Do you know about The New-York Ghost? It’s not just for New Yorkers anymore. (Further information can be found here.)
The latest issue features a new piece by Ben Greenman, author of Superbad, numerous show tunes, and the recent A Circle Is a Balloon and a Compass Both.
Poetry fans: Check out, if you haven’t already, this excellent interview with Guy Maddin about his new Brand Upon the Brain!, a mind-meltingly good silent movie (“A Remembrance in 12 chapters”) with a lot of exclamation points. It’s being screened as I write this along with live narration, an 11-piece orchestra, a castrato (!), and fun sound effects.
In the interview, Jessica Winter asks Maddin about the aesthetic kinship he shares with John Ashbery, who narrated a performance of Brand! last night in New York.
(This is neither here nor there, but did you know that Akira Kurosawa’s elder brother, Heigo, was a benshi—a narrator of silent films? I’ve had this factoid lodged in my brain for nearly five years, ever since writing this article; I wasn’t able to deploy it then, but I’m glad I can share it now.)
Back to Brand Upon the Brain!:
New Yorkers, you have until tomorrow to watch it!
Other people, the show might come to your town! (Here’s the schedule.)
UPDATE: Just as this post was “going to press,” Jessica W. e-mailed me about last night’s Ashbery-voxed perf:
Ashbery’s authoritative monotone and deliberate pace, familiar from his readings, made a perfect complement with the feverish melodrama onscreen—just as it underlined his own influence on Maddin’s intertitles. As the story flung itself toward its climax, the effect of Ashbery’s steady intonations became—maybe I just love a chance to use this word, but—chthonic, like an ancient voice from long ago and far away was just reaching us. We were spellbound.
…and yet in the absence of Ed there is another Ed: your humble narrator, Ed P., occasionally referred to on this blog as East Coast Ed.
There are so few Eds roaming the landscape that we need to band together. (So it is written in the Ed Manifesto.) It’s a strange name—Edward‘s not strange, but Ed is so abrupt. And yet I like it, Ed C. likes it—there is the idea that you are getting the maximum possible impact from two letters.
To kick things off, I want to share my favorite recent blurb: Sarah Manguso on poet Jennifer Knox’s forthcoming Drunk By Noon (Bloof Books). The blurb itself is like a poem!:
Since Knox favors premise over conclusion, her poems simply speak—they do not explain. In this way they are not entirely unlike scripture. The part that is unlike scripture is the one that’s like “Wait, I was reading these poems and laughing but my hearing aid fell out and then my face just kind of blew off in a beautiful rainbow spray of bullshit-dissolving napalm.”