=mail art received=

::Richard Canard, Carbondale, IL::

On the left, a spare and elegant visual poem. 

On the right, a bit of early mail-art history.

Together, a perfectly matched, beautifully balanced presentation that, again, eludes-defies-transcends-simply disregards with indifference the ultimate irrelevance of interpretation when it comes to art.

=mail art received=

::Richard Canard, Carbondale, IL::

This one is so great on so many levels that any description of why its so great would only diminish it. Suffice to say, I never tire of looking at "Sasquatch Big Stick" and find myself amused and bemused anew each and every time.

=mail art received=

above: the envelope
below: 2 ATCs

microbook (cover):

microbook (sample spread):

below: "scrapsbook" front and reverse:

Below: another microbook:

::Carina Granlund. Petsmo, Finland::

I can only hint with these scans at the incredible beauty and delicacy of this work. It's really a treasure of creativity, intimation, and imagination. I suspect that this is a collection that I'll be returning to again and again for inspiration. Its a museum exhibit in an envelope. I mean that quite literally.  

=Books recently read=

Suddenly, a knock on the door by Etgar Keret.                    This is another one of those books I came upon by chance at the Brooklyn Public Library. In fact, it was by chance that we came upon this particular branch of the library at all (the Mapleton Branch on 60th Street), returning home after an expedition to a giant freezing warehouse of an Asian supermarket where we went in search of a particular kind of vegetarian duck. 

Etgar Keret is a celebrated Israeli short story writer whose work originally appears in Hebrew. He's praised by the likes of Amos Oz and Salman Rushdie, among others. I'd never heard of Keret before accidentally coming upon this book and I've never read Amos Oz. I have read Salman Rushdie, but that isn't why I picked up this book. It was the cover, partially, though I know well enough by now not to judge a book by that criteria; the back cover copy also had something to do with it, though having written cover copy for thousands of books myself for publishers over the years, I know firsthand how unreliable and intentionally misleading that can be, too. What sold me in the end was opening the book at random and finding a story about a man with a hemorrhoid (<—Jesus, what a difficult word this is to spell!!!) that takes over his life. 

Now I'm not a fan of hemorrhoids, real or fictional, nor am I anything but an occasional fan of sophomoric literary humor, but I do like very short stories peopled with quirky characters caught in darkly tragicomic absurd situations where literally anything can happen. I find such stories a good way to describe life.

Keret's tales are less short stories in the usual sense than postmodern fables. By "postmodern" I mean they are ambiguous in meaning, have no clear moral or any moral at all in the conventional sense, and very often they even lack a proper ending. They start  seeming to be about one thing, wander off in another direction, and finish in mid-air on a tangent. They are conscious of themselves as "stories" and work against the notion that the reader is meant to lose him or herself in the narrative, in the so-called "reality of fiction." They are a comment on storytelling itself and our need for stories as much as anything else.

This may annoy some readers but I'm not one of them. I rather like stories like this. When done well, as most of the stories in this collection are, it's an effective technique for working against expectations and cliche, for capturing something essential about life: specifically, life's resemblance to a story that never really comes together, that doesn't finished tied up in a neat red bow. 

When such stories are not done well, as they are sometimes not so well done in this collection, the reader is left with a "ho-hum, meh" feeling, the sense that certain writers live a charmed life, somehow managing to get important people like Salman Rushdie and the book reviewer at The New York Times to read into their work meanings and nuances that may or may not exist, taking the time and making the effort they wouldn't take or make for a hundred other writers no more or less talented than Keret. 

Well, that's the way it goes. There's no use railing against the "injustice" of it all. For every Etgar Keret I don't doubt there are fifty thousand other "Etgar Kerets" who labor on right this very moment, scribbling away in obscurity, their life's labor unappreciated, their stories fated never to see the light of day (or the candlelit dark of night), never, in short (if it's not too late already to call this rambling sentence "short," except in relative terms, since I could easily go on), never, I say, to find an appreciative eyeball. 

I once got an editor of James Patterson novels to admit what I'd long suspected all along. That an unknown writer could submit to him the exact same manuscript that James Patterson submitted and it would be rejected out of hand instead of rewarded with a million-dollar contract. Having elicited this unforced admission, perhaps it was a confession, I consider to have been, with hardly any exaggeration, the crowning moment in my publishing career and it confirmed everything I'd observed and could ever stomach to know about the business. In one case, a book is undistinguished drivel; in the other, it's a bestseller and a blockbuster movie. One writer pumps gas to make meager ends meet; the other lives like a Borgia. Why? Because life is wildly absurd, that's why, and that's what Etgar Keret tries to capture in his stories.

Some of his tales are particularly successful. Like the one where a writer is held at gunpoint and ordered to tell the desperate gunman a story and he wants a good story too; something original, no cliche's, nothing he's heard a hundred times before. There's another story called "Lieland." It describes a place where every grandmother we've ever killed off to avoid going to a dreaded party, every run-over dog we used as an excuse when late for work actually exists and suffers. There's a delightfully wicked story about an unrepentant contract killer on death row; unlike most contract killers featured in first-person narratives, there's nothing to like about this guy. During his long and dark career, he had absolutely no scruples about who he'd murder. Kids, old ladies...he'd kill a "bushel of them." Why not? Money is money. Shortly before his execution, he tries to get the low-down on the tough guys in Hell from the priest come to take his confession. He wants the inside dope on who's who in the netherworld, specifically who he should kiss up to and who he can afford to simply knock-off. In the end, hell is nothing like what our killer expects—or what you expect either.

