Interview with Dominique de Varine

June 19, 2023 in Article, Interview, Feature, Press

[This week we thought we’d share an interview with artist, Dominique de Varine, who calls Brittany home, but who we met in the Tibetan colonies of Northern India.]

Mutable: I think a good place to start our conversation is Dharma and Karma, as this was where our conversation began. What is the relationship between Dharma and Karma in your work? Has it always been this way or has their relationship evolved over time? And also, was there a time when these concepts were not important to your work and some moment when they became more so?

Dominique de Varine: Karma, Dharma, I don't know what they are! I do have some ideas of course but fleeting ones that fade over time. When I started working on the series "Galipettes," the question it seemed capable of answering was that of emptiness. Over time, an echoing fullness invited itself in, playing an equal and dialectical role. A semiotic reading complements it, involving the opposition between engagement (narrative) and disengagement (narrative). Emptiness, disengagement in the here and now. Fullness, engagement in all the formations of the world. Hence, the Dharma and the Karma.

Interview with Joshua Hiram Banks

August 16, 2021 in Article, Interview, Feature, Press

[This week we thought we’d share an interview with Hanoi DIY producer and punk aficionado, Josh Banks.]

Mutable: Could you give us some background on your time in SE Asia? Where have you lived? What are some events you’ve been involved in?

JB: I’ve lived all over South East Asia since moving here from China in 2009. Most of my time was spent in Thailand, but I have had the chance to travel and live in several different countries. I’ve spent a lot of time in Bangkok but also lived in the Deep South of Thailand, Vientiane, Laos and also Yangon, Myanmar.

Basically I’ve been involved in teaching English to make a living and got involved with different groups over time to write, promote and also later started to put together my own shows here in Hanoi. My main hobby became traveling for gigs around South East Asia in around 2015. I’d spent a lot of time in Bangkok. While living in Vientiane Laos I would head over to Thailand and fly down to Bangkok for shows. Later, I ended moving to Bangkok and getting more involved in the scene. Even after moving to Vietnam, I still spent a lot of time heading over to Bangkok to check out the shows happening, yet Vietnam, especially Hanoi, had more opportunities for me to put on my own shows. Here I was able to use my connections and past knowledge to put on gigs. My last show was the most successful, at a small underground venue called the Hidden Club which was a hot spot for the scene. The name of the event was “Return of Hanoi Punk Rock.” The headlining band was “Cut Lon”, a thrash metal group whose members all wear Pikachu outfits. They have gained quite a following in the underground music scene here in SEA.

Interview with Mike Sauve

January 14, 2021 in Article, Interview, Feature, Press

What I am struck with in your work is the macabre playfulness. Would you like to talk about the relationship between comedy and pain in your writing?

As I respond to your questions, it is Christmas morn, and I have messaged several friends asking, “Know of any local bukkakes I might partake in?” This is not going to go over at my in-laws breakfast table, but to me it unearths something very vital: the vertex of all that Christmas is meant to mean with not only the lurid nature of the bukkake, but the logical extrapolation that:

1) Bukkakes are known to exist.
2) Since bukkakes are known to exist there must be men ever on the prowl for one.

As a lapsed journalist, I see little value in simply making ledger entries regarding the world’s immeasurable darkness. We know human’s heads have been stomped against curbs. We know people boil dogs alive to release an adrenaline they find flavourful. I’ve largely outgrown horror fiction as both a reader and as a writer because there isn’t a single thing Jack Ketchum or Stephen King might conceive of that anyone couldn’t find in the news were they motivated to look. And yet for me to write any alternative to the boiled dog reality results in platitudes that are worse than banal, they are insulting to the boiled dogs! Regardless, I must abide these platitudes. I must direct my feet to the sunny side of the street. I must live, laugh, and love to the extent I am capable. (I have gone calendar years without laughing aloud.) In this need for capital-P positivity, I find myself at the same sacred and profane vertex as the Christmas morning bukkake: taking a deep breath, practicing gratitude for my daily bread and NBA basketball and the more wholesome pornographic categories such as “nude breasts,” all while knowing perfectly well that the world is full of rotten old ragamuffins who needed to boil a dog alive rather than dead just so it would taste 5% more adrenaline-y or whatever. In other words, you got to laugh to keep from cryin’.

This Alienated Hero: A Review of Gabriel Chad Boyer's Welcome to Weltschmerz

January 13, 2021 in Press, Feature

Matt Ampleman

Originally published in The Lit Pub 9.21.12

I wanted to walk away from this book as if a newly single man from a conflict-wrought relationship. I wanted to forego any sense of duty to the protagonist and his attendant world. But I had to see things through.

Friends, to read Gabriel Chad Boyer’s book, Welcome to Weltschmerz, is to enter into a conversation with an interlocutor that will break all the rules of polite authorship, but you find you cannot leave for niceties sake, for interest, then for sheer incredulity and inspiration at the arc of the story before you. It is like talking to a homeless man, at whom you are nodding out of politeness until you realize that he knows every line of John Berryman’s Dream Songs and can recite them backwards.

Lina Ramona Vitkauskas on Spiny Retinas!

January 12, 2021 in Article, Interview, Feature, Press

Gabe, you are writing to me from Tokyo.

Whenever I think of Tokyo, I can’t help but think of the film Lost in Translation. And I’m going there now (mentally) because Bill Murray starred in that film, and one of his great contemporaries, Robin Williams, tragically removed himself from this planet this past week. This also transitions into the questions you’ve asked me about my work, most relevantly, Spiny Retinas, because before Williams’ death, he was interviewed specifically about the perception of the “sad clown” archetype: what did mean to him, how did he relate (sadly, he fully committed to that life role).

I think of this specifically because I often use humor to confront personal challenges and I use it in my work to address the “darkness” of our times, which is what I believe Spiny Retinassomewhat deals with. In past work, I have let this sardonic voice come through a bit (e.g. my e-book from 2012, HONEY IS A SHE, often trails off into dark humor [it deals with going through a divorce]). More so with Spiny Retinas.

Trinity: A Review of Colin Winnette's Revelation

January 12, 2021 in Press, Feature

herocious

Originally published in The Open End

For some reason three is a good number. There’s a balance to three, a symmetry that seems to establish an axis. Three is triptych, three is trinity. With a title like REVELATION I feel like trinity is the more applicable to Colin Winnette’s first novel.

It’s a good book. There’s a weight to it that sits heavy and savory, like the first book you ever read.

Amazing Adult Fantasy

January 12, 2021 in Press, Feature

Paul Kincaid

Originally published on The SF Site

To begin with, these short fictions are funny.

They are also experimental, wayward and surreal, any of which might make them seem far more serious and “worthy” than they actually are.

They are not stories in the conventional sense. Some of them may offer a narrative, but if you try to follow them too closely you will find characters change, chronologies wander all over the place, and an obsessive interest in something mundane and irrelevant will suddenly intrude into the text. They take risks with what we expect of our fiction, which is a good thing, but not all the risks pay off, of course. This means it is all too easy to linger over phrase-making or ponder construction, or otherwise consider the success or failure of the individual pieces in some drily academic way. But that would be to miss the simple joie de vivre, the devil-may-care insouciance of the pieces.

Amazing Adult Fantasy by A D Jameson

January 12, 2021 in Press, Feature

Jonah Vorspan-Stein

Originally Published in the Noo Journal, Issue 13

AD JAMESON’S Amazing Adult Fantasy opens with a brief indictment: “Fiction may be the worst thing about the 21st century.” The stories that follow—fabled, sardonic, sharp—venture to strip fiction of its conventions, substituting in their place a new narrative logic: one that brandishes an acute playfulness and grandiose sentiment, one of mustachios and infatuation, the most mature kind of absurdity. These are stories about obsessions and deficiencies, about people who glare every bit of themselves, who feel the world on its largest scales. In these stories, astronaut Buzz Aldwin falls into the bad graces of NASA, a girl shares her various and mutually exclusive truths about Oscar the Grouch, and Bronx monkeys devote themselves to preserving earth’s aurora borealis. While these are certainly stories of insistent and shifting forms, they are also stories that always endeavor to a literary beauty.

