Genre is powerful, especially in the hands of as gifted a filmmaker as France’s Jacques Audiard. His new film, the masterful “A Prophet,” is an answered prayer for those who believe that revitalizing classic forms with contemporary attitudes makes for the most compelling kind of cinema.

Part prison film, part crime story, part intense personal drama, this all-consuming narrative with the power and drive of a Formula One racer has been something of a phenomenon since it took the grand jury prize at Cannes last year. A “Sight & Sound” poll of 60 critics worldwide named it the best film of 2009, it’s one of the five foreign-language film Oscar nominees, it took Britain’s prestigious BAFTA award in that category and, with 13 nominations overall, it’s a prohibitive favorite to win the Cesar, France’s Oscar, for best picture. (Read More)

From the Flatmancrooked Winter 09/10 Poet-In-Residence, Eleni Sikelianos, comes selected poems, chosen by the poet from her body of work. These posts will appear every Sunday for the next ten weeks, after which a new Poet-In-Residence will be introduced and his or her work featured. This number 10 of 10. The poems featured in previous weeks can be found here: Week 1, Week 2, Week 3,Week 4, Week 5, Week 6, Week 7, Week 8, Week 9

I Too Want to Sleep in America Tonight

I am full of nostalgia tonight
like a sootbag filled with rocks
my hometown’s shining behind me
in the avocados’ glistening skins
The lemon’s electricity socks

my leg is starting to break
but my feet are not breaking
so I can walk

but my stomach is starting to break
around my mouth
says it’s nighttime
where I forget my teeth
& my teeth-shine

my ankle is breaking but my thumb is not
breaking
around my thought

bone particles hover inside the wrist
like a luminous halo of feeling the flesh once hid

Written and directed by Scandar Copti, an Israeli Arab (who also plays an important supporting role), and Yaron Shani, who is Jewish, the film is acutely insightful about the social divisions within Israel, but it examines them without scolding or sentimentality.

There is no finger-pointing here, and no group hugging either. Instead there is a sharp sense of just how deep and wide the schisms are, not just between Jews and Arabs but also between Christians and Muslims, rich and poor, farmers and city dwellers, men and women, young and old and so on. (read more)

I was expecting nothing. Then, after a while I was expecting an extreme provinciality from my Central Illinois. But finally I came to realize that it is not more provincial than one of the minor cities: Pittsburgh or Milwaukee, say.

Maso’s eventual openness allowed her to see the Midwest’s beauty:

This land of stark miracle springing from the extraordinarily fertile earth. Flat earth. Where each night on the flatlands I dream of a curvaceous woman. She cups water in her hands. And I marvel at the beauty of the cornfields and the sky. Count pheasants. Visit what I’ve dubbed the Beckett tree, straight out of Godot. The land is breathtaking in its austerity, in its uncompromising forever, as gorgeous as anything I’ve ever seen. A different sort of ocean.

She also developed a real love for her students and wanted to “celebrate their instincts, their feeling for language, their willingness to try anything” with her:

Writing classes are about trust, of course, and after a while, in the safe place that we have created together they begin writing their dreams, their fantasies, their desires. What many of them write about again and again is a thing they have never seen—the ocean. I am moved by their longing—these children of the Midwest, these children of ISU—cinder-blocked, landlocked. They swim in high water. They never tire. They begin to learn how to write themselves free.

Imagine a classroom built not on stranglehold notions of discipline, of policies and procedures, but on trust, on reciprocity, on freedom, a classroom that’s a safe haven for, as Maso writes, dreams, fantasies, and desires.

My experiences in the classroom have rarely felt that way. More often, it was structured around fulfilling requirements, about having to prove acquisition of key concepts, about putting my guard up rather than being encouraged, and given a safe space, to be vulnerable. So, have you ever had an experience in the classroom where you were free to dream, to fantasize, to express your desires? Have you ever been in a classroom where you felt you could try anything as a student? as a teacher?

(originally published by and reprinted in partnership with www.bigother.com)

DMC is a 50-year-old private firm looking to invest in, produce, and market new consumer technologies. DMC Worldwide senior v-p Anthony Antolino said that Copia is the result of the company’s long-term examination of “emerging markets, content consumption, and what makes consumers tick.” Antolino described Copia as a “social reading platform that combines all kinds of content—books, movies, comics, music—and collaborative tools that let people read and enjoy books together, and, of course, it offers commerce.” 

