Guyotat at World PEN Voices; BEA 2011

The photo is of the great French novelist Pierre Guyotat, who appeared at several fora at the PEN World Voices festival recently concluded, including the afore-captioned one at Maison Francaise with Edmund White.Guyotat, who is often described,somewhatsimplistically, as the heir to Rimbaud and de Sade, first came to national attention with the publication of Tomb for 5000 Soldiers(Tombeau pour cing cent mille soldats), an obsessively brilliant rant of atrocities in a military zone which evoked the Algerian war.Eden Eden Eden,which followed, was one uninterrupted stream of violent sexual activities/expressions, censored for many years by the French Government.He has proceeded , through Prostitution, printed in French and not here in English except through a brilliant recasting of language in a short piece by Bruce Benderson, to continue to subvert the French language. Coma, reprinted this year in English by Semiotexte, describes his breakdown and recovery as a writer many years ago, and he is now expanding his writing style to a confluence of memoir and language subversion, which makes easier reading for some. An altogether brilliant man and fantastic writer.NB:Red Dust has published the aforementioned Bruce Benderson's unique translation and commentary on Prostitution, which is a marvellous feat of reinvention of vocabulary akin to the translation of Perec's lipogrammatic "A Void',a three hundred page novel in French without the letter "e" brilliantly recreated in English by Gilbert Adair.


BEA 2011 starts this week; we are attending and focussing on these titles, which among others will be reviewed in these pages.(We will also cover and review the state of University Press publishing, the legal ramifications of limited library use of e-books, the state of the market and titles from small independent presses, and the mise en scene in publishing today.

Again, the following are but a few of the more obvious books we will treat in detail- The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, whose writings are finally getting as much attention in his home country as they have for decades in Europe, The Last Word, Mark Lane's summing up on the Kennedy Assassination from Skyhorse,and new works by Anne Enright,Kenneth Goldsmith, Carlos Franz, JMG Le Clezio, and the titles of Dalkey Archive, North Atlantic Press, Archipelago and a host of others. Off to the races!

Someday

Someday
C 2011 by E.M.Kabak


Someday we’ll close Guantanamo
Someday we’ll end all wars
Someday we’ll stop treating nations like a domino
And bust the financial whores

Someday we’ll stop pushing sugar and fats to folks
While millions are chewing on bones
Someday we’ll stop all the PR hoax
Someday stop killing with drones

Someday we’ll stop selling radioactivity
And building cell phone towers
Someday we’ll end our brutish proclivity
Someday we won’t abuse power

Someday we’ll end deception and stealth
And the sheep will be safe with the fox
Someday there’ll be a cap on wealth
And thought won’t default to “Lock”

Someday the rich will pay their taxes
And tribalism will dissolve
Someday we won’t push the earth off its axis
Who knows? We may even evolve.
(I might just bet on it)
Who knows-we may even evolve.

Coalition Partners;Janet Malcolm

For the perished-
Coalition Partners
C 2011 by E.M.Kabak

Ordinance, shrapnel
Depleted uranium
Cesium, strontium
Creeps in the cranium

Rocketing weapons
Pro-clivity
Rampant radio-
Activity

Cores of reactors fueled now with Mox
Atomic dust seeps into our timed clocks
Anti-aircraft guns, bombs’ thunderous noise
These are our coalition partners’ new toys

Nuclear reactors built on a fault
Human but seismic in greed and gestalt
Truth is briskly washed out to sea
Daily regimen- catastrophe

Tsunamis and earthquakes ,plutonium spewing
It’s unsafe to eat or do what you’re doing
Our coalition partners- don’t hold your breath-
Disease, deceit, destruction and death




Janet Malcolm, the fearless New Yorker writer who specializes in a rarefied prose combining astute reporting with fine edged character study and more than a touch of psychoanalysis and the craft of a fine novelist, has just published her latest, Iphigenia in Forest Hills,(Yale University Press).

It is an expansion of her celebrated article in last year's New Yorker on the trial of Mazoltuv Borukhova, the Forest Hills Uzbeki doctor who was tried and convicted for engaging a relative to murder her estranged husband/dentist in cold blood in front of her daughter, shortly after suffering what appears to have been a totally unjust decree of losing custody of the child.
Malcolm, who is also the subject of a long interview in the new issue of Paris Review, casts a broad net, catching human folly in the family court system, in the conspiracy rantings of one of its representatives, in the Uzbeki community,male- dominated as it is, and in the judiciary, among other places.
No one escapes the scalpel. Here she is on the trial judge:

"[The Judge] is a man of seventy-four with a small head and a large body and the faux genial manner that American petty tyrants cultivate."
Here again-
"The court documents do not reveal what was actually going on between Borukhova and malakov during the dissolution of their marriage.The documents are a crude allegory of ill will peopled by garishly drawn, one-dimensional characters. But some truth leaks out of every court document, as it does out of everything written or said."

In the stable of fine writers deployed by the New Yorker,including such stalwarts as Lawrence Wright, Janet Malcolm may well be the lead horse.You can also pick up her recent book on how Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas escaped the Holocaust without leaving France, as well as her earlier works on Plath and Hughes , the Jeffrey McDonald murder trial, and her "In the Freud Archives", the subject of a long and ultimately unsuccessful libel suit by Jeffrey Masson against the author.

