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John James left his native city of Cardiff for Bristol and then Cambridge where he has lived and worked for many years. He was a founding editor of The Resuscitator in Bristol and became one of the group closely associated with The English Intelligencer in Cambridge. His work embraces everyday life, the visual arts, philosophical speculation, hommage, place, food, love, memory and loss. His Collected Poems appeared from Salt in 2002 and a new book, In Romsey Town, has just been published in the summer of 2011 by Equipage. He is currently working on a new collection for Oystercatcher Press.

Redell Olsen’s publications include; ‘Book of the  Fur’ (Rempress, 2000), ‘Secure Portable Space’ (Reality Street, 2004)  and the collaboratively edited ‘Here Are My Instructions’ (Gefn Press,  2004). Her recent projects have involved texts for performance and film and include: ‘Newe Booke of  Copies’ (2009) and ‘Bucolic Picnic (or Toile de Jouy Camouflage)’  (2009) and ‘The Lost Swimming Pool’ (June 2010). From 2006-10 she was the editor of the online journal of How2, which publishes  modernist and innovative poetry and poetics by women writers.  Her recent poetry is available in ‘Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by UK  Women Poets’ (Shearsman, 2010) and forthcoming in ‘I’ll Drown My Book: ‘Conceptual  Writing by Women” (Les Figues Press, 2012). She is a  Director of the MA in Poetic Practice  at Royal
Holloway, University of London and one of the co-organisers of the POLYply reading series.

Ian Patterson teaches English Literature at Queens’ College, Cambridge. In earlier versions he was variously a Further Education Lecturer, second-hand bookseller, translator, editor, and cake-maker. Books this century include a translation of Proust’s Finding Time Again for Penguin, Guernica and Total War (Profile, 2007), Time to Get Here: new and selected poems (Salt, 2003) and The Glass Bell (Barque Press, 2009).

“Larry Neal once described riots as the process of grabbing hold of, taking control of, our collective history. Earlier this week, I started thinking that our version of that, our history, had been taken captive and was being held right in the centre of the city as a force of negative gravity keeping us out, and keeping their systems in place. Obviously I was wrong. Its not our history they’ve got stashed there – its a bullet, pure and simple, as in the actual content of the collective idea we have to live beneath.”

http://abandonedbuildings.blogspot.com/2011/08/letter-on-silence.html

“Day is not the only working poet to know better than to mistake art for labor, but to labor anyhow in her art and cite her reading. Yet nonetheless, this sourcing is where the joy is, in such a state of irreparability. It is a sort of co-authoring, experienced by someone, contradictorily, producing the poem alone. And so I return to the word ‘enthusiasm’, which I now also understand as an emphatic gratitude for literary and cultural inheritance, a broad repetition that formally recontextualizes.”

Download/read here. (And read Jean Day’s poem in CLR4 here.)

CLR5 contains a previously uncollected story by Donald Barthelme. Here’s how we came to publish it (by editor Boris Jardine).

I first heard about Donald Barthelme’s work on the New Yorker’s Out Loud podcast, in an interview with Louis Menand (available here). Menand describes Barthelme’s distinctive style, his status as a ‘postmodern’ writer, and talks in particular about an early short story ‘The Viennese Opera Ball’—a brilliant collage of technical medical information, lines culled from Hemingway and others, and an oblique account of the eponymous goings on. On Abebooks I found the copy of Contact magazine from 1962 with the story, and then, hooked, bought the beautiful Secker & Warburg collection. To understand what makes Barthelme so great, just listen to this reading of one of his most famous stories, ‘I bought a little city’, read by Donald Antrim and weirdly resonant with recent urban unrest.

With Menand’s careful exposition in mind—placing Barthelme firmly within the modernist tradition, by turns acerbic and uproarious, suspicious of consumer culture, riding the zeitgeist—I think the CLR’s short fiction is deeply Barthelmian. Lorqi Blinx’s ‘Cowards are Great’ (issue two) for example, hits plenty of those highs: unwillingness to dodge cultural references that are locally brilliant but will date; a Borgesian fidelity to the inner logic of the conceit; and, of course, wit. Rosie Šnajdr’s ‘The Cake Woman’ in issue one is also in this lineage. So while putting together issue 5 I began to wonder what had become of all Barthelme’s stories. On the one hand he was prolific, and wrote under pseudonyms. But, on the other, he’s incredibly well known, especially in the US, and his short fiction has been collected and republished many times. Could there be any ‘lost’ works? For some reason I had a feeling there might be.

