BLATT

NEW BLATT BLOG ADDRESS

2007-05-08T15:26:00.000-07:00

A big thank-you to everyone who entered our first ever novel contest. We should be announcing the winner sometime this summer.

Our blog has moved; please visit us at http://blog.blatt.cz/

We will no longer be posting on this blog.

Get Edgier

2007-01-08T08:30:00.000-08:00

I can't believe I forgot to mention 3am's great anthology, The Edgier Waters. 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?

Thank You, 3am!

2007-01-07T16:53:00.000-08:00

3am Magazine has named BLATT magazine of the year for 2006.

On James Chapman's STET

2006-09-29T12:07:00.000-07:00

Stet by James Chapman
Fugue State Press, 336 pages

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.

In this finely crafted fake biography-cum-novel, author James Chapman makes the interesting choice of writing from within 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.

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.

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.

_Travis Jeppesen

This review originally appeared in the October issue of Think Again magazine.

Happy Birthday to Me by Aleš Mustar

2006-09-27T02:59:00.000-07:00

Congratulations! Condolences!
Greeting cards are always ugly in the same way
regardless of the design: a bunch of
flowers or a black ribbon.
Clichés in sentences cut through the
heart like surgeon's knives.
A complaisant company dealing in catalogue sale
presents me with a gift coupon.
A well-read advertiser didn't forget to
include lines from Wordsworth
closely followed by good wishes
for a nice celebration and much joy in
the use of the discount.
As soon as the fax machine gets as smart
as mobile phones
and starts responding with the Happy Birthday tune
I shall commit suicide.

Translated from the Slovenian by Manja Maksimovič

Restore Thee Skylab by Matthew Wascovich

2006-09-23T10:31:00.000-07:00

a band of mentals
that would not calm existing
for a certain defined amount of time
do you need a badge?
the time is the time that is

the straighties want to jam a cock
fight nite but fuck that
fuck the times new
to us wiper the skylab
to the sleeping on floors

34 not 34 yes 34
eve i saw with the wickedest line of sight
for the leanest high
the leanest rat
and us to you to them

corners for restore
the walls were painted by grant
the valley of machine face
marching nude street
my eyes are rifle shaped

BLATT recommends

2006-09-12T12:28:00.000-07:00

While you're waiting for BLATT 2 to come back from the printer, you might as well buy issue 4 of

DREAMS THAT MONEY CAN BUY

www.dreamsthatmoneycanbuy.co.uk

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.

It costs only 6 pounds, 9 dollars if you happen to be a yank

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 soon

6. internationales literaturfestival - berlin

2006-09-06T10:11:00.000-07:00

http://www.literaturfestival.com

September 5th through the 16th.

If you're in Berlin, go.
Or don't.
We don't care.

James Tenney Died on August 24th

2006-09-01T14:15:00.000-07:00

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...

From Kyle Gann's American Music in the Twentieth Century.

Go here to listen to some of his work: http://www.kalvos.org/tenneyj.html
And here: http://disquiet.com/downstream-past5.html#d20060731-jt

Malcolm & Jack

2006-08-28T21:33:00.000-07:00

Malcolm & Jack
(And Other Famous American Criminals)
Ted Pelton
Spuyten Duyvil
262 pages, $14.00

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.
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.
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.
Tensions, like "Mosquitoes" in the Faulknerian sense of talkers and planners and thinking-largers, abound.
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.
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.
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.
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.

Per Svenson: A First Siciliana

2006-08-28T01:44:00.000-07:00

Who can pick up the weight of Britain,
Who can move the German load
Or say to the French here is France again?
Imago. Imago. Imago.
Wallace Stevens

I say, Imago Stevens,
The fruit garden of Armenia
(Norbrandt: „This is where mirror meets mirror.”)
Would perhaps be easier to have moving
„lightly through the air again”, whatever the price of
„imagination and its hymns”,
Britain, Germany and France still being so very heavy.

*

And surely Portugal, the garden of Sophia de Mello Breyner:

D’autres aimeront les choses que j’ai aimees
Ce sera le meme jardin á ma porte.

Canto 110: „Thy quiet house.” And a fruit garden.

*

The needleboats at San Sabba,
the beasts above Cabra, are they still there?
The snow of Ararat, the ocean of Portugal,
can they be moved lightly enough by fantasy?
Who can pick up the weight of France?

*

Lightly,
between mirror and mirror,
A cloning of black roses
Enters the room,
A joint Armenia and Sicily
of fragrance.

She is:
Thirteen ways of looking at
a black rose.
She is also:
Thirteen ways of looking at
a rose in Sicily.

*

13 ways, a black rose.

*

13 ways,
Like a siciliana sung,
13 ways,
Like swallows,
Singing the cloning of their canon of lament.

*

A quiet muse
in a quiet house, Szilvia Melinda
(a cloning of gardens, ending in melancholy,
ending in joy),
The mirror of a new poem in a mirror of poetry,
Weightless,
in the early evening light,
A green sunset.
13 ways of dreaming
A dream twice.
„Es jagt die Schwalbe weglang auf und wieder.”
(Liliencron, four times repeated.)

*

To be cloning to be,
That is the implication,
Mirroring traditions
Of what you have seen and heard
Between themselves.
That is the new poem
Mirrors added,
Saying, „Here is France again.”
That is a new lightness
Of the German language:
Add the mirrors.
This is an English poem
Moving out of France,
Spirals
of black lace
Circling
over the black rose.

Budapest – Paris
March-November 2005

Danyi Dani - Notes on a First Siciliana

2006-08-27T05:10:00.000-07:00

First Notes on „A First Siciliana”

„For Wolfgang Amadeus, the
hesitating rhythm of
the siciliana
lent itself to the portrayal of
grief...

with lilting rhythms”
(from the Wikipede)

For Barrington Levy
of Reggae
the Black Rose
grew in his Garden
Jamaica
especially

there too one Michael Rose
sings a Stalk
of Sinsemilla
Szilvia Melinda Sin Semilla
blooming
in his backyard

a hydroponic
fruit garden
yielding green
meditation

over rose
and
under sensi

so

„six million ways to die, choose one” –

perhaps a lighter load
than grief
fe I chief,
is listen to Jah Wolfgang
stoned

J H Conway Dreams Notes on A First Siciliana

Take Sicily as
a mirror,
her skew-curved
island screen
set on an inland sea

of modelling space
for a quiet house that generates
its own metamorphosis,
self-replicating at
an evolutionary pace

where each of its pixels are
(about ten to the power of sixteen
ways) a millimeter speck

*

Vrda
Rhodon
Róza Melindia
rose weightless

*

each speck switches discretely
OFF or ON
for a few rule-governed millennia
or more

to clone perfect roses for
a black and white planar garden
Silva Szilvia

her dark flower
imagines
each early evening tree
imagines
the swirling Italiano-meridionale-estremo galaxy
imagines

*

Who can pick up flowers from a mirror screen?

The Otepää Rabbit’s One Eye

2006-08-26T20:39:00.000-07:00

By Errol Scott

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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'.

2006-08-26T11:52:00.001-07:00

Grzegorz Wróblewski

SOCIETY ORIENTATIONS

Renoir again, though there have already been
many poems about him and because of this ladies
cried bitter tears and an art connoisseur
ran about distracted, with a stomachache etc.
So it’s this hapless Renoir again,
it’s clear, his old age wasn’t
pleasant, he suffered just like any other
ailing grandpa, but why does it always
lead to societal conflicts
when you, God forbid, say that his father
was a tailor and had the eyes of a common sadist?

(The Portrait of Renoir’s Father, 1869; Saint Louis, City Art Museum)
(Translated from the Polish by Adam Zdrodowski & Joel Leonard Katz)

Günter Grass

2006-08-24T16:16:00.000-07:00

Schadenfreude and Suspicion After Nobel Laureate Reveals SS Past

by Joshua Cohen, from the Jewish Daily Forward

Fri. August 25, 2006

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.

ABOVE by Michael Nardone

2006-08-23T03:57:00.000-07:00

Then, drop by caustic drop, a perfect cry
Shall string some constant harmony,-
Relentless caper for all those who step
The legend of their youth into the noon.
-Hart Crane

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A voice tumbles down the stairway. -What the hell is going on down there? Someone here?

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.

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.

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.

She lifts from the floor the half-charred pages of a coloring book.

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.

The voice comes back again. -The hell is happening? Better not be anybody down there.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The steps come closer and the two can see a set of stumped ankles at the stairway top.

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.

The projector wheel spins the uncoiled reel of film. The wall goes white.

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.

**An earlier version of this story originally appeared in the first issue of BLATT.

STEPHEN RODEFER

2006-08-22T06:00:00.000-07:00

Prague Spring

2006-08-20T20:11:00.000-07:00

Today's the 38th anniversary of 1968's Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.

Below's a relevant excerpt from Pavel Brycz's I, City, to be published this fall by Twisted Spoon Press.

An Appearance, Occupied

Translated by Joshua Cohen and Marketa Hofmeisterova

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!”
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 . . .”
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!”
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.
“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.
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.

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.

Photo by Karel Cudlin

2006-08-20T05:02:00.000-07:00

Tears, Foreman.
For Who is not afraid.

by Geoffrey McCarthy

tears, Foreman. for who is not afraid.
poorer from the poor and prior
his name for what it is by then.
he who know this knows in them there is a darkness.

what speed the car do, I enjoy but couldn’t like it all my life.
my mother, my birthday. I her years.
who shakes not, the same in honour and disgrace.
whose inner peace is beyond victory, defeat.

pure work. the heart saying, ‘it is my duty.’
pure intelligence beyond the conditions of nature.
Eternity in things that pass.
Infinity in finite things. And of the cock, a lack.

Wanderer north of Lafayette, there are older ages than this.
Eternity Eternity’s reward. a thousand birds along the BK1,
a thousand adorations from the tree line rail
for the fragrant purpose of the earthe in time.

2006-08-19T10:02:00.000-07:00

Viscosity Breakdown
By Jason Price Everett

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.
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.
She made him go back to the couch after they had finished in order to preserve appearances he went but grudgingly.

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.
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.

2006-08-18T09:18:00.000-07:00

The Paper Me

By Wayne H.W. Wolfson

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.
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.
Snow always reminds me of death.
Snow, winter lay dead on the road. Secrets buried beneath a cold soul.
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.
“Save your artifice for your writing.”
I had not thought anything of it, I did not have time, Monk’s solo was coming.
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.
“Mmmm, yeah, yeah, show me.”
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?”
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.
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.
Dismissively. “Oh it won't hurt anything.”
I didn’t know, but she was making her list too. My failings, my things that she would have to change.
She actually had a mania for lists. No, not lists, notes.
Drinks that first night, cool vodka breath delivers the message.
“I don’t mind some eccentricities, I have a few myself.”
Ah, be careful what you wish for.
She left these little yellow notes for me everywhere. It was maddening. It was without pause.
That last night.
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.
She was going out. I waited until I knew she was too far gone to come back for anything forgotten.
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.
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.
Without saying a word or turning on the light she climbs into bed. Patiently I wait until I hear the sleep breath come.
It comes, let it come down, let it come now.
I hold a naked flame up to the bottom of his foot.
A serpent of flame rapidly crawls the leg.
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.
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.
don't forget... fold twice... dirty towels in the hall... the light above the oven... scrub.scrub.bathroom... fold
I felt bad that the bird had burned up too. He never bothered me, just sitting on his perch looking out the window.
To say I got caught would be wrong. It would imply a freedom that was never acknowledged, did not exist.
I had been there, I did that. Now I am here.
The color of my skin prevents me from joining certain groups, philosophical differences others.
It took awhile, but I found my niche.
There are some of us. Those who have seduced or killed with words, a brotherhood of ink.
I am.
I am still blue.
Still here.

SIX

2006-08-17T03:41:00.000-07:00

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.

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.

You can check out Six’s work online at www.six.cz.

SUE DE BEER

2006-08-15T05:15:00.000-07:00

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:

www.sevenseven.com/debeer

Meanwhile, enjoy these images of Ms. de Beer's work.

Four Parts from Sentience by Clayton A. Couch

2006-08-13T08:45:00.000-07:00

8.

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.

9.

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.

10.

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.

11.

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.

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/).

Asemic Writing by Tim Gaze

2006-08-12T06:39:00.000-07:00

BLATT in the news...

2006-08-10T12:21:00.000-07:00

From the Guardian:

Marjayoun - about five miles from the Israeli border - was used as the command center for the Israeli army and its allied Lebanese militia during an 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon that ended in 2000. The high ground around Marjayoun, including the village of Blatt, overlook the Litani River valley, one of the staging sites for the relentless Hezbollah rocket assault on northern Israel.

INCREASE THE SIZE OF YOUR DICK

2006-08-09T04:06:00.000-07:00

Increase The Size Of Your Dick:
SPAM Poems

(Extracts)
By Ben Myers

Introduction

Every morning they’re there.
Waiting for me.
I make coffee, roll a joint and sift through the SPAM messages that fill my In Box DAILY.
By the time I’m wired from the second cup of coffee and a little stoned from the weed, new poems have appeared before my eyes. They’re not my poems though. No – these ones were written by the wires, and by strange men and women at the end of the wires. Code-writers. Work station techies. Silicone valley geeks.
All the people you laughed at school.
It’s unprecedented and exciting that some of the best poetry and wordplay currently being created is not to be found in the pages of traditional poets or writers, but in the randomly generated unwanted SPAM messages that fill our e-mail ‘In’ boxes daily. Perhaps for the first time it is the online marketing men and technologically sussed code-writers that are inadvertently creating a new poetic voice that is born out of and inextricably intertwined with the mechanics of the technological age. It is they who are articulating the disembodied voice that exists in the hinterland of this current economic and informational revolution.
Advertising Viagra, penis extension programmes and all manner of other shady ventures, these e-mails that survive in-built SPAM filters are often crammed with poetry and prose that is wholly abstract, yet strangely effecting. Who knows what they mean, these post-Burroughs technologically-driven visions of the early twenty-first century. And really – who cares. This is technology and advertising in perfect symbiosis and out of it comes – unexpectedly – poetry.
It’s a strange and unique landscape that emerges. The unexplainable remains just that; yet the words make sense. That is how we know it is poetry. Something jolts inside. Something deep in the subconscious stirs, stretches and yawns.
Welcome to the new world of words.
Here is a selection of some of these cryptic daily missives.
I call it Increase The Size Of Your Dick after the most frequent SPAM subject line of them all.

Contents

All You Lovers Out There
Everybody Wins
All Your Cash Is Mud Lost
A Glimpse Of Paradise
Can’t Sleep?
August Normandy
Your Health, The Musk Bag
Social Michigan
Freedom Fries
The Cold Elbow
Time Travelers!
Cold Bucks
Throat Slitting Cash

All You Lovers Out There

The devil’s brew has worn off
and there is something
wrong
with this mind
like a robbed store
window

You and I -
we were the
same journey
but going
different ways.

And now
the lie detector
has been unearthed
(it was something
I grabbed in
the struggle) -
now we will hear
all about your
lies.

The reality is
the vengeful fleet
was just a mirage
after all,
a water glass full
of the local
spirits.

My mind is a cross
You are on it.

