[REVIEW] Saturn, by Simon Jacobs

Saturn
Spork Press
36 pages, $12

Review by Emily-Jo Hopson

Saturn, by Simon Jacobs (of Safety Pin Review) is a brave oddity: a collection of 16 shorts about David Bowie, both semi-biographical and hyper-fictionalized. If the thought of reading a book of fan-fiction puts you off from picking it up, reconsider: It is a powerful, intelligent work, polished to the gleam in both theme and execution, at sentence and story level. Though Jacobs is clearly a Bowie fan, and Saturn is, by definition, fan-fiction, it is not a work of fan worship – the portrayal is affectionate, but not uncritical. It’s a fascinating, weird speculation on what life might perhaps be like in David Bowie Land, in David Bowie’s “sizable Manhattan apartment,” as the artist comes to the end of his multi-decade career. There are some accompanying illustrations, and these are equally honest; Bowie’s big teeth, jowls, stubble and age lines are all there.

Plot basics are open to interpretation. My reading: Having become “the ‘elder statesman’ of rock, an old man left to passively herald in the new as his voice goes reedy,” Jacobs’ Bowie is descending Mt. Olympus, and becoming mortal. He attempts to stave off the future and his mortality by revisiting and, increasingly, dwelling within his own iconography; purchased works of art begin to take on his features, flashes of Ziggy Stardust and The Thin White Duke appear in stormy windowpanes, movie and video game cameos are re-watched, obscure bit-parts re-inhabited. Continue reading

The Lightning Room: Blog People

Welcome, once again, to Blog People, a venture here at the Lightning Room in which interview editors Simon and DeWitt interview their fellow denizens of The Blog. In our third installment, Simon interviews Randon Billings Noble, our reviews editor.

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1. What do you do outside of PANK? I’m always curious to hear about the daytime lives of people working in the small press/literary magazine community.

I write – usually essays, right now a collection of them – and wrangle our three-year-old twins.

2. Where are you, spiritually and geographically? Our team is a far-flung one.

Geographically? Washington, DC. Spiritually? New York. Or Sunshine, Wyoming.

3. Can you tell us about your first-ever experience with PANK?

Nope. Continue reading

The Lightning Room: Blog People

Hello! Welcome back to Blog People, a venture here at the Lightning Room in which interview editors Simon and DeWitt interview their fellow denizens of The Blog. In our second installment, Simon interviews Dan Pinkerton, author of the column “Marvelous Medicine.”

1. You write the monthly column “Marvelous Medicine” (often subtitled “Books for Precocious Kids and Kid-Hearted Grown-ups”) for PANK –could you tell us a little about it, and perhaps its beginnings?

Sheila was familiar with my writing, so when she took over as editor of the PANK blog she asked if I’d like to contribute something on a regular basis.  I was enthusiastic about doing a themed column, but neither Sheila nor I were too keen on the first couple ideas I proposed.  Then I had one of those eureka moments as I was reading to my kids.  They are six and eight, so they’re starting to read some of the books I remember enjoying as a child, so I envisioned writing a monthly piece on children’s books that might hold some appeal for literary-minded adults.  I presented the idea to Sheila and she approved (perhaps because she also has young kids at home?).

I’ve started by discussing some writers who will likely be familiar to PANK fans – Donald Barthelme, George Saunders, Matthea Harvey – but I’m hoping to branch out and explore “lost” (out of print) books and underappreciated authors. Continue reading

The Lightning Room with James Tadd Adcox

Five of James Tadd Adcox’s “Scientific Method” poems appeared in our June issue. Below, he and Simon talk about empiricism and constraint.

1. Your “Scientific Method” poems have appeared in a bunch of different places – what was the inspiration for this collection, and how big is it? I love that they all have the same title.

The inspiration was a constraint—specifically, I wanted to send some poems to Safety Pin Review, but didn’t have anything that fit the size requirement (small). And I like series of poems that have the same title. I like how the title shapes whatever follows it, and how so many things can be shaped in different ways by the same title. I think I have somewhere around 40 or 50 of these at the moment, but I’ve culled them down to a chapbook of around 30.

2. These poems seem effortlessly, perfectly concise to me – what’s your editing process like? Are the original drafts longer, and you cut away? Or are they painstakingly pieced together from the beginning, very carefully and deliberately? Continue reading

The Lightning Room: Blog People

Hello! Welcome to Blog People, a new venture here at the Lightning Room in which interview editors Simon and DeWitt interview their fellow denizens of The Blog. For our first installment, Simon talks with Sherrie Flick, author of the monthly column “Eat Drink Book.”

1. Can you talk a little bit about your column, “Eat Drink Book”? By my understanding, it seems to be a mixture of food and drink in literature, and literature in food and drink – what inspired it?

I have ongoing obsessions with both food and writing so it seemed natural to combine them when Sheila Squillante invited me to write for PANK. In my column I look at food/drink in literature on a variety of levels. Recreating food from some books and eating it and reporting in on the results/revelations, looking closely at food within the text, and sometimes including recipes. I want to discover and explore the ways food and literature intersect.

2. Did you have a particular journey-through-food-to-literature or journey-through-literature-to-food? Or have the two always gone hand in hand?

The two have pretty much gone hand in hand for me, although I’ve come to connect them more directly in recent years. I was an English Lit major with a creative writing focus as an undergrad at the University of New Hampshire, and I also worked my way through school at a wonderful bakery in the nearby town of Portsmouth. I continued to work as a professional baker (and write) after I graduated and moved to San Francisco. My creative process is tied to baking in so many ways. (Here’s an essay I wrote about that for Necessary Fiction.)

3. The community of PANK is such a widespread one. Where are you located – beyond the internet – and what do you do there outside of PANK?

I live in Pittsburgh. I’m a fiction and non-fiction writer, and I teach adjunct in Chatham University’s MFA and Food Studies programs. I work freelance as a writer and copy editor for (mainly) arts organizations, and I write a regular garden-to-table food column for Pittsburgh Quarterly magazine. I occasionally curate literary programs around town (previously, I was Artistic Director for the Gist Street Reading Series for 10 years). I cook and bake and garden, and I also play the ukulele.

4. How did you come to know PANK, and to be involved with it?

I’ve known and admired PANK through social media connections for some time and got to know PANK a bit more through Sheila Squillante.

5. What book – not a cookbook, that’s the easy way out – makes you hungriest when you read it? This doesn’t necessarily have to be about food; we’re talking appetites in general.

Wow. That’s a hard one. A book that was important to me in understanding how fiction and food can connect in amazing ways is Jim Crace’s The Devil’s Larder. It’s a book of fantastical flash fiction all focused on food – but in doing so it’s also focused on family and love and hate and lust too. So I’d credit The Devil’s Larder with whetting my appetite in many ways.

6. Of all the books you’ve read, what is one impossible food or drink that you’re dying to try? (This can either be ‘impossible’ as in ‘utterly fantastical’ or ‘impossibly impractical or difficult to prepare.’)

I would love to sit at John Singer’s table in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. He would silently serve me wine and gin and oranges that he’d pulled from his closet, and I would tell him my deepest secrets.

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Sherrie Flick is author of the novel Reconsidering Happiness and the flash fiction chapbook I Call This Flirting. She lives in Pittsburgh.

Simon Jacobs curates the Safety Pin Review, a wearable medium for work of fewer than 30 words. He may be found at simonajacobs.blogspot.com.

The Past Feeds on Itself: An Interview with J. Bradley

by Simon Jacobs

J. Bradley is not an unfamiliar face at PANK – the longtime interviews editor before DeWitt and I came aboard, he made a point of interviewing every single writer and artist who appeared in the magazine’s pages – as an editor, writer, and performer, J. Bradley has been, consistently, an indefatigable, tireless, and rampantly productive member of the literary community. His latest book is an illustrated collection of poetry called The Bones of Us, and will be out in March from YesYes Books. J. was generous enough to reply to my prodding questions about the ghosts of his past, and provide us with a few vivid samples from The Bones of Us.

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Your most recent project, The Bones of Us, is what you’ve called a “graphic poetry collection,” with your words illustrated by Adam Scott Mazer. What was the genesis of this project – how did your work and Adam’s begin speaking to each other?

KMA Sullivan actually came up with the idea of turning my manuscript into a graphic poetry collection when she accepted it in late 2011. There were other books ahead of mine, which allowed us time to really make sure we found the right artist to illustrate the poems. In February of this year, KMA found Adam through Dolan Morgan, who stated interest in the project. From the moment we received the first samples in April, KMA and I knew we found the perfect artist for The Bones of Us. Adam constantly amazes me with each new illustration. His artistic vision complements and enhances the experience of processing the poems in ways I never thought possible.

Can you share an example of how Adam’s artistic vision has complemented yours? Have there been any cases where what he’s drawn up for your poem was wildly different from what you were imagining?

