Month: May 2020 (Page 11 of 13)

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Adam McEwen Birth Control Pills (2018)
‘The item is instantly recognizable, but again, freighted with a different set of meaning for each person. The actual objects, while being graphite facsimiles themselves, are ultimately alluding to real objects in everyday life. Indeed, the concept of verisimilitude runs throughout McEwen’s practice. What is real and what isn’t? Is that a picture of a birth control pill packet, or merely its graphite doppelgänger? If an object has no utilitarian purpose, but exists solely to evoke a specific memory or reaction from the viewer, can it still be considered real?’

 

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Beverly Fishman Pill Spill (2018)
‘In each of these works…I treat the museum or gallery space as a living organism by releasing pharmaceuticals into the institution’s interior.’

 

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Chemical X Caned Glass Windows (2019)
‘Artist Chemical X has taken 10,000 ecstasy tablets to make two enormous murals that look like something you would definitely want to have in your children’s room. irst, the artist and his team make a purchase in the “ingredients” wholesale and then make the pills in a house at a secret location. They use two pill presses, one to get the colours right in blanks, than they transfer the colour recipe over to the other press hidden away so that if the studio is raided there is no “contamination”. They have a large selection of old school embossing tools.’

 

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Jeremiah Johnson House Of Worship (2014)
‘Jeremiah Johnson found a new use for all of the empty pill bottles he’s collected since he was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis in 2001. Johnson’s latest work, ‘House of Worship’, is a model of a regional church constructed from his personal collection of empty prescription pill bottles.’

 

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Rob Pruitt Viagra Falls (2008)
Installation, Sand bags, plastic, water, electric pump and vast quantity of crushed Viagra pills

 

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Claes Oldenburg Emerald Pill (1977)
Enamel on cast aluminum, and stainless steel

 

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Dana Wyse Pills & Remedies (1996)
‘While remedies are usually used to cure diseases, Canadian artist Dana Wyse offers a series of pills allowing who ingests them to extend their powers and abilities. Do you want to understand complex mathematics instantly? Become a professional photographer? Are you dying to remember your dreams? Or would you like to contact UFOs? Dana Wyse has the medicine for you.’

 

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Carsten Höller Pill Clock (2011)
‘The visitor is invited to pick up a pill and take it, to see whether it affects her or his relation to the space, the exhibition and reality in general. Note: these pills have been developed so as to ensure they contain no allergenic substances. However, they are not suitable for vegan visitors.’

 

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LAS VEGAS (KTNV) — ‘A Las Vegas mom whose son died because of drugs is upset about large pill stickers on the outside of a local hotel-casino. It’s only been a year since Debi Nadler lost her 28-year-old son, Brett. “He fought hard, he fought very hard, and he lost the battle,” Nadler said. “One pill can kill, one pill.” His pill addiction cost him his life and left Nadler devastated.

‘The anniversary of his death was just days ago, the same day she saw what appeared to be stickers of pills on the windows of the Palms Resort. “It was kind of like a big slap in my face to see a building with pills on the day I was doing my son’s unveiling,” Nadler said. “I wouldn’t even call it a piece of art, I call it something that is like a constant reminder to people who have lost their kids, to active users out there,” she said.’

 

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Peggy Kliafa Various (2013 – 2019)
Aluminum pills’ blisters, silicone, plexi glass

 

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Kelly Reemsten Pill Party (2011)

 

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Scott Blake Ecstacy Self-Portrait (201`2)
‘I collected all of the pill images from Dancsafe.org, a harm reduction organization promoting safety within the rave community.’

 

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Yin Xiunzhen Slow Release (2017)
‘The twelve meters long capsule-shaped installation called Slow Release is wrapped in 700 feet of red and white cloth donated by Muscovites. The medicine capsule references a brand-new generation of pills aimed to reduce the speed of release of the medicine into the body – to increase the therapeutic effect. The idea is furthermore accentuated by the fact that the visitors can freely enter the capsule which from the inside resembles one’s body and reconsider the connection between the fast pace of our lives, the wish for the quick effects (in this case – relief) and, on the contrary, the necessity to take a step back once in a while and take time for the continuing process of self-medication.’

