"...as dark and mysterious as its title."
-Hartford Courant
Elsewhere, News & Links
book notes
date: Sep 18, 2009
Here is a playlist I did for David Gutowski’s Largeheartedboy.
Vall Killpack
date: Sep 15, 2009
Vall Killpack has posted a very interesting essay on The Exquisite and Steve Erickson’s Zeroville on his blog.
Buntport Indiana, Indiana
date: Sep 12, 2009
A great review of Buntport Theater’s Indiana, Indiana appears in today’s Denver Post.
HTMLGiant Interview
date: Sep 08, 2009
An interview I did with the very agreeable Drew Toal is up at HTMLGIANT. Note the loud shout at the start to Brian Evenson’s Fugue State!
Recommended Reading
date: Sep 08, 2009
I have a short interview over on Ravi Mangla’s Recommended Reading.
Ray of the Star: Brief Dramatic Treatments
date: Sep 02, 2009
Two short dramatic treatments of Ray of the Star by Paul Ketchum!
If you’ve already read Ray or are still wondering whether to pick up a copy, you could do worse than to check out Paul Ketchum’s dramatic adaptations. To that end I’m reposting them. And the offer still stands: Anyone moved to make either of these into a video will receive miscellaneous small, nifty things and have her/his finished work featured on this site. Enjoy…
Ray of the Star: Brief Dramatic Treatment #1
Note: In general, shots should be continuous and unbroken with no cuts unless otherwise indicated. This note should be taken as far as is cinematically feasible.
A man, Alfonso, dressed like a golden centaur and seated at a table in a cafe, talks to the camera.
Alfonso: Once upon a time there was or there wasn’t a young woman named Solange who lived in a fine old city by the sea, and each day in that city she painted her face with gold and put on golden robes and wings and went and stood on the Boulevard, which is famous the world round for its fine buildings and fine trees and crowds of people, but most of all for its extraordinary living statues, of which Solange, the golden angel, was the most beautiful and the most beloved, for when she smiled the sun slipped out of her mouth and danced in front of the crows that would gather around her in such numbers that the Boulevard was blocked and people seeking passage spilled out onto the surrounding streets, and while young men and young women alike fell quite hopelessly in love with Solange, and spoke to her and beseeched her to step down off her box, she never answered, never even seemed to look at them, until the day that the sun, having slipped out of her mouth to dance around in the crowd, stopped before a young man, who reached out a long, dusky finger and caressed it, as if it were a cheek, my cheek, thought Solange on her golden box, and when a moment later this young man came and stood before her and asked her to step down and join him for a drink, she shocked everyone (the murmur of it, which I remember well, said Alfonso, rippled like electric wavelets all th way down the Boulevard) by stepping down and removing her wings and walking off with him, and although Solange and the young man were often out and about in the days and weeks that followed it was as if they had pulled on magical cloaks that kept anyone from seeing them clearly, so that when they had been somewhere and then left it was like a dream had come, glowed for a moment, then gone, so love begins, and in truth, ends, even when it ends so horribly, as Solange’s did
The dialogue above continues over this scene and ends just before Eulalia speaks. A man, Ireneo, is jogging and his jogging shoes are speaking to him. He can only hear them when they are in his line of sight, so, while running, he can hear one shoe and then the other. He looks at his shoes while they are speaking and looks up to follow their commands. No cuts.
Shoe 1: Turn left
Shoe 2: at the next
Shoe 1: corner.
Shoe 2: Run close
Shoe 1: to the
Shoe 1: window
Shoe 2: with the
Shoe 1: beautiful
Shoe 2: antique
Shoe 1: toy cars.
Shoe 2: Kindly
Shoe 1: nod at
Shoe 2: The con-
Shoe 1: struction
Shoe 2: worker who
Shoe 1: is having
Shoe 2: trouble
Shoe 1: with his
Shoe 2: backhoe.
Shoe 1: Cut through
Shoe 2: the market
Shoe 1: but walk
Shoe 2: don’t run and
Shoe 1: sniff the
Shoe 2: papaya.
Ireneo arrives at Dona Eualia’s. He goes in, looks at her (she has an illuminated lampshade on her head).
Eulalia: Imbecile!
Ireneo looks at his shoes.
Shoe 1 and 2: Smelly old bag.
