Rebecca Brown's The Terrible Girls

Last month I read Rebecca Brown's The Terrible Girls. It is a curious, combination of dream-story and science fiction, a bit like The Twilight Zone with a touch of sado-masochisism, the characters allowing themselves to be wo-manhandled or doing the handling themselves. The "The Dark House" is one of my favorite.

In "The Dark House" a woman pursues the one she desires, by doing anything and everything for her. She grovels, becomes the coffee-cart girl, the hidden one, serving the conference star, her would-be lover, who blabs on and on at the podium with out-dated information. We have no idea what the conference is about. It's just in that middle realm of conference twilight zone. Someday, someway the girl will have the one she desires. Just "do things right" and "We are going to be part of a fine and lovely and long and true tradition." A kiss in the elevator and then out the door they go, running away from the conference. The coffee-cart girl carts the conference star on her back with her twisted ankle across a river and through the woods. Ah, here they are. Now you go away, the dominatrix demands, her ankle apparently recovered. A figure is in the house waiting for the desired-one. Brown carefully avoids telling us whether this figure upstairs is a man or a woman. And then she kicks the coffee-cart girl out and makes love to this other one, leaving the curtain open just a bit, with a promise, perhaps, for the coffee cart girl, too. The coffee-cart girl is a curious character, desiring someone who is so vacant and so demanding, and still wanting her, with a terrible driving desire.

"The Ruined City" reminds me a little of Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Everything is ruined and beware of the gangs of roaming girls. No men here except Lord Bountiful. The narrator and her girlfriend hide from the terrible girls who fight over what they steal. The city they left behind before the disaster—they are here now searching for something the narrator left behind, "what was left of me," something hidden under the mat. "I tried to pick up what they'd hacked from me but I was weak and it was very heavy." Parts of her body? Too heavy she had to leave "it" behind. Her lover has super psychic powers. Kinesiology? She can hold her hands over the earth. Here it is here, she says. The bag is there and it's rotted away, "the resurrected heart." She gets her heart back like the tin man.

When I read these stories, I sometimes have the sense that the fictional writer is writing out of revenge, to get back at some lover, striving for fantastic fictional revenge. And there are these odd objects in each story that are pursued and hunted, usually without resolution, an "it", a bag, a box, a body part. And the language of the stories moves from straight action and description into poetic prose. It's very hip writing, laying out with a kind of glee the damage love can do.

"The Dinner" in Talisman's final issue

The new issue of Talisman is available, #38/39/40 all together as the final print issue. Sometimes folks talk about how difficult it is to find Talisman but when it's found (at SPD), it's a beauty. I have been happy that that over the years Ed Foster has published my work in many of the issues. And I lament the end of the printed version. I'm a bit of a biblio lover, but I think the trees may be happier when the pages of Talisman are flickering over a screen.

My most recent novella (28 pages and 18 chapters) is printed complete in the middle of this issue: "The Dinner". You can order issues from Small Press Distribution for $20.00 http://www.spdbooks.org and read work by John High, Ed Roberson, Laynie Browne, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Tony Iantosca, Joel Lewis, Kimberly Lyons, Vyt Bakaitis, Basil King, and many others.

Because I loved the project of writing "The Dinner" (and at the end there is a description of the process), I want everyone to read it so I am posting a link to my website where there is a pdf.

http://myweb.brooklyn.liu.edu/bhenning/PDFDocs/The%20Dinner.pdf

New Novel by Barbara Henning : Thirty Miles To Rosebud

My new novel is now available from BlazeVox. Any one interested in reviewing let me or Geoffrey Gatza at BlazeVox know. Thanks to all. Barbara

Order from

BlazeVox

Order from

Amazon

Soon available to order from

Small Press Distribution www.spdbooks.org

Here's some of the PR:



Title: THIRTY MILES TO ROSEBUD 232 pp.
Author: Barbara Henning ISBN 13: 9781935402251
Genre: Literary Fiction LOC 2009923618
Release Date: November 15, 2009 $18.00
Publisher: BlazeVox
www.spdbooks.org 800-869-7553
Cover by Miranda Maher


