D o u g l a s A* m a r t i n

Once You Go Back

2010-12-03T13:56:00.000-08:00

"...I suppose the book that most set my graying hair on fire -- line by line, surprise by surprise -- was Douglas A. Martin's gorgeous ONCE YOU GO BACK."

-James Magruder, author of Sugarless

a best book of this year

2009-12-03T12:52:00.000-08:00

"Remember that time in your life when you didn’t know if you would ever learn how to breathe? No, you knew you were breathing, but you wondered if it would ever feel like it was supposed to. Douglas Martin [Once You Go Back] nails the claustrophobia of growing up, somehow succeeding at delivering an adult’s voice with a child’s awareness, a voice at once aloof and familiar. Martin steers clear of the typical nostalgia in order to convey a loneliness so intimate that even a catalog of deteriorating home life becomes something almost like hope. And, the best part is that he doesn’t fuck it up at the end with some kind of tidy closure – yay, thank you!" - Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

"As for fiction –- again, lots of favorites, by Stacey D'Erasmo (The Sky Below), Douglas A. Martin (Once You Go Back), Peter Gadol (Silver Lake), Vestal McIntyre (Lake Overturn) and Derek McCormack (The Show That Smells). - Richard Labonte

"Martin, who possesses one of the most distinctive younger voices in contemporary gay lit, transcends the familiar with heartbreaking poignancy. His language is spare and evocative, his prose is infused with the compactness of poetry, and his graceful, elliptical narrative evokes painful early years with ferocious precision." (Labonte review)

The Review of Contemporary Fiction

2009-07-18T15:38:00.000-07:00

"Douglas A. Martin’s ecstatic and devastating narrative verges on what Roland Barthes called the text of bliss. Unlike the text of pleasure, which is refined, delicate and readable in an ordinary sense, the text of bliss, of jouissance, offers up its dense, poetic language for the reader to lose herself in. Told almost entirely in an insistent second-person voice that mixes Martin’s own with the ruminations of his characters, Your Body Figured traces through three parts of the lives of three well-known artistic figures on the cusp of transition: Balthus, metamorphosing from his youth into maturity; and, from their maturity to their respective deaths, Hart Crane and George Dyer, Francis Bacon’s longtime lover and model. Martin’s responsibility to the text, which hangs suspended between fiction, biography, and the question of autobiography, never allows him to absent himself from the addressing 'you' that floats through the work, refusing to allow any detail to be pinned down to certainty. Though Your Body Figured functions on many levels, it wouldn’t be inaccurate or reductive to call it a work of minor or alternative biography. Martin tells the history of these formidable men as a history of interior struggle, sexual entanglement, addiction, and deep delight. This inner life, though fictionalized (what life isn’t?), crashes through the official facts with a force strong enough to leave the reader with a shudder of lasting pleasure."--Michelle Tupko

Once You Go Back, blurbs

2009-05-26T13:38:00.000-07:00

Mary Gaitskill: "Lonely, understated and heart-breaking, Once You Go Back will haunt you like a familiar face that has emerged and then fallen back into a dream."

Darcey Steinke: "In Once You Go Back, Douglas A. Martin tells a story of a sister, a brother and their complicated love for each other inside a family nuanced by both love and violence. In his careful prose Martin lays out the details of childhood, vibrant and fearing, with a sure hand and a big heart."

Your Body Figured, review

2009-01-30T15:45:00.001-08:00

"...an incantatory book that embodies the passions of love, sex, and death in writing that’s often suspended in a beautiful tension between indulgence and restraint. Through the lives of these three [Balthus, a.k.a. Balthasar Klossowski de Rola (1908–2001), an esteemed Polish–French modern artist who painted perversely queer and disturbing visions; gay poet Hart Crane (1899–1932); Francis Bacon (1909–1992), the Irish-born British figurative painter], Martin offers an unflinching meditation on suffering, mortality, and the beautiful in artistic transfiguration."

radio spot

2009-01-30T15:27:00.001-08:00

On the way to the dinner party, Nancy Rawles speaking of her MY JIM, reminds me how I've been meaning to visit, spend some more time with Leslie Fiedler's "Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey!"

working, in the midst of

2009-01-30T15:09:00.000-08:00

"Shame, Theatricality, and Queer Performativity: Henry James's THE ART OF THE NOVEL," Eve Sedgwick

"Reading Boyishly," Carol Mavor

"Telling Anxiety: Anxious Narration in the Work of Marguerite Duras, Annie Ernaux, Nathalie Sarraute, and Anne Hebert," Jennifer Willging

Jogged by the idea of Breton's "Wake Phrases" (reading, The Feminization of Surrealism)

2009-01-30T14:54:00.000-08:00

two nights ago now
Dream that we end up touching fiberglass, because someone doesn't do the right thing with the roller coaster--and a bridge?--and so we have to fix this, cure, by rubbing through and over our hands pebbles.

naropa
Dream of seeing Bhanu again, and speaking to Anne--in some connection to the question of being in Boulder teaching again like last summer, involving also a ditch we are all in or around.

home from CT
Dream that my boyfriend's mother dies--her empty chair at the table we try to ignore.

