Blog

Good New Things, Two of Which Aren’t New

I. Synecdoche, New York

synecdocheFor a long time while watching I wasn’t with this movie. Not like: I didn’t get it. I didn’t, but didn’t much work at it that way. But I wasn’t with it as it wanted me to be. The situation/drama/conflicts were too synthetic for me to move past the distance I was keeping. I know this is in line with the movie’s themes, but okay so Hazel’s house is just perpetually on fire. But then the movie kept going and Caden kept getting older and suddenly two things happened:

  1. Dianne Wiest shows up.
  2. The scope of things gets so carefully large that the movie becomes one of the best representations of the bigness of life I’ve ever seen.

Shame about Catherine Keener though. Early on, N said: “See this is why I don’t like her, she always plays the same role.” I like C.K., but he’s right. We’ve seen her range with that other Philip Seymour Hoffman vehicle, Capote. Isn’t she tired of playing the sexy-smart-disloyal flake? Isn’t Charlie Kaufman ready to write another role for her?

II. Hedwig and the Angry Inch

hedwig1_400N & I just finished watching it. It’s on Netflix streaming now, so you can, too. What I like best, this time around perhaps, is the easy way it makes cartoons and soft-rock ballads out of Aristophanes’ genderqueer creation myth. And of course the music. At last: a rock musical to expose the lack of rock in all previous rock musicals.

UNL once called its Intro to Lesbian and Gay Lit class, “Sex Roles in Literature.” It is, let’s admit, a far better name than what we have now, right? I’d try to teach it, if I could, and I’d totally show this movie on a day I didn’t feel like teaching.

III. The Chapbook Review

This is the new one. The inaugural issue of this useful resource just launched, and The Cupboard’s latest volume, Play, gets reviewed not just once but twice. Take that, Pocket Finger!

Birthday Wishes: A List

  • An uncongested head
  • A more helpful horoscope than this one:

    For Wednesday, May 27 -You can’t be helping other people all the time! Today, it’s time to help yourself. Add a few selfish acts into your good deeds and don’t feel bad about it. Don’t do anything too crazy — just put yourself first a few times when you usually would not. This isn’t an excuse to forget your manners — you should still say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and be a nice person. But you deserve a day when you treat yourself more like the star you are. There’s no harm in that.

  • Surprise visitors
  • At least one correct answer to a trivia question from either of these decks:
    All-St*r Sports Edition
    All-St*r Sports Edition
    Baby Boomer Edition
    Baby Boomer Edition
  • A phone call from a benevolent book publisher
  • An email from a benevolent journal editor
  • A handshake from a benevolent hobo
  • Some yarn art to fill this space, and/or replace the unicorn which is too unlike the rest of my collection to really fit well and, though it’s dumb to say, is a bit too 2005:
    yarnart
  • World peace
  • The sudden disappearance of all “Visualize Whirled Peas” bumper sticks, buttons, T-shirts, et al.
  • An advance copy of The Pale King
  • Everyone to have a good time, or a whole good day, whether or not I’m involved at all.

Son of Rambow

Son of Rambow!

son-of-rambow

Boy on the left is Will, the only son in a family that’s part of some fundamentalist “Brethren” that disables him from movies, TV, breathing, etc. Will’s dad died some years back. He draws all over his Bible, like even over all the words, and he also works on a mural that runs all around one of the stalls in the boy’s bathroom at school. Boy on the right is Lee, who gets in trouble a lot, and copies bootlegged movies for his older brother to sell. His latest: First Blood.
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Samedi the Deafness, Jesse Ball

samedi_the_deafnesslargeGiven what Ball had given The Cupboard, I’d assumed all this time this would be a language-driven book. Or if not a language-driven book, much like something written by a Lish devotee, than an image-driven one. A Ben Marcus novel, or maybe like a Djuna Barnes one.

Imagine my surprise to read this morning a plot-driven novel.

I was only going to breeze through a few pages as a way to get ready for the morning’s writing. And then, four hours later: Finished.

Samedi the Deafness is a mystery novel. Its back cover’s blurbs do a fine job of summing it up: Kafka meets Hitchcock, or Kafka meets Fleming. Take your pick. The latter(s) in that one day James Sim leaves the house and comes across a man who’s just been stabbed and “learns” of a possible plot to destroy mankind. Events progress well outside of his own control. The former in that in those events we never know whom to trust, what is the truth, or even if such exists. Hence those quote marks a few sentences back.
Continue reading Samedi the Deafness, Jesse Ball

Help Needed from Smarter People

I’m trying to come up with a list of what I’m belaboringly calling “deuteragonistic narrators”—i.e., first-person narrators who are not the protagonists in their own stories.

Some classic examples:

  • Nick in The Great Gatsby
  • Jim in My Ántonia
  • “we” in “A Rose for Emily”

And that’s all I can come up with. Sorta-kinda DNs can be found in Heart of Darkness, A Good Soldier, and Lolita, though whether all those narrators aren’t pretty much the protagonists of those novels is I think up for debate.

There has to be more. (There have to be more?) Can you help?

