Ellipsis Press

Changing the Subject by Stephen-Paul Martin

admin — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 19:48:43 +0000

ISBN 978-0-9637536-5-6 | Fiction | 204 pages | $14

Publication date: 10/10/10.
Pre-order and get free shipping!

Available here and soon through Small Press Distribution,

your local independent bookstore,

and Amazon.

Review on Goodreads.

In Changing the Subject Stephen-Paul Martin once again deforms traditional notions of the story, giving us beautifully digressive revenge-fantasies, hysterical moral tales, and his singular, uncanny brand of the shaggy dog yarn.

Praise for Changing the Subject

In Stephen-Paul Martin’s new book, utterly banal situations are transformed into something extraordinary. His stories are unbirthday presents from the Mad Hatter. He is one of our great deadpan humorists.

—Eric Basso

What’s so transformative in Changing the Subject is Stephen-Paul Martin’s wizard-like range of knowledge–quantum mechanics, semiotics, literary theory, psychology & meditation practice–delivered in a voice unpretentous yet outrageous, scary yet funny, reader-friendly yet beyond category.

—Kirpal Gordon

Marked by subversive wit and philosophical insight, Martin’s prose is ultimately musical in construction, like a fugue for the ruin of time. Here, irony and longing coexist in counterpoint: Martin, a humanist in a posthuman age, is still composing figures of redemption.

—Andrew Joron

Stephen-Paul Martin is North America’s foremost master of the short story. The narrators of Martin’s new stories probe center after elusive center, until we see that it’s not just the subject that’s changing, but also our sense of what it means for a story to have a subject.

—Vernon Frazer

Praise for Stephen-Paul Martin

[Stephen-Paul Martin's] fiction is fresh, breaks new ground, and concedes nothing to conventional literary formulas.
—Ronald Sukenick

Martin spins his arresting tales, tales full of surprises and yet reassuringly “normal.” The Possibility of Music is a joy to read.
—Marjorie Perloff

Stephen-Paul Martin has, for many years, brilliantly wrestled with the problems posed by his own chosen material/experience. Entering his witty contemporary monologues, the reader unravels the great questions: does a person anticipate his or her own actions, as one word in a sentence anticipates the next? Or is an event an explosion of contingencies that arrive fully integrated? “I didn’t expect to become a composer,” he begins one story and this one statement articulates the magnificent and entertaining wrestling match he performs with time and act in each of his beautifully crafted stories.
—Fanny Howe

Read an excerpt

About Stephen-Paul Martin

Stephen-Paul Martin, former editor of Central Park magazine, has published many books of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry — including The Possibility of Music (FC2) and Instead of Confusion (Asylum Arts). He is currently a professor of English at San Diego State University.

The Harp & Altar Anthology,

admin — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 03:16:34 +0000

edited by Keith Newton and Eugene Lim

ISBN 978-0-9637536-4-9 | Poetry & Fiction | 336 pages | $17

Edited by Keith Newton and Eugene Lim

The Harp & Altar Anthology ($17 + shipping):

Available through Small Press Distribution and Amazon.com.

Review on Goodreads.

_____________________________

Since 2006, the Brooklyn-based online literary magazine Harp & Altar has emerged as an exciting new source for innovative and risk-taking literature. In its short tenure, Harp & Altar has established a home for serious readers attracted to its groundbreaking writing and original design. The energy and talent on display have been widely recognized—and now the best of this online magazine has been collected in The Harp & Altar Anthology, which features a selection from the fantastic poetry and fiction published in the first three years.

_____________________________

from Pieces for Small Orchestra

by Norman Lock

A lack of animals has stalled the progress of our zoo! Elephants, though large, are by themselves inadequate to constitute it with similitude. The people will not come for peanuts and pachyderm alone! The Engineer insists he can fabricate a facsimile of any animal, bird, or fish we wish. (He has a box of schematic diagrams, as well as dance steps by Astaire on paper patterns with which he hopes to acquire savoir-faire.) “There must be space inside, however, for a mechanism that can be wound up by a key.” He rejects transistors as inelegant. “But the elephants are real!” shouts the Zoologist. “Our menagerie must not be marred by incongruity!” The General is impressed by his intransigence and avers, “Too many have forsaken principles in favor of a life of artifice and sloth.” We forgive the General his remark because of the absinthe he is drinking, a habit acquired in a youth misspent on the Continent with poets, rogues, and others living by their wits. The Taxidermist volunteers to stuff the elephants with mattresses. He has already done much in the case of swans with feather-dusters that is admirable. “There will be no offal to pick up,” he says, “once they’re dead.” (As if dung were our only concern!) “What is wanted is monkeys!” rasps the Zoologist brandishing Introduction to the Primates by Daris Swindler as if it were a club. We scold him for his savagery as we swivel on our barstools to listen to his discourse: “The shaggy red orangutan, Pongo pygmaeus of Sumatra, will give the most delight. Orangutans are arboreal—according to Swindler, who has been among them. So we will have reason to look up once more, now that the sky is no longer with us.” “But there are no trees!” grumbles the Prime Minister, who used to punt on a river underneath them when the world was everywhere in leaf and rivers rich with fish. The orchestra wakes long enough to play Brahms’ lullaby, which affects us like a soporific, i.e., we fall—each and every one—to sleep, including the Funambulist, who balances on her wire by an instinct stronger than unconsciousness. While we doze, a troop of shaggy red orangutans materializes from thin air, or so it seems; and with them is no other than Daris Swindler arrived from Borneo and the Wild Men there. He wears a watch-cap and bell-bottomed sailor’s pants because he was one (a sailor, not a pair of pants!) before the study of man’s interaction with the simian absorbed him. The Cigarette Girl minces forward with a lacquered tray of smokes. Everything moves so slowly while we are mired in this dream! Daris takes a Camel and dilates on a favorite theme: the venery of Homo sylvestris—orangutan, which word is Malay for forest man. “According to seventeenth-century Dutch physician and anatomist Nicholaas Tulp, orangs are as amorous as the Satyrs of the ancient world.” So says Daris, quoting the original. Our dreaming selves are polyglot! The General is delighted. “But what,” the P.M. asks, “will become of our zoological specimens when we wake and, furthermore, whose dream this time has enthralled us? The answer involves a pin jabbed into the limbs of the musicians one by one until—having reached the Bassoonist—we swim up into consciousness with an appetite for sardine sandwiches. Who can fathom the devious paths of desire? “Look!” the General shouts. “Swindler and his evolutionary gang are gone! Here’s a cone of ash that fell from his Camel, and here and here and here is dung!” We retire to the Metaphysicians’ Room to debate the (in-)substantiality of figures in a dream (including orangutans)—what weight, if any, they may have; what life for them when they return to where we found them while we slept.

Girl With Sudden Death Syndrome

by Linnea Ogden

The grade I got from a niece of the current

Regime. My sunburned

Nipple, also a variety of Japanese shrubbery.

Did you know the bus is free. Untitled skirts for

Fall. Why didn’t you say something.

I didn’t want to say anything. Underwater plants wave from

The underwater mirror of the spring. I don’t cede

My right to poignancy and have been assured

You did so only recently. Birds ask

And answer fire where here

Here here.

