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Monthly Dispatch #6 — October 2023
A letter from the editor[s]:
Another Monthly Dispatch comes around, and again the idea of writing some kind of editorial seems redundant. Not this time because of the work we’re sharing — excellent work, to be clear, which we’re proud to publish — but rather because in the context of what’s happening in Gaza, pontificating about some literary triviality seems absurd, if not grotesque.
And it cuts both ways: to carry on as though it isn’t happening is wrong, but to try and craft some kind of statement or compose a polemic feels equally perverse: conceited, empty, and unworthy of the nightmare that’s unfolding.
Seek out and support Palestinian voices. Do not look away from the catastrophe.
Unwavering solidarity — with the Palestinian people, and the victims of the Hamas terrorist attack. Love.
Free Palestine.
The Editor[s]
Icicle Wedged Totally — Sebastian Castillo
“The headline read: “An icicle wedged totally through a man’s skull!” The article was in reference to a poor fellow’s condition. He had been smoking a cigarette outside of his apartment building in the middle of winter …”
Sebastian Castillo is the author of SALMON, Not I, and 49 Venezuelan Novels. He lives in Philadelphia Twitter: @bartlebytaco
The Memory Tape [excerpt] — Jared Marcel Pollen
“The video shows an old man standing on a balcony. He’s wearing one of those black karakul caps and a double-breasted coat with fur collars. He holds his hand up in the way dictators do, stiff and unflinching the way his statues do …”
Jared Marcel Pollen is the author of The Unified Field of Loneliness: Stories, and the novel Venus&Document. His work has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Jacobin, The Yale Review, and more. He lives in Prague. Twitter: @jaredmpollen
The Story of the Paper Crown [excerpt] — Józef Czechowicz (tr. Frank Garrett)
“Henryk is speaking: A man can do so very little and all too much …
On a night like this he cannot overcome himself, cannot fill up his depths with sand. Even if there be filth, even if there be miry sin …”
Józef Czechowicz (1903 – 1939) was a Polish poet, playwright, and critic from Lublin, Poland. He is considered one of the greatest Polish poets of the twentieth century and one of the main proponents of the literary avant-garde.
Frank Garrett is a writer and translator, living in Dallas. He is essays editor at Minor Literature[s].
Your Cross in the Desert Sky [excerpt] — Carolina Sanín (tr. Fionn Petch)
“When I upbraided the Chilean for going hot and cold on me, and demanded he meet me in person, he told me that it had always been implicit that our thing was like a game of hide and seek, and that I was being ridiculous to imagine anything else …”
Carolina Sanín was born in Bogotá. She is author of the novels Todo en otra parte (2005), Los niños (2014, translated by Nick Caistor as The Children) and Tu cruz en el cielo desierto (2020, forthcoming from Charco Press as Your Cross in the Desert Sky, translated by Fionn Petch), and more. Twitter: @SaninPazC
Fionn Petch is a Scottish-born translator from Spanish, French and Italian. He lives in Berlin. His translations of Latin American literature for Charco Press have been widely acclaimed. Twitter: @elusiveword
The I Recommends — Jon Doughboy
“Full of admiration, this I is, for people with firm opinions, especially aesthetic judgements, their confidence, the way they take ownership of their opinions saying x is the best short story writer or y is the best Impressionist or z is the best post-punk album. But I can’t do that …”
Jon Doughboy is a lowly clerk at Bartleby & Co. Prefer not to with him @doughboywrites
Daisy Troop #505 Finds a Pet Cemetery — Shannon Frost Greenstein
“I drain the dregs of my espresso martini and burst out laughing.
“Remember when she fried her hair with the hair straightener?”
