The Imaginary Museum

Monday, May 11, 2015

Verbivoracious Festschrift 3: The Syllabus

G.N. Forester and M.J. Nicholls, ed.: Verbivoracious Festschrift Volume 3:
The Syllabus (2015)

I was a little surprised, last year, to be invited to contribute a piece to the above festschrift from Singapore-based alternative literature publisher Verbivoracious Press. They appear to specialise principally in the work of British writer Christine Brooke-Rose (1923-2012), many of whose books they have reprinted. The title of the above compilation, "The Syllabus," though, shows that they also aspire to represent a whole universe of experimental writing - what might be called (in Roger Horrocks' phrase) the Kingdom of Alt.

Adam Thirlwell: Miss Herbert: An Essay in Five Parts (2007)

The book Mark Nicholls wanted me to write about was Miss Herbert (2007), by British novelist Adam Thirlwell. The reason this surprised me was that he based the request on the blogpost I'd written about it, a piece which strikes me (in retrospect) as rather unkind - though I certainly don't subscribe there to any of the more ad hominem attacks Thirlwell's book received in the more up-themselves reviews.

We quickly rejected the idea of compiling an essay from the blog itself, and instead I decided to take the licence he offered to compose a more "creative" piece taking off from Thirlwell's book (which rejoices in a number of titles in America and Britain, my favourite being the one on the spine of the paperback edition: Miss Herbert: A book of novels, romances, and their translators, containing ten languages, set on four continents, and accompanied by maps, portraits, squiggles and illustrations ...

Each contributor was limited to 500 words, and it must have been a devil of a job to assemble them all, since it was only last week that I was at last alerted to the appearance of the compilation:

A monument to our insatiable verbivoracity, The Syllabus is an act of humble genuflection before the authors responsible for those texts which have transported us to the peak of readerly nirvana and back. The texts featured, chosen in a rapturous frenzy by editors and contributors alike, represent a broad sweep of the most important exploratory fiction written in the last hundred years (and beyond). Featuring 100 texts from (fewer than) 100 contributors, The Syllabus is a form of religious creed, and should be read primarily as a holy manual from which the reader draws inspiration and hope, helping to shape their intellectual and moral life with greater awareness, and lead them towards those works that offer deep spiritual succour while surviving on a merciless and unkind planet. Readers of this festschrift should expect nothing less than an incontrovertible conversion from reader to insatiable verbivore in 225 pages.

“The Syllabus, as a third volume of Verbivoracious Festschrift, is a celebration of reading. It’s a great literary feast for the true readers, for all the verbivores around the world, a feast consisting of hundred delicious meals. I am honored to be a part of that unforgettable menu.” — Dubravka Ugrešić.

And what exactly is in it? Here's a list of the contents, arranged (as you can see) in chronological order:

Introduction or, The Art of Sillybustering

The Editors

Jonathan Swift — A Modest Proposal [1729]
Laurence Sterne — The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy [1759]
Xiao Hong (萧红) — The Field of Life and Death [1935]
Louis-Ferdinand Céline — Death on the Installment Plan [1936]
Rayner Heppenstall — The Blaze of Noon [1939]
James Joyce — Finnegans Wake [1939]
Flann O’Brien — At Swim-Two-Birds [1939]
Raymond Queneau — Exercises in Style [1947]
Boris Vian — Foam of the Daze [1947]
Douglas Woolf — The Hypocritic Days [1955]
Henry Miller — Quiet Days in Clichy [1956]
Muriel Spark — The Comforters [1957]
Alexander Trocchi — Cain’s Book [1960]
Michel Butor — Mobile [1962]
Robert Pinget — The Inquisitory [1962]
B.S. Johnson — Omnibus [1964-1971]
Raymond Queneau — The Blue Flowers [1965]
Alan Burns — Celebrations [1967]
Guillermo Cabrera Infante — Three Trapped Tigers [1967]
Macedonia Fernández — The Museum of Eterna’s Novel [1967]
Anna Kavan — Ice [1967]
J.M.G Le Clézio — Terra Amata [1967]
Flann O’Brien — The Third Policeman [1967]
Ishmael Reed — The Freelance Pallbearers [1967]
Christine Brooke-Rose — Between [1968]
Anthony Earnshaw & Eric Thacker — Musrum [1968]
Nicholas Mosley — Impossible Object [1968]
Vladimir Nabokov — Ada or Ardor [1969]
J.G. Ballard — The Atrocity Exhibition [1970]
Pierre Guyotat — Eden Eden Eden [1970]
Raymond Federman — Double or Nothing [1971]
Hubert Selby Jnr. — The Room [1971]
Stanley Crawford — Log of the S.S. the Mrs Unguentine [1972]
Tom Mallin — Erowina [1972]
Ann Quin — Tripticks [1972]
Guy Davenport — Taitlin! [1974]
Lawrence Durrell — The Avignon Quintet [1974-1985]
Chrisine Brooke-Rose — Thru [1975]
Georges Perec — An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris [1975]
Fernando del Paso — Palinuro of Mexico [1976]
Coleman Dowell — Island People [1976]
Raymond Federman — Take It or Leave It [1976]
Italo Calvino — If on a winter’s night a traveller [1979]
Gilbert Sorrentino — Mulligan Stew [1979]
Roald Dahl — The Twits [1980]
Donald Barthelme — Sixty Stories [1981]
Alexander Theroux — Darconville’s Cat [1981]
Camilo José Cela — Mrs. Caldwell Speaks to Her Son [1982]
D. Keith Mano — Take Five [1982]
Thomas Bernhard — Woodcutters [1984]
Christine Brooke-Rose — Amalgamemnon [1984]
Rikki Ducornet — The Stain [1984]
Christoph Meckel — The Figure on the Boundary Line [1984]
Milorad Pavić — Dictionary of the Khazars (Male Edition) [1984]
Milorad Pavić — Dictionary of the Khazars (Female Edition) [1984]
Don Delillo — White Noise [1985]
Gilbert Sorrentino — Pack of Lies Trilogy [1985-1989]
Ronald Sukenick — In Form: Digressions on the Act of Fiction [1985]
Marcel Bénabou — Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books [1986]
Michael Westlake — Imaginary Women [1987]
Nicholson Baker — The Mezzanine [1988]
Italo Calvino — Six Memos for the Next Millennium [1988]
David Markson — Wittgenstein’s Mistress [1988]
Janice Galloway — The Trick is to Keep Breathing [1989]
Jacques Roubaud — The Great Fire of London [1989]
Felipe Alfau — Chromos [1990]
Robert Alan Jamieson — A Day at the Office [1991]
Alasdair Gray — Poor Things [1992]
W.G. Sebald — The Emigrants [1992]
William Gaddis — A Frolic of His Own [1994]
Jáchym Topol — City Sister Silver [1994]
Martin Amis — The Information [1995]
William H. Gass — The Tunnel [1995]
Gilbert Sorrentino — Red the Fiend [1995]
Roberto Bolaño — Nazi Literature in the Americas [1996]
Geoff Dyer — Out of Sheer Rage [1997]
Alasdair Brotchie & Harry Mathews (eds.) — Oulipo Compendium [1998]
Dubravka Ugrešić — The Museum of Unconditional Surrender [1998]
Percival Everett — Glyph [1999]
Ali Smith — Other Stories and Other Stories [1999]
Ignácio de Loloya Brandão — Anonymous Celebrity [2002]
Curtis White — Requiem [2002]
Lucy Ellmann — Dot in the Universe [2003]
Dubravka Ugrešić — Thank You for Not Reading [2003]
Roberto Bolaño — 2666 [2004]
Meredith Brosnan — Mr. Dynamite [2004]
David Mitchell — Cloud Atlas [2004]
Steve Katz — Antonello’s Lion [2005]
Graham Rawle — Woman’s World [2005]
Gilbert Adair — The Evadne Mount Trilogy [2006-2009]
Nicola Barker — Darkmans [2007]
Lydia Davis — Varieties of Disturbance [2007]
Lydie Salvayre — Portrait of the Writer as a Domesticated Animal [2007]
Adam Thirwell — Miss Herbert [2007]
Urmuz — Collected Works [2007]
Marilyn Chin — Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen [2009]
Gabriel Josipovici — Only Joking [2010]
Steven Moore — The Novel: An Alternative History [2010-2013]
Will Self — Walking to Hollywood [2010]
Charles Newman — In Partial Disgrace [2013]

The Influences of Others

Igo Wodan

What, no Raymond Roussel, you say? No this person, no that? Instead of such carping, let's just celebrate all the weird and wonderful texts they have managed to include in their roll-call of 100+:

Texts:

A Modest Proposal — The Avignon Quintet — The Comforters — Finnegans Wake — In Partial Disgrace — Impossible Object — Wittgenstein’s Mistress — The Freelance Pallbearers — Foam of the Daze — Between — Darconville’s Cat — Thru — Terra Amata — Poor Things — Pack of Lies — Amalgamemnon — Anonymous Celebrity — The Stain — Palinuro of Mexico — Miss Herbert — Tristram Shandy — The Mezzanine — White Noise — Glyph — The Twits — Woodcutters — Erowina — Chromos — A Day at the Office — Darkmans — The Evadne Mount Trilogy — Mobile — An Attempt to Exhaust a Place in Paris — The Trick is to Keep Breathing — The Great Fire of London — Thank You For Not Reading — Exercises in Style — Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books — B.S. Johnson Omnibus — Six Memos for the Next Millennium — Sixty Stories — Requiem — Mrs Caldwell Speaks to Her Son — The Atrocity Exhibition — Walking to Hollywood — At Swim-Two-Birds — The Death of the Author — Dot in the Universe — Eco: On Literature — Dictionary of the Khazars — The Novel: An Alternate History — Varieties of Disturbance — Mr. Dynamite — The Blue Flowers — Portrait of the Artist as a Domesticated Animal — The Tunnel — Oulipo Compendium — In Form: Digressions in the Art of Fiction — Take it or Leave it — If on a winter’s night a traveller — The Information — Double or Nothing — The Hypocritic Days — Berg — 2666 — The Inquisitory — Woman’s World — Museum of Eterna’s Novel — The Blaze of Noon — Musrum — Island People — Take Five — Death on Credit — Three Trapped Tigers — Cain’s Book — Invisible Cities — Out of Sheer Rage — Log of the S.S. Mrs Unguentine — The Room — Revenge of the Moon Vixen — Mulligan Stew — Ice — Red the Fiend — Urmuz: Complete Works — Ada — Taitlin! — Celebrations — The Figure on the Boundary Line — City Silver Sister — Nazi Literature in the Americas — The Emigrants — Other Stories and Other Stories — The Third Policeman — Antonello’s Lion — Cloud Atlas — Imaginary Women — The Museum of Unconditional Surrender — Eden Eden Eden — Quiet Days in Clichy

Contributors:

Scott Beauchamp — Kim Fay — Igo Wodan — Fionnuala McManamon — Eric Lundgren — Shiva Rahbaran — Joseph McGrath — Tosh Berman — Katarzyna Bartoszyńska — David Detrich — Ellen Friedman — Steven Moore — Keith Moser — Rodge Glass — Michelle Ryan-Santour — Jack Ross — Silvia Barlaam — Tom Conoboy — Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado — M.J. Nicholls — Barbara Melville — Nate Dorr — Sam Moss — Kinga Burger — Manny Rayner — John Trefry — Lauren Elkin — Gillian Devine —Ian Monk — Peter Blundell — Ana Stanojevic — Geoff Wilt — Nicolas Tredell — Daniel Levin Becker — Lee Klein — Lance Olsen — Trevor Dodge — Rosalyn Drexler — Rick McGrath — Richard Strachan — Edwin Turner — Ali Millar — Alec Nevala-Lee — Nathan Gaddis — Alberta Rigid — Jarleth L. Prenderghast —Inez Hedges — Juliet Jacques — H.L. Hix — Jason Graff — Tom Willard — Steve Katz — Anthony Vacca — Ammiel Almacay — Lee Rourke — Alex Cox — Michael Leong — Eric Byrd — Steve Penkevich — Kenneth Cox — Gene Hayworth — Paul John Adams — Pablo Medina — Gill Tasker — Kathleen Heil — Georgina Holland — Stephen Sparks — Anonymous — Melanie Ho — Jenny Offill — Kristine Rabberman — Eddie Watkins — Rob Friel — Joseph Andrew Darlington — Alex Zucker — Ben Winch — Alex Johnston — W.C. Bamberger — Stephen Mirabito — Michael Westlake — Peter Bebergal — Jasmina Lukić — Nadine Mainard — G.N. Forester

Here are the publication details:

Release Date:

May 11th, 2015. ISBN: 9789810935931. 237pp.

Pricing Information:

Paperback: GBP9.99 + postage GBP2.00 within UK, US, AU, CAN, EU, ZA, NZ, IN and SG.

Available from:

all booksellers and usual online retailers, or the Verbivoracious website at sales@verbivoraciouspress.org

I've got a good mind to use it precisely as they suggest: as a syllabus for the new course in "Advanced Fiction" I'm planning (to commence at Massey Albany in 2017). Maybe that's a bit cheeky, but it'll certainly be listing it as a recommended text for the students.

Go on, then, test yourself. Just how many of the above books have you actually read? How many have you even heard of, for that matter? Not even Richard Taylor would score 100% on that one, I suspect. Scott Hamilton, perhaps?

Jack Ross: Kingdom of Alt (2010)

Monday, April 13, 2015

Off the Page Writers Series [17/4/15]

Palmerston North City Library

This Friday I'll be flying down to Palmerston North to chair a session in Massey University's "Off the Page" series of writers events at the City Library from 6.30 pm (there'll also be an open mike reading from 5:45-6:30). These events are jointly sponsored by the School of English and Media Studies and the Palmerston North Public Library.

The panel I'm in charge of will be focussing on short fiction, and includes renowned writers Owen Marshall, Jaspreet Singh, and Tracey Slaughter. Books by all three of the panelists will be available for sale from representatives of local independent bookseller Bruce McKenzie Books.

Owen Marshall
photograph: Liz March

Owen Marshall needs no introduction, I should imagine: he is, after all, probably the most celebrated virtuoso of short fiction in New Zealand. I've never met him before, though, and am greatly looking forward to it.

Jaspreet Singh

The amazing Jaspreet Singh, whom I met for the first time yesterday at the Signalman's House in Devonport (aka The Michael King Writers Centre), where he's staying before flying down to Palmerston North to take up the Massey University writer-in-residence position there for the next ten weeks, is probably better known for his two novels Chef (2010) and Helium (2013), but actually began as a short story writer.

His first book, Seventeen Tomatoes: Tales from Kashmir, published by Véhicule Press of Montreal, won the 2004 QWF McAuslan First Book Award. He tells me he has a number of other short stories in stock, but of course commercial publishers will persist in preferring full-length novels ...

Tracey Slaughter

I have to say that I'll be particularly excited to introduce Tracey Slaughter to the audience, though. Bronwyn and I are both great admirers of her work, and we're therefore very pleased to announce that Pania Press has just published her novella The Longest Drink in Town. You can find out more about this publication here, and if you'd like to order a copy of it, please try here.

Cover image: Bronwyn Lloyd / Cover design: Ellen Portch & Brett Cross

Tracey has a somewhat larger collection, Deleted Scenes for Lovers, due out from Victoria University Press in early 2016, but this is her first stand-alone book since Her Body Rises (Random House, 2005) - though of course her stories have appeared in many, many magazines and anthologies since then.

The Longest Drink in Town is available in an initial print-run of 100 copies.

Friday, March 13, 2015

Ramon Llull and Curriculum Mapping

Ramon Llull: Ars magna (1305)

Yesterday I went to an interesting meeting where it was explained to us just how the - relatively new - concept of curriculum mapping could help us improve our teaching programme. There are many forms that this can take, but the one which was explained to us consisted of a listing of the "graduate attributes" considered essential for students in particular degrees or subject areas within degrees, together with a list of the papers we teach, and a series of boxes to fill in confirming that we do indeed teach those particular things.

So far, so harmless: useful, even (perhaps). I note in particular the following passage from the wikipedia article on curriculum mapping, which concludes:

The curriculum needs to be perceived as a 'work-in-progress', a 'living and breathing' document, whose ultimate owners are students. Curriculum mapping is a 'process', not a one-time initiative. Traditional curriculum mapping software are just tools available to make the review process easier.

There's no doubt that obtaining an overview of something as complex as a major within a degree can be very difficult - and hence an impressionistic sense that "we must talk about that somewhere" often stands in for certainty that we really do cover things with the requisite detail and emphasis.

DePiep: Periodic table (polyatomic)

One example of a dynamic system which functions extremely well would be the periodic table of the elements. Dmitri Mendelev originally lined up the elements (on little cards) according to their atomic weights as a kind of after-dinner parlour game. He observed that at a certain point he needed to start a new row in order to match up the same kinds of elements with one another: in his system there were six rows, but this has been subsequently enlarged to fit in hydrogen and helium.

The point is that it wasn't till some time afterwards that the reasons for this periodicity were discovered: the fact that it was the number of protons in each nucleus that dictated their place in the scheme. The atomic weight, the factor he was using, was a far cruder indicator. Nevertheless, the whole system - with certain modifications - worked, and enabled him to predict the existence of various new elements which were subsequently discovered in nature (or, in some cases, fabricated in the laboratory).

