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.”

Still another confused and enervated soul wrote, “Argue all that you want, but this particular book was for children yes? Or no? If it was, does that mean we should allow and subject young children to gratuitous violence, gore and pornography? And what age is it acceptable? Does this mean we have to start putting PG-14 on printed material and make it mandatory because certain writers can’t conduct themselves with a moral scale?”

Another angry reader summed it up quite simply by posting, “Freedom is bullshit, literally.”

[Note: As much as possible, the spelling, punctuation and grammatical errors which peppered the above posts have been corrected here for the sake of simple comprehensibility.]

Although Abrams initially stood by Gackley and the First Amendment right to offend, and had received the public support of several anti-censorship organizations, by December tenth the noise had simply grown too shrill. Mr. Gackley, maintaining to the end his intentions had been grossly misinterpreted, admitted there was no way to salvage things, and asked that Abrams not reprint the book. In a statement, Abrams announced they would be complying with his wishes. Although Bad Little Children’s Books was not banned in any official capacity, it had all but completely vanished from online booksellers within a few days after the announcement. Used copies, while available, are now selling for outrageous prices.

At the same time that this was happening, there were also calls to ban the (real) children’s books When We Was Fierce and A Birthday Cake for George Washington. The invented slang used in the former was interpreted as racist by some parent groups, and the latter was attacked for its historically inaccurate portrayal of the daily lives of slaves on Washington’s estate. Meanwhile, a mother in Tennessee led the call to pull Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks from the local school system. The New York Times bestselling biography, which concerned a Baltimore woman whose massive cervical tumor had become the invaluable source of several generations worth of cell lines used by cancer researchers, was being taught in local high schools as a means of educating students both about cancer and about racial issues within the medical community. The Tennessee mother calling for its removal, however, found the book pornographic.

Point being, I guess, that certain sectors of the population harbor an insatiable, even desperate desire to be shocked and offended by something they’ve read, seen, or even heard about, and the drive to ban these things (made much easier with the advent of social media) will likely always be with us. But back to the Gackley for a moment. Reading through the enraged postings aimed at Abrams, a number of the offended make the point that they are not attempting to censor, but are merely exercising their own First Amendment right to criticize. That’s fine and understandable. But the crux of the matter is that these people would be much happier if the book never existed in the first place, and considered Abrams’ decision a glorious victory for their cause.

Let’s try to put it in some sort of semi-comprehensible historical context. Dark and occasionally tasteless adult-oriented satires of children’s books, television and toys have been with us about as long as media aimed specifically at the innocent set. We just can’t help ourselves. Present us with the doe-eyed lukewarm treacle of the Smurfs or Care Bears, and some of us will instinctively reach for a baseball bat. In the case of Bad Little Children’s Books, the outrage in many instances seems to be sparked less by the content than form, and the fear that the book might actually be mistaken for legitimate kidlit. So here are a handful of similar cases from the last half-century. While reactions and results differ wildly, a certain historical pattern does seem to emerge.

Ralph Bakshi’s 1972 animated feature Fritz the Cat, based on the R. Crumb character, became notorious overnight for being the first theatrically-released cartoon to receive an X rating from the MPAA. What people tend to forget is that the film received the distinction not on account of its sexual content, nor because it included characters who were overtly racist, misogynistic drug addicts who cursed a lot. The real problem was the film featured cute and fuzzy animals who were racist, misogynistic drug addicts who cursed a lot, and had sex. The MPAA board was afraid people would see the cartoon poster and stroll into the theater, family in tow, expecting the latest Disney opus. By modern standards the film should have received nothing more than an R rating, but the damning “adults only” designation was an effort to avoid any confusion. It didn’t matter. People saw the X rating and immediately concluded Bakshi had made a hardcore cartoon in a diabolical effort to corrupt the nation’s youth. Although the publicity attracted large audiences and earned the film an undeniable bit of underground cred, that same publicity did irreparable damage to Bakshi’s career. For decades afterward, even while trying to redeem himself with the family-friendly Mighty Mouse cartoon series for TV, he found himself labeled a racist, sexist pornographer determined to get America’s young people hooked on heroin—charges leveled at him mostly by people who had never seen Fritz the Cat.

Long before he won a Pulitzer for Maus and became a regular contributor to The New Yorker, cartoonist Art Spiegelman spent twenty years working for the Topps trading card company. Among other things, he was one of the primary creative forces behind Topps’ wildly popular and wickedly subversive Wacky Packages series, which satirized American consumer products. In 1985, Topps attempted to arrange a licensing deal to release a series of trading cards based on Cabbage Patch Dolls, which were all the rage at the time. Finding licensing fees had already gone through the roof, they decided instead to release a Wacky Packages-style parody. As it happened, an unreleased Wacky Packages design called Garbage Pail Kids was already on the boards, so they ran with it.

Spiegelman and the involved artists took the basic design of the cuddly and adorable plush dolls beloved by all the world and twisted them into deranged monstrosities covered in snot, vomit, oozing sores and bugs. From the moment they hit convenience store checkout counters, the GPK stickers were outrageously popular. Although some school systems banned them as an unwelcome distraction and more than a few parents were mortified and disgusted that any sick individual would do such a horrible thing to something so innocent and cuddly, there was no organized grassroots effort to censor the stickers on moral grounds. Topps’ only real trouble came in the form of a copyright infringement suit filed by the Cabbage Patch Dolls’ creators, Original Appalachian Artworks, Inc.

Topps’ argument that what they were doing was clear and obvious parody (and therefore protected under the First Amendment) didn’t quite cut it. The suit was settled out of court, with Topps agreeing to alter the Garbage Pail Kids logo and basic character design so as to avoid any possible confusion with the original dolls. The stickers continued to come out, and went on to inspire an animated television series, a feature film, a book and an unholy array of merchandise ranging from trash cans to sunglasses. In the end, it could easily be argued that over time the Garbage Pail Kids had more of a lasting impact on the culture than their inspiration.

Struwwelpeter was first published in Germany in 1845. The cautionary and terrifying collection of nursery rhymes (with graphic accompanying illustrations to drive the point home) warned children that if they sucked their thumnbs, didn’t eat their dinner, didn’t clean themselves up properly, mistreated their pets or threw tantrums, a horrible fate awaited them. The book became a standard instructional volume in most German households with young children. In 1898, a similar but decidedly British version was released in England under the title Shockheaded Peter, and was nearly as popular. Nobody it seemed thought much about presenting naughty children with images of potential disfigurement or death. The book helped keep the little buggers in line.

In 1999, American indie publisher Feral House released a gorgeous new edition of Struwwelpeter, complete with new illustrations, interpretive and historical essays, and assorted bowdlerized and satirical versions of the nursery rhymes which had appeared over the years. Feral House, which had always prided itself on publishing dangerous and controversial works, soon found this simple history and analysis of a once popular if disturbing children’s book could be just as troublesome as their books by notorious British serial killer Ian Brady or the Church of Satan’s Anton LaVey.

“Yes, we had minor trouble with Struwwelpeter,” says Feral House founder and publisher Adam Parfrey.  “But most of that was put to rest when bookstores simply refused to carry the book. I guess 21st century Americans are more touchy than the Germans of yore. For a while, a couple chains and many independent bookstores stopped carrying the Anton LaVey books we published after Geraldo Rivera put on those sensationalist programs about Satanism… I credit Marilyn Manson for putting an end to that crap. After he spoke out about it, so many people went into bookstores to order them that the stores saw best to get them back into their shops. Time passed, and the crazy ideas receded.”

Parfrey also sees a potential connection between the backlash Abrams suffered over Bad Little Children’s Books and the present brouhaha over what has been termed “fake news.”

“Right now there’s a good bit of madness going on with Trump-loving crazies, including Alex Jones and Infowars building up this idea that Hillary Clinton and John Podesta are torturing and killing children…and they’re pointing at Marina Abramović, too. That’s a big deal on Facebook at this instant. And anyone who poo-poos this story is being accused of covering up kiddie killing. I can see how this sort of madness can amplify into the book trade, a situation where parodies are mistaken for outright kiddie torture. Sad, isn’t it?”

As a final example, in 2010 Simon and Schuster published my book These Children Who Come at You With Knives, a collection of darkly comic fairy tales aimed at adults. Across roughly a dozen stories written in traditional fairy tale formats (though with more cursing, gratuitous gore, and uncontrolled bodily functions), assorted anthropomorphized animals, magical creatures, human children, the elderly and the dull-witted come to various terrible ends. The book received decent reviews and publicity, but there was no outcry, no controversy, and no one insisted the book be banned in order to protect the innocent. Meaning, of course, that I didn’t sell millions as a result of the hoo-hah.  Christ, I’ve even heard from people who use them as bedtime stories for their own kids. Dammit! What the hell did I do wrong?

I think I made two deadly mistakes. First, despite my best efforts to the contrary, my publisher decided to release the book without illustrations, meaning it could never possibly be confused with an actual children’s book. More devastating still, I was cursed with bad timing. These Children Who Come at You With Knives was released halfway through President Obama’s first term, and while there was certainly a good deal of rancor in the air, satire was still a viable form and accepted as such, at least among the literate. 

In different eras and in different ways, all the above examples were damned by a public inflicting its own preconceived notions upon works of obvious satire, insisting they be what the public believed them to be instead of what they actually were. 

By the time Bad little Children’s Books was released, the world had become too ridiculous, too absurd, and as a result we lost our sense of humor. There was simply no longer any way to lampoon our chosen leaders or our own insecurities, with the world itself poised and ready to top us at every turn. In short, the book’s publication coincided with the precise moment satire breathed its last, meaning readers had no choice but to take Gackley’s work, as Parfrey points out, at face value. Lucky bastard.

Jim Knipfel is the author of Slackjaw, These Children Who Come at You with Knives, The Blow-Off, and several other books, most recently Residue (Red Hen Press, 2015). his work has appeared in New York Press, the Wall Street Journal, the Village Voice and dozens of other publications.

“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?

JC: I don’t know how other designers do it, but I keep iterating until things feel right. Sometimes it’s quick, sometimes it takes 82 versions like the Confidant notebook’s packaging. My goal is to isolate and preserve the best elements, improve the weak ones, and look to my inner self’s gut response to see if the new outcome pleases or not. Rinse and repeat. My old teacher and designer James Victore has a good line about this: “In the particular lies the universal.” Solve your problem—and delight yourself—and you’ll do the same for others.

BLVR: The Archer, besides its other greatnesses, smells so good I have to pause what I’m doing and take a hit. How much wood did you have to test/sniff to make the best choice?

JC: I hear you. We try to take our hits when no one is looking. Sometimes you can find Adam near the stock shelves face-deep in a box of them. It’s definitely an issue.

BLVR: You mentioned earlier this idea of ubiquitous loyalty when it comes to laptops, etc. Pencils are sort of marked by promiscuity—once you’re done with one, you just pluck another from the box. So how do you hope to gain that kind of loyalty with the Archer?

JC: Think of a pencil being more like a cup of coffee rather than a pen. We all find our favorite coffee and stick to it. Sure, the cups run out, but there’s always another one waiting—and you know it’s going to be just as good as the ones that come before it. Quality, reliability—they’re both extremely important in designing a consumable, especially a tool that helps us do our work or hobby.

BLVR: For pencil nerds like myself, how does the Archer differ, and improve upon, something like the Palomino Blackwing?

JC: I get asked this a lot. We put major emphasis on community feedback, and design accordingly. Since we launched Baron Fig we’ve tweaked and redesigned every product directly based on the ideas that come our way from our customers. When we say “Designed by the community,” we mean it. As far as the Archer goes, they’ve been a requested product since day one. Each Archer is extremely high quality, better than anything available at their price point of $15 per pack. And, if I do say so myself, sexier than any pencil, period.

BLVR: It’s definitely a sexy pencil.

JC: Thank you.

BLVR: Pencils, packaging—it’s so minimalist it’s sans-serif, without a stray line in sight, the Phillip Glass of writing implements (I could go on). But I do find myself a little thrown off by the lack of an eraser. Was there a debate to excise the eraser?

