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'Salt Is For Curing is the debut of writer Sonya Vatomsky. This book of poetry is structured as an elaborate meal, set in preparation of the worlds grimmest dinner party. It is layered with metaphor and brutality, even the cover hints at the dark ritual you are about to observe, and unbeknownst to you, partake in.
'They say only poets read poetry, but I would be remiss if I didn't recommend this to readers everywhere. The ability to provoke thought and prompt introspection and revelation is not easy. Neither is exposing the deepest fears and desires of complete strangers. Sonya manages to do just that.
'Admittedly I have not read poetry in a very long time, and now I am regretful. The beautiful complexity, raw passion, and bleak lens through which we are gifted perspective, opened my mind and heart to the world of poetry again. This is a book with which I will not have just a simple fling; rather I'll be pouring over these words for a while to come. My passion for this art form has been reignited.
'The structure of each poem is nearly as important as the words themselves, some evoking manic urgency, others military-like precision, still others, naked fear. I found this book to be a work of brilliance, not for the weak of heart or closed of mind, but those seeking adventure, sorrow, and uncertainty. This collection is refreshingly honest. After a lifetime wandering a world full of masks, watching someone lay themselves bare, as nerves splayed out upon a table of wet opened flesh, brings a kind of comfort and kinship I've not experienced with a complete stranger before.' -- The Belfry Network
Sonya Vatomsky Salt is for Curing
Sator
'Salt Is For Curing is the lush and haunting full-length debut by Sonya Vatomsky. These poems, structured as an elaborate meal, conjure up a vapor of earthly pains and magical desires; like the most enduring rituals, Vatomsky’s poems both intoxicate and ward. A new blood moon in American poetry, Salt Is For Curing is surprising, disturbing, and spookily illuminating.'— Ken Baumann, Sator
'Sonya Vatomsky’s Salt Is For Curing is many things: a feast, a grimoire, a fairy tale world, the real world. It’s also too smart for bullshit and too graceful to be mean about the bullshit: a marvelous debut. I love it.'— Ariana Reines
'Imagine bodies within bodies eating a feast, spilling over with their own secrets and hopes and dreams and fears and brutality and witchery. That is the party you will find in this book — a modern-day, literary equivalent of a Bosch painting.'— Juliet Escoria
'These poems melt the hard fat of life into tallow candles, then they reach up and light themselves.'— Mike Young
'Curious, intricate poems. Lots of language play and the conjuring of myths. Rather enjoyed this one.'— Roxane Gay
Excerpts
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'Cassette 74' from Dostoyevsky Wannabe
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'In the introduction to A Raskolnikoff by Emmanuel Bove, Brian Evenson refers to a “secret history” of literature, “a stratum of books and authors without whom contemporary literature would not be possible but who have somehow been pushed to the side, neglected, forgotten.” Bove is one of those authors, a writer whose work I’d never read before this one. He wrote A Raskolnikoff as part of a series of books based on the imaginary chronologies of fictional characters. Inspired by Dostoyeksky’s Crime and Punishment, we follow a pair of wanderers, Changarnier and Violette, in a raw and emotionally unnerving odyssey. Most of the story revolves around their relationship, both to each other and the society around them. Changarnier is brutally honest with himself, so much so that he’s torn by his own ambivalence. Life’s platitudes are no comfort and his seeming apathy is exacerbated by his remorse:
“What’s left to losers like us if it’s not moving forward with the hope that something new will happen? Aren’t we the mediocrity, the sickness, the weakness of the world?”
'A Raskolnikoff brought back memories of all the walks I’ve had in my life, the random encounters, obscure sights, and secondary exchanges marked by a glance or a word dripping with intimation. Changarnier’s exchanges with Violet vacillate across the spectrum and it’s their whimsical, and sometimes cold nature, that make them feel authentic, even disturbing. Their jabs of cruelty to each other imbue the story with a sense of sorrow compounded by the unrelenting pressures of society. Time and emotion are inextricably bound, Siamese twins of tragedy that culminate in murder and eschew the tropes that are setup earlier. I couldn’t help but wonder, is the murder that takes place an illusion or a type of self-annihilation, a nihilism driven by a lack of direction? This journey has no home, and Changarnier’s all too aware of it even if others aren’t:
“The beauties of life attract him, and when he finds himself before another man, one like himself yet different, it would be just as mad for him to attempt to make himself understood as it would be to understand the other.”
'The book is as much an emotional stream as it is a meditation, a contemplation riding through different stages of nonexistence. The best translations rarely draw attention to themselves and Mitchell Abidor gives us a seamless transition from French to English, evoking their air of desperation and guilt as Changarnier convicts himself of an atrocity that he may or may not be responsible for. Along the way, they meet a strange old man who regales them with the melodramatic vicissitudes of his life. Just when you think you can sympathize, that feeling morphs into anger, even disgust, and then back to more pity. The palpably plaintive scars of age wear Chargarnier down, but he refuses to let it hinder him. He keeps on walking and is relentless in his motion, driven by the kinetics of either a youthful delusion or a naive optimism.
“There’s nothing in the world that makes people as skeptical and is as difficult to revive for others as lost happiness. We describe it as we see it in our memory: that is, adorned with a sweetness it didn’t actually have, but which the passing years have given it. And yet I have to tell you that I have fallen short of reality, precisely so as not to fall into this trap, and if I wanted to depict it as it was I would be accused of exaggeration.”
'It troubles me to think I’d never even have heard of Bove if not for a random notice on Facebook. Changarnier, through Bove, remains possessed by the undaunted spirit that treads forward independent of its fate and the fact that there is no final destination. The footprints remain, haunting, occasionally waiting to be rediscovered. It’s our own secrets, personal convictions, disappointments, and losses that Bove prods us with. It’s as though he reminds us, punishment doesn’t require a crime. The drive forward merits its own form of suffering.'-- Peter Tieryas, Entropy
Emmanuel Bove A Raskolnikoff
Red Dust
'Translated from the French by Mitchell Abidor. Introduction by Brian Evenson. A RASKOLNIKOFF was originally commissioned for a series of novels called "The Great Fable: Chronicle of Imaginary Characters," in which figures from literature, theater, film, and legend were brought back to life. Other writers chose Merlin, and Chaplin's Tramp; Bove's choice was to write "a continuation of Crime and Punishment." In a letter to his publisher he said that Raskolnikoff "doesn't appear in flesh and blood, but his influence on the young man's spirit is very visible."'-- Red Dust
Excerpt
Changarnier sat down in the only chair in his wretched room. It had been snowing since the previous day and flakes settled on the windowpanes like bugs on a wall.