Ramon Llull: Tree and Wheel (1305)

I guess the other thing curriculum mapping reminds me of, though, is the Catalan polymath Ramon Llull's wheels (and trees) of science from his 1305 work the Ars Magna (or Great Art). Basically his idea was that if one could summarise all the attributes of God - which come down to Goodness, Greatness, Duration, Power, Wisdom, Will, Virtue, Truth, and Glory - into one wheel, which interlocked with other wheels of natural elements, planetary influences, and bodily humours, it should be possible to make a kind of machine for generating knowledge.

Any question (theoretically) could be coded onto the wheels and receive a satisfactory answer which must be demonstrably true, since these things were guaranteed to be so by the very nature of the First Cause.

I suppose it's apparent at once how much information theory and digital computers owe to Llull's pioneering work (not dissimilar, in its way, to that of Alan Turing: at any rate in the over-simplified form portrayed in The Imitation Game, the recent film about him).

The Imitation Game (2014)

I guess the main problem with Llull's system, from a modern point of view, is the arbitrariness of the terms he was using. How, for instance, does God's Glory differ from his Virtue? Llull could no doubt have explained the distinction with great cogency, basing it on the best models of theological commentary available to him, but the results might still be a bit unconvincing.

He himself felt no doubts, however. When he visited Tunis in 1314 and tried to explain to a crowd of Muslims that the logic of his system demanded that they all immediately renounce their beliefs and convert to Christianity, he was greeted with a volley of stones. Though rescued by a group of Genoese merchants, he died the next year, probably as a result (though he was in his 80s, so it may not have been).

His other model for generating truth from interlocking ideas is the Tree of Knowledge (L'arbre de ciència). This, too, suffers from the lack of an empirical basis for the words and concepts he regarded as primary and undeniable.

Curriculum Mapping (civil engineering) (University of Hawai'i at Manoa)

Now my own feeling about all such exercises in codification is that they tend to promote uniformity and lessen creativity and originality. It isn't that I think that either of these aspects should predominate in any course design: institutions must maintain some control over just what is being taught in its classrooms, and how that ties in with other classes in the same discipline. By the same token, though, teachers are individuals, and teach in their own ways - and have to teach differently according to the particular students they're faced with.

There's no reason per se why a system such as curriculum mapping should interfere with that necessary freedom a teacher must feel to temper their teaching style to particular complex circumstances. That is what we're hired to do, after all. But (as a colleague of mine has put it): "templates control pedagogy." Once you have a particular model, there's a tendency to see everything in terms of that set of predetermined categories.

Nor is it enough to ask teachers to list all the possible variations from the existing curriculum categories and try to revise them accordingly. The mere fact of having to list such categories puts the assumptions behind them further and further off the agenda. The categories become real. Departures from them have to be justified and explained. What began as mapping has become prescription.

In this particular case, the battle is already lost (or won: depending on how you look at it). The curriculum mapping exercise will go ahead, and we're all soon going to be spending a good deal of time debating just how the projected learning outcomes of our courses match up with the graduate profiles of our degrees. And it's hard to argue against that process - in the abstract, at any rate.

I do feel a niggling doubt when I think of Ramon Llull, however. The second law of thermodynamics tells us that disorder always increases. While there can be local exceptions to that rule (the entire evolution of life on earth, from less to more complex organisms, might be seen as one such exception), it's beyond doubt that chaos tends to increase, and that attempts to arrest it in its tracks can have strange consequences.

For myself, I would predict that the more regimented course content and course outcomes become, the more creative classroom practice will become. If one wished to draw an analogy with poetry (as I so often do), it's just as futile to privilege content over form as it is to prefer form over content. Neither can function without the other, and it's only the proportions and relationship between the two which is really worthy of debate.

Our accountability as teachers to the students we teach must be taken very seriously: this does entail looking carefully at what we cover and how. On the other hand, bored, unmotivated students learn little. Nor do they rejoice at the idea of being cogs in some giant wheel of information. The best way to convince students that you really have something of value to teach them is to invoke your own creativity by learning along with them.

For Llull, the universe was sewn up. Everything that needed to be known was already known - it was just a matter of explaining that clearly, in words of one syllable, to potential dissenters, and then the millennium could be proclaimed!

That's not how knowledge works, though. Ideas change. Models shift. What we teach in 2015 is very different from what we were teaching even a couple of decades ago. Who would ever have though of demanding "digital literacy" from students then? We have to leave some space to react to changes when it comes, and any new mapping systems we devise must start with that very firmly in mind.

Llull in North Africa (1314)