Contributors Notes

Roberta Allen is the author of eight books, including two story collections, a novella-in shorts, a novel, and a travel memoir. She teaches at the New School and in private workshops. Her novel The Dreaming Girl is forthcoming from Ellipsis Press. • Stephanie Anderson’s chapbooks include In the Particular Particular (New Michigan Press), The Choral Mimeographs (Dancing Girl Press), with two more forthcoming. She lives in Chicago. • Jason Bacasa lives in Los Angeles. He performs music under the name Jackson Durkacz. • Andrea Baker is the author of like wind loves a window (Slope Editions) and the chapbooks gilda (Poetry Society of America) and true poems about the river go like this (Cannibal Books). • Jessica Baran currently resides in St. Louis. Her poetry and art criticism has appeared in Tusculum Review, The Village Voice, and The Riverfront Times, among other publications. • Jessica Baron is the author of a chapbook, The Best Word for the Job of Mourning (BlazeVOX). She lives in the high mountains of Colorado, where she writes, works, and teaches. • Shane Book is directing a film based on his first poetry collection, Ceiling of Sticks (University of Nebraska Press), winner of the 2009 Prairie Schooner Book Prize. • Donald Breckenridge is fiction editor of The Brooklyn Rail and co-editor of the InTranslation website. He is the author of the novels 6/2/95 (Spuyten Duyvil), YOU ARE HERE (Starcherone Books), and This Young Girl Passing, forthcoming from Autonomedia. • Michael Carlson is the author of Cement Guitar (University of Massachusetts Press), which won the Juniper Prize. He teaches 5th grade in Brooklyn. • Joshua Cohen is the author of five books, including the novels Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto, A Heaven of Others, and Witz, which is forthcoming in 2010 from Dalkey Archive Press. He lives in Brooklyn. • Julia Cohen has ten chapbooks out or forthcoming, and her first full-length book, Triggermoon Triggermoon, will appear in 2010. She is poetry editor of Saltgrass and assistant editor of Denver Quarterly. • Adam Clay’s second book, A Hotel Lobby at the Edge of the World, is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions. He co-edits the magazine Typo and teaches at Western Michigan University. • Lynn Crawford lives outside of Detroit. Her fifth book, Simply Separate People, Two, is forthcoming from Black Square Editions. • Oisín Curran’s Mopus was published in 2008 by Counterpath Press. He grew up in Maine and lives with his wife in Montreal. • Claire Donato lives and writes in Brooklyn. Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, and Octopus. • Farrah Field’s first book of poems, Rising, won Four Way Books’ 2007 Levis Prize and was published in 2009. She lives in Brooklyn. • Corey Frost lived in Montreal for many years and is now an enthusiastic resident of Queens. He has published three books, including My Own Devices: Airport Version, a collection of stories. • David B. Goldstein is the author of the chapbook Been Raw Diction (Dusie, 2006) and a founding member of the Wa-kow! artist collective. He teaches at York University in Toronto. • Andrew Grace’s third book, Sancta, is forthcoming from Ahsahta Press in 2012. He lives in Cincinnati with his wife and daughter. • Kate Greenstreet’s second book, The Last 4 Things, is new from Ahsahta Press, which also published her book case sensitive in 2006. Her most recent chapbook is This is why I hurt you (Lame House Press). • Sarah Gridley is the author of Weather Eye Open and the forthcoming Green is the Orator, both from University of California Press. • Emily Gropp’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Bloom, Denver Quarterly, Fence, and Whisky & Fox. Her manuscript Sleeping with Phosphorus was recently selected as a finalist for the Fence Modern Poets Series. She teaches 8th grade in Pittsburgh. • Evelyn Hampton co-edits Dewclaw. Her writing appears in Birkensnake, Denver Quarterly, and other venues. • Jennifer Hayashida is the translator of Fredrik Nyberg’s A Different Practice (Ugly Duckling Presse) and Eva Sjödin’s Inner China (Litmus Press). She is on the faculty of the Asian American Studies Program at Hunter College. • Stefania Heim’s poems have appeared in chapbook form from Hand Held Editions and in many publications. She is co-founder and co-editor of Circumference: Poetry in Translation, and a doctoral candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center. • Lily Hoang is the author of the novels Changing (Fairy Tale Review Press), Parabola (Chiasmus Press), and The Evolutionary Revolution (Les Figues Press). Her novels Invisible Women and Unfinished are forthcoming later this year. She is an associate editor at Starcherone and an editor at Tarpaulin Sky. • Joanna Howard is the author of On The Winding Stair (BOA Editions) and In the Colorless Round (Noemi Press), a chapbook. She is an editor for Tarpaulin Sky and lives in Providence, where she teaches at Brown University. • Dan Hoy lives in Brooklyn and is co-founder of Soft Targets. His recent publications include Glory Hole | The Hot Tub (Mal-O-Mar), co-authored with Jon Leon, and Basic Instinct: Poems (Triple Canopy). • Thomas Kane is the editor and co-translator of Tomaž Šalamun’s collection of poems There’s the Hand and There’s the Arid Chair (Counterpath). His work has appeared in McSweeney’s and Bat City Review. • Steve Katz started the trouble with The Exagggerations of Peter Prince in 1968 and published Kissssss: a miscellany last year. Many books came between. The first volume of his memoirrhoids is forthcoming as Time’s Wallet from Counterpath Press. • Karla Kelsey is the author of Knowledge, Forms, the Aviary (Ahsahta Press), Iteration Nets (Ahsahta), Little Dividing Doors in the Mind (Noemi Press), and 3 Movements (Pilot Press). • Joanna Klink is the author of They Are Sleeping, Circadian, and Raptus (forthcoming from Penguin in 2010). She teaches at Harvard University. • Jennifer Kronovet is the author of the poetry collection Awayward (BOA Editions) and is co-founder and co-editor of Circumference: Poetry in Translation. • Norman Lock is the author of the novels Shadowplay (Ellipsis Press) and A History of the Imagination (FC2), among many other works, including novellas, brief fictions, and stage plays. He lives in Philadelphia. • Jill Magi works in text and image and is the author of SLOT (Ugly Duckling Presse, forthcoming), Threads (Futurepoem), Torchwood (Shearsman), and numerous small, handmade chapbooks. She runs Sona Books, a chapbook press, from her apartment in Brooklyn. • Justin Marks’s first book is A Million in Prizes (New Issues Press). He is a co-founder of Birds, LLC, and lives in Woodside, Queens, with his wife and their oneyear- old son and daughter. • Peter Markus is the author of a novel, Bob, or Man on Boat (Dzanc Books), as well as three short books of short fiction. A new book of stories, We Make Mud, is forthcoming in 2011 from Dzanc. • Eugene Marten is the author of In the Blind (Turtle Point Press) and Waste (Ellipsis Press). He lives in Harlem. • Stephen-Paul Martin has published twenty-two books of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. His most recent collections of fiction are Changing the Subject (forthcoming from Ellipsis Press in 2010) and The Possibility of Music (FC2). He teaches at San Diego State University. • Zachary Mason is a computer scientist specializing in artificial intelligence. The second edition of his first book, The Lost Books of the Odyssey, came out with Farrar, Straus and Giroux earlier this year. He lives in California. • Miranda Mellis is the author of The Revisionist (Calamari Press) and Materialisms (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs). She is an editor at the Encyclopedia Project, and lives and teaches in San Francisco. • Sara Michas-Martin’s work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Forklift, Ohio, Jubilat, Field, Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. She lives in San Francisco and teaches at Stanford and Goddard College. • Patrick Morrissey’s chapbook Transparency was published by Cannibal Books in 2009. He lives in New York. • Ryan Murphy is the author of Down with the Ship (Otis Books/Seismicity Editions) and The Redcoats (Krupskaya). • Eileen Myles lives in New York, though not this spring; right now, she’s in Montana. The Inferno, a novel about the hell of being a female poet, will be out very soon. • Bryson Newhart’s fiction has recently appeared in No Colony, Anemone Sidecar, Thieves Jargon, Lamination Colony, Sein und Werden, Defenestration, 5_trope, Caketrain, elimae, Tarpaulin Sky, The Dream People, and BDtDaEAtC. • Linnea Ogden is a teacher living in San Francisco. Her work has appeared in the chapbooks Another Limit (Projective Industries) and Long Weekend, Short Leash (Taproot Editions). • Cameron Paterson lives in North Carolina. His poems are forthcoming in Permafrost and California Quarterly. • Johannah Rodgers’s book sentences, a collection of short stories, essays, and drawings, was published by Red Dust in 2007. She teaches at CUNY’s New York City College of Technology and is a contributing editor at The Brooklyn Rail. • Joanna Ruocco co-edits Birkensnake, a fiction journal, and is the author of The Mothering Coven (Ellipsis Press). Her collection of short fictions, Man’s Companions, is forthcoming from Tarpaulin Sky in 2010. • Elizabeth Sanger’s work has appeared in Conjunctions, Phoebe, Meridian, Touchstone, Past Simple, Typo, Verse Daily, Drunken Boat, and Saranac Review. She lives in Florida with cats. • Rob Schlegel is the author of The Lesser Fields, winner of the 2009 Colorado Prize for Poetry. New work is forthcoming in New American Writing and LEVELER. • Zachary Schomburg is the author of The Man Suit (Black Ocean) and Scary, No Scary (Black Ocean). His translations of Andrei Sen-Senkov have been published in Circumference, Mantis, and Aufgabe, among others. He lives in Portland and co-edits Octopus Books and Octopus Magazine. • Kate Schreyer lives in North Carolina. • Andrei Sen-Senkov, the author of eight books of poetry, was born in Tajikistan in 1968. He now lives in Moscow, where he is a medical doctor. • Brandon Shimoda’s collaborations, drawings, and poems have appeared in books and magazines, on magnetic tape and vinyl, on walls and online. He was born in the valley and lives now in the shadow of a chief hanged for murder. • Peter Jay Shippy is the author of Thieves’ Latin (University of Iowa Press), Alphaville (BlazeVOX Books), and How to Build the Ghost in Your Attic (Rose Metal Press). He teaches at Emerson College in Boston. • Joanna Sondheim’s chapbooks The Fit and Thaumatrope were published by Sona Books. She lives in Jackson Heights, Queens. • Mathias Svalina is the author of Destruction Myth, published by Cleveland State University Poetry Center. • Bronwen Tate is the author of the chapbooks Souvenirs (Dusie), Like the Native Tongue the Vanquished (Cannibal Books), and Scaffolding (Dusie). She is a PhD candidate at Stanford University and can read and knit at the same time. • G.C. Waldrep is the author of Goldbeater’s Skin (Center for Literary Publishing), Disclamor (BOA Editions), and Archicembalo (Tupelo Press), which won the 2008 Dorset Prize. He lives in Lewisburg, Pa., and teaches at Bucknell University. • Derek White is the author of Marsupial, a novel. He runs Calamari Press, edits Sleepingfish magazine, and blogs at 5cense.com. • Jared White’s chapbook of poems Yellowcake appeared in 2009 in the hand-sewn anthology Narwhal from Cannibal Books. He lives in Brooklyn. • Joshua Marie Wilkinson is the author of several books, most recently Selenography (with Polaroids by Califone’s Tim Rutili). He lives in Chicago and Athens, Ga. • Paul Winner’s work has appeared in Tin House, Maisonneuve, Seneca Review, and The Paris Review. • David Wirthlin is the author of Houndstooth (Spuyten Duyvil) and Your Disappearance (BlazeVOX Books). He is currently at work on a PhD from the University of Denver and is editor of smallHABITS. • Michael Zeiss is a writer living in Woodside, Queens. He works as a consultant for non-profit organizations.• Leni Zumas is the author of the story collection Farewell Navigator (Open City). She has taught at the University of Massachusetts, the Juniper Summer Writing Institute, Hunter College, and Columbia University.

