It's Cold, Battling AI, Standalone Novels & Ideas from Canada, Scots Philosophy!

 Yesterday, I did not leave the apartment - the time was not spent writing or reading, but mostly in sleeping. I felt like a bum.

Nothing has been written today. I managed one submission. But I did get to the dentist with my Humana card, and to the grocery twice (Aldi's in the morning and Payless in the afternoon). CC came by in the evening, gathered some of her stuff, and left. 

The big thing was the delivery of my new computer. It did not happen. I missed it when it was delivered. I could not get into the FedEx site to fix the incomplete address. I could not penetrate their AI at the other end of their telephone number. I had had similar problems with Best Buys the night before - especially the inability to get past their AI customer service to a human being. I was on my way to Best Buys to cancel the whole deal when I got a call from FedEx. The poor woman from India who was on the other end got a good dose of my spleen. The computer is supposed to come to on Friday. Sure.

A piece I had set aside seems appropriate here: When We Devalue Art (Books!) We Devalue the Future.

In that same week a piece for The Baffler by Noah McCormack called “We Used to Read Things in This Country” contained a passage that stopped me in my tracks: “It is AI that has given the American ruling class the final impetus to more or less abolish education. As primary and secondary schools prepare to push AI on students, higher-education funding is basically being eliminated.”

Maybe this is another form of catastrophizing. People are still buying books, young and older readers alike. Certainly there are some high schools that are still assigning and engaging with The Great Gatsby in full. But with the rise of Big Tech and AI I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that our values as a society appear to be changing for the worse.

 I will do no more business with Best Buys or FedEx. Ted Gioia may be right about cultural stagnation, and the worsening of the internet. There needs to be an off-ramp from AI. Obviously, it cannot do anything for which it is not programmed, and from my experience there is not much for which they are programmed. If you put up with this intolerable level of service, then you are selling yourself into slavery.

 This evening I baked a little - the rooms are too chilly. I worked on this post.

 I have felt some of the feelings expressed in Maria Cichosz's For Better or Worse: On the Failure of the Stand-Alone Excerpt (Craft). I tried doing this trick once, and it was painfully hard.

When you turn part of a novel into an excerpt, what you’re really doing is asking it to function like a short story, a form that could not be more different. Deborah Treisman, fiction editor of The New Yorker, describes the raw surgical process of transforming one into the other: “Sometimes a chapter stands alone as a story; more often, some cutting and splicing and piecing together of different elements from a novel is required.” These are not cosmetic changes, but deep structural shifts. “Sometimes this requires the author to write additional lines or passages; sometimes plot points are adjusted slightly; sometimes a fifty-page section of a novel is pared down to twenty-five, or passages that are a hundred pages apart in the book are combined. Our goal is to publish something that is a satisfying story in its own right—not to present a writing sample from a forthcoming novel.”

 No kidding.

She also opened new questions for me - while reassuring me that my lack of talent for the short story is shared by others.

 My aversion to excerpting is not, as I’ve learned through trying, a problem of love—or rather, not only love. It’s a question of form and process, how one informs the other, and the way these ultimately amount to a kind of love. An appreciation of the affordances of long-form fiction and the structural impossibility of ever fully translating these into short-form writing, because the two modes demand very different relationships with the writer. All creative writing requires love—of language, of form, of subject—but the novel alone requires hard-core commitment.

You meet many ideas, but how many of them do you fall in love with? How many worlds would you consent to inhabit day in and day out for months, possibly years, over the course of false starts and failed drafts, thousands of hours of work and exponentially as many words, for better or worse? The novel is an act of devotion. To write a novel, you must love a story enough to want to spend a significant chunk of your life with it. The novel is not just a finished piece of work—like any extended relationship, it is a process of living that unfolds through time.

***

This is why novels take so much time. In craft, we are used to anatomizing narratives into discrete considerations of character, dialogue, setting, and plot, but it is much harder to articulate how these all grow from and depend upon a hidden understructure formed by the writer’s consent to live with a fictional world through time. In Flick’s words, novels necessitate “a different kind of big-world thinking that connects characters to plot to dialogue to setting.” This imaginative labor begins long before the actual writing starts and fills days that are, in terms of word count, empty, but in terms of experiencing a story, incredibly full: the ordinary bus ride that becomes a dream space, the shift in late afternoon light that opens a window onto summer light in a fictional room. These moments are as much a part of the writing process as drafting or editing, yet are often given short shrift because they are difficult to quantify and proscribe. There is no way to reliably produce them beyond giving yourself to a story, making the labor of imagining the most intimate and demanding of writerly tasks.

