January 11, 2009

Isabelle Baladine Howald
Secret of Breath
Translated from the French by Eléna Rivera
SERIE d'ECRITURE, No. 21
Burning Deck/Anyart
Providence
2004 (original publication) / 2008 (translation)
64 pages
Softcover, $14


Spare, open, with dream drama, and longing, hard to figure, and yet figured. Touching, isolative, embracing, distancing. Transmissions from the air, conversations seemingly unlocateable. Sentences, helium-filled, floating away. On page 18:

No longer pushing away the obsession.


Seeking. Like an exploration, slow, diligent, desperate,
looks, faces, bodies.


Repeating in front of this face and this body:
“There is something, there is something.”

*

Page 43:


What is this, tears?
Tell me, is it you who cries?

A little before leaving, knowing that I would never see him again,
I wiped a tear from his cheek; though he wasn’t crying.
She was alone and he was asleep, and something was crying.

*

As Howald says, “there is something.” And one is constantly transfigured, in reading the work, by the search, the investigation, for this something or multiple somethings. There appears to be a dialog between the narrator and an other, a male, though the other is lost, missing, or present—somewhere else—and not returning. Then, he is dead. The plot is miniscule, is emotional, is piercingly subtle.

I haven’t gone back and back and back to a book, picking it up for a little time, reading another little sequence, quite like I have with this book. This behavior of mine has been going on for a couple of months now.

“There is something.”

Perhaps one is trying to fill in the spaces with story, with a reason for the errancy, the threads of spacious meaning. What happened to her? To him? What am I missing? Am I not missing anything? Und so weiter.

Perhaps a war widow.

Page 37:

Breathing every other time,
with the other mouth’s breath


-- not even a kiss, I don’t even kiss you anymore, as if
sealed by the distance


no longer moves, the one
no longer moves, the other

*

Howald’s writing is evaporative. The writing is writing toward or into. The writing exteriorizes an interiority of nervousness, of hope, of loneliness, of documentary necessity.

Page 50:

“It’s nothing,” he says several times,
doubled over, prostrate,
his hands caught in mine.


It’s nothing that approaches.

*

Page 36:

He kept on asking for paper.

___________



Isabelle Baladine Howald



Eléna Rivera

January 7, 2009



RECEIVED:


Paul Maliszewski, Fakers--Hoaxers, Con Artists, Counterfeiters, and Other Great Pretenders,The New Press, New York/London, 2009.

--Paul is a good friend of mine, and this his first book. It's a glorious investigation into the world of fakes (persons, places, and things).

Some reviews of the book online:

"Hocus Bogus" at Boston.com

Review at Time Out Chicago

"I Want the Truth! You Can't Handle the Truth!" at Buzzine.com

Paul will be reading at the Regulator Bookshop in Durham, NC, on January 23, 2009. Info here.

January 1, 2009

Anne!

(on fire for weeks now) (click on older posts)

*

On the plane back from WI, I was seated next to a couple with two young daughters. The mother sat behind me. The father sat across the aisle from me in the same row. Their two daughters--ages 3 and 4, perhaps--were with the father, next to him. From the moment that we boarded to the moment that we left, it was just a continual litany of parenting techniques foisted on the poor daughters. And constant, agonizing nurturing. And I'm all for nurturing. Believe me. But there's a point! The father was doing it all. He sounded like a robot out of a Parenting 101 course. "Good Drinking, Zoey." "Good Drinking, Zoey." Or, "You are upset, Zoey." "Use your words, Zoey." "Use your words to explain why you are upset to me, so that we can understand one another." On and on. He was the most anxious parent I've ever been around.

*

McCaffery's Theory of Sediment is proving to be quite a ride so far. Soil sampling structure combined with linquistic patternings.

Greatly enjoyed Bernstein's sort of TV guide movie-of-the-week synopsis piece, which is untitled. Some gems:

Julie grows attached to an abandoned baby.

A man withers away after being exposed to a strange mist.

It's the dog pound for Roger when Jeannie turns him into a poodle.