Scarecrow 44: Death of Language...

Oh no! scarecrow was going to be back on Monday 14th August with a plethora of scribbling action from Stewart Home, Ben Myres, Anne Booty, Robert Woodard, Paul Kavanagh but will now be back the first week of September. Even an old scarecrow needs a holiday once in a while! See you soon.

Travis Jeppesen

Dare I say it? Many people won’t get Travis Jeppesen’s latest offering. I can hear them now: why bother writing poems while watching TV? Some will ask: why bother writing poetry at all? Others will read his, at times, difficult and awkward verse and be immediately shocked by its brusqueness, its anger, its cryptic playfulness. But then there will be those who tune in to his unique airwaves, those who bother to listen - the enigma-crackers - those willing to spend some time with this extraordinary book. And it is these readers who will gain the most – and ultimately matter.

The very idea of letting foreign TV creep into the mind is as intriguing as it is baffling, yet Travis Jeppesen’s marvellous collection is - as topsy-turvy as all this seems - accessible (accompanied as it is by Jeremiah Palacek’s striking paintings) and it matters. Jeppesen’s language, although new in approach, unhinged and at odds, still manages to invigorate the reader. It is fresh, and as compelling to us as first switching on the TV in a foreign hotel room for the first time: it taps into our natural curiosity, our shared sense of the other. Travis Jeppesen’s hypnotic collection should be applauded for this. [Read More]...

:::scarecrow pages:::

[short fiction]

• Janice Erlbaum - Watching Him Fuck Her.
• Heidi James - The Sister.
• Peter Wild - You've Got Everything Now.
• Ellis Sharp - The Photograph.
• Tony O'Neill - They Go Together Like A Horse And Carriage.
• Michael Keenaghan - Beast.
• Matthew Coleman - A Fat Fuck Named Sue.
• Paul Kavanagh - Decubitus.

[poetics]

• Tony O'Neill - To All Of My Dead, Drunk And Missing Uncles.
• Johnny Grace - Poems.
• James Davies - Two Fat Boys.
• Stephen Monaghan - An Ode To The Author.

[reviews]

• Tony O'Neill reviews Billy Childish - Sex Crimes of the Futcher.
• Stewart Home reviews David Seabrook - Jack of Jumps.

[interviews]

• Lee Rourke interviews Travis Jeppesen.

"Most poets I know are either dusty academics or stinky hippies rotting in the snotty tears of their own obscurity. If I'm looking for inspiration, I won't go to a poetry reading. I'd rather go to a heavy metal concert. In fact, I think poetry should move in the direction of heavy metal. What's at stake here is a poetics that's rooted in an amplification and subsequent distortion of pure thought. At least that's where I'm coming from: amplification + distortion."

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Snow Books and A.Stevens have combined and delivered a must read anthology: five glorious years of 3AM Magazine:

With contributions from Billy Childish, Bruce Benderson, Tony O'Neill, Noah Cicero, Steve Aylett and some dudes from Sonic Youth - you just know it's the anthology to read this summer.

And just when you thought it couldn't get any better Granta are set to release Tom McCarthy's wonderful Tintin and the Secret of Literature [those of you who live in London please pick up a copy of next month's The Penny for an article on Tom McCarthy written by scarecrow editor Lee Rourke]:

From the blurb:

"Hergé's Tintin cartoon adventures have been translated into more than fifty languages and read by tens of millions of children aged, as their publishers like to say, 'from 7 to 77.' Arguing that their characters are as strong and their plots as complex as any dreamt up by the great novelists, Tom McCarthy asks a simple question: is Tintin literature?"

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~book of the week~

Marguerite Duras - Whole Days in the Trees and Other Stories.

And another thing: Check out The Book Depository ::: Download the first issue of The Penny now! :::

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Wassily Kandinsky - Tate Modern.

Howard Hodgkin - Tate Britain.

Marine Hugonnier - Max Wigram Gallery.

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Scarecrow 43: An Interrogation...

Clarice Lispector.

Scarecrow returns on Monday 19th June [think gargantuan technical problems and then double them] with a Travis Jeppesen Special and fiction from novelists Janice Erlbaum, Tony O'Neill, Ellis Sharp, Stewart Home, Peter Wild and film-maker and co-editor Matthew Coleman, to name but a few...Woof!

