Let's All Go to...

The Faster Times, a great new online culture magazine, is up and running, and I'm excited to be among many talented writers who are contributing to the site. My contribution is a column on indie books, which I will be updating regularly.


Columns of Note:

Fiction: Lincoln Michel
Love and Lies: Clancy Martin
Russian Love Advice: Gary Shteyngart
Interview with John Wray: James Yeh
TV: Adam Wilson
Wine: Alex Halberstadt (I can personally vouch for his selections)
Science: Michelle Legro
Publishing: Kimberly Parsons

Interview with Arthur Jones

Inchworms, Angry Bees and the Mona Lisa

In my interview with illustrator/animator Arthur Jones, Jones talks about celebrating Jewish holidays as a Southern Baptist, evangelical puppet troupes and bloody biblical dioramas that delivered him into adulthood.

The Faster Times will be launch tomorrow, 7/9/09, and I'm thrilled to be contributing a column on indie books. You can read what The New York Observer has to say about it here.

Sculptures in Miniature

The Art of Thomas Doyle

Half-interred houses, blondes burying corpses, and hopeful families approaching homes that have lost the ground beneath them are some of the subjects of sculptor Thomas Doyle. Constructed in small scale and fit neatly within a bell jar, the sculptures-in-miniature are at once manageable, ethereal, dark, pristine, and, like the illusion they conjure, just short of accessible. His work was recently commissioned by the New York Times Magazine for its issue devoted to architecture. And, I'm excited to announce that his work will be featured in the next issue of Gigantic. Take a look. You will not be disappointed.

Fourth of July Postpartum

The Cure: The Rumpus Interviews

The Rumpus is roughly six months old, and since it's inception it has compiled a stellar line-up of interviews, a list that includes Dave Eggers, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, Atom Egoyan, Colson Whitehead, Cecil Woolf, Princess Superstar, Dave Hill, Amy Stein, Bela Fleck and Malcolm Gladwell among so many other very talented people.

Also compelling is Stephen Elliott's oral histories project, in which he transcribes oral histories of people who have known him at various points in his life, such as Fat Mike; kids who knew him from group homes, his friend's baby sister, and even a teacher of his high school AP class. What is most scary, is that it shows that we are more or less a collection of facets of innumerable and independently vibrant perceptions that are entirely out of our control.

The Documentarian

The Windmill Movie

"How does not being me help to tell a story about me?" It is this question around which Alexander Olch constructs his film about the life of experimental filmmaker Richard Rogers. The Windmill Movie is Olch's deeply felt effort to complete the autobiographical film project that Rogers, his film professor and mentor, could never complete, a project which was named simply "Windmill." Olch takes the quest literally, becoming, in a sense, Richard Rogers.

The first half of the film is a collage carefully built from over 200 hours of found footage that Rogers recorded, either home movies of his mother listing the family's suicides in a fur coat in summer, or from his own documentaries, such as one of hot-air balloons alighting from a manor of the English countryside, along with super-8 footage from his father's archives, overlaid by Rogers's own narration. The second half of the film is freed up in a fictionalized rendering of the director's own. Olch's voice takes over where Rogers's left off. Derailing his own projects, Olch helped the deceased filmmaker complete a film he could never finish. What begins as one man's confusion about his own need to obsessively document his life, and questions not only the worth of his documentation, but the value of the life documented, ends in a discomfiting hall of mirrors that contends only with that in Orson Welles's The Lady from Shanghai.

The boundaries between fact and fiction are coyly flubbed not only to flatly question the sincerity of the "facts" about Rogers being put forth, but also to toy with the tension between the observed world and that world which exists somewhere just outside it. The film presents life as spectacle and asks, How much of the spectacle are we willing to buy into. Olch takes risks with The Windmill Movie and, as is the province only of risk-taking, succeeds, not only in sublimating "Windmill," but in transcending its limitations.

