Simon Jacobs

The Lightning Room with Russell Jaffe

Posted on by

Welcome  to the Lightning Room, where DeWitt Brinson & Simon Jacobs take turns asking PANK authors extremely difficult questions about their work. Russell Jaffe’s sly, watery end of all things, “Doritos,” appeared in our April issue. He and Simon chat, below.

 

1. Hi Russell. If this is “after Cassandra Gillig,” can I ask what came before? Or after, assuming that the world was re-populated?

It’s after her because she suggested the idea for it! I do love the idea of a post-Cassandra-Gillig-world (PCGW).

Never assume anything about repopulation.

2. This piece is basically two people floating on a boat in the middle of watery nothingness, where all entertainment and civilization have been utterly wiped out. If you’re in love with the last viable person on earth, how do you deal with rejection?

I think that’s what real rejection feels like, at least in my life, be it romantic or job-related. Let me tell you, I once dreamed of working for the WWE as a creative writer. And I had an interview with them to be a content writer for the website! And I gave them some rad ideas and they had me sign a form that just because I had given them any ideas did NOT mean I could keep them or copyright them or that they hadn’t come up with them themselves. Then they USED ALL MY IDEAS ON THE WEBSITE, right down to a series about specific wacky pro wrestler gimmicks of the past and more interactive Facebook-page-like wrestler profile pages. And they told me they had just let 5 people go, which was true. The economy had just tanked. I felt like I was basically the last man in a barren landscape. I cried sitting on my car in Stamford, Connecticut, by a big thing of water and all these big white houses. It was like I had slept and this flood had killed everyone and devastated everything. Dealing with rejection is every step you take and breath you inhale and exhale. You just do it by continuing. Next thing you know, you’re like, fuck, I would have hated that job. I would have hated that relationship.

3. “Doritos” basically reads as optimism: crushed. Is it hard to be cheery when the (your) world is ending?

It’s not because I love the end of the world so much that it’s usually a positive thing for me. It’s a beautiful finale, and this poem is a particularly memorable part of the episodic series we’re all gifted by the universe whose narrative we kind of scrape together and determine day to day, maybe second to second. I can’t write anything if I feel sad, even brutally sad stuff. I feel like the sicker and sadder my poetry is, the happier I am IRL. Continue reading →

The Lightning Room with Lena Bertone

Posted on by

 

Welcome  to the Lightning Room, where DeWitt Brinson & Simon Jacobs take turns asking PANK authors extremely difficult questions about their work.

 

“Self Portrait,” by Lena Bertone – a story written in mirrorings – showed up in our April issue. To celebrate, Simon and Lena discuss narcissism.

1. What is the most narcissistic piece of artwork you’ve ever seen?

I love that Frida Kahlo’s relentless self-portraits feel so self-indulgent, yet they’re so vibrant and full of pain and story. I love her painting of her sitting next to herself, holding hands with herself, both of her hearts exposed.

2. “Self Portrait” has a marvelous, reflective quality to it – what was the first image or line that struck you to begin writing it?

The first line was the first line—I liked the idea that Leo’s wife would be disturbed that he painted himself as a woman. He promises he hasn’t done it before, but he doesn’t promise that he won’t do it again. Continue reading →

The Lightning Room With Dawn Sperber

Posted on by

Welcome  to the Lightning Room, where DeWitt Brinson & Simon Jacobs take turns asking PANK authors extremely difficult questions about their work.

 “Our Master of Psalmody,” by Dawn Sperber, appeared in our February issue. Below, Simon talks with Dawn mutable pronouns and religious ecstasy.

 

1. I’m really curious about the origins of this piece – what possessed you to write it, or what was the first image or phrase that struck you and had to be written down?

I actually wrote the first draft of this story when I was 20, almost half my life ago. I’d picked a handful of words from the dictionary to write about (neuter, psalmody, saffron, glissando), and as a result, this weird story pushed out of me. I loved it back then, but it was more like a story seed. A couple years ago, I opened a box of old writing and found it inside. I still felt the story, so I decided to refine what had inspired me.

