Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio's Nobel Lecture entitled "In the forest of paradoxes":

"Why do we write? I imagine that each of us has his or her own response to this simple question. One has predispositions, a milieu, circumstances. Shortcomings, too. If we are writing, it means that we are not acting. That we find ourselves in difficulty when we are faced with reality, and so we have chosen another way to react, another way to communicate, a certain distance, a time for reflection...."

*

Gil Mantera's Party Dream - "Elmo's Wish"

Directed by Seth Kirby and David Monaghan

*

No Age - "Eraser"

Directed by Andy Bruntel

*

Marnie Stern - "Transformer"

Directed by Dylan Mulick

*

At long last...

New Issue of World Picture

Theme: Obvious

(featuring new fiction by Sam Lipsyte, new philosophical theory by other folks, and a conversation with Ernesto Laclau)

California-born photographer Tony Stamolis:

*

"Bathtime in Clerkenwell"

a short animated film by Aleksey Budovskiy

(2002)

*

Stranger than Science Fiction is a now-defunct blog with a nice archive of reviews of old sci-fi books.

*

Jeff VanderMeer's current project is to read 60 classic works of philosophy in 60 days.

You can follow along, since he's blogging about each text here.

*

"Salome in Low Land"

("Richard Strauss' opera heroine Salomé set into an 80's arcade game world where she urges for love, blood and satisfaction.")

Directed by Christian Zagler

*

Blake Butler recaps his massive year of reading.

(84 total books, which averages out to 7 books a month or nearly 2 books a week)

*

British rock photographer Michael Robert Williams:

Rilo Kiley

The Noisettes

Portishead

Candice Tripp left her native South Africa in 2006 to resettle in London:

*

Harold Pinter has passed away.

Jahsonic covers it.

*

Jim Stoten is an Illustrator living and working in London:

*

Table of Contents for Gordon Lish's The Quarterly

Issues 1–25

*

Lech Jankowski lives in Poznań, Poland:

Polish artist Janusz Maria Brzeski:

*

The end of days is here for the publishing industry...

"Read it and weep"

by

Jason Boog

*

Illusory Confections posts a bunch of interesting vintage photos:

*

"Labyrinth"

Directed by Jan Lenica

Made in 1963, Lenica created "Labyrinth" a self-consciously Kafka-esque tale of a winged lonely man literally devoured by totalitarian rule.

Part One




Part Two

Chrissie White is a 15 year old photographer from Seattle:

*




Gertrude Stein's "The Making of Americans"

as an opera

*

Yo-Yo Ma & Andrew Bird

Elif Sanem Karakoc is a 16 year old photographer from Istanbul, Turkey:

*

"Partisans of Oblivion: A Situationist Novel"

by

Joshua Clover

(review of Michèle Bernstein's All the King's Horses)

*

"Books-A-Million"

by

Brian Hayes

(review of William Goldbloom Bloch's The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges's Library of Babel )

*

London based illustrator Andrew Clark:

Last night I finally watched David Lynch's Inland Empire for the first time. I know I should have seen it ages ago, but it just kept slipping through the cracks. Now, I have finally seen it and all I can say is:

I am changed.

If you haven't seen it, you must.

It will require giving three hours of your life away; but in return you will be changed.

I should say more, but I won't. I'll just ask you to believe me when I say it is truly an unassailable work of avant-garde, anti-Aristotelian, rhizomatic genius.

I intend to watch it many, many, many more times.

*

The new installment at Abjective is amazing:

"drifter"

by

Jeff Crouch

*

Bruce Covey's Picks for Best Poetry Books of 2008

*

Here are a few deadly videos I culled from a sweet newish site called Jando:

Plastikman - "Disconnect"

Directed by Ali M. Demirel






*



"Allahu Akbar"

Directed by Usama Alshaibi






*



"I Met The Walrus"

Directed by Josh Raskin

"In 1969, a 14-year-old Beatles fanatic named Jerry Levitan, armed with a reel-to-reel tape deck, snuck into John Lennon's hotel room in Toronto and convinced John to do an interview about peace."






*



"Larytta - souvenir de chine"

Directed by Körner Union

*

Mia Mäkilä was born in Norrköping, Sweden, in 1979:

*

Matthew Dessem's project is to watch every movie in the Criterion Collection (in number order) and then publish a discussion of each film on his blog, The Criterion Contraption. Right now he is on #86 Alexander Nevsky, 1938, directed by Sergei Eisenstein.

*

Brad Phillips was born in Toronto, Canada:

*

"Brought To A Boil: An Essay On Experimental Poetry"

by

John Olson

*

"A lovely Curiosity: Raymond Roussel"

by

William Clark

*

Michael Lewis was born in Hamilton, ON, & now lives and works in Toronto:

*

Check out The Underground Library -- a new wiki:

"To document, promote, and sustain the literary underground in the most grassroots way possible: relying on the knowledge of said literary underground. To give incoming generations of writers and publishers a sense of history from which they may learn and to which they can contribute. To remain balanced and factual. To bring writing back to the reader."

*

Claudio Parentela was born in Catanzaro, Italy, where he lives and works:

*




Be advised: Previously-unpublished Thomas Bernhard text
to be released in 2009!!!

*

Speaking of crazy, avant-garde videos, I experienced Ryan Trecartin’s zany I-Be Area last year at The Wexner Center. Now you can too -- he's begun posting clips of the project in non sequential order on a youtube channel.

Here is an excerpt:

Portraits by Charles Bernstein:

Myung-Mi Kim

(12-12-06)








Leslie Scalapino

(11-12-06)








Susan Howe

(10-16-07)








Ann Lauterbach

(12-4-06)

The Black Cab Sessions

Chapter Thirty-Six: Charlie Siem

*

2008 Pitchfork Readers Poll

(which is an interesting example of a feedback loop, if you think about it: readers regurgitate what Pitchfork has told them to listen to all year)

*

Marx's Das Kapital

the
manga
version

*

Michelle Segre lives and works in New York City:

Swamp Eyes
(2004)

New Species
(2004)

*

"To Have Done with the Judgement of God"

transcript of a radio play by

Antonin Artaud

*

Galaxie 500 - "When Will You Come Home"

(note: band members Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang now run the amazing avant garde small press Exact Change)

Artist Nikos Fyodor lives here in Columbus, Ohio:

Derided by Derrida

Foucault's Nose

*

Artist Rai Escalé lives in Barcelona, Spain:

Fritz Kappler is an artist that resides right here in Columbus Ohio:

*

William Gibson's elusive electronic poem:

AGRIPPA

*

Speaking of William Gibson, here is a passage from the opening of his book Pattern Recognition, which I've been reading:

"She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damien's theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can't move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage."

*

Speaking of books I've been reading, here's a passage from Kathryn Davis's Hell:

"Though why cleave slavishly to historic fact: there are fissures and tunnels and trapdoors (cobwebbed ducts too) in the brain, the watery tracts and coral castles through which the little shining seahorse floats -- now you see it, now you don't! -- and despite a prevailing sense (at least among those who don't believe in an afterlife) that being remembered is the closest we can get to immortality, the simple truth is that it's not just in our memory where the dead reside."

*

Digital collage by Dutch artist Ingrid Baars:

*

"Network Subrealism"

by

K N Brown

*

Eugene Lim’s reading diary

*

The New Yorker posts:

2008: The Year in Review

*

Footwear as art: Kobe goes low-top

*

"In Defense of Žižek"

by

Josh Strawn

*

R2D2 & C3PO on Sesame Street




[also check out Turkish Star Wars]