"This book is a silence: an interrogation." (Pg 17, The Hour of the Star).

Whilst I was reading for my MA at the University of Manchester (many years ago now) my then tutor, Michael Schmidt (before he moved to Manchester Metropolitan University), solicited the age-old question: what is the primary hook, the defining crux in any contemporary novel? Many of the answers that followed, all completely right in their own way of course, centred exclusively on plot, narrative structure, place, setting, and prose-styling et cetera...

Eventually, towards the end of the seminar, I asked Michael what he thought to be the most important factor in/of the contemporary novel: "Voice" was his terse, but vital answer. The novel we were discussing that afternoon was Clarice Lispector's The Hour of the Star: a wonderful, precise novel that makes up for its flimsy appearance with a weight and timbre unsurpassed by many. I immediately agreed with my tutor, and his words (or should I say word?) still resonate strongly with me today - as do those of Lispector's astounding The Hour of the Star. But if it is indeed voice that is the fundamental undercurrent in a novel, and I ask this with utmost sincerity, how can a "book" be silent? If, after all, its sole functionality is to be heard? [Read More]...

:::scarecrow pages:::

[short fiction]

• Matt Thorne - Inside Out.
• Joshua Cohen - A heaven of Others.
• Ellis Sharp - Coming That Way.
• Heidi James - Cut To Size.
• Henry Baum - Michael Sennet [extract from North of Sunset].
• Robert Woodard - Heaping Stones [chapters 11 & 12].
• Bob Short - Red [Part II].
• Anne Booty - Jack + Jill.
• Max Dunbar - Crush With Eyeliner.
• Steve Vermillion - Notes to Self.
• Steven J. McDermott - Crane Man.
• Glenn Fisher - Play it again, Christos.
• Fern Bryant - Two Short Stories.

[poetics]

• Tony O'Neill - For N. B.
• Tony O'Neill - Between a Rock and a Hard Place.
• Travis Jeppesen - Anal Mermaids.
• Adrian Slatcher - 1970.
• Cathy Flower - On Your way - Somewhere in Hackney.
• Stephen Monaghan - 3 Poems.
• Kailas Elmer - Animal Lust.

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Scarecrow contributor and friend Tom McCarthy goes global with his astonishing debut: Remainder.

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It's been a busy month of late here at Scarecrow especially for Mr Postman; with five extra-special titles landing on the mat. First is the eagerly anticipated The Flowers of Tarbes [Michael Syrotinski's translation of Jean Paulhan's subtle, but damning, Les Fluers de Tarbes, ou la terreur dans les lettres].

This is the book Mark Thwaite at RSB has been championing for a long time now: for instance see Michael Syrotinski's Profile of Jean Paulhan at RSB. Also published at RSB is the introduction from this engaging book.

The next interesting title to land was Bruce Benderson's The Romanian [the first non-French winner of the Prix De Flore].

Thanks to James at the forward-thinking Snow Books for this important book - expect a review here at Scarecrow soon.

Scarecrow contributor Rob Woodard is the author of the down-right excellent Heaping Stones via California's Burning Shore Press. This is a novel with voice and guts that is deserving of a European readership. Read novelist Tony O'Neill's review HERE.

From Rob himself: "In some ways it makes me really angry that I felt the need to write a book like this one. In a better world we'd all be happy nudists and there'd be no need to examine our pain or create art."

Read two chapters on scarecrow right HERE.

And finally, yet another Scarecrow contributor, Henry Baum sends his scathing novel: North of Sunset.

Lee Rourke will be reviewing this compelling novel in the next issue. In the meantime you can find out all you want about this talented writer at his website. North of Sunset is also reviewed at Dogmatika - where Henry is also interviewed.

Read Henry's scarecrow debut [a chapter from North of Sunset] right HERE.

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Snow Books Book Launch, Wednesday, May 3rd, 7.30pm @ The Horse Hospital, Bloomsbury.

Bruce Benderson's The Romainian.

*Don't forget:

a) Scarecrow Gallery [with photos from Through a Glass Darkly reading].

b) Through a Glass Darkly Blog.

c) Lee Rourke reviews David Mitchell's Black Swan Green over at RSB.