ISBN 978-0-9637536-4-9 | Poetry & Fiction | 335 pages | $17

Edited by Keith Newton and Eugene Lim

The Harp & Altar Anthology ($17 + shipping):

Pubdate: June 1, 2010.

Pre-Order today!

Book ships upon publication.

Soon available through Small Press Distribution and Amazon.

About The Harp & Altar Anthology

Founded by Keith Newton in Brooklyn in 2006, Harp & Altar is an online journal and archive showcasing the best in poetry and innovative fiction. The work in this anthology was selected from the poetry and prose published in the first six issues, dating from the fall of 2006 to the spring of 2009. Although many contributions to Harp & Altar were unable to be published here—including criticism, reviews, translations, art, and photography—every issue is fully archived at
www.harpandaltar.com.

Excerpt from Shadowplay

admin — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 16:02:14 +0000

In Java during the reign of King Senapati, a master of the shadow-puppet theater heard, by chance from a Portuguese sailor, the story of Orpheus and Eurydice.

PART ONE

Guntur was already past fifty when he was granted, by virtue of a supreme artistry or a special destiny, the power to possess the woman he adored since he had first seen her standing shyly in his puppet theater. He had been forty then, his hair not yet gray or his back bent. Candra had come from the batik clothmaker to buy puppets, and for six afternoons Guntur had questioned her from behind the story-screen about her life. During the sixth night, she was taken by a fever whose origin might have been Guntur’s own ardent interest in her, his desire to ravish her of words. For ten years after that first death, he sought her among the shadows while the theater remained closed, the puppets shut away. At the end of the tenth year, Guntur took up the puppets again and with one of them, Arjuna, brought Candra back from the dead. Had he refused the gift and resisted the arrogance its acceptance entailed, the artistry and destiny (which for a time exalted him) would not have exacted so absolute a punishment.

Candra was unhappy to live always inside the shadow theater, which itself seemed composed of shadows. They clung like soot from the oil lamp to the edges of the table and the strings of the rebab. They collected like rain in the hollows worn into the floor. Shadows obscured the faces of the musicians when they turned toward the darkness as if seeing there Sinta abducted by Rahwana, the Monster King, whose story Guntur performed behind the illuminated screen. Were Candra to leave the theater and its enchantment, she would return to the sleep from which Guntur and Arjuna had wakened her. This, she knew when she did leave, finally, to follow her lover there. She stepped outside and, in an instant, died.

Guntur is once again undone by grief. He weeps but is not inconsolable, for he knows how Candra can be restored to him-knows by what secret ways she can be brought back. (That she could have chosen death is a possibility he rejects.) He asks two Sikhs, who are watching him kneel beside a woman in the street, to carry her body into the theater.

Guntur has only to make the puppet rods dance at the door to the Land of the Dead to draw the woman out of its iron embrace. He has only to take in his hands the buffalo-horn rods to send the Warrior Prince, Arjuna, on his difficult way across death’s doorway to release, for a second time, Candra from her dream of life. Although Arjuna’s journey to Yama’s island kingdom will be painful for Guntur while he sits bent over his puppets behind the story-screen, with the music of the gamelan and the rebab heard only in his mind now that the musicians are home sleeping-he would suffer this and more to have Candra with him again.

It is after all a small thing for a dalang, who long ago mastered his shadow art, to work the puppet rods and, with them, walk into Death on the legs of his puppet warrior. It would be the puppet master who enters the lovers’ pavilion. It would be he who lifts the sleeping woman from the soldier’s arms and carries her across the threshold of the afterworld, through the nothingness that separates it from the village with its huts and pigs and squabbles and dust, into the theater where Guntur has performed ever since he was a young man. It will be Guntur in the form of Arjuna, who rescues Candra.

The sleeping woman whose hands are blue.

His heart wishes it. His mind does, and his body- his hands, which for forty years have manipulated the goat-skin puppets behind the diaphanous white screen. His hands move as if they are themselves wayang, as if they are no longer part of himself but belong, instead, to them. His hands move with no more thought given them than to the spoon with which he eats his rice and fish. They move with no more thought than a Dutch soldier’s wife gives to the needles as she knits out of a strand of yarn, woolen hose for her husband, which he will not wear in the intense Java heat; but knit she must-obedient to the will of her hands and, perhaps, also of the wool. So, too, a dalang knits out of shadows the Hindu stories his people love, not knowing whether his hands will it or the stories themselves do.

Guntur’s hands have wandered the ancient realms of the Ramayana and Mahabharata-have made formidable journeys during a thousand nights while the oil lamp casts his puppets’ shadows onto the story-screen. The flat parchment puppets-wayang kulit- and the hands of their master are one. This is true of all dalangs. Unlike them, however, Guntur once went to the Land of the Dead. He became Arjuna and brought Candra back with him to the shadow theater. (Unless it was that Arjuna became Guntur; it is impossible to say in whose mind the story was written.)

Now, Guntur’s mind and hands are bent on one thing: to deliver Candra from death and, though death be a paradise, to return with her to Surakarta.

Why, then, does he hesitate to light the oil lamp and take from the banana-tree trunk in which it rests the goat-skin puppet; to play in his mind the two-stringed instrument, whose songs are as intricate and seductive as the sea’s; to hold the puppet rods and send Arjuna where Candra, whose hands are dyed indigo, is dreaming? Why does Guntur not hurry with Arjuna to where there is neither time nor words nor dust?

“You mustn’t!” the old woman admonishes Guntur, taking from him the puppet Arjuna, so that the dalang cannot travel a second time beyond death’s door and return with Candra. Here, there is only a likeness of death. In the room’s heavy shadows and in the single shadow that is night, death admires its image as if in a mirror. When the rain beats mournfully against the leaves and the thatched roof, it is as if the night sea were hurrying into the room’s corners and the spaces between its rafters. “You mustn’t!” she repeats, roughly handling the puppet as though she intends to cripple Arjuna. Guntur stares at her as he would a ghost who has entered his room from a seam in the air. He sees Arjuna gripped in her hand and wonders, idly, if the pressure of her fingers hurts the Pandava warrior, whose invisible presence the puppet signifies. For a moment he forgets Candra-forgets his determination to abduct her from the blue pavilion where she sleeps in the arms of the dead soldier, enfolded together as if

death were a silk shroud wound about them both. For a moment, Guntur does not see Candra where she is sleeping without end-does not see her asleep as though in a mist, a shimmering heat, or the waning light. Now it is this old woman he sees, who seems to have arrived from the passageway connecting life and its reflection-so suddenly did she appear. He grasps her wrist to prevent her flight from the shadow theater with his puppet. But she has no intention of leaving.

The woman may be herself a ghost quickened by the dalang’s hand on her wrist while in her hand Arjuna has halted in his preparations for the difficult journey. There are many such formidable women in Hindu stories. May not this woman be one of them? Might she not have left the shadow world, attracted by the lamp light wavering on the cotton screen? The theater is silent beneath the black trees; what music there is, plays only in Guntur’s mind. Perhaps this fierce woman has possessed the puppet master’s hand clenching her wrist. Perhaps she has cast her shadow, from where the Ramayana and the Mahabharata are eternally occurring, into the theater- drawn by a light and music unheard by all save the two of them.

“You must not wake her!”

She releases her grip on the puppet, but in her eyes Guntur sees that she has not relented. He inserts the puppet rod in the banana-tree trunk, letting Arjuna rest. Lying between Guntur and the story screen, the trunk has the heft of a man’s arm.

“Who are you?” he asks.

“Candra’s aunt.”

And Guntur remembers how, after Candra’s mysterious first death, he had gone to beg of her aunt the young woman’s wooden bangles.

“I did not recognize you,” he says, letting go her arm.

“You destroyed her once-now let her be!” The weak light seems to shrink from the woman’s fury as though her gusting anger shook the flame in the unchimneyed lamp, which yielded its small and timid fire to the room’s expectant darkness. She may be only a mortal woman; but in her rage against Guntur and his indecency, she is like Amba, an exemplar of supernatural vengeance. Guntur feels the storm of her buffeting him, and his hands tremble so that he cannot take up Arjuna and with him drive the woman from the playhouse.

Arjuna rests, his puppet rod in the hollow green trunk. He is without resolve, emptied of purpose-now that Guntur’s will, like a boat submissive to a powerful tide, has ebbed away from the seaward journey.

If Guntur was destined to live among shadows, Candra was fashioned for bright sun. She was born in the light and twice died when darkness was already gathering in the corners of the room where she lay waiting to be engulfed by night.

Her father was a fisherman. Her mother tended fields of sweet potatoes and rice. Their house was raised on stilts above the marsh grass. The house looked out upon the Java Sea, into which Candra’s father disappeared each morning, early, when the sun trembled on the horizon, and from which each night he appeared out of the darkening sky when the fishing was done.

Like a wayang. Ghost.

There were the three of them together; and then a fourth, Lastri, was born.

As the sisters grew, they became bound in affection- each to each and each one also to the mother or father. Lastri followed her mother into the fields while Candra was already in the boat when the sun came up over the rim of the world, making light spill across the sand, turning it pink, then gold, then white. The sand would be white until the sun’s leaving turned the grains to rubies, which shone until the light was put out suddenly in the sky and the shadows that all the while had been lengthening joined to become night.

Her father was almost always silent. He spoke only of what was important to know in a boat far from land.

“You must coil the rope this way,” he said, showing Candra how to make the rope lie flat on the bottom of the boat. “In the water, it will come alive again, like an eel.”

“You must hold the net this way,” he said, showing Candra how to gather the corners of the net in both hands. “So that when it is thrown, it will turn in the air like a wheel before falling into the water.”

“You must reef the sail this way,” the father said, showing the girl how to fold and tie the sail. “So that the increasing wind will not overwhelm the boat.”

In the boat, he spoke little, preferring to listen to what the wind and water sang. When he spoke, he did so with deliberation so that Candra would understand the importance of what he said. The only exception to his solemnity, which she, too, observed, was the nonsense words they sang to encourage the fish to swim into the net.

The nights were dark but not entirely when the weather was fine, for the vast quantity of stars was like a shining dust against the blackness. So many stars were there that they seemed to sift down onto the sea and, when the tide was high, into the tiny bays that coiled among the marsh grasses. The stars seemed also to cling to the tops of the palm leaves-their bottoms blacker than night itself.

Later, inside the house, Candra would sit mending a torn net under the oil lamp, or eating fish and rice sweetened with coconut, or singing with her father the nonsense song they sang, waiting for the fish. Lastri helped her mother to wash and put away the pots. Such a division as this is natural when the work must be divided. This story is not about the envy of sisters or the jealousy of parents. This story tells of an impossible love, which overrules reason and the boundary the gods have ordained between life and death.

Back to Norman Lock’s Shadowplay.

Shadowplay by Norman Lock

admin — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 16:21:20 +0000

ISBN 978-0-9637536-3-2 | Fiction | 138 pages | $13

Also available through Small Press Distribution,

and through your local independent bookstore,

Powell’s, Amazon, or Barnes & Noble.

Review on Goodreads.

In Java, a master of the shadow-puppet theater seeks to possess-by his art-a woman, who perishes as though by the contagion of his unnatural desire. Shadowplay is a meditation on story-telling as an act of seizure, a parable of obsession and of the danger of confounding the real with its representations.

Praise for Shadowplay

Stories compensate for lives unlived. They are what Norman Lock, or his avatar Guntur, calls shadows, negative reflections on a backlit screen, comprising, through artistry and brief illumination, ghosts. Lock’s teller is imprisoned by darkness, captivated by warriors and princesses no longer, if ever, living. Death becomes a distance from which the voices of these unliving return. It is a journey as delicious as it is threatening.

—R.M. Berry

In the Dickensian tradition, Lock is adept at writing about places he has never been. He develops exotic lexicons of objects to stage his dramas. Pure objects, the words for them as portrayed in other books & art, unencumbered by the reality of the objects themselves… this is the brilliance of Lock — he mines the unknown or underknown for gems whose value is not relevant to the soil they were dug up from, for no other reason othen than in the name of art.

—Derek White

Just as a dalang retells ancient and iconic stories in his puppet-theatre, Shadowplay is itself a fable that stages the storyteller’s struggle between imagination and reality, experience and its record… Mistaking the shadow for the object from which it is cast, [Lock] illustrates the fact that the narratives we use to make sense of the world sometimes do so at the expense of our experience of it.

—Rain Taxi Review of Books

Lock’s language reflects the fabulous nature of the myth, intricate in description but never hard to understand, full of repeated images that, however simple, resonate deeply within the story.

—The Quarterly Conversation

Lock …evokes a deeply sensual world in which the smell of cinnamon all but sings in the breeze and the sea beckons like a lover… Shadowplay is informed by so many stories… that I initially feared I’d need to haul out my old Bullfinch’s Mythology and a dozen other reference works. But I didn’t. The novel stands on its own and does its tricky work unaided, like the afterlife of a dream.

—The Brooklyn Rail

Praise for Norman Lock

Lock allows us to see the world through an Other’s eyes in such a way that by the end the difference between us…seems little more than a thin sheet of paper, if even that.
—Brian Evenson

Wise up and get all you can of Lock. His writing was written by a writer exquisite in the singularity (read for this “genius”) of his utterance.
—Gordon Lish

[Lock's] prose is melodial, and alert to every signal from the unseen.
—Gary Lutz

All hail Lock, whose narrative soul sings fairy tales, whose language is glass.
—Kate Bernheimer

About Norman Lock

Norman Lock has written novels and short fiction as well as stage, radio and screen plays. He received the 1979 Aga Kahn Prize given by The Paris Review. He is a recipient of a 1999 fellowship from the New Jersey Council on the Arts and a 2009 fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts-both for fiction. His novel The King of Sweden was recently published by Ravenna Press. Norman lives in Philadelphia with his wife, Helen.

More information available at : http://www.normanlock.com/

The Mothering Coven by Joanna Ruocco

admin — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 16:05:19 +0000

ISBN 978-0-9637536-2-5 | Fiction | 123 pages | $14

BEST OF 2009

Also available through Small Press Distribution or Amazon

Review on Goodreads.

Mapping a utopia on the brink, The Mothering Coven’s rare blend of charisma and pyrotechnic wordplay makes for an utterly original act of storytelling. Bertrand has disappeared from the house she shared with seven women-artists, scientists, and of course, witches. As the women plan a party for Mrs. Borage’s hundredth birthday, Bertrand’s absence threatens to dissolve the world they’ve created.

Praise for The Mothering Coven

Ruocco’s Coven is an engagingly whimsical tale, graceful and inventive, with its own distinctive lexicon, reminiscent of the works of such writers as Ronald Firbank or Coleman Dowell. It toys with language and knowledge somewhat like the emerald-eyed black cat in the book toys with a large bird. Batting it about playfully. Coaxing something new out of it.

—Robert Coover

Deliriously imagined, The Mothering Coven is a work of wonder. Joanna Ruocco arrives: marvelous, and fully sprung!

—Carole Maso

The prose of Joanna Ruocco’s remarkable debut novel The Mothering Coven is so exuberant and thoroughly enlivening in its contagious and cheeky love for the mutability of language’s meanings that its plot often seemed to serve a subsidiary role to its stylistic rollicks; one could read for sound and linguistic play alone – its rhetorical approach to story seemed a narrative unto itself, and one could enjoy and take from this element of the novel as much – indeed, far more than – one could from practically any other published work out there, contemporary or otherwise… a kind of sui generis gem.

—art + culture

This book, ostensibly about a group of women missing one of their own, is delightfully strange, both in the way the plot progresses and the way Ruocco plays with language…

—Time Out New York, Best of 2009

About Joanna Ruocco

Joanna Ruocco lives in Providence, RI, where she coedits Birkensnake, a fiction journal. She has published stories in Marginalia, Quick Fiction, Tarpaulin Sky, No Colony, Webconjunctions, Caketrain, and elsewhere. Her short story collection, Man’s Companions, is forthcoming from Tarpaulin Sky Press. The Mothering Coven is her first novel.

Read an excerpt.

Image Credits

admin — Fri, 23 May 2008 18:18:25 +0000

http://www.englishrussia.com/?p=1849

Ray Johnson (American, 1927-1995), “Five Massage Balls”, c.1968; color silkscreen, http://www.treadwaygallery.com/ONLINECATALOGS/MAY2005/0751-0800.html

http://phineasxjones.com/

Korea, Chosŏn dynasty, last quarter of the 19th century; Eight-panel folding screen http://www.metmuseum.org/special/beauty_learning/view_1.asp?item=0&view=l

Library hit by Hurricane Katrina http://www-wsl.state.wy.us/slpub/outrider/2005/Sep2005.html

New Zealand library hit by earthquake http://www.flickr.com/photos/22090245@N05/2131895362/

Excerpt of Fog & Car

admin — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 17:26:25 +0000

Mr. Fog

They have come, early, to a river without a bridge. Scuttle down the sides the papers fly from their pockets in the race to a cool water. The banks are muddy but one of them has swam here before, come through the woods. That one says he would take him to a small fort on an island deep in the woods where did he know? there’s a river. He didn’t know and the creek’s ravine is satisfying and secret.

He has come here in a dream though that is a mistake, it happening before so it is a memory but so fuzzed as to make the friend this or that one perhaps not him or him and the creek is a river is a small lake never big and always hidden in thickets or groves and always a wood deep and delicious in the size of memory (though the road was not far).

A certain memory then, of objects that substantiate his movements, these memories this nostalgia incorporates into this doing of this exact moment. It is this drumsong and this leather engraving on a belt, this hat and this ravine.

After his divorce, he moves to Ohio, a small town. Now it is late August in a mild summer. September will begin soon, so will the cool season and boys come to the field, play soccer while the light remains.

The lake. Several days will pass there. In his bag, several sheets of paper. Each day in late summer in dead calm but in evening sun, he folds a boat. Blank pages all, each a letter. The drum marches distantly.

The accord set for whatever peace from battle. He imagines brightly clothed soldiers, a nineteenth century war, thick and stiff clothing. Fields of battle shift and the paper boats can be let go in swift if not precise formation. Ringing the football field, the band’s march. Time passes.

Say this: was there some moment past in a rose bush he as a small child small enough to travel in and under this bush and meet with a boy, this among secrets.

Now, sitting at the lake, he thinks about what he has done. One month before school begins where he has been hired as a teacher. He has moved to a house. His savings are ample, there is a smelly part of town. He rents an entire house there.

He remembers also someone older on a celebratory day on a hill poke holes in a tin can and place blue hot coals inside, whirling it round on a string and whooping whooping circled by light. He once played in a ravine. Someone once gave him a hat; he speaks this language and knows these words in another and these in another and he writes with this one so he knows at least that that he hears himself repeating tin can poked with holes tin can poked with holes tin can tin can tincan tincan tincan tincan tincan almost gone tincantincantincantincan almost gone but turning away from it, eyes closed to feel the wind off the lake, he finds laughing that there it is ready to bite again, tin can.

So he, beside the lake, with a preoccupation, admittedly boyish, of paper boats. He recognizes that he is purposely creating drama and its accompanying landscape to relieve. The picture wakes him to the relevant fact. He has recreated, no—re-envisioned, heroically—a child playing alone. As the thought finishes, the theater lights fade and he is again beside the lake.

* * * * * * *

He feels a panic as he thinks about his new job. As he eases out of it. She would have approved. A productive waiting she would have called it.

His wife. The words beat twice, are the snares of the marching band. Da dum, da dum, da dum.

She sent him letters, their envelopes containing blank pages. He has been thinking about her.

And the other? Which one was it. Oh yes the dear friend. Who came and we sang, what did we sing. Was it that one. Oh yes it was him. Oh yes the dear friend. When we sang. Which one. And the song. Which.

It must have been his birthday. You had arranged a party for he was your friend and it was his birthday. But they left the crowd because you and he could set up a rosebush, large and filling out the street with a strong flush of alcohol and there was the sun, not set, and a spring day and there was talk. So with thoughts, you think, there is not this man or that but him once. Even now you can summon the warm face, the blood thick in the face from the drinking, your forehead and his meet and a shout throated and released. The stone walls and bricks of the street clear and empty, a chamber for his voice for his cry of life. Oh deep sound. Put your hand to your face, his forehead once there, so it is, you confess, not this, that, but this, and that is memory, fear living there.

There is the event of them in several habits of conversation. At his house or his house, at the restaurant, at the bar. And the memory arises of those (that) occasions (occasion): Communion Communication Fraternity. The words sway in his mind and as he forces the remembering, he thinks those Historian words, smoothing fact into theory. When it was the two of them, sitting, discrete.

* * * * * * *

School begins but he is not there, asleep in front of the class, a voice settling on the shelves and heads, an addition to the room’s dust and light. A friend whom he saw in the past. For a while, daily.

* * * * * * *

He is the greedy horse starving between two bags of oats, choosing between paradoxes, mind faltering to know if one empty the other wise. In his brain, the friend and his wife, standing equally on two opposing lobes, asking of him.

After school he walks past the lake to his home. There is a letter in the mailbox, another letter from his wife so she is still there, she has found him and is living somewhere new again, so he takes the time to reply, thinking maybe then he can rise from his chair.

It is only an accident, however, and the chair fits just as well. He knows the sadness of the unraveling, which not bitter, after all, begun some years ago, but still the unraveling shows like the dust on the mirror shelf. What to do with it, too gone for repair though repair was cheap in every purchase save the doing.

* * * * * * *

The children ask him questions, it is difficult for him to respond. Somehow the unlawed, the criminals of Chester A. Garfield Public High school, acted with mercy in the classroom of what everyone knew, adult and child alike, to be an imitation.

Criminals of a type, flush they both had been in the face, when they found the briar patch, a thorny young creature and not thick but thick enough for the hiding of them, had arisen in a lot they had never seen. Examining it, they went under, the other leading, tearing at the ground with their fingers hoping to get to the center. It was there that they did and hid their criminal acts: he had taken a bottle of his father’s whisky there, so their drinking partnership was early established, and he had brought cheese and bread.

They started early on a Saturday and were sick by ten in the morning. They dug holes in the earth for their vomit, and were scared of dying and whipping both so sat there eating the cheese sandwiches. Their minds were soft and liquid, the branches netted the sky above them, he thought he wouldn’t mind the dying and someday he might bring a girl here and do the same and perhaps that was what love was and sobering by evening went home to a scolding, of course, triumphant.

Was it him, truly, had they traveled away together, to the city together, or was it a semblance of him that he had later met in the city and put the two together as they served the same purpose. This man or that woman, accidents and coincidence were the substance of his memories so what could those words possibly mean? That his dreams had objects which he juggled and slapping these objects into his palm and hurling them without caution into the air, and he sat in his chair studying at a distance the picture of this violent juggler and watched the violence below nonetheless spring into perfect arcs of motion above, listless sitting watching.

And when he had gone away to another city, finally to another language and another country, how he had met his wife. And she was a coincidence also, yet he thought that their combat fit his ideas of marriage. They had stood at a museum in St. Petersburg and shivered and they had both turned, he from an old way that he had forgotten, and she in some—wonderful he had thought at the time—auguring of his action and each pantomimed the other so that they both turned and plugged a nostril with a finger and voided mucus onto the snow. He stood facing her and behind them both, two snot blobs in the snow.

In San Francisco, he is in a hotel bed with his wife. He thinks that he is hungry as they had traveled the whole day to get here and only had one cup of coffee, too excited or busy to have eaten. Well, the truth was that circumstances had mismanaged his stomach. They had gotten up, had the cup of coffee and there met the man who was going to Las Vegas, half the way, right that moment. So off they went and the same happened in Las Vegas so now here they were, she tired and happy, he anxious and hungry and happy.

Preparing for bed, a partial light from the street lamp. The window open, the room is filled with a coolness. His clothes are not twisted and his sheets are straight. He is wearing cotton sweat pants and a t-shirt and his mind is blank.

* * * * * * *

He has returned. An evening in fall he searches through a wood and finds a river, now with a bridge. He carefully walks down the embankment, making sure nothing in his pockets comes unburied and stands at the creek.

He felt conscious of taking the time after his divorce, the sadness, picking that up like a roll of dough and stretching it. He knew he did so with a penitent’s selfishness, the infirm pleasure that came after the heart broke, reviewing the breaking.

Then after a while, it wasn’t even the breaking, but the sound of the action that he followed out, rode upon to seek other similarities.

* * * * * * *

Going to sleep he notices the lamp light of this room is almost the exact color of this other lamp light in this other room, and he sickens with sadness and desire to go to this other room with this other light. In his dreams he goes there to find it is the same room and wishes to wake to regain the former but it is by then day and the night light and wall, so inconsistent their ellipse of movement and so precise his memory of color, never repeat.

Back to Eugene Lim’s Fog & Car.

Fog & Car by Eugene Lim

admin — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 17:21:53 +0000

ISBN 0-9637563-0-6 | Fiction | 263 pages | $10

Order Fog & Car ($10 + shipping):

Or buy through Small Press Distribution,

your local independent bookstore,

Powell’s, Amazon, or Barnes & Noble.

Review on Goodreads.

Praise for Fog & Car

In this astonishing, assured first novel Eugene Lim intertwines elegant poetics with a fantastic plot, rife with love, mystery, malaise, and the supernatural. His gift for ingenious, startling permutations of language and plot make for a memorable, mesmerizing read. It was hard for me to put Fog and Car down; harder for me to stop thinking about.

—Lynn Crawford

The events of this novel take place in a space contrary to action, illuminating the silences of the page and the nothing that haunts the borders of “doing something.” A beautifully paced and thoughtful work.

—Renee Gladman

In Fog & Car Eugene Lim scalpels deep into the loneliness of coupledom, into divorce, into obsession and stalking, into casual hookups, into homoerotic shocks. The book slowly heats its duos until they come to a rolling boil, blistering out surprises and unexpected complexities. Mr. Lim is definitely a writer to watch.

—Steve Katz

In Fog & Car, Eugene Lim renders the uncanny convergences of the lives of partners and strangers in a language entirely new. This is a deep, engulfing novel of breathtaking, even spooking precision—an altogether heady and heart-shaking debut.

—Gary Lutz

Reviews for Fog & Car

In this debut novel documenting the aftermath of a shattered marriage—its disintegration evident in the artifacts of memory and loss strewn across an abandoned landscape—Eugene Lim doesn’t as much collect and catalogue the fragments of lives shared, as artfully piece them into a puzzle reflective of players whose moves were induced by seemingly inconsequent forces… [A] phenomenal ability to nestle revelatory gems in the corners of his muscular text.

—Bookslut

Eugene Lim’s impressive debut novel… has the shape of a long turnpike that runs into an urban snarl of on and off ramps. Suddenly every incidental thread of the early, gently-paced narrative knots up into a supernatural tangle of a plot — souls are echanged, coincidences multiply… To defy novelistic conventions is easy enough. The difficulty comes in custom-building new forms for a story, and new stories for these new forms. Suiting the action to the word and the word to the action is no easy feat, but it is one that Lim has achieved with his first tragicomic novel.

—The Brooklyn Rail

FOG & CAR is a strange amalgam of several ideas, it begins with a dissolved marriage from which both ends begin to branch and splinter and spread back into each other in weird ways. I was surprised to be so captivated by a book about a ruined marriage, which it is only on the surface, what it really is is a puzzle and a book of worming forms, sometimes the tense shifts or lines are layered and/or repeated, there is a lot of subtle innovation, refreshing… FOG & CAR is new in familiar ways and familiar in new ways, and altogether a thing that turned my mind on in such a mode that I could not turn it off.

—Blake Butler

Lim peels relentlessly at his story’s realism until it tugs loose, revealing much stranger happenings underneath… a disturbing mystery pitched somewhere between Mulholland Drive and City of Glass… [I]t never loses its appealing initial tone of aching loneliness, even as its characters and its goings-on grow increasingly supernatural.

—Review of Contemporary Fiction

How Lim manages to negotiate the reversals, to maintain believability, to take the reader with him, is only part of his success, for it is, ironically, the story’s lack of resolution that brings satisfaction… It balances, albeit in a detached tone, compassionate depictions of moral dissolution with Murakami-styled fabulist plot departures, dramatic reversals, and coincidental connections. It leaves the reader with a balled up jumble of narrative threads, but in such a sophisticated and befuddling manner as to force Murakami’s own mind into a tailspin. Fog & Car is an extraordinary debut.

—NewPages

About Eugene Lim

Eugene’s writings have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Boog City, sonaweb, Harp & Altar, Sleeping Fish and elimae. He is the fiction editor for Harp & Altar and, with Johannah Rodgers, runs Ellipsis Press. He works as a librarian in a high school and lives with the poet Joanna Sondheim in Brooklyn. Here are some books he’s liked.

Finalist in Blatt Book’s 2007 Novel of Novels Contest

Jim Fog is marooned in a small Midwest town shortly after his divorce, succumbing to purposelessness and nostalgia. His ex, Sarah Car, has moved to New York City with the ambition of skipping over any mourning for their marriage. An old friend, ignorant himself of his action’s consequences, enables Fog and Car to move through and haunt each other’s lives. Eventually Fog and Car chase this friend, who is disguised to both of them, and the momentum of that chase pushes the two characters out of their static life-cages towards different unreal conclusions.

Fog & Car begins with the alternating voices and perspectives of a Mr Fog and a Ms Car. Eventually this symbolic dialectic—which examines a tension in the novel’s tradition, the engineered ride of some narratives versus the associative cloud of others—collapses. The narrative’s shifting styles finally find an equilibrium in a troubled and subversive escapism.

Hear Eugene Lim read from Fog & Car here.

Read an excerpt.

Excerpt from Waste

admin — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 16:57:44 +0000

Sloper’s big thick body promised great strength and he resented the obligations this seemed to confer, as certain people resent the burden of physical beauty. Once the guards fully appreciated this reticence they were no longer afraid of him. They would sometimes give him a bad time about giving him his keys at the start of his shift.

They were just kidding, he didn’t mind.

There were a great many keys on his ring, most of them practically identical–he didn’t rate a master. Even after months on the job they still looked alike, so he went to the trouble of color-coding them with small round stickers.

Once he picked up his keys and all the stickers had been removed. Another time all the stickers had been switched around. There wasn’t much point in complaining–the keys went through a lot of hands during the day–but Sloper had to wonder about the guard who sat behind the console on Mondays and Tuesdays, Dedlow or Ludlow, a big indolent kid, almost as big as Sloper, rosy-cheeked, with a sparse blonde mustache and a mouth full of small brown stones. He did not like being asked for keys–it would take him away from the monitors, especially those looking out on the exterior entranceways and alcoves, where street people frequently came to pee or defecate. These locations were fitted with loudspeakers, and the kid would watch and wait for that singular relaxed moment critical to the act before barking into the microphone: “This is not a public restroom! Take your business elsewhere!” Some fled though they’d already gotten started, and some finished what they’d begun.

When asked for keys the kid would, with the elaborate discomfiture of the mortally inconvenienced, roll his chair back from the console to the key box behind the desk, groping inside with considerable difficulty and reluctance, looking only with his hand, his eyes always on the monitors, eventually returning with a set of keys, proffering them with renewed disinterest, and on the point of dropping them into your palm, suddenly retract them, saying, “Whups, wrong set. You want number 4,” or “Sign the log first, fireball,” or would withdraw them in increments, making you reach further and further in for them, saying, “How’s that? Wrestling’s fake? Huh, fireball? Get you in one of them holds, see how fake it is then.” All the while never looking away from the screens.

