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May 2010

Nick Antosca—

Resolved: Sex and the City 2: Leathery Monsters is the ne plus ultra in Al Qaeda recruitment propaganda.

3 Books I Loved Recently

1. Families Are Formed Through Copulation by Jacob Wren

Self styled as “a book designed to convince the reader not to have children,” this is a beautiful collage of dialogue, tract, ideas, parables, monolgues, and the like from Canadian director, writer, and filmmaker Wren. Like all the books Pedlar Press has released that I’ve read (notably Ken Sparling), this book is singular for its sound and mannerisms: there is no other object you could want to have like it. It is it. And it sticks. The book worries over its sales rank on Amazon, mourns dead music, contains telephone correspondence with lost relatives, mourns more: “Some days there are a few things to do and those days are a little bit better than the others. Every once in a while I faintly remember just how ambitious I used to be.” And yet the sum is not morbid, more than a true haunt, a neon-colored wow box, a fun and frightening object of tricks and mannequin talk. Highly recommended.

2. The Morning News is Exciting by Don Mee Choi

Like every new Action Books title, I clamored for this until I had it, and rubbed it on my face. I read the book while on a stationary bike, it took me 343 calories of riding. There are a variety of voices crammed exquisitely into one mouth here, some in translation, in mourning, some snagged, many mothers, ecstatic or hammered. The trouble speech together, and in calmer moments selved, all seemed to me in the gym room in a circuit of what seems to be a lid of skin between making a child and a child leaving the body to walk in humans, bodies on bodies for continents under confluences of Nation, methods of moving among and through and around it, gross and wet and big and small. “No one is alarmed. After the experiment, I wipe. Mother has mishandled meat again. Bitch. The door has to be wiped again.” It, like the above, contains a variety of forms, letters, collages, quiet, instructions, news, diarists, fear bleat. If you like bodies and being in pretend burn trauma, you’re gonna go bajoinkers for this. I did, and had the sweat all over me.

3. Souls of the Labadie Tract by Susan Howe

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May 26th, 2010 / 10:20 am

Ken Baumann

I was the one who was called to make it: an interview with Luca Dipierro

Luca makes films, makes paintings, makes stories. He recently moved from New York to North Carolina, where he has become a visual artist full time. We talk about this recent decision, the relationship of art & commerce, art as work, and what is beautiful/not pure.

KB: So, what I’m immediately curious about is your thought process before you moved to North Carolina and decided to make art your primary business. Was there a definite moment in which you decided this?

Light Boxes Redux

I reviewed Light Boxes back in February, 2009. In honor of the official US release day of the Penguin presentation, here are those words, slightly altered and here again:

I feel it’s hard today to find a work of art that is earnest, that is compassionate. (Michael Kimball’s Dear Everybody comes to mind). I was startled by Shane Jones’s novel because it is so painfully both; it bleeds itself, and bleeds for others.

Light Boxes is a story about a community, about a man’s quest to rid his community of February, a bitter and long spell of cold that haunts the the town and its people. I don’t want to speak explicitly of the ‘narrative’ here, only because I think there is magic in discovery; it’s a sensual work. Many of the images affected me viscerally, and will stay with me for a long time. Dead bees pour from the sky, a broken father sits in the middle of a snow-covered street, a body surfaces in a river covered in text… I could list all the beautiful and often tragic images contained within for awhile.

To go deeper: The people in Light Boxes breathe true. I felt them living and felt them dying. They seem warm, hot & cold all at once, much like the seasons that surround them. The story also functions on a level outside its own prison, outside the printed page, but, again: I’d like to keep quiet. I’d like you to discover the layers and try to keep warm yourself.

Shane has crafted a fine myth, one I hope lasts for a very long time.

Buy and read Light Boxes.

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May 25th, 2010 / 10:06 pm

Sean Lovelace

Phantoms by Chad Simpson

It would be convenient to fly. But I can’t fly, so I read drugs and do books and wobble my way along.

Phantoms (Origami Zoo Press) is a drug. It is belly habit/super flu of 9 flash fictions. Chad Simpson ignites them tight.

The book came to me in the mail with my Bodog magazine (this a gambler’s rag with a blacked-out cover so pretty much the mailman thinks I am a pervert) and with two origami rabbits. They were cute. I didn’t know what to do with them, so set them free, atop the roof of my shed. There they crumple now, somewhere in time and space, out of most vision, out of eye, primarily in the mind.

The first flash is “Miracle.” A man is run-down by his own car. Primarily in the mind. Chad Simpson writes, “And I will imagine…I will imagine…I will imagine…” It is a collection/recollection. It ricochets internal monologue off objective scene (often primo way to present drama/calamity; I actually wish more writers would learn that sex/guns/thunk are often best written with a neutral eye). Image to notion, notion to image–dreamlike.

The Five Stages of Zack de la Rocha

THE FIVE STAGES OF ZACK DE LA ROCHA

1. Denial that the washing machine is being used.

2. Rage against the machine, but mostly at his roommate who waits do to seven loads of laundry at once.

3. Bargaining with roommate for temporary use of the machine, and also who’s turn it is to clean the bathroom.

4. Depression over the fact that he’s 40 years old and still lives with a roommate (that and Capitalism).

5. Acceptance that he will not be doing any laundry, and that he has a Ph.D. in Anthropology.