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A Review of “dislocate No. 6: The Contaminated Issue” by Colleen Coyne, Editor-in-Chief

Friday, October 15th, 2010

Jessica Maybury

Reading the new issue of dislocate is not unlike diving into the sea. You stand at the edge, momentarily put off, unwilling to dive…and then you jump in, and it’s wonderful.

What was making me unwilling to read was that when I was flipping through the issue, much of the writing seemed to be of that technical/academic/nonsense style that always seems to just go right over my head. I find it off-putting, pretentious and, frankly, boring. The book lay on my coffee table for a few days, emanating malevolent vibes.

When I sat down for a proper reading, it was with a depressed distaste. This was quickly overturned by reading the editor’s note, wherein there is a description of what ‘contaminated’ means to them: “it is a blending that produces something new.” In this multicultural, increasingly connected world, this is something that is both important and needed.

Technical etc., entries aside, there are astonishing stories, poetry and artwork collected in this issue. The photographic work, taken by Justine Beth Gartner, is displayed in glossy coloured plates and reveals a tight, claustrophobic world of edges and corners, of abandoned places.

The collection speaks up for the contemporary story, breaking boundaries in Modernist fashion, redefining the benchmark for what is ‘acceptable’ or ‘good’ fiction–if any aesthetic viewpoint can be held as relevant nowadays–in ways that made me panic. I doubt that anything I could have written would have been included in this. It is a wake-up call for writers everywhere.

dislocate No. 6 features writers such as Jenny Boully, Greg Bachar, and Curtis Dawkins. The surreal and often complicatedly pictorial metaphors are double-edged and unforgiving; the reader finds that they stay with them long after the volume has been set away.

I have to say that I liked Lindsey Drager’s “Photographs I Did Not Take” the most. Her style is minimalist, pared back and rife with striking images: “If zero is empty, a gaping defined by frame, then so is your mouth,” and “You syndrome of affection, breaking my smiles clean open, smiles cracking over my face,” are but two examples.

More quotes abound, from Jenny Boully: “I have seen the imprint of your little teeth all about the dawn,” from Greg Bachar: “…wasp is a difficult dish to enjoy,” and from Lucas Church:

The weight of something gives a sort of authority, a rifle feels heavy and that’s part of the power, a wrench, a crowbar, a shovel, they’re like badges.

dislocate No. 6 is not easy reading. I was left feeling a little overwhelmed by it, and slightly humbled. Don’t be put off by the pretention of some of the pieces–here there is much that is good.

Official dislocate Web Site

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A Review of “Diary of a Gentleman Diabolist” by Robin Spriggs

Friday, October 8th, 2010

Spencer Dew

Some schools of occultists are inordinately fond of merit badges, hierarchic ranking, fancy dress, special handshakes, Excel spreadsheets brimming with esoteric codswallop, and the like. In certain lodges, club houses, and initiatory chambers, these folks are hailed, by their peers and underlings, as magus maximus, etc., etc., but in the wider world they are usually identified as bores, gas giants with pretensions to some new, much speedier, mathematics. Beware the man who soliloquizes on “infinite delight.” He has a set of manikins in the basement, which is fine for his own private hours, but shouldn’t be confused with what he’s preaching about nor passed around, in sticky pieces, to houseguests.

This little collection of what are inexplicably self-identified as “prose poems” suffers from something of this larger problem of blabbing on about the occult and thus stripping away from it its very useful occultation–useful in the sense of actually inspiring a sense of power, mystery, creepiness, or allure. What we have instead, here, are bits like: “Mighty Moloch, book ablaze, to you do I sacrifice the word-born babes of my fevered brain, hoping to glean from their silent wails the golden secrets of the Infinite Self.” Good luck with that. There’s some saying somewhere about wisdom and its relation to keeping ones mouth shut from time to time, but you won’t hear that alluded to in Diary of a Gentleman Diabolist. You will, however, hear plenty else, with accompanying sigils, or squiggles, an alphabet of energies, as best I can figure it, that drains a little more ink in the printing process but otherwise adds nothing to the book. “All of his bad Latin was entirely intentional,” it is said, of a certain character, a certain type. “Sometimes he even confused it (both purposely and purposefully) with Italian, Spanish, and French, having learned long ago the potent effect of such pseudoscholarly inscriptions on minds of a particular stripe.” This “particular stripe” of mind might find Diary of a Gentleman Diabolist worthy of a half hour or so. Others most likely will not.

