The Rumpus.net » Joshua Cohen http://therumpus.net Books, Music, Movies, Art, Politics, Sex, Other Wed, 19 Jun 2013 10:00:35 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.1 Four New Messages, by Joshua Cohen http://therumpus.net/2012/09/four-new-messages-by-joshua-cohen/ http://therumpus.net/2012/09/four-new-messages-by-joshua-cohen/#comments Tue, 04 Sep 2012 14:00:01 +0000 Shannon Elderon http://therumpus.net/?p=105071 It’s hard to write well about the Internet. This is partly, as many have noted, because life on a screen is already mediated, so to write about these corners of twenty-first-century existence is to attempt, in some ways, a representation of a representation.

]]> It’s hard to write well about the Internet. This is partly, as many have noted, because life on a screen is already mediated, so to write about these corners of twenty-first-century existence is to attempt, in some ways, a representation of a representation. But it’s also because time spent online is, for many of us anyway, accompanied by sometimes paralyzing levels of self-consciousness.  I’m not the first to note that the Internet tends to foreground likeability – hits, views, retweets, hat tips – over all other values. Sometimes I think about posting a status update on Facebook. Then I question what I’m trying to get out of that status update. Validation? Love? Reassurance? What kind of response will it look like I’m looking for? How will colleagues from two jobs ago, scrolling through their news feeds in their ergonomic work chairs, feel about this hypothetical status update? Maybe a little irritated? Faintly contemptuous? Even a seemingly innocuous post, the blandest of links, will reveal something about me, expose me to the judgments of what Joshua Cohen, in one of the stories in his new collection Four New Messages, calls the “commentariat.” Perhaps it’s best not to write anything at all.

What impresses me about Cohen’s Four New Messages is its willingness to risk being unlikeable in service of the goal of genuine conversation – conversation that doesn’t consist only of lines cribbed from a “7 Ways to Ace Your Next Interview” blog post.  The stories that make up this collection are preoccupied with conversations, with acts of communication and message-sending. In several, the narrator positions himself as speaking directly to a specific subject: his dad; the main character in a story he’s attempting to write; or, most often, and at the most uncomfortable of moments, his mom. In “McDonald’s,” for example, the narrator agonizes over which restaurant to have the fictional protagonist of his story visit:

Ronald Ray watched the backlit logos approach, every craven incarnation, every franchise of desire. So many amenities yet so many the same, so many ways to condemn them, yet all of them the same. Too many few choices: which restaurant I should go to? what to order at which restaurant he should go to? which suit to wear or wash? having skipped breakfast should I skip lunch too to write? I know nothing impresses you, Mom.

All of the stories involve, to some extent, a narrator’s struggle with the things that interfere with or prevent conversation: the intrusion of brand names into every corner of our existence (“McDonald’s”), the distancing effects of porn (“Sent”), the way blogs lend themselves to anonymous libel (“Emission”).  In addition to these obstructions, there are the aforementioned thickets of self-doubt one has to bushwhack before saying anything at all.  All of the stories deal in some way, in content and form, with the kind of anxiety that comes from social media, the perpetual high-school-yearbookness of it. In “The College Borough,” a middle-aged narrator recounts the story of a college creative writing teacher who tasked his students with constructing a physical building. Speaking of one of his fellow former students, Sora, the narrator says:

[The workshop teacher] made her our glazier, and wouldn’t you know it, she’s become our own home’s window woman, and is even developing an exclusive make of energysaving window that reduces heating costs, has a screen that can be raised only from the top sash as a child safety feature, and, I remember, Dem was just telling me – Dem’s in touch with her from the gym and PTA – that it recently won some national design award. Congrats, Sora! Let’s catch up sometime!

Joshua Cohen

Joshua Cohen

Those last two sentences kill me. (Cohen has a knack for this, making paragraphs that lead to final sentences that I want to return to over and over.) These particular sentences feel like the next in a lineage of fiction that would include David Foster Wallace’s five-sentence story “A Radically Condensed History of Post-Industrial Life.”

