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.

………………..

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.

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.

shortly after his great, brutal novel RED THE FIEND came out, i wrote what amounted to a fan letter to gilbert sorrentino, whom i’d had as a teacher. he was kind and always responded to my (shamefully hopeful) letters. in this response, he wrote that if his work had any common theme, it was an ever abiding and complete sense of loss.

it should be noted too that sorrentino was of course suspicious of the very conceit of a “common theme,” and would sometimes demonstrate its feebleness by arguing that a writer had only one or two ideas, really. the implication being that these ideas were not the key ingredient. beckett, for example, he would say sardonically, thought the world was bleak.

and now we have his last, posthumously-published novel — THE ABYSS OF HUMAN ILLUSION — the hint of which was given in a piece published in the spring 07 issue of GOLDEN HANDCUFF REVIEW. that short piece openly announces its autobiography (so much that perhaps we’re obligated to question it) containing admissions like the below short excerpt.

what struck me as i read this last novel was sorrentino’s clear understanding that while he was here (and perhaps throughout his career) dealing with absolutely common, almost bathetic episodes of human misery, each familiar trope nonetheless is relieved (variably, here, certainly–but at times transcendentally) of its mundane moorings and wrestled into artifice.

to me, this transformation is something of great mystery. the furious ravings of a cuckold or drunk, nostalgia, even the confessions of desperate or envious or dying writers are made into something else: something somehow simultaneously witty, inexplicably sad, and determinedly fake. the latter out of a sense of integrity, the moral that art is not a transparent glass through which we can see reality, but an opaque, additional reality (to which, perhaps, we might compare our own).

from GOLDEN HANDCUFF REVIEW:

He wasn’t much good for anything else, and what he did know how to do — even when, he smiled ruefully — even when he knew how to do it, proved nothing, changed nothing, and spoke to about as many people as one could fit into a small movie theater.

And so he continued to do it, correcting and revising each newly made page with a feeling of weird neutrality, with a feeling that he was simply passing the time: this or solitaire — all right, this. Surely, the other old writers he still knew felt precisely this way. Did they? He surely wouldn’t ask such an impertinent question.

He had recently received a letter from a dear friend, who, it so turned out, died soon after. He took the letter from his files one morning, before he started what he now thought of as “work,” scare quotes flaring, and found in it what he was sure he had read. The friend had confessed to him that his last book was, indeed, his last book, that he had given up or lost — it made little difference — the ability and the desire to write another word…

He sat at his desk, and read the letter again. He wished, oh how he wished it wasn’t so, but he was choked with envy of his friend’s sterility: not to be able to write, not to want to write, to be, as they say, “written out,” or, more wonderfully, “burnt out” — lovely phrase! But it was a gift that had not been given him, and, he knew, despairing, that it would never be given him. He was doomed, damned, if you will, to write on, and on and on, blundering through the shadows of this pervasive twilight, until finally, perhaps, he would get said what could never be said.

buy it from the publisher. find it at your local library.

info for an event on 2/20/10 in celebration of the book’s publishing. with reading by walter abish, david markson, susan daitch and others here.

a reminiscence i wrote on sorrentino for the brooklyn rail here.

i’ve a story in an anthology put out by mudluscious press, collecting its first year of excellent chapbooks. includes ken baumann, shane jones, jimmy chen, brandi wells, blake butler, nick antosca, sam pink, james chapman, colin bassett, michael kimball, jac jemc, kim chinquee, kim parko, norman lock, randall brown, brian evenson, michael stewart, peter markus, ken sparling, aaron burch, david ohle, matthew savoca, p. h. madore, johannes göransson, charles lennox, ryan call, elizabeth ellen, molly gaudry, kevin wilson, mary hamilton, craig davis, kendra grant malone, lavie tidhar, lily hoang, mark baumer, ben tanzer, krammer abrahams, joshua cohen, c. l. bledsoe, joanna ruocco, josh maday, & michael martone.

pick it up from mlp.

I’ve a bit in the new Sleepingfish — edited by Derek White & Gary Lutz — along with Ryan Call, Anna DeForest, Sasha Fletcher, Nina Shope, Rachel May, David McLendon, The Brothers Goat, Lito Elio Porto, Adam Weinstein, Diane Williams, Dennis Cooper, Elliott Stevens, Tim Jones-Yelvington, Alec Niedenthal, Amelia Gray, Matt Bell, Eduardo Recife, David Ohle, Evelyn Hampton, Émilie Notéris, Ottessa Moshfegh, Cooper Renner, Christine Schutt, M. T. Fallon, Daniel Grandbois, Julie Doxsee, Terese Svoboda, Blake Butler, Stephen Gropp-Hess & Ali Aktan Aşkın.

