Now you can buy us on Amazon in the US and the UK, as an e-book or as one of those old-fashioned rectangular paper things.

Or you can start by reading an excerpt in The New Inquiry, and then buy a copy.

Need convincing in person? There are some events happening, and we’d love for you to come along:

Tonight! Februrary 19th: my co-author Scott Esposito will be in conversation with the youngest most American Oulipian, Daniel Levin Becker, author of Many Subtle Channels, at City Lights in San Francisco.

March 11th: if you happen to be in Paris, I’ll be appearing at Shakespeare & Company with Joanna Walsh.

Further reading: Scott’s Oulipo-themed 2012: A Year in Reading, for The Millions. Chad Post wrote about us here, and Levi Asher wrote about us too.

The Oulipo celebrated its fiftieth birthday in 2010, and as it enters its sixth decade, its members, fans and critics are all wondering: where can it go from here? In two long essays Scott Esposito and Lauren Elkin consider Oulipo’s strengths, weaknesses, and impact on today’s experimental literature.

Sullivan is a study in contrasts: a one-time born-again Christian and a liberal-minded critic, a Southerner and a darling of the New York literati, a goofy dude and a sober social conscience. He is, therefore, in an ideal position to explore the shady byways of American identity. His essay on the Tea Party, “American Grotesque,” features just this kind of intellectual magnanimity, even if he does (as he must) eventually come down on “our side” of the fence. “Today is September 12, 2009. We are marching,” he writes. We begin to meet the other marchers: “I want my America back,” reads one of their placards. It isn’t clear for certain whose America the sign refers to until we see another sign of Nancy Pelosi’s enlarged face, into whose open mouth the crowd is tossing Lipton tea bags. “It’s only fair,” Sullivan comments. “Liberals made fun of us because, at first, we didn’t know what ‘tea-bagging’ meant (…) Now we’re turning the joke back on them.” In the very next paragraph, we see a person standing on a garbage can wearing an Obama mask and a little gold crown, sporting “a bright purple pimp’s coat with faux-leopard-skim trim.”

 

Throughout this first part of the essay, Sullivan casts himself as a reasonably-minded member of an unspecified political rally. As he begins to mention its heroes— “[Glenn] Beck is an entertainer. We love him, but he goes over the top” — we know we’re at a Tea Party gathering, and we’re confused about what we’re doing there. It’s not until after the rally, back at the hotel, that it becomes clear why Sullivan has included himself in the “we” of the lunatic fringes of the Republican Party: he is there with his first cousin, an insurance executive from Kentucky whose politics are radically different from Sullivan’s. He gets into it with his cousin: “Didn’t the crap those people were spewing originate in the e-mail accounts of lobbyists and ‘former CEOs’ and other cynically interested types? Why else would these citizens purport to fear ‘socialized medicine‘ so intensely?” By the end of the essay, Sullivan is wishing his cousin luck and hoping for him to fail.

A métro poem has as many verses as your trip has stations, minus one.

The first verse is composed in your head between the two first stations of your trip (counting the station from which you departed).

It is transcribed onto paper when the train stops at the second station.

The second verse is composed in your head between the second and third stations of your trip.

It is transcribed onto paper when the train stops at the third station. And so forth.

One must not transcribe when the train is in motion.

One must not compose when the train is stopped.

The last verse of the poem is transcribed on the platform of your last station.

If your trip involves one or more changes of subway lines, the poem will have two or more stanzas.

17 May, 2012
19:30
Dialogue Books
Schönleinstraße 31
Kreuzberg, Berlin, 10967 Germany

 I write, I inhabit a sheet of paper – I invest in it, I travel across it. I incite blanks, spaces… This is how space begins: with words only, signs traced on the blank page. (Georges Perec, Species of Spaces)

Join Dialogue Books as we explore the hidden boundaries and outer limits of urban exploration and the role of the flâneuse in the modern city with artist/writer Joanna Walsh and novelist/critic Lauren Elkin.

Joanna Walsh and Lauren Elkin have been exchanging ideas for a number of years. Working in different practices, they are both concerned with the city as a grid for explorations of politics and identity.

Joanna Walsh is visiting Berlin at the end of a period mapping European cities, researching her next book, which deals with love in space and cyberspace.

“I began to record my journey in photographs at theskyovereuropa.tumblr.com. What started as a side-project has now become an important part of my work. Inspired by the practices Georges Perec used in his attempts to wrestle place onto the page, I imposed the Oulipo-style constraint of showing no less than 75% sky in any photo. Drawn, like Perec, to undefined, overlooked, and in-between spaces, I explore a passenger’s aesthetic of travel in which the city, not the observer, appears to move, as from a train, a bus or a taxi. Chasing the borderlands of places and relationships, subjectivity and objectivity, I ask, does the sky over Europe have frontiers?”

Lauren Elkin is at work on a book about women and cities called Flâneuse, which challenges the widely-held idea that the flâneuse has never existed because women have not had the same access to the city as men. Part critical meander, part memoir, Flâneuse charts a path through literature and art revealing women’s sometimes liberating, sometimes fraught relationship to the metropolis.

“Cities have invisible boundaries, invisible customs gates that demarcate who goes where: certain neighborhoods, certain bars and restaurants, certain parks, are reserved for different kinds of people; a place that’s native and comfortable to one person may seem exclusionary to another. We become so accustomed to this that we hardly notice the values underlying the structure of the city. This is what Perec’s Oulipo and Debord’s Situationism attempt to disrupt: ordered, reified, normative, and oppressive city structures. But for a woman, who does not inhabit public space the way a man does, what does this disruption entail? How can women take possession of the literature and the city on their own terms? What links can we find between women’s radical movements through the city and feminism’s response to literary tradition?“

ABOUT

Joanna Walsh (Badaude) writes and draws graphic fiction and non-fiction. She is published by Tate, and has drawn and written for The Guardian, The Times, The Idler, FiveDials and The White Review amongst others. She has created large-scale artworks for the Tate Modern and The Wellcome Institute. Her website was a Webby Honoree in 2008. She is an associate member of the London Institute of ‘Pataphysics. This year she will be talking at the Port Eliot Festival, The Wellcome Institute and the Melbourne Writers’ Festival.

Lauren Elkin is the author of the novel Une Année à Venise (Editions Héloïse d’Ormesson) and co-author of The End of Oulipo? An Attempt to Exhaust a Literary Movement (forthcoming from TQC Long Essays and Zero Books). Her essays on books and culture have appeared in The Guardian, Bookforum, The Daily Beast, The White Review, and Five Dials, and are forthcoming in n+1 and the TLS.  She lives in Paris and London.

RSVP via events@dialoguebooks.org

Entry €5 including wine

“The cat= the lion.  Venice is a kind of pun on itself, which is another way of saying that it is a mirror held up to its own shimmering image—the central conceit on which it has evolved” (13).

–Mary McCarthy, Venice Observed (1963)

So ok, how do you decide who gets to go and who doesn’t? We could institute a tax, but that’s not fair because not everyone can pay it, and I don’t think Venice ought to become some kind of exclusive resort for rich people.  So I thought of something much more egalitarian: there should a pop quiz to get into Venice. If you don’t get at least 60% of the answers right, you have to get back on the boat and go visit some other Italian city– try Padua!–  instead.

Here is my suggestion for the Venice in Peril Pop Quiz.

1. Venice was once ruled by the Doge.  A doge is a______
a. car
b. duke in a funny hat
c. group of men in funny hats

2. Bellini, Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, Canaletto.  These names refer to:
a. cocktails
b. cities in Italy
c. artists

3. The Accademia is:
a. a school
b. a museum
c. a sports stadium

4. True or false: a canal is an acceptable substitute for a garbage can.

5. Do you and/or your family own and wear fanny packs [UK visitors: bum bags]? (Y/N)

6. Do you think it is acceptable to eat potato chips whilst riding in a gondola? (Y/N)

7. Do you believe that if you don’t videorecord every moment of said gondola ride it’s like it didn’t happen? (Y/N)

8. Are you likely to buy a sparkly mask as a souvenir? How many?

9. Please define the following terms in your own words and to the best of your ability: mosaic, vaulted ceiling, gothic arch, Byzantine.

10.  If told you that you were to be staying in a hotel in Venice that was built in 1890, which of the following most closely would match your response?
a. 1890? So it’s a new building. That’s disappointing.
b. 1890? Holy shit, that’s like a hundred years ago! Dude, this place is old!
c. Whatever, as long as it’s clean.

(…)

« Loup et domino invisibles, guidé par les rails d’itinéraires fléchés, chacun s’en va par campi et calli fredonnant son petit air d’opérette, déguisé comme il convient (c’est encore lors du carnaval, où la pantomime s’avoue le plus, qu’on joue le moins).  La fête est programmée, encadrée, répétée, Marinière et chapeau de paille à ruban rouge, le gondolier joue à donner la sérénade ; le facchino, à porter les valises ; le camerière, à nous servir en sifflotant scampi et calamaretti ; et nous, entre l’Arsenal et les Prisons, à espion en mission, à Casanova en cavale, à l’entremetteur, au dandy dégoûté ou à l’ambassadeur déchu.  Touriste, on peut même jouer au touriste ».

–Régis Debray, Contre Venise

–Daru, Histoire de la République de Venise (1819)

[All of life is a letter posted anonymously; mine bears three stamps: Paris, London, Venice. It was fate that took me there, though I often didn't realize it, but certainly not casually.]

Perhaps it’s some belated fin-de-siècle fates that have assigned me to these three Jamesian cities, but for better or worse they’re where I’m linked; they are my subjects and my backdrops and my milieux. It seems somehow appropriate, then, that my first novel, about Venice, is being published in Paris before anywhere else, just as I prepare to move to London, at least part-time for now.

Morand, in his wonderful book-length essay Venises, reflects on his career as a diplomat and his relationship to history, to literature, to his family, and to place, writing lyrically about his connection to Venice, but also his tendency to find “Venices” elsewhere– in Paris, London, and even Bangkok. Anywhere there is unpredictable water, canals, waterways, watervistas, there is another Venice. And he reads back these cities onto Venice, where “every street is the Seine.”

Paris, as I have said, is where I taught myself to write, sitting in cafés imitating Ernest Hemingway, but as Paris became my new everyday, I moved indoors from the cafés, and developed the writing habits that are, by now, inseparable from the work itself. (That’s a fancy way of saying I can only write on my couch.) But spending more and more time in Venice gave me a space away from my everyday life– even in a beautiful city like Paris, daily life becomes humdrum– to measure the effects moving to a foreign country were having on my psyche.  To set my first novel in Paris seemed too obvious, and potentially limiting– I didn’t want to typecast myself as someone who could only write about her own experiences, and expatriates in Paris is a subject that I believe has to be approached with either sheer innocence or advanced cynicism, neither of which I had at the time. So I turned to Venice, which seemed the perfect metaphor for the act of building your home in a place where you have no foundation to do so– no land to build on, only bits of mud.

The result, in English, is Floating Cities, but for now– and as of today!– the book is out (only) in French under the title Une Année à Venise. To have my first book come out in the city where I became a writer seems the sweetest of coincidences.