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)
Worlds Collide!!!! aka “Justin Taylor is Cool”
You know what I love? Waking up to a Google alert that has a story in it called “Justin Taylor is Cool.” Who wouldn’t love that? So imagine my surprise when I clicked through and wound up at something called the Reformation21 blog. It’s a post about me and my doppelganger, Justin Taylor of Crossway Books, a preacher from Wheaton, Ill about whom I’ve blogged many times, and whose awareness of my existence I’ve frequently been given to speculate about. Well it seems all but certain that he knows about me now, and furthermore, this post by Stephen Nichols seems to make clear once and for all that he is not my doppelganger, but rather that I am his. Since it’s a short post it is reproduced in full, but you might as well see Ref21 for yourself.
So here I am thumbing through my latest copy of Paste catching up on the latest Indie and post funk metal ska offerings and there it is:
“Justin Taylor’s first short story collection” . . . “artfully captur[ing] the view of the 2000s.” Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever–great title, despite being riddled with theological problems.
Apparently our Justin, “Editorial Director at Crossway and follower of Christ” by day, is a Brooklyn-living professor of writing at Rutgers on the side.
I knew someday being Justin’s friend would raise my HQ (hip quotient for those not in the know).
Stephen, if you’re reading this- thanks for the shout! And yes, EHITBTE presents something of a theological problem–hardly beside the point, btw. You might think about it as an intentional release of the self-destructive powers of the exponential and the recursive onto Leibniz’s notion that “all is for the best in the best of all possible wolds.” Not that that solves anything- but solving problems is your homeboy’s line of work. Mine is causing them. Seems like we’ll work together splendidly. And Justin, if you’re out there, pleased to meet your acquaintance! I’m really sorry I keep putting out books that have titles that sound like they could be your books- The Apocalypse Reader, and the (forthcoming novel, provisionally entitled) The Gospel of Anarchy. We have things in common! I love GK Chesterton! And Kierkegaard! And I just got my copy of The Axioms of Religion by Hobbes and Mullins in the mail today and am very excited to read it. Let me know if you ever want to chat about the history of American Baptist thought and sectarianism.
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.
Experimental Detective Fiction
One of my all time favorite writers, Robert Coover, has a new book coming out in about two weeks called Noir. It’s a detective novel written in the second person. Say what you will about writing in the second person, I’m super excited to see what Coover does with this puppy.
You can read an excerpt at Vice.
You can listen to Coover read from the book and answer some questions via Kelly Writers House.
Here’s a blurb from Ben Marcus:
“At age 75, Coover is still a brilliant mythmaker, a potty-mouthed Svengali, and an evil technician of metaphors. He is among our language’s most important inventors.”
Here’s the summary:
You are Philip M. Noir, Private Investigator. A mysterious young widow hires you to find her husband’s killer-if he was killed. Then your client is killed and her body disappears-if she was your client. Your search for clues takes you through all levels of the city, from classy lounges to lowlife dives, from jazz bars to a rich sex kitten’s bedroom, from yachts to the morgue. “The Case of the Vanishing Black Widow” unfolds over five days aboveground and three or four in smugglers’ tunnels, though flashback and anecdote, and expands time into something much larger. You don’t always get the joke, though most people think what’s happening is pretty funny.
Harold Bloom recites “Tea at the Palace of Hoon” by Wallace Stevens
with a hearty hat-tip to Adam Fitzgerald. Happy Sunday!
The Rules
The Guardian has published ten rules for writing fiction from several different writers. Find Part 1 here and Part 2 here. My favorite are Jeanette Winterson’s rules which include:
2. Never stop when you are stuck. You may not be able to solve the problem, but turn aside and write something else. Do not stop altogether.
7. Take no notice of anyone with a gender agenda. A lot of men still think that women lack imagination of the fiery kind.
9. Trust your creativity.
What are your rules?
It is Friday: Go Right Ahead
I’d feel better if you drank your drink.
I like to laugh smoke out.
You’re drunk, and I’m drunk, and I’m just exactly drunk enough to tell you anything you want to know.
Stupidly calm.
Now I am dangerous.
Drunk, yes, but so what?
I want to try cocaine, though because that’s suppose to sharpen the brain, isn’t it?
Stop waving your hat in my face.
Feed the lettuce to the bunny and eat the bunny.
We’re Getting On: A Conversation With James Kaelan
James Kaelen’s We’re Getting On, a collection of interconnected stories following five people as they relocate to the Nevada desert intending to abandon technology, will be published by Flatmancrooked on July 2, 2010. The project is being billed as a Zero Emission book. In addition to sending his writing out into the world, Kaelen also plans on going on a West Coast bike tour without leaving a carbon footprint to promote the book and, in many ways, the ideology behind the book. He took some time from his busy schedule to talk with me about the book and the book/bicycle tour.