My review of Christina Tudor-Sideri’s novel Disembodied (Sublunary Editions, 2022) has been published at Heavy Feather Review.
…Tudor-Sideri’s novel queries the nature of being, relentlessly pondering bodies, souls, memory, death, and time—spoken through the voice of a narrator experiencing her own disappearance.
Posted by sean on November 7, 2022
https://sd-stewart.com/2022/11/07/book-review-published/
The first psithuristic wisp of autumn arrived this week. Early August and the heat retreated with a whimper in the presence of the death season’s harbinger. Odd to experience this with all the news of raging fires out west. It has been dry here, though, it has been that. Will we too one day be engulfed in flames? More likely floods.
I have been occupied with and preoccupied by disruptions and transitions in my quotidian existence. This has led to feeling disconnected from the written word, excepting my dealings with it for which I receive monetary compensation. However, I did finish reading a book—The Moment by Peter Holm Jensen. A subdued but riveting read, it was calling to me from a special box I’d packed of most-likely-to-be-read-next books. So I answered its call.
Per its publisher Splice, The Moment is a novel but it reads like a journal of its author. Is this an important consideration? Probably not, at least not to me. Frankly I long ago grew tired of the inevitable questions around the mingling of autobiography and fiction. I like works that resist being genrefied. Even the term autofiction seems absurd to me—as if any fiction exists that does not contain parts of its author. What exactly those parts are and what percentage of a book they represent should not matter when it comes to evaluating and appreciating the finished work.
These days I find it far easier to filter my reflections through others’ written words (or music) rather than document them using my own words. It actually feels like it has been this way for far too long. And this is a significant part of what resonated so deeply with me in Holm Jensen’s book: the struggle of living with the paradox of a simultaneous passion for and distrust of language, and in particular the written word.
As the narrator grapples with this paradox, he is also documenting a blurring of the intentional and unintentional experience of living in ‘the moment’—of finding over time that opening into greater awareness, from which more insight may flow. And because the transition to moment living is continuing to happen as the narrator is writing about it, there is a sense of gradual unfolding, with attendant periods of uncertainty and confusion. But what accumulates through the narrator’s journal is evidence that each moment is indeed unique, provided one is open to noticing it.
I was reminded of how all the books I’ve read by Buddhist teachers seem to repeat the same simple ideas over and over until it eventually becomes clear that what at first appear to be the simplest concepts are actually the most complex when it comes to putting them into practice. While Holm Jensen’s book is not overtly Buddhist in nature, it does touch on ideas and questions common to Buddhist practice. But it also entwines these with questions around the act of writing and its significance, leaving those questions—as they can only ever remain—unanswered.
The Moment is a book I think best read without much foreknowledge of its contents, which is why I’ve not delved into any of its narrative specifics here. However, I did write a brief review on Goodreads that offers just a skeletal overview. I hope you consider seeking out the book.
The moment lurks inside everyday time; always new, always the same. It waits to give you back your life, like an event long prepared without your knowledge, like an act of fate. It needs you: your ragged past, your timid present, your whirl of thoughts, your hoard of words. It waits for you to step into the light of day, where it can find you and let you come into your own.
—Peter Holm Jensen
Posted by sean on August 7, 2021
https://sd-stewart.com/2021/08/07/caught-between-writing-and-life-peter-holm-jensens-the-moment/
Dull sleep rolled over me like a heavy wagon, laden with the dust of darkness, covering me with its gloom.
Then the winter night began to wall itself in with black bricks of nothingness. Infinite expanses condensed into deaf, blind rock: a heavy, impenetrable mass growing into the space between things. The world congealed into nothingness.
In late 2019, Ukrainian researcher Lesya Khomych discovered what would soon be declared a previously unknown story by the great Polish writer Bruno Schulz, originally published under the pseudonym Marceli Weron. Entitled ‘Undula’, after its initial republication in Polish in the journal Schulz/Forum 14, the story appeared in English this summer on the website Notes From Poland, translated by the site’s editor Stanley Bill.
Prior to the story’s publication on Notes From Poland, however, the publisher Sublunary Editions had announced it would publish an English translation of the story in paperback this fall. So now there will be two English translations of what scholars believe is likely to have been Schulz’s first published story, a decade before the publication of his first collection of short fiction, Cinnamon Shops (Sklepy cynamonowe).
Posted by sean on September 23, 2020
https://sd-stewart.com/2020/09/23/newly-discovered-story-by-bruno-schulz/
It’s so hard watching them continue to fall . . .
Oh Where
by David Berman
Where did you go, my dear, my day;
Where, oh where, did you go?
To market, to maker of market, to say
Too much of the little I know.
Where did you go, my dear, my year;
Why did you flee from me?
I went from here to there to here
Loitering breathlessly.
Where did you go, my life, my own,
Decades gone in a wink?
Some things are better left unknown
Some thoughts too thick to think.
‘It is autumn and my camouflage is dying . . .’
Posted by sean on August 8, 2019
https://sd-stewart.com/2019/08/08/r-i-p-david-berman/
Streaming free during August on PBS.org.
