The Cutthroat Diaries

Kim Barnes, author and angler, channeling a little Izaak Walton and dreaming of tight lines over white pages, blue waters.

[infiniteessay]

The Coat Waits with You

A response to Kim Barnes’ Spokane Is A Coat: 1978

By Lily Monsey 

This multimedia watercolor is designed to reflect multiple definitions of the “coat” in Kim Barnes’ Spokane Is a Coat: 1978. Her brief essay reveals a slice of the life of a young woman from Lewiston who goes to the city of Spokane to experience multiple dimensions of urban life. Throughout the piece, the speaker depicts her fur coat, a staple of her wardrobe for this novel, city experience, as a kind of living, breathing companion.

My visual interpretation of this piece uses watercolor to intentionally reveal the multilayered nature of the coat itself. I have placed a deer in front of the young woman, wearing her fur coat, to reflect both a sense of origin of the substance of the coat (a living, breathing, fur covered animal) and to reflect elements of the speaker’s own identity: she is the “daughter of a logger, raised on venison” and she traded her own deer rifle to pay for the ticket to Spokane (Barnes 123).

Behind the visual images in this piece, I have selected snippets of text that reveal the deep-seated nature of venison, fur, and the coat itself throughout Barnes’ work. Lines from the speaker such as, “you feel like you might be able to pull yourself inside of it, hibernate for awhile” (referring to the coat), or that the fur of the coat “lifts, settles” as a young man helps her into it are a few of the examples I have included in the background of the artwork. These lines animate the coat as a living companion, as a source of protection in the city, a reminder of home, and a way to signal confidence and status in unfamiliar spaces (Barnes 124-125).

[kimbarnesauthor]

I wasn’t aware of this gorgeous treatment of my essay “Spokane Is a Coat: 1978” until recently. Thank you, #lilymonsey and #infinite essay! 

[treechangedolls]

Here are some of my favourites from my latest group of finished dolls! These little girls will be available in my Etsy shop www.treechangedolls.etsy.com on 6th July at 10pm Australian Eastern Standard Time (for time conversions go totimeandzone.com). 10% of the sale of each of these dolls will be donated to Greening Australiaand the wonderful work they do to preserve our environment. For more information please go to treechangedolls.tumblr.com/faq

[outofprintclothing]

RIP, Elie Wiesel

[grant-maierhofer-deactivated201]

GROBBING THISTLE cover reveal

Excited to announce my next book. GROBBING THISTLE, coming out via Dostoevsky Wannabe. The book contains my first poetry chapbook (now o.o.p. from Black Coffee Press) ODE TO A VINCENT GALLO NIGHTINGALE, a long poem called SEEDBED, and a warped, cut, destroyed version of the first novel I ever wrote called GIVE UP.

Here are Paul Curran, CA Conrad, and Liz Worth on the book:

“Grant Maierhofer sculpts the everyday trails of youth into something far more beautiful and traumatic. The results feel like watching someone in a furious dream spewing gold down the corridors of an abandoned hospital to cauterize some memories and reinfect others with mad laughter.” Paul Curran, author of Left Hand

“I left earth for something grave” writes Grant Maierhofer and I left earth when reading his amazing new book. It is rare to meet a poet and novelist who is superior to both mouths of the Muse, but in your hands is where that genius provides. This is where instant classics find the frequency to draw the Love of many fans, the Love Maierhofer justly deserves!” CAConrad, author of The Book of Frank

“Grant Maierhofer’s Grobbing Thistle is a book that needs to be experienced, not simply read. Visceral, raw, and weird as hell, Maierhofer’s words must be given entry into your head and heart, where they can writhe like worms. Part pop culture magick cut-up, part stream-of-consciousness confessions, Maierhofer has masterfully crafted a surreal, evocative literary scream.” - Liz Worth, author of No Work Finished Here: Rewriting Andy Warhol

More soon! Thank you to Richard Brammer and Victoria Brown for designing what is possibly my favorite book cover ever.

[kimbarnesauthor]

Congrats, Grant Maierhofer!

[outofprintclothing]

Remembering Virginia Woolf, who died on this day, March 28, in 1941.