Two Things Struck Me: A Review of Jameson's Amazing Adult Fantasy

January 12, 2021 in Press, Feature

Jeff Bursey

Originally published at The Quarterly Conversation

We’re in an unimaginative period when many readers prefer memoirs to fiction. Perhaps there’s something in Canadians and Americans that demands fiction to mirror life, to provide a perspective on how to live, like one would download an app designed to locate chain restaurants in foreign cities. Imaginative writing, so newspaper reviews would lead one to believe, has its best home in science fiction and fantasy titles. The serious novels—written by Philip Roth and James Ellroy, for example—don’t stray far from realism, unless you’re Spanish, South American or Salman Rushdie. When was the last time you picked up the local paper and saw a long review of a book that didn’t pretend to tell you exactly how this or that occupation was carried out in the 1540s, or describe minutely the way clothes were worn in 19th-century Wales? When was the last time an author’s style, above all other elements of a book, received praise in that same paper for its vocabulary, fresh metaphors, complex sentences, and the use of adverbs and adjectives, without once mentioning plot?

Interview of Colin Winnette in The The

January 12, 2021 in Article, Interview, Feature, Press

(Author Colin Winnette, whose novel, Revelation, was put out by Mutable last Fall, is interviewed below by The The’s Brian Chappell.)

Brian: What authors and styles have shaped you?

Colin: Influence is a tricky thing to talk about. I can say that Ben Marcus’s work was extremely important to me. It still is, but at one point it totally saved me. Or, reinvigorated me. I was finishing up undergrad and I was in love with writers like Beckett, Proust, Chekhov, Joyce, Kafka, these iconic figures who did what they were doing so masterfully that there seemed nowhere to go at all after that. That was also the result of my age at the time and what being in school can do to you. I didn’t realize it then, but I had a pretty narrow vision of what it meant to be a writer and what one could do with fiction. But then I picked up Age of Wire and String and Notable American Women and I was just totally blown away. It was an entirely different approach to working with and examining language than I had ever encountered before. Those books led me to Gertrude Stein and William Gaddis and all of these authors who were breaking language apart, yes, but also reclaiming it, making it do new and fascinating things. And, I mean, they had been doing this for a long time and in different ways, and here was Ben Marcus doing it still in his own way and just killing it. So I suddenly felt very free again. It’s interesting the difference between grad school and undergrad. In undergrad I was constantly being told what good writing looked like. It looks like Carver. It looks like Chekhov. It looks like Pynchon (and indeed it does!). It looks like Austen. Etc. Workshops were little help because they were often the same kind of thing: I think you should do this, or I think this should happen, etc. Initially I lacked the confidence to assert myself. Then, when I gained a little confidence, I asserted myself by just ignoring pretty much everybody and only listening to the 2% I thought made sense or seemed to come from a good place. I started to tune a lot out. So I left undergrad fed-up, but with a lot of energy. I wrote and worked and traveled and didn’t write and two years later I went to grad school with a much different attitude. I used that time to write as much as possible. I listened to people and read as much as I could, but took the whole thing less…personally, I guess…than before. I took it seriously, but I knew the conversations we were having in class were often selfish in that we were all interested in enhancing our work by discussing the work of others. Helping one another wasn’t exactly the point, although we certainly did help one another from time to time. And I should say I think all that’s great. The two most important things grad school gave me were time and a sense of purpose. I felt encouraged to work and I had the hours in the day to do it. Or if I didn’t have them, I made them because I knew my time was limited. I taught myself how to make time to write. I was writing a lot on the train and in bed my first year. I wouldn’t let myself sleep until I had done a certain amount of work. I’m not sure I would have had that kind of discipline at first if I weren’t in a program. Now, it comes much more naturally. I had to learn how to kick my own ass.

The End of the World: A Review of Colin Winnette's Revelation

January 12, 2021 in Press, Feature

Steve Himmer

Originally published in the Steve Himmer Blog

Revelation, a novel by Colin Winnette, is a story about the end of the world in which, somehow, the apocalypse isn’t the biggest thing going. The story follows a core of three friends (Marcus, Colin, and Tom) from youth to old age as they lead ordinary lives in the midst of exploding trees, vanished oceans, plagues of locusts, and the Four Horsemen. Mundane traumas like a lost teenage girlfriend are more devastating to these characters than a lost ocean, and the vast wasteland of dead, rotting fish left behind as it dries are taken as a wretched novelty but not much of a warning.

