Six Personal Investigations of the Act of Reading:

Brian Oliu's So You Know It's Me

By Pablo D'stair

When I think of reading literature, I tend to think of "books"-the artifact, whatever the content-as the delivery method, books or some analogous thing, a magazine, an online journal, any kind of "container" be it concrete or ethereal-I think of some format specifically made to contain literature-as-I-generally-think-of it. But of course, I am not only aware of but enthusiastic about the notion of very "non-book" formats being the delivery system for literature-a simple piece of loose leaf paper, a restaurant napkin, a postcard, a toilet wall, "make believeadvertisements," the dirt that accumulates on car windows in long-term parking lots, the skin over someone's shoulder blade, anything in any number of places the written word can show up and often does, specifically tailored to such formats.

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Brian Oliu

Brian Oliu-from what I am made to understand-wrote the series of lyric essays (as they are referred to) that constitute the collection So You Know It's Me in the format of posts on Craigslist's "Missed Connections" public forum(a forum which is a kind of aimless literature even with no manipulation) a place where individuals write little descriptions of someone they saw or interacted with and descriptions of themselves, with the hopes of getting back in contact (to over simplify) with the person they are writing about, hoping this person will have remarked them enough that their description of themselves (often prefaced with the titular phrase of Oliu's collection) will be enough to make said connection.

A wonderful thing to do and something I often suspect is what eighty-five percent of the content of Craiglist's forum space and dozens of like sites are actually composed of-make believes, little sketches written off with no connection actually to anything.

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Now, one of the beauties of the specific forum Oliu utilized when composing his work, and a thing that Oliu's collection remarks on in it's jacket description, is the fact that anything posted on the forum will automatically "delete itself" after a certain period of time-in the case of Oliu's posting, after 45 days.

And it is this point (or two points made in reference to this) that my reading rather fixated through a filter of-Why was this mentioned by the author/publisher/at all? and Did it and/or my knowledge of it become something I should address as equally as the prose?

That is, more pointedly, did I think the fact that I was holding a bookan actual, intrinsic betrayal ofthe content I was reading?

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Which I don't mean aggressively or doom-and-gloom, certainly not-but the pointed questions of "What am I reading" and "Does how I read it have pertinence, definitive pertinence on whether I am actually reading 'it?'" are the heart and soul of this series and, truthfully, I think about them allthe time when I read.

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To give a bit of context: the actual text, the lyric essays themselves, in Oliu's collection struck me as representations of an almost idealized "tension in isolation" a kind of romanticizing-the-ordinary to explore a perhaps only ethereal void-these were not simple fictionalized "I saw you...I was wearing" sort of things but poetic mediations on apartness, on unrequited desire for connection (not necessarily concrete, interpersonal connection) were dirges of sorts, and at the core of them I felt a beating heart, an almost love for perpetual isolation.

The essays seemed to be flirtatiously stroking over and over the philosophical intricacies built of considerations that even if one is connected, so to speak, to someone, has a full life, nothing erases the ultimate, staggering disconnection from "everything" or "everything else" or "everyone else" and in the face of such a staggering ratio of connection-versus-disconnection even what one might feel kin to becomes dizzyingly inferior, questionable, longed for even while obtained.

And these pieces of literature were created (or "perhaps were", at least) with the direct intention that they, themselves, be finite, be a gamble, be mortal-these would disappear, the same way that a poem on a toilet door would likely be painted over before a kindred soul would encounter it, the way a postcard on which is written a literary fiction thrown into a bin at a thrift shop will likely not be recognized as fiction if read over, will not be seen as literary creation, will likely never find a mind to interpret it how it was intended.

What to make of the immortal presence of something that should be dead and gone, should be, in a sense, a "never was"?

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To come at it first using the two sub-examples just mentioned, I thought about a book of photographs of notes or poems on toilet walls, a book collecting images of various postcards pulled from thrift bins, the book raising the question "are these real or imagined?" In these cases, it was never the "stated intention" that the material be effaced, as with Oliu's material, but didn't the contact with the walls, the "postcards in the form of a book" intrinsically alter the experience? I might "pretend I was reading a wall" or "imagine what it would be like to have found X postcard and wondered Is it real?" but I was not actually doing so if I was flipping pages and looking at reproduction given "general book presentation".

