Fall Semester Reading List: 21st Century Horror
For those of you who might be interested, click through for the reading list I’ve assigned the students taking my “Contemporary Literature: 21st Century Horror” course this fall.
Saying goodbye to Nintendo Power, but hello once again to Howard & Nester
I read today that Nintendo Power will soon cease publication. I haven’t bought or looked at a copy in 18 years, but from 1988 until about 1994, it was one of my favorite magazines. When I was a kid I really loved Nintendo.
I also loved drawing (still do), and I learned a lot about it from Nintendo Power. One of my favorite parts of the magazine was the comic strip “Howard and Nester”:
"Howard & Nester" Volume 22 (excerpt)
William Giraldi’s Review of Alix Ohlin: A Failure in Four Parts
Background
Last weekend, William Giraldi’s New York Times review of two new books by Alix Ohlin blew up the literary twittersphere (which is to say that literally tens of people were talking about it). The discussion about Giraldi’s incredibly mean-spirited critique coincided with a debate about niceness vs. honesty in reviewing, started by an intriguing (though, in my opinion, somewhat alarmist) article at Slate. But Giraldi’s piece is irrelevant to the nice vs. honest debate and completely worthless to either side of the argument, since his review is not only dickish, but also dishonest.
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August 21st, 2012 / 1:54 pm
August 21st, 2012 / 1:54 pm
A D Jameson—
This is a little late (apologies), but those of you in the Chicagoland area can, today and Thursday, see Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974) at the Siskel. I wrote a bit about that movie here; it’s one of the best ever made.
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Fan Mail #5: Karl Taro Greenfeld
Dear Karl Taro Greenfeld –
Thank you for sending me your book, even though you said—cheekily—that I would hate it. I didn’t. Your artificial humility was unearned. Triburbia is a fabulous book, not fabulous as in fabulist, no it’s realist, as real as a utopia about Tribeca can be. I use the word utopia with real care. Triburbia is not the kind of utopia Thomas More would think up, but for your characters, Tribeca is utopia. To have a place in Tribeca is to have achieved, to have made it, and yet, and yet, here they are, suffering just like the rest of us plebs.
Reynard Seifert—
“. . .in August in Mississippi there’s a few days somewhere about the middle of the month when suddenly there’s a foretaste of fall, it’s cool, there’s a lambence, a soft, a luminous quality to the light, as though it came not from just today but from back in the old classic times. It might have fauns and satyrs and the gods and — from Greece, from Olympus in it somewhere. It lasts just for a day or two, then it’s gone. . .the title reminded me of that time, of a luminosity older than our Christian civilization.”
— William Faulkner
Other Kinds
Other Kinds
by Dylan Nice
Short Flight / Long Drive Books, Forthcoming October 2012
120 pages / $10.95 Buy from Short Flight/Long Drive
Dylan Nice’s first collection, Other Kinds, holds a particular resonance when placed alongside his recent essay over at The Rumpus [http://therumpus.net/2012/07/truth-in-nonfiction-a-testimonial/]. Each short story in this collection revolves around a young man who’s left his poor mountain home, but still doesn’t belong in the new land he has claimed. Most of the characters drove away from rural mining towns to the Midwest, or some other part of blank-faced suburbia. Now, the protagonist can’t return to where he came from—he’s too smart; he’s too quiet; his hands are too soft.
Nice writes in his Rumpus essay, “Truth in Nonfiction: A Testimonial,” about the Pennsylvania coal town that he came from: “I had spent much of my childhood in backwoods revival services, in evangelical youth groups, trips to praise and worship services in stadium-sized venues… I had come down out of the mountains with a wad of snuff in my lip and driving a high-mileage Ford.” This wonderful essay goes on to tell how books, in their slow and subtle way, brought to him an irrevocable change. “Other Kinds,” on the other hand, seems to tell of the price one pays for that kind of change.
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August 17th, 2012 / 12:00 pm
August 17th, 2012 / 12:00 pm
Human and unassuming
“We do not like work that says, “Like me; I’m human and unassuming just like you. I ask only a little of your time, a bit of appreciation for my hip intelligence, my sentiments, my (you may be pleased to discover) clever way with words and sounds. I ask for passive acceptance.”” — Cal Bedient
It’s been said and said, but David Lau and Cal Bedient say it all strikingly in this interview with Sandra Simonds about Lana Turner, one of the best lit spaces going for telling the moment where to go mow itself.
Shitty Youth Update
As you may remember, Adam Humphreys, director of Franz Otto Ultimate Highballer and co-designer of these t-shirts, has been working on a documentary about elusive author Zachary German titled Shitty Youth (taken from German’s now-defunct weekly radio show).
I worked with him on the tail end of shooting earlier this summer and have seen some excellent prescreenings of the work.
I received an email from Adam this morning:
Thanks for your continued interest in this project.
Shitty Youth has been something I’ve been pursuing for a while off and on and it is nearing a place where it feels like I am unable to take it any farther and I want to get on with my life.
something something online release near future, more details forthcoming
In the meantime I highly recommend people check out Fi卐hkind, the band, especially the EP “Brooklyn” which was a band I conducted featuring Zachary, Erik Stinson, and you, wherein they can hear Zachary free associating some really brilliant shit.
“College”… is just… wow.
Here’s the logo for the movie [pictured above]. Link to the facebook page if people want to engage: facebook.com/killcops2
:)
Regards,
Adam