interviews September 14, 2015

Bookforum talks with Sylvère Lotringer

Few people can be said to have singlehandedly introduced a new body of thought to a foreign country, but that is precisely what the critic, professor, and Semiotext(e) founder Sylvère Lotringer did throughout the 1970s and ’80s.

Few people can be said to have singlehandedly introduced a new body of thought to a foreign country, but that is precisely what the critic, professor, and Semiotext(e) founder Sylvère Lotringer did throughout the 1970s and ’80s, bringing French theory to these shores via the original Semiotext(e) journal (1974-1985), the famously anarchic “Schizo-Culture” conference at Columbia University in 1975, and, most importantly, the “Foreign Agents” series of pocket-sized paperbacks—English translations of essays and excerpts from Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Paul Virilio, and

fiction June/July/Aug 2015

User Illusions

Back in the last millennium (1993, to be exact), I was asked to serve as the house hipster on a panel at an advertising conference in San Francisco. At the time, digital marketing, the subject of the conference, was still bleeding-edge stuff, not the ubiquitous warp and weft of our matrixed present. These were the days of Al Gore’s fabled “Information Superhighway,” to be brought to you by that miraculous oxymoron, the “smart TV.” Mosaic, the first widely available Web browser, had just been released. For most, the Internet meant Prodigy, CompuServe, America Online—Candy Land interfaces known

politics January 26, 2015

Paul Thomas Anderson's "Inherent Vice"

“Paranoids are not paranoid because they’re paranoid,” Thomas Pynchon wrote in Gravity’s Rainbow, “but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations.” This line could easily slot into a eulogy for Larry “Doc” Sportello, the “gumsandal” hippie private eye at the heart of Inherent Vice, Pynchon’s seventh novel, recently adapted for the screen by Paul Thomas Anderson. Compared to Pynchon’s other books, which serve up boundless complexity and vertiginous implication in a candy-apple coating of pot resin and screwball farce, Inherent Vice is little more

print Dec/Jan 2015

Twenty Years Booked

Bookforum asked contributors to weigh in on the most distinctive and influential works of the past two decades. The writers named the best works in a number of categories—and came up with a few new genres in the process.

LITERARY RANT - J. HOBERMAN

ART THEORY - DAVE HICKEY

PHOTOGRAPHY BOOK - GEOFF DYER

NEW YORK BOOK - LUC SANTE

INVENTIVE FICTION - WAYNE KOESTENBAUM

PORTRAIT OF EVIL - WENDY LESSER

CRIME - GEOFFREY O’BRIEN

FUTURE OF FICTION - CHRISTIAN LORENTZEN

NOT POETRY - ALBERT MOBILIO

BUSH-ERA NOVEL - CURTIS SITTENFELD

CULTURAL CRITICISM - ANDREW HULTKRANS

WHAT WE LEARNED FROM

print Dec/Jan 2015

Cultural Criticism

One of the best journals of the 1990s, The Baffler paired Frankfurt School contempt for mainstream consumerism with a relentless skewering of the “we’re all individuals” paradoxes of its ostensible foe: “alternative” culture. At a time when the template for the present-day hipster was just coming into focus, The Baffler’s épater le hipoisie attitude was provocative; its editors seemed to be saying “no” to all sides, rejecting both marketers’ lame attempts to describe the emergent Generation X and Xers’ inflated image of themselves as iconoclastic nonconformists.

Appearing in 1997, The Conquest

politics February 05, 2014

Duchamp's Life and Legacy at the New York Public Library

One of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, Marcel Duchamp was a magpie doubling as a prophet. He dabbled in Dada, Cubism, Fauvism, Futurism, and Surrealism, all to great effect. His work prefigured postmodernism and deconstruction, Pop and conceptual art, and he undertook what can be seen as the longest ever piece of performance art by pretending for decades to have quit art-making to play chess (he was playing chess, but he was also secretly making art).

Last Wednesday, New Yorker staff writer Calvin Tomkins appeared at the New York Public Library to discuss his definitive

culture January 15, 2014

The Metamorphosis A New Translation

In our present era, marked by a ferment of genetic engineering and hybridization (not to mention alienation and economic hardship), revisiting Kafka's totemic novella seems not only appropriate but necessary. This welcome new edition of The Metamorphosis was translated by Susan Bernofsky in a smoother, less Germanic, more contemporary voice, and is introduced by the master of biological horror, director David Cronenberg.

A totemic novella of Modernism and alienation, Franz Kafka’s “bug piece” has been in publication for nearly a century, baffling and delighting readers in equal measure with its fundamental strangeness and rigorous avoidance of explanation. In our present era, marked by a ferment of genetic engineering and hybridization (not to mention isolation and economic hardship), revisiting this text seems not only appropriate but necessary. This welcome new edition of The Metamorphosis was translated by Susan Bernofsky in a smoother, less Germanic, more contemporary voice than the Muir version most

culture November 13, 2012

’Pataphysics: A Useless Guide by Andrew Hugill

Frenchman Alfred Jarry (1873–1907), a diminutive queer alcoholic raised on Rabelais and steeped in Symbolism, could be called the John the Baptist of modernism. While most of modernism’s inspirational figures are better known than Jarry, he influenced nearly all of them to varying degrees: Filippo Marinetti, Tristan Tzara, André Breton, Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Max Ernst, Henri Rousseau, Antonin Artaud, Guillaume Apollinaire, Erik Satie, André Gide, Eugène Ionesco, Boris Vian, Raymond Queneau, Jean Genet, Jacques Prévert, and especially Marcel Duchamp were all disciples. And if their explicit

culture September 12, 2011

See a Little Light: The Trail of Rage and Melody by Bob Mould

In his new memoir about indie rock, pro wrestling, and overcoming self-hatred, Bob Mould describes his time in Husker Du as an “eight-year ground war”—not, as you might expect, between band members, but against Reagan-era America and the disposable music that stemmed from it.

When a young, Boston-based musician named Charles Thompson—soon to be known by the nom de guerre Black Francis—needed a bassist for his fledgling group the Pixies, he ran a classified ad reading, “Seeking bassist for rock band. Influences: Hüsker Dü and Peter, Paul & Mary.” With hindsight, Thompson’s stylistic coordinates—which must have seemed pretty mystifying when it ran in 1986—could serve as a fairly accurate description of his band’s sonic palette, if you threw in surf music, science fiction, and Puerto Rico. From Hüsker Dü, he took the pulverizing distortion and trenchant chording of

culture Summer 2011

The Paranoid Style

It’s always good to revisit the cold war to remind yourself that, despite an orgy of supporting evidence, you’re not living through the most fucked-up period in American history. As J. Hoberman’s factually dense, swiftly narrated history of Hollywood’s symbiosis with the atomic-age body politic makes clear, the cold war was, pace our current moment, the third great battle over the nation’s identity and purpose, trailing only the Revolutionary and Civil Wars in significance.

An Army of Phantoms is, like the second Star Wars trilogy, a prequel, in this case to Hoberman’s 2003 The Dream Life:

culture Dec/Jan 2009

BUBBLE TROUBLE

Timing, as a great sage once said, is everything. Seven Days in the Art World—purportedly an ethnography, according to its access-obsessed author, but really a Vanity Fair article writ large—seeks to limn the go-go, gaga art world of the early twenty-first century in all its bubbliciousness. Problem is, it arrives on the shelves at the very moment a global economic meltdown is under way, a total implosion of bad debt and illiquid assets that could make every financial downturn since the Great Depression seem like a gilded age. As go hedge-fund bonuses and global petrodollars, so goes the art

culture June/July/Aug 2008

I Have Fun Everywhere I Go

I have a pet theory about a microsegment of my generation—those whose junior high years were 1978–80—which holds that in the midst of an already “lost” generation (Generation X), there exists a subset, of which I am a member, that is more lost than the rest, having come of age at the exact moment when two cultural tectonic plates collided, heaved, and ground any hope of an integrated self-image into dust. Our older siblings were ’70s kidsdeseeding schwag weed inside Led Zeppelin II LP sleeves to roll joints for laser rock or sniffing glue on the way to CBGB. Our younger siblings were ably

fiction Dec/Jan 2008

PROJECTION RACKET

Fading in with an epigraph from Josef von Sternberg—“I believe that cinema was here from the beginning of the world”—Steve Erickson adapts nearly the oldest story in the book (Abraham and Isaac), threads it through the projector through which all film history spins, and, having cast a hero who’s part Being There’s Chance the gardener and part 2001’s Starchild (endowed, no less, with an infinite perspective worthy of Borges’s Aleph), throws light and shadow onto the backs of our eyelids in this love letter to celluloid. The mash-up of cultural references in the preceding sentence gives you an