I’ve always felt that the sacred parts of life don’t stay in cordoned-off areas, and the idea that God disapproves of sexuality sounds like a set-up for self-deceit. Instead of trying to control our passions out of existence, it seems only natural to look for balance with who we really are and find the divine in every aspect of life. This is one of the reasons established religions make me nervous. If we’re going to find balance in our crazy selves, shouldn’t we start out being as honest as possible? To me, Lee embodies a lot of the messy sacred richness that doesn’t fit in prescribed boxes.

2. I love the casual shift between Lee’s gender pronouns in this story. It creates an indeterminate yet mythic figure, with this mysterious yet subversive power. Who is your favorite person to hear singing?

Mm, it changes. I get song crushes and haunt certain songs for weeks, knowing I shouldn’t fixate, that it’ll weaken a song to hear it too often, but I love being in love. Those song crushes end up fueling a lot of my stories. Some recent ones were sung by The Civil Wars, Anais Mitchell, and Jeff Buckley. Continue reading →

The Lightning Room With Jenny Sadre-Orafai

Posted on by

Welcome  to the Lightning Room, where DeWitt Brinson & Simon Jacobs take turns asking PANK authors extremely difficult questions about their work.

Today, Simon talks with  Jenny Sadre-Orafai, who brought two poems to our February issue earlier this year, about burning young things.

 

1. “Biography of Teenagers” seems to explore, in part, the fumblings of adolescence as a substitute for later, averted maturity, a desire to concretize things before they happen. What do you think drives our desire for the past over the present?

Perhaps we spend so much time with the past because it’s what is known. We have been there. We know how it all happens. We lived it. We can’t know what will happen this second. There’s a sense of control, ironically, in the past.

2. Both “Biography of Teenagers” and “Treasure in Timber” explore burned-out or elided history, post-dated moments: can you share another moment of deleted history?

I visited Seattle and British Columbia when I was seventeen with my parents and sister. I remember feeling like we would never get back home. I was an anxious teenager who missed her boyfriend and listened to a cassette he made over and over again. Before leaving the Seattle Airport, the news reported that a body had been found in Kurt Cobain’s home. That’s what I remember most from the trip and not how much I was missing by just being there. I would go back to Seattle eighteen years later. I wore flat shoes and walked everywhere. I watched giant seagulls strut and the water shine around them. I didn’t waste it the second time. Continue reading →

The Lightning Room With Nuncio Casanova

Posted on by

Welcome  to the Lightning Room, where DeWitt Brinson & Simon Jacobs take turns asking PANK authors extremely difficult questions about their work.

Today, Simon talks with Nuncio Casanova, whose photo collage “Once There Was A Giraffe” appeared in our February issue. Ages later, he brings us wisdom from the old masters.

for pank

 http://www.coroflot.com/nunciatura

1. This is a wonderfully surreal collage-piece. For mixed-media work like this, what comes first, the images or the words? And how?

Both come first and then I close the eyes. They start to lick and bite each other, rumour has it. I trow thence cut-out heads, one here, two there, and whole phrases grow horns, and vice versa, when I place misspelled words. To be honest it is completely the contrary, everted, backwards, then show it to a mirror and put upside down, cut in pieces and add garlic, onion and oregano, fry in whale oil at high heat for 20 minutes and then send it to Greenland via priority airmail.

2. When it comes to creating surreal, Dada-inspired works like these, how do you select what images/phrases to use to build the story? What is the process of creation like, in a style that traditionally relies on so much experimentation, randomness, and subconscious motivation?

The entire process will be accurately described as capricious, because I say so!

3. What’s the most bizarre place from which you’ve ever cut a photograph?

Where I had glued them! That was quite more impressive… would have been, because the lights went out. Oh, if you had seen!

4. Does this piece come from a larger project?

Yes, it does. After eating the emperor, the crocodile eats almost everyone in the story, including the grandmother of Herodotus and Nuncio Casanova, and then escapes to Leningrad and eats ice cream until he explodes.