 Which goes to remind how much I have not done with my own writing this week. If I could write like I sleep, then yesterday would not seem such a disaster.

Gods, Dogs, and the Dark Magic of Toronto Novelist André Alexis (The Walrus) might offer a different way of approaching the novel.

And so began one of the most unusual experiments in Canadian literature. Between 2009 and 2021, Alexis wrote five interlinked novels in five different genres, all of which dealt with philosophical questions of order and chaos. The books were not a series but a network, an arrangement of four points with a fifth in the centre: a quincunx. It was a structure he borrowed from the seventeenth-century polymath Thomas Browne, who believed the Garden of Eden had been laid out according to this same mystical design. By the time the last instalment of The Quincunx Cycle was published in 2021, Alexis would be one of the best selling fiction writers in Canada, having won the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Windham-Campbell Prize, two Rogers Writers’ Trust prizes, and the top spot on Canada Reads 2017. It was an extraordinary run. 

The review expands this description a bit, a little history of what became of this project, and a heads-up that there is a reissued edition that Americans might be able to get their hands on.

Here’s Alexis, a writer who, after a major career setback, constructs an elaborate schema for a cycle of novels about the relationship between order and chaos in which the characters are constantly frustrated in their desire to make sense of the world by the capricious will of cosmic forces. The second of these books ends up becoming a massive success, but it’s the least characteristic of the cycle, and when he finally publishes the final novel—the centrepiece of the whole project—it’s a bit of a flop. If André Alexis appeared as a character in an André Alexis novel, this is exactly how his career would go.

Earlier this fall, Coach House Books released a new edition of Fifteen Dogs to mark its tenth anniversary. It includes an expanded text, a foreword by the American poet Eileen Myles, and an essay by Alexis himself on the origins of the novel. Alexis says his intention had originally been to edit and rewrite sections of the whole series and publish it as a single volume, but when he set about the task, he found it was beyond him. “It felt,” he says, “like I was looking at the work of another human being.”

This far too much for me to even try at my age, but it is tempting. Perhaps not so much the theme of chaos and order (although what else is life but the yin-yang of chaos and order), but the cycle of interrelated novels. Faulkner did this a little bit - Quentin Compson appears in both The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom!. I am thinking of Rashomon spread over different novels. A stray thought just streaked through my brain - something that Mishima did, tried to do, or maybe a misunderstanding on my part.

I submitted "Saved By The Georgia Peach" to Factor Four Magazine. My attempt at flash fiction. Yes, I know what I just wrote about not being simpatico with the short story. This magazine also has a page describing the editorial process, Story Selection Process, that I suggest you check out.

 Reviewing Netflix's "Death by Lightning" series | Public History Podcast - is long and more interesting than I expected it to be, and might get me to sign up for Netflix. Who would think James Garfield would be so interesting. Well, I do think Garfield's death was more injurious to the Republic than is generally credited.

 I ran across The Institute for the Study of Scottish Philosophy, which seem inconsequential, but Scottish philosophy is an important school of thought. Scottish philosophy influenced the founding of America and is the source for capitalism (Adam Smith was a Scottish philosopher). 

I actually read H.V. Chao's Raymond Chandler (Adroit Journal) a week or more ago,but made no mention of it until now. This delay is not to my credit. It will stick in your mind, and your heart, too. Just one paragraph for you:

This is something that did happen to me: on December 10, 2014, I went to Home Depot with my wife. I guess this is a western, in that my wife is a civilizing influence. When I was a boy I read about a boy and a girl who ran away to a museum. I thought I’d do them one better by running away to a furniture store. Home Depot is kind of like that: a gallery of pretend. There’s a lamp for every kind of lifestyle, more lamps than lives you can ever live, even if you grew up lucky enough to have parents who said you could be anything. The model kitchens make me want to pick a mock domestic spat over some issue my wife and I have yet to face. Not money, we already fight about that. A baby, maybe? She will slam the fridge and cross her arms, and I will flick the tap on and off with an idiot grin, delighted by the lack of water. Through the paneless window we can spy on neighbors waffling over a new dishwasher. But not today. Today we have come shopping for a new front door, one that fits flush and doesn’t let in a draft. A front door is like the face you show the world, she says. In the next department down, doors hang hinged along the aisle like pages in a giant book. One door closes and another opens. Flip, flip, flip. They are running some promotion. Plastered on each door is a life-size Elvis Presley as a cowboy, pistol drawn. The poster is tinged pastel, with day-glo stars shooting out. I feel dizzy; I have to sit down. My wife asks, “What’s the matter?” but I can’t explain. What should I say? That we’re lucky? That I feel guilty about our luck? That I’m dumb about the problems of the world and don’t know which is worse: that I think we’re safe or that we’re really not, or that no matter how unsafe we are, there will always be someone worse off? I want to hold her and say, in spite of all our problems we have our whole lives ahead of us, but instead I hold my head in my hands. Flip, flip, flip. It’s too ridiculous; it’s just Elvis. It never happens to anyone you know, until someone you know can’t believe it happened to you. Endless choices. Endless doors. And behind every door, a man with a gun in his hand. 

 And I still have not written about Saturday's trip!

But I did get another rejection:

Thank you again for the submission of your short story "Going For The Kid" to Haven Spec Magazine. Unfortunately, we have decided to pass on this one, but we wish you the best of luck on your writing and publishing endeavors.

Sincerely,
Leon Perniciaro, Editor
Haven Spec Magazine  

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John Updike's The Coup

 I read Updike's The Coup while in prison. Not that I did not know of Updike. I had seen him speak at Clowes Hall, I owned a copy of Pigeon Feathers, I knew about Rabbit Angstrom - I failed to read him because I gave up on fiction writing before I started law school.

So came to Updike to fill a hole in my education. The prison leisure library had several of Updike's novels, so I read The Coup. My notes are still in a box - somewhere, I hope. My recollection is that I liked the novel. The Rabbit Novels had perplexed me, and not in a good way. I do not recall being annoyed by The Coup.

However, I could not understand why Updike had the reputation that he had. Listening to Ninety-Nine Novels: The Coup by John Updike, the Updike scholar explained why he should be considered a Great American Novelist - not for any one of his novels (none hitting the mark as great in and of itself) but for the whole of his works. Which, to me, makes Updike not the American Dickens but the American Balzac. 

The video made me think I was not wrong to see value in The Coup (and The Terrorist). Do give the video a listen.

Some items turned up while looking for links to add to this post:

No Way: John Updike’s latest novel reveals his tin ear for critical times by Christopher Hitchens (The Atlantic) - ouch.

The Coup review (Russell A. Hunt, 1979)

In spite of that, there are lots of readers who get from Updike the same bracing whiff of irony, like the sparkling air when it's twenty below the morning after a blizzard, that they get from Jane Austen or George Meredith. It's for such readers that I report that The Coup is not what they had in mind, at all. There's irony, but it's no longer the irony of the poet laureate of Westchester: mostly it's a direct political irony of a kind quite unlike the scalpel we're used to in Updike's hands. Here it's a double-bladed axe. One side sinks crunchingly into the pretensions of a North American society that knows what's best for all the peoples of the world: WonderBras and Spam and Big Macs and Buicks. The other blade, with less crunch but possibly even more finality, disembowels the fallacies of political fanaticism (in this case, it's a Marxist / Moslem variety, but the specific subspecies is not, one suspects, a crucial issue for Updike.)

sch 11/14 

Then Came Molloy 5-10-2015

 [ I am back working through my prison journal. It is out of order… Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. The date in the title is the date it was written. I hope this is not confusing. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars. sch 10/25/2025]

Definitely on lockdown today. Whatever happened last night in 5741 had us all locked down in our units. I missed the 5-minute move for lunch. Not that lunch cannot be missed. I did decide something needed done with this package of duplex cookies I meant for chapel. I will need to get another package tomorrow for next Sunday. Oh, well.

