Hello !
Welcome to my Substack.
If you are signed up for it, it is because I thought you might be interested. If you aren’t, I’m sorry, and you are welcome to unsubscribe forthwith.
Here’s what I’m thinking of doing with it. As you may have seen me post about a couple weeks back, I have a new book, The Island, coming out on June 4th with Shabby Doll House. So, I thought I’d use this space to tell you a bit about it, because apparently social media is dead and also I miss blogging and emailing (doesn’t everyone?). I might also do a few posts about translation, yoga, running… I don’t know. Just the things I like!! I promise to do my best not to be too annoying.
Anyway, this is the book’s cover, in case you missed it:
I, for one, am very pleased with the way it turned out.
The drawing is by Mad Manning, a visual & tattoo artist living in Berlin who provided the illustrations for the interior (and who, incidentally, I met in 1st grade, lol). We thought her style of line-drawings would be a perfect fit for the book - which is a “book-length haiku,” whatever that means, except it does mean that the text is at once spindly & compact, long & minimal, and so in that way seems sort of in keeping with the drawings.
As for the design, from the beginning I thought I wanted a pink cover – you know, tropical, dreamy, a bit plastic maybe. We played around with adding in other colors too - turquoise blues, emerald greens, sandy yellows, etc. – because I had been imagining a slightly cheesy, very ‘pop’ beach look from the get-go. I have this palm tree lamp from like, I don’t know when or where… Ikea? Tiger? (edit: Bouchara, I’m told) Just one of those “random-shit” shops. It looks like this:
And I had imagined having it against a milky sea of pink, which when pressed for how I might achieve such an effect, I thought, maybe by somehow filling a tub with some pink dye or bubble bath, and then dropping the (battery powered) lamp in, and hoping to get the pic before it short-circuited and exploded? Idk, maybe that’s not how that works. I’m not a science guy.
I was picturing it being both candy-like shiny and dysfunctional / pathetic, and it’s funny because one of the main associations I have with the lamp is from the Covid lockdowns, during which time, I think in the spring when the days started getting a bit longer and the depression of being stuck inside was just hitting a little too hard, we would sometimes open the windows wide at dusk, set the palm tree lights out, some beads, some salty snacks, some “tropical” drinks (corona? desperados? not sure), and say, “The beach bar is open!”
Anyway, once we got Mad’s drawings for the inside, it seemed obvious we should just use one of those for the cover, too, and I’m glad we went with that in the end – feel like it really “pops” nicely against the simple pink background, and the off-white celestial body gives it an almost Etel Adan painting vibe.
Here is an example of an Etel Adnan painting, for reference:
But so yeah, one nice thing about not trying to go through any Bigger Publishing Channels is you get a lot more of a say about things like cover design!
Ok, a bit about the book itself. Basically, it’s a long-poem, which I worry is perhaps a form that some people might find… offputting? intimidating? alienating? something like that. I’ve been told it’s not too tough a read, as long poems go. It’s also not even really that long, it just looks it because of the haiku formatting.
Speaking of form, I keep calling it a “book-length haiku,” but in doing so I fear I am perhaps doing some injustice or even offense to the age-old Japanese form. According to Wikipedia, a traditional haiku has 3 features: 17 “phonetic units” in a 5-7-5 pattern, a “kigo” or “cutting word,” and a seasonal reference. Let’s see if this book fits within those strictures:
Is there a seasonal reference? Kind of. The bulk of the book was written over the course of two springs / summers, and there is a lot of sort of ‘lush summer imagery’ (I date the book at the end as “S.S. 2022 / 2023” - cuz, you know, fashion#), but there is also winter, and well basically it’s not just one haiku so there are lots of seasons in it, except for those times when there aren’t any, really.
Is there a “kigo”? I don’t really know what that is. There are certainly words that “cut through” in the sense that they’re maybe a bit of a funny choice or wouldn’t usually belong there, but there again, is there one every three lines?? No idea.
Finally, does it contain 17 phonetic units in a 5-7-5 pattern? Well, yes and no. I followed the usual 5-7-5 syllable thing, but then when I was messing around with the form of it, I found that if I made the text one solid chain of text that switched right back to a 7 after the 5, it sort of flowed and fell over & into itself and built momentum, kind of “waterfall-style,” in a way that excited me & seemed to carry the writing forward. So instead of being a text of bookended haikus with line breaks between them - which would look like “ 5-7-5 / 5-7-5 / 5-7-5 ” - what you have is one long block of text that goes 5-7-5-7-5-7-5-7-5-7-5-7-5-7-5… starting and ending on 5s, and with occasional line-breaks included for readability / to give readers a breather. In short, just a normal poem of alternating heptasyllabic and pentasyllabic lines … nothing weird going on here!! Anyway, I’ve tried to be pretty anal about maintaining the syllabic count (I found that as I was writing it I would frequently overlap two 5s or two 7s without noticing, or collage two sequences together and then the count would be off, all of which led to more than a few editorial headaches - which my gracious editors helped me out with quite a bit, thank heavens). Still, I have sometimes allowed for a word that might usually be pronounced with two syllables to count as one if I thought I could get away with it, and vice versa, such as if it’s a word whose syllables are broken up by two vowels in a row. So sometimes “poem” is counted as one syllable, or “being,” that sort of thing. (This caveat provided to you for the sole purpose of pre-empting any potential smartassery from anons on goodreads in the future.)
Anyway, blablabla: is it a haiku? I mean, no, not really. But kind of…? If anything it is maybe almost an anti-haiku, not that it antagonizes the form, but like, it’s more chaotic and panicky than contemplative, although it does seek the latter out, maybe. I really don’t know all that much about haikus, to be honest. Which makes me feel like a bit of an idiot, but there you go. I looked into it a bit and found that there is another term, a “Haibun,” which refers I believe to a longer text that intersperses haiku with prose elements and weaves these into a longer format. This is not quite it, still, even though the poem is bookended by a prose foreword and afterword, but it is closer. However… if I called it a haibun, I don’t think anyone would know what I was talking about.
Seeking to assuage my general angst on the subject, I had a conversation recently with my friend Leonore Sell, who’d informed me her grandmother had been a member of the German Haiku Society. She told me not to fret too much about what did or did not qualify as a haiku, and that “only the most conservative blockheads at the haiku society worried about that.” So, relieved and reenlivened, I have decided to go forth and continue calling it a “book-length haiku.”
Please don’t cancel me.
OK, that’s all for the first one, I think. Sorry if I went on about form for too long - just wanted to get one of these out there, really.
By the way, you can preorder the book individually, or also in a bundle with
’s LOG OFF, which will be released simultaneously, simply by visiting the Shabby Doll House website.Thanks for reading !
x
your substack debut, finally! lol thinking about the ‘conservative blockheads at the haiku society’