5. Can you name one of the thousands of wonders circling around the belly button of a Victorian lady? Please?

Ha! Try to get your own Victorian ladies! Be aware that they are extremely slippery at this time of the year.

6. What else have you learned from Dada?

I learned nothing and besides I have to reassure myself three times per hour that I am awake. I demand my money back!

 

***

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 Lightning Room with Kallie Falandays

Posted on by

Welcome  to the Lightning Room, where DeWitt Brinson & Simon Jacobs take turns asking PANK authors extremely difficult questions about their work. Today, Simon talks with Kallie Falandays. Back in our February issue, Kallie pulled us apart as she put us together. Now, she speaks:

 

1. “I Want To Tell You Yes” and “If Morning Never Comes” are both profoundly physical poems, of pulling things out and stuffing things in. Are these based on specific people?

Yes and no. Yes they are based on real people, but no because it’s not the real person but the imagined person that these poems explore. That world (of imagination) is sometimes infinitely more interesting to me.

2. What is the most uncomfortable (not physical) experience you’ve ever had.

That experience is probably buried somewhere too deep to find at this moment.

3. “I Want To Tell You Yes” reads like a demand, mixing a kind of visceral carnality with images of nature, as if subverting one of those boring nature poems. Is this poem really about innocence lost?

No, it is more about going to what is lost and wanting to undo it – not necessarily so that it becomes whole, but so it becomes again and again.

4. Tell me one soul you’d like to completely tear apart.

That’s one secret I will not reveal. Continue reading →

The Lightning Room with Tara Mae Mulroy

Posted on by

Welcome  to the Lightning Room, where DeWitt Brinson & Simon Jacobs take turns asking PANK authors extremely difficult questions about their work. Today, Simon talks with  Tara Mae Mulroy, whose story,“The Last Hurrah,”  from our February issue is loss itself:

 

1. The atmosphere in “The Last Hurrah” is just perfect – the unease of being abroad; exotic history and locales coupled with familiar things taking on unfamiliar dimensions (the McDonald’s, the dogs; the Greek alphabet); it heightens the sense of a couple in limbo. What brought you to Greece to write this story?

As a wedding gift, my father, who travels for a living, offered to comp our plane tickets for our honeymoon. My husband is also a manager for a hotel, so since we were footing the rest of the bill for our honeymoon, we sought out locations that would a.) be able to be flown to and b.) provide us with a hotel discount. Athens, Greece ended up being that place. Athens was far from what we expected though. As we were flying over, the economic riots started, and our first foray into the city center ended up with us in the middle of the riots, our eyes watering from tear gas.

On top of that, we couldn’t find hummus, falafels, or gyros because that’s Turkish, not really Greek, food. The city was covered with graffiti, and most of the public transportation was shut down due to the riots. We sent expensive text messages home to our families to let them know we were okay. It was a strange two weeks. When I started writing this story, I wanted to re-create that time of discomfort and exoticism. I imagined a failing marriage and the husband running out to join the rioters. It ended up as a love story. Continue reading →

The Lightning Room with Chris Terry

Posted on by

Welcome  to the Lightning Room, where DeWitt Brinson & Simon Jacobs take turns asking PANK authors extremely difficult questions about their work. Today, Simon talks with  Chris Terry, whose story “Graffiti” appeared in the August issue of PANK. His young adult novel, Zero Fade, is now available from Curbside Splendor.

 

1. This story is saturated with issues of identity – a biracial narrator terrified and compelled by the idea of standing out; like a public performance. How did you capture this delicate balance in your narrator?

Being a teenager is a form of public performance. “Graffiti” is an autobiographical story, so I tried to remember that teen feeling of wanting to assert my newly formed identity, but remain safe from scrutiny and suggestion. I was trying to capture that contradiction, while indulging in some blame-deflecting. I remember being in 9th grade, feeling like I had things figured out, and shutting myself off from criticism, in case it toppled the fragile house I’d built. That’s why there’s a lot of “And if this hadn’t happened” language at the beginning of the story. That’s the narrator denying any culpability.