Long Awkward Moment

This is a hilarious and very awkward video that illustrates audio of a phone conversation between a man, writer Rodney Rothman, and a girl he kissed in high school, Jessica. It was made to promote this anthology: “Things I Learned from the Women Who’ve Dumped Me." If you miss the awkward moments of Curb Your Enthusiasm, watch this.

Pittsburgh, Truro and Lynchburg

An Ode to Industrial Dinosaurs

If you're into romance this side of economic despoliation, award-winning online journal Triple Canopy has an incredible photo essay by Adam Davies, an ode to American cities abandoned due to the demise of their mainstay industries. Issue 6 has several other interesting articles on urban development (which I highlighted here) with the exception of "Gypsy Mansions," the derogatory tone of which undercut its sexy title and whimsical illustrations and kind of turned me off. But all else is very cool.

Olja Ivanjicki

1931-2009

Olja Ivanjicki: a painter, poet and thinker without parallel. You will be greatly missed.

Arthur Jones will Illustrate Your One-Sentence Story

Friend and very talented animator Arthur Jones has a new project. He's illustrating one-sentence stories. All you have to do is send him your one-liner and he'll whip up an Original Jones Post-It Note illustration. He's done some really fantastic animation and illustration that was the subject of one of my earliest posts for The Rumpus, which you can view here, and an interview I conducted with Jones is upcoming on The Rumpus, so keep an eye out. Send him your stories! This really is a unique opportunity. One day you will say, "I had my story illustrated by Arthur way back when..."

Cecil Woolf est Tres Charmant

A couple of weeks ago Cecil Woolf, publisher and nephew of Leonard and Virginia Woolf, was in New York for the Woolf in the City Conference. I arranged for Sasha Graybosch to interview him for The Rumpus, and she did a fantastic interview and write-up. Mr. Woolf, who says he has the "family face," talks openly Virginia and Leonard at home, Virginia's breakdowns and his inspiration for starting the monograph series Bloomsbury Heritage. And it turns out, according to Mr. Woolf's website, The Rumpus was the only venue to respond to the opportunity to interview Mr. Woolf!!!

"Put that one in the man trap with him."

My first work in The Believer about wing chairs and the witchery that it works on the people who sit in them; an interview with Ryan Manning for Thunk.

The Words They Like

Lawrence Durrell: Exiguous

Lawrence Durrell likes things complicated. The author of the Alexandria Quartet, a tetralogy, the first book of which (Justine) I lost last night at the Rumpus/McSweeney's/SMITH Mag event, Durrell was also fond of complicated four-partnered entanglements that transcend conventional conceptions of love, and four-syllabled Latinate words:

Exiguous

As defined by the Oxford English Dictionary:

Scanty in measure or number; extremely small, diminutive, minute.

Etymology as per The Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary: Latin exiguus, from exigere

Just a Little Bit Crazy

Elizabeth Wurtzel Calling our Founding Fathers Insane



I recently wrote a piece for The Rumpus debunking Elizabeth Wurtzel's argument that our Founding Fathers were stark-raving mad. Her essay was published in Issue 47 of the Columbia Journal, which also offers some great work by Deb Olin Unferth and Justin Taylor, a transcript of a panel discussion between Heidi Julavitz and Mark Greif on genre ghettos and slipstream fiction, as well as an interview with Michael Ondaatje.

McSweeney's, The Rumpus, and SMITH Mag present "You're Not Alone"

McSweeney's, The Rumpus and SMITH Mag are throwing a party, "You're Not Alone," Saturday, May 30, 2009, the pinnacle of the Book Expo America weekend extravaganza. Don't miss this event, hosted by Stephen Elliott, editor of The Rumpus. It's sure to be the hit of BEA.

In honor of this event, and of a Rumpus column "The Last Book I Loved," HTML Giant is offering free tickets to the winner of a contest for the best six-word statement about the last book he/she loved.

There will also be special guests, such as Amanda Palmer from the Dresden Dolls and others...

If you happen not to win the contest, you can purchase tickets to this event here. Or visit the website for the event here.

Doors open at 6, show starts at 7:00.

But They Move: Darkbloom and Doghebited Me Get Installed at Gershwin

Darkbloom and Doghebitedme, the peripatetic characters of Dark Horse Black Forest who relate their private activity via Twitter are going to have their twitters (that I've been writing - see right) become a fixed force for a month-long run in June of Dark Horse, a dance performance, at the Gerhswin Hotel. Lauren McCarthy, formerly of the MIT Media Lab, was commissioned by the creator of Dark Horse, a canary torsi, to create overheredarkhorse, a physical integration of the twitters into the dance performance by audio installation. The piece furthers thought on the delineation of public and private space.

BUT WITH THE VEHICLE, IT REQUIRES CHANGING THE NOTIONS OF THE WHEEL

NEW CAMPAIGN FOR GIGANTIC

PROJECT PHASE – A Photo Concept by NADIN EPICURUS

To see the campaign in full visit Gigantic.

RAIN S.O.S.

Found on My Windowsill at 4:23pm

"Dear Rain, Hi! How are u? I hope u are doing well. when can we have a play date? your up stair (whoops) nabors: collette/the kawanishi family"

Shane and Deb

I was surprised and pleased to see a post about my review of Shane Jones's new novel Light Boxes on HTML GIANT, a site a visit frequently. Light Boxes is a novel that invited me into a world I had a hard time leaving. GIANT also praised a review by Deb Olin Unferth, a writer who does things with words I have rarely seen done before.

Writer Ben Stroud in One Story

Eraser: #119

There's a new writer that I'm fond of named Ben Stroud. He has been called an Americanist, and his stories demonstrate an interest in historical figures. But its his language that grabs me, because it exhibits a definitive sensitive ear for the accoustic potential of words, so much so that I could detect a Ben Stroud story from its first sentence the way some might detect a song by the Rolling Stones in the first five seconds.

An Excerpt:

Two Deadly Fish
I lift up the lid of the livewell and look inside. A couple fish—bass, largemouth—sit in place, not really swimming.
"What's up, fish?" I say.
The fish open their mouths and close them, which is about all they do. You can't tell by looking at them, but they're poisoned—like, if you eat too many, you go blind, or crazy, or you become sterile or someshit. They've got signs at the pier and boat ramp, no more than two fish a week. It's their revenge, I guess, even though it's really the big power plant that sits on the side of the lake that does it.
"Fish don't need hassling," my stepfather says to no one, meaning me.
I close the lid.
Usually, whenever my stepfather wants to tell me something, he'll make some general comment or filter what he's got to say through my mom instead of just talk to me. Not that I'm complaining.
I go sit behind the steering wheel and look at the screen mounted there. It shows how deep the lake is below the boat, and the size of any fish passing below. I wonder if it would show a dead body, if there's a picture programmed in it for that. See, son, a dad'll say, tapping on the screen, that's a child. We only need the small net.


Ben's stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Pindeldyboz, Subtropics, and Fiction and now in One Story. There is an interview with Ben about Eraser here. Check it out. You will, no doubt, be hearing more about this writer.

Scoping Our Digs

Soho Prime

Gigantic occupies good real estate at McNally Jackson, above Book Forum and The New York Review of Books, and with great views of Prince street. You can grab one and have an espresso at McNally Jackson's always comfortable and communal cafe.

At Housing works, while it was at the front of the shop, and placed next to another very artful and beautifully designed magazine, Found, which excited me very much, it was placed under a table, which did not please me at all. I thought it should be on top of the table where people walking into the store could see it, and under the table, it was difficult to locate. I asked the woman to move them and she moved them, but I did not see where she moved them to and am now worried about where she has moved them to. I like Housing Works very much, though, and think they are a good and honorable venue, so I am generally pleased that we are represented there.

I went into Bluestockings, and while it is a very interesting shop, it is one with a decidedly strong voice, a strong voice that is maybe too strong for Gigantic.