http://www.edrants.com a blog in collaborative standing Wed, 14 May 2008 21:37:07 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Subject, thirty-three, contemplated writing a confessional post that pointed to certain emotions established by (a) two phone calls, one currently unreturned, (b) the ontological isthmus from one apartment to another that must be crossed in the next two weeks, and (c) watching a late-period Woody Allen film, flawed but interesting, ... http://www.edrants.com/dossier/ I always dreamed of being like Jackie Collins or Danielle Steele. Of writing novels devoid of character or intelligence or truth. Of multiple marriages that the tabloids could gloss over. Of a hack career that had nothing to do with my color, but everything to do with ... http://www.edrants.com/a-hack-of-a-different-stripe/ Due to many pleasant events over the next few weeks, posting will be less regular, less frequent, with a possibility of intermittent showers and random madness here as the monsters use my brain. There is considerable output right now on the novel. (Somehow, a great anger in relation ... http://www.edrants.com/infrequent-posting/ The Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place ... http://www.edrants.com/am-i-being-detained/ Dear Peter: I write to impress my most profound apologies for our recent disservice to your book, Cup in the Hole: My Year Puncturing Baltimore's Yeastern District. Had we been aware just how much these typographical errors had infected your work, we most certainly would have cleansed up the mess ... http://www.edrants.com/we-regress-the-error/ I recently had the opportunity to talk with underground animator Ralph Bakshi. A portion of our conversation appears this afternoon at Vulture, where you will discover the song that was originally going to play during the finale of American Pop. (For the specific reasons why, you will have ... http://www.edrants.com/interview-with-ralph-bakshi/ Liveblogging the elections. 12:18 AM: Listening to WIBC-FM feed. Indiana remains close, with Hillary ahead by only two percentage points. Gary, Indiana remains the big mystery. Hillary has just announced that she will not appear at any public event tomorrow. Does a public event entail a ... http://www.edrants.com/is-hillary-finished/ I walked into my local comic shop and saw few unfamiliar faces looking over a few freebies. I walked out with a thick stack of comic books, headed home, and consumed them in the best way: in one mad tear, one mad comic book binge. It was Free Comic Book Day, ... http://www.edrants.com/free-comic-book-day/ [EDITOR'S NOTE: Sadly, this website's proprietor could not attend PEN World Voices due to contracting a particularly nasty bug. Thankfully, the more robust Eric Rosenfield was able to pick up the slack. What follows is his report from the Umberto Eco, Salman Rushdie, and Mario Vargas Llosa panel.] The ... http://www.edrants.com/pen-the-three-musketeers-reunited/ From John P. Marquand's Wickford Point: No one could teach anyone else to write. You could be as industrious as you pleased; you could steep yourself in the technique of all the Flauberts and Maupassants and Dickenses who had gone before, and out of it would come exactly nothing. That ... http://www.edrants.com/concerning-poshlost/ I must have the same thing Tayari had. A deadly strain, not unlike the vicious superflu portrayed in Fiona Maazel's Last, Last Chance, has knocked your faithful correspondent on his ass. So PEN World Voices coverage remains stalled for the present time. I'm going to see how ... http://www.edrants.com/pen-in-absentia/ Love and Sex with Robots David Levy HarperCollins, 334 pages, $24.95 Review by Erin O'Brien Let's start with the RealDolls. Actually, it's not the dolls I want to dwell on, but the men who own them. I spent untold hours conversing on an online forum set up specifically for sex doll owners while researching this ... http://www.edrants.com/love-transformer/ It's a drizzly Tuesday afternoon in the Meatpacking District. I'm waiting outside a hotel suite. It's just before a junket interview that will be my last. A film publicist wanders in the hallway, jitters in her stride. She's gabbing into her cell, calmly trying to placate ... http://www.edrants.com/the-bunk-behind-junkets/ Being wrong is wonderful! It's a bit like accidentally walking into a fitzroya and suddenly realizing that there's this large evergreen that you didn't know about. Suddenly, you're forced to alter your existence to account for the fitzroya. And when you ponder the fitzroya a bit -- ... http://www.edrants.com/sven-birkerts-and-the-frightening-fitzroya/ It seems particularly fitting to remark upon Errol Morris's latest film, Standard Operating Procedure, as Armond White offers yet another hysterical fulmination about how online culture is apparently destroying exegesis, ranting in particular about "the shame of middle-class and middlebrow conformity that critics follow each other when praising movies that ... http://www.edrants.com/standard-operating-procedure/ "This should be a better world," a science fiction convention attendee said. "A more honest one, where sex isn't shameful or degrading. I wish this were the kind of world where you could say, 'Wow, I'd like to sodomize you with my nightstick,' and people would understand that ... http://www.edrants.com/open-source-sodomy/ Ladies and gentlemen, you may have observed the relative silence around these parts of late. This is because I am very angry -- furious about Hillary Clinton's willingness to say anything to get elected, indignant about the White House's denial about torture, prepared to apply a baseball bat to ... http://www.edrants.com/simple-as-pie/ Over the course of the weekend, a number of people were interviewed by Our Young, Roving Correspondents on the floor of New York ComicCon. Thankfully, we have managed to assemble a rather strange collection of interviews into a podcast. We had no idea that we had recorded so ... http://www.edrants.com/new-york-comiccon-podcast/ Dude, like, there's this whole web conservation moment going down. The same bullshit about how there's all this bullshit on the Web and how it's up to us to be responsible and all for our content. I hereby abdicate editing on this post. Because I want to tell ... http://www.edrants.com/on-the-exchange-of-moments/ On Friday afternoon, I began walking the floors of New York ComicCon, collecting strange snippets that will be glued together for a future installment of Segundo. I counted thirty-seven Jedi Knights (some of them portly, making me wonder why Jedi discipline doesn't seem to involve physical fitness), two Stormtroopers ... http://www.edrants.com/nycc-an-impromptu-interview-with-jeffrey-brown/ Eric Rosenfield reports: The first annual New York Comics Legend Award was held at the Virgin Megastore in Times Square where a number of die-hards ponied up $350 each to see the award given to Stan Lee, co-creator of Spider Man, The Hulk, The Fantastic Four, The X-Men, etc. etc. ... http://www.edrants.com/nycc-the-new-york-comics-legend-award/ Today, there are two notable pieces of news: The Bat Segundo Show has now crossed the 200 episode mark, with shocking developments involving Mr. Segundo, and Mark Sarvas's Harry, Revised hits bookstores. In an effort to tie both pieces of news together, one of the podcasts released today ... http://www.edrants.com/200/ INT. LOST PRODUCTION OFFICE -- DAY DAMON runs ALL THE WAY THE FUCK INTO THE OFFICE, passing SIX FUCKING WRITERS. He carries a latte -- A FUCKING VENTI LATTE, MOTHERFUCKERS! Teach that FUCKING BARISTA a lesson! CARLTON holds up his hand. Holy. Fucking. Shit. It's the BIG ... http://www.edrants.com/damon-lindelof-and-carlton-cuse-plan-season-five/ This week, The Bat Segundo Show will cross the 200 episode barrier. A future program will feature a conversation with the writer Tobias Wolff, whose most recent book, Our Story Begins, is a short story collection containing previously collected tales -- including the classics "Bullet in the Brain" and ... http://www.edrants.com/interview-with-tobias-wolff/ Tobias Wolff's short story, "Bullet to the Brain" concerns Anders, a critic so removed from the joys and pleasures of life that he is reduced to niggling over every ontological detail. Because of this, reality trumps his existence. The story is unspeakably tragic in its final paragraphs, as ... http://www.edrants.com/anders-in-the-flesh/ Reports on the Mailer tribute at Carnegie Hall, the Baker/Julavits/Siegel talk* at the New York Public Library, and a review of the documentary Young@Heart are forthcoming. In the meantime, there are interviews to conduct, panels to attend, deadlines to meet, and taxes to finalize. But there will also ... http://www.edrants.com/interim/ In 2007, the French Ministry of Culture had an annual budget of €3.18 billion. (To give you some sense of how this fits into the grand scheme of things, France's national budget in 2005 was €288.8 billion. So that's roughly around 1% of the national budget.) While ... http://www.edrants.com/david-kipen-a-true-american/ Rock ‘n’ roll is here to stay this morning Rock ‘n’ roll is here to stay this morning Rock ‘n’ roll is here to stay Old-time music never went away this morning —Bubba George Stringband, Ithaca, NY You see them on street corners and bars, sometimes in the corners of restaurants. Fiddle and banjo players. ... http://www.edrants.com/old-time-music/ Just so you know the heights of her hauteur, Jane Smiley's latest review is about the snobbiest nonsense you can imagine from a book review section. The kind of afternoon balderdash "dictated but not read" by a humorless patent attorney and dutifully revered without quibble by fawning sycophants. Unable to ... http://www.edrants.com/jane-smiley-is-snobby-enough-to-aim-low/ The phone rang. "Charlton Heston died." "I know." "Well, what do you think?" I hadn't realized that my feelings for Charlton Heston were complex. I didn't even know that I had feelings about all this. Heston was one of those dependable melodramatic actors, blessed with a wonderful and often ridiculous voice that ... http://www.edrants.com/charlton-heston/