Changarnier looked at his worn-out shoes. “I’m going to get drenched if I go out,” he thought. “But what will I do if I stay here?” He stood up and lit a cigarette. He wasn’t thirsty and wanted to drink. He wasn’t hungry and wanted to eat. He flicked away his cigarette, for he didn’t want to smoke. A disagreeable smell floated in the air of his room, which though it was closed was cold. “After all, I’m not a zero,” he murmured. He leaned into the mirror. “You, a zero!” As if wanting to be impolite, with an unexpected abruptness he turned his back on his image, and then hesitated a few seconds. He didn’t know what to do. Sit back down? He picked up the cigarette he’d tossed away and lit it. “Where am I?” he asked himself with a smile. In the end, he fell back onto the chair.
He had been dozing for a few minutes when someone knocked on the door.
“What is it?” he asked without thinking.
“It’s me,” a woman’s voice answered.
He opened the door and found himself standing in front of a sickly-looking young woman, who seemed unaware of her state of decay. Changarnier lit his cigarette again and with a smirk examined his new visitor.
“You’re not ashamed, to be so wretchedly poor?” he said. “You’re not ashamed to inspire pity in all those who know you? Don’t you have a shred of dignity in your heart? You live like an animal. A man offers you a drink and you follow him. He takes you to a disgusting room like this one and you follow him. You ask him for nothing before, but afterwards you try to drag money out of the happy sap. And yet you live, and you have the intact body of a human being, with hands with five fingers and feet with five toes. Don’t you understand that there is something in this world aside from the degradation you wallow in? Don’t you understand that there are superior beings?”
The visitor listened to this tirade without surprise and without interrupting. She was dressed in a ragged, dyed rabbit coat, its buttonholes torn. She was wearing a fur hat. Her banal attire gave this woman buried under sarcasm a hint of something even more dramatic. But Changarnier seemed insensitive to this drama. He was following an idée fixe. Poverty, lack of work, and the little interest he had in anything rendered him insensitive to the ills of others.
“You’re a poor wreck.” He continued, “You don’t even have any self-respect. Isn’t that true?”
She nodded in agreement.
“You could work like everyone else. Why don’t you do it? You prefer to beg, to receive threats and blows, to whore yourself to any filthy and disgusting man.”
Violette started to cry. The portrait the young man had painted didn’t surprise her. When she took the trouble to reflect, what he had said was also what she thought of herself. But normally, she preferred not to think.
“You’re right,” she contented herself with saying.
(cont.)
la vie de l'écrivain français Emmanuel Bove
Emmanuel Bove, la vie comme une ombre
Tombe Emmanuel Bove
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Phillip Griffith (Brooklyn Rail): I thought we’d start with the titles of these poems. You title each poem Trance Notebook, give each a number in the series, and then another title in brackets. You pluck that bracketed title from one of the fragments that make up the poem. How did you make the decisions for those titles? Did it have to do with how you composed the poems?
Wayne Koestenbaum: The decision-making process was similar to most of the titling I do. The title comes after, from scanning the section and trying to choose something that sounds nice by itself, and that seems symbolic or allegorical enough that it opens out toward something else. Sometimes, as with my book Blue Stranger with Mosaic Background, that phrase doesn’t appear in the book at all, but the painting I chose for the cover is called Blue Stranger with Mosaic Background. As for the Trance Notebooks’s bracketed subtitles, I simply chose a phrase that seemed allegorical.
Rail: So some of these fragments can stand for the whole? So many of them could be allegorical in that way. Are the fragments equal parts? Or are there moments that somehow rise above the rest?
Koestenbaum: Some of the fragments fall into a kind of narrative, with thematic sequence, either syntactically continuous with the ones that came before, or using verbal repetition, a kind of litany. At the end of one of the early notebooks I mention a dog, and the dog continues for two pages, which is an unusual continuity. In other cases the fragments are freestanding. And sometimes freestanding doesn’t mean allegorical or above the fray. Sometimes the phrase is just an aside or—not quite a punctum, but maybe a punctum to the extent that a punctum includes the accidental, the extraneous.
Rail: Did you write these poems in a trance?
Koestenbaum: It would be lovely to invent a whole fiction that I could spin via the Brooklyn Rail. When I speak to the newspaper of record, what account shall I give of my composition? The word “trance” came to me before I wrote most of what became the The Pink Trance Notebooks. When I set out that very first day, beginning them, I didn’t say, “Now I’m going to do trance notebooks.” But it came to me pretty quickly that I would be operating in these notebooks with an unusual lack of premeditation, lack of intention—and a corresponding abundance of physical freedom of movement. The notebooks were handwritten, and written as quickly as I could. What made the process trance-like was that in the drafts of the raw material, there’s really no punctuation except for commas. There’s not much punctuation in the final version, either, but in the original drafts, there were no interruptions, no pauses, nothing stanzaic in the least. It was pure torrent. I used small Moleskine notebooks and I’d write somewhat large, so there would be about five words per line. I used that line length as a kind of arbitrary measure, as a visual measure rather than a sonic or syllabic one. The process was trance-like because I often didn’t know what I was thinking, saying, or doing. And, since I spent so much time drawing and painting, I tried to find a way to make handwriting as much of a sport as possible. I tried to reinvent my handwriting. I tried to reinvent my arm and shoulder position, to think about how I could write so that it would physically feel like sketching—lines, or semantic lines in poetry, with abstract or other kinds of graphic lines.
Wayne Koestenbaum The Pink Trance Notebooks
Nightboat Books
'THE PINK TRANCE NOTEBOOKS is the product of the year Wayne Koestenbaum stopped keeping the traditional journal he had maintained for three decades and began a series of "trance notebooks" as a way to reflect an intensified, unmoored consciousness. The resulting sequence of 34 assemblages reflects Koestenbaum's unfettered musings, findings, and obsessions. Freed from the conventions of prose, this concatenation of the author's intimate observations and desires lets loose a poetics of ecstatic praxis—voiced with aplomb and always on point.'-- Nightboat
'Wayne Koestenbaum is one of the most original and relentlessly obsessed cultural spies writing today. His alarmingly focused attention to detail goes beyond lunacy into hilarious and brilliant clarity.'-- John Waters
Excerpt
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not many people know
what the inside of a
vagina during sex
looks like she said
–––––––––––
Obama and Hillary Clinton
had a top secret
lunch today
–––––––––––
if the lunch was top secret
why do I know about it?
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nothing to draw without
hair’s filigree
to stabilize the gaze
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his face in my ass
even if I don’t
want his face
in my ass even
if I’m supposedly
enjoying it—
––––––���––
tuber-shaped penis
shoved up me though
I said no and made
my eyes go blurry
in honor of his need—
––––––––––
supposedly gargantuan
but then it turned out
to be puny—
–––––––––––
psychotic husband
didn’t pamper
the bipolar martyr who
bragged about her
Bakelite as if it were
God's little acre
–––––––––––
if your desire to write
dies a natural death,
what happens to residual
urges, The Aeneid,
Roger Federer, crunch
of goy eating chocolate?
–––––––––––
tall guy on subway I
disabused of false notion
that I was cruising him
–––––––––––
Mr. Baer gave me his
stamp collection but wasn’t
a pervert
–––––––––––
we met at a cello concert—
–––––––––––
did I adequately
thank Mr. Baer?
–––––––––––
a fat portfolio of rare
stamps to add to my
impoverished collection
–––––––––––
(cont.)
Wayne Koestenbaum, in conversation with Elisabeth Ladenson
Wayne Koestenbaum reads "Streisand Sings Stravinsky"
Dear Wayne, I've Been Humiliated
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'Without a doubt, Boyd McDonald was the best film reviewer ever. The thing is he wrote for a gay mag, and mostly on films he watched on TV late at night. He also had a zine in the 1980s that focused on homosexual sex "Straight to Hell." The brilliance of McDonald is that on a physical level he's very much part of an underground "gay" world, when there used to be one. Now, everyone is getting married and becoming taxpayers - but alas, there was a life that was lived in the shadows, and McDonald, a superb writer, captures that series of shadows that were shown on TV - mostly films from the 1930s to the 50s. The beauty of his work is that he mostly focuses on the actor's cock size or butt. But that is just the platform or foundation of his serious observations - here he marks the queer world where females act out certain passions, while men react to them. Or is it the other way around? Cruising the Movies touches on a lot of fascinating subjects - the nature of old films being shown on TV, before the world of VHS recording - in a way it is almost a coded, often secret, transmission from Hollywood to a gay man's sensibility. William E. Jones wrote a beautiful and insightful introduction.'-- Tosh Berman
'Boyd McDonald’s Cruising the Movies: A Sexual Guide to Oldies on TV landed on my desk this week, and if the title didn’t hook me, then the cover image of a sassy young man in tight-whities and white high-tops sure helped. McDonald looks every bit the tweed Ivy Leaguer in his 1949 Harvard yearbook photo, but by the sixties, he’d ripped off the conservative postwar band-aid to reveal the sordid desires underneath. Originally published in 1985, Cruising gathers McDonald’s reviews written between 1983 and 1985 about films made between 1936 and the early eighties; the short feuilletons are gossipy, erudite, political, and largely about genitals on-screen. (McDonald also edited a series of chapbooks called Straight to Hell comprising “true homosexual experiences.”) His writing is feisty and funny, as when he levels a critique of Ronald Reagan in John Loves Mary (1949): after observing Ronnie’s rather feminine legs on display in the film, McDonald moves on to the “big fat tits” Reagan developed later, which “supplied an additional incentive to make himself feel manly by issuing, as President of the United States, an anti-homosexual statement. What a hero.'-- Nicole Rudick
'The collected articles of Boyd McDonald – founder of S.T.H.: The New York Review of Cocksucking (Gore Vidal, circa 1981: ‘one of the best radical papers in the country’), and contributor to Christopher Street, New York Native, Connection, and Philadelphia Gay News – were published as Cruising the Movies: A Sexual Guide to ‘Oldies’ on TV (New York: Gay Presses of New York, 1985). About his invigorating, theoretical tome, a model of critique in its unabashed accuracy, historical clarity and piquant thrill, the author stated that it was ‘not strictly about movies; it frequently uses them as an excuse for political, social, sexual, psychological, biographical, and autobiographical comments’. Art as lube for getting down to it (thinking). His essay on The Big Circus– ‘seen at 3 p.m., April 14, 1984, on Channel 5’ – zones in on David Nelson’s turn as a trapeze artist in white tights. Its third paragraph can stand as proof of the brilliance of McDonald’s rollicking analysis: ‘Even if he had made no other pictures than The Big Circus, David Nelson would still rank as one of Hollywood’s premier suck objects. On or off the trapeze, his body composes a variety of images for which the world ‘historic’ would not be an exaggeration, and when, on rare occasions, he turns his butt to the camera, the white fabric clinging ecstatically to his crack can only draw gasps from men who have an aesthetic sense. At gatherings of serious cineastes, speculation sooner or later turns to David Nelson’s asshole – his ‘vital centre’ in Arthur Schlesinger’s phrase. In the absence of any published data – David married twice, but if either of his wives had any special interest in or knowledge of his asshole, she has not written of it – the only thing film scholars can do is extrapolate from information visible on his face, mainly his eyebrow hairs and pink lips. Most would conclude, I think, that his hole, and the hairs which formed its ornamental frame, were among the finest in the film capital. By contrast, the heavy black brows of Brooke Shields and Matt Dillon threaten the possibility that these two newer players are, literally, bushy-tailed.’'-- Bruce Hainley
Boyd McDonald Cruising the Movies
Semiotext(e)
'Cruising the Movies was Boyd McDonald's "sexual guide" to televised cinema, originally published by the Gay Presses of New York in 1985. The capstone of McDonald's prolific turn as a freelance film columnist for the magazine Christopher Street, Cruising the Movies collects the author's movie reviews of 1983--1985. This new, expanded edition also includes previously uncollected articles and a new introduction by William E. Jones.Eschewing new theatrical releases for the "oldies" once common as cheap programing on independent television stations, and more interested in starlets and supporting players than leading actors, McDonald casts an acerbic, queer eye on the greats and not-so-greats of Hollywood's Golden Age. Writing against the bleak backdrop of Reagan-era America, McDonald never ceases to find subversive, arousing delights in the comically chaste aesthetics imposed by the censorious Motion Picture Production Code of 1930--1968.
