Port Magazine interviews Paul Thomas Anderson

Interview conducted by Lynn Hirschberg

Paul Thomas Anderson. Photograph: Stefan Ruiz. Handwriting: Daniel Day-Lewis.

From Lynn Hirschberg (Port Magazine) talks to American filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson:

Anderson, who is tall and boyish, was wearing faded jeans and a matching work shirt. He perpetually has the sleepy look of the recently awakened, but his bedhead-ness is a disarming ruse: Anderson is, actually, a brilliant and sharp judge of human nature. He has an enduring fascination with lost souls – especially men – who attempt to find their way with the help of a determined mentor. The complex nature of those tangled relationships, which Anderson sets against defining periods of American history, provide the world of his six movies. They include Sydney in 1984, the story of a gambler and his hapless protégé; the now classic Boogie Nights in 1997, which was set in the world of 70s porn; and There Will Be Blood in 2007, in which Daniel Day-Lewis brilliantly portrayed a ruthless man searching for an oil fortune in turn-of-the-century California.

In 2012, Anderson wrote and directed The Master, a film inspired by L Ron Hubbard and the evolution of Scientology. The Master, which was the most fascinating and controversial movie of 2012, has divided audiences, mostly due to Anderson’s stubborn unwillingness to create “likeable” characters and a happy ending. The film stars Joaquin Phoenix as Freddie Quell, an emotionally damaged WWII war veteran, and Philip Seymour Hoffman as Lancaster Dodd, the leader of a self-devised cult. It is both enticing and challenging: shot in 70mm, a dying form of lush cinematic glory, the movie asks an audience to identify with a rage-filled, deeply unhappy, alcohol addicted protagonist. Phoenix, who is mesmerising in the film, is twitchy and emaciated – his face locked in a kind of lopsided rictus that was, reportedly, inspired by a documentary he watched on the lives of apes. Hoffman, meanwhile, is charismatic and subtly diabolical – his cult leader may be making up his religion as he goes along, but he is seductive and captivating. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Paul Thomas Anderson on Pynchon's Inherent Vice
• The Master: Official Trailer (2012) [HD]
• There Will Be Blood

William S. Burroughs on Writing Routines

Extract from Oliver Harris' The Letters of William S. Burroughs 1945-1959

William S. Burroughs

Excerpt from a letter written by William S. Burroughs addressed to Allen Ginsberg (Tangiers, 13 December 1954), in which he describes the process of writing the 'skits' or 'routines' that comprise Naked Lunch :

I am up to my neck in this new work right now plus kicking habit. Besides I don't have a complete MS. In fact I have hardly any of Queer. I still think Roosevelt skit is funny. Sounds to me like Rexroth just doesn't dig what a routine is. You don't study Zen and then write a scholarly routine for Chrissakes! Routines are completely spontaneous and proceed from whatever fragmentary knowledge you have. In fact a routine is by nature fragmentary, inaccurate. There is no such thing as an exhaustive routine, nor does the scholarly-type mind run to routines.

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: William S. Burroughs
• Cronenberg: 'Imagination is dangerous'
• 97 Things You Didn’t Know About William S. Burroughs
• William S. Burroughs: A Man Within
• Cronenberg: 'Imagination is dangerous'
• William S. Burroughs: Commissioner of Sewers
• Naked Lunch: Deposition Manuscript

X-Radiographic: Seeing Through Edward Hopper

From the Indianapolis Museum of Art Blog

A radiographic of Edward Hopper's Hotel Lobby (1943)

From Richard McCoy (Indianapolis Museum of Art Blog):

In the comments on that last post Karen T discussed the importance of being able to make a 1:1 comparison between a radiograph and a painting, and then Christina responded with some first-hand experience with our new system. I confess, though: I cheated a bit and asked Christina to answer that question because, after all, Christina is an experienced paintings conservator here at the IMA, and I’m not.

Christina and I were talking about all of this when the Chief Conservator, David Miller, walked into the lab and joined the discussion (you can find out more about both of them on the Mainardi web page). To make a long story longer, the three of us decided to put together an example that illustrates how the new system handles the 1:1 comparison issue. So David and Christina printed out an image to demonstrate a 1:1 comparison of the radiograph and the painting. The photo above is of Christina holding a 13” x 19” print out of a radiograph of the IMA’s Edward Hopper’s 1943 painting Hotel Lobby. The painting was fully radiographed as part of a technical study of Hopper’s painting technique for an exhibition (and catalogue) opening at the IMA in August of 2008, called Edward Hopper; Paper to Paint, that explores the relationship of the artist’s drawings and studies to the finished painting. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Edward Hopper's Sketchbook
• Finding Edward Hopper's Nighthawks
• Gail Albert Halaban: Out My Window
• Solitude and Light

Ginsberg's Cold Summer Borscht

Recipe found at Dangerous Minds

Allen Ginsberg

From Dangerous Minds:

COLD SUMMER BORSCHT

Dozen beets cleaned & chopped to bite size salad-size Strips
Stems & leaves also chopped like salad lettuce
All boiled together lightly salted to make a bright red soup,
with beets now soft - boil an hour or more
Add Sugar & Lemon Juice to make the red liquid
sweet & sour like Lemonade
Chill 4 gallon(s) of beet liquid -
Serve with (1) Sour Cream on table
(2) Boiled small or halved potato
on the side
i.e. so hot potatoes don’t heat the
cold soup prematurely
(3) Spring salad on table to put into
cold red liquid
1) Onions - sliced (spring onions)
2) Tomatoes - sliced bite-sized
3) Lettuce - ditto
4) Cucumbers - ditto
5) a few radishes
__________________________________
for Summer Dinner [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg
• Gordon Ball: Beat Generation Photographs
• William S. Burroughs on Allen Ginsberg
• Carolyn Cassady on the Beat Generation
• Bringing Ginsberg's Howl to the screen
• Kerouac and Ginsberg Correspondence

David Lynch and Lykke Li, I'm Waiting Here

A song from the new record, The Big Dream

The Big Dream the new album from David Lynch will be released on 15 July (UK & Europe) and 16 July (USA & CAN)

Concept by Lykke Li and Daniel Desure
Edited by Jesse Fleming and Sadie Strangio
DP - Nicholas Trikonis
Designer - Michelle Park. [Source]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Filmmakers: David Lynch
• David Lynch on Meditation
• David Lynch and the Big Fish
• David Lynch releases pop single
• Is David Lynch Retiring from film?

Cover Art: Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge

Striking cover art and dust jacket synopsis available from Amazon

Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge

Synopsis from Amazon:

“Thomas Pynchon brings us to New York in the early days of the internet

It is 2001 in New York City, in the lull between the collapse of the dot-com boom and the terrible events of September 11th. Silicon Alley is a ghost town, Web 1.0 is having adolescent angst, Google has yet to IPO, Microsoft is still considered the Evil Empire. There may not be quite as much money around as there was at the height of the tech bubble, but there’s no shortage of swindlers looking to grab a piece of what’s left.

Maxine Tarnow is running a nice little fraud investigation business on the Upper West Side, chasing down different kinds of small-scale con artists. She used to be legally certified but her license got pulled a while back, which has actually turned out to be a blessing because now she can follow her own code of ethics—carry a Beretta, do business with sleazebags, hack into people’s bank accounts—without having too much guilt about any of it. Otherwise, just your average working mom—two boys in elementary school, an off-and-on situation with her sort of semi-ex-husband Horst, life as normal as it ever gets in the neighborhood—till Maxine starts looking into the finances of a computer-security firm and its billionaire geek CEO, whereupon things begin rapidly to jam onto the subway and head downtown. She soon finds herself mixed up with a drug runner in an art deco motorboat, a professional nose obsessed with Hitler’s aftershave, a neoliberal enforcer with footwear issues, plus elements of the Russian mob and various bloggers, hackers, code monkeys, and entrepreneurs, some of whom begin to show up mysteriously dead. Foul play, of course.

With occasional excursions into the DeepWeb and out to Long Island, Thomas Pynchon, channeling his inner Jewish mother, brings us a historical romance of New York in the early days of the internet, not that distant in calendar time but galactically remote from where we’ve journeyed to since.

Will perpetrators be revealed, forget about brought to justice? Will Maxine have to take the handgun out of her purse? Will she and Horst get back together? Will Jerry Seinfeld make an unscheduled guest appearance? Will accounts secular and karmic be brought into balance?

Hey. Who wants to know?”

Bleeding Edge will be published on 17 September 2013 [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge
• Thomas Pynchon, Philosophy, Ethics
• A new Thomas Pynchon novel?
• International Pynchon Week 2013
• Paul Thomas Anderson on Pynchon's Inherent Vice
• Trailer for Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice
• Thomas Pynchon: Man of Mystery
• Thomas Pynchon on Objective Reality

Gary Indiana on Burroughs and Naked Lunch

An extract from Everything Is Permitted: The Making of “Naked Lunch”

William S. Burroughs on the set of David Cronenberg's adaptation of Naked Lunch

From Criterion has posted an essay by novelist, playwright, and culture critic Gary Indiana, which originally appeared in Everything Is Permitted: The Making of “Naked Lunch” (1992):

Burroughs’s work tends to affect people like a Rorschach test. It separates cultural conservatives from avant-gardists, social reactionaries from libertarians. Or, to use one of Burroughs’s favorite distinctions, members of the Johnson Family from the Shits. Johnsons have a live-and-let-live, mind-their-own-business mentality. Shits have an uncontrollable need to pass judgment on and be right about everything. In today’s censorious climate, police work dominates the pages of the book reviews: this writer has the wrong attitude and must be done away with.

