tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-301942532024-02-19T08:42:45.996-08:00BLATTblatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10292619344606858197noreply@blogger.comBlogger61125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30194253.post-44714369398539371392007-05-08T15:26:00.000-07:002007-05-08T15:28:21.377-07:00NEW BLATT BLOG ADDRESSA big thank-you to everyone who entered our first ever novel contest. We should be announcing the winner sometime this summer.<br /><br />Our blog has moved; please visit us at http://blog.blatt.cz/<br /><br />We will no longer be posting on this blog.blatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10292619344606858197noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30194253.post-10410930798596834612007-01-08T08:30:00.000-08:002007-01-08T08:35:57.587-08:00Get Edgier<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjq6b9kvacbFna1kfp9s8r1YkBjbbLy4qqgiQm_mfdrhk0mkbrdHPQ93kgmVz34gLw6Fv0rO9DgXj4LTdRyiXTvhtqhjmZysZnEB7sL1884RpFWGJ0oB6tla4KfcKJS-5XGSaS_rQ/s1600-h/Edgier.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjq6b9kvacbFna1kfp9s8r1YkBjbbLy4qqgiQm_mfdrhk0mkbrdHPQ93kgmVz34gLw6Fv0rO9DgXj4LTdRyiXTvhtqhjmZysZnEB7sL1884RpFWGJ0oB6tla4KfcKJS-5XGSaS_rQ/s400/Edgier.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5017699235491830354" border="0" /></a><br />I can't believe I forgot to mention 3am's great anthology, <a href="http://www.snowbooks.com/web9781905005208.html"><span style="font-style: italic;">The Edgier Waters</span></a>. It came out in June and is still blowing our minds. Fiction and poetry from a bunch of kickass, brilliant, and "difficult" writers, including Bruce Benderson, Noah Cicero, Travis Jeppesen, Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, Matthew Wascovich, and Kenji Siratori. It's the type of book you'll wanna come back to again and again. It's nice to be able to read this stuff off the screen for once. When was the last time you had your eyes checked, by the way?blatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10292619344606858197noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30194253.post-39882601411109573012007-01-07T16:53:00.000-08:002007-01-07T16:59:30.261-08:00Thank You, 3am!<a href="http://www.3ammagazine.com/">3am Magazine</a> has named BLATT magazine of the year for 2006.blatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10292619344606858197noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30194253.post-1159556953969349122006-09-29T12:07:00.000-07:002006-09-29T12:09:13.976-07:00On James Chapman's STETStet by James Chapman<br />Fugue State Press, 336 pages<br /><br />Loosely based on the life and work of Sergei Paradjanov, Stet is a filmmaker in the Soviet Union who, in the 1960s, is sent to a labor camp where he dies having produced not much more than a single feature-length film. <br /><br />In this finely crafted fake biography-cum-novel, author James Chapman makes the interesting choice of writing from <span style="font-style:italic;">within </span>his subject – which is not to say this book is a stream-of-conscious monologue. The subject is too vast, bigger than Stet himself, encompassing a large slab of time, an era – the subject, in fact, is History itself. Even more specifically, Chapman grapples with the large (not just geographically) subject of Russia in the century we recently left behind us, forging a deceptively authentic memory of an ever ungraspable Russia of the mind. Chapman’s poetic language works to mysticize this vast terrain of subject matter, becoming entangled in virtually every deeper implication it stumbles across. Yet the novel never feels crowded – Chapman’s pacing is too masterful. He manages to convey in prose the sense of a good film, shifting from subject to subject the way a movie camera mounted on a dolly might slowly move across different paintings in a large museum. <br /><br />This novel, which is unlike any novel you’ll read this year or this lifetime, is many things, one of them being a probing philosophical examination of the nature of critique – particularly critique that is fueled by ideology. Its temporal setting is that period that marked the end of the “freedom to talk to yourself,” as Chapman so beautifully puts it, the new era when all art would have to address the nameless masses and therefore negate the bourgeois model of individualism. <br /><br />So what happens to Stet? When he is no longer able to follow these external instructions, to listen to the voices outside his head, he can no longer make films in his homeland. He winds up having to work as an orderly in a mental institution. He fails at this just as he “failed” at his former profession. He stays home at his flat in St. Petersburg, where he and his wife create a Museum of Everyday Life, of the type of banalities that are the very stuff that art is made of. He is ultimately betrayed by all those around him and torn away from his wife. Even after his death, the probing narrative continues, exploring what Russia would become without Stet in it. The book effectively comes to a close with the eulogy of Chodok, the actor who turned Stet in and effectively caused his slow, painful, state-sanctioned demise. <br /><br /><br />_Travis Jeppesen<br /><br />This review originally appeared in the October issue of <span style="font-style:italic;">Think Again</span> magazine.blatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10292619344606858197noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30194253.post-1159351428233709182006-09-27T02:59:00.000-07:002006-09-27T03:03:48.243-07:00Happy Birthday to Me by Aleš MustarCongratulations! Condolences! <br />Greeting cards are always ugly in the same way<br />regardless of the design: a bunch of<br /> flowers or a black ribbon. <br />Clichés in sentences cut through the<br /> heart like surgeon's knives. <br />A complaisant company dealing in catalogue sale<br />presents me with a gift coupon. <br />A well-read advertiser didn't forget to <br /> include lines from Wordsworth<br />closely followed by good wishes<br />for a nice celebration and much joy in<br /> the use of the discount. <br />As soon as the fax machine gets as smart<br />as mobile phones<br />and starts responding with the Happy Birthday tune<br />I shall commit suicide. <br /><br /><br />Translated from the Slovenian by Manja Maksimovičblatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10292619344606858197noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30194253.post-1159032750466350922006-09-23T10:31:00.000-07:002006-09-23T10:32:30.473-07:00Restore Thee Skylab by Matthew Wascovicha band of mentals<br />that would not calm existing <br />for a certain defined amount of time<br />do you need a badge? <br />the time is the time that is<br /><br />the straighties want to jam a cock <br />fight nite but fuck that<br />fuck the times new<br />to us wiper the skylab<br />to the sleeping on floors<br /><br />34 not 34 yes 34<br />eve i saw with the wickedest line of sight<br />for the leanest high<br />the leanest rat<br />and us to you to them <br /><br />corners for restore<br />the walls were painted by grant<br />the valley of machine face<br />marching nude street<br />my eyes are rifle shapedblatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10292619344606858197noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30194253.post-1158089652821294612006-09-12T12:28:00.000-07:002006-09-12T12:34:14.576-07:00BLATT recommendsWhile you're waiting for BLATT 2 to come back from the printer, you might as well buy issue 4 of<br /><br />DREAMS THAT MONEY CAN BUY<br /><br />www.dreamsthatmoneycanbuy.co.uk<br /><br />Fantastic little magazine with fragmentary writings, conceptual poetics, & manifestationless manifestos by a few modern day visionaries, like Stewart Home, Heidi James, Donari Braxton, Tony O'Neill, HP Tinker, and a bunch of other brainfuckers with A+ hygiene. <br /><br />It costs only 6 pounds, 9 dollars if you happen to be a yank<br /><br />Otherwise BLATT 2's gonna come real soon, printer ran out of binding so we have to wait a couple more days -- that's right, this motherfucker's gonna get bound. A lot of other things, we'll keep you posted real soonblatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10292619344606858197noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30194253.post-1157562782097679572006-09-06T10:11:00.000-07:002006-09-06T10:13:48.590-07:006. internationales literaturfestival - berlinhttp://www.literaturfestival.com<br /><br />September 5th through the 16th.