American Afterlife

David Leo Rice On Steve Erickson’s Shadowbahn

Simultaneous Histories

Shadowbahn, Steve Erickson’s 10th novel, opens with the impossible happening in America: the Twin Towers appear in the heart of the Badlands in South Dakota and Jesse Presley, Elvis’s stillborn twin, wakes up on the 93rd floor of the southern one. Much of the “United States of Disunion,” as the nation is known here, flocks in to bear witness, only to fall into intense disagreement about what has happened and what it means.

Long obsessed with the the fault lines running through the American soul, Erickson has now given us the first key novel of the Trump Era. Written before the election but published after, Shadowbahn is hyper-aware of the ways in which America has not only been split into rival factions, but into mutually exclusive realities. If the old wisdom was that “it’s impossible to be in two places at once,” in 2017 it has become impossible to be in one place at once. All places in Trump’s America, which represents both the End Times and the supposed return of a great mythic past, are frighteningly multiple.

After an opening scene in which a trucker whose truck bears the bumper sticker “SAVE AMERICA FROM ITSELF” discovers the “American Stonehenge” in the Badlands, Shadowbahn only gets stranger as it goes along. Jesse Presley works up the nerve to jump out of the South Tower and finds himself flying into a revised 20th century where JFK lost the Democratic nomination to Adlai Stevenson and the Beatles never took off. Making his way as a cantankerous music critic, Presley meets Andy Warhol and falls into a bizarro version of the Factory scene, commenting on the decline of America from within the novel just as Erickson comments from without. Meanwhile, a brother and sister (one born in California, the other in Ethiopia)  drive across near-future America via a series of lost highways and secret tunnels, discussing their fraught relationship with their writer father (a clear Erickson stand-in, carried over from 2012’s These Dreams of You) en route to visit their mother in Michigan. By the time they reach the Badlands and see the Towers for themselves, numerous realities have been born and died and reemerged transfigured, and the map has gotten ever more skewed without quite ceasing to be navigable.

In bringing all these strands together without forcing them to cohere, Shadowbahn marks a culmination of both Erickson’s apocalypticism and his vision of history as a porous entity, full of glitches, wormholes, and “Rupture zones.” Straddling the Millennium, the terms of his ongoing project are most clearly defined by 1989’s Tours of the Black Clock, which charts a simultaneous history in which Hitler far outlives the 1940s, eventually coming to America. That novel—which lent its name to the glorious and now sadly defunct literary journal Black Clock, yet another casualty of 2016—develops the notion of hidden events running parallel to, and occasionally intersecting with, those we’re aware of. The black clock itself is the embodiment of this idea: it’s the “dark back of time” (to borrow a phrase from Javier Marías), ticking with unseen minutes and hours behind those we perceive passing.

Like the black clock, the shadowbahn renders subjective experience objective, making Erickson’s psychic landscape disturbingly physical. Cutting “through the heart of the country from one end to the other with impunity,” it connects disparate times and places the way a jittery radio dial splices together stations.

On the one hand, it’s a dangerous strand of wishful thinking to imagine a simultaneous America in which Donald Trump is not our president, or one in which he turns out to be merely a blowhard and not a tyrant; on the other hand, the election represents a possibly unfixable rift in the fabric of our national consciousness, so that the present we now occupy is both unimaginable and hyperreal—so in-your-face it’s impossible to see.

"I am wide awake when I see artist books.”

Ed Ruscha, Metro Mattress #4, 2015, Acrylic and pencil on museum board paper. 40 1/8 x 60 inches. Copyright Ed Ruscha, Courtesy of the artist, Gagosian Gallery and Sprueth Magers

Stephanie LaCava on Ed Ruscha’s Metro Mattresses

The following is from a letter Ed Ruscha wrote on February 25, 1966 to John Wilcock, a publisher who asked Ruscha to write about his books:

This is a charming prologue to an exemplary career. Fifty years later, it’s difficult to get a hold of Ruscha's early books, and impossible save for a certain price. The books Ruscha made in the 60s and 70s are largely credited with a reinvention of the genre. They all feature photographs: images of gas stations, small fires, swimming pools, palm trees, cacti, LA apartments, buildings or parking lots, Dutch bridges, babies or film stills, and Ruscha’s record collection. 

Unlike the others, Ruscha’s latest book, Metro Mattresses, features no photographs. Inside are twelve reproductions of the acrylic and pencil mattresses rendered on museum board paper as they were shown at last year’s Metro Mattresses exhibition. Ruscha and I emailed about Metro Mattresses last December, on his 79th birthday.

—Stephanie LaCava

Ed Ruscha, Metro Mattress #8, 2015. Acrylic and pencil on museum board paper. 40 1/8 x 60 inches. Copyright Ed Ruscha, Courtesy of the artist, Gagosian Gallery and Sprueth Magers

STEPHANIE LACAVA: Is there an implied narrative in the mattresses?  

ED RUSCHA: There is no story line with the arrangement of images in the book.  These mattresses began catching my attention as I moved around the city, especially Hollywood.  They became my “clown” paintings.  Clown paintings, in general, might be universally detested for what they are, but I began seeing mattresses as sad, and yet humorous subjects like clowns.

Ed Ruscha, Metro Mattress #9, 2015, Acrylic and pencil on museum board paper. 40 1/8 x 60 inches. Copyright Ed Ruscha, Courtesy of the artist, Gagosian Gallery and Sprueth Magers

SLC: Why not photos of the mattresses?

ER: A shift from photographs to painted images gave me a vision of another kind.  The images were pampered with paint rather than with a camera.  However, this left the book with a feeling of street objects being interpreted within the confines of a studio rather than being grabbed from the street itself. 

Ed Ruscha, Metro Mattress #4, 2015, Acrylic and pencil on museum board paper. 102 x 152,5 cm, 40 1/8 x 60 inches. Copyright Ed Ruscha, Courtesy of the artist, Gagosian Gallery and Sprueth Magers

SLC: What do you think is most vital and important about artist's making books? Has this changed since you began your practice?

ER: I am wide awake when I see artist books. Here are people using actual ink on paper in the eventual age of total digital.  For this reason I am retaining my hope and expectation of more books.

Material taken from the Roth Horowitz books on Photography put together by Andrew Roth in 1999.

Read Part 1: A Conversation with Seth Price

Read Part 2: A Conversation with Paul Chan

Read Part 3: A Conversation with Alissa Bennett

Read Part 4: A Conversation with Ed Atkins

Stephanie LaCava is an author and journalist living in New York City.

Who Will Think of the Children?

