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Unknown Arts: A Book About Joyce’s Books About … How Many of Us Are Really Sure What?

Unknown Arts
by William Walsh
Keyhole Press, 2012
142 pages / $9.99 Buy from Keyhole Press or Amazon

Unknown Arts by William Walsh (Keyhole Press, 2012) is a collection of critical appropriations sourced from James Joyce’s Ulysses, Finnegan’s Wake, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Dubliners, and more. A book about Joyce’s books, Unknown Arts can be read as analysis, distortion, homage, and/or a work of art all of its own. It is doubtless a contentious book that will likely add fuel to the ongoing and often fiery debates around contemporary criticism, the imprint of influence, and the nature of creativity. Controversial or not, the collection is a valuable artifact that allows rare access into what are for many the impenetrable works of a literary master.

Here’s an excerpt from one of the many texts in the collection appropriated from Ulysses (1922), titled “Sunny Jim 2”:

Near the end, remembering king David and the Sunamite, he shared his bed with Athos, faithful after death. But thou hast suckled me with a bitter milk: my moon and my sun thou hast quenched for ever. There’s the sun again coming out. Paris rawly waking, crude sunlight on her lemon streets. Under its leaf he watched through peacocktwittering lashes the southing sun. The coroner’s sunlit ears, big and hairy. A flying sunny smile rayed in his loose features. His eyeglass flashed frowning in the sun. The tip of his little finger blotted out the sun’s disk. Mercy of God the sun was in his eyes or he’d have left him for dead. WAS JESUS A SUN MYTH? By heaven, I am guiltless as the unsunned snow! It What went forth to the ends of the world to traverse not itself, God, the sun, Shakespeare, a commercial traveller, having itself traversed in reality itself becomes that self.

I made a video that critiques the opening three scenes of “Inception”

I’m trying out different ways of doing film criticism. In addition to writing articles, I think it makes sense to record commentaries (like the one I just did for Drive) and make critical videos. (My inspirations here are Mike Stoklasa and Jim Emerson.)

So here’s my own foray into the latter:

Nick Flynn on “A Crisis of Narrative” in Memoir

“A lot of it feels, to me, like a crisis of narrative. These stories basically follow the same model, often it’s the redemption narrative—a Christian redemption narrative of sinking low then rising above. This same narrative is repeated over and over, the culture can’t get enough of it for some reason. It’s not a bad story, but it’s crowding out alternative tellings, alternative versions, and this is very limiting, and basically false because it is limiting.”

(Read the rest, from the 2006 print interview newly posted at the Sycamore Review.)

Random / 2 Comments
April 2nd, 2012 / 1:24 am

Andrew Weatherhead—

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Roxane Gay

Chiasmus Press is Looking For a Managing Editor

chiasmus press is slowly unfurling out of hiatus. we have a big idea about our reincarnation and they want you.

YOU

want to run a nationally recognized micro indie press. like head honcho big mamma jamma.

want to work with Lidia Yuknavitch.

want to reinvent online, print publication, and cross genre media projects.

YOU HAVE
big time digital savvy and skills, including web, blog and podcasting.

large experience with alternative press world–all facets.

impeccable literary and media counter culture taste.

crazy good organization skills.

a relentless desire to correct culture.

alternative forms of marketing do not frighten you. in fact, they turn you on.

you have big ideas everyone else thinks are nutso.

it’s likely you drink and enter altered states on occasion.

OTHER
compensation negotiable. if you know what “micro indie press” means then you have realistic expectations.

it is not mandatory that you live in Portlandia, though it would be helpful. We have heard of Skype and shit before though, so you know, we are down.

if this is YOU, send a 500 word description detailing your experience and desire and why we should pick YOU to: lidiamiles at yahoo.com by April 15.

yes, really.

Presses / 4 Comments
April 1st, 2012 / 3:54 pm

Erik Stinson

Midtown Skin 5/5: The Executives

I just put in my fucking laundry. I put everything together in one load. There was a girl next to me. She came across the place, put her clothes next to my clothes. I kind of wanted to giver her my business card, I had nothing interesting to say. She was a typical dreamgirl.