An Array of Utopian Flowers
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The Underworld, Rebirth and Renewal with Ceres and Proserpina
Posted on June 29, 2018 | No Comments -
Cinematic Cultural Change in West Africa with Idrissa Ouédraogo
Posted on June 3, 2018 | No Comments -
Mild Satire, Outrage and Hostility, with Philip Roth
Posted on June 2, 2018 | No Comments -
Big Noise from Big Band Drummer Gene Krupa
Posted on April 10, 2018 | No Comments -
Loose Nuts: Edison Reveals Huge Gap in Safety at San Onofre
Posted on April 9, 2018 | No Comments
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Literary Archive
Mild Satire, Outrage and Hostility, with Philip Roth
Posted on June 2, 2018 | No CommentsHis alter-ego Zuckerman, unconsciously frightened of success and of failure, frightened of being admired and also despised, frightened of being frightened, he unconsciously suppressed his talent, frightened of what it might do next. On the passing of Philip Roth, we look into his often black comic chronicles of an imagined life, his taking down and reshaping the meaning of 'Jewish American', and his play at historic re-creating the zeitgeist within the form of the novel.
Stranger in Tangier: Paul Bowles Under The Sheltering Sky
Posted on November 14, 2017 | 1 CommentPaul Bowles during his life (1910-1999) remained aloof from all the hipsters and hypesters of U.S. letters. Living in self-imposed exile in Tangier, he had cast a spell over such talents as Tennessee Williams, Libby Holman, Truman Capote, and Allen Ginsberg. We revisit an essay penned by Jay McInerny in 1985, on how the inimitable expatriate writer-composer's dark arts retain their power, even more so 32 years later.
La Belle et La Bête – Natural Surrealism of a Misunderstood Beast
Posted on November 6, 2017 | No CommentsWe feature the popularized story version of the French fairy tale 'La Belle et La Bête' (Beauty and the Beast), which became a classic 1946 Jean Cocteau film accompanied by composer Philip Glass's mesmerizing 1994 score.
Gogol’s Vision of Metaphysical Unraveling Amid the Dark Arts
Posted on August 9, 2017 | 1 CommentWatch the 1967 supernatural horror story "Viy" based on the 1835 novella by the Russian writer Nikolai Gogol, where a student philosopher from the Christian seminary encounters a young woman with dark powers who can summon the ogre, King of the Gnomes, which the author claims comes from Ukrainian folklore tradition.
LA Poet Wanda Coleman on Smog Addiction and Angel Wings
Posted on July 7, 2017 | No CommentsIn "Angel Baby Blues," from Wanda Coleman's collection Heavy Daughter Blues, she offered a take on the failed promises of her home in Southern California. A prolific poet, fiction writer, and journalist, she was considered for a time Los Angeles' unofficial and controversial Poet Laureate.
Poet Antonio López on the “Road Rage” of Clashing Histories
Posted on June 30, 2017 | No CommentsAntonio López won the Poetry Award at the 2017 Santa Barbara Writers Conference with 'Which Cobija Feels Most Comfy?: A Letter to Sister Nabra', about the murder of a teenage Muslim girl beaten and killed by a bat-wielding motorist near a Virginia mosque.
Bukowski’s ‘Born Into This’ – Treachery, Hatred, Violence, Absurdity
Posted on June 29, 2017 | 1 CommentThe documentary, 'Bukowski: Born into This' rehashes stories of the inimitable misanthrope, poet, and author Charles Bukowski. Post features the poem, 'Dinosauria, we.'
Jack Eidt’s ‘The Blue Basement’ on Luna Review
Posted on June 18, 2017 | No CommentsAn excerpt of Jack Eidt's recent novel 'Nowhere Beckons' was published in the Luna Review. Called 'The Blue Basement', it narrates the protagonist T.'s visionary descent into the urban underworld, where ideas, light, and color blend, and surviving on the journey to the end of the night is everything.
Political Haiku: The Revolution Will Not Be Roboticized
Posted on January 12, 2017 | No CommentsMark Morris lays down some poetic effulgence in the budding genre of political haiku, or as he endearingly calls it: Hacku. Let it flow in the Era of the Orange One.
Max Talley Story: A Secret Utopia Called Devorah
Posted on July 28, 2016 | No CommentsMax Talley's surreal and disturbing story posits a lone traveler who stumbles into an eerie alternative universe, a quiet utopia, or a slow death trap. Read the entire story for free online at Chantwood Magazine.
Monte Schulz’s Beautiful Jazz Age Tragedy in ‘Crossing Eden’
Posted on June 14, 2016 | 1 CommentMonte Schulz's literary novel Crossing Eden (Fantagraphics Books), sweeps across the Midwestern U.S. landscape through the story of a family pulled apart in the Jazz Age summer of 1929. A failed businessman, seduced by city lights and the dream of wealth and power, divides himself from his wife and children, while a troubled farm boy runs away from home in the company of a gangster.
Geo-Fauvism and Anthropocene: Altered Planet, Wild Literature
Posted on June 4, 2016 | 2 CommentsWelcome to the Anthropocene age, where humans have transmogrified the planet, its oceans and atmosphere, caused mass extinctions and wholesale contamination that will remain for millennia. Beyond the politicians and scientists, the way forward remains in the hands of writers, artists, and designers taking inspiration from wild earth in a movement called Geo-Fauvism.
