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'O Fallen Angel is a tribute to all the damaged girls, all the toxic teenagers, college roommates, and friends you’ve known who were all at once the best and worst versions of themselves. This work spews back at society the vile, misguided judgments we place upon one another with the style of a post-modern poet and the mind of Woolf. The reality and banality of suburbia, its conventional ideals and preconceived notions regarding gender and voice are quickly demystified as Zambreno examines the root of our culture clashes. Here we are asked: what are accepted/rejected ideas on madness and the cruelty of the monotony of the middle-class landscape? Reminiscent of Baudelaire, Zambreno takes that madness and hysteria to a new level, where their yin and yang drive these powerful, sparse pages.' -- Angela Stubbs, The Collagist
'Kate Zambreno is centrally concerned with superficiality and its relation to the limits of empathy, the inaccessibility of others’ suffering. Her treatment of her characters embodies this concern: the characters here are flat enough that the narrator remains a plane removed from them, and we readers a plane yet further. O Fallen Angel investigates superficiality and empathy both as defining concerns of fiction—which (traditionally?) aims to make fictive lives real enough to allow us to imagine the pain of another—and as issues of acute political concern in contemporary America.' -- The Quarterly Conversation
Kate Zambreno O Fallen AngelChiasmus Press
'O FALLEN ANGEL is a triptych of modern-day America set in a banal Midwestern landscape, inspired by Francis Bacon's Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. There is "Mommy," a portrait of housewife psychosis, cruelly and crudely drawn, fenced in by her own small mind. There is "Maggie," Mommy's unfortunate daughter whom she infects with fairytales, a Dora stuffed numb with pills, a casualty of gender roles and the DSM-IV. Then there is the mysterious martyr-figure Malachi, a Cassandra in army fatigues, the Septimus Smith to Mommy's Mrs. Dalloway, who stands at the foot of the highway holding signs of fervent prophecy, gaping at the bottomless abyss of the human condition, while SUVs scream past. Kate Zambreno's O FALLEN ANGEL commits an act of anarchic literary sacrilege that calls to mind the rant and rage of an American Elfriede Jelinek, an exorcism of the culture wars and pop-cultural debris, a sneering indictment of deaf ears, blind eyes, and mute mouths.' -- Chiasmus Press
Excerpts:
And Sleeping Beauty wanted to be liked and had terribly low self-esteem so when he said that she was the prettiest girl in all the land she gave him a blow-job, even though her jaw locks sometimes.
And Sleeping Beauty pretended to be asleep but really she died inside and then she let Prince Charming cum between her tits and on her face and in her hair as he breathed Yeah Bitch Take It.
And Sleeping Beauty didn’t make him wear a condom and now she has pelvic inflammatory disease and crotch-itch and genital warts, but, oh, the memories.
Don’t all little girls have rape fantasies? Maggie is in a dark wood and the wolf comes up to her and he slams her face into a tree. He chops her to pieces, the bad, bad, wolf, because she is a bad, bad girl.
*
Maggie is depressed. Maggie LIKES to be depressed. Maggie writes in her dear, dear, diary (tear drops stain the ink): Perhaps love is a delusion and we all hide ourselves with half-lies and fiction. Maggie writes to fill in her anonymous sketched outline. Maggie is a blank slate. Maggie is beginning to realize the life truth that no one else knows who anyone else truly is inside. Maggie’s inner life is radically different than people’s outward perception of Maggie, which makes Maggie desperately unhappy. Maggie knows from psychology that the happiest are those with the most illusions. That is Sigmund Freud. This is why Maggie is not happy—she has lost her illusions. Maggie is a lost girl. Maggie is drifting in a sea of anonymity and anomie.
