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Poem Brut #101 – Mayakovsky Fan

So, I’d been looking fondly at the propellers on the lined up dry-docked yachts in Aarhus harbour before I found what I was after. Had long since heard of how Mallarmé would inscribe beautiful handwritten verses onto fine paper fans for his female admirers, and wondered what Mayakovsky would do. Probably not a dumped ceiling fan, but then we make do with what we have and the rest, as they say, is history.

I figured it’d be good to rest the fan on a pile of loose cobblestones, as if it were standing reserve for some retro-futurist insurrection, and the strewn roses a swish in the face of good taste. That each blade took on the shape of a tombstone was an unexpected bonus.

In the 101st of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Matt Travers.

Not Far From the Junction (Excerpt)

On Tuesday May 21st 2019, I travelled from Redbridge in East London up the M11, then the A1(M) past Newark, across to the M1 just below Sheffield, before heading South and eventually abandoning hope of a lift at Donnington Park services, having been moved off junction 24 by the police. At the time of writing, this is also the last of my hitching expeditions. I can’t explain why, just that it’s an ending of sorts. In presenting this text I’ve changed the names of all contributors, and everyone they mentioned, and disguised place names. Although everyone gave me permission to use their words, these were decisions taken in a moment, while a stranger sat in their vehicle, and I don’t want to get anyone into trouble. Transcripts are edited, truncated and, to some extent, manipulated. The text below represents a partial selection of the people I met and the subjects we covered.

Read our extracts from Will Ashon‘s Not Far From the Junction.

The Love and Poison of Nineties Music Weeklies

When I started writing my latest novel, Dead Rock Stars I had no idea how influential the cheaply printed music weeklies from the nineties were on my writing style. In the novel, a teenage boy called Jeff, stealing glances at Melody Maker in his newsagent but unable to afford a copy, at one point cites a review of the Chemical Brothers at the Heavenly Social as he dreams of finding fame with his own band. In my fictional review he quotes writing about “Spasmodic ravers, gurning as their ears are drilled by sirens, beats and psychedelia until derangement sets in.” My excellent editor, Laurence, raised the eminently reasonable point — “is this an actual quote?”

By Guy Mankowski.

(Who She) One

i’m on a steep hill
with the vandals
harmed by a lame boss
classical is her maturing
her heart the saving grip
monopoly mind forever trendless
fold up the game kitten
just another boring day
on permanent detention
wicked light beckons
and national herds march on

A new collaborative poem by Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth, Thurston Moore Group) and Matthew Wascovich (Scarcity Of Tanks, Vicious Fence).

The Witchcraft Acts

She’s My Witch, as the title would suggest, depicts Maria’s world inside her coven of sex witches (a particular focus of Home’s on social media recently), their rites and in particular burgeoning hold over Cooper, as depicted by a series of highly-organised tarot cards throughout the book. Home has clearly done his research here, as not only do the cards form the basis under which Maria extends her sexual hold over Martin, but also arrange the book’s chapters until its cruel yet satisfying denouement. Home works in a backstory for Cooper as a skinhead, particularly his involvement in the “hardcore leftist streetfighters” of Red Action and its offshoot Anti Fascist Action (AFA).

Andrew Stevens reviews Stewart Home‘s She’s My Witch.

Reading Faulkner’s The Hamlet in 2020 USA: Part III

I just finished the book today. It’s always a strange experience to finish a novel for me; I wonder what it’s like for you. It’s bizarre in how I seem to focus my attention much more acutely in the final pages, though I hardly read for story—except that Faulkner’s plots do have something of the “boilerplate” about them, an astonishing key. I didn’t want it to end, but there are a plethora of other Faulkner fictions I can steep myself in.

Genese Grill and Greg Gerke read The Hamlet by William Faulkner, Part III.

Reading Faulkner’s The Hamlet in 2020 USA: Part II

There are searing mementos of the Southern wages of sin in this novel, none perhaps more disturbing than the aside, mentioned in a description of Eula’s lover, who paid a black man so he could whip him. Man’s inhumanity to man (and to woman). His cruelty and depraved sadistic need to be stronger than someone else. Many would like us to cleanse the world of such depictions, preserve our children from these markers of our past, erase the stain and replace it with something more monolithically correct. But Literature—it shouldn’t have to be said, but it does need to be said—teaches us about all of the ways that humans are, rather than just an idealized, cleaned-up version of how they are supposed to be. Great writing, like Faulkner’s, gives us the complexities and makes us more fully human. Great writing, like Faulkner’s, is not essentially dogmatic either, not essentially Moral, but is a lever to open up ethical channels, ways of feeling and thinking, through irreducible aesthetic experience. The more uncensored or un-self-censored the better.

Genese Grill and Greg Gerke read The Hamlet by William Faulkner, Part II.

Reading Faulkner’s The Hamlet in 2020 USA: Part I

And what is the first significant sign about Flem? His shirts. Newly cut and stitched at the beginning of each week, then soiled by weekend in exactly the same places. And then he adds a necktie: “a tiny viciously depthless cryptically balanced splash like an enigmatic punctuation symbol against the expanse of white shirt…postulated to those who had been present on that day that quality of outrageous overstatement of physical displacement which the sound of his father’s stiff foot made on the gallery of the store….”

Genese Grill and Greg Gerke read The Hamlet by William Faulkner, Part I.

Re-Framing History

So here he is hands on (techne) with the subject (epistêmê) of his book but, as always with Barber, the history he is addressing — that of Eadweard Muybridge’s projectionist tour of Central European cities in 1891, his Chicago Exposition projections of 1893 and the influence of Muybridge on other artist/projectionists — is always excavated in a deep archaeological and genealogical analysis of the peripheral and the forgotten, the people on the reverse page of history, the shadowy, the splinter events that, in the end, underpin and underwrite the Event itself.

Steve Finbow reviews The Projectionists: Eadweard Muybridge and the Future Projections of the Moving Image by Stephen Barber.

Heaven Metal

As it happens, Mitchell has an affinity for the strange. His works usually contain dreams, which he does fairly well, he fancies the numinous and the transcendent, and is often at his best as a prose stylist in his most meditative moments — the literary equivalent a hummingbird’s wings beating in slow-motion HD. One would expect then that a novel about music would channel the best of Mitchell’s gifts into a subject he is better poised to write about than most. He’s written about music before, most notably in the Robert Frobisher section of Cloud Atlas (the best of the book), and unlike Egan and Chabon, it’s clear that Mitchell himself either plays music, or has a theoretical knowledge of it. But readers will not find much of this in Utopia Avenue, a novel that commits to the story of a rock band with a kind of docu-literalism, and is often remarkably incurious about the deeper meanings of music and what it is like for people to create it together.

Jared Marcel Pollen reviews Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell.

3:AM Magazine

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