Jim Knipfel on Satire and Children’s Books

This past September, the Abrams’ imprint Image, which specializes in illustrated and reference works, published a novelty book entitled Bad Little Children’s Books by the pseudonymous Arthur Gackley. The small hardcover, which itself quite deliberately resembled a little golden book, featured carefully-rendered and patently offensive parodies of classic children's book covers. Instead of happy, apple-cheeked tykes doing pleasant wholesome things, Gackley’s covers featured kids farting, puking, and using drugs. Others included children with dildoes and racially inflammatory portrayals of Middle Eastern, Asian, and Native American youngsters. The book was clearly labeled a work of satire aimed at adults, and adults with a certain tolerance for bad taste and crass jokes.

Upon its initial release it received positive reviews and sold fairly well. Then in early December, a former librarian named Kelly Jensen posted an entry on Bookriot entitled “It’s Not Funny. It’s Racist.”  

“This kind of 'humor' is never acceptable,” Ms. Jensen wrote. “It’s deadly.”

Jensen’s rant circulated quickly across social media, and Abrams suddenly found itself besieged by attacks from the outraged and offended, who assailed Gackley for creating the book in the first place, and the Abrams editorial board for agreeing to publish it.

“There is a difference between ‘hate speech’ and free speech,” one outraged member of the kidlit comunity wrote on Facebook. “In the same way, you cannot yell ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater just because you feel like it. This book was in very bad, insulting, racist taste, and designed to look like a children's book. How is that a good idea? Children are too young to understand this as parody. If it's for adults, why is that even funny? Oh, I guess if you are a racist you would think it's funny.”

Another tweeted, “Sounds like something that should've been completely ignored and removed before it hit the shelves. Just because we have the freedom of speech, it can be taken way too far.”

"Think of a pencil being more like a cup of coffee rather than a pen.”

An Interview with Joey Cofone of Baron Fig

As far as pencils are concerned, I’m a late adapter. I made the switch from a fountain pen (how pretentious, I know) after finishing an essay by Mary Norris on her quest for the ideal No. 1 pencil (contrary to the cabal of No. 2 makers at Ticonderoga, they do exist, and are nigh impossible to find). It shows how deep pencil-freak culture goes that if you’re too occupied to maintain your pencil-point, you have the option of mailing your dulled graphite to David Rees, author of How to Sharpen Your Pencil, to be professionally sharpened. But is there anything more to be said about pencils? Can the pencil be re-conceptualized?

For minimalist pencil-designed Joey Cofone, the answer is an all-caps yes to both questions. Cofone has taken 1st place in the 2013 AIGA CMD-X competition, while Print Magazine named him one of 15 designers under 30 to watch.

The thing to understand first off about Cofone is that he likes simplicity a lot. The co-founder of Baron Fig, a New York-based maker of notebooks, Cofone has recently delved into reinventing the pencil. Or revolutionizing it. At the very least, he’s produced a damn fine instrument to write with and to hold.

The fittingly named Archer has a design that’s extremely clean-lined, forsaking the ferrule and even the eraser in pursuit of lightweight practicality. It’s also incredibly aromatic.

—Michael Peck​

BLVR: What got you into paper and notebooks?

JOEY COFONE: Several years ago, back at the School of Visual Arts here in New York City, I had realization that changed my life. Walking through the design department and taking a look at my fellow classmates’ tools, I noticed something: each of us was using two tools—a laptop and a notebook—to design. The laptops were all the same, MacBooks, but the notebooks were all different brands, sizes, paper types, and so on. I was intrigued. Why was there ubiquity with one tool but no loyalty to the other?

I went home and checked out my own bookshelf, and lo’ and behold all of my notebooks were different. There was this unspoken search for the right notebook that was going on all around me. Eventually my Co-founder Adam Kornfield joined the mix, and together we talked to thinkers all over the world, asking them one question: What do you like in a sketchbook or notebook?

Out of the five hundred plus cold-emails, we received a whopping 80% response rate. It turns out others were on the same search as us—and they had a lot to say. We used all that feedback to design the first community-inspired notebook, the Confidant, and put it on Kickstarter. At the end of thirty days we sold almost ten thousand notebooks and raised over $150k. That was just over two years ago.

BLVR: How did the name Baron Fig come about?

JC: I had this hankering for the word “Baron.” No idea why, such is life. I took the word to my co-founder Adam and our friend Scott, and told them that it needed a second word. Scott immediately, without hesitation, said “Fig.” Adam and I were confused—what does it mean?—even Scott didn’t know why he said it. Somehow it stuck, but I wasn’t happy with it. How could a company about thinking, about infusing meaning into creativity, not have a name with meaning itself?

For the next few weeks I wrote down hundreds and hundreds of possible names, but none stuck like Baron Fig. Finally, pretty much at wit’s end, I decided to look up the origins of baron and fig. Baron was a symbol of Apollo and Fig was a symbol of Dionysus—brothers that represent order and chaos. The name essentially symbolizes balance, of having the discipline to work hard but also the impulse to play, which is the essence of the creative mindset.

BLVR: What prompted the leap into pencil-making?​ Were there specific models that influenced the design of the Archer?

JC: I’m a minimalist designer. Hell, I’m a minimalist exister, if there is such a word. I like everything simple, fluid, clear. Clutter and excess drive me nuts. Even when I was a kid, I always wanted things to be just right. I used to go around the house and organize each room as if they were showrooms on display. Lamps squared with the edges of tables, stove tools arranged from longest to shortest, you name it and I was all over it. 

The Archer pencil was sort of a minimalist dream come true. I’ve always wanted to design a pencil—they’re like little creative wands—and it took our team over a year to hone in on the right production quality. In the meantime I designed dozens of versions before landing on the Archer you see today, each iteration a little more refined and simpler than the ones before it.

BLVR: Minimalism is definitely a noticeable trait, and it seems like the Archer is something of an ultimate statement of this simplicity. How does one go about re-conceptualizing the pencil?

ELECTRIC BLUE

All photographs by the author.

Kim Wood on David Bowie

1.

There are roughly ten blocks between the theater where David Bowie watched rehearsals for Lazarus, and the studio where he recorded Blackstar. In his last years, we both lived between them, on opposite sides of Houston Street.

My side is the Bowery, known in real estate speak as NoHo (North of Houston). On the street where I live—a two-block stretch of 3rd Street known as Great Jones—is a chandeliered butcher shop occupying the spot where Basquiat worked, and died, of a heroin overdose. Twenty years before his time, Charlie Mingus’ heroin-addicted presence on this corridor is said to have birthed the term jonesing.

