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In September of 2003, during Scott’s first year of grad school, two years after he’d set that dumpster on fire, a young undergrad named Millie Dufresne set off a series of pipe bombs on campus, shutting down the school for eight days. Scott had seen Millie almost every morning, as she worked at the coffee shop right off campus. She was a friendly girl who’d always smiled when she asked how his day was going, which had always seemed like a stupid question, as it was 7:30am and the day hadn’t even been given a chance to fully develop. But she’d always smiled and said Awesome! every time he told her his day was going okay.
Read an extract from Jeff Chon‘s forthcoming novel, Hashtag Good Guy with a Gun.
We can then see MF DOOM not only as a fiction, but the universe of that fiction, and how the tenets of that fiction reflect/refract the problematic fascinations of our reality. DOOM is then, within that definition, a pastiche, a costume, an ethos, a topos, and in that, a literature.
An essay by Eric Tyler Benick on MF DOOM.
The X-ray shows an opaque stain on a lobe of the right lung. Fernand has no precise idea of what this means, beyond the fact that the statement’s length invites the interpretation that what he took for a common cold, caught after a soccer match in Algeria, may be a more serious illness. Very probably tuberculosis.
An excerpt from Tomorrow They Won’t Dare to Murder Us, the first novel from Joseph Andras.
The suggestion here is that the ‘I’ (like the ‘it’ in expressions like ‘it is raining’) is simply a verbal construct — a placeholder for an agency which only exists in language and whose entire being consists in ‘a name’. For Borges’ narrator, the Zahir destroyed his identity; for this collection, it simply revealed the existing cracks.
Accordingly, much of Zahir treats language with a degree of distrust.
Oscar Mardell reviews the Zahir: Desire and Eclipse anthology edited by Christian Patracchini.
‘Everyone I know says they’ve met a chauvo-feminist at some point during the past few years,’ says Sam Mills in this excellent book. I am sure she is right, and I greeted the text with some relief because chauvo-feminism is exceedingly difficult to deal with; to someone on the end of it, it may feel intractable, hard to prove and you may think it is only you. You may be told, if you dare to challenge the man who practices it, that you have entirely misunderstood; it is all in your head and no-one else has a problem. So why are you making a fuss? Perhaps you will even wonder if you are going mad. All these things have happened to me, at several points in my life and more recently where their effects were appalling for my view of myself, self-esteem, and trust in others.
Anna Vaught reviews Sam Mills‘s Chauvo-Feminism.
‘These found texts are from a fire precautions sign at a disused textiles mill in Farley, near Leeds. It was demolished soon after. The long, elaborate wording seemed to me to offer up other meanings.’
In the 113th of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Mark L Valentine.
The writerly answer would be that it is a totally fictional creation, but all me, as all the characters I create come from me, out of me, and are me. But this writing process was one of method acting. I developed this character out of my own pain and frustrations and then gave him life in his own journals. When I thought thoughts that fit him, I wrote them in there. That journal — which became several journals — was always in my pocket and I wrote in it out in the world. The text itself bleeds in and back out of reality and life and the clues within it support this idea and crazy experience. References to Anna Kavan and Rimbaud’s “Je est un autre” tease out the lie that Maawaam is me and that he isn’t.
Jordan A. Rothacker interviewed by Chris Kelso.
On Wednesday, December 4, 1935, beneath an article about the removal of a controversial monument from the front lawn of the county courthouse, the twenty-first page of the Los Angeles Times carried an item about the death of an assistant professor, thirty-two years of age [sic], a graduate of the Universities of California and Paris, then employed in the Classics Department at Harvard, in a hotel suite overlooking downtown’s MacArthur Park, where he and his wife, Marian (née Tanhauser), were staying during a visit to her gravely ill mother, whose estate they were putting in order.
Short fiction from Ryan Ruby.
The book evokes the strong bond between art and literature, and of ekphrastic writing that evokes images by highlighting hidden relationships and implied mysteries. The result is a moving collection of poems and short stories revealing the profound state of existence and the fate of our torment, the inevitability of suffering, and of our helplessness from pain.
As Tinti says “This partnership moves from the rubble, passes through cemeteries, sniffs out the signs of what has gone. Roger Ballen’s photos, my words, are a kind of defense against the terrible power of death. They are an accumulation of enthusiasm, injuries, obsessions. They are effigies composed to disturb the reader, to ambush the thought, the things.”
In the 18th of the Duos series, new poetry by Gabriele Tinti and Roger Ballen.
Kelso documents a precursor of sorts to Burroughs’ transatlantic shit-stirring in the serial killer and rapist Peter Thomas Anthony Manuel. I think the inclusion here of these grim and apparently unrelated facts is not entirely normal in a biography, but feels like an important hangover from Kelso’s fiction. He’s always been good at making unusual connections, and his idea that Manuel was a demon seed from across the water whose planting on Scottish soil was the beginning of mutations in the country’s collective psyche preparing its population for further subversions is an interesting one.
Matt Neil Hill reviews Chris Kelso‘s Burroughs and Scotland.