Michael Leong
Passionate Consciousness
John Olson, In Advance of the Broken Justy (Quale Press, 2016), $18.00 (paper), 335pp.
The narrative premise behind John Olson’s latest autobiographical novel is deceptively simple. In Advance of the Broken Justy explains, among other things, the curious connection between the total breakdown of Olson’s 1994 Subaru Justy in a sublevel of a Seattle parking garage and his subsequent trips to Paris: a stay in 2013 to do a tour of bookstores and art museums and another in early 2015 to catch the end of the “Marcel Duchamp: La peinture, même” (24 septembre 2014 - 5 janvier 2015) exposition at the Centre Pompidou.
These events intertwine when Olson decides, against practical reason, to reallocate money set aside for a new car to fund an aesthetic pilgrimage to the City of Light. He says, “I’m still not sure how it happened, but somehow a Venetian red Subaru with manual shift turned into a trip to Paris.” From one perspective, an automobile suddenly morphing into a transatlantic voyage sounds like a surrealist transformation (perhaps on par with Benjamin Péret’s “locomotive […] born / of the convulsions of rebellious trees”; from another, it attests to what Karl Marx called the “magic of money” (“Everything becomes saleable and purchaseable […] Nothing is immune from this alchemy, the bones of the saints cannot withstand it”); and from yet another perspective, it emphasizes the odd causalities and amalgamations, the juxtapositions of chance events that are necessarily part of the meandering logic of an ordinary life. A car breaks down; one travels to Paris. Or as T.S. Eliot put it: one “falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other.” Life as a series of Duchampian assemblages.
One of Olson’s great concerns in In Advance of the Broken Justy is the strange and complicated relationship between ordinary and aesthetic experience, between art and life. Much of the novel reads like daily dispatches (indeed, excerpts have appeared on Olson’s blog Tillalala Chronicles) that recount mundane affairs—from Olson having to deal with loud neighbors in an acoustically-unforgiving condo (he calls the tenant above him, an apparently noisy showerer, “a John Cage of the bathroom”), to managing home repairs (a dishwasher installation, for instance, that had to be completed in two installments because of a defective screw), to getting around Seattle “without a functioning car for the first time in twenty years.” Olson trains his attention on what French writer George Perec might call the “infra-ordinary” in his insistent focus on quotidian detail. We learn what he and his wife have for dinner one night (at the 5 Spot café, on Queen Anne Avenue North, he orders the Tennessee brisket, “dry rubbed & hickory smoked for ten hours; served with baked beans, spiced & blistered green beans & sweet ’n’ hot Memphis BBQ” while his wife opts for the “Crossroads pan-roasted chicken, topped with ‘habenero Voodoo sauce and served with Brussels sprouts & griddle cornmeal cake’”); later, we are informed of Olson’s exact flight data as he flies over Greenland (“ground speed, 534 mph; 59 mph tail wind; temperature -67 degrees Fahrenheit; altitude, 35,014 feet; distance to destination, 2,026 miles” and so on).
But the novel often veers from the infra-ordinary to the extraordinary linguistic stratosphere of the marvelous. One minute Olson is mentioning “getting our apartment primped and proper for sale,” the next he is discussing “a cocoon in which scintillas of meaning evolve into anatomies of potential flight” and the “important distinction between real estate and the astronauts lost in the catacombs of a harmonica.” This is to say that one of the compelling compositional dramas of the book is the way it wildly toggles back and forth from the literal to the figurative. Some passages—beautiful in their synaesthetic perceptions—can be isolated and presented as Rimbaudian prose poetry: “I can do marvelous things when the drums are pounding and the coupons have been well-perforated and the avocados are fresh and have the sound of drums. I can move my finger along the rim of a bowl. I can create a subjunctive mood if I so wish. I can shape reality so that it looks like a bank teller or a hole in the ground.” Indeed, Olson is mostly known as a poet, and In Advance of the Broken Justy contextualizes Olson’s energetic surrealist poetry in a variety of interesting frames.
