Are We There Yet? A Reading of Paul Legault
Near the end of his prescient 1990 essay, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” David Foster Wallace discusses who the new “real rebels” of American fiction will be after postmodernism, and what their writing will look like, speculating that, “The new rebels might be the ones willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, [...]
Big Data And Why Spielberg Don’t Know Dick
A problem with philosophically charged reviews of sci-fi films is that they often treat technology as either an extension of an ancient question or secondary to the quandary at hand. Upon a recent viewing of Steven Spielberg’s dystopian thriller Minority Report, based on the Philip K. Dick short story, my online hunt for a review venturing beyond [...]
McNeill and Burroughs: Ah Pook Is Here
OBSERVED WHILE FALLING: Bill Burroughs, Ah Pook, and Me’ & THE LOST ART OF AH POOK IS HERE: Images From The Graphic Novel’ by Malcolm McNeill; Fantagraphics, November 2012. William S. Burroughs’ The Soft Machine, inaugural novel of what would become his “Nova Trilogy” (also including The Ticket That Exploded, and Nova Express) arrived on [...]
ANGELA CARTER’S THE PASSION OF NEW EVE
Angela Carter’s anti-mythic The Passion of New Eve (1977) is a novel that, for me, resides in easy company with Jean-Luc Godard’s new wave Weekend (1967) and Derek Jarman’s post-punk Jubilee (1978). Visually, with its hysterical sexually dimorphic revolutionaries, graffiti, machine guns, dystopian landscapes, surgical Sadomasochism and improvised guerrilla skirmishes The Passion of New Eve [...]
Brilliant New Cover Art For Orwell’s 1984
The cover art for Penguin’s latest edition of George Orwell’s classic dystopian tale is fantastic! Designer David Pearson said that the design went through numerous iterations as to, “Establish just the right amount of print obliteration. Eventually we settled on printing and debossing, as per the Great Ideas series [Why I Write shown, above], with the [...]
Short Documentary: Shteyngart Blurbs
First a tumblr dedicated to author Gary Shtengart’s blurbs, and now this short documentary by Edward Champion and narrated by Jonathan Aimes, makes it official - Gary Shteyngart is a blurb whore. Shteyngart has gone so far as to blurb his blurbs on Twitter. In fact, he blurbed this documentary:
Jones the Cat and the Litigation of ‘Alien’ and ‘The Terminator’
Of all the enigmas of Ridley Scott’s magnificent film Alien (1979), one with the capacity to genuinely cause fans and critics to sink into dejected catalepsy or fevered rage is the presence aboard the space vessel Nostromo – and the narrative consequences of – Jones the cat. My purpose here is to close decades of [...]
Edward Hopper and the Dissolution of Pulp
Edward Hopper painted American melancholia, scoping the silent exhaustion and unuttered shame of men and women so isolated and suicidal that one can only wonder at the desperation shadowing them. These mute Hitchcockian scenes (his 1925 painting House by the Railroad is worthy of Norman Bates – incidentally Robert Bloch, author of Psycho, got his [...]
Recipe for an Ayn Rand Novel
While digging deep in the back of a kitchen cupboard I found the recipe for an Ayn Rand novel: In a large mixing bowl add a dash of pseudo-plot, preferably with the seeds removed as to cut down on the spicy aftertaste, to a cup of utopian daydream. Pour into a large skillet. At a [...]
The Late David Rakoff’s “Christmas Freud”
After a long battle with cancer writer David Rakoff has passed away at the age of 47. His brillant, humorous and sincere storytelling will be greatly missed. Here he is on This American Life reading a story about being Sigmund Freud in the Christmas window display of a Barney’s department store. This episode starts with David [...]
Gore Vidal’s Wittiest TV Appearances
Gore Vidal once said, “I never miss an opportunity to have sex or appear on television.” Before apathy and old age beseeched the once virile Vidal, he didn’t. His appearances along side William F. Buckley and Norman Mailer are legendary. His cantankerous charm and acerbic wit led Johnny Carson to offer him a spot as a guest host of “The Tonight [...]
Fran Lebowitz is New York: Watch her takedown Bloomberg and NYU
The always insightful and righteously pissed off Fran Lebowitz takes down Michael Bloomberg, NYU, and all the greedy bastards gentrifying New York. Lebowitz’s passionate rant has been brought on by NYU’s plan to construct four new buildings in Greenwich Village creating six city blocks (1.6 million square feet) of massive concrete structures. The Village is one of the rare [...]
Get Jiro! Anthony Bourdain at SDCC
Noted chef, author, and world traveler Anthony Bourdain has finally released his graphic novel “Get Jiro!” Vibrantly illustrated by Langdon Foss and José Villarrubia, “Get Jiro!” features a raging sushi chef in a near-future Los Angeles who casually slashes and decapitates militant vegans and soy sauce slathering sushi noobs. Besides his two hit shows “No [...]
