MadInkBeard | Derik A Badman

Lindon asked me, one day, if I knew what this new literary movement could be called. Back then, I had dodged the question, but now, eighteen years later, I think I can answer it. It took me quite some time, about twenty years of reflection, but I found the answer. The answer is in the [...]

The latest Quarterly Conversation has an interview with Belgian novelist Jean-Philippe Toussaint, who happens to be one of my favorite contemporary authors (though I seem to have only posted about him once): MR: Critics comment on your interest in the minutiae of daily experience. Do you feel that you have a particular interest in minutiae? [...]

The publication histories of both A Thousand Cranes and Sound of the Mountain resemble the erratic, scattered pattern Kawabata set with Snow Country, though they do not stretch over as long a period of time or undergo as many major revisions. But the technique of evolving narration–with one segment suggesting, through the “remnant of feeling” [...]

I don’t think I’d call the American impatience with aesthetically complex fiction “anti-intellectualism.” Plenty of intellectuals themselves express the same disdain for writers like Pynchon and Gaddis, whose work can’t be reduced to sociological observation or political agitation. It’s more a resentment of complex art, a disinclination to give such art the sustained attention it [...]

A theme is an existential inquiry. And increasingly I realize that such an inquiry is, finally, the examination of certain words, theme-words. Which leads me to emphasize: a novel is based primarily on certain fundamental words. It is like Schoenberg’s “tone-row.” In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, the “row” goes: forgetting, laughter, angels, litost, [...]

The latest issue of the excellent online lit journal The Quarterly Conversation is now up for your reading enjoyment and edification. Among other interviews, articles, and reviews it includes my review of David Markson’s The Last Novel. Markson is one of my favorite authors, and for some reason this is the first time I’ve written [...]

Most readers when they think of the way a narrative (novel, comic, tv show) is ordered will think about plot: what Brian Richardson, in his “Beyond the Poetics of Plot: Alternative Forms of Narrative Progression and the Multiple Trajectories of Ulysses,” describes as “a teleological sequence of events linked by some principle of causation; that [...]

The new issue of The Quarterly Conversation is up, including my review of Stefan Themerson’s novel The Mystery of the Sardine. Go check it out.

The Mystery of the Sardine by Stefan Themerson. Dalkey Archive, 2006. 194p., $12.95. There are few novelists equal to the likes of Raymond Queneau. HIs ability to combine the quotidian, the fantastical, the absurd, the humorous, the philosophical, and a healthy does of linguistic play makes his work sui generis. But, if I were asked [...]

The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker (1986). Vintage, 1990 (latest edition). 144 p., $11.95. Sometimes I buy books at used bookstore and then forget I have them. I forgot I even owned this book until I read something about in online and realized it was on my shelf. Am I glad I read this? Yes. What [...]

(If you’ve already looked at my last post on Little Nemo and the images were missing, please check it out again. Some of the image paths were messed up, so they didn’t appear.) When it rains it pours, I just put up that long post on Nemo and now I find my review of Flaubert’s [...]

Last week over at the Litblog Co-op site saw a lot of interesting posts (including one by yours truly on novels and indexes) and a podcast on Anders Monson’s Other Electricities, a novel in stories I enjoyed quite a lot. Discussion continues this week with a second pick. Addition (8/23/09): Here’s the actually post I [...]

Crowley, John. Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land. William Morrow, 2005. I’ve been awaiting new John Crowley novels for over a decade now, ever since I first read Little, Big (certainly his most well known novel) and Aegypt (1987) (arguably his masterwork in progress). The thing is, I’ve been waiting for more novels in his [...]

Having finally read one of Metcalf’s works, I went back and reread this interview (from the always brilliant interviews at Dalkey Archive). It is worth the time for a number of interesting takes on prose, novels, structure, organization, etc.: I: When you eliminate so many of the conventions of the traditional novel (i.e., plot, and [...]

After reading two of his novels (Never Again and Negativeland), I contacted Doug Nufer, and he agreed to answer a few questions. Thankfully, he had no trouble going on in depth and even managed to answer a few of my questions previous to me asking them. My questions and comments are in bold. (This is [...]

Metcalf, Paul. Genoa (1965). In Collected Works 1956-1976. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1996. I first learned of Paul Metcalf when I was searching for a Poe quote and found it in an interview with Metcalf on the Center for Book Culture site. What I read was enough to interest me, so I put his name [...]

Nufer, Doug. Never Again. New York: Black Square Editions, 2004. Also available online at ubu.com. I think it’s safe to say that there is no novel like this one. This is a constrained novel on the level of Perec’s La Disparition in its level of ambition and difficulty. Doug Nufer (also author of the novel [...]