Posts by author
Michael Berger
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Adapting Blood Meridian?
I just found out that James Franco is set to direct the film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian which is the most violent novel I’ve ever read. So I pose the obvious questions: how will he pull it off?…
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My Year In Books
As The Millions keeps rolling out their amazing Year In Reading series, I’d thought I’d offer my own attempt at doing justice to the books in my life, and not just the ones I read this year but the ones…
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The Visual World Of W.G. Sebald
“Sebald is brilliantly visual. He makes you realize with some discomfort that you often fail to look attentively enough at what you see. Another novelist referred to the “phenomenal configuration” of the author’s mind and what astonishes and delights in…
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What John Ruskin Thinks Of Us
“For when we are interested in the beauty of a thing, the oftener we can see it the better; but when we are interested only by the story of a thing, we get tired of hearing the same tale told…
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Vice Fiction
I haven’t followed Vice magazine in a long time. I used to pick it up at the video store, The Naked Eye in the Lower Haight back before it closed up. Vice always seemed somehow noxious the way it both…
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Sam Anderson’s Marginalia
Once more from The Millions “Year In Reading:” Sam Anderson shares his marginalia. I particularly like what he wrote in the margins of a certain Twitter-referencing page in Franzen’s Freedom: “OMG! ROLLING EYES SO HARD!” This encourages me to write…
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The Millions “A Year In Reading”
Don’t miss it! The Millions “A Year In Reading” is underway with contributions from John Banville and Lionel Shriver, among others.
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Fire In My Belly
For me, having been inculcated with pictures of a bloody, naked man nailed to a tree since I was five, any discussion of obscenity, homo-eroticism or sexual violence begins with Jesus, or at least the Jesus that hangs in churches,…
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The Dangers Of Making Art
“To be dangerous is to remind the world of what our humanity means to us, rather than allowing everyone to settle into complacency. To challenge us to dig deeper into reflecting on our lives, instead of just accepting what we’re…
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Rebecca Solnit’s Infinite City
Just to let all discriminating book-buyers know: Rebecca Solnit’s new gorgeously-illustrated and highly-collaborative book, Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas is out now at all independent bookstores.
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The Millions On Creeps
Invoking theorists Helen Cixous and Avital Ronell, The Millions tackles a recent favorite of mine: The Orange Eats Creeps. (I particuarly like this turn of phrase from Ronell: “they rerouted the hunting grounds of the cannibalistic libido.”)
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Kerouac The Tragic Bro
“I first met Dean not long after Tryscha and I hooked up. I had just gotten over a wicked fucking hangover that I won’t bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with a six-foot-five douchebag and…