So, first some things to know about Gladman. She is firmly GenX, born in the early seventies. From the South, as in The, as in Atlanta. She went to Vassar (philosophy) and went to New College (poetics) (that school that doesn't exist anymore, which is sad) and now teaches at the one MFA program that I wanted to go to but knew I never had a chance (though, she wasn't there yet at the time): Brown. Oh, she is African American. And lesbian. Totally experimental. I know most of this because I already knew it because I am writer-in-love-with her. I know some of it because I have teachers who know her because she is definitely a fellow of the New Narrative school of writing. Specifically, Dodie Bellamy taught her at New School. Camille Roy included her in the anthology of essays about New Narrative, Biting the Error. I have worked with each of these writers a lot since as early as 2003 and 2005 was the first time I read Gladman.
What the hell is New Narrative? Well, that is complicated. But, generally, it is writing in a style related to or actually writing from a particular group of San Francisco prose/poets of the late seventies into the eighties. It is decisively queer in nature, if not literally so. It is always other. It need not be from that time period. The real defining characteristics is narrative attempting to undermine the typical hierarchical, controlling characteristics of narrative. That is, the New Narrative writer sees traditional narrative as of the system and definitionally oppression. It is too Anglo, too male, too straight, too Protestant, too law abiding, too linear, too English speaking, too logical, too "realist", too capitalistic, too consumerist, too detached, etc. All of these poses presents a false and alienating narrative moral stricture upon the reader. New Narrative tries to break that. Bunch of commies, socialists, Buddhist, anarchists (little 'a'), punks, etc. and et al.
How? Well, lots of ways, actually. Such an aesthetic purpose, it turns out, allows for a very wide range of style. Sort of makes sense: let us break up the system; there are many ways to break the system. Strategies can look like an unblinking "I" (Robert Gluck, Eileen Myles) or very personal and yet clinical language to tell almost rumor-like stories (Pamela Lu). It can include a consciousness picking away at itself and its memories and their validity (Kevin Killian, Lydia Davis). It can include the grotesque and the found in the middle of critique and sex (Bellamy). Extreme metaphor and almost inverse language poetry (Carla Harryman). Or, as with Gladman, the use of the sentence to impart mystery in sense of self, time, location, and others. Many more, sure. But you get the idea.
Here are some money quotes from various reviews of three of Gladman's works that I have chosen to concentrate on.
Juice, the first, was published in 2000. It was the first work by her I read. Loosely, it is about a woman, you do eventually get the sense of her gender, ethnicity and sexuality, searching. A lost city. A lost self. There is shifting, movement, myth and losing myths. Lovers and familial. I have always suspected, since before I knew anything about her or that she was from Atlanta, that it was about San Francisco and Atlanta (I grew up a bit there myself).
The Activist was published in 2003 by Krupskaya, on a year when Kevin Killian (Dodie Bellamy's husband) was an editor, so you see how this all is related. Loosely, it is about a journalist reporting on a group of activists. Only nothing is really certain. A bridge may, or may not, have been exploded. The group may or may not have demands. It is a critique of the war mongers of the state, but clearly of activists with no clear point too. And definitely, perhaps most bitingly, of the media use of passivity in attempting to communicate reality. As with Juice, the book is distinctly about a place, though the place is not named specifically and even in the world the maps of the place keep changing and the activists are unable to read where they are at. This parallels some shenanigans with street signs changing in Juice. Definitely, I felt the first time I read it, San Francisco. But then, she had moved. Maybe it is Boston or Providence?
Finally, The Event Factory is the first of a trilogy of sci fi books. I mean this loosely. It is about a linguist who travels to a city, Ravicka. Everyone is leaving. Though there are some coming and going. She has difficulty communicating directly even though she speaks the language. There is some revolutionary stuff again. And she has great difficulty finding the downtown. Everything is slippage.
"Gladman's text is ... made up of beginnings—of appearances—that do not develop in expected hierarchical or chronological ways, but instead open into the disappearances in which the text abounds. While Gladman's appearances and disappearances do not conform to normative codes or systemic modes of thought, such systems are often alluded to..."
