PART 2 OF MY NOTES TOWARD AN AVANTGARDE MANIFESTO. . .
READ PART 1:
THE UNITEDSTATESIAN AVANTGARDE
I IDENTIFY AS A HATER OF CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE.
But it’s kind of amazing, when I look at it, how much current work I love & admire.
ONE OF THE BEST LIVING PROSE STYLISTS IS JACK HOUGHTELING.
It’s a shame nobody knows about his first novel Goodman (2022) or its fantastic follow-up Sunnyside (2023) published by Alien Buddha Press.
I found his book because I was scouring the Socrates on the Beach online literary journal seeing what dreck they published instead my story they rejected.
I was hate-reading an excerpt of Sunnyside and was immediately converted.
It’s about mythic-American football star Montague Yazzo,
And so existed Montague Yazzo, muscles long, talent, or so I treated it — and why, maybe, I sit here, organizing and levigating past particles — a fortuity of humor.
I recognize this is not fair. Not fair to the kids-of-cops-and-contractors. Not fair to those who passionately and diligently curse the trophy-ism of the fragile and educated and sensitized while working — hard as they can, with square hips and oval calves, with the power and explosivity of vegetable oil — to overcome sinking bodies. Most of those guys would have marched on Russia in January to have been two-time Class C New York State Player of the Year, and to them I would have happily, at a competitive bargain, sold off my noumenal-phenomenological goods.
It’s a slim book & it’s just bars on bars.
It’s not doing anything insane, visually, typographically; its real originality is in stripping away the filler of telling. Really, nobody writes prose like Jack.
He just sent me his new book THE FOREST,
—written in a wild 17th Century register; in the form of a reflection on the Centennial of the colony of New York: about the primordial stew of the United States before it solidified its identity, —
and I was STUNNED (here, about Willem Usselincx, the founder of the Dutch West India Company):
Willem Usselincx was a person of ministry, of idea and hardihood, of group maneuverings, of the globalscopic, of explicability.
And, too, of exile, reprobate, land snatch and cozenage, of the Templaric adventure’s final desultory teleologia, of witless defeat after witless conquest.
What might one call the postulate under which things have been too protractedly endured (and, within the temporal hull, too much), begging for either superior sufferance, silent sufferance - falsely transcribed, though leaden, as none at all - or death? And what do exhibitors of silent sufferance pursue? Tergiversation from expiry - or, its more beauteous sibling, conversance, wakefulness. That distinct Walloon belief in the matrimony of movement, revelation and ignorance (and its deliverance from sorrow); that movement of Code and Charter, sagacious, formal, monied and fatherly - drifts and actuations that you, Men of of the Colony, tektons, might apprehend - that so necessitates power. The animal wants it, the sapien knows and values it, and the corporate minister digests it, and with it the very irration one puts toward reproduction, oblation and Seideling, goes, instead, toward that punctilious assimilation of mind and action we might called placemaking.
WHEW!, CHEW ON THAT, FUCKERS. . .
WHAT I MEAN BY THE FILLER OF TELLING,
from Jonathan Franzen’s most recent novel Crossroads (2021):
The sky broken by the bare oaks and elms of New Prospect was full of moist promise, a pair of frontal systems grayly colluding to deliver a white Christmas. . .
Indeed, she was sagless, pouchless, flabless, lineless, an apparition of vitality in a snug paisley sleeveless dress, her hair naturally blond and boyishly short, her hands boyishly small and square. . .
did she know how gut-punchingly, faith-testingly, androgynously adorable she looked to him like that?
It was 2:52 when Frances came bounding up to him, like a boy, full of bounce.
As he was getting into the Fury, a single, floppy snowflake, the first of the multitude the sky had promised all day, came to rest on his forehead and dissolved in itself.
OK!, so we get a very, First-time-I’m-writing-a-story opening with the weather: there is the nice little phrase there, “grayly colluding”. . .
and then we get, and I don’t mean to go all PAUSE on Mr. Franzen,
but in the first 15 pages of the book, the woman the pastor main character is horny for is described as boyish 3 times!! and I just skimmed! there’s undoubtedly more!,
unless that is laying the groundwork for an odd twist of his predilections (I don’t know, I can’t get passed the second chapter of this book), this is DISTRACTING, unnecessary, writing. . .
and then he ends with a lyrical snowflake moment; can we ABOLISH the lyrical snowflake moment, PLZ?
