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Much as we'd like to like Booknotes just on its own merits (though we do, we do, and you should too), we're liking it right now especially because of the profusion of Soft Skullers that have popped up there recently.
Those merits, not-so-incidentally, are that Mr. Large-Hearted Boy invites writers to talk about the music that inspired them, or that accompanied them as they wrote, or that might serve as a soundtrack for the reader...
So herewith four Soft Skuller's responses (And make sure you scroll down, cause there's a bonus prize from Mark Swartz at the end...)
There's CAConrad, of Deviant Propulsion (of which Sam Delaney says: "[B]brilliantly tough, now jaw-droppingly romantic, witty, outraged, yearning, and often unabashedly lovely. With a clarity of language that makes the bones sing, they sneak past our defenses and do things, directly, surprisingly, irreparably, to us...")
There was this crazy fag I met when I was 19 and he LOVED the band X, and soon enough I too was a crazy fag, LOVING the sound of that wicked bitch EXCENE CERVENKA! Excene drag is the BEST drag to do man! Curdled punk swaggering out, "A THOUSAND KIDS BURY THEIR PARENTS!" All my writing has come ashore on white caps and pounding curls of song. Continues...
Lynne Tillman on American Genius
Glenn Gould playing Beethoven Sonatas equaled: we’re in this game of imagining together. You can hear him humming happily sometimes beneath the music, and it’s reassuring. He goes in and out of range nicely, the way my protagonist does. Gould playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations: concentration aid, since Bach’s logic and reason are merciless, and this novel reckons with reason and unreason all the time. Bach kept me in line.But then there’s the irrational, which is as much what the novel’s about, and which is always compelling, so let’s say it’d be Miles Davis’s “You’re Under Arrest” : a wake up call and a reminder of how bad things really are. There’s an insanity – or unreasonableness-- I need when writing anything, and Miles supplies it, except when he plays ballads, and then he stops everything and holds it in place. Sometimes Hole’s first CD worked for adolescent angst, which never goes away completely, when nothing can ever be right. Courtney Love sounded like an aggression I needed to usurp for the novel at times.Continues...
And the ravishing Michelle Embree of Manstealing for Fat Girls...
CRAZY TRAIN — Ozzy Osborne: I still get pretty riled up when I hear this song. In the eighties, I would go insane. Ozzy was something punks and the burn outs had in common; Ozzy, weed, beer (though not necessarily in that order). The name OZZY next to a big pot leaf was spray painted on pretty much every available surface. And I don’t think it was really a tagging thing, I think that is just what stoned working-class-suburbia, white-dudes painted on a wall whenever they got the chance. Continues...
And, as promised, a bonus from Mark Swartz, of H20:
Call it Water Music. This isn’t the soundtrack to the nonexistent movie of my eco-noir novel H2O, but to one proposed way of reading the book. The first three people who write me at swartzmark [at] yahoo (friends and family excluded) win a CD-R of the mix.
Chapter 14.TEXT: We settled in a far corner, out of earshot, but neither of us said a word as the room filled. She took me by the hand, but I didn’t know whether it was a true gesture or part of the act.
AUDIO: Marianne Faithfull, “Don’t Forget Me,” from 20th-Century Blues. It’s about a breakup, but for a long time I thought it was about dying. I’ve never heard the Harry Nilsson original. Continues...
And, if you've not yet checked it out, the Flash trailer for the book!
The editor of That's Revolting: Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation, Mattilda aka Matt Bernstein Sycamore has, notwithstanding his fibromyalgia, launched his blog, Nobody Passes, darling.
Mattilda's some beautiful things to say in there, especially a letter to Mattilda's dying father, but here's the most recent post, on Mr. Foley, in which you get a sense to the potent combination of the personal and the political that you'll find on this blog:
I thought I had discovered something that no one else knew about -- the tapping of feet underneath stall walls, notes written on toilet paper and wrapped around pens, the texture of hairs between pants-below-knees and everything above. This was my gay world of desire and loathing, the place I inhabited so many evenings after school -- it's where I learned about men like Mark Foley -- at the urinals, between stalls, in the stairwell, in their cars in the parking lot.I remember this one guy who drove me to my father's office -- it was just one block away, but he really wanted to drive me. He handed me his business card -- Capitol Hill, lobbyist. I wondered about his audacity -- did he know I was 15? I hoped that I was passing as older. I wondered what would happen if I called him, but that was his desire not mine. I wanted so much more.
Here is what I would've wanted that lobbyist -- or Mark Foley -- to say to me, if I'd run into him at Woodie’s department store or Mazza Gallery or Georgetown Park: This is a monstrous world we live in, but your defiant faggotry will take you to places as brilliant as you can imagine -- if you need somewhere to go to talk about your dreams, your hopes and hopelessness, don't hesitate to call -- I will require nothing of you.
