Everything Sings: Intimate Cartography
Rob Tennant02.04.11
Rob Tennant reviews Denis Woods’ Everything Sings, a book of eccentric maps exploring an array of aspects of Boylan Heights, a neighborhood in Raleigh, North Carolina, including the distribution of its jack-o-lantern, the areas in which different radio stations are available, the route and duration of the newspaper boy, shades of autumn leaves and many others.
The Dehumanizing Effects of Sam Pink’s Person
Jamie Gadette12.15.10
The narrator of Sam Pink’s novel Person has sex with his neighbor, shoots himself in the face with a pellet gun and agrees to kill his roommate’s father, but primarily the book is composed of elaborate fantasies, none of which come to pass. Perhaps anticipating this criticism, Pink has commented, "people will say nothing happens in the book but that’s impossible, you silly motherfucker!" Jamie Gadette, who has quaffed deeply of the waters of eccentric literature in her previous reviews for the Fanzine, retorts that it’s fine to create a text chock full of anti-social psychosis, but please don’t bore your readers.
Assume Vivid Astro Focus: Chaos Bound
Gean Moreno12.02.10
Try and judge Assume Vivid Astro Focus’ first monograph by its cover and you may be falling for an old adage which instructs one not to bother. Instead start flipping. Flip, then focus. Then go back and read the main essay and appreciate the fact that it’s gonna be a bitch to put a hardcover lid on an art collective that is heir to the Situationists International. Artist Gean Moreno tackles that notion, and all this movement, color and vivacity, but sets off on a different tack, one tinged by say… Caribbean Carnival?
“Le Rire de la Meduse” – an excerpt from The Correspondence Artist
Barbara Browning11.15.10
The Correspondence Artist, Barbara Browning’s 21st century epistolary novel is jam-packed with cultural references and lubricated body parts and has been praised by Harry Matthews, DJ Spooky and Rebecca Miller. In a fiction that merges with cultural theory, Vivian and her lover Tzipi Honigman, a 68-year-old Nobel Prize-winning Israeli novelist, make out to a mix tape that includes such hits as Lacan’s seminar on Poe, Sartre and Simone Beauvoir’s threeway, Tippi Hedron the Swedish Jew and mistranslated sexual idioms. Is it a federal offense to steal a letter or is it in fact totally impossible? When you steal a letter, do you become the letter’s true intended audience? Either way this is mail worth rifling through. The book is due out in February from Two Dollar Radio.
Bluets by Maggie Nelson
Ben Fama11.08.10
Belatedly but, as always, with the purest of hearts Fanzine offers poet Ben Fama’s thoughtful take on Maggie Nelson’s Bluets. Despite or due to its incorporation of Wittgenstein and Goethe, Nelson described this meditation on the color blue in a grant application as "heathen, hedonistic and horny." Nelson, who has appeared on Unsolved Mysteries, examined the death of her aunt in The Red Parts and Jane: A Murder and Bluets is not without its darkness.
Secret Historian: Samuel Steward
Kevin Killian11.02.10
In Kevin Killian’s review of Justin Spring’s Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade, Killian recounts his own close encounters with Steward, who lived in the Bay Area in the ’80s, and his divergent viewpoints with a man whom he found, while not entirely fascinating, intriguing, not only for his sexual prowess and Stud File, but for Steward’s relationship with Gertrude Stein, his life as a tattoo artist in seedy postwar Chicago, his artistic endeavors, and multiple identities during an age of homosexual persecution. It was a transitional time for Killian as well, and his initial apprehensiveness toward Steward as subject matter gives way to real understanding.
My Favorite Generals: Roberto Bolano’s The Third Reich and New York’s Latin Awakening
Andrew Haley10.10.10
Andrew Haley explicates how Bolaño’s unpublished manuscripts led to a US-based Spanish-language joint venture that included Random House and a Berlusconi-owned Italian press—a deal that will have large ramifications on how Spanish-language literature is bought and read in the Americas. Business strategies may be an apt parallel to the novel in question: Bolaño’s The Third Reich is about an obsessive player of a World War II board game, not unlike the gaming classic Axis & Allies. El Tercer Reich was published last March and Natasha Wimmer’s English translation will hit stores this fall.
Book: Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season
Ben Bush10.09.10
With the NBA season starting later this month, it seemed like a good time to recommend this book from David Shields about the, ahem, 1994-1995 season…
You Have Arms to Bar Yourself from People: Gary Lutz and I Looked Alive
Alissa Nutting10.03.10
Gary Lutz is notoriously unprolific and for good reason: the man puts a super-human amount of thought into each line of his prose. In his speech "The Sentence is a Lonely Place" he describes how he thinks about word choice and order: the shapes of the letters on the page, his preference for ending a sentence with a hard consonant sound unless there’s a reason to leave it intentionally open-ended. Given the intensely unusual grammar of his fiction, it’s either counter-intuitive or completely appropriate that he is also the co-author of Writer’s Digest Grammar Desk Reference. I wasn’t entirely sure it was the same "Gary Lutz" until I saw that Ben Marcus’s novels were listed in an example of how to correctly use a colon. With copies of the first edition of Lutz’s out-of-print 2003 short story collection I Looked Alive currently priced at $175 on Amazon, Brooklyn Rail/Black Square Editions have kindly reprinted it for the rest of us. Alissa Nutting, author of Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls, reviews.
James Baldwin, Uncollected
Nicholas Boggs09.21.10
Although he was well known as a gay public figure, Baldwin rarely spoke candidly about his own sexuality and The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings only highlights the absence of the most essential of his unpublished papers. Baldwin’s correspondence has been called the “one great Baldwin masterpiece waiting to be published” but his family has long suppressed these letters because of their own discomfort with what they contain. Nicholas Boggs describes the writer’s many contradictions and the importance of Baldwin in his own life, growing up white and gay in a predominantly black public school in Washington D.C.
