Nerve

I spend about half my time writing about Jewish subjects. The other half is spent overseeing the video content at the sex-themed website Nerve.com.

As I don't find too many opportunities to bring these  two halves together, I'm grateful to have the chance to tell you about Nerve's new Web series, "Tight Shots," here on Jewcy.

"Tight Shots" is the semi-true story of six New York film school grads trying to make a movie about the "budding sexuality" of  a 15-year-old girl in the deep south. They are not having much success, and not only because they know nothing about the deep south. There is also the problem of them all sleeping together.

Most of the credit for Tight Shots goes to 21-year-old Oberlin senior Lena Dunham, who created and directed the series. Dunham's resume already includes a feature film she shot this summer,  a short selected by the 2007 Slamdance film festival , and another short, co-written with her mother,  which stars Meryl Streep. I appreciate that I couldn't be more biased, but I really believe that Tight Shots is an important piece of filmmaking.  It puts the talents of a great young director on full display and may be the best example to date of the quality of original Web video.  With our very minimal budget, Nerve Video can't provide Hollywood production value, but I hope you'll agree that Dunham's gift for moving seamlessly between the hilarious and the dramatic more than makes up for the fact that we couldn't provide her with enough lightening or the best sound equipment.

For more info on Dunham and her superb cast, please visit: www.tightshots.tv

For those of you in New York, we're having an official "Tight Shots" premiere tonight at the Two Boots Pioneer Theater (East 3rd between Avenues A and B).  You can no longer order tickets online, but a limited number of seats should still be available at the box office. After the screening of all 10 episodes, the cast will be sticking around for a Q& A.

If you show up and tell me that Jewcy sent you, you'll receive a warm handshake.

Thanks for your time and for helping me to bring Jews and sexy videos together at last.

[Note: Movable Snipe is a week-long feature wherein two writers read and evaluate five blogs, sending each other one letter a day. This week's Snipers are Michael Helke and Fiona Maazel. Michael's first letter can be accessed here; Fiona's response to it, here. Day Two: Michael; Fiona. Day Three: Fiona; Michael. Day Four: Michael; Fiona. Day Five: Fiona.]

Maaz:

I agree with you: one can’t talk about books in polite company anymore without it metamorphosing into talk of movies.

And as if to prove the point, just wanted to say, first off, if you haven’t seen “Pitch ’n’ Putt with Joyce ’n’ Beckett” at YouTube, you should. Feckin’ brilliant, it is.

Back to books: Jane Smiley’s new novel about Hollywood is due to – MERDE! I’m doing it again…

Margin of Hopelessness: The kugel falls far from the deli counter, says Crooked Timber You want to get meta-meta? I just read about us reading about Crooked Timber and reading what Crooked Timber thinks we’re doing. Suddenly I’m very dizzy…

Dunno about you, but I don’t think I’ve ever had what I’m doing mentioned within the same paragraph as the fabled New York Intellectuals. But I suppose there’s a first time for everything, isn’t there? And other clichés. Ever wondered what it means to be “post-ironic”? I think I do: it’s when you think you’re being sarcastic but don’t realize you’re actually telling the truth. That is, talking “in quotes” about things that can be safely said without them.

As of this moment, no news yet from The Elegant Variation about Martin Amis’s teaching stint at Manchester Uni, so check it out at the Guardian. (The Mancs are going to have his balls for breakfast with his scalp as a side salad…) There is mention of Simone de Beauvoir being honored at the 16th International Book Fair in Argentina. Didn’t the Times run a story a couple years ago that the English translation of Beauvoir’s Second Sex is actually rather shitty, and a generation of novice scholars might therefore have derived erroneous notions from it? Too bad this is the end of the line for discussion – would love to solicit your thoughts on that…

Big Bongo: Physicist and QED maestro Richard FeynmanOh, dammit, woman – you scooped me on Richard Feynman! Another late, lamented scientific mind. He and Carl Sagan. If you haven’t read Tuva or Bust: Richard Feynman’s Last Journey, you should. Would have been fun and interesting man to have hung around with: that stoner dewd who actually had a 180 IQ and excellent taste in music, lit, etc.

