Some Notes on Deformation Zone: On Translation, a Chapbook by Johannes Goransson and Joyelle McSweeney
Deformation Zone: On Translation is the latest installment in Ugly Duckling Presse’s Dossier Series, which is edited by Anna Moschovakis, and which has already distinguished itself as one of the more adventuresome and aesthetically exciting projects in American publishing. (Other titles in the series include Christian Hawkey’s Ventrakl, Jon Cotner’s and Andy Fitch’s Ten Walks/Two Talks, and Laura Nash’s Brownfields.)
Deformation Zone might also be considered the latest installment in the intertwined multi-platform and multi-genre project that the careers of Joyelle McSweeney and Johannes Goransson have become. Both writers seem to have long ago eschewed any of the preexisting boxes into which literary artists typically confine themselves. Their work routinely crosses the borders that perhaps artificially have separated the practice of poetry, fiction, the personal essay, the scholarly essay, the Internet post, the stage play, the translation READ MORE >
FREE BOOKS SUNDAY
I am drowning in books. I want these books to be read. If you are interested in any of these titles, I will send them to you (one per person). If you write a review of the book, I will publish it on the PANK blog. Some of these have been lightly used but the pages aren’t sticky or anything. If you want a book, claim it in the comments AND e-mail me your mailing address (roxane at htmlgiant.com) and I will get it out to you sometime this week. Seriously, though, email me your address. I can’t track you down. Enjoy! (These books can only be shipped within the United States unless you want to pay for shipping. Sorry!)
ALL GONE. MORE SOON.
Cream of Kohlrabi by Floyd Skloot
Nothing Can Make Me Do This by David Huddle
The Postmortal by Drew Magary
Umberto Umberto Lamberto Lamberto Lamberto by Gianni Rodari
LA Is the Capital of Kansas by Richard Meltzer
Luminarium by Alex Shakar
A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness
One of These Things Is Not Like the Other by Stephanie Johnson
Traffic With Macbeth by Larissa Szporluk
Mama’s Homesick Pie by Donia Bijan
The Best Of (What’s Left of Heaven) by Mairéad Byrne
She’d Waited Millennia by Lizzie Hutton
A Man of Glass & All The Ways We Have Failed by JA Tyler
The Hieroglyphics by Michael Stewart
The Nostalgia Echo by Mickey Hess
The Harbor by Ernest Poole
The Girl With the Crooked Nose by Ted Botha
Love and Shame and Love by Peter Orner
Running the Rift by Naomi Benaron
The Buenos Aires Quintet by Manuel Vazquez Montalban
Pocket Kings by Ted Heller
Dead Man Upright by Derek Raymond
The Coldest Night by Robert Olmstead
Until the Next Time by Kevin Fox
Dogma by Lars Iyer (2)
Radio Iris by Anne Marie Kinney
Red Weather by Pauls Toutonghi
Livability by Jon Raymond
Walking With the Comrades by Arundhati Roy
God’s Hotel by Victoria Sweet
Hurricane Story by Jennifer Shaw
The Watery Part of the World by Michael Parker
A Very Minor Prophet by James Bernard Frost
“…by writing we lose control…”
Consider this provocative statement from a recent post over at Montevidayo entitled “The Inhuman Art of Dying vs. Poetry’s Grief Police” by Lucas de Lima, “…by writing, we lose control of our narratives, and inevitably end up thwarting not just our intentions for a poem, but also the way we conceive of ourselves and our bodies as bounded, autonomous entities shaped through free will.”
…by writing, we lose control…
Like Brownian Motion: the presumably random drift of particles, which is, of course, among the simplest of the probabilistic processes, and thus serves as a limit of both simpler and more complicated stochastic processes, writing being one we might never have thought to correlate.
Which is to say, what may begin determined becomes random. A transformation. Or, perhaps, determination and control are always an illusion anyway…?
The Faster I Walk, The Smaller I Am
The Faster I Walk, The Smaller I Am
By Kjersti A. Skomsvold
Translated by Kerri A. Pierce
Dalkey Archive Press, 2011
147 pages / $17.95 Buy from Dalkey
Originally published in Norwegian as Jo Fortere Jeg GÂr, Jo Mindre Er Jeg by Forlaget Oktober A/S, 2009
Although I know I shouldn’t, sometimes I judge a book by its title.
At first glance, The Faster I Walk, The Smaller I Am might suggest some kind of self-help manual advocating weight loss by means of low-intensity cardiovascular exercise. But putting the title aside and judging instead from the book’s front cover, (something else I know I shouldn’t do,) it’s clear this could never turn out to be the case. The copy I have, the hardback Dalkey Archive Press 2011 translation, sports artwork reminiscent of a Marcel Dzama painting. In a forest of leafless trees against pink-purple sky there is a woman standing with her back to a trunk, iniscernible save for her white dress and white shoes. The woman turns out to be Mathea Martinsen, and the title turns out to be a reference to Einstein’s theory of relativity, and the book’s content turns out to be a candid portrayal of losses far greater than that of a few inches around the waistline.
Skomsvold writes from the point of view of the front cover’s indiscernible woman. Mathea is childless, widowed and “almost a hundred, just a stone’s throw away.” All of her life, she’s been overlooked. “The spun bottle never pointed at me, the neighborhood kids never found me when we played hide-and-seek, and I never found the almond in the pudding at Christmas…” Now she lives alone in the same apartment block in Haugerud, a suburb of Oslo, where she has spent all her married life. Mathea likes to knit ear-warmers, read the obituaries and start new rolls of toilet paper. She is surprisingly proud, yet appallingly lonely – so lonely she listens to the distant sound of sirens and wishes they were coming for her, so lonely her only sense of fellowship is achieved by buying the same groceries as strangers she passes in the aisles of the local store.
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March 23rd, 2012 / 1:00 pm
March 23rd, 2012 / 1:00 pm
DARK MATTER #2
Dark Matter is a publication made up of poems and songs from other places on the internet.
Mike Young—
“My religion is Poetry, not a religion of kindness and love but one of absolute permission. If poetry doesn’t strip me naked in front of my enemies then nothing will.” — CAConrad, in an amazing (duh, it’s CAConrad) and even downright rousing interview with Thom Donovan at The Academy of American Poets, excerpted from A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon, Conrad’s new book of (Soma)tic exercises out April 1st from Wave.
5
R.I.P. Christine Brooke-Rose
I just heard that Christine Brooke-Rose passed away.
I first came across her work thanks to Brian McHale’s Postmodernist Fiction (1987), where he wrote about her 1975 novel Thru.
At the time, I was deeply into concrete poetry, in particular novelists who used concrete poetry techniques (Kenneth Patchen, B.S. Johnson, Ann Quin). So I was hooked. I picked up the 1986 Christine Brooke-Rose Omnibus, which contains Thru as well as its three “companion” novels: Out (1964), Such (1966), and Between (1968). All of them are decidedly unusual; like Johnson and Quin, Brooke-Rose was heavily inspired by the French New Novel of Alain Robbe-Grillet, Marguerite Duras, and Nathalie Sarraute. (She translated Robbe-Grillet’s In the Labyrinth.) Like all of those authors, Brooke-Rose was a brilliant maker of contemporary fiction who deserves to be more widely read.
Lit Scene Tarot
The Hanged Man is suspended, upside-down, by his still-incomplete thesis. Given the calm expression on his face, it appears he hasn’t been on any academic job-search boards yet. Around The Hanged Man’s Head is a yellow halo, depicting the fondness he feels toward his Freshman seminar students. This fond feeling will soon cease. The Hanged Man’s number is 12, reflecting the number of years he has spent in grad school thus far.
The High Priestess is high. She sits at the gate before the great mystery of experimental literature, passing beneath a narrative arc on ionic corinthian pillars. She no longer goes from point A to point B, but from point B to point J. She sits between darkness and light, half enlightened by the experimental text on her lap and half not knowing what the hell is going on. The tapestry hung between the pillars keeps punctuation out.
The Knight of Wands is an impulsive type of dude who frequently posts his rough drafts to Fictionaut. He provides status updates about his divorce roughly every four – six minutes. Drawing The Knight of Wands card in a tarot reading may foreshadow an unexpected event in one’s life, such as being cornered by The Knight of Wands at a “literary reception” and forced to talk with him about Bolano for over an hour. The Knight of Wands is the patron saint of open mic nights.
14 laptops or hammers
2. Ander Monson wades into the whole D’Agata thingy.
2. Matt Mullins interview.
1. I Take Back the Sponge Cake is a choose-your-own-adventure collaboration between poet Sierra Nelson and visual artist Loren Erdrich.
1. Seems to me we flash fiction folks don’t really get enough book contests. Hell, here’s one.
14. Duck tape and eggs greeted vehicles traveling down Highway 3 in the early morning hours of Friday, March 16.
5. We learned about student evaluations from a sociologist. She said studies show men rate female professors lower than male professors on student evaluations, but men and women rate male professors the same. OK.
6. A little breakfast treat on tennis and DFW.
The woman is my own regret.
The children are my friends,
how they cannot reach, or save
me. The birds are my eyelashes,
the wolves are my hands.