"each of the prose poems that comprise Juice has at its center an inexplicable appearance of absence, disappearance, displacement—one that might encompass private as well as public, and internal as well as external, loss—whether of a culture, a community, a relationship, a period of memory, a sense of self."
Rust Morrison, epoetry.
"The Activist is almost too explicit for allegory. It is practically a direct metaphor for current circumstances in the United States, where the book is set. And yet, it explores ideas that go far beyond the current situation and are applicable to any case in which civil liberties are at issue and a government is trying desperately to support its own agenda at the expense of the truth. It peers insightfully into the activities of activists and discovers their strengths and shortcomings."
David Harris, Bookslut
"In Ravicka, the color yellow is pervasive; sometimes tender or empty, at others, more a green or brown. When Ravickians are healthy, they breathe yellow in and out. It's the color of the sun, but perhaps not our sun, although as the narrator reminds us, this isn't a different world than ours, since she arrived here on an airplane and that's also how she will leave. How Ravickians themselves leave remains a mystery, even though they appear to be abandoning Ravicka faster than the narrator can "stamp it" with her "tourism." (101)"
"The narrator is a linguist. She speaks seven languages, including several dialects of Ravic, but discovers that speaking the language isn't sufficient: "If only traveling were about showing off your language skills, if only it did not also demand a certain commitment of body communication, of outright singing and dancing--I think I would be absolutely global by now." (42) She may arrive accidentally (or not), but once in Ravicka, she embarks on numerous quests. What she's looking for changes as she changes location (place is primordial here; time more incidental, except when it's time to eat or "time to fuck." 23)."
Paula Koneazy, Taurpaulen Sky
"Unlike the shattering of a planet, Event Factory presents a world simultaneously exploded, particulate, and intact. The novel's narrator, an expert linguist and tourist, deplanes in Ravicka a stranger, and despite weeks or months of interpersonal disjunctions and a vague, nearly-lethal survival exercise, grows no more integrated. She remains other, and though she occupies Ravicka and is known to Ravickians, the world they engender is out of her reach. Its meanings are too fluid to grasp. Even as she waits for understanding, waits for something definitive to happen, the city-state grows and changes."
"Not only does Gladman multiply possibilities by addition, she subtracts in a wildly generative way as well. When the narrator attempts to explain her experience with the agents in Ciut Centali, her escape, and her time with the city's other revolutionaries, she says, "I argued... that it was possible to tell a story without explicit details, that this was even the better approach. How else to get to what is hidden?" Though reminiscent of Ashbery's "The New Spirit"—"I thought that if I could put it all down, that would be one way. And next the thought came to me that to leave all out would be another, and truer, way"—it seems Gladman's narrator is implying a particular detail, a particular event, a particular needle in a particular, and exponentially reproducing, haystack. Where Ashbery abandons the general glut of details in favor of lack's simplicity, Gladman's narrator is leaving out a very specific injury. More importantly, even if there is no such injury, the process of leaving-out so specifically even a nonexistent entity engenders a specific field of absence. By breaking the world of Ravicka, the world of Event Factory, into told and untold, existent and non-existent, Gladman cultivates new and more fertile terrain in the interstices and overlaps."
"Whether or not, "the event of sleeping on the grass,"—a scene of loveless, mechanical sex—is the absent injury, it nevertheless forms the tonal fulcrum of the book. Prior to it, the narrator is a happy tourist, attempting relationships across the chasm of the Ravic tongue's gymnastic physicality. She visits buildings and talks to people, using the language, if somewhat imperfectly, as a tool. Afterwards, all such differences are conflated. People are buildings to be excavated or evacuated. People are parts of speech. She says, "The hotel became a sentence I struggled to complete. My friends there, adverbs. In Ravic, however, there are no adverbs." She becomes solitary, and her friendships dissolve."
Tom DeBeauchamp, The Collagist
"There is a pervasive sense of urgency among Ravickians yet none seem deeply bothered, just lonely and disconnected and constantly in motion."
Michael Davidson, The Open End
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