jeffalessandrelli

[jeffalessandrelli]

An innovative work of fiction, Jeff Alessandrelli’s And Yet interrogates contemporary shyness, selfhood and sexual mores, drawing out the particulars of each through historical references, cultural commentary, and the author’s own restless imagination. And Yet builds off the work of authors as disparate as Michel Leiris, Marguerite Duras, and Kobo Abe, while alluding to the work of Susan Sontag, Young Thug, Young Jean Lee, Cesare Pavese, Sylvia Plath, and Louise Glück, among others. With its nameless protagonist simultaneously proud and afraid of his daunting interiority, And Yet‘s form morphs, cracks, and continuously tries to repair itself while becoming a nuanced story of our times. “Love is a thing full of anxious fear. Especially when what you ultimately love and fear is your self,” writes Alessandrelli, and And Yet draws such a notion down, out and around again, arriving at its own idiosyncratic answers by the end of the book.

And Yet asks, What might be gained or lost from living one’s life via text instead of directly participating in the world? Through aphorism, anecdote, observation, and narrative, Alessandrelli examines the complex entanglements of sexuality and desire. A profound and concise work of self-construction. –Patrick Cottrell, author of Sorry to Disrupt the Peace

Composed in delicately and suggestively connected fragments, Jeff Alessandrelli’s And Yet is a lyrical yet probing investigation of the nature of modern intimacy, full of heart but always meticulously thoughtful. –Joe Moran, author of Shrinking Violets: The Secret Life of Shyness

Jeff Alessandrelli is the author of four books, most recently the poetry collection, Fur Not Light. His poetry and prose have been published in The American Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. His reviews and interviews in The Rumpus, Kenyon Review, Rain Taxi, and more. He directs the nonprofit book press/record label Fonograf Editions.

ISBN: 978-1-892061-97-3 268 pages, paperback Cover design and book layout by Mike Corrao

Interview with Jeff on The Lives of Writers

#patrick cottrell #future tense books #joe moran #shyness #sex #society #Marguerite Duras #Young Jean Lee #Cesare Pavese #kobo abe #susan sontag #Louise Glück #sylvia plath

[jeffalessandrelli]

#bishop and wilde #portland or #lisa ciccarello

[jeffalessandrelli]

I tend to write about things I know nothing about, and there is of course a vast amount published on any given topic. Eventually I have to abandon further research, accept my ignorance, and start writing. After all, I’m trying to create a literary text, not produce an academic article.

--Eliot Weinberger

#the paris review #eliot weinberger

[jeffalessandrelli]

4/11/24

"As a failure and a stranger I'm equally depressed

with spring resembling fall I'm also confused"

--Liu Zongyuan, 816

#Liu Zongyuan #red pine #816

[jeffalessandrelli]

3/31/24

November 25

Brian Blanchfield

A snow-dirty car, engine on, idles

in front of the house across the street

and the Great Dane, released, squats in the lot,

then runs back onto the porch, head at the door.

The man inside requires care—paramedics

have come twice this week, and the ambulance

is familiar to this window too. The exhaust

curls back over the rear windshield like a lip

in filmic villainy. The bare mountain beyond

is brown and the peaks behind it are white.

One catches the first of the sun from somewhere.

Bernadette Mayer came to Tucson once

and I helped host and when she went back home

she sent me Ethics of Sleep, the tallest

paperback I have of poetry. I have to keep it

with the art. I read her randy poem that nearly

queers Carlton Fisk, his squat and his mitt

she calls her ideal—oh the legs of a catcher—

on the radio. Just this week, before I knew,

before perhaps she died, I shared Memory

with my class, and Midwinter Day. I like

when she remarks, I see what she means,

about the woman in line at the post office

who asks if she’d like feedback on her

dinner party. A book not of Strega and taxis

and Mal Waldron, Lana Turner, but of

beer and pills and diapers and dreams and Lewis.

Her mustache was, I want to say, important,

her fisher’s vest. She favored one side

as most of us will or do. Requiring care

harder than giving it in the beginning. A turn

at poetry she gave others of her own. Helen,

Helen, Helen, Helen, and Helen of Troy.

