Check out lists from Nick Antosca, j/j hastain, Lincoln Michel, and William Walsh. Here are parts one, two, and three.

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Nick Antosca

Here are some things I admired in 2011:

Sleeping Beauty: Australian novelist Julia Leigh’s directorial debut, starring Emily Browning as a college student who gets paid to take a sleeping pill and let men take liberties with her unconscious body, is as beautiful and discomfiting a film as I’ve ever seen.  My favorite film of the year.  Mesmerizing, haunting, perfect.

Margin Call: I used to work at a financial firm.  In recruiting, not one of the get-rich jobs, but I was there in the fall of 2008, when everything came crashing down (my firm’s assets declined by $20 billion).  JC Chandor’s first film feels authentic.  It is a more gripping thriller than anything where badges get flashed and bodies get buried (although, actually, one body does get buried in Margin Call), and it is also a controlled character drama of the highest order, on par with Glengarry Glen Ross or Quiz Show.

You Deserve Nothing by Alexander Maksik: Now-controversial because it’s allegedly based on truth (the author apparently really did, as one of the three narrators does, have an affair with, and impregnate, one of his 17 year old students), Alexander Maksik’s first novel is an unexpectedly profound, deeply engrossing, and beautifully written novel about ethics, literature, courage, and sex.  The prose recalls James Salter and nuance of character recalls Francine Prose.  Buy it, read it.

Last of the Live Nude Girls by Sheila McClear: A memoir of the author’s time spent working in peep shows in Times Square.  One thing it is not is titillating.  It’s funny, sad, blunt, and familiar.  If you lived in New York during the latter half of the last decade, you will probably find yourself nodding in recognition as you read this book.  McClear is a terrific writer.

Nick Antosca is the author of two novels: Fires (2006, Impetus Press) and Midnight Picnic (2009, Word Riot Press).  His novella The Obese comes out in 2012 from Lazy Fascist. His blog is HERE.

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j/j hastain

Some Stimulations From 2011

Some books, music, movies and meta-rants about how they pricked:

Books:

The ferality of Jenny Boully’s latest book not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them–symbolic engagement and torque of some of my own childhood mythos.

Melissa Buzzeo’s books Face, What Began Us- questions about lacunae, form, crux and climax. Re what the shapes of page by feeling and as aesthetic are and can mean. Re the performativity of thirds or nexts. What are the ethics of getting to a there from a here? Proceeding from a here by hearing?

Some books re their violences (JA Tyler (A Shiny Unused Heart), Selah Saterstrom (Meat and Spirit Plan), some fellow dusiers’ (I loved Jared Hayes’ DUSIE http://www.dusie.org/jhayes.html).

Simone Weil-for content, emotio-spiritual kinship and philosophy more than praxis.

Elizabeth Robinson’s books generally-re the integration of the quotidian into the rhythmically moving (and always surpassing of borders) alchemical.

Bhanu Kapil’s Schizophrene-Bhanu’s usual and brilliant aphotic, poetic, edge.  Embodied haunts.

Akilah Oliver’s A Toast in the House of Friends-for heartbreak of content of book and timing of book.

Brenda Iijima ‘s Glossematics, Thus -“the myriad global, political, biological, and economic resonances of any local event” (Jamie Townsend).

Tc Tolbert’s territories of folding-the slow approach to the deep and beveling body. To space and text as honor.

Trace Peterson’s Since I Moved In- content that disquiets and destabilizes. For mirror.

Music

Duke Ellington’s Sacred Songs

“Jeongseon Arirang” sung by Kim Young-im (from film: Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter and Spring)-OMG–your body your bridge!

Sarah Brightman/Andrea Bocelli Time to Say Goodbye-so much like fucking a content-oriented matrix.

Films

Lars von Trier’s Melancholia-for those of us who know the feeling of our appendages having become roots to ulteriors. How can we stay? What happens to our surroundings and social/kinship contexts if we stay? Is staying core? Also considers agencies re leaving?

Stephen Elliot’s The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert and John Cameron Mitchell’s Hedwig and the Angry Itch- both of these are always for descants of the kinships. For feeling the ephemeral lineages.