 

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Fred Tomaselli Various (1993 – 2005)
‘Fred Tomaselli is one of the premiere psychedelic artists at work today. The California-raised, Brooklyn-based painter is best known for embedding actual pharmaceutical pills, hallucinogens and marijuana leaves in his glossy, resin-covered paintings. At root, Tomaselli’s art is about creating windows into alternative inner and outer realities—inspired by drugs, by 1970s conceptual art, by transcendental encounters with nature, by utopian movements, by the make-believe of Disneyland, which he could see from his childhood home.’

Hangover (2005)

49 Palms Oasis (1995)

Desert Bloom (2000)

Echo, Wow, and Flutter (2000)

Black and White All Over (1993)

 

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Catharina van de Ven White on White (2018)
Lasered aluminium, 20 acrylic resin domes, automotive paint

 

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Ben Ouaniche Pills Dissolving In Macro (2019)
‘Have you ever wondered what a pill looks like as it dissolves in your stomach? Although this video by filmmaker Ben Ouaniche for Macro Room doesn’t create the exact same conditions as your gut, the time-lapse video does show the spectacular ways pills quickly disintegrate in water as they bubble, ooze, expand, and disappear.’

 

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Jason Mecier Various (2011)
‘Jason Mecier’s life-like artwork is composed of differently colored prescription pills. The famous figures he has chosen to portray with the brightly colored pills are those who notorious for drug abuse. Some have even lost their lives to over-dosing.’

 

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Nan Goldin Drugs on the Rug (2016)

 

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Beejoir A Pill A Day (2017)
‘One pill a day’ a hand painted bronze that’s amazingly realistic until you try and pick it up as it weighs about 4 kilos.’

 

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Noubeda Carbone Disease (2019)
‘Disease by Noumeda Carbone is an art series of sculptures made out of empty pill capsules—9500 empty capsules, to be exact. Abstractly formed, each creation looks like some kind of disease rather than the cure they are supposed to be. They seem to suggest that taking medication can become a problem in and of itself. Even the colorful exterior attempts to hide the often dark truth of pill popping, which is symbolized by the black void inside.’

 

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Deathorgone glitchpills (2019)

 

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My art bulli Shelter (2015)
‘This is a sculpture project I recently finished. The assignment was called shelter, so I decided to show how I felt in mine. I took over 1000 pill bottles and relabeled them to say things people have said to me to cause me to take these pills. I wanted people to realize what bullying does to people.’

 

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General Idea Various (1991)
‘In General Idea’s vocabulary, placebos serve as surrogates for art, functionless and soothing. Consistent with this notion is the deceptively cheerful appearance of the PLA©EBOs: Saturated color radiates from the liquid gloss of the pills’ surfaces, investing these stand-ins for both treatment and disease with an impertinent lightheartedness. A strange disorientation results from their gigantic proportions. The application of such dimensional shifts to everyday objects had already proven a powerful expressive tool for Pop artists, invariably promoting a sense of displacement. The PLA©EBO installations draw their unsettling effect from the impact of this device on our ingrained perceptual habits.’

Red (Cadmium) PLA©EBO

One Year of AZT

 

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Benjamin Eliasz Pill Paintings (2010)

 

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!Mediengruppe Bitnik Random Darknet Shopper (2014)
‘Operating out of Zurich and London, art collective !Mediengruppe Bitnik are best known for “Random Darknet Shopper”, a computer program built given bitcoin purchasing power and free reign to buy items from the dark web with a $100 weekly allowance and have them delivered to Kunst Halle gallery in St Gallen, Switzerland. The shopping bot, stationed within the exhibition space, bought 10 ecstasy pills from Germany for $48 and concealed in a DVD case> upon delivery they were put on display.’

 

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Loretta Lynn The Pill (1975)
‘Loretta Lynn has caused plenty of controversy over the course of her storied career in country music, including having — by her count — 14 songs banned from the radio. Arguably none of those caused a bigger stir, however, than her 1975 release, “The Pill,” which celebrates birth control and all the freedom it offers to married women who don’t want or can’t afford another baby.’

 

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Daniele Sigalot Einmal ist keinmal (2019)
‘Daniele Sigalot covers the ground with colorful medication pills, in which the perception of the audience challenged as if the ground is covered with crystal minerals.’

