Aesthetic Drift #15: An Out of Mind Experience (The Excellence of Simon Vance)

31 Thursday Aug 2017

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Aesthetic Drift

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Audiobooks, Dale Lucas, Fifth Ward: First Watch, Simon Vance

Aesthetic Drift #15 by Dale Lucas

An Out of Mind Experience: The Excellence of Simon Vance

It’s often said that writing should be its own reward. But, here’s the thing that people forget: there is another level of satisfaction and validation attainable only when the book is printed by kind strangers at faraway publishing houses, given a gorgeous cover by someone you’ve never spoken to, and weighs down bookstore shelves from Cleveland to Brisbane. Like a child graduating college, the work can finally live in the world, independent of its creator.

Chief among these pleasures: hearing a first-rate reader narrate your audiobook.

For those of us who adore them, audiobooks are a singular magic: the modern-day equivalent of being huddled round a fire, hearing a tale told by a master dreamweaver whose only tools are his voice and the right words. (Audiobooks also make commutes and treadmill-walking a mentally vital activity). A great narrator elevates even the most forgettable material; a lousy one can sink an immortal classic.

When Orbit Books asked me who I wanted to narrate the audiobook of The Fifth Ward: First Watch, the only reader I offered was Simon Vance, winner of 14 Audie awards and 61 earphone awards, named both the ‘Voice of Choice’ by Booklist Magazine and the ‘Golden Voice’ by AudioFile Magazine.

First-Watch-cover

I didn’t mention him because I thought he’d actually be willing to read my book. But he was my absolute ideal, due in large part to his facility with voices and accents, his deadpan and sometimes hilariously understated delivery, and his glorious BBC newsreader’s accent. Even if Vance himself were not available, I simply hoped we could find someone who aspired to that level of versatility, subtlety, vocal range, and gravitas.

Some months later, Simon Vance emailed me, asking for help with my characters’ accents and the pronunciation of their names. My editor hadn’t even let me know that he was hired for the audiobook! Our brief back-and-forths over the course of several days, via email and text, gave me fascinating insight into what it meant to be a professional audiobook narrator: I was asked for pronunciation guides for almost every name spoken in the novel and was urged to cast real-world actors as my characters in order to give Vance a sense of how I imagined they should sound (and yet, in the end, none of those casting suggestions led to one note vocal impressions—Simon took my suggestions and extrapolated from them to give each of the characters a life of their own). The thrill of knowing that an actor of Mr. Vance’s caliber was about to interpret my work, to read it seriously—my tawdry, popcorny, beachy little modern-day pulp adventure—filled me with a sense of validation, a sense of success, that I’d never known before.

An artist I admire put his stamp on my work. I get to hear the Golden Voice describing a world that had hitherto only existed in my head, give life to characters who’d previously only spoken to me, and bring a world to life, filtered through his own worldview and skillset, that had, for years prior, only existed in my imagination. When I listen to that audiobook, I get to be just another listener, ready to be told a story and swept away. It’s an unusual sign that you know you’ve actually given something to the world—however modest, however humble—and that someone, somewhere thinks it’s worth a look.

Or a listen.

Photo by JP Wright.

Dale Lucas, author of The Fifth Ward: First Watch (Orbit Books) and Doc Voodoo: Aces & Eights (Beating Windward Press), is a novelist, screenwriter, civil servant, and armchair historian. A graduate of the University of Central Florida and one-time teen movie critic for the Orlando Sentinel, his short stories have appeared in Samsara: The Magazine of Suffering, Horror Garage, and Futuredaze: An Anthology of YA Sci Fi. He lives in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Aesthetic Drift #14: I Read Ethan Frome Every January

12 Thursday Jan 2017

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Aesthetic Drift, Uncategorized

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Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome, Scott Hoffman

Aesthetic Drift #14 by Scott Hoffman

I Read Ethan Frome Every January

For the past decade or so, I’ve read Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome every January. I’m still trying to figure out why.

The story is simple. (I suppose I should announce “spoilers alert!” here, but we’re all adults.) Ethan is a hard-scrabble farmer trapped in a loveless marriage. His wife Zeena is a hypochondriac who bitterly questions and criticizes his every move. Her obsession with her health slowly drains the couple’s resources as the farm falls deeper and deeper into disrepair. They live among the granite outcroppings of Western Massachusetts in an isolated village aptly named Starkfield, where it always seems to be winter but never Christmas. Into this tense, claustrophobic situation enters Mattie, Zeena’s orphaned cousin, an attractive, sunny young lady left alone and impoverished by her parents’ death. With nowhere else to stay she becomes the couple’s “girl,” but she doesn’t know much about farm life and is little help. Zeena despises her. Ethan is smitten. So is Mattie. The story tracks the final days of their furtive, cautious relationship as Zeena maneuvers to send her rival away into a life of poverty and desperation. Ethan tries to escape with Mattie, but finds himself trapped by poverty, the past, and a tattered sense of loyalty to his wife. The two desperately attempt suicide only to survive, their bodies mangled, still trapped in Starkfield. The story is told by a visitor who, decades later, finds the three on the farm barely scraping by. Little trace of the love once shared by Ethan and Mattie lingers, just bitterness and poverty.

Bleak. Yet, I read Ethan Frome every January. I’ve even developed a ritual around it. At one point in the story, a cat shatters a red pickle dish deeply prized by Zeena, but used surreptitiously by Mattie when eating supper alone with Ethan. It marks the beginning of the downhill slide to the lovers’ doom. As soon as I finish reading that passage, I text one of my best friends in Boston, excoriating the damn cat for breaking the damnable dish. She waits for the text every year, noting that I get to that point quicker each time.

I read Ethan Frome each January. I am somehow drawn to relive that bitter winter in Starkfield. Perhaps it’s the environment. Wharton makes palpable the snow-bound oppressiveness of Starkfield, the chipped, threadbare poverty of the Frome farm, and the brilliant flashes of red that relieve the gloomy whiteness whenever Mattie appears wearing that color of joy and lust. Often, when reading the book, I’m startled to see that the sun is shining through my window. Or perhaps it’s the characters that Wharton draws. Ethan Frome could be read as a fairy tale among the Berkshires: a hero, a heroine, and a witch. But Ethan and Mattie and Zeena have more depth than that. Living in a land where silence reigns, each reveals their desperation quietly. Wharton’s characters express more in a simple glance than pages of dialogue.

I’m most drawn to Ethan himself. Not the young Ethan of some twenty years earlier, that desperate, trapped Ethan who cannot find it within himself to really assert himself before Zeena and who thinks death is the only way out. Instead, I find myself admiring Ethan in his later years when the visiting Narrator first encounters him at the village post office. This Ethan bears the hideous scars of his “smash-up” with Mattie, when they tried to take their lives. One side of his body is a mangled, tortured mess. Mattie’s scarf and Zeena’s dish have become a red scar across his forehead. Ethan’s “A” perhaps. He limps painfully from his wagon to the mail and back again. All of Starkfield views him with pity, an emotion that New England reticence cannot allow them to express, except perhaps when gossiping behind drawn curtains. Yet the Narrator describes him as “striking,” with “a careless, powerful look.” Soon the Narrator hires Ethan to drive him to the nearby train station, a regular assignment, which the farmer takes pragmatically because he clearly needs the cash. But Ethan quickly proves to be as curious of this outsider as the Narrator is of him. Perhaps he is the first outsider that he’s encountered in Starkfield for years. They share an interest in engineering, which Ethan had studied in his youth, never completing his degree. As a driver he proves to be faithful, showing up at exactly the time he is needed and delivering his passenger right on time. Perhaps the Puritan work ethic and the need for a dollar makes him so punctual, but I suspect his curiosity and possibly a sense of friendship with the stranger drives such dedication. When a winter storm blocks their path one afternoon, Ethan generously offers the Narrator his home and a share in his meager supper until the storm blows over. And in crossing the threshold into the Fromes’ battered kitchen the Narrator puts together the clues he has learned about Ethan into a vision of his life.

I suppose we could debate the causes of Ethan’s tragedy. Does it lie in his character flaws? His inability to defend himself against the domineering, harping Zeena? His romantic vision of love that somehow escaping with Mattie will solve all his problems? Or in the empty circumstances of his life? The harsh social order and poverty of Starkfield that prevents him from escaping anyway. Either or both lead him to end the pain in his life by ending his life altogether. Wharton does not allow him such escape. Rather he must endure crippling pain in a mangled body and the pity and whispers of the village. But I find hope in Ethan’s response to the aftermath of the smash-up. When the Narrator enters the Fromes’ kitchen he finds Zeena and Mattie there. Zeena doesn’t greet the visitor, but silently goes about preparing supper with “pale, opaque eyes that revealed nothing and reflected nothing.” The mild surprise that she registers suggests that later she might berate Ethan for violating their privacy. Earlier we learned that Ethan still picks up patent medicines for her at the post office, indicating that she still suffers hypochondria. It seems that Zeena has changed only little. Mattie on the other hand has changed the most. The girl who once reveled in red is now “bloodless and shriveled,” with a “witch-like stare that disease of the spine sometimes gives.” Ethan and his visitor walk in on her in mid-rant, complaining about Zeena in a “high thin voice.” Her charm and warmth are long gone, understandably so. Clearly Zeena spends her days caring for Mattie, but the animosity that was once hidden between them is fully in the open now, catching Ethan in the middle. He himself however has a different response. He does not remain relatively unchanged, like Zeena, nor does he succumb to bitterness like his one-time love, Mattie. Ethan endures. His is one of those everyday Americans who rises each day to the tasks at hand and, despite pain and disappointment, puts his hand to them. He continues to scratch out a living among the granite outcroppings of the Berkshires in the face of great hardship. Perhaps this is simply his New England pragmatism, but I see something heroic in his quiet refusal to simply quit. He once tried to escape the pain of his life through death, now his body bears that pain, no doubt it reminds him of it each morning, but now he does not quit. He continues. He endures. How many of us in our comfortable first-world lives would have the strength, the fortitude to do that?

Yet Ethan does more than simply endure. When he encounters the Narrator, he could easily take the stranger’s money and drive him to the train station and back with only the most necessary of words. It takes a certain remarkable decency for someone who has so little to offer what little he has. It also takes a certain strength. Despite his despair, his pain, the smash-up has brought out that core of decency and fortitude that exists inside Ethan. To me, that is perhaps the best response to disappointment and tragedy in our lives.

I read Ethan Frome every January. But this January, January 2017, I am of two minds about reading it again. We’re living in a world that seems much starker, colder, and more unjust than Starkfield. That feeling of being trapped and desperate is all too palpable. Or, with my hand lingering over the red-bound volume on my bookshelf, I might just read it again and go on to bear life’s scars, like Ethan, like all of us, to endure another winter and rise each day to try to work a little more good in the world. We could all try that. It is the decent thing to do.

_______

Scott Hoffman

Scott Hoffman (Episode 66, 241) is an independent scholar and native Austinite living and working in his hometown. He earned his Ph.D. in American Studies from Purdue University in 2005 and is currently revising his manuscript Haloed by the Nation: Popular Martyrdom in Contemporary America. In 2008, he was nominated for a Lone Star Emmy for researching and writing The World, the War and Texas, a public television documentary about Texans during the Second World War. His publications include “How Do You Solve a Problem like Maria? St. Maria Goretti in the Post-Counter-Cultural World” in The CRITIC and “Holy Martin: The Overlooked Canonization of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.” and “‘Last Night I Prayed to Matthew:’ Matthew Shepard, Homosexuality and Popular Martyrdom in Contemporary America,” both in Religion and American Culture. This year he completed compiling an LBGT Resource Guide for the Austin History Center. In his spare time Scott likes to sing like nobody’s listenin’ and dance like nobody’s watchin’, which means he tends to wail and flail his arms a lot…

Aesthetic Drift #13: Young Kid in a Voting Booth

25 Thursday Aug 2016

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Aesthetic Drift #13 by Brett Pribble

Young Kid in a Voting Booth

Alone in my college apartment, satirical versions of Al Gore and George Bush reenacted the first debate of the 2000 election on Saturday Night Live. Will Farrell played Bush as a clueless redneck, and Darrel Hammond’s take on Gore was rude and robotic.

Bush Gore

This didn’t seem like satire because both politicians seemed like total douchebags in real life as well. I agreed with Gore on many issues, but I didn’t like him. Voting for such an establishment politician felt like a betrayal of myself, of democracy itself. The thought of voting for him unnerved me.

I wasn’t going to compromise my values. It was the system’s fault for putting me in an impossible situation, for providing me with only bad options.

Bush frightened me, but I wondered if his presidency would really be so much worse than Gore’s. They both answered to corporate masters. The difference in their tenure would be minor, and it would certainly be minor compared to me alienating myself from myself by compromising my values and voting for someone I didn’t believe in one hundred percent, or even 65 percent.

It wasn’t long before I discovered Ralph Nader. Now, here was a dude I could get behind. I agreed with him on every issue, and he wasn’t beholden to corporate money.

Nader speaks

I knew that he wouldn’t win, but if America was ever going to develop a third party it had to start somewhere. Shaking from anxiety as I entered the voting booth, I marked my vote next to his name.

That evening Bush declared victory. Gore’s campaign contested the results but would ultimately be rebuffed when the Supreme Court ended the election with the Bush vs. Gore decision. Somehow that outcome already felt inevitable, though. I watched a Bush rally on TV in horror as his supporters pumped their hands in victory. It was surreal to see crowds of people cheering for Bush, so surreal that everything seemed to lose color, and I felt like I was watching the German acolytes in Triumph of the Will. My stomach swirled and my heart ached. Something horrible was to come. I could feel it.

In the coming years, President Bush exceeded my darkest fears. We invaded Iraq without any real evidence, killed thousands of Iraqi civilians, and created a civil war that would not only wreck havoc on that nation but the entire Middle East. Bush doled out massive tax cuts to billionaires and created massive income inequality. Eventually, the economy plunged into the worst recession since the Great Depression.

I was ashamed to call myself an American, and I loathed the way the rest of the world viewed Americans: idiot cowboys full of greed and guns. It didn’t occur to me when I voted for president that I was also voting for our chief ambassador of American Democracy. When my trip to Europe in 2008 felt like an apology tour. Anytime I told people I was from the states, they’d ask, “Why Americans love Bush?”

George-W-Bush

When Bush pushed for a constitutional amendment declaring marriage between one man and one woman, it stung to watch my gay friends vilified. Would such a disgraceful law ever have been voted on had Gore won the election? I was angry with Bush, but I was angrier with myself.

I’ve never regretted a decision in my life more than my decision to vote for Nader. The silver lining to me has been the belief that Americans would never make this idealistic mistake again. Just because a democrat was part of a political machine wouldn’t mean we would allow our country to be destroyed by a half-witted lunatic. The presidency was bigger than me feeling pure. It was old people getting their social security checks and maintaining a positive image to our allies abroad. It was a lot of things that at twenty years of age I didn’t understand:

Supreme Court Appointments
Unemployment benefits
Women’s reproductive rights
The environment

We’d learned our lesson from what happened sixteen years ago, though, or so I thought. We would never let such a reckless person run our country again just to maintain idealistic purity. We wouldn’t make the perfect the enemy of the good. I believed this. But now, months away from the November election, I hear my fellow liberals saying they aren’t going to vote for Hillary Clinton. I thought we’d learned our lesson after Nader, but just as I was wrong about not voting for Gore, I was apparently wrong about our collective memory. I also thought I’d never see a politician as terrible as Bush again in my life time, but Trump makes him look like a competent saint.

I’d take a ride in a van with someone who just escaped from a mental hospital just for kicks, swim with sharks on a dare. Hell, I wrote a positive review for a Satanic coloring book for children. But I’d never vote for Trump. For the right amount of money, I’d even suck his tiny fingers, but I would never vote for him, either directly or indirectly (by not voting for Clinton).

We can’t let Incompetent Asshole Part 2 play in theaters across the country. We suffered through this movie for eight long years under Bush. Don’t let the previews fool you. The first film was awful and the sequel is going to be much worse. Vote for Hillary, and help start the next revolution by voting for real liberal in House, Senate, and local races. You can’t fix the system by starting with the top. There needs to be reliable politicians in place for the President to govern. Bernie is gonna have a big voice in 2017, and Hillary might actually list to him. Trump only listens to the sound of himself tweeting out racist bullshit.

_______

Brett Pribble

When he’s not looking for his keys, Brett Pribble teaches creative writing in Orlando, Florida. His work has previously appeared in Stirring: A Literary Collection, Saw Palm, The Molotov Cocktail, and 10,000 Tons of Black Ink. He spends his nights trying to understand the divinity of his third nipple.

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Aesthetic Drift #12: A Letter from Henry Hughes

04 Thursday Aug 2016

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Abel Debritto, Back Seat with Fish, Charles Bukowski, Henry Hughes, On Writing, Sycamore Review

Aesthetic Drift #12

A Letter from Henry Hughes

July 7, 2016

Dear John,

It’s great to hear from you. I remember the excellent work you did editing the Sycamore Review when I was last at Purdue at the turn of our new century. And I listen to The Drunken Odyssey when I can—great stuff, man. You’re not just keeping literature and literary discussions afloat, you’ve got them cruising at fifty knots.

I didn’t know about this Bukowski collection, On Writing. Gotta get a copy.