By the time Sloper decided that maybe this wasn’t kidding, that maybe he should say something about it, the kid was gone. Security had a terrific turnover. They went through people.

* * * * *

Sloper kept his hard tile mopped, and he was good about glass. He squatted on his haunches in front of the lobby doors, head tilted back, and in this way could see every smudge and handprint. The cleaner was a pale green liquid in a plastic spray bottle that you refilled at the mixing center. Sloper used paper towels only–cloth smeared and left lint. He burned off a case a month. He didn’t think it should be so hard to use the door handle, the panic bar, or the handplate, but he didn’t take it personally that they didn’t. Too, you had to figure how busy they were.

Aside from this commitment to clarity, Sloper left the detailing to the women. The edging, the deep dusting, kicking out. It was understood.

The glass cleaner went into one of numerous pouches on the yellow plastic apron strapped to his cart, along with the other spray bottles and cleaning supplies. If pouches were empty you could use them to hold burgers and sandwiches. If a burger or sandwich no longer had a wrapper you used a paper towel from another pouch on the yellow plastic apron. It was okay if a sandwich or burger was half-eaten. Potato salad from the deli in the lobby came in small plastic tubs that would also fit into the pouches, as would donuts, bagels, cookies, rice cakes, croissants, muffins.

People never finished their potato salad.

In the smallest yellow plastic pouch Sloper kept his only other diversion, a transparent plastic cube containing three silver balls of various diameter, and three loose cups, correspondingly sized. He was usually unable to cup more than two of the balls without dislodging one or both, and it could be difficult to place just one.

The cart the yellow apron was strapped to was a gray Rubbermaid barrel screwed to a round pedestal with five casters, one of which rattled with bad bearings. When you trashed a floor, you dumped all the wastebaskets into the liner in your barrel. When the barrel was full, the Safety Committee asked, did you push it or pull it? It was a surprise visit. They asked Sloper nineteen other questions and then had him demonstrate the proper method of removing a full bag from the cart. Then he signed his name twice. You double-tied the bag and dropped it down a chute in the core of the building, all the way down to a dumpster in the first basement. Throughout the night you could hear the chutes booming distantly, like artillery. Sloper would periodically check the trash room to make sure a dumpster wasn’t overloaded and backed up into a chute, that bags hadn’t landed on the floor and burst. Doing so, he might hear a faint languorous beeping fade in, getting louder as the truck from the waste management company backed up to the garage door.

The trash was picked up every night after midnight. The guy who came in for the dumpsters said, “Howdy” and Sloper said, “Morning.” When he left the guy said, “Have a good one” and Sloper said, “You bet.” In the interval they rarely spoke, unless it was to discuss the possibility of a compactor, of which lately there’d been talk. They didn’t always see each other, and neither called the other by name.

After the trash had been picked up, Sloper swept and mopped the trash room floor. He swept in slow circles, the pile of dirt and debris in the middle of the floor getting smaller and higher, and smaller, higher, as he spiraled in around it. He mopped in figure eights, changing the water once–he never put the dirt back on the floor. At the end of the night he put his vacuum sweeper in the empty Rubbermaid and pushed it into a closet. The sweeper’s bumper was fitted with magnets for picking up loose paper clips, staples, tacks. If you didn’t clear them off now and then, something could work its way under the spindle and jam the belt. The bag was supposed to be emptied every three nights but sometimes Sloper waited weeks. Sometimes his routine was interrupted by his supervisor or another janitor, who called on him to do the heavy lifting or plunge a shitty toilet, because of his apparent strength and because the building had no utility person. Sloper did not receive utility pay but this was how he got out of detailing. It was understood.

The service preferred the janitors call it trash, not garbage, no matter what it smelled like.

Back to Eugene Marten’s Waste.

Waste by Eugene Marten

admin — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 16:17:30 +0000

In an age of affluence, an important depiction of a member of the purported invisible class.

ISBN 978-0-9637563-1-8 | Fiction | 116 pages | $10 + shipping

Or buy through Small Press Distribution,

your local independent bookstore,

Powell’s, Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

Review on Goodreads.

Praise for Waste

Dark and difficult, with clipped sentences and pungent passages, [Waste] concerns a janitor whose use of office workers’ waste and personal objects is queasy…. a look at humanity from the slick insides of a wastebasket.

Angle: a Journal of Arts + Culture

Only Eugene Marten can keep a reader enthralled with the minutiae of a janitorial existence. From the most unlikely of subjects Marten constructs, with great care and taking joy in every sentence, a spellbinding work. Precisely and exquisitely detailed, Waste is a stark little masterpiece.

–Brian Evenson

There is nothing quite like the controlled burn of Eugene Marten’s prose. Waste is an exhilarating and unnerving piece of fiction.

–Sam Lipsyte

When a poet pal had put a copy of Waste into my hands, I right away went nuts until I had gotten myself in touch with its author for to add to my household a supply of enough copies to scare all my writer friends with. Here, said I, in wild proclamation, is one for history and a half.

–Gordon Lish

This is surely one of the darkest and most jarring books I’ve read. It is also pitch-perfect. Waste wastes nothing–not a syllable, a beat, a ragged breath.

–Dawn Raffel

Reviews:

Reading Eugene Marten’s Waste is like reading the margins of Then We Came to the End…

–Steve Himmer

Eugene Marten is a writer’s writer… his books provoking the sort of breathless admiration usually reserved for the deceased.

–Vanessa Place in American Book Review

I will read anything [of] Eugene Marten’s for the rest of my life… His sentences are sentences in the realest application of the word, in that each one kind of condemns itself on the paper or in you in your own mind.

–Blake Butler

Waste is a novel that will stay with you even after you’ve finished its slim pages, its powerful stench sticking to you long after you’ve put it aside.

–Matt Bell on NewPages.com

A cult classic.

–Time Out New York

[T]he banality of the day-to-day workaday eccentricities of a troubled janitor’s lonely life is recorded with devastating precision… One might think that mentioning the novella’s startling nods to “A Rose for Emily” and Psycho, would ruin its surprises, but the details of Waste’s strengths lay not beneath a spoiler alert but within its acute attention to language, its profound empathy and understanding for its protagonist, and its underlying critique of the endless cycle of consumption and waste.

–John Madera at WordRiot

With unnerving clarity and precision, Marten starkly executes a chilling portrait of loneliness and anonymity, reminding us, in the process, that that which we might ever so casually discard and dismiss may not necessarily respond so casually in kind.

–Geoffrey Brown in the Ottawa XPress

[A] brutal, disturbing little novel that works beautifully both for those who read for story and those who read for the artistry—or at least those who read for those things but who can deal with a shocking amount of physical and psychological trauma distilled down into sharp, tight sentences.

–The Quarterly Conversation

Eugene Marten writes with a chiseled flair that is basically unheard of in today’s fiction market…

–Jason Rice on Three Guys One Book

About Eugene Marten

Marten’s novel In the Blind was published by Turtle Point Press in 2003. He lives in Harlem.

Hear Eugene Marten read from Waste here.

Read an excerpt.