Brian Dettmer’s Altered Books
Brian Dettmer, "Key Monuments #4," Altered Book (2009)
I really enjoy Brian Dettmer‘s altered books, in which cut-out negative spaces inside books are layered together in their original binding to create, or more accurately, excavate, hidden visual and physical worlds. Gladly, the postmodern reflex of facetious appropriation is not the fancy here, but rather, a austere “classical” sense of intricate sculptural negation which brings to mind Michelangelo’s La Pietà or David, whose manifestation were through an aggregate of chronic and gentle subtractive layers. This idea of god or man buried under marble is similar to the newly discovered compositions buried, incidentally or arbitrarily, between the pages of encyclopedias and historical books. Put simply, the truth is in there. To see more, visit his flickr or website.
KILL KILL KILL
hi it's me
I had an interesting morning. Early this morning I sat down at my computer to write and realized that my computer had eaten, or I had deleted, ten pages that I wrote yesterday.
Stage Fright
Here’s a serious question. I’m 32. I’ve been reading here and there for a few years now. When I was young I had bad, migraine-inducing stage fright. But recently I’ve been fine. I’ve read in front of hundreds of folks without an iota of sweaty palmage or trilling voice. Then, today, I read in front of 10, maybe 15, people, and I was quaking in my boots. You could freaking see me shaking. AND, I wasn’t even reading my own poetry, rather some of my favorite poems by Yusef Komunyakaa.
So, what gives?
I wasn’t intellectually nervous, but my body at that moment said, fuck you. Why? Do any of you have stage fright moments or tips to share?
Back Flash: Margaret Atwood
–like she’s pretending to write a story but really examining plot, the art, the control, all that writer shit. It’s like a trick and a lesion.
–Yes, I know. But it’s a book I’m saying, not just that story.
–Well, people only know that plot story. It’s a trick, you know, meta, but a legion, sort of supposed to teach you—like with Buddha, a Kola. You could use it in class plenty.
–You mean a Koan.
–Yeh, a colon. A story not about the story. Sharp as a cat’s eye. Lorrie Moore did it and then Grace Paley, too.
–No, no, you’re off-focus. Forget the plot picking. I’m saying it’s a book. Atwood did a whole flash book. It goes out of print because so many people think flash fiction is the lining of a diseased lung. Well, it was coughed up and won the Booker. I don’t know how these things work.
–You mean Fletch?
–No, no, phlegm, not Fletch. Just read the book, if you can find it.
SAMPSELL WEEK (3): A READING @ A READING (PART DEUX)
There’s a little girl sitting in the children’s section of Skylight Books reading a picture book; she looks about six or seven. (Too old to be reading a picture book. What the fuck? I was reading Bunnicula by that age.) I’m sitting in the back of the audience, so I can see into that section of the bookstore. Kevin Sampsell, who is reading from A Common Pornography, can’t. He doesn’t know that the little kid is listening to him read about the time he had manual sex with a stranger in the back of a porn shop.
Kevin Sampsell corrupting small child (courtesy Sabra Embury)
Threefer
The Rumpus has a long interview with Paula Fox.
Okay, this one’s actually two, but I stole them both from Bookslut, and “fourfer” sounds stupid. Therefore, (2a) everybody’s homeboy (that is, Bookslut’s and ours) Michael Schaub is interviewed at Willamette Week. (2b) Anarchist news dot org has an interview with Eric Hazan of La Fabrique, the French publisher of The Coming Insurrection, which I have read a lot about and plan to own by the end of the day today.
Question: What is the reason for the resurrection of the communist idea?
Eric Hazan: People feel that there is no longer a choice between the Right and the Left, but between ways of getting out of capitalism. That’s the key question. If it remains in the domain of ideas, one can only go round in circles. For me, thinking about communism isn’t heading towards a political organization, but towards practical reflections.
And finally, the other day I was trilling about having finally received my copy of The Axioms of Religion in the mail. What I did not understand was that the 1977 edition, attributed to Hobbes and Mullins, is not in fact Mullins’s original work as edited by Hobbes, but is rather a wholesale revision by Hobbes of the original work. As such, he rightly credits himself as the primary author, and it’s not clear where and to what extent he is quoting or paraphrasing Mullins, whose writing is the actual locus of my interest. Also, after reading the intro and the first chapter, it’s clear to me that Hobbes is an incredibly annoying–though basically well-meaning, and only unintentionally racist– propagandist for his own weird notion of the Baptist cause. His edition, published during the (brief) heyday of the Carter administration, is basically designed as a primer to introduce the Baptist faith to a general American audience that, at the time, apparently needed a documentary special to explain what it was to be “born again” after Carter declared himself so. What a difference a generation makes! Yikes. Anyway, I want to read the real, original Axioms of Religion by E.Y. Mullins, which has apparently been out of print since 1908. HELLO INTERNET ARCHIVE. THANK YOU PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY. I recommend the B&W pdf version, which is easier to load than the full-color one, and all you really lose is the yellowness of the scanned pages. Very, very excited to start reading this. Soul competency, here I come!
PS- As long as we’re all careening toward some weird conversionary episode, Mathias Svalina and I were talking the other day about Xian-era Bob Dylan. I was talking about listening somewhat obsessively to Shot of Love but he said the real action is on Saved. They’re both pretty amazing records. Have you ever seen the original cover art for Saved? It’s so hardcore that they actually switched it out after the first edition of the album, for this kind of crappy picture of BD playing live. But I still think Shot of Love would make a better poster.
