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Service Area at the Rumpus

Published May 6, 2016 by Matthew Kirkpatrick

My short story, “Service Area,” at the Rumpus (with illustrations!)

Tom was on glory hole duty and Ericka was doing the dog shit, so when Crystal went on break, she went out back by herself and lay in the lettuce bags with one of the pamphlets from the Info Kiosk, a pamphlet for the Akron Zoo, a place with things like tigers and fruit bats and penguins that were sort of like dogs and the deer they sometimes saw, but not like dogs and deer at all. Soon her shift would be over and she’d use the time allotted for art-making to work on her sock puppets, and then she’d meet up with Tom and Ericka for dinner and hear all about their day, and if she was lucky, after Ericka had fallen asleep, she and Tom would take a long walk around the perimeter fence and make out behind the dumpsters.

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Victorine by Maude Hutchins

Published August 11, 2015 by Matthew Kirkpatrick

Victorine_1024x1024I picked up Victorine by Maude Hutchins after seeing her name on a list of nouveau roman writers on Wikipedia (a page I glanced at when thinking about Fra Keeler, below, but also looking for something new to read). I’d never heard of Maude Hutchins, so did some googling, surprised to find there’s not a ton of info out there. In what I did find on Hutchins, it’s often repeated that she’s “considered one of the foremost practitioners of nouveau roman in the English language,” a quote attributed (again, by Wikipedia) to Anais Nin in The Novel of the Future. I’d like to read the quote in context, and maybe should read more by Hutchins–Victorine didn’t feel particularly like a nouveau roman, at least not in the sense that I understand it (as described in For a New Novel). Victorine definitely doesn’t conform to the conventions of the realist novel–it’s episodic and more or less plotless–so in that sense, it’s certainly experimental. Not to get too hung up on labels, but became curious about how that bit about Hutchins became so pervasive.

 
Anyway, the NYRB describes the book in its product description for their edition as “a sly, shocking, one-of-a-kind novel that explores sex and society with wayward and unabashedly weird inspiration, a drive-by snapshot of the great abject American family in its suburban haunts by a literary maverick…” Victorine’s an interesting read, full of lively lyricism and great, almost kitschy humor. I feel like my interest started to fizzle about half-way through, but that’s probably me. I was surprised how much the novel–published in 1959–still pushes in terms of taboos around sexuality (especially around childhood sexuality), and the brother/sister relationship reminded me of Paul and Elisabeth in The Holy Terrors a little bit. Maybe I’ll have more to say on this at some point. I couldn’t find any criticism on Hutchins after a cursory search, but Victorine is certainly fascinating enough to make me want to read another novel by Hutchins.

Victorine at Powell’s

Victorine at Amazon

 

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What madness is this – Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi’s Fra Keeler

Published August 3, 2015 by Matthew Kirkpatrick

I just read Fra Keeler by Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi, a short novel I’m planning on teaching in my upper division Contemporary Forms class this fall, a lit class for creative writers that investigates notions of “the contemporary.” I’m still figuring out the thrust of the class, though I know we’ll be using Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge as a way into the novels and poetry collections we’ll be reading throughout the semester.

I’m not alone in comparing Oloomi to Robbe-Grillet, but I’m struck by how (as in Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy) Oloomi leaves so much out of the novel–motivation, for example, and back story, and how what’s absent doesn’t prevent the narrator’s manic, paranoid investigation into the death of Fra Keeler to not only move forward, but to spiral and plummet. Despite what’s missing, the novel (at around 120 pages) still feels at once immediate and energetic while at the same time heavy and fraught. Fra Keeler is a detective novel where it seems that we only know half of the story, that what we’re left with–the narrator’s obsessive investigation (in the strangest sense of the word)–is all the narrator’s left with, too.

Here’s a great passage:

“My mind was as vast and infinite as the sky above, as though the sky had doubled itself inside my head. We are what we see, surely, I thought, that must be the case. Because now that I see the sky, I thought, my mind is another sky alongside it.” (pg. 79)

So much of the novel is concerned with what the narrator perceives, what he sees, and how he connects (or doesn’t connect those things) and the madness of signs. That’s probably where we’ll start our discussion this fall. A great, unexpected novel.

