5 books I read recently & loved: Unai Elorriaga Plants Don’t Drink Coffee, David Trinidad Hollywood Cemetery, Garielle Lutz Worsted, Ron Padgett Pink Dust, Joe Westmoreland Tramps Like Us

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‘Unai Elorriaga does away with the boundaries and coordinates of conventional literature and takes them elsewhere: to the surprising literary territory of a writer with no hang-ups.

‘In these stories there is a psychological process, a learning curve, a painful jump toward crucial knowledge. In Vredaman that jump takes place toward the end, which helps the story glide along joyously, aided by the novel’s two main strengths: the innocent but brilliant, and almost shrewd language of the child narrator and the abundance of secondary stories.

‘Vredaman must be understood from a double perspective: as an approach to reality from a non-realist position and also as the practice of pure creativity…Thus while Elorriaga seeks to explain reality outside conventional lines, he doesn’t avoid it. The events that take place in the novel are more than uncontrolled inventions: they aim to give the world meaning, and are sometimes imbued with naivety…In other words, Elorriaga does whatever he wants, without concern for convention.’ — El Mundo

 

Unai Elorriaga @ Wikipedia
Unai Elorriaga @ goodreads
‘Plants Don’t Drink Coffee’ reviewed
‘Plants Don’t Drink Coffee’ reviewed
Buy ‘Plants Don’t Drink Coffee’

 

Unai Elorriaga Plants Don’t Drink Coffee
Archipelago Books

‘Four stories narrated from four different perspectives criss-cross throughout this powerful and lighthearted novel. The young Tomas — who wants above all else to be intelligent — draws us into the web of his curious mind, magnifying misadventures and stumbling upon all sorts of small wonders. Through an omniscient narrative, we learn all about his eccentric entourage, from their surrealist creation of a rugby field on a golf course, the mystery of why a couple of forty years never married, and the intrigue surrounding his grandfather’s role in a European carpentry competition.’ — Archipelago Books

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Video Review: Plants Don’t Drink Coffee

Shane MacGowan en Gibela – Unai Elorriaga

 

 

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‘Heaven’s stars are quasi-immortal, while Hollywood’s are fated to fade. Graciously, Trinidad’s page-sized eulogies grant a couple dozen bit players one last flash-in-the-pan. The actors tell their own stories, but Trinidad’s voice floats above them, an angel wearing shades, bestowing epitaphs, footnotes and the harsh irony of glimmer and glamour doomed in a company town. (Capitalism, like time, is cruel.) The lives of these players (including one dog, Toto) end prosaically. Still, they emit elegantly tangy poetry, as does this book.’ — Jack Skelley

Jess Smith: “Every obsession is a mystery that must be figured out.” That’s wonderful. How is poetry a way to interrogate our obsessions? And have you ever found yourself in a moment when you were a poet who didn’t want to be a poet anymore?

David Trinidad: Perhaps there’s a mystery behind every poem I feel compelled to write. Writing for me is not a completely conscious or deliberate act. It’s more of a gnawing, intuitive process. I want to figure out what I think or feel about something—usually something I’ve seen or experienced. After it’s done, the poem will teach me things, help me see differently, from the other side of the obsession, or whatever was eating at me. It enables me to let go, move forward with my life.

Regarding your second question—and a very sharp question it is, Jessica!—yes, I have found myself in that place. I seem to vacillate between not wanting to be a poet anymore, at least a public one, and feeling perfectly comfortable with it all. It’s a balancing act. You have to protect your time, and yourself, find a way of staying honest and vulnerable in your work. And you have to deal with the perils of the poetry world: powermongers, famemongers, gossipmongers, jealousy, competiveness, one-upmanship, pettiness. I guess the latter is the real world, any world. But the poems that matter come from a pure place, an untouchable place.

 

David Trinidad @ Wikipedia
David Trinidad @ instagram
David Trinidad @ goodreads
The Deep, Dark, Seething Tar Pit of the Past
Buy ‘Hollywood Cemetery’

 

David Trinidad Hollywood Cemetery
Green Linden Press

‘No one writes sharp-witted, funny, and sad all in one poem like David Trinidad. Hollywood Cemetery is dishy and soapy—any movie buff’s must-have—but beyond that, Trinidad also considers themes of death and memory. The poems are voiced by various former stars, reanimated by Trinidad’s vast knowledge and his incomparable talent for finding the pathos (and often, too, the delicious irony) in these lives.’ — James Allen Hall

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Readings in Contemporary Poetry – David Trinidad and Joanna Fuhrman

David Trinidad Poet on Tea With Tosh

 

