CARY STOUGH: Hello, Kelly! I have been really looking forward to this interview. Your books—Math Class, No Measure, and the just-released Concentric Macroscope—form a bit of a series for me, not just by the innovations of style and form you take up throughout these projects, but by their shared concerns. For readers who may be new to your work, could you speak to the conversation you see happening between your distinct book projects? And then, could you give a little insight into the new book, Concentric Macroscope, published by the brand-new Crop Circle Press?
KELLY KRUMRIE: Hi! Thanks so much for taking the time to read and to think through these projects with me. I do think they’re a kind of trio, but the books are pretty different, especially in their forms. Math Class, which is about a group of girls at a Catholic high school after one has been in a train crash, is written in vignettes that are interspersed with original drawings. The drawings look like doodles one might make during math class. No Measure is about a desert remediation project where two researchers attempt to observe things as delicate and vast as grass blades and sand dunes. The researchers form a romantic relationship that’s complicated by the act of scientific observation and documentation. It’s made of ninety-two paragraph-sized prose fragments.
Like No Measure, Concentric Macroscope is a lot about being outside, and it takes up similar themes, but it feels much bigger to me—maybe we could call it macroscopic. Here, a linguist has been assigned by an “Agency” to create a message to send to an unknown recipient via radio transmission, but everything else about the project has been kept secret. We follow her as she tries to figure out what to do and as she interacts with her colleagues at an isolated, hilltop research station. Everything starts getting a little blurry, and memories of her past jobs and relationships start boiling up as she digs deeper into thinking about communication technologies and the ways people have communicated with her. The book asks questions like: what’s the relationship between the method of communication and what someone says? How do we know what someone else really means? For example, there are rules around what the researchers can tell one another, and they’re not permitted to speak out loud near the research station, so there’s a lot of gesturing, and passing notes, and sneaking away to talk. This secrecy leads to paranoia. Because the book is a lot about language, and about sound and vibration and concentric circles, it’s written one sentence at a time, with blank spaces between each sentence. This gives some airiness around what’s said: Each utterance becomes more independent and less certain.
Something that my books have in common is that they engage with mathematical or scientific ideas as they’re troubled by human experiences like adolescence, desire, friendship, sex, and just being in a body, having thoughts and feelings. I’m interested in how the strictness of something like math fails to give me information. Like, the clearer it claims to be, the less I can actually see. The narrator of No Measure attempts to understand their romantic desire for their coworker by using the language they use for their research—which involves extreme precision, technical terms, tools, data, and graphs. But data and graphs can’t tell them if they love that person, or if that person loves them back. Extreme precision doesn’t work like that.
I’m so happy to be working with Crop Circle Press on Concentric Macroscope. Naomi Falk and Colette Bernheim have taken such good care of this book. Their vision for it feels so true. And their overall vision for the press is excitingly singular, so stay tuned. (Plus, it’s woman-run! There are fewer woman-run small presses than you think.) I’m super grateful to be aligned with presses like Crop Circle and Calamari Archive—rad small presses that are fearless and expansive. And they’re all just good people.
CS: Each of your books takes up, in slightly different ways, the concept of measure—identities, differences, and the very human attempt to both develop and utilize a standard of order. Your productive preoccupation with the issue of standardization, as well as all the theoretical complexities that unfold from it, is approachably didactic. I’m thinking of a passage early on in Concentric Macroscope:
There must be a pattern: something replicable, replicable
scaffolding where parts can be plugged in.
A hierarchy, a structure, a tree form with larger units made
from smaller ones, ways these units link up, where they can
go in relation to one another, fit inside one another, replace
one another.
A language is a set of relations. (14)
There’s an undeniable schematic beauty to these lines. The narrator is obviously cataloging—either for herself or for the imagined reader—a set of linguistic-scientific directives, standards of truth that will be tested throughout the book. And yet a large part of the narrative or sequential drama in your work hinges on the futility of that desire for measured order, especially when confronted by certain forms of experience, both embodied and transcendent. What source, or sources, does this preoccupation with measurement come from?
