Ten Walks/Two Talks: Interview with Jon and Andy
Jon Cotner and Andy Fitch met in their late teens, when they were both crashing in a crowded house in Boston. As Jon tells it, “I stretched on a bedroom floor, shortly after the room’s official resident had left for work. It was 7 a.m. Andy entered the bedroom from the living room (where he must’ve been trying to sleep), hoping to gain a few more hours’ rest, but the bedroom had already been occupied by another scavenger. Standing above me, Andy looked down. He seemed a bit shocked. It was ‘love at first sight’ in the sense of immediate and unshakable friendship.”
Now the fast friends have put out a book together – one that is much beloved here at HTMLGIANT (see?) — called Ten Walks/Two Talks, from Ugly Duckling Presse. It’s a great read that highlights a walking view of NYC, and more than that, a look at thoughts, and more than that, a voyeuristic look at how the brainy half lives in friendship. I’ve interviewed the guys below, and I’ll send a copy of this great book to the commenter who has taken the longest walk (deadline is noon, Friday, 7/2). My record is 28 miles. READ MORE >
Suggested Pairings: Icehouse and Meg Pokrass/Cooper Renner
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zu0uOONkX-E
As I rule I suggest you marry yourself first. Take a moment. OK. Today we will marry a chapbook with a domestic beer.
“Lost and Found” (elimae stories) is glow for the hammock, though I suggest an older model, one swaying for seasons and made of fishing line—as in cutting into flesh–and below it a brush pile with a brown rat you name Brown Rat. You feed Brown Rat crumbling Cheetos. I think these flashes are fragile, about to collapse, falling, as in you/me/us…They disintegrate you forward.
She’s ruined this before.
Abfulled Plank Road (Miller) since 1885, Icehouse pours to a golden yellow, basically the color of human urine in the later stages of renal failure, but don’t let my description (sorry, former RN here) put you off your feed. You probably have some hazy nostalgia—possibly college, a dorm room bathtub full of ice and balthazars of beer?
“I’m not very modern, I’m afraid,” she said.
Outdated things make me sad, like the word, “howdy.”
Interview with Lee Rourke
Lee Rouke’s debut novel, The Canal has just been released in the the States and will be hitting the UK in less than a month. I’ve already said good things about it & so have Shane Jones & John Wray . I conducted this little interview with Lee over email.
First, an excerpt, then another after the interview:
She addressed him only.
“Do you remember me?”
There was a long pause.
He looked at the woman next to him, then back at her, then back at the woman. He looked nervous, rubbing his thumb into the palm of his hand. The woman’s eyes began to narrow and her whole face started to contort. He looked back up at her.
“Er . . . I’m . . . afraid . . . I’m afraid I don’t, sorry. Er . . . Have we . . . Should I?”
“You tell me.”
“I’m sorry, I’ve never seen you before in my life. I fear you may have mistaken me for another person, someone else in your life . . . I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry?”
“Yes.”
“You’re sorry? That’s all you can say? Sorry? Don’t you remember me at all?”
4 cups of world
14. Sometimes people write stupid shit just hoping for a response. Example, at Huff: Comparing Dave Barry and David Foster Wallace…right. (Next week David Stoesz will examine a midnight dinner of two bottles of white wine [fling cork into air, don’t need it]/rooftop blanket making out/grappling versus a quick lunch at Cracker Barrel.)
2. Over at The Short Review: Richard Yates Collected Stories.
4. June 30 is Indy Underground Reading Series. Donald Ray Pollock, Andrew Scott, The Brick Windows. Music, words, alcohol–what do you need in life?
7. Ernaux’s autobiographical books are breathtaking in their level of disclosure and unflinching as they rehash real-life experiences—obsessive love, bereavement, abortion, marriage, illness, sexual jealousy—that are not bizarre or uncommonly tragic, nor by any stretch uplifting or inspirational in the Eat, Pray, Love vein.
Amazing expose of Annie Ernaux at The Second Pass. Do you know her well? You should. Summer is here–get to jumping.
Go Right Ahead: It is Friday
A mind too active is no mind at all.
Drink at any dance.
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
A glass of beer first thing in the morning.
Grew wild, broke furniture, beat out windows.
His favorite bar: The Corner Unusual.
I may look like a beer salesman but I am a poet.
The garden is a river flowing south.
Racing the devil for Rainbow, a beer joint.
You smell like television.
Best Prologue Ever
Father was wailing. I deduced from the morning sun and moving flotsam that we were drifting slowly southward with the force of an unknown current. He slumped on the backseat of the wooden rowboat and I leaned forward grabbing his shirt to keep him from pitching overboard. Both of his hands had been severed at the wrist and the stumps had been tightly bound with duct tape. His normally withered forearms now bulged with an unsightly color. When they had pushed us out from the estuary on a falling tide before dawn I had been given only one oar. When I clearly noticed this at first light the humor wasn’t lost on me. I was equipped to row in circles with my left hand. The thumb of my right hand was missing and the pain lessened when I raised it high. In the early light I had seen a green or loggerhead turtle and took my thumb someone had stuffed in my pocket pitching it toward the beast but the turtle had submerged in alarm misunderstanding my good intentions. By midmorning the shore had arisen and I could see the coastline south of Veracruz. The current was carrying us toward Alvarado. My father woke from his latest faint. His face was too bruised for clear speech and now rather than wailing he bleated. His eyes made his request clear and I pushed him gently over the back of the boat. It was quite some time before he completely sunk. I would study the stinking fish scales and bits of dried viscera on the boat’s bottom and then look up and he would still be there floating in the current. And then finally I was pleased to see him sink. What a strange way to say goodbye to your father.
Blunts
Emily Kendal Frey’s THE NEW PLANET is now available from Mindmade Books. Some of these poems recently leapt into Real Poetik
PITY
I feel sorry for people who fall in love with other people.
We wait on the boat’s deck to see a whale.
What we see are waves.
Dead-hearted tomatoes bobbing up and down.
Ocean of hearts.
It is Friday: Go Right Ahead
She claimed he was my type, which I took to mean a little bit twisted.
A massive hollow swallowed.
Too drunk to stop.
I’m nihilistic, antagonistic, violent, horrible – but not obliterated, yet.
Room 453 smelled of beer, barbecue, and old leather.
The party was a bust, full of Valley chicks, jocks, and rockabillies.
Pig Mountain Valley in the middle of the South.
I prepared by swallowing a couple of quaaludes washed down with Jack Daniels.
Stirring the fiery liquid.
One drink away.
Light leeches out.
David Markson reads at the 92nd St. Y, 2007
[Thanks to Stephen for the heads up.]
Maribor is a city and a book of poems
Post-Apollo Press was founded in Sausolito, CA in 1982. They’ve published a number of poets, including Lyn Hejinian, Barbara Guest, Tom Raworth (one of my faves), Leslie Scalapino and recently, Demosthenes Agrafiotis (translated by John Sakkis, an always level-headed htmlgiant commenter, and his uncle Angelos Sakkis). This description of how the collaborative translation worked is beautifully written, very California, which is where these guys are from. What’s most compelling to me there is how Angelos confronted the poetry. He writes, “I take a look and I am completely nonplused perplexed bewildered not the kind of thing I usually read by choice still the specificity of the language keeps me hooked I struggle with it word by word line by line all the while thinking hey I can read Greek but what is this guy saying here where is he going with this the ellipticity of it,” which is about how I feel as I encounter the poems. READ MORE >
Comments Off on Maribor is a city and a book of poems
June 8th, 2010 / 11:56 am
June 8th, 2010 / 11:56 am