In reviewing Olson’s Stevensianly titled novel The Nothing That Is (Ravenna Press, 2010), Paul Constant quips at what he takes to be the disappointing slippage between Olson, the man, and Olson, the writer. He opines, “I don't much like the John Olson who is the subject of the new ‘Creative Bio-Autobiography’ The Nothing That Is. The book details a few days in the life of Olson as he tools around Seattle and travels to Missoula to do a poetry reading at an art gallery. He is a bitter man, privileged and obsessed with how everything used to be better […] This is a very different John Olson than the one you’ve read before, the brilliant, occasionally frustrating poet.” Constant wonders out loud, “Has Olson been hiding a boorish dolt inside of himself all this time?”
I haven’t read—and thus can’t speak to--The Nothing That Is. But I can imagine Constant mounting a similar critique against Olson’s new novel. After all, in In Advance of the Broken Justy Olson certainly rails against the Microsoftification of his resident city as he laments “Seattle’s sea-change from an affordable, art-friendly city to a cheerless, affluent dysphoria of clueless bobos.” He damns the constant home renovation projects that pollute the soundscape around his neighborhood and condo, interrupting his valuable writing time. A self-described Luddite, he is apt to complain about “digital technology” as a source “social decay.” “I am an asshole, I know,” says Olson.
Nevertheless, Constant seems to miss the important fact that there is no contradiction between Olson the poet, who writes—in the excellent volume Echo Regime (Black Square Editions, 2000)—“This is why I became a poet. I wanted to be / seven stomachs & a mouth of steam” and Olson, the autobiographical novelist, who describes “the [mundane] life of a poet, struggling to get by outside the sheltering walls and income of academia.” Olson’s point is a dialectical juxtaposition of the boorishness of reality with the surreality that poetry affords. It is, in short, a surrealist project. In the classic 1934 lecture “What is Surrealism?” Breton explains that surrealism is not an escape from the real but “a desire to deepen the foundations of the real; to bring about an ever clearer and at the same time ever more passionate consciousness of the world perceived by the senses.” Breton continues, “we have attempted to present interior reality and exterior reality as two elements in process of unification, of finally becoming one. This final unification is the supreme aim of surrealism: interior reality and exterior reality being, in the present form of society, in contradiction (and in this contradiction we see the very cause of man’s unhappiness, but also the source of his movement), we have assigned to ourselves the task of confronting these two realities with one another on every possible occasion.” Olson’s novel presents a “passionate consciousness of the world perceived by the senses,” whether it is a world of Paul Celan’s Atemwende or Bob Dylan’s Tarantula (two books that Olson admires) or a world of Home Owners Associations and the Number 3 bus to Virginia Street. Its ambition is nothing less than to confront interior and exterior reality. In this way, despite Olson’s presentation of himself as a misanthrope and curmudgeon, he is, at root, a utopian thinker.
We can see Olson’s dynamic treatment of the two realities Breton describes in a passage in which he remarks on a seemingly banal detail: the way a restaurant-bar intricately folds its table napkins. Olson casually mentions that “[t]he art of folding napkins seems to be on the uptake” then launches into an almost Deleuzian flight of baroque philosophy. “How does one fold the phenomenon of distance? Of a propagating wave of light?” he asks. “One begins with a periodic lattice in a higher dimension. Fold the lattice by taking one end and sliding it under the other end […] Make your folds long and wide and cinematic. Make them glide and hover over a table of horsetail fern and browsing brontosauri.” If you think a napkin is boring, Olson seems to be implying, then look again.
The cover of In Advance of the Broken Justy shows Olson at “Marcel Duchamp: La peinture, même,” posing in front of Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel. Duchamp constructed his “assisted readymade” by fastening an inverted bicycle wheel to a four-legged kitchen stool. Bicycle Wheel seems to outdo Apollinaire, who said, “When man resolved to imitate walking, he invented the wheel, which does not look like a leg. In doing this, he was practicing surrealism without knowing it.” Duchamp’s sculpture makes a wheel look like an aesthetic form instead of a wheel. Bicycle Wheel is, in fact, the dialectical opposite of the Venetian red Subaru that Olson had considered buying: though it contains a wheel—a rudimentary component designed to harness locomotion—it goes nowhere. It is a purely aesthetic rather than practical object. Olson could have been driving around Seattle, passing “clueless bobos,” rather than standing in the Centre Pompidou. In the black and white photo, Olson’s expression seems neutral as he gazes at the camera; but with his left hand grasping his belt buckle, his body is ever so slightly tilted towards the readymade in a gesture of accomplishment, as if to say, this is the way I roll.