There are some genuine spooky bits (any stuffed toy monkey is a terrifying stuffed toy monkey) and some watery reproduction Lovecraft and some fan fiction for the new religious revival of the old religions–“The hatchling Prince, his ways Loki-wild, his words Odin-wise,” etc.–grimoires get eaten, things happen to trees involving semen, and there is an eye, deliciously, in a candy jar, “pressed hard against the glass by a crush of gobstopping spheres made all the more horrific by the fact that they were sweet.” But the book is in desperate need of an editorial hand. Must we really endure such weary declarations as that hell is a woman “every warlock worth his wand” wants to stick his stave into or that “She stood like a phantom before me, like a dream of a ghost in the mist, but her smile was the smile of a sunrise, and it reached to the core of my soul, the core of my Stygian soul”? Again, a “particular stripe” of mind will surely dig this, and feel some excitement, too, over the fact that “The wrath of the nigromancer is like a hairtrigger rifle of unlimited range in the hands of a fickle sniper,” but it is a rather limited “particular stripe” to feel anything from lines like “I am…the thing under your bed, the hate in your heart….” No spell is cast by such deflated clichés. That scent isn’t brimstone, it’s just something stale.

Official Anomalous Books Web Site

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A Review of “They Had Goat Heads” by D. Harlan Wilson

Friday, September 24th, 2010

Spencer Dew

There’s a Bob Dylan song about umbrellas and crime, darkness and climbing, and the flow of that song, the flow which that song is about–the narrative form of dreams, the logic of their progression, without “great connections” or “intricate schemes”–is a useful notion for making sense of what D. Harlan Wilson is doing in this collection of short, strange stories, each its own dream, in a sense, unfolding in the manner of dreams, laced with absurdity and non sequitur, yet engaging, too, in the specific lineament of genre, of what is now called the “speculative.”

You walk into a theater and realize you’re the star of the movie, or a motel clerk tries to have you arrested because you don’t have your key. “Near the restrooms, a contortionist juggles minute koalas while dishing out smoked sausages for $3 a pop. Takers are legion, and they’re not unhappy with the taste, given the proper medley of condiments.” This is the stuff of Wilson’s stories, but the most successful ones are the most stripped down. There’s the case of the man who “screwed an antenna into the soft spot on an infant’s skull and tried to get a signal,” for instance, or the child who wants to crawl back inside his mother’s womb, or the man who denies the existence of elbows, who has something to do with a bridge engineered out of Cornish hens….

The collection begins with an experimental tweak of genre, a piece called “6 Word Scifi,” which reads, in its entirety, “Mechanical flâneurs goosestep across the prairie.” There’s quite a bit going on here, and, to some interpreters at least, it is a string of words thick with allusion. Sometimes, however, Wilson can misstep with his attempts at some sort of witty meta level. On flying squirrels, for instance, he writes, “One should not do battle with arboreal gliders, theoretical or otherwise (ref. Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus), no matter what they’re wearing.” But perhaps the point is that Delueze and Guattari references–or Arabic script, or definitions of terms from Japanese cinema–do turn up in the genre and, likewise, do turn up in dreams. That which is jarring, here, also packs a gentler, in-joke nudge, as when descriptions devolve to blunt declaration of “Animé nights and scikungfi battle royals.”