No Sex Please, We’re Nerds: The Gernsback Continuum and the Neutering of Science Fiction
The sexual repression of science fiction began in what is now Tribeca, New York. More precisely: the wormhole, the vortex of this Bermuda Triangle of missing sex was located at 53 Park Place, New York, NY, the editorial address of Hugo Gernsback and Dr. Thomas O’Conor Sloane. It was from this address that Gernsback launched [...]
Paul Fussell (1924-2012): Excerpt From ‘Wartime’
Paul Fussell, literary scholar, professor, and author of many works, most notably his book on World War I ”The Great War and Modern Memory,” died Wednesday morning at the age of 88. A veteran of World War II, Fussell tackled the absurdity of war romanticization and journalistic censorship with a keen experiential and literary eye. This unsettling and brilliant excerpt [...]
Doctorow, Amis and Atwood discuss America’s Global Politics
This year’s PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature brought roughly 100 writers from 25 countries to New York. One of the most fascinating talks was with writers E.L. Doctorow (Homer & Langley, Ragtime), Margaret Atwood (The Blind Assassin, Year of the Flood) and Martin Amis (Money, The Pregnant Widow) regarding America and its role in global politics, something the Sunday [...]
The Psychogeography Of A Clockwork Orange
The rain had penetrated the bricks and infiltrated the electrics of my basement flat, so that when the doorbell finally rang near midnight, it was with the barely audible rattle of a drowning cricket. He was late. I climbed the stairs to the communal foyer, beyond the slagheap of unsolicited mail, the Raleigh bicycle with [...]
Kathy Acker’s 4H Club
Tattooed, mastectomized, pierced, body-built and crew cut, Kathy Acker rode her motorcycle along the wet seam of the posthuman, defying and pirating the traffic of literature in her leather jacket and sunglasses. Acker was a mythographer, rewriting the corpus of literature, rewriting the body, writing through the orgasmic body and writing on and into the [...]
P.G. Wodehouse Documentary
Wodehouse’s plots were almost always the same: The nescient Bertie Wooster finds himself tangled in a debacle of his own underpinning, until, through a series of well foreshadowed events, his omnipotent valet Jeeves saves the day. After thirty years of novels neither character undergoes much development. The novels rarely delve into the contemporary issues of [...]
Confessions Of A Redeemed Burroughs Addict
One of the profound ironies regarding William S. Burroughs is his facility of attracting revisionist addicts to perpetuate the Burroughs hagiography, the Burroughs product, and therefore, the Burroughs junk. I consider William Burroughs to be one of the pre-eminent writers of the mid/late twentieth century. But just as a good drinker is one who knows [...]
30 Renowned Writers Speak Disbelief in God
Writers such as José Saramago, Margret Atwood, Phillip Roth, Ken Follet, Arthur Miller, Ian McEwan, Phillip Pullman, Salman Rushdie and more speak about God and their disbelief. Ian McEwan: If you have a sacred text that tells you how the world began, or what your relationship is between this “Sky God” and you, it does curtail [...]
Video: Christopher Hitchens 1949-2011
The day Christopher Hitchens passed away I received a considerable amount of calls and emails offering condolences. It was a bit odd considering that I never knew the man though, admittedly, I do have an entire shelf dedicated to his work. That said, the internet has been flooded with people both mourning his death and taking the opportunity to bash him [...]
Occupy Books
“The only sure bulwark of continuing liberty is a government strong enough to protect the interests of the people, and a people strong enough and well enough informed to maintain its sovereign control over the government.” - Franklin D. Roosevelt Roughly a couple weeks into the Occupy Wall Street protest a group of activists in Liberty [...]
Stéphane Hessel’s Time For Outrage
As published in the North Coast Journal (OCT. 20, 2011): It’s arguably a good thing some challenges are too immense to be tackled alone. Cooperation, reciprocation and compassion – the tempered tools of our species’ survival – when wielded against seemingly insurmountable struggles, remind us of what it is to be human. At the seasoned [...]
Rove’s Brain
Published in the North Coast Journal May 5th, 2011 Barack Obama announced his reelection campaign on April 5, and within hours Karl Rove, the crafty political strategist once famously dubbed “Bush’s Brain,” was on Fox news opining on the field of Republican candidates. Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty was cited as a leading contender. Was there [...]
Revolutionary Jokers
Recent revolutionary events have shown that simplistic western perceptions of a monolithic middle east are out of date, and even the very idea of a separated and distinct east and west hold little relevance in our connected modern world. But what form does this modern revolution take? Albert Cossery’s satirical novel The Jokers, recently translated [...]
Books: Foreshadow of the Singularity?
“The enlightenment has to be conceived as an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment of possibly going beyond them.” – Michel Foucault ENTER EMBEDDED SYSTEMS [...]