Everybody Wins

state-pensioned
lilac-banded
iron-worded
buckle-beggared
ever-smiling
self-motivated
seven-figured
well-applied
with tooth and toil
and nail

he’s a high-towered miracle man

king of
the tourist-crammed
condominium colonies
a soot-colored
point scorer;
his aluminum family
pillow-shaped
and locked
bottle-tight.

All Your Cash Is Mud Lost

the paper hunt chases
narrow-throated
palsy-struck
pack animals

their passion-kindled in
international oak beauties
an oblong-void
in the zealous party

an orange daisy
pressed in Sanskrit pages
offers a one-sidedness;
a wily net fixer newly-awakened

by the motorcade ballast
of the morning champion
returning in a pearl blue
paper-coated
musk bag
dripping mud pie
red eye
paracoto bark

more night-wandering in ninety-one,
once again out-of-print
open-aired and alcohol scented
a papyrus column
a paper clothed
and paint streaked
metric system
an oily organ desk

that’s nothing but a
multiple-toothed
one-hoofed
pale-livered

middle-witted
orderly officer
mew gull.

A Glimpse Of Paradise

Paradise is where almost
anything
could be sold.

End of story.

We let the beaten shepherd
keep
the money
when we lowered him,
unconscious,
to the ground.

“This calls for consultation,” I said.
“For starters, there are all these
sheep
to consider.”

Can’t Sleep?

Moon-mad noble-looking
one-eyed Italians in patent leather
nimbly side step with
mid-air thrusts.

Neck-deep
pearl-fishing night herons,
native millets with broken beaks
sing one-sided words

at multiple-speeds
yet perfectly poised
- neither dead nor
mud-splashed.

August Normandy

At the rising of the new moon
a one-legged mosquito
infects the neck-cracking eskimo in
Panama reading a novel by fire kettle light.

Once he cracked Polish night club Passover bread
on Michaelmass Eve beneath
the timber roof of a ninth-born pauper
breeding needle bath greens
like a ninth-rate ox feather;

but now he’s a nerve-tingling overlap
a fault needle gathering night letters
- palm honeyed by the ocean’s compass
and as sour as a milk cart in August Normandy.

Your Health, The Musk Bag

Your neighbours lost their alarm clock today
Your neighbours lost that fat today.

Many nice things suck
yet you inherited a small dick from your father,
the fountain of sperm.

One good turn
gets most of the blankets
but your muscles are nothing
if you can’t show them off

Ever stop to think and forget to start again?

Social Michigan

Events in
Atlanta Orleans Detroit.
result in sudden death.
while smoking minutes;
deaths
downloading web play
wares for someplace special

Any sound heard is the cocaine
cardiac seizure poll
so think sideways
about leaving the glass alone.
clear glass, clean flow -
danger: when people mix
Americans decline.

Yet still an estimated forty per cent
metal foreigner blues
love their key chain
mailboxes in
Detroit.

A national surprise
to hide themselves under.

Freedom Fries

Hello, it has been weeks since we’ve caught up.
My time has been taken up with this project,
it has been consulting me get fit.
You should crash by at it.

I apologize I have been so overdue with it;
elbow-led I sprawled headlong to the
ground, the others of his tribe, unprofitable on
a tow-path to normality which wound northward

Arranging animals - red deer, average aurochs,
wet wolves down telephones wires,
I shot down the little
cardboard horses of Guadalupe

Thanks,
Kenneth

The Cold Elbow

neck yoke drips from open-shelved spaces
naked-footed in the muscle building
the pastor-elect scarfs opium
in the darkened nook shaft

odd-humored, his pain defines the pavilion hospital
sour-faced and off colour
beneath the weeping
ming vase tree

he’s the impatient English patient
a paraffin soaked
monkey with a moustache
the proverbial organ grinding play thing

the military band midsummer daisy tangle
the much-lauded paraffin wax pool-side planner
a nine-hole lover, part time book keeper
orange grove grower

paradise paint waster
mistletoe kisser
card stamper
credit carrier
oil burner

balding big wig of the
muzzle-loader;
mosquito-bred Muezzin
of the nutmeg water drinker.

Time Travelers!

Hear me now:

The alien artifact is not
alien
after all
but a
human construct
from the far future
sent back
then lost in time.

I made the
the time travelers
promise
not to tell anybody.
so the people of the
present day
would remain
none
the wiser

because
knowledge
is
power
and the people of the
present day
prefer to believe
in aliens
anyway

However
I’ll make this single
exception
since
I
need your help.

I mean, who’d
have thought
it:
aliens really
do not
exist
it was just one of our own
fucking
with us
from the future.

Well, you have to laugh
don’t you.

Laugh like a drain.

Cold Bucks

“Strive to learn more
or to stop receiving useful info
then see the hallowed location.

In truth, so great are its
powers that even the dead
may be restored
to life
provided the blood
has not yet chilled.

In presenting you with this
appliance, I feel I am bestowing
upon you the greatest blessing
and most longed-for boon
ever bequeathed upon
suffering humanity.”

Here he held the slender,
dull-colored metallic band
toward the boy.

Throat-Slitting Cash

the lap ring troop leader is
too-aged for rod-polishing now
he’s thrice-sold the old
nickel gray back-spikers
to a trencherman philosopher
a steel merchant of the topmast shuttle shell
who first saw the sewer crow tread cradle steps in ’88.

Another animus injuriandi
for the witch that totes a broom
with an opium smoker’s pistol grip;
all pseudo impartiality sliced away
like fashion scissors through braid wool bonnets
discarded in Russo-Turkish snow.

2006-08-08T03:04:00.000-07:00

Women Ending Badly - On Tsipi Keller

2006-08-07T21:05:00.000-07:00

Women Ending Badly

By Joshua Cohen

Jackpot
By Tsipi Keller
Spuyten Duyvil, 224 pages, $13.

Retelling
By Tsipi Keller
Spuyten Duyvil, 288 pages, $14.

Readers of Dostoyevsky's "Crime and Punishment" always know that Raskolnikov committed murder, but they often don't know whether Raskolnikov knows that he committed murder. It is in this wonderful vagary, more than among any writerly tricks of mood, foreshadowing or scenic alteration, that one finds the origin of the so-called psychological novel, a genre that has become largely moribund in an America in which consciousness is often postmodernized into hocus pocus, or ignored altogether for the sake of the heartless thriller. In her new trilogy, Tsipi Keller is revealed as a superlative psychological novelist: "It was the end of the millennium, life rushed at me, the streets reeked of urine. Everybody talked but nobody listened. Men in suits shook hands as if important matters were at stake. It was all a game."

Born in Prague, where her father owned a kosher restaurant on a street that no longer exists, Keller fled the communists and arrived with her parents in Israel, where she began her writing life. A stint at the Sorbonne followed, during which she wrote in French. In the mid 1970s, another city and yet another language: Keller came to feminist America, settling in its capital, New York, where she would produce translations of Hebrew-language poets as diverse as Dan Pagis and Irit Katzir; her anthology, "Contemporary Hebrew Poetry" — which has been decades in the making — will appear next year under SUNY Press.

Many English-language novels followed Keller's American arrival, most notably "Elsa," finished in 1995; "Jackpot," 1998, and "Retelling," 2002. Written out of order and published only recently, these books constitute a trilogy that is among the most subtly compelling of our time — so subtle, in fact, that this trilogy doesn't have a name.

"I couldn't think of one," Keller said recently over coffee and cigarettes in the East Village. "Call it, 'Women Ending Badly.'"

These three books, in the words of their author, "follow women in bad situations that they have brought on themselves." In "Jackpot," the first volume (written second), we meet Maggie, an attractive, insecure 26-year-old who thrives on submissiveness. Hers is an inconsolably vicarious life, an attempt at existing in a hostile city she suffers with a self-imposed neurosis, which at its best prevents her from living her life to the fullest and at its worst stifles her terribly, rendering her smallest decisions moments of impossible stasis. Her domineering friend, Robin, offers to take her on a vacation to a Bahamian Eden, an island named Paradise. Much as Hebrew had to address English in Keller's mind, the language of the body has to have a sit-down with years of inculcated propriety. Maggie opens her mouth and, instead of verbalizing her inner life to Robin, she begins drinking, then gambling and having sex, all to excess. Eventually Maggie becomes either reinvented or her "true self," finding a wretched sort of liberation as a successful resident prostitute at the hotel at which she once was a tourist.

After sex comes death, and so "Retelling," out this month, from Brooklyn's Spuyten Duyvil, which also published "Jackpot." The heroine is a 32-year-old named Sally, a similarly trapped New York woman accused of murdering her friend Elsbeth. Alternating largely between Sally's lazy days in a park on the Upper East Side and her interrogations by the police following the murder, suspense is achieved right from the opening ("Ah, to be alive, I thought. Not a small miracle, considering the events of the past few weeks and the growing uncertainty I sense all around me") and is maintained straight through to the end, which is marked by a quick coda that glosses Newton's writings not on pure science but on alchemy: "All things are corruptible, all things are generable." As Sally is brought low, we should be reminded of the line previous to that which Keller quotes from Newton: "Nothing can be changed from what is without putrefaction."

According to Keller, her project is less to accuse than to descry. "Society gives women mixed signals," she said. "And woman have a different relationship with authority than do men." It's because of this that her second book in the trilogy is called "Retelling." "It's a defense," she explained, "a rehearsed monologue. Even if Sally didn't commit a crime, she has to defend herself. All women have to defend themselves, whether they're guilty or not."

After meeting Keller, I was privileged with a peek at the manuscript of "Elsa," the last of Keller's three women and also the eldest at 39. In this short epilogue, set to appear in 2007, Elsbeth's nipple rings are gone, as are Maggie and Sally's occasionally knowing lasciviousness. What's left is utter vulnerability, not as a role women assume for men in response to expectation but as an unsurpassable handicap to intimacy. The book ends with a startling scene in which Elsa goes beyond the tired trope of enjoying victimization at the hands of men; eyes open as she makes love, she sees relationships for what they really are: a flux of allegiances that flicker by the thought.

This article originally appeared in the Forward

Two Poems by Stephan Delbos

2006-08-06T06:47:00.000-07:00

Landscapes

Honeysuckle
Subtle
Jukebox
Rumble

Words rise like mountains from the landscape of the page.
Thunder roars through certain phrases
Whose every jagged ridge reveals
A valley pungent with the musk of earth.

Sheltered in the lean-to of my name,
Overshadowed by cliffs of sheer obsidian,
I sing the voice we give the world.

Eucalyptus
Eggplant
Platypus

*

Trying to Write a Poem Beneath the Statue of Saint Vaclav

Rain slid from holy face to horse's hoof
On streambeds oxidized by eighty-six relentless years.
I was pressed behind the statues, keeping out of wind.
Looking up, I couldn't help but see the horse's bulge
And balls and recall Nabokov's advice:
"Caress the details."

The man in red sweatpants seemed possessed:
Prostrate, praying to the statue of a king,
Scabbed hands out-cupped, catching rain, awaiting blessings.
He shivered in the steel-eyed gaze,
But remained the picture of devotion, unlike his brothers
Sprawled on benches clutching rum-filled rosaries.
Raindrops rippled puddles all around him. Finally,
He stood with crusading eyes, paraded past,
Possessed by his commission.
I stood waiting in the rain for direction,
One authoritative voice.

BLATT @ GALAPAGOS

2006-08-03T19:26:00.000-07:00

BLATT Readings @ Galapagos Art Space

Friday, August 11th, 8pm

with Tod Thilleman, Donari Braxton, Julia Cohen and Joshua Cohen.

Tod Thilleman moved to New York at the age of 18 and worked for a brief period with Pace Editions. He is the author of numerous poetry collections and the novel Gowanus Canal, Hans Knudsen. From 1991-1999 he was editor of Poetry New York: a journal of poetry & translation.

Donari Braxton's writing revolves around the ambition to reach a state of maximal objectivity, a state he defines as that in which one can juxtapose relevancy with symbolic personalism in order to maximally interpret the humanities. Braxton developed the bulk of his literary systems writing theatre in Paris. Currently he resides in New York, where he plans to release a collection of ten inter-dependant pieces numbered I — X.

Julia Cohen is the Managing Editor for Nightboat Books and a fiction reader for Small Spiral Notebook. Her chapbook, If Fire, Arrival, was just released with Horse Less Press, and her poems have been published in the Mississippi Review online, MiPOesia,How2, Octopus #7, Hanging Loose, GutCult, Boog City, the tiny, Pindeldyboz, and Word for/ Word and are forthcoming in typo, 5_Trope, AUGHT and H_NGM_AN. She lives in Brooklyn.

Joshua Cohen is the author of The Quorum (Twisted Spoon Press, 2005) and Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto (Fugue State Press, 2006). His essays regularly appear in The Forward, and he is a co-editor of BLATT.

http://www.galapagosartspace.com/

70 North 6th Street
between Kent and Wythe
Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY 11211
718 782-5188

2006-07-29T13:44:00.000-07:00

quick recognition of inside eternity

by Matthew Wascovich

PART I

death fast. do you want out dragon? have you put a
dime toward the future? black spoons and yellow
liquids rammed into one television. don’t be so
decided. don’t be so decided. please read all the
warnings. it’s the country vinyl. looking into your
body, you know absolutely and lovingly that we will
jeopardize our faith.

we will undercut each other. we will do what is
paranoid. do what we are told. we will play a role
in storage. we are dependency. you can’t forget it
now. you can’t hear his sky. you can’t remember it.
you can’t hate no more. you can’t regret some skulls.
you can’t save yourself. you can’t forecast the
frost.

you can’t understand a jaw harp. you can’t find the
time. you can’t search and press. you can’t rule and
clash. you can’t compare it now. all day bombs.
there are messages looking from the tombs. there are
messages looking right into a oneness of light.
there’s a note in your eyes. there’s a reason we are
low. there’s a place of knowledge.

never, this is not very long anymore. there’s a
bitter in this exception. let’s let it go. we’ll
meet again. we’ll meet again. provocateur and
zeppelin. harmony and a belt. the closer closed and
californian water ghost taunts for womanhood fluxing
the leather. i’m not jealous of your cameras, i just
want to lick the skin to be some sort of hero.

PART II

los angeles and her extra flesh. we hear our actions
providing for the fluid. the touch of esteem. pox
debts. hey 52 comments in my lap. whistle in berlin.
a manhole stepped upon gonged in the market. the
beards have united and it’s sort of lost on him that
fashion is stunted, that she did it beautifully.

there’s a ring in the hollow. a hole in the summary.
a repeating of the hurting. a scale of conjunction
does it notepad. your wings are giving believable
life as holy as fake and the rats are trashy.

we’re trashcans. your gunboy cornered whispers lady.
the glass house ensemble played four stunts of edison.
four stunts of edison and 35 minutes above the lake.
she doesn’t care about pictures of you. a hovering
gallery in which we strip underneath paintings.
village service hawk. he is in a car completely
right. i met you and we love. the future is a crew
of blowing the kings into tornadoes. our phones die
with meta-knowledge. bow to her. bow to here, to be
there connecting row after row. an angel’s psychic.
the maze of streets and light of a candle tunneled our
swamp pass. these tide rewards looking at a body of
veins listening and slipping away. a tight slope
knockout. a stifling in triple clothes as the
basement washes out.

guide her post. recovery is sinker. pour it rains.
the city is empty and each side wants more depravity.
a midwest nose grind. inventions are what questions
and grafton is a dead bird. a medal worn. an adult
at the dumpster. the truth first. a visible sign.
thee normal fish pounding lice. off lice, we are
farmed. hurt. feeling. it’s crashed and alit. this
hastings rock beach. england is to one as one is you.
a singular needle that she sees double with. we are
a climate of falling things. a course. we are a
broken clearance and it’s nice to some with heavy
stickers and their sex of musicality. a program
toward an ending. a phone blanker rings teller. you
can call out perfection but only get scared. you can
calculate with your head in an ass cloud. you can
reward for talking like talking in the mind.

