Monday, April 26, 2010

Proust/Hannaham

This week’s Proust Questionnaire contestant is an author who has been previously interviewed by The Corresponding Society. See below,

Introduction to James Hannaham

James Hannaham, writer. Of what? Well, his stories have appeared in The Literary Review, Open City and Nerve, and one has shown up in One Story. He has received fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, The Blue Mountain Center, Chateau de Lavigny, and Fundacion Valparaiso. He teaches creative writing at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and lives near there. His first novel, God Says No came out through McSweeney's Books in late May of 2009. An excerpt from the book appears in McSweeney’s 31, which looks a lot like a yearbook, binding-wise.

He has also written reviews and profiles for The Village Voice, Spin, Blender, Out, Us, New York, The Barnes & Noble Review, and once, circa 1997, a tiny sidebar in the front section of The New York Times Magazine. He was on staff in the culture department of Salon for most of 2008. Then the crash came, and with it, layoffs. He's been okay since then--thanks for asking. Starting work on several new projects, applying for grants and fellowships and jobs, etc.

He is a founder and former member of Elevator Repair Service.

James Hannaham Answers the Proust Questionnaire

Your favorite virtue.
Of my own: Patience. Of others: Compassion.

Your favorite qualities in a man.
Bashfulness. Flirtatiousness.

Your favorite qualities in a woman.
Wit. Forthrightness.

Your chief characteristic.
Mysteriousness. Inscrutability.

What you appreciate the most in your friends.
Open-mindedness.

Your main fault.
I often think I’m probably right. Though I’m willing to believe I’m full of shit.

Your favorite occupation.
Does novelist still count as an occupation?

Your idea of happiness.
Time to write plus financial support.

Your idea of misery.
Being stuck under a corporate glass ceiling at an unethical, creepy organization.

If not yourself, who would you be?
Kelefa Sanneh.

Where would you like to live?
Earth, please. Other planets seem so inhospitable!

Your favorite prose authors.
Halldór Laxness, Lydia Millet, Yukio Mishima, Richard Wright, etc etc etc.

Your favorite poets.
Ron Padgett, Marianne Moore, Emily D., Robinson Jeffers, Stephen Dunn, Sylvia Plath, Susan Briante, Patricia Smith, Jackson Mac Low, etc etc etc

Your favorite heroes in fiction.
Portnoy, Charles Kinbote, Ferdinand the Bull, Don Quixote

Your favorite heroines in fiction.
Lily Bart, Sethe, Portia (I know it’s drama), Mitsuko (from Masumura’s film Manji), Kazu (from Mishima’s After the Banquet)

Your favorite painters and composers.
Kara Walker, Larry Walker, James Rosenquist, Marcel Duchamp, Gary Hill, Caravaggio, Vija Celmins, Mark Rothko, Philip Guston, Adrian Piper, Beethoven, John Cage, Morton Feldman, Andrew May, etc etc etc

Your heroes in “real life.”
Brendan Moran, my mother, Kara Walker, Larry Walker, Daniel Clymer, Shaffiq Essajee, Eric Sawyer.

What characters in history do you most dislike?
Anyone who has killed a lot of people. Whether or not they regret it.

Your favorite names.
Lloyd. Floyd. Kyle. Lyle. Anything Italian: Artemesia Gentilleschi, Fra Fillipo Lippi, Mariangela Melato, Giancarlo Gianinni—heck, even Silvio Berlusconi, though I despise the guy himself.

What do you hate the most?
Cruelty mixed with indifference.

What military event do you admire the most?
The US Army going to Haiti to help earthquake victims.

What reform do you admire the most?
The New Deal or The Great Society. Or reform school.

The natural talent you’d like to be gifted with.
I wish I could shit legal tender. Is that natural?

How do you wish to die?
I don’t wish to die. You needn’t beg the question.

What is your present state of mind?
Relatively calm. Normal.

For what fault do you have the most toleration?
Snobbery. Love me some snobs. Where my snobs at? Holla!

Your favorite motto.
Do unto others—then split!

Sunday, April 18, 2010

Play Records

We have discovered some new media related to recent dramatic endeavors of two familiar poet-dramatists, viz. Robert Snyderman and Lonely Christopher, who have both collaborated with others for productions of their own scenarios for the stage.
The first item is an audio recording of an event put on at Philadelphia’s Mostly Books. Robert Snyderman had previously presented the play he created --- with Lisandre Whitty, Gabrielle Doyon-Hanson, Chanelle Bergeron, and Christopher Sweeney --- as part of “The Institutionalized Theater presents a Night of Superstition and Intellect,” a run of three short plays at Red Hook’s Jalopy Theatre. Shortly thereafter The Fingertips of the Vital Blackbirds: A Ballad traveled to Philadelphia for a challenging performance in a bookstore (much different, logistically, from the theater it premiered in). The event also featured a reading by Ish Klein, author of Union!. The recording of this entire event can be found here!