Description—

Thirty Miles to Rosebud is a mystery, a journey of self-discovery, a love story, and a story of bohemian life in the United States in the 70s and 80s. As a young teenager, Katie runs away from her home in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan with a boyfriend, a van and little else. She leaves behind her father and the cabin where she grew up, along with visceral memories of her mother and the landscape of her childhood, the dense forests and dark blue of Lake Superior. The novel shifts between rural and urban landscapes—jazz clubs in Detroit, Hari Krishnas in Tompkins Square, Vietnam War vets in a VA hospital, driving through the desert, a makeshift apartment on a rooftop in NYC, underground music clubs in the East Village, and a yoga shala in Mysore, India. All of these stories unfold seamlessly with a lyrical, calm and almost contemplative narrative voice as Katie searches on the road and through memory for a long-lost friend and the roots of her fractured sense of self.

Blurbs—

Thirty Miles To Rosebud depicts a series of imploding families and fast interstates. Barbara Henning's landscapes—a rust-belt childhood, a nearly forgotten East Village Bohemia and the arid Southwest streaked with the setting sun—are populated by runaways, lost loves and lifelong betrayals. In this remarkable novel, Henning's eye for detail and her emotional honesty enables the past to loom in the rear-view mirror long after the car has sped by. Donald Breckinridge

One of Barbara Henning’s great accomplishments is the voice we came to appreciate in You, Me, and the Insects. It presents her world with a candor both companionable and profound, both disengaged and intimate. She has no agenda but to tell her own story, which is the story physical, emotional, and spiritual, of her generation. Wisdom enters her telling as easily as a deer crosses a road. And many deer do, because this is a book in line with Celine’s crazed Castle To Castle, Douglas Woolf’s Wall to Wall, Kerouac’s romantic On The Road, Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Thirty Miles to Rosebud stands with all of them as one of the great memoir road novels of our time. Steve Katz

Author's Bio—

Barbara Henning is the author of two other novels, You, Me and the Insects and Black Lace (Spuyten Duyvil). Her books of poetry include My Autobiography, Detective Sentences, Love Makes Thinking Dark, Smoking in the Twilight Bar. A collection of prose and poetry, Cities & Memory, is forthcoming from Chax Press in 2010. She teaches creative writing courses in the MFA programs at Long Island University in Brooklyn and for Naropa University in Boulder. A native Detroiter and a long time resident of New York City, she now lives in Tucson, Arizona.

Roberto Bolano's By Night in Chile

By Night in Chile. Roberto Bolano. Translated by Chris Andrews. New Directions. 2003. 130 pages. A challenging book to read when you are busy and can only read ten to twenty pages a night. But worth it. One long paragraph in the mind of a dying priest who is looking back on his life, not confessing, instead justifying his way of living. Very long spiraling sentences. He's agitated by a "wizened youth" who I keep expecting to turn up in the text, but he never does, just a fly buzzing around the priest. A dying priest who writes poetry and criticism and enjoys the benefits of Chilean literary society under Pinochet. He makes the sign of the cross and at the same time ignores what is going on around him. He secretly teaches Pinochet and his military leaders about Marxism, knowing they are going to use this knowledge to oppress leftists. His compassion for the poor is just a ritual. Mostly he is disgusted by them. But he sometimes says he admires Neruda (but not for his politics for a poetic phrase or stance) and a critic he calls Farewell, another compromised human being who advocates high culture writing and socializing. In the tunnels in the basement of all this high thinking and elitism, there is a secret. We come to realize that the wizened youth knows this secret and he's been tormenting the priest with his knowledge and writings. As the priest tunnels down through his memories, never really looking deeply into the rooms around him (but the reader gets the idea that something isn't right in all of his rooms) and finally under the house where the literati meet there is a room with a naked man, tied up and suffering from torture. Religion, high culture and the military join hands to oppress, murder and destroy.