Is SHE Available: Defying the Physics of e books

Igor Goldkind’s genre busting book Is SHE Available: Tales of Sedition and SUBVERSION released by Chameleon Publishing, challenges the typical boundaries of literature, maybe even space and time. The book uses graphic art, poetry, spoken word, music and animation to create an immersive, multimedia experience. Having worked with Igor at Titan Books, UK, I’ve seen his innovative instincts before when, for example, he took the term “Graphic Novel” (with permission from Will Eisner) and propagated the phrase around the world without the help of the Internet. So I listened to his description of his book with growing curiosity. A book that incorporates art, music, poetry and motion? Igor Goldkind defying convention didn’t surprise me, it’s sort of his M.O. After graduating from San Diego University with a degree in Philosophy, Igor worked as a political journalist in Paris, studying with the French post structuralist Michel Foucault and graduating with a certificate from the Sorbonne. He’d always been an iconoclast.

What did surprise me when I opened the book was that he would defy the physics of e books.

Is SHE Available is driven by Igor’s poetry. His voice moves the reader through pages which come alive. After a splash of graphic art, I was immersed in color, light and movement. Type treatments swirled, letters flew away, a wind blew past, there were demons, bombs, Mother Mary with a machine gun, lost loves and odes to the dead. Igor’s spoken word performance forms the bass note, twining and intertwining with jazz musician Gilad’s fusion solos on saxophone and guitar. Is SHE Available is a luminous, moody creation, sometimes strange, often raw and philosophically biting. Both Igor and his co-creator Gilad, compose in similar ways, with prominent meter, distinctive tones and syncopated rhythm, in a dizzying explosion of ideas. The illustrations are cutting and provocative.

The craftsmanship of the book is remarkable. Publisher Chameleon Editions created a stunning book, proving that the new bar for e books is quality. Written by Igor Goldkind, designed by Ryan Hughes, composed by jazz musician Gilad Atzmon (BBC Jazz Album of the Year) and illustrated by artists include Bill Sienkiewicz (cover and interior illustrations), Shaky Kane, Liam Sharp, Glen Fabry, and many others, including Mario Torero and noted Costa Rican artist Margarita Zuñiga (Igor’s mother).

In the press release for the book, Amy Sterling Casil of Chameleon Publishers says, “I can honestly say, this is like no other book we have ever seen before; we think perhaps – like no other you may have seen as well.” And I agree. If you have ever wondered what EPUB technology is capable of, Is SHE Available is a singing, moving glimpse of the future.

AE— You worked as a worked as a political journalist in Paris.  How did that experience affect your writing?

IG—It affected everything really; everything I knew to be true. I was observing and reporting the politics of Europe from the streets of Paris;  living and working for 5 years  there as a radio journalist back in  the mid 80’s, while Mitterrand and the  Socialists were in power.  It was an exciting time to be there because accompanying the pervading progressive politic, the arts were thriving. Not just legacy stuff,  but new approaches, new movements were flourishing.

It was great.  I paid half my income in tax but everything worth doing in public was free: museums, films, art exhibitions, performance theatre.  Each neighbourhood  arrondissement had its own street party paid for by taxes.  Artists, local bands, poets, clowns etc paid a meager sum, but employed by taxpayer money to perform for their local community.  And local communities thrived, because the arts were celebrated in local communities.

It felt to me then and there that the most effective political thing a person could do was to do something creative that connected you with others: if politics starts with the person standing next to you, then show or tell them something that matters. And of course this idea that the arts are core to the health of a culture and a community, that they are worth something as a representation of what was for the public good, of what was good for everybody.  This was my first hand experience as a young American ex pat writer in Paris.

IG—Why do I need to pose a  question to myself? Does Intent, human or otherwise, create the universe?

AE— The subtitle of your book is Tales of Sedition and Subversion. What role do those concepts play in art?