'Better known as the editor of the Straight to Hell paperback series -- a compendia of real-life sexual stories that is part pornography, part ethnography -- McDonald in his film writing reveals both his studious and sardonic sides. Many of the texts in Cruising the Movies were inspired by McDonald's attentive inspection of the now-shuttered MoMA Film Stills Archive, and his columns gloriously capture a bygone era in film fandom. Gay and subcultural, yet never reducible to a zany cult concern or mere camp, McDonald's "reviews" capture a lost art of queer cinephilia, recording a furtive obsession that once animated gay urban life. With lancing wit, Cruising celebrates gay subculture's profound embrace of mass culture, seeing film for what it is -- a screen that reflects our fantasies, desires, and dreams.'-- Semiotext(e)
Excerpt
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Public Sex for Boyd Mcdonald - MATMOS
John Loves Mary Original Trailer
FIREBALL 500
*
p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. Cinefamily would be an excellent venue for LCTG. They're considering the film right now, so we'll see. I've talked to enough people now who knew or had some relationship to Pierre Clementi and who've said that him dying of AIDS-related causes isn't true at all that I believe them. There was going to be a 'B'? Oh, damn, that's too bad. 'A' is incredible. ** Aaron Mirkin, Hi, Aaron! Dude, your Tokyo pix on FB are upping my Japan-jonesing to serious levels. It looks like you're making the very best of the place. Montreal went really well. Great response. We managed to see two films: the new Grandieux, which was really great, and the new Wenders, which was really not great. M Lamar's work is super interesting. I've never met him, but he came to the talk that Gisele and I did re: 'Kindertotenlieder' in NYC. I'm probably a dunce because I don't know who Laverne Cox is. Oh, and, due to crazy busyness, I didn't get a chance to write to you to tell you how much I like 'Crazy House'. It's wonderful! Congratulations, man! ** Steevee, Hi. AFA would be a great place to show LCTG. Do you know how best to approach them or who one should approach there? I didn't love the theatrical release version of UTEOFW, but there were occasional things in it that I liked. For me, the extended cut just added a lot of pretense that kind of spoiled the little things I'd found intriguing. I don't know. Maybe a bit like the extended 'Donnie Darko' cut, which kind of ruined what been a curious, cool film for me. It's sad if depressing that having no internet at home is like a horror movie, but it is. Hope that vacancy is sorted today as you'd hoped. ** Krayton, Hi. Every year, the tiniest bit of Halloween get added to Paris, so it's easing into celebrating the occasion very, very gradually. I think I'm going to watch horror movies and eat scary cake on the 31st. There's really no other choice. How did the story go? ** Schlix, Hi, Uli! Thanks, man, belatedly, about the gig. And for your kind words about 'TVC'. Cool, man! I hope Paris treated you in a kingly manner. ** Thomas Moronic, Hi, T! I like the new Deerhunter a lot. It took me a minute to get used to the brighter sound, but, yeah, I'm digging it. They're playing at Pitchfork here this week, and I'm hoping that maybe I'll finally get to meet Bradford if he has some free time. Berlin went well. I mean, I had been pretty wary of showing LCTG in that context, and, as I think I mentioned, it was a decision for which Zac and I were allowed no input or say. We had two screenings. The first midnight screening was weird but ultimately as okay as it could have been under the circumstances. The festival fucked up and showed the film without its German subtitles. That didn't help. The crowd was really big but kind of rowdy, and some people were drinking in the theater, etc., and our film's first part is very quiet and gradual, so the match wasn't great. But the response was finally pretty good. The second screening in the late afternoon went much, much better. They managed to show the film with German subtitles. The theater was extremely packed with people sitting in the aisles and standing. It got very enthusiastic applause and the Q&A went very well, and I think it's safe to say that showing was a total success. So, it was good. But, yeah, weird context for sure. Nothing against the festival, which is quite cool, but LCTG was sort of like the festival's sore thumb. It was a context wherein people talked about Bruce la Bruce like he was Orson Welles. Nothing against Bruce, of course, but just to say that the favored aesthetic there was quite far from ours. So, yeah, it went well. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben! The new Laurel Halo is nice. Kind of low-key, but in a really good way. Yeah, I saw that Simons split from Dior thing as I was heading away. Most people I know here who know about such things tell me the stuff he did for Dior wasn't all that great anyway, but I have no clue. Thanks for the link to the Mills/Eliasson continuance. Everyone, via Black_Acrylic, ... 'Part 2 of Jeff Mills and Ólafur Eliasson's tête à tete is now online at Electronic Beats.' ** Misanthrope, Hi. Oh, come on, you have to have heard of Deerhunter. Me? Awesome? Thank you, wow. So, which spooky thing did you pick? Tell me everything! Clown fear is a real thing, I don't get it, but yeah. Since getting scared is the point of HHs, that shouldn't be a problem if a clown stocks his head in. ** H, Hi, H! I'm back! ** Unknown, Hi, Unknown! Oh, I don't know, about Warhol. Was he working on a writing project that that never reached fruition? I love his novel 'A'. Have you read it? It's amazing, and an unsung hero of 20th century avant-garde lit. Thank you very much about my blog, Mattias. It would be nice to get to talk more and know more about you, if you feel like hanging out here a bit. Take care. ** James, Hi, James! I don't think 'fun' is the right word for the Berlin experience, but it went well. Don't know. I haven't read 'The Pale King', and I don't know if I'm going to. I have read Rikki Ducornet, yes. In fact, I should do a post about her, hm. I haven't read 'The Stain'. She's pretty consistently very good, from my experience. I think maybe my favorite of hers so far is 'Phosphor in Dreamland'. ** Etc etc etc, Hi, Casey! I'll give a gander to that Garth Greenwell novel. I don't think I know his work. Mellowing? Ha ha. Not quite yet, no. Maybe if I'm really lucky in a few weeks. ** Bill, Hi, B! I just read something somewhere about a big new Quays film in 35mm or something? ** Kyler, Hi, Kyler! Cool about the write-up. Everyone, Kyler got written up, and here he is to direct you to it: 'The Washington Square Park Blog did a write-up on me today about The Strand (includes a mention of Patti Smith working there) … thought you’d like to see it here.' ** So, we're caught up. Above here are four books that I managed to both read and love reading in the spare bits of my recently over-busy existence, and, as always, they are highly recommended to you. See you tomorrow.

