PETE Ensemble's R3

PETE Ensemble’s R3, directed by Gisela Cardenas, is a tour de force of costuming and condensation. The play runs and hour and forty-five minutes: the costumes are black, trim, tight-fitting, slightly adorned or stripped for the second role for each performer; the props are minimal, focused on shape, and also do double duty as the scene demands.

R3 is also a tour de force of dance. The choreography is a study in grand and subtle aggression, threat, incitement, calculated retreat and redoubled advance.

But the heart of R3, the reason to see it, is Jacob Coleman’s performance as Richard – an astonishingly kinetic and athletic presentation of twisted spine, dog-loping, monkey-gripping, chest-thrusting, bowing, cringing, curling, twisting – which instantly conveys the villainy at the heart of the plot.

This is PETE’s most accomplished piece to date. On this evidence, PETE is a company to be able, confidently, to expect great things from.

Of course!

That's why books like Never Coming Back

"Struggling with fear, despair, and suspicious Swedish authorities when his wife fails to return home, Mike endures a nightmarish existence with his daughter, unaware that his vigil is being secretly filmed and shown to his wife by her abductors in a nearby cellar..."

have moved, like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, out of crime or mystery sections and into general fiction sections everywhere! It's the pandemic corruption.

General fiction has always covered war (Stendahl) adventure, comedy (Defoe), domestic fiction, adultery (Flaubert, Tolstoy), and horror (Shelley) - the plain bloodsimple used to be mystery (Hammett).

Between them the drug trade (begun in earnest during the Vietnam War and continued throughout the Latin American sectors of the Cold War and the Friedmanite collapse of the Soviet bloc) and the War on Terror have corrupted everything. Middle class reality (Chekhov, Cheever, Updike, stretching to Burroughs & Heller) is turned to genrefic.

The Structure of Autumn

The Word's the Thing

I was tripping around my local facility the other day, looking for and at this and that, reading the intervening spine-labels, when it occurred to me that the shelf-dividers & other descriptors on offer have been somewhat overwhelmed by developments in the publishing industry.

So, with great humility, I offer the Library of Congress the following possibilities for fiction and non-fiction, print and other formats:

Belleslettristic trash

Hipster epistemology

Debordian spectacle

Gormless clusterfuck

Further suggestions wined, dined, & entertained below...

On Being a Publisher

Publishing – small press, micro press, book packager, co-publisher… Over the last 10 years GobQ has published Gobshite Quarterly – a multilingual quarterly magazine (now back I print after a long hiatus), co-published Curse + Berate in 69+ Languages, a multilingual dictionary of language from the dark side; a bilingual edition of Gato Eficaz, an early novel by Luisa Valenzuela; and Golems Waiting Redux, an account of the vandalism of local sculpture in downtown Portland in 2002.

The first time I ever held a manuscript in my hands was when Oriel Gray let me take Scraps of Paper home to read. It was her memoir, fresh and vivid. There was something about the unbound pages and the indented lettering (Olivetti portable) that made me shiver – some life or power fresh from her mind and hands came, straight and unmediated, to my hands and mind.

Though that manuscript became part of my furniture for almost 30 years, I forgot what handling real manuscripts is like. When RV Branham suggested starting a magazine I wasn't paying much attention, truth to tell. But when the manuscripts started coming in…. I'll never forget the day Vénus Khoury-Ghata's Words arrived at the Gobshite Quarterly office, as a mailed fax from Marilyn Hacker in Paris. It was a delirious experience: I couldn't focus on them, the sense of awe and strangeness and déjà vu was so strong; I couldn't stand quite upright. I put them down and picked them up again, read them, and finally took them to my own office – a quiet, west-facing room upstairs, with nothing but a desk, 2 chairs and 2 windows – even northern light on the one side and filtered western light on the other – and laid them on the desk, in order, and began again. They were so good, and so far outside the realm of English poetry that having them in my hands felt made me feel as though something I'd never known but always known was trying shake itself free of the categories I always thought in, or lived in.

We ran them all in issue 1, in French and English. (That is, we ran 14 in French and 13 in English: The New Yorker had bought one of the translations.)

In that issue we also ran "Sirens," a short story by Frederic Raphael (Two for the Road, The Glittering Prizes), which hadn't placed in England. It's a great story, another world-view shatterer. I couldn't believe it'd been "Good luck placing it elsewhere"-d. In England. Couldn’t believe it.

The 3rd most wondrous experience was an email from Palestine (long after we'd given up hope), allowing us to reprint some of Mahmoud Darwish's poems. (Typesetting the Arabic was an adventure – it was eventually done by one of the partners in a local printing business, who'd studied Arabic and been to Syria for a year as a Fulbright scholar. As we didn't have the right font at the time we scanned the page as a jpg and InDesigned it that way.)

Marilyn Hacker also brought us the French poet Marie Etienne. Writers from Cuba and Mexico and Argentina contacted us, looking for translators; translators contacted us, looking for publishers (Hungary, Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Poland), and we found translators and published them.

On a visit to Portland Julienne Eden-Bušić chanced to see us mentioned in The Oregonian. She brought a treasure-trove of new Croatian, Slovenian, and Bosnian poets – Tomica Bajsić, Barbara Korun, Dubravka Oraić-Tolić and Ferida Durakovic, as well as prose-writers Edo Popović and Gordan Nuhanović. Tomica Bajsić's poetry was – seeing it in manuscript was just a rush, it really was. Seeing something that good, and new, already accomplished and huge with future possibility – fills you with hope and joy and repletion, all at once.

The other astonishing thing about publishing, perhaps particularly about Gobshite, was that the printed object travelled roads we'd never imagined. People kept saying they'd run across a copy in a train in Spain or some other obscure way-station. The Algerian poet Amari Hamadene contacted us after seeing a copy in an Algerian café.

And just as well the manuscripts shake the world and then travel beyond imagining, because the financial dance of publishing is awful. We were just beginning to get some ad-revenue when our major distributor collapsed, leaving us with pennies on the dollar, unable to return to print until very recently.

And we are beginning to return to print, using Portland printers and very small runs. Issue 12 came out just before last Christmas, featuring a short story by Lidia Yuknavitch, essays on the Occupy movement by Richard Melo and Joyce Reynolds-Ward, Occupy sketches by Shannon Wheeler, an excerpt from a lost Russian novel about the Revolution (by Anatoliy Mariengoff; we are hoping to co-publish the entire book when translation is complete), an etymological reminiscence by Katherine Dunn; short, surreal prose-poems from Denmark – all sorts of things that do not appear elsewhere in English, and certainly not in conjunction with each other. We intend to print issue #13-14 this coming autumn.

Though I usually function as factotum, reader of first or last resort, proofreader, poetry editor, image-bank, and bookkeeper for Gobshite I am preparing a couple of books for publication later this year. One is almost ready; the other, which will be larger, I haven't quite mentioned to the writer, yet… I'll drop by later this week, and have a word.

Sometimes the World Works

Perhaps it was the hint of rain in the air, but this morning I did things in the front garden instead of what I'd usually do. The moss and ferns (largely unwanted on the one hand, struggling on the other), reminded me of a terrarium -

The first writer's organization I was a(n associate) member of was SFWA. (Sometimes the world works in very strange ways.) From the early '80s to the early '90s,LOSCON was local and we went to it every Thanksgiving. For 2 or 3 years during the late '80s there were wonderful terrariums in the dealers' room, fantasy castles on moulded plastic cliffs, and wizards with staves topped with orbs of opalized or coloured glass in among ferns and mossy things; they were small and whole fantasy worlds, made with real, living plants from this one. You could look into them and find them surrounding you.