KK: Measurement is something I’m kind of obsessed with. It’s key to my book No Measure and perhaps a key for how to read Math Class and Concentric Macroscope, though certainly not the only one. I’ve written several essays about measurement, and short stories, too. I wrote a kind of crazy story called “Voice of the First Metre,” which is about the history of the metric system as told from the point of view of the first meter stick—like, in the voice of the unit. My essay “Any Viewing Demands Imagination” is about Mel Bochner’s measurement drawings in conversation with Renee Gladman’s book Plans for Sentences and how measurement works. There’s a bit about grids in visual art, which comes up in Concentric Macroscope, too, as the narrator alludes to an interest in abstract painting. (Before coming to the research station, she dated a gallerist who becomes a significant figure later in the book.)
Why can’t I stop thinking about measurement? What do I like about it? It’s endless and a little mystical and entirely made up. A ruler is an invention. It’s an arbitrary rule. Affect theorist Brian Massumi somewhere uses the word “rulered”—how erotic! How fantastic. To be lined up, to be measured. Measured against what? Your body against mine. The novel manuscript I’m working on now is about the descendants of the founders of an isolated, utopian community who have never experienced the outside world. They are bound by rules and rituals as well as a literal boundary. I’ve been reading about histories of rules, about utopianism, about communes, and about monasteries. I’m not much of a rule follower, but I find rules as interesting as measurement, for similar reasons. The phrase I always come back to is from the art critic James Elkins. When he writes about Agnes Martin, he says that her paintings elicit “the feeling of measurement.”[1] I love a penciled grid, a rulered aura, a metric affect.
CS: You’re invoking a lot of my favorite names! There’s almost a genre connection between artists like Stein, Gladman, and Martin—a formalism that admits a sort of oceanic feeling behind all the deliberate graphings. But there’s an even more conventional genre I consider your works to be in conversation with: science fiction. Jeff VanderMeer comes easily to mind when reading No Measure and Concentric Macroscope, especially. And I sense just as much David Cronenberg, or even Ken Russell’s Altered States, in the way your work deals with technology and its relationship to the human body, or to embodiment, maybe, in a more existential vein. How would you describe your relationship to genre, and maybe science fiction in particular?
KK: This is an interesting question to me, mostly because I don’t know how to answer it—it’s hard for me to get outside of the work to something as expansive as genre in the way a critic might. But I’ll try. Like VanderMeer’s Southern Reach books, Concentric Macroscope is very much about nature and about being outside. It’s also about technology’s ability to access or modify the natural environment. The narrator spends a lot of time walking through the forest, and in the distance, a dam is being constructed. She can hear and see evidence of this, though it’s not directly related to her work—peripheral environmental destruction. What is directly related to her work is sound and radio transmissions and verbal communication, so while she’s walking, she’s very attuned to her auditory environment. Early in the book, the narrator is kind of dizzied by all of this new sensory information:
The line of pylons is so long I can almost see the slope of the hill, or the slope of the
planet—this is an illusion.
The clanking of steel, the flare from a torch, slag and clang, shouts, whir and hum of a
pylon firing up, a call out, air horn, wind down, Jenny at the door, chalk falling into the
tray, my feet shuffling, creak of the screen door, breeze and shifts in air pres¬sure when
Jenny reaches up to pull a bit of leaf from my hair.
My hair tickles my scalp in all this air.
The electricity tickles my body. (23)
My relationship to science fiction as a genre is also pretty peripheral, I have to admit. I haven’t seen the work of the filmmakers you mention, nor do I read much science fiction proper. I kind of dabble, though, when working on specific projects, to pick up certain frequencies. I’m a very research-heavy writer, and I read a lot of nonfiction about science, philosophy, linguistics, and art, and this information can be generative for my fiction. I also watch documentaries and YouTube videos, like of people climbing the Duga radar towers near Chernobyl, which is where the character the narrator refers to as “Duga” tells her he worked. One of my favorite things to do is to borrow technical language and put it in a place where it doesn’t belong. Radio transmissions give off a genre vibe, for sure, but I think the heart of this novel is heartbreak.