 So, I go from Kate Chopin to Samuel Beckett. I read Waiting for Godot when I was in high school - my Aunt Mary Ellen Finholtsent us our cousin Paul's copy he used at the Cheshire Academy. I was the only one in the family to read the play. Beckett's novel Molloy was no stranger than his play.

I can enjoy Beckett, while knowing I can never write about what he writes about. He seems a bit cranky about life's absurdity. I was seriously put out about life's absurdities. Thinking about the eventual heat death of the universe gave me my first anxiety attack. I was maybe 34. Another reason I did not try my hand at writing. Later, I got even angrier when I decided to my life and efforts seriously. That kind of thinking got me into prison. So why'd Beckett keep writing? Because if you're a writer interested in life, that is what you do.

Molloy (Grove Press) was written in French by Beckett in French, then translated into English by Patrick Bowles and Beckett; it screams out avant-garde absurdism. The second paragraph of the first section runs on for 116 pages. Grammarians aside, it works because the sentences run short, pungent. You accept the narrator - Molloy -s a bit mad. Maybe more than a bit. Obviously, Molloy goes on a bit, but he doesn't go on in a Henry James kind of way. 

Part II's paragraphs do not achieve the Everest-like heights as the one in Part I. We also have a different narrator:

That we thought of ourselves as members of a vast organizaiton was doubtless also due to the all human feeling that trouble shared, or is it sorrow, is trouble something, I forget the word. But to me at least, who knew how to listen to the falsetto of reason, it was obvious that we were perhaps alone in doing what we did. Yes, in my moments of lucidity I thought it possible. And, to keep nothing from you, this lucidity was so acute at times that I cam even to doubt the existence of Gaber himself. And if I had not hastily sunk back into my darkness I might have gone to the extreme of conjuring away the chief too and regarding myself as solely responsibile for my wretched at six pungs ten a week plus bonuses and expenses. And having made away with Graber and the chief (one Youdi), could I have denied myself the pleasure of  - you know. But I was not made for the great light that devours, a dim lamp was all I had been given, and patience without end, to shine it on the empty shadows. I was a olid in the midst of other solids.

What is the novel about? An object lesson in miscommunication - or non-communication. What happens? Not much. 

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[ Some items turned up while seeking out the links I put in my original text:

 Molloy by Samuel Beckett – part one (1950) (Books & Boots, 2020) - very long, long enough that I might go back later to see just how superficial was my understanding 10 years ago.

Two Fools, Among Others (The Rambling, 2023) 

I see my reading life as pre-Molloy and post-Molloy. The book is an unforgiving, bleak, and bewildering experience, with every variable crying out for attention: the plot, the narration, the philosophy, the tone, the language. Beckett demands an attentive reader. And I was once such a reader. Twenty-year-old me had an incessant need to consume great books, partly driven by a desire to assuage imposter syndrome, partly just to prove that I could. That drive turned into a greedy intellectual curiosity. I’d read three books a week, sometimes more, grappling with meanings and interpretations, taking notes in a never-ending supply of cheap notebooks.

I recently re-read Molloy. And something has become clear: I am stupid. Or I am more stupid, or stupider, than my younger self. The twenty-year-old fool who read Molloy in a day, captivated and alarmed, has regressed into a thirty-three-year-old fool who took a week, checking his phone every few minutes, binge-watching The Crown, even socialising on occasion. I often put the book down, not in awe but anguish, struggling to follow the plot, struggling with tone.

***

Maybe the problem isn’t smartphones or age. Maybe the problem is that particular book. Maybe Molloy is the problem. The plot, the second time around, failed to capture my attention. Molloy is an epic quest in which no goal is stated, no progress is made, and no one cares either way. The narrator from the second half is likely the narrator from the first half, only at an earlier and more lucid stage of his existence. The clues are abstracted but evident: the narrator(s) suffer the same ailments, employ a similar idiom, use profound poesy to discuss bicycles, reference paternity, fight dirty. Some critics deny this view, suggesting that Beckett would not engage with a method as simplistic as non-linear narrative.

