Little Star Journal | A journal of poetry and prose

Sewing and dreams: “Mr. Ferri and the Furrier,” by Cynthia Zarin

Posted by Ann Kjellberg on March 12, 2013

In the jewelry store I unwrapped the fabric. I had bought it the week before, in the pouring rain, in the garment district, in a shop I had visited obsessively years before. It was during a time in my life when the amount of time that I devoted to thinking about upholstery fabric was in inverse proportion to everything else I wasn’t thinking about: chief among these was how a person like me, untrained in domestic arts or stick-to-itiveness, could be responsible for a baby, who would quickly grow up into a child. I slip-covered one hand-me-down sofa in ill-advised pale duck linen, with striped piping. By the second year I had dyed it with tea, to hide the stains. But by the time I found myself propelled to Mr. Ferri I had long given up on slipcovers or upholstery—draping the multiplying chairs and sofas with old tablecloths and shawls, as one child, by hook or crook, had followed another, and many of my sentences, then, were prefaced by the words “there’s just no point in…” I had not looked at the fabric since I bought it—the shop had wrapped it, like a present, in carefully folded tissue paper. It slid across the glass counter, like a half-vanished dream.

Lots Coming Up at Little Star!

Posted by Ann Kjellberg on February 19, 2013

We have an action-packed couple of months ahead and wanted to tell you about all our goings-on.

~ February 29: The long-awaited release of our delicious new app! With weekly installments of Little Star writing, new and seasoned. Music recommended by Alex Ross, art by Mary Weatherford. Created by the innovative app shop, 29th Street Publishers. More info here.

March 5: Reading with Little Star authors Jamaica Kincaid, Alice Fulton, and Evan Rehill at McNally Jackson! More info here.

March 6–9: Little Star will once again be sharing a table (N15) with our beloved colleagues from Archipelago Books at the AWP Conference in our hometown, Boston. Please come visit us!

March 7: Little Star co-hosts U35 Poets Under 35 at the Marliave, 7 PM, with LS authors James Stotts and Daniel Pritchard. More info here

March 9, noon: Little Star Reading at AWP with Derek Walcott, Glyn Maxwell, and Melissa Green, talking about their years together at BU and Walcott’s effect as a teacher. More info here.

Any day now: Our new on-line bookstore, providing links to books we admire.

And don’t forget our great new issue! Ann Beattie, Jeet Thayil, Stig Dagerman, Henri Cole, Sigrid Nunez, James Longenbach, Eamon Grennan, Tomas Rozycki, Charles Simic, Alice Fulton, Wolfgang Koeppen, Anakana Schofield, Gary Snyder, Marilyn Hacker, Les Murray, Nikolai Leskov, Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr., Mark Halliday, Cynthia Zarin, Jean McGarry, Arkady Dragomoshchenko, and more! Order here. Or pick up at these great bookstores.

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Our new favorite book: The Way of the Dog, by Sam Savage, in bits

Posted by Ann Kjellberg on January 25, 2013

From the very beginning I found it difficult, debilitating and painful, to work for other people, with other people. As the years went by I found it increasingly difficult to work in the vicinity of other people, until that too became impossible. People recognized that I didn’t have a crowd, and they resented me for it. They found me disturbing, because I didn’t have that restraint on me. They recognized that I didn’t have people around ready to put a hand on my shoulder at the last minute, whispering in my ear, urging me to think it over. Though they themselves don’t think, are incapable of thinking, they sense the danger of someone whose thoughts are allowed to go on and on without check, they are made uneasy by the presence of someone who makes a habit of thinking matters all the way through to the end, to their logical rather than their emotional conclusion, who does not stop thinking at the point where he happens to feel comfortable, I have always believed. The thoughts, unchecked, either go round and round like a snake biting its tail or they shoot straight ahead like bullets, and one ends up a madman or an assassin, I think now.

The difficulty I have in being with people, the discomfort I feel in even a small crowd of people, stems from the fact that I can see into their souls, I sometimes think. At any rate I imagine I am seeing into their souls, and I suffer the consequences.

♦

The elation and immense relief that a released prisoner must feel when he steps form the prison door, while different in degree, are in kind like my feelings upon being released from boredom.

♦

Some things are becoming clear. It is becoming clear that I have to make a stand, for one. Or take a stand, or both. It is becoming clear that I must make a statement, for two. Lacking a statement, it is impossible to take (or make) a stand. Without a statement people have no idea what you are doing. Your statement is designed to clarify that, shed fresh light on it, situate it in relation to its origins, to what you hope to accomplish by it, and so forth. Without a statement your stand will appear arbitrary and stupid. On the other hand, statements minus stands are the sure marks of a blowhard. For me now to make a statement and then fail to take a stand is out of the question.

