an excerpt from the manuscript i’m working on — via the latest gimmick.

She said, “If I had a twin, and I’m not saying that I do, I would say we grew up in a simple house, squatting on a hill that overlooked a debased island, one used only as a trash dump.”

“Go on,” I said.

“If this were the case and in no way am I admitting that it is, then I’d say our mother and father were examples of a kind of utopianist, a type of idealist or religious seeker. In short, they were drug addicts and debilitated. My twin and I (should those two referents signify any aspect of reality) raised ourselves eating handouts from the market women and making toys and tools out of the junkyard, which was an ocean that seemed to us then almost as infinite as the real, but was not, no not nearly.”

“I see,” I said.

“You see what?” the captain said.

“No, nothing. Please continue,” I said.

The captain touched the tip of her tongue with her pinkie. I took out a pair of zebra-patterned sunglasses and placed them on top of my head. She said, “If this happened to have happened, and please understand I deny and affirm nada, squat, zilchy-zilch, then it may have occurred that my twin and I began experimenting, playing, fooling around with at first electronic equipment then computational devices and then daisy-chained elements and then nets within and without other nets and then highly personalized and only occasionally brought-forth, never-uttered languages. With this expertise, if one is to believe such a tale, an action I neither endorse nor condemn, my twin and I might have begun reaching out from our trash island to stroke the belly of far away commodity exchanges, purring stock markets, and deeply dreaming arbitrage centers. Twins of this type, in this manner of story, may have taken strange numbers from that ambush of bewildered and half-sentient financial tigers, may have taken unliving or savage or mystical or deformed digits buried inside calculations and data and spreadsheets never actually handled but whose shadowy existences were made necessary by other gravitational events, other more obvious and prosaic numbers closer to the minds of drone bankers. Twins of this sort, though it isn’t in my nature to speculate on their existential possibility, may have corralled these iridescent integers into more worldly shapes so that they, the hypothetical twins, could, should they want to (should they exist to want to), purchase not only the entirety of their own debased island but fleets of archipelagos and pinwheels of peninsulas and infinite itineraries of isthmuses for, in short, these perhaps possible twins were now—had become—bandits of an extreme order and therefore godly rich.”

i keep thinking maybe this next bolaño that i pick up will be somehow minor or irrelevant or merely clever. but it never is! it’s always consistently great and consistently surprising with thin yet deep connecting seams of evil and loss, tiny to large explosions of sex and examples of worldly power… structurally so genius and yet so natural, hopeless wisdom, sad beauty, perfect jokes…

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and parts to remember (spoiler alert if you believe in such) : the first visit to Farewell’s estate (for some reason, reminding of Zuckerman the young writer meeting Lonoff “the great man” in THE GHOST WRITER) (the repeating scenes in all the varying literary worlds); the build-up, the launch to (and the story of) heroes’ hill/helsenberg and the visionary aftermath scene with Farewell; the audacity of depicting the marxist crash course with the junta; the collapsing telescope of history intertwined with Fr Urrutia’s reading of the greeks; the basement of the maría canales salon (the basement of history being a torture chamber) — but he pulls off that rather heavy metaphor …how much he pulls off(!) …the falcons… and overall that our narrator is a right-wing critic, pinochet-collaborating opus dei cleric, haunted by the wizened youth who is himself or bolaño or the other or…

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and here’re bits from a sweet 2001 interview just stumbled upon:

“As to my writing, I don’t know what to say. I suppose it’s realist. I’d like to be a writer of the fantastic, like Philip K. Dick, although as time passes and I get older, Dick seems more and more realist to me. Deep down—and I think you’ll agree with me—the question doesn’t lie in the distinction of realist/fantastic but in language and structures, in ways of seeing.

…The truth is, I don’t believe all that much in writing. Starting with my own. Being a writer is pleasant—no, pleasant isn’t the word—it’s an activity that has its share of amusing moments, but I know of other things that are even more amusing, amusing in the same way that literature is for me. Holding up banks, for example. Or directing movies. Or being a gigolo. Or being a child again and playing on a more or less apocalyptic soccer team. Unfortunately, the child grows up, the bank robber is killed, the director runs out of money, the gigolo gets sick and then there’s no other choice but to write. For me, the word writing is the exact opposite of the word waiting. Instead of waiting, there is writing.