U guys are too interested in Joyce’s “The Dead” : it is a very nice story, but it need not influence us NO MORE, folks. . .
Franzen is a nice little writer, too, —I’ve read most of his books with pleasure, I don’t hate on him, other than the fact from everything I’ve heard he seems very personally distasteful, —;
he diluted many of the more interesting things happening in his post-modern milieu and he sold a lot of books, boon to him! but this is about the avantgarde: Franzen is definitively NOT a way forward, and if you are following him,
you’re gonna follow him right into a ditch of yesterday’s otiosity. . .
SUNNYSIDE SHOWS US THAT THERE ARE MYRIAD WAYS TO AVANTGARDE.
Mauro Javier Cardenas, evolving Thomas Bernhard,
>—who seems to be a huge influence on much, current, Unitedstatesian prose: some people, like MJC use Bernhard good, some people I won’t mention b/c I know them animuslessly, I just think their work is irrelevant:
are doing it tritely,
it is such a heady intellectual mode that you actually have to be able to think well to pull it off; & Bernhard’s funny, too, in a heavyjoke way,
it’s like what T.S. Eliot said about Milton, he was too sui-generis to be a good influence;
I don’t think Bernhard is the way forward for us. . ., —>
in 3 excellent novels, is concerned with showing us how to think differently thru style;
his latest, the wickedly prescient American Abductions (2024, Dalkey Archive) wants to know,
what do you really think buried underneath all the artificial responses the world has already given you?;
what is your real response to what the world calls trauma?;
his torrential sentences are captivating & propulsive,
I didn’t tell him I had forgotten about my nephew, or that it had been months since my sister had called me and said she wanted to send her son Felipe across the border before he was shot or kidnapped in San Salvador can you imagine if I had changed my number due to a wireless switch your line for free special, for instance, you didn’t talk to your sister again after she called you about Felipe, Antonio says, I love my sister, Elsi says, of course, Antonio says, I love my sister and I know that’s what I’m supposed to say because she’s my sister, Elsi says, but I say I love her because I do love her, even though she was taken away by the American abductors when I was still little. . .
YOU CAN’T COMPLAIN ABOUT CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN LIT WHEN YOU READ LUCY IVES.
Her Life is Everywhere (2022), published by Greywolf, is one of the most fun books I’ve ever read in my life.
It’s full of fake writing: one of my favorite genres; an old tradition of medieval forgery, picked up by Rabelais, then Don Quixote, expanded on by Sterne, popularized by Borges and eventually bequeathed to Bolaño,
(who casts a large shadow on all the most interesting contemporary literature, it seems).
Here’s the closing lines; we’ve been reading the books in Erin’s bookbag, including her novel draft and the novel she’s doing a dissertation on,
Erin was in the park now. She stretched out in the wet grass. A translation. This was what she sought. A passage and a way. What, having nothing, Erin possessed. The mere present. Life Is Everywhere, she thought. Not a bad title. Now Erin is asleep. We cannot reach her. So let her rest, for soon there will be much for her to do. But someone is still speaking. Who is writing this book? A funny question yet not entirely unwarranted. Some words have gathered in this narrow space, common and humane. A magic circle forms around an anomalous day that occurred years ago and really did occur.
SUNNYSIDE, AMERICAN ABDUCTIONS, AND LIFE IS EVERYWHERE ARE ALL SMALL PRESS BOOKS.
Collectively they have 27 Amazon reviews (3 of which are mine).
Would these books have a massive readership if these writers were famous in a persona extralibrus way? Obviously. I will also concede that’s very difficult to achieve, and something many people don’t want. . .
also, that it is easier to garner a larger readership with the machinery of Big Publishing behind you.
But don’t get it twisted, just because something is on a small press don’t make it automatically good or interesting; just because something’s on a big press don’t make it dreck.
FSG puts out Catherine Lacey’s work and everything she does is interesting. I especially enjoyed her Biography of X (2023): which physically looks different than any other book on the hardcover table! That’s a mighty BOON!
