Zak Ferguson - Manic images somehow increasingly specific, like intimate sea-divers setting off a light-pulse from within a leviathan, merging with genres like science fiction or metaphysics and rant. It is writing that burns itself

 

Zak Ferguson, The System Compendium, Sweat

Drenched Press, 2021.

T H I S I S N O T A B O O K

I T I S A S T A T E M E N T I T I S

A N anti - A N T I - A N T I - N O V E L.

I T I S A M A N I F E S T O.

A P A R O D Y.

A S A T I R E .

A C U T - U P – C O N S C I O U S N E S S - n o v e l.

????¬¬¬¬¬¬``````?????????/???????//////////\\\\\\\\\\\\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/I T I S P E T U L A N T. `/`/`/`/`/`/`/`/`/`/`/IT IS RAW. IT IS UNDEFINABLE. IT IS PURE EXPERIMENTAL-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism AUTISTI-CLITERATU\\R\E -ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism...for better or for worst.

Zak Ferguson’s debut novel Eat Your Keyboard was released at the beginning of 2017, and before, during and after its release he was working furiously at writing the final two books of what Zak fully envisioned as a trilogy of books. The writing process was hard going – the book continually evolving – warping. The whole experience has been hard. Heart-wrenching. Zak wasn’t happy with it, nor felt much confidence as to the future books’ safety and the works integrity with the Press it was with initially.

Eat Your Keyboard was and continues to be a novel that has infected those of whom have read it. Many have enquired as to whether there are follow ups. Zak has reassured many, for the last two to three years, that the book was forthcoming. Alas, it wasn’t. So much had gone on between the first book and the ever changing two books that were bristling in anticipation, to mess up the readers it knew it could corrupt – Zak was undecided about the books fate.

After much turmoil and strife, both professionally and personally, Zak burnt out. The only thing that kept him going was the notion that he could now set up shop and continue on his career as a writer – but, wishing to add Publisher to his resume. And the Eat Your Keyboard cycle was not going to fade, it was going to be at the epicentre as to why he wanted to publish his own works.

Since then, starting his own Press, Zak has released 7 novels – though, no signs of the EYK follow ups/re-issues were made clear – to anyone, nor himself.

Over the past few years Zak has worked almost every single day on his 600-page experimental novel – that collects all three books of the EYK trilogy.

The difference is, the book is one big compendium, with new art exclusively made for this books release by Carlos Davila, and special adverts shoved in by DB Spitzer – to lend this book a whole new identity. And a few crappy pieces of artwork from Zak’s end, but, lets see if you can spot them?

If you have read EYK, not only do you get a new, expanded, re-written (like the best re-released experimental cut-up novels) novel, you get both of the follows up, DESTROY YOUR KEYBOARD and DISGORGE YOUR KEYBOARD - a wholly NEW huge beast of a book to weigh down your children when they won’t keep still, or to hold open a bank vaults door as you steal its contents – that, or it just makes your already heaving bookshelves bow under its madness.

As a person with a diagnosis of Autism, Zak strived to create a book that gives the reader the closest thing to an autistic experience, as possible, a roller-coaster ride that Zak experiences on a daily basis, a psychological and mental challenge that has been shaped into a physical form. The reader will feel most things associated with Autism by immersing themselves into Zak’s world and writing.

"Zak Ferguson's writing is like letting an electric virus invade your central nervous system. Nothing is left intact. You are left wiped out and ready to reboot. It's wonderful." – Seb Doubinsky 

“The System Compendium is far and away the most ambitious thing I can remember reading for some time, and certainly one of the most ambitious contemporary books I’ve read in a number of years. Maximalist to the hilt and as expressive as a gob of milky spit in the face of a court-ordered psychiatrist, this is a book to live within and with, an author to keep close.” - Grant Maierhofer

“Not often does new fiction come to this world so fully formed and peculiar in its execution. Zak Ferguson’s work confuses me on the deepest levels- and I would not have it any other way- as it twists a thread of visceral narrative layers only to break it and start anew. Ferguson dredges the most specific and proscribed shapes and images to page, stilting and rendered through oblique and haunting vantage, riddled through to the baser aspects of the conscious and condensing as something more. Writers like this are born to it, when one might suspect a heritage - Bataille, Lautréamont, Bulgakov, or Burroughs -  but also with a surprisingly delicate touch. Manic images somehow increasingly specific, like intimate sea-divers setting off a light-pulse from within a leviathan, merging with genres like science fiction or metaphysics and rant. It is writing that burns itself”. – Jared Pappas Kelley

Zak Ferguson, T E X T U R E Ss, 

Sweat Drenched Press, 2021.

 "So it begins, book-objects emerging from the Covid-19 UK lockdown and beyond. Artbook. Yes. That word.

I pause. I like it. Gordon Lish famously said literature is retrograde. Why are we not trying harder? Zak Ferguson is.

[Text] in TEXTURESs is immanent… already there. Bugger all images. Even the text is an image. Hieroglyphics of HTML. The negative space of text. Negentropic text. Keywords emerge: auto-fact, auto-fiction, IKEA meatballs, channel 3, channel 4, loneliness, boredom, vacant lots, tin-foil cocks, bubble-gum girls, ruins. Yes, ruins.

Lish also said: You don’t even have to make it up!

The opening & closing of a laptop computer… like a giant clam! This is Brighton, after all. And Eastbourne. The grunt-groans of existence are here. Existence as a cut-up experience. This book claims to be an accident.

It is. A big, beautiful fucking accident. Like the Universe itself.

Electronic waste. E-waste. TEXTURESs reminds us everything is made of particles. Box text. Text in boxes. Language prisons. Good luck, pal.

A writer reading a writer is something, eh? A writer reading a writer reading a writer… probably what you are doing right now. Am I right, pal? John Trefry famously said he is okay with Inside the Castle books only being read by other writers. That is what you have here. Zak Ferguson makes me want to write. TEXTURESs makes me want to write. Makes me want to “fuck around” with text. Echo chambers. Chambers without echoes. The anechoic chamber in Minneapolis is purportedly the “quietest place on the planet.” TEXTURESs is screaming. Zak Ferguson is screaming. Hear my tell-tale heart, indeed.

Life is a rough draft. I still don’t know what the fuck Nietzsche means by eternal return. What I do know: TEXTURESs by Zak Ferguson makes me feel alive." -R.G. Vasicek, author of THE DEFECTORS

TEXTURESs

{Or}

{The Autistic Experience} didn't start out as a book, it started out as a collage piece.

This is just the end result.

A book reflecting on Zak's ever evolving relationship with various artistic mediums; and the artistry even the most minor of details.

This is both a collection of prose, fiction, poems, essays and a novel length manifesto that relates to Zak's neurological condition and the condition of the interiority of a book. It is also about sweet fuck all.

Zak Ferguson, Dimension Whores, Sweat

Drenched Press, 2019.

Dimension Whores is a non-novel. A non-linear-experimental book. An ode to the works of William S. Burroughs and all the great literary masters who gained notoriety in death...rather than in life...a legacy Zak Ferguson won't even have a chance at even following in his own demise. Praise for Zak Ferguson, “Not often does new fiction come to this world so fully formed and peculiar in its execution. Zak Ferguson’s work confuses me on the deepest levels- and I would not have it any other way- as it twists a thread of visceral narrative layers only to break it and start anew. Ferguson dredges the most specific and proscribed shapes and images to page, stilting and rendered through oblique and haunting vantage, riddled through to the baser aspects of the conscious and condensing as something more. Writers like this are born to it, when one might suspect a heritage- Bataille, Lautréamont, Bulgakov, or Burroughs- but also with a surprisingly delicate touch. Manic images somehow increasingly specific, like intimate sea-divers setting off a light-pulse from within a leviathan, merging with genres like science fiction or metaphysics and rant. It is writing that burns itself”. – Jared Pappas Kelley (Author of SOLVENT FORM) "I don't get it, I truly do not understand how this is even allowed to hit the presses...he didn't even pass English Literature in his GCSE's"- Zak's English Teacher (year 9/10/11) "Anyone know of Zak's whereabouts, please get hold of your local Police"- Zak's Probation Officer

Zak Ferguson, Interiors for ?, Sweat

Drenched Press, 2020.

Interiors for ? is an experiment. Nothing else.

Zak Ferguson, Interiors for ? mark ii, Sweat

Drenched Press, 2020.

This book is about experimental literature, and its inter-inter-inter-inter--relationship with images, spaces, interiors and the ontology of not just words but their relation to the physical book and its form. pART 2 OF THE foUR-bOOK SERIES- iNTERIORS fOR ? Praise for Interiors for ? mark ii: "Interiors for ? Mark ii is a passionate experiment of form / structure / narrative. Navigating the interiority of the text, investigating the semiotics of the white-page and black-ink.Ferguson builds this machine with a steady hand. He converts the interiors of the head into the interiors of the text. Mapping this newly-formed space with the energy of a dadaist manifesto--employing the techniques of collage and cut-up to create simultaneously entrancing and enigmatic images. All of this revealing the fragility of the book-object. The inclinations of language to break down and distort / the limitations and potentialities of its construction.Interiors for ? Mark ii is an exciting exploration of what can be planted within text, what can be grown, seeded, destroyed." - Mike Corrao, author of Gut Text and Man, Oh Man

Zak Ferguson, Interiors for ? mark iii, Sweat

Drenched Press, 2020.

