First Encounters: David Fincher
David Fincher centers me. Like Radiohead says, “everything in its right place.” I couldn’t have told you this a week or so ago, but an artist I’m interviewing put it just so. Putting it in my own words does nothing to diminish or unsettle its power. “I have a philosophy about the two extremes of […]
Dead Souls
All of the men I love are dead now. At least it feels that way. After the news of Jason Molina’s death yesterday, I sat down and put on “Molina & Johnson,” stared at the ceiling, and let the knives dig in. Only the night before I was restlessly spinning Vic Chesnutt, the rain and wind beating at the window, trying to exhaust myself enough fall asleep. […]
A Weekend of Fucking Nazis: Eddie Izzard, Stoker, Community
I. Cosmology Recently, Benjamin Van Loon resurrected a thorny old idea – cosmology – to describe the stronger, darker force than animates Sam Lipsyte’s ephemeral and satirical jests. The thorniness of the issue we owe, in part, to the postmodern conceit that everything is art, everyone is an artist, and in part to an older […]
The Hysterical Realism Reading List
First Wave: Vladimir Nabokov—Lolita (1955), Pale Fire (1962), Speak, Memory (1936-66), Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969) Thomas Pynchon—V. (1963) , Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Mason & Dixon (1997), Against The Day (2006) William Gaddis—The Recognitions (1955), JR (1975), a Frolic of His Own (1994) John Barth—Fiction: the Sot-Weed Factor […]