Hogarth puts out Namwali Serpell whose novels, The Old Drift (2019) & The Furrows (2022) are both experimental & rich & readable in very different ways.
Random House did Same Bed Different Dreams (2023) by Ed Park: a big, postmodern novel, filled with pictures, false books, mystery, different fonts.
They also did Joshua Cohen’s Book of Numbers (2015): a fantastic book, one of the best of the century: a highly readable one from a writer who flirted with incomprehensibility in his Witz (2010) and came around to easily readable comedies in Moving Kings (2017) and The Netanyahus (2021):
whose victory of the Pulitzer Prize once again proves that the best way to win a major prize is to write ~difficultly~ for a while, unnoticed, then collect your laurels for what is a decidedly minor work; see James (2024),
or Faulkner as the all-time example winning 2 National Book Awards for 2 of his worst books;
the truth is, the public loves a hint of aesthetic shock without, you know, real extremeness: The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2008); Trust (2020); The Rabbit Hutch (2023); Franzen!
I mean I LOVE Oscar Wao; the first time I read it I was 20 and I read for 14 hours straight; I also really like The Rabbit Hutch; I think Trust, you know, appeals to a certain kind of regular person. . . but these books ain’t Finnegans Wake.
BUT ALSO, like: the contemporary landscape, even domestically, ain’t as bleak & brittle as some of U opine. . .
VANGUARDA PORNÔ LATINOAMERICANA
IF YOU WANNA FIND SOMETHING INNOVATIVE, LOOK IN LATIN AMERICA.
What the mid-20th Century Latin American writers did with the influence of modernism is breathtaking:
Bomarzo (1962), Hopscotch (1963), Paradiso (1966), The Obscene Bird of Night (1970), Fluxo-Foema (1970), Three Trapped Tigers (1971), Pedra do Reino (1971), Cobra (1972), Avalovara (1973), I, the Supreme (1974), The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975), Terra Nostra (1975). . . and I’ll add Texaco (1992) to this list b/c I fucking love that book.
Really anything translated by Gregory Rabassa, Helen Lane, Suzanne Jill Levine, Edith Grossman.
I’m reading Terra Nostra (TR: Margaret Sayers Peden) right now: it’s so fucking good; here’s a riff, in a chapter where Phillip the Second is playing, dangerously, with heresy, and we get Joseph’s voice, saying he was the one who betrayed Jesus:
I, forgotten, scorned, cuckolded, you think I’m not going to betray him?, you think I’m not going to give myself the pleasure of being the one, the very carpenter who with his old, callused hands, a simple man of the people, crude but honest, the one who held the saw and cut two planks and joined them together to make a cross and nailed them firmly so they would bear the weight of a body? Thirty pieces of silver. I’d never seen so much money. I hefted the weight of the pretty pouch as lost in the crowd of curiosity seekers I watched him die on the cross I had built.
And next year we’ll finally get a good English translation of the most successful avant-garde novel of all time Vastlands: The Crossing by João Guimarães Rosa. . . which is called Grande Sertão: Veredas (1955) in Portuguese.
It might be the most difficult book in Brasilian literature, but it’s also one of the most widely read & beloved by regular people interested in good books.
THERE’S AN EXTREMISM IN THE LATIN AMERICAN VANGUARD,
in perversity, in myth, in history, in darkness,
which is more appealing to me, personally, than the brainiaCACAl Bernhardians;
. . . —> some dude me & Sean had on the pod, recently, was talking to us about he don’t like Faulkner and that the Latin American Boom literature is saturated with Faulkner, and he’s right,
I think you have to have a sense of illegitimacy & periphery to really FUCK w/ Faulkner on a deep level, to see his GOATedness. . .
and illegitimacy & periphery is, to some extent, THE Latin American condition,
it’s no surprise to see his influence abdicated Stateside: why would the HEGEMON be interested. . . ?, —>
I mean, the Latin Americans are HORNY, but it’s hot as fuck down there, & have you seen what the people look like?
Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season (2020) translated by Sophie Hughes and published by New Directions, is a book I recommend to almost everyone who is interesting in reading shit more nutritious than Taylor Jenkins Reid.
