My story “Beatitudes” is in Alice Blue Sixteen here here here. Also in Sixteen are a pair of tables by Brandi Wells, poems by Valerie Witte, more prose by Rich Ives, Greg Mulcahy, more poems by Albert Abonado and Cat Jones—just read the whole issue. You’ll be better off.
Short interview with the unstoppable Mike Young on the Redivider website.
I was up until 5 this morning playing this game
because I’m nearing the end of writing a thing and a demon bride climbing a block tower to murder you with a cake knife is what the thesis process tries to approximate.
“When you think about it, on one day in Prague, on a street corner, you could’ve had Schulz coming down on one side of the street, Walser coming down on the other, and Kafka already standing there. And of course they would just pass insignificantly. Imagine if somebody had caught them on camera. Slightly out of focus since that person would’ve been photographing something else, like the Clock.” - Brothers Quay
Herzog’s profile in GQ. Process is dull and public elaborations on personal approaches sound so stupid that they’re almost panic-inducing (see interviews where the interviewer asks straight out what someone’s creative process entails and the subject either squirms away or gets off). But both Chris Heath and Herzog know how to handle firebombs:
When you look at other filmmakers, do you think they are engaged in something that—
He interrupts me. “Always, always the same. And you can straightaway, when you see films on filmmakers—they’re always, always embarrassing. Including me. I cannot elude that embarrassment, either. I do not feel it as deeply as others should feel who have an ego problem and play the king on the hill, the genius behind the camera. That’s an additional embarrassment. But when you look at movies made about filmmakers, they are without exception embarrassments.”
I suppose the counterargument should be something about this glorious role as a grand storyteller, the spinner of illusions.
“There is nothing glorious about making a film. It is an endless sequence of banalities.”
With a magical goal?
“Yes. But shooting a film itself is nothing but banalities. [Then, as though reluctantly, he continues.] However, there’s very rare moments where I get the feeling sometimes I’m like the little girl in the fairy tale who steps out into the night, in the stars, and she holds her apron open, and the stars are raining into her apron. Those moments I have seen and I have had. But they are very rare.”
I Never Wanted You by David Bazan (recorded live at Electric Audio in Chicago)
(somewhere in Cambridge)