Amazing Adult Fantasy by A D Jameson

January 12, 2021 in Press, Feature

Jess Stoner

Originally reviewed in Necessary Fiction 11.14.2011

The artist statement of sorts, “Fiction”, that begins the first half of the stories in A.D. Jameson’s Amazing Adult Fantasy, teaches us how to read the entire collection: we’re told that we’re reading a book that’s been lost in a fire, that the book we’re reading doesn’t exist. A better metaphor for childhood, the gratuitous fiction of how we remember it, might not exist either.

Interview of Colin Winnette in Monkey Bicycle

January 12, 2021 in Article, Interview, Feature, Press

(Recently, Monkey Bicycle interviewed Mutable author Colin Winnette about Revelation, his writing process, pressures, and hopes for the future. This interview can be found below.)

MB: What is your religious background?

CW: I’m not a religious person at all, really. Far from it. But I had the unique experience of being a non-religious person growing up in a small town in Northeast Texas. So throughout my life I was steeped in various devoted interpretations of biblical narrative. The closest our family ever came to adopting a religion was when, in an arguably noble attempt to set our family on a, well if not more righteous, certainly more socially accepted path, my older sister (who was very young at the time) insisted our family begin attending church. The idea was that we would then be more like the other families in town, more like her friends’ families, and a little less…our strange selves. My parents were very open-minded and supportive, so we went. I don’t remember which denomination it was, or even what we did there. I only remember dressing up for a few Sundays in a row, then being very happy when we abandoned the project. Christianity, in one form or another, was the dominant religion in our hometown, but I never really got into it and, aside from this little experiment, I was never really asked to. Then, in grade school, I had a good friend who was Muslim, (his was the only Muslim family in our school, I think) and I used to talk to him a lot about his beliefs and his particular religious practices, and the benefits/challenges of these. I distinctly remember him telling me that I had to believe him about something or other because he couldn’t lie as it was against his religion. That struck me then as very convenient; to have a system of beliefs that worked as a set of rules governing your behavior. In my head, he didn’t have to worry about lying because he couldn’t lie. It was against the rules. I was open to, and enthusiastic about, his religious experiences and accounts because he was my friend and they were so unfamiliar to me. The idea of finding something like that for myself became appealing, and I asked my mother to take me to the library so I might read up on various religions and see which one best suited me. Then I too might have a set of rules by which to live. On the one hand, the project was a failure. No single text, or tradition, really fit me that well, but it all seemed really wild and each religion exhibited these great imaginative capabilities. I was learning a lot. At the same time, I was struggling my way through Tolkien, some Shakespeare, Greek mythology, that kind of thing. It’s probably for this reason that I have always viewed religious texts simply as powerful narratives, as literature, rather than existential truths or solid guidebooks for how to live. At best, I guess, they’re examples of how things could be, or might have been. But, again, this was just my experience. Since then I’ve always studied religious texts as/alongside literary texts, particularly the Bible, as it was such a dominant narrative voice in the town/state/country where I grew up. This was one of the initial sparks for this project, engaging a biblical narrative on literary terms, and exposing it to the same manipulations/experimentation one might any other literary tradition.

New Mutable Author Explains Spiny Retinas!

January 12, 2021 in Article, Interview, Feature, Press

Here I am explaining what SPINY RETINAS is.

It is an epic poem, or if you prefer, a narrative poem, or perhaps still if you prefer, a “hybrid text piece” that was compiled slowly over the course of the last six years (2006 – 2012). Perhaps you do not prefer. I love you just the same.

It was constructed using automatic writing technique and addresses and/or speaks to war, politics, and religion (stereotypes and cultural myths explored through use of military and theological hierarchical titles); rape culture, gender roles, and sexism; and pop culture in general. The following books, films, and/or television shows were used as reference points to create SPINY RETINAS: I Dream of Jeanie episodes, John Ashbery’s Girls on the Run, David Lynch’s Lost Highway, Jennifer Chambers Lynch’s Boxing Helena, and Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America.