Kevin Sampsell Week (3): A Reading at A Reading
Kevin Sampsell: Small Press Champion. That’s the title on his business card. Kevin works with Powell’s. The title on the card doesn’t lie: Future Tense, Kevin’s own small press, is vibrant and energetically handled; at the beginning of the reading I caught Kevin talking about his catalogue with a Skylight employee. Oh: Skylight Books, 7:30 on the 9th. That’s when & where Nick, me, Sabra & Ned met Kevin, and first heard him read from A Common Pornography.
I sat down. Kevin set up his laptop, he had said something about a slideshow. And he started: not having read ACP yet, I was impressed and warmed by the calmness instilled by the text, and Kevin’s performance. He gave equal weight to each line, each section–death, masturbation, house fire, girlfriends and ‘real girlfriends’–all was given its due. It’s as if Kevin had managed to pull up & present to you not the best or the worst moments of his recollected life, but the most poignant. And somehow he achieves a soothing equilibrium; I laughed a lot. The sentences, his delivery: all intoned with grace. That’s what Kevin Sampsell is: graceful.
The slideshow contained mostly happy but all weird-in-that-old-polaroid-way captures. His family was shown, and shown again. His old girlfriend. Yearbook photos. Kevin had really broad shoulders when he was ~12. Immediately intimidated.
Afterwards he invited Nick & I, with a few others, to join him for dinner. Dinner was a long table laid full of bread at an Indian restaurant. I sat kind of far away from Kevin; near the end of the meal he came over and sat, wanted to talk. Again: graceful. The night wrapped up late, we parted, not before Kevin & his fiancee invited me to Portland and Kevin gave me free books.
Hmm. Hard to wrap this up because it was all so damned nice. KS, his friends, his future wife, the reading… Oh: I’ll end with this. A friend promised to send me a DVD filled with Kevin’s old slam poetry performances. Kevin Sampsell Video Day, coming soon. :)
p.s. I’ll take Egon and smile. (see Nick’s post)
Joshua Cohen + The Cupboard = Must Have
Bridge & Tunnel (& Tunnel & Bridge)
by Joshua Cohen
66 pages. Tape-bound
$5.00 (Just released — order here!!!)
A man performs the role of the Sun in a bit of modern choregraphy, and a young ballerina ruins a dinner party with one violent sneeze. A painter paints paintings of walls and hires a painter to paint onto a wall. Some lifestories get rejected. Some stalkers get stalked. Here, for you: twelve stories, to be read as they were written—on the bridge, in the tunnel, in the bus, on the train.
Here’s an excerpt:
from Bridge & Tunnel (& Tunnel & Bridge)
“WHEN WE STOPPED SAYING WE WERE GOING TO MOVE OUT OF THE CITY”When we stopped saying we were going to move out of the city, we had:
nothing to talk about at parties, nothing to talk about on the train, nothing to talk about to my aunt, nothing to talk about to her parents, nothing to talk about over pizza, nothing to talk about over good but insufferable sushi, nothing to talk about on the corner of Canal Street & Centre, nothing to talk about at jury duty, nothing to talk about in the bathroom at the theater before a movie began. When the bun place closed. The midnight movie theater in Midtown. When there was nothing to do in Midtown. No point to go. When the deli that pastramitized its own meats shut down, too. I really liked that bun place. When we stopped saying we were going to move out of the city, we became more bearable (we had to be). But, speaking just for me, more depressed.
Worlds Collide!!!! aka “Justin Taylor is Cool”
You know what I love? Waking up to a Google alert that has a story in it called “Justin Taylor is Cool.” Who wouldn’t love that? So imagine my surprise when I clicked through and wound up at something called the Reformation21 blog. It’s a post about me and my doppelganger, Justin Taylor of Crossway Books, a preacher from Wheaton, Ill about whom I’ve blogged many times, and whose awareness of my existence I’ve frequently been given to speculate about. Well it seems all but certain that he knows about me now, and furthermore, this post by Stephen Nichols seems to make clear once and for all that he is not my doppelganger, but rather that I am his. Since it’s a short post it is reproduced in full, but you might as well see Ref21 for yourself.
So here I am thumbing through my latest copy of Paste catching up on the latest Indie and post funk metal ska offerings and there it is:
“Justin Taylor’s first short story collection” . . . “artfully captur[ing] the view of the 2000s.” Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever–great title, despite being riddled with theological problems.
Apparently our Justin, “Editorial Director at Crossway and follower of Christ” by day, is a Brooklyn-living professor of writing at Rutgers on the side.
I knew someday being Justin’s friend would raise my HQ (hip quotient for those not in the know).
Stephen, if you’re reading this- thanks for the shout! And yes, EHITBTE presents something of a theological problem–hardly beside the point, btw. You might think about it as an intentional release of the self-destructive powers of the exponential and the recursive onto Leibniz’s notion that “all is for the best in the best of all possible wolds.” Not that that solves anything- but solving problems is your homeboy’s line of work. Mine is causing them. Seems like we’ll work together splendidly. And Justin, if you’re out there, pleased to meet your acquaintance! I’m really sorry I keep putting out books that have titles that sound like they could be your books- The Apocalypse Reader, and the (forthcoming novel, provisionally entitled) The Gospel of Anarchy. We have things in common! I love GK Chesterton! And Kierkegaard! And I just got my copy of The Axioms of Religion by Hobbes and Mullins in the mail today and am very excited to read it. Let me know if you ever want to chat about the history of American Baptist thought and sectarianism.
Barry Hicks, Bill Hannah
P.S. If this actually ever happens, I’m getting out a gun, Hannah-style.
P.P.S. Here’s Barry editing himself.