<br /><br />If you're in Berlin, go. <br />Or don't.<br />We don't care.blatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10292619344606858197noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30194253.post-1157145655817887522006-09-01T14:15:00.000-07:002006-09-01T14:20:55.826-07:00James Tenney Died on August 24th<a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1621/3233/1600/tenneyj.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1621/3233/320/tenneyj.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br />In a way [James Tenney] stands at the center of American music, a kind of focal point: he studied and worked with seminal figures such as Varèse, Partch, Ruggles, Cage, Kenneth Gaburo, and Lejaren Hiller; he performed in the ensembles of his contemporaries Philip Glass and Steve Reich; and he has taught some of the leading young composers, including John Luther Adams, Polansky, and Peter Garland. Though his music and interests put him squarely on the side of the experimentalists, he is the only such composer so admired by the academic establishment that an entire issue of the academic journal Perspectives of New Music was devoted to his music. No other composer is so revered by fellow composers, and so unknown to the public at large...<br /><br />From Kyle Gann's American Music in the Twentieth Century.<br /><br /><br /><br />Go here to listen to some of his work: http://www.kalvos.org/tenneyj.html<br />And here: http://disquiet.com/downstream-past5.html#d20060731-jtblatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10292619344606858197noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30194253.post-1156828244213334552006-08-28T21:33:00.000-07:002006-08-28T22:10:44.456-07:00Malcolm & Jack<a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1621/3233/1600/malcolmjackcover.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1621/3233/400/malcolmjackcover.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br />Malcolm & Jack<br />(And Other Famous American Criminals)<br />Ted Pelton<br />Spuyten Duyvil<br />262 pages, $14.00<br /><br />The Beat Generation was really just a bunch of white guys sitting around mothers' houses and cheap rented rooms (in Morningside Heights and the Village, New York City, in suburban Michigan, and elsewhere: Mexico, Paris and Tangiers) according to Ted Pelton's wonderfully demystifying, cartoonishly funny revisionist history cum novel, Malcolm & Jack. Of course, there were a few black people in American then, too, most notably - at least here - a young, angry doper named Malcolm Little, nicknamed Red, later surnamed with only an X. <br />The Jack of this book is Kerouac, in Pelton's perceptive, dialogue-heavy prose not On the Road but married in the Midwestern hinterlands, reading books in the bathroom of his in-laws, casting around for a subject while the neighbors go to work, have kids, mow the lawn. <br />Malcolm not yet X flits in and out of Uptown New York college life, in his dealer or drug-running capacity just getting by while the freshmen agonize the extra-curriculum. <br />Tensions, like "Mosquitoes" in the Faulknerian sense of talkers and planners and thinking-largers, abound.<br />Pelton does the period magnificently: New York, he says, is a 40s town, and his lens - because a lot of this book lingers like a camera well-handled - zooms in on all the grays and the grillwork, the municipal weight. Kinsey, he of the famous sex poll, shows up as a reincarnation of Freud, who earlier in the book counsels David Kammerer (not smart or attractive enough to be gay as Allen Ginsberg was gay), killed by Lucien Carr after making unwanted advances. Carr runs to Bill Burroughs, ten years his senior, who advises him to get a good lawyer. Kerouac helps Carr bury the weapon. Kammerer sinks into the Hudson. Though many of Pelton's stories retold are well-known, they've never been said better (especially his disquisition on Billie Holiday jailed). Malcolm & Jack is art history pure, as it once was, total story, the oral-thing, returned to the campfire to spark. <br />As for lasting, it'll last, this book, because it speaks to now beyond all Beatitudinal cliché, in the spirit - and wise, wised-up voice - of what's essentially the American good. <br />Pelton's got no answers only the questioning tale, and the love that's the right of fellow-traveling, of staying up late with the past. <br />He marvels along with the reader: America might kill its best artists, but - man - can they ever make art! No consolation, but it's a birthright Pelton's living up to in style.blatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10292619344606858197noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30194253.post-1156754750501940902006-08-28T01:44:00.000-07:002006-08-28T01:45:50.510-07:00Per Svenson: A First Siciliana<span style="font-style:italic;">Who can pick up the weight of Britain,<br />Who can move the German load<br />Or say to the French here is France again?<br />Imago. Imago. Imago.</span><br />Wallace Stevens<br /><br />I say, Imago Stevens,<br />The fruit garden of Armenia<br />(Norbrandt: „This is where mirror meets mirror.”)<br />Would perhaps be easier to have moving<br /> „lightly through the air again”, whatever the price of<br /> „imagination and its hymns”,<br />Britain, Germany and France still being so very heavy.<br /><br />*<br /><br />And surely Portugal, the garden of Sophia de Mello Breyner:<br /><br /> <span style="font-style:italic;">D’autres aimeront les choses que j’ai aimees<br /> Ce sera le meme jardin á ma porte.</span><br /><br />Canto 110: „Thy quiet house.” And a fruit garden.<br /><br />*<br /><br />The needleboats at San Sabba,<br /> the beasts above Cabra, are they still there?<br />The snow of Ararat, the ocean of Portugal,<br /> can they be moved lightly enough by fantasy?<br />Who can pick up the weight of France?<br /><br />*<br /><br />Lightly,<br /> between mirror and mirror,<br />A cloning of black roses<br />Enters the room,<br />A joint Armenia and Sicily<br /> of fragrance.<br /><br />She is:<br /> Thirteen ways of looking at<br /> a black rose.<br />She is also:<br /> Thirteen ways of looking at<br /> a rose in Sicily.<br /><br />*<br /><br />13 ways, a black rose.<br /><br />*<br /><br />13 ways,<br />Like a siciliana sung,<br />13 ways,<br />Like swallows,<br />Singing the cloning of their canon of lament.<br /><br />*<br /><br />A quiet muse<br /> in a quiet house, Szilvia Melinda<br />(a cloning of gardens, ending in melancholy,<br /> ending in joy),<br />The mirror of a new poem in a mirror of poetry,<br />Weightless,<br />in the early evening light,<br />A green sunset.<br />13 ways of dreaming<br />A dream twice.<br />„Es jagt die Schwalbe weglang auf und wieder.”<br />(Liliencron, four times repeated.)<br /><br />*<br /><br />To be cloning to be,<br />That is the implication,<br />Mirroring traditions<br />Of what you have seen and heard<br />Between themselves.<br />That is the new poem<br />Mirrors added,<br />Saying, „Here is France again.”<br />That is a new lightness<br />Of the German language:<br />Add the mirrors.