Spring 2013,
Web Issue 15
Spring 2015, Web Issue 17
Spring 2014, Web Issue 16
Spring 2013, Web Issue 15
Spring 2012, Web Issue 14
Spring 2010, Web Issue 13
Summer 2009, Web Issue 12
Winter 2008, Extra Issue 11
Spring 2008, Web Issue 10
Spring 2007, Web Issue 9
Spring 2006, Web Issue 8
Summer 2004, Web Issue 7
Winter 2004, Web Issue 6
Summer 2003, EXTRA #2
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A multidisciplinary
journal in the
arts and politics
mailbox
FLASHLINKS!
Galerie
Paintings & Prints
Poetry & Prose
Virtual Facsimiles
Founding Editors:
Joe Brennan
Carlo Parcelli
Contributing Editors:
Bradford Haas
Rosalie Gancie
Cathy Muse
Mark Scroggins
Jim Angelo
Web Editors:
JR Foley
Rosalie Gancie
Nicole Foley
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In order to get started, he went
to live alone on an island and
shot himself. His blood, unable
to resist a final joke, splattered
the cabin wall in a pattern that
read: It is important to begin
when everything is already over.
This maxim, published on the
cabin wall between an outdated
calendar and a freshwater fish
chart, would have pleased him.
He had once begun a story about
the raising of Lazarus, in which
Jesus, having had the dead man
dragged from the tomb and
unwrapped, couldn't seem to get
the hang of bringing him around.
There was an awful stink, the
Jews crowding around were
getting sick, and Jesus, sweating,
was saying: Heh heh, bear with
me, folks! Won't be a minute!
If I can just get it started, the
rest'll come easy!
– Robert Coover
“Beginnings”
All
essays, poetry, fiction, and
artwork are copyrighted in the
names of the authors and
artists,
to whom all rights revert.
Issue Index
David Jones Conference
March 29 & 30, 2012
J.R.
Foley
Country Valley Press
Carlo Parcelli:
Book /
Author page
Wayne Pounds
Book
/ Author
page
Eric Rosenbloom
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triptych “We
All Jump” by Pilar Coover
intro
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Larry McCaffery
THE RECOGNITIONS
An Editorial Collaboration with
Robert Coover’s “Party Talk
(Unheard Conversations at
Gerald’s Party)”
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CAROLE MASO
The President, the Pope, the
Pioneers and the
Polygamists
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Stéphane Vanderhaeghe
RC//DC
Robert Coover & the Strange
Case of Dr. Chen
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Carlo Parcelli
SYLLOGISM:
Or is
the internal combustion
engine an example of
‘bad science‘?
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In this
issue…
ROBERT COOVER
has been a major
American novelist for nearly 50 years.
He has won many awards, but his great success has been in subverting and reinventing narrative, then vivisecting his reinventions to find new ways to put the same narrative together to tell a different story, and on and on. The objective is not so much formal experimentation with new ways to tell any story but the probing and eviscerating of folk tales, fairy tales, and mythologies people tell themselves and each other — and institutions political, religious, commercial, and/or “cultural” tell everyone — to explain what in the world cannot be explained. But I get ahead of myself.
.
Coover’s
first novel, The Origin of the Brunists,
recounts (largely in terms of Zola-like Naturalism)
how a small Kentucky mining town recovers from a
devastating mine collapse by starting a new
post-Christian religion founded on the mutterings of
the disaster’s sole survivor. Since before that
novel was published in 1966 Coover started preparing
a sequel — many times interrupted by new novels and
stories. But in September 2013 that sequel, The
Brunist Day of Wrath, will finally see the
light of day.
Last
spring Brown University celebrated Coover’s
retirement after 30 years of teaching with a grand
finale of the several Unspeakable Practices
festivals Coover has organized over the years for
writers of all kinds, print and/or electronic, who
engage their imaginations in “vanguard narrative.”
