If a conversation can be described as the territory of speech between two people; then, interviews can be organized by those specific spaces. The negative space between the names of the interviewer and interviewee is an embodiment of that space. As an index for the latest archived interviews, I’ve extracted these negative regions between the lines between names and hyper-linked them as key-holes to their respective pieces

Click on the blocks below to be linked to the BOMB interviews they’ve been excerpted from.

James Woods in Videodrome. Courtesy Museum of Modern Art/ Film Stills Archive. (From BOMB 26, Winter 1989)

John Wesley Harding performs this Saturday at the festival “Words and Music: A Literary Feast in New Orleans.” Cannes winner Michael Haneke’s film ”Das Weisse Band” (The White Ribbon) opens the Festival of European film “Cinedays” and will be opening in NYC next month. Last night at Canon Theatre, David Cronenberg interviewed Stephen King about his possible upcoming sequel to The Shining (so perhaps an upcoming film adaptation [perhaps by Cronenberg?!?—ed]) Patti Smith plays this Saturday along with Sonic Youth and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs at Chicago Filmmakers. In the new issue of Paris, LA, Hilton Als talks about self-portraiture. Joel Shapiro has nine new prints with Gemini G.E.L. at Joni Moisant Weyl. John Zinsser’s Art Dealer Archipelagos, a collection of drawings by the painter, opens today at James Graham. Film The Blind Side with Kathy Bates comes to theaters today. And tonight, Jayne Anne Phillips reads from her latest novel at NYU’s Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House.

In this climate of hyper-referential non-paint(ed) abstraction, where critical relevance relies on a connection to an established idea of a preexisting form, the focus of many of these artists on the undiscovered that awaits them in their studios is—despite or because of the critical nature of their investigation—a welcome shift.

Dystopic commonalities weave together occasionally, but seldom linger. They reflect the very lack of established rules and boundaries that many of these artists cite as the reason they choose abstraction. Jessica Dickinson describes this openness as a result of the recent debunking of the meta-narrative myth that followed abstraction in the 20th century. Philip Taaffe speaks of abstraction as a place for synthesis, where multiple frameworks (cultural, intellectual, gestural) can converge. Dan Walsh guides us along a rollercoaster ride of abstractions possibilities, from a place of absolute freedom to wasteland. Embracing the farcical, Steve DiBenedetto conducts a conversation with himself on the pros and cons of committing to an abstract painting. An epistolary contribution from Amy Sillman announces a breakup with abstraction. Keltie Ferris and Carroll Dunham take an objective stance and divide the spectrum of abstraction into camps, to name a few.

To coin any type of real consensus from these spirited comments seems artificial given the nature of the responses. They sizzle in their dissimilarity, conveying the mercurial ground that abstraction in painting still, and again, provides. Check back weekly for responses to Jackie’s question.




Dan Walsh and Amy Sillman

Amy Sillman DETAIL from "Fatso," 2009, oil/canvas, full painting 7'x7.5', area of detail: approx 8 inches.

Abstraction is historically about essences, intuitions; something one cannot put into words. But today it seems like everything can be put into words. This has certainly diluted abstraction’s position and mystery. Although what distinguishes it from other forms is no longer clear, we continue to embrace it. Still, I would say abstraction is alive and well. One can exist there with absolute freedom; there are no more rules or ideologies to uphold or hierarchies to respect. And the formal has shown itself to be an incredibly flexible vocabulary—any idea can stick to it. I think this is just what we wanted: to have many ways to understand abstraction, history, and the world.

On the other hand, with contents interchangeable and contexts so fluid, how can abstraction be meaningful, significant? Would not a “relevant” work today be too didactic? I don’t doubt that a commitment to painting/art has its rewards. A sensibility’s journey into historical awareness and clarity of expression is very meaningful—think of Morandi. But today, aren’t we more concerned with the cultural status of abstraction, not the health of the artist’s activity?

Something has to be at stake in the studio. But what is there to believe in? Exactly what we had to give up in order to continue is now haunting us. Idealism is still at the core of making an abstract painting. I am certainly not going to propose restoring it to its past glory, or mourn its loss. But can we work there without giving in to the gratuitous quotation? Maybe just wrestling one’s work from the grips of codification and determinism is good enough. Intention and embodiment still seem to have more traction than the reflection of culture.

Wait! I changed my mind. Abstraction today is an anemic wasteland; but for me, it’s still the best vehicle with which to think.

Amy Silman

Dear Jackie,

I guess you didn’t know this but me and Abstraction broke up!!!!! Last summer!!!! Well, I mean, I’ve been feeling like kind of confused for a long time, like years. I’m friends with all of A’s friends and stuff, and I think A’s really cool and I totally learned a LOT from A, but you know what? I don’t want to say anything bad about A but I have to TOTALLY MOVE ON with my LIFE. I started to really feel like A’s been holding me back and even like kind of manipulative. I mean, when I moved to NYC it was kind of incredible to get to know A … but you know what? I am super worried that when you get really to the core of things, A is just super conceited and can’t talk to me. I feel really bad saying this but I KIND OF WONDER sometimes if A is just DEAD INSIDE. I don’t know, maybe A is like a meal ticket for me. I mean, I get invited to a lot of shows and things because of A, but when I’m there, A just kind of talks to other people. Like I don’t feel A can really concentrate on one person at a time—A always addresses the whole room, if you know what I mean. I mean, it’s not like Representation even knows I exist either. I feel like when I come into the room, R is like all glassy and actually really conservative; it’s a weird feeling, too. But anyway I just started to feel like I can’t be tied down and I have to play the field. I guess all of you know that I was always like that and totally non-monogamous, but that’s why you didn’t hear from me all winter. I totally learned a lot from A, and I even got to be friends w/ Cézanne who I didn’t even LIKE before and now I like totally, like, LOVE, and I super love Cubism, (I am so mad at my friend Kerstin in Berlin because she doesn’t even LIKE Cubism but I feel like Cubism is like so amazing. It’s basically a diagram, if you know what I mean.) OH, and also, I never would have understood Process without A but I just feel like A’s really old friends are just WEIRD. And kind of pompous? Or something? Well, anyway, I feel really bad telling you this like you’ll be pissed, but I hope you know this has nothing to do with you and I really love you and the part of A’s friends that are really open like you are AMAZING and everything. But basically I kicked A out of my studio this summer, and afterwards I felt really good. I had this amazing fling, don’t tell anyone, but I had this fling with this face, and I don’t know, that was the straw that tipped the iceberg and I just went with it. I feel like me and A can be good friends after a while, though, and I am super hoping that all of A’s friends will still be friends with me, but, sometimes I almost kind of wish, you know, I was sleeping ALONE. You know what I mean????

Love, Amy

Next week: Jessica Dickinson and Philip Taffe

Jessica Dickinson: I use abstraction because it reflects aspects of my lived experience where things shift, change, and resist definition—where things are unknown yet positively real.

Philip Taffe: To me, the idea of abstraction represents an eternal starting point. It is the way back to our archaic origins, in order to identify and examine those circumstances. And it is also the way to bring forward lost themes and passages—to convey them now and to reflect upon their potency.

Glenn Kaino and Ryan Majestic’s HONOR ANOMG THIEVES, 2009, photograph by Meghan McInnis, courtesy Creative Time.

In my opinion, the true test of a good magic trick is that after it’s performed, you don’t want to know how it’s done. Questions about magic tricks are like money—it’s a good feeling to have them jingling contentedly in your pocket. When I went to watch the Glenn Kaino/Ryan Majestic magic show at the Slipper Room the other night, I really didn’t have a clue what I was in for. I found out later that Kaino conceived of the project, and later collaborated with Majestic to bring his ideas to fruition. Luckily (especially when it comes to this breed of guerilla “art-magic”) not knowing any of this beforehand was probably the best way to go into this one-night PERFORMA event.

To truly appreciate the spectrum of the act, it’s important to form a mental picture of the Slipper Room—a narrow burlesque club with ’20s décor and vintage pinups, an ancient mahogany bar, and perhaps most importantly, a stage roughly the size of four closets jammed together and cloaked by scarlet curtains. I’ve been to my share of magic shows, and as I suppose I should’ve predicted, this wasn’t anything like the kind of magic show I had experienced before: laser lights, fog, music, and frankly, a flatline pulse. But there the audience was, piled against the stage, sitting so close that our hips and arms touched. When Majestic himself appeared, there was no preamble, no music, barely any introduction, and in the innocuous way that he strode out onto the stage, he set the tone for the rest of the evening.

The first thing I noticed was how Spartan his set was, if you could call it a set at all. Aside from Majestic and an assistant, the only other things on the stage were a couple of tables (one of which held nothing) and atop the other stood a three-foot tower of playing cards, at which Majestic gazed sadly and sighed. I wrote earlier that questions after a magic show are like money—when a deal is done, the more you’ve got the better. Majestic’s first card trick was the infamous “only-card-facing-the-wrong-way” one; we’ve all seen it a million times, and I was nonplussed. I had seen this before. And then I saw it over and over, as Majestic ambled through the rows, repeating the trick with identical dialogue, identical movements, and identical accuracy. So who was in on the act? It wasn’t until about ten minutes in, when an audience member stood up and coldly replied “Bored,” to a polite “How are you this evening?” from Majestic, that I realized what was happening.

The real trick wasn’t done with cards, but with the audience members themselves. As the overall patience index plummeted, people grew uncomfortable, impatient, and astonishingly mean. Halfway through the act, everyone was wondering the same bewildered thought: is he honestly going to go through that entire damn tower? When the revolt threatened to overflow, Majestic, hands literally atremble, vanished behind the scarlet curtains to unenthusiastic applause.

You just have to turn on C-SPAN, and you’ve got a 9/10 chance that you’ll see a town hall meeting about health care, and if it is a health care meeting, you’ve got an even better chance of seeing just how quickly humans can turn into animals. After Majestic’s performance, I could barely stand to look at most of the people I had just been friendly with: the one who told Majestic he didn’t even want to see his card, another who spoke to Majestic in an almost scolding tone.  Most of the time, when we go to a performance of some kind, we approach it almost like a fishbowl carnival. We come to watch the fish dance and throw party streamers, but in this case, the joke was on us. I eventually realized the truth; that on this blustery November night, the trick was to reveal that we were the fishbowl carnival, and with a mounting despair, to see in the reflections in the bowl the grotesquely cruel circus that was ourselves.

AN APRIL MOOD, 1946–55. Watercolor and charcoal on joined paper, 40 x 54 in. (101.6 x 137.2 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art. Purchase, with partial funds from Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence A. Fleischman.

Those unfamiliar with Burchfield will immediately recognize an intense focus on nature and the American landscape. A simplified description of his style is van Gogh meets Hopper (actually, Hopper was a colleague). The artwork does convey his talent for composition and draftsmanship, but he seems at times troubled by color and inconsistent with texture. Paintings like An April Mood effectively nail the cool end of the spectrum, but as the scenes get warmer his brush and palette assume the subtlety of a tack hammer. In Glory of Spring (Radiant Spring) for instance, the trees and sky are spontaneously combusting in saturated yellow flames that mimic psychedelic tattoo graphics. Technical criticism aside, artists should make note of Burchfield’s care to catalog and maintain his own large body of work. The effort helps his audience acknowledge and appreciate not only the depth of his perspective and creativity, but also the breadth of his contribution and the value of its history.

R. Crumb. THE BOOK OF GENESIS: ILLUSTRATED by R. Crumb, 2009. Chapter #8. Ink and correction fluid on paper. 14 ¾ x 11 ½ in. (37.5 x 29.2 cm). Courtesy the artist; Paul Morris; and David Zwirner, New York. (Click to enlarge)

A stone’s throw from the Burchfield show is R. Crumb’s Book of Genesis. This is a heroic exhibition, even just as an installation. Over 200 original illustrated pages hang uniformly framed, side by side. The format gives a unique view of a staggering amount of work (5 years in the making). Half way though Adam and Eve I knew there was no way I had enough time to read the entire book in one visit. Frequently I would hear a giggle or gasp by other readers on to latter chapters. Admittedly, it was impossible to follow the story in Crumb’s signature style and not chuckle because the artist had actually transcended Genesis and his own oeuvre at the same time. Best known for Zap Comics and Fritz the Cat, Crumb’s stories are adult themed, depicting characters that are either neurotic or buxom (or both) and often suffering through various stages of depravity. However, only a closed mind would believe he is more interested in the flexibility of the female anatomy than the psychology of the human condition. While puritanical Bible-thumpers may be quick to label Crumb’s work as ”inappropriate” or ”depraved” and take offense to this rendering, they might want to read more carefully what they’re thumping. The Book of Genesis is rife with sex, violence, alcohol, murder, rape, human trafficking and incest. Furthermore, the honest attempt by one man to respectfully tell the tale through pictures is rarely (if ever) seen and should be applauded. No doubt more people would love for R. Crumb to illuminate the rest of the Bible… or at least the Book of Revelation?

Peter Hildebrand; WARP AND WEFT; Gouache on paper; 22 x 30 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Pierogi Flat Files.

Peter Moysaenko: How might you respond to the assertion that contemporary poetry, stacked against advances in such studies as that of quantum mechanics, offers little in the way of knowledge or intelligence, favoring the cultivation of elegant delusion and sophistic logic over a genuine apprehension of the conditions of existence?

Weston Cutter: This question’s all sorts of dicey-ness and trouble for me. A close friend is a high-energy theoretical physicist (the stuff he studies is what’s modified by all those adjectives, not he himself—he’s real and low-to-moderate-energy), and I bet we’d both argue that our respective fields are equal re: providing knowledge and intelligence, delusion and sophistic logic. Where things get truly forky is at “a genuine apprehension of the conditions of existence”—the phrase could do with a whole bunch of unpacking (”conditions of existence” meaning roofs over heads and bridges not collapsing, or broken hearts and memories of youth, or the half-life of radon and the never-ending quest to quantize gravity?), plus there’s N. Bohr who said, “Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it,” and then R. Feynman who said, “If you think you understand quantum mechanics you don’t understand quantum mechanics”—eminent scholars both, and each positioned well to savor whatever truths QT/QM had to offer. This is already getting long—there’s plenty more to say—but let’s be fair: the fundamental condition of existence is not knowing, and poetry and physics, plus pie charts and plowing fields and parsing the stock market each, in ways, are valid means of apprehending elements of the unknown we live in, plus let’s just admit that “more” or “less” re: apprehending conditions of existence has much more to do with the user than the field.

No Science

by Weston Cutter

If you can’t find yr way in, written on the edge of a brick : it’s August, heat and wetness thick as a scent but I can find winter anywhere: the brick a member of an old wall’s army, remnants of cement : scabs : too hot to sleep well : last night I lay down in my bed but awoke in the next room’s chair : and if the phrase is complete in itself : if you can’t find yr way in : perhaps brick as answer : perhaps nothing : no answer : I’m thinking snow, thinking my way arctic : relieving : the brick’s been sitting on a table I’ve passed dozens of times, been sitting like a doomed prince, the kingdom already fallen and him sitting in his last throne : all brick walls just iterations of until : on the way home the long walls of the church hold the summer day’s heat : heat as confession, brick as priest : private unto darkness : amen : + at night, when it’s cooler, 3pm August will still be stuck in the wall, trapped : a name not quite forgotten : spare heat for absent touches : if you can’t find yr way in and perhaps there is no way in : no in : how warmth moves into brick : voices into dark : and before dawn, day’s bricks finally cool, their heat like secrets told to the dark : ready again : again :

Weston Cutter’s from Minnesota, presently lives in Iowa, but has a strong inclination that Chicago is really where it’s at. He’s got stuff coming soon-ish in the Gettysburg Review, Third Coast, Sonora Review, and Apostrophe Cast.

For  more on Peter Hildebrand, visit his page at Pierogi Flat Files.

ArtWeLove.com’s news digest, now also available in email form, brings a comprehensive roundup of the week’s art developments to your digital doorstep. If you aren’t signed up, simply click here. ArtWeLove helps people explore art on their own terms, by suggesting artists, artworks, and exhibitions based on the art they love.

The news coming out of the art world was truly international in scope this week, with stories popping up all over the globe. Read on for ArtWeLove’s news digest, now also available in email form—bringing a comprehensive roundup of the week’s art developments to your digital doorstep. If you aren’t signed up, click here. As always, we welcome your feedback at editorial@artwelove.com.

WOMEN STEP IN AT THE TATE & IN VENICE
In London, Tate Britain has named Penelope Curtis, now curator of the Henry Moore Institute, as its new director. (Read on.)

ROME OPENS MAXXI, ELIASSON GETS A BRIDGE, & AND BEUYS PLANS ARE PROTESTED
Speaking of architecture, the city of Rome has soft-opened Maxxi (a.k.a. the National Museum of the XXI Century Arts), a multidisciplinary contemporary art center in the ancient capital’s Flaminio district. (Read on.)

KING TUT SPIFFS UP, ZAHI HAWASS GETS FLACK, & AND A MUNCH GOES MISSING IN A SMASH-AND-GRAB
Another place in need of repair, King Tut’s tomb, is about to get some relief. (Read on.)

NEW MUSEUM CONTROVERSY CONTINUES
Lastly, in assorted U.S. news, the New York Times and Jerry Saltz weighed in on the mushrooming scandal over the New Museum’s ethically problematic plan to show work from the collection of a trustee, Dakis Joannou, in an exhibition curated by Jeff Koons. (Read on.)

ARTISTS IN THE NEWS:

Olafur Eliasson

Matthew Barney

Joseph Beuys

Zaha Hadid

FULL NEWS DIGEST:
Follow this link for the full roundup and a list of related news articles.

Alexandre Singh, 3 LECTURES, 1 STORY, 4 EVENINGS. Photo by Paula Court. Courtesy of Performa

For Thom Donovan’s Performa09 Week 1 Round-up, click here.

On Monday, November 9th, I attended the first of four performances by Alexandre Singh at White Columns gallery in the West Village. When I arrived chairs were arranged in a circle in the gallery, facing an overhead projector. As the performance began the lights went off and the audience could hear a voice starting to tell a story. The disembodied voice seemed to be stumbling, faltering, or, rather like a camera coming into focus. The voice made reference to cinematic lighting and camera work making one feel as though they were at the movies only without the projection.

What unfolded after this were two sets of stories—the first taking no more than a half an hour (the length of a film short?), the second approximately one and a half hours (a feature length film?). In the first story, Singh wove different characters and incidents together from modern art history. Yves Klein finds himself among a band of thieves in the woods; Kurt Schwitter’s meets his “double.”  I don’t remember many details of the story now, but that is because I did not follow the story entirely while Singh was telling it. I was too busy paying attention to his techniques as a storyteller as well as my own cognitive reflections as I listened to the story being spun.

Singh, it seems, is a kind of phenomenologist. An artist cum phenomenologist or phenomenologist cum artist principally concerned with storytelling as a constructive cognitive process. Lurking behind Singh’s stories, I felt, was some kind of procedure or constraint by which the artist was allowing himself to weave his tale, or, more appropriately, fit all of the pieces of it together more or less seamlessly. Did Singh write down different parts of the story in advance and memorize them? Did he practice making-up stories based on preexisting materials—plotlines, characters, descriptions? The night I attended Singh at White Columns Singh told stories, however the three subsequent nights of performance were advertised as “lectures.” My intuition is that Singh would have revealed his ’sleight of hand’ during this series of lectures which had titles like “assembly instructions” and “strategic magik.”

While I think Singh went on a bit long during the second story, what he accomplished was nevertheless quite impressive. His performance cleverly composed a series of cliché/formulaic story elements deriving from various cosmologies and storytelling traditions. During the second tale, the audience encountered a council of elders comprised entirely of parrots, a Golem, an alchemist, a “Chinaman,”  Arthurian knights and many other exoticized and mythical beings. As in Boccaccio’s Decameron or The Arabian Nights, the structure of Singh’s story was both nested (discrete stories receding within larger ones), and digressive (the narrative often swerving suddenly).

The overplayed critical term pastiche came to mind listening to Singh’s stories, a pastiche being a hodge-podge, or anything that tends to be cobbled together. It is as if a world literature had provided Singh with a wealth of tropes and Singh only had to reassemble them, stitching them together through the most basic patchwork. The trick seems to be in keeping the various materials in play, and wending one’s way through them—as though through a kind of cognitive labyrinth. And this is the genius of any storyteller—that they not only remember, but more so tunnel through a set of memories taking what they need as they go.

Throughout the performance, Singh illustrated his story via colored acetate sheets that he placed on the overhead. With each colored sheet, Singe could change the mood of the room, and have it match better with his story. At one moment Singh was describing a fire, and placed his hands over the projector, flicking his fingers. I appreciated Singh’s use of low fi effects and gestures which were clever and added an element of wonder to the performance.

Had Singh’s performance been shorter, I think it would have been more palatable. However, I also understand that time was a crucial aspect of the piece. How long can one sustain telling a story? (Scheherazade of The Arabian Nights, the archetypal storyteller, did so for a thousand and one nights in order to save her neck.) How can one pleat the discrete elements of a story in such a way that narrative strands and characters return after long tropes, detours, and hiatuses? How does storytelling embody an act of mind—both of remembering and imagining—that gets an audience to think about how they are processing something being heard and made-up in their own minds separate from the storyteller?

These are some questions I think may be important to ask after Singh’s performance, but also after a performance I saw later in the week, Omer Fast’s Performa commissioned “Talk Show.” ”Talk Show,” like Singh’s stories, takes up storytelling as a practice, and as a problem of cognitive-phenomenological investigation. Only while Singh was more concerned to investigate storytelling as an art of construction—of assembling disparate elements and making them hang together in one’s attention—Fast’s piece was concerned with storytelling as an art of transmissability—handing-down and bearing across cultural information.

Rosie Perez and Bill Ayers. Photo by Paula Court. Courtesy of Performa.

The first thing I noticed when I sat down to Fast’s performance was a set of plush, white armchairs. Next to the armchairs were bouquets of flowers containing skulls at their center. The stage resembled something between a talk show set and a funeral parlor. When Omer Fast’s ”guest” sat down—Fast had invited non-actors to tell their stories of the Iraq War/Middle Eastern geopolitical conflict—she did so with Rosie Perez, one of two actors I recognized in the performance (the other being Lili Taylor). Perez listened while Fast’s guest told her story. Occasionally Perez would interrupt the actor to ask questions.

In the course of her story, Fast’s guest described watching a PBS news broadcast one night and recognizing the woman who would become her husband’s ”second wife.”  She continued, relaying how her husband went to Iraq as a non-imbedded journalist at the beginning of the 2003 invasion. When the husband was finally leaving Iraq, he realized that to leave his translator behind would put her life at great risk, and that the only way to ensure her safety would be to marry her and travel with her out of the country (the translator’s family would not allow her to leave the country with a man unless she and the man were married).

The journalist and his wife hatched a plot that he should convert to Islam and bring the translator to England where polygamy is tolerated for Islamic British citizens. But before the husband was able to follow-through with their plan, he and the translator were shot, the husband fatally. After the death of her husband, Fast’s guest fought successfully to bring the translator to New York City where she currently lives.

When the guest finished telling her story, it was Perez’s turn to tell the story based on the guest’s iteration. Following Perez’s rendition, six other actors each told their own versions of the story having only heard the story’s previous iteration. As in Singh’s performance, with Fast’s ”Talk Show”  I became acutely aware that what I was witnessing was an investigation of storytelling itself as a feat of memory blending selective recall with the concocted. While some of the actors (especially the ones that went first) struggled to remain faithful to the facts of the story, others seemed to struggle to recall anything at all of what they had just heard. When one of the actors seemed to completely blank on almost every detail of the previous iteration, the actor who followed him started making things up.  At this point in the performance, the performances became more about individual acting styles, and a performer’s ability to improvise virtuosically. Much of this was quite entertaining—the audience was in a more or less constant guffaw from Lili Taylor’s brilliant improvisation throughout the last actor’s iteration of the story.

The audience’s response got me thinking about what Fast may be getting at through “Talk Show.” Is he critiquing the diffusion of information by mass media, the fact that noise forms a ground for any signal? Is he, like Singh, offering a phenomenological investigation of storytelling as a site of cultural exchange? Is he getting his actors to perform the difficulties of conveying a story properly—of making wisdom transmissible? Is he critiquing the talk show as a theatrical format wherein what’s at stake is emotional identification (pathos) and the need to convey moral lessons—to discipline and evaluate in other words?

Following Fast’s guest, it was interesting to me how Perez and the other actors appropriated cliché tropes from talk show and entertainment news formats to tell their stories. Pressurized by Fast’s own ‘telephone game’-like constraint, all of the actors fell back upon what they knew, and in the process reproduced many of the dominant ‘messages’ and techniques of the popular media.

Shana Moulton's THE UNDISCOVERED ANTIQUE as part of Art in General's ERRATIC ANTHROPOLOGIES. Image courtesy Art in General.

The performances which took places at Art In General on Wednesday, November 11th as part of the art organization’s “Erratic Anthropologies” show had to do with questions of storytelling and cultural transmission in a much different sense than Singh’s and Fast’s works. Shana Moulton, one of the artists featured in “Erratic Anthropologies,” mines her late 70s/early 80s suburban Californian childhood to produce her work.  In her performance piece The Undiscovered Antique, on Wednesday, Moulton performed with an interactive video involving animated objects that would respond to her movements and adapt to the contours of her figure.

The declared theme of the performance was “health education.” Throughout the performance, Moulton walked upon a short stage in front of a projection screen dressed in a white leotard. In the video accompanying the performance, images of women’s faces from Renaissance paintings morphed into one another. A separate video projection showed Moulton plunging a pronged, metal object into a piece of amorphous foam. When Moulton took the stage, she fit her head into this object. A pinkish-red line appeared and ran down through her body.

Among the many images that appeared in the video included footage from Todd Haynes‘ 1995 film Safe, in which an upper middle-class woman (played by Julianne Moore) becomes sick with an undiagnosed illness. Throughout Haynes’ film, Moore’s character takes solace in self-help groups, and eventually takes refuge in a community for people suffering from “environmental” illnesses—illnesses caused by autoimmune reactions to toxins in the environment. At another point in the performance, Moulton gave a speech in the style of an award recipient. While she said all of the things a reward recipient typically says, what stuck out to me was her histrionic mention of AIDS.

The eruption of the AIDS pandemic into Moulton’s performance reminded me that Moulton and I both came of age during a time when HIV/AIDS was just starting to enter a wider public awareness, and as a result public education was finally starting to respond to the health crisis which had plagued Gay communities and ethnic minorities since the late ’70s. Moulton’s work, for me, performs a desublimation of cultural materials from a past that is not entirely mythical, but not altogether factual either.

The realities Moulton channels are that of our mutually hyper-mediated 70s/early 80s childhoods, and of a California which never really got over the various fallout from 60s counter cultural excesses (Moulton grew up in Oakhurst, California and myself in Menlo Park until I was eight). Without saying anything too specific about CA culture, Moulton’s performance evoked for me the eeriness of health enthusiasts and new age cults, of Hollywood simulacrum and erstwhile deadly wilderness such as those encountered by the Donner party in the 1840s. It is as though Moulton is organizing California/the West of 70s/80s as personal myth—encrypting this myth, but also performing it through a politics of embodiment and ironic self-transformation, exorcizing through performance that which one might other repress or abject.

Like Mike Kelley or Matt Mullican before her, in Moulton’s work a personal cosmology becomes metonymous with the mythos of a culture both ruled by health regimes and haunted by liberal economic specters simultaneously. Following Haynes’  Safe, Moulton holds a mirror up to groups like the Scientologists and other American religious cults. Throughout the performance, Moulton would retire to a room in back of the projection screen, as though she were being punished. Thus does Moulton remind us of the disciplinary regimes which regulate religious cults and cults of Capitalism alike—the two phenomena being of course inextricable.

A participant in Tan Lin's LITWITCHALK. Photo courtesy of the artist.

While Tan Lin’s ”Chalk Playground”  performance, “LitTwitChalk,” was also not concerned with storytelling per se, Lin and other participants in the performance—among them Christopher Alexander, Bruce Andrews, Anselm Berrigan, Robert Fitterman, Kristen Gallagher, Paolo Javier, Maya Lin, Dan Machlin, Frances Richard, and myself—did address the question of transmissiability in terms of the speed of information (a problem shared by the Italian Futurists who are being celebrated and reconsidered during this year’s biennial).

Arriving at the playground, I feared that the event would be rained out (it was sprinkling throughout the day). But around twenty people showed up, and more came off the street to participate. As with Arto Lindsay’s ”procession”  in Times Square, I was reminded that public art is necessary during our current cultural moment, if only because it assembles groups of people who may not otherwise come together and provokes embodied interactions thoroughly limited by virtuality. Had the weather been better and the location less remote (the event took place at the playground of the P.S. 2 school near the Manhattan Bridge in Chinatown) I think many more people would have been attracted to the event and ended up participating.

Among the poets participating, many were poets whose work I’ve been reading for years, and whose practices I both appreciate and admire.  Given my interest in the various poets assembled, I was very curious what people would do together. My sense, for the most part, was that the poets were writing poems they may write for the page on the surface of the playground, although Lin had called for poets to generate their poems using live Twitter feeds.

Some exceptions to this general trend were Kristen Gallagher’s piece, which transcribed feeds from the current demonstrations by University of California students, faculty, and staff. Similarly, many of the participants seemed to address Twitter and other social networking technologies in terms of problems of idiolect such as in Bruce Andrews’ text where the poet stutters “‘an’  an’ an’ an’ ’bout an’ an’ git aint nigh an’ aint’” and writes “ye rale purty” rather than “you’re real pretty,” thus drawing attention to the noisy phoneticism of web 2.0. Any number of chalk “feeds” also responded to the speed of information by evoking a luddite response to social networking platforms such as in the following: “When I see you I don’t think of Kilowatt hours.”

At Lin’s prompting, other feeds recopied the Futurist Manifesto itself, a particular group of writers transcribing the manifesto from a Chinese translation.  This recopying was site-specific insofar as the event took place in Chinatown. It was also appropriate since later that afternoon Lin would participate in a poetry reading at MOCA (Museum of Chinese in America) featuring Charles Bernstein and John Yau.

Despite the rain and lack of critical mass, I could discern many possibilities in Lin’s ”chalk playground”—both in concept and in actuality. Though the rain would wash away the chalk, therefore mirroring in extremis the frequent disappearance and erosion of messages by such popular web 2.0 applications as Twitter and Facebook, it got people to write together and thus score a collective and collaborative text. Looking out among the group of chalkers, I was struck by how much people seemed withdrawn while they were chalking-absorbed in their personal message/poem. Yet, as soon as you finished chalking you could walk around and see what others had written.

The event was an occasion for conversation and physical, ‘face-to-face’ interaction—I take this to be the meaning and importance of Lin’s piece. As the dominant world continues in its ceaseless pursuit of virtual ‘connectness,’ Twitter chalking can provide a necessary space-both physical and cognitive—to reflect on what we as an information-driven society are doing, and the extent to which we are determined by our technological advances. In lieu of these advances the rain-soaked chalk became an etherization I could actually feel.

Mark Bibbins. Photo by Star Black.

Although The Dance of No Hard Feelings is Mark Bibbins’ second book of poetry, nothing about this recently released collection feels sophomoric. Its bulk (just under 100 pages), its effortless political and didactic flourishes, its lapidary formal qualities and charismatic cadences give an impression of rare expertise. Bibbins, a long time New York native and perennial fixture in its poetry scene, has staked out an aesthetic niche in the constant flux of urban poetry. Always lyrical, his poems range from opaque explorations of mood to highly stylized op-ed pieces. Many of the poems conflate the public and private spheres, giving one the impression of being taken into the confidence of a close friend while simultaneously partaking of a discourse as public as the news.

What is perhaps most appealing about The Dance of No Hard Feelings is its candidness. There is a willingness on the part of the poet to simply state that things have gone badly for America and that “We, the Reader” (the title of one of the poems in the collection) are no longer able to claim our exception as bystanders. Without hinting towards alienation, on his part or ours, Bibbins implicates, with humor, intensity and charm.

Ben Mirov: How did you choose the title for this collection?

Mark Bibbins: It’s ridiculous to say that the title chose itself, but that’s what happened. The phrase arrived in my head like a kitchen timer going off. The working title of the manuscript had been Forcefield, but I’m wary of giving a collection the same name as a poem it contains. I like having a title that isn’t too prescriptive, which I don’t necessarily think “Forcefield” is, but I’m glad to have one that’s kind of absurd, yet also acknowledges dissatisfaction or regret. I hope, if people read the book, that the title means more than what they thought it might, while not necessarily voiding their initial impressions.

BM: How would you describe the time between your first and second books in a single sentence?

MB: It was the shortest and longest six years of my life, as were the previous five.

BM: Do you feel like there is some kind of relation between Sky Lounge (Bibbins’ first book) and The Dance of No Hard Feelings, like the two are somehow in a dialogue or a kind of argument with each other?

MB: The conversations are overlapped, certainly. A man with a beard once asked, “Do I contradict myself?” I wouldn’t mind too much if I did—and I often do—but the two books are more complementary than contradictory.

BM: Were you trying to “do” something with this collection? Was there some kind of overarching aim, or is it more of a greatest hits of the past few years?

MB: So far I have been a person who writes poems, not collections. I’m not sure what you mean by greatest hits, but there isn’t a big pile of abandoned pieces languishing somewhere that didn’t make it into the book—maybe it’s not good to admit that—but I’m not very prolific, so I try to make each poem into something I’d like to keep.

BM: Some of your lines feel like they were written for a specific person while remaining open and available to any reader. Do you think about the gap between public and private when you write?

MB: I do think about that gap. It’s huge. It’s also a fiction—one that’s filled with us. No gap.

BM: I know you draw inspiration from a wide variety of sources. What are some of the best non-poetry things you’d recommend at the moment?

MB: I love the new albums by Fuck Buttons, Atlas Sound, and A Sunny Day in Glasgow; also BEAK>, of which Portishead’s Geoff Barrow is a member—spooky and spare and great. Mark Wagner’s recent collages (incredibly intricate, made of cut-up dollar bills) are amazing, and I could watch “Two Fat Ladies,” a British cooking show from the ’90s, all day long.

BM: I remember hearing the painter John Currin say something about the most important thing in art being taste. Like choosing what color sweater to put on a figure in his painting. I get this sense from the people, objects and turns-of-phrase you use in your poems. Do you think taste, has anything to do with the way you write?

MB: Absolutely, unless this is a trick question. The person wearing the sweater in a Currin painting might also be naked from the waist down, which will always make someone uncomfortable, so he’s a good artist to invoke. John Waters and Gabriel Gudding and Jennifer Knox and Eileen Myles and Andy Warhol are others. Taste needn’t be merely “good.” Solemn reverence is the default “good taste” mode, and such poems look like parody to me at this point. On the other hand, if snark is your default and you don’t somehow tweak or transform it, that’s just as dull.

BM: The Dance of No Hard Feelings contains two longer poems: “Forcefield [hazard]” and “Forcefield [ardor].” It occurred to me that most of the poems in the collection fluctuate between these poles of “ardor” and “hazard,” or that they deal with the desire for danger and the danger of desire in various ways. Did you write these two poems as a sort of containment field for the other poems in the collection?

MB: That’s a good assessment of their function, if not my intention. Those sequences aren’t easy for me to talk about without sounding like a maniac, but I’m okay with putting things in a book that unsettle and intimidate and resist me. Each page is limited to 34 syllables, so they do have containment woven into them. And while they weren’t designed to herd or define the other poems, I am interested in those two conditions, and in the areas where they coexist. I wouldn’t say I have a desire for danger—the latter seems pretty good at finding us whether we look for it or not.

BM: This collection feels more overtly political than your last. Would you say this is a fair assessment?

MB: Yes, fair. Also accurate. Nearly every poem was written during the Bush-Cheney regime, and they gave us a lot of material to work with, alas. The litany of negligent and/or monstrous acts committed by our elected officials, corporate media, lobbyists, insurance companies, religious leaders, defense contractors, etc., is so staggering as to be almost unutterable. It’s certainly unquantifiable. And since enough of us remain willfully and lethally stupid—it’s practically a badge of honor, encouraged (and surely relished) by all of the aforementioned perpetrators—they continue to run the show.

The Dance of No Hard Feelings is out now from Copper Canyon Press.

A no-frills B-noir born in the gutter of Hollywood’s Poverty Row, Detour was shot in six days on a broken-shoestring budget in the low six figures. Given the track record of its parent PRC film studio (Producers Releasing Corporation, or “Pretty Rotten Crap,” as the joke went), this 1945 road movie should have disappeared into the vanishing point of film history faster than a hitchhiker in your rearview mirror. But director Edgar G. Ulmer’s rough-edged and surprisingly raw adaptation of Martin Goldsmith’s eponymous novel has become a long-shot success a story: a cult favorite cum certified classic.

A throwaway line in the opening scene—”Can I get change for a dime?”—pretty pithily sums up Detour’s aesthetic of impoverished improvisation. “Nobody had ever made good pictures faster and for less money than Edgar Ulmer,” wrote Peter Bogdanovich. Ulmer’s direction jury-rigs copious amounts of stock footage, cleverly recycled camera set-ups,  and several bravura experiments in scene dissection into a remarkably unified style, its seams concealed beneath generous amounts of artificial fog and smoothed over by the unifying narration of its anti-hero’s fatalistic voice-over.

That perversely romantic monologue is brought to life with an almost unintentional authenticity by low-rent leading man Tom Neal. A struggling actor beset by personal problems, Neal plays the part of Al Roberts, a struggling musician beset by personal problems. Staring into a bottomless cup of coffee at a truck-stop diner, Al plunges into a solipsistic reverie as he recounts his personal tragedy. The camera tracks in on his glassy stare—the diner literally fades away, lights dim and background noise subsides—and tunnels straight into his tormented soul. Drunk on self-pity, bitterly savoring the blank poetry of Goldsmith’s hardboiled fatalism, Al flashes back to his life as an underappreciated musical prodigy abandoned by his girlfriend. Trying to his escape his sad sack existence, he follows her cross-country to Hollywood, thumbing his way through the empty heart of America. No sooner does he find a ride to lift him straight through to the Coast than the pill-popping driver, Charles Haskell Jr. (Edmund McDonald), mysteriously knocks off, collapsing in a ditch by the side of the road. Afraid he’ll be fingered for a murder he didn’t commit (if you take his word for it), Al switches clothes and wallets, assumes Haskell’s identity and speeds off in his car. It seems a straight shot to Hollywood, but the biggest detour lies up ahead.

You can call her Vera.

Hard as nails and as vicious as a wildcat, Ann Savage’s “Vera” (we’re never quite sure if that’s her real name) is the baddest bad girl and the craziest bitch classical film noir ever produced. “She looked like she was thrown off the crummiest freight train in the world,” Roberts explains. “Yet in spite of that, I got the impression of beauty, not the beauty of a movie actress, mind you, or the beauty you dream about with your wife, but a natural beauty. A beauty that’s almost homely, because it’s so real.” Oh boy is it real. Voice pitched to the sound of a boiling teakettle, consonants crackling with the rat-a-tat-tat of a Tommy Gun, Savage is a visceral force. Far more fatale than femme, she has little of the intoxicating allure radiated by noir screen sirens like Veronica Lake or Rita Hayworth (though Vera would take Gilda in a fight hands down, making sure to scratch up that pretty face along the way) but she has something else entirely. “I knew Charlie Haskell, mister, and you’re not Charlie Haskell…Where did you hide the body?!” Dum dum dummm! But just relax, Vera assures him. (”Shattup!”) There’s no need to explain. (”Skippit!”) There’s a way we can both benefit from this. (”Where’s the roll!”) She uses her upper hand to blackmail Roberts into selling the automobile as Charlie Haskell. “One last time,” hopes Roberts, and he can escape this nightmare for ever.

But of course, from the diner stool where Roberts sits, where he can clearly see “that don’t-make-me-laugh expression on your smug faces,” he knows all too well that this fatalistic fever-dream will haunt him for the rest of his life. So too for the viewers of Detour.

* * *

Noah Isenberg is Associate Professor of Literary Studies at Eugene Lang College and a member of the Committee on Liberal Studies at the New School for Social Research. He is the author of the BFI Film Classics monograph on Detour, a critical gloss written with an economy and unaffected but punchy prose style worthy of the film itself. Reproduced below are excerpts an interview in November 2009.

Martin Goldsmith

Paul Brunick: I’ve never read the original novel of Detour by Martin Goldsmith. Are you a fan?

Noah Isenberg: Yeah, I think it’s a good read; a “fast stepping little number,” as they NYT described it on release in ‘39. It is what you would expect, that kind of snappy prose. I think Goldsmith was good at dialogue in general. Ulmer perhaps less so; he was certainly less able to craft dialogue in that particular vernacular, and so for that he drew heavily on both the novel and the version of the screenplay he had asked Goldsmith to work up.

This has caused a lot of problems for the reception of the film. Basically there are the Goldsmith loyalists and there are the Ulmer loyalists, and ne’er the twain shall meet. In a well known interview with Bogdanovich, Ulmer refers to it as “that horrible little book” or something along those lines, quite harsh; though it’s obvious that he was quite taken with it at that time.

Sometime in the ’90s there was an issue of Scenario magazine that reprinted Goldsmith’s screenplay in full, which is pretty long, impractically long for a PRC production. And that is preceded by a sort of critical corrective that claims that Goldsmith is the true auteur of Detour. So the battle rages on.

PB: There’s something about Detour that’s always reminded me of a Twilight Zone episode. The almost mystical estrangement of everyday Americana, Tom Neal’s portentous voice-over about Fate as this kind of metaphysical literary irony. It turns out that Martin Goldsmith went on to write a couple episodes of the series.

NI: I didn’t know that. He had trouble working in Hollywood because of his political views, his fiercely anti-capitalist politics, which manifest themselves in Detour, and even more so in the novel where the critique of consumer culture and of Hollywood is extremely caustic and bitter. So during the Red Scare of the ’50s and HUAC and all that, he may have had some trouble finding employment, though I’m not sure. He eventually wound his way down to Mexico. Much of his life remains shrouded in mystery.

Edgar Ulmer

NI: There are a lot of very self-conscious moves in the film. Ben Kline, who worked with Ulmer at PRC before as his cinematographer¾his use of that subjective camera, particularly in that very famous scene where Al discovers Vera’s murder, that focusing in and out on various objects that sort of retell the story as we’ve just now seen it, all filtered through Al’s panicked subjectivity. That’s a very effective scene and it was done with such limited means. All he’s doing is going in and out of focus. But at the critical moment we’re able to gain the same tormented, traumatized vantage point. It’s very well done.

PB: Yeah, that sequence is amazing and the one in the diner where they tunnel into his empty stare and enter his subjective space. And then the camera then tracks down on the coffee cup where suddenly the perspective is forced—I mean, they do swap out his regular coffee cup with an oversized prop, right?

NI: I’m so glad you asked that question. For me as someone who is very concerned with what Ulmer imports from the old country. [Ulmer emigrated from Vienna in 1924.] There’s been a lot of discussion of how much film noir is a continuation of German Expressionism. I don’t think there’s a strong causal continuity, so much, but there are formal and stylistic affinities which are obvious. And that coffee cup, he seems to have pulled that out of his Weimar-era bag of tricks. That was designed specifically for that shot. It’s totally a throwback to the canted angles and larger than life objects which Expressionism uses to externalize the psychic landscape of the hero. We become engulfed in his memories as he cries into his coffee cup.

PB: I once heard someone claim that Raoul Coutard’s famous coffee-cup shot in Godard’s Two or Three Things…was an homage to that moment, which I’m not sure about. But Godard really was a fan of Ulmer.

NI: Right that’s where it all starts, Ulmer’s critical renewal begin with the New Wave boys. If I’m not mistaken didn’t Godard dedicate one of his films to Ulmer?

PB: I’m not sure. Was Breathless dedicated to PRC? Or no, that was Monogram.

NI: Oh I remember, Detective was dedicated to Ulmer!

PB: (laughter) Ah, I think you’re right . It was Ulmer and [Clint] Eastwood and someone else [John Cassavettes]. Anyways, Truffaut was a fan as well.

NI: Even more, it seems. The Naked Dawn especially, which provided the basis for his Jules et Jim, which then caused some legal trouble for him down the road.

PB: Right, right. In that Naked Dawn review he says something like, “Ulmer’s tender humanity for his characters reminds us inevitably of Jean Renoir and Max Ophuls.” A comparison which would’ve sounded even stranger in its time, but captures something.

NI: I mean, the people who came out of that Cahiers scene, they wanted so much to champion these Hollywood genre directors that.. There’s some comments by Godard later in life where he expresses an anxiety about championing these underappreciated figures, that he may have ignored the true greats, so to speak. And Ulmer was one of those more marginal directors who definitely earned their praise the hard way, but in some cases that praise is just so high that it feels like overkill.  I have one of those Cahiers anthologies, and there’s one piece where Godard discusses this specifically in relation to Ulmer. Was all of this praise really earned, or we just trying to make a point? And they were trying to make a point, of course. It was meant to be polemical.

PB: Right, well that was the house style of Cahiers, or at least of the Young Turks generation. Which is probably why their work traveled so well, becomes their enthusiasms were so exultant and their pans so merciless. There was certainly lots of nuance in their writing as well, but they loved these boldly hyperbolic assertions. And in a way, you could say that their response to—whatever you want to call them¾philistines or reactionaries was, in its own way, just as reactionary.

NI: I think that’s right. But they did open a lot of doors, so…

Ann Savage and Tom Neal

NI: I have a real soft spot in my heart for Ann Savage. It’s easy to dismiss her performance as shrill and over the top, but she was ahead of her time. You wouldn’t find a female character who’s that aggressive, who’s that charged in an A-list film of that era. It would have been absolutely inconceivable.

PB: Right, you’d have to go back to pre-Code films (Clara Bow in Call Her Savage) or skip ahead a decade to the final years of classical film noir (the scheming wife [Marie Windsor] in The Killing or the bad girls in Kiss Me Deadly) to find someone who even comes close. At its most hysterical, Savage’s performance also reminds me of Joan Crawford and Bette Davis at the heights of their Camp grotesquerie.

NT: Guy Maddin wrote a Savage tribute in The Guardian in which he relates this anecdote (I have no idea whether it’s true or not) that Bettie Davis was apparently so unnerved by Ann Savage’s performance as Vera that she literally fled the theater.

PB: It just got too REAL, I guess. Generally the problem in B pictures is that the poverty of resources works to disrupt the illusionism; the cheapness of the sets or the uneven performances pull us out of the story and the film becomes a documentary of its own production. But Ulmer is pretty clever about getting around this. He picks a story with a down-and-out ambience that actually gains from the ersatz production values. And the same with the performances; Tom Neal was a hack actor with a lot of personal problems and he plays a hack musician with a lot of personal problems; that furrowed brow has a Bressonian authenticity.

NT: I’m sure you know this anecdote that’s been told again and again by film noir fans. In a strange case of life imitating art, Tom Neal ended up murdering his wife, who had been having a fling with Franchot Tone. A good PR department couldn’t come up with anything better than that. So I see what you’re saying, that Savage and Neal are not so much acting as inhabiting their bottom-of-the-barrel B-movie actor lives.

PB: And also their known on-again, off-again sexual history.

NT: Oh for sure! There’s one comment Savage made in her interview with Muller that I adore. Apparently during her and Neal’s first film together, he showed up on the set one day with his crew in tow, went to give her a kiss on the cheek and then just buried his tongue in her ear. Savage responded by giving him a knuckle sandwich in the face. So when Muller revisits this anecdote in the interview, Savage says, “I wasn’t about to let anyone play me cheap!” That seems more Vera than Ann–or maybe they’re one in the same. She was a very independent minded actress. There’s a B-Western called Renegade Girl where you get to see her continue in this vain; though the transfer quality is poor, there is a version of it in that Ann Savage box set [Apology For Murder]. It’s a lot of fun.

PB: Yeah, Ulmer definitely likes that kind of character. Heddy Lamar in Strange Woman, for instance. Wow.

Hollywood and the Hays Office

PB: What were the interactions like between Ulmer and the Hays office? Nowadays we tend to think about ratings and censorship in reference to explicit sex and violence, but the original Production Code was much more elaborate in its ethical imperative and proscriptions.

NI: Right. Like for example when they go to the hotel, their characters check in as Mr. and Mrs. Haskell; they could not be seen as an unmarried couple cohabitating in a hotel room; the Hays office wanted them to check in separately.

When they get into the room, the sexual tension is almost suffocating but its all coded. She tells him she’s going to take a bath first which is a way of saying, “I’m going to get naked.” Then they have this tense exchange in front of a Murphy bed which is spinning around between them; Savage says, “Do you know how to work it?”; Neal replies, “I invented it.” It’s coded but just barely. That pretty racy for 1945. And then the final very clear pass she makes is when she puts her hand on his shoulder and says, “I’m going to bed.” They sent back notes on all of these points, though Ulmer compromised instead on some other points and managed to keep that scene in tact.

Interestingly a lot of notes were about the depiction of Hollywood itself, which is portrayed in a very unflattering light. It’s depicted as a place of runaway greed. The Hays office wanted to clean up the image of Hollywood itself particularly.

PB: Which is basically why the Hays office was invented: to do damage control for “Hollywood” after off-screen scandals became rallying points for the pro-censorship backlash. But what I don’t quite understand is what happens a few years after Detour, starting in the late 40s and continuing through the ’50s: there are just tons of unflattering portraits of Hollywood: The Bad and the Beautiful, Sunset Boulevard, The Big Knife, et cetera. And suddenly it’s not an issue anymore?

NI: That’s a good question, I don’t know what changes. But there’s definitely some shift.

PB: Putting Ulmer ahead of the curve.

NI: Which is true in a lot of ways. Detour was ahead of its time: a true “independent” produced in the studio era.

Kristin Naca’s first book Bird Eating Bird was selected by Yusef Komunyakaa for the National Poetry Series and published October 2009 by HarperCollins. Naca’s language is similar to her title—her poems are delicate, meticulously edited, and at times ravenously devour the reader. She takes us on a road trip from Pittsburgh to the Philippines, Mexico to Nebraska. We enter her intensely personal world though familial anecdotes written in Spanish and English that illuminate her multicultural background with tenderness and humor in poems with titles like “Grocery Shopping with my Girlfriend Who is Not Asian,” and “Uses for Spanish in Pittsburgh.” She also explores her sexuality and relationships with women in the poems “Heart like a Clock” and “Rear Window.” Her fresh and much-needed voice is that of the American grappling with the supposed idea of our country’s “melting pot” mentality, which at times seems filled only with white bread and vanilla ice cream.

Kristin Naca is a CFD Fellow at Macalester College in Minnesota where she teaches courses in poetics, Asian American and Latino poetry, and creative writing. She received her Ph.D. in English from University of Nebraska (2008), M.F.A. in poetry from University of Pittsburgh (2003), and M.A. in English Linguistics from University of Cincinnati (2000). Her poems have appeared in Harpur Palate, Indiana Review, Bloom, and Rio Grande Review. She has been a member of Sandra Cisneros’ Macondo Workshop in San Antonio, TX, since 2002.

Susie DeFord: Your first book Bird Eating Bird was selected by Yusef Komunyakaa for the National Poetry Series and published by HarperCollins. You also got to interview Komunyakaa for MTVU. Will you tell us about this whole experience?

Kristin Naca: When I was told about the prize, I was in the middle of moving to Minneapolis from San Antonio, Texas. I was in Minneapolis a few days before and MTV called and told me I had a day to compose interview questions that they would review. The producers added three questions to my list, in which I was to ask Yusef why he picked my manuscript for the prize, what kind of advice he had for me, etc. I thought their questions would be completely mortifying to ask. Then, filming the actual episode was strange because they tell you what to do and you just do it, knowing you have no control of what the end result will be. But once I finally got to the interview, the world finally slowed down. Yusef is such a careful, thoughtful person and, as he speaks, his sonorous voice makes you believe you’re inside a poem with him. I asked my questions—embarrassing ones first—and he answered directly and surely. We talked about performance, about his poetry heroes, his writing process, and how the subject of death continually cycles through his poems. The questions MTV made me ask really helped me understand how he personally connected with my collection. It was maybe one of the most thrilling experiences of my life. I flew back to Minnesota in a completely different space; I could hear my own thoughts again.

SD: Bird Eating Bird is very meticulously written and edited. How long did you work on this book?

KN: I salvaged seven poems from my MFA manuscript and composed the rest over a three-year period, in Nebraska and Mexico City. Then, I revised that group of poems for about three years. In the last year, I was working with comments from poet Joy Harjo, whom I had met at the Macondo Writers Workshop. It took me a while to digest her feedback. It was mostly unspoken or nonverbal. That’s the best way I can think to describe it. Somehow, her feedback inspired me to become the enemy of my poems. That’s when I did the most aggressive work. I wrote from scratch, over and over. It was like doing reverse taxidermy, refitting the poems’ skins around clouds of ideas.

SD: In Bird Eating Bird you have some poems written in Spanish. Have you always written in Spanish and English?

KN: Spanish was an experiment for me. I’m not a great speaker. But I have a desire to learn more about my family from Puerto Rico and Spain, as well as the roles that Spanish colonial myth play in my being who I am, in my family’s inception, etc. I was reading poems and taking courses in Spanish. In writing the poems, I wanted to build emotional connection to the words. It seemed like the decent strategy, since so much of my life takes place between pages of books. I also believed working and reworking the poems would help me build emotional attachment to vocabulary. Good writing comes from the body. The poems document my mouth conforming to the sounds of words. I also tried to work with the limited vocabulary I had. So, the poems reflect what I don’t know. Like, I repeat words, record my awkward / non-fluent phrasing, and when I sound out words that becomes the content of the poem. A fluent speaker can see how much I stumble around. I know some readers are hostile to that idea. But honestly, how else do we learn, but by being clumsy?

SD: In your poem “Uses for Spanish in Pittsburgh” you quoted relatives who said, “Spanish means there’s another person inside you.” Can you speak about this?

KN: My father told this to my brother and me as children. He meant, you can speak to twice as many people and inhabit other worlds. But he also talked about the harshness of the culture, and of his family, around speaking Spanish: not polluting it with code-switching in English, and the traditional (or violent) catechism of learning grammar, la letra con sangre entra. I think this is one reason he wasn’t so hot to teach us Spanish. Because it hurt. That decision, though, left this gaping hole in my understanding of my own experiences, particularly in relation to him. It meant there was someone inside him I couldn’t know or perceive, unless I learned more about where he came from. In the same way, as a young person, you know when your existence is complicated. I wanted to give myself the tools to reexamine existing. My parents believed that it would be easier for my brother and me—as mixed race, multiethnic kids—to just skip that part. My curiosity just never went away.

SD: Bird Eating Bird has a section all about houses. What inspired you to write about the concept of houses?

KN: I think the actual thing, house, was probably a product of my reading House on Mango Street. Author Sandra Cisneros told me this story, one, about class discrimination, and how she had a strong reaction to Bachelard’s A Poetics of Space in MFA workshop. In all the lyrical, theoretical meditation in Poetics of Space she said, Bachelard left out the rats. I wanted to borrow from both traditions, to write about growing up around a blue-collar town, that doesn’t exist anymore, Arlington, Virginia. The Arlington I knew was erased. What’s there now is a monument to disparity, in comparison. Because no issue is more ubiquitous than class difference in the U.S., nothing is more deliberate, poetic, and political than the ways in which we do and don’t talk about class. Class and colors were my ways I hoped to talk about space. My background in linguistics, too, heavily influenced my meditations on the letter ‘h.’

SD: You teach Latino and Asian American Poetics at Macalester College. Who is one Latino writer many people have not been exposed to that you would recommend and why?

KN: Generally, I like to encourage readers to check out what’s current. Paul Martínez Pompa’s My Kill Adore Him is the most recent Letras Latinas Andrés Montoya prize-winner. Two forthcoming collections, Francisco Aragón’s Glow of Our Sweat and Carmen Gimenez-Smith’s Odalisque in Pieces, are great examples of current evolutions in Latina/o poetics. Looking at two to three collections is a reliable way to approach the conversation taking place, in particular the complex modes of identity and edgy poetics that these poets interject.

SD: Who is one Asian American writer many people have not been exposed to that you would recommend and why?

KN: I’ll stick with Filipino poets: Vince Gotera, Luisa Igloria, Nick Carbó, and Eileen Tabios. Gotera and Igloria write poems that thoroughly, brazenly complicate who we are as a nation and as an empire. I also recommend people read Carbó’s blog for poems that celebrate the every-day with depth and compassion, and Tabios’ blog for up to the minute conversations about poetics.

SD: What are you working on now?

KN: I’m working on two, sort-of historical projects. One is a poem collection in various traditional forms. A prophesy is all I can say about it. Second is translations of a border poet, whose existence was left to the dust, literally. A friend found a heaping pile of their uncle’s manuscripts in his mother’s attic. This poet had a sixth-grade education, at best. His poetics strike me as elaborate and contemporary, though he was writing in the 50s.

Bird Eating Bird is out now from Harper Perennial.

Ann Lauterbach. Photo by Eve Thoreau.

With the National Book Awards ceremony approaching this Wednesday, we’ve filled our homepage with nominees and winners of the prestigious awards from our archives throughout the decades. Head over to our site for interviews with Joyce Carol Oates, Jonathan Franzen, and a brand new Web Exclusive interview with 2009 National Book Award for Poetry nominee Ann Lauterbach.

The printer is a busy area in any office. With different desks sending different jobs sometimes orders tend to accumulate, get crossed, or collide. At our printer the past and present meet…archive jobs are sent sometimes simultaneously as correspondence or layout plans for future issues. Though we try to avoid it, there is always the chance for some jobs to be mistakenly printed on scrap, letterhead, or even labels. (For archive proofing we always try to print on scrap. The already-been-printed versos never cease to surprise, cryptic office tarot.) Just yesterday I was printing to proof Reena Jana’s interview with Jennie Livingston, and the first page was printed on a sheet of labels. Instantly, the archive became wearable, collectible, and détourn-able. Following is a hyper-linked collage of the sticker propostion.

In discussing some guerilla sticker tactics, Clinton Krute and I quickly took to the street to tag with our custom made archive labels.

Click on the images below to be linked to the BOMB interviews the stickers have been excerpted from.

Shakespeare and Company. Paris, France.

Shakespeare and Company, the legendary English-language bookstore on Paris’s Left Bank, recently got a facelift. Several faces, in fact. Fourteen illustrated portraits of the Lost and Beat Generation writers who once frequented the store—and its predecessor—now adorn the staircase wall leading up to the second floor library of the bookshop. On a recent visit there, I caught up with illustrator Joanna Walsh, who goes by the nom de plume “Badaude,” as she put the finishing touches on her mural, using only a pencil, Posca paint markers, and a touch of gilt for enhancements like picture frames, hanging wires, wall tacks, and an underlying wallpaper text design courtesy of James Joyce.

Paul Morris: Your illustrations are an interesting fusion of image and text. How does your experience as an artist inform your appreciation for literature in general—and for literary figures in particular?

Joanna Walsh: I don’t think I could ever call myself an “artist” without some kind of qualification: it’s a term I’m shy of. I’ve always defined myself as a commercial artist or illustrator, and my earlier work was all commissioned press illustration. Now most of my work is self-generated (I’m writing/drawing a book about London which will be published by the Tate, UK, and another book about Paris). My drawing always relates to writing, whether because I’m responding to a text or mixing my own writing and pictures. Writers are also “commercial” artists—books have to sell to a certain number of people in order to be published. This doesn’t mean that I think “blockbusters” are better than “literary fiction” because they sell more, but I am interested in the knife-edge balancing act whereby writers write what they have to in such a way that enough readers will want to go out and buy a copy.

In drawing the Shakespeare & Company writers—looking at the way they presented themselves in the reference photos I used-I became interested in how the image of being, and the story of becoming, a published writer in Paris was so central to the myth their lives; a myth so hugely attractive it frequently became their subject matter (Quartet, A Moveable Feast, Tropic of Cancer). This is why I chose the quote from Ulysses (full excerpt at bottom), hidden in the wallpaper design of the mural, in which Stephen Dedalus remembers his “Latin Quarter hat,” “puce gloves,” and other “Paris fads” with which he—and no doubt his hipster-goatee’d creator—furnished his Paris persona.

PM: I was wondering about that “wallpaper.” Ulysses was originally published by the founder of the first Shakespeare and Company, Sylvia Beach, in 1922; the bookstore published several later editions after the novel was banned in the U.S. Were you grounding the mural in the literary history of the Lost Generation writers who frequented the store after World War I?

JW: I’ve included authors from every decade of the 20th century and could happily have drawn others (for instance, Smollet for his very funny “Travels through France and Italy”—he hated Paris, but then he hated most of continental Europe). It was logical to include writers connected with the current Shakespeare and Company, founded by George Whitman, but also with Beach’s original bookshop. I wanted to highlight the shop’s legacy of supporting writers, which the present owner Sylvia Whitman [daughter of George] continues.

The focus on the “Lost Generation” via the Joyce quote is almost coincidental. Sylvia wanted to include poetry in the mural but we failed to find an appropriate English-language poem about Paris. Joyce’s writing is closer to poetry than that of most of the other writers I drew. I have a few theories about why there are so few English-language poems about Paris: a) Poets are even poorer than prose writers so don’t travel; b) Most poets’ work is deeply connected with their native landscape; and c) Poets, unlike prose writers, are less likely take jobs in journalism or other professions which encourage foreign travel. Or maybe it’s something more fundamental to the nature of poetry and poets, or prose and prose-writers: take your pick…

PM: What’s your connection to Shakespeare and Company? How did you come to paint a mural on the staircase wall there? It is prime real estate, some of the only wall space in the store not dedicated to displaying books.

JW: I first met Sylvia about a month previously at a party to celebrate the launch of the Paris issue of FiveDials magazine, for which I did an “illustration essay” (like a photo essay but with drawings) about the homeless in Paris.

Oddly, before the FiveDials party, I’d always avoided going into Shakespeare & Company fearing I might find a literary tourist shrine, but the shop was full of fresh ideas and projects. What Sylvia’s doing there is really exciting—a constant program of events involving established and new authors, and a real atmosphere of improvised community. I met so many interesting writers and other people just hanging around the shop, there for the day, the week, the year…

I was pretty excited to be drawing on the walls of a 17th century Parisian building where some very interesting things had happened. As for “prime real estate”-the staircase is so narrow I don’t think it could be used for display without blocking the way upstairs. In fact, the whole upper floor of the bookshop is, refreshingly, a “non-sales” space dedicated to George Whitman’s library where customers can sit and read but not buy.

PM: Was it a just blank wall before you started, or did you have to paint over what was already there in order to begin?

JW: Here’s a picture of what I started with [see slideshow], and one of what was there before. The original photographs pinned up on the wall inspired me to make something similar but more playful: a trompe d’oeil art gallery of writers’ portraits complete with appropriate frames.

PM: What kind of research did you have to do in selecting your subjects? And when you finally had your list of writers sorted out, what was your approach to locating the right archival image to use as source material?

JW: Because Shakespeare & Company is an English-language bookshop, and because of its links to the Beat writers, as well as to Joyce, Hemingway and others, the portraits had to be English-language writers who had written about, or lived in, Paris. I looked at lots of photos, mostly online. I already knew what most of the writers looked like, except Edith Wharton. I included her because I love the French sections of “The Custom of the Country” and was delighted to find that she looked exactly as I’d hoped: a solid, square-jawed Gibson Girl with a wicked eye. With the other writers, I used purely personal selection of references based mostly on the hope that I might be able to make them recognizable to other people.

But then I became interested in how the writers presented themselves to be photographed. I came across lots of photos of Jean Rhys in the pose I used to draw her here, with her chin resting on her folded hands. I wondered whether this was a stock “cute” actress pose (she was an chorus girl, having failed to make it in speaking parts on the English stage due to her heavy Jamaican accent), but it’s very much undermined by the crazy determination of her expression. Djuna Barnes, who was also an illustrator, dresses for the camera and her whole persona is very graphic—as stylized as her writing.

PM: The picture frames you’ve drawn vary from writer to writer, some ornate, others rustic, and some hang simply from a tack. I’m assuming the frame styles say as much about the perceived public image of the writer as the portraits do themselves. How did you decide on what frames to use for which writers?

JW: Yeah, I had fun with those, but not very highbrow fun. Hemingway has a rough-hewn timber frame; Fitzgerald, a shiny Art-Deco job; and Wharton, Belle Epoque curlicues. They’re more a reference to the historical period associated with each writer than anything else.

PM: How long did the entire project take you to complete?

JW: I worked the way I always do: quick bursts of thinking mixed with enough time to let the ideas percolate (usually while I’m doing something else which makes it pretty difficult to quantify). I started thinking about the project a few weeks before I started drawing. I did a couple of rough sketches the week before, and the work at the bookshop took around a week.

PM: Oftentimes, visiting writers and artists stay at the bookstore during their stay—did you opt to sleep there during the week you were drawing?

JW: When I arrived Michael Smith, the Giro Playboy, was already in residence in the famous writers’ room (the shop traditionally provides basic “writer in residence” accommodation with no remit, which is so often what writers need). There were also about four or five “tumbleweeds” (wandering writers and other lit types who can stay in the bookshop in exchange for a little work) sleeping and working on the upstairs benches. I’d have liked to. Maybe another time…

PM: Do you have plans to do more illustration work at the bookstore, or elsewhere in Paris? Do you think that the booksellers in Paris would welcome it?

JW: I’m working on more designs for Sylvia: a bookbag and bookmark for the shop, and also drawings for the literature for next year’s “Festival & Company,” based at the bookshop, which will be a celebration of political writing. These “extras,” especially the “eco-friendly” shopping bag, seem a little Anglo-Saxon. I haven’t seen any other independent bookshops in Paris offering this sort of thing, perhaps because they feel more secure than independents in the Anglo world, who have to battle the retail giants.

PM: BOMB readers are most interested in the creative process: how artists and writers think and talk about their own work is of primary concern to us. What can you tell us about your own process, and your progress, as your style has evolved?

JW: I’m somewhere between being a writer as an illustrator. I look with envy at other artists’ sketchbooks which are full of pictures and are beautiful objects. Mine tend to be pages of scribbled notes with the odd sketch thrown in. As I get more excited about something, my notes become less legible. I can spend hours later trying to decipher them. Making work, I use my notes along with (bad) photos I’ve taken for visual reference. Some artists have a natural eye for a snapshot but I quite like that I’m not a good photographer: it means I don’t have to worry about making good photos that might become something in themselves.

Nevertheless I continue to prefer working with a combination of writing and drawing to writing alone. With books, however experimental, you start at page one. Or, if you don’t, you start conscious of the fact you’re making a personal-or guided-deviation. We don’t have rules for looking at pictures in this way, though I don’t think we’re very conscious of this being something extraordinary. When you see a picture, you get the whole thing at once, or you start with a point that particularly grabs you. Though my work on www.badaude.typepad.com tells stories, you can start at any point in the picture: they work in a different way from the way writing does. So I’m neither a writer nor an artist. I’m never sure how to categorize most of the work I do in under one sentence. I like that.

Paul Morris is the General Manager of Digital Media at BOMB Magazine.

View a slideshow of the process of Walsh’s mural below:

Lost, Beat, and X Generations collide in the original photo gallery that adorned the wall of the staircase of Shakespeare and Company Bookstore, on Paris’ Left Bank.

Tabula rasa: This is what it looked like before the artist began her mural.

Djuna Barnes getting sketched.

A gallery of framed portraits begins to appear: Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Jean Rhys, Henry Miller, and Djuna Barnes.

Writers getting defined.

Portrait of the artist drawing a portrait artist (Joanna Walsh using a heavy marker define her sketch of William Burroughs, also on screen).

The wall, and the wallpaper, emerge, with a faint outline of the Joyce quote visible as a ghostly sketch.

Anaïs Nin.

Jean Rhys.

Henry Miller

Djuna Barnes

James Baldwin.

A section of the finished mural.

Another vantage of the finished mural.

Yet one last vantage of the finished mural.

The full text quote that appears embedded in the wallpaper of Joanna’s mural is from the “Proteus” section of James Joyce’s Ulysses and appears in its entirety below:

“My Latin quarter hat. God, we simply must dress the character. I want puce gloves. You were a student, weren’t you? Of what in the other devil’s name? Paysayenn. P. C. N., you know: physiques, chimiques et naturelles. Aha. Eating your groatsworth of mou en civet, fleshpots of Egypt, elbowed by belching cabmen. Just say in the most natural tone: when I was in Paris, boul’ Mich’, I used to. Yes, used to carry punched tickets to prove an alibi if they arrested you for murder somewhere. Justice. On the night of the seventeenth of February 1904 the prisoner was seen by two witnesses. Other fellow did it: other me. Hat, tie, overcoat, nose. Lui, c’est moi. You seem to have enjoyed yourself.”

All photos courtesy of Lauren Goldenberg of Shakespeare and Company and also Paul Morris.

An installment of WNYC’s signature series The NEXT New York Conversation, Pen America’s Breakout: Voices From The Inside began with a brief introduction about Pen’s Prison Writing Program and its involvement in prisons by Jessica Hagedorn whose novels include Dream Jungle; The Gangster of Love, and Dogeaters, and then moved swiftly into readings of poems, stories, journal entries, and the memoirs submitted to Pen’s Prison Writing Competitions by incarcerated people. The evening’s readers included established writers and performers such as Mary Gaitskill, Eric Bogosian, Lemon Anderson, Sean Wilsey, Patricia Smith, Marie Ponsot, and Jamal Joseph as well as Dawud Gonzalez, a Brooklyn based poet whose heartfelt reading of an untitled poem bookended the readings like a stoic rendition of Taps.

Of the readers, only three spent time in prison, and the distinctions between the other reader’s lives and the ones they were presenting gave the evening an air of necessary disjunction, raising the possibility that the incarcerated poets, memoirists, and fiction writers whose work was being read could be anyone: a celebrated short-story writer like Mary Gaitskill, a distinguished novelist, playwright, and actor like Eric Bogosian, the Chair of Columbia University’s Graduate Film Division like Jamal Joseph, or even the iconic poet Marie Ponsot, an 88-year-old woman, and the vivacious sage of the evening as well as the author of the forthcoming Easy.

When the readings were complete, Jackson Taylor, The Director of Pen’s Prison Writing Program and author of the soon to be released novel, The Blue Orchard, introduced an audio clip of Kenneth Hartman, author of Mother California and an inmate in the California Correctional System. Hartman was supposed to participate in the evening on a live feed, but at the last minute the connection was abruptly disallowed by California Corrections, so what was heard was a recorded phone conversation between Hartman and his publisher. Hartman spoke about rehabilitation, and how one can be literally and figuratively freed or saved from prison through education and the written word.

Afterwards, Jackson used Hartman’s perspective to jump into a brief interview with Lemon Anderson and Jamal Joseph about the relationship between writing and imprisonment. Anderson, the star of the hit one man play, The County of Kings, admitted that he had not written much while incarcerated, but upon his release he found writing, or it found him, and it awakened in him a sense of purpose. A poet, playwright and screenwriter, and a former Black Panther who founded the Impact Repertory Theatre and served nearly a decade in state and federal prison, Joseph told a story about how a play he wrote and the theatre group he led in prison had transcended gang culture and prison turf wars.

The writing of incarcerated men and women shared at Breakout: Voices From The Inside was heartfelt and humorous, self-reflective and exacting. It demonstrated that prison is a physical environment as much as it is something that infects one’s mind and soul. However, the evening also conveyed something greater. It proved that the frustrations and sadness prison imposes on its inhabitants cannot suppress the human need to bear witness, to speak a truth, to sing poetry and story in celebration of the individual life and the lives of those within one’s community.

Matthew Aaron Goodman is a writer/author living in Brooklyn.  His most recent novel, Hold Love Strong, was published by Simon and Schuster (Arpil 2009). His website is holdlovestrong.com

R.D. Gluibizzi; ROOT COUPLE; Ink on paper; 12 x 9 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Pierogi Flat Files.

Peter Moysaenko: Adrienne Rich—hearkening perhaps the spirit of late ’60s feminist thought—has intimated that poetry, by virtue of being “root-tangled in the grit of human arrangements and relationships,” figures as a necessarily political medium. But is such a claim only a willful conflation of connotation: to what degree may a poem be expected to persuade public policy, to effectively address the demands of a massed citizenry, to significantly alter systems of government and economy; and anyway, should such achievements remain as any of its concern?

Yael Shinar: To me, it is obvious that poetry is political. I am a student of Adrienne Rich’s work.

When I read, I am open and willing to be transformed; when I am transformed, my political life is transformed, including my intimate relationships and my voting in elections.

Who or what transforms me? I don’t know. Transformation occurs as an interaction among several parts. Adrienne Rich helped me to see that.

I met Adrienne Rich, briefly, in 2002. I said, “Thank you for your work. Your writing changed my life.”

She said, “No. You changed your life—you opened a book.”

Midday
for children in Gaza, 2006

by Yael Shinar

One
at a time,
limbs
distended
from their tending parts.

As in,
a child was wiping his asshole,
when he heard a sound he hadn’t heard before
and thought
to lick the wound of his right shoulder

(like he licks the juice off roasted lamb,
shredded by his mother with a knife,
while he waits
with spongy bread).
His belly

so full now, though,
with a smell he’s never smelled before,
and he’s not sure his arm’s
the only thing gone.
He thinks

some walls
between his bladder and his belly
button may have torn away, as well.
His abdomen feels open,
like a monk’s cave

in the desert;
like dust,
his insides swirling out,
filling God’s great nose.
Then he screams.

It is a word
he has heard before,
but he never knew before
why
it was a word.

Yael Shinar was born in California and now lives near Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she is working towards a degree of Master of Divinity at Harvard University. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Mid-American Review, The Drunken Boat, Slush Pile, Beloit Poetry Journal, Meridian, Third Coast, and other publications.

For more on R.D. Gliubizzi, visit the artist’s page at Pierogi Flat Files.

ArtWeLove.com’s news digest, now also available in email form, brings a comprehensive roundup of the week’s art developments to your digital doorstep. If you aren’t signed up, simply click here. ArtWeLove helps people explore art on their own terms, by suggesting artists, artworks, and exhibitions based on the art they love.

One of hundreds of beautifully illustrated letters written by Vincent van Gogh to his brother and others, newly translated and available online. ; Via the Van Gogh Museum

It was another busy week in the art world, with Dia announcing plans to return to New York City, the Impressionist and Modern auctions, and a plethora of other developments.

VAN GOGH HAS MAIL, HIDDEN CARAVAGGIO FOUND, & THE WHITE HOUSE NIXES A PAINTING

In an addition to art history that is already being hailed as indispensable, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam has released a comprehensive new collection of Vincent van Gogh’s letters, allowing the artist to tell his story in his own vivid, direct terms.(Read on.)

DIA ANNOUNCES NYC SITE, GUGGENHEIM BILBAO PONDERS OFFSHOOT, & THE PINCHUK PLANS NEW KIEV CENTER

The most welcome news of the week came from the Dia Art Foundation, which revealed that it has finally found the site for a new Manhattan home after an obstacle-riddled search. (Read on.)

THE ASHMOLEAN FRESHENS UP, THE MET PLANS NEW GALLERIES, & THE NEW MUSEUM FACES CRITICISM

Meanwhile, Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology - the oldest public museum - reopened after a multimillion dollar renovation by Rick Mather Architects that added 39 sleek modern galleries. (Read on.)

NEW CURATOR JOINS THE BARNES, DONALD JUDD TO GET CATALOGUE RAISONEE, & SAM TAYLOR-WOOD LANDS A TEENAGE FIANCE

In assorted news, the Barnes Foundation has announced the appointment of Judith F. Dolkart as chief curator - a fraught job considering the controversies around the foundation’s move to Philadelphia and Albert Barnes’ strict specifications of how his art should be displayed. (Read on.)

ARTISTS IN THE NEWS:

Henri Matisse

FULL NEWS DIGEST:
Follow this link for the full roundup and a list of related news articles.

Riding my bike home, I reflected on my own experiences in the bookstore: a friend selling them her entire library for $80 to help pay for her ill-advised $1200 per month loft over Peter Luger Steakhouse; me pretending to read a dense art theory book in an attempt to impress a boy who was scheduled to meet me there on a first date; and finally, buying my first issue of BOMB Magazine from them. A neighborhood hub and a welcome escape from the ubiquitous “scene,” Spoonbill and Sugartown may be one of the last institutions saving Williamsburg from becoming just another trendy strip to barhop.

What’s wrong with the following picture? “In the weeks since he’d first come to the neighborhood, he’d met a fag real-estate agent, two senile old people, a pair of stoned hippies, and a nut. (He’d also met, albeit briefly, a substantial number of Negros and Puerto Ricans and one goofy grocer from the Canary Islands, but they were not the people he was looking for, and they didn’t count.) Clearly such a collection couldn’t be a reasonable cross-section of this or any neighborhood.” The novel is as un-PC and cringe-inducing as they get, but what’s even more wrong with the picture is that, although the novel was published in 1971, it parallels the talk around current gentrification, if not in Fort Greene—it’s tapped out—perhaps Clinton Hill, Bushwick, Bed-Stuy? The list goes on …

L.J. Davis masterfully captures the cognitive dissonance of those incapable of acknowledging the consequences of their actions. Lowell is not precisely evil, he’s just self-absorbed, lost in life. Though he completes the renovation project, the joys of homeownership are forever barred to him. Somewhere down the line things go terribly wrong, but he’s such a nonentity no one even notices. Loser status intact, he’s still merely, if inaccurately, “the guy who moved to Bedford-Stuyvesant.”

—Mónica de la Torre is Senior Editor of BOMB.

A Meaningful Life is out now from NYRB Classics.

L.J. Davis will be reading at the New York Review of Books Classics 10th Anniversary Event at the Greenlight Bookstore in Fort Greene along with Jhumpa Lahiri and Matt Weiland on Friday, November 13th at 7:30pm.

Holly Goddard Jones. Image courtesy HarperCollins.

While the words girl trouble may conjure up images of teenaged girls talking on the phone about boys, please read further. Holly Goddard Jones’ debut collection Girl Trouble offers intimate character portrayals set in Roma, Kentucky. From unexpected pregnancy to murder, the characters find themselves in desperate situations which often render them helpless. These stories elucidate the loneliness embedded in a small Southern town, and in the lives of the people who fill it. Holly Goddard Jones’ stories range in voice and reflect the talents of this young, new author. Her’s is the kind of book whose characters will linger in your thoughts for days after.

Stories from Girl Trouble have previously been published in Best American Mystery Stories 2008, New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best, 2008,  New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best, 2007, The  Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Hudson Review, and Epoch.

Jaclyn Alexander: Many of the stories that appear in Girl Trouble have been previously published in various journals and anthologies. That being said, how does it feel to have your first book published?

Holly Goddard Jones: Having them in a book is certainly different from having the stories appear individually in journals, both professionally and personally. For instance, I do think that they really are a book now, not just a collection of mashed together, previously published stuff. Some of the stories have been drastically revised since they first appeared in print—in part because I’ve kept growing and evolving as a writer since I began drafting them, but also because they sometimes needed adjustments to work as components of a larger project. “Good Girl” is the oldest story in the collection, and it also became the first story in the book, so it ended up setting the tone for the book and focusing the set of themes.

It’s different too because there’s suddenly a lot of you out there, and your profile changes. When I published “Good Girl” in The Southern Review four years ago, I only heard from one reader about it. That was Jim Tomlinson, a fine writer from Kentucky, and we’re still friends. With a book, though, I’m reaching people that I didn’t think I’d ever reach, and that’s been a wonderful thing. Folks back home in Kentucky–Russellville, my hometown, and nearby Bowling Green–are reading it. The individual journals just weren’t reaching that audience.

JA: Have you always known you wanted to be a writer? When did you decide to seriously pursue writing?

HGJ: I’ve always been interested in writing, because I’ve always been an avid reader. The two went together for me from as far back as I can remember. I don’t know how serious I was, but I switched majors from journalism to English my sophomore year of college, and I knew immediately that I wanted to be on a writing track rather than a literature track. I didn’t want to teach high school. I didn’t want to be a librarian. At the time I didn’t even want to be an academic. I didn’t think very far ahead, period. I’d just gotten married and transferred to University of Kentucky, and so in a way it seemed that I was already living out an “adult” life. I didn’t think about the future, about job prospects and goals, the way I probably should have. I just wanted a college degree. Then, the semester before I graduated, I found out what an MFA program was and did a little bit of research into programs near Kentucky, and that’s how I found out about Ohio State.

JA: What process went in to choosing the order you put your stories together?

HGJ: Like I said, “Good Girl” was the oldest story in the collection, and it just seemed to set the right tone thematically, so that’s why it’s first. I think it embodies the book’s polar modes of tenderness and harshness. After that, I played with several different kinds of structures, and the book was even one story longer at an early stage. “An Upright Man,” which is almost novella length, is in the middle as an anchor. And I wanted the linked stories “Parts” and “Proof of God” to be spread far enough apart that, if the stories are read in order, “Proof of God” will come as kind of a surprise. The nice thing there, too, is that “Proof’s” the last story, so it doesn’t set up the expectation that there will be a third linked piece. It was also important to me that the two first-person POV stories not be side-by-side; it just seemed imbalanced. So in the end, a kind of thematic movement emerged. The more adult, violent stories are at the beginning and end, and the three less tragic coming-of-age stories are in the middle. The last lines of “Proof of God” seemed like the right kind of sorrowful sentiment for the book as a whole.

JA: Many of your stories have males as the central characters. Can you tell me about your title choice?

HGJ: It’s been interesting—and I’ll admit it, occasionally frustrating—to see how people have reacted to the title. There’s this knee-jerk reaction to “girl” that you don’t see to literary books with “boy” in the title: This Boy’s Life, Wonder Boys, Black Boy. The irony to me is that I chose “girl trouble” because it’s a phrase lodged in the  male point-of-view. Women don’t generally have girl trouble. At its most benign, the phrase refers to a young man’s romantic problems, and you see that concretely in “An Upright Man” and “Allegory of a Cave.” But the bigger troubles in the book are just an amplification of that disconnection between men and women, that misplaced desire. In a story like “Life Expectancy,” about a high school basketball coach who gets his star player pregnant, there’s a pleasing irony to the suggestion that he’s having “girl trouble.” The phrase trivializes it, just as men trivialize women by calling them “girls.” The climax of that story underscores this: “Josie was a girl—a woman—who would, Theo was understanding, have her way, with his help or without it.” That little moment of him checking himself was as close as this character can get to being enlightened.

But no title should require that level of explanation, and so maybe it was a misstep. I did a reading at my hometown library a few weeks ago, and the father of a guy I’d gone to school with brought me a book to sign. “He couldn’t make it, but he read your book and really liked it,” this man said. “He told me I should read it, but I told him that I’m too old to read a book about girl trouble.” I’ve gotten other reactions like that. It’s a little depressing.

JA: All of these stories are driven by characters who are plagued by a desperate loneliness. As a writer, was this a conscious choice or something that evolved naturally through your writing process?

HGJ: I don’t know how consciously I thought about the issue of loneliness specifically, though you’re right that the characters are almost all abandoned or alienated. I was aware that I was writing these little contemporary tragedies, and I was aware, too, that I wanted to write about characters with intellect and dignity, even if they’re poor-in some cases-and rural and going through difficult times. I guess it seems to me that there’s something very dignified about loneliness. And-this is personal-but I’ve always thought that there was a kind of painful ache to loving and being loved. One of the characters thinks of it as “anticipatory sorrow”: the sense that your moments of joy are shadowed by the possibility of the loss of joy.

JA: A theme that reoccurred throughout your stories was the concept of a child forming a more adult perception of his or her parent (for example, Ben in “Allegory of a Cave” or Ellen in “Theory of Realty”). Can you speak further on this?

HGJ: Several stories in the collection pair for me, and those two definitely go together. You know, they’re the only kids’ stories in the book, and I wrote them with a retrospective third person narrator so that they could have the texture and weight of the adult stories. I guess it just seems like a dangerous time in one’s growing up-the discovery not just that parents are human and can be wrong, but that they can be wrong in a way that causes you harm.

JA: Most of your stories end with characters in a similar state of despair, if not worse, than they started out in. What are you trying to say to readers through this choice?

HGJ: I tell my students that I don’t believe stories necessarily record a process of change in a character-that’s how some textbooks define the form-so much as they offer a character the possibility of change, which the character then embraces or rejects. I guess my characters often reject change. But that doesn’t seem hopeless or nihilistic to me, believe it or not. I just like tragedy as a form. I like how seriously it takes the business of living, and I like the process of catharsis. The short stories that fail to interest me-and this is purely personal-are the ones that just don’t go for much, that deliver a nice little image or subtle idea and then dissipate. I don’t want to read a book full of those. I want something to happen, and I want to feel a big emotion in response to that something, whether it’s despair or hilarity or just the sense that my intellect’s gotten a good workout.

JA: As a teacher, what concepts about writing are most important to you to get through to your students?

HGJ: I don’t think that certain concepts are more important than others, but I do think that a writer gets used to filtering problems through specific lenses. For me, that first lens, the big one, is story structure. I tend to read for conflict, balance between narrative and back story, causal connections. I want my students to see when they’ve employed an episodic or associative structure as compared to a more traditional, Aristotelian structure, not because I always advocate the latter, but because making apparent that underlying shape can help during the revision process.

The second lens is point of view: levels of psychic distance, the way retrospection or lack of can affect voice, why the story’s getting told, to whom, under what circumstances.

What I’ve discovered, though, is that these issues of craft just give you concrete language for tackling abstract problems. Recently I read a couple of student stories that another colleague had workshopped, and the students told me that so-and-so said the problem was voice or that the prose wasn’t interesting or that a character’s motive had gone unexplained. Sometimes we were identifying different issues entirely, but most often my colleague and I had sensed the same issue but were offering distinct tools for correcting it. Or, in some cases, we were offering the same tools but giving different advice about how and when to use them. To mix the metaphor up entirely, it’s like an old moment in All in the Family, when Archie and Meathead were arguing about whether a man should put on both socks and then both shoes, or one sock and one shoe followed by the other sock and shoe. “What if there’s a fire and it’s snowing outside?” one of them argued. But in the end, you end up with both shoes and both socks on, so who cares?

JA: What now—are you working on a new writing project?

HGJ: I’m working a novel and moving more slowly than I’d like, but I’m excited about it.

Holly Goddard Jones’ Girl Trouble is now available from Harper Perennial.

“‘The Ballet of The Red Shoes’ is from a fairy tale by Hans Andersen. It is the story of a young girl who is devoured with an ambition to attend a dance in a pair of red shoes. She gets the shoes and goes to the dance. For a time, all goes well and she is very happy. At the end of the evening she is tired and wants to go home. But the red shoes are not tired. In fact, the red shoes are never tired. They dance her out into the street, they dance her over the mountains and valleys, through fields and forests, through night and day. Time rushes by. Love rushes by. Life rushes by. But the red shoes go on.”

—Anton Walbrook as Boris Lermontov in The Red Shoes

How can one explain the wonderful and terrifying magic of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1948 adaptation of The Red Shoes? A film about creative obsession, it has itself become the object of such obsession. Amongst cinephiles and filmmakers it commands a faction of true believers that rivals that of Citizen Kane, Vertigo or 8 ½. More than a textbook classic, The Red Shoes has been a fetish object, inspiring a feverishly ritualistic devotion that borders on the occult. Strange fate for a “commonplace backstage melodrama,” as Variety pegged it upon release, calling the story “trite” while acknowledging its technical achievements. “Pure women’s magazine” is how the film’s star, Moira Shearer, later shrugged it off. But the red shoes go on, now pirouetting their way through Film Forum in a gorgeous 35mm restoration, the final product of a 2½-year labor of love by the non-profit Film Foundation. What is it about Powell and Pressburger’s dance-film fairy tale that solicits such devotion to this day? Wherein lies the esoteric power of The Red Shoes?

Is it the impossible love triangle between a dancer (Shearer), her devoted composer (Marius Goring) and her demanding impresario (Anton Walbrook), whose fiery melodrama soon engulfs their Diaghilev-esque ballet company? Or is it the meticulously choreographed pas de trois of the three-strip Technicolor cinematography, arguably the most virtuousic and visionary example of that historically moribund process?

“One might call it the poetry of motion perhaps,” offers Lady Neston (Irene Browne) when asked by Lermontov to define the ballet. Might one also describe the spellbinding power of The Red Shoes, one of Powell and Pressburger’s most fluidly dynamic film, in similar terms?

“Yes, one might,” Lermontov spits out, dismissing such an answer as superficial and philistine. “But for me,” he continues, “it is so much more.”

Perhaps it is the realistic authenticity of the performances, the mix of professional dancers in their film debut  (Shearer, Ballet Russes choreographer Leonide Massine) and professional actors in carefully studied a clef characterizations (Walbrook’s composite of Dzighalev and the film producer Alexander Korda in the role of Lermontov). Or perhaps—quite the opposite!—it’s the visionary flights of fancy that transport the set pieces of this backstage musical into the realms of neo-romantic mythology?

Or is it something still more?

Perhaps it’s the film’s gesamtkunstwerk genius, its formal integration of multiple artistic media into a totalizing vision. The theatricality of the stage invades everyday life in the outsized personalities and self-conscious performativity of a troupe of performers who are always on. Cinema, in turn, invades the space of the theatre. In the Ballet of the Red Shoes—a 17 minute tour de force set like a crown jewel in the middle of the film—the camera unmoors itself from the audience’s view of the stage and boldly crosses the proscenium, dissolving theatrical time and space into the impossible topography enabled by montage and superimposition. Music invokes images (”This is ballroom music,” Goring’s character asserts, “and anyone who knows anything about music will see a ballroom”) and images invoke music (from the hushed pianissimo of off-whites and pale pastels to the furious fortissimo of ultra-saturated primary and secondary hues, The Red Shoes‘ color design mirrors the dynamic range and internal complexity of a full house orchestra). Is it the sensual power of synesthesia that so vividly evokes the agony and the ecstasy of the story? Or is it something still more?

“For me,” Walbrook declaims, with a conviction that defies Camp, “it is a religion.”

Closer still to the quickening pulse of The Red Shoes. To watch Moira Shearer (porcelain-skinned and flame-haired like a pre-Raphaelite goddess) give herself fully to the terrifying and transporting power of the red shoes ballet is to be reminded of the words of Walter Pater, that high priest of British aestheticism: “To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.” The magical device of the red shoes is but a symbol for the unstoppable drive of the aesthete: the rapture of creative expression and the tragedy of creative compulsion. Everything else is just Intermission.

And yet there’s still something more.

More for then Art for Art’s sake, more than Life for Art’s sake, The Red Shoes is the story of Death for Art’s sake. And it is ultimately a deeply personal confession. Through the form of a highly conventionalized allegory, two of cinema’s greatest filmmakers acknowledge the obsessive, antisocial, and self-destructive pathologies that underlie creative genius.  But The Red Shoes is not a cautionary tale. On the contrary: “For 10 years we had all been told to go out and die for freedom and democracy,” Powell wrote in reference to World War II. “But now the war was over, and The Red Shoes told us to go out and die for art.”

Go out and die for art. It is a supremely perverse celebration of the artistic drive as a kind of pathology for which there is no cure. The Red Shoes gives you permission to sacrifice everything (everything: free time, friendships, lovers, life itself) in order to create. Indulging this pathology may very well not lead you to happiness, as the tragic ending of The Red Shoes makes clear. But denying this pathology cannot lead to happiness. The idea is horrifying, depressing—and strangely comforting. Without your art you have nothing, but that means you also have nothing to lose.

And as this Powell and Pressburger’s breathtaking film reminds us in the dying flicker of every beautiful frame: you have so, so much to gain.

The Red Shoes is playing at Film Forum through Thursday, November 19th.

cineBrat is daily ‘best in show’ picks (www.twitter.com/cineBrat) and weekly reviews of NYC repertory film screenings & local premieres.

Paul Brunick is a young film fanatic residing in New York and a regular contributor to Film Comment magazine. He is currently completing an M.A. in Cinema Studies at NYU.

Fady Joudah. Courtesy of the author.

In November 2009 FSG added If I Were Another, a collection of epic poems by the eminent Palestinian poet and activist Mahmoud Darwish, to the diverse dialogue of international poetry. Darwish’s work spanned not only over his lifetime from 1941–2008, but also over literary genres, with more than 30 poetry collections written in forms from classic Arabic style to free-verse, and eight volumes of prose. Some of his more recent poetry titles include The Butterfly’s Burden (Copper Canyon Press, 2006), Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems (2003), Stage of Siege (2002), The Adam of Two Edens (2001), Mural (2000), Bed of the Stranger (1999), Psalms (1995), Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone? (1994), and The Music of Human Flesh (1980). His awards and honors include the Ibn Sina Prize, the Lenin Peace Prize, the 1969 Lotus prize from the Union of Afro-Asian Writers, France’s Knight of Arts and Belles Lettres medal in 1997, the 2001 Prize for Cultural Freedom from the Lannan Foundation, the Moroccan Wissam of intellectual merit handed to him by King Mohammad VI of Morocco, and the USSR’s Stalin Peace Prize.

Houston, Texas doctor and poet Fady Joudah translated Darwish’s If I Were Another and The Butterfly’s Burden, which won a TLS Translation Prize (the Saif Ghobash-Banipal Prize) for Arabic Literary Translation from the Society of Authors in the UK. Joudah’s first collection of poetry, The Earth in the Attic, was published in the Yale Series of Younger Poets in 2008.

Susie DeFord: What was your first introduction to Mahmoud Darwish’s work?

Fady Joudah: I must have been six or seven years old, in Benghazi, Libya, listening to my father or uncle recite Darwish’s newly published poems in Palestinian Affairs and memorizing them to recite them back, sometimes for pocket-change.

SD: Why is Dawish’s work significant to you?

FJ: In a simple sense his is one of the first poetic cadences I heard. So he resided in me from such a young age as a memory I could only recognize many years later as my bond with poetry took hold. He is also a unique phenomenon in Arab and world poetry. It’s an amazing experience to have been his contemporary, this poet who has already defeated death and achieved artistic immortality, without needing the usual test of time. And of course there is his life-long dialogue with identity, with self and other, with place as passion and as exile, as time and as ruse.

SD: You mention meeting Darwish in your introduction to If I Were Another. What was that like?

FJ: It was certainly packed with the anxiety of knowing, as he put it, “this could be the last time.” But it was a pleasant morning and afternoon. We had a good lunch, good wine, and talked for hours in a place at the edge of the mall, where he would not venture deeper, because he thought it resembled a chicken coop. He was brilliant with satire, loved humor. I think he knew all along that those were his last days. He said goodbye in such a beautiful way to almost all those who were part of his life. I had the added strangeness of being a physician, and knowing the extremity of the situation.

SD: How did you come to begin translating Darwish?

FJ: I contacted a friend of mine in Beirut who went to his old publishing house and got Darwish’s number in Amman from there. I called him up and introduced myself and he simply said: “Translation is anyone’s right. Show me your work when you’re done.” And then I showed him the list of accepted publications and he told me his English is not going to be better than that of the editors, and congratulated me. This was in 2004, prior to publishing The Butterfly’s Burden with Copper Canyon Press.

SD: Darwish died on August 9, 2008. Your introduction said you’d met with him five days before this. How did this effect you and your work on this translation?

FJ: The translation was already complete by then, and he knew, as I said in the intro, about the book. He was hands-off. Available to answer questions, but mostly to correct an obvious error or misreading. He did not delve too deeply in explaining his work, which made it a lot more enjoyable for me, to be in proximity with his imagination. Still, Darwish’s work is not a mystery. His mastery of language is a window to song, to meaning and away from it. “Extreme clarity is a mystery” he says in one of the poems in If I Were Another, then later on in the book, he adds “like a dawn that yawns a lot.”

SD: How do you think your work translating influences your own poetry?

FJ: I am not sure. I think it simply expands my syntactical and vocabulary meadow. I am very conscious of echoing Darwish. If I do so clearly, I am not sure I would have learned much. Sometimes I think reading good poetry and great poets is an act of translation in and of itself. The way music and thought enter you then leave you, then settle on the white page, neither self nor other. Translation keeps the hand and rhythm going, an adventure into the illusions of fidelity and infidelity to language (beyond text per se). All poetry is an act of translation. And all art is, at best, deception with good conscience, as I think Nietzsche said.

SD: What did you learn from your experience working on If I Were Another?

FJ: Because the poems are all long ones, lyric epics, it was an amazing editing experience, tonally speaking. The energy needed to nail-down the shift from the drive or gallop to the pace of a stroll, in long lines and long poems, was amazing. Darwish changes his diction over these long poems (the selections spans 15 years) and also develops dialogue. Chorus becomes echo and scene. Voice becomes character, etc. One can imagine turning the quartet of Exile, his last collected long poem in 2005, into a play of four acts, for example.

SD: What do you see as the major differences between the Arab and American literary worlds? What are the similarities?

FJ: I am admittedly uncomfortable about such questions that risk stereotype. Literature is naturally bound to culture and thus one inevitably embarks on cultural and anthropologic theories when a mouth is wide open. The American literary world certainly has a deeper infrastructure behind it. Yet the Arab literary world is perhaps one of the healthiest generative aspects in Arab culture, in its diversity and vision. These are both similarities and differences. I, however, am intensely bound to the illusion that moving between literatures and languages is a life in the unified field of human endeavor, filled with its particularities and privacies. A dance between the personal and the universal, “where the personal is not personal. / The universal not universal” as Mahmoud Darwish says in If I Were Another.

SD: You’re a Doctor, Poet, and Translator—When do you sleep and what projects are you working on now?

FJ: My sleep these days is primarily the function of my 19 months old boy, Ziyad. After working in the emergency room for eight years at the VA, and after two field trips with Doctors Without Borders, I shifted to clinic hours. It is still full-time and a lot of responsibility, but better sleep. As for projects, I have completed my second manuscript, Alight, and have also completed another translation selection for a wonderful Palestinian poet, Ghassan Zaqtan, who is well-known in the Arab literary world, quite innovative in his lyrical succinctness and dexterous portraits. The manuscript is titled Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me.

If I Were Another is now available from FSG.

Read Darwish’s BOMB interview here.

Heather Rowe, "Green Desert." Photo by Matthew Septimus, Courtesy P.S.1.

Acting as a signpost for a new exhibition at PS1, “Green Desert” by Heather Rowe sensitizes visitors to visual textures, literal referents, and artistic nuance, keys to experiencing much of the work that has been brought together. “Between Spaces,” a rare exhibition organized by the junior curatorial staff—namely Tim Goossens and Kate McNamara—begs viewers to pay close attention to moments of transition and liminality, which are not limited to physical space. In eight thoughtfully arranged galleries, the curators present recent work by eleven relatively young artists. Among so much sculpture and installation there are many resonances—such as a predominance of strong formal geometry, attention to the power or preciousness of materials, the careful manipulation of light and space, and a sympathy for forms and ideas that can be conferred carefully, cleanly, though with no loss of poetry or energy.

Zak Kitnick’s works in the series “The People Behind Our Products” cause a fantastic perceptual and symbolic effect, whereby screens of faux-precious metals obscure the details of found objects—paper products, cloth, crumpled paper—set back in shallow boxes. Visually, the space of these boxes and the volume of their contents collapse on the screens, causing these everyday objects to stand as naturalized icons. Kitnick’s Carl Andre-inspired arrangement of vinyl floor tiles calls out to the room with Alex Da Corte’s thin molds of dried soda. Created on-site specifically for the exhibition, Da Corte’s gelatin puddles suggest Felix Gonzalez-Torres‘ masses of candy melted together into slightly irregular geometric shapes of saccharine color.

“Perfect Square,” a video piece by the artist Melanie Schiff, presents viewers with direct contradiction—neither the rectangular shape of the projected image nor the sinuous path that a swimmer is shown swimming are geometrically precise squares. What the video instead imparts are enough visual cues to understand the nature of the process first established in the artist’s mind and then carried out: blind to the cameraman deep below her, she attempted to swim along the path of a perfect square—an inevitably failed act.

In several instances, the works in this exhibition represent a re-engagement with old dialogues—on painting, art and life, and the persistent question of what can be considered art—but in new ways, using the old ways instead as indications of this grouping’s formal and conceptual sympathies. Given the variety between these works in terms of nature and concerns, it follows that light would shift definitively from gallery to gallery—ranging from artificial to natural, to spotlights in darkness, to ambient, provided by the work, to reflected and distorted light. Each gallery is a coherent lighted environment, and as such they are distinct; there is no space between galleries, only thresholds, instantaneous transitions. The rooms between works that resonate with each other are left to be those liminal zones, those spaces in between. And since these meaningful works support an intensely complex system of interrelations, the viewer is left in a state of never arriving, left wanting only to return.

Between Spaces is on view at PS1 through April 5th, 2010.

Hold on, there are five more weeks left to the TimeBOMB’s completed set of archived interviews.

Enjoy and remember

ourchive is yourchive

Richard J. Goldstein

Click on the blocks of text below to be linked to the BOMB interviews they’ve been excerpted from.

"Rousseau Cinématique," 2008. Oil with Collage on Linen. Panel 8: 45 x 64.5 in.

When I think of Pam Joseph’s work, I imagine standing before Bernini’s classic sculpture Pluto and Proserpina, with Pluto wrestling a naked Proserpina, while behind it as backdrop is a Victoria Secret billboard advertisement, the golden cleavage, faceless head thrown back in pleasure, blown ten-stories high in technicolor.

For Joseph, this is when the fun begins.

Pam Joseph’s body of work explores issues of sexuality and gender, the sacred and the profane, violence and chance. She finds creativity in mixed metaphors, styles and techniques. Incongruity reigns. In past works, such as her Calendar Girl series, Joseph used 1960s Italian pin-up calendars she found in a Roman flea market for her paintings and collages on shooting targets. Her show Naked Madonna took a playful look at Mary, seeing the Virgin as a modern woman, wearing a crown of thorns, weeping, a hand to her face, bearing long nails and red lips.

Victim or power vixen? Joseph’s women are survivors and if they have to use their sexuality to their advantage, so be it.

"Alice Neel's Andy and Fans," 2008. Oil with Collage on Linen, 45 x 30 in.

Joseph’s solo show Wunderlust at Francis Naumann this month will showcase works from the Postcard Painting series featuring a nine panel work called “Rousseau Cinematique.” For her Postcards, Joseph collages erotic images from London tart cards and Mexican pornographic comic books onto reproductions of museum masterpieces that she has collected over the years. She then digitally manipulates them, overlapping and receding the new visual information into the other artist’s painting.  From this interpretation she’ll create a painting with the original collaged elements. Finally, she’ll photograph it and reproduce it to the size of a postcard.

Joseph understands the power of image. By manipulating such icons as Magritte, Rousseau, Courbet, Dali and Duchamp, the new adaptations are not only outrageous and humorous, but laced with an absurdists’ dark humor. Her “Re-Origin of the World” (2006) after Gustave Courbet’s “L’Origine du Monde,” interweaves shards of pornography between the splayed legs. A fist. A mixed-racial couple, a side-glance of a woman’s closed eyes and open mouth.

For “Rousseau Cinematique,” Joseph’s homage to Rousseau’s “The Horse Being Attacked by a Jaguar” (1910), she reworks Rousseau’s primitivist tableaux by introducing pornographic images of women fondling themselves or mouths agape in what could be perceived as ecstasy or horror. A visage peers through the tall verdant blades of grass while, in the foreground, a white horse lies in the grip of a savage tiger.

Joseph has broken the large work into nine separate panels (oil and collage on linen), each panel akin to a frame of a movie still which can be observed alone or as a larger whole. The dot matrix degradation of the blown-up comics juxtaposed to the classical oil technique is the perfect visual incongruity nailing contemporary culture.

Throughout the ages, Western pornography embodies the oppression of women; woman-as-victim; but just as pornography can teeter on the hilarious, here too Joseph has leavened it with humor. In American Nudism, after Rubens (Rubens’ masterpiece, “Head Of Medusa” (1617)), Joseph superimposes Medusa’s wild-eyed head onto a 1950s postcard of a nudist gathering. The nudists, replete with a woman in a 50s hair-do and cat-eyed glasses, peer innocently below as Rubens’ snakes coil and float dangerously close-by.

Rubens, Rousseau and Joseph make good company with their snakes, white horses and porn stars. We’re just human after all.

"American Nudism, after Rubens," 2009. Oil with Collage on Linen, 28.12 x 42.12 in.

Wunderlust will be at Francis M. Naumann Fine Art from November 11th to December 23rd.

Our friends at PEN America are hosting a big event next Monday, November 9, at WNYC’s Green Space to benefit PEN’s Prison Writing Program. Breakout: Voices from Inside, their second annual benefit reading and reception, featuring readings by Mary Gaitskill, Eric Bogosian, John Turturro, Patricia Smith, Jamal Joseph, Lemon Andersen, and others. As an installment of WNYC’s signature series “The NEXT New York Conversation,” this event will be broadcast and live-streamed, allowing incarcerated men and women with radio and/or internet access to listen to the event and join our audience.

Please visit www.pen.org for more details and to purchase a ticket!

Proceeds from the evening will benefit PEN’s Prison Writing Program. The event will be streamed live on the web at www.wnyc.org/thegreenespace

The United States has the highest documented incarceration rate in the world; there are hundreds and hundreds of prisons across the country and, as of 2007, these institutions housed more than 2,300,000 inmates-70% of whom are non-white. Nearly 1 million of those in prison are serving time for committing non-violent crimes. Sadly, the situation is not improving.

The second-annual Prison Writing Benefit Reading will help to raise much-needed funds to enable this important program to continue into the future, but also to help the prisoners see themselves in a new way: as writers.

The NEXT New York Conversation, sponsored by HSBC, “The World’s Local Bank,” is WNYC’s The Greene Space’s multiplatform dialogue series featuring a collective of changemakers, newsmakers, tastemakers and New Yorkers, sharing their values about interesting topics that are reshaping, redefining, and re-imagining our world in the 21st century.

COLLABORATOR TICKET covers the expenses of one-on-one mentoring services between a PEN member and an incarcerated man or woman for one year. This premier ticket includes the best views and a reception following the program.

FRIEND TICKET covers the postage and printing costs to provide eight incarcerated men and women with a free copy of PEN’s Handbook for Writers in Prison. This ticket includes a reception following the program.

Triptych by Pier Marton: "War is allowed to exist every time some vital information is withdrawn. The skills required to create such a vacuum are present in most advertisement and popular media."

In late October, The School of Visual Arts held its 23rd Annual National Conference on Liberal Arts and the Education of Artists, entitled Visions of War: The Arts Represent Conflict. The week of events included a play, a panel discussion on photography, and a series of films exploring the emotional scars of war. The conference was held at the Algonquin Hotel, and I sat in on one of the sessions called Images of the Other.

One man, Carl McBride, shared his photography from Saigon, where he had been deployed during Vietnam. Brian Winkenweder addressed various artists whose work acknowledged the human cost of war. He delved into Lévinas’ theory of the other, explaining that one must dehumanize in order to rationalize killing. Winkenweder discussed the art of Suzanne Opton and Daniel Heyman, arguing that art can re-humanize the other.

An audience member found fault in his language, saying that the word “re-humanize” implies that the other was at one point not human. An interesting debate sparked around the role of an artist, but time was limited, and the last speaker, Pier Marton, changed the lecture to a new tone. His lecture was more theatrical-at one point he screamed to evoke the sounds he heard as a child from his neighbor, a World War One veteran who had screaming fits.

Certain questions ran through my mind as I sat in the small room, ignoring the cold draft coming through. Can the arts offer a form of healing from war? I thought back to the words a five year-old girl had said to me the other day, “When I get older, I want to be mean.” Though this inclination is quite different from killing, I wondered, where does this violent desire root?

I had a chance to speak with Pier Marton the following day, and the following are excerpts from our interview:

Jaclyn Alexander: Why did you want to speak at this conference?

Pier Marton: Possibly the fact that my grandmother was asked to take a shower at Auschwitz which clearly can mark generations thereafter. Another factor was when Susan Sontag asked me why I had not gone to a war zone, I said to her, “I don’t need to go to a war zone, I hear the bombs all the time.” I’m connected to war in that way, my parents survived the war, and I grew up across the way from somebody who had screaming fits. It was very, very loud, and not just representing pain, but a very raw scream that went on and on.  It wasn’t just, as I did at the conference, a few seconds…When you listen to that and you cannot find out anything else except that this man survived the trenches in World War I, that’s not a sufficient answer. Messages carry through and I’m the recipient of that message, and I have to somehow deal with it. I become a witness to his life.

JA: How do you deal with it?

PM: I deal with it by being at the conference, by talking, acknowledging something. You witness something, everything affects you. We differentiate between the normal world, which allows us to go on automatic, and the other parts of life that wake us up in some ways. We can’t go on automatic when threatening events happen around us. And in those moments, we feel we owe something to those occurrences.

JA: What about the fact that this conference revolved around War and Trauma in the Visual Arts?

PM: I don’t think the answer for me is whether it is art or not art. If something needs to be expressed. If there is a conference that is art, that is a good context, but it doesn’t have to be art, it could be anything you want, sociology, psychology, living. I tell my students, it’s a quip, that I was looking for a department called “Life, Film and Media Studies” but the closest I could come to this was “Film and Media studies.” (laughter).

JA: How do you think one can make sense of violence?

PM: One doesn’t need to make sense of violence because violence has no sense. Do you remember the image of the book that I included called “Making Sense of the Holocaust”? I was mocking that attempt. I don’t think one can make sense of it. Unfortunately, one has to at times live through violence. One cannot digest violence; war is not to be digested. Yes, you have to process, but that is different from digesting. Processing means dealing with emotions that were stirred up with the event of violence, but that doesn’t mean that you have digested it. The reason I screamed, beyond just relaying the scream, was that there is a scream all the time, everywhere. You could say, “explain, say this in clear language,” but the scream is the true language. Back to Artaud’s quote, “true language is incomprehensible.”

JA: Do you think violence is inevitable?

PM: That’s a good question. I definitely cannot answer; I wish I could say it’s avoidable. But it hasn’t stopped; we haven’t seen any signs of the end of the violence. It’s quite likely, despite our wishful thinking, that it is going to go on. We’re devising remote ways of having remote war in Afghanistan. We’re devising fancier and fancier ways of killing but I don’t think we are devising fancier ways of not killing. We’re going in the wrong direction, but we are going forward, it’s obviously not anything I would like, but I don’t think I can stop it. I can talk about it, that’s about it.

JA: What role can art play?

PM: The way most people approach any question is, “Are you part of the solution or part of the problem? Are you adding to the problem or are you alleviating the suffering? Are you helping people become more conscious?”

You never know if you are really helping when you’re doing something but if there is fire you try to extinguish it, and beyond that, it’s very complex.

I’ll see birds that are attacking each other and I think. “Do I intervene here?” These are birds harassing each other. But who am I to say in the order of animals that I know what’s best for them? It’s easy to think or feel you are right; it’s much harder to know you are right.

Pier Marton is on the faculty at Washington University in St. Louis. He works with desktop video and graphics, performance, installation, and sound. His pieces revolve around issues of ethnicity, violence, and spirituality.

ArtWeLove.com’s news digest, now also available in email form, brings a comprehensive roundup of the week’s art developments to your digital doorstep. If you aren’t signed up, simply click here. ArtWeLove helps people explore art on their own terms, by suggesting artists, artworks, and exhibitions based on the art they love.

MoMA’s proposed Jean Nouvel-designed tower–seen here in three stages of planning–has been approved by New York’s City Council. ; Via Hines

Halloween came and went this week, and the scariest thing in the art world may have been the pop-out prosthetic tongue in Urs Fischer’s New Museum show–unless, that is, the politicization of art and cultural heritage gives you the heebie-jeebies.

INTERNATIONAL NEWS: THE MET PLACATES EGYPT, & SINGAPORE EMBRACES ART

It’s been nearly four years since Greece and Italy won landmark victories in their campaign to retrieve looted antiquities from U.S. museums, winning back dozens of objects from the Met, the Getty, and other institutions. (Read on.)

MOMA GETS SKYSCRAPER, GROUND ZERO ARTS SPACE STRUGGLES, & CONGRESS GIVES ARTS MORE $$$

In New York, MoMA won city approval for its controversial expansion, an 82-story skyscraper designed by Jean Nouvel that will include more exhibition space along with deluxe apartments and a hotel. Originally planned to be as tall as the Empire State Building, the tower lost 225 feet in city negotiations but still angers opponents in midtown, who find the building hubristic and too dwarfing. (Read on.)

PERFORMA DEBUTS TASTILY, URS FISCHER IMPRESSES, & THE GUGGENHEIM HONORS ARTISTS WITH A WINK

A string of gala events in New York last week pumped some excitement into the art world, combining with artist-thrown Halloween parties—like Kenny Scharf’s day-glow affair in Brooklyn—to make for an unusually full week. (Read on.)

COMINGS, GOINGS, & A HALLOWEEN TREAT

Miami Art Museum director Terry Riley, a former MoMA architecture curator, abruptly stepped down from his post last week—just days after designs for the Miami museum’s long-in-the-works new building were unveiled. (Read on.)

ARTISTS IN THE NEWS:

Mary Heilmann

Jeff Koons

Maurizio Cattelan

Cindy Sherman

Ryan Trecartin

SHOWS IN THE NEWS:
URS FISCHER: Marguerite de Ponty
New Museum of Contemporary Art
Oct 28 - Jan 31

FULL NEWS DIGEST:
Follow this link for the full roundup and a list of related news articles.

Ira Glass and Edgar Keret. Photo by Peter Foley.

Before the discussion between the acclaimed Israeli writer and filmmaker, Etgar Keret and Ira Glass, the host of This American Life, a short video of a conversation between the Portuguese writer, Antonio Lobo Antunes and Paul Holdengraber, the Director of the NYPL’s Public Programs played on a screen to the left of the stage. Comprised of sketches by Flash Rosenberg, the NYPL’s artist in residence, completed during, and inspired by Antunes and Holdengraber’s conversation, the video offered a glimpse into the mind of an established writer. “Every good book,” Antunes declared in one clip. “Is a victory over death.”

When Glass and Keret’s discussion began, Glass asked Keret a few initial questions, and then Keret launched into a tangential, mischievous monologue about what it must be like to be a security guard in an airport, particularly one charged with performing body cavity searches.

“What would be a good day?” he mused in Israeli accented English. “When they take their flashlight and look in an anus. And find what? A lotto ticket? A cupcake?”

Like Glass, the audience laughed throughout the first half of the discussion. Then Keret read a story he recently wrote, and the audience was enveloped not only by Keret’s sense of humor but by his gravitas as well. The story Keret shared was about a man forced to tell a story, first by a bearded Swede, then by a pollster, and finally by a pizza deliveryman, all of whom had entered the narrative by knocking on the protagonist’s door, and all of whom carried a weapon. Later in the evening, Keret and his wife, Shira Geffen’s short film, What About Me? was shown. The film depicted a checkpoint in the midst of a sparse, desert landscape. Its leading characters were a young soldier, an elderly man, and a mule carrying bananas. Afterwards, Keret told the story about making the film, how he’d instructed the actor playing the elderly man that he should think of the mule as if it was his wife, and how the United Nations had commissioned it and insisted that the film be apolitical.

“But,” Glass interrupted. “That film is clearly political.”

Keret smirked and shrugged, then he explained how the uniform worn by the soldier in the film was not the uniform of an Israeli soldier and that in the film’s English subtitles they’d replaced the word “Arab” with the word “man.”

“Because one in the UN speaks Hebrew.” Keret quipped, alluding to recent allegations that the United Nations was biased against the state of Israel.

At the end of the evening, I attended a reception hosted by the Israeli Consulate where I had the good fortune of being introduced to Keret. Listening to Keret enthusiastically lead a conversation about the recent start of the NBA season and Omri Casspi, the first Israeli ever drafted in the first round, I was reminded about the theme of the evening’s discussion. Is Reality Overrated? Never; or at least not in the hands of someone such as Keret, a storyteller who depicts reality as it feels as much as it factually exists; and by doing so reminding us that stories and storytellers lead our temporary escape from reality. Some, as Antunes stated, might even be “victories over death.” Some, like Keret’s, remind us that whether existing in the most mundane or exciting reality, miracles exist all around us and, in fact, sometimes we might even be a little miraculous ourselves.

Matthew Aaron Goodman is a writer/author living in Brooklyn.  His most recent novel, Hold Love Strong, was published by Simon and Schuster (Arpil 2009). His website is holdlovestrong.com

Elina Lowensohn and Willem Dafoe in IDIOT SAVANT. Photo © Paula Court.

David Kapp’s New Paintings will be at the Alpha Gallery until November 4th. Steven Holl Architects’ recently completed Linked Hybrid complex just won the 2009 “Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) Best Tall Building Overall Award.” Carroll Dunham will be at the Barbara Gladstone Gallery until 11/5 and Eric Fischl opened at Mary Boone on 10/31. Richard Foreman’s Idiot Savant, with Willem Dafoe (also starring in von Trier’s Antichrist, but you knew that already), is playing at the Public Theater and Kenneth Lonergan’s The Starry Messenger is now playing at The New Group.  Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Roni Horn have a joint exhibit, Paired, Gold, at the Guggenheim Museum through 1/6. Matthew Ritchie will be at the Andrea Rosen Gallery through 12/5. Steve Earle is now touring (with y’alternative hunk Rhett Miller <3)  to support his newest album Townes. Mitch Epstein will be speaking with Michael Fried, author of Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before, at the New York Studio School on tonight (11/4) at 6:30pm.  Karole Armitage and Lukas Ligeti’s Itutu opens tonight at BAM. Also, right around the corner from BOMB HQ, Jonathan Lethem will be reading at Greenlight Bookstore this Thursday!

Image via.

Courtesy Ugly Duckling Presse.

I’m thinking about a party I went to a while ago. People ate and drank, and those too distracted to leave before the levity slackened ended up in the kitchen, voicing regrettable proclamations about art or metaphysics or something. Half-an-hour fell to bemoaning the death of poetry. An academy-type raised his red cup as if commiserating at the wake of an estranged uncle. I took the show of enthusiasm as my exit cue, but on my way home began obsessing over the complaint. Since when has the poem been burdened with the expectation of dominion? Auden’s “In Memory of W.B. Yeats” has been cited enough already for its forward that “poetry makes nothing happen.” Yet if poetry is not a force of authority, we shouldn’t likely expect it to play police. Poetry is process, and by its inefficacy locates its virtue, subversive and pliant as water.

Bellow’s egghead narrator in Humboldt’s Gift gets down-in-the-mouth about the disfigurement of the poet before reigning powers of science and technology. But his gripes are those of an artist struggling against materialist specters. If verse—the good stuff, at least—does anything, it calls attention to the otherwise negligible detail of the day-to-day and the elusive import housed therein. A helicopter trip might grant one a view of an entire cityscape, but perception does not preclude comprehension, or even apprehension. I can’t say I judge the fitness of a poem by how fast and cheap it gets me to California from New York, or by how mechanically it makes the fans in the bleachers stomp their feet. Better yet, the genuine poem, the cathartic whorl of language that sears through to the hippocampus, succeeds where the market fails—it grants its accomplices an eminent mobility, transport through expired time, through memory, through the ranging history of our mind.

Before we even crack its cover, Rick Snyder’s first full-length, Escape from Combray, promises action. As the title references the hometown of Proust’s memorable, nameless front man, so does it hint at themes of origin and transience. Over the course of nearly 40 lean poems Snyder positions his voice as one at the stitch of our collar. They reverberate with the timbre of the interior concern, which nevertheless paces its nerve through mundane landscapes as a “light bulb swung / in circles / casting light into / the corners.” Organically and off-the-cuff Snyder presses classical figureheads against the facade of the gas station, the convenience store at closing, the streets at midnight, the passing train. Contexts and their constellate symbols transpose, so that Erasmus in his labor rests beside two men ice-fishing, so that the apparition of Dante Alighieri hovers at a windy city intersection. Snyder conducts his “Hagiography” before a liquor store, where the saints take their “locusts / drowned in honey,” and sets a vision of afterlife “in a fluorescent lunchroom / …in a strange city, / at 4:15 in the morning.” Recollection intermingles with presence, chronology curves into itself. The poet aims at a “song / of interstices” and hits the mark dead-on, meanwhile eschewing any such determinacy. “Program Notes” poses as a poem writing itself out of existence, refuting a foretold ending, and the book’s closer, “The Memory of Whiteness,” finds its author owning up to himself—“my head is snowing / I’m sober / but my memories are drunk / it doesn’t matter much / what I am.” The collection approaches the character of dérive, as if our confidant is continually between books, between destinations or conclusions, tracking backwards to retrieve some keepsake he misplaces in the future.

Miraculously enough, we don’t get bored or frustrated with Snyder’s meandering appreciations. His poems represent lovely constructs of syntax and significance that unravel along the page with captivating rhythm. The lines scarcely push past tetrameter and arrange in neat couplets, triads, and quatrains, or otherwise assume narrow currents of text, one thought rippling into another. We float along with Snyder’s subdued music, from the Greek tragedies to those of Milwaukee Ave. and Fullerton, the Golgotha around the corner, and “walking under / the black leaves / dripping / from new metal stems” back to the apartment where we “drink the wine / and split your last / Orthonovum / staring down / at the desolation / of Seventh St.” Not only by the benefit of the speaker’s erudition but by his sense of play—a little Latin here, a joke in Spanish, a marvelously buried allusion to Marianne Moore—he accomplishes an informal gravity. Escape from Combray permits the discrete particulars to articulate a vista in which both joie de vivreand ennui figure as inept poses. Though we’re not always certain where we’re headed, we’re sure of where we are—rooted in this world and the others it presupposes. Timely and timeless, these poems—“Sky Blue,” “Pastoral,” “How Are You Doing?” to name a few—echo the best of veterans like Simic or Strand but pop with an updated disquietude, a low-key magic that conjures from familiar architecture new alcoves, new apses. Generous with style and energy, marked by a negative capability and a clarity of vision, Snyder’s poems don’t just move, they sweep us up with them.

Escape from Combray is out now from Ugly Duckling Presse.

Rachel Zucker.

Every few months I receive several review copies of books from BOMB. For a poetry nerd like me, it’s like Christmas. I run upstairs from my tiny mailbox to my tiny apartment and rip open the manila mailer to find 4 or 5 fresh books of voices I can’t wait to discover. Whether these poets realize it or not we are all part dialogue that’s been going on quietly between the pages of books and backrooms of bars for years. Poetry is a bit of an underground subculture like the punk rock record swap and house show scene I grew up with where artistic expression trumped money and ambition. Few are getting rich off poetry, so those who practice it really do it for the love of the artform. In that sense, it remains pure, and therefore retains intimacy and comradery among its practitioners.

Thumbing through the pages of my newly acquired review copies I came across the press release for Rachel Zucker’s latest book Museum of Accidents (Wave Books October 2009). It read “A brutally honest epic of domestic proportions.” I began reading the book and found a brutally honest account of marriage, motherhood, and daily life—the good and bad of it all expressed in a compelling urgency shouting from the pages to be heard. From her post 9/11 parenting paranoia, to teaching, to miscarriage, Zucker’s voice is that of the modern woman struggling to juggle and comprehend all her daily challenges.

Rachel Zucker is the author of the poetry collections Eating in the Underworld (Wesleyan 2003), The Last Clear Narrative (Wesleyan 2004), and The Bad Wife Handbook. Along with poet Arielle Greenberg, Zucker edited Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts and Affections, (University of Iowa Press 2008), Starting Today: 100 Poems for Obama’s First 100 Days (forthcoming University of Iowa press 2010). Zucker is the winner of a Salt Hill Poetry Award, Barrow Street Poetry Prize, and Center for Book Arts Award for her long poem, “Annunciation” which was published as a limited edition chapbook. Her poems have appeared in many journals including: 3rd Bed, American Poetry Review, Barrow Street, Colorado Review, Epoch, Fence, Iowa Review, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner and The Best American Poetry 2001. Zucker has taught at Yale, NYU, and Makor. From 2005–2007 she was the poet-in-residence at Fordham University. She is a certified labor doula, CD (DONA) and has attended 8 births. She lives in New York with her husband, Josh Goren, and their three sons.

The following is an interview with Rachel Zucker about Museum of Accidents:

Susie DeFord: Museum of Accidents makes me think a lot about Carolyn Forche’s The Blue Hour. You both contemplate children and family while also contemplating the atrocities of our world. Did you think about the dangers of the world as much before having a family or as a result of having one?

Rachel Zucker: Before I had children I was prone to periods of existential despair, but these feelings and preservations have changed since becoming a mother. On the one hand, having children (in particular, having three children) forces me to lead a “regular” life. By regular I mean routinized rather than “normal.” Being responsible to others (so responsible!) and doing things that would be good for my children—going outside, eating well, sleeping enough—has made me healthier and taught me how to care for myself. I have less time to think about the big picture and to contemplate the meaning of life because I am busy negotiating sibling conflicts and making sure there’s food in the apartment. At the same time, having children has intensified my sense of sorrow and terror about the precarious nature of life and death and about the suffering of individuals.

Becoming a mother makes me realize how little control I have. I am unable to protect those I love from harm. Having a baby brings this into focus in a painful way. For months and months a parent is responsible, literally, for keeping the baby alive. It is an awesome responsibility and it’s terrifying. In many ways babies are much more resilient than we think and part of parenthood is learning to see, honor, and develop your children’s resilience. On the other hand, one realizes that even if one does everything right, one cannot protect one’s child from illness or harm or emotional upset or even the big one: Death. I think I feel this more acutely than my husband does. I’m not sure if the reason for this discrepancy is temperamental, sociological or biological. My husband is (frequently) outraged about hypocrisy and political ineptitude, but he does not seem to be fighting an uphill battle against despair or feel that he must be constantly vigilant in order to keep our children safe.

SD: You have a poem dedicated to Spalding Gray. What is your connection to him?

RZ: I adore Spalding Gray’s work. From the moment I first saw him, I felt that his monologues and methods spoke to me in a way no other art has. Later, when he had children and began to write and monologue about his domestic life, I was even more moved and inspired by both his methods and his content.

My husband and I once met Gray in the Denver airport. There was a Broncos game on television and the three of us were the only ones not staring at a monitor. My husband (a bold and friendly fellow) went up and introduced himself and told Gray how much we loved his work. My husband asked for Gray’s autograph and pulled out the book he was currently reading. It turned out that Gray and my husband were both reading Harold Bloom’s Omens of the Millenium and were almost on the same page. Gray liked that strange coincidence and signed my husband’s copy. I was too shy to do more than watch from a distance. I am deeply upset that Spalding Gray is no longer alive to comment on the times in which I live. He is the artist I would most want to be, and I mourn the loss of his continuing art on a daily basis.

SD: Writing is always such a juggling act between work and family. How do you find time to write and do you have any advice for other working parent writers?

RZ: Any answer I could give to this is completely inadequate. It’s not just a question about writing or even a question about working or about having children. It’s really a question about living! But, of course, it becomes more urgent when one has children. Every day and every year I have different answers and different advice and then suddenly I’m struggling again and none of my previous experience seems useful at all. For a while I didn’t work (at a day job). For a while (a long while) my husband was in graduate school. We had day care. Now my older sons go to school. We’ve had babysitters and have gotten a lot of support from my parents. I don’t know. Writing is and isn’t really a job. For one, it doesn’t pay. It works well with having kids and doesn’t work at all. This morning after I dropped my two year old off at daycare I saw this public art sculpture on 97th Street in front of PS 163. It was a large red and white sculpture with quotations (from famous people but also from students) written on the white spaces. In one rectangular space it read:

I want to be an inventor, to invent Solar Powered Vehicles. –Jake Nicklas, Age 8

I have a dream about people having a job and be with their families. –Robert Nelson, Age 7

My son Judah had cried (as he does every time I leave him at his wonderful daycare) and when I saw this sculpture I thought how very sad it is that Jake’s dream of being an inventor is more realistic than Robert’s dream of people having jobs and being with their families. The way work and children fit into our modern lives is a broken system that leaves parents feeling that they are always in the wrong place at the wrong time. At least that’s how I feel. But I keep writing anyway.

SD: You’ve taught writing and been a labor doula. Which profession do you think supports your creativity better?

RZ: I think working as little as possible (and having time to be alone and think and read and walk outside and exercise and cook and go to museums and movies) supports creativity. But work (like exercise) can also make a person healthy and engaged and that’s good for productivity. Teaching writing necessitates the reading of new books and poems and brings a lot of language into my life and that’s useful. Being a doula is physically, emotionally and spiritually challenging. It’s work I feel passionate about, work that feels necessary and vital and sacred. Feeling passionate about something nonliterary is more important, I think, than simply being part of a university but feeling beaten down by the job (which often happens in academia).

I don’t need a job to get me up and dressed every day—having three kids forces me to do that! But, working outside the home forces me to interact with adults and constantly engage in the continuation of my own professional development. I suppose these things are important to my creativity in the sense that if I never did them I would waste a lot of valuable time worrying about not having a career. The downside is that it’s very easy to put writing at the end of the very long list of things I do.

SD: You’ve done some co-editing with Arielle Greenberg. How did you two meet and begin working together?

RZ: In 1996, fresh out of the Iowa Writers Workshop, I moved back to New York. I was teaching Prose Composition at NYU and missed the company and responses of other writers. I put up a sign at the Gotham Bookmart advertising a “Peer Poetry Workshop.” Arielle was the only one (initially) who responded. We read each other’s poems (as part of this group) and were friendly with one another. Then she went to Syracuse for her MFA and we kept in touch. A few years later we bonded over the process of having our first books published. The friendship continued to deepen and widen—we have co-edited two anthologies and written a book-length lyric essay together (called Home/birth). Mostly, though, when we speak on the phone (which is frequently) we talk about birth activism, cooking, parenting, teaching, city v. rural life, politics, television, and sometimes poetry.

There are many ways Arielle has changed my life not least of which is that in 2004 she invited me to attend the birth of her first child. At that point I knew nothing about birth even though I’d had two children. In order to prepare for her birth I became a doula and learned about homebirth. I’m now training to become a certified childbirth educator.

SD: You two co-edited a great book about mentorship Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts and Affections (University of Iowa Press 2008). I had a horrific MFA experience with a complete lack of mentorship but still consider my undergraduate teacher, Barbara Hamby, a mentor. Through this experience I learned there is a definite difference between teaching and mentoring. I’m curious about how Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts and Affections came about? Can you speak about what you learned as a result of editing it?

RZ: Yes, I agree—there is a big difference between teaching and mentoring! In our anthology, some of the essays in our book are written about teachers but most are not.

Years ago Arielle and I went to hear a Sylvia Plath tribute reading at the New York Public Library. Jorie Graham was one of the readers, and in her introduction told this amazing story about making a sort of pilgrimage to Emily Dickinson’s house when she (Graham) was pregnant. Graham said that all the books on her shelf were written by men, except for those by Plath, Sexton, Bishop, Moore and Dickinson and of these, three were childless and the others killed themselves. Arielle and I began to talk about how different our experience was from Graham’s and how lucky we were to have a thriving generation of women poets come before us. We realized that we were the first generation to have such visible and vocal foremothers and we wanted to explore and document this change.

SD: You and Arielle Greenberg also co-edited Starting Today: Poems for Obama’s First 100 Days. Can you speak about this project? Do you have any plans to do a book version?