 

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Tina La Porta Various (2012 – 2013)
‘Artist Tina La Porta is a diagnosed schizophrenic. Since consuming pills have become a part of her daily routine they have become a central focus of her work. La Porta uses over the counter pills and coats them with resin, crushes them, places them into the palms of plaster casts of her own hand, photographs them and makes screen prints based on digitally altered images of them. “Pills are art supplies for me. I’m aesthetically attracted to them, and yet I’m also repulsed by them.”‘

Ecstasy (2013)

Mirror, Mirror (2013)

White Lies (2012)

 

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Unknown LSD Mind (1967)

 

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Sarah Schönfeld All You Can Feel (2013)
‘Whether you’ve tried mind-altering substances or not one thing remains true: we all have an idea of what a drug feels like, be it imagined, anecdotal, or from direct exposure. So what might the effect of a drug look like? That was the question asked by artist Sarah Schoenfeld who had ample exposure to the realities of drugs while working in a Berlin nightclub. To answer the question she converted her photography studio into a laboratory and exposed legal and illegal liquid drug mixtures to film negatives. The resulting chemical reactions were then greatly magnified into large prints to form a body of work titled All You Can Feel.’

LSD

Melatonin

MDMA

Ecstacy

Valium

GHB

 

 

*

p.s. Death was brutal yesterday. RIP Florian Schneider, Michael McClure, Michael Friedman. ** JM, Hi, Josiah. That’s so nice to hear. It really seems like your authorities knew how to handle this thing. Oh, man, Japanese-French hybrid patisseries are my absolute favorites, and hitting probably the best one here, Sadaharu Aoki, is literally the first thing I plan do come our Monday semi-release. Amazing that you might be back in the theater in two weeks. We’re still fuck knows how many ages away from that. The French end is very gradually preparing to sort of reawaken. I was out yesterday, and the lights were on in most storefronts, and the sounds of vacuum cleaners filled the otherwise dead air. It’s going to be strange, that’s for sure. Very curious for whatever it is. Take care, pal. ** David Ehrenstein, She’s marvellous. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Ha ha, no doubt. It’s weird because this one of those extremely rare days when I remember a vague fragment if my dream last night, but only that I had accidentally killed somebody and was running around trying desperately to cover up the crime so I wouldn’t be arrested. So a tiny bit of variety there. I envy that dream you had, nice. It always amazes me when friends have dreams where they’re best friends with famous movie stars or are royalty in fairytale kingdoms or … all that sweet stuff. It does sound like your dream was telling something with that word. Pfffhhht, I walked all the way to Chipotle, which is about 25 minutes away, and it was totally closed and boarded up, so its website is a liar, and then I got lost coming home, and it ended up taking me 90 minutes to find my neighborhood, and of course I was starving the whole time, so, long story short, fuck Chipotle! Ha ha, gimme gimme that piñata love! Love that makes you react like this, Dennis. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hooray! Everyone, _Black_Acrylic, who is more widely and intimately known as Ben Robinson, has a short story entitled ‘Jake’s Détournement’ just up on the great X-R-A-Y site, and I highly recommend that you strike that link back there and read it post-haste or even right this very second! Can’t wait! ** Sypha, Ha ha, sorry, about the ELP lyric, not that I remember the lyric offhand, of course, so, hey, if I were to re-listen to that track, which I can’t imagine I will, I might agree with you, so how about that? Murder hornets have been in France for quite some time, and I honestly don’t ever remember anyone ever talking about them, so you probably won’t die. ** KK, Hello there, sir! Excellent to see you! I’m doing alright, thanks. No, I haven’t read all of her books, I think I’ve read three, or maybe four. All superb, I might add. Well, speaking as someone who quit university after one year to concentrate on my writing solo, I don’t think that not going for an MFA seems like a dangerous decision. If your classes warded you off loving writing then that is not good at all. And if you think it’s a general problem of the set-up and