CS: Forgive my genre projection! I definitely think your work has more to do about science in fiction than any adherence to specific conventions. Heartbreak is so immediately present in Concentric Macroscope. The way the book depicts romance feels so authentic to contemporary life. Perhaps there’s a nostalgia for radio communication as a relatively simple form: a navigation of the necessary static between sender and receiver. After more of a century of pop-cultural examples utilizing “technical language…where it doesn’t belong,” it’s nearly impossible for a nostalgia-pilled millennial like me, at least, to consider radio transmissions and not think of Joy Division’s “Transmission” or Karen Carpenter’s inimitable warble whispering “Your guitar, it sounds so sweet and clear / But you’re not really here, it’s just the radio.” As these songs teach us, mediation by technology is never entirely metaphorical. Anytime a phone call drops, or GPS blacks out, real feelings follow. How do you see heartbreak navigating (or being navigated) through the specific technological space of the book?
KK: I think that’s the biggest question of the book!
CS: Concentric Macroscope: the title seems to mimic both the style and content of the narrative. Certain of the narrator’s statements and observations recur, giving the entire book a sort of odd materiality, like—to extend the metaphor—concentric rings emanating in a pool. I think here particularly of the phrase “I send the message–out,” which is itself a repetition of the directive the narrator receives from The Agency. How do you see repetition working in the book?
KK: Repetition resonates in Concentric Macroscope in several ways. This book is indebted to sound studies and to the work I’ve done with folks there the last few years, especially Patrick Farmer and his online lecture series On Vibration, which ended up forming a little cohort of brilliant multimedia artists. Many of them are published in the journal Patrick and I edit, a row of trees. In thinking about how sound works alongside how sound is represented, one finds oneself in the realm of repetition: rings, traces, hatch marks.
The narrator is instructed to send her message out, which is like setting a wave in motion. The editors at Crop Circle sent me Keiji Uematsu’s 1976 photographs Wave Motion I, which are a diptych where one image shows a finger touching a pool of water and the emanating rings that come from this gesture, and the other shows the finger holding a stick upright in the same pool with similar rings. This image speaks so perfectly to the book. Because on the one hand, the narrator is to send a message: to say something, to send out the concentric, vibrational waves of the radio transmission. On the other hand, her message must be sent through these technical means that are mediated further by the assistant she’s been assigned––the computer scientist. There are many components to the ripples: voice and machine, self, and other. What traces are in them, then? And are they all the same?
Alongside communication, which consists of calls and responses, the book wonders how we come to know the things we know. In scientific observation, we know something when it happens again, when we can recreate it. This is repetition. But we also know this in love. How do you know if someone’s interested in you? When you hear from them again. This is repetition. Repetition can get freaky. Too much repetition and you get obsession. Misunderstood repetition is déjà vu.
CS: The sentence, as a unit of information, also seems to be an important part of this book’s content and form as it progresses sentence by delirious sentence. As a linguist, the narrator cares for sentences as carriers of information. In the way only a scientist can understand, though, there’s a risk involved in studying communication and meaning so closely that one loses one’s coordinates, so to speak. At one point the narrator wonders, “Who gives something to me or anyone, and what part of any system is mine?” (119). This seems key to how this whole book operates.
KK: Yes, that gets into the whole universal grammar question, doesn’t it? I minored in linguistics as an undergraduate, so early research for this book involved digging up a few of my old textbooks. While the narrator was wrestling with these questions, so was I: the present me trying to remember terms and trying to find what would resonate most with the narrator, and the past me in my notes and marginalia. At the time I was also teaching several sections of Introduction to Literary Theory, which gets at some basic questions around how language works. I often tell students in that course that part of our work is feeling more comfortable losing our coordinates.
