Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Steven Taylor Sings at the 2009 SWP
Here's a audio clip for those of you suffering from SWP withdrawl. Steven Taylor sings at the 2009 SWP, July 11, 2009. Enjoy.
Saturday, October 10, 2009
A Funeral for Edgar Allan Poe
160 years after his death on Oct 7, 1849, Edgar Allan Poe was finally given a proper funeral, since his original one included less than 10 mourners, and took all of three minutes. Read the full (odd) story at http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/oct/08/edgar-allan-poe-funeral
Thursday, October 8, 2009
Raymond Federman 1928 - 2009
From THE BUFFALO NEWS (Thursday, October 8th)
Raymond Federman on Ways to Improve Death
The fact that Federman cannot say "I am dead "...The fact of being unable to speak one's death is the supreme category which abolishes all the others. It is the ultimate category, the category of the unspeakability of death...
Whether one dies in bed, dies in one's boots, dies with one's boots on, dies on the vine, dies in harness, dies prematurely or in one's sleep, dies in a gas chamber, dies while making love to one's lover, when all is done and said, that is the category of death that has reached total improvement because it can no longer be spoken.
Language vanishes into death, and death vanishes into silence. Or is it, death that vanishes into language, and language into silence?
So wrote Raymond Federman in "Reflections on Ways to Improve Death," an essay that reads like Jonathan Swift through the lens of Samuel Beckett, with marginal commentary by Ludwig Wittgenstein. It's another one of Federman's brilliant transgressions on mortality, his pas de deux with Death over the course of a nearly forty-five year long career as a literary fabulist telling many different “self-reflexive” versions of the same, living text: the joyous, terrifying, self-canceling story of his own life.
Raymond Federman died Tuesday morning in San Diego after a long battle with cancer. He was 81.
From 1964 to 1999, he lived and taught in this city as Distinguished Professor of Modern Languages and Literatures at the University at Buffalo. No mere academic, he became a key figure in Buffalo's experimental arts and literary community, especially at Hallwalls, where he served on the Board of Directors and recruited a number of his graduate students--including longtime director Ed Cardoni and yours truly--onto the staff.
For those of us who knew him, who studied under him, who watched him invent kind of writing he called "Laughterature," a tragicomic mode that mixed grief with laughter, playfulness with fatalism, ebullient digression with the looming silence of the Holocaust, his death signifies much, much more than what he in his writing frequently referred to as a simple "change in tense."
Federman—who heard his father, mother and two sisters led away by Gestapo officers from their Paris apartment in 1942 to their eventual death in Auschwitz while he, hidden in a closet, listened to the newly orphaned “voice of absence” in his 14 year-old head (read his classic novella The Voice in the Closet) —survived to become a leading literary theorist, postmodern novelist and one of the inventors of avant garde writing in America (although he disavowed both the terms “postmodern” and “avant garde”).
A writer whose influence on world literature continued to grow over the decades, Federman—who traced his narrative lineage through Proust, Joyce, and especially Samuel Beckett—was considered a "major" (and in France and Germany, even a best-selling) American author throughout Europe. Here in the U.S., his novels Double or Nothing (1971), Take It or Leave It (1976), The Twofold Vibration (1982), the American Book Award winning Smiles on Washington Square (1985), To Whom It May Concern (1990), and Aunt Rachel’s Fur (2001), enthralled and disoriented readers even as they confounded mainstream critics with their carnival-like flights of narrative invention and metafictional hijinks.
His most recent books, My Body in Nine Parts published by Buffalo novelist Ted Pelton’s Starcherone Books in 2005, and The Carcasses: A Fable (2009), published by Geoffrey Gatza's BlazeVox Books, lend an entirely corporeal literalism to the term "body of work".
As a critic and theorist, Federman’s coinage of the terms “surfiction”—for fiction that seeks not to imitate reality but rather expose the fictionalized quality of what we hold to be “real”—and “critifiction”—writing that explores the boundaries between autobiography and fiction by mixing discourses /and genres— to describe his own work and that of his peers in the Fiction Collective in the 1970’s anticipated and were the narrative parallel to many of the innovations introduced by the "Language" movement in poetry.
Quite apart from his stellar body of work, Ray was a world-class storyteller, a raffish literary raconteur with a carefully cultivated French accent, a quietly generous man who help launch the careers of many of his former students, and a former paratrooper turned scratch golfer in his leisure hours. He taught us that the primary function of literature was to find new, ever more adventurous ways to tell the human story, that the entire point of writing was to press on, even when faith and hope and even language failed us.
In 2006, the American Center of PEN International, the world's oldest human rights organization, asked Federman for a poem about "Faith and Reason". This is the poem he sent them:
Here & Elsewhere
I cannot write I cannot write
when I want to, when I need to.
I mean I cannot write
what must be written
what demands to be written.
Every morning I ask myself : why?
No good, nothing, nothing, nothing.
How long will this go on?
Everyday I wake up and around me
terror earthquake murder fire killing
the newspaper the radio the television
tanks famine death war corruption bombs.
Where am I, me, I mean?
And you? Where are you?
Torn away. Displaced. Angry.
It's not that I cannot write
oh yes I can write
anything I want
but it's this one thing
this one thing I cannot write
this thing that refuses
to let itself be written
to surface out of me.
The horror in the world
the human debacle.
Reading writing speaking
my life has been but that
a life of words
a pell mell babel of words
a life full of stories
but a life anyway.
I awake here in exile
It's because of the world
because of history
because of what goes
on in the world
that concerns us
frightens us
dejects us
saddens us
the moment I jump
out of bed there is
this horror in the world
and I cannot write it.
I cannot say which
is my country today
it constantly changes
it's always the country
that invades me
devastates me
that makes me angry
I remain caught
in this incapacity
to detach myself
from this .... this ...
arrachement. [Fr. extraction]
My body seemingly here
but my mind elsewhere
full of sordid images
It's exhausting to be
where one is not
and not be where one is
While brushing my teeth
I hear the cracked voice in me
whisper: this is the day
the day of rapprochement
the day of frenetic work
and then....
Where was I last
where was I seen last
where will I be today?
Jerusalem?
Paris?
Berlin?
Kabul?
Auschwitz?
Federman was one of a kind. May he rest in peace.
--R.D. Pohl
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Monday, September 21, 2009
Monday, September 14, 2009
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