JC: Well said. Since launching the Archer I’ve been asked this question often—"Why did you remove the eraser? What’s your thinking?“—as if I’ve committed an atrocity. There’s a disconnect, though, between how people say they feel about erasers versus how people actually feel about them. When’s the last time you used an eraser on a pencil and thought to yourself, “Damn, this eraser is great”? I don’t think it happens. They’re pretty much crap, every one seems to leave marks on the page, gets dirty and blemished, and in the end delivers an underwhelming experience.

So I nixed it. Boom, goodbye eraser at the end. With that out of the way now we can actually deliver a quality eraser on the side, one that doesn’t mark up your page and isn’t limited to the lifespan of the pencil itself.

BLVR: What do you see the Archer going into the world to achieve?

JC: Everything. Imagery and language are some of the oldest and most glorious technologies known to man. Technology? What? Yes, technology. But I’m digressing—what do I hope for the Archer to achieve? For these pencils to be the vehicles of communication, of images and words, that affect the world. Ideas are powerful, writing instruments are the means by which they’re communicated. On our site, at the top of the Squire pen page, it explains that a writing instrument “…grants the power to move entire nations, to touch people’s hearts and souls—to make something from nothing.” And I mean every word of that.

Michael Peck is the author of The Last Orchard in America. His work has appeared in Tin House, LA Review of Books, Pank and elsewhere. He lives in Oregon City, where he deals in rare books.

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?

I took it personally, coining the unforgiving term David Bowie Syndrome. As a burgeoning artist, I feared (a scaled-back version of) his creative arc with my whole heart—reaching the greatness of Bowie’s 1970s only to follow it up with Let’s Dance. To say nothing of Tin Machine. Like many old-school fans, I’d stopped tuning in to modern Bowie to keep my vintage Bowie flame flickering.

In my most youthfully caustic moment, I joked that Bowie’s personal Oblique Strategies deck—that famous stack of cards, creative prompts such as Ask your body, Abandon normal instruments, and Courage! allegedly used when Bowie and Brian Eno recorded Low and Heroes—should be made up of cards that all read, simply: Call Eno.

Unfair, untrue. Kindly allow this counterpoint mea culpa admission: I secretly love the ham-fisted, cringtastic video for Dancing in the Street.

3.

On the third day after Bowie’s death I step outside, wondering if I’ll still hear his presence hum. Just feet from my front door I’m greeted by his face gracing one of two large posters advertising Blackstar. Well hey there, Mr. Jones.

They’re wet with wheat paste and like a teenage fangirl I consider stealing one, but then notice a smaller poster hung next to them, featuring the Sesame Street characters peering out joyously, encouraging me to attend an event entitled… Let’s Dance!

I accept Bowie’s cosmic joke, had it coming I suppose, and briskly hoof it to Union Square where at the farmer’s market I find apples, apple cider, cider doughnuts and not much else. My gloveless fingertips smart as I pocket change and consider the possibility that the visitation was an invitation to dance through the sorrow. A bit maudlin perhaps, but then, so was Bowie.

When I return home the Blackstar posters are gone. In under an hour someone has pasted them over with clothing and gym ads—leaving all the posters on either side for the length of the street untouched. Like Steppenwolf’s Magic Theater, the message—whatever it was—had appeared and just as quickly vanished.

My feet walk me to Bowie’s memorial, which has exploded in a heap of bouquets, black bobbing Prettiest Star balloons, cha-cha lines of platform heels, disco balls, eye shadow, quarts of milk, British flags, drawings and paintings of Bowie’s many incarnations, fuzzy spiders, bluebirds, boas, vinyl copies of David Live annotated Forever in thick silver marker.

A giant orange tissue paper flower hangs from a nearby tree, electric blue eye at its center, petals edged in lyrics: Give me your hands, because you’re wonderful! Let the children lose it, let the children use it, let all the children boogie.

Here and there are tucked personal notes: You taught me that weird = beautiful, and: When I was a teenager I wished I could check off “David Bowie” for both my gender and my race. I still do.

“Taking away all the theatrics…” Bowie said, “I’m a writer. The subject matter…boils down to a few songs, based around loneliness, isolation, spiritual search, and a looking for a way into communication with other people. And that’s about it—about all I’ve ever written about for forty years.”

Perhaps, then, my “Let’s Dance” visitation was an anti-message, a warning against wasting creative juju by pandering for cash. Of course, Bowie made not a dime (relatively, and thanks in large part to shifty management) from his artistic era I find most inspiring. The seed of the fortune that brought him financial security was that very song. So what then?

When I return home, Bowie’s spot on the wall has been papered over yet again, all white this time, as though to say, as he has when pressed to interpret his lyric’s meaning, “nothing further,” “you figure it out,” “space to let.”

4.

I rise before the sun, pull on bright turquoise tights and red clogs and walk the cobblestone of Lafayette Street in the dark. Collar up, breath ghosting, I feel as I secretly do in all such moments, like the cover of Low, or The Middle-Aged Lady Who Fell to Earth. Car headlights slide over me as I approach the memorial that is, it appears, being dismantled.

I quickly make the photograph I awoke imagining: my platforms meeting Bowie’s shore of flickering candles, cigarette butts, stray boa feathers, sea of glitter. Beside me a sweet lone man sorts out the dead flowers, shuffling handmade things to one side, candles to another, not tossing it all as I first suspected, but tidying up, preparing for another day.

What drew me into this frigid darkness, half dressed in pajamas? Perhaps a need to meet Bowie toe to toe, promise to honor the contract, all in, heart wide, funk to funky.

Put on my red shoes and dance the blues.

“I don’t think (the act of creation is) something that I enjoy a hundred percent. There are occasions when I really don’t want to write. It just seems that I have a physical need to do it…I really am writing for myself.”

Before Blackstar, the last time I know of Bowie creating under extreme duress is when making the album Station to Station—which coincidentally also opens with an epically long titular song wherein a man yelps from the darkness, singing with pride and pain about a fame that has isolated him beyond measure.

As the Thin White Duke, Bowie sings with bitter irony, It’s not the side effects of the cocaine! I’m thinking that it must be love! It’s well known that Bowie, living for a year (1975-1976) in his despised, self-chosen, wasteland of Los Angeles, had fallen victim to a kind of Method Writing, unable to escape in life the character he’d crafted to hide behind on stage.

Subsisting on a diet of cocaine, chili peppers and milk, he grew paranoid, hallucinating, allegedly dabbling in Black Magic and storing his jarred urine in his refrigerator. I was six years old at the time, living less than a mile from Cherokee Studios where Station to Station was in session, and smudging my mother’s brand new Young Americans vinyl with powdered sugar fingerprints.

He said of the following album, Low, “It was a dangerous period for me. I was at the end of my tether physically and emotionally and had serious doubts about my sanity. But I get a sense of real optimism through the veils of despair from Low. I can hear myself really struggling to get well.”  

It’s the pale, shimmering hope that makes Low my favorite of all of Bowie’s offerings, but for Station to Station’s Duke of Disillusion it’s too late—for hate, gratitude, any emotion. It’s not, however, too late to lay himself bare in the work: there’s no reach for sanity, just a man collapsing while still directing, as the camera rolls.

Blackstar has been called a gift, and on “Dollar Days,” a song that describes his effort to communicate in the face of death, Bowie breaks the fourth wall to address this directly: Don’t think for just one second I’ve forgotten you/I’m trying to/I’m dying to(o).

I believe as an artist he had no choice, no other way to confront his circumstance other than to talk himself through it, put it in the work.

The profound generosity of Blackstar, and a vast swath of Bowie’s creative output, is that in this most intimate conversation with death, god, time, himself, we’ve been invited to listen in.

5.

What makes a good death? Bowie withdrew from the public in the last decade and was characteristically silent regarding his illness, in this tell-all age (that owes him not a little for its status quo “tolerance” of Chazes and Caitlyns). He was also, in his time post-diagnosis, compelled to make his most raw and exposing work in years, and between the play and album, likely spent a long part of each day in their pursuit, while presumably also tending to his needs as a father, husband, friend, man.

In Walter Tevis’ book The Man who Fell to Earth—the basis of Nicholas Roeg’s film that inspired Bowie’s production Lazarus—stranded, despondent space alien Thomas Jerome Newton records an album called The Visitor: we guarantee you won’t know the language, but you’ll wish you did! Seven out-of-this-world poems! Newton explains it’s a letter to his family and home planet that says, “Oh, goodbye, go to hell. Things of that sort.”

Bowie’s seven-song swansong, Blackstar, is rather more generous, and from a writer notorious for lyrical slipperiness, layered meanings, a cut-up technique (copped from Burroughs) that spawned lines about Cassius Clay and papier-mâché, its text is frequently plain-spoken and direct.

Even my favorite frolic sounds a combative calling down of his illness, time: Man, she punched me like a dude/Hold your mad hands, I cried/She stole my purse, with rattling speed/This is the war. It would not be the first time Bowie referred to Time as a “whore.” (see: Aladdin Sane.)

In the title video’s most vivid sections, Bowie becomes god—less vengeful than dismissive—singing, from heaven’s attic, a swaggering takedown of Bowie himself: You’re a flash in the pan, I’m the great I am. (From Exodus: And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.)

His button eyes in both videos suggest a puppet, and so the presence of a puppet master, but I don’t read these images as signs of deathbed conversion. Bowie was a spiritual seeker who borrowed magpie style—in this case from Egyptian, Kabalistic, Christian and Norse iconography—to create a language to give voice to his fears and dark entries.

“If you can accept—and it’s a big leap—that we live in absolute chaos, it doesn’t look like futility anymore. It only looks like futility if you believe in this bang up structure we’ve created called ‘God’.”

In his last gestures Bowie answered not God, but himself, regarding the way he’d lived, and in particular, as an artist. The pulse returns the prodigal sons suggests that the characters he inhabited—some regrettable, but not irredeemable—are with him as he assesses the intentions behind, and perceived short-comings of, his creative offerings: Seeing more and feeling less/Saying no but meaning yes/This is all I ever meant/That’s the message that I sent/(but) I can’t give everything away.

In his almost unbearably haunting last video, it seems we’re finally invited to meet David Jones, or Bowie playing Jones. Jones the man lies in bed, clutching a blanket with those mortal, frightened hands. Nearby the writer manically, fretfully reaches for immortality, while Bowie the performer, dutifully dances to the end.

“There’s an effort to reclaim the unmentionable, the unsayable, the unspeakable, all those things come into being a composer, into writing.”  “You present a darker picture for yourself to look at, and then reject it, all in the process of writing. I think that’s what’s left for me with music. Now I really find that I address things to myself. That’s what I do. If I hadn’t been able to write songs and sing them, it wouldn’t have mattered what I did. I really feel that. I had to do this.”

This morning I remembered where I’d seen the writer’s austere, black and white striped costume before: the program for the 1976 Isolar tour, wherein Bowie self-consciously poses with a notebook or makes chalk drawings of the Kabbalah tree of life. Isolar is a made up word—and name of his current company—said to be comprised of isolation and solar.

I love this costume—a kind of artisan worker-bee uniform. There are satin kimono-sleeved ass-baring rompers for when its time to present the work, but when making it, roll up your revolutionary sleeves and get to it.

1976 saw the success of Station to Station, the premiere of The Man Who Fell to Earth and the recording of The Idiot and Low. It was not the most grounded time for Bowie personally (to understate it), but arguably his most vital creatively, and this nod to the continuum of creative spirit seems to suggest that the artist dies, but through the work, like Lazarus, rises again.

6.

So what, then, is a Blackstar? Perhaps a marked man, a sly reference to Elvis’ song of the same name whose lyrics include, Every man has a black star/A black star over his shoulder/And when a man sees his black star/He knows his time, his time has come.

Although Bowie did not, as rumored, write “Golden Years” for Elvis, he did find (somewhat bashful) significance in their shared birthdays, took pains to catch his concerts, had his white jumpsuit copied to wear while performing “Rock and Roll Suicide,” modeled his own costume in Christiane F after Elvis’ ensemble in Roustabout, and perhaps his Aladdin Sane red/electric blue lightening bolt was inspired by Elvis’ signature gold one. Which is to say, he likely knew of The King’s “Black Star.”