'Salt Is For Curing is the debut of writer Sonya Vatomsky. This book of poetry is structured as an elaborate meal, set in preparation of the worlds grimmest dinner party. It is layered with metaphor and brutality, even the cover hints at the dark ritual you are about to observe, and unbeknownst to you, partake in.
'They say only poets read poetry, but I would be remiss if I didn't recommend this to readers everywhere. The ability to provoke thought and prompt introspection and revelation is not easy. Neither is exposing the deepest fears and desires of complete strangers. Sonya manages to do just that.
'Admittedly I have not read poetry in a very long time, and now I am regretful. The beautiful complexity, raw passion, and bleak lens through which we are gifted perspective, opened my mind and heart to the world of poetry again. This is a book with which I will not have just a simple fling; rather I'll be pouring over these words for a while to come. My passion for this art form has been reignited.
'The structure of each poem is nearly as important as the words themselves, some evoking manic urgency, others military-like precision, still others, naked fear. I found this book to be a work of brilliance, not for the weak of heart or closed of mind, but those seeking adventure, sorrow, and uncertainty. This collection is refreshingly honest. After a lifetime wandering a world full of masks, watching someone lay themselves bare, as nerves splayed out upon a table of wet opened flesh, brings a kind of comfort and kinship I've not experienced with a complete stranger before.' -- The Belfry Network
Sonya Vatomsky Salt is for Curing
Sator
'Salt Is For Curing is the lush and haunting full-length debut by Sonya Vatomsky. These poems, structured as an elaborate meal, conjure up a vapor of earthly pains and magical desires; like the most enduring rituals, Vatomsky’s poems both intoxicate and ward. A new blood moon in American poetry, Salt Is For Curing is surprising, disturbing, and spookily illuminating.'— Ken Baumann, Sator
'Sonya Vatomsky’s Salt Is For Curing is many things: a feast, a grimoire, a fairy tale world, the real world. It’s also too smart for bullshit and too graceful to be mean about the bullshit: a marvelous debut. I love it.'— Ariana Reines
'Imagine bodies within bodies eating a feast, spilling over with their own secrets and hopes and dreams and fears and brutality and witchery. That is the party you will find in this book — a modern-day, literary equivalent of a Bosch painting.'— Juliet Escoria
'These poems melt the hard fat of life into tallow candles, then they reach up and light themselves.'— Mike Young
'Curious, intricate poems. Lots of language play and the conjuring of myths. Rather enjoyed this one.'— Roxane Gay
Excerpts




'Cassette 74' from Dostoyevsky Wannabe


________________

'In the introduction to A Raskolnikoff by Emmanuel Bove, Brian Evenson refers to a “secret history” of literature, “a stratum of books and authors without whom contemporary literature would not be possible but who have somehow been pushed to the side, neglected, forgotten.” Bove is one of those authors, a writer whose work I’d never read before this one. He wrote A Raskolnikoff as part of a series of books based on the imaginary chronologies of fictional characters. Inspired by Dostoyeksky’s Crime and Punishment, we follow a pair of wanderers, Changarnier and Violette, in a raw and emotionally unnerving odyssey. Most of the story revolves around their relationship, both to each other and the society around them. Changarnier is brutally honest with himself, so much so that he’s torn by his own ambivalence. Life’s platitudes are no comfort and his seeming apathy is exacerbated by his remorse:
“What’s left to losers like us if it’s not moving forward with the hope that something new will happen? Aren’t we the mediocrity, the sickness, the weakness of the world?”
'A Raskolnikoff brought back memories of all the walks I’ve had in my life, the random encounters, obscure sights, and secondary exchanges marked by a glance or a word dripping with intimation. Changarnier’s exchanges with Violet vacillate across the spectrum and it’s their whimsical, and sometimes cold nature, that make them feel authentic, even disturbing. Their jabs of cruelty to each other imbue the story with a sense of sorrow compounded by the unrelenting pressures of society. Time and emotion are inextricably bound, Siamese twins of tragedy that culminate in murder and eschew the tropes that are setup earlier. I couldn’t help but wonder, is the murder that takes place an illusion or a type of self-annihilation, a nihilism driven by a lack of direction? This journey has no home, and Changarnier’s all too aware of it even if others aren’t:
“The beauties of life attract him, and when he finds himself before another man, one like himself yet different, it would be just as mad for him to attempt to make himself understood as it would be to understand the other.”
'The book is as much an emotional stream as it is a meditation, a contemplation riding through different stages of nonexistence. The best translations rarely draw attention to themselves and Mitchell Abidor gives us a seamless transition from French to English, evoking their air of desperation and guilt as Changarnier convicts himself of an atrocity that he may or may not be responsible for. Along the way, they meet a strange old man who regales them with the melodramatic vicissitudes of his life. Just when you think you can sympathize, that feeling morphs into anger, even disgust, and then back to more pity. The palpably plaintive scars of age wear Chargarnier down, but he refuses to let it hinder him. He keeps on walking and is relentless in his motion, driven by the kinetics of either a youthful delusion or a naive optimism.
“There’s nothing in the world that makes people as skeptical and is as difficult to revive for others as lost happiness. We describe it as we see it in our memory: that is, adorned with a sweetness it didn’t actually have, but which the passing years have given it. And yet I have to tell you that I have fallen short of reality, precisely so as not to fall into this trap, and if I wanted to depict it as it was I would be accused of exaggeration.”
'It troubles me to think I’d never even have heard of Bove if not for a random notice on Facebook. Changarnier, through Bove, remains possessed by the undaunted spirit that treads forward independent of its fate and the fact that there is no final destination. The footprints remain, haunting, occasionally waiting to be rediscovered. It’s our own secrets, personal convictions, disappointments, and losses that Bove prods us with. It’s as though he reminds us, punishment doesn’t require a crime. The drive forward merits its own form of suffering.'-- Peter Tieryas, Entropy
Emmanuel Bove A Raskolnikoff
Red Dust
'Translated from the French by Mitchell Abidor. Introduction by Brian Evenson. A RASKOLNIKOFF was originally commissioned for a series of novels called "The Great Fable: Chronicle of Imaginary Characters," in which figures from literature, theater, film, and legend were brought back to life. Other writers chose Merlin, and Chaplin's Tramp; Bove's choice was to write "a continuation of Crime and Punishment." In a letter to his publisher he said that Raskolnikoff "doesn't appear in flesh and blood, but his influence on the young man's spirit is very visible."'-- Red Dust
Excerpt
Changarnier sat down in the only chair in his wretched room. It had been snowing since the previous day and flakes settled on the windowpanes like bugs on a wall.
