The Best American Poetry

Meet the Press: Nin Andrews in Conversation with Norman Conquest, editor of Black Scat Books

NA: Tell me about Black Scat Books?  

NC: When I was in the eighth grade I was given detention for clowning around in class. When the teacher left the room briefly (probably to have a smoke and calm her nerves) I started snooping around her desk and discovered a copy of Ginsberg’s HOWL. I started reading it and it changed my life. It was my introduction to the Beats, which inevitably led me to the avant-garde, pataphysics, and surrealism.

I grew up amid piles of books published by City Lights, Grove Press, Olympia (Paris), and Gaberbocchus (London). Those are the publishers whose footsteps Black Scat tiptoes in. I don’t think there’s anybody doing quite what I do…and that may explain why there’s no money in it. 



NA: I think that everyone should look at your website before we talk more.  You have to see the covers and read the descriptions of the books.  It’s a beautiful website.   Could you provide a link?

NC:  www.blackscatbooks.com  

NA: Are you the sole editor of the press?

NC: 
I founded the press in July, 2012 here in the Bay Area. Artist Farewell Debut, in NYC, was in on the ground floor, and without her support and inspiration Scat would be a scrawny shadow of itself. Farewell and I go way back and have indulged in various art-lit conspiracies. From time to time I also get enlightened editorial assistance from Ryan Forsythe and Jim McMenamin.

NA: Farewell Debut? She’s a photographer?  I think I saw her on the website.

NC:  We published a book of her photographs:

http://blackscatbooks.com/2013/08/19/enter/ 

NA: What attracts you to absurdist texts?

NC: We live in an absurd world. This point of view, this philosophy if you will, is a survival mechanism… a rational way of coping with the inherent strangeness of this planet and its day to day horrors. I don’t waste my time trying to decipher, define or make sense of things beyond interpretation. I embrace the absurd. I dance with it. And sometimes I kick it in the ass. 

NA: How did you come up with the title, Black Scat?  



NC: It morphed from my personal blog, Le Scat Noir (“where art & literature hit the fan”), which started out as an imaginary newspaper with concocted stories accompanied by odd illustrations. I don’t post there much now since Scat gobbles most of my time. 


NA: What’s the origin of the Black Scat clown logo?

I’d love you to attach a jpeg of the logo and one or two more of your covers.

NC: I came across that face in a 19^th century French lantern catalog. I traced the image and altered it a bit to achieve the perfect grin. The rest, as they say, is history.

NA: I just read one of your recent books, Hotel Ortolon, by Tom Whalen, http://blackscatbooks.com/2013/08/31/your-room-is-waiting/, which is a book of prose poems, accompanied by dream-like photographs by Michel Varisco.  The text reminds me of a Kafka story.  Tom is fantastic writer. How did you come across Tom’s work?

NC: I’ve been a fan of Tom’s work for many years. He’s one of the most innovative writers working today. His wicked little Doll with Chili Pepper was the second book published in our Absurdist Texts & Documents series.

NA: I thought maybe I should include Tom in this interview and ask him to talk about Hotel Ortolan   . . .

Tom, How did this book come about?

TW: Michel Varisco's foreword states:

"The text for Hotel Ortolan originated in a dream of the author’s in Münster, Germany. [...] The summer after I first read the story, I went to stay at an empty cottage owned by some friends that was located in the Languedoc region of southern France.  It was Bastille day weekend, July 13th (my birthday), when I entered their three-story intensely vertical house, and noticed a cemetery marker on the fireplace mantle reading 'here lies Marcelle Marie Portal' with the date 'le 13 Juillet'. Out of that disorienting set of circumstances and the intrigue of Tom’s writing came the photographs."

She is right.  This is one of the rare instances when I dreamed something worth recording.  (Readers will recognize the section.)  Over the next few weeks, as I wandered around Münster in a Westphalian or perhaps Annette von Droste-Hülshoffian daze, I would pause wherever and jot down the pieces that eventually became the text for Hotel Ortolan.  

 It's Michel's analogical faculty, her poetic eye that placed image to text so aptly and mysteriously.  (For more on her work, see www.michelvarisco.com)  We both loved the project, but it took several years (with an infamous hurricane in the middle) before we admonished ourselves for not trying to publish it.  After extensively revising some of the sections, I suggested we submit it to Black Scat Books, in large part because I thought the press would do her photographs (and the writing) justice.

NA: Tom, how did it happen that you and the photographer, Michel Varisco, began to work together?

TW: During my last three years at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts I was lucky enough to have Michel as a colleague. She in the art department, I in the writing department.  I liked her work and wrote a short piece on her "Cotton Mill Series."  It began, "The rejected objects of our world have something to say to us, but we seldom hear them."  I linked her photographs to Wright Morris's "transient ruins."  Also she let me sit alone in her darkroom at the school, which I found very therapeutic.

NA: Could you provide an excerpt from the book?   

TW: "In the room next to mine live angels.  Sometimes when I pass their room during the day their door is partially open and I step in.  They hang from the ceiling, one in each corner, their dark wings enfolding them like the wings of bats.  Always one opens its eyes, which are as gray as the sea, and I politely ask if there is anything I can do for them, but the angel only shudders inside its wings and closes its eyes.  I do not stay long, the smell of the room, like that of dead birds, is too strong.  I have never seen them in the halls or outside the building.  But often at night I hear them stirring about, hear their wings thump against my wall, and their soft moans to one another, like those of people making love." (page 27) 

NA: Back to Norman, your latest book is a Tintin book.  Tintin Meets the Dragon Queen in the Return of the Maya to Manhattan.  Could you tell me about it? And provide a link to it?

NC: Tintin is but one of many characters in this extraordinary novel by Alain Arias-Misson. You’ll also find Captain Haddock, as well as several characters out of ‘real life,’ i.e., the Spanish philosopher, Ignacio Gomez de Liaño, novelist Walter Abish, and others. The adventure begins when ghostly Maya pyramids suddenly appear in the streets of Manhattan.

Arias-Misson is a writer who doesn’t fit into a familiar niche. He’s completely unique and quite a character himself!    

NA: If you could pick any three authors to publish, dead or alive, who would you publish?



NC: Stefan  & Franciszka Themerson; Georges Perec; Russell Edson.  Oops, that’s four—sorry--and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Publishing translations from the French are a particular thrill for me. I’m fortunate to have John Crombie of Kickshaws Press (based in Paris) and Doug Skinner in my corner. John translated a collection of microdramas by the French humorist Pierre Henri Cami; and Doug has translated works by Isidore Isou (the founder of Lettrism)  and the great Alphonse Allais (1854-1905).

Allais, I should mention, represents the heart and soul of Black Scat Books. He was the first writer I published and is totally unknown in the U.S. He was hailed by Breton and included in his seminal Anthologie de l’humour noir.

NA: How many books do you publish per year?

NC: About 20. I’ve been traveling all around northern California recently, so I’m doing much of my editing in motel rooms. It’s a bit chaotic.

NA: How do you find your authors?   

NC: Most I’ve solicited directly, although a few have arrived unannounced and knocked on my in-box. For example, the British writer Samantha Memi was a pleasant surprise. I’ve known Nile Southern for years and together we assembled a collection of unpublished works by his father–Terry Southern–one of my favorite satirists.  

NA: I’d love to close with a selection from one of your books.

NC:  Here’s an excerpt from TINTIN MEETS THE DRAGON QUEEN IN THE RETURN OF THE MAYA TO MANHATTAN, a novel by Alain Arias-Misson

 Augustus pivoted on his knees and scuttled back down the Pyramid in order to intercept this childhood hero lookalike, and even so, with his head lower than his posterior as he hurried on the downward slope, he experienced no pull from gravity, the inclined plane of the Pyramid's surface maintaining all the characteristics of a horizontal. And as he caught up with the odd-looking personage below, the latter glanced up with that perfect 0 of a face, empty except for the pin-pricks of eyes and stubby turned-up nose and taut line of a mouth, his expression not one of pleased recognition but of utter disbelief. Eye-contact was brief, a shock of recognition, and he realized the young man before him actually was the real Tintin—or better, the unreal Tintin. However real Tintin had always appeared to him, his appearance here was out of the question—some fraud, some masquerade. And the same dismissal of his presence was evident in Tintin’s eyes.

Self-uneducated, Norman Conquest dropped out of the Art Institute of Chicago and, in 1989, co-founded the anti-censorship art collective, Beuyscouts of Amerika. He has produced book-objects, verbo-visual multiples, mixed media, and collage. Several of his book-objects are part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in NYC. He is the author of many books, including the A BEGINNER'S GUIDE TO ART DECONSTRUCTION (Permeable Press),  WHAT IS ART? (JEF Books), and THE NEGLECTED WORKS OF NORMAN CONQUEST (Black Scat Books).

Nin Andrews received her BA from Hamilton College and her MFA from Vermont College. The recipient of two Ohio Arts Council grants, she is the author of several books including The Book of Orgasms, Spontaneous Breasts, Why They Grow Wings, Midlife Crisis with Dick and Jane, Sleeping with Houdini, and Dear Professor, Do You Live in a Vacuum. She also edited Someone Wants to Steal My Name, a book of translations of the French poet, Henri Michaux. Her book, Southern Comfort  was published by CavanKerry Press in 2010. Follow Nin's blog here. Follow Nin on Twitter here.

Leaves of Glass [by Alexandra Zelman-Doring]

Theodor Reik left Vienna in the post-war years and moved to Berlin.  He built up his practice there, and one day received a request from Vienna for an appointment with a wealthy American.  The man described his symptoms, (he had a severe obsessional neurosis, and found himself constantly engaging complex safety measures in order to defend himself against imaginary dangers.) He made Reik an offer he couldn’t refuse: If Reik would come back to Vienna to treat him for just one hour a day, he would pay all his living expenses, plus a salary exceeding his earnings in Berlin. In November 1932, Reik returned to Vienna. 

“I felt like a son coming home to his mother.  All during the journey I had been happily anticipating the prospect of the life ahead of me.  I would be free from financial considerations and would be able to devote most of my time to scientific research.  I would be able to see my family and friends as often as I wished.  This wonderful opportunity would permit me to see Freud and to attend the weekly meetings of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Association whose secretary I had been in past years.  Altogether it seemed like a fairy tale come true.”

No longer spending ten hours a day treating patients, Reik worked on two books, saw family and friends, visited Freud, and attended meetings of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Association.  He lived in the Hotel Bristol (where his American patient also lived.) The Hotel Bristol is like the Waldorf-Astoria.  Mornings, going down to breakfast humming a Strauss waltz, he discovered that “of course there was no one in the dining room to serve me—it was not yet seven.  As I passed the night clerk at his desk, he looked up at me with a startled expression as if I were some ghostly apparition in the middle of the night.  It dawned on me that guests in such a place as this would scarcely be expected to appear for breakfast much before eleven o’clock.”  He started eating breakfast and lunch at a coffee house in a side street, and got annoyed with himself for being embarrassed about slinking past the night clerk.  Hating having to shave and wear a dinner jacket every day, hating the head-waiter and his three helpers who served him dinner, he ended up eating all three meals out. 

His patient didn’t always show up.  Reik still go paid, and urged himself to be patient enough to adapt to his new and improved life:

“Did I not work hard every day?  Had I not written one book and done preliminary work on another? Did I not study all the new literature in psychology and psychiatry? Evidently I considered these activities pleasure rather than work.”  A sense of shame filled him to the brim-- although he was earing more than ever before, he did not feel that he was earning his living.  “This too easy life without duties and obligations was uncomfortable.  I even began to feel a resentment against my patient whom in all reason, I should have considered my benefactor.  How often in the past, tired from my ten daily hours of analytic work, had I daydreamed of an easeful life, free from financial burdens, which would permit me to devote myself to the realization of my research plans? And now when kind destiny had made me a gift of just this situation, I could not enjoy it.”

Reik did not give up, he kept trying to shake the bad mood that got worse and worse.  He told himself over and over again that he had every reason to be satisfied.  He found no reason why he could not just enjoy himself. “My life had every possible amenity and I was home in Vienna where I wanted to be—what the hell was the matter with me?...A cloud darkened the most beautiful holiday.  It was mysterious that I was so often restless or sad without reasonable reasons…I had felt moods of this sort before, but none so persistent as this.” 

One day he got up, wrote a letter to his patient, and packed his bags.  Without giving reasons—for I had none—I asked him to excuse me and then packed my trunks.  The next morning as the taxi took me through the streets of Vienna on my way to the station, I felt wonderfully lighthearted, as if I had thrown off a heavy burden.  The air of the radiant spring morning was delicious, and I looked with friendliness into the faces of the people in the streets.”

Many weeks later, Reik tried to make sense of what had happened.  He recalled one afternoon, soon after his return to Vienna, when he had passed the house in which he was born and raised.  “My father, who was in the Civil Service, had often been worried about money and had had difficulties in making ends meet on the meager salary of an Austrian official.  As I walked along, childhood memories crept up from shadowy corners and I saw again the worried faces of my parents.  A sudden sadness had come over me by the time I reached the Bristol…The childhood memories had brought back to me the poverty in which my parents had spent their lives, the sacrifices they had to make to give us children educational advantages.  Here in the same city, only a half-hour’s walk from my childhood home, I had lived in luxury. “

In his memoir, “Listening with the Third Ear,” Reik concludes that he was foolish leaving Vienna and his opportunity there.  At the same time, he admits that at that time, he could not have done differently.  Visiting the Hotel Bristol many years later, a poem came suddenly to his mind; a poem he had not thought of since he was a boy, seven or eight years old: “The Little Tree That Wished to Have Different Leaves.”  The poem “tells the story of a small fir tree that stands among trees of other kinds in the forest and is ashamed because it has only prickly needles.  It wishes to have leaves like other trees.  It receives such leaves, but a goat comes along and eats them up.  The little tree then wishes for leaves of glass, but a storm destroys them.  The tree now wishes for itself leaves of gold; a peddler sees them, picks them and carries them off in his bag.  The disillusioned little tree now only wants its old needles back.”   

Reading this memoir, I felt very close to Reik—almost as though I knew him personally.  I felt this closeness from the first to the last line. That thing people talk about when they feel like “the writer is speaking directly and specifically to me” was oddly transformed: I felt like I knew this man, like he was my very close friend, come to share with me the most important experiences, stories, anecdotes.

The idea of “making a choice” is very strange to me.  I didn’t choose to be a writer.  My mother and my grandmother are painters. They taught me to paint, and took me to painting class.  I ended up writing all over the canvas, and all over the walls of my room. With paint. I chose to get married but- I didn’t feel like I had decided anything.  One night I went to a concert in the east village and it shook my soul.  The concert was Arkady Goldenstein’s—I have rarely seen a performer so “in” his music.  There seemed to be no distance between him, his instrument, and the sound he produced. You could feel through him passed so much history, so many stories sang through him. That night, I met his son Naum, who played a few songs beautifully with his father, and six months later we were married.  I got married without telling my family.  They barely knew my husband- a classical clarinet player who grew up in Israel.  I thought of Reik, and asked myself how I could have done such a thing that had so hurt my family. Did I regret it? For the harm I caused- of course.  Could I have done it any other way? I don’t think so.  

 

Download Bela Kovacs, Homage a Manuel De Falla by Naum Goldenstein

 

Download Final by Arkady Goldenstein

 

visit http://www.claudiadoring.com

and http://lucerogonzalez.com

"November Limericks" [by Anthony Madrid via Facebook]

26.
There was a young man from Waukeegan,
Who was happily dating a vegan.
There were times when he irked her by eating a burger, 
But each found the other intriguing. 

27.
There was an old person whose zeal
Made him bug-eyed and tense at the wheel.
He wasn’t much fun, and they said he was un-
representative of their ideal.

28.
There was an old person from Bozeman,
Who greatly resembled a clothespin.
The part in her hair was remarkably square—
So her husband inserted his nose in.

29.
There was an old man from Connecticut,
Who was always forgetting his etiquette. 
He jumped up and sprayed us, and ate our potatoes,
And made his escape through Connecticut.

30.
There was a young person named Wheeler,
Preserved in a jar of tequila.
“I’m a gnat! I’m a gnat!” was the comment of that
Hymenopterous person named Wheeler.

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