2. Along similar lines, “Graffiti” is a story about hybridity and blurred barriers – can you talk a little about this?

I was drawing from my own experience. I’m a pale, half black, half white guy who spent the first fifteen years of his life in the Boston suburbs. I got in trouble for graffiti a couple of times in ninth grade, a time when my family was having a lot of financial problems that exacerbated my alienation in our fancy suburb. A lot happened all at once. I was forming my taste for alternative culture like skateboarding, hip-hop and punk while being forced to consider my racial identity while just starting to think of myself as black, having never thought much about race before.

I cut a section from “Graffiti” where I talk about being isolated from blackness at large in the ‘burbs, and learning to be black from pop culture. This was just after Rodney King, and police brutality was a big topic in early ‘90s hip-hop and black cinema. After watching Menace II Society and listening to Ice Cube, I expected the worst from the cops and turned that into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Continue reading →

The Lightning Room with Marcelina Vizcarra

Posted on by

 

Welcome back to the Lightning Room, where DeWitt Brinson & Simon Jacobs take turns asking PANK authors extremely difficult questions about their work. Today, Simon talks with Marcelina Vizcarra, whose story “The Oldest Living American” appeared in our February, 2013 issue. The secret of immortality, below.

 

 1. “The Oldest Living American” explores, among other things, our glorification/souvenirification (which is not a word) of objects or people recovered or still present from our collective past. Why do we suppose we do this?

That’s a good question. I think these relics give us a vicarious participation in our past. Maybe if we connect to something outside of our timelines, we extend them. That’s the optimistic aspect. But there’s also a darker theme in our efforts to distinguish ourselves, a sense of ownership that I’m guilty of, to appropriate all manners of objects and people from the cabinets of history. In that respect, Harvey is a sort of living Wunderkammer that can be picked through, and his panoramic experiences can be appraised against market trends. Lately, I’ve come to view our collective past as yet another store for the modern consumer, yet another way to define ourselves by what we purchase.

2. This story presents a number of perspectives of the same, very old man; in so doing, you manage to bring up a host of issues surrounding what we do with our old; what inspired you to write this story, and to use this multi-perspective approach?

Some of my first jobs were taking care of elderly neighbors, and then the institutionalized, so these characters tend to volunteer often in my writing. I’m especially fascinated by the artificial stasis imposed upon them during their slide into dependence, along with its accompanying indignities—perhaps the most offensive being the assumption of muted emotions, or worse, naïvete. I suspect that the fear of this marginalized future is what funds our society’s contradictory stances—disdain for old age but celebration of longevity. Harvey embodies both, so I put his death under public scrutiny, harkening back to the old coroner’s juries. Continue reading →

Beneath the Liquid Skin, By Berit Ellingsen (A Review By Simon Jacobs)

Posted on by

 

firthFORTH Books

108 pgs./$10.95

Towards the end of this collection’s first story, Berit Ellingsen writes, “We need to be something else again.” We begin in uncertainty at the point of dissolve, as things change, and it is this unease, this perpetual state of transition that drives Ellingsen’s brilliant, undulating and mysterious first short story collection, Beneath the Liquid Skin.

The book begins with the aforementioned “Sliding,” the inevitable drift into winter, and ends in a duet, “The White,” which chronicles the journey of “you,” a logistics assistant who treks from a research base into the vast, shifting whiteness of the Antarctic landscape, and finds wholeness and home, the universality of everything in the ice and snow. This is followed by “Anthropocene,” describing, in fierce, poetic language, a frigid apocalypse on our age, dragging everything into the center, when “you” and “I” are torn apart in fire and ice, only to begin again:

This is where it ends: in a concrete hall between reticent, snow-burdened mountains, under a mute sky the color of forgetfulness, snow falling like soot, and the air so frigid that every metal object tears the skin from your fingers. The lashing nettle-wind shrieks and tries every door and hollow window frame, like a burglar at night, clinking across the floor’s lake of glass shards. The red-rusted ley lines with rows of disc-shaped insulators curve into the sky and sing of legacies misspent and lost, of eternal life squandered. Continue reading →