Details of the Last Supper, c. 1986, (Double Jesus), by Andy Warhol

I received the above image and below ’card’ in an email from Electric Literature yesterday.  The image struck a chord, as I have recently been re-reading sections of a biography of Andy Warhol by Wayne Koestenbaum and working on a personal statement about teaching the short short, a form of which Keret is a champion.  I thought I would repost the opening to Keret’s  ”Christmas Card” below.  To read it in full, check the Electric Literature blog here.

Christmas Card

by Etgar Keret

There was this guy who could walk on water. Not that that’s such a big deal. Lots of people can walk on water. They usually don’t know that because they don’t try. They don’t try because they don’t believe they can do it. In any case, that guy believed, and tried and did it. And that’s when the whole mess began.

* Translated by Sondra Silverston.  Etgar Keret can be found at www.etgarkeret.com.

cherry lane underpass, west 96th street, new york, ny

snow on the hudson

leaves

two sleds

neighbors

a seat in riverside park

new york snow storm, december 20th, 2009

Check out Electric Literature’s latest installment of their single sentence animation project.   Up on the docket?  A sentence from Lydia Davis’s “The Cows” interpreted in claymation by artist Donna K.

In other news, I can’t wait to read Best European Fiction, 2010, Dalkey Archive’s recent dreamchild.  35 writers.  30 countries.  A tribute to the press’s enviable commitment to translation. Check out interviews with editor Aleksander Hemon here and here.

I particularly enjoyed this excerpt from Hemon’s interview in Papercuts on the “exotic:”

“Exotic” describes something so wholly outside of “our” experience as to be interesting if incomprehensible. The writing in our anthology is not exotic — it is fully intelligible to a reader willing to go beyond the comfort zone of blatant banality. A literature that takes itself out of global conversation is bound to be reduced to nationalistic navel gazing. The panic reigning in the American publishing industry notwithstanding, I think that the future of translation in America is bright. On the one hand, I think there has always been curiosity and desire to communicate with the rest of the world, even if both impulses are perceived by the exceptionalists as symptoms of treason.

NPR’s Studio 360 featured a short sci-fi story by Lydia Millet today.  Check it out here.  I had the chance to interview Millet for the upcoming issue of Gigantic.  Topics discussed: our technicolor society, the slow moving apolcalypse, and ill-fated pets.  Stay tuned to the Gigantic blog for more info about the issue due out soon.

p.s. If you haven’t yet had a chance – check out Millet’s new collection, Love In Infant Monkeys, recently out from Soft Skull.   As acerbic as it is tender, as per usual Millet delivers a raucous, witty delight.

If you haven’t happened upon these folks already, check out VOL. I Brooklyn.  Pithy, smart, and refreshingly down to earth, their a Brooklyn based arts and culture blog that covers everything from books, to music, to scrapbooking hilarious news clips and quotes.  Though admittedly “literary-minded,” beyond their ability to wisely geek out about great books which you might not have heard of, what keeps me coming back is the simplicity of the format – they like lists and links and lots of ‘em – and their fondness for marginalia.  (Also, Brooklyn Vegan is one of the “People They Like.”  Check plus.)

Some post which made my recent favorites:

- Tobias Carroll’s review of Prose.  Poems.  a novel. by Jamie Iredell

- Dear New York Magazine – Vol I BK’s letter to New York Mag about their top 40 songs that define Brooklyn “sound” right now * Side note – Nice St. Vincent shout-out. “Marry Me,” please, do so.

Representative Post Titles:

Bites: Henry Miller in LA, Bolano was a Reader, Frost Sent Christmas Cards, Art Basel is on, Idiots, and More

Bites: Phone Booth Libraries, The Cows that Killed Jane Austen, Cormac McCarthy to Sell the Remains of His Writing Career, A Remnick Interview, and more

Random Thanksgiving Bites: Punk Photographers, Victorian Veggies, Leftovers, Thanks for Kerouac, and More

I came across the above picture on the Sartorialist recently.  Her boots reminded me of the purple Doc Martins I cherished in 1991.  (Where are they now?  In that box in the attic?)  This morning as I was taking down my coffee and grapefruit, I came across the following article in The Times.  Accordingly to the article, unisex fashion is making a comeback.   “Chuong Pham borrowed his mother’s sweatshirt,” one caption exclaims.  (I’m not sure if they’re commenting here on the fact that it’s a sweatshirt or that it’s his mothers… but that’s another debate.)

