3 Books I Recently Loved [Cardinale, Brodak, Demske]
The Size of the Universe by Joseph Cardinale [FC2] This is one of the most spiritual books I’ve read in a while, reconceiving memory and mourning and expectation and instance and the animal under god all in six semantically locked stories of beautifully rendered post-Beckettian sentencery: really really refreshing and powerful in a really moving way. Having read certain of these works in past issues of New York Tyrant, I had high expectations already for Cardinale’s full throttle, and even more so the work as a whole functions as a bigger unit, each portrait of ruptured emotion-memory and space fractal mapping kind of splintering and biting into the others, a shell of shells. Logic, faith, lost revelation, searching, repetition, lurching to change the body, histories: “She said as they grow older one eye moves to the other side and the skull twists after it.” A son and mother wait for the reappearance of a water-walking figure they can only assume is god coming across the face of a drowned city; a man enrolls in astronomy classes after the death of his wife in search of sense from math and madness; a child hides in a tree from his sister and stumbles and disrupts space-time. In Cardinale’s pacing, soothe-speak voice portraits of what could seem mass-histrionic, terrifying are somehow dream-made and real once, touching a space that touches back. “And yet if we all joined together to make a living animal out of nothing we would eventually give up.”
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A Little Middle of the Night by Molly Brodak [University of Iowa] The image on the front of this book resembles two things, at least: first, perhaps, a ridiculously fat white gravelly tree rising from a mottled puddle up to a eggy mountain fog that caps the sky; and or second, perhaps, a mushroom cloud explosion placed casually among a landscape of bottlebrush trees, the destruction contained to something like a summit where the apex of the hurt casually, menacingly gathers. I don’t know where the image came from, or how intently it was aimed at the book, but the description of it in my head is more the poems than the image really; the images here, the ideas in them, contain at once a calm air of remove and something of great lurking, a color underneath a ledge. “Once I / woke up laughing. / Saw the limbs of the pine / row and paw. / I heard bells, split geologic. / Did anyone take a photo of me / while I was in the coma? / Why no.” There seems a brain wanting damage and not getting it fully, or not the right way, here in the midst, something joking with its sores, not impressed by lighthouses but still inside them. Ideas snatches from out of old books and placed in between what happens on a paper table or “where my power creeps out.” It’s creeping out all over the place. It’s a milk bath.
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Nick Demske by Nick Demske [Fence Books] I got excited about the results of 2010’s Fence Modern Poets Series contest immediately when I knew that Joyelle McSweeney was the deciding judge; that meant the book was going to bat its face at some shit, make new words, be wild in the eyes and knees and chestmeat, give me something to laugh at in the black parts, go whoa a lot, read while standing up, get slurred the fuck up. Indeed, Nick Demske’s Nick Demske is a mashup city of where am I’s, and who is tickling my other body? “I reinvent the solar / Powered flash light every night. I malfunct / Ion like an elapsed R&B singer’s wardrobe.” Demske freaks words apart, gets nasty a lot, says things you might imagine muttered on gas or syrup. You just want to quote and quote it. “I’m going to buttfuck / you in the mouth. I know where you live.” or “God is a virgin, / Which explains a lot. God is a Christian, / Initiating full-blown AIDS like foreplay.” I mean I’d take this thing to the White House and sneak in the back with some candy and a big torch if being rad wasn’t illegal. Just as fast, too, the getting fucked gets fucked and goes back to real hell logic, real you-can’t-do-this-in-comedyland: “I like banjos. I like / It’ll grow back. You are the first black / Person I have ever met in real life. This / Alcove a strobe so ablaze with resplendence / The sun itself cast doth a shadow! O my nasty God. / Votive pyromania. You people.” Yeah, buy this motherfucker and get busy eating a big one.
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December 21st, 2010 / 10:54 pm
December 21st, 2010 / 10:54 pm
Fantagraphics to the Rescue
Stephen Dixon, in a new interview with Sean P. Carroll at Bookslut, says:
Fantagraphics became involved because Melville House, the publisher of three of my novels, didn’t want to bring out the three collections in one book. They thought it would be too expensive and a losing proposition. I thought the collections would generate no interest if published one at a time. That publishing 62 stories, never in book form and all rewritten, except for the unfinished ones still in manuscript form, which I finished for the collection, would be interesting and unusual if not unique as a body of work.
