The following is a draft excerpt from my novel in progress, Housebreaking the Muse. The novel is haunted by the character of Jacques Rigaut, the French dadaist, gigolo, drug addict, dandy, and suicide. In this fragment, Maxime Fraçois-Poncet begins to say his piece. Poncet was a boyhood friend of Rigaut, who believed he shared a…
Thoughts …
We became our own time machines. Then, when we grew weary living out our various pasts, we bent our swords into now-shares. We set aside our pleasant albeit useless dreams, and shaped our labor to destroy nostalgia. Still, every now and then, we send each other roses.
Craft Notes: Always with a Bit of Laughter
The following is excerpted from Manifesto: Maximalist Expressionism, or "Shut/-/Up(!) Fiction". Always With a Bit of Laughter If there’s one thing I’ve taken from works of the authors I admire it’s the role humor and high-spiritedness can play in making fiction come alive. It seems to me fiction should bring to bear the full spectrum…
Craft Notes: What’s Happening?
The following is excerpted from Manifesto: Maximalist Expressionism, or "Shut/-/Up(!) Fiction". As to what transpires in my novel Flicker in the Porthole Glass, I’ve been asked point blank: Does anything happen in this novel? My answer: The novel happens in this novel. In his book of essays, For a New Novel, Alain Robbe-Grillet sums up…
Craft Notes: Knowing My Place
The following is excerpted from Manifesto: Maximalist Expressionism, or "Shut/-/Up(!) Fiction". A large part of the “work” my novel sets out to accomplish is to foreground the way in which self-knowledge is not an exact match for the narrative-of-self we carry around with us in our minds, a narrative subject to constant revision and emendation,…
Ed Desautels' Maximum Fiction 