 

***

It is the language that beguiles, even the second time and, I presume, the third. Beckett uses all sorts of improprieties: dangling sentences, constant qualifications, grammatical indecencies, interjections disrupting discourse, re-corrective sentences, repetitions, repetitions, breaks in syntax, multi-lingual interventions, neologisms upon neologisms. God knows how it works. But it works. To take a handful of examples, because we can, because we should: “Yes, the confusion of my ideas on the subject of death was such that I sometimes wondered, believe me or not, if it wasn’t a state of being even worse than life. So I found it natural not to rush into it.” Or perhaps: “My life, my life, now I speak of it as of something over, now as a joke which still goes on.” Or maybe: “The fact is, it seems, that the most you can hope for is to be a little less, in the end, the creature you were at the beginning, and at the middle.”

Beckett’s words are dark and desolate, cruel and cutting. But, perhaps most of all, Beckett’s words are funny. Not necessarily laugh-out-loud-funny. Not slap-the-knee-funny. Beckett is laugh-in-the-library-and-hope-no-one-notices-funny. We laugh at Beckett as a defence mechanism, choosing joy in despair because the alternative is solely despair. So we laugh when the narrator ends up in a ditch, soils his trousers, compares himself less than favorably to a pig. And we laugh when the narrator kills a person, maybe two people. We laugh because it simply does not matter. Nothing really matters, at all. And that’s funny, I think.

Brian Evenson on Samuel Beckett’s Molloy  (Electric Literature, 2014)

   sch 10/25/2025] 

The Novel As The Walking Dead?

 I have not had a good day today - not feeling quite well, tired out, achy, having not stirred from the apartment (so far).  I point all this out as a preface to my saying I am not sure that I understand David Vichnar's Necromodernist Architectures in Contemporary Writing (3:AM Magazine).

The best description of necromodernist is:

 Common to both assessments of Armand’s writing — to reverse a well-known Lyotard maxim regarding postmodernism — is a notion of a type of modernism in its posthumous state, a necromodernist condition in which writing persists in the ruins of literature’s once-modern ambitions. Necromodernism neither celebrates the new nor nostalgically mourns the old, inhabiting instead a space where cultural memory, media saturation, and infrastructural collapse converge into textual practice. It is neither an elegy for modernism nor a prophecy of what comes next, but rather a practice of endurance.

 Okay, I get that much. I read on, waiting for where novels should go. Instead, there is more explanation. Wherein I have read only one novel.

 1. Necromodernism continues some of the radical tendencies in late-postmodernist writing produced in the wake of the many 1960s proclamations of the “death of the novel,” like Nathalie Sarraute’s “age of suspicion,” Alain Robbe-Grillet’s nouveau roman, John Barth’s “Literature of Exhaustion”, and Ronald Sukenick’s The Death of the Novel and Other Stories. Thus, a vast genealogy spanning the last three decades of the 20th century and reaching across languages and continents — from Arno Schmidt’s Bottom’s Dream (1970; trans. 2016), Peter Weiss’ The Aesthetics of Resistance (1975; trans. 2005), Carlos Fuentes’ Terra Nostra (1975; trans. 1976) to Julián Ríos’ Larva: A Midsummer Night’s Babel (1983; trans. 1991) and Roberto Bolaño’s Savage Detectives (1998; trans. 2007) and 2666 (2004; trans. 2008) — includes mega-novels that, despite their ruinous form, still strive for the condition of architecture. They rehearse the untranslatability of literature into linear narrative, whether through polyphonic glossolalia, textual overgrowth, or multilingual play and semantic entropy. Conversely, a genealogy of the first three decades of 21st-century English-language necromodernist mega-novels — starting with David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1997) and Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000), and including tomes like Lynne Tillman’s American Comedy (2006), Joshua Cohen’s Witz (2010), Alan Moore’s Jerusalem (2016), and John Trefry’s Massive (2024) — comprises works that refuse to simplify, streamline, or submit to the attention economies of the present.

These tomes do not merely expand the novel — they enact a praxis that is simultaneously necromantic and architectural, their writing constructing ruins-in-process, vast labyrinths of language that resist closure, and in so doing marking a refusal of literature’s “function” as communicative instrument. They engage in literature as an entropic machine, a necropolis of signifiers, a literature that survives as infrastructure survives — broken, provisional, haunted — where meaning is no longer constructed but scavenged from debris.

Yep, there is Infinite Jest, but I do know of Roberto Bolaño’s Savage Detectives and 2666. 

I may have learned more about Infinite Jest from this essay than in all other works I have read. It does align with my reading.

