Starcher-Blog

Contest Press Release (with finalists, honorable mentions, etc.)

2009-08-31T11:29:00.000-07:00

Press Release
Contact: Ted Pelton, Director, Starcherone Books, ted@starcherone.com, 716-885-2726

Alissa Nutting’s Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls Chosen by Ben Marcus for the 6th Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction

Alissa Nutting of Las Vegas, Nevada, is the winner of the 6th Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction contest (2009-10) for her manuscript, Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls. She will receive $1,000 and publication during Starcerone’s 2010-11 season.

Nutting was selected from among five finalists by Final Judge Ben Marcus. A total of 210 manuscripts were submitted for the prize.

Alissa Nutting received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Alabama, where she served as editor for The Black Warrior Review. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, where she is the Schaeffer Fellow in Fiction.

Nutting’s manuscript was one of five finalists. The titles of these manuscripts were announced in July, while the names were held back to keep the judging blind. The other finalists, listed alphabetically, were:

• Roxanne M. Carter – Glamorous Freak: How I Taught My Dress to Act
• Rich Ives – The Balloon Containing the Water Containing the Narrative Begins to Leak
• Grace Krilanovich –The Orange Eats Creeps
• Levi Teal – 200 Pieces

Nutting’s Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls is a hilarious and terrifically inventive collection of short fiction where each story in the book is predicated upon a would-be career choice for women. The stories are titled, sometimes very fancifully, after these "unclean jobs," such as "Model's Assistant," "Knife-Thrower," "Bandleader's Girlfriend," "Corpse Smoker," and "She-Man." Ten of the stories have been published in literary journals, including Tin-House, Mid-American Review, Denver Quarterly, Southeast Review, and Swink.

In awarding the prize, Ben Marcus had this to say about Nutting’s book:

“Alissa Nutting builds a dark catalog of behavior for her characters and the result is a kind of human bestiary, if humans were programmed to go down in flames, to run themselves aground, to seek ruin on every occasion. These fine stories, anthropologically thorough in their view of the contemporary person, illuminate how people hide behind their pursuits, concealing what matters most to them while striving, and usually failing, to be loved.”

Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls will be Nutting's debut book. Although it is not a condition of the prize, all six times the Starcherone Prize has been awarded, it has gone to a debut author. Previous winners of the Starcherone Fiction Prize have gone on to win even more critical accolades for their work; most notably, Zachary Mason's The Lost Books of the Odyssey, selected for the Starcherone Prize in 2006, went on to be named one of five nominees for the 2008 New York Public Library's Young Lions Award, given to the best work of fiction by a writer 35 years of age or younger.

The other previous winners of the Starcherone Prize have been Aimee Parkison, Nina Shope, Sara Greenslit, and Janet Mitchell. Mitchell's book, The Creepy Girl and Other Stories, is newly available from Starcherone Books.

There were also 5 manuscripts designated as honorable mentions in the 2009-10 contest:

• Rebbecca Brown – They Become Her
• Misha Hoekstra – The Joy of Edge Tools
• Mary Overton – The Gossip's Crime
• Brian Seabolt – The Alpha Privative
• Ron Tanner – Kiss Me, Stranger

The blind-judged contest drew a total of 210 entries in 2009. The 7th Starcherone Prize contest (2010-11) will begin accepting entries in October 2009, with a final deadline in February 2010. The judge of next year’s contest will be novelist Stacey Levine.

Winner!!!

2009-08-07T07:02:00.000-07:00

Alissa Nutting of Las Vegas, Nevada, is the winner of the 6th Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction contest (2009-10) for her manuscript, Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls. Nutting was selected from among five finalists by Final Judge Ben Marcus.

Alissa Nutting received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Alabama, where she served as editor for the Black Warrior Review. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, where she is the Schaeffer Fellow in Fiction.

Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls is a hilarious and terrifically inventive collection of short fiction where each story in the book is predicated upon a would-be career choice for women. The stories are titled, sometimes very fancifully, after these "unclean jobs," such as "Model's Assistant," "Knife-Thrower," "Bandleader's Girlfriend," "Corpse Smoker," and "She-Man." Ten of the stories hagve been published in literary journals, including Tin-House, Mid-American Review, Denver Quarterly, Southeast Review, and Swink.

Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls will be Nutting's debut book. Although it is not a condition of the prize, all six times the Starcherone Prize has been awarded, it has gone to a debut author. Previous winners of the Starcherone Fiction Prize have gone on to win even more critical accolades for their work: most notably, Zachary Mason's The Lost Books of the Odyssey, selected for the Starcherone Prize in 2006, went on to be named one of five nominees for the New York Public Library's Young Lions Award, given to the best work of fiction by a writer 35 years of age. The other previous winners of the Starcherone Prize have been Aimee Parkison, Nina Shope, Sara Greenslit, and Janet Mitchell.

The blind-judged contest drew a total of 209 entries in 2009. The 7th Starcherone Prize contest (2010-11) will begin accepting entries in October 2009, with a final deadline in February 2010.

Starcherone Prize Finalists Announcement

2009-07-07T10:21:00.000-07:00

These are the titles of the five manuscripts that are finalists for the 6th Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction:

> 200 Pieces
> The Balloon Comtaining the Water Containing the Narrative is Leaking
> Glamorous Freak: How I Taught My Dress to Act
> The Orange Eats Creeps
> Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls

These manuscripts, with the authors' names remaining undisclosed, have been forwarded to Final Judge Ben Marcus, who will select one winner of the Starcherone Prize for 2009. The winner will receive a $1,000 prize and be published in our 2010-11 season.

The Final Judge has the option of selecting additional manuscripts from which to make a selection.

This year's contest began with 210 entries, and our decisions to date have been extremely difficult, owing to the high quality of the submissions. Many terrific books had to be eliminated from contention, simply due to the limitations of the contest and what we are able to accomplish as a small press. In order to help promote some of these worthy manuscripts, a number of other entries will be designated with Honorable Mentions. These will be announced when our final decisions are announced, in early August. Please check this blog for an announcement in late July or after.

An Interview with Ted Pelton

2009-04-08T12:01:00.000-07:00

This "interview" mash-up was constructed by Brian Lampkin.

Ted Pelton is the author of the novel Malcolm and Jack and other Famous American Criminals and the collection of short stories Endorsed by Jack Chapeau 2 an even greater extent. He is also the founder and executive director of Starcherone Books—a publisher of innovative fiction. Ted was also a classmate of mine at the University of Buffalo and co-conspirator in several literary and community experiments and projects. He is currently at work on a collection of Woodchuck Stories. Let’s call them parables.

The danger in all interviews for the interviewee is that all control is lost in the editing process. A writer can be taken completely out of context or elided to the point of incomprehension. This interview foregounds those concerns and is compiled from twenty-five years of conversations, letters, blogs, articles and e-mails.

Brian: Hi, Ted, do you have time to talk?
Ted: Oh, we are all such busy people! Who has time? But friends, let us not forget what brought us here. No need to write essays every time out of the box. But we should continue to talk about why we think innovative/avantgarde/experimental/heterodox fiction is what we all have said it is: a potential antidote to the stupidity of American hegemony in 2007! [ed: I’m sure he knows the year; perhaps he refers to the pre-Obama era.] to the mindlessness of a society that knows of many ways that it's going in the wrong direction but seems powerless to stop itself!! to the simplistic selves we're told we are by advertisers politicians law enforcement officers and many many others!!! an art form at a time when books are commodities and Bertelsmann Murdoch Time Warner etc. has nearly secured its victory over us and we're at the point of near-irrelevance!!!! -- It's important to keep talking. We are not against tradition. We are a version of the tradition that's being edited out.

Brian: Right on. So how does an independent publisher and experimental writer promote his work?
Ted: A funny thing happened to me this week. I was promoting my novel Malcolm & Jack during the month… (and so the smartest among you are now saying, oh, I see, this isn't a legitimate [interview] [ed: to say the least], this is just part of his marketing strategy ... but I'll just leave that thread alone ...), and have it linked on amazon.com with Jack Kerouac's new "Original Scroll" version of On the Road …. This has made my sales rise ever so slightly (and not nearly enough to pay for the cost of the promotion).

Anyway, my novel is called Malcolm & Jack (and Other Famous American Criminals) and is centered around a conjectured meeting between Malcolm X and Jack Kerouac. It's a novel about history, underground characters during the beginnings of American empire, improvisational poetics & politics, etc.

Brian: Okay, we’ll talk specifically about your novel. I was going to get there, but now’s fine. I love its mix of imaginative re-creation with the hard science of research. Is there any conflict in your mind about altering and even misrepresenting history?
Ted: Endings are the toughest thing to do, as a writer, no doubt….

Brian: I’m sure that’s true, but can you answer the question?
Ted: I am interested in and sensitive to questions concerning the ethics of representation…questions…may well be raised about my own novel, Malcolm & Jack, particularly where I fashion artificial constructions of the subject positions of such figures as Malcolm X and Billie Holiday. In answering these concerns myself, I would underline the sense that narratives are always constructions, and any verisimilitude created by fiction is an effect of the art form, in no way a speaking for the absent subject: verisimilitude is not verity. At the same time, what fiction writers DO is represent. That is the essential form of the art: it is an art of lying, invention, artificial construction, mimicry, semblance. I think it is a limitation on the practice of the art to say that there is some aspect of discourse, experience, or history that one should refrain from representing, as a hard and fast rule. Of course, one should not go into the minefields of representation unadvised or without respect for the significances of histories of racism, oppression, violence and the like. We should also expect the representations of others from assumed and masqueraded subject positions will be problematic--that is the nature of experimental art. Fiction, by its very nature, is a practice which self-consciously presents itself as lies, thus leads us to reflect upon lying, both within deliberately designed aesthetic creations and upon the at-large practices of fictionalization at work in all walks of our lives. Fiction is that discourse that calls into question the truth-telling strategies of language even as it employs them. Airtight, airbrushed, sanitized lies are the ones we really have to worry about. I am a fiction writer, and so I lie, but my lies haven't been killing people. This distinguishes Kent Johnson and I and y’all (who’s out there?) from Bush and Rumsfeld and Cheney, who lie and kill people, or who lie and make people killers. Fiction is lies that do not lie about lying. That distinguishes the art of lies that is fiction from the lies of power we are so much in the grip of in our national discourse today. We are distrusted and feared by the world and we have alienated our own youth so much that a majority have opted out of democratic agency even as we claim to be bringing this great gift to the rest of the world.

Brian: You know, I don’t really think of Malcolm and Jack as an explicitly political novel, but to hear you talk…
Ted: Reading is becoming more and more explicitly a political act, and promoting reading certainly is. When I was writing this book, many people said to me, “Ooh, you’re going to get into trouble for writing as Malcolm X. People are really going to be angry with you.”

Brian: Oh, sorry, that was me. We’ve talked in the past about issues of beauty and ugliness. How has the impulse to make something beautiful informed your work?
Ted: How this impulse informed Malcolm & Jack? I wanted it to be a good book, so I kept trying to make it more beautiful in fulfilling the tasks it had created for itself. Billie Holiday not being able to sing because she’s in jail for drugs she takes because she’s miserable about her life and, goddamn it, oppressed in white America, allowed to appear on a marquee at a hotel club but having to enter the hotel through the back door, and then finding herself in an interracial affair in the segregated jail ... I wanted to create such complex situations out of little-appreciated histories in a way that fit my sense of the complexities of lived experiences–beauty is truth, and truth beauty. That’s all I know, as the poet sez, and I’m sorry some find that a maudlin or politically unsophisticated construction. I want to move thoughtful and sophisticated readers; part of that is political, certainly, but, as Williams says, bad writing never helped anyone. Beauty is what makes a political art successful or not. What is beauty? You tell me.

Brian: Hey, I’m interviewing you, remember? Which reminds me, is marijuana still part of your writing practice?
Ted: Anyway, there was another aspect to your question, about remaking the past. I think this was basically just a side-product of writing about my heroes, Malcolm X, Jack Kerouac, Billie Holiday, and, sure, Alfred Kinsey. And it was also certainly prompted by political resentments against a generation of politicians who have now pretty much passed from the scene, though not entirely–and certainly their assumptions haven’t. I was interested in taking on the 1940s, the period of the development of American Empire. I mean, yes, we fought a war that saved the world from fascism, not rhetorical but real fascism, and that was wonderful and necessary, but what has followed from that, the national valuing of war, has been disastrous, and keeps repeating.