It was easy when all one had to do when making a statement was offend against good taste, when just making a statement provoked a stand. That was possible when there was still good taste, a code of aristocratic honor and after that a code of bourgeois correctness that could be violated. Now they are all louts from the outset. Especially the so-called educated classes, including the local middle class, are complete louts incapable of being offended. They cannot be offended even by good taste. At best they are puzzled, at worst they are amused.

♦

The few people I was still seeing showed by their expressions and by their avoidance behaviors that I had become a thoroughly tedious person, one who was also doggedly persistent and therefore completely annoying. As a thoroughly marginal person I was now forced by them, by that, into what was practically a clinical depression.

That was when Roy came and pulled me out of it.

I went from a socially excluded, potentially suicidal person to a marginal character with a dog.

Read more in

Sam Savage was born in South Carolina in 1940. He was miseducated at Yale and the University of Heidelberg. For decades he wandered the great deserts of America and Europe. Lost from view, he discovered strange oases. In 2006, at the age of 65, he reappeared, leading a camel bearing manuscripts. The first of these manuscripts was Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife, which went on to become and international sensation, followed by The Cry of the Sloth and Glass. Savage resides in Madison, Wisconsin.

“If I’d had [this] novel three months earlier, I would have offered to make a special issue, or to run it as a serial… I think would’ve been just a coup.” Lorin Stein, in The Rumpus

We won’t tell you how this amazing book ends, but it is a beautiful (almost) surprise. A last quotation: “It is not even true that man is born, suffers, and dies. Even that is too much of a story.”

Reprinted by permission from The Way of the Dog (Coffee House Press, 2013). Copyright © 2013 by Sam Savage

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Entries from an Encyclopedia of A Life in Russia, via José Manuel Prieto

Posted by Ann Kjellberg on January 4, 2013

Operating under the pseudonym of Thelonius Monk, a refined but mostly aspirant Cuban witness to the final days of the Soviet imperium offers these clarificiations of several regional enigmas.

Babionki (бабионки). There are, of course, women—or mujeres as I might prefer to call them—in Muscovy, but there are babionki, as well, and these latter are superior. They wear their hair in a tight bun at the back of the neck and can generally be found in the bazaars, haggling at the top of their lungs, arms akimbo, over the price of a kilo of figs. They are very sweet albeit somewhat hardened by life in the imperium. Not every woman, I hasten to clarify, is worthy of the title. Both nerve and temperament are prerequisite. Babionki are much more commonly found among women of the people, though a number of female intellectuals, slightly derailed by the novels of Françoise Sagan, are also babionki, as if consubstantially. When, upon arriving at a rendez-vous in fine spirits and with every intention of sailing carefree through an inconsequential romantic interlude (our erudite commentary on Beardsley at the ready), we discern, behind an elegant pair of glasses, the glint of a pair of babionki eyes, it is highly advisable to retract the hand—though it may be halfway on its journey toward the skirt— indefinitely postpone this particular siege, and slip down the back stairs, giving thanks to merciful God all the while for the warning.

As a biological entity (they give suck to their offspring, which is a highly irrational mode of conduct) the babionki eluded the rigid state control exercised by the imperium. In consequence, they’ve been the victims of perfidious defamation campaigns. But the babionki, as “free men,” до одного места about that — which is to say, les importa un rábano or, in other words, “they don’t give a radish” (or a “fig” or a “good goddam”).

Bogatyr (богатырь: mythic warrior). We might call him a colossus out of a medieval epic poem of heroic deeds. He represents the немереная (incomparable) force of the Russian nation. Many secretly know themselves to be bogatyr, a conviction for which no evidence whatsoever is required. One need only sprawl Continue reading »

Posted in News | Tagged Fiction, Spanish | 1 Comment

A Christmas poem, by Joseph Brodsky, translated by Derek Walcott

Posted by Ann Kjellberg on December 24, 2012

…………………………………………………………To Elisabeth Leonskaya

The air—fierce frost and pine-boughs.
We’ll cram ourselves in thick clothes,
stumbling in drifts till we’re weary—
better a reindeer than a dromedary.

In the North if faith does not fail
God appears as the warden of a jail
where the kicks in our ribs were rough
but what you hear is “They didn’t get enough.”

In the South the white stuff’s a rare sight,
they love Christ who was also in flight,
desert-born, sand and straw his welcome,
he died, so they say, far from home.

So today, commemorate with wine and bread,
a life with just the sky’s roof overhead
because up there a man escapes
the arresting earth—plus there’s more space.

Psst: Little Star will host a reading at AWP with Derek Walcott and his former students Glyn Maxwell and Melissa Green on the theme of the poet as teacher. Translations of Brodsky by Maxwell and Green also appear in Nativity Poems.