Art is subversive, or it is not Art.   Tales of Sedition and Subversion is actually the title for my Blog at Igorgoldkind.com,  but it doesn’t matter because any artist attempts to subvert everything they’ve known or seen before; if they’re trying to do something new.  Or even trying something old.   Subversion is also the subversion of the form.

It’s kind of  like scientists who are always testing and retesting established conventions; just in case.  Just in case something’s not quite right. Something, perhaps seemingly quite insignificant, happens slightly differently than we thought it would.

What we think to be True  must be constantly tested, just to make sure it’s still true.  It’s a  survival instinct.  That’s the difference between a rational methodology and a faith-based ideology:  science and religion.  And that’s exactly what artists are doing when they are making good art: not religion, but science.

And there is such a thing as Bad Art btw,  just as there is Bad Science.

IG—LOL!  That was a joke and a self-effacing one at that.  Shatner was a notoriously bad at spoken word  (The Impossible Dream?!?  Come on…) and I wanted to compare myself to him in the hopes of  sounding only marginally better.  Also, ‘William Shatner’ gets a lot of key word views and I may just be able to boost my juice on his coat tails.  Isn’t that what it’s all about  these days? I would love to be asked to do a credit card commercial—Bill Hicks-style.   “If you’re a futures trader or a banker, do the world a favor and go home and kill yourself etc.”

AE— You write very passionately about poetry on your blog. What do you think poetry should accomplish?

IG—To  better understand what the word accomplishment is, both as meaning and in ‘accomplishment.’ Poetry is the sound our thoughts make whilst escaping on the wind. I like saying that aloud because it sounds nice spoken and demonstrates the meaning of the phrase.  The cut lisp on ‘whilst’.  Go on, try saying it aloud to yourself now or to whomever is in your room: Poetry is the sound our thoughts make whilst escaping on the wind.

Poetry as an art-form, reveals the intent that motivates our senses to perceive the world and ourselves in it. As I say in my intro in IS SHE AVAILABLE? Afterwards:  Poetry is a door that opens into yourself and that leads out of your self.

Poetry are the sounds we make before we are taught to pray.

Or a quick hook-up with the great goddess Eternity who inevitably smothers us in her impassioned embrace we so smilingly welcome into our last grateful  gasps.

IG—This right here,  is my writing process. It starts with every word one could write.  I’m always checking: ‘what do I mean?’, ‘is this the clearest, most accurate way to say this?’, ‘do these words mean what they say?’  ‘say what they mean?’

Writing is the mechanism, the mastery of an instrument which always takes the practice it takes. But the words are just the vehicle to convey what is being expressed and there are many states of mind, many experiences to account for.  What I am interested in in my writing, is not so much recounting, as recreating a direct transmission from the writing/ realization of the words to the reading/hearing realization of the words.  My words are mindful not to entertain or as an escape from the reader’s immediate  reality,  as much as a return to it, a direct confrontation with that reality.  I paint signifiers that point towards, not away from, a  perception of the reality I am expressing.

Expressionist, I guess is one way of categorizing my approach.

My poems and short stories come from events or moments of realization about something or someone at any point in my day or middle-of-the-night. The novel I’m half way through writing, PLAGUE, is being assembled on several large mental black boards I keep in stacked rows in my mental attic. Occasionally I go up there and transcribe what I’ve stored in my attic to long hand or to word processor.  Then the rewriting happens, but in a different state of mind than that of the original transcriber.  My initial hand need not be coherent or make sense, it just transcribes, like Thoth the Ibis-headed Egyptian god who accounted for the souls of the underworld on his endless papyrus scroll.

But the rewriting is what extracts and abstracts structure from the chaos.

AE—What writers influenced you and why?

IG—When I was 13 or 14 years old and involved with the San Diego Comic Con when it was still at the old El Cortez Hotel, I approached Ray Bradbury who was wearing an ice cream suit standing by the pool between panels.  He was unusually on his own and I mustered all my teenage bravado to walked up to him to ask:  “Mr. Bradbury, I’ve read all of your books and I love them.  How can I be a writer like you?”