Many reviews of Cohen mention Wallace, and there are undeniably similar thematic concerns as well as similarly complex sentences and shifts between high and low diction. But the Yiddish-inflected rhythms and frequent shifts and pivots of Cohen’s sentences remind me more of early Leonard Michaels or, occasionally, Gordon Lish. There’s a kinetic energy here that I don’t know how to describe other than life-affirming.

In an essay titled “Reading: The Most Dangerous Game” (collected in Sea Battles on Dry Land), Harold Brodkey writes of “folk art” (his term for art that serves “the democratic necessity of making our lives interesting to us”) that it can be “shaming.” But, he adds, “so is much in life, including one’s odor giving one’s secrets away (showing one’s nervousness or one’s lechery), but it is better to do that than live messageless and without nerves or desire.” Shame is what Cohen and his narrators wrestle with, judo-style. In the final story, the narrator speaks of pedestrians who pass with “their very lives averted.” These stories don’t avert. They are not always easy to read. They are invitations to places we might be reluctant to go. They want, like the best conversations, to disturb you a little, to leave you changed.

Related Posts:

]]> http://therumpus.net/2012/09/four-new-messages-by-joshua-cohen/feed/ 0 The Work of the Day, Which is Slaughtering http://therumpus.net/2010/07/the-work-of-the-day-which-is-slaughtering/ http://therumpus.net/2010/07/the-work-of-the-day-which-is-slaughtering/#comments Mon, 12 Jul 2010 14:00:06 +0000 Kevin Evers http://therumpus.net/?p=56738 In Joshua Cohen’s hyperreal world of kitsch, the Sabbath becomes law, Auschwitz becomes Whateverwitz, and the world’s last Jew is on the run.

From the first pages of his novel, Witz, it’s clear Joshua Cohen wants to challenge our hardwired taste for the prim and proper.

]]> In Joshua Cohen’s hyperreal world of kitsch, the Sabbath becomes law, Auschwitz becomes Whateverwitz, and the world’s last Jew is on the run.

From the first pages of his novel, Witz, it’s clear Joshua Cohen wants to challenge our hardwired taste for the prim and proper. He ignores the shrill voice that whispers in many a writer’s ear: “Make it neat. Beware of sprawl. Spit and polish those sentences as you would a fancy loafer…” For many writers, this is the voice of reason, saving them from unchecked ambition; but the downside to self-control is that it can pull us toward the safety and security of the status quo.

Considering this novel’s plot, it’s no surprise the author veers toward excess; the world he depicts is absurd. After a biblical plague, all the Jews—referred to as the “Affiliated”—die, save the first-born sons, whom the government corrals and interns on Ellis Island. Among the living is Benjamin Israelian, born bearded and bespectacled, an adult-sized and readymade savior. Soon after, the survivors meet their demise, leaving Ben as the lone Jew in a world that heralds him as a Messiah. A reluctant celebrity, Ben skips town and travels the country, through its deserts and woods and beyond. So the chase begins: Ben becomes the hunted.

Cohen matches the absurdist plot with freewheeling prose. At times, the writing seems out of control; clauses and phrases try to unhinge from the punctuation that bolts them in place. The words fight to keep hold as the sentences buck and buck:

Him turning the place upsidedown, insideout, and for nothing; Him searching, setting aside, in a fit, a maddening raising of heirloom dust. This basement eternally unfinished, this basement eternalizing the unfinished—its lowliest beetles and spiders and worms, its annelids dumb, search through the abandoned for meaning, night and day; day and night, making their ways through whatever remains. To seek out any prophecy left to rot by the rotted—to mourn a future frustrated in the retrospection of our death.

In the above sentence, Ben sits alone among his dead family’s possessions. Here, emotion peeks through (“in a fit, a maddening raising of heirloom dust”). But no matter our narrator’s attempt to riff toward understanding (“the basement eternally unfinished, this basement eternalizing the unfinished”), ambiguity wins (“to mourn a future frustrated in the retrospection of our death”). In other words, the sentence doesn’t rumble toward consciousness; a riff pushes it apace, but it halts at the aphoristic ending.

