Elias Canetti, Fence Magazine,

Inside all day, half unwell half retreating. November, yes, and three weeks after the hurricane, the sequence of events churned about, as if the room you live in had dropped down with crashes and groans into someone else's bedlam and you're staring at your stuff as magma, breaking off and almost glowing, from their floorboards, then going back to an Elias Canetti essay called Dialogue with the Cruel Partner.

The sentence is always something different from the man writing it. It stands before him as something alien, a sudden solid wall which cannot be leaped over.

Then, as the day wanes, add logs to the fire and move on to Fence Magazine where sentences, lines, half-lines and spaces arise and puncture, stop short and relaunch in ways Elias Canetti could not conceive, as he could hardly conceive a writer who was a woman, unless many centuries earlier, like Sei Shonagon. Elias Canetti was Bulgarian Sephardic German English, but none of these got so far as to rupture his language.

The Fence contributors are ruptured throughout, they are perilous in this world. At the back of the magazine they tell us what they're reading. Many writers I haven't heard of, which is peaceful. There's a spread of publishing behind this writing, an irruption, a flood plain, an inland sea. Some contributors are very specific: there are books for the morning, for the evening, books carried around and books dipped into. It is a condition devoutly to be wished.

Fence Magazine

Up at the pond on a fine day I think I can't get any quieter than this and then I know there's a ways to go. This is a dipping pond, and I read in the same way. Fence magazine is just the thing. Other people's bumpy jolty. I know myself there, stippled and onward like the sound of aspens in a light easterly wind, crossed by pigeon flaps, blackbirds going to ground and small brown birds whose intimate flight between bushes and ponds renders them modestly nameless.

Read this journal. It is not the news, but it is the news as reported through the lens of a collection of contemporary artists who approach the world like boundless governmental wiretaps: investigating all of humanity.

I'm not sure how come I receive Fence; somewhere along the line I moved towards it and, after several issues, I have grown into it. Reading it I have some sense how people might read me. And that's a rare aperçu. Here are people moving around in just as much language as they can muster, if not less. As well as what they've written we know what they're reading. This is a more complete sense of a person than you can get after several days spent together. In some cases, a lifetime.