Yes, Charles Bukowski and I exchanged a few letters while I served as the first editor of Sycamore Review from 1988 – 1991. I have six letters and a postcard, some are lost. The original September 13, 1990 Bukowski letter that Abel Debritto reprinted in On Writing is among those I possess. I don’t know how he got it, but I’ve made some copies for folks over the years. I’m pleased to see it in print.

I’m not sure if you know how Sycamore Review got started. In 1986, Purdue inaugurated its Creative Writing program. I arrived in the fall of ’87 and there was sadness in the air. A few months earlier, a gifted graduate student and poet, Ann Griffith Lindsey, had been killed in an automobile accident. Ann was working hard to start a serious literary magazine. Her death was devastating, but her parents made a generous bequest in her honor, and the English department and administration backed it up with more money and resources. The department hired me and we put together a staff of other graduate students, including Elizabeth Stuckey-French. But no one ever heard of Sycamore Review, and Purdue had the reputation of a tech school, so we had to advertise like crazy as well as solicit contributions from some “big names.” I wrote a few authors—William Stafford, Simon Ortiz, Mary Oliver, Diane Wakowski—and they all contributed. It was great. Then I sent a letter to Charles Bukowski, landing some terrific poems and initiating a lively correspondence.

I always found Bukowski’s work refreshing and honest, though not always deep and layered. He cranked out a lot of stuff, some crap, some gold. Collections like Mockingbird Wish Me Luck (1984) and Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame (1988) had a big influence on me. Like Buk, I grew up working class, liked to drink and party, liked chasing girls. Bukowski’s work showed me that it was okay to write directly about these experiences. You didn’t have to be polite about it—though Bukowski had more courage to talk straight than I ever did. Nonetheless, many of the poems I wrote in my early twenties embraced and, I think, benefitted from this raw freedom. My main professor, Marianne Boruch, did not always approve, however. Boruch was a good teacher, but she found many of my poems over-sexed and in bad taste. There’s one poem, “Holiday,” that begins with an epigraph from Bukowski: “each evening bent like the point of a thumb tack / that will no longer stick / in.” The poem talks about drinking and getting laid. There’s line: “Jennifer telling me to come. And I tried, / but the whole ceiling collapsed on me.” Boruch hated it, but it’s in my first book. Men Holding Eggs.

I also use a couple Bukowski poems in the literature and writing classes I teach at Western Oregon University. There’s striking specificity and lovely music in a poem like “The Shoelace,” warning that most of us can handle the big calamities like “death . . . fire and flood,” but it’s the accumulation of small unlucky stuff and bad shit, like “no pot, except maybe one to piss in and / the other around your / gut” that can send us to the madhouse when that shoelace “snaps / with no time left.” And in the more narrative poems, such as “The Last Days of the Suicide Kid,” students and I hear and trust the candor and simplicity of the speaker in a nursing home. It’s all about the power of voice. You believe Bukowski when he’s talking—even when he’s making shit up. There’s nothing wrong with inventing characters and voices—novelists do it all the time—but to write in first person as yourself or Henry Chinaski and sound authentic nearly all the time, damn, that’s effective.

When I wrote Bukowski the first letter back in 1989, I quoted a phrase Marianne Boruch brandished to criticize some poems she called “Good doggie poems,” that is, well behaved, nice image, nice sentiment verses. Buk obviously loved the expression and teased us about the earthy, predictable name of our heartland journal, Sycamore Review, warning us we were “going to get a lot of ‘Good Doggie’ poems.” That letter—illustrated with a drawing of a man in bed beside a bottle of booze and two little dogs—was published along with his poem “Getting Old” in our Winter 1990 issue. “Getting Old” is long-winded dialogue and not his best work, but we liked it well enough, and our readers loved it. Bukowski had a cult following.

Bukowski Hughes letter 3

There was, of course, no email or internet. Physical letters fluttered back and forth. Bukowski had bold, handsome handwriting. He addressed envelopes and signed typed letters with a fine-tipped black marker. He used stamps depicting birds and Native Americans. Here’s an interesting note. Despite Bukowski’s drunken, stoned, uncensored crudity and reputation for wildness, he was extremely professional in literary business matters. You pointed this out, John—Bukowski worried that he couldn’t sign a contract granting our journal first rights to his poem because the piece might appear in a collection a couple months prior to our release date. Of course, I waived the stipulation. Who cares about whether one poem comes out a few weeks early in an author’s book? Obviously Bukowski did.

Around this time I wrote him another letter and asked about fishing, my passion.

This exchange is described in my new memoir, Back Seat with Fish. Bukowski pointed me to his poem “The Fisherman,” a sad song of both endurance and resignation set in Sand Pedro, California where he lived. He said he’s send me a new poem that included some kind of fish.

I wrote him in the fall of 1989 asking if he’d do a reading at Purdue, but he said he no longer gave readings: “Only did so as a means of absolute survival, never liked giving them. I think a writer’s job is to write.” He made references to the passing of time and his age, “Christ, I never thought I’d live this long” and expressed a sense of fading action. “I rather miss the excitement I felt when I first read POUND, ELIOT, e.e. CUMMINGS, AUDEN, SPENDER, JEFFERS, and that gang. Everything is too close now, there seems a lacking. I call it ‘the absence of the hero.’”

In January, 1990, I got a postcard from Buk—he made his own postcards—with a photo of him pressing a barbell over his head in front of an open refrigerator full of beer. On the card he wrote “Lively, good issue. Keep it up!” He clearly liked the Sycamore and soon after submitted 13 new poems.

What a windfall! I thanked Buk in a letter and expressed my disappointment with a lot of the poetry I was reading in the big journals. He wrote back right away with the September 13, 1990 letter that DeBritto used. From that big batch of poems we published “Glory Days” and “Luck Was Not a Lady for Me” in Vol 3. No. 1 (1991). Although Buk was suffering from Leukemia and would be dead in three years, he was still writing with guts and fire. “Glory Days” is both grounded and surreal. It starts, “the dead rivers run backwards into nowhere, / the fish cry through neon memories, / and I remember you drunk in bed.” As he promised, there was a fish image for me. These poems are tough, funny and desperately alive. I loved them.

Sometime in the spring of 1991, there was some push back on Bukowski’s vulgar language and perceived sexism. I don’t have copies of the letters I sent, but I remember explaining to Buk that some people were getting bent out of shape about the line from “The Glory Days” when the landlady is yelling at Hank, “Mr. Chinaski, I must warn you,” and Hank yells back, in caps, “AH GO WARN YOUR MOTHER’S CUNT.” I thought it was very authentic dialogue. Of course, the folks in the Writing Program championed free speech, but Indiana is a conservative state. Our journal raised money with the help of Purdue’s foundation, and undoubtedly many donors—perhaps wealthy engineers or retired astronauts—were not too keen on “cunt” references. Bukowski responded in an emphatic letter to me on March 28, 1991: “They are full of falsity, decay, shit, boredom and fear. Universities are not places of learning to them, they are places of comfort to them, they are the Eternal Ostriches with their heads in the sand . . . Be proud you fought against these, no matter the price.” God, I cherish those words.

The last poem we published was “One More Day” (Vol. 3.2 1991). It’s a sad beautiful end-of-life, washing my car poem: “the slippery summer sun of my youth is / gone.” But the speaker tips the “gentleman,” gets back into his glistening automobile, puts his hands on the wheel, and drives off:

it’s a fair day among the

living.

the earth has been here for

such a very long

time.

I get the green and go

on.

Rereading these poems and letters has helped me remember the vitality, humor, hardship and sadness that moved through Bukowski’s work. He touched and influenced a lot of young writers. He certainly helped me become a better poet.

Thanks, John, for asking about those old days at Sycamore Review and the rich exchanges with writers like Charles Bukowski. Again, I admire what you’re doing on The Drunken Odyssey and wish you all the very best. Let me quote the very last lines of that last Bukowski letter—lines that apply very much to you and your work: “You are alive. That’s rare, that’s rare. Rejoice.”

Yours in Oregon,

Henry

_______

Henry Hughes

Henry Hughes (Episode 217) grew up on Long Island, New York. After completing an MA in Creative Writing at Purdue University in 1990, he spent five years working in Japan and China. He completed a Ph.D. in American literature at Purdue in 2002 and now teaches at Western Oregon University. Hughes is the author of four collections of poetry, including Men Holding Eggs (2004 Oregon Book Award), Moist Meridian (2011 Finalist for the Oregon Book Award), and Bunch of Animals, new from Cloudbank Books. His poems and essays have appeared in Antioch Review, Carolina Quarterly, Shenandoah, Seattle Review, Poetry Northwest, Gray’s Sporting Journal and Harvard Review where his book reviews regularly appear. His fishing memoir, Back Seat with Fish: A Man Adventures in Angling and Romance, was published this spring by Skyhorse. He is the editor of the Everyman’s Library anthologies, The Art of Angling: Poems about Fishing and Fishing Stories. Hughes is a professor of literature and writing at Western Oregon University.