***
A woman, Solange, sits at a table and picks silver tears off of her face before dipping them into a bowl of clear liquid in front of her and putting them on a rack to dry. The shot never shifts. No cuts.
Solange: One night when her young man had gone out in search of milk and ended his search with a knife blade broken off so far down his throat it tok investigating officials several hours to discover the cause of death though it did not take them long to find the one who had broken his knife off in the young man’s mouth:
The audio of Solange speaking continues while the shot changes to Harry trying to fall asleep. He is in his room lying on the bed. He smacks the bell sitting next to his bed then gets up and performs calesthenics, poorly executed sun salutations, before getting back into bed, ringing the bell, standing up, getting back into bed, ringing the bell, standing up, with increasing frequency.
after the deed he had drunk a bottle of sparkling water, swallowed a sprig of parsley and a fistful of Valium and went out to inform anyone who would listen that the golden angel, whom he had admired for far longer than the young man, would soon be his and his alone, without knowing that at the precise moment he had shoved his knife blade down the young man’s throat the golden angel had ceased to exist, for whom, some weeks later, Solange reappeared on the Boulevard, she was no longer golden - she had gone as pale as a piece of cloudy ice - and she never smiled, and there were tears on her face, and inside those tears, which she carefully affixed each morning and tore carefully from her face each night, were flecks of the broken blade, which the coroner had given her out of pity.
Cut back to Solange pulling the last tear from her face. She looks at it.
Shard: I don’t want to be a tear anymore.
She dips it into the liquid and puts it out to dry next to the other shards.
***
An old woman is seated in a chair across a table from two other people seated on a sofa. Dona Eulalia takes a cookie from the platter sitting on the table and eats it while Harry and Solange watch.
Eulalia: They’re coming.
She searches around in her mouth for leftover cookie crumbs. Then looks at Solange.
Eulalia: For both of you.
***
Three rotund old men with cigars are standing next to a window as a door opens and Harry walks into the room. The camera is tight on their smiles the entire time. When the door opens, they all smile wide grins and smoke escapes from their teeth.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Ray of the Star: Brief Dramatic Treatment #2
A man in slacks and a button-up shirt puts on some running shoes and proceeds to jog through narrow streets, alleyways, etc., while the narrator does his thing.
Narrator: Once upon a time there was or there wasn’t a young woman named Solange who lived in a fine old city by the sea, and each day in that city she painted her face with gold and put on golden robes and wings and went and stood on the Boulevard, which is famous the world round for its extraordinary living statues, of which Solange, the golden angel, was the most beautiful and the most beloved, for when she smiled the sun slipped out of her mouth and danced in front of the crowds that would gather around her in such numbers that the Boulevard was blocked and people seeking passage spilled out onto the surrounding streets, and while young men and young women alike fell quite hopelessly in love with Solange, and spoke to her and beseeched her to step down off her box, she never answered, never even seemed to look at them, until the day that the sun, having slipped out of her mouth to dance around in the crowd, stopped before a young man, who reached out a long, dusky finger and caressed it, as if it were a cheek, my cheek, thought Solange on her golden box, and when a moment later this young man came and stood before her and asked her to step down and join him for a drink, so love begins, and in truth, ends, even when it ends so horribly, as Solange’s did one night when her young man had gone out in search of milk and ended his search with a knife blade broken off so far down his throat it took investigating officials several hours to discover the cause of death. Solange reappeared on the Boulevard, she was no longer golden and she never smiled, and there were tears on her face, and inside those tears were flecks of the broken blade, which the coroner had given her out of pity.
The jogging man reaches a building. He opens the door to blackness and enters. He is in a room where an old woman is seated in a chair across a table from two other people seated on a sofa. Dona Eulalia takes a cookie from the platter sitting on the table and eats it while Harry and Solange watch.
Eulalia: They’re coming.
She searches around in her mouth for leftover cookie crumbs. Then looks at Solange.
Eulalia: For both of you.
***
Camera tight on a face. A door opens and the face shifts into a huge smile. Smoke escapes between the teeth.
Pub Date!
date: Sep 01, 2009
Ray is officially out and hopefully about starting today.
