Contrappasso Magazine, Issue 2

Poetry in Celebration of Dogs and Cats. You are commenting using your WordPress. You are commenting using your Twitter account. You are commenting using your Facebook account. Notify me of new comments via email. Notify me of new posts via email. Poetry by Floyd Salas I. Book launch in Sydney: Leave a Reply Cancel reply Enter your comment here Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: Email required Address never made public. Your work is particularly cosmopolitan.

Did you live there? More like Santa Cruz, some 80 miles to the south. I was first there as a student in , missing the summer of love by a year, though I did meet A, midwife to my writing career. A decade later, and I was back again thanks to a Bicentennial Arts Fellowship, fall out from the success of Hearts of Gold. For five years the British government paid creative types like me to live in the USA for twelve months and a day. We were wampum to the natives, gifts to the American people in honour of their Bicentennial.

So we smuggled our son with us, as it were, in embryo. Lucky thing, he was born in Santa Cruz, and automatically acquired American citizenship. Recently he reclaimed his birthright, and moved to LA with his wife, where they intend to make their names in the Business. As for me, I look upon Santa Cruz as my second home. Looking out of my study window at 9th Avenue I once saw a grey whale passing by.

I spent quite a bit of time there recently. I first drove down when I was a student in , with A among others. We drove thinking we would reach Mexico City. You look at the map, and Mexico looks fairly compact compared to the United States, but when you start driving through it you realise your mistake. And we drove through some fairly rugged and unknown parts not visited by many tourists. That visit inspired the story you mentioned. Later still I did a little tour of the Yucatan, where I became known as the hombre valeroso , on account of my immunity to the hottest of chipotles.

In we crossed the border at Juarez. At Easter time, too, just like in the Dylan song. We were driving the aforementioned Ford Falcon. I had long hair then. The border police on the El Paso side were unbelievable. They just wanted to catch us as drug smugglers. They almost took the car to pieces. Took all the seats out. Let the air out of the tyres. I thought there was something weird about being in Texas.

People were slightly alien-looking. And then I suddenly realised they had these things protruding from the sides of their head.

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Egypt bowled me over. I was only there three or four days, but I absolutely adored the place. It was a difficult time, to say the least: I carry an evil gene—a sort of in-house antisemite—which occasions polycystic kidney disease or PKD—not to be confused with a Palestinian revolutionary cell.

Anyway, there was something about Luxor—with its spoilt grandeur—which put me irresistibly in mind of Chekhov. You can guess which story in particular. But I wanted to write it in my own way, and was stuck, until I remembered a character I had met at that conference in Mexico, a Middle Eastern dramatist.

As a matter of fact, I had seen him previously in Stockholm, accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature, on behalf of its winner, Naguib Mahfouz. Anyway, I borrowed his voice—a very distinctive one—and he became my narrator, and my laissez-passer into Egyptian society. They will ask you: I grew up in a Jewish area, and in my innocent years thought England was a Jewish country, populated exclusively by Jews, save for a few cleaning ladies.

It was safe, but it was very suffocating. As I grew less innocent, I really wanted nothing to do with that world. I was a non-violent resister at Hebrew classes, a Gandhi among the Cohens—I simply refused to learn. Though I must have learned enough to pass my bar mitzvah—a sort of Jewish driving test—but after that I planned to have nothing more to do with Jewishness or Jewish people. How God must have laughed.

First I went to East Anglia, where I found myself in a minority of one, and felt myself more Jewish than ever before. Then there was the Six Day Way, which turned me into a Zionist overnight. Our grammar school was located in a rough area. One afternoon, when walking to Burnt Oak station with my buddies, we passed some goyim loitering outside a shop.

To my shame I just stood there, without even dropping my briefcase. However, as a supporter of Wingate FC, the only Jewish club in the Football League, I was much more vocal in our defense, especially when we played the dread Cray Wanderers. At university, some upper class kid in a bar said: If you ask me, antisemitism in England is very overrated. He lived here, I think. At that time—the mid 80s—I was literary editor of the Jewish Chronicle. We hung out a bit, though I was more acolyte than friend. We had numerous lunches without incident, but in one of his books—perhaps Deception —he describes a visit to a restaurant, when he overhears an upper class woman at a nearby table demand of the waiter: Well, maybe it happened.

But it just shows he was going to the wrong restaurants, or mixing with the wrong set. It does not deal kindly with either the Anglo-Jews or the Anglos who accommodate them. In fact it sets the one upon the other. This may seem to contradict what I have already said, but the novel is a fantasy, a vision of what could happen in the land that—albeit long ago—first gave the world the idea of the blood libel. Let me remind you that when I first went to Norwich in , its cathedral still displayed a brass plaque commemorating the murder of little William in , supposedly at the hands of Jews.

Well, in Blood Libels , I take those paranoid fantasies literally. But I am no misanthrope, God forbid.

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My unfriendliness is directed exclusively at those I see as enemies of the Jews, some of whom happen to be Jewish, and—even worse—in charge of Israel. They are worse than criminals. As you can tell I thought I was writing a tragedy. Imagine my surprise when Blood Libels was greeted as a comic novel. You published the non-fiction book Diaspora Blues: A View of Israel in What would an updated edition focus on?

So the book could almost be republished as is. If anything the situation feels worse, even if there have been genuine advances, such as treaties acknowledging the two-state solution. In a reissued Diaspora Blues I would express more anger at the enemies of peace; not only at Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran, but also at the baleful Israeli government, and the fascistic settlers who provide its backbone.

I am still sufficiently enamoured by the creation and making of Israel to see its unmaking as anything other than a tragedy. In one essential way the theatre serves as a metaphor for Israel, being the brain child of another Jewish obsessive—Sam Wanamaker—who, like Herzl, did not live to see him dream become reality. And, just like Israel, it was born of a text; its Bible being the First Folio, of course. But I would write about only one of the dramas that folio contains: The Merchant of Venice. I would describe what happened on a summer night in , when the Habima Theatre of Jerusalem brought their production of The Merchant to South London.

In order to enter the theatre that night it was necessary to pass through a security check, manned by policemen borrowed from the Houses of Parliament. Opposite the would-be audience, as it shuffled along the line, were a bunch of sorrowful Englishmen whose banners identified them as Christian lovers of Zion. Further away were a score or more of sterner-looking citizens bunched under Palestinian flags.

At their head was some Marianne who tunelessly sang songs of freedom. Thirty-seven different nations were taking their turn to present one of the canon, a cultural appendix to the London Olympics. Only when it came to The Merchant of Venice was it deemed necessary to turn the theatre into an airport, complete with bag searches, sniffer dogs, and full-body scans. It is a curious turn of events when Jews insist upon seeing an antisemitic play, whereas antisemites among others try to get it banned.

The production itself was chiefly notable because it was performed in the language not of Shakespeare, but of Shylock. Muscular men, employed for the night, removed the heckler. You know, rather than create a disruption, these small disturbances actually added another layer to the theatrical experience.

As a matter of fact I probably sympathized with many of their views. Nonetheless I found it worrisome that Israel should be subject to a unique cultural excommunication, that Shylock was being vilified not from the historical depths, but because he spoke the language of Israel, the sign of his eventual vindication. As the theatre emptied I found myself being filmed by a fierce-looking mullah. It felt like a threatening act to me, so I approached a policeman and complained. The good officer replied: One look at the mullah was enough to show me that his mind was beyond my reach.

But maybe my voice may still have some resonance among the more reasonable. In any event, Shylock was last seen shuffling off-stage with a battered suitcase, a once and future refugee. Some of my best friends are Israelis, and I try to visit them at least once a year. Among them, needless to say, is Yosl Bergner.

And he was very cognisant of what was coming down the pike. He travelled the world in the s, trying to find a place of refuge for the Jews of Europe. The Northern Territory in Australia was one such location. As a matter of fact, I wrote a long article for a magazine called Wasafiri on that very journey. It prompted quite a response, given its small circulation. Melech Ravitch kept a journal, written in Yiddish naturally, which a friend of mine translated, and he took a lot of photographs.

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Many years later his son Yosl produced a series of paintings based on the photographs. These were my sources. Fortunately, Ravitch heeded his own counsel, and quit Europe before it was too late. He settled in Melbourne with his family. After the war Yosl Bergner became one of the founding fathers of modern art in Australia.

There were the Angry Penguins, who believed in art for arts sake, and there were the others. Bergner was one of the others. He was a communist with a great belief in a political component, or a social component. He was the first to portray Aborigines as people, as souls lost in urban misery, rather than as figures in a landscape. I was a writer in residence. I was expressly not allowed to teach. I was a resource. I had a sort of vague notion it was cold up there, that the Swedes liked sex, and that they had one great film director.

I had absolutely no notion of what Stockholm looked like. And I was completely seduced.

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Its one of the most beautiful cities in the world. You have a sense of the vastness of the world just beyond. You can actually see the curvature of the world beyond the ships tied up. And I became a big admirer of the Swedish character. No one in Sweden ever said to me: Sweden also provided one of my most pleasurable working experiences. I wrote in the empty apartment in the morning, when Seth was at the local school, and Fran elsewhere. And in the afternoon I went to my office in the university, and used the electronic typewriter to translate my handwriting into something like sense.

After living in Sweden—though we were only four months in Uppsala, alas—I really wanted to write a novel set there. For some reason, now lost even to me, Strindberg seemed the ideal vehicle. Perhaps on account of his very equivocal relation with Jews. He loved some and hated others. He loved them because his publisher was a Jew. And his most prominent intellectual supporters were the Brandes brothers, a pair of Danish Jews.

The Jews he loved were the international Jews, the rootless cosmopolitans. They were the ones who had became more Swedish than the Swedes, more English than the English, more Australian than the Australians. And because he loathed Swedes, those Jews who were more Swedish than the Swedes, he would of course loathe especially. Augustus Rex opens with the great playwright selling his soul to Beelzebub, and ends with his come-uppance: Most of the time you write in the present tense. Tell me about that choice.

It contributes to the distinctive tone of your voice. You feel you ought to be able to save them, but for some reason your hands are tied. There is the related issue of the first person. I like the impression it creates: Not in the way you mean. I admire and am extremely envious of writers who do. A great writer —A. Yehoshua, I think—said writing is like having a shop.

You go in every day and do something in there. So I write in insane bursts. I persuaded them to let me review Western movies. And each one is regarded as a revival of the old genre. I read a lot of Israeli fiction. I read very little English fiction. Maybe Shena Mackay and Angela Carter, wonderful short story writers both.

But mainly I read American writers. I continue to read Philip Roth. I am not convinced they are all masterpieces. I thought The Plot Against America was pretty good, the first two thirds. Then I think Roth chickens out. It would have been a sacrilege of sorts. But these books lack the fire and the fireworks of their predecessors. Then again, what else can Roth do? Roth is chopping off his own fingers and sending them out. I told you I thought Blood Libels was a tragedy. I owe him big time; both for his own novels, and for the series he edited for Penguin in the 70s and 80s: Writers from the Other Europe.

What could be better, apart from attending an Arsenal home match—my own love for football goes back more than sixty years—than to see a good production of Chekhov. I grew up in the northwestern suburbs and skedaddled as quick as I possibly could. Though it does seem to have its own gravitational pull. I raised my son twenty miles north of London, above the major unexcavated Roman site in Britain, a place called St Albans.

So this is my first immersion in Central London, really. I share a house in Islington with Haidee Becker, another great painter, whose forte is portraits and nature mortes. Is contemporary London a good place to be writer? Obviously the literary culture is enormous. You could phrase it the one I loathe the least. My favourite book of all as a physical object is the Japanese translation of The Brothers Singer.

All the prose looks pristine, in a beautiful but incomprehensible script, and best of all I am blind to the mistakes. I love it—power without responsibility. So those are the two. Bedbugs is quite good, as well. And—since you asked—I quite like Meet The Wife. For example, the other day I wrote maybe words, and judged the day to have been well spent. Until on reappraisal the words seemed naggingly familiar, and gradually the horrible realization dawned upon me that I had written the same couple of pages—give or take—twenty years earlier.

That said I think my writing is now less self indulgent. I have more editorial skill. But at the same time some of the madness goes out of what you write. The frenzy that you had as a younger person is gone. With such a replica, who needed the original? Especially when it was located excatly where a Dodge dealership—of all things—wanted to build a parking lot. So down it went, leaving the facsimilie to masquerade as the real thing.

As it happens, the titular story concerns Davy Crockett. In this a manuscript comes to light which proves he was no John Wayne at the Alamo, but a lily-livered yellow-belly who begged Santa Anna for his life. Truth or dodgy realism? All I can vouchsafe by way of an answer, is that the hero makes the wrong decision. As the editor of Contrappasso , I was thrilled to publish two of the other stories from the book. Where else does the new book take us? As you say, the stories in Contrappasso had itchy feet: Perhaps I am best characterized as a travel writer too shy to embrace the locals, therefore forced to people the exotic locations with my own inventions.

This has been my MO for many years now. These days when I glance at my older stories I am no longer certain what really happened and what I made up. Addressing one of the narrators a character sums it up nicely: Not half as happy as me. In those days there were long queues to see popular movies, which only sharpened the anticipation. Of course movie stars are called stars for a good reason; their images are transported on rays of light, and they live light years away from ordinary mortals.

Or at least that was how Fess Parker appeared to me as he defended the Alamo in the guise of Davy Crockett. So imagine my excitement when I discovered that, having quit acting, he ran a winery and a hotel a few hundred miles from my temporary residence in Santa Cruz, CA. How could I not go? And how could I not include the encounter in my story about Davy Crockett? Looking back upon it, the occasion still seems as unlikely as an ancient Greek taking tea with Achilles.

Who could resist lyrics such as this: Needless to say, after the visit I played his songs all the way to San Antonio. To the best of my knowledge Kinky Friedman remains the only country singer to have penned a song on the subject: We had a lot of fun in those early days, especially with Hearts of Gold and Blood Libels.

This was not always the case, to say the very least. I am looking to recapture that sensual experience—that bibliosexual moment—you are never going to get with a kindle. Do you now regard yourself as a short story writer? I have been thinking more and more that the short story—or the novella, at a stretch—is my natural form. At any rate, it is what I do best. When I write I try to thread together well-made—even beautiful—sentences. I do this because I remain enamoured of my raw material: And the way they strike the five senses: But there is a constant balance to maintain between the felicity of the prose, and the efficiency of the narrative.

In the short-story the scales can be more pleasingly biased toward the former. What makes The Great Gatsby so great is that Scott Fitzgerald found a way of so vitalizing his exquisite prose that it actually motored the narrative; each image being not only decorative, but also functional. But The Great Gatsby is a rarity: This is less likely to happen with a short story.

The same applies to the intensity of emotion a short story can contain. Put all that in a novel and the poor reader would be in great danger of sensory overload, like Barbarella in the Orgasm Machine. So you write about your fear of falling, and about those who fall in front of your very eyes.

Illness becomes a subject. Not in a gruesome way, I hasten to add, or a lascivious way. I try to counter these horrors with humour, and no self-pity. I count self-pity as a capital offense, along with sentimentality. The second is a melancholy tale, set on the Lido, in which a necklace goes missing. And it seems that the only way for me to write a money spinner is to write a genre book.

So this incorporates a tension already. On the other hand, the dialysis unit offers space to think, to solve the problems of life and death. A master criminal is much harder to invent, especially if you rule out serial killers, which have become revolting cliches. Here is the introduction to our special issue on Noir in film, fiction, and other arts. It has never previously appeared online. The Noir Issue remains available in print form at Amazon. When we decided to do this special Contrappasso noir issue—a grab bag of essays, interviews, and new and classic poetry—we were aware that some time ago two critics whose work we greatly admired, Luc Sante and James Naremore, had expressed fatigue with the term.

