Contrappasso Extra: Interview with Loren Glass

Interview with Loren Glass

One of our inspirations here at Contrappasso is the Evergreen Review, the classic journal published by Barney Rosset’s Grove Press from 1957-1973, and revived online since 1998.

This week I traded a few emails with Loren Glass, Associate Professor of English and the Center for the Book at the University of Iowa, to discuss his exciting new book, Counter-Culture Colophon: Grove Press, the Evergreen Review, and the Incorporation of the Avant-Garde (Stanford University Press).

Loren Glass

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MATTHEW ASPREY: When did you first become aware of Grove Press and the Evergreen Review?

LOREN GLASS: I was researching a project on modernism and obscenity and became aware of Grove’s centrality to the post-war campaign against censorship in the US.

So how did you come to write Counter-Culture Colophon? What was the research process?

I went to the Grove Press papers at Syracuse University Special Collections library to look into their materials related to the trials of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Tropic of Cancer, and Naked Lunch.  I quickly saw that there was a much larger story, one which looked more fascinating and more important than the project on obscenity that I was envisioning.  I spent a total of about two months over a period of two years with that archive.  I also did research in the Donald Allen Papers at UC San Diego and with Barney Rosset’s Papers at Columbia. I interviewed Barney twice, as well as Fred Jordan, Nat Sobel, Morrie Goldfischer, Herman Graf, Claudia Menza, and Judith Schmidt Duow.

Barney Rosset seemed prepared to risk all financially to further his political and literary objectives. Can you tell us about his vision for society, why he was ultimately so important as a publisher, and why he was left in reduced circumstances in retirement?

I see Barney as a romantic revolutionary.  For him it was all about “sex and politics,” as he repeatedly said.  He was more of a contrarian than a visionary, a sort of left-wing libertarian determined to fight the powers that be but without any carefully articulated idea of what would come next.  In terms of his importance, he was in the right place (NYC) at the right time to really make a difference.  A combination of factors—the paperback revolution, the expansion of the American university, the weakening of censorship—converged to make his efforts at Grove particularly successful.  However, once the cultural revolution he set in motion had succeeded, he became less relevant, and the corporate consolidation of publishing made it more difficult to run a company as recklessly as he did.  He put all his money into Grove, and was barely able to cover his debts when he sold it.

Barney Rosset (1922-2012)

Daniel O’Connor and Neil Ortenberg’s documentary Obscene: A Portrait of Barney Rossett and Grove Press was released in 2007. It seemed long overdue. Have Barney Rosset and Grove Press otherwise been given their due recognition?

I would say, emphatically, no.  I was astonished that there hadn’t been a book on Grove.  Part of the reason is that they did so much, far more than is covered in the film, or even in my book, though I try to be comprehensive.

The Olympia Press in Paris had a close association with Grove. Olympia’s publisher Maurice Girodias was a colourful character and a dubious businessman. You write about how Barney would eventually come to support him financially. What was their relationship?

Barney called it “deep.”  Dick Seaver called it “a fragile friendship.”  I think they had similar characters in certain ways, but Barney had more access to money and was also a better businessman.  Girodias was notoriously sloppy with contracts and copyrights, and Barney basically cannibalized his entire catalogue.

I love the graphic design of Roy Kuhlman for Grove Press in its classic era. His covers were an endlessly inventive commercial application of mid-century Modernism, as impressive as the work of Reid Miles for Blue Note Records. Sadly there does not seem to be a book in existence celebrating that relationship – or even about his work in general. How important was Kuhlman to Grove?

Kuhlman was central, absolutely, to establishing Grove’s brand recognition, and he was the first book artist to incorporate Abstract Expressionism into cover design.  His daughter, Arden Riordan, is apparently working on a book dedicated to his work.  There’s also an amazing website dedicated to his work with Grove: www.uncoveredgrove.com

There are rumours Barney Rosset wrote a memoir before his death. Are we likely to see that published?

Barney’s memoirs are being edited by Bradford Morrow for Algonquin.  Rumor has it that he doesn’t say enough about Grove, but rather focuses on his years in China, though I haven’t read the manuscript.

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More information on Counter-Culture Colophon is at Stanford University Press.

