S., HOUSE OF LEAVES, and PALE FIRE treat metatext as mystery. But what’s the purpose of the authorial mystery story, not the whodunit but the whoisit?
I love the mediated intimacy of the internet, and the way it enables an aspect of me to have a relationship with aspects of a lot of other people.
I think that writing becomes significant through labor. The cherished things online, whether they be profitable or not, clearly spring from a place of great effort, even if in the end that effort is, as it usually should be, invisible.
Narcissus and Ego: Poets Try the Novel
Ben Lerner’s LEAVING THE ATOCHA STATION and Dan Beachy-Quick’s AN IMPENETRABLE SCREEN OF PUREST SKY are grand narcissistic projects. But if that sounds like a slight, you haven’t listened to these books.
Books We Missed: AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A CORPSE
Krzhizhanovsky comes across as a kind of Mikhail Bulgakov on drugs.
Books We Missed: ROT, RIOT, AND REBELLION
It is hard to overstate the debauched, terroristic nature of the students at UVA; if you’ve seen Sam Peckinpah’s STRAW DOGS you might have a pretty good idea.
I want to find him there, waiting for me, behind the text. This is my necromantic hermeneutic. It brings me again and again to a place that I cannot traverse, the pit of his death.
T.R. Fehrenbach’s spellbinding semi-fictionalizations of Texas history have an air of Manifest Destiny about them, Texas envisioned as a promised land for an exceptional people.
Full Stop Recommends, Fall 2013 (pt. 2)
“This is the point,” Herzog tells the viewer, gesturing to the 179 meter mark, “where ski-flying becomes inhuman.”
Awakening the Dead: Film and the Technologies of Wonder
Hugo traces a history of movie technology, but it also gestures towards something far more elusive and far-reaching: a modern history of the desire for pictures that come to life.