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A short riff on a favorite scene from Richard Linklater’s film Boyhood
I absolutely loved Richard Linklater’s film Boyhood, which is nominated for a few Oscars this year, including Best Picture. (Boyhood is too good to win best picture; I’m fine with that prize going to...
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An Interview with Christopher K. Coffman and Daniel Lukes, Editors of William...
William T. Vollmann: A Critical Companion, new from University of Delaware Press, collects academic essays and memoir-vignettes by a range of critics and authors to make the case that Vollmann is, as...
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A Conversation about Evan Dara’s Novel Flee (Part 1)
[Context/editorial note: I’ve been meaning to read Evan Dara’s latest novel Flee for a while now, and when Biblioklept contributor Ryan Chang told me he’d be reading it as part of a contemporary...
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A rambling and possibly incoherent riff on Inherent Vice (film and novel) and...
A. The first time I saw Paul Thomas Anderson’s film Inherent Vice, I was in the middle of rereading Pynchon’s novel The Crying of Lot 49, which I hadn’t read in fifteen years. I remembered the novel’s...
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Jon McNaught’s Birchfield Close Is a Tranquil Visual Poem
A few weekends ago, I spent several days primitive camping on a tiny, rocky island off Cape Canaveral. The weather was miserable and the fishing was poor, but the company and bourbon offered cheer....
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A Conversation about Evan Dara’s Novel Flee (Part 2)
[Context/editorial note: I’d been meaning to read Evan Dara’s latest novel Flee for a while, and when Biblioklept contributor Ryan Chang told me he’d be reading it as part of a contemporary literature...
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Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World is sharp subterranean...
Yuri Herrera’s sharp, thrilling novella Signs Preceding the End of the World opens with calamity. A sinkhole — “the earth’s insanity” — nearly swallows our hero before we can properly meet her: I’m...
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A scattered riff on Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow
I’m safe here at my office, away from Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. I almost certainly would not dare to write about it were it proximal. If the book were here with me, its text would infect me,...
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Riff on the end/beginning of Gravity’s Rainbow
Well: “A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before [—]” □ □ □ □ □ □ □ So. Okay. So I finished Gravity’s Rainbow on Friday night, and reread the opening section (and more than the opening...
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A first riff on rereading Gravity’s Rainbow (and some thoughts on...
I enjoy rereading more than reading. Returning to Moby-Dick, 2666, Ulysses, or Blood Meridian reveals so much more: More depth, more art, more structure, more precision, more humor, more pain, more...
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Derek Pyle Discusses Waywords and Meansigns, an Unabridged Musical Adaptation...
I recently talked to Derek Pyle about his project Waywords and Meansigns, which adapts James Joyce’s novel Finnegans Wake into a new musical audiobook. Derek worked for years as half of Jubilation...
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In which I read Playboy for the Thomas Pynchon article
A couple of days ago I posted a brief excerpt from Jules Siegel’s March 1977 Playboy profile “Who is Thomas Pynchon… And Why Did He Take Off With My Wife?” The excerpt came from an excerpt posted on...
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This is not a review of Lydia Davis’s Can’t and Won’t
This is the part of the not-review where I include a picture I took of the book to accompany the not-review: This is the part of the not-review where I briefly restage Lydia Davis’s publishing history...
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What the hell is Pynchon in Public Day?
Pynchon in Public Day is tomorrow, May 8th–that’s Pynchon’s birthday if you’re keeping score. (He’ll be 78 tomorrow. Last year I put together links for his auspicious 77th birthday). For the past...
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Jim O’Rourke’s Simple Songs
In the last minute of “Hotel Blue,” the fourth track on his new LP Simple Songs, Jim O’Rourke belts out his lines with an emotional directness we haven’t heard in his work before. He sings, and sings...
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Mad Max: Fury Road Reviewed
Fury Road film poster by John AslaronaGeorge Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road performs exactly what its intended audience demands. Essentially a cartoonish two-hour car chase brimming with violent...
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On Mad Men’s cynical finale
In an early scene in “Person to Person,” the series finale of Mad Men, Joan Holloway tries cocaine for the first time. “I feel like someone just gave me very good news,” she beams, offering an...
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A last riff (for now) on Gravity’s Rainbow (and Disney’s Fantasia)
Disney’s Fantasia is one of the better film adaptations of Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow. At least this thought zipped into my head a few weeks back, as I watched the film with my wife and...
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An Interview with Christopher K. Coffman and Daniel Lukes, Editors of William...
William T. Vollmann: A Critical Companion, newish from University of Delaware Press, collects academic essays and memoir-vignettes by a range of critics and authors to make the case that Vollmann is,...
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Some notes from 299 pages into a rereading of Infinite Jest
A note on the context of the first reading, subsequent ventures, and this rereading I bought David Foster Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest in 1997 when I was a freshman in college, as required by law. I...
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