Ken Stringfellow’s Foreign Correspondence: Tristan Egolf

You probably know Ken Stringfellow as the co-leader of Northwestern power-pop all-timers the Posies or as a sideman for R.E.M. or latter-day Big Star. He’s also a solo artist (we’re particularly fond of the soft-rock American beauty that is 2001’s Touched) and is currently preparing the debut by his Norwegian garage-rock band, the DiSCiPLiNES. Each day this week, magnetmagazine.com guest editor Stringfellow will be filing reports from his home on the European continent.

Stringfellow: Here we encounter an exception to the list (Tristan Egolf being an American author), but he did live, write and was discovered and first published here in Paris. I was in a bookstore in Berlin a couple of years ago, looking through the small quantity of English-language books. One title stood out. In fact, made me laugh just to see it: Kornwolf. I bought it on the spot and found inside a wit comparable to other favorites of mine, George Saunders and Thomas Pynchon. I soon picked up Egolf’s first novel, Lord Of The Barnyard, which depicts an alternate universe that places a thinly disguised Long Winters singer John Roderick (OK, not really, but the comparisons were striking) in the midst of “Pennsyltucky” and imagines the ensuing chaos. Egolf was, like me, a musician (he had a band called Kitschchao, which released one seven-inch) and a Paris resident, and he has a daughter about the same age as mine. I would have truly loved to have known him, as it seems we had much in common. But Egolf killed himself in 2005, just after the completion of Kornwolf. I have yet to run in to anyone who knew him, and there isn’t a ton of info on him on the web, so, if anyone reading this did know him and could reminisce a bit, please contact me: ken@kenstringfellow.com. I can’t recommend the two books above highly enough. I have his second book, Skirt And Fiddle, on order at The Red Wheelbarrow bookstore in Paris.