One thing Keret knows how to do effectively is to avoid the trap that many authors who write this brand of fantastical fiction often trip themselves into—and that is letting the tale drag on too long. That hemorrhoid (<—I didn't even try spelling it this time; I just copy-and-pasted from above) story is a good example. It's only about two pages in length. Any longer and it would have become forced and tedious; it's a joke to begin with and like many jokes it's length alone that can often be the difference between a laugh and a groan. Even short, it wasn't such a good joke, which is ironic since, as I already noted, it was the clinching reason I borrowed this book from the library in the first place.

Magic goldfish, walk-on terrorists, the Butterfly Effect as manifested with a knifing at a fast food place called "Cheesus Christ," a woman who can only reach shattering orgasms with lovers named "Ari," another woman who finds a little zipper under her lover's tongue and takes the chance of unzipping it, an estranged father who conspires with his young son to "kill" his mother-in-law...you'll find all these oddities and curiosities and plenty more in Suddenly, A Knock on the Door. 

In the end, this collection is like a bag of potato chips. A quick, easy, and crunchy snack. You can even read it while the television is on; many of the stories are no longer than a commercial. Some of the chips are broken, others crushed to crumbs, the bag is not as full as it looks before you open it, a lot of it is just air, but every time you reach inside you come away with something if only a tasty trace of grease and salt you can lick off your fingers.  

=envelope art=

::heading to Ocracoke, NC::

=mustache envelope mail art=

::to Victor Dada Industries, whatever that is, located in Dartmouth, MA, of course::

"Whenever a man is any kind of doubt, the first thing he ought to do is grow a mustache. Nine times out of ten everything will become clear after that. If it is not, the answer may well be the rope—or the bullet." 
—Lord Pembroke Haversham-Lilly

=Books Recently Read=

Dictation by Cynthia Ozick. This book consists of four narratives, each no longer than 50 pages—too short to be novellas and too long to be short stories—but none longer or shorter than it need to be. Cynthia Ozick is a writer who doesn't write according to formula, not with regard to length or theme or plot or anything else; there isn't one word too many, nor one word too few. She's a true literary artist and this collection is a nice sampling of her talent.

The title story is a fictionalized account of a possible meeting between the secretaries of two legendary writers: Henry James and Joseph Conrad. Miss Bosanquet, who takes dictation from Mr. James, is anxious to meet Miss Hallowes, who takes dictation from Mr. Conrad. She believes they have a great deal in common. They are the mediums through which these great figures of literature pour the bounty of their talent; the genius passes through them first and by their transcription alone onto the page. Why should James and Conrad alone get all the glory? Aren't they, too, deserving of at least a subordinate fraction of immortality for their efforts? Miss Bosanquet has a plan to achieve her goal but first she must seduce the modestly reluctant Miss Hallowes into complicity. She starts by initiating Miss Hallowes into the illicit pleasures of sapphic love.

"Actors" is the story of Matt Sorley, an aging workmanlike thespian who never made it far enough to be reduced to a has-been. Unexpectedly, he's getting his belated big break when a trendy up-and-coming director decides to cast Matt as the star in his new updated stage-production of "Lear." At first, Matt is reluctant to take the role. He's disdainful of the young director. He thinks the play is pure schmaltz and the production over-the-top, harkening back, with post-modern irony, to the unabashed emotionalism of old Yiddish theater. But almost in spite of himself, Matt gets into the role—or maybe the role gets into him. Something clicks. The past comes pouring through Matt: suddenly he is Lear reincarnated as an immigrant New York Jew. He feels it with every fiber of his being. It's the role of a lifetime for which he's been waiting all his life. Until the second act of opening night when the authenticity of his performance is challenged by the unexpected appearance of a living ghost.

Frank Castle is a journalist, a Catholic apologist on radio and in print. In "At Fumicaro" he is off to a retreat in the Italian countryside where a gathering of priests and Catholic intellectuals are attempting to define the Church's role in the modern world. It's a world where religion is struggling to survive, besieged on all sides by politics, science, secularism and the failing of faith, and where, in Italy, Mussolini and fascism are on the rise. On the night of his arrival, Castle finds the chambermaid leaning over the toilet in his room, sick and vomiting. Inexplicably, he is struck as if witnessing a vision from God. He takes the chambermaid to bed. By morning, he's obsessed with her. Within days, he decides he must marry her. The girl is a dolt. She's pregnant with another man's child. She's from the lowest social strata. When he returns with her to New York, he'll be a laughingstock; people will think he's gone mad. Maybe he has. Maybe the girl herself will realize that they don't belong together. Frank can't decide. He's going to let fate decide, or God, or the girl, or whatever hand that shapes the cosmos. All he knows for certain is that this girl is his spiritual destiny, his long dark night of the soul. Rather than being her salvation, as he initially supposed, he comes to understand that one way or another, she will be his.

In the final and, in my opinion, most powerful story in the collection, "What Happened to the Baby," a woman works her way through a family history of lies, deceptions, misunderstandings, illusions and self-delusions that have turned her past into a labyrinthine hall of mirrors. As a child, Phyllis was given to understand that her uncle Simon was an eccentric, idealistic genius devoted to creating a universal language that will surpass Esperanto and promote world peace. Conversely, his wife, her aunt Essie, was a vain, selfish, controlling shrew whose unreasonable jealousy of Simon led to their baby's death. But as Phyllis grows older she discovers that the truth is far more complicated, nuanced, contradictory; in fact, it may be altogether unrecoverable. Phyllis—and through her, Ozick--confronts a disorienting and chilling revelation: that whatever the truth may be, it is lost in the telling, told as it is by those determined to shape it to their own advantage. That we may very well use language less as a tool to build bridges between us than as a weapon to destroy each other, less as a means to communicate  than as a way to deceive. That we already speak a universal tongue and everywhere it's forked. 



    

=envelope art=

=postcard (outgoing)=

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