Cinema x 3: Melancholia, The Tree of Life, Feature Friday
1.
You no doubt read Greg Gerke’s deeply critical post about Lars von Trier’s Melancholia. Curtis White has now posted his own much more positive impressions of the film. I’ve tried convincing the two of them to go at it like me and Chris Higgs—I even introduced them during AWP—but they’re being too polite. Chime in in the comments section, demanding blood!
2.
Martin Seay is currently posting a series on Tree of Life; the first part went up yesterday, and part 2 is supposedly forthcoming today. (Meanwhile, don’t miss Martin’s meditations on Anonymous.)
(My own thoughts on Tree are here. I have nothing to say about Anonymous.)
3.
Every Friday at Big Other, I’m posting links to feature-length films that are up at YouTube. And I’m doing it for you!
“CASTRATION IN THE CHURCH AS A THEATER OF CRUELTY”
I understand the necessity of addressing the issue of gender imbalance in the publishing industry–I understand that this is something that isn’t being talked about enough and needs to be talked about more, but part of me always wants to insist that the entire program that is feeding this dichotomy is where the real problem is. Positing the issue of statistical counts of biological Male vs. Female bodies in the publishing industry is excluding any outliers to this constructed binary, the opposition of Male to Female bodies inherently erasing any room for discussion of the gray area. That which lies between, or somewhere on a spectrum outside of this opposition, is completely eradicated.
Of course, statistical analysis of anything, where numbers reduce actualities and items must be rounded down or up because we as humans understand that .4 of a person doesn’t mean anything–this is a structural analysis that always seems to miss the forest for the trees. Even within the realm of women-bodied authored writing, there is (often) an insistent phallocentric pathos that leads the narrative, generally within the construct of heterosexual relationships (the penetrative function of the penis is ostensibly what we all actually mean when we use the term “patriarchy”). If we want this overwrought homogeneity of patriarchal rule to end we cannot simply count on the binary of female-bodied versus male-bodied authors divorced from their content to be the deciding factor that we focus on. This changes nothing. The function of phallocentrism immediately ignores any sort of feminist thought, immediately assuming the role of the prick as presence and the vagina as void/absence (though we must consider the fact that Kathy Acker is one of the few people I am aware of who was able to subvert the dominant paradigm while writing what is arguably phallocentric sex).
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Blake Butler—
A new volume of David Foster Wallace’s uncollected essays, Both Flesh and Not, has been announced for release on 11/27/12 from Little, Brown.
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2 – M i l l i o n – S i t e s – l i n k i n g – t o – y o u r – F a c e
Hello, I’m Norma Chan, Tak-Lam, S.B.S., J.P., Chief Executive, Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA). I have a publishing business worth 47.1m USD for you to handle with me. I need you to assist me in executing this project from Hong Kong to your county.
workshop 14
There is no secret to this at all. Use the CW vocabulary. The creative act is a feed triangle of writer and work and reader. Technical issues: beginnings, titles, structure, characters, language, setting, corn, mood, etc. Are we talking birds? Can you give me a map to that tunnel through the mountain so I don’t have to spend so much energy climbing this stupid mountain? Whether they’re absorbing it or not? No clue. Positive AND constructive comments. I’m getting a feeling you are a bigot. Comedians get to see if someone is actually laughing. Coaching and nurturing (editors don’t do this like in the past. Now groups and workshops and universities do this). WORKSHOPS are not debates! Makes art cooperative and collaborative. Were you ever lost? Did we understand the ending? Any transition problems? Is the horse believable? If I slap Barbie, how does she react? Dialogue realistic? Any places you felt tension? Don’t write the story where you kill the class, I beg you. A desire to see what happens? What is the central conflict? I love when characters say strange or funny things. The pilot said. “Hey, Tiger,” as a greeting to the little boy. After a brief pause, the kid said “I’m not a tiger.”
