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.
ZSNYRB
Zadie Smith writes with mixed feelings and a note of condescension in the New York Review of Books about The Social Network, a movie I saw four times in the theater. (Enough times to know that she misquotes the dialogue.) From the opening scene it’s clear that this is a movie about 2.0 people made by 1.0 people, she writes, and it does its job so well that it feels more delightful than it probably, objectively, is. Mercifully she ignores the tedious controversy over the film’s alleged misogyny in favor of a nuanced analysis of its generational significance. Remember half a decade ago, when you’d meet someone and one of you would say, “Are you on Facebook?”
BLUE
Do you write more or less during times when you’re depressed? For me there are two kinds of depression, the kind that comes from failure or rejection (which usually leads to long sessions of writing), and the kind that comes from feeling worthless because I’m not writing enough (which is tougher to beat because it’s not intuitively obvious that the cause is not enough writing; breaking this sort of depression requires more willfulness, because the insidious thing is that is doesn’t particularly make me feel like writing; I just have to remind myself from past experience that productivity makes me feel not-worthless).
Nick Antosca—
Amelia Gray’s Museum of the Weird reviewed in the New York Times Book Review by J. Robert Lennon. Congratulations, Amelia!
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DECRIMINALIZED
So Schwarzenegger decriminalized marijuana a couple days ago (law goes into effect January 1). What writers are huge stoners? David Foster Wallace… who else? I’m thrilled to hear about this news, since on principle I think all drugs should be decriminalized, although personally I loathe weed — always seems like an incredible waste of time, doesn’t do anything particularly interesting to your thoughts the way more intense drugs do, after 20 minutes I get impatient for my mind to return to normal, and I don’t like being around other stoned people.
A BOOK I LOVED: THE DEVILS OF LOUDUN
a cardinal's instruments
One thing I’ve meant to do more frequently as an HTMLGIANT contributor is simply to post about books I love, especially ones that didn’t just come out, especially ones that don’t get flogged constantly here already. I’ve got a mental list, but when there’s no publication date to which a post is tied… well, shit gets away.
But I read something in the past two weeks that absolutely got me by the throat, and I want to write about it: The Devils of Loudun by Aldous Huxley. It came out in 1953 and I’d never heard of it until a few weeks ago. I’ve rarely read a book that gnaws so thoroughly — and simultaneously — at the intellect and the viscera.
ESSENTIAL VIEWING: ENTER THE VOID
the naked city
Gaspar Noe’s Enter the Void, which opened Friday in New York and Los Angeles (and will soon be available on demand, I think), is spectacular, maddening, technically brilliant, sophomoric, unsubtle, mature… what am I forgetting? I don’t know. You could make stew out of the adjectives that would work in that list. It’s a movie that, if you love movies, you have to see. (By no means do I mean to suggest that you’ll definitely love it. You very well may loathe it.) It is truly, and I honestly feel I’m saying this without hyperbole, not like any movie you’ve seen before.
Noe is an infamous and incorrigible provocateur. There’s no one moment in Enter the Void as confrontationally horrific as Irreversible’s fire extinguisher or tunnel rape scene, but it does contain many instances of hardcore sex and gynecological grotesquery. That aspect of the movie, though, is an afterthought to me. I saw it foremost as an attempt to expand the language of film.
Nick Antosca—
Read all the interviews ever published in The Paris Review. Of particular interest (to me): Bradbury, Salter, Amis, Amis, Ballard, Fowles, Ellroy. They have a new site design. We have a new site design. Coincidence? I think yes.
WORD RIOT HAVIN’ A CONTEST
contest!
Yo! Word Riot, publisher of me (oh and some other folks, like Mike Young and Paula Bomer and Kevin Sampsell), is having a contest. THREE contests. Poetry, flash fiction and short story. The winner of each will receive half the contest money (from their respective individual contest, I assume) and be published in the WR 10th anniversary anthology. They’ve also opened up submissions for the WR 10th anniversary anthology from authors previously published on the site. More info here: http://www.wordriot.org/archives/2019. I just got a galley of Paula Bomer’s book Baby this week and I’m gonna read it ASAP, like as soon as I finished this amazing Aldous Huxley book The Devils of Loudun that I got from the library. (Read this shit, it’s so good!)
Nick Antosca—
The Republican Party in Arizona is recruiting homeless people to run as Green Party candidates in order to siphon off Democratic votes. Short story writer Richard Grayson won the Sixth Congressional District Green nomination with six votes, and says he is now being sued by the Green Party for being a sham candidate.
Nick Antosca—
My friends over at RapGenius put up a pretty excellent post on the triple entendre in hip-hop. I tried to think of some triple entendres off the top of my head, and now the top of my head hurts.
NOTRE JOUR VIENDRA
Looks pleasing. (slightly NSFW?)
Nick Antosca—
All other things (like payment, for example) being equal, at this point I’d rather have short fiction published online than in a print magazine. It lasts longer, it’s accessible to more readers, and typos can be fixed.
WRITER’S EMBARRASSMENT
mortification
One time I saw the film director Paul Thomas Anderson give a talk to a small group of college students. A burly male student made the mistake of asking a question that went something like, “My problem is that I feel embarrassed to show my work to people. Do you have that problem?”
Nick Antosca—
I saw Tony O’Neill read from Sick City a few weeks ago when he was in town and heard him tell stories afterward. Even more edifying, however, is this Jim Ruland interview for Fanzine where they drive east on Sunset Boulevard and O’Neill reminisces about the stuff he sees.
Nick Antosca—
I just got the first library card I’ve had in years. For most of my adult life I’ve bought rather than borrowed the vast majority of books I read. New or used, whatever. Now I’m recovering that thrill I used to experience as a middle-schooler browsing the library’s website, putting stacks of books on hold. It’s pleasing, no?
Nick Antosca—
Profile of Eugene Marten in the NY Observer. Damn, nice. I like that picture. I want my skull to look like that when I’m 50.
Nick Antosca—
Wow… an old audio interview with Vincent Gallo, which is mesmerizing in its relentless mad-dog shit-talking. Gallo shoots venom at Spike Jonze, Sofia Coppola, Francis Ford Coppola, Jason Schwartzman… I guess he really doesn’t like that family? Other topics include Mickey Rourke’s face, alleged incest in the Roberts family, Abel Ferrara’s crack addiction, Eric Roberts’s face, Kirsten Dunst being fired from one of his movies, and why he hates giving credits in movies. (via Jeff Wells)
HOW MUCH DO YOU CARE?
just hanging out in here. admire me. or not, i don't care.
How important to you is it to get your writing published? We’re probably all familiar to some degree with the feeling of “flow”, that creative euphoria you experience when immersed in creation, and we’re also probably acquainted with the intense (and rare) sense of personal satisfaction that comes from having created something that resembles (or even exceeds) something we conceptualized before we sat down to create it. And then, of course, there’s that very different experience: the clotted/congested sensation of ushering it into the understandably indifferent world that reacts with form rejections or silence. So do you care? Or to phrase it differently: Would you still write if there were no chance of getting your work published?