This piece was created using aleatoric method/approach and poetic language was used carelessly, unabashedly, often with such extreme force the author found herself shaking simultaneously with utter pleasure and despair. It was a freeing exercise, like running around nude in a random suburban neighborhood at 2 a.m. with a clear squirt gun or picking the first cucumber of the season or even hanging upside down on the monkey bars.

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A Review of Jameson's Amazing Adult Fantasy

January 12, 2021 in Press, Feature

Peter Fontaine

Originally published in The Collagist

Amazing Adult Fantasy, A D Jameson’s debut collection of fiction, asks us to think carefully, as adults, about our childhoods. Not only our childhoods, however, but the nature of fiction and fictions, the imagination, and our relationship with them as we ‘grow up’ and supposedly “put away childish things.” The epigram that starts the collection, Paul speaking to the Corinthians, is one of the many clues Jameson gives us for thinking about the book, for understanding the sometimes contradictory ideas that govern its form and his approach to familiar and even iconic characters from our youth.

Still-recognizable Figures: A Review of Jameson's Amazing Adult Fantasy

January 12, 2021 in Press, Feature

Matt Dube

Originally published at H_NGM_N

A.D. Jameson is a pretty much a monster when it comes to corrupting familiar characters, folding, spindling and mutilating existing forms, and generally bankrupting your appreciation of traditional narrative. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Mutable Author Tells All!

January 12, 2021 in Article, Interview, Feature, Press

(A D Jameson, author of Amazing Adult Fantasy, out this coming fall through Mutable, talks with us about his influences, his loves, his hates, and his secret horror. His most recent story, Korawik Wattanakul, can be found at Harp & Altar. To read his extended bio, please go here.)

What does it mean to be a writer? Who are writers? What do they do?

For me, writing’s a form of thinking. It allows me to express ideas that I couldn’t express otherwise, because my memory isn’t good enough. And because writing possesses a logic all its own. It’s a meditative activity and a form of discipline that allows me to clarify some thoughts, and muddle others.

There exist more writers than people suspect, including all those whom “real writers” usually won’t acknowledge. There’s a disturbing tendency among high lit folk to not take seriously other writing, even if they enjoy it: genre fiction, commercial television, comics, children’s books, writing by actual children, zines, journalism. Also excluded: slam poets, performance poets, conceptual artists, and many others. This is elitist, short-sighted and unfair, not to mention a huge mistake. The people who wrote G.I. Joe and Star Trek are very much so writers. They wrote all over me! They wrote me!

A Review of Boyer's Survey of My Failures This Far

January 12, 2021 in Press, Feature

D. Quentin Miller

Originally published in The Review of Contemporary Fiction

The size of this tome makes one think of Wallace’s Infinite Jest, or Stein’s The Making of Americans. Boyer’s iconoclastic style would seem to bear out these comparisons, yet the subject of this book does not pretend to the coherence of Stein’s or Wallace’s. There is no single consciousness bringing the work together, which may be part of the point: the second sentence of the book reads, “I am so many different sorts of people it makes me want to stick my fingers in your mouth.” The surreal, absurd non sequitur here is a consistent feature of a book that is, ultimately, a mystifying miscellany. A Survey of My Failures This Far is seven books in one volume. Each is markedly different in terms of genre as well as style and subject matter. “Chewing in the Land of the Bonobos” is written as absurdist drama in the manner of Beckett; “Shorthand with Periodic Tenderness” is a collection of poems reminiscent of Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues. Boyer’s experimental impulse occasionally yields nuggets of philosophical wisdom or narratological insight, but a large part of the appeal of this work is musical and imagistic. Much of it operates according to the logic of nonsense: even individual sentences plunge us down into a new rabbit hole. In the central book within the book, “The God Game,” Boyer gives us some sense of his method in the form of a playful instruction manual about creation itself: “[W]e are using words in a manner similar to their original meaning, while simultaneously giving a new twist for our purposes. This level of involvement is post-culture creation, or rather simultaneous with culture creation.” Got that? This is Barthian postmodernism on crack, or one man’s insistence that printed narrative may not be exhausted, but it can be exhausting.