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Lincoln Michel

Looking back on my 2011 art and entertainment consumption, the first thing I notice is that I read very few books published this year and watched virtually no new movies at all. I didn’t listen to all that many 2011 albums either. I am embracing my change into a crotchety old man. All new music is bleepy bloop Star Trek disco nonsense, all new films are watered-down remakes ruining my childhood, all new books are… well I still like a lot of new books, but I had a harder time keeping up with them this year. I started a lot of great books that I haven’t finished yet. So, that said:

Best 2011 novel: TBA (I’ll have to get back to you on this one.)

Best new-to-me novel: tie between Hunger by Knut Hamsun and Jakob Von Gunten by Robert Walser

Best 2011 story collection: The Angel Esmeralda by Don DeLillo

Best new-to-me story collection: Taking Care by Joy Williams

Best 2011 comic: Wilson by Daniel Clowes

Best new-to-me comic: Weathercraft by Jim Woodring

Best 2011 TV: Breaking Bad season 4

Best new-to-me TV: early 1930s Betty Boop cartoons.

Best 2011 movie: TBA

Best new-to-me movie: Rumble Fish

Best 2011 hip-hop album: The Book of David by DJ Quik

Best new-to-me hip-hop: Diplo Presents Free Gucci mixtape

Best 2011 rock/pop/indie/whatever: NewVillager by NewVillager

Best new-to-me rock/pop/indie/whatever: tie The Sensual World by Kate Bush and Love vs Money by The-Dream

Lincoln Michel is around. You can find him online at lincolnmichel.com.

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William Walsh

Bee-Loud Glade  by Steve Himmer
A high-concept novel about a modern-day decorative hermit. It is also a novel about this American age of diminished expectations. Should become a major motion picture within the next three years starring Jonah Hill.

Fog Gorgeous Stag by Sean Lovelace
Filing this one under nonfiction. I know that everything in this book happened. It’s like a few dozen episodes of a reality show. Lovelace reduces all human thought and action into a plate of nachos, and says, Enjoy.

Townie by Andre Dubus III
The best parts of this memoir are the scenes with Dubus’s dad, the great short story writer Andre Dubus. And there’s a wonderful passage of Andre III and his father visiting with Thomas Williams, one of my old writing teachers at UNH. Overall, the central, repetitive action of Dubus as a street-fighting man would have read better as a novel. Like a lot of contemporary memoirs, Townie would have benefitted greatly from fictional compression.

Beauport by Kate Colby
What a concise poet. Every image, every idea is delivered perfectly.

Cut Through the Bone by Ethel Rohan
Acute stories, unsentimental but emotional writing.

The Weather Stations by Ryan Call
These stories do for the weather what Pontius Pilate did for the stations of the cross.

House of Holes by Nicholson Baker
It’s even pervier than The Fermata. The writing is just so good, and it seems effortless. Baker has simplified his sentences significantly over the years.

The Curfew by Jesse Ball
I haven’t read this yet, but I hope to by the end of 2011. If it is only half as good as Samedi the Deafness and The Way Through Doors then it will be brilliant.

You Can Make Him Like You by Ben Tanzer
This novel reads like a sitcom. It’s a litcom about you an your friends. A fun, quick read.

Stories V! by Scott McClanahan
Authentic.Four for a Quarter by Michael Martone

Probably Martone’s fourth best book, behind, in order, Michael Martone, Seeing Eye, and Unconventions (his craft book).

William Walsh is the author of Ampersand, Mass., just out from Keyhole Press. His other books include Pathologies, Questionstruck, and Without Wax. His stories and derived texts have appeared in journals such as Annalemma, Quick Fiction, New York Tyrant, Caketrain, Juked, Lit, Quarterly West, and elsewhere.

Terrific interview between Mark Polizzotti and Mark Ford about (re)translating Raymond Roussel’s Impressions of Africa and New Impressions of Africa at Bomb Magazine (the page says available online in full for a limited time, so you may want to check it soon):

Polizzotti: As I go groping along the same linguistic tether that Roussel grappled with, inevitably that tether will bear some of my fingerprints. Your version of New Impressions differs from those of Koch and Monk. You can defend it on the basis of needing to hew particularly closely to a deliberate meaning, but there’s also a measure of your own personality even in that choice, just as there are traces of the personalities of Koch and Monk in theirs. It’s what makes translations worth reading, and also what makes it desirable to retranslate periodically.