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Dickens and love, Sigrid Nunez in the new Little Star

Posted by Ann Kjellberg on December 12, 2012

I remember playing Estella in a school performance based on scenes from Great Expectations.

Remember how, despite how she mistreats him, Pip goes on loving her—always.

Remember the teacher-writer-director and what an oddball she was (one of those teachers children find it almost a duty to torment), and how one of the oddest things about her was how much this junior high school playlet meant to her. At rehearsals, she kicked off her shoes and tore around the stage, demonstrating, cajoling, moving so energetically that her waistband twisted askew, and the sweat shone on her skin (while we shivered: it was cold in the auditorium after school). It is her voice I hear animating the lines:

Don’t loiter, boy.

I think she is very pretty.

Why, he’s a common laboring-boy.

Well? You can break his heart.

I hear an accent, too, and unless memory has invented it she was from the South. I remember her disappointment with Pip, who would not get into the spirit; her frustration with me for not being able to project; and how she wrested from another girl the likeness of a witchy old British spinster that was truly uncanny.
In another class, we read an abridged David Copperfield.

I am called on to describe Steerforth, the good and the bad.

Steerforth is handsome, he is clever and rich, Steerforth is charming, romantic, and popular. Steerforth is selfish, he is dishonest, he is bad to Little Em’ly and mean to the poor.

And did I think there were many people in the world like Steerforth? asks Mr. Rosenberg.

Quite sure of the answer, I say there are not.

Really? says Mr. Rosenberg, giving me another chance. And when I nod he says, Then I think you are very naive.

The world is full of Steerforths, he warns, looking straight into my eyes.

More Dickens in high school, Dickens in college—more and more one of my favorite writers. Long out of school, I decide to read Our Mutual Friend for the first time. Anticipating the old rapture, I am crushed to feel—boredom. But that’s what happens: writers who once meant everything don’t thrill in the same way anymore. And have you noticed how almost all rereading, even of the most beloved books, brings at least some disappointment.

“Steerforth and Mr. Mell” by Phiz (Hablot K. Browne). July 1849. Steel etching. Illustration for Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, Source: Centenary Edition (1911), volume one. Image scan and text by Philip V. Allingham from Victorian Web. “Phiz has vigorously captured the precise moment when in the confrontation between the virtuous school master and the haughty adolescent: ‘I am not clear whether he was going to strike Mr. Mell, or Mr. Mell was going to strike him, or there was any such intention on either side. I saw a rigidity come upon the whole school as if they had been turned into stone….’” [ch. 7, “My ‘First Half’ at Salem House”]

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Introducing Bilge Karasu

Posted by Ann Kjellberg on November 27, 2012

We’ve just encountered the fascinating Turkish modernist Bilge Karasu, in a new translation from City Lights of his 1971 novel A Long Day’s Evening. This remarkable book considers agonizing internal struggles of faith among eighth-century Byzantine monks through the refracted, internalized prose of Joyce and Proust, giving them startlingly raw existential urgency. Something soul-plumbing for the holidays!

When Byzantine emperor Leo III issued edicts forbidding the veneration of icons in the 720s, a monk named Adronikos responded with self-sacrifice, fleeing the demand that he renounce the practices he held sacred and then returning to face torture and death. His friend Ioakim chose escape.

En route to Ravenna

as if on a trip, an excursion

he was running away as everyone knew

on the ship that was carrying away a family, servants, slave

wealth, provisions, oils, fabrics, gold that belonged to noble Michael who grudgingly had to leave his mansion behind

Ioakim had heard that the noble’s slave was from the Orient, but had not thought of asking him what part of the ocean known as the Orient he was from. He can’t even recall his name, except that it was an odd name, like all Oriental names

One night, he’d told Ioakim a fairy tale; it was a night when the sea was somehow perfectly calm, a night of oppressive heat when a cool dampness clung to one’s skin.

It must have been an Oriental tale. It’s strange that he can still remember it.

Perhaps it’s not strange.

Some details elude him: where the architect was from, who he was, why he had agreed to undertake the task.

He does remember this: An architect is instructed to build a palace with hundreds of, thousands of, cut stones of various colors. A palace such that whoever enters it should feel perfectly at home, know which room is where, which stairway leads where, which door opens to which room; but at the same time, the palace has to be so extraordinary, built so ingeniously, that whoever enters it should know, recognize right away that he neither has seen nor will ever get to see another place like it in his lifetime.

The architect is given one more instruction. No two stones of identical color can be set either side by side or one over the other, except once, in one singular instance throughout the immense palace.

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“Stanzas for an Imaginary Garden,” by Octavio Paz

Posted by Ann Kjellberg on October 25, 2012

The municipal government of Mexico City approached Octavio Paz with a proposal to build, in his childhood neighborhood of Mixcoac, a public garden whose gates and walls would be decorated with his poems. Mixcoac, once a charming village on the outskirts of the city, is now largely a desolate, anonymous corner of the spreading megalopolis. Paz designed the verbal plantings for the garden, but, after visiting the site, decided it was impossible: Mixcoac had become another world. His poems, then, became stanzas for an imaginary garden.