To go back to thinking about measurement and rules, a sentence follows rules. It’s something measured, something measurable. As readers, when we encounter a sentence that’s different—that doesn’t look like something we’ve seen before or that might break a rule—we might lose our coordinates. We might not be able to line it up to our internal syntactic ruler. Some readers like this, some readers don’t. Some might call it “experimental.” Personally, when I’m writing, while I know I have my own thoughts and voice, and while I know I can arrange words however I want on a page, by using language I’m always a little bit trapped within its system, or at least in conversation with it. In My Emily Dickinson, Susan Howe writes, “Who polices questions of grammar, parts of speech, connection, and connotation? Whose order is shut inside the structure of a sentence? What inner articulation releases the coils and complications of Saying’s assertion?”[2] I love this last question. The narrator of Concentric Macroscope is wondering these things too, even for the language she’s creating—and these thoughts dovetail with other questions about artistic creation and about labor, and about desire and meaning what we say.
CS: That leads me to a moment near the middle of the book, where, amidst what seems to be an intimate moment between the narrator and Duga, the narrator says,
I drew a sentence along his leg with my finger, up along the hamstring then
around.
A sentence is something that is followed.
We took turns.
I’d say a word, he’d say a word.
I draw my hand up a steel beam.
Listen.
What I’m best at is waiting.
The secret is to hold the right thing. (84–85)
The actual text of this sentence remains unknown to the reader. We never even get the satisfaction of knowing whether the sentence has ended. It’s a wonderful way to express relational being. The formation of this sentence is collaborative, dependent upon duration, forged in anticipation. For the characters, then, the decoding of the sentence for meaning, perhaps, becomes an erotics of the decoding process itself. How does this relate to your own conception of a sentence as a writer?
KK: I love the idea of an “erotics of decoding.” It makes me think of early, flirtatious correspondences: close reading a text message, interpreting song lyrics. Looking for big meaning behind little things. In the case of Concentric Macroscope, the narrator, as a linguist assigned to construct a new language, is literally in the business of making a code. At the same time, her assignment involves an experimental workstation and much secrecy. She repeatedly tells herself she’s not interested in decoding the secrets behind the experiment, but the insistence is a little suspicious. When she becomes involved with Duga, as with any early relationship, she falls prey to this kind of interpersonal decoding, gets tangled up in a kind of epistemological longing.
One sentence you point to in your question is lifted from Gertrude Stein. In How to Write, she writes, “A sentence is something that is or is not followed.”[3] She liked to write about sentences very much. I believe here she’s thinking about the sentence as a standalone unit: it is contained within itself. But it can also be followed by another one, and when we get a string of these, we get a paragraph, and she famously goes on to say that sentences are not emotional, but paragraphs are. I don’t know if I agree with her or not, but I, when I started this book, I began by writing individual sentences and playing around with how I could sustain this mode: how long or short could I make the sentences, in what order, and with what relationships between them. I did wonder about the emotion in this ordering. Sentences are inherently linear, though. We read words in a line. When we speak, words come out one at a time in the order of utterance, and there’s no going back to respeak or rehear them (unless we repeat them (but then they’re something different)). Sentences in paragraphs also have a linear relationship, but if I pluck them free from the paragraph while still operating somewhat within the norms of a prose narrative, there’s a kind of reverberation that makes them feel more dynamic, more so than simply liberating them from hypotaxis. I like thinking about the dynamism of sentences despite the ways they’re restricted by their own syntax, or because they’re restricted by their own syntax.