…Yes, plots are a strange matter. I believe, even though there may be many exceptions, that at a certain moment a story chooses you and won’t leave you in peace. Fortunately, that’s not so important—the form, the structure, always belong to you, and without form or structure there’s no book, or at least in most cases that’s what happens. Let’s say the story and the plot arise by chance, that they belong to the realm of chance, that is, chaos, disorder, or to a realm that’s in constant turmoil (some call it apocalyptic). Form, on the other hand, is a choice made through intelligence, cunning and silence, all the weapons used by Ulysses in his battle against death. Form seeks an artifice; the story seeks a precipice. Or to use a metaphor from the Chilean countryside (a bad one, as you’ll see): It’s not that I don’t like precipices, but I prefer to see them from a bridge.”

http://bombsite.com/issues/78/articles/2460

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PS and NB: according to this, “ Urrutia Lacroix is modeled on a real figure, the priest and right-wing literary critic José Miguel Ibañez Langlois.”

two times the amour fou! …a writing of passion and extremes not dissimilar to marguerite duras and georges bataille, karapanou’s RIEN NE VA PLUS tells a break-up story twice, completely shifting not only perspective but wholly changing event and characterization. the effect is more subtle than simply the apprehension of relative truth à la a he-said-she-said story — but rather something is revealed about our own ability (and desire) to be both brutalizer and willing submissive.

there’s something about this type of passion tale that’s inviolable, so evidently pure that it appears impossible to fake. it respects something, keeps something holy so that, despite itself, it maintains its integrity ….and yet karapanou’s novel is also entirely about the deceptions and lens of narrative, about the malleability of truth. it’s the congress of erotic truth with skilled and pointed artifice then that arguably gives this superb book its force.

also its immaculate style (beautifully translated from the greek by karen emmerich), e.g.

–I love you more than anything, Alkiviadis told me, eyeing the boys around him in the café, who returned his gaze.
–Alkis, are you only attracted to boys?
–Yes, but it’s you I love.
My cup of coffee spilled on the lap of the blond boy at the table next to ours. He was wearing green corduroy pants.
–It’s nothing, he said, catching Alkis’s eye.

pick it up from clockroot books or your local library.

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an essay on karapanou, who died in 2008: http://www.criticalflame.org/fiction/0110_fragopoulos.htm

Worn-out woods are invented
We read daylight in brooks.

a true mystic, jarnot writes her poems to some quantum-entangled self light years away. not to us — though we can understand.

her “ditty reel yam” does so dazzle.

the first part (of three) is very jabberwocky, a signifying glossolalia of demented or “touched” or graced neologisms. even there and crystallizing through the rest is a domestic and richly habited circumstance.

O LIBRARY O LAWN O CAROUSEL

O vocages of the dead,
o dead this one
and dead that one,
let me count the ways
that you are dead,
o people I used to know
who are married,
o people I used to know
with their children,
o broken line of
trees and branches
picked at by the squirrels,
o work and sleep
o work and sleep
o lighter fluid,
the cool of grass
in spring,
o forty, o flag, o
fantastic statue
staring back,
o famous historian
with birds upon your head
the sycamores in bud
abound,
the brilliance of the others
who are brillianter than I
o page-turning pigeon,
o felicitous husband,
o tourists, go away,
the somber stares of couples
and the somber glow of ties,
o ties of the living dead,
and the businesses of midtown,
all gone, with felicity,
all gone, with grace,
all gone, in this resistance,
erased encobbled space.

rumor just heard the other day says that the poet is taking a year off the internet. when i heard this all i could think was: GO LISA JARNOT. YOU ARE A HERO. YOU ARE A VERY BRAVE HERO… coincidentally i found this book dedicated to three poets, one i haven’t had the pleasure but two i quite have (here & here).

also i think all books designed by jeff clark is my new reading map.

What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you?
I think that people think that I’ve read the Language poets, but I haven’t. Actually Ron Silliman sent me a chapbook recently and I read it and liked it. And I’ve read some Susan Howe and Michael Palmer and Rosmarie Waldrop, but I don’t really think of them as language poets. I’m a sucker for a good story and a lot of emotion. I guess I’m not cool enough for languagepoetry.

from an interview with jarnot here.

here jarnot read, from pennsounds hear.

buy NIGHT SCENES from spd or find it at your library or buy it from the publisher.