Changarnier looked at his worn-out shoes. “I’m going to get drenched if I go out,” he thought. “But what will I do if I stay here?” He stood up and lit a cigarette. He wasn’t thirsty and wanted to drink. He wasn’t hungry and wanted to eat. He flicked away his cigarette, for he didn’t want to smoke. A disagreeable smell floated in the air of his room, which though it was closed was cold. “After all, I’m not a zero,” he murmured. He leaned into the mirror. “You, a zero!” As if wanting to be impolite, with an unexpected abruptness he turned his back on his image, and then hesitated a few seconds. He didn’t know what to do. Sit back down? He picked up the cigarette he’d tossed away and lit it. “Where am I?” he asked himself with a smile. In the end, he fell back onto the chair.
He had been dozing for a few minutes when someone knocked on the door.
“What is it?” he asked without thinking.
“It’s me,” a woman’s voice answered.
He opened the door and found himself standing in front of a sickly-looking young woman, who seemed unaware of her state of decay. Changarnier lit his cigarette again and with a smirk examined his new visitor.
“You’re not ashamed, to be so wretchedly poor?” he said. “You’re not ashamed to inspire pity in all those who know you? Don’t you have a shred of dignity in your heart? You live like an animal. A man offers you a drink and you follow him. He takes you to a disgusting room like this one and you follow him. You ask him for nothing before, but afterwards you try to drag money out of the happy sap. And yet you live, and you have the intact body of a human being, with hands with five fingers and feet with five toes. Don’t you understand that there is something in this world aside from the degradation you wallow in? Don’t you understand that there are superior beings?”
The visitor listened to this tirade without surprise and without interrupting. She was dressed in a ragged, dyed rabbit coat, its buttonholes torn. She was wearing a fur hat. Her banal attire gave this woman buried under sarcasm a hint of something even more dramatic. But Changarnier seemed insensitive to this drama. He was following an idée fixe. Poverty, lack of work, and the little interest he had in anything rendered him insensitive to the ills of others.
“You’re a poor wreck.” He continued, “You don’t even have any self-respect. Isn’t that true?”
She nodded in agreement.
“You could work like everyone else. Why don’t you do it? You prefer to beg, to receive threats and blows, to whore yourself to any filthy and disgusting man.”
Violette started to cry. The portrait the young man had painted didn’t surprise her. When she took the trouble to reflect, what he had said was also what she thought of herself. But normally, she preferred not to think.
“You’re right,” she contented herself with saying.
(cont.)
la vie de l'écrivain français Emmanuel Bove
Emmanuel Bove, la vie comme une ombre
Tombe Emmanuel Bove
________________

Phillip Griffith (Brooklyn Rail): I thought we’d start with the titles of these poems. You title each poem Trance Notebook, give each a number in the series, and then another title in brackets. You pluck that bracketed title from one of the fragments that make up the poem. How did you make the decisions for those titles? Did it have to do with how you composed the poems?
Wayne Koestenbaum: The decision-making process was similar to most of the titling I do. The title comes after, from scanning the section and trying to choose something that sounds nice by itself, and that seems symbolic or allegorical enough that it opens out toward something else. Sometimes, as with my book Blue Stranger with Mosaic Background, that phrase doesn’t appear in the book at all, but the painting I chose for the cover is called Blue Stranger with Mosaic Background. As for the Trance Notebooks’s bracketed subtitles, I simply chose a phrase that seemed allegorical.
Rail: So some of these fragments can stand for the whole? So many of them could be allegorical in that way. Are the fragments equal parts? Or are there moments that somehow rise above the rest?
Koestenbaum: Some of the fragments fall into a kind of narrative, with thematic sequence, either syntactically continuous with the ones that came before, or using verbal repetition, a kind of litany. At the end of one of the early notebooks I mention a dog, and the dog continues for two pages, which is an unusual continuity. In other cases the fragments are freestanding. And sometimes freestanding doesn’t mean allegorical or above the fray. Sometimes the phrase is just an aside or—not quite a punctum, but maybe a punctum to the extent that a punctum includes the accidental, the extraneous.
Rail: Did you write these poems in a trance?
Koestenbaum: It would be lovely to invent a whole fiction that I could spin via the Brooklyn Rail. When I speak to the newspaper of record, what account shall I give of my composition? The word “trance” came to me before I wrote most of what became the The Pink Trance Notebooks. When I set out that very first day, beginning them, I didn’t say, “Now I’m going to do trance notebooks.” But it came to me pretty quickly that I would be operating in these notebooks with an unusual lack of premeditation, lack of intention—and a corresponding abundance of physical freedom of movement. The notebooks were handwritten, and written as quickly as I could. What made the process trance-like was that in the drafts of the raw material, there’s really no punctuation except for commas. There’s not much punctuation in the final version, either, but in the original drafts, there were no interruptions, no pauses, nothing stanzaic in the least. It was pure torrent. I used small Moleskine notebooks and I’d write somewhat large, so there would be about five words per line. I used that line length as a kind of arbitrary measure, as a visual measure rather than a sonic or syllabic one. The process was trance-like because I often didn’t know what I was thinking, saying, or doing. And, since I spent so much time drawing and painting, I tried to find a way to make handwriting as much of a sport as possible. I tried to reinvent my handwriting. I tried to reinvent my arm and shoulder position, to think about how I could write so that it would physically feel like sketching—lines, or semantic lines in poetry, with abstract or other kinds of graphic lines.
Wayne Koestenbaum The Pink Trance Notebooks
Nightboat Books
'THE PINK TRANCE NOTEBOOKS is the product of the year Wayne Koestenbaum stopped keeping the traditional journal he had maintained for three decades and began a series of "trance notebooks" as a way to reflect an intensified, unmoored consciousness. The resulting sequence of 34 assemblages reflects Koestenbaum's unfettered musings, findings, and obsessions. Freed from the conventions of prose, this concatenation of the author's intimate observations and desires lets loose a poetics of ecstatic praxis—voiced with aplomb and always on point.'-- Nightboat
'Wayne Koestenbaum is one of the most original and relentlessly obsessed cultural spies writing today. His alarmingly focused attention to detail goes beyond lunacy into hilarious and brilliant clarity.'-- John Waters
Excerpt
–––––––––––
not many people know
what the inside of a
vagina during sex
looks like she said
–––––––––––
Obama and Hillary Clinton
had a top secret
lunch today
–––––––––––
if the lunch was top secret
why do I know about it?