<br />This is an English poem<br />Moving out of France,<br />Spirals<br /> of black lace<br />Circling<br /> over the black rose.<br /><br /><br /> <span style="font-style:italic;">Budapest – Paris<br /> March-November 2005</span>blatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10292619344606858197noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30194253.post-1156680730229521522006-08-27T05:10:00.000-07:002006-08-27T05:12:10.236-07:00Danyi Dani - Notes on a First SicilianaFirst Notes on „A First Siciliana”<br /><br /><br />„For Wolfgang Amadeus, the <br />hesitating rhythm of <br />the siciliana <br />lent itself to the portrayal of <br />grief...<br /><br />with lilting rhythms”<br /> (from the Wikipede)<br /><br />For Barrington Levy<br />of Reggae<br />the Black Rose<br />grew in his Garden<br />Jamaica<br />especially<br /><br />there too one Michael Rose<br />sings a Stalk <br />of Sinsemilla<br />Szilvia Melinda Sin Semilla<br />blooming<br />in his backyard<br /><br />a hydroponic<br />fruit garden<br />yielding green<br />meditation<br /><br />over rose<br />and<br />under sensi<br /><br />so<br /><br />„six million ways to die, choose one” –<br /><br />perhaps a lighter load<br />than grief<br />fe I chief,<br />is listen to Jah Wolfgang<br />stoned<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />J H Conway Dreams Notes on A First Siciliana<br /><br /><br />Take Sicily as <br />a mirror,<br />her skew-curved<br />island screen<br />set on an inland sea<br /><br />of modelling space<br />for a quiet house that generates<br />its own metamorphosis,<br />self-replicating at <br />an evolutionary pace<br /><br />where each of its pixels are<br />(about ten to the power of sixteen<br />ways) a millimeter speck<br /><br />*<br /><br />Vrda <br />Rhodon<br />Róza Melindia<br />rose weightless<br /><br />*<br /><br />each speck switches discretely <br />OFF or ON<br />for a few rule-governed millennia<br />or more<br /><br />to clone perfect roses for<br />a black and white planar garden<br />Silva Szilvia<br /><br />her dark flower<br />imagines<br />each early evening tree<br />imagines<br />the swirling Italiano-meridionale-estremo galaxy<br />imagines<br /><br />*<br /><br />Who can pick up flowers from a mirror screen?blatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10292619344606858197noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30194253.post-1156650120870359912006-08-26T20:39:00.000-07:002006-08-26T20:42:00.880-07:00The Otepää Rabbit’s One EyeBy Errol Scott <br /><br /> If it weren’t for the antlers rocketing out of the sideroad right onto Highway Two to Otepää, I never would have hit the oncoming rabbit with the one magic eye. I would have seen that rabbit in time; that rabbit would still be okay. <br /><br /> The deer’s ears stretched out to his tail. Velvety streaked muzzle and blinking heels sliced across to the far snowy shoulder of the road, not even a snipped twig left behind. Big empty road. Big empty night.<br /><br /> Inside my glowing Fiat, radio stuff wrapped around my head and clogged up my car. Night drifted back and forth across the highway; the road smoothed out ahead, fine and uncrumpled. Then, right into that bare-bones, nobody-home Estonian road, behind the still smoking tail-trail, a silver rabbit blared up straight out of the ground. First the rabbit wasn’t there, and then there it was, diving towards me in my lane, dragging the entire highway behind it like a ribbon.<br /><br /> I didn’t want to hit it, I’m not a fan of running down rabbits. I would have turned the wheel and churned up a field if I could. I would have used up all my brake fluid in one giant stomp if it would’ve done any good. Yanked the wheel and rolled my Fiat. Jumped out the drive-side window and let it rush into a stream or an iced-over ditch or whatever. I would have done something. Anything but hit the silver ribboned rabbit. <br /><br /> Rabbits are supposed to sit around on Highway Two doomed and frozen, but this one was the other kind. This one wafted in an arc toward me with a purpose, all silky and nose twitching and how often does that happen? He was nothing like all the other photocopied rabbits you see along every roadside. <br /><br /> The silver rabbit smashed flat on my fender and arched back through air away from me; it took about maybe ten hours for him to fly two metres. He landed on the Highway Two tarmac, his hair matted through with stones. Rabbits mostly don’t have much of a chance. <br /><br /> I slowed down and pulled off the road, not to look, right, just to kind of pay my respects and be off. I couldn’t wait to get away from there, you’d feel the same. Anyone could have seen I had to leave. Anyone could have seen that. The door was sticky and wouldn’t open right away. I thumped the lock unstuck and the black night poured in. <br /><br /> Soft rabbit hair over rabbit shoulders and broken long legs; he could barely breathe. His upside eye shivered wide. In there, in that rabbit’s one magic eye, I could see way in. I could see every place I hadn’t been to yet and every thought I hadn’t bothered yet to have. I could see to all the way to China and back. <br /><br /> The blood in his lungs bubbled; his leg jerked. The magic eye looked right through my head. A blob of ooze drained out his mouth and drained and drained until the eye glued up all white. His ears relaxed. I listened and listened but the one eye was silent. <br /><br /> If I could change things, I’m not saying I could but I would, here’s what I’d do: I’d go back and take a different way that night or maybe a detour down by Pühajärv Lake and take a look around, maybe finish up a case of Saku Tume, and then get me to that same spot on the Two just a few hours later. Even a few minutes later. That’d let that rabbit live, that’s what I’d do. <br /><br /> The antlers would be long gone, the road level and steady. I’d sail past the silky rabbit, me in my car and he on his paws. I’d be listening to radio stuff and not even see him, gliding on Highway Two from here to eternity. I would be thinking about every place I was going to and all the thoughts I was already bothering to have. Heading right past me in the hundred-per-cent opposite direction, twitching and pulsing and humming some stupid song, that old rabbit with the one magic eye still would be too.<br /><br /><br />Errol Scott is a fiction writer, currently living in Munich, who has sailed and travelled in over fifty countries. His work has appeared in literary magazines around the world, in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, France, Mexico, South Africa, Turkey, Japan and the USA, including 'Chapman' and 'Pretext'.blatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10292619344606858197noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30194253.post-1156618766686227552006-08-26T11:52:00.001-07:002006-08-26T11:59:26.686-07:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1621/3233/1600/pere_grand.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1621/3233/400/pere_grand.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br />Grzegorz Wróblewski<br /><br />SOCIETY ORIENTATIONS<br /><br />Renoir again, though there have already been<br />many poems about him and because of this ladies<br />cried bitter tears and an art connoisseur<br />ran about distracted, with a stomachache etc.<br />So it’s this hapless Renoir again,<br />it’s clear, his old age wasn’t<br />pleasant, he suffered just like any other<br />ailing grandpa, but why does it always<br />lead to societal conflicts<br />when you, God forbid, say that his father<br />was a tailor and had the eyes of a common sadist?