Some Kind of Cheese Orgy by Linh Dinh
Kaya Oakes01.30.10
Vietnamese-American author Linh Dinh’s short story "Stewart Crenshaw" has to be among the oddest, most Borgesian slave narratives ever written. A pre-Emancipation southern white man commands his slaves to be his master. The community is an uproar over this arrangement and the slaves object to their circumstances but Crenshaw asserts that it is his right. The story revolves around the question of whether this southern gentleman is a heroic John Brown figure or the ultimate poseur until the narrative undoes itself in a final brilliant metafictional move. Kaya Oakes, author of Slanted Enchanted: The Evolution of Indie Culture, reviews the most recent collection of Dinh’s poetry. Fans of his work will be glad to know that after several delays, Dinh’s novel Love Like Hate will be published by Seven Stories in May.
86’d Stories: Interview with bouncer Frankie Clinton
Jennifer Blowdryer01.27.10
George Orwell recounts his experience of being shot while fighting in the Spanish Civil War: "Roughly speaking it was the sensation of being at the center of an explosion. There seemed to be a loud bang and a blinding flash of light all round me, and I felt a tremendous shock––no pain, only a violent shock, such as you get from an electric terminal; with it a sense of utter weakness, a feeling of being stricken and shriveled up to nothing." Here Frankie Clinton describes what it was like to be stabbed while working as a bouncer outside a Manhattan night club. His advice on human interaction is essential reading for any potential bouncers out there and for fans of workplace tourism. Learn more about Jennifer Blowdryer’s 86’d project here.
Stab Vests, Jesus Guns and Eating Human Hearts
Casey McKinney01.22.10
There was a bunch of stuff I wanted to blog about tonight, lots of goings on in the world since I lost a blog earlier this week due to a…
Rob Nilsson and Cine Manifest at Anthology Film Archives
Nancy Keefe Rhodes01.22.10
This week (Jan 21. through the 28th) at New York City’s Anthology Film Archive come the films of award winning director Rob Nilsson and Cine Manifest, San Francisco’s 1970s Marxist film collective. Nancy Keefe Rhodes gives an exhaustive yet breathless preview of the films screened at AFA. But even if you aren’t in New York, you can get many on Netflix, from your favorite indie movie store, or buy them from the source; so read up, watch, and learn how Nilsson, the octogenarian everyman, demurs his stance over time, favoring art over politics.
Theater: Gisèle Vienne and Dennis Cooper’s ‘Jerk’
Casey McKinney01.18.10
French theater director ‘Gisèle Vienne’s Jerk is based on the chilling text of Dennis Cooper, an author deemed "the most dangerous…
Unicorns
Joanna Ruocco01.17.10
Joanna Ruocco’s writing is packed with odd and intelligent linguistic adventures and has received praise from Robert Coover and Carole Maso. In her first short story for Fanzine, she addresses Derrida’s football scholarship, drinking gimlets in body stockings, gluten allergies, the Cuban revolution and the self-conscious feeling that arrives when we become concerned that our thoughts and fantasies are determined by the power structure. "Unicorns" is from her forthcoming short story collection Man’s Companions. The accompanying images are from Portland-based artist and designer Sarah Gottesdiener, who is also one half of the performance duo, The Gay Deceivers.
Film: Aristide and the Endless Revolution
Casey McKinney01.14.10
First of all donate to the American Red Cross and PIH if you want to help the victims of the devastating earthquake in Haiti (but ignore the texting…
The Last Station – Love, Copyright and Anarcho-Christianity
Amy Meyerson01.14.10
It seems that L. Ron Hubbard wasn’t the only writer to create a bizarre and zealous spiritual organization. In the later part of his life, Leo Tolstoy began a radical ascetic pacifist Christian movement. He swapped letters with Gandhi, advocated for anarchist zoologist Peter Kropotkin and extolled the values of Esperanto. Director Michael Hoffman’s The Last Station offers a view on the last days of Tolstoy’s life and the dispute over the ownership of the literary estate between his wife and his followers. While the film maintains a tight focus on its pair of lovers, Amy Meyerson offers insight into the historical events that loom just outside the frame. Starring Christopher Plummer, Helen Mirren and Paul Giamatti, the film is based on a novel by literary critic Jay Parini, who having contemplated the influence of an author after their eventual departure in his writing, has perhaps appropriately been appointed literary executor to Gore Vidal.
The Queer Child, or Growing Up Sideways in the Twentieth Century by Kathryn Bond Stockton
Aaron Nielsen01.11.10
The suicide rate among queer youth is twice to four times that of their heterosexual counterparts depending on your source, and perhaps concern for that population formed the root of Kathryn Stockton’s inquiry into the depiction of queer children in literature and film. But to take on such a project is inevitably to tangle with our social construction of childhood and its very problematic relationship to sexuality. Stockton, an intellectually fearless English literature professor at the University of Utah and a graduate of the Harvard Divinity School, relies on a fascinating array of texts including Georges Bataille, Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures, Supreme Court cases, Virginia Woolf, William Blake and Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Aaron Nielsen, a contributor to Dennis Cooper’s Userlands anthology reviews.