This is not the first time the people at Fantagraphics have proved themselves to be heroes of literature. Their catalog includes Joe Sacco’s Palestine, the Hernandez Brothers’ Complete Love and Rockets Library, Daniel Clowes’s Ghost World, R. Crumb’s The Book of Mr. Natural, and Chris Ware’s ACME Novelty Library. New releases in 2011 include Usagi Yojimbo: The Special Edition, Dave Cooper’s Bent (with an introduction by Guillermo del Toro), and David B.’s The Littlest Pirate King. You can find out more about all this goodness at http://www.fantagraphics.com/.
“Christmas carried a switchblade, usually in his boot”
Frank Hinton has put together Metazen’s second ever Metazen Christmas E-Book. Full of weird Christmas stories from the weirdest and cuddliest, you can read this e-book on Christmas Day by making a small donation of your choice. Last year, Metazen’s Christmas e-book raised a few hundred dollars for an orphanage in Cambodia, and this year all donations will go to help micro-finance a small business through Kiva.
I’ve had the chance to read an advance version of the e-book, and it’s full of lovely, surprising work, everything from hydraulic orgasms to squirrel pie to crossbows to the real headaches of having your true love gift you a bunch of crazy shit. Definitely not your typical Christmas cheese, and definitely a worthy cause. Check it out.
{LMC}: Considering The Collagist as Collage
I decided to take a look at The Collagist as a whole—or, rather, a whole created by the sum of its parts, the magazine as collage that lives so smartly up to its name. It’s true that perhaps any literary magazine could be considered a sort of collage, as it layers story and poem and visual and sometimes sound to produce a bigger picture. And yet not many literary magazines choose their pieces with the consideration a collagist uses to cut out his shapes, to determine the colors of the paints she’ll layer. The Collagist is one of my favorite literary magazines because the choosing is intentional, is meticulous, is precise. The chosen few pieces generate an intentionally tight edit. The name of the magazine, I’d guess, was not chosen on a whim, but as a sort of statement of purpose. The Collagist’s contents are widely varied in style and substance but are not random; like the best collagists, I believe editor Matt Bell uses every story, every review, every poem and excerpt and reprint and even the bios as a layer to build, to create something greater than the pieces themselves. The magazine as the work of art.
Many of my favorite artists worked with collage at some point. Georges Braque, Robert Motherwell, Jim Dine, Robert Rauschenberg, Louise Nevelson, Marcel Duchamp—they all created work that was layered, that intensified as it grew and spread and collected and fragmented and shifted meaning from piece to piece and space to space. With wood, with paint, with newspaper, with found objects, with paper, with photos—and in the case of The Collagist, with words. Like collage artworks, each issue of The Collagist seems to swell and grow, the consequence of addition. The thread running through is not a theme per se, but a meaning you build yourself. A customizable puzzle. Deliberate yet obscure, fuzzy as close-up pixels in its larger clarity.
RIP Jean Rollin (1938-2010)
French filmmaker and novelist Jean Rollin — known for his erotic, gothic horror films — passed away on Wednesday. Rollin was an auteur who described his work as “fantastique.” I’m not that big of a fan of 70s Eurosleaze, but I like the films that I’ve seen by Rollin. Above is an untranslated trailer from Night of the Hunted, which is one his “art” films (and one of my fav Rollin films; reminds me a little of Alain Robbe-Grillet).
Books for Christmas?
The kid in this video (via Harriet) feels like I do. Unless it’s htmlgiant’s Secret Santa thing, don’t ever give books for Christmas.
The wtf-est book I ever received was Kurt Warner’s bio. What gives, Pop?
Blake Butler—
Are there any books you really wish you hadn’t read, and not necessarily because you thought they were bad, but because they altered or opened or predicted or made bad practice or negated something in you in a way you maybe wish you could go back from or forget?
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