I started the book following on the heels of the Reagan-Bush years; Reagan and Bush were both of that war generation. Malcolm and Jack were both part of an underground in the 1940s that became the different parts of the powerful counter-culture discourse of the 1960s. I wanted to meditate on the 1940s mythmaking that fueled the rise of conservatism in the late 20th century and trumped 1960s pacifist and socialist impulses. Remaking the past is something everybody does. It is the job of fiction writers, I think, to clarify this. Reagan isn’t in the book, but he so clearly exemplified this: I mean, in his stories, as was well documented (see Gary Wills’s book on him, for instance), he believed he actually fought in the war, even though he had worn the uniforms only in war films, and believed as well he was actually present at the liberation of the death camps, so powerful and convincing had his narrative reconstructions about these events been.

So in Malcolm & Jack we’ve got American Empire, hegemonic national narratives, historical crimes (as Malcolm never stopped telling us), and a bunch of sexy people at the heart of it–why shouldn’t I enjoy the activity of remaking the past? Susan Sontag says somewhere that the past is the greatest, most tantalizing imaginative space we have. It’s supposed to be stable. Of course, it isn’t at all; it’s all stories, being remixed and recreated all the time.

Brian: Lovely, Ted, really lovely and astute, I think. Hey, I remember you saying something about your opposition to the New York Times Best Novels of the Post-War era. It’s no good complaining if you can’t come up with alternatives.
Ted: Here's my top list:
Toni Morrison - Beloved
Ben Marcus – Notable American Women
Jane Smiley – A Thousand Acres
Marilynne Robinson – Housekeeping
David Markson – Reader’s Block and/or This is Not a Novel
Joe Wenderoth – Letters to Wendy’s
Walter Abish – How German Is It
Stacey Levine – Frances Johnson
Charles Johnson – Oxherding Tale
Jeffrey DeShell – Peter (seriously; but then I'm the publisher, so maybe this is a cynical manipulation)
Denis Johnson – Jesus’s Son
Harold Jaffe – 15 Serial Killers
Thomas Pynchon – Vineland

Honorable Mentions:
David F. Wallace – Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
Matthew Derby – Super Flat Times
Raymond Federman – To Whom it May Concern
Brian Evenson – Altmann’s Tongue
Kevin Killian – Little Men
Elizabeth Sheffield – Gone
George Saunders – CivilWarLand in Bad Decline and/or Pastoralia
Nina Shope – Hangings (sorry, compromised again)
Kenneth Bernard – From the District File
Robert Gluck – Margery Kempe
Carole Maso – Ava
Thersesa Hak Jyung Cha – Dictee
Thaddeus Rutkowski – Tetched
Sandra Cisneros – Woman Hollering Creek

Brian: It’s not my place to argue, but what about Malcolm and Jack?
Ted: I want to read more so I can do better. I know I'm forgetting some. But not nearly what the TIMES has forgotten. I couldn't believe that list was for real.

Brian: Well, thanks for your time, Ted. Anything else about Malcolm and Jack you want to get off your chest?
Ted: Sorry, I realize I’m getting off on a political tangent – but it remains a political story for me. I am a pacifist, and it feels like this position has lost years of progress. Now, even Obama feels it’s OK to launch missile strikes into countries we are not at war with, and kill people we feel are guilty of crimes without charging them or having to produce evidence. And that leaves out the children and neighbors of the bad people, who also die, because missiles are a little less precise than lethal injection. It’s a crime to be in certain neighborhoods, evidently, and the crime is punishable by mass, summary executions, which are sometimes administered mistakenly. Oops!

I am angry about similar things in Malcolm & Jack, which examines the 1940s and the roots of American Empire by looking at drop-outs from it. The arrogance of how we have come to look at the world; more specifically, how our narratives have come to be powerful, persuasive, and deadly.

Brian: Goodbye, Ted, it’s always good to check-in with an old friend. I remember when we first met in French class, what, twenty-five years ago….
Ted: Fuck, it's Friday afternoon & I'm home from work & no one has been writing… this concludes the project of reconstruction of a small island of happiness now long lost.

Shoes

2009-03-02T18:04:00.000-08:00

After the explosion occurred, the shoes dropped from the sky. Some of them took up to a year to drop.

I am speaking, of course, of Joshua Cohen's novel, A Heaven of Others. All the great news in recent weeks about Zachary Mason's The Lost Books of the Odyssey obscured for the moment another terrific book we published this year by an under-35 author, Cohen. Then dropped two more shoes:

1. A powerful long article on A Heaven of Others in The New Haven Review:

(excerpt) "It is poignant and profound to refract one’s religious doubt this way through a religious mirror, brave to structure an epic novella around religious terrorism in which belief interrogates itself, through its own manifestations, which is something like God seeing himself in the passing surface he has created. Cohen engages his own religion in the terms of that religion, in its own language, which he recreates using myths—like wind-up Schulzian toys—cast in Semitic-syncretic mold, bursting with contradiction. Foreshadowed by writers like Kafka and Bruno Schulz, and poets like Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs, these myths are fashioned by Cohen out of the baffling vulgarity of modern life in order to make that life personal again and thus open to interpretation: bombs become seeded fruit and foliage a landscape of exploded nails; a pogrom joke in which a fictional shtetl dresses its animals in human clothes and returns to find it repopulated is turned into an allegory for the state of Israel, with Ray-Ban sunglasses. Though we may be far from home, tragedy is never far from humor. Like Beckett, after whose beat much of the rhythm is marching, Cohen manages to be serious and wry at the same time, ironic and sincere: “Remember that the dead cannot sacrifice. Never again! And, too, that it is not for the living to judge the sacrifices they are bound to make […]” Never again is the slogan of Holocaust remembrance, the refrain of Yom Hazikaron, or the official Israeli Day of Remembrance, on which the last page records this book to have been finished."

2. Mentioned on The Believer short list reader survey of Best Books of 2008, at #14. Behind Morrison, ahead of Millhauser, and in between 2 Bolanos. [scroll down for the whole list]

For more about Joshua Cohen's A Heaven of Others, released one year ago this past month, see Starcherone or Amazon

Young Lions Fiction Award

2009-02-21T18:22:00.000-08:00

Zachary Mason's The Lost Books of the Odyssey has been chosen as a finalist in the New York Public Library's ninth annual Young Lions Fiction Award.

The award honors the works of authors age 35 and under who are making an indelible impression on the world of literature. The winning writer will be awarded a $10,000 prize on March 16, 2009 at a ceremony hosted by Young Lions co-founder and actor Ethan Hawke, held in the Celeste Bartos Forum of the Humanities and Social Sciences at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street.

The award is given annually to an American writer age 35 or younger for either a novel or collection of short stories. Each year five young fiction writers are selected as finalists by a reading committee of Young Lions members, writers, editors, and librarians. A panel of award judges, including novelist Lore Segal, and last year's winner Ron Currie, Jr. (who won for God Is Dead), will select the winner of the $10,000 prize.

AWP hype

2009-02-01T15:08:00.000-08:00

If you're going to AWP in Chicago this year, stop by the Starcherone table (#544, Northwest Hall, Lower Level) on the following days and times to meet some of our authors:

Thursday Feb 12, 1-2 pm - Johannes Göransson, Dear Ra

Friday Feb 13, 1-2 pm - Donald Breckenridge, YOU ARE HERE

Saturday Feb 14, 1-2 pm - Sara Greenslit, The Blue of Her Body

How Zachary Mason supplied The NY Times with a candy dish, and other strange tales of 2008

2009-01-13T11:42:00.000-08:00

The big spread on Starcherone in the newest edition of American Book Review (Vol. 30, No. 2, Jan/Feb 2009) is only the latest in what has been a year of great press for our books. Here is our annual year-end review of online reviews and other curiosities (toenail clippings, a Swedish poet, the last Jew on Earth, a novelist-veterinarian...) relating to Starcherone authors, leading off with what may be the book of 2008...

Zachary Mason – The Lost Books of the Odyssey

Eugene Lim, "The Trojan War Will Take Place." Brooklyn Rail

Garrett Rowlan, "Irreal Expedition." The Café Irreal. http://home.sprynet.com/~awhit/review9.htm

Jefferson Hansen. Experimental Fiction/Poetry/Jazz blog.

Shawna Yang Ryan, Gently Read Literature

Ben Ehrenreich, "Get Lost!" LA Times Book Review

Alex Kasman. Mathematical Fiction

NY Times Book Review blog, "Papercuts" (mention by Rachel Harris - re: candy dish)

Steve Donoghue, "Many Voyages Home." Open Letters Monthly

Daniel Green. The_Reading_Experience

James Crossley. Review of Contemporary Fiction

Francois Monti. Tabula Rasa (in French)

Joshua Cohen – A Heaven of Others

Buffalo ArtVoice (interview)

Alexander Zaitchik, "The Politics of the Afterlife." Brooklyn Rail

Joshua Cohen, "Last Line." Esquire Magazine Books Blog

The Wrong Heaven: Critic Joshua Cohen on His New Novel (interview). Jewish Forward

Patrick Schabe. PopMatters

Daniel Green. The_Reading_Experience

Johannes Goransson - Dear Ra

Kevin Killian amazon review

Blake Butler. No One Does That blog.

Rauan Klassnik, "Ecstasy of Dismemberment: interview with Johannes Goransson." Holy Land blog.

Ploughshares Blog

[Movie of JG reading poems in Swedish] Rabbit Light Movies.

Raymond Federman and George Chambers – The Twilight of the Bums

Buck Quigley, "Federman @ 80." Buffalo ArtVoice

Jeff Simon. Buffalo News

Raymond Federman – My Body in Nine Parts (2005)

Buffalo News (mention by Mary Kunz - cutting toenails)

Sara Greenslit – The Blue of Her Body (2007)

"Sara Greenslit — Novelist grabs second career in animal care." U. of Wisconsin-Madison News

The Grand Return

2008-11-17T17:41:00.000-08:00

After a year away, Starcherone Books announces the return of our annual manuscript contest, featuring fiction writer Ben Marcus as Final Judge.

The 2009-10 contest, offering $1000 and publication with Starcherone Books, is now accepting entries. Contest is open to story collections, novels, or indeterminate prose works up to 400 pages. Manuscripts will be blind-judged; the author's name should appear on the first of two title pages and nowhere else in the manuscript. There is an administrative fee of $30. Please do not send cash. The postmark deadline is February 15, 2009. The winner will be announced in August 2009. All finalists will be considered for publication with Starcherone Books. See our ad in the January 2009 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

We are very happy to have as judge for our prize for innovative fiction one of the most daringly innovative and powerful authors of our time, Ben Marcus. Marcus is the author of three books to date -- The Age of Wire and String, Notable American Women, and, with Matthew Ritchie, The Father Costume. He also edited The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories. He is Chair of the MFA in Creative Writing program at Columbia University.

[click here to go to the Starcherone contest page]

Views of Federman

2008-11-09T16:10:00.000-08:00

Here are images from the day of events celebrating Raymond Federman @ 80 at University of Buffalo's Anderson Gallery and Poetry Room, and at Medaille College of Buffalo, Oct. 18, 2008.

Click for an expanded view of the sketches of Federman by artist Harvey Breverman and various members of the UB English department from the 1960s-90s.

artist Mark Lavatelli, Ted Pelton, poet Charles Bernstein, scholar Marcel Cornis-Pope.

Hallwalls director Edmund Cardoni, Pelton, Cornis-Pope, artist Harvey Breverman

artist Terri Katz-Kasimov, Federman, scholar Larry McCaffery

Federman, Pelton, scholar Menachem Feuer

Cardoni, Federman, Erica Federman, fiction writer Christina Milletti

scholars Susan Rubin Suleiman & Marcel Cornis-Pope

Debby and Harvey Breverman, poet Jorge Guitart

Charles Bernstein, curator James Maynard, Erica and Raymond Federman

FEDERMAN@80: A CELEBRATION

2008-10-04T11:42:00.000-07:00

FEDERMAN@80: A CELEBRATION
Saturday, Oct. 18, morning, noon, and night, Buffalo, NY

Friends, colleagues, critics, and students past and present from near and far welcome writer, raconteur, and retired distinguished professor Raymond Federman back to Buffalo for a day-long celebration of his work and him in visual art, critical appreciations, rollicking literary readings, & champagne. All events are free and open to the public.

