10: 01

by Lance Olsen

Fiction. You're sitting in a darkened theater, waiting for the movie to begin when American culture explodes all around in I-Max, Sensurround, Technicolor--this is the experience of reading Lance Olsen's brilliant 10:01, a novel in frames that unreels the random thoughts of a random movie audience: a screening of our own moment that Olsen lights with the white heat of a a projector beam. Be sure to check out Lance Olsen's other titles at SPD, including SEWING SHUT MY EYES.

Genres: Fiction, Novels, Literature

196 pages, Paperback

First published March 31, 2005

About the author

Lance Olsen was born in 1956 and received his B.A. from the University of Wisconsin (1978, honors), his M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers Workshop (1980), and his M.A. (1982) and Ph.D. (1985) from the University of Virginia.

He is author of eleven novels, one hypertext, four critical studies, four short-story collections, a poetry chapbook, and a textbook about fiction writing, as well as editor of two collections of essays about innovative contemporary fiction. His short stories, essays, poems, and reviews have appeared in hundreds of journals, magazines, and anthologies, including Conjunctions, Black Warrior Review, Fiction International, Iowa Review, Hotel Amerika, Village Voice, Time Out New York, BOMB, Gulf Coast, McSweeney's, and Best American Non-Required Reading.

Olsen is an N.E.A. fellowship and Pushcart prize recipient, and former governor-appointed Idaho Writer-in-Residence. His novel Tonguing the Zeitgeist was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award. His work has been translated into Italian, Polish, Turkish, Finnish, and Portuguese. He has taught at the University of Idaho, the University of Kentucky, the University of Iowa, the University of Virginia, on summer- and semester-abroad programs in Oxford and London, on a Fulbright in Finland, at various writing conferences, and elsewhere.

Olsen currently teaches experimental narrative theory and practice at the University of Utah. He serves as Chair of the Board of Directors at Fiction Collective Two; founded in 1974, FC2 is one of America's best-known ongoing literary experiments and progressive art communities.

He is Fiction Editor at Western Humanities Review. With his wife, assemblage-artist and filmmaker Andi Olsen, he divides his time between Salt Lake City and the mountains of central Idaho.

Reviews

[Paul Bryant · Rating 1 out of 5]

CRASH BURN FZZ HEAD ROLLING ABOUT IN GUTTER, AND NOT IN A GOOD WAY

In 1918 James Joyce wrote the Wandering Rocks section of Ulysses wherein a bunch of random people wander about Dublin and our author hops from one mind to another as their paths criss and cross. I love it!

60 years later in Life : A User’s Guide by Georges Perec, we have a block of flats in Paris and we have Georges describing in fanatic detail the décor and the bunch of random people who inhabit it and their back stories. This is a giant book, and I’m sure it has A POINT, but it defeated me the first time I tried to figure it.

20 years after that Geoff Ryman wrote 253, an experimental novel with an online version. In that novel we have a London Underground train with a bunch of random people in it. Now when you begin reading you know there’s going to be a POINT, and after the 7/7 bomb attacks in London you get an idea of what it will be pretty soon, but here is Geoff ponderously filling in the back story of all these people one after the other becomes less than enthralling after 50 pages or so.

Seven years after that, in 10.01 we have the same thing going on – a movie theatre in a mall in Bloomington, Minnesota, a bunch of random people, and also another organising principle, it all happens in the 10.01 minutes of the title. It also has an online version. So, back stories and streams of consciousness and wackiness and gallons and balefuls and boxes and shoppingbagfuls of incisive commentary and satire of American blah blah blah.

I was actually expecting something other than recycled Donald Barthelme, Jean Luc Godard films, White Noise by Don (“the Don”) DeLillo, and absurdist comedies like I Heart Huckabees.

Here’s some satirical humour from page 46 :

When this flick is over, Fred will meet Pablo Tati, a flight attendant twelve years his junior, in America’s Original Sports bar. They will share several syrupy drinks, then take separate shuttles to the Country Inn where Fred will rent a room on the 4th floor, don a Snagglepuss outfit, and boink Pablo senseless.

Yes, all the moviegoers here displayed are freaks and weirdos in their private lives. Moira Lovelace, frinstance, likes to make short porn movies of herself & then make copies & mail them to people picked randomly from the phone book.

