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Adam Robinson—

Don’t forget to win the original Light Boxes b/w the new Penguin one. Buy an indie book and send the receipt to lightboxescontest@gmail.com. Longer post saying the same thing here.

Blake Butler

My Mother is the Father of the List: An Interview with Joshua Cohen

This month saw the release of Joshua Cohen‘s latest novel Witz, an 824 page monster of language from Dalkey Archive. The book focuses on the occasion of the plague-death of all the world’s Jews, save one, Benjamin Israelien, who in his newfound cultural superstardom becomes an object of replication, then becomes the hunted. Beyond the plot, Witz is enormously powerful for its invention, its sound, its complex rhythms. Each paragraph and sentence alone is an orchestral thing, which in the larger context, and in the locomotion of the brutal, beautiful and often hilarious plot’s rising, becomes easily one of the more courageous and stunning outfits in the last at least dozen years of publishing.

Last week or so I spent a few days emailing back and forth with Joshua about the book, his process and influences, faith, language, and the like.

This is a mess

Ever feel like this?

Like most writers, I have this knack for suffering, for being a complete mess. Maybe this is disclosing too much about myself, but I’ve had this conception that to be a writer—an artist—means that I have to suffer, that happiness somehow inauthenticates my “work.” Even though I know this is a myth, I fall for it every time. I’m a fool like that.

Nicelle Davis Poem

(click to enlarge)

Poem text first appeared in an e-chap published by Gold Wake Press.

Nicelle Davis lives in Southern California with her son J.J. Her poems are forthcoming in, Mosaic, The New York Quarterly, Two Review, and others. She’d like to acknowledge her poetry family at the University of California, Riverside and Antelope Valley Community College. She runs a free online poetry workshop at: http://nicelledavis.wordpress.com/.

Ken Baumann—

Bookkake – has anyone read The Torture Garden?

Ken Baumann

The Most Energy

This means starting with a very simple definition of the avant-garde. I stole it from Fairfield Porter, the great midcentury painter and critic, who said the avant-garde was always just the people with the most energy.

…

The scene seemed wild, but there were simple rules all along. You were given a white room in a Big Art City for a month. You had to do something in that room to generate attention beyond that month. You had to be written about, bought, or at least widely discussed. Then you would get to have the white room again for another month, and so on. If you did this enough, you had what was called a career. This generated what is perhaps this century’s biggest art movement: careerism.

…

A practical avant-garde is post-careerist. It seeks out low rent and private time, and it concentrates on powerful objects.

…

All of this means that the practical avant-garde has a lot of work to do. It knows that manifesto is the weakest genre and that promises are irrelevant, so it will use words but not hide behind them.

Read the rest.

Craft Notes / 10 Comments
May 23rd, 2010 / 3:48 pm

Christopher Higgs

For those of you who like books that kick ass through language, let me recommend Nightwood by Djuna Barnes (published in 1937)

The perfume her body exhaled was of the quality of that earth-flesh, fungi, which smells of captured dampness and yet is so dry, overcast with the odor of oil of amber, which is an inner malady of the sea, making her seem as if she had invaded a sleep incautious and entire. Her flesh was the texture of plant life, and beneath it one sensed a frame, broad, porous and sleep-worn, as if sleep were a decay fishing her beneath the visible surface. About her head there was an effulgence as of phosphorous glowing about the circumference of a body of water—as if her life lay through her in ungainly luminous deteriorations—the troubling structure of the born somnambule, who lives in two worlds—meet of child and desperado. (pgs. 34-35)

Better get you a copy

Excerpts / 9 Comments
May 23rd, 2010 / 2:30 pm

Blake Butler

Muthafucka 2

120 pages. 100 copies. $10. Poems by Alice Notley, Dot Devota, Phil Cordelli, Norma Cole, Quinn Latimer, Matthew Klane, Hoa Nguyen, Lucas Farrell, Lisa Lightsey, Lewis Warsh, Ron Horning, Caitie Moore, Thom Donovan, Trey Sager, Brenda Iijima, Youna Kwak, Karena Youtz and Etel Adnan. Translations of Angel Escobar (by Kristin Dykstra), Mohammed Khair-Eddine (by Pierre Joris), Kazuko Shiraishi (by Tomoyuki Endo and Forrest Gander), Michel Deguy (by Wilson Baldridge) and Amelia Rosselli (by Vanja Skoric Dewan and Deborah Woodard). A drum score by John Niekrasz. Collages by Sarah Lariviere. A two-channel installation by Anthony Hawley. Cover art by Sam King. Edited by Mitch Taylor. Side-stapled with two-layer transparency/cardstock cover. Available here.