two titans of DIY industry, derek of calamari and adam of publishing genius, recently posted about the nature of small press economies here and here. thinking about accounting may be my least favorite activity, but one’s relationship to the means (and costs) of production are — if these accounts are typical examples — never far from a small publisher’s mind:

i guess i’m just TIREd of THinking about all these businessy things | at some point you just have to do what you do naturally & if people buy it great & if they don’t fuck ‘em | as a consumer you can spend all the time in the world contemplating the footprint of every piece of fruit you buy at your local market but at the end of the day what sells it [for repeat customers anyway] & makes it all worth it is the TASTE of the fruit itself | i’d rather concentrate my efforts on making tasty book & art objects that are true to their nature [with no additives or artIFIcial flavors] & not worry about the ugly business of marketing & selling the fruit | maybe that makes me a bad «publisher» i don’t know | this whole circle-jerk business of people promoting & selling themselves or their wares or their «friends» is what really gets me down about this book business | it’d behoove me to buy into all it but honestly i don’t see how most people live with themselves | i’d rather fail gracefully than succeed using such tactics | even measuring «success» by the number of BOOKs sold doesn’t make sense to me | Justin Taylor & his HTMLGiant entourage are imploring everyone to buy his new book so it will make the NY Times Bestseller list | that seems about a silly a reason to buy a book as i can think of | they say it will be good for him & the comMunity of independent presses & writers or some such thing but ¿will it really make us better writers? ¿will it really make for better LITerature? it’s a filthy business this trying to wag the dog with it’s tail.

The rest of derek’s post here.

i tend to agree with him but on the other hand, in terms of us versus them or dichotomies of complicity versus subversion — i’ve always taken this wisdom from creeley to heart:

Something lost in trying to kick against the pricks unless the vision, call it, is complete, and secures itself in its own inviolability. Blake says, I am Socrates. John said that in the act of non-adaptation to the demands of an economic system may lie a commitment to the system’s forms far more destructive an involvement than any simple-minded conformity. But such a long and dull sentence it had to seem.

From Creeley’s THE ISLAND.

for what it’s worth, i think ellipsis may look to getting non-profit status some nearfuture day. at least i keep debating that move… even while i dislike the idea of a non-self-sustaining operation and of trying to find handouts, here’s why i think i’ll do it: i don’t necessarily think acts of self-promotion like taylor’s are inherently base (though i admit it turns me off), but i think it’s a tendency or talent (or gluttony) unrelated to that of writing (or if it is related, it seems more negatively correlated than anything else.)

if you are the shepherd of someone else’s book into the world however, some kind of promotion seems to be part of the responsibility. or not. in any case the ellipsis press advertising and distribution plan — such as it is, what a laugh — has been to put up notice in a minimum number of places. enough so that if you were a seeking reader not of an escapist ride but of literary art  (of which i estimate there are about 1,000-5,000 such seekers extant in the u s of a), you’d be able to find ellipsis titles. determining that minimum placement hasn’t been easy, might be a higher bar than i realized, and could require more funds than i’m willing to fork over (thus the non-profit deliberating).  …which reminds me once again of this quote from Scott Walker formerly of Graywolf (which might seem like self-back-patting but is frankly more like a self-warning) :

Starting a small publishing company takes an angel’s combination of idealism, passion, unreasonableness, innocence, naiveté and blind obedience to an inner voice telling you to go heart- and head-long into something utterly likely to fail. It would in fact be a kindness if the venture failed, because success requires so much time and intellectual and emotional energy that it squeezes to death every last healthy impulse you had to start with.

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PS from a profile of greywolf here:

[Graywolf Press director and publisher Fiona McCrae] delights in the opportunity to snatch up books a major publisher might ignore and says a Graywolf book can succeed by selling only a few thousand copies. “When we’re not having to pay enormous overhead or debt for an acquisition or that kind of thing, the numbers we need for a book to do well are much smaller. From Faber I learned, rightly or wrongly, that it’s not that books never make money, but that it takes time. Years after it was published, T.S. Eliot’s [Old Possum's Book of Practical] Cats was bringing in significant revenue. I saw the way publishing and art intersect. The market goes for something that’s done well before, but the most difficult thing is something that hasn’t done well before. When you’ve got this nonprofit structure, you can stick more with the art side. If it’s working artistically, we’ll make the numbers work.”

read the rest of the greywolf press profile at: http://www.citypages.com/content/printVersion/628801

samuel delany in a nice interview in the latest LOCUS:

“As my agent … says, this is the worst time for American writing in general, that anyone has ever seen. One of the ‘Serious Young Writers’ showed me a rejection letter from a major publisher that said, ‘Your book is much too well-written for us to publish.’ Those were the words! Literary publishing has changed entirely in the last 25 years.”

