Actors Anonymous by James Franco
Actors Anonymous
by James Franco
Little A / New Harvest, Oct 2013
304 pages / $26 Buy from Amazon
James Franco seems to want to be anything he can think of. He is an actor-writer-director-producer-musician-artist, as well as a PHD candidate. This novel, Actors Anonymous, suffers from the same desires that the author does; it wants to be every kind of novel it can think of. The novel-group of stories-abstract meta sentences is arranged in a sort of alcoholics anonymous style, with twelve chapters apparently representing the twelve steps.
23 Comments
March 21st, 2014 / 11:00 am
March 21st, 2014 / 11:00 am
My Experience Writing for Muumuu House
Wrote about Tao Lin for Hobart.
Exchanged emails with Tao about what I wrote.
Tao cut and pasted part I’d written about Zac Zellers and Marie Calloway and wrote beneath it “this seems funny to me.”
Replied with a paragraph in which I described Zac Zellers as the “Where’s Waldo” of Ann Arbor.
19 mins later got email from Tao saying “you should write something about this and send it to me.”
James Franco + Hart Crane
Two posts in one day after not posting for a century, but then I saw this:
James Franco, Hart Crane, discuss.
your actions become more forgivable if you don’t know the rules: an interview with Harriet Alida Lye
I wanted to talk to Harriet on here because I like what Harriet is doing and I think people ought to know. What Harriet is doing is living in Paris as a Canadian expatriate, publishing a journal that keeps getting better, writing her own fiction, and essentially just doing it. In the last three years, I’ve watched her journal, Her Royal Majesty, grow from printer paper and staples to cardboard and printer paper and staples to letterpressed covers and hand-sewn binding to its most recent incarnation as a slick and perfect bound gem. Something I love about the journal is how fully-considered each issue is — unlike most “journals of the arts,” the art isn’t an afterthought in Her Royal Majesty. The layout and design — the way the thing functions and moves as a whole — seems prized above all, which makes each issue less a collection of contributors’ work and more like a large-scale collaborative project. The journal has recently expanded its online presence with a fancy new website and very nice looking blog called HRM Daily, which I advise people to look at. I’m thrilled that Harriet has kept the faith and never looked back. After the jump we talk about the journal, being a foreigner, James Franco, and European MFA programs (they don’t really exist).
Palo Alto
Palo Alto
by James Franco
Scribner, 2011
224 pages / $14.00 Buy from Powell’s
Rating: 5.4
Last week, the Guardian posted their longlist for the year’s best first book award, an award carrying a prize worth £10,000. Afterwards they asked booksellers and bloggers to submit their nominations. In response, Elizabeth Baines posted an article citing her own list of books she felt were missing, one of which was James Franco’s debut story collection Palo Alto, recently published in paperback.
127 Comments
August 10th, 2011 / 12:06 pm
August 10th, 2011 / 12:06 pm
Ow, Howl
I upped a new entry into my top 10 worst films of all time, the absolutely stank rendition of Howl, starring J. Franc. I’m not even a Franco-hater, his wanting seems nice, and I was rooting for him, and it’s not really his performance that blows the dog (though it’s certainly often cringey: don’t know why they didn’t get David Cross after his performance in I’m Not There).
Mostly, whoever wrote this script is a dingdong. I mean, they literally present animations that act out trippy renditions of a full reading of the poem, complete with bros on the rooftops of the city shooting up and howling. The rest is just an interview with Ginsberg in Franco style, and a milky version of the obscenity trial for the book. The guy who plays Kerouac looks like a game show host. Jeff Daniels hangs out.
I can’t think of many good movies about writers: it’s not exactly food for wow. Naked Lunch was good. I like Wonder Boys for some reason, and Barton Fink. I didn’t like Barfly though I’m sure there are some hounds here. I’m sure I’m blanking on some others. What you got?
Ken Baumann—
Gossip until it’s not, but anyway: James Franco to write/adapt & direct As I Lay Dying and Blood Meridian.
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The Good Men Fiction Project
The Good Men Project Magazine launched Weekend Fiction on January 1, 2011. Every Saturday, this section will feature original short fiction that speaks to the male experience, from award-winning, along with new and emerging, authors.
The debut features a new short story, “Yosemite,” from James Franco. Also featured in the debut is “Saint Roger of Fox Chase,” by Sean Ennis of Gotham Writer’s Workshop.
Weekend Fiction will be edited by Good Men Project Magazine contributor Matthew Salesses, author of Our Island of Epidemics. Future issues will include stories by accomplished authors George Singleton, Ben Greenman, Kim Chinquee, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Alexander Chee, Ryan Call, and others.
Submissions are welcome. They are looking for fiction in the range of 1200-10,000 words in some way touching on the “male experience.” Go here for guidelines and to submit.
77 interviews and now you people be happy goddamn you etc 14
5. Some MFA fuck will host the Oscars.
77. In other sad news:
14. Flash Fiction interviews Nicolle Elizabeth. I thank them.
My favorite part of it is that it isn’t getting another print run. Can I say that?
111. Kyle Hemmings interview at Dark Sky Magazine.
One of the biggest influences, besides other writers, was the nine or ten years I spent on the streets of New York, when I became addicted to the club scene.
1. Me here. My father brings novels to family reunions, funerals, and weddings. They are secreted in large pockets of his jacket. He brings them out, he reads them during the various proceedings. People have said things. But is this so wrong?
Don’t write all over the goddamn books please.
I hate blurbs on book covers, at least put that shit on the back if it’s all you can do you think you have to to sell your shit and maybe you’re right, I’m no good at selling it. A terrible telemarketer, I would probably make a mediocre regional fertilizer salesman, which is to say I would be shitty at selling shit. So you go on building bridges and stuff. I mean I get it. It’s silly but I’m better at burning them britches. What I like is to consume my brain food from a plain colored box, like an Oreo milkshake, or expensive yogurt the way Muslims frown on figure drawing in the mosque. I think that’s rad. Frown away Mohammad. Patterns are whatever. Pyramids are when. They are good to think on I think. I like to gaze at them and think on Gawd oh gawd the stars the trees. But my kind of cover is a naked Knopf hardbound from the 60s. Maybe I’m boring and probably it’s vain but I don’t want other people’s opine opinions influencing my internal dialogue, not until I’ve digested my lunch which is to say eaten the text the film the album the thing and pooped out an opinion of some kind, however odd it might look oblong and oblique, not until I’ve had time to play with it to prod it to scrape and slice it beneath the blade of my tongue. But I like first for a thing to be in space like a rock in the ground pulsing tight 600 million miles a fucking hour going this is True btw, and then to have it there in my mouth in my ears my eyes huge like a fresh batch of fungus, a bunch of firecrackers going off in my bulb my skull my head. My favorite thing said in French is J’ai mal à la tête. To think of it rolls off the tongue like butter on bread.