2. Two necromodernist masterpieces as unlike each other as Wallace’s Infinite Jest and Armand’s The Combinations (2016) are both centred on the tragic violent deaths and spectral afterlives of their respective patriarchal protagonists, James Orin Incandenza (JOI) and “The Prof” Tomáš Hájek. JOI’s death can be read both as an homage and a move beyond (and against) high modernism. While in life this experimental, encyclopaedic “auteur” stages the Joycean father-artist in American late-century form, JOI’s grotesque, self-annihilating, head-centred suicide with domestic technology (the microwave oven) allegorises the exhaustion of the high-modernist dream of the autonomous masterpiece. His ugly legacy for posterity — the lethal master-film “the Entertainment” — then folds Shakespeare/ Joyce/ Wallace into one lineage of “total” artworks and father-ghosts. Infinite Jest inherits modernism’s ambition while overturning its faith in aesthetic autonomy, relocating literary value from mastery to relationship, contingency, and care.

***

Their further parallels then extend from these two central structuring absences. Each book revives the cathedral-scale project of totality, yet frames it as a haunted object: cf. Wallace’s shattered-chronology endnotes and Armand’s combinatorial grids (chess/“octaves”/files), where the big forms are literally raised only to be shown as ruins. Both texts obsess with archives and notational apparatus and perform necromancy at the level of materials: Infinte Jest’s endnotes, filmography, and dossiers stand in parallel to The Combinations’ state files, library stacks, and sealed papers. Both novels turn paratext into plot, making the dead paperwork speak while exposing its epistemic limits. Finally, both portray their own striving towards form as a type of literary addiction and compulsion: AA mantras, rituals, and relapse cycles in Wallace rhyme with Armand’s iterative “investigations” and list-logics. In both, repetition becomes an aesthetic of haunting—characters and texts reenact what they cannot resolve.

There is the point that I think annoyed me most with DFW - the lack of resolution. I think my mind has no great trouble allowing for an open ending. I read Blood Meridian as not having a neat ending that answers all question; it may raise even more. No Country for Old Men lacks an ending explaining and resolving the plot. But Infinite Jest just ends, its irresolution does not seem so much as commentary as much as the writer running out of words.

Expanding its thesis further, discussing novels of which I am wholly ignorant:

Whilst quite diverse and very much in leagues of their own, all these writers resurrect high-modernist procedures (streamed interiority, montage/collage, documentary apparatus, polyphony) and put those “dead” forms to work inside today’s mediascape, often with literal ghosts, archives, or revenant voices. What unites their necromodernist impulses is not style or ideology but a shared condition: writing in a time when literature is no longer central even to itself and finding in that marginality a strange freedom. What links these works is their commitment to excess as writerly praxis. Narrative is not abandoned but drowned in a surfeit of commentary, digression, and linguistic interference.

Excuse me, but this freedom seems to me to be the freedom of suicide. Yes, we are even more immersed in information overload. This overload has brought us the Trump Presidency. But we find ways to survive the howling onslaught of words, ideas, and plain noise. Shouldn't literature take on how we live now?

 But where the water starts getting deep for me is in these paragraphs:

5. In each case, the “text” becomes the scene of writing itself rather than its product. Consequently, each novel stages a continuous process, instead of parading as a finished commodity. What this praxis effects is a shift from representation to performativity: Massive describes until description collapses under its own density; The Combinations shuffles until the act of combination becomes more significant than the result; Larva and Bottom’s Dream demand that reading become a physical ordeal, an enactment of linguistic impossibility. In Makin’s triptych, the seriality of text undermines closure, insisting that dwelling in the language itself is the only possible “plot.”

This is not Joyce’s encyclopaedism re-performed, but the novel conceived of as archive of the already-decayed. Schmidt’s monstrous page-columns, Ríos’s multilingual saturation, Armand’s vertiginous palimpsests, Makin’s seemingly endless serial accumulations — all of these deploy excess as a critical resistance to the contemporary literary economy of brevity, clarity, and digestibility. Trefry, too, treats description as an endless surface that resists plot’s reduction to skeleton, demanding instead that the reader dwell in stratigraphy.