I came across a message of hope embedded in the text on page 67. It says on that page:

This will all be over soon

The formless surreal smorgasbord of brainscapes Olsen presents to us appear to demonstrate the witty aphorism you see nailed up above some less salubrious retail enterprises

You Don’t Have to be Mad to Work Here but It Helps

The wackiness never ends, what reeling roiling rocking good fun we have – still going strong on p144:

He learned that there were more interesting things than having sex. Since then, he has composed 4,132 lyrics, all concerning animals, mostly falcons and fish, although frogs have also put in sporadic appearances, and how nature is not nice, except sometimes, when it is.

If that is your idea of a good time then welcome to 187 pages stuffed full of more of the same. As for me, I have already thought of 4,132 reasons why experimental novelists should be denied all sources of income from public bodies and if that doesn't kill them or make them reform, they should all be shrunk to teeny weeny size so I can put them all in a specially made ring which I will wear on my left hand.


NOTES

Splendid review of 253 by Manny here

http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...

And a dangerously beautiful review of 10.01 by Joshua here – please note dear reader that J's review is a gazillion times better than the book.

http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...

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THE THING ABOUT EXPERIMENTAL NOVELS

I know what my problem is. I’m attracted to the wrong sort of novel. You know the one, the fiercely intellectual glamorous novel full of arrogance and flash, lounging insouciantly surrounded by fawning acolytes and yet still somehow alone. When our eyes lock across a crowded Waterstones, that’s it for me. I know I’ll be wasting so many evenings, there’ll be no explanations for any of its puzzling behaviour, I’ll feel I’ve walked into something I really don’t understand, I’ll end up so confused, we’ll part in a few months on the worst terms. And yet it keeps happening. What is the problem?

Zadie Smith wrote a fascinating essay (with some dull bits, I confess) in the New York Review of Books called Two Paths for the Novel. One path has been realism, we all know what that is or tries to be, and the other is, in the words of Eddie Cochran, something else. Experimental, metafictional, avant garde, postmodern, all of those. You know those words, they’ve winked and giggled and made kissy lip movements at you before. (“Much more fun over here, sugar – come on, shed your expectations and…join us in the orgiastic jaccuzzi of fictional possibility ”) . The realists have over the years received vast criticism for many crimes such as unexamined assumptions, uncritical use of omnisicience in the authorial voice, naïve beliefs in – as Zadie says - “the capacity of language itself to describe the world with accuracy” and “the essential fullness and continuity of the self”.

She continues:

Yet despite these theoretical assaults, the American metafiction that stood in opposition to Realism has been relegated to a safe corner of literary history, to be studied in postmodernity modules, and dismissed, by our most famous public critics, as a fascinating failure, intellectual brinkmanship that lacked heart. Barth, Barthelme, Pynchon, Gaddis, DeLillo, David Foster Wallace—all misguided ideologists … In this version of our literary history, the last man standing is the Balzac-Flaubert model, on the evidence of its extraordinary persistence. But the critiques persist, too. Is it really the closest model we have to our condition? Or simply the bedtime story that comforts us most?

And I liked this point :

The received wisdom of literary history is that Finnegans Wake did not fundamentally disturb Realism’s course as Duchamp’s urinal disturbed Realism in the visual arts

Today I clicked on the BUY icon for this novel and Kraken by China Mieville. Both are , as I understand it, experimental. When I read some goodreads reviews I thought – hey, that’s my kind of stuff. But then I wondered : is it really?

EXPERIMENTAL NOVELS I HAVE READ AND LIKED

Ulysses
At Swim two Birds
The Sound and the Fury
Beautiful Losers
Lanark
House of Leaves
Tristram Shandy

EXPERIMENTAL NOVELS I HAVE READ AND NOT LIKED

253 (Ryman)
The Castle of Crossed Destinies
Blood and Guts in High School
The Atrocity exhibition

EXPERIMENTAL NOVELS I HAVE NOT BEEN ABLE TO FINISH

The Dictionary of the Khazars
Let the Dog Drive
The Sea Came In at Midnight
Infinite Jest
Pale Fire
City of Glass


EXPERIMENTAL NOVELS STILL SITTING ON MY SHELF HAVING BEEN PICKED UP & PUT DOWN PROBABLY MORE THAN ONCE

Life : A User’s manual
Omensetter’s Luck


So you see, the signs aren't that good. Maybe experimental stuff fails bravely more often than it succeeds. Or maybe it's me and my low church life-is-not-an-ironic-parody-of-life background.

