Harold Jaffe
Beyond the Techno-Cave - $16
Beyond the Techno-Cave: A Guerrilla Writer's
Guide to Post-Millennial Culture
For some 25 years, Harold Jaffe has been synonymous with confrontational innovative
fiction with a subversive edge. This new volume collects the author's recent
"creative nonfiction." But in Jaffe's hands, this term takes on a whole new
meaning, blurring insight and innovation, moving widely and effortlessly from
art and technology in America to global politics to travel in Asia to writing
in wartime to gift-giving as a revolutionary act. Many of Jaffe's texts read
like formally innovative narratives; others function like conceptual art,
remaining in the mind long after. Everywhere evident is Jaffe's broad erudition,
social commitment, and energized, elegant writing.
From "The Writer in Wartime," one of thirteen pieces collected
in Beyond the Techno-Cave:
"You live in Des Moines, Iowa, and are a published novelist with a modest
reputation based on your narratives about white middle-class domestic crises.
You also serve in a National Guard military police unit, and your company
is called up and sent to Iraq to function as MP's in Abu Ghraib Prison, west
of Baghdad. There, you observe and strongly disapprove of the unlawful abuse
and torture of the inmates, many of them innocent Iraqi teenagers snatched
from the streets. Do you continue to write narrative still lifes or do you
bracket your customary subject in order to bear witness, to broadcast as widely
as possible the unlawful, immoral treatment in Abu Ghraib?
"You are an 'Aryan' painter living in Berlin during the Reich. You have heard
and read about the extermination camps. You have witnessed Nazis violently
mistreat Jews and gypsies, homosexuals and the disabled. Appalled colleagues
and friends -- most of them Aryans like you -- have left the country. You
yourself are appalled at the Nazi practices. At the same time, you continue
to sell your pictures -- oil and watercolor renditions of rustic woodland
scenes -- and make a respectable living in Germany, so you choose not to leave
the country, at least physically. Mentally, you have separated yourself from
the ongoing atrocities. You have, in Hannah Arendt's words, embarked on an
inner emigration, and in keeping with this 'emigration' your art does not
in any way reflect the Nazi virulence."
Some Praise for Jaffe's previous work:
15 Serial Killers
"Harold Jaffe explodes the very social, political, and narrative structures
supporting capitalist culture's illusory edifices, further cementing his reputation
as one of our finest literary terrorists/freedom fighters."
Paradoxa
Othello Blues
"With multi-layered dialogue and descriptions as clipped and terse as stage
directions, Jaffe uses his science fictional setting to hold a satirist's
funhouse mirror to our own contemporary world, showing us the rich grown richer,
the poor poorer, and the powerful even more indifferent to the misery around
them. It is a world to which the blues is the all too appropriate response."
Rain Taxi Review of Books
Straight Razor
"Jaffe's best book to date. Which is saying a great deal. Incisive, vibrant,
brilliant, even prophetic." Washington Post
"A hip, bleak, postmodern masterpiece." San Francisco
Chronicle
Mourning Crazy Horse
"Harold Jaffe is to fiction what Merce Cunningham is to dance, what John Cage
is to verbal/musical instrumentation." Newsday
Harold Jaffe
is the author of nine fiction collections and three novels, including Terror-Dot-Gov
(2005), 15 Serial Killers (2002), Straight
Razor (1995), Beasts (1986), Dos
Indios (1983), and Mourning Crazy Horse
(1982). Jaffe's fiction has appeared in numerous journals and has been anthologized
in Pushcart Prize, Best
American Stories, Best of American Humor,
Storming the Reality Studio, American
Made, Avant Pop: Fiction for a Daydreaming Nation,
and After Yesterday's Crash. His novels and
stories have been translated into several languages, including German, Japanese,
Spanish, French, and Czech. He has been the recipient of two NEA's, a California
Arts Council grant, a Rockefeller fellowship, a NY CAPS grant, and two Fulbrights,
to India and to the Czech Republic. Jaffe is editor-in-chief of Fiction
International and Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at
San Diego State.
See also:
Jaffe/Anti-Jaffe
Harold Jaffe Wikipedia
entry
Fiction International