My oldest friends join me in laughter, as the rain pours outside and the soft glow of the restaurant makes all our complexions look like teenage skin …”
Shannon Frost Greenstein resides in Philadelphia with her children and soulmate. She is the author of Pray for Us Sinners, and An Oral History of One Day in Guyana. Her work has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Pithead Chapel, Bending Genres, and elsewhere. Twitter: @ShannonFrostGre
A People’s History of Football [excerpt] — Mickaël Correia (tr. Fionn Petch)
“Introduced to Buenos Aires in the 1870s by English immigrants, Argentinian football was dominated until the turn of the century by amateur clubs of British expats who played a rough and physical, disciplined and mechanical football. In contrast to this ‘Britishness’, an authentically ‘Argentinian’ style of play emerged, called the criollo …”
Mickaël Correia is a journalist at Mediapart. He is the author of several books, and his work focuses on social and ecological struggles as well as working-class culture. He has written for Le Monde Diplomatique, Le Canard Enchaîné and La Revue du Crieur. Twitter: @MickaCorreia
The Momus Questionnaire — Guy Debord
“The notion of personal pride in creative achievements can be quite problematic. You see, I’ve always been critical of the cult of the individual artist and the way it’s commodified in capitalist society.”
Guy Debord was a French Marxist theorist, philosopher, filmmaker, critic of work, member of the Lettrist International, founder of a Lettrist faction, and founding member of the Situationist International. He was also briefly a member of Socialisme ou Barbarie. He died in 1994.
“My books are a product of a community experience”: An interview with Claudia Hernandez — Mauro Javier Cárdenas
“Claudia Hernandez would prefer that I suppress superlatives from my descriptions of her work. I’ve done so except for “great epic” in reference to Slash and Burn. The following interview was conducted in Spanish over email during the summer of 2021. I have also excluded all the jokes about what it would have been like if we would have done the interview in person …”
Claudia Hernández is the highly acclaimed author of five short-story collections and two novels, the first of which was Slash and Burn, published in Spanish in 2017 and in English in 2020. Her work has appeared in various anthologies in Spain, Italy, France, Germany, Israel and the USA.
Mauro Javier Cárdenas is the author of American Abductions (Dalkey Archive, 2024), Aphasia (FSG, 2020) and The Revolutionaries Try Again (Coffee House Press, 2016). Twitter: @IneluctableQuak
The Momus Questionnaire — Fionn Petch
“Last week, we featured two pieces of writing in translation by the highly-acclaimed Fionn Petch: an excerpt from Mickaël Correia ‘s A People’s History of Football, and a teaser from Carolina Sanín’s Your Cross in the Empty Sky. Given his prolificacy, and the range of writing his translations bring to non-Spanish speakers, we thought it would be good to hear from the man himself, and learn a little more about his life, career and the other idiosyncrasies the Momus Questionnaire reveals …”
Better Shopping Through Living II: Dreaming of Translation
“Within the regime of representation, the dream of originality breaks against the grid of intelligibility. Ungraspable radix. There is no and can never be an original […] What if—and here I must really ask for an almost transcendent suspension of our all-too-easy Platonisms—the real world were only and ever coterminous with the world, and what if translation were that world worlding itself, the very process by which the world enworlds?What translation then can only ever be: the act, the work of translation …”
Writer and translator Frank Garrett shops in Dallas, Texas. His series ‘Better Shopping Through Living’ will appear monthly. He has never been original.
The Waterfront Journals by David Wojnarowicz — Emma Miles [23/10/18]
There are so many people, it’s so beautiful. A world full of people. (too many creeps wackos loonies) So many beautiful people.
David Wojnarowicz was a writer, artist, AIDS activist and anticensorship advocate. He wrote five books, and his paintings are exhibited in MoMA and the Whitney Museum of American Art. He died from AIDS in 1992.
Emma Miles is an English graduate and writer, with a particular interest in typography. She is most commonly found pretending to be other people.
Coming in November …
New fiction from Jak Merriman, Yoanna Pavlova, Sylvia Warren, Will Lupens and Genta Nishku; essays from Eoghan Carrick and Francis Keaton; and the first in our ANONYMOU[S] series: six pieces submitted, read and to be published anonymously …