Contemporary Authors

• You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake ( poetry) Coffee House Press (Minneapolis, MN), 2010
• They and We Will Get into Trouble for This ( poetry) Coffee House Press (Minneapolis, MN), 2016
• Eleanor, or, the Rejection of the Progress of Love ( novel) Coffee House Press (Minneapolis, MN), 2018
• The Possession Seven Stories Press (New York, NY), 2008
• The Jokers New York Review Books (New York, NY), 2010
• Nazis in the Metro Melville House (Brooklyn, NY), 2014
• Mr. Hire's Engagement Penguin Books (London, England), 2014
• Bresson on Bresson: Interviews, 1943-1983 New York Review Books (New York, NY), 2016

Library of Congress Online Catalog 1. Nazis in the Metro LCCN 2014933228 Type of material Book Personal name Daeninckx, Didier, 1949- author. Uniform title Nazis dans le métro. English Main title Nazis in the Metro / Didier Daeninckx ; translated by Anna Moschovakis. Published/Produced Brooklyn ; London : Melville House, [2014] Description 165 pages ; 21 cm. ISBN 9781612192963 (paperback) 1612192963 (paperback) Shelf Location FLS2014 175516 CALL NUMBER PQ2664.A417 N3913 2014 OVERFLOWA5S Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLS1) 2. They and we will get into trouble for this LCCN 2015028946 Type of material Book Personal name Moschovakis, Anna, author. Uniform title Poems. Selections Main title They and we will get into trouble for this / Anna Moschovakis. Published/Produced Minneapolis : Coffee House Press, 2016. Description 90 pages ; 23 cm ISBN 9781566894203 (paperback) CALL NUMBER PS3613.O7787 A6 2016 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 3. Mr. Hire's engagement LCCN 2015506969 Type of material Book Personal name Simenon, Georges, 1903-1989, author. Uniform title Fiançailles de Mr. Hire. English Main title Mr. Hire's engagement / Georges Simenon ; translated by Anna Moschovakis. Published/Produced London : Penguin Books, 2014. ©2007 Description 155 pages ; 20 cm. ISBN 9780141978468 (pbk.) 0141978465 (pbk.) CALL NUMBER PQ2637.I53 F513 2014 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 4. Bresson on Bresson : interviews, 1943-1983 LCCN 2016017891 Type of material Book Personal name Bresson, Robert, author. Uniform title Bresson par Bresson. English Main title Bresson on Bresson : interviews, 1943-1983 / Robert Bresson ; edited by Mylène Bresson ; translated from the French by Anna Moschovakis ; preface by Pascale Mérigeau. Published/Produced New York : New York Review Books, [2016] Description xv, 285 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm ISBN 9781681370446 (alk. paper) CALL NUMBER PN1998.3.B755 A5 2016 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 5. Eleanor or the rejection of the progress of love LCCN 2017056242 Type of material Book Personal name Moschovakis, Anna, author. Main title Eleanor or the rejection of the progress of love / Anna Moschovakis. Published/Produced Minneapolis : Coffee House Press, 2018. Description 211 pages ; 21 cm ISBN 9781566895088 (softcover) CALL NUMBER PS3613.O7787 E43 2018 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 6. The jokers LCCN 2010013738 Type of material Book Personal name Cossery, Albert, 1913-2008. Uniform title Violence et la derision. English Main title The jokers / Albert Cossery ; translated from the French by Anna Moschovakis ; introduction by James Buchan. Published/Created New York : New York Review Books, c2010. Description x, 145 p. ; 21 cm. ISBN 9781590173251 (alk. paper) 1590173252 (alk. paper) CALL NUMBER PQ2605.O725 V513 2010 FT MEADE Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 7. The possession LCCN 2008035106 Type of material Book Personal name Ernaux, Annie, 1940- Uniform title Occupation. English Main title The possession / Annie Ernaux ; translated by Anna Moschovakis. Published/Created New York : Seven Stories Press, 2008. Description 62 p. ; 21 cm. ISBN 9781583228555 (pbk.) 1583228551 (pbk.) CALL NUMBER PQ2665.R67 O2513 2008 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 8. You and three others are approaching a lake LCCN 2010016459 Type of material Book Personal name Moschovakis, Anna. Main title You and three others are approaching a lake / Anna Moschovakis. Edition 1st ed. Published/Created Minneapolis : Coffee House Press, c2010. Description 119 p. ; 23 cm. ISBN 9781566892506 (alk. paper) 1566892503 (alk. paper) Shelf Location FLM2013 017316 CALL NUMBER PS3613.O7787 Y68 2010 OVERFLOWA5S Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM1) CALL NUMBER PS3613.O7787 Y68 2010 FT MEADE Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• author's site - http://badutopian.com/

  Anna Moschovakis is the author most recently of the novel Eleanor, or, The Rejection of the Progress of Love (Coffee House Press, 2018). Her books of poetry include the James Laughlin award-winning You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake and They and We Will Get Into Trouble for This, a “best of 2016” pick at BOMB, Entropy, and The New Yorker. Her translations from French include Albert Cossery’s The Jokers, Annie Ernaux’s The Possession, and Bresson on Bresson, and experimental translations of and with the Algerian poet Samira Negrouche. A recipient of grants and fellowships from New York Foundation for the Arts, The Poetry Fund, the Howard Foundation, and apexart, she has taught in the graduate writing programs at Bard, Pratt, and Columbia. She is a longtime member of the publishing collective Ugly Duckling Presse and a co-founder of Bushel, an art and community space in Delhi, NY.

• Poetry Foundation - https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/anna-moschovakis

  Anna Moschovakis is a poet, a translator, and an editor. She earned a BA from the University of California-Berkeley, an MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School for the Arts at Bard College, and an MA in comparative literature at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her books of poetry include I Have Not Been Able to Get Through to Everyone (2006), You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake (2011), which won the James Laughlin Award, and They and We Will Get Into Trouble for This (2016). She is also the author of the novel Eleanor, or, The Rejection of the Progress of Love (forthcoming 2018) and numerous chapbooks, including The Blue Book (2005), The Tragedy of Waste (2007), The Human Machine (2009), She Got Up (2009), and Anna's Half/Anselm's Half (2013, with Anselm Berrigan). Her translations include Georges Simenon's The Engagement (2007), Annie Ernaux's The Possession (2008), and Albert Cossery's The Jokers (2010), Marcelle Sauvageot's Commentary (2013, with Christine Schwartz-Hartley), and Bresson on Bresson (2017).

  Moschovakis is a member of Ugly Duckling Presse, where she has been an editor, a designer, an administrator, and a printer since 2002. She founded the Dossier Series at the press in 2008 and edits both poetry and translations. A core faculty member of Bard College's Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Moschovakis is also an adjunct associate professor in the Writing MFA program at Pratt Institute. Her honors and awards include grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Fund for Poetry, the Howard Foundation, the Edward F. Albee Foundation, apexart, and Headlands Center for the Arts. She lives in Brooklyn and Delaware County, New York, where is is a founding member of Bushel Collective.

• American Acdemy of Poets - https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/anna-moschovakis

  Anna Moschovakis
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  Anna Moschovakis

  Poet, translator, and editor Anna Moschovakis studied philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley. She then went on to receive her MFA in creative writing at the Milton Avery Graduate School for the Arts at Bard College, and her MA in comparative literature (French and American) at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

  She is the author of three books of poetry, They and We Will Get Into Trouble for This (Coffee House Press, 2016), You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake, winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and I Have Not Been Able to Get Through to Everyone (Turtle Point Press, 2006).

  Her translations from the French include Albert Cossery's The Jokers (New York Review Books, 2010), Annie Ernaux's The Possession (Seven Stories Press, 2008), and Georges Simenon's The Engagement (New York Review Books, 2007).

  Her awards include fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Fund for Poetry, and a translation fellowship from Le Centre National du Livre.

  Since 2002, Moschovakis has been a member of the publishing collective Ugly Duckling Presse, in the capacity of editor, designer, administrator, and printer. She edits several books each year for Ugly Duckling, and heads up the Dossier Series of investigative texts.

  She currently teaches at the Pratt Institute and at Milton Avery Graduate School for the Arts at Bard College. She lives in South Kortright, New York, part of the Catskill/Delaware watershed.

• Poetry Society of America - https://www.poetrysociety.org/psa/poetry/crossroads/new_american_poets/anna_moschovakis/

  QUOTE:
  My writing begins most often in the experience of discomfort, lack of mastery, or failure, and the decision to interrogate it in language. This extends to form and approach as much as to content. My poems tend to be long and fall somewhere between poem and essay, challenging the expectations of both but also doubly exposing themselves. And I will let myself inhabit—and attempt to challenge from within—modes I find problematic but too easy to dismiss wholesale: a kind of philosophical introspection in my first book; in my second, both appropriated and invented didacticism; and in my incipient current work, optimism. Like travel to a country whose language I only partially know, these trips are educational—writing becomes a test, an experiment, complete with risks of misprision, embarrassment, trouble.

  Anna Moschovakis

  My writing begins most often in the experience of discomfort, lack of mastery, or failure, and the decision to interrogate it in language. This extends to form and approach as much as to content. My poems tend to be long and fall somewhere between poem and essay, challenging the expectations of both but also doubly exposing themselves. And I will let myself inhabit—and attempt to challenge from within—modes I find problematic but too easy to dismiss wholesale: a kind of philosophical introspection in my first book; in my second, both appropriated and invented didacticism; and in my incipient current work, optimism. Like travel to a country whose language I only partially know, these trips are educational—writing becomes a test, an experiment, complete with risks of misprision, embarrassment, trouble.

  I wrote that artist's statement recently, and it still seems true enough.

  And then I had the ridiculous good fortune to spend a month in a country whose language I knew not at all—Ethiopia—as a resident artist, with the assignment to compare notes with working writers and artists based there. I felt unexpectedly at home in Addis Ababa and by my last night, also the evening of my one public presentation—a poetry reading at which I was to share the bill with two well-known Ethiopian poets—I had developed such a connection to and respect for the people I'd come to know, I was apprehensive to the point of panic. I am ashamed to admit it: I was nervous that, removed from the context of American poetry, or New American poetry, or (by extension and sometimes directly) the European avant-garde tradition—not to mention a potential language barrier, though I knew most of the audience would have very good English—my poetry wouldn't do its work, wouldn't "work." Based on the discussions I had been having with writers, I was in fact fairly certain that it wouldn't be understood as poetry at all. So in a wrongheaded attempt to mitigate disaster, I did something I never do: I prefaced my reading with some comments, on form (it was a serial poem I had written in a blue examination book, with the constraints being that each line had to be a statement, and each poem had to fill a page, and the series had to fill the book); on influence (the poem stole its title and the cadence of its syntax from Wittgenstein, an important figure for me); and on subject matter (the poem sublimates logic with sex and vice versa in a vain attempt to kill the love poem once and for all, as Wittgenstein tried to topple philosophy with a single slim volume). Then I read the whole series. Before and after my reading, the Ethiopian poets presented poems in Amharic, of which I understand maybe 10 words; but they clearly had the audience riveted. Afterwards, we discussed. One of the other poets, who is a professor of literature by day, asked me this: You have all of these references to philosophy and private constraints and poetics in your work; what about the reader or listener who doesn't share these references? (Poetry in Ethiopia has a spectrum of readers, listeners.)

  The discussion period was lively and unlike any I've experienced elsewhere; it included the spontaneous recitation of poetry from audience members; questions that cut straight to the bone; and a rare frankness and desire to get to the bottom of what we call cultural difference—and of poetry. But I remain haunted by that first question, because I have no desire to write poetry only for people who have read the books I have read and thought the thoughts I've thought. Or, more accurately, I have discovered other, stronger desires.

  So, to begin again (a phrase borrowed from Ann Lauterbach, another important figure for me): My writing begins in the experience of discomfort, lack of mastery, or failure, and the decision to interrogate it in language.

• Bomb - https://bombmagazine.org/articles/anna-moschovakis/

  Anna Moschovakis by Jennifer Kabat

  The poet’s first novel, Eleanor, or, The Rejection of the Progress of Love, concerns a woman’s unnamed grief, as well as the meta-dialogue between the narrative’s author and the critic reading her manuscript.
  BOMB 144
  Summer 2018
  144 Cover

  Interview
  Tauba Auerbach and Sam Hillmer by
  Chris Martin and Cy Gavin
  Amy Jenkins by David Shapiro
  John Akomfrah by Shezad Dawood
  Florian Meisenberg by Peter Rostovsky
  Simone Forti by Tashi Wada​
  Ottessa Moshfegh by Benjamin Nugent
  Anna Moschovakis by Jennifer Kabat

  Essay
  The Haunting of Reza Abdoh by
  Marc Arthur

  First Proof
  The Trees of Sawtooth Park by
  Ben Marcus
  Yesterday’s Papers, an excerpt from Poso Wells by Gabriela Alemán
  Stories from The Conservation of Mass by Ronaldo V. Wilson
  Three Poems from Heck Land: The Resorted Text by Annelyse Gelman
  My Feeling’s Pyramidal by Julian Talamantez Brolaski
  My Favorite Regular by Devon Marinac
  Portfolio: Tuning by Torkwase Dyson
  Tilden by Geoffrey G. O’Brien

  Editor's Choice
  Otobong Nkanga’s To Dig a Hole That Collapses Again by
  Jason Foumberg
  The Films of Emile de Antonio by Michael Blair
  Gunnhild Øyehaug’s Wait, Blink by Ryan Chapman
  Arturo Ruiz del Pozo’s Composiciones Nativas and Miguel Flores’s Primitivo by Renato Gómez
  Roque Larraquy’s Comemadre by J.W. McCormack
  Sesshu Foster’s City of the Future by Ammiel Alcalay
  Shezad Dawood’s Kalimpong by Sabine Russ

  Journal
  Burying White Supremacy (A Future Language Sovereign) by
  Demian DinéYazhi´ & Ginger Dunnill

  End Page
  Variation on 1.00056 by Paul Chan

  Sep 18, 2018

  Interview
  Literature

  Ugly Duckling Presse by Alan Gilbert
  Ugly Duckling Presse

  Anna Moschovakis is a poet-philosopher, though she might balk at this description. For her, the act of writing is often subsumed to her engagement with the world. The interpersonal is political, a way to undercut hierarchies—and friendships are key. Ours began soon after we each moved to the Catskills, she from New York City and I from London. Explorations of the social, communal, and collective are central to her work. She’s part of the publishing collective Ugly Duckling Presse and cofounded Bushel, an upstate space “for art, agriculture, and action” that hosts exhibitions, readings, activist groups, and meetings for a new version of the Grange. Recently she set up an experiment in shared living in Brooklyn.

  Unsurprisingly, social intimacy is a thread in her first novel, Eleanor, or, The Rejection of the Progress of Love (Coffee House Press, 2018), which centers on the titular Eleanor’s struggle with an unnamed crisis, intercut with the nascent friendship between the novel’s first-person narrator—the author who created Eleanor—and a critic giving her notes on her manuscript. By turns funny, melancholic, and provocative, Anna’s novel undoes and remakes the conventions of realist fiction through repetition and compression of time. Set in a not-quite-recognizable moment in the near past, Eleanor, or ends suffused with hope. It is “luminously ordinary” in its progression, where profound shifts are as small as a postcard written or a hand touched.

  —Jennifer Kabat

  Jennifer Kabat Last night I read the ending of your novel again, and I decided we should title this interview “Luminously Ordinary.”

  Anna Moschovakis I stole that line.

  JK Who’d you steal it from?

  AM It’s Charles Nicholl’s description of Rimbaud’s life toward the end. I quote it, actually.

  JK But it also fits your book. Just the way you describe the people in their spring coats in the street when it’s actually winter, or this moment: “the air outside was translucent, as if particles of cold were suspended in it…” You’re describing this scene in New York City; Eleanor’s walking around and she sees the words 9-1-1 WE WILL NOT FORGET and we know where we are, but there’s something about it that’s unlike the description in most realist novels because you compress and repeat things in a way that unhinges the narrative.

