Links | The Coronzon Press

External memory of the happened upon

A book is a postponed suicide.

– E M Cioran

An annotated ongoing collection of links having to do with the small press scene, the literary underground, outsider writing, audio recordings of writers, cult writing (great writing that fails to excite the masses), book cover art, and some of my favourite writers. – JB

blackheath books: Poetry chapbooks and novels done on a very small scale. Some engaging stuff from a range of writers.
Taneda Santoka’s haiku: A relatively modern (1882–1940) haiku nonconformist and wandering hobo Zen monk inspiring for his faults. There is a nice collection including diary extracts translated by Burton Watson available from Columbia University Press called For all my walking. I’ve uploaded a PDF of the book Grass and Tree Cairn, translated by Hiroaki Sato. James Abrams wrote a great article on Santoka: Hail in the Begging Bowl.
Fire on the mountain: Another excellent page on Santoka (disappeared, but found again at the Internet Archive).
Fuel Design & Publishing: Some innovative design ideas and a fascinating three-volume set of the Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia, which David Cronenberg made good use of in Eastern Promises.
Vertigo: A blog about reading and collecting the fine writer W G Sebald, cut off in his prime in a car crash in 2001. Also covers other novels that make use of embedded photographs, something Sebald does beautifully in The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz. A number of great books I had never heard of before have come my way via this site, such as Max Frisch’s exquisite Man in the Holocene. There’s a nice three-part interview with Sebald.
Joyce reading Finnegans Wake: The Finnegans Wake Society of New York meet once a month to read from the great book. Years ago I travelled across London to hear this recording at the National Sound Archive, the only one of Joyce reading from the Wake. The web takes the trudge out of many things, but we probably value them less as a result.
3:am magazine: Litzine, particularly good interviews.
UbuWeb: Sound: What an amazing collection of audio recordings of writers. Loads of William S Burroughs, John Giono, even Gertrude Stein, E E Cummings, and some fascinating stuff from Marshall McLuhan, who, amazingly, is still interesting. Even Kurt Schwitters’ Ursonate.
Kenneth Goldsmith: Fascinating interview with the founder of UbuWeb.
Lu Xun (1881–1936): One of the best modern Chinese writers (Lu Hsun in the old Wades-Giles spelling) – I call him ‘modern’ I suppose because most of the Chinese writers I regularly read are at least a thousand years old. Lu Xun is a joy, and a pleasure to translate from the few bits I’ve had a go at. Forget all that dreary crap about unwanted Chinese daughters in orphanages. Read Lu Xun’s Wild Grass instead. In Chinatown bookshops you can usually pick up the cheap and lovely English editions put out by the Foreign Languages Press of Beijing. (Lu Xun on Wikipedia.)
Céline’s Fable for Another Time: On-the-money review by John Dolan of one of my favourite books, Céline’s Fable for Another Time. Most of this book was written in a very grim Danish prison cell. This is one of Céline’s lesser-read books, perhaps, but certainly one of his maddest and amazing. Twenty pages just talking about his arse. This must be almost the best book ever written. There’s a few videos of Céline on YouTube.
E M Cioran: E M Cioran’s philosophy asserts that all our troubles began in being born, and this was the basic mistake. Cioran is a great stylist who wrote splendidly and often with sly humour on alienation, boredom, despair, suicide, futility, and suchlike. I think of him as an enlightened man who decided to forgo enlightenment for the sake of carrying on exploring the darkness, such that he is like a light that shines out of the Pit. The Trouble with Being Born is a good book to start with if you’re new to him. On the Heights of Despair, written when he was just 22, is a great read and really quite astonishing for such an early work. I’ve read most of his books and also made a sort of pilgrimage to visit his grave in Paris. I’ve gathered some of his essays in PDF: Encounter with the Void; The Evil Demiurge; The New Gods (different translations of the last two appeared in his book The New Gods); A Bouquet of Heads; The Snares of Wisdom; Odyssey of Rancor; Mechanism of Utopia (the last two appeared in his book History and Utopia). Plus the extract from The Book of Delusions that appeared in Hyperion in May 2010, the excellent interviews by Jason Weiss and Michel Jakob, and two articles by Willis G Regier: Cioran’s Insomnia and Cioran’s Nietzsche. And the entire 1970 book The Fall into Time, which has been out of print for ages (this book has a different translation of ‘The Snares of Wisdom’ as ‘The Dangers of Wisdom’, and the concluding essay of fragments, ‘The Fall Out of Time’ about ‘the wrong eternity’, is another Cioran gem). Here are different translations of two of the essays from The Fall into Time: A Portrait of Civilized Man; The Ambiguity of Fame.
Planet Cioran: Good site on E M Cioran, includes a piece on Cioran’s remarks on Beckett from his as yet untranslated Cahiers.
William Saroyan: It is a complete mystery to me why so little of Saroyan’s work is still in print. It is said that the public lost the taste for him. Oh, and found it for all the utter shite that is put out these days I suppose? Anyway, it is a pleasure to track down his many works second-hand. Might I recommend as a good start The Trouble with Tigers (1938), My Name is Aram (1940), and Here Comes There Goes You Know Who (1961). The latter is a delightful ‘autobiography’. There’s plenty more good stuff after that, particularly the early short stories, although after a while he does start repeating himself a bit. I have uploaded a rather idiosyncratic audio recording of him reading some of his writings in 1953. Yes, I like Saroyan.
Charles Bukowski: The best site on the web on Bukowski.
Brautigan Archive: Besides bibliographic information, this site has an excellent page on his recordings and the whole Listening to Richard Brautigan album can be downloaded.
Steven Jesse Bernstein: Page for a great dead poet, put up by his son.
B S Johnson: Johnson, like more than a few good writers, killed himself. Trawl (1966) I think is his best book, although I’ve yet to track down a copy of See the Old Lady Decently (1975). He always said he wrote novels, but not fiction. I don’t know why a lot of people have difficulty with this idea. A novel is a form. But views are hopelessly entrenched and so a better form to write within is simply a book, and let others categorise it if it makes them feel better. If the novel is to be judged by the formulaic boredom it has mostly become today, then it may already be a dead word. When I see writers struggle to name what their writing is, particularly when it contains autobiography and fiction mingling promisciously on the page, with the object that you shall not know which is which (the skill of it after all), I can understand their reluctance to call it a novel or a memoir, and why they plump for novel in the end. But wouldn’t it be better not to have to come down on either side? When J M Coetzee’s publisher asked him whether Boyhood was fiction or memoir he replied: ‘Do I have to choose?’
Dissident Editions: A wonderful site by Anthony Weir, ‘a male hermit-anarch who has successfully resisted employment for forty years’. This is one of those rare sites that has the power of drawing you in, probably because it has spirit and personality, whereas many literary sites of equivalent size can often seem sterile and offputting and you want to leave at the earliest opportunity. Maybe it’s something to do with being older, the anarchic spirit in twenty-somethings is loud and boorish but in the older person such a spirit when it surivives is a flame that has been carried further, it quite simply becomes genuine. And another thing, his online ‘novel’ Cannibalism for Vegetarians is the only online novel I have ever read all the way through. I was immediately attracted to it as something potentially worth reading by the quote by Fernando Pessoa at the start. People who have read Pessoa, people who have heard of Pessoa, I usually like.
Strange Attractor: Mark Pilkington’s great taste for the obscure and esoteric in Strange Attractor Journal. Also covers some eccentric literary figures such as Boris Vian, Richard Jefferies, C F Russell, and David Lindsay.
Dreamflesh: Dreamflesh Journal Vol. 1 and Archaeologies of Consciousness, self-published print works from Gyrus. Essays, interviews, blog, and very good reviews section.
Stone Bridge Press: Great small publisher of Japanese literature in translation, such as Furui Yoshikichi’s superb Ravine and Other Stories (some of the best short stories I have ever read) and Ozaki Hosai’s Right under the big sky, I don’t wear a hat. Their website describes Ozaki’s book in this way: ‘Colloquial haiku and occasional essays by an eccentric and disturbed personality who spent his last years at a small Buddhist temple off the coast of Shikoku.’ The word ‘disturbed’ I think conveys a false picture of him. I presume the comment is based on the eerie imagery in Bell-clinker, but you don’t have to be disturbed to draw supernatural elements into your art. In fact, in that wonderful piece of prose it is clear he is not disturbed by what others might find disturbing. Ozaki lived 1885–1926 and was an insurance salesman and heavy drinker who at the end of his short life lived a solitary existence on Shodo Island. He’s every bit as fascinating as Taneda Santoka. Stone Bridge Press have also published a book of ‘flash fiction from contemporary China’, entitled The Pearl Jacket and Other Stories, which I haven’t read yet but I’m intrigued, pity they have no excerpt available. One is reluctant to take a risk on books completely sight unseen. Very short fiction has taken on the recent label of ‘flash fiction’ as if it is a new thing but Kawabata Yasunari did this way back in his great Palm-of-the-Hand Stories.