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Aesthetic Drift #11: Notes on The Pink Fire Revue

07 Thursday Jul 2016

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Dudag, Jared Silvia, John King, Nicole Oquendo, Synthestruct, The Pink Fire Revue, Tod Caviness

Aesthetic Drift #11 by Jared Silvia

Notes on The Pink Fire Revue

We knew, first off, that we wanted the event to be part concert, part reading, part projector art show. Whenever you start with the idea of creating a mutant, you have a relatively good chance of succeeding. Whether its destiny is to dwell in the sewer or not is another question.

Photo by Jared Silvia.

John mentioned the idea of music/poetry coming together with an eye toward, I think, some of the modular synthesizer music I had been posting on various social streams. I had been bouncing a similar idea around in my brain, imagining it would be impossible to accomplish, or hoping that I would get better at what I do with synthesizers first, allowing my insecurity to shove the idea into the realm of “possible, but not likely,” that zone in my brain where I imagine something happening without reasonably expecting it to manifest. Sometimes it just takes the realization that you’re not riding a waveform alone to draw an idea out of hibernation.

Photograph by Shawn McKee.

Here’s what we did, for all the planning and one false start:

First, we knew it would be a literary event. That’s what our events, collectively, are. We knew it should be poetry with a technological bent, something that thought about ghosts in machines, silicon strands, electrical arcs, retro-futures, and technological mainstreams of now. We reached out to a collection of poets who would, we thought, approach this matter with an open mind, and who had performance experience, which would be necessary for a show that inherently required interactivity. This included John, of course, and also Nicole Oquendo, Tod Caviness, and Mary McGinn.

Photo by Shawn McKee.

Meanwhile, at the school I teach at in an audio program, there are a number of teachers who dabble (to various degrees) in modular synthesizer building. I’m at the lowest extreme of that world, taking very small steps into the modular synthesizer world after loving and playing synthesizers since I was a teenager. Jon Curtis and Derek Duda, who both build their own modules, and are resourceful, enjoy making music, but hadn’t recently performed with their systems. When I asked if they were interested, they were immediately down. We spent a few weeks gathering in a classroom and improvising together in order to see what it sounded like when all three of us went forward into the world of self-playing patches and barely controlled chaos.

Derek Duda, photograph by Lesley Silvia.

This part takes some explanation. I know many folks won’t be completely aware of what modular synthesizers are. Generally, they are like other synthesizers you may have seen or heard (zap, boom boom boom), but they present their components individually, and require that you determine how they are connected in order to create sounds. This requires a base-level of knowledge, but allows for an incredible amount of flexibility and variation from a simple collection of components. Sound sources (oscillators), modifiers (filters, etc.), and math/control functions (sequencers, envelopes), plus other cool modules (samplers, in this case) come together in many various ways to generate different sounds. We started with fresh patches each time. Each of our systems was chasing a common “clock,” which means that any elements we wanted synchronized together between our systems could be locked together with a common guiding timing signal that consists of electrical pulses. In the video of the event, you’ll notice us tweaking settings, pulling patch cables, modifying the sound. That’s how it goes every time.

Ginger Leigh, photograph by Lesley Silvia.

It also takes a little of explanation to understand the video aspect of the event. Ginger Leigh, who I have known for a really long time, is a very highly regarded visual artist who operates under the name Synthestruct. She has presented her work in the US, in Germany, Sweden, and elsewhere, and has recently curated projector art shows here in the Orlando area. I originally asked her if she would be interested in participating in this show, naively imagining that she would create series of live visuals she could trigger in much the way a VJ might.

What she did, instead, though, was to create an entire program that received sound inputs from our modular synthesizers, and from the microphone at the event, and would vibrate and modify visual protocols she had designed. In essence, she wrote a sound-reactive program just for the event, and while she tweaked parameters live, the show was utterly one-time in that the sounds came from a set of variable un-repeatable instrument settings running chaotic patterns, modifying visuals that were designed to react to these patterns.

Photo by Shawn McKee.

Ultimately, this event was wonderfully synchronized. The work of the poets intersected uncannily with the sounds being generated, the improvisation huddled up perfectly well, and the visualizations functioned in ways that went so far beyond what I imagined that it was a little overwhelming to be standing in the wash of light. Not bad considering that the actual event was the first time we put all of these ideas together to become the mutant it became, not, it turned out, a sewer-dweller.

It strikes me that there are some interesting concerns inherent in an event like this. What do we see when we view ourselves as technology users? The ubiquity of media is such that we so easily slip back into our devices, a closeness of mind and screen that is unprecedented in ages before ours. We are experts at media, consuming it constantly, ravenously. And yet, our consumption is often so solitary, a monologue flowing mainly in one direction from device to person. That this event was a “multimedia presentation” of unintuitive, self-exploring instruments, programs designed for visual translation, and human voices confirming that things are amiss, things are unsettled, does not encapsulate the full experience. Because The Pink Fire Revue was a communal happening, shared not only between members of the audience, but between the performers, the audience, the instruments, the software, the voices, and the building itself, complete with feedback at every hinge, it suggested another coming age of technological witness. In retrospect, it was (without any of us realizing it, and that includes those of us who came up with the idea) an experiment in basic singularity, with all of the complex nodes it takes to form a new, multi-mind nervous system.

This event would not have been possible without John King, who conceptualized it with me, Ryan Rivas, who is an amazing event producer, and who always makes Functionally Literate stuff possible, Shawn McKee, who shot the video of the event alongside John King, and edited the video as well, Pat Greene, who was generous in providing the space at The Gallery at Avalon Island, and Lesley Silvia, who always helps in a million tangible and intangible ways as things kick off on an idea like this.

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Jared Silvia (Episodes 57, 62, 69, 90, 122, 129, 131, 152, 167, 171, 173, 206, and 213) is the host of the Functionally Literate reading series and radio show. His fiction has appeared in decomP, Monkeybicycle, Annalemma Magazine, Digital Americana magazine, and in collections from Burrow Press. He was the recipient of a Luso American scholarship from the DISQUIET International Literary Conference in 2013. You can find out more at jaredsilvia.com.

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Aesthetic Drift #10: Why I Go to AWP

07 Thursday Apr 2016

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Aesthetic Drift #10 by Shawn McKee

Why I Go to AWP

Los Angeles is a metropolis unlike any other. After I got kicked out of a bar for allegedly being too drunk, I could have been back home in Orlando for all I knew. But I wasn’t in Orlando, I was somewhere else—a magical land of endless towering skyscrapers and a dazzling array of massive, glowing advertisement screens like something out of Blade Runner, on a smaller scale. Five days in L.A. for the AWP 2016 conference felt like one tightly-confined day with minimal sleep in-between hours.

AWP Skyline

After all the panels, readings, dinners, Ubers, and miles walked back and forth from the hotel to the convention center, I’m faced with the question of why I go to AWP in the first place.

Aside from being the premiere literary conference for writers all over the country, AWP is, for me, I guess, like the cabin in the Lawrence Kasdan’s The Big Chill, where old friends periodically reunite to catch up on their lives, loves, and passions. Now that I think of it, that’s not at all like The Big Chill. I’m thinking more of Alan Alda’s The Four Seasons. I need to get my annoying 1980s baby boomer drama allusions right.

Theoretically, AWP is as much about absorbing as many panels as you can endure in one day as it is as test to see how many tweets you can emit ending in #AWP16. Of course, non-writers on Twitter may wonder just what in the hell #AWP16 means and why it’s trending, if at all, but that’s beside the point in this gargantuan whirlwind of an experience that, if anything, always turns out to be memorable in the three years that I’ve attended.

It’s February 2014, and I’m at my first AWP conference in Seattle as a MFA grad student from the University of Central Florida. I’m diligent in my approach to selecting panels. I take note of which ones seem the most useful and who I want to see the most and what notes I can take back home on my college ruled notebook in handwriting so sloppy, you’d think I’d suffered a stroke.

I’m excited to see Phillip Lopate, Chuck Palahniuk, Roxane Gay, Stephen Elliott, Sherman Alexie, and many other writers I may or may not be familiar with. But they’re here—and for an hour or so—they’re willing to share elements of their craft with me—a veritable nobody. I’m exhausted by the end of the day, but I still go out and have fun with my talented colleagues and take in all that Seattle has to offer. It rains a lot of Seattle rain, and my shoes are always soaked. I share a hotel room with four other guys, but the situation totally works. I absorb copious amounts of drink as though the government will be reinstating prohibition in a matter of days. By the end of the conference, I don’t know what the hell happened. All I have are my notes that the NSA couldn’t transcribe if they wanted to.