Read Loren Glass’s recent two-part feature on Grove at the Los Angeles Review of Books (parts I and II).

from Issue #2: Poetry by Daniel East (II)

Photo (CC) symmetry_mind @ Flickr

Daniel East’s poem of Kathmandu, In lands where my icons stand without my aid or design, is presented in PDF to preserve its unique formatting.

ABOUT THE POET

Daniel East is an Australian writer currently working in Sydney, publishing theatre reviews on media culture reviews (reviews.media-culture.org.au). He is a graduate of UOW’s Creative Writing degree and his work has appeared in Cordite, Mascara, Going Down Swinging, Voiceworks, Red River Review, Verity La and is soon to appear in PAN Magazine and cutthroat. He co-wrote Sexy Tales of Paleontology, which won the 2010 Sydney Fringe Comedy Award and he is a member of Australia’s only performance poetry boyband, The Bracket Creeps.

from Issue #2: Poetry by Daniel East (I)

Photo (CC) Karva Javi @ Flickr

The God of Bone and Antler

What passes here for air is dry.
Four bare rooms and four doorless frames
sixteen unwindowed walls of caulked pine
and countless things with claws that scrabble
in the dry above.
If it lives
it lives like a shadow, preceding and anterior
to the light, tethered at the edge of vision.
Your feet below are naked.
As you creep across the boards
there is a scraping, a thunk
a hiss, clock, hiss and clock
of limbs as they strike ancient wood.
An antiphony of bones, a twitching cow skull
in a nest of horns.
It has no songs, it is kin to stone and ferryman to beasts;
language makes no purchase
and keeps no token or effect.
You wonder as you go within
elbows held over your breast
if it thinks like a draught horse working a bit –
teeth wearing flat on steel.
If it lives, it is behind,
cracked hoof seeking the shelving of your heart.

 

For Adam, Lara and the Cactus

My last love was a husky
a beautiful, high-maintenance pack animal
that devoured my heart with tenderness.
Before I flew out of Stansted, I sent her a postcard,
said love was a chimera, no one knows
what it looks like but everyone
hunts it. She thought it meant
I wanted to get back together.
There are green parrots in the bottlebrush.
They wake me. Dawn moves so
quickly the dream and the hangover
marry in lilac.
Yesterday, I bought a yellow-thorned cactus for my friend.
Adam is thirty, unemployed, useless.
All his friends know he has a tumour
but no one says anything.
I bought the plant for him to look after,
Adam left it on the window-sill
and his sister’s black husky smashed it, ate the roots,
left it for the rising sun to bury.
The dog now comes to his window, tries to climb in
with digging motions, yelping.
I can’t stay angry. It is so easy to fall
in and out of love
with something so stupid and so fierce.
So I drink Coopers Red on Adam’s ancient mattress,
give advice I should probably take
and throw away that cactus
too damn shredded to live.

 

ABOUT THE POET

Daniel East is an Australian writer currently working in Sydney, publishing theatre reviews on media culture reviews (reviews.media-culture.org.au). He is a graduate of UOW’s Creative Writing degree and his work has appeared in Cordite, Mascara, Going Down Swinging, Voiceworks, Red River Review, Verity La and is soon to appear in PAN Magazine and cutthroat. He co-wrote Sexy Tales of Paleontology, which won the 2010 Sydney Fringe Comedy Award and he is a member of Australia’s only performance poetry boyband, The Bracket Creeps.

from Issue #2: Poetry by Erin Martine Sessions (II)

Photo (CC) osseous (Victor Martinez) @ Flickr

 

The Door

She locks herself in the loo and presses
her back square against the door. She closes
her lids and swears she can hear the ocean.

The emerald swell engulfs her, salt sticks
to her gangly limbs and dries and tightens
her pocked skin. She is driftwood floating

to crests and troughs different from her own.
Here the sea buoys her, guides her ups and downs
till she is moored in mirage. Disorder

waits outside the door: interrupted, sleep-
deprived thoughts – the door handle digs into
the small of her spine – blue moods and trends ebb

and waves of confusion come crashing in.
Seaweed slips between her fingers as
she counters the current, sand scratches at

her toes, and the tide takes her away to

… Knock, Knock…

The roar of the ocean fades to trickling
in the cistern, the sea breeze stings like bleach
in her nostrils, and the breakers dump her.