Mid-book there is a story deserving special note: “The Sister,” presented in graphic novel fashion via the artistry of Skye Thorstenson. These are gorgeous, disquieting, and addictive pages. I only wish the entire book had been told this way, with the dreams visible on the page, an anteater, a gash for a face. Here the hallucinatory logic takes on even more haunting resonance. While elsewhere Wilson gives us the dangerously pendulous stray breast of a nurse or all those strangers tying notes to bricks, it is the image of the tangled birdcage, the leg sticking out of it, that will linger longest, like the afterimage of a particularly baffling and unshakable dream.

Official D. Harlan Wilson Web Site
Official Atlatl Press Web Site

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A Review of “The Artist in Question” by Michael J Seidlinger

Saturday, September 18th, 2010

Spencer Dew

What is exciting about this book is how unlike other books it is. A compendium of bits, in different san-serif fonts and styles, ranging from aphorisms to flash fictions, notes on larger projects, and editorial asides enclosed in parentheses. The document begins with “an editor’s note” (and note here the article, its anonymity) that “editing the following documents has been limited to comprisal, arrangement remains ‘as-is’ according to how all documents birthed, and typeface alterations transpose the nature of transcription, be it bold, italicized, underlined or otherwise constrained to reflect the proposition and dissuade any proposal unintentionally made.” And with that prose, so begins the problem–whether in an awkward attempt at intentional opaqueness or merely as a result of associative exercises or even a blend of both, the writing in this book is such that many brave readers will throw the thing away.

Then there is the content: “He writes of himself like a character, from the third person to filter out discomfort,” one unpaginated page says in large font, nicely. Another declares, “‘The concept’ is my main source of interest” while somewhere else we see this definition: “The avant-garde–really, the intent on changing and challenging forms is an art in itself–an art of an art/ an art in an art.” All fine so far, especially if coupled with, say, any sense of this uneasy third person, this concept, this meta art. Instead, we are barraged with platitudes. “No love is as precious as a need for a new idea.” “Dreaming is a form of development.” “Entertainment is the most important aspect of this society.” It feels, quickly, like going through Barbara Kruger’s trash. But then it get worse. “To use politics is simply to engage in the methodology of managing something,” we are told. Now please tell me what that means. “Morale shall never be forced; panic into justice yields ignorance. One must speak from stability. Never must we follow by alarm for self-preservation, we must identify and recognize. We must truly care.” Huh? Thus we go from the cliché of “We all create stories to protect ourselves from ourselves” to the gaseous musing that “Even with the civil services in First World countries, all it takes is a five-car pile-up to have your house burned down before the firefighters could get there in time. Insurance or not, a policy could have a loophole that only compensates for a certain amount of damages, and there are [sic] the obvious increase of charges. A single spark and that ‘safety’ could be gone.”

If your idea of an enlightening time is flipping through a thick text for tidbits like “Arts and Sciences are both forms of expression–much like anything else that presents humanity in a manner–yet have different qualities,”  then, by all means, go for it, but others will likely feel that Seidlinger’s work could have benefited more from an editorial presence than this extended wallowing in rather cheap, even lazy, interpretations of so-called death of the author theory.

“I write this as I am here,” it is written, “anxious;/ I’m writing to stay busy, to look busy to avoid being singled out. My spastic scrawls/ double as a/ defense/ mechanism…. freely writing in the wake of boredom, droplets of irritation immaculately irrigating a desperate battle defense of pen, scribbling to paper, eyes averted in order to attain the image of concentration.” This reads like first person from the writer. Maybe it’s a conceptual trick, but, in any case, it’s dull, arguably inexcusable. Likewise, “When doodling, words creep in through certain contexts: band logos, personal names, words from notes often randomly chosen/highlighted. Our association with language AND art transcends any limitation coming from the subconscious response to boredom to keep the pen moving.” But, brother, might it not be better to pause the pen from time to time? Might a little silence and stillness and thinking be what’s required to make a work of writing that’s worth reading?

“Whether or not the world will remember you, is not important; it is about whether you ever find yourself.” One gets the sense that all of this is about precisely that–or, rather, is precisely that, the author’s own coping mechanism, the author’s way of trying to make sense of the world, pen in hand, etc. As is said somewhere here, “For every novel approach, there’s an underlying personal need.” If only a little more of that “personal need,” that motivation, showed through, and showed through in such a way that it was conveyed and could be felt. Instead, we have parenthetical notes to the effect that “certain statements can nearly be considered as evidence of the supposed disappearance and expected demise of creative license,” bits of description such as “The cold that’s just too low numbered for comfort, doing its best to break down subsistence, freezing then shattering the top layers of proposition, tensing only the lowered mists as they huddle together to preserve” and such snippets of farce as “To compare, will only cause disrepair. Vacant stares. Swiftly downstairs, twin pairs would fall down, fading despair.” But wait, there’s politics, too, of a (again, as with the insurance premium discussion, shockingly bourgeois) sort: “Already common, obesity is a result of no self-control and poor diet because of many factors, one of which involves the food within reach of the common citizen. The common citizen cannot afford to eat healthy salads, cuisine, and even power/energy bars.”

This book may be many things, including, certainly, a record of a wrestling with the act of writing and the concept of textuality itself. It will not, however, function for many readers anything like a “power/energy bar.”

Official Civil Coping Mechanisms Web Site

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A Review of “The Really Funny Thing About Apathy” by Chelsea Martin

Sunday, September 12th, 2010

Spencer Dew

“Sometimes I received text messages from people about things right as I was about to send them a text message about the very same thing, on a day when there were no previous text messages between us,” says one of the narrators of one of the stories in this collection, each hooked, in some thematic way, to a paradox, each exploring the quotidian this and that of life. Apathy figures, and humor:  there is the high school girl prepared to tell her boyfriend she’s pregnant–“Well, I’m not really pregnant, but that’s what I’m going to tell my boyfriend”–and the high school girl who thinks it “a pretty funny thing to do” when a boy brings a wrench to school, threatens another boy, and gets himself arrested. There is the narrator “consumed, of course, with thoughts of” an ex-lover, halfway attempting to bother to believe that “Maybe someday I would find someone sort of almost close to as good,” and there is one extended piece, echoing a notion from Zeno, as to why “Eating food from McDonald’s is mathematically impossible.” Cause and effect unwinds: “…before you can read something that reinforces your insecurities, you have to have insecurities./ And before you can have insecurities, you have to be awake for part of the day./ And before you can be awake for part of the day, you have to feel motivation to wake up.” There are funny bits throughout, about battery acid and parents, and the rhythm of paradox allows Martin both to skewer fallacies–“And before you can stop being so depressed, you have to understand what depression is”–and stretch out tangled motivations–“I wanted to make people think I was manipulative so that when I appeared weak they would think I was just trying to get something.” Much of the minimalism or whatever tone of these pieces–“He sent me a link to a music video. I can’t remember if I watched it or not.”–is too familiar, however, and ultimately there is something unsatisfying about the state of suspension in which Martin locates her characters, never quite making it, pondering impossibilities. “In a movie I had seen recently,” one narrator relates, “there was a scene in which two people looked at each other and made subtle facial expressions back and forth that conveyed very little.” “I belonged in that movie,” she says, but this book, with its generally stripped down language and glossed-over tone–“And before you can buy alcohol, you have to want your psychological state to be altered”–isn’t really anything like that movie. Rather than drawing an audience into the subtleties of the visual, or pulling readers along into the mechanics of language, The Really Funny Thing About Apathy plays some small and generally forgettable games. It’s like that video, the one you can’t remember watching or not.

Official Chelsea Martin Web Site
Official sunnyoutside press Web Site

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A Review of “99 Problems: Essays About Running and Writing” by Ben Tanzer

Sunday, September 12th, 2010

Spencer Dew

It is fitting that as disciplined and obsessive a writer as Ben Tanzer–who, by way of disclosure, I have known for years–would produce a book like this, a lean volume of reflections on how the act of running feeds his creative habit. Autobiographical in that most intimate sense of an artist’s working notebook, though polished into its present form with the help of a rigid framework based in part, structurally, on Haruki Murakami’s book on running, 99 Problems explores Tanzer’s belief that “Running produces a means for escaping mental clutter, which most of the time allows for processing ideas and untangling the kinks that slow the evolution of any story” by chronicling specific runs in specific places and the ways those runs helped with the “untangling” of specific stories. While Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running was, as Tanzer says, “about the pure act of running itself, in all of its metaphysical and quotidian awesomeness,” his own book is very much about writing, with running as a necessary step in the artistic process. Yet this process, as construed by Tanzer, encompasses everything. Consider this diary-like passage:

Last night I went to listen to Ike Reilly at Schubas, and many beers were drunk. I got home late and, after watching television and gabbing with my wife for an hour, I didn’t sit down to write until 2:30 in the morning. That got me to bed at 3:30 in the morning, and then back up at 7:30 in the morning to get the boys ready for school. Then after that it was time for my annual physical, for which I have been fasting since midnight, clear liquids only; I am allowed to drink coffee, but have not.  At the physical I give blood, and have a prostate exam. Sweet. I walk to the supermarket, so I can help my wife carry the groceries back to the house. We get home and watch the latest winner of American Idol perform on Oprah.

While much of 99 Problems consists of monologues on stories-in-process, garnished with scenery from the run in which such monologues, to some degree, unfurled, the larger story here is Tanzer himself, the writer and his life, a portrait of the author as man no longer so young, though defined by a youthful exuberance and attitude (“Sweet”) in the face of the responsibilities and anxieties of adulthood. In athletic exertion, Tanzer wrestles with his own physicality; running was easier, he writes, “before the kidney stones and cancer scares, colonoscopies and high cholesterol, arthritis and biopsies,” yet that long-ago time was “also before September 11th, before my father died, before I became a father as well….” All of these things are approached as fodder for writing, of course, something that, like running, is more than the sum of its parts, more than, say, “drugs or sex. Or Pringles” because it encompasses and orders all of these things, imposing a structure upon the otherwise random, be it terrifying (“cancer scares…September 11th”) or merely banal, like the hours in Atlanta that Tanzer alchemizes into something solid, with words:

I land. Get off of the plane. Board the tram. Exit the tram. Navigate the terminal. Buy a Breeze card. Board the Marta. Exit the Marta. Walk to the Springhill Suites. Check in. Take elevator to room. Plug in laptop. Check email. Open bag. Remove running clothes. Remove running shoes. Put on running clothes. Put on running shoes. Grab iPod. Leave room. Take elevator down to lobby. Leave hotel. Start running. Victory. Atlanta.

As I said, there is something diary-like to much of this, yet there is something more here, too; a writer at work, crafting raw experience into product, with discipline and hunger. If anything, there is a bit too much discipline in these pages, with the inadvertent effect of self aggrandizement. Obsessive about folding laundry, obsessive about television, and obsessive about hitting the streets to push through new thoughts on the day’s story, Tanzer can come across as if feigning what might be meant as intimate moments of introspection. When he admits, “maybe I do enjoy whatever ‘outsider’ status it is I think I possess, but I don’t think it’s been holding me back or making me less ambitious, has it?” His question seems insincere. “I always thought the whole effort was about improving my craft and seeking opportunities, and that like with running, when my skill level and the right opportunity converged I would grab it,” he says, but by this point we don’t need to be told, we have already seen.

And yet, 99 Problems also offers insistent reminders of what we have not yet seen, standing as a series of paced training runs for competitive literary projects to come, both the stories it describes working through and larger future projects emerging from the basic dynamic it seeks to describe, not just that running fuels writing but that “the bigger you feel things, the more curious you are; and the more problems you want to solve and not actually run from, the better everything is, even the things you already love.” I take this to be not only a nice summary of Tanzer’s approach to the world (as seen in his two novels and story collection), but also a promising manifesto of intent.