<br /><br />(The Portrait of Renoir’s Father, 1869; Saint Louis, City Art Museum)<br />(Translated from the Polish by Adam Zdrodowski & Joel Leonard Katz)blatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10292619344606858197noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30194253.post-1156461500402646202006-08-24T16:16:00.000-07:002006-08-24T16:18:20.413-07:00Günter GrassSchadenfreude and Suspicion After Nobel Laureate Reveals SS Past <br /><br />by Joshua Cohen, from the Jewish Daily Forward<br /><br />Fri. August 25, 2006<br /><br />Last week, in an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in advance of his new autobiography, “Beim Häuten der Zwiebel” (“Peeling the Onion”), Günter Grass — Nobel laureate, public intellectual and arguably the greatest modern novelist in German — revealed his membership in the Waffen-SS, saying that he had been inducted into the ranks of Nazism’s most vicious paramilitary unit during the waning days of World War II.<br />After the admission, Grass retreated into silence, leaving a void soon filled with reams of screeds and apologias — most of the former directed not at the writer’s past but at the silence he’s maintained for decades. These have been delivered with a significant degree of Schadenfreude, especially in light of Grass’s decades-long career as Germany’s professional conscience, and his reputation for having held so many — politicians, artists and thinkers — to the highest moral standards that he himself now appears to have publicly failed.<br />According to the interview account, in August 1944, Grass, at the age of 17, had volunteered for submarine service but was instead routed to the SS, which at that late date was becoming desperate for new blood. Heinrich Himmler’s brainchild, the Waffen SS was not an Army unit but rather an elite enforcement squad of the Nazi Party and, later, its government; known as one of the most ruthless organizations of modernity, it was responsible for the management of both concentration and extermination camps and for carrying out assassinations and other acts of state terrorism. Grass’s was the 10th SS tank division, and with it he saw action at Lausitz in March and April of 1945, until he was wounded then taken prisoner.<br />In many ways, his confession is the last great scandal of a generation that necessitated a figure as moral as Grass once positioned himself to be in order to expose its own vital deceptions. Grass’s “Frundsberg” tank division’s last mission, which was left unfulfilled because of American capture, was to have been to spirit Hitler out of Berlin. Grass’s late admission now seems like a similar backdoor “escape,” a maneuver whose desperation is typical of many of Grass’s generation — Germans who would seek postwar identity under the rubric of the Flakhelfer (literally “flak helper”, designating child combatants who typically served in anti-aircraft), whose complicity was said to be unwilling, a matter of being conditioned from a young age to an evil that no child could hope to understand. Today, distance is still being measured, most visibly in a rallying toward Grass’s public punishment. Polish President and former Solidarity dissident Lech Walesa now regrets granting Grass the Freedom of Danzig, Grass’s hometown (now the Polish city of Gdansk); German politician Wolfgang Boerson has been demanding that the Nobel committee rescind its prize, to which the Swedes have responded with polite refusal.<br />It’s nearly impossible for Americans to understand Grass’s former role in German life, at least among those of his own generation. Grass had been a Nationaldichter, a position to which our poet laureate is mere paperwork, the mediocre mark of officialdom. If Philip Roth, Don DeLillo or Thomas Pynchon (the three Americans most mentioned as Nobel contenders) would publicly accuse President Bush of certain indiscretions, or even crimes, hardly any of our newspapers would hand over significant space; the American public has been historically mistrustful of art’s encroachment on politics — especially now, in a world in which art has been depoliticized into mere entertainment. A close political companion of Willy Brandt, later a cynical critic of Helmut Kohl and the so-called German Economic Miracle that boomed the bombed-out nation into today’s unified, stable prosperity, Grass always has been shrilly profound, intellectually adrift in the Niemandsland between fact and fiction, practical politics and stunt provocation; a stooped, mustachioed figure smoking his pipe when not speaking his mind; an agitator equal parts peacock and priest. Nothing quite like him can exist in a country that hasn’t had Germany’s past, and so the public’s current demand for an American-style atonement, with all the trappings of a talk-show confessional, belittles the tradition that Grass until now has embodied, and it furthers, too, the destruction of all sensitive, subtle critique.<br />To be sure, Grass’s detractors are right, but it doesn’t much matter. Anyone who intends to totally discredit Grass should first take a year and read his wondrous novels (again, if not for the first time). From “The Tin Drum” to his most recent, “Crabwalk,” they’re works of the most naked genius and now can be read as atonements in advance, pre-emptive aesthetic strikes against their maker’s darkest truth. Even the most appalled cannot deny the books’ brilliance; they deserve every prize we ever could embarrass them with, and despite any revelation they should continue to be read, and widely. Of course, Grass’s present unbinding comes with curious timing: The interview in which he let fall the shadow of his record was actually a junket for the release of his “Peeling the Onion,” which at this very moment is being maniacally translated into English for the edification of all who would seek to read and think before accusing.<br />And that’s what might be truly distressing, that indiscretions can become co-opted for sales. It might be that yesterday’s mistakes can become tomorrow’s opportunities for self-exploitation, but it would be kinder, and much more inspiring of thought, to regard this whole fiasco as a type of Warholian campaign — that Grass is engaging in a late-model manipulation of our culture.<br />Unfortunately, one can’t help but note that Grass seems neither iconoclastic nor unburdened, but rather like a writer dutifully undergoing the publicity gauntlet, taking his knocks while getting the word out. His autobiography already has sold in the tens of thousands of copies and is on its third printing within a week of release.<br />Of course, there’s publicity and there’s public. As reported by Der Spiegel, Grass’s SS service has been a matter of record ever since his American capture. (Why has no one attacked any of Grass’s biographers? This lacuna has been their lapse nearly as much as it has been his.) That magazine has reprinted Grass’s American prison records, in which his SS unit and serial number are given.<br />As a teenager, Grass studied firsthand the horrors that mankind can perpetrate; his life demands respect for its trauma. Anyone who condemns Grass for his silence must not know what it means to have shame, or to feel regret, or to allow those feelings to inform a life’s reinvention. It should suffice to say that had Grass never served in the SS, he might never have written the novels that made him Günter Grass, the novels whose humanity allows us to feel so betrayed by their author’s unfortunate deception.blatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10292619344606858197noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30194253.post-1156330678338602742006-08-23T03:57:00.000-07:002006-08-23T03:57:58.353-07:00ABOVE by Michael NardoneThen, drop by caustic drop, a perfect cry<br />Shall string some constant harmony,-<br />Relentless caper for all those who step<br />The legend of their youth into the noon.