One Hour Of Television
By Kristina Born | Review by J.A. Tyler
How delicious it is when things come together. Think strawberries and chocolate. Think peanut butter and chocolate. Think peanut butter and jelly. These things that come together and bring new flavor, that mix unexpectedly, that create in their meshing.
Shane Jones wrote Light Boxes. It is lively and surreal and simply phrased but complex in its mood and its action and its way of dreaming a story.
Blake Butler wrote Scorch Atlas. It is a chaos, a white noise, it is a spark that starts a flame that so quickly gets out of control that we are holding ashes before we can scream fire, or help, or o my god.
Put them together, these two, their styles, their tastes, their aesthetics.
Let them influence and flavor one another.
Ta-da:
And then Presto:
Kristina Born’s One Hour Of Television.
Here:
They say you can’t get the bends from swimming in a puddle of cat piss, but I know this to not be true. I have been on the living room floor with my head in it. I have, with my head in it, been weeping and in excruciating pain. I have had marbles crawling through my skin, I have had hallucinations, I have had my tendons seized by a sudden clarity in which they leap off the bone and drown.
Here:
A person is one of the few substances that expands as it solidifies. And he is not the only one. An example is that a fetus is quite liquid and a child of five noticeably less. Or that when a man is no longer a boy we allow him to run our country. He stops crying. Or that a boy, becoming a man, is seized by sudden confusing pains.
Here:
We will not hide our naked ambition. Our ambition is natural and we are not ashamed. We were born this way, with ambition; what could be more good or right? One day, we imagine, you will see the beauty in your own ambition. You and your ambition will walk with us and our ambition, down the street, in the sun.
Here:
Only trace amounts of you will ever be produced. You may think you’re fucking everything in sight but in concrete reality you are just a ghost. In fact, it is downright impossible to leave behind the volume of semen you want when your wife is determined to wash her face and wash the sheets. Clearly, though, something needs to be done.
Born’s One Hour Of Television is this, the great coming together, two tremendous writers going editorial, unearthing a new vibrancy, their own phenomenal eyes working in tandem and bringing a third to life, this new book, this fantastic writer.
But Born too is not simply a mixture, we cannot relegate her to this role; she interjects, she mingles, she brings other aspects to an already fused and stirring storm front. She brings the surreal and the dreamlike and the chaotic and the decaying, yes, but she also adds this clever undercurrent, the wit and fervor of a politician slowly losing grip. Born attaches sleek to slick in a novella that is pushy and pulsing and wonderful in its digestion of a reader, vignette by vignette, seeping in and closing the door behind itself, locking us in the dark with nothing but words.
Year Of The Liquidator is a press that will demand and satisfy. And we should all be reading this their first title, One Hour Of Television, because Kristina Born is an angry mob contained in a charmingly droll shell, raging language inside of flash and fiction.
So think in threes instead. Think perfect triangles. Think flying-by tricycles. Think menage et tois.
Read Kristina Born’s One Hour Of Television. Support Year Of The Liquidator.
This is when lit explodes.
J.A. Tyler reviews books and things for Rumble Magazine. He is also founding editor of mud luscious / ml press. He is a male human.