Going Up: When an Actor Forgets their Lines
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A writer and an actress describe their joys and torments of fifty years in the theater.
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Marcel Duchamp Switched to Chess - But Wait: Before that, this Eccentric Baroness Sent Him a Toilet For Which He Later Became Quite Famous. . .
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Marcel Duchamp's impact in the genesis of modern conceptual art was revolutionary. For one, he produced the famous Nude Descending a Staircase:
Then he gave up painting in order to play chess full time.
The idea of Duchamp playing chess in lieu of making art was fascinating and puzzling.
Read MoreThen, one hundred years later . . . D. B. Tompsett
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One hundred years later, D. B. Tompsett is playing tennis with his net down on the Idaho plain; the only poet I know who can animate a desert outhouse, give her a paramour and communicate that pathos. Dan understands the temperament of a desert, for one. His job is agriculture and plant life. All the while, he moves in and out of reveries, a working man's surrealist: A cricket couple are hunted by dogs in a cornfield; the dogs grow bored of the chase; butterfly wings turned to toast; their bodies, small sausages; and he asks, already knowing the answer, which way do pumpkins really point?
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Defining Artists
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Hekate has taken to the streets and spoken to several artists with regard to their life, work and the world in which they live. These individuals are all unique and their work ethic exemplary; when support for what they do is not assured. They define their own art as well as the relentless spirit of art through that commitment and tenacity. Their world is interactive out of necessity and they represent a form of communication within the New York community bringing their own neighborhoods and homelands into the conversation.
Read MoreThe Dolphin Show and an Orangutan
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The aquarium of 1968 packed them in, before the city had become, as the infamous headline suggested, “ungovernable.” They’d insert a probe into the electric eel’s tank, there’d be a zzt-zzt and what sounded like faint thunder claps over a little loudspeaker. We’d all watch the needle of the galvanometer slowly creep up, eventually hovering around 900. The crowd would take one step back.
Read MoreExile and the Writer's Psyche
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Displacement affects a delicate sensibility like a slap in the face with a wet fish
Read MoreThe October Revolution
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The era spoke to originality and passion and cooperation within the industry. All that happened and was acknowledged not just by the writers but by the musicians themselves. Kenyatta attributed it to a "spirituality," which in a few short years, had all but evaporated: "There was solidarity there. It was a good movement, a lot of beautiful people, but the musicians have changed. Times have changed and the situation has changed. Living conditions for the people who are playing that way are very hard, so it never stays the same."
Read MoreThe Writer's Voice, Part Two: A Man on the Street
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I interviewed fifty people on a busy city street over the course of a single summer day, a pool of subjects derived from a robust sampling of life: Vendors, cab drivers, business people, tourists and homeless. I asked them all the same question: “What interests you most about Soren Kierkegaard, apart from his religion and philosophy?”
Read MoreThe True Voice
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. . . The question is raised as to the importance of the true voice. Does it exist at all? Other writers have weighed in and the consensus generally relates to the type of writing contemplated and if the writer wants to get paid . . .
Read MoreHAIRSPRAY AND LIGHTER: LOWER EAST SIDE NOIR COMING SOON FROM ORPHAN PAPER
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Dawn yielded, flooding west over Houston like blood backtracking into the grey dope filling that morning’s syringe. Trap Boy stood, frozen, arm raised, mouth open, a prehistoric peat man until the blue and white Volare made its turn onto B and everything began to move; him cawing No-Joke, No-Joke, No-Joke, other mad hatters joining in, all trolling the east side between 2nd and 3rd. Patrol car windows were rolled down, two blueberries slumped in their seats, staring ahead, listening to brand names, Cash, Chinatown, Poison, echo through gutted space. Something was happening that wouldn’t happen again; the air was torn, and no one had a clue what had just spilled out the gash, the city, a rat’s whisker away from shattering.
The RMP cut across the next intersection; a few feet over on 4th, bucket hats, hoodies, Adidas, all lining up behind the jagged hole sledge hammered through a bombed-up cinder block wall; framed inside, the head of AJ, fourteen, price tag drooping off the side of a Knick’s cap. AJ handed the man in a wheel chair the glassine envelope, line nudged forward. Next block, a torn tan polyester suit pushed his way out two cracked glass double doors reflecting the RMP’s skewed white stripe, frosted red bulb over the frame making it for after-hours. The suit spun, plastered, already falling, fell, flat on his face; the officers catching salsa pop before the doors pulled shut. Then a sloppy fist fight, nothing serious; beyond that, three souls tilted, hands brushing faces, the smell of coffee and fresh bagels blowing through the car before making a right onto 14th; and slowing in front of the sooty walk-up, sandwiched between two other sooty walk ups, driver lighting his last Chesterfield of the shift.
