Daily Shvitz
David Silverman guest-blogging at Jewcy...
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David Silverman guest-blogging at Jewcy...
So yesterday my new colleague, the iconic Jack Shoemaker (editor of David Markson, Wendell Berry, Gary Snyder, MFK Fisher, Geoffrey O'Brien etc etc etc etc) sends me an email in which he reports that an Oregon-based writer's program's director emailed to say "Tell Jack that C.A. Conrad's Deviant Propulsion (Soft Skull) kicked my ass." Jack in turn tells me, I in turn tell Jack how much CAConrad really does rock and then I see this great interview in this week's Philly City Paper and I know that Conrad does not believe in coincidences, only certain queer cosmic forces (aka deviant propulsions) and I'm therefore compelled to post the forgoing...
Also, please note this references an event in Philadelphia at Robins featuring the Soft Skullers Hal Sirowitz and Eileen Myles.
So there's a rather excellent interview with Angelique Bosio, in which she discusses her film Llik Your Idols which documents the still-influential (and still underground) Cinema of Transgression. She was asked, why hasn't a documentary about it been made before now?
I know there was something done about Richard Kern (photo sessions being filmed). SA Crary did "Kill Your Idols" about the NY music scene in which Foetus, Arto Lindsay, Lydia Lunch etc...appear. To my knowledge, nothing on film was made about the COT specifically. But maybe these documentaries simply never got out. I'm sure I'm not the only one having thought about it! I bet it's just because people couldn't make it happen for technical or financial reasons. Or because these filmmakers didn't want to participate in such a thing until recently. Or more possibly because Deathtripping by Jack Sargeant was such an excellent and complete book about it! Actually the book will be published in a new version in December by Soft Skull. I strongly recommend it.
Ah well thanks very much.
Hotel Theory is getting some folks all hot and bothered. They're stalking him (albeit gently). They're concerned it might not be "possible to be a hotel woman in today's day and age"...Or perhaps not? "All I needed was a vodka gimlet. And a naked Liberace."
There's some other nice online stuff—nice little review in the LA Times, the tireless Richard Labonte, Brian Pera performs real sleight of hand for the Fanzine, the inestimable Joshua Glenn enjoys it for the Globe's Brainiac.
But the Venom Literati, I'll confess they've found a model of literary blogging I find awfully hot. Gently stalking an author, oh yeah...
(Incidentally, it occurs to me that a catalog, the subject of a previous post, could be considered a sort of hotel...a thought I've nowhere to put but here)
David Silverman is a hard-working author.
...and you've got the latest in online literary interview audio. The inestimable Donna Seaman has taken many of the interviews she's done for the Chicago radio station WLUW (once a sister station of WBEZ) and put them on Open Books Radio for your delectation. (I should add that she's one of these people whose qualities as a critic match her level of influence, in that she's the Associate Editor of Booklist and is trusted by America's libraries to help them pick the books they must have in their collections...) Browse around, there's so much to choose from—it's like Ed Champion posted 100 shows at once, or it's like you only just discovered Michael Silverblatt's Bookworm...