I Am Not Jackson Pollock: Stories

by John Haskell

Overview

A bewitching collection of short fiction—haunting and hypnotic meditations on art, movies, literature, and life. In "Dream of a Clean Slate," Jackson Pollock the man struggles with the separation he feels from Jackson Pollock the artist; "The Judgement of Psycho," probes the sexual dynamic of Janet Leigh and Anthony Perkins in Psycho, and then delves into the relationship between Hector and Paris in the Iliad; and Orson Welles presides over "Crimes at Midnight," a tense evocation of desire and its consequences. A series of myths for modern times, this is an astonishing debut.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780312421861
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	04/01/2004
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.44(d)

About the Author

John Haskell is the author of Out of My Skin, American Purgatorio and of the short-story collection I Am Not Jackson Pollock. A contributor to the radio program The Next Big Thing, he lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Table of Contents

Dream of a Clean Slate

Elephant Feelings

The Judgment of Psycho

The Faces of Joan of Arc

Capucine

Glenn Gould in Six Parts

Good World

Crimes at Midnight

Narrow Road

Editorial Reviews

Haskell uses language like a surgical instrument....These are stunningly sophisticated stories in which everything is new....[Haskell] makes language seem limitless in its possibilities.” —Los Angeles Times

“A dazzlingly inventive collection of nine uninhibited narratives that uses myths, meditation, and old-fashioned morality to examine age-old conundrums of life and art.” —Elle

“Simultaneously charming, innovative, and moving.” —Esquire

“Haskell and his wild imagination put some fictional oomph into reality....The highly original, Hemingway-esque prose is just as colorful and provocative as Pollock's paintings.” —Time Out New York

“A wonderfully intelligent, audacious, and perverse collection...I savored every mythic, mesmerizing word of it.” —Jim Crace

From the Publisher

Nine intriguing debut pieces explore the point where art and life intersect-or collide-in the lives of artists, performers and movie characters. While "Dream of a Clean Slate" examines Jackson Pollock's last affair, it mainly contemplates how the painter's unhappiness and frustration fed his art even as they destroyed him. The story asks, who is more authentic, the artist as person or the person as artist? "Elephant Feelings" juxtaposes a show elephant on Coney Island with a South African woman who was a freak-show attraction in France. According to Haskell, both loved and were discarded by the men who controlled their lives. Less fortunate than Pollock, they had no outlet for communicating their feelings and died broken-hearted. In "The Judgement of Psycho," the Hitchcock movie is re-envisioned along with the role of Paris in the Trojan War. Haskell's interest is the power of unattainable desire. "Crimes at Midnight" plays several riffs on Orson Welles films (including a walk-on by Janet Leigh) and on Welles himself as actor/character/creative force. These stories tend to be written in short segments, often seemingly unrelated. "The Faces of Joan of Arc," for example, jumps from a discussion of Mercedes McCambridge as the devil in The Exorcist to a silent-screen version of Joan of Arc, to Hedy Lamarr as Delilah, to Godard's wife (Anna Karenina) in a film persona as a prostitute. For Haskell, actors and their parts are seemingly interchangeable. "Capucine"-about the actress's suicide-is one of the more unified stories, as is "Glenn Gould in Six Parts," which also stands out for its few almost happy moments. "Good World" takes its cue from Aristotle's pronouncement about habit as thefoundation of virtue as it imagines the short life of the first Soviet dog in space and Richard III's courtship of Anne. "The Narrow Road" shows the poets Basho and John Keats forced to choose between art and life. Intellectually dazzling, emotionally chilly, and bound to provoke.

Kirkus Reviews