my story collection, unusual comfort reading, jameson
WHM's new story collection plus thoughts on Han Kang and M. John Harrison and a first look at Mimesis, Expression, Construction.
Hello.
In this issue, I have some thoughts on unusual comfort reading and an initial look at Fredric Jameson's Mimesis, Expression, Construction, but first some news: my story collection Oddities: Fantasies & Science Fictions is out today from Frozen Sea Press (which is me).
Direct order links: Trade Paperback | Ebooks (DRM free): Kobo | Kindle | Apple Books | Nook (Barnes & Noble)
The collection features seven works of fantasy, seven works of science fiction, and a fantasy novelette. It republishes the four short stories that ran in Big Echo (with some minor changes), and everything else is unique to the collection. It covers a wide range of genres within SF&F (from secondary world fantasy to weird west to urban fantasy to cyberpunk to space opera to science fantasy [I originally had 'sort of' in front of some of those genre labels, but I removed it because I could apply that qualifier to all of them]); comes in at just over 65k words; and represents the best of the short fiction I've written over the past decade.
In the copy I used for the various online bookstores, I claim: "Not quite experimental, not quite weird, not quite core genre, but containing elements of all three, the stories in Oddities gently yet insistently (and sometimes darkly humorously) attempt to paint genre fiction into a corner."
I will break from my every other month newsletter cadence and send out an email in the next few weeks that goes into a bit more depth on and has some behind the scenes for Oddities, but I will say this now: revising and copyediting and proofreading these stories over the past several months has been a dawning realization that the description above, which was always intended to be a little hyperbolic, a lot tongue in cheek, fits more than I thought it would when I first began putting the collection together.
If you'd like a free electronic copy (for any reason at all), reply to this email and tell me which format would work best for you.
Two more things before we get to the main sections:
- Earlier this month I released "it's a silence" on Bandcamp, a new single which features me singing over some intertwining virtual modular synth phrasings I recorded and then messed about with. I'm quite proud of the lyrics and vocal performance for this one. I call it dirge pop, although melancholy, slowed down synthwave might be a better description.
- Back in January, I wrote about Samantha Harvey's novel Orbital, using it as a jumping off point to reflect on my increasing discomfort with implied/off screen mass death and destruction that is either ignored or seems to exist solely for the main characters to react to. Paul Kincaid, who is a much better critic than I am, has also written about Orbital, including about the distance between the astronauts and the typhoon down on Earth and how it's portrayed, and it's helped me better understand what Harvey is doing in the novel.
Okay, now on to two thoughts on recent reading:
On the comfort of reading modern masters
I've been intermittently but persistently reading the work of Han Kang and M. John Harrison over the past year. Their work is not pleasant or pleasurable or pleasurably unpleasant. It's disquieting, sometimes visceral, sometimes elusive. I could chalk this steady pulse of reading them, which I anticipate continuing, up to wanting to immerse myself in their dissonant worlds, worlds which are mundane and strange and hypnotic, but also make sure that reality, that history, is always there lurking even when not overtly present.
And that must be part of it, part of why I keep picking up their fiction.
But there's also a comfort to reading their work because of what it demands of me personally—and I want to encounter art that demands—while at the same time demanding nothing of me creatively or intellectually.
Or at least not directly. I'm sure the indirect effects will lurk below the surface for quite some time, perhaps forever.
But because their work is accomplished in a way that I know is unattainable for me, I don't feel the need to engage with it consciously.
Usually when I read fiction published in this century, there comes a point, either while reading or shortly after finishing the work, where I think about what fiction I am writing or could write—not so much in response to that particular work, but in response to the type of fiction that work represents. Or, if it's a particularly interesting work, I also start writing criticism in my head about it, which then means I need to decide if I'm actually going to write about the text.
The same is true, but in a slightly different way, when I read fiction that is not contemporary. Sometimes I even go so far as to consider how I could strip a much older novel for parts/reinterpret it for today.
With the work of Han Kang and M. John Harrison, I feel no such compulsions. Wouldn't even know where to start. This is not to say that either author is unassailable or unapproachable, but only that I, personally, don't respond to them in the ways I normally respond to reading fiction and criticism.
And that's a comfort. A weird one—one that I didn't know I needed. But a comfort nonetheless.
Do you have authors like that? Or works that have an effect on you that is different from your normal response to reading?
On the form of Mimesis, Expression, Construction
As promised in my May newsletter, I have an update on Mimesis, Expression, Construction: Fredric Jameson's Seminar on Aesthetic Theory, which someone graciously sent me from my Bookshop Wishlist (and, again, thank you, whoever you are). I had added this to my wish list for several reasons:
- I have a general interest in aesthetic theory but most of my (shallow) grounding in it is from the 18th and 19th centuries.
- I wanted to read more Jameson and figured reading his lectures would give me a different sense of him as a thinker than his formal writing.
- I liked the idea of a meaty, rambling tome that was divided up by lectures so I could dip into it here and there over time rather than feeling like it was a discrete work I had to rush to finish; not by any means leisure reading, but amenable to approaching at a leisurely pace.
- I figured Jameson explaining to students would be more approachable than his formal written work (which I enjoy, but requires intense focus).
