GET RID OF MEANING. YOUR MIND IS A NIGHTMARE THAT HAS BEEN EATING YOU: NOW EAT YOUR MIND.
I saw Kathy Acker’s name fly by in a tweet yesterday. Her name carries power for those who remember it. Alternative and transgressive literature blossoms in today’s Internet-powered cultural scene, but there … Read the rest
I used to read short stories all the time. At one point, I was more into short stories than novels.
Well, why not? This was back when Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie, Tama Janowitz, Lorrie Moore, John Updike, Cynthia Ozick, Alice Munro and William Trevor were all putting out stuff … Read the rest
In 2002, filmmaker Richard Linklater selected a six-year-old actor named Ellar Coltrane to be the star of his new movie Boyhood, which was expected to take twelve years to film.
Linklater also cast seasoned actors Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke to play the boy’s divorcing parents, and signed his … Read the rest
Maggie Estep, the charismatic and accessible spoken word poet and author, has suddenly died of a heart attack. She was 50 years old.
Maggie Estep was a big part of the slam poetry scene that emerged from Chicago and New York City in the 1980s and briefly flared into pop … Read the rest
I’ll never forget where I was and how I felt when I read the closing pages of Paul Auster’s City of Glass, the first and most crucial part of his New York Trilogy
City of Glass was … Read the rest
Very Recent History: An Entirely Factual Account of a Year (c. AD 2009) in a Large City
From the Talking Covers blog, here’s a memorial tribute to the trend-setting Vintage Contemporaries line of original paperback books that led the publishing pack in visual freshness during the 1980s. Jay McInerney, Mona Simpson and Raymond Carver all looked great in these uniform cover designs, which vaguely referenced Roy Lichtenstein … Read the rest
1. A favorite baseball player of mine died last week.
2. Here’s a fun literary site that’s been making the rounds: police sketches based on descriptions of fictional characters, by Brian Joseph Davis. I’m particularly impressed by his Emma Bovary and Humbert Humbert, but I sense subconscious influence … Read the rest
I’m still on vacation. But here are some links:
1. The image above is from a teaser promo for a new movie based on Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis. I don’t know what to think. You be the judge.
2. It was fifty years ago that Ernest Hemingway took his own … Read the rest