Shuttlecock: Reflections on writing by Shono Junzo, one of the Japanese writers published by Stone Bridge Press.
Fugue State Press: An uncompromising small press in New York we like the outlook of. I like this that they have to say: ‘It’s hard to define what experimental means. By its nature there’re no rules. We’d love to see a book that’s like an artifact, elemental, less like storytelling literature, more like dirt or air. We often enjoy prose that’s broken…’ An article on it on NYPress.
The Boy and the Darkness: A pity only the first part of this fantasy novel by Sergey Lukyanenko is available in translation. I don’t read much fantasy but this I loved. Lukyanenko wrote the novel that was made into that great Russian vampire movie Night Watch (Nochnoy Dozor). While we’re on Russian writing, I came across the Strugatsky brothers’ Roadside Picnic, which I was interested to read because Tarkovsky’s film Stalker is based on it and Stalker doesn’t mention aliens once. So I had that confirmed, at least. The film is far superior, probably because it doesn’t spell things out the way the book does. The novel’s characters are largely cardboard, as in most genre novels, but there are a few good ideas, in particular the idea of the ‘roadside picnic’ as a model of alien intervention, that the roadside trash left behind by extraterrestrials having a fag break at some truckstop planet in which they have zero interest becomes for the humans that have to clear it up a Chernobyl-like ‘Zone’ holding mysterious dangers. I like the idea of aliens visiting Earth the same way some of us might visit the countryside solely to dump in a lay-by an old washing machine, a broken electric kettle, and a battered suitcase of laddered tights.
The Devil: If the Devil died, would God make another? I was really pleased to come across Robert Ingersoll’s The Devil (1899) online. One of those forgotten Freethinkers still worth reading. I once saw the most beautiful girl receiving a pile of books at the hatch when the British Library was still in the Round Reading Room. The pile was half her height. As I looked, I saw that every single one of the books was about the Devil. The Devil has all the best chicks. They read books, too. I always give this as an explanation for my interest in the occult.
Atlas Press: Great small press this. Extremist and avant-garde prose writing from the 1890s to the present day. Of particular interest to me is 4 Dada Suicides, one of whom is Jacques Rigaut, whose suicide led to the book Le feu follet by his friend Pierre Drieu La Rochelle on which Louis Malle’s film masterpiece of the same name was based. Julien Torma’s Euphorisms is also a good find. According to an interview with Eugène Ionesco in the Paris Review Torma never existed, he was invented by Sainmont and Queneau, who even invented a biography for him, including his tragic death in the mountains.
Book Covers Anonymous: Old blog on book covers, some real gems.
Caustic Cover Critic: Self-titled: ‘One man’s endless ranting about book design . . .’ Digs out some fascinating very old covers as well as new.
Joseph Torra: Official site of the author of Gas Station and Tony Luongo, the latter being a great favourite of mine (written without any punctuation in one long stream, and it works wonderfully). Gas Station also has a fabulous voice. His 2008 autobiographical novel Call Me Waiter is strangely ordinary, but I strangely enjoyed it. I found an interview with him from 2001.
A Journey Round My Skull: ‘Unhealthy book fetishism’ from an ‘amateur historian of forgotten literature’. This blog was upgraded in 2011 and the posts decanted over to the new site 50 watts, intended to be its replacement, but the first site has been kept going running alongside as a sort of scrapbook. Some great stuff in both places, wonderful illustrations, and fine article by Gilbert Alter-Gilbert: Taedium Vitae – Farewell Notes of Japanese Literary Suicides.
Reading Robert Pinget: Good essay on Pinget, author of the fabulous Someone, on the Dalkey Archive site. Red Dust published many of his books in English translation.
wig·leaf: Publishes very short fiction, stories under 1000 words. I often find some good stuff here.
Beckett’s poetry: Detailed essay on Samuel Beckett’s poetry.
