Jacob Wren
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Rating: 4.5* of five
The Publisher Says: From multidisciplinary artist and author Jacob Wren comes a small book of big ideas. Originally produced as a 'Boondoggle Book' limited edition specifically for the first Authors for Indies Day in Toronto, this small and delightful book is a must-have for fans of the author of POLYAMOROUS LOVE SONG (named one of the top 100 books of 2014 by The Globe and Mail). IF OUR WEALTH IS CRIMINAL THEN LET'S LIVE WITH THE CRIMINAL JOY OF PIRATES collects two short stories and an essay by Jacob Wren. In the first story, 'The Infiltrator, ' certain ongoing, rarely mentioned, difficulties for the activist Left are explored with unlikely candour. In 'Four Letters from an Ongoing Series, ' the postal service becomes an unwitting accomplice to the gatekeepers of potential culture. Finally, in the essay 'Like a Priest Who Has Lost Faith, ' questions of art and emptiness shift focus in relation to the agency that at all times surrounds us.
My Review: As always with story collections, I'll offer specific comments on the stories themselves and finish up with some wise (or wise-ass) summing up. Without further ado:
The Infiltrator is either the shortest récit I've ever seen or it's a short story with the same intimate effect as a récit because we never get out of our nameless narrator's head. It's more effective at greater length, in my opinion, but there is nothing wrong with the story's story. It's fascinating to look at an agent provocateur's strange mental state. The money? The cause? I can't imagine. The narrator's account of his actions are without emotional responses; the narrator records the emotions of the people she or he is manipulating without attempting to respond to them personally. Curiously, I found this more telling of the narrator's character than any more noisy declaration could have. This is an amoral person. This is the bad seed your mother warned you about.
Four Letters from an Ongoing Series details the dreary, pointless existence (it's not in any way describable as a life) of an aspiring writer. From information within the frame of the story, he sounds like a white, middling-aged bore who has never escaped the analysis paralysis that a liberal arts education can put some people in:
Self awareness? Or narcissistic navel-gazing? Both in some degree?
His manuscript, one assumes the same one each time, is rejected by four presses. Each letter he receives is more explicit about why they aren't publishing it. Midway through this painful process of absorbing so much rejection, he ruminates on the very business he's trying to enter:
If he writes the way he thinks, no wonder his manuscript bounces back to him so often. Yeah, all of that blahblahblah is true and valid. But outside an academic journal or a classroom this is some seriously dreary verbiage.
The last rejection letter is a rant of epic proportions, ordering the narrator to go out and live, to get his head out of his butt and maybe then he'd have something other than his pathetic life to write about. However good this order is, what a difference it might have made...human nature wins.
Like a Priest Who Has Lost Faith: Notes on art, meaning, emptiness and spirituality really doesn't need more explanation than the instruction "read that title again and reflect carefully on how it can relate to the subtitle" and this paragraph from the text:
Has Wren lost faith in the idea of modernity? The art exhibition that elicited this essay from him was called 'Animism,' a group of works in multiple media by artist Anselm Francke. Wren tells us he didn't actually see the exhibition, only read the catalogue; how amazing must this show have been to make a very intelligent man dig so deeply into his psyche and gift us with this revealing, delicious meditation on humanity and our endless search for meaning.
I read this book, slim but deep, in an hour of happy immersion. It's been my introduction to Peter Wren, and to BookThug's very, very interesting publishing program. Apart from two pet peeves (stationAry instead of stationEry; it's instead of its), this is a tight and involving package of words. It's going to be even more fun for me to read Wren's novels now. I am looking forward to it, and I suspect many other readers will be right there with me.… (mehr)
The Publisher Says: From multidisciplinary artist and author Jacob Wren comes a small book of big ideas. Originally produced as a 'Boondoggle Book' limited edition specifically for the first Authors for Indies Day in Toronto, this small and delightful book is a must-have for fans of the author of POLYAMOROUS LOVE SONG (named one of the top 100 books of 2014 by The Globe and Mail). IF OUR WEALTH IS CRIMINAL THEN LET'S LIVE WITH THE CRIMINAL JOY OF PIRATES collects two short stories and an essay by Jacob Wren. In the first story, 'The Infiltrator, ' certain ongoing, rarely mentioned, difficulties for the activist Left are explored with unlikely candour. In 'Four Letters from an Ongoing Series, ' the postal service becomes an unwitting accomplice to the gatekeepers of potential culture. Finally, in the essay 'Like a Priest Who Has Lost Faith, ' questions of art and emptiness shift focus in relation to the agency that at all times surrounds us.
My Review: As always with story collections, I'll offer specific comments on the stories themselves and finish up with some wise (or wise-ass) summing up. Without further ado:
The Infiltrator is either the shortest récit I've ever seen or it's a short story with the same intimate effect as a récit because we never get out of our nameless narrator's head. It's more effective at greater length, in my opinion, but there is nothing wrong with the story's story. It's fascinating to look at an agent provocateur's strange mental state. The money? The cause? I can't imagine. The narrator's account of his actions are without emotional responses; the narrator records the emotions of the people she or he is manipulating without attempting to respond to them personally. Curiously, I found this more telling of the narrator's character than any more noisy declaration could have. This is an amoral person. This is the bad seed your mother warned you about.
Four Letters from an Ongoing Series details the dreary, pointless existence (it's not in any way describable as a life) of an aspiring writer. From information within the frame of the story, he sounds like a white, middling-aged bore who has never escaped the analysis paralysis that a liberal arts education can put some people in:
I hate it when I feel like a man. It is probably even worse when I don't, since those are times when I am coasting through territory where my privilege is even more invisible to me than usual.
Self awareness? Or narcissistic navel-gazing? Both in some degree?
His manuscript, one assumes the same one each time, is rejected by four presses. Each letter he receives is more explicit about why they aren't publishing it. Midway through this painful process of absorbing so much rejection, he ruminates on the very business he's trying to enter:
Will literature last forever or is it practically already a thing of the past? And how do we even define literature, since without some definition it is barely possible to judge the field's relative health or disrepair. Are my overly refined tastes--predelictions and preferences I've spent most of a lifetime overly refining--the most useful criteria or do they pertain only to my personal idiosyncrasies? Would it be better to have something more generalized, a canon most might agree upon, or would this very canon simply be a dampening force, pushing down the lid, creating conventions through consensus both more consensual and more conventional?
If he writes the way he thinks, no wonder his manuscript bounces back to him so often. Yeah, all of that blahblahblah is true and valid. But outside an academic journal or a classroom this is some seriously dreary verbiage.
The last rejection letter is a rant of epic proportions, ordering the narrator to go out and live, to get his head out of his butt and maybe then he'd have something other than his pathetic life to write about. However good this order is, what a difference it might have made...human nature wins.
Like a Priest Who Has Lost Faith: Notes on art, meaning, emptiness and spirituality really doesn't need more explanation than the instruction "read that title again and reflect carefully on how it can relate to the subtitle" and this paragraph from the text:
I wonder if the framework within which most contemporary art attempts to generate meaning is analogous to the 'never been modern' framework that {Bruno} Latour criticizes {in his major work, We Have Never Been Modern}. Art is a world that separates, continuously playing the divisions against one another in ways that are often contradictory: good art against bad art, art against everything else, political art against commerce, etc. The gallery is the place for art, but it is also a way of removing art from the rest of life.
Has Wren lost faith in the idea of modernity? The art exhibition that elicited this essay from him was called 'Animism,' a group of works in multiple media by artist Anselm Francke. Wren tells us he didn't actually see the exhibition, only read the catalogue; how amazing must this show have been to make a very intelligent man dig so deeply into his psyche and gift us with this revealing, delicious meditation on humanity and our endless search for meaning.
I read this book, slim but deep, in an hour of happy immersion. It's been my introduction to Peter Wren, and to BookThug's very, very interesting publishing program. Apart from two pet peeves (stationAry instead of stationEry; it's instead of its), this is a tight and involving package of words. It's going to be even more fun for me to read Wren's novels now. I am looking forward to it, and I suspect many other readers will be right there with me.… (mehr)
At first a seemingly incoherent collection of thoughts, dialogue and quotes, but when you dig a little deeper, it's basically a celebration of art, theatre and freedom of speech. At least, that's what I saw at first glance. Some very nice fragments in here, will probably be read again some day.
