What’s up Shabby Dolls,
How are you? It is almost the end of May already, and I am reading everyone’s work for the next meeting of our Spring/Summer Writing Club, which feels like an interesting break from reading and rereading the three books Shabby Doll House is going to publish in a few months time. I have been editing for hours every day lately, which I feel very happy about. We’re planning to announce the books very soon so… prepare yourself.
I also did a half-marathon on Sunday. It was in a town called El Puerto de Santa Maria, between Cádiz and Jerez de la Frontera.
It was very hot and windy and I accidentally left my watch at the hotel, so I did not get the personal best I had hoped for, but I did have a very nice time. It’s amazing how a half-marathon is only half of a marathon, so in that context it feels very easy.
On Saturday, we checked into the hotel at 5:57pm, went up to the room and I immediately opened my laptop and logged into the Zoom meeting for Charlene Elsby’s lecture on “Existence as Horror and the Human Monster” which started at 6.
(If you’re a paid subscriber to Zona Motel, you can watch the recording. Or in fact any of the previous recordings. There have been twelve different talks now. I did one last summer about the Hungarian literary magazine, Nyugat, so that’s something you can enjoy if you have a spare $7.)
After that, we went out to find some food. There had been a lot of noise in the distance throughout the lecture, which suggested some kind of sporting event. I assumed some local football seeing as it was the last weekend of the season. As we stepped out and got closer to the noise - loud music, excited announcements - we realised it was coming from a bullring. Oh no!
But don’t worry, it wasn’t a bull fight. It was the… Euro Beach Soccer League! An international tournament of 5-a-side beach football… in a bullring. And it was free. We walked in through a tunnel lined by cow’s heads and out into the little colosseum and watched Spain play Belarus.
I know what you’re thinking. It does seem unfair given that Belarus is landlocked. But on the other hand, I was surprised they’re even allowed to compete in an international tournament. This was my first time experiencing 'beach soccer’ in an official capacity, and it reminded me of going to see 3x3 basketball during the Olympics. There’s a DJ shouting about the game and playing short samples of super loud pop songs while they play, and the clock is on a countdown towards zero. It was fun because a lot of people in the crowd were wearing Spain shirts and waving flags, and it felt like a practice for the World Cup.
I was already filming for their reaction when the clock reached 0:00 and they would have won 5-4, but then they scored again in the last seconds, so… Vamos y viva España.
An amazing thing to simply stumble upon. I felt bad for the Belarusian players a few moments later when I saw them sadly walking around Mercadona in full kit. (We needed bananas for our pre-race breakfast, I don’t know what they were buying.) But I actually think they should feel proud of themselves considering they don’t even have a beach.
After the unexpected international sporting event, we still wanted to eat, and we were thinking specifically of pizza. When I say we, I’m referring to Oscar d'Artois, one of the fastest poets in long-distance running. He had found a pizzeria on Google maps that looked promising and so we started walking in its direction. El Puerto de Santa Maria, a town we had visited once before eight years ago, felt much more pleasant than we remembered. So many people out, eating and drinking, children playing, beach soccer players from various countries wandering around, and presumably we were surrounded by other people preparing to run the half-marathon in the morning. En route to the pizza place, we passed another pizza place that we had both also noticed on google maps but dismissed.
Wait a minute!
The vibes at this place… They were exquisite! The whole restaurant consisted of a kitchen behind a large wooden door and a bunch of white plastic tables on a side street. It was called Pizza de Gerry.
We continued walking to our original destination, just to check, but we knew in our hearts that we would soon be back at Gerry’s. The other place was just like a normal restaurant.
At Gerry’s the pizza was served on a round piece of cardboard, and their drinks menu consisted of Cruzcampo by the can. Do you ever get this feeling when you wander into a place and it’s like everything has just lined up for you and the ambience matches exactly how you feel? Across the street, there was a fancy seafood restaurant with a classic art deco design called Los Portales, and I loved sitting at Pizza de Gerry and watching well-dressed people arrive and disappear into it.