Stein finds syntax dynamic, of course. She writes, “Why is grammar not dull. / Because it is a diagram.”[4] When she’s explaining how much she liked diagramming sentences as a child in school, she says, “[it] has been to me ever since the one thing that has been completely exciting and completely completing. I like the feeling the everlasting feeling of sentences as they diagram themselves.”[5] This is also my experience with sentences and why I like to write. I loved diagramming sentences in school, thinking about how the parts go together, drawing lines and brackets. While now I spend a lot of time blathering on about measurement and rocks, walking and running, sometimes numbers or lines, my first love was grammar.
Lyn Hejinian says that lines of poetry and sentences are like paths.[6] A sentence is a path. One walks along it. When the syntax is disrupted, as in a poem, the path branches or curls. As the narrator of Concentric Macroscope becomes increasingly paranoid, she thinks she’s being followed, or she is actually being followed, as she walks along paths in the forest. (This is very much a walking book.) But Stein’s sentence led me to this sense of paranoia: what it feels like to be followed, what a sentence might feel like on its own as opposed to when another comes after it (comes after it!).
CS: What’s your relationship to terms like “experimental,” “innovative,” or “avant-garde?” One thing I’ve always cherished about your writing is the evident care you take to invite your reader into the complexity of meaning-making amidst repetitions, interruptions, and eruptions of a kind of poetry. Personally, when I think about my own writing, I don’t like the label “difficulty,” partly because the work of writing is difficult enough and partly because I consider both writing and reading as opportunities for inching—maybe along with Hejinian, along a path—toward new forms of expression. Concentric Macroscope certainly casts a spell, brings me in and out of attention in a way only literary language can.
KK: Like many writers and artists, I’m interested in exploring ways to capture perceptual, sensory, and emotional experiences. I don’t think rendering the phenomenological experience of walking through a desert is possible in traditional narrative form, or even in complete sentences. I don’t think one’s experience of being on top of a hill surrounded by radio towers and radio waves while mysterious engineers hand you secret slips of paper would be linear. My life right now isn’t linear. It’s not just a question of mimesis but also of what’s interesting and what’s beautiful. Traditional novels can be beautiful, but often they’re not so interesting to me because language is what’s interesting: how the work is made, how words can move around like paint, how syntactic assemblages can build an environment or an atmosphere. The more you can see the stuff that makes the narrative, on the kind of material-to-representation spectrum, the more likely it is to be called “experimental,” when really we’re all just playing with how sentences work together to tell stories. There are lots of ways for sentences to tell stories. Terms like “experimental” or “avant-garde” might be useful to situate readers or students, but I’m definitely not sitting down and thinking, “I’m going to write something experimental today.” As a reader, I find pleasure in being a little dazzled and a little puzzled by how texts are made. As a writer, I find pleasure in dazzling and puzzling myself. When I write, I’m simply thinking about how language can manifest the thing I’m imagining and how language can change the possibilities of what I can imagine.
CS: The dialectical swing you describe, from manifestation to imagination, feels so practical. It reminds me of Lisa Robertson, especially her prose projects, such as Occasional Work and Seven Walks From the Office of Soft Architecture and The Baudelaire Fractal. The way the book as project morphs and meanders as it goes along. Robertson and many of the authors mentioned above—Howe, Stein, Hejinian—blur the line between poetry and prose. And by that I don’t mean that they, or you, approach prose-poem territory. There’s something much more expansive going on, something akin, I think, to your aforestated wonder (dazzlement and puzzlement) at how texts are made. Each of these authors sets out a plan, a constraint, or at least a focused attention on one or another way a text is made; as well, the plan and the result are undeniably gendered, an outgrowth of their own (albeit very different) feminisms, which puts a different sort of pressure on how a text is made, received, and even edited. Is there a feminist aspect to either the composition or form of Concentric Macroscope? Maybe to continue from the last answer: In the context of Concentric Macroscope, this paranoia of being followed, of a mad search for the correct message, seems to dovetail with the complicated positions women occupy—and fight to occupy—in the world and in literature.