 

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‘Garielle Lutz is an author who makes at least part of her living writing and editing grammar textbooks. For 25 years she has published, as Gary Lutz, short stories with titles like “Sororally” and “Chaise Lozenge.” Her introduction to the Writer’s Digest Grammar Desk Reference is unusually passionate, for that sort of thing. Her favorite unabridged dictionary is Merriam-Webster’s 1934 New International, and one gets the sense that it is always close at hand, turned to words that had not yet been deemed archaic. In her prose, lines like “As for the daughter: she was a dampered little dispatch already orderly in her dolors” have attracted an ardent audience, which over the years has raised her name into the oxymoronic echelon of “indie giant.” In truth, Lutz is a writer’s writer — and the closest thing to a cult figure in American literature, which, thanks to the top-down consolidation of contemporary publishing, is in desperate need of a little more cultishness. …

‘Lutz’s style, though surely difficult to replicate, becomes immediately recognizable after just a few pages. One of the fascinations of her work is its uniformity, and the sense that it was fully wrought and unimprovable from the very first collection. It’s in this sense that Worsted finds its humor as a title, since many of the new stories are updated fragments chopped from Stories in the Worst Way, and seem to have grown outward in the same mordant direction. This makes Worsted difficult to critique as a discrete collection. Each of Lutz’s stories indexes the rest of her work, and maintains its steady posture. Like Giorgio Morandi, she teases out metaphysical subtleties by painting the same still lifes over and over again. …

‘As a grammarian, she understands the ways gender intersects with language (beginning with but going far beyond the delicate matter of the pronoun), perhaps better than anyone else. With the publication of Worsted, Lutz officially shepherds her work into the realm of trans literature, in the same fell swoop as she playfully undoes the completeness of The Complete Gary Lutz. As revised fragments of her former life’s work, these stories are a reminder that the work of the self is unfinished too, and is as available for revision as the stuff that spouts from it.’ — Nolan Kelly

 

Garielle Lutz’s Favorite Books
Gary Lutz @ goodreads
I like Garielle Lutz, a lot.
Sentenced to Life: A Garielle Lutz Roundtable
Buy ‘Worsted’

 

Garielle Lutz Worsted
Calamari Archive

‘Garielle Lutz is one of America’s great writers. Why has her literary genius gone unnoticed?’ — The Nation

‘. . . Lutz displays an innate understanding of the grim compromises of modern life but heightens and glorifies these with [her] dizzying language. [She] refuses to let the dreary world force [her] to write a dreary sentence.’ — The Paris Review

‘Worsted feels illicit, begging to be discussed in hushed tones even amongst hip company. The book’s quiet ravishments of lives brushing up together isn’t incriminating; it’s the style that’ll get you blitzed. Lutz reminds us that sentences themselves can be pleasurable.’ — The Rumpus

‘Lutz is the new sad man of contemporary fiction. [Her] first collection turns the official notion of gender inside out, supplying a new kind of creature—call it a Lutz—which is neither man nor woman.’ — Interview magazine

‘Garielle Lutz’s sentences are among the most original in modern English, their linguistic specificity making them virtually untranslatable.’ — Hyperallergic

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Garielle Lutz interview and reading with Meg Tuite

Obscure Clearly: George Salis Interviews Garielle Lutz

 

 

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‘In 2018, the Poetry Society of America awarded Ron Padgett the Frost Medal, for a distinguished lifetime achievement in poetry. A busy intellectual lifetime, reaching further back than its first appearance in an avant-garde literary journal, The White Dove Review, in high school in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Between then and now, a staggering output of publications in prose and poetry (over 20 volumes now)—and awards, including an L.A. Times Book Prize, the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award, and the Chancellorship of the Academy of American Poetry from 2008 to 2015— attest to the kind of restless, prolific literary life, the vigilant, upkeeping mind that could make a significant statement about the virtue of a couple hours of frittering.

‘Good poems don’t leave us silent. But they do much more than simply add to the chatter in our minds. The right words, mots justes, become a vehicle to remind us we’re consuming perhaps an awful lot of language; straining at its limits and ripe silences for genuine expression and meaning; expending, per-minute per-day, an awful lot of concentration. It’s good for us to zone out, back off, take a walk. Breathe, as the cognitive behavioral therapists remind us. Who of us, stepping out onto a crosswalk, isn’t potentially in a twilight zone? It’s something beyond the secular sense of things, in our sense however dim that might be of eternity. We’re all, on one level, in the same boat, aged 17, 26, 35, 52, 81 or 90. Life is mortal, we each feel its urgency, pine in its slags.

