making me happy / blowing my mind, the latest (per Tami's request!):
1) 2666. After Savage Detectives, the first novel I'd maybe ever read that was written like poets write, Bolano became my new favorite novelist. This one's a beast. 200 pages in (of what, 900+?), it makes me feel good about writing.
2) Bird & Forest, Brent Cunningham. I know, this one's a few years old now, but I found it in a used book store in Mountain View (!) then read it on the train while on a field trip with 42 8th graders. It's a sweet book, wandery.
3) Picture Palace, Stephanie Young.
and the other newbie from ingirumimusnocteetcomsumimurigni:
4) Action Kylie, Kevin Killian.
These two are too new for me to have a complete sense of them yet, but I've been enjoying the process. & ingirumimusnocteetcomsumimurigni is the only press out there that only publishes poetry that I care about. That's not a surprise to anyone, but I'm glad they're out there.
Saturday, November 29, 2008
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Q: What happens when...
a contest with three winners has only four entries?
A: I get a free book.
I'll take Anne Boyer's The Romance of Happy Workers, thank you much.
A: I get a free book.
I'll take Anne Boyer's The Romance of Happy Workers, thank you much.
Monday, November 3, 2008
On the sudden, and the unaccountable
Dave Kehr's on over at the Paper of Record about the Curious Case of Benjamin Button.
What catches my attention are the first two paragraphs:
GROWING old is a subject American movies have largely avoided since the 1980s, when the commercial triumphs of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas made it clear that there was money to be made in never-never land — that world of the adolescent imagination where no one ever matures and death exists only as a punch line. It surely means something that Leo McCarey’s 1937 “Make Way for Tomorrow,” the most deeply moving Hollywood film about old age, has never been released on DVD in the United States and has not been seen on television in many years.
But suddenly and unaccountably, here is “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” a big-budget studio film, set to open Christmas Day, whose central theme is human mortality, a theme the film explores using the same special effects technology, now extended into the digital realm, that American movies have used for so long to keep us trapped in perpetual childhood.
In the 1980s, there was no death. Just like there was no society, see-- neoliberalism arching its back in the morning of a new day. What Kehr is recording is ideology-- which states that the current state is the natural and final state of human existence. The only end (or death) possible was the end of history.
But if history is not over, crises are neither sudden nor unaccountable. The question is not, then, where does this sudden willingness to talk about death come from, but rather: what does the system gain by considering its mortality?
I'd label it a production of a kind of false consciousness, whereby the average world citizen is convinced that the death of the system is in fact equal to their own death.
Which is to say, Mr. Kehr is just parroting the ideology of today as blindly as he is that of the 1980s.
As my friend Jane Dark once so eloquently put it, file under critics not doing their job.
What catches my attention are the first two paragraphs:
GROWING old is a subject American movies have largely avoided since the 1980s, when the commercial triumphs of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas made it clear that there was money to be made in never-never land — that world of the adolescent imagination where no one ever matures and death exists only as a punch line. It surely means something that Leo McCarey’s 1937 “Make Way for Tomorrow,” the most deeply moving Hollywood film about old age, has never been released on DVD in the United States and has not been seen on television in many years.
But suddenly and unaccountably, here is “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” a big-budget studio film, set to open Christmas Day, whose central theme is human mortality, a theme the film explores using the same special effects technology, now extended into the digital realm, that American movies have used for so long to keep us trapped in perpetual childhood.
In the 1980s, there was no death. Just like there was no society, see-- neoliberalism arching its back in the morning of a new day. What Kehr is recording is ideology-- which states that the current state is the natural and final state of human existence. The only end (or death) possible was the end of history.
But if history is not over, crises are neither sudden nor unaccountable. The question is not, then, where does this sudden willingness to talk about death come from, but rather: what does the system gain by considering its mortality?
I'd label it a production of a kind of false consciousness, whereby the average world citizen is convinced that the death of the system is in fact equal to their own death.
Which is to say, Mr. Kehr is just parroting the ideology of today as blindly as he is that of the 1980s.
As my friend Jane Dark once so eloquently put it, file under critics not doing their job.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)