napowrimo #26

JUSTIN TAYLOR ON MIKE YOUNG: "In the Family Double Dare of the heart, Mike Young's comic enjambment demands no less than that we confront our father and sisters (off-camera, before taping starts) and work out our issues so that the whole family can rely on each other and function as a team. Only in this way, Young's comic enjambment suggests, do we stand a chance at completing the Physical Challenges and making it to the final Obstacle Course, where, of course, after two rounds of trial we are immediately to be tried again. As Kierkegaard has it in _Fear and Trembling_: "The true knight of faith is a witness, never a teacher..." To put this in terms of Mike Young's comic enjambment, we must think not just *of witness* but of *what is witnessed.* The closest analog comes to us from W.G. Sebald in the "All'estero" chapter of _Vertigo_. I am, obviously, thinking of the episode where the narrator is suddenly overtaken by a fear of assassination and flees Verona on the night train to Innsbruck. Delayed at a stop along the route, the narrator notes that "[t]he rain turned to snow. And a heavy silence lay upon the place, broken only by the bellowing of some nameless animals waiting in a siding to be transported onwards." This describes not only the interior logic and executive process of Mike Young's comic enjambment, but also, in a roundabout way (Kierkegaard again: "Faith *is* this paradox" [emphasis mine]) it describes the way in which first-time reader's of Mike Young's comic enjambment both receive and internalize the text as an extension of the poetic device, and vice versa, maybe."

MIKE YOUNG ON JUSTIN TAYLOR: "Since his recruit days in the Winnipeg Jets fantasy camp, Justin Taylor has studiously strove to undermine the market through a deft 4-5-6 double play of Vaudevillian proportions. Though wily mermaids have called him "a young Moses" and "the black George Foreman," Taylor has consistently identified and defied expectations by logging off before you can rape his allegory. His breakout show, GYPSIES ARE MADE OF FART BRICKS, had some critics comparing him to Edna St. Vincent Millay inside a Ziploc bag. But since retreating into a blowfish culvert, Taylor has dismissed his previous aesthetics and embarked on a new project tentatively entitled BRICKS ARE MADE OF GYPSY FARTS. Ever the literary "cunt balloon," Taylor's work promises to buy a new food processor, eat a piano, and make everyone forget about how Beckett used to drive Andre the Giant to school until at least 2026."