Danielle Dutton, from an interview at BOMBLOG:

Anne K. Yoder: Culturally, are people more open to experimental approaches in other art forms?

Danielle Dutton: On a very basic level, my best guess is that writing asks something different of its reader than listening asks of the listener. Same goes for looking at a painting, even one that might perplex or upset us. To read, to connect words in a difficult syntax, like Stein’s, or make sense of seemingly simple sentences within a maddening paragraph, like Beckett’s, or piece together a narrative that doesn’t seem to add up in a familiar way, like Gladman’s or Woolf’s, the reader has to pay close attention, has to work. I’m not saying that experimental writing is all slog slog slog, that it isn’t rewarding or entertaining, because obviously I think a lot of it is, but that we’ve been trained to think that language itself should work in one way, should be clear, and linear, and should instantly reveal meaning, so when writing confounds those expectations it’s perhaps easy to feel cheated by it, or to chalk it up as wrong, bad, pretentious. I’ve had students who were very open to talking about cubist paintings, for example, but who became furious over Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons. We’re taught to read, after all, and perhaps more importantly we’re taught to write (the subject-verb agreement, the five-paragraph essay, the rhyming stanza), whereas no one actually teaches us a particular way to hear or look, and rarely to compose or paint, which maybe, ultimately, means we’re more open when we listen and look. Maybe?

I was lucky enough to score galleys of Miroslav Penkov’s East of the West, which is due in bookstores in July from Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. I’ve read the stories twice already. They’re knockouts.

Penkov is a Bulgarian writer who writes in English. He studied as an undergraduate at the University of Arkansas, and discovered his talent for storytelling in an Ellen Gilchrist workshop. After graduating, he spent four more years studying at Arkansas in the MFA program, and now he teaches at the University of North Texas. I first read his story “Buying Lenin” in The Southern Review, and I’ve been a big fan ever since.

Here is the promotional copy from FSG:

“A grandson tries to buy the corpse of Lenin on eBay for his Communist grandfather. A failed wunderkind steals a golden cross from an Orthodox church. A boy meets his cousin (the love of his life) once every five years in the river that divides their village into east and west. These are Miroslav Penkov’s strange, unexpectedly moving visions of his home country, Bulgaria, and they are the stories that make up his charming, deeply felt debut collection.

“In East of the West, Penkov writes with great empathy of centuries of tumult; his characters mourn the way things were and long for things that will never be. But even as they wrestle with the weight of history, with the debt to family, with the pangs of exile, the stories inEast of the West are always light on their feet, animated by Penkov’s unmatched eye for the absurd.”

You can learn more about Miroslav Penkov at his website, and preorder his book at Amazon.com or IndieBound. I’ll write more about him here (a review, maybe an interview) when the publication date draws nearer.

At The Marcel Duchamp Studies online journal, Francis M. Naumann begins his volatile evisceration of Wayne Andersen’s Marcel Duchamp: The Failed Messiah (Geneva: Éditions Fabriart, 2010) with:

This book is an insult to the intelligence of anyone who believes that Marcel Duchamp was an important and influential figure in the history of modern art in the early years of the 20th century.

And ends with:

I find myself in an equally complex dilemma in writing this review, for allowing its publication can only serve to draw more attention to a book that presents no legitimate justification for its existence.

Between those two phrases, Naumann pretty much chops the book to shreds for being uninformed, unauthorized, prudish, self-published, you name it. Except, in the one and only passage he quotes from the book, Naumann fails to accuse Anderson of flagrant misogyny, despite the utter repulsiveness of the quote:

READ MORE >