  AM I interviewed Renee Gladman recently and we talked about the question of detail—how fully to describe things in the world of a book. How true to geography to be, how to measure the trade-offs of naming versus gesturing toward. For a long time the street names in Eleanor, or were just initials, and then that started to feel distracting or too close to allegory. At the same time I wanted to de-emphasize the specifically Brooklyn aspects, so places are a bit off. Streets and police stations are in the wrong place.

  JK Intentional weird geography.

  AM I was interested in a phenomenological realism, or soft architecture: what you sense when walking through a space.

  JK What do you mean by phenomenological realism? Or soft architecture?

  AM I never know if I’m using a term correctly.

  JK Oh, like Office for Soft Architecture?

  AM Lisa Robertson.

  JK Yeah, I love her.

  AM I haven’t read that book in over a decade and need to revisit it. In her Manifesto, she says something I love about description and politics that’s impossible to summarize, though it includes the injunction “Practice description.” The tendency to read with passion and still half-forget what I’ve read is also all over my book. The most autobiographical thing about this novel is its intertextuality, the piles of books that Eleanor dips into, which both do and don’t register fully on her person. But yes, I’m more interested in describing how what Eleanor takes in through her senses becomes inscribed in her body and thought than in trying to “map” or reproduce her point of view.

  JK Can you give an example? It’s an intense subjectivity.

  AM There’s a part toward the beginning where Eleanor’s lost her laptop, and she has this habitual response, a cycle of shock, anger, and self-abnegation, modeled on the stages of grief. And while in that intense state, a somatic as well as a psychic one, she happens to be walking down a street, hoping her lover will be home.

  JK There are moments when she notices things around her in a very acute way. The voice becomes lyrical, and then she self-abnegates again. It reminds me of that part in Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight where the protagonist, Sasha, is walking down the street, and the houses come alive, standing over her “like monsters.” They seem to shake their fists at her and point out her flaws: “Tall cubes of darkness, with two lighted eyes at the top to sneer.” In realist fiction, the details around the character often reflect the character’s state of mind, and it becomes super heavy and drives me nuts. But you seem to have found another way of using Eleanor’s interiority as a way of seeing the world.

  AM I’m glad you brought up Rhys, whose novels I love. When you work on something for so long, you sometimes think of the perfect solution to a problem and then forget it. One solution I had came directly from a Rhys novel, and I realized just now that I forgot to put it in the book.

  JK But now we can have it as an addendum!

  AM It’s from After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie. The protagonist has a relationship to chance and passivity that feels somehow similar to Eleanor’s. She’s trying to make a decision and decides if a car honks three times in the next X number of minutes, the answer will be yes. I was going to have Eleanor use the same trick.

  JK Eleanor does tarot and other things as a way of understanding her fate, even as she disbelieves in that stuff.

  AM Yeah, back to architecture: these divination-type practices are sort of non-geographical maps.

  JK That’s how I look at astrology, as a map of the future that might not be exactly accurate but gives you a guide.

  AM You can look at a map of somewhere you intend to go or somewhere you’re never going to go, and both are valid uses. People argue about the “right” way to use recipes, etcetera…I’m interested in these shifting kinds of use.

  JK In the novel there’s a critic; his name is Aidan. And then there’s the author character, the first-person I, who is not Anna Moschovakis. I remember when you added in the critic—do you want to talk about why you did that?

  AM I always assumed that if I were to write fiction it would be a slim little book. Once I’d written the first two thirds of Eleanor’s story, I thought that was going to be my little hundred-page, international fiction–influenced novella that I would never publish. But I was enjoying working out questions about fiction and particularity, trying to write something that made me feel the way certain novels I love do. Short ones! Like Maud Martha by Gwendolyn Brooks or Forever Valley by Marie Redonnet or Clarice Lispector’s novels. Eleanor’s story felt like a picaresque, which at first I’d liked, but something about it became unsatisfying. I shared those pages with people, yourself included. And I was making my own marginal notes. I do this with poetry too: a brutal takedown of my own piece, where I’ll write down everything the meanest critic might say. Then I sleep on it, cry. And in the morning decide whether those are legitimate critiques, and if they are, whether I want to resist them—because I disagree, or because they serve as openings to conversation—or if they need to be addressed. At the same time I was getting these astute notes back from the people I’d given the manuscript. I did a couple revisions based on the comments, and it occurred to me that this process of resistance and integration was as interesting to me as what was going on in Eleanor’s story. So I thought, What if I invent an interlocutor and put these interactions and arguments in the book? It brought up a lot, but was also freeing. And it created another problem: any thought I had about the book could be pretty easily folded into it, via a conversation with the critic or a question in the author character’s head. I had to decide where to stop.

  JK At the beginning, the relationship between the author character and the critic was mostly them reflecting on the text, but then it became a larger narrative with its own arc.

  AM I didn’t expect for that to happen, and that was the point where it started to feel unexpectedly novely. Their relationship became a way to explore a particular dynamic I decided to try to face. I was more bemused than anything. But then I just went with it. I’ll do anything once.

  JK Let’s talk about that. One time we were having dinner with Lynne Tillman, and you said you’d been writing longer and longer poems and that fed this project.

  AM I had written the first fifty pages of three novellas and each time lost interest. I think a couple of things led to my finishing this book. One is that my poems had become more discursive, more essay-like, with figures and characters, with extension. Though prose, argument, and a certain level of narrative have always been part of my poetry. And then I’m a freelance translator, and over the last ten years I’ve translated five novels from French. The process of translating is a little like writing without the anxiety of figuring out what you need to write—it can feel like training, like covering songs in order to learn how to write them. I envied the type of immersion I presumed would happen if I wrote a novel. I’d always written poetry in the cracks of my life, never establishing a regular studio practice. I was just talking to Sawako Nakayasu, and she told me that this year she boycotted Thanksgiving and wrote a book over the long weekend. Years ago, I spent the Fourth of July weekend locked in my room writing the long poem that ended up completing my first book. The kinds of jobs I’ve had, and maybe my psychology, made it impossible to centralize writing as a daily practice. And at a certain point in my life the question arose, Can I change that? It turned out that, especially during the summer, there were many days when I felt I could afford to spend ninety minutes writing without hurting anyone (that was how I put it to myself). But since that was not my way of writing poetry, this new habit led me to try again to write a novel. With this book, instead of relying on the cracks in my schedule, I would go through a two-month period where I wrote every day. I would have to drop it, sometimes for as long as a year or more, but then I’d pick it back up with sustained intensity. It was a palpably different way of working. It took maybe six years to get to where it was basically done. I was also craving the play-space of doing something I didn’t expect to publish. My friend Carin Besser, a great editor and writer, gave it lots of time and challenged me to see it through.

  JK Your novel conforms to a traditional novel in ways you probably never expected. But it’s still experimental.

  AM Probably the only way in which it’s experimental is that I didn’t have a plan when I wrote it, so I was experimenting.

  JK There’s also the way you use repetitions and compress time. Repeating “time passed” instead of filling up that time. There’s the refrain of “She got up,” which was the original title. The critic character and I both think that was a great title.

  AM That’s funny. “She Got Up” was the title of an older, fragmented prose piece I wrote, which was where the idea of “the thing that had happened” came from. I was struggling, both in my life and in writing, with how to talk about the effects of acute but everyday trauma, like grief and loss. Or the destabilizing shock of the unexpected, something not turning out the way you planned. And the paralysis that can come with that, either temporary or more long-term. I was trying to figure out—back to the conversation with Renee—how many particulars are necessary. What’s just the right amount of particularity to get across the emotional effects of something sharp, painful, and consequential?

  JK Right. So there’s an unstated moment of grief or trauma that happens before the beginning of the novel that we’re only privy to indirectly; you call it “the thing that happened” or “thing prime.” There’s no sense of what it actually is. The backstory isn’t filled in. And we have to live with that as an ellipsis.

  AM I struggled with this. I didn’t want to be coy. But I gave up that worry after a point. Often in poetry, especially when there’s autobiography, this question comes up: What is the right amount to reveal? When is the intensely personal or specific useful to the piece? I just rewatched Moyra Davey’s video about Derek Jarman, Notes on Blue. And she goes through a litany of artists and thinkers who have said something to the effect of: the more intensely personal and specific it is, the more broadly affecting it will be. When I wrote “She Got Up,” I was also learning how to meditate and was interested in the idea of emptying the narrative—which also means emptying the causality—from a feeling and trying to sit with the feeling itself. How do you talk about a feeling that comes out of narrative while reducing the importance of the backstory?

  JK The novel is basically about how Eleanor deals with this unspoken trauma. She starts as a person full of grief. And she’s a little solipsistic. And she ends up a more transcendently open person.

  Plot involves this notion of progress, which neither of us is super into. Yet Eleanor changes. The ending is so beautiful and open. There’s this line: “any thing may produce any thing.”

  AM That’s from David Hume. I’ve kept that line with me since I took a course on Hume in college as a philosophy major because it was taught by the only female professor in the department. Hume was obsessed with how knowledge related to experience and causality, with describing whether or how we might ever be justified in claiming that A has led to B. The same events can be interpreted by one person as progress and by another as simply change or sequence. Eleanor does change—but the changes aren’t so easy to describe. I was talking earlier about the body and all of the minute internal shifts that register on Eleanor’s person. I trained in modern dance for a while. And what I loved most about that training was how you discover within your body—which you think you know—very tiny movements that you wouldn’t have considered if someone hadn’t called your attention to their possibility.

  JK The difference between holding your wrist like that or like this.

  AM Exactly, or a muscle tensing slightly, invisibly. Changes can be about focusing attention rather than proceeding through steps.

  I’ve been thinking about whether we tend to perceive a categorical difference between transformations that feel forced upon us by events or circumstances as opposed to those that originate from within, with a desire to be a better person, to acknowledge privileges, to combat learned behaviors, to align our desires with our politics. On both sides of this flawed binary, the changes are about responding to facts of the world—facts we take to be beyond our control—but we locate our agency differently. Both kinds of changes are happening in Eleanor and in the author character. And maybe it adds up to progress in some way.

  JK Your writing has a deep engagement with Western philosophy, and you unhinge it a bit.

  AM I fell into studying philosophy as an undergrad and always felt excluded by the Western philosophical tradition and by the male-dominated rooms in which I learned it. I formed a relationship to it based on a lack of belonging, with a corresponding absence of the anxiety of influence. And maybe a propensity—common among poets—to read philosophy as “creative writing.”

  JK Totally. It’s a way to use it in a different way, one you own.

  AM Yes, though I struggle with notions of ownership! A lot of things I like about language and sentences came from reading those philosophers—often in translation—in that unauthorized way: specifically Wittgenstein, as well as Hume and Kierkegaard and Kant. My allegiance was to the continental philosophers and to theory, but the analytic philosophers fascinated me with what I felt to be an absurd desire to nail down experience—it often felt like fiction, or science fiction. How not to create characters for Leibniz’s monads? I wrote in a poem about Hume’s figuration of empathy, which he calls a form of sympathy. It’s a diagrammatic proposition, describing what amounts to the transmission of affect, which depends on his belief that impressions and ideas are different in degree and not in kind. I loved how these descriptions felt wrong-headed yet kind of right. Plus his writing was just fun to read. So I formed a relationship to philosophy that was mediated through creativity or through the unauthorized use of the material. It wasn’t subversive so much as survivalist, at the time. Wittgenstein felt much closer to how I was thinking and how I still think. I read him for both style and substance. And Lévinas, the subject of my thesis, hit me hard—this is where the foundational nature of relation comes in. The idea that relation is not something we do after we become a self but is how the self begins is one I encountered most explicitly through my reading of Lévinas. His ideas, combined with later readings in psychoanalysis and whatever psychological makeup I inherited, fed my conviction that without relation, there’s nothing.

  I grew up the daughter of two logicians. Their domains in math fall under Constructivism and its subset, Intuitionism. I knew as a child that people who thought math was about cold, hard facts were wrong. I knew it was essentially creative. So the imagination became linked in my mind to what appear to be systems of structuring, describing the world. And you know, I work with two collectives, and we’re always trying to invent or reinvent systems that are efficient but that preserve creativity. I’m drawn to organizational methods with that aim: collectivized labor, time banking, mutual aid.

  JK We were supposed do this interview at Bushel, a community space you started with other people in Delhi, New York. Your collectivist urge is really strong—the idea of the interpersonal creating something that can replace hierarchic structures. You also recently set up a time-share apartment in the city for adjuncts who commute from upstate—a kind of utopian experiment in how people can share space. And then there’s Ugly Duckling Presse, a publishing collective. You and I both have an interest in nineteenth-century utopias and non-capitalist possibilities.

  AM I hold friendship as beyond a value, almost as a religion, and this feels inborn. I’m thinking of the title of this beautiful essay by Ann Lauterbach, “The Given and the Chosen.” I feel this kind of feral commitment to and belief in friendship, and not just close personal friendship but the possibility of commons and commune, is both a given and a chosen for me. Which doesn’t mean I’m perfect at any of those things!

  When I joined UDP in 2001, it was a group of friends who’d been making one-of-a-kind books and Xeroxed chapbooks and mounting performances wherever they could. We started making larger editions, and they confused some people because there were certain elements that belonged to fine press printing, like letterpress or hand stitching, but then we were using totally non-archival materials, sometimes Xeroxing, sometimes sending out to a commercial binder—combining all of these methods because they worked, they were available, and they didn’t get in our way. We were young and we had more time than money. It was a lot about enjoying the process. We’d find dusty shops downtown or in Queens to acquire lead type or free off-cut paper. Places that had been open for many decades (and now have been closed for years).

  Bushel is a space that a bunch of us created in a tiny town that we felt lacked public venues for random encounters or collaborative activities. There are a million churches here, but we didn’t see any spaces like that. At first people weren’t sure what Bushel was, but we kept at it, and it’s become a locus for organizing and for many forms of assembly and exchange. I think with Bushel and with UDP, there was an interest in responding to voices that say, “You can’t do that. You shouldn’t. That’s not how it’s done.” And to say maybe we can just do that, or even if we can’t, we can try.

  JK That’s what I’ve learned from you as a writer—not to wait for someone to say, “It’s okay, now you can start to do this thing.” Find your own way through it. And that allows you to write in ways that shift one’s relationship to authority figures.

  AM The relationship to authority is an important engine for the novel—the author is struggling to author her book, just as Eleanor struggles to author her life, and in each case there are looming (male) figures that hold up the shoulds and shouldn’ts that oppress and get internalized. I often feel like my relationship to authority is unresolved. One of the ways I deal with that is by keeping my focal length pretty short when it comes to what I’m making. Just me working, or just me and you talking, or just this small group of people and the ways we can engage with our immediate community. Anything beyond that is like hmmm, just a hum that I don’t have the wherewithal to focus on, because I’m going to keep my nose to the grindstone and keep plugging away.

  JK It stops authority and success from being these things that sit on your shoulder.

  AM It’s a refusal to engage with certain forces that might otherwise paralyze me. Which may or may not be okay. It’s fairly avoidant, but also adaptive.

  JK In the novel there’s a constant purr of the outside world, news events that press in, giving a sense of the timescale, and there’s also a sense that the interpersonal becomes the political.

  AM There’s a tension there, because to focus too much on what an individual can or should do, especially what a consumer can or should do, is to fall prey to a kind of fiction that can do a lot of damage. And at the same time, what we do as individuals, how we respond, matters a lot to us and to the people we engage with, and maybe to the world.

  A related question came up in my conversation with Sawako: What is the political value of a feeling? To feel bad about events in the world. To feel guilty. To feel implicated in the systems we participate in. What is the status of those feelings? It can be tempting to think they’re only political insofar as they promote action. At the same time, they are real; we seem to want to account for them. And to deny that is to deny that they can also act as excuses for not changing your relationship to your own givens. Or that they can be so oppressive they become incapacitating, making you a burden on whoever’s taking care of you, if you’re lucky enough to have someone take care of you. All of these things add up to it being almost impossible to live. A graduate student of mine, Alisha Mascarenhas, is writing a sequence of prose poems called “All my friends are sick & sad.” So many people I know are struggling with not knowing how to be, wanting to fight but facing such extreme exhaustion. And deep alienation.

