My Favorite Generals: Roberto Bolano’s The Third Reich and New York’s Latin Awakening
Andrew Haley10.10.10
Andrew Haley explicates how Bolaño’s unpublished manuscripts led to a US-based Spanish-language joint venture that included Random House and a Berlusconi-owned Italian press—a deal that will have large ramifications on how Spanish-language literature is bought and read in the Americas. Business strategies may be an apt parallel to the novel in question: Bolaño’s The Third Reich is about an obsessive player of a World War II board game, not unlike the gaming classic Axis & Allies. El Tercer Reich was published last March and Natasha Wimmer’s English translation will hit stores this fall.
Book: Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season
Ben Bush10.09.10
With the NBA season starting later this month, it seemed like a good time to recommend this book from David Shields about the, ahem, 1994-1995 season…
You Have Arms to Bar Yourself from People: Gary Lutz and I Looked Alive
Alissa Nutting10.03.10
Gary Lutz is notoriously unprolific and for good reason: the man puts a super-human amount of thought into each line of his prose. In his speech "The Sentence is a Lonely Place" he describes how he thinks about word choice and order: the shapes of the letters on the page, his preference for ending a sentence with a hard consonant sound unless there’s a reason to leave it intentionally open-ended. Given the intensely unusual grammar of his fiction, it’s either counter-intuitive or completely appropriate that he is also the co-author of Writer’s Digest Grammar Desk Reference. I wasn’t entirely sure it was the same "Gary Lutz" until I saw that Ben Marcus’s novels were listed in an example of how to correctly use a colon. With copies of the first edition of Lutz’s out-of-print 2003 short story collection I Looked Alive currently priced at $175 on Amazon, Brooklyn Rail/Black Square Editions have kindly reprinted it for the rest of us. Alissa Nutting, author of Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls, reviews.
Music: Swans: My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope To The Sky
Casey McKinney09.30.10
Swans said they’d never play old Swans again. So, then, what’s to say about My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope To The Sky? besides it’s fucking…
Mark Zuckerberg is Maybe an Asshole: a review of The Social Network
Brandon Scott Gorrell09.30.10
This film offering a purported peek into the life of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg seems somehow like a fitting bedfellow for the public view we have allowed into our own lives by joining his network. The Social Network boasts the odd assortment of talents David Fincher (Fight Club), Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing), Jesse Eisenberg (Michael Cera’s understudy and star of The Squid and the Whale) and Justin Timberlake (spokesman for Audi, Givenchy and various Sony electronic products). Brandon Scott Gorrell, author of during my nervous breakdown i want to have a biographer present, is a poet whose writing depicts the impact of the internet on our neuroses and whose work is at much at home in the digital sphere as on the printed page. He seemed a natural fit for this review.
Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps): Animal Collective’s Oddsac, John Zorn’s Astronome, and Candian Hipster Comic Opus Ivory Tower
Christian Williams09.28.10
These three DVD releases have their origins with the work of musicians but each one mutates into something hard to define. Christian Williams explains about the canoeing undead, how to masturbate with a pepper mill and Gandhi’s approach to the art of chess.
The 2010 New York Film Festival
Benjamin Strong09.24.10
Benjamin Strong takes in the offerings from the 48th annual New York Film Festival and finds there’s more to it than the story of the founder of the friend ogling phenom, facebook, in Social Networking––more than Aaron Sorkin’s limited involvement anyway (Sorkin admitted today that the hardest thing for him to do on a day to day basis is to "not do cocaine." What a weirdo…). Billionaire bios aside, many of the films try to straddle the headlines of the world economic downturn, but are still best here when running from middle to high brow. Strong unearths the diamonds amidst the coal (or maybe that order should be reversed, coal over diamonds, beautiful coal?…I dunno, but you’ll know what to see after his preview of a festival that has been "pretty tremendous across the board.")
James Baldwin, Uncollected
Nicholas Boggs09.21.10
Although he was well known as a gay public figure, Baldwin rarely spoke candidly about his own sexuality and The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings only highlights the absence of the most essential of his unpublished papers. Baldwin’s correspondence has been called the “one great Baldwin masterpiece waiting to be published” but his family has long suppressed these letters because of their own discomfort with what they contain. Nicholas Boggs describes the writer’s many contradictions and the importance of Baldwin in his own life, growing up white and gay in a predominantly black public school in Washington D.C.
Daniel Nester Reviews His Friend Eric’s External Hard Drive
Daniel Nester09.16.10
Like Janus, the two-headed Roman god who could see the future and the past, Daniel Nester, author of How to Be Inappropriate, both eulogizes the record stores that appear in his recurring dreams and reviews his friend Eric’s external music hard drive. Bands discussed include San Diego math-rockers Thingy, Terence Trent D’Arby, Gary Numan, David Pajo’s Aerial M, two-tone ska, Sun Ra, Judas Priest, post-Sony Prince, Ultravox and Judy Collins. In a way this is a follow-up to Dutch cut’n’paste pop star Solex’s recent review of her own Pandora station, the music is reviewed not as albums, but in the way we now most frequently experience it—as streaming sound or blocks of data.
Book: Camden Joy: Palm Tree 13
Ben Bush09.07.10
I was first introduced to Camden Joy’s writing by The Greatest Album Ever Told, his beautifully letter-pressed screed about Frank Black’s Teenager…