Buy it from Calamari Press.

i haven’t read stephen elliot (whose memoir-ish latest is the much-praised THE ADDERALL DIARIES) though i just might after stumbling on this essay about why he writes. in it, he discusses MFA programs, publishing, process, and the economics of being a writer:

I realized that to continue as a writer I had to adjust certain expectations. My books have never sold in huge numbers and probably never will. But I can make enough while only writing what I want to write… I’m 37 years old and I can live off $30,000 a year, which is about what I make. It’s not a lot for San Francisco, but it’s enough. I try to do the best work I’m capable of, which is not the same as making the most money.

I’m at an age where my nonwriter friends are buying property, having babies, and moving ahead in their careers, while I live in a rent-controlled apartment with my young hipster roommate. I still go through heavy bouts of depression; it’s my nature. But I wouldn’t choose a different life. Time spent focusing on art is a privilege and a gift. The writing doesn’t make me happy, but it makes me happier, and it makes everything else easier to take.

…It sounds spoiled, but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with considering yourself an artist. There are sacrifices as well as payoffs. When I was discussing my new book with two married writers, they kept asking how I could work without an advance. I didn’t see how they could work with one. They said they needed a certain amount of money and that they had children. They made their children sound like a tremendous burden, and I felt they were using the word need when they should have said want. There’s nothing wrong with prioritizing something higher than writing. The husband has sold a lot more books than I do and has plenty more money than I have, but being a writer seems to make him unhappy. One day, when he was telling me how easy I have it and about the kind of advance he needed, I snapped. I said his book wasn’t worth more than my book just because he has kids. We’re lucky to be writers. Nobody owes us anything.

Read the rest at The Rumpus at: http://therumpus.net/2009/08/why-i-write-2/

one definition of a novel, say, is that which honestly tries to organize the chaos of thought into a semi-satisfactory, semi-consistent semantic machine of about eighty-thousand words. this definition might help us understand a book that’s mainly digressive in structure or one that fails to draw a moral conclusion.

only the simple and the pedantic want an art that purports to teach you something. or, as robert creeley said it: “Had I lived some years ago, I think I would have been a moralist, ie, one who lays down, so to speak, rules of behavior with no small amount of self-satisfaction. But the writer isn’t allowed that function anymore, or no man can take the job on very happily, being aware (as he must be) of what precisely that will make him.”

a big [sic] to the genderizing, but you get the point.

one is drawn to susan daitch’s magnificent novel because a reader can feel, can sense, the writer thinking as she writes. both to the reader and herself, the author is unpredictable and surprising. she is gratifyingly clever; she is free.

i think, because of this freedom, the book is capable of mysterious and beautiful passages that are wonderfully unanchored and yet, which in accretion, create a trusted, consistent experience… passages like the following which describes a uniquely modern state of desire, a ghost of love — a momentary and unpassionate desire:

She looked at a photograph of an attractive young man, not an advertisement, but almost. It was something passed by quickly, flipping through the pages of a book or a magazine. Laurel was drawn to the picture, although she didn’t turn back to it. She put the volume down and left the store. Even if the man himself stood near her in the store, she would have left. That kind of pursuit, whether she was its object or the pursuer, seemed unfathomable to her. It was something she was no longer capable of, she’d lost the language. As engaging or as easy as he or any random person looked, she knew she’d only feel embarrassed about it later (200).

i re-read this book after about fifteen years and i think it feels even fresher than when i first came to it… susan daitch’s fantastic novel tells the tale of julie greene and her boyfriend, eamonn, a weegee-admiring photographer. julie is a colorist, one who colors comic book panels for a living — specifically a comic book about electra, a heroine who can make duplicates of herself.

electra’s doubles, the comic book industry, eamonn’s photography — all allow a focused but continued and varied meditation on the artifice of representation, its constantly shifting mimetic, mythic and mystic functions. this meditation meanders and digresses while slyly and courageously never coming to a conclusion.

late in the book, Daitch writes:

Electra’s world had turned into a house of mirrors. She reflected or mimicked every situation she found herself in. I considered this condition a kind of disease, one which had lain dormant for years: she’d probably caught it in space. The first symptoms were awkward polyphonic parrotings of other people. Residents of Allen Street avoided Electra because she copied them involuntarily. She would instantly look and sound like each random passerby in turn. Her reflexivity reached such proportions that Electra was, for all intents and purposes, invisible. She had no control over herself. People saw themselves in her, which was confusing to both parties, or she blended in with buildings. It was an anti-solipsistic condition, and it explained why Eamonn’s photographs of her were blank. In the early stages of the disease, the camera was more sensitive to invisibility and mimicry than the naked eye (212).

daitch’s style is never ostentatious, almost modest. and yet, using subtle juxtapositions and transitions, this work creates all kinds of new holes of indeterminacy, weird and new thoughts.

an opposing but related definition to the above for the novel might nonetheless also be true: the novel as a totem — a symbol to ourselves that the ineffable unfolding of the world cannot (and should not) be made into a reductive narrative. the novel then can only exist as a fractal, unresolvable piece of the whole. THE COLORIST is thus a brave type of paradoxical work — a powerful and almost impossible novel that attempts to organize the unknowable and yet also one that refuses to do so.

buy it used or find it at your local library.

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a nice interview with daitch by KCRW’s silverblatt (which takes place in 1990 and has great background from daitch — and also includes a historical bit …as silverblatt also interviews knopf editor robin desser, then an editor at vintage contemporaries, who speaks, it’s almost quaint, about the reasons a book would come out as a “paperback original”) :

http://www.kcrw.com/etc/programs/bw/bw900724susan_daitch

BEST OF 2009

This book, ostensibly about a group of women missing one of their own, is delightfully strange, both in the way the plot progresses and the way Ruocco plays with language…

congratulations to joanna ruocco for penning this stunning debut. on only its fourth outing, a nice feather too in the cap for Ellipsis Press. won’t you consider picking up a copy of our first four titles at a special year-end sale?

…

At a time like ours, in which mechanical skill has attained unsuspected perfection, the most famous works may be heard as easily as one may drink a glass of beer… Should we not fear this domestication of sound, this magic that anyone can bring from a disc at his will. Will it not bring to waste the mysterious force of an art which one might have thought indestructible.

Written under the subtitle: ON REMOVING THE MYSTIQUE OF MUSIC

most days i so agree with claude’s pov, but ah well… my new favorite album only uses synth drums… que sera sera:

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not that you should care about the motivations of your humble correspondent, but breaking once the vow to myself never to blog about movies seems to have opened the floodgates as i now feel a sick need to write about arnaud desplechin. just re-watched his enormous KINGS AND QUEEN — the DVD of which has some incredible extras, including interviews with desplechin and others with the films’ incredible actors.

in the desplechin interview we learn one method that makes possible the density and overflowing of theme and idea and joke in the movie. desplechin had been reading truffaut who wrote to his scriptwriter once, “How can you imagine I will make a scene of four minutes to say one idea?” desplechin decided to make a motto (and one-up) his idol, by placing above his writing desk the following: “Each minute we have to be sure that we show five different ideas.”

the interview also reveals desplechin’s frankly weird idea of the specific possibility of cinema–one it turns out related to a very gendered idea of the psychology of romance. it came out of his re-watching VERTIGO.

I thought I was not a fan of VERTIGO. I thought that I preferred MARNIE. But when I saw the real film that Hitchcock wanted to make, I was crying and crying and crying… I thought the film was saying something, an awful truth about manhood, which would be that each time you love a woman, there is another hidden woman who died before, and that you haven’t been able to stop that. … It doesn’t have to be a particular woman, but there is this idea that as soon as you start your love life, there is a woman who died before and that you will mourn all your life. And all the women you will meet, they will be pale copies of this dead woman. …And I think cinema [in particular] …is able to describe that sort of feeling …which is typically …bizarre…quite abstract and concrete… I think that on the opposite side for a woman… I think that each woman has killed a man before the man she is loving now.

i’m really not sure about all of that. maybe it’s important, maybe not — but what a film! overspilling with gesture and idea and tragedy. totally artificial and yet utterly connecting with human experience. a completely new type of extraordinary epic built out of artificially and continuously contradicting characters’ psychologies.