Sponsored by Starcherone Books, the Department of Romance Languages of the University at Buffalo, UB Anderson Gallery, the Poetry Collection at UB, Medaille College, Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center, and the following endowed chairs at the University at Buffalo: Melodia E. Jones Chair of Romance Languages, James H. McNulty Chair of English, David Gray Chair of Poetry & Letters, and Samuel P. Capen Chair in American Culture.

Morning: 10:30 A.M.-12:30 P.M., UB Anderson Gallery, One Martha Jackson Place.
Opening reception (with coffee and accompaniments) of an exhibition of Federman-inspired art works by Terri Katz-Kazimov and Harvey Breverman, & photographs by Bruce Jackson. [The image above is Jackson's.]

Noon(ish): 1:00-4:30 P.M., Poetry Collection, 4th Floor Capen Hall, UB North Campus.
Two sessions of presentations and discussion featuring contributors to the forthcoming SUNY Press collection of essays, Federman at 80: From Surfiction to Critifiction, edited by Jeffrey DiLeo.

1:00-2:30: A Life in the Text.
Dr. Larry McCaffery, Dr. Menachem Feuer, & Dr. Ted Pelton.

3:00-4:30: Laughter, History, and the Holocaust.
Dr. Susan Rubin Suleiman & Dr. Marcel Cornis-Pope.

& NIGHT: 8:00 P.M., Medaille College, Main Building, Foyer & Lecture Hall.
An Evening of Laughterature, Surfiction, & Playgiarism in Tribute to Raymond Federman

Readings by (in order of appearance):

Ted Pelton, Christina Milletti, Geoffrey Gatza, Julie Regan, Michael Basinski, & Steve McCaffery.

—Intermission—

Davis Schneiderman, Charles Bernstein, Simone Federman, & Raymond Federman

The readings will be followed by a reception and 80th birthday toast.

Joseph Lease, from "now"

2008-08-27T12:12:00.000-07:00

Starcherone Books has long been interested in poetry -- you know, that stuff that breaks lines? Less commercial fiction such as we publish probably has more in common with poetry than with the mega-blockbusters that the commercial fiction marketplace has become nearly entirely about. As a writer myself interested in alternative writing, I've had many long-time friends and fellow-travelers in the poetry world. One whom I've known for more than twenty years, though we've always lived in different cities, is Joseph Lease. Joseph and I met through Bob Creeley and through Joseph's coming to the read, for the first time, in Buffalo in 1983, I believe. I was taking a course with Creeley at SUNY-Buffalo at the time. Since then, over the years, Joseph and I have sent each other work and met up in various cities around the country -- New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Buffalo again, Las Vegas. Sometime after Creeley died a couple of years ago, Joseph came out to Buffalo again to do a reading at Medaille College, and we had a sad drink in a hotel out by the Buffalo Airport. I've always been a fan of Joseph's work -- its lyric beauty, its understanding of sound, its civic engagement. So here is some Starcherone fellow-traveler work, from a new poem by Joseph (with apologies for the clumsy formatting of this medium).

from “now”

you—in the park—

watch them sleeping—

you invented the family, private property, and the state—you did it—

“hey you”—it was you—and gray rain, shadow, mist—

And this is perfect—you are the light and the dark—

And no you don’t and no you don’t—

You don’t want to laugh at them you don’t—

You say take me to Heaven you say take me to Heaven—

Don’t you want to say that—don’t you—

Blue night
Opens
Blue night
Comes
Soft sweet kiss
Dear Mr
Fantasy

We came back to the world: the green world, the fertile world, the corn world, the gun world

We came back to the world and there was nothing there
fine
depression it is

a flying yell and
naked pants—everyone’s

diaspora—

You
Paint

God

Lightning
Spinning

Heat
Lightning
Far

“this sky is your sky this sky is my sky—“and God said let there be gas let there be cash and soft glances

bright
branches

blue side of the mountain, blue side—will I drink, will I laugh, tell me, will I laugh—tell me—will I spark—in this light, expensive light—did you pray—did you beg—for days like these—

so

typing

too late to watch the sunrise

pink and gray violet

bands

hills

there is nothing innocent

nothing more innocent

“I was unspeakable, I was backwash, or a global Marshall Plan to reduce carbon emissions or one from the distant past, elite with shoddy environmental records, spiritual disciplines, treat yourself to tart cherries this summer: new research suggests the juicy fruit could shield your heart health, and a boy in the twilight, a face in light blue, tan, orange, palm trees dark and offices and the sweetness in the air and the light and sleeping pills”—

the lake the
blue
35

clear mini lights,

42 inch animated and lighted

grazing doe (no sneering):

any purple day someone scatters

someone’s ashes,

[to be continued]

Joshua Harmon, "History of Cold Seasons"

2008-08-08T05:59:00.000-07:00

"History of Cold Seasons" was published in Chelsea in 1996 and is the title story of a collection of short fiction that "has been looking for a home for some time now." Harmon's Quinnehtukqut (Starcherone Books, 2007) was one of three finalists this year for the Cabell First Novelist Award.

History of Cold Seasons

Where we live: brown weeds lifting from unbroken snow, blown snow rising like smoke. Smoke rising like smoke, thick and white these subzero days, from chimneys. Snow, days-old and packed, squeaks underfoot.

My Mattie’s feet froze in his boots, the leather laces stiff with ice. When they carried him in, I put his feet against the woodstove, watched while ice hissed and steamed, while water pooled on the hearth, knowing not to bother, knowing already that feeling stopped inches short of what are called “extremities.”

Which is not how Mattie would say it.

Dalton, feet under drifted snow and frozen earth, would have said, “Where everything else begins.”

Where we live: words take form as I speak them, hanging in the air for anyone to see—my breath visible the instant I exhale it.

I don’t speak much, generally.

The searchers—men from town, all of them known to me except those Carl Normandeau called up from Deerfield, leading dogs churning through snow shoulder high, sniffing my Mattie’s glove, not barking, as if they knew.

In my kitchen, I scraped frost from the window with a fingernail, watched all the men disappear in blue dusk, spreading apart in a line before they reached the woods. My tea steeped, swirls of color clouding the water. I held the mug in circled hands, warming.

Later, I held those toes in my hands, not warming, the skin blue and under the nails purple. I held them to remember in my hands their shape, to keep with me a feeling he couldn’t feel.

* *

Through February and March I chipped at ice dams along the edges of the roof, watched snow warmed by sun slide off—heavy, soft. Icicles dripped deep holes in packed snow. Mattie sat in his chair by the window, quiet, his eyes flicking from one thing to the next.

His cuticles he chewed raw, bloody.

The old sugar house, below the orchard, was where they found him, huddled inside the door, blanketed by snow blown through the chinks, through the windows hunters shot out.

Two, three hours, one of those Deerfield boys told me.

He said other things into his radio while we waited for the ambulance.

Footprints through snow are not difficult to follow. Carl Normandeau wanted the dogs for the newspaper people, whose trucks skidded along my plowed driveway half an hour past dark.

* *

“Mother,” my Mattie would say, if he could. What he says when he means “mother” is not a sound anyone else would recognize.

Carl Normandeau, that Frenchman blood in his veins, also told me words that sounded like nothing I’d ever heard before, words his own mother whispered to him when he still slept in her arms.

Most can, I expect—mothers being mothers.

Nights, in bed, this is what I tell myself, saying the words only in my head.

“Fool,” is what Dalton said. “Idiot,” he shouted, slapping the loose leg of his pants. He would sic the dog on him, watching as he stumped thick-legged into the woods.

“Not mine,” is what Dalton said.

Me, I went into the woods after my Mattie, chasing the shape of his broad back, calling off the dog that ran away the same day Dalton died. Mattie: shivering in dry ferns, hiding behind a tall tree, its shadow darkening his face. I held him, the bark pressing its pattern into my skin while he leaned his weight against me. That dog sniffed the ground.

“Shh,” I whispered, patting my Mattie’s back, “hush,” I breathed, stroking the soft flannel of his shirt.

We waited for dark.

We did not move.

This—in summer, any summer it could have been, before Dalton, before Mattie.

I held to Mattie under arching trees. Leaves sifted slanting light.

What I heard in my head were the words he’d murmured the occasion he held me, like this, and the body’s wordless answer, lifting, stretching, warming; taking in what is not its own—a time of year when cold did not give words shape, when water was not yet ice.

Ted Pelton, "Something New"

2008-07-30T12:59:00.000-07:00

After he shot John F. Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald shot a policeman, Officer J. D. Tippit.

However, it was actually Tippit, a Dallas policeman, who shot the unarmed Oswald, switched clothes with him in further enactment of his own plan to murder Kennedy, under another identity.

Tippit, in fact, was Richard Nixon, dressed as a Dallas police officer.

So Richard Nixon, impersonating a Dallas police officer, shot an unarmed man named Lee Oswald, switched clothes with him, thereby adopting a second new identity, in further enactment of his plan to shoot John F. Kennedy, whose election fraud in Illinois in 1960 had cost Nixon the Presidency.

Nixon was also angry that Kennedy had stolen away his lover, Marilyn Monroe.

Nixon and Monroe had met in California, while Nixon was a Senator and Monroe an up-and-coming actress.

It was Monroe, evidently, who suggested to Nixon that they name their family dog Checkers.

Checkers, coincidentally, died the same day as Kennedy, and was also murdered, a crime that remains unsolved to this day.

Many years later, when asked by Madame Mao during the famous state visit in 1972 if she had ever known sadness, Pat Nixon, evidently confusing details due to jet lag, replied, Yes, when someone shot my poor dog Checkers from a nearby schoolbook depository.

Madame Mao replied, through an interpreter, Yes, it was me who did that – a statement whose meaning has been debated ever since.

The most outlandish interpretation of this statement that has been suggested is that Madame Mao, dressed as Officer J. D. Tippit, shot the unarmed Lee Harvey Oswald, changed clothes with him, in further enactment of her plan to murder John F. Kennedy, and confessed to the killing of Checkers, which happened at the same time some twenty-five hundred miles away, in Washington, DC, to create an alibi.

This interpretation is unlikely, a) because Madame Mao was not known to have left China during this time, and, b) because it would mean Madame Mao and Richard Nixon were, in fact, the same person.

Madame Mao and Richard Nixon could not possibly have been the same person because, a) they were photographed together on many occasions during the 1972 state visit, and, b) because even if Madame Mao were real in these photos and posed next to Officer J. D. Tippit, disguised as Nixon, or if on the other hand it was Nixon who was real and Tippit who was Madame Mao in the photos, one of the two of them would have to have been in Dallas with Tippit in order to take his clothes and then exchange a second time with Oswald after killing John F. Kennedy, and so could not have simultaneously been shooting Checkers in Washington, DC, and posing for a photo in China.

As regards Madame Mao and Richard Nixon, all reasonable commentators are in agreement – there had to have been two of them.

Nina Shope, "The Clinic"

2008-07-19T07:53:00.000-07:00

This excerpt from a novel-in-progress includes sections first published in Fourteen Hills, then later in New Standards: The First 10 Years at Fourteen Hills. Nina Shope's Hangings: Three Novellas won the 2005-6 Starcherone Fiction Prize.