Kate Zambreno reads from 'Of Fallen Angel', pt. 1
Kate Zambreno reads from 'Of Fallen Angel', pt. 2
Kate Zambreno 'I Am Sharon Tate'
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'The ghost is spirit, immaterial, beyond the boundary of what lives. The machine has a mass; it is made from parts and moves though it remains stationary. Thus Mirov's poems move like parts, yet remain immaterial; they describe a world of the spirit where we see moving parts. The sentence rules. The imagination is based upon a foundation of parataxis. If the poem is lineated on the page like a poem, if the poem is given the contours of a prose poem, this means almost nothing: these poems explore the sentence in its simplest, most marvelous form. 'My ideas are boring. She bleeds on the sheets.' We have boring ideas, this is called living. And when she bleeds on the sheets we want to know why: is this an ordinary bleeding or a more sinister flow? Mirov doesn't tell us. We have imaginations. 'I act like myself at a coffee shop and try not to shake.' I remember something called phenomenology, an excruciating inventorying of every noticed moment and its content. These are phenomenological poems. The ghost of Jack Spicer presides.' -- Jon Cone, eliminae
'What with all of Ghost Machine’s stripped-down declarative sentences of wet earlobes and blithe gashes and mythic ATMs and beer spilled on neon, the reader does get a sense of hipster angst. And certainly this is the book of poems I’d give to anyone who likes when The National gets stuck in their head. But Ghost Machine transcends the fashion feedback chamber by thinking about what it means to be stuck thinking in heads. What it means to be an I who’s an Eye who “walk[s] through love with a / mannequin’s arm” and who “lose[s] all of my echoes to friends.” The real angst in these poems floats from the way memory is a ghost of visitation that never stops suggesting otherwise: “Eye / can never revisit a moment. Eye can’t shut down the / recording device.”' -- Mike Young, Noo Journal
Ben Mirov Ghost MachineCaketrain
'“I should tell you something about my life,” Ben Mirov intones in the midst of Ghost Machine, and by this point, about two-thirds of the way through the book, the reader has already been absolutely inundated with bizarre images from the life of a poet that seems indissoluble from the words on the page -- it feels at once autobiographical, despite any argument over the separation of “voice” from “poet” and so on, but also vaguely fictive, fantastical. Either way, this book is frighteningly honest in tone, fact, and style, and we are thrown into a vision of life that is at once playful and unbearable.
'Ghost Machine, winner of the 2009 Caketrain Chapbook Competition, is exactly as its title suggests: a stylistic cavalcade of poems reminiscent of John Berryman’s The Dream Songs, in the sense that Mirov has stumbled across a form that, once unleashed, harnesses and contains the energy of the language. The formalism of the book is its constancy, a deceptively simple series of rapid-fire declarative sentences that carry the entire weight of the book, the machine through which the ghost -- that elusive personality of fractured understanding that the speaker himself can barely comprehend -- must attempt to speak.' -- Sean Patrick Hill, Bookslut
Excerpts:
Kid Dream Title
Zombies flush the meadows. Vampires flush the meadows. I think green bunnies as D goes in the PSR. I say green bunnies to protect me from the silence we make. I take an escalator to another level. I take huge leaps to get to a garage full of weapons. I choose a samurai sword to do I don't know what. People I know are riding black keys. One of them climbs the face of a stone idol. Another posts pixilated photographs. A huge brain controls the waterfall. It can't hide itself. I blow the doors open with wind from my eyelid. Enemies flood the garage with motorcycles. He takes his time filling the shells.
Ummm Bone
TV will cure you and drink coffee and listen to the Don'ts. Nothing left of the dream on the hill leaves me feeling washed. The sentence in my mind is turn your breasts into cash with music. I lack organizational skills and love and calls over the infrastructure. My soul is sent to another city to organize a puddle. I hear the bullshit and choose another. I'm made of enemies of steam and things you've done to me. This relationship is doomed. The claw comes and goes. I am a smoker. You are a door to a switch. I am beginning to travel. I think about planes and suitcases and what shampoo. They send back no reply. I serve them waffles and say say please. R won't stop biting his toes. C is walking through a memory of Dolores. Sometimes she is with me. Sometimes not. I can bum around on couches for a month. I can buy shoes.
Sample Edits
We work in a room with the blinds down. You can eat pizza all the time. I remember swimming in the ocean with her. I pass a yellow cable over the coffee. Two weeks and she touched me there. Coming from the East Bay is thinking time. I won’t run into you. Promises about feelings are turquoise. Cigarettes are tiny men, not women. I bet you’re cold. We make-out against some graffiti. Poems can’t be typed. Other times, I wonder what he’s like in bed. I buy noodles at midnight. Couples on the street piss me off, then make me happy. What’s your trick for going to sleep.
Trailer: 'Ghost Machine'
Ben Mirov reviews Ben Mirov's 'Ghost Machine'
Ben Mirov reads his poetry
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'Always one to think outside of the box and speak his mind honestly, Dom Lyne’s work takes a no-holds-barred approach. A visual, aural, mental kick in the teeth, a punch in society’s guts. Misanthropic, blunt, and opinionated; a style in keeping with Dom’s ethos that if you don’t think for yourself, you are not thinking at all, only merely following like livestock. One person might not be able to change the world, but he’ll certainly try and leave a scar upon it. Punk ethics for a digital and wasted generation.