And sure enough, almost like in one of his own stories as re-versioned by Spielberg, Ray Bradbury sat down with me on the edge some pool side  lounge chairs on a bright San Diego day  and said, ”Well the first thing is that you should start calling yourself a re-writer, not a writer, because that’s what you’re mainly going to be doing.”

That’s a true story and obviously a huge influence.

Shortly afterwards, Shel Dorf and Barry Alphonso took me to Harlan Ellison’s house in LA to meet him and again, someone who’s words I had revered in the intimacy of my bedroom head was actually a live, flesh and blood adult who did it for a living.

I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream is truly the most horrifying SF story I have ever read back when it was written and even today. The ability for a short narrative to resonate so loudly over time that the feeling is still with me today is an example of the kind of enduring penetration I aspire to. And Theodore Sturgeon, whom I escorted during one Comic Con and took a Obi Wan Kanowbi-like-liking to me.

Then writers that I hadn’t met:  Milan Kundera, Sam Becket, Dashiell Hammett, Albert Camus, Jack Kerouac, Raymond Carver, Charles Bukowski, Robert Crumb, Jean Genet, Yukio Mishima,  Sylvia Plath, Rimbaud, Nerval, Mallarme, Baudelaire, the great Edgar Allen Poe, Guy Maupassant, Rod Serling & George Clayton Johnson (just for the Twilight Zone), Philip K. Dick, Antonin Artaud, Roland Barthes, Fred Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger . . . the list goes on as I’m really influenced by everyone I read.

AE—George RR Martin said that when it comes to writing, there are two types of writers; architects and gardeners. The architects design with a blue print, the gardener plants a seed and sees what grows. Which one are you?

IG—I’m the gardener who claims a patch of meadow brimming with bright blooming wild flowers to be his own intention all along.

It’s  the discovery  that’s at the heart of creation. In Poetry it is the discovery of the beauty of meaning in words that we have always used and will be used, long after us. Throughout the history of our species,  in very golden era of our civilizations,  people have enjoyed and celebrated their poetry.  We’ve  used pictures, stories, dances, and chants as healing rituals.

To keep us healthy, to keep us whole within ourselves. Until just lately, that is.

It is more than a meaningful  coincidence that at this time, at this pinnacle of  mass- manufactured consumption,  Poetry as an art form, is the second least popular art that people spend money on in America today. Only Opera is less popular than Poetry in modern America.

More than architects and gardeners, we need healers; nurses and doctors of the soul.   That’s what artists and poets, are; we’re the shamans of the post industrial primitivism:

Our tools have grown so huge, so efficient, so monumentally complex that we’ve grown dependencies on things we don’t even understand, much less have ready access to.

Authors  beside myself,  describe the use of poetry to help people find their voice and gain access to the wisdom they already have but cannot experience because they cannot find the words in ordinary language. Our voices are saturated with who we are as individuals, embodying  the rhythms, tonal variances, imagined associations, images and other sensory metaphors that adhere to the meaning of the words. We  all really do  long to find words, both written and spoken that are the sound of another human voice, if only  to remind  us that we are not alone in this vast cave of howling winds.

We need a place to turn to when all else of value is commercialized beyond relevance; and when religions just take our money and corrupt our children.

There is no trade or career of Poetry; it is a calling:  a necessity to express that which is churning inside of all of us, that falling tree that will not be silenced.  That which will always seek escape from confinement; that  which will never acquiesce and remains always uniquely and purely human.

Am I channeling William Shatner again?

Poems are a way to talk to a side of ourselves we cannot talk to and a way to take pictures of things that we cannot take pictures of. But like a picture, it also holds moments in time. It works in the space between words, where connections are made, meaning is formed and the poem is ultimately owned by the reader.

Have I said enough?

The official Publication date of Is SHE Available: Tales of Sedition and SUBVERSION released by Chameleon Publishing is June 15th, 2015.