What is your mental image of the main character? THEME PLOT LANGUAGE Should you accept all of them, or ignore them, or what? It’s like Russian nesting dolls? Get inside the syntax. Maintain equilibrium so they can keep moving the work forward. Cleavage! Polite. Always respond to the story! Don’t ask her out with a comment. As a consequence I end up feeling at a loss when I don’t have a pen in my hand—it’s just a kind of job hazard that the pen is part of the reading life. Compare to things in class, other texts. Take notes as you read. A work is a work IN PROGRESS! You can accept or reject an opinion. If I say 2+2 does not equal 5, it won’t hurt your feelings. You will get last word in your FINAL DRAFT. I can’t move people in cars. Grammar concerns, editing, corn. Rudeness, sarcasm. Do NOT be prescriptive. It’s not your draft! A lack of honesty. “It was all good.” “This is not college level” etc. Remember, this is a draft. Is that beer? Confusing the writer with the material. (I can write from the perspective of Billie Holiday, for example.) I really can’t see that anything has changed. And the people in either of these extremes can vary greatly from room to room. You have to define the rules when using magic. The writing is too good to be written by a bad writer. Corn.
Goodbye to All That
When I was a kid, my mother assigned homework to my brothers and I in addition to any homework we may have been assigned in school. My mother’s homework was generally more of a priority. Some of her assignments came from Little Professor workbooks but most of her assignments came from the Encyclopedia Britannica, which she made us read, a lot. I have, in my lifetime, read the entire compendium. I know things.
My mother would give us a page range and we’d read and write little reports on what we learned. Other times we had to do assignments that reflected critical thinking—comparing and contrasting different topics, creating new entries or using existing entries as the starting point for a story or article of some kind. At times, I did not understand why we were being forced to read that stupid thing, but I know now—my mother wanted, in her way, for us to understand that knowledge is important, that knowledge is a tool for better thinking.
Blake Butler—
A preview from Tom Bissell’s forthcoming essay collection, Magic Hours, is up today at McSweeney’s.
“To do this Biennial justice would require an encyclopedic, Baudelaire-style ‘Salon’ review”
Last week’s New Yorker (3/12) covers the Whitney Biennial. One passage that caught my eye:
“See, for instance, Gisèle Vienne’s mechanized boy mannequin wielding a hand puppet, with a chilling soundtrack by the Los Angeles poet and novelist Dennis Cooper. ‘I’m not dead,’ the boy muses, ‘unless this is death.’ The sinister-voiced, twitching puppet comments on things that the boy imagines, in what sounds like a game of exquisite cadaver: ‘decapitated head upon severed arms upon mutilated trunk-like logs and branches in a fireplace.’
‘Because I said so is the fairly witless way most images get you to look at them,’ the poet and performer Ariana Reines writes in an essay that complements, rather than addresses, the grotesque montage photographs and assemblages, satirizing high fashion, by the artist who styles herself K8 Hardy.”
point oh
I’m in the early stages of developing an online CW class. I’m thinking an intro class. Anyone taken one? Advantages? Entanglements? I wouldn’t mind hearing some anecdotes. Was it synchronous or asynchronous? Did it matter to you? Face-time versus online time—what IS the difference, to you? What can ‘physical’ time offer online could never? What can online offer over physical?
I’m asking big picture questions here, sure. As I said, I’m in the early stages. One key aspect of early stages: Do I want to do this? I feel it could be innovative and high quality, but I could be wrong. I haven’t taken or taught an online CW class. You?
THE SKY WENT RED giveaway x2 for why
I’m giving away two copies of THE SKY WENT RED WHILE HE WAS INSIDE, a small book produced by Kiddiepunk. The man behind Kiddiepunk and the cover artist/brilliant artist in general is Michael Salerno. This book is made of edited sections from CALL OUT, a novel I wrote. To enter: comment! I’ll randomly pick two people and hunt their e/meat addresses down. Thank you.