Allen Ginsberg (via words-and-coffee)

“In writing fiction, I can be free. I can use my life. The raw material is my experiences.” —Miriam Toews

"Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories—and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories." —Happy birthday, Alice Munro!

Big Bend

Stephanie La Cava Talks to Flavin Judd and Eileen Myles About the West Texas Trans-Pecos Pipeline

As of last week, there have been over a dozen cases of condemnation proceedings against local landowners in Western Texas in the interest of Energy Transfer Partner’s private contractors beginning work on the 143 mile Trans Pecos natural gas pipeline. The three companies in the ETP (two helmed by billionaire businessmen) argue that the pipeline will bring tax revenue and jobs, as well as purported environmental benefits. Opposition believes these jobs will be short-lived and and leave the pristine desert landscape destroyed. There are concerns about the transparency of both the ETP and government. It’s a complicated argument. I wanted to ask two very different sometime residents to talk about their personal history of creative production in Marfa in particular.

The undisturbed land has a rich cultural context. It’s not valuable because of any one legacy. “Marfa’s become self-aware, and that is a bit of a problem,” Flavin Judd tells me. “It’s Marfa’s price to pay for not becoming a ghost town, which was the other alternative. Don didn’t like the idea of an artist’s community and thought it was ridiculous, so that was not his intention or interest. His interest was finding a beautiful place to learn, think, and work.” Judd is the son of the late artist Donald Judd, known for his minimalist works, the subject of a MoMa retrospective next year. It was Donald Judd who put Marfa on the proverbial cultural map, establishing his studio, residence, library there surrounded by site specific works that maximize the landscape’s space and light.

Eileen Myles bought a house in Marfa just last year. I emailed her to ask how she feels Judd’s presence around her there. “Marfa is so inflected by him,” she says. “You take the tour… I was never so interested in NY. Minimalism was what I walked into when I came to NY so I thought of it as very 70s and Soho and then there it was writ large. You kind of get infected. I want a big long table like that. I want that wall. Half the town looks like Judd. He makes more sense there with the scale and the surrounding land. He got something right.”

All this said, Flavin’s brief account of his father’s beloved Marfa is moving in this context. We spoke earlier this week in New York. He was visiting from Los Angeles, where he currently resides. Every six weeks he returns to Marfa.

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“The Visionary Hatter” by Alejandro Jodorowsky, recommended by Restless Books

Issue No. 204

AN INTRODUCTION BY NATHAN ROSTRON

When we at Restless Books first learned that the Chilean cult film director Alejandro Jodorowsky—the madman/genius behind such voluptuously unsettling and surreal epic movies as The Holy Mountain, El Topo, and Santa Sangre—had written novels, we were intrigued. And maybe a little frightened. His films tend to leave their viewers enthralled, disturbed, emotionally and sensorially drained. The images are the material of nightmares and erotic fantasy—often both at once. What sort of esoteric labyrinth would we have to walk in those pages in order to extract their meaning? What minotaur would be waiting at the center? Whatever the danger, we knew we had to take the leap.

It was with delight that we dived into the pages of Where the Bird Sings Best (the first book that Restless Books printed, last March) and discovered a richly novelistic (and, in Jodorowskian terms, surprisingly straightforward) family story, an auto-mythography of Jodorowsky’s ancestors who immigrated from the Ukraine to Chile. We rediscovered what readers in the Spanish-speaking world already knew: for all his cinematic fame, Jodorowsky was also a major literary author.

The second installment of our trilogy of Jodorowsky novels, Albina and the Dog-Men, is a seductive genre mashup only he could conceive: a Western-cum-ancient folktale-cum-road novel-cum-werewolf story about an otherworldly sapphic albino giantess whose sexual power literally turns the men of a small Chilean village into dogs. One day, the titular Albina lands like a messenger of Heaven into the world of a bitter barkeeper whose temperament and sidelong gait earns her the moniker Crabby. Albina cracks something open in Crabby, and together they build a bond that shields them from a world bent upon their destruction. But their road is made more difficult by a side of Albina that comes out only during the full moon…

As you’ll read in this excerpt, Crabby and Albina are fleeing the corrupt and lecherous policeman Drumfoot, who’s been made more dangerous and hell-bent by Albina’s bite. Happily, they rescue a drowning dwarf, Amado, who may have the key to their salvation. I guarantee it’s like no other novel you’ll read this spring—and perhaps ever.

Nathan Rostron Restless Books

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The Visionary Hatter

Excerpted from Albina and the Dog-Men

by Alejandro Jodorowsky

Translated by Alfred MacAdam

Recommended by Restless Books

Crabby and Albina the albino giantess leave town on a bicycle built for two after drugging the corrupt and lecherous policeman Drumfoot, who is now dangerously transformed by a bite from Albina. While disturbed by the violence they’ve witnessed, the new companion they rescue might change their cynical idea of men.

Crabby pedaled in the forward seat. Albina, behind, moving her enormous legs automatically without holding onto the handlebars, was writing in her notebook: “I don’t know where I’m going, but I do know with whom I’m going. I don’t know where I am, but I do know that I’m here. I don’t know what I am, but I do know how I feel. I don’t know what I’m worth, but I do know not to compare myself to anyone else. I don’t know how to dodge punches, but I do know how to withstand them. I don’t know how to win, but I do know how to escape. I don’t know what the world is, but I do know that it’s mine. I don’t know what I want, but I do know that what I want wants me.”

In that manner, they reached the outskirts of Iquique. The fishmeal factories appeared, covered by a thick layer of café-con-leche colored dust and vomiting thick smoke that slithered up through the chimneys and down to the ground, where they threw down roots and stuck. Rotten meat, acrid excrement, fermented guts—the stench passed through their pores, infected their blood, and tried to infect their souls. Crabby made Albina sit up front and pedaled behind her, sinking her nose into Albina’s wide back. The pestilence was like the mass of demons born from Crabby’s intestines, and the fragrance that emanated from Albina’s white skin, the redemption of the world. Barely breathing, they covered twelve more miles.

After a steep hill, the ocean appeared, sending its salty aroma toward the flank of the mountain, which, under that extended caress, responded with a thousand perfumes from its ochre earth. “Let’s stop to enjoy the pure air and to eat a bit. Just look, Albina, all I have to do is stroll among the rocks on the shore for the crabs to come to me.” Which was exactly the case; hundreds of crustaceans came out of the cracks and began to follow Crabby. It was easy to catch a couple, open them up, roast them on a red-hot stone, and devour them. All the while crabs never stopped rubbing against the legs of the woman they considered their Universal Mother.

A ray of lunar light passed through the keyhole and hit Drumfoot’s forehead. He awakened without realizing he was naked, and lifted the leg with his normal foot to scratch himself behind the ear. Then he went into the kitchen and lapped up the water in the washbasin. Since the door resisted his shoves, he pulled up some of the floorboards and used his hands to dig into the clayish soil and make a hole to get out. He howled at the waning moon and set out, bent over, sniffing the road. “Mmm… they stopped here and placed their feet right on this spot… mmm!… they peed here and… mmm!” He rolled around in Albina’s excrement, panting with pleasure.

Some soldiers on coastal patrol found him that way, naked and carrying out that fetid act. After giving him a good thrashing, paying no attention to his heartrending barks, they dragged him off to the police station. After two days, he got his mind back. The bite on his shoulder had healed, leaving a violet, half-moon shaped scar. “Those witches will get what they deserve!” Drumfoot spent hours sharpening his knife.

The narrow road built by the Incas along the ridge seemed to float over the abyss. Far below, the waves, transformed into gigantic foamy lips, called to them, insidiously sucking. Luckily, the landscape flattened out little by little, and the path was swallowed up by the dunes on a beach. Albina stripped, ran over the hot sand, and plunged into the glacial water. Crabby followed her, fully dressed. They swam, frolicked, ate clams, and drank the little water they had left, knowing that if they didn’t find a town soon, thirst would swell their tongues.

Twelve bowlers floated out of a creek followed by top hats, pith helmets, military caps, pork pie hats, Panama hats, and a huge variety of hats with upturned brims. The tide was carrying them to the shore like an armada of fragile little boats. The intrigued women climbed the rocky wall. On a narrow beach, a small man—he had no visible deformity, so he couldn’t be called a dwarf—surrounded by empty hatboxes was staring out to sea. As they watched he burst into high-pitched laughter, ran toward the high waves, and let himself be carried away, beginning to drown in those convulsing waters.

Albina dove in. Swimming vigorously, she reached the desperate man, knocked him cold with a punch to the jaw, and floated him to the beach. Crabby shouted in a rage, “Why did you bother to risk your life? You should have let him carry out his destiny! He may be small, but he is a man, and one less man in the world is a good thing!” The drowned man opened his eyes, and with an amiable smile said to Crabby, “Madam, perhaps my destiny was to be saved by your friend here, or, even better, perhaps I’m here so that your destiny can be carried out. The plans of mystery contain multiple paths. But I see you have eaten clams! Allow me to translate what these scattered shells mean.” And the little man examined the remains.

“The white lady, who has fled from a temple—I don’t know if she transmits a blessing or a curse. She’s something less or something more than human. With regard to you, Madam Anger, it seems you hate men because you see them as identical to your father, a thin, tall, dead man who was a callous remover by profession. Since I am the opposite of him, a pudgy, living, short man, a hat maker by profession, you may accept me as a partner without a second thought.”

“As a partner? You’re raving mad!”

“Wait a second, let me go on interrogating my clams. A dangerous enemy is chasing you. One of you dances, and the other manages her. You’re looking for a tranquil place to set yourselves up. Now I appear. About a mile from here, in a ravine near the Camarones River—not much of a river, true, but more than welcome in these sandy territories—is my town, Camiña. A little-known place because the highway is far away from it and you can only get there on foot or by mule. About forty years ago, miners loaded with silver from the Chanabaya mine came to town. My father sold them all kinds of hats, because they wanted to look elegant for the prostitutes working in the saloons. But the silver veins gave out, the miners went off to other regions, and the whores followed them. I inherited an enormous shop filled with bowlers, wide-brimmed, narrow-brimmed, and pork-pie hats opening their felt jaws hungry for heads. Those mute complaints drove me to despair. With no other profession than this useless hat-making business and forced by my stature to have no wife, sick with boredom, I decided to bury myself in the sea along with my little felt brothers. But as you two may see, I have a different destiny. Come with me, I’ll give you everything I have, a magnificent shop in the center of town! There you can set up, as the clam shells tell me, the café-temple you want!”

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Harper Lee — a life in pictures

Nelle Harper Lee, author of Pulitzer prize-winning book To Kill A Mockingbird, has died aged 89. Born in Monroeville, Alabama, she was famously reclusive, and few photographs of her have emerged over the years. To see some of the few that have, visit The Guardian.

By Tom Gauld