June 2009

“In Search of Lost Time,” or, My Netflix Queue is Longer Than Yours

titanic-winslet-dicaprio_lrevolutionary-road-reviews

I’ve always considered Revolutionary Road the sequel to Titanic — where the young couple, escaping death, go on to get married and move to suburbia, only to find their own little patch of freezing water within. Every time Titanic is playing on TBS or AMC, I watch the entire thing (try heckling the frantic people at the end, feels aweome). I’ll watch any movie I don’t care. The greatest modern currency is time, and I’m a rich bastard. Back to Leo and Kate: Repetitive casting creates subliminal narratives, as the actors (as we know them) have as much to do with their characters as the characters themselves. Hollywood abridges the complexity of love into two categories: 1) The romantically ill-fated, and 2) the d-d-dumb. I’m not being a snob here, I actually enjoy these movies:

joesleepless-in-seattleyouve-got-mail

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Web Hype / 14 Comments
June 20th, 2009 / 6:26 pm

HTMLGiant gets kind props from Dennis Cooper’s Candidates for Best of 2009 Top 10 List: Internet. Many other Giant favorites are all mentioned including Ellen Kennedy, Brian Evenson, Vanessa Place, Dalkey Archive, and my gracious gracious self. Thanks Dennis! Check it out and share your own.

Classic Word Spaces (3): Maxim Gorky

5-gorkys-house1One of the writers’ houses/flats that I visited in Russia was that of Maxim Gorky, born Alexei Maximovich Peshkov (b. 1868), who would later become a significant influence upon Soviet Russian literature and socialist realism. I had not read any of Gorky’s writing before visiting his house; however, I had become familiar with his name in the other books I had read before the trip. I recall reading, for example, that Gorky had intervened on Yevgeny Zamyatin’s behalf, convincing Stalin to allow Zamyatin to leave Russia after the publication of We, which saved his life. Ronald Wilks, the translator of my edition of Gorky’s book My Childhood, writes in the introduction: “As a close friend of Stalin, he had immense influence on the progress of literature and arts in Soviet Russia and there is no doubt that he was the driving force behind the creation of a modern Soviet literature.” Gorky’s house, then, to me, was an important landmark, and I’m thankful that my wife’s family tolerated my insisting we visit the place.

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Word Spaces / 20 Comments
June 19th, 2009 / 9:51 pm

Deb Olin Unferth’s “Wait Till You See Me Dance” is the featured short fiction in this month’s Harper’s. A thousand huzzahs.

Ken showed me this: Electric Literature. Looks amazing. $1000 for contributors, beautiful design, various mediums, etc. Nice’ns. Enjoy the weekend fellas and fellettes.

Possible texts from David Byrne

davidbyrneI came across this photo of David Byrne on the L-train in NYC and wish to offer some possible text messages from him:

–wtf no signal

–where’s moma?

–w8 up i’m on the L

–3 chords 2 many

–lol eno is emo

–CD release party 2nte?

–gf is better

–omg Bb yes

–gr8 a fan

–new wave bitch

–stop making ¢

I guess now is the time to give a “shout out” to David Bryne, who unlike other heros, remain enthralled with the — um — enthralling world around them. What’s the secret Dr. Bryne? How do you still be so cool?

Uncategorized / 16 Comments
June 19th, 2009 / 2:28 pm

Fleeced by FC2?

32_18_fleecefest0_z

'baaaaahhhht what did ewe think of my manuscript?'

We’ve shit on Narrative Magazine so much that I thought it might be fun to have it go the other way round for once: here’s someone shitting on a press that I really like.

I give you a link to and excerpt from Tim W. Brown’s essay in Preditors and Editors and in the ULA’s Monday Report. The essay, published in 2006, is (hilariously?) titled “FLEECED by FC2: Being an INVESTIGATION into the CONFLICTS of INTEREST and SELF-DEALING that Plague the Publisher FICTION COLLECTIVE 2, with ADDITIONAL OBSERVATIONS on the Academic-Government Complex, Proper Organisational Stewardship, &c.”

Responses?

Excerpt after the break.

Enjoy!

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Mean / 61 Comments
June 19th, 2009 / 1:05 pm

Reviews

GIANT GUEST-POST: Tom Barbash “On Smugness”

On Smugness

by Tom Barbash

I often wonder how it all worked out for the couples who end up together in the last scenes of movies. What happened for instance to Elaine Robinson and Benjamin Braddock after they escaped onto the bus at the end of “The Graduate?”

Supposedly the scene was to end with them smiling in triumph, but they kept the camera rolling a few minutes longer. In the actor’s exhausted faces they found their ending, which was essentially: They’re in love, but the world is a mess, so now what?

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5 Comments
June 19th, 2009 / 11:52 am

Etgar Keret adapted to clay film

be7410d81c289dff70a77cfa7858c98d078476aaFor you Etgar Keret fans out there, Tatia Rosenthal has adapted the short stories of Etgar Keret into a stop motion animated film titled $9.99. I’ve little information about it – it just debuted yesterday in Los Angeles – so I’ll let you do that research on your own. Geoffrey Rush and Anthony LaPaglia do some of the voice acting. I wasn’t as familiar with the other actors, but you can check credits at the film’s site. There are also some ‘the making of’ pages, a list of bios, news and reviews, the trailer, and so on.

For the trailer, click over to Design Related and scroll down (sorry I can’t get it to embed).

Author News / 18 Comments
June 19th, 2009 / 10:21 am