J. Timberlake on SNL

J.T. on SNL this past weekend was very good. As all the bloggers are probably briefly saying before linking to vidclips, he killed, in practically every sketch he was in (and he was in just about every one), even upstaging Wiig’s Target lady in her own eponymous sketch. Most folks will probably link to the latest Samberg-Timberlake collab vid “Motherlover”, but for me the highlight of the show was “Immigrant Tale”, where J.T. played Irish immigrant Cornelius Timberlake, prophesying on the benefits to be reaped by his famous and talented great-great-grandson.
justin
Continue reading J. Timberlake on SNL

Parks and Recreation and Single-Cam Sitcoms

That laff-track, studio-audience sitcoms still exist in a post-30 Rock / –Office / –Scrubs / –Malcolm in the Middle era is as confounding to me as the length of hockey season. What’s the allure, exactly? Sitcoms have always been my favorite genre of TV—and I say this as a fan of Six Feet Under, Twin Peaks, and the Sopranos—but one of the difficult things about admitting that you love sitcoms is how unbearably formulaic and plodding they can be.
friends
For, oh, fifty years, every sitcom was built of scenes the dialogue to which fell into a nice rhythm. Line-line-line-laff. Line-line-laff. Line-line-line-line-big laff. It got depressing. Even at their funniest, your laughter was always supplanted by recorded laughter, and always met with the hammy patience of the actor waiting to proceed. And now there are sitcoms that don’t do this. There’s no waiting for laughter sounds to diminish, and so rhythm—i.e. timing, that which any comic will tell you is key to a good joke—is so much more loose and interesting. A belabored analogy: whereas Everybody Loves Raymond is a waltz, 30 Rock is jazz.

It doesn’t take an Alessandra Stanley to know that sitcoms are America’s least favorite genre of television. We’d much rather watch reality television—American Idol and Dancing with the Stars, specifically—or one hour dramas, preferably in a multi-program franchise, definitely about crime and the solving thereof. In the top 20 Nielsen-rated shows for the 2008-2009 season, there’s only one sitcom listed, and it’s currently tied for the number 11 spot with a show named Criminal Minds that I’ve never heard of. That sitcom is Two and a Half Men.

Continue reading Parks and Recreation and Single-Cam Sitcoms

“Empty Shell” – Vic Godard & the Subway Sect (tab)

vicgodardI have a lot of work to do. I’m throwing an end-of-the-semester / end-of-my-comps party for English dept. friends, and they’re due to arrive in t-minus eleven hours. I’m expecting ten, maybe twelve people. I have low expectations.

So: rather than clean and go food shopping, why not try to figure out the guitar chords for an obscure song by a band I’d up until 2009 never heard of?

tabs after the jump

This is Water

By now you’ve probably read David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech, and if you haven’t your life is lesser for it. If you, like, have been meaning to and but can’t find the time, I’ll try to grab the best part to give you a sense of how good it is:

But most days, if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she’s not usually like this. Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it’s also not impossible. It just depends what you what to consider. If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re gonna try to see it.

This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship.

Continue reading This is Water

Roth's Pastoral Pictorial

HTMLGIANT is one of many writing-related blogs, this one like the bratty stepchild of the rest. Its posts, like all blogs’, are hit or miss. Today, a bull’s-eye:
roth
“Let me tell you something mother fuckers: it’s not easy writing all day. Sometimes I like to take a long walk by the stone wall and sit down and wait for a mojito — which never comes. If one were to magically appear in my lap, I’d believe in surrealism once and for all; but for now, social realism will have to do.”

N.B.: Yers truly = big adoring fan of P. Roth.

Summer Plans

NYC friends: rejoice. It’s looking as though I’ll be spending two weeks House-/cat-sitting in Brooklyn for my good friends Clay and Elaine as they honeymoon in Italy. Clay and Elaine are mathematicians, with PhDs and everything. I recently wrote something called “Go Pitt”. Clay recently wrote something called “Non-archimedean equidistribution on elliptic curves with global applications.”

Yes, I said cat-sitting. Yes, I’m allergic to cats. I’m coming armed with freshly refilled prescriptions for Fexofenadine and many reporter’s notebooks. I have a lot of (let’s hope) final research to do on the taxidermy book, and here are some things I hope to see on my trip:

The AMNH archives
The AMNH archives

Darr, a shop on Atlantic Ave in Brooklyn.
Darr, a shop on Atlantic Ave in Brooklyn.

Well, a guy can dream....
Well, a guy can dream....

And you, perhaps? It’ll be the end of June and very early July. “Let’s do lunch,” and by “lunch” I mean let’s see what five dollars will get us at the nearest bodega.

the cupboard, the cupboard.

For a couple years now, Adam Peterson and I have been putting together a literary pamphlet named The Cupboard. It used to be monthly, can you imagine? (Pgh folks: remember when The New Yinzer was fortnightly?) Now it’s a quarterly, and while we’re a little behind on the seasons, we have a new volume out.

The Winter 2009 volume:
Mathias Svalina’s Play.

Play
Play is a book you can buy.

It’s so good. It’s 29 instructions for 29 games for children. You’ve never played a single one, and you have to play all of them this spring and summer. You can probably play a few in the fall, too. Winter’s of course for indoors and going off on your own.

The Cupboard only costs $5. This is cheaper than every other book you’ll ever buy. But even cheaper is getting four of them each year for only $15.

Mathias is such a nice and smart guy. He was so nice and smart to send this to us. Buy a copy, or subscribe for a year, and feel nice and smart for supporting independent publishing.