Please Take Me Off the Guest List, Nick Zinner, Zachary Lipez, & Stacy Wakefield (Akashic Books) $15.95
In their fourth collaboration, photographer Zinner, essayist Lipez, and book artist Wakefield achieve a satisfying fusion of content and form. Zinner’s photographs are sparse travel narratives, documenting the world travels required of his day job as rockstar musician with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Wakefields content is form: she designed the petite book to contain even more petite matte pages layered throughout. The tiny pages showcase Lipez’ essays as individual mini-books, though Zinner’s photographs continue to thread through them, interacting with the narratives of their written counterparts in both obvious and subtle ways.
Lipez writes rambling, maybe coke-addled essays that somehow manage not to annoy, despite their easily-able-to-be-mishandled subject matter: bartending in New York, scoring coke in New York, quitting a bookstore job in New York, and the like. He achieves this by avoiding—even mocking—the pretension and pseudo-intellectualism that often accompanies such narratives as well as the obvious imitation of Bukowski/Burroughs/Kesey/Thompson and their ilk. He writes,
Now that Richard Price has written the L.E.S. cocaine morality tale of the foreseeable future, it’s left to us literary bottom feeders to find our drug-related niche as best we can. I call dibs on the indefensible. I call dibs on the buyer without remorse, the jaw grinder and twitchy talker, or, worse, the cocaine vulture. These are my people.
That’s Lipez, a writer without remorse, here, in his potshots on literary critics, which are exaggeratedly right-on, and throughout his five essays. His second best attribute is his wit, which he deploys in a Dempsey-style combination of small, almost unnoticeable sleights of craft, like the tongue-in-cheek repetition of “So there was this one time,” in the coke tribute essay the above quote comes from, and the powerful hooks he throws once his smaller hits have landed, as in the penultimate paragraph of “My Letter of Resignation,” his essayistic epistle to his former employers at New York’s The Strand Book Store, in which he writes,
Goodbye, dear sweet bosses. You’ve been really okay. Tell the gang that I love them and the union that I think it’s cute the way it fumbles at the lock to the door to dignity. Tell Matt on the third floor that I hate every shirt, ironic and non, that he’s ever worn. And, most importantly, please tell Samantha (who I suspect is really named Becky) at the registers that I burn for her. Tell her that I burn to be the sexual stopgap between her MFA and her assistant editorship at n+1, that I yearn to be the bad actor sweating over her shuddering whiteness, and if she ever changes her mind about that oft offered, never accepted drink after work that I am, now and forever, “after work.”
Please Take Me Off the Guest List is a great success, an invitation to explore and enjoy an intimate collaboration between artists and friends. The book’s design is fresh, fitting to its contents, and its narrative is neither too slow nor too fast. I enjoyed it far more than I expected—perhaps because of the Billy Corgans and Jewels of the poetry publishing world—and hope to see more of this trio’s collaborations in the future.
Parrot on a Motorcycle: On Poetic Craft, Vítězslav Nezval, tr. Jennifer Rogers (Ugly Duckling Presse) $10
Designed by Amy Mees and Mark Wagner of X-ing Books, Parrot on a Motorcycle is one of the most cleverly presented bilingual editions of poetry I have ever seen. Because Nezval’s original poetry presents monolingual en-face prose poetry and poetry-commentary, the traditional bilingual en-face translation would not work. Their solution: an unusual hand-sewn binding that results in the Czech original and its English translation appear back-to-back but with different page-tops, so that the book is reversible. The mid-point of the book readily folds open, so that neither language appears to dominate or overshadow the other. Published in 1924, when its author, a founding member of the Czech Surrealist Movement, was just 24, it is one of the early documents of Poetism, “a movement which aimed to combine life with art.” The poetry itself begins in exclamation—“To have charlatan elegance!”—and sets out to “spit[s] on the literati.” Throughout its length it alternates between the delightfully overwrought:
…My charming little cousin, my radioactive dove, bon vent, bonne mer! The one who came from the unexpected quietness of a hospital or from boulevards of the last century and leaned an ear to my head will hear the ringing of thirty little alarm clocks.
and the deadpan, “I am enthusiastic about my manner.” Translator Rogers has done well to retain its sense of belonging in history while also achieving a very contemporary diction. Both sides of the page feature aphoristic definitions—like Nezlav’s definition of the poem: “miraculous bird, parrot on a motorcycle”—and pithy statements on poetics. These are the most rewarding, most pleasurable sections of this excellently designed and translated book, which belongs in a prominent position on an accessible shelf of favorites. Here are several examples, taken from both sides of the page:
The neurotic health of the 20th
century is a prerequisite of
modern poetry, enabling fast
association and free ideas.
New way: organic and
physiological growth of the
form from images and their
reproductive laws.
Poetic intelligence
resides in the drowning out
of gained intelligence.
Rhyme: to connect distant wastelands, times, breeds and castes with harmony of word. Create miraculous friendships.
Metaphor: gallant exalted playboy.
Art: big brave lovers, audacious and beautiful, walking through a den of masturbators.
Psychoanalysts will likely
discover the real sense
of this poetry.
DS
