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Department of Regret, Kurt Vonnegut Edition

Silkscreen collaborations between Kurt Vonnegut and Joe Petro III

A few years before Kurt Vonnegut died, I paid a visit to the studio of Joe Petro III of Lexington, Kentucky. Petro was Vonnegut’s late-life collaborator on several series of silkscreened art based upon Vonnegut’s drawings, some of which were new, and some of which were elaborations upon the drawings he had incorporated into middle-period-and-later books such as Slaughterhouse-Five, Breakfast of Champions, and Hocus Pocus.

Petro generously offered me a tour of his studio, where, in addition to his work with Vonnegut, he had completed work for the likes of Ralph Steadman and Greenpeace. The Greenpeace work had caused him some problems, so he was a little nervous about people knowing where he lived. Nonetheless, he wanted to do his part to champion the work that had become the passion of Vonnegut’s late life, so he consented to an interview, and then he consented to put me in touch with Vonnegut, who had indicated that he, too, was willing to yammer with a nobody such as I was, so long as that yammering was about drawings and silkscreenings. READ MORE >

Random / 6 Comments
October 11th, 2010 / 6:01 am

Reynard Seifert—

Anteaus‘s Neglected Books of the 20th Century is the kind of list making me feel like a lazy reader.

Ken Baumann

The movie about the murderous trolley from the future.

Above image from the enticing visual/literary production blog of Looper, a movie forthcoming from Rian Johnson (director of Brick, The Brothers Bloom, etc.) What I know about the movie so far: time travel & corporate sponsored murder & an excellent cast. Favorite time travel, in fiction or film?

Mark Leidner goes vocal in an excellent episode of Apostrophe Cast. I think he is locating a presence in the warped examination & worshipping of cinema in his words. Pretty and strong.

The Trolley Problem. Heard of it? Push the fat man, touch the switch, pivot the disc, kill the people. I think gestures and the power of certain images have more to do with the decision than ethics.

Douglas Coupland lays out 45 reasons to stay inside, or go outside, or move. If you have best guesses for the next 10 years, please posit them here.

Random / 7 Comments
October 10th, 2010 / 11:33 pm

Blake Butler

A to Z of Stupid Feelings About Anybody

Are you hungry. Did you come because you are hungry. When you eat do you eat more than you had planned to eat and then feel so full you cannot as well move or do you limit yourself to the eating of the thing that might best keep your body toward a vision of something people look toward and do not not see in jest.

Books come in the mail. I stack them up, some on the sofa arms, some on the floor around my bed. At night in the dark trying to walk or piss I slip on them sometimes and often have to move books to make room on my desk to sit my laptop down. I’ve been thinking about reordering my books in the order that I read them. I have been keeping a list for ten years. I’ve yet to make the switch because I am afraid of disrupting the order of the stacks I’ve already put together, which is based on associations such as press, idea, time, generation, like-mindedness, or something else. I mostly know where everything is.

Can you please talk to yourself more. A public forum doesn’t demand the idea of losing steam. It doesn’t mean you are doing a service to people who are mostly wholly worthy of doing service to, but it means there is somewhere doing something and sometimes trying to eat. A girl just sat down next to me in the coffee shop and pulled her shirt down over her pants in such a way. Her pants are too long at her feet. She doesn’t seem to be trying.

Do you think it’s wrong to try. Do you think it’s wrong to say too many good things. Is there so little out here that it’s surprising that the things that get lit to are the things someone would want to talk about. I’m sure there are articles where someone is telling everybody how there are so many books coming out each year. People are worried about machines. Machines are getting older too.

Padgett Powell gives a little writing advice

This was just posted to Unsaid literary journal’s Facebook. Reposted here in case you don’t do the Facebook. (If you do do the Facebook, you should click on the link: “like” the post, “friend” the journal, &c.) There’s also an interview with Powell in the new issue of the New York Tyrant.

Keep in mind what writing should do:

1) Be alive.

2) Be surprising.

3) Obey tenets of economy, verve, etc.

4) Amount to something (usually, in terms of having “something at stake”).

5) Payoff (i.e., resolve).

Any three of five is worth spoiling paper for. It should be remembered also that:

6) Brave wild failure is applauded.

And that:

7) You should be less comfortable if you’re pretty sure of what you’re writing about.

And that:

8) You should ignore, at all times, all sense of authorial narrative obligations, and, certainly, your own preconceptions and ideas.

This is more preaching than could possibly be salubrious. So, some more: Obey only the logic of immediacy, from word to word. Or, obey only its obverse, the illogic of immediacy, or the logic of inimmediacy, as you prefer.