PART III

a boy screens shirt. what cost to that allegiance?
these trappings are of whores. tomorrow is a bunch of
feathers in your mouth. it’s a self in an
all-encompassing mirror that points anywhere when
nothing little seems only big. hands quoted.
westlake is a clueless maze of rained roads. a war
bone ache. a covered marrow as birds roll grass
clippings. the dogs bark while america in this year
that it is becomes voicelesss, goes between
maledictions as catacombs impose. don’t worry about
me because he doesn’t trust either. we are chumps
with loose mouth gathering our chartered group,
destroyed lame walking thru a graveyard.

she spits the selfish in a sci-fi landing. spits the
writing of man made movements. the background
instruments all nod to be forgiven only common
colourless and less known.

crater of roof. we are gentle in our production
predicting square miles. the males catch us railroad
heaving. we are hefty and printed. touch now,
presently in this hiding, sweet dipping into your
savings with so many more ideas. the endeared stand
up because god’s done with shouting.

fixed cut sea foam health grime tunnel polite skip
short now remain stone. return ramps to which it’s
the opposition whereby we comment. pocket presence
wasteful nurse of the cubicle. thin line operator
honey port.

PART IV

work check and her pounds of paper prod the girl
liarbird. you walk fast (uncaringly). sick woman
walks with old man down kenilworth in a schizophrenic
blitz.

the kissing was left on your throat. you knew last
week but i didn’t. you defined everything without
knowing the movement. get ready for leaving. the
pants shut their seams when head rested on bicep.
what sort of guitar cuts to the artful men? the
northern people say manchester is forever.

an animal is optical and victoria is in the bathroom.
the nipples look to freedom. he donated copped hours
to the less worked. there were days off in the worst
place. the first worst place.

a chateau thwarting seats stretching to her. we camp
at the ledge reading slang and each other, looking at
our marks. a family of lashes mimes a hummingbird
loosing its job. let’s drink clear liquids and
confidently scared talk later.

--

Ludvik Vaculik is 80

2006-07-27T13:31:00.000-07:00

If you're too lazy to read, you can listen to this article here:
http://www.radio.cz/en/article/81414

From Radio Praha:

Renowned author Ludvik Vaculik turns eighty

By Linda Mastalir

This past Sunday, Ludvik Vaculik celebrated his 80th birthday. One of the Czech Republic's most well-known and respected writers, Ludvik Vaculik has been part of the Czech literary scene since the 1950s. He has written several novels, literally hundreds of essays, not to mention some of the most important political texts of twentieth century Czechoslovak history.
He was born in Brumov, near Zlin, south Moravia, on July 23, 1926. Ludvik Vaculik started to toy with the written word when he was thirteen—it was then that he began to keep a diary that would be published 45 years later under the title "The Indian Book." Ludvik Vaculik says that it was the only time in his life when he actually enjoyed writing, when writing came easily and he knew exactly what to say.
Gerry Turner first met Ludvik Vaculik in 1976, when he was asked to interpret between the Czech writer and Tom Stoppard, the Czech-British playwright who was visiting Czechoslovakia. By then the communist authorities had banned Vaculik from publishing and his texts were circulating in the samizdat underground. It was what Gerry Turner describes as a "turning point," and though the two men did not see one another again for ten years, Gerry Turner—known as A.G. Brain in those days—translated many of the author's texts into English during the 1970s and 1980s. He recalls two of Ludvik Vaculik's essays that still stand out after all these years:
"Well, the one that immediately stands out for me is the essay that he wrote at the time of Chernobyl—which I translated—where he is with Hanzlik in Zlin. I think it's one of the funniest pieces of writing that I've ever read because it is so understated and the horror of the situation comes through in a very insidious way. One can only call it shorthand, the way that he operates. I would compare it in many ways with the essay he wrote just after the demonstrations in Prague at the beginning of 1989—that piece was called 'Komunismus je biti.' There, again, he can convey in a very downbeat way a very horrific situation. And therein is his power as a writer—he's not an emphatic writer."
Though his critics may not always agree with what he writes, few would claim that Ludvik Vaculik is anything less than a master of the written word. At eighty, he still writes a weekly column for the daily Lidove Noviny newspaper, and he's currently preparing another collection of diary-type entries for publication. As always, Ludvik Vaculik will give Czech readers something to think about.

Elias Canetti

2006-07-26T00:40:00.000-07:00

Yesterday (the 25th) was the birthday, is the birthday, of Elias Canetti.
He would have been 101.
Below was written last year, a review of his most recent posthumity, the book Party in the Blitz: The English Years, translated by Michael Hoffman and published by New Directions.
This originally appeared in the Forward.

"I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can," the character of Stephen Dedalus argues, in James Joyce's "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," "using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use — silence, exile, and cunning."
This trinity of silence, exile and cunning became the mandate for many of the greatest writers of the past century, and for none more so than Elias Canetti. Not a young man, nor a young artist, by the time he left Germany to seek refuge in England in 1939, Elias Canetti — born in Ruse, Bulgaria, in 1905, to a family that spoke Ladino and German — became adept in these three disciplines in a manner that surpassed the overshadowing careers of fellow wartime writers, such as the brothers Mann, and the author of "Ulysses." After writing his single novel, "Auto da Fe," a masterpiece that some believe to be the link between the just flowering Anglo-American Modernism of Joyce and the rapidly dying Central European tradition of Robert Musil and Hermann Broch, Canetti escaped the continent leaving fiction, and his reputation, behind. When he arrived in England, the only man who knew his work was Arthur Waley, a renowned scholar of Sinology. Eerily for the author, this was the profession of the protagonist of his unread novel. In "Auto da Fe," one Professor Peter Kien is a man of learning who loses his life in a bout of the bibliophilic: He dies protecting his library from destruction.
Despite financial straits and the exigencies of a life in exile, Canetti was similarly obsessed with books. He was so obsessed, it took great effort to write them. After a few plays, the novel, and two decades of work on his monumental, and monumentally flawed, sociological study, "Crowds and Power" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984) Canetti went on to write the three volumes of his autobiography that would win him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1981. Of the five projected volumes, each to be focused on a single sense, only "The Tongue Set Free," "The Torch in My Ear" and "The Play of the Eyes" were finished. The series ended with the author's death in August 1994.
But Canetti would not "go gentle into that good night," as his friend Dylan Thomas wrote and did; he worked until the end. And even beyond: Possibly intended to be predicated on the olfactory sense, an ersatz fourth volume, "Party in the Blitz," has just been published posthumously. It is a wartime memoir couched as a collection of drafts and notes that Canetti made in the early 1990s, which he rewrote and revised until he had the strength to write no more.

Faced with silence, forced into exile and armed with cunning, in England Canetti became a sort of sleeper-cell headquartered in petit-bourgeois Amersham, an hour northwest of London. This was the provincial nowhere from which Canetti observed the culture of war, maniacally recording in journals the exploits of his fellow displaced and the native elite, all the while planning to develop the material into the memoir he never would finish: an encyclopedia of personalities that is at depth a study of his own. He called himself der Hund meiner Zeit, the dog of his day, in that he sniffed out clues, following his nose — here an organ of the deepest, most intuitive, sense — through bombed-out, class-conscious Old England, attempting to maintain its dignity amid destruction both corporeal and of the culture. This work was done mostly at coldly decadent, masquelike parties of the intellectual elite, which Canetti would come to characterize as Nichtberührungsfeste — ritualized celebrations of noncontact — peopled by intellectuals faux and real, all suffering from what Canetti called Gefühlsimpotenz (the emotional impotence of those removed from the world by circumstances of power and privilege).
After attempting in the three volumes of his autobiography to situate himself, a Bulgarian-born Jew, as the preeminent German intellectual of his day — positioning his achievements alongside and often above those of Mitteleuropean contemporaries such as Karl Kraus and Bertolt Brecht — Canetti in old age attempted to assert himself as the foremost thinker if not in modern English, then at least in modern England. What this meant was the equivalent of a blitz, in literary terms. And indeed, salvos are fired fast and furious in these pages, which are by contrast structured quietly, as if a Victorian portrait gallery — studded with depictions intended for strolling past as much as in appreciation of their craftsmanship as in deference to their creator. Flitting horrifically from Oxonian party to party amid privation, the sky dark with Luftwaffe, Canetti struggles to transmute anecdote and accusation into philosophy, as if attempting to prove the gossip of the great a verity in and of itself.
As a fellow pretender to the throne, American expatriate T.S. Eliot is hit first — and hard. With Canetti's friend and fellow exile Franz Steiner taking the neglect of his writing as a pretext to die prematurely, the competing and competitive Eliot is treated as if in retaliation against his very existence.
"I was living in England as its intellect decayed," Canetti writes. "I was a witness to the fame of T.S. Eliot. Is it possible for people ever to repent sufficiently of that? An American brings over a Frenchman from Paris ([Jules] Lafourge), drools his self-loathing over him, quite literally lives as a bank clerk, while at the same time he criticizes and diminishes anything that was before, anything that has more stamina and sap than himself, permits himself to receive presents from his prodigal compatriot, who has the greatness and tenseness of a lunatic, and comes up with the end result: an impotency which he shares around with the whole country." And further, "a foothill of Hegel, a desecrator to Dante (to which Circle would Dante have banished him?); thin lipped, cold hearted, prematurely old, unworthy of Blake or of Goethe or of anything volcanic — his own lava cooled before it ever warmed — neither cat nor bird nor beetle [...]" Canetti's own lava flows on for paragraphs more; animals and insects give way to a critique of the poet's manners, name-dropping Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound and Dylan Thomas along the way.
Amid warm portraits of Steiner, painter Oskar Kokoschka and English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, Canetti reserves such bile only for one other — his lover, acclaimed English writer Iris Murdoch. Then an author of 24 novels (as Canetti noted, 23 more than him), Murdoch was an elemental force. Canetti's portrait of her is persuasive, though most probably unfair. She is portrayed as an unfeeling nymphomaniac, a profligate writer of no genius to justify her ambition. In their liaisons they have sex — described in detail; they indulge each other's egos and part with haste. In private, they are unrelentingly vicious: Murdoch parodied his misogyny in many of her books; Canetti writes of her here with an almost intolerable scorn. "I don't think there is anything that leaves me quite so cold as that woman's intellect," he writes. "You could call Iris Murdoch the bubbling Oxford stewpot. Everything I despise about English life is in her." Apparently she did not suffer from Canetti's absolutism: "She never completely adopts anything, just as she never completely rejects it, it is all left in a harmless, tolerable, un-worked-out suspension." And later, there's a portrait of a portrait: "Her relationship to art: she travels and goes to museums a lot, she gets hot under the collar, because she's forever talking in front of pictures, or rather: getting others to talk." By contrast, Canetti's wife, Veza — also an author and a collaborator — is hardly mentioned. But then neither is the married couple's unremitting poverty. Nor a single moment of happiness.
But Canetti doesn't dole out all the insults. He receives his fair share. Knowing he spent time in Prague before the war, many ignore his work and ask him instead if he had known Kafka. When a member of the illustrious and eccentric Maxwell family discovers that Canetti is a Jew, he asks him to evaluate a diamond. Even amid war, such is life among the privileged. Class, which so obsessed the German Jews, is revealed here for what it is amid the ruins of modernity: birthright, with no mandate of responsibility to culture.
Born to nothing, entirely self-made, Canetti died before his work — and so, his self — was finished. It would be pleasant to think that had he lived, he would have tempered some of his words here, elided a few hateful phrases, eliminated the snobbery against snobbery implicit in his tone. But nothing ever was pleasant about Canetti. And nothing ever is pleasant about great literature. Despite the casualties, we should have it no other way.

If Fire, Arrival by Julia Cohen

2006-07-24T11:29:00.000-07:00

Julia Cohen's new chapbook, If Fire, Arrival, done up by horse less press (no caps), is a wonderful, if the so far only, introduction to the work of a wonderful poet. A girl in woman's clothing, a Mac-user who has probably never held a pen in her entire life, Cohen's poems here are her declarations of independence from independence, high school notes passed directly to the trashcan because, like, friends are so yesterday. I just want to be young again, and alone and in nature, but with the assurance of love and an internet connection.
These poems despite the forms imposed seem unmade, or seem still unhealed, forever; here childhood isn't any longer a state, or a life to be outgrown, otherwise pardoned; innocence is not the unconscious naive, it's the willed vague. We know only that we don't want to know. Around us is "something akin to weather". Huddle near. "Tell another bedtime story when you leave" ...

Reins

When buckets and pails were our favorite words/units of measure what
did you want that the pretty day continue into pretty days

The photo booth took polaroids of nipples and neck my head was never
in the picture where is the culpability when we say The past or It passed

I whitewashed the disturbing symmetry to give you - Dare you to find
what is more disturbing than a slate scraped clean

Is pure freedom what exists without love let's not paraphrase I never
said let it go or take me back I said tangle

Next Year in Uman: A Journey to the Ukraine

2006-07-22T08:33:00.000-07:00

Congratulations are due to Ahron Weiner, a frequent contributor to BLATT.

It's just been announced that his new photography book, Next Year in Uman: A Journey to the Ukraine, will be published in 2007 by Tzaddik, in America and in Israel, in two editions: English and Hebrew.

Weiner writes:

Every year, an increasing number of Jews from every walk of life, from all over the world, converge on a small, unremarkable city in the Central Ukraine to spend three days together, united in meditation and prayer.
Uman is home to 100,000 Ukrainians. In 2005, 25,000 Jews undertook this pilgrimage; displacing a quarter of the town’s population for the duration of their stay.
This diverse group of Jews travels to Uman for “Rosh Hashana” – the Jewish New Year, in early autumn – to pray and meditate at the tomb of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, a spiritual seer of the 17th century who is revered to this day as the one and only leader of the Breslov Chassidic movement.
For the past several years, I have joined this pilgrimage – camera in hand – to document this uniquely moving and increasingly spectacular event.
Rabbi Nachman, grandson of the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Chassdism, chose to be buried here because of Uman’s tragic history. In 1768, an estimated 30,000 Jews opted to be tortured and killed by the infamous Ivan Gonta and his Cossacks rather than convert to Christianity. Rabbi Nachman believed that there had been no greater martyrdom among the Jewish people since the Roman destruction of Solomon’s Temple.
On his deathbed at the tender age of 38, Rabbi Nachman is said to have made an oath in front of his two main disciples. He proclaimed that anyone who came to his grave on Rosh Hashana to pray (and regardless of the depravity of their sins) would find a place for himself in the World to Come. His teachings, and this promise, have resonated over time, and created a ripple effect that seems to grow stronger with each passing year.
While a small number of devout Breslov adherents risked their lives to sneak into Uman when the Ukraine was under communist rule, things opened up during Perestroika, when 250 Jews were allowed to travel there, officially for purposes of observing Rosh Hashana. Since then, this pilgrimage has seen exponential growth – last year, 18,000 made the trip. This year, that number swelled to 25,000.
This series documents the festival-like atmosphere of Uman, which is part Woodstock and part Mount Sinai: with dancing, singing, eating, drinking (sometimes too much) and a spirit of communal prayer.

David Hill reading tonight in Prague at Cafe Metropole

2006-07-21T06:56:00.000-07:00

David Hill - poet, writer, translator and performer - will be reading
his work on Friday July 21, starting at 7.30pm. The venue is Café
Metropole, Prague 2, Anny Letenske 18.

David Hill is a founder, organiser and host of The Bardroom, Budapest's
English-language literary cabaret, which has been running since 2001.
This is his third performance in Prague during the last six years.

Hill's translations of Hungarian poetry have appeared in publications
including Prague's very own Blatt, as well as the Times Literary
Supplement, The Independent, a wide array of international anthologies,
and a poster series on the Budapest metro.

His own poetry has also been widely published in literary magazines and
anthologies.

He has written lyrics for recording artists, and appeared as himself,
reciting a poem, in the 2004 independent movie, Café in the Sky, about
the famous Hungarian suicide ballad "Gloomy Sunday."

Also a travel and lifestyle writer, he has just finished a revision of
the Budapest book published by Blue Guides.

He is variously described as: perversely talented, dexterous, raunchy,
arch, acerbic, serpentine, verse-perfect, elegant, laugh-out-loud
brilliant.

More information and pictures can be found on the David Hill website:
www.lyriklife.com

Eva Braun's Last Tragic Abortion by Lynda Schor

2006-07-20T13:20:00.000-07:00

Eva lies in the mother-of-pearl tub staring at the green tarnish bleeding from the fourteen- carat-gold carved faucets into the bathwater. She raises the hand mirror she'd brought with her into the bath, which, like the faucets, is carved with Aries rams just at the point of being transformed into Taurean bulls—Adolph's sun signs. Used to picturing herself as Adolph sees her, she peers at her face as if to recall herself, whatever that is. Or perhaps to catch a glimpse of a new possibility. She feels (perhaps it's the water, the sensation of floating) unmoored, as if she could, like a turn of a faucet, find herself beautiful one moment, ugly the next. She moves the small mirror from her face, flushed, surrounded by an aureole of fine curls, downward toward one breast, which, as she's just six weeks pregnant, is tender, swollen, nipple rounder than usual, areola rosy. She enjoys the sensation of prickly cool on her face and shoulders, the rest of her submerged in water almost unbearably hot. She moves the mirror along to her belly, just slightly more rounded than usual, an almost undetectable convexity between diminutive pelvic bones which stand out of the murky bathwater like small sails softened by mist. It's exciting to see each small portion of her body at one time, magnified, as if it's foreign terrain. Raising her hips she feels the slight tickle of the water's edge, above which she's flushed pink. The portions of her still in the water appear dead white, buttery and unarticulated. Sexual arousal was the only time Eva could stand feeling the least bit vague, her boundaries undefined. The image in the mirror of her stomach, then her pubis, excites her, then the pictures in her mind superimposed, then the warm excitement she feels, then those sensations in her mind, then the image in the mirror–she's tempted to carefully deconstruct passion, but finds she no longer wishes to think. She lays the mirror across the marble ledge and closes her eyes and listens to her breathing.

Eva imagines she can hear similar breathing from Adolph's room on the other side of the bath. She likes to think they are doing the same thing, separately, and toys with the idea of climbing out and trying his door. She jumps when Adolph, in his brown, beige and gold flannel robe, barges in without knocking. Timid about his aging body, he pulls on an already tight belt. Eva looks into his eyes and in the lust reflected there sees herself anew.

He stands looking at her for a moment, glassy-eyed and peaked, and Eva senses his whirling galvanism, his inability to remain immobile, or placid. She watches him and imagines how he sees her lovely hair, pulled up in back except for the long, damp tendrils which hang down around the sides of her narrow face and delineate her small moist ears, rounded cheekbones, and, under a wide chin, her surprisingly slender neck.

"Your wide, smooth forehead reminds me of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the greatest war criminal of all time," he says in a tired voice, while laying his chenille robe over the gilt stool. He sits on the edge of the tub, one patent leather scuff hanging precariously from the toes of the foot he is resting on his other knee.

Eva stares at the pale flesh of his abdomen. He's not at all fat, but there's a looseness to his flesh nowadays. His white calf, crossed over his thigh is slightly freckled, like freshly poured pancake batter with raisins. How ugly he is, she thinks.

"What are you thinking?" he asks.

Slightly flustered, she says, "Nothing."

"That you find me repulsive and ugly because I'm so much older than you?"

"I don't find you ugly," says Eva, upset to be caught at a rare moment when she saw him clearly as one would see a stranger, or an object. "I feel our spirits meeting," she says, observing how his eyeball apertures resemble miniature anuses.

Adolph leans over the edge of the tub and dips his hand into the water. He fondles Eva's ass slowly, feeling, and picturing, her lovely curves; then, reaching under her, he inserts his finger with the square nail into her anus. As he pushes he describes the smoothness he feels as "a road, fish entrails, a muddy trench, a shiny train track, the inside of a cheek." Eva responds to his descriptions. She's always turned on by him. She listens to his monologues for hours. She's especially moved by Adolph in his uniforms. He has charisma.

"I believe," says Adolph, "in ending life in a clear-cut manner. No use being so in love with it, so dependent upon it, wishing to prolong the pain of it. It can be so neat if our relationship with life is broken cleanly, when we make the decision to end it. I can't stomach passivity. I'm in love with free choice."

"Why are you thinking about ending your life?" Eva asks. "Do you think it's fair of you to end a life that expends so much in the service of others?" She studies his buttocks hanging further over the water. His passion for order and cleanliness seems to be growing daily. She wonders about "free choice."

Adolph abstractedly rubs the moist bar of soap near his thigh with his forefinger, and then, for a moment, rubs the foam into it. He slips his feet out of his patent leather scuffs, the only shoes he wears now in the bunker, even when dressed in suits and uniforms, and gingerly enters the tub, facing Eva, careful not to scrape his back on the gold fixtures. He peers over his knees, folded nearly to his chin. Eva's legs wrap around him, her calves circling his buttocks underwater.

Eva feels uneasy, but says nothing. She can't help recalling her pain when Adolph continued his relationship with both herself and the beautiful, buxom Geli Raubal, lying to both, unable to break off with either one until Geli made the choice by killing herself. "What about Geli? Were you so strong then?"

"I didn't miss her," says Adolph, misunderstanding. "I was enraged that she found a way to counteract my will."

"Geli lives with us always," cried Eva. "She still lives in us both." Perspiration drips down her face and neck, reddened even more now by suppressed anger. The heat of the room, the water, is suddenly unbearable. She focuses on the spot where her calf touches Adolph's thigh until she loses any sensation of the contact.

Eva recalls the funeral, Geli perfectly beautiful, perfectly frozen, embalmed in the best Egyptian technique, worthy receptacle of the costly scientific studies of the third Reich. Even then Eva envied Geli as she lay there, peaceful, her white hands across her breasts, clutching dried baby's breath. Her dark hair is pulled back around her heart-shaped forehead, so different from Eva's. The deep blue color of the clingy jersey dress chosen by Eva accentuates the clarity of her eyes, a shade of blue quite different from Eva's and Adolph's light ones, her skin pure white, cheeks rosy with rouge. Eva recalls seeing Adolph lift Geli's dress. Her thighs, close, make a heart shape, outlined by the top edge of her black underpants. He gazes into her eyes, which stare dumbly, willfully into space.

Adolph suddenly looks meek. He lowers his eyes, seeming to watch the smoggy water.

"She still is the master of your moods," Eva continues. "That's why you're always so sad. And I think about her all the time too."

"You're lying on your bed, arms out, naked. ‘Eat me,' you order. ‘I'm not in the mood,' I say. ‘Then Geli will do it,' you say. ‘You turn your head. Geli is kneeling, hair shiny and disordered, light trapped in the tangles like fireflies, straight-cut bob just brushing the silk sheet. Her large, firm breasts rest arrogantly over her wide rib cage, the small, dark birthmark between her heavy mounds disturbs me. She bends over you lingeringly, letting you feel her hot breath on your groin. I lean tensely against the chill wall and watch, pulling the peach silk cover sheet over my small breasts. After a moment you lift her hair in your hand exposing a portion of the back of her neck, which is thin and childlike in contrast with her voluptuousness, and which, though resembling my own, is somehow hateful to me. I restrain an urge to smack her, which hopefully might cause her to bite down hard on your prick. Geli looks at me, her eyes pulled Asian by your clutching of her hair. Within my jealous hatred, a bubble of compassion grows. Only then can I gently kiss the soft hairs at the nape of her neck also, while I whisper with love and envy, ‘How can you be such a masochist?'"

"Don't talk to me like that," says Adolph, but meekly. He was forgetting all he'd meant to tell her about his depression, caused by events currently occurring in the German Nation, and everyone either against him, or after his ass.

"You can't make a commitment to me," says Eva, watching his soft penis move in the water like a slug.

"Can't you get over it?" asks Adolph. "I needed emotional security from both of you."

"Don't you think I need emotional security?" Eva screams.

Adolph covers his ears with his hands. "Don't scream like that. It reminds me of my mother."

Eva feels her the wrenching of tears in the back of her throat. Adolph places his fingers on her breast, but she only cries harder.

"It's strange about the mind and the body," says Adolph. "Without the mind, the body is an animal. The mind is God and religion. The body of Eva won't respond when her mind is upset and angry. This is Eva's integrity." He pauses. "My own body, on the other hand, tends to respond to the physical under any mental conditions. It therefore follows that my mind has more integrity than my body."

"If your body has no integrity, neither does your mind," says Eva. "Mind and Body are one."

Adolph is aware that he's sweating. Eva has never spoken to him like this. It reminds him that there's no time.

"Listen," says Adolph, "I don't bother about your past, why harp on mine?" He recalls that they are practically buried alive beneath the rubble of the destroyed city.

"It's our past. Our past was connected. Should have been connected. Except all the parts you didn't share," says Eva. I've lived with you so long, she thinks, and have been so alone.

"Nothing like that matters any more. Today's the day I make a clear commitment to you. We're getting married," says Adolph.

"Only because today's the day you're making a clear severance with your relationship with life," pouts Eva.

"Sarcasm is unbecoming in women," says Adolph, rubbing his chest against Eva's. His excitement has the quality of desperation. "Do you hate me?" he asks, holding his penis as if it's something to grasp for security.

"No, no," says Eva nearly inaudibly. She feels triumphant, yet sorry for him.

He stares at her in a supplicating way, as if she can give him self-esteem, as a gift. "Hit me, oh, hit me, Eva," he sputters, churning in the water in what seem like attempts to become smaller, something lower on the evolutionary scale. "I feel I'm nothing. A piece of slime. I can't bear it. Hit me hard. Put your finger in me," he begs, on his knees in the water. Then, sinking down, surrendering to his feeling of being slime he almost looks it—white, flabby, shrinking, he becomes another creature, a pulsing sea anemone, a mudpuppy, so light that he moves with the oscillating water.

Feeling powerful, Eva raises herself to gain leverage, and smacks Adolph really hard. He glances at her with a mixture of love, gratitude and supplication. Placing his hands above his own head as if they're tied there, he writhes, whispering unintelligibly.

Eva doesn't know what fantasies he disappears into. Yet she adores his strength. She loves it that he allows her to hate him, while not feeling threatened that she can't love him at the same time. She would have gladly pretended to untie his wrists and feet if only he'd tell her about their being tied. Squatting with her back toward him, she moves over him, lowering herself on him and watching his feet turn in and caress each other, toes curling under, then out.

Adolph moans, "Now, baby, now."

Eva knows what he wants. Relaxing her muscles, she urinates on and around his penis, seeing her urine as a mountain stream. The warm liquid and her sense of abandon excite her too.

"Let's pretend," says Adolph breathlessly, "that you're a massacred Ogellala Indian, beautiful, and oh so wounded."

Eva nearly loses her balance as she feels her hair being pulled back by Adolph. She can almost sense the location of each hair on her head. Her mouth is long, her eyes pulled into slanty Indian eyes.

"Boy of the Loups," Adolph says, "the scalp of a mighty Dakota shall never dry in Pawnee smoke."

"What?" asks Eva.

"It's from THE PRAIRIE, by James Fenimore Cooper, who copied it from our Karl May." Adoph stares at Eva's throat, trying to imagine blood there. He keeps his hold on her hair. "The fickle Indian gives up his wife for a white woman. But shaking off the grateful sentiment like one who would gladly be rid of any painful, because reproachful, emotion he laid his hand calmly on the arm of his wife and led her directly in front of Inez."

Adolph presses his penis back and forth along his own thigh, eyes closed, concentrating. Eva is surprised by his erudition.

"You be the discarded Indian wife," Adolph suggests feverishly, "and after my battle scene I ravish you."

"‘Fool, die with empty hands, Mahtoree exclaimed, setting an arrow to his bow and sending it, with a sudden and deadly aim, full at the naked bosom of his generous and confiding woman . . .'"

Eva no longer hears his words. He is sweating. Ripples generated by his drilling hand on his own penis seem like volcanic waves. She feels like she's drowning. She can feel each minute body hair as live coral or seaweed pushed back and forth by the stormy waves.

"I admire your control," whispers Eva.

"Shh," says Adolph, one hand on his lips, the other still holding himself, but absolutely still now. "You're lying on the bloody sand. Both of us are wounded." He breathes in and begins moving his hand up and down along himself again.

"This is wonderful. You're letting me share your fantasies," cries Eva.

Adolph moves his hand faster, then stops, and holds his breath. Eva watches the three creamy spurts as they lie on his stomach, then slowly dissipate like smoke in the water.

Adolph lies there exhausted, crumpled and infant-like, hand curled next to Eva's breast. He rubs her nipple halfheartedly, as if he wants to try to satisfy her.

"I feel good," he says, tracing a finger lightly over her round breast. "I'd love for you to have my baby."

Eva knows he only says that because it's probably their last night alive. She hates him for this deception, yet looks hopefully into his eyes wondering whether to reveal that she's pregnant.

"Imagine a baby of the Führer. It would be such a great baby. With such beautiful blue eyes." Tears moisten his own pale eyes, now framed in pink.

Eva recalls all the abortions he'd insisted upon, and her unsuccessful attempts at suicide, which she knows full well were desperate demands for attention and fulfillment of needs he was simple incapable of fulfilling. Staring at Adolph, she sees him as an infant. His cheeks are fat and rosy, squeezing his small lips into a rosette, the bluish vein on his white forehead even more apparent. His curls are soft and blonde.

Water drips, echoing in the silence as in a tunnel. Blue-green stains run down like blood on the tiles where the faucet drips. For the moment Adolph is still. They face each other in the tub. Eva sees herself as she looks at Adolph. Both are now wet-haired, draggled creatures, pale and limp. She feels a rush of hatred, yet her belly and thighs feel heavy with desire.

Adolph gazes innocently into her pale blue eyes. "I really want to be your only baby," he says.

Laudanum by Johnny Grace

2006-07-19T09:55:00.000-07:00

The pain in my head was electric.
Like a thunderbolt with more than a half-life. A thunderbolt manifesting itself as solid form, twice as intense and searing. The memory of your face still etched onto my vision. I couldn’t move my legs or turn my head. I lay on my right side, looking through your face at the blank wall covered in shadow. The huge black figure standing at the end of the bed, hovering at
the end of the bed, gargled, its breathing distorted, untamed. Out of my eye - its corner - I watched it in fear, gargling like a bronchitic sex pest, drooling over a bed of perversion. It was as if something was sitting on my head, gripping me between its black rock legs. I struggled, struggled to break free of the grasp the beasts had on me. Struggling, struggling, I
broke free. I turned onto my back, breathing in time to a tachycardiac disrhythmia, shaking. You lay beside me, your legs where your arms should be and your face ripped to shreds. It must’ve been Jack , returning for what I owed him. It’s been so long I can’t remember.
I needed not open the door. I distinctly recall thinking that I wanted the door open. And that it did. The wasteland stretched over what used to be the docks for miles. The tarmac and pavement and concrete had been removed a long time ago and replaced by television screens facing upwards, projecting acts of sodomy and cartoon shows into the atmosphere. The noise was incredible. The high pitched scream of rape and the guttural growling of the men who crawled over the TV screens. Their tongues had been ripped out and replaced with fingers, hands, remote controls, cocks or anything that was handy to their destructor. Most had no lower torso. They crawled on their chests, growling as the televisions burned them. Perpetual night burned red in the wasteland, clouds melted with acid rain, dripping their content through the TV screens causing constant, cacophonous explosions. Not a woman was in sight, not one. Although, the familiar stink of cunt stung my eyes and caused blood to run from their ducts, running crimson streaks through the dust lacquering my face.
I had to rest. The journey had be long.
The saloon doors swung open, creaking like old films, attached to the architrave by mouths with nails for teeth. This was where the population gathered, sitting on tables on a raised platform. Underneath, the crawling torsos from outside swarmed, a quagmire of flesh. Every now and then, a patron would take a shot at one. Weapons hung on fingers all around. I
stepped onto the platform amid drunken jeers and scowling mouths. Some of the men on the platform had their tongues removed too, although not all had been replaced. Some had just sewn their mouths shut.
I approached the bar, my worn down shoes clunking across the wooden platform.
“Excuse me, Do you have any rooms for rent?” I said. She moved along the floor towards me, her big red hair shaking like a hedge in the wind.
“We got room.”
I had no idea what that meant.
“How much?”
“Nothing,” she said. The red-haired woman reached under the counter and came out with a key and a bottle.
“Drink?” She said.
“Sure.”
She handed the bottle to me. I waited for a glass until I realised there wasn’t any, and then took a good swig from the bottle. Tasted like water and laudanum. But what else?
“Enjoy your stay,” the barmaid said, as a gunshot boomed through the bar.

It felt like I’d climbed one hundred stairs but every time I looked over my shoulder, the faces of the people were right up there in front of me. I was just looking, transfixed, into a one-eyed man’s socket when I tripped and fell over the threshold.
I was on the landing.
I looked round again and all I could see was the one hundred steps I’d just climbed.
The hallway was short with two doors either side and another at the end. My room was number six, on the right. Outside the door at the end lay a crusted, rusty bicycle, its wheels still spinning and that clack-clack-clack sound. I couldn’t find my key but the door was already open. I crawled in through it.
The room was wooden and empty. Water ran down the dampened walls and even though no light hung from its fixing, the room was illuminated by a red phosphorescence. The bed was a mattress on the floorboards and not one other door in the room led to a bathroom. The only window in my new residence was boarded up by the same mouths that held the doors on at the entrance. I tried to rip one off but the nail-mouthed parasite just gripped tighter. I took a step back and then raised my leg to stamp the little fucker off of the wall. It worked. It yelped and dropped to the broken floor, landing on its back. The board had dropped to reveal a view of the docks. Bodies littered the beach, replacing stone with bone. The light from the television pavement painted the sky like nothing I had ever seen before. The half-men crawled and crawled, taking bites out of each other, victims of some crude affliction.
The bite came suddenly, my eyes whitened. The little fucker had bitten through the sole of my shoe into my heel, the pain of the nails counteracting the laudanum, sending shock spiralling through my system.

KNOCK.

I fell backwards onto the mattress, clutching my foot. I was unable to take my shoe off as the nails were embedded. Must’ve been the little fucker’s death throe defence.

KNOCK.

The door opened. A hugely deformed boy stood in the red light holding a piece of paper in his claw-like hand.
“I brought this for ya, mister,” he said.
“What is it?”
“Your invoice… for the room.”
“You’ll have to bring it here.”
The boy moved towards me slowly. I noticed by the way he walked, he could not bend his legs. I took the invoice from him.
“Why you here, mister?” He said.
“I’m looking for someone.”
“A woman?”
“More of a myth.”
“Dangerous here, mister,” he said, “I’d go now if I could.”
“Too late.”
He looked down at the nails penetrating my shoe and started walking backwards, a cautious look in his eyes. Something about the boy typified the entire experience. If I didn’t get the fuck out soon, I might end up here forever with all those freaks downstairs. Or worse.
I crawled along the floor and pushed the door, now accepting that it would not shut and any hope of privacy was just that. For a while, I sat on the mattress trying to remove the nails from my foot but every time I touched one it would excrete a lubrication and go soft.
These things were never supposed to come out.
I wouldn’t call it sleep, but I laid back and closed my eyes.

“I’m so glad you came,” you said. You were sitting up on a bed of the half-men, naked, beckoning me forward. The half-men writhed together, never leaving a crack. Biting each other, ripping fibre and tissue. That familiar smell of cunt that ruled the atmosphere outside the saloon surrounded you. The room begun to spin, slowly at first, gaining ground, spinning faster, then faster.
“I’m so glad you came.”
As the room revolved, you grew larger, your cunt like a doorway. It was then as I got nearer, you sucking me in, that I noticed the teeth. Two layers of glass teeth, gnashing together causing huge splinters to fly all over the spinning room. They would hit the half-men, bisecting faces, lacerating backs, removing spines. One smashed over my shoulder as I drew nearer, entering you.

When I awoke, the pain was gone. As were the nails in my foot. I took off my shoe to examine the damage, finding that from the holes left in my foot, small vines had grown. As I touched one, it tightened its grip around my ankle. I was losing the feeling in my leg.

KNOCK.

It was the boy again.
“ Mister, I took out the nails for ---”
“WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS?” I said, holding my leg out.
“Oh no, mister, you got it bad.”
“What. What have I got bad?”
The boy left the room and within one minute, returned with an archaic syringe and a crusted, rusty axe.
“Only one way to deal with the vines, mister,” he said.
“No fucking way.”
I slapped him hard about the face as he approached me. He stumbled backwards.
“If I don’t do this, the vines will grow and grow. Mister, they will overtake you and crush you.”
“You don’t know that. How do you know that?”
The boy put down the needle and lifted his right trouser-leg. In place of his lower leg stood an upturned glass bottle, smashed and jammed into the stump.
“There’s no other way,” he said. His words soothed me, his voice seduced me into taking the shot.
I thought the needle was going into my arm. Instead, he gently opened my mouth and squirted its molasses-like content into my mouth.
“The substance thinks for itself. It knows where the pains is,” he said. His voice had taken on a sinister tone, accentuated by the red light suffocating the room.
Immediately, the feeling in my leg disappeared, leaving the rest of my body surprisingly comfortable. The boy stood up clutching the axe.
“You shouldn’t watch,” he said, raising the blade above his head.
Before I could react, he had struck the first blow, the blade smashing into my leg, crunching into the bone. No blood. The vines were sucking me dry. The second smash finished the boy’s work. No need to even cauterise the wound.
“All done, mister,” he said, the malevolence disappearing from his voice.
“Thank you.”
He picked up the axe and syringe and headed out, closing the door behind him.
I sat on the mattress, examining my severed foot and the vines that destroyed it, thinking, ‘this is it, this is the beginning of my mutilation, my descent into becoming one of them’. How did all this come about? Is this what happens when men are left to their own devices? I knew it all stemmed from the room at the end of the hall. Your room.

The hall was longer than I remembered. The floorboards, mostly, were missing. I traversed the joists, catching my good leg on shards of timber, until I stood outside the door. I pushed it open and instead of opening left to right or right to left, it opened downwards, landing on a lake of the half-men that loiter the docks and crawl underneath the floorboards in the saloon.
And there you were.
“I’m so glad you came,” you said. You were sitting on the backs of the crawling men, your legs wide open revealing your gnashing glass cunt. I hopped onto the door, floating on the surf of flesh, rubbing against lacerated spines, breaking skulls. Hands reaching over the top guiding me towards you. I hopped off onto the backs that made up your bed, and fell to my knees. You unfastened my fly, revealing a long vine swirling and swaying, hypnotic. It reached into you. At first, you contracted, pulsating yourself around the vine. I was in love with you, for that moment, the groans from below. The blood running down the walls.
Then came the first bite.
The vine burst, spraying nails everywhere. Into your face, killing you. Into the sea of flesh writhing underneath us, provoking moans and screams from those still with tongues.
It was there that our love died, with us, me inside you.

Johnny Grace currently lives and writes in Gravesend, Kent (England). His short fiction and poetry have previously been featured on Scarecrow.

BLATT editor Joshua Cohen gets interviewed

2006-07-18T04:21:00.000-07:00

1. How do you think the concept of Blatt will add upon the idea that
was the Prague Literary Review? How do you see this publication as
different its predecessors?

Though Blatt is a continuation of the PLR (Prague Literary Review),
with the same editors and art director working under the auspices of a
new publisher, we hope to make a few changes, if mostly on the
reading-and-reader-end, meaning in our profile and in the dark
mechanics of distribution; we want to establish both the magazine, and
its books imprint, internationally, and to set ourselves up as an
important conduit, between languages, cultures, artists, writers and
their mothers. And then your next question. I'm not quite sure who our
predecessors are. If our predecessor is the Paris Review, then we're
different in that our predilections are more extreme, and we're much
poorer. If our predecessor is something like Big Table, which was
probably the most interesting American literary magazine that was also
taken seriously, the difference is is that not all of us are junkies -
and we'd kill for the publicity that comes with being brought up on
obscenity charges. In its day, Revolver Revue did some great things in
Prague. We'd love to be considered that serious, but that kind of
class can't be bought, or even worked for. That's all politics.

2. What do you plan to do differently with Blatt compared to the PLR?

Better distribution, better design (color). We'd like to get invited
more to fabulous poetry festivals where it's warm and there's free
wine.

3. Why did the pair of you decide to leave the partnership with
Shakespeare & Sons, and switch to Anagram as a publisher?

It was a decision made for us. Shakespeare & Sons no longer wanted to
support us, financially. Anagram did. There's nothing journalistic
about it - we had been given a certain amount of money to pay for the
PLR, and then when that got spent, it was time to find another angel.

4. How do you harvest work for each issue? Is it on a submission and
commission basis? How would you describe the type of writers and
artists you are looking for?

We accept submissions, and we read them, but much of the work is
solicited directly from people whose work we like and respect. I don't
know what I look for. I mostly read prose for the magazine. And so I
look to see if the work has quotation marks in it. Or if a character
is named something like Janet. Then I stop looking. I like it when
work is completely incautious, when I read something that tells me
that if it weren't for words, which are the only pure and purifying
agents of coherence, this writer would be a murderer, or a racist, or
a democratically elected president.

Hubert Lampo and another Belgian

2006-07-16T20:32:00.000-07:00

Hubert Lampo died July 12th.
One of the greatest Belgian writers of this century, we're told, he's little translated into English. All we've read is The Coming of Joachim Stiller (Twayne Publishers, New York, 1974), which was brilliant.
Here's a stupid obituary from Reuters:

Belgian writer Hubert Lampo, one of the founders of magic realism in Flanders, has died aged 85, according to the Standaard newspaper's Web site on Wednesday.
Author of 21 novels - of which The coming of Joachim Stiller is the most famous - as well as novellas and short stories, Lampo has received several awards and was for many years regarded as a candidate for the Nobel Prize.
Strongly influenced by his experience of World War Two, Lampo's work focused on humanism, democracy and social engagement. He was also a co-founder of a prominent literary magazine.
The literary genre of magic realism, which combines a realistic setting with supernatural elements, was made famous by Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde and Gabriel Garcia Marquez among other writers.
Lampo was born in Antwerp on September 1, 1920.

The photo of Lampo above is by Tom Ordelman.

Another great Belgian novelist is Louis Paul Boon, whose Summer in Termuren, translated by Paul Vincent, is out this September from Dalkey Archive Press.

Here's an excerpt, unfairly out of context:

"red ass - oh democracy, red nipple of a burgeoning breast - oh social situation of some other place where things are dire, but not here."

First Person Plural by Chris Pusateri

2006-07-10T12:36:00.000-07:00

First Person Plural

I miter Paxil
I unthithered bid
I disfathomed furrow
I misfigured did
Now I blink in livery
I now blanked in knavery
I miter, miter I
Flew blackest closer may
By tuber matter mutter say
I now furrow mine
Wither bye & biter
Fatter I, miter my
Truck lunch mine & wider
Level graded smoother due
Dying lighter highest plied
Radon ping and neither be
Me epic epoch liter sea

HORROR POETRY BY AC HORN

2006-07-09T14:34:00.000-07:00

THE HOUSE

by AC Horn

I was standing in front of the house;
A deserted place with a dangerous past
Vast open shattered windows
And a wooden patio
Gave me the impression
Of a place the lord forgot.
Entering the ramshackle doorway
Made it all the more clear
That everything inside might be queer
At least for my perceiving ear.
No "Wings of Madness"
But a broken spell
Let loose the devils and sprites
Inside a land of broken dreams.
Beneath a rotten human body
On the floor
Is an illuminated mark
That's carved in the plaster floor.
It says whoever will enter this realm
Is condemned of never
Going back wherever you belonged.
So I tear off the corpse's head
And look in the wormy face.
But nothing happens but
The terrible stench of long gone flesh.
As I go further into this darkened zone
I realize that
It might be a well known place
Where I killed my friend.

LUCIEN ZELL'S BRIGHT SECRETS

2006-07-09T05:25:00.000-07:00

Bright Secrets by Lucien Zell
DharmaGaia, 2006

Reviewed by
Stephan Delbos

When it is honest, Lucien Zell's poetry has the potential for radiant insight. The best poems in Zell's new collection, "Bright Secrets" reflect his maturing voice and prove that his writing can match the depth of his vision.
In the most powerful poems of this collection, the narrative voice speaks clearly and authoritatively, beyond conscious poetic or aesthetic sensibilities:

"When I say wind,
I mean breath. When I say
breath, I mean word.
When I say word, I mean
meaning. When I say meaning
I mean depth...."

"Wind to Wind" was written to be shared; every word is a vehicle of conveyance. Its language is unadorned and therefore crisp with clarity. The poem is driven by an authoritative voice more concerned with message than poeticism.
Too often, however, the narrative voice is self-consciously poetic:

"Beauty! Beauty! Aloof alone she swept her hand to breach
Its pristine white aloofness
Beauty! the joy as the swan sweet soft manuvered..."

"Leda and the Myth of Earth" is an ambitious retelling of the myth of Leda and the swan, but the poem is too reliant on adjectives to carry its images. The lines seem to be aware of the profundity of their task and thus cease trusting themselves. Instead of a powerful, natural voice, the narration is frail. The lines are gorged with abstactions; words that sound nice but say very little.
But other poems in the book are stripped of that poetic excess and thus resound:

"Hand thunder!
Something aliens would be surprised by...
The universal yes to ends.
What theatres (and actresses! and politicians!)
Eat and starve without."

"Ode to Applause" combines insight with a rye humor. What drives the lines is a candid voice, not a desire to retell myths, philosophize, or sound poetic. The poem trusts words rather than descriptions to convey insight.
Perhaps the highest achievements of this collection are the poems which remain insightful within the confines of form:

"The ivy's fingers had stretched above
The former home of my former love
And I wandered on, half-aware, O half-aware
That the ivy-like my love-
Might no longer be there...

"...And stood there long, O long I stood
As seeds which have nightmares of firewood
I turned but slowly in my shell."

"The Ivy" incorporates more formal aspects than any other poem in the collection, but does so without poetic posturing. The poem combines narrative and lyrical elements in a cohesive whole. Zell's craft shines in this poem as an ability to invest lines with insight without departing from a clear narrative thread. "The Ivy" is a narrative that sings, an achievement.
"Bright Secrets" is its own achievement for Lucien Zell, for it shows that the poet is as dedicated to craft as vision. When both aspects of Zell's voice harmonize, the poems sing with insight. "Bright Secrets" is a diverse, if uneven collection whose strongest poems set their own standards.

BOYS AND MURDERERS

2006-07-07T03:39:00.000-07:00

NEW RELEASE FROM TWISTED SPOON PRESS

Boys & Murderers
by Hermann Ungar
translated from the German by Isabel F. Cole
Preface by Thomas Mann
Cover and frontispiece by Otto Gutfreund

Available in bookshops

This volume presents the first English translation of Hermann Ungar's
complete short fiction (novellas, stories, sketches). A writer of unique
talent and the author of the highly-acclaimed novel The Maimed, Ungar was
born in Boskovice, Moravia, and lived in Prague until his life was cut short
by illness. Taking Prague as well as his hometown for his settings, his
stories explore the depravities of the heart and delusions of the mind.
Ungar¹s work has experienced a renaissance over the past decade with new
editions appearing in German and translations in Dutch, French, Spanish,
Portuguese, English, and Czech.

"In the two novellas Boys & Murderers [Ungar] demonstrates an almost
disconcerting mastery. Here, in utterly sharp, utterly clear, almost
violently naked language, the author relates two fates with an intensity
equaled by few of today¹s luminaries. Unyielding, steely as a screw, a cruel
psychology bores its way into people, down to the innermost core of their
being: you falter, you shudder to read on, but with the relentless grip of a
man on fire he thrusts you inexorably into his narrative will, not releasing
you until the final page. I rank this little book among the most powerful to
have emerged from Austria or Germany in recent years. From now on the
greatest hopes, the highest expectations, will be pinned to this new name."

-Stefan Zweig

"[A] masterpiece, with such a wealth of psychological relationships,
symbolism, harrowing experience, comedy and misery, bold moral statements
and artfully evoked mystery that one has this feeling: this comes from a
fullness; here is a talent that musters its forces for deeds that will make
a stir ... extraordinary artistic courage and inspiration, a vision that has
left its mark on me forever."

-Thomas Mann

Praise for The Maimed:

"This is an absolutely riveting tale ... The translation by Kevin Blahut is
fine. The design of the books is a gorgeous, subtle work of art all on its
own."
-RALPH

"[O]ne of the most provocative novels I have ever read."
-Los Angeles Times

"David Lynch and Patrick McCabe fans will fall right into this marvelously
dark and psychotically twisted tale."
-NewPages

"Secretly Inside" by Hans Warren

2006-07-05T13:18:00.000-07:00

Secretly Inside
Hans Warren
Translated from the Dutch by S.J. Leinbach
Introduction by Jolanda Vanderwal Taylor
The University of Wisconsin Press
104 pages, $16.95

To conflate hiding from the Nazis with a homosexual hiding his or her sexual preference “in the closet”, even in an age less chauvinistically accepting than ours, would be artistically disastrous if not just embarrassing for a lesser writer than the Dutch Hans Warren. Survival must precede sexuality. One must be alive before one may profess love, or lust.
In Warren’s newly translated novella Secretly Inside, written in 1975, the year Warren left his wife and children and quite publicly “came out” as a homosexual, a young Jew hides from the Nazis in the remote Dutch countryside. While attempting to pose as a farmhand renamed Cornelius Goense, he uncovers his true sexuality, and that of the young son of the family with whom he lives. If he survives, he can love; if he doesn’t, he can’t.
Though best known for his seventeen-volume memoir Geheim dagboek, “Secret Diary”, a Proust-meets-the-gossip-rag omnibus published in installments between 1946 and the present (posthumously after 2001), Hans Warren is also a fiction writer with deep respect for secrets, a novelist of artfully hidden existences, master of a prose gifted with an incredible, almost nonchalant, purity that recalls the most concise Thomas Mann (Death in Venice, The Black Swan) wedded to the lucidity the so-called noveau roman.
“‘When you’ve passed the last house in the village, turn right at the dike,’” Warren begins his story. “‘You’ll come to a very long lane that leads to the farm.’ That was all he had been told.” That’s all the reader is told, too. The instructed, Eduard van Wyngen, is a young, entirely secular Dutch Jew we know only from his own account; we engage him exclusively through his self-image. “He said that he was twenty-five, studied literature and for his pleasure psychology […] and that he hadn’t just come to the farm to be safe from the reprisals that threatened him because of his origins and an act of resistance he had committed, but that he also wanted to work as hard as he could, to earn his place on the farm.”
Known as Ed, he has been sent out on a Kafka’s Castle-like journey to Kruisdrope, a village secreted in the countryside of Warren’s native Zeeland, an area comprised largely of a chain of islands located in the southwestern corner of the Netherlands, to be hidden there by the Van ‘t Westeindes, an impoverished Roman Catholic family of farmer-landholders, prominent in their rural enclave. Ed is welcomed into their home if not warmly then with stereotypical Dutch stoicism; he rooms with the son, Camiel; the daughter, Mariete, slowly falls in love with him. It emerges that Camiel had earlier developed a relationship with a “Kraut”, an atypical German officer with a passion for poetry (especially that of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, of the ephebophilic, boy-loving school of German poet Stefan George, who elevated German “brotherhood” to a homoerotic firmament), who was found dead on family land, stripped half-naked, a bullet in his chest, lipstick on his lips. Camiel killed the soldier accidentally, in one account; in another, it was a mercy killing, as the “Kraut” was destined shortly for the Eastern Front. As Mariete attempts to seduce the hero (whose name Ed, must echo that of the writer, Hans, with Wyngen standing in for Warren, the elevated “van” being a pretense that raises the hero, though Jewish, to the social class of his hosts), Ed and Camiel become close, though their relationship ends before consummation, with the arrival of the Gruene Polizei.
As Ed and Camiel flee together, Camiel is shot. A final chapter, set two years later, finds Ed returning to Kruisdorpe, to find Camiel insane, “waving his arms like the blades of a windmill,” “drooling and hiccupping.” At first, Ed refuses to recognize the former object of his affection. “I’m looking for Mr. Van ‘t Westeinde.” “Grrr, says Camiel, “ — gesture of someone being hanged — kaput!” “Kaput, alles, kaput, alles kaput!” Finally, Camiel hands Ed a “grubby, folded piece of paper,” a poem the German officer had gifted his former lover; “there was a dark brown bloodstain on it, and it was missing a corner.” The poem is Herrn Stefan George – Einem, der vorübergeht, which Hofmannsthal wrote upon first meeting George: “you reminded me of things / which are secretly inside me / for the strings of my soul you were / the nocturnal whispering wind […]”
Secretly Inside is doubtlessly less strange for English-language audiences, especially today, than it was for the Dutch when first published. As each nation developed its own genres of literature addressed to the Holocaust, the Dutch were no different, engineering a response peculiar to the tenor of their wartime; their favored genre, with all the comfortable cliches endemic to any familiar narrative (the dark night, the unfamiliar surroundings, the strange directions to an unknown house, the hosts at one moment to be trusted, at another, to be feared), might be called the “hiding narrative,” the literature of the secret annex. Ill equipped to fight the Nazi Occupation (luftkrieg, or air war, had rendered Dutch naval superiority worthless; the Low Countries fell in four days), a Holocaust literature that saved Dutch face had to be focused not on the glory of resistance, which was minimal, but on the more mundane, and yet ultimately more successful, endeavor of hiding. Though in all of Europe, the Jews of the Netherlands had the worst survival rate in the camps, in no other country did so many gentiles hide Jews. Undoubtedly, this genre’s preeminent example is the famous diary of Amsterdam’s Anne Frank, later reworked to achieve more dramatic form by Otto Frank, her father; this diary would become codified, and many works, both of fiction and memoir, would be based upon its habits. Secretly Inside is at once an heir, and subversion; its capacity for sensationalism converted to naturalism with homosexuality presented as a fact that manifests equally among the impure (the Jew), the pure (the Nazi), and those who might metaphysically mediate between the two (Camiel).
One complaint. Novels in translation often lead secret lives, too. Secretly Inside was originally published as Steen der hulp, the Scriptural “Stone of Help,” after the name of the Zeeland farm on which Ed is hidden, the landmark to his love for the rural, simple Camiel. This title, which unavoidably treats on helping others as a necessary burden of our humanity, with the superadded notion of embracing one’s true sexuality against dominant perception as both a saving grace and an enormous weight that can never be lifted, is immensely preferable to the more filmic, and ultimately glib, Secretly Inside — speaking either to the occasional misjudgment of translator S.J. Leinbach, or to the difficulties in selling the English-language literature in translation. Let it be no secret that Warren deserves better, and his readers do, too.

Photograph of Hans Warren from http://www.dbnl.org

An Excerpt from "Viscosity Breakdown" by Jason Price Everett

2006-07-04T10:11:00.000-07:00

She had sublet some friend's intimate little boxlike pied-a-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.
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.
She made him go back to the couch after they had finished in order to preserve appearances he went but grudgingly.

Jason Price Everett was born in Orlando, U.S.A., in 1972. After a period of study at, among other institutions, Lafayette College, Cornell University and the Sorbonne, he embarked upon a series of odd jobs. In a process that has lasted the better part of a decade he has managed to write and publish a dozen books, with matter ranging from short fiction to poems to travel sketches and criticism. His work has appeared in many small magazines and online journals, including The Circle, Hubris, Burning Angel and Si Senor. His last job was as a professor of English in Xian, China. He currently resides in New York City.

"The Nimrod Flipout" by Etgar Keret

2006-07-02T21:52:00.000-07:00

The Nimrod Flipout
Etgar Keret
Translated from the Hebrew by Miriam Shlesinger and Sondra Silverston
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
176 pages, $12.00

Etgar Keret’s the most widely read young Israeli writer for a reason: he's much funnier than the headlines of Ha'aretz and Ma'ariv, which have newsed much of Israeli literature over the last half-century. Amos Oz, A.B. Yehoshua and David Grossman, the trinity of Israeli letters, especially abroad, have long held the ivory tower high-ground with their fictions of Israel's fall from European influence, the disastrous invasion of politics into personal life, and investigations into what it means to democratize a nation against the religions (Zionist, Socialist, Jewish) that inspired its founding.
Keret is from the other side of the fence, though still on the good side of the Wall. His generation has flipped, Nimrod-style. Though his subject is also the making of peace, it’s peace between man and woman, which to him is less sex than fucking.
He writes about fucking twins. About fucking a woman who, as the sun goes down, therianthropically turns into a beer-buzzed, fat-pantsed, football-fanning friend. About getting out of the army only to take your time in Tibet picking (and swallowing) mushrooms, then laying this Dutch girl you met in Dharamsala before ingathering, assimilating back into civilian society, going into telecom with your Uncle Whomever thirty floors up in downtown Tel-Aviv. You wouldn’t believe — Keret’s so cool he writes comics, too.
The only way to thoroughly enjoy the thirty stories of Keret's lite but, hey, at least popular “The Nimrod Flipout” is to have them read to you aloud by Henry Kissinger, while you watch the TV on mute, flipping between CNN and something on cable scrambled more soft than core. Even so, amidst the canine fellatio (“It’s sociable, maybe even existential.”), interlarded with the promise of better intercourse abroad (“We’ve never fucked abroad.” “We fucked in Sinai.” “Sinai doesn’t count, it’s Egypt.”), there are strangenessess of another species that indicate we might still be within blast radius of Oz. The most compelling is deep within the title story, which concerns three friends visiting Taba, Egypt, with a Bedouin taxi driver. The drunken plan’s to continue to Eilat, cashing in on nubile Israelis with piercings and easy, if overweight, American tourists. “He’d have loved to come with us himself,” Keret writes of the Bedouin cum chauffeur, “except he wasn’t allowed to cross the border.” Too bad for him. Too bad Keret’s too smart to stop there.

Goce Smilevski's "Conversation with Spinoza: A Cobweb Novel"

2006-07-01T10:53:00.000-07:00

Conversation With Spinoza: A Cobweb Novel
By Goce Smilevski Translated by Filip Korzenski
Northwestern University Press, 152 pages, $16.95.

A few centuries too late, it seems that Spinoza's time has finally come. In a world in which many Jews are yet again attempting to assert a secular identity as the dialectic antipode of extremism, Spinoza has been credited lately as the first secularite, as the founder of Modern Jewry, identifier of its humanitarian agenda and prophet of the existential crises that follow the philosophical limitation of God's meddling within the mundanity of His creation. As unwitting subject or spokesperson, Spinoza is especially attractive to American Jewry because he seems to us a rebel, the Enlightenment equivalent of a bar mitzvah boy gone bad. Mostly, though, what makes him interesting to us is the God issue: Long before Friedrich Nietzsche pronounced God dead, Spinoza slyly hinted that he was not God with a big G at all, but rather a universal constant to be encountered only through a revelation, or manifestation, as thing — as animals, plants and as us, men, the only creatures made in His, or maybe Its, image, and as such the only creations capable of creation themselves.
One of the most promising of these creations, and a rather young one at that, is Macedonian novelist Goce Smilevski, whose fourth novel has just been translated as "Conversation With Spinoza." As it is subtitled "A Cobweb Novel," it's interesting to note that one of Spinoza's favorite pastimes was putting two spiders in a jar and watching them fight to the death. Smilevski is cruel, too, but never to his reader, who is positioned as a conversationalist with the great philosopher on his deathbed. Rather, Smilevski is cruel to his subject, Spinoza himself, putting him not only through all the paces that good research can conjure when liberally handled (for example, Spinoza is heard at a young age arguing his mature ideas with Rabbi Saul Levi Mortera, the influential scholar and teacher responsible for Spinoza's cherem, or excommunication), but also through many trials that are pure, and often gratuitous, invention.
Woven into this web, in sections arranged as silken strands to meet at the tangling middle that must mean Spinoza's death, the philosopher is talked through a handful of amorous encounters both hetero and homosexual, all the while being chastised by the narrator — which is us in conversation — for having subordinated the passions to the intellect. If Pascal was right when he said that it's hard to be a philosopher and a man at the same time, then there should be a novelistic corollary: It's hard to write humorously, and sexually, about a man you evidently revere.
Still, there's much to relish here, not the least of which is Smilevski's sense of the fantastic that owes as much to the rigorous philosophical play of Jorge Luis Borges as it does to the miniature parables strewn throughout the works of Milan Kundera. This sense is the privilege of a writer engaged with ideas of Humanism supposedly destroyed by a century of technology and war, necessarily unreferenced in the text as the narrator is us, is any reader who will ever come to these pages, in any century, with any politics. I suspect that the current Spinoza obsession in America has much to do with our need to justify our secularism, in substantiating it as not just a modern dereliction but as an actual European creed, with history behind it, the bona fide of ages of thought on the nature of man's relationship with God. Smilevski, being an Eastern European, seems to find in Spinoza a similar assurance brought to bear on a different concern: In a Godless Europe in which democracy was never native, it has become necessary to once again find a religious course that allows one to respect all creation without recourse to laws that necessarily issue from divinity as unified in one supreme intelligence. A young heir to Gunter Grass and Jose Saramago, Smilevski might be the newest of a rare thing — a living European novelist with a message for the future of his continent, with an imagination borne against inheritance with such force that even Spinoza might have approved.

The photo of Smilevski above is from www.mirage.com.mk, an English-language Macedonian literary website.
This article originally appeared in the Forward.

From "Wake" by Daniel Elkind

2006-06-30T20:30:00.000-07:00

Everyone has to get up and get up from somewhere. Eventually, you can’t be from everywhere. No, stuck-struck, knowing I can go anywhere, the red rucksack in my closet for the wide countryside, the fast, the slow, for the short and long; the pack on my back for the strange corners, the sticky floors, the random shift of lobbies and stations. There sending my simulated heart from a terminal, composed from the hard drive of my surveillance. A waste. In the street you froze off your hands for no one, remember, for no one’s benefit. In a room you sat avoiding no one’s glance, wanting a prayer to resound bus depot and bank, off-license and highway: I’d be a thief, a prostitute, a bum if they accepted me as I am. You took a trip once, to a foreign city from a foreign city. You stayed at the apartment of a girl, friend of a friend. You couldn’t believe her disinterest: here you are, a living resource, your fire hands ready. In her bathroom, thinking it over, all of it, in parts, you finally rested your attention on her toothbrush lying on a shelf in the cabinet with a feminine disregard you knew well, almost intimately, and rescued at that moment as something familiar. Or was it the feminine disregard you sensed in the overall shabbiness of the bathroom, of the peeling-paint cabinet in particular? Of what was missing there? In any case, it is not any properly feminine disregard but what general disregard and casual neglect become in the hands of women that so impressed you. The sudden humanness of haste, of being too tired, of being preoccupied, and a world ripening out from that root: of doubts, deficiencies, confidences, mortgages, pregnancies, debt, pills, sickness, plans, phone bills, toilet paper, arguments, betrayal. Human, meaning as beat up as you. All the older female graduate students you’ve ever seen walking in front of their backpacks. Frazzled, late. You think it is because your mother was a librarian that you are fascinated by women brushing their teeth.

Photo by Ahron Weiner - Lodz, PL, 2004

2006-06-29T09:41:00.000-07:00

Alabama Vengeance Stories
by Bard Cole

A small town in Alabama is terrorized by the resurrected zombie corpses of murdered black folk and other victims of white society. These zombies especially care to seize a white family's sons, strip them nude, and sodomize them while slurping out their brains through large bite holes at the base of their skulls. While this occurs, black lady zombies serve tea and distribute box lunches. At first, the white people work on a plan to defeat the zombies, but then it seems too complicated, plus they figure this is exactly what they had coming.

An Alabama teenager is dealing coke to his rich friends. A whole posse of black drug dealers come from Atlanta and take over the boy's house with guns. His family is in the house, as well as all his friends down in the rec room. One by one the black drug gang rapes and kills every member of the boy's family and then every one of his friends, as each begs for his or her life. They leave the drug dealer boy for last. He is all upset and crying like a little bitch. The evil drug dealer leader, Q-pod, breaks every one of the boy's fingers, then stomps his shins and forearms until the bones snap like twigs. The gang holds the kid down and nail his prick to the floor, then they give him a rusty knife, then they set the whole house on fire. On the drive back to Atlanta, D-Dog reminds Q-pod that he "broke that cracker motherfucker's fingers, how's he supposed to saw his motherfucking dick off?" Q-pod was embarrassed, D-Dog was right! How silly he was not to think of that! They laughed all the way home.

An Alabama teenager worries his little bro is gay, so he & his frat brothers kidnap his bro & take him to Crazy Sexy's where he is forced to go to bed with a parlor-tanned 28 year old woman with severe chlamydia and a yeast infection. The boy gets chlamydia and a yeast infection up his urethra, i.e., his weiner hurt bad. He wasn't gay but boy this makes him scared of pussy now, he don't ever want to have sex again. His older brother realizes that he and his frat brothers enjoy forcing a weaker male to experience sexual arousal while they intimidate him. They become UA's first openly gay frat and have S&M parties every month, attended mostly by guys visiting from Auburn.

An old Alabama grandpa shoots his teenage grandson for watching the MTV. In revenge, his daughter-in-law ties him up underneath her SUV and drives all around the pot-hole-ridden streets of Tuscaloosa, with the result that by the end only shreds of his corpse remain attached to her vehicle. For this she is kicked out of the Jaycees.

Five drunk Alabama teenagers are killed on the way home from Gulf Shores. Their names are Kelli, Britnee, Kamryn, Jaxon, and Wylee. Everyone is so sad at their funerals. People leave big flowers by the embankment their car flipped over.
Then, their parents discover their secret diaries and learn their secrets, such as Kelli didn't believe in Jesus anymore and thought Christianity, while a comforting moral compass, possessed symbolic rather than literal truths; such as Britnee had a crush on a black guy who wasn't good at sports, didn't have a big dick, couldn't sing, and wanted to be an accountant; such as Kamryn had been entertaining the thought that her aversion to penetration might be because she was a lesbian rather than just being a reaction to all the sexual abuse her Uncle Dave had done to her because she was too pretty for him to help himself; such as Jaxon enjoyed it when his Yankee girlfriend put a finger up his ass during sex; such as Wylee not thinking all that highly of World War II vets.
Learning these appalling facts, the people of their town dug up the corpses, stripped them, threw them into a pile, and set them on fire. They took the fake flowers and decaying stuffed animals from the embankment crash site. Everyone felt ashamed, and never mentioned it again.

An Alabama teenager had a hard time in life, he blamed his high IQ, so he took an ice pick, stuck it into his head above his eye, and gave himself a home lobotomy. Once it healed, he found a girlfriend and his dad stopped calling him a sissy.

Jesus says to make things even, Alabama must send a tribute of 49 youth & 49 maidens once every 7 years for seven times total to Idi Amin's Castle. These youth must be the handsomest and most athletic, the maidens the most beautiful & virginal, from the families of the highest rank. If a family has more than one child, the selected kid must be the undisputed best one. The first time it happened, there was some attempted cheating but Jesus found the more loved child wherever he or she was being hid & his soldiers dashed out the hapless teenager's brains on the spot. Then he had the corpse mashed up and shoved up into the womb of the mother who cherished it so rashly, and then she was sewn shut. This punishment deterred most cheaters but people were still sad, because after their departure none of these youth or maidens were ever heard from again.

A boy who would redeem his people of Alabama came forward, his name was Typhus J. Tutweiler, he had sandy hair and a winning smile and a big dong. To save his sister Regina he threw acid in her face. Jesus couldn't think his way around that one. Then, he was selected one of the forty-nine youth. On the boat over to Idi Amin's, the other forty-eight youth decided they didn't like Typhus's stuck-up, "I'll save Alabama" attitude, like he thought he was too good or something, so they set upon him & bit him to death. Displeased, Idi Amin killed them all most painfully, with elaborate tortures that took months and in a few cases years.

Secretly Typhus Tutweiler had had a son, a balmy lad named Crocus, skilled at archery and syllogisms. His mother was Typhus's very own mother, she was the only female he knew well enough to ask. Before the beginning of the 7-year pageant of his youth, Crocus set the stage on fire. He stabbed his own chest open and watered the ground with plumes of blood jetting from his beating heart. Capricious as ever, Jesus restored the boy to life & swept him away to heaven. He was pleased by Crocus, though he did call that self-sacrifice act "kind of copycat."

BLATT READING!

2006-06-28T13:41:00.000-07:00

featuring Tsipi Keller, author of Retelling
and
Joshua Cohen

Thursday, June 29th
6 p.m.
Cornelia Street Cafe
29 Cornelia Street
West Village, NYC

Above, Cornelia Brandt, German body-building sensation.

http://books.blatt.cz

2006-06-28T10:00:00.000-07:00

Poems I Wrote While Watching TV

Travis Jeppesen
images by Jeremiah Palecek

Travis Jeppesen’s debut collection Poems I Wrote While Watching TV is a ruthlessly implosive meditation on the death of language in a media-saturated world. Perfectly complimented by Jeremiah Palecek’s sardonic illustrations, Poems I Wrote While Watching TV ponders the mundane and the un-nameable with a highly personal mixture of devastation and humor.

Travis Jeppesen was born in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, studied literature at the New School for Social Research in New York and the Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris. He currently resides in Prague, Czech Republic. He is the author of a novel, Victims, which was selected by Dennis Cooper to debut his Little House on the Bowery Series for Akashic Books in 2003. His poetry, prose, and essays have appeared in numerous print and online periodicals, and his work has been translated into Russian, Czech, Slovak, Croatian, and Bulgarian.

Jeremiah Palecek attended the Lyme Academy of Fine Arts, in Old Lyme Connecticut, was a visiting artist at the Glasgow School of Art, and received his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Currently, he maintains a daily painting blog. Jeremiah’s work has been said to be a collection of media detritus which is reconstructed, and (re)presented, through the medium of painting. While his work tends toward images culled from the more pop elements of our culture, there is always a sense of intense normalcy, which imbues his work with an air of confrontation. Having left America in 2003, Jeremiah Palecek lives in Prague, Czech Republic.

Nebulous Spectre

Pieces of matter transformed into holes.
Leave the pieces at salvation’s doorstep.
A million different ways of coming apart now.
It seems like the forevers once knew my sandwich.
Not anymore. So much
Passion in those files, the poisson in our archive,
Our history of lightness.
Deepness dwells inside the running man.
So many different spheres of inactivity competing to combine the two blank factors.
Sanitize backlaunch.
We haven’t slept together yet.
My human warmth blues get me down style.
Splurge into forgiveness; the puppet trope’s battle.

When the buttock soars…

Present escapes flashes of transplanted genus. Know how
Beneficial icy snatches of paradise can be when you’re singing the praises of the whale.
Dark splotches matter deeply.

Critical praise for Jeppesen’s novel Victims:

“A novel that utterly defies description. [A] thrill to read, and... the best debut novel I've read in a long time. Jeppesen's prose is stunning in its originality and power. Jeppesen’s novel has the potential to change your life.” — Michael Schaub, Bookslut

“Infused with schizophrenic logic and a gleefully unique syntax, Travis Jeppesen's debut novel, Victims, reads like a fictional embodiment of outsider art. Its bosky surrealism and anti-authoritarian aura suggest Henry Darger’s Realms of the Unreal, and like Adolf Wölfli, Jeppesen has a flair for skewed reasoning and an obsession with internment […] An artfully fractured vision of memory and escape, Victims maintains a rigorous structure throughout—even when the aliens show up.” — Michael Miller, Village Voice

POEMS I WROTE WHILE WATCHING TV

Travis Jeppesen
ISBN: 1-59971-340-3
BLATT BOOKS

Price: $15

OUR FORTHCOMING BLATT BOOKS:

Federmania: A Raymond Federman Reader
Channel: A Novel by Joshua Cohen

2006-06-28T08:13:00.000-07:00

VI Fictions by Chris Pusateri
(Gong Press, 2006)

Reviewed by Travis Jeppesen

Chris Pusateri’s VI Fictions is really a book of prose poems. Actually, it’s pointless to make these distinctions.

Pusateri has something that most writers nowadays lack – a poetics. It’s important to have a poetics, whether you write poetry or prose. It’s important to make distinctions, too; to quote Pusateri, “I’ll loan you my love, but not my indifference.”

Police are everywhere these days. The poet’s role is to be an anarchist cop. Pusateri clearly realizes this, but he doesn’t shove it down our throats. Instead, he cleverly gives us a job mopping up the detritus of fillintheblank’s stewage. He writes about hardcore anal fucking with the ease of someone who’s been inside. I’m not talking about ability, but the way it’s put down on paper. Grand in the way thoughts matter, elastic like entropy.

Published in an edition of 100 by Gong Press. Don’t fuck up by not getting one of these things. gongpress@earthlink.net

An Excerpt from "Nin and Nan" - by Eckhard Gerdes

2006-06-26T21:23:00.000-07:00

The following is Chapter One from Eckhard Gerdes' new novella, Nin and Nan.

Eckhard Gerdes is editor of The Journal of Experimental Fiction, and the author of six novels, including Cistern Tawdry (from which the graphic text above is excerpted), Przewalski's Horse, and the forthcoming The Million-Year Centipede. More of his work will appear in a future print issue of BLATT.