“When I talk to people with MFAs who are now working as editors for literary publishers, they say, ‘What we learned in college is a kind of writing that our current bosses do not want to let in the door.’ They want nothing to do with ‘good writing.’ These are places like Random House; Harcourt Brace; Knopf; and Farrar, Straus & Giroux, who are the epitomes of literary publishing in this country, yet they’re willing to say, ‘I’m sorry. That’s not what we’re interested in anymore. We have a couple of slots a year for novels like that.’

“This is not a healthy situation for writing in general. It’s not healthy for science fiction, not healthy for anyone. I think we have five publishers left in New York, and 25 years ago there were 79! So when we’re talking about ‘commercial’ versus ‘art’ publishing, we’re using a leftover vocabulary. We’re still looking at the world through 1955-colored glasses.”

Read more excerpts from the interview here. Full interview in the March 2010 issue.

a story told twenty-eight times (once each for all the days of february), harold abramowitz’s project of memoir as only one memory infinitely repeating and retold is interesting… but even more interesting, more mysterious — and certainly constructing a delicate and beautiful linguistic hermitage — are each chapter’s introductory flourishes of direct address. these seem to situate the text’s ambitions but end up just dancing (which could amount to the same thing) and demonstrate a rare control somewhat reminiscent of blanchot. here are a few examples:

And it is high time I made myself more clear. Forgive me for having been, thus far, obscure. In fact, I did not mean to lie. In fact, I meant to do the opposite. I mean always to tell the truth. It’s just that your line of questioning has been excellent and has allowed me an opportunity to reflect on the past, to remember that there are many different ways of viewing the past. Indeed, I have come to realize, yet again, that certain principles need constant restating in order to be understood. For instance, in violation of the law. Or how certain acts of indecency were, at first, construed. Hence, the page turns. The story continues. If even only in outline. Why, the mere mention of it causes me to shudder. But if one carefully studies the footnotes. And every word was an act, or rather, a movement towards persuasion. Rather put together, don’t you think? But let me put it to you still more clearly… (p. 36)

And the question quickly came to haunt him. The color of his umbrella against the sky. Or, its outline, so to speak. Or even a potion, or a serum, or some other kind of cure. In fact, a fixation on creating something perfect. A perfect day. The memory of which was just out of reach. It was spring and it was raining. The mockingbird sang. A beautiful day, nonetheless. There was an electricity in the air that reminded him of the time before the war. Flags and banners. The platform. Trucks in the streets with loudspeakers. He had managed to get everything he’d wanted then. And there was a buzz in the air. One question remained, however. And things were very different from that point on… (p. 70).

Eventually every mystery is solved. But without narration. And without a specific voice to guide the reader. However, without noise, without air and sound, there is no one left. No one. Eventually he was able to repeat everything he knew. And every irrelevancy was recorded. And the point was that between irrelevancies various truths could be discovered. The mystery would be solved. He had to get back to his house at some point… (p. 76).

buy it from the publisher or from spd or check it out of your local library.

lethem’s most ambitious outing in a while… and hats off because as talented and well-positioned as he is, he could’ve phoned it in or gone for — as he has in the past — cheaper success. but for all CHRONIC CITY’s ambition and for all its frantic counterculture name-dropping and for all its borrowed and original wackiness (a giant tiger, love letters from a marooned astronaut fiance, psychedelic ceramics) lethem’s latest is at heart a comedy of manners, gently lampooning a fundamentally effet…more

for all CHRONIC CITY’s ambition and for all its frantic counterculture name-dropping and for all its borrowed and original wackiness (a giant tiger, love letters from a marooned astronaut fiancée, psychedelic ceramics) lethem’s latest is at heart a comedy of manners, gently lampooning a fundamentally effete manhattan. it’s also more page six than swiftian, the sting and focus of its satire sadly dulled and clouded as if in a solipsistic, self-entertaining mary jane fog.

which is both strange and unfortunate because the author here certainly seems to be going for more, working hard and well for significance and depth. despite its flaws it also seems in many ways a return to form, so one is left with a puzzling ambivalence. what happens? it’s hard to say… but i kept recalling a review for some wes anderson film — one that noted anderson, for all his lavish and cleverly particular art direction couldn’t help but make an airless movie. something similar happens here. all emotion, messiness, pureness and quickness of heart has been photoshopped out in order to make some cooler, shinier but more dead artifact.

from yoshihiro tatsumi’s memoir A DRIFTING LIFE:

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yoshihiro tatsumi, an innovator and long-heralded master of manga, draws a very moving doorstop (800+ pages) which entertwines his own history with the story of manga’s birth and the post-war development of japan. appreciateive for its many lessons, i was particularly happy to read the above, which was the most convincing argument i’ve seen in a while to say that certain changes in technology wouldn’t necessarily make obsolete older ones…

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PW interview with tatsumi:

PWCW: You owned and ran a used-books store for 18 years. Sometimes people would come looking for you, the founder of gekiga, but you would hide in the back.

