Hotel St. George - The Atrium
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At long last, the Hotel has compiled and prepared for your esteemed pleasure a lovely assortment of literary and artistic curios to usher in the new season.  This latest series of dispatches features the usual exotic tomfoolery you’ve come to expect from us, but with a delightfully freakish edge.  Think mutant love, experimental organ transplants, Francophilliac absurdism. (If this does not immediately appeal to you, there is a specialist in Zurich we can recommend.)

Our menu includes:

• A selection of plates from ’s ingenious Novels in Three Lines, a pictorial appropriation of the Felix Feneon classic;

• a deliciously bizarre love story from one of the Hotel’s favorite recurring guests, Janice Clark;

• and an intriguing proposal from one Dr. Ihrwir von Derdidas concerning troglodytes;

among other treats in our READING LIBRARY.

For those who like to stay current on the world of nerdily whimsical miscellany, feel free to check out our recent blog posts, where we discuss such things as the short films Guy Madden, the indelible fiction of Paul LaFarge, the lost tradition of Victorian collage, and quite a bit more in our ECHO CHAMBER.

Come on in—you’ll be glad you did.

—Hotel Staff

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February 15th, 2010

NEW FABULISM

“Of all narrative forms, fabulation puts the highest premium on art and joy.” —Robert Scholes At long last, we have officially begun the NEW FABULISM PROJECT, a new kind of book that hopes to celebrate a long-neglected literary tradition. What the hell is Fabulism? “Fabulation” was popularized in the late 60s by Brown University critic, Robert Scholes, to describe literature that vaguely resembled magical realism but was neither magical enough nor realistic enough to fit the bill. He was speaking primarily of Iris Murdoch, John Hawkes and John Barth, but may as well have included Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino and Robert Coover.  These authors wrote in a highly literary fashion, proceeding studiously from various classical traditions only to violate them by tampering with their formal expectations. Alain Robbe-Grillet, for instance, wrote love stories using his detached narrative voice as sort of movie camera, collapsing all analysis and digression to a single roving voyeuristic gaze.  Georges Perec composed long, meandering essays on subjects so elementary they became de facto prose-poems by virtue of their departure from the given.  Milorad Pavic drafted assiduously detailed encyclopedias for tribes that ..read more

November 13th, 2009

RENOVATIONS COMPLETE!

As many of you know, the Hotel has been under renovation for months now.  In that time, we’ve reconfigured the whole online interface in an effort to make the site more user-friendly, a little more accessible, easier to navigate, etc.  You’ll notice we’ve added a blog, known as the ECHO CHAMBER, excerpts of which are featured in the ATRIUM.  The blog functions as an open forum for matters pertaining to books, culture and in general things that strike us as worthy of curiosity. We’ve also restaffed.  Two extraordinary new editors,  Dan Visel, from the Institute for the Future of the Book, and Dan Piepenbring, from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, have become keepers of the Hotel, much to our delight.  In addition to mining the world for interesting writers, artists, musicians, filmmakers and other potential guests of HSG, they will be contributing regular articles and blog posts of their own.  Feel free to check them out here. While you’re there, you may as well wander around a bit.  Click the links at the bottom of the page.  View some films, listen to some music, ..read more

We are thrilled to report that Ben Greenman’s Correspondences has officially been picked up for paperback reissue by Harper-Perennial.  Senior editor Cal Morgan happened to come across a copy of our strange, letterpress object in a bookstore in LA and immediately got in touch with us.  Cal is on the side of good—one of the very few remaining editors to take a serious interest in both short fiction and innovative book design.  We soon worked out the acquisition details and began moving forward into production.  HSG was hired to design the cover and the interior of the paperback edition, which contains several additional stories and has been retitled, What He’s Poised to Do.  Hats off to Mr. Greenman!

June 30th, 2009

Boing Boing

Earlier this Spring, the popular blog, Boing Boing, put together a lovely feature about our books and website, which can be read here. On the day of the posting, our web traffic increased by something like 400%, which should tell you something about both of us. Our book sales also skyrocketted–a relative term, to be sure–and as a result, we are now nearly out of stock for Correspondences. (See below for more info.) Among other nice things, Boing Boing wrote: “Their website is stunning, one of the more impressively-designed sites I’ve seen. And their print publishing efforts are truly unique, infused with wonder and playful, brainy ideas for presenting and telling stories.” Thanks, Boing Boing!

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The story of Virginia and Grace Kennedy, discussed in Dan Visel’s last post, is truly fascinating and I wish the complete film were available on DVD.  I’ve since learned that “idioglossia,” the technical term for a naturally occurring invented language shared by an extremely small community, is not all that uncommon: up to 40% of twins develop a kind of “private language” in their first few years, only to abandon it as they mature.  The theory is that as the siblings acquire the language of their parents, they mimic one another’s vocalizations—often incorrectly—and the resulting sounds (which appear nonsensical to everyone else) eventually develop into a grammatically and lexically consistent language of its own.  I brought this up with my cousin, a linguist who studies deaf autistic children, and he cited a few cases where kids had been completely ignored by their parents, and yet had managed to acquire a crude, garbled version of their native tongue simply by watching television.  In fact, there are whole cultures where young people are not addressed or spoken to at all because they aren’t ..read more

Jean-Pierre Gorin’s rarely-seen film Poto and Cabengo just played in New York as part of the Migrating Forms festival. It’s a shame that this isn’t available on DVD, as it’s an absolutely fascinating documentary. Some enterprising soul has made the first six minutes on YouTube, which gives a good idea of the flavor of the movie: Virginia and Grace Kennedy were twin girls born in 1970 who suffered seizures shortly after their birth and who were raised as if they were mentally disabled. They attracted attention as they grew up: while it’s common for twins to speak exclusively to each other for a period, and thus to take longer to come to speak normally, Virginia and Grace appeared to have their own private language which was incomprehensible to anyone else. A flurry of newspaper reports made them into minor celebrities. In 1978, the French documentarian Jean-Pierre Gorin, who’d been one of Godard’s collaborators, traveled to their San Diego home in an attempt to try to understand what the twins were saying. The film is idiosyncratic but strange and haunting: (Gorin frequently ..read more

Guy Maddin’s latest film for the National Film Board of Canada, Night Mayor, might well appeal to the Hotel St. George audience. Ostensibly the story of a Bosnian immigrant to Winnipeg’s attempt to create energy from the aurora borealis, as with all of Maddin’s films it’s hard to know how much to believe: I’ve written about Guy Maddin before. A few of his short films can be found on YouTube – I recommend The Heart of the World; or, see his video for Sparklehorse’s “It’s a Wonderful Life”. And he’s also made a couple of books, well worth picking up, for Toronto’s Coach House Books.

I. PANK Magazine has just launched its March 2010 issue, featuring several short pieces of mine. These are situated somewhere along the continuum of “flash fiction,” “microfiction,” “short-shorts,” and “prose poems”–all the ambiguous appellations of a booming sub-genre. Many an essay promotes or derides this form’s new-found popularity, and I can’t quite say how I feel about its ascendancy. Of course, my mixed feelings have done nothing to stop me from writing in it. What say ye, readers? Is the sudden preponderance of unusually brief fiction a blessing, a curse, or merely an annoyance? (PANK is also in the excellent habit of interviewing all its authors on its blog, so you can expect a bewildering Q&A with yours truly in weeks to come.) *** II. Though he’s too shy to say it, HSG’s Alex Rose has an essay on directors’ cuts, “Auteurs Gone Wild,” in the latest issue of The American Scholar. Click here to read it. Just kidding. It’s only in print. Go out and buy it. -Dan Piepenbring

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