Janice Lee's Blog, page 22

Observations on the long take: Interview with 3AM

I was recently interviewed by Maxi Kim of 3AM Magazine and we talked in depth about my forthcoming book Damnation, as well as my love of Béla Tarr, the sentences of László Krasznahorkai, and the long takes of Tarkovsky.

An excerpt:

I felt like I was in a confessional booth, actually giving confession when I was watching Béla Tarr’s films; I’ve never given confession before, but that’s how I imagine it’d feel like – the simultaneous intimacy with distancing and guilt, and all of these emotions all at once. Though Tarr isn’t “religious” in the same sense, the distant and vague ghost of religion is almost more powerful for me than the overbearing presence of it.

Read the full interview here.

 

There is No Redemption: On Writing and Obsession

I have a new blog post over at Bleed, Jaded Ibis’s awesome new blog. I talk about a bit about the relationship between writing and obsession, and a bit about my writing process for my forthcoming book Damnation.

An excerpt:

The long takes of the film opened up for me, not the possibilities of aesthetic contemplation, but ethical and moral contemplation. Redemption, as a possibility, was impossible, but not nonexistent. The feeling of eternity could penetrate my being over the course of minutes. The images weren’t just inviting me to contemplate, there was almost an ethical obligation to mirror back and contemplate the situation of my own particular self, a strange connection between their hopeless situation and my own, a strange hope in the landscape of hopelessness. In my mind, I was giving confession while immersed in these sustained gazes. (To whom?) The experience was meditative, hallucinatory, compulsive.

Read the full post here.

Damnation Book Release / Oct 26

Save the date for the book release of Damnation at Avenue 50 Studio in Highland Park, Los Angeles.

Featuring:

A short film by

Bill Basquin

Readings by

Jared Woodland

Amina Cain

Anna Joy Springer

Jon Wagner

&

Janice Lee

More details TBA.

 

Jaded Ibis Press @ The Last Bookstore / Oct 20

More details TBA.

it’s casual: reading / Aug 23

I’ll be reading next Friday at the Sabina Lee Gallery in Chinatown, LA for a new group-show installation: it’s casual.

Sabina Lee Gallery

971 Chung King Road, Los Angeles, California

Artists include:

Lauren Brick

Tom Forkin

Andy Gohlich

Gil Gentile

Mary Hill

Guthrie Lonergan

Jenny Yoo

Reading begins at 8pm w/ writers:

Janice Lee

Felipe Martinez

Ben Segal and Feliz Lucia Molina

Curated by:

Josh Logan & Tom Trudgeon

Tieryas Visual Preview of Damnation

Thanks to Peter Tieryas Liu for this awesome visual preview of both Bela Tarr’s Damnation and my forthcoming book. See the whole post here.

KEROTAKIS in Platform: Post-Human Nature

An image and text excerpt from KEROTAKIS are currently being featured in this exhibition Platform: Post-Human Nature, at the UCSB Interdisciplinary Humanities Center. Check our details here.

Damnation Now Available For Preorder

My new book Damnation, is now available for preorder. Check out more details on the publisher’s page or add it to your Goodreads list.

Also, the first fifty pre-orders will receive a limited, handmade chapbook, Waiting for the Feeling of Death, a collection of quotes and images, numbered and signed.

DESCRIPTION:

No technique of cinema is as royal and as risky as the Long Take—audacious in its promise of unified time and space, terrifying in what that might imply. Inspired by the films of Hungarian auteur Bela Tarr, famous for his long take, and the novels and screenplays of Tarr’s great collaborator László Krasznahorkai, Janice Lee’s Damnation is both an ekphrasis and confession, an obsessive response, a poetic meditation and mirror on time; time that ruthlessly pulls forward with our endurance; time unleashed from chronology and prediction; time which resides in a dank, drunk, sordid hiss of relentless static. As declared in Tarr’s film Damnation, “All stories are about disintegration.”

ADVANCE PRAISE:

“That a film or a series of films is inspirative of a literary work of the most poetic and sophisticated kind is a rare phenomenon. Janice Lee’s book is the meeting point of two sensitivities of the finest. One is for the most desperate conditions of life in its objectivity, the other is for the most sublime, even divine spiritual reflection of this life. Lee’s Damnation is a beautiful variation on these themes that are at the depth of every film of Béla Tarr.”

- ANDRÁS BÁLINT KOVÁCS, Author of The Cinema of Béla Tarr: The Circle Closes

“Like its image of a furtive Holy Book that drives its bearers mad, Janice Lee’s Damnation hovers with remarkable grace between the sublime states of faith and terror. The graceful immediacy with which she navigates frame after frame of struggling humans caught up in the veils of darkness, thunder and silence, and moral duty bears resemblance to Saramago’s The Cave or McCarthy’s Child of God, though perhaps even more haunted, stripped to bone. “Anything that God takes part in is the most horrific thing you’ve ever imagined,” she writes, and then holds the reader in that vast anticipation, with mesmerizing results.”

- BLAKE BUTLER, Author of Scorch Atlas and There Is No Year

My Response to The Last Vispo @ The Volta

My response to Nico Vassilakis’s “The Last Vispo: toward vispoetics” up now in the new issue of The Volta.

The feature Women Looking at Vispo is curated by Nico Vassilakis and includes work by:Mary Burger, Janice Lee, Kate Greenstreet, Amaranth Borsuk, Katie Yates, Deborah Poe, Sharon Mesmer, Rosaire Appel, Colleen Lookingbill, Melanie Noel, Kristin Prevallet, Jessica Smith, Crystal Curry, Donna Stonecipher

Tieryas Reviews The Other Worlds by Janice Lee

Thanks to Peter Tieryas Liu for this little review of The Other Worlds over at his blog.

From the review:

It’s part of the eohippus Tract series and while it’s only twelve pages long, the pages are packed, in fact, overflowing, with philosophical musings, whimsies, as well as commentary on what defines our reality. What exactly is this world versus, say the world from the perspective of a complete stranger? Communication creates different realities and “ghosts appear only when words fail.” It’s a lyrical conversation, a dialogue born of questions, a discourse exploring alternatives based on skewed sight and the sensitization of a metaphysical retina focused on nebulous truths. Only those truths are powered by the sun:

“Dreams are closer to the real than one thinks, the other reality we access when the ghosts peel our eyes closed and remind us of the past we so viciously try to tuck away.”

Read the full post.