Posted by sean on August 6, 2019
https://sd-stewart.com/2019/08/06/ursula-k-le-guin-documentary/
June 1, 1965 – Buenos Aires
The open walls, the walls have been beaten, the cracks, the fissures, the holes – who will close them up? This question, easy to formulate, is impossible to answer. The self in the form of the open slated shutters of a house in children’s stories. Those same shutters, closed, would form a green heart with small hearts which are crevices through which the air passes. But they cannot be closed. Or if they are closed, then something happens to the crevices, since the air doesn’t pass through them and the dwellers of the little house in the forest die asphyxiated. No. No one suffocates since they can’t be closed. Rather they’re injured, injured but not dead, although they would very much like to be dead; they are injured by the sharp wind. I don’t know if it’s because of the wind or because bandits have entered and injured them, stripped them of everything, and abandoned them to their bad luck. They dream of the green heart and of small hearts through which the air was coming. At the beginning it had to be like this. They were not going to be spared sorrows but those sorrows were going to be different from this one, so poor and so humiliating. It is not terrible to suffer but only to suffer for humiliating causes, since this robs all the beauty from the ceremony of suffering which, at first, didn’t differ from the other ceremonies.
Posted by sean on April 2, 2019
https://sd-stewart.com/2019/04/02/excerpt-from-alejandra-pizarniks-diary-2/
Rick Schober at Tough Poets Press continues his admirable efforts to introduce the work of Gil Orlovitz to a new contemporary audience. He previously raised funds via Kickstarter to publish a collection of Orlovitz’s stories, poems, and essays. With this latest campaign, he hopes to raise enough capital to reprint Orlovitz’s long out-of-print novel Ice Never F. As of this writing the project is over a third of the way funded, but it still needs support. [Update: Now fully backed and then some!] This book is virtually impossible to find on the used market, so Tough Poets Press is doing a valuable service to the many readers who in recent years have become interested in Orlovitz’s contributions to avant-garde writing in the 1960s. Now is your chance to be part of experimental literary history! Help fund the book’s publication and your name will appear in the Acknowledgments. More important than that, though, you will be assisting in the resurrection of a true American original writer.
Posted by sean on February 9, 2019
https://sd-stewart.com/2019/02/09/the-return-of-gil-orlovitz/
Unconsciously, but still of free will, he had preferred the splendour and the gloom of a malignant vision before his corporal pains, before the hard reality of his own impotence. It was better to dwell in vague melancholy, to stray in the forsaken streets of a city doomed from ages, to wander amidst forlorn and desperate rocks than to awake to a gnawing and ignoble torment, to confess that a house of business would have been more suitable and more practical, that he had promised what he could never perform. Even as he struggled to beat back the phantasmagoria of the mist, and resolved that he would no longer make all the streets a stage of apparitions; he hardly realised what he had done, or that the ghosts he had called might depart and return again.
—Arthur Machen, The Hill of Dreams
Posted by sean on February 8, 2019
https://sd-stewart.com/2019/02/08/the-phantasmagoria-of-the-mist/
. . . Assigned to you when your flesh was separating from your
mother’s, this shadow, who seeing the opportunity at hand, joined your
presence in such a way as some say the soul is given.
You have always caricatured me in my travels. I have seen you on
mountains, and in dim cafes. I have seen you hold your head, your elbows
on your knees, and while I was sad you were serene!
I seek a mastery over fate, of which you are, in objective witness, the
agent of . . . I run away one night as you sleep, the trusting wife, whose
borders have opened in the universal dark.
She feels in the morning among the sheets for the easy habit of her
husband’s shape – Now arc the earth, sweet dark, the law of umbra give
you panic to search me out with your cunning speed of light!
~from The Clam Theater (1973)
Posted by sean on November 16, 2018
https://sd-stewart.com/2018/11/16/the-agent-by-russell-edson/
Reposting this link from Jeff Bursey on Goodreads to a brief but excellent interview with Gabriel Josipovici, not so much for its questions, which are fairly pedestrian, but for his responses, which are as always gracefully eloquent in their pithiness and demonstrative of a far-ranging reading mind. A writer who is woefully underappreciated, in my opinion.
My favorite responses:
Would it be fair to say that one of the central distinctions for you between works of modernism and books you consider less interesting is not only a sensibility but also the kind of things it can do without, such as description?
Duchamp once said that it was demeaning to expect an artist to fill in the background – and it’s easy to see that once he understood that it was, for him, he was on his way to becoming the artist he was destined to be.
The Goldsmiths Prize was set up to reward fiction that “breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form”– what can an “innovative” approach offer the reader (and writer) that a more conventional novel might not? Do you think that books in this broad category are, for example, better-equipped to address questions of transcendence, mortality, and despair?
These are such difficult issues to pin down, aren’t they? My dear friend John Mepham, a biochemist turned philosopher turned literary critic, who died tragically young, put it as well as I’ve ever seen it put in a beautiful essay he wrote in 1976 on To The Lighthouse. “The orderliness of fiction,” he says, “involves not only an internal orderliness but also an orderliness of its telling. For a story to be told there must be, implicitly or explicitly, a teller of it, a narrator or a narrative voice, the voice of one who knows… But what if we lack this sense of epistemological security? What if our experience seems fragmented, partial, incomplete, disordered? Then writing might be a way not of representing but of creating order.” That, he sees, was always Virginia Woolf’s dilemma and the way of her art. And what he says about her I can identify with totally.
Posted by sean on November 12, 2018
https://sd-stewart.com/2018/11/12/a-brief-interview-with-gabriel-josipovici/
s. d. stewart 