The Clinic

you stand at the front of the amphitheatre, chalk in hand, the right side of your face drooping and insolent like a stroke victim. your hand curving inward, clenched, right leg dragging behind your left like a vestigial appendage, a half-amputated limb. you play to the crowds—ape paralysis—distort your face until they almost cease to recognize you, wondering if you have not in fact escaped the wards, if you are actually an inmate imitating the great professor rather than the reverse. charcot, le maître. cold. aloof. with a face like an undertaker. under your black stovepipe hat. your dark coat that always smells of damp wool.
the stage is arranged like a set around you—your entire body dedicated to this performance of paralysis, this act—standing amidst charts, drawings, and plaster casts, image after image projected onto the wall behind you. a picture show, a preview of the live performance. the illusion is only ruptured when you add to the illustrations on the blackboard—standing straight so as to draw more accurately, coloring the muscles along the right side of a chalked skull a bright and glaring red, as though you have peeled back the board to expose flesh or struck hard enough to bruise it—leaving a flaring handprint against your subject’s drawn and sallow cheek. only then do you relax the muscles of your mouth, your arm, your leg. only then do you return to yourself—the doctor with the dour face. the professor in the black coat with the brain in his hand.
I am the example. the living proof. no farcical facial impressions.
when the projector screws loosen in the middle of the lecture, the lens pivots so that the images swing sideways and project upon me, and I am covered by the bones of someone else's body, by a portrait of you with another patient. your image superimposed upon me, as if the subject has become le maître, dressed in black coat with a torn white nightgown underneath. neither one of us looks quite real. the students laughing and scrambling for the screws that have fallen under their seats.

our casual sleight of hand.

augustine, you say, looking out at them, your audience, augustine, and you linger like that over my name, making it hover there above us all, so that even I wonder what it is you will make of it, of me, so completely have you taken over that word, augustine, you say, and we are breathless, all of us, breathless. your audience, waiting, for a single word from you. augustine, you say, is the classic example, and we nod, and we let out a sigh. you have said it all so simply, moved us somehow into the realm of art with that one word. classic. and we are now as those contemplating an exquisite nude—you, the master painter, your hand tracing the anatomical charts, your chin raised, and all of us too, somehow raised by your words, the audience suspended several inches above the stage. and they look at me, and I look at them, and we look at you, breathless.

your fascination until death, la grande hystérie.

in the studio at night, next to the wax figure of the emaciated woman, underneath the skeleton strung to the ceiling, you say, augustine, seize for me, and you place your hands under my uterus and below my breast. applying gentle pressure, you release and wait, and I, arching my back, ecstatic, the feeling of your hands under my hipbone, hips pressing upwards, eyes rolling back, teeth clenched, wait for your hand to find that spot, to press it again, to stop all of this with a touch, as you have told the audience you can, your face flushed. augustine, you say, but you do not touch me again. writhing, rocking, unable to stop, legs twisting around themselves, knees hitting the wall, and the bed hardly beneath me now for more than a moment at a time, as if I am levitating, only my head my toes touching the mattress, you whisper, arc-en-ciel, and the reverence in your voice freezes me there, and I cry out maître, and mother, and wait for you to stop this. your notebook out. writing. everything in focus for a moment.

and I am your masterpiece.

note the arched back, you say to your listeners, the infamous arc-en-ciel. you will notice that this patient’s form is nearly perfect: first, we are presented with an epileptoid phase with two parts, tonic and clonic, followed by exotic movements, and then a phase of high emotional pitch. all of this succeeded by these elaborately contorted postures.

the attitudes passionelles. the poses plastiques. like some elegant stilled ballet.

in the mornings, you rehearse your lecture before me. repeating it so often that I can mouth it back to you –like a prompter in the wings, never remembered, never needed—this speech of yours so flawlessly fixed in your memory. each hysteric has her own specific hysterogenic points, you say once more, touching my back, each breast—above, below and upon the nipple, the back of my knee, my thigh. and doctor, how do you expect me to stop from falling, your dexterous thumb throwing me again and again to the floor. the base of my neck, the space behind my ear, my abdomen, there, you say, and there, and I on the floor, hoping it will not stop.

fridays are your grand events, les leçons, the only time that you address an audience other than your peers and students. hours of memorization in which the drawings you will make are traced, erased, and traced again—until you know that every gesture will be accurate, precise. the projector carefully focused. and you in the center of the stage—dark coat, pocket watch, every detail so conscientiously, so conservatively chosen. the amphitheatre empty until you order the doors to be opened. and the interns whisper, there are authors and journalists in the audience, actresses, the women in furs have performed before royalty. and star struck, we step out onto the stage to become the soul and center of it all.

Doug Manson Interview: On Having Fallen In

2008-07-18T05:53:00.000-07:00

This week something a little different: I had a chance to publish this interview conducted between two friends of mine who are also terrific writers and people I've met in the great Poetry City of Buffalo, NY, where Starcherone Books is located as well. In fact, the interviewee here, Doug Manson, recently signed on as our new Development Director. He is also the publisher of Celery Flute, a Kenneth Patchen newsletter, and of Little Scratch Pad Books, a micro-press publisher of poetry, and he's the author of several chapbooks as well as of Roofing and Siding (BlazeVox Books). He is interviewed below by Jonathan Skinner, publisher of the wonderful litmag, Ecopoetics.

Jonathan Skinner: So how did you fall into poetry in the first place?

Douglas Manson: This assumes a kind of direction—a relatively useful place to start—the notion of a "fall", rather than a start to a writing practice, or the beginning of a dialog with poetry, which is what it was. My mother used to read to me each night when I was a small child, a “Shakespearefor kids" book, European myth stories, and the Bible. I started writing when I was eight or so: adventure stories, science fiction epics and scripts for my dolls to act out (called "action figures" so boys could play with them). When I was nine or ten, I began writing songs like Roger Waters, after buying Pink Floyd's The Wall. I used to spend my after school hours playing records and lying on the floor with my head between these two plastic clamshell speakers from Sears. I wrote obnoxious and pornographic stories in seventh grade study hall and handed them around to my friends. Then, when I was thirteen, I re-wrote Poe's "Annabel Lee" as "Tony the Tree," which was a real ecological manifesto. I was asked to read it for the entire class. Until high school I was rarely asked to read poetry, or saw very much of it. It was never really a presence in our house. Music seemed much more important to me, and I studied Bob Dylan's lyrics more intensely than Walt Whitman's poems. I started learning guitar when I was twelve. Dylan and Whitman: these seemed to be the two poets of my adolescence who stand out. I started reading and writing much more when I turned fourteen, and I also began smoking a lot of pot.

Just after a really difficult time in my senior year of high school, I became very close to another poet named Jennifer. After an illness that put me in the hospital for three weeks, she took me out to a quarry to go swimming one day and we sat there and talked until I could make sense of what had happened to me—and it was a magical experience. Poet helping poet—profoundly uncomfortable experiences worked through together, made sense of in a way that was real to the way my consciousness had been affected. She taught me what a "paradigm" and a "paradigm shift" were, and so there was a shift in my own realization of what I had gone through. She made a collage out of that conversation I still own. So, I have been writing poetry and song lyrics since I was ten. I don't like to think of them as separate in any great degree. I never fell into poetry, its always been one of those components in my life that has lifted me up, no matter what.

Jonathan: Can you say a bit about what Ohio, or the midwest/ Great Lakes region more generally, has contributed to your formation as a poet?

Douglas: I grew up in a relatively stereotypical whitebre(a)d suburb. Ohio. Flat, with humid summers and cold grey winters. Strict parenting with high expectations, of education and (mechanical/civil/railway) engineering stock, milling and farming ancestors. I often felt myself drawn to Polish moods and Central European authors as a young man. But these facts say as little as they do taxonomize--and seem more mythic to me than real. After living in Buffalo for ten years, all the similarities of experience from Ohio to New York seem simulacral, and being "from" a place only seems to reinforce my need to recognize a distance: cognitively, philosophically, emotionally. Geographically there is something to be found there--forest, river and lake--though "suburban" really trumps all these considerations--cars, TVs, church and school. Garrison Keillor's recent visit to my hometown (aired 6/21/08) featured an author from the same place, and I'm assuming he's near my age, but the prose was so "flat" I wasn't invested in remembering his name [his name is Ian Frazier]--his memoirs reminded me of my childhood, but in a very simplistic way. I felt no nostalgia hearing his words, just a kind of claustrophobia, really. I was one of the "kids in the woods" he describes. And then there's the infamous Cuyahoga River. As a family, we spent a lot of our free time walking in the second- and third-growth trees, or drifting in a sailboat on a wakeless, man-made lake. A lot of stillness, come to think of it. Being without a car for the majority of the last four years has returned me to that kind of stillness. I've obsessed for some time with relative speed differentials and consciousness, the way automobiles have (had?) such a determining quality on our experience.

Hindsight shows this as a very privileged upbringing, especially since I consider myself a poet fully invested in the term. This means economic sacrifice and openness far beyond what my childhood ever encouraged me to expect. In the Midwest there isn't an oceanic/desert existential line of vastness on the horizon. The land seems a bit more generous, nurturing, but also consuming. It’s an intimate space--embowered. Character ranks pretty highly, too. Since I wasn't interested in staying within the neatly drawn lines mapped out for me as a child, I acquired a fair degree of shame for my endless questioning of limits and rules, for my experiments with living. But the truth is I don't like to define my work in regional/geographic terms, though my work may announce this more than I'm aware of.

So, given this, people from quite different circumstances may find my poetry saturated with a Midwestern mind--and I do write about my place a great deal. I like to write as much about the rich human universe here in the city of Buffalo as I do its geographic specificity. This region and my specific background may account for the inward, reflecting, syncretic attempts at meaning in my poems, or show up in the broader activity of writing, editing and mentoring. When you are fully engaged with basic human questions like love, living, dying, time and speed, its a little harder to account directly for place. If I am nothing more than an elaborate infolding of my environment, then all ideas I work with will show it. It is an idea worth pursuing consciously and descriptively, as well. But as you've noted before, I am obsessed with language, with the "conversational implicature of our words". The language I most know (or only know?) is the one spoken in the Midwest, however much it is used as a model in the larger, national society. Likewise, there are a lot of economic, social and technological pressures that ask us to forget about our place and how well our neighbors are doing--just as we know the Eisenhower/Robert Moses epoch effectively divorced Buffalonians from their waterfront with the building of a highway system and suburban rings. It is encouraging to know that the much-needed reconnection of communities and the reconstruction of waterfront access is just now getting underway.

One joy of living in Buffalo, among others, is the quality of the light. Light. period. I agree with Penelope Creeley, the light here is pure magic. It always teaches, it opens the senses. It doesn't mean I bathe in it all day, but its beauty forces me to step outside my own writing obsessions just as emphatically as do the basic pressures and invitations of living in the culture, being open, approachable, and responsible to others. I write my poetry in a room that catches the morning light, my "room of light"; my emails and business writing take place in back, in the windy "night room". I am blessed with ample space to work in.

To sum up these diverse thoughts: the question of “region” is one that I examine in my essay "What is a Regional Poet?" (In Celery Flute issue 3), which does include some of my own personal views on the issue. To compare my work with Charles Olson's enormous and articulate concern for geography, and for the many who follow his example, I have to say that I do not consider my poetry "regional". I am not trying to work on the same issues in my poetry. Because I live on a major ornithology fly-way, I hear a complex, varied & continental music when the birds return or the weather permits. On the street I hear hip-hop, country, rock and Latin music, too. I play my Beethoven records very quietly at 3 a.m.

Jonathan: Are there particular mentors, communities of writing, publications, major figures you might identify with the "Great Lakes" region, who have been vital to your development as a poet?

Douglas: The mentors in Kent I learned the most from were Maj Ragain, Alice Cone, Ted Lyons, and Tom Hines, but many other writers were influential, including Maggie Anderson and Zee Edgell. In Buffalo, I learned from Charles Bernstein, Robert Creeley, Susan Howe, Dennis Tedlock, Michael Basinski and William Sylvester; though the younger poetics scholars were often my more direct mentors (see below). In Kent, my community was made up of the open-mike readers I met from 1996-98. There was no "formation" label other than place, Brady's Café. My friends were Jayce Renner, Kathy Korcheck, David Snodgrass, Jim Burris, R.J. Wilson, Steve Skovensky, Katie Daley, Ben Pershey among many others. And this led to friendships with Cleveland poets like Ben Gulyas, Adam Brodsky, Christopher Franke, Jim Lang and Daniel Thompson.
At UB in Buffalo, I was lucky to spend time and work with a lot of amazing poets--Loren Goodman, Linda Russo, Jonathan Skinner, Kristen Gallagher, Alicia Cohen, Tim Shaner, Chris Alexander, Rosa Alcala, Michael Kelleher--the list goes on and on, especially factoring in the 10-15 poets visiting every semester to give talks and readings. The head spins to think of it now.

