Sewing Shut My Eyes (Black Ice Books.) - Softcover

Lance Olsen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1573660833 ISBN 13: 9781573660839

Publisher: Fiction Collective 2, 2000

Synopsis

Sewing Shut My Eyes is a tour-de-force avant-pop anti-spectacle—nine darkly satiric out-takes of America tubing. Visions of mid-air synchronicities, robotic cockroaches, cyborg poets and one monstrous HDTV, all rendered in a hypo-manic style of electrified clauses and full-throttle patter. Here's Mona Sausalito, self-proclaimed "fricking gorgeous" bad-little-girl for Escort a la Mode and, on the side, Neogoth lyricist in the band of her boyfriend Mosh ("His real name is Marvin Goldstein"). Mona wants to be a poet. "I write about human sacrifices, cannibalism, vampires, and stuff. Mosh loves my work. He says we're all going to be famous some day. Only right now we're not, which bites, cuz I've been writing for like almost ten months. These things take time, I guess."

Olsen hallucinates a turned-on, channel-surfing nation where pain has become home theater and given enough channels, watching would beat sex. A nameless agent of the ultimate phantom bureaucracy holds his Yeltsin-70 at the ready and recalls O.J. on trial, supermodels and styrofoam landscapes, America screening fast and addictive. In the title story, Kerwin Penumbro wakes on his birthday to the ultimate tv, the renowned Mitsubishi Stealth, and at a point thirty-three thousand feet above the triangulation of Iron Lightning, Faith, and Thunder Butte, SD, Itty Snibb, supremely confident dwarf and prosperous entrepreneur, prepares to meet God.

These are fictions for minds lit with cathode-ray tubes, hands pixilated with static, for bodies that have become switching stations for the Society of the Spectacle.

The only thing left to do is start sewing shut our eyes.

About this title

About the Author:

Lance Olsen is the author of eighteen books of and about innovative fiction. His short stories, essays, poems, and reviews have appeared in a wide variety of journals and anthologies, including Fiction International, Iowa Review, Village Voice, Time Out, BOMB, Gulf Coast, and Best American Non-Required Reading. His novel Tonguing the Zeitgeist was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award. A 2006 NEA Fellowship recipient, he lives with his wife, assemblage-artist Andi Olsen, somatically in the mountains of central Idaho and digitally at www.lanceolsen.com 

Review:

"Edgy, angular, these intricate narrative-pictorials fizz in that most anxiety-saturated space for high art, where the word and image meet easily and breezily on the bubbling rim of genre ... Olsen and Olsen are to the current stream of American alternative art what Olsen and Johnson were to the vaudeville circuit of the thirties and forties: Hell's still a-popping in these techno-parables, filled with surprising insights and articulations." —Samuel R. Delany

"An exhilarating, high octane performance ... consistently inventive—at once frenzied and furious and tender." —Carole Maso

About this edition

• Publisher: Fiction Collective 2
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 1573660833
• ISBN 13: 9781573660839
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 143