Official Ben Tanzer Web Site
Official CCLaP Publishing Web Site

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A Review of “This Boy, This Broom” by P. Edward Cunningham

Sunday, September 5th, 2010

Spencer Dew

This attractively designed little book from BatCat Press relays a series of dispatches from the frontlines of the American cineplex, P. Edward Cunningham’s accounts of his days as a teenage employee of a movie theater, replete with sweeping, second-hand candy, and occasional snippets of human tragedy. The writing, alas, does not match the productive value of the text itself, though there are stronger moments, such as the repeating “Shift” sections, terse, chronological reports of the job itself. “Return to lobby,” one such entry reads, “No popcorn to sweep. Concessionist smiles at me. Asks me what my name is. I tell her. She wears too much eye shadow. Eyes like Nixon. Swollen. Results of a shellfish allergy? She tells me I’m cute. Radio lights up.” Where such a minimalist–and speedy–style succeeds, much of Cunningham’s writing falls short, stumbling over its own phrasing while aiming for a comic didacticism, a discourse of distance from the thing itself. “As a person who is often oblivious to the obvious, I consistently fail to notice statistics that some would consider highly informative when searching for someplace to spend on holiday,” the author writes, by way of a story about the wonders and horrors of Detroit. Then, of the visit, he says, “Meg and I were rather stunned by the number of Picassos hanging in the halls of the DIA–an amount larger than that of most museums we had visited. Compared to the copious amounts of wind-swept trash throughout the city, the museum was quite the contrast.” My problem here, ultimately, is that the awkwardness of the writing masks an absence, that of full characterization of the narrator. “I imagine that having the rare permission to photograph anything in the contemporary portion of a museum is similar to a police officer letting you hold his gun for a moment or two,” he says, and there is, in the unreality of that particular comparison for the narrator, in the stretch and the smirk of it, something simply missing. The relationship to art–to photography of it–remains vague, and while this is a minor example, the same problem plagues the book’s emotional core. As the narrator remains vague on his own feelings about his situation, his work (he’s upset when a new manager promotes all ushers to the “head usher” title, which is clear enough, but “Nothing mattered anymore” hits the wrong sort of hyperbolic note) so too does he remain disturbingly distant from the suffering of others that he routinely encounters on the job. The narrator can turn away from a man sobbing into his hands after, on his day out with his son, sitting in a movie seat saturated with human waste…yet he turns away, too, as author, leaving his readers unsure whether to cry or laugh, leaving them, in the wake of his own unexamined insularity, ready to quickly move on as well. This Boy, This Broom is autobiography devoid of intimacy, lacking an authentic sense of the author’s self and his relations with the world. Ultimately, the book mimics the tedium of the work at the cineplex, which is perhaps one of its goals. But with the scenes Cunningham witnessed and the experiences he endured, he could have crafted a much more affecting text.

Official P. Edward Cunningham Web Site
Official BatCat Press Web Site

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A Review of “MLKNG SCKLS” by Justin Sirois

Sunday, September 5th, 2010

Spencer Dew

Redaction is its own form of narrative. Consider that eighteen-minute gap in Nixon’s Whitehouse tapes–a text of absence at once tantalizing and indicting, a deletion that recasts everything around it, a hole that demands reinterpretation of the whole.

In this slim novella, Justin Sirois has tapped into just such a vein, creating a book out of deleted sections from his novel Falcons on the Floor, written with Haneen Alshujairy. Here, two refugees from the city of Fallujah wander through a landscape of desert and water and memories. The dreams of the displaced narrator mimic the method of the book itself, as he redacts, mentally:

The market.
Men milking sickles.
The unemployed barber, General, welder, masseur.
I’ll have deleted all of these entries before they have a chance to breathe.

