Some Notes on Laurie Sheck's "A Monster's Notes"
To call something "notes" means it isn't finished.
A preparation for something else, or a work in progress.
Or
It means I know this is less than perfect. It means the piecemeal composition is acknowledged, should be applauded.
"And to my horror (for I had read the books which now all but crowded us out of the apartment) I discovered I knew nothing whatever about the grueling, mundane business of making form out of fragments." -- Frederick Exley, "A Fan's Notes"
"Form connotes and carries with it expectation." -- Ander Monson, "Fragments: On Dentistry"
It means this is less than perfect, and hence more real. The crude shape a virtue. The rough edges. Texture over all.
In Laurie Sheck's novel, "A Monster's Notes" (Alfred A. Knopf: 544 pp., $28), Victor Frankenstein's creation is alive and well and living in New York.
Mary Shelley's creation has come unstuck in time. He lives in New York or did until recently. He passes Tower Records, a Duane Reade drugstore. He takes notes on the news, developments in science. He reads abandoned books, is privy to whole correspondences, is a historian of his own loneliness.
The novel's first part is "Ice Diary"; the second is "Dream of the Red Chamber"; the last is "Metropolis/The Ruins at Luna." But the best parts of the book are in the "notes" -- lyric essays on time, space, leprosy, art. On Albertus Magnus, on John Cage. The sinews of this odd and unwieldy creature.
"I didn't seek to find her," Sheck writes in her preface, "wandered instead within and among her fragments of language -- notebooks, drafts, journals, fictions, letters, essays, and found there whole worlds spinning like planets, lived in their cold light and burnings light, wondering where I was, where they might take me. Curious, I heard a monster's voice, and out of some sharp need I followed."
Mary Shelley's stepsister Claire's letters, invented, real. Hesitant, aborted:
"So even liberty is a prison xxxxxxx and xxxx"
Much in that manner.
Writing is revision, or a kind of madness. Claire's cross-outs (xxx) resemble the stitches on the monster -- they are words left suspended in the air of the page.
When does a poet (Sheck is one) become a novelist? Sensationally great novels by poets: James Lasdun, "The Horned Man"; Robert Kelly, "The Scorpions"; John Ashbery and James Schuyler, "A Nest of Ninnies"
Ashbery and Schuyler trading off lines initially.
"On the first notebook's pages," Sheck writes in the preface, "she penciled in a left-hand margin, and there Percy Shelley left his comments and marks. Picture two hands moving side by side, she writing 'creature,' he (in some impulse of tenderness, kindness?) crossing it out, replacing it with 'being.'
Reading "Frankenstein" afresh: I see it as a commentary on (and twisted how-to kit for) the novel, that magpie form. A restlessness of form. A series of letters by an Arctic-bound explorer to his sister gets taken over by Victor Frankenstein's life story (a tangled affair in itself), which dissolves the artifice of correspondence for most of the book. And, at one point, Frankenstein's narration gets dominated by a soon-to-be one-sided dialogue with his creation.
We unthinkingly refer to the monster as "Frankenstein," understandable when the frame is so crooked, and creature and creator present themselves with equal eloquence.
Sheck embeds texts or, rather, lets them slip into and out of the pages; she compounds the vertigo. Characters write letters about books that they're translating; they quote passages, which are in fact like passages from one world to another.
The text as body.
Any line could serve as a metaphor for Sheck's project and process, such as:
"[Lady Su Hui's 'Xuan Ji Tu shi' is] a poem composed of 841 characters woven into a five-colored tapestry and arranged in a perfect square. Reading it, there's no need to start at the beginning or move straight to the end. Instead, it can be entered anywhere."
Or:
"Of Archilocos we have not one single work entire and most of the context's fallen away".
As the monster explains: "You worked to make the parts of me combine to form a new, amazing being."
More where that came from.
A commonplace book, a cover version of "Frankenstein," a epistolary novel. A commentary on revision, translation -- what lives in the margins.
"Where do you end and I begin?"
The fiction of "A Monster's Notes" is framed (as a found text) by a letter, dated June 30, 2007: "This is to inform you that the final closing on your building at East 6th Street was successfully completed . . . [Y]esterday afternoon as I made my last walk-through, I found on the second floor a shorter note, a manuscript wrapped in a rubber band, and an old computer. . . ."
It's the monster's handwriting. He muses: "And Clerval, that gentle man who everyone thought dead -- in fact he traveled east as he wanted. Even now I sometimes picture his hand moving in patient transcription as day after day he translated the 'Dream of the Red Chamber' in his house at the foot of Xianghan Hill. . . . " Clerval was Victor Frankenstein's faithful friend, destroyed by the monster in Shelley's novel, but here living in China, translating "The Story of the Stone," or "A Dream of Red Mansions," or "Dream of the Red Chamber."
"Dream of the Red Chamber," 18th century. Unfinished by the author, who is Cao Xuequin, or is he. Commentary by "Red Inkstone," who might also be Cao.
Originally published anonymously.
Unfinished by the author and hence potentially perfect, endlessly expandable in the mind.
Question for the reader: Why start what cannot stop?
Partial list of books never completed by their authors but published: Charles Dickens, "The Mystery of Edwin Drood"; Robert Musil, "The Man Without Qualities"; Walter Benjamin, "The Arcades Project."
"Those days in the graveyard I traveled across many pages which frequently ended in mid-sentence -- the books I found were mostly torn -- so my travels were wayward, random, disrupted, though maybe the mind mostly travels in this way."
"The whole issue of the unfinished is a living idea," writes the monster.
"[S]omething unfinished changes," he continues. "That means it's in a certain way alive."
As Sheck demonstrates, the lyric essay is a kind of Frankenstein's monster, equipped with parts sliced out of others, stitched up with genius and white space:
"Claire. Air. Care. Clear. Claire."
"If I could see intervals as well as objects. . . ."
"How slowly the time passes here, encompassed as I am by frost and snow!" -- "Frankenstein"
"Architecture of oblivion, its drifts."
"Winter darkness pulls over like a monk's cowl, enclosing us in worlds where strange things take place, where anything can happen, where the mind goes where it's never gone before, and stays." -- Gretel Ehrlich, "The Future of Ice"
I started this review before finishing the book, in the form of notes. I didn't know I was writing the review yet. I have another file just as long.
Fungibility of the notebook mode. Juxtaposition is easy, at times even arbitrary; effects perhaps no less revelatory or pungent.
"As the minuteness of the parts formed a great hindrance to my speed, I resolved, contrary to my first intention, to make the being of a gigantic stature; that is to say, about eight feet in height, and proportionally large. After having formed this determination and having spent some months in successfully collecting and arranging my materials, I began." --"Frankenstein"
Cut and paste.
When am I writing this sentence?
Page 271, in its entirety: "The monks in their patchwork rags . . . and I a patchwork . . . the workings of each mind a patchwork, each self roughly stitched as you stitched me."
The energies of "A Monster's Notes" are not incompatible with those of the Web. Thought for future development: Unruly, genre-leaking books like Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's "Dictee," Ishmael Reed's "Mumbo Jumbo" and David Markson's "Wittgenstein's Mistress" might seem merely reflexive today, when we write in fragments, when our blogs and Twitter feeds and Facebook pages are de facto lyric essays, Frankenstein creations.
The intricacies of Shelley's life (who was Claire?) unclear to me till I went to Wikipedia. Sheck also embeds into her book Wikipedia, Google searches, Unknown Hosts, Redirections. All this webwork.
"The dissecting room and the slaughter-house furnished many of my materials; and often did my human nature turn with loathing from my occupation, whilst, still urged on by an eagerness which perpetually increased, I brought my work near to a conclusion. . . . With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet." --"Frankenstein"
R. e-mails me that our friend J. has to take blood pressure medication because she drinks too much coffee, which makes me laugh. But also that J. "had this horrifying story about recently running into a crime scene near her house where a man had been cut into little pieces in a box." Which makes me think I will never get to sleep. I do, but in the middle of the night a storm centers itself overhead. I am not dreaming and now I understand the term "rolling thunder," the noise caroming like a ball in a roulette wheel, a ball the size of 20 baseball stadiums, a wheel with a diameter the length of Manhattan. Car alarms go off. I silently count the seconds before, or is it after, lightning penetrates the armor of the venetian blinds, to scrape my eyes and shock the bedsheets silver. —Los Angeles Times, June 14, 2009
I.
“Good idea the repetition. Same thing with ads.” -- Joyce, "Ulysses"
Mary Shelley’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, died 10 days after giving birth to her.
“This is ordinary. I was a body coming out of another body that died. That died because of my body.” -- Laurie Sheck, "A Monster’s Notes"
“This was scant said but all cried with one acclaim, nay, by our Virgin Mother, the wife should live and the babe to die.” -- "Ulysses"
I don’t know which file contains my review in the form of notes and which contains my notes for the review in the form of notes.
Bloomsday now. Still writing this.
In the midst of putting together this monster I get an e-mail from R., who writes that our friend J. has to take high-blood pressure medication because she drinks too much coffee, which makes me laugh. But also that J. “had this horrifying story about recently running into a crime scene near her house where a man had been cut into little pieces in a box.”
The fiction of poet Laurie Sheck’s novel "A Monster’s Notes" is framed by a letter, dated June 30, 2007: “This is to inform you that the final closing on your building at East 6th Street was successfully completed. . . . [Y]esterday afternoon as I made my last walk-through, I found on the second floor a shorter note, a manuscript wrapped in a rubber band, and an old computer. . . .”
Page 271, in its entirety: ". . . The monks in their patchwork rags . . . and I a patchwork . . . the workings of each mind a patchwork, each self roughly stitched as you stitched me."
“Winter darkness pulls over like a monk’s cowl, enclosing us in worlds where strange things take place, where anything can happen, where the mind goes where it’s never gone before, and stays.” -- Gretel Ehrlich, "The Future of Ice"
Fungibility of the notebook mode. Juxtaposition is easy, at times even arbitrary; effects perhaps no less revelatory or pungent.
On Amazon’s Omnivoracious blog, Tom writes: “Ed Park's notes on 'A Monster's Notes' by Laurie Sheck: ‘I started this review before finishing the book, in the form of notes. I didn't know I was writing the review yet. I have another file just as long. Fungibility of the notebook mode. Juxtaposition is easy, at times even arbitrary; effects perhaps no less revelatory or pungent.’ [His notes weren't really revelatory for me -- what do you think?]”
I think you’re wrong.
And we’re not done yet.
II.
“The whole issue of the unfinished is a living idea,” writes the monster in his “Notes on Eva Hesse.” “[S]omething unfinished changes. That means it’s in a certain way alive.”
“Save your screams until you see its face.” -- movie poster, "It’s Alive!" (1974)
“It’s such a gamble when you get a face.” -- Richard Hell, “Blank Generation” (1977)
“Years later when I got smallpox it was as if that hatred was finally writing on my face. Scrawling all over it. That it had been waiting all those years. . . . My ugly, ruined face.” -- Mary Shelley to stepsister Claire, "A Monster’s Notes"
Clerval was Victor Frankenstein’s faithful friend, destroyed by the monster in Shelley’s novel, but in “A Monster’s Notes” he’s living in China, translating "The Story of the Stone," or "A Dream of Red Mansions," or "Dream of the Red Chamber," 18th century, originally published anonymously. Unfinished by the author, who is Cao Xuequin, or is he. Commentary by “Red Inkstone,” who might also be Cao.
Unfinished by the author and hence potentially perfect, endlessly expandable in the mind.
Partial list of books never completed by their authors, but published: Georges Perec, "53 Days." Ralph Ellison, "Juneteenth." Jane Austen, "Sanditon." P.G. Wodehouse, "Sunset at Blandings."
Nabokov, "The Original of Laura," to be published.
J.G. Ballard, "Conversations With My Physician," never to be published. David Foster Wallace, "The Pale King," to be published.
Title of Musil book: "Posthumous Papers of a Living Author." Published.
“[E]very book in the world is out there waiting to be read by me.” -- Roberto Bolaño, "The Savage Detectives"
Read that some scholar said the unfinished fragments of stories on the late Roberto Bolaño’s computer could be read as having conclusions -- they ended, sometimes mid-sentence, in a way that made as much sense as if he’d actually finished them. Now mortality shapes them, a hidden theme emerges.
Where did I read this thing about Bolaño’s abbreviated works? Real? A dream?
Note to self: Take better notes.
Open up the paper: “Roger L. Kay, one of the most prominent analysts of the PC industry, described the new generation of machines as “Franken-products,” a reference to the monster cobbled together from various parts.” -- New York Times, June 7
Cao Xuequin’s "The Story of the Stone." Five volumes in the Penguin Classics edition. I bought Volume 1 during my weekly lunch-hour book-buying allowance, at my old job, circa 1996, at Tower Books on Broadway at 4th Street, New York.
Sheck’s monster passes TOWER RECORDS in New York.
Found Volume 2 in a box in front of a store in Cambridge, Mass. I thought it would go on like this, with me finding further installments at used bookstores, stoop sales, Salvation Army shelves. But it stopped there.
“A darkbacked figure scanned books on the hawker’s cart.” -- "Ulysses"
Found in an old folder of mine, notes for an abandoned novel, April 30, 2000: “I believe the Korean War has never ended, just as I believe the 1999 Stanley Cup finals, between the Sabres and the Stars, continues to this day.”
Next page is from a New Yorker piece, dated Sept. 30, 1996, author and article unknown: “Under the narrow legal definition of the term, Tigar found, the only national emergency even hypothetically still in existence in 1969 was, strangely, the Korean War. ‘We argued on appeal that no rational person could think the Korean War was still going on in 1969,’ Tigar explained. ‘The Tenth Circuit agreed, and dismissed the whole case.”
