……Kevin Sampsell’s Paper Trumpets…..
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In late April I read with Kevin Sampsell and Jay Ponteri in Nathan Curtis Warner’s LYE:WORDS at Pond Gallery.
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Kevin had a projector set up and interrupted reading from his book to show his Collages. Sometimes they contained text, and sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes Kevin read the Collage text. . .Regardless, I was quite taken by them. . .And so I asked Kevin if I could feature some of them here on htmlgiant.
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What follows, then is a Q & A we did with Kevin’s Collages interspersed.
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And for more Collages check out this special section of Kevin Sampsell’s website. And starting June 10th Kevin will be doing a Collage column, called Paper Trumpets, for The Rumpus!!
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Rauan: How did you get started doing Collages ??
Kevin: I was inspired by the cut-up experiments of William S. Burroughs and actually started doing word collages, mostly from newspaper headlines, about twenty years ago. I put out a weird little chapbook called Children’s Book in 1996 and I’ve always wanted to make a follow-up book. I’ve kept this big manila envelope of words ever since then, occasionally pulling it out and making funny cards and pictures with them and giving them to friends.
But those were more about wordplay and odd language. At the beginning of this year, I decided I’d pull out that envelope and start making more collages, kind of as a break from writing. I started to look around at other collage stuff on-line and discovered this whole big vibrant world of collage artists and, more importantly, I started to seriously consider the use of altered images to play off the words. I discovered this book called The Age of Collage and it included profiles and work by a bunch of great artists doing amazing work with collage. This page on the publisher’s web site included videos of John Stezaker and Linder Sterling and I became hooked. Stezaker’s video was especially influential. I started to look at collage every moment that I could and I joined a bunch of collage groups on Facebook too. I started to put more importance on how the images in the collage were presented. Words are still important, but the images are equally so now. Something clicked in my brain and I’m starting to figure out things with images. How to play with them and make them do strange things. Making collages is like creating optical illusions sometimes. Like with writing fiction or poems, pretty much anything can happen.
RK: Can you tell us a bit about yr Collage process??
For me, collage is all about seeing, as opposed to writing READ MORE >
6 Books: Kevin Sampsell on Nonfiction
This is Part II of a series where I ask writers I like for 6 book recommendations according to some loose guideline. Part I is here. This week, Kevin Sampsell, editor of Future Tense Books out of Portland, Oregon, doyen of Powell’s Books, and author of the wildly excellent memoir, A Common Pornography (Harper Perennial). To give you an idea of the goodness of Kevin’s book, I’ll confess that the first copy I had didn’t make it through my ravenous reading of it and I had to switch to another.
I asked Kevin to recommend 6 nonfiction books, old or new. He obliged, and then some:
Black Box: Cockpit Voice Recorder Accounts of In-Flight Accidents by Malcolm MacPherson
I’m fascinated with this book and the way these transcripts reflect the collected calm of airplane pilots and then their sudden confusion, panic, and tragedy. An eerie and morose reading experience.
I Remember by Joe Brainard
Whenever I go talk to a writing class about memoir, I always point out this book and read a little from it. Then I have the class write a few of their own “I Remembers.” It’s such a non-threatening and easy way to access parts of your life that you think are uninteresting and trivial, but turn out to be engaging and universal.
Time Out of Mind by Leonard Michaels
Besides his fiction and his essays, this book is a bit of an oddity because it’s more like disjointed journal entries. It took me a few pages to lock into Michaels’s groove, but once I did, this book turned into a thing of uncut beauty. I would have to say that Leonard Michaels is the author I’ve been most obsessed with for the past year since I read his novel, The Men’s Club.
Oedipus Wrecked by Kevin Keck
This book is so dirty and hilarious, but also sweetly heartfelt. For fans of Jonathan Ames and other straight-faced pervs.
Kevin Sampsell Week (7): A Common Pornography, Future Tense Books
Because Kevin reads HTML Giant, I have addressed a few questions directly to him in this post. Let’s treat the comments section as an impromptu author interview. If you, readers, have questions, ask away. Maybe Kevin will be good enough to respond.
The original version of A Common Pornography from Future Tense Books (why don’t the planes fly anymore, Kevin?) is a slim 59 pages. It arrived to me in an envelope of Future Tense Books that I had asked the fiction buyer at my bookstore to order. I wanted our store to carry them even though we had no small press section, no good way to display or highlight small press books, and—sadly—no real audience in our customer base. But I read an article about him and liked his glasses. And his suit. (It was a nice suit, the suit you were wearing in the photo accompanying the article. So I got us to carry copies of A Common Pornography, Please Don’t Kill the Freshmen, and Grosse Point Girl.