John Olson, In Advance of the Broken Justy (Quale Press, 2016), $18.00 (paper), 335pp.
The narrative premise behind John Olson’s latest autobiographical novel is deceptively simple. In Advance of the Broken Justy explains, among other things, the curious connection between the total breakdown of Olson’s 1994 Subaru Justy in a sublevel of a Seattle parking garage and his subsequent trips to Paris: a stay in 2013 to do a tour of bookstores and art museums and another in early 2015 to catch the end of the “Marcel Duchamp: La peinture, même” (24 septembre 2014 - 5 janvier 2015) exposition at the Centre Pompidou.
These events intertwine when Olson decides, against practical reason, to reallocate money set aside for a new car to fund an aesthetic pilgrimage to the City of Light. He says, “I’m still not sure how it happened, but somehow a Venetian red Subaru with manual shift turned into a trip to Paris.” From one perspective, an automobile suddenly morphing into a transatlantic voyage sounds like a surrealist transformation (perhaps on par with Benjamin Péret’s “locomotive […] born / of the convulsions of rebellious trees”; from another, it attests to what Karl Marx called the “magic of money” (“Everything becomes saleable and purchaseable […] Nothing is immune from this alchemy, the bones of the saints cannot withstand it”); and from yet another perspective, it emphasizes the odd causalities and amalgamations, the juxtapositions of chance events that are necessarily part of the meandering logic of an ordinary life. A car breaks down; one travels to Paris. Or as T.S. Eliot put it: one “falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other.” Life as a series of Duchampian assemblages.
One of Olson’s great concerns in In Advance of the Broken Justy is the strange and complicated relationship between ordinary and aesthetic experience, between art and life. Much of the novel reads like daily dispatches (indeed, excerpts have appeared on Olson’s blog Tillalala Chronicles) that recount mundane affairs—from Olson having to deal with loud neighbors in an acoustically-unforgiving condo (he calls the tenant above him, an apparently noisy showerer, “a John Cage of the bathroom”), to managing home repairs (a dishwasher installation, for instance, that had to be completed in two installments because of a defective screw), to getting around Seattle “without a functioning car for the first time in twenty years.” Olson trains his attention on what French writer George Perec might call the “infra-ordinary” in his insistent focus on quotidian detail. We learn what he and his wife have for dinner one night (at the 5 Spot café, on Queen Anne Avenue North, he orders the Tennessee brisket, “dry rubbed & hickory smoked for ten hours; served with baked beans, spiced & blistered green beans & sweet ’n’ hot Memphis BBQ” while his wife opts for the “Crossroads pan-roasted chicken, topped with ‘habenero Voodoo sauce and served with Brussels sprouts & griddle cornmeal cake’”); later, we are informed of Olson’s exact flight data as he flies over Greenland (“ground speed, 534 mph; 59 mph tail wind; temperature -67 degrees Fahrenheit; altitude, 35,014 feet; distance to destination, 2,026 miles” and so on).
But the novel often veers from the infra-ordinary to the extraordinary linguistic stratosphere of the marvelous. One minute Olson is mentioning “getting our apartment primped and proper for sale,” the next he is discussing “a cocoon in which scintillas of meaning evolve into anatomies of potential flight” and the “important distinction between real estate and the astronauts lost in the catacombs of a harmonica.” This is to say that one of the compelling compositional dramas of the book is the way it wildly toggles back and forth from the literal to the figurative. Some passages—beautiful in their synaesthetic perceptions—can be isolated and presented as Rimbaudian prose poetry: “I can do marvelous things when the drums are pounding and the coupons have been well-perforated and the avocados are fresh and have the sound of drums. I can move my finger along the rim of a bowl. I can create a subjunctive mood if I so wish. I can shape reality so that it looks like a bank teller or a hole in the ground.” Indeed, Olson is mostly known as a poet, and In Advance of the Broken Justy contextualizes Olson’s energetic surrealist poetry in a variety of interesting frames.