I read it first at Nerve’s Scanner: Al Franken is running for Senate, and Rudy Giuliani’s declared for president. Would have thought Giuliani’s cancer scare of a few years ago might have put him off the rigors of campaigning; and think Franken hasn’t a chance of winning, as he’s much too much fun to listen to. Think he’d get bored after awhile anyway. Drezner also weighed in with some drive-by thoughts on Giuliani worth pondering.

Maaz, my mighty heart is breaking. As we are being separated, perhaps never to see or hear one another again, I thought I’d bequeath to you a link of Joy Division performing “Love Will Tear Us Apart” as a sort of musical summing up.

Speaking of which: I knew a bit about Nerve and Elegant Variation beforehand but never really gave it a sustained look – so many wasted nights! Well, not anymore, buster. Crooked Timber, Drezner, and 3 Quarks Daily I hadn’t a clue, and am glad that I was clued in before I died. It’s been a pleasure sniping.

(Of course, Fiona, there is always e-mail, you know…)

Helke

[Note: Movable Snipe is a week-long feature wherein two writers read and evaluate five blogs, sending each other one letter a day. This week's Snipers are Michael Helke and Fiona Maazel. Michael's first letter can be accessed here; Fiona's response to it, here. Day Two: Michael; Fiona. Day Three: Fiona; Michael. Day Four: Michael; Fiona.]

Hi, Michael. By now, it should be evident that I don’t read blogs much. I have certainly never read as many or as much as I have this week. It’s been sort of fascinating. One tends to forget how much is going on out there. I have been chastened by the experience. I also realized that I do, indeed, know who Philip Rieff is, but that out of context, all this stuff just comes at me like unorganized data I cannot process.

Indie Presses Save LiteratureI just noticed on Elegant Variation mention of Dzanc Books and their first two titles. I’d never heard of them—which says nothing—but I was excited about what they are publishing. For one, the indie presses are keeping literature alive. They are publishing the stuff that’s too risky for most of the big houses—and by too risky I mean too weird and thus unpalatable to the majority of readers out there. I’m not trying to be a snob, it’s just that most people don’t know what to do with novelty. Because if you can’t turn it into a movie, what have you? I like that Dzanc quotes Gary Lutz and Brian Evenson because when you get endorsements from writers like these, and when you publicize them, you are pretty much saying: We are the real deal. And it’s true, they are.

Apropos the business of the good childhood, here comes the Netherlands. Crooked Timber reports UNICEF’s findings that the Dutch excel when it comes to the well-being of kids. Who doesn’t excel? We don’t, of course. The United Kingdom, too. There follows a paean to the Netherlands that has me wanting to immigrate and then an anti-paean that’s making me feel better about where I am, should I ever manage to have kid of my own.

Professor of Media Studies Jodi Dean: Her website, anyway (who says Crooked Timber's run by stuffed-shirts?)This is what I like about Crooked Timber—they aren’t so bad at flipping the coin, despite the overall lefty bias of the thing. What I don’t like is how self-referential some of the posts are. Like that bit about Jodi Dean and formal modeling; not only is Dean’s post unintelligible, but so is the discussion that follows, if only because this guy assumes we know something about formal modeling beyond the obvious. I suppose most people who regularly read this blog do know about such matters. Me? I’m done. Can’t say the same of Drezner who, apparently, reads Crooked Timber with regularity.

I wanted to watch his bloggingheads tv thing, but I guess I need some intel-based mac plugin. Worth the trouble? No. Maybe I should just read his new book, which looks hot.

Richard Feynman on 3 Quarks: most satisfying. Likewise the snippets from the Orr/Dennett smackdown. It’s getting personal. By time it’s over, they will have long departed from debate over The God Delusion. Did you read The God Delusion? It’s on my pile, just below Anna Karenina, but above Catch-22. Props to 3 Quarks: I learned more from reading the site this week than I have in months.

