Review: The Official Catalog of the Library of Potential Literature
by Anna Laird Barto • 02.15.2011
The Official Catalog of the Library of Potential Literature (Cow Heavy Books, 2011), edited by Ben Segal and Erinrose Mager, is more than just a collection of short blurbs describing would-be books; it is a droll and scalding glimpse into the witches cauldron of the postmodern literary imagination.
No, really.
The contributors to this collection, from well-known writers like Aimee Bender and Matt Bell to newer voices like Mallory Rice and Sean Higgins, do more than satirize the tired language of book reviews, dust jackets, and literary theory–they take our preconceived ideas about what is literature and turn them upside down and inside out. Posited here are books by authors both real (Vladimir Nabokov, Georges Perec) and imaginary; books by the dead, and yes, the undead; books in the form of cubes, wooden drawers, sounds; books that can only be deciphered when held up to a mirror.
In some cases the prose is as irritatingly self-conscious and convoluted as its object of ridicule, but more often the language, although hyperbolic, is to be savored. For example, this from Lance Olsen:
“Pages ornamented with trompe-l’oeil, paperclips and coffee stains and buzzing houseflies, some busy with illegible runes that dissolve when exposed to light, three that smell like roses or lemons (depending on whether a man or woman is reading), two that stain with the bloody fingerprints of the those who handle them, one that ignites when brushed with breath, thirteen sewn from baby skin, one that moans when touched, and one that screams—yet all without mass, unimaginable, and invisible.”
But my favorite has to be the blurb by Lucas Astor, PhD (courtesy of Samuel Ligon) which contains the embedded narrative of the reviewer’s affair with the would-be book’s author, who taught him, “over and over, first in my office, then in her apartment, also in the woods behind Barrett Hall and in so many other places, at AWP in the New York Hilton for example,” that their thirty-five-year age difference was inconsequential and that he should not under any circumstances introduce her to his agent.
Not surprisingly, this collection is packed with enough obscure references to scare away the lay-reader, and to have the AWP crowd snorting our lattes through our noses. But it also has zombies, so check it out.
Glad to see that someone finally hinted at the deeply narcissistic nature of this publication. Writers writing blurbs about “imaginary books”? Sounds like writers couching their own thinking as someone else’s so that they can praise their own ideas publicly. The blurbs in turn imply praise on the editors’ original idea. It’s no surprise that one of the bits of “potential literature” included is the book itself. It’s a circle jerk of reflective praise.
Alexander, you mean sort of like Borges describing possible books in the Library of Babel, or “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”? Or Calvino writing about the fact that you, the reader, have picked up a copy of If On A Winter’s Night a Traveler? Maybe Nabokov’s Pale Fire is self-aggrandizement writ exegetically large? Or perhaps the entire Oulipean movement devoted to “potential literature” is merely a bunch of self-promoting narcissists? And that Don Quixote–when Part One comes up in Part Two, things start getting pretty self-referential, not to mention Scheherazade telling the story of her telling. I don’t know, man, it sounds like the latest emanation of a venerable, well-trodden literary tradition, and based on the quotes in the review kind of sounds fun, actually.
As a contributor, I don’t feel as though I was doing any couching – the idea is the blurb itself, not the ‘work’ to which it refers. And, unless a work is published against the author’s will, isn’t every publication an implied public praise of one’s ideas?
John Madera’s THE UNBEARABLE HEAVINESS OF NONBEING, a literal take on the worn-out creative writing dictum that writers write “invisible” prose, is a kind of an emperor’s-new-clothes-for-the-mind, inscribing itself on unsuspecting consciousnesses by the incessant repetition of its existence, through word-of-mouth, reviews, blogorrhea posts, droll comment “trollery,” Fakebook and Chitter-Chatter updates, and other insidious forms of self-promotion. Despite their invisibility, Madera’s sentential convolutions still ouroborically wrap their words in the mind’s wastes.