Of course, this is Cohen’s intent. Each turn of phrase leads to the right. There’s no way out. But for every sentence like the one above, there are handfuls of the following:

Then, to begin with the work of the day, which is slaughtering, the killing of meat, the knifing of it into product, into cuts as numerously diverse as appetites, and as grossly disarticulated, irreconcilable: these eyes of all around seeing, beeves in crosscuts, sirloins and tenderloins, rear round, roasts of flank and shank, brisket and chuck, butterflychops flitting through the dim, evading the chops of blades swung high to scalp, held as long and disjointedly sharp as the teeth of a starveling God…

Joshua Cohen

The hyperrealist detail borders on the self-amused, and much of Witz is full of it, and purposely so: the excess of language mimics a world that values kitsch. Ben is heralded as a messiah. He is a cultural symbol, an instant celebrity. Judaism becomes the Next Big Thing. Observance of the Sabbath becomes law. Yarmulkes. Poland is renamed Polandland. Auschwitz is Whateverwitz. No wonder Ben is on the run—this is a world, not far from our own, in which the popular trumps all else. Everything is appropriated and then stripped of meaning. Judaism isn’t a faith, but side curls and matzo-ball soup. The sentences, therefore, pick up details until they lose all sense of what’s important.

And so the overwrought prose, the details that accumulate until we lose all sense of what’s important.

Unimaginable evil like the Holocaust may be beyond the grasp of art. Yet many have tried, to the point of exploitation. So it’s no wonder that Cohen, who’s been vocal about his intent, is quick to make life difficult for his readers, avoiding convention and sentimentality at all cost. But if he’s a martyr then he’s also an opportunist—in other words, he always has an alibi. However excessive and indulgent his prose, Cohen stays on message. But when the sole focus is excess, the liveliness of his sentences—the tone shifts, the wordplay, the puns, the riffing—is lost to this uniformity of purpose: to out-kitsch the kitsch. The energy of the prose begins to enervate itself, giving way to a glut of detail. Useless information becomes the king of nothing serious, and perceptiveness gives way to cynicism: “Up and down they kneel and they narrow, they straighten, they genuflect, bow up and down—as if this Group’s nothing but a congregation of marionettes.”

People as puppets. There isn’t much to believe in here—but maybe this is the point. If so, maybe my issue is with Cohen’s worldview. There’s no doubt he’s a serious writer, and a skilled one at that. It takes conviction to push an idea to its breaking point, to run the risk of a novel collapsing under its own heft. But I need more than elastic sentences. I need more than criticism. I need to walk away with faith. For faith is what drives difficult books, the feeling that if we hang in there, if we suffer the bouts of hardship, the experience will ultimately reward us in ways that simpler, more conventional novels can’t. Cohen’s refusal to smother his cynicism prevents his prose from stoking that faith, resting instead on the somewhat cheaper laurels of irreverence.

Related Posts:

]]> http://therumpus.net/2010/07/the-work-of-the-day-which-is-slaughtering/feed/ 1 The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #3: Kevin Lincoln in Conversation with Joshua Cohen http://therumpus.net/2010/06/the-rumpus-mini-interview-project-2-kevin-lincoln-in-conversation-with-joshua-cohen/ http://therumpus.net/2010/06/the-rumpus-mini-interview-project-2-kevin-lincoln-in-conversation-with-joshua-cohen/#comments Wed, 09 Jun 2010 17:32:32 +0000 Kevin Lincoln http://therumpus.net/?p=54226 Joshua Cohen just wrote a book called Witz. Or rather, Witz was just published—its writing took nine years, and the inimitable Jewish culture with which it symbiotically exists has been gestating way longer than that. For a day, Joshua and I exchanged e-mails.

]]> Joshua Cohen just wrote a book called Witz. Or rather, Witz was just published—its writing took nine years, and the inimitable Jewish culture with which it symbiotically exists has been gestating way longer than that. For a day, Joshua and I exchanged e-mails. He loves Saul Bellow, and he likes Philip Roth. I love Philip Roth, and I also love knowing that today still sees writers like Joshua, and books as magnificent as Witz.

Kevin Lincoln: Much has been made of the long sentences, which, true to talk, are very long. But these sentences also seem to have a particular lilt, a warm Jewish canter that imbues the narrative voice with its own Affiliation. I assume this is deliberate unless I’m misreading it, so I’ll ask, what compelled you to Affiliate even your omniscient narrator? Who is this narrator? Is it you?