Here are a few more in-depth reviews of Fra Keeler:

LA Times

Bookslut

The Millions

Buy Fra Keeler at the publisher’s website.

Buy it at Powell’s.

Buy it at Amazon.

 

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Unconventional Creative Writing: Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit

Published August 2, 2015 by Matthew Kirkpatrick

In thinking about new approaches to teaching creative writing, approaches that don’t rely so much on the idea of “craft” (more on this in another post) as they do on exploration, close reading, and method (or practice), I thought I’d take a look at Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit. Known as conceptual art, this collection of “event scores,” instructions for art, or events, rather than the art itself, might seem like a ridiculous thing to use in a creative writing class, but I think it offers a few different possibilities.

The most obvious way to use this book is as an introduction to conceptualism (and Fluxus). An exercise in imitation might ask students to imitate the style, method, and form of the event scores in the book by creating similar impossible (or improbable) artworks by describing them. Pretty straightforward, but what’s the goal of such an experiment? As an experiment in form and creativity, the experiment asks students to imagine something they couldn’t or wouldn’t normally do. For example, in “HIDE-AND-SEEK PIECE” Ono asks readers to “Hide until everybody goes home./Hide until everybody forgets about you./Hide until everybody dies.” Not something anybody is likely to actually do, but by imagining situations, or events, students are pushed away from the usual way of thinking about poetry and fiction. At least that’s the idea.

A second thought is to use these as prompts–what would a story generated by “HIDE-AND-SEEK PIECE” look like? Taken a step further, could students devise scores for experiments they might actually perform, and then write about (or not). Maybe these scores would start to look like CAConrad’s somatic experiments. I’m thinking about the more “doable” pieces in Grapefruit. For example, using “PAINTING TO EXIST ONLY WHEN IT’S COPIED OR PHOTOGRAPHED” (“Let People copy or photograph your/paintings./Destroy the originals.”) students might exchange detailed descriptions of locations and/or people and then copy each other’s work, letting the original serve as inspiration for a distorted, degraded, or enhanced “copy” of another piece of writing. What would a “copy” of a photograph in writing look like? While not a lot of the experiments in Grapefruit lend themselves to this sort of thing, plenty do. I’m thinking about using a combination of these experiments in my class this fall.

Buy Grapefruit at Amazon

Buy Grapefruit at Powell’s

Buy Acorn (Ono’s Sequel to Grapefruit) at Amazon

Buy Acorn at Powell’s

 

Further Investigation:
The Fluxus Performance Workbook

A 2009 performance of George Brecht’s “Event Score” (1966) 

CAConrad’s ECODEVIANCE: (Soma)tics for the Future Wilderness

Yoko Ono – Eyeblink (1966) – via UbuWeb

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Eero Saarinen’s General Motors Technical Center

Published July 31, 2015 by Matthew Kirkpatrick

Eero Saarinen’s General Motors Technical Center00088v

Photographs by Balthazar Korab via the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Online Catalog. Check it out here, including more photos of the GM Technical Center and Saarinen’s other projects. Here’s the wikipedia page and a short article linking Saarinen to the rise of the corporate campus.

Credit: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Balthazar Korab Archive at the Library of Congress LC-KRB00- 36, LC-KRB00- 47, LC-KRB00- 58, LC-KRB00- 65, LC-KRB00- 89, LC-KRB00- 72, LC-KRB00- 97, LC-KRB00- 101, LC-KRB00- 104, LC-KRB00- 117, LC-KRB00- 114, LC-KRB00- 16

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Some Upcoming Readings and Talks

Published October 26, 2014 by Matthew Kirkpatrick

I’ll be speaking at Wayne State University as part of Barrett Watten’s Poetics Series on December 2, 2014, and reading on December 4, 2014 in Salt Lake City as part of FC2’s 40th Anniversary reading. Details here.

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