These books are, in a sense, anti-cultural products: they demand time, patience, and acceptance of incompletion. In doing so, they enact a politics — not of slogans or themes, but of form itself. In persisting as unreadable, they insist on the possibility of thought beyond optimisation. A Tomb in H-Section is exemplary here: it does not seek to be “about” anything in the reductive sense; it is, instead, an experience of navigating the wreckage of narrative in the 21st century. And in that experience, it points to what literature, however marginalised, can still do: not to revive the modernist project, but to haunt the present with its afterlife.

Critically, these texts should not be read genealogically — as descendants of Joyce or Pynchon, for example — but synchronically, as constellations of textual praxis that opposes late-capitalist aestheticised escapism. Each in its own way insists on opacity, overproduction, and unreadability as critical tactics. Against the neoliberal demand for transparency and communicability, these works perform a counter-economy of the unreadable as political strategy. Necromodernism here is a shared condition: literature composed of ruins, spectral intertexts, archival debris, linguistic overproduction, and the refusal of a future teleology. Thus, what is common to Schmidt, Ríos, Wallace, Makin, Trefry, Armand et al. is not merely scale or difficulty but a shared commitment to the unreadable as praxis. Their novels are not failed communication but deliberately anti-communicative constructions. They force us to confront language as architecture, ruin, and mass; they displace the novel from a linear temporality to a necromodernist simultaneity. In this constellation, the novel survives not as a living organism but as a machine-for-the-undead.

 Let set out my reactions, so far.

1. Performativity I will accept as accurate. It seems to me to be the conclusion of an idea I came to when reading in prison. The novel is a form whose content is filched from other genres. Before the Twentieth Century, it was the history, the romance, the memoir provided models upon which novels were based. Film became the genre copied (or rebelled against) in the Twentieth Century. The novel borrowing from film become performances in themselves does not seem so strange. It could also be likened to abstract art and various forms of jazz, where the technique becomes the art. This has not been productive for art or jazz; I cannot see it being productive for literature. Art should be to connect with humanity, not perform masturbatory acts for a sect based upon secret knowledge.
2.  I had trouble finding a prescription for the future until I ran across "but to haunt the present with its afterlife". Taking a stand against the tech bros, against the screen culture, against our willful know-nothing culture, seems a most honorable goal for literature. However, literature becoming a coded message for cognoscenti subverts any of its subversive power.
3.  The "linear temporality to a necromodernist simultaneity" returns me to my idea of literature as taking on the techniques of film. It is also a bit of modern life  - and a bit of David Hume - everything happening on thing after another and at the same time. That is reality. I do not know how else to describe reality - but for one thing. That is, put the author back in as the mediator between the word and the page.

It hurts again to sit upright and type. Too much stuff that was to be done remains undone. All I have at the end of the day are ideas without having the time or the energy to apply them.

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What In The World Is Going On At Fort Dix?

 Okay, there were stories when I was at Fort Dix of people seeing two pairs of feet in the showers. That the showers were disgusting. Often blocked, with water coming back up from the drain; condensation (or worse) dripping from the pipes above. These are places for an assignation of utter desperation. Not that there were no gay men - I knew several of them - and there were also the GUMPS (Gay Until Make Parole; when I first heard the term I tried fitting into Forrest Gump.), but there is a strong, deep, and wide homophobia. Keep men banged up together long enough, and some start fearing they are succumbing to "unnatural urges". I cannot understand P Diddy's prison 'overrun with inmates having mass orgies in showers at night' (Irish Star) as being about the prison I was in for 11 years. Maybe it is about the west compound; I was in the east.  There was one couple who were kicked out of the leisure library and the the chapel's video library for doing what Lauren Boebert did in a theater. There was a story that one of the COs came upon two inmates having full contact congress in one room in the Education Building; it was given as the reason for it being available only by permission when it had been open. The CO being somewhere on the autism spectrum got a sympathy from me and several other people - it had to be a traumatizing sight. Considering how Sean Combs partied, I do not see where he should be making complaints.

 But besides all that, there is a Correctional Officer stationed in the first floor of the unit buildings. Not all of them actively patrolled. Some should have, it might have improved their health. They would stay in the office watching who knows what on their computers. Yet, nighttime was a good time to catch someone with a cell phone. People would fall asleep in their bunks with phones in their hands. I recall a story of someone being caught in a bathroom stall - being heard on the phone. I always wondered if the prisoner was doing FaceTime on his phone and got a little too noisome.