It’s hard for me to imagine what a poem might look like if it was illustrated. When I’m writing a poem, I’m more focused on the sound and the images created, so when I see Adam’s interpretation of my poems, I love that I usually don’t have a set expectation in mind of what any of the poems should or should not look like in a graphic medium. Continue reading

The Lightning Room with Dolan Morgan

Welcome to the Lightning Room, where DeWitt Brinson & Simon Jacobs take turns asking PANK authors extremely difficult questions about their work. Dolan Morgan’s story “Euclid’s Postulates” appeared in our April issue. Simon and Dolan talked about looking forwards, backwards, and down paths of no return. Dolan’s first book, That’s When the Knives Come Down, is forthcoming from Aforementioned Productions in August 2014.

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1. “Euclid’s Postulates” is about, among many other things, the tenuous tracks of our lives compared against mathematical principles, and probably inevitability. Bearing this in mind, can you respond to this hypnotizing gif?

Yes, please, let’s talk about this hypnotizing gif. Now, for those who haven’t clicked through, I’ll save you the trouble: the gif includes a rotating green cube. Innocent enough. Familiar shape, calming tone, gentle rhythm. Great. But soon we see a new shape, interrupting our tranquility. A blue pentagon obscures part of the cube, immutable and irrevocable. Why? We can’t say. Then another, and another: blue pentagons definitively overtaking the cube like so many feral umbrellas – jesus, when will it stop? – until the cube itself is entirely subsumed, devoured and disappeared, such that we see clearly now, with a terrifying certainty, that a dodecahedron can be – and in fact has been, right here and now, you can’t deny it, it’s really happening – formed around this simple cube, and that it in fact was always there, waiting to be realized and made manifest. And of course, there is the inverse realization too: that beneath every dodecahedron has always been lurking this cube, mocking in its simplicity. The past is undone in an instant, one life swapped for another. David Foster Wallace has written of this particular kind of horror, wherein a person realizes that what scares us is not only here, but that it has been here all along, that even when we felt calm, safe, and secure, we had no grounds to feel this way. Take for example my sister’s one-time fiancé, Doug, who struggled to find employment. Fortunately, he landed a seasonal job working at a Christmas tree farm owned by a family friend, Eric. Every morning, Doug and Eric would head out in a truck through the trees, getting things ready for the holidays. Now, Eric noticed something peculiar each time they embarked, something that just couldn’t be ignored or denied, try as he might. So, one morning in the truck, Eric said, “Doug, I know you’re pooping.” Turns out, every time they got going, Doug would defecate in his pants, right there with Eric next to him, in the truck. Eric had hoped it wasn’t true, but day in and day out, the facts presented themselves, the irrefutable pentagons slowly formed on the situation, and Eric had to accept and confront it: “I know you’re pooping,” he said. Doug denied it. “No, I know you’re pooping. You’re doing it right now.” Doug again denied it, mid-movement. Eric gave him an ultimatum. “If you don’t admit what’s happening, I’ll have to fire you. You don’t even necessarily have to stop, you just have to admit it. Meet me halfway.” Doug did not. And I can only imagine Doug’s mortification – all that time he thought to himself that he was getting away with it. That no one knew he was pooping. He had a job. He had freedom. The brisk, early mornings. A hard day’s work. But he was wrong, and was forced to understand he’d always been wrong. These are the facts. Or take Gene Hackman: in Coppola’s The Conversation, he plays a surveillance expert who faces a moral quandary after discovering that the people he’s surveilling are targeted for murder – by none other than his own paying client. The people he spies on are concerned, sure, but ultimately unaware of the imminent danger, and it would be a breach of professional integrity for Hackman’s character to confirm their suspicions. Still, his silence makes him complicit. He jeopardizes his otherwise renowned career by finally attempting to intervene. Yet, at the crucial moment, he learns quite viscerally that he misinterpreted the conversation: the people he spied on were not concerned about being murdered, but in fact were plotting a murder. Mr. Hackman’s character must accept not only the horror of this current moment and the finality it entails, but must also contend with each prior moment he misconstrued. He too is being surveilled, has been all along. Everything has been reversed. His life is in shambles. It was never a cube, but always a dodecahedron. One thing becomes another, and in fact was never anything else in the first place. I know you’re pooping. At any moment, a single fact or series of facts, can present itself, such that whole swaths of our lives are swept away, people/places/things, to be replaced by something alien, something new. What we took comfort in up to now was never us at all, and this new alien thing, this unfamiliar thing: that has always been us. There’s no denying it. That’s why I am scared of this gif and will never look at it again. Continue reading

The Lightning Room with Jessica Alexander

Welcome to the Lightning Room, where DeWitt Brinson & Simon Jacobs take turns asking PANK authors extremely difficult questions about their work. Jessica Alexander’s piece “Daughter” appeared in our April issue – below, she and Simon talk condition narratives, desperation, and volatility.