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~book of the week~

Gunter Eich - Pigeons and Moles.

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And another thing: The V&A; Modernism Website to accompany the exhibition is bloody great fun ::: Novelist Henry Baum's Website is worth a visit ::: 3am Magazine's alternative list ::: RSB's Minisites [Beckett & Blanchot] ::: Tony O'Neill featured over at Dogmatika :::

LITERARY GRAVESTONES No 17:

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Modernism: 1914 - 1939 - Victoria & Albert.

Bedwyr Williams - ICA.

Ceal Floyer - Lisson Gallery.

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Scarecrow 42: Opening Paragraphs...

Juan Rulfo

ALL NEW IMPROVED SCARECROW will be back on Monday 1st May with fiction from Matt Thorne, Heidi James, Ellis Sharp, Rob Woodard, Henry Baum, Joshua Cohen, Steve J. McDermott, Anne Booty and much, much more besides...All good things come to patient scarecrows!

In the meantime why not have a look at the all new Scarecrow Gallery.

Recent online musings concerning the value of opening paragraphs in Literature has led to further contemplation here at Scarecrow. I cannot stress enough the power that lies beneath a well-orchestrated opening paragraph [not to be confused with opening lines]. And, although it doesn’t happen enough, it is simply paramount. It is the legerdemain of great literature. It is the hook, the dazzling light that draws us closer, that pulls us into the text. And, to my sheer delight, most of the time we don’t even know it’s happening to us. Although it can’t happen without the presence of voice, it isn’t an event, or a milieu, or some dialogue that pulls us in - it is something much more esoteric; something beyond tonality, voice, scene and setting; it is an unfathomable undercurrent, and it lies beneath each word, each caesura, each sentence. It simply lurks, waiting for us.

Quite possibly the most remarkable opening paragraph I have read [and reread] for some considerable time is Lydia Davis’s translation of Maurice Blanchot’s haunting l’arret de mort [more commonly know to us over here as Death Sentence]. Please consider:

“These things happened to me in 1938. I feel the greatest uneasiness in speaking of them. I have already tried to put them into writing many times. If I have written books, it has been in the hope that they would put an end to it all. If I have written novels, they have come into being just as the words began to shrink back from the truth. I am not frightened of the truth. I am afraid not to tell a secret. But until now, words have been frailer and more cunning than I would have liked. I know this guile is a warning: it would be nobler to leave the truth in peace. It would be in the best interests of the truth to keep it hidden. But now I hope to be done with it soon. To be done with it is also noble and important.” [Pg 1]. [Read More]...

:::scarecrow pages:::

[short fiction]

• Steve Vermillion - Radio Waves.
• Ellis Sharp - Dirt Enters at the Heart.
• Andrew Gallix - Sweet Fanny Adams Reloaded.
• Zakia Uddin - Gauze.
• Andrew Venner - Shot.
• Jason Michel - Black Dog.
• Matthew Coleman - The Adventures of Super Cock. [csl]*
• Airina Imran - Pas De Deux: Fucking of Pens.
• Kwok Wan - Forget the Dead You've Left.

[poetics]

• Robert Woodard - After Richard Hell in West Hollywood. Coffeehouse Poem [to Michelle]. My Formal Sleep. Oh Cunt.
• Lisa Williams - The Blackbirds Filled the Sky With Song. Central Park Zoo. The Bathers.
• Travis Jeppesen - ARF ROCK. formoverform. Poem.
• Glenna Myles - Two Poems.
• Merrick Palmer - Her First Dance. One Of My Old Jobs.
• Rositza Pironska - About Florida, France, Germany and Everything Else. A Yellow Spot.
• Andrew Venner - Logical Engineering.
• Cecilia Condon - Some Poems.

[reviews]

• Tony O'Neill reviews Robert Woodard - Heaping Stones.
• Naomi Ziewe reviews Delores Philips - The Darkest Child.

[interviews]

• Robert Woodard interviews Dan Fante.

