“ Traversed the grass... ” begins Lance Phillips' Imposture Notebook and aptly so. This book enacts traversal (and trans versality) in so many ways, it's difficult to keep count. Add another entry to the heroic, folded tradition of post-autobiography scrolling from Hejinian-Whitman to Howe-Dickinson and back. At once comprising intensely personal concretions, sweeping, almost hierophantic abstractions, and meditations on the places where such ends of the language spectrum must meet, Phillips' Notebook is a welcome record of many names writ in aether.”
—Aaron McCollough
Not only is Imposture Notebook a work of doubling and division confounded by tragic movement of missed chance and lost meetings, it is a work of great moral courage wherein Phillips applies Wittgenstein's "... begin with the mistake and transform it into what is true."
Interleaved here are lines from letters to a long-absent father and notes from Lance Phillips' readings and reflections on self, knowledge, desire that "bursts everything," and visceral memory located deep in the spine, a structure that lets us move and walk.
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Lance Phillips seeks the longhouse of inter-familial living and rejects the skyscraper of self made with the annihilated "other." Phillips' life-writing pieces together cuttings to form new, but porous, wholes from the philosophical tradition that currently argues with the adequacy of its own centuries' old method of division into two's. Does he make a man from many, or is Frankenstein deflated, and here, his son's Halloween costume?
Because the work explores the bodily platform for retrieval, it compels us to enter questions on the very nature of commemoration asking whether its economy can halt at mere representation, yet another self-enclosed set of references that rehearse and perform as a tautology of pain. Or, is there, like a Rothko painting, an essential stripping down to what human perception is -- the thing and its background -- that removes the shimmer of presence, leaves a remainder in space. Loss.
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—Deborah Meadows
Lance Phillips grew up in many places, among them, Stuttgart, Las Vegas, Del Rio, and New Castle. He holds degrees from the University of North Carolina and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, though doesn’t really like school (i.e. jumping through hoops). His first book, Corpus Socius (Ahsahta Press), appeared in May 2002 and his second, Cur aliquid vidi (Ahsahta Press) is due out December 2004. Texts of his have been published in Aufgabe, Fence, Interim, The Gig, Slope, Colorado Review, Gutcult, Muse Apprentice Guild and other journals. He lives in Charlotte, NC with his wife, son (pictured, though it’s a couple of years old) and daughter. He edits the interview blog, Here Comes Everybody and lately has been writing some fiction.
http://lancephillips.blogspot.com [web log]
Writers on writing at http://herecomeseverybody.blogspot.com
Corpus Socius (Ahsahta Press) ISBN 0-916272-71-0 http://ahsahtapress.boisestate.edu