I’ve passed a decade in Brooklyn, but never before now lived in Manhattan and love being a downtown kid, stepping through the door and onto crowded streets, passing CBGBs—now a skinny pants boutique I’ve never entered—on my way to buy groceries, or borrowing books from a library branch housed in the one-time factory of Hawley & Hoops’ Chocolate Candy Cigars—that Bowie lived above, in a modern penthouse perched atop the turn of the century brick building.

For twenty-four months, barring the occasional trip to Central Park, I’ve lived below 14th Street and in this time Bowie loitered here too, sipping La Colombe’s double macchiato, fetching chicken and watercress sandwiches at Olive’s, or dinner supplies at Dean & DeLuca. One day I’d catch him on the street, I figured, hailing a cab or taking out the recycling in his flat cap and sunglasses, and when I did my well-worn New Yorker discretion would be jettisoned as I tried, and likely failed, not to cry.

I didn’t, of course, know that for most of the time we were neighbors David Bowie was dying. Today I walk the familiar stretch of blocks to his building, eyes tearing, I tell myself, from the frigid, bone-dry air. At the front entrance, a group of fans stand gutted, surrounded by news trucks, generators, vulturing reporters.

A growing pile of daisies, tulips, roses, daffodils leans against the wall, along with a few photographs, a pair of silver glitter heels, a Jesus candle with Ziggy Stardust face. Tucked here and there are handwritten notes: Look out your window, I can see his light and We are all stardust and Hot tramp, we love you so.

Everyone here, news crew aside, feels known somehow, the mood is gentle, polite, quiet. Too quiet, I realize, when someone plays “Life On Mars?” from a tinny smartphone speaker. As the closing strings swell, a woman turns to me to say through tears, “I love this song!” All I can do is nod, “I know!” and take comfort among fellow kooks.

A pair behind me wonders aloud about a “world without Bowie,” and while I know what they mean—the way some people feel like a force and invincible—you could argue we’ve been living in such a world for a long while. David Jones-ing.

2.

Three days earlier, on the night of Bowie’s 69th birthday, I danced in my kitchen to the foppish, falsetto, “‘Tis a Pity She Was a Whore,” delighting in his rude lyrics and wild whooping. Later at a dinner hosted for the birthday of a friend, I commented on Bowie’s continuing fixation upon mortality, but also his energy, sly humor, return to form, exclaiming, not tentatively, “Bowie’s back!”

I was thrilled he’d finally slipped the ghost of what he called, “my Phil Collins years.”  In one of the endless interviews now flooding my screen in text and video, he explains, “I was performing in front of these huge stadium crowds and at that time I was thinking ‘what are these people doing here? Why did they come to see me? They should be seeing Phil Collins.’ And then that came back at me and I thought, ‘What am I doing here?’ It’s a certain kind of mainstream that I’m just not comfortable in.”

Like the divisiveness of fat and skinny Elvis, there were those of us who fancied ourselves glittering, androgynous, apocalyptic half-beast hustlers who bought drugs, watched bands and jumped in the river holding hands, and there were others, contentedly jazzin’ for Blue Jean.

When, in your Golden Years, your mentor of not only music but all things relevant—art, clothes, books, films—enters his Phil Collins Years, suddenly high-kicking in Reeboks and staring in Pepsi commercials, how not to feel betrayed?

Something Happened on the Day He Died

Jordan A. Rothacker on David Bowie

On Friday, January 8th 2016, David Bowie turned sixty-nine and his final album Blackstar, was released. I purchased it that morning, having waited for months. On the following day I sat for a black star tattoo straight from the album cover; a recent writing project was lousy with black stars and I felt more than ever that Bowie and I were on the same wave. After a weekend of listening to the album I was awoken Monday morning, January 11th 2016 by my wife, “before you look at your phone, Bowie passed away yesterday.” She was right, my text messages were as full as my Facebook feed with tearful and shocked notifications from friends, but I was glad I heard it from her first.

It took until December of 2016 for me to finally read Simon Critchley’s little book, Bowie (OR Books/Counterpoint, 2016). I’ve wanted this book since it came out in 2014 and I remember reacting, “a book by one of my favorite living philosophers on one of my favorite living everythings? Yes, please.” Luckily I put it off until this 2016 re-issue with extra chapters treating Bowie’s death and final album. Although most of the book was written more than two years ago it is hard not to read the whole thing eulogistically. His spirit goes on though, now more than ever, as the last dreadful year has come to a close. I lost of close friends and faith in my country, but now my thoughts turn back to Bowie with hope his art can carry me forward.  

What have I lost in Bowie? For the most part, the same things we all have: the chance for more music, more movie appearances, and just the knowledge that he is out there being brilliant and dashing, making art, and giving a wry smile to a paparazzo. What have I lost personally? True confession time. I have always dreamed of knowing Bowie (I’ve never even seen him perform live), but more so, and more embarrassingly, I’ve always wanted him to know me. I’d hoped one day he would read one of my books and like it. That moment of mutual respect between artists, that bump to my sense of worth from an artist who has helped shape my understanding of the world, art, and myself.

This is why sometimes Critchley’s book feels like it’s talking to me or for me. I haven’t read much about Bowie. He is mine and my feelings for him and about him need not be mediated. Critchley’s book however is now added to a small list of my favorite Bowie books which also includes Hugo Wilcken’s Low and Steve Erickson’s These Dreams of You.

Critchley’s book praises Wilcken’s so I’ll start there and circle around back. Wilcken’s Low (Continuum, 2010) doesn’t need a book review; it’s kinda perfect (I say kinda since perfect is such a strong word). It’s one of the best 33 1/3s I’ve read, and I’ve read a lot. I’m a sucker for this series of tiny books on albums of music as I have always suffered from that most Cartesian of obsessions in regards to my most beloved art works, the need to know how he, she, or they did it. The reverse engineering of a work gives me faith that maybe I could also do or make something comparable. Wilcken’s Low is like the sweetest of candies; I wanted to devour and savor all at once, which is difficult with such a short book. Wilcken chose Low because it was a definitive turning point in Bowie’s body of work and during maybe the most beloved period in the myth of the artist. In 136 pages the reader experiences a thorough historical context for the album and detailed production notes for each song as well as each song. The most important moments I savor from this book are descriptions of his work ethic and the well-researched information about his time in Berlin.

“To Make Oneself Understood is Impossible”: Thomas Bernhard Speaks

Jim Knipfel talks to Blast Books’ Laura Lindgren about the publication of Thomas Bernhard: Three Days.

Novelist William Gaddis once said that writers should be read and not heard. For the most part I would agree, but there are rare exceptions—Henry Miller and William Burroughs, say—writers whose voices and personas and free-flowing ideas remain as vital and significant as their published work. Thomas Bernhard fits neatly into that extremely limited category.