"I wanted to write a play about my father [John Fante], and it's interesting that my mother said to me, after she read it -- my father had been dead many years -- and she said: "Oh my god, it's like having your father sitting here next to me!" His style of delivery is kind of wry, cynical, and his ease at antagonism was, is captured in that play. I also really wanted to capture my father's personality, to kind of give a glimpse of in real time the kind of person he was. He comes alive again, and that was very important to me because I wanted ... It's kind of a biography of my father."

*This interview was taken, with kind permission, from the Burning Shore Press website.

[essays]

• Ellis Sharp - The Complicity of Paul Celan.

*[csl: Contains Strong Language].

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More than a mere literary shindig this, most definitely, is a literary event. Reading on the night will be Tom McCarthy, Matt Thorne, Heidi James, Paul Ewen and Lee Rourke:

:::

An online Paul Celan Archive was recently unearthed by Mark Thwaite at RSB. The archive is extensive and contains some of Celan's best work.

Contained here are, undoubtedly, some of his greatest works. If you have not yet read Paul Celan he is definitely a poet worth pursuing.

:::

Also unearthed by Mr Mark Thwaite [via Steve Mitchelmore] is this fascinating essay on Maurice Blanchot's wonderful l'arret de mort.

It seems interest is hotting up concerning this most intriguing of writers. And long may it continue.

:::

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Stewart Home

Hallucination Generation: High modernism in a tripped out world.

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~book of the week~

Juan Rulfo - Pedro Paramo.

And another thing: Buzzwords' Missing Links ::: Short Term Memory Loss demands an answer! :::

LITERARY GRAVESTONES No 19: Paul Verlaine.

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Hendrik Whittkopf - Generalpublic, Berlin.

Gothic Nightmares - Tate Britain.

Richard Cuerden - Seventeen.

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Scarecrow 41: Almost Blue...

Tony O'Neill

It was A. Stevens from 3am Magazine who first referred to novelist Tony O'Neill as a potential "Nelson Algren for the 21st Century". I'm the second and I won't be the last. 3am Magazine having unearthed this extraordinary writer, you'll recall, long before current interest. Talk long ago was about Tony O'Neill's, then, forthcoming debut novel Digging the Vein. Well, we don't have to wait any longer as Digging the Vein has just been published over in America by New York's Contemporary Press. The heavily awaited British release is scheduled for July via the ultra cool publishers of Dan Fante - our very own Wrecking Ball Press.

The book is hard-hitting, yet beautifully written. The first paragraph speaks for itself in its clarity and splendour. It is also a paragraph that articulates many things:

"In Hollywood, the sun rises and stays up in the dirty sky pummelling you into submission for twelve hours or so before sinking behind the hills. Then everybody waits for it to start up all over again, up and down and up and down, futile and ceaseless. No seasons, no change, just relentless brightness. Nobody can ever escape the glare of the unforgiving sun. They just carry on, dumb with sunshine and desert heat, trying to find a darkened corner where they can conduct business that has no place in the daylight." [Pg 1]. [Read More]...

:::scarecrow pages:::

[short fiction]

• Mark SaFranko - Southern Holiday.
• Bob Short - Halloween '79.
• Tony O'Neill - Dr, Ira.
• Steve Vermillion - Now We Are Home.
• Fern Bryant - The Prisoner.
• Johnny Grace - Polemic.
• Adelle Stripe - Jeanie.
• Marvin Medina - Waiting Room.
• Paul Kavanagh - Flower.
• Lander Hawes - The Moustache Diaries.
• Matthew Coleman - Manny the Ex-Tranny.
• Kwok Wan - Ghosts in the Eyes.

[poetics]

• Mark SaFranko - The Lawnmower.
• Mark SaFranko - The Noose.
• Mark SaFranko - Trapped.
• Travis Jeppesen - Pagan Cunts a Virtue, She Says.
• Sam Milsom - Three Poems.
• Richard Wink - Four Poems.
• Cathy Flower - There is a Tune.

[interviews]

• Lee Rourke interviews Tony O'Neill.

