Karpovsky looked up briefly from his phone and smiled at the audience. "He's the one over there checking his phone," Cohen said.
It starred Alex Karpovsky, a filmmaker and actor best known for his role as Ray on HBO's "Girls." Karpovksy, the picture of nonchalance, was also at the launch, and was singled out by Cohen as he introduced the film. Also titled “Emission,” it was elegant and evocative-there were scenes of night driving and shots of smoke billowing into the air. Instead, Cohen showed a short film-a book trailer of sorts-directed by Brian Spinks. More a gathering of friends-Cohen seemed to know almost everyone present personally-than the overstuffed bash one would expect for the author of a book feted just last week in the New York Times by Dwight Garner.Īfter the reading, the idea of question and answer session was floated, then immediately and mercifully dropped. Perhaps because Cohen has steadily built a reputation, rather than bursting onto the scene, the launch was a casual affair. It was also about a guy watching porn on his computer in a dingy motel room. The excerpt was a sharp evocation of the dissonances which are the inevitable result of our lives being split between the virtual and the real.
Miranda popkey twitter full#
Introducing “Sent,” the final novella, from which he then read, Cohen explained that it was about "one of the great conjunctions in our time: the fall of the Eastern Bloc and the rise of the Internet, resulting in full employment for young, mostly female-mostly young, mostly female Eastern European pornography talent." "Sent" documents a young American writer's journey East in search of one such young, female, Eastern European he's found on a pornography website he ends up in a town populated by, as Cohen put it "every woman he's ever masturbated to." The comic premise, however, never quite escapes the pall of organized crime, sex trafficking, and the main character's bleak malaise.
Miranda popkey twitter series#
He makes a series of attempts to have her remove the story, each time with rising intensity and aggression.
In “Emission,” the first of the Four New Messages, a low-level drug dealer named Richard Monomian finds his previously non-existent reputation ruined after he drunkenly reveals a shameful secret to a young woman, who then posts the story on her blog, from whence it goes viral. To the contrary: it’s provided him with a wealth of material. "Profound abuse in childhood," Cohen deadpanned.Ĭohen’s relationship to more traditional vices seemed applicable to his relationship with the Internet as well: it’s informative of his essence, but it doesn’t seem to have sapped him of his precious bodily fluids. Asked to explain his impressive work ethic-Georgia Cool, the literary agent who sold Four New Messages (she is now a freelance copyeditor and proofreader) mentioned 12- to 14-hour work days. A few minutes of conversation with him quickly dispel the latter impression. He is also the New Books columnist at Harper's Magazine, where he succeeded Larry McMurtry.Ī neat, compact man with perfectly circular glasses and a strong, steady voice, he presents, initially, as precocious, even a bit dour. At just 31 he is the author of seven books, including the 800 page Witz, which earned him comparisons to Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace. That strategy seems to have worked well for Cohen. Whether that is your writing, or yourself.” So you have to embrace everything as informative of your essence.
Miranda popkey twitter free#
There’s free alcohol at this party that is probably not the best thing to be drinking as much as I am, and you know, but, but, but you have to embrace it all as informing something, because if you don’t then you get into an enormous self-monitoring system where you’re not really sure that you are where you want to be, and you're doing what you want to do when you want to do it. “Your friends have drugs that will hurt you. “You go to a bar, you go to a restaurant, and there’s food there that will probably kill you,” He continued.
0 kommentar(er)
