"I can't do this from a physical level anymore... but I will always be with you." And the music is always with us, resurrecting, inexplicably present in distant earphones, as the universe arriving between piano notes. A pocket passport, with parallel texts in English, German, Croatian, Lithuanian, Bengali, Spanish, Russian. These five jazz pieces in A Meaningful Life 3:1: Sound Seekers, File Under Jazz, originally published en-face, with parallel text in Gobshite Quarterly, are a companion volume, an after-the-fact prequel if you will, to America The Beautiful & Other Indictments: A Meaningful Life 3:0. The Europeans have a word for this sort of thing: feuilleton, which was originally a supplement attached to editorial pages of Belle Epoch French newspapers, and later in German and Middle-European newspapers. They can be anything from political or non-political gossip and news, surreal short-short stories, art criticism, reports on the latest fashions, philosophic epigrams to charades and other literary pieces in the guise of trifles. Practitioners have included George Sand, Flaubert, Zola, Capek, and Kafka. They've been in and out of fashion, going into hiding during the world wars, and coming back out after the treaties settled and the dust signed; in Eastern Europe they're often written to side-step censorship.
Christoph Keller (1963), born in St. Gallen, Switzerland, and writing in German and English, is the author of numerous prizewinning novels, plays and essays in German, including I'd Like My Country Flat (Ich haette das Land gern flach) (1996), the best-selling memoir The Best Dancer (Der Beste Taenzer) (2003) about his life with the progressive neuromuscular disease, Spinal Muscular Atrophy, A Worrisome State of Bliss (stories written in English, 2016) and The Ground Beneath the Feet (Der Boden unter den Fuessen) (2019). In 2017, Alice James Books published We're On: A June Jordan Reader, coedited with Jan Heller Levi. Keller lived in New York for twenty years. In 2018 he heeded the president's advice and went back to where he came from. (fr. www.christophkeller.us) Clemens Umbricht (born 1960) is a publishing director in Teufen, Switzerland, and has published several volumes of poetry. His books of poems include Museum der Einsichten, orte-Verlag, Oberegg, Switz. (2012); LyrikHeft 13, Sonnenberg-Presse, Chemnitz/Kemberg, Germany (2012); Die Augen ueber dem Bildrand, San Marco Handpresse, Neustadt, Germ. (2007). His poems are published in anthologies, newspapers, and magazines. Among other awards, he has twice won the Poetry Prize of the Swiss literary magazine orte. He lives in Andwil, Switz. He did the Swiss German translations of the Keller works included in this volume.
Welcome to Christoph Keller's America the Beautiful & Other Indictments, whose title is as misleading as its apercus are biting original. Like pinpricks penetrating a dark veil, these glittering insights are arranged as cunningly as they are crafted, for a constellation greater than the sum of its shards. - Madison Smartt Bell, author, All Souls Rising, Master of the Crossroads, and Zero db Some observations from the European press on Christoph Keller's latest novel in German, Der Boden unter den Fuessen (The Ground Beneath the Feet): A poetic and optimistic book. - WDR5 (Westdeutscher Rundfunk) Magical! - Style A narrative jewel. - Neue Zuercher Zeitung am Sonntag Who travels, they say, educates themselves. But maybe they only pollute the world. - Suedkurier ... featherlight, sparklingly elegant as Duke Ellington's piano. - kulturzeitschrift (Austria)