not a thing to do with the particular set of students and facilitators you’ve been strapped with, you’re probably right to think twice, no? I’ve never been to North Carolina, but it has lots of cool people/artists in it, and it looks pretty, and so that sounds like a great plan. As does your chapbook, very naturally. You sound pretty sharp and good, man, all in all. Things trundle along here. Hm, good watching, … I’ve been being pretty random about it. A couple of films that aren’t released yet, so I can’t yet recommend them. Some films I watched because I made posts about their makers: Syberberg’s ‘Hitler’, a few Germaine Dulacs, a Daniel Schmid film (‘Le Chat Qui Pense’), a coupla so-so rock band documentaries, … You seen anything that you can suggest to improve my state? Take care, K. ** Joseph Goosey, Hi, Joseph! I’m doing as well as one can do, thanks, and you seem to be doing the same? There’s a weird problem with the blog where commenters can’t see that their comments have registered or even see any comments sometimes. For instance, your comment appeared three times. Strange, seemingly unsolvable tech issues. Nice that your partner liked ‘God Jr’, thank you. She probably already knows that the game in the book is heavily influenced by ‘Banjo Kazooie’ and its sequel ‘… Tooie’. You have a new book out! Awesome! I didn’t know! I’ll order it today! Thank you! Everyone, The very, very fine poet Joseph Goosey has a new book out, and that’s cause for much celebrating, and it’s called ‘Parade of Malfeasance’, and I’m going to buy a copy in a couple of minutes, and I suggest that you do that too because his poetry is killer. Get it here. Fantastic news! Thank you for your longterm considerable inspiration, man. All the best! Excited to read your new work! ** Armando, Hi, Armando. Yeah, that is one big loss. There just isn’t a more important and all-influential extant musical force than Kraftwerk. RIP Florian. ** Bill, I still don’t remember ‘Deerskin’ 24 hours later. Means something, I suppose. Oh, what had you expected from the Audrey Szasz that it/she non-delivered? ** Ian, Hi, Ian! I hope you like ‘Berg’. It seems like you will. Glad you’re writing and able to and can think the writing through. I’m having a hard time concentrating over here. When in doubt, skeletalize scene setting. Or I do. A little goes a long way? I sort of think so. Hope you can sort whatever issues out. Really good to see you! ** Steve Erickson, Hi. Everyone, The latest entry in Mr. Erickson’s budding new venture as a music recording artist is, and I quote, ‘a song with absolutely no melody, made mostly from samples of noise’. Sounds good to me. See what you think. Here. Lady Gaga is about to make her next career move! Stop the presses! Didn’t see ‘Fourteen’ here, no, and I don’t remember hearing about it all when it did play here, but I’ll see if I can score it somewhere. ** Jeff J, Hi, man. Thank you. Why do it at all if you’re not going to do it up, I guess. I do want to see the Lil Peep doc precisely because of Malick’s involvement. Not that Lil Peep isn’t interesting in and of himself, of course. Thank you for reminding me. Oh, nice, about the Danielle Collobert journals. She’s just wonderful. Uh, I don’t recall the issue of pb or hardcover being discussed yet. Hm. ** Right. Take pills. Or take mine anyway. Taking pills is often a bright idea. Or taking mine is at least. See you tomorrow.

 

‘In 1964 the British novelist Ann Quin gave an extended interview about work, sex, relationships, men, and patriarchy to playwright and fellow Brit Nell Dunn for Dunn’s collection of interviews, Talking to Women. Quin and Dunn were in their late 20s and were struggling with the stodginess of respectable society. Dunn, who was married with children, admitted to wishing she lived like Quin, saying, “I feel a sort of envy for your freedom, this freedom of having a place and having time and space.” To which Quin, who lived alone in a lodging house, replied, “But is it freedom?”

‘Quin said she regretted nothing on her journey to becoming a writer but found it difficult to live outside the conservative social norms of mid-20th-century England. She even confessed to feeling self-destructive at times. Whenever this happened, a child’s smile on a street corner could save her. “What we all want is some contact to make us feel that we do exist, because beyond that, there is a complete sort of void,” she said. Despite living a free life, Quin, who died by suicide in 1973, said she often felt she was living in that void.

