There’s something profoundly dystopian about Bunk, the not-exactly-game-show that’s finishing up its first season on IFC. On it, stand-up comics and sketch performers are forced into improv-based challenges that include insulting puppies or drawing new appendages to the crotch of Michelangelo’s David. And all the while, the barefoot host — played with terrifying confidence by New York-based comic Kurt Braunohler — will do things like force his intern to sift through glass shards or threaten to murder his viewers. […]
Reviewed: Ten Walks/Two Talks by Jon Cotner & Andy Fitch
Ugly Duckling Presse (2010) ,88 p. Reviewed by Laura Wetherington What do you get when you cross David Antin’s talk poems, William Carlos Williams’ Paterson, and Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro”? Ten Walks/Two Talks. That’s what. This book by Jon Cotner & Andy Fitch composed in four parts, depicts the urban ecosystem as its living, breathing protagonist. Here New York plays the hero. A constellation of character sketches, including, “two blonds…thrilled to be tall,” the “guys […]
Bites: Is New York Bad for Writers?, Should Bookstores Rethink Shelving?, East of Eden as Performance, the Death of the Man of Letters, How to Get Rid of Hipsters, and more
HTMLGiant asks if New York for writers is The Place to Be, or whether it’s just too damn expensive. Lit. Should bookstores shelve by publisher rather than author? (Thanks, The Rumpus) How East of Eden became a performance piece. A surprisingly interesting picture essay of the last 10 years of Nobel Prize winners in literature. The “slow death of the man of letters”? Hm. Shakespeare’s endless Answers: Why it’s smart to be a Shakespearean fool. Books as art. Very cool. […]
Weekend Bites: New York nostalgia, Dzanc’s new lit mag, the Seinfeld effect, Jane Austen’s syllabus, bit.ly is bad?, Brooklyn’s Stairway to Heaven
For Bookforum, Philip Nobel’s review essay on The Eternal City: “Despite New Yorkers’ powerful nostalgia for the Gotham-that-was, the city’s urban ecology has always thrived on change.” There’s a new monthly online lit mag, The Collagist, by Dzanc Books. Field Guide to the Snob: The Seinfeld Effect. Like Jane Austen? Don’t read zombie lit! Read some of these books instead. Are shortened url’s bad for the health of the web? Finally, has Google found a Stairway to Heaven in Brooklyn??
Bites: Decent thoughts on today’s fiction (I know!), Bruni is replaced, Gladwell’s Mockingbird, Kubrick’s unmade work, middle-class “slave labor”
By Willa A. Cmiel Lee Seigel for the Washington Post on the End of the Episode. It’s a greatly informed, well-put essay on changes in American fiction. (Finally a good essay on contemporary fiction. Seigel is critical but not raging, constructive but unassuming): “Are you a Narrative or Episodic personality?… Or do you think that you live, like Huck Finn and every other picaresque hero, from isolated minute to isolated minute – episode to episode – and that far from adding […]
Bites: Nora Ephron not optimistic, novels about being broke, America still liberal, Antony does Beyonce, problems with the High Line
By Willa A. Cmiel America is still blue. Nora Ephron’s must-reads include The Great Gatsby and Barbara Ehrenreich’s upcoming Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. “Ehrenreich convinced me so completely that I hesitate to say anything so positive as that this book will change the way you see absolutely everything; but it just might.” Another list: The Best Novels About Being Broke. First three are Oliver Twist, Hunger, and, my personal favorite, Down and Out […]