Semi-Ambient Review of Mathias Svalina’s I Am A Very Productive Entrepreneur
Blake Butler04.23.12
Blake Butler finds a little sweetness in Mathias Svalina’s I Am A Very Productive Entrepreneur and burns it off with a machine like the one from the 80s that swings around your ankle as you skip, but it’s not skip counting because that’s how you count by twos.
Jon Raymond’s Contradictory Territories: From Page to Screen
Donal Mosher04.19.12
Jon Raymond is the incredibly adroit screenwriter behind Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy, Old Joy, Meek’s Cutoff and the award winning tv miniseries Mildred Pierce. He’s also an author, and his latest novel Rain Dragon is reviewed here by filmmaker Donal Mosher (whose latest Off Label debuts at the Tribeca Film Festival tonight…review on that soon!). The two also sit down for a chat about the differences between script and prose writing and a heap of other tasty, sage stuff.
Roberto Burle Marx: The Modernity of Landscape
Gean Moreno03.01.12
The landcape architecture of Roberto Burle Marx is the interstitial fluid that lubricates the intersection of nature and artifice. As the lines blur that separate insular impulses of design, the artist reimagines the usefulness––and ultimately, the paradigm––of deliniation. Gean Moreno takes us through Burle Marx’s garden of forking paths.
A magic trapeze: Baby Geisha by Trinie Dalton
Laura Carter02.06.12
Laura Carter explores Trinie Dalton’s short story collection Baby Geisha and finds Flarf, a muddy horse, and what may be the opposite of feminine writing. It’s snapping turtle prose. It’s tree-cutting season.
Review of Fuckscapes by Sean Kilpatrick
James Greer01.30.12
Painterly? No that’s sort of feeble for what it is. Impressionistic? Nah…getting there but… author James Greer ponders––with his own lyrical might––the right word to describe Sean Kilpatrick’s Fuckscapes (his first collection of poetry with a title con huevos). Vomitous? Yes, but bombastically beautiful in the squalor. Here’s a revolutionary panorama of jarring rhythm that deserves your prompt attention.
Girls in Trouble
Winston Ward12.26.11
Douglas Light has built a world of characters tossed into the air with a fascination for their lack of safety. Their context fails to hold them on the page, and as they arc out over the unknown, Winston Ward analyzes their doomed trajectory with one eye down the barrel of a shotgun. The hunted, haunted heroines of Light’s Girls in Trouble.
The Air We Breathe: Artists and Poets Reflect on Marriage Equality
Donal Mosher12.08.11
A party-line game of telephone in which each voice is distinct, The Air We Breathe grew by accretion into a conversation that stepped off the page into an exhibition at SFMOMA, running November 5, 2011 through February 20, 2012. Photographer and filmmaker Donal Mosher enters the pages of the formative text/collage on marriage equality from the mind of editor Apsara DiQuinzio and takes a look at what is on display, and what is at stake. The public and the private forms of exhibition and exchange are on the table.
Lay Mirrors in the Street / Bring Heaven Down to Earth: On Jen Benka’s Pinko
Laura Carter11.28.11
All the leaves fall off the trees in one night (as they do) and all the flowers come back red in the springtime. Laura Carter explores the loveliness in revolution of Jen Benka’s Pinko.
Swarms of Swarms: The Awakened Space of Dennis Cooper’s The Marbled Swarm
Blake Butler10.31.11
Fanzine caught up with the always gracious Dennis Cooper in Paris this summer and was casually handed his forthcoming book The Marbled Swarm on a day we went to see Anish Kapoor’s inflatable Leviathan sculpture at the Palais Royal. "It’s my best yet," an understatement of humble challenge coming from America’s elder statesman of trangressive literature, now a more on-than-off expat in the country of his literary heroes, France. Cooper certainly has taken his economically taught, So-Cal erotic horror mastery and cloaked it with a mashup of continental elan. A novel of cannibalism twixt the secret passages of chateaus told in a new form of language that turns ouroboros-like (cannibalistically) in on itself, we couldn’t think of anyone better to unravel such a challenge than the next gen bard of sleepless nights, Blake Butler.
What Not Sleeping Starts To Make: Blake Butler’s Nothing
Ken Baumann10.15.11
The late great David Foster Wallace was once interviewed on European TV and said he can’t own a TV because that’s all he would be doing. Like in the pot scene from Infinite Jest in the first bit of that epic novel. He also said he writes in a difficult way to try and battle this tendancy in himself. Too easy is self defeating. Blake Butler, the author of Scorch Atlas, Ever and two books on Harper Perennial this year, the novel There is No Year and Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia, released this week, is an inheritor of Wallace. Everything Butler writes is difficult (a good thing), beautiful, dark, and oft funny. Friend and copublisher of the literary mag No Colony Ken Baumann recently interviewed Butler. It is no less challenging than Butler’s fiction, or non.
