The Roaring 20s

There Is No Year

Some exciting news for anyone in the tri-state area this week! To celebrate the launch of Blake Butler's There Is No Year, we'll be hosting a 4-night reading series in Manhattan and Brooklyn.  If you're into David Lynch, imagery as poetry, and visceral dissonance as enlightenment, Blake Butler is your man.  His writing is stunning and challenging--and he just may be the heir apparent to post-modern masters of the last century like Donald Barthelme.  

Is your interest piqued? Come on out and "try Blake on. Lace him up. Wear him around your neck in wreaths” (Vice Magazine). 

Praise for Blake Butler:   

"Blake Butler, mastermind and visionary, has sneaked up and drugged the American novel. What stumbles awake in the aftermath is feral and awesome in its power, a fairy tale of an ordinary family subjected to the strange, lonesome agony known as daily life."- Ben Marcus

"An entirely original work that does what the best art should do: challenge the reader..Like a 4G version of fiction[,] a metaphor for our new digital age. And like the best of dreams, There Is No Year also sticks in the brain long after the book is set down."- The Atlantan

"Like the best sur-reality, Butler's alien world is made from the building blocks of everyday life. . . . His novels and stories are linguistically twisted dispatches from a half-house, half-body in which the author himself seems to be imprisoned. While he struggles to escape into the outside world, he remains obsessed with what's at the end of the next abysmal hallway." - The Believer

Who do you picture?

When your favorite novels have been adapted into much-lauded films, how do you decide who to picture as you read?

Like loads of bloggers, I am thoroughly enjoying the Jane Eyre challenge on Goodreads.  I read the classic in high school and highlighted it to pieces.  Nearly ten years later, I'm relishing the re-read, wishing the F would linger longer between stops, particularly since the appearance of Mr. Rochester.  I've always been a sucker for brooding men with tragic pasts and lacerating wit, but Rochester is in a league of his own in terms of literary sex appeal. Which brings me to my current dilemma.  

Charlotte Bronte is very clear when it comes to describing the physiognomy of Mr. Rochester.  "He had a dark face, with stern features and a heavy brow" and he is decidedly not a "handsome, heroic-looking young gentleman." In fact, Bronte goes on to tell us he has a "decisive nose, more remarkable for character than beauty" and "full nostrils, denoting...choler" as well as a body that is "neither tall nor graceful."

Frankly, Mr. Rochester doesn't look anything like swoony, chiseled Michael Fassbender (Inglourious Basterds), or like William Hurt, who played him back in the '90s.  My dilemma is this: while I find Bronte's Rochester to be attractive in his own way, Fassbender is ridiculously handsome.  As I read, should I be picturing the authentic Rochester, or the much dreamier actor of the upcoming adaptation?

When you read Pride and Prejudice, do you imagine Colin Firth, Laurence Olivier, or Matthew MacFayden? Do you see Olivier as Wuthering Heights' Heathcliffe, or are you partial to Ralph Fiennes? Maybe you stick with the descriptive text and imagine your own amalgamation. Your own Darcy, your own Rochester.  Either way, I would love to know who you picture.  Enlighten me in the comments?