Do you want to go to the cinema?
For about six months my girlfriend was getting texts from a guy named Fahad. She used to be Fahad’s English tutor. Fahad rarely showed up to their meetings, but despite his lack of dedication to his studies, he always wanted her to come out with him and his international friends. His most common request was “Do you want to go to the cinema?” which, with its toneless ESL charm, was my favorite to hear. One day, Fahad’s scripted-foreign-dude texts suddenly stopped and I was a little sad that his interjections into our world had stopped. That was a few months ago. Today, in celebration of Fahad’s texts, I am asking that everyone go to the cinema at The Continental Review where there are new poem-films from Bianca Stone and Chris Martin and Mary Austin Speaker. It’s more than worth it to go through their entire archive and watch everything. Some of my personal favorites are Heather Christle’s “And Then We Clap Ourselves Together” and Brandon Downing’s Bollywood sonic translation/walking d0g mash-up, which made me LOL.
Bianca Stone drew the cover of my chapbook, WHAT A TREMENDOUS TIME WE’RE HAVING! She is more than rad.
And Jordan Stempleman, who c0-edits The Continental Review, has a new book from Magic Helicopter called No, Not Today. You should order it. If you don’t believe a book of poems written by a human being who curates this kind of site is anything but fucking excellent, I can give you Fahad’s number and you can ask him all about it. The weekend is just getting started.
Insanely outdated review: Stone Arabia.
If you’re thinking, jeez, didn’t this come out, like, last year? You are correct. Daddy’s been busy.
I’ve been looking forward to reading Dana Spiotta’s Stone Arabia. The story surrounds a sister looking for a missing brother, Nik. Nik is a Robert Pollard/Jandek sort of recluse who records his own albums for no audience, but also writes “The Chronicles,” a fictitious history of his bands with fake record reviews, interviews, obituaries, album art and the like.
Stone Arabia at once delivered higher and failed to meet expectations in surprising ways. “The Chronicles” were not explored to their biggest possibilities, leaving much of the documentation to the readers’ imagination. However, The book’s focus on middle-agedom is powerfully touching. Stone Arabia is strongest when its protagonist, Denise, is scraping at the pain, confusion and disappointment of being 40-something.
There are some other interesting rabbit holes dealing with dementia, Denise’s daughter filming a Nik-focused documentary and the oddly soothing oversaturation of daily media atrocities. Stone Arabia was worth the wait, but for dazzlingly different ways than expected.
Mud Luscious’ AWP specials for the lonely.
‘Established in 2007, Mud Luscious Press publishes raw & aggressive works by writers unafraid to destroy & re-suture words.’
This week and next only, for losers like I, who cannot attend AWP, Mud Luscious Press and its imprints are making sweet deals on all titles:
Mud Luscious Press and Blue Square Press titles are all on sale for $10 each, Nephew titles are on sale for $9, and you can mix ‘n’ match any two titles for $15.
Niceness.
Finger the new Cataclysm Baby by Matt Bell, or the new The Oregon Trail is the Oregon Trail by Gregory Sherl, or one of my favorites from the ‘good ole days’ (like two years ago), [ First Year ] An MLP Anthology.
Barney Rosset, 1922 – 2012.
Barney Rosset, who died Feb. 21 at 89, didn’t just publish books. As the commander-in-chief of Grove Press, he helped direct the course of literature in the latter half of the 20th century. Books that bore the Grove Press name in all-black capital letters at the bottom of the jacket spine challenged our ideas of what constitutes a novel or a play and defied the authorities to declare on the record that freedom of speech was fine in concept, but not in practice.
A glance at a few titles from the Grove Press back catalogue reminds us of the extent to which Rosset’s vision affected literature:
Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet
Lady Chatterly’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence
Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
The list reads like a syllabus for a course on groundbreaking 20th-century fiction and drama. The five authors are not simply writers who produced a few books. They are titanic names who created schools of writing, whose work encouraged others to pursue writing careers and who lived lives that were as interesting as—or even more interesting than—those of their characters.
In addition, Grove Press provided a forum for radical black thought in the 1960s, publishing the first edition of The Autobiography of Malcolm X and English-language editions of The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon, the Caribbean psychiatrist and anti-colonialist.
Grove Press published many books under Rosset’s stewardship, some by obscure authors with just one title to their name. My Grove Press editions are a cornerstone of my collection, not just The Wild Boys and Querelle, but Richard Horn’s Encyclopedia, a 1969 novel written as a series of encyclopedia entries, complete with cross-references, and A Life Full of Holes by Driss ben Hamed Charhadi, an illiterate North African who spoke an entire novel that was tape-recorded and translated by Paul Bowles.
