Posts by author

Ryan Boudinot

  • The Eyeball #42: Talking to Tom Nissley About The Most Dangerous Game

    Last year my friend Tom Nissley appeared on Jeopardy!, winning eight straight games, which allowed him to quit his job as a Books editor at Amazon

  • The Eyeball #41: Talking with Aimee Bender About The 400 Blows

    I’ve been writing this column off and on for a few years now and I thought I’d shake it up a bit by turning it into a dialogue.

  • The Eyeball #40: Unreal Fiction and Film, Part 1

    I’m midway through teaching a course at Antioch University Seattle called Unreal Fiction and Film. Every week we pair a film or selection of shorts with a short story. The class is scheduled from 7-10 PM on Mondays, a brutal…

  • Composing the Wilderness: An Essay on the Nested and Dynamic Model of Nature, Humanity, and Technology

    In July, 2010, I delivered a keynote address at Goddard College’s MFA Writing residency in Port Townsend, Washington, on the theme “Composing the Wilderness.” This essay is included in an anthology of addresses given by Goddard College MFA faculty, to…

  • The Eyeball #39: Bros. Quay, Svankmajer, and McLaren

    Last week for my Hugo House class on using experimental films as writing prompts we spent 88 glorious minutes with House, the 1977 Japanese haunted pajama party freak-out directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi. This week we puzzled ourselves with three stop-motion…

  • The Eyeball #38: HOUSE

    Session four of my six-part class on using experimental films as writing prompts commenced last night at Richard Hugo House. In previous weeks we viewed films by Buñuel, Brakhage, and Anger, moving westward from Spain to Colorado to Los Angeles.…

  • The Eyeball #37: Kenneth Anger

    Are there some films you have to take drugs to enjoy? I asked this question toward the end of this week’s session of the class on experimental films I’m teaching at Richard Hugo House, after spending two hours with the…

  • The Eyeball #36: BRAKHAGE!!!

    I taught another session of my Experimental Films as Writing Prompts class at Hugo House last night. This one we looked at some films by Stan Brakhage. At the outset of the class I admitted that I had no idea…

  • The Eyeball #35: Un Chien Andalou

    I’m teaching a class at Richard Hugo House in which we look at experimental films as writing prompts. I’ve always wanted to teach a film class, and marrying writing exercises to viewings of films seemed like a good way to…

  • The Eyeball #34: The Thorn in My Heart

    What’s going on with Michel Gondry’s career these days? Well, this, for starters…

  • The Eyeball #33: Why It’s Complicated Actually Is Complicated

    You want to watch an on-demand movie with your wife, something funny, something in which you can become invested in the characters’ problems, something from the “New Arrivals” section, and you keep scrolling back to It’s Complicated, a film starring…

  • The Eyeball #32: Two Ways to Deal with the End of the World

    If you’re like me, you grew up running various scenarios about what you’d do if the world were to end. Would you go nuts and run around in a stadium wearing a woman’s slip like the guy in The Quiet…