The Fassbinder
Diaries
James Pate. Civil Coping Mechanisms, $12.95 paperback (124 p)
ISBN: 978-1937865207
I kept imagining a corpse. I kept imagining a dirty, thin
corpse in the hall of a dead home with a camera somewhere in the hallway, a
camera with a cracked lens, missing its tape, the record-light still blinking
as if something was taking it in—all of the bleak and cold seconds. This is
where you'll find James Pate, in the light or in the absence of light,
in-between the seconds of a theatrical production. The Fassbinder Diaries is a wavering grayscale of film spool: “The
footage is grainy, as if the world being shown has gone through a storm of
broken glass shards.” This Gothic collection of short stories and poems and
hybrid prose / poems is thoroughly blended with filmic murder. You're not just
reading these stories, you're watching them: “We are watching them in the dark.
I mean we're in the dark ourselves.” Pate's prose tumbles onto itself with
sentences often repeated or with small variations that nearly cause disorientation.
But it's so purposeful that the reader is made into a desperate
voyeur—attention is held, move on. It is obvious to compare Pate with Johannes
Goransson due to the fact they are both children of Burroughs, and if you like
Goransson you should pick up The
Fassbinder Diaries without hesitation as Goransson has championed this book
for a long time. He recently called it “Book of the year,” and states that Pate
is, “...one of my...closest collaborators.” But if Goransson is a fever dream
then Pate is a calculated nightmare. Pate's world feels like it is bending into
itself—it's already in darkness but how much violence is there? Pate is the
person who found the missing tape from the camera in the dead home. Here is
something entirely new and entirely consuming. (June 2013)
Purchase The
Fassbinder Diaries HERE.
Reviewer bio: Ben Spivey is the author of the novella Black God. He recently invested 146
hours into the video game Dark Souls.