B. Traven: Underground Anarchist in the Mexican Jungle
Posted on March 27, 2016 | 3 CommentsB. Traven, German underground author, anarchist and writer of the Treasure of Sierra Madre, purposely obscured his origins to evade consequences from his revolutionary past in Germany and to stoke his literary mystery that hinged upon his words: "An author should have no other biography than his books."
Jack Eidt and the Bison: Words to Save the World
Posted on March 20, 2016 | No CommentsJack Eidt, reading from a literary vision quest called "Medicine Walk," Part of Environmental and Activist Poetry/Fiction at Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center in Venice, CA. 12/5/2015, from the Vision LA 2015 Climate Change Arts Festival.
The Ambiguous Colors of Haruki Murakami
Posted on March 14, 2016 | No CommentsA documentary on Japanese literary postmodernist Haruki Murakami, as well as a folktale from his novel, "Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage." As the Guardian puts it: "Full of ambiguity and sex – all Murakami's signature flourishes are here."
Death By Misadventure: Malcolm Lowry’s Gin-Sopped Volcano
Posted on October 22, 2015 | 1 CommentMalcolm Lowry’s 1947 masterpiece "Under the Volcano," about the fervid last hours of an alcoholic ex-diplomat in Mexico, is set to the drumbeat of coming internal and external conflict. Autobiographical and reflective of the expatriated trust-funder in a futile search for an artistic home, the perpetually inebriated master got lost along the road toward his own abyss, and died under suspicious circumstances, out-of-print.
Will Self: Talentless Hipsters and Commodification Culture
Posted on September 30, 2014 | 1 CommentThis awful cult of talentless hipsters has its Mecca in Los Angeles, according to Will Self. He asserts his generation took the avant-garde and turned it into a successful rearguard action by the flying columns of capitalism’s blitzkrieg. What to make of the commodification and democratization of culture, and where to go from here?
Charles Bukowski: Madness is Never Ordinary
Posted on September 25, 2014 | No Comments"In my work, as a writer, I only photograph, in words, what I see. If I write of "sadism" it is because it exists, I didn't invent it, and if some terrible act occurs in my work it is because such things happen in our lives. I am not on the side of evil, if such a thing as evil abounds." -- Charles Bukowski
Goethe’s “Sorcerer’s Apprentice”: Power Over Wisdom
Posted on August 13, 2014 | 1 Comment"The Sorcerer's Apprentice," an ages-old fairy tale interpreted as a poem by Goethe, made famous today by Disney's "Fantasia," illustrated the dangers of power over wisdom, and the risk of human creations getting out of control.
Gabriel García Márquez on Latin American Dictatorship and Liberation
Posted on April 18, 2014 | No CommentsOn the passing of the celebrated Colombian magical realist Gabriel García Marquez, we explore some of the highlights from his Nobel Prized Literary career.
Jorge Luis Borges: On Literary Magic and Garden Labyrinths
Posted on January 29, 2014 | 5 CommentsJorge Luis Borges forged into the realm of literary magic, he led his readers down through the Garden of Forking Paths, wandering the red and tranquil labyrinths in Elegy, growing old in so many mirrors, seeking in vain the marble gaze of statues, compiling regrets of a fantastic nature. Watch the BBC profile on him as an elder of strange destiny who had seen nothing, or almost nothing, but the face of a girl from Buenos Aires, a face that does not want you to remember it.
J. G. Ballard: Atrocity Exhibition and the Modernist Motorcar Dystopia
Posted on December 27, 2013 | 2 Comments"The Atrocity Exhibition" is J.G. Ballard’s instruction manual in how to disrupt mass media and recontextualize technology in a dystopian landscape overrun with industrial waste and technological white noise. Watch the piece on Ballard and the Motorcar, that careens across the landscape of his controversial novel, "Crash."
Henry Miller’s Free Association into the Surreal
Posted on May 19, 2013 | 1 CommentIn 1934, Henry Miller, then aged forty-two and living in Paris, published his first book. In 1961, finally distributed in his native land the book promptly became a best-seller and a cause célèbre. By now, the "controversies" dominate his legacy, including issues of censorship, obscenity, misogyny and anti-Semitism, clouding the import of Henry Miller's words. "Tropic of Cancer" broke literary ground, mixing novelistic forms with autobiography, social criticism, philosophical reflection, and surrealist free association.
Lady Lazarus: The Hurt Imagination of Sylvia Plath
Posted on April 25, 2013 | 2 CommentsRobert Pinsky on Sylvia Plath: "Thrashing, hyperactive, perpetually accelerated, the poems of Sylvia Plath catch the feeling of a profligate, hurt imagination, throwing off images and phrases with the energy of a runaway horse or a machine with its throttle stuck wide open."
E.T.A. Hoffmann: The Soul’s Adventure on New Year’s Eve
Posted on December 31, 2012 | 2 CommentsE.T.A. Hoffmann's Literary Gothic: Every New Year's Eve the Devil keeps a special treat for me. He knows just the right moment to jam his claw into my heart, keeping up a fine mockery while he licks the blood that wells out.