(Note that all three of these books were subsequently expanded upon and released by major publishing companies. Note that Kevin Sampsell is a man with really good taste and an eye for emerging talent. See Elizabeth Ellen. See Suzanne Burns. See the beginning of the Tao Lin Today…Today thing. See Claudia Smith.)
The original version of A Common Pornography shares with its newer, slightly more heavyset brother book a number of things. The spareness of the pieces, for example. The directness of the language and confessional nature of the story. But there is a randomness to it, too. A serious embrace of the unserious.
The book is illustrated with collages by a woman named Melody Owen. (Who is Melody, Kevin? Tell us about her.) The images are built out of old photographs and clip art. They relate to the pieces that they accompany, but it seems that Owen grabbed bits from the language instead of recreating scenes.
Also, the book is filled with notes by Mike Daily. The title page refers to the as footnotes, but most actually appear in the margins, giving one the sense that they have purchased a copy of the book that had been previously owned and analyzed. And the notes themselves are random, funny, and sometimes seemingly unrelated, as if one has purchased a copy of the book that had been previously owned and analyzed by a crazy person or a liar. (Wikipedia has an entry about footnotes that includes a section called “Opponents of footnotes”.) How did Mike get involved, Kevin? Why did you ask him to add the notes? Mike, how did you approach adding the notes?
There’s something about the first version of A Common Pornography helped me figure out how to navigate my own writing. A lightness, maybe. The lack of photographs of the subjects (Kevin and his family) makes the book harder to pin down than the new version. The cover photograph for each version fits. The new cover: a chair. A room. Sit. Listen. The old cover: and industrial landscape. A flatness. An emptiness.
The books seem the same way. There’s a concrete beauty to the new version. It’s a chiseled book, and the little pieces fit in an ever-unfolding structure. It’s a Jericho Rose opening.
The original, though, floats a little. Maybe it’s the length. Maybe it’s the addition of the other two voices—the reworked images of Owen, Daily’s absurdist comments from the book’s peanut gallery.
It’s odd how the same book can feel so different. It’s odd how two versions of the same book can be exactly right in very different ways.
Uncategorized / 10 Comments
February 26th, 2010 / 8:01 pm
February 26th, 2010 / 8:01 pm
Kevin Sampsell Week (6): Future Tense
[In closing out Kevin Sampsell week, Kevin gave us the inside track for the next two releases of his press Future Tense Books. If you aren’t familiar by now, give it a peek: Kevin truly makes releases that are unlike any other press around. – BB]
From the desk of Kevin Sampsell (Portland, OR)
As many of you know, we’re on the brink of releasing the poetry collaboration, OK, Goodnight, by Zachary Schomburg and Emily Kendal Frey (March 2010), but I’ve also been poring over manuscripts to figure out what other treasures Future Tense can deliver this year. This week we were excited to acquire two books that will come out this summer and fall.
In June, we will release a chapbook called Ventriloquism by Prathna Lor. I’ve been buttering up this hot young Canadian for a while now. I’ve sent him knitted hats and coffee-flavoured chocolates. I’ve spelled words like colour and favourite with the extra u in it. Finally, he sent a batch of story-type things. Ventriloquism features works that do that wondrous thing I love so much–when a piece of writing feels so fresh and original that you’re not sure if it’s prose poetry or flash fiction. It’s beautifully uncategorizable, with body parts flitting their way through deeper emotions that Lor’s language tries to dissect with grace and force and unexpected humour. It reminds me a little bit of my all-time favorite story writer, Gary Lutz.
Prathna Lor lives in Toronto, Ontario.
Links: http://prathnalor.bearcreekfeed.com / http://prathnalor.blogspot.com
In November, we will release a paperback book tentatively titled The Book of Freaks by Jamie Iredell. This is another book that seems so fresh and weird and laugh-out-loud funny, I’m tempted to compare it to modern cult classics like Letters to Wendy’s and The Age of Wire and String. The story about discovering this book is a recent and happy accident. While in Seattle just two weekends ago, I saw that Blake Butler and Jamie Iredell were reading at a place called Neptune Coffee. I was excited to meet Blake for the first time and hear him read. I was not familiar with this Iredell dude. At the reading, Jamie read a few parts from his great new book, Prose. Poems. A Novel. And then he read parts of this Freaks project. There was unexpected laughter. There was surprise. There was sheer uncut artistry at work. A few days later, he sent me the manuscript. A few days later, I wallpapered my bathroom with it so that I could always have it near. Sometimes, magic happens fast when true talent is involved.
Jamie Iredell lives in Atlanta, Georgia.
