4x (Publishing Project, Poet's Novel, Pizzagate Fanfic Plus, Beautiful Profiles)

On leaking a new project I've been brewing, Hannah Regel's The Last Sane Woman, Sean Price Williams's directorial debut, & Solondz/Semiotext(e)

I’ve continued trying and failing to write shorter posts on here so this is going to be a sustained attempt to do that!

1. Secret Publishing Project

I’ve been spending most of my free time the past couple weeks on a publishing project I’ve been imagining building for several years now. Finally reaching a state where it’s feeling real and like it can happen soon, so I’m mentioning it here in an attempt to seal the deal. I think I’ll have a preview for paid subs before others, just for fun. Thanks to all the recent paid subs who came through in recent weeks; it’s always appreciated.

2. The Last Sane Woman by Hannah Regel (2024)

Picked this novel up on a whim earlier this summer after seeing it on a prominent display table at Greedy Reads, having never heard of it besides the title and the compelling jacket copy. Essentially it’s about a grad school ceramics artist who begins visiting an archive devoted to women’s art and becomes obsessed with another artist after reading her personal letters and discovering eerie similarities between her life and the dead woman’s. What sounds like a conceit that could offer more on the surface than the interior based on the way books get sold now turned out to be the opposite of the case, as I found the way Regel intertwines the perspectives and lives of both protagonists fascinating and intriguing both as narrative and in psychological effect. I believe this is Regel’s debut novel, having previously published multiple books of poetry, which helps explain her unique sentence and paragraph structures, which continue to shift and blur as the book goes on. I’m not always a believer in the idea that novels by poets are specifically destined to be good; in fact, I’ve probably experienced the opposite and can think of numerous cases where novels by poets are more cute than satisfying. Regel, however, is the real deal, and the effects she employs in how she unpacks the mystery of suicide and miraculous coincidence were truly stunning in a way I hadn’t expected even as I delved in. The way she shifts between styles, too, sometimes like Bernhard, sometimes Delillo, or Lispector, or even Lorrie Moore, felt polished and unique in a way most debut books these days rarely seem to. OK I’m going to stop writing about this novel now before I break my opening rule. Highly recommended.

3. The Sweet East (Sean Price Williams, 2023)

We stumbled on this film streaming last night, the directorial debut of Sean Price Williams, who did the cinematography on several Safdie brothers and Alex Ross Perry films. Since it features a cameo from Andy Milonakis (as a violent conspiracy theorist who shoots up the restaurant where Pizzagate is theorized to have occurred) we couldn’t help but want to watch it immediately. Incredibly refreshing and full of so much energy that once you stop you can’t look back; something like a mix of Gummo and Vagabond and Palindromes and Slacker and Under the Skin in that it follows a young woman who leaves her home and just kind of follows whoever offers her a ride, putting herself in a series of bizarre and potentially dangerous situations while maintaining a chill aplomb that makes her impossible to lose interest in. Simon Rex is well used as a Nazi apologist with a heart of gold haha and the other various subcultures they include feel freshly rendered and real in ways I haven’t seen onscreen. The title kind of sucks but that’s about the only negative thing I can say about it.

4. Profiles

Speaking of Todd Solondz, I loved this profile by Elena Saavedra Buckley for the New Yorker about the path of his career and the many difficulties he’s faced to get movies made that don’t follow the rules: Todd Solondz’s Unfulfilled Desires. It remains shocking if not a surprise that there’s really no standard in media to give carte blanche to creators who establish themselves as separate from the pack no matter how impactful they have been. I can’t imagine having to be a filmmaker who can’t make work without convincing people to give you money; I guess that’s one thing writing has always had up on other artistic-centered industries. Counter if akin to that, this Semiotext(e) profile by Whitney Mallett (whose Whitney Review has also been fantastic) was totally inspiring, demonstrating a model that trusts its own will and figures out the details after the fact. “Sylvère used to say about Semiotext(e) when it was still a magazine that you have to try and reach all of America in order to reach 5,000 people.” Easier said than done, I’m sure, but still a keystone way of thinking for any publishing endeavor worth taking seriously in a landscape like today’s.