Through his doggedness and commitment to publishing the avant-garde and the transgressive, Rosset made Grove Press a template for the small, independent presses that proliferate today. These presses, often strapped for cash (as Rosset tended to be, thanks to legal wrangles), publish books they believe deserve to spend time in readers’ hands, books that reflect their editors’ particular tastes and aesthetics. The major publishers may have the capital, but the small presses have the foresight and determination to tend the literary landscape as they deem necessary.
They and those of us who are writers and readers owe Barney Rosset our thanks.
Your assignment: Read a Rosset Grove Press book that you haven’t read or re-read one you have.
Ben Tanzer on a roll.
Ben Tanzer writes a great book about as often as you and I write grocery lists.
In the last 12-ish months, he’s released two novels, a short story collection and now a chapbook of essays, This American Life.
Thumbing through Leonard Cohen’s back pages.
Dateline: February 17, 2012—Leonard Cohen at 77 is a bona fide pop star. His new album, Old Ideas, held the no. 1 spot in Amazon sales the week of its January 31 release date. As of today, it is no. 3 on the Billboard album chart, his first Top 10 appearance in his 45-year musical career. Of note is the fact that the album doesn’t succumb to the latest trends in popular music. Leonard Cohen remains Leonard Cohen. The country’s music buyers have elected to meet him on his terrain.
I considered writing on Old Ideas, but there already is plenty of cyber- and real ink on it. Instead, I decided to use its arrival to travel through Cohen’s back catalogue and cover an album that seems to have fallen by the wayside: the offhandedly titled Recent Songs (1979). Cohen himself doesn’t appear to place much significance on the recording. Only one of its songs is on The Essential Leonard Cohen (“The Guests”), and one (“The Gypsy’s Wife”) made it to the set list of his 2009 tour.
Recent Songs came between the Phil Spector-produced Death of a Ladies’ Man, reviled in its day and now assessed more politely, and 1984´s Various Positions, which Columbia declined at the time to release in the United States (ironically, the album contains “Hallelujah”). After the critical flogging he endured for Death of a Ladies’ Man, Cohen retreated to a familiar sound on the next album. Instead of Spector’s sonic pyrotechnics, the songs on Recent Songs are clothed in acoustic guitar, violin, Jennifer Warnes’ exquisite background vocals and, a new instrument for Cohen, oud.
These are songs from an Athens taverna, an Andalusia café, a broken-down theater on some Paris side street. Cohen’s voice had not yet developed the cellar-deep tone of Isaiah that listeners first heard on I’m Your Man. Here, it still occupies the middle range and murmurs leisurely and stoically through the clouds of saloon smoke.
The lyrics are among Cohen’s most ornate. He employs the tropes and phraseology of English Romantic poetry (The Rose I sickened with a scarlet fever / The Swan I tempted with a sense of shame) and translations of Middle Eastern verse (And here they take their sweet repast / While house and grounds dissolve). (In the sleeve notes, he writes that Attar and Rumi influenced the imagery of several songs; remember, the album came out in 1979, well before Rumi became the New Age flavor of the month.) The writing, consequently, has more overt ties to his previous life as a literary figure. Some track titles are closer to poem and short story titles than song titles (“The Traitor,” the aforementioned “Gypsy’s Wife,” “Ballad of the Absent Mare”).
Wedged in with the original material is “The Lost Canadian,” a 19th century song from north of the border that Cohen sings in French, accompanied by a mariachi band. It’s a member of the small and idiosyncratic group of cover songs that Cohen has scattered across his albums, a group that includes “The Partisan,” a World War II resistance song which he continues to perform, and Irving Berlin’s “Always,” which Cohen and his musicians turn into eight-minutes of simmering R&B.
“Ballad of the Absent Mare” closes Recent Songs and is one of Cohen’s best. Befitting the title, it’s a true ballad, his only purely narrative song, yet filtered through its writer’s poetic sensibility. Inspired by an old Chinese text, the song is about a marriage cast as the story of a cowboy searching for his fugitive horse. The details are sharp (And she steps on the moon / When she paws at the sky) and poignant (And she comes to his hand / But she’s not really tame / She longs to be lost / And he longs for the same).
The final lines are So I pick out a tune / And they move right along / And they’re gone like the smoke / And they’re gone like this song.
With So I pick out a tune, Cohen seems to be implying that he will continue to work at his craft. We have been the lucky beneficiaries.
READ THIS BOOK.