Along with Günter Grass, Bernhard remains one of the most monumental figures of postwar German literature. Beginning with On the Mountain in 1959, he published nearly forty novels, plays, and poetry collections before his death in 1989.

In novels like Gargoyles, The Lime Works and Concrete, employing a language at once rich and spare, Bernhard painted unrelentingly bleak and nihilistic portraits of isolation, frustration, and melancholia marked, as in Beckett and Gaddis, by both gallows humor and an intense aversion to traditional storytelling structures. Bernhard was an Austrian who, in Heldenplatz, referred to his home country as a land of “six and a half million retards and maniacs,” and a writer who became a writer only after finding art, music and business too easy. Writing was difficult, it was the only thing that offered any resistance, so that’s the path he followed. As filmmaker Errol Morris puts it, “He wrote in such a way as to undermine the process of writing. The writer with an underlying hatred of writing, as if each word was a stain on the page.”

After some difficult negotiations, in June of 1970 (the same year The Lime Works was published) experimental filmmaker and documentarian Ferry Radax and a small crew followed Bernhard to a park just outside Hamburg. Bernhard was thirty-nine at the time and already well-established as Austria’s greatest living writer. He took a seat on a park bench and, over the course of the next three days, talked about whatever came to mind.

Occasionally prompted by key words provided by Radax, Bernhard’s wide-ranging extemporaneous monologue touches on everything from his childhood, (“I remember still, from that very first school day, a pale boy laid out in the mortuary, a cheesemaker’s son...”) to his work, (“In essence, isn’t such a book nothing but a malignant ulcer, a cancerous tumor?”), to aging, to the inescapably existential human condition.

Radax took the footage and edited it into Three Days (Drei Tage), a fifty-five minute feature for German television. Far more than simply a monologue, Radax’s film was marked by prolonged silences, abrupt blackouts, and cutaways to trees, birds, and shots of the crew setting up. Subtly over the course of the film, the camera draws closer and closer to its subject, ending on a tight close-up. Weaving through it all is Bernhard’s precise and measured voice, at turns irritated, uncomfortable, even occasionally wistful and funny. It’s a deceptively simple and brilliant film, and Bernhard’s monologue, as dark and hopeless as much of it is, is enthralling.

Some forty years after it was made, and over twenty years after Bernhard’s death, Blast Books co-founder and publisher Laura Lindgren caught a screening of Drei Tage at New York’s Anthology Film Archive.

“I could hardly stand up from my chair when the end credits rolled,” Lindgren says. “I instantly thought I need this as a book to read anytime I want to sit down and read it. Everything he says makes absolute sense to me. Some people find it depressing—I don't. His concluding thought is one of the most perfect expressions of a perfect idea I have seen.”

“Do I have to choose? Probably.”

Still from Happy Birthday, Ed Atkins. 2014. Courtesy the artist.

Stephanie LaCava in Conversation with Ed Atkins

At the end of the summer, Fitzcarraldo Editions released the thick blue A Primer for Cadavers, a selection of British artist Ed Atkins’ writings from 2010 to 2016. While the Berlin-based writer is best known for his videos of computer generated figures spliced to vivid sound cuts, he is very much preoccupied with words.

Atkins sometimes provides texts to accompany his exhibitions. Many of these are included in the book, like “A Tumor (in English)”, once distributed alongside his 2011 Tate Britain show of the same name. Both writing and video often reference the abject or unseen body: a poetic meditation on tumors, for instance, or a CGI severed head bouncing down the stairs. It is perhaps best to let Atkins explain his writing, which seems eerily prophetic in relation to political events of late.

Take the following, from Hammering the Bars, as an example:

—Stephanie LaCava

STEPHANIE LACAVA: Can you speak to the recent world events and how you see them playing into your practice and point of view? In past conversations, you’ve mentioned The Invisibles, a comic book series with a drug that turns a word into the actual thing it represents, and you said how this is mirrored in the gaming of electronic profiles for impressions that lead to actual events or outcomes.

ED ATKINS: This is vast, right? I mean, to even scrape the surface feels like it requires a heft I’m not sure I can properly muster here… I’ll try a few thoughts. Firstly, there’s the thing I rehearse pretty much constantly in my videos and writing, namely poles of literality and figuration and how they are confused to political or ideological ends—and conversely how they might be used productively. Responsibly, even. So in a lot of my stuff this would directly relate to the disappearing of the material history of an object by the deliberate misapplication of literality for figuration—how calling something “The Cloud” maintains or conjures a fantasy for the express purpose of dematerializing server farms in a puff of pretty clunky figuration: A Cloud. This misuse is similarly likely in the other direction: the figurative for the literal. Like a Render Farm, for example. How it might be super productive to delve into the literal aspects of terms like that in order to better understand or make tangible the intangible world of digital representation, process, etc. The obfuscation in either direction is clearly about creating situations where the use of these things can occur with an impunity afforded by their apprehension as not really existing in our material world—rather in some digital no-place next to desire, fantasy, convenience and money. Obviously, the particulars of what I’m referring to are attached to the digital, but the effective cynical employment of figurative and literal language has been for ideological ends forever. It just seems like the particular ignorance and fantasy that orbits the ways in which we live with, via or in the digital, affords a new kind of virulence to these feints.

Our digital lives feel both more important than they actually are, and weirdly way less impactful—way less culpable than they certainly are. This, surely, is at least partly to do with our lack of understanding about the material conditions of the digital—how it’s constituted—and how it confuses temporal immediacy with material intimacy. Which is, I reckon, a version of the literal/figurative confusion. Certainly so much of what’s been happening—from the coining of various “post-truth” terms, to the rise of so-called populism—feels directly related to the ways in which life becomes increasingly disincorporated in genuinely disturbing ways (the conflict in Syria; bodies floating in the Med), and wholly incorporated in others—and I mean as in the forming of a corporation. But given the subject, you understand my underscoring of an etymological split in that incorporation. Rendering, farming, cutting, capturing, performing—this is a preeminent lexicon for computer generated imagery, but its also almost entirely rooted in material violence. That first slip of linguistic use was enough to eventually vanish the abattoir and the cadaver. Now, as applied to digital process, they are a part of another material evanescence, and on a massive scale.

Our Favorite Books from 2016

If you were able to spend 2016 immersed completely in the world of books, I genuinely envy you. As for myself, I think asking for words on paper to make up for the general horribleness of so much of the rest of lived experience might be putting too much pressure on them. It takes great concentration to impose sense on horizontal lines of text when sense seems to be seeping out all around you. And even if you manage, for an afternoon, to forget about reality in the space of two covers, you’ll look up from the last page and remember that reality has not forgotten about you. And so what, to quote Missing Persons, are words for when no one listens anymore? The answer depends on what you’re reading. At the end of the day, books are the only available technology capable of transmitting our dreams to one another as repackaged realnesses, each one an option for what another life might look like, a satellite porthole onto the orbital planetoids known as other people. Below are fifteen model worlds worth aspiring to and what they offer is not escape from the present, but a novel interface with it. The world of books is our world.