There is, in fact, no transcendent reason why we should have a noir category at all. Whenever we list any movie under the noir rubric, we do little more than invoke a network of ideas as a makeshift organizing principle, in place of an author, a studio, a time period, or a national cinema. By such means, we can discuss an otherwise miscellaneous string of pictures, establishing similarities and differences among them.

If we abandoned the word noir, we would need to find another, no less problematic, means of organizing what we see. The basic paradox of film noir lies in the fact that no one who made the original series of films ever heard the term; it has always been applied ex post facto , in contrast to the way other genres such as the musical or the western were used by Hollywood to plan production schedules and distribution strategies.

Instead film noir is, as Naremore puts it, a discourse, a way of processing and thinking about films as much as a pattern for their production. Whatever the case, if film noir was not a genre at the time of its first appearance—if by genre we mean a film industry-recognised way of producing and marketing films—it has certainly become one, in the industry and the academy, in our time. Meanwhile film courses around the world have devoted themselves to the film noir, accompanying the surge of scholarship since the late s. On the film-critical front there has been since that period a deluge of books on classic film noir roughly and on whatever we call the films noir that emerged from the sixties onwards.

The Dark Side of the Screen. There are many other important new books: Philips Out of the Shadows: Film Noir and the American Dream, Some excellent material was gathered in a special issue of Iris no. And as the British Film Institute series of Film Classics and Modern Classics now combined into one series trundles along it delivers new forays into the world of noir and neo-noir. Film noir is seemingly everywhere—on our screens, in the academy, and in the hearts of movie lovers. Westlake than anything Hollywood has yet come up with.

Recent generations of Batman comics are practically synonymous with noir. Frank Miller steered the comic franchise in this dark direction in the s; the latest collection illustrated by Eduardo Risso, Batman Noir , is a another fine example. A Collection of Crime Comics We could have easily devoted an issue to the subject of comic book noir, which attracts many of the best contemporary illustrators and has an enormous fan base.

The noir sensibility has found expression in video games. Noire , the first video game officially selected for the Tribeca Film Festival. The game inspired a spin-off ebook anthology of noir short stories edited by Jonathan Santlofer. Noir fiction is now a distinct category within the crime genre. Moreover, Gifford focused on republishing crime writers with a distinct noir sensibility. Noir fiction turned out to be something slightly different from the masterful hardboiled detective tales of Chandler and Hammett. The prose of James M. Cain, Jim Thompson, Charles Willeford, and David Goodis was certainly hardboiled, but their narratives focused less on tarnished heroes and more relentlessly on the self-destructive, the hopeless, and the insane.

Luc Sante—who examines a series of haunting New York City police photographs in this issue, revisiting the terrain of his book Evidence , an inspiration for Australian writer-researchers Peter Doyle and Ross Gibson—once wrote in the New York Review of Books of how. The ingredients of compulsion, self-destruction, revenge, and blind chance awakened a kind of poetry in pulp writing, and in the movies adapted from it.

American Noir , attempting to establish a canon of the subgenre. To this tradition of American noir fiction should be added writers such as Paul Cain, W. Independent publishers New Pulp Press and Stark House Press are doing important work publishing new and vintage noir, respectively. And we decided the work of independent crime publishers Dennis McMillan and Matthew Moring deserves attention; interviews with each appear in this issue and point the way to unjustly-neglected writers in the noir tradition. Film Noir and the American City is his account of noir and the fascination it holds for him, from the initial moment of encountering the great Out of the Past in a small Parisian cinema off the Rue de Rennes after he had taken some opium, through to his long New York years which saw him diligently work through all films listed in the Film Noir Encyclopedia In fact, he added extra titles, based on his own viewing, which he felt deserved inclusion.

