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'Brion Poloncic, a musician and author also, is deliberately withdrawn and elusive. Choosing not to participate in the artist talk, he lets his obscure statement and symbolic, abstract work speak for itself. He is at his most revealing when he writes, “following your dreams is like climbing up, hanging on, and riding the bucking bronco.” And crash landing as well, as his most forthcoming trademark cryptogram, “The Journal,” fairly screams its headline, “Schizophrenic.” True to form, as with his other pieces, the cipher for encryption remains hidden up his sleeve…….Poloncic’s world is puzzling, psychological and paradoxical, on the one hand Poloncic bares his troubled soul to the viewer only to overwhelm one with a myriad of iconic imagery and text messages virtually impossible to decipher in their mazelike patters…………..Furthermore, while Poloncic’s art in emotionally charged, it is also intellectually stimulating and aesthetically pleasing. His meticulous, almost obsessively drawn geometric and organic topography resemble pictographs with symbols both familiar and unfamiliar, especially in his “Untitled “ series of two inks on paper and his four variations of “Xanthous Mermaid Mechanics,” 1-4 which in spite of their separate iconography are united by one visual motif, a wide-eyed, open-mouthed figure in fear and pain………This image dominates Poloncic’s title piece, “Xanthous Mermaid Mechanic,” split as it were into two symbolic, blue and red extremes of the same coin or personality and a lot of stream of consciousness text including: “In space lit dimly by xanthous suns and small, sallow fireballs…but God is here now.” This is either a mixed message or a balanced one, but not so in Poloncic’s most overt piece, the aptly named “The Journal.” In this darkest work, even the banner headline “Schizo-phrenic” is split as is what may be its muse or source, the words “love-affair” which are embedded in a paisley-like flower in the center of the canvas. The artist leaves little further doubt as one of the many entries in his journal says “I read schizophrenia was a choice to take the high road. I feel it might be a low at best, terror at worst.” And perhaps a final word, “I’ve been hurt,” written to be legible when held up to a mirror, another sign of a doppelganger or double. Judging by the above, art is also a form of therapy for Poloncic, a way of keeping “it” together if not a cure-all. In “The Journal,” there is a direction for the viewer, “Enter here” but nowhere is there an exit, presumably for the artist as well.'-- Michael J. Krainak, Omaha City Weekly
'I used to philosophize about the possible realisms concerning communication of the soul, the subconscious mind, and the communal consciousness contained within my subjective experience. But, nowadays I like to keep things simple and cliché on different levels. Whereas I once thought my art transposed thought and invisible “stuff” into black line drawings, I have arrived at something simpler, where the interconnectedness , similarities, differences, contradictions, and undetected realms of nature all work together to achieve a state of perpetual harmony and resolve. I consider my art the kin of improvisational jazz and free-style rap where things ‘just happen’. But, I always arrive at the same conclusion, that life should be approached and lived with gratitude and enthusiasm.'-- Brion Poloncic
Brion Poloncic Psychedelic Everest
JEF Books
'If there isn't already a genre of writing called psychedelic realism, Brion Poloncic has created it with his book Xanthous Mermaid Mechanics. Each selection vibrates with color, spirals through experience and lands squarely in the territory between humor and madness. Madness imbues each of these pieces, yet Poloncic's view of the world seems remarkably clear-eyed. Suicide form letters, advice for the newly-diagnosed schizophrenic and an appreciation of his mother are the more straight up prose pieces. Some others read like they were channeled through some long ago beat sensibility; the language rich, evocative and rhythmic. Poloncic's book is a structural hybrid, Some pieces are short and pithy, two sentence salutes to spiritualism or an ode to a revered writer. Burroughs makes an appearance when he dictates a story through the writer's meth-charged brain. Longer pieces venture into the seamier side of the Omaha 90's music scene…blow jobs behind closed door, drug-addled debutantes slumming and transvestites turning tricks. But this is not a trip to the dark side. Humor and grace make frequent appearances and there is something sweet under the pathos, as if Poloncic wants to show us the dark, then let in the light. And, as reader, we trust him as a tour guide because his vision is so human, rings true and, at times, is so damn funny.'-- Vicki Wood, Art Move Magazine
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Excerpt
Uh which student? Here we go and tulips and love and sweetness and doves my my the buzz gets you and lies down beneath the blankets and then here she comes again and stops in midair like a helicopter bug like you’ve never seen one. Oh my this place sure is a mess, coming in low and aloft with finesse bows and banana peels and concession stands and a morphing hoop from which nothing much comes but does not give up all the same post war mint and dollar store laundry detergent amiss a flood a Miss a dud and woops here goes the best the ephemeral the bloody smoke on which we choke fuck for heaven’s sake and not to get excited please bring me back she said at caffeine dreams and I write from them, the was a gourd I hate people when the band was travelling to Kansas City, I am exactly like, enough purpose so outside English have some control and me, enough purpose so outside, religious or philosophy class pretty cool, I loved critical thinking, oh god texture, every single dot, now generalize that fifth, and it’s like shut up but then you think of it and it’s like Jesus! I oxford, no one really understands, one fourth of the population, it’s really funny, she’s also hilarious and I’ve never read a book like that before, I get into each subject, dumb dancing are hilarious right to do and everything, quantum theory, the opposite of what you want to do. I don’t know what to do about it, people have dedicated their life to this, it’s all about being self-aware, you have no idea, it just made me laugh, not unless you are into science, I am not one percent I am not suicidal, all you do it…..i am really unsaid, I’ve decided pages stamped in quinoa and either that or can we go inside no dean faction if you like the silent teaching talk to them and I know It sounds stupid but the birds and stuff like that and I make friends and I don’t question about something, and then I have a syllabus and to be in two classes at once, and it was hard to focus on mine but she was like oh yeah we can do this and that’s what got me into the classes we take and r.B. and one and our contagion and honestly there is some…….i blanched it all too. I don’t’ want to take it so I don’t take it all and she did the math and it would be the same price if I had gone to metro. Double prospectus like 18 credit hours which I absolutely believe dissolved errrr….that’s what we don’t like if I schedule and also we have a lot. A professor and language about a girl wish I had known awe man that’s a bummer and oh that stopped everything and I know I have a schedule and so I started out, it’s nice to start out tense and a chess match or a close approximation of bad well known and bad establishment I have all the verbs. Tuesday Wednesday class and I ended out at eleven and grand slam this sucks on with the classes it’s the most wayward chuckle and they took a nap like amazon for ours. Damn girl! A lot of abilities a cycle weird to ride ok it’s not everything but your opinion is wrong science defacto a girl again she asked oh where I been and I need science needs typing question ok with all matter its boring to me and it’s a shitter but I want to adhere but I just don’t know gather anywhere what a creative train wreck ha ha ha I was gonna go inside every done that? Honestly I am not educated enough and that was gonna be my first I’m on it will not be well founded. That’s a pitchfork I’m burning Halloween like I said I am waiting if you take a big wherever you are to one guitars plus is the next one you’re welcome thank you. It’s kind of weird but it’s not this kind of awesome, oh my god are you cause I walk in oh abandon that heavy seriously it is something of the girls I think talking about what you think and laugh ha ha. I mean it’s like a grocery store it happens even not knowing ha ha politically clap snap clap laughter do you vote well not challenge the pull by the time we drop all the elements it will look like glasses look better for them am I addicted now fair enough thank you for the porpouri and a floppy daze we used to do well it’s local I just abhor a shakes plus that will be oh the vacuum is us numbers numbers a game of backgammon not if he is railed with shit like you. Where is it? That is so I think it was skier a good time for the letter bonze get the flies out of here where glad I am not charging today oh I’ll look at it lovely pardon he does look like a’s finally go home what would we need next day oh jadon beat Chicago she’s still bitchin I know an ice jockey where ride the mule and hence a starter I went to once we’re gonna do bottom drop off yeah this tom he did their shoes the story yeah feel like surfing like one shoe naw I don’t think I saw do you know that one half courier curry oh yeah feel it brakes like good job aha! Is not way wings, yeah. God. More coffee? And uh, they say didn’t have anything spray paint which is youthful which isn’t rather incite cuz beans don’t burn in the kitchen ha wow they are nine thirty thank god they are a train does he? Where is alien coup if you don’t have to work fine frightened ha ha ha is all this for real for some reason our torpedo is that all of them um yeah cody beat that then again do you like katy? That is work done we’re gonna be elated get into that but I think I guess you could say this he had a rock inside his shave what about tort you French for turtle I’m going for three could be a beer can others release like lance does, yeah responsive have they left already so you and the bitter college we haven’t grubbed their high pitched feel shadowed but nice guy they are um Macy’s you have long legs oh gosh talons fur maid that’s mine really all that smoke first day planters oh my gawd vroom oh yeah that’s right okay thank you thank you head some people ruth I’ll bet on rudiment she really admired my dad double garry tell you this four way they had such a crime are gonna be so long it takes so long. I did it once last week, I don’t really think I’m gonna need this, she’d have it out of the way, one in line to do it…dizzy is like the light and we get it right but we don’t like it often like howdy okay flipflop and the guy is like here go check first state stuck with rough diamonds a lot of amount of reason but mental a good address I make it out I knew three thousand out of nowhere well be it starts to be that was the first time I was dreaming of it I really down you make have a good night I’m out.