—JW McCormack

The Revolutionaries Try Again by Mauro Javier Cardenas (Coffee House Press)

The best book of the year and the reason this list exists is also proof that James Joyce is alive and well and splitting his time between Ecuador and the Bay Area. The revolutionaries of the title are a collection of ex-students, devastated by their fractious adulthoods, who reunite to take advantage of their home country’s vulnerable government. The opening image of a lighting bolt striking a pay phone is the ideal set-up for the following series of collisions between English and Spanish, thought and expression, the social and the personal, prose and poetry, finding wholeness in fragmentation until the reader is completely attuned to a style as perfectly realized as it is unique in all fiction. The Revolutionaries Try Again is such a wonder of composition that its very existence is an argument for literary consciousness as ongoing experiment.

The Babysitter At Rest by Jen George (Dorothy, a publishing project)

This collection of art brut short stories is a primer on what it feels like to be young and desperate, even if the stories themselves move between surreal encounters with phantom lovers and pornographic phantasmagorias set in schools and hospitals, where the institutional air acquires a certain porousness. Every young writer reckons on some level with the contemporary atmosphere of minimal employment, isolating education, the impossibility of privacy and the ubiquity of etiquette; George’s method is to pump everything full of helium until the ridiculousness of it all is laid giddily bare.

Private Citizens by Tony Tulathimutte (William Morrow)

Quite simply, a book it seems just about everyone would like to find in the glove box of a rental, stuffed into a time capsule or dog-eared in a bus station. Devious is the mind that fails to identify with this lucid novel of contemporary Americana, which follows four millennials through the post-University wilderness of protests, start-ups, and web porn. For all its force as painfully-recognizable panorama, Private Citizens is also a savvy rejoinder to the treatment this latest, shat-upon generation has received from their elders; Tulathimutte initially assigns each of his leads a type, daring us to mistake them for updated Breakfast Club cartoons, only to delve into their deeply-rooted pathologies, romantic misfires and the panicked sojourns into degradation that pass for day jobs. The result is a lively set of misadventures populated with a cast possessed of a rare humanity, acquired at enormous cost.

The Battles for Ellis Island, 1970-1977

A group of Native Americans approach Alcatraz Island with the aim of reclaiming it from the U.S. government in 1969. (Ralph Crane/Getty)

By Jim Knipfel

In March of 1963, Alcatraz Prison in San Francisco Bay was closed down, and the few prisoners who still remained were transferred to other facilities. As per standard operating procedure, the following year the island, which housed the former penitentiary, was declared surplus federal property. According to the Treaty of Fort Laramie, signed in 1868 between the federal government and the Lakota Indians, all retired or abandoned federal lands were to revert back to the native peoples from whom they had been stolen. Apart from the members of a group calling itself Indians of All Tribes, or IOAT, very few people seemed to remember this.  

Although a handful of Native American activists made attempts to reclaim the island in the years after it was declared surplus property, nobody paid much attention. Then in November of 1969, eighty-nine members of IOAT took up residence on the barren and rocky island, declaring it their own in an effort to call attention to the shabby treatment Native Americans had received at the hands of  the U.S. Government. The occupation lasted some nineteen months, until June of 1971, and received a great deal of publicity.

The Alcatraz occupation was just one of several actions undertaken around the same time by what was known as the Red Power Movement, though most of  it was concentrated on the West Coast. The targets of the assorted occupations were, without fail, either government office buildings (like the Department of Indian Affairs) or historic sites with a darkly ironic significance to Native Americans (like Wounded Knee and Mount Rushmore).

On the East Coast, Ellis Island ceased operations as an immigrant checkpoint and detention center in 1954. It, too, was soon declared surplus federal property. Over the next decade the island moldered; its neglected and unattended buildings fell into ruin. Then in 1965, President Lyndon Johnson linked the island together with the Statue of Liberty, placing it under the stewardship of the National Parks Service. The declaration didn’t help much. Although several plans for revamping Ellis Island were drafted, most were shelved as there were simply too many other things going on at the time. The only thing that changed was the arrival of a single Parks Department security guard, who was supposed to patrol the island a few hours every day.

Noting this situation, inspired by the events on Alcatraz, and frustrated by the lack of Red Power activity on the East Coast (where arguably Native Americans had it far worse than those on the West Coast), thirty-eight members representing over a dozen local tribes decided to occupy the island themselves to call attention to their plight and forward a few demands.

Like Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills, Ellis Island was an appropriately ironic target, as from a Native American perspective it essentially represented a welcoming gateway for the foreign invaders who stole the country from them. As symbols go, it would be much more powerful than Alcatraz, as soon as most Americans were reminded what Ellis Island was.

At about 5:30 on the morning of March 13th, 1970, the protesters gathered on the docks in Jersey City. As the rest waited on shore, eight activists, the first wave of the planned occupation force, climbed into a boat and headed for the island. A press release was sent to the media announcing the action, and soon local news broadcasts were reporting the protesters had landed on the island.

Unfortunately, they hadn’t. The boat’s engine had stalled thanks to a leaky gas line, and those first eight would-be occupiers were left adrift in the channel. Meanwhile, the National Parks Service, who only learned what was happening on Ellis Island thanks to those news broadcasts, got in touch with the Coast Guard, who sent out two patrol boats to safeguard the island’s perimeter, and that was pretty much that. No arrests were made, as no one actually landed on the island.

Go Forth (Vol. 45)

Go Forth is a series that offers a look into the publishing industry and contemporary small-press literature. See more of the series.

An Interview with D. Foy

I read and loved D. Foy’s novel Made to Break a couple of years ago when Two Dollar Radio published it. His new novel is Patricide, just out from Stalking Horse Press. His work has appeared in Guernica, Literary Hub, Salon, Hazlitt, Post Road, Electric Literature, BOMB, The Literary Review, Midnight Breakfast, The Scofield, and The Georgia Review, among other places, and has been included in the books Laundromat, A Moment’s Notice, and Forty Stories: New Writing from Harper Perennial. I recently talked to D. Foy about Patricide.  

—Brandon Hobson

BRANDON HOBSON: In the opening chapter of Patricide, "Sleep," the narrator tells us: "I was ten years old, and I was stoned." I was drawn to the childhood scenes of Rice's struggle with family, with peers and life itself. What inspired you to write such a damaged but likable young character?

