1/17/12

Gretchen E. Henderson - A cabinet of curiosities of things deformed, disabled, reformed and enabled. A choose-your-own adventure that advises and counsels the reader how to change the work itself. Deformity becomes a modality of exploring the literary, the body, and the cultural


Gretchen E. Henderson, Galerie de Difformité, Lake Forest College Press, 2011.

"Traces of many books mask themselves inside Gretchen E. Henderson s Galerie de Difformite. With the head of a novel and the body of a poem, this extraordinary work interrogates the nuanced concepts of ability/disability, voyeurism/exhibition, deformity/normality all with a wry sense of self-representational humor.
A lineage that bequeaths mysterious relics to an unsuspecting recipient, led through a textual labyrinth by Bea: a deformed reincarnation of Dante s muse.
The story-within-a-story takes shape through the mysterious Undertaker a perhaps reanimated-yet-disabled Beatrice, intertwined with the contemporary Gloria Heys and the presumed publisher, Gretchen E. Henderson.
An infamous brotherhood called Ye Ugly Face Clubb. Lushly designed with crowdsourced images, text deconstructions, and enough narrative tomfoolery to make Tristram Shandy blush, the Galerie is both funhouse and curiosity cabinet, art catalogue and choose your own adventure.
This bestiary of the novel-as-poem-as-essayas- art grows outside of the bounds of the Book and, in the process, redefines deformity for the digital millennium."

"Gretchen E. Henderson’s Galerie de Difformité is a deforming book that invites collaborative participation, as this novel-as-poem-as-essay-as-art migrates outside of the bounds of the Book and communally redefines Deformity. Her wide-ranging critical and creative practices and projects explore aesthetics of deformity, museology as narrative strategy, poetics, the history and future of the book, and literary appropriations of music." 

"What a work!...The book explodes across distributed platforms and media, with a digitally networked existence that simultaneously builds on and destroys the integrity of the print object." - Johanna Drucker

"A totally enjoyable book! While the Galerie de Difformité speaks for itself, it does so in a raucous chorus—each page a patchwork of questions, prompts, ventriloquisms, and extra matter—the sum of which is uncountable—an ongoing challenge to the finality and good hygiene of the book. I love the messiness in Gretchen E. Henderson’s invitation to visit her, and any number of other ghosts, online, in galleries, and on the page. Got something to derange? Any miserliness a reader feels quickly mutates into an abundance of play." -Thalia Field

"Galerie de Difformité is a cabinet of curiosities of things deformed, disabled, reformed and enabled.  A choose-your-own adventure that advises and counsels the reader how to change the work itself. Deformity becomes a modality of exploring the literary, the body, and the cultural through various lenses of historical periods and ideologies in which, for example, Dante’s Beatrice metonymically becomes the inspiration for writing ugliness in a series of displacements —a stolen part of remains is turned into a pen which then travels through history to inscribe various kinds of deformity. A book that combines the metacriticism of Tristram Shandy with the randomness of a complex video game, Henderson has created a unique work that aims at being extraordinary, arcane, and eminently accessible.  A book you won’t forget." - Lennard J. Davis

"Cross the form of a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book with fragmented, cut-up, torn-up, stretched, and unconventionally printed text. Skip the “of” of an English title and give it a French name, using the “de” form. Bend book into blog. Deformity here includes transgressing the boundaries of authorship and inviting “user-generated” fascicles. Work the book’s text into something despicable or respectable: Fill out the form. Click to put Ye Ugly Face on Facebook. The story’s play of conspiracies and resurrections resonate with the transformations of the reading process that book and reader enact. Further, the exercises in textual topology – and lettered exhibits calling for further deformation – show that remixing is not just for one-note works such as Dramatic Chipmunk. The book, and indeed this thoughtfully developed artist’s book, can also serve as seed for elaborate transformation and convolution." - Nick Montfort

