Nick Antosca
http://brothercyst.blogspot.com/
Nick Antosca is the author of two novels: Fires (2006, Impetus Press) and Midnight Picnic (2009, Word Riot Press). Antosca was born in Louisiana and currently lives in New York City.
PHOTO: THE CREEPIEST NURSERY SCHOOL FACADE EVER
I swear to God, this is a real nursery school in Manhattan. I took the picture.
jhonen vasquez school for tots
HOW TO SEE AVATAR
it's really quite good
Just saw Avatar. Hardcore noble savage leftist story; Dances with Sexy Blue Catgoats. (I like that it was all, “Kill the humans!”) Fucking incredible immersive 3-D. Definitely worth going, you’ll be like WHOA the whole time. I really regret seeing it in a regular state of mind. My advice is: Don’t.
Nick Antosca—
Did you know that the great Charles Mingus also developed a process for training cats to use human toilets?
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BEST MOVIES OF THE DECADE (THE NEW YORKER’S AND MINE)
Dale Peck as a child
And here’s Denby’s list of the best movies of the decade. The only ones that I really love are There Will Be Blood and Caché (even if it’s probably in my top 20 rather than top 10). He also includes The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, which I had extreme difficulty sitting through. I don’t care if the movie is about a guy who’s lost the use of his body and can’t even really open his eyes. I don’t want to spend the first twenty minutes looking at a lens smeared with Vaseline.
My list, which you should feel free to dismember, is after the jump.
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HAMLET’S SOLILOQUY AS TAUGHT TO A TODDLER BY BRIAN COX
I don’t even like kids that much, but this is great.
Also, one of the two best movies I saw in 2009 was The Escapist, starring Brian Cox, the first film by a guy named Rupert Wyatt. It’s absolutely terrific and it played in New York for one week, in one theater, and then disappeared. Imagine Brian Cox as an action hero. Excellent trailer after the jump.
Nick Antosca—
Just saw that I. Fontana has a short piece in the new online issue of PANK. (So does HTMLGiant regular Reynard Seifert–nice.) Last month I loved Fontana’s much longer story “What the Matter Is” on Spork.
NABOKOV SMIRKING IN INTERVIEW (SORRY, KINGSLEY, I LOVE HIS TRICKS)
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ldpj_5JNFoA
Every now & then I watch this interview purely for entertainment value. Nabokov. My dad gave me one of his books when I was twelve or thirteen, I think, and shortly thereafter I had a dawning-of-comprehension moment, like, this guy [my dad] might actually be pretty smart/have good taste. Which, while not quite a Nabokovian epiphanic moment, actually is a revelation to an adolescent.
I’ve long had the impression that a lot of folks in the HTMLGiant/indie lit crowd don’t care for Nabokov* or at least orient more toward Bukowski/Burroughs/Kafka & what I think of as the “Grits” (i.e. writers whose lifestyles are associated with gritty shit and/or whose writing prioritizes visceral response over sublimity), but I pretty much consider it axiomatic that VN was a genius and maybe the most skilled manipulator of the English language who ever lived. Also, nobody has ever been more successful at translating synesthesia into art. (Btw, do you know what “Martian colors” are? I call that as a title for a book.)
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Nick Antosca—
A reader of my earlier Patricia Highsmith-related murder post forwarded a picture of Highsmith topless. NSFW, obvs. I was not aware that that existed. (Thanks, Nicole.) Enjoy your weekends, everybody.
WRITERS WHO ARE REAL OR POTENTIAL MURDERERS
ominously hot: Patricia Highsmith at 21
I recently heard someone state the offhand opinion that Patricia Highsmith was a sociopath who managed to use her “condition” to produce excellent fiction. The New York Times has a big, fascinating article today on a new biography of Highsmith (“She kills so many dogs… She hated dogs. She couldn’t bear sharing attention”), who in fairness I think was not really a sociopath but just a very troubled person. Also, as the photo above suggests, a pretty sexy one as well.