I’ve been reading a lot of Aeschylus lately, doing research, or something like that. Well, it started out as research, then, I got caught up in reading, as often happens. Then, I got caught up in how different translations can be.
Check this out. Here, I offer five translations of the same passage, each one equally lovely, each one equally amiss:
I don’t know if anyone else on this site is planning to write about my pressmate Kevin Sampsell’s new book–I hope someone is–but I feel like sharing some thoughts about it, so here goes. The main thing that strikes me is how effortless and propulsive the reading experience is. The package containing A Common Pornography (and a galley of Dennis Cooper’s Smothered in Hugs–it was like Christmas all over again!) arrived this afternoon around five, and yet, somehow, here it is a quarter after ten and I’m about three quarters through it. I read it sitting in my desk chair. I read it on the subway. I read it in the checkout line at Trader Joe’s. I read it on my couch. If I hadn’t put it down to write this blog post about it, I’d be reading it now.
Now, I know that Kevin is–like me–a Richard Brautigan fan, and I think there’s a very Brautigan-y energy at work in this book. Not a Brautigan tone, mind you–Kevin’s book isn’t emo or surrealistic–but here, as in a Brautigan, the chapters are very short, typically a page or two at most, and tend to be anchored by a single image or idea. The book doesn’t demand so much as suggest your attention–hey, you wanna hear a story? Sure. The subject matter (the author’s superlatively deranged upbringing) is sometimes dark (and/or gross) but Sampsell doesn’t plea for your sympathy, he doesn’t go for pointless shocks, and he doesn’t attempt some sort of showy “defiance” or “reclamation” or whatever. He’s just this guy remembering stuff that he did or that happened to him, or to people he knew, and sort of thinking about how it was all maybe a little weirder than he thought it was at the time. Some of it’s funny, and some of it’s touching, and some of it’s sad–and a lot of it is two or more of these things at once–but I think what it really succeeds at doing is creating an atmosphere that encompasses all of those states without forcing the reader to choose one, and that too for me is very Brautigan.
So anyway, that’s my first reaction to Kevin’s book. I’m excited to see him in February, because Harper has us scheduled to do a handful of events together–we’re doing a night in Boston (2/17) and then the following two nights in NYC, and hopefully I’ll be out to see him in Portland sometime later this spring. Want to know how we met? Okay, I’ll tell you the story. We met because right before I moved to Portland, Oregon from NYC in early ’05, I found a copy of Susannah Breslin’s You’re A Bad Man Aren’t You? which he had published through Future Tense, on the bookshelf at St. Mark’s. So I emailed him to say that I was moving to his town and we should get together. He was, I think, looking for an intern, and I know that I was looking for someone to publish the mess of short stories in my backpack. So we had lunch one day near Powell’s. There are a number of ways this meeting might have ended poorly, but instead what happened was I interviewed him for Bookslut, and we’ve been friends ever since. You can read that interview here. Fun interview fact: Kevin Sampsell was the first person I ever heard mention the following names–Sam Lipsyte, Gary Lutz, Gordon Lish, Diane Williams, Amy Hempel, Tao Lin. Not bad, right?
Pardon the sort of self-promotion but PANK is contributing all proceeds from all sales (between now and 2/13/10) of our chapbook, How to Take Yourself Apart by Aaron Burch, and PANK 4 to the Red Cross and Médecins Sans Frontières. If you want to acquire some great reading material and make a generous contribution to organizations who will put your money to good use in Haiti, consider participating. Order here. Both ship next week.
Small Press Distribution 2009 best seller fiction list released. Why not use this as a reading list for 2010?
If you’re in New York: The Rubin Museum on 17th st. screens David Lynch’s Blue Velvet tomorrow night, Friday 1/15, at 9:30 to accompany their awesome, ending-soon exhibit of The Red Book by Jung. Info here. I’ll be briefly introducing the film. There’s a Q & A about it @ The L Magazine here.
Terrific new Sixth Finch. Alabaster, abandoned Cadillacs, a big fat flying snooze, white as a long sleep, a horse snow-starred with blood, and that’s just the first few. Plus great visual art. Check it out!
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2Q7YRDL90E
or
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T0Ofr6VYMI
Who wins? READ MORE >
According to Firmuhment’s list of websites described as food, we are: “Good pea soup that the cooks took turns spitting in, garnished with dead flies.” I like. (Lots of other interesting erasures, destructors on here, including blackouts of Tara Reid, blurring of Gertrude Stein, so on.) (Thanks M. Rascher.)
Alyssa Carver, "fragment from Faulkner" - Brooklyn, New York
From the very first day that Eva Talmadge and I announced that we were putting together a photo-anthology of literary tattoos–in a post I made from Hong Kong to this blog, on 7/24/09–we have been overwhelmed and elated by the response. Photos have come in from all over the world, from all different kinds of people, each with their own reason for having chosen their line or lines or illustrations that pay homage to everything from Twain to Twilight, from Shakespeare to King’s Dark Tower, Plath, Dickinson to Salinger, Shel Silverstein, Dostoevsky, John Berryman, J.K. Rowling, T.S. Eliot, Mark Z. Danielewski, David Foster Wallace, Moby-Dick–I could go on (which reminds me: several fine Becketts already, including at least two versions of the line alluded to here). And yet, despite the sheer volume of amazing work we’ve received–and the fact that we had declared 12/31/09 the submission deadline–we are still looking for more. We’d love to hear from you anytime between now and, say, Valentine’s Day. But don’t delay, because after that it really will be over. We will turn the book in to our editor at Harper Perennial very soon after that date, and it will be on shelves this coming fall. Detailed guidelines are posted on the original call for submissions, but here is the most important thing: Please send clear digital images of the highest print quality possible as an attached file in jpeg format to tattoolit@gmail.com. Pixel resolutions should be at least 1500 x 2000, or a minimum 300 dpi at 5 inches wide. I can’t tell you how many people have sent us excellent ink in unusable formats or at too-low-for-print quality levels–this close to the deadline, there simply may not be time to wait for re-sends, even if we love the work. A million thanks to everyone who has shared their work with us thus far, and to everyone else–hope to hear from you soon.
Alec Bryan, "Dore's Ezekiel with Melville Banner" - Ogden, Uta
Dan Slessor, "text from Neuromancer" - Brighton, England
Baby Hedgehogs and American Apparel Dogs by David Fishkind is self-described as an “epic poetic narrative,” which is what it is — if one considers one’s life since conception (“I was nothing and then I was two and then I was one”) to the present to be “epic,” a word hopefully employed by the 19 year old with a little sarcasm. It’s easily readable and generous in its candidness. There is a trend of hyper-aware self-conscious writing among younger (I use this word as a description of age, not qualifier) writers which is either the last course of irony, or its propagation. There is a difference between the self-consciousness behind, say, Notes from the Underground and Fishkind’s, the former being a philosophical device, the latter more of a collection of tweets. I don’t say this in derision, only to suggest that our recent technologies (iPhone, myspace, youtube, etc.) have altered our orientation with “the self.” But that’s okay. Fishkind describes autobiographical prosaic experiences (getting erections, going to museums, being in love) with refreshing stoicism met with thoughtfulness: