joan
Anne Boyer, who writes odali$qued, has a novel coming out soon. It’s called Joan, and I will most certainly purchase it and read it with excitement, especially because she describes it in the following manner:
Joan is a novel of everybody but mostly of a woman named Joan. It is the story of a private life made out of public language. It is probably a female epic, though Joan often knows she is a man.
I started it in Iowa in February of 2006, and I finished it in Kansas in January of 2009. I wanted it to be like Moll Flanders or Robinson Crusoe or Roxanna. I also wanted it to be like Kathy Acker.
[snip]
Once in a comment box Jasper Bernes wrote something about the new epic:
“I’m imagining something that takes the life of the collective as its protagonist, something lateral, relentlessly exteriorizing and objectifying, global, perhaps a bit didactic, documentary perhaps, something that does not assume character or even narrative as the sine qua non of the form”
I think Joan is like that, maybe, except that it is very much a narrative in a pure and ancient sense of narrative in that it begins with birth and ends with death and has life and many ordinary human activities like war, birth, love, and work in between.
Ha! Jasper said that in my comment box, which makes me ridiculously happy in an unusually uncomplicated way. Long live the blogform! Long live the comment box! Let the new infra-interesting aggregate epic come, in verse or prose or both, whoever it is that writes it!
ads without products 
Joan is quite simply one of the most remarkable things I’ve ever read. She’s a collective subject like no other.
Jasper
July 21, 2009 at 12:43 am
Honestly, I wish I could have a copy right now. I’d still pay for a properly printed one…
Ads
July 21, 2009 at 12:44 am