Matthew Jakubowski is an American short story writer, literary critic, and Asymptote editor. He has collaborated with sculptor Geoff Thompson on a piece for the group show, Impossible Books, which opens in Philadelphia this weekend. He is also the author of one of our favourite essays from last year, ‘Honest Work: an Experimental Review of an Experimental Translation’. For gorse, Matt contributes the story ‘Killing Off Ray Apada.’
Rorschach Audio on the radio transmissions in Jean Cocteau‘s Orphée.
“To write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write.”
If you don’t follow us on Twitter or Facebook, you may have missed our announcement that we’ve opened submissions for issue two. The guidelines are here. To summarise: we’re looking for your best work, for writing that resists definition for stories and poems that strain against classification. We’re not looking for book reviews per se (we do consider them for our online arm) but we will consider essays related to books. We’re also looking for interview proposals: we’re open to suggestions, though we do have a list of people we’d love to talk to, but don’t have the time ourselves. And we’re especially looking for submissions from women; we don’t get enough, frankly.
Ben Marcus in The Rumpus:
Sometimes I worry, for myself, that I’ve stopped being amazed at certain things, or I’ve taken for granted a set of ideas about how the world works, what people are doing with each other or alone, all the fundamental relationships in the world. I worry that I start taking it for granted and stop feeling the intensity of it because of language. Language starts to shut down the strength and power and strangeness of what it means to be a person in the world.
In The Quietus, Darran Anderson on William Burroughs’ centenary.
William S. Burroughs was a high modernist and a writer of complete trash; the two are by no means mutually exclusive. He was a genius and a bullshit artist. If his books prove anything, it’s that profundity and inanity can skip along merrily arm in arm. Sometimes his work was heavyweight, sometimes dumb. To borrow a Freudian analogy, sometimes a cigar really is just a cigar and sometimes a man who taught his asshole to talk really is just a man who taught his asshole how to talk (what it’s saying and why is a different story). The paradox of the freest writer being a lifelong junky is really no paradox at all. As a user and pedlar, he understood the mechanics of how it all worked and kindly pointed it out to us, even as he was picking our pockets. He was a stiff morose patrician figure in a suit (so much so his friend Herbert Huncke initially took him for an undercover agent) with books and a history full of debauchery and depravity. If there seems a contradiction there, it’s in the eye of the beholder. What makes Burroughs’ work seem prophetic is that he was perceptive enough to see that people don’t change, the secret to all successful prophecies. We’re still continually re-enacting Greek myths on a daily basis and always will. Psychosis may mirror the zeitgeist (whether it’s paranoia of witches, Jews, communists, drug fiends, Islamists or whoever next) but its essential character doesn’t alter. The bugs and the feds are always with us and there’s only so much one man can do, calling door to door with an extermination kit.