Brion Poloncic
Brion Poloncic
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'In "The Animal Mode of Inescapable Shock," Anne Boyer writes, "If an animal is shocked, escapably or inescapably, she will manifest deep reactions of attachment for whoever has shocked her. If she has manifested deep reactions of attachment for whoever has shocked her, she will manifest deeper reactions of attachment for whoever has shocked her and then dragged her off the electrified grid. Perhaps she will develop deep feelings of attachment for electrified grids. Perhaps she will develop deep feelings of attachment for what is not the electrified grid. Perhaps she will develop deep feelings of attachment for dragging. She may also develop deep feelings of attachment for science, laboratories, experimentation, electricity, and informative forms of torture."
'In her book-length collection of essays, A Bestiary, Lily Hoang explores this complicated relationship between abuse, attachment, affection, and autonomy. Juxtaposing fragments of the author’s personal life and other ephemera, Lily Hoang weaves together images of rats, tigers, fairy tales, a dead sister, Asian/Orientalism, time, an abusive ex-husband (a self-described anarchist who demands alimony), myth, memory, an occasionally lying, occasionally cheating lover, family etched onto the body, feminism, teaching, an addicted nephew, violence, compulsion, and one night of hedonistic pleasure with an old school friend. This structure, like Tender Points by Amy Berkowitz or The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson, works best when the fragments speak to each to create a whole, something larger than the sum of its parts. Hoang’s A Bestiary accomplishes this through both subtle and clever means. ...
'As the book’s title suggests, there is no shortage of beasts in this book, both animal and human. The humans in this book treat each other badly and then try, sometimes, to do better. They struggle against addiction and their own asshattery; they feel the pull of family like thread sewn just beneath skin. They drive 500 miles to visit their lover who lies. They themselves lie. They burrow into friendships, into teaching, into fairy tale and myth. And alongside the humans, the beasts roam, both symbol and salve. Rats run mazes and press levers, tigers haunt villages, goats are both feast and sacrifice, rabbits perform cunning tricks, and in the Great Race, the pig always, always finishes last.'-- Melissa Reddish
Lily Hoang A Bestiary
Cleveland State University Press
'Rarely have I come across tenderness, venom, and fire held so intimately, so exquisitely, as in Lily Hoang’s A Bestiary. This book would be impressive enough as a collection of finely-forged fragments, but as it weaves itself into an even more impressive whole, my hat came off. Lily Hoang writes like she has nothing to lose and everything at stake.' -- Maggie Nelson
'A Bestiary is a work of great subtlety, precision, intelligence, daring, and emotive keenness. It seems completely contemporary (by which I mean that it is unlike anything I’ve read and that it makes me want to change my own writerly procedures). With headlong, reckless, improvisatory gestures, Lily Hoang prompts us to rethink what literature today can dare to aspire to. Her intellectually magnanimous book’s position on the threshold between recognizable ‘literature’ and some other vanguard form of performance/utterance made me feel happy and stimulated and dizzy (in a rapturous way) while I was reading it.'-- Wayne Koestenbaum
'The most perfect use of fragmentation, myth, language, fairytale, and terrible beauty that I have ever seen in my life. I’m swooning. My faith in what writing can be has been restored.'-- Lidia Yuknavitch
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Excerpt
On My Birthday, Dragons, & Intestines
Today, I am thirty-three, the year of Christ.
My parents are devout Catholics. Before my sister is dead, she is a perfect failure of a daughter. To God, they ask: why?
My dead sister’s son puts heroin through his body. He calls it: dragon.
Because he does not remember it is my birthday, my lover says today is sarcasm day—when all of Facebook does.
My hypochondriac mother on odysseys to explain sadness, because it must be something physical. Until—her insides push outward: uncontrolled liquefied shit: while driving, in stores, not quick enough to the toilet: its stain and stink. Its embarrassment.
Cancer does not explain my mother’s sadness, but they prescribe her SSRIs all the same.
They prescribe her medicinal marijuana pills to bring appetite back, to disrupt pain. When I tell her what they are, she throws them in the trash. Drugs, she says. She says, No, both words in English, to show how bad drugs are, medical or not.
I write a story in which I list out my parents’ prescriptions—the battle of journals to publish my Asian American plight.
I disgust.
I write an essay in which I list out my prescriptions. It feels too honest, but I publish it anyways.
I am not worth a nickel of shame.
My dead sister’s son, I can’t imagine how the cessation of dragons feels, his fall.
From one map come others, centuries ago: Here there be dragons, at the edges of our flat world, but there were never any dragons.
The amount of medical marijuana I smoke daily. For me—psychiatrically—it is prescribed: legit.
Many months ago, a friend gives me a bottle of oxy. I crush them up and snort.
Many days after that, I am reading at a conference in Denver and I am rationing my lines and I remove my intestines into the toilet of my hotel room, I gather all my shakes and fevers and sweat it on out. I am a ghost. Imagine the dragons.
Is it bad that I continue to check social media, counting the well wishes for a birthday that portends death and resurrection?
My mother on the edge of the world, hardly surviving.
I remember—the shadowing of her skin, how warmth to her feels like ice—the perpetual motion machine of excuses for my absence.
I cannot handle my mother’s sickness. It is not fear of contamination. It is simple fear.
My simple fear: death—hers, but that doesn’t happen yet, instead I have a dead sister and we are all guilty.
Bhanu, writing me a letter that will one day add up to become a book, about the rape of a woman in India, her intestines mashed up with a metal pipe.
My father smokes a pipe. Daily, my mother warns him of cancer, using herself as proof.
Yesterday, an explosion. My lover texts me: an explosion. I take pictures as proof, as memory, the building was vacant, intestine intact.
Later, he says: All the other guys’ girlfriends took way better pictures. I say: I’m not your girlfriend.
I don’t say this. I’m lying. But I wish I’d spoken up, for proof that we no longer are, or maybe his mind is changed, but it isn’t—I know.
(cont.)
Lily Hoang - Fiction
Lily Hoang Reads from Changing
Delta Mouth 2012 Lily Hoang
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The Fourth River: Why do you write and for whom?
Tyehimba Jess: I used to write for political purposes strictly. I was interested in writing poems that would inspire people to take political action. That’s what “when niggas love Revolution like they love the bulls” is all about. Those poems were for black people. But you know you can’t control who reads your work.
So, after a while, I came to accept the idea that I was writing for everybody. Even when I thought I was writing for black people, not all black people agreed with what I was writing. It is difficult to say that you are writing for one particular group of people. It can limit your imagination. After a while, I was like, “OK, I am writing for the entire world.” I think that later on, it became about writing for me.
The more I write, the more I realize it is about conveying a message. My poetry is pretty clear. Generally, you know what I am writing about by the end of a poem. I try to write that way. But it is working internally, as well.
When I am doing these poems, these syncopated sonnets and all that, I think I am trying to find a way to tell two different stories in one breath. I am looking for metaphors beyond the rhetorical that link into the shape of the poem and [into] the way the poem is read on the page.
FR: Philip Larkin once wrote, “the impulse to preserve lies at the bottom of all art.” In your case, what are you preserving in your poems?
TJ: Yes, I guess I am in the business of historical preservation. There were a few things I was trying to preserve. One was Leadbelly’s legacy but also the idea of the work that the old music has done for us. When I say “us,” I mean nationally what that work has done.
That legacy continues. The thing I think about a lot is the roots of the music, particularly in regard to the African community and the African-American contribution. With this new work I am doing, it is beyond the music. It is about theater and literature as well. When you look at the intellectual property, so much of that property has been generated from the black community.
Paying homage to Leadbelly, trying to present a portrait of his life, to me, meant recalling the pain and the joy that went into making that music. It lies at the bottom of American music. So I guess I’m back where Philip Larkin was: at the bottom of his preservation.
Tyehimba Jess Olio
Wave Books
'With ambitious manipulations of poetic forms, Tyehimba Jess presents the sweat and story behind America's blues, worksongs and church hymns. Part fact, part fiction, Jess's much anticipated second book weaves sonnet, song, and narrative to examine the lives of mostly unrecorded African American performers directly before and after the Civil War up to World War I. OLIO is an effort to understand how they met, resisted, complicated, co-opted, and sometimes defeated attempts to minstrelize them.'-- Wave Books
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Excerpts
Blind Boone’s Pianola Blues
They said I wasn’t smooth enough
to beat their sharp machine.
That my style was obsolete,
that old rags had lost their gleam
and lunge. That all I had
left was a sucker punch
that couldn’t touch
their invisible piano man
with his wind up gut-
less guts of paper rolls.
And so, I went and told them
that before the night was through
I’d prove what the son of an ex-
slave could do: I dared them
to put on their most twisty
tune. To play it double-time
while I listened from another
room past the traffic sounds
of the avenue below.
To play it only once,
then to let me show
note for note how that scroll
made its roll through Chopin
or Bach or Beethoven’s best.
And if I failed to match my fingers
and ears with the spinning gears
of their invisible pneumatic piano
scholar, I’d pay them the price
of a thousand dollars.