'A graduate of The Academy of Contemporary Music, Guildford – where he studied for five years both in performance (drums), music business and music production, and gained a first-class honours Degree in Contemporary Music Production - Dom has worked in various mediums. He has both worked with and rebranded companies both in the UK and the US. His musical project The Red Devil Incident has provided music for usage on Nadeo’s TrackMania Sunrise (PC, 2005), Trackmania Sunrise Extreme (PC, 2006), THQ’s MotoGP06 (xBox, 2006), Modern Life’s independent UK film Ten Dead Men (Film, 2008), and Tailslating Production’s interactive web series The Hayley Project (Episode 6, 2008).
'He is the author of two books The Mushroom Diaries (DPL Publishing, 2009) and Ink Spills and Five Notes of Suicide (Degraded Dischord, 2010). His most recent works are a series of graphic shorts collectively entitled Cycle-2, available as eBooks, Apple apps, and pdfs at Lyne's Fasten Your Seatbelts website.' -- FYSB
Dominic Lyne Ink Spills and Five Notes of SuicideDegraded Dischord
'‘Look what you do to me. Let’s have sex.’ ‘Okay.’ And that was the start of it all. Well, not the start. The commitment, the uncaring change over.
So here’s the deal, you’re being let into a head. That’s it, that’s all you’re getting. Only part of a story, only waking thoughts for which you’ll need to fill in the blanks.
This is the output of fifty mornings. Fifty ink spills across blank pages of a book. Fifty waking thoughts scrawled through half open eyes.
Fifty mornings getting over him.' -- Degraded Dischord
Excerpt:
The cigarette dies slowly between my fingers, two more drags and it reaches its end. I flick it out onto the balcony before me and watch its dying gasps against the solid floor. I smile coldly. How like the past year, ignited with a spark, enjoyed then extinguished, leaving nothing but a taste. Enjoyment and damage all from something so small.
Behind me the flat rattles with its silent ghosts. Memories. So few arguments existed here, but the laughter has long since been forgotten and only the silence remains in its wake. I sigh. Click, flame, inhale. Another cigarette breathes to life in my shaking hands. Welcome to this moment, sorry for its lack of sunlight.
It wasn’t always like this; it used to be fun, happy. Two lives filled with laughter. I loved him you know, I really loved him, still do, only now it just feels hollow. I guess he loved me; he said he did but we never truly know for certain do we? That’s where trust comes in. Long story short, our relationship rotted within these four walls in front of a television screen. Conversations gave way to cold silences; entwined sleeps to opposite sides of the bed. When you live with someone, that’s when you realise how different they truly are to the vision in your head. I guess you stop growing as people, and when you stop growing you start rotting.
The cigarette breathes its last and stumbles to the floor to be next to its brothers. I watch it for a second before getting to my feet and walking into the flat. I let my feet guide me through, they’ve walked this path so many times that now it’s an unthinking movement. Everything is as it always is, in the allotted place, nothing just randomly positioned. That’s the way he likes it, so that’s the way it’s maintained. There is only one difference though, one major difference. The flat is devoid of anything that belongs to me, well when I say that I mean the things that indicated my existence, the personal elements of my part in the relationship. They are somewhere else; these are my final moments.