At this point I found Jessamyn West’s excellent Barthelme fan site, containing mention of ‘The Ontological Basis of Two’. Here was an early story that appeared to have slipped through the net. It was printed in 1963 in a gentleman’s magazine called Cavalier (see above), under the pseudonym Michael Houston, and has circulated in photocopy and scan ever since. Again I was able to buy a copy of the magazine—a kind of sub-Playboy but full of intriguing investigative pieces, political comment and stories—and I eagerly read Barthelme’s piece.

Crucially, of course, it’s good. In fact it’s really good. Barthelme has many modes, but there are two broad categories and two constants: the categories are wild collage and deceptively straight narrative, the constants his beautifully turned sentences and penchant for repetition. This is the opening paragraph of ‘The Ontological Basis of Two’:

Peridot Concord was raised in a glass box by a Harvard professor and is as beautiful as money, as saucy as Hollandaise, as captivating as Pancho Villa. She is also sexless as a Senator. She likes to walk around in mostly her skin, the magnificent flesh tones, ranging from golden sienna to a sinister umber, filling the air with deadly radiation. You begin, perhaps, to see the outlines of the problem.

This is Type II Barthelme: the progression of the story is as linear as can be. And it’s vintage stuff; that last sentence in particular—measured, cool and perfectly rhythmical. The “flesh tones” are an example of the second tic I mentioned; they recur throughout the story, commodifying Peridot and giving her a mechanical aspect.

In Menand’s interview he stresses just how modish Barthelme was, and that’s in evidence in ‘The Ontological Basis of Two’. Peridot has been “raised in glass box”, i.e. a Skinner Box—a chamber designed for studying animal behaviour by B.F. Skinner in the 1940s. Clearly Barthelme was a keen reader of contemporary psychology, and was not impressed with what he found. ‘I bought a little city’, linked to above, is a parody of Skinner’s utopian novel Walden Two, and in ‘The Ontological Basis’ the behaviourist-Freudian complex comes under sustained attack. Barthelme was pretty up to the minute: in 1959 Noam Chomsky had published his famous review of Skinner’s Verbal Behaviour, effectively ending the behaviourists’ reign as chief interpreters of human psychology. Incidentally, Chomsky’s attack on behaviourism also contributed to the avant-garde via his famous grammatical but absurd sentence “Colourless green ideas sleep furiously” (later to be brilliantly parodied in a Fry & Laurie sketch). And maybe Barthelme’s pseudonym refers not only to his home town but to John Huston’s 1962 film Freud: The Secret Passion (1962).

Psychoanalysis makes its entrance early in the story, when we learn that Peridot, “sexless as a Senator”, can only be inspired to lust by her father, the experimentalist who engineered her sterile upbringing. The remainder of the story recounts the narrator’s attempts to rewire Peridot in order to get at her “swelling, young, Maidenform bosom”…

Having secured rights from the Wylie Agency and the Barthelme estate, to both of whom huge thanks are due, I transcribed and typeset the story, first in this issue’s prose section. Then, thinking of the Chicago Review’s excellent recent cover image, which wraps around to great effect—a proud boxer on one side, his slain foe on the other—I put together a cover featuring a joyous baby safely sealed in a Skinner Box, proud parent (or is that ‘experimenter’?) looking on:

(via Peter Gizzi and http://kasamaproject.org/2011/08/09/britain-a-poet-speaks-truth/)

“Over tea, he showed me a new poem. It began with the almost-nothing of ‘A wine glass of water on / the windowsill’, only to spread out into thistle seeds, teasels, chaffinches, wading birds, south doors, sunlit tombs, and rabbits ‘kindling in their / burrows’—in short, the whole country we had just visited.”

“For Cavell, questions about philosophy are central to the study of philosophy. “What can I know?” must be intimately connected to “why should I care about what I can know?” This is one of the many reasons why his work has always stood in such stark opposition to that of his colleagues in the Anglo-American philosophical academy. Philosophy, in his terms, is therapeutic. It is bound up (or interchangeable) with literature, psychoanalysis and the care of the self.”

Download here.

“Remarkably, Wordsworth’s recall of his earlier, intense and often frightening Nature experiences, which made him describe childhood as a heroic age, now comes to his aid. He sees those experiences as a providential pedagogy preparing him internally for later identity shocks. Nature’s return via these recollections also returns to him his identity at this disorienting moment. He recovers his vocation of poet by removing from it the slur of otium, of ignoble leisure, envisioning his task that of assisting Nature, its role in human development at this turbulent time. In a period marked by the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and the Napoleonic wars (as well as industrial side effects such as urbanization and stimulus-flooding), his poetry would be devoted to preventing schismatic schemes of social reform.”

Download the .pdf here.