6 Books: Kevin Sampsell on Nonfiction
This is Part II of a series where I ask writers I like for 6 book recommendations according to some loose guideline. Part I is here. This week, Kevin Sampsell, editor of Future Tense Books out of Portland, Oregon, doyen of Powell’s Books, and author of the wildly excellent memoir, A Common Pornography (Harper Perennial). To give you an idea of the goodness of Kevin’s book, I’ll confess that the first copy I had didn’t make it through my ravenous reading of it and I had to switch to another.
I asked Kevin to recommend 6 nonfiction books, old or new. He obliged, and then some:
Black Box: Cockpit Voice Recorder Accounts of In-Flight Accidents by Malcolm MacPherson
I’m fascinated with this book and the way these transcripts reflect the collected calm of airplane pilots and then their sudden confusion, panic, and tragedy. An eerie and morose reading experience.
I Remember by Joe Brainard
Whenever I go talk to a writing class about memoir, I always point out this book and read a little from it. Then I have the class write a few of their own “I Remembers.” It’s such a non-threatening and easy way to access parts of your life that you think are uninteresting and trivial, but turn out to be engaging and universal.
Time Out of Mind by Leonard Michaels
Besides his fiction and his essays, this book is a bit of an oddity because it’s more like disjointed journal entries. It took me a few pages to lock into Michaels’s groove, but once I did, this book turned into a thing of uncut beauty. I would have to say that Leonard Michaels is the author I’ve been most obsessed with for the past year since I read his novel, The Men’s Club.
Oedipus Wrecked by Kevin Keck
This book is so dirty and hilarious, but also sweetly heartfelt. For fans of Jonathan Ames and other straight-faced pervs.
When art and life mix?
Townspeople at a reading
I’ve been doing some readings lately for my new book. I’ve read at colleges, in the community, at art centers. I’ve sold a lot of books at these readings. I’ve watched people smile and cry at these readings. Sometimes people laugh at the right times, sometimes they laugh at the wrong times. Always, people seem to be hearing me. Except for the one deaf guy who told me I read too fast. People buy books for themselves, for their daughters, for their childhood best friends.
Poets talk a lot about how poetry is dead to mainstream culture. Nobody wants poems anymore. Well, I’m beginning to wonder about that. Have we, the poets, created an insular world for ourselves because we’re insecure about our words? Is it safer to keep ourselves sequestered in the academy–or even on the internet where we know the audience who reads our work will respond in a way familiar to us? Is it frightening to think that we might write something not quite as erudite as we imagined?
We Are Dead Unless We Do Something – a conversation between Brandon Shimoda and Matthew Henriksen
Matt Henriksen is the author of Ordinary Sun. Brandon Shimoda is the author of The Girl Without Arms. Both books are available now from Black Ocean. Both authors are currently on tour.
Adam Robinson recently had some good things to say about Matt Henriksen’s book, finding its poetic attempts at translating the incommunicable both frustrating, yet filled with meaning. As Johannes Goransson wrote at Montevidayo, “The ‘difficulty’ of Henrikson’s poetry is not about access but the experience it aims to put the reader/writer through.” So I invited Matt & Brandon to interview each other, to further collide those ideas of frustration and experience, and the poetry that comes out of it. What takes place amounts to late night cross-country trek talk, hallucinatory and winding, filled with shunned understanding and been-through truth. Enjoy.
My mom live-texted the James Frey Oprah Interview
5:01 PM: Oprah interviews James Frey again
5:20 PM: James Frey is such a whiner!
5:23 PM: Although he’s got a little contrite going on now.
5:28 PM: Nope. Whining again.
5:35 PM: Uh oh. He has nothing good to say about memoirists.
5:36 PM: He’s whining again. What’s for supper?
5:58 PM: Oh my! She’s doing a part two of this interview tomorrow! Wow.
Mike Young—
“We need critics who set impatient standards, ask uncomfortable questions, and maintain an omnivorous appetite for the unfamiliar, the awkward, the angry, the untoward. Instead, we have a gated community, a velvet-roped garden party, a Brooklyn vs. Cambridge fantasy baseball league. We don’t need critics obsessed with the real, or with whether the novel is alive or dead. We need critics willing to look at the novels that are already out there, going about their business, quietly making the future of literature, whether “we” like it or not.” — from Jess Row’s provocative and expansive “The Novel is Not Dead” in the Boston Review, which has so far scored a Benjamin Kunkel self-defense in the comments; so, you know, bombs away.
45
Random Live Reading of Recent Books I Like #5
Shit be over but I read from a bunch of books:
Everyone Loves You When You’re Dead by Neil Strauss [It Books]
Cop Kisser by Steven Zultanski [Bookthug]
Entrance to a colonial pageant… by Johannes Göransson [Tarpaulin Sky]
“CEOs” from No Colony 003 by Krammer Abrahams
Today and Tomorrow by Ofelia Hunt [Magic Helicopter]
The Angel in the Dream of Our Hangover by Mark Leidner [Sator Press]
Someday This Will Be Funny by Lynne Tillman [Cursor]
The Buddhist by Dodie Bellamy [Publication Studio]
The Marbled Swarm by Dennis Cooper [Harper Perennial]
Girl Without Arms by Brandon Shimoda [Black Ocean]
Then Reynard challenged me to read all of Vanessa Place’s Dies: A Sentence, so I did. It took five hours. Reynard left in the middle.
The pink “Sugapuelffuns” in the room
Mr. Snuffleupagus was my favorite character on Sesame Street. When I was a kid my parents bought me the whole series on VHS (up to that point) so I watched it all the way through. Because of this I saw the saga of Snuffleupagus play itself out.
I love to tell people about my theory of Sesame Street (actually I stole it from Slacker but whatevs) which is that the characters are all the sorts of miscreants one might encounter on the streets of a city: Oscar is a junkie; Cookie Monster’s a crackhead; Elmo is a speed freak; Bert and Ernie are gay; etc. But when I get to the part about how Big Bird is on acid and that one of the proofs was his imaginary friend Snuffleupagus, people are like what?
What these people forget or don’t know, is that for years Big Bird was the only one who saw Snuffleupagus. He would have conversations with Snuffy, sometimes musing with existentialism, but by the time Big Bird could get adults to come and see for themselves, this amazing creature had vanished into thin air.
It’s Weird That People Think That That’s Weird: An Interview with Jamie Iredell
Earlier this year saw the release of Jamie Iredell’s second book, The Book of Freaks, from Future Tense Press, on the heels of his much beloved Prose: Poetry, A Novel. Essentially an encyclopedia-style catalog of human oddities and the author’s wild ruminations on everything from Russians to People Named Spencer and Their Wives, the whole assemblage works as a collage you can dip in and out of with immediate pleasure, but also manages to construct among its pieces a hybrid narrative that is truly singularly Iredellian. Over the past several weeks, Jamie was kind enough to take some time to talk about some of the manners of the book with me via email.
– – –
BB: Having published your first book that was largely autobiographical, but in some ways also a book full of freaks, how did you end beginning work on an actual, encyclopedia-styled Book of Freaks?
JI: I don’t know. I didn’t really think about it at all, in that I wasn’t thinking “I’m writing a book.” I was just writing shit mostly in the Notes App on my iPhone. Basically talking shit. When I thought something was funny or fucked or whatever, I’d write about it, and then in rewriting I’d make it better. Eventually I saw themes developing. I caught a bunch of these A&E shows about obese people, or folks with other debilitating conditions, like this woman with one part of her body (legs) growing out of control her entire life, so her legs were all fucked up huge while the rest of her was normal. Then I figured, if there’s something interesting about those people then there’s something equally interesting about Mexicans, or people who purposely style their hair into fauxhawks.
Gigantic Issue #3 Launch
New York City’s consistently innovative print/online journal Gigantic is launching its third issue (Gigantic Indoors) in Brooklyn on Friday 8-4:30 AM. Beer’d by Brooklyn Brewery, “live performance and installation by Newvillager,” and on the Williamsburg Waterfront (!)–all the trappings of a Williamsburg soiree (what my parents used to call a “function” or “gala”) without the constant discomfort and guilt. “Our people” don’t often throw such massive events on this side of the borough, so take advantage, please. Readers include: Chloe Cooper Jones, Joshua Cohen, Lauren Spohrer and John Dermot Woods. Admission is free for subscribers, and $10 for non-subscribers. Please RSVP here, on the Facebook. Attractive people will not receive free admission simply because they are attractive, easing the resentment that their less attractive friends already feel toward them.
