Century of Clouds

by Bruce Boone, Rob Halpern (Contributor)

This edition restores to print a central text of the New Narrative movement, founded in San Francisco by Boone and Robert Gluck in response to the stagnation of contemporary experimental poetry of the late 1970s. Wishing to bring the vigor and energy of the gay rights and feminist movements, Bruce Boone's writing of the late 1970s is as fresh, funny, witty, and self-reflexive as it was thirty years ago. First published in 1980, Century of Clouds, based on Boone's experiences at the summer meeting of Marxism and Theory Group in St. Cloud, Minnesota, takes up issues of sexuality, political and theoretical identity, religion, and friendship in the characteristically rich and varied writing of the New Narrative movement.

Genres: Poetry, Fiction, Queer, 20th Century

120 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2009

Reviews

[Rodney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some of the recent excitement around Boone’s work I think involves his special fusion of the “third-person” registers of theory, experiment, and political sophistication with the kind of emotionality and personal affections that come most alive in second-person address. His route to the join in Century of Clouds is to tell a friend about the goings-on at the then-recent meeting of the Marxist Literary Group in St. Cloud, MN some thirty summers back. The straightforward formal frame turns out to allow for all kinds of complex refractions and meta-moments, where the actors in the story replicate the power hierarchies they’re so earnestly out to take down.

That a gaggle of literary Marxists should themselves become subjects of literature is already kind of delicious, like those scenes in movies where the camera swivels around to include the studio and crew in the shot. The result is that anything the characters say in the story becomes a potential commentary on the story, really on the nature of story itself, which is also the topic of the conference that drives the plot. The set-up allows for the most ordinary details—a volleyball game, a passed note, a Midwestern sunset, or a leisurely discussion of ceremony—to move simultaneously in multiple directions, from critique to metaphor to pathetic fallacy to objective correlative to fierce reportage, without strong-arming the reader to settle on either one.

The fact that it took thirty years for Century of Clouds to come back into print adds an extra dimension to Boone’s rich narrative layering. For me, it gives his story the quality of a grand summing up, so that sunsets, the evening crossing of bridges, the falling arc of a volleyball, or the climactic rising up of our narrator to call out the academic Marxists on their homophobia all feel like tropes for ending, or interrogations of the idea of endings, a narrative convention that in Boone’s hands can feel casually descriptive, craftily contrived, and mythically profound all at the same time.

[oliver · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wasn’t really enjoying this until approximately 60% of the way through when Boone’s technique suddenly made complete sense to me and I realised that this book is genius.

[Holly Raymond · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another 2011 read that totally readjusted how I thought about ethics and poetics functioning together. This book is really unspeakably lovely and smart, and it's a fucking miracle that it's back in print for you to buy and read.

[Olivia]

proto new narrative, one of the most refreshing interesting voices i've read in a while, political theory meets gossip means personal, the conference! i loved it. theorizing itself while it writes

"I would make images of people in my stories so they would have the pleasure of seeing themselves. With every person named, life would be tangled in the text. I wanted people to feel they had a stake in the writing and credit it and affirm it and give it a community and social life it could if many people saw their representations there, not just one person....Your text could not begin until people were able to start loving you and hating you on account of it."

bruce boone i think i started loving you on account of it

[Dawn · Rating 4 out of 5]

A quick and campy set of vignettes about Boone’s time in the Marxist Literary Group courses in the summers of ‘77 and ‘78. Trying to find a way to emotionally relate to some of these intellectual and practical approaches to Marxism by way of personal antidote and affective experience. He describes his ‘interventions’ to be more inclusive of gay and women’s rights at the conference, and how retelling these stories in context might help others. The sheer optimism of the times is what strikes me most. Boone too I think finds it jarring in retrospect. In the afterwords he states: “Century, which is light, deserves its dark companion, and some day it may find it.”

[Zoe]

this was GREAT. going into the new narrativeverse is like a warm hug of awesomeness. i glided through my reading of this book not fully delving into all bruce's profundities but i think that's maybe a good way to read this. it felt like catching up with a friend after a long time and maybe they start going on a monologue but you're noticing a bird out the window and are sort of just getting the contours of what they're saying, dipping in and out, gossip & theory

[Acacia · Rating 2 out of 5]

no

[Roz Ito · Rating 5 out of 5]

The other evening I waited an hour and a half for a bus home from the library. It never came, casualty of a regional bus driver strike. But I didn't mind! Because I had Bruce Boone's Century of Clouds to keep me company, and I used the time to finish reading this ecstatic account of friendship, politics, and community in a 1980s summer camp for Marxist intellectuals. What a heady, giddy, digressive, and really quite poignant read. Boone uses every observation of nuanced social interaction as an opportunity to explore pithy relections on human nature, gossip, history, and power. For example, I love one character's camp theory about the continuity of iconography between aristocratic portraits and portraits of high Communist Party officials. Actually, I feel a lot of underlying kinship with Boone the narrator/character. His cerebralism, his sentimentality, his idealist possibly at times naive desire to change the world for the better, his status as a late bloomer in the romance & sex department. And his simultaneous attraction to traditional systems of knowledge (scholarship, theology) and radical politics. One of the climactic scenes takes place around a volleyball game, where Boone as gay man joins with the women attendees of the summer camp (all of them marginalized by the dominant straight male attendees) to stage a pivotal intervention during the game: they refuse to be pushed around & bullied any longer by the more aggressive male volleyball players. It's an eloquent micro-systemic critique of power relations: how can this band of Marxists hope to change the power structure of the world through revolution if they can't even reform their internal power structures as a community?

The book concludes on a note of communal warmth and optimism, Boone flying through the clouds into a hopeful future. And this makes me sad, b/c as Rob Halpern notes in the preface, the hopes of many radical gay liberation activists like Boone in the 1970s were dashed by the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s. Those hopes were never fulfilled, or at least shelved for a long time while the community was forced to rally around a public health crisis. And this reminds me of when I first went to the Castro District in SF for a movie, this was when I was in high school in the early 90s, I went with friends to watch a Clark Gable film at the big theatre, and the whole neighborhood, it was like a devastated ghost town, a town where everybody had died or was dying or knew someone who was dead or dying. Really like walking into the aftermath of a war. Totally different from the consumer shopping district that is the Castro today. In the afterward to Clouds, Boone suggests that he may someday write a darker companion volume, one that will no doubt deal with this subject. And it makes me wonder what's happened on the communal level to the radical hopefulness that Boone describes in Clouds. Has it been resurrected? transformed? reborn in another form? Are we still waiting for its return?

[Jerrod · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very strange and baffling read, as the story unspools into a series of loops around the ideas of change and stasis, in both their personal and political contexts. The central tension that Boone plays with is how radical politics can be reconciled with the realities of how we actually live our lives, and he makes many digressions while trying to pin down why it is that they are so hard to keep in the mind simultaneously and to make real to each other. A great exploration of "nonfiction" narrative and its possibility

[Tyler · Rating 4 out of 5]

Has several of those brilliant moments of familiarity and clarity, with lots of references to stuff I've never heard of. Eminently re-readable -- will probably get a great deal more out of it the second time around. I really liked Rob Halpern's preface, and the afterword was inspiring in itself.

[Patty Gone · Rating 4 out of 5]

read this because dana mentions him as a huge influence. love bruce's voice - a lovable narrator for sure.

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

i really really enjoyed this book