It seems I read 318 pages of Volume 1 of "The Story of the Stone." The bookmark is a business card from Taj Mahal Indian Restaurant, where I used to eat lunch once or twice a week. On the front I’ve written either “locus of history” or “loans of history.” On the back I’ve scrawled some unfamiliar words that I’ve encountered in the book: cangue, flocculus, incrassation, camlet. And this plaintive question: “Why does one begin to read an unfinished novel?”
“Jia She led a cultured life and never did anything.” -- "The Story of the Stone"
The bookmark at P. 178 of Gretel Ehrlich’s "The Future of Ice" is a ticket stub for the Neil LaBute play "Fat Pig."
“If 'The Story of the Stone' is a sort of Chinese 'Remembrance of Things Past,' it becomes doubly important to us to know as much as we can about the author’s life.” -- from David Hawkes’ introduction
Sheck’s Mary: “My days spent imagining his parts.”
Sheck’s monster: “I tried to piece together what I could. The lost Atlantis of her.”
“What words will you cut?” -- "The Story of the Stone"
Cut as in incise. But I’m reading it, now, as abandon.
III.
Strike-throughs, slashes. Brackets and underlinings. Double-strike-throughs. Question marks. Different typefaces. Obelus and ellipsis.
Words and names dissected, syllable by syllable. Silent letters identified. “The silent ‘e’ in hide, the silent ‘i’ in pain and recoil. The silent ‘g’ in sign.”
“If I could see intervals as well as objects...”
“It’s in the silence after you feel you hear. Vibrations. Now silent air.” -- "Ulysses"
“But it must be stressed that metaphor is not a completely successful or controllable means of communication. We employ inadequate language always.”
Mistyped: “meataphor.”
"I collected bones from charnel-houses and disturbed, with profane fingers, the tremendous secrets of the human frame." -- "Frankenstein"
The lyric essay is a kind of Frankenstein’s monster, equipped with parts sliced out of others, stitched up with genius and white space.
Where a man had been cut into little pieces--
“Those days in the graveyard I traveled across many pages which frequently ended in mid-sentence -- the books I found were mostly torn -- so my travels were wayward, random, disrupted, though maybe the mind mostly travels in this way.” -- "Frankenstein"
Another novel by a poet, Robert Kelly’s "The Scorpions" ends mid-sentence. As does "A Monster’s Notes."
List of books in "A Monster’s Notes" includes Mungo Park’s "Journal of a Journey in Africa."
Mungo Park disappeared in Africa.
As did his son, who went to find him.
“The Japanese word ‘oku’ means not only ‘north’ but also ‘deep,’ ‘inner,’ ‘the heart of a mountain,’ ‘to penetrate to the depth of something or someone,’ ‘the bottom of one’s heart,’ and ‘the end of one’s mind.’” -- "The Future of Ice"
“Sometimes I feel my own body turning into words, my skin a living network of words.” -- "A Monster’s Notes"
I misread “netsuke” for “network.”
Error.
“Claire” and “Cerval” both have “err” in them, or “air.”
“My head aches, I’m tired all the time and clumsy. My right hand’s not working right, I drop things for no reason.”
“BE SUSPICIOUS OF ANYTHING.” -- NYC MTA poster, quoted by Sheck
Meditation on themes suggested.
I mistyped “meditation” as “mediation.” “Thems” for “themes.”
Meditation on themes suggested by Mary Shelley’s "Frankenstein."
On spaces created.
My notes written on the endpages, on the upper margins, on a torn sheet of a publicity letter, on a dry-cleaning receipt, across four different files on my laptop. Words in the air.
In China (relates "A Monster’s Notes") every scrap of writing is sacred, to be collected and burned. Words in the air.
Are these my real notes or the ones I will publish? Which version has more energy?
“Twenty-four-hour-a-day sun and I’m living in a skin turned inside out.” -- Gretel Ehrlich, "This Cold Heaven"
Sheck’s novel acknowledges Google searches. Wikipedia. Redirections. All this webwork.
"A Monster’s Notes" is an uncommonplace book. A site for revision, translation, error, confusion, melancholy. Limits of this method. Book is over 500 pages long, not without longueurs. (Could it have worked at 100 pages, at 50?) But heft becomes crucial to the experience. To exhaust the metaphors and the monster.
A mirror, an instant replay, “the automatic relation to himself of a narrative concerning himself.” ("Ulysses")
Sheck: “I’m reading and she’s listening.”
Every line potentially last or first.
-- Ed Park
Bloomsday 2009
New York City