Unfortunately, I also learned one great way not to get any work done is to read the aforementioned. I have been so unproductive! It’s a little depressing. And when depressed, instead of taking a walk or reading a book, I’ve gone to the Nerve Scanner. Today’s array? A clip from the startlingly unfunny “The Half-hour News Hour,” evidence that John Mayer looks like Edward Scissorhands, and a posing of the age-old question: is Vladimir Putin looker or loser? In short, what 3 Quarks inspires—brain activity, I guess—the Scanner destroys.

I’m signing off, Michael. It’s been fun corresponding with you. Maybe when we meet in the flesh, we can talk cupcakes.

Cheers,

fiona

[Note: Movable Snipe is a week-long feature wherein two writers read and evaluate five blogs, sending each other one letter a day. This week's Snipers are Michael Helke and Fiona Maazel. Michael's first letter can be accessed here; Fiona's response to it, here. Day Two: Michael; Fiona. Day Three: Fiona; Michael. Day Four: Michael.] 

Happy VD, Helke. I once wrote a song called “Immaculate VD” for a friend of mine. “Immaculate VD is what she had, woke up one day predictably sad…” And so on. Awful stuff. But oh, the memories.

Nobelist Dissident: Orhan PamukYou know, I was thinking about the anniversary of the fatwa against Rushdie today. 3 Quarks didn’t even have to remind me. My love life is such that this is the sort of thing I associate with 2.14. Rushdie, on the other hand, has little to complain about in this department. Especially since Turkey is the new Iran when it comes to harassing or, I suppose, killing dissident writers, e.g. Ömer Asan, Elif Shafak, and Orhan Pamuk, who, Elegant Variation tells us, has immigrated to the U.S. To New York, in fact. Don’t you feel like there’s a neighborhood bar somewhere in this story? If your country wants to kill you, dollar beers at the Beekman Arms.

Apropos Dawkins on 3 Quarks, I wonder what he’d say about this Dr. Ross fellow who, according to the NYT, is a “young earth creationist” cum paleontologist who dates the earth back 10, 000 years or 65 million, depending on which hat he’s wearing. I cannot understand this at all. The man’s a scientist working with fossils and data who somehow disbelieves the material he works with all day? Dawkins would probably call him a fool. Have you ever seen the Atheism Tapes? A bunch of interviews with renown atheists, Dawkins and Arthur Miller, among them, conducted by the somewhat windy but always fascinating Jonathan Miller? I recommend them, if they slipped your radar.

As for Drezner and the Center for American Progress’s poll, what do you expect? No conservative wants to hear that even his campadres are jumping ship. I checked the list of participants and while I didn’t recognize a lot of the names—besides Drezner, of course—I did notice the bit where the CAP asked the participants to characterize their bias. I can only assume the self-proclaimed conservatives are actual conservatives, not liberals hellbent on infiltrating the CAP’s poll. On a side note, didn’t that graphic of the poll results seem sort of fancy for Drezner? Ugliest site ever, but nice graph!

On Crooked Timber—these people are really starting to scare me. Why do they all know so much about the American Maoist Movement? And why do I know so little? I went to school with one of the Weathermen and I still know less than these people. What the hell is the Klonskyite CP(M-L)? The farther along I got in the comments, the more my eyes glazed over. I feel like this is a self-indictment, though I am trying hard to make it their fault.

Thank God for the Scanner! I’m not reading Nerve for the content—sorry, Waters—I’m just in it for the laughs. That period lesbian song from Buffy they featured today? Hilarious. She levitates. She cums. She cums under a “Willow” tree. Stop reading the main pages, Helke, and just go to the Scanner.

She went to parties, but grief accrued
Immaculate VD is solitude.

G’night.

f.

[Note: Movable Snipe is a week-long feature wherein two writers read and evaluate five blogs, sending each other one letter a day. This week's Snipers are Michael Helke and Fiona Maazel. Michael's first letter can be accessed here; Fiona's response to it, here. Day Two: Michael; Fiona. Day Three: Fiona; Michael.]

[Note: Movable Snipe is a week-long feature wherein two writers read and evaluate five blogs, sending each other one letter a day. This week's Snipers are Michael Helke and Fiona Maazel. Michael's first letter can be accessed here; Fiona's response to it, here. Day Two: Michael; Fiona. Day Three: Fiona.]

