Douglas Messerli; My Year 2008: In the Gap
Series No.: 263
ISBN: 978-1-55713-462-2, Pages: 552
Exploring a year in which, after having gone "To the Dogs" in 2007, society seemed to be in transition, as a new US President was waiting to be inaugurated, cultural memoirist Douglas Messerli saw a territory that he metaphorically characterized as being "In the Gap." Using a phrase he had first encountered in the 1966 film The Quiller Memorandum, with a script by Harold Pinter, the author saw American society (along with international culture) as being in a position in which one was looking for signs of the future somewhere in the distance, trying to get a glimpse without giving away one's own current situation.
Yet, as Messerli declares: "...little could I have imagined how trapped in the netherland of great wealth and severe debt we would be, how entangled we had become in the coils of unbridled growth and stagnant destitution. As I wrote in my essay 'Between: The Art of Collaboration,' in 2008 I found myself using time and again in some of the titles of my essays the word 'between.' The gap I was describing was often a significant spatial manifestation that called up geographical and geological separations such as canyons, ravines, tunnels, holes, breaks, fissures, cuts--and cliffs off of which we seemed ready to leap; but just as often I saw the 'gap' as a space between individuals, between companions, friends, acquaintances and between values--vast spaces that, in order to move forward in language and action, had to be bridged or, at least, traveled through by the individuals on either side of those separations."
Like the volumes before it, My Year 2008: In the Gap is an attempt to link the personal with the international using the interconnections we all share through our cultural engagements. It is also another of the documents which helps to define and explain the early 21st century.
Author of several collections of poetry, dramas (under the pseudonym Kier Peters), fiction, and other diverse writings, Douglas Messerli is the publisher of Sun & Moon Press and Green Integer.