Blackstar could also suggest the theoretical transitional state between a collapsed star and a singularity—a state of infinite value in physics, a metaphor for immortality.

I’m not a gangstar/I’m not a film star/I’m not a popstar/I’m not a marvel star/I’m not a white star/I’m not a porn star/I’m not a wandering star/I’m a star’s star/I’m a blackstar.

“Sometimes I don’t feel as if I’m a person at all…I’m just a collection of other people’s ideas.”  Is Bowie simply claiming his right to throw off all mantles?

The car crash that is the documentary Cracked Actor opens with a reporter asking, “I just wonder if you get tired of being outrageous?” “I don’t think I’m outrageous at all,” Bowie throws back, miffed. The reporter persists, “Do you describe yourself as ordinary? What adjective would you use?” Bowie searches his brain for an appropriate response to the inane question and finally lands upon: “David Bowie.”

Or perhaps, as Isolar suggests, a Blackstar is someone hidden in plain sight. In an interview that seems more therapy session, with Mavis Nicolson in 1979, mostly drug-free and grounded Bowie speaks of the appeal of life in Berlin, whose physical wall seemed to mirror his psyche. Without referencing himself or the characters he’s inhabited, he describes an isolated figure who finds no home in the world, but instead creates “a micro world inside himself.”

When Nicolson suggests that as an artist Jones must keep himself from love, he rejects the idea outright, but when gently pressed about the demands of relationships in actual life and not “from afar,” he concedes, extending his arms before him like a shield, “No, love can’t get quite in my way, I shelter myself from it incredibly.”

The moment is so resonantly raw that the two break into manic humor, shifting to the story of his eye injury in a childhood fight over a girl, wherein he laughs and says, “I wasn’t even in love with her.”

In “Lazarus,” the dying Jones sings: everybody knows me now, and perhaps that is so, as much as it ever could be for a man who spent an artistic career in self-sustained exile.

And why shouldn’t David Jones have been—with the exception of a few deeply druggy years—free from the curse and blessing of being Bowie? What are we owed by our artists?

7.

Blue, blue, electric blue, that’s the colour of my room.

The Bowie song that forever circles my brain describes a writer waiting for the muse, describing the loneliness and blessing of the electric blue of creation. Vishuddhi, or the electric blue throat chakra of Hindu tantra, is associated with the vocal cords, communication, creative expression, one’s inner-truth.

For sixteen months I lived in Berlin’s Schöneberg quarter, around the corner from 155 Hauptstrasse and the apartment that song was composed in and of. I’d pedal my bike past and nod to the ghost Bowie inside, still wondering and waiting for the gift of sound and vision.

It’s the seventh day since Bowie’s death, the final day of shiva I’ve sat beneath his window. I’ve never much understood funerals, always felt they were for a “living” that didn’t include me, but this has been different.

Over this week I’ve shared glances with occasional bleary-eyed oldsters coming or going from where I’m headed or have just been–there have been no young folk to speak of and no platform boots necessary to recognize the kooks.

Today, from a block away, I spy a pair of women making the pilgrimage. The taller of the two—who for one moment I mistake for Patti Smith—has Smith’s hair, a floor-length bright blue shearling coat and an armload of exquisite orange, flame-tipped roses.

Trailing my comrades I think of Smith’s line in Woolgathering when, upon being given a dandelion, she asks, “What could I wish for but my breath?”

At Bowie’s door the energy feels less personal, dissipating. After the roses-bearers depart, a lone woman and I stand shivering before the diminished pile of offerings framed by narrowed police barricades: plastic-wrapped bodega flowers and a few handmade items, the most prominent being a cigar box shrine with a Halloween Jack eye patch and what seems a bunch of random stuff tossed in. The woman plays “Starman” on her phone, and rather than poignant, it’s just sad.

A years later follow-up to his first solo release, “Major Tom,” “Starman” takes the isolation of planet earth is blue and there’s nothing I can do and turns it into an anthem where a cosmic DJ messiah tells us misfits not to blow it, ‘cause he thinks it’s all worthwhile.

The 1972 Top of the Pops performance famously featured Bowie’s flirty finger wagging at the viewer, and casually intimate embrace of Mick Ronson, which blew the minds of much of Britain and beyond and marked Bowie as a more than a one-hit wonder. I silently give thanks to many, including Bowie, not to live in a world where a rock and roll arm thrown over a shoulder can cause a stir.

Over the song’s fade out the woman shrugs and says something about bears—at least I think that’s what I hear. I smile and nod remotely, then realize she’s drawing my attention to the carefully rendered Ziggy Stardust teddy bear—complete with lightning bolt and guitar—hanging from the police steel.

This bear abrades me for no good reason. A few young women pass by on their way into American Apparel. “That was David Bowie’s house,” one says over her shoulder, and the other makes an “awww” sound like she might at the sight of a teddy bear, or the memorial of that musician guy that died the way people do—other people, older people. As they pause to take a selfie in front of Bowie’s memorial offerings I turn and nearly sprint downtown.

I learned in this week of Bowie Internet inundation that he trailed these streets too, often at dawn, in solitude, but right now I need Chinatown’s chaotic, smashing life. I’ll buy those killer clementine from that vendor on the corner, I think, and eggplant, scallion and ginger for supper.

I weave among cardboard boxes of dried silver fish and lotus root, tourists linked arm-in-arm in matching New York pom-pom hats, Chinese grandmas pushing plaid shopping carts in (Harold and) Maude braids. A man exits a hallway, arms loaded with red-ribboned funeral flowers. A chef in a paper hat leans against a wall, smoking beneath a pumpkin-sized, spinning dumpling.

Beneath crisscrossing wires strung with giant, glinting snowflakes, I warm my hands on a cup of milky tea and wonder when we’ll get winter’s first snow. Glancing up to cross Mott (the Hoople) Street, I wonder when the city’s details will cease to conjure Bowie.

I tuck dragon fruit into my sack, humming “Starman”—whose chorus melody is plainly lifted from The Wizard of Oz’s “Over the Rainbow.” Somewhere over the rainbow, bluebirds fly/Birds fly over the rainbow./Why then, oh, why can’t I?

In performance, Bowie sometimes coyly sung a mash-up of these anthems of longing for belonging. On “Lazarus” he sings, seemingly of his death, This way or no way/You know, I’ll be free/Just like that bluebird/Now ain’t that just like me.

Blackstar begins by naming the Norse village of Ormen. In Norse mythology, the rainbow bridge that connects this world to that of the gods is Bifrost, which translates as tremulous way. Tremulous—as in trembling—as Bowie does so heart-wrenchingly as he backs into the armoire and out of this world.

When he heard the call, David Jones, who could walk the streets of Manhattan undetected, slipped over the rainbow and into his own imagination.

But with generosity and courage it seems he did not fully recognize, David Bowie spent his life pulling back the curtain on the Great Oz, showing the man, his frustration and fallibility, questioning art-making and then making it anyway.

I fear in the end he imagined himself “a very bad man but a very good wizard,” when in fact the opposite was true. The droves of people gathered at his front door and around the world may have found the masks fascinating, but only as much as the man, and heart, behind them.

I imagine catching David Jones wandering past shop windows plastered with red New Year monkeys, beneath golden, swaying lanterns. I would thank him for Ziggy Stardust, whose hair my mother copied and Scary Monsters, whose poster graced my eleven-year-old bedroom wall. I’d say thanks for Low and Hunky Dory, which got me through hard times. Thanks for The Man Who Fell to Earth and The Hunger, Aladdin Sane and the Thin White Duke. Thanks for Diamond Dogs, Heroes, Lodger, Station to Station. Thanks for creating a soundtrack for my life and the lives of my favorite people.

Thanks for being a fierce, literate libertine, giving permission when I so badly needed it and inspiration always. Thanks, from the strange kids, for saying, No love, you’re not alone! You’re wonderful!

On the afternoon of January 10th, in what I later learned were the last hours of Bowie’s life, a double rainbow drew me from my desk and to the window. It arced across the skyline and ended at the Empire State Building, so strikingly that fire fighters in the station across the street took to the emergency dispatch microphone to exclaim to the neighborhood, “There’s a rainbow!”

As the first snow falls over Chinatown’s back alleys, I think: rainbowie!

There’s a Starman, over the rainbow, way up high, and he told me—let the children lose it, let the children use it, let all the children boogie.

Kim Wood’s writing has appeared in Out Magazine, McSweeney’s, Tin House’s Open Bar, and on National Public Radio. She has received grants from the Jerome Foundation and is a MacDowell Colony fellow. She is working on a book, Advice to Adventurous Girls, based upon the unpublished archive of a 1920s motorcycle daredevil. Her documentary film on this subject has screened internationally in festivals and museums including Sundance and the Guggenheim, where it double-billed with an episode of ChiPs.

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.

After a teenage obsession with Ziggy Stardust, the Berlin years have always been my favorite period and that’s where Erickson’s These Dreams of You (Europa Editions, 2012) comes in, illustrating the Berlin years in the subplot of a larger novel. The book is about a white novelist, Alexander “Zan” Nordhoc, and his family. The narrative opens with the election of Barack Obama not long after their adoption of a little Ethiopian girl with gray eyes named, Zema (mostly called, Sheba). The structure involves small paragraph vignettes familiar from Erickson’s last Europa novel, Zeroville, but otherwise from the start of my first read I wondered, “is Steve Erickson actually writing a domestic family novel? Where is the trademarked weirdness I love so much?” My worries were for naught, for after about fifty pages it started getting weird, and oh so wonderfully weird. Ultimately it is a novel about race in America and therefore about America itself. On the second page, watching the first black president’s victory, Zan wonders, “Do I have the right… as a middle-aged white man, to hold my face in my hands? and then thinks, No. And holds his face in his hands anyway, silently mortified that he might do something so trite as sob.”

It is the only book by a white guy that I included in my African Diaspora Literature course, and only in a summer section to follow complementarily Obama’s memoir, Dreams From My Father. The book captures the spirit of Obama’s election, his place in history, but never directly names him. This is Erickson’s way of writing historical fiction since Zeroville, never naming names. But what does this have to do with David Bowie? We can only assume that he is the “British extraterrestrial in a dress” or “the man who sings the hero song [with] red hair” whom four year old Sheba/Zema is obsessed with. These Dreams of You is a complicated work that shows all of Erickson’s narrative deftness, the twisting, ellipsing Mobius strip orchestration of strands and timelines that all interweave and make total sense by the end. One of those twists that proves essential to the whole follows a black woman named Jasmine, who while working in the music business is assigned to assist a rocker who seems a lot like David Bowie. She accompanies him and his friend Jim (Iggy Pop?) to Berlin where they record music with a man called The Professor (Brian Eno?). In his not so covert way, Erickson depicts the recording of the albums Low and “Heroes” and all of the escapades of that period: the lingering Crowley occultism, the conviction to kick cocaine through copious amounts of alcohol, the transvestite clubs, the obsession with kraut-rock like Can, Neu!, and Kraftwerk. Moreover, Erickson captures what drew Bowie to Berlin, what first enticed him through the writing of Christopher Isherwood. Berlin was not just the City of Ghosts, it was the City of the Wall, both East and West, Old World and New, Weimar burlesque and pulsing kraut-rock. It was a time and place that inspired Bowie to create two of his greatest albums (and eventually Lodger, which is still pretty good) that both helped take “pop” music to a whole new place, along with great solo work from Iggy Pop (The Idiot and Lust For Life, both produced and co-written with Bowie). In the almost caricatured portraits by Erickson are a stylized ideal of the artists at work, inspired by this liminal space, the guards posted on the Wall just outside the Hansa studio windows. It is a space where maybe the most emblematic theme in Bowie’s work comes out: love as defiance. “I can remember/Standing, by the wall/And the guns, shot above our heads/And we kissed, as though nothing could fall/And the shame, was on the other side/Oh, we can beat them, forever and ever/Then we could be heroes, just for one day,” as he says in the song “Heroes.”

