BRAIN INSULT
reprint of poems from Kristin Garth/Alyssa Perry, recent book review news, an experimental French translation of Eris
At her substack Womanchildish, Kristin Garth recently published a sonnet that was so beautiful and good, to my mind, that I asked Kristin if I could share it here and she agreed.
I don’t know for sure but I think this poem will be part of a new collection from her, RIDE. If you like erotic, psychologically fearless, dark poetry I recommend checking out her books, as she’s very prolific.
Elsewhere, I saw in the pages of volume one of the Cleveland Review of Books, this poem by Alyssa Perry called “In Order To Be Here,” that likewise blew me away and I thought I would share photos of it with you all.
Here’s what the Cleveland Review of Books looks like:
I wanted to check out some print journalism/criticism that was approaching the kinds of things I read a little bit more than the New York Review of Books or the London Review of Books. Still not there yet. I’ve read a few of the critical reviews and essays in the CRB and it’s not quite sharp enough in the ways I’m looking for. I’ll keep looking though and tell you what I think.
I’ve been writing a lot in notebooks, longhand, but there’s a frustrating lack of shape there that I am trying to acquire, impose, correct. I have many ideas for poems, stories, novel sections, letters, etc. But it feels very difficult to go back to notes I’ve written, which were sprayed in all directions like multicolored tiles, and rearrange them into groupings that will take on compositional patterns, which could be turned into “writing.” Stephen King, in his famous craft book On Writing, says keeping a notebook as a writer is like making a museum for bad ideas. I think that’s bull crap with all due respect to the Schreckmeister’s blockbusters and notorious discipline and output. I think some of these tiles I’ve been scattering out of the burlap bag could add up to something. The question is whether the discomfort of doing the composing and arranging and rewrites will outweigh the narcotized trance of scrolling social media feeds all day long. I’m trying to get into good habits. Sometimes it feels like the maximum I’m capable of is writing pages in these notebooks/diaries and then dropping them in exhaustion. I recently bought Franz Kafka’s Diaries in some sort of desperate attempt to try to learn “how to use a diary productively as a writer.” I think insomnia is partially a factor. Not that I want that but there’s times when sleep feels like the ultimate brain insult that utterly destroys concentration, industry and creativity. Ideally, taking a pill that would remove the need for sexual release and sleep would unlock artistic accomplishments that are otherwise unreachable. Did he just say “sexual release”? Hey, I’m just being real with all of you. I think I have a strong asexual streak in me. More about that later.
I have recently been approached by people from X-R-A-Y to provide book reviews for a series of features that may roll out in the coming months. This is welcome news as I’ve always wanted to be published by X-R-A-Y, and getting acknowledged for writing reviews is a confidence boost. Maybe this will get some more eyes on my writing.
I want to write many more books and many more of the building blocks required to add up to books, but there is this nagging (and worsening) problem of gathering together the quicksilver of the attention span that is always fleeing and going elsewhere. I feel like I don’t have time to hammer things into shape and it just gets harder to accomplish all the time. In a way the diary is good but it introduces other obstacles. You have to review what you wrote over the past few months and piece things together. It’s work and double work and often I just don’t feel like it. I’d rather try to cook up a tweet that will get me seven or eight likes. That’s the new writing. It is an absurd, crushing dead end. It’s garbage. It’s “microblogging.” This is a little better because it’s longer and there are more features you can add. I seek inspiration, and Garth’s and Peters’ poems above are examples giving me a little strength, cutting through the static and sensual sewer backwash of the digital environment that chokes me and threatens to deaden my mind.
I recently listened to an episode of a podcast called Index of Continuance which is based out of CSU (Cleveland again), where Johannes Goransson and Joyelle McSweeney of Action Books were interviewed. It was good medicine too. It’s elevating. They’re poets and translators and I just like hearing smart people talk about literary culture. I have McSweeney’s new collection Death Styles and I want to review it and try to get it published somewhere with some visibility. But for all I can muster up it may just appear here in a future newsletter. I put the podcast link at the bottom of this page since it frustratingly won’t let me write below it (it has let me do this in the past with podcast links).
Speaking of translation, for fun I tried to translate into French a short passage from Elizabeth V. Aldrich’s Ruthless Little Things. Here’s the English version:
And now the French:
I have to confess that I’m not a proper translator and I got help from “a machine.” It’s not pure. It’s got me thinking about translations, whether it’s breaking the rules of the art to get help from computers/machines/AI etc. One interpretation could be that Google translate can be an assistant to the translator who will try to fine-tune the word choices through synonyms in either the source or target language to get a certain kind of “beautiful result.” (Probably hogwash.) I’m just trying to get the language across while escaping our Terminator/Skynet overlords. Another statement that could be made is that the selection of texts, and not so much the translation process, could be where the art lies. Who would think to translate a non-canonical writer like Eris? Talk about “minor literatures” (see the podcast below.) I wonder if the whole book could be translated into French and if French readers would want to read it, regardless of whether or not a machine did the heavy lifting. I don’t want to go too far down this road and anger purists and humanitarian holdouts. It was just an exercise, and besides, comparing the original with the translated results could help me as an educational exercise to brush up on my French. And maybe that’s where the value lies, as a personal tool. Something to think about.
Good French translation, Jesse. Well done. I might have replaced "perspicacite" (which is a clunky word) by "vision" which distorts the meaning a bit but that's how languages are, hard to capture an exact equivalent. Great post.