We Can Only Expand the Boundaries When We’re Up Against the Ropes: Gabrielle Calvocoressi and Brandon Scott Gorrell

Kaya Oakes, author of Slanted and Enchanted, reviews the work of two very different young poets: one who writes in the voices of historical figures, including Amelia Earhart’s mechanic and boxer Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini, the other working in the genre of “Gmail Confessionalism.” Through these collections, Oakes traces the influence of parallel trends: the rapid expansion of MFA programs and the growth of digital publishing, showing us two very different points in the vast territory of contemporary American poetry.

Kaya Oakes, two Los Angeles independent record labels and I will be part of a panel discussion on independent media at Skylight Books, Sunday Sept. 27 5:00 pm. It would be great to see you there.

“Electronic Literature” N. Katherine Hayles

Published in The Fanzine, Aug. 2008.

With newspapers feeling the bite of advertisers’ migration to the internet and the music industry, for better or worse, in dire need of a new business model, the era of digital media seems to offer more fodder for fears than opportunities for innovation. Advances in electronic ink technology have brought resurgent interest to e-book devices, such as Amazon.com’s Kindle, and so readers of literature might be wondering if a similar fate awaits their medium of choice. N. Katherine Hayles’ Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary profiles the work of writers who are diving into the new creative methods headfirst. In her forward, Hayles makes explicit her aim to create a canon of electronic literature and to introduce it both to lay readers and the university classroom. Additionally, Hayles’ book provides an overview of the critical discourse on the subject, arguing that this new kind of writing will require a different critical perspective than its print predecessors, advocating an examination not just of what appears on screen but the coding beneath.

Read the complete article at The Fanzine.

Trinie Dalton “Wide Eyed”

Published in San Francisco Bay Guardian, Nov. 2005

Basically this book is pretty fucking rad. It’s a succession of semilinked stories blending Trinie Dalton’s obsession with proto-punk rock stars, animals, and horror movies to form her amazing and fake autobiography, Wide Eyed. After the Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up” helps her to drown out the sounds of lobsters being boiled alive and later to cope with her mother’s remarriage, Mick Jagger appears to our narrator in a vision, and she explains to him how Antoni van Leeuwenhoek discovered sperm by looking at his own semen under a microscope and dissecting rabbit testicles. In “Decrepit,” Dalton and her roommates, living in a house inhabited by a ghost, enact a play about a giant maggot, which threatens to grow so large that it suffocates the residents. “The maggot play was meant to be retro like Godzilla or King Kong – one of those huge creatures dominating humanity stories,” Dalton writes. “But we were wasted on Xanax, dressed in red dresses and red feather boas, so it had a New Wave feel … ‘I vill crush you,’ said Heidi in a low Krushchevian maggot/dictator voice from behind the door. ‘I am zee maggot.’” After all of this temporal compression, it is fitting that Dalton makes the ghost a po-mo poster child: “Eras run into one ageless mess. Ghosts live in different eras simultaneously.”

Complete article available at the Bay Guardian website.

Vonnegut Inspired to some Invective

Originally published in the San Francisco Chronicle, Oct. 2005

Man Without a Country
By Kurt Vonnegut
SEVEN STORIES PRESS; 146 PAGES; $23.95

Kurt Vonnegut’s writing inspires a fierce devotion that seems to baffle the man himself. Novelist and amateur wrestler John Irving studied under Vonnegut at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. In a local pool hall, one of his fellow students, a boxer, dismissed Vonnegut as a sci-fi hack, and Irving threw down for a brawl right there to defend Vonnegut’s writing (although Irving cites his victory as an example of the superiority of wrestling over boxing as much as anything else).

After one of Vonnegut’s book tour readings, a friend whose suicide attempts far outnumbered Vonnegut’s tracked him down to a bar he was known to frequent and showed him where she had tattooed a quote from one of his novels — “It was all beautiful and nothing hurt” — on her neck. He responded, “What the hell did you go and do that for?”

Read the complete article at the San Francisco Chronicle.

Thurston Moore “Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture”

Originally published in the Portland Mercury, June 2005

Thurston Moore’s collaborative zine-like book Mix Tape is like a mix tape of mix tapes: John Zorn, DJ Spooky, Christian Marclay, Mike Watt, Dodie Bellamy, Mac McCaughan, and dozens more writers, graphic designers, artists, and other people in the entertainment industry share stories of favorite mix tapes from and for friends, lovers, and parents.

The book is primarily a record of the mix tape as a method of emotional communication. Sensitive menfolk who can’t verbalize their love can give a mix tape on which rock stars express their undying emotions. As Moore puts it, “The toughest cowpoke can express his gooey love vibe without losing an iota of man stench.” He tells of bringing a box of mix tapes to wife and Sonic Youth bandmate Kim at the hospital when she was going into labor. Filmmaker Allison Anders recalls getting busted giving the same mix tape to multiple boys.

Read the complete article at The Portland Mercury.