"Gretchen E. Henderson's Galerie De Difformité is unlike any other book you are liable to find yourself reading this fall. If you were to throw the book into the air so that it came down face open downward and began reading, you would be starting exactly where the author would want you to be. At one point in the book the text reads,
Gretchen Henderson writes a-novel-that-deforms-a-novel about her fictional relative Gloria Heys and Gloria's fictional Galerie in which Beatrice is reincarnated as a fallen… angel. Bea (a.k.a. Gloria a.k.a. Gretchen – at least a fictional version of Gretchen) reimagines her story from shards of a perceived paradise. Writing straight with crooked lines, she tries to deform "deformity."
Got that? If so, forget it because this paragraph just deformed the paragraph that preceded it. Diving into the labyrinth at random is the only way to discover the structure of the labryinth itself, but in doing so, you continually change it. Fortunately, all is not lost. At the bottom of almost any page you were to find the book open to, you would see a list of options as to where you might want to go next.
For example, the bottom of page 48 reads:

To continue reading Gretchen's letters to Gloria, turn to page 69.
    To try on a second skin, visit page 57.
          If you don't know where you are, turn to page 6 or 185.
               For more options, see next page.


If this sounds vaguely familiar, recall those "choose your own adventure" book that you read as a child. Of course, in Galerie De Difformité, this technique is much more than a clever gimmick. By pursuing these various choices, certain patterns do seem to emerge that give shape to the book. (Note: probably the least successful strategy is to start at page one and insist on trying to read straight through.)
Of the patterns that emerge, three seem to predominate. The first is a series of epistles from Gretchen to Gloria in which the presumed author recounts how she came into possession of the galerie de difformite, events in her life that lead her to try to complete Gloria's project, and her attempts to develop a plan on just how she will proceed.
A second pattern running through the book is a series of "Exhibits," ostensibly belonging to Gloria's original gallery. These are labeled alphabetically "Exhibit A" through "Exhibit Z." They read like prose poems. For instance, "Exhibit C" begins: "Color is a chronicle of chemistry, fueled by desire." For "Exhibit M": "It's a matter of digging up a body. Digging up and into: a body, of myths, any legend…" Of course, in keeping with the spirit of the non-linear structure, these pieces do not follow in alphabetic sequence. For those who cannot free themselves from the compulsion to work through the "Exhibits" alphabetically, the author providesa key in the form of a rhymed acrostic tucked away in the text. That is one way that a reader might approach the book.
By keeping "Exhibits" unnamed (A-Z), they hopefully rouse curiosity about the curated collection and, secondarily, become exhibits with political implications (allied with "exhibits" in a legal trial).
One thing that seems to be on trial are constructions of (dis)ability and (in)accessibility: how these notions operate on bodies, even on the body of this book, in different environments.At one point,in a section entitled "How to Make This Book More (In)Accessible," readers are invited to transcribe ortranslate the text through assistive technologies,like speech-recognition software, sign language, Braille output, audio description, and related approaches. Through the Galerie De Difformité's playful process, our strategies for reading and writing both books and bodies are called into question and broadened.
Of course, the "Exhibits" do not follow an alphabetically sequential order in the book. For those who cannot free themselves from the compulsion to work through the "Exhibits" alphabetically, the author does provide a key in the form of a rhymed acrostic tucked away in the text, and that is one approach to the book that a reader might take.
A third major pattern or thread in the book is that of deformity or deforming. Throughout the book are scattered a number of pages with the word "deformity" in the title, such as "Deformity as Definition," "Deformity as Character" or "Deformity as Natural" There is even an examination in the book part of which asks the reader to create their own "Deformity as _______ page. The locus of this part of the book, however, is "The Destruction" room where directions are given to the reader for deforming the book. Deforming can involve any number of activities including cutting, adding to, reshaping, using as wall paper, making paper dolls from, or painting over any of the exhibits or, for that matter, any page in the text.
An interesting aspect of Galerie De Difformité is that it enlists the help of subscribers to carry the project beyond the bounds of the pages of the book. In "the Undertaker's" words:
I'm enlisting the help of "Subscribers". ~ a very minimal commitment, which need only happen this one time, more if you like. To participate download a copy of an "Exhibit" from the project's website http://difformite.wordpress.com/ to deform however you like. One you have materially deformed your "Exhibit," please email me a representation (e.g., a digital image) to post on the site with your permission.
Indeed if a reader goes to the !HOME page of the Galerie De Difformité website they will find examples of each of the exhibits that the subscribers have deformed. Early submissions helped to illustrate the book, and the online gallery and other offshoots will continue to grow as the project expands (or better said: deforms).
Henderson also stretches the bounds of the book in another way. All of the exhibits, and many other pages too, contain Quick Response codes. Better known as QR codes, these are square-like barcodes that can be scanned with an iPhone or Android that allows you to automatically enter that exhibit in the web site gallery. This breaking down of the conventional barriers between two traditionally discrete media is just one more way that the gallery deforms preconceived ideas.
Any way one looks at it, Galerie De Difformité is a prodigious undertaking. There is little wonder why the book form (now published by &NOW Books) garnered Henderson the 2010 Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writer's Residency Prize. The amount of research, the creativity and the sheer variety within the book. It takes the metaphor of the novel as a "baggy monster" to a whole new level. It even gives Henderson the opportunity to show her skills as a poet, as she does in the opening lines of "The Beekeeper's Apprentice:"
When she first appeared
she was whitewashed,
bandaged gauze

haze of clouds
collapsing
knit with frenzy

of bees. She was
buzzing. Limbs locked
in light-wire, quiver

ing, I watched
thick with trembling.

The emerging field of disability literature is not only about recording personal experiences of disability through memoir and poetry or even countering negative or paternalistic images of disability that have persisted in literature since the beginning of written language, it is also about using language and perceptions culled from the disability experience to create new forms. In that regard, Gretchen E. Henderson's Galerie De Difformité makes a real contribution. It provides a seedbed for new ideas of how disability might be thought about and the forms that it might take. Beyond any appeal to the post-modern sensibility, Galerie De Difformité is sheer fun and, addictive, at that. Whatever it is that drove you as a child to want to keep returning to those "create your own adventure stories" is going to grab you here as well, but on a deeper and much more multi-layered level. Go ahead and click on the website link above. Then go out and invest in the book." - Michael Northern






Gretchen E. Henderson, On Marvellous Things Heard, Green Lantern Press, 2011.

"Derived in form from Aristotle’s “Minor Work” of the same title, this variation of ON MARVELLOUS THINGS HEARD explores a range of literary appropriations of music, in terms of translation and metamorphosis. Part investigation, part inventory, and part invention (in the musical sense: a composition in simple counterpoint), this poetically-driven essay assays the narrating subject as she assays the subjects of literature, of music, and of silence."

"A beautiful and evocative interweaving of short texts about music and language.  The unexpected juxtapositions shed surprising light on this famously tangled relationship." - Joseph N. Straus

All those who have enjoyed Gretchen E. Henderson’s collaborative Galerie de Difformité will happily feel invited to assemble in their own way the marvelous bits collected in this chrestomathy of thinking about music and language." - Tom La Farge

“To prevent myself from becoming ‘earwashed,”’ Henderson writes, “I must again and again shift my listening.” Must listen to the act of listening; must, then, commit an act of the mind (volition, a choice) on the act of the mind of the body (the aural faculty)… To move through a mind thinking on this subject of silence, this subject of music, is to dance about architecture, to sing about economics—these structures of exchange, of raiment. We are not ourselves, or not only." - And G.C. Waldrep

“…smart and passionate…to read and re-read, a different way each time…” - Another Chicago Magazine

“I wish there were more like it.” - Small Press Reviews

"The pupil…having fallen sick, was dumb for ten days; but on the eleventh, having slowly come to her senses after her delirium, she declared that during that time she had lived most agreeably. (Aristotle)
Chicago-based Green Lantern is a non-profit press helmed by Caroline Picard and other artists, focused on bridging contemporary experience with historical form. The Press brings forth “emerging and forgotten texts” within a cultural climate where the humanities must often defend themselves. You may recall their notable release of last summer, Erica Adams’ utterly innovative The Mutation of Fortune. Blake Butler wrote in March, 2010:  “Green Lantern Press is simply making some of the most beautiful, singular limited run book objects of anybody in the pack. If you haven’t browsed their catalog recently, it’s overflowing: such a wide range of things to dig in, from new translation of Rimbaud, to art space phone books, to indexes and collection, so on.”
Gretchen E. Henderson’s On Marvellous Things Heard is no exception.
Incited by one extant fragment within Aristotle’s paradoxography text, Minor Work, Henderson labels her book an essay: a slim, tidy, hypnotic volume of 178 prose entries grappling with literature’s capability of achieving the realm of music (178 being, fittingly, the number of Aristotle’s identically titled anecdote). Here begins a sumptuous tapestry, invoking sage fragments of Theodor Adorno, Thomas Mann, Anne Carson, Toni Morrison, Bruce Holsinger, James Baldwin, Allen Ginsberg, John Hawkes, W.E.B. DuBois, and James Agee—for a start.
Henderson asks:
120.  •  Can we find better ways to listen? To music? To one another’s words? To the vibrations of our nerves and blood?
Ten entries later:
130.  •  In Silence, John Cage describes going into a soundproof chamber and hearing his circulatory and nervous systems. He came to realize true silence doesn’t exist.

