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'Juliet Escoria's poetry debut, Witch Hunt, out in May from Lazy Fascist Press, is sad and funny—but only funny if you're sad. Moving in the hollow vein of her 2013 short-fiction collection Black Cloud, Escoria navigates the tracks of symbiotic drug romance and degradation with a bleak, hilarious sarcasm. Her musings are macabre, but for a generation that regularly wonders if the kid nodded out next to us on the couch is alive or not, we find honesty in graveled humor.
'"Everything I'm working on now is a fake version of myself," Escoria tells The KIND at a closing El Pollo Loco on Sunset Boulevard. "Most of it's more recent; so it's less depressing. But I think Witch Hunt is funnier than Black Cloud."
'Juliet has just finished reading at an AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Programs) event at Circus of Books, an iconic erotic book shop on the brink of extinction, now resembling a bodega selling porn, meth pipes, and magazines from the '90s. We retreated across the street, to a synthetic Mexican restaurant wet with ammonia.
'"It's a poetry book, which is weird. I didn't really think of myself as a poet. I started writing poetry when I was a teenager, but I stopped because I couldn't tell if it was any good or not."
'Escoria grew up in San Diego, California, depressed. Defying the highs and (mostly) lows depicted in her work, she's been sober for years, having escaped Manhattan's cocaine corridors and California's meth-bleached boredom to focus on writing/not dying.
'In 2014, Escoria married fellow author Scott McClanahan, moved to the Appalachian hills of West Virginia, a region McClanahan hails from and has chronicled extensively. "I work in the basement," explains Escoria. "My husband works upstairs in his little bedroom. Then we travel once a month, which makes me feel normal." She pauses. "At least when you get annoyed by people, they're more interesting than yuppies."
'Escoria's cool approach to poetry is unfazed by the circle-jerk formality of academia: "I was working on a novel, and I felt like I couldn't tell what I was doing. So I just started writing poetry for fun. We had a joke to see how quickly I could write a poetry book. So I did that. I wrote most of them in two months, then it took another five of me just fiddling around with them."'-- The Kind
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Juliet Escoria Witch Hunt
Lazy Fascist Press
'Escoria's debut short story collection is a brazen admission of the pains of reality in a time when pretending to be happy – to make light of your sadness – is easier than ever. The tone is a combination of Denis Johnson and Joan Didion, and although the stories are focused on drugs (and a wide variety of), Escoria never uses them gratuitously. Rather, each story is a dose of potent insight on the motivations and experiences of users both active and struggling-to-be former.'-- Lauren Oyler, Dazed
'Unrelenting, violent, often scary: Juliet Escoria's debut collection of stories will likely have you begging and crying for salvation a few pages in. She's just that good.'-- Jason Diamond, Flavorwire
'Simply riveting and raw.'-- Lindsay Hunter, FSG blog
Excerpts
Contemporary Guilt
when i went home
the first time
after going off to get married
my mother begged me: please don’t have a baby.
here were her reasons:
1) it would have problems
2) i have problems
3) my husband has problems
4) all the problems would be parts of a real disaster and she wouldn’t be able to deal
so essentially she’d have to disown me
predictably, i got mad and
stormed off to what used to be my bedroom.
which is the place where
i tried to
kill myself
four times
half a lifetime before.
in the morning, she apologized
– kind of –
asking if i understood what she meant
that she was speaking
out of love but also fear.
she told me there were things
she never told me
because she had to pretend to be strong.
i think that was when i was supposed to ask
about the things i never knew
but i failed to.
a few days later, i asked her when she knew
that i’d turn out “okay”—
eighteen, twenty-two, twenty-five?
but she was honest
and said it didn’t come until i was
living in new york,
two years sober.
that she used to watch the wine bottles pile up
my skin yellow
teeth darken
and that smell.
i guess that’s a long time to be
worried
that your daughter is going
to die.
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Whatever Useless Things
When he kissed
me there was only
one more thing
I wanted and that
was to completely
disappear.
The mornings left
my insides sore
and the outer part
of me in a dust
film broken
pieces of skin
and no dreams
remembered.
He did not regret
his wanting
although he
may have regretted
the fulfillment
but what else
is there
to say about
desire.
The answer is
disappointing.
The answer is
not much.
APRIL 24, 2012: BROOKLYN, NY
I don't really know how it happens but we are fighting in our bedroom and the mirror from the wall ended up on our bed somehow? And then it broke and shards and pieces got all over the sheets, and we were wrestling in it, wrestling for the bracelet she had given him but also for control and neither one of us could find any. It ends with him on top of me because he is bigger and stronger. We are breathing hard, our hearts pounding, and the slivers of glass dig into our skin. His face is in front of mine, his big hands on my shoulders, and I hate it that he has won. So I spit in his face.
Later, I see that me spitting is the demarcating line between what was before and the end of our relationship. But at the time it didn't seem like that big of a deal.
He gets off me, and is going out the door, and I am chasing him, but his lead is too much and I am not wearing shoes, and I have no idea where he went. Probably to one of the bars a few blocks away, but my hair is a mess and I can still feel glass in me and I am too ashamed to be in public and searching for him like a jilted woman. So I go back home.
Except besides not having shoes, I also don't have keys or a cell phone and I can't get back into the apartment. I sit on the stoop and although it's a warm night it is still April and it is cold and my feet are cold and I realize that my life with him is going to end now, that one of us will have to move out, that it will probably be me, that he won't be in my life anymore, that I am alone, that I am ugly, that we just yelled and broke things and wrestled in shattered glass on our bed, that I spat in his face, and my feet are cold, and it is cold, and I am locked out, and the world is spinning, and I am worried I am dying and the edges of things grow dizzy and black.
But then a raccoon is crawling up the fence. There is no wilderness anywhere near us, and I've never seen wildlife around here before, and seeing this raccoon here feels like something meaningful. It is perched at the top, looking at me, deciding if I am a threat, weighing its choices. We regard each other for a while. Then it hops my side of the fence and walks slowly down the street, in the direction of where the person who is now my ex-boyfriend has gone, and I can breathe, and things are terrible and ugly and I am still ashamed but I also know things will be OK without him.
Witch Hunt #1 by Juliet Escoria
Witch Hunt #2
Cut These Strings by Juliet Escoria
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'I promise to retire this anecdote after one last airing, but here goes: When Dodge Rose first landed at my desk at Dalkey Archive Press, I thought it was a hoax. A trap. (It wouldn’t have been the first.)
'I showed it to my assistant editor of the time and he agreed: novels like Dodge Rose don’t come into one’s life in brown paper, humble, untrumpeted. They’re whispered of, recommended, enthused and griped about, passed around, gradually shibbolethed, forgotten . . . then reprinted with glowing intros, taught, accepted, and still never enough read.
'It wasn’t possible, we said, that a young, Australian Beckett with virtually no publications to his name had just dropped in our laps. No, there was some sinister plot in the works. A plot to—well, what? Was this some éminence grise of the mainstream cutting loose and producing the high-modernist novel he or she had been lusting to write since their teenage infatuation with Ulysses? Or could this be one of Dalkey’s own authors—or employees?—submitting a novel under a false name to see if we would be able to sniff out the imposture? It even occurred to me to worry that Dodge Rose was, Ern Malley-wise, a prank, an attempt to snare a small press known for publishing “subversive” fiction into signing on a book written expressly to parody said fiction. There had to be a catch, no?
'After all, when we sit down with Joyce, with Beckett, we sit down with the celebrity as well as the text, often instead of the text, even—you know who you are—in preference to the text. Sitting down with Dodge Rose, we were alone in the presence of Dodge Rose, and could not entirely believe the evidence of our senses, which told us, from the first gnomic sentence—“Then where from here”—that we were in the presence of the Real Thing.
'Even now, with the book finally hitting stores, and the author’s identity confirmed (supposedly confirmed), there is a soupçon of suspicion in me, as though the trap’s jaws are still waiting, out of sight, to bite. Perhaps this is because, even now, after multiple readings, Jack Cox’s Dodge Rose remains something of a mystery—this is a book that demands a book’s worth of exegesis, not a brief appreciation—but its elusiveness is something I have come to treasure, and is in any case central to the book’s strategy of beguilement. It is cryptographic and disorienting in its manner of presentation, in the density of the information presented. But this is not, as they say, a drawback—it’s a feature.
'Though made up largely of dialogue, Dodge Rose eschews quotation marks, wages an almost totally successful campaign against the hyphen, and, as it progresses, empties the apostrophe, the comma, and capital letters too from its aesthetic quiver. You’ll say that these are typical modernist tics, and you’d be right, but Cox goes a ways farther than homage: this is a novel that demands of the reader that she labor continually to orient herself not only in the sentence, on the page, in the plot, but in Australian history, geography, architecture, commerce, in property law, in the properties of language and personality. The reader can never sleep, letting the comfortable mores of fiction propel her from page to page, but must ask always who is now addressing whom, where in the line or paragraph did the speaker change, the tense, the object, the tongue? And neither is there any relaxing into incomprehension—the other form of readerly slumber—because Dodge Rose is that wonderful rarity, a novel that flirts so skillfully and successfully with seeming incomprehensibility, with some private order of authorial logic, that it never once crosses the line to lapse into the mere objecthood of so much “experimental” fiction, content to be read as a blank or black page. That is, Dodge Rose wants to be enjoyed, to be entered and experienced, to be grappled with and for its subjects to be grasped, not skimmed over. Its intentions are legible, but other; its tools are familiar but wielded askew. It is a work of fiction that, despite its playfulness of diction, its successful absorption and deployment of the full compliment of modernist artifice, is committed to meticulous research and deployment of the real—the real in all its definitions: “fixed, permanent, or immovable things”—while operating in a mode nonetheless dominated by a syntax of confusion, a vocabulary of multilingual malapropism.'-- Jeremy M. Davies
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Jack Cox Dodge Rose
Dalkey Archive
'Eliza travels to Sydney to deal with the estate of her Aunt Dodge, and finds Maxine, a hitherto unknown cousin, occupying Dodge’s apartment. When legal complications derail plans to live it up on their inheritance, the women’s lives become consumed by absurd attempts to deal with Australian tax law, as well their own mounting boredom and squalor. The most astonishing debut novel of the decade, Dodge Rose calls to mind Henry Green in its skewed use of colloquial speech, Joyce in its love of inventories, and William Gaddis in its virtuoso lampooning of law, high finance, and national myth.'-- Dalkey Archive
Excerpt
It dawned on me in a perfectly good manner of speaking that Dodge was dead, that Eliza was not Dodge, I was not Dodge, that we would have to do what was undone. I was looking into the hard wet patch of my own reflection. No. Because. Though the drawers of the desk and the bookcase still hung open because we had not in fact been able to find Dodge’s birth certificate and had kept looking for it until we couldn’t put off leaving for Bernard any longer without being late, that centripetal invasion of blank space only seemed to point to a deeper reticence, a fixture as secret as the clamps in a family portrait, even now the patch of damp carpet beneath the window returning as if the shock of her death had exposed the room to an image that no matter how well you cleared the place out would come back like a photograph blooming under the alkalies across a furious sheet of paper.
Well said Eliza quite frankly. What do you think happened to the money.
I have no idea. Maybe she never had any.
She shook her head. She must have. I can’t believe Mum took everything.
Maybe she spent it.
On what.
There used to be a lot more in here. Dodge was always going out to auctions and second hand stores when I was younger and taking things with her and bringing back more than she took. Heaps of old stuff really. It all seemed worthless to me but you know you can’t tell with old stuff.
Eliza drummed her fingers on the back of the threadbare sofa. What happened to it all.
We got rid of it. It’s gone. That was a long time ago now. I can’t think what she could have ever got for those trinkets. I want to know can’t I say anything straight. Have a real cigarette. Eliza tapped up a slightly squashed Stuyvesant from its packet and began patting the pockets of her jacket for her lighter with a rapid movement that might have been nerves and I realised also as if for the first time that in a shallow way I was falling in love and maybe she was too. Maybe it was just beginning to have a friend. I guess it must have been as lonely on the farm in Yass with no one but her mother and the surrounding sheep as it was to live exclusively for a mistress in the Cross. It was Caprotinia the day of the. Caprio. Went under, no a loir wild fig tree. I love long life. Posh, damn short shrift high school don’t remember anything. Two figs to the captor of that profound navel from down here over your pretended arsehole. Who the hell gave me this extravagant education.
That night I was woken by the sound of something metallic crashing onto the floorboards of the dining room. At first I held still in order to put nothing between my ears and the other end of the flat as my eyes adjusted to the moonlight that fell in through the open blinds spreading pink amid the wales of my woollen bedspread, shining on the rim of my alarm clock and in the silence that followed between the ticks of its infinite helix I threw the cover off and walked carefully, I won’t say I pattered down the corridor to the living room. There was no light on anywhere and still no noise. I did not want to go any further without some kind of weapon but standing in the dark of the corridor at the entrance to the living room I could see through the open doors of the dining room to where a faintly luminous body was bent over something on the floor. It was Eliza. Again. Who else would it be. When she saw me walking towards her she jumped up with the metallic object in her hands and I reached and grabbed it only out of fear that she might drop it again but as she raised her hands in surprise now two pale palms against the shimmering obscurity of the dining room that for years had been no more than a hoarding house for family silver if it wasn’t the effect of Fagan himself it was Jack Dawkins or the Artful Dodger coming at me for his share with streaks of ash down the thighs of his nightie and with an equally vacant reflex I swung the lidless urn to one side and out of her reach. She yelped, then recovering she said my name and asked me to turn on the light. I did, and saw that her hands too were covered in ash. What is that she said.
It’s an urn I said.
She flopped down on the floor one bare leg either side of the little pile of burnt bones and the copper lid. She seemed as half asleep as I was. Come on I said in the atavistic fuddle of the early morning, no use crying over spilt milk. I was not long recovering my senses though. What I asked was she doing.
She looked at me and waited, her eyes resting opaque and patient on mine until at last her mind seemed to withdraw something that it must have been almost holding out, face down as it were, and it was with the kind of disappointed but levelling calm of a card player who folds before getting in too deep that she said she was looking to see if Dodge had hidden her money anywhere and I didn’t bother to ask why she was doing it at one o’clock in the morning. O God how can I wash my hands. I suggested she rub them over the top of the urn first. She did, interlocking her fingers, rubbing the backs, making a fist of each hand and rubbing out the ash from the creases in her knuckles. She went to the bathroom then and I got a dustpan and brush. I had to feel for them in the dark in the cupboard under the sink then I took them back to the dining room and crouched and swept up the ash that had fallen on the floor and turned up the dustpan so that it ran off one corner into the urn. Thanks said Eliza through her collar as she wiped her face in the doorway.
How do you feel now.
She almost said she felt like a cigarette. I thought she was going to start drooling again. Here I said and pulled out a chair from the dining table. Let’s talk a bit before you go back to bed.
She sat down and put both elbows on the table and her head between her hands. Did she say what she wanted done with those.
No. Remember she didn’t leave any instructions.
That’s right.
It’s cheaper to cremate than bury.
How could she not have any money. It doesn’t make sense. She should have been rich.
Maybe she had an expensive habit, that can add up.
But like you said she must have had a pension or something. Otherwise how else was she keeping you. And anyway it was more than two million, that’s just what Mum spent on the sheep. There must have been a real fortune between grandma’s and grandpa’s families. They were bloomin bankers and squatters. It was ying and yang. Someone’s money must be hidden somewhere.
What did you want to do with it.
Get off the farm start a business.
What kind of business.
I don’t know, travelling sales. I’d like to travel.
And the flat.
What about it.
If we sold the flat.
But you live here.
There is a law you know that it goes to your mother.
Mum wouldn’t kick you out, she doesn’t need it. Besides what about the family matinee act or whatever. You can have the flat.
We could sell it I said. We could go halves and then you could get off the farm and I could get out of here.
She drew back slowly. It struck me then that I might have taken her reserve the wrong way, that she may rather have doubted her good fortune from the beginning, suspended as she was between the files and musters, deferring even conjectural investment until she could put her hands on something concrete, afraid to find that there was nothing there but unable to admit that it was possible, as if she had been holding her breath, not daring to let herself go in case there was, impossibly, nothing to take back. But no sooner had the idea rung out than I felt with all this outward stimulation that I recognised another kind of restraint, that Yass, whose misted hills appeared to roll about her pupils as they drifted from me over the dim walls of the dining room held her somehow locked in like I had been that she was still in some sense pinned back to that far from littoral shore as for thirteen years I had been by Dodge and the keys and some other illegible force, some manifestly prurient though untold indenture, perhaps her false but fantastic interest, in the foul and motley wallpapered flat (apart from skoo l, I’ll have this coven between the covers in no time), the former’s, I mean Eliza’s eyes flying open even as I told out to myself for the last time and with the faintest, the very faintest regret the modest changes I had briefly foreseen, which were I would be the first to admit rather a failure of imagination than otherwise, all more or less this side the dictates of my intangible legacy, flying open as I was saying at the sudden recovery of such a pinched square of floor space, like a stump grubber’s on still colder ground who, severed the red thread in the navel string, hoes up from the decorated threshold of an expired cult the tessera going to reveal the actual value and dispensability of the whole familiar plot, our anonymous, adverse brother, adrift in the unbounded troughs. And Eliza, I have not forgotten you, pushed up against me, cast forth before your time from the same infant quarter that might in a single blow be subtracted to a real escape route, through whose b darkened rooms da you, of your dried tears like the underglaze, in the French sense, were beginning to sense a way out of the vast and smothering enclosure of your immediate inheritance.
I think I’m starting to get the hang of these peripli of the mind.
As I was unequipped at the time to unload such sonnets on to her, she nodded and smiled and kept nodding equally dumbly until I suggested we go to bed and talk about it in the morning. It was not, she admitted then, referring to my earlier contribution, a shite idea.
We were woken up by the phone. I was back in the dining room to answer it before Eliza arrived with her pyjamas tucked into her jeans mussing her curls and resembling under the foreign velour of the morning light nothing so much as any other punk kid. There goes the beggar king. The morning makes us new.
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'Why Write? Because wrapped in machinery I confess my ashamed desire. That’s actually a line from Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Why Is God Love, Jack,” a shorter A.G. poem I’ve always been fond of that uses “Because” as a line opener all the way through. I had a flash of doing an answer to the “why write?” question by stringing a lot of because-sentences together, but realized the only furtive impulse behind it other than the bogus ease of encapsulation–and the question does implicitly demand the summary axe–was gonna be figuring out where to drop the Ginsberg line for maximum impact of ambiguous nature (a form of amusement). That’s something to do with timing, and I write at this point in part to make arrangements with words, the sounds of which I love, and abhor, occasionally, and sometimes upon request, to set in time. I do not write to make images or metaphors or to reveal or to be expressive or unexpressive. I do probably write out of mad word love and also because it was something I realized at some point I could do and keep being surprised by (the doing). I wasn’t sure if I could -do- anything when I was between the ages of 12 and 18. I started writing when I was 17, for a college paper’s news desk. I started writing poems about two years later. The poems were and are the response I was looking for, and that’s always being written, that response, so I’m writing to keep at that.
'You could write because you could be good at it (and then actually become good at it, the way becoming is riskier than being, sometimes) and you could learn to make it be a filter between your consciousness and the world pouring in. That kind of thinking can contain a lot of “reasons” to write, and so may let you be various in your practice of writing. I’ve shifted to “you” to take on an affect of inclusivity and to let you in and to turn the situation around slightly, but that also makes the tonal space being constructed by this writing advice-like, and I don’t want it to be that, or be like that. I’m currently very upset with likeness. I write to have a practice I can continue and alter, and the question of how to change keeps getting raised as a result. There is entering a tonal space, building a tonal space, trying on a tonal space, stealing a tonal space, and there’s finding yourself stuck with one you didn’t realize you were in until totally immersed. There are more tonal spaces than that last sentence gets at. I do not write in order to play at or react to or fight with being contemporary or classical.
'I can legitimately say that in recent years I have written across months-long periods of time out of (this will be non-chronological): 1) a fear of being stupid; 2) a desire to stretch my ability to make and understand thought in sentences; 3) outrage, with specific regards to the ease with which this country’s general populace can be manipulated (by and through language of various stripes, in order to be rendered a weaponized generality); 4) desperation to maintain a practice in the face of life-altering changes; 5) a clear need to depressurize my practice (which meant writing poems that I didn’t think could be reproduced, thereby disarming the question of publication); 6) it’s interesting to be working very fast and very slow at the same time, all the time (I know that doesn’t grammatically connect back to “of”…what’s really at stake for that of?); 7) a recent recognition that I’ve been very serious the past thirteen years, and my body needs a break, since I’m prone to damaging it under conditions of high seriousness.
'I write because duration is so strange. “Everything lasts a certain amount of time; that’s very odd,” I heard the poet Kenneth Koch say one day.'-- Anselm Berrigan
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Anselm Berrigan Come In Alone
Wave Books
'New York poet Anselm Berrigan plays with space like a painter with the prosody of a poet. Written as infinitely looping sentences around the page, the rectangular poems of COME IN ALONE act as a frame to space, outrunning thought with quickness, openness, humor, and protest. They are simultaneously inviting and impermeable, making familiar language uncanny with every turn around the page.'-- Wave Books
Excerpts
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Anselm Berrigan for Poeteevee
Anselm Berrigan's Sure Shot
Anselm Berrigan reads Ted Berrigan
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'Sara Tuss Efrik (is) one of the most interesting young writers in Sweden. Efrik is a writer and performance artist (and sometime writer for Montevidayo and sometime editor of Action, Yes). Her first novel is getting published this fall. I first came in contact with her when she wrote a kind of review of my book Pilot. The review wasn’t exactly a review as an amazing poem/story in and of itself, a kind of rewriting of my poems that treats through a deformation zone. And since then I’ve read a lot of her writings, including the novel. ...
'In many ways, Efrik’s work is an investigation of what Mark Seltzer (drawing on Kittler’s work) has called “wound culture,” the epoch of mass media, starting in the early 20th century in which the public arena is one of wounded bodies, mass-reproduced killers/victims (“serial killers”) and media. I also think of how this trailer shows something important: how the violence of art does not necessarily have to be what we typically think of as violence and dismemberment – hard, severe, rigorous (the fantasy of the avant-garde), but can come out making out, cuddly animals, permeation. It is an interesting spin on Bersani’s “shattering” experience of art – art can tamper with the self in other interesting ways than the “hard” kind of “shattering.” The self already contains the mutations and the art and the autoimmune disorder that will undo it and undo it and redo it and rewind it and unwind it.
'Efrik’s Automanias (are) are diary entries of sorts, but instead of diary entries, which invoke the very private take on lived experience, these diary entries are written through the experiences of art, as the texts move through other artworks. They are “automanias” rather than “autobiograhies” – they mania-ize the texts rather than biographies.
'This particular piece on the paintings of Berlin-based artist Emeli Theander as well as a kitschy painting by Efrik’s grandmother. “Chin Chin” is a series of images (from what I gather) that were grafiti–ied on various city walls around the world, translated already through various cityscapes. So already the diary is based on a reproduced images. But the poem is not “indeterminacy” in the old postmodern way, nor is it really about “reproduction” (as in a lot of art of the 1970s), but it’s about a constant tension between the many and the singular, the diary-narrative and the forces that break apart the body: she becomes not just two people (two copies without an original) but also “chin chin,” a name that evokes the realm of orientalist-freakshow-otherness kitsch (the exact realm through which translations – of say The Arabian Nights – produces the very idea of kitsch). It goes without saying that she’s “inauthentic”; she’s not worried about authenticity or mediation. For me this is about art as deformation zones.
'The rabbit is the “brand” or “symbol” of this violence; and like the tension between the one and the reproduced, like the diving in the land that produces the flood (in the statement by Teater Mutation), the speaker both doesn’t want to free the rabbit or bury it.
'It is not properly speaking a symbol because it unsettles the topographic models of the symbol: it distorts the depth that is needed in a symbol by living inside the ribcage (ie it is inside, where one is supposed to find the meaning of the symbol, but instead one finds the symbol, the vehicle) as well as outside. And unlike a conventional symbol, the concrete singular that holds together the more abstract, the vehicle that leads the way to the tenor (to paraphrase Coleridge’s famous definition), this symbol is an “epidemic” and a “coal-burning” – the singular vehicle multiplies in itself, becomes an auto-mutilation, burning itself into orphan birds. The vehicle of the symbol moves up toward the tenor/meaning, but the meaning is stuck in the insistent deformation zone (vultures ready to eat the text). ...