And what was in it for Boone?
you might ask…
Might be the same thing that drives men
through mountains at heart attack pace.
Might be just to prove some tasks
ain’t meant to be neatly played
out on paper and into air,
but rather should tear
out from lung, heart and brain
with a flair of flicked wrists
and sly smile above the 88s…
and, of course, that ever-human
weight of pride that swallows us
when a thing’s done just right…
But they were eager to prove me wrong.
They chose their fastest machine
with their trickiest song and stuck it
in a room far down the hall from me.
They didn’t know how sharp
I can see with these ears of mine—
I caught every note even though
they played it in triple time.
And when I played it back to them
even faster, I could feel the violent
stares… heard one mutter
Lucky black bastard…
and that was my cue to rise,
to take a bow in their smoldering
silence and say, Not luck,
my friend, but the science
of touch and sweat and
stubborn old toil. I’d bet
these ten fingers against any coil
of wire and parchment and pump.
And I left them there to ponder
the wonders of blindness
as I walked out the door
into the heat of the sun.
100 Times
I say “nigger” a hundred times before breakfast every morning just to keep my teeth white.
–Paul Mooney, Comedian
Of course, I was skeptical, but because there’s often wisdom in the hardest humor, I stood before the mirror one sunrise and began my morning chant. All repeated calmly for the first week, but with flavors added on as the regimen continued into the second. 50 with er and 50 with a. 1/4 as question, 1/4 as surprise, 1/4 as anger, 1/4 implying the complaining “please.” All alternately whispered, shouted, laughed, snarled—all in search of the ideal whitening formula. After four weeks I remained skeptical. However, perseverance paid off by the sixth, when colleagues remarked on my brightened, hazeless smile, when friends alerted me to a steely glint in my grin.
I doubled the regimen to maximize results. Week eight saw a 2/3 increase in brightening, with a luminousness approaching diamond quality, particularly in the lower incisors. The uppers were sun white, never leaving room in their shine for shadow. Side effects became audible as well as visual: a small echo became perceptible after each repetition in my mantra, such that the cadence assumed a wondrous worksong rhythm. Upon closer examination, magnifying mirrors revealed one (1) small, brown man peering into the side of each tooth’s mirror-smooth enamel, each one appearing only briefly before each utterance. Alarmed but intrigued, I enhanced my treatment. Various gesticulations were added to the morning litany. Sneers, chuckles, sighs, and facial contortions were enhanced throughout. As a result, the echo’s intensity increased from slight windy whisper to low murmur, to small and steady chorus each morning, a daily affirmation of my will to shine. A halogen glare burned from my mouth throughout the day. I’ve become a walking lighthouse of shine—the ritual has grown above and beyond and through me. I wake each morning to stand before my mirror, and before I open my mouth I hear the chant begin above and around me, as if I were in the middle of the mantra’s core, as if I’m one in a circle of prayer. I’ve found others who hear the chant with me, or they’ve found me, those who rise up with me each morning to stand before our mirrors with the diamond-sharp sound of ourselves polishing each tooth until we gleam—our number grows daily. We shimmer and shine inside the bulging head of our chant, polishing our glowing mirrors, staring into the glare until we shield our eyes.
Tyehimba Jess - Syncopated Sonnets
Tyehimba Jess reads "Another Man Done"
Tyehimba Jess, “Against Silence”
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'Nineteen provocative fictions and docufictions comprise Death Café. Each narrative is independent of the other yet connected thematically by what perhaps can be described as “daring not to avert one’s eyes from the unjustified pain and sorrow that populate the globe.” Jaffe’s work examines, through different eyes, eyes of the other—the oppressed, the marginalized, the mad, the inevitable—until the examining seamlessly gives way to inhabiting. This ideality is underscored in “Inhabit,” a multiple-discourse docufiction that explores the deeper aspects of suffering as the narrator seeks to inhabit crucial moments during the lives and deaths of individuals who have made artistic, loving, even ugly impacts on the world. In one section, the narrator inhabits the nearly failed suicide of the “Maladroit when not masterful” Vincent Van Gogh and recalls Artaud’s words, “Suicided by society.” He dwells in the deathbed moments of the Aldous Huxley and later Blake with his beloved Catherine. When interrogated as to whether he wishes to inhabit Theo Van Gogh—the great-great grandson of Vincent’s brother—filmmaker, racist xenophobe, who is murdered and martyred, the narrator replies simply, “No.” Later he concedes that while Vincent would not wish for a descendant like Theo, he would understand. “The world moves forward and back. Proceeds by oppositions.” ...
'In the docufiction “Stockholm Syndrome,” Jaffe draws on the reported account of Wolfgang Priklopil who kidnapped a 10-year-old girl in Austria, held her captive for eight years, and eventually committed suicide when at age 18 she escaped. Afterward, the girl says of her captor that he “was a part of her life and ‘in a certain way’ she mourned his suicide.” Further, we learn that she wept inconsolably when she was informed he had killed himself. As the narrator interrogates the story, the girl expresses that she does not feel that Priklopil robbed her of her childhood, “I don’t have the feeling I missed something important. As far as I can see, children are robbed of their childhood one way or another.” Later, alone, she pays her respects at the morgue before his burial and lights a candle for him.
'With just a subtle massaging of emphasis, Jaffe manages to expose the hidden assumption in the original reporting—the girl is better off back with her society. But with her conflicted thoughts carefully articulated in Jaffe’s treated text, along with the egocentricity of the so-called authorities, the barrage of media attention, her dysfunctional family and the pointed reminders of the historical complexity of her society, the reader cannot help but wonder to what degree that assumption is valid.'-- Susan Grace, Autre
Harold Jaffe Death Café
Anti-Oedipus Press
'Death Café resumes and refines Harold Jaffe’s ongoing anatomy of the world in pain. Featuring 19 innovative fictions and docufictions set in Africa, Europe, China, India, the Middle East, and the benighted US, the collection addresses issues of global warming, political defiance, committed art-making, dream space, and speculative discourse. As always, Jaffe works his literary voodoo in variable tonalities that are uncannily formulated, displaying unequal doses of razor-edged satire and compassion.'-- AOP
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Excerpt
Stockholm Syndrome
An Austrian teenager held captive for eight years in a dungeon-like room on the outskirts of Vienna says her captor, Wolfgang Priklopil, was part of her life and “in a certain way” she mourned his suicide.
Eighteen-year-old Krista Ludwig is reported to have wept inconsolably when told that Priklopil killed himself.
After Krista Ludwig made her escape on Wednesday, Priklopil, 44, threw himself under a commercial train traveling east to Bucharest. The train was delivering electronic hardware and pigs for slaughter.
Krista Ludwig said she sympathized with Priklopil’s 89-year-old mother and planned to telephone her. (Priklopil’s mother is suffering from dementia and subsists in a nursing home near Graz, the “second city” of Austria, where the steroidal, gap-toothed governor-action star of California, Schwarzenegger, was birthed).
Krista Ludwig, said to be pale and trembling and to weigh just 42kg, less than she did as a 10-year-old, managed to flee her abductor after he sidled away to take a call on his mobile phone as she vacuumed his car, a 2003 white Audi sedan, in the driveway of the abduct house.
The time was three-fourteen pm, on a Wednesday, precisely eight years to the day and very close to the precise time that she had been kidnapped on her way to school.
Did Krista Ludwig realize it was exactly eight years to the day and hour since she was taken captive?
“No.”
Why then did she choose that very moment to attempt to escape?
“I was ready to leave so I left.”
Now 18, Krista Ludwig insists that communications technician Wolfgang Priklopil had not robbed her of her childhood.
“I don’t have the feeling I missed something important. As far as I can see, children are robbed of their childhood one way or another.”
Krista Ludwig said her lengthy abduction actually spared her bad habits such as smoking, drinking to excess, injecting heroin or speed, snorting cocaine, playing video games, and having “false friends”.
What was a typical day like with Wolfgang Priklopil?
Between 7:30 and 8:00 a.m., Krista Ludwig and her abductor, who usually did not go to work, she said, would have breakfast, a sweet roll and coffee with heavy cream, or schlag.
The rest of the day Krista Ludwig would spend doing housework, reading, talking, cooking.
“That was it for years. Everything tied to the fear of being alone.”
If she was fearful of being alone why didn’t she attempt to escape sooner?
“It would be the same somewhere else.”
Nor was it clear from Krista Ludwig’s statement whether by “housework,” she referred to working in her room or elsewhere in the large ramshackle house.
What did she and her abductor talk about?
“Different things. I am not prepared to go into details.”
What did she read?
“Greek and Nordic myths, anthropology. The great god Zeus abducted virgins.”
Was Wolfgang Priklopil a version of Zeus?
“No. He was not my lord and master. I was just as strong. Perhaps stronger.”
She used an Austrian expression to indicate that at times Priklopil treated her tenderly, but at other times cruelly.
“He carried me in his arms but also trampled me underfoot.”
Investigators have been trying to determine whether Priklopil had an accomplice, based on a 14-year-old boy’s account at the time of the kidnapping that he saw two men drag young Krista Ludwig into a white Mercedes van.
But Krista Ludwig insisted that Prikopil acted alone. Moreover there was a later report that the 14-year-old boy was hyped up on coffee with schlag when he gave his account.