[Joshua Nomen-Mutatio · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Fiction is empathy technology," was the sound the target and the arrow made when conjoined at the bulls-eye by another incisive explanatory summation in a long and winding queue of incisive explanatory summations of the multidisciplinary-hat-donning writer and public intellectual, Steven Pinker, at a fairly recent panel discussion/debate held on the subject of morality as it relates to the analytic and creative reach and potencies of the methods and accumulated knowledge of the sciences. This phrase leapt out of the placid murmur of my laptop while I was making some vain attempt to fall asleep a few months ago. I immediately—without a single jump cut of hesitation—preserved it with unquestioning keystrokes. I felt it was a beautifully compact coordinate and that it was magnetically in-want of my symbiotic yearning and yielding, secretly in-command, unknown but felt as a palpable ache beneath the stratum of the clown-sad artifice, in a language older than sensation. An ache with a heartbeat. And a mouth sealed in resignation by the pitiless omnidirectionality of it all—of all the canted arrows R. Feynman slings into the mouths of babes. The increasingly less muffled thud of the heart, and I, stricken with both the need for and terror of hidden motives that may be finning about in the heart of the heart of the heart of anything, an addition to the anxious fluctuations of the asymmetrical piecemeal assemblage meant to give a sense of self-possession, cutely euphemized as a conscious individual human being—ah, behold the insignia of terror and triumph. Attempts to navigate the great outdoors and the accursed oblong shell housing the illusory continuity commonly euphemized as ____________. O, the tragicomic slapdash cartography of being a feeling, thinking thing! Woe!

"Fiction is empathy technology" amasses as a singularity, hyper-densely atremble with illuminative energies—from which emerge many profoundly morally consequential and intellectually contributive ideas about the nature of and the highest virtues of art generally, and literary fiction more specifically, which possibly—arguably—holds a particularly unique and prized position among the arts and sciences in its intractable entetherment to cultivating empathy and compassion, free of the cynical reflex.


(GIS: fiction is empathy technology)

When applied to my readerly experience with the thoroughly satiating and inspiring novel 10:01, this connective tissue between art and the strained attempts to see the world through someone else's eyes—to be broken down and rebuilt by compassion—in the shifting climes of context, this quaking epicenter of illumination in potentia then detonates within—erumpent and joyful—the seduction of the prismatic bloom and the realignments of everything fleeing everything, fanning out with a bone-rattling force and its echo-chamber-shattering reverberations, louder than the deepest roaring at the heart of the sun, straining beyond the event horizons of sense perception and the abstracta of theory vainly imagined to be purified of experience, and into the unutterably lonely, itinerate, radial swells of the sea of immeasurability.

Pinker’s quote summarizes the deep and probable evolutionary and motivational origins of fictional narratives and their continual ability to teach us not only the importance of empathy but how to carry it out to actual practice, and to heightened levels of activation and attentional commitment that demand more than the knee-greets-mallet reflexes of Pavlovian instinct, and/or the mere dutiful obedience to social conventions and the inherently sullied good intentions and/or the manipulative pathologies of the iron fists of unprincipled coercion.

Empathy is a teachable skill, and one that is pliable and subject to growth and decay, and as such can be honed, intentionally sculpted, improved upon in myriad ways, and then conversely it can be neglected and atrophied and debased or altogether obliterated by the terrifying ravages of sociopathy, a condition which has a still largely ungrasped nature animating it and therefore eludes the possible preventative measures that could be used to sidestep the uncountable scores of human cruelty and suffering, laid out by the fractured millisecond upon its bloodied ledger. Luckily, the rapid advancements in the modern sciences of the mind are making undeniable progress through meticulous multi-disciplinary study, sorting and sifting through the dauntingly elaborate and nebulous constellations of cause and effect in order to zero in on some truly salient factors that give rise to those of us who cannot feel the minds of others. So perhaps there are seedlings of hope to be found scattered throughout the unresponsive stretches of infertile earth, and an array of both willfully concerted efforts and the beautifully aligned, dumb luck accidents of the bilateral anophthalmia of chaos that's intrinsically woven into the order of things.