In the past 3-5 years, I've witnessed the dispersion of this temporary community, and made good friends with poets, artists, writers in Buffalo like Aaron Lowinger, Kristi Meal, Damian Weber, Celia White, Ted Pelton, Ethan Paquin.
The major "Great Lakes" precedents for me are Kenneth Patchen, d.a. levy and bpNichol, and with a little shake'n'stir-up of my "regional" reading in the 1990s: the midwest deep imagist James Wright. The question of publications that are important to me pretty much mirrors the sense of my University at Buffalo communities—there are many temporary coalescences of energies—though Jim Lang's "Split/W*sky" bag-o-zine has been holding steady for the past decade or so. Frank Davey's "Open Letter", certainly. The House Press magazines, though often temporary, have showcased amazing work--Drill, or String of Small Machines. As a starting point, then, in terms of my own publishing, I have to credit Cheryl Townsend's Impetus press for being my first publisher, which was a longstanding magazine in the 80s and 90s, and the soul-child of d.a.levy's renegade and 7 Flowers presses. I’m also interested in whatever Basinski is up to at the moment, and the Slack Buddha series from William and Lisa Howe. After saying all this, to indicate the influence these have had on my development on a personal level would take another day or two to give adequate acknowledgment—if I could do it at all.

Jonathan: I zoomed to Great Lakes contexts in my first two questions, given, yes, your interest in and extensive writing on d.a. levy, bpNichol and Kenneth Patchen. Not that you've focused on and conceived of this as a "regional" project, but I'm wondering if you see yourself carrying forward a certain tradition of "midwest poetics." (Are you a Lake Poet!? And if so, who is your Edinburgh Review?) Whether in the positive sense, as identifying with the geography and its holdouts (including, yeah, James Wright), or negatively in terms of a resistance to the bicoastal polarities that have so dominated the narrative of New American Poetics. Or in terms of something that unites these three important figures . . . ?

Douglas: Well, it’s a seemingly odd formation—Patchen, levy and Nichol—but they really are closely connected, aesthetically. And with the major league poetry teams so sharply divided into the Americans and the Nationals, they may forever be thought of as the Batavian Muckdogs of Modernism. I see my own writing project as less one of carrying any tradition forward, but rather paying it forward, in the time-honored practice of a generalized reciprocity. I hope all my creditors, spiritual or otherwise, can recognize my commitment to this. The amazing scholar Gordon Brotherston had me shaking in my seat one day when he described how the Pre-Columbian Mesoamerican cultures initiate novices into the scholars' caste. I felt it such an apt analogy for my own experiences as a graduate student, however buffeted I was by the corporate comforts of the campus lifestyle. It involves the ritual bleeding of the novitiate’s ears for something like four straight days without food. I’m not exaggerating too much to say that it felt like I went through this once every 6 months for 10 years, though after each bleeding we’d all go get starbucks and play kickball with the media studies grads! The problem today is that, after all this, our unspoken model for new scholars is: any non-trust-funded humanities graduate in the 21st century must either slavishly obey dogma for their kibble, or go preach to birds! Or “move to Brooklyn.”

But, okay, Jonathan, I'll try to tease this out: Patchen registered the shock of Fordist capitalism in a poetry of spiritual disjunction. I'm not certain he resolved the contradictions he witnessed the 1930s, because his Furies are still tormenting the landscape—no deal was made with them. He got stuck in the non-cathartic tragedy that is the twentieth-century, and got his back smashed in the heroic rescue of a Hollywood starlet. Riding as we are on Minerva's wings, we should see him as the perfect example of postmodernism before Warhol. You know, Pittsburgh and Youngstown are both on the Baltimore & Ohio railway. For his part, d.a. levy discovered that the midwest wanted nothing to do with modernism, or with any of the deep level remedies to the military-industrial complex proposed by the antiwar generation. So he disappeared into the vortex of his solar plexus. He was the Buddhist precursor to Devo and Pere Ubu. Devo-founder Mark Mothersbaugh was a part of the poetry scene in Kent/Cleveland in the mid-70s, before he realized that music and film were a lot easier to make money from. And both you and I have met Charlotte Pressler, Peter Laughner's widow, who donated a huge underground literature collection to UB. Nichol was able to transcend a lot of this heavy historical baggage, perhaps because he was Canadian. Though it’s more likely that, as he stated, he had to replay the phylogeny of modernism in the ontogeny of his work. Most serious poets in Cleveland understand what levy was doing, though one of the Flarf Popes has recently told me he's still shit. So he still gets under the skin of some of the heavy hitters in the National league, which is, to my mind, a productive relationship—as useful to defining a "midwest" poetics as anything else. The history of this kind of poetry and ethics is like the history of salt—you know? How American expansion was in many ways held back for a century or more by the need for salt, and that most settlements beyond Appalachia depended first on finding salt deposits. So, when the Americans and the Nationals come roaming around the provinces for kicks, they might discover these salt mines. Otherwise, they get chicken wings, or as in your fillip, "holdouts".

What connects these three poets is their maintenance throughout their careers of a serious concern for poetry that materializes across artistic practices. They demonstrated an ethics just as much as a poetics—so that, when you read a visual poem, the effect is poetic: its called kenosis, kind of like a good samadhi kick in the ass. A visual poem is not an example of visual art or design, though laborers in these fields do a good amount of poaching from each other. All the rest of the talk about the subject is rhetorical foreplay. But my idea of it, in this offhand definition, might just be a masculine way of seeing things (because it’s only concerned with the blank). So, if I fetishize the “spasm” of the poem, I also know that the trick is to maintain this state for longer and longer periods of time. Great poets know how to do this. It’s like tantra. And it is a lifelong study.
But Ginsberg was right, d.a. levy got too caught up in the fight, and he let anger take over. Patchen, perhaps because of his disability, knew how to keep the teakettle at just the right temperature. Myself, I'm fully, thoroughly, invested in sustainable and renewable resources. The best example I can give for this poetics is the experience I had when I realized, while studying bpNichol's archive in Vancouver, that he had fucked with his own archiving system for his work, and got me to scramble around for an hour looking for "missing" poems that didn't exist—AHA!

Put the reader into the context, put the context into the poem. Be a good whore, love your clients.

You playfully compare me to the Lake Poets, and ask me what “My Edinburgh Review" is. It sounds like a good title for an self-mythologizing literary study. “Call Me Endymion”. Pretty much any of the beautifully allusive non-recognizing recognitions that spurt out of the bloggosphere these days make up the dismissals I come across. I can't say I taken two across the bow lately. It feels more like the "death by a thousand cuts" process (see Aztec reference above). There must be a decent book out there on the case of Lyrical Ballads v. Edinburgh Review. The most I know about the Edinburgh Review comes from John Brewer's book The Pleasures of the Imagination. As I was trying to tell Dale Smith in his blog—I'm just the guy making the sammiches in the kitchen. They want lunch, I give them lunch. Its very, very difficult for me to get invested in ideas of "formations" and canon-this and canon-that, because it’s such a drain of useful energy. Nor am I very interested in pulling oars on a polytechnic research and development trireme. Midwest poetics: get up in the morning, eat your eggs and drink your coffee, and get to fucking work. Everything else is love-love-love (play La Marseillaise here).

Jonathan: We met in the context of the SUNY at Buffalo Poetics Program. Did that program change you in any fundamental way as a poet?

Douglas: Undoubtably. Oddly enough, I had to carry whatever scholarly ability I had with me to Buffalo, because the point of the program wasn't to refine scholars, it was to keep up the pace. And I wasn't ready for the social stratification. We likes it flat in the midwest!! *yawn* "Buildins goin' up to the sky/ people goin' down to the ground" as some crazy folksinger put it. But, honestly, it was an amazing, intense experience. They brought in just about every important writer you can name. And you don't just learn poetics, you learn parlimentary culture. So there was a year or two of feeling, as Linda Russo once said, "crushed by knowledge." And then I became comfortable to mostly watch the goings-on, as I learned my "place". Lots of maps and retorts, diagrams and genetic sequencing lists. Aaron Kunin has a beautiful book in the works called The Mandarin (excerpted in Fence 11:1) which dramatises perfectly how this kind of artistic incubation works. It was collaborative, anarchic, exhilirating, and enormously disillusioning—all useful experiences in the end.

Jonathan: We came in the wake (backwash?) of a vanguard that had hit Buffalo (from the late 'sixties through the early 'nineties, say) but were ultimately interested in making waves of our own. Where do you see the edge, for language arts in these early (yet accelerating) years of the 21st-century?

Douglas: I hate to shift this question away from a survey of the state of the art, but I honestly feel my view is far too limited to pick out any particular names or obligations for the moment. It seems to depend on what any particular writer, or group of writers, feel they have to do, and how well they stay committed to that activity. I am drawn towards poets and writers who understand that they have the incredibly difficult task to work and gain the continuance of their efforts. Careful consideration of the history of literature shows us that much of the discourse around the work is a kind of shuffling of terms, a chess-game, and an attempt at self-invention. Nick Piombino spoke into the virtual air recently—"I don't give a flying fuck how my personhood is doing!" (on the Poetics list, I think). That's the case for the best work going on—and it may seem selfish, and it may seem indifferent, but when you know that what you can provide in the work depends on a way nobody else may understand, or even dislike, you gain a better and better grasp on its meaning, better and better company, and better and better work. Great works are written by Martians, waitresses, martini-drinkers, dishwashers, subway cellists, and ski bums in their chalets out in Aspen. What should accelerate right now is a diversity of means for the work of art that doesn't wreck the ecology. Any work that pursues its question honestly is one that isn't getting caught up in the schizophrenia of trying to be what it already is. And we all benefit from that. But more often than not, we don't know what it is sufficiently to give it a name—so any names provided for this "edge" are already retrospective. But the comfort of working in retrospection and on familiar tropes may also provide for a career and two-car garage. Right now there is an enormous set of means for writers to discover what has been written, and to narrow that enormous potential into a single list of twenty book that will point the way through is ludicrous—I mean, we're no longer interested in just "buy[ting] a goddam big car and driv[ing]" anymore, are we? The landscape may have been vast, but we know now that it really isn't, because everything is connected. And we have to take care to understand when the frame of our potential literature shifts dimensions/shifts planes of reference. It’s important to recognize when some soils are exhausted, and it seems to me, the best writers know how to get continual harvest, even if only on a subsistence level.

Jonathan: You are the founder, editor and publisher of a unique, ambitious and thoughtfully composed 'zine, Celery Flute: the Kenneth Patchen Newsletter. I am interested in how you manage to serve Patchen's (underappreciated) legacy, while directing many of the contents of the newsletter to the present moment. How do you see Kenneth Patchen functioning as a vortex (or insert metaphor of your choice) for present concerns in poetics?

Douglas: I'm not much into the rehabilitation game for great figures—but I am working on an essay about Melville and Patchen right now. As much as I expend a lot of energy trying to figure him out, Patchen remains an anomaly to me. And there still seems to be no explanation for how or where he would fit into American literature, or Modernism more generally. I suppose resolving this question and making an elegant case for him would have gotten me a nice book contract. But the question is still with me, and though it no longer feels as personally determining as it once did—I get an enormous amount of satisfaction and pleasure in working on the questions he poses, one of which, to unfairly minimize (and hopefully not to cheapen it) seems to be: "Damn, you human beings are so nasty, but why do I love you so much?"

Jonathan: In "The Guts & Mechanisms" (Roofing and Siding) you quote a mentor we shared at SUNY Buffalo:

"Words are amphibious, says Bunn,
combining a materially transmitted signifier
supplanted by a superstructural signified."

Elsewhere (in At Any Point), you state that "it is irresponsible to make the world seem less complex than it really is."

I'm drawn to how you hold onto both ends of the amphibian. Your poems often address lyric situations they refuse to clarify. And they mobilize language without resorting to chess moves.

Some readers, I fear, have not the depth to hear your hearing. While others may not care to touch "the little green blackbird hiding in pleine sight." (The context you put your reader in.) Who, then, do you feel you are writing for?

