Over at decomP, Spencer Dew discusses the formal fireworks as well as the more “traditional” gratifications of Doug Nufer’s By Kelman Out Of Pessoa. Nufer’s technique of writing, Dew claims, is made up of “rules” rather than “constraints”—”this isn’t Oulipo-style creativity-within-restriction so much as a free-ranging (and unpredictable—or at least it’s presented, explicitly, as so) frolic of an idea, ideas, aspects, personalities.” Dew goes on:
Of the heteronyms we’re told, “These figments of your imagination were always playing tricks on you, engaging you in dialogues you might have only thought they said as they plied their schemes you had in mind for them,” and elsewhere “These aspects of hysteria, these characters or heteronyms or whatever: they aren’t people you fuck with; they’re more like friends, imaginary friends.” Indeed, friends, with all the quirks and range of intimacies, their addiction to Spoonerisms (“Systematic minds missed thematic signs, whereas air ways haze weighs”), their stumbling love subplot (“This thing between them, this live workout of a handicapping theory, this reverie of a life”), their dreams and desires and that stale racetrack smell, which is never from winning.
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