  JK Clearly Eleanor has these feelings that shape her existence in the world.

  AM In the first part of the novel, Eleanor is in a kind of decadent mode. I can’t totally defend how or who she is.

  JK Grief shuts her off from the world.

  AM And at the same time, her manic relationship to the news—being hyper-stimulated by it and having to reduce it to a hum—is familiar to many of us now, the way news gets flattened. Things that happen at a distance. Things of which our knowledge is always mediated by so many unknowns, as well as by methods that we understand or think we understand. The politics of Eleanor’s trajectory, and the author’s too, are under revision. They’re mired in a confusion about how to break out. Maybe that’s the biggest way in which this is a middle-aged novel: just when you get to the point—and to me this has felt gendered—where you’re a little bit less susceptible to trying to do things right or doing things to fit in or just to pass unnoticed; just when you try to claim your subjecthood from your habit of letting yourself be overrun, then there’s a new panic. You think: I need to reassess everything because of all these things I haven’t been letting myself say out loud. I have to look at what those things are in a new way, and see if I like myself or believe in this haphazard formation of self that I have let occur by following the exigencies of material needs, or the dictates of largely unconscious needs. So there’s a massive question mark at the heart of the novel. And at the end it’s still a question, but it’s maybe, I don’t know, set in a better font.

• New York Review Books - https://www.nyrb.com/collections/anna-moschovakis

  Anna Moschovakis is a translator and editor, and the author of several books of poetry, including I Have Not Been Able to Get Through to Everyone (2006) and You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake (2011), which won the James Laughlin Award. She is the recipient of awards and grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Fund for Poetry, the Edward F. Albee Foundation, and has completed an apexart residency in Ethiopia. Moschovakis lives in Brooklyn and Delaware County, New York.

• Brown U - https://www.brown.edu/academics/literary-arts/events/anna-moschovakis

  Anna Moschovakis is the author of two books of poetry, You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake and I Have Not Been Able to Get Through to Everyone, and the translator of several novels from the French, most recently The Jokers by Albert Cossery. She is a longtime member of the Brooklyn-based publishing collective Ugly Duckling Press.

• Flavorwire - http://flavorwire.com/565892/can-poets-be-successful-in-2016s-terms-a-conversation-with-anna-moschovakis

  QUOTE:
  Probably most directly is from Wittgenstein, which is a sort of recursion — I’m always terrified to say something about a philosopher I admire, when other people know so much more than I do — but, in my reading, part of what to me, as a non-philosopher drew me to Wittgenstein, is the way in which revision of ideas and revisitation of formulations of ideas remain in the text, and so there are returns and revisions and it’s not like everything is edited down to a message which is then delivered whole. There’s something that feels like it’s left in there, of the process of thinking, and thinking is one of my subjects. We can’t get away from it. I felt permission from reading him to leave it in.

  Can a Poet Be Successful in 2016’s Terms? A Conversation With Anna Moschovakis
  Books | By Shane Barnes | March 16, 2016

  “I feel sad. I feel discouraged about the future. I feel I have failed more than the average person.” Those are the opening lines of “What It Means to Be Avant-Garde” the second of three long, great poems in writer, teacher, and translator Anna Moschovakis’ third collection, They and We Will Get Into Trouble for This. Named for David Antin’s book of the same name, the poem makes use of online self-tests and alternates the writer’s results with the writer’s search for a book, and, when she finds it, the subsequent search for meaning in that book.

  The poem and the collection it calls home pulse with lines full of power — “The people we bury put us in the ground too”; “I was very literal/ especially with my lovers/ I could say ‘I love you today’/ but not ‘I will love you tomorrow'” — in forms interesting enough to be compelling but not experimental enough to be off-putting. It’s a fine line, and the distinction is vital for Moschovakis, who told me over the phone that her key politics, should she have them, involve “expecting and accepting mistakes, and being mistaken.”

  That didn’t stop her from adorning the bottom of every page of the collection with what adds up to a book-length poem. “She wrote with something like/ optimism/ to be in the way of/ something like/ happiness,” reads an excerpt from this fragmented work that has no name, but which, over the course of reading, becomes essential to the flavor of the text. It’s a risky move in a medium often viewed through skeptical eyes.

  Poetry, more than most other forms of writing, lends itself to misinterpretation, demanding close reads that could still, in the end, hit the wrong mark. To attempt to sum up Moschovakis’ position or mission statement is beside the point, and maybe impossible. Further, after talking to her about philosophy and the way Wittgenstein’s texts gave her permission to think through writing, and to leave that thinking in the writing itself, it would be misleading to present my understanding of her work as complete; the bells struck by her lines are still ringing, far from settling any time soon.

  It’s best, then, to let her speak for herself. I talked to Moschovakis about her philosophy background, the nebulous terms that have come to define success in the 21st century, the necessity of empathy in life and in poetry, and how someone with four jobs manages to find the time to put out a collection like They and We Will Get Into Trouble for This.

  Flavorwire: Let’s begin with your philosophy education, and how it has influenced your poetry.

  Anna Moschovakis: I got diverted to philosophy, partly because it was a much smaller major, and there was something about the intensity of the group of people that were studying that stuff and I just totally fell in love with it on the one hand. But, at the same time, I always knew I wouldn’t belong to philosophy. When I read the philosophers I was reading — all white men, mostly dead, and also taught mostly by white men — I was acutely aware of all of that. I never spoke in class. And I was reading Schopenhauer, who compares women to cows. So, my way of reading philosophy was kind of like acting. When I was reading Hume or I was reading Nietzsche or Heidegger I was reading them more the way I would read literature. It wasn’t about finding my position and how that related to it.

  It lead to a lot questions and feelings and anxiety, which came out in poetry that I was writing, which was really bad.

  Everybody’s poetry is bad in college.

  My poetry was an outlet for pressures that I felt from studying philosophy. At the same time I really absorbed a lot about the modes of thinking and investigation in all of the various kinds of philosophy. I just also really loved the way David Hume puts words together. I was a pretty irresponsible philosophy student.

  Do you think that the actual language of the philosophers worked its way into your poetry? You said your angst from the program inspired it, but can you see any of that in your writing?

  Probably most directly is from Wittgenstein, which is a sort of recursion — I’m always terrified to say something about a philosopher I admire, when other people know so much more than I do — but, in my reading, part of what to me, as a non-philosopher drew me to Wittgenstein, is the way in which revision of ideas and revisitation of formulations of ideas remain in the text, and so there are returns and revisions and it’s not like everything is edited down to a message which is then delivered whole. There’s something that feels like it’s left in there, of the process of thinking, and thinking is one of my subjects. We can’t get away from it. I felt permission from reading him to leave it in.

  For a time, I read more analytic philosophy, and there’s one side of that that really struck me. The sincere attempt to break down and explain something in a systematic way, there’s something about that desire even to do that. To break things down in the way that can be diagrammed. That’s always interested me, though every part of me rejected it as a goal.

  When you talked about Wittgenstein and what you interpret as his leaving the process in his work, it definitely spoke my job, where I feel I need to approach writing with my opinion fully formed, and that sometimes makes me uncomfortable. But you also mentioned empathy, and I was wondering if you felt that was essential in poetry?

  I appreciate what you said about the world you’re working in, and the expectation you have to be sure of one’s position. I do feel like this is a particularly anxious moment for me, because my whole sort of expecting and accepting mistakes, and being mistaken, is a pretty essential part of my politics, if I have one, and it’s not an easy one to sort of defend. So, empathy, I feel like — I don’t even know how to separate poetry and living. That’s a cliché, but I don’t.

  Trying to have empathy or feeling like you feel empathy for an other, those are places where mistakes are inevitable. I guess I don’t know what it would mean to be alive with other people without being very concerned with empathy. And I know that there are people out there writing polemics against empathy. I think maybe something like openness is a simpler way to talk about it. Or, opening, because it’s a verb, it’s not a state that you reach. All kinds of shit comes in and gets exposed in that, so. So, it’s also always going to be wrong.

  I wanted to ask you about all the different jobs you do, as a poet, a translator, and at Ugly Duckling Presse. How do you manage your time? Is poetry a priority for you? Are there moments when you feel you have to write?

  You didn’t mention a big thing: I’m an adjunct teacher. Not just the relationships with my students and with my colleagues, and the discussions we’re having all the time, but also the meta-conversations I’m having with myself and with my students and with my colleagues about teaching and especially the teaching of creative writing, that takes up a big part of my day, and it’s inextricable from writing and in many cases from friendships and editing and publishing and translating. It feels like one many-headed job, which in some cases is paid somewhat and in some cases is not paid at all.

  Actual writing, I’ve never had a rule or a daily practice of writing poetry. Over the course of the day I might be preparing for teaching for two hours, and communicating with my authors for an hour, and designing a book for an hour, and then I might be editing my own poem for an hour. But the actual start to a new poem — there’s a reason I’ve taken five years for each of my books. It’s not a super-common thing that I decide to write a poem, and then they stick around for a long time. They can take a couple years.

  It’s really embarrassing to admit because of all the ways in which they could’ve stood to take several more years of work.

  Do you consider yourself a successful poet? And, if not, what would you consider a successful poet?

  I don’t think in terms of that word, which isn’t to deny that the question could be meaningful, but I don’t know how to respond to that. I feel an unbelievable sense of something, which I can’t describe, when I occasionally get a note from a stranger or I run into someone who says they’ve read my work.

  I don’t think any poets are successful in the way that this culture defines success. There’s a lot of different conversations to have about that.

  I just spent a long time looking at the lives of “unsuccessful” artists, and it really furthered my skepticism about what we consider success anymore.

  The term that comes up sometimes, seemingly unironically, in place of success, is “relevance,” and I find that even more sticky, and yet of course we all know what it means. At any given moment, in your mind, there are a number of people who are most relevant to your thinking. All of these things are obviously about perception and performance.

  And sometimes the most “successful” people — like, say, Stephen King — aren’t very relevant in certain conversations.

  I think at some point the fog around these notions is partly what drew me to those internet self-tests that are in the second poem in the book. You could type in to the computer, “How successful am I?” and I guarantee you there will be several people who devised some way for you to measure it.

  [Editor’s note: Moschovakis is right.]

• Coffee House Press - https://coffeehousepress.org/products/they-and-we-will-get-into-trouble-for-this

  About the Author

  Anna Moschovakis is the author of You and Three Others are Approaching a Lake, winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and I Have Not Been Able to Get Through to Everyone, a finalist for the Norma Farber First Book Award and a selection of the Poetry Society of America’s New American Poetry Series. Her translations from the French include texts by Robert Bresson, Annie Ernaux, Samira Negrouche, Marcelle Sauvageot, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Albert Cossery. She teaches in the MFA programs at Pratt Institute and Bard College and was the 2016 Holloway Lecturer in the Practice of Poetry at UC Berkeley. Raised in Los Angeles, Moschovakis has lived in New York since 1993 and is currently based in the northern Catskills, where she is active in a nonprofit art and community space called Bushel in Delhi, New York. She is also a longtime member of the Brooklyn-based publishing collective Ugly Duckling Presse.

QUOTE:
Less a novel than it is performance art in print, Moschovakis's fiction exercise illuminates a writer's disconnected choices and personal connections, but, like her characters, bogs down in the creative process.

Eleanor, or, the Rejection of the Progress of Love
Publishers Weekly. 265.26 (June 25, 2018): p158.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Eleanor, or, the Rejection of the Progress of Love Anna Moschovakis. Coffee House (Consortium, dist.), $16.95 trade paper (224p) ISBN 978-1-56689-508-8

For her first novel, poet and translator Moschovakis (They and We Will Get into Trouble for This) offers a cerebral, sometimes meandering rumination on novel writing that juxtaposes two women writers: Eleanor, who loses the laptop containing notes for the novel she is writing, and Eleanor's creator/alter ego, who is writing a novel about Eleanor. After her laptop disappears from a coffee shop table, Eleanor receives an email from someone claiming he cannot return the device but might retrieve its contents for her. Eleanor departs Brooklyn for Albany to find the emailer, visits an upstate commune, and then travels to Addis Ababa. When the writer writing about Eleanor shows a draft of her novel to a critic she met 20 years earlier, he asks why Addis Ababa? The question remains unresolved. The writer accompanies the critic as he receives an academic honor. They discuss her novel; their friendship grows. Rich in cultural references but short on plot, Moschovakis's concentric narratives capture moments of inspiration, distraction, analysis, and mundane activity in prose encompassing quotes, lists, emails, texts, news reports, and two pages of nothing but the words "time passed." Less a novel than it is performance art in print, Moschovakis's fiction exercise illuminates a writer's disconnected choices and personal connections, but, like her characters, bogs down in the creative process. (Aug.)

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Eleanor, or, the Rejection of the Progress of Love." Publishers Weekly, 25 June 2018, p. 158. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A545023374/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=15793a9f. Accessed 30 Sept. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A545023374

QUOTE:
Philosophically exhaustive yet profoundly human, this book sets itself the task of asking the big questions--What am I? What was I? What will I be?--in a style that evokes Lispector and Camus but with the self-referential and weary globalism of the current milieu. A consummately accomplished novel. A worthy treatise on the now.

Moschovakis, Anna: ELEANOR, OR, THE REJECTION OF THE PROGRESS OF LOVE
Kirkus Reviews. (June 1, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Moschovakis, Anna ELEANOR, OR, THE REJECTION OF THE PROGRESS OF LOVE Coffee House (Adult Fiction) $16.95 8, 14 ISBN: 978-1-56689-508-8

A sprawling, fragmented novel that studies the paradoxical alienation and immediacy of the digital age as it follows its twinned narrators: the author and her character, Eleanor.

Moschovakis (They and We Will Get into Trouble for This, 2016, etc.) opens her fourth book with a quintessential 21st-century scene: a woman, alone, skimming a report of a senseless act of public violence. This is Eleanor--approaching 40, adrift in her ambition and ambivalent in her love, grappling daily with "the thing that had happened--that she had made happen, or at least not prevented from happening"; literally a character in someone else's tale. Eleanor is at a crossroads in her life, but instead of being faced with a binary decision (left or right?), she is confronted by the thoroughly modern dilemma of multiplicity. A reader, a thinker, a woman aging out of youth but still as unsettled and provisional as she was in her 20s, Eleanor can imagine herself as almost anyone, but her only stable companion is her own unsatisfactory reflection. In simultaneous, spliced sections, the reader is also introduced to Eleanor's unnamed author--a similarly aged, similarly situated woman who is exiting a relationship with her lover, Kat, and entering into a thorny intellectual friendship with a famous male critic who has expressed interest in her manuscript. As the author and the critic's friendship builds, the author's struggle to maintain control over her revision against the heedless authority of male confidence leads the reader through a nuanced and provocative discourse on the power of identity as a tool of both creation and erasure. Meanwhile, compelled by the catalyst of a stolen laptop and the data it contained, Eleanor leaves New York on the trail of the enigmatic Danny Kamau--petty thief or good Samaritan--in a peripatetic quest that takes her from an Albany hostel to a "cutting-edge eco-squat," from Addis Ababa to the Rimbaud museum in Harar. As the novel progresses, the author's and Eleanor's stories intertwine like strands of a double helix--touching only through the laddered bonds of their shared time and place but inextricably connected by the common access of their thought.