Douglas: James H. Bunn's book Wave Forms is blindingly complex on its own terms, but thanks for bringing that into view. His thesis is that wave-forms in language form a material consistency (a constant) that can be followed from the cognitive and the sonic into the basic rhythms of nature. This proposes an empirically verifiable connection that may get us past the sceptical philosopher's "problem of other minds". A radio signal carries the "superstructural" information of language, and we transpose, or translate, the basic wave (electromagnetic) to the sonic (human speech as sound), into our particular language (English, perhaps) and then into the particular message ("Sonic Youth is playing tonight at the Hollywood Bowl"). The resonance doesn't end, and we can find a meaning at every level. But in our experience this doesn't happen sequentially—what we hear is the message, instantaneously—that part we can use. Love, language, and message pass through the most complex entity in the universe—us. But they also pass through a very complex world and its ten thousand things. Love, language, and the message bring traces of all the other waystations they visited along the way. The poet has to learn all the ways, all the transformations that take place to get from HERE (the lover) to THERE (the beloved): "Come here, tired one, and let me love you, soothe you, and make you whole again." OR: "Lover, I am tired and in pain, please touch me and heal me." I guess that clarifies what the message is—but you can find clarity at any level you would like: "here's what I know about how to love" or "here's how I didn't know, I'm sorry. I'll remember."

The "little green blackbird" image I use in "Sines-poem" is from a seven-part sequence in Kenneth Patchen's book Because It Is—which is included in the new compendium We Meet, coming out this week from New Directions!

Who do I write for? I sometimes write for specific people, I write for communities, my society. I write for my lover, and I write for the one who doesn't, or can’t love. I write when I'm out of my own depths and I don't even know what it is I'm writing or who I'm writing for—etc., etc. I've written for you, Jonathan. My parents. For anybody at any point. But I have recently changed, or have maintained a particular direction in my work, in the poem To Becoming Normal. I constantly "revise for clarity" in the same way I ask my composition students to. Being ambiguous or amphibious can be seen as generous if you realize you are not trying to direct or determine what the reader will experience. But sometimes you want to be direct. I often write to someone. To YOU. Everybody wants a big mac, right? A flavor-blast. If you streamline the process and give the reader the product the same way every time, and they don't have to worry about it, they will go there to find what they were looking for. But maybe some readers will find something in my work. I can’t stop to worry about this too much. And then again, there are some people you don't want touching you. Take it or leave it. Isn't that the baseline function of our capacity for judgment? These pills don't work!! or That shit was superfly.

You mention the lyric situations that my poems refuse to clarify. There is some reticence in the poetic "lover's voice" in my poems, yes—uncertaintly about that use of language, and uncertainty about who, specifically, is looking back at me. Language is the same way. But since I trust myself and other people more and more these days, I invite this "other" insofar as I trust myself, and am able to anticipate, to look forward to, what I can't predict. I've made a lifelong commitment to love, and to express that love in what I write. Consciousness is divine suffering, and consciousness is bliss. Some people may find presumption, patronizing attitudes, or a bit too much self-satisfied pride in my work. Yes, I have heard this from others. And I'm sorry. I really am. Pay it forward.

Jonathan: Sound. I love the extravagance of your word-choice, as much when heavy-handed as when deft. Like the actual bolt screwed through the chapbook version of Love Sounds (Like Perfidy).

Indeed, sound is perfidy in this counter-reformation. (I typed the parentheses wrong in that title, but I like it better now.)

Or sound nowadays is used only modestly, or severely, or systematically, or unrestrictedly, or ironically, or between parentheses. But what about sweet nuzzling sounds. Unleashed sounds. Thrushes that make the woods ring. When we use them we lose our hall pass. Yet anyone will listen in, peeping Dimmesdales.

In "That One Thing (on sublimation)," you rap on the feminine endings—expectation, transformation, realization, compunction, duration, anticipation, location—bringing back certain words like a sestina teaser. Or like a quenine. You flirt with oulipian sounds (for instance), but won't grid your poems. (Or did you write one for Stalling's Grid?)

You bring into poetry the non-meaning sounds of your life in music. At the same time, and interestingly enough, your critical rap focuses on visual poetry.

Douglas: Putting a bolt through a book was a heavy-handed thing to do. It left a hole in the center of the text. It split the book into "above" and "below". It seemed at that time that what I had loved betrayed me, and the poem got included in that feeling. I was also feeling that the conversational implicature of the words "I love you" could be heard as a kind of command to do something very harmful to oneself. Of course, one may come home unexpectedly and overhear their beloved having sex with someone else. Or, in turn, you open the door and find a Dimmesdale in the hallway. Its really sad. Yes, I lost my hallpass, but they didn’t tell me until three years later.

I do have a poem in Jonathan Stalling's grid book. I used the idea of the "shell game" for that one: I / You / We –under which shell do we come together?

Jonathan: Where does your emphasis on sound come from, then, and where do you think it is headed?

Douglas: Well, my emphasis on sound isn't from anything I can specifically name. I guess I'm vedic in that way—sound is both source and destination. As for my writing on visual poetry: Visual works vibrate. Great visual works vibrate greatly. Same thing—wave forms.

Jonathan: I won't ask you about America, or the sinking carbon economy, since we know your answers (though I can't wait to read the Melville essay), but do you think now that the future has gone South (God help them), or in the North we can look forward to the benefits of a future in reverse? Will you watch the olympic games?

Douglas: Well, I do love the South! Florida, North Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Texas—I've met more generous and genuine people in these states than I can tell you about here. And these are beautiful, beautiful geographies. Read William Bartram's Travels. I guess any "regional" predictions about the future would have more to do with making good rather than bad economic, emotional and environmental choices, and with giving up on the terrible idea that we can't stop doing something wrong once we've started doing it. Any rhetoric of "us vs. them" is exploitative—is used to push buttons and collect $200—it is offensive to the conscience, and offensive to what we really know about ourselves as human beings. Our culture, if American, is a fluid one, it changes. I can't define that identity in any other way. If there is a hope for a "static" American culture, well, then, hand over the embalming fluid, and we will mourn. I like to recite Mr. Rogers’ poem about "what do you do with the mad in you" which he read at a Senate appropriations hearing for PBS back in 1968. If my poetic project is the consistent examination of the components of identity, one of the first to be deconstructed are the false binaries. Hey, I played my first games for the American league! Jonathan, don't paint in such broad swathes: I plan on writing a series of Pindaric odes to the olympians.

But I really have no idea what you mean by a "future in reverse.” And a "carbon economy” is just a buzzword, isn't it? Aren't we made of carbon? Isn't this our house??

Joshua Cohen, "Aim"

2008-07-14T14:40:00.000-07:00

Continuing our in-house journal, here's a new short fiction by Joshua Cohen, author of A Heaven of Others.

Aim

He was six or seven and this was fun, it was fun being in the woods, doing everything in the woods with dads and his dad and the other boys their sons, hunting or pretending to hunt or fish, making fire with three matches (collecting tinder, branches), pitching tents and breaking it all down again, the campfire stories, the gear.
When you had to piss you'd go deep into the woods away from camp, always bring another boy with you; it was good and not shaming if the other boy had to piss, too, or only said he did.
Then, if he had to piss, you'd stand about five six feet apart and face each other and, careful not to piss on each other (though that sometimes happened), piss at each other, trying as hard as you could not to cross the streams but to merge them into one stream where they would deflect each other down to the ground. But this skill could only be sustained for a moment or two, at a uniformity of flow.

Later (years) aim was tested from the train platform, the El. Waiting was boring so you'd talk sex while smoking cigarettes with other friends from college. When the tobacco taste hurt your mouth and the cigarette was almost done you'd spit over the railing to the street (careful not to hit a passerby), then drop your lit cigarette butt trying to land it and so snuff it directly in the spit puddle (again, careful not to hit a passerby). You tried for three years including summers, you dropped out; you only hit it once.

For your grandfather it had been taking the gun they'd given them, loading it with bullet then shooting that into a German, and with your father it was similar in Asia: you pulled the trigger and suddenly, motion stopped, behind that shed door outside Aachen or a stand of bamboo … Sometimes you saw your victim, before or after you killed him, other times not. Still, there was no doubt he was there: He, in turn, could kill you. He took aim and you, too, were a target.
Not him. He sat at a desk embedded with a screen. When a light blipped on the screen he pressed a button, a bullet was launched remotely, then the light disappeared, eventually, ten nine eight, the light was destroyed. There was no danger to this work. There was no aim, and his finger could not miss that little white circle that was the same size and shape and color as his mother's nipple. What was necessary was only that he "Pay Attention." Every three hours he was relieved from duty to eat dinner, or take a piss — which he did, pissing, alone and with his eyes closed the entire time.

Harold Jaffe, from "Paris 60: Docufictions"

2008-07-07T14:24:00.000-07:00

This month begins a new direction for this blog, as we are going to start featuring recent works by our 13 Starcherone authors, with new works appearing every week or so, creating a type of journal from our list. American fiction is moribund and predictable; its most well-heeled promoters are intentionally looking to print works in already tested formulae, and as a result fiction is the most conservative of all contemporary art forms. This is a small attempt to give voice to an alternative, to renew the art form. Starcherone Books tries to publish and promote the types of non-mainstream authors ignored by big publishing.

The following are from an unpublished manuscript by veteran fiction writer Jaffe, called Paris 60. Its 60 pieces were each composed in Paris, as dated semi-documentary, semi-fictive journal entries.

4.3 Dracula
I saw Bela Lugosi as Dracula walking in the Tuileries gardens.
It was daytime, the sun was out, he looked splenetic, distinctly out of sorts.
His head (with the widow’s peak, Asian eyes) was bent.
He was wearing black.
(Of course French males wear black as a rule.
Whether for reasons of style, tacit devotion, grieving, or indirect satire, has never been established).
Lugosi as Dracula was wearing black for his own immemorial reasons.
Looking hard, I thought I made out a sharpened canine.
At that moment I heard a bird sound—a raven on a dead chestnut tree clacking like a woodpecker.
It was warm, the raven could have been in courting mode.
Bela Lugosi died in 1956, and here we are eight years into the Millennium with a small hyper-ambitious man named Sarko at the helm.
Lugosi didn’t die, his morphine habit and quality time as Dracula on those Hollywood sets sucked up death and vomited it back out as life eternal.
These off-center formulations unreeled rapidly in my chest.
When I came to my senses (if that’s what they are), I thought of following him.
But he was gone, disappeared into nuclear springtime.
Then I remembered the dream I had in my small bed in my small Paris flat.
Alongside someone else, unidentified, I was looking across a broad verdant landscape when suddenly it began to sink behind the horizon until it disappeared.
I turned to the person by my side and said: “It’s over at last.”

4.6 Solitude
Baudelaire in Paris Spleen goes on about the virtues of solitude.
This was before the advent of the Internet.
After despising Parisians with whom you’re compelled to interact daily, returning to your flat at dusk and securing the locks on the door would seem reassuring.
The cask of laudanum, half-open bottle of absinthe, and hashish laced with opium are arguably more productive than surfing the Net or watching a DVD.
I’ve been isolated in New York, Berlin, London, Amsterdam, Mexico City, Quito, Tokyo, Singapore, New Delhi, Paris.
Paris is the most evocative city in which to be alone.
It is only the French who admit, or do not deny, the fou and folle.
The mad and palpably deviant.
Not the functionally mad: bankers, corporate chieftains, uniformed child-murderers.
Those are welcome everywhere in the First World.
I mean the dysfunctional who smell bad, can’t decipher the métro do nothing “right” but dream and rant.
True, Sade was imprisoned and Artaud institutionalized, but there were mitigating circumstances.
Parisians cross the boulevard at the red.
Drive their cars and motorcycles on the sidewalks.
Litter the Bois de Bologne with condoms.
Love their dogs but don’t pick up the dog shit.
They welcome, at least in principle, the transgressive tradition in art and letters.
After a bad day with bad people, cross-dressing or undressing,
Getting high on anything,
Then going out in the Paris dark to a film festival or gallery opening and sexually groping the human or sub-human to your left,
Stabbing him in the thigh with the poisoned tip of your umbrella,
It’s a rush, cathartic, very satisfying.
And Paris is the only major city I know that grants you your donnée, won’t even turn around to glare.

