Mark Linkous took his own life yesterday. I interviewed Mark in 2001, right before It’s A Wonderful Life came out. Stupid me, I couldn’t get the recorder to work, which seems peculiarly appropriate. What I remember is here.
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Barry Hannah on WWII & Writing
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
The great lit Web site The Rumpus has an intriguing piece about the late, great Barry Hannah. Apparently he was a bit of a WWII buff and gave a lecture at Bennington entitled “Military History as Regards Fiction: The Unquenchable Thirst about World War II.” Man, what I would’ve given to have been there. Brooklyn writer [...]
On Reality & Its Discontents
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Quite possibly the most brazenly insubordinate and thought-provoking book I have read since Walter Benjamin‘s landmark essay “The Work of Art In the Age Of Mechanical Reproduction” is David Shields’s highly hyped “manifesto,” Reality Hunger. (Inverted sentence structure intended, BTW.) I don’t know if I am yet prepared to follow Shields into the novels-are-not-really-novels wilderness, [...]
My First Time with a Salinger
Saturday, January 30, 2010
I don’t remember where I was. The library stacks, where a rose-cheeked high-school junior I had a crush on hung out? The alley behind La Petite, where my delinquent friends smoked bowls during lunch hour? A bookstore on the South Side? Or, actually, no, now I remember: I was in college, shamefully belated in my [...]
Most Influential Novels of the Decade
Sunday, January 3, 2010
Not the “best,” necessarily, but these are the novels, I think, which will cast the longest shadows to the writers of the future. 2000 Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius 2001 Tie: Ian McEwan, Atonement; Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections 2002 Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex 2003 James Frey, A Million Little Pieces (now that we [...]
My brilliant Mom, the Abstract Expressionist
Thursday, November 19, 2009
The phenomenally talented and innovative Susan Michod, who happens to be my mom, is part of an online show over at the esteemed Chicago-based Koscielak Gallery. Her new work, which in my opinion ranks among the best of her long and thoughtful career, are vivid and vigorous “mash-ups,” so to speak, of familiar images from [...]
What I’m Reading
Friday, November 13, 2009
Don DeLillo, Point Omega Sam Lipsyte, The Ask Lydia Davis, The Collected Short Stories Joshua Ferris, The Unnamed
WWII in HD
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
I was a writer of a 10-hour History Channel documentary mini-series, WWII in HD. It’s a pretty gripping project, narrated by Gary Sinise and featuring additional voices by Steve Zahn, Justin Bartha, LL Cool J, Ron Livingston, Amy Smart, and Rob Lowe, among others. Watch the trailer. “Four stars…a fresher angle on a war already analyzed in [...]