Priklopil “carried out the kidnapping himself. Everything was prepared,” Krista Ludwig said, adding that they then “decorated” her room together.
Photos released by police show the underground hiding place in Prikopil’s gabled, two-story wood house in Strasshof village outside Vienna, where he kept young Krista Ludwig: a small, cluttered, windowless room with washbasin, “squat toilet,” cot, cupboards and narrow concrete stairs leading up to a trapdoor.
No “decorations” are visible.
Because blueprints to the house were unavailable, investigators could not say for certain whether there were any other hidden compartments, dungeons or cells.
In her statement, read by flamboyant Viennese psychoanalyst Max Friedrich, who has been “treating” her, Krista Ludwig urged the media to respect her privacy.
“Everyone wants to ask intimate questions, but they don’t concern anyone,” she said via Max Friedrich.
She felt well, she said via Max Friedrich, if “maybe a bit patronized” at the location where she was currently held, and she appealed for more respect from the media.
The location was described by police as a secure institutional space with “carers” under the supervision of Max Friedrich.
Max Friedrich, with his unruly leonine grey head, wraparound mirror shades, corncob pipe, and unsteady, stiff-legged gait, cautioned the media to show restraint, insisting Krista Ludwig was severely traumatized and the intense media coverage was capable of victimizing her all over again.
Krista Ludwig’s parents, who separated after her abduction eight years before, complained that they had not been told where she was being held.
“Why can I not see my child?,” her mother, Birgit Dieskau, pleaded in a Sunday supplement newspaper interview
Max Friedrich confirmed that Krista Ludwig did not wish to see her parents again after their brief reunion. “Nor is that unusual under these extraordinary circumstances.”
Regarding what actually transpired between Krista Ludwig and her middle-aged abductor beyond the housecleaning, unspecified conversation, and consumption of sweet rolls and coffee mit schlag, the young woman refused to say.
After spending the first years locked in the dungeon-like room, which Priklopil had furnished with toys, books, magazines, and chewing gum, but neither television nor computer, Krista Ludwig was, she confided, via Max Friedrich, allowed to make occasional, brief, unaccompanied outings to the village.
Police are trying to determine if Krista Ludwig had a sexual relationship with her captor. And if so, the nature of the sexuality. If it was sadomasochistic, as suspected, then how far did it go, and were the roles steadfast or did they alternate?
She said, “Perhaps I will tell Dr. Friedrich one day or someone else. Perhaps I will never tell. The intimacy only belongs to me.”
A police photo of kidnap suspect Wolfgang Priklopil was presented at a news conference in Vienna. Smooth face with arched brows, a widow’s peak, and a small fleshy mouth, he bore some resemblance to the pious, silver-tongued former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Meanwhile it has been confirmed that Wolfgang Priklopil (what remained of him after he threw himself under the train) was buried secretly under a false name. The secret burial was to deter vandals, officials explained.
There were just two mourners not including Krista Ludwig. She paid her respects alone at the morgue the day before the burial and lit a single candle. Only Priklopil’s mother (severely demented and in a wheelchair) and a former business partner’s sister, “legally blind,” were at the unspecified gravesite.
The ceremony lasted seven minutes, Austrian radio said. No priest was in attendance and nine-and-a-half policemen stood guard.
According to Max Friedrich’s diagnosis, Krista Ludwig suffered from Stockholm Syndrome, a psychological condition in which long-held captives begin to identify with their captors.
The American heiress Patty Hearst was arguably the most famous contemporary example of Stockholm Syndrome after her kidnapping by the Symbionese Liberation Army in the early ‘70s.
After extensive cosmetic surgery and long hours of psychological debriefing, Hearst recovered and resumed her life as a self-consumed billionaire heiress.
Police Major General Gerhard Haeckel, of the Federal Criminal Investigations Bureau, said investigators are continuing to follow up on “every lead” in the case, which until last week was Austria’s second greatest mystery.
The greatest Austrian mystery of course is how a homely, ill-educated vegetarian dog-lover with a comical Chaplain mustache became the most charismatic genocider of the 20th century.
Harold Jaffe: "Anti-Twitter" | Talks at Google
*
p.s. Hey. ** H, Hi. 'Model of Oblivion' ... oh, yes, cool. I actually had forgotten about Sedgwick's employment of 'fountain', but yes, that's a great bonus. My Monday was swamped with work on the TV series script. That is my lot in life until at least the weekend, I think. A couple of possible screening for Zac's and my film 'LCTG' arose yesterday, so I started those pursuits. I was pretty home- and computer-bound. How was yours? I don't know Ranciere's 'The Intervals of Cinema', but your description and recommendation are enough to get me chasing it, so I will start looking today. Thank you so much for that tip! ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. Yes, and I especially like his color. Oh, Tim Parks. I like his writing/thinking. I'll read that asap. Thank you, D. ** Jamie McMorrow, Bon Mardi, Jamie! Yeah, is that fountain cheesy? Maybe. I like it too. Maybe being a big fireworks fan -- me too and, in fact, I've got a fireworks post coming up soon for folks like you and me -- helps. I would say my ultra-busyness is good. Well, if ARTE doesn't end up wanting our TV series, I might look back on the busyness differently, I guess. Was that Stephen lecture the RedBull one he did in Paris recently? I was there. That was excellent. Sorry about the slowness of the vocal recording, but what's that whole thing about the tortoise and the hare? I can't remember, but I think the tortoise wins. I'll go google search Louis Michel Eilshemius. Awesome. Did the exhibition live up? It's still wintery here, yay. Have a most fine, fine day, Love, me. ** Dóra Grőber, Hi! I will, by hook or by crook. It's the kind of English language book that shouldn't be too hard to find in the couple of English bookstores here. It's interesting how when you imagine a relationship it's so ... I don't know, wow, but they're always unpredictable. Another feather in the imagination's cap. Great, great about the meeting with your writer friend. Did your writing and scrapbook work end up excitingly? I'm glad you liked the post, and thank for noting your interesting favorites. My favorites? If I had to choose, let's see ... Charles Ray's 'Ink Line' is one of my favorite artworks, so that one, obviously. I saw Olafur Eliasson's 'Big Bang' in the real, and the videos don't catch how mind-blowing it is in person. And I do like 'Model of Oblivion'. All that red. Thanks about the script. It's a brain-drain, but I guess most good things are, right? Well, maybe not most, ha ha. Have a lovely Tuesday! What happened? ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. This Thursday ... okay. Fingers crossed. And its splendidness is all that really matters. I like that Portishead cover. I'm surprised because I think 'S.O.S' is sublime in the original version, but they managed to fool with it very well. ** Steevee, Hi, Steve. Very curious to hear what you think of 'High Rise'. It's still not in France. ** Schlix, Hi, Uli. Thanks, man. Oh, I see. The workshop does sound super interesting and super taxing simultaneously. 'The Big Moment' is a strange decision re: the title. Much, much less intriguing, in English at least. Four of my books are going to be published in Germany in the new few years, and I'm curious what the titles will become. Hopefully not something like 'The Big Moment'. Have an excellent day! ** Tender prey, Hi, Marc! Yeah, the Hein's cool twist is so slight that it's maximal or something. Thanks for going back over the posts. The Anger is ' Eaux d'Artifice'. _B_A linked to it in the comments somewhere if you want a quick fix. Yes, the Leslie Thornton Day its launching tomorrow, in fact. Interesting installation of that film. In her gallery work, she's been working with the circular lately. Shit, sorry that the link didn't work. Here's a link to a brief, not fantastic video showing quick looks at a few of the circle/pair pieces. Thanks a bunch, Marc! Love, Dennis ** Misanthrope, Hi, George, I think your (gloriously) weird mind can find the weird (and glorious) in anything, that's what I think. I think that eternally peeing fountain person would be difficult to pull off technically, but that's only a reason to attempt it. Maybe that's what you can do with your Noah Matous slave or whatever his name is. I'm busy too, man. Whew. High, crampy five. I light the wrong end of a cigarette probably every day. Man, not a good taste. Whoever those guys are who told you you're ugly are way ugly total stink-faces, guaranteed. LPS is the fucking man! Go-go-go! Your mom sounds kind of wise. ** Alistair McCartney, Hi, Alistair! Tuesday is gonna be a bit too work-y for my taste but you know that goes. Windy Venice! That a beautiful image. Windy LA in general! There's something about LA that makes it seem very mystical when it's windy. How's stuff? Any news from your agent or anything? Big love to you and to Tim too! ** Kyler, Hi, K. Ah, a review. Visually dazzling is good. Funny is good. Huh, okay. It's hard to imagine I'll ever see it unless it comes to Paris, which I suppose it might. I'll test out that song in the video to start. Thanks a bunch, Kyler. ** Alan, Hi, Alan! Very good to see you, my friend! Thank you for alerting me to that comment. I would never have seen it. I wonder how I can answer him. Hm, I'll go find the comment and see if his profile has any contact info or something. Thank you very much, man. How are you? ** Right. There are yet four more books I read and loved in recent times for those of you who are looking for things to read and find yourself intrigued by my squib-like portrayals of them. Have at it. See you tomorrow.
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'Brion Poloncic, a musician and author also, is deliberately withdrawn and elusive. Choosing not to participate in the artist talk, he lets his obscure statement and symbolic, abstract work speak for itself. He is at his most revealing when he writes, “following your dreams is like climbing up, hanging on, and riding the bucking bronco.” And crash landing as well, as his most forthcoming trademark cryptogram, “The Journal,” fairly screams its headline, “Schizophrenic.” True to form, as with his other pieces, the cipher for encryption remains hidden up his sleeve…….Poloncic’s world is puzzling, psychological and paradoxical, on the one hand Poloncic bares his troubled soul to the viewer only to overwhelm one with a myriad of iconic imagery and text messages virtually impossible to decipher in their mazelike patters…………..Furthermore, while Poloncic’s art in emotionally charged, it is also intellectually stimulating and aesthetically pleasing. His meticulous, almost obsessively drawn geometric and organic topography resemble pictographs with symbols both familiar and unfamiliar, especially in his “Untitled “ series of two inks on paper and his four variations of “Xanthous Mermaid Mechanics,” 1-4 which in spite of their separate iconography are united by one visual motif, a wide-eyed, open-mouthed figure in fear and pain………This image dominates Poloncic’s title piece, “Xanthous Mermaid Mechanic,” split as it were into two symbolic, blue and red extremes of the same coin or personality and a lot of stream of consciousness text including: “In space lit dimly by xanthous suns and small, sallow fireballs…but God is here now.” This is either a mixed message or a balanced one, but not so in Poloncic’s most overt piece, the aptly named “The Journal.” In this darkest work, even the banner headline “Schizo-phrenic” is split as is what may be its muse or source, the words “love-affair” which are embedded in a paisley-like flower in the center of the canvas. The artist leaves little further doubt as one of the many entries in his journal says “I read schizophrenia was a choice to take the high road. I feel it might be a low at best, terror at worst.” And perhaps a final word, “I’ve been hurt,” written to be legible when held up to a mirror, another sign of a doppelganger or double. Judging by the above, art is also a form of therapy for Poloncic, a way of keeping “it” together if not a cure-all. In “The Journal,” there is a direction for the viewer, “Enter here” but nowhere is there an exit, presumably for the artist as well.'-- Michael J. Krainak, Omaha City Weekly
'I used to philosophize about the possible realisms concerning communication of the soul, the subconscious mind, and the communal consciousness contained within my subjective experience. But, nowadays I like to keep things simple and cliché on different levels. Whereas I once thought my art transposed thought and invisible “stuff” into black line drawings, I have arrived at something simpler, where the interconnectedness , similarities, differences, contradictions, and undetected realms of nature all work together to achieve a state of perpetual harmony and resolve. I consider my art the kin of improvisational jazz and free-style rap where things ‘just happen’. But, I always arrive at the same conclusion, that life should be approached and lived with gratitude and enthusiasm.'-- Brion Poloncic
Brion Poloncic Psychedelic Everest
JEF Books
'If there isn't already a genre of writing called psychedelic realism, Brion Poloncic has created it with his book Xanthous Mermaid Mechanics. Each selection vibrates with color, spirals through experience and lands squarely in the territory between humor and madness. Madness imbues each of these pieces, yet Poloncic's view of the world seems remarkably clear-eyed. Suicide form letters, advice for the newly-diagnosed schizophrenic and an appreciation of his mother are the more straight up prose pieces. Some others read like they were channeled through some long ago beat sensibility; the language rich, evocative and rhythmic. Poloncic's book is a structural hybrid, Some pieces are short and pithy, two sentence salutes to spiritualism or an ode to a revered writer. Burroughs makes an appearance when he dictates a story through the writer's meth-charged brain. Longer pieces venture into the seamier side of the Omaha 90's music scene…blow jobs behind closed door, drug-addled debutantes slumming and transvestites turning tricks. But this is not a trip to the dark side. Humor and grace make frequent appearances and there is something sweet under the pathos, as if Poloncic wants to show us the dark, then let in the light. And, as reader, we trust him as a tour guide because his vision is so human, rings true and, at times, is so damn funny.'-- Vicki Wood, Art Move Magazine
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Excerpt
Uh which student? Here we go and tulips and love and sweetness and doves my my the buzz gets you and lies down beneath the blankets and then here she comes again and stops in midair like a helicopter bug like you’ve never seen one. Oh my this place sure is a mess, coming in low and aloft with finesse bows and banana peels and concession stands and a morphing hoop from which nothing much comes but does not give up all the same post war mint and dollar store laundry detergent amiss a flood a Miss a dud and woops here goes the best the ephemeral the bloody smoke on which we choke fuck for heaven’s sake and not to get excited please bring me back she said at caffeine dreams and I write from them, the was a gourd I hate people when the band was travelling to Kansas City, I am exactly like, enough purpose so outside English have some control and me, enough purpose so outside, religious or philosophy class pretty cool, I loved critical thinking, oh god texture, every single dot, now generalize that fifth, and it’s like shut up but then you think of it and it’s like Jesus! I oxford, no one really understands, one fourth of the population, it’s really funny, she’s also hilarious and I’ve never read a book like that before, I get into each subject, dumb dancing are hilarious right to do and everything, quantum theory, the opposite of what you want to do. I don’t know what to do about it, people have dedicated their life to this, it’s all about being self-aware, you have no idea, it just made me laugh, not unless you are into science, I am not one percent I am not suicidal, all you do it…..i am really unsaid, I’ve decided pages stamped in quinoa and either that or can we go inside no dean faction if you like the silent teaching talk to them and I know It sounds stupid but the birds and stuff like that and I make friends and I don’t question about something, and then I have a syllabus and to be in two classes at once, and it was hard to focus on mine but she was like oh yeah we can do this and that’s what got me into the classes we take and r.B. and one and our contagion and honestly there is some…….i blanched it all too. I don’t’ want to take it so I don’t take it all and she did the math and it would be the same price if I had gone to metro. Double prospectus like 18 credit hours which I absolutely believe dissolved errrr….that’s what we don’t like if I schedule and also we have a lot. A professor and language about a girl wish I had known awe man that’s a bummer and oh that stopped everything and I know I have a schedule and so I started out, it’s nice to start out tense and a chess match or a close approximation of bad well known and bad establishment I have all the verbs. Tuesday Wednesday class and I ended out at eleven and grand slam this sucks on with the classes it’s the most wayward chuckle and they took a nap like amazon for ours. Damn girl! A lot of abilities a cycle weird to ride ok it’s not everything but your opinion is wrong science defacto a girl again she asked oh where I been and I need science needs typing question ok with all matter its boring to me and it’s a shitter but I want to adhere but I just don’t know gather anywhere what a creative train wreck ha ha ha I was gonna go inside every done that? Honestly I am not educated enough and that was gonna be my first I’m on it will not be well founded. That’s a pitchfork I’m burning Halloween like I said I am waiting if you take a big wherever you are to one guitars plus is the next one you’re welcome thank you. It’s kind of weird but it’s not this kind of awesome, oh my god are you cause I walk in oh abandon that heavy seriously it is something of the girls I think talking about what you think and laugh ha ha. I mean it’s like a grocery store it happens even not knowing ha ha politically clap snap clap laughter do you vote well not challenge the pull by the time we drop all the elements it will look like glasses look better for them am I addicted now fair enough thank you for the porpouri and a floppy daze we used to do well it’s local I just abhor a shakes plus that will be oh the vacuum is us numbers numbers a game of backgammon not if he is railed with shit like you. Where is it? That is so I think it was skier a good time for the letter bonze get the flies out of here where glad I am not charging today oh I’ll look at it lovely pardon he does look like a’s finally go home what would we need next day oh jadon beat Chicago she’s still bitchin I know an ice jockey where ride the mule and hence a starter I went to once we’re gonna do bottom drop off yeah this tom he did their shoes the story yeah feel like surfing like one shoe naw I don’t think I saw do you know that one half courier curry oh yeah feel it brakes like good job aha! Is not way wings, yeah. God. More coffee? And uh, they say didn’t have anything spray paint which is youthful which isn’t rather incite cuz beans don’t burn in the kitchen ha wow they are nine thirty thank god they are a train does he? Where is alien coup if you don’t have to work fine frightened ha ha ha is all this for real for some reason our torpedo is that all of them um yeah cody beat that then again do you like katy? That is work done we’re gonna be elated get into that but I think I guess you could say this he had a rock inside his shave what about tort you French for turtle I’m going for three could be a beer can others release like lance does, yeah responsive have they left already so you and the bitter college we haven’t grubbed their high pitched feel shadowed but nice guy they are um Macy’s you have long legs oh gosh talons fur maid that’s mine really all that smoke first day planters oh my gawd vroom oh yeah that’s right okay thank you thank you head some people ruth I’ll bet on rudiment she really admired my dad double garry tell you this four way they had such a crime are gonna be so long it takes so long. I did it once last week, I don’t really think I’m gonna need this, she’d have it out of the way, one in line to do it…dizzy is like the light and we get it right but we don’t like it often like howdy okay flipflop and the guy is like here go check first state stuck with rough diamonds a lot of amount of reason but mental a good address I make it out I knew three thousand out of nowhere well be it starts to be that was the first time I was dreaming of it I really down you make have a good night I’m out.
