Elik Press, Salt Lake City
This book describes a friendship, or, better said, it explores a friendship, or perhaps we should say it documents a friendship, celebrates it and performs it, a friendship that began in 1984 in Tübingen, Germany, the university town where philosophers Hegel and Schelling and poet Hölderlin were once roommates, a friendship that deepened when we crossed the Austrian/Yugoslav border to follow a character in Peter Handke’s Repetition for our book Repetitions, that matured when we traveled up the Drina River with Peter Handke and drove through south-western American landscapes for our Vampires & A Reasonable Dictionary (of which a reviewer claimed that it was a two-seater with no steering wheel, a claim we contested by pointing out that the car had two steering wheels), a friendship informed by relationships with Marina Abramović, Era, Julije Knifer, Nina Pops, Alex Caldiero, Sam Rushforth, and above all Peter Handke—the hero of our books and the author of works we have translated and that have translated us.
Žarko’s genre-stretching stories assert that their realities, including space and time, are narratively constructed, and that gender, Aristotle’s unities, and even punctuation! are, subject, to, authorial, whim. Scott writes an “approximate biography” of his friend Žarko and offers “An Amicable Correspondence” between Žarko, Sonosopher Alex Caldiero, and himself. Letters by Goethe and Schiller augment the correspondence and when Schiller, approaching the end of his life, hopes that he and Goethe “can walk together down as much of the road as may remain, and with all the more profit, since the last companions on a journey always have most to say to each other,” we understand him well.
Two friends join us in this book about friendship:
Nina Pops, Serbian/German artist (Cologne) whose work we featured on the covers of our first two books and who has colaborated extensively with Žarko, contributes two works.
Alex Caldiero, Sicilian/American (Utah) poet, sonosopher, musician, and visual artist, is featured in the amicable correspondence that comprises one section of our book.
Drawings by Nina Pops
three book covers
and
“Scott and Žarko”
“ Žarko and Scott”