‘Anne Waldman nails the general feeling Padgett’s late writing, “masterful for its panoramic humanity and mind-stopping verbal wit, its breathtaking power and beauty. We want to stay with the person in these poems all day long.”’ — Michael Todd Steffen

 

Ron Padgett Site
Ron Padgett’s “Pink Dust” — The Joyful Weight of Words
on ‘Pink Dust’
On ‘Pink Dust’
Buy ‘Pink Dust‘

 

Ron Padgett Pink Dust
New York Review Books

‘Ron Padgett is one of America’s best-known and most acclaimed poets. Admired by John Ashbery, Jim Jarmusch, and Anne Waldman, his poems have moved and delighted generations of readers with their inventiveness, their gentle humor, and above all their ability to elicit wonder. These qualities are as evident as ever in Pink Dust, whose title refers to the residue from all the author’s erasers, swept away or blown into the air. Like that dust, this is a book of memories rubbing up against the present. Its poignant reflections on old age shimmer with all the insouciance of youth.’ — NYRB

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Ron Padgett and Tyhe Cooper

 

 

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‘An achievement, in the major category. — Hilton Als

‘This first novel by Joe Westmoreland begins in 1975, when 19-year-old “Joe” leaves an abusive home in Kansas and tumbles across the country, “learning about being gay from the street-level on up.” In New Orleans he comes out, a boy with a punk heart trapped in a disco scene. When he rolls into San Francisco in 1979 he finds a home in the New Wave anti-Castro movement and in the now-vanished bathhouses and flophouses South of Market.

‘The sexual extravagance of the period is sketched with keen playfulness. As Joe’s best friend says, “I’m not bi-sexual. I’m tri-sexual. I’ll try anything once, and if I like it, I’ll try it again and again!” No matter how hard-core his surroundings, Joe remains a romantic, too malleable for decadence to tarnish. He’s a queer Candide, with Bruce Springsteen’s populism and optimism clinging to him like a tattered Old Glory.

‘”Tramps” celebrates community, the support provided by a shifting band of friends and lovers who throw down drugs and booze with the joyful exuberance of a Disneyland locomotive — a party engine that crashes headfirst into AIDS. The panic and confusion of the epidemic’s early days have rarely been so vividly evoked. Remember when poppers were thought to spread Gay Cancer? The way Westmoreland’s party boys and girls switch selflessly to care-giving is very touching.’ — Dodie Bellamy

 

Joe Westmoreland @ instagram
Love and Drugs in the Darkest Days of AIDS
‘Tramps Like Us’ @ goodreads
‘Tramps Like Us’ @ Internet Archive
Buy ‘Tramps Like Us’

 

Joe Westmoreland Tramps Like Us
MCD

‘Abused by his father and stifled by closeted life as a teenager in Kansas City, Joe, the wide-eyed narrator of Tramps Like Us, graduates from high school in 1974 and hits the road hitchhiking. But it isn’t until he reunites with Ali, his hometown’s other queer outcast, that Joe finds a partner in crime. When the two of them finally wash up in New Orleans, they discover a hedonistic paradise of sex, drugs, and music, a world that only expands when they move to San Francisco in 1979.

‘Told with openhearted frankness, Joe Westmoreland’s Tramps Like Us is an exuberantly soulful adventure of self-discovery and belonging, set across a consequential American decade. In New Orleans and San Francisco, and on the roads in between, Joe and Ali find communities of misfits to call their own. The days and nights blur, a blend of LSD and heroin, new wave and disco, orgies and friends, and the thrilling spontaneity of youth—all of which is threatened the moment Joe, Ali, and seemingly everyone around them are diagnosed with HIV. But miraculously, the stories survive. As Eileen Myles writes, “I love this book most of all because it is so mortal.”

‘Back in print after two decades and with an introduction by Myles and an afterword by the author, Tramps Like Us is an ode to a nearly lost generation, an autofictional chronicle of America between gay liberation and the AIDS crisis, and an evergreen testament to the force of friendship.’ — MCD

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Joe on Vimeo

Joe Westmoreland, et. al. @ Pathetic Literature launch

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** rei, Hi. I don’t know what that means, but thank you, I think? ** jay, Hey! There’s actually been a kind of rash of haircut wanting slave guys lately, but forevernotyours has been the only one so far who requested that in an interesting way. ‘Kakegurui’: My fingers are pointed at that search term, and my eyes will be peeled. Thanks! Still enjoying your increased freedom, I’m guessing? ** Misanthrope, Well, people definitely don’t read books like they used to. Even shitty books. So there’s that. I guess that may be true even here. I would guess more people in the US recognise, say, the name Ocean Vuong than Pynchon, et. al. at the moment. It’s all just interesting to notice and analyse, I guess. Yeah, see the orthopedist. So says the guy who’s had two very painful toes for months but has yet to seek out a doctor. But you should. ** Carsten, Thanks a lot, man. Oh, the rubble, that was kind of difficult. There was a building in the town where we shot (Cherbourg) about to be knocked down/ imploded/ whatever, and that kept being delayed, and we had to wait and be ready to rush over there as soon as our spy gave us the word, and it finally did happen, and we had to change the shooting schedule to get there before they cordoned it off to people. So, yes, it was real. Yeah, we’re so happy that ‘RT’ is getting a theater release. Quite unexpected, but this distributor is run by young, daring folks, so we got lucky. Uh, the only bands/musicians I personally know at the moment only do instrumental music. But I’ll try to think further. ** _Black_Acrylic, You just need to find yourself a sexy haircutter maybe. Or maybe just enjoy having your hair cut in peace. I’m on the hunt for the ‘Pee Wee’ doc. It hasn’t hit my illegal sites yet. ** Hugo, Hey. Yeah, Michael is amazing. Bookworm was a major gift to writers and writing. And he and I have been friends for a long time, and it’s all very, very sad. A panic attack and reducing someone to tears … pretty promising initial responses, I must say. Stay confident, or find confidence and stay there as the case may be. If you love writing and are driven to write, those are the most important and aspects by far. If you ever read my early attempts at writing, and you never will, I ‘pray’, you’d probably understand what I mean. Wanting to and doing and keeping at it are all that matter. Seriously. No, I haven’t heard the new Swans yet, but of course I will. How is it? ** pancakeIan, That’s a good 50/50 reaction. I would say that’s how I choose the entries. Excellent careful reading there, thank you. I did envy that mozzarella sticks sentence. I might even steal it. Yeah, Don did a portrait of me when I was much younger. I liked it because he made me look really cute, but he didn’t like it and threw it away, I think. I knew Chris a little. I organised a reading by him at this venue where I was curating readings. He was quite old at that point and pretty grumpy, but kind of charmingly so. One should never definitely believe anything one reads these days. There’s barely any truth ‘in print’ around. ** julian, There are your everyday cruel condoms and then there are the kind that look like they could’ve dug the Eurotunnel. Good news about the new Swans. The last one or two were a little sleepy for me. I’m on it. I really like the early Swans, 80s era, the very assaultive phase, especially. They were crushing live. I quite like some of the early 90s stuff like ‘White Light from the Mouth of Infinity’ and ‘Soundtracks for the Blind’. I appreciate what they’ve been up to recent years, but I can’t say that I’m in love with it or anything. Are you a longterm fan of theirs? ** Steeqhen, I only use social media to link up blog posts and announce book- and film-related things. I never get personal there. I don’t have any inclination to do so. I’m always confused by the people who cathart there about every terrible or good thing they’re doing every day. I don’t understand why they think anyone cares and why they think anyone on social media can do anything to help or celebrate them other than adding a ‘like’ or a sad face-type icon. ** HaRpEr //, I can’t remember my friend’s argument about Dickens’ post-modern influence, but it was curiously not dismissible. Never read that Walser. Huh, now I’m really interested, of course. How curious. I’ll seek it. You mean that France is talking about banning smoking in parks and on beaches? Annoying if that actually comes about, but it’s hard to imagine that being very enforceable unless they started stationing lots of police in the parks, etc., which I don’t they will. Hope not. ** maggie, Hi, maggie! It’s very nice to meet you. Thanks a lot for coming inside and for being kind about my stuff. Huh, ere … as in ‘ere long’? There was definitely a reason, if so, but I don’t remember what the reason was. I have a million little structural and stylistic rules I set up for myself, especially in the Cycle books, and I’d have to look at my notes and so, which are in NYC. Cool question, though. It would have to do with some kind of quaintness or archaic thing that I was hoping for, yes. Sorry I can’t be more specific. I think the vast majority of the music I listen to most and am most excited by is non-viral stuff. I just did one of my gig posts here the other day that has some of the music I’ve been liking lately, and I think most of it is pretty off the big radar. I’m really into experimental music, and the magazine The Wire is really good for finding things that are not covered elsewhere if you want to take a look at it? I agree with you about Royal Trux, of course. Thanks again. What do you do and/or what’s going on with you? xo, Dennis ** Right. There up above are five books I’ve read in recent days and enjoyed enough that I am recommending them to you. See what you think? And I will see you back here in Monday.