Brion Poloncic
Brion Poloncic
________________
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'In "The Animal Mode of Inescapable Shock," Anne Boyer writes, "If an animal is shocked, escapably or inescapably, she will manifest deep reactions of attachment for whoever has shocked her. If she has manifested deep reactions of attachment for whoever has shocked her, she will manifest deeper reactions of attachment for whoever has shocked her and then dragged her off the electrified grid. Perhaps she will develop deep feelings of attachment for electrified grids. Perhaps she will develop deep feelings of attachment for what is not the electrified grid. Perhaps she will develop deep feelings of attachment for dragging. She may also develop deep feelings of attachment for science, laboratories, experimentation, electricity, and informative forms of torture."
'In her book-length collection of essays, A Bestiary, Lily Hoang explores this complicated relationship between abuse, attachment, affection, and autonomy. Juxtaposing fragments of the author’s personal life and other ephemera, Lily Hoang weaves together images of rats, tigers, fairy tales, a dead sister, Asian/Orientalism, time, an abusive ex-husband (a self-described anarchist who demands alimony), myth, memory, an occasionally lying, occasionally cheating lover, family etched onto the body, feminism, teaching, an addicted nephew, violence, compulsion, and one night of hedonistic pleasure with an old school friend. This structure, like Tender Points by Amy Berkowitz or The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson, works best when the fragments speak to each to create a whole, something larger than the sum of its parts. Hoang’s A Bestiary accomplishes this through both subtle and clever means. ...
'As the book’s title suggests, there is no shortage of beasts in this book, both animal and human. The humans in this book treat each other badly and then try, sometimes, to do better. They struggle against addiction and their own asshattery; they feel the pull of family like thread sewn just beneath skin. They drive 500 miles to visit their lover who lies. They themselves lie. They burrow into friendships, into teaching, into fairy tale and myth. And alongside the humans, the beasts roam, both symbol and salve. Rats run mazes and press levers, tigers haunt villages, goats are both feast and sacrifice, rabbits perform cunning tricks, and in the Great Race, the pig always, always finishes last.'-- Melissa Reddish
Lily Hoang A Bestiary
Cleveland State University Press
'Rarely have I come across tenderness, venom, and fire held so intimately, so exquisitely, as in Lily Hoang’s A Bestiary. This book would be impressive enough as a collection of finely-forged fragments, but as it weaves itself into an even more impressive whole, my hat came off. Lily Hoang writes like she has nothing to lose and everything at stake.' -- Maggie Nelson
'A Bestiary is a work of great subtlety, precision, intelligence, daring, and emotive keenness. It seems completely contemporary (by which I mean that it is unlike anything I’ve read and that it makes me want to change my own writerly procedures). With headlong, reckless, improvisatory gestures, Lily Hoang prompts us to rethink what literature today can dare to aspire to. Her intellectually magnanimous book’s position on the threshold between recognizable ‘literature’ and some other vanguard form of performance/utterance made me feel happy and stimulated and dizzy (in a rapturous way) while I was reading it.'-- Wayne Koestenbaum
'The most perfect use of fragmentation, myth, language, fairytale, and terrible beauty that I have ever seen in my life. I’m swooning. My faith in what writing can be has been restored.'-- Lidia Yuknavitch
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Excerpt
On My Birthday, Dragons, & Intestines
Today, I am thirty-three, the year of Christ.
My parents are devout Catholics. Before my sister is dead, she is a perfect failure of a daughter. To God, they ask: why?
My dead sister’s son puts heroin through his body. He calls it: dragon.
Because he does not remember it is my birthday, my lover says today is sarcasm day—when all of Facebook does.
My hypochondriac mother on odysseys to explain sadness, because it must be something physical. Until—her insides push outward: uncontrolled liquefied shit: while driving, in stores, not quick enough to the toilet: its stain and stink. Its embarrassment.
Cancer does not explain my mother’s sadness, but they prescribe her SSRIs all the same.
They prescribe her medicinal marijuana pills to bring appetite back, to disrupt pain. When I tell her what they are, she throws them in the trash. Drugs, she says. She says, No, both words in English, to show how bad drugs are, medical or not.
I write a story in which I list out my parents’ prescriptions—the battle of journals to publish my Asian American plight.
I disgust.
I write an essay in which I list out my prescriptions. It feels too honest, but I publish it anyways.
I am not worth a nickel of shame.
My dead sister’s son, I can’t imagine how the cessation of dragons feels, his fall.
From one map come others, centuries ago: Here there be dragons, at the edges of our flat world, but there were never any dragons.
The amount of medical marijuana I smoke daily. For me—psychiatrically—it is prescribed: legit.
Many months ago, a friend gives me a bottle of oxy. I crush them up and snort.
Many days after that, I am reading at a conference in Denver and I am rationing my lines and I remove my intestines into the toilet of my hotel room, I gather all my shakes and fevers and sweat it on out. I am a ghost. Imagine the dragons.
Is it bad that I continue to check social media, counting the well wishes for a birthday that portends death and resurrection?
My mother on the edge of the world, hardly surviving.
I remember—the shadowing of her skin, how warmth to her feels like ice—the perpetual motion machine of excuses for my absence.
I cannot handle my mother’s sickness. It is not fear of contamination. It is simple fear.
My simple fear: death—hers, but that doesn’t happen yet, instead I have a dead sister and we are all guilty.
Bhanu, writing me a letter that will one day add up to become a book, about the rape of a woman in India, her intestines mashed up with a metal pipe.
My father smokes a pipe. Daily, my mother warns him of cancer, using herself as proof.
Yesterday, an explosion. My lover texts me: an explosion. I take pictures as proof, as memory, the building was vacant, intestine intact.
Later, he says: All the other guys’ girlfriends took way better pictures. I say: I’m not your girlfriend.
I don’t say this. I’m lying. But I wish I’d spoken up, for proof that we no longer are, or maybe his mind is changed, but it isn’t—I know.
(cont.)
Lily Hoang - Fiction
Lily Hoang Reads from Changing
Delta Mouth 2012 Lily Hoang
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The Fourth River: Why do you write and for whom?
Tyehimba Jess: I used to write for political purposes strictly. I was interested in writing poems that would inspire people to take political action. That’s what “when niggas love Revolution like they love the bulls” is all about. Those poems were for black people. But you know you can’t control who reads your work.
So, after a while, I came to accept the idea that I was writing for everybody. Even when I thought I was writing for black people, not all black people agreed with what I was writing. It is difficult to say that you are writing for one particular group of people. It can limit your imagination. After a while, I was like, “OK, I am writing for the entire world.” I think that later on, it became about writing for me.
The more I write, the more I realize it is about conveying a message. My poetry is pretty clear. Generally, you know what I am writing about by the end of a poem. I try to write that way. But it is working internally, as well.
When I am doing these poems, these syncopated sonnets and all that, I think I am trying to find a way to tell two different stories in one breath. I am looking for metaphors beyond the rhetorical that link into the shape of the poem and [into] the way the poem is read on the page.
FR: Philip Larkin once wrote, “the impulse to preserve lies at the bottom of all art.” In your case, what are you preserving in your poems?
TJ: Yes, I guess I am in the business of historical preservation. There were a few things I was trying to preserve. One was Leadbelly’s legacy but also the idea of the work that the old music has done for us. When I say “us,” I mean nationally what that work has done.
That legacy continues. The thing I think about a lot is the roots of the music, particularly in regard to the African community and the African-American contribution. With this new work I am doing, it is beyond the music. It is about theater and literature as well. When you look at the intellectual property, so much of that property has been generated from the black community.
Paying homage to Leadbelly, trying to present a portrait of his life, to me, meant recalling the pain and the joy that went into making that music. It lies at the bottom of American music. So I guess I’m back where Philip Larkin was: at the bottom of his preservation.
Tyehimba Jess Olio
Wave Books
'With ambitious manipulations of poetic forms, Tyehimba Jess presents the sweat and story behind America's blues, worksongs and church hymns. Part fact, part fiction, Jess's much anticipated second book weaves sonnet, song, and narrative to examine the lives of mostly unrecorded African American performers directly before and after the Civil War up to World War I. OLIO is an effort to understand how they met, resisted, complicated, co-opted, and sometimes defeated attempts to minstrelize them.'-- Wave Books
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Excerpts
Blind Boone’s Pianola Blues
They said I wasn’t smooth enough
to beat their sharp machine.
That my style was obsolete,
that old rags had lost their gleam
and lunge. That all I had
left was a sucker punch
that couldn’t touch
their invisible piano man
with his wind up gut-
less guts of paper rolls.
And so, I went and told them
that before the night was through
I’d prove what the son of an ex-
slave could do: I dared them
to put on their most twisty
tune. To play it double-time
while I listened from another
room past the traffic sounds
of the avenue below.
To play it only once,
then to let me show
note for note how that scroll
made its roll through Chopin
or Bach or Beethoven’s best.
And if I failed to match my fingers
and ears with the spinning gears
of their invisible pneumatic piano
scholar, I’d pay them the price
of a thousand dollars.