'I love all these explorations of gothic artifice, engagements with tensions and violent eruptions and disruptions, performances of distortions and multiplications. Greenberg famously objected to kitsch for its visceral impact: Here we get the symbol (that redeemer of Art) but its consumed by itself, turned into visceral kitsch. When people talk about using “kitsch” it almost always seems to be with the gloves of irony, thus reaffirming the division between true art and kitsch. In this poetry, the kitsch is visceral, it doesn’t have that ironic distance.'-- Johannes Goransson
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Sara Tuss Efrik AUTOMANIAS
translated by Paul Cunningham
Good Morning Menagerie
'The winner of our 2015 Chapbook-in-Translation Contest, Automanias turns autobiography into a one-way mirror. When Efrik digests the work of Lars Von Trier, Alejandra Pizarnik, or Shakespeare, she transforms herself into a valve, collecting the violences of influence into a self that is aggregate, submerged, subversive, and emergent. Paul Cunningham's English translations have masterfully preserved Efrik's disturbing, and captivating, diary-like manias into language that is both hallucinatory and without boundaries.'-- GMM
Excerpts
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Automanias: Selected Poems by Sara Tuss Efrik
PERSONA PEEP SHOW (2013) english subs
I LOVE MUMMY (2011)
*
p.s. Hey, everybody! ** Saturday ** Dóra Grőber, Hi Dóra! I hope you liked it (the Richey Edwards thing). Maybe you said later. I'm glad the self-portraits worked out well. I hope you had fun and lots of productive stuff this past week. How are you, how were things? ** David Ehrenstein, Hi, David. Thanks, and thank you so much for that amazing review! Zac and I are just thrilled and so grateful! The Cinematheque printed the review and gave it out as the 'program' for the showing. Everyone, if you haven't read David Ehrenstein's great article about Zac's and my film 'Like Cattle Towards Glow', and if you want to, you can do that by pressing down softly on these words. ** Bill, Hi, Bill. It was so great to get to see you and to hang out a little. Thanks so much! Love, me. ** Sypha, Hi, James. Huh, I don't remember that Robin thing, but it does seem plausible, although the boner itself was probably more conceptual than a real thing. Thanks for buying my book. How have things been? ** Jamie McMorrow, Hi, Jamie! My brain a little lagged-out this morning, so I'll save my powers of invention, if they exist, for tomorrow's initial salvo. Me too, re: unpredictable levels of nerves pre-readings or I guess pre-film-related talks lately in my case. Strange stuff. Oh, on the Scandinavian theme park book, at this point, I think the audio would just be on-site field recordings, but we haven't put our minds to the audio aspect yet. That was the initial idea: field recordings. How were Gluck and Kraus? Maybe you say later. I haven't read the future comments yet. Great to see you, Jamie! Love, me. ** Steevee, Hi, Steve! The Russian government seems very into being unfairly slighted. It seems like an addiction. ** Misanthrope, Hi, G! Trip went really good. Whoa, you are pervert! Holy moly! Ha ha. ** Liquoredgoat, Hi, Douglas. The Mormon ones are rarities. It's actually very rare that I'll find any American escort ads that are useable. American escorts' profiles tend be very boring and by the book. How's it, buddy? ** MANCY, Hi, Steven! Everything on the trip went great, thanks! How are you? ** Monday ** Brendan, Hey, B! I didn't get to LA after all, as I guess you realized due no alert from me. We had to get back here for some film stuff. But I'm planning a decent, longish visit home, probably in July. How is everything? ** Dóra Grőber, Hi! Thanks, Dora. It was good. ** David Ehrenstein, Ah, ha! ** Unknown, Hi, ... uh, Bill? How did you get unknown? ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben! I watched the Eurovision Finals, and I immediately thought Ukraine would win. It was a weird or rather unweird one this year, I thought. Lots of so-so to bad catchy pop and not nearly enough dated, overblown theatrical shenanigans. ** MANCY, Hi, thanks! ** Tuesday ** Unknown, You're unknown again! Yeah, we had a nice dinner instead of a stressful meet-and-greet = much, much better. ** David Ehrenstein, Thank you again! ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. I think San Francisco got a little rocked. Cicciolina! I have never actually heard Cicciolina until this very moment. Is that weird? ** Wednesday ** David Ehrenstein, Yes, indeed, I read it the very second I heard it was up! ** Damien Ark, Hi, Damien, That's okay. I was elsewhere anyway. Save your shit giving for the work itself, basically. 'Journal For Plague Lovers': I need to retry that. On my initial listening back when, there was something that bothered me about the post-humous illustrating thing or something. Good to see you, pal. ** Dóra Grőber, Hi! Cool you did like it, yay! ** Thursday ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. The SF screening went really well. The crowd was healthy, and the feedback was excellent. Nice theater too with a giant screen. We'd never seen the film at such a huge scale. It almost looked like a real movie. ** Bill, Hey! Great seeing you too! I wish I could remember the tidbits and back stories. I think there were some. I really should take notes or something. ** Dóra Grőber, Hi! Like I just told David, the screening went really well. We were very happy. ** Marcus Pyotr Mamourian, Hi, there! Whoa, good to see you! We're still trying to set up a screening of our film in NYC, although our luck has been really bad, but, if we can, I'll definitely be there for that. Otherwise, I'd like to. We'll see. Cool that you'll be there. What are you doing there? ** Friday ** David Ehrenstein, Interesting take on 'TWB'. Huh. ** Steevee, Hi. Look forward to the interview. Everyone, Steevee has interviewed director Roberto Minervini about his much-discussed documentary film 'The Other Side', and you are invited to indulge. Oh, a review too! Everyone, you can also read Steevee's review of the new documentary about Anthony Weiner by clicking this. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. 'The Wild Boys' is my favorite Burroughs, I think, maybe. Wow, interesting about the Best PhD thesis. And interesting that he wrote one. There'a link. Everyone, _B_A links everyone up with a download of Philip Best's PhD thesis if you like. Here. ** Bernard Welt, Hey! I hope the event went really well. Philip Clark left me an FB comment to that effect. Possibility of a description? I hope everything is going okay. Are you back in DC? ** James, Hi, man. I did make it back home safely. Jets-lagged, duh, but in one single piece. The screening went great. No, not a packed house, but it was a huge heater, and we were very happy with the turn-out. Otherwise in SF, Zac and I mostly looked around, visited the new SF MoMA, galleries, city in general stuff, saw some friends, saw the documentary about Chantal Akerman, ate some superb sushi, etc. Didn't hit City Lights, no. Never got over into that area. It was a pretty quick trip. ** Bill, Hi. The flight was long. The lag is ... we'll see. Semi-bad so far. Saw a bunch of plane movies. I don't know if I can remember. Um ... 'Deadpool' (what makes it fresh also makes it annoying), the new 'Star Wars' (fun), 'Shutter Island' (terrible, maybe the worst ever Scorcese), 'Paranormal Activity: The Ghost' (weak), 'The Revenant' (boy, is that maybe the most overrated movie ever; boring, badly written, phony-feeling), ... I'm forgetting the others. That William Davenport event/film does sound really good. Johanna Went! ** New Juche New Juche, Hi, welcome to this place, and thank you coming in. I think it's my favorite Burroughs too. Josef Winkler? Hm, no, I don't think I know him. Okay, I will go try to find those two books by him today. Thanks a lot, sir. How are you? What's going on in your world? ** Saturday ** _Black_Acylic, Oh my god, it's up, it's real, at long last! Hooray! I'll imbed it. Everyone, the third, extremely long awaited episode of Ben Robinson's exciting and already legendary web series 'Art101' is finally in the world! This is sufficiently momentous news that I am going to imbed Episode 3 right down at the bottom of this p.s., and please click where its arrow is and fully enjoy. Can't wait to watch it, Ben! Fantastic! ** David Ehrenstein, He was indeed. ** Jamie McMorrow, Hi, Jamie! Cool, I'm glad the reruns were still alive. The trip was great, all we had hoped. The screening went extremely well, yes. We're very happy. Here's hoping about my jet-lag. It seems kind of sneaky so far. Of course, you're back from Aarhus! So the performance went well? Did you see any other music or anything else that you particularly liked? I'm spaced too. I hope you got all the catch-up sleep you needed. Talk to you more and better tomorrow. Lots of love, Dennis. ** Steevee, Hi. Oh, god, ugh, I hate that. I hope your new card gets winged to you lickety-split. ** Okay. We're caught up. Sorry for the effects of my jet lag on the above. I should be brighter in the morning. In the meantime, please consider these four books I loved. Thanks! See you tomorrow.
