Video of Lim and Marten reading at McNally Jackson last week

Courtesy of Derek White:

The good, the bad, and the slightly confusing....

The ever generous, flâneuring Derek White takes a walkabout NYC and does some ruminating on Fog & Car:

On the plane here I watched some movies, most not worth mentioning besides Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. I did see some program on Andy Warhol though, and they were talking about his movies, the ones where he would put a camera on people, unscripted, without guidance, and then leave the room. They'd leave the camera on them for hours, until something had to give. Somebody commentating on it was saying something about how Warhol dances this fine line between what’s exciting and boring. And how this is sexual or some such thing. I'm not sure why I'm telling you this, except to say that maybe Fog & Car skates this same fine line. Through rout reiteration, Lim pushes boring to the extreme that it becomes exciting. How does Lim do this? To quote his character, “the normal always let my mind go the farthest, always the immediate physical world was navigable without thinking, so that thinking would head elsewhere, deep into its own self-contained jungle.”

more at: http://www.5cense.com/zero_sum.htm

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A critical, sometimes complimentary review of WASTE by Vanessa Place in The American Book Review. Arguably it underestimates the use of class in the book--but judge for yourself:

http://americanbookreview.org/sampleReview.asp?Issue=10&id=20

It starts out with some friendly fire:

Eugene Marten is a writer's writer, a writer after whom many other writers would be happy to clean up, his books provoking the sort of breathless admiration usually reserved for the deceased... Marten writes precisely. He writes to the point. His sentences are crisp and clean as fresh cider. His paragraphs unfold with the grace of small paper swans. He writes of things in their thingness, abject in their sobbing objectivity. If his books were marsupials, they'd be opossums. If furniture, Ottomans. He eschews similes and metaphors like these, preferring the raw truths of things simply said.

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Also Thomas McGonigle writes something about both Waste and Fog & Car. For example:

I have tried to read each of the books.

I know that Marten has published an earlier book with Turtle Point Press.

I am interested in why I have not read more. The Marten book is in the tradition of Bataille’s The Story of the Eye.

I am probably not strong enough to read about a janitor and what he collects.

FOG & CAR by LIM is more appealing but I can’t get beyond the names: MR FOG and SARAH CAR.

The rest at his blog: http://abcofreading.blogspot.com/2009/03/new-and-old-lim-marten-and-fine.html