And what was in it for Boone?
you might ask…
Might be the same thing that drives men
through mountains at heart attack pace.
Might be just to prove some tasks
ain’t meant to be neatly played
out on paper and into air,
but rather should tear
out from lung, heart and brain
with a flair of flicked wrists
and sly smile above the 88s…
and, of course, that ever-human
weight of pride that swallows us
when a thing’s done just right…
But they were eager to prove me wrong.
They chose their fastest machine
with their trickiest song and stuck it
in a room far down the hall from me.
They didn’t know how sharp
I can see with these ears of mine—
I caught every note even though
they played it in triple time.
And when I played it back to them
even faster, I could feel the violent
stares… heard one mutter
Lucky black bastard…
and that was my cue to rise,
to take a bow in their smoldering
silence and say, Not luck,
my friend, but the science
of touch and sweat and
stubborn old toil. I’d bet
these ten fingers against any coil
of wire and parchment and pump.
And I left them there to ponder
the wonders of blindness
as I walked out the door
into the heat of the sun.
100 Times
I say “nigger” a hundred times before breakfast every morning just to keep my teeth white.
–Paul Mooney, Comedian
Of course, I was skeptical, but because there’s often wisdom in the hardest humor, I stood before the mirror one sunrise and began my morning chant. All repeated calmly for the first week, but with flavors added on as the regimen continued into the second. 50 with er and 50 with a. 1/4 as question, 1/4 as surprise, 1/4 as anger, 1/4 implying the complaining “please.” All alternately whispered, shouted, laughed, snarled—all in search of the ideal whitening formula. After four weeks I remained skeptical. However, perseverance paid off by the sixth, when colleagues remarked on my brightened, hazeless smile, when friends alerted me to a steely glint in my grin.
I doubled the regimen to maximize results. Week eight saw a 2/3 increase in brightening, with a luminousness approaching diamond quality, particularly in the lower incisors. The uppers were sun white, never leaving room in their shine for shadow. Side effects became audible as well as visual: a small echo became perceptible after each repetition in my mantra, such that the cadence assumed a wondrous worksong rhythm. Upon closer examination, magnifying mirrors revealed one (1) small, brown man peering into the side of each tooth’s mirror-smooth enamel, each one appearing only briefly before each utterance. Alarmed but intrigued, I enhanced my treatment. Various gesticulations were added to the morning litany. Sneers, chuckles, sighs, and facial contortions were enhanced throughout. As a result, the echo’s intensity increased from slight windy whisper to low murmur, to small and steady chorus each morning, a daily affirmation of my will to shine. A halogen glare burned from my mouth throughout the day. I’ve become a walking lighthouse of shine—the ritual has grown above and beyond and through me. I wake each morning to stand before my mirror, and before I open my mouth I hear the chant begin above and around me, as if I were in the middle of the mantra’s core, as if I’m one in a circle of prayer. I’ve found others who hear the chant with me, or they’ve found me, those who rise up with me each morning to stand before our mirrors with the diamond-sharp sound of ourselves polishing each tooth until we gleam—our number grows daily. We shimmer and shine inside the bulging head of our chant, polishing our glowing mirrors, staring into the glare until we shield our eyes.
Tyehimba Jess - Syncopated Sonnets
Tyehimba Jess reads "Another Man Done"
Tyehimba Jess, “Against Silence”
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'Nineteen provocative fictions and docufictions comprise Death Café. Each narrative is independent of the other yet connected thematically by what perhaps can be described as “daring not to avert one’s eyes from the unjustified pain and sorrow that populate the globe.” Jaffe’s work examines, through different eyes, eyes of the other—the oppressed, the marginalized, the mad, the inevitable—until the examining seamlessly gives way to inhabiting. This ideality is underscored in “Inhabit,” a multiple-discourse docufiction that explores the deeper aspects of suffering as the narrator seeks to inhabit crucial moments during the lives and deaths of individuals who have made artistic, loving, even ugly impacts on the world. In one section, the narrator inhabits the nearly failed suicide of the “Maladroit when not masterful” Vincent Van Gogh and recalls Artaud’s words, “Suicided by society.” He dwells in the deathbed moments of the Aldous Huxley and later Blake with his beloved Catherine. When interrogated as to whether he wishes to inhabit Theo Van Gogh—the great-great grandson of Vincent’s brother—filmmaker, racist xenophobe, who is murdered and martyred, the narrator replies simply, “No.” Later he concedes that while Vincent would not wish for a descendant like Theo, he would understand. “The world moves forward and back. Proceeds by oppositions.” ...
'In the docufiction “Stockholm Syndrome,” Jaffe draws on the reported account of Wolfgang Priklopil who kidnapped a 10-year-old girl in Austria, held her captive for eight years, and eventually committed suicide when at age 18 she escaped. Afterward, the girl says of her captor that he “was a part of her life and ‘in a certain way’ she mourned his suicide.” Further, we learn that she wept inconsolably when she was informed he had killed himself. As the narrator interrogates the story, the girl expresses that she does not feel that Priklopil robbed her of her childhood, “I don’t have the feeling I missed something important. As far as I can see, children are robbed of their childhood one way or another.” Later, alone, she pays her respects at the morgue before his burial and lights a candle for him.
'With just a subtle massaging of emphasis, Jaffe manages to expose the hidden assumption in the original reporting—the girl is better off back with her society. But with her conflicted thoughts carefully articulated in Jaffe’s treated text, along with the egocentricity of the so-called authorities, the barrage of media attention, her dysfunctional family and the pointed reminders of the historical complexity of her society, the reader cannot help but wonder to what degree that assumption is valid.'-- Susan Grace, Autre
Harold Jaffe Death Café
Anti-Oedipus Press
'Death Café resumes and refines Harold Jaffe’s ongoing anatomy of the world in pain. Featuring 19 innovative fictions and docufictions set in Africa, Europe, China, India, the Middle East, and the benighted US, the collection addresses issues of global warming, political defiance, committed art-making, dream space, and speculative discourse. As always, Jaffe works his literary voodoo in variable tonalities that are uncannily formulated, displaying unequal doses of razor-edged satire and compassion.'-- AOP
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Excerpt
Stockholm Syndrome
An Austrian teenager held captive for eight years in a dungeon-like room on the outskirts of Vienna says her captor, Wolfgang Priklopil, was part of her life and “in a certain way” she mourned his suicide.
Eighteen-year-old Krista Ludwig is reported to have wept inconsolably when told that Priklopil killed himself.
After Krista Ludwig made her escape on Wednesday, Priklopil, 44, threw himself under a commercial train traveling east to Bucharest. The train was delivering electronic hardware and pigs for slaughter.
Krista Ludwig said she sympathized with Priklopil’s 89-year-old mother and planned to telephone her. (Priklopil’s mother is suffering from dementia and subsists in a nursing home near Graz, the “second city” of Austria, where the steroidal, gap-toothed governor-action star of California, Schwarzenegger, was birthed).
Krista Ludwig, said to be pale and trembling and to weigh just 42kg, less than she did as a 10-year-old, managed to flee her abductor after he sidled away to take a call on his mobile phone as she vacuumed his car, a 2003 white Audi sedan, in the driveway of the abduct house.
The time was three-fourteen pm, on a Wednesday, precisely eight years to the day and very close to the precise time that she had been kidnapped on her way to school.
Did Krista Ludwig realize it was exactly eight years to the day and hour since she was taken captive?
“No.”
Why then did she choose that very moment to attempt to escape?
“I was ready to leave so I left.”
Now 18, Krista Ludwig insists that communications technician Wolfgang Priklopil had not robbed her of her childhood.
“I don’t have the feeling I missed something important. As far as I can see, children are robbed of their childhood one way or another.”
Krista Ludwig said her lengthy abduction actually spared her bad habits such as smoking, drinking to excess, injecting heroin or speed, snorting cocaine, playing video games, and having “false friends”.
What was a typical day like with Wolfgang Priklopil?
Between 7:30 and 8:00 a.m., Krista Ludwig and her abductor, who usually did not go to work, she said, would have breakfast, a sweet roll and coffee with heavy cream, or schlag.
The rest of the day Krista Ludwig would spend doing housework, reading, talking, cooking.
“That was it for years. Everything tied to the fear of being alone.”
If she was fearful of being alone why didn’t she attempt to escape sooner?
“It would be the same somewhere else.”
Nor was it clear from Krista Ludwig’s statement whether by “housework,” she referred to working in her room or elsewhere in the large ramshackle house.
What did she and her abductor talk about?
“Different things. I am not prepared to go into details.”
What did she read?
“Greek and Nordic myths, anthropology. The great god Zeus abducted virgins.”
Was Wolfgang Priklopil a version of Zeus?
“No. He was not my lord and master. I was just as strong. Perhaps stronger.”
She used an Austrian expression to indicate that at times Priklopil treated her tenderly, but at other times cruelly.
“He carried me in his arms but also trampled me underfoot.”
Investigators have been trying to determine whether Priklopil had an accomplice, based on a 14-year-old boy’s account at the time of the kidnapping that he saw two men drag young Krista Ludwig into a white Mercedes van.
But Krista Ludwig insisted that Prikopil acted alone. Moreover there was a later report that the 14-year-old boy was hyped up on coffee with schlag when he gave his account.