‘Published in 1964 and now rereleased by And Other Stories, Quin’s first novel, Berg, blends tropes and techniques of crime fiction, vaudeville, and modernist literature to explore the weight of this void. Her protagonist, Alistair Berg, lives a lonely life without meaningful human contact and feels related to “the dismembered trees, half-broken walls, roofs with slates ready to fall off.” Wanting to change this, Alistair believes he “must first annihilate,” or in other words, the world as he knows it must be destroyed for some undefined new one to come. But what happens when, for whatever reason, annihilation cannot be achieved? What happens when you cannot escape respectable society, the social structures of patriarchy that you were born into? The remainder of Berg dramatizes this problem in dense, lyrical prose.

‘And it is this prose that makes Quin’s novel so dazzling 55 years later. The language of her book lurches in unexpected directions, fishtailing wildly from the dark to the erotic to the violent to the insanely funny. It feels barely in control, but willfully so. In insisting on this dicey means of narrative movement for the majority of the novel, she can make even simple actions feel berserk: “Crossing the park: a subterranean world surreptitiously risen; here a million star-fish pinned on the forelocks of a hundred unicorns driven by furious witches.” In describing what should be quotidian, she instead confronts the reader with a moment of demonic weirdness. And just as the psychedelia of her prose sets in, the narrative skates along, leaving behind one chaotic situation for another. Reading Quin is a marvelously frustrating experience that works according to diffraction. The light of the novel comes into contact with some interference and then creates new patterns that bump against other interferences to create new patterns.

‘One sees this already in the first three sentences of the book. While the first sentence tackles the problem of fathers and ridding oneself of patriarchy quite clearly—“A man called Berg, who changed his name to Greb, came to a seaside town intending to kill his father”—the following two create a kaleidoscopic portrait of Alistair and the setting:

Window blurred by out of season spray. Above the sea, overlooking the town, a body rolls upon a creaking bed: fish without fins, flat-headed, white-scaled, bound by a corridor room—dimensions rarely touched by the sun—Alistair Berg, hair-restorer, curled web toes, strung between heart and clock, nibbles in the half light, and laughter from the dance hall opposite.

‘Here and elsewhere, Quin works with dashes, giving just enough information to work affectively. Even when she takes the opposite approach and creates a baroque monument out of the infinitely small, the effect is the same. Everything feels frayed, dangerous—but also exciting. More than anything, her prose feels like an exploration of Virginia Woolf’s assessment in the essay “Craftsmanship” that the task of the writer is “to see what we can do with the English language as it is.” Or, as Alistair’s mother puts it in the novel, “It’s not the material but the manner in which the article’s sold that counts.”’ — Shane Anderson

 

Further

Who cares about Ann Quin?
Welcome reissue of Ann Quin’s gloriously twisted debut Berg
The Comic Tragedy of a Narrator with No Sense of Self
The Quin thing
Her Body or the Sea
Sixties secretary turned avant-gardist
Narcissist or Voyeur: On Ann Quin
Ann Quin’s Berg by Dan Shurley
Ann Quin by Brian Evenson & Joanna Howard
ann quin: a peculiar fish without fins (blurring, filth, and smut. or, what ann quin means to me)
Book Of A Lifetime: Berg, By Ann Quin
“Settle For Nothing Less”: On Ann Quin By The Authors She Has Influenced
An avant-garde seaside farce: Berg by Ann Quin
ANN QUIN AND ME: AN APPRECIATION BY DEBORAH LEVY
‘The foremost female novelist of her generation’: Ann Quin remembered
The Voice as an Object of Desire in the Work of Ann Quin
Ann Quin’s experimental debut novel has a runaway, off-kilter style all of its own
Sinister Shapes Emerge
‘Berg’, by Andrew Gallix
Pay It Forward: Ann Quin
Buy ‘Berg’

 

Extras

Stewart Home & Chloe Aridjis On Ann Quin

Scott Manley Hadley​ visits the death sites of Malcolm Lowry, Virginia Woolf, Ann Quin and BS Johnson

 

Manuscripts & Mail

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Interview
from The Quietus

 

The cult author Ann Quin still seems scandalously under-read and underloved, considering her unique voice as a working class, female, British, radical experimental writer. She lived with mental health problems and committed suicide in 1973 by walking into the sea by Brighton Palace Pier. She was only 37 and had published four books at that point (Berg (1964), Three (1966), Passages (1969) and Tripticks (1972) yet has still managed to leave behind an underground legacy of modern, anti-patriarchal, anti-bourgeois, proto-queer, peripatetic, progressive writing.