1. This piece is written as a series of twelve steps along the disappearance of a daughter. What is this the path to? Acceptance? Annihilation?

At the time, I’d coined this phrase “condition narrative” – and I was very proud of it – as in a physical or mental condition. I thought I was finished with events. Done too with characters and settings. I’d just write condition narratives. I’m no longer sure what that meant. I remember thinking a condition is a pattern, not a plot; a repetition, an obsession, or a personal discordance with public time or progress.

2. A sense of abject, frantic loss runs through this piece. I can imagine that things that disappear without explanation are much worse than those you watch vanish before your eyes (or perhaps it’s the other way around) – is this, do you suppose, a universal reaction to this kind of grief?

I have no idea. At the time, I was reading Bataille’s Visions of Excess and I was really struck by the violence of substitution. To me it seemed like he kept situating animals, planets, body parts in a space of impossible longing. So what interested me was not so much the disappearance of a thing, though that’s significant, but that space of impossible longing where objects are almost mythical. Continue reading

The Lightning Room with Katie Schmid

Welcome  to the Lightning Room, where DeWitt Brinson & Simon Jacobs take turns asking PANK authors extremely difficult questions about their work.  Below, Simon and Katie Schmid talk about roots and brutal youth and hunger and “The Boys of the Midwest 1 through 5,” which appeared in the April issue.

 

1. When you write about the Boys of the Midwest, it’s always as a collective. Is this a generational thing?

In my mind, children go through a pack-like stage. At least, that was true for me. Especially around the ages of 8-11, I was a part of a neighborhood gang of girls in my mostly rental/apartment living neighborhood in Evanston, IL. There was a kind of rangey lazy quality to our movements – I don’t ever recall us making decisions about what to do, we just found ourselves in the midst of activities: playing in someone’s tree house, informing each other of the edible plants we could find in the grass (I remember eating crabgrass and onion grass, though we were not underfed). It’s a weird time. We didn’t live in an especially great neighborhood, but there was the sense that there was strength in numbers, and we were allowed to be on our own sometimes. Left to yourself, you construct a whole kid world that adults have no bearing on. Or at least, the wisdom of adults gets filtered down to the group through kid logic and becomes beautifully warped.

When my family tells me stories about their childhoods, it seems to confirm that lots of kids, given the opportunity, form their own little feral packs at that age, with their own rules and rituals and heartbreaks. It can be brutal and intense and emotional. They force each other to eat bugs, they tell each other wild insane lies and deliver these as gospel truth. Carson McCullers’ novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, has that fierce little protagonist, Mick Kelly, and she’s simultaneously a leader-parent in her gang of neighborhood children and a child herself, given to all the whims and large, unbearable emotions of childhood. I am fascinated by that time, in my own life and in others’. Looming over all of that feral, emotional child closeness is the specter of the “right” world in the form of your parents, the true gods of your life, whose emotions are even more inscrutable and terrifying than your own. Continue reading

The Lightning Room With Russel Swensen

Welcome  to the Lightning Room, where DeWitt Brinson & Simon Jacobs take turns asking PANK authors extremely difficult questions about their work. Here, Simon asks Russel Swensen a series of increasingly terse questions about his magnificent poems in the April issue.

 

1. “TOURISM IS IMPORTANT” has such a restless quality to it, as if built of frantically-stacked images. I ask this a lot, but how did you construct this poem? Did you know right from the beginning it would be a series in this manner?

Ah, intention my old friend I have to come to pretend I believe in you again. But not so much really. I knew I wanted this to be sort of camera-friendly so in that sense yes, I had some idea of what it would look like [it’s like those really bad rap videos from artists who well never made it like at all but DID make a video: this is MY hood, this is my weird fucked up ice cream parlor, this is the park that makes me unspeakably sad, this is THE WEATHER except it’s personal, it was incredibly cold that day because of me, because of my friend, the cripple, etc.]. And I mean, I say this with nothing but love for those videos – series of vignettes basically that are genuinely tender because the vignettes are all there is, there’s no career, no real light: I get that. I mean, I’m a complete zero as a poet so showing a few shops in my inner city really isn’t that much of a stretch. I hope this doesn’t sound like fucking painfully white. I just have a built-in love for travelogues that are essentially testimonials – this, exactly, is where I’ve been and maybe I don’t get a chance to say it again so I’m a say it loud.

[paragraph deleted that details the writer’s difficulties with prose of which there are many, typical lines being, “I think the basic Ikea-ness of this has more to do with that anda stubborn refusal to give up like in a relationship, cf. “I can make this right,” “ok but like “it’s so cold in the d” you see what I’m getting at here” sic for what’s it’s worth] Continue reading