Splinters

[ The Modern Word: Interviews and Small Press Spotlights ]

Derrick Hussey, the founder of Hippocampus Press: ?A hippocampus has the front end of a horse and the back end of a fish; it is essentially a sea-horse. However, the word can also refer to a part of the brain having to do, roughly speaking, with memory. However, Hippocampus Press takes its name from neither of these!?

Damon Krukowski of Exact Change on books in his reading list: ?And a work of criticism I somehow managed to avoid all through graduate school, Deleuze and Guattari?s Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. I couldn?t resist that great title any longer. But in the end I think the title might be what I like best about that book.?

Art critic Donald Kuspit discusses his book The End of Art: ?Picasso once said it took him a lifetime to learn to paint like a child. I think that it?s time for a new adult art.?

Translator Geoffrey Brock talks about Eco?s The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana: ?As the title suggests, there is a mystery (indeed more than one) at the novel?s heart, and it generates various kinds of suspense, which makes the novel another Eco page-turner, despite (or because of?) his propensity for digression. (?Digressions are the sunshine,? as Laurence Sterne once said.)?

The title of the post is derived from guitarist Robert Fripp. A founding member of King Crimson, Fripp has described himself variously as a ?jobbing musician? and as a ?small, mobile, intelligent unit? (WTF?). In addition to his musical projects, much of Fripp?s time is spent in the day-to-day operations of Discipline Global Mobile, a worthy independent record label.

Fripp?s diary makes for interesting reading. Somewhat jarringly, the journal presents entries from several years back to back. A fierce sense of intentionality, of a willed internal architecture emerges from the fragments of personal (e.g. his love and devotion to his wife), professional (tours and assorted hassles) and family (the importance of his parents' siblings, etc.) history. Fripp would probably counter this ?intentionality? claim by stating the obvious: chance and random events have contributed significantly to the shape of his life.

And so forth. Or as Fripp frequently has it: ?Dribble. Dribble.?