Skip Rhudy's Blog
April 15, 2025
Giveaway
5 winners will get a signed print copy of the book. Be sure and check it out on the usual places, the Kindle version is now shipping, too.
Giveaway link:
https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/sh...
Bookshop.org:
https://bookshop.org/p/books/under-th...
Stoney Creek Publishing:
https://stoneycreekpublishing.com/und...
Happy reading!
February 7, 2025
ARC readers
Check out the video trailer for the book and if you're interested message me. I'll be using BookFunnel to manage the ARC downloads (and also goodreads if I can figure that out).
Here's the link to the trailer on goodreads:
https://www.goodreads.com/videos/2173...
May 8, 2024
Under the Gulf Coast Sun
It's a feel-good beach read with super smart heroine who roils a small Texas beach town during her summer vacation before she's supposed to head off to California on a full ride UC San Diego scholarship in aerospace engineering.
No woman in her family has gone to college before, and she's determined to have a job at NASA one day like her dad.
But the guy she met last summer in Port Aransas has been on her mind all year. When she surprises him at a party back at the coast and they become hopelessly infatuated both have to face hard choices about their future.
It's a world with no Internet, no cell phones, and no social media; a story filled with surfing and spring break partying -- spiced with real-life drama at the end.
Under the Gulf Coast Sun
August 23, 2023
Hurricane Katrina
This wave caught down the Gulf Coast near South Padre Island.
July 30, 2023
Under the Gulf Coast Sun: Crew Boat
You’d have to go out in the Gulf and sometimes tie up to a platform and wait until further instructions came in. Many of the platforms were (and are) caps on existing wells. They have no crew. The captain backs the boat in close to one of the legs that has ladder rungs welded onto it. The legs are big, about 3 or 4 feet in diameter, and covered with giant barnacles, oysters, and very slippery seaweed. If the swell knocks you into the leg you’re going to be bleeding.
Once the boat is close, if you’re the deckhand you take a fat rope that is attached on one end to a giant cleat on the back of the boat, then loop the free end around your shoulder. You dive into the water, swim to the leg, and then wait for the right moment of ocean swell to try and grab the ladder. Lunging at just the right moment, you grab a ladder rung and climb up quick before the next swell comes and knocks you off again. The captain has to keep the boat close but not let the rope get sucked into the screws (yanking you into the whirling propellers). He tries to avoid letting the boat crash into the rig. He tries to keep the boat from crushing you while you are climbing up to tie the rope onto the platform railing. Usually that’s about 10 to 15 feet up. You tie a knot (say a double half hitch) around a railing and then wave at the captain, who backs up the boat until it’s basically right under the platform. Then you have to leap down onto the back deck, which is bouncing up and down with the swell. The thought of being crushed and then shredded is definitely on your mind:
July 26, 2023
Under the Gulf Coast Sun: Skating
Video of two friends and I skating on a makeshift skateboard ramp in the parking lot of Boxcar Billy’s and Pat Magee’s Surf Shop. The surf museum says it’s 1976, Boxcar Billy’s is there, it had to be at least 1979 (it was a new bar and attracted a lot of people’s attention and business). The surf museum credits my friend (and current editor of the Port Aransas South Jetty) Dan Parker for filming. I’m wearing red Birdwells or OPs. Ray Castell is in jeans. Calvin Steiwig makes an attempt or two.
An important developmental scene in Under the Gulf Coast Sun happens in Boxcar Billy’s and its parking lot.
This skating is alluded to near the denouement of the novel.
When I lived in Waco mid-2010s I got a skateboard out and spun 360s until I got dizzy. My wife yelled at me: “Put on a helmet, you idiot!” I rolled my eyes but did, then skated through the neighborhood. A car full of kids blasted past and saw me from behind — long pants, long sleeves, helmet. “You look like you’re 40 years old!” one of them screamed.
September 9, 2021
Wolfgang Hilbig: abwesenheit review
Abwesenheit: Gedichte by Wolfgang Hilbig
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
The poems in abwesenheit (translated: absence) range from what appear to be straight forward denunciations of the socialist police state Wolfgang Hilbig was living in when he wrote them (1965 to 1977), to very lyrical metaphors with image densities approaching that of the poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin. Absence, as a theme, turns out to be a broader metaphor than the reader might at first suspect; in fact, it is a concept that is explored in other early works by Hilbig, like The Females.
The title of the collection derives from a poem written in 1969, just after the Soviet Union crushed the democratic “uprising” in Czechoslovakia known as The Prague Spring. For a peek into the theme of the collection of poems (to be published Summer 2022 by ECP Books), here is a link to an English version of the title poem:
https://ecpbooks.com/wolfgang-hilbig-…
What we have in that poem is a lament about ‘absence’ — but what kind of absence is Hilbig meaning?
One meaning that stood out to me when I first read this poem is the simplest: Being absent from the wider world. When Hilbig wrote these poems East German policy was literally to shoot people down who tried to flee their country to the West. The poet asks:
how long still will our absence be tolerated
Hilbig’s poems forgo most punctuation and plays with syntax which intensifies the imagery his words provoke and underscore the underlying core theme of the entire volume (which I interpret as identity in crisis). Identity is being undermined by the manipulation and stipulation of language by a wide-ranging and powerful state apparatus, the mean works of which the poem absence equates with destruction:
all things to the last are destroyed our hands
shattered to the last our words shattered: come on
go away stay here — a language shattered to the last
Something more is going on here; it’s not just guards and machine gun towers. It is
a destruction as has never been before
In this poem Hilbig is referring to a sinister psychological destruction resulting from an assault on language and culture – as well as physical imprisonment and worse.