KK: I don’t personally feel particularly paranoid, mad, or followed as a writer, and I’m definitely not searching for a correct message. There is no correct message. I actually feel very little pressure as a writer. Maybe this is because I’m not famous. I write because I like it. I do think the narrator of Concentric Macroscope feels paranoid, mad, and followed, but I don’t think she’s searching for correctness; she’s waiting for what feels right. Things aren’t feeling right, so she keeps waiting, and then it all gets a little messed up. Sure, we could probably call this a feminist book, but as with “experimental” writing or with science fiction, I certainly didn’t set that as a goal. If I had tried to muscle some kind of objective or message into it, it probably wouldn’t have turned out very good, or turned out the way it did, anyway. That’s not how I typically go about writing.
Math Class was informed by some feminist thinking for sure, because it’s about adolescent girls in a strictly patriarchal space (Catholic school) and operating within a historically patriarchal topic (mathematics). The book is also informed by the lives of saints and mystics, religious ecstasy, visions, and what might happen when that presses against not just the church but something as clean and rule-based as math. Take someone like Hildegard von Bingen. She was a nun with visions, and she did all kinds of things with them, one being her lingua ignota, which was a list of invented nouns. She’s credited as being one of the first “conlangers” (people who make constructed languages—the narrator of Concentric Macroscope is one), but her language was a glossary, not a language per se. Why would she do this? It’s unknown, but it might be for the same reason Stein writes the way she does. Maybe Hildegard didn’t have the right words for what she was experiencing. Maybe Stein didn’t have the right grammar. Or rather, she wanted to do something else with the grammar she was given. Now we’re getting into Cixous and écriture feminine, yeah? “What part of any system is mine?”
Both Hejinian and Robertson work within and around a kind of anti-systemic thinking in their poetry and essays. They bring forward the stuff the forms are made of, as you say, and change them in the very best ways. While I read and greatly admire those authors, I think the grounding in my work, or maybe the strongest influence in it, has got to come from fiction, from writers like Pamela Lu, Marie Redonnet, Fleur Jaeggy, Anna Kavan, Nathalie Sarraute, Renee Gladman, Clarice Lispector. Have you read Jaeggy’s The Water Statues? Fucking incredible. There is nothing like it. These are writers who are doing some pretty amazing stuff with brevity and concision, inside of which there’s a kind of poetry. But it’s a poetry that’s very different from, well, poetry, because it’s fiction. They’re interested in narrative form and the expectations that come with narrative—with how it’s made. What are some other ways to make it? I’m more attracted to writing fiction than I am to essays or poetry because I think there’s something a little more anchoring in it—in narrative, in setting, in character, in cause and effect—that’s fun to contort while still being held in that space. Another kind of constraint. I also really do live a life of imagining, of having a little diorama in my brain, a little movie playing. There’s another dimension when you’re working with invention. It involves dreaming up the million ways a thing can look, how a person might move or speak, and then finding the best or most interesting words to describe those things, arranging sentences for that experience. It’s important to make the narrative the way you see it, or the way you want to. That might involve setting yourself up to receive a certain kind of transmission, to tune in. It might also come from your history of reading, and I read a lot of writing by women doing cool things with words.
[1] James Elkins, Six Stories from the End of Representation (Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 2008), 68. My emphasis.
[2] Susan Howe, My Emily Dickinson (New York: New Directions, 2007), 11–12.
[3] Gertrude Stein, “Sentences,” in How to Write (New York: Dover, 1975), 200.
[4] Gertrude Stein, “Arthur a Grammar,” How to Write (New York: Dover, 1975), 75.
[5] Gertrude Stein, “Poetry and Grammar,” in Gertrude Stein: Writings 1932-1946, ed. Catharine R. Stimpson and Harriet Chessman (New York: Library of America, 1998), 314.
[6] Lyn Hejinian, “The Quest for Knowledge in the Western Poem,” in The Language of Inquiry (Berkeley: University of California Press), 226.