"So that’s when I decided to try and withdraw from methadone again – and that’s why I started writing the book. The book – at the start – was literally something to do while I was detoxing. Something to keep me sane. And I started writing about incidents that I wasn’t proud of in my life, almost to purge them out of my system. And after a rickety start, I felt the words start to come. I felt like a retired boxer going back in the ring for one last fight. It started to come easier and easier. At the start I was sat by the computer, you know, in tears. Dope-sick. Shaking. Throwing up into trashcans. And getting it down a fucking word at a time. The depression lasted months. Months and months. And I wrote through it. There was no thought of publishing it at the start. It was just to keep myself sane."

[essays]

• Noah Cicero - What I am Really Angry About?

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Landing quite recently on the Scarecrow doormat was an interesting title from Marion Boyars Publishers:

Expect a thorough review here at Scarecrow rather soon. Also worth a look, while you're at it, is their concise Modern Classics series.

:::

Randolph Carter informs Scarecrow of the imminent arrival of the all new Johnny Pulp series - a new imprint that has risen from [the still crackling embers of] Attack Books.

Randolph says: " Johnny Pulp is an overkill junky blending his blood splattered vision with comedic overkill that takes the novel back to its dissenting political roots. Pulp fiction for the Grand Theft Auto generation". Please get in touch with 3am Magazine Editor-in-Chief Andrew Gallix for more information.

:::

Be sure to get your hands on a copy of this month's Dazed & Confused as editor Lee Rourke has written a little something about novelist, and scarecrow contributor, Tom "Remainder" McCarthy.

:::

~book of the week~

Alain Robbe-Grillet.

And another thing: Lee Rourke is this month's Featured Writer at Dogmatika ::: scarecrow contributor Lauren McCarthy has her own site ::: The artwork for Noah Cicero's latest is very nice indeed ::: Mark Thwaite is the 51st most important human being in publishing! But who put Simon Mayo in there! ::: Haw haw haw haw haw haw haw! :::

LITERARY GRAVESTONES No 17: Hugh MacDiarmid.

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Rod Dickinson and Tom McCarthy - Beaconsfield Gallery.

Kevin Cummins - Paul Stolper Gallery.

Mark Titchner - Arnolfini.

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Scarecrow 40: Everyday Life...

Raoul Vaneigem

Ask most people familiar with the Situationists and most probably [in my humble experience at least], eight times out of ten, they will mention Guy Debord. And Guy Debord only. Fair enough, that’s highly understandable. But for all concerned here at Scarecrow the underlying influence that has continued to dazzle and delight is the quite brilliant Raoul Vaneigem [and some of you may now shrug and say “so what?”, to which we reply “He still matters”]. We are ultimately interested in his seminal work: Traite de savoir-vivre a l’usage des jeunes gens [or as it’s more commonly known over here: The Revolution of Everyday Life].

When Raoul Vaneigem proclaims:

“In a gloomy bar where everyone is bored to death, a drunken young man breaks his glass, then picks up a bottle and smashes it against the wall. Nobody gets excited; the disappointed young man lets himself be thrown out. Yet everyone there could have done exactly the same thing. He alone made the thought concrete, crossing the first radioactive belt of isolation: interior isolation, the introverted separation between self and outside world. Nobody responded to a sign which he thought was explicit. He remained alone like the hooligan who burns down a church or kills a policeman, at one with himself but condemned to exile as long as other people remain exiled from their own existence.” [Chapter 3 “Isolation”, The Revolution of Everyday Life].

We sing from the same hymn sheet, Raoul baby! [Read More]...

:::scarecrow pages:::

[short fiction]

• H P Tinker - Intermezzo.
• Paul Ewen - French House, Soho.
• Andrew Gallix - Angel at a 25 Degree Angle.
• Michael Keenaghan - Love and Hate on the Silver Screen. *[csl]
• Cathy Flower - Nine Stories High.
• Steve Vermillion - Surface Tension.
• Lauren McCarthy - Ways To Go.
• Matthew Coleman - The Dominatrix. *[csl]
• Gurdeep Mattu - Turned Into Street.
• Lee Rourke - Being Lee Rourke is Boring.

[reviews]

• A. Stevens reviews Lisa Appignanesi [ed.] - Free Expression Is No Offence.