#brian blanchfield #helen of troy #yale review #Bernadette Mayer

[jeffalessandrelli]

She was a critic of the Western canon, but not for the usual reasons. Her concern was not that it left out people of color or of non-European heritage, but that it was an obstacle to the avant-garde; indeed, she could be withering in her criticism of works by non-Western authors that nevertheless replicated the tropes of canonical writing.

Professor Perloff was an advocate of close reading, or the word-by-word, line-by-line examination of a text, and of seeking beauty in literature, long after both concepts had become suspect in some academic circles for playing down the social and political contexts of a work.

“She definitely turned against the reigning mode of whom to read and how to write about them to expand the canon and look at more challenging experimental work,” Andrew Epstein, a professor of English at Florida State University, said in a phone interview.

Professor Perloff gained notice with her 1977 book “Frank O’Hara: Poet Among Painters,” the first full-length assessment of a writer who until then had been largely ignored by scholars but who, in part thanks to her, has since come to be regarded as one of the most significant American poets of the past century.

#marjorie perloff #frank o'hara

[jeffalessandrelli]

I should be at standing rock instead of listening to laura nyro under a river tree and drinking coconut water in the columbia river gorge on a beach that would not exist unless the earth was exploded to construct a series of man-made dams along this rivers natural course that would not exist unless sacred indigenous lands and cultural artifacts were drowned or displaced entire populations relocated removed by force by gunpoint by threat of death

now this site is a nude beach primarily populated by cismale white queers

a couple months ago someone complained on facebook about the amount of heterosexuals who were taking over the beach / the prime real estate / fallacious queer utopic destination: “Do you remember when Rooster Rock was a gay beach?” I chimed in “Remember when Rooster Rock was Indigenous Land?” someone said “This comment should have ended the discussion.” but you know how white progressives are they keep going and going and going

but before I allow the frustration to consume me I have to remind myself that everyone has a right to their opinion and we live in a time of corruptive culture desperate for attention desperate to leave our mark somewhere desperate to give away any soul we have left for a momentary glimpse of validation

#Demian DinéYazhi’

[jeffalessandrelli]

Until Guy died of lung cancer at a Lexington hospital in January 2005. His partner and lover, Bonnie Jean Cox, survived him by twelve years. Bonnie was the Director of the Collection Development Department At the University of Kentucky, where Guy was a professor of English. I loved Bonnie. She was nerdy and warm, but with Yankee sarcasm. She developed Alzheimer’s, right after Guy died, and forgot everyone. Their vibe was: he would say outrageous things and she would chide. People joked that “Bonnie Jean seems like a lesbian and so does Guy” And it was kind of like that, they sort of seemed like a lesbian couple, Although, you know? Not really. Guy had his own kind of masculinity. The strangest part of his biography was that he had been in the army. He understood well, like his hero Fourier, that our sexuality’s a chord Made up of notes. We play a few in our lives and leave others muted. After Guy died somebody tactlessly asked Bonnie Jean if he was gay. She said something quite colourful about how good the sex had been. I remember sitting with them in front of Guy’s ground-floor fireplace. He would burn trash in there, paper bags and empty cigarette packs. Now and then they would scrounge around for more stuff to throw in, Especially after they’d exhausted the stack of rejected review copies, Talking that famous Guy Davenport talk, which will never exist again, Literary-historical free-association punctuated with dramatic pauses, Ready to laugh but rarely silly, sometimes gossipy, sometimes bitchy. He might tell you about a conversation that he had with his neighbours Or about one that he had with Samuel Beckett at an old café in Paris. He told me an anecdote about a visit he’d had from Cormac McCarthy, Who for a time considered Guy’s Geography one of his favourite books.

#guy davenport #john jeremiah sullivan #samuel beckett #cormac mccarthy

[jeffalessandrelli]

3/22/24

There was a letter that Ted Hughes wrote to his son, Nicholas. He said the only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest and how much they can ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated.

#ted hughes #calibration

[jeffalessandrelli]

#pj harvey #nick cave #henry lee #90s #nick cave and the bad seeds

[jeffalessandrelli]

Breton argued instead for embracing the “omnipotence of dreams” and exploring the unconscious and all that was “marvelous” in life. Art that could reach beyond the rational could liberate humanity, he felt. “The mere word ‘freedom’ is the only one that still excites me,” Breton wrote in his “Surrealist Manifesto.”

It was a literary idea that became an art movement and revolutionized nearly all forms of cultural production. It’s now commonplace to call pretty much any weird experience “surreal.”

#surrealism #andre breton #René Magritte #Paul Nougé

[jeffalessandrelli]

#siglio press

[jeffalessandrelli]

While discussion of My Life has been central to Hejinian’s reception history, her poetry and poetics transformed substantially afterwards. In the 1980s Hejinian taught herself Russian as a way to establish a direct dialogue with poets in the Soviet Union. This led to her translations of Arkadii Dragomoschenko and to her books Leningrad (with Michael Davidson, Ron Silliman, and Barrett Watten) and Oxota: A Short Russian Novel (1991). Other books from this period include The Cell (1992) and The Cold of Poetry (1994). In the first decade of the twenty-first century Hejinian published a series of shorter works — The Beginner (Tuumba, 2002), Slowly (Tuumba, 2002), The Fatalist (Omnidawn, 2003), My Life in the Nineties (Shark, 2003) — as well as the longer book, A Border Comedy (2001), which Hejinian considered her most important work. Hejinian’s more recent poetry books include The Unfollowing (Omnidawn, 2016), Positions of the Sun (Belladona, 2018), and Tribunal (Omnidawn, 2019).

#lyn hejinian

[jeffalessandrelli]

Jayson Musson

#Jayson Musson #new york times #history of art #Hennessy Youngman

[jeffalessandrelli]

How many hours do you sleep? Six at the max. Three if I’m in the throes of a body of work.

What are you obsessed with? Up until a couple years ago, I didn’t miss many Blazers games. I would sacrifice studio time. Even if I had a project to do, I would go to a bar with friends to watch a game.

Describe being an artist in America. Foolish. It’s that age-old thing: why would you choose this? But it’s also empowering, to have this outlet to take in all the negative, the positive—all the things—and throw them back at people in a creative way.

#Jeremy Okai Davis #portland monthly

[jeffalessandrelli]

L’Enigme d’Isidore Ducasse, 1920, remade 1972, consists of a sewing machine, wrapped in a blanket and tied with string. Man Ray’s idea of using a sewing machine was inspired by a simile used by the French writer, Isidore Ducasse (1809-87), better known as the Comte de Lautréamont, ‘Beautiful as the accidental encounter, on a dissecting table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella’. It was a phrase that was greatly admired by the writers in Paris with whom Man Ray was close friends and who formed the nucleus of the Paris dada and later surrealist groups. They saw it as paradigmatic of a new type of surprising imagery, as well as replete with disguised sexual symbolism. (The umbrella was interpreted as a male element, the sewing machine as a female element, and the dissecting table as a bed.). Man Ray’s wrapped object, however, was a mystery, and suggested not so much a sewing machine as some utterly undefined, and therefore potentially more disturbing, presence. The word ‘enigma’ in the title echoed some of the titles of paintings by Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978), also much admired by the proto-surrealist group, while its image of something wrapped and hidden can be seen as a forerunner of images of disguised or concealed objects by the Belgian surrealist René Magritte (1898-1967), as well as the later wrapped works of Christo (born 1935).

#man ray #magritte #christo #duchamp #Lautréamont #dada

[jeffalessandrelli]

Books appeared to be at the center of Mr. Navalny’s prison life, all the way until his death.

In a letter last April to Mr. Krasilshchik, Mr. Navalny explained that he preferred to be reading 10 books simultaneously and “switch between them.” He said he came to love memoirs: “For some reason I always despised them. But they’re actually amazing.”

He was frequently soliciting reading recommendations, but also dispensed them. Describing prison life to Mr. Krasilshchik in a July letter, he recommended nine books on the subject, including a 1,012-page, three-volume set by the Soviet dissident Anatoly Marchenko.

Mr. Navalny added in that letter that he had reread “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” the searing Alexander Solzhenitsyn novel about Stalin’s gulag. Having survived a hunger strike and gone months “in the state of ‘I want to eat,’” Mr. Navalny said he only now started to grasp the depravity of the Soviet-era labor camps.

“You start to realize the degree of horror,” he wrote.

#Alexander Solzhenitsyn #Aleksei Navalny