In another scene, this man “uncooks” a meal, playing it all backwards, drying out rice, reassembling cut carrots, “stacking the slices in columns and blowing on their wet seams until they morph whole.” As in Vonnegut or Amis, this running of time in reverse is a response to horror, to catastrophe, to a world rendered strange. A burnt dog stumbles onward, carrion-feeding birds cluster on a wrecked car, and our narrator observes, “I’ve never noticed, until now, how sounds have transformed after the occupation began–how screams of pain have grown mundane, but simple banging doors jolt us from our chairs.”

Ubiquitous stress, constant threat, and necessary wariness, combined with the raging heat of the journey, turns the journey of these two Iraqis into something on the level of parable. One, starved for a cigarette, remains always without a light. The other, surveying the sparkle of the river from an elevated tier of land, wants “to say how beautiful it is,” but keeps quiet out of fear of ambushes and irritation at his companion’s constant talking. So, like the wounded dog, they journey on, outwardly and inwardly, and the narrator records some thoughts in a laptop, its battery depleting, itself already an artifact of some alien world, jarringly surreal. As he opens it up, he notes “The welcoming chime from the speakers is made to sound like a doorbell, like you’ve been invited in, but I’ve never had a doorbell and no one I’ve ever known has, either.”

The characters keep low to the ground, forging on, into an altered reality, keeping low to the ground through fragments forgotten from a novel, deleted scenes, self-censored snippets about a war or, more, about the people the war passes through, leaving behind in their own land. “Windless as an aquarium, the night stretches itself from rim to rim with no beginning or quit,” and this is more than mere night or mere desert, mere shoreline.

I can’t get thoughts of home out of my head. The Jolan hemorrhages with olives, oily bread, brake pads, shoes shined with butter and ink, chicken pens with chickens thrashing rabid–and hovering silver trays like spaceships, tea kettles, tea glasses, tea–motorbikes backfiring, cabbage choking tailpipes, Mountain Dew drizzling through gutters, and children, dozens of shoe-less children pitting dates. Their fingers look shit-stained, but it’s just date juice.

MLKNG SCKLS is a book characterized by contemplate urgency, a story and a project that reflects on the nature of life, war, and narrative itself. Sirois, through the presentation of hallucinatory consciousness, offers an undeniably human portrait:

I’m not hungry or full. The rugs of my guts finally unravel. They roll out, throwing plumes of dust in the mosques of my lungs. Men and women enter through my open ribs and kneel in neat rows, each of them kneeling with palms over their knees. I don’t think they pray for me. They pray for other people.

Official Justin Sirois Web Site
Official Publishing Genius Web Site

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A Review of “Clinical, Brutal… An Anthology of Writing with Guts” by Christopher Nosnibor, Editor

Saturday, August 28th, 2010

Jessica Maybury

Clinical, Brutal… embodies the manifesto of Clinicality Press: “…the concept of ‘clinical brutality,’ i.e. those everyday acts of violence recounted crisply, factually and using technical rather than literary flourishes.” This is certainly not a ‘literary’ collection, although some of the better stories do contain elements of literary insight.

The collection, edited by Christopher Nosnibor, makes me think of that moment when you flip a coin and it hangs in the air, spinning, its landing side unknown. The reader is unsure as to whether each story is going to be good or not so good–they might as well be flipping a coin to decide. The only thing to do is to plunge in, sliding effortlessly through the smears of blood and juicy ropes of gore to the heart of the story. Sometimes your efforts will be rewarded, and sometimes not. Work by Pablo Vision, Díre McCain, A. D. Hitchin and S. F. Grimm are almost certainly going to reward the reader. The others, not so much.

It’s not that the stories themselves are bad. They’re not. It’s two things, really:

1. Spelling mistakes. I cannot abide them, and there is no excuse for them.
2. Peppered between the better stories, written by the people listed above, are stories that smack of the juvenile. I don’t know if this was the intention of the editor to include works by younger authors or if it was just including badly written stories. This is not to say that younger authors write badly–it’s more that the stories in Clinical, Brutal… are not honed to within an inch of their life.

It could be that I am extremely bourgeois and only like ‘literary’ fiction. I do, however, appreciate gratuitous gore, junkies, sadistic sex and death by machine gun…and in that department this collection never let me down.