Ms. Maazel:

Your outlook regarding the fan mail as evidenced by your response to the anonymous hangman: too right.

Re: real threats to one’s health and reputation: doesn’t Daniel Drezner know that Vladimir Putin can have him killed? Drezner shouldn’t be surprised to wake up one day to see the contents of his stomach glowing through his shirt.

That's him! That's the terrorist who hit the Snooze button this morning!Of course, as Matt Yglesias of Crooked Timber points out, there’s something to be said for living a life of spying and espionage. Saw Munich the other night and thought, “At least I’d have an excuse for sleeping on the floor of my closet.” Was reminded of key scenes from Tony Kushner’s script after reading this essay at 3 Quarks Daily. Particularly when Avner has that intense discussion with the Black Septembrist in the squat. If they only had Alon Levy refereeing for them.

On a related note: read the following letter by Beirut-based Waleed Hazbun when you’ve got a free moment and tell me what you think.

Re “The Good Childhood”: if you survived, period, then it’s good.

Was going to catch the discussion on that very subject at the Central Library in Madison, Wisconsin, at 7 PM (Central) when I realized that 1. I don’t live in Madison, and 2. I’d be missing American Idol anyway.

See? You’re not lacking for company in vacuousness…

Re upbringing: solidly middle class. And don’t think I don’t make a fetish of it in the right circumstances.

Don’t you find yourself wishing that Drezner was your dad? At least he’d give you a ride to school, come rain, sleet or snow, in which the Midwest is wrapped like a frosty gyro.

Causabon and His Dorothea: Phillip Rieff and Susan SontagRe Phillip Rieff: he was Susan Sontag’s husband, wasn’t he? Helped give the world David Rieff, among other contributions. Sontag said she felt she had married herself into a modern-day version of Middlemarch when she fell in with him. Shudder.

Joan Acocella’s 2000 New Yorker essay on Sontag appears in Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints (Pantheon). Ever read her? (Acocella, that is. Would be very surprised to hear that Sontag never appeared on your syllabus.)

Agree with you about layout of Elegant Variation: very user-friendly. And reading the Wednesday bullet points, one is surprised to see Orhan Pamuk, who is in fear of his life from Turkish nationalists, having chosen the States to live in exile. I would have thought Sweden, myself. Or Canada (particularly Toronto). Pamuk hasn’t exactly had the best things to say about the States, but so what: hope he enjoys however much time he chooses to spend here. At least I hope he receives better than Salman Rushdie, whom the government seemed only intermittently concerned with protecting during the years of Khomeini’s fatwa.

Speaking of the consequences of extremist activities, another shudder passes through me: Justin Clark’s story at Nerve about Gordon Lee, a comic book store owner in Rome, Georgia, who’s been harassed for the past three years for the “knowing dissemination” of images of "sexually explicit nudity, sexual conduct, and sadomasochistic abuse" to minors. Source of the flap? The Salon by Nick Bertozzi, a graphic novel murder mystery set in turn-of-the-century Paris, where Picasso is portrayed painting in the nude. A copy unwittingly made it into the hands of a minor. Call out the National Guard: three years later, it’s still being fought over. Bertozzi weighs in with this interesting observation:

“The Disneyfication of culture has helped contribute to that lack of understanding… I think people unfortunately see cartoons and they see a nice thick line — a lot of cartoonists including myself are influenced by that nice thick line. It's assumed to be childlike.”

I think there’s more to it than that, but it’s a nice starting point for a discussion about how the peculiar oppressive forms cultural ignorance can adopt. Care to weigh in?

I must say that I enjoy reading Crooked Timber dispatches such as this one concerning reaction to an interview with Danny Postel, where the reader response fairly overwhelms the article to which readers respond and takes on a life all its own. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote about the “marketplace of ideas,” and it’s a lot of fun to envision the occasional intellectual slugfest erupting in the midst of it. That’s what the ‘Net was made for, I believe.

Now let’s see what jams and jellies you’re offering…

[Note: Movable Snipe is a week-long feature wherein two writers read and evaluate five blogs, sending each other one letter a day. This week's Snipers are Michael Helke and Fiona Maazel. Michael's first letter can be accessed here; Fiona's response to it, here. Day Two: Michael; Fiona.]

We Love You Guys: The Saudis do Philo-Americanism right?

Hey, Michael. You read the paper today? At Yaddo, there’s always much talk about which house gets the Times and how best to leave it for others once you are done. Me, I read it online. And today I was reading about Iran—Iran is supplying weapons to the insurgency, here is the evidence, here are the serials—let’s start another war. Because that’s what this is, right? Prelude to war? Or maybe I’m just a cynic. 

Yes, yes I am. And so is our good man Drezner. His bit on Barbara’s Slavin’s USA Today piece—the Saudis love us and aren’t afraid to say so!—made me laugh.

I mean, I had to read it a couple times because there’s something weirdly incoherent about the man’s prose style, but once I got with it—the ultimate endorsement of pleonasm—I laughed. He’s a cynic. So the Saudis make nice with us, so what? It’s only a gesture. Or: they’re just getting in bed with the winning side. Or: they’re getting in bed with the lesser evil. We’re doing good! We suck. You get the feeling he thinks we suck. And he’s right. Especially now that Bush wants to bleed even more money from the arts, ostensibly to fund his New War. Because when I need money, the first place I turn is the arts. Jeeze. Does anyone read anymore? I’m serious.

Tonight at dinner, someone was telling me the average novel sells 4-6 thousand copies. How grim. Grimmer still is that a lot of these novels are kick-ass. Collections of short fiction, too. Like The Dead Fish Museum by Charlie D’Ambrosio. Such a good book. Featured on Elegant Variation, which is always stumping for books people are not reading but should. It’s depressing. Sarvas has impeccable taste, and just not enough people are caring. Course, I think I liked the site better before he wrote up what you and I are doing. We’re reviewing blogs? I didn’t realize that’s what we were doing, and now I feel like a lowlife for it. I thought we were just talking about stuff of interest. 

Does the Koran Endorse Bloodshed and Martyrdom?E.G. Hooray for David Markson! I didn’t know some of his early books were hopping back into print until the EV told me. Need book news? Go to the EV. Need to save your life? Not a bad place to start. I saw Markson recently, in New York, and we talked about whether the Koran actually endorses bloodshed and martyrdom, which I rather think it does, though in the same way the New Testament sees Jesus encourage everyone to kill the Jews. I like how in New York there’s such a concentration of writers and artists, you can actually run into one of them and get talking, spontaneously, about bloodshed. I appreciate the city, but I can’t really deal with these bromides about what is New York and who’s got the right to call a spade, and so on.

I’ve been reading 3 Quarks and I like these guys, but there’s still got to be something else to write about. Fuck you, Adam Gopnik? Should talk of New York, in all its irascible and protean glory, really incite this kind of passion? I sort of prefer ye old Crooked Timber. For one, it’s got eye appeal. I’m all about the serif font and feng shui arrangement of text, and the CT pleases me well. Plus they are writing about things that are a little off the beaten path. 

Putin on election monitoring? Most interesting. I have been waiting for him to rewrite the constitution so he can be reelected, but I see that’s not happening. I guess he’s going to take over a large conglomerate someplace, from which he can oversee illegal elections in neighboring countries.

FemBot: Liz Wurtzel's twins aren't nearly as versatileNext post: embodied energy. What the hell is that? I have to go to some other website to read about this thing—energy consumed in creating one unit of product X, wha?—and then back to the CT to read more? I don’t have time for this. Do you have time for this?

Part of what stuns me about the ubiquity of blogging is that people find the time a) to post and b) to read. My life is replete with niggling obligations and tedium—it’s not like I’m saving the world instead of blogging—but still, I have scant room in the day for all this. How do other people manage? My best experience of the Internet continues to be the piffle collected on Nerve’s web trawl. Just a bunch of stupid shit to brighten my day.

I am still looking at the kangaroo man, though he’s old news. He’s been surpassed by eleven gems of culture, like Christina Ricci’s retractable breasts.  Wish mine could do that.

F.