—

Does anyone have suggestions for good fictional, alternative narratives of Jesus’s life? I’ve read and liked Jim Crace’s Quarantine and Jose Saramago’s The Gospel According to Jesus Christ.

31

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.

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Film / 27 Comments
September 27th, 2010 / 12:41 pm

ARob AGin Catfish Word

1. Our own Adam Robinson has just been announced as Guest Editor for the next edition of Dzanc’s Best of the Web. If anyone can up the game they set with the latest edition, Adam is it. Editor nominations are now open.

2. @ Jacket Copy, they compare the voice of Allen Ginsberg reading “Howl” to the voice of James Franco reading “Howl.” I was too ehh to listen, but you can if you want.

3. Saw Catfish, or “the other Facebook movie that is a documentary instead of a stupid drama by a washed up director,” the other night, it was refreshing.

4. If you are in NYC, I am reading Tuesday night at 7:30 at the excellent Word Bookstore in Greenpoint for Indie Press Night with Jon Cotner & Andy Fitch (for Ugly Duckling), Rachel B. Glaser (for Publishing Genius), and Timothy Donnelly (for Wave Books). Should be real awesome, would be real awesome to see you out.

Roundup / 15 Comments
September 26th, 2010 / 10:59 pm

Sunday Service

Melissa Broder Poem

Supper

Everyboy comes to me at a church potluck
perfumed with frankincense and lasagna.

He believes I am a gentle bird girl
in my tulip sweater and raincoat.

I am not so gentle, but I act as if
and what I act as if I might become.

He says: Let’s be still and know refreshments.
Tater tot casserole is wholesome fare.
Let’s get soft, let’s get really, really soft.

I do not say: I am frightened of growing plump;
something about the eye of a needle
and sidling right up close to godliness.

Instead I dig in,
stuff myself on homemade rolls,
tamale pie and creamed chipped beef with noodles.

I eat until my bird bones evanesce.
I eat until I bust from my garments.

I become the burping circus lady
with meaty ham hocks and a sow’s neck.

Everyboy says: Let’s get soft, even softer.
We vibrate at the frequency of angel cake.

Our throats fill with ice cream glossolalia.
The eye of the needle grows wider.
There is room at the organ bench.

I play.

Melissa Broder is the author of the poetry collection WHEN YOU SAY ONE THING BUT MEAN YOUR MOTHER (Ampersand Books).

25

PEN Literary Awards Winners

A few of the big winners: DeLillo takes the Saul Bellow award for Achievement in American Fiction. Anne Carson wins for Poetry in Translation for An Oresteia from the Greek, and, in a separate translation prize, Michael Henry Heim wins for Wonder by Hugo Claus, from the Dutch. This caught my eye because Heim’s translation of Mann’s Death in Venice pretty much made my summer. I feel like I’ll read anything that guy turns English. Anyway, full list below the fold.

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Author News / 14 Comments
September 26th, 2010 / 1:27 pm

Le Scrap

I’m feeling scrapbook-y this fine Sunday morning.

1. Insanity 101:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dW3Roqmfr94&feature=related

2. There’s a new issue of SpringGun out that includes an e-book and digital writing. I think this is one of the better new online lit mags.

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Roundup / 8 Comments
September 26th, 2010 / 11:06 am

6 sculpture drinks of FM-three

14. Who gives a damn about Lady Gaga’s meat dress? People have been wearing meat dresses for years. It’s called leather.

6. A list of supernatural collective nouns (a caucus of shamans, a flurry of yeti, an indulgence of leprechauns). Thank you Paul Symons, and also anyone who lives the Darkon way.

23. As a flash writer, I want to thank Vestal Review for their submission manager. While I enjoyed reading the mag, submitting was once crumpling cot. The prior guidelines Byzantine, bizarre, off-putting (rich text, curly quotes, something). But now it’s all OK. Thanks.

99. So-so Jim Harrison interview here.

Have you ever noticed the painters tend to be more sensual, and better cooks than writers?

5. Book borrowing: Look, here’s the law. You loan the book, consider it flown. If it returns, feel great, like you just dug a musty $20 out your winter jacket pocket. But consider the book gone, and be happy. Customarily you spread skin cells and STDs. Today, you just spread literature! Glow.

24. There is no # 24.

Random / 11 Comments
September 25th, 2010 / 2:13 pm

Charles Bock reviews Richard Yates in the New York Times Sunday Book Review. Here’s my top pick for a pull-quote: “[Lin] provides accurate, often filthy dispatches on what it is to be young and pushing against the world.”

… Also, in case you didn’t catch it when we bugged out about it the other day, TL’s self-profile in The Stranger is the best piece of satire of 2010 so far, and a strong favorite for best of the year.

Roundup / 62 Comments
September 25th, 2010 / 1:17 pm

Malone & Savoca Week (5): Kendra & Matthew Interview Each Other

(note: Kendra’s keyboard is broken so none of her text is capitalized. She would really like it if someone wanted to buy her a computer.)

Matthew: Can you briefly describe the timeline of events surrounding the entirety of Everything is Quiet, from inception to publishing, including the total amount of time that the poems span?

Kendra: okay. four years ago i moved to new york for a job. three years ago i got laid off from that job. three years ago i started drinking everyday and writing a lot because i wanted to just use up my savings instead of getting another job. two years ago, or maybe a little more i started submitting things to magazines. a year ago i compiled a manuscript. six months ago jeremy spencer accepted the manuscript and told me he was releasing it in six months so i could be released with you. i think the poems span about three years of my life. some go back a little farther. some don’t really have time frames at all.

most of your work is grounded in the quietness of domestic life, and the listless struggle of it all. do you ever intend to do this? how does your domestic partner(s) view your work?

Matthew: I’m pretty sure that I don’t intend it in the sense that it is something I really try to convey. What I’m usually trying to do is “get things right”. It’s a whole lot different from “make things right” which I think has more in common with the general idea of being deliberate, which I am not.

I think my domestic partner probably views my poetry as something good that it is “doing something” – that’s a phrase she has used before – but she also feels bored sometimes in reading about her own life, and then other times she enjoys it in the way we all do, and then in one final way, when she reads it she learns things that I was thinking and feeling that she was unaware of previously.

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Author Spotlight / 6 Comments
September 25th, 2010 / 1:08 pm

from the 1900 page suicide note of Mitchell Heisman

It is a test of whether America can be true to itself.

…

The first superhuman AI might merge all of the computational power on the internet into its own power, master all of the significant information on the internet, and then reorganize the entire global brain of the internet so that it “wakes up” as the global mind of God.

…

From this late biological phase, I count myself as, among other things, genetic replicator, eukaryote, animal, vertebrate, gnathostome, chordate, mammal, primate, ape, Homo sapien, and Jew.

…

I took Gilbert’s recording of Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier, eliminated all time gaps between the tracks, and listened repeatedly in a loop.

…

But wait a minute. Why am I doing this? Ah, yes, now I remember the punchline:

I’ll try anything once!

(according to Mitchell’s wishes, the website will be ‘kept up as is, free for access for all’)

Random / 27 Comments
September 24th, 2010 / 11:40 pm