As I scroll through photos of skinny jeans and worsted wool overcoats – “MIX, MATCH, BLEND”! – I flashed back to a scene of the Monday night drag show I used to frequent back when I was still a teen trying to prove something about suburban malaise.  That night I was wearing a thin tube of silver lycra – perhaps an oversized vest would’ve been better?  Misery was performing a rousing rendition of the new Jennifer Lopez single.  The boy next to me was wearing what looked like a leather napkin pieced together at the seams with black fishnets.  At one point Misery pointed at me in the crowd.  ”Baby, I like your dress,” she said.

As I sit around my apartment a decade later in wool knee-socks and a men’s cowlneck sweater with holes under the arms – ok it’s cold in here – I wonder about transcending and blending.  “Kids, even little kids, are experimenting across gender lines. Boys are wearing My Little Pony T-shirts, just because they like them. Sometimes they like to dress in the girls’ section because the shirts are cooler,” says psychologist Dr. Ehrensaft in the article.

Well, she’s got a point there.  Who doesn’t want to rock out with My Little Pony?  But, what’s the hype?  And is this really anything new?  Beyond the thrill of unleasing your inner man/woman – an important feat to be sure and one not to be missed (personally, my favorite unisex toy was the abacus) – I wonder if this new trend isn’t glossing over one key factor?  Unisex fashion isn’t just about transcending barriers between sexualities, or taking your mother’s old sweatshirt out for a spin (thought this does make for a fun evening out).  It’s about a nostalgia for garments which transcend fads or trends.  In fact, the new “unisex” embraces an aesthetic of tradition – lines and fabrics which, though modified, at their core recall the classics.  Who doesn’t like a pair of tapered trowsers?  Don’t all good things start under a houndstooth trench?

I like old garments, my father’s old L.L. Bean button-ups, things with a wide wale.  As a kid I used to dress up in my parents clothes when they went out for the night: my dad’s denim Wranglers and wool fisherman sweaters, the dresses my mother wore on her honeymoon.  I  wanted to know what it was to be him at college in the 70’s, and her during those warm Bermuda nights.  I was attracted to those clothes not because they somehow unsexed or resexed me but because I respected them.  They had a history that predated me.  It was a bit like making a cameo in a vintage noir film.

Check out friend Lizzy Seckler’s new clothing line LYS.  Liz “set out to design a collection made from organic and sustainable fibers that would also be fluid and wearable – clothes that would be viable in any situation and whose reliance on and modification of classic lines would give them an extended lifespan.”  (This lifted from her mission statement.  Check it out in full on her website.)

“’Sustainability is not just about the materials,’” Liz points out. “’It’s answering the question of just how versatile and timeless each piece can be. I wanted to consider not only the process used to create the clothes, but also the ability of the garments to sustain integrity for many years. The idea of disposable fashion is not just detrimental because of how the materials are produced, but because it feeds the belief that clothes are meant to last for no more than a season. The items I design are meant to have both a low-impact upon creation and a long-impact on the life of their owner.”

She’s right.  That lycra tube dress didn’t make it through the night … never mind the season.

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She will be missed.

*Photo by: Bryan Obrien.  The Sydney Morning Herald.

I recently engaged in some risky business.  Armed with a free afternoon I took myself out to my favorite vegan discount lunch buffet and wandered over to Spoonbill & Sugartown looking for a new good read.  Having worked in an independent bookstore for an extended stint while living in Cambridge,  I’m partial to scouring shelves for used paperbacks.  Hardcovers don’t do much for city living or transportation.  However, I made an exception to the rule that day and picked up a copy of the new translation of Witold Gombrowicz’s Pornographia.