In reviewing Olson’s Stevensianly titled novel The Nothing That Is (Ravenna Press, 2010), Paul Constant quips at what he takes to be the disappointing slippage between Olson, the man, and Olson, the writer. He opines, “I don't much like the John Olson who is the subject of the new ‘Creative Bio-Autobiography’ The Nothing That Is. The book details a few days in the life of Olson as he tools around Seattle and travels to Missoula to do a poetry reading at an art gallery. He is a bitter man, privileged and obsessed with how everything used to be better […] This is a very different John Olson than the one you’ve read before, the brilliant, occasionally frustrating poet.” Constant wonders out loud, “Has Olson been hiding a boorish dolt inside of himself all this time?”
I haven’t read—and thus can’t speak to--The Nothing That Is. But I can imagine Constant mounting a similar critique against Olson’s new novel. After all, in In Advance of the Broken Justy Olson certainly rails against the Microsoftification of his resident city as he laments “Seattle’s sea-change from an affordable, art-friendly city to a cheerless, affluent dysphoria of clueless bobos.” He damns the constant home renovation projects that pollute the soundscape around his neighborhood and condo, interrupting his valuable writing time. A self-described Luddite, he is apt to complain about “digital technology” as a source “social decay.” “I am an asshole, I know,” says Olson.
Nevertheless, Constant seems to miss the important fact that there is no contradiction between Olson the poet, who writes—in the excellent volume Echo Regime (Black Square Editions, 2000)—“This is why I became a poet. I wanted to be / seven stomachs & a mouth of steam” and Olson, the autobiographical novelist, who describes “the [mundane] life of a poet, struggling to get by outside the sheltering walls and income of academia.” Olson’s point is a dialectical juxtaposition of the boorishness of reality with the surreality that poetry affords. It is, in short, a surrealist project. In the classic 1934 lecture “What is Surrealism?” Breton explains that surrealism is not an escape from the real but “a desire to deepen the foundations of the real; to bring about an ever clearer and at the same time ever more passionate consciousness of the world perceived by the senses.” Breton continues, “we have attempted to present interior reality and exterior reality as two elements in process of unification, of finally becoming one. This final unification is the supreme aim of surrealism: interior reality and exterior reality being, in the present form of society, in contradiction (and in this contradiction we see the very cause of man’s unhappiness, but also the source of his movement), we have assigned to ourselves the task of confronting these two realities with one another on every possible occasion.” Olson’s novel presents a “passionate consciousness of the world perceived by the senses,” whether it is a world of Paul Celan’s Atemwende or Bob Dylan’s Tarantula (two books that Olson admires) or a world of Home Owners Associations and the Number 3 bus to Virginia Street. Its ambition is nothing less than to confront interior and exterior reality. In this way, despite Olson’s presentation of himself as a misanthrope and curmudgeon, he is, at root, a utopian thinker.
We can see Olson’s dynamic treatment of the two realities Breton describes in a passage in which he remarks on a seemingly banal detail: the way a restaurant-bar intricately folds its table napkins. Olson casually mentions that “[t]he art of folding napkins seems to be on the uptake” then launches into an almost Deleuzian flight of baroque philosophy. “How does one fold the phenomenon of distance? Of a propagating wave of light?” he asks. “One begins with a periodic lattice in a higher dimension. Fold the lattice by taking one end and sliding it under the other end […] Make your folds long and wide and cinematic. Make them glide and hover over a table of horsetail fern and browsing brontosauri.” If you think a napkin is boring, Olson seems to be implying, then look again.
The cover of In Advance of the Broken Justy shows Olson at “Marcel Duchamp: La peinture, même,” posing in front of Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel. Duchamp constructed his “assisted readymade” by fastening an inverted bicycle wheel to a four-legged kitchen stool. Bicycle Wheel seems to outdo Apollinaire, who said, “When man resolved to imitate walking, he invented the wheel, which does not look like a leg. In doing this, he was practicing surrealism without knowing it.” Duchamp’s sculpture makes a wheel look like an aesthetic form instead of a wheel. Bicycle Wheel is, in fact, the dialectical opposite of the Venetian red Subaru that Olson had considered buying: though it contains a wheel—a rudimentary component designed to harness locomotion—it goes nowhere. It is a purely aesthetic rather than practical object. Olson could have been driving around Seattle, passing “clueless bobos,” rather than standing in the Centre Pompidou. In the black and white photo, Olson’s expression seems neutral as he gazes at the camera; but with his left hand grasping his belt buckle, his body is ever so slightly tilted towards the readymade in a gesture of accomplishment, as if to say, this is the way I roll.