Tar Spackled Banner

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Tar Spackled Banner, subtitled A Sequel/Prequel to Arboretum, presents itself as the autobiography of a 21st-century time traveler, written under the in-book persona of J. A. Ellis . Another Billy Pilgrim come unstuck, the narrator drifts through an era of fascist violence and secession, working out the curious esoterics of Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus and recalling the underground raving of Dostoevsky's antihero in Notes from Underground. The book is scripto-visual: image and text set against each other, in a world where, as it deadpans, "the Goosestep has grown more popular than the Soupy Shuffle." It is a mockumental work, a satire built by borrowing real texts and bending them out of true. That borrowing-and-refunctioning is James R. Hugunin's ludicakadroman, his term for a playful autotheory in which lived memory is one material among theory, artworks, and other literary texts. It was named to BAX (Best American Experimental Writing) 2015's Notable Books of 2014, from Wesleyan University Press, recognized for the seriousness with which it makes its joke and the precision with which it commits its theft. Show more