Philosophically exhaustive yet profoundly human, this book sets itself the task of asking the big questions--What am I? What was I? What will I be?--in a style that evokes Lispector and Camus but with the self-referential and weary globalism of the current milieu. A consummately accomplished novel. A worthy treatise on the now.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Moschovakis, Anna: ELEANOR, OR, THE REJECTION OF THE PROGRESS OF LOVE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A540723404/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=03572317. Accessed 30 Sept. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A540723404

Bresson on Bresson: Interviews 1943-1983
Jon M. Sweeney
The Christian Century. 134.12 (June 7, 2017): p41+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Christian Century Foundation
http://www.christiancentury.org
Full Text:
Bresson on Bresson: Interviews 1943-1983

By Robert Bresson, edited by Mylene

Bresson, translated from the

French by Anna Moschovakis

New York Review Books, 288 pp., $24.95

This collection of interviews with the great French filmmaker Robert Bresson contains much for anyone interested in film or faith. Bresson, who died in 1999 at the age of 98, was one of the most important (if not most influential) directors of the last century. Born, raised, and educated a nominal Catholic near Paris, he began his career as a painter and photographer, immersed in the arts scene. During World War II, he spent a year in a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp. After the war, he turned to making films.

Bresson became famous for his techniques. While filming his first picture, he noticed that the actors he'd cast "suddenly ceased to be people" while acting. Henceforward, he hired men and women "who didn't act"--who were amateurs, or, as he preferred to call them, "models." He wanted them to know almost nothing about a film before shooting began, and once it began he wanted them to remain themselves rather than attempt to embody a character.

Bresson's films revolved around sin, shame, passion, and redemption. These themes were embodied in characters that included a depressed provincial pastor, taken from a Georges Bernanos novel, the misunderstood saint Joan of Arc, and a man struggling against evil, pulled from a short story by Tolstoy. Balthazar, at Random (1966) tells the story of a donkey, as inspired by Dostoevsky's The Idiot. (You can watch the amazing two and a half minute final scene online.)

Despite critical accolades and a devoted if small following, Bresson experienced persistent difficulty when seeking funding for new projects. (Imagine those pitch meetings!) He was always consciously trying to make cinema an art form.

When I first watched The Angels of Sin (1943), Diary of a Country Priest (1951), and The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962), I remember being arrested by the close-ups of concentrating, unadorned faces. Recently I loaned my copy of The Trial of Joan of Arc to an atheist friend who, when she returned it a week later, said that she'd wept while watching it. Bresson's spare, honest approach elicits raw emotions. "It's the knots that tie and unravel inside the characters that give a film its movement," he said in a 1946 interview. He developed characters from the inside out.

Bresson downplayed the role of a script, preferring to improvise while filming. He was, after all (and as he often reminded interviewers), a painter first and foremost, not a writer. He also downplayed the purpose of a soundtrack in order to focus instead on what he called "the music of daily life."

Most of all, he sought to draw out interiority--which isn't easy to do on film. On choosing Bernanos's novel Diary of a Country Priest for adaptation, he said,

What drew me to this book above
anything else was the interiority of
the plot and dramatic threads.... I
believe that the action in film must
become--will become--more and
more interior.... [W]hat we have
understood so far as ... the kind of
motion, or movement, we currently
seek in films, is nothing more than
restlessness.
To my eyes and ears, Bresson's films are deeply religious, although he does not speak of them in such terms in these interviews. When he talks of "luck" and "truth" as his method and purpose, I hear a man schooled in faith and perhaps even listening to the Holy Spirit. There may be no other way to explain an artist who prepares for his work like this: "I make a point of forgetting, the night before a shoot, what I'm going to do in the morning so that I'll have a very strong feeling of spontaneity."

But if this is religious instruction, it is in the postmodern mode. For example, Bresson asked his models (not actors) to "learn their lines not as a text that has meaning but like something that makes no sense at all, like a sequence of syllables. ... I ask that the meaning come from them, from their own impulse, in the moment when ... I let them loose in the world of the film."

When Bresson talked about Bresson--which he did a lot, over a long career --he did often speak about spiritual matters. In an interview from 1973 that's not included in this book, Bresson quotes Milton's Paradise Lost to explain why he doesn't crowd films with music and other diversions: "Silence was pleas'd." He further explains, "I try to catch and to convey the idea that we have a soul and that the soul is in contact with God. That's the first thing I want to get in my films--that we are living souls" (see The Films of Robert Bresson: A Casebook, by Bert Cardullo).

Many of the interviewers comment on Bresson's bright, joyful appearance--his blue-green eyes that light up, the smile that flashes on his face, and an open expression and attitude toward life. He was, indeed, a man full of life on the outside. Yet his films were full of brooding. Bresson was a paradox. One of his interlocutors says it best, near the end of this book: "What matters to you [Bresson] is what can't be seen."

Reviewed by Jon M. Sweeney, whose most recent book is The Saint vs. the Scholar: The Fight between Faith and Reason.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Sweeney, Jon M. "Bresson on Bresson: Interviews 1943-1983." The Christian Century, 7 June 2017, p. 41+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A497797048/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=1c33da93. Accessed 30 Sept. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A497797048

Bresson on Bresson: Interviews, 1943-1983
Publishers Weekly. 263.25 (June 20, 2016): p143.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Bresson on Bresson: Interviews, 1943-1983

Edited by Mylene Bresson, trans. from the French by Anna Moschovakis. New York Review Books, $24.95 (296p) ISBN 978-1-68137-044-6

What strikes one about this illuminating collection of interviews with revered French filmmaker Robert Bresson (1901-1999), edited by his widow, Mylene, is the unwavering consistency of the philosophy. Thoughts appear time and again, always just a bit more refined--just like his films. In several interviews, Bresson explains the unaffected performances he elicited by saying he tells his actors, "When you're talking, talk to yourself." Not that there is much dialogue in his famously spare work; in I960 he states, "What I'm trying to do is to come up to the edge of saying too little, in order to try to express what other films express with words instead with silence." He repeatedly compares directing to painting, his first metier, observing that the relationship between colors makes meaning in paintings; likewise, the juxtaposition of images makes meaning in filmmaking. One would be hard pressed to find more than a few interviews where he doesn't speak against the cinema of the time--which he refers to as "filmed theater." Cinephiles will delight in reading this book and following Bresson's thinking as it develops further and makes each interview more compelling than the last. (Nov.)

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Bresson on Bresson: Interviews, 1943-1983." Publishers Weekly, 20 June 2016, p. 143. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A456344765/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5d011600. Accessed 30 Sept. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A456344765

QUOTE:
maps the circuitous and circumstantial nature of connections between people and ideas, in her deeply engaging third collection.

They and We Will Get into Trouble for This
Publishers Weekly. 263.7 (Feb. 15, 2016): p43+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
They and We Will Get into Trouble for This

Anna Moschovakis. Coffee House (Consortium, dist.), $16.95 trade paper (100p) ISBN 978-156689-420-3

Poet, editor, and translator Moschovakis (You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake) maps the circuitous and circumstantial nature of connections between people and ideas, in her deeply engaging third collection. The book is arranged in three sections that appear to be autonomous, but are subtly threaded together. "Paradise (Film Two)" is a poetic record of the rhizome-like thought trails that link Moschovakis's experiences with Kierkegaard, Aristophanes, sacrifice, and the 1978 BBC television series Connections, among other things. Next, in "What It Means to Be Avant-Garde," she repurposes online self-inventory checklists into a poetic sequence that alternates with a memoiristic exploration of an "unexplained condition," the latter of which draws from such writers and artists as David Antin, Lucy Lippard, and Jan Yoors. The closing piece, "Flat White (20/20)," is a series of translations of and responses to poems by Algerian writer Samira Negrouche, through which Moschovakis interrogates the process of translation and reveals language's dissociative and associative qualities. Throughout, Moschovakis largely eschews punctuation in favor of symbols ([parallel],-- [??], [??], etc.) that offer new means of linkage, and a chyron-like text of bracketed sequences runs the length of the book. Moschovakis sets philosophy, etymology, and memory in motion to show that "There are many ways to follow a thought." (Mar.)

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"They and We Will Get into Trouble for This." Publishers Weekly, 15 Feb. 2016, p. 43+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A444206312/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=17e7a0a3. Accessed 30 Sept. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A444206312

QUOTE:
filled with lengthy poems, each spread across multiple pages that tell scattered, but deeply connected theories.

You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake
Karlin Reed
Apalachee Review. .63 (Annual 2013): p102+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 Apalachee Press, Inc.
http://www.apalacheereview.org/
Full Text:
You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake

ANNA MOSCHOVAKIS. COFFEE HOUSE PRESS: MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA. 2011.

Anna Moschovakis forces her readers to question the society in which they live, as well as forcing them to question their own values throughout You and Three Others are Approaching a Lake. The simplicity of the cover leaves room for these questions to be brought up, and this writer's dark but powerful imagery fills the spaces left on the cover.

The book is filled with lengthy poems, each spread across multiple pages that tell scattered, but deeply connected theories. The physical location of the words throughout the book is half of the effect of the writing. Even when five or six pages past the beginning of a poem, Moschovakis will repeat a stanza from the very first page, connecting all the thoughts brought up through the poem.

Moschovakis uses literal questions to influence her readers to question their beliefs and the world around them. In "Death as A Way of Life," she opens with this:

It began:

Life is not fair
How can I be happy while others suffer
How can I not be happy while others suffer
Others will suffer whether or not I am happy
It is not the suffering of others that causes my happiness
It is not the not-suffering of others that causes my unhappiness
The not-suffering of others would not prevent my happiness
This unconventional list as the opening of the poem immediately inspires the reader to attempt to answer these questions. Filled with some confusing double negatives, it's as if Moschovakis wanted the reader to go back and read this list multiple times, increasing the time spent considering the questions. This effect is something she includes within all of her poems. Between the messages she's trying to send the reader, Moschovakis includes beautiful and passionate description, as seen further into "Death as a Way of Life":

Man dies, that is nothing.

but

When a woman sits on the edge of her bed ... and lets down her red silken hair, threading it through her delicate fingers as it waves down her porcelain back, which reflects the moon's silvery mood ... Any man privileged enough to catch a glimpse of her falls directly to his knees ... disgusted with anything he saw fit to consume before setting sight on this morsel of perfection ... and the woman is gone, and her hair is gone, and her porcelain back is gone, and her slender fingers, and even her image is gone, and still he has no regrets, and he welcomes death, incites it, knowing as he's never known anything before that his life wants for nothing

now that is something

heaven

a sliver
In this scene, Moschovakis portrays the message that unless you have something in life worth living for, life may not be worth living at all--until you find the true beauty. Contrasting with her darker poems, some of her work studies aspects of the growth and power of the human race, as in "The Tragedy of Waste," the first poem of the collection:

At the beginning of 1917 there were housewives
children, old people, sick people
fields, factories, stores, offices
food, shelter, and clothing.

Modern industrialism
the slums of the great cities
reasonable comforts

We entered with 40,000,000 workers
warriors
uniforms and boots

We made graphs
were surprised on the home front:

The house went up faster with three men
than with four

What miracle occurred?
No miracle.
Along with making her readers think deeply, she also empowers them through passages like this one. Moschovakis wants to subtly reveal the secrets of the society that surrounds us.

Reed, Karlin

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Reed, Karlin. "You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake." Apalachee Review, Annual 2013, p. 102+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A347971676/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f1bff7a4. Accessed 30 Sept. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A347971676

QUOTE:
If the title of Moschovakis's second collection reads like a textbook logic problem, it's because Moschovakis not only confronts her readers with a series of logical and philosophical dilemmas but also questions the possibility of such investigation.
her poems subject each of these structures to. constant, and troubling, poetic pressure from within.

You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake
Publishers Weekly. 258.8 (Feb. 21, 2011): p115.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2011 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake

Anna Moschovakis. Coffee House Press (Consortium, dist.), $16 trade paper (119p) ISBN 978-1-56689-250-6

If the title of Moschovakis's second collection reads like a textbook logic problem, it's because Moschovakis not only confronts her readers with a series of logical and philosophical dilemmas but also questions the possibility of such investigation. "You have your axes," Moschovakis tells us, but "[w]hat, precisely, is your procedure?" For Moschovakis, the procedures are several; the book appropriates form and language from sources ranging from computer chat programming to the writings of Emmanuel Levinas to records of an 18th-century French hunting excursion. Although the poems also draw on autobiographical detail, Moschovakis is more interested in probing the conditions of the poetic act than in any traditional lyric subjectivity: when she writes that "[i]n the application of any system/of perfecting/the machine/no two persons/ will succeed/equally" it is clear that she intends the proposition to level, not to individualize. Throughout the book, Moschovakis maintains a strongly clinical detachment even in the face of cultural crisis. Yet if it is cynicism that drives Moschovakis to inhabit structures of capitalism, technology, consumerism, Western philosophy, and religion, the assumption of these various positions nevertheless allows a necessary poetry of critique: her poems subject each of these structures to. constant, and troubling, poetic pressure from within. (Feb.)

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake." Publishers Weekly, 21 Feb. 2011, p. 115. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A250321174/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b3619eaf. Accessed 30 Sept. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A250321174

Ernaux, Annie. The Possession
Karen Walton Morse
Library Journal. 134.8 (May 1, 2009): p70.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2009 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Ernaux, Annie. The Possession. Seven Stories. 2009. c.64p, tr. from French by Anna Moschovakis. ISBN 978-1-58322-855-5. pap. $11.95. F

Ernaux's latest book to be translated into English (after Simple Passion: A Woman's Story) is the story of an all-consuming jealousy--a self-portrait whose spare 64 pages sketch the life cycle of a possession. A woman has left a man "as much out of boredom as from an inability to give up [her] freedom." The relationship may have been forgettable, but the narrator finds the idea of the man being with another woman unbearable, and her life is soon eclipsed by an obsession with that nameless, faceless woman. Occupation, the title of the original French edition, more clearly elucidates this state with its double entendre: the narrator is both engaged and possessed. While actively cultivating the obsession, the narrator is also very much concerned with chronicling it; this work is as much about the act of writing the novella as it is about the six months it recounts. Clearly for sophisticated readers.--Karen Walton Morse, Univ. at Buffalo Libs., NY

Morse, Karen Walton

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Morse, Karen Walton. "Ernaux, Annie. The Possession." Library Journal, 1 May 2009, p. 70. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A272485646/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=fd2cfdf0. Accessed 30 Sept. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A272485646

The Engagement
Publishers Weekly. 254.5 (Jan. 29, 2007): p46.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2007 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Engagement GEORGES SIMENON, TRANS. FROM THE FRENCH BY ANNA MOSCHOVAKIS. New York Review Books, $12.95 paper (160p) ISBN 978-1-59017-228-5

First published in 1933, this new English translation of a short, bleak psychological drama from Simenon (1903-1989), creator of Inspector Maigret (Lock 14, etc.), dispassionately describes the fate of the odd Mr. Hire, a reclusive middle-aged man whose life of dull routine begins an inevitable slide into disaster when a prostitute is brutally murdered near his apartment in a Paris suburb. Guilty only of a slightly disreputable occupation, a voyeuristic fascination and an unusual physical appearance, Hire inadvertently seals his fate with mundane, unremarkable observations and suggestions. His concierge brings him to the attention of the police. Though Hire is aware of the net being spread for him and tries to escape it, eventually, like a swimmer struggling against an undertow, he's gradually exhausted and sucked further away from the safety of the shore. This is a quietly compelling story with no hero, no villain and no justice--just the inevitability of fate. (Mar.)

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Engagement." Publishers Weekly, 29 Jan. 2007, p. 46. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A158908676/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=fc6bda96. Accessed 30 Sept. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A158908676

QUOTE:
Moschovakis's playfully grim debut, a gathering of smart, sometimes puzzling poetic sequences, swears
allegiance to fragments, open-ended inquiries, sudden juxtapositions and projects linked to analytic
philosophy.