But now, what does this have to do with a book about race in America? The Bowie character in the book tries to explain to Jasmine why he’s in Berlin and what this new work is all about. “Look, the whole century has been about black and white fucking… New York Jews like Gershwin, Kern, Arlen cumming southern Negro music while Duke Ellington ravishes Nineteenth Century Europeans like Debussy,” he says. Erickson’s use of “Bowie” gets at the heart of another central theme in Bowie’s oeuvre, the embracing and merging of binaries.

This is why I chose the book for my class and why I believe the students responded so well to it. The narrator explains, “Zan began pondering race when he was younger only because he began pondering his country, and knew that it wasn’t possible to understand his country without pondering slavery and it wasn’t possible to understand slavery without pondering race. He considered how his countrymen from Africa were the only ones who didn’t choose to be there; Africans were compelled to come and only once they were made to come did they choose to stay. Did that make them, then, the true owners of the country’s great idea, by virtue of having accepted the country in the face of so many reasons not to? If the country is more an idea than a place then are those who were so compelled its true occupants, given how the country’s promise to them was broken before it was offered?”. This is to support a conversation Zan has about race in America a little earlier where he says, “what the zealot or the ideologue really believes in is the zealous nature itself, the devout embrace of hard distinctions—the crusade against gray.”

As this book illustrates, grayness is what Bowie was all about. This AND that. Andro and gyne. Like how gray is both black and white, Bowie was masculine and feminine, straight and gay, artist and pop star (one could be critical and declare that all of this grayness is aspirational and point out that Bowie never escaped being a white, straight male whose aesthetic endeavors were all rooted in privilege and appropriation, but right now I am most certainly here to praise Caesar). Bowie helped destroy binaries by embracing them. His place in Erickson’s wonderful novel helps express this. If you think Erickson might be alone in this sentiment some tangential support might be found in the Acknowledgements of the 2016 novel, Underground Railroad, where Colson Whitehead says, “David Bowie is in every book [of mine].”

It is especially the last duality, Artist and Pop Star, which always excited me most about Bowie. He was legit and fun. Dissertation-worthy and danceable. He was the first side of Low and the second. He was references to Greta Garbo and the Golden Dawn all in one song. Maybe this is what makes David Bowie the quintessential Pop Star to many people. In Low, Wilcken explains how “popular music as it developed in the fifties and sixties turns the cultural paradigm on its head. With pop, postmodernism always came before modernism. Pop culture didn’t actually need any Andy Warhol to make it postmodern. Rock ‘n’ roll was never anything but a faked-up blues—something that the glam-era Bowie had understood perfectly,” and then quoting Brian Eno: “Some people say Bowie is all surface style and second-hand ideas, but that sounds like the definition of pop to me.”

This now brings me back to Critchley’s book in which early on he describes the “inauthenticity” of Bowie. “The ironic self-awareness of the artist and their audience can only be that of their inauthenticity, repeated at increasingly conscious levels.” Bowie clearly understands this as is evidenced in his song “Andy Warhol” off Hunky Dory (1971) in which we find the line, “Andy Warhol, silver screen/Can’t tell them apart at all.” On this topic Critchley continues, “Art’s filthy lesson is inauthenticity all the way down, a series of repetitions and reenactments: fakes that strip away the illusion of reality in which we live and confront us with the reality of illusion;” and, “Bowie’s genius allows us to break the superficial link that seems to connect authenticity to truth.” Finally, after more Heideggerian digressions, he brings it all home with: “In my humble opinion, authenticity is the curse of music from which we need to cure ourselves. Bowie can help. His art is a radically contrived and reflexively away confection of illusion whose fakery is not false, but at the service of a felt corporeal truth.”  

I might not have been able to express this better myself and that is why I’m so grateful Critchely did. He and I are of the same world, a world he describes “of people for whom Bowie was the being who permitted a powerful emotional connection and freed them to become some other kind of self, something freer, more queer, more honest, more open, and more exciting.” Critchley also helped me understand that what makes Bowie’s music so successful in reaching people is that what is at its core is a yearning for connection. For all of Bowie’s lyrics about tragic characters, dystopian settings, solitude, and loneliness, there is a romantic notion about the ability of love to triumph in some small way, to make us heroes even, just for one day. The song that ends the album Ziggy Stardust (1972), that ends the eponymous tragic character’s narrative, is called “Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide” and it sure hit a nerve with me as an angsty teenager. It can still bring a tear to my eye as the pleading bombast of final lyrics (which Critchley writes about in a short chapter titled, “Wonderful”):

Oh no love! You’re not alone
No matter what or who you’ve been
No matter when or where you’ve seen
All the knives seem to lacerate your brain
I’ve had my share I’ll help you with the pain
You’re not alone
Just turn on with me and you’re not alone
Let’s turn on with me and you’re not alone
(wonderful)
Let’s turn on and be not alone (wonderful)
Gimme your hands ’cause you’re wonderful
(wonderful)
Gimme your hands ’cause you’re wonderful
(wonderful)
Oh gimme your hands.

Critchley’s little book is heartfelt and thoughtful. I’ve read it twice now—almost as many times as the other two books—and it is another element in my connection to a great artist that I will never know but always love. What these three books reinforce to me about David Bowie, the thing I take the most away from him after sheer aesthetic pleasure, is a deeply committed artistic discipline. Critchley dwells on the fakeness and inauthenticity of Bowie’s artistry, and while I like what he makes of that philosophically, I’ve always understood this about Bowie to just be professionalism. Bowie wasn’t some bright shooting star of a rocker, burning himself out and dying young, although he did get to experience that with his Ziggy Stardust personae. David Bowie was a consummate artist who mostly worked in the medium of popular music and created great work until the end of his life, a year ago today.

Jordan A. Rothacker is the author of the novella, The Pit, and No Other Stories (Black Hill Press, 2015), and the novel, And Wind Will Wash Away (Deeds, 2016). He holds a PhD in Comparative Literature and a MA in Religion from the University of Georgia. He lives in Athens, Georgia.

The Age of Simulation

Rick Kirby, Vertical Face, 2004.

By John Reed

No longer will we hang our heads in shame. We will lift our heads high, as we hang ourselves in effigy. Politics, art and culture no longer aspire to self-representation, but to shining insincerity, pixilation, the debris of our denials and our basest caprices. And “greatness” is not merely a twentieth century joke, a fleeting gag, it is the agreement for our eternal soul, devil’s contract and all.  

“Art & Literature,” as we think about it now, is a few hundred years old. “Great men” and “great women,” and “works of great art,” are post-Elizabethan concepts. The “artist as hero” didn’t take hold until the nineteenth century, and wasn’t defacto until the twentieth century. But in less than a hundred years, the artist as hero has become mainstream: music, art, literature, fashion, film, everything. In Western schools, we’re taught that the artist has won a revolution. Mozart, Beethoven, Joyce, so it goes, insisted that the artist had more cultural cachet than the aristocrat, and it changed the world. Maybe-ish, but in our century, the heroism of artistic pursuit is primarily concerned not with creative freedom, but with the sale of stuff, and we attain self-actualization not through art, but through the purchase of identities we’ve dreamt up for ourselves.  

The self-centered creator, the ego that self-defines, is not only the rock star, the novelist, the couture chef, it is the consumer. You need to need stuff, need recognition, need definition, to be you. To be successful, you need a fancy watch, to be Hip-Hop you need this music, to be environmentally conscious, you need this hemp thneed. You can’t be what you are, even if it’s a gender, even if it’s a race, without buying something. This is the mindset, the ecosystem, that media fosters in order to sell advertising space.

The problem for media is that this model, this story of the artist, is limited and immature, and losing its audience to an array of alternative stories, and alternative ways to find and experience culture. The internet is vast, and a mode of distribution—an egalitarian one—unto itself. The big media answer is to convince advertisers that their demographic, let’s say the readership of a book section of a major newspaper, is small but targeted; their readers also buy Mercedes. Which leads to another problem: to make sure that the readership buys Mercedes, the content is again compromised (to entice Mercedes buyers), which again shrinks the readership, which again necessitates the insistence that advertisers will reach "the right people,” which again compromises the content. Ad inifitum. Micro targeting markets is an old idea, but in old media, like print, it’s barely better than self-immolation.

In its favor, the “artist as hero” is an appealing construct. Creative people, all people, like to hear they’re important, and different, and definitive, or at least somehow included among the “elite.” We like to think that the world is small; that there’s a direct line of ascension from this great artist to this great artist to this great contemporary to, hmm, “me.” These illusions, “greatness” and “a small world,” work together to generate an endless stream of propaganda; as we elevate the artist that has been deemed culturally acceptable (deemed so by the categories and philosophy of the distributors far more than the market), we elevate our vision of ourselves as tastemakers, and at the same time shrink the giant world to make the whole rigged process less ludicrous. All of which makes us easier targets for salesmen; we are vain and petty.

Politically, this model of exclusion and hierarchy is also a justification of existing structures, and existing injustice. A Western culture of exclusivity and hierarchy is bolstered by a creative culture that presumes resources are limited and that the world can be and is understood only by a certain class of people. (So if you find yourself talking about “greatness” all the time, you’re a propagandist.)

As long as the distribution is controlled, i.e., one major book distributer, the message of sublime artistic merit can be protected and perpetuated. The content, the artistic output, can be fashioned and conformed to specs, and the bar for inclusion is: creative content that’s good enough to pass as meritorious. And, like the content, the casting and presentation of the artist can be tightly maintained. The stories are predefined; as are the cultural archetypes of the artists who tell them. In fact, a story that’s presumptive of a Western model is better, more easily approved and accepted, if it’s told by the dispossessed. No matter how bittersweet, the coming home story, the story that delivers the outsider to the cultural mainstream, is the stuff of big awards and, capitalize, Artistic Merit.  

But the centralized economies of the arts are collapsing. The art world is ever broadening; no longer is it just Soho or New York or London. The big auction houses, overselling their wares and losing market share to smaller auction houses, are dipping in stock value (see it on MarketWatch); people can cherry pick their interests across the spectrum, and sidestep hegemonic bullying. The book world is competing with Amazon, which is far more inclusive than traditional publishing; and even more daunting to the big five publisher is this seemingly unstoppable proliferation of self-distribution, i.e., the Internet. William Shakespeare, by the most generous tallies, had a few hundred contemporaries writing in London; the total population of the city was 200,000, and 70% of the population was illiterate, and literacy itself was not an education, and the only outlet for imaginative writing was poetry and the stage, so it’s not terribly surprising that the creative pool was so limited. In fact, the only “profession” associated with writers was “scrivener.” To elevate Shakespeare from the rabble was not a task ponderous with subjectivity. But today, with what? a few million writers, and picking the best one can be only an act of oligarchy, or exclusion, or folly. Last year, Poets & Writers stopped ranking MFA programs. Why? Because there are well over 600 Masters programs in the United States alone, and that number is growing exponentially, and to tally the best 10 or best 100 Masters programs is to willfully stand by a process that is arrogant, corrupt and stupid (the New Yorker called it back in 2011).  

The current solution for traditional distribution? Bunker down, take firm control of the message, put out less, and back your bets with astronomical figures: make this particular painting worth way more; pay a huge sum for this particular first book; make just a handful of movies, each of which has the budget of a small nation. Again, a problem; with fewer offerings, you open the way for competitive models. And not just on the side of populism. Not long back, former New York Times editor Jill Abramson announced a startup that would pay $100,000 per short story, and publish and promote only one such story a month (via The Guardian). A model like that could out-propaganda the propagandists, at a much lower overhead. Additionally, a hierarchal model self-proliferates; while the hierarchy must be continually bolstered by awards, etc, awards lead to more awards, and as much as people are inclined to bow to what is “great,” they are prone to bridle at obvious bias, and to dilute the hierarchy with their own hierarchies. Museums (case in point, via Holland Cotter in the New York Times) don’t know what to do with themselves, and with auction prices what they are, can’t afford to do what they’ve done before. And what does that mean? More, smaller museums, or, uh, museum-like entities, like DIA or Union Docs or The Tenant Museum, which cater to the audiences museums have lost. The transition will not be painless—a shift to smaller/local venues will value proximity over quality—but hierarchy is inherently inclined to diffuse.