Anyway, I wasn’t planning on telling you about any of that, I was just enjoying writing. I haven’t been doing much of it lately.
What I really wanted to do is tell you about some of my favourite pieces we’ve published at Zona Motel recently. If you don’t already know this, Zona Motel is an online magazine covering independent literature. I’m the managing editor. You should subscribe, if you don’t already.
I really loved reading this report about attending a Jack Kerouac Festival in a typewriter museum:
I’m antsy. It’s the last week of my twenties. Did I say that? No, I said I need to be alone, but that’s not quite right. It’s the last week of my twenties and my high school friends are at Coachella and I feel like I haven’t had an original thought in weeks. I need a mental laxative. Maybe Jack has something to tell me. Maybe I’ll type or talk to strangers, remember who I am and where I’ve been and that it’s ok wherever I’m going.
I loved editing an essay about quitting smoking twice by one of my good friends, the author of SALMON (Shabby Doll House, 2023). It felt really fun to work together again.
we’re chatting about this and that—nonsense sometimes, though other times conversations of grave seriousness, conversations that must be had among the best of friends, for one could not hold that designation if you can’t yammer from gossip to philosophy and back again in a single breath—
ESSAY: Cheerfulness, Titillation, Melancholy and Anguish by Sebastian Castillo
I am really happy we could publish this dispatch about the launch of an anthology from Working Girls Press.
Sometimes, when I read my own writing about sex work in rooms unlike this one, I notice that people seem afraid to laugh, perhaps worried they’ll be perceived as laughing at me. But here, the audience knows that when Sage says “I learned to be a successful escort by first being a wife” that she’s inviting us to laugh with her.
DISPATCH: I Hate My Job Anthology, New York by Anna Eastman
I am obsessed with this series of magical essays that make up an imaginary course syllabus. Definitely one of my favourite things we have ever published. Edited by the great Mesha Maren. The line between fiction and nonfiction is extremely blurry. I find it so pleasurable to read and I think it’s so funny on a line-by-line basis.
Before we get going there are, as usual, a few arcanities. Last semester you were all good sports about winding your way through the abandoned, off-campus building where our class was held, and the semester before that you all played nicely despite the peculiar conditions of the class, which involved the library stacks and, of course, the boiler room.
We should not speak again of the shimmering room.
ESSAY: Spring Term by Nicholas Rombes
Another one I had the pleasure of editing. As I said to Yvonne in a message the other day, ‘I love experiencing events in California through your brain!’
I found out about the reading from my friend Justin, a translator of Brazilian poetry who was there to be “in conversation” with Ricardo and his translator, Chris Daniels. Then, two days before the event, my friend Lucy had messaged me the flyer, saying she became friends with Ricardo around ten years ago, back when she lived in Berlin. When previously invisible lines of community reveal themselves like that, you’d be stupid to ignore them.
First Epistle to the Amphibians by Yvonne Lin
And okay, I know this is way too many links, but I’m enthusiastic. I also helped to edit this conversation between Oscar d’Artois and Dennis Cooper on the occasion of the reissue of Closer (1989) which is republished in the US today. I found this exchange really amusing:
OD: You have this character that I feel kind of recurs in other books, such as The Marbled Swarm. You have similar iterations of this pervy old French man. I’m wondering where he comes from?
DC: French literature. It probably comes from extrapolating a kind of character out of that. I was obsessed with French literature. So, Sade, Genet, Bataille. There’s a kind of pervy gay intellectual guy thing that’s very specifically French. I wanted to work with that, because that’s how I learned so many things, from that kind of voice. So, placing that stuff inside a French character who’s a little pretentious was both strategically useful, and I thought it was funny.
Dennis Cooper on Closer, Confusion and Fantasy by Oscar d'Artois
You’re right, it’s time for me to get back to actually editing.
But isn’t it cool that we can publish such a variation of strange and interesting work?!
If you are going to be in London on June 11th, come and hang out!
I will write to you again soon about the BOOKS.
Thank you for reading,
Lucy
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