Two New Reviews
date: Sep 01, 2009
Darby Dixon has penned the kind of review that a writer dreams of (with great delight and fist pumping and so forth) only to wake up and realize that of course it was not so, except that this one is so and it’s about Ray of the Star and you can check it out (on Identity Theory) here. Meanwhile, Zack Kopp at the Denver Examiner generously weighs in with this.
Buntport Does Indiana, Indiana!
date: Aug 30, 2009
A great article on Buntport Theater’s imminent adaptation of Indiana, Indiana appeared in today’s Denver Post. Some intriguing shots from the production and an excerpt from the novel are included.
Indigest
date: Aug 28, 2009
At Indigest Blog an interesting reading of Ray and Moya’s Senselessness.
Time Out!
date: Aug 28, 2009
Time Out Chicago and Time Out New York have both weighed in, simultaneously, on Ray of the Star. Thanks to both!
Indiana, Indiana at Buntport
date: Aug 18, 2009
The marvelous Denver based Buntport theater company has put up details about its forthcoming production of Indiana, Indiana (based on my second novel).
The Collagist
date: Aug 18, 2009
Dzanc Books has started an excellent new journal called The Collagist, edited by Matt Bell. Check it (and a Ray excerpt) out here.
Not Normal, Illinois
date: Aug 18, 2009
Michael Martone’s anthology, Not Normal, Illinois, peculiar fictions from the flyover, is now out from Indiana University Press. Some great stuff included, and a piece of mine called Happy Film.
First Ray Reading
date: Aug 11, 2009
The 5th Anniversary of Vermin on the Mount!
Savor a Night of Irreverent Readings with Laird Hunt, Sean Carswell, D.R. Haney, Alicia Gifford and your host, Jim Ruland!
Sunday, August 23 8pm at The Mountain, 473 Gin Ling Way, Chinatown, LA.
FREE rat cake for the filthy and the depraved!
Indiana, Indiana and The Exquisite
date: Jul 31, 2009
M.T. Fallon at Trestle just put up this interesting post about Indiana, Indiana, while Val Killpack had this to say about The Exquisite at Literary Analysis. Many thanks to you both!
Advance Word on Ray
date: Jul 29, 2009
In the same week that Publisher’s Weekly called Ray of the Star, among other things, a “sour mishmash of unexplainable sadness”, David Milofsky, writing in the Denver Post, said the same book “has a mesmerizing quality that is hard to resist and is frequently dazzling in its evocation of both place and states of mind” (who was right? you decide!), while the New York Times reserved judgement but generously ran a playlist I put together around my various books.
In other words, the fun has started!
Five Reviews: Book 3
date: Jun 25, 2009
An excerpt from a short review I did some years ago in Rain Taxi of Magdalena Tulli’s Dreams and Stones.
Dreams and Stones, Polish writer Magdalena Tulli’s first novel to be published in the United States, dexterously braids cords of memory, imagination, and elegiac intensity, as she give us the story of the founding and development of a major city and, by extension of all cities: a brilliant tale of “these interpenetrating spaces” that become “ever more confused, entangled, diffuse.” Tulli manages with apparent ease to parse the shifting urban amalgam she posits into complementary component parts that are rendered with great exactitude: “The city of yesterday and the city of today can seem like a pair of identical looking pictures from a puzzle in which on closer inspection one may find a flag missing from a rooftop, an additional flowerpot on a windowsill or one more sparrow upon a ledge.”
To read the whole review, click here.
Five Reviews: Book 2
date: Jun 23, 2009
Excerpt from a review I did for Bookforum of Nam Le’s The Boat.
The unusually various characters in Nam Le’s excellent debut collection, The Boat, live between worlds. In “Cartagena,” for example, a teenage contract killer in Colombia moves from squalid shantytowns to his master’s opulent mansion; in “Hiroshima,”a young girl shifts unambiguously toward death in the days and hours before the atomic bomb is dropped; and in the title story, a Vietnamese refugee overtaken by a storm on the South China Sea feels as if she is “soaring through the air, the sky around [her] dark and inky and shifting.” As these brief descriptions indicate, the book’s seven stories are also diverse in setting and mode. Consequently, the reader, invited to travel from, say, a tale of cultural and generational estrangement in Iowa City to a brooding coming-of-age story in an Australian coastal town, becomes a participant in Le’s transglobal examination of lives being lived in mental and physical border zones.
