Michelle Tea, T Cooper, Judith Thurman, and more.
Danielle Evans, Honor Moore, John Koethe, Interviews: Roddy Doyle and Stephen Elliot
Oliver Sacks, Richard Ford, Jorie Graham and more
Michael Ondaatje, Lydia Millet, Gary Snyder, and more.
The staff of issues 50 and 51 joined an incredible group of contributors past and present last night to celebrate the arrival of the 50th Issue of Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art.
Issue 50 EIC Emily Firetog (left) and Managing Editor Megan Foley host
Issue 50 is about to launch and it’s time to celebrate! Come toast the new issue with us on May 1.
Details:
May 1, 2012, 7:00 pm to 10:00 pm
Pianos Bar
158 Ludlow Street (corner of Stanton), NYC
Readings from Donald Antrim – Seth Fried – Robert Ostrom – Kimberly Grey – Scott Anderson – Alison Barker
DJ: James Yeh
From our Poetry Editor, John Fenlon Hogan:
Gale Marie Thompson’s poem, “Sigourney Weaver” was selected by Eileen Myles as the winner of Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art’s 2012 Poetry Contest. “I have so much optimism / that when I look around me I squint. / All I want is for someone to let me love them, all of them,” she writes. Thompson lives in Northampton, MA. Her first collection, Soldier On, is forthcoming from Tupelo Press. She has work in the Denver Quarterly, Bateau, Salt Hill, Volt, and elsewhere. She is assistant editor at jubilat.
From our Nonfiction Editor, Tara FitzGerald:
Anne Fadiman, the award-winning writer, essayist, editor and author of The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, served as judge for the Journal’s 2012 nonfiction contest, and selected a raw and compelling essay by Lucas Mann as this year’s winner. Fat Man: A Day in Calories addresses fatness, food and family with equal measures of self-deprecating humor and stomach-churning intensity. “The fat male characters are around you still. Falstaff, Costanza, Homer Simpson, late Orson Welles roles, all of them — giggling, slapping their stomachs and reminding you that they, you, are not heroes.” Mann is completing his MFA in nonfiction at the University of Iowa and his first book, tentatively titled Class A, is forthcoming from Knopf in early 2013.
From our Fiction Editor, Zinzi Clemmons:
Joselyn Takacs’ “A Form of Waiting” was selected as the 2012 winner in fiction by judge Dinaw Mengestu. The haunting story follows Allison, a newly-married musician living in rural Georgia on the day her house is invaded by two mysterious strangers. Each moment of this story is charged with danger, dread and surprising thoughtfulness, as she waits for the two men to decide her fate. In the pivotal scene, the narrative reflects on her life in the unfamiliar countryside and realizes, “her new life is just a form of waiting.” Takacs is pursuing her MFA at John Hopkins University, and will soon see her first major publication in Narrative Magazine. We’re honored to feature a story by this talented writer at the beginning of what appears to be a promising career.
In celebration of finishing our proofs of Issue 50, COLUMBIA: A JOURNAL is giving away TWO TICKETS to Kathryn Harrison and Lionel Shriver reading on Monday night at 92nd Street Y in New York.
Just tell us something about your favorite piece published by COLUMBIA in the past 50 years by writing on our facebook page. We’ll select a winner on Sunday.
http://www.92y.org/Uptown/Event/Kathryn-Harrison-and-Lionel-Sh.aspx
Sleeper Shawn Kuruneru
Canadian artist Shawn Kuruneru’s beautiful, intricate drawings have just been compiled into Women (a 38 page book, laser printed and perfect bound, published by Bsviv, Canada). Shawn’s work recently featured at the Drawing Center in New York, Battat Contemporary in Montreal and Night Gallery in Los Angles. He is currently working on a solo show at Ribordy Contemporary in Switzerland and Blackston Gallery in New York. Last year his drawings were acquired by the Montreal Contemporary Art Museum.
Amongst all these amazing shows, Shawn found time to share his thoughts on his new book, ballpoint pens, and Patrice O’Neal….
Congratulations on your new book! One of my favourite drawings is “The Sleeper.” What inspired this image? How does it fit with your more abstract drawings in the book?
The Sleeper is based on a 1950′s black and white photograph by Robert Frank from his series The Americans. I came across the photo by chance in a book store and at the time I was thinking a lot about figuration and colour. The dark mood of the image reminded me of my body of work I did during University in Montreal, Quebec in 2006. I wanted to explore certain surreal inclinations I had in the past with things in my immediate present.
Image courtesy of Lincoln Center Film Society, “Autumn Almanac.”
The complete retrospective of Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr (at the Lincoln Center Film Society from February 3-8) brought together all of his films, including the rarely seen Macbeth. The showings provided a unique opportunity to track Tarr’s artistic development.
The super-talented Ellis Avery is the author of The Teahouse Fire, (Riverhead 2006), which won three awards and was translated into five languages, and The Smoke Week (Gival Press 2003) an award-winning personal account of life in lower Manhattan after 9/11. Her critically acclaimed new novel The Last Nude, centering on the relationship between Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka and her muse, Rafaela, was released in January this year. Before her reading from The Last Nude last week at KGB bar, Ellis and I sat down to chat about Paris, artistic ambition, historical fiction, and painting classes with naked models.
Congratulations on the release of The Last Nude! There’s a big tradition of Americans going off to Paris and writing there; I’m thinking of writers like Henry James, Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein, and Earnest Hemmingway. Do you think Paris still holds a certain fascination for American writers, and if so, why?
Paris was the epicenter of Anglophone modernist literature in the twenties and thirties. Americans went there and it set them on fire. Paris has always been a small, dense city, and the idea of being there when you could have just happened to run into pioneers in literature, art, music, dance, and fashion must have been incredibly seductive.
All images courtesy of Eleven Rivington Gallery
Hilary Berseth (SOA’ 2001) impressed with his first show at Eleven Rivington Gallery in 2008. He seamlessly blended nature with human agency; his honeycomb sculptures combined his own wood and wire armatures with wax and honey structures built by bee colonies. His manipulation of natural processes resulted in beautiful, subtle effects. The sculptures were cacti-like formations, with soft curvatures and elegant flowing lines; the poetic manifestation of mathematical formulas embedded in the natural world. Critic Karen Rosenberg, writing for The New York Times, described Berseth’s work as “a novel twist on process art.”
Berseth’s most recent show, at Eleven Rivington through February 5, 2012, is a slight departure. His graphite drawings feature some natural elements, such as plant life and clouds, but this time they are captured on a paper. The use of graphite lends the drawings an ethereal lightness, while the images, (juxtaposing a tree inside a room, or an eyeball with what look like vines or veins), masterfully blend the real and the surreal. Recurring themes are decay and impermanence; one particular drawing shows a room that could be a scene of either a demolition or a cataclysm. The floor is littered with wood pieces, and an entire wall has been ripped away, revealing a dark interior. The use of half-opened doors as an entrance into the composition suggests a psychoanalytic preoccupation, while the drawing of the eyeball references the technique of optical illusion.
Every year, photohysteria descends on Paris in the form of the world’s leading photography fair, Paris Photo. This November, the Grand Palais off the Champs Elysees played host. I wandered in to take on the works of 117 international galleries, and to find out what the buzz was about.
My starting point was Magnum, the legendary agency co-founded by Henri Cartier-Bresson. The fair’s theme, Africa, was represented by Ian Berry’s harrowing images of South African apartheid, and George Rodger’ 1950s study of the Nuba tribe in South Sudan. Hitler’s ex-protégé Leni Riefenstahl was so struck by Rodger’s naked warriors that she asked Rodgers where to find them, and photographed them to great acclaim. I was similarly impressed.
At the Stevenson Gallery, Viviane Sassen showed why she featured on the Paris Photo poster this year, and why she works successfully in high fashion. Neon-yellow butterflies in mud, a sleeping boy in fishing nets, overexposed flowers at night – there was an idiosyncratic dreaminess hinting at a vision of African photography that is both contemporary and versatile.
Film Comment Selects
Image courtesy of Lincoln Center Press
Each year Film Comment Selects at Lincoln Center presents an eclectic mix of films they term, among other things, “the rare and the rediscovered.” Two noteworthy films at the festival this year were literary adaptations, remarkable for the gusto with which they handled the original texts.
Faust, by Russian filmmaker Aleksandr Sokurov, belongs to the “rare” category, since it may not easily find an American distributor. The film won the Golden Lion award in the 2011 Venice Film Festival. Sokurov is famous for his long takes. His Russian Arc, filmed in a single shot, was a piece of supreme fluidity. He is less interested in plot than in drawing our attention to how time unfolds. Mother & Son, for example, was a quiet meditation on the last day in a woman’s life, exploring the textual, ritualistic richness of minute moments.
Sokurov bases Faust on the famous text by Wolfgang von Goethe. The film is both a continuation and a departure for Sokurov. Visually it contains key elements of Sokurov’s art; for example the film features distortions (an entire image leans one way), to emphasize the subjectivity of looking. The blurring of shots adds a sense of emotional vertigo. Faust, however, unlike Sokurov’s other films, has a clear narrative thrust, in the form of the story of Faust’s sensual infatuation with young Margarethe.
Sokurov has put his own spin on the material: Mephistopheles becomes a lascivious pawnbroker, possessed of mysterious powers. Sokurov delivers a Faust we can relate to; he renounces religion in the name of science, but finds his pursuit of knowledge only increases his sense of alienation and disenchantment.
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