D. FOY: I think it’s safe to say that not all, but a good portion of today’s fiction emphasizes the question of “what” as opposed to the questions of “how” and “why.” Just about everywhere I look, in course descriptions, workshops, essays, and interviews with authors and editors, writers are encouraged to focus, first, on character, and, second, through character, on conflict, as expressed in their actions, as opposed to their feelings and thoughts. Honestly, I find this as astonishing as I find it baffling. It doesn’t make sense to me that readers wouldn’t be interested in the workings of the human mind. And yet, obviously, since most readers aren’t, this must say more about me than it does about them. Most readers, actually—what’s left of them, anyway—aren’t concerned to enter into the consciousness of a character to see what motivates them, and, more, why and how. Instead they want to escape themselves by living vicariously through another person’s generally unexamined actions.

While I have to confess that the dirtiest of my little secrets is that I space out by watching sci-fi, fantasy, thriller, and action TV and films—I wait, for instance, for a season of Game of Thrones to close, then buy it on iTunes and binge watch the crap out of it for two days tops—in my work, and in life, too, I suppose, I’m interested in how the forces that play on people in their youth ramify through the rest of their lives. Probably this obsession explains my proclivity to trash when I’m not engaged in the obsessions themselves. In any case, I’m interested, in why and how people become who they are, in the moments that affect them so profoundly that they affect just as profoundly everything they do going forward, and, from there, how they process these events. 

So a boy who becomes a drug addict when he’s ten years old is fascinating to me. Why does he become an addict, and how? And how does his dependence affect him as he moves through adolescence into adulthood? What sorts of decisions does he make, what sorts of people does he fall in with, and how does the rest of the world see and treat him? Is such a person able to surmount the difficulties in which his circumstances inevitably engulf him, or is he destined to the state of apathy—avoidance and denial—with which a human can’t do more than fail at everything he touches? I imagine what makes Rice likeable for some is that to whatever degree, they can identify with him—more with his psychology, his thoughts and feelings about his circumstances than with the circumstances themselves.

BH: I really like the way you structured this novel, employing various point-of-views with chapter titles that, in a way, make this book feel like a series of connected stories. Can you talk specifically about this structure?

DF: The structure of Patricide is the structure of a tornado. Though I didn’t set out with this image in mind, it didn’t take long to see. I’ve talked elsewhere about a principle I could almost say describes everything I do artistically: the work will show you how to do it. In this book, at first, in any case, my protagonist Rice was confronted with his father and everything that makes his father who and what he is. But once the writing deepened, the further into the work I got, I began to consider the uber-matrix in which our fathers are molded. What is the father? How is it he’s become the figure of power and fear he is? What is patriarchy? How does the patriarchy maintain dominance and control, and how and why does its influence pervade every aspect of our society and culture? Things like this. 

Flying Yolo

WARNING: This interview was conducted in late 2014 and concerns Kool A.D.'s novel Not OK, which at the time was known as O.K., but is now the unpublished prequel to OK, which is just out from Sorry House. If you are the type of reader who prefers interviews about published books rather than those about unpublished prequels, you are advised to pursue other interviews. 

An Interview with KOOL A.D.

KOOL A.D.’s debut novel, O.K., is reminiscent of the drawings of visual artist KOOL A.D. as well as of the music of rap artist KOOL A.D. If you don’t know, you better ask somebody. If you’re asking me, I’ll tell you what’s distinctive about the work of KOOL A.D., no matter the medium, is its eclectic and idiosyncratic melange of people, images, sounds, ideas, and references. His source materials are as broad as you could hope and the consciousness he filters them through is witty, playful, political, subversive, and deeply intelligent.

If you’re someone who has been waiting for the novel in which Anne Carson appears “in a pink velour FUBU tracksuit sniffing poppers,” your wait is over. If you’ve been looking for a book in which large reptiles are taxis, O.K. is also that book. Celebrities you’re not sure if you’ve heard of on Hunter Thompson-drug binges channeling theorists you haven’t read? Plenty of that.

The novel is as fluid as its narrator, who metamorphoses (a la Kafka’s Gregor) into LL Cool J, Steve Buscemi, Donald Duck, and many others, or more often combinations thereof. It flattens any neat distinctions between fantasy/reality, online/offline, thought/action, exposition/plot, intoxication/soberness, and perhaps most fundamentally dreaming/waking. There is no way to read it but to jump in and move with the dream-logic. For this reason, I found Chuang Tzu, of the philosophers invoked in the novel, the most helpful, in particular his butterfly dream, after which “he didn’t know if he was Chuang Chou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Chuang Chou.” Subjectivity in O.K. is a function of environment, needs and desires, and the present moment. The notion of stable identity over time doesn’t begin to obtain.

While the shifting self is culturally produced from our everyday world and the book is therefore of pop culture, it isn’t for it. Rather, it sucks up the textures and personalities of pop, de- and recontextualizes them, subverts their cliches, and empties them of signification. Justin Bieber is Adorno is Tupac’s hologram. If Reality Hunger were a recipe, O.K. would be its cake. You can have yours and eat it too.

We conducted this interview over email. I used my computer. He used his phone.

—Scott Parker

THE BELIEVER: Tell me, is everything O.K.? Is the moon?

KOOL A.D.: Everything is not O.K. A lot of cops shooting black kids and getting away with it and I guess it's nothing new but things seem to have reached a spectacularly terrifying boiling point right now. Israel seems particularly fucked up as of late too. Afghanistan and Iraq don't seem like they're doing so well either. Mexico has been going through some shit. Ozone layer seems fucked. Peak Oil, deforestation, polluted oceans, pharmaceutical monopolies, massive corporate tax evasion/bank fraud/general fuckery, record-breaking incarceration rates, truly insane economic disparity, a global atmosphere of paranoia and xenophobia, Militarized Prison Industrial Complex in full effect, etc. Which isn't to say there aren't some things that are O.K. This book is I guess mostly concerned with rooting out a reason to live despite all of this, looking for the occasional O.K. moment to be found in a world of suffering. And I mean, on an extra "grand scheme of things" level we're all a tiny speck in a vast essentially infinite universe and someday we'll all be dead, so like in that sense I guess you could say everything is O.K., but I guess in that sense you could say anything. Moon seems pretty O.K.

BLVR: When Hui Tzu asked Chuang Tzu how he could sing after his wife’s death, he answered: “When she first died, do you think I didn’t grieve like anyone else? But I looked back to her beginning and the time before she was born. Not only the time before she was born, but the time before she had a body. Not only the time before she had a body, but the time before she had a spirit. In the midst of the jumble of wonder and mystery a change took place and she had a spirit. Another change and she had a body. Another change and she was born. Now there’s been another change and she’s dead. It’s just like the progression of the four seasons, spring, summer, fall, winter.