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From within the Animal Hospital (2)

January 12, 2021 in Article, Interview, Feature, Press

2 of 2

(Below is the second of a two-part conversation we had with Animal Hospital concerning what he [Kevin Micka] has been doing with himself these days, in the distant past, and the elusive future, discussing both his signature sound, and the pivotal part that all variety of metal, from boxes and genres to genres of boxes and boxes of genres, has played on that aforementioned signature sound of his, as well as many other topics of interest. Please do not be alarmed at the shocking content of this interview. Trained professionals were at the ready, as will you be, for this is Animal Hospital as you have never seen him before.)

GABRIEL BOYER: Well, I’m thinking that there’s these two memories, right?

ANIMAL HOSPITAL: Yeah.

GB: You put them together do they? Do they STAY as those memories, but in but in relation to each other, or do they become a brand new thing, or?

AH: Again, I think it was more more like uh an emotion more than a specific, this makes me think of this specific moment.

GB: So, you’re saying at that time you were going through a specific emotion.

AH: Yeah.

GB: You were like swimming through it.

AH: Yeah, I was just trying to get through this.

From within the Animal Hospital (1)

January 12, 2021 in Article, Interview, Feature, Press

1 of 2

(Below is the first of a two-part conversation we had with Animal Hospital concerning what he [Kevin Micka] has been doing, what he will do, what he sounds like, metal, and other topics of interest. Please do not be alarmed at the shocking content of this interview. Trained professionals were at the ready, as will you be, for this is Animal Hospital as you have never seen him before.)

GABRIEL BOYER: So there was was was was. What made you decide to start start Animal Hospital?

ANIMAL HOSPITAL: Um. The girl’s dating at the time. We wanted. We were planning a trip. Um. To go to a comic convention and go visit her family.

GB: Mhm.

AH: So we were planning on going to San Diego and Santa Fe.

GB: Mhm.

AH: Um. So. [Clears throat.] Thought I would try to come up with something to do on the tour. On the trip. To play some shows and help pay for some gas.

GB: Mhm.

AH: See some friends and stuff on the way.

GB: Mhm.

AH: So I um. Started booking some shows.

GB: Mhm.

AH: Before I had like a real plan of what I was going to do.

GB: [Enthusiastically] Mhm.

Interview with Dominique de Varine

Interview with Joshua Hiram Banks

Interview with Mike Sauve

This Alienated Hero: A Review of Gabriel Chad Boyer's Welcome to Weltschmerz

Matt Ampleman

Lina Ramona Vitkauskas on Spiny Retinas!

Trinity: A Review of Colin Winnette's Revelation

herocious

Amazing Adult Fantasy

Paul Kincaid

Amazing Adult Fantasy by A D Jameson

Jonah Vorspan-Stein

Two Things Struck Me: A Review of Jameson's Amazing Adult Fantasy

Jeff Bursey

Interview of Colin Winnette in The The

The End of the World: A Review of Colin Winnette's Revelation

Steve Himmer

Amazing Adult Fantasy by A D Jameson

Jess Stoner

Interview of Colin Winnette in Monkey Bicycle

New Mutable Author Explains Spiny Retinas!

Paperback Book
8" x 5.25"
60 Pages
$12.00
Now Available

A Review of Jameson's Amazing Adult Fantasy

Peter Fontaine

Still-recognizable Figures: A Review of Jameson's Amazing Adult Fantasy

Matt Dube

Mutable Author Tells All!

A Review of Boyer's Survey of My Failures This Far

D. Quentin Miller

Paperback Book
9" x 6"
952 Pages
$12.00
Now Available

From within the Animal Hospital (2)

From within the Animal Hospital (1)

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Enjoymutable.com is the website of Mutable, a loose conglomeration of artists making books, music and other products, as well as sharing their ideas on the web and in the world. You can read more about us here.

Matt Ampleman

herocious

Paul Kincaid

Jonah Vorspan-Stein

Jeff Bursey

Steve Himmer

Jess Stoner

Paperback Book8" x 5.25"60 Pages$12.00Now Available

Peter Fontaine

Matt Dube

D. Quentin Miller

Paperback Book9" x 6"952 Pages$12.00Now Available

Paperback Book
8" x 5.25"
60 Pages
$12.00
Now Available

Paperback Book
9" x 6"
952 Pages
$12.00
Now Available