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
Rarely does a book come along with a strong academic bent that really blows me away; but man, it sure was the case with Jacob Wren's Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed, the first of several books I recently received from Canadian small publisher Pedlar Press. And that's because Wren manages to take a situation that would usually only appeal to the professor crowd -- basically, imagine if Julian Assange and Naomi Wolf started dating, and the thousands of NGO tongues that would start waggling because of it -- but then rapidly expands this storyline to quickly reach almost a fairytale-like quality; for example, after their breakup, the Assange character ends up starting a hipster art gallery in a third-world country, then hosting a hit reality show that combines The Apprentice with leftist political activism, then gets picked up by the CIA for impersonating an agent, and a lot more, keeping what would otherwise be a snoozer of a talky tale instead lively in a Michael Chabon kind of way. Now combine this with some of the most beautiful prose I've read in years, plenty of symbolic ridicule concerning the habit of radical liberals to talk problems to death without actually accomplishing anything, and simply a physical look to the manuscript that makes me believe that there's still a future for gorgeous-looking trade paperbacks, and you have what has so far been one of my favorite reads in the last year, and one I predict even eleven months in advance will likely be appearing in CCLaP's best-of lists at the end of the year. It's a true revelation in an industry that no longer sees many of them, and needless to say that I'm now looking highly forward to the other Pedlar titles in my reading list.
Out of 10: 9.6… (mehr)
Rarely does a book come along with a strong academic bent that really blows me away; but man, it sure was the case with Jacob Wren's Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed, the first of several books I recently received from Canadian small publisher Pedlar Press. And that's because Wren manages to take a situation that would usually only appeal to the professor crowd -- basically, imagine if Julian Assange and Naomi Wolf started dating, and the thousands of NGO tongues that would start waggling because of it -- but then rapidly expands this storyline to quickly reach almost a fairytale-like quality; for example, after their breakup, the Assange character ends up starting a hipster art gallery in a third-world country, then hosting a hit reality show that combines The Apprentice with leftist political activism, then gets picked up by the CIA for impersonating an agent, and a lot more, keeping what would otherwise be a snoozer of a talky tale instead lively in a Michael Chabon kind of way. Now combine this with some of the most beautiful prose I've read in years, plenty of symbolic ridicule concerning the habit of radical liberals to talk problems to death without actually accomplishing anything, and simply a physical look to the manuscript that makes me believe that there's still a future for gorgeous-looking trade paperbacks, and you have what has so far been one of my favorite reads in the last year, and one I predict even eleven months in advance will likely be appearing in CCLaP's best-of lists at the end of the year. It's a true revelation in an industry that no longer sees many of them, and needless to say that I'm now looking highly forward to the other Pedlar titles in my reading list.
Out of 10: 9.6… (mehr)
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The author is a GoodReads friend of mine & he regularly sends out promotion for this bk to his GoodReads friends w/ links to an interview w/ him regarding it & probably a review or 2. I read some of this material & became interested b/c his POV is informed by political activism. As such, I asked for a review copy b/c activist culture is a central concern of mine - particularly anarchist culture - wch is NOT what this bk is about even though there're overlaps.
Having 'self-declared' as an anarchist around 1969 when I didn't know a single other anarchist, I've been in the interesting position of being able to observe anarchism be considerably revitalized as a socio-political philosophy after what seemed like a long hiatus that followed the severe repression of anarchists around 1930 & the Palmer Raids & the expulsion of non-American-born anarchists, etc.. As I often point out, now anarchists in the US (& Canada) are mostly BORN here & can no longer just be conveniently kicked out of the country.
For me, personally, I've observed political activism w/ the most interest when it's been anarchist driven - but certainly not entirely. As novels started to appear apparently written by people directly involved in such activism, I read them both to check out whether I thought any great writers were coming out of this & also to see how the subculture(s) were being fictionalized. Stewart Home's cynical novels come to mind but I don't think Stewart's ever really been an activist so he's mostly irrelevant here. Instead, I think of G. A. Matiasz's "End Time - notes on the apocalypse" - or of J. G. Eccarius' "The Last Days of Christ the Vampire" & "We Should Have Killed the King". I don't know anything about Matiasz's or Eccarius' personal histories but they seem somehow rooted in anarchist or anarcho-punk rebellion.