And with a book of Oliu's work, with its connected statement emphasizing the method of the individual works' creation as "temporary," I might imagine what it would have been like to have encountered the prose in a random way, but the very fact that I was encountering it in a decidedly "un-random way" seemed...out of sync.

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In reading the pieces themselves, I admit this set of considerations crept in, cast a light of "quaintness" on the pronouncements, the admissions, the revelations, and the questions of each essay. I have, after all, written a piece and actively destroyed it, I have written pieces and lost them, I have felt lonely, alone, far away, nowhere when looking across the room at someone and have made glances, suggestions, left notes unreturned-the beauty in all of these realities being the unavoidable definitiveness. Nothing, Nowhere, Never-these are all definitive. Mortal means the danger of ending without being known, and art, literature which (in more than a discussion of subject, a "book written as a book" so to speak) takes the form, so pointedly of something able to die hit me funny when it "made itself a ghost, undead" by way of the printed and bound volume, a kind of self-inflicted, forceful specter.

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What had I read?

I could not decide.

I still have not decided.

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In one sense, I have the prose and my reaction (through whatever filter) and my reaction strikes me, hook or crook, as "literary reaction" so it is not a torment, not that I feel swindled or some such childishness.

The eerie questionability of things that is on me from my read was (and is) always on me (personally) in that I wonder "If I look at the text of an advertisement but 'pretend it' to be a literary statement, is it?"

No harm no foul, one way or the other, but where does "book" come into it when work, written word, originates in other form?

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Oliu's intentions are largely irrelevant to me, of course, as are the intentions of all writers (as are my own intentions, I would hope, to someone else when someone else reads my material) so I think it was the confrontation with labeled intentions, at all, that wormed into my read.

Which is to say, without the "back story" of the pieces, would their "read" be altered and in what way?

Of course, this ties in to what I recently mentioned about "deciding" something was made with artistic intention-if I go to Craigslist, read a random entry, pretend it is "literature," is this "the same" as reading literature, the same as reading an earnest advertisement, even?

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Literature in or on objects other than books has a living place in my heart, the repurposing-of-nonliterary-objects is a statement I admire and, as an artist and in thinking of other artists, the boldness, the abandon into anonymity and nearly certain "missed connection" is central to such beauty. Much as Dogme 95 filmmaking confronts the idea of eliminating the artists' name, the actors' name, the "literature" of phony Lost Dog posters or "message board" essays is a world apart from "book."

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But I read a book, and only in doing so did I encounter, read Oliu-and somehow I still don't think I did read, did encounter and, perversely, I kind of find myself annoyed at the book for robbing the "original art" by transmuting it into "archive," even if I was almost certain never to have encountered the original.

And, more perversely, this makes me annoyed at the author, makes the originator, in my eyes, into a sort of betrayer-a harmless one, but nonetheless.

Books-especially ones made commercially available-have built into them the idea of looking for connection and the idea of embracing notoriety, posterity,knowability, certainty-and so I cannot help but feel a less than genuine encounter with what could have been actually encountered in Oliu-as-non-book-uncertainty, nonentity, perpetual unknowing-and "less genuine" always first hits me as the inverse of literature, the anti-art, the mock up.

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Slightly moving to the side of this, I do not say that the things Oliu writes, discusses, do not strike me, that even if there is a conscious need for me to distance them from this other, more gut reaction they are devoid-nothing like that.

Much the same way that even if someone who I know doesn't love me were to say 'I love you' I might earnestly consider the idea of Love, the idea of So You Know It's Me transcends the content of its volume. It's, I suppose, very much the same as a piece being augmented by its title, that extra ripple, that secondary level of communication that can come from naming, only with Oliu's book it is in a slightly more modern (but certainly not entirely modern) way, in that the surrounding material, the presentation, acts as a kind of instruction, a nudge at the outer world the work has been pulled interior from.

Pablo D'Stair is a writer of novels, shorts stories, and essays. Founder of Brown Paper Publishing (which is closing its doors in 2012) and co-founder of KUBOA (an independent press launching July 2011) he also conducts the book-length dialogue series Predicate.

His four existential noir novellas (KasparTraulhaine, approximate; i poisoned you; twelve ELEVEN thirteen; man standing behind) will be re-issued through KUBOA as individual novella and in the collection they say the owl was a baker's daughter: four existential noirs.