Simultaneously Familiar & Unrecognizable: Ben Fama, Johannes Göransson & Sarah Gerard

At Entropy, Christopher Higgs reviews three "new notable books" by authors Ben Fama, Johannes Göransson, and Sarah Gerard. Higgs uses a screenshot-Tweet from Iggy Azalea as an epigraph! This makes sense. Later, he writes:

All three are very much timely, relevant, and compelling. But they’re also something else. Something like Aidan Baker & Tim Hecker’s musical collaborations, which is to say unnameable. Strange. Simultaneously familiar and unrecognizable. Both of the now and of the other.

Earlier, he writes of Fama's first book, Fantasy, just out from Ugly Duckling Presse. "As in most of my favorite recent books, I sense in Fama’s Fantasy the desire for present-ness, for lingering in the here and now, for soaking in — rather than resisting — our highly technological age of commodity fetishism." Higgs advances to future. From his peace on Göransson:

“Dear Los Angeles,” writes Johannes Göransson in his forthcoming The Sugar Book, “stop cutting yourself, I’m not you.”

Earlier in the book, Göransson declares, “I invented my son to destroy Los Angeles…Poetry has to destroy Los Angeles. Poetry has to be Los Angeles.”

I was surprised — pleasantly surprised — to see that Los Angeles plays such a leading role in Göransson’s newest book. Like other of his electrifying recent work, The Sugar Book demonstrates a transformation of text and concept: fatherhood, lover, master, villain, celebrity. It’s as if we’re being invited to witness the process of social reconfiguration: reforming gender, reforming aesthetic and ethical values. And so much degradation, filth, pig meat, blood, whores…

For Gerard, author of the novel Binary Star, Higgs invokes Hardt and Negri’s Multitude about recuperating the public and political conception of love:

We need to recover today this material and political sense of love, a love as strong as death. This does not mean you cannot love your spouse, your mother, your child. It only means that your love does not end there, that love serves as the basis for our political projects in common and the construction of a new society. Without this love, we are nothing.

Read the full piece at Entropy. At top: Robert Mapplethorpe “Self-Portrait” (1983).