The Sign

Nin and Nan sat at the top of the hill together and observed the goings-on below. Nin's mind was sufficiently empty. Nan's was insufficiently so. The future was never not far enough away. Enough that neither of them would never know.
Nin liked straw. Nan liked Styrofoam. The hill obviously disliked the straw because the hill did all it could to free itself of the itchy stuff: it begged the winds to come and blow it away, it enraged the fireflies and it shook itself fiercely. It didn’t mind Styrofoam, which was just fluff, but everyone else did, especially the bugs who came to rest on the hill, and because the bugs were such terrible whiners, the hill decided not to tolerate Styrofoam either.
Nin said to Nan that one fateful morning, "Look - beans are encroaching upon our hill."
Nan looked around. True - the beanfields seemed much closer than they had just a few months earlier.
"No, not those beans," said Nin, pointing to the beanfields. "Those beans." Nin pointed at a newly constructed billboard alongside the not-too-distant highway.
Nan at first did not see it and imagined a different billboard: "Coca Beans--put some toot in your toot!" But Nan quickly dismissed the idea as too silly to even mention to Nin, and by then Nan saw the offending blot on the landscape, a billboard so enormous and gaudy that why Nan hadn't previously noticed it was worthy of some psychological investigation perhaps. But that would have to wait for another time, for at the time the only item being investigated was the billboard: a fifty-foot wide by twenty-foot tall luminescent green-and-pink lettered atrocity featuring a photo of a smiling, dancing string bean in top hat, tails, can and spats. The bean was ascending a spiral staircase. The advertisement text read, "Dance up a stair to good health with Rogers' brand beans."
"Oh, that has to come down, Nin," said Nan.
"Exactly, Nan," replied Nin.
Nan rolled down the hill, across the highway and along the shoulder up to the billboard. Fortunately, it was cheaply constructed of soft pine. That gave Nan an idea for the moral justification for the destruction of the sign.
Back up the hill, Nan said, "Nin, they've killed the trees that went into the manufacture of that sign."
"True, Nan."
"And they've drained the trees of their life energy."
"True again, Nan."
"Would it be wrong . . .wouldn't it indeed be a holy thing for us to restore to the trees their energy?"
"Yes, indeed."
"And what are the spirits of pine called?"
"Why, turpentine, Nan. We have some at home."
"Yes, we should get it."
"Yes, and then we'll soak the sign in the spirits of pine and restore the life energy."
"Yes."
"But Nan?"
"Yes, Nin?"
"That may not be enough. For this to be a holy transformation we need more. Do you remember the holy transformation of Christ's disciples?"
"Of course, Nin. The Pentecost."
"Wasn't the spiritual transformation described as taking place in tongues of fire? Hasn't it been depicted so by artists for centuries?"
"Ah, yes! So after we douse the sign, we must ignite it with the spirit of the Lord."
"Yes, Nan. You get the turpentine. I'll get the matches."
When Nin lit the fire, Nan was reminded of Abednego's surviving the flames of Nebuchadnezzar's furnace in Babylon. From the German abend, or "evening"; the English "a-bed," meaning "to take oneself to bed"; the Hebrew neg--¬, meaning "south" [to the Hebrews, of course, the black races lived south]; and the Latin nec, meaning "not," a statement of contrast. Abednego's surviving the flames contrasted the darkness of night yet also upheld it. That it was both things contradictory simultaneously was inherent. All things confirm their opposites. The atheist is as dependent upon the concept of God for hir (i.e. "his or her") self-definition as the theist is. By standing in opposition to theism, the atheist acknowledges the existence of theism. Indeed, the atheist needs the existence of theism in order to exist hirself.
Of course, unlike Abednego, the billboard did not emerge from the fire unscathed. Coca the dancing string bean shriveled and writhed as the bill separated from the board. The wood was freed to dance according to its grain, and as Nin and Nan watched, it danced itself away completely. The billboard turned dark as it was consumed by fire, and then, in turn, fire gave way to the darkness of night. The spiritual transformation of the wood was complete. Nin and Nan watched the last embers give way before returning to the home inside the hill.

2006-06-26T11:22:00.000-07:00

Random Notes from “Coin Operated Barber Shop”
By James Hoff

1.
Meet me at the curtain: me.

The hairdresser’s been maimed
by pizza box ink.

Tell the teller to
number the account
(and hurry those knees).

2.
Pine needle
headache. Kneeling
women. So stuffed

shirts. Cigarettes
and ice cream.

3.
A sneeze
went unnoticed.

4.
A robbery w-

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.
-ild died
swallowing
colored numbers. See

up its sleeve:
all the letters

(doc swore) he
found between

A and B.

10.
A fly sighs.

A New Book "from" the East

2006-06-25T15:37:00.000-07:00

Stet
James Chapman
Fugue State Press
336 pages, $16.00

“Have you ever written a letter to your beloved,” James Chapman asks in his sixth novel, Stet, “and then had to rewrite it repeatedly, trying to please a third party?” I hope you get something from the following...
Chapman’s Stet is the story of a Soviet filmmaker, who is also a Russian filmmaker, who might really be — at least to Authority, and popular opinion — no filmmaker at all. For reasons perhaps only slightly more official than personal, this director Stet has made more movies in his own head, for his own private viewing, than he has on celluloid, for the censorious delectation of the Party and its State. He’s born late in the book (50 or so pages set the stage), suffers at the hands of children, grows up, suffers at the hands of adults, runs afoul of the Nomenklatur for his initial filmic efforts — I'm using "efforts" in the way all reviewers avoid saying films — producing his own type of moving-picture-propaganda, reels for the soul; then, he’s exiled out to a work camp, to be joined by his DP-wife, where they less die than, what else, fade to black. Silencio, that David Lynch line. That, however, is only the surface — an “official” reading, which would also tell you that Stet is an experimental novel, formalist in its manic formlessness, as emotionally tough as concrete in which the characters are cement.
Under the narrative, which is roving in the clean-limbed omniscient tradition of Resurrection Tolstoy mixed with the nervously quick cuts of an American neurotic, say Dos Passos, camera-eye-style encompassing Stalin’s funeral, the composers Shostakovich and Prokofiev, low-level Politburo wonks and post-Communist elinty millionaires, is the autobiography — the author seeming to shine through a chink in the Iron Curtain via allegory, the least postmodern authorial device around.
Enough to say that under the Work, is the Life. And that why autobiography comes to mind is that, ultimately, Stet is art about why Chapman makes art, and an argument for why we lesser lights should make art, too. Stet is the Life and Times of every artist to ever make something “wrong” — in Soviet times “formalist,” “decadent”; in our world, “unmarketable,” “not-reader-friendly” — in the face of everything “right,” which might be symbolized by the Order of Lenin, or the New York Times Bestseller List. (Otherworldly) success, at the end of the book, is nothing less than the gulag.
Which is not to say that Stet is merely reactionary. It’s more like a proofreader’s, or copyeditor’s, “stet” — an editing mark designed to retain the original version of something, scrapping later efforts at change; in pagan Latin meaning “let it stand.” This idea — far from the tropes of “massaging” text, or of fixing everything up in “post-production” — is somewhere between the Beat-Zen “first-thought-best-thought” and the slow acceptance of the self for who and what it is, “becoming comfortable in your own skin.”
Six novels in, it seems that Chapman has made a “career” out of becoming himself — slowly, gorgeously, and as publicly as a small press like his own Fugue State can afford. If he is an undiscovered genius, it’s because genius can only be undiscovered. After that, all is canon, and can be worried apart into schools, influences and intentions. Glass (Pray the Electrons Back to Sand) (1995) was a Gulf War novel as the last Vietnam art, condemning American imperialism in the most intimate terms possible (through faliures of relationship, self-image) while also examining the decadent allure of that alternate America, capitalism's bebop-First Amendment. In Candyland It’s Cool to Feed on Your Friends (1998) was a painful airing of an urbis decayed, semioticized in its ruin to the point where even picking up a spoon to eat your breakfast is an act of performance art, snootily subversive. Daughter! I Forbid Your Recurring Dream! (2000) was softer, quietly madder than anything else that had come before — a coming of age book, an undomesticated portrait of smalltime, small-town nowhere as lived by a woman who was almost incapable of being a “herself” that could adjust to her manifold selves. Stet reprises these responses to the Official Lie, which is universal, in a way that damn near reaches summation on American soil. It is a book written by a mystic in sneakers. And it tells us that if we don’t represent our own damage in art, then all the Job-comforters and their mini-biographers, the armchair dictators of any regime, the squinty presidents and their multinational kitschmeisters will do it for us. They have their red pens to keep their books in the black. We have Stet.

Metaphor-for-Metaphor for by Donari Braxton

2006-06-25T14:11:00.000-07:00

I walked up the stairs as if strung to the barn-like gambrel ceiling cered in my last tuxedo unmoving, or twined by my large left incisor by one thousand feet of fishing-wire, my manic body, already dead, frantically succussing in stupid Egyptian shapes, floundering heartbreakingly as if my life depended on breaststroke-swimming through a cloud I was crawling, by the end of the paragraph I was crawling and the human-parts had all but left me, on the grasspatch-like veins of marble mispatterns, this meandering stair-case that was groping for Babel, I scuttled upwards on four rigid paws, already calloused and bleeding, mouth agape and parched for better humor, crawling, and I had grown a tail, and immediately I did not wag it, rather I put it between my legs and decidedly kept it there—
Still there’d gone missing, hallowed out and mistranslated into something that never was; a one-piece studio with a bed with an angel who was masturbating in wait for me, her wings spread coquettishly, scrumptiously upon the white, linen sheets, enormous, glittering wings without folds, they were spread so large and so wide that it was as if they’d transformed the angel’s entire body into the consummate sex of a woman, enveloped in a cocoon of feathers—
From as early as the second flight I could feel her body’s warming and the moist, sensual air raining down from the roof like trickling water leaking, plopping off my forehead like holy water, the kind that smells of carnal things, and I could hear her, with my every step climbing closer, breathing heavier, loosing patience, growing bolder, coming closer, I knew, closer and closer to her final farewell—
When the voice of an angel, from the seventh flight, began resonating in the cleft of itself, echoing in the ugly white of marble drained, calling, siren-like, “Quickly, boy, come, come to me,” and whisper words followed then, barely intelligible, cryptic words: Forever, Paolo!; my ears had been transformed and the words themselves lost meaning to me, though clearer and louder than ever, and my tongue had grown swollen and saliva dripped, the universe was crumbling and re-forming before my eyes, but I could only think of the angel, of time, one step at a time, her unworldly climax lay not far in the distance, I could barely breath nor even begin to tame this desire, this one that no longer belonged to my species—Only an image, a hug, our beautiful members and her most splendid, divine orgasm, the imaginary, would always could always be mine—
If. I was following scents and they were forever up, up, up Donari, you must continue to climb the stairs, Donari, you are a human-being and angels will understand, Donari, and the tenth story flew by and the eleventh and twelfth, and then finally, the door, Donari, impassable, I learned after fanatical gestures, impassable to clumsy paws, a charcoal-black iron knob was mocking me, had derided sick dogs permanently exhausted where I could do nothing but wait and listen in, and she came, the angel, and it wasn’t mine but another’s name she was calling, it was the name of a man I could have recognized, a man I might have known, a man I’d maybe fucked once, or the name of what I once could have been, and when she’d finished she opened the door for me, and nighttime by then had already fallen and it was very dark save the bright starlight through the large curtained window over the canopy, and the angel led me to the foot of the bed, patted my head and lay me down there, where I slept very quietly for the rest of the night—dreaming the dreams of other people’s prophecies, I walked up the stairs like this.

Donari Braxton is the author of I. See www.donaribraxton.com for more info.

The New Book of Masks

2006-06-24T17:28:00.000-07:00

BLATT contributor Forrest Aguirre (author of the excellent

Fugue XXIX

) has just announced the contents of his forthcoming anthology, Volume One of the Text:UR series, entitled "The New Book of Masks", to be published by Raw Dog Screaming Press in the fall. Intended to bridge the gap between so-called genre and experimental fictions, it promises to anger the purists while flattering the schizophrenics.

The cover is to the right, the contents below:

Nadia Gregor - Faure, Envenomed, Dictates
Eric Schaller - Monkey Shines
Toiya Kristen Finley - The Avatar of Background Noise
Christine Boyka Kluge - Parchment and Twigs
Sarah Totton - Bluecoat Jack
Terese Svoboda - The Lindberg Baby
Tamar Yellin - Strangers on a Train
Joe Murphy - Bitter Almonds and Absinthe
Christine Boyka Kluge - No Mooing in the Moonlight
Catherine Kasper - The Theater Spectacular
Joshua Cohen - Last Transmission or Man with a Robotic Ermine
Darren Speegle - Peace Rituals
Jay Lake/Ruth Nestvold - Incipit
Lance Olsen - Six Questions for an Alien
E. Sedia - A Play for a Boy and Sock Puppets
Christine Boyka Kluge - Documenting My Abduction
Tom Miller - When the Devil Met Baldrick Beckenbauer
Rikki Ducornet - The Scouring
Brian Evenson - Fugue-State
Jason Erik Lundberg - Most Excellent and Lamentable

The Recently Dead

2006-06-24T07:40:00.000-07:00

Two wonderful writers died recently, one we've published, Jerzy Ficowski, one we would've loved to publish, Marianne Hauser.

Below is a tribute to Marianne Hauser from her good friend Raymond Federman, followed by an obituary for Jerzy Ficowski from the Forward.

Marianne Hauser, 93

ETERNAL RETURN

For Marianne Hauser

By Raymond Federman

As we old bums [you & me & your mom & the other bum in peeoria] contemplate what appears to others to be l'âge [vieillesse ou vieilles fesses] as we admire [with a touch of disdain] our own amazing present mental agility [and virility too] as we delight in the fact that we are becoming so good [so dexterous] so much better with words as we get older [perhaps even wiser in spite of the cliché] as we listen [especially at night] to those protracted echoes of the void [excuse the terminal lyricism] but without asking [as in days of youth] whence the original sound [I almost said original sin) came [sometimes unwanted] as we contemplate the landscape of words we designed and left behind us [not without pain] yes as we contemplate the not too distant moment when we will have to change tense [inevitably so] we wonder [often aloud] how the hell have we managed to come this far [to do that much] with words [words words our whole life was but a pell mell babel of words] and look oh look how they fall in place now so easily so quietly our words as they say [or fail to say] what they want to say before crumbling into the great void [excuse the romantic agony] alright crumbling into the motherfucking abyss of forgetfulness [le grand abîme de l’oubli]

Jerzy Ficowksi, 82

Jerzy Ficowski, a peerless advocate for the arts and letters of a decimated Polish Jewry, died in Warsaw on May 9, at the age of 82.
Following World War II, during which he served in the Home Army and participated in the Warsaw Uprising, Ficowski published nearly 20 volumes of poetry, including the acclaimed "A Reading of Ashes." However, it was his work as an archivist that marked him for greatness: Having witnessed the genocide, and the ongoing oppression of the Roma, Ficowski became one of the few translators from their languages, producing renditions of folktales lauded for their whisper-weight mastery.
Translations from Yiddish followed, as well as from Russian. Ficowski humbled his gifts, too, in the shadow of Bruno Schulz, perhaps the greatest Polish Jewish writer of modernity, murdered by the Gestapo in 1942. If not for Ficowski, who was not Jewish, Schulz's work would have been lost. Ficowski later published a seminal "biographical portrait" of Schulz called "Regions of the Great Heresy."
Ficowski would produce only one book of his own fiction, a set of stories that extend Schulz's preoccupation with estrangement, and with dreaming as escape, into new worlds of isolation — muted by violence, beset by the politics of catastrophe. Only this month did that book, "Waiting for the Dog To Sleep" (Twisted Spoon Press), find its way into the English language; copies arrived at Ficowski's house two weeks before his death. A riddling, forbidding colloquy of fantasies fevered by war and privation, it offers only the grayest of consolation: the pleasures of a last cigarette, the aroma of a cup of coffee, the quiescence of hiding. "The dead things are glad," Ficowski writes. "I have descended to be one of them, from this moment on."

THE NEW BLACK

2006-06-24T03:46:00.000-07:00

blatt is the new black
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