The themes of authorial power and the interpenetration of fiction and reality are of great personal interest to me.
Teacher Lee Foust has.I can say that t
You really have to um, it takes some time to describe this stuff.
Here it is on Stuart’s site, and here is the Publishers Weekly review.
Their writing is frightfully resistant to the casual reader. It is immense and difficult and tangled. I should say I think I am not smart enough for either of them but you may be.
I have
immense affection
for both of them, for Stuart because he is one of my oldest friends, from junior high school days, and
for Baret Magarian
because he is one of my newest friends, from my first night attending one of the performances at the Harold Acton Library in Florence, where he showed up to read his poetry and play the piano. I was struck by his genius. I was struck by his genius and his naivete and his absolute determination to play the piano and read his poetry and be heard. IMHO, it was not on the whole a completely successful performance, but it’s the courage and risk that stands out for me: He does not read music or write things out but just sits and the piano and makes surprising sounds.
Naturally, because we know each other so well, we support each other’s work, and write about it.
This is something that rings my bell: the absolute need to be heard, and the courage to do what you do, however obscure it may seem to other ears. I too, have this, though in my drive to be heard, to be understood, to be respected, I think I often bury this more strange and particular thing, this essential thing in which I am unlike any other. Stuart has it too, that utter uniqueness and the willingness to take the stage and proclaim.
Creative people must proclaim themselves, must put themselves in the spotlight, and many of us are deficient or stunted in this. It requires a bit of the power motive, the desire to influence and be heard, to make a mark, but many of us are not really that interested in power. I do not think that we creatives are by and large power-hungry people; in fact we are often power-averse. No, this is about the soul, that is, the central strange inner being in its uniqueness; it is what needs to be heard.
Anyway, here are some things that must be heard.
Stuart’s work, Baret’s work.
First, I can hardly believe that Lee Foust’s review of Baret Magarian’s The Fabrications is only online in this ridiculously impractical image taken from the tiny Florence paper, and is only available online here, I believe … no, wait, if you are smart and go to the Florence News site itself — punto it, as they say — you can find it as an actual published article here.
So that is good — but it also points up how fucking awkward and amateurish is the promotion attempt … poor Baret! wild with ambition but he does not even have a Web site. It makes me look like a Web marketing genius. Which maybe is why I gravitate toward Baret: He is problematically sincere, and he is a misguided self-promoter. How do I know this? Because he comes to me for advice! If he were smart he would go to the actual … but no.
I mean, seriously, this is what I like about Baret, but also what exasperates me. We were having some tea in the Feltrinelli Red bookstore cafe on Piazza Republica the other day and he told me his publicist told him he should have a web site and at first I said, well, duh, of course you have to have a baretmagarian.com
Google www.baretmagarian.com and see what you get? It’s laughable. I was astounded. I should have done a spit take:
What? !! (spit take in the Red cafe): You don’t have a WEB SITE? YOU ARE A RIDICULOUS MAN!
Then it was like the purity of his intention and feeling reached me, and I realized in that instant: No, of course! Do not get a web site! Refuse! Resist!
I realized: I hate having a web site but I have capitulated. This man refuses to have a web site! That is newsworthy! That is an angle right there for the publicists!
Look, world: An author without a web site. Like some rare, exotic creature. He refuses.
Reporters gather: Mr. Magarian, when did you first come up with this idea of not having a web site? Did you realize at the time just how revolutionary this would be?
So I said, sure, Baret, don’t have a fucking web site. Right. I applaud you.
Stuart Hopen has some web presence, as he is a genius, an absolute genius who, somewhat like me, has made his accommodations. Shit, accommodation, he, a talented artist, painter, writer, all-around crazy visionary thinker, he did the ur-accommodationist thing and actually, as a dutiful son, did as his father demanded and became a lawyer and worked in the same hospital as his father, a medical doctor, doing risk management legal work for his entire professional career. Meanwhile there were these crazy, far-out comics and novels and all this stuff. And raised three kids and put them in college and took care of his lovely wife and had the house and all that.
But meanwhile, in the off-hours, he is producing these fabulous and fabulously difficult and abstruse literary works, in a pop vein, in a pulp vein, in a sci-fi vein, in a kind of autodidactically philosophical vein, and painting these pictures.
As I think of these people I also think of the sculptor Alberto Bruni, another outsider who has finally gained notice for sculpting stone chains unbroken out of huge rocks. The thing is just inconceivable and yet he does it. Magician in stone.
So I am putting these people out there for you to know about. I can tweet and all that shit but something in my heart just dies when I tweet. I want my full voice to be heard. I do not want to chop it up. I do not want to pretend.
the sun is rising. I am done.
Their writing is frightfully resistant to the casual reader. It is immense and difficult and tangled. I should say