Link: http://jamieiredell.blogspot.com
We’re thrilled to be publishing these two brilliant writers later this year. Both of their books display an effortless and immense kind of entertainment value that we feel is both accessible and revolutionary. Thank you for reading. Please stay tuned to futuretensebooks.com and/or email me to get on our email list: info@futuretensebooks.com
Kevin Sampsell
editor & publisher
(along with Frayn Masters and Bryan Coffelt)
Kevin Sampsell Week (5): Unedited Cover
The original cover for A Common Pornography included “Hank,” a harness compatible silicone flesh-tone (Caucasian, wtf!) dildo resting in its intended vector on a retro 70s wool lounge chair. Sampsell, who gave up minimalism when they said “negate the wieners,” propagated his living quarters with various intra-orifice objects, though he prefers to name them after country singers. “Johnny Cash,” a real doll who looks strikingly like, well, Johnny Cash, is not pictured, but lies supine on the floor outside of the camera’s frame. Thanks to Sampsell, Cash’s plastic sphincter is now a “ring of fire.” Jonathan Ames, as his blurb will tell you, calls the book “heartbreaking”; what he fails to mention is that the heart is not the only thing being broken — so if Sampsell should sit down with a grimace for his next interview, please note that it is not any qualms of the mind which cause such facial strain, but rather tribulations of a more bodily, self-inflicted sort.
Kevin Sampsell Week (4): A Common Interview by Michael Kimball
Kevin Sampsell lives in Portland, Oregon and works at Powell’s Books. He started the press, Future Tense Books, in 1990 and has published many writers including Mike Topp, Zoe Trope, Chelsea Martin, Susannah Breslin, Elizabeth Ellen, and Claudia Smith. His own books include Portland Noir (as editor), Creamy Bullets, and A Common Pornography. Harper’s Magazine says, “Sampsell’s talent for observing the ordinary….is perhaps best displayed in chronicling the cringing inelegance of adolescent sexuality: the embarrassing hookups, the acne-cream-flavored kisses, the obsession with pornography, and the preoccupation with discarding one’s virginity.” And Jonathan Ames says, “This is the kind of book where you want to thank the author for helping you feel less alone with being alive.”
Michael Kimball: One of the most striking things about A Common Pornography is the way you lay yourself bare on the page. There are so many awkward, funny, difficult, honest, and maybe embarrassing episodes in the book. How did you get to a place where you were able to do that and what was your mindset as you approached each episode (maybe especially as compared to your mindset writing fiction)?
Kevin Sampsell: It’s mainly a matter of time going by. I’m 42 now. You just get to the point where you don’t really care if other people are bothered or feel uncomfortable with whatever you’re writing. I always think it’s weird when people say, ‘I didn’t like this book because it was so depressing or so dirty.’ I don’t think an author should treat readers like children, or like they have to protect the reader. Personally though, it was hard sometimes to let go of some of these things that I didn’t tell anyone about. I didn’t even tell my girlfriend, now my fiancé, about the prostitute stuff until a couple of years ago. The dilemma I think most writers have is that they don’t care about embarrassing themselves but they do worry about how their family or co-workers or lovers will react.
Compared to fiction, it’s maybe a little harder. At least with fiction you can say to your mom or whomever, ‘Oh, I just made that up.’
SAMPSELL WEEK (3): A READING @ A READING (PART DEUX)
There’s a little girl sitting in the children’s section of Skylight Books reading a picture book; she looks about six or seven. (Too old to be reading a picture book. What the fuck? I was reading Bunnicula by that age.) I’m sitting in the back of the audience, so I can see into that section of the bookstore. Kevin Sampsell, who is reading from A Common Pornography, can’t. He doesn’t know that the little kid is listening to him read about the time he had manual sex with a stranger in the back of a porn shop.
Kevin Sampsell corrupting small child (courtesy Sabra Embury)
Kevin Sampsell Week (3): A Reading at A Reading
Kevin Sampsell: Small Press Champion. That’s the title on his business card. Kevin works with Powell’s. The title on the card doesn’t lie: Future Tense, Kevin’s own small press, is vibrant and energetically handled; at the beginning of the reading I caught Kevin talking about his catalogue with a Skylight employee. Oh: Skylight Books, 7:30 on the 9th. That’s when & where Nick, me, Sabra & Ned met Kevin, and first heard him read from A Common Pornography.
I sat down. Kevin set up his laptop, he had said something about a slideshow. And he started: not having read ACP yet, I was impressed and warmed by the calmness instilled by the text, and Kevin’s performance. He gave equal weight to each line, each section–death, masturbation, house fire, girlfriends and ‘real girlfriends’–all was given its due. It’s as if Kevin had managed to pull up & present to you not the best or the worst moments of his recollected life, but the most poignant. And somehow he achieves a soothing equilibrium; I laughed a lot. The sentences, his delivery: all intoned with grace. That’s what Kevin Sampsell is: graceful.