A perfect illustration of the East German state’s attack on language is what they dreamed up to call the wall they started constructing in August 1961. New evidence from Soviet archives clears up any questions about its purpose, which was to stem an unsupportable out-migration from communist East Germany to the West ( https://tinyurl.com/berlinwallfacts). What did the East German autocrats call it? The Anti-Fascist Wall.
When I lived in West Germany during the mid- to late-1980s it was the required term in all East German newspapers, magazines, radio, and TV broadcasts (and used by pro-communist West German student groups). The brazen lie was jarring even when it did not affect me directly. In fact it angered me. But while I was at liberty to unpack it and argue for what it was, millions of East Germans could not bluntly say: “It’s a prison fence.”
Hilbig’s first poetry collection lyricizes this bizarre and damaging society and its destructive side-effects. Alcoholism, alienation from others and one’s own self, mistrust of everyone, hatred of the other, hatred of one’s own self, spiritual yearning, the joy of music, the touch and taste of a lover, or wandering crazed and drunken and ruined through the empty midnight streets.
On two occasions I found myself visiting communist East Germany. Once in August of 1985, and then again on a train trip returning from Prague in 1988. I wound up sharing a compartment with what seemed to be a passed out drunk. Suddenly he awoke and surprised me: “We socialists will destroy you Americans,” he exclaimed without prompt. He hadn’t spoken to me the entire trip then suddenly blurted out a Nikita Khrushchev style cliche’. Later I thought he might have been Stasi. Even Christa Wolf had worked for the Stasi, so why not that guy? Thus, paranoia.
The German Democratic Republic left an indelible impression: Wide avenues empty, absent either car traffic or busses, absent any people on sidewalks, absent shoppers or strollers, absent any street musicians or artists of any kind. Absent levity. Whatever it was socialism was supposed to enable individuals to achieve they certainly didn’t seem to take advantage of it in the public spaces of East Germany. In a small pub off a side street from Alexander Platz, I sat with a friend surrounded by East Germans who took furtive looks at us. Two soldiers sat directly across from us at a small table. It looked like a conscript and an officer. The conscript frowned at us and made a gesture with his hand: He rather dramatically closed his fist to crush whatever it was he imagined was in it. Maybe our throats — maybe our skulls.
Wolfgang Hilbig’s poems speak to those memories.
How could such a place have come to pass? Karl Marx once stated clearly what he believed was necessary for the liberation of all people:
“The free development of each person is the basic requirement for the free development of all.”
The source of that quote comes, with deep irony, from the Communist Manifesto.
no one sees how filled with darkness we are
how withdrawn in our ourselves we are
in our darkness
Surely Marx would be horrified.
Wolfgang Hilbig passed from this world in June 2007. His work lives on and continues to get wider exposure in English and other languages. His writing, in particular the poems in the book absence, are more than a lament: They are warning.
It is not just a warning about governments oppressing people.
At a time when the meaning of language is under constant assault by partisans on both the left and the right, when misinformation, disinformation, and 1984-esque radical redefinition of language for political ends has become common place and unquestioned by those listening to the bull horn of social media, Wolfgang Hilbig’s absence could not be more pertinent and dire.
It is, in fact, a portrait of what we could become.
View all my reviews
August 27, 2021
Wolfgang Hilbig: “I will not submit to censorship”
On August 20th ECP Books concluded a contract with S. Fischer Verlag to publish Wolfgang Hilbig’s first volume of poetry in English. The title of the volume: abwesenheit
In German that means absence.
Hilbig grew up in East Germany, where writing and individual expression of any kind was subject to review and control by state functionaries. Michael Opitz, of one of Wolfgang Hilbig’s biographers, went digging through East German Stasi files and discovered a series of letters between Hilbig and the censorship offices.
Hilbig had bravely written to them: “I will not submit to censorship.”
Opitz has made his findings available in the German literary magazine Neue Rundschau (Volume 132, No. 2, 2021). The issue is entirely devoted to Hilbig, and it is filled with correspondence between the writer and state bureaucrats enforcing “appropriate messaging” (to use an insidious term becoming all to common in the United States).
All the poems in the book were written in the time period 1965 to 1977 before he was ushered out of East Germany to the West. Opitz uncovered clear evidence that not only did the East German state attempt to suppress his writing by refusing to publish him, but they also tried to prevent his writing from “escaping to the West” to publishers like S. Fischer. The deliberations went all the way to the Central Committee of the The Socialist Unity Party of Germany (the only political party in East Germany); of course his case was also worked by the Stasi (State Security Services).
That covers a bit of the background to abwesenheit — poems literally written from a police state.
Here’s my English language cover of the title poem. It stands as a preview of what will be in the published book. This poem was written in 1969 after the Soviets had crushed The Prague Spring and utterly shattered it by August 21, 1968 (ten days before Hilbig’s twenty-eighth birthday):
Originally published as “Wolfgang Hilbig – Werke – Gedichte”
© 2008 S. Fischer Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt am Main
Translation © 2021 Skip Rhudy
August 12, 2021
ECP Books: Alfred Schwaid
https://ecpbooks.com/book-preview-eve...
