Tuesday
Notes from the Committee—Catherine Kasper’s sold out prize-winner from Noemi Press—is described by Brian Everson on the back cover: “Notes from the Committee offers a mental movement through a cityscape as a kind of revelation of a lifestyle. Offering a world at once very unlike and all too much like our own, a city hovering very much on the edge of itself, these putative notes lull one along into some very odd spaces. There are traces of Schulz’s Street of Crocodiles here, Borges’s Tlon, and Coover’s The Grand Hotels of Joseph Cornell, but these crisscrossing influences add up to a wholly unique and original work.”
In an interview with John Dermot Woods, Kasper describes the book as “a manifesto that calls for the will to dissemble and/or refashion the bureaucracies we’ve made instead of perpetuating senseless and often inhumane systems.” Kasper generously allowed us to reprint a piece from this book whose voice “is amazed that others have given up the desire and the right to breathe unpolluted air.”
All that I love and admire about this piece is apparent here: that opening with the imperative (Don’t mistake…); the first person plural narrator (our malls); the sounds of words knocking against each other (Caucasian skin grafts, sexiness or salubriousness); the humor (every thing is replaceable, especially you); and the horror that underlies it all (anatomical mining). Against that opening image of “pitiful caves” is another option, that of “all things shiny,” of “images cast in reflective glass.” There’s always, in each of these pieces, that bureaucracy: the volunteer staff, the administrative assistants, the cheerful exchange. For what world have we exchanged this one? How did it happen? Who let it happen? Who is “we” and who is “you” here? That, to me, is the brilliance of this piece and the entire book, the way it gets me to insert myself into it, as someone being talked to and about, all the time wondering who exactly is doing the talking.