It’s March 2016, and I’m in L.A. for my third AWP conference. (I may have blacked out last year.) By the time I check into my hotel room by mid-afternoon, all I want to do is register and take a nap. Maybe this premature exhaustion’s due to the fact that I have a full-time job now—and a part time job that feels like a full-time job, but that’s another story. I can’t believe that it’s already March and that I’m in Los Angeles. I hope that I didn’t forget my toothbrush.

AWP Group

My friends and I meet up, all MFA graduates like myself. Many of them are enrolled in or pursing PhD programs. Meanwhile, I’m still working on thesis revisions. Time flies like a premature nuke launched from communist North Korea where the missile spins around like a pin wheel and explodes to the sound of that Price is Right losing horn. Uber is every bit important in L.A. as it is in Orlando. That’s just how I look at it. Their stupid rates keep jacking up around certain “fare times.”

We walk, for the most part, to the convention center. We Uber to West Hollywood where the diverse mountainous landscape can be seen beyond the sprawling strips of a city that looks a tad more faded and less glamorous than I had imagined. We drink margaritas and each nachos. We visit the “Museum of Death” where I reconnect with my morbid fascination with serial killers, cult leaders, and mass murdering tyrants.

Shawn McKee

Perhaps I should have went into investigative journalism. There’s still hope. It’s essentially a house with different rooms decked out in grotesque photos, themes, and video involving some of the most heinous people that the 20^th century had to offer. Oddly enough, many of them are from California. Joan Didion was definitely onto something with The White Album.

The aesthetic of L.A.—which I’m including as Hollywood—is similar to any major city: noisy streets, hordes of people waiting at cross walks, massive tarps covering buildings mid-construction, benches, and variants of wandering or sleeping homeless—but I don’t recall seeing roads blocked off for filming last time I went to Washington D.C., or San Francisco, for that matter. I watch uniformed police officers rush the street and shoot a bad guy full of lead as cameras film. It looks almost like a street performance, but apparently it’s a television show called Training Day.

As I walk the streets, at a cool seventy six degrees, I notice that drivers in L.A. love to honk—probably more than they enjoy Starbucks. But don’t get me wrong, every person I run into is nice, almost suspiciously nice, especially bartenders and servers. It’s when I look at my extensive collection of receipts that I realize why. It’s very expensive to do anything out here. I ask my Uber driver if it’s expensive to live out here. He tells me, “very.” A few more days in L.A. and I’d be wandering the streets and sleeping on benches broke as the day I was born—I was born in Yuma Arizona, if you were wondering.

So back to the conference: I know there’s a lot that I’m leaving out. I have to mention first that many of the people I met in L.A. were from somewhere else, sort of like a magnified version of Orlando multiplied by one hundred stars on the “Hollywood Walk of Fame” (I’m sticking with that math analogy). Everyone out here, well most of everyone, is from somewhere else. And many of them, not all, but many, are aspiring actors. This should come as no surprise. The cliché is as evident as the fact that L.A. often substitutes as other major American cities in movies and television shows. It really could be a state all of its own. I’m wandering off topic again.

Most of my time at the 49^th annual AWP is spent at the book fair. The physical layout is fantastic and well-spaced.

Book Fair

Gone is the squeezing through tight aisles to perennially glance at the most interesting booths. The experience is initially overwhelming, but that’s why you peruse in intervals. I spend a few hours at the book fair each day and pick up my fair share of flyers, buttons, books, journals, bookmarks, stickers, shirts, and mugs—enough to reach a satisfactory weight in my tote bag. Of course, I don’t gather near as much booty as I did my first AWP go-around. This time everything is “AWP lite.” I’m older and less inclined to take a bunch of shit back home.

I attend three, maybe four panels at the most. I have work to do back in the hotel room. I’m getting text messages from work reminding me of this fact. I go to the AWP dance party, but I don’t dance. The participants are all the more lucky. I miss the panel on book to film adaptation with Brett Easton Ellis. I don’t remember why. I always wanted to meet him. I see Cheryl Strayed in the hotel bar lobby and I ask my friends if I should get a selfie or a “groupie” with her, as the kids call them.

I’m advised multiple times against it.

I attend a panel on Comics in Literary Journals and there are multiple walkouts. I’ve rarely ever walked out on anything. Many years back, I ran out of the theater during Meet Wally Sparks, but that’s another story. An esteemed professor tells me that she gives panels upwards of ten minutes, and if they don’t deliver, she’s gone. I admire that. Maybe I need a few more AWPs under my belt before doing so. I don’t go to many panels this time, but writing is never far from my mind. There’s probably a story to write for each day. A week after the event, I realize that there are about a hundred other things to write about. If I ever needed a reason to explain why I go in the first place, that’s a start.

_______

Shawn McKee

Shawn McKee (Episodes 179 and 184), despite still working on his thesis edits, is doing just fine.

Aesthetic Drift #9: Dramatic Stakes, and Why Dawn of Justice Will Likely Suck

24 Thursday Mar 2016

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Batman, Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, Frank Miller, High stakes storytelling, Superman, The Dark Knight Returns, The Great Gatsby, The Portrait of a Lady

Aesthetic Drift #9 by John King

Dramatic Stakes, and Why Dawn of Justice Will Likely Suck

Thirty years ago when Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns series appeared, this epic of what would happen to superheroes in the future changed the culture of comic books. Miller introduced an expressionistic art style that could be crude and gothic. Miller worried about the physics of the world Batman inhabited, so that the world was as real as the art was wild. And by making his heroes old, he inadvertently revealed American culture’s doubts about whether these pop culture icons could be meaningful with about fifty years of continuous storytelling occurring with many of the same archetypal characters.

In The Dark Knight Returns, Batman would have his final confrontation with his nemesis, The Joker. Batman would have his final confrontation with his other nemesis, Superman. All of this seemed so intriguing in large part because of the dramatic stakes this finality implied. We see Batman’s heartbeat. We see our heroes, even Superman, bleed and suffer. We see The Joker die laughing.

If you want people to read your fiction or watch your play or film, the dramatic stakes need to be high. Highly abstract emotions and average slice-of-life narratives might be appealing, but they are most appealing when they turn out to be related to high-stakes storytelling. Gatsby has to die trying to outmaneuver the American class system in the name of love. Isabel Archer must learn that her freedom and pride were high prices to pay at the expense of her truest friendship, the depths of which she should have seen earlier. And Batman must try to slay Superman to prove the truth of his own perhaps unhealthy convictions.

High-stakes define character in indelible ways, and watching such storytelling changes us, when those stories are good.

Batmans V Superman

This is why Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice is likely to be terrible.

Batman-Vs-Superman-Dawn-Of-Justice-2015

Besides the actual animated adaptation of The Dark Knight Returns, no other movie seems to be leaning quite so heavily on the Miller comic. In Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, we are going to see Batman in battle armor face off with Superman, but this will not be their final confrontation. Instead, this looks to be the beginning of a beautiful friendship, in which they can quip to one another about how cool Wonder Woman is, since a glib Lex Luthor will create a new villain that makes the rivalry, the fatal ideological and psychological conflict, between Batman and Superman irrelevant on their way to kicking a lot of CGI ass.

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John King (Episode, well, all of them) is a podcaster, writer, and ferret wrangler.

Aesthetic Drift #8: Literary Austin

10 Thursday Mar 2016

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Aesthetic Drift #8 by Scott Gilman

Literary Austin
HRC2

What do Lord Byron, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, John Keats, the Bronte sisters, D. H. Lawrence, Don DeLillo, John Fowles, Norman Mailer, Bernard Malamud, David Mamet, Arthur Miller, James Salter and David Foster Wallace all have in common? Either their manuscripts, collections, or personal libraries reside in Austin, at the Harry Ransom Center on the campus of the University of Texas. For good measure, the Ransom Center also houses one of the original Gutenberg Bibles.

HRC1
Emanating from this rich academic and literary foundation is a culture in Austin that fosters independent thinking, writing and creativity. While smaller, of course, than literary hubs like San Francisco and New York, what Austin shares with those larger coastal cities is its magnetism for those seeking something–and some place–else. While today the hordes come because of technology and start-ups (and food trucks and live music and hipster acceptance) Austin has long been home, and welcoming, to the outsider, the hippie, the iconoclast, the weird.

So it’s no surprise that even in today’s world of devices and handhelds and screens, books, writing, and publishing are all engrained into the city’s life. Once a year, in the Fall, the Texas State Capitol hosts the Texas Book Festival, a two-day event featuring a diverse set of readings, tents, booksellers and activities. A Literary Pub Crawl the night before gets reading types out of the house and into the bars, walking the streets, loosened up before sessions in the House and Senate chambers.

The focus of the formal aspect of literary culture in Austin resides at the University of Texas with the Michener Center for Writing, which offers a three-year, full-time residency MFA program. Additionally, the Michener Center offers a reading series open to the public; its lineup this year includes Jesmyn Ward, Charles Wright, TC Boyle, Laura Kasischke and others.

