Alexander Kluge: Temple of the Scapegoat: Opera Stories (2018)

“Combining fact and fiction, each of the one hundred and two tales of Alexander Kluge’s Temple of the Scapegoat (dotted with photos of famous operas and their stars) compresses a lifetime of feeling and thought: Kluge is deeply engaged with the opera and an inventive wellspring of narrative notions. The titles of his stories suggest his many turns of mind: “Total Commitment,” “Freedom,” “Reality Outrivals Theater,” “The Correct Slowing-Down at the Transitional Point Between Terror and an Inkling of Freedom,” “A Crucial Character (Among Persons None of Whom Are Who They Think They Are),” and “Deadly Vocal Power vs. Generosity in Opera.” An opera, Kluge says, is a blast furnace of the soul, telling of the great singer Leonard Warren who died onstage, having literally sung his heart out. Kluge introduces a Tibetan scholar who realizes that opera “is about comprehension and passion. The two never go together. Passion overwhelms comprehension. Comprehension kills passion. This appears to be the essence of all operas, says Huang Tse-we: she also comes to understand that female roles face the harshest fates. Compared to the mass of soprano victims (out of 86,000 operas, 64,000 end with the death of the soprano), the sacrice of tenors is small (out of 86,000 operas 1,143 tenors are a write-off).””

Translated by Isabel Fargo Cole, Donna Stonecipher, and Martin Chalmers
Publisher New Directions Publishing, New York, 2018
ISBN 9780811227483, 0811227480
xii+193 pages

Reviews: Publishers Weekly (2018), Kirkus Review (2018).

Publisher
WorldCat

HTML

Constance DeJong: Modern Love (1975–)

Constance DeJong performs recitations from her novel Modern Love at Western Front, Vancouver, 20 Jan 1978. The segment up to 1m23s has no audio.

“Constance DeJong‘s long-neglected, late-1970s novel, Modern Love, is one thing made up of many: It’s science-fiction. It’s a detective story. It is a historical episode in the time of the Armada and the dislocation of Sephardic Jews from Spain to an eventual location in New York’s lower east side. It is a first person narrator’s story; Charlotte’s story; and Roderigo’s; and Fifi Corday’s. It is a 150 year old story about Oregon and the story of a house in Oregon. Modern Love’s continuity is made of flow and motion, like an experience, it accumulates, as you read, at that moment, through successive moments, right to the end.”

DeJong initially published Modern Love in 1975–76. Serialized as five chapbooks, she designed, printed, and distributed it herself, then released a new edition with help from Dorothea Tanning on the short-lived Standard Editions imprint the following year.

DeJong also performed the book—not as a reading or play, but as a kind of mark of narrative in time. In 1976, she performed selections at The Kitchen’s first-ever literary event (a bill shared with Kathy Acker). Two years later, shortly after the book’s publication by Standard Editions, she produced a complete performance of the novel at The Kitchen, accompanied by prerecorded voices (including a cameo by David Warrilow of Mabou Mines) and music by Philip Glass.

The above video was posted on the website of Western Front in 2014.

A History of Modern Love as told by author, 2017
Interview by Emma Clayton, 2017
Resource assembled by Nick James Scavo, 2017

Reviews: Publishers Weekly (2017), Joe Milazzo (Full Stop, 2017), Gloria Beth Amodeo (Literary Rev, 2017).

Publisher (UDP, 2017 edition)
Publisher (PI, 2017 edition)

MP4 (154 MB)
PDF (book excerpt, 9 MB)

Chris Kraus: Aliens & Anorexia (2000)

“Chris Kraus’s second novel defines a female form of chance that is both emotional and radical. Unfolding like a set of Chinese boxes, with storytelling and philosophy informing each other, the novel weaves together the lives of earnest visionaries and failed artists. Its characters include Simone Weil, the first radical philosopher of sadness; the artist Paul Thek; Kraus herself; and “Africa,” Kraus’s virtual S&M partner, who is shooting a big-budget Hollywood film in Namibia while Kraus holes up in the Northwest woods to chronicle the failure of Gravity & Grace, her own low-budget independent film.

In Aliens & Anorexia, Kraus makes a case for empathy as the ultimate perceptive tool, and reclaims anorexia from the psychoanalytic girl-ghetto of poor “self-esteem.” Anorexia, Kraus writes, could be an attempt to leave the body altogether: a rejection of the cynicism that this culture hands us through its food.”

Publisher Semiotext(e), Brooklyn, NY, 2000
Native Agents series
ISBN 1584350016
236 pages

Interview with author (video, 4 min, 2008)
Introduction to new edition by Palle Yourgrau (Bookforum, 2013)

Review: Giovanna Barbara Alesandro (Ark Books, 2017)

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (63 MB, no OCR)