And the biggest problem, of course, with this artist as hero, troubled soul in a drafty garret, all-alone vision of creativity, is that it is incorrect. People don’t work in vacuums, and the greatest of the great artists who exemplify this model, let’s say William Shakespeare, worked in a time without copyright, and with massive collaboration, and with royal sponsorship and endorsement. If Shakespeare were to work today the way he worked in his own day, no major theater or publisher would ever have anything to do with his patently and ineradicably plagiarized works.

We’re drawn to collaborative arts—whether it’s a wiki or fan fiction or satirical treatments of pop culture or big-budget television or whatever—because collaboration is intrinsic to creativity. And the way people now work via the Internet—crowdsourcing, information and techniques readily available—is but an indication of what we’ll see in the next forty years. And not just in the arts. Whole identities, whole professions will end. There will be no scientists; if you want to be a biologist, you’ll upload the expertise and then participate in a groupthink with other interested people. If you want to be an architect, or a geologist or an historian, same thing. Already, innumerable fields have been replaced by software. In video-editing, there used to be people who made computer graphics flames; that was all they did, FX fire. And they were well-paid, in-demand people. And as of three years ago, with your discount code, that’s a 20-dollar plugin. Advertising? You can target advertise from your Facebook page, or your Twitter account, or your Amazon author profile. In other words, marketing has become an add-on.

Piotr Uklanski Nazis, 1998.

Jeff Koons, Titi, 2004-2009.

If the twentieth century, as Walter Benjamin characterized it, was the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, the twenty-first century will be the Age of Simulation. Increasingly, there are no fields of expertise, because so much of what is “expert” can be downloaded, and even if it has to be learned, the information is so accessible—even micro decisions, like, do I want an H-pipe or an X-pipe on my 1967 Camaro—that to be anything, any kind of professional anything, has become, and will progressively become, little more than a commitment to pretend to a given status. And that, of course, can only last for so long, before people realize they can’t really adopt permanent professional identities. We will each be, in our own way, simulations of however many identities we have the time or patience to pursue.

Josh Kline, Cost of Living (Aleyda), 2014. 3D‑printed sculptures in plaster, inkjet ink and cyanoacrylate, with janitor cart and LED lights.

And the simulations have already begun; as of 2016, our celebrities of popular culture are as likely to be simulations, for example, of musicians or actors, as they are to be musicians or actors. Our stars of reality television, our pre-packaged youth bands, and even our politicians, whether Sarah Palin or Barack Obama or Donald Trump, arrive, oddly, as if by the force of central casting. History is no longer made, it is arbitrated.

Donald Trump, and Alec Baldwin as Donald Trump.

This entertainment-oriented history is something that we can customize to our preferences. We see this feed, we follow this person, that person. We can, and do, favor the people close to us, making ourselves and our circles appear, in the grand scheme of things, more important than they are. While the cult of I will persist, technology will allow users to further shrink the world, to make their hero’s journey, their community, which is to say, their epic, appear that much more central to the “now” of the human narrative. Along with professions, fame will become the purview of simulation. We will cease to have perspective enough to know who is famous—and we will revel in the misconceptions we engineer for ourselves. “I am famous.” “My best friend is famous, and, oh no!, has been embroiled in a scandal!” Quite willingly, some of us will live within our own simulations, while others among us, driven by aversion, will “opt-out” of heroic creativity (which is to say, creativity that can be marketed and profitable). There have always been artists, incredibly talented artist, who have drifted into town, gotten their notices, and either flamed out, or moved onto a nice teaching position somewhere. In Rowling Dord’s take, via Artenol, when artists want to be plumbers more than they want to be famous, art is dead. Yet Dord’s portent dire is DOA itself, arriving 40 years after Arthur Danto’s terminal diagnosis via his 1984 essay, “The End of Art.” But isn’t Dord kinda right? When we want fame more than we want culture, all culture ceases to exist; culture becomes the simulation, while fame, the drive for fame, the experience of fame, is what’s real.

The arts present a microcosm of how the dynamic plays out in the macro (as Douglas Coupland, author of Generation X, recently pondered in Artsy). The scales are tipped: the desire to be famous is a more critical prerequisite to fame than is the talent to be famous. And at the same time, the expression of talent, the expertise to realize talent, has become elementary. Once, painters who sculpted, sculptors who painted, for example, were looked at askance, but now, artists may fabricate in any medium without being too onerously penalized by critics, as William Deresiewicz recently discussed in The Atlantic in his essay, “The Death of the Artist—and the Birth of the Creative Entrepreneur.”

If we date the epoch of fabrication with Jeff Koons’ Puppy of 1992, Deresiewicz, only 30 years too late, is a decade more current than Dord. That said, Dord and Deresiewicz may be comfortable with the assignation “simulation of critic.” I’m fairly comfortable with it myself. The Believer, as an entity, may be equally unworried that it is a “simulation of literary journal.” Our apparent ease in our own illusions, and the smallness of creative worlds—the “artstar” mentality of artists and writers who almost nobody has heard of outside of a peer group of a few thousand—typifies the accentuation of our own “hero” status in an epic tale that is self-manufactured. It will—alas, hooray, regardless—happen to all of us. And already, we seem to revel in the distinction of having become ersatz; the Republican defense of George Bush Jr., our first simulated president, is that he was not intelligent, and perhaps not much of a leader, but he was a good “manager.” And—this is more important than we’ll ever admit—he was a marvelous prank. The presidency of George Bush Jr. was the best dark comedy in years; and he did, to top it all off, in delightful simulative flourish, look just like Will Ferrell. Perhaps the election of Donald Trump, brilliantly mimicked by Alec Baldwin, speaks to a new presidential mandate: without a comedic doppelganger, thou shalt not be president.  

Left: Cindy Sherman, UNTITLED #355, 2000. Right: Cindy Sherman, UNTITLED #360, 2000.

The recent proliferation of fake news, and journo bots may be dismaying, and perhaps it may be mitigated, but it can’t be reversed. The inclination of news organizations to abandon what is “objective” in favor of what is “balanced” has allowed for reportage and news discussion that is not factually based; the argument of “balanced” reporting has allowed for two sided arguments that pit fact against, um, the other side, even if the other side is a fantasy, misconception, or lie. It should come as no surprise to us that such reportage has made palatable the non-news news; and when such news appeals to our politics, it may be, of the “balanced” alternatives, chosen.

This process of choosing fantasy over reality carries over to our personal lives, whether via social media or just flat out self-deception, as well as to all aspects of culture. Art in the Age of Simulation seeks not to represent reality, or to reproduce it; rather, Art in the Age of Simulation fashions preferable realities. Realism will cease, has ceased, to be the baseline of creative representation. In film today, special effects make living fabulous and skin perfect. No matter that isn’t what the sky looks like, and that isn’t what skin looks like, and that teal color that’s a perfect compliment to vibrant skin, that isn’t what every background looks like. The world, if you take a moment to look at it, isn’t all green and orange, hmm, like it is in this still from Transformers:

Glenn Ligon, I Sell The Shadow to Sustain The Substance, 2011.

We don’t want perfect representations, not of our experiences, or ourselves. A rule of thumb in humanoid representation, whether virtual or robotic, is that the approximate human form shouldn’t be too perfect: by way of an effect known as “uncanny valley,” a near-identical resemblance to the biological human arouses revulsion. A body that is too exactly a body causes us discomfort. Whether in an issue of a mid-century Playboy, or in the figure of a modern-day sex doll, it’s in part the burlesque of human proportions that grants the permission to fantasize. A human body that is too real arouses sympathy, morality, etc; whereas the fantastical representation can be purely carnal. And our impulse to create better conduits for fantasy are not reserved for robots and virtual reality; we have, as well, chosen to move the reality of our own bodies further toward exaggeration, and fantasy.

Lisa Yuskavage, Big Blonde Jerking Off, 1995.

We want, in our flesh, what is unreal, bodies that appear air-brushed or imagined, via anime, let’s say (note, in the below example, the South Korean trend of facial surgery). We go so far as to reshape ourselves, with surgical sculpture, to conform to our fantasies.

Our sexual fantasies, in our pornography—silicone and pixels—preview our future. The profit incentive, too, keeps pornography at the forefront of technology; throughout the twentieth century, our cultural proclivities, our deepest desires, have been catered to in porn before we can even articulate them. The earliest porn films, stag films, captured events as they happened; viewers could watch something that had once been, i.e., representation. Later porn films took on the distribution model of cinema; porn went out to theaters, where audiences, for the most part, watched reproductions of just a few originals. With video, the distribution of porn was decentralized, so there were more choices, albeit at a lower production value (proximity over quality). And now, on any given porn website, there are an infinite number of categories and tags, and almost every option is garbage. As porn moves into visual 3D, via technologies like oculus, and physical representations of sexual beings, via cybertronics, we will invariably be able to “live” our fantasies. As Artificial Intelligences, or simulations of Artificial Intelligences, become more convincing, the vestiges of the age or reproduction will fall away. The categories, the tags, will become irrelevant, as whatever porn manifestation you’re looking at takes on the ability to adapt to your wants. In the end, just a few, or even one porn interface will flawlessly service all of us.

However long it takes for porn to become experiential, or rather, simulative of experience, art will be not too far behind it. In the future, the medium of art will be “alternate existences,” not paint or clay or any physical materials. Artists will manipulate, in its entirety, experience itself.

Paul McCarthy, Spaghetti Man, 1993.

Cesar Voinc, Soubrobotte, 2014.

Pipilotti Rist, Pixel Forest, Installation at The New Museum.

In the sciences, an odd notion has entered the mainstream. Perhaps we and our known universe are the holographic preservation of information at the event horizon of a black hole. At the edge of a black hole, everything is synchronously destroyed and infinitely remembered, and we might very well go on as holograms without knowing it. Scientists around the world have worked out equations that prove this, however bizarre, is mathematically possible.

The hypothesis, if disquieting, is metaphorically apropos. We may well be in the midst of designing our own Armageddon, which we witness, or, hmm, watch, in a state of torpor—it’s entertainment, but not very good entertainment. In seeing what lies in store for us—if we can arouse ourselves from our acedia for long enough to be bothered with prognostications on our destiny—we have to draw upon everything we know, all of our experience of the past. But we also have to know that everything we know may be irrelevant, illusory. We might fashion a future that is no more than manifestation of our own denial; a totally false simulation, however whole-heartedly we enter it. And however enthusiastic we are, the simulation that we enter may not remember us. We will merge with our technologies—in cybernetics, and cognitive augmentation and countless other ways—and we will become our own simulations. And it seems rather doubtful the simulations will become us.

Oskar Fischinger’s Raumlichtkunst (Space Light Art), a recreation of his 1926 multiple-screen 35mm film events, The Whitney Museum.

Hito Steyerl, Factory of the Sun, 2015. Immersive installation.

Michele Basta, Sphynx, 2010

Can’t we envision it now? The crossing over? The instant when Facebook has more dead profiles than live profiles? We will simulate loved ones, first in AI, then in robotics, then in both. We will simulate ourselves, in clones and cyborgs and incarnations yet unimaginable. And then we will simulate humanity. Whatever of it we deem necessary.

Yadegar Asisi, Great Barrier Reef, 2015.

Do we proceed, or drop all of this tech nonsense and get back to the Gaia? The one argument is that we’ve reached the end of heavenly virtues, that all Satan lacked was a proper platform to advertise, and that now, in the digital age, he has it. The other argument is that we’ll take to the stars, that through technology we will become free and enlightened. Whatever is coming, it will probably take a bit longer than we think, and in the slowness, will be less of a revelation than our overly dramatic hypothalamus has been portending. In the case of first generation human cybernetics, it will take at least one human generation, a birth to death data recording of experience, conducted and data processed for a sampling of test subjects that would preferably number in the hundreds of thousands.