At the same time The
Review of Contemporary Fiction published
a “
Robert Coover Festschrift” to complement the
Brown celebration. With this issue FlashPøint brings
together participants from both celebrations to throw
our own, ongoing Robert Coover celebration.
For
those less familiar with Coover the man we offer a
choral introduction from Ben
Marcus, Bradford
Morrow, Mary
Caponegro, and Joanna
Scott.
For
a quick introduction to Coover the writer there is “The Chicago
Interview”.
Looking
forward to The Brunist Day of Wrath,
Stéphane Vanderhaeghe, who organized the Coover
Festschrift for The Review of Contemporary
Fiction, examines The Origin of the
Brunists as the end as well as the beginning of
Coover’s explorations of myth, both Christian and
American, in “The
End at L(e)ast, Perhaps … .”
If
Brunists is the beginning and the end
(perhaps), certainly The Public Burning is
Robert Coover’s most notorious novel. Not only is it
narrated by a Vice President Richard Nixon who
develops an irresistible lech for Ethel Rosenberg that
takes them both into the Sing Sing electric chair for
a climax before the climax, but it also features a
superhero Uncle Sam who develops a lech of his own for
the Veep whose climax, no doubt, enraged the mundane
Nixon’s lawyers to try to kill the novel legally
before it reached print. Coover tells his own tale of
the
misadventures of his manuscript, to which
Elisabeth Ly Bell adds a publication chronology and a
bibliography of critical essays and books on of
“The Notorious Hot Potato”.
German
scholar Elisabeth Ly Bell has herself written
extensively about Robert Coover’s work, including
essays here about the novels Pinocchio
in Venice, Stepmother,
and The
Grand Hotels (of Joesph Cornell).
For a
ravishing change-of-pace in the heart of this Robert
Coover celebration, we wish also to celebrate the
spectacular fiber art of Pilar
Sans Coover, who has developed a unique art
form of her own throughout the years of her marriage
to Bob and the raising of their three children. We
offer a few samples in this issue, and refer the
delighted to much more displayed on her personal website.
Of Robert Coover’s many works one of the funniest
is his send-up of Agatha Christie mysteries – if
murder at an orgy that doesn’t quit can be called
a “cozy” – Gerald’s Party. The exuberant
Larry McCaffery, one of the first to explore
Coover’s fiction critically, offers a sort-of
back-channel collaboration with Gerald’s creator
called “Party Talk”, with an introduction winking
at a favorite novel by one of Coover’s friends,
William Gaddis,
“THE RECOGNITIONS: An Editorial Collaboration
with Robert Coover’s “Party Talk (Unheard
Conversations at Gerald’s Party“.
At the Brown celebration last May a number of
writers saluted Robert Coover by reading from
their own work passages that explore and play with
fiction much in the spirit of Coover’s fictions.
Jonathan Baumbach reprises his salute here with
the opening chapter of his novel, YOU,
or The Invention of Memory. Carole
Maso offers a chapter from Mother
& Child. Michael Joyce’s title, “Someone Else’s
Story (After Robert Coover)”, speaks for
itself.
Robert Coover has taught hundreds and hundreds —
well over a thousand, at least, probably thousands
— of writing students over more than 45 years. One
of them, Maya Sonenberg, has been especially
fascinated by one of Coover’s short stories, “The
Babysitter,” which created a hypertext tale a good
25 years or so before hypertext fiction was
invented online. So she tells us about it in , “Not-Knowing
and the Proliferation of Plot, or On
Reading ‘The Babysitter’ for the 34th Time”.
Mary Caponegro was not a student of Coover’s but
he mentored her all the same (see her tribute).
In “Spanking
the Form” (a play on the title of Coover’s
novella Spanking the Maid) she explores
more of Coover’s short fictions.
While Coover taught in the University of Iowa’s
Fiction Writers Workshop, he experimented with
film as well as literary form. One result is On
a Confrontation in Iowa City covering
an anti-Vietnam War demonstration against a
recruiter from Dow Chemical, manufacturer of
napalm, in December 1967. He deployed a number of
cinematographers, himself included, then assembled
and edited the coverage into a documentary that is
quite a bit more than a mere chronicle. The film
has been preserved by the University and also
featured on YouTube. Access to both sources is
provided here.