I've now read the introduction, first three lectures, and lecture eighteen (I couldn't resist skipping ahead to this one: it focuses on essays by Ernst Bloch and Walter Benjamin), and the reasons above have proven to be spot on.
But there's something that I didn't expect: this volume was transcribed and edited by Octavian Esanu, a student in Jameson's seminar, which took place January through April 2003, and he presents the lectures as a written record of the audio that exists as it exists. He dramatizes it: capturing not just Jameson's words, but also the other sounds that are happening in the classroom (or even outside of it, such as the whistle of a passing train).
Esanu also frames this approach as drama rather than trying to pass it off as purely vérité, including starting each lecture with the words "Curtain Rises" and ending with "Curtain" along with descriptions of what's happening in the classroom. He tries to give a sense of flow via what in a play would be stage directions by inserting tags like [Pause.] or [Long pause.] or [Silence.] (for when he asks a question and none of the students respond) or [Bang! A book falls to the floor.] ] .
This choice to dramatize the lectures also means Esanu can interpret not just the sounds of the audio, but also how they sound. This is both helpful and, at times, amusing, especially since these stage directions are usually things like [Agitated.] (p. 80) or [Impersonates Brecht.] (p. 57).
It also means that the gaps in the audio where Esanu can't transcribe Jameson's words because he mumbles or trails off become part of the transcription, part of the experience of the lecture rather than trying to make an interpolation or just having a gap in a more traditional presentation of a lecture in print.
This could be annoying to some readers, but I'm enjoying it. Indeed, after reading the first lecture, I decided that I'd lean into the presentation and read an entire lecture, no more, no less, in one sitting, and then let at least a couple of days pass before I tackle another one (it's usually been more days than that).
All that said, I don't know that Jameson's lectures and the format in which Esanu reproduces them make Jameson's thought easier to understand. It's just a different experience. A more raw, more embodied, more mundane form that I, who have little grounding in philosophy and a very piecemeal understanding of the Frankfurt school, find accessible. It's an experience most akin to reading the letters of Walter Benjamin. Letters are, of course, quite different from lectures (most of the time), but they also have baked into them quotidian matters mixed with more lofty thoughts and a sense of location in place and time.
Would I be better served by reading all of Jameson's and Benjamin's formal works before diving into the looser stuff?
Maybe.
But it's a nice change of pace that keeps bringing me back to the text.
I suppose I should also say something about the content of what I've read so far. My one complaint about the book is that it doesn't also include the syllabus. Now, most? all? of the readings appear to be mentioned in the text, but it's not always clear what you're supposed to read in advance of each individual lecture.
Of course, this also presents something I didn't think about when I added the book to my wishlist: am I going to do the reading? The core texts are clear: Adorno's Aesthetic Theory and Mann's Doctor Faustus. Plus some Kant and Freud, etc. But it'd be nice to have it laid out in an actual reading list.
I've read some Adorno and quite a bit of Mann, but not the exact texts featured in the seminar. However, I have read Critique of Judgment. It's one of the few works of philosophy I have, so that's helped.
I don't know yet what I'm going to do. I'm inclined not to because I'm still getting something out of the lectures, although, of course, the lectures I've read so far focus on work I'm acquainted with.
This is the beauty of and problem with theory: one text opens up into a multitude of other ones.
Let's just say that, at the very least, I appreciate Jameson's explications of Kant's aesthetic theory, especially since my reading back in college focused on the sublime, and I didn't take the time to truly understand Kant's work on the beautiful.
For example:
"Understanding provides the rules to organize our experience. The imagination, on the other hand, synthesizes and forms mental representations and sensory information into these... [Pause] into these, hmm... [Hesitates] forms. There isn't a concept or rule involved. Well, the ultimate effect of the aesthetic then, in Kant, or what he calls [Stressing] the beautiful is the result of clicking together of these two faculties — so one could say a harmony of [Stressing] freedom and knowledge" (103).
One of the trickier things I've found about aesthetic theory, assuming I'm understanding what I've read so far (not just of Jameson, but across my life), is that approaching aesthetics purely in terms of the idea of pleasing attributes, to use aesthetic in the way very online people say "that's so aesthetic", doesn't work since any theory of aesthetics needs to account for the subjectivity of taste while still being able to make some sort of universal (or at least larger) claims.
That's something I do want to continue to work through.
But I'm also intrigued by these notions of freedom and knowledge in relation to the aesthetic, less in relation to theory itself and more in relation to writing fiction, especially science fiction and fantasy. Because this is the dirty secret of all my reading (and I know I'm not alone in this — I see you writer friends and your plundering of history): when I read something like Mimesis, Expressions, Construction or Marina Vishmidt's Speculation as a Mode of Production, yes, I want to understand the core arguments of the text, but I'm also looking for what I can transmute into the fiction I write (which is a contrast to/reinforcement of my thoughts above on reading Han Kang and MJH even though when I wrote that piece, I hadn't decided what I was going to write about the Jameson lectures).
Granted, this is an awful thing to do. And I'm lucky in that when I get drawn into a text, I do get immersed in it so all those ulterior motives aren't typically active during the time of reading. But there is always a danger of them becoming activated. The writerly sleeper cells...
More on Jameson's lectures as I get further in.
Let me know if you have any specific questions on Mimesis, Expressions, Construction.
Next month: a bonus issue featuring more details on my Oddities collection.