 

mythology

he is writing a home of words for you
portmanteau windows with rhymed panes of glass

he’s designing a myth on the threshold
that both his doors and his plot hinge upon

white noise notes are sprawling across his page
clicks of keys and the language of latches

he lures with his architect recipe
of mulled positions and latticed lines

racontes-moi une histoire, cherie
the one about Apollo and Daphne

an arboreal border protects you
from his terra cotta couplets and his

lead-light laurels      you labour to out play
him, only, your own face will forbid it

 

ABOUT THE POET

Erin Martine Sessions is an emerging poet based in Sydney. Contrappasso is the first place in which she has been published. Later in 2012 her work will also appear in Sparks, the Sydney University Anthology, and Volume 11 of Swamp, an online magazine for creative writing postgraduates. Erin has a Bachelor of Ancient History (Honours) from Macquarie University, a Bachelor of Christian Studies from the Australian College of Theology, and a Master of Creative Writing from the University of Sydney. She is a part-time student, part-time registrar, part-time librarian, and always a poet.

from issue #2: Poetry by Erin Martine Sessions (I)

Photo (CC) Josh Semans @ Flickr

 

If I were a house

I would have a cast iron
spiral staircase from the cellar
to the attic so that head
and heart could confer.
I’d have a rocking
chair on the balcony that arches
back to indecision and lurches
forward to light bulb moments.
There would be a weather
vane on the roof to warn
of my swarming mood.
I’m pretty sure my floors
would be polished
hardwood for resistance
to your whirling elements.
The laundry would have
a machine just for
washing my mouth out.
My wine-coloured dining
table would always have
an extra place set.
I would have one window
left open
for you to climb in.

 

New Year

Your eyes were colder and sharper
than the icicles that overhung
from your gutters. Your hair, like the sky,
was greying, and your new house was as
ostentatious as your introduction.

In August you snuck a glance
over the tops of your agapanthus,
their finger-like fronds
reached through our
fence and into my yard.

A month later you ventured
past your melting ice
demeanour and flower-fence
to watch me through the window
with those steely eyes.

In Spring you followed me,
steam rising from
the footpath, but the heat
I felt was your gaze
on the back of my neck.

I knew from the knock
it was you on my stoop —
some excuse to borrow
a book. You smelled
like coffee and Christmas.

At a New Year’s party with
all our neighbours, I avoided
your glimpses and fixed my eyes
on the fireworks. The moon
was round and gold like your wife’s ring.

 

ABOUT THE POET

ERIN MARTINE SESSIONS is an emerging poet based in Sydney. Contrappasso is the first place in which she has been published. Later in 2012 her work will also appear in Sparks, the Sydney University Anthology, and Volume 11 of Swamp, an online magazine for creative writing postgraduates. Erin has a Bachelor of Ancient History (Honours) from Macquarie University, a Bachelor of Christian Studies from the Australian College of Theology, and a Master of Creative Writing from the University of Sydney. She is a part-time student, part-time registrar, part-time librarian, and always a poet.

 

Contrappasso 2: Now Available

The blockbuster 400-page issue #2 of Contrappasso Magazine is now available in print and ebook form.

The new issue contains Anthony May‘s never-before-published 65-page interview with the legendary Elmore Leonard; ‘STR82ANL’, a new novella by British writer Clive Sinclair (accompanied by a career-spanning interview); a long narrative by film writer David Thomson; fiction by Mimi Lipson and John Salazar; a memoir by Australian jazz musician Paul Pax Andrews; an essay by Peter Doyle; and poetry by Antigone Kefala, Chris Andrews, Tessa Lunney, Erin Martine Sessions, Mark Tredinnick, Daniel East, Mark O’Connor, Paolo Totaro, Chris Oakey, Elias Greig, Luke Whitington, Paolo Fabrizio Iacuzzi, and Floyd Salas.

You can buy the new issue here:

Other EBOOK formats @

from issue #2: ‘The Getaway’ by David Thomson (excerpt)

THE GETAWAY by DAVID THOMSON

[This essay was originally published in Vienna as “The Getaway”, in German, in The Last Great American Picture Show, New Hollywood 1967-1976 (Wespennest), edited by Alexander Horwath, in 1995 on the occasion of the Viennale of that year. This is the original English text, corrected and somewhat shortened by the author, but not updated. Thus the essay has no knowledge of films or events from after 1995.]

I OWED MYSELF A BREAK, and I could not think how else to get the writing job done. So early one morning in San Francisco, I tiptoed through the creaking house listening to the nocturnal breathing, so coarse, so tender—wife, child and new baby—how could there be any air left for me? I wondered—and I put together just a few things, some maps, the necessary tapes, those books I read on journeys, and took myself, as quietly as a thief going away, to the car.

I hesitated a moment at the threshold, so fond of all those sleeping sounds—why is it that one needs to go away? Is it adventure or some unfitness, close to madness? Minutes later I was on the Bay Bridge, impatient to see the first flush of rose or fire in the eastern sky. There is no way of telling escape and its folly from going after the bold new thing. The American experiment has always had its neurosis, its great dread of surrendering its capital, the loneliness.

These are the tapes I had taken—The King of Marvin Gardens, Badlands, The Gambler, Chinatown, The Parallax View, Taxi Driver, The Long Goodbye, the first two parts of The Godfather, Night Moves and The Passenger (the one that contrives to find America in London, north Africa and Espana). These are the films I want to propose for the 1995 Viennale and its examination of the American movie, circa 1968 to ‘76 or so. Oh yes, and I took the VCR, too, leaving its wires dangling from the wall, aware that my son would come down the next morning, bereaved and aghast, to discover not just that Daddy was gone but that he was cut off from Red River, The Adventures of Robin Hood, Winchester ‘73, Lives of a Bengal Lancer, Captain Horatio Hornblower, Treasure Island and the unending struggles of Tom and Jerry.

With ease and relief the car headed east, gravitationally drawn to the West. In San Francisco, our car becomes tense, crotchety, old before its time, aggravated by the hills, the STOP signs on every block and the small erranding to the market, to school, to friends after school, and that especially awkward trip, where there is never any parking, to Captain Video. But in half an hour on the road, slipping through the Oakland hills and then climbing up through Altamont beneath the windmills, all still and alert, the car reclaims its youth and a chance of adventure. I am encouraged, sitting in the small, warm shell, hurtling past scenes that bloom in the night. In one bright window, as I pass, the angle always changing, I see a woman stretching her arms and letting a dark sweater drop down over her white body—I will never see or know her, but I feel stirred by the remote intimacy.

In Tracy, I stopped for breakfast—it wasn’t seven yet—marveling at the eggs, over easy, white and pink and gold, the trim pancakes and the smiling syrup, all for a few dollars. There is such vitality in the American road breakfast; it comes so swiftly and so lyrically, whereas at home I would curse and stumble over making the same meal—break the eggs, burn the coffee, and produce ignominious pancakes. Here, and at a million places on the road, the breakfast is as pretty as the girl at the counter in a Hawks movie—some girl he’d spotted and sought to keep around, like Dorothy Malone at the bookstore.

Over breakfast I was reading The New York Review of Books, a review of the biologist Edward Wilson’s autobiography. It speculated on ways in which a chosen concentration of study—insects or primates, say—might be borne out in the physique, the behavior and even the neurological make up of the scientist. This is intriguing, for I have for some time been working towards a kind of biological portrait of the cineaste. He or she is not a replica of the people on the screen, alas. But surely the moviegoer is shaped by the experience of watching and its dark—by sitting, by the bright light, by the unseen flutter of the machine, by the ultimate inaccessibility of the screen. The cineaste is a bulb (I mean the type of plant life), sheathed in dark earth, leaning towards the light, hoping to bloom. The special fantasizing impulse leads us often to overweight, pale, shy, recessive if not depressed creatures whose dreams are in turmoil.

I drove down the gray, gloomy valley where dust, mist and agricultural spray drew in the horizon. I crossed the canals of irrigation; I passed the great herd of cattle waiting patiently in fields of excrement, waiting to be hamburger; I saw the faint outline of California’s creased hills in the distance, like folds of dun colored brain. Then at Bakersfield I turned east to skirt the southern end of the Sierras. It was winter and all the passes were blocked. The legend of California would be incomplete if its large cities were not within such easy reach of wilderness—the Sierras, so many miles of peaks and unreachable valleys where there might be forbidding desolation and rogue creatures, a cat from Track of the Cat, or ghosts of lost pioneers and prospectors. It is at the northern end of the Sierras, after all, that some of the Donner party dined on their companions.

And then, beyond Tehachapi, bending north again on 395, I was in reach of that other wonder, the desert, something that can be seen from the top of Mount Whitney, highest point in the Sierras. That desert provides the greatest temperatures in the continental U.S., as well as the lowest altitude. It is Death Valley, and you go right through the valley on your way to Las Vegas: it surely helps the notion that Vegas is not quite, or not simply, on Earth….

Copyright © 2012 David Thomson. The complete text of David Thomson’s ‘The Getaway’ is available in Contrappasso issue #2, available in Paperback, Kindle Ebook, or other Ebook formats @ Smashwords.

Header photo from Arthur Penn’s Night Moves (1975).

Contrappasso Contributors: David Thomson

DAVID THOMSON, born in London, in 1941, and living in San Francisco since 1981, has consistently attempted to extend the ways in which we write and read about film. So his deeply researched biography of David O. Selznick, Showman, and the five editions of The Biographical Dictionary of Film, have been balanced by “novels” taken from the movies—Suspects, Silver Light and Warren Beatty and Desert Eyes. More recently he has mixed The Whole Equation and Have You Seen…? with a study of Psycho and The Big Screen, a one-volume historical survey from Eadweard Muybridge to Steve Jobs.

David Thomson’s 15,000 word narrative ‘The Getaway’ appears for the first time in English in Contrappasso issue #2. An excerpt will appear here this week.

from issue #2: ‘STR82ANL’ by Clive Sinclair (excerpt III)

[In addition to a career-spanning Clive Sinclair interview, issue #2 of Contrappasso features STR82ANL, a never-before-published novella by the British author. Here is the third of several excerpts.]

MEANWHILE, alone in their 7th floor hotel room, Zachary Siskin is beginning to pine for Ida. When the phone rings sometime after midnight he assumes—not unreasonably—that she is calling to explain her absence.

“Where are you?” he says.

“Perhaps I should tell you who I am,” a man answers, “before I tell you where I am. Hickory Waxwing at your service. Ruddy Turnstone’s right-hand man. That’s the who. The where is downstairs in the lobby. Now for the why. When he got home from the Sapsuckers’ soiree—which he said had developed into the dinner party from hell—my lord and master immediately dispatched me to guide you through Atlanta’s demimonde. ‘Leave no stone unturned in the pursuit of pleasure,’ were his instructions. I am here to carry them out to the letter. Am I to understand that your wife has not yet returned? Meet me in the bar, and we’ll wait out her coming in the company of good ol’ Jim Beam.” Hickory Waxwing adds that he is easy to spot, his hair being the colour of a Georgia peach (though not naturally so).

Sure enough Zachary Siskin spots him easily. Both men order their bourbon neat.

“Have you noticed,” says the blond-haired one, “that our names are practically homonyms? Though we don’t look much alike. And probably don’t act much alike either. What is it you do, Mr Siskin?”

“I’m a rabbi,” replies Zachary.

“Jesus,” exclaims Waxwing, “a Jewish one?”

“Most of us are,” replies Zachary.

Hickory Waxwing whistles.

“I would never have guessed,” he says. “Does it bother you to be seen with someone like me?”

“Someone like you I do not know about,” replies Zachary, “but with you I have no problem.”

“I was under the impression that your God took a dim view of Sodom and its eponymous perversion,” says Hickory.

“Fuck my God,” says Zachary Siskin, “I am a rabbi not because I believe in Him, but because I believe in man.”

“I believe in men, too,” counters Hickory, “but not to the extent that I worship them.”

“I don’t worship man, either,” says Zachary, “I simply maintain that he has the capacity to do harm, and the capacity to do good, and that it is my duty to encourage the latter proclivity.”

“Encouragement is perfect,” says Hickory, “the problem with religion over here is that it’s all about control.”

Is that what I am doing, wonders Zachary, trying to control Ida? Nevertheless he calls up to their room three times during the course of the next hour, to check if she has returned unobserved, or at least left a message to ease his worried mind.
From Hickory he learns that his wife had left the party with the Kingfishers. Although it is close to 2.00 am he phones their home. Mrs Kingfisher picks up. He makes his apologies, and is assured that Ida is fine.

“She’s with Art in his studio,” the woman adds. “Been there for a couple of hours at least. I can only assume that he persuaded your wife to sit for him after all. He can be a very persuasive man.”

Zachary downs another measure of Jim Beam (his sixth) and says to his new bosom buddy: “Okay, Hickory, let’s go turn over a stone or two.”

Waxwing does a double-take. He knows how to burn the candle at both ends, but doesn’t know how much of this knowledge he should share with a rabbi.

“What is it you’re hoping to find under them?’ he asks.

“Naked women,” replies Zachary.

“What sort?” asks Waxwing, beginning to wonder if his companion really is what he said he was.

“Not whores,” replies Zachary, “dancers.”

“You want to see a titty show?” exclaims Waxwing.

An excerpt from Clive Sinclair’s novella STR82ANL, whichappears in issue 2 of Contrappasso Magazine, available in Paperback, Kindle Ebook, or other Ebook formats @ Smashwords.

from issue #2: ‘STR82ANL’ by Clive Sinclair (excerpt II)

[In addition to a career-spanning Clive Sinclair interview, issue #2 of Contrappasso features STR82ANL, a never-before-published novella by the British author. Here is the second of several excerpts.]

MRS KINGFISHER SAYS “Goodnight” cheerfully enough as Ida follows Arturo’s Maglight down the garden path to his studio at its furthest end. He unlocks its door, switches on its lights, and points towards an easel at its centre, to which a canvas is secured. The first thing Ida notices is that the model is naked (save for a discreet scrap of white towelling).

“You didn’t mention anything about me having to take my clothes off,” observes Ida.

“That’s because it’s not obligatory,” replies Arturo.

“How many have kept them on?” asks Ida.

“None,” replies Arturo, “but that’s because they are determined to demonstrate that no mutilation can stop them remaining objects of desire.”

“Bollocks,” laughs Ida, “they strip because you’re a bully.”

“You are suggesting that I threaten them with my fists, or put a gun to their heads?” he asks in mock-outrage.

“Don’t be an idiot,” says Ida. “You know as well as I do that the relationship between painter and sitter is a form of wrestling. In the end one has to submit to the will of the other. Which is why—despite the entreaties of Ruddy—I have declined to accept commissions from the likes of Elton John. I fear that his very presence in my studio would force me to produce a representation, something that would be much more to his liking than mine. So I stick with sunflowers, anemones, and anonymous models. That way I can make paintings.”

“I am not blind,” says Arturo, “I know that your paintings are a thousand times better than mine, that you have true greatness in you. I can also see that you are not impressed by my work, that you think it is shit. Of course you are right. The example you are looking at is more soft-porn than portrait. My only real interest in the sitter was to show that women can have mastectomies and still have great looking breasts. But you are far too English to tell me so yourself. Perhaps that is why your paintings still fall short of their potential. Some vestige of that Englishness stays your hand at the last moment, prevents you from delivering the coup de grâce. I have the temperament, but lack your divine gift. If only I knew how to teach, I would teach you how to strike without fear, how to take without guilt.”

“You are absolutely right,” she replies, “I need to learn how to take.”

“And to give, and to give your all,” cries Arturo, “Damn it Ida, let me paint your portrait. Fuck the other women with breast cancer. Let me do it for my own enjoyment. Sit in that chair over there.”

And Ida sits, like Missy the poodle.

She watches as Arturo dismisses Breast Cancer Survivor No. 19 from the easel and replaces her with a blank canvas. How is he going to prepare it, she wonders, watching him open an earthenware jar and tip something that resembles red-brick dust on to a marble work top. Of course she identifies it immediately as Armenian Bole. Who would have thought it, she muses, he is going to prepare the canvas exactly as I would have done?

“I see we are going Dutch tonight,” she observes. “I am surprised. I had you down as a German Expressionist.”

“That is because my other sitters were flighty things, women of the air. Whereas you are an earthier creature.”

An excerpt from Clive Sinclair’s novella STR82ANL, whichappears in issue 2 of Contrappasso Magazine, available in Paperback, Kindle Ebook, or other Ebook formats @ Smashwords.