The third part in the (Experimental, Pseudo-Non-Fiction, Innovative, Essay-Critique, Fictionally-F*cked-Up-) INTERIORS FOR ?Quadrilogy, where Zak Ferguson reaffirms, redesigns, alters, surveys, waffles on about the relationship of text, interior design and formation of a book, rediscovering the alternate dimensions of the book-space and all those great avenues of thought, interpretation, philosophy of the book and its overall dimensionality. It is full of meta-critical-evaluation, meta-fiction, born from such a construction- such as a place of de-con-struct-ion, ION-/i/o/n-contained, offered, delivered, via the physical form of a paperback novel. |Full| of| T/Y/P/O/S and error error errors-full of mess and mess and mess and mess and mess and mess and mess and mess.

Zak Ferguson, Interiors for ? mark IV, Sweat

Drenched Press, 2020.

The final book in the Interiors book series. Where Metaphysics, Philosophy, the inter-inter-inter-inter-interior-expansive-overt-expansive-cosmic-inter-I/N/T/E/Riorssssssssssssssssssss-inter-RIORs-Equations-56666888888=========-Satire-Non-Fiction-Essays-Cut-Up-Collage-Semiotics-Ontological-Phenomenological-Illogical-ill/i/L/l-are offered-break down, mind, no mind, all mind. Art is the future. Expression=Expansion of avenues of pathways of opening ups of a variant and varietal osmosis of genetics where words make up known connotations where. . .this book is all up for interpretation.

Zak Ferguson, One of Them Days, Sweat

Drenched Press, 2020.

One of them days we all have, whether young, old, racist, all-inclusive, tolerant, intolerant, gay, straight, bi, human, alien, we all have one of them days. So, here is a book of them, from many different people, having one of them days.

Zak Ferguson, Soft Tissues, Sweat Drenched

Press, 2021.

Soft Tissues is for all the current generation of whom have had issues and need a tissue.

"Exact— investigational retching— reminiscent of Apollinaire— or Saint-John Perse. There is spiralling flight— redolent imagery within Zak Ferguson’s writing— poetries constructed in lifeblood—assembled fibres and entangled bear hair— online apps and old static radios— social media and skid marks— slang terminology inside high rise blocks— fashioned overall debris and dormant wood rot— erected tequila slime within antisocial attitudes— taken apart and pieced together by fag ash and slow motion— structured infection combining— composed and created by milky forms— put up and knocked down. Zak Ferguson has written verses full of the shrill cries— the secret codes— and tricks of spit spray and skeletal frames— material worth reading. Poetry as pleasure buttons— the soft tissues— the synthesis of Alcools and Anabasis— muscle." – Shane Jesse Christmass  

Zak Ferguson, Volatile Voice's, Volatile

Universe, Sweat Drenched Press, 2019.

We live in a reality that is supposed to be our own. Voices break through, in textural compositions. A reality crafted by our own hand. Our own, their own, a sum of many, many parts of this slop of material. We are existing on multiple plains of existence. Layered. Tiered. Dormant. Existing. Birthing. Dying. Fizzling out. Our decisions are not our own, it is dictated by a melange of our other selves. Our parallel selves. Our truer selves. And if that isn’t comfortable enough for you to accept, to compute, to define as a narrative streak, there is a billion others in the wings to be hung up for contemplation- {not entertainment}...then faith, objectification and all great emotions are greater served and rationalized, and made acceptable, by putting it to our greatest deities; to make our most basic of decisions somebody else’s fault. The Narrators? {who do you trust?} What if you got a TASTE of your own reality? What if every minute thing has cause and effect, rippling through the linearity of your(multiple-selves) LIFE-LINE(s)? What if every possibility of all potentialities submerge into "your" cohesive narrative life? What if you got a TASTE of a broader Cosmos?What IF… those voices, those rippling, bending, curvature-noise-made-material-ectoplasmic-events altered not one singular variation of yourself, but all of your selves..these phantom images, these intrusive thoughts, these Déjà vu-moments are our own extremely tempered voices...ever so V O L A T I L E Breaching...reaching out...Part of an even greater web-work and mapping, making its own sub-pocket in space and time, where, out there, in there {indicate to your own head, thus meaning your mind} personified within itself as a multi-layered Universe, itself ever so,V O L A T I L E...Meet a whole host of characters, whose singular, epic, contained stories all interweave to culminate into a broader far more {"pretentious} cosmic whole, where there is a sexually perverse demented youth Dimension-hopping, searching for his sick obsession, a young girl, of pig-tail innocence, a council-block dwelling witch with a penchant for pushing carers to their mushy-deaths, meet That Man who exists on the fringes of a young girls reality, a girl, who in question is the focal point to all of these characters, whose realities are splayed out, who is a key component to this fractured,

Zak Ferguson, What Mr. Wants Mr. Gets, Sweat Drenched Press, 2019.

What Mr. Wants Mr. Gets. It's as simple as that....Or is it?He has a method. He has no plan. He has a vision. He has no qualms with being caught. He needs people. He has no friends. He has puppets. He has pray. His thoughts run like a whippet...they strike like mercury to flesh. He is damaged. He will damage. The art of killing has lost its obliqueness and contrarily its definition. Killing isn't art. Art is killing. Killing is enlightening. Not to sole perpetrator. But to society as a whole.Kill. Manipulate. Games. Mind. Bodily. Eruptions of instinctual possessiveness garnered by fear. Not of blade. Not of death. But of the loss of one's legacy.Impromptu imprints impromptu actions impromptu impromptu impromptu........pointlessness.The greatest thing isn't the whys and the hows of a serial killer. It's the internal coalescence of lust, greed, insecurities, control. It's not the making of that's interesting...it's the subconscious splay out played in real time that is the main and real focus one needs to truly understand and experience to comprehend a killers actual pure unadulterated motives and reasoning's.Experimental fiction hasn't been this outright f*cking audacious.What Mr. Wants Mr. Gets is an extremely experimental piece. Transgressive. Surreal. Disjointed. This book is petulance personified. This novel is a harsh critique on society, expectations, media-consumption, how expectations of self border beyond deity levels of narcissism and modern humans want to leave an imprint on this f*cked up Universe. Its a satire, a meta-commentary on experimentalism used in modern day fiction. But, be warned...

Zak Ferguson,  A Taste of

Feeling, Sweat Drenched Press, 2018.

We live in a reality that is supposed to be our own. A reality crafted by our own hand. We are existing on multiple plains of existence. Our decisions are not our own by a melange of our other selves.And if that isn’t comfortable enough for you to accept, then faith, objectification and all great emotions are greater served and rationalized, and made acceptable, by putting it to our greatest deities; to make our most basic of decisions somebody else’s fault.What if you got a TASTE of your own reality? What if every minute thing has cause and effect, rippling through the linearity of your LIFE-LINE? What if every possibility of all potentialities submerge into your cohesive narrative life? What if you got a TASTE of a broader Cosmos?What IF…

Zak Ferguson,  Eat Your

Keyboard, Sweat Drenched Press, 2017.

Have you felt the lure of T H E P R O G R A M M E Has T H E S Y S T E M worked its way through to your greatest most secreted depths? Or is it still massaging, kneading, soaking into your subconscious, into your extended being. Into your key-eat- boarD...Your.... THE BOOK YOU HOLD IS SOMETHING ONE COULD MISCONSTRUE AS A LIE. IT IS THE TRUTH. THIS IS LIVING PROOF OF A HIGHER CALLING, OF A BETTER WAY OF LIVING. ONE COULD ANTICIPATE AN ANSWER TO THE ULTIMATE QUESTIONS. WE DON'T ANSWER...WE HELP YOU GAIN A TRUTH. HERE, DEAR READER YOU'RE GIVEN...snippets of experiences, one right after the next, all piling in a heap. Slowly, as they all decompose together, they will begin to form something. Again, not so much a story, but events that are all related by something, united to "shine a light" on something greater than the individual events. What are WE as a species shining a light on by our actions? Like scattering bones and the casting of entrails to seek some truth out of the random, through its "chaos" , its telling YOU something, telling truths about ourselves and what we, you, they, them- collectively create. Writer Zak A. Ferguson takes his readers on a rip-roaring rampage through the madness of one's mind. With this debut novella we, the audience, are subjected to literary experiments that take us from one existence to another, in flashes, explosions that tear the brain apart, leaving each piece to grow into its own character - one after another, they grow into agents of pure chaos. Their existence - a manic slideshow shown at 100mph. Sit back, open your mind and EAT YOUR KEYBOARD!

Zak Ferguson, Mr. Nick, Sweat Drenched Press, 

2018.

Mr. Nick. He’s the Devil. Or just good ol’ Nicky-Boy. Any who, Nick is suffering from a case of the mid-Millennium blues. What is his life? To serve others, and more? At the end of the day, it’s not like he’s got horns and breathes fire… …that, and he’s not the actual epitome of Evil. He’s an old boy wanting to live out the remainder of his (im)mortal life. After a few bevvies, and World Record for MOST CIGARETTES SMOKED IN HALF AN HOUR, Nick comes to the conclusion that it’s high-time to call it quits. To pass the baton. Heavy lies the crown upon the head of he who is: RULER OF THE WORLD. Of whom, you ask, would be the worthy heir to The Devil’s throne? Well, none other than Nick’s son himself – a simpleton with a devout passion for pushing papers, and sorting pencils. The REAL question is: Can this desk-dweller do what is necessary to keep Earth neat and tidy? That question is put to the test when Cupid is bequeathed his utmost desires… …desires full of beautiful benevolence – a fire too HOT for any level of Hell to contain, or control. From one fiasco to another, Nick’s spur-of-the-moment decision to quit his job couldn’t have come at a more hellacious time. Mr. Nick offers laffs (laughs, for the spelling police), gonzo-bonker characters (like a mallet to the head, and that soppy cartoon laugh), and moments that’ll most likely have critics throwing this book at their least favourite child.

THE RUMPUS MINI-INTERVIEW PROJECT #219: ZAK FERGUSON

BY JARED PAPPAS-KELLEY

Zak Ferguson’s work is mental in the best possible sense of the word. His work is unsettling. He is a self-professed experimental writer (I am an experimentalist!) and you can see how he approaches each aleatory novel or book with its own rules, lucidity, and structures as with this new series of “interiors” that are underway. The logic of Ferguson’s work is one of expansion and collapse, putting forward a thread only to subtlety fold in or snap under, yet still felt in body and under skin.

I spoke with Zak about his new book, Interiors for ?, and the second installment Interiors for ? Mark ii, which was published only two weeks later. We also talked about wandering burnt-out buildings in the UK, the legacy of underground or zine culture, vaporwave, his autism, and his awakening as a writer.

***

The Rumpus: I stumbled across your newest writing project Interiors for ?, and wasn’t really aware of the concept or idea of it. Can you talk a bit about this project, and the thinking behind it?

Zak Ferguson: Interiors for ? began as a whole other endeavor. To take images for a project. Maybe THE SYSTEM COMPENDIUM, or something else. So after and during photographing, I had this image percolating, not so much an image as an idea, that burned into that idea, where I needed to name a folder, to create one, where to place these images, to pick from—like a goodie box of images to use in experiments and to apply to certain pieces I am working on. Then this philosophy and appreciation for interiors, spaces, my relationship with the metaphysics, meta-contextual-textural-integrated notion—warped and took me over, wholly.

I needed a name, so I titled the folder Interiors for ? because that had been percolating inside my mind as I was taking the photos, too, and then this whole other plane of contemplation opened. Already spurred and accessed by having initially started upon this path of productivity, the images I had taken were taking on different resonances. The husk of a recently burned-down hotel in Eastbourne all of a sudden evolved, and was dislocated from this thing called reality, and took on a new meaning, relating to my art, relating to my procession of creativity.

The whole thing (the hotel) had fallen into itself, and only the outside, the walls, the façade, the foundations, the sides were remaining—it was wholly aesthetically and physically there in its exterior standings, its own physically embodied thing, but there was something supernal about it, too.

For me it was and still is about the spaces, the new being of this fucking burnt down building, and in segments, framed by its falling down, its eventual disintegration—the boring parts turned into anarchy-parts, the beautiful parts turned into textural-parts.

Rumpus: So, what are your plans for this project, and what is it about exactly?

Ferguson: I am planning on releasing four Interior books, from here on at the end of every week; whether it may be later, may be sooner, I have no clue, but I am enjoying myself because it is testing my skills as an artist, metaphysically, with pathways of contemplation and reflection and also my interrelationship with image-mockery, image-manipulation, my need to explore, embrace, extend, engorge my overall intentions, but in newer, for me, and far more innovative and puzzle-piece-experimental ways. My intention is to build on this work, because it has evolved, taken upon itself a whole new meaning. It is the first official release from my press, and it is an itch that needs to be scratched. To test. To push. To prove to myself.

What is it, exactly? I don’t fucking know, and I love that energy; it’s almost a synergy and cyclical thing that is issued forth from the ripples coming off my other works. Inside, outside of me, there is something cosmic happening here…

Rumpus: I was talking the other day about all this and about how it reminds me a bit of the glory days of zines and zine-making, but sort of like the next evolution of that sort of process. I grew up in places like Olympia and Seattle where a lot of that was going on and sort of in the air. What do you think of this?

Ferguson: That is very fucking cool. I have never been part of any zine, or publication that is circulated in a cool, underground, DIY way. I think that this can be bettered, considering how things are going, on a sadly commercial and capitalist level, by the accessibility of POD (print-on-demand) platform, if used well. But then as I think about this, I get agitated and the reality dawns, and that is—that it takes something away from what makes zines, well, zines… they’re printed, stapled, clustered, with art not approved but shoved in, because they need as much content as they could scurry together, collage, prose-poetry, rants, terrible advertisements for local businesses, where the time is nearly running out on the publication date they had set for themselves and told a fair few mates (greasy-haired, mascara-clad, with a few terribly ill-thought-out and self-applied tattoos)—who are willingly standing on the street corner from the “press” contemplating the jump from curb to road.

Rumpus: You mention this idea of underground, which makes me think of Baudrillard, who says: “You must create your underground, because now there’s no more underground, no more avant-garde, no more marginality. You can create your personal underground, your own black hole…”

What do you think of that?

Ferguson: Yes, we all must make our own underground, because there really is no avant-garde, no more room or spaces allowed for the people with the real rushing of blood keeping the actual heart of these creative movements alive any longer. But people creating zines, or chapbooks, or macro pamphlets, this reality, this place, that will never die, oh I so fucking hope it doesn’t, and telling those whose supposed positioning with these supposed wants to be DIY and so underground is truly all faux and disingenuous. But if it can be attenuated and captured in some minor way, that intent and well-intended motion is more than what most presses try to express and sell themselves off as.

Nothing will live up to the underground nature of pamphlets, and the only person I know of successfully doing this, using the POD platform, is Christopher Nosnibor at Clinicality Press. I love Christopher as a publisher, reviewer, and writer himself. His nonfiction really shaped my want to start writing, and is not as veined into experimental fiction, but perhaps into spreading experimental nonfiction.

Even though I may have been part of faux literary movements, all online, and only in existence in words, in boasting, and on the social media platforms these projects always live and ultimately die by—that try to capture that punk-rock-underground aesthetic, and in all honesty, in their failure, make it known that you just cannot capture that type of thing without experiencing it. So, no, I have never been part of it.

Rumpus: You talk about the idea of these small communities that exist online or these faux literary movements. That makes me think of some of the early intentions of vaporwave in music and its decentralized locale (online), the first entirely online music genre. Scott Beauchamp proposed that “vaporwave was the first musical genre to live its entire life from birth to death completely online.” So what is this shift?

Ferguson: Things are so gentrified, but it’s evolved beyond its originally assigned and processed meaning, the process of renovating and improving housing or district, yadder, yadder, yadder; its about labels, about being this thing, in name, but not in execution. And with this motion of application it is just a knock-off. Being this thing, so people gravitate, towards it. To try adding to it, but if it’s not truly the encapsulation to begin with, it’s just assigning its own fizzle/burn out.

Rumpus: I sort of think, what would’ve happened back then if we’d had access to this sort of immediacy with POD with zines or for similar projects. But as you’ve said, there’s now this desire for the physicality of the printed object as well or the sort of irony, if we want to think about vaporwave as an example again—all of this digital music that was produced and released online is now being rereleased on vinyl, the sort of uber-analogue holy grail. But is this POD also kind of brilliant in its potential?

Ferguson: Oh, it is brilliant. Really brilliant. For creative endeavors, to circulate art that usually, in the past, needed to be approved and were then made to wait. The POD platform has given freedom to people of great intentions, to get other artists, other experimentalists, innovators together and out there, to have their work out in the open, without a committee board judging it, editing it, breaking it down, and stating it is this, labelling it as that. I do not know of what platforms they use, but publication houses like Inside the Castle, headed by the genius John Trefrey, Dostoyevsky Wannabe by Richard Brammer and Victoria Brown, are doing things in literature that I wish to achieve. For the art. For the artist. For the love of making and creating books and content.

Though POD encourages a lot of amateurism and bad books by some people of whom shouldn’t write, there is no stopping that and nor should those people be stopped. POD is a great place to create careers, but also a great freedom to make presses, and through that and the books, fuck yeah, POD is a masterful ingenious and necessary platform and maybe a future scape where the best of artists end up creating—because you can either learn, grow from it, or be stuck in the same old rut from the beginning. You can put out there whatever the fuck you want as an artist.