. . .

Ford: I guess, while translating New Impressions, I felt rather like one of the servants in the Roussel ménage in his mansion at Neuilly, toiling away to fulfill the master’s bizarre but inflexible instructions. One of Roussel’s cooks, André Guillot, left an account of working at 25 boulevard Richard-Wallace in which he remembers how none of the vegetables served could reveal the slightest trace of serration—if they did, they were sent back to the kitchen . . .

And which interview’s assonance with my bedside reading (Lawrence Weschler’s Uncanny Valley) I remark here, as is only proper with a book written by someone as mindful of “convergences” as Weschler; this from his essay, “Uncanny Valley: On the Digital Animation of the Face”:

Faced with the claims of the ever more positivist Scholastics of his own time, [Nicholas of] Cusa likened true knowledge of God and the Infinite to a circle, within which  was slotted a regular compounding n-sided polygon: a triangle, say, and then a square, a pentagon, a hexagon, and so forth. Keep adding sides– a hundred, a thousand, a million — and true, Nicholas conceded, it seems like you’d be getting closer and closer to the encompassing circle. But in fact, he went on to point out, you’d be getting further and further away, because a million-sided polygon, for example, has precisely that: a million angles, a million sides. Whereas a circle has no angles and only one “side.”

On the set of Apocalypse Now:

COPPOLA: …Burt Reynolds.

BRANDO: Don’t say that name around me.

Click here to pre-order Cul de Sac by Scott Wrobel! Read the collection that Donald Ray Pollock calls “one of the truest and saddest collections I’ve ever read, but also one of the funniest.” I couldn’t be more proud to publish Wrobel’s debut.

[Being a review of Krystal Languell's Call the Catastrophists*]

Personal anecdote followed by utterly shallow pop-culture reference. Sweeping claim of quality. Comparison to artist from another discipline. Description of content, return to pop-culture reference, return to personal anecdote. End of introduction.

Save These Instructions

Three men were not well and one died but not the one I thought would doesn’t matter now another cascade suddenness literally ashes not only is it possible it’s a fact if one dies then my entire family will which is obvious the next time I get a Google alert with my full name it better not be another obituary if so I will need someone to slowly feed me a handful of candy I will be childlike and difficult.

Extreme situational juxtaposition or incongruity followed by specific details then a short anecdote that brings in another voice or character. Rhetorical question or general statement. Return to specificity from beginning, but with modulation. Surprising use of simile or metaphor, disregard secondary characters in favor of meaningful interiority: idea, image, epiphanic zinger.

Labored explication of first line; labored explication of seventh line; eschewal of remainder of quoted poem. Repetition of first line for effect. Transparent attempt to cover up failed attempt at restatement of sweeping claim (cf. introduction): less grand claim, made with more conviction.

—————-

* A brief epic and we are in a land of Catastrophes: Hungary, Romania; missing Indiana. We’re swallowed in a language

She Doesn’t Understand

A neighbor across the courtyard threw a jar of tomatoes at guests leaving our apartment because locals are day drinkers on their national holidays they don’t like to stay up late in the morning Colin asked me to interpret the last time I was delighted by helping a man doors opened housewives scolded in French as well as if my Nem ertem meant I don’t see the problem rather than I don’t know the words you are using.

It’s interesting to explore the intricacies of this language, we think. There is novelty. Surprise. Horror, too; shadings our own language seems incapable of: “A process occurs when you give up your language and start calling things by new names but there’s not a term for how new phrases infiltrate your reflex it starts with gutturals and when you try to give it up try to back out the primal language dialects but you will understand shouts of surprise from the last place to wipe clean.” But by this point we have crossed the border of Catastrophes into Salvage. What are we making? We end the book with Continuum; those Instructions? They’re here. Not at the end– there’s air there, the lines lose their tangle and possibly some syntax is repaired. (“I understand; sometimes I’m at the zoo, and I am the zoo.”) But close to the end, where they might do some good. Here’s the end:

You’ll want to think the end isn’t your fault. Get organized. Go for a hike. Start a non-profit.