Joshua Cohen: The narrator, omniscient or not, is Affiliated by dint of the writer’s Affiliation. Certainly it was my conception that the languages approach a Jewish conversational ideal: hyperarticulate, jokey. Also with a krechts. When the narration turns from third person to first – when Benjamin Israelien loses His tongue to an unfortunate confluence of cunnilingus and the 137th Psalm – the true nature of speaker and spoken is revealed: Not that what you call the voice of the book is the voice of Jewry, but that the voice of the book is Jewry itself (that is all Jewry is).

Lincoln: Also, what do you have against the period?

Cohen: Ask the Torah that question – the Torah has no periods, commas, or dashes – ask God. Punctuation is Greco-Roman, not Semitic. What had been a guide to reading aloud has become silent convention. The more holy the book the less its punctuation.

Lincoln: What appeals to you about the effects of blunt repetition and slight variation, which you use to great success in the novel—two particular instances coming to mind: Israel’s being haunted by cancer everywhere, and the manipulation and repetition of the word “beget”?

Cohen: Repetitions and variations fascinate. They provide grounding, comfort to the wilder creations. Formulas also make great bricks for formal pyramids. With them you can build high or build wide. Hebrew has no superlatives. When you want to say “the best song” – meaning Solomon’s – you say “The Song of Songs.” To make better you double, redouble. That is one structural principle of Witz.

Lincoln: Out of all the allusions and symbolism that I’ve so far encountered in Witz, the one that sticks out the most for me comes right at the beginning: the Shabbos guests climbing out of the Israeliens’ oven, stars falling from their chest, the semantics of “oven” vs. “stove” debated so that there’s little doubt in the reader regarding the deliberate, Holocaustian invocations of the word “oven.” In the New York Observer profile, you claim the “aesthetic mission” of putting “an end to the novel of Jewish kitsch, Holocausts with happy endings,” and this scene sticks out as a definite sally in this battle, one that, to me, has a greater ideological significance and gains more ground in the reclamation of Jewish history than Safran Foer and Chabon’s novels all put together. I really liked it. What are you trying to do to the readers’ perceptions with a scene like this and a novel like Witz?

Cohen: That scene – but it’s really more of an image than a scene – is about how history comes to the present, how history comes into our homes – literally. A group of men and women exiting an oven in Europe only to emerge from one – or from a stove – in America. Just in time for dinner. But, in a sense, they are the dinner too.

Lincoln: Also, bonus question: what do you think of Philip Roth?

Cohen: If Roth didn’t exist Bellow would’ve had to invent him. So, yes, I like him. But Bellow I love.

***

Read “The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #1: Deborah Hampton in Conversation with Kellesimone Waits”

Read “The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #2: Tao Lin in Conversation with Shannon Neale”


Related Posts:

]]> http://therumpus.net/2010/06/the-rumpus-mini-interview-project-2-kevin-lincoln-in-conversation-with-joshua-cohen/feed/ 0 Notable New York, This Week 4/12 – 4/18 http://therumpus.net/2010/04/notable-new-york-this-week-412-418/ http://therumpus.net/2010/04/notable-new-york-this-week-412-418/#comments Mon, 12 Apr 2010 13:00:37 +0000 Rozalia Jovanovic http://therumpus.net/?p=49609 This week in New York The Future of Criticism with Lorin Stein and Maud Newton, John D’Agata and Thalia Field discuss the lyric essay, Alice Walker on activism, Salman Rushdie and Lee Bollinger discuss free speech in a globalized world, Mikael Kennedy shows his Polaroids at the Chelsea Hotel and Congress for Curious People symposium is held at Coney Island.

]]> This week in New York The Future of Criticism with Lorin Stein and Maud Newton, John D’Agata and Thalia Field discuss the lyric essay, Alice Walker on activism, Salman Rushdie and Lee Bollinger discuss free speech in a globalized world, Mikael Kennedy shows his Polaroids at the Chelsea Hotel and Congress for Curious People symposium is held at Coney Island.

