Vanessa Place

Each metropolis preselects its suicide like an officer packs a capsule, for if a city lives by remembering, mein Leibnitz Herr, the opposite must also be true, ergo a city dies from forgetting, and such death is by the city’s own hand, it turns it neglected bungalows to gallows and potholes its veins.

Wasn't Leibnitz snowed in somewhere and instead of completing a mathematical treatise, instead developed a system for irrigation? I recall reading that somewhere in the shadowed corridors of my memory. Likewise the dump of snow we experienced in fits and starts last week and into this weekend put all other endeavors on hold. I was left with this hefty tome and an otherworldly silence. Some other reviewer led me to explore Blake Butler's conversation with Vanessa Place in html.giant. A resounding thunderclap of affectation was discovered. I did not allow that to dissuade me. There are threads and patches of this novel which remain inscrutable. There are also lush expanses of a poetic argot which only a well-read polyglot could embrace. I may be just pulling out of the station towards Well Read. I struggle enough with English.

La Medusa concerns Los Angeles, the City of Angels, Hollywood(land) and the crack and Glock infested corner of the American imagination. The associations between threads and characters revealed whispers of our cinematic memory, one from Sunset Boulevard to Magnolia, though Crash (2004) appears a lodestar as it is for Danielewski and Ericson.

The snow afforded ponderous solitude and muscle memory conjured the feral. Hibernation is presupposed by mastication and gnawing remains a poetic ritual. Salvaging through the depths of La Medusa, one can certainly be sated if not unhinged by its rich eloquence.… (meer)

I reviewed this a bit in comments on Place's "Dies: A Sentence."

This book is a wreck. It has all the worst qualities of a grad-student theory manifesto: a collage of sources, willful contradictions, inadvertent contradictions, overdetermined graphics, leaps of argument, supposedly evocative breaks between aphoristic paragraphs.

Here are four possibilities for reading such a text:

1. As a piece of conceptual writing. In this case the claims would not be referential, but about the obduracy and materiality of language itself. Such a reading would be in line with conceptual writing, but clearly not with the authors' intentions.

2. As a collection of aphorisms, like de la Rochefoucauld, Lichtenberg, Chamfort, Novalis, or Pascal. In that case, a reader would pick and choose images and ideas, and wouldn't mind the inconsistencies. But the text itself speaks against that because it keeps addressing its putatively single subject.

3. As a document of its time (2009) and place (those parts of North American academic experimental writing that are closest to visual art). In this case, ironically, a reader wouldn't need to consider how plausible or coherent the claims are, because they would be signs of their historical place. Ironic, because a nominalist, literalist reading is in line with conceptualism.

4. As "notes" that approach the utility of a manifesto or at least a position paper, and hope to adequately address and express an emerging field. This is more or less how the authors intend it. But how it is possible to read this text as theory? Consider some exemplary obstacles:

(4a) The text opens "Conceptual art is allegorical writing." The paragraph that follows says, among other things, that allegory is "saying slant what cannot be said directly," which is not a useful definition of allegory; but the same paragraph also offers about a dozen other properties and possible definitions. The authors apparently don't know Stephen Melville's essay on the "re-emergence" of allegory, and they only mention Benjamin in a group with De Man and Stephen Barney, saying all three argue that allegory is about the "reification" of words. I think that in the history of the modern and postmodern reception of allegory, that opening page is a mess. Does it follow that "Words are objects"? That's what they claim, on the top of the next page, in an isolated one-sentence paragraph.

(4b) What kind of reading does an entry like this call for:

"Sophocles wanted a true language in which things were ontologically nominal. This is true in fiction and history.

"Fiction meaning poetry.

"Poetry meaning history.

History meaning the future state of having been." (p. 17)

Surely such a passage is a signal to the reader that the "Notes" cannot be read as theory or as argument. And yet they keep insisting they can be.

There's an interesting problem with recent theorizations of conceptual writing, especially Craig Dworkin's essay: there's a tendency to trace the lineage of conceptual writing to conceptual art. It's a problematic genealogy, which sometimes makes sense but often doesn't. In these "notes" there are references to many art world figures, including Hal Foster. An especially interesting moment is when the authors review some highlights of institutional critique, mentioning Andrea Fraser, and then wonder what conceptual writing has done by way of critiquing its institutions. They name some examples (p. 49), but there aren't many; and soon the text is back to its a-political literalism.

Of the four readings, the only one that makes sense to me is the third.… (meer)

This book is, effectively, unreadable. (I did not finish it.) That in itself is not a criticism, because the book is intended as an example of conceptual writing. Place is co-author of a manifesto on conceptual writing published by Ugly Ducklinge (some is here: www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/22133), and she has also written, or collected, a volume of legal texts as a novel. In that tradition, what matters isn't authorial voice or the other markers of the Western fiction tradition.

The problem is that the book conjures those markers continuously, and there is -- now, at this point in history -- no way to read texts except in terms of existing conventions of fiction or their deliberate disruption, dissociation, and deconstruction. And by those standards, those conventions, she is a not a good writer. It doesn't matter that the book is one sentence; as in other such experiments, from Oulipo to Énard, the issues associated with that gambit are separable from questions of the prose that is created. The problem is Place is a poor writer in a conventional sense, and that lack cannot be erased or overridden by the experimental matrix. She is arch, given to compulsive punning and slant rhymes, incapable of larger-scale rhythms and transitions, and unconvincing in her metaphors and other tropes. Many passages attempt a facsimile of the breathless last breath that the book is supposed to depict, but as a naturalistic, mimetic gesture, that seldom works. A random passage shows this. (Randomness is part of the conceptual anti-aesthetic, so I think it is as fair as any excerpting.)

"...she bucketed no surname, but kept an extra set of keys and a spate of cinnamon-colored freckles dancing on her delicate nose, she smelled of something, to be sure..."

The tropes and general mode that enables writing like this are modernist stream of consciousness. But the choice of words is less thoughtful than Joyce, Faulkner, or other modernists. It's more like a nervous rummaging through alliterations and grammar than a considered (modernist) search for expression. "Bucketed" conjures "broached," and it implies "kept" and "hid," but it's distracting, because it's slightly surrealist -- a little off, a bit distracting, but to no clear purpose -- and so it's slightly inappropriate. "Spate" slant-rhymes "splatter" or "sprinkle," but it's no clear exactly why she chose it: it's neither surrealist, nor grammatically motivated, nor clearly expressive. And it doesn't work with "dancing." Those are modernist criteria, but they apply because that is the mode that's enabled here even if it is put to conceptual purposes. On YouTube she reads like the breathless full audio recording of "Finnegans Wake" -- too fast for full comprehension, too unmodulated for expression. Those are conceptual gestures, but they can only work when the material is not modernist in origin.

Place's manifesto of conceptualism ("notes") is full of contradictions; it's a gathering of many sources and ideas, from Hal Foster to Lacan to Gödel. Not that such a project needs to be entirely consistent: but that book's misunderstandings of theory and its uses resonates with this book's misunderstanding of how expressive prose, and the gestures meant to undermine it, might work.… (meer)