This is a fucking great book. I read it before it was published because I briefly knew Socrates, the guy reading in the video, the author of the book. I considered him a friend but something happened, I’m not really clear what, we just stopped talking, and my feelings were hurt. It was ‘one of those things’. But so I am still posting this video because I believe in this book and in Socrates, not as a friend, but as an author. I think that some people will be in your life for a short time, some people for longer, but it doesn’t matter. Each person is his own little world, and I’m an explorer. So I don’t regret knowing Socrates, then not knowing him, because I got to read this magical, sad, beautiful book. I got to explore, however briefly, this magical, sad, beautiful world.
BUY THIS BOOk, YOUR HEART WILL THANK YOU
The Arbor and lipsync nonfiction.
The best documentary I saw last year was The Arbor, Clio Bernard’s story of the late English playwright Andrea Dunbar, whose work is set in the working-class council housing estate in West Yorkshire, and the legacy she left behind with her children. The film concentrates on the lives of her two daughters, who, fathered by different children, led very different lives.
If it was a traditi0nal biopic or documentary, it still would have had a great story to tell, but Bernard made the choice of having actors lipsync to recordings of subjects–archival and original interviews. The actors do this while facing the camera, making beds while working, making tea or, in one of the opening scenes, in a flashback while a bed burns behind them.
The method takes some getting used to, watching someone obviously but expertly mouth the words of someone else. Maybe it has to do with it being a serious story rather than a farce. Besides Madonna’s halftime show, lipsync is used in things like Funny or Die’s Drunk History videos and identity theft and ETrade commercials to reinforce the absurdity of some situation or for broad laughs. Lipdub videos provide the path to self-actualization, a way to to sing like Steve Perry, or both.
The Arbor‘s use of lipsync got me thinking about equivalents in first-person nonfiction. In the story of Dunbar, it reinforces the realism of the story being told, its intimacy; it adds to the verisimilitude (one of my favorite words, so let me use it) while taking the necessary liberties to keep a story moving along.
In the first scene, for instance, we see Manjinder Virk, who portrays Lorraine, viewing archival footage about her mother. If this was staged altogether, it would be a reenactment perhaps. Or it could resemble something out of a news magazine, complete with reporter asking pro forma questions about how she feels watching this old news report. A journalistic trope can sometimes work advancing our understanding of a subject–a 60 Minutes segment with Andersoon Cooper playing an SNL sketch inspired by Adele to the singer herself is really charming.
But what if you can’t get someone on camera? What if the real person is dead or won’t talk or if there is a need or just a desire to juxtapose someone’s words with someone else’s an image?
I think about how this technique has already been or could be used in nonfiction: multi-subject oral history, memoir certainly. What I like about the staged-ness of The Arbor, as Frank Kermode says as well, is it reinforces the idea that are multiple truths in a story, especially one as raw and as variegated as Dunbar’s.
Related articles
- Doc of the Day: The Arbor (daysofdocs.com)
- “The Arbor” Tops Grierson British Documentary Awards (bruneljournalism.wordpress.com)
FeatherLit fledges.
There’s a new birdie on the block of online literary journals. Fittingly launched on Valentine’s Day, FeatherLit is “a place for short literary erotic writing: flash fiction and poetry that makes you think about sex.”
The name of the journal is perfectly explained by this quote: Erotica is using a feather. Pornography is using the whole chicken. – Isabel Allende
Nikki Magennis says in her first Editor’s Letter -
Sex is everywhere, but it’s not enough.
Among the internet’s acres of sweaty, grunting bodies, FeatherLit present a clutch of poems and stories that offer you more.
More than titillating fucks, shock or clever word-play, these pieces reach in different directions all at once.
FeatherLit is lovely, uncluttered, and not-at-all juvenile or blush-blush. No purple wallpaper or sparkly bits to distract from the writing. Those of us whose work ventures into the erotic have been wanting a place like this. There really are not that many classy venues dedicated to short erotic works (just type “erotic poetry” into that search engine thingy and see what you find). And yeah, full disclosure time – I have a couple of poems here, so I’m somewhat (haha) biased. But I loved all the pieces here, which is a rarity. Congratulations to all the writers in this nest.
I wish Nikki, a Scottish author, artist, and animator, all the best with this new endeavor. Check FeatherLit out, and if you have some appropriate work, submit! And like them on Facebook. Today’s their birthday!
These are videos of people I like reading poems and stories in a basement that is also a bar.
I curate THE BIG BIG MESS READING SERIES in Akron, Ohio. Here are a few videos from the September, November, and January readings. The first video is Matt Hart. The second video is Cathy Wagner. The last two videos are Alissa Nutting reading a short story. There are more videos and info about the series here. Happy Valentine’s Day. Go kiss another animal.