The hub of the Copia network/device venture is the social network,  a Web-based platform that is free to consumers. It will launch a limited beta in March and a public beta by the summer. Antolino said that Copia offers a distinctive online graphical display as well as a search infrastructure that allows readers to discuss and compare books, but that also attempts to visually recreate book browsing.  While Copia offers the usual social networking functionally—connections with like-minded readers; title and subject-focused discussion groups; the ability to compare book lists—the site offers its own nifty and intuitive ways to do so. (read more)

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“Ready at last?” she said with a touch of sarcasm as he came toward her.

Wolfgang shrugged. He was wearing his good suit with a red and yellow kerchief-tie pulled through a signet ring. She put a finger to it and said, “Hanning, you look like one of those nigger musicians.”

“That’s the idea,” he mumbled. He grasped his coat from its peg and threw it on. “Tschüß, Paps,” he called into the parlor, where his father was sulking, and followed Hertha out the door.

Neither of them spoke as they went, though Hertha glanced furiously at her watch at regular intervals. It was a beautiful spring night; the scent of damp, thawing earth filled the street, the Alsterbach lay still as glass, and the trees rattled and waved their buds in the night air. Hertha’s legs pumped as they hurried toward the station—a tram had pulled up with a screech as they approached. She sat on a bench by the window on the way to the Neustadt district while Wolfgang stood, apart from her, showing her his back, one hand clutching the leather strap, the other thrust into his pocket. At length Hertha tried to talk about the play; a friend of hers, a woman named Aline Bußmann, an actress who had played Ophelia a dozen times, had recommended the production. Wolfgang didn’t care. None of it mattered to him: not Hamlet, not this famous Aline, about whom his mother couldn’t stop talking. All he could think about was the Staatstheater. The place would be stifling if it were full—and it would be, for all the world turned out for master Shakespeare. Wolfgang imagined himself sitting pressed in between his mother and some overfed Hamburg bourgeois, thought of the smell of all those bodies sweating in the theater’s hot air, and knew exactly why Fritz had suggested that The boy get some culture.

At the theater stop, an elderly man pointed at the ring that held Wolfgang’s tie and made a cutting motion with his index. Baring his teeth, he muttered something unintelligible as mother and son stumbled forward to the doors.

“Jesus-God,” Hertha said once they were out in the street. “I told you—about your tie.”

Wolfgang shrugged as though he didn’t care, and strode on ahead of her, hoping that his speed might hide that he trembled with anger—and fear—beneath his coat. He kept on until they arrived at the theater, where an usher asked him to stop until Hertha had produced their tickets. Mother and son took their seats, side by side, each of them brimming with fury, and neither wanting reconciliation; Hertha clutched her bag in her lap and breathed deeply, letting the air out in sharp blasts through her nose. From time to time she fussed with the program, while Wolfgang grasped the armrests of his chair as though he were seated in a fast-spinning carnival ride. Two older women, sisters by the look of it, sat down beside Wolfgang, the one nearest to him constantly touching a lace handkerchief to her nose while the other chattered on about their last visit. On the far side, by Hertha, a man in uniform and his wife were discussing the meaning of the play. Nothing to do with any of that silly Oedipus pap, according to the husband.

Wolfgang made a show of yawning and stretching, for the benefit of both his mother and their closest neighbors. His own performance finished, he propped his chin in his hand in a final show of boredom.

At last the lights dimmed and the curtain lifted, revealing a scene of snow and ice, of towering, jagged rock that on second glance revealed itself to be a castle. Wolfgang did not recognize at first how he had straightened up and taken notice. He hadn’t paid much heed to the palace guards huddled inside their coats, or to the armored ghost who challenged them. Hamlet was a different matter. For almost two hours he forgot the snuffling woman beside him; his mother’s tense body and indeed, every other living soul within that great room had, for him, ceased to exist. Hamlet was played by a slender, dark-haired fellow, not much more than twenty, dressed in simple black clothes and tall boots, who wore a tired expression that Wolfgang could read even from well beyond the orchestra box. He didn’t much care if he couldn’t quite follow the language, or even the intricacies of the story, but O, what a glorious man! Wolfgang’s mouth opened softly, his lips moving as though he were speaking—just to have felt what it was like to be that person, there on the stage, as though he were just now remembering that this was the man he had always wanted to become.

When the interval came, Wolfgang disengaged quickly from his mother and hurried out to the top of the stairs. He felt as though he were shivering, whether from cold or from excitement he couldn’t be sure. The grand hall was full of people, young and old, all of them dressed, as Hertha was, in their finest clothing and jewelry. A number of SS officers stood out, their black uniforms visible among all the colorful clothing, the gold braids and beribboned field gray of the regular army. The crowd parted as a group of four of them passed through, the chant of the Hitler-greeting following them as they crossed the floor. Party armbands and uniforms abounded—officials and senior officers out with their wives. The men boomed their laughter across the space, slurped from their champagne bowl, and filled the air with their smoke and talk, while their wives clutched their bags and sipped from their own glasses, grinning, their sequined shoulders flickering in the light. A woman standing on the staircase, her long auburn hair spilling to her waist and a pale fox stole wound about her neck exclaimed, Moritz, darling!—her voice surprisingly deep and loud, as she took a tall young man by the elbow and pulled him in close for three kisses. Among all these faces Wolfgang did not see Hertha. He wasn’t looking for her.

He ensconced himself between two marble columns. He needed to think. What was this play doing to him? His legs felt strained and weak, as though he’d been sprinting for the duration of the first three acts. His body felt as though it was no longer his, but having fed on Hamlet’s speeches, he had now become something other than the small-framed, hamster-cheeked Wolfgang Borchert. Unconsciously he had adopted the pose in which he had first seen the actor, head angled downward; eyes up, focused, so it seemed, on a particular face in one of the loge boxes; lips at an angle, as though in an angry sneer; hands down at his sides, formal, the tips of his fingers touching the seam of his trousers; his back erect, heels together, toes pointed slightly out.

He had been standing that way for several minutes when his mother found him.

“Hanning?” she asked, as though she were no longer sure of her own son’s face. “I thought perhaps you’d gone home.”

“No, mother,” he said, finding in his voice some new, borrowed quality.

“Don’t you like the play?”

He looked away from her. Hertha’s voice hurt him, though he wasn’t sure why. She said something else, and he turned again. She irritated him; her interruption of his fantasy, her very arrival and continued presence, spoiled every thought and emotion, broke his joy down into anger, and her persistence made it all seem as though this were exactly what she’d wanted. After a time she asked him, “Shall we return to our seats?”

Wolfgang followed her, unspeaking, uncooperative, as though she were dragging him off to school. Once seated she asked, “It’s a lovely production, isn’t it?”

What did she know of lovely productions? he wanted to ask. And what did he care if it was lovely? Couldn’t she see that the play was meant to be anything but? He trembled, waiting for the curtain to rise, eager as he’d never been for anything before in his life to discover how it all came to an end.

The play resumed, rescuing him from further talk, but on the way home, Hertha pressed him.

“You haven’t said anything about the play.”

Wolfgang pretended not to hear her.

“Hanning, I—”

“Don’t say anything!” he growled, turning his back on her as he did. Why wouldn’t she leave him alone? It was as though she had sensed this new feeling that was blooming inside him and sought to stamp it out by keeping him engaged. Their entire trip home was punctuated by her attempts and his deflections. A few people seated close by stared at the odd scene in disbelief, as though they’d never experienced a mother and son who didn’t always get along.

Fritz had gone to bed, though it wasn’t late when they arrived home. In the parlor they found an empty port glass and a full ashtray. A book laid sprung open atop the coffee table. By the look of it, he hadn’t left the sofa all evening. While Hertha busied herself with picking up Fritz’s mess, Wolfgang pulled down a volume of Schlegel’s Shakespeare—it didn’t matter to him which one, the first he could find—and went to his room, without bothering to say good night.

by Matthew Yost

How shall I review The Hermaphrodite?  One could simply label it a humorous book that revels playfully in the unraveling of received meaning, of apparent opposites, of anything under, over, or between the sun.  To be sure, one could start with the tired and true convention of placing Daniel Grandbois’ latest hallucination within its larger literary context.  One could mention his name along the likes of Richard Brautigan, Italo Calvino, Woody Allen, and Dr. Seuss. Yet does one truly experience the fundamental essence of The Hermaphrodite from this approach?  Yes, you say, this is a fabulist work, Mr. Reviewer, I see!  An enema for the habitually realist mind!  Indeed, this assertion appears to be as true as “true” can be, but what of our sacred yet bowlegged hermaphrodite, its unfresh breath “pungent with the odor of protoplasm?”  What is the meaning of this El Hermaphrodita? you demand.  Meaning? I demur, sliding rather pleasurably into convention number two of my literary arsenal, AKA, genre identification.

The Hermaphrodite, I exclaim, could be described — like Grandbois’ previous collection of tales (Unlucky Lucky Days) — as a tour-de-force in various short forms such as the fable, the parable, the fairytale, the allegory, and the creation story.

But what does any of that explain? you observe, rather willfully.

Similarly, I shout, one could say that Grandbois has written in tour-de-force fashion a novel in prose poetry — quite often stunningly beautiful in its hallucinatory lyricism — wherein the sentence as a unit of meaning functions much like the line in traditional poetry, to undermine expected meaning, to defamiliarize rather than linearize: “Simone’s surrender commingled with the cotton fibers of her panties, staining them with fertility icons and incomprehensible crystalline formations like snow. Oceans can be drawn into glaciers to reveal connections between lands.” To expect the unexpected, therefore, is surely one meaning that can be abstracted from The Hermaphrodite’s often startling juxtapositions.

I hate the unexpected! you pout, packing your bags for an Iowa workshop.

Stop, dear reader, I interrupt, one can go even further and point to the journey as an essential form here; although unlike Cervantes’ Don Quixote, The Hermaphrodite’s cast of characters do not, as Milan Kundera says, “go out freely and come as [they] please.”  No, here the journey is best understood as the multidimensional adventure of the mind, perceptually tripping balls off LSD/other hallucinogens: “One day, as Alfred was meditating in his tree, using the knocking of a woodpecker as his mantra, the significance of the hole became clear. It revealed itself as a kind of bird that took him in its beak and soared through the stratosphere and out into space, until the man’s humble hole took on the properties of an astronomical black hole, to which Alfred surrendered, as one must.”

Drugs are illegal, you observe, rather preachily.

Reader dearest, I sigh.

Yes, sir?

Just hush.

And finally, one would be remiss without addressing the supposed memoirist nature of this “memoir.”  Just whose memories exactly are we remembering here?  Grandbois?  The hermaphrodite?  The answer probably falls somewhere in-between, as most of the meaning does here, but one could read this as an absurdist’s metaphysical riff on humanity’s various and sundry attempts to find meaning in the world, which, of course, brings us rather happily back to the question of El Hermaphrodita.  Just what the hell is it?  Neither fish nor fowl, male nor female, the hermaphrodite lives happily “in the bliss of confusion, having surrendered unknowably to the unknowable.”  And that, dear readers, is my final answer to you: The Hermaphrodite is all about reveling in the experience of life — however confusing it may be — rather than attempting to understand or categorize an enigma.  Stop making sense, David Byrne says.  Indeed, we respond, with a cockeyed glance, dropping the tab of Grandbois on our tongues.  Oh, yes.  I see now.  Ah.

by Steve Owen

The day it started, I kissed Bradley goodbye and watched his car move away down the street. Bradley is my husband whom I met on a subway. I noticed him because he had on this very interesting tie with a topographical map of Antarctica spreading down like a spider’s web, with the South Pole at the bottom. And so I said Hello.

I have always wanted to go to Antarctica. I think it would be very clean, and very quiet.

An hour later my mother called. Her voice was breathy and short. She said she’d been gassed while getting coffee in a Cuban restaurant. Someone spilled bleach into a heating vent, and all these invisible, burning fumes were seeping everywhere, and burned her lungs.

I took the train out to the house. She was lying on the couch in the sun room, and her face looked pale and slippery. I put my hand on her forehead and her eyes rolled back, just the whites, sort of fluttering. In this sleepy mumbling voice, thick like chocolate, she said, I think I swallowed that jewel.

I said, What jewel?

She said, That jewel I had in my mouth. Didn’t I have a jewel in my mouth?

She started to cry.

It turned out they had given her some antibiotics and something for the pain, and she was disoriented. I took her upstairs and put her to bed. I had to leave her high heels on, because the ankle straps were very complicated and I wanted to get home before Bradley did. I was glad I went, though—my mother had this wonderful black and white photograph of Tokyo that I wanted but hadn’t had a chance to get. Bradley likes me to be home during the day when he calls. He has a very stressful job.

The photograph of Tokyo was taken from above, and the people in the street look like a moving river. I have always wanted to go to Japan.

I got home later than I expected, and Bradley was waiting for me. He was very angry. He has a nice face and a good nose, but when he gets angry his chin turns bright purple and starts to quiver. We had words.

I went up to my room, and immediately I could tell things weren’t quite right. It’s nothing you would notice at first, just a sudden sense that something was off, and that’s when I realized. The rug. It was on the ceiling! Just stuck up there, like someone had glued it down! It’s one of those oriental rugs, rough like the fur of a horse, and very heavy. Well, I didn’t say anything to Bradley. He has enough to worry about without having to hear about the strange goings-on in my bedroom. He sleeps in his study most of the time, because he works so hard. I decided I would just wait to tell him until the time was right.

The next day I stayed home and watched one of those National Geographic specials on the Amazon. It was fascinating. I have always wanted to go to Brazil. It’s just terrible, what’s happening to the rainforest down there. They’re cutting down more and more trees every day. They call the Amazon “The Lungs of the World.” They say that when enough trees are gone, the world is going to fill up with bad air. I got so upset about the bad air that I walked around the rest of the day breathing very carefully. I just couldn’t shake the feeling that the air was already turning bad, and that any second I’d be flat out on the floor, gasping like a spilled goldfish. And then—I went upstairs to lie down, and my dresser and my desk were both on the ceiling. Just hanging there. As casual as can be.

I wasn’t surprised. I almost expected it. I was a bit startled, of course, but I had some sweeping to do in the bedroom, and after I cleaned for a while, humming a forgetful little tune, I guess I just got used to it.

I didn’t mention it to Bradley that day, either. When he got home he was wanting to have sex right on the living room floor, where I was clipping out food recipes from Bon Apetit, and I felt a little hesitant about bringing it up right then. And the next day, well, that was the really amazing day. Bradley was away on a business trip, so I took my mother to a matinee at one of those old revival theaters. The whole place smelled like nesting birds, sort of stuffy and warm, dry and floury and a bit like unwashed scalp. All theaters smell that way. My mother was breathing in little gusts, sipping from an inhaler every few minutes. And I remember this—it was so strange—she took my hand while the lights went down and she said,

Louisa, nothing bothers you. Even when you were a baby. You never cried. Where is it?

I said, Where’s what?

She said, Your pain. You must have swallowed it. Eat bread, Louisa, eat bread.

They were very strange, the things she said.

I guess she’s right, though, I don’t get bothered.

I suppose I’m just a happy person.

When I got home, I immediately went to my room, because I wanted to see if anything else had happened. I rushed upstairs and flung the door open, and sure enough—everything was up there. My bed, my little night table, everything. And on the night table, there was a glass of water. Full. Even on the walls, everything had been flipped. My mirror, my photograph of Tokyo, and the little hook by my bed where I hang my bathrobe—you’ll never believe this, but the bathrobe was hanging upwards, towards the ceiling. Really. It was like—it was like what I used to think Australia would look like, when I was a little girl. I thought that if I ever went down there, everything would be hanging off the bottom of the world, just barely attached, and you would have to dangle like a chimp, swinging yourself around from town to town. I have always wanted to go to Australia.

Here’s what happened. I put one foot against the wall. Just to see. I leaned on it a little, and I felt a little bit of a pull, and then there I was, standing on the wall. I walked over and stepped onto the ceiling.

I went over to the bed, took off my shoes, and dropped them, to see where they would go. They fell at my feet. I drank some water from the glass on the night table, and then I sat on the bed, looking out the window. This is where everything changes. If you’re upside down on the ceiling and all the furniture is upside down with you, nothing looks different at all. In fact, it looks just exactly the same. But through the window—

I don’t know if I can explain it. Snow. Think about snow. Picture the way it falls. When I watch the snow from my window, it comes flying up from below thick and silent, like a flock of startled birds, lifting off a telephone wire or the roof of a house, and moving as if they are one body. And I know that if I opened the window and stepped out, that they would carry me up, and I wouldn’t fall.

By Alyssa Knickerbocker