Tether 4 Contributors

 
W. C. Bamberger has translated works by Gershom Scholem, Louis Levy, Paul Scheerbart, and other German writers. One of his Scheerbart translations will be included in Vintage’s forthcoming Big Big Book of Classic Fantasy. His most recently published translation is Hashish, by Oscar A. H. Schmitz (Wakefield Press), a collection of interconnected stories featuring eroticism, Satanism, sadism, necrophilia and more.

Jonathan Becker was a research assistant at the Center for Translation Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas from 2015 to 2018. In 2017, he earned his MA from UT Dallas with a translation of contemporary German author Marcel Beyer. He currently lives in Berlin.

Otis Burger was born on November 9, 1923, in the Staten Island Hospital on Staten Island. As a child, she developed a fascination for the natural world and would sometimes skip classes to roam about the woods located behind the school. She later studied zoology to learn how to accurately re-create the physical proportions of the animals. Her her work was sold in department stores such as de Pinna, Lord & Taylor, and Best, among others, and can be found in the collection of the American Folk Art Museum in New York.

John Reid Currie was a writer in residence at the Louis Armstrong Archives and Museum. His poetry is featured in Greenwich Village: a Primo Guide to Shopping, Eating, and Making Merry in True Bohemia published by St. Martins, Griffin and in the journal Newtown Literary. His chapbook OTHERS, was published by Ghostbird Press in 2015 (ghostbirdpress.org).

Mark Ford’s fourth collection of poetry, Enter, Fleeing has just been published. He is also the author of Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams (2000).

Salomo Friedlaender (1871–1946) used the pen name Mynona—the German word for “anonymous” spelled backward. Friedlaender/Mynona was best known as the author of several collections of grotesque and fantastic fictions. Those available in English include The Creator (novel), My Papa and the Maid of Orléans, and The Unruly Bridal Bed (both collections of short grotesques). F/M was also a poet, satirist, and philosopher. “Creative indifference,” mentioned in passing in this selection, is a term from Friedlaender’s philosophy, one which refers to a desirable state to be found at the center or balance point of conflicting ideas, a place between extremes, where all opposites are balanced out, and from which true creativity can emerge.

Elliott Green makes paintings and short films in Athens, NY, a river town in the Hudson Valley. He has upcoming one-person shows planned at Pierogi in New York City and Hill Gallery in Birmingham, Michigan, where he grew up. He was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 1993, received two Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grants, and the 2011–12 Rome Prize Fellowship.

Paul Grimstad’s writing has appeared in print and online in Bookforum, London Review of Books, n+1, New Yorker, Paris Review, Times Literary Supplement, and other journals and magazines. He has taught literature and philosophy at NYU, Yale, and Columbia University.

Durs Grünbein is considered one of the most innovative and prominent poets of post-reunification Germany. Born in Dresden and having lived in Berlin since 1987, the New York Times noted that “Grünbein’s poems read as if the forces of history pressing in on the present drove them into this world.” His poems and essays have been translated into English by Michael Eskin and Michael Hofmann, among others.

Kreg Hasegawa is the author of two chapbooks: The New Crustacean (2006) and 3 Tales (2018). He is the editor of the press Smoke Specs. He lives in Seattle and works as a dutiful public librarian.

Erik LaPrade has a BA and MA from City College. His latest book, Neglected Powers, was published by Last Word Press in Olympia, Wash. 2017. His writing has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, ARTCritical, Tether #3, and Outlaw Bible of American Art (edited by Alan Kaufman).

Diana MacKown is a professional photographer who graduated from the Yale School of Art and Architecture in 1960. She lived and worked with Louise Nevelson for twenty-nine years, until Nevelson’s death. MacKown’s book Dawns and Dusks records conversations she had with Nevelson.

Joseph Gordon Macleod (1903–1984) had his first book of poems, The Ecliptic, published in 1930, when it was recognized as a major addition to English Modernism (at least by the happy few). It was republished by Flood Editions in 2016.

Paul Maziar is a writer and small-press editor. His full-length poetry collection is titled Opening Night (BlazeVOX, 2019), and his art writings can be read at Oregon ArtsWatch, artcritical, Whitehot Magazine, Los Angeles Review of Books, and rrealism.com.

Francis M. Naumann is an independent curator, and art dealer, specializing in the art of the Dada and Surrealist periods. He is the author of numerous articles and exhibition catalogues, including New York Dada 1915–25 (Harry N. Abrams, 1994), considered to be the definitive history of the movement, and Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Making Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Harry N. Abrams, 1999). In 1996, he organized Making Mischief: Dada Invades New York for the Whitney Museum of American Art, in 1997, Beatrice Wood: A Centennial Tribute for the American Craft Museum in New York, and, in 2003, he curated Conversion to Modernism: The Early Work of Man Ray for the Montclair Art Museum. His most recent book is a collection of his essays on Marcel Duchamp: The Recurrent, Haunting Ghost: Essays on the Art, Life and Legacy of Marcel Duchamp (Readymade Press 2012), and MENTORS: The Making of an Art Historian will be published by DoppelHouse Press in 2019. He lives with his wife and family in Northern Westchester, and operates his own gallery on West 57th Street in New York City.

Raymond Roussel (1877–1933) is best known for his two novels, Impressions d’Afrique (1910) and Locus Solus (1914). The present extracts from Locus Solus, together with a translation of an unfinished novel entitled L’Allee aux lucioles will form part of a Roussel volume forthcoming from The Song Cave. Ford’s exemplary translation of Roussel’s New Impressions of Africa is still available from Princeton University Press.

Barry Schwabsky is art critic for The Nation. His recent books are Heretics of Language (Black Square, 2018), The Perpetual Guest: Art in the Unfinished Present (Verso, 2016), and a collection of poetry, Trembling Hand Equilibrium (Black Square, 2015). Special thanks to Pieranna Cavalchini and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston for a residency that made this essay possible.

Erica Van Horn, writer, artist, and bookmaker, was born in New Hampshire, and for the past twenty years has lived in Tipperary, Ireland. A compendium of her visual work is available as The Book Remembers Everything by Nancy Kuhl, a catalogue for her exhibition at the Beinecke Library at Yale. Her journal (2007–2012) Living Locally was published by Uniformbooks in 2014. The texts published here are taken from the book Too Raucous for a Chorus which contains 32 texts, with drawings throughout by Laurie Clark, and will be available in December 2018. Many of her other works, most recently Em & Me 2018, can be found at Coracle: coracle.ie.

Paula Wilson is a multidisciplinary artist whose work is included in the collections of the Studio Museum Harlem, Yale University Art Gallery, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, and Saatchi Gallery, among others. She holds an MFA from Columbia University and co-runs the artist-founded organizations MoMAZoZo and the Carrizozo Artist in Residency. She lives in Carrizozo, New Mexico.
John Yau, who seldom wears hats, wears many hats. His recent publications include a book of poetry, Bijoux in the Dark (Letter Machine Editions, 2018), monographs on Thomas Nozkowski (Lund Humphries, 2017) and Philip Taaffe (2018), and a selection of reviews, The Wild Children of William Blake (Autonomedia, 2017). In 2018, he received the Jackson Prize from Poets & Writers. The beekeeper’s uniform is a product of Emergency Eyewash (emergencyeyewash.org), a conceptual label for collaborations between Barry Schwabsky and Carol Szymanski, and others—in this case between Szymanski, John Yau, and the Norwegian menswear designer Siv Støldal. It was first exhibited at the Tanja Grunert Gallery, New York, in 2017. The garment and the individual patches can be ordered via studio. szymanski@gmail.com