The Lone Oak Press: Beautifully printed books by Abigail Rorer.
The Old Stile Press: Lovely hand-printed fine books by Frances and Nicolas McDowall.
White Pine Press: Small literary press that has some very interesting translated works. They have published a great collection of (mostly) prose poems by Gary Young entitled Even So.
Annie Ernaux: Annie Ernaux is another writer I picked up by chance in a second-hand bookshop purely on the thinness of the spine compared with the other books. I like short books. That was The Possession, her shortest work. Ended up as a result of that reading all of her books available in English translation back-to-back. Her plain style says so much with a few words. A great writer. My favourite is the one she wrote about her father, La Place, published in English as A Man’s Place (this is the title of the American edition, but for the UK edition the title was translated as Positions, which, annoyingly, resulted in me buying it twice from Amazon not realising).
Horror Sleaze Trash: Poetry, flash fiction, interviews. Trash art, lowbrow, offbeat.
Full Stop: Excellent reviews, interviews, and features. A lot of quality material on this site.
Eugene Von Bruenchenhein: I love EVB’s paintings, but the despairing tape recordings he made lamenting the lack of recognition of his art are so poignant. All he wanted was to see people looking at his paintings.
W G Sebald | 92Y Readings: Footage of Sebald reading from Austerlitz on October 15, 2001, a couple of months before he died. There is an excellent question-and-answer session at the end.
Poetry Foundation: Good place to browse poems for hours and still not find one you like. One returns, ever hopeful.
Two Halves: Unica Zürn: Good article on Zürn at Siglio, which has a photo of her with Hans Bellmer in their small apartment. Unica Zürn’s short novel Dark Spring is a brilliant evocation of perverse childhood fantasy, based on her own childhood. I love her madness, her sadness, her automatic drawings. Like more than a few of those I like to read, she committed suicide. Apparently her descent into the dark began after she took mescaline with Henri Michaux, another whose writings and art I enjoy. Her suicide is regarded as being foretold in Dark Spring. Her book The Man of Jasmine was out of print for a long time, but is available again now. In The House of Illnesses she wrote: ‘Since yesterday I know why I am making this book: in order to remain ill for longer than is correct. I can slip in a fresh page every day.’
Osamu Dazai Short Stories: A very useful finding list of Osamu Dazai short stories translated into English. Dazai is one of my favourite writers. He committed suicide in 1948 at the age of 38. The best book of his short stories is Self Portraits, and his novels No Longer Human and The Setting Sun are quite brilliant. I’ve collected a few of his stories in PDF: A Snowy Night’s Tale; After the Silence & Down with Decadence; Fallen Flowers; Fulfilment of a Vow; I Can Speak; Morning; Mother; The Father; The Lady of Banquets; Waiting.
Dazai’s Angst Journal: Published 1936. Some fascinating little fragments. The bits in the text marked _______ ___th are 月日。in the original, ‘Month, Day’. But there are no actual dates.
Dazai’s Despair: ‘The Immutable Despair of Dazai Osamu’, an article by David Brudnoy from Monumenta Nipponica, Vol. 23, No. 3/4 (1968), pp 457–474.
Intersection, by Liu Yichang: Wong Kar-wai’s wonderful movie In the Mood for Love is supposed to have been partially inspired by this short story.
Interview with Peter Owen: Interview with pioneer British publisher of avant-garde writing.
Writers No One Reads: Writers hardly anyone has heard of let alone read. A good place to come across dark, offbeat, eccentric works that may happen to be beautifully written.
Gary Young: I’m very fond of prose poetry as a form, but find many prose poems are too long and really just flash fiction, or dull anecdotes pretending to be ‘poetic’. Gary Young’s work is the exception, having the kind of contemplativeness of haiku in carefully observed moments of feeling.
Letterology: Great typography blog with some lovely printed ephemera from the letterpress era.
20th century Korean writers: Translations of stories by modern Korean writers, including works by Yi Sang, who wrote The Wings.
It’s the Dream: Article by P G R Nair on the Norwegian poet Olav Hauge, with translations of his poetry.
RealityStudio: Wonderful site on William S Burroughs. The piece Burroughs in London by Heathcote Williams is great.
CB editions: Great single-person press that has published over 60 quality books from a desk in the family living room. An inspiration.