To read the whole review, click here
Five Reviews: Book 1
date: Jun 22, 2009
An excerpt from and link to a review I did for The Believer of Julio Cortazar’s Autonauts of the Cosmoroute.
Envision a journey informed by a playfully relaxed version of Zeno’s paradox on the impossibility of forward motion, and you’ll have a sense of the spirit presiding over Autonauts of the Cosmoroute. But only a sense, for if this collaborative volume, which recounts a thirty-three-day, 490-mile meander along the Paris-Marseille autoroute, at the carefully calculated rate of two rest stops per day, has an air of high jinks about it, the mad enterprise is also imbued with an air of sweet melancholy, a by-product of the mental and physical demons afflicting the two voyagers. Indeed, given that Canadian writer and activist Carol Dunlop died shortly after the trip was completed, and that Julio Cortazar—Argentinian author of vertiginous twentieth-century experimental classics such as Hopscotch—nearing the end of his own days, was left to finish the resultant book alone, it’s hard not to read a little too much sadness into the proceedings. Happily, though, Autonauts of the Cosmoroute resists projected pathos with the same vigor that “Fafner,” Cortazar and Dunlop’s fiery red VW camper, valiantly resisted the elements. To read the whole review click here
Indiana, Indiana on the Stage
date: Jun 09, 2009
The marvelous Denver-based Buntport Theater has announced its fall lineup, which will include their adaptation of my second novel, Indiana, Indiana.
Influences on Ray of the Star: Book 5
date: Jun 01, 2009
The fifth of five books that influenced the writing of Ray of the Star.
It would be hard to overstate the impact the writings of Georges Perec have had on my work. Whether in his increasingly unsettling debut Things, his pamphlet sized cabinet of wonders, A Portrait Gallery, or in his masterwork, a book Warren Motte has put forward as perhaps the greatest work in French of the 20th century, Life: A User’s Manual, there is much in Perec to stun and refresh. Ray of the Star opens with an epigraph from Perec’s novella A Man Asleep (trans. by Andrew Leak): “Now you must learn how to last.” My protagonist, Harry Tichborne, enacts the inverse of Perec’s man and his gradual move into Bartelby-esque stasis, but the shoe of existential melancholia is always threatening to drop back on him. Or maybe the boot.
Influences on Ray of the Star: Book 4
date: May 30, 2009
The fourth of five books that influenced the writing of Ray of the Star.
Marie Redonnet’s Forever Valley (trans. Jordan Stump) hit me like a ton of bricks when I first came across it. Part of what Redonnet calls a triptych, rather than a trilogy, Forever Valley stands alongside Hotel Splendid and Rose Mellie Rose just outside of time, just outside of place. In Forever Valley, the young female narrator, who lives alone with an aging minister in a valley that is going to be flooded, spends her free time digging holes to try and find the cemetery that long since erased any trace of itself. That all she ever manages to uncover is ooze is terribly a propos in the watery universe of the triptych. The narrator’s preferred pastime puts me in mind of the instruction that my friend the writer Selah Saterstrom received many a time in her youth (and which I borrowed in my novel The Exquisite ) to go out into the yard and “dig for the devil.” In Ray of the Star Harry Tichborne does his own variety of digging in a city that is not quite Barcelona and a time that is not quite now and is both surprised and not surprised by what he digs up.
Ray Sighting
date: May 29, 2009
Time Out New York is showing some Book Expo America acquisitions.
Influences on Ray of the Star: Book 3
date: May 29, 2009
The third of five books that influenced the writing of Ray of the Star.
Ann Quin’s 1964 debut novel Berg famously begins with the following, set apart on its own page: “A man called Berg, who changed his name to Greb, came to a seaside town intending to kill his father….” The backbone of Berg‘s plot duly summarized, Quin goes on to give us a novel about how lives get lived in the odd torquing of language, or perhaps how odd lives get lived in the torquing of language. Berg/Greb, a traveling salesman (hair tonic) in an off season past its sales date “resort” town in England, lives in a highly active, highly interesting befuddlement that infects everything that surrounds him.
“Isn’t there a moment caught between two moods, that space within, separated from life, as well as death, when the sun is faced without blinking, when eternity lies here inside; no division whatsoever, simply a series of circular motivations?”
I hope so.