–––––––––––
nothing to draw without
hair’s filigree
to stabilize the gaze
–––––––––––
his face in my ass
even if I don’t
want his face
in my ass even
if I’m supposedly
enjoying it—
––––––���––
tuber-shaped penis
shoved up me though
I said no and made
my eyes go blurry
in honor of his need—
––––––––––
supposedly gargantuan
but then it turned out
to be puny—
–––––––––––
psychotic husband
didn’t pamper
the bipolar martyr who
bragged about her
Bakelite as if it were
God's little acre
–––––––––––
if your desire to write
dies a natural death,
what happens to residual
urges, The Aeneid,
Roger Federer, crunch
of goy eating chocolate?
–––––––––––
tall guy on subway I
disabused of false notion
that I was cruising him
–––––––––––
Mr. Baer gave me his
stamp collection but wasn’t
a pervert
–––––––––––
we met at a cello concert—
–––––––––––
did I adequately
thank Mr. Baer?
–––––––––––
a fat portfolio of rare
stamps to add to my
impoverished collection
–––––––––––
(cont.)
Wayne Koestenbaum, in conversation with Elisabeth Ladenson
Wayne Koestenbaum reads "Streisand Sings Stravinsky"
Dear Wayne, I've Been Humiliated
_________________

'Without a doubt, Boyd McDonald was the best film reviewer ever. The thing is he wrote for a gay mag, and mostly on films he watched on TV late at night. He also had a zine in the 1980s that focused on homosexual sex "Straight to Hell." The brilliance of McDonald is that on a physical level he's very much part of an underground "gay" world, when there used to be one. Now, everyone is getting married and becoming taxpayers - but alas, there was a life that was lived in the shadows, and McDonald, a superb writer, captures that series of shadows that were shown on TV - mostly films from the 1930s to the 50s. The beauty of his work is that he mostly focuses on the actor's cock size or butt. But that is just the platform or foundation of his serious observations - here he marks the queer world where females act out certain passions, while men react to them. Or is it the other way around? Cruising the Movies touches on a lot of fascinating subjects - the nature of old films being shown on TV, before the world of VHS recording - in a way it is almost a coded, often secret, transmission from Hollywood to a gay man's sensibility. William E. Jones wrote a beautiful and insightful introduction.'-- Tosh Berman
'Boyd McDonald’s Cruising the Movies: A Sexual Guide to Oldies on TV landed on my desk this week, and if the title didn’t hook me, then the cover image of a sassy young man in tight-whities and white high-tops sure helped. McDonald looks every bit the tweed Ivy Leaguer in his 1949 Harvard yearbook photo, but by the sixties, he’d ripped off the conservative postwar band-aid to reveal the sordid desires underneath. Originally published in 1985, Cruising gathers McDonald’s reviews written between 1983 and 1985 about films made between 1936 and the early eighties; the short feuilletons are gossipy, erudite, political, and largely about genitals on-screen. (McDonald also edited a series of chapbooks called Straight to Hell comprising “true homosexual experiences.”) His writing is feisty and funny, as when he levels a critique of Ronald Reagan in John Loves Mary (1949): after observing Ronnie’s rather feminine legs on display in the film, McDonald moves on to the “big fat tits” Reagan developed later, which “supplied an additional incentive to make himself feel manly by issuing, as President of the United States, an anti-homosexual statement. What a hero.'-- Nicole Rudick
'The collected articles of Boyd McDonald – founder of S.T.H.: The New York Review of Cocksucking (Gore Vidal, circa 1981: ‘one of the best radical papers in the country’), and contributor to Christopher Street, New York Native, Connection, and Philadelphia Gay News – were published as Cruising the Movies: A Sexual Guide to ‘Oldies’ on TV (New York: Gay Presses of New York, 1985). About his invigorating, theoretical tome, a model of critique in its unabashed accuracy, historical clarity and piquant thrill, the author stated that it was ‘not strictly about movies; it frequently uses them as an excuse for political, social, sexual, psychological, biographical, and autobiographical comments’. Art as lube for getting down to it (thinking). His essay on The Big Circus– ‘seen at 3 p.m., April 14, 1984, on Channel 5’ – zones in on David Nelson’s turn as a trapeze artist in white tights. Its third paragraph can stand as proof of the brilliance of McDonald’s rollicking analysis: ‘Even if he had made no other pictures than The Big Circus, David Nelson would still rank as one of Hollywood’s premier suck objects. On or off the trapeze, his body composes a variety of images for which the world ‘historic’ would not be an exaggeration, and when, on rare occasions, he turns his butt to the camera, the white fabric clinging ecstatically to his crack can only draw gasps from men who have an aesthetic sense. At gatherings of serious cineastes, speculation sooner or later turns to David Nelson’s asshole – his ‘vital centre’ in Arthur Schlesinger’s phrase. In the absence of any published data – David married twice, but if either of his wives had any special interest in or knowledge of his asshole, she has not written of it – the only thing film scholars can do is extrapolate from information visible on his face, mainly his eyebrow hairs and pink lips. Most would conclude, I think, that his hole, and the hairs which formed its ornamental frame, were among the finest in the film capital. By contrast, the heavy black brows of Brooke Shields and Matt Dillon threaten the possibility that these two newer players are, literally, bushy-tailed.’'-- Bruce Hainley
Boyd McDonald Cruising the Movies
Semiotext(e)
'Cruising the Movies was Boyd McDonald's "sexual guide" to televised cinema, originally published by the Gay Presses of New York in 1985. The capstone of McDonald's prolific turn as a freelance film columnist for the magazine Christopher Street, Cruising the Movies collects the author's movie reviews of 1983--1985. This new, expanded edition also includes previously uncollected articles and a new introduction by William E. Jones.Eschewing new theatrical releases for the "oldies" once common as cheap programing on independent television stations, and more interested in starlets and supporting players than leading actors, McDonald casts an acerbic, queer eye on the greats and not-so-greats of Hollywood's Golden Age. Writing against the bleak backdrop of Reagan-era America, McDonald never ceases to find subversive, arousing delights in the comically chaste aesthetics imposed by the censorious Motion Picture Production Code of 1930--1968.
