“Oh my God!” and “This is horrible!” clucked and gasped the audience of Please Give. They were responding to the film’s many cynical and self involved remarks. It wasn’t as antisocial as a Todd Solondz film, but people are unused to women representing and speaking their ugly truth on film. Nicole Holofcener’s movies show angry, bitchy, unhappy characters—usually women—in unflattering lights, such as laughingly wondering if you can fuck in a wheelchair, or hoping for the death of an elderly person. But unlike other directors who show the worst of human relationships—Neil Labute, for example—Holofcener has compassion for her characters. She and her actors create multidimensional portraits of women, mostly white and upper class. When she attempted to deal with race in Lovely & Amazing, it was awkward. For all the flaws and missteps in Holofcener’s movies, they address class when most films do not. There is honesty in these movies about how class separates people, how we hang out with our own kind, though sometimes I wonder how critical she is being. And her women, as horrible as they may be, are respected as whole fallible humans.
GIANT Guest-post: Kati Nolfi on “Please Give”, Catherine Keener, and the Holofcener oeuvre
5 Shits 4 PinkPartyGirl
1. New issue of Harp & Altar, with work by Matt Kirkpatrick, Luca Dipierro, Susan Daitch, A.D. Jameson, Ana Božičević, and several others. Also available, a print edition of their archives.
2. The Tyrant is blogging for The Paris Review.
3. The titular story from Ben Greenman’s What He’s Poised To Do appears now at Fictionaut.
4. Some people are real pissed about the NYker list apparently. It’s like being upset when the sun rises. Or sets.
5. Backlist staff picks at Dalkey Archive.
Pressure Valve
Oh snap, my girl hated Eat When You Feel Sad. Then everyone else did too.
June 3rd, 2010 / 9:39 am
It’s a bird it’s a plane
I wonder if Scribner, publishers of Don Delillo’s Underworld (1997), thought much about their cover after September 11, 2001. Delillo’s novels work high off prophetic allusions, almost desperate for dystopia, so the cover detail above showing a bird approaching the side of one of the World Trade Center towers seems like sad good luck (not to mention the twin towers in his last name). No social commentary is complete without a passive-aggressively placed Cross, a solemn mark increasing the +3000 headcount by 1. It’s all math they say, the number of copies sold, which is why massive books are not sold by the pound. To be nominated for a National Book Award is to lose, no matter how shiny the embossed sticker is. If Don tells you that at a party, you’ll know he got that from me.
New Yorker’s 20 under 40 Revealed
The New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 list has been revealed:
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, 32; Chris Adrian, 39; Daniel Alarcón, 33; David Bezmozgis, 37; Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, 38; Joshua Ferris, 35; Jonathan Safran Foer, 33; Nell Freudenberger, 35; Rivka Galchen, 34; Nicole Krauss, 35; Yiyun Li, 37; Dinaw Mengestu, 31; Philipp Meyer, 36; C. E. Morgan, 33; Téa Obreht, 24; Z Z Packer, 37; Karen Russell, 28; Salvatore Scibona, 35; Gary Shteyngart, 37; and Wells Tower, 37.
Winners of our picks contest to come. What do you think of the list?
“This Is An Enormous Amount of Eyes”
I have been stark-raving-obsessed with Marina Abramović’s The Artist is Present. I’ve spent hours at MoMA; I’ve interacted with the interactive website; I’ve scrolled through the Flikr; I’ve learned about other obsessives; I’ve read essays and reviews; I’ve watched this nifty video; And yeah, I’ve seen that blog that is just the pictures of people crying. (Love that one.) I know Ken has posted links to it twice since it’s been going on, but I’m posting them again, at risk of redundancy, because to me (and many others) this was a huge moment in art history and I think anyone who is alive and creating things right now should know about it.
Memorial Day was the last day for the exhibit and now Marina has given a pretty interesting exit interview to the WSJ blog Speakeasy. It’s full of such non-native-English-speaker sentences like, They made a lot of interesting drawings of how I pee. I didn’t even have urge. and This is an enormous amount of eyes. The interview also refers to an earlier statement she has made that “nobody ever changes when they do things they like.”
I am not sure if I entirely agree with that but it does raise some interesting questions. I know a lot of writers who say they hate writing, but they do it anyway. I don’t know how to react when someone tells me this. Are they masochists or do they feel like they can’t do anything else? I often find writing really difficult and trying, but I almost always like it. So will I never change or grow as a writer because I enjoy it so much? READ MORE >
1. 1st issue of adjnoun comes in a ltd ed of 200, letterpressed and wild with Ohle, Markus, Lopez, myself, some other freaks.
2. Pitchfork runs an article I actually liked reading, on “drag”.
3. Heather Christle be tweeting for the month of June for @harriet_poetry.
Advanced Edition Shipping June 14. Order Up.