At issue as well are our malfunctioning phones. At one point I'm riding my bike up some side ramp at Coney Island--something I've never or yet to do--and I must get through to my own (mom) to let her know the call hasn't been dropped because, despite the busy signal, I've died, too.

Books to remember to get

2009-01-23T13:21:00.000-08:00

The Eight Technologies of Otherness, Sue (Johnny) Golding
11 Kinds of Loneliness, Richard Yates

Poetry State Forest, Bernadette Mayer

11/25/08

2008-11-26T10:42:00.000-08:00

He disappears from bed and shies from an answer. I leave my copy of Bersani and Phillips intimacies on the kitchen table.

Engl257: Queer Literature and Studies

2008-10-20T12:27:00.000-07:00

On a chalkboard: “Memory is the [I slip and want to/do write “seamless”] seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither.”

–Woolf, Orlando class

Novel Projects, Spring '08

2008-08-03T14:18:00.000-07:00

Who else did I suggest to her besides Chuck Palahniuk?

Two Boos for Bravo

2008-07-30T10:11:00.000-07:00

Jo & Slade, DATE MY EX, or: "I pimp, she hoes."

Denise Richards, IT'S COMPLICATED: or, no, you're still just basically a whore.

Meanwhile, at French Roast near the New School for Social Research, we see Michael Adams.

Un-helmed (Old Uncle Jesse)

2008-07-19T08:40:00.000-07:00

Bitterly bruising style, tightened sanctions, flocked, ached, vigorously, no Senator promote horn-rimmed, simple values.

Declining health, pain, limping hard to hold the line; former, mossy, hard-edged conservatism died.

NYTimes, New Hampshire to Ipswich

reading 6/11/08

2008-06-03T16:46:00.000-07:00

Elaine Equi + Douglas A. Martin

nycvisit.com: "Poet Equi (Ripple Effect) and poet-novelist Martin (In the Time of Assignments) share a gift for work that’s at once conversational, stylistically rigorous and emotionally intense."

St. Mark's Church, corner of 2nd Ave and 10th St, New York, NY

8pm

L train, One Recent Friday (after movie disappoints)

2008-05-20T19:06:00.001-07:00

I pointed out Randy Harrison ("there's Justin")--but not the two boys daring to kiss in front of both him and us, though we saw them both.

Emile Hirsch sublime

2008-05-15T13:51:00.000-07:00

not so cynical it didn't make me cry

go speed racer
go speed racer
go speed racer, go

event 5/2/08

2008-04-25T08:01:00.000-07:00

on-stage conversation, reading, q&a w/

Jenny Boully (The Book of Beginnings and Endings)
Douglas A. Martin (In The Time of Assignments)
Cecily Parks (Field Folly Snow)
Christopher Schmidt (The Next in Line)

4pm
CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Ave, New York City
DSC study lounge, room 5409

Hopkins + Calzaghe (subway ad)

2008-04-10T16:17:00.000-07:00

Toe to toe is one foot away from dick to dick, give or take an inch, depending on size. On and on the beat goes.

screening 3/19/08: Urinal (John Greyson, 1989)

2008-03-20T12:06:00.000-07:00

Something for Larry Craig to see. There was no one there when I got there, and I wondered if this was the place.

Read: Mishima's Forbidden Colors.

In The Time of Assignments

2008-03-13T09:21:00.000-07:00

"I have always enjoyed Martin's writing. He lets you in -- brings you along
and deep into his longing and makes both him and you, the reader, a little
less lonely in the process." -Mike Albo

Meena Alexander at CUNY Graduate Center Feb. 22, '08

2008-02-28T10:42:00.000-08:00

I'm thinking of her accent, in the context of Elena Georgiou and Bhanu Kapil.

reading 2/23/08

2008-02-21T10:51:00.000-08:00

The Enclave @ Kenny's Castaways
157 Bleecker St (btwn Sullivan and Thompson)
4pm

TimeOut NY: The writers collective welcomes Douglas A. Martin, a novelist and short-story author with intense talents (see They Change the Subject and Branwell) who has just put out an ambition- and desire-charged book of poems, In the Time of Assignments. He’s joined by novelist Nick Burd, author of the forthcoming The Vast Fields of Ordinary. Also reading is Dan Cayer.