ART101 ep. 3 - death lolz
'Juliet Escoria's poetry debut, Witch Hunt, out in May from Lazy Fascist Press, is sad and funny—but only funny if you're sad. Moving in the hollow vein of her 2013 short-fiction collection Black Cloud, Escoria navigates the tracks of symbiotic drug romance and degradation with a bleak, hilarious sarcasm. Her musings are macabre, but for a generation that regularly wonders if the kid nodded out next to us on the couch is alive or not, we find honesty in graveled humor.
'"Everything I'm working on now is a fake version of myself," Escoria tells The KIND at a closing El Pollo Loco on Sunset Boulevard. "Most of it's more recent; so it's less depressing. But I think Witch Hunt is funnier than Black Cloud."
'Juliet has just finished reading at an AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Programs) event at Circus of Books, an iconic erotic book shop on the brink of extinction, now resembling a bodega selling porn, meth pipes, and magazines from the '90s. We retreated across the street, to a synthetic Mexican restaurant wet with ammonia.
'"It's a poetry book, which is weird. I didn't really think of myself as a poet. I started writing poetry when I was a teenager, but I stopped because I couldn't tell if it was any good or not."
'Escoria grew up in San Diego, California, depressed. Defying the highs and (mostly) lows depicted in her work, she's been sober for years, having escaped Manhattan's cocaine corridors and California's meth-bleached boredom to focus on writing/not dying.
'In 2014, Escoria married fellow author Scott McClanahan, moved to the Appalachian hills of West Virginia, a region McClanahan hails from and has chronicled extensively. "I work in the basement," explains Escoria. "My husband works upstairs in his little bedroom. Then we travel once a month, which makes me feel normal." She pauses. "At least when you get annoyed by people, they're more interesting than yuppies."
'Escoria's cool approach to poetry is unfazed by the circle-jerk formality of academia: "I was working on a novel, and I felt like I couldn't tell what I was doing. So I just started writing poetry for fun. We had a joke to see how quickly I could write a poetry book. So I did that. I wrote most of them in two months, then it took another five of me just fiddling around with them."'-- The Kind
Lazy Fascist Press
'Escoria's debut short story collection is a brazen admission of the pains of reality in a time when pretending to be happy – to make light of your sadness – is easier than ever. The tone is a combination of Denis Johnson and Joan Didion, and although the stories are focused on drugs (and a wide variety of), Escoria never uses them gratuitously. Rather, each story is a dose of potent insight on the motivations and experiences of users both active and struggling-to-be former.'-- Lauren Oyler, Dazed
'Unrelenting, violent, often scary: Juliet Escoria's debut collection of stories will likely have you begging and crying for salvation a few pages in. She's just that good.'-- Jason Diamond, Flavorwire
'Simply riveting and raw.'-- Lindsay Hunter, FSG blog
Excerpts
Contemporary Guilt
when i went home
the first time
after going off to get married
my mother begged me: please don’t have a baby.
here were her reasons:
1) it would have problems
2) i have problems
3) my husband has problems
4) all the problems would be parts of a real disaster and she wouldn’t be able to deal
so essentially she’d have to disown me
predictably, i got mad and
stormed off to what used to be my bedroom.
which is the place where
i tried to
kill myself
four times
half a lifetime before.
in the morning, she apologized
– kind of –
asking if i understood what she meant
that she was speaking
out of love but also fear.
she told me there were things
she never told me
because she had to pretend to be strong.
i think that was when i was supposed to ask
about the things i never knew
but i failed to.
a few days later, i asked her when she knew
that i’d turn out “okay”—
eighteen, twenty-two, twenty-five?
but she was honest
and said it didn’t come until i was
living in new york,
two years sober.
that she used to watch the wine bottles pile up
my skin yellow
teeth darken
and that smell.
i guess that’s a long time to be
worried
that your daughter is going
to die.
Whatever Useless Things
When he kissed
me there was only
one more thing
I wanted and that
was to completely
disappear.
The mornings left
my insides sore
and the outer part
of me in a dust
film broken
pieces of skin
and no dreams
remembered.
He did not regret
his wanting
although he
may have regretted
the fulfillment
but what else
is there
to say about
desire.
The answer is
disappointing.
The answer is
not much.
APRIL 24, 2012: BROOKLYN, NY
I don't really know how it happens but we are fighting in our bedroom and the mirror from the wall ended up on our bed somehow? And then it broke and shards and pieces got all over the sheets, and we were wrestling in it, wrestling for the bracelet she had given him but also for control and neither one of us could find any. It ends with him on top of me because he is bigger and stronger. We are breathing hard, our hearts pounding, and the slivers of glass dig into our skin. His face is in front of mine, his big hands on my shoulders, and I hate it that he has won. So I spit in his face.
Later, I see that me spitting is the demarcating line between what was before and the end of our relationship. But at the time it didn't seem like that big of a deal.
He gets off me, and is going out the door, and I am chasing him, but his lead is too much and I am not wearing shoes, and I have no idea where he went. Probably to one of the bars a few blocks away, but my hair is a mess and I can still feel glass in me and I am too ashamed to be in public and searching for him like a jilted woman. So I go back home.
Except besides not having shoes, I also don't have keys or a cell phone and I can't get back into the apartment. I sit on the stoop and although it's a warm night it is still April and it is cold and my feet are cold and I realize that my life with him is going to end now, that one of us will have to move out, that it will probably be me, that he won't be in my life anymore, that I am alone, that I am ugly, that we just yelled and broke things and wrestled in shattered glass on our bed, that I spat in his face, and my feet are cold, and it is cold, and I am locked out, and the world is spinning, and I am worried I am dying and the edges of things grow dizzy and black.
But then a raccoon is crawling up the fence. There is no wilderness anywhere near us, and I've never seen wildlife around here before, and seeing this raccoon here feels like something meaningful. It is perched at the top, looking at me, deciding if I am a threat, weighing its choices. We regard each other for a while. Then it hops my side of the fence and walks slowly down the street, in the direction of where the person who is now my ex-boyfriend has gone, and I can breathe, and things are terrible and ugly and I am still ashamed but I also know things will be OK without him.
Witch Hunt #1 by Juliet Escoria
Witch Hunt #2
Cut These Strings by Juliet Escoria
_______________
'I promise to retire this anecdote after one last airing, but here goes: When Dodge Rose first landed at my desk at Dalkey Archive Press, I thought it was a hoax. A trap. (It wouldn’t have been the first.)
'I showed it to my assistant editor of the time and he agreed: novels like Dodge Rose don’t come into one’s life in brown paper, humble, untrumpeted. They’re whispered of, recommended, enthused and griped about, passed around, gradually shibbolethed, forgotten . . . then reprinted with glowing intros, taught, accepted, and still never enough read.
'It wasn’t possible, we said, that a young, Australian Beckett with virtually no publications to his name had just dropped in our laps. No, there was some sinister plot in the works. A plot to—well, what? Was this some éminence grise of the mainstream cutting loose and producing the high-modernist novel he or she had been lusting to write since their teenage infatuation with Ulysses? Or could this be one of Dalkey’s own authors—or employees?—submitting a novel under a false name to see if we would be able to sniff out the imposture? It even occurred to me to worry that Dodge Rose was, Ern Malley-wise, a prank, an attempt to snare a small press known for publishing “subversive” fiction into signing on a book written expressly to parody said fiction. There had to be a catch, no?
'After all, when we sit down with Joyce, with Beckett, we sit down with the celebrity as well as the text, often instead of the text, even—you know who you are—in preference to the text. Sitting down with Dodge Rose, we were alone in the presence of Dodge Rose, and could not entirely believe the evidence of our senses, which told us, from the first gnomic sentence—“Then where from here”—that we were in the presence of the Real Thing.
'Even now, with the book finally hitting stores, and the author’s identity confirmed (supposedly confirmed), there is a soupçon of suspicion in me, as though the trap’s jaws are still waiting, out of sight, to bite. Perhaps this is because, even now, after multiple readings, Jack Cox’s Dodge Rose remains something of a mystery—this is a book that demands a book’s worth of exegesis, not a brief appreciation—but its elusiveness is something I have come to treasure, and is in any case central to the book’s strategy of beguilement. It is cryptographic and disorienting in its manner of presentation, in the density of the information presented. But this is not, as they say, a drawback—it’s a feature.