I Have Not Been Able to Get Through to Everyone
Publishers Weekly. 253.41 (Oct. 16, 2006): p36.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2006 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
I Have Not Been Able to Get Through to Everyone ANNA MOSCHOVAKIS. Turtle Point, $16.95 paper (108p) ISBN 1-885586-49-3

Moschovakis's playfully grim debut, a gathering of smart, sometimes puzzling poetic sequences, swears allegiance to fragments, open-ended inquiries, sudden juxtapositions and projects linked to analytic philosophy. The first sequence, "Thought Experiment," consists of slightly flirtatious short blocks of prose: "With progress, not only earthquakes but kisses will be predicted." Her last two, "Winter Songs" and the excellent "The Dead Man Looks into His Own Dead Ear," explore self-alienation and mourning in quirky, curt lines, distorting grammar as she goes: "Coiling around a stone/in the posture of sleep/I is getting wakier." Of the four sequences in between, the strongest, "The Blue Book," piles up single-line sentences as it vamps on queries from Ludwig Wittgenstein: "A language changes in appearances as I learn to decipher its characters." Moschovakis, an editor at Ugly Duckling Presse, has crafted a mix of sparkling moments and baffling structures; her first sortie of philosophical investigations promises much more to come. (Oct.)

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"I Have Not Been Able to Get Through to Everyone." Publishers Weekly, 16 Oct. 2006, p. 36. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A153188314/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=78e83233. Accessed 30 Sept. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A153188314

Trip to bountiful. (Books)
Richard Howard
Artforum International. 41.1 (Sept. 2002): p47.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2002 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.
Full Text:
RICHARD HOWARD ON HENRI MICHAUX

Henri Michaux, Miserable Miracle: Mescaline, trans. Louise Varese and Anna Moschovakis. New York: New York Review Books, 2002. 179 pages, $14.

IN THE DECADE BETWEEN 1956 and 1966, Henri Michaux, who had been publishing verse, prose, and drawings since 1927, produced six little books concerning his experiences with mescaline and other, mostly psychedelic, drugs. Several of these volumes, including this first one, are "illustrated" by the author's astonishing drawings, which frequently afford a more direct account than his discursive writing of the exploratory voyages Michaux inveterately undertook beginning in the late '20s. These brief texts, often (as in the case of Miserable Miracle) written during the experiments with mescaline and reproduced with the same fidelity as the drawings, which resemble electrocardiograms, indecipherable grass writing, and then word landscapes, are difficult to read and have very little to do with prevailing notions of pleasure and even ecstasy typically promoted in the literature of addiction. I translated the sixth one myself--The Major Ordeals of the Mind and the Countless Minor Ones--and I can testify to the corruga tions and anfractuosities of surface which must discourage the reader in search of entertainment and (given the ostensible subject) delight.

Even as he trips, Michaux quite soberly gives us an overwhelming (and distinctly disagreeable) sense of connection with the universe and its inceptions in fire, in earthquake, in oceanic rhythms, and in whistling, shrieking winds. Inevitably with the grudging and painful epiphanies comes a sour echo of all that flapdoodle which blows out of the East. Behind all these accounts of mental process under the effect of mind-altering drugs lies Michaux's central craving to lift the veil, to reveal the mechanisms of the brain, thereby enabling the mind to realize the veritable nature of thought, to which mere thinking, Michaux asserts, is so uncomfortably unequal.

The literature of addiction is as limited as it is (Baudelaire and Burroughs float to the surface, along with some fragments of Cocteau's Opium), we discover, because most transactions with these enormous metamorphoses are already on one side or the other of the Abyss. As in most accounts of dreams, as in the Surrealists' experiments with "automatic writing," the ecstatic seizure is exciting but not interesting, just as the rational narration is interesting but not exciting. What is exciting and interesting is the transition from excitement to interest, when a writer can seize the monster as it rushes out of the cave and identify it before it becomes, in the open air, no more than a bag of slimy skin with strange tusks and odd-colored strands of hair. This is the triumph of Henri Michaux, and part of the reason why he is one of the greatest French writers (though Belgian) of the twentieth century: His excursions and explorations into and among these substances we have come, so heedlessly, to call psychedelic are a long, deliberate, and frequently painful odyssey through the six volumes of disintegrations and alienations that are the often lurid, often alluring consequences of his clinically ingested and recorded experiences (experiment is also the word for experience in French: both words have peril at the root), and if they are read as a sequential expression (as we read the first six volumes of Proust, say) we come to the redeeming discovery of the final one (as we come to Proust's Time Regained), of what Michaux calls "the marvelous normal," that is, the untampered-with human brain, sifting and shifting, choosing and organizing, determining and directing, constantly filtering order out of chaos and duplicating that act of creation which culminates in the command Let there be light. Certainly it is no accident that back in 1935 Michaux published one of his most inward books of poems under the premonitory title La Nuit remue (The night moves).

Of course Miserable Miracle is merely the first of the sequence and will be read in this attractive reprint decisively introduced by Octavio Paz and illuminated by those scary drawings (which are probably the most rewarding records of The Hunt since Lascaux) without the proper sense (as I see it) of the entire trajectory. But most people who read Proust at all have only read Swann's Way and are thereby fulfilled to the limit of their capacity. Reading Miserable Miracle by itself is a sufficiently grand "experience" indeed and a successful "experiment" without venturing onward, and inward, and (for so culminating is the situation) upward and downward at the same instant. Especially since in this new avatar the editors have added four grim and explanatory little essays written from 1968 to 1971 which afford a kind of cursory coda to even the first of Michaux's drug books, so that we can traverse the arc to the splendors of the return to an unmanipulated consciousness. I must quote at least a couple of the final paragraphs, which even in this primary exposure reveal where Michaux "comes out":

Why did I stop taking Mescaline?

Not reliable. Not as pliable as one wants...

Over the years, I made progress. I knew, nearing the important states... how to direct them (and myself), but not enough, not with certainty, only in an irregular fashion...intermittently.

Invisible but always there, behind the extraordinarily excellent states, apparently irreversible, definitive, there is a sudden unveiling of the very, very bad states which you don't want, or of the chaotic, the bizarre, the extravagant you thought you had gotten past.

Difficulties with getting them back, maintaining them, and in the second case with eliminating them, dismissing them.

Taking some (of these products) every four years, once or twice just to see how one is doing, probably would not be a bad idea.

I'm giving up even that. Let's just say that I don't have much of a talent for addiction.

Let's just say that that is the only talent Henri Michaux does not have.

Richard Howard is a poet and translator. He teaches in the School of the Arts (Writing Division) of Columbia University in New York.

Howard, Richard

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Howard, Richard. "Trip to bountiful. (Books)." Artforum International, Sept. 2002, p. 47. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A91202085/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=0684900f. Accessed 30 Sept. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A91202085

The Elliptical Economies of a Filmmaker
J. Hoberman
The New York Times. (Dec. 8, 2016): Arts and Entertainment: pC6(L).
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com
Full Text:
The great French filmmaker Robert Bresson (1901-1999) not only made movies but also gave instructions about how his films might be watched and thought about.

The collection ''Bresson on Bresson: Interviews 1943-1983'' and Bresson's own ''Notes on the Cinematograph,'' published in tandem by New York Review Books, are primers for the gradual understanding of Robert Bresson, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein.

Bresson, who made only 13 feature films over the course of his long life, scarcely lacked for acolytes. In 1957, Jean-Luc Godard, then primarily a critic, declared on the basis of Bresson's first four features that ''Bresson is French cinema, as Dostoyevsky is the Russian novel and Mozart is German music.'' The Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky considered Bresson an artistic ideal, telling an interviewer that ''one is compelled to consider his artistic form as life, nature itself.''

But the regard with which Bresson was held by fellow filmmakers was not necessarily shared by audiences, at least not in the United States. Festival and college film society screenings aside, Bresson was a virtual nonentity here, even during the foreign film boom of the 1950s and '60s, when he made his best-known movies, ''Diary of a Country Priest'' (1954 in the United States), ''A Man Escaped'' (1957) and ''Pickpocket'' (1963).

Originally a painter, Bresson was a proponent of pure cinema, something he elaborates throughout ''Bresson on Bresson.'' Interviewed during the making of ''Pickpocket,'' he asserted his desire ''to make a film of hands, glances, objects, refusing everything that is theatrical.'' To that he later added: ''More and more in my films, I'm trying to suppress what people call plot. Plot is for novelists.'' In an interview given while ''Pickpocket'' was in release, he asserted that ''films should not have subjects at all.''

In fact, Bresson's films tended to focus on individual figures. Most of his movies can be seen as dramas of faith and bids for redemption -- both on the part of the filmmaker and the central character, who in ''Au Hasard Balthazar,'' the 1970 movie widely considered his masterpiece, happens to be a donkey.

''Impossible tasks attract me,'' Bresson told Le Figaro in 1949. ''It's good to create obstacles. I, at least, don't work well without obstacles,'' he said in a radio interview, conducted in English, at the 1962 Cannes Film Festival, where ''The Trial of Joan of Arc'' won a special jury prize. Five years later, he ended a conversation with the critic Georges Sadoul by musing, ''I wonder if my films are worth the effort they require.'' He might have meant require of himself, not his viewers.

Bresson was assumed to be a religious, if not a practicing, Catholic, although this is not extensively explored in ''Bresson on Bresson'' (a book that would have benefited mightily by the inclusion of an index). He was also a master of subtraction. ''To create is first of all to prune,'' he told an interviewer in 1960. More than simply pared down, Bresson films distill motion picture narrative to a particular essence. The epitome of the elliptical, economical Bressonian spectacle is ''Lancelot of the Lake'' (1974), a vision of Camelot almost entirely composed of knights on horseback jousting in medium shot or close-up, distinguished from one another largely by details of their armor.

''Notes on the Cinematograph'' (previously published here in 1977, in the same translation by Jonathan Griffin, as ''Notes on Cinematography'') is the ultimate refinement of Bresson's thought, a loosely grouped succession of aphorisms and Zen koans (''the soundtrack invented silence''). Both of these books give considerable attention to the use of the nonactors Bresson referred to as ''models.'' Beginning with ''Diary of a Country Priest,'' his actors do not act, they simply are.

Bresson used the term ''cinematography,'' which he defines in ''Bresson on Bresson'' as ''a kind of writing,'' to distinguish between his own methodology and the bogus theatrical naturalism and fake psychology of popular cinema. In a 1959 interview with L'Express, he also rejected the title ''director'' as belonging to the stage. (In the same interview, he refers to himself as a ''metteur en ordre,'' which could be translated as ''organizer.'')

Asked how he directed his models, he replied: ''It isn't about directing anyone, but about directing yourself. The rest is telepathy.'' (''You really feel he is trying to empty your mind,'' Dominique Sanda, one of the very few Bresson models to go on to an acting career, once explained in a documentary on Bresson.)

In some respects, however, Bresson's sense of cinema was quite conventional. His statements acknowledge montage, or editing, as the medium's basic source of meaning. When he declares that ''cinema must express itself not with images, but with relationships between images'' or speaks in terms of visual rhythm, he is echoing the ideas of Sergei Eisenstein and the other Soviet theorists (although this is not something he seems to acknowledge). Like the Soviets as well, Bresson recognized sound as a material element, observing in ''Notes'' that ''the noises must become music.''

The interviews in ''Bresson on Bresson'' are grouped chronologically and organized by film. Reading it, one can see Bresson refining his answers to the similar questions that inevitably arose with each new production, even as he refined his filmmaking style. (The interviews, which were edited and even redacted by Bresson before their original publication, mostly in French periodicals, are invariably sympathetic.)

The longest and most substantial interview is a discussion with Mr. Godard and the actor Michel Delahaye, published in Cahiers du Cinema upon the release of ''Au Hasard Balthazar.'' Here, Bresson admits to an obsession with what he calls the ''the real'' and says that ''fake lighting is as treacherous as fake dialogue.'' These sentiments alone would establish him as a classic filmmaker.

For Bresson, motion pictures -- which, at least before the digital revolution, recorded what occurred before the camera -- were a form of truth. His belief in movies as an intrinsically authentic, essentially documentary medium explains his statement that ''to bring the past back to the present'' is ''the privilege of cinematography.'' The most spiritual of filmmakers was also the most devout of cinema realists.

Bresson on Bresson

Interviews 1943-1983

By Robert Bresson. Edited by Mylene Bresson, with a preface by Pascal Merigeau.

Translated by Anna Moschovakis

Illustrated. 285 pages. New York Review Books. $24.95.

Notes on the Cinematograph

By Robert Bresson, with an introduction by J. M. G. Le Clezio.

Translated by Jonathan Griffin

88 pages. New York Review Books. $14.

CAPTION(S):

PHOTOS: Top, the French filmmaker Robert Bresson at the Venice Film Festival in 1966. And above, Bresson behind the camera on the set of ''Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne.'' (PHOTOGRAPHS BY GIANNI FOGGIA/ASSOCIATED PRESS; ROBERT BRESSON ARCHIVES)

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Hoberman, J. "The Elliptical Economies of a Filmmaker." New York Times, 8 Dec. 2016, p. C6(L). General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A473104357/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5a3b4814. Accessed 30 Sept. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A473104357

Misspelled
Ivan Blatny
Harvard Review. .31 (Dec. 2006): p137.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2006 Harvard Review
Text:
TRANSLATED BY VERONIKA TUCKEROVA AND ANNA MOSCHOVAKIS

So restoration is not spelled au
I spelled it so thinking of the Czech word restaurace
to restore
and go with a lady to the room
like a unicorn in the mirror
all naked in the mirrors
so that I could see the blood trickling.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Blatny, Ivan. "Misspelled." Harvard Review, no. 31, 2006, p. 137. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A157081602/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d8c6772a. Accessed 30 Sept. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A157081602

Love
Ivan Blatny
Harvard Review. .31 (Dec. 2006): p136.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2006 Harvard Review
Text:
NOTE: Lines in italics are in English in the original.

TRANSLATED BY VERONIKA TUCKEROVA AND ANNA MOSCHOVAKIS

The python has up to three tongues in his mouth
I prefer two

A bee visits five hundred flowers
until she fills her wee stomach

She digests like Rilke
probably moss which the bumblebee can't reach

But the wood butterfly's caterpillar does
In an enchanted butterfly forest

One of them is Rosie
She has a big Roman nose.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Blatny, Ivan. "Love." Harvard Review, no. 31, 2006, p. 136. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A157081601/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=6d15cb94. Accessed 30 Sept. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A157081601

Just one thing after another, none more important than any other; FICTION: The plot is not the point of this intriguing and complicated novel
Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN). (Aug. 12, 2018): Lifestyle: p9E.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Star Tribune Media Company LLC
http://www.startribune.com/
Full Text:
Byline: BRIGITTE FRASE

Special to the Star Tribune Anna Moschovakis' "Eleanor, or The Rejection of the Progress of Love" is one of those novels, in turn fascinating and irritating, that is as interested in its own inner workings as in telling a story. The building blocks of modern realistic fiction are all here: protagonist, secondary characters, relationships, place, thought, emotion, action and reaction. But they don't go anywhere; whenever a narrative seems poised to move, its flow is thwarted, questioned. The didactic title alludes to the mix of concrete and abstract. Chapters about a year in the life of Eleanor, a 39-year-old university lecturer and single woman, alternate with a first-person critical narration by her novelist/creator, who discusses her creative process and revisions with a renowned male critic. Both women are increasingly annoyed with the unearned smug confidence of men. The linguistic structure is equally self-interrogating; the book is prose poem and essay as well as novel. The smooth continuity readers expect in storytelling is often interrupted by the crudest, most basic stylistic devices: synopses (of books and movies), stage directions, questionnaires, lists, repetitions of words and phrases. Among the latter are "Time passed" and "the thing that had happened before (thing-prime)." The first is a grandiose cliche that gestures at story movement without doing anything. The second suggests an event in Eleanor's life that is never named. Here is what happens. After Eleanor's laptop is stolen, she hears from a man who has it, offers to restore her data, then doesn't. He goes to Albany; she hops on a bus there but doesn't find him. Eleanor's love affair peters out, she visits a commune in the country, talks to her friends, visits a museum, reads, thinks about terrible events in the news, travels to Addis Ababa and studies the life of the French poet Rimbaud, who declared, in a youthful definition of a chameleonic life, "I is an other." These are the bits and pieces of a life that accrete without arriving anywhere definitive. Eleanor and Author are fierce interrogators of the situations they find themselves in. There's an implicit feminist critique of male thought (and fiction?). Where men have all the answers, women interrupt with buts and whys. Eleanor and Author are also magnanimous in their acceptance of mundanity. This is a novel about noticing and ruminating rather than assessing and concluding. The daily weather, interchanges with passing acquaintances, views out the window, are accorded the same attentive courtesy as love and pain. Life isn't seen as a grand arc but as one thing after another, second by second. The book offers each moment, each sentence equably and leaves us to decide what is important and how. Brigitte Frase is a winner of the Nona Balakian Citation for excellence in reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle.