Priklopil “carried out the kidnapping himself. Everything was prepared,” Krista Ludwig said, adding that they then “decorated” her room together.
Photos released by police show the underground hiding place in Prikopil’s gabled, two-story wood house in Strasshof village outside Vienna, where he kept young Krista Ludwig: a small, cluttered, windowless room with washbasin, “squat toilet,” cot, cupboards and narrow concrete stairs leading up to a trapdoor.
No “decorations” are visible.
Because blueprints to the house were unavailable, investigators could not say for certain whether there were any other hidden compartments, dungeons or cells.
In her statement, read by flamboyant Viennese psychoanalyst Max Friedrich, who has been “treating” her, Krista Ludwig urged the media to respect her privacy.
“Everyone wants to ask intimate questions, but they don’t concern anyone,” she said via Max Friedrich.
She felt well, she said via Max Friedrich, if “maybe a bit patronized” at the location where she was currently held, and she appealed for more respect from the media.
The location was described by police as a secure institutional space with “carers” under the supervision of Max Friedrich.
Max Friedrich, with his unruly leonine grey head, wraparound mirror shades, corncob pipe, and unsteady, stiff-legged gait, cautioned the media to show restraint, insisting Krista Ludwig was severely traumatized and the intense media coverage was capable of victimizing her all over again.
Krista Ludwig’s parents, who separated after her abduction eight years before, complained that they had not been told where she was being held.
“Why can I not see my child?,” her mother, Birgit Dieskau, pleaded in a Sunday supplement newspaper interview
Max Friedrich confirmed that Krista Ludwig did not wish to see her parents again after their brief reunion. “Nor is that unusual under these extraordinary circumstances.”
Regarding what actually transpired between Krista Ludwig and her middle-aged abductor beyond the housecleaning, unspecified conversation, and consumption of sweet rolls and coffee mit schlag, the young woman refused to say.
After spending the first years locked in the dungeon-like room, which Priklopil had furnished with toys, books, magazines, and chewing gum, but neither television nor computer, Krista Ludwig was, she confided, via Max Friedrich, allowed to make occasional, brief, unaccompanied outings to the village.
Police are trying to determine if Krista Ludwig had a sexual relationship with her captor. And if so, the nature of the sexuality. If it was sadomasochistic, as suspected, then how far did it go, and were the roles steadfast or did they alternate?
She said, “Perhaps I will tell Dr. Friedrich one day or someone else. Perhaps I will never tell. The intimacy only belongs to me.”
A police photo of kidnap suspect Wolfgang Priklopil was presented at a news conference in Vienna. Smooth face with arched brows, a widow’s peak, and a small fleshy mouth, he bore some resemblance to the pious, silver-tongued former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Meanwhile it has been confirmed that Wolfgang Priklopil (what remained of him after he threw himself under the train) was buried secretly under a false name. The secret burial was to deter vandals, officials explained.
There were just two mourners not including Krista Ludwig. She paid her respects alone at the morgue the day before the burial and lit a single candle. Only Priklopil’s mother (severely demented and in a wheelchair) and a former business partner’s sister, “legally blind,” were at the unspecified gravesite.
The ceremony lasted seven minutes, Austrian radio said. No priest was in attendance and nine-and-a-half policemen stood guard.
According to Max Friedrich’s diagnosis, Krista Ludwig suffered from Stockholm Syndrome, a psychological condition in which long-held captives begin to identify with their captors.
The American heiress Patty Hearst was arguably the most famous contemporary example of Stockholm Syndrome after her kidnapping by the Symbionese Liberation Army in the early ‘70s.
After extensive cosmetic surgery and long hours of psychological debriefing, Hearst recovered and resumed her life as a self-consumed billionaire heiress.
Police Major General Gerhard Haeckel, of the Federal Criminal Investigations Bureau, said investigators are continuing to follow up on “every lead” in the case, which until last week was Austria’s second greatest mystery.
The greatest Austrian mystery of course is how a homely, ill-educated vegetarian dog-lover with a comical Chaplain mustache became the most charismatic genocider of the 20th century.
Harold Jaffe: "Anti-Twitter" | Talks at Google
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p.s. Hey. ** H, Hi. 'Model of Oblivion' ... oh, yes, cool. I actually had forgotten about Sedgwick's employment of 'fountain', but yes, that's a great bonus. My Monday was swamped with work on the TV series script. That is my lot in life until at least the weekend, I think. A couple of possible screening for Zac's and my film 'LCTG' arose yesterday, so I started those pursuits. I was pretty home- and computer-bound. How was yours? I don't know Ranciere's 'The Intervals of Cinema', but your description and recommendation are enough to get me chasing it, so I will start looking today. Thank you so much for that tip! ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. Yes, and I especially like his color. Oh, Tim Parks. I like his writing/thinking. I'll read that asap. Thank you, D. ** Jamie McMorrow, Bon Mardi, Jamie! Yeah, is that fountain cheesy? Maybe. I like it too. Maybe being a big fireworks fan -- me too and, in fact, I've got a fireworks post coming up soon for folks like you and me -- helps. I would say my ultra-busyness is good. Well, if ARTE doesn't end up wanting our TV series, I might look back on the busyness differently, I guess. Was that Stephen lecture the RedBull one he did in Paris recently? I was there. That was excellent. Sorry about the slowness of the vocal recording, but what's that whole thing about the tortoise and the hare? I can't remember, but I think the tortoise wins. I'll go google search Louis Michel Eilshemius. Awesome. Did the exhibition live up? It's still wintery here, yay. Have a most fine, fine day, Love, me. ** Dóra Grőber, Hi! I will, by hook or by crook. It's the kind of English language book that shouldn't be too hard to find in the couple of English bookstores here. It's interesting how when you imagine a relationship it's so ... I don't know, wow, but they're always unpredictable. Another feather in the imagination's cap. Great, great about the meeting with your writer friend. Did your writing and scrapbook work end up excitingly? I'm glad you liked the post, and thank for noting your interesting favorites. My favorites? If I had to choose, let's see ... Charles Ray's 'Ink Line' is one of my favorite artworks, so that one, obviously. I saw Olafur Eliasson's 'Big Bang' in the real, and the videos don't catch how mind-blowing it is in person. And I do like 'Model of Oblivion'. All that red. Thanks about the script. It's a brain-drain, but I guess most good things are, right? Well, maybe not most, ha ha. Have a lovely Tuesday! What happened? ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. This Thursday ... okay. Fingers crossed. And its splendidness is all that really matters. I like that Portishead cover. I'm surprised because I think 'S.O.S' is sublime in the original version, but they managed to fool with it very well. ** Steevee, Hi, Steve. Very curious to hear what you think of 'High Rise'. It's still not in France. ** Schlix, Hi, Uli. Thanks, man. Oh, I see. The workshop does sound super interesting and super taxing simultaneously. 'The Big Moment' is a strange decision re: the title. Much, much less intriguing, in English at least. Four of my books are going to be published in Germany in the new few years, and I'm curious what the titles will become. Hopefully not something like 'The Big Moment'. Have an excellent day! ** Tender prey, Hi, Marc! Yeah, the Hein's cool twist is so slight that it's maximal or something. Thanks for going back over the posts. The Anger is ' Eaux d'Artifice'. _B_A linked to it in the comments somewhere if you want a quick fix. Yes, the Leslie Thornton Day its launching tomorrow, in fact. Interesting installation of that film. In her gallery work, she's been working with the circular lately. Shit, sorry that the link didn't work. Here's a link to a brief, not fantastic video showing quick looks at a few of the circle/pair pieces. Thanks a bunch, Marc! Love, Dennis ** Misanthrope, Hi, George, I think your (gloriously) weird mind can find the weird (and glorious) in anything, that's what I think. I think that eternally peeing fountain person would be difficult to pull off technically, but that's only a reason to attempt it. Maybe that's what you can do with your Noah Matous slave or whatever his name is. I'm busy too, man. Whew. High, crampy five. I light the wrong end of a cigarette probably every day. Man, not a good taste. Whoever those guys are who told you you're ugly are way ugly total stink-faces, guaranteed. LPS is the fucking man! Go-go-go! Your mom sounds kind of wise. ** Alistair McCartney, Hi, Alistair! Tuesday is gonna be a bit too work-y for my taste but you know that goes. Windy Venice! That a beautiful image. Windy LA in general! There's something about LA that makes it seem very mystical when it's windy. How's stuff? Any news from your agent or anything? Big love to you and to Tim too! ** Kyler, Hi, K. Ah, a review. Visually dazzling is good. Funny is good. Huh, okay. It's hard to imagine I'll ever see it unless it comes to Paris, which I suppose it might. I'll test out that song in the video to start. Thanks a bunch, Kyler. ** Alan, Hi, Alan! Very good to see you, my friend! Thank you for alerting me to that comment. I would never have seen it. I wonder how I can answer him. Hm, I'll go find the comment and see if his profile has any contact info or something. Thank you very much, man. How are you? ** Right. There are yet four more books I read and loved in recent times for those of you who are looking for things to read and find yourself intrigued by my squib-like portrayals of them. Have at it. See you tomorrow.