[thetinhouse-deactivated20180604]

“Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow.” —Margaret Atwood

[muspeccoll]

Have you seen our new exhibit in the Ellis Library Colonnade?  It’s called Libraries at War, and it features selections from the Poster Collection dealing with libraries in World War I and World War II.  

The Library War Service was created in 1917.  It was directed by Herbert Putnam, then Librarian of Congress, and administered by the American Library Association.   In an enormous effort to send books and other reading material to the American forces, the ALA distributed about ten million books and magazines; collected five million dollars from public donations; supplied library collections to more than 500 locations, including military hospitals; and with the financial help of Carnegie Corporation, established 36 camp and military base libraries.  During the Second World War more than seventeen million books were collected through the National Defense Book Campaign launched in 1941 and better known as the Victory Book Campaign.

Books were frequently regarded as powerful ideological tools. President Roosevelt wrote: “No man and no force can take from the world the books that embody man’s eternal fight against tyranny.  In this war, we know, books are weapons.”

It was very hard to take good photos through glass AND mylar, but be assured - in person, these posters are quite striking.  If you’re in Columbia, stop by and take a look.

[owlsounds]

Would love to see this as a traveling exhibit to bring to my town.

[muspeccoll]

Great idea! We’ll talk to some of our exhibitions partners about this…

[thetinhouse-deactivated20180604]

“Create dangerously, for people who read dangerously. … Writing, knowing in part that no matter how trivial your words may seem, someday, somewhere, someone may risk his or her life to read them.” ― Edwidge Danticat

Happy Birthday Edwidge Danticat!

[mttbll]

You’re listening to what people say. Don’t do that. Stop right now. As an artist, you gotta make this world your world. You gotta do it; that’s your job. That is your job.

Hilton Als (via mttbll)

[wordbookstores]

If you loved Patti Smith’s M Train as much as we did then you’re probably curious to read the works that inspired her life of writing. We’ve gone ahead and listed every book mentioned in M Train for your pleasure.

EVERY AUTHOR AND EVERY BOOK MENTIONED IN M TRAIN

The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri The Beach Cafe by Mohammed Mrabet Paul Verlaine, poet The Thief’s Journal by Jean Genet William S. Burroughs, writer The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson Amulet by Roberto Bolano 2666 by Roberto Bolano Alfred Wegener, writer, scientist and arctic explorer The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov Anna Akhmatova, poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, poet Friedrich Schiller, poet Winter Trees by Silvia Plath The Master Builder by Henrik Ibsen After-Dinner Declarations by Nicanor Parra Letters from Iceland by W.H. Auden The Petting Zoo by Jim Carroll After Nature by W.G. Sebald The Story of Davy Crockett by Enid Meadowcroft The Little Lame Prince by Dinah Maria Mulock Craik Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery A Girl of the Limberlost by Gene Stratton-Porter Kurt Wallander mysteries by Henning Mankell A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami Dance Dance Dance by Haruki Murakami Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami Moby Dick by Herman Melville Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelly A Dog of Flanders by Ouida The Prince and the Pauper by Mark Twain   The Blue Bird by Maurice Maeterlinck Five Little Peppers and How They Grew by Margaret Sidney Little Women by Louisa May Alcott A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter by Cesar Aira A Night of Serious Drinking by Rene Daumal Wittgenstein’s Poker by David Edmonds and John Eidinow Wallenstein by Friedrich Schiller The Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera by Bertram David Wolfe The Confusions of Young Torless by Robert Musil Women of Cairo by Gerard de Nerval Astragal by Albertine Sarrazin Songs of Innocence by William Blake Journey to the East by Hermann Hess The Messiah by Bruno Schulz Black Spring by Henry Miller Temple of the Golden Pavilion by Yukio Mishima The First Man by Albert Camus Yoshitsune and the Thousand Cherry Trees The Setting Sun by Osamu Dazai Rashomon by Ryunosuke Akutagawa No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai Ariel by Sylvia Plath The Tempest by William Shakespeare Hawk Moon by Sam Shepard A Scarcity of Love by Anna Kavan The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles Isabelle Eberhardt, writer Tennessee Williams, writer Jane Bowles, writer Mohamed Choukri, writer Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol Algernon Charles Swinburne, writer Robert Graves, writer Herman Hesse, writer Samuel Beckett, writer Arthur Rimbaud, poet

[aaknopf]

Well done, @wordbookstores!

