Janice Lee's Blog, page 21

Check out the latest review of Damnation over at Lemon Hound. A milion thanks to to Nicholas Grider for the amazing & thoughtful review.

An excerpt:

In at once both a breathtakingly austere and wondrously lurid novel of the endless now that comes before an unknowable future, Lee manages to not only offer her take on “the long take” but to surpass reference and craft a collective portrait of not-quite-damned but faceless and motionless villagers caught in both the fear and the thrall of being unable or unwilling to break their current “nothing” with a future of a “something” that, as the novel proceeds, you understand as the characters suspect can be nothing other than terrifying beyond naming, an end and beginning, a future from which no one can escape no matter how much they (and we) try to wait.

Read the full review here.

The Transparent As Witness, a poetic collaboration with Will Alexander, is available now for order from Solar Luxuriance.

Order it here.

“The Transparent as Witness as a collaborative text is not so much a fusion as a call and response between two linguistic poles, the extra galactic igneous superstructures of Will Alexander responded to by the sub numinous ghostly human corollaries of Janice Lee. Seemingly disparate at first, two spectacular voices reacting to each other’s cosmic reverberations and echoes, the two slowly meld and enigmatically a third voice seems to manifest, making the text both more complex and surprisingly more luminous. Side by side we encounter such assertions as these: ‘The fragile shudder of the dream wolf who nudges at the small of your back. You are in the wrong place. Or this is the wrong time.’ ‘…in-human suns rising and setting over the wrathful sky of Saturn.’ This is an apocalyptic read, immaculate with surface tension yet riddled with the mysteriously ineffable encounters of consciousness with its other.”

“Will Alexander and Janice Lee’s The Transparent As Witness is testimony of a seemingly telepathic interplay between alien philosophy and vital insight into the Imaginal. They give their thoughts room to breathe, to expand, to inhabit a vertical space branching off into boundless territory where something seems ancient, where language is magnetized to the unseen. It is akin to watching dreams unfold, sustaining its internal momentum through the clarity of ascension. The constancy of their vision is grandiose and in tune with an unborn language. They provide the cerebral ignition needed to come in contact with the infinite.”

Listen to Jon Wagner’s introduction of Damnation at our event at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts via Penny-Ante’s SoundCloud here:

Blake Butler shares his thoughts on Damnation over at Vice, with a few excerpts from the book. –> “Everyone Is a Plagiarist”

Excerpt:

Damnation, a new novel by Janice Lee, is a great new creation in the tradition of directly growing your own organism out of someone else’s blood. Taking its title from the Béla Tarr film of the same name, the book opens with a foreword describing its relation to Tarr’s body of work—specifically his long shots, which is as signature a device to him as an arched eyebrow is to the Rock. Damnation makes no bones about the fact that it sets its world in Tarr’s cosmology, sharing many of his films’ thematic elements: God, love, violence, music, family, ecstasy.

And yet, if you weren’t told of the connection, you’d never know. The novel is comprised of dozens of small moving parts, each quite compact and simple. Essentially, the book follows the effect a cryptic holy book has on a small town. Shortly after it appears, it begins to drive the townspeople mad. The prose has an essential and timeless element, somewhere near the tone of early Cormac McCarthy and the novels of José Saramago, while also quietly subverting itself throughout using deceptively casual formal digressions like lists, clipped dialogue, monologue, fragmented dream imagery, and repeating threads.

Read the full article here.

A new interview is up at Bees Make Honey Creative Community where I talk about writing & my first book KEROTAKIS, published by Dog Horn Publishing.

Excerpt:

When I was working on KEROTAKIS, I was very much influenced by the ideas of Julian Jaynes, especially his book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. I was also reading a lot in the realms of neuroscience, consciousness studies, and alchemy. Michael Persinger was another one. My canon at the time consisted of writers like Kathy Acker, Bhanu Kapil, Camus, & Nietzsche. Today, I’m being affected by writers like Kenneth Patchen, Laszló Krasznahorkai, Cormac McCarthy, & Kim Hyesoon.

Read the full interview here.

Two reviews of Damnation have recently gone up.

Bernardo Villela at The Movie Rat reviews Damnation here.

Excerpt:

It also struck me that since this is a pastiche, my long-burning question about what the best introduction to Tarr would be has found an answer, and it is Damnation by Janice Lee.

…

It’s a joy, and not a wonder, that sketches of frames (re-created storyboards) from Tarr’s films are found in the appendices of the book as well. For the book is not only drawing from said images but expounding on them, creating new ones; a new tapestry. The power of Lee’s work is as undeniable as the films that inspired her and are truly a gift to us all. Do yourself a favor and seek this book out, you’ll be glad you did.

Read the full review.

& Peter Tieryas Liu reviews Damnation for The Lit Pub: “Ekphrasis Becomes Distant Confessional”

Excerpt:

Even in the shortest pieces, Lee makes us feel the onerous weight of time burdened by doubt as graphically startling imagery is punctuated by questions and the ephemeral is flanked by the visceral.

…

It’s a controlled presentation, an auteur not just pulling the strings, but tearing them asunder and seamlessly stitching them back together again. Lee is a visualist that paints with her words the way a cinematographer paints with light. But she’s also switching brushstrokes to fully articulate the psychological diffusion of human ambivalence. The mise-en-scène varies in that pursuit of damnation at the outskirts of society and her choice of film stock in terms of diction bounces from physical bombast to meditational ruminations that alter the visual lexicon.

Read the full review.

A new Interview-in-Excerpts is up at The Collagist, where I talk about writing via excerpts from forthcoming Damnation.

What is writing like?

Sometimes one willingly enters a dark and empty space, the creaking of the loose boards below, the phantom moonlight above.

- I had a dream that I was carrying a wounded deer in my arms. He lay there limp, depending on me completely and solely for the permission to go on living. Then I dropped him into the river. How can you forgive an act like that? Why were we only made to die?

[Read the full interview-in-excerpts here]

The USC School of Cinematic Arts invites you and a guest to attend a special presentation and discussion of the book:

To include readings by Janice Lee, film clips from Béla Tarr’s Damnation & Sátántangó, and a panel discussion on ekphrasis, obsession, Béla Tarr, and the long take with Jon Wagner, Jared Woodland, & Rebekah Weikel.

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7:00 P.M. on Tuesday, October 29th, 2013

The Albert and Dana Broccoli Theatre, SCA 112

900 W. 34th Street, Los Angeles, CA 90007

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FREE ADMISSION. OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.

To make a reservation (FREE) & for more event details, click here.

There is an excerpt from Damnation in the newest issue of The Collagist. Read it here.

I just received my copy of the beautiful Vincent Van Go-Gogh, a collection of art and writing edited by Ali Liebegott. I have a short piece in it called “Van Gogh.” You can help support this cool project and buy a copy here.