It’s a twisted, hilarious, psychologically claustrophobic Mexican murder mystery written in chapters with no paragraph breaks. It’s brilliant.
I gave my copy to somebody; so I’ll quote you from the opening lines of her novella Paradais (2022),
It was all fatboy’s fault, that’s what he would tell them. It was all because of Franco Andrade and his obsession with Señora Marián. Polo just did what he was told, followed orders. Fatboy was completely crazy about her, and Polo had seen firsthand how for weeks the kid had talked about nothing but screwing her, making her his, whatever the cost; the same shit over and over like a broken record, his eyes vacant and bloodshot from the alcohol and his fingers sticky with cheesy powder, which the fat pig only ever licked clean once he’d scarfed the whole jumbo bag of chips. . . I’ll fuck her like this, he’d drawl. . . then I’ll flip her on all fours and bang her like this. . .
Monica Ojeda is an Ecuadorian writer translated by Sarah Booker and published by Coffee House Press.
I LOVED her Jawbone (2022) & Nefando (2023).
They’re thrilling, horny, interneted out, visually various, experimental children of The Obscene Bird of Night.
It’s like what you think you’d be getting from Rejection (2024) based on the chatter.
I’ll quote from the ending of Nefando, after several pages of creepy drawings by a character, entitled, Exhibition of My Ruins,
outside I heard only crickets, the world seemed to have been turned off too, and I felt safe in the company of strangers and in being one myself. After all what did I know about the consciousness in front of me? What did I know about my own consciousness? And the most terrible thing was sensing that I was like those shadows, anchored in a continuous present, without any expectations, without any tomorrow, just that cave, right? The question is: Do you think there are words for this darkness? I imagine you have an opinion, and now’s a good time to say it. Are there words for all the silence yet to come?
One of the most avantgarde world writers who hasn’t been published in English yet is Bruna Kalil Othero.
Her novel O Presidente Pornô (2023), or, The Porno President is being translated right now by Adrian McKinley.
The novel was a big hit in Brasil.
It’s a genre-melding, linguistically, typographically, structurally inventive, lascivious satire of Brasilian political history;
I mean, there’s a lot of wild fucking going on in this book.
It’s a comedy in the irreverent tradition of Brasilian avantgarde hero Oswald de Andrade mixed with Hilda Hilst,
(Bruna is writing Hilda’s biography).
Here’s a section about the childhood of the President in question, Braulio (my translation),
years pass. everything grows: legs, hair, rage. puberty hit little Braulio hard, he developed an absolute adoration for his phallus, the protagonist of many of his poems. robust, firm, constantly hard, and despite being very small, he beat off his member dozens of times daily since he was 11 years old. the orgasm he reached from petting his wand was unequaled, it was the best part of his day. it made him feel like a full grown man.
I have no doubt The Porno President will find a Unitedstatesian publisher, which will be further proof of just what a good moment we are in.
I WONDER WHERE MY BOOK TROPICÁLIA (2023) FITS INTO ALL THIS. . .
I think of it as a Latin American book; I mean, it takes place in Rio de Janeiro, Brasil (ever heard of it?!?),
but I go into McNally Jackson (one of the few stores that still carries my book),
I walk past the small, nicely procurable Latin American Literature section where I see books by SEVERAL writers who I KNOW, for a FACT are Unitedstatesian, writing in English,
and go over to the bottom shelf of the vast wilderness of American Literature to find Tropicália (where I pull my book out and toss it on top of the recommendations table),
all because my name is HAROLD ROGERS.
I mean, my book is horny, if not outrageously so,
Rachel pressed against the wall, me behind her, clutching her waist tight, kissing her neck, dripping sweat in that wild bathroom. I wasn’t wearing a condom and without meaning to, I came inside her.