<br /> -Hart Crane<br /><br /><br />A white light gleams in the passenger side mirror, dances left to right, and blinds the eye in its sway. The car groans through the parking lot, tires crackling the torn-up patches of pavement. When fingers press it, the silver door handle seers the top layer of skin. The door swings open and the white light spins upon the mirror. <br /><br />The sunlight doesn't penetrate the layers of cloud. Still, it seeps into every pore. Around each object there is a shadow so thin it seems the sunbeam shower maintains itself perpendicular to the ground despite the earth's curved path.<br /> <br />When he hears a footstep scuffle, he turns. A woman. She was driving the car. Or she was the one reflected in the rearview. It's unclear now, but she is with him and follows him across the parking lot and through a set of swinging doors. Inside the heat is heavier. Perhaps it was once a shop of baseball cards. Or handguns. A rental store of some kind.<br /><br />The walls are whitewashed and hold everything in pieces. Posters have been ripped and scattered around the room and the shelves lay broken. The floor is covered in pages torn from books. Their jackets and spines are in a pile at the center of the room. A crunch of glass beneath every step. <br /><br />They stand together, each one atop a pile of rubble, and watch a projector play upon the wall. The figures flicker in stereo-toned colors. A moving picture of a woman holding a baby in a cream colored room, crowded with birthday-hatted children running in every direction. There is a table strewn with presents and paper plates of half-eaten cake. On a stage, giant mice shift an automated dance. There are shouts and songs mouthed and muted by the film reel spin.<br /><br />A voice tumbles down the stairway. -What the hell is going on down there? Someone here?<br /> <br />There is another frame: a boy in grass up to his waist. He runs side to side chasing the blink of a firefly. Behind him walks a bearded man carrying a blanket and a shovel. <br /><br />The woman is rummaging through the scraps of posters, glimpsing back and forth to catch moments of the home movie. She pulls from the debris a photo of a child sitting on a diving board beside a pool. He has sunglasses across his eyes and a toy pistol in his hands, and she says to the man watching the film, -This picture, this kid, reminds me of you. He could be you.<br /><br />On the wall, a person in an overcoat walks the yellow dotted line at the center of a street. His arms are outstretched in a Y toward the five story buildings covered in tints of grey-green and blue. The trees are bare and everything is predawn still, except for a traffic light swaying on a pole.<br /><br />She lifts from the floor the half-charred pages of a coloring book. <br /><br />The images on the wall, they are familiar to him just as this store is familiar to him, from a memory or a dream, or from a story someone once whispered to him.<br /><br />The voice comes back again. -The hell is happening? Better not be anybody down there.<br /><br />And she holds the coloring book open with one hand, the shapes and lines changing with the downward flop of pages. There are two crayoned figures - one child strangling another. A woman with spotted hands held outward. Then a man in a chair with a woman's face buried in his lap, her hand upon his thigh.<br /> <br />The projector stops, clicks, then starts to run backward as though it were searching through some unknown archive. The characters stumble in slow-speed rewind: the body on the empty street lowers its limbs and it is night again, the man and the boy backstep deeper into the forest, the birthday cake is resurrected forkful and knife-slice at a time.<br /><br />The woman flips to another crayola figure - a rotund woman exposing her leg. There is a hatchet driven deep into her hamstring. Her lips, drawn in a crimson circle, are puckered in pain.<br /> <br />Footsteps across the ceiling and the voice grumbles once more, -What the hell is. A deep breath and sigh, -Happening. There better not be. Thump, then the shuffle of a single stride, -Anybody down there. <br /> <br />The steps come closer and the two can see a set of stumped ankles at the stairway top.<br /> <br />The coloring book drops into the clutter, the pages falling in a single blur of primary colors. Kicking some shattered glass, she departs, and he is standing alone amidst the rubble. He knows there is a man, guard or proprietor, coming down the steps, but he can't take his eyes off the backward sprawl of images. Even as the film rewinds to scenes displayed before he entered the room, he is sure that these moments belong to him, are him or were him, and he will not leave the room until there is some location he can recall with clarity to be certain that this film is indeed made by the moments of his life.<br /> <br />The projector wheel spins the uncoiled reel of film. The wall goes white.<br /> <br />With the vision of bare legs belonging to the man above, he turns to the door. He can hear the growl and breath of the man, but the car is in sight. She is waiting, calling for him to hurry. He is running, hard as he can, but his legs refuse, as though they now belonged to some other's body. -Hurry, she mouths, hurry. The distance between his outstretched fingers and the car opens wider. When he collapses onto the graveled ground, the sun, now broken through the clouds, glares off the hatchet buried deep into his leg, blinding his eyes the moment the fat-calved man takes hold of his neck.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />**An earlier version of this story originally appeared in the first issue of BLATT.blatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10292619344606858197noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30194253.post-1156251781576089312006-08-22T06:00:00.000-07:002006-08-22T06:03:01.590-07:00STEPHEN RODEFER<a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1621/3233/1600/Rodefer1.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1621/3233/400/Rodefer1.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>blatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10292619344606858197noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30194253.post-1156130415952247242006-08-20T20:11:00.000-07:002006-08-20T20:20:15.966-07:00Prague Spring<a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1621/3233/1600/brycz.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1621/3233/320/brycz.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br />Today's the 38th anniversary of 1968's Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.<br /><br />Below's a relevant excerpt from Pavel Brycz's I, City, to be published this fall by Twisted Spoon Press.