Secondly, a video recording of the latest play by Lonely Christopher is now online; the play was given two performances in Alphabet City as part of the “Way of the Word: Poems to Plays” program, a collaboration between Republic Worldwide and Everywhere Theater. The play is titled Pages from a Course in General Linguistics; it was directed by Teddy Nicholas; the sound design was by Brendan Byrne; and the cast included T. Ramon Campbell (A), Tricia Cramer (B), and Kristopher W. Imperati (Z). To watch the videotaped version of the encore presentation, find it here!

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Into is Out!

My, my: are those of The Corresponding Society ever busy these days! We officially launched issue 3 of Correspondence, magnificent journal that, early March (at the KGB Bar)… and have been running around ever since, distract with projects of all sorts. Richard Loranger and Lonely Christopher celebrated the issue three release with a reading in San Francisco’s Mission; we hosted a queer birthday party, moderated by the wonderful Rachel Levistky, at Unnameable Books; our associates from The Institutionalized Theater put on a run of plays, in Red Hook, from Correspondence contributors; Robert Snyderman took his collaborative play to Philadelphia; our friends at Republic Worldwide produced another run of one-acts featuring dramatic work from two members of TCS; Lonely Christopher went to Denver with Ryan Doyle May to represent The Corresponding Society at the annual AWP conference and book fair (sharing a table with our compatriots from Small Anchor and Flying Guillotine presses); and now comes even more giant news!



Seven CirclePress is proud to announce the publication of a new collection of long form poems from three of the founding members of The Corresponding Society: Christopher Sweeney, Robert Snyderman, and Lonely Christopher. The collection, Into, brings together four poems by these three young writers; four poems related in enigmatic and resonant ways, thematically and emotionally, while remaining utterly different and illustrative of the unique approaches of each poet. Together this triad have forged a wild, esoteric, deconstructionist, archetypal dream-rant that simultaneously evokes and destroys, embraces and rejects, the root forces of our Western literary tradition. It is a book of deepening, each page representing a further step into the spaces of the world. Featuring a thorough and thoughtful introduction by scholar and comrade Greg Afinogenov.



Christian Hakwey (Citizen Of, VENTRAKL) says of this project: “INTO is a book of three first books, each composed by three authors, and it constitutes a travelogue and trialogue of possible approaches, paths, procedures, all to discover the mountain, and how it takes—to do this—the place of a poem. it is also a book about place: the place of the page, one's place in the history of pages, and the absence of place that defines poetry's essential openness. jabès called this absence love. snyderman calls it the mountain. sweeney, face. and lonely christopher: earth trembles / destroy nothing /hold it back // place is the sentence."



Into is now available to preorder through the Seven CirclePress website; it will officially be released on April 30. In the meantime, to celebrate and promote this volume, authors Christopher Sweeney, Robert Snyderman, and Lonely Christopher are hitting the road with a carful of advance copies of Into; beginning on the 14th, they embark on a reading tour that will bring together this current poetic undertaking, the machinations of The Corresponding Society, and communities of poets across the East and into the North! The poets kick this thing off in Brooklyn, returning to Unnameable Books (the best bookstore in NYC, incidentally), before running into a gaggle of New Philadelphia poets in Fishtown, taking on Providence, tearing it up at Harvard, enjoying the hospitality of Nathanial Otting in Massachusetts (in a joint launch featuring Brian Foley), before finally headed up to Canada to finish in Montreal! Below are the details of the tour, insofar as they have been able to be assembled, in case you or somebody you know is in the vicinity of one of these not-to-miss happenings:

Seven CirclePress, in Association with The Corresponding Society, presents “Into is Out!” an adventure in poetics and independent publishing!

Venue: Unnameable Books
Location: 600 Vanderbilt, Brooklyn
Date: 14 April
Time: 8pm
Featured Readers: Christopher Sweeney, Robert Snyderman, Lonely Christopher, Adam Tobin

Venue: BookSpace
Location: 1113 Frankford Avenue, Fishtown (Philadelphia)
Date: 15 April
Time: 7pm
Featured Readers: Christopher Sweeney, Robert Snyderman, Lonely Christopher, Adrian Shirk, Debrah Morkun, Patrick Lucy, Jamie Townsend, Marion Bell, Gregory Bem, Carlos Soto Roman, Sarah Heady, Brandon Holmquest, & Hailey Higdon

Venue: Ada Books
Location: 717 Westminster St (Providence, RI)
Date: 16 April
Time: 7pm
Featured Readers: Christopher Sweeney, Robert Snyderman, Lonely Christopher

Venue: Gato Rojo Coffee Shop (Lehman Hall)
Location: Harvard University
Date: 17 April
Time: 5:30-7:30pm
Featured Readers: Gregory Afinogenov, Christopher Sweeney, Robert Snyderman, Lonely Christopher, special guests

Venue: The Red & White House
Location: 39 West St (Northampton, MA)
Date: 18 April
Time: 3-4pm
Featured Readers: Brian Foley, Christopher Sweeney, Robert Snyderman, Lonely Christopher

Special Note: The final stop on the Into tour will be Montreal, on Tuesday the 20th --- featured readers will include Robert and Sweeney (Lonely doesn’t have a passport) and possible special guests; details on this exciting extra-national reading will be made available presently on our events page!

