Table-talk of Parkus Grammaticus for March 3

I. Parkian fiction and nonfiction:

A) Another bit of the novel The Dizzies has cropped up in a new anthology, 3:AM London, New York, Paris. It's called "The Alchemists"! First line: "But first a little bit about me." (Other bits have appeared here, here, and here.)

B) Speaking of anthologies out in March, the Atkinson-edited Exile Cinema (with my pre-Host Bong Joon-ho piece) comes out this week....yes?

II. New Cinema Scope has part 2—or shall we say "Track 1b"?!—of B. Kite's Rivette epic! Also: Edward Crouse on The Darjeeling Limited, Tony Rayns's eye-opening piece on a Korean movie so alarming-sounding that I've repressed the title, Dizzyhead Jason on Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg, Dizzyhead Jessica on Lady Chatterley...I am no longer qualified to write for this excellent magazine!

III. Ten Words has a new writer—Mr. Levi Stahl! (Who is even more of a Powellite than I am—he has actually read Violet Powell's memoirs!)

The connections: Korean cinema edition

In "The Bong Show," my essay on Bong Joon-ho's first two (pre-Host) films, originally published in Cinema Scope, I mention a TV show that the cops are watching in one scene: Inspector Chief. Man-of-many-hats Mike Atkinson (Babylon Fields! Zero for Conduct! Some novels! Flickipedia!) is compiling the index to Exile Cinema, an anthology of film writing in which the piece will appear; he asked if I knew whether the show was real or a fiction created for the film. A few mouseclicks revealed...It's real!:

Now their upcoming project has been announced: Han Hyung-Mo's 자유부인 (Madame Freedom) from 1956. The film is perhaps the prototype for future Korean melodramas, describing social and popular trends in postwar Korea, along with Director Han's usual eye for composition, innovative editing and filming techniques (he was the first Korean director to seriously take advantage of crane shots). The film was adapted from a work by Jung Bi-Seok, which was serialized over 8 months in the Seoul Shinmun from Fall 1954. It aroused a big debate in the Korean Press over the issues depicted, the morality and social values of the characters, with Professor Hwang San-Deok criticizing the film so much it became even more popular. It starred Park Am - who would later star on many TV Drama, including the landmark 수사반장 (Inspector Chief) - Kim Jung-Rim and Joo Seon-Tae.

The connections: When I spoke to Gina Kim this summer about her film Never Forever, she cited Madame Freedom as an influence.

Dizzies Newsfeeds™ for Wednesday, July 25

Named for the Arabic word whose triliteral root - ayn, jeem, meem - holds such antithetical meanings as to clarify and elucidate and to make ambiguous and foreign, "I'jaam" follows the prison diaries of Furat, a young poet who keeps a record of his dreams and nightmares during his incarceration in Baghdad. Already jailed for writing off the official script, Furat takes precautions: He obscures the meaning of his words by leaving off the diacritical dots that distinguish about half of the letters in the Arabic alphabet from one another.

Two memos bracket the narrative: One acknowledges the discovery of Furat's manuscript and assigns the task of deciphering it; the other reports back on the task's completion. Whether by accident or design, the second memo leaves readers to puzzle over the liberties taken in the translation and interpretation of the text that lies before it. Meaning in "I'jaam" is forcefully unstable, and the recuperation of Furat's writing is deliberately, creatively left open to question.

—"A ruined manuscript, a broken country and the cryptic missives of a young man from Baghdad," in The Daily Star (Lebanon), by Kaelen Wilson-Goldie (who worked, long, long ago, at the PTSNBN)

I am always attracted to words like manuscript and cryptic, aren't you?

(Via Complete Review)

* * *

From Jane Dark's Sugarhigh:

[O]ne way to understand [Transformers] is as a sort of measuring device displaying the necessary distance of fantasy at which the events in question can be screened. Or as a particular registration of the certainty that this one day in history is to be the Rosetta Stone of American cultural imagery for the foreseeable future.

* * *

Jacques-rivette.com posts "Track One" of B. Kite's Rivette opus, originally seen in the pages of Cinema Scope. How's this for a beginning? I love how it's one huge, continent-sized sentence...

When a submerged continent rises suddenly to the surface, and one is able to visit territories that had been relegated to the fabulous by their previous inaccessibility, and trace continuities and significant ruptures between what had seemed isolated promontories, when there are new languages to learn and histories to uncover in urban centers still impossibly vibrant with life despite their decades of undercover existence, that, you may say, is a hell of a thing, and one steps out onto ground still redolent of fish and spackled with seaweed with excitement and apprehension, not least at the fact of one's own inevitable inadequacy as explorer, at a time when one stays close to home, keeping company with the cats, so seldom finding new neighborhoods, let alone new worlds.

Dizzies Newsfeeds™ for Thursday

Mollie on stamps!...New Ghost!....At Hua's place, Dave Tompkins has some Frampton-vocoder madness....In the latest Cinema Scope, Dennis talks to Abel Ferrara! Jessica gets (so to speak) Knocked Up!.....And now it's time to get really overheated with some "Soul Raga Cookin'," circa 1969, by a group called—The Believers! (Via the invaluable Office Naps)