Eleanor, or the Rejection of the Progress of Love By: Anna Moschovakis. Publisher: Coffee House Press, 211 pages, $16.95.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Just one thing after another, none more important than any other; FICTION: The plot is not the point of this intriguing and complicated novel." Star Tribune [Minneapolis, MN], 12 Aug. 2018, p. 9E. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A550099232/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=6166cfbc. Accessed 30 Sept. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A550099232

"Eleanor, or, the Rejection of the Progress of Love." Publishers Weekly, 25 June 2018, p. 158. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A545023374/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=15793a9f. Accessed 30 Sept. 2018. "Moschovakis, Anna: ELEANOR, OR, THE REJECTION OF THE PROGRESS OF LOVE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A540723404/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=03572317. Accessed 30 Sept. 2018. Sweeney, Jon M. "Bresson on Bresson: Interviews 1943-1983." The Christian Century, 7 June 2017, p. 41+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A497797048/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=1c33da93. Accessed 30 Sept. 2018. "Bresson on Bresson: Interviews, 1943-1983." Publishers Weekly, 20 June 2016, p. 143. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A456344765/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5d011600. Accessed 30 Sept. 2018. "They and We Will Get into Trouble for This." Publishers Weekly, 15 Feb. 2016, p. 43+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A444206312/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=17e7a0a3. Accessed 30 Sept. 2018. Reed, Karlin. "You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake." Apalachee Review, Annual 2013, p. 102+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A347971676/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f1bff7a4. Accessed 30 Sept. 2018. "You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake." Publishers Weekly, 21 Feb. 2011, p. 115. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A250321174/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b3619eaf. Accessed 30 Sept. 2018. Morse, Karen Walton. "Ernaux, Annie. The Possession." Library Journal, 1 May 2009, p. 70. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A272485646/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=fd2cfdf0. Accessed 30 Sept. 2018. "The Engagement." Publishers Weekly, 29 Jan. 2007, p. 46. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A158908676/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=fc6bda96. Accessed 30 Sept. 2018. "I Have Not Been Able to Get Through to Everyone." Publishers Weekly, 16 Oct. 2006, p. 36. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A153188314/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=78e83233. Accessed 30 Sept. 2018. Howard, Richard. "Trip to bountiful. (Books)." Artforum International, Sept. 2002, p. 47. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A91202085/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=0684900f. Accessed 30 Sept. 2018. Hoberman, J. "The Elliptical Economies of a Filmmaker." New York Times, 8 Dec. 2016, p. C6(L). General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A473104357/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5a3b4814. Accessed 30 Sept. 2018. Blatny, Ivan. "Misspelled." Harvard Review, no. 31, 2006, p. 137. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A157081602/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d8c6772a. Accessed 30 Sept. 2018. Blatny, Ivan. "Love." Harvard Review, no. 31, 2006, p. 136. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A157081601/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=6d15cb94. Accessed 30 Sept. 2018. "Just one thing after another, none more important than any other; FICTION: The plot is not the point of this intriguing and complicated novel." Star Tribune [Minneapolis, MN], 12 Aug. 2018, p. 9E. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A550099232/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=6166cfbc. Accessed 30 Sept. 2018.

• Brooklyn Rail
  https://brooklynrail.org/2018/07/books/Eleanor-or-the-Rejection-of-the-Progress-of-Love-by-Anna-Moschovakis-Coffee-House-Press-2018
  Word count: 1290

  QUOTE:
  Moschovakis has created a novel of great strength and flex. Much as it bends and twists and gyres, it does not break, in fact only accumulates more tensile strength from the motion, just as, one hopes, we all can do.

  Anna Moschovakis's Eleanor, or, the Rejection of the Progress of Love
  by Veronica Scott Esposito

  Eleanor, or, the Rejection of the Progress of Love by Anna Moschovakis. Coffee House Press, 2018.

  The first thing that must be said about Eleanor, or, the Rejection of the Progress of Love, the debut novel from the poet, translator, and Ugly Ducking editor Anna Moschovakis, is that it is great fun. There is nothing so distinct as a screwball protagonist, a comic plot, or innumerable one-liners that we can attribute this enjoyment to—rather, it is simply found evenly distributed everywhere throughout the tone and shape and feel of Moschovakis’s work: the words she chooses to place together, the movement of her sentences, the ironic pleasures that come from her interpolation of two narratives set in different, but related planes of reality.

  Moschovakis’s mastery of this tone is appropriate, because Eleanoris your classic novelist-writing-a-novel novel, very much in the mode of Ben Lerner and Chris Kraus, oftentimes self-reflexive, self-commentating, and self-conscious, but never precious or purposeless. We begin when Eleanor’s laptop is stolen from a busy cafe, and we soon learn that the computer contained a very necessary file: there has been a tragedy in her life—”thing-prime” as it is enigmatically referred to throughout the novel—and she was processing it in a document of some twentypages on the computer.

  We have barely had time to connect with Eleanor’s plight before we learn that she’s an invention—the protagonist of a novel being worked on by an unnamed woman who begins a sort of relationship with Aidan, a well-known and prestigious critic who offers to comment on her manuscript. When we pick it up, Aidan, a “son of privilege and trauma,” is on the verge of being flown to Denmark in honor of an acclaimed film he has made about Beckett. Brilliant and charming, he is also alcoholic and melancholic, and he seems to be pushing the relationship toward ambiguous and possibly romantic territory. The novelist fights to prevent herself from becoming too attached.

  These three leads all suffer from varieties of malaise, and this is a book about the way we deal with what Moschovakis refers to as “becoming blurred at my edges” —that is, having a hard time determining where our emotions are coming from. I take it as given that this blurring is widespread today—it’s probably at least as old as the mass media and telecommunications, and it’s likely amplified in an era of prodigious information and connectivity. Moschovakis recognizes that this malady is partly technological—she references the never-ending stream of terrible headlines as part of Eleanor’s confusion—but it also derives from how we construct our lives and latch on to memories: Moschovakis pointedly never reveals “thing-prime,” perhaps in part because the naming of our traumas has grown to be just as formulaic and problematic as any other part of postmodern life. As real as trauma may be, it is also a mask that must be broken down before we begin to uncover the a more complete picture of our emotions. As Moschovakis puts it, Eleanor’s grief “was never fully expressed because never singularly caused.”

  A book about the inner lives of our contemporaries must be conversant with how it feels to live right now, and at this Eleanorexcels. Not in the weak sense of name-dropping popular websites, fashionable trends, and political slogans, rather in the much stronger sense of understanding how we use those things to construct our identities and live our lives. Eleanor’sis a world of motorcycle road-trip liveblogging and volunteer farms where one finds composting toilets bearing “fig- and patchouli-scented candles.” Eleanor procrastinates by reading on her phone a bulleted list answering “what is the essence of really good sex?,” an absent-minded way of alleviating a minor, concrete anxiety in order to avoid processing larger, intangible ones. This all feels very true, and subtle, as much as Moschovakis writing of Eleanor “maxing out her free page views on the corporate [news] sites,” while also “maxing out her tolerance of the user-generated content on the far-left and far-right blogs she felt compelled to read in tandem”. Acutely aware that nowadays we either pay for our news in dollars or outrage, Moschovakis is likewise observant of the fact that reading all this news is an attempt by Eleanor’s to fill empty space in her life, a failing attempt that doesn’t even “grant her a more complete picture of the world.”

  What exactly does grant us a complete picture of the world? How can we cope with the fact that our understanding of our world and ourselves will never be complete? Eleanorreferences the Twin Earth thought experiment, an argument for semantic externalism, or, as its creator Hilary Putnam famously put it, the fact that “‘meanings’ just ain’t in the head.” It’s an attempt to prove that the meaning of our words only becomes complete with reference to the world beyond our skull, or, to put it in the language of Eleanor, “one witnesses one’s invention by life.”

  In light of Putnam’s conclusion, Eleanor’s quest to recover “the site of her lost paragraphs” becomes itself a quest to connect with the world that will enable those paragraphs to acquire a fuller meaning, the “more content” that Eleanor will add to the document “once that content is both knowable and known.” The world has stolen her computer, and the adventures incurred in the quest to get it back stand like an order to cease believing that she can absent herself from reality. She is living the words of Danish poet Inger Christensen that Aidan casually flings to the novelist in an email: “I always thought reality/was something you became / when you grew up.”

  Eleanor’s twinned plots continuously move forward, frequently reinventing themselves and turning in unanticipated directions, all the time connecting with more and more of the world in which we live. There’s no clear endpoint to this process—Eleanormight have grown into one of those encyclopedic novels that summon a thousand pages in a failing attempt to fully connect with some aspect of existence—but instead of solidifying into a brick, Moschovakis’s novel pursues the alternative option: a closing accent and a gesture toward everything that can’t be said. “It’s in the nature of us all to want to be unconnected,” says a woman in Alfred Leslie and Frank O’Hara’s The Last Clean Shirt, which the novelist is viewing at novel’s end, “To want to be unconnected / and you should pull us all together / like Humpty Dumpty / or something.” By the time she hears these words, the novelist has provisionally overcome this drive toward disconnection, though for how long who knows—among other things, Eleanortells us that reality pushes us to disconnect, even as so much in our lives tells us to do otherwise. In narrating the twisting, intersecting plots by which Eleanor, the novelist, and Aidan move from disconnection to connection, and probably back to disconnection again, Moschovakis has created a novel of great strength and flex. Much as it bends and twists and gyres, it does not break, in fact only accumulates more tensile strength from the motion, just as, one hopes, we all can do.

• Pank
  https://pankmagazine.com/2018/07/31/review-eleanor-rejection-progress-love-anna-moschovakis/
  Word count: 1013

  [REVIEW] Eleanor, or the Rejection of the Progress of Love by Anna Moschovakis
  Posted on July 31, 2018

  (Coffee House Press, 2018)

  REVIEW BY NICHOLE REBER

  —

  Eight of the last 10 books I’ve opened landed in my Donate pile well before page 99. When it came to Anna Moschovakis’s Eleanor, or the Rejection of the Progress of Love, I found a book I nearly imbibed. Most of us do when reading something we can relate to. The book is, in essence, about existential angst of our zeitgeist. However, for me there was delight in reading about sex, sexuality, and the first steps of mid-life during that zeitgeist. So few art forms capture this period of life well from a woman’s POV, and Moschovakis does it in parallel plots.

  One prong of the bifurcated plot features the protagonist, 37-year-old Eleanor. It opens with her sitting in a cafe, its staff a little too hip with their veritable clothing of tattoos and piercings. Upon returning from the loo her laptop has been stolen. This leads to a geographical and existential journey rife that may be a mid-life crisis. One might say her laptop is that sparkly youth and the thief represents time. She chases the foreigner who’s likely stolen her laptop, searching for him through Google, email, text, and New York. Along the way, we pass landmark that range from sexual liberation and bisexuality to feminism and childlessness, and from aging and friendships to travel and crumbling traditions. Meanwhile she recognizes that men don’t approach her as readily as she had grown accustomed to in her youth.

  “She ran her hand through her hair; a crinkled grey strand appeared in her fingers, followed by a sudden need to be noticed, but only just, only for a minute.”

  When the thief texts her a photo of Canada, she seems to understand that chasing after lost youth is pointless. But still propelled by the mid-life crisis, she keeps traveling, gradually coming to terms with her new phase in life, finding new comfort in contentedness and new dimensions to friendships that simply aren’t possible in the know-it-all invincibility of youth.

  “…The women to whom she was so fiercely loyal had made choices that were in fact fundamentally different, especially in relation to male authority…and that even though their mutual fierce loyalty might well continue in the face of this difference, it was a difference nonetheless, and one that contributed to Eleanor’s feeling of special loneliness in this moment, as she walked somewhat quickly by five or six male road workers…attempting both to ignore and to interpret the expressions on their faces.”

  Meanwhile, the second plot prong centers on a nameless first-person narrator. In this strand Moschovakis demonstrates the growing pains, AKA contradictions, that stem from growth. We morph into our new phases, while elements of the previous one still linger. In that liminal space she still believes the philosophy of the passing generations: to seek approval from male authority figures such as one of her former professors, a critic named Aidan. Yet now, meeting Aidan in her adulthood and as a fellow professor, we see her coming to trust herself more as a writer, knowing when to listen to and when to ignore Aidan’s (a man’s) constructive criticism.

  “You could say that I was becoming blurred at my edges. When I worked on my revision, the critic’s marginalia invaded my mind.”

  Meanwhile, as her confidence grows, she mocks the commonly held belief that women can’t or shouldn’t write sex, that it’s too emotional. I laughed when she employed the paragraph and sentence structure Aidan said was indicative of romance novels, implicitly skewering him as she write about what women really think about whilst enduring boring sex.

  Eventually, the first-person narrator and Eleanor become one, a woman wise enough to know she doesn’t know it all. Maturing confidence meet acceptance in a way that allows her to accept flaws— in herself and others— and lean toward intimacy.

  Moschovakis’s Eleanor, like many books published today, contains essayistic pondering along with plot progression and character development inherent of novels. It combines some lyrical prose, prose poetry, and traditional poetry.

  It’s not a perfect book. The last quarter frays into a series of parcels about as long and substantial as a Tweet. Moschovakis might use these staticky fits and starts to parallel social media or our minds on social media, but it was utterly skimmable. Nor did I appreciate the inundation of artistic references; the ubiquity of these came to feel like a crutch for the author, akin to David Foster Wallace’s footnotes.

  The end further suffers from a seemingly random geographic jump too. The plot makes clear why she leaves New York City for upstate New York, for Albany, and elsewhere in the country for an event with critic Aidan, but what bring her to Ethiopia? It’s not an unforgivable flaw. In fact, I forgive it because by the time you reach middle age you’ll have been somewhere or done something in your life that you could not have imagined or foreseen in your 20s. You come to a place or a time in your life when you thump your noggin and say, “How the hell did I get here?” However, I may be projecting.

  Despite these minor flaws, Moschovakis’s Eleanor, or the Rejection of the Progress of Love offers literary and plot interests on most every page. It’s a book meant for those of us whose sparkle is wearing off and whose lives are beginning to resemble something in a Camus novel.

  Moschvakis’s other books are of poetry include You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake and They and We Will Get into Trouble for This. She has also translated books from French.

• Frieze
  https://frieze.com/article/anna-moschovakiss-remarkable-debut-novel-searches-way-present-womans-life
  Word count: 1509

  Anna Moschovakis’s Remarkable Debut Novel Searches For a Way to Present a Woman’s Life
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  By Sarah Resnick
  23 Jul 2018

  In Eleanor, or The Rejection of the Progress of Love, two women repudiate the long-held expectation: get a husband, make babies

  ‘What, if anything, can I do in the time I have left?,’ asks Eleanor, the titular character of poet and translator Anna Moschovakis’s remarkable first novel, Eleanor, or The Rejection of the Progress of Love (Coffee House Press, 2018). The question is, I would wager, unfamiliar to no one. The privilege of youth is to feel that time lies ahead of you; that like a renewable resource we need worry less about wasting it, about whether we are wasting it. The curse (blessing?) of middle age is to perceive time’s abstraction in a new way: it appears suddenly finite, progressing more rapidly toward life’s only certain event. Amid this transition, the chaff of youthful ambition, of ideas and desires unrealized – or worse, maybe, realized but delivering little more than indifferences – can settle as a scrim over the scenery, impairing one’s vision. Now the question lingers, an ambient irritant.