The Red Devil Incident 'Mutants'
Dom Lyne/The Red Devil Incident interviewed
The Red Devil Incident 'Parasites'
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*
Hey. Very sorry about the unexpected pause. Those who saw my comment yesterday know that the electricity and internet here at the Recollets suffered a big outage yesterday, possibly snowfall related, and things didn't get back to normal around here until the late afternoon. Anyway, all that was broken has supposedly been repaired now, and things should proceed smoothly, I think. LATER: I spoke too soon. The internet went out again as I was about to post this, and it will be out until at least tomorrow morning. I'm posting this from a cafe. I should be able to post tomorrow. I'll do my very best. Sorry for the mess. ** Misanthrope, Ha ha, I'm no psychic, it's just logic, dude. Maybe Leo DiCap is going through the actor version of what you're going through. His 'do it' side is losing out to his stay comfortable side. Maybe it's you and he who have the psychic link. Wait, you're off to NYC today. Dude, have a blast. Last year on my birthday, I was sitting in PS122 watching 'Jerk' and Jonathan C. had the audience sing happy birthday to me, and it was a pure horror moment that still makes my shoulders knot when I recall it, so don't even think about trying something like that. Serious. ** Kiddiepunk, Dude, so where are you exactly? Australia, Italy? Your Facebook update was most ambiguous. You missed the big Recollets blackout. It was the best blackout ever!!! ** Colin, I'm very happy that my Santas dried your tears, in theory at least. I'm sure the Santas were happy too. Watch your chimney for further updates. ** David Ehrenstein, Finnish horror, evil Santa ... what more could one need? I knew you'd come up with the goods on the DADT repeal. Hat doffed. Everyone, Mr. David Ehrenstein on the DADT repeal in his inimitable FaBlog style. ** David, Yep, that's for sure. ** Pilgarlic, Hey, sir. How was the island? I googled Tybee Island this morning and found an aerial shot. Nice looking place. What are all those brown, blank looking areas of the island? Swamps or ... ? They look like brown golf courses. ** Bill, That Santa of yours would have made the cut, you bet. Good weekend just past, I hope? ** Sypha, You're on your vacation now, I think. Congrats, bud. Oh, very cool ... I'll go read what you have to say re: the Smithsonian controversy in a bit. Everyone, the might Sypha has 'finally got around to posting my reaction to the whole "Fire in my Belly"/Smithsonian controversy this afternoon on my new blog. Here it is. Do yourselves the obvious favor by clicking that, yes? ** Alan, Hey. Thanks for close look at my Santas and for the kind words. Very interested to see what you'll be making along the Santa lines. Everyone, the fine wordsmith, blog master, and d.l. Alan is going to be doing a Santa-themed something or other this week on his dreamy blog 'the purest of treats'. Keep a lucky eye out. Oh, Paul Buccholz, yeah, he's a wonderful writer. Hm, he moved to New York a while back, and posted here for a while and then stopped. I wonder how he's doing. Have you met up with him? Oh, yeah, that is a good piece on the DADT repeal. Thanks a lot for that. Everyone, while we're on the Alan bandwagon, he recommends this think piece on the DADT repeal, and I think it's quite good too, so add my recommendation. ** Jon Reiss, Hey. Well, I'm psyched to have an 'in' with Jewcy, so we're, like, twins. I read the Lypsite interview. Really good. I'll go find the the others. The 'getting an agent' thing is harder than the 'getting a publisher' thing, which is, yeah, hard enough. I don't think it's totally necessary to have a predetermined 'in' or reference. I can think of people who've gotten agents without advance schmooze or preemptive strikes or much anyway. I mean, use/drop my name in your queries if it would help at all. I'm not sure if it would, though. My name is pretty divisive, I think. Anyway, don't give up on the agent. I say try with total dedication and stay as pragmatic as you can about the outcomes. ** Bernard Welt, Well, it's about setting precedent and adding leverage and weakening the opposing arguments re: the grander rights ahead, no? ** MANCY, Hey. Have you managed to take photographs and make art lately? I'm guessing/ hoping the new work on your blog means you have. Great stuff. I love 'Quad 1' and the latest few series on Light Socket a lot. ** Brendan, Well, that was a secret test to see how clever everybody here is, and you won, man! Congratulations! No, it just weirdly came up in my relentless google search for Santa Clauses, and all credit goes to the nameless guy who put it on his blog to explain how Santa's sleigh pulls off its amazing technical feat every Xmas. ** Dusty Rose, Well, surely someone can boot you a copy of the first problem solver, and God can solve your second problem if you change your evil ways, I guess, and Santa can solve the third problem if you've been a good boy. So, yeah, no worries, ha ha. ** Steevee, I don't think defriending people on FB is hard. I've never de-friended anyone, but people do it constantly. Thanks a lot for your best films list. Excellent choices, obviously. Happy to see 'EtV' up at the top, of course. Yes, I've been following the conviction of Jafar Panahi. Shocking and very distressing. ** _Black_Acrylic, Well, good news for sure. On the unfrozen taps/ pipes, and, well, on the haircut too. I think Yury prefers some direction from the client. I think stylists usually do. The problem is when clients have exactly what they want in mind and don't realize that their hair