“Stanzas for an Imaginary Garden,” by Octavio Paz

These eight lines describe a rustic village garden. A small walled enclosure with two entrances (the avenues Revolución and Patriotismo). Besides the plam trees, which are already there, bougainvillea, heliotrope, an ash, and a pine should be planted. There should also be a small fountain.

This poem could be placed at one of the entrances to the garden, either as one eight-line stanza on the lintel or pediment, or divided into two quatrains on each of the door jambs:

Four adobe walls. Bougainvillea:
eyes bathe in its peaceful flames.
Wind rushes: an exaltation
of leaves and kneeling grass.

Heliotrope runs by with purple steps,
wrapped in its own aroma.
A prophet: the ash tree. A daydreamer: The pine.
The garden is tiny, the sky immense.

These four lines could be placed at the other entrance, on the pediment or the lintel:

Rectangle of ease: a few palms,
jade sprays; and time flows, water Continue reading »

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4 December 1941: Kluge, Richter

Posted by Ann Kjellberg on October 23, 2012

There was a huge area of high pressure over the Atlantic with its center to the south-west of Ireland. A weak ridge extended in a north-easterly direction over Scandinavia as far as the Arctic Ocean. It separated an extensive low-pressure area over the Polar Sea from a weaker low-pressure area over Russia. At its base cold continental Arctic air mingled with cloud masses pushing up from the south. This was the causal chain which brought about the sudden cold spell of December 1941. According to weather researcher and meteorologist Dr. Hofmeister of the Potsdam Weather Station, by applying the principle of DYNAMIC METEOROLOGY the German forces could have been warned ten days beforehand. In the past, augurs predicted the outcome of a battle by examining the entrails of their sacrificial animals before the fighting began. Today, in the rational December of 1941, meteorologists have replaced the augurs.

DYNAMIC METEOROLOGY does not investigate the actual state of the weather but concentrates its observations on the large-scale movements of the overall circulation which precede and create the distinct shifts in weather. As is proper for a National Socialist, this “totality” is to be ascertained with the tools of INTUITION and not with the methods of PROVABILITY.

The school of dynamic meteorology pressed for an “active intervention in weather conditions.” In order for that to happen, air squadrons would, if necessary, have to bomb cloud masses to a breadth and length of several hundred miles with dry ice and carbonic acid packs. That would only make sense if one knew in advance what such an active intervention set in motion. Dynamic meteorology came too late for the battles on the Eastern Front. On 4 December, however, even before the government departments of the Reich shut down for the St. Nicholas holiday, which had been brought forward, Dr. Hofmeister’s workgroup received confirmation of a government credit to the value of 500,000 Reichsmarks for their research. This could be called the “beginning of the era of dynamic meteorology.”

Alexander Kluge, translated by Martin Chalmers; photograph by Gerhard Richter

From December, by Alexander Kluge and Gerhard Richter, a “calendar book” featuring a story and a photograph for each day in the month of December, though each from a different year. It was published this fall by Seagull Books.

Alexander Kluge is, as a filmmaker, one of the originators of the New German Cinema movement. He is also the author of novels and books of social criticism. A retrospective of Gerhard Richter’s work, in honor of his eightieth birthday, appeared this year at the Tate in London and the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin.

Posted in News | Tagged German fiction, photography | 1 Comment

“Epitaph,” by Kiki Dimoula

Posted by Ann Kjellberg on October 3, 2012

“One per cent of every kiss given,
each one without exception, consists
of eternity
and all the rest the risk
it may be the last.”

Even if it’s the last
it will be called a kiss all the more

at least as long
as memory on one hand
and oblivion on the other
pull it about
each claiming it for its own

until Solomon the just
to reveal whose it is
threatens to divide it
giving half to one, half to the other

and every time one of the two
—never the same one—
screams “don’t.”

Every kiss
consists entirely of the risk
it may be the last.
Only the kiss never given
remains everlasting.
Wisely, peacefully it’s shared
by expectation and renunciation,

two rival flowers
in one resigned vase
adorning a cenotaph.

Translated by Cecille Inglessis Margellos and Rika Lesser

Kiki Dimoula was born in Athens in 1931 and published her first book of poems in 1956. She is the third woman ever to be inducted into the Academy of Athens.

Excerpted from The Brazen Plagiarist , by Kiki Dimoula, in the Margellos World Republic of Letters series, published by Yale University Press. Copyright © 2012 by Kiki Dimoula. Reprinted by permission. For more information, www.margellosworldrepublicofletters.com

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A journal of poetry and prose