[kimbarnesauthor]

Not a bad list to read out your living days with...

[instagram]

#SetintheStreet: Creating Film Sets From the Mundane with @justinbettman

To see more from Justin’s Set in the Street project, browse the #SetintheStreet hashtag and follow @justinbettman on Instagram.

New York City art director and photographer Justin Bettman (@justinbettman) would like to cast your old furniture in his next public art project. Justin reclaims disposed and unwanted items from New York’s streets and overnight assembles them into stylized comic sets, which he photographs then leaves up for passersby to capture with the hashtag #SetintheStreet. “In New York on trash day people just leave stuff out, so instead of going to [the] landfill I thought, ‘Why not give it a second life?’” he explains. Justin is inspired on his daily runs through the city, where he often finds items for the next set, whether it be a fake deer head or a bathtub. “I like the mundane everyday life no one choses to photograph — scenes which look like they could have existed but didn’t actually exist,” he says.

Sets can take from four weeks to two months to assemble, and his latest ones were erected in London and Berlin. “I’d like to go to other locations,” he says. “The type of furniture in each location is very different.”

[forgottengenres]

Stopping a piece of work just because it’s hard, either emotionally or imaginatively, is a bad idea. Sometimes you have to go on when you don’t feel like it, and sometimes you’re doing good work when it feels like all you’re managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position.

Stephen King (via thatlitsite)

[treechangedolls]

Finished! Here are all the dolls I will have available in my Etsy shop on 12th November!

I will post these dolls in my Etsy shopwww.etsy.com/au/shop/treechangedolls on Thursday 12 November at 10pm Australian Eastern Daylight time. For time conversions please visitwww.timeandzone.com For more information about my dolls, and prices, please read my FAQ page at www.treechangedolls.tumblr.com/faq

Good luck everyone! For those interested in purchasing, my dolls still sell out very quickly, so remember it is a good idea to have your Etsy payment information already loaded into Etsy, and make sure you are already logged in at 10pm. After this group, I plan to have one more group ready at the beginning of December, in time for delivery before Christmas.

For everyone else, enjoy the photos!

[thetinhouse-deactivated20180604]

“But there is always a November space after the leaves have fallen when she felt it was almost indecent to intrude on the woods…for their glory terrestrial had departed and their glory celestial of spirit and purity and whiteness had not yet come upon them.” ― L.M. Montgomery, “Anne of Windy Poplars”

[nprfreshair]

‘Arab Of The Future’ Chronicles The Challenges Of A Cross-Cultural Childhood

Riad Sattouf is well known in France, in part for the cartoon strip he had in the magazine Charlie Hebdo from 2004-2014.  He had already stopped working there when two jihadists killed 9 of his colleagues.  He’s been writing a series of graphic memoirs, which tell his story in cartoon form. The first volume, which was a bestseller in France, has just been translated in English. It tells the story of the first six years of his life, growing up in Libya, Syria and France. His French catholic mother met his Syrian Sunni Muslim father when they were students at the Sorbonne University. After Sattouf was born, his father got a job teaching at a university in Libya. At the time, the father admired Libya’s ruler, Muammar Gaddafi.  After getting disillusioned with Gaddafi, he moved the family to Syria, where they lived in a poor village near Homs, where the father grew up. The women wore hijabs, and men and women were segregated. The memoir describes the radical cultural shifts, between France and the middle east, from the point of view of a child who didn’t fit in either place. Sattouf’s memoir is called The Arab of the Future:  A Childhood in the Middle East:  1978-1984.

“ It’s very difficult for me to be proud of being from Syrian origin or French origin. … I feel, myself, much more like a comic book author, it’s my first nationality. I know it be a little bit stupid to say that, but I have much more in common with a Japanese guy who draws manga than with people from my neighborhood in France.”

Photo of Sattouf by Olivier Marty 

[powells]

Mary Gaitskill’s playlist for The Mare

[kimbarnesauthor]

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot

My complete 24-page comic-book adaptation of the poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T.S. Eliot (Click on images to enlarge). To those who have asked me where they can find this in print:...