The Paris Review - A Literary Wonderland
From one of the most classic literary journals of all time, famous for its author interviews (among other things), comes the PR feed. Grab your coffee and conjure your most literary mindset cause you're going to need it. Academics and shut-ins will wet their pants over this. Ya gotta love it!
1,022 topics in this forum
-
- 0 replies
- 216 views
The following photographs are taken from the archives of Lester Sloan, who was a photojournalist for Newsweek, where he documented the 1967 uprising in Detroit, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the kidnapping of Patty Hearst, and the O. J. Simpson trial, from the late sixties until the mid-nineties. The captions are transcribed conversations between Lester and his daughter, the writer Aisha Sabatini Sloan. They have been edited for concision. They are offered here in the spirit of an eavesdropped conversation. While this is a work of nonfiction, the stories relayed here are recollections, prone to the vicissitudes of memory over time. Aisha’s questions and prompts to her fath…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 584 views
Added to “Gen X Soft Club” Are.na channel by Evan Collins. I love this time of year. It takes a little while to adjust to the shorter days, but soon I settle into and relish the long dark hours. Some evenings I turn out the lamps, except for the dim reddish one, lie on the sofa, and listen to terrifying music. I love to feel my heart pound, my stomach drop, my blood move backward. I remember as a child encasing my head in my dad’s enormous leather headphones and listening to his Hawkwind, Kate Bush, Pink Floyd, and Captain Beefheart records in the dark. The padded headphones were a helmet and the spooky eccentric sounds they emitted conjured a nocturnal universe that I s…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 197 views
Author photo by Tang-mo Tan. By 2100, as feared, the earth is scorched. The ocean is a second sky: humanity has migrated to the sea floor, leaving combat cyborgs to play out war games on the surface. After a childhood spent in quarantine due to a deadly virus, Momo now lives mostly in isolation in New Taiwan’s T City, lit by the glow of her screen. In the tightened grip of capitalism, Microsoft has been supplanted by MegaHard; Momo, a renowned aesthetician, applies a transparent, protective layer to her clients called “M skin,” which, unbeknownst to them, surveils their movements and transcribes their sensations, from the nip of a mosquito bite to the “$#@” of an orgasm.…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 212 views
Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter. KENZABURO OE IN 2002. This week at The Paris Review, we’re highlighting work from some of the more than thirty Nobel laureates in our archive, in honor of the Nobel Prize in Literature announcement last Thursday. Read on for Kenzaburo Oe’s Art of Fiction interview, Alice Munro’s short story “Spaceships Have Landed,” an excerpt from Naguib Mahfouz’s novel The Journey of Ibn Fattouma, and Wislawa Szymborska’s p…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 219 views
Photo by Lauren Elkin. Lauren Elkin’s new book, No. 91/92: Notes on a Parisian Commute, is composed of short diaristic notes that she made on her phone while traveling twice weekly to her university teaching post in Paris between 2014 and 2015. The idea that they might be collected in a volume and published did not occur to Elkin at the time of writing; the purpose of her project then was a personal one. It encouraged her to “observe the world through the screen of my phone, rather than to use my phone to distract myself from the world,” she writes in the book’s introduction. At the core of Elkin’s work is a commitment to noticing, paying attention to the everyday and th…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 563 views
We Work Again includes the only known footage of the Negro Theatre Unit’s 1936 production of Macbeth, staged by Orson Welles through the Federal Theatre Project. Above, a photograph of the production: Charles Collins and Maurice Ellis in act III, scene 4 of the play. I am a lover of old things. I could spend hours strolling through vintage furniture stores or flipping through clothing catalogs from the past, but my favorite is undeniably archival video. Recently, I discovered a treasure trove of streaming links: The Black Film Archive. The site, which aggregates lists of comedies, westerns, dramas, and documentaries made between 1915 and 1979, is updated each month, and …
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 559 views
Photo: Erica Maclean The Mexican writer Amparo Dávila (1928–2020) is known for uncanny, nightmarish short stories full of strange visitations and sudden violence. Reading The Houseguest, a sampling of her work translated into English by Audrey Harris and Matthew Gleeson, my thoughts turned toward several people I love who are suffering from alcohol dependency, depression, or other mental health afflictions worsened by the isolation and unemployment caused by COVID-19. These conditions sometimes feel to me like evil spirits, loosed by social chaos, and they are all the more disturbing because of the ways they trick their hosts into participating with them. I find myself w…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 620 views
Ghost Ranch, 2019. Fuji Instax photographs taken by Josephine Halvorson in and around Georgia O’Keeffe’s houses, New Mexico, 2019–2020. There’s a certain weather-beaten tree stump at Ghost Ranch—the U-shaped, adobelike home once occupied by the famed American Modernist painter Georgia O’Keeffe—where Josephine Halvorson, the first artist-in-residence at Santa Fe’s Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, often took breaks from her own work. It offered her a clear view of Cerro Pedernal, the narrow New Mexican mesa that appears in many of O’Keeffe’s desert paintings, and where the artist’s ashes are scattered. From here Halvorson could observe weather patterns forming around the mesa’s ca…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 226 views
Tuxyso, Sleeping Beauty Castle in Disneyland Anaheim, 2013, via Wikimedia Commons. My formative understanding of world events had two acts: the ancient history conveyed in the Bible and the modern arc approximated at Disneyland, which opened in Southern California in 1955, four and a half decades before my first visit. I was ten. My mom and I took a 4:30 A.M. Greyhound bus from Sacramento for the fifteen-hour ride through the Central Valley, past fruit fields, oil rigs, and speed traps, around the Grapevine Hills, and into Anaheim. My mom slept or prayed the rosary most of the way, while I reviewed the two-day game plan I’d drawn up on a piece of binder paper, which I k…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 285 views
Dear Readers, We’ve missed you, and we know what you’re probably thinking: Why is there no Fall issue of The Paris Review? Has the staff taken some kind of sabbatical? Perhaps they have given up on print altogether? (There is, as you might have heard, a national paper shortage.) I am here to assure you that we have not absconded to a Greek island, nor have we (just) been curled up with cups of tea. Since I joined the Review this summer, a flurry of activity has taken over our Chelsea office, which had been uninhabited since the pandemic began and was, as a result, a bit dusty. Things are starting to look quite different around here (thank you to Nick Poe for the table…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 317 views
Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter. PHOTO © OLIVIER ROLLER (DETAIL); MANUSCRIPT IMAGE COURTESY OF GALAXIA GUTENBERG This week at The Paris Review, we’re writing about reading, and reading about writing. Read on for Enrique Vila-Matas’s Art of Fiction interview, Kate Zambreno’s short story “Plagiarism,” a piece of fiction by Chekhov called “What You Usually Find in Novels,” Gevorg Emin’s poem “The Block,” and a portfolio of Richard Prince art f…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 252 views
Max © Reinbert Tabbert Biography is always a matter of joining holes together, like a net, for reasons that W. G. Sebald’s own work explores: the fallibility of memory, the death or disappearance of witnesses, the dubious role of the narrator. All these reasons must exercise any biographer. But Sebald’s biographer more than most. For the holes in the net of this story are many. The central absence is his family life, because his widow wishes to keep this private. Without her permission, his words from privately held sources, such as certain letters, cannot be quoted, only paraphrased. Even his published words, in books and interviews, can be quoted only within the limit…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 578 views
17776 (screenshot), by Jon Bois. Four years after its first chapter was published on SB Nation in 2017, Jon Bois’s serialized multimedia novella 17776: The Future of Football is still my favorite (and some of the only) “new media” lit online. Told through text interspersed with video and graphics that mix satellite imagery, newspaper clippings, and Telestrated sports-field diagrams, the story follows the sentient space probe Pioneer 9 as it flies over the United States of the future: a land in which no one dies any more, but everyone still loves football. With their newfound immortality, Americans have developed more and more baroque constellations of rules for their fav…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 208 views
Frank Southgate, Autumn. Waders on the Breydon muds–little stint, curlew, dunlin and curlew-sandpiper, 1904, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Galloway is unheard of. This southwestern corner of Scotland has been overlooked for so long that we have fallen off the map. People don’t know what to make of us anymore and shrug when we try and explain. When my school rugby team traveled to Perthshire for a match, our opponents thumped us for being English. When we went for a game in England, we were thumped again for being Scottish. That was child’s play, but now I realize that even grown-ups struggle to place us. There was a time when Galloway was a powerful and independ…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 232 views
In Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be. The Fortnight in September was republished this month by Scribner. “The man on his holidays becomes the man he might have been, the man he could have been, had things worked out a little differently,” writes R. C. Sherriff in The Fortnight in September, his unassuming but utterly beguiling tale of an ordinary lower-middle-class London family during the interwar years, on their annual holiday to the English seaside town of Bognor Regis. “All men are equal on their holidays: all are free to dream their castles without thought of expense, or skill of architect.” First published in…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 207 views
Tyshawn Sorey. Photo: Sharif Hamza. Tyshawn Sorey is a remarkable figure in contemporary music. For the past twenty years, he has been among the most highly regarded and in-demand drummers in avant-garde jazz, playing with major contemporary figures such as Steve Coleman, Kris Davis, Vijay Iyer, and Steve Lehman, as well as veterans like Marilyn Crispell, Myra Melford, Roscoe Mitchell, and John Zorn. On albums like Alloy, The Inner Spectrum of Variables, and Verisimilitude—the trilogy of trio records he released between 2014 and 2017—he blurs the boundaries between jazz and classical music, exploring sound textures and patches of silence as well as driving rhythms. Over …
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 215 views
Caio Fernando Abreu. Photo courtesy of Adriana Franciosi. First Letter for beyond the Walls Something happened to me. Something so strange that I still haven’t figured out a way to talk about it clearly. When I finally know what it was, this strange thing, I will also know the way. Then I’ll be clear, I promise. For you, for myself. As I’ve always meant to be. But for now, please try to understand what I’m trying to say. It is with significant effort that I write you. And that’s not just a literary way of saying that writing means stirring the depths—like Clarice, like Pessoa. In Carson McCullers it hurt physically, in a body made of flesh and veins and muscle. For i…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 234 views
Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter. In His Analysands’ Chair, 2000. This week at The Paris Review, we’re thinking about psychoanalysis and the interpretation of dreams. Read on for Adam Phillips’s Art of Nonfiction interview, an excerpt from Sigrid Nunez’s novel The Friend, Joanna Scott’s short story “A Borderline Case,” and Mark Scott’s poem “Freudian Tenderness,” as well as selections from a 1984 portfolio of Louise Bourgeois drawings. Inter…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 233 views
As the only Jew in my class, it fell to me to introduce the single Hanukkah song included in the annual winter concert at Randolph Elementary. All I had to do was approach the microphone and name the preceding song (That was “Silent Night”) and say what we were singing next (Now we will present “Hanukkah, Oh Hanukkah”) and then return to my place on the metal bleachers which had been set up in the cafeteria for the performance. I wasn’t a shy kid, but this task absolutely terrified me, and I worried about it for weeks in advance of the concert. As soon as I knew the names of the songs in question, I would lie awake at night practicing, repeating the words so often their s…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 229 views
Samuel David Colkett, Landscape with Cottage, 1842, oil on canvas, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. The path to the Oracle was best before dawn, past the pond sleepily switching from frogsong to birdsong, through the dark woods fringed with ferns, up the hill so steep that no matter how slowly I went, I was always out of breath when I reached the top. Three years ago, my parents contracted with a logging company to do what they thought was routine cutting of their two hundred and fifty thickly forested acres in New Hampshire. Perhaps they were thinking of men in picturesque plaid shirts with axes and the careful removal of a few choice maples; instead, a machine of …
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 596 views
Linus Borgo, Bed of Stars: Self-Portrait with Elsina and Zip, 2021, oil on canvas, 46 x 68″ (detail). Linus Borgo makes consistently uncanny and gorgeous work, some of which will be featured at Steve Turner Gallery in Los Angeles this January. My favorite of their self-portraits—deadlocked with Fuzzy FTM Transsexual Amputee Plays with Magic Wand and Poppers (Self Portrait)—is Bed of Stars: Self Portrait with Elsina and Zip, in which Linus lies in a pool of deep blue, star-stamped sheets, an oblique banner of sunlight across his torso and thighs, his body filling the frame, toes nearly poking through the border. It’s a work that questions what it is to reproduce an image,…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 284 views
The first thing that needs to be noted about the collected works of MacKenzie Bezos, novelist, currently consisting of two titles, is how impressive they are. Will either survive the great winnowing that gives us our standard literary histories? Surely not. Precious few novels do. Neither even managed, in its initial moment of publication, to achieve the more transitory status of buzzy must-read. But this was not for want of an obvious success in achieving the aims of works of their kind—that kind being literary fiction, so called to distinguish it from more generic varieties. In Bezos’s hands it is a fiction of close observation, deliberate pacing, credible plotting, bel…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 291 views
Photo: Tereza Červeňová/Morgenbladet When Amia Srinivasan published her essay “Does Anyone Have the Right to Sex?” in the London Review of Books in early 2018, several months into the public discussions surrounding #MeToo, it provoked many strong feelings—not to mention gave the world the sentence: “Sex is not a sandwich.” Opening with a reading of the incel manifesto written by the perpetrator of the Isla Vista killings, it became a far-reaching meditation on the ideological, political, and public dimensions of sexual desire and how we might begin to think more critically about them. Srinivasan trained as a philosopher at Yale and then Oxford, where she has since estab…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 243 views
Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter. Ali Smith, with Leo, in Cambridge, 2003. This week at The Paris Review, the leaves are changing, the air is cooling, and the autumn equinox approaches. Read on for Ali Smith’s Art of Fiction interview, Robert Walser’s work of fiction “From the Essays of Fritz Kocher,” and Reginald Shepherd’s poem “A Muse.” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? You’ll a…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 232 views
In her monthly column The Moon in Full, Nina MacLaughlin illuminates humanity’s long-standing lunar fascination. Each installment is published in advance of the full moon. Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, ca. 1558, oil on canvas mounted on wood, 29 x 44″. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. In 1957, the first satellite was launched into orbit around the earth. A gleaming metallic sphere about two feet in diameter with four long antennae, it had the look of a robot daddy longlegs. It weighed a hundred and eighty-four pounds and sped through space at about eighteen thousand miles per hour. After three months and more than fourteen hundred sp…
Last reply by Admin_99,
ALGONKIAN SUCCESS STORIES
WTF is Wrong With Stephen King?
-
AAC Content Stream
-
-
-
-
-
0
The Usherette (Historical Fiction). Meeting Orson Welles
Scene: Chapter Four. Jo returns to New York from visiting Madeleine in Florida after receiving a telegram from Orson Welles asking to meet. He wants to premiere "Citizen Kane" at the Palace Theater and needs someone to show him around. The scene captures Jo's passions and core decency - and why the movies matter to her. He wanted to meet at midnight.docx -
-
-
-
0
Demystifying the Blog Tour: A Powerful Marketing Tool for Your Book Launch and Beyond
A blog tour is a marketing campaign that involves coordinating a series of blog posts and online promotions to create buzz and generate exposure for your book. It typically involves collaborating with bloggers and influencers who have an audience that aligns with your target readership. These bloggers will read your book, write reviews, host author interviews, and feature guest posts or excerpts from your book on their blogs. The goal is to reach a wider audience and generate interest in your book within their established community. The Blog Tour Framework Here's a breakdown of the framework for a typical blog tour: Identify and contact bloggers: Research and compile a list of relevant bloggers who cater to your book's genre or niche. Reach out to them via email or through their website's contact form, expressing interest in collaborating on a blog tour. Provide review copies: Offer a digital or physical copy of your book to the interested bloggers, allowing them time to read and review it before the tour begins. Create tour schedule: Coordinate with the participating bloggers to create a schedule for the tour. Each blogger will have a designated day to feature your book on their blog and share their review, interview, guest post, or any other agreed-upon content. Create content: Prepare author interviews, guest posts, or excerpts that you can provide to the bloggers to publish on their respective blogs. These pieces of content should be engaging and relevant to your book, enticing readers to learn more about it. Promote: As the blog tour progresses, actively promote each blog post across your own social media channels and any other platforms you use. This will help generate more visibility and encourage your existing followers to visit the blogs hosting your content. Engage with readers: Throughout the blog tour, make an effort to engage with readers who leave comments on the blog posts. Responding to their comments and answering their questions will help build a connection and potentially lead to more interest in your book. Blog Tour Benefits The benefits of a blog tour can be significant for your book launch or generating interest long after your book has been released. Some potential advantages include: Increased exposure: By leveraging the established audiences of bloggers and influencers, you can reach a wider audience that may not have been aware of your book otherwise. Social proof: Positive reviews and endorsements from bloggers can lend credibility to your book, encouraging readers to take a chance on it. Networking opportunities: Collaborating with bloggers and influencers can expand your network within the literary community, opening doors to potential future partnerships or opportunities. Enhanced online presence: The blog tour generates online content related to your book, increasing your online presence and searchability, which can have long-term benefits for your author platform. When to Plan a Blog Tour Determining the best time to have a blog tour for your book largely depends on your specific goals, timeline, and the nature of your book. However, there are a few general considerations to keep in mind when planning the timing of your blog tour: Book launch date: Ideally, you'll want to schedule your blog tour around your book's launch date. This ensures that the tour generates maximum buzz and attention during the critical period when your book becomes available to the public; however, a book tour can also help reignite interest in your book long after it’s been published.. Pre-launch promotion: Consider starting your blog tour a few weeks before your book's official launch. This gives bloggers and influencers ample time to read and review your book, and it allows you to generate buzz and anticipation leading up to the release. Pre-launch promotion can help build excitement and generate pre-orders or early sales. Availability of review copies: Ensure that you have review copies of your book available and ready to send out to bloggers well in advance of the blog tour start date. This allows sufficient time for bloggers to read the book and prepare their content for the tour. Consider providing digital copies for ease and quick distribution. Audience availability: Take into account the preferences and availability of your target audience. If your book caters to a specific season, genre, or holiday, it might be beneficial to align your blog tour with that theme or timeframe. For example, a romance novel might benefit from a blog tour around Valentine's Day. Other marketing efforts: Consider coordinating your blog tour with other marketing initiatives you have planned. This could include social media campaigns, advertising, or other promotional activities. A coordinated approach can amplify your book's visibility and impact. Blogger availability: Reach out to bloggers and influencers well in advance to secure their participation and confirm their availability for the tour. Keep in mind that popular bloggers may have busy schedules, so it's beneficial to plan ahead and be flexible with scheduling to accommodate their availability. Ultimately, the best time for a blog tour is when you have everything in place, including review copies, promotional materials, and a solid plan for engaging with bloggers and readers throughout the tour. Take the time to strategically plan and execute your blog tour to maximize its impact on your book launch or relaunch. Did you know WOW! Women on Writing offers blog tours as part of our marketing services? If you're interested in exploring professional assistance for your blog tour and other book marketing endeavors, check out WOW! Women on Writing's book marketing packages. We offer comprehensive and tailored solutions to help authors like you navigate the world of book promotion. Our team of experts can guide you through the process, provide valuable insights, and connect you with influential bloggers and reviewers in your genre. By leveraging the expertise and network of WOW! Women on Writing, you can enhance the effectiveness of your blog tour and ensure your book receives the attention it deserves. Learn more here or contact blogtour@wow-womenonwriting.com with questions. (C) Copyright wow-womenonwriting.com Visit WOW! Women On Writing for lively interviews and how-tos. Check out WOW!'s Classroom and learn something new. Enter the Quarterly Writing Contests. Open Now![url={url}]View the full article[/url] -
0
Whatcha Reading? May 2023, Part Two
It’s time to wrap up May with our second Whatcha Reading! It’s also Memorial Day weekend in the States, which seems like a perfect excuse to get even more reading done before the month is over. Sneezy: I’m reading Right Wing Women by Andrea Dworkin. She takes no prisoners. Sarah: What’s that? The library has the next Veronica Speedwell audiobook? Don’t mind if I do! Currently listening to A Murderous Relation ( A | BN | K | AB ) and having a splendid time. The audiobook performance by Angele Masters is terrific. A | BN | KShana: I just finished a YA romcom that gave me the biggest book hangover, Highly Suspicious and Unfairly Cute by Talia Hibbert. So much banter and sweetness! I’m now reading The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka Older, and liking it so far. Elyse: I just finished The Daydreams. ( A | BN | K ) Some of it was how awful tabloids were to young female stars in the aughts (Lindsay, Britney etc), but each of the main characters does something really shitty to another so it’s hard to really like any of leads. It was meh. Lara: Elyse recommended Loreth Anne White’s The Maid’s Diary ( A | BN ) and I’m hooked. No romance, but the suspense is phenomenal so far. Whatcha reading? Let us know in the comments! View the full article -
1
Book Lovers: Know Your Tribe
Another fundamental that makes a whole lot of sense, esp marketing wise. -
5
Writing Hot Sex Scenes - Saints Preserve Us!
I've been trained. It works! -
1
Crucial Self-Editing Techniques - Don't be Hostage to a Line Editor
If you knew how many writers this has positively impacted, you'd say, it's no wonder. Fundamentals like this are too often neglected. -
0
Podcast 564, Your Transcript has Bunny Ears
The transcript for Podcast 564. Bunny Aliens in Space: Cover Design with JL Logosz has been posted! This podcast transcript was handcrafted with meticulous skill by Garlic Knitter. Many thanks. ❤ Click here to subscribe to The Podcast → View the full article -
-
0
Paul Schrader’s Master Gardener Doesn’t See the Forest for the Trees
Master Gardener is the third in Paul Schrader’s “God’s Lonely Men” trilogy, in each film of which a weary middle-aged man who has previously experienced alienation from mainstream society contends with his haunted past and hazy future, reflecting on these things, and his rote daily existence, via diary-keeping—a technique that suffices until his world is challenged by knowledge of something greater, and tested by a newfound bond with a distressed young person. Via these characters, the films in this trilogy tend to pair and interrogate the relationship between two normally unrelated topics: religion and climate change (First Reformed, 2017), gambling and the War on Terror (The Card Counter, 2021), and horticulture and racism (Master Gardener, 2022). Schrader is an accomplished, highly literary storyteller and his interests (particularly the the masculine-coded concepts of destruction and violence) have produced some of film’s most fascinating inquiries into the ills of modern society, from Taxi Driver to Affliction to American Gigolo, to First Reformed and The Card Counter. First a film critic and then a screenwriter (responsible for classics like Raging Bull and Obsession and famous for his collaborations with Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma), Schrader’s later work as a director is epitomized by the triad of films about “God’s Lonely Men,” three anti-social anti-heroes in crisis: a self-loathing pastor, a troubled gambler, and a secretive gardener, all reckoning with the sudden collision of themes, lives, selves once kept at a distance. Many of his protagonists, but especially these three, can be read as homages to Alain Delon’s Jef Costello in Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1967 film Le Samouraï: cool, reserved, highly-competent professionals whose whose adherence to rituals and observances leaves them unprepared to confront unforeseen cataclysms. It’s almost never useful to compare films in a director’s oeuvre to one another; despite similarities, each is its own discreet contribution. But Schrader’s films are designed to reference each other—or, really, The Card Counter and Master Gardener are designed to reference First Reformed—so please forgive me while I place them all side-by-side for a moment. In First Reformed, Ethan Hawke plays Ernst Toller (no, not that Ernst Toller), a cheerless reverend at a small antique church upstate who keeps a diary of his own stark life the year he happens to encounter a distraught climate activist who opens his eyes to the ravishment of God’s green earth by greedy corporations, as well as the ways God’s own church is influenced by corporatization to the point of disregarding the stewardship of the planet. That film, a simmering hagiography of a soul in turmoil, provides the blueprint for Schrader’s subsequent two films, not only thematically, but also stylistically, in the terms I mentioned in the opening paragraph. The films are dark, lonely meditations into their protagonists’ natures, told via their floridly-written, allusion-rich journal entries, as they finally confront aspects of their lives and their worlds they have kept at bay for so long. The Card Counter inherits the framework of First Reformed, but reworks it enough for it to feel distinct; Oscar Isaac plays William Tell (no, not that William Tell), a former military interrogator and now card-counter, who carpetbags from casino to casino, living out of austere motels, until he meets a young man who informs him that he knows his true identity, as a soldier who served jailtime for his role in the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, and asks for his help committing an act of revenge against one of Tell’s military superiors. This film slowly explores the human capacity for both empathy and cruelty, teasing out the relationship between “keeping one’s cool” and “losing it.” I don’t have as conclusive a reading of the forces at work Master Gardener, arguably the film in this trilogy with the toughest conceit. Joel Edgerton plays Narval Roth, a taciturn head gardener of Gracewood Gardens, a privately-owned estate with gardens that are open to the public. Narval manages a team of polo-clad young people, overseeing their work but also instructing them in the history, philosophy, and science of horticulture. He answers to no one, except Norma Haverhill (Sigourney Weaver), the wealthy owner of the estate, who throws his carefully cultivated world out of order when she demands he take on an apprentice, her grand-niece Maya (Quintessa Swindell). Maya is biracial, the daughter of the “wayward” daughter of Norma’s sister, who left the family and “fell in with a bad crowd,” as Norma purrs. Maya seems to be her only relative left, so she is eager to draw her into the family—but not enough that she doesn’t insist that she work on the family’s land, first. Maya is a curious, intelligent twenty-something, surprisingly accepting of the fact that she’s a minimum wage worker on her great aunt’s estate. Norma wants Narval to educate her, teach her about the maintenance and culture and theories of horticulture, so that she might be able to pursue a career in the field in the future. Maya takes kindly to this earthy finishing school, especially because she appreciates the softspoken and passionate manner of Narval, her teacher. The movie appears to take place in the South (it was filmed in Louisiana), and the house looks like a plantation estate, so it seems like there might be some interesting explorations into contemporary white supremacy, the way Norma insists that Maya be fashioned into a more refined version of herself in order to be welcomed into her family tree, and simultaneously wants this self-improvement to take place as a farm-worker beneath her, and literally in the dirt. But the film wobbles from here on out, mostly because we learn about the haunted, Narval’s past as a soldier of a Neo-Nazi army, before turning state’s evidence against them and going into witness protection. Under his clothes, he is covered in White Pride and Hitler-fandom tattoos, which he looks at disparagingly in the mirror. He likes his current life as a peaceful caretaker of the Gracewood Gardens, is glad to have distanced himself from the silo of racism, misogyny, antisemitism, and violence in which (he explains) he was raised. That Maya and Narval form a bond, while he also has flashbacks to things that his proud boy/hillbilly cult leader told him about how his job is to “pull out the weeds,” suggests that Master Gardener will become a thriller about the insidiousness of white supremacy, juxtaposing it with a reading of gardening as a kind of fascism (or at least, a way to disguise it). In other words, perhaps Narval’s solitary salvation in gardening for a racist white lady becomes an outlet for the very impulses that allowed him to thrive in a fascist cult in the first place. Master Gardener doesn’t till this ground, though, which is fine, but it also doesn’t do anything else productive with all of these rich, ripe, and (productively) thorny thematic concerns. What begins as an incredibly fruitful plot soon wilts and shrivels into a wandering love story; and the kind of discipline and restraint that Narvals brings to his gardening becomes, exactly, the element missing from the story itself. Master Gardener quickly forgets its powerful portrayals about white supremacy and racism when it becomes interested in whether or not its protagonist can be redeemed, can be saved, and, in giving him some way to carry this out, represents Maya as needing to be saved by someone, too. If this narrative shoot were to blossom into a meaningful development (unlikely as it is), we would need a clearer understanding of Narval’s life or background, a focused explaining of how he has come to be changed in the first place. But more importantly, this whole angle not only misses out on saying anything thoughtful about race in America, but also robs Maya of the opportunity to be more than a plot device, perhaps (especially in light of Swindell’s elegant performance), the greatest sin of all. What results is a confusing film, overgrown in some areas and under-seeded in others. Instead of becoming as thoughtful and risky an exploration as The Card Counter, Master Gardener becomes like a game of 52-card pickup. It’s as if Schrader has a deck of cards and instead of laying them out strategically, throws them all in the air and lets them come down where they will. Instead of become the focused sermon of First Reformed, Master Gardener becomes one of those themed themed refrigerator poem packs. It has a lot of terms on the table, but shuffles them around until they say almost absolutely nothing. View the full article
-