And yet, On Marvellous Things Heard begins, solely, like this:
1.  •  Silence.
In her “Prelude” to the work, Henderson explains: “By trying to inhabit the essay’s interstitial spaces—literal, aural, and otherwise—I follow Umberto Eco’s concept of the ‘open work,’ as well as John Cage’s motivation for musical composition: not self-expression, but self-alteration.”
Such alteration means text as metamorphosis, a quest “moving beyond critical boundaries,” an elusive voice that “becomes permissive behind its theoretical veil, like the shape-shifting boundary between speech and song.” On Marvellous Things Heard steeps and stews in this threshold, this intermediary realm between binaries, this white space:
3.    •  With regard to poetry, Stéphane Mallarmé addressed white space in his preface to Un coup de dés, saying that verse demands white “as a surrounding silence.”
4.  •  Epigraphs work similarly with white space.
To the between of sound and silence, black mountains of text amidst bloated white swaths of air, Henderson invites her readers: “to contemplate and respond in whatever form (even in white space: refuting, concurring, doodling, dreaming) about our world’s natures and nuances, volitions and vulnerabilities: its marvels.”
125.  • What about these margins? Might writing in them be call-and-response? Or what else to call it?
The text quests to metamorphose, conjured in Federico Garcia Lorca’s duende:
134.  • …which “insists upon the insufficiency, the essential silence of mere technical eloquence, stretching the singer’s voice to the breaking point.  Surpassing the throat to start at the soles, duende (according to Lorca) “struggles from within” to yield “a radical change in forms.”The essay is thus supremely aware of its own form—178 prose fragments, white space—assaying the reader with its own awareness of itself, its inevitability:
26.  •  “And does not form have two faces? Is it not both ethical and unethical at once: ethical as the result and expression of discipline, yet unethical, even anti-ethical, insofar as, by its very nature, it is indifferent to all moralities, indeed sedulously strives to make morality bow to form’s proud and sovereign scepter?
Joachim Neugroschel said the above; and then, later, Henderson translates this from Christopher Maurer:
135.  •  Does not form have two faces? Is it not simultaneously moral and amoral—moral insofar as it is the ultimate expressions of discipline; amoral, even immoral, insofar as it automatically entails ethical indifference, aspiring to make all that is ethical bow down before its own proud, unchecked scepter?
The echoes: the call,
the response.
By definition, form is morally blind: its sole drive is to mean something. In its inevitability lies its indifference to assignation of value. Could one, thus, call the text silent?
81.  •  The spaces between translations and metamorphoses—of sound, of silence—may be more telling than what stories are told. Within these variations:
82.  •  How can we know the singer from the song?

In fragment 33, Henderson recalls William Butler Yeats: “How can we know the dancer from the dance?”
Henderson, trained as a classical vocalist and historian, engages in her literary works both music and visual arts; her first novel, Galerie de Difformité, structured as an art catalogue, won the 2011 Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writer’s Prize from &NOW Books.
68.  •  There she is.
114.  •  But where is she?

