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Tests of Time
Ron Silliman:
Some poets have chosen to embrace the new with everything from flarf to technology-based visual poetries. Others have decided that the “timeless” values of tradition will outlast even this. They recall and sometimes reiterate the archaeologist’s maxim that ultimately hard copy is truth. If you can’t dig it up in 5,000 years, did it ever exist? Ian Hamilton Finlay, with his stone-carved minimal texts, may outlast us all.
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Recommended Books DeLillo's major work before White Noise is probably his most underrated novel. Its all right here--the politics of paranoia, terrorism, the unnamable--set in an evocative, timeless Greece.
The most bizarre Abe novel I've yet read, which is indeed saying something. About a subclass of Japanese men who go around wearing boxes from the waist up (and then use them as domiciles in the evening), the book is also an experiment in perspective shifts, a highly unstable, metafictional first-person narrative, and an exploration of voyeurism, consumerism, and aberrant sexuality.
Charting the path to three gunshots--the one that killed filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, the one that disabled his Islamic extremist assassin, Mohammed Bouyeri, and the one that led to Vincent Van Gogh’s one hundred years earlier--Olsen tells three separate stories that resonate with one another on numerous levels: the logic of extremism, the role of the dissident in Dutch society, the limits of tolerance, the purpose of the artist, the feeling of the most important five minutes of your life. Read my interview with the author.
Creatively structured, well-executed epic novel of rural South Africa from 1950 - 2000. Takes on a lot and lives up to it magnificently. Highly recommended.
A book that's an interview about the book you're supposedly holding in your hands. Creative, potent, and full of life. Just what metafiction should be. Read my post on it.
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The Novels of Kim Young-ha
Graphs, Maps, Trees
The Names by Don DeLillo (1982)
The Box Man by Kobo Abe (1973, English 1974)
Head in Flames by Lance Olsen (2009)
Agaat by Marlene van Niekerk (2006, English 2010)
The Weather Fifteen Years Ago by Wolf Haas (2006, English 2009)
“Embrace the new.” They’ve been saying that for 100 years now. Astounding lack of irony.
Daniel,
You sound like you’re suffering a bad case of ‘lost gatekeepr envy.” Like Republicans who still can’t figure out why they’re not the majority party…
J.,
Not particularly (was the goal of that just to call me a Republican?), since I’m not nearly old enough to have ever been a “gatekeeper” (itself a pretty useless term; there are no gates, no limiting structures such as production and distribution).
I think that “Make it new” is an axiom in the poetry world which has led to repetitious strategies of emphatic divergence, and its use has long since passed; “Make it blue” would be more avant garde at this point. This is not to say I enjoy the rote redundancies of “traditionalist” poets either. But as Fredric Jameson recently wrote, the various Theories of the 1960s–80s have codified over the course of 40 years into the very type of philosophies they claim to explode. They are the form of current academic hegemonies. Hard-line traditionalist academics and poets are the natural counterpoint of their rise. They are faces of the dominant postmodern ethos which I feel has run its course. Whatever is next, I have no idea.
Daniel,
I confess that I dashed off these comments having my mind largely on something else–though related… so your comment/post set off the associations I was not prepared by time or inclination to defend as you surely deserve. Please accept my apologies. We may or may not disagree, but discussion in good faith is too valuable to subvert with less than mindful exchanges (mine, not yours)
Some of what I did have in mind… the lastest post on Barking Dog.