<br /><br />An Appearance, Occupied<br /><br />Translated by Joshua Cohen and Marketa Hofmeisterova<br /> <br />When remembering the Russian occupation of August 1968, I think of painting. And that of painting the apartment of an ordinary family in an ordinary apartment block on my main street. Mr. Novák stands atop a stepladder, dips the brush and above the paper cap on his head lays on broad swaths of white paint. Mrs. Nováková stirs the paint for him and every now and then hands him a beer, with a pointed warning: “Karel, don’t you fall down!” <br />And Mr. Novák first goes glug glug glug, and then claims: “True enough, though after beer I have a little difficulty with my feet on the ground, on this stepladder I don’t seem to have any problem at all . . .” <br />And though I could continue describing the beautiful dialogue of this married couple, who bring yin and yang, the anima and animus, and so philosophy, peace, and harmony even into ordinary painting — the brother of Mr. Novák all of a sudden bursts into this idyll and roars: “Dear people, while you’re painting away here without a care in the world we’re being occupied!” <br />Mr. Novák quickly climbs down the stepladder, and indeed without it he wavers a bit after the beer, and together with his wife Marenka and his brother Breta they open the doors to the balcony to hear the same sound they had all heard before in their strollers and as men in the army, a sound they wished never to hear again, especially on the main street of their city. <br />“Now it’ll never dry!” Mr. Novák proclaims, gazing at the tanks tearing the asphalt of the main street with their treads, their noise tearing the eardrums of those great pals of Mozart, those pitch-perfect Czechs, the pennyweight heroes for whom Blaník had been exchanged for Bílá hora. <br />And for ages men disappeared into pubs and boys didn’t grow up to be men, though their dreams were of such kind as if they had long ago formed The Brotherhood of Cremation. <br /><br /><br />Pavel Brycz was born in 1968 in the Czech town of Roudnice nad Labem. A graduate of Prague's Drama Academy, he worked as a copywriter for an advertising agency where he produced the Czech slogan for KFC (roughly translated as "damn good chicken"). He is the author of six books. For I, City he was awarded the Orten Prize and in 2004 he received the State Prize for Literature, its youngest recipient ever. In English his work has appeared in the anthology Daylight in Nightclub Inferno (Catbird Press, 1997). Currently he teaches Czech language and literature at a Gymnasium in Liberec, hosts a weekly children's program on Czech radio that narrates legends from around the world, and writes lyrics for the Balkan-chanson-folk band Zdarr. <br /><br />Photo by Karel Cudlinblatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10292619344606858197noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30194253.post-1156075369399926902006-08-20T05:02:00.000-07:002006-08-20T05:02:49.406-07:00Tears, Foreman. <br />For Who is not afraid.<br /><br />by Geoffrey McCarthy<br /><br /><br />tears, Foreman. for who is not afraid.<br />poorer from the poor and prior <br />his name for what it is by then.<br />he who know this knows in them there is a darkness.<br /><br />what speed the car do, I enjoy but couldn’t like it all my life.<br />my mother, my birthday. I her years.<br />who shakes not, the same in honour and disgrace.<br />whose inner peace is beyond victory, defeat.<br /><br />pure work. the heart saying, ‘it is my duty.’ <br />pure intelligence beyond the conditions of nature.<br />Eternity in things that pass. <br />Infinity in finite things. And of the cock, a lack.<br /><br />Wanderer north of Lafayette, there are older ages than this. <br />Eternity Eternity’s reward. a thousand birds along the BK1, <br />a thousand adorations from the tree line rail<br />for the fragrant purpose of the earthe in time.blatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10292619344606858197noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30194253.post-1156006977847528192006-08-19T10:02:00.000-07:002006-08-19T10:02:57.856-07:00Viscosity Breakdown<br />By Jason Price Everett<br /><br /><br /><br />She had sublet some friend's intimate little boxlike pied-à-terre (what was her name?) in some hideous angular apartment building (what was her name?) somewhere along the sterilized nether stretches of the Boulevard Raspail (it might not have been Raspail it might have been something else and what the fuck was her name?) she was older than he was and he had timed it just right an evening out with the rest of the students summering at the university and as the less adventurous talkative bibulous types evaporated he allowed himself to get drunker and drunker more rapturous without actually becoming disjointed so much so that when he claimed to have forgotten the RER shutdown time and accidentally missed his chance to ride the iron millipede back to his suburban cyst of a room (no phone and riddled with cats) she believed him implicitly and offered to put him up at her place for the night she was drunk too on wine and conversation and she was a tall redhead and her cheeks glowed with the redhot malleability of her emotions and the glow was reflected in his eyes as he turned away to hide the twisted grin of success the first blow had been administered to her finely folded matrix sprinkled with dust of rubies: access.<br />He bought a packet of Gauloises Blondes at a tabac near the Metro station and followed her through the hollow junctions of the weeknight to her apartment she glowed the entire time she was tall not fat not thin she was defined by what she was not except for all that red he imagined her nether parts lit up like the power indicator on a graphic equalizer blasting out pink noise drowning out her fiancee deafening her to all save him and his purpose as they entered the apartment he found to his perplexed chagrin that her aged mother was visiting for the week couched in shock he chatted amicably before the sleeping arrangements were decorously calculated (he got the couch; she got her room; mother got the guest room -- enough taxonomy) he removed his shoes and lay curled on the couch like his missed train under the damp mossy rock of a roundhouse of expectation accurate on cue she flowed out to him in the dark he could see the burn she gave off on the back of his retinas (rods and cones) she led him to her room and his forgeries were vindicated and his penis turned the color of her hair and his body turned the color of her body and everything was red in the clustered darkness of her narrow bed except the reflected chartreuse light of the neon sign crowning the chain drugstore across the street and four stories down.<br />She made him go back to the couch after they had finished in order to preserve appearances he went but grudgingly.<br /><br />In the morning before her mother awoke she put on her bathrobe and made him coffee the robe heightened her pallor she burned no longer she had gone out he was chilly on the balcony at the little glasstopped table his clothes reeking of cigarette smoke and spilled pernod from the bars of the night before her coffee was the worst coffee ever to defile the earth with its blasphemous presence to a consistency of diesel fuel and cemetery dirt such as one finds in nearly all alien coffees was added a foul flavor compounded of equal parts Worcester sauce ashtrays and vaginal secretions he choked it down straight through his vitals it drilled its own hole like gay bikers on acid lapping each other in the velodrome of his intestines marveling at her transformation in the night she had exploded and her skin was soft with the corrosion of maturity in the morning the scattered smoky tendrils of her explosion had been dispersed on the pale winds of her skin coarse and weathered like a bedspread as he sipped the atrocious bile she had prepared for him she leaned against the railing of the balcony her robe parted to reveal her genitals (which did not aid his appreciation of her coffee genitals and breakfast are best kept separate) and her newly prosaic pubic badge of hair and a notch carved in the glacial meat of her upper thigh which she showed to him and explained was the result of the removal of a malignant melanoma occasioned by too much sunbathing in Florida conjoined with her pale freckled skin she was especially susceptible to skinbased suncancers she said.