Film has long been a special fascination of Robert
Coover. One of his collections of short stories is
A Night at the Movies, or, You Must Remember
This. He has also written novellas
projecting Charlie Chaplin (Charlie in the
House of Rue, also available in A
Child Again) and his own Western, Ghost
Town. The Adventures of Lucky Pierre:
Director’s Cut” is an epic skinflick. And
most recently he produced Noir, about a
cheap private eye named Philip M. Noir, at which
Toby Olson looks “Out
of the Corner of the Eye.”
As a special treat Stéphane Vanderhaeghe, in
addition to his essay on The Origin of the
Brunists, takes a fresh perspective on one
of the least-discussed but most provocative titles
in the Coover oeuvre, Dr.
Chen’s Amazing Adventure.”
And not inappropriate for a celebration of a
Robert Coover who delights in playing with fairy
tale and Christian myth, we include the video of a
2012 Capital Fringe Festival production of JR
Foley’s 45-minute one-act “surcomedy” Jesus
le Momo. It’s 1970, D.C. A priest’s
“wife” – at odds with her husband – the priest,
and communal housemates hold a prayer meeting,
speaking in tongues. Dead mad poet-playwright
Antonin Artaud suddenly materializes, demanding
they assist him in his resurrection – without God!
From
Rosalie Gancie we have
Fish and Chicks, a surreal seascape of
whimsical collages.
Carlo Parcelli has
also contributed four new items.
First we have Five New
Monologues according to the Gospel of Simon
Kananaios which expand upon the 88
monologues published as The Canaanite Gospel
by Country Valley Press in 2012AD (ISBN
9780982019627).
Included are an
introductory monologue by Kananaios’s scribe, Hilarius
Grammateus and the lengthy monologue by Joseph
Barsabbas the chemist behind the miracles,
mass hallucinations and drug trips of the Apostles
and their followers. The later monologue requires
two and one half hours to perform and has only
been staged once in its entirety in the holding
tank at the Roxbury Correctional Facility in
Hagerstown, MD.
Parcelli’s second
offering is an essay simply entitled
Syllogism. It is an attempt to lay out in
short form controversial theories that have
perplexed and angered people who are otherwise
ill-equipped to understand or comment on them. By
elaborating more fully in the essay, Mr. Parcelli
as he has stated in numerous affidavits hopes to
be ridiculed by a better class of academic than in
the past, at least by a few pedantic shits with a
rudimentary knowledge of what he’s talking about.
His third piece is
a hagiography of the comic Doug Stanhope, quite
simply the greatest comedian of his age:
“I have hooker money and my life is still a
shambles!”, Doug Stanhope and the Drunken Grope
for the Best of All Possible Worlds.
There are also
sidebars of unrestrained praise for comic greats
Lenny Bruce, [Joe Ancis], Richard Pryor and Bill
Hicks.
Lastly, Parcelli
tells the forlorn and often violent tale, of the
censorship of performances of the monologues
comprising the Gospel of Simon Kananaios:
The Gospel According to Simon Kananaois Gets the
Bum’s Rush: Literature in a World of Neo-Liberal
Sissies.
Venue after venue
controlled by neo-Liberal weenies found the
monologues too radical and intellectually
transgressive for the sissy culture that the
self-censoring now institutionally dominate.
Lastest, but never
least, Joe Brennan gives us the newest portion of
his Work in Progress, entitled:
“…..allyougulliblegabba-
blegurootablesgeni-
ulessnessavoidinth-
eboidnthefactuswitz-
singinmidheadnhartz…..”
The first person who can pronounce that title gets
to telephone Joe in Italy and recite it to him!
We are eager
to hear from you, especially about this
issue, so please tell us what you think: [email protected]!
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