The VP Annual 2016 by M.J. Nicholls

The VP Annual 2016 Reviews

• 
  MJ Nicholls

  Excerpt from conversation with Steven Moore:
  
  After leaving university and while working as a substitute teacher, you wrote a novel yourself, which is unpublished, and produced a second one of several hundred pages which you abandoned. It may be that, as with your early poetry, you don’t particularly want to revisit your fiction, but given the centrality of the novel to your critical and scholarly work, I thought it would be interesting if you could give us an idea of what sort of fiction you were writing at that time.
  
  I was still under Joyce’s spell, so the first one, entitled Clarinets and Candles (1974–75), was mostly a formal exercise, in which a rather tepid autobiographical tale of unrequited love was enclosed in an elaborate superstructure. I was fascinated by the so-called Linati schema that Gilbert published in his book on Ulysses, which shows not only that every chapter has a counterpart in the Odyssey but also its own style, color, science/art, etc. So I used sonnet form to construct my novel: not only did it have fourteen chapters, but each chapter ended with a sonnet about clouds (I called them skyscapes), which metaphorically commented on the subject of the preceding chapter. Like Ulysses (in the most superficial sense) it boasted lots of literary allusions and stylistic devices; one chapter is in dramatic form, like the Circe episode, and the novel concludes with an epilogue in the form of a fairy tale. All of my time went into the structure and style, neglecting the actual story material, so it deservedly was turned down by the half-dozen publishers I sent it to.
  
  It’s a short novel, so I planned to follow it with a Ulysses-size novel, also alliteratively titled (Sunlight and Summer, 1975–78), which was intended to be a Rabelaisian satire on religion—a subject I was immersed in at the time (and its shadow, the occult). By then I was also under the spell of American meganovels by such authors as Barth, Coover, Gaddis, and Pynchon. It too had a complex structure and showy erudition, but a more sensational plot: it concerned two teenage girls who, after an emotional crisis, become nuns; realizing their mistake after a while, they swing to the other extreme and become prostitutes (while in the background I made lots of snarky remarks about sublimated sexuality in religion), and eventually they abandon the extremes for a more centered approach to life. One of the girls is into vampires, and my research into that subject eventually resulted in an anthology of vampire poetry I edited in the 1980s.
  
  Why did you not persist with writing novels?
  
  I realized I could never be as good as my spellbinding models, plus I was writing literary criticism by that time (I published my first article in 1976), and I realized what talents I had were more suited for the latter. But attempting to write fiction enhanced my appreciation for those who can pull it off, which informed my later criticism and book reviewing. Every book reviewer should try writing a novel before criticizing others.
  
  *
  
  Excerpt from conversation with Alexander Theroux:
  
  Some critics have called your work misogynistic. The easy question would be: “Do you deny that this is so?” A harder question is: “Even though you disagree, do you see why they feel this way?”
  
  Women and cars (car trouble at the side of the road) alone have made me weep in life! Seriously, love, the conflicts of love, jealousy, abandonment and loss of love and all its variants, provide the most intriguing plots in fiction. I have written as satirically about men as I have of women. Dr. Crucifer, a character in my novel, Darconville’s Cat (1982), was an articulate and mad, rant-oriented misogynist, however, and someone whom I had so much fun writing about, making him if I may say so indelibly drawn, that he gave serious ammunition, I suspect, to a good many readers who committing the “intentional fallacy” blithely chose to attribute his particular follies to me. I must say I do find women remarkably different than men, lovelier, at times more comical, warmer, certainly strung with opposite wires.
  
  
  http://www.verbivoraciouspress.org/th...
• 
  Nathan "N.R." Gaddis

  A rather sloppy mixed bag of stuff this time out from VP ; no thematic unity. Some scraps left over from other VP projects. There's an unbearable fiction in here. Then too a glimpse into our next MJ=fictional offering promised for later this year. There's a few interpretive essays on authors I'm not currently/yet invested in. An old piece from Sukenick that you need to read, a kind of history of recent narrative authority. A couple of other things.
  
  I bought the damn thing for the short Theroux interview and the somewhat longer Moore interview (whose interview with Rikki is also in this thing here because VP are Rikki=junkies!). So here's two quotes, one each from Moore and Theroux, which are pretty much about as starkly opposite as you'll get. Yet, who is the biggest Theroux=head in our little itty=bitty world?
  Moore :: "I'm more happy to be associated with people like Hitchens and Dawkins: we're on the right side of history."
  Theroux :: "I can honestly say I am literally astonished when meeting thinkers whose questions and answers to the universe are different. In this regard, Christopher Hitchens, whom I knew in passing....could have come from another planet."
  Let this be your model.