Burroughs has always elicited a testy response from the cultural establishment. While early support for Naked Lunch from such mandarins as Mary McCarthy and John Ciardi has been matched over the years by encomiums from many of our best writers and by a substantial body of excellent academic criticism, the overall literary world’s recognition of Burroughs has been grudging more often than not. Perhaps Burroughs’s achievement represents a threat to the well-mannered, conventionally crafted, middle-class novel. It could be as simple as that. Burroughs expanded the content of fiction, giving artistic form to extremes of contemporary abjection. Naked Lunch opened a path into the world of the addict, the homosexual, the social outlaw. From this despised and largely unmentionable territory, Burroughs extracted a presiding metaphor of control. Naked Lunch deals with the control of consciousness and behavior through addiction—to sex, power, money, drugs, even to control itself. When themes of this nature, which ultimately have to do with politics, lie at the heart of a writer’s work, appreciation is often checked by the timidity of those who prefer not to think about such issues. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: William S. Burroughs
• Cronenberg: 'Imagination is dangerous'
• 97 Things You Didn’t Know About William S. Burroughs
• William S. Burroughs: A Man Within
• Cronenberg: 'Imagination is dangerous'
• William S. Burroughs: Commissioner of Sewers
• Naked Lunch: Deposition Manuscript

Pearl S. Buck: Lost Final Novel to be Published

The Eternal Wonder will be available as a paperback and ebook from 22 October 2013

Peal S. Buck sitting at her desk

From Nick Davies (Melville House):

Pearl S. Buck , the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, is best known for her novel The Good Earth, which also earned her a Pulitzer Prize. Buck was a prolific author who started her career in 1930 and kept writing until her final days in 1973, and in fact wrote for longer than almost anybody realized. Julie Bosman writes for the New York Times that Buck’s final, unpublished novel has been discovered and will be available this fall.

The newly unearthed book, The Eternal Wonder, was a surprise even to Buck’s son Edgar S. Walsh, who manages her literary estate. He tells Bosman that his family doesn’t know exactly how the manuscript, which Buck finished shortly before dying, made it halfway across the country: “After my mother died in Vermont, her personal possessions were not carefully controlled. The family didn’t have access. Various things were stolen. Somebody in Vermont ran off with this thing, and it eventually ended up in Texas.” [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Marguerite Duras and Yann Andréa Steiner
• Barbara Bray 1924-2010
• The Poetic Riddle of Clarice Lispector
• Why Sylvia Plath still haunts us

The Selected Essays of Jean-Paul Sartre, 1939–1975

An NYRB Classics Original, edited by Ronald Aronson and Adrian van den Hoven

We Have Only This Life to Live: 
The Selected Essays of Jean-Paul Sartre, 1939–1975

From NYRB:

Jean-Paul Sartre was a man of staggering gifts, whose accomplishments as philosopher, novelist, playwright, biographer, and activist still command attention and inspire debate. Sartre’s restless intelligence may have found its most characteristic outlet in the open-ended form of the essay. For Sartre the essay was an essentially dramatic form, the record of an encounter, the framing of a choice. Whether writing about literature, art, politics, or his own life, he seizes our attention and drives us to grapple with the living issues that are at stake.

We Have Only This Life to Live is the first gathering of Sartre’s essays in English to draw on all ten volumes of Situations, the title under which Sartre collected his essays during his life, while also featuring previously uncollected work, including the reports Sartre filed during his 1945 trip to America. Here Sartre writes about Faulkner, Bataille, Giacometti, Fanon, the liberation of France, torture in Algeria, existentialism and Marxism, friends lost and found, and much else. We Have Only This Life to Live provides an indispensable, panoramic view of the world of Jean-Paul Sartre. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus in New York
• Jacques Derrida on Jean-Paul Sartre
• Sartre: 'Adventures are in books'
• Albert Camus' The Outsider: Illustrated
• On Albert Camus

Paul Celan Reads Japanese

An article from The White Review

Paul Celan

From Yoko Tawada (The White Review), translated by Susan Bernofsky:

There were exceptions, though, such as the poems of Paul Celan, which I found utterly fascinating even in Japanese translation. From time to time it occurred to me to wonder whether his poems might not be lacking in quality since they were translatable. When I ask about a work’s ‘translatability,’ I don’t mean whether a perfect copy of a poem can exist in a foreign language, but whether its translation can itself be a work of literature. Besides, it would be insufficient if I were to say that Celan’s poems were translatable. Rather, I had the feeling that they were peering into Japanese.

After I had learned to read German literature in the original, I realised that my impression hadn’t been illusory. I was occupied even more than before by the question of why Celan’s poems were able to reach another world that lay outside the German language. There must be a chasm between languages into which all words tumble. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Samuel Beckett and Paul Celan
• Translating Paul Celan's The Meridian
• Collecting Paul Celan
• Paul Celan, The Meridian: Final Version—Drafts—Materials
• Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs: Correspondence