But outside the halls of government and academia lies an undercurrent of literary activity from striving and published writers of all kinds. Meet-ups for writers (like the one I sometimes attend, “Sit Down, Shut Up and Write”) occur regularly to encourage writers to do the hardest thing about writing – sit in a chair and write – while others provide forums to workshop their work and network with like-minded creatives and to provide assistance on getting published. These meet in coffee shops around the city, encouraging writers to keep going (another group is called “Write It Already”), functioning as de facto gym buddies for those plugging away on a novel, thesis or memoir, and more generally, a career in or pursuit of writing. Groups like the Writers’ League of Texas host events, conferences and classes for its members; The Writing Barn is a space that hosts readings, workshops and seminars as well as open hours for writers.

Austin boasts a diverse collection of small and independent bookstores, many operated with the intent on keeping the value of a book store, and an inviting space for writers and readers, alive. Most well known is BookPeople, which on top of its impressive selection offers regular readings from nationally recognized writers (I’ve seen Michael Chabon and Jonathan Franzen read there) and also offers events and reading for kids. Their kids section, in fact, is one of the best parts of the store. But there are plenty of intriguing and fun options beyond BookPeople. Just down the street is 12^th Street Books, which houses the city’s only walk-in rare book room.

12thstreet3

Great for collectors looking for out of print and special and first editions, 12^th Street focuses on small-press books, fine bindings and titles by and about Texas writers.

12thStreet2

Along the popular, trendy corridor of South Congress Avenue is South Congress Books, a smallish store with an eclectic collection of used fiction titles and books on art, film, music, criticism and history. Its also features rare books for those looking to collect hard-to-find editions. And on the East Side is Farewell Books, a progressive used book store and art gallery. Their collection is small but will challenge you, and the rotating art exhibits will keep you coming back.

Malvern1

Malvern Books, an independent store located close to the UT campus, hosts a variety of events, from various book and reading clubs to novel nights and open readings.

Malvern2

It fashions itself as not just a bookstore but a literary community, focusing on “lesser know and emerging voices.”

One of the more exciting elements of the writing scene in Austin is the proliferation of local presses and magazines in recent years. And in addition to publishing new and local writers, they are also hosting events and readings, helping to foster and cultivate the local writing community. Fields Magazine was started over three years ago and holds a reading series three times a year in a local art gallery. Founded around the same time, The Austin Review, an independent, non-profit literary journal, publishes fiction, flash non-fiction and analysis.

Describing the scene here in Austin, Sean Richmond, editor in chief of Fields, was enthusiastic about the nature of the community. “There’s a lot going on, and it’s just so much fun to be a part of,” he said. “Everyone is really supportive of each other, and we collaborate on each other’s journals and read at each other’s events and otherwise all work together to grow this burgeoning community. … It’s small enough still where we all really know each other, but large enough that it feels really rewarding, and I still see a lot of new faces every time we host an event.”

Not all readings occur in bookstores or art galleries. Whip In is a former convenience store converted into a beer house and Indian restaurant. On the first Tuesday of the month, Whip In hosts “One Page Salon,” during which writers, poets, and other performers get a chance to showcase their work in a laid back environment. ‘Everything is Bigger’ is a monthly reading series currently held at the downtown bar Cheer Up Charlie’s; it features three readers and a special performer. Also held at Cheer Up Charlie’s is Five Things, a bi-monthly event where five readers are asked to read five minute pieces on five different things; this event has been on-going since 2008.

Five Things is hosted by Adeena Reitberger of American Short Fiction and Callie Collins of local press A Strange Object. A Strange Object published its first book in October 2013 and is continuing to release new titles. American Short Fiction was founded in Austin, is published three times a year and focuses on emerging and established voices.

Says editor Rebecca Markovits, “American Short Fiction has been around a long time, and we’ve watched the literary scene here really flourish over the decades. Like the city in general, the Austin literary crowd seems to be growing and growing. There’s always a new writerly or readerly project popping up – a new journal, a reading series – and it says a lot about that particular combination of creativity and can-do that so characterizes this town. So it feels like a great time to be talking literature in ATX.”

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Scott Gilman

Scott Gilman lives in Austin, Texas and enjoys exercise, reading, writing, eating and drinking. He is working on his first novel and a short story and essay collection. More of his writing can be found here.

Aesthetic Drift #7: The Ten Best Films of 2015

25 Thursday Feb 2016

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Aesthetic Drift #7 by Brett Pribble

The Ten Best Films of 2015

With the Oscars dropping on Sunday night, I’ve decided to hurl out my own opinion about the best films of the Trumpian Year of the Pig: 2015. I didn’t include documentaries or foreign films because I didn’t have time to watch enough of them, but I did spend countless hours watching English language features. And while I think the Oscars got a few things right this year, here’s a healthy serving of what I’m eating up.

Applesauce

Applesauce

Nothing says love and romance quite like receiving a severed finger in the mail. Onur Tukel writes, directs, and stars in this fresher than fresh horror-comedy-meditation on relationships and commitment. His character Ron is a cynical high school teacher just dying to tell the tale of how in college he accidentally sliced a man’s fingers off. After failing to reveal this on live radio, he spills the beans about his sordid past on a double date with friends. This confession throws Ron’s world into chaos. His best friend’s girl tells his wife that he fingered her at a party. At work, his condescending lectures to his class about resolving international conflicts peacefully lead to his own fanatical paranoia (“You may be Italian, but I’m Turkish. And Turkish people are fucking crazy!”).

Did I mention that Ron receives amputated body parts during all this? While trying to keep his love life and irritated students in check, he discovers severed limbs the mail, his laundry, and even his Chinese food. Is his cuckolded former friend Les the culprit, or is something more nefarious at play? If you like your comedies with a dose of ghastliness, a touch of social commentary, and a dash absurdity, mark this one in your queue.

Anomalisa

If you’ve been waiting your whole life for a movie about a narcissistic puppet dealing with existential crises, well friend, your wait is over. In this haunting oddity, Charlie Kaufman demonstrates once again his ability to craft a bizarre, wholly original work of art. Some of his previous screenplays include Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. In 2008, he released his first directorial effort and possible magnum opus, Synecdoche, New York. His sophomore effort Anomalisa illustrates once again that he belongs both in the writer’s room and behind the camera.

The puppets in Kaufman’s movie simultaneously feel both real and fake. Their expressions, movements, skin—all appear life like, but they are held together by strings to remind us that they are just puppets (like all human beings). The protagonist is British author Michael Stone (voiced by David Thewlis). He’s travelling to give speeches after writing a successful book about Customer Service in America. But he hates customer service and customers. He doesn’t like anyone, not the cab driver making jokes on the way to his hotel, not his wife and kids back home, not his ex-girlfriend he rings for a booty call, not anyone. Everyone is the same: fake, boring, meaningless. And for this reason Kaufman chooses to have every character but Michael voiced by the same male actor (Tom Noonan). Well, there is one exception. Jennifer Jason Leigh voices Lisa, an insecure fan of his he meets in the hotel. Her voice sounds unique and beautiful to him, and it’s through her that this movie finds its poetry.

But like every hot jolt of excitement a new romance provides, it eventually fades. This movies drifts in the black hole at the center of every skeptic’s heart. Everything is ultimately meaningless. We’re always alone. Life is completely absurd. It’s a script that would make Albert Camus proud. But it still has its meaning and resonance in the way it drifts back and forth between heartache and heart failure. Most beautiful things are tragic in their own way.

Clouds of Sils Maria

It’s a question we’ve all heard: does art imitate life or does life imitate art? Olivier Assayas takes us to the French Alps to explore the answer. In the filmmaker’s latest piece of thought porn, Juliette Binoche is Maria Enders, an aging actress tasked with starring in a new rendition of the play that gave birth to her celebrity. Only this time her character won’t be the young femme fatale that she is famous for. Instead, she’s forced to play an older woman manipulated by the younger vixen. This mirrors the 1980 film Rendez-Vous, also directed by Assayas. In it Binoche plays a young actress at the brink of stardom. Binoche herself (now in her fifties) doesn’t command the attention she once did as audiences are drawn to dystopian teen romances.

And who could teach Binoche a thing or two about this generation’s pop-culture obsessions better than Twilight heroine Kristin Stewart? She inhabits the role of Valentine, Maria’s assistant, with ease and potency. Valentine convinces Maria to take on the role of the older character because (unlike Maria) she sees strength in her. Stewart owns this performance, and it’s a shame she wasn’t nominated for Best Supporting Actress. It washes away any bad taste that Twilight might have left in your mouth.

This richly textured movie is a film within a film. Valentine and Maria practice the roles of the characters in the play to wrench Maria from her doubts. Meanwhile, it becomes clear that the sensuality extends beyond their roles and into each other. If you enjoy complex characters and crackling dialogue more than chase scenes, you’ll be lured into Sils Maria’s vibrant landscapes and erotic tension. Chloe Martez is also excellent as the Lindsey Lohan-esque troubled young actress taking over the femme fatale character from Binoche. There are enough layers here to watch this movie several times and take away something new with each visit.

The Revenant

In a supporting role, Tom Hardy steals this film as murderer John Fitzgerald. He looks directly into the camera with burning eyes at the end of a monologue about his pa finding religion: “In that moment, he told me, he found God. And it turns out, that God, he’s a squirrel. Yeah, big ‘ol meaty one. I found God, he used to say. While I was sitting there basking in the sublimity of mercy, I shot and ate that son of a bitch.”

The quest to slay Fitzgerald for killing his boy is the only thing that keeps protagonist Hugh Glass’s (Leonardo DiCaprio) heart ticking. The theme of survival—in all of its barbarity, selfishness, and grace—courses through every frame this beautiful film. Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki turns a lush wilderness into savage ghost lands. You’re so immersed in the bloody trees that you can feel snow cutting your flesh and freezing your limbs. Critics who claimed writer-director Alejandro G. Inarritu’s Birdman was just a gimmick ought be silenced by the scope and ambition of this staggering work.

It’s said that the more a character wants something, the more we want it too, and Hugh Glass wants to avenge his boy so fiercely that he’ll eat raw bison, sleep inside horse carcasses, and endure being mauled by a grizzly bear to attain justice. Watch this film and see if you can survive the beating it puts you through.

Sicario

Dread. Ominous, pitch-black dread wails through this movie like a soul falling straight to hell. But hell is a better place than the cartel controlled neighborhoods of Juarez. That’s where FBI agent Kate Macer (Emily Blunt) travels in director Denis Villeneuve’s finest work yet. After a raid on an Arizona house leaves her with nothing more than rows of corpses wrapped in plastic, Kate seeks an answer. Josh Brolin, with more than a touch of patronization, is happy to give her one: go on a secret mission to capture the head of a cartel in Mexico. The details of how, why, and where are murky, but Blunt’s Kate is willing to go along with it.

Through her eyes, the film’s singular conscience, we sail through a nightmare world. The shadows and contours of it are filmed in brilliant detail by Roger Deakins (probably the best cinematographer still working—just watch most Coen Brothers films from the last two decades if you don’t believe me). In this nightmare, we’re left to ponder if the war on drugs can ever work, and even if it could work, is it worth the moral price we’d have to pay to win it? Josh Brolin’s morals went out the window a long time ago, and Emily Blunt does a great job struggling with hers. Also along for the ride is a demon more mysterious than Josh Brolin: a former prosecutor named Alejandro played by Benicio Del Toro. Del Toro won the Oscar for his role in the last great movie about the futility of the war on drugs, Traffic.

While this isn’t the first movie to deal with this subject matter, the tight and rule-breaking script by Tyler Sheridan breathes new life into the genre. As the film states at the beginning, Sicario is the Mexican word for hit man. This may seem a relatively clear and simple title on the surface, but much like the movie’s themes, it proves more complex.

Room

We hear about their stories on the news: women kidnapped and forced to live in captivity for years. On May 6, 2013, Amanda Berry escaped the home of Ariel Castro with her six-year-old daughter. Shortly thereafter, Castro pled guilty to 937 counts of rape, one of which led to Amanda’s daughter, Jocelyn. Before escaping, Amanda created a schoolhouse in her prison to give Jocelyn some semblance of normal life. It’s easy to see parallels between this story and Room. The book of the same name that it was adapted from was actually influenced by an Austrian case in which a 42-year-old woman told the authorities how her father imprisoned her and fathered seven children from her.

It’s impossible to imagine experiencing such terrors. But that’s exactly what Room does. The fact that the film is imbued with hope, love, and beauty is nothing short of a small miracle. Brie Larson is brilliant as Ma. Imprisoned seven years in an outhouse with her five-year-old son Jack (Jacob Tremblay), she does everything she can to shield the dark reality of their situation from him: their imprisonment, that Jack is a product of rape, that Old Nick visits them to sexually assault her, and her desire to kill herself if it weren’t for loving her boy. Filling Jack’s life with games and distractions, she convinces him that the world doesn’t exist outside of the room they inhabit. It’s just the two of them and the window in the ceiling.

The story is told from Jack’s perspective, which was a genius decision. It allows the universe to take on a magical quality instead of grim desolation. Room is about imprisonment, but it’s also a thriller about escape. What if they found a way to get free? And how then would a child react to experiencing other people, animals, nature, the world—if he was raised to believe the entire universe was contained in four by four walls? Unlike the outhouse Ma and Jack are trapped in, the amount of emotions and ideas Room wrestles with is numerous.

Carol

Melancholy permeates every facet of this bewitching adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel The Price of Salt. If you swooned over the wistful imagery of Todd Haynes earlier works, Carol will not disappoint. It swims in murky puddles of the ‘50s that Haynes treaded in Far From Heaven. Some like to romanticize the ‘50s as a golden age. The economy was booming and a man could provide for his family while his wife stayed home and took care of the kids. But what if that man didn’t fit into society’s idea of the model life? What if he (or she) was black or gay or simply refuses to go with the flow? How golden would things be then?

This movie is about such questions, as Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara struggle to live out their lesbian love affair. But it’s more about the somber mood than the somber message. It allows you to wallow in New York’s rainy streets, the expressions of desire and innuendo on the faces of its talented actresses. It basks in the midcentury style of its cinematography: cool and warm magentas and greens, pronounced but limited color. At times the camera is positioned away from the characters, allowing us to ease drop on their conversations, which further highlights the fear and alienation of homosexuals in the ‘50s. Adding to the visuals is the dreamy score by Carter Burwell, which further plunges you into the movie’s melodrama and sensuality.

Blanchett and Mara are a couple to be remembered. Blanchett’s Carol is always in control, always three steps ahead (if perhaps a bit self-defeating) in her luxurious coats, and Mara is perfect is the younger artist, the naïve and curious Therese. Kyle Chandler does excellent work as Carol’s jealous husband who wants her to stay home and raise their daughter with him. In order to tame her, he’ll hire private detectives and attempt to declare her unfit to raise a child—for her perverse sexuality. It’s indeed a melancholy romance, but one with traces of hope and gallons of beauty. Lose yourself in its sumptuousness.

Ex Machina

What makes us human? What makes life valuable? These are some of the questions mined by Alex Garland’s psychological thriller. Films have touched on these questions in the past, but in comparison to this movie most have only grazed the surface. More often than not, philosophical inquiries are pushed to the side so that explosions and fight sequences can take center stage. Alex Garland has written some of the smartest Sci-Fi screenplays out there (Sunshine, 28 Days Later), and for the first time he got to direct one of his scripts. Ex Machina seeks out a more analytical science fiction viewer, one more interested in ideas than eye candy. Though, there is plenty of imagery to marvel over in this slick addition to the genre. Alicia Vikander is Ava, an artificially intelligent android with a machine-like body and a human face. The CGI is fantastic, but the best special effect is Vikander’s acting. She is confident, alluring, and wiser than any natural born male gives her credit for.

We are introduced to Ava and the world that keeps her hostage by Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson). He’s flown into the secluded compound of his billionaire boss to test whether or not she has human intelligence. Oscar Isaac gives a tour de force performance as Nathan, Caleb’s brilliant employer. Isaac seduces Gleeson with his masculine charms. They share beers and shoot the shit about life like two dudes in a frat house. But in an instant, Nathan shifts into a terrifying monster. He’s both mentally and physically threatening. He didn’t just create Ava to improve the world—he views A.I. as the inevitable end of the human race. He wants to be a God (“If you’ve created a conscious machine, it’s not the history of man. That’s the history of gods.”). Like many brilliant sociopaths, he’s lacks empathy, and Ava is nothing more to him than one more thing to control and manipulate to fortify his manhood. His relationship with Ava, and her struggles against him, work at giving the film an underlying feminist message.

But for all its themes, Ex Machina is still a thriller. It puts you in a vice grip and never lets go. Caleb’s feelings are blown back and forth like little leaves. What does Nathan have planned for him? Why would a billionaire genius need an underling like him to test Ava? Was Ava programmed to exploit his emotions? Is Nathan right about the inevitability of machines taking over? In a fortress designed like a Kubrick film from the ‘70s, we are taken through a maze of danger and ideas that’s hard to forget. Eat your heart out, Avatar.

The Diary of a Teenage Girl

The title of this film initially gave me pause. Not another quirky indie film like Juno, I thought. Not zany, millennial garbage masquerading as something meaningful. Luckily, you can’t judge a film based on its title. The Diary of a Teenage Girl is a true gut punch. Forget hybrid T-Rexes that can blend into their environments. You’ll experience the claws of life ripping into you with much sharper precision if you spend a day in the life of 15-year-old Minnie Goetz.

In the opening scene of the movie, Minnie (Bel Powel) smiles with exhilaration and says, “I had sex last night. Holy shit!” She triumphantly struts through Golden Gate Park in slow motion as the song “Looking for Magic” by The Dwight Twilly Band plays. Little do we know, the sex she had involved losing her virginity to her mom’s 35-year-old boyfriend. The skeazy boyfriend, Monroe, is expertly played by Alexander Skarsgard as a manipulative man-child with touches of humanity. While the film shocks you, causing your full body to recoil in disgust, it avoids being just another public service announcement about sexual predators by telling the story from Minnie’s point of view. We experience her excitement, sorrow, horniness, and the plethora of other emotions that come with youth. Because we’re yanked between revulsion and joy as whimsically as the actions of a teenager, the film contains lurid complexity. She has Monroe take a picture of her face after losing her virginity and later says in her audio diary, “This officially means I’m an adult!” But you can tell she senses something acrid has taken place, but she’s too caught up in the moment to see it.

Unapologetically honest, The Diary of a Teenage Girl triumphs by not portraying a young girl’s sexuality as fragile or simple or repulsive. It revels in the splendor of female sexuality without exploiting or objectifying it. As far as characters go, there are few as intricate and alive as Minnie Goetz. You’re compelled to root for her as she grows in her pursuit of love, art, and sex. We follow her through cocaine hazes and the glam rock streets of ‘70s San Francisco. The comic book artwork of Aline Kominsky-Crumb flows in and off the screen, symbolizing Minnie’s inner world. She imitates Kominsky’s comics in her own art, and in one scene has a conversation with a walking cartoon of Komnisky. “I just want to be touched. I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” Minnie says to her. “Maybe you’re a nympho,” Kominsky replies before adding, “Eh, I’m just fucking with your head. Everyone wants to be touched.” I agree with Kominsky. Everyone does. And everyone should see this movie.

Beasts of No Nation

Netflix struck gold with its first major feature film. If there’s one film in 2015 that that will be remembered as a masterpiece, it’s Beasts of No Nation. It’s not an easy film to watch, but it shouldn’t be. After showing signs of his brilliance directing the first season of True Detective, Cary Fukunaga demonstrates his true artistic power with this jewel of a film. Acting as writer and director, Fukunaga adapts Uzodinma Iweala’s 2005 novel about Agu, a young boy who is forced to become a soldier after losing his family in an unspecified African country.

Agu is played by first time actor Abraham Attah, who shows more range and intensity than most award-winning actors. Your heart breaks for him and then breaks for him a dozen more times. After witnessing grave atrocities and having nowhere left to call home, he becomes easy prey for the ruthless Commandant played by Idris Elba. Elba’s performance is towering. He is terrifying yet charming, savage yet tender. Elba gives the most convincing performance of any actor this year. The fact that Idris and the film itself didn’t receive Oscar nominations is the clearest example that the voting system in the Academy is flawed. While I wasn’t impressed by Will Smith’s “snubbed” performance in Concussion, it’s easy to see how those claiming the Academy lacks diversity would pounce all over this one. Elba blows away all of the actors nominated for Best Supporting Actor (and the SAGs agree with me, who awarded him the prize), and no film nominated for Best Picture takes a tenth as many chances as this one.

It’s easy to see how some might be put off by the grim savagery depicted in this film. The horrors of Africa aren’t something Americans like to think about. Africa is a far away place with atrocities we have no idea how to mend. No one likes to think of child soldiers taking over villages with machine guns and machetes. It’s punishing to watch a sweet boy like Abu slaughter women and children. But this is the reality of many nations in Africa. The fact that we want to turn away from it is all the more reason to embrace it.

But don’t think this is just a depressing movie about child soldiers. It’s also an elegant story with arresting cinematography. At times the landscape becomes neon shades of pink and blue, which further emphasizes how surreal the world has become to Abu. And through all of his suffering, Agu still brings us a glimmer of hope. But not before he asks in despair, “Sun, why are you shining on this world? I am wanting to catch you in my hands, to squeeze you until you cannot shine no more. That way, everything is dark and nobody’s ever having to see all of the terrible things that are happening here.” And yet, he does maintain hope. He’s stronger than most adults will ever be.

Some critics said the film would have a greater impact if it referred to a specific country and conflict. But these critics missed the point. Fukunaga is interested in more than just a single conflict because children have been turned into soldiers in many countries, and more of them will surely be again in different nations in the future. Much like the First Season of True Detective, watching this film leaves you wondering how a loving God could allow such horrors. The film provides no God, but it does give us a devil. Elba is an acting wizard as the Commandant. He is both nurturing and petrifying when he tells Abu, “I will always protect you because you are my son. And a son always protects his father.” Human beings are capable of greater depravity than any fallen angels.

The main reason Beasts of No Nation didn’t receive any Oscar nominations is likely due to its distributor, Netflix. Many members of the Academy had to wait for the screener (or watch it on Netflix) instead of seeing it in theaters because AMC, Regal, Carmike, and Cinemark all refused to show it. The major chains protested Beasts because Netflix didn’t allow theaters 90 days of exclusivity before releasing it on its streaming service. Nevertheless, Netflix managed to show it in 31 theaters in 30 US cities, which qualified it for Oscar contention. But whatever the reason for it not being nominated, whether because the subject matter was too challenging, or new streaming technology too intimidating, or because it didn’t appeal to old white men—Beasts of No Nation will be remembered as a classic.

Honorable Mentions:

The Hateful Eight: Tarantino brings his signature dialogue to a western horror hybrid that includes delicious turns from actors Walton Goggins and Jennifer Jason Leigh. Easily the most polarizing film of the year, it deserves a shout out simply for giving pretentious people something to debate about.
Mad Max: Fury Road: Director George Miller recreates everything magical about his trilogy from the ‘80s (especially Road Warrior). This film made every other big budget summer blockbuster feel like an exercise in punching yourself in face. The cinematography is beautiful, the car chases through the Australian desert are impeccably choreographed, and its upending of gender roles is refreshing. Charlize Theron steals the show as Imperator Furiosa, a female warrior fighting for the freedom of other fierce women. This certainly isn’t your father’s action hero.

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Brett Pribble teaches writing courses in Orlando, Florida. He’s afraid of sharks and often isn’t sure whether or not he’s dreaming. He was previously published in Saw Palm, The Molotov Cocktail, and 10,000 Tons of Black Ink.

Aesthetic Drift #6: Psych Yourselves Up, Fellow Writers—NaNoWriMo is Almost Over!

26 Thursday Nov 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Aesthetic Drift

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Aesthetic Drift #6 by Lisa Martens

Psych Yourselves Up, Fellow Writers—NaNoWriMo is almost over!

Like many self-loathing, procrastinating writers who fear of dying before the world discovers their geniuses, I am participating in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). For those of you with self-respect (to quote Louis CK), I will explain:

During the month of November, you write a whole novel. 50,000 words is the standard goal.

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This means no sleep, contact with loved ones, and usually being a zombie at work. It’s hard to write over 1,000 words per day, and if you miss a couple of days, you kind of want to die. But I’ve collected a few powerful comments from my Instagram followers to help you all going for that last gasp:

The reason: writing IS life. For a writer, writing is not optional. I understand being tired and others constantly demanding our time and attention. It’s a daily struggle. Your writing is worth it. You are worth it. – Instagram @kimbaileydeal

Kind of depressing and motivating at the same time, like a photo of someone climbing a mountain with dignity and skill.

You have to write 10 pages of garbage to get a page of gold. – Instagram @thecreativechick

I love the nihilism! But it’s true.

Sometimes the night will be long and the coffee will be bitter, but when the words flow in the end you’ll be thankful you started. Never give up! – Instagram @the_prince_of_roses

People taste coffee? They don’t just tilt their heads back and swallow it with a bunch of aspirin and birth control pills?

The thing that hit me this month is that no one else is going to tell my story the way that I tell it. If I don’t write it, no one will. – Instagram @hollykirt

Absolutely. No one tells your truth like you. Keep writing, everyone! And if you’re not participating, check out the sleepless nights and stacks of papers by searching the #nanowrimo or #nanowrimo2015 tag on basically every social media platform.

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Lisa Martens

Lisa Martens (Episode 22) currently lives in Harlem. In her past 10 years in New York, she has lived in a garage on Long Island, a living room in Hell’s Kitchen, the architecture building of CCNY, and on the couch of a startup. She grew up in New York, Costa Rica and Texas, and she’s still not sure which of these is home. She completed her MFA in Creative Writing from CCNY. Her thesis, What Grows in Heavy Rain, is available on Amazon. Check out her website here. Follow her on Instagram here.