But, it needs to be learned, not taught; it needs to be felt out. It needs to have a person with a mind to think outside the box, because those who think inside the box are dictated by the rules of Amazon, marketing on Facebook, which is an echo chamber, and so forth—those people are lost.

Rumpus: You mentioned it in passing a bit, but maybe you could mention your ideas about experimentalism or experimentalists briefly? What is its significance or what might it entail?

Ferguson: Being me. I feel everything I have spoken about is the encapsulation of what it means to be an experimentalist, such as my methods, my attitudes, also when paired with the reality of having autism. Autism allows one to be an experimentalist, whether they know it or not, to be a discoverer, whether they want it to or not. It’s a continual struggle—social niceties, social rules, and supposed law-governed rules of how to behave or come across—that is an experience born from an altered angle and perspective and a consciousness. That is something one tries to attain with their art: the experience, the mechanisms running the mind, the cerebral nature of those with autism. Autistic people are born creators and born experimentalists; it is how the “condition” dictates and such. Just pair with it and become one. It then will be a benefit and not a detriment.

Rumpus: Something else you’ve spoken a bit about in the past was how your autism relates to your process and viewpoint in your work. Does that relate to what you are doing with this new project?

Ferguson: It is my art. Autism is the product of my mind. My emotions. My personality. These are wholly dictated, controlled, steered, corrupted by my non-typical brain. Thus, it is heavily tied to me. Everything you read, experience, process, read, enjoy, hate, loathe, don’t quite get, appreciate, is part of my autism. Having autism is now a piece of Art itself. It is a hurt, an ache, as it affects my living situation societally, housing-wise, my processing and survival.

My work is a total obliteration of those emotions, a capturing of those odd moments, odd traits, odd-angled vistas from the way I look at the world, that gets the creative mind and accompanying imagination boiling over, and the autistic episodes and frustrations to my existence with this alternate way of thinking and feeling and living—sees me process, molecularly break it down, via experimentation, of prose, prose-imagery, imagery, short films. It is me. The full me.

Rumpus: I also know that you have been working on a new book, Art Is Autism. can you speak a bit about that?

Ferguson: It is a manifesto. A pseudo-memoir. Talking about my life with autism, and my coming into myself as both writer and reader. It is almost an experimentalist autistic (passionate) meltdown, full of rants, critiques, studies, emotional pleas. A wholly intimate portrayal of what writing and experimental and innovative fiction means to me.

https://therumpus.net/2020/05/the-rumpus-mini-interview-project-219-zak-ferguson/

Zak Ferguson’s work is mental in an unsettling and best possible sense of the word. He is a self-professed experimental writer (I am an experimentalist!) and you can see how he approaches each aleatory novel or book with its own rules, lucidity, and structures as with this new series of “interiors” that are underway. The logic of Ferguson’s work is one of expansion and collapse, putting forward a thread only to subtlety fold in or snap under, yet felt in body and under skin. Some books are pulpy in their page turning and others are a task, but one never doubts there is something at stake or a very real risk, taking place in their execution.

I spoke with Zak about his new books Interiors for ? and the next instalment Interiors for ? Mark ii, as well roaming through burnt or torn down buildings in the UK, the legacy of underground or zine culture, vaporwave, discussing both his autism and awakening as a writer and an opening up of a literary world, as well as the launch of his recent publishing venture Sweat Drenched Press.

Read it here: https://www.invertextant.com/post/interview-zak-ferguson-s-sweat-drenched-interiors

Zak Ferguson is an Autistic, mental health-suffering much despised entity, barely a person, just an irritable itch, on the ear- lobe, on the fringes of your conscious-self; whose reality consists of words, literature and the pretensions garnered from art.

If you like literature that tests your perceptions of literature, that tests your patience, that entices, arouses, annoys, irritates, breaks into you machinations of consuming literature, literature that confounds, upsets, and semi-forms itself as entertainment and all such and sundry as accepted and marketed in the full fledged market place of book-building and publication… then Zak is probably somebody you’d like to beat around the head with, said book, and tell him what a waste of time it was…

If, and this is a BIG if, this is an experience you wish to partake in, if only to get a chance to beat him publicly/privately…read his stuff.

He exists online in some vague form. On INSTAGRAM under some name or other…and TWITTER…under another name based around his issue with sweating…

Zak lives in the seaside town of Brighton.

Scunnard presents … the Novels of Zak Ferguson Day or Sex is Confusion – DC's (denniscooperblog.com)

Emilio Fraia - People have just two or three stories in their lives. You won't learn anything from it. No one learns anything from any story.

 

Emilio Fraia, Sevastopol, Trans. by Zoë Perry,

New Directions, 2021.

Three subtly connected stories converge in this chimerical debut, each burrowing into a turning point in a person’s life: a young woman gives a melancholy account of her obsession with climbing Mount Everest; a Peruvian-Brazilian vanishes into the forest after staying in a musty, semi-abandoned inn in the haunted depths of the Brazilian countryside; a young playwright embarks on the production of a play about the city of Sevastopol and a Russian painter portraying Crimean War soldiers.

Inspired by Tolstoy’s The Sevastopol Sketches, Emilio Fraia masterfully weaves together these stories of yearning and loss, obsession and madness, failure and the desire to persist, in a restrained manner reminiscent of Anton Chekhov, Roberto Bolaño, and Rachel Cusk.

A truly beautiful book that is hard to describe without using words like precision, subtlety and, mostly, wisdom.—Alejandro Zambra

Three stories track the wanderings of contemporary Brazilians in Fraia’s subtle and melancholy English-language debut, a collection inspired by Leo Tolstoy’s Sevastopol Sketches.

—Publishers Weekly

Like the writers I most admire, Fraia sets for himself the hardest and most respectable task a writer can face: unraveling the mystery without revealing the secret. —Javier Montes

 Three stories track the wanderings of contemporary Brazilians in Fraia’s subtle and melancholy English-language debut, a collection inspired by Leo Tolstoy’s Sevastopol Sketches. In “December,” the 20-something Lena tries to avoid a life of stultifying office work by becoming the first Brazilian woman to climb the tallest peak on every continent, with her lover Gino, a photographer, accompanying her on an ascent of Mount Everest. In “May,” a man goes missing while staying at a run-down countryside inn. Before his disappearance, he tells a meandering story of his life in Lima, Peru, in the 1980s, a time when “the city’s air was poisonous.” And in “August,” an aimless young woman teams up with Klaus, an older theater director, to write a play about a 19th-century Russian painter, though the lonely Klaus may really just be “seeking some kind of accomplice in his sadness.” Situations and motifs recur within and between the stories; for example, a ritual of mountaintop sacrifice described in “May” echoes the ordeal undergone by Lena and other climbers in “December.” These reflective, self-aware tales eschew linear narration in favor of the characters’ somewhat understated thematic musings. In the end, the reader is left to piece together the sketches in this promising if somewhat underwhelming triptych on the nature of storytelling. - Publishers Weekly

Three snapshots of lives spent striving but ultimately falling short.

On the surface, these stories have little in common: Each is titled by a month—December, May, August; each takes place in Brazil—the first and last in São Paulo, the second in “the middle of nowhere.” In the first, Lena writes to the creator of a short film playing on a loop in an art gallery near her home. The piece seems to portray her life, but in ways that make her question her lived experience, especially her relationship with Gino, a photographer who accompanied her on a fateful ascent of Everest. In the second, Adán and his wife, Veronica, stop at a hotel that's defunct, but the owner, Nilo, lets them stay anyway. Veronica leaves after one week; Adán seems content on his own, then vanishes, leading Nilo to search for him. In the third, Nadia, a young writer, quits her job to work on a play with Klaus, a much older director who cruises for men to cast in his work. The lone reference to the book’s titular city comes in a gloss at the start of Nadia’s tale—“Sevastopol, a soulless port...a generic scene, the kind with no story to tell.” It is immaterial to what follows, almost an overt wink to the reader that there is no hidden message in this slim volume. Similar metatextual sentiments run throughout: “The stories ran in parallel, never meeting”; “People always tell the same stories, even when they try to tell new stories.” These are merely moments in time, lives lived and—with the possible exception of Nadia’s—lives mismanaged, leaving disappointment, regret, or, at minimum, probing introspection. With deft precision, Fraia bares his characters just enough to reveal only these stories—nothing is extraneous.

Somber, spare stories that let the reader crawl inside, searching for insight, only to be left greedily craving more. - Kirkus Reviews

Emilio Fraia’s Sevastopol isn’t a debut but it is his first book to be translated into English (by Zoë Perry). It’s a string of three stories that … well, the lack of direct connection between them makes me reluctant to invoke the word triptych, but there is a pattern at work. The book was inspired by Tolstoy’s Sevastopol Sketches, and each story is titled after his (“December”, “May”, “August”); and sets up a pair of characters in opposition, destined for disappointment.