“Now she’s going to lie down peacefully in a vast room. If I were to follow after her bawling and sobbing, it would show that I don’t understand anything about fate. So I stopped.”

Question would be something like: Is it too early to understand fate?

KOOL A.D.: Yes.

Typical of the Times: Growing Up in the Culture of Spectacle

We’re So Famous was my first published novel, but it is not the first novel I wrote. I originally attempted to emulate my hero F. Scott Fitzgerald, attracted to and influenced as I was by his narratives about sad young men, a thread I’d pick up later for my trilogy about Charlie Martens. But when my first novel failed to sell, I cast about for another theme that interested me, and didn’t have to ruminate long before recognizing my intense interest in the culture of celebrity. It seems naive to claim that back in the late 1990s, celebrity culture was a relatively new phenomenon, but fame for fame’s sake seemed new and curious to me—previously those who wanted to become famous aspired to be athletes or actors or musicians or models—and so it was the perfect subject for a novel in that moment in time before the Internet truly became the enabler it is for any and all attention seekers. (As proof of how pre-Internet this novel was, I remember a late-night trip to the record store to confirm the spelling of the name of one of the singers in Bananarama, at the behest of the copy editor.)

As I contemplated the afterword for this new Bloomsbury edition, I tried to transport myself back to that time and place in my life when I was obsessed with and amazed by fame, to create a little sketch meant to provide the context in which the novel was written. Instead a torrent of words issued forth over the course of a month, and when I was finished, it was apparent not only why I wrote We’re So Famous, but also that it was a book I was destined to write.

—Jaime Clarke

2016 Election Diary, The Final Installment

Donald Trump’s speech on immigration from August input into Paul Chan’s “oH Ho.”

Read Part I, Part II, Part III. 

By Rick Moody

October 3, 2016

One of my jobs is teaching writing classes for visual artists. I do this at two schools—at the Yale University School of Art, and at the NYU graduate program in fine art. This is a job I dearly love, in part because I love visual artists (I am married to one), love their minds and their conceptual brilliance, but also because I love making writing accessible to people who aren’t always sure that it is for them. My theory is that creativity the same across disciplines, and if you can take a great photograph, or make a multi-media extravaganza, you can definitely write well too. People think the writing always has to be perfect, literary, or, in the case of visual artists, that it has to sound like Artforum or October. Not at all! It should sound like human beings!

What this has to do with the election is that I always give an assignment that involves making found text, or collage-oriented poems (something I do myself on occasion) at the beginning of the semester in order to give the non-writers a chance to demystify language, and so that they might realize that it’s okay to treat the words like objects (I’m quoting the great poet Susan Wheeler here).

In both classes this semester, I gave the artists Donald Trump's speech on immigration from a couple of months ago and then a copy of the National Enquirer—the last publication supporting him, it would seem—after which they were encouraged to make four lines of poetry combining words or lines from the two sources. We then voted on our favorites lines and made “sonnets” out of the resulting collages.

Here’s the Yale class (who consisted of: Joe Hoyt, Res, Danna Singer, Chau Tran, Anna Shimshak, Ashton Hudgins, Farah Al-Qasimi, Bek Andersen, Lance Brewer, Matt Leifheit, Carr Chadwick, Kathryn Kerr, Harry Griffin):

Word Salad #1

Most people thought the era of the super-powerful diet pill ended because of safety concerns,   and they would comply if we would act properly The juiciest body doesn’t serve you—let me tell you who it does serve. Don’t forget the Supreme Court of the United States, don’t forget that, and don’t forget building up our depleted military, and don’t forget dad’s high school ring. Someone from your past who you never expected to hear from reaches out to send her daughter one final message— weak, weak, weak… I would hide them all in my lace-up shoes, and before I would go home I would Febreeze my car. A vampire breast lift, a pair of my jeans, the reign of terror. Hear these words from me—they think the biggest thing is that The crimes scenes are desperate for heroes Say hello to the police, disgusting pig fat mother of a whore Touchy royals, guilt free wanks, cut it off! Cut it off! Welfare use will decrease Skid row squatter, flowers on the tarmac, another creep, white supremacist: America itself.

And here’s the NYU version (and the students were, Lara Saget, Jerry Adams, Biraaj Dodiya, Nick Doty, Alex Heffesse, Jessica Lanchester, Luca Molnar, Omer ben Zvi, Erin Schiller, Meeka Patton):

Word Salad #2

Without the laws against crime we have got a shock—primped metrosexual guys, wow.

Lip plumpers cost our country more than $113 billion a year.

Toking and twerking, they're going out fast.

I'm going to ask the moms to come join me. These are amazing women who can crush steel with the slightest ease. That's what's going to happen sure as you're standing here.

I used to put a sock under my arm and touch the doll but I don’t have to now.

The Trojan Horse will capture your woman folks, the heavens will fall.

I am by the way just a twisted baby killer who got a glam makeover from Susan Smith, who doesn't have a mom many more, seriously, the chin-implant made her look like a different person.

It seems you have multiple tragic deaths and attempted murders and it’s all going to end very, very badly.

NIE WIEDER KRIEG 1991

Donald Judd, 2nd Floor, 101 Spring Street, New York, 1985. Photo credit: Doris Lehni-Quarella © Antonio Monaci

By Donald Judd

Announcing the start of what later was called Operation Desert Storm on January 16, 1991, President George H. W. Bush argued that “the world could wait no longer,” a declaration which led to a five-week bombardment of Iraqi command, leading to coalition casualties in the hundreds and Iraqi losses in the tens of thousands. Written in January 1991 and completed, as Judd specified, on the 18th of January, “Nie Wieder Krieg,” which translates from the German as “No More War” is Judd’s direct condemnation of the First Gulf War. Whereas President Bush proclaimed in his speech of January 16th,  “We will not fail,” Judd argued to the contrary that “War is failure. War is caused by carelessness, wastefulness, thoughtlessness, incompetence, complacency and laziness.” Condemning the inaction of the US citizenry, Judd continued, “The people in the United States said nothing in August against the first soldiers, just like Vietnam, or the second soldiers, also like Vietnam, and have not said anything since, and Congress mumbles OK, whatever you want. Only people in the streets can stop this waste of their labor and lives.”

Collected in this new volume are essays, notes and letters reflecting not only on art and architecture, but also on the societal and political conditions that allow, or in the case of war, disallow the freedom with which to produce art and architecture. Made possible through the transcription of handwritten and typed writings from the Judd Foundation Archives, these writings provide insight into the consistency of Judd’s political attitudes from the late 1960s onward. Written for an exhibition catalogue for the show Donald Judd—Architektur, at the Österreichisches Museum für angewandte Kunst in Wien in 1991, “Nie Wieder Krieg” is just one example in which Judd explicitly linked his work in art and architecture with his political concerns. As Judd wrote in response to a survey conducted by Artforum in 1970, “I’ve always thought that my work had political implications... I think everyone has to be involved in politics.”  