<br />She saw him to the door he said goodbye (he never saw her again after that he avoided her at the university and after they all returned home her destination remained unknown he presumed she got married after all she never gave him any indication of memory or permanence) and wobbled down the Boulevard Raspail (or whatever street it really was) to the nearest Metro station under the impetus of a spin imparted by hangover coriolis and the weather was rather gloomy that morning he thinks he remembers but he can’t remember her name.blatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10292619344606858197noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30194253.post-1155917938517896362006-08-18T09:18:00.000-07:002006-08-18T09:18:58.530-07:00The Paper Me<br /><br />By Wayne H.W. Wolfson<br /><br /><br />We were not living together, officially. I was in-between places, staying with her. Lugging my box of Blue Notes over early in the morning so that she could let me in before she left for work. <br />She lorded it over me, making a big ceremony of giving me my own key. I had not thought anything of it then. Just another thing in life’s long list of humiliations.<br />Snow always reminds me of death. <br />Snow, winter lay dead on the road. Secrets buried beneath a cold soul.<br />It started with the snow. We were sitting around. I was playing one of my favorite records, explaining different passages to her, the images they gave me.<br />“Save your artifice for your writing.”<br />I had not thought anything of it, I did not have time, Monk’s solo was coming.<br />When we fucked, she yelled. It was distracting, not from any passion, but just to be obnoxious and annoy the neighbors. After she got hers, while she waited for me, it never failed. Her hoarse voice.<br />“Mmmm, yeah, yeah, show me.”<br />I did my best thinking in the shower. She never tired of banging on the door, just as the words were starting to come, and ask me “What I was doing?”<br />Her internal clock was precise to within a fraction of the second the words would appear. Startled by her banging they take wing, leaving behind the vaguest notion of a piece.<br />Last thing on my list. She always waited until I was in the shower to put her music on knowing I couldn’t change it. Just that one song and she just dropped it right on top of my record.<br />Dismissively. “Oh it won't hurt anything.”<br />I didn’t know, but she was making her list too. My failings, my things that she would have to change.<br />She actually had a mania for lists. No, not lists, notes.<br />Drinks that first night, cool vodka breath delivers the message.<br />“I don’t mind some eccentricities, I have a few myself.”<br />Ah, be careful what you wish for.<br />She left these little yellow notes for me everywhere. It was maddening. It was without pause.<br />That last night.<br />I had nothing left to think about, but I stayed in the shower until the water lost all its heat. From the other room came her song. <br />She was going out. I waited until I knew she was too far gone to come back for anything forgotten.<br />He was under the bed. It had taken awhile, not as long as it should have, but I made a perfect replica of myself. Me, made entirely of those little yellow notes.<br />I placed him in bed on his side, a position in which I would never lie, but she would not notice. I turned off the light and kneeled in the tub.<br />Without saying a word or turning on the light she climbs into bed. Patiently I wait until I hear the sleep breath come.<br />It comes, let it come down, let it come now.<br />I hold a naked flame up to the bottom of his foot.<br />A serpent of flame rapidly crawls the leg.<br />The heat twists his jaw and makes it slowly open. The outer edge of some notes now the charred lips. Lips which quiver with a life both starting and ending with a flame.<br />I take a final look. The mouth is now open wide. It vomits out letters. Letters of the words written in ink which was his blood.<br />don't forget... fold twice... dirty towels in the hall... the light above the oven... scrub.scrub.bathroom... fold<br />I felt bad that the bird had burned up too. He never bothered me, just sitting on his perch looking out the window.<br />To say I got caught would be wrong. It would imply a freedom that was never acknowledged, did not exist.<br />I had been there, I did that. Now I am here.<br />The color of my skin prevents me from joining certain groups, philosophical differences others.<br />It took awhile, but I found my niche.<br />There are some of us. Those who have seduced or killed with words, a brotherhood of ink.<br />I am.<br />I am still blue.<br />Still here.blatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10292619344606858197noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30194253.post-1155811406068649062006-08-17T03:41:00.000-07:002006-08-17T03:48:50.406-07:00SIX<a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1621/3233/1600/02_E_greena.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1621/3233/400/02_E_greena.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br />One of Prague’s more intriguing (and under-recognized) photographers, the pseudonymous artist Six has also lived a most fascinating life. Born Simon Barker, Six spent his teenage years developing the visual language of punk, rooming in London with Sid Vicious and working closely with Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood in their infamous Sex clothing store. His working relationship with Westwood continued throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s. He left the fashion world in the mid-90s in order to focus on his own photographic work, and re-settled in Prague. It was here that he became a regular in some of the city’s shadier establishments, documenting the teenage underworld of male prostitution and drug addiction. The work that emerged from this was the portrait series PERVATEEN (pictured here), which was shown in London at the Horse Hospital Gallery and here in Prague at the first Prague Biennale. <br /><br />Six is a street artist in the true sense of the word – he can often be found wandering the streets of Prague with camera in hand, mapping the city’s subterranean geography through his lens. The Cast, a series of portraits of youths with broken limbs, ironically transformed the cast into a medical accessory of sorts, and has been the subject of solo exhibitions in London and Belgrade. Six’s latest project, THC Superstar, isn’t so much about marijuana the drug but the subculture that has emerged around it and the sense of camaraderie that emerges wherever the green smoke fills the air. <br /><br />You can check out Six’s work online at www.six.cz.blatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10292619344606858197noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30194253.post-1155644530366287852006-08-15T05:15:00.000-07:002006-08-15T05:22:10.440-07:00SUE DE BEER<a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1621/3233/1600/Sue3.0.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1621/3233/400/Sue3.0.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1621/3233/1600/Travis%202.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1621/3233/400/Travis%202.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1621/3233/1600/Sue4.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1621/3233/400/Sue4.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1621/3233/1600/Sue1.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1621/3233/400/Sue1.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br />In case you're wondering who took Travis Jeppesen's author portrait on the inner flap of POEMS I WROTE WHILE WATCHING TV, it's a New York and Berlin-based artist by the name of Sue de Beer. Read more about her work here:<br /><br />www.sevenseven.com/debeer<br /><br />Meanwhile, enjoy these images of Ms. de Beer's work.blatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10292619344606858197noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30194253.post-1155483974669386732006-08-13T08:45:00.000-07:002006-08-13T08:46:14.680-07:00Four Parts from Sentience by Clayton A. Couch8.