ANYWAY, "Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed" focuses mainly on 3 characters who attend political discussion meetings. 2 of these get involved in a passionate love affair that's temporarily interrupted as one of them goes away for activist service. Shortly before the one returns, the other has a brief affair w/ the 3rd main character. While all 3 characters are immersed in trying to create a more just world, they can't overcome the typical problems of jealousy & they collectively deteriorate as a result.
All in all, I was impressed by the writing. This seems like the effort of a youngish writer but hardly a beginner. The writerly strategies of changing unspecified 1st-person narratives & such-like helps propel this & helped keep me engaged. A reference to Italian political thinker Toni Negri on page 63 caught my attn & a section about water on page 73 was a nice diversion. Being the sometimes nit-picky critic that I can be, I was a mite-bit put off by the reference to a "large format 35mm camera" on page 48 - given that if its 35mm it's NOT large format - but I knew what he meant. The plotting is fairly strong - there're spectacles of intrigue & conflict that wd satisfy most readers of adventures not TOO needy of just blood & guts & the descriptions of the meetings wd likely amuse anyone who's ever sat thru too many of these.
But what was perhaps the most thought-provoking aspect of reading this (& others of its activist-novel ilk) was the question of: WHAT DO I THINK ABOUT WRITING NOVELS ABOUT POLITICAL ACTIVISM AT ALL? Most of my own political writings are deliberately non-fictional - they don't purport to represent "the whole truth & nothing but the truth" b/c I find such a notion to be highly problematic - but they DO attempt to be accurate & w/ my own opinions & experiences transparently displayed. In other words, I don't purport to believe in 'objectivity' but I do try to not LIE or GLAMORIZE, etc.. - & here's where the problem of fictionalization of activism comes in.
I was interested in this B/C it's a fictionalization of an activism that may be somewhat close to the anarchist activism that my own political activities have been primarily connected to. But what I wonder is: does the fictionalization of activism open the gates to people living in fantasy worlds instead of actually BEING activists? I think of things like Arnold Schwarznegger starring in the Philip K. Dick based "Total Recall" - no doubt many an enthusiast of revolution has cheered on Schwarznegger's character in this while paying to see a movie that enriches the coffers of a man whose actual politics are never likely to come anywhere close to those of Dick's character (at its most revolutionary). In other words, activism & revolution, once displaced into fiction, run the risk of becoming escapist fantasy - no matter what the author's intention.
On pp 142-143 of Wren's concluding Epilogue chapter here, he writes:
"Jonathan Coe wrote a biography of the British novelist B.S.Johnson entitled Like A Fiery Elephant". I have never read B.S.Johnson but I have read his biography. The reason I read his biography is because I am fond of certain novels by Jonathan Coe, especially What A Carve Up!, a vicious condemnation of Thatcherism masquerading as an entertaining, almost Agatha Christiesque, mystery novel. It is a political book but, because it is written in such a conventional manner, for me the form itself is lacking in politics and this makes it feel less political. Instead of challenging the status quo, the novel's politics take on a Trojan horse mentality, a radical political message hidden within a well written, but conventional, novel. B.S.Johnson, on the other hand, prided himself on being a fiercely experimental writer, each of his novels a deliberate experiment in form. His career suffered the consequences of this 'experimental position.' He was not especially political. Like A Fiery Elephant could therefore be described as a conventional yet political writer about the life of an unconventional yet apolitical writer. These are the types of contradictions that continuously fascinate me."
SO, Wren is certainly a highly self-aware writer who tries to address this issue of how a political novel shd be written in order for it to serve its purpose best. On p 144 he writes: "all I want to say is FUCK ALL THIS CYNICISM AND PESSIMISM does it really ever get us anywhere. And I worry that what I have written conveys the exact opposite of what I had hoped, because I fucking love activism and fucking love art and I want there to be more radical activism and more politically radical art". Now, I've taken this latter quote & truncated it out of context but that's partially b/c I want you TO READ THIS BK & to read Wren's concluding thoughts & I, therefore, don't want to overencapsulate it here.
I'm not opposed to the fictionalization of activist experience - after all, there're bound to be novelists who come out of activist backgrounds & it'll probably continue to be of interest to me to read what they do w/ their personal experience. I do hope that such writers at least TRY to address possible political consequences of such writing & I appreciate Wren's doing so. I wish him luck & will certainly make an attempt to read more by him - even though my own personal preference is probably to create work that sets examples rooted in real life rather than thru fictional proxies.… (mehr)