Sevastopol by Emilio Fraia [trans. by Zoë Perry] Lolli Editions, £12.99

In the first and best story, a woman sets out to scale the “Seven Summits”, the highest mountain on each of the seven continents. (I’m sure there were only five when I was at school.) At the same time she has to cope with the legacy of her lover Gino, the sort of filmmaker who makes “a series of commercials for a car brand — commercials in which cars never appear”.

It’s a smart, knotty story, much fuller and more complex than its length should permit, with plenty of space for the reader to think but also some authorial sleight of hand to keep you curious. By comparison the second story, “May”, seemed to me underweight, despite its otherwise satisfying ambiguities in the narrative viewpoint and its account of the two sides of hospitality.

Fraia is interested not in the reality of things but its representation. That, after all, is what writing is about

The final story, “August”, was published in the New Yorker (as “Sevastopol”), though this is not a traditional New Yorkery story, just as the collection itself evokes less a South American literary sensibility than a spare, elusive mitteleuropean one. This placelessness is apt enough for a story which is — finally — actually about the debatable land of Sevastopol, the largest city in the Crimean peninsula annexed by Russia in 2014.

It’s narrated by a woman, Nadia, involved in a play about the siege of Sevastopol. Her narrative is peppered with concise pen portraits (“he sports a showy, swashbuckling moustache”) but really the message is all about art, from Nadia’s advice to the playwright (research is like a cherry in a cocktail, she tells him: “only there so that it can be removed”) to the subject of the play: a war artist who never witnessed the battles he depicted.

Fraia is interested not in the reality of things but its representation. That, after all, is what writing is about. “The chief thing,” we’re told via a soldier in the Crimean war, “is not to think. If you don’t think, it’s nothing much. It mostly all comes from thinking.” I’ll drink — or think — to that. - John Self

https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/june-2021/debutant-novels-and-great-expectations/

This novel was inspired by Tolstoy’s The Sevastopol Sketches, though there does not seem to be a great deal of similarity between the two. Tolstoy’s work was, as the title tells us, based on his visit to Sevastopol during the Crimean War and describes, in three sketches what he saw. This book consists of three stories, which have the same titles as The Sevastopol Sketches – December, May and August – but there the similarity ends. These stories are fictions. Each is set partially in Brazil and partially in another country,- Nepal, Peru and Russia respectively. The last one is called Sevastopol and is set partially in Sevastopol during the Crimean War but mainly in modern-day Brazil.

So what links these stories, apart from all being set partially in Brazil and sharing their titles with the Tolstoy work? On the surface, not a great deal is the answer. However, there is one common theme. All deal with a relationship (only one is romantic/sexual) which starts and ends during the course of the story and in which some problematic event occurs which hastens the end of the relationship.

Out first story is called December and is narrated by Lena. She comes from a well-off Brazilian family and is a keen mountain climber, so much so that she plans to become the first Brazilian woman to climb the Seven Summits. i.e. the highest mountain in each continent. She has trained hard, got her sponsorship and got a team together.

We know from the beginning of the story that she has a serious accident and we later learn the full details. She had had an affair with Gino, an Italian who had moved with his family to Brazil when a teenager. Gino was also a climber but, above all, he he made videos. He makes a video of her voice talking over shots of a mountain landscape which, she says, gives the whole video a dreamlike feeling. - The Modrn Novel

read more here: https://www.themodernnovel.org/americas/latin-america/brazil/emilio-fraia/sevastopol/

Emilio Fraia's Sevastopol clearly alludes to Leo Tolstoy's Sevastopol Sketches, not just in its title but in its composition, with three pieces titled (as in the Tolstoy) 'December', 'May', and August' -- even as otherwise any connections are far less obvious; the stories in Sevastopol are not scenes of war, and they are not set around the Crimean locale; only in the final story does the place and time Tolstoy described figure in any significant way.

Sevastopol is very much about story-telling. The narrators of 'December' and 'May' each recount significant experiences from their lives but in each a separate story also figures prominently, stories within the stories: in 'December' the narrator comes across a video that clearly is based on her life yet in which: "Everything was inaccurate", while in 'August' the narrator, Nina, describes a theater-project she long worked on (featuring a painter, and set in nineteenth century Sevastopol). So also 'May' -- written in the third person -- first focuses on the mysterious disappearance of Adán but then repeatedly turns to Adán's own story-telling.

In all three pieces there are also other incidental examples of stories being told; typically, in 'August', Nina describes being at an Alcoholics Anonymous-type support group and listening to one woman, whose testimony switches back and forth between her family situation and "a story about the ocean, the waves"; the way: "The stories ran in parallel, never meeting" is reflected in Sevastopol as well, in both the whole and its parts.

'December' is narrated by Lena, a woman who had been a mountain climber; her project (as she called it) had been: "to reach the summit of the highest mountains of each of the seven continents". When only in her early twenties she had already had considerable success. Scaling Everest, however, everything changed. Her story was then presented to the public -- recorded by the photographer and documentary filmmaker Gino, recounted in Reader's Digest and National Geographic, and also by her:

I went out and told my story. I gave interviews. I did more than one TED talk. I made money. I became a successful speaker, someone who had beat the odds, overcome adversity, and moved forward with her head held high.

When Lena comes across Gino's video-version of her story, part of her sees it as a betrayal: "How could someone have twisted my story so horribly ?" Yet ultimately she's led to wonder:

(W)hat's the difference between the story in this video of yours and the one I've told myself for so long ? Is there even a difference, in the end ?

'May' is set in an out-of-the-way failed countryside inn -- "an all-but-abandoned-spot in the middle of nowhere, drowning in the landscape, looking like it was about to get swallowed by the surrounding wilderness". The owner, Nilo, clings on to it in its final collapse. When a couple arrived, looking for a place to stay, he offered them a room; the wife, Veronica, soon flees, but the man, Adán, stays for two weeks -- before suddenly disappearing. The story moves back and forth between the present-moment search for Adán, and the story Adán has to tell, from his past.

In 'August' a young woman, Nadia, describes getting involved with the work of aging, theater-obsessed Klaus, helping him with a play-project. Set in 1855:

It's about the life of a painter, Bogdan Trunov, a man who reached his heyday during the war years and then died young. He left behind many paintings, which have only fairly recently been discovered. What's most fascinating, Klaus said, is the way Trunov was always breathing the leaden air of war -- he was up to his neck in it -- but the war, the war itself, never appeared in his paintings.

The project is an episode in her life. She quits her job to devote herself to it, and sees it through, but Klaus -- and she -- then also move on. Even so, the story -- in and of the play -- remain with her. As she notes, reflecting on all this: "People always tell the same stories, even when they try to tell new stories".

Fraia suggests story-telling -- the stories we tell ourselves, and of ourselves -- is both fundamental and very basic. We cling and return to it, to try to impose some order and make some sense: as Lena put it:

I did what people do all the time. Tell stories, retell them, freeze them in time, try to make sense of them. This is me, I exist, this is my story, this happened to me

But story-telling only gets us so far. As Adán suggests:

(P)eople have just two or three stories in their lives. You won't learn anything from it. No one learns anything from any story.

The three pieces in Sevastopol are nicely presented, well-written and atmospheric. Fraia manage to keep the common theme of story-telling as under-current, not drowning his stories in it (even as it is omnipresent), and the interweaving back-and-forth in each of the tales is very effective. It makes for a solid little volume -- fine reading. - M.A.Orthofer

https://www.complete-review.com/reviews/brazil/fraiae.htm

Shakesqueer - Exploring what is odd, eccentric, and unexpected in the Bard’s plays and poems, these theorists highlight not only the many ways that Shakespeare can be queered but also the many ways that Shakespeare can enrich queer theory

Shakesqueer: A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare, Duke University Press Books, 2011.

Shakesqueer puts the most exciting queer theorists in conversation with the complete works of William Shakespeare. Exploring what is odd, eccentric, and unexpected in the Bard’s plays and poems, these theorists highlight not only the many ways that Shakespeare can be queered but also the many ways that Shakespeare can enrich queer theory. This innovative anthology reveals an early modern playwright insistently returning to questions of language, identity, and temporality, themes central to contemporary queer theory. Since many of the contributors do not study early modern literature, Shakesqueer takes queer theory back and brings Shakespeare forward, challenging the chronological confinement of queer theory to the last two hundred years. The book also challenges conceptual certainties that have narrowly equated queerness with homosexuality. Chasing all manner of stray desires through every one of Shakespeare’s plays and poems, the contributors cross temporal, animal, theoretical, and sexual boundaries with abandon. Claiming adherence to no one school of thought, the essays consider The Winter’s Tale alongside network TV, Hamlet in relation to the death drive, King John as a history of queer theory, and Much Ado About Nothing in tune with a Sondheim musical. Together they expand the reach of queerness and queer critique across chronologies, methodologies, and bodies.

Contributors. Matt Bell, Amanda Berry, Daniel Boyarin, Judith Brown, Steven Bruhm, Peter Coviello, Julie Crawford, Drew Daniel, Mario DiGangi, Lee Edelman, Jason Edwards, Aranye Fradenburg, Carla Freccero, Daniel Juan Gil, Jonathan Goldberg, Jody Greene, Stephen Guy-Bray, Ellis Hanson, Sharon Holland, Cary Howie, Lynne Huffer, Barbara Johnson, Hector Kollias, James Kuzner , Arthur L. Little Jr., Philip Lorenz, Heather Love, Jeffrey Masten, Robert McRuer , Madhavi Menon, Michael Moon, Paul Morrison, Andrew Nicholls, Kevin Ohi, Patrick R. O’Malley, Ann Pellegrini, Richard Rambuss, Valerie Rohy, Bethany Schneider, Kathryn Schwarz, Laurie Shannon, Ashley T. Shelden, Alan Sinfield, Bruce Smith, Karl Steel, Kathryn Bond Stockton, Amy Villarejo, Julian Yates

“The adventurous essays in Shakesqueer demonstrate that queer theory does indeed need Shakespeare, if only to defy rumors of its own demise: the essays show what is vital about a queer studies that might have been thought by this point too domesticated or reified or ‘fixed’ to be intellectually vibrant.”—Carolyn Dinshaw

“What happens when queer theory gets into bed with Shakespeare? A play in forty-eight acts, this spirited group production never ceases to entertain and surprise with its queer cast of characters: virgins, eunuchs, and lechers; queens, kings, and pageboys; tyrants, assassins, and killjoys; lions, tigers, and bears—oh my! Full of toil and trouble, wit and wisdom, Shakesqueer succeeds where few other edited collections do: it puts the play back in playwright, and the fun back in theory.”—Diana Fuss

“In the end, this book is a big, glorious mess, full of playful juxtapositions and frightening possibilities. It is thrilling. Theatre scholars, queer theorists, actors, directors, and dramaturges will all find something useful and interesting.” - Michael Cramer

“When studying endless Shakespeare plays on English Literature courses, we always had a hunch there were some exceptionally queer goings on beyond some same sex sonnets and this collection of essays proves us right. Earl on earl analysis sits beside complex queer theories on the bard.” ― Gay Times

“Few works of literary criticism deserve the descriptor ‘monumental,’ but this one does. . . . The book is both readable and witty. It is also important, for it drives the final nail into the coffin of 20th-century Shakespearean studies... No hierarchies survive this book. Every play and poem receives a fresh new reading... Essential. All readers.” - M. J. Emery

“If you're looking for clues to Romeo and Mercutio's secret romance in the new academic volume Shakesqueer : A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare, edited by Madhavi Menon (Duke), you're barking up the wrong yew tree. American University professor Menon and her queer-theorist contributors find queerness in Shakespeare in that term's most all-encompassing meaning of oddball, unusual, or non-normative. But when you come to think of it, fairy queen Titania falling in love with an ass named Bottom is pretty queer, in all senses of the word.”- Roberto Friedman

“It is rare to see a volume that does so much, and does it with such consistent wit, thoughtfulness, and creativity. . . . In putting together this volume, Menon has done scholars from all fields and periods an immense service. Shakesqueer gives us a very queer new reading ‘’companion’’ — friend, helpmeet, comrade-in-arms — that makes us exquisitely aware of the need for the perverse and disruptive critical practice its essays so pleasurably model.” - Melissa E. Sanchez

“There’s something for every queer scholar and Bard-lover in the anthology; from bears in Henry VIII to eunuchs in Antony and Cleopatra, from the death drive in Hamlet to precariously heterosexual marriages in All’s Well that Ends Well, the contributing authors chart Shakespeare’s varied engagements with queerness, putting pressure on assumptions that Shakespeare has nothing to offer to contemporary queer theory. . . . The assorted essays assert that Shakespeare has as much to offer queer theory as queer theory can contribute to understanding and deconstructing the Bard’s texts. This book belongs on every bookish queer’s shelf, right where the leather-bound Complete Works of William Shakespeare butts up against Butler and Foucault.” - Kestryl Cael Lowrey

“This fascinating collection of essays explores the queer elements within all of Shakespeare’s works. With contributions from scholars of both queer studies and Shakespeare, the volume represents a joining of the two fields rarely attempted before.” - Charles Green

“[Shakesqueer] manages to put the fun back into academic research. Shakesqueer is a highly entertaining collection of essays, which all focus on the strange, the unusual, that is, the queer element in the Shakespearean oeuvre.” - Veronika Schandl

"For 'insider experts'—those who are Shakespeareans, queer theorists, or both (always, already, at once)—Shakesqueer provides a garden of delights between its covers. . . . Shakesqueer extends, enriches, and strengthens the vocabulary of Shakespeare criticism in concert with queer theory."- Stephen F. Evans

Michael Kinsella - Through collective performances, legend-trippers harness the interpretive frameworks these stories provide and often claim incredible, out-of-this-world experiences that in turn perpetuate supernatural legends

Michael Kinsella: Legend-Tripping Online: Supernatural Folklore and the Search for Ong’s Hat University Press of Mississippi, 2011.


On the Internet, seekers investigate anonymous manifestos that focus on the findings of brilliant scientists said to have discovered pathways into alternate realities. Gathering on web forums, researchers not only share their observations, but also report having anomalous experiences, which they believe come from their online involvement with these veiled documents. Seeming logic combines with wild twists of lost Moorish science and pseudo-string theory. Enthusiasts insist any obstacle to revelation is a sure sign of great and wide-reaching efforts by consensus powers wishing to suppress all the liberating truths in the Incunabula Papers (included here in complete form).
In Legend-Tripping Online, Michael Kinsella explores these and other extraordinary pursuits. This is one of the first books dedicated to legend-tripping, ritual quests in which people strive to explore and find manifest the very events described by supernatural legends. Through collective performances, legend-trippers harness the interpretive frameworks these stories provide and often claim incredible, out-of-this-world experiences that in turn perpetuate supernatural legends.
Legends and legend-tripping are assuming tremendous prominence in a world confronting new speeds of diversification, connection, and increasing cognitive load. As guardians of tradition as well as agents of change, legends and the ordeals they inspire contextualize ancient and emergent ideas, behaviors, and technologies that challenge familiar realities. This book analyzes supernatural legends and the ways in which the sharing spirit of the Internet collectivizes, codifies, and makes folklore of fantastic speculation.

Maria ter Meetelen - "From the age of thirteen I wandered abroad and at twenty-one I decided to take a little trip across France dressed as a man....." Maria tells the story of her capture by Barbary pirates and twelve years as a slave at Meknès in Morocco

 

Maria ter Meetelen, The Curious and Amazing

Adventures of Maria ter Meetelen; Twelve Years

a Slave (1731- 43), Trans. by Caroline Stone

and Karen Johnson, Hardinge Simpole, 2010.

"From the age of thirteen I wandered abroad and at twenty-one I decided to take a little trip across France dressed as a man....." Maria ter Meetelen tells the story of her capture by Barbary pirates and twelve years as a slave at Meknès in Morocco. Straightforward and with no literary pretensions, her voice comes down the centuries, robust, clear, personal and often surprising: "I do not complain at having been so far across the world, nor of my twelve years of slavery, nor of the suffering the Turks caused me, I can rise above that. But the spitefulness and derision that my husband and I suffered from our fellow-countrymen cannot be forgotten, and is impossible for me to set it down here in writing."

Meetelen was a child from the slum. She enlisted in the Spanish army disguised as a man in 1725. After this, she lived in Spain as a nun until she married.

The couple was on a ship destined for the Netherlands in 1731, when it was captured by pirates and all the passengers sold as slaves in Morocco. Her spouse died, and to avoid being taken to the harem of the sultan, Abdallah of Morocco, she refused to convert to Islam and married the spokesperson of the sultan's slaves, Pieter Janszn Iede, the couple provided the non-Muslim slaves with alcohol and lived quite well at the court.

In 1743, the Dutch slaves where bought free by the Dutch state and returned to the Netherlands. She emigrated to South Africa in 1751, where the traces of her disappear. - wikipedia

Susana Thénon - a collection full of stylistic innovation, language play, dark humor, and socio-political insight, or, as Thénon writes, “me on earth; me with the others; me ignorant, rude, all mixed in Latin, Greek, shit, noodles, culture, and barbarism.”

 

Susana Thénon, Ova Completa, Ugly Duckling

Presse, 2021.

excerpt (pdf)

 Susana Thénon (1935–1991) is a key poet of the ’60s generation in Argentina. In Ova Completa, her final, most radical collection, Thénon’s poetics expands to incorporate all it touches—classical and popular culture, song lyrics and vulgarities, incoherence and musicality—embodying humor and terror while writing obliquely of femicide, Argentina’s last dictatorship, the Malvinas / Falklands war, the heritage of colonialism. Ova Completa is a collection full of stylistic innovation, language play, dark humor, and socio-political insight, or, as Thénon writes, “me on earth; me with the others; me ignorant, rude, all mixed in Latin, Greek, shit, noodles, culture, and barbarism.”

 I’m in disbelief that these poems were written over thirty years ago by someone born in 1935. How can it be? Susana Thénon’s flair for code-switching—from Argentine regionalisms to mock etymologies to an ever-seductive English—seems ahead of its time, as do her poems’ fragmentariness, skepticism of language and its institutions. (Vide letters, bureaucracy.) Clearly, they weren’t, but that’s the magic of their immediacy and of Rebekah Smith’s brilliant translations. Caustic, restless, and delighting in their own performativity, they’ll make you want to catch up with them. - Mónica de la Torre

One of the best kept secrets of Argentine literature, Susana Thénon’s poetry takes on new life in this subtle English version of her Ova Completa. Wisely mixing critical reflection and casual impudence, literary references and unruly banter, Thénon draws her readers into a powerfully disquieting reading, a dialogue not only with her many voices but with literature itself. - Sylvia Molloy

This is the first time I’ve endorsed a book after reading a handful of poems because I’ve never encountered a handful of poems this intriguing. Is Susana Thénon Jorge Louis Borges' long lost daughter, is she Juan Gelman’s sister, or is she a star from some wholly underrecognized dimension? It took just a sampling of Ova Completa to expand both my sense of the Argentinian literary landscape and my sense of poetic innovation. I can’t wait to read the rest of this rich and resonating collection. -Terrance Hayes

Experiments with language, with writing, with discursive genres, with situations and communicative actions or with pragmatic effects; [Thénon's later poems] are, in a parodic version, a reflection on all of these. They are also… a bleak and acidic gaze on a world that “enduring—until when?—it destroys itself” and that incessantly longs to see reconstruction rising up over destruction. - Ana María Barrenechea

The thematization is almost obsessive around the book as aesthetic object and as commodity that offers a double market to circulation: that of the buying and selling, and that of the critical and academic discourse. In the face of both, this text shows itself as a relentless mocker. And so an anti-aesthetic proposal arises… the effect is to topple hierarchies and distances, contaminate territories, violently erase the limits of a discourse typified as “cultured poetry.” … A heterogeneous and mutant text that on a few pages reasons with cartoonish humor, on others becomes linguistic decomposition à la Girondo, and on others almost a Cortázaran fantastic tale or almost a Borgesian essay, almost a popular song. The reader can perhaps find in these almosts a little appeasement: a powerful discursive will seeps through... Delfina Muschietti

Kikirikyrie

god help us or god don’t help us

or god half help us

or he makes us believe that he’ll help us

and later sends word that he’s busy

or he helps us obliquely

with a pious “help yourself”

or cradles us in his arms singing softly that we’ll pay for it

if we don’t go to sleep immediately

or whispers to us that here we are today and oh tomorrow too

or tells us the story of the cheek

and the one about the neighbor and the one about the leper

and the one about the little lunatic and the one about the mute who talked

or he puts in his headphones

or shakes us violently roaring that we’ll pay for it

if we don’t wake up immediately

or gives us the tree test

or takes us to the zoo to see

how we look at ourselves

or points out an old train on a ghost of a bridge

propped up by posters for disposable diapers

god help us or not or halfway

or haltingly

god us

god what

or more or less

or neither

‘Susana Thénon (Buenos Aires, 1935-1991) was an Argentine avant-garde poet, translator, and artistic photographer. The daughter of the psychiatrist Jorge Thénon, she was a member of Argentina’s Generación del ’60. Although she was a contemporary of Juana Bignozzi and Alejandra Pizarnik, Thenon was not part of any literary group. She affiliated within the marginal construction that works in her poetry, without adhering to any reigning movement.

‘Her relationship with other poets of her generation was minimal, with the exceptions of Maria Negroni, who later became one of the compilers in Thenon’s posthumous books (La Morada Impossible I and II) and the aforementioned Pizarnik with which she frequented, and along with that published in the literary journal Agua Viva (1960), which was perhaps one of the few signs of her openness to the poetic environment. A gap in her publications occurred between 1970 and 1982 when she was actively engaged in photography, although she continued to write during that period. Thenon also wrote some essays.’ — collaged

Susana Thénon (1935–1991) was a poet, translator, and photographer. She is considered part of the Argentine generation of the 60s, alongside contemporaries Alejandra Pizarnik and Juana Bignozzi, though she was never formally aligned with any particular group. She published five books of poetry: Edad sin tregua (1958), Habitante de la nada (1959), De lugares extraños (1967), distancias (1984), and Ova completa (1987). Between her publications of 1967 and 1984, she took a break from poetry, focusing instead on photography, especially photography of the dancer Iris Scaccheri. One of these photos appears on the cover of her book, distancias, and a book Acerca de Iris Scaccheri was published in Buenos Aires by Ediciones Anzilotti in 1988. Distancias was translated into English by Renata Treitel and published by Sun & Moon Press (Los Angeles, CA) in 1994. Thénon’s work was collected and published in two volumes entitled La morada imposible, edited by Ana M. Barrenechea and María Negroni (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Corregidor, 2001). Some of her poems have also appeared in English in the collections, The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), The Helicon Nine Reader (Kansas City: Helicon Nine Editions, 1990), and Crossings (San Francisco: Center for Art in Translation, 2000).

On December 17, 2020, UDP hosted the launch event for Ova Completa by Argentine poet Susana Thénon (1935–1991). Poets Asiya Wadud and Silvina López Medin read from their work, followed by a reading from Rebekah Smith, UDP editor and Ova Completa’s translator. Additional contributions were made by Victoria Cóccaro and Emma Wippermann during the reading.

Along with fellow UDP apprentices Ainee Jeong and Raphael Schnee, I prepared an introduction for one of the readers. Ainee introduced Susana Thenon & Rebekah Smith, Raphael introduced Silvinia López Medin, and I introduced Asiya Wadud. I was first introduced to Wadud through her book Syncope (UDP, 2019) and have since enjoyed exploring more of her work. Finding her work through UDP has provided comfort and solace even during a time that has been extremely difficult for many of us. For me, it felt special for Asiya Wadud and Silvina López Medin to join Rebekah Smith during this particular reading of Ova Completa.

I, along with the other members of the audience, were able to bear witness to an astounding night of community during the Ova Completa launch. Though sharing space has been rather difficult during the course of the pandemic, gathering virtually for this reading brought people together from various corners of the world, including Argentina, where Susana Thénon is from.

As Rebekah, Silvina, and Asiya read in a call-and-response fashion from Ova Completa, I found myself relating to Thénon’s self-reflecting commentary of decades past. Similarly to Mónica de la Torre, “I’m in disbelief that these poems were written over thirty year ago by someone born in 1935.” Hearing each of their voices cradling Thénon’s musings as chorus, it felt more as though Ova Completa was always meant to be experienced with a community of others. Being introduced to this sample of meditations by Susana Thénon makes me grateful for the world of translation and the relationship UDP continues to create with the writers of our past, often lost to time and not given their appropriate consideration.

— Bria Strothers

Big Bruiser Dope Boy - It's hurt shit. A laugh that ends with a turned head and a teary eye. Each poem sings for lost unknowns to come home. It's funny, straightforward, absurd, sad, and, ultimately, true in the way that only art can be

Big Bruiser Dope Boy, Something Gross,

Apocalypse Party, 2021.

 "This genre-defying account (novel? narrative poem?) of the troubled love of a young man for an emotionally stunted older one in the bars and apartments of megalopolitan Denver is written with such a spooking purity of line and with such an audaciously stark, grave wisdom that it already feels like a classic of its kind. Big Bruiser Dope Boy’s undecorated, indecorous sentences cut right through you and into the soul you might not have even known you still had. Something Gross is his most triumphant book yet. You are sure to wish you had written it." — Garielle Lutz

Nathaniel Kennon Perkins: Do you expect your readers to “understand” your work? Does that matter?

Big Bruiser Dope Boy: I don’t know what there is to understand in my work. The words are there and the reader reads the words and they have that experience. If a reader feels they understand my work, or understands something from my work, then that is their understanding that they have. People are trained to be shallow consumers of simple, entertainment-oriented art. They want to understand. They want there to be a purpose, a point, a meaning, and become frustrated and feel as if their time is being wasted when they can’t find one, dissatisfied with a lack of distraction.

NKP: Tell me about the history and vision of Gay Death Trance.

BBDB: I wanted to start a website that looks good to me and publish writing on it that I like. Giacomo Pope, the guy who created Neutral Spaces, helped me design it and taught me how to do the basic HTML necessary to add work. There will be t-shirts soon, courtesy of Steve Anwyll.

NKP: What living poets, early in their careers, do you admire and recommend people read?

BBDB: I don’t admire or recommend people read living poets with careers.

https://denniscooperblog.com/5-books-i-read-recently-loved-mike-corrao-rituals-performed-in-the-absence-on-ganymede-ursula-andkjaer-olsen-outgoing-vessel-big-bruiser-dope-boy-something-gross-susana-thenon-ova-completa-rikk/

Big Bruiser Dope Boy, Foghorn Leghorn, Clash

Books, 2019. 

excerpt

The voice of this book. It has everything I want and yet I really can't explain it. It's hurt shit. A laugh that ends with a turned head and a teary eye. Each poem sings for lost unknowns to come home. It's funny, straightforward, absurd, sad, and, ultimately, true in the way that only art can be. Say hello to the gay Rodney Dangerfield. Say hello to the Boom Doctor. Say hello to your first real boyfriend. Join me in welcoming this new voice. The Big Bruiser Dope Boy. One of the new wolves. May he forever huff and puff. We will never escape his cartoon. —Sam Pink

Walking Through: https://www.philosophicalidiot.com/bigbruiserdopeboypoetry

Big Bruiser Dope Boy is the author of Foghorn Leghorn, Your First Real Boyfriend & Other Poems, and After Denver.

Amaranth Borsuk - An unlikely marriage of print and digital, Between Page and Screen chronicles a love affair between two characters, P and S. The book has no words, only inscrutable black and white geometric patterns that, when coupled with a webcam, conjure the written word

 

Amaranth Borsuk, Between Page and Screen, Siglio, 2012.

http://www.amaranthborsuk.com/

Created in collaboration with programmer Brad Bouse, Between Page and Screen is a book of poems that contains no text, only stark black-and-white geometric shapes and a web address leading to betweenpageandscreen.com, where the reader follows instructions to display the book on his or her webcam. Our software detects the square markers in the book and projects poems mapped to the surface of the page. Because the animations move with the book, they appear to inhabit “real” three-dimensional space—a kind of digital pop-up book.

The poems—a series of cryptic letters between P and S, two lovers struggling to define the bounds of their relationship, do not exist on either page or screen, but in the augmented space between them opened up by the reader.

Originally created as a limited-edition hand-made artist’s book, Between Page and Screen was published in 2012 by Siglio Press and went through two printings. A second edition is now available from SpringGun Press. Readers interested in book arts and book history can print and bind their own copy and create their own augmented reality poems using our DIY tools. For more information, visit www.betweenpageandscreen.com.

An unlikely marriage of print and digital, Between Page and Screen chronicles a love affair between two characters, P and S. The book has no words, only inscrutable black and white geometric patterns that, when coupled with a webcam, conjure the written word. Reflected on screen, the reader sees him or herself with open book in hand, language springing alive and shape-shifting with each turn of the page.

The story unfolds through a playful and cryptic exchange of letters between P and S as they struggle to define their relationship. Rich with innuendo, anagrams, etymological and sonic affinities between words, Between Page and Screen revels in language and the act of reading.

 Between Page and Screen has reinvented visual poetry, doing so by displaying hieroglyphs that humans can read only through the eyes of robots. Each coded sigil resembles one of the cellular automata that a mathematician might find in the game of life—except that each glyph has become a cipher for an epistle that explores the sound of words, then explodes these messages into shrapnel. Such a book heralds the virtual reality of our own poetic future, when everyone can read a book while watching it play on television, each hologram standing in its cone of light, hovering above the open page. —Christian Bök

 You suddenly see yourself projected on the screen, holding in your hands the paper pages from which the living language of digital text unfolds into the story. And what a story it is -- full of wordplay and innuendo, the narrative flows with equal parts humor and poetic sophistication as words morph into one another with your every movement, a visceral metaphor for the longing of the two alphabetical lovers.-Maria Popova, Brainpickings

Innovators like Borsuk and Bouse prove that the future of the book should be something we all consider with optimism provided we think beyond current expectations and strive to build new ones. - Buzz Poole, Salon.com

Between Page and Screen invokes--indeed necessitates--a love affair between the reader of books and the reader of screens, a love affair that is inevitable, timely, lovely.-Timothy David Orme

Reviews:

• Max Parnell. “Between Page and Screen.” SPAM Zine, December 2018.
• Elizabeth Cooperman. “Notable Books.” Poetry Northwest (February 2014).
• Jessica Pressman. “Reading (Between) Machine.” American Book Review (January 2014).
• Abraham Avnisan. “Between Page and Screen.” Rain Taxi Review of Books (October 2012).
• Ander Monson. “Mirror Work.” American Letters and Commentary 23, Special Issue: The Future of the Book (August 2012).
• Peter Szatmary.”Between Page and Screen” Phi Kappa Phi Forum (Fall 2012).
• “A Useful Pageant,” Anna Lena Phillips, American Scientist 100:3 (May-June 2012).
• “Seen/Scene, Sheet, and Screen: Reading Amaranth Borsuk and Brad Bouse’s Between Page and Screen,” Timothy David Orme, Diagram 12.2 (May 2012).
• “May Book List: Between Page and Screen,” Hey, Small Press!, May 8, 2012.
• Maria Popova.”Between Page and Screen: A Digital Pop-up Book About Love.” Brain Pickings, April 30, 2012.
• Cassia / Muse of What. “Coolest Book Ever.” April 19, 2012.
• Daniel Donahoo.”Why I Love Augmented Reality Right Now,” Geek Dad, Wired, March 27, 2012.

The Book, MIT Press, 2018)

Project Website: t-h-e-b-o-o-k.com

The book as object, content, idea, and interface.

What is the book in a digital age? Is it a physical object containing pages encased in covers? Is it a portable device that gives us access to entire libraries? The codex, the book as bound paper sheets, emerged around 150 CE. It was preceded by clay tablets and papyrus scrolls. Are those books? In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Amaranth Borsuk considers the history of the book, the future of the book, and the idea of the book. Tracing the interrelationship of form and content in the book’s development, she bridges book history, book arts, and electronic literature to expand our definition of an object we thought we knew intimately.

Contrary to the many reports of its death (which has been blamed at various times on newspapers, television, and e-readers), the book is alive. Despite nostalgic paeans to the codex and its printed pages, Borsuk reminds us, the term “book” commonly refers to both medium and content. And the medium has proved to be malleable. Rather than pinning our notion of the book to a single form, Borsuk argues, we should remember its long history of transformation. Considering the book as object, content, idea, and interface, she shows that the physical form of the book has always been the site of experimentation and play. Rather than creating a false dichotomy between print and digital media, we should appreciate their continuities.

Translation:

El Libro Expandido: Variaciones, materialidad y experimentos. Trans. Lucila Cordone. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Ampersand, 2020.

Interviews:

• Beyond the Book, A Copyright Clearance Center Podcast hosted by Chris Kenneally, July 14, 2019.
• The Hedgehog and the Fox Podcast hosted by George Miller, February 26, 2019.
• “Papyrus Scrolls to Kindle and Beyond,” Peter Kelley, November 26, 2018.
• “The Book’s Body: Talking to Amaranth Borsuk,” Andy Fitch, Los Angeles Review of Books Blog, June 22, 2018.
• Thinking Aloud hosted by Marcus Smith, BYU Radio, June 8, 2018.

Reviews:

• Marc Kosciewjew. “Amaranth Borsuk: The Book.” Publishing Research Quarterly (January 2020).
• Ana Sabino. “O livro enquanto objeto, conteúdo, ideia e interface.” MATLIT: Materialidades da Literatura 7.1 (2019) pp. 249-252.
• Eric C. Loy. “The Book by Amaranth Borsuk.” Textual Cultures: Texts, Contexts, Interpretation 12:1 (Spring 2019) pp. 186-189.
• Megan N. Liberty. “How Our Relationship to Books Has Changed Throughout History.” Hyperallergic. May 21, 2019.
• Gill Partington. “Box of Tricks: The Shifting Identity of the Book.” Times Literary Supplement. February 15, 2019.
• Kathi Inman-Berens. Electronic Literature Review. December, 2018.
• Cinthya Garcia-Leyva.“Sobre el Libro Sobre el Libro.” GASTV, August, 2018.
• Jan Baetens. “Review of The Book by Amaranth Borsuk.” Leonardo Reviews, September 2018.
• Ron Slate. “On The Book by Amaranth Borsuk.” On the Seawall (July 17, 2018).
• Robert Bolick. “On The Book (MIT Press, 2018).” Books on Books (June 7, 2018).

Excerpts:

“El libro expandido.” Página 12, August 2020. An excerpt from the Spanish translation of The Book that focuses on defining the artist’s book.

“The Book as Recombinant Structure.” The Writing Platform, October 2018.

Supplement:

What exactly is a book? In The Book, I have tried to define it with respect to its status as object, content, idea, and interface. By nature slippery, the book has taken numerous forms over time and been the subject of extensive experimentation by artists, filmmakers, tinkerers, and bookbinders.

In April, 2018, I began contacting writers, artists, and scholars I admired to ask them What is the/a book? You’ll find their answers at t-h-e-b-o-o-k.com in an attempt to draw attention to the many other formulations of what the book is and can be.