Monday, April 12, 2010

Proust/Afinogenov

This week the enigmatic Greg Afinogenov discloses his innermost by answering our version of the Proust Questionnaire. See,

Briefly Introducing Greg Afinogenov

Greg Afinogenov is a graduate student in an unknown discipline at an undisclosed location [history, Harvard ---ed.]. He is an editor of Correspondence and has published translations and essays

Greg Afinogenov Answers the Proust Questionnaire

Your favorite virtue.
Perspective.

Your favorite qualities in a man.
Subtlety.

Your favorite qualities in a woman.
Precision.

Your chief characteristic.
Uncertainty.

What you appreciate the most in your friends.
Sangfroid.

Your main fault.
Self-delusion.

Your favorite occupation.
Omphaloskepsis.

Your idea of happiness.
Progress.

Your idea of misery.
Stagnation.

If not yourself, who would you be?
Peter the Great.

Where would you like to live?
Wherever you go, there you are.

Your favorite prose authors.
Musil, Sterne, Cortazar, Dovlatov.

Your favorite poets.
Tu Fu, Alexander Pope, John Ashbery (?).

Your favorite heroes in fiction.
Fabrizio from The Charterhouse of Parma, but I don't remember why. Ulrich from The Man Without Qualities. Zhuge Liang from The Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

Your favorite heroines in fiction.
Ayn Rand.

Your favorite painters and composers.
Hubert Robert, not applicable.

Your heroes in “real life.”
Peter the Great (?), Georges Brassens.

What characters in history do you most dislike?
John Locke.

Your favorite names.
Helmut, Elodie.

What do you hate the most?
Self-delusion.

What military event do you admire the most?
Jan Zizka's campaigns against the Holy Roman Empire (15th century).

What reform do you admire the most?
The American Revolution.

The natural talent you’d like to be gifted with.
Charisma.

How do you wish to die?
Quickly.

What is your present state of mind?
Anxious.

For what fault do you have the most toleration?
Pedantry.

Your favorite motto.
"inter faeces et urinam nascimur" or "parturient montes, nascitur riduculus mus"

Saturday, April 3, 2010

Poems to Plays



from our friends at Republic Worldwide:

Way of the Word: Poems to Plays

April 5th, 2010
@ Bar On A
170 Avenue A, NYC

The first installment of REPUBLIC Worldwide presents: Way of the Word featured readings by poets inspired by timeless thinkers such as Saussure, Nietzsche and Walt Whitman. In an attempt to expound on the creative vision and unique interpretations of these renown masters of language, three of those original poems from Way of the Word have been transformed into three one act plays by the of the original authors.

Produced by Marissa Forbes and directed by the founding members of Everywhere Theatre Group, Way of the Word: Poems to Plays, promises to be a unique and entertaining evening of poetic theater beginning with Lonely Christopher's adaptation of "For Example" into "Pages from a Course in General Linguistics" directed by Teddy Nicholas, performed by T. Ramon Campbell, Tricia Cramer, and Kristopher W. Imperati, with sound by Brendan Bryne; followed by Marissa Forbes' "Scrabble (or Nietzsche)", directed by Chase Voorhees, performed by Dan Whalen and Mary Hynes, concluding with "Big Talk" by Katie Przybylski, directed by Leah Winkler, performed by David Wienhiemer, Nikki Dillion, Rachel Pearl, and Gary Ferrer.

Doors open at 8pm, performances begin at 8:30. The evening will conclude with a meet and greet with REPUBLIC Worldwide, the playwrights/poets, performers, and directors.

Way of the Word's first poetry anthology, featuring the poems transformed into plays and poems from around the nation will be available for purchase online and at the door for $10. Portions of the proceeds will be donated to Reading Excellence and Discovery (READ), a foundation that promotes literacy by pairing qualified high school tutors with elementary students who demonstrate below grade level reading skills.

Drink specials are provided by Bar On A from 8pm until 9pm. Bar On A (or B.O.A.) is located at 170 Avenue A, between 10th and 11th Streets, NYC.

For more information about Way of the Word, Everywhere Theatre Group, READ or Republic Worldwide please contact Jason Voegele or Marissa Forbes at info@republicworldwide.com, or call 443-528-6761.