MONDAY 4/12: The Congress for Curious People, an amazing collection of “human marvels” runs for ten days at Coney Island with lectures, esoteric performances and film. Tonight Evan Michelson provides an illustrated meditation on the Saddest Object in the World: an exercise in Proustian involuntary memory, aesthetic critique, and philosophical bargaining. 7:00pm. The Sideshow presents Chris McDaniel, the undisputed master of whip-wielding. 8:00pm. 1208 Surf Avenue.

Hamilton. This film chronicles two summer days in the life of a young family: Lena, 17, and Joe, 20, two recent and accidental parents residing in a diverse suburban neighborhood in northeast Baltimore. Q&A with director Matthew Porterfield and New Yorker film writer Richard Brody to follow 6:50 show.

Mary Gaitskill reads from Don’t Cry. Franklin Park. Prospect Heights.

Rosario Dawson directs a benefit reading of selections of Eve Ensler’s newest book I Am an Emotional Creature: The Secret Life of Girls Around the World. The reading will be produced by Obie Award winner Lori E. Seid and will feature 20 teenage girls who are members of the Lower Eastside Girls Club of New York. PS 122. 1st Ave. at 9th St. 6:30pm.

TUESDAY 4/13: Dash Shaw discusses his graphic novel, Body World, with author and book-cover designer Chip Kidd. The Strand. 828 Broadway. 7:00pm.

Alice Walker on Activism. Pulitzer Prize winning novelist (The Color Purple) and poet Alice Walker is also an activist. She will discuss her new book Overcoming Speechlessness: A Poet Encounters the Horror in Rwanda, Eastern Congo and Palestine/Israel, the trip that inspired it, the people who survived devastation and persecution, and the necessary response of human beings to violence. 92Y. 92nd Street at Lexington Ave. 8:00pm.

A Rogue’s Approach to Stuffing It: Taxidermy in Contemporary Pop, Art and Sub-Culture.

WEDNESDAY 4/14: Salman Rushdie, Michael Schudson, David Ignatius and Lee Bollinger. “Free Speech in a Globalized World.” Columbia University. Low Rotunda. 116th & Broadway. 6:15pm.

Deborah Eisenberg reads from Collected Stories, a compendium of her stories of the last twenty-five years. 192 Books. 7:00pm.

“Shoot the Moon” an exhibit of the Polaroid photographs of Mikael Kennedy opens at the Chelsea Hotel. There will be a reception for the artist from 6:00pm – 8:00pm. Chelsea Hotel Room 524.

THURSDAY 4/15: Joshua Cohen reads from his comic novel Witz. Book Court. 163 Court Street. Cobble Hill. 7:00pm.

Second Hand Culture: Waste, value and Materiality. This symposium explores the ways in which objects ranging from clothing to collectibles to trash have been constructed and experienced. Scholars of Theater, History, Geography, and Art and Design History discuss this vital new area at the intersection of consumerism, material culture studies, cultural geography, and artmaking. Bard Graduate Center. rsvp: academic-events@bgc.bard.edu. 38 w. 86th St. 5:00pm – 8:00pm.

Liars, the art-punk group called the “slightly garage-ier Hot Chip” perform at Bowery Ballroom. 6 Delancey Street. 8:00pm.

FRIDAY 4/16: Texts to Argue Through. John D’Agata, Thalia Field and Jena Osman discuss the evolution of research-based projects into book-length lyric essays. Poets House. 10 River Terrace (@Murphy). 7:00pm.

Second Hand Culture: Waste, value and Materiality. See above for details. Bard Graduate Center. rsvp: academic-events@bgc.bard.edu. 38 W. 86th St. 9:00am – 4:00pm.

Painter and photographer Shelton Walsmith (whose work graces the latest cover of Unsaid Magazine) shows his work at Causey Contemporary Gallery in Brooklyn. Opening reception 6-9PM. 92 Wythe Avenue, Brooklyn.

SATURDAY 4/17: The Future of Criticism: A Conference in Honor of Roger Shattuck. This one day conference explores the future of criticism in the age of the Internet. Prominent critics, writers, and editors will talk, debate and discuss the future of serious writing about literature. Conversations and panels will feature Daniel Mendelsohn, Liesl Schillinger, Morris Dickstein, Jed Perl, Maud Newton and Lorin Stein. Robert Weil will begin the day with a tribute to his friend, legendary critic, author and Proust scholar Roger Shattuck. rsvp required: events@centerforfiction.org. 1:00pm – 5:00pm. Center for Fiction. 17 E. 47th St.