Craft Notes / 12 Comments
October 10th, 2010 / 3:14 pm

Reviews

Blake Butler

Hank by Abraham Smith

Most everyone I’ve talked to about this book or about Abraham Smith in general, his reading performances or his writing, his ideas, his sense of verbal compulsion and montage of syllable, his voice, has pretty much come to agree on one point: “I have no goddamn idea where this guy came from.” His first book Whim Man Mammon, also from Action, was one I read I think in a small room and somewhat in my backyard, thinking somehow someone had learned to talk to a machine, but like a machine that used to sit in the back room of a shaving place where men came to bark secrets at other men while getting the hair done off their face. An image from one of the poems in that first of a man throwing a chair at a sweet gum tree remains one of those tranplanted sights that is just now a full part of my own head.

Earlier this year then I saw Abe read from the same poems in a larger room, channeling some kind of cross between his own admitted sound of hearing preachers through transistors growing up in Kentucky, and some kind of tangled man caught in a draft vent. Everyone I went to that reading with still talks about jesus christ that guy is something. I had to reread that first book again after that and understood it not as a machine but as someone maybe talking to the ground that used to be underneath our feet and the sky that used to have a different kind of color too, and with a shitton maybe of whiskey and old music that sits in the soles of people’s feet. [Here’s a downloadable video of Abe reading from both books.] Here’s another:

This new second book, Hank, after Hank Williams, goes even further than that first one in just inventing and channeling this who the what where how did you say mode. These poems are longer and all titled not in english but in expletive deletion symbols, probably like the weird kind of coils that seem to come up when you hear someone talk like this. I can’t even pick excerpts from these ongoings because it feels like taking the finger off a hand.

Writing: the balancing act between self and other, solitude and engagement, me and world

Hello my little Giants.

I fell out of blog world for a second. A combination of personal turmoil, relocating to Pittsburgh for a month, and buckling down on my novel has left less room for reaching out to my fellow writers via the internet.

In Pittsburgh, I am doing a writer residency at a punk house. Isn’t that interesting? I think more people that own houses and have a little extra space should do DIY writer residencies. Here, they give you a room to live in for free for a month, and you produce something by the end of your stay. The room has a bed, a desk, clean sheets/blanket, and there is a grocery store just a few steps away. They also have a letterpress studio and the equipment to do perfect binding at the house, so they are always making beautiful DIY books and zines. I’ve only been here for a few days, but already I’ve been immensely productive, averaging about 3,000-3,500 words a day on my novel alone. My head feels clear. And one of my best friends from college lives here, which means I have enough socializing opportunities to feel engaged, satisfied and happy, but not enough to be terribly distracted. Virginia Woolf’s thing about having a room of one’s own is starting to seem true. But I still wonder, are such conditions ideal on a more permanent basis?

Here in Pittsburgh, I am thinking about the conditions under which people are able to write. When are you most productive? I am considering the following factors: free time, personal space, emotional stability, routine, environmental, etc. In Baltimore and Florida, I shared a room with my partner. Right now we are both dedicated artists that don’t have “real” jobs and just work on our projects all day. This is completely different from my life several months ago, when I worked 2 jobs while I was going to school full-time and working on my thesis. While my partner and I are living together, every day we continually have to negotiate how to spend our time, where to work, when and what to eat (who should cook), space (she works best listening to loud music, I can’t focus when loud music is playing), our emotional needs (I feel upset right now, will you put aside your work to talk to me?), sleeping schedules (I will often sneakily get up in the middle of the night to pound out several pages [if I have already taken my ambien, you get this]), etc etc. Rather than seeing this as “bad” for my work because I am quantitatively less productive, I see it as something that indirectly enriches my work because it forces me outside myself, makes me more expansive, forces me to learn how to balance self and other. Plus, we always have the opportunity to bounce ideas off of each other, and since we are hyper-engaged and thoughtful about things, we challenge and move each other in unforeseeable directions.

This balancing act brings me to the next issue I am trying to sort out in my mind. The question of living vs. writing.
READ MORE >

Craft Notes & I Like __ A Lot & Random / 13 Comments
October 9th, 2010 / 6:36 pm

Christopher Higgs

How To Reassert The Universe Of Magic

“There IS a responsibility to the audience,” he said. “We don’t want anything bad to happen to these kids–we don’t want to release anything we can’t handle.” We talked about magic and Aleister Crowley. Jimmy said that Crowley has been maligned as a black magician, whereas magic is neither white nor black, good nor bad–it is simply alive with what it is: the real thing, what people really feel and want and are. I pointed out that this “either/or” straitjacket had been imposed by Christianity when all magic became black magic; that scientists took over from the Church, and Western man has been stifled in a non-magical universe known as “the way things are.” Rock music can be seen as one attempt to break out of this dead soulless universe and reassert the universe of magic.

“Rock Magic: Jimmy Page, Led Zeppelin,
And a search for the elusive Stairway to Heaven”
by William Burroughs
Crawdaddy Magazine, June 1975