LA-based Suzanne Lummis has been running a noir poetry workshop for years; we are delighted to reprint two of her noir-themed poems in Contrappasso. This is apparent from a casual encounter with the world of book publicity. In each anthology, noir stories and sometimes bits of graphic novels emerge from specific neighbourhoods. The noir sensibility is truly international. As we finish up this introduction, news comes that Lou Reed has died. We hope readers of this special issue of Contrappasso enjoy our explorations of noir in its many guises.

Contrappasso has a special relationship with the literature of the Philippines through the enthusiasms of our frequent contributor and occasional guest editor Noel King. Here is a final round-up of all the installments of that special online series. Some pieces had never before appeared in our publication, while others had appeared in earlier issues. The various pieces constitute, in a way, a special virtual 10th issue of Contrappasso. Jose Dalisay and the Marcos Period: An essay by Noel King. An essay by Jose Dalisay. Killing Time in a Warm Place: An extract from the novel by Jose Dalisay.

Smaller and Smaller Circles: An Interview with F. Twelve Short Takes on Montgomery Clift. Fat Elvis in Kamias: World Publishing Today by Noel King. Books Beyond Borders by Noel King. Bringing in the Evidence: A review by Noel King. Pasig City by Yacine Petitprez. Reproduced under a CC licence. This version includes some material added after that presentation. Accordingly, winning a literary prize can be a windfall for a writer, permitting him or her to devote themselves undiverted to their craft for a certain measure of time.

On the general matter of writing and money, and using film adaptation as an example, however complicated critical discussions can get concerning the relation of a literary work to its film adaptation, one thing is certain: In The Economy of Prestige: It is given to an oeuvre rather than a one-off work. We should recognise up front that one sideshow aspect to literary awards concerns scandals, as English notes.

Scandals can be a lot of fun. At the height of this paisley-shirt-wearing fame Berger won the Booker Prize for his novel G.

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The competitiveness of prizes I find distasteful. And in the case of this prize the publication of the shortlist, the deliberately publicised suspense, the speculation of the writers concerned as though they were horses, the whole emphasis on winners and losers is false and out of place in the context of literature.

Nevertheless prizes act as a stimulus — not to writers themselves but to publishers, readers and booksellers. And so the basic cultural value of a prize depends upon what it is a stimulus to. To the conformity of the market and the consensus of average opinion; or to imaginative independence on the part of both reader and writer. If a prize only stimulates conformity, it merely underwrites success as it is conventionally understood. It constitutes no more than any other chapter in a success story.

If it stimulates imaginative independence, it encourages the will to seek alternatives. Or, to put it very simply, it encourages people to question…. One does not have to be a novelist seeking very subtle connections to trace the five thousand pounds of this prize back to the economic activities from which they came. Booker McConnell have had extensive trading interests in the Caribbean for over years.

The modern poverty of the Caribbean is the direct result of this and similar exploitation. One of the consequences of this Caribbean poverty is that hundreds of thousands of West Indians have been forced to come to Britain as migrant workers. Thus my book about migrant workers would be financed from the profits made directly out of them or their relatives and ancestors. The fake poems appeared in the Autumn issue of that journal. The Emergence of Modernist Painting in Australia to Demidenko later went on to postgraduate study at Oxford University.

And last — but only in terms of random examples from Australia — in Paul Radley won the inaugural Vogel Award for an unpublished manuscript by writers under the age of 35 with his book, Jack Rivers and Me , which sixteen years later he said had been written not by him but by his great uncle, Jack Radley. In one sense we should probably align scandals such as these with those routine media stories whereby the work of a canonised author Patrick White, Henry James, Jane Austen is sent off to a contemporary publisher and inevitably declined for not being quite what the publishing house is after.

I think these instances and the Sokal incident indicate that some people have too much time on their hands, whereas the other scandals are more intriguing. This puts us awfully close to the stunts used by P. A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. For a while he made fifteen hundred dollars a week from her. The operator is a ventriloquist. The United States also has tossed up some instances of fictional works masquerading as non-fictional works, simply because non-fiction was deemed a better-selling genre, again leading to shaming and exposure, but of course the book sales had already happened.

It would have been a good novel but it would have got nowhere and she felt she had to re-cast it as non-fiction.