In awareness of its form, On Marvellous Things Heard possesses a superabundant consciousness: nearly every fragment includes a footnote, which means experiencing the book sensorially, flipping forth and back, from product to originator, from expression to creator—a song-song, lilting effect akin to melody. Space and non-space, sound and silence. In that interlude of assigning a maker to the quotation is the echo of the self dismantling the self, and progressing through the work.
In this progression, we are consumed with process over product:
124.  •  …William Gass’ The Tunnel operated for nearly 30 years as a “performance which has not yet taken place.”
and
154.  •  September 5, 2001 marked the beginning—in silence—of an organ composition by John Cage, performed in an 11th-century church in Halberstadt, Germany. The concert will last 639 years.
The experience of On Marvellous Things Heard is to be an interloper between silence, and one type of silence, and our silence, expressed in a form that demands acknowledgment even as it has no choice but to do so; and so creating cohesion within and between the spaces of text and paper, reader and author, listener and hearer, eye and paper, eye and sound of words in one’s head, dancer and dance, creator and created, form and content, even as it dissolves, like Orpheus, finding Eurydice and losing her again, following his inevitable
50.  •  …fate of dismemberment wherein his head continues to sing.
 We are already there." - August Evans


Gretchen E. Henderson, Wreckage: By Land & By Sea, dancing girl press, 2011.

"Based in cartographic history ranging from colonial maps of Africa to medieval portolan charts, Wreckage: By Land & By Sea ranges across continents and consciousness, constrained and coordinated by bodies: of land and water, of mind and matter."

“Gretchen E. Henderson’s Wreckage is entangled as it entangles, netlike, the lonely history of the “wild surmise” (Keats) of colonialism. In ripe language saturated with serpent-like, sea-evoking sibilants, Henderson maps the deterritorializing territory of the ocean, the void, the voyager “In the shallows (wreck- / age) among shoals / of sheol, shell of soul.” In spite or because of the always-palpable pressure of horror, these poems move with abounding grace, like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, into an ecstatic embrace of “happy living things! no tongue / Their beauty might declare: / A spring of love gushed from my heart, / And I blessed them unaware.” So too are we blessed by these gorgeous and mysterious poems.” - Joshua Corey

V.
Time passes without notice.
Above berth, you forget acanthus, rip-
tides, gulls. The portolano does not
feature this stretch, only dark
arcs suggest a flock. Birds, mere
blots. All coordinates may be
rumour. The inland is like that:
fabricated. There may be no rivers
or mountains. (Look above, no
gulls; nothing matches—the legend
included a dove.) If the voyage has no
end, maybe it was mistold from
the beginning—
Wind whispers & pivots
slowly, under cloudiness, filtering
curves, shavings, splinters in-
side stars. Compass roses (for eight
winds) cast arrows again. Culpa de—
rhumbs keep tracing moors, anchor-
ages, pointing toward alleged safe seas.

(Under the surface, serpents sleep.)



Gretchen E. Henderson, The House Enters the Street (novel, forthcoming from Starcherone Books in Fall 2012.

"Steeped in the visual arts and music, THE HOUSE ENTERS THE STREET is a novel of interwoven stories. Following constraints of music composition, seven narratives modulate, distinguished by voices and plots. As stories tangle and unravel, “She” wanders through the Metropolitan Museum of Art looking for “You” and “Me,” pondering the plasticity of timeworn artworks and of narratives. Wedded to a Futurist painting by Umberto Boccioni (entitled “The Street Enters the House”), THE HOUSE ENTERS THE STREET unfolds in parts, re-membering dismembered stories. Akin to an act of ekphrasis in prose, these fictions and a play confront (dis)ability and (dis)ease by evoking literature’s aural roots, to breathe life into some fragments of a broken modern world."

This beautiful novel is simultaneously a love letter to the arts and a complex interweaving of characters, stories, landscapes. Scandinavian immigrants in Iowa migrate towards war. A photographer in Arkansas returns to California to repair her family after a devastating fire. Stories unfold, modulating and resonating. This intricate, moving book reminds us of the art a novel can be.

"THE HOUSE ENTERS THE STREET is beautifully written, confident and complex. I was appreciative of its language and intelligence, mindfulness and scope. The novel is unusual…" -  Rikki Ducornet

"A startling and lovely configuration of stories, endlessly echoing and reverberating, haunted and haunting. Gretchen E. Henderson creates a sublime and mysterious music all her own." - Carole Maso

"Intricate and complex, but never confusing, this dazzling novel is as eloquent as it is original. As if content and form were singing in rounds, Gretchen E. Henderson’s vibrant characters—their voices and their stories—emerge with careful intent and true beauty to achieve what reads as almost miraculous." - Binnie Kirshenbaum

Gretchen E. Henderson's web page

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