IT’S A POST-SOLSTICE MISCmedia, the online column that had just gotten used to less than 8.5 hours of sunlight when the nights suddenly started getting shorter again.
For one thing, the long nites have left me plenty-O-time, and the right climactic setting, to get caught up in all the reading matter I’d obtained at the last Tower Books clearance sale six months before.
That, in turn, meant I could turn my eye toward some of the literary zines that have popped up of late.
Such as August Avo and Doug “Das” Andersson’s Klang.
It first appeared almost three years ago, disappeared after one issue, and has now reappeared, with three tabloid installments produced thus far.
Each issue mixes two serials with one-shot short stories, poems, line art (including some old Durer woodcuts), and other supplementary material.
Andersson’s serial, “The Transformation,” starts with an antihero who applies a sexual-enhancement salve and turns into a donkey. The first, origin-story installment has its lame parts (such as its fictional names for Seattle and Woodland Park Zoo); but the next two segments go places Kafka never nightmared. In the third part, that includes a Fundamentalist Y2K survivalist farm, where our protagonist (a literal “ass man”) is enslaved to run an old-fashioned flour mill.
Avo’s serial, “Badge” (purported to be a translation of a “bestselling Russian novel by Sasha Klinokov”), is even more ambitious. Since it’s now online at the above link, I won’t try to explain or summarize it. I will say that, no matter what its true origins, it does a grand job of capturing the epic-tragedy spirit of classic pre-USSR Russian lit; as situated in the epic tragedy that much of post-USSR Russia has become.
But the zine’s best part is “Notes on the American Novel” by the pseudonymous “JAD,” appearing on the back pages of issues 1 and 3. These pithy aphorisms revolve around a pair of premises: (1) The Novel, in the classical definition, is a European art form unsuited to capturing U.S. social realities; and (2) this inadequacy reveals fundamental flaws about U.S. society:
- There will be no great American novel until we get to know each other. Presently, we look at each other in a few limited and near meaningless ways: Movie star, criminal, consumer, welfare mom, soccer mom, rich guy, poor guy, Negro, whitey… gay, straight….
- In America he who screams the loudest plays guitar the loudest laughs the loudest gets the attention of others–the most obvious–wins. This is not the ideal environment in which to develop the subtle art of the novel.
- The novel in America is not considered a legitimate place of perceptual business, of intellectual endeavor or inquiry. Nothing is advanced or looked for beyond titillation and sensationalism. In America the novel is what you do at the end of the line; after you retire from film directing or acting you write novels.
- Fucking is no big deal and yet most writers, who I assume don’t get enough, magnify this act into transcendence and epiphanies.
- The only transaction that has any meaning in America is the transaction of buying and selling; we have no concept of each other outside the narrow bounds of our economic transactions.
Slightly more optimistic views on fin-de-siecle American writing can be found in Context, an in-bookstore tabloid review from the Illinois-based Dalkey Archive Press. Besides tributes to great authors from other times and places (Borges, Calvino, Flann O’Brien, Henry James, Samuel Beckett), it’s got thoughtful praise for Diane Williams, David Markson, and McSweeney’s. (Dalkey publishes Williams and Markson; and its placement of its own authors as implied heirs to modern-lit’s greats is a PR move for sure; but, at least in the case of Williams, it’s deserved.)
Whether Williams’s tight, internalized short-shorts; Markson’s hibrow story-essays; or McSweeney’s high whimsy mark new directions for storytelling in the new whatever-period-of-time-you-wanna-call-it will, natch, have to be answered later.
But at least they, and the Klang guys, are asking some of the right questions.
TOMORROW: A festive holiday message.
ELSEWHERE:
