Trinie Dalton, Kevin Sampsell, Joanna Ruocco, Louis Chude-Sokei

Just wanted to pass along some links to some of my favorite new pieces up on the Fanzine.

“Sex and Micro-Prose” — Trinie Dalton on Kevin Sampsell’s A Common Pornography and Joanna Ruocco’s Man’s Companions. Trinie makes a lot of interesting connections between the two works.

“Pottymouth” — Kevin Sampsell talks dirty in his piece on the conversations that occur in bed.

“Knowing Me, Knowing You, Knowing Them” — Louis Chude-Sokei reviews Shameem Black’s Fiction Across Borders but perhaps more importantly tangles with the echoes of Edward Said’s Orientalism and the way it has inhibited fiction writers from imagining and/or speaking as characters who are culturally, racially, sexually different than the writers themselves. He aptly describes the way that disdain has become indistinguishable from respect. I always find Louis’s work to be pretty incredible but here he says quite a few things that seem long overdue. The accompanying collages are from Berlin-based artist Paul Tyree-Francis, who has done quite a bit of graphic design for the Luaka Bop record label.

Trinie Dalton “Wide Eyed”

Published in San Francisco Bay Guardian, Nov. 2005

Basically this book is pretty fucking rad. It’s a succession of semilinked stories blending Trinie Dalton’s obsession with proto-punk rock stars, animals, and horror movies to form her amazing and fake autobiography, Wide Eyed. After the Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up” helps her to drown out the sounds of lobsters being boiled alive and later to cope with her mother’s remarriage, Mick Jagger appears to our narrator in a vision, and she explains to him how Antoni van Leeuwenhoek discovered sperm by looking at his own semen under a microscope and dissecting rabbit testicles. In “Decrepit,” Dalton and her roommates, living in a house inhabited by a ghost, enact a play about a giant maggot, which threatens to grow so large that it suffocates the residents. “The maggot play was meant to be retro like Godzilla or King Kong – one of those huge creatures dominating humanity stories,” Dalton writes. “But we were wasted on Xanax, dressed in red dresses and red feather boas, so it had a New Wave feel … ‘I vill crush you,’ said Heidi in a low Krushchevian maggot/dictator voice from behind the door. ‘I am zee maggot.’” After all of this temporal compression, it is fitting that Dalton makes the ghost a po-mo poster child: “Eras run into one ageless mess. Ghosts live in different eras simultaneously.”