Congress for Curious People two-day symposium. This symposium explores education and spectacle, collectors of curiosities, historical fairground displays and more, in conjunction with The Coney Island Museum. The symposium will feature panels of humanities scholars discussing with the audience the intricacies of collecting, the history of ethnographic display, the interface of spectacle and education, and the politics of bodily display in the amusement parks, museums, and fairs of the Western world. Also on view in the museum will be “The Collector’s Cabinet,” an installation of astounding artifacts held in private collections. In conjunction with the events at the Coney Island Museum, Observatory’s Gallery space will host “The Secret Museum,” an exhibition exploring the poetics of hidden, untouched and curious collections from around the world.

At the sideshow is Super Freak Weekend. Mat Sealboy Fraser, Jennifer Bearded Lady Miller, Koko the Killer Clown, and Ravi the Indian Rubber Boy. 1:00pm – 8:00pm continuously. 1208 Surf Avenue.

SUNDAY 4/18: Congress for Curious People continues. See above.

ART: Joachim Koester. Joachim Koester’s just-opened solo show at Greene Naftali Gallery includes new film installations, photographs, and a multi-media projection work. Koester continues his ventures into the nature of human exploration, but where previous projects have retraced the journeys of geographic explorers and the psychogeography of historical sites, his current works probe deeper into the complex legacy of counter-culture and the varying states of mental and psychedelic experimentation of the twentieth century.

***

News about notable happenings in New York can be sent to rozalia-AT-therumpus.net

Original Notable New York Illustration © André da Loba

Other images in order of appearance: illustration by Dash Shaw; photograph by Mikael Kennedy; vintage photograph of Coney Island; film still from film by Joachim Koester.

Related Posts:

]]> http://therumpus.net/2010/04/notable-new-york-this-week-412-418/feed/ 0 Guernica and Triple Canopy: Two Not to Miss http://therumpus.net/2010/03/two-not-to-miss-from-guernica-and-triple-canopy/ http://therumpus.net/2010/03/two-not-to-miss-from-guernica-and-triple-canopy/#comments Fri, 19 Mar 2010 19:19:12 +0000 Rozalia Jovanovic http://therumpus.net/?p=47655 Two pieces of writing that caught my eye today were Bridget Potter’s essay “Lucky Girl” in Guernica, and Joshua Cohen’s “Thirty-Six Shades of Prussian Blue” in Triple Canopy.

Potter’s startling essay relays her experience getting an illegal abortion as a nineteen-year-old in 1962 America, and the bevy of options and predicaments that came along with it–the social stigma of being an unwed mother, her humorous if stygian attempts to self-abort, and her final lone and costly trip by which she saved face.

]]> Two pieces of writing that caught my eye today were Bridget Potter’s essay “Lucky Girl” in Guernica, and Joshua Cohen’s “Thirty-Six Shades of Prussian Blue” in Triple Canopy.

Potter’s startling essay relays her experience getting an illegal abortion as a nineteen-year-old in 1962 America, and the bevy of options and predicaments that came along with it–the social stigma of being an unwed mother, her humorous if stygian attempts to self-abort, and her final lone and costly trip by which she saved face. The title is sincere and ironic, revealing both Potter’s precarious position and her fortune at having survived a procedure by which, around that time, seventeen percent of women reportedly died yearly in the U.S.

In “Prussian Blue,” Cohen curates a paean to the color Prussian blue, by selecting texts which refer to the origin of the color (the first manufactured color), provide a chart of its literary pedigree (having been worthy of musings by Wordsworth, Baudelaire and Christina Rossetti), and more. Prussian blue was used, according to this piece, to hide secret notations on the buttons and socks of spies and reveal, by turning the walls of delousing chambers blue, some of the most hideous crimes committed against humanity. Cohen’s collage is a curatorial wonder.

Related Posts:

]]> http://therumpus.net/2010/03/two-not-to-miss-from-guernica-and-triple-canopy/feed/ 0