Tennis balls in a slanted pattern cover the floor of the performance loft. As you walk in you immediately see a machine named the Lob-ster fire tennis balls at a paper picture of a young girl in tennis clothing with her back to us. (The setup feeds right into my David Foster Wallace dorkiness as I catch the numerous allusions throughout the room. I laugh at the reference to Consider the Lobster, and to perhaps the funniest scene in the […]
“The Pale King” Supplement Scenes: First Impressions
The paperback version of David Foster Wallace’s posthumous novel, The Pale King, is set to come out April 10th with four new supplemental scenes, but to my surprise I already found a stack of them in a book store. Here’s a preview of what the four pieces offer.
The Dwindling Prominence of Historical Memoirs in a Post-Historical World: Claude Lanzmann’s “The Patagonian Hare”
The Patagonian Hare: A Memoir by Claude Lanzmann Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux; 544 p. Memoirs used to belong to the realm of the accomplished. In this sense, an essential question has always haunted the memoir i.e. why should I read about your life? We used to know the answer. After a singular life of historic importance a person felt obligated or entitled to write their life story. Now memoirs belong to the young, to the not yet accomplished. Whereas memoirs […]
What Now? After The Controversy with Mike Daisey
What does the day or week after controversy look like on a human face? Can you notice fatigue, or despair, or stubborn resolve etched into a person’s skin? How long after a controversy should you wait before you get back into the ring? Can we conceive of an etiquette of controversy? With these questions in mind, I went to see the much maligned Mike Daisey speak last night at Symphony Space.
Adrienne Rich Was My Connection
As a high school teacher with copious amounts of time on my hand, I availed myself of a surprisingly ample high school library. There, I found the works of Adrienne Rich in an anthology put together by venerable critic Helen Vendler. Before Rich, I never connected to poetry. I read enough of it as an English Major, but I always felt dissuaded by its gnomic code. With the help of Vendler I began to crack the the hieroglyphics of poetry and […]
Destruction, Discomfort, and Enlightenment: On Matt Mullins’s “Three Ways of The Saw”
Three Ways of the Saw by Matt Mullins Atticus Books; 216 p. Matt Mullins’s debut book of short stories, Three Ways of The Saw, left me feeling vulnerable, hurt, shocked, appalled, exposed, enlightened, moved, even inspired; just feeling a strange range of emotions, deeply, in a way I haven’t felt from a book in a while. Mullins, a creative writing professor at Ball State University, as well as a fellow in an experimental fiction center, writes with an acute sense […]
Bringing Nathanael West Back To Life: A Review of “Alive Inside The Wreck”
Alive Inside The Wreck by Joe Woodward OR Books, 272 p. One of the curiosities of time is that later generations can resuscitate a career, or the importance of an artist. Stewing in obscurity, scrounging for money, forced to work beneath their talents in their own time, artists turn into revered heroes long after they pass. Sometimes, this occurs naturally, as with Melville, while other times, people need to actively push an author as a forgotten, or a hidden treasure. […]
Stalker Letters, Surreal Cartoons, & Biblical Imagery At The Franklin Park Reading Series’s Third Anniversary
Referring to public readings, Shalom Auslander, last night at the 3rd anniversary of the Franklin Park Reading Series, stated, “I don’t know why people come to these things. It’s kind of sad,” right before he launched into his book. I find it hard to pin down his antics. I can never tell if he truly feels the vitriol he expresses, or he enjoys playing a certain role. Regardless of this cynical sentiment, the night turned out to be a fitting […]