  When the novel opens, Eleanor is 39 and living in New York. She drifts amid overcast conditions: a lapsed PhD student, an adjunct professor of literature, a consummate reader, a writer who does not appear to spend much time writing. Her aspirations are dim. She is ambivalent about her lover with whom she shares an erotic connection but little else (they ‘were not perfectly matched, she was the first to admit’). Motherhood lacks appeal, the uniform certainty with which mothers ‘compared the before to the after of the unconditional love they felt for their spawn’ unsettling. Too cash-poor to socialize with better-paid friends, her social interactions dwindle; she texts. The atmosphere sweats news stories of trauma and upheaval in six-word summations. Eleanor meets them with anaesthetized dispassion, unable to ‘muster any of the outrage’ she expects to feel. The numbness extends to a recent trauma of her own, an event ‘that she had caused to happen, or that she had not caused but merely not prevented from happening’, which we never hear described. When her laptop is stolen, a document that has become the ‘site for a certain kind of thinking’ in the wake of the ‘thing that had happened’ is lost with it, and she ruminates on the missing paragraphs.

  the_progress_of_love_-_reverie_-_fragonard_1771-72.jpg
  Jean Honoré Fragonard, Reverie from ‘The Progress of Love’, 1771–72, oil on canvas,

  Jean Honoré Fragonard, Reverie from ‘The Progress of Love’, 1771–72, oil on canvas, 3.2 x 2 m. Courtesy: © The Frick Collection, New York

  Unmoored, flittering Eleanor. One could reach for the metaphor that she is a character in someone else’s story, except that there is no need: Eleanor is, quite literally, the protagonist in a novel-within-the-novel of an unnamed author whose own story transpires concurrently with her own. Moschovakis oscillates episodically between the two stories – both Eleanor’s and the unnamed author’s – in the same austere, exacting prose, with Eleanor’s half narrated in a limited third person, the author’s in the first. Recently separated from her girlfriend, Kat, the author preoccupies herself with how best to describe her character Eleanor’s arc as she leaves New York and gives chase to her lost data, moving from a hostel in Albany to an ‘eco-minimalist’ commune, from Ethiopia’s Addis Ababa to the former home of French poet Arthur Rimbaud in Harar.

  An eminent male critic, Aidan – ‘one of those men … who speaks only in subordinated sentences, developed theories’ – has asked to read the author’s manuscript. In a series of emails and encounters, they discuss ‘the function of Eleanor’s lover’ or the anxiety of conforming too closely to the traits of a literary zeitgeist (the use of episodic narrative, for instance) or why the author has chosen the pronoun she instead of I (‘a character who’s lost her data has lost her “I,”’ the critic theorizes). The exchange, with its self-conscious airing of potential flaws, weaknesses, criticisms, feels equally germane to Eleanor the novel.

  5c48e4dc712bffe7e30bb72da4870002.jpg
  Jean-Honoré Fragonard, The Lover Crowned from ‘The Progress of Love’, 1771–72, oil on canvas, 3.2 x 2.4 m. Courtesy: © The Frick Collection, New York

  Jean-Honoré Fragonard, The Confession of Love from ‘The Progress of Love’, 1771–72, oil on canvas, 3.2 x 2.2 m. Courtesy: © The Frick Collection, New York

  ‘I have a question for you about the title of my book,’ the author writes in an email to Aidan late in the novel. Eventually, we learn that she has too many titles in mind and is considering borrowing the form of the frontispiece from Clarice Lispector’s The Hour of the Star (1977) – a list of 12 alternate titles – ‘as a kind of homage’ (the two novels bear many thematic similarities). The list she sends to the critic, typeset in the same format as Lispector’s, includes the two titles of the novel we are reading. This is the first time the phrase ‘The Progress of Love’ appears; it is capitalized, including the T, and set in quotes. Although the novel contains no further discussion of the prospective titles, the style suggests it may be a reference to the short story by Alice Munro, first published in The New Yorker in 1985, about three generations of mothers of daughters on a farm in rural Canada. The phrase appears again some 40 pages later, this time because it is the title of the tetraptych painted by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, four canvases depicting ‘the four ages of love’ – flirtation, furtive meeting, consummation/marriage, happy union. The paintings were, once completed, turned down by the commissioning patron. This is one ‘rejection’, but the word reverberates in other ways: more obvious, perhaps, is that both Eleanor and the unnamed author have rejected heteronormative love and family-making; they have rejected what for a long time women were expected to do with their lives: get a husband, make babies.

  There is, perhaps, one further rejection – Moschovakis’s. Western narrative forms have been developed to record and explicate male life (surely, it’s no coincidence that the narrative arc – inciting incident, climax, denouement – hews closely to the male sexual experience), and in a world in which women were denigrated. The novel, its conventional form, descends from this same tradition. As feminist historian Jill Ker Conway has observed, when they began to be told in novels and in memoirs, women’s stories were often shaped by the romantic myth, concluding with some version of Jane Eyre’s ‘Reader, I married him,’ as if, once married, their own lives ended, were subsumed by the man’s. Or stories with women protagonists centred on relationships between mothers and daughters. Shaped by the romantic or familial myth but not invariantly stamped by it – and certainly not wholly absorbed by it. These stories also expressed anxieties about the anonymizing and economic precariousness of being a woman; about entrapment in the domestic sphere, and, likewise, entrapment in the female body (the experience of childbirth was particularly fearsome).

  resize_formatfull.jpg

  Jean-Honoré Fragonard, The Lover Crowned from ‘The Progress of Love’, 1771–72, oil on canvas, 3.2 x 2.4 m. Courtesy: © The Frick Collection, New York

  Today’s literary landscape has no doubt evolved into something much broader. Yet how literary conventions derived from a culture that assumed women’s inferiority can grant integrity to the experience of women seems to be under question right now – both in Moschovakis’s novel and in English-language writing more broadly. The renewed interest in so-called autofiction, a form with which Eleanor shares much in common (the novel gives us clues but does not confirm that some version of Eleanor is the unnamed author is Moschovakis) seems to be one manifestation of this exploration. Moschovakis is in search of a way of presenting a woman’s life that is not expressed solely through family and bonds with others – that rebuffs inherited conventions while acknowledging that women are still labouring their way through the mare’s nest chaotically erected by patriarchy. For a clue as to what she might do instead, Moschovakis borrows from Rimbaud, a figure Eleanor studies closely in the novel’s third section. ‘I am present at the explosion of my own thought,’ he wrote in a letter in 1871. ‘I watch and listen to it.’ It is life that creates Eleanor, life that creates the unnamed author, rather than the other way around. This is in part why the Aidan’s observations cause the author to doubt her choices in the novel but ultimately don’t prove to be all that helpful – Aidan, so convinced of his own ideas, so buoyed by male authority, fails to recognize the nature, let alone the significance, of the rejection she is making.

• Grist
  https://gristjournal.com/death-empathy-anna-moschovakis-eleanor-rejection-progress-love-review-amy-lee-lillard/
  Word count: 928

  QUOTE:
  Moschovakis’ book is a stunner, showing how we are detached, separated from our bodies, from empathy, from the world and its horrendous events, from time. We’re acting out patterns to cope, and in that way we make no progress.

  But we still try. Eleanor does, ultimately moving to another country to simplify her life. She may still find a way to live in this world. Maybe we can too.

  The Death of Empathy: Anna Moschovakis’ Eleanor or the Rejection of the Progress of Love | Review by Amy Lee Lillard

  September 9, 2018 By Grist Journal

  Something has happened to Eleanor, the thirty-nine-year-old teacher and writer at the center of Anna Moschovakis’ debut novel. This thing permeates Eleanor’s daily routine of teaching, reading, and wandering her Brooklyn neighborhood. This thing also haunts Eleanor when she breaks her routine to track down her computer thief, take drugs with a commune in upstate New York, and finally move to Ethiopia to work in a Rimbaud museum.

  But this thing, the “thing that happened—that she had caused to happen, or that she had not caused but merely not prevented from happening” is never named.

  A few pages in to the novel, I assumed that “it” would eventually be named rape. When one is female and reading of female trauma, especially one tinged with guilt and self-blame, that’s perhaps our go-to response.

  But Moschovakis resists and questions this reaction, and she does it with a bit of structural play that’s exciting and shocking. Interspersed with the third-person narration of Eleanor, Moschovakis adds an unexpected first-person voice: the writer behind Eleanor.

  This writer details her revision process with her novel about Eleanor. She grapples with the critics: her own inner voice of self-doubt, and a male critic who questions her choices. This male critic assumes that Eleanor is a stand in for the writer, and demands simplicity and clear motivations of the characters; he wants the “thing that happened” to be named.

  In some ways, the critic may serve as the voice of the reader who wants things to be explained and resolved. But at the same time, the critic is a certain kind of male that women know well, especially women writers. The critic dominates all their conversations, first with overly negative feedback on the work, and then with his own neuroses. He uses Eleanor as a therapist, an object of seduction, and an empty receptacle waiting to be filled. The writer recognizes what he’s doing, knowing he’s:

  “one of those men…who speak only in subordinated sentences, developed theories…whatever insight emerged was of an apparent authority and completion that I knew from experience I could muster only after substantial thought, the painful suppression of doubt, and rehearsal before a mirror.”

  Perhaps by giving this man the lines and demands that readers might also have, Moschovakis encourages us to examine how we view female stories.

  That’s what I did. As Eleanor thinks of the “thing that happened” again and again, and the critic demands the writer name this thing, I started to think about how we react to female trauma in particular. If the thing that happened to Eleanor was rape, for instance, readers might pity her, while quietly (and perhaps unconsciously) poking holes into her account. If the thing was a parent’s death, we might feel sad for her, but may also want her to deal with it quickly and move on. If it’s divorce, or a miscarriage, or a lost job, or a meltdown, we might have more ready-made responses prepared.

  And maybe we’ve developed these gut reactions because of the sheer volume of stories in the world. We see Eleanor herself may even do this: every day she shifts from social media to news feeds to books to films, consuming hundreds of stories in giant chunks. Most of these stories, on their own, could be deeply emotional, important, life-changing. But she reads and moves on. We’ve all had to learn to do this with the daily firehose of story, to read, digest, and move on to the next. When they’re stories of trauma, as they often are, we’ve learned practiced reactions to help us do that.

  This may be the ultimate power of Moschovakis’ novel. Eleanor, and the male critic, and we readers, may no longer be able to feel real empathy, the book suggests. Detachment may be the new human state.

  Eleanor for one recognizes this in herself, and tries to make herself feel something, anything. She tries sex, masturbation, drugs; she tries thinking deeply on the thing that happened. But time passes, as Moschovakis repeats again and again, and Eleanor “takes note” of events, and her reactions to them, from a distance. We may assume that this is the effect of her trauma. But really, this is life. This is Eleanor’s life, and this is ours.

  Moschovakis’ book is a stunner, showing how we are detached, separated from our bodies, from empathy, from the world and its horrendous events, from time. We’re acting out patterns to cope, and in that way we make no progress.

  But we still try. Eleanor does, ultimately moving to another country to simplify her life. She may still find a way to live in this world. Maybe we can too.

• Lambda Literary
  https://www.lambdaliterary.org/reviews/07/29/eleanor-or-the-rejection-of-the-progress-of-love/
  Word count: 857

  ‘Eleanor, or, the Rejection of the Progress of Love’ by Anna Moschovakis
  Review by Daphne Sidor
  July 29, 2018

  Name: Eleanor. Age: “still not halfway to death.” Marital status: single, though recently granted a drawer of her own in her not-boyfriend’s apartment. Race: white, with the requisite sense of culpability in an age of “school shootings, murderous cops and their defenders, and remote-controlled bombings of unarmed civilians.”

  When we meet the title character in Anna Moschovakis’s Eleanor, or, the Rejection of the Progress of Love, she has blood on her hands—both literally, her thumb bleeding from an unspecified injury, and figuratively, dwelling on an unspecified “thing that had happened—that she had made happen, or at least not prevented from happening.” She is stuck, and so is her creator: not Moschovakis, but an unnamed narrator whose struggle to revise her manuscript unfolds in alternating sections with Eleanor’s story. If this sounds unwieldy, in practice it isn’t, even as the narrator worries that her book has become “like a sequence of nested clauses, an interminable sentence requiring too many readings to locate the verb.”

  For help untangling the threads, she turns to a not-quite-new acquaintance: Aidan, a critic and filmmaker whose place in the cultural canon is already being laid out, and whose course she once took as an undergrad—not that he seems to remember. His celebrated film is titled Audience, and his need for the narrator to serve as a combination student, handler and confessor is overpowering. Almost instantly, he thrusts dark personal secrets into her hands and reveals himself as one of those men who delivers every opinion with “an apparent authority and completion that I knew from experience I could muster only after substantial thought, the painful suppression of doubt, and hours of rehearsal before a mirror.”

  But despite his self-absorption, Aidan is interested in her novel. And despite herself, the narrator is interested in him. Not romantically: she’s “mostly off men,” though Aidan’s correspondence is a welcome distraction from a breakup so fresh she’s still tripping over her ex-girlfriend’s stilettos. But love isn’t the only story worth telling. In this book, nonce friendships can be as life-changing as committed relationships, and sex isn’t necessarily a more potent form of eros than conversation.

  While the narrator fields Aidan’s volley of emails and margin notes, Eleanor embarks on a fraught email correspondence of her own. After her laptop is stolen, she receives a message from a young African immigrant claiming that he’s found it and would like to help return her data. When he stops responding online, she decides to pursue him into the real world, seeking some cloudy mixture of confrontation and connection.

  It’s this pursuit that ultimately pries Eleanor loose from her holding pattern and launches her on a shaggy-dog pilgrimage from Brooklyn to an Albany youth hostel, an upstate eco-commune, and ultimately Ethiopia. Along the way, she pinballs off a slew of characters who are no less vivid for having only walk-on roles.

  Moschovakis is a poet, and Eleanor is unmistakably a poet’s novel, alert to the textures of experience but relaxed in the pursuit of plot. It is elliptical in the manner of David Markson or Renata Adler, yet eager to point out its experiments and omissions. We don’t learn what sort of event Eleanor regrets having caused, but we do get the narrator pondering “whether the benefits of withholding the particulars of the thing that had happened were worth any frustration such withholding might cause in a reader.” She also worries about the book’s “many unoriginal traits: its episodic structure, its banal storyline reflecting the alienation of the individual in late capitalism, and more.” All this could come off as precious; instead, it lands as a kind of generosity.

  The other risk with such meta-commentary is that it might bog down the narrative. But in fact it’s the narrator’s story that starts to produce the stronger pull. Her unstable bond with the critic launches a compelling exploration of the kinds of witness we seek in others and the insidious ways gender and power complicate friendship. While Eleanor traces the footsteps of Arthur Rimbaud in Ethiopia, the narrator travels with Aidan to a ceremony in his hometown, where she finds it “hard not to take on the role of assistant, though I assuaged some of my anxiety about this tendency by calling it care.”

  How might any of us get unstuck—from endless rumination, from gendered relations gone stale? One viable strategy, Eleanor suggests, is to escape, not carelessly away from the past but carefully toward each other and deeper into the world. Its heroines’ paths progress as unpredictably and digressively as Moschovakis’s magpie pen, picking up cultural artifacts ranging from Marina Abramovic to My Dinner with Andre along the way. It’s a pleasure to journey alongside all three of them as they drift and drift, and finally take flight.