Aimee Bender “Willful Creatures”

Originally published in the Portland Mercury, Sept. 2005

Aimee Bender’s stories fall distinctly into one of two styles, each of which is on display in her new collection, Willful Creatures. She is best known for her oddball modern fairytales. Supernatural births abound: A pumpkinhead couple gives birth to a child with an iron for a head and babies grow from a pot of indestructible potatoes. They’re the kind of stories Jeanette Winterson would write if she was more fun at parties.

Read the complete article at the Portland Mercury.

Dennis Cooper “God Jr.”

Originally published in the Portland Mercury, Nov. 2005

Rather than a deserved reputation as an innovative stylist, Cooper is best known for the deviant subject matter of his previous novels—fisting, erotic snuff films and violently victimized teens—and critics have long pleaded with him to turn his prodigious talents to other topics. In answer, he offers God Jr., perhaps the first truly great literary treatment of playing videogames stoned.

Having never put much effort into understanding his teenage son Tommy until after he kills him in a car crash, Jim seeks posthumous connection by constructing a massive monument to a drawing he has discovered in his son’s notebook. His marriage and financial stability already suffering, Jim learns that Tommy had copied the image from his favorite videogame and receives an intellectual property lawsuit from Nintendo’s attorneys. It’s a funny and disturbing moment as a father attempting to understand his dead son finds nothing but mass-produced fantasies handed down from pop culture—Tommy’s closest emotional connection seems to have been to Thrasher magazine, Christina Ricci and his heavy metal action figures.

Read the complete article at the Portland Mercury.

Myla Goldberg “Wickett’s Remedy”

Originally published in the Portland Mercury, Oct. 2005

With Wickett’s Remedy, Myla Goldberg has followed up her acclaimed debut, Bee Season (soon to be a major movie starring Richard Gere), with a story about the massive and nearly forgotten 1918 Spanish Influenza Epidemic in Boston. Set against the backdrop of that most pointless of global turf battles, WWI, Goldberg’s portrayal of a deteriorating home front as a war occurs in distant lands rings true to the current daily zeitgeist.

The first half of Remedy serves to depict the Irish immigrant lifestyle in early 20th-century America; the second half finds a sizable portion of those immigrants falling down dead from the flu. Our plucky, well-intentioned heroine, Lydia, volunteers to assist in a semi-nefarious (and real) Tuskegee-esque government project to intentionally infect war deserters in order to understand the transmission of the deadly illness. Clearly heavily researched, Goldberg incorporates a wide variety of styles into Wickett’s, and bounces freely between 1918 and 1993. The primary narration reads like a postmodern take on Horatio “Ragged Dick” Alger rags-to-riches novels of the time with their accompanying linguistic schmaltz, but the storyline is interspersed with newsletters of a soda pop historical society and period newspaper clippings, showcasing the sad minutiae and paranoia wrought by the epidemic, but made humorous by the era’s overblown journalistic style. Goldberg’s most interesting invention is notes in the margins in which the dead correct the faulty memories of the living with alternate accounts of events. This has the odd effect of making it seem as though the huge number of fatalities have created a portal allowing easier communication with the deceased.

Read the complete article at the Portland Mercury.

Spalding Gray “Life Interrupted”

Originally published in the Portland Mercury, Nov. 2005.

Last year actor and monologist Spalding Gray committed suicide, jumping from a Staten Island ferry. In his final work, Life Interrupted, he tells of a car accident during a visit to Ireland that left him disfigured, limping, and nearly catatonically depressed. The monologue, performed only once (during a period in which friends said Gray’s depression made him nearly incapable of conversation), presents the events that led to his suicide with his trademark humor and juxtaposition.

“I didn’t think there’d be another monologue,” Gray begins. “I had settled down into domesticity and a quiet life.” Walking through the Irish countryside on the last long walk of his life, Gray sees a young calf clearly suffering, and encourages the farmer to put it out of its misery. That night as he and his wife and friends are returning from dinner, their car is struck from behind. “There was cow medicine everywhere, because the van that hit us was the veterinarian… taking care of the poor sick calf I’d reported.”

Read the complete article at the Portland Mercury.

Guy Delisle “Pyongyang”

Originally published in Planet magazine, Summer 2005

Pyongyang records comic book artist Guy Delisle’s time in North Korea supervising productions at a Saturday morning cartoon maquilladora, where during food shortages France’s largest television network pays its staff of animators with bags of rice. His book is a portrait of both the transnational infotainment economy and the country famously included in Bush’s Axis of Evil. “North Korea is the world’s most isolated country,” says Delisle, “Foreigners trickle in. There’s no internet. There’s no cafes…It’s hard to leave the hotel and meeting Koreans is next to impossible.” Like all foreign visitors, Delisle’s travel is tightly controlled by his government-issued translators, who shadow him at every step. Even when he is able to shake them off, they somehow know exactly where he’s been. Propaganda blares from speakers in every office and portraits of the world’s only father and son Communist dynasty, Kim Jong-Il and Kim Il-Son, adorn every wall. Despite the country’s poverty and corruption, the most scathing public criticism Delisle encounters is when one man admits he finds the propaganda films boring. Due to his government enforced isolation, Delisle is unable to answer to the most intriguing question, whether citizens are terrified to dissent or whether they actually support the system in place.