English Shope fan blog post

I post today an entry from the blog of Jai Clare, a British writer-blogger. See the original at http://www.jaiclare.com/blog --

It’s not often one reads a book that leaves you gobsmacked – for non-British readers that means shocked, stupefied, amazed. And by this book so I am. Gobsmacked. It isn’t like ‘normal’ books – it takes risks, it tries different things, without being alienating. This is not about clever meta-fictional techniques but stories through lyricism. If you like your fiction literal and accessible and down to earth this isn’t for you. But that means you’ll be missing out a piece of miraculous inventive imaginative and quite beautiful prose. Nina Shope’s collection of novellas under the umbrella title of Hangings won the Starcherone prize last year and is a worthy winner of any literary prize. The book left me reeling with excitement – at the audacity, the risk, the beautiful prose, the rhythms, the lack of playing by the rules of Creative Writing 101 – those rules that straitjacket many writer’s imaginations and pocket. Shope has taken serious risks here and Stacherone Books has the foresight to see that this is a writer of quality and Hangings is a book of long-lasting literature. I can’t do her book justice in this brief review. I can only reveal my enthusiasm and love of this book, so be aware there is far more to this book that I can summarise as ‘plot’ details.

The first novella called 'Hangings' concerns a daughter whose mother is dying of breast cancer who is haunted by a painting by Miro that depicts a giant spider. The narrative becomes littered with spider imagery, stories told about the mythic Aradne, weaving her way in and out of stories. The story of the two women and the girl’s burgeoning sexuality is told through riveting imagistic prose.

“Her mother, reading, is entirely unaware. She is an atheist. A philosopher. A classicist. She reads mythology for the symbolism. For the psychology. For the pure lyric beauty of form and idea. She does not understand that her daughter actually believes in women who transforms into beasts and spiders. That she dreams of mythical creatures. That she dreams of bodies transforming.”

The second 'In Urbem' is a marvellous, in the true sense of the word, recreation of ancient Rome, an alternative version, taking up ideas and even characters from the differing periods of that city’s history and again through haunting prose takes a part that city’s creation built upon the bones of women and slaves. (the city is continually under construction) In one section the imagery is particularly outstanding: Verginia has been auctioned as a slave and all of the parts of her body have been bidden upon. Her father comes to rescue her but can only afford parts of her:

‘he is raising a knife above her breast and baring his teeth as if to defend her until she feels the knife inside her and her father above her trying to wipe her clean of marks and measures and numbers and names. And the crowd surrounding her – the bidders reaching desperately for the pieces they have bought.’

The novella is reminiscent of Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Angela Carter’s the Infernal Desire Machine of Dr Hoffman, but in its use of imagery and so on is even more beautiful.

The last novella, 'Hagiographies', was for me the least successful but still stunning. Instead of a plot this story moves forward through juxtaposing time and imagery. It concerns a pixie-haired girl who is friends with a black-eyes girl and a series of letters sent /unsent between them, a tale of obsession and jealousy especially when a boy from out of state enters their friendship. It’s a collection that pumps life into the novel form with its imagination and audacity. Not here will you find timidity, carefully following well-trodden routes. Instead you will find storytelling refreshed and exciting. Something to challenge you. As for me I was left reading this book thrilled more than any anti-climatic fast-paced commercial thriller could ever do. This is only a brief review. Unfortunately I haven’t time to write a full paper to do justice to the startling way Shope writes and the intricate complex yet very subtle way she weaves stories through words. I can only urge you to read this book for yourself. But I warn you if you’re looking for an easy read, work much like that you have perhaps read before, I can only say you’re in for a shock. This happens to be one of the best books I have read in years and it is so gratifying to know there are people out there writing original glorious prose AND getting it published. Thank god for Starcherone Books.

The coolness of PP/FF (1)

For a while, I thought that Kent Johnson was Geoffrey Gatza, or rather that Geoffrey Gatza was Kent Johnson. I first heard about Kent Johnson through Geoffrey Gatza's online mag BlazeVox. Kent had the amazing poem/text there, "Lyric Poetry After Auschwitz (or, 'Get the hood back on'.)" Kent was the first person I saw in print really express the anger I was feeling at our disgraceful national cruelty and stupidity in blundering into becoming worldwide torturers. The kids who speak in Kent's poem are the same dumbheads we see in George Saunders stories in "Pastoralia" and elsewhere. But here they've discovered absolute power and the intoxicating power of being able to completely debase someone who doesn't matter, having been cast as inhuman.

Kent Johnson was the guy who had first come on the scene (I now dimly remembered) as the revealed huckster behind the poems of the supposed Hiroshima survivor, Araki Yasusada. Yasusada's poems had appeared all over the place (see the Marjorie Perloff article here detailing the Johnson-Yasusada saga) and when the hoax was revealed, there was even an article in PMLA. For those of you who have never seen it, PMLA is as establishment as it gets, the journal of the principle literary academic professional organization. The article about Kent in a place where you usually see articles about Henry James or Olaudah Equiano. Johnson at the same time remains a community college professor in Illinois. He seems at once notorious and unknown or, to use Gertrude Stein's terms, "genius" and "outlaw" at the same time. He gets ever more notorious with books like Epigramitis, his newest from Gatza's press, BlazeVox, which features about 100 poems about contemporary poets, alternately nasty, insightful, scandal-mongering, and lyrical.

Anyway, Kent Johnson, whom I had never met, had pretended to be someone else, and just as Yasusada could not be contacted except through Johnson, so too I had only had access to Johnson through Gatza -- so I can be forgiven for thinking them one and the same. Ethan Paquin thought the same thing for a while-- you can ask him.

I'm trying to invite Kent Johnson to Buffalo this Fall, to get some things straight. Anyway, both he and Geoffrey Gatza are in our new anthology, PP/FF, as are Ethan Paquin and I and Nina Shope and Lydia Davis and Elizabeth Robinson and Gary Lutz and Dan Nester and Brian Evenson and Jessica Treat and Harold Jaffe and Raymond Federman and many many more.

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