The slideshow contained mostly happy but all weird-in-that-old-polaroid-way captures. His family was shown, and shown again. His old girlfriend. Yearbook photos. Kevin had really broad shoulders when he was ~12. Immediately intimidated.
Afterwards he invited Nick & I, with a few others, to join him for dinner. Dinner was a long table laid full of bread at an Indian restaurant. I sat kind of far away from Kevin; near the end of the meal he came over and sat, wanted to talk. Again: graceful. The night wrapped up late, we parted, not before Kevin & his fiancee invited me to Portland and Kevin gave me free books.
Hmm. Hard to wrap this up because it was all so damned nice. KS, his friends, his future wife, the reading… Oh: I’ll end with this. A friend promised to send me a DVD filled with Kevin’s old slam poetry performances. Kevin Sampsell Video Day, coming soon. :)
p.s. I’ll take Egon and smile. (see Nick’s post)
Kevin Sampsell Week (2): Smorgasboard
For day 2 of Kevin Sampsell week, I’d like to collect some various KS/A Common Pornography pornographalia from around the web and elsewhere. Below you’ll find some video, some review snippets, another excerpt from the memoir, and everything else to keep your Sampsell buzz afloat. If this turns out to be not enough, you can always peruse Kevin’s website, a free-flowing form of fun and e-orgasm. Hit it!
Kevin reads from ACP at the In The Flesh Reading Series 2-18-10
***** 5 Star review for ACP from Time Out New York: “…Sampsell shares loneliness with such intensity that his book almost defeats it—both his and yours.”
– A Sampsell short story (not in the memoir) from 52 Stories, “Jailbreak.”
Pillow Talk Episode 1: Kevin interviews our own Mike Young (produced & edited by Bryan Coffelt)
– A review of ACP on Blogcritics: “… The structure of A Common Pornography is narrative genius.”
…. and, lastly, for today, pg. 75 of A Common Pornography:
Vibrator
Dad gave me a vibrator once. Sort of oval-shaped. He gave it to me so I could wrap it and give it to Mom as a birthday present. Later, they kept it in a drawer by the bed. Then, shortly after, they slept in separate beds.
Kevin Sampsell Week (1): Chongo
Earlier this month saw the release of my label-brother Kevin Sampsell’s memoir A Common Pornography, which I read in the light of a late evening on a sofa I bought from a friend. I’d had big expectations and excitement about this book, which in the course of reading turned to not only the pay off of that wanting, but being stuck simultaneously by a kind of reading feeling I could have never seen coming. Herein, this week we’ll be talking about the book and other things Sampsell, including his press Future Tense Books.
Among the many wonderful things about this book, perhaps the most surprising and beautiful for me was how the period chronicled in Kevin’s book, essentially his youth, adolescence, into his current age, felt at some points so familiar, and at the same time catching me by the side of the head. Kevin’s rendering of the odd but somehow most defining moments of aging so often missed in these kinds of books is so well nailed–he doesn’t overdescribe them, or romanticize them, but lays them out in all their hairy light–calm, common, uncommon, etched.
From his obsessive collecting of select pieces of porn (which he keeps hidden in the ceiling of his parents house), to the strange ways of sexual becoming with friends and paid help, to just the air of those spaces and people that exist with us for a time and somehow are that time, all of this rendered in eerily calm and perfect sentences, sometimes somewhat like a minimal Gary Lutz, A Common Pornography is a book I will long remember for its poise, heart, and humor, and for its making of a picture of an age that no one else has nailed quite so beautifully, and singularly.
The book is made up of many 1-3 page sections, each with titles, that together follow the timeline of Kevin’s life, each of which alone makes for its own little amazing object. Here’s one to whet your bib.
Chongo
The toughest kid at our school was named Chongo, and he was a short but muscular Mexican who always seemed to be suspended or doing Saturday school. He lived in the pit of this valley that ran alongside a long irrigation pipe. The pipe was connected to the ditches surrounding our neighborhood and it had a flat surface on top lined with flimsy two-by-fours. For some reason, we always called this pipe “the floons.” My friends and I would often have races on the floons. There was an element of danger whenever we did because there were big gaps where you could fall through and go into the dirty water. And if we went too far down the floons we’d be dangerously close to what we called “Chongo Country.” Other kids had told us that if you got a good look into Chongo Country, you’d see all sorts of stolen bikes and bike parts in his weed-filled yard. When Chongo had his shirt off, they said, you could see a tattoo of Pontius Pilate across his chest. We never dared to look.
Purchase A Common Pornography at the links above, or from the publisher, or Amazon.