mercredi, janvier 28, 2009

ARC EN CIEL



Painter and occasional porn actor Zak Smith's stories from working in the adult film industry, along with drawings and paintings of the same.

mardi, janvier 27, 2009

A WRITER OF ENORMOUS NOVELS


Product Description
Talking bugs, electricity, the founding of empires, hobos, Nazis, whores, violence, drugs, murder, secret cabals, Heaven, Hell - William T. Vollmann is a writer of enormous novels that are stuffed with entire worlds of creation and destruction. This first ever book-length critical study traces his career to date with chapters devoted to each of his novels, as well as his short stories and major nonfiction. Vollmann is a writer of obsessions, and this study concentrates on three of them - freedom, redemption, and prostitution - while arguing that the author that dwells on them is worthy of being called one of our greatest living American writers. Also included in this title are seven interviews spanning the years 1991-2007 that reinforce the persistence of Vollmann's attraction to these themes.

mercredi, janvier 14, 2009

IM MEMORIAM

mercredi, janvier 07, 2009

NICHOLSON BAKER


Nicholson Baker's new novel, The Anthologist, is narrated by Paul Chowder, a poet of some little reknown who is sitting in his barn most of the time trying to write the introduction to a new anthology of poetry called Only Rhyme. He's having a hard time getting started because his career is falling apart, his girlfriend Roz has recently left him, and he is thinking about the poets throughout history who have suffered far worse and actually deserve to feel sorry for themselves. He has also promised his readers that he will reveal many wonderful secrets and tips and tricks about poetry, and it looks like the introduction will be a little longer than he'd thought. What unfolds is a wholly entertaining and beguiling love story about poetry, among other things; Paul tells us about all of the great poets, from Tennyson, Swinburne, and Yeats to the moderns (Roethke, Bogan, Merwin) to the contemporary scene as well as the editorial staff of The New Yorker's editorial department. And what he reveals about the rhythm and music of poetry itself is astonishing and makes you realize how incredibly important poetry is to our lives. At the same time, Paul manages just barely to realize all of this himself and what results is a tender, wonderfully romantic, often hilarious, and inspired novel. The Anthologist bears all the beloved hallmarks of Baker's novels: it is witty, erudite, breathtakingly articulate and stylish, and full of the whimsical, compulsive elements that have made its author a worldwide success.

DENIS JOHNSON


From the 2007 National Book Award-winning, bestselling author of Tree of Smoke comes a sly, suspenseful
thriller set in the American west.
Jimmy Lutz—a small time crook in Bakersfield, California—is behind on his gambling debts. He isn’t too worried, until a man named Ernst Gambol comes to collect. When Jimmy takes desperate measures to escape, he begins a dangerous game of cat-and-mouse that pits him against both Gambol and Juarez, Gambol’s vindictive boss. Enter Anita, a tough con artist who’s been accused of embezzling a couple of million dollars. Anita doesn’t have the money—or so she claims—but she knows how to find it, and she wants Jimmy to help her. With Gambol at his heels, Jimmy joins forces with Anita on a tense, riveting journey to cash in on the money—and to stay alive.
NOBODY MOVEis an homage to one of the most popular genres: The American crime novel. Touched by echoes of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, NOBODY MOVEis at once a fond tribute and an outrageous variation on a literary form, marked by the verve and energy we’ve come to expect from Denis Johnson, a master of American fiction. Sexy, suspenseful, and above all entertaining, NOBODY MOVE shows one of our greatest novelists at his versatile best.
Denis Johnson is the author of six novels, a collection of poetry, and one book of reportage. His novel Tree
of Smoke was the winner of the 2007National Book Award. He lives in northern Idaho.

samedi, janvier 03, 2009

GRAVITY


« You were in London », she will presently whisper, turning back to her wheel and spinning it again, face averted, womanly twisting the night-streaked yarn of her past, « while they were coming down I was in’s Gravenhage »- fricatives sighing, the name spoken with exile’s lingering- « while they were going up. Between you and me is not only a rocket trajectory, but also a life. You will come to understand that between the two points, in the five minutes, it lives an entire life. You haven’t even learned the data on our side of the flight profile, the visible or trackable. Beyond them there’s so much more, so much none of us know… »
But it is a curve each of them feels, unmistakably. This is the parabola. They must have guessed, once or twice, guessed and refused to believe – that everything, always, collectively, had been moving toward that purified shape latent in the sky, that shape of no surprise, no second chances, no return. Yet, they do move forever under it, reserved for it’s own black-and-white bad news certainly as if it were the Rainbow, and they its children….

Passage magnifique, et crucial….on ose à peine regarder la traduction française. Michel Doury, ancêtre de Google trad ? A quand une nouvelle traduction de Claro ?

(pour le fun :
Elle murmure :
-Tu étais à Londres quand ils tombaient…moi j’étais à’s Gravenhage quand ils décollaient (elle prononce le nom étrange avec la nostalgie de l’exil), entre nous il n’y a pas seulement la trajectoire d’une fusée, mais toute une vie. Tu finiras par comprendre qu’entre ces deux points, pendant les cinq minutes du vol, une vie entière s’écoule. Tu ne connais pas les chiffres de notre côté du plan de vol. Il y a tant de choses derrière que nous ignorons …
Elle dit cela à voix basse, faisant négligemment tourner la roulette derrière son dos, comme si c’était son passé qui se dévidait.)