Unfortunately, Mark Foley will probably never utter these words, and that is the real tragedy.
So we've this rather fun new book about to come out and some of you might have even inadvertently come upon a reference to it in last Sunday's New York Times piece on graffiti movies, called Graffiti Cinema Turns Moody" The book—Putting the Pieces Together—is a behind-the-scenes/screenplay tie-in to the film Quality of Life (now out on DVD, though still having theatrical screenings here and htere), and it also has a big section on DIY movie-making.
The punchline of all this though is that they've a great video podcast. Click here to watch the first installment, and here to add the RSS feed and this is a little bit of what Ben, the director, has to say about this vodcast:
Making Quality of Life was sheer hell. Our lead actor dropped out. We lost our jobs. Personalities clashed. We were always worried about the cops shutting us down. We never had the money to do anything we wanted to do. Every fricking step was a struggle.But we adopted The Graffiti Model to get the shite done. And in the
process, proved that money doesn't mean anything, and passion means
everything.This vodcast series will pull back the curtain and tell the
compelling, behind-the-scenes story of how we made (and distributed)
this film with no money, against all odds.As you know, we have no ad budget to speak of, so we live or die on
guerilla marketing and word-of-mouth. Every person you share this with
is another link to proving you don't need money to be heard. It's all
about you, the grassroots.
The magazine that bills itself as "the magazine for high-minded low-lifes" has two great reviews—fascinating for us here at least—of Mark Ames's Going Postal and Claro's Electric Flesh as translated by Brian Evenson, the latter review a two-hander that also looks at Shelley Jackson's Half Life.
If you ever wondered what an American author touring in Europe sounded like, you can derive a sense of it from two events in NYC this week, wherein the foreign language writer reads a little bit him/herself, and then has a chunk performed by an actor (which is how they do it "abroad"). I came across these events in part because I'd the pleasure of meeting one participant—Germany's leading queer theorist Thomas Meinecke (as in the muffler, sort of)—last month, and the pleasure of hearing about a great urban theorist named Bruce Begout from his cool French indie publisher Max Milo. The fact that both of them were in fact doing these two events together, well I just had to alert folks. Below is the details, forgive the cut-'n'-paste from the German, I think y'all can figure it out...
19. Oktober 2006
19:00 Uhr
New Literature from Europe: The Writer in the City
Lesung aus „Hellblau“ und Diskussion an The New School
Theresa Lang Center
The New School
55 W. 13th St., 2nd Floor
New York, NY
21. Oktober 2006
19:00 Uhr
New Writers from Europe
Lesung aus “Tomboy” in der Buchhandlung “192 Books”
Adresse:
192 Books
192 Tenth Ave./21st St.
New York, NY 10011
tel.: 212-255-4022
Nice little round-up of some recent Soft Skull titles...
...what might that be? Well, I know at this time of year there is much discussion of the effect of awards on literary culture, but what of the effect of applying for awards on a publisher's bank account?
To wit, Kristin Pulkkinen, our genius publicist, was just now discussing with me the books we're submitting for PEN Awards. Mostly, we love submitting for a PEN Award, they don't charge us. (Unlike the extortionate National Book Awards, who do, and handsomely...). We've also managed to be a finalist in a couple of PEN Awards, engendering even greater fondness for them here at Soft Skull.
But we saw that the PEN Hemingway Award, for Best First Novel, administering by PEN New England, had a $40 entry fee. "F&*k!" I exclaimed, my predeliction for profanity well-known in this office.
And then we see the note:
"* Exceptions will be made for small press submissions: if your press's annual net sales do not exceed 4 million dollars, you need not submit the entry fee."
Ladies and gentleman, the only literary award of which we are aware that recognizes that awards submission fees are a form of regressive taxation on independent publishers: the PEN Hemingway. Kudos to them, and to PEN in general for being free, and to the NBCC for also being free.
And a big-time hint to the National Book Foundation that one of the ways in which they could contribute to literacy and respect for the book could be by ceasing to extort $100/title from independent publishers for each nomination. Or at least waiving it for say the first 2 or 3 titles submitted...
(As for the $2000 the publisher on the short list has to pay as a contribution to marketing support—well let's just say that Copper Canyon must have a separate line item in their annual budget for forking over money to the NBF in exchange for being one of the finest independent poetry presses in the United States)
Jenny Davidson (of Heredity and others) on memoirs and blogs.
This just in from Anne Elizabeth Moore, series edtor of Best American Comics, Associate Publisher of Punk Planet, all around maveness, and author of Hey Kidz! Buy This Book: A Radical Primer on Corporate and Governmental Propaganda and Artistic Activism for Short People
My friend John Pierson of the Neo-Futurists here in Chicago has written and staged a two-minute, live-action version of HEY KIDZ BUY THIS BOOK for adults, and it's running in their show Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind.