A new book, Rut by Scott Phillips, is coming from Concord Free Press. Also: two of their previous titles got picked up by St. Martin’s Press and HarperCollins. Not that this is the case, but I’d be scared if it takes giving away a few thousand copies of your book to get it published by a big house.
Random Live Broadcast of Recent Books I Liked #3
You missed the live reading but you can watch it archived.
Featuring excerpts read from:
Museum of the Weird by Amelia Gray
Flowing in the Gossamer Fold by Ben Spivey
The Book of Frank by CAConrad
Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls by Alissa Nutting
Selected Poems by Mary Ruefle
Event Factory by Renee Gladman
Sean Kilpatrick’s “The All Encompassed Drowned” in New York Tyrant Issue 8
“Why do they apply. This to that.” – Gertrude Stein
I think it’s fascinating that a statement followed by a question mark asks a question of itself? Don’t you? Would you rather be considered a concept or a theory? Under what circumstances would you walk the dog? Do you yo-yo much? What, in your opinion, is the essential difference between a word and its thing? Do you feel a word can be more interesting than the thing it represents? Less than? Does the term ‘paradox of the heap’ mean anything to you? What terms do you use when talking about music? About literature? Would it be fair to say these terms are borrowed from the critical discourse surrounding these respective forms of media? Would that not be a fair thing to say because this appropriation has been more or less subconscious? Is your culture popular? If not, do you believe in a ‘popular culture’? If so, who are its friends? Who benefits? What defines your culture? At what point does an onomatopoeia become the sound it signifies? When learning a new language, do new words signify new things, old things, or other words? What does that say about words? Is the term ‘figurative language’ not redundant? Just a little? Is this a book review?
October 19th, 2010 / 6:03 pm
Elaine Kahn: Explain Yourself!
I was just reading the new issue of La Petite Zine for fun and then there was this thing by Elaine Kahn called “Imp, Imp” and I was like, dang Mom how did that happen? Here’s the bit that got me:
. . .
in the deep flit of your eyes
boldly rolling, high as a fruit palletYour voice, your voicely voice
. . .
Kahn blends sense sense and poem sense effectively, which is perhaps a challenging thing to do quickly as she does here. Also note that she uses fewer periods than most poets who’ve habituated Western Massachusetts, which is cool with me. My guess is the poem was written longer first and then reduced, but who cares what I think, what I’m asking is ELAINE KAHN, EXPLAIN YOURSELF! (applause)
(See earlier Explain Yourself! posts and rules to the game show here, here, here and here.)
99% BLUSTER: AN INTERVIEW WITH JON LEON ABOUT THE FUTURE OF LITERATURE
Wrath of Dynasty is a boutique imprint of fine art objects that was established by Jon Leon halfway through 2010. If you’re not familiar with Leon, the best thing to do is check out his poetry, some of which is available online here. If you want to check out any of his many chapbooks, well, you’re pretty much out of luck, because they’re all out of print. In three days the final title from this season of Wrath of Dynasty, formerly Legacy Pictures, will also be out of print. In fact, in three days, everything Wrath of Dynasty has ever released will be out of print, at least until the next season starts and a new series of unique print objects are brought to light. I have been consistently impressed with Wrath of Dynasty, which has brought to light a lot of exciting and unique work that would undoubtedly be inappropriate for other venues, so I thought I’d send Jon an email and ask him more about it. Check out the interview behind the cut.
{LMC}: A Letter to Padgett Powell, From the Famed Autodidact Lonny Nilsson
Ed: You can read a PDF of this interview, here, so you can better participate. Buy NY Tyrant.
Man, Powell, you are a redneck savant.
Powell, I’m writing to you about your interview with a Jacob, Jacob White. You know, you can say he’s a Jacob, because there’s a many Jacobs in the world, just as there are a many pitbulls that’ll kill your littler dogs, as you so say. But can we correctly say you’re a Padgett? I’m not so sure. I mean, you are a Padgett, don’t get me wrong, but to say so seems a mite disingenuous, as though I were to say you are a three-headed rattlesnake: You’re probably more the three-headed rattlesnake.