YT: There were times when people used to come to the store, asking to meet me, but I would hide in the back. My wife would tell them “He’s not here.” Sometimes, I wouldn’t make it [to the back] in time and they would catch me and ask “Are you Mr. Tatsumi?” and I would tell them “No, that’s my brother.”

PWCW: Why did you want to hide?

YT: I was embarrassed. I liked thinking of myself as a successful manga artist, but running the book shop meant that I wasn’t. I was a very proud cartoonist and the thought of being the “comic book artist who doesn’t make enough money and has to run a bookstore” was embarrassing.

after reading SAVAGE DETECTIVES — whose psychotropic magics utterly redistricted my limbic system — i’d decided to take my bolaño in little bits and had stayed away from 2666, saving it up i think.

just now i’ve finished it. and, while it wasn’t the same experience as SAVAGE DETECTIVES (which, relatively speaking, is more suffused with intoxicating romantic ideas) 2666 indeed was another complete deracination. rather than romantic epic, this work — the primary effort of the last five years of bolaño’s life — is a fearless, everything-risking tome on violence, history, sex, death and (the banality of) evil. after finishing it i feel changed in only a way, at least it seems to me, a novel can change you.

one important aspect of the book maybe to mention is its tedium. the book can be tedious. or, better said, it risks tedium to make a point about time and evil. especially this is true for a 300 page section called THE PART ABOUT THE CRIMES, which makes a fiction from the real violent deaths of hundreds of women in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico — a mass murder given the grim name feminicidios.

an achievement only possible by a very great writer is this slowly unfolding effect, precisely built on tedium and our too-easy habituation to our race’s various evils. the reader is allowed, finally, to comprehend her or his habituation — with no small amount of horror.

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and two quotes from early and late in the book that might serve as self-descriptions of his method:

“On the front flap, the reader was informed that the testamento geometrico was really three books, ‘each independent, but functionally correlated by the sweep of the whole’…” (186)

“The style was strange. The writing was clear and sometimes even transparent, but the way the stories followed one after another didn’t lead anywhere: all that was left were the children, their parents, the animals, some neighbors, and in the end, all that was really left was nature, a nature that dissolved little by little in a boiling cauldron until it vanished completely” (887).

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also of potential interest: the translator has some “Notes Toward an Annotated Edition of 2666″ here, which has this fine witticism:

“Proposition: Part I of 2666 as satirical sequel to The Savage Detectives. The visceral realists, young idealists, have grown up to become professors of literature, still seekers but no longer idealistic, writing scholarly papers instead of poetry and feuding with academic rivals instead of opposing schools of poets.”

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also: marcela valdes has a great long piece on 2666 in the nation. of particular interest is her description of bolaño’s relationship to the journalist and writer gonzález rodríguez, who took on the life-risking task of investigating the juárez murders. bolaño seems to have based much of his novel on details from rodríguez. there’s, for instance, a person who seems to be the partial basis for klaus haas named abdul latif sharif — and it is at a press conference held by sharif (eerily similar to ones in the book) that rodríguez comes to a pivotal conclusion about the case:

That day González Rodríguez watched a tall, middle-aged man with green eyes talk to some thirty reporters. Sharif Sharif barely spoke Spanish–he’d lived in Mexico for less than a year–so he gave his presentation in English while a bilingual reporter translated. What he said sounded like a soap opera. According to Sharif Sharif, the femicides were being committed by a pair of rich Mexican cousins, one who lived in Juárez and the other just over the border in El Paso. He told a love story involving one of the cousins and a poor, beautiful girl from Juárez. The press corps was annoyed–they exchanged glances, cracked jokes. González Rodríguez felt pretty skeptical himself, but the critic in him was intrigued by Sharif Sharif’s style. Rather than pound his chest and declare his innocence, the suspect calmly recounted his ninety-minute tale. He seemed to believe that if he provided an alternate explanation for the murders, the charges against him would be dropped.

At the end of the session, González Rodríguez introduced himself to a local reporter. In a park near the prison, the two chatted about the strange presentation. A mother and her daughter approached them.

