WRITERS IN AMERICA?

This is an excerpt from an interview with Norman Mailer conducted by Andrew O'Hagan, in the Summer issue of The Paris Review, and reprinted in the September issue of Harper's Magazine.

The question asked by O'Hagan was: Do you think America is a good place in which to practice the arts?

Mailer's reply: When I was young it was marvelous for a writer. It's the reason we have so many good writers in America -- most of our literature had not yet been written. English novelists had all the major eighteenth and, and nineteenth, century geniuses to deal with and go beyond. What did we have to go beyond? A few great writers, Melville and Hawthorne. The list is very short. For us, the field was wide open. Now we're beleaguered. The movies were bad enough, though American novelists always felt a certain superiority to what was going on in Hollywood. You weren't learning more about human nature from films, you were just being entertained -- at some cost to learn a little more about why we're here, which I think is one of the remaining huge questions. Now people grow up with television, which has an element within it that is absolutely inimical to serious reading, and that is the commercial. Anytime you're interested in a narrative, you know it's going to be interrupted every seven to ten minutes, which will shatter any concentration. Kids watch television and lose all interest in sustained narrative. As a novelist, I really feel I'm one of the elders of a dying craft. It once was an art, and now it'd down to being a craft and that craft is going soon. The answer to your question is this: America is no longer a good place to be a novelist, and once it was a wonderful place.

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Mailer's most recent novel, The Castle in the Forest, was published by Random House in January. O'Hagan's third novel, Be Near Me, was published by Harcourt in June. You might want to check out the complete Mailer interview in either one of the two publications listed above. If you have any strong feelings on the subject feel free to enter your comment below. I hope a few people will read them. I am sure this blog has relatively few readers. Considerably more Internet users obviously prefer watching things like being cats tortured, or men falling off ladders, things which are supposed to make us laugh on sites like YouTube

We are always interested in submissions. You can send short pieces, fiction, non-fiction, or poetry to us at: OnagerEditions@aol.com.

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Below is a poster for an art exhibition you might find interesting if you are in the Ithaca, NY area. The show was put together by Rebecca Godin, who also designed the poster.

Sidney Grayling, editor

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Tags: Norman Mailer, Andrew O'Hagan, Writers in America, novelists

PRIDE AND PREJUDICE?

SO YOU'VE BEEN SENDING around your manuscript, following all the advice you have gleaned from those "how to get published" books and articles. You wait six months to get a response addressed to "Dear Author" telling you Mr. Big Time Agent receives so many letters he can't be bothered to write to you by name, but he assures you that he has "given your material serious consideration," and has determined it is "not right for us," but that "other agents might feel differently." Good luck.

 What he has not said is that you were not the hot chick he met at a party in Brooklyn thrown by a currently best-selling writer. He just loved her collection of short stories about hankey-pankey in trailer parks, written in short, easy to read sentences. Nor are you the cute MFA candidate he encountered at the Iowa Writer's Workshop. He couldn't put down her novel about corn-fed robot zombies attacking the citizens of Kokomo, Indiana.

It doesn't cheer you up when you read that Jane Austen sent the manuscript of "Pride and Prejudice" to a publisher under an assumed name and that within six weeks it was a finished book, which has never gone out of print. But what if Jane were alive today?

A story in the July 27, GUARDIAN WEEKLY, tells of David Lassman, the director of the Jane Austen Festival in Bath, England, cheekily submitting the scarcely altered work of Austen to eighteen of the UK's biggest and brightest agents and publishers. He was surprised to find that all but one sent back polite, but firm, rejection slips.

Lassman's trick was not the least bit subtle. Calling himself Alison Laydee, a play on Austen's nom de plume A Lady, he typed up chapters from three of his hero's most famous books, with a few changes of names and re-worked titles. Apparently only one editor, Alex Bowler, of the publisher Jonathan Cape, was familiar with the opening sentence of "Pride and Prejudice" and caught the ruse. He wrote back to Lassman expressing his "disbelief and mild annoyance, along, of course, with a moments laughter." 