4.8 Nose
Depardieu, Philippe Noiret, Jean Gabin, Lino Ventura, Aznavour, Bonaparte, Sade, Le Grand Charles, Sarko himself . . .
The prominent nose accords with the broad forehead of Descartes.
With the cathedrals of Chartres, Notre Dame, flying buttresses, gargoyles.
The intricate streets and rooftops of Paris.
Redondo Beach, California, is a Pacific Ocean beach city in Los Angeles County.
Silicon-rather than carbon-based, one might say.
Profile-less as the computer.
Females are blonde and tall with flat, pretty faces.
Males are blond and rangy with flat, handsome faces.
The male voice is low, without timbre.
Like the radiant Pacific when the tide is out.
It came to pass that a well known philosophe from Paris was on
his way to deliver a lecture in the Flemish city of Antwerp.
Sitting next to him in the first-class cabin of the Air France-slash-Delta Airlines aircraft was a champion surfer from Redondo Beach.
He was on his way to a high-level competition near the Flemish city of
Knokke-Heist, on the North Sea, where for obscure reasons, the surf was breaking abnormally high.
Each of the principals was according to type: the philosophe, 49-years-old,
medium height, sallow with an imposingly broad forehead and De Gaulle-like proboscis.
The surfer, 23-years-old, tall, rangy, broad-shouldered, sun-bronzed, with blond hair, a flattish face, very white teeth, and a small upturned nose.
It might have happened after the complimentary champagne (two small bottles each) that the unlikely pair got into a conversation in English (the philosophe was fluent), and decided to exchange identities.
The six-foot-four-inch surfer with the blond hair and flat face would deliver the lecture (on Gilles Deleuze) at the University of Antwerp, respond to questions from the distinguished audience, be honored at dinner, then return to his senior post at the Université Paris-Sorbonne.
While the sallow-faced philosophe with the Cartesian nose, who could not swim, let alone surf, would compete in the surfing competition near Knokke-Heist, from there fly to Hawaii for another surfing competition, then return to Redondo Beach, California and smoke a joint.
This exchange was validated with a handshake, the surfer’s long, tanned hand tenderly enclosing the philosophe’s delicate fingers.
Was the extraordinary transfer of identities implemented?
The aircraft crashed while trying unsuccessfully to negotiate the short Antwerp International Airport runway.
No survivors.

4.9 Cannonball
Julian (Cannonball) Adderley, jazz alto saxophonist and composer, especially known for his bebop arrangements, was living in Paris between 1959 and ’63.
He changed apartments three or four times, first living in the 14th close to Saint Anne Hospital; next in the Marais, then in the Belleville quarter.
While in Belleville he was visited by his younger brother Nat, a virtuosic jazz cornetist.
Cannonball opened the door, he and his brother embraced, Nat said:
--Man, this is a small pad.
Cannonball laughed:
--Yeah, it’s a small pad. But it’s a small pad in Paris.
They both laughed.
Over a drink, Cannonball said:
--Notice the Parisian women?
--Damn right, Nat said. Real lookers. Elegant.
--You got it, Cannonball said.
Nat sipped his gin.
--Are all the bathrooms as small and dark as this one?
--Most of ‘em, yeah, Cannonball said. Some have bathtubs but no showers. Others--it’s the other way around.
--How can a French chick look so fresh in a bathroom like that? Nat said. How can she apply her makeup ‘n shit?
--That’s the 64,000 dollar question, right there, Cannonball laughed.
They sipped their gin.
--How’s the music going? Nat asked.
--Good chops here, kid bro. The audiences dig us. Ain’t many black folks in the audience, true. But you remember that singin’ soul sister Josephine Baker? They loved her in Paris.
--I heard ‘bout that, Nat said. Was a long time ago. And she showed her titties, as I recall. Me, I’ll do some shit, but not that.
They laughed and sipped their gin.
--I can’t tell you how it all goes down, Cannonball said. But they seem to understand what we’re up to much better than that other place.
Nat feigned surprise.
--You don’t mean America?
--Polish your horn, Cannonball said. You gone see fuh yo’sef at our gig tomorrow night.

4.10 Fast Train
First class on the fast train from Marseilles to Paris.
Every seat taken but one, next to a middle-aged man sitting near the window.
I face a family of three: mother, son, grandmother.
The son, about 10 years old, called Alfonse, can’t sit still; he stands on one foot, hops down the aisle, kicks the air like a kung fu warrior, puffs out his cheeks and makes goofy faces.
(Americans would label his condition Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and attribute it to a malfunctioning brain).
The mother and grandmother appeal to the boy.
“Alfonse, Arrête-toi!.
“Alfonse, Viens ici!”
Alfonse ignores them.
Mother and grandmother glance at each other in familiar futile frustration.
Meanwhile, the middle-aged man who alone has an empty seat beside him has gestured to Alfonse and, astonishingly, coaxes the boy over.
The man gets up from his window seat, sits on the aisle, and manages to get Alfonse to sit by the window.
Once seated, the man talks to him softly, and while he talks Alfonse looks at the floor or actually looks at the man without jerking his body or twisting his face.
Next, the man puts his hand gently on Alfonse’s back and begins to stroke.
I’m reminded of a documentary I saw of one of Mother Teresa’s nuns stroking the back of a severely traumatized Palestinian boy.
Alfonse responds to the gentle stroking the way a feral cat, temporarily appeased, might respond.
Are the mother and grandmother suspicious of the obviously homosexual man stroking their child?
Pas du tout.
The mother and her mother smile and exchange a look which says silently: Unexpected relief. Thank you, Monsieur, whoever you may be.
For his part, the man is now talking softly, almost lovingly to the boy, while stroking his back with longer, more penetrating strokes.
Alfonse occasionally responds with a few words.
Even when he doesn’t talk, the boy seems relaxed, almost at peace.
This continues for the duration of the trip, which is about three hours.
When the train pulls into Paris’s Gare de Lyon, I watch the middle-aged man trade friendly, low-key goodbyes with the mother, grandmother and with Alfonse.
He.tousles the boy’s hair.
The family and the man go in opposite directions.

Quinnehtukqut a Finalist for First Novelist Prize

2008-05-02T10:12:00.000-07:00

Visit Quinnehtukqut here.

Joshua Harmon's novel, Quinnehtukqut, has been named one of three finalists for the Virginia Commonwealth University First Novelist Award.

Quinnehtukqut traces the real and imagined travels of Martha Hennessy, a girl wishing for a life beyond her family's farm in Northern New Hampshire. In varied and musical language, Quinnehtukqut interweaves Martha's story with those of the dreamers and drifters whose lives intersect hers: an American soldier scarred by the first World War, a mythical and murderous tramp seeking lost Indian gold, a man haunted by his memories of Byrd's expeditions to Antarctica, an industrialist longing to become a woodsman, and an old woman forced to leave her home due to the planned flooding of a valley. Elegiac and lyrical, evocative and visionary, Quinnehtukqut reveals how people inhabit place and how place inhabits people through its vivid study of the New England landscape.

Quinnehtukqut was published in 2007 by the Buffalo, NY-based small press, Starcherone Books. It is the only one of the three finalists for the VCU prize published by an independent small press. The other two finalists were issued by Dial/Random House and Vintage/Penguin, respectively. The much-lauded first novel by Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, finished as a semi-finalist.

Quinnehtukqut may be ordered from Starcherone directly or from your favorite bookseller.

Starcherone at AWP-NYC

2008-01-18T08:57:00.000-08:00

[photo: Aimee Parkison & I in NYC a coupla years back]

Starcherone Books's appearance at this year's Associated Writing Programs conference and book fair, Jan.31-Feb.2, will be the largest gathering of its authors in one place ever. We don't ever all get to see each other -- but folks are coming in from Denver, California, North Carolina, and Wisconsin; I'm driving down from Buffalo with fellow Starcheree, Doug Manson; and then we've got more folks who are already in the NY-metro area. In all, 10 Starcherone book authors may well be in one place at one time -- I think the most we ever had before was 4 -- and that's in addition to our staff and all the writers who graced our PP/FF anthology a couple years back. I am tingling.

While some conference events are limited to registered participants (costly, and they sold out anyway!), the Book Fair is open to the public on Saturday, Feb. 2. If you are in New York, I urge you to check it out -- this is the largest small press book festival in the world, and everyone sells at discount, especially late in the day Saturday. It will be taking place at the New York Hilton, 1335 Avenue of the Americas, in Midtown, and it's free to get in (that day).

Starcherone authors signings will be taking place at our book table #94 all three days -

Thursday, 1/31: 11 am - Sara Greenslit, The Blue of Her Body
2 pm - Joshua Cohen, A Heaven of Others

Friday, 2/1: 11 am - Aimee Parkison, Woman with Dark Horses
1 pm - Nina Shope, Hangings: Three Novellas

Saturday, 2/2: 12 noon - Zachary Mason, The Lost Books of the Odyssey
2 pm - Joshua Harmon, Quinnehtukqut

The grand culmination of it all will be a celebration reading Saturday night in the East Village with all six of these authors (Greenslit, Cohen, Parkison, Shope, Harmon, & Mason) reading from their work at KGB Bar, 85 E. 4th St., 7-9 pm, hosted by yours truly. More info can be seenat the KGB site.

If you are registered for AWP, you are also invited to come check out a panel I'm on with authors R.M. Berry, Michael Martone, and Noy Holland from FC2: "Fraud! The Debunking of Experimental Fiction." Should be fun -- and good for you!

Hope to see you all there, one way or another! Please come by and say hello or introduce yourself.

--
PS - A new interview with Joshua Cohen on the eve of the release of A Heaven of Others appears in the Jan. 16 Jewish Forward.

The Year in Reviews

2007-12-29T15:41:00.000-08:00

[image is from Joshua Cohen's notebook for A Heaven of Others]

More than any year since we began publishing books in 2000, Starcherone publications garnered terrific reviews in 2007. Here's a listing of these reviews (at least most of them), with links to those that can be found online:

Joshua Harmon's Quinnehtukqut:

Jeff Hansen, Rain Taxi Review of Books, Winter 07/08, p. 44: "'The Legend of Jimmy Frye' is reason enough to get this book."

Anne Cammon, KGBBarLit: "a bold effort from a new writer eager to push the boundaries of storytelling."

John Cotter, "Voices in the Woods," Open Letters Monthly, November 2007.

Alexander Nazaryan, "The Wood Demons: Wilderness, darkness, and drink in a debut novel," Village Voice.

Sara Greenslit's The Blue of Her Body

Mary Cappello, "Monstrous Beings in Need of a Hair Wash," Women's Review of Books, November/December 2007, p. 20-22: "an extended prose poem passing as a novel."

Daniel Green, "The Silence She Sought," The Reading Experience: A LIterature and Criticism Blog, May 29, 2007.

Harold Jaffe's Beyond the Techno-Cave

Steve Shaviro, "Strategies for the War on Culture," American Book Review, November/December 2007, p. 20-21: "Harold Jaffe is pissed off. As he ought to be. As we all ought to be."

Gary Lain, Belphegor, June 2007

Michael Filas, Rain Taxi Review of Books, Summer 2007, p. 47: "The essays especially bring in an element of earnestness and personal conviction, nakedly revealing the heart and courage for which Jaffe is so often noted."

Larry Fondation, "Nonfiction: Writing as Warfare," Brooklyn Rail, April 2007

PP/FF: An Anthology, ed. Peter Conners

Chris Murray, "A Fluxifyin' Concoction, PP/FF: can we have our say and play it too?", Sentence #5, p. 271-4.

Peter Bricklebank, "Neither/Nor Fish/Fowl (NN/FF)," American Book Review, January/ February 2007, p. 6-7.

"Rants & Raves" exchange between Peter Conners and Peter Bricklebank, American Book Review, September/October 2007, p. 3.

Jeffrey DeShell's Peter: An (A)Historical Romance

John Domini, "Par(enthetical)ody," American Book Review, January/February 2007, p. 9.

This list includes only reviews from 2007 (PP/FF & DeShell had a lot more last year). Look for more in 2008! And in the meantime, check out these 2007-08 Starcherone author pages:

Zachary Mason's The Lost Books of the Odyssey (worth it for the hilarious FAQ alone!)

Joshua Harmon's blog

JoshuaCohen.org

As well as the interview about publishing I gave last February in Conversations in the Book Trade.

Happy New Year!

PP/FF Podcast [link]

2007-12-04T12:26:00.000-08:00

How did I miss this for a whole year?

Starts with an interview with Peter Conners, then goes on to a reading from the anthology featuring Thom Ward, Ethan Paquin, Dimitri Anastasopoulos, Sean Thomas Dougherty, Geoffrey Gatza, Christopher Kennedy, Peter Conners, and Tony Leuzzi.