I go back & forth on how avantgarde my first book is;
<—I mean, I was 25 when I wrote it, 26 when it got published (despite LITERALLY NEVER being mentioned in a Young Male Writer conversation);
there’s only so much of the tradition you can understand at that age: I was still learning how to write & read, (as I am NOW!), —>
I think, ultimately, it is a fairly conventional fastly-plotted novel;
I think the novels it is most like are The Bluest Eye (1970) and Carmen Laforet’s Nada (1943), but it has a much twistier plot than both those books,
but there are several games within the book; like, there’s 6 total first person voices over 12 chapters and they’re in 2 distinct punctuation lineages to trace the family heredity:
the characters who use the em-dash to designate dialogue; and the characters who use unmarked dialogue. . .,
—though from some of the questions I got about “not using quotation marks” in the few interviews I did, you WOULD THINK I DID write Finnegans Wake, —
also the book is exactly 80,500 words in 3 parts: the 2nd part is almost exactly HALF the word count of the first part and the 3rd part is almost exactly HALF the word count of the 2nd part,
the book is mathematically designed to speed up as you read it. . .,
also, the only punctuation used is “! ? . ,” and the dash for dialogue: I wanted to prove I could write a book with the barest tools before earning the Write to do this shit: ;:. . ., —>
and there’s a fake family tree at the beginning of the book; I’ve never seen THAT anywhere else!,
—we get the family tree from Lucia’s perspective, and we find out, like her, that she’s been being lied to. . .
Here’s Lucia speaking, in the last chapter, after her dying mother tells her she loves her:
She loved me. I wondered if she really felt that, or if she had an inkling that nonexistence would be colder than she imagined, and so she was trying to cling to warmth while she could. She loved me. What did I know about love? Even the possibility of it troubled me because feelings were so fickle, and if my feelings changed, my opinions changed, often one day to the next, what was capable of grounding a sustained, permanent feeling toward another person? Because that was love. It had to be permanent, or it didn’t exist. Because death was permanent. And only another strong permanence could counteract the dark eliminator awaiting us. But you didn’t have to do anything to die, that just happened. Presumably, there were people unworthy of love. Because didn’t you have to earn love? You had to show up everyday, be good, be worthy, and if you messed up, unfortunately, you were cut off. That didn’t seem right to me because people were so falterable, and the kind of love that mathematized, counted comforts and culps was meretricious and wrong. You owed other people love, a kind that didn’t waver, and you probably owed it to everybody in the world, and though that was impossible, if there was someone I irrevocably owed it to, it was my dying mother.
Like, BUY TROPICÁLIA OR I’M GONNA GO BROKE. . .
THEM EUROPEAN BOYS THO. . . (EYES EMOJI)
I GET SO EXCITED ABOUT ALMOST EVERYTHING I READ,
that my allegiance & love is constantly shifting, various.
But the 2 living writers I’ve gotten the most consistent pleasure from are António Lobo Antunes & Mathias Énard.
I kinda feel that Antunes should’ve won the Nobel Prize that went to Jon Fosse. . . ; they’re not dissimilar writers, formally, but Antunes is much hotter, being from that angry tiny globally historically viciously influential Lusophone sliver of the Iberian peninsula;
and Antunes got the sub-equatorial experience because he was sent to Angola, right out of college, where he worked literally delivering babies in the middle of a war zone;
Portugal’s colonial history, the Salazar dictatorship, & the experience of that war haunt his writing.
My favorite works of his are The Inquisitors Manual (1997) and The Return of the Caravels (1988), and his masterpiece might be Fado Alexandrino (1987), but the dude just will not stop writing, he got 20+ novels,
Dalkey Archive just published Midnight is Not in Everyone’s Reach (2025) translated by Elizabeth Lowe; I’ll quote from that,
there must have been a path here, if I am still there will be stairs, if I am still there will be a handrail to reach the shellfish and the drinks instead of spiders and feces of feral cats, once in the big pine forest I saw a feral cat running with a bird in its mouth, which disappeared into the bushes, here they call them ginetos, I never walked so fast as on that day and when I got home, why the hell do they call them ginetos, I couldn’t speak, my father
—Did something happen girl?
of course I thought of all of you, new shirt, and creased pants, in tatters, the shoes from Lisbon ruined, even if I wanted to go back, and I thought of going back, I couldn’t, I always said I wouldn’t go to the war, it was me, I couldn’t see the sense of it. . .
Antunes is completely GOATed. You must read him.