Are you journalists? the mother asked.

Yes, they answered.

Then we want to tell you something we think that you should know.

The 14-year-old girl beside her wore a T-shirt, jeans and sneakers. She told the reporters that the Juárez chief of police had forced her to accuse The Rebels. The chief, she said, had taken her by the hair and banged her against a wall until she agreed to say exactly what he told her.

For González Rodríguez, perspective suddenly shifted. Old facts (the nightclub sweep, the escalating charges against Sharif Sharif) glittered in a new light: the police were beating witnesses. “This,” he thought, “is the undercurrent.”

Read the full article, which includes more background material and a nice portrait of bolaño and rodríguez’s friendship, here.

From Fra Keeler by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi

‘It’s on the edge of a canyon,’ the realtor said, raising his eyebrows when I offered to buy the home without having looked at it first.

‘Fine,’ I said, though I wasn’t sure exactly what the realtor meant. Then I didn’t say anything for a long time because I was thinking of Fra Keeler’s death. And it seemed the realtor wanted to repeat what he had just said, his eyebrows even more tense. ‘Some things aren’t worth looking into,’ I said, and the realtor’s eyebrows slackened a bit. Then I asked, ‘Where are the papers?’ ‘Here they are,’ he said. ‘I’d like to sign them,’ I said, and he pushed them across the table with his middle finger. What an ugly finger, I remember thinking while I signed the papers, and then I got up and I left.

We are said to die of one thing on paper, but it is entirely of something different that we die, I thought as I left the realtor’s office. And it is dangerous to take the discrepancy between the two for granted, what one actually dies of and what one is said to have died of on paper; there is hardly ever a correspondence. And I’m thinking now that some people’s deaths need to be thoroughly investigated. I’m more than certain that I thought this then too, as I left the realtor’s office, but the thought wasn’t as highly illuminated in my head. I’m thinking now, it isn’t every day one comes across a death that is especially timely and magnificent, for example Fra Keeler’s death. And then, one really has to wonder, one has to begin to think, to retrace the mental footsteps of the deceased person, e.g. Fra Keeler, since the chance that such a timely death would remain unexplained on paper is that much more significant.

More at http://harpandaltar.com

…

Harp & Altar #7 is now available — with poetry and fiction by Cynthia Arrieu-King, Ana Božičević, Matthew Klane, Michael O’Brien, Alejandra Pizarnik translated by Jason Stumpf, Brett Price, Jared White, Edmond Caldwell, Susan Daitch, Luca Dipierro, Craig Foltz, A.D. Jameson, Matthew Kirkpatrick, and Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi. Also: Farrah Field on Julia Cohen; Patrick Morrissey on Joshua Harmon and Rob Schlegel; Michael Newton’s gallery reviews; and art by Brandon Downing.

Collecting the ground-breaking poetry and fiction from the first six issues of the online journal Harp & Altar.  With writing by Roberta Allen • Stephanie Anderson • Jason Bacasa • Andrea Baker • Jessica Baran • Jessica Baron • Shane Book • Donald Breckenridge • Michael Carlson • Joshua Cohen • Julia Cohen • Adam Clay • Lynn Crawford • Oisín Curran • Claire Donato • Farrah Field • Corey Frost • David Goldstein • Andrew Grace • Kate Greenstreet • Sarah Gridley • Emily Gropp • Evelyn Hampton • Jennifer Hayashida • Stefania Heim • Lily Hoang • Joanna Howard • Dan Hoy • Thomas Kane • Steve Katz • Karla Kelsey • Joanna Klink • Jennifer Kronovet • Norman Lock • Jill Magi • Justin Marks • Peter Markus • Eugene Marten • Stephen-Paul Martin • Zachary Mason • Miranda Mellis • Sara Michas-Martin • Patrick Morrissey • Ryan Murphy • Eileen Myles • Bryson Newhart • Linnea Ogden • Cameron Paterson • Johannah Rodgers • Joanna Ruocco • Elizabeth Sanger • Rob Schlegel • Zachary Schomburg • Kate Schreyer • Andrei Sen-Senkov • Brandon Shimoda • Peter Jay Shippy • Joanna Sondheim • Mathias Svalina • Bronwen Tate • G.C. Waldrep • Derek White • Jared White • Joshua Marie Wilkinson • Paul Winner • David Wirthlin • Michael Zeiss • Leni Zumas

yesterday i saw PLATFORM. which, with PICKPOCKET, make up the stunning first two thirds of the “hometown trilogy” by jia zhangke. for some reason, maybe because he’s found relatively secure funding in his latest films (and not had to work outside china’s constrained studio system), these first two are, for me, much richer than his more recent work. both star the nerdy, nebbish beauty of wang hongwei–who plays an odd, shangxi-province version of bizarro woody allen. i think i could watch wang hongwei smoke and eat noodles for hours.