is too thick or flimsy or thin or whatever to support the look they want. Hope the Xmas dinner was a total pleasure. Nice alert on the Philip Best thesis. Let me ... Everyone, here's _Black_Acrylic: 'May be of interest to some folk round these parts, Dr Philip Best of Whitehouse wrote his thesis on "Apocalypticism in the Fiction of William S. Burroughs, J. G. Ballard, and Thomas Pynchon." It's available for download here'. I'm guessing you saw that William Bennett did the Invisible Jukebox in last month's issue of The Wire. It was pretty interesting. Such a smart guy. ** James, Hi, James. Yeah, I got the book safe and sound. I haven't started reading it yet, but it's staring me in the face, and I plan to start it asap. Thanks a lot! ** Hayden Derk, Hi, man. How's it? How's the novel going? Oh, I like Yukio Mishima a lot. I'd like to go back and reread him because it's been a while. 'Forbidden Colors' is totally wonderful. I even really like the 'Sea of Fertility' novels, which lot of Mishima fans I know find too baroque or something. Do you know them? ** Polter, Weird, I have a little thing in my novel about 'Edward Scissorhands'. That's not so interesting to note, I guess, but it surprised me. The thing that scared me the most in 'Wizard of Oz' as a kid was when that guard says, 'Dorothy, you killed her', or whatever he says after the witch melts. I think it was his weird voice. And maybe the hemet. Hm, I dream about falling every time I remember my dreams, which probably means I dream about falling every night, and I wonder what part of me keeps growing, if that theory is correct. I guess I'm kind of tall, but I don't think I'd be all that tall in Scandinavia. 21 is a funny age to become. Good, but confusing because it's so hyped up, I guess. What am I doing next? Oh, I have to write a theater piece. Well, it's a theater piece that's a trailer for a bigger theater piece that I'll need to write after that, but it's a theater piece in and of itself too. It's a teenaged boy mannequin/ robot wearing an evil hand puppet who is supposed to implore people to come rescue him and his friends who are captive in some scary maze world. The bigger piece will take place in the maze world. That probably makes no sense. So, I have to do that and ... what else? Oh, maybe put together a book of the slave posts from the blog. The texts, not the photos. It's pretty different to write a theater piece than a novel. For one thing, it's writing something to realize the ideas of the director, and it's subject to a group decision as opposed to my novels where I get to totally play God. It's more like building one part of a machine that has to work together with all the other parts that are being made by the director, composer(s), performers, lighting and set designers, and so on. Merry Xmas week to you too. ** L@rstonovich, Aw, thanks, man. Peart realm ... mm, that's not good. I can imagine how that could have happened, though. Awesome on the parental generosity. Now you have to get them a really cool gift. Like ... what? ** The Dreadful Flying Glove, Ha ha, great story about your dad's double take. That was good. You sound amazingly calmish and centered for a guy who's about to make such a big move. I get all out of sorts before I even have to take a two hour train ride somewhere. ** Andrew, I knew you could do it. Walk down an icy hill, I mean. So, I'm guessing you walked back up too. ** Frank Jaffe, Hi, Frank! What in the world is a Krispy Kreme Bacon Cheeseburger. Tell me. I can take it. That Krispy Kreme part really confused me. 'Weird Little Boy'! Trippy. I didn't know that was still gettable. That is an interesting boyfriend you've got there. 'WLB' isn't the kind of thing you play every day or even more than once maybe, ha ha, but it has its charms, I think. Wait, today's your birthday! Holy shit! Have the happiest one ever! I'll drink something in its and your honor tonight. I can't guarantee it'll be alcohol, but I'll make sure it's a lot better than water or a double expresso. Enjoy! ** Steven Trull, Wow, you answered my questions. You're the best! Nice answers too. You don't want to have sex with the mummified Santa? Okay, that surprised me. Anyway, you rule, like I said. I miss LA too. High, sad five. ** Dennis Cooper, 'F' shouldn't be capitalized, and the structure of that same sentence is very poor, and not in your inimitable faux-poor sentence structure way either. ** Adjoun, Cool, thanks. Well, low key as they may be, compared to my Xmas Eve and Xmas, yours are going to be excitement central. Well, I do have that second Buche de Noel waiting for me, though. So, maybe it's a tie. ** Paul Curran, It was nice to have been down here, even via iPhone, which made being down here feel sort of tenuous. You must be gearing up for Xmas, papa. ** Creative Massacre, Hey. Yeah, the sky was all thick and overcast last night here too, so no eclipse sighting for me either. 'Black Swan' hasn't opened here in France yet. I kind of can't stand that director's movies, but I've read so much positive stuff about the film that I guess maybe I'll go see it. Let me know what you think of it. ** Postitbreakup, Hey. Xmas chores: I only have maybe one or two this year, which is so nice. I will admit that I did a little studying of the way Keanu used to talk before he went all tight lipped and suave re: my characters' voices. Hope you've gotten most of your chores done. ** Right. Today's post: three more books I loved and that I want to alert you guys to. Pretty simple. I think or I strongly hope that I will see you as per usual tomorrow. Fingers crossed.
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