If you’re looking for something sharp, something shocking, or for things that go bump in the night, read this.

Official Christopher Nosnibor Web Site
Official Clinicality Press Web Site

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A Philistine Press Round-Up: Reviews of “Dark Horse Pictures” by Andy Hopkins, “Valve Works” by Rob Sherman, “The Birth of Taliesin the Bard: A Tale” by Richard Britton, and “Entertainment” by Mr If

Saturday, August 28th, 2010

Spencer Dew

The meat and bones that start as dust will end up dusty in
the black
or blackly thought in backs of minds by mindless boys and
mindless girls
the world that keeps us warm at night is burning bones and
dusty bones
the crap we talked on ending days like ending men on
ending chairs
Monday starts with seven shades of this.
Monday starts with seven shades of this.

This is from the re-release of 2007’s Dark Horse Pictures, by Andy Hopkins, one of four new free PDF chapbooks from Philistine Press. Hopkins’s collection wrestles with the frustrations of teaching, the work of Guy Debord, and the discourse of evil. Along the way, there are poignant engagements with text messaging and fresh takes on the “Victorian guts” of sewer lines–“shallow modern/ intestinal cuts, gulping duodenum and plastic abject shadows./ There is a grid on grids, a grid of grids, a grid with grids.”–or a puddle of dying tadpoles, “prefrogs”–“a spill, a slick of apostrophes pooled;/ commas exiled/ from a dialogue that should have happened/ elsewhere. Or else never. They are at first a delight, a/ wonder./ Then a realisation. A souring miracle: they are unfrogging.”

Rob Sherman’s Valve Works pairs poems about different organs or body parts with sketches from Sarah Ogilvie and dictionary definitions, such that we can contrast the more literal take on the hallux (or big toe) with Sherman’s amusing rant at it: “You fat twin pig, gout-sponged, you spread/ Take your real estate from the less fortunate./ You bloat, you block, you foul menstruate.” Sherman dissects the anatomy in energetic swipes, from the heart–which looks “like a dog’s head, panting”–to the liver and the spleen. There, in the spleen, the poet sees mostly “a line of bumping, clumsy blood, quaking and true./ Past their use, rejected and obtuse, marching to their death in/ you.”

Richard Britton’s The Birth of Taliesin the Bard: A Tale offers straight narrative, albeit it fantastic, from a fabled past:

At the city of Emrys the priest arrived,
The city of pyromancers, where red-bearded
Druids converse in koine with turbaned
Alchemists and draw potent symbols
In the shell-sands for far-eastern sages
And fakirs from the valley of Indus,
Who sweat water from the Ganges,
As they lean over their kilns and forges.

This world of hemorrhaging pink moons, cuttlefish daggers, and metamorphosing, larger-than-life characters, the great bard is ultimately born, his origin story a parable for literature itself.

Of these four free PDF chapbooks, Entertainment is more defined by its vibrant authorial voice, which declares, “This took me roughly the same amount of time to write/ As it’s taking you to read./ You might think it’s flimsy, and a load of bollocks,/ But it’s the best I can do,/ And I think it’s quite good,/ So fuck you.” In a special “note to my readers” he writes, “You may think you know something about me because you’ve read these poems. I’d just/ like to say, you don’t know anything about me…. I would like to say I don’t give a fuck what anyone thinks, but that’s not true. I want people to read these words over and over until they are dizzy, until they are sick.” Here is a representative sample, to test the effect, the poem “Fiona,” in full:

I did it doggy style with my friend Tony’s pregnant wife, Fiona. I ran my fingers over her spherical belly and felt their kid kick. We had to stop halfway through so she could go to the bathroom. I sat her down and held her hand while she went for a shit. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, like watching a butterfly flap its wings. For a brief moment, I wished I’d been that baby’s father, but I knew I wasn’t.

Official Rob Sherman Web Site
Official Richard Britton Web Site
Official Philistine Press Web Site

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