(GIS: fiction is empathy technology - interesting background information regarding the photo)

This first encounter with Lance Olsen’s writing elicited an unqualified demolition of ye old proverbial floodgates and the unfettering of surges that overwhelmed my shores with reinvigorated thoughts and feelings about the abilities of art to be so much more than mere novelty, or intoxicating entertainment, or the pathetic inward collapse of the full embrace of the bedpost notches of fashionable consumption—and this sense of excavation and re-engagement and even optimistic inspiration all frankly felt and feels life changing to me. Olsen's empathy technology is extremely advanced, and expertly fashioned and maintained in this truly unique and cardiac-resuscitating collection of human experiences.
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I urge everyone who will read this review to read this book. I was going to write a much more forthright, much less insanely purpled-prose style and unrevealing review (if you could see my wild notes you'd have your proof of this), but realized that I would have just ended up summarizing the entire thing in a much too revealing way. So just take my word/s for it.

And thank you thank you thank you to Jasmine for alerting me to this book and author. This is one of those testimonials that reminds me that Goodreads is something I'll forever be in debt to for its sheer usefulness in giving me access to the existence of books I probably would not have access to otherwise.
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Addendum: I will try to (continue to) more straightforwardly articulate things about the book in the comments section.

[Ian "Marvin" Graye · Rating 2 out of 5]

What’s Left of Handke in the Darkness?

One of my favourite films is Wim Wenders’ "Wings of Desire", in which two angels sit in the heaven above Berlin ("Der Himmel über Berlin"), listening to the poetic visions and thoughts of people below them.

Much of the dialogue was written by the German novelist and playwright, Peter Handke, whose first short story, "The Flood", was translated by Lance Olsen. Handke is also name-checked in "10:01".

Imagine instead of the angels the assistant manager of an American Mall, who slips into a darkened movie theatre just to watch the patrons witness ten minutes of trailers for disaster films.

The patrons have temporarily escaped from the retail pandemonium of the mall as well as the personal madness of their own lives.

As the lights go down, their minds transition from the vivid contemplation of their own circumstances to the vicarious experience of the apocalyptic world of modern Hollywood American film.

Between mall and movie, we have a microcosm of contemporary American society.

Slo-Mo, High Concept Moments

Like the angels, the manager can see what is going on in the minds of the patrons in these moments before the feature starts.

Imagine also that one of the patrons "wants to capture a hundred such moments, gray and grainy, slo-mo and soundless, in a montage called ‘Where the Smiling Ends’...in the belief that living is nothing if not a series of dissolves, superimpositions, odd juxtapositions, and unexpected cuts."

The patron never makes his seven-minute-and-forty-four-second short film (this foreshadowing occurs frequently in the novel), but Lance Olsen gets to write a 187 page slo-mo soundless novel that assembles more or less "a hundred such moments" to argue that "life is probably the thing that arrives in ten-minute portions disturbed by commercials", but by the same token "my life, basically, [is] a movie I can’t direct".

Where the Smiling Ends

So life, like the novel itself, is supposed to be chaotic and unstructured, not ordered or structured as an accessible three-act play, let alone a screenplay.

Well, then, so what? It's this question that I wanted Olsen to answer, but which he fails to address.

In a way, the failure of the novel derives precisely from the fact that it is so high concept. It starts with a concept and never moves far from it. It is a methodical enunciation, but unfortunately not an insightful exploration, of the sub-themes implicit in the concept.

Is it enough to ask questions, but not seek or posit answers?

Life, ultimately, for me, is more than this.

A Plethora of American Arcana

If Lance Olsen had been true to the inspiration of Peter Handke, the prose would have been more lyrical and inspiring and perhaps, therefore, more significant or meaningful.

Instead, it is relatively pedestrian and unimaginative, perhaps reflecting the thought processes of the American mall- and movie-bound patrons (although Peter Handke discovered greater beauty in the minds of Germans).

At times, Olsen escapes the pedestrian, only to adopt a post-modern academic language that obfuscates modernity rather than illuminating it:

"Trudi Chan is in possession of a plethora of related arcana."

"She is drifting in the soothing amniotic awareness that everyone around her is part of a much larger project than he or she suspects."

"They accomplish little in life except the ceaseless increase of proteinaceous contamination."

"The film they have come to see deals with the fluidity of subject positions."

"Lewis employed the terms ‘foveated vision’...and ‘saccadic movement’...in the public sphere."

Blow Up

Lance Olsen positions these characters and issues on the page, so that he can explode them with ostensibly pyrotechnical verbal force.

I would rather have seen him blow them up, in the sense of magnify and resolve them.