And at work there was a young lad who'd come to study in the Library every morning before his first class, always awkward and overwhelmed. One day his mother came in with him, bringing his lunch in a brown paper bag, and urging him to do well. She was badly dressed and missing some teeth: they were clearly very poor and the boy was both the apple of her eye and the family's great hope. His frailty and burdens worried me. I wanted to tell him about the terrariums in the dealer's room; I knew the plants would comfort him; but I didn't know him well enough to talk to him about anything at all.

I suppose he graduated; he stopped coming in in the mornings. In the brutal way of the daily grind I forgot him.

Some years later I was walking back to the library from the cafeteria (I worked there a very long time), and I saw a tall young man talking to some students. I bristled and asked him if he needed anything, unknown adult male on campus, talking to a group of quite young girls. He replied that he was talking to his sister. Naturally I wasn't convinced. And then he said, "Don't you remember me? I'm Carlos."

And yes, it was Carlos. More than 6 feet tall, in fatigues (name-patch at the join of clavicle and shoulder), out of the Army now, studying to be a Forest Ranger.

The Inside-Out, Utterly Hypocritical, Pre-Paid, Jerry Who? from Where? "Review" "Scandal"

It's a Gordian knot of bad faith and absurdity.

Firstly, the matter of e-book authors writers paying a supplier for positive (5-star) reviews from "readers" who may not have read the books in question. (That's actually 2 matters - firstly, the automatic 5 stars, and secondly, and the one I assume the hoo-hah is about, is the availability of the paid service.)

Now this could not happen - the reviews wouldn't convince potential buyers - if customer reviews hadn't already been a large feature of Amazon's database, if people hadn't already been using them to make buying/reading/viewing decisions.

I've used the customer reviews there many times to decide about DVDs I wanted to use for some of the DVD film-festivals at work a few years ago. I needed them particularly for things I wasn't personally familiar with (Korean TV series, films from Mongolia and Iran, some older new-wave films from China I hadn't seen, and so on). I liked Amazon customer reviews because they are, generally, without guile. If people got bored half-way through, or even ten minutes into, they said so. There were usually enough reviews of a title to form a balanced judgement before setting in motion a lot of possibly needless activity in setting up the festival, and to save myself a lot of embarrassment.

So that was valuable knowledge. I appreciated its existence.

And, once more, there are 2 things to consider here.

Firstly, how can I go on trusting Amazon customer reviews if they can be bought and paid for?

Secondly: why do I value Amazon customer reviews for their honesty, if the old-media, "professional" reviews, are also honest?

Answer: because the professional reviews are not honest.* They are every bit as pre-paid as the "scandalous" e-book reviews - they just work in the 2.5-4.5 star range. (Their question seems to be: Is this book a good or bad example of its type?)

(Publishing is an assembly-line; the assembly-line mass-produces predictable objects. The potential book should announce its similarity to previous books; it  should not take place in a particular locale, but be equally local to all potential readers...) (But that's old news. This development began in the mid-'60s, when profits were first going to be "maximized" and corporate mergers were still just proposals and plans. It took another 10 years for the doing away with the mid-list to become an explicit, effective policy. Norman Spinrad was one of the first to raise that alarm among writers, in 1978.)

The function of professional reviewers has always been to keep the books selling, and, hemi-demi-semi-consciously, reviewers feel the pressure. (How many times have you read a negative review that revised itself into positivity before your eyes and its own end?)**

This is another kind of silencing of dissent, trivial, creepy, and indicative. If you can't tell the truth about a book you've read, what can you tell the truth about?

In an understandable effort to create an island of sanity/probity in this steaming swamp of payola, this anyone will do anything for money - which is a definition of slavery, among other things - 49 British authors wrote a letter to the Daily Telegraph, condemning the widespread use, by authors, of fake identities to puff their own pieces and slam those of their "rivals". (See the introductory article here.)

Yesterday I came across a hard copy of Steve Lawhead's The Spirit Well (Nashville, Thomas Nelson, 2012). This is a transcript of the first two pages. (Emphases in the original.)

