But how can I be sure of anything in the state in which I find myself? I feel as if extracted from someone else's dream, as if I--the would-be poet--were nothing more than a failed verse written in crabbed script, left adrift in the wake of a passing train, skimming the platform of a deserted…
Craft Note: Kickin’ it Old School
A Quiet De Luxe, it is, banged together by a worker preoccupied with discovering the subconscious mechanism by virtue of which his recurring nightmare of The Battle of the Bulge accommodated the delicate gesture made every day by the newspaper guy he passed on Farmington Avenue, a beseeching and weary opening of the hand that…
Housebreaking the Muse: Enter Raymond Queneau
This summer has been regrettably saturated, disruptive, and shambolic. Pulled by life in too many directions, I've been operating in a fog where everything gets some of my attention but never the amount it deserves. It has been, for me, a failed summer. And, oh yes, the world seems to have gotten even madder (are…
Maxime François-Poncet — Excerpt from Housebreaking the Muse
The following is a draft excerpt from my novel in progress, Housebreaking the Muse. The novel is haunted by the character of Jacques Rigaut, the French dadaist, gigolo, drug addict, dandy, and suicide. In this fragment, Maxime Fraçois-Poncet begins to say his piece. Poncet was a boyhood friend of Rigaut, who believed he shared a…
New Fiction From Mark Seinfelt: Baldr and Beatrice
Praised for his works of historical fiction, notably Symphonie Fantastique and Henry Boulanger of Mushannon Town: A Novel of the American Revolution, Mark Seinfelt has ventured afield to give us Baldr and Beatrice, an impressive appropriation of Norse legend. In this telling, Seinfelt unravels a rich and subtle analysis of the psychology of friendship and…
Ed Desautels' Maximum Fiction 