MATHIAS ÉNARD HAS THE MOST VARIOUS, READABLE AVANT-GARDE WORK IN THE ENTIRE WORLD RIGHT NOW.
I’m not gonna quote any of his work because I just did a long piece on his major novels, but his genius is in reveling in PLAY, and yet being insistently political & HUMAN thru his form, attitude, & vision.
He is a POET, HISTORIAN, TEACHER, and SCIENTIST. All while spinning a good yarn and being hilarious.
Though there’s a similar kind of brainiac who don’t fuck with Antunes or Énard; I heard one of these guys describe Énard as “just a bourgeois French guy”,
I think what they miss is the sub-equatorial SUN haunting both these writers;
I mean, Énard’s biggest touchstone is the Thousand and One Nights. . .
Antunes had his experience in Africa and it seems like Énard had extensive experience in the Middle East (he teaches Arabic),
and they brought back transformed ideas about Time, Love, & Empire that I find intoxicating. . .
THE MOST AESTHETICALLY DISCOMFITING YET PLEASURABLE BOOK,
I’ve read in the last few years is SCHATTENFROH (2025) by Michael Lentz, translated by Max Lawton.
I seen that they got almost 1000 pre-orders of this obscure 1001 page book. Why?
Because there’s hype around it! People might actually read it because they’re doing a great job motivating people to buy it: to read it.
They’re not just letting the existence of the book speak for itself, because BOOKS CAN’T TALK!
I begged Deep Vellum for an ARC because I wanted to be the first person to write a review of the English translation, and I was.
So I won’t tell you too much about it other than it is EVERYTHING you could want out of an avant-garde novel.
READING SCHATTENFROH HAD A PROFOUND EFFECT ON ME, PERSONALLY.
I had just sold my second novel, HUMPTY DUMPTY (2026) to FSG:
it was certainly much more ambitious than my first, approaching avantgarde, I was thrilled with it.
But after reading SCHATTENFROH, I realized my paltry little book couldn’t compete, so I rewrote the entire thing from cover to cover.
Because I’m trying to COMPETE!
And that’s what YOU should be trying to do. The books I mention here are just part of my personal canon.
That’s what canon-building should be: PERSONAL.
The personal canon that will be canonical in the end, is the one that is responsible for producing the most aesthetically successful and influential art work of a generation.
Your work is a failure if it doesn’t influence subsequent work; and the strength of the influenced work reflects back on your own.
If Great writing is producing thin bullshit, then the writing really can’t be that Great.
KRASZNAHORKAI IS REALLY GOOD TOO.
His Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming (2019) is my favorite. . .
The Most Secret Memory of Men (2023) by Mohammed Mbougar Sarr is awesome. . .
The Red Handler (2024) by Johan Hardstadt made me laugh really hard. . .
HAVE I GIVEN U GUYS ENOUGH BOOKS?!
ARE U TRYING TO SAY SOMETHING, HAROLD?
YES!
This is the BEST TIME in human history to be a reader;
if that’s true, it must also be the BEST TIME in human history, artistically, to be a writer.
It has never been physically easier to write.
I’m using a fucking stupid computer to type this!
Sterne had to have a quill ink pen, and he was sick as HELL!!! with tuberculosis.
Coughing up a damn lung while dipping his pen in expensive ink.
But he said, Fuck this cough, I’m GRINDING.
NOBODY HAS EVER LEARNED TO WRITE AT AN MFA.
You learn to write, <—and you learn to write INTERESTING shit, —> by reading the people who are writing INTERESTING shit.
I know there’s some people that think that to preserve your own unique voice you should avoid contact with anything other than your own work. . .
if you think that, OK. . . you do you, man. . . just know,
especially in literature,
every interesting piece of work EVER has been based on the work that came before it,
and now we have more opportunities than ever in HUMAN HISTORY to be influenced by good work.
What are we gonna do with it? Watch TV?
READ!, MOTHERFUCKERS!, WRITE!
I don’t even own clothes fancy enough to live up to this text. Good thing I'm not wearing any! THANK YOU SO MUCH for reading me with such attention, generosity and boldness. Um beijo vanguardista, meu colega de escola literária!
What are your ops on Clarice Lispector ?