One rarely finds an author whose characterizations are so apt and prose so accurately and unforgettably etched.

Nuclear meltdown: A Premonition and Past prophecy

The nuclear meltdown in Japan this weekend and our continuing blindness to the risks of nuclear power and nuclear weapons reminds one of the Ferlinghetti poem
American Roulette, first published in pamphlet form 35 years ago, even before Chernobyl and Three Mile Island- Here is an excerpt:

If things go on like this
cockroaches will inherit the earth
they are actually just waiting
upsidedown in hidden corners
for us to fuck up even worse
And when we do
they'll just throw off their disgusting disguises
and come right out in the open
larger than life
and march down the boulevards
like live tanks
spraying stored up DDT
which was sprayed at them for years
and which they've saved up
for just such an occasion
as the end of the world.....
when for instance
the Jupiter effect triggers California earthquakes
far worse than 1906
which naturally cause every nuclear plant West of the Rockies to crack their reactor cores
and leak live white death
over all
which really shouldn't bother anybody at all
for after all weren't we assured it wouldn't happen
by the SF Chronicle and
{several named corporations}and dozens of other multinationals
who contributed a total of at least
$$$$$$$$$$$$million dollars
to defeat the California anti-nuclear proposition
and hide from us the facts
that there is still no known and approved
method of storing atomic waste and that
pure plutonium really isn't dangerous at all
and that live reactors can't really leak at all
especially in the San Andreas fault
Any anyway the fault lies in our stars
and not in our selves at all


Two and a half weeks ago I woke from a powerful dream in which I was standing on the shore,inside of a large vertical glass cylinder to protect myself against large waves coming in to shore- Outside the glass structure an roundish owl-like flying demon with piercing eyes and a huge fire spitting dragon with a tremendous scaled wingspread rapped mercilessly against the glass

death- or resurrection by fire and water-

when we will ever learn? when will we e-ver learn?

Hard Ground by Michael O'Brien and Tom Waits

Here is the blurb from the University of Texas Press about this book:
Michael O'Brien got out of his car one day in 1975 and sought the acquaintance of a man named John Madden who lived under an overpass. Their initial contact grew into a friendship that O'Brien chronicled for the Miami News, where he began his career as a staff photographer. O'Brien's photo essays conveyed empathy for the homeless and the disenfranchised and won two Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards. In 2006, O'Brien reconnected with the issue of homelessness and learned the problem has grown exponentially since the 1970s, with as many as 3.5 million adults and children in America experiencing homelessness at some point in any given year.

In Hard Ground, O'Brien joins with renowned singer-songwriter Tom Waits, described by the New York Times as "the poet of outcasts," to create a portrait of homelessness that impels us to look into the eyes of people who live "on the hard ground" and recognize our common humanity. For Waits, who has spent decades writing about outsiders, this subject is familiar territory. Combining their formidable talents in photography and poetry, O'Brien and Waits have crafted a work in the spirit of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, in which James Agee's text and Walker Evans's photographs were "coequal, mutually independent, and fully collaborative" elements. Letting words and images communicate on their own terms, rather than merely illustrate each other, Hard Ground transcends documentary and presents independent, yet powerfully complementary views of the trials of homelessness and the resilience of people who survive on the streets


And it's totally accurate- when you read the gritty poetry of Waits, in juxtaposition to the faces and the stories of the increasingly large number of homeless people in America,many of whom thrown out of homes by disastrous health situations,it almost makes a sham out of speeches like the one delivered in Tucson by our great orator President, for this is a country that,notwithstanding its tremendous wealth, and even with the decline from unitary superpower, still has the capacity to offer basic social protection to those less fortunate than others, but turns its back on them and on their dreams,while granting virtually every last wish of those of mega-Mammon status.

News fromLibya- Hard Ground with poems by Tom Waits

(Photo of Benghazi residents learning to use anti-aircraft weapons)


Wouldn't it be a lot of fun
to use an anti-aircraft gun
to stop the propaganda and the bleating

wouldn't it be just so much fun
to use the anti-aircraft gun
to stop corrupt Congresses from meeting

wouldn't it be a lot of fun
to bring financiers in the sun
with subpoenas for an in court meeting?

wouldn't it be a barrel of fun
to stop the sale of the automatic gun
at least while our hearts are swiftly beating?..


Stay tuned for the review of Hard Ground, a collection of photos and short life profiles of the new homeless accompanied by poems from Tom Waits- to be posted tomorrow

Valentine to a Celestial Body

Maybe
C by Ed Kabak

Maybe the wind is schizophrenic
The sky is depressed when it’s blue
Maybe the clouds are catatonic
When the eye of a storm passes through

Maybe the stars have paranoia
Celestically prancing apace
And maybe the moon is often bi-polar
Those times it averts its whole face

Maybe the trees and mountains and valleys
Are demented by flowers and rain
Maybe the oceans rivers and gorges
Disordered are flowing insane

Maybe the earth is confused and deluded
Confined by its gravity too
For even the sun was manic depressive
Until it fell crazy for you