'Better known as the editor of the Straight to Hell paperback series -- a compendia of real-life sexual stories that is part pornography, part ethnography -- McDonald in his film writing reveals both his studious and sardonic sides. Many of the texts in Cruising the Movies were inspired by McDonald's attentive inspection of the now-shuttered MoMA Film Stills Archive, and his columns gloriously capture a bygone era in film fandom. Gay and subcultural, yet never reducible to a zany cult concern or mere camp, McDonald's "reviews" capture a lost art of queer cinephilia, recording a furtive obsession that once animated gay urban life. With lancing wit, Cruising celebrates gay subculture's profound embrace of mass culture, seeing film for what it is -- a screen that reflects our fantasies, desires, and dreams.'-- Semiotext(e)
Excerpt



Public Sex for Boyd Mcdonald - MATMOS
John Loves Mary Original Trailer
FIREBALL 500
*
p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. Cinefamily would be an excellent venue for LCTG. They're considering the film right now, so we'll see. I've talked to enough people now who knew or had some relationship to Pierre Clementi and who've said that him dying of AIDS-related causes isn't true at all that I believe them. There was going to be a 'B'? Oh, damn, that's too bad. 'A' is incredible. ** Aaron Mirkin, Hi, Aaron! Dude, your Tokyo pix on FB are upping my Japan-jonesing to serious levels. It looks like you're making the very best of the place. Montreal went really well. Great response. We managed to see two films: the new Grandieux, which was really great, and the new Wenders, which was really not great. M Lamar's work is super interesting. I've never met him, but he came to the talk that Gisele and I did re: 'Kindertotenlieder' in NYC. I'm probably a dunce because I don't know who Laverne Cox is. Oh, and, due to crazy busyness, I didn't get a chance to write to you to tell you how much I like 'Crazy House'. It's wonderful! Congratulations, man! ** Steevee, Hi. AFA would be a great place to show LCTG. Do you know how best to approach them or who one should approach there? I didn't love the theatrical release version of UTEOFW, but there were occasional things in it that I liked. For me, the extended cut just added a lot of pretense that kind of spoiled the little things I'd found intriguing. I don't know. Maybe a bit like the extended 'Donnie Darko' cut, which kind of ruined what been a curious, cool film for me. It's sad if depressing that having no internet at home is like a horror movie, but it is. Hope that vacancy is sorted today as you'd hoped. ** Krayton, Hi. Every year, the tiniest bit of Halloween get added to Paris, so it's easing into celebrating the occasion very, very gradually. I think I'm going to watch horror movies and eat scary cake on the 31st. There's really no other choice. How did the story go? ** Schlix, Hi, Uli! Thanks, man, belatedly, about the gig. And for your kind words about 'TVC'. Cool, man! I hope Paris treated you in a kingly manner. ** Thomas Moronic, Hi, T! I like the new Deerhunter a lot. It took me a minute to get used to the brighter sound, but, yeah, I'm digging it. They're playing at Pitchfork here this week, and I'm hoping that maybe I'll finally get to meet Bradford if he has some free time. Berlin went well. I mean, I had been pretty wary of showing LCTG in that context, and, as I think I mentioned, it was a decision for which Zac and I were allowed no input or say. We had two screenings. The first midnight screening was weird but ultimately as okay as it could have been under the circumstances. The festival fucked up and showed the film without its German subtitles. That didn't help. The crowd was really big but kind of rowdy, and some people were drinking in the theater, etc., and our film's first part is very quiet and gradual, so the match wasn't great. But the response was finally pretty good. The second screening in the late afternoon went much, much better. They managed to show the film with German subtitles. The theater was extremely packed with people sitting in the aisles and standing. It got very enthusiastic applause and the Q&A went very well, and I think it's safe to say that showing was a total success. So, it was good. But, yeah, weird context for sure. Nothing against the festival, which is quite cool, but LCTG was sort of like the festival's sore thumb. It was a context wherein people talked about Bruce la Bruce like he was Orson Welles. Nothing against Bruce, of course, but just to say that the favored aesthetic there was quite far from ours. So, yeah, it went well. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben! The new Laurel Halo is nice. Kind of low-key, but in a really good way. Yeah, I saw that Simons split from Dior thing as I was heading away. Most people I know here who know about such things tell me the stuff he did for Dior wasn't all that great anyway, but I have no clue. Thanks for the link to the Mills/Eliasson continuance. Everyone, via Black_Acrylic, ... 'Part 2 of Jeff Mills and Ólafur Eliasson's tête à tete is now online at Electronic Beats.' ** Misanthrope, Hi. Oh, come on, you have to have heard of Deerhunter. Me? Awesome? Thank you, wow. So, which spooky thing did you pick? Tell me everything! Clown fear is a real thing, I don't get it, but yeah. Since getting scared is the point of HHs, that shouldn't be a problem if a clown stocks his head in. ** H, Hi, H! I'm back! ** Unknown, Hi, Unknown! Oh, I don't know, about Warhol. Was he working on a writing project that that never reached fruition? I love his novel 'A'. Have you read it? It's amazing, and an unsung hero of 20th century avant-garde lit. Thank you very much about my blog, Mattias. It would be nice to get to talk more and know more about you, if you feel like hanging out here a bit. Take care. ** James, Hi, James! I don't think 'fun' is the right word for the Berlin experience, but it went well. Don't know. I haven't read 'The Pale King', and I don't know if I'm going to. I have read Rikki Ducornet, yes. In fact, I should do a post about her, hm. I haven't read 'The Stain'. She's pretty consistently very good, from my experience. I think maybe my favorite of hers so far is 'Phosphor in Dreamland'. ** Etc etc etc, Hi, Casey! I'll give a gander to that Garth Greenwell novel. I don't think I know his work. Mellowing? Ha ha. Not quite yet, no. Maybe if I'm really lucky in a few weeks. ** Bill, Hi, B! I just read something somewhere about a big new Quays film in 35mm or something? ** Kyler, Hi, Kyler! Cool about the write-up. Everyone, Kyler got written up, and here he is to direct you to it: 'The Washington Square Park Blog did a write-up on me today about The Strand (includes a mention of Patti Smith working there) … thought you’d like to see it here.' ** So, we're caught up. Above here are four books that I managed to both read and love reading in the spare bits of my recently over-busy existence, and, as always, they are highly recommended to you. See you tomorrow.