In The Time of Assignments

2008-02-21T10:40:00.000-08:00

"Douglas A. Martin is best known as a writer of luminous, brooding prose, but IN THE TIME OF ASSIGNMENTS shows him to also be a poet. The poems in this book tell about memory, loss, life’s complicated hurts and longings. And they show a wonderful trust in beauty to get us through all that."
-Juliana Spahr

"IN THE TIME OF ASSIGNMENTS begins in youth and sadness, and no matter the shifting boundaries of time, place, and love, we return again and again to Martin's ever-searching 'I,' an 'I' that wants us to want him, that seduces us to go into these rooms with him, to love him, to follow him."
-Jenny Boully

"Douglas A. Martin treks from a Georgia childhood to present day New York, maybe losing his accent a little, but always maintaining a fierce, magically intimate and expansive relationship with language."
-Brandon Stosuy

"These are great poems cause they’re such non-poems. Torn up pieces, patches of stuff like a guy on a train reminds you of someone you used to love. If the whole category of poetry emptied out and they opened something else next door that does what poetry did—by falling down, missing the train, missing everything, and you can almost hear it—like music—well this poetry (Douglas Martin's) is kind of like that. It's awkward and swift. I really like it."
-Eileen Myles

Linda Williams at NYU Tuesday Feb. 19, '08

2008-02-20T12:41:00.000-08:00

Williams's talk (HARDCORE ART FILM: THE CONTEMPORARY REALM OF THE SENSES) made me remember something I wrote in my dissertation:

"I must stress that [Kathy] Acker approaches what is deemed porn not because she wants to see more than she gets normally to see—in fact, she expresses her misgiving with the usual limits of its specular imagination in her writing on and in praise of the vision of David Cronenberg’s motion picture of J.G. Ballard’s Crash: “What interested me most was that, contrary and probably antagonistic to all porn conventions, the cock is not hard. Through sexual desire, both his own and that of his characters, Cronenberg has reenvisioned the dominant and always rigid phallus of the old king-must-not-die world as other, soft, another body part....”566

note 566: See “The Future,” in Bodies of Work, esp. 175. Also of importance in Crash is a (male) desire for a more porous and penetrable body. Interestingly, given Acker’s early focus on madness, John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus (2006) equates sanity with (sexual) penetrability.

*
I asked about Vincent Gallo's THE BROWN BUNNY--which Williams seems to accept the critical reaction of, the film as a failure--as it, interestingly, in terms of failure, in its crux scene will not slot discretely--or discreetly?--into any of Williams' proposed four categories of the hardcore: lyrical sex, or urgent sex, or humiliated sex, or that of the orgasmic imperative (Shorbus would illustrate that last).

I wanted to add to the discussion (FAT GIRL and SEX IS COMEDY were cited) Breillat's ANATOMY OF HELL also--a film I often fight with my boyfriend, or fought, when friends, about--as many of the examples, as one audience member pointed out, moved around the phallus still; and its indexicality, as "real" or not, was, umm, raised. Breillat's HELL is apropos here in at least two ways: 1. philosophically, for its stand-in (the "prosthesis" here a body double for the actress for genital close-ups) and 2. how the film ultimately centers itself.

reading 2/2/08

2008-01-31T12:15:00.000-08:00

AWP
Hilton, Morgan Suite, 2nd Floor S158B
1335 Avenue of the Americas
1:30-2:45 p.m.

Soft Skull 15th Anniversary Reading:

Cristin Aptowicz, Jenny Davidson, David Griffith, Douglas A. Martin, Matthew Sharpe, Lynne Tillman

"In fifteen years, Soft Skull Press has delighted, excited and enraged the American public--from eight books selected as Voice Literary Supplement Best Books of the Year, to two books identified by Ann Coulter as amongst the five most fraudulent books of the past decade. In so doing, Soft Skull has become one of the most well respected, independent publishers in the world, with books in translation throughout Europe, South America and Japan, Korea, and China. Herewith we offer several of the writers who have made us who we are, and will continue to make us who we hope to be."

reading 1/30/08

2008-01-16T13:34:00.000-08:00

Indie Press Series: Nightboat Books

w/
Michael Burkard, author of Envelope of Night: Selected and Uncollected Poems 1966-1990
Joshua Kryah, author of Glean
Douglas A. Martin, author of Your Body Figured
Jonathan Weinert, author of In the Mode of Disappearance
Introduction by poetry editor Christina Davis

"Four of Nightboat’s distinguished and award-winning poets will read from their new and forthcoming books from Nightboat."

Founded in 2003, Nightboat Books is a nonprofit publishing company of new and out-of-print poetry and prose, with a mission to “distribute and promote beautifully crafted work that resists convention and transcends boundaries — books rich with poignancy, intelligence, and risk.”

@McNally Jackson