• Boston Review
  http://bostonreview.net/bredie-on-i-have-not-been-able-to-get-through-to-everyone-by-anna-moschovakis
  Word count: 403

  QUOTE:
  I Have Not Been Able to Get Through to Everyone is concerned primarily with knowledge, its forms and its limitations.
  Moments of intimacy like this save Moschovakis (not to mention the reader) from her own steely intellect.
  Poetry
  Microreview: Anna Moschovakis, I Have Not Been Able to Get Through to Everyone

  Nicholas Bredie

  I Have Not Been Able to Get Through to Everyone
  Anna Moschovakis
  Turtle Point Press, $16.95 (paper)

  Plato’s Republic begins with the Ring of Gyges fable and ends with the banishment of poetry from the realms of knowledge. Near the beginning of her remarkable first collection Anna Moschovakis offers her own speculation on knowledge in a prose poem entitled “Thought Experiment: The Ring of Gyges”: “the content leaves something to be desired, but nobody knows what it is. Instead, they all know each blade of grass, how a criminal’s made, what constitutes grief and how it’s removed. In addition, they (kind of) know Kung Fu, Swahili, and the waltz.” With Plato, George Herbert and an unnamed Hélène Cixous acting as guiding lights throughout the book’s several sequences, I Have Not Been Able to Get Through to Everyone is concerned primarily with knowledge, its forms and its limitations. In this so-called Information Age we seem to know an awful lot, but the depth and rigor of our knowledge (like “the content” above) leaves something to be desired. In opposition to this Moschovakis pursues a knowledge stripped bare of pretensions. In one lyric she sets her mind on the relationship between names and sex, moving from insightful, disinterested comparisons of the two (people change their names and are treated as fundamentally the same while people change their sex and are treated fundamentally differently) into a less scientistic, more intimate space. “Like many people, I like hearing my name spoken during sex,” Moschovakis writes, nicely undercutting the impersonality of her speculation. Moments of intimacy like this save Moschovakis (not to mention the reader) from her own steely intellect. Instead of concluding in the antiseptic emerald city of Plato’s republic, Moschovakis’s inquiries leave her winding down poetry’s open road, and it is here that she is at liberty to be most herself: “In the city of my book,” her final “Winter Song” concludes, “the character’s blown-out / winding up alleys & leaving.”

• Rumpus
  https://therumpus.net/2012/09/you-and-three-others-are-approaching-a-lake-by-anna-moschovakis/
  Word count: 1016

  QUOTE:
  The referential landscape of Moschovakis’s poems is massive. I’m flipping through the pages learning all kinds of things. There are autobiographical details, statements about The Church of Scientology, references to cultural guilt, and information about tribes from New Guinea. There exist Craigslist advertisements, concerns about work, ethics, concerns about compensation. There’s information about weddings, information about giving gifts, Bonnie and Clyde, inurement. The poet talks about Louis XV, Wittgenstein, Tom Cruise. The book is on overdrive.

  You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake by Anna Moschovakis

  Reviewed By Collin Schuster

  September 28th, 2012

  Because it’s a pleasure to think about the significance of the word “approach” in Anna Moschovakis’s new book You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake. Because it is. Because approaching a lake is a strange thing, especially in the opening pages. Small detours abound. We are taken back to 1917, the origins of “Modern industrialism,” workers, comforts, waste. It’s as though you are being plotted on a map, the axis or “axes” or access of it. You are getting asked to interpret it, to “choose.” Choose what though, interpret what?

  A glass of milk
  or
  a cigarette
  but not both

  —

  a matinee
  or
  a siesta
  but not both

  The important thing is that you choose, and choice grows out of information. We think about the way that information plays. It is illustrated in the two conditional statements above, but it is also born out in the book’s trajectory. We are brought back to the idea of choice amidst information overload. And therefore, choose what? The referential landscape of Moschovakis’s poems is massive. I’m flipping through the pages learning all kinds of things. There are autobiographical details, statements about The Church of Scientology, references to cultural guilt, and information about tribes from New Guinea. There exist Craigslist advertisements, concerns about work, ethics, concerns about compensation. There’s information about weddings, information about giving gifts, Bonnie and Clyde, inurement. The poet talks about Louis XV, Wittgenstein, Tom Cruise. The book is on overdrive.

  One of the core questions, too, it seems to me that the book asks its readers is this: What do we get out of work? And to this, I’ll say that one of the poems I completely absolutely love happens to be a job history poem, a poem that lists past names of employers, and their attendant tendered bones of compensation—

  Todo Mundo, 1995-96. $125/day. Free CDs. Lunch.

  VHI, 1998. $500/wk. Swag.

  Baltimore City Community College, 2000. $1,600 per course per semester.
  Free parking.

  These are excerpts, portions. What fascinates me is the way the list can build and engage us to think about what is missing. Here, I am reminded of Ammiel Alcalay’s wonderful book, Scrapmetal, and that poetic form of using work as a way to measure one’s time. It is a poignant invitation to read by, personal, and it compels a reader to think about what is worked through, what given, what left out. Compensation for one’s work proves to be more than just numbers, after all, just as choice involves more than the binary offered between one thing and another.

  I’ll limit my review to a few more things. Because I am only one reader approaching a lake, and for me, this lake is connected to noise and entanglements of vagus nerves angular and brightly lit, relentless as a sound of information, relentless as the precise and dynamic upturned canoe of information—

  And I will go with you to the end of this argument
  As I have gone with you to the beach
  And the man with the cooler will walk by selling streets
  And we will pick a street to carry us home

  I do go to the end of these arguments. “From these definitions one must pick / and choose.” Moschovakis fetches and confects the poems. She responds to information as other, as in you and “three others” are approaching a lake. I continue to wade through it.

  Because material exposes comforts and error. Because there is more than we can sort out. How can we get a better understanding of the materially dominated society we live by, as in superstructure, as in information to interpolate, as in jobless rate? Because there are many things, because the outcome of each changes things. I find this picking and choosing amidst the poet’s “selling streets” a positive, worldly response.

  And don’t let me leave off without saying it seems a perfect pleasure to think about the significance of the word “approach” in terms of strange love letter algorithms, inherent within the book, and how these are just schmaltzy enough to be timely, goofy cards for your Valentine sweetheart. Take one example—

  HONEY SWEETHEART

  YOU ARE MY EROTIC ENTHUSIASM. MY AMBITION
  ATTRACTS YOUR APPETITE. MY UNSATISFIED EAGERNESS
  YEARNS FOR YOUR UNSATISFIED ENTHUSIASM. YOU ARE
  MY FERVENT LONGING. MY KEEN FERVOUR.

  YOURS KEENLY,

  It’s downright intriguing that amidst markets, efficiency, waste, diminishing returns, our poet has us think about the ways that machines articulate desire. Because in dealing with chatbots, questions get posed. How does a person engage language differently than a machine? Do you know what a Turing Test is? What are the horizons of desire?

  Of course, at this point, I might even digress and ponder a gemmy cinematic reference: the Blade Runner Turing Test. Deckard interrogates Rachael. Her maker, Dr. Eldon Tyrell, presides over the event, and the doctor is proud that it takes more questions than usual to detect that Rachael is a replicant, a verifiable humanoid. But I won’t go there. No. Because it’s like that earlier message and reminder: the important thing is that we choose.

• American Microreviews
  http://www.americanmicroreviews.com/eleanor-or-the-rejection-of-the-progress-of-love-by-anna-moschovakis/
  Word count: 407

  Eleanor or the Rejection of the Progress of Love
  by Anna Moschovakis
  Coffee House Press, 2018; 208 pp
  Reviewed by Abby Burns

  "At this point, Eleanor’s thinking became unfamiliar. Had she not been aware of just how familiar her thinking was to her in general, how expected it had become, even in its extremes, in its total enthusiasm and its total skepticism, its most rational gestures and its most impulsive ones? All of it now seemed dull and pathetic, as if thought were a giant mountain and she had spent her life so far considering one side of it only, attempting to scale it, duly scraping her hands and knees, her sights set on the mountain’s unattainable peak, without it ever once occurring to her—how stupid she’d been!—to relinquish her frontal perspective, to let the mountain become unrecognizable. As if it had never occurred to her to walk to the other side."

  As I read Anna Moschovakis’s Eleanor or the Rejection of the Progress of Love, I found myself returning to Scklovsky’s idea of estrangement, or the process by which writers defamiliarize their material, making it strange and perhaps unsettling to the reader. Similar to Two Serious Ladies by Jane Bowles, one of the many texts it collects over its two hundred pages, Eleanor seems primarily interested in queering particular states of affect or thought. Moschovakis interrupts long passages of intense quotidian detailing with sharp outbursts of emotion. The language she uses shifts from the routine and merely descriptive: “She was alone in the hallway and in the elevator: mirrored walls coated with gray construction dust,” to something almost baroque in how exquisitely excessive it is: “She felt a shift in her guts—subcutaneous creature—at the transition from disbelief to outrage” (emphasis mine).

  This toggling between styles augments the novel’s introspective moments, making Eleanor and her unnamed writer’s interiorities the driving force of the narrative. Our attention is drawn to the narrators’ discomfort, anxiety, and heightened emotion while their day-to-day routine slowly disintegrates, made insignificant by Moschovakis’s increasingly fragmented, unfinished sentences: “Abraham put on his goggles and [power saw, exhaust, plywood]”. In this way, Moschovakis slowly unsettles her narrators’ relationship to the familiarity of their surroundings and their actions, which once may have comforting, now invokes dread and disdain: “All of it now seemed dull and pathetic.”

• Kenyon Review
  https://www.kenyonreview.org/kr-online-issue/kr-reviews/selections/they-and-we-will-get-into-trouble-for-this-by-anna-moschovakis-738439/
  Word count: 1316

  QUOTE:
  They and We Will Get into Trouble for This may have its lineage in various traditions, but if we call it avant-garde or experimental, it is to say that it provides new ways of looking at what poetry can do at this very moment, broadening our perception of what was always possible. In that sense, it is a rich and momentous book, which should establish Anna Moschovakis as one of the most important poets writing today.

  ON THEY AND WE WILL GET INTO TROUBLE FOR THIS BY ANNA MOSCHOVAKIS
  Jeremy Allan Hawkins

  Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 2016. 112 pages. $16.95.
  (Click on cover image to purchase)

  What does it mean to be avant-garde? Does it require a specific set of practices, access to arcane knowledge, or membership to a certain school? Anna Moschovakis’s third collection, They and We Will Get into Trouble for This, might suggest experimental poetry requires formal devices, making use of non-standard forms on the page and in the layout of the book in order to disrupt convention. Her formal approaches, however, create new possibilities for meaning, and so prove to be integral to the content of the work. The result is a poetry that can be seen to rely on invention to generate new conceptual opportunities for what is essentially a lyric mode. If Moschovakis writes experimental poetry, it is in creating a lyric that thinks as much as it feels.

  The opening line of poetry works as a first indication of these considerations, appearing not where we might expect it, but in the footer of the dedication page, coincident with the dedication to the poet’s grandmothers. “[ WHAT IS HAPPENING IN THE ROOM ] [ HOW ARE WE IN THE ROOM ],” the poem begins, and continues in the footer throughout the book until it concludes in a thicket of slashes just after the acknowledgements page. This untitled piece, with its unconventional use of brackets and a strong tendency against sense-making, breaks with the common “one poem per page” rule known by anyone familiar with poetry manuscript submission guidelines. Instead, the footer poem is the constant companion of the book’s other work, sometimes echoing those poems, but most often giving the appearance of having resulted from the arbitrary processes of layout and design.

  These are not simply happy accidents, though. The interplay between the four long poems/sequences in They and We Will Get into Trouble for This deliberately echoes both internally and externally. When, for instance, the body of a poem mentions (however obliquely) David Antin’s writing on Vietnam in “the fringe,” the footer exclaims “[ THIS CONVICTION ] [ A TALE OF OUR WICKEDNESS / IT IS NOT ],” and sets feedback humming that is picked up elsewhere in the book. Moschovakis’s intertextuality reaches out to Antin, among others, but also operates on the level of the volume, and animates even the single page, with an effect that is as resonant as it is glancing. As with most Oulipo techniques, the devices Moschovakis uses may sometimes appear arbitrary, but they are anything but random. And so when a profusion of brackets confronts the reader in one poem, and double bars “||” in another, and then also unpredictable slashes in still another, the poet invites us to read these varying graphical marks as having significance, if not necessarily precise significations. The indeterminacy obliges multiple readings, suggestive of everything from formal logic operators to film cuts to traditional line breaks in quotation.

  To be certain, though, the formal elements Moschovakis employs have stakes beyond the graphic and concrete. The gathering of what is normally kept separate plays out, for example, in the sequence “Flat White (20/20),” where Moschovakis interweaves twenty sections of what she calls her “often-corrupt translations” of a poem by Algerian poet Samira Negrouche, with twenty sections of her own poetry written in response. The result is a sequence that breaks down the division between poet and translator, and comes close to erasing whatever distinction was left between writing and translation. In a section attributed to Negrouche, the poet speaks of what precedes an encounter:

  That which predisposes toward an encounter these are sometimes the four winds that become confused / telescope / on an eagle’s nest and the instant /\ word of love will cancel \/ really cancels /\ all the forces of opposition.

  The cancelling of opposition is a recurring consequence of Moschovakis’s encounter with Negrouche, and even if response sections often address “Samira” directly, it is possible to read the sequence as a plurivocal unity, where the translated poet and poet-translator are intertwined in a text that looks outward and in on itself simultaneously.

  Other oppositions receive even stronger treatment. As the untitled footer poem explores the “They and We” pairing found in the book’s title, for example, those pronouns morph into one all-encompassing plural, “thwey,” with an accompanying possessive of “thour,” creating possibilities for an English language that has never been more in need of pronominal invention:

  [ THWEY CARRY NATIVENESS / TO A CONCLUSION / IN SUICIDE . . .

  And:

  [ THWEY WALK INTO THE OTHERS ] [ WHO WAIT IN THOUR ] [ UNIFORMS ] [ STUPID ] . . .

  New linguistic possibilities are also new possibilities for being, and while the creation of new ontological modes may appear to be a stratospheric aim for poetry, avant-garde or otherwise, it is worth asking if there really is any other principle at stake.

  . . . TO SAY ] [ THAT THE PROBLEM ] [ IS REAL ] [ TO ASK ] [ WHOSE I IS THIS ANYWAY ] [ STATIC ] [ OF DECIPHERABLE ] [ WORLDS ] . . .

  But perhaps the most important opposition troubled by Moschovakis’s work is between poetry and thinking. In “Paradise (Film Two),” she moves effortlessly through a surprising array of topics: Kierkegaard, science, the Bible, Medea, cell phones, and marriage liturgy, among others. The effect is of very intelligent, disembodied talking, as if we were simply listening in on a public intellectual’s spontaneous meditations. This is an illusion, however, created by a deft metonymic exploration of ideas. When Moschovakis writes in the poem of James Burke’s late ’70s television series Connections, “in which the host followed a trail || wherever it led || across time || space || and disciplinary divides,” she calls the show an “influence” on her work, but also puts on display the lyric engine operating in her book, where the connections made across divides distinguish her writing from narrative, exposition, or argument. Musicality and emotion have their places in the work as well, but the essential element of Moschovakis’s lyric tendency comes from the sort of thinking the poetry employs, both metonymic and connective.

  Careful reading of They and We Will Get into Trouble for This reveals the many formal inventions Anna Moschovakis uses are perfectly coherent with a lyric tradition, and her formal choices are conceptual, in that they help generate meaning. So there are indications that these formal aspects of the work are not necessarily “what it means to be avant-garde”—the title of a poem/sequence in this volume—just as a poem’s use of found text, critical theory, and “a pail of Guggenheim piss” are not what it means, either. Rather, the poetry that redefines and extends the art form’s limits is always the one that provides the most interesting and fruitful answer(s) to the question: “What can poetry do . . . now?” They and We Will Get into Trouble for This may have its lineage in various traditions, but if we call it avant-garde or experimental, it is to say that it provides new ways of looking at what poetry can do at this very moment, broadening our perception of what was always possible. In that sense, it is a rich and momentous book, which should establish Anna Moschovakis as one of the most important poets writing today.

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