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Just finished reading this one last week -- given to me by its editor, Darren Wershler-Henry, a sort of cornucopic chuckle-patch of diverse, earth-shaking cultural products, on his most recent trip to New York.
This book is so great and beautifully, apparently effortlessly, written -- the VV actually used the word "disgustingly" to describe the feeling one gets, as a writer, reading such amazing prose, but I'd be risking a revolt to agree -- I can't help but think a "best poetry book of year" huzzah andor encomium would be forthcoming were one to edit out the narrative continuities (and maybe some of the bits about losing weight), letting the flow of the Proustian rambles take centerstage.
Some of it reads like part of Rimbaud's Illuminations, and the longish autobiographical film treatment, "A Child of No Qualities," riffing off the title of Robert Musil's famous novel, suggests what Maddin could do were he to devote a book to a single work. Not that I would want to see a halt in the production of the films, which include Careful (one of Ashbery's all-time favorites, I hear), Archangel, Tales from the Gimli Hospital (just caught that on tape), Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, and the amazing 5-minute pseudo Soviet agit-prop Heart of the World (the cover image of the book is of the heroine in that film).
Here's a slice from one of his reviews for the Village Voice -- I don't know if Maddin included the unedited version of this piece or the version that I am presently copping from the VV's website. (I can't help but think that J.H. Prynne's next chapbook is going to be called "Unprecedented Posture of Prurience Enmarbled.")
"Savagely lashed by her own tresses while Destiny blasts her soul, the diva cries out for vengeance, cries out with her entire body, and this is what is most spectacular about the diva film—the vocabulary of the body! Aided only in part by as many as 30 drool-inducing costume changes per film, the diva's body twists and ripples in endless metamorphoses expressing wave upon wave of inner tumult. Ever so slowly—for the film's time is the diva's time!—and in a fashion completely alien to our New World eyes, do the torso and its limbs strain toward an unprecedented posture of prurience enmarbled, and upon achieving this shocking pose, move on to the next astonishing attitude, unfurling the fingers first, languidly allowing these digits to splay about the face and the bosom of the diva and in so doing inscribe upon those marvelous surfaces the plots of all stories from all times.
During the screenings you can't help imagining you sit next to Wayne Koestenbaum, that great curator of history's taxidermied opera divas, chronicler of their conduct, and exegete of their every signifier. You pretend you've introduced him to these florid films and by doing so you've struck him dumb. The cine-diva's vocabulary smites him with its vastness, strangeness, and uncanny accessibility—like hieroglyphics made suddenly readable."
This is of the slighter journalistic pieces in the book -- the best and perhaps most developed is his story on the filming of the Osmond's biopic in Winnipeg -- you can probably find that online also -- in which he strikes a peculiarly intimate friendship with the actor that plays the young Donny. BTW, I ran into Wayne Koestenbaum in the elevator today and discovered he's an occasional "anonymous" reader of FSC (which, in case you haven't noticed, is somewhat more lively recently, both with my activity and that of the avenging spam).
Posted by Brian Stefans at December 17, 2003 04:55 PM | TrackBackOh! In seeking a respite from tussling with paper on Warhol's movie *Kiss*,queer desire, and the iconic face of Jackie Kennedy,I take a break and find... Guy Maddin *and* Wayne Kostenbaum on FSC. Divaness on in all its aesthetic glory, which has been pretty much all I've been thinking about these past days. Now I'll have to re-watch Tales of the Gimli and re-read Ode to Anna Moffo. Or, no, maybe dive back into *The Queen's Throat until I can get ahold of this book to further inspire me. Thanks for continuing to post and Happy Holidays!
Posted by: kristine at December 18, 2003 12:34 AMThanks for the kind words, Brian, and even kinder plug. Not to split hairs, but credit where credit's due, etc: I actually edited the book. Darren designed it, lovingly so.
Posted by: Jason McBride at January 2, 2004 10:09 AMWhat elevator was that Mr. Koestenbaum rode? I'd love to follow him for a few blocks some day, see what kind of gum wrapper he tosses on the sidewalk.
Guy Maddin
Posted by: guy maddin at January 2, 2004 02:41 PMWhat elevator was that Mr. Koestenbaum rode? I'd love to follow him for a few blocks some day, see what kind of gum wrapper he tosses on the sidewalk.
Guy Maddin
Posted by: guy maddin at January 2, 2004 02:41 PMWhat elevator was that Mr. Koestenbaum rode? I'd love to follow him for a few blocks some day, see what kind of gum wrapper he tosses on the sidewalk.
Guy Maddin
Posted by: guy maddin at January 2, 2004 02:42 PMNote first that favoriteNumbers type changed. Instead of our familiar int, we're now using int*. The asterisk here is an operator, which is often called the "star operator". You will remember that we also use an asterisk as a sign for multiplication. The positioning of the asterisk changes its meaning. This operator effectively means "this is a pointer". Here it says that favoriteNumber will be not an int but a pointer to an int. And instead of simply going on to say what we're putting in that int, we have to take an extra step and create the space, which is what does. This function takes an argument that specifies how much space you need and then returns a pointer to that space. We've passed it the result of another function, , which we pass int, a type. In reality, is a macro, but for now we don't have to care: all we need to know is that it tells us the size of whatever we gave it, in this case an int. So when is done, it gives us an address in the heap where we can put an integer. It is important to remember that the data is stored in the heap, while the address of that data is stored in a pointer on the stack.
Posted by: Helen at January 18, 2004 11:12 PMSince the Heap has no definite rules as to where it will create space for you, there must be some way of figuring out where your new space is. And the answer is, simply enough, addressing. When you create new space in the heap to hold your data, you get back an address that tells you where your new space is, so your bits can move in. This address is called a Pointer, and it's really just a hexadecimal number that points to a location in the heap. Since it's really just a number, it can be stored quite nicely into a variable.
Posted by: Dudley at January 18, 2004 11:13 PMEarlier I mentioned that variables can live in two different places. We're going to examine these two places one at a time, and we're going to start on the more familiar ground, which is called the Stack. Understanding the stack helps us understand the way programs run, and also helps us understand scope a little better.
Posted by: Georgette at January 18, 2004 11:13 PMThe rest of our conversion follows a similar vein. Instead of going through line by line, let's just compare end results: when the transition is complete, the code that used to read:
Posted by: David at January 18, 2004 11:14 PMLet's take a moment to reexamine that. What we've done here is create two variables. The first variable is in the Heap, and we're storing data in it. That's the obvious one. But the second variable is a pointer to the first one, and it exists on the Stack. This variable is the one that's really called favoriteNumber, and it's the one we're working with. It is important to remember that there are now two parts to our simple variable, one of which exists in each world. This kind of division is common is C, but omnipresent in Cocoa. When you start making objects, Cocoa makes them all in the Heap because the Stack isn't big enough to hold them. In Cocoa, you deal with objects through pointers everywhere and are actually forbidden from dealing with them directly.
Posted by: Newton at January 18, 2004 11:14 PM