There are also counts during the night. Now, these are patrols by the unit CO and outside staff. They want to make sure everyone is tucked in and having sweet dreams.

Then I read Corrections Officers Leaving Federal Prisons in Droves for ICE (ProPublica) and BOP union seeks restoration of collective bargaining through new lawsuit. I saw one or two Correctional Officers that I thought had any talents justifying their salary. They also quickly departed the fold. The Fort Dix staff was lazy when they had a contract; without one they probably became even more so. I can see some of the guards I knew with firearms, and it is not good for the citizenry. For ICE, it will be a good thing - officers who already have a dislike of people will transition well to ICE.

The federal prison system is corrupt. It corrupts its employees and inmates alike. Not that anyone will want to reform it - they will look too soft on crime. But it needs reform so people can tell the difference between criminals - those in blue BOP uniforms and those in the tan of convicts. I used to say I stuck in a place with crooks, and then there were the convicts. It was far easier to trust the convicted than the representatives of law and order.

(There was one story of a female CO who had no problem getting into a convict's locker and eating his food.)

Anyway, there is another reason for the lack of prison reform at the federal level: the American people take a vicarious thrill from the degradation imposed by their government on fellow citizens.

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Atwood On The Book Selling Circuit; William Kennedy Lives

 Margaret Atwood: The 60 Minutes Interview

 Alice Munro won the Nobel, but I suspect Canadian literature means Margaret Atwood.

Neil Gaiman and Margaret Atwood celebrate Salman Rushdie's latest book, Victory City (PEN America, 2023) - several readings then Gaiman and Atwood discuss the book and writing.

For Albany, New York, there is William Kennedy. I had his Ironweed before my arrest, only I procrastinated in reading it. I can say I read Legs early on. What I had not known was there were a whole cycle of novels set in Albany, New York. I made up for lost time in prison. It may also be that the time had come where I could read with clearer eyes. 

Today, Google News put At 97, the Bard of Albany Still Spins Tales of Gangsters and Politicians (New York Times) in front of my eyes. A celebration, a bit of fluff, and yet.... For people like me, growing up when what we knew about writers and writing only from the finished work, that ignorance drove us away from writing. I had Faulkner with his cycle of Mississippi stories, but no one else. I did not think of people like Kennedy (or Joyce Carol Oates or John Updike or Zola or Balzac, they were still far in my future from my twenty-year-old self). One thing I have learned is: it is not the place that is important but the writing. Another thing is this: within the writing is the story of humanity around you and your locality, and means opening one's eyes, one's mind, one's imagination to the life around you. Check out what Willa Cather did for Nebraska and New Mexico; what Joyce Carol Oates did for western New York, what John Updike did for his Pennsylvania; what Michael Martone has done for Indiana; what William Kennedy did for Albany, New York. What I thought this morning while working on this paragraph: where are the stories of Indianapolis?

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Rejections! What Has Come In The Past Few Days

 "The Unintended Consequences of Art" got two:

 Unfortunately your story "The Unintended Consequences of Art" will not be published at Fiction on the Web.

I'll quote from the reviews in case the feedback helps you out:

    Three centuries after events, publication of Chelbie Barcid's diaries challenges the long-accepted historical records of the Saproniki-Meerkat War. Reminiscent of/influenced by Iain M. Banks +/- Asimov's Foundation. Difficult to get into. It's sophisticated writing, but I felt the academic voice of the narrator, complex political machinations, worldbuilding and number of named characters are too dense for this short story presentation.

If you want detailed suggestions for making this story better, consider using our critique service to get actionable feedback from our editorial team.

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Thanks,

Charlie

*** 

 After careful consideration, we are unable to accept your story for publication in A Summer of Sci-fi & Fantasy: Volume Five. We had over 400 submissions this year, and even great stories didn't make the cut.

We wish you the best of luck in finding a home for your story elsewhere and sincerely hope that you will continue to submit your work in future submission cycles. 

Thank you for considering Worldstone Publishing. We hope to speak again,

 

Dustin Bilyk - Lead Editor

Worldstone Publishing