Powell, I called myself a famed autodidact in the title of this letter because you put a pressure on me, in your skills. You put a pressure on all of us. You’re a writer in the mold of writers who do things other than write—a practical mode, this is. In the shadow of your many voices, many minds and many habits, I call myself an autodidact, and I do try—but crafts seem to wither at my touch, you know, as though I’m a wrecking ball come to break things down rather than put them together, and I can’t hardly overcome my big iron-spherical nature. But hey.
Powell, we don’t send half-enough letters these days, and at the beginning of this compilation-of-many-sorts you are in, this New York Tyrant 8, sort of diverse in that way you are diverse, there’s a letter unsent from the great West Virginian Breece D’J Pancake to his mother, in which he dreams double-layered about a strange kind of deathless yet skeleton-haunted world. If a letter, even unsent, is good enough for Pancake, it’s better than me, and hopefully better for me, than to continue trying to fish and hunt and roof in your image and keep hooking my buddies, jamming my gun, falling through the ceiling like the paralyzed man on his pallet in Mark, sans rope and pulleys.
In wheel life
The first scene of Reservoir Dogs follows a group of men around a table having a discussion about Madonna’s “Like a Virgin,” my favorite moments being when the camera’s view is completely obliterated by someone’s back — and a black occurs like said movie’s premature end. Tarantino (both writer and actor here) proposes that the song is about a woman in coitus with a man of such large girth, that the pain is that of a virgin’s incipient intrusion. In 1917 an unidentified photographer took multiple pictures of Marcel Duchamp and patched the images together.
The zoetrope — or (from Greek) “wheel of life” — is a device we owe our first moving images to, a kind of cyclical Sisyphus, like our tethered earth moving in circles and never going anywhere, just forcing seasons into chapters, as if a grand story were being told. Should Duchamp look a little like Andy Garcia, and should Zoetrope be Ford Coppola’s production Co., then we’ll have to block Godfather III out of our minds.
Madison Smartt Bell in Haiti
Madison Smartt Bell, badass
I’ve spent every minute, day, week, fortnight I can beg, borrow, or steal in Haiti for the last three years. I went the first time because a film director had enticed me to go in preparation for a proposed project for which I was to write the screenplay, but then pulled out at the last minute when the book he wanted to option fell through (the author unfortunately was booked on the Oprah show and had dollar signs in his eyes). By then I had been studying my Pimsleur language tapes (woefully inadequate), my Edwidge Danticat stories (magic on paper), and my C.L.R. James (men in chains, severed heads on posts, quills dipped in skulls filled with the blood of white men), and it was love from afar. I had to go, so I started going, and I’ve been going ever since.
Most the time I’m in Ouest Province — Port-au-Prince, Petionville, Fermathe, Callebasse, Artiste, Barette. But this summer I traveled north for the first time, to Cap Haitien, near where King Henri Christophe hired an Italian architect to build him the most beautiful royal complex in the Western Hemisphere, bid him adieu, then sank the architect’s boat in the harbor with his cannons, so he would never be able to build anyone else anything like what he had built for Henri Christophe.
I’ve tried my best to experience Haiti as the Haiti I am experiencing, through the filter of my own experience and through the eyes of the friends I have made in Haiti, rather than on the terms set by books. But it was difficult to visit Cap Haitien and not be constantly in mind of its foremost American interpreter, Madison Smartt Bell, whose trilogy of the revolution set a standard for precision and exhaustiveness that the rest of our practitioners of historical fiction have yet to match, and whose uncollected essays on Haiti reflect a degree of insightfulness I doubt I’ll be able to achieve twenty or thirty or a hundred years from now unless I finally give in to an impulse my family considers dangerous and move to Haiti for good.
An excerpt from Bell’s “Miroir Danjere,” an essay about vaudou, a religious expression to which Bell has become an acolyte:
According to the vaudou beliefs in which the country has been saturated since the time of slavery, the ocean surrounding Haiti is a mirror, whose surface divides the world of the living from the world of the dead. The division is not absolute, however, for in vaudou as in the African religions from which it springs the dead do not depart, but remain present and available for communion with the living. It’s fortunate that no one really dies in Haiti, since it has always been a bloody place. READ MORE >