like his recent films, PLATFORM and PICKPOCKET detail china’s transformation from a closed society of state-run industry into its current brand of particular capitalism.  for the sixth generation this change has resulted in a stunning slowmotion whiplash. jia zhangke was actually present at this particular screening, which took place because of a MOMA retrospective. at the Q&A after the screening someone asked the director whether he thought of himself more akin to the blockbuster and arguably escapist films of zhang yimou or the more openly critical, political-protest films of li yang. jia zhangke gave an interesting reply, saying he didn’t necessarily agree with such dichotomous labels, that reality was larger than such simple opposites. i asked a poet friend — who was also in attendance and who had himself left china shortly after ‘89 tiananmen — whether he thought jia’s response was more true or more politically coy — and my friend seemed to think it was a sincere answer.

in any case, i spent today thinking a great deal about PLATFORM’s last scene. i don’t think it will give anything away to say it’s a strange, mostly static composition. i’d seen PICKPOCKET a while back (which also has a terrific ending) and while i think it’s easy to say PICKPOCKET’s the better film, i was taken with how beautiful PLATFORM’s story was, a love story really, about two couples in a theater troupe through the 1980s. this last scene is a mysterious one, which doesn’t add particularly to your factual knowledge of the characters, but does have a very strange magic in its blocking and in its actions that burns in the brain (at least in mine) a permanent portrait of this non-couple and non-family.

the film’s precise depiction of the changing material conditions of the youth of shanxi province make for me a kind of mind-shattering comparison with the material state of the west in the 80s… definitely one to try.

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[somewhat relatedly, tonight -- through tragic happenstance -- i was forced to watch the very end of SEPTEMBER ISSUE -- a documentary about vogue magazine. it made me ill. maybe i'm a fool, but to see those two movies back to back made me speak into the apartment air, involuntarily: we live in an insane world where the ones in power are insane people who do insane things.]

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profile and interview with jia zhangke by stephen teo at senses of cinema:

ST: Why do you want to return to that stage of primevalism? Cinema has developed for a hundred years.

JZ: Because after a hundred years, the human life force in cinema is becoming less and less. The cinema is subjected more and more to industrial standards. I think cinema should contain human flavour and the flavour of the auteur. That’s why I didn’t want something easy and smooth. I want a movie that has an accent. For example, I can’t speak standard English, I have a Chinese accent. The cinema is the same. I have my own Jia Zhangke accent. I may be too garrulous, or too vague. My camera may be shaky or it jerks too much but that’s the emotion I feel on the set. That’s the kind of movie I want to make. Pouring your life force into the movie, not conforming to a cold industrial standard. That’s why I rejected the use of certain supplementary film techniques such as steadicam or even the track – though I used a bit of that in Platform. I don’t want my cameramen to use these supplementary techniques. Because I want my camera to come into direct contact with the subject.

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JZ: I use a lot of long shots. If the audience can see things in there, that’s good, if they can’t, so be it. I don’t want to impose too many things onto the audience… I don’t want to impose a message onto the audience. I want to give them a mood and within that mood, you can see things that you want, or you can’t see things. My films are rather challenging for the audience. They are not very clearly stated to the extent where the audience can see clearly the objects they want to see – this pen or this watch. If they don’t notice it, they don’t notice it. It’s not that I am being indifferent. Through all these, I am imparting a director’s attitude, how he sees the world and the cinema. What I mean to say is that it’s only an attitude because you can never be absolutely objective. When you need somebody to look at something, it’s no longer objective. There is no absolute objectivity, there is attitude, and through this attitude, there is an ideal.

cover of FEED by m.t. anderson

ereaders already are, or will soon enough become, visually engaging; they are in many ways already more convenient than their analog counterparts — from their hypertexuality to their capacity for instant distribution. however — other than the more apparent rebuttals (worse reading resolutions, less hardiness in bathtubs and backpacks, culture placed on permanent electronic life support), i think the less obvious, more subtle rejoinder is unfortunately the important one. as maryanne wolf argues below, we’re not directly wired to be readers. our instincts to follow distractions and follow titillating, quick bits of visual information (e.g. those involved in stalking that saber-toothed dinner) can overcome (perhaps more often in developing brains) our capacity for deep contemplation (e.g. our ability to consider: some day i too will cease to exist like this saber-toothed dinner i’m gnawing on and so i wonder what this means about the value of my own life and also if this would taste better with ketchup).

what the book does then is protect us from the flashing baubles and shiny lights of the beautiful internet vaudeville: that latest email, “friend” request, tweet, jezebel/craigslist/nytimes update… dwelling in the carnival for so long, we tend to forget that there’s another option possible: meadows free of noise.

or if the pastoral gags you: then the book as fortress, a portable monastery keeping aflame the capacity for contemplation in our current digital dark age:

Beyond Decoding Words at: http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/14/does-the-brain-like-e-books/

…In brief, this brain learns to access and integrate within 300 milliseconds a vast array of visual, semantic, sound (or phonological), and conceptual processes, which allows us to decode and begin to comprehend a word. At that point, for most of us our circuit is automatic enough to allocate an additional precious 100 to 200 milliseconds to an even more sophisticated set of comprehension processes that allow us to connect the decoded words to inference, analogical reasoning, critical analysis, contextual knowledge, and finally, the apex of reading: our own thoughts that go beyond the text.

This is what Proust called the heart of reading — when we go beyond the author’s wisdom and enter the beginning of our own.

I have no doubt that the new mediums will accomplish many of the goals we have for the reading brain, particularly the motivation to learn to decode, read and experience the knowledge that is available. As a cognitive neuroscientist, however, I believe we need rigorous research about whether the reading circuit of our youngest members will be short-circuited, figuratively and physiologically.

For my greatest concern is that the young brain will never have the time (in milliseconds or in hours or in years) to learn to go deeper into the text after the first decoding, but rather will be pulled by the medium to ever more distracting information, sidebars, and now,perhaps, videos (in the new vooks).

The child’s imagination and children’s nascent sense of probity and introspection are no match for a medium that creates a sense of urgency to get to the next piece of stimulating information. The attention span of children may be one of the main reasons why an immersion in on-screen reading is so engaging, and it may also be why digital reading may ultimately prove antithetical to the long-in-development, reflective nature of the expert reading brain as we know it.

the rest at : http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/14/does-the-brain-like-e-books/#maryanne

or, similarly Nicholas Carr here:

The pages of a book shield us from the distractions that bombard us during most of our waking hours. As an informational medium, the book focuses our attention, encouraging the kind of immersion in a story or an argument that promotes deep comprehension and deep learning…Our attention is scattered by all the distractions and interruptions that pour through our computers and digital networks. The result, a raft of psychological and neurological studies show, is cursory reading, weak comprehension and shallow learning.

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A good interview with Carr here:

Nicholas Carr — author of last July’s Atlantic cover story, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” — believes the distracted nature of Web surfing is reducing our capacity for deep contemplation and reflection. He began developing his theory when he realized that, after years of online information gathering, he had trouble reading a book or a magazine. As he puts it, “I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. . . . I’m not thinking the way I used to think.”

full interview here:

Reaction to Carr’s article on the EDGE.org here and the reaction in general summarized here.

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and as related postscript…

“Are We Doomed?” read the headline to an article in New Scientist, a British magazine that last year took a long look at complexity. (Spoiler alert: maybe.) There is a lot of end-of-days talk when it comes to this subject. You will find a strain of it in the work of Joseph Tainter, an anthropologist at the University of Utah and the author of “The Collapse of Complex Societies.” In the book, Mr. Tainter examines three ancient civilizations, including the Roman Empire, and explains how complexity drove them to ruin, essentially by bankrupting them.

Does he look at the complexity of the problems facing the United States and see doom? Possibly.

“Complexity creeps up on you,” he said in an interview. “It grows in ways, each of which seems reasonable at the time. It seemed reasonable at the time that we went into Afghanistan. It’s the cumulative costs that makes a society insolvent. Everything the Roman emperors did was a reasonable response in the situation that they found themselves in. It was the cumulative impact that did them in.”

Mr. Tainter isn’t peddling the nostalgic charms of simplicity, which is wise because there aren’t a lot of people who would buy it. Unless the subject is TV remote controls, most Americans have a fondness for complexity, or at least for ideas and objects that are hard to understand. In part that is because we assume complicated products come from sharp, impressive minds, and in part it’s because we understand that complexity is a fancy word for progress.

Read the rest at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/weekinreview/02segal.html