==

What Readers Are Saying about The Bright Empires Series

"His mastery of the art of description is beyond belief. (I had to stop several times to jump up and down because I loved his style so much, seriously.) His level of attention to details like period mind-set and speech is a delight to behold (especially for die-hard background-first novelists like me)." - Sir Emeth M.

"This is a story that has it all: mystery, history, damsels in distress, and a mind-bending meditation on the nature of reality. It is in equal parts Raiders of the Lost Ark, National Treasure, and Jumper. Highly recommended." - Chad J.

"Filled with descriptions that beguile all five senses and all the beauty and charm of the language I have come to expect from Lawhead, this book is a fascinating blend of fantasy and sci-fi." - Jenelle S.

"... a hold-your-breath beginning to a new series. This novel mixes ancient history, time travel, alternate realities, mystery, physics, and fantasy, to create a story so compelling that I find myself recommending it to any who will listen." - Sheila P.

"[A] sure winner for eager sci-fi readers... The vivid imagery and witty lines help keep the reader on the edge of their seats." - Jerry P.

"Time travel and high adventure abound in this brand new title from veteran author Stephen R. Lawhead." - Ben H.

"Imagine Narnia merged with Hitchhiker's Guide, and you have a starting point for the adventures of Kit Livingstone." - Rick M.

"Lawhead vividly describes the sights, sounds, and smells of the markets in Prague, the streets of Restoration England, and even the dry heat of Ancient Egypt... The premise of ley-line travel is fascinating yet mysterious, with scientific definitions that are detailed without being too technical. The characters are personable and complex, and it's easy to get caught up in their search for that elusive map." - Malinda D.

"... an excellent, mysterious storyline that draws the reader in." - Kieran

==

Let's leave aside the fact that The Spirit Well is volume 3 of the series and that at least one of the quotes does not strictly apply to the item in hand.

What I immediately notice is that:
*the punctuation is surprisingly correct for the level of prose - "I loved his style so much, seriously"
*the pitch-points/selling-points (bolded) are surprisingly concise for people who are "beguiled" by Lawhead's prose, which is flat, sloppy, flatly under-imagined and flatly overwritten, awkward in contemporary scenes and awkward in period.

None of these accolades is credibly sourced. They sound like some Amazon reviews but they don't sound quite real.  They smell of over-eagerness; they have such a sameness of tone and intent, such a single thrust of argument, they smell of some sort of fix.

A major publisher including such "reviews" in the book itself, is, to me, an even greater scandal than writers puffing themselves, no matter how deceitfully and underhandedly.

These pages in the book are not accessible to greedy individual authors, mavericks who suffer an unfortunate ethical insufficiency, and who will be discovered, eventually, pass through the mandatory brief public shame and so be absolved, i.e., forgotten and left to begin again under a pseudonym.

The beyond-Amazon, hard-copy corporate sponsorship of this kind of review is not being mentioned. The "scandal" is being confined to the behaviour of flesh and blood individuals. Corporate persons are exempt from, defined as above and beyond, whatever rage results from the hijacking of the mouths they call ours.

===

*Writers glad-handing each other's work is not just a recent occurrence: writers reviewing each other favourably and arranging exchange professorships / lectureships / fellowships for each other goes all the way back to the New York Review of Books, which was founded by publishers, notably Random House. (NYRB also pretty much founded the travelling writer's lecture business, another medium for promoting some writers, some books, some ideas.)

All this is detailed in The End of Intelligent Writing, by Richard Kostelanetz (Sheed and Ward, New York, 1974). This book is invaluable about the history and shape of U.S. publishing - and if nothing else, will explain why is is so important to know that Jason Epstein was Jeff Bezoz' mentor.

**In the Australian case I see the fear that bad reviews will kill a genuinely tiny industry. Unfortunately, that  industry can also die of good reviews. The precariousness of Australian book activity, like that of the other English-language publishers, comes from trying to make a branded, assembly-line industry out of an essentially unpredictable, low-margin business.