January 2, 2014 At Work The End of the Internet: An Interview with Matthew Thurber By Sam Frank I met cartoonist and musician Matthew Thurber six-odd years ago somewhere in Prospect Park (a séance? a picnic?), and then saw him play alto saxophone in his Muzak-jazz-punk trio Soiled Mattress and the Springs at the New York Art Book Fair. We kept running into one another in odd places; or, since New York City is now lacking in odd places, at places where subculture obsessives go to convince themselves there’s still oddness in the world. Soiled Mattress broke up in 2008, but Thurber’s “Anti-Matter Cabaret” act Ambergris has continued, and sometimes he plays with artist Brian Belott as Court Stenographer and Young Sherlock Holmes. In 2011, after years of publishing minicomics, zines, and books on tape, Thurber collected his serial 1-800-Mice in graphic-novel form. It’s about a messenger mouse named Groomfiend, a peace punk named Peace Punk, and a cast of thousands. More recently, Thurber wrote a culture diary for this blog, and started Tomato House gallery with his girlfriend, Rebecca Bird, in Ocean Hill, Brooklyn. Thurber’s new graphic novel, Infomaniacs, is about the singularity and the end of the Internet; it’s also the final book from the great comics publisher PictureBox, which serialized parts of Infomaniacs online starting in 2010. The book’s heroine is Amy Shit, a punk rapper who sometimes lives off the grid—in a subway tunnel, even. Her brother’s a neo–Ned Ludd who goes around smashing iPhones. Meanwhile, Ralph is an Internet addict who escapes from reality rehab, then embeds in an immortality cult run by a libertarian oligarch who wants to eat the brain of the last man who’s never seen the Internet. A horse and a bat, both intelligence agents for the ATF (Anthropomorphic Task Force), wonder what the singularity will look like—a 1950s computer, a crystal, a cell phone, a tree branch? Thurber’s video trailer offers a sense of the comic’s raucous hugger-mugger and subterranean surrealism, but doesn’t touch on its Underground Man againstness. For that, perhaps this quote, from an early, uncollected strip: “All bundled up and no place to go … The man who hates the Internet is a man who hates the world.” Thurber and I met in the office I share with a puppet theater, near the Barclays Center. Giant heads hung from the walls. I don’t have Wi-Fi and don’t know anyone’s password. Read More
January 2, 2014 Fiction Selections from Graveyard of Bitter Oranges: The Bloody Boar By Josef Winkler Art credit Anthony Cudahy. This week, we will be running a series of excerpts from Josef Winkler’s Graveyard of Bitter Oranges. Inspired by the author’s stay in Italy after leaving his native Carinthia, the novel was first published in 1990 by Suhrkamp Verlag and its English translation will be published by Contra Mundum Press in 2015. The first night after we had moved into a sublet room in Rome, I dreamed of a girl who had a swatch of blood resembling a Hitler moustache on her upper lip. As she approached me, and I kicked my legs at her frantically, blood ran from down over her mouth and chin. I sprang awake, and tried to awaken Andrea, but I seemed to be paralyzed, and it was only minutes later that I could once more move around the bed. I said nothing, and waited more than an hour for sleep to return. After that dream followed a second. Bishops and cardinals in their vestments were dying in a hail of bullets; though they stayed dead in their seats, I could not distinguish a single wound on their bodies. I approached a cardinal and looked long at his body. Then I was jarred awake once more by the clangorous bell of the Convent in the Via Tolmino, which tolls every quarter of an hour and which had only allowed me, my first few nights there, to sleep in fifteen-minute increments. You no longer show any sign of life? But I write about death, my friend! I like to be among the dead, they do me no harm, and they are people, too. Read More
January 2, 2014 Bulletin Our New Year’s Resolution: Stop Watching So Much Fucking TV By Dan Piepenbring Family watching television, c. 1958, via Wikimedia Commons Two thousand thirteen was the year that introduced binge-watching to the lexicon. In a new poll by Netflix, sixty-one percent of respondents conceded to having binged on one show or another, meaning they’d watched upwards of three episodes a single sitting. The message, dear reader, is clear: we’re gorging ourselves on serialized dramas and slick on-demand entertainment. It’s time to step away from the fucking television. This should be the year we all read more. And because our resolve can sometimes waver, we’ve enlisted our friends at McSweeney’s in a call to action. Until the end of January, you can subscribe to The Paris Review and McSweeney’s for only $75—that’s 20 percent less than the price of individual subscriptions. Your 2014 will be so stuffed with the best in fiction, poetry, interviews, and essays that you’ll forget where you put the remote, forever.
January 2, 2014 Our Daily Correspondent, Quote Unquote New Year’s with Burroughs, Surprisingly Tame By Sadie Stein Firecrackers and whistles sounded the advent of the New Year of 1965 in St. Louis. Stripteasers ran from the bars in Gaslight Square to dance in the street when midnight came. Burroughs, who had watched television alone that night, was asleep in his room at the Chase Park Plaza Hotel, St. Louis’s most elegant. —William S. Burroughs, the Art of Fiction No. 36
January 2, 2014 On the Shelf, Our Daily Correspondent Happy Birthday, Isaac Asimov (Maybe), and Other News By Sadie Stein Happy birthday, Isaac Asimov! Maybe. Probably. Newbery winner Kate DiCamillo has been named Ambassador of Young People’s Literature, a position which has been around since 2008. Sure you can find plenty of lists of best of 2013, but what books were unfinishable? (Well, for Laura Miller?) Ruth Rendell: “Reading is becoming a kind of specialist activity and that strikes terror into the heart of people who love reading.”
January 1, 2014 Arts & Culture Darcy and Elizabeth Go to Summer Camp By Ted Scheinman In the summer in 2014, in honor of the Pride and Prejudice bicentennial, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill held its first annual Jane Austen Summer Program, described informally as the “Jane Austen summer camp” and inspired in part by the Dickens Project at UC Santa Cruz. Our correspondent kept an illicit diary of his experiences, excerpted below. Thursday, June 27 4:35 P.M. I have been hoodwinked into wearing many hats at this conference, some of them literal. E-mails from the braintrust inform me that I am to play Mr. Darcy at the Meryton Assembly on Saturday night, to which end I must shave my beard and attend two sessions of Regency dance instruction, all while perfecting my scowl. During convocation, I scan the order of the dance: “Braes of Dornoch”; the “Physical Snob”; “Mr. Beveridge’s Maggot.” The more boisterous sounding the dance, the more I fear for my newly fitted tights and breeches on generous loan from the Playmakers Repertory. Professor James Thompson of UNC is our first plenary speaker. Thompson explains the etiology of the program, suggests that next year’s gathering will likely focus on Sense and Sensibility, and floats the idea of one day holding a summer conference about “Austen and the Brontës.” From the collective intake of breath, he may as well have been talking of 2Pac and Biggie. Thompson also expresses gentle alarm over suspected “crypto-Trollopians” in audience, a joke that lands with shocking force among this mix of academics, various regional representatives of JASNA, garden-variety superfans, Ladies of a Certain Age Wearing Sun Visors, archaic dance enthusiasts, and one very precocious eleven-year-old who takes notes at each of the plenaries. I give thanks that Thompson is a friend and banish anxiety over the tights. Read More