I don’t do that kind of thing, but I’m not the one who wants to live forever.

Generally, equinox refers to the poise of a dependent figure (Earth), inclined neither away from nor toward the sun. So–equinox is the short-term experience of a figure that is in usual relation to the sun (being held in correlation by the sun) becoming its own temporary primary—becoming abandoned, becoming the painful solitudes of a thing forced into the position/ poise wherein it has to be its own light.

Jill Stengel writes deeply of the losses and lonelinesses of the solitudes of such equinox realities in the Dusie chap dear equinox. This book is an unintentional prothalamion (“I am out here raw as the/ night sky waiting for you”)–a pouring song to a not yet found future beloved. This sweet little book is an agonizing, loving pitch that emerges by way of calling out to the night (“dear night [...] filled with longing and seek”).

Calling out to the night as a figure to relate to, pulls the sun toward us (“the sun always comes”), which is the power of a “passive chalice [being] ruptured.” I think of the sore nights in the cave where the tears were countless and no matter what I did the night seemed to thicken. It may seem dramatic, but moving from the hermetics of the cave into nomadisms with bare feet (until the feet bleed) in the darkest hours is worth—is something more romantic and vigilant than time merely passing in an awaiting bucolic zone (“there are tears there is ache there is such desire”). It is a way to promise presence to the not yet seen or not yet seeable (“and if the match is wet with tears I will find my own light”).

-j/j hastain

Embedding oneself in The Ambassadors by Henry James is like reading little else. I feel as if every time I start up again an unending endoscopy of my perceptions proceeds until I shut the book. Take this section of beauty from. Strether, the main character, is talking to Madame de Vionnet—a woman who has some hold on Chad. This young man is the son of Mrs. Newsome—it is she who has dispatched Strether to Paris to see what is keeping her son there for she wants him to return to Massachusetts and take over the family business. Mrs. Newsome is also Strether’s love interest and it is probable he will marry her if he succeeds in getting her son back to the old USA):

‘Well, I can bear almost anything!’ our friend briskly interrupted. Deep and beautiful on this her smile came back, and with the effect of making him hear what he had said just as she had heard it. He easily enough felt that it gave him away, but what in truth had everything done but that? It had been all very well to think at moments that he was holding her nose down and that he had coerced her: what had he by this time done but let her practically see that he accepted their relation? What was their relation moreover—though light and brief enough in form as yet—but whatever she might choose to make it? Nothing could prevent her—certainly he couldn’t—from making it pleasant. At the back of his head, behind everything, was the sense that she was—there, before him, close to him, in vivid imperative form—one of the rare women he had so often heard of, read of, thought of, but never met, whose very presence, look, voice, the mere contemporaneous fact of whom, from the moment it was at all presented, made a relation of mere recognition. That was not the kind of woman he had ever found Mrs. Newsome, a contemporaneous fact who had been distinctly slow to establish herself… (177-8)[i]

If what is happening is easy enough (a man is becoming attracted to a woman, comparing the kind of woman she is to the kind of woman he has back home), what joy comes is delivered by words and sentences that have never been quite so combined as to tell what happens when someone is taken with the one one isn’t with. “Deep and beautiful on this her smile came back, and with the effect of making him hear what he had said just as she had heard it,” is a sentence for the ages, a gold-plated locomotive with a built-in freezer. Let’s break it down, component by component.

Deep and beautiful – beginning the sentence with adjectives, a nice variant; I think anybody would follow such a sentence’s start, even if it lead to a goblin’s fundament—just because we all want what is “deep and beautiful” and need to know where it is

on this – this refers to Strether’s prior line of dialogue and if the reader chugs back to those easy words with the bat and ball at the end, they return to this sentence peeved—You aren’t just making me hug this sentence you big oaf, now I’ve got two to contend with!

her smile came back, – this would be a spectacular sentence by itself—it is so pregnant with meaning I’m ashamed to look at the words; James constructs around it to avoid sounding like 1980’s US fiction

and with the effect – here is live tape delay within the sentence; the smile has come back but it already has an “effect” while the reader has not had the pleasure of leaving this sentence (calm down, you can make it); James is not one for “cause and effect,” but “cause of the cause for effect of the effect,” as we shall soon see

of making him hear – let the shitstorm of h’s begin; also this periscoping from her cognition to her face to his sense of hearing begins to rev, only to end with him hearing himself (No surprise, ladies?) as she would have heard it (Is there any better example of animal attraction?) (Oh, I can’t get you out of my head)

what he had said – again reverberations extraordinaire, referring again to the “Well, I can bear almost anything!” line—now the reader has hip checked that sentence of splurge twice (He can “bear almost anything!?” Are you serious? Is James fucking with me? Had Henry picked this directly from a smut mag?)

just as she had heard it. – that “just” is a little unjust and maybe inexact; how can he hear something just as she can hear it?—maybe the greatest impossibility of human endeavor; but the narrator would have it so and so it is, if you want to believe it, but fight for the right and what do you have? something like the mystery of why you love your cat, or boo*, or bend in the river; if you can explain such without duress, I never writ nor no boo ever loved

Why read The Ambassadors? I honestly liked the cover painting of the Penguin Classics edition by the not so famous Paul Gustav Fisher. By the brunette leaning at the gallery outfitted in a fetching gray dress displaying her rear bounty was some place I wanted to be. And I wanted Henry James to tell me what it was like to be there. To be in Europe, to be in Paris just as the whole ball of earth was about to be blown by technological advances and that Yugoslav Nationalist.

Sven Birkerts says:

…if it was not a specific message or set of realizations that I took away from my reading of The Ambassadors, what was my payoff? What made the reading worth the many hours it took?…I have no hesitation now about marking the experience out as worthy, even important, both on the immediate “process” level, but even more in terms of what the great Italian poet Eugenio Montale called “the second life of art,” referring to the ways in which a work lives in us after we have finished our looking, listening, or reading. Indeed, for me the value of the novel lies mainly in its aftereffects, the residues it has left behind—residues that become subtle goads to new awareness. (153)[ii]

Since I’m only halfway through I can’t make friends yet with my residues—besides they’d dress up as Cheetos if they thought it would help me understand at thing or two about humanity. I’m reading The Ambassadors because it’s winter, people are sick, some are getting drunk, and I’m not too interested in money markets, Mcfearmongers, or the tears of Maria Shriver. I want the hair of the dog never to leave my blood. I’m occupying The Ambassadors because Annie Dillard said,

Henry James launched the century with a splash: The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl. It is hard to see why writers write anything else after James, and readers read anyone else, but literature persists. (58)[iii]

Just before the midway point, in Book Seventh to be exact, The Ambassadors starts to shoot forward and the page upon page of perception/reflection/reperception starts to melt over a plot that plucks from The Portrait of a Lady. What doesn’t change with time is how people play with each other—and play in a not nice fashion. Usually this has to do with money, power, and family. That is the world of Henry James. Older people’s sport is influencing the lives of the young, making sure they marry who they want them to be married to. It’s a delightfully heartless pastime and you don’t have to dress in black to understand it. It can even be fun, especially with this endnote from Professor Christopher Butler from page 63. He is defending James against a fusspot critic who asks if anything is adequately realized in the late works of the Master. Butler smotes him—thus:

…his argument is simply a plea for a more naturalistic kind of novel. But the reader who has got this far is probably not wishing he or she was reading something else. (443)

*colloquial for boyfriend or girlfriend

Friends–I wanted to post here regarding an Anthology of Queer Nudes that I am curating. The book is slated to be published in color by Knives Spoons and Forks Press in 2013. The premises of the book are honesty, nudity and ink (interpretations encouraged). There are already a few very exciting submissions in the queue. We have quite a bit of space to work with in the book so likelihood of being published is high (depending on quality of submission). The submission will need to include photographic images as well as a body poetics statement. Please feel free to forward my email (or post on other lists) to anyone whom you think might be interested:

julia_loveintention@hotmail.com