Literarisches Events (in and around Lawrence KS)

  • PATRICIA LOCKWOOD. Lawrence. Thursday, September 11, 7:00 p.m., Spooner Hall, KU Campus.
  • PATRICIA LOCKWOOD. Lawrence. Friday, September 19, 7:00 p.m. Lawrence Public Library. Sponsored by Raven Bookstore.
  • DENNIS ETZEL, JR. & RACHEL CROSS. Lawrence. Thursday, September 25, 7:00 p.m., Raven Bookstore, 6 E. 7th St.
  • TONY TRIGILIO. Lawrence. Thursday, Oct. 2, 4:00 p.m., English Room, Kansas Union, KU Campus. FREE.
  • CALEB PUCKETT & JUSTIN RUNGE. Lawrence. Thursday, October 16, 7:00 p.m., Raven Bookstore, 6 E. 7th St.
  • BEN LERNER. Kansas City, MO. Thursday, October 23, 7:00 p.m., Epperson Auditorium, Vanderslice Hall on the KCAI campus, 4415 Warwick Blvd.
  • KRISTIN LOCKRIDGE & ROBERT DAY. Lawrence. Thursday, December 4, 7:00 p.m., Raven Bookstore, 6 E. 7th St.

Wednesday, May 25, 2011

On Goro Takano's _With One More Step Ahead_

Now that it is officially almost summer, I'm back at it - with my first "book description" of the new season. But how to describe With One More Step Ahead, by Goro Takano? It is certainly a charmingly weird book - a novel with a bibliography, which is addressed telepathically in English to a group of girls in Hawai'i by a Japanese woman or girl named Lulu who may have senile dementia or schizophrenia or may not, but who is under restraint of some kind, who purports to be "translating" the memoir of a paraplegic man from whom the girls in Hawai'i serve as amanuenses as he composes his musical scores by moving his eyeballs this way or that. With me so far? No? Me neither. But there's never a dull moment. "Mr. Onishi," the protagonist (?), is a sensationalist TV reporter turned English grad student (not unlike Takano himself) who becomes involved with a group called the Banyan Tree Society, which promotes world harmony via sexual intercourse. As the story unfolds, it appears there is more than one Lulu and multiple Onishi's - one Lulu will look to Onishi like his ex-wife, or vice-versa, for instance. Every so often, someone - Lulu? Onishi? Takano? An unnamed omniscient narrator? says:

    "Wait a minute.
     This is a goddamn lie. This should be a goddamn illusion.
     My life should not be like this.
     This should be somebody else's life.
     Somewhere, without my permission, somebody is revising my life. Rewriting my life. Translating my life into something else. Exchanging my life with somebody else's."

A lot of "edgy" novels these days aren't. But this is novel writing that hasn't forgotten John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, Alain Robbe-Grillet, et al. It's narrative as carnival - and Takano is the master of digressions within digressions and flashback within flash-forward. The novel includes legends, a story-board, an essay on Dostoyevski's The Idiot, poems, and travelogue. It is a satire, in the sense of satura lanx, full plate. The fare most often has to do with Japanese history and contemporary Japanese culture, but it's also about (post)modernity writ large - the nature of subjectivity in a digital for-profit environment.

Appropriately enough, the English prose here is peppered with instances of non-native-speaker-type usages - such as the recurrent use of "cocksure" to mean "to be very certain." Given that the author possesses a PhD in English, one suspects that these are more or less intentional, and they give the texture of the novel a strangely manic quality - like a poorly-dubbed samuai movie that turns into a psychological thriller/comedy.

OK - that's the best I can do. This book is proof positive of Croce's dictum that every work of art is a unique aesthetic phenomenon.

Friday, May 20, 2011

"It Is Finished . . ."

. . . grading, I mean - and, by extension, The Semester that Would Not Die. But better not say that too loudly (knock wood).

Those of you who have been stuck in "The Back" cupping your ears during readings at the Raven Bookstore in Lawrence will be happy to know that a new sound system is on its way. The amp is 10x more powerful than the cheapo one you've come to know and hate.

Speaking of which: please put June 16 on your calendar, when poet Sonnet L’AbbĂ© (from Toronto via Vancouver) will be visiting our fair burg and reading aloud to us, along with local image+text artist+writer Karen Ohnesorge. If you haven't read Sonnet's stuff, you should - esp. her book Killarnoe. (I love writers who are hard to "pin down.")  If you haven't read Karen's work, you should come hear her read and then tell her to publish more of it  : )

Also don't miss Big Tent in June (Th. 23) w/ Louise Krug, reading from her hilarious & cheeky forthcoming memoir; Kansas Poet Laureate Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg; and, of course, everyone's favorite: T. B. Announced.

In other news, just saw an orchard oriole outside my bedroom window.

The sun is finally coming out.

I can breathe.

Friday, May 13, 2011

Reviews 'n' Such

My book, Things Come On, was reviewed in the UK's Stride Magazine. I don't know that I agree that one "would need a doctorate in twentieth century American politics with a specialism [specialism?] in Watergate to really understand the text," but I can see how the allusions might be offputting or irrlevant to readers outside the U.S.  Fortunately, the reviewer concludes that "the emotional tragedy of his mother's death born out [sic] through Harrington's subtle mix of genres and language will connect with all readers."

Also, many thanks to Dennis Etzel, Jr., for the kind comments on his blog, Radius.

Yesterday was the last day of classes (seriously). So I hope to be devoting more time to the blog soon. Stay tooned. There are a number of topics upon which I wish to hold forth - I'm saving them up.

Sunday, May 8, 2011

Heard a great reading by the Latino Writers Collective last night - followed by the revolutionary hip-hop stylings of Rebel Diaz. Great evening.

In other news - I noticed that Rachel Blau DuPlessis' reading at KU is now up on PennSound, thanks to Ben Cartwright. I introduced Rachel and read "Draft 105: Pilgrimage" with her (poorly, from the sound of it).