RZ: Yes! The book, Starting Today: 100 Poems for Obama’s First 100 Days, will be published by University of Iowa Press in early 2010. We’re VERY excited about it. The project was really thrilling and has forced me to rethink some of my ideas about the purpose of poetry. I think I’d always looked down upon or had been a little afraid of Occasional poetry. Now it seems so obvious that all poetry is written for an occasion and that it can be exciting and meaningful to make the occasion explicit. I’m interested, now, in what it means to write political poetry that is not protest poetry. Also, I love the way this project brought 100 poets from all over the country together and how their poems reached people who do not often read poetry.

SD: In Museum of Accidents you mention working on a “momoir.” How’s that going and what else are you currently working on?

RZ: Well, honestly, my husband just began a full time job as a high school teacher. I’m barely working on anything. Even this interview has taken me more than three weeks when you asked me to be finished in two. It was almost funny that my response to the “how do you juggle work and family” question was interrupted by a call from my oldest son’s teacher saying that because I had forgotten to send him to school with shin guards he was left behind by his soccer team and I needed to come and pick him up immediately. It would have been funny except that I burst into tears—I had been counting on those extra two hours to finish the interview and maybe spend some time writing.

Rachel Zucker’s Museum of Accidents is now available from Wave Books.

Susie DeFord will be reading selections from her collection The Dog’s of Brooklyn at Ozzie’s  Park Slope this Friday, 11/6. Visit http://www.susiedeford.com/ for more info.

Shot in five days for less than fifty thousand dollars, this down and dirty production skids along Los Angeles’ Sunset Strip, that unholy mecca of the West Coast beatnik scene. Drifting between coffee-and-cigarettes conversations at the Yellow Door café-all jazz-infused poetry readings and exposed brick interiors—director Corman and screenwriter Charles Griffith sketch out a cross section of counterculture stereotypes as cartoonishly colorful as the animated TV icon Cool Cat. A Ginsberg-esque prophet is trailed by a clique of sycophantic hangers-on; jive talking smack dealers play cat and mouse with undercover narcs; hustlers on the make scam some quick cash from a well heeled couple gone slumming. (For just a few bucks they’ll escort you to the most happening spot and introduce you to a genuine arteest who just happens to be a personal friend…) And buzzing from table to table, like a pesky housefly endlessly brushed away, is our ill-fated protagonist: busboy Walter Paisley (Dick Miller).

A nebbish nobody who desperately wants to be a charismatic somebody, Walter’s got a whole lot of nothing going for him—no looks, no talent, no success.  He grovelingly parrots the misanthropic ramblings of the café’s house poets, just to let them know how much he gets it. Reactions range from indifference to open hostility—Walter is the kind of sad sack that everyone either ignores or despises. Everyone, that is, except for Carla (Barboura Morris) who offers Walter a modicum of kindness and is promptly rewarded with undying devotion. Desperate for still more of her attention and affirmation, Walter one night buys a block of clay and sets out to become a sculptor. After thirty seconds of work on a bust—”Be a nose, goddamnit!”—he is more dejected than ever.

His fate seems sealed when suddenly a black cat crosses his path (sort of), getting trapped in the crawlspace between the apartment walls. As Walter carves an escape hole in the drywall he slips and stabs the animal, killing his landlady’s beloved pet. In an attempt to cover up the accidental death, he then plaster-casts the kitty (knife and all!) and pawns it off at the Yellow Door as his very first sculpture.

The jazz music squeals to a halt as everyone stares in awe at his supreme artistic achievement. They praise its “realism.” (Wink wink) They eulogize it as a supreme expression of the modern condition. But what is it called?

“Dead Cat,” Walter tells them. They ooh and aah, mistaking his laughable literal-mindedness for esoteric profundity.

“But you’ll have to do more,” they insist.

Yes. More. Perhaps even some figure studies with a (ahem) live model?

A Bucket of Blood is something of a rarity amidst Corman’s horror films, a broadly comic entry in the Grand Guignol tradition rather than a straight exercise in Gothic atmospherics, as is true of his famous cycle of Poe adaptations. Credit for the comedy is typically given to Charles Griffith’s screenplay (based on a scenario the two hashed out together in a single evening), an assertion backed up by the pair’s subsequent work on A Little Shop of Horrors, which strikes a very similar tone. (An oft-repeated anecdote has it that on the first day of shooting Corman asked Griffith, “How do you direct comedy?”) But what’s most surprising about A Bucket of Blood is the way the story somehow transcends its schlock premise and cardboard caricatures to achieve a very moving sense of pathos.

While far from a modernist masterpiece—and even playfully satirizing the cult of High Art—Walter’s dilemma has a certain affinity with E.M. Forster’s Leonard Bast and T.S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock (”I have measured out my life with coffee spoons”), two authors Corman claimed to have studied in depth during a semester at Oxford’s Balliol College. Call it the tragedy of modern man, if you can say it without smirking: the eternal dilemmas of sexual frustration and personal unfulfillment compounded by the social atomization of contemporary urban life and the existential awareness of one’s ultimate insignificance in the material universe. Just as Prufrock lamented that he would never be the Prince Hamlet of his own life—”but an attendant lord, one that will do / To swell a progress, start a scene or two [...] At times, indeed, almost ridiculous. / Almost, at times, the Fool.”—so Walter’s greatest triumph comes when the beatniks who once ridiculed him now crown him as their creative King. Sporting a gold star on his lapel and wielding a toilet-plunger scepter and an ersatz chalice, Walter gets tipsy on champagne while the others sing his praises: “He blossoms as the one hope of our nearly sterile century.” Though his artistic achievements will soon (quite literally) come crashing down, there’s a real tenderness evoked by Walter’s punch-drunk speech to the crowd. “I would never, ever ignore you guys. I know what it is to be ignored.”

Could Walter be a surrogate for Corman, as Prufrock was for Eliot? Though he would go on to develop a cult following, Corman had only enjoyed limited critical success at the time he made Bucket. Working out of the mainstream studio system, he was denied the cultural prestige of Hollywood’s major productions, almost exclusively producing exploitation pictures aimed at the youth market: fast, cheap and (in Corman’s own view) totally dispensable. Though he was a notorious penny pincher, he never bothered to copyright any of his early works, feeling that the expenditure of shipping a certification print to the Library of Congress would cost more than anything he would ever gain in royalties. (He would even recycle original camera negatives to cut costs.) Not knowing that he would someday be christened with the moniker “King of the Bs,” Corman may very well have seen himself in Walter Paisley. Early press releases written by Corman erroneously claimed that he was, of all things, a Rhodes scholar-like Walter, he tried to bluff his way to a higher social status.

Its this underlying identification with Walter (however complex) that gives this film its unexpected resonance. If it’s not exactly Howards End, Walter’s End has a tragic sweep and creative power all its own.

A Bucket of Blood is screening as part of Anthology Film Archives’ Roger Corman Retrospective on Nov. 2 at 9:00 (following a 7:00 screening of Wild Angels), Nov. 6 at 7:30 (followed by a 9:00 screening of X: The Man with X-Ray Eyes), and Nov. 8 at 5:30 (following a 3:30 screening of Wild Angels, and followed by a 7:00 screening of Little Shop of Horrors and an 8:45 screening of Bloody Mama). Please note that each film requires separate admission.

cineBrat is daily ‘best in show’ picks (www.twitter.com/cineBrat) and weekly reviews of NYC repertory film screenings & local premieres.

Paul Brunick is a young film fanatic residing in New York and a regular contributor to Film Comment magazine. He is currently completing an M.A. in Cinema Studies at NYU.

A record keeper in both her drawings and story telling, Lauren Redniss holds tight to details to keep them from being stolen by the pitfalls of memory. Embedding herself within a story by recording interviews and drawing on-site during conversations, one becomes tangled within the thoughts and learns that all stories are interconnected. Although images for her forthcoming book have not been included in our conversation below, trust me when I tell you that they exhibit a dramatic movement towards an abstract method of storytelling through beautiful and sinuous lines.

DG: Are you still illustrating for the NY Times?

LR: I’ve been pretty consumed with these books that I’m working on, and some other new projects. I did those Op-Art pieces for a long time and the constraints of working within that framework was really interesting. There’s no room for anything extraneous. The Op-Arts were all about spare-ness - how much you can do with how little - they’re black and white, and have a very restricted amount of text. Those constraints made me crave color again, and to develop something that couldn’t fit on a newspaper page. Any project or medium has some limitation, some missing element. When I’m working on something, over time I become more and more conscious of what that missing element is. Then I get really interested in pursuing those elements. That’s what generally leads me to my new project. So, sort of in reaction to the Op-Art pieces, I did this book, Century Girl, about a 100-year-old dancer - now 106 — who has lived the most over-the-top life. She was a showgirl who danced for Woodrow Wilson. She scandalized Henry Ford with the rumba. She made silent movies in Egypt in the Valley of the Kings, set off 100 rockets at Times

Square when she turned 100 - same year that Times Square turned 100 — and on and on- her life has been and continues to be this uninterrupted, superabundance of colors and characters. I had to create a form that could capture that.

DG: Century Girl is a mixed presentation of collage and drawing and your first published book. But, you’ve used books as a mode to present you work before …

LR: Yes. These here are handmade silkscreen books. I made about 3 copies of each since I was printing and binding them all by hand.

DG: What is this one about?

LR: This is about New York City water towers. It struck me that they’re everywhere and no one knows what they really are. So I went and interviewed the heads of the two companies that dominate the New York City water tower market. And it’s this great story of immigrant families in New York in the late 19th Century. There are two Jewish families that at one point worked together. There was some kind of scuffle around 1895. If I remember the story correctly, one guy wants to go out on his own, and the matriarch of the other family hires a bunch of Irish thugs to rough him up. It’s a Friday, and apparently, when the cops come to arrest her, she uses the excuse that, it’s Shabbat and hides behind the curtains in her apartment. Long story short, after that there are two families competing for the water tower market.
I did the drawings on a roof in midtown 40 stories up, trying not to get blown off the building. You can identify which company builds each tank by the finials atop the pointed roofs — the four cornered “R” stands for Rosenwach. The “I” is for Isseks Brothers.

DG: The color is beautiful.

LR: It’s funny to see those books now.

DG: Why?

LR: You know, I see things that I’d never do now, or things that I used to do that I’ve forgotten about and think maybe I should explore them again.
The books were printed in just three colors - cyan, magenta, and yellow. I wanted to see how much variety I could get by layering the color in different combinations and concentrations.

DG: Your work always incorporates imagery and writing as imagery. What inspired you to create this process?

LR: I have anxiety around how fleeting time is. Since I was a young, I always felt Well, this could be the last time that …. I remember that feeling vividly. I think this has always been the impulse behind my drawing - an effort to record things that otherwise would slip away. This grew into writing down dialogues between people. Then I started using a tape recorder. I used to record my grandparents all the time. They had this kind of vaudevillian banter after being married for 60 years. One time I recorded them having a conversation about ping-pong. Their exchange was just like a ping-pong volley.

I was drawing for the New York Times, and my art director at the Op-Ed page knew I was making these recordings on the side, and interviewing people, which I’d do because I was so shy. It was a way to formalize talking to people. So, the Times asked me to do a piece to mark the 10-year anniversary of the riots in Crown Heights. I interviewed a lot of people, did a lot of drawings, and eventually stumbled into two strangers having a conversation on a corner of Eastern Parkway. A black man talking to a Hasidic man. They’d just bumped into each other and struck up a conversation and were debating interpretations of Biblical stories. Their conversation, and the fact that it happened seemed to reflect on the riots. I wasn’t interested in making some pronouncement that in the 10 years since the riots things had changed for the better, or for the worse. That this moment of serendipity and connection had taken place-that such a moment was possible-seemed to speak for itself.

DG: There are specific boundaries with form and line that the words play with in the panel. I guess it becomes an overall idea of how one reads the imagery.

LR: The balance between text and image is something that I struggle with. I don’t think of myself as a writer, and yet words keep showing up in my drawings. I have mixed feelings about that, why do I need to put words in, isn’t the image enough? Part of it has been this fear that the image wasn’t enough, and that I had to add more and more layers of meaning. One of the reasons I was interested in making these books was that in this format you could have both, and have space to pull them apart. I also wanted to explore text as a visual language of its own, like calligraphy or hieroglyphics. In Century Girl I hand wrote everything. For my new book, I designed a font. The calligraphy of the lines is still very important, but I don’t want the words always on top of the picture.

DG: You want the line of the letters to become their own drawing element?

LR: Yes. Because this new font is something I can type in, it could end up feeling too orderly and consistent, and therefore devoid of feeling. So I go back in and mess with it. It has to feel drawn, and the lines of the lettering need to have the same vigor and intention of lines that you’d have in a gesture drawing of a figure. It can’t feel like its generated by a computer and pluncked down on top on the picture. At least, not in this book. Maybe for a different project a more mechanical quality would fit.

DG: What’s your new book about?

LR: It’s about radioactivity-sort of…(laughs). It’s the bodice-ripping version of Marie Curie’s life. The backbone of the book is a biography of Marie Curie - the three love stories that punctuate her life and her scientific discoveries. Interwoven into the biography are metaphorical, non-chronological connections to moments in the history of atomic science.

DG: You kind-of just blew my mind. What a cool idea. How long have you been working on this idea, and how did it come about?

LR: It was part of that impulse to seek out that missing element from the previous work. Century Girl is all glittery photos on glossy paper, there’s such an attention to surface -even though there is a meaningful story - the surface quality highlights the show business and spectacle and is center stage. I wanted to go in the opposite direction. I wanted the images in this new book to feel tender and hand-made. I wanted to write a love story. And one reason radioactivity is so interesting is because it is invisible. I loved that echo between the theme of love and radiation - both these powerful unseen forces.

The images in the new book are cyanotype prints. It’s a photographic process that doesn’t use a camera. You coat paper with light sensitive chemicals, cover it with a negative, and expose it to the sun. The chemicals turn the paper blue where it is exposed to light. I turned my apartment into a darkroom. If you had been here a few days ago my whole place was wrapped in black plastic and was all infrared lighting. I was running up to the roof to expose the paper and then back down to rinse the prints in citric acid.

DG: Is it limited by color and has to go blue?

LR: Yes. And the process made sense conceptually because, like radiation, it’s all about exposure.

DG: Do you think that you’ll make a book that conveys the narrative without text?

LR: I feel like I need them both, but I don’t know if I need them both present every time in every work. There are some stories that feel like that can be written in prose without images. And vice-versa. Some stories seem to need both text and image, with each offering a quality the other couldn’t. I don’t think like a comic book artist or graphic novelist, I can’t draw the same character over in sequential panels. I’m really interested in abstraction-I think I’m letting myself inch towards it.

BOMB On The Inside is conversation series created by David Goodman that engages artists, curators, gallerists, and visionaries to reveal the dynamism and power of creative thought. This piece was edited with the help of Richard J. Goldstein.

Amit Chaudhuri. Photo by Eamonn McCabe. Courtesy Knopf.

“My interest in the English language is not just to do with a relationship with empire,” says novelist Amit Chaudhuri. At least, not the British Empire. For him, Indians have to contend with an empire of a different (although not unrelated) kind: their own. Set in the ’80s when India’s socialist government was liberalizing its economic policies and the West was eying this new free market power raising its head over the rest of Southeast Asia, Chaudhuri’s new novel The Immortals portrays the difficulties three middle-class Bengalis experience in situating their musical talents within this changed economic landscape. Nirmalya Sengupta plays the adolescent bohemian with barely a trace of irony, growing a beard and belittling the more commercial aspirations of his vocally-gifted mother Mallika and his music tutor Shyamji.

Thankfully, Chaudhuri is not there just to teach us a lesson about the hubris of adolescence. Committed as he is to the liberal, modern approach to culture he calls Bengali humanism, Chaudhuri mines the often unself-aware pronouncements and plottings of his three main characters to comic effect. (A chapter begins: “Nirmalya, unobtrusively but firmly rejecting his father’s Mercedes, stood at a bus stop with The Story of Philosophy in his hand.”)

But encounters like Mallika’s losing a record contract because she sings with Bengali-accented Hindi feel tragic, not comic, because the people who populate his novel are getting crushed in the gears that provided the opportunity they’ve just worked up the courage to seize. (Also, music industry politics is a subject Chaudhuri, a successful musician himself, can speak on with authority.) The novel is remarkable in its attention to detail, its almost Woolf-ian interest in the quanta of domestic life. Chaudhuri’s been criticized for the glacial pace of his narratives, but that’s made up for by the balletic way he fills out his characters’ inner lives.

Kyle McAuley: People who write about your work tend to marvel at how tranquil and composed your writing style is. Is that a kind of writing you intend to aim for?

Amit Chaudhuri: I must aim for it on some subconscious level. It’s not something I’m thinking about when I’m writing. I am kind of composing from sentence to sentence so that each sentence takes its cue from the previous one. It’s not so much plot as the cues that each sentence and each paragraph is giving me.

Tranquility, as you put it, is something I maybe take from Indian aesthetics. I’m very hesitant to make a claim of that kind, to identify any kind of quality my writing might have as being Indian in some way because I’m Indian. But I’ve always been moved by the composure and calmness of Indian pictures, paintings, and music, and how it privileges peace. There is the word shanti, which you might have heard of, that “The Waste Land” ends with, which means peace. Shanti’s also one of the nine aesthetic emotions in Indian classicism. It’s a hugely desired aesthetic mode in music. I’ve also responded to it in western writers—people like Seamus Heaney, for instance, who I think has that tranquility, and in fact writes about it in one of his poem “The Harvest Bow.” He quotes the 19th century poet Coventry Patmore where he says, “The end of art is peace.” And I don’t think that’s the only end of art—that’s a pun there on the word “end”—but that’s certainly one of the intentions.

KM: You’ve written about post-colonialism before, and I think a lot of western academics, and the general readership, tend to situate a lot of Indian writing that way. But you’re a full generation after the poster children for post-colonial Indian writing like Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, and Bharati Mukherjee. How do you situate yourself in relation to writing like that?

AC: I don’t fit in with that expectation or that way of positioning oneself as a writer-in relation to empire or whatever, in relationship to the English language. My interest in the English language is not just to do with a relationship with empire. And my relationship with British culture or western culture certainly doesn’t only have to do with colonialism. It has to do with other traditions as well—modernism, modernity, cosmopolitanism—and that’s also true of many Indian writers that have written in the Indian languages over the last hundred years or so. Some of the writers who are the poster boys, as you put it, like Rushdie, are also themselves misrepresented because there are qualities in their writing where you can see that they’re responding to film, to Buñuel, to Dalí, which are not picked up on as much as they should be.

KM: Is that a part of your ideas about Bengali humanism?

AC: Yeah. It’s an intellectual and cultural background for me—whether or not I would like to be one, it is there. It’s been insufficiently written about I think. It’s probably there in all of my books and it’s probably there in The Immortals. In The Immortals, I’m also looking at a kind of ambivalent terrain where the regard for high culture that Bengali humanism had, like other forms of humanism elsewhere, is by the ’80s beginning to wane and give way to something else. That ambiguous terrain is what I’m exploring in the novel.

KM: When I read The Immortals, I found that there was a keen sensitivity to being an outsider—the idea that a woman who sings with Bengali-accented Hindi can’t get a record contract, for instance.

AC: That’s something that’s been with me for a very long time. To be an outsider provides a useful prism through which to see things, but the reason it interests me is that it’s a role that’s no longer talked about, especially in India, where everyone has to be in on the project of being Indian. It’s not acceptable for someone to walk out of that project. The economic boom in India that we’ve been witnessing in the last twenty-five years or so also interestingly positions the Indian as a postcolonial, as a non-western person, in a triumphal way. The rise of India becomes concurrent with the rise of “Other” (within quotes) cultures, but within, of course, the parameters of the free market. There’s a kind of free-market triumphalism about the rise of Indianness, but that also gets talked about as a kind of Otherness, a kind of non-westernness.

What this project to do with Indianness doesn’t understand is that there might be people who aren’t interested in the project at all. Those who are not interested in that project become the outsiders. They have other affiliations, other things that interest them, which would necessarily have to be of an exploratory nature, because those things are less written about, less advertised, less publicized. One would be groping one’s way through a different mapping of the present and one’s past from the one that’s given to you, ready-made, as it is very often when one is positioned as “postcolonial.”

KM: The alternative that you seem to present in The Immortals is art, specifically music. But that creates a problem for the characters, where the free market intersects with artistic creation. There’s that encounter with the record executive, and there’s the son’s quasi-Bohemian ethos.

AC: Exactly. And I’m trying to look at the comic aspects of that.

KM: Yeah. (laughs)

AC: The novel allows you to be ambiguous about these things. In an essay, you have to take a position, but in a novel, because these are characters, their positions are in quotation marks. You can draw out the comic aspects of their earnestness while at the same time tapping into the urgency of what they’re saying. The boy and the whole veil of adolescence with its utopian vision of the world allows me to do that—to both present the comedy of it, but also the urgency of it, which we lose as we grow up.

KM: This concern of yours with the educated upper-middle class is also a form of outsiderness. It plays off the stereotype that in India there’s this vast divide between the business elite and the poor. When you’re presented with a family so up close that’s so stridently in the middle, it immediately destabilizes those kinds of stereotypes.

AC: I think the problem with these stereotypes and preconceptions is that they put things in broad categories, and then you forget individual histories—histories of people, histories of classes, how people of different classes come together by chance or by predetermination. I think there’s a constant flux and movement going on. Writing, and noticing, and interpreting is all about being attentive to that constant movement, not only of people, but of meaning.

Shyamji comes from a less privileged class, but he has other privileges to do with his knowledge of music. The people who work in the house lead a very different kind of life in a different neighborhood. But they too have their place within the family. The boy represents some kind of odd rebellion. He actually wants to play at being poor, distancing himself from his father’s Mercedes Benz. These are various roles being played by various people. Some of them are actual vocations or professions that people are fixed to, like the boy’s father. Other vocations are changing with the time, because of the changing economic landscape of India. The free market, which has been shaping so much of what is India, had made its presence felt in a big way in the early ’80s, and that changes Shyamji’s sense of his own vocation because it gives him a new sense of opportunity.