A Rave for Quinnehtukqut [link]

2007-11-19T06:58:00.000-08:00

John Cotter, Open Letters Monthly

Quinnehtukqut
Joshua Harmon
Starcherone Books, 2007

{This month's issue of Open Letters features a lead review of Joshua Harmon's Quinnehtukqut by John Cotter, who calls it "the most accomplished debut I’ve read in years...." Read on.... - ed.}

Vermont shares so smooth a northern border with New York, you could finish their maps with a straight edge and a single stroke. But travel one state over, and you’ll find the Canadian border as complex and cragged as the spider web of wide rivers and narrow lakes that shape it. They are the headwaters of the Connecticut River (“Kwenitekq or Quinatucquet—something like that the native tribesmen called their Great River, speaking so low in their throats”). Here, briefly, was once an independent nation, “The Republic of Indian Stream,” and here is the spiritual home of Joshua Harmon’s haunting novel Quinnehtukqut, the most accomplished debut I’ve read in years.

An unassuming package, Quinnehtukqut’s dull beige cover reproduces a period photograph of a couple of backwoods swells smirking outside a clapboard post office. It looks eerily like a snap from one of those Arcadia collections: Images of [Your Town] drawn from historic post cards and documents. As soon as you open the book and read a few lines, you’ll find Quinnehtukqut to be the opposite of that black and white embalming fluid with which we set our local histories. Here is a whole shelf of books: adventure stories, tearjerker romances, historical curios, post-modern poetry, fairytales. Reading Quinnehtukqut is like dropping a dozen of these books on the sofa next to you (what a friend of mine used to call “full-contact reading”), and skipping from book to book, until it gradually dawns on you that that the same current runs through all of them. The story is the same; only the weather changes.

Harmon is a brave writer, and one of the novel’s great strengths is its daring mix of narrative styles: from a straight third-person which easily shuttles back and forth through time, to haunting impressionistic monologues, to jagged, folkloric nuggets and parallel narratives that creep alongside one another on the page. What’s remarkable about this mixture of methods is how accessible it is. Harmon takes care to provide lots of concrete detail, the “whipchords, puttees, suspenders, crumpled and battered hats” of the old New Hampshire settlers, and the feel of the woods, the “dirt, dirt worn smooth, the twigs ironlike, the spruce bark and frozen pitch.” [continued...]

{for more, click the link above.}

{to purchase Quinnehtukut, click here.}

The Odyssey, or, What's in the Horse?

2007-11-14T16:25:00.000-08:00

Zachary Mason's book The Lost Books of the Odyssey just came back from the printer and I am beside myself with anticipation to see what people think of this book. It was the winner of our 2nd most recent contest, judged by Carole Maso -- and I remember Carole writing to me about it after the judging was done and saying, "You're really lucky to have found this one." It's a miracle of a book -- for his debut, Zachary Mason has imagined a long-lost ur-text of the Odyssey, with alternate episodes, fragments, retelling and the like of the original, and rendered it in such stunning fashion that Harry Mathews (whom Mason wrote, out of the blue) had this to say:

"“Zachary Mason’s astounding glosses of The Odyssey plunge us into an unforeseeable and hypnotic dimension of fiction. Of the three possible interpretations of the work that he proposes — Homeric stories anciently reproduced by recombining their components, a Theosophist dream of abstract mathematics, and pure illusion (that is, it was all made up by him) — the result is one and the same. This enthralling book is his doing, whether as translator, conjuror, or author. I vote for number three.”

OK, OK, I won't make this a simple press release. I have more to tell. Dig this picture of sculptures that Mason commissioned to enclose review copies sent to five major reviewers -- Harper's, NY Times Book Review, NY Review of Books, New Yorker, and LA Times Book Review. Each review copy, wrapped in white crepe paper written over with gold calligraphy, goes inside a sculpture.

I take no credit for this -- this was Zach's idea -- and one of the smarter and more stylish book campaigns I've seen. Now hopefully it will work, and people will pay attention to this absolutely singular book -- a book I can honestly say (though such a statement is subjective, and there's a disagreement in the very next post) is the most impressive first novel I have ever seen.

Since the originals of these are off to do their business and will be seen by relatively few people, I wanted to show them here. You gotta go a long way these days to try to get a review these days for a small press book! But this book especially is one I hope people really pay attention to.

Go to Mason's Starcherone page to order the book here.

An Interview with Joshua Cohen

2007-10-23T16:26:00.000-07:00

In from the printer this week, with review copies now starting to go out, is Joshua Cohen's new novel, A Heaven of Others. Despite the fact that Cohen is just 27, this is his fourth book. Most recently, his Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto drew raves from venues as diverse as Library Journal and Bookslut, the former saying the book "just might become a cult classic." A Heaven of Others is scheduled for a February 2008 release, but copies are available now exclusively on Cohen's Starcherone page.

I interviewed Josh over the last couple days via email.

STARCHY: Today, so-called "experimental" writing seems often to be labeled such simply to be dismissed; a review of Schneidermann, for instance, refers to the "much-maligned 'experimental' genre" -- as if it's a surprise that your book would be good. Where do you think the state of fiction is today? Is there hope of transcending this rhetorical ghettoizing and reawakening a sense of excitement in the discoveries one can make as an innovative artist who happens to be working in
fiction?

COHEN: Having never worked in marketing or managed a business, I can only tell you how labeling, as you say, or categorization, feels: both as a book reviewer, and as a writer of fiction. I earn a living as a book reviewer - or critic - for The Forward. I know from experience that categorizing a book as X or Y is much easier than explaining it as it is. I also know this: Categorization is the ultimate technique by which book reviewing is reduced to salesmanship.

Now as a writer of fiction, being labeled "experimental" feels anywhere from humiliating to enraging - depending on day of week, position of stars, and who under them might be doing the labeling. It's like being called an African - if it means anything at all, it's neglect; it's the Western hubris to have to know what you're ignoring. As for "the state of fiction" – let me say this: As I don't believe in bins, categories or genres, I don't believe in "experimentation," either. "Experimentation" is often just trying to say something in a way that isn't blemished or compromised. I don't like the language of progress in art. I like to read a writer in history, but I don't like to read a writer making history – "experimenting." Such "experiments" almost always result in foolishness and, conversely, expose the writer as desperate product of his or her day and its immediate ambition or concern. Given that, I should be happy with "the state of fiction" - as everybody's writing so expectedly and unprogressively of late. Why, then, am I not happy? I never am.

Lastly, you ask is there any hope of "transcendence"? I don't know. I think there might be. You write and try not to die, and one day you and the culture begin speaking the same language. If worthy, you become less a description and more an individual: At some point, postmortem, Melville was no longer regarded or referred to as a maritime writer; just like Nietzsche transcended "existential philosophy" and Freud "psychology" – a category he created himself! - to become two of last century's greatest writers, period. Hopefully, my book won't only be read by Jews or the Philosemitic…

STARCHY: That would be a shame. Your book comes from a perspective, in that there are certain markers that identify it as the work of a Jewish author, from the identity of the protagonist, to the closing date marker, "Yom Hazikaron, 2004," which I had to look up to find out is Memorial Day or, more particularly, at least according to Wikipedia, "Israel Fallen Soldiers and Victims of Terrorism Remembrance Day." But it is a book that, to its very core, challenges intolerance. I'd like to hear you talk about this: you have said that this is a "political" book. What are its politics, to the extent that one wishes to articulate them beyond what the book itself says?

COHEN: Swedenborg, working freelance, mapped the Christian heaven. The Muslim heaven features prominently in the Koran and various Arabic poetries, Hadith and other homiletic commentary (I've profited from that of Ibn Kathir). The Jewish heaven, though, is still a mystery — it's mystic. Jews believe in olam haba — lit. "The World to Come," which is, accurately, this world if and when Messianically perfected, and not "The Next World," or any other world, for that matter, past or future. Because Jews have this world and only this world, then, they have been particularly sensitive to the lives they live on and of it.
To example: Martyrdom, or suicide, is forbidden in Judaism. The only way a Jew might become martyred is if he or she is killed, not if they kill themselves.

In "A Heaven of Others" a Jewish boy (he's an Israeli, but he's also a Jew) is exploded by a suicide bomber, and ascends, mistakenly, to the Muslim Heaven. He's on the wrong side of the wall, and without a passport — this is, in itself, and even if mistaken, a political act.

But before we get any further, some thoughts: Baruch Spinoza, who denied the divine authorship and so authenticity of Scripture, died a century before the founding of America with its Constitution, and still we're having this discussion of religion vs. politics. Our current American president has exampled, once again, that the more religious the politician, the more dangerous. A religious person like W. Bush can justify his politics, though, because this isn't it for him — there's more (and it's a shame that since 2001 "religion" has meant "ideology," and "politics" can only be had by Western democracies and not by those native to deserts). According to the theology of this Administration and, too, to the theology of every terrorist that wants to kill Americans, Israelis and Jews, today does not have to be tended if a tomorrow awaits. Earth and humanity can be defiled and murdered, these people think, because heaven is inexhaustibly ours — only, that is, if you're a believer. It follows that there is no such thing as a nihilist suicide terrorist, or a brave or courageous suicide terrorist — because true belief wins over nihilism, because religious conviction will always oppose any individual or personal sense. All of that said, the politics of this book are simple, almost simple-minded: I believe in peace. I believe in the world here and now. Spinoza said that he considered "reality" and "perfection" synonymous terms. He was saying, in effect: This is the only world and the only life we have, or that we know we have. "We" not just being Spinoza's Jews anymore, but — as the Age of Reason created the Enlightenment — everyone.

There are a number of old questions I ask anew in the book: Are people still religious in Heaven? Does a Sabbath exist in Heaven? Are there foods one may or may not eat? Do dead people pray, why and for what? The absurdity of these questions marks the corpse of my private politics and religious belief like the tape around a police scene.

STARCHY: I wouldn't want people to get the wrong idea about this book – there are these terrifically sweet and sad moments of the boy's remembrance and evocation of life with his Aba, his father, family meals and shopping expeditions, and you do a remarkable job tenderly rendering the circumscribed life of a ten year-old child, outside/unaware of all the dreck of political labels and machinations before the end of his earthly life. One of the things that impressed our readers when we first saw this book was its work in the discourse of fiction. Not that it didn't signify in other ways—certainly it did, and powerfully. But what is it that fiction does or sets out to do that you find powerful and persuasive? You are also a reviewer and an essayist, and we have been told at times of late that in today's world, only non-fiction will truly suffice. How would you respond, in terms of articulating the importance of fiction as art and/or discourse?

COHEN: Here's Spinoza again. He said that the true was true and the false was false, but fiction was pure possibility — the way things could have or would have happened, or will. It's true that nonfiction has gained prominence, lately. This is because there's a crisis of record. With so much information, with so much of so much, we seem to have developed a deep need for the bottommost truth, a craving for what or who really is real.

We want to know the facts, according to Them, and then we want to know the facts, according to Us. And then we want to make a synthesis of the two, enabling us to think ourselves enlightened, open-minded. Most "facts," though, are actually facts of facts, are winnowed-down, or sieved: We find ourselves wounded by bullet-points, bombarded by dates and laid flat on timelines, crucified by twelve steps, Ten Commandments. Fiction, though, refuses to homogenize or come to consensus. The "persuasion" of fiction, as you put it, is just that: its argumentative passion, its unrelentingly subjective agenda. A
hundred histories attempt objectivity on the history of Israel and Palestine, and none achieve it. In their fear of irrationality, they lose heart. I should stress that I'm not trying to make an argument in favor of what's been called Relativism — I'm speaking not about or within history, but around history, outside history. It's between the failures or abuses of history (violence predicated on religion, for one, political discrimination predicated on race, for another) that we
find the possibility of fiction, which is the success of the individual over the mass or a God — whatever entity that presumes to tell the writer who he is, who he should be, what he should do and think, and when and where to think and do it. I have come to believe that fiction is a form of agnosticism, the highest and most respectful form of doubt.

STARCHY: What are you working on next?

COHEN: "Next" has been for the last seven years: As of September 2007, I've finished work on a novel, an epic, about the last Jew in the world. I call the book "Graven Imaginings." Its first sentence is: "In the beginning, they are late." When will it be published? That would be my next question, were I interviewing myself...