FEATURES
Prologue: This Fragile Fortress
Thomas McBee
01.19.12
Thomas Page McBee is running––down a street in Oakland, down a stretch of history, down a thread like an ant in the description of a tesseract. In the prologue of his (as yet) unpublished memoir "about crime, family, and masculinity," This Fragile Fortress, McBee brings his hands together in a flash––a boyish Mrs. Who––and the ant passes from who Thomas was into who he is about to be. Oakland, California: 2010.
Top 10 Moving-Image Events of 2011
Bradford Nordeen
12.29.11
From feature to porn to trailer to meme, Bradford Nordeen assembles his 10 favorite "moving-image events" of 2011.
What Not Sleeping Starts To Make: Blake Butler's Nothing
Ken Baumann
10.15.11
The late great David Foster Wallace was once interviewed on European TV and said he can’t own a TV because that’s all he would be doing. Like in the pot scene from Infinite Jest in the first bit of that epic novel. He also said he writes in a difficult way to try and battle this tendancy in himself. Too easy is self defeating. Blake Butler, the author of Scorch Atlas, Ever and two books on Harper Perennial this year, the novel There is No Year and Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia, released this week, is an inheritor of Wallace. Everything Butler writes is difficult (a good thing), beautiful, dark, and oft funny. Friend and copublisher of the literary mag No Colony Ken Baumann recently interviewed Butler. It is no less challenging than Butler’s fiction, or non.
Post-Hotdog, Sober, Mr. Lee
Linh Dinh
05.12.11
Decorated with fake skulls and Phillies pennants, Linh Dinh's favorite dive bar Dirty Frank's is, in truth, not so much a drinking establishment as an elaborate shrine to a pair of twin lost causes—art and picking fights with bouncers. Here, Dinh explains the similarities between the two and, like a series of snapshots of a night when you were blackout drunk, reminds you of mistakes you didn't know you'd made.
Sponsored in Part
Malina Saval
03.26.11
Malina Saval is the author of The Secret Lives of Boys: Inside the Raw Emotional World of Male Teens. She is also a member of Al-Anon. A sponsor-less member, much to her desperation, as she struggles alone with her husband's addictions, her family life, her own anxieties and moments of self-doubt. As someone once said, "I've been out to sea a long time." This is the first column of Malina's that will chronicle her search for an Al-Anon sponsor.