<br /><br />Castle's own king, and frame bogs down on camera's unsettled friend. Literacy rates continue to decline until telepathy cuts the head off, and then those damn extraterrestrials land. Thinking in biological obsessions. There's the not-so-subtle realization that consciousness is an addiction, one never intended to grow in the shade beneath trees. War on senses. The question doesn't involve grey goo, viral insurgencies, or magic lamps; rather oh is about to break into ah without a comma's separation. Are we being prepared for parasites? Remains that confuse the issue provide a crux for the problem separating wave from particle, which infuses Auto Focus with its crushed orange outlook on Bob Crane's cranial fornications. Beat ahead with tripod in tow, and if this is a picture of climate change, a future full of humidity and heat, then come back to ground level where the foundation sits atop a refuse pile left over from an era when this neighborhood was constructed. Ships made of oak. Even conservatives begin to argue about the value of hashish, which is to say that no citizen should be left to the devices that mechanize your mind's harsh progress into compulsive statistical analysis. To use the cross as a shield against one's own spurts, and to forget that it was all blood when you smelt the silver. "Another CEO in handcuffs," says The Christian Science Monitor, and inside we compare Sir Gawain to Kenny Boy, with the Green Man being a potential cellmate or panoptical companion. In cuffs, you've been designated to hang upside down from the highest branch, with your torso pierced in thirty places and parched of interest. To be continued, as they say when the producers don't realize that no one wants to watch next week. To be able to erase minutiae.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />9.<br /><br />Hold this hose close to the edge. Does it make you wonder how you keep from coming asunder? Such a spin, like it was Labor Day for cubicles and cold-cocked Federales. Red tint is what radiates naturally from hours of campaigning for the Party, which is a healthy dose of balloons and goodnight kisses. Visions of Bikini Atoll. The same dose of garlic that filters lungs of aetherous coughings keeps vampires from launching deep bass thumps into the parked sweetness, but such odors are not to be trusted. What's it like to reclaim a belching laugh in this age of flour and egg whites? You guessed it. It's like we slept outside in puddles, bumping into maddening jokes along the way to the fat drugstore. Won't be napping. And the shoplifters said that no one would ever drop kissing bugs into chocolate on their watch, however hard it was to see past the mud-thatched walls that couldn't be reconciled with Futurism. Cans linked together with fishing line. A towering shine of dinosaur lept from the lake and into grandfather's tall tale, and this dedication reminds spectacles of nothing more than scratched lenses. So tired, it's a crime to rhyme a hymnal recited from earthenware, tinged as such things are with the soulprints of what's ailing everyone else. Were the buffalo herded over the edge, or was that chasm simply swallowing? At the tip, the acrylic table's eye looks over at us like a cheap wink, and it must be tough to live in the hands of those models. Perhaps, when our Masonic lodge vacates the old laundromat, there'll be golden fleece with direct-deposit options.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />10.<br /><br />Explicit, says the clandestine news report. Fingers smudge what's left of print topics, and there it is: a new spy agency built to unearth Assyrian artifacts. Smooth. A blister lurks where rain left its drops. Although not nearly as painful as the state's at-will employment relationships, the dependability of monsoons lingers upon how much fortune slumbers in the fame of childhood. Busy creating a monster, which is to say, too far gone to remember how far the geese flew to reach their lake. I lumber into another phrase, and recall the shower it took to resign from the university, breaking to pieces. At least racket has lost its deserters to the private sector, or being confident, holing up near the mouth of a crocodile-infested river. Kids light Roman candles and M-80s near inner organs. If the whole civilization now collects retirement, who will turn up the music in the back of the schoolbus? Middle Ages don't coalesce by accident, although accidents happen to those who wait. There's an instrument that holds its nose below the din and slumps down, waiting for the mandibles to finish. There's a strike. Crossing the line into pure national politics, two parties shape an inevitable violent extreme: Peter Sellers crosses Olaf Stapledon crosses Konstantin Tsiolkovsky crosses Julia Kristeva crosses X MARKS THE SPOT. And fire trucks race towards grease, bumping cars into ditches and wrecking your stepmother's hip. On the bridge, light is peach between cables.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />11.<br /><br />Hapless and retired. Nothing comes closer than these walls of juggled mist, and when the patients retire to the side, an exceptional twist with leaves occurs under gaze. To be aware, at this road made of a smooth obelisk. A moment while camping, when you nearly black out two miles into the woods, seeing what's so separated. To be walking sidewise; to greet encountered figures with a "hey" and a cramped smirk. This manufactured view carves a globe into quarters, into a threatening ration of bathtub fish flops. Are these the lounge lizards that give you the fear? Knowing what you taped yesterday with the painter in her lingerie, should you risk bending an inner sun towards the unfinished chemistry project that left you with an alligator tail and too many distorted dune buggies? When Richard Nixon boarded his plane, Henry Kissinger's pineal gland settled down for a fair match of DiplomacyTM with Anton La Vey. The winner was expected to report his findings to Circe, who in her turn consulted Kali, who in turn caught Begotten in order to brush up on the latest happenings at the surface pustules of our 40-hour work week, which came under the devious auspices of the Libertarian Party in 2012; thereby proving that some sort of singularity was, in fact, possible under the supervision of Dr. Kevorkian. Yes, too many movies. But in sensing dimensions of blinding, these choreographed retinal dancers see too much. There is no red here, and envy is why we move out. Feeling out. Mad and no disturbance: beware of dog. Solar winds. Treble turned way up on the upcoming fire. <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />BIO: Clayton A. Couch (http://www.claytonacouch.com/) works as a reference librarian at two Asheville, NC-area community colleges and as a review columnist for Library Journal. His first poetry collection, Familiar Bifurcations [xPress(ed), 2004], was recently reviewed in Prague Literary Review, and Artificial Lure (effing press, 2005), a chapbook, has received favorable commentary from Book/Mark, Midwest Book Review, and other publications. Poems have recently appeared in The Alterran Poetry Assemblage, Call: Review, Cannibal, milk magazine, Wherever We Put Our Hats, Verse, and wire sandwich. From 2001-05, he edited and published sidereality (http://www.sidereality.com/).blatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10292619344606858197noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30194253.post-1155390159304425322006-08-12T06:39:00.000-07:002006-08-12T06:50:48.720-07:00Asemic Writing by Tim Gaze<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1621/3233/1600/timgaze2.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1621/3233/400/timgaze2.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1621/3233/1600/Tim%20Gaze%201.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1621/3233/400/Tim%20Gaze%201.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>blatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10292619344606858197noreply@blogger.com0