WP on Zak Smith

[gp]

I didn't realize Tin House was behind this volume - props to them.
They're one of the handful of lit-mags that I can still enjoy on
occasion.  Sure, they have those stories that are manifestations of
style and theory in which the story is secondary, but not entirely, at
least from what I've seen.  Perhaps I am deluded, perhaps I am full of
myself, but it appears as though most lit mags are filled with those
theory-as-opposed-to-story (that might incorporate theory as well, but
without allowing theory to drown them) short stories.  I use "theory"
loosely.  I