Human life, in the beginning, will greatly benefit from a protocooperatic relationship with technology. We’ll be able to feed ourselves, enjoy our time, have longer lives, repair the environment, etc. (In Art In America, Carol Becker, discussing John Gerrard’s 2014 installation, Solar Reserve, considers the upside of a “simulated reality, one we have imagined into being and are continuously recalibrating”). But, inevitably, somewhere down the road, we’ll have the technology to transcend the tribulations of our biologies, and we’ll decide that the perks of being monkeys are insufficient to hold us in our flesh. We’ll want to do things that our physicality can’t do—and we’ll already be, perhaps mostly be, by way of our upgrades and technological integration, simulations of humanity, and not humanity. We’ll be human until we decide not to be human, until we decide we’ve already crossed over. The bots will supersede us, but they’ll be our children. Quietly, we will pass into the afterlife, holding the hands and looking into the eyes of our descendants. And we will wonder if, perhaps, with the end of human biology, such niggling intransigences of social and financial inequities, murderous cruelty and greed, mass environmental destruction, will finally meet the ultimate solution: no more us.

Teamlab, Floating Flower Garden, 2014.

Mariko Mori, Birth of a Star, 1995

Dina Chang, Flesh Diamonds, 2013

Perhaps that’s no comfort. And perhaps, if you’re an artist, it’s no comfort that, in the near future, the distribution model of the arts that we grew up with will be relegated to the add-on, the app, the widget; perhaps it’s no comfort that the world is not small, that there are seven billion of us, and that more than a few of us have stories, and that more than a few of us have talent; and perhaps it’s no comfort that we are not as special as we supposed, and that the revolution we have long touted will be championed by a collective army, groupthink, and not a great gladiator, and not any one of us personally. Not me, not you.

But if we can take comfort somehow, in this age of plugins, it’s that there is not yet a plugin for writer, there is not yet a plugin for artist. Computers beat humans in Jeopardy, but we still need a human to say who won. At this moment, we can’t teach a machine to know, 100%, if the answer is right, and we can’t teach it to be a novelist or a film director or a painter. Computers beat us at chess, but not via creativity; they beat us with the sheer force of their computation skills. And, yes, there have been attempts to make computers into creative beings, and there is already evidence, if somewhat pathetic, that is contrary to what I’m saying. A computer is “self-aware” (sort of, says gizmodo). A computer “passes” the Turing test (but not really, if you care to read about it on Vice.) A computer paints “emotionally aware” portraits (also in Vice); a computer writes science copy (the BBC); a computer composes classical music (Slate). But if the computer can’t yet make convincing creative decisions, it’s because we’ve barely taught it do so—because we’re still trying to understand our own creativity.

Ed Atkins, Performance Capture, 2015–16.

So, we have, maybe, a lifetime. Maybe a few lifetimes. Isn’t that comfort enough? And what a glorious, sparkling moment it is, this moment until then; while our every field of expertise splashes into a sea of microprocessors, while our last labors are cast to the capable attentions of robots, the artist, the writer, will persist. Writer and artist, these final professionals. In an era when the hierarchies that have impeded creativity since, hmm, the onset of history, will fail in their fetters. In this time, brief but radiant, creativity will hover on the last razor’s edge. And long after the bankers and prostitutes are chiseling, groaning digital facsimiles of themselves, artists will still be working, still be useful. The sculptor will work in the burgeoning aesthetic of porn robot; and the writer will bot-script his/her, as discussed by Vice, “skank mode” persona. And what then? When the creatives are gone? Well, when that happens, we’ll be gone too.

Read more about John Reed at http://johnreed.org

“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.”

Lindgren, who had also been an instrumental force as managing editor, designer and typesetter of the 2006 centenary corrected edition of Samuel Beckett’s complete works, first became aware of Bernhard through William Gaddis.

“Joseph Tabbi’s terrific afterword to Agapé Agape, Gaddis’s final book, published in 2002, identified Gaddis’s affinity with Bernhard. Gaddis—like Bernhard recognized with awards and yet obscure to most readers—wrote of Bernhard’s book Concrete: ‘he’s plagiarized my work right here in front of me before I’ve even written it!’ So I started with Concrete and couldn’t stop—The Loser, Gargoyles (which is titled Verstörung in German, which means ‘Deranged’), Amras, Gathering Evidence, My Prizes. There’s a distinct kinship between Bernhard, Beckett, and Gaddis: among other things, the pursuit of truth, in all its terrible absurdity.”

Having decided she wanted to turn Three Days into a book forty-five years after it was first broadcast, the question became how to go about it.

“First I contacted Ferry Radax’s son, Felix, to propose the book, and originally thought I would use the English subtitles from the DVD issued in 2010. However, film subtitles, written for instantaneous, quick comprehension are not best suited for book publication. Felix told me of the German paperback.”

Unbeknownst to Lindgren at the time of the Anthology screening, German publisher Residenz Verlag had already published the text of Drei Tage as a slim volume, though with no stills and minus the film’s prologue. The German edition, which contained a post-production note by Bernhard about the film, was titled Der Italiener (The Italian), after a short story Bernhard revised to be shot by Radax after completing Three Days.

“So I bought a copy and translated the text, adding the prologue from the film,” Lindgren says. As an afterword, she also translated and revised an essay by Austrian film historian George Vogt, which had originally accompanied the DVD release. “Radax sent me a high-quality German DVD, and I pulled images from the film and designed a sample layout with my translated text. With the sample, Radax and Residenz Verlag could see precisely what I had in mind when I proposed to publish a book of the film in Bernhard and Radax’s honor. The head of foreign rights at Residenz in turn sent my sample layout to Bernhard’s brother, Dr. Peter Fabjan, executor of Bernhard’s estate, for approval. We all came to immediate contractual agreement.

“By the way,” she adds, “I was curious about the book Bernhard has alongside him on the bench in part of the film and looks into now and again. Georg Vogt knew. As a means of triggering thoughts for Bernhard’s extemporaneous monologue, Radax had prepared a book with quotes from Bernhard’s works thematically arranged. From Radax’s archive, Georg supplied images of four pages from the book, which I included with my translations as the book’s appendix.”

The translation was central, though not necessarily an easy thing when it comes to someone like Bernhard, a writer who—like Gaddis—had a reputation for being a bit of a stickler over the tiniest details.

“Bernhard certainly was a stickler about the publication of his work,” Lindgren admits. “Radax, too, knew of Bernhard’s ability to sustain an argument over a comma… Bernhard basically considered translations to be not his work, but other books in themselves. Of course loss is translation’s unshakable companion, but what else have we got if we can’t read in multiple languages? Bernhard’s works have been translated into English by a variety of translators, and scholars have discussed their successes or shortcomings in getting Bernhard across in English. Bernhard had facility with the imaginative compounding of German words (Wirklichkeitsverachtungsmagister, Menschenwillenverschweiger), but with Three Days, the text is quite conversational. My aim was to keep it feeling natural to the situation of Bernhard sitting on the bench and talking.”

Published by Blast Books in November, the compact finished volume, also designed by Lindgren, is a gorgeous thing which, like Bernhard’s prose, is at once rich and spare. Beyond being a mere movie tie-in, the book is a work of art in itself, which both accentuates and expands the themes and style of Radax’s film. Combining dozens of stills, assorted shades of gray and black, supplementary materials and a text laid out in such a way as to leave the monologue reading at times like a collection of existentialist aphorisms and at others like a prose poem, Lindgren has meticulously crafted a singular and invaluable addition to Bernhard’s English bibliography.

“My model for the book layout was the film itself,” she says. “I designed Three Days in synch with Ferry Radax’s vision, in particular his ideas about observing—at times intensely scrutinizing, at times extremely distant from—his uncomfortable and yet astoundingly open subject. With some 160 film frames, the pace of the book reflects the pace of the film. Image and word combine to form a visual-verbal poetic prose. The book is intended as an extension of the collaboration between Bernhard and Radax, a way to slow Three Days down yet further to the stillness of a book, the silent conveyance of ideas and images to the reader.”

It is interesting to consider from this vantage point what Bernhard, a man who (to put it mildly) could be a bit prickly, a man who bought and polished his own tombstone in the months shortly before his death, would have thought about both the film and the book.

“As Bernhard says in the film, ‘To make oneself understood is impossible; it cannot be done.’ No question about that,” Lindgren says. “But Three Days is a powerful attempt to break through the impossible–the film itself is a prime example of Bernhard’s ideas about confronting that which one resists, doing that which one wants nothing to do with.

Ferry Radax has spoken and written about Bernhard’s reaction to the film. When Radax first showed him the finished work, Bernhard, of course wary, was seated in an adjacent room. From his vantage point, Radax could see only Bernhard’s crossed legs and feet. Radax says from the mere swing of Bernhard’s foot, he could see that Bernhard’s anxiousness dissolved into satisfaction with the result. Radax is very happy with the book, and Bernhard’s brother has told me Thomas would be content with it. I can imagine the easy swing of his foot.”

See more about Three Days.

Jim Knipfel is the author of Slackjaw, These Children Who Come at You with Knives, The Blow-Off, and several other books, most recently Residue (Red Hen Press, 2015). his work has appeared in New York Press, the Wall Street Journal, the Village Voice and dozens of other publications.

“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:

X: A Concern Troll.
Stage one is
X phantom limning in whichever web forums.
The masked troll seemingly devoted to the forum’s consensus: a proper apologist, as immoderate as the damnable moderator.

Stage two involves
X’s attempts to sway the group’s action or opinions—
all the while opining on their specific goals—only with professed concerns.

—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.

I suppose this also relates to Grant Morrison’s Key 24 drug, as it appears in his Invisibles comic. That it makes whatever word written on a piece of paper become the real thing. There is perhaps no really reliable way in which one might be able to know what a word means any more. Or what its reality would be in application. This does feel deconstructionist, really—albeit crucially embodied, crucially corporealized in its attachments, its application, if it is to be saliently critical.

SLC: Much of the writing in the new book are from texts given for free in conjunction with exhibitions. Do you see them as explanatory texts or more as a way to prolong engagement with the viewer? Is there an aspect to them that functions based upon the ability to remove the “work” from the space?

EA: Totally. Though this was something more common earlier on. Nowadays the texts have pretty much entered the videos entire—or the videos have become texts. I always wanted things to be more holistic, less discrete, but I couldn’t quite work out how to do it. Or I didn’t quite have the courage to not use the writing as a bolstering or an apologetic thing. Inveigling the work a little further, I thought.

And certainly I wanted people to engage in the work in way that I think I also thought was asking too much. On my part. Giving people a free text—giving people a chunk of the work that they could have and engage with in their own time, felt both generous and demanding. People would hopefully get closer to the work, would allow it up against them in ways that an installation cannot sustain. The texts are certainly not explanatory. If anything, I think of them as extending the condition of the work as something resistant to the explanatory in general. I suppose they have directly engaged with the idea of something explanatory—particularly pieces like “An Introduction to the Work”—though they pointedly refuse to mean in pretty much any coherent way. I suppose I think of the videos and the writings as entirely equivalent to one another.

Still from Warm warm warm Spring Mouths, Ed Atkins. 2013. Courtesy the artist.

SLC: There is a history of artists playing with misspellings—Twombly, Broodthaers. Your device of choice seems to be metaphor. There are also instances of grammatical error. (““Um, wherever I will go, there I fucking will are am,”)  and moments of word play—“digits” for example, as both numbers and figures, code and image—why fixate on metaphor?

EA: Regarding the visualizing of metaphor, the computer generated thing explains this best, I think. I mean, using CGI is to conjure imagery similarly to the way the written word does—from nothing but the imagination and some code, manifest only as image, as fantasy. That’s a forced and convenient rhyme, of course, but the sensation stands, I think.

CGI is capable of a level of realism that approaches proper signs—or at least they function like the real thing. However, their impossible plasticity and their infinite combinatory aspect means that I can make metaphors happen in an imagery that shouldn’t be able to do so. Cartoons have been doing this forever —and it’s the specific satire of caricature that is perhaps the best testament to that. But CGI introduces this crazy realism to the formula, meaning that the manifesting of a metaphor, visually, is super close to the metaphor becoming the real thing: the coming true of anything, really—with that always-already caveated “truth.”