And then there’s Nirmalya, the boy who’s playing at being something, who’s giving a performance, as it were, for himself. Looking at things as stereotypes risks ignoring the fact that living people are made up of these very particular histories. History is very particular.

KM: You’re a musician yourself, and in The Immortals, music is a central concern. What made you decide to so comprehensively merge these two elements of your creative life?

AC: In the novel, classical music is a thread which allows me to explore certain issues that I have been interested in in the last ten years or so, to do with the position of the artwork in the world today. It’s changed a lot since my first novel [A Strange and Sublime Address] was published in 1991. It seemed to have been smuggled into the world of published work because it appeared at a time that still believed in literary culture—not to do with commercial success, but literary culture for its own sake. That’s not the say that publishers were unmindful of returns, but there was a still an idea of a literary culture. By the mid-’90s, at least in England, Thatcher’s legacy began to belatedly affect the arts. Thatcher’s impatience, as it were, for public funding for the arts—

KM: That’s a very nice way of putting it.

AC: (laughs) Her dislike of any kind of public spending, really. So that began to dry up, and every book had to fend for itself in this new world of the market. It was at that point that things began to be represented differently. That changed the relationship the writer had to his material and to his reader and to his or her publisher. I kind of escaped that in 1999 by going back to India, but it was basically happening everywhere.

I had first seen this kind of marketing of the arts in India, ironically, with music. Popular Indian music was at a crossroads. There had been a decline in classical music; the great classical musicians were aging, and no new constellation of musicians had emerged. The great film directors and film singers-Hindi film was the main form of popular music-were also in decline. Films themselves were in decline in the 80s. And then a new kind of music, which was the ghazal, the Urdu love song, began to be sung and marketed as a kind of substitute for film music. And many of these ghazals were actually terrible. At that time, marketing and packaging became very important. In a scenario like that, people like Shyamji would have suffered with their own kind of genuine commitment to the arts.

So I began to play around with some ideas that had preoccupied me: What happens to the musician or the artist or the writer in this changed world? What happens to these artifacts that possess a certain kind of beauty in that world? It becomes a kind of thread through which I am allowed to explore both the ambiguity of that world and also a certain kind of beauty, a certain valid yearning for beauty that seems to persist and nag at people.

KM: Do you know what your next project is going to be? Is it going to be music or literature?

AC: My next project is probably going to be a book on Calcutta as it is today. A non-fiction book.

KM: Do you know what sort of tack you’re going to take with that?

AC: I’ve written so much in my fiction about Calcutta, but that was a Calcutta that existed in the last heyday of its time, which was the time of modernity. But then—what has happened to Calcutta since, since its kind of falling off the map, as it were? It’s still an interesting city, but it’s lost its old definitions. So I’m interested in writing about where it is now.

The Immortals is out now from Knopf.

ArtWeLove.com’s news digest, now also available in email form, brings a comprehensive roundup of the week’s art developments to your digital doorstep. If you aren’t signed up, simply click here. ArtWeLove helps people explore art on their own terms, by suggesting artists, artworks, and exhibitions based on the art they love.

MoMA has named Klaus Biesenbach the new director of P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center as part of a string of far-reaching changes the institution has been making. ; Via nycgo.com

INTERNATIONAL NEWS: MONA LISA GETS ANOTHER NEW NAME, & RICHARD PRINCE CONTROVERSY CONTINUES

The Mona Lisa at the Louvre, was subject to a new scholarly hail Mary last week when an art historian proposed that da Vinci’s portrait does not depict the Florentine merchant’s wife Lisa del Giocondo-by whose name the painting is universally known in France-but Pacifica Brandani, a mistress of Julien de Médicis. (Read on.)

MODERN TIMES: A NEW P.S. 1 DIRECTOR, MORE WOMEN AT MOMA, & A CONTRACTED EXPANSION STALLS

Change can be slow to come to MoMA, but when it arrives the reverberations run deep. (Read on.)

ODDS AND ENDS: ARCHITECTS UNVEIL NEW PROJECT, MATTHEW MARKS GOES TO L.A., & RYAN TRECARTIN GETS AWARDED

In assorted news, Herzog & de Meuron have unveiled their design for the new Miami Art Museum. (Read on.)

ARTISTS IN THE NEWS:

Olafur Eliasson

Richard Prince

Louise Bourgeois

Jackson Pollock

Ryan Trecartin

SHOWS IN THE NEWS:

POP LIFE: Art In A Material World

TATE Modern, London, UK

Oct 1 - Jan 17

FULL NEWS DIGEST:

Follow this link for the full roundup and a list of related news articles.

Makoto Take, UNTITLED FROM SUBCULTURE SERIES; Gelatin silver print; 20 x 16 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Pierogi Flat Files.

Peter Moysaenko: “At the Savoy” speaks through the persona of jazz musician and bandleader William Henry Webb, and its ultimate line echoes the Catalonian poet Joan Maragall i Gorina’s petition for clemency in the wake of la Setmana Tràgica. In your view, does a particular poetic voice succeed by its achievement of plurality—a Whitmanian sense of one for all, all as one—or by its distillation of incomparable idiosyncrasy: and if a poem may indeed fail, what then has been lost?

Joseph Chapman: Well, I wish I had intended the echo of Joan Maragall i Gorina’s essay asking for the pardon of protestors in Catalonia in the wake of la Setmana Tràgica. It would have been a perceptive sentiment: that African-Americans in New York suffered similar marginalization and oppression as the Catalonian workers of Barcelona. Sadly, I haven’t read any of Maragall i Gorina’s work—I was very proud of myself after writing the final line of this poem, and I believe I even said to myself, “That’s a damn fine phrase, ‘City of Pardon.’” It’s likely I heard the phrase somewhere, that it took up residence in me, and then came to me (stripped of its context and past) when the poem needed it.

Of course, intentionality isn’t everything. I recently watched a film (at the behest of A.O. Scott’s wonderful NY Times Critic’s Pick’s feature) which, though billed as a romantic comedy in 1961, seems like a tragic masterpiece many years later. Rock Hudson and Doris Day play two ad executives in New York, during the heyday of ad men, and though there’s probably an intended subtext of sexism, the much more present tragedy of Rock Hudson’s closeted life shakes one to the core. There’s more sexual tension between Rock Hudson and Tony Randall than between Rock Hudson and Doris Day. As the film follows the standard romantic comedy plotline of initially reluctant lovers, and sparks fail to fly between Hudson and Day, I can’t help but think of the sexual exile of Hudson’s public persona. The jokes, though still funny, start to ring a little hollow, and you feel like both laughing and throwing up while watching the film. Which makes the film, in its own right, an aesthetic achievement. It’s an unintentional tragic masterpiece. (I wonder if there’s a focused study of works which succeed most fully in realms beyond the author’s intentions?) In the critical discourse, we seem to privilege the intentions of the maker, though I deeply believe that art exists beyond the maker, and can even betray him.

I believe a particular poetic voice succeeds when another person hears that voice as his own. In this way, Whitmanian plurality and incomparable idiosyncrasy are (sometimes) one and the same. But this brings up another ethical and aesthetic question: when does the writer overstep the bounds of self? I’d like to believe the writer can inhabit the pain of others through sympathetic identification. But maybe not. Charles Wright has a stanza in Sestets which reads:

It’s not possible to imagine and feel the pain of others.
We say we do but we don’t.
It is a country we have no passport for,
                                                             and no right of entry.

Language and imagination approximate the other—the question is whether that approximation goes far enough. I’m not sure if my own poem succeeds. In “At the Savoy,” I become the voice of Chick Webb in an attempt to both enlist someone to speak for me and, in a weird way, to hear myself speak. When I sat down to write this poem, I had endured a year of chronic insomnia, an ailment which I had also experienced as a child. From this very personal point of origin, I wrote as Chick Webb: here’s a drummer who had contracted spinal tuberculosis as a child, but who also—as his health began to fail—played as hard as anyone else, often collapsing after his shows. My own writing, at that time, was a similar pattern of exertion and collapse. From there, perhaps the real questions of the poem arise: what right does one have to appropriate the suffering of someone else? Is this poem a glorification of sickness? Does this poem risk a variation of blackface? In the final line, on some level, I’m asking for forgiveness.

At the Savoy
        Chick Webb

by Joseph Chapman

The ballroom fills with Harlem’s skin.
                                                           On the bandstand, behind custom-
Made pedals, goose-neck cymbals, none of us
Are in blackface.

Our horns swing from one dance number
To the next.
                   These girls in their saddle shoes and flared skirts;
My ecstatic sickness inside
                                           Her diamond earrings.

When I was born I was born
Deformed;
                 My spine curved away from me;
Now I pull tuxedo pants

Halfway up my chest, and imagine
Sleeping in the conch
                                  Shell of the trumpet

In a City of Pardon.

Joseph Chapman’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Main Street Rag, and The Portland Review. His honors include The Ann Williams Burrus Prize in Poetry (2005), the Henry Hoyns Fellowship (2005-2006), and an Academy of American Poets prize (2007). He teaches in the Interdisciplinary Studies Program at the University of Virginia.

For more on Makoto Take, visit her page at Pierogi Flat Files.

HILBERT, 2009. Acrylic on MDF 18-1/2 x 21 x 2 1/4 inches.

David Ryan is a Las Vegas, NV based artist. He earned his BFA from the University of Texas, Austin and his MFA from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He is also a member of Ripper Jordan, a collaborative visual art and country and western songwriting endeavor based in Las Vegas with artists Sean Slattery and James Hough. He has shown internationally in the United Kingdom, France and South Korea.

I first met David in 2003 when we worked together at Godt-Cleary Gallery in Las Vegas. We quickly transcended our Registrar/Preparator relationship and I have always admired his paintings, as well as his deep knowledge of the indie rock bands of the 1990’s. We also both attended Enwood Elementary School in Houston, TX, although we were never close.

Ryan Spencer: You sent me a Facebook message where you said, “Some times my iPod thinks of you and plays our song(s).” We talked about this a over a couple pints the night before your opening at Davidson Contemporary and it struck me how like your paintings that comment was; I was trying to explain how you create these precise, somewhat factory-produced looking objects which are imbued with this sort of humanity. Does that resonate at all with you?

David Ryan: It does, and while lame, I suppose my jokes do give me away. You are right though; technology plays an integral role in the production of my work. Drawn lines are traced on the computer then manipulated and layered into files that get cut with computer-navigated lasers or routers, depending on the material. The cutting devices can embed lines into the material within a tiny margin of error. It is quite impressive. Once cut, I smooth the material until its surfaces resemble a factory-produced object. Your example of an iPod is appropriate but my lines are often more clumsy and error-ridden. The beauty of that analogy however is that I feel like I am attempting to do what the iPod does. For instance, Joey Ramone’s voice on an MP3 file is a messy and hard to define thing that is embedded into a digital substrate. The chorus of “Beat on the Brat” has been captured and then delivered to the listener by technology that is predicated on sharp boundaries but the voice isn’t rendered discrete.

104 44 30 40 36 10, 2009. Acrylic and Flashe on Corafoam. 48 x 107 x 4 inches.

RS: I know it was ultimately too big to fit in to the show, but I was impressed by the large, modular work you made, such as 104 44 30 40 36 10, 2009. The pieces are economical and complicated; the designs appear layered and complex but the further you look in to them, you realize that there are no unnecessary lines or shapes. Even compared to your earlier works, which appear to be more ’simple’ I guess, these still maintain that minimal aesthetic. It’s like Minimalism on mushrooms…

DR: Oddly, I keep getting that response as I introduce more complexity into the work. The newer pieces seem wrought with unnecessary components in my opinion, especially when viewed through the lens of Minimalism. I suppose the back and forth of the design process from simplistic to overly complex and then back cues the viewer to a response similar to yours. I’m probably not the person to ask but to me they seem to take on a sum over histories approach where every path appears to be attempted.

People have commented that the newer work gets them thinking in terms of minimalism even though they admit that it is more complex. My suspicion is that the younger generations can handle complexity in ways that previous generations can’t. I haven’t taken a poll on my new pieces vs. the older and simpler ones and divided those responses by age but it would be awesome to see if that is the case.

RS: It would be great to see a pie chart or a Venn diagram that dissects the work in terms of meaning, age and comprehension. Personally, I feel that as technology advances, my recall decreases; I’m pretty good at accessing information but my memory is worthless. Being in the over-30 set, it’s hard for me to say what the kids are into these days. But the idea of quantity vs. density of information is not uninteresting, especially with regard to your works as they have evolved.

There are a lot of codes and pop-culture references in the titles of your pieces, many of which are music related, like Seeking Bassist and Drummer Who Enjoy Husker Du and Peter Paul and Mary.

DR: That particular title is supposedly the flier Black Francis and Joey Santiago put up that attracted Kim Deal. It’s one of my favorite titles regardless of its validity. I prefer titles that serve as handles for the pieces but don’t bias the experience of viewing them. It could be anything from a license plate number, an address, a phone number or a band’s flier. They are taken equally from real world sources as much as from fictitious ones.

RS: Yeah, totally. The whole idea of authenticity is painfully boring to me. First of all, who cares? And second of all, does it make the story more interesting? There’s this great Tom Waits bootleg where he’s asked to tell stories about his songs, and he says, “Some of these I don’t remember where they came from. But I’ll make something up that might be better. It’s kind of like when you’re at the movies and you’re watching a really bad film, and someone leans in and says, ‘You know this is a true story?’ Does it really improve the film?”

DR: That’s great! I just saw Paranormal Activity and they use the shaky-hand-holding-the-camera-trick to establish its “true story” tone. Now that I think about it I use that technique in my paintings too: some of my lines are based on hand-drawn lines. Oh how we keep getting Blair Witched!

SEEKING BASSIST AND DRUMMER WHO ENJOY HUSKER DU AND PETER, PAUL AND MARY, 2009. Acrylic and Flashe paint on MDF and Corafoam. 31 x 36 x 3 3/4 inches.

RS: You were a student of Dave Hickey’s in the heyday of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas MFA program. I was just looking at the Diaspora catalog, the show a couple of years back which Dave put together of some of his former students, and in his essay Hickey says, “I remember…David Ryan making absolutely hideous art until the day [he] decided to make absolutely wonderful art.” Did you recognize that moment?

DR: I specifically remember bumping into Dave one day on campus and he asked how things were coming along in the studio. He was wondering if I had anything for him to see. I told him I was working a lot and hopefully I’d have something worth checking out soon. He turned away and said that artists make bad things until they decide that they want to make good things. I stood there thinking, “Oh, really. It’s that easy.” And actually, it is that easy. At least in the sense that once you give yourself permission it allows you to do whatever the fuck you want.

With that said, I would have preferred that he had only told me how bad my paintings were and left it out of the Diaspora catalog but it does serve to make a point.

RS: I love the fact that he even under his tutelage, he acknowledged the fact that at the end of the day, it’s up to the artist to make that leap forward; it’s nothing that can be learned or taught.

Tim Bavington was one of your contemporaries at UNLV. All of his paintings are inspired by—or more like interpretations of—pop songs. Dave was a songwriter, I know. Did he inspire this cross-pollination between visual art and music?

DR: Not in my experience. Whenever Dave would come by the studio we might talk about whatever was playing at the time. He would suggest Slider over Electric Warrior if I had on T Rex, or maybe he would try to talk me out of listening to the Replacements as a general rule. It didn’t work. I never witnessed or heard of Dave pushing any agenda on an artist.

RS: You, Sean Slattery, and James Hough, all UNLV alum, started Ripper Jordan. Talk about your song-writing collaboration; how is that going now?

DR: We haven’t been doing any songs lately. Our focus has been on making art-objects for most of our collaborative sessions with a brief diversion into Nashville-style song writing.

IV, from the series ELLSWORTH PEANUTS by Ripper Jordan

RS: Ripper Jordan also has a show up now at Michele Quinn’s’s gallery, MCQ Fine Arts, In Las Vegas: Ellsworth Peanuts—the Ellsworth Kelly / Charles Schulz mash-up. It’s that sort of reductive smart/stupid, or I guess high/low-brow aesthetic, more appropriately.

DR: Ripper Jordan has always been a commercial endeavor, and although the three of us pursue our individual art careers separately, we enjoy what happens when we get together. We drink beer. Sean smokes cigarettes. At times we might talk about the draftsmanship of Schulz and the color of Kelly, we will most likely recite the lyrics of Alex Chilton when it starts to play and argue if MGMT is capable of pulling off another success.

Concerning Ripper Jordan’s angle on the latest idea of putting Peanuts and Kelly together, some times you just come across a good title and the rest falls into place.

RS: Yeah, I have to have the title before I start a project; it’s key. Anyway, you said that Ripper Jordan is a ‘commercial endeavor.’ But don’t you feel that your own work is also a commercial endeavor? Is there a difference between the David Ryan product and the Ripper Jordan product? I’m being blunt here, but ultimately both are dependant on market - their ability to be bought and sold as objects.

DR: Well, there is a difference between the two in the sense that a Ripper Jordan product is the collaboration between three people. We agree on an idea that interests us all and then use each person’s expertise to pull it off in a manner that looks good and that is also cost effective. We strive for cool but affordable. “Stuff for stores” has been the latest unapologetic goal for Ripper Jordan, but we have done album covers, illustrations and other projects along the way.

My personal art is the collaboration between myself and the technology used to make it. It requires more labor per piece and quite honestly isn’t cost effective. If I were a better boss I would rethink my business plan and probably make different work.

RS: But the Ripper Jordan show looks serious. And what is so great is that Michele has shown Ellsworth Kelly before and, not to diminish Kelly’s work in the least, is showing Elsworth Peanuts too. It’s fantastic. But what’s the difference between the buyers of David Ryan works and Ripper Jordan works? Has the game really changed or is it just the same field just with different players?

DR: The people who buy my stuff are usually taller than those who buy Ripper Jordan stuff.

RS: Didn’t you pay a session band to record Ripper Jordan’s song “Table For One?” That’s pretty serious, too…

DR: Sure. If we were Nashville studio musicians then we would have played it ourselves because that was the sound we wanted. It is the same reason people come to us to design and create objects for them. It’s what we do. Seriously.

David Ryan’s New Work will be up at Davidson Contemporary in New York through October 30, 2009. Ripper Jordan’s Ellsworth Peanuts will be up at MCQ Fine Art Salon in Las Vegas, NV through December 18, 2009. He is represented by Mark Moore Gallery in Santa Monica, CA.

Ryan Spencer lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He is represented by Arin Contemporary in Laguna Beach, CA.

Courtesy BOA Editions.

Joanna Howard’s dizzying tales of drowned sailors, glowing specters, reclusive dandies, and roguish pursuers start like the strike of a match: they ignite in an instant to a dazzling flame and then just as suddenly die out. Howard’s linguistic prowess sets the conflagration by bombarding the reader with irresistible images, such as “a mendicant: a scarved pale beauty with silver bell earrings, curled to sleep on kinked metal filings on the floor of a windowless farm shed gone to rot.” Howard’s oft idyllic scenes depict romantic pastures, crumbling farmhouses, and other filigree among the ruins, that evoke a heightened past. And the present is always overripe. To these scenes she adds adventure, tales of restless, wandering souls, often beauties, who are chased and who pursue and who are seeking. Tie in touches of the fantastical, the macabre, and the romantic, and the intrigue that inevitably laces Howard’s stories begins to take form.

What you will not find in Howard’s first book of short stories, On the Winding Stair, are elements  of the mundane, the transparent, or the slipshod. Much of what Howard accomplishes on the page owes to the sensuality of her words. Of Fennis, the reclusive dandy who the gourd farmer’s wife watches from a distance in “The Scent of Apples,” Howard writes, “From here she can see into Fennis’s home from her spyglass. She watches him creep about in Nile green crêpe de Chine robes. He spoons hollandaise from a pewter porringer and scans the spring catalogs, circling items with a charcoal marking pen.” No syllable is squandered in the lush descriptions; each word builds upon the previous to fashion an existence both delicate and decrepit. Howard’s sentences read as if she’d spun them in a linguistic centrifuge to rid them of excess. What remains is condensed, colorful, necessary.

The wonderfully strange worlds we fall into in these first sentences are complex and often unsettling. In “Black Cat,” a car crash crushes a chauffeurs’ head and leaves a honeymooning (and gauche) American couple and a Hungarian aristocrat at the driveway to a mansion that would rival Marienbad. “What Was There Was Gone, Burning” opens to bullets shattering the dining room window, piercing brocade curtains, and killing the narrator’s two great uncles. Or consider “Captive Girl for Cobbled Horseman,” where a girl taken from a ditch below her “family graves” wanders with a nomadic pack of girls across rivers and fields to faraway lands. She is not dead, but it’s also unclear in what form she survives.

The girl in “Captive Girl for Cobbled Horseman” lives, though if not as a human, then somewhere between this world and death. We know she and the other girls are endangered, that baying dogs search ceaselessly, that distant pursuers are always trailing, and that in an abandoned farmhouse an empty bed waits. Time moves in both directions, flying forward within a sentence, and distant memories hold sway. When the girl finds a torn shirt sleeve “blood-soaked and homespun,” she takes it “to be fit later quite naturally into an emerging puzzle.” Much of what is revealed is enigmatic, and the reader, like the captive girl, must piece together what has happened from the morsels that are given. In this sense, the story is formed like patchwork, much like the captive girl at the end who, “Severed and refitted, she now begins the flight to this strange future from this imagined past.”

These transient, cryptic middles lead to provocative ends that accentuate the fragility of the characters and their precarious worlds. Like the almost absent narrator of “The Black Cat” waiting in a crystal box for her husband’s return from the war, there is often anticipation of violent release: “In the end, these walls might be razed in strips, like peeling fruit, or they might come down in shards.” The narrators are frequently fractured and refitted: the captive girl (literally), but also metaphorically. The absconding femme fatale in “She Came from the East” glances at herself in a shattered funhouse mirror: “she was still working out the minor points, a story which began in windows and ended in mirrors, and nothing cleanly cut.” Nothing is cleanly cut in Howard’s stories; her characters are more beautiful in their brokenness. Nothing is definite and nothing is safe, and yet there is beauty and artifice and everything is at stake.