—Caitlin Murray

It’s hard to write about constructive and peaceful matters before a war.1 It’s difficult to live threatened by war all of your life, and further to know that the reasons are not outwardly determined and serious, but are inwardly caused and frivolous. War is failure. War is caused by carelessness, wastefulness, thoughtlessness, incompetence, complacency, and laziness. That’s why war is the solution and dream of governmental bureaucrats, and as well the easiest way out for their subjects. If the Americans, governors and governed, ordinarily thought of war as failure, they would not be in Arabia. But even there, without being able to say why they are there, war is exciting and a little glorious and seems to be a brave defense. This war, which may happen, and which may carelessly grow to be World War III, will be very destructive in lives and in buildings, which are labor and effort, the construction of lives. But war is not just a mindless spasm that goes away. The preparation for war for all of our lives has made our society. At length and steadily it destroys constructive and peaceful activities.

Almost no one in the United States has said that for fifty years the country has been a military state and that the “Cold War” was, and is again, a situation devised to maintain that military state. War is patriotism, which is first, single, and sacrosanct. Hardly anyone dares to complain or object, mostly no one thinks to object. In August no one in the United States objected to soldiers being sent to Arabia.

The intention was obviously to set up a situation for further soldiers and for war. Since then there has been even less discussion than accompanied the last election, the least lively in a dead series, the height of freedom worth dying for. War is sacrosanct. There can be no discussion of its benefits and results. Not even the most crass self-interest is considered; war is conspicuously without self-interest. To the Americans it immediately means the total destruction of the enemy. The last time that they couldn’t do that was against England in 1812.

They have no grand plan, other than maintaining the military, only little schemes, and no purpose once war begins other than extermination. Here is an example from 1891:

The Americans are supposed to be innocent, which they are not, and naive, which they are, and not good at diplomacy, which is true, having no purpose. They are vicious and naive and just as dangerous as if they were calculating, even more so.

"An artwork doesn’t necessarily need to be loving or kind.” —Ariana Reines

Our own Ross Simonini has a new podcast out with SFMoMA, Raw Material. This week’s episode on divination features Ariana Reines, Melissa Buzzeo, and CA Conrad. The poets discuss astrological techniques used to perceive and foresee the unknown. Recommended for fans of anti-authority talk, Madame Blavatsky, and arachnomancy.  

The Céline Blacklist

Jim Knipfel on Louis-Ferdinand Céline Translations from the French by Mitchell Abidor

At the time of his death in 1961, French novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline remained an extraordinarily controversial and contradictory figure. He had been a cavalryman in World War I who collaborated with the Vichy government during the French Occupation and was later found guilty of treason. He was a physician who treated the poor in some of the worst slums in Paris, yet who was also a virulent racist and anti-Semite. He was a disillusioned humanist who turned misanthropist after seeing a world overrun with stupid human brutality. He spread myths about himself, and publicly attacked those who repeated them as truth. He loved the ballet, he loved animals, and was during his lifetime perhaps the most singularly despised man in France—a role he accepted and performed with undeniable gusto. Some said he was the embodiment of evil, others that he was merely and utterly insane.

He was also one of the most important and influential writers of the 20th century. He smashed forms and rewrote the conventions of what constituted proper style and storytelling. Without Céline’s bitter, sprawling, phantasmagoric black comedies, there would have likely been no Henry Miller, no Beat movement, no Jean Genet, no Kurt Vonnegut, Nathaniel West, Hubert Selby, Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, or a thousand others.

So then the question becomes, given Céline’s undisputed literary importance, why does so much of his work remain unavailable?

In 2009, fifty-five years after its original French publication, Normance, the last of Céline’s twelve novels to be translated into English, was finally released for the first time. Mea Culpa, an attack on communism written after a brief visit to Russia in 1936, was translated and released in the States in 1938 but never reprinted. In 2012, a small Quebecois publisher released a limited edition of three notorious pamphlets (some would call them “screeds” or “rants”) written by Céline between 1937 and 1941. It was expressly forbidden to sell or ship the book outside of Canada. Apart from the novels and two minor works (a play and a collection of ballets), none of Céline’s other writings are available in English. The amount of untranslated material is staggering—thousands of pages worth of essays, speeches, and correspondence.

Yes, Céline was an unpleasant fellow with some mighty harsh and unpopular ideas, but I’m hardpressed to think of another writer of similar stature, no matter how loathsome we may find his or her opinions, whose work has been so effectively quashed. Contrary to general perception, it’s not that these works have been banned. They haven’t been, at least not in any official manner. People are simply afraid of them, it seems, in a way they fear few other writers. People who have never read Céline call him a Nazi and dismiss the novels on that basis, often insisting, in fact, no one should read him. Academics treat him as if he will quite literally leap from the pages to inject poison into the minds of those who dare open his books. Publishers are apparently afraid of the repercussions of being associated with such a monster.

Funny thing is, over time the shrill, hair-pulling paranoia surrounding Céline has come to resemble a mere reflection of the ignorantly superstitious world against which he aimed so much invective. (On the fiftieth anniversary of his death in 2011, the French Culture Minister struck Céline’s name from the list of the five hundred most important French cultural icons because he was a nasty person.) It’s a situation that would have come as no surprise to the author of Journey to the End of the Night.

In 1934, after being approached by noted art historian Élie Faure to denounce the recent fascist riots in France, Céline wrote the following, excerpted from a previously untranslated letter:

... I absolutely refuse to line up on this side or that. I am an anarchist to the tip of my toes. I always was one and I will never be anything else. Everyone has spit on me, from Izvestia to the official  Nazis, M. de Regnier, Comœdia, Stavisky, president Dullin, all of them in almost the same exact terms have declared me unacceptable, unspeakable. I haven’t done this on purpose, but it’s a fact. I’m fine with this, because I’m in the right. Every political system is an enterprise of hypocritical narcissism which consists in projecting the personal ignominy of its adherents onto a system or onto “others.” I admit that I live quite well; I proclaim loudly, emotionally, and strongly all of man’s common disgustingness, on the right and the left. I will never be forgiven for this. Since the death of the priests the world is nothing but demagoguery, shit is constantly flattered, and responsibility is rejected through ideological and verbal artifice.

There is no more contrition; there is nothing but chants of revolt and hope. But hope for what? That shit will start smelling good?