lundi, novembre 19, 2007

Love-Lies-Bleeding


Love-Lies-Bleeding, Don DeLillo's third play, is a daring, profoundly compassionate story about life, death, art and human connection.

Three people gather to determine the fate of the man who sits in a straight-backed chair saying nothing. He is Alex Macklin, who gave up easel painting to do land art in the southwestern desert, and he is seventy now, helpless in the wake of a second stroke. The people around him are the bearers of a complicated love, his son, his young wife, the older woman -- his wife of years past -- who feels the emotional tenacity of a love long-ended.

It is their question to answer. When does life end, and when should it end? In this remote setting, without seeking medical or legal guidance, they move unsteadily toward last things.

Luminous, spare, unnervingly comic and always deeply moving, Love-Lies-Bleeding explores a number of perilous questions about the value of life and how we measure it.

samedi, novembre 17, 2007

Marco Knauff's Universe


44.

The existence of the Invisible cannot be refuted.

For example: many believe an invisible Zoo exists. How else explain the animal sounds that issue unaccountably from "seams in the air"? (Not to be confused with the "Caruso Effect" [5 & 34].) Or a mauling on the Lawn one afternoon in which no assailant was seen.

Some produce, in evidence, recordings of chamber music made by an invisible string quartet. The adagio is "unearthly" and few can resist weeping.

Some have brought leaves into the Rest House {7} that, they allege, dropped onto the Lawn from no apparent tree. These leaves are treasured as relics. They are said to possess healing properties.

I myself have a hat of a style unknown to us. I found it in the vestibule of the Rest House in which I take my leisure. The hat is precious to me.

It has, in the hatband, a feather of a bird our zoologists cannot identify.

All these are—are they not?—evidence of the Invisible?

ODYSSEE



Les épreuves sont arrivées ce matin au courrier – et je peux déjà vous annoncer (une centaine de pages plus tard), le petit chef-d’œuvre. On revient dessus très vite !

With brilliant prose, a rich body of authorial knowledge, and a terrific imagination, Zachary Mason has fashioned a book that might have been one of the classics of world literature, if only it actually dated from the time of Homer. Following the structure of the ancient Greek classic, The Lost Books of the Odyssey features alternative episodes, fragments, and revisions of Homer's original Odyssey and, equipped as well with a faux-authoritative scholarly introduction, richly carries off the illusion of being the lost ur-text of Homer's masterpiece. Constructed by an author who is part poet and part computer genius, The Lost Books of the Odyssey employs theories of artificial intelligence and the creation of fractals in its composition, traces of which are effaced by the sheer beauty of the language and scope of its accomplishment. This postmodern novel is by no means simple game-playing, but an elegantly written, frequently beautiful book, justifying comparison with the great postmodern fictive hoaxes of Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov, and Robert Coover. This is a one-of-a-kind book that is destined to become a classic in its own right.


"“Zachary Mason’s astounding glosses of The Odysey plunge us into an unforeseeable and hypnotic dimension of fiction. Of the three possible interpretations of the work that he proposes — Homeric stories anciently reproduced by recombining their components, a Theosophist dream of abstract mathematics, and pure illusion (that is, it was all made up by him) — the result is one and the same. This enthralling book is his doing, whether as translator, conjuror, or author. I vote for number three.” Harry Mathews

A VOIR


Une nouvelle aventure pour Mcsweeney's (http://mcsweeneys2.net/)....on attend de voir. Il est vrai que si la revue, puis le site, avaient à leurs débuts suscités pas mal l'enthousiasme du fait de leur originalité, le soufflet était retombé ces derniers mois, l'ensemble étant tombé dans une sorte de banalité gentillette. (La banalité, qui est à l'originalité, comme chacun sait ce que l'eau est à la glace, la cigarette à l'amour, ou l'homorphisme aux monoïdes libres non triviaux)