Jennifer Hodgson, who edited and introduced The Unmapped Country, which covers pretty much Quin’s entire career, is currently researching a new book about Ann Quin’s life, and spent most of July in New Mexico, to follow the Ann Quin trail and begin making some notes. Claire Sawers caught up with her, during and briefly after her trip, to let her explain a bit more about what she wanted to get out of the semi-pilgrimage.

What’s the trip about?

Ha – good question. I have no idea how to write a biography. I mean, I’m not even sure what one is, but I know that one way that people go at it is to follow in their subject’s wake, to go to the places they went and through that try to commune with them in some way. Now, I have to admit, I find all of that a bit suspect. Whenever I’m in a place some eminent person, or a person I admire, has been, for sure I get a little charged feeling of proximity, but it’s a proximity that’s all about distance, about the impossibility of collapsing time and overlaying the scene with you in it with the scene with them in it. When I go to places with blue plaques, which I don’t very often, I find myself sort of morbidly more interested in what’s left of the person’s body than in traces of their consciousness, more interested in who the dust and the greasy smudges belong to.

Writing (and reading, and thinking, and being, for that matter) are such private, self-enclosed acts, I’m not sure how you extrude “real” flesh-and-blood people and places from any of them, and vice versa. But I think that might be what’s most interesting about the project. Quin was so concerned with trying to lay herself bare, trying to struggle out of her own skin and find a way to communicate directly, with all the difficulties of knowing other people and yourself – and any book about her life and work should reflect this most of all, I think.

So I came to New Mexico not so much to try to commune with Quin, but to commune with the same things she did. Her connection with this place has always amazed me, the idea that mid-way through the sixties she jacked in the secretary-ing and the London bedsits and upped sticks to reinvent herself as an American poet and maraud around the States. She rented a little house in the village of Placitas, nearish to Albuquerque for several years, but she travelled around a lot: to New York, San Francisco, Iowa, Maine, the Bahamas.

I visited the house the other day, I was in a kind of trespass-y mood, full of bravado, but there was an electric fence and two Dobermans guarding it – probably not for its blue plaque status. It’s a tiny little adobe bungalow. Adobe doesn’t look solid, somehow, like it’s been poured out rather than built, it’s like royal icing. Anyway, it’s a wreck now, there’s no roof and no windows and these shrubs crawling up the insides and through the windows and teeming out of the hole where the roof was. The plot is flytipped to shit, full of old sofas, fridges, chests of drawers.

I had no sense of what New Mexico actually was – I’d seen a single episode of Breaking Bad and had to switch it off part-way because I found it unbearably bleak. So I decided I’d come and see. She doesn’t write about New Mexico directly very much, but you can feel it in more oblique ways: in her attraction to merciless landscapes and arid climates and the sense of self-exile and alienation. Somehow those things have always done it for me too. I like the almost-but-not-quite intolerable heat here, it makes the air around you seem somehow solid, like you’re sort of gently encased. If you were looking for a place to escape your own skin and turn vaporous, I can see why you’d choose here.

In more practical terms, a few of her old pals and peers from that time are still around, still writing. Larry and Lenore Goodell, friends of Quin’s and very much the custodians of that scene, live just up the road from Quin’s old place. I wanted to meet them, and get a sense, in person, of what it was like to know Quin and to be here during that time.

I was quite adamant that this thing wasn’t going to have any of me in it, that after all these years it didn’t feel right to insert my own fairly unremarkable disconsolateness into this story – but I’m coming to realise, kind of reluctantly, now what a daft notion that was.

Do you have a route you’re following?

Well, I don’t drive, never learned, so this trip is kind of an exercise in constraint. Public transport is kind of minimal, and Uber often doesn’t reach out here, and if there are pavements at all, they’re often ornamental. So, I’ve found myself spending hours and hours walking along highways – friends I’ve met here think this is quite crazy, but I have to admit I rather enjoy it. I knew I wanted to spend time in Placitas, and I knew I had in the end to make it up to Santa Cruz, in Northern California, to interview Quin’s friend, the poet Robert Sward, who lives up there. I also wanted to go to Taos, where Quin stayed in the Lawrence Ranch when she was D.H. Lawrence fellow. I didn’t manage this last bit – first the area was closed because of forest fires and then the two Uber drivers who work the Taos beat seemed to be indisposed and it was a seven hour walk, and even I am not as dogged as all that.

In between those two points it’s been a bit, well, freeform. I went to Santa Fe, because it seemed like a kind of regional cultural centre, but when I got there, my impression of it was that it is the place where New Mexico shills a genteel version of itself to tourists – Pendleton blankets and misshaped linen mumus and extremely expensive cowboy boots, so I sacked that off and went to a sauna in the mountains (I’m sure I’m doing Santa Fe an incredible disservice here). I went to Las Vegas too, absolutely nothing whatever to do with Quin (I mean, probably), but I was an overnight bus ride away and I wanted to see it, since I was there.

What are you hoping for?

Just enough of a perspective shift to mess with me a bit, but not enough that I totally lose it, I think.

 

Book

Ann Quin Berg
And Other Stories

‘‘A man called Berg, who changed his name to Greb, came to a seaside town intending to kill his father . . .’

‘So begins Ann Quin’s madcap frolic with sinister undertones, a debut ‘so staggeringly superior to most you’ll never forget it’ (The Guardian). Alistair Berg hears where his father, who has been absent from his life since his infancy, is living. Without revealing his identity, Berg takes a room next to the one where his father and father’s mistress are lodging and he starts to plot his father’s elimination. Seduction and violence follow, though not quite as Berg intends, with Quin lending the proceedings a delightful absurdist humour.

‘Anarchic, heady, dark, Berg is Quin’s masterpiece, a classic of post-war avant-garde British writing, and now finally back in print after much demand.’ — AOS

Excerpt

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** JM, Hey, bud. How does freedom feel? And thank you! ** David Ehrenstein, Still images (or GIFs) only, otherwise … ‘The Ghost and Mrs. Muir’ was one of my mom’s favorite movies. ** _Black_Acrylic, I … think it’s possible that Paul McCarthy wasn’t in there, strangely enough. But I made it, what, five years ago, so he might be there somewhere and my memory is the problem. Quite an intriguing sounding story you’ve written there, Ben. I love that you’re on a roll. ** Bill, Cool, I’ll hit that site and see. The international restriction thing on film streaming is pretty common though. I did see ‘Deerskin’, yes, but for some reason I don’t remember what it was, just that I saw it and, I’m pretty sure, liked it. Seen it yet? I understand Santa porn, I just don’t … feel it. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Yeah, it’s weird what not doing much exercise and having no routine does to one’s sleeping patterns, or that’s my diagnosis. I almost never remember my dreams. Sometimes I remember them for about half a second when I wake up, but then they self-erase. Don’t know why. But when I do remember them, they’re always about me trying to get away from someone or something that’s trying to kill me. Strange. Do you remember yours? It’s so, so great: your decision, your acting upon it, how good and positive you sound! You’re seriously role model stuff, my friend. It was raining last evening, and I want to walk to the Chipotle, so I delayed my burrito dinner until this evening, and the sky is cloudless blue, so I think that’ll work. But I am stupidly excited about that. I looked up Joulupukki, He looks fucking weird, I like him! Love like the huge amount of Euros you would have if you found a previously unknown Vermeer painting in your grandma’s attic and auctioned it at Sotheby’s, Dennis ** Jeff J, Thanks, man. I kind of liked it too. Nice color and movement combos. Well, Santa Claus is a character in my novel, but to explain that further would require filling a week’s worth of p.s.es, I fear. No release date yet other than probably late next year. Yes, ideally that should make Jeremy highly employable by a highly craveble boss. Let’s hope. I did put together a Daniel Schmid Day yesterday, but I’m sufficiently far ahead in my post making that it won’t appear here until mid-June, so try to hang on to whatever degree of interest you have in him until then? ** Okay. I surprised myself by realising I hadn’t spotlit this great book by the great Ann Quin so I rectified that situation. She’s amazing, and so is it. See you tomorrow.