[poetics]

• Travis Jeppesen - Murder Leisure.
• Travis Jeppesen - Under a Funeral Moon.
• Travis Jeppesen - You Are My Anything.
• Lauren McCarthy - Poems.
• Glenna Myles - Conversation in a Hammock.
• Glenna Myles - OHMYGOD! An End to Cinema.

[interviews]

• Lee Rourke interviews Stewart Home.*

"I wrote Tainted Love precisely because I don’t find most memoirs worthwhile. They’re formulaic, particularly the celebrity memoir or autobiography. I wanted to create the double of the memoir, something with a twist and that recorded a genuinely interesting life. Celebrities are never interesting, they’ve become pure image with all their humanity removed from them, celebrities are just an abstraction of what it is to be human and their pseudo-lives aren’t of interest to me at all. I’m more interested in people who can’t afford to do rehab in The Priory, but unfortunately it’s the rich and famous who most usually get their memoirs published."

*Download Tainted Love audio mp3.

• Tony O'Neill interviews Mark SaFranko.*

"Part of the problem of course is the deficit in attention span, These days, unless you can make something move, you’re pretty much dead as a writer, especially if you’re not Stephen King or somebody like that. So much, both internal and external, has to be sacrificed to pace. I don’t think Henry Miller or lots of other people could get their stuff into print today."

*Read 3 original Mark SaFranko short fictions at DOGMATIKA.

*[csl: Contains Strong Language]

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Go on, have a gander...

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Well, yes, the recent Top 100 First Lines from novels list was an excellent exercise, but surely the following line should be in the top three, eh?

"A man called Berg, who changed his name to Greb, came to a seaside town intending to kill his father. . . ." BERG, Ann Quin.

Well, where the hell was it?

:::

You'll be pushed to find better writing elsewhere.

:::

Recently a very interesting book landed on the scarecrow doorstep from the wonderful Fugue State Press in New York. James Chapman's absorbing Stet is a luscious reworking of the Russian "holy fool":

"Opinionated, discursive, soulful, the voice establishes the basis of the society in which Stet lives: a place where everybody judges, everybody feels he has the right to criticize, and the State even encourages 'Self-Criticism'. Failing that, the State may even criticize you to death. The novel imagines a world where we do not live by our judgements of others, nor by our fear of what other people think of us."

Interesting stuff, eh? From what we've read it lives up to its initial promise. Expect the review soon. In the meantime have a look at Fugue State Press.

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!The Birth of BLATT!

Rising from the ashes of the defunct Prague Literary Review, editors Joshua Cohen and Travis Jeppesen [who's made his scarecrow debut this issue here, here and here] have once again teamed up with art director Mario Dzurila to produce a bi-monthly review featuring a mixture of literature, art, and ideas. When questioned about the magazine’s idiosyncratic name, Jeppesen had this to say:

“It’s a German word meaning ‘leaf’ or ‘sheet of paper’… basically any blank surface you can write on. Rather than say anymore about it,” he added, “I’d rather let BLATT define itself.”

In addition to the magazine, the first titles in a BLATT BOOKS publishing imprint will be hitting the shelves this spring. Says Jeppesen:

“We hope to be an engine for those interested in challenging dominant modes of perception, be it in the realm of letters or in visual mediums, or some cross-over between the two. We’re interested in artists, writers, thinkers, madmen, skeptics, and skydivers who are creating their own languages, carving out their own systematic approaches to the world that have nothing to do with anything else going on today. We want to be a forum for the voiceless, those who, by dint of artificial barriers such as language or purity of vision, don’t fit in with any current trends or cultural definitions. We’re into challenging preconceived notions of good and evil. We’re young, angry, horny, and persistent. We’re fighting a war against the mediocrity that surrounds us. We’re here to fuck shit up.”

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Get thyself here now!

[Simply the best new blog in town]

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~book of the week~

Michel Houellebecq - The Possibility of an Island.

And another thing: 3AM Magazine interview Noah Cicero ::: Lee Rourke's latest over at RSB ::: The Sharp Side points out the good from the bad ::: Oh where would we be without our RSB? :::

LITERARY GRAVESTONES No 18: Gerard Manley Hopkins.

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Carrying the Colours - People's History Museum, Manchester.

Warhol's World - Hauser & Wirth.

Dryden Goodwin - Chisenhale Gallery.

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