'Though made up largely of dialogue, Dodge Rose eschews quotation marks, wages an almost totally successful campaign against the hyphen, and, as it progresses, empties the apostrophe, the comma, and capital letters too from its aesthetic quiver. You’ll say that these are typical modernist tics, and you’d be right, but Cox goes a ways farther than homage: this is a novel that demands of the reader that she labor continually to orient herself not only in the sentence, on the page, in the plot, but in Australian history, geography, architecture, commerce, in property law, in the properties of language and personality. The reader can never sleep, letting the comfortable mores of fiction propel her from page to page, but must ask always who is now addressing whom, where in the line or paragraph did the speaker change, the tense, the object, the tongue? And neither is there any relaxing into incomprehension—the other form of readerly slumber—because Dodge Rose is that wonderful rarity, a novel that flirts so skillfully and successfully with seeming incomprehensibility, with some private order of authorial logic, that it never once crosses the line to lapse into the mere objecthood of so much “experimental” fiction, content to be read as a blank or black page. That is, Dodge Rose wants to be enjoyed, to be entered and experienced, to be grappled with and for its subjects to be grasped, not skimmed over. Its intentions are legible, but other; its tools are familiar but wielded askew. It is a work of fiction that, despite its playfulness of diction, its successful absorption and deployment of the full compliment of modernist artifice, is committed to meticulous research and deployment of the real—the real in all its definitions: “fixed, permanent, or immovable things”—while operating in a mode nonetheless dominated by a syntax of confusion, a vocabulary of multilingual malapropism.'-- Jeremy M. Davies
Dalkey Archive
'Eliza travels to Sydney to deal with the estate of her Aunt Dodge, and finds Maxine, a hitherto unknown cousin, occupying Dodge’s apartment. When legal complications derail plans to live it up on their inheritance, the women’s lives become consumed by absurd attempts to deal with Australian tax law, as well their own mounting boredom and squalor. The most astonishing debut novel of the decade, Dodge Rose calls to mind Henry Green in its skewed use of colloquial speech, Joyce in its love of inventories, and William Gaddis in its virtuoso lampooning of law, high finance, and national myth.'-- Dalkey Archive
Excerpt
It dawned on me in a perfectly good manner of speaking that Dodge was dead, that Eliza was not Dodge, I was not Dodge, that we would have to do what was undone. I was looking into the hard wet patch of my own reflection. No. Because. Though the drawers of the desk and the bookcase still hung open because we had not in fact been able to find Dodge’s birth certificate and had kept looking for it until we couldn’t put off leaving for Bernard any longer without being late, that centripetal invasion of blank space only seemed to point to a deeper reticence, a fixture as secret as the clamps in a family portrait, even now the patch of damp carpet beneath the window returning as if the shock of her death had exposed the room to an image that no matter how well you cleared the place out would come back like a photograph blooming under the alkalies across a furious sheet of paper.
Well said Eliza quite frankly. What do you think happened to the money.
I have no idea. Maybe she never had any.
She shook her head. She must have. I can’t believe Mum took everything.
Maybe she spent it.
On what.
There used to be a lot more in here. Dodge was always going out to auctions and second hand stores when I was younger and taking things with her and bringing back more than she took. Heaps of old stuff really. It all seemed worthless to me but you know you can’t tell with old stuff.
Eliza drummed her fingers on the back of the threadbare sofa. What happened to it all.
We got rid of it. It’s gone. That was a long time ago now. I can’t think what she could have ever got for those trinkets. I want to know can’t I say anything straight. Have a real cigarette. Eliza tapped up a slightly squashed Stuyvesant from its packet and began patting the pockets of her jacket for her lighter with a rapid movement that might have been nerves and I realised also as if for the first time that in a shallow way I was falling in love and maybe she was too. Maybe it was just beginning to have a friend. I guess it must have been as lonely on the farm in Yass with no one but her mother and the surrounding sheep as it was to live exclusively for a mistress in the Cross. It was Caprotinia the day of the. Caprio. Went under, no a loir wild fig tree. I love long life. Posh, damn short shrift high school don’t remember anything. Two figs to the captor of that profound navel from down here over your pretended arsehole. Who the hell gave me this extravagant education.
That night I was woken by the sound of something metallic crashing onto the floorboards of the dining room. At first I held still in order to put nothing between my ears and the other end of the flat as my eyes adjusted to the moonlight that fell in through the open blinds spreading pink amid the wales of my woollen bedspread, shining on the rim of my alarm clock and in the silence that followed between the ticks of its infinite helix I threw the cover off and walked carefully, I won’t say I pattered down the corridor to the living room. There was no light on anywhere and still no noise. I did not want to go any further without some kind of weapon but standing in the dark of the corridor at the entrance to the living room I could see through the open doors of the dining room to where a faintly luminous body was bent over something on the floor. It was Eliza. Again. Who else would it be. When she saw me walking towards her she jumped up with the metallic object in her hands and I reached and grabbed it only out of fear that she might drop it again but as she raised her hands in surprise now two pale palms against the shimmering obscurity of the dining room that for years had been no more than a hoarding house for family silver if it wasn’t the effect of Fagan himself it was Jack Dawkins or the Artful Dodger coming at me for his share with streaks of ash down the thighs of his nightie and with an equally vacant reflex I swung the lidless urn to one side and out of her reach. She yelped, then recovering she said my name and asked me to turn on the light. I did, and saw that her hands too were covered in ash. What is that she said.
It’s an urn I said.
She flopped down on the floor one bare leg either side of the little pile of burnt bones and the copper lid. She seemed as half asleep as I was. Come on I said in the atavistic fuddle of the early morning, no use crying over spilt milk. I was not long recovering my senses though. What I asked was she doing.
She looked at me and waited, her eyes resting opaque and patient on mine until at last her mind seemed to withdraw something that it must have been almost holding out, face down as it were, and it was with the kind of disappointed but levelling calm of a card player who folds before getting in too deep that she said she was looking to see if Dodge had hidden her money anywhere and I didn’t bother to ask why she was doing it at one o’clock in the morning. O God how can I wash my hands. I suggested she rub them over the top of the urn first. She did, interlocking her fingers, rubbing the backs, making a fist of each hand and rubbing out the ash from the creases in her knuckles. She went to the bathroom then and I got a dustpan and brush. I had to feel for them in the dark in the cupboard under the sink then I took them back to the dining room and crouched and swept up the ash that had fallen on the floor and turned up the dustpan so that it ran off one corner into the urn. Thanks said Eliza through her collar as she wiped her face in the doorway.
How do you feel now.
She almost said she felt like a cigarette. I thought she was going to start drooling again. Here I said and pulled out a chair from the dining table. Let’s talk a bit before you go back to bed.
She sat down and put both elbows on the table and her head between her hands. Did she say what she wanted done with those.
No. Remember she didn’t leave any instructions.
That’s right.
It’s cheaper to cremate than bury.
How could she not have any money. It doesn’t make sense. She should have been rich.
Maybe she had an expensive habit, that can add up.
But like you said she must have had a pension or something. Otherwise how else was she keeping you. And anyway it was more than two million, that’s just what Mum spent on the sheep. There must have been a real fortune between grandma’s and grandpa’s families. They were bloomin bankers and squatters. It was ying and yang. Someone’s money must be hidden somewhere.
What did you want to do with it.
Get off the farm start a business.
What kind of business.
I don’t know, travelling sales. I’d like to travel.
And the flat.
What about it.
If we sold the flat.
But you live here.
There is a law you know that it goes to your mother.
Mum wouldn’t kick you out, she doesn’t need it. Besides what about the family matinee act or whatever. You can have the flat.
We could sell it I said. We could go halves and then you could get off the farm and I could get out of here.
She drew back slowly. It struck me then that I might have taken her reserve the wrong way, that she may rather have doubted her good fortune from the beginning, suspended as she was between the files and musters, deferring even conjectural investment until she could put her hands on something concrete, afraid to find that there was nothing there but unable to admit that it was possible, as if she had been holding her breath, not daring to let herself go in case there was, impossibly, nothing to take back. But no sooner had the idea rung out than I felt with all this outward stimulation that I recognised another kind of restraint, that Yass, whose misted hills appeared to roll about her pupils as they drifted from me over the dim walls of the dining room held her somehow locked in like I had been that she was still in some sense pinned back to that far from littoral shore as for thirteen years I had been by Dodge and the keys and some other illegible force, some manifestly prurient though untold indenture, perhaps her false but fantastic interest, in the foul and motley wallpapered flat (apart from skoo l, I’ll have this coven between the covers in no time), the former’s, I mean Eliza’s eyes flying open even as I told out to myself for the last time and with the faintest, the very faintest regret the modest changes I had briefly foreseen, which were I would be the first to admit rather a failure of imagination than otherwise, all more or less this side the dictates of my intangible legacy, flying open as I was saying at the sudden recovery of such a pinched square of floor space, like a stump grubber’s on still colder ground who, severed the red thread in the navel string, hoes up from the decorated threshold of an expired cult the tessera going to reveal the actual value and dispensability of the whole familiar plot, our anonymous, adverse brother, adrift in the unbounded troughs. And Eliza, I have not forgotten you, pushed up against me, cast forth before your time from the same infant quarter that might in a single blow be subtracted to a real escape route, through whose b darkened rooms da you, of your dried tears like the underglaze, in the French sense, were beginning to sense a way out of the vast and smothering enclosure of your immediate inheritance.
I think I’m starting to get the hang of these peripli of the mind.
As I was unequipped at the time to unload such sonnets on to her, she nodded and smiled and kept nodding equally dumbly until I suggested we go to bed and talk about it in the morning. It was not, she admitted then, referring to my earlier contribution, a shite idea.
We were woken up by the phone. I was back in the dining room to answer it before Eliza arrived with her pyjamas tucked into her jeans mussing her curls and resembling under the foreign velour of the morning light nothing so much as any other punk kid. There goes the beggar king. The morning makes us new.
________________
'Why Write? Because wrapped in machinery I confess my ashamed desire. That’s actually a line from Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Why Is God Love, Jack,” a shorter A.G. poem I’ve always been fond of that uses “Because” as a line opener all the way through. I had a flash of doing an answer to the “why write?” question by stringing a lot of because-sentences together, but realized the only furtive impulse behind it other than the bogus ease of encapsulation–and the question does implicitly demand the summary axe–was gonna be figuring out where to drop the Ginsberg line for maximum impact of ambiguous nature (a form of amusement). That’s something to do with timing, and I write at this point in part to make arrangements with words, the sounds of which I love, and abhor, occasionally, and sometimes upon request, to set in time. I do not write to make images or metaphors or to reveal or to be expressive or unexpressive. I do probably write out of mad word love and also because it was something I realized at some point I could do and keep being surprised by (the doing). I wasn’t sure if I could -do- anything when I was between the ages of 12 and 18. I started writing when I was 17, for a college paper’s news desk. I started writing poems about two years later. The poems were and are the response I was looking for, and that’s always being written, that response, so I’m writing to keep at that.
'You could write because you could be good at it (and then actually become good at it, the way becoming is riskier than being, sometimes) and you could learn to make it be a filter between your consciousness and the world pouring in. That kind of thinking can contain a lot of “reasons” to write, and so may let you be various in your practice of writing. I’ve shifted to “you” to take on an affect of inclusivity and to let you in and to turn the situation around slightly, but that also makes the tonal space being constructed by this writing advice-like, and I don’t want it to be that, or be like that. I’m currently very upset with likeness. I write to have a practice I can continue and alter, and the question of how to change keeps getting raised as a result. There is entering a tonal space, building a tonal space, trying on a tonal space, stealing a tonal space, and there’s finding yourself stuck with one you didn’t realize you were in until totally immersed. There are more tonal spaces than that last sentence gets at. I do not write in order to play at or react to or fight with being contemporary or classical.
'I can legitimately say that in recent years I have written across months-long periods of time out of (this will be non-chronological): 1) a fear of being stupid; 2) a desire to stretch my ability to make and understand thought in sentences; 3) outrage, with specific regards to the ease with which this country’s general populace can be manipulated (by and through language of various stripes, in order to be rendered a weaponized generality); 4) desperation to maintain a practice in the face of life-altering changes; 5) a clear need to depressurize my practice (which meant writing poems that I didn’t think could be reproduced, thereby disarming the question of publication); 6) it’s interesting to be working very fast and very slow at the same time, all the time (I know that doesn’t grammatically connect back to “of”…what’s really at stake for that of?); 7) a recent recognition that I’ve been very serious the past thirteen years, and my body needs a break, since I’m prone to damaging it under conditions of high seriousness.
'I write because duration is so strange. “Everything lasts a certain amount of time; that’s very odd,” I heard the poet Kenneth Koch say one day.'-- Anselm Berrigan
Wave Books
'New York poet Anselm Berrigan plays with space like a painter with the prosody of a poet. Written as infinitely looping sentences around the page, the rectangular poems of COME IN ALONE act as a frame to space, outrunning thought with quickness, openness, humor, and protest. They are simultaneously inviting and impermeable, making familiar language uncanny with every turn around the page.'-- Wave Books
Excerpts
Anselm Berrigan for Poeteevee
Anselm Berrigan's Sure Shot
Anselm Berrigan reads Ted Berrigan
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'Sara Tuss Efrik (is) one of the most interesting young writers in Sweden. Efrik is a writer and performance artist (and sometime writer for Montevidayo and sometime editor of Action, Yes). Her first novel is getting published this fall. I first came in contact with her when she wrote a kind of review of my book Pilot. The review wasn’t exactly a review as an amazing poem/story in and of itself, a kind of rewriting of my poems that treats through a deformation zone. And since then I’ve read a lot of her writings, including the novel. ...
'In many ways, Efrik’s work is an investigation of what Mark Seltzer (drawing on Kittler’s work) has called “wound culture,” the epoch of mass media, starting in the early 20th century in which the public arena is one of wounded bodies, mass-reproduced killers/victims (“serial killers”) and media. I also think of how this trailer shows something important: how the violence of art does not necessarily have to be what we typically think of as violence and dismemberment – hard, severe, rigorous (the fantasy of the avant-garde), but can come out making out, cuddly animals, permeation. It is an interesting spin on Bersani’s “shattering” experience of art – art can tamper with the self in other interesting ways than the “hard” kind of “shattering.” The self already contains the mutations and the art and the autoimmune disorder that will undo it and undo it and redo it and rewind it and unwind it.
'Efrik’s Automanias (are) are diary entries of sorts, but instead of diary entries, which invoke the very private take on lived experience, these diary entries are written through the experiences of art, as the texts move through other artworks. They are “automanias” rather than “autobiograhies” – they mania-ize the texts rather than biographies.
'This particular piece on the paintings of Berlin-based artist Emeli Theander as well as a kitschy painting by Efrik’s grandmother. “Chin Chin” is a series of images (from what I gather) that were grafiti–ied on various city walls around the world, translated already through various cityscapes. So already the diary is based on a reproduced images. But the poem is not “indeterminacy” in the old postmodern way, nor is it really about “reproduction” (as in a lot of art of the 1970s), but it’s about a constant tension between the many and the singular, the diary-narrative and the forces that break apart the body: she becomes not just two people (two copies without an original) but also “chin chin,” a name that evokes the realm of orientalist-freakshow-otherness kitsch (the exact realm through which translations – of say The Arabian Nights – produces the very idea of kitsch). It goes without saying that she’s “inauthentic”; she’s not worried about authenticity or mediation. For me this is about art as deformation zones.
'The rabbit is the “brand” or “symbol” of this violence; and like the tension between the one and the reproduced, like the diving in the land that produces the flood (in the statement by Teater Mutation), the speaker both doesn’t want to free the rabbit or bury it.
'It is not properly speaking a symbol because it unsettles the topographic models of the symbol: it distorts the depth that is needed in a symbol by living inside the ribcage (ie it is inside, where one is supposed to find the meaning of the symbol, but instead one finds the symbol, the vehicle) as well as outside. And unlike a conventional symbol, the concrete singular that holds together the more abstract, the vehicle that leads the way to the tenor (to paraphrase Coleridge’s famous definition), this symbol is an “epidemic” and a “coal-burning” – the singular vehicle multiplies in itself, becomes an auto-mutilation, burning itself into orphan birds. The vehicle of the symbol moves up toward the tenor/meaning, but the meaning is stuck in the insistent deformation zone (vultures ready to eat the text). ...
'I love all these explorations of gothic artifice, engagements with tensions and violent eruptions and disruptions, performances of distortions and multiplications. Greenberg famously objected to kitsch for its visceral impact: Here we get the symbol (that redeemer of Art) but its consumed by itself, turned into visceral kitsch. When people talk about using “kitsch” it almost always seems to be with the gloves of irony, thus reaffirming the division between true art and kitsch. In this poetry, the kitsch is visceral, it doesn’t have that ironic distance.'-- Johannes Goransson
translated by Paul Cunningham
Good Morning Menagerie
'The winner of our 2015 Chapbook-in-Translation Contest, Automanias turns autobiography into a one-way mirror. When Efrik digests the work of Lars Von Trier, Alejandra Pizarnik, or Shakespeare, she transforms herself into a valve, collecting the violences of influence into a self that is aggregate, submerged, subversive, and emergent. Paul Cunningham's English translations have masterfully preserved Efrik's disturbing, and captivating, diary-like manias into language that is both hallucinatory and without boundaries.'-- GMM
Excerpts
Automanias: Selected Poems by Sara Tuss Efrik
PERSONA PEEP SHOW (2013) english subs
I LOVE MUMMY (2011)
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p.s. Hey, everybody! ** Saturday ** Dóra Grőber, Hi Dóra! I hope you liked it (the Richey Edwards thing). Maybe you said later. I'm glad the self-portraits worked out well. I hope you had fun and lots of productive stuff this past week. How are you, how were things? ** David Ehrenstein, Hi, David. Thanks, and thank you so much for that amazing review! Zac and I are just thrilled and so grateful! The Cinematheque printed the review and gave it out as the 'program' for the showing. Everyone, if you haven't read David Ehrenstein's great article about Zac's and my film 'Like Cattle Towards Glow', and if you want to, you can do that by pressing down softly on these words. ** Bill, Hi, Bill. It was so great to get to see you and to hang out a little. Thanks so much! Love, me. ** Sypha, Hi, James. Huh, I don't remember that Robin thing, but it does seem plausible, although the boner itself was probably more conceptual than a real thing. Thanks for buying my book. How have things been? ** Jamie McMorrow, Hi, Jamie! My brain a little lagged-out this morning, so I'll save my powers of invention, if they exist, for tomorrow's initial salvo. Me too, re: unpredictable levels of nerves pre-readings or I guess pre-film-related talks lately in my case. Strange stuff. Oh, on the Scandinavian theme park book, at this point, I think the audio would just be on-site field recordings, but we haven't put our minds to the audio aspect yet. That was the initial idea: field recordings. How were Gluck and Kraus? Maybe you say later. I haven't read the future comments yet. Great to see you, Jamie! Love, me. ** Steevee, Hi, Steve! The Russian government seems very into being unfairly slighted. It seems like an addiction. ** Misanthrope, Hi, G! Trip went really good. Whoa, you are pervert! Holy moly! Ha ha. ** Liquoredgoat, Hi, Douglas. The Mormon ones are rarities. It's actually very rare that I'll find any American escort ads that are useable. American escorts' profiles tend be very boring and by the book. How's it, buddy? ** MANCY, Hi, Steven! Everything on the trip went great, thanks! How are you? ** Monday ** Brendan, Hey, B! I didn't get to LA after all, as I guess you realized due no alert from me. We had to get back here for some film stuff. But I'm planning a decent, longish visit home, probably in July. How is everything? ** Dóra Grőber, Hi! Thanks, Dora. It was good. ** David Ehrenstein, Ah, ha! ** Unknown, Hi, ... uh, Bill? How did you get unknown? ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben! I watched the Eurovision Finals, and I immediately thought Ukraine would win. It was a weird or rather unweird one this year, I thought. Lots of so-so to bad catchy pop and not nearly enough dated, overblown theatrical shenanigans. ** MANCY, Hi, thanks! ** Tuesday ** Unknown, You're unknown again! Yeah, we had a nice dinner instead of a stressful meet-and-greet = much, much better. ** David Ehrenstein, Thank you again! ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. I think San Francisco got a little rocked. Cicciolina! I have never actually heard Cicciolina until this very moment. Is that weird? ** Wednesday ** David Ehrenstein, Yes, indeed, I read it the very second I heard it was up! ** Damien Ark, Hi, Damien, That's okay. I was elsewhere anyway. Save your shit giving for the work itself, basically. 'Journal For Plague Lovers': I need to retry that. On my initial listening back when, there was something that bothered me about the post-humous illustrating thing or something. Good to see you, pal. ** Dóra Grőber, Hi! Cool you did like it, yay! ** Thursday ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. The SF screening went really well. The crowd was healthy, and the feedback was excellent. Nice theater too with a giant screen. We'd never seen the film at such a huge scale. It almost looked like a real movie. ** Bill, Hey! Great seeing you too! I wish I could remember the tidbits and back stories. I think there were some. I really should take notes or something. ** Dóra Grőber, Hi! Like I just told David, the screening went really well. We were very happy. ** Marcus Pyotr Mamourian, Hi, there! Whoa, good to see you! We're still trying to set up a screening of our film in NYC, although our luck has been really bad, but, if we can, I'll definitely be there for that. Otherwise, I'd like to. We'll see. Cool that you'll be there. What are you doing there? ** Friday ** David Ehrenstein, Interesting take on 'TWB'. Huh. ** Steevee, Hi. Look forward to the interview. Everyone, Steevee has interviewed director Roberto Minervini about his much-discussed documentary film 'The Other Side', and you are invited to indulge. Oh, a review too! Everyone, you can also read Steevee's review of the new documentary about Anthony Weiner by clicking this. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. 'The Wild Boys' is my favorite Burroughs, I think, maybe. Wow, interesting about the Best PhD thesis. And interesting that he wrote one. There'a link. Everyone, _B_A links everyone up with a download of Philip Best's PhD thesis if you like. Here. ** Bernard Welt, Hey! I hope the event went really well. Philip Clark left me an FB comment to that effect. Possibility of a description? I hope everything is going okay. Are you back in DC? ** James, Hi, man. I did make it back home safely. Jets-lagged, duh, but in one single piece. The screening went great. No, not a packed house, but it was a huge heater, and we were very happy with the turn-out. Otherwise in SF, Zac and I mostly looked around, visited the new SF MoMA, galleries, city in general stuff, saw some friends, saw the documentary about Chantal Akerman, ate some superb sushi, etc. Didn't hit City Lights, no. Never got over into that area. It was a pretty quick trip. ** Bill, Hi. The flight was long. The lag is ... we'll see. Semi-bad so far. Saw a bunch of plane movies. I don't know if I can remember. Um ... 'Deadpool' (what makes it fresh also makes it annoying), the new 'Star Wars' (fun), 'Shutter Island' (terrible, maybe the worst ever Scorcese), 'Paranormal Activity: The Ghost' (weak), 'The Revenant' (boy, is that maybe the most overrated movie ever; boring, badly written, phony-feeling), ... I'm forgetting the others. That William Davenport event/film does sound really good. Johanna Went! ** New Juche New Juche, Hi, welcome to this place, and thank you coming in. I think it's my favorite Burroughs too. Josef Winkler? Hm, no, I don't think I know him. Okay, I will go try to find those two books by him today. Thanks a lot, sir. How are you? What's going on in your world? ** Saturday ** _Black_Acylic, Oh my god, it's up, it's real, at long last! Hooray! I'll imbed it. Everyone, the third, extremely long awaited episode of Ben Robinson's exciting and already legendary web series 'Art101' is finally in the world! This is sufficiently momentous news that I am going to imbed Episode 3 right down at the bottom of this p.s., and please click where its arrow is and fully enjoy. Can't wait to watch it, Ben! Fantastic! ** David Ehrenstein, He was indeed. ** Jamie McMorrow, Hi, Jamie! Cool, I'm glad the reruns were still alive. The trip was great, all we had hoped. The screening went extremely well, yes. We're very happy. Here's hoping about my jet-lag. It seems kind of sneaky so far. Of course, you're back from Aarhus! So the performance went well? Did you see any other music or anything else that you particularly liked? I'm spaced too. I hope you got all the catch-up sleep you needed. Talk to you more and better tomorrow. Lots of love, Dennis. ** Steevee, Hi. Oh, god, ugh, I hate that. I hope your new card gets winged to you lickety-split. ** Okay. We're caught up. Sorry for the effects of my jet lag on the above. I should be brighter in the morning. In the meantime, please consider these four books I loved. Thanks! See you tomorrow.
ART101 ep. 3 - death lolz