A basic example would be at the end of my video “Ribbons,” where the guy is deflated. Literally: his head deflates. It’s dumb, but because of his empathy, his discomfiting approach, his address, etc, and how they’re predicated on his cleaving to reality, to realism, his deflating is a puncturing of that performance of reality for the sake of metaphoric affect. CGI makes the confusion possible. I guess this directly relates to what I was saying about the literal and the figurative above.

I’m not really aware of fixating on the metaphor. Or rather, isn’t “fixating on the metaphor” simply fixating on the structural? Fixating on the reappearance of language from whatever transparent, solely communicative application it might have been presumed to be able to perform.

Still from Safe Conduct, Ed Atkins. 2016. Courtesy the artist.

SLC: When you say “And the truth of metaphor being that it too much emphasizes a community of sameness.” Is this a nod to that recognition that occurs between a reader and a work (often of fiction) that endears them to the page?

EA: The “community of sameness” line is a quote, I think. Though from what, I can’t recall. I suppose I used it to mean the problems of determinism or determined coherence as regards understanding the Other is still very much present in as apparently poetic and potentially “free” a thing as metaphor. That it relies on a consensus as much any kind of literalism. More so, really, as what it occludes or negates is the thing that we have to rely on as our point of understanding. It’s certainly a way to hopefully engage the viewer, to rely on their understanding of what I mean (like the rhetorical appeal in conversation: “do you know what I mean?”) in order to move on, but also as way to create community between us—even if that community is perhaps dangerously a community of samenesses.

SLC: There’s aways talk of Gothic literature and Lacanian nods in reference to your work, wondering where Freud’s Uncanny comes into play? Do you have any special affinity in ETA Hoffmann’s Sandman story? (Also, what about Gabrielle Wittkop?)

EA: I guess there’s some pretty obvious, overt nods to Freud’s Uncanny and his reading of Hoffmann. The avatar, the heretical anima in the non-living. The not-quite human. These are a huge part of the affective aspects of my work. Gothic literature in general, I suppose. Horror, certainly—and genre more generally, of which I would say gothic horror is the preeminent example.

To engage with genre structurally is, I think, to engage with horror, insofar as genre’s movement is attached to presumed understanding—to go back to some instinctive, antediluvian sense of what we are and what we might presume our responses to be, surely horror most accurately describes what those presumed reactions are.

Right up to horror cinema, which is so terrifyingly legible, which- relies so heavily on its legibility. It’s something all my stuff flirts with, predominantly in order to undermine that very presumption, that formula. I can’t say I’ve every read any Wittkop—which I guess I should find shameful. Will rectify: have just placed an order for what is tantalizingly titled, The Necrophiliac. I would say that the Gothic might be an unavoidable style if you’re going to deal in corpses as regularly as I do. Fantasizing around the dead will render the gothic, no?

SLC: How much does Beckett come into play? I’m not sure I’ve ever read this confirmed, but the title Even Pricks—is that a nod too? What about the non-linear narratives of Alain Robbe Grillet (and his commentary on the collaborative nature of film)? John Barth? Does Mallarmé factor in at all—his name comes up time and time again among visual artists.

EA: Beckett, sure—how could it not?—though perhaps less explicitly or deliberately than I should admit. Even Pricks is certainly tonally a nod—though I’d like to think more broadly, to a kind of bathetic confusion Beckett would afford, but so would a lot of those later pomo americans, who certainly had a more immediate and steeling effect on me.

Barthelme is the big one, and so I suppose I kind of went backwards from there. Robbe Grillet, certainly—though I prefer the harder-core. Guyotat, Klossowski, Artaud. Mallarmé, yes, though not really worth going there, considering both your tired tone around his cropping up with artists, and the fact that he crops up with artists all the time!

SLC: And lastly, you’ve talked before about how there is not the primacy of say, drawing in writing, you are able to go back and edit. I’d love to hear more on this. You’ve also mentioned taking time to write a novel. Why continue to make visual art and not turn to literature full time?

EA: Do I have to choose? Probably. I’m almost entirely certain the whole threat of a novel thing is bollocks. I don’t think I mean it. At least in any conventional sense: I can scarcely write a sentence without getting mired in it, totally absorbed by it. Why a novel, then? I do know that I’d like more time to write solely. I continue to make visual art because I really enjoy it. And it’s a place (more than anything else, I increasingly think) that affords so much more possibility than any other. Why choose when I can keep smooshing shit together into tighter, weirder objects to be concurrently read, looked at, heard, felt.

I used to hardly edit the writing or the videos. Rather I’d generate what felt like fragments but which were actually whole: created that way. Sentences that feel like abbreviations of things, broken versions of things that once made sense, are actually broken from birth. Now I do edit a little more, though seldom for a reason that makes much sense outside of my own dim sensations. Edits that excise the sensible, mostly.  

SLC: What are you reading now?

EA: I’ve recently read and enjoyed and felt and felt affinities of all kings with Linda Stupart’s first book of spells and misandry, Virus. Ian White’s collected writings, Here Is Information. Mobilize. Lots of Laura (Riding) Jackson, and I’d never read, amazingly, Edward Dorn or Geoffrey Hill until this year. Steven Zultanski’s Cop Kisser. Colette Thomas’ The Testament of the Dead Daughter. Theweleit’s Male Fantasies is sitting here begging to upheave shit. I dunno. Keston Sutherland’s circled back round—and Joe Luna is a constant. I did get a lot out of Seth Price’s Fuck Seth Price, though I’m not sure what I’ve ended up with. Sort of exhausted, I think. Jon Leon! Which was recommended by the anonymous lovelie(s) who write Contemporary Art Writing Daily, which is so so so good and renewed lots of things for me.

Still from Hisser, Ed Atkins. 2015. Courtesy the artist.

Read Part 1: A Conversation with Seth Price

Read Part 2: A Conversation with Paul Chan

Read Part 3: A Conversation with Alissa Bennett

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

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 Mirror Thief by Martin Seay (Melville House)

Less on-the-surface experimental than some of titles on this list, Mirror Thief is the year’s best hefty, character-driven novel-qua-novel, with chase scenes, mysterious strangers and spies whose intrigues span roughly four hundred years. We begin in 2003 with an Iraq War veteran tracking a mysterious gambler through a Las Vegas casino, then cut to West Coast beatniks on the verge of a mid-century mystery whose true nature is disclosed in Sixteenth-Century Venice. Erudite and action-packed, Seay’s novel is a yarn for all time that stacks up handsomely beside the likes of Jorge Luis Borges or Robert Louis Stevenson.

Dating Tips for the Unemployed by Iris Smyles (Mariner Books)

The title isn’t just a cuteness, this is a practical book for impractical people. In this chronicle of one woman’s navigation through the creeping normalnesses of 21^st century life, you will find helpful tips like “Never date someone more or less miserable than you,” translations of party talk, and ideas for board games amid advertisements for home courses in snake handling, dream interpretation guides, and a novelization of Weekend at Bernie’s 2. And yet, there’s so much more than novelty at the heart of Dating Tips, which is ultimately a classical reckoning with modern love and a sure way to turn a disappointing day around or find solitary delight while fully clothed.

Trysting by Emmanuelle Pagano, tr. by Jennifer Higgins and Sophie Lewis  (Two Lines Press)

Pagano’s first book in English contrasts different vignettes, none of them related by scene or character. Like the books of Marguerite Duras or Maggie Nelson, each fragment builds upon the other, managing to paint a picture of every single stage of being in love. These vignettes range from a couple of sentences to about a page, and reveal love in all its guises. A woman is woken from her sleep every night by her partner coming to bed. A man searches for his lover for years, only to find her featured in a documentary, still beautiful, though filthy. Another woman spends her life plucking hairs from her husband’s back. These moments are dazzling in their personal specificity, and together they create a universal experience of love, one in which you can simultaneously witness every relationship you have ever had, those you have witnessed from the sidelines, and all those loves you have only imagined and have been lost from their very conception.

Memoirs of a Polar Bear by Yoko Tawada, tr. Susan Bernofsky (New Directions)

The story of one writer’s Eastern Bloc beginnings and the struggle of two generations of her progeny and, yes, they are polar bears. What could have been frivolous in the hands of another writer acquires poise and implication, as German-language writer Tawada is deadly serious on the subject of the daily toil of the circus, labor movements, interspecies love and the thrill of invention. Central to the story are the intricate routines that the polar bears enact before their big top audiences, which seems an argument for insisting on one’s own peculiarity in the shadow of strict accord.

The Vegetarian by Han King, tr. Deborah Smith (Hogarth)

A novel of male domination, starvation and madness, The Vegetarian is a nightmare in three parts. First there is Yeong-Hye’s husband, who responds to her decision to give up meat with violence, then there is Yeong-Hye’s video artist brother in law, who enlists her in a pornographic fantasy, and finally Yeong-Hye’s embattled sister. The clipped tone is studiously unsentimental, the frailty of the characters beautifully rendered, as though weakness and insanity were themselves a rebuff to society’s emphasis on strength and unity. This is a pitch black book—I’m pleasantly surprised by its popularity—and one that makes Lars Van Trier look like Frank Capra. The most salient critique on structural power to appear in years.

Madeleine E. by Gabriel Blackwell (Outpost19)

A unique, curvilinear collage of texts found and imagined, Madeleine E., circles Hitchcockian themes of doubled identity and filmic consciousness, alighting on everything from Slavok Zizek and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Crack-Up” to Francois Truffaut and Kim Novak along the way. It’s also a biography-in-fragments that fingers the cracks in its own composition and emerges with a unique form that’s neither quite fiction, essay, or film critique but partakes of the pleasures of all three. Blackwell takes his cues from David Markus in his configuration of a mind by annotation of its influences, but pushes the envelope of the medium even more by suggesting that a person is that imposter we glimpse between the scenes.

Infidels by Abdellah Taïa, tr. Alison L. Strayer (Seven Stories Press)

The latest from prolific writer/filmmaker Taïa is the story of young Jallal who grows up in the Morocco underworld under the tutelage of his mother, Slima, who is both a prostitute and a saintly mystic. In alternating, largely dialogue-driven chapters, mother and son navigate the cruelty of their surroundings through a mélange of Arab pop music, Marilyn Monroe, and the promise of heaven. Jallal eventually falls in love with Mouad, a Belgian convert to militant Islam whose secrets lead Jallal and Slima both to salvation and destruction. Revolutionary for both in terms of content and the circumstances of its composition (homosexuality is a crime in Morocco), Infidels is a much larger on the inside than its slim page count would seem to suggest.

Gesell Dome by Guillermo Saccomanno, tr. Andrea G. Labinger (Open Letter)

The seedy double life of an Argentinian resort town is depicted in snaking storylines in this noir masterpiece, which reads not unlike Twin Peaks by way of Roberto Bolaño. Opening with the outbreak of a kindergarten sex scandal and getting darker from there, Gesell Dome shows us a criminal government, a captive press, and an economy based on blackmail and fear mongering. For all its strength as a microcosm of failed statehood, it is the characters who make this 600+ page book a speedy read, including a cursed painter, a Pilates-obsessed crime wife, a supposed Nazi diaspora and a monster lurking in the forest. What more could you want?

John Aubrey, My Own Life by Ruth Scurr (NYRB Classics)

A towering whatsit of a book, John Aubrey, My Own Life is a biography of Aubrey—a founding English eccentric and collector who pioneered the form in his portraits of eminent friends—which takes the form of a diary by the writer himself, each entry traceable to a primary document, be it a letter, bulletin, or Aubrey’s own work in the natural sciences. This allows Scurr to channel her research into a full-scale recreation of Aubrey’s life and times that is as vivid a rendering of Cromwellian London as seems possible. Imagination and scholarship, as well as supplementary drawings, arrange the past into an elegant mosaic that also manages to overflow the boundaries of what a book can be.

Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett (Riverhead Books)

Pond is a quiet book. A woman goes to live in a cottage in rural Ireland, and nothing much happens, yet everything is strange. In Bennett’s work, you experience the defamiliarization of eating bananas for breakfast. The narrator wants to throw away her freshly-cooked stir fry into the garbage. The banalities not only work but become something strange and full of wonder. Bennett’s writing is steeped in Lydia Davis and has the wit and bleakness of Beckett. Outside the narrator’s cottage the Irish countryside reflects and reifies her loneliness. Over the course of the novel-in-stories, the narrator comes gently undone.

The Knack of Doing by Jeremy Davies (David R. Godine & Black Sparrow)

What do Kurt Vonnegut, sad white people, the Rosenbergs’ executioner, and a hypercube all have in common? I don’t know. But Jeremy Davies does. The stories in this collection run the gamut of Davies’ incredible and hyperliterate imagination, and are a reminder that being playful is of great importance to our humanity. Reader beware, these stories are a deadly serious labryinth of fun.

The Natural Way of Things by Charlotte Wood (Europa Editions)

A group of girls are captured and imprisoned deep in the Australian desert, as punishment for unruly behavior and their sexuality. Gradually we learn that they have all been involved with powerful men in some way, and are now forgotten by the company that’s imprisoned them, the playthings of their ever-more deranged jailers. Exploring what it means to hunt and be hunted, this book is vicious and prescient and astonishingly visceral. The Natural Way Of Things resonates with you long after you’ve read the final pages. A Handmaid’s Tale for end times, this is an important book about contemporary femininity.

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.

Afterward, John White Fox, a Shoshone Indian from Wyoming who helped plan and organize the attempted occupation, held a news conference in which he demanded a Native American cultural center be created on the island. He also demanded an end to pollution. He was about as successful as the occupation itself.

Even before the attempted Red Power occupation, Dr. Thomas W. Matthew, the nation’s first black neurosurgeon and chairman of the National Economic Growth and Reconstruction Organization, or NEGRO for short, was already in talks with President Nixon to let his group move onto Ellis Island. He proposed his group would repair and refurbish the buildings for use as home to a self-sufficient black community. The island would also offer rehab facilities for drug addicts. Matthew’s NEGRO had received a good deal of national press in the late 60s for its assorted venture capital endeavors, and despite the socially conscious plan he’d laid out for Nixon, his ultimate goal was to transform Ellis Island into a decidedly for-profit spawning ground for young black entrepreneurs.

Although Nixon never officially signed off on the plan, a few months after the abortive Native American occupation, Matthew and a few dozen supporters snuck onto the island and set up shop as if he had. A few weeks later, with no interference from the Coast Guard or Parks Service, everyone just assumed he had the right to be there and let him be.

Matthew and his group did some minor work toward rehabilitating the island, making assorted small repairs on a couple of the buildings and clearing away some brush, but conditions remained primitive, and the numbers on the island began dwindling quickly. The winter took a further toll on the occupiers, and by the autumn of 1971, the tiny handful remaining gave up and went home. In 1974, representatives of the National Parks Service would report it seemed Matthew and NEGRO had done little if anything to make improvements to the island. In 1973 Matthew himself, who had a checkered criminal history (mostly for assorted financial improprieties) was convicted on federal Medicaid fraud charges. He would insist to the end he had done little wrong, and was the target of a character assassination plot spearheaded by the Nixon administration.

Only a few weeks after the last of Matthew’s supporters vacated the island, still a third group of disenfranchised Americans took their fight across the channel to an even more symbolic (and easily defensible) site. If you have a beef with what you see as the federal governments failure to promote the blessings of liberty, where else can you go?

On December 26th, 1971, the same day similar protests and occupations were held around the country, fifteen members of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) occupied and barricaded themselves inside the Statue of Liberty in order to protest America’s continued efforts in the war in Southeast Asia. Occupiers flew an American flag upside down from the statue’s crown and posted a note on the door directed at President Nixon, stating they would leave when he provided a specific date on which American efforts in Vietnam would cease.

While most of the other similar protests around the country that day lasted only a few hours, the VVAW occupation of the statue went on for two days. When a court order was delivered insisting they vacate the premises, they did so peacefully. Unlike the Native American and African American efforts, the VVAW protest was not only high-profile, the protesters themselves received a good deal of public support for their actions and intent.

Vietnam Veterans Against the War in 1976. (Courtesy of VVAW Inc)

The Statue of Liberty occupation was considered such a success another group of VVAW protesters returned and occupied it yet again on June 6th, 1976, this time to call attention to the plight of Vietnam vets following the end of the war. But the mood of the nation had changed, and sympathy was harder to come by. They were all quickly arrested by Parks Department police.

In 1977, a group of Iranian activists briefly took control of the statue in order to protest the Shah’s long and bloody record of human rights violations, as well as the US government’s continued support of the Shah’s regime. A few months after the Iranians were booted out, 29 members of the New York Committee to Free the Puerto Rican Nationalist Prisoners infiltrated the statue and hung a Puerto Rican flag from the crown. Among other things, they demanded Puerto Rican independence, immediate pardons for all political prisoners being held in Puerto Rico, and an immediate end to all discrimination against Puerto Ricans in the United States. After eight hours, the Parks police stormed the building and arrested them.

Perhaps noting that however peaceful they had all been, six occupations (or attempted occupations) over a seven year span was a bit excessive, in 1981 the National Parks Service finally got down to fundraising in earnest to regain legitimate control of both Ellis and Liberty Islands. The plan was to transform Ellis Island into a tourist attraction and refurbish the Statue of Liberty (including improved security measures) before its 1986 centennial. A cleaned up and revitalized Ellis Island, complete with museums, historic reconstructions, and several gift shops, officially opened to tourists in 1990. No one has tried to occupy it since, and now that it’s back in business as a National Monument, Native Americans no longer have any claim on it.

Jim Knipfel is the author of Slackjaw, These Children Who Come at You with Knives, The Blow-Off, and several other books, most recently Residue (Red Hen Press, 2015). his work has appeared in New York Press, the Wall Street Journal, the Village Voice and dozens of other publications.

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. 

The answers made it clear that I wasn’t simply treating a father/son relationship, but also a Father/World relationship. There’s the father in Patricide, but there’s also The Father, which is both every father ever and every thing that makes the world what it is today—our customs, codes, morals, laws, ideologies, rituals, taboos, and on—everything, everything, not one thread of which isn’t of and by and controlled by the patriarchy. So between Rice’s father and The Father that’s the system from which both Rice and his father emerge, I was challenged to wrestle an entity of universally colossal proportions. And the only way I could see to have a chance in this contest was to employ every tool I have in my box from every possible vantage. In other words, I had to circle around this father/Father figure in way that circled back on itself even as it moved inexorably forward. It didn’t matter that I’d set myself to a job I didn’t know how to do. The job itself, and the work of it, showed me the way.  

BH: I’ve had more than my share of experiencing tornadoes in my life, so I know how violent they can be, then calm, then erupting again into chaos all while following a very straight path. Is this what you mean?

DF: That description is one aspect of the structure, for sure. Growing up in California, I’ve experienced some hardcore earthquakes, though, unlike you, I’m lucky enough never to have weathered a tornado. I just know how they work. Another characteristic of tornados, the one that interested me most, I think, and which is the structure’s foundation, as it were, is that they work according to the principle of a vortex. They spin from without to within, laying waste to everything in their path, none of which anyone knows when it will be taken. Nothing in a tornado’s path can escape, either. Once the tornado scoops it up, it can’t do anything but what the vortex says. What’s more, it’s constantly cycling back to ground it’s already razed, even as it moves along an arc that’s more or less random. There’s more, too, stuff I’ve addressed elsewhere, so I hope you won’t mind that I plagiarize myself! The book’s structure and approach, I said, are at once a reflection of the devastation of The Father and an act of patricide. They use the patriarchal framework within which the novel has until now largely been created to destroy that framework. The Father’s way is The Father’s death.

BH: While the first person scenes with Rice feel emotionally close to the reader, there are third person scenes as well as character names (the father, the mother, for instance) that seem to convey a distance for Rice. The balance works very well. Can you speak to this balance between closeness and distance?

DF: I don’t think you’d disagree when I say this book is emotionally fraught. That, actually, would be close to grotesque understatement. Again, the work showed me what to do. The scenes narrated in first person are those that, typically, Rice tells from the distance of memory—moments and events he’s exploring retrospectively. They’re intimate in the sense that he treats them directly. And regardless of how personally intense they may be, the buffer that is the space between Rice’s telling of the events and the time of the events themselves enable the reader to absorb the telling. The opposite is true, frequently enough, of those passages that are narrated from the perspective of a tight third person. Many parts of Rice’s story verge toward what Judith Herman calls the “unspeakable.” Had Rice narrated these experiences first hand, it seems to me, the reader herself would’ve been forced too unbearably close. She couldn’t handle these moments any more than Rice could. Such events would literally asphyxiate a reader. This is in part why they’re unspeakable. They steal the breath we need to speak them. The space between the telling and the perspective of the telling provided by the remove from first person to third person gives the reader the space they need to breathe. Without that space, they’d collapse, figuratively, in the least.

As for how names work in the book, you’ll notice that the only characters without proper names are those in Rice’s family. This isn’t about anonymity per se, but, as you noted, about the actual distance such anonymity creates. Rice doesn’t call the people in his family by name because he’s always felt disastrously remote from them. These characters aren’t so much people to him as constructs, products of the systems I was just describing. But it’s also his way of creating the space he needs to see them clearly. Names have a lot of power. Names can imbue their objects with power, just as they can divest them of that power, to the point of powerlessness. In other words, in the same way that sex clouds, so do names. They’re nothing if not nebulous, right? Rice knows this. Or rather he’s learned it over time. In his refusal to name the people in his family, he’s divested them of the murk within which they act. Nameless, the people in his family stand out in the relief that’s vital to Rice’s seeing them as he must if he’s to understand not just them but, more importantly, himself as a product of them.

BH: Was there any specific book that influenced this one?

DF: Not a specific book. I did read a shitload of stuff about time and memory and language and writing, though, by way of constructing a thesis of sorts about how they’re inextricably entwined. That’s the stuff I struck almost entirely from the book. It was a lot!

BH: What are you reading right now? What books are you excited about?

DF: I had a really, really bad year-and-half that didn’t quit till the end of last spring, a time during which I’m almost ashamed to say I read next to nothing. It took a bit to get back in the swing of things, but I’m more or less in it now, which means I’m reading maybe fifteen books at once. I just reread Sōkō Morinaga’s Novice to Master and the Tao Te Ching while swinging with Wendy C. Ortiz’s Excavation and one of yours, Desolation of Avenues Untold. I read Jeff Jackson’s new novella, Novi Sad, Mark de Silva’s Square Wave, Annie DeWitt’s White Nights in Split Town City, Elizabeth Crane’s The History of Everything, and Matt Bialer’s epic poem about Bigfoot, Distant Shores. Also, László Krasznahorkai’s Seibo There Below and Satantango, and Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick. I’m writing an essay about Kraus’s book, in fact. It’s incredible. Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet is in the mix, too, and so is John Domini’s Movieola! I also finished Zoe Dzunko’s chapbook of poetry, Selfless, which is really fantastic. Next to Natalie Eilbert—whose press Atlas, not incidentally, published Dzunko—she’s probably the first poet in a while that’s supercharged me. There’s more, but I can’t recall them now here in this café. All I know is that my to-be-read pile is plural, as in piles, what I call hoodoos and fire hazards by turns. It’s comforting to know there’s so much good stuff out there, but it’s also a reason for anxiety. Choosing a single book to read entails a decision, which I somehow find stressful. Maybe it’s because so many of the books are by people I know? But oh well! I’m reading me some books.

Brandon Hobson is the author of Deep Ellum and Desolation of Avenues Untold. His work has appeared in The Believer, The Pushcart Prize XL, Conjunctions, NOON, The Paris Review Daily, Post Road, and elsewhere. He can be found at http://brandonhobson.com