Hekate Gold Classic Series
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Hekate hopes to shortly publish the first volume of its Gold Classic Series. Pending permision from the translator's estate, we are thrilled to offer Nikolai Gogol's The Overcoat paired with Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Double, both translated from the Russian by Constance Garnett.
Our idea is to offer thoughtful and overlooked books from the past to a modern reader. Annotated and re-introduced by Hekate, we offer these at the lowest price we can manage. The idea is enabling access to brilliant writing.
We are looking for translators with interests in specific authors or works.
The Plot Thickens. Or does it?
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Regarding the handling of plot and by extension, the appropriate use of outlines, the variation and adamancy among authors seem to be as varied as the recent hard-headed debates concerning the scope of the American government. When contention arises, and lines in the sand are drawn someone needs to ask, “what is the real issue here?” as well as, “do I understand you correctly?”
Read MoreBook Release - Ramonst
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Hidden in the Mountains of East Tennessee, eleven-year-old Rodney goes about the business of being a boy during the summer of 1970. In the playground of his grandmother’s overgrown garden, he bears silent witness to the relentless cruelty of a teenage psychopath.
Rodney’s narrative of his family, flung between terror and innocence, is set in a small community carved from legacies of poverty, coal mining and religion.
Ramonst is the second novel from author A.F. Knott.
Click here to read the first three chapters
For non-UK orders on the paperback - Amazon is the cheaper option. Click here to buy.
Book Release - The Trainee
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It's 1982. Rodney Pepper, a socially inept college drop-out, is thoroughly dissatisfied that his knowledge of life has been derived from television and misinterpretations of 20th century literature. Fixated on the belief that suffering will lead to Wisdom, he decides that New Orleans is the perfect destination to immerse himself in despair and abject misery. Barely off the bus, Rodney is accosted by a man claiming to be his long lost Uncle who thrusts upon him an unexpected and unwelcome pirate legacy. As he looks for work and moves between dilapidated downtown rooming houses, he is preyed upon by underworld agents and bears witness to archaic tortures. Mayhem and skullduggery, both imagined and real, follow him at every turn. Can he decipher a dead man's code and locate what lies hidden before he himself is buried?
Click here to read the first three chapters.
For non-UK paperback orders: Amazon is cheaper, click here to buy.
The New Pulp Mentality
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The pulp genre has reemerged. While a modern emulation of the pulp voice is compelling, the idea of a mass-market book sold cheaply once again is more so. What might be sacrificed in its more hurried composition is gained in accessibility.
Some suggest that expanding markets for independently published books heralds the collapse of literary civilization. Indeed, there are so many people wanting to be writers out there as well as a deluge of degree programs titivating their appetites (for a fee), that the editor's slush piles need to be shoveled not read these days.
Read MoreTwo Big Little Books
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We've created a new category: books which have inspired or interested us. The reading inclinations and interests of Rowan differ from me. I doubt she would choose a book written by a poet. This is fine. The descriptions will be short and intended as suggestions for a reading list. Below are mentioned two short books written by well-known poets on subject matter for which they had a passionate relationship.
Read MoreAre Quotation Marks Irrelevant?
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I removed Bolaño’s Last Evenings on Earth from our kitchen bookshelf to investigate how he handled quotation marks. Kafka's short stories had been sitting right beside his, but I've been having shoulder problems so Bolaño's book was a lesser stretch. I initially read his collection six or seven years ago and had forgotten the grammar was less conventional and perhaps less representative. I began reading at a random page.
Read MoreLetting Your Hero Do Their Thing.
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On this matter of a hero's fall, I recall sitting in the second row of a packed Public Theater screening room one Saturday evening, watching Bukowski being interviewed. At one point, while drunk, he kicked his fiancé several times and kicked her hard. All of a sudden this writer hero of mine was a nasty shit, and I left feeling confused. The author, on camera, had reacted to what he considered a personal affront but hadn’t acted as I imagined he would. He behaved like members of my own family might.
Read MoreSmartEdit and the Redundant Adverb
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I am currently applying SmartEdit to the content of my second novel in Microsoft Word and am happy with it. Today, I discovered I had used the adverb "only" sixty-seven times. That's right. Embarrassing. 'Exactly" came in a distant second with twenty-four repetitions and 'usually,' a not so shabby third, at eighteen. Granted, the narrator's voice in this book, set in the rural south, is that of an eleven-year-old boy; yet, I very much wish for him to be trusted as an astute if not vigilant observer and reporter of what he hears and sees. Hence, I have taken his sixty-seven "onlys" to heart.
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