I don't crave a happy ending or a traditional plot structure. But I would have appreciated some sense of resolution or analysis, within the novel rather than just in the acts of criticism that accompany it (e.g., the statements of intent in the blurbs that supposedly explain what happened in the 'burbs).

In Which the Audience is Framed by the Author

Olsen views film as "architecture in motion". Likewise, the novel hopes that life can be framed in the language of film.

Instead, the author's design is far too obvious, while its execution is lacking. The building doesn't live up to the plans. It doesn't dance to the music of time. Instead, it slouches in its cinema seat. This is a motion picture with little genuine, recognisable emotion we can identify with as participants.

As a result, it is not life, but we, the audience, its readers, who have been framed by the pretensions of this novel, which is in essence overthought, overwrought, and underwritten.

[Katrin Kirilova · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5

[Jasmine · Rating 3 out of 5]

http://www.lanceolsen.com/1001.html

I read this as a book book. it's easier that way.

This is a book about being lost in one's own mind. It's a book about the end of something, or perhaps the beginning. In reality it's a book about sadness and depression and how really we're all just kind of fucked up.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qiBpRCciN...

I mean maybe that's overstating the book I can't be sure, but what I got out of it is basically we're all screwed. and I don't even like malls.

http://www.epinions.com/review/trvl-Dest...

[Selena · Rating 5 out of 5]

he took ten minutes and made it into a downright wonderful book. i was in love with the characters. they're all based on living or historical figures. i felt like i knew them. i felt like his characters allowed us to look at yourselves. they were extreme, sure, but we have aspects of ourselves that are extreme as well.

i'm looking forward to re-reading this book because i feel like the more i read it, the more i get out of it.

[Chris Bailey · Rating 4 out of 5]

this is a book about the ten minutes and one second before a movie starts in the theater. Good commentary on post 9/11 America's false alarmism.

[Ching-In · Rating 2 out of 5]

Loved the concept, but wish I cared more about the characters. Some of them felt a little over-the-top to me -- more archetype than a real person.

[Danielle C. · Rating 4 out of 5]

A strange and interesting tale. Each very small chapter goes into the minds of various people waiting for a movie to start in the Mall of America. Each chapter and person are wildly different, the tone and style of writing cleverly shifting between each person. There are two stories going on here: each chapter a little vignette: self-contained and self-interested, each person an island upon themselves. The second story is broader: the inactions and interactions between them in the 10 minutes before the show starts - when these islands cross the broad sea and suddenly and briefly collide with one another. A tone is overall one of isolation and self-interest. Each person unique and different but not able to recognize the same uniqueness in the people around them, and so they sail on oblivious of each other. A bit disjointed but the strong tone of each mini-chapter bumps this up to 4 stars. Not 5 since this book is almost made for a single sitting: there is a large cast of characters and it sometimes matters who is colliding with whom. There are clever little allusions in there as well that a careless reader might miss. Also, I am not sure exactly how this ends.

[Amy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tried and failed to read the original hypertext version. Print worked better for me. Amusing profiles of people in a movie theater stylistically reminiscent of Kurt Vonnegut. It's hard to imagine what type of movie might attract these disparate characters, but apparently it's a disaster flick. Alternate endings are possible.

[D.J. Desmond · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting ideas, but not compelling storytelling

[Idlerwheel · Rating 4 out of 5]

3,5. gets convoluted near the end

[Beth · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well, the premise was good, but it really didn't deliver.

What is going through everyone's mind when we are all sitting in a theater waiting for a movie to start? The brief glimpses into the minds of the audience members were interesting and often disturbing, but it was ultimately too disjointed to be enjoyable for me.

It did make me think, though, about how we never know what others around us are thinking. That's a little scary.

[Monica · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book has an interesting concept (random thoughts of movie goers in a movie theater waiting for the movie to start) but ultimately I can't say I enjoyed it. Not enough of the characters were engaging or well written.

[Emily Ware · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really loved this book.

[A · Rating 4 out of 5]

"For him the dominant metaphor for good film derives from the idea of The Persistence of Vision, where the human brain retains images the eye receives for a fraction of a second longer than they eye actually records them. If it didn't, we would all go crazy with the jump-cut awareness of blinking. What we see in blinking's place is an unending optical illusion: a coherent, continuous version of reality....Life flies at us in bright splinters. We turn them into significance."