So keep sending out those manuscripts. Maybe you will have better luck than the resurrected Jane Austen. 

 

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I hope you enjoyed this short piece excerpted from the Guardian Weekly. And don't forget to check the archives for postings you may have missed. If you would like to send us something see our requirements in the sidebar. I guarantee you we won't take six months to respond.

Sidney Grayling, editor

Tags: how to get your work published, Jane Austen,

THDNR-1

THINGS HE DOES NOT REMEMBER - ONE

 

Stephen Poleskie 

 

When I asked him, he said he could not remember being born. I told him he should not expect me to write an accurate biography if he could not remember such basic details. He apologized, and volunteered that he did remember things that had happened before he was born, while he was still in his mother’s womb.

            He recalled looking down, through a small opening at the light, and seeing his mother’s legs, her high button shoes pacing up and down on patterned rugs or hot sidewalks. His view was blocked by his mother’s thighs when she went up and down stairs or sat down. In winter she wore fur-lined galoshes made of rubber. He told me he watched the snow passing under her feet, and wondered if it would be cold when he finally was born. Then one day, while we were going through an album of his mother’s old photographs, we realized that she had never worn high button shoes. He was born in 1938, and high button shoes had long gone out of fashion by then. She also appeared to be a very modest woman who never would have gone without underwear.

            A year and three months after he was born the German army marched into Poland, in effect beginning the Second World War. He was sure he remembered that too, but I told him he was too young then to remember anything. I explained to him that the idea must have been put into his mind much later, by someone else, and he only thought he remembered it.

            He began to think about what I said. Then it came to him that a woman artist he knew in New York City in the 1960’s, Elaine de Kooning, had told him a similar story about looking out of the womb and seeing her mother’s high button shoes.           

            Then he thought about the high button shoes. He wanted to be a detective once and so researched Elaine’s birthday and the date of the demise of high button shoes. He discovered that it was highly improbable the unborn Elaine looked down and saw her mother wearing high button shoes. Perhaps she had seen some other kind of shoes, but unless her mother was extremely out of fashion she had not seen high button shoes. He wondered if the idea might have been put into her mind by someone else. He knew I had written a history book and asked me if that what was what history was all about.

            He told me about meeting Elaine’s husband, who was a very famous artist. The man was wearing a blue chambray work shirt and bib overalls, sitting at the table drinking a beer. It was the third time had had been to Elaine’s studio, for whom he was working at odd jobs. Elaine’s studio was on Broadway at 12th Street. It was large and well lighted by many windows. He lived in a boarded-over store front on 11th Street between avenues C and D. His studio had no windows.

            Elaine turned to him and said, “Do you know my husband Bill?”

            At first he was confused. He thought her husband’s name was Willem, and that he now lived in East Hampton with a teen-aged girl. He had seen photographs of the famous man who was tall and handsome, and painted large and powerful paintings. However, Willem was now painting on the wooden doors that had been delivered for his new house, much to the delight of the art critics who saw this as a radical idea. This Bill was short and bent over, and smelled of beer. If Bill painted large paintings he would have to stand on a box.

            He had extended his hand. Bill ignored it and took another sip of beer from the can he was holding with the massive mitt of a house painter. Without looking at him Bill asked, in a deep accent, “Did I ever tell you the story of how I came to America from Amsterdam?”

            “No sir you did not,” he replied. He knew now that this really was the famous Willem de Kooning. He had read in an art history book about how the artist had emigrated from Amsterdam.

            Bill told him the story.

            Bill would tell him the story several times after that.

            He could not remember a time when they were together that Bill did not tell him the same story.

 

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STEPHEN POLESKIE is an artist and writer. His artwork is in the collections of numerous museums including the Museum of Modern Art , and the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and the Tate Gallery,  and theVictoria and Albert Museum in London. Currently a professor emeritus at Cornell University, he has also been a visiting artist at twenty-six other colleges and art schools in the United States and abroad. The above piece is from a novel in progress.

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Thank you for logging on. Please come back again. And don't forget to check the archives, available from the top right corner, for things you may have missed. We welcome submissions. See the sidebar for our requirements.

Sidney Grayling, editor.

 

 

 

Tags: Stephen Poleskie, Elaine deKooning, Willem deKooning, being born

STEPHEN POLESKIE RADIO INTERVIEW

Here is a recording of a radio interview Tish Pearlman did with Stephen Poleskie which aired on her program OUT OF BOUNDS on June 14, of this year. Click on his name to listen to the audio.

Stephen Poleskie
6/14/07

Artist and Writer, Stephen Poleskie

In this fascinating interview, Poleskie discusses his many life adventures as a flyer, an artist, and a writer. He also discusses his book "The Balloonist- The Story of T.S.C. Lowe: Inventor, Scientist, Magician and Father of the US Air Force."

Tish Pearlman

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Thank you for logging on. You will need a high speed connection to get the audio. To hear other interviews by Tish Pearlman you can go to her program web site: www.outofboundsradioshow.com Interviews are broadcast on WEOS-FM every Thursday at 7:00 pm. The station can be heard on 89.7 & 90.3 Geneva, NY & 88.1 Ithaca, NY, or via stream at weos.org.

Sidney Grayling, editor

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The Balloonist: The Story of T. S. C. Lowe, Inventor, Scientist, Magician, and Father of the U.S. Air Force by Stephen Poleskie Category: Fiction / Historical Format: Hardcover, 368 pages On Sale: May 2007 Price: $24.95 ISBN: 978-1-929490-27-1

click on title for more information

 

Tags: Stephen Poleskie, Steve Poleskie, Tish Pearlman, Out of Bounds Radio Show, WEOS-FM Geneva NY,

LADY CLAIROL & HILL

by Laurel Speer

 

HERE'S BARBARA FRIETCHIE DURING the Civil War waving our flag in the faces of Stonewall Jackson's Confederate troops marching through Frederick, Maryland:

"Shoot, if you must this old gray head

But spare you're countries flag." she said.

Being in her nineties - or so the story goes - perhaps she figured she didn't have all that much to lose. Still it's a nice note of patriotism for our side.

Here's our very own Hillary Rodham Clinton, wife of the Governor of Arkansas, the year before he gets elected as president of these great United States:

Then there was the morning of Labor Day, 1991, when Hillary noticed as she was driving away from the mansion that the security detail had neglected to raise the American flag. Pulling a U-turn, she came careening back to the guardhouse and screamed, "Where is the goddamn fucking flag? I want the goddamn fucking flag raised every fucking morning at fucking sunrise!"

No question, Hillary's got my vote. She knows where she's going, but if necessary she'll do a U-turn to correct a mistake. This woman's got time to pay attention to details. She's forceful, keeps her hair free of gray. And she's only in her fifties.

Copyright 2005 by Laurel Speer

 

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 Laurel Speer lives in Tucson, Arizona. Her work has been published in many journals including, The Louisiana Review, and Chiron Review. This piece comes from her chapbook Ali's Mouthpiece. The quotes are from Barbara Frietchie by John Greenleaf Whittier and The First Partner, Hillary Rodham Clinton, by Joyce Maynard. You can order a copy of this chapbook, for $4.00, from Laurel Speer, PO Box 12220, Tucson, Az 85732-2220. A complete list of other titles available from this author, including her Geryon Press Series Poetry Books, can be had by sending an SASE to the address above. And watch for more of her short pieces on OE in the future.

Sidney Grayling, editor, OnagerEditions 

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Tags: Barbara Frietchie, John Greenleaf Whittier, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Joyce Maynard, Laurel Speer

KAFKA MADE IN PENNSYLVANIA

PASSERS-BY

by Franz Kafka

translated into the patois of middle-Pennsylvania by Hans Upph-Ovryerhed

LIKE IF YOU'RE SHLEPPING your ass up a hill at night and see some dude a ways off because there's a full moon, and this here dude is running at you full-bore, well, you don't tackle the fucker even if he is some whipped out little piece of shit, if you know what I mean, and even if there is some other fucker panting after him. You play it smart and let the bastard run by you.

Because it's night, even though there is a full moon. And like what the fuck do you know, maybe these assholes are just having a game of tag or something. Or maybe the two are chasing some other motherfucker. Or maybe the second guy has a grudge against the first dude, maybe for something he didn't even pull. And maybe he's going to snuff the fucker. You might even get sent up as an accessory. If you know what I mean. Or maybe they don't even know each other at all and are merely running home separately to get laid. Or like maybe they just always like to go jogging at night.

Anyway, like you're too tired to grab anyone, even if you had the balls to. And haven't you had a few too many beers, and are a bit shit-faced. You watch the two men disappear into the darkness, thankful that you didn't stick you're nose in it. If you know what I mean.

translation copyright 2007 OnagerEditions

 

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Hans Upph-Ovryerhed was born in East Germany. Accused of being a snitch for the STASI, he fled his homeland and moved to Trout Run in central, Pennsylvania, where he still lives. He has had many jobs, and currently works as a grocery-bagger in a supermarket. On Sundays he is an usher in a Slovak Catholic church. Han's goal is to translate all of Kafka's work into the middle-Pennsylvania dialect. This is his first published translation.

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Thank you for logging on. Please check back again. We welcome your comments. If you are interested in submitting a piece check the sidebar for the requirements. 

Sidney Grayling, editor   

 

Tags: Franz Kafka, middle-Pennsylvania, Hans Upph-Ovryerhed,

MAIL ART

MAIL ART IS APPARENTLY becoming popular again. I have received several envelopes of stuff in the post in the past few months. This moved me to dig out a mail art piece Steve Poleskie did sometime in 1982. The image has been on the Internet for many years. It was done for a project called Budda Ray University, which was a collaboration between Ray Johnson, the quintessential "mail artist" and Artpool, a group from Budapest, Hungary. You can get the history of this project, at www.artpool.hu/Ray/RayUniversity.html.

The face and nose in the drawing was supplied by Ray Johnson, and mailed to various artists, who added their own elements to complete the piece, and then mailed it back to Artpool who put some of them on their web site, then an early adventure, and also made an exhibition that was shown in many European cities.

 

 

Steve Poleskie, mail art collage with Ray Johnson, ca. 1982

This small piece came to life again in 2003 when it was used by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as part of their Wright Brothers Centennial celebration. It accompanied an interview Poleskie did in which he talked about his Aerial Theater performances. This image was not his choice, however, the producers found it on the web, and it was large, bright, easy to swipe, and not copyrighted. It was put on the CBC web site, along with the audio. The program was also picked up by the BBC in England, and so had considerable world-wide exposure. This was in marked contrast to the artist's experience here in the U.S. A., where although numerous exhibitions, and books, were put together honoring the Wright Brothers, none of the organizers saw fit to include him, despite Poleskie having worked in the sky for thirty years. An especially dreary exhibition, with a massive catalog, was put together by the North Carolina Museum of Art, the Wright's First Flight was in North Carolina, in which b-list artists from New York City, Los Angles, and for some strange reason Australia, whose main connection with flight seemed to be riding on an airliner now and then, showed work that looked like they were responding to an art class project about "flying." Nor did the North Carolina Museum of Art bother to show the work of Otto Piene or Leila Daw or any of the other artists who worked in the sky for many years, and who regularly participated in the "Sky Art Conferences" arranged by MIT, in places like Boston and Munich. 

And what became of Ray Johnson? On January 13,1995, the artist performed his final "Nothing," jumping off a bridge into the freezing waters near Sag Harbour, New York. 

SG 

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Thank you for logging on. You can read more about Poleskie's Aerial Theater pieces in his blog, available through the listing in the sidebar. If you have anything you would like to add you can post a comment below, or contact me, Sidney Grayling, at OnagerEditions@aol.com

     

Tags: Steve Poleskie, Mail Art, Aerial Theater, Ray Johnson, North Carolina Museum of Art, Otto Piene, Leila Daw,

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