In short, the novel is itself a rare bird.  With a witty  introduction by Sam Lipsyte and a fantastic new translation by Danuta Borchardt, on the surface it’s a  novel about the isolation and brutality of wartime Poland.  Seeking to escape German occupied Warsaw, the unnamed narrator and his dandy-ish friend, Fryderyk, travel to the countryside where they take up with an elderly farming couple whose young daughter, Henia, is betrothed to a man who they deem an ill-suitor.  As their fascination with the rural wilds wares thin, united in isolation and boredom, the two elderly gents embark on a wild plan to split up the young lovers through staging various encounters with a young farmhand, Karol. 

Gombrowicz is a wildly ambitious stylist.   The books entertains a manic elision of modes of telling  - the scenes between the young lovers are relayed in hyperbolic metaphor which then abuts highly controlled passages of description about the bucolic nature of the rural countryside.  The book feels oddly contemporary.  It has somehow performed an act of time travel, condensing various stylistic trends from the philosophical underpinnings of Kundera to Cortazar’s and Schultz’s love for the imagistically bizarre, the psychological obsessions of Robbe-Grillet and Duras to the insight and levity of contemporaries such as Lipsyte.  When all’s said and done, this produces one precocious, eccentric voice. 

The book has a sense of the imagined familiar which may be an effect of trying to capture a war Gombrowicz didn’t actually experience which transpired in a country with which he was intimately familiar and often highly critical of.  Born in Poland, having traveled to Argentina before the war broke out, he decided to reside in Buenos Aires until peace was resumed.  

A raucous romp which has now entered my cavern of classics.  Well worth a  read.

I just returned to the city from the Blue Ridge Mountains in the Shanendoah Valley.  We celebrated my Dad’s 60th there.  Our cabin had a wood burning stove and a porch with a view of the violet highs.  We hiked bits of the AT and made fires in the stove with old wood and pistachio shells.  My mother brought us a series of brightly colored bandanas.  Above is a short selection from a series I took of an abandoned farm house and a few items I found in a vintage shop.

The Believer just ran a great interview with Agnes Varda in their latest Issue.   The kicker?  It’s invented.  Varda refused to conduct individual meetings with reporters.   Hence, BLVR interviewer Sheila Heti transcribed bits of dialogue captured in Varda’s hotel room at the Toronto International Film Festival and penned interview questions to match after the fact.

Key topics covered: Gleaning, rosemary, the “after-night pill” and being called the “Grandmother of the Nouvelle Vague.”

I wrote a short post a few months back after I’d seen Varda’s latest film, Les Plages D’Agnes, an autobiographical documentary about her life, her life’s work, and her loves.  I was interested in the way the film relied on images as a mode of narrative removed from literal time and space.  In a list of the many great things about the recent Believer interview, one of the greats is the following exchange:

***

BLVR: The way you made Les plages d’Agnès can be seen as a kind of gleaning—you found material that already existed to put in your film. It is almost like you were looking into the ground, bringing up images from the past, from old films you had made, and photographs, and scenes from the films of your late husband, Jacques Demy.

AV: But gleaning is getting things that are abandoned. I did not abandon my early pictures, my photos, my early films. It’s just going through my body of work as something I can pick from—I pick this and that and that. It’s like I had a collection of my work and I could choose this one or this one. With Jane Birkin, we had a scene from a film called Jane B. by Agnès V.—a portrait I made in ’87. We had a casino scene, surrealistic, in which we had some naked people gambling. Jane Birkin was the card dealer and I was the player. I had beautiful jewelery around me, and when I lost I would take the jewelery and say, Service—being very generous, because it was very expensive jewelery. I would say, Tip.

Now, I just take this piece of film, and I make a narration in Les plages where I say I’m losing. I say that I lost my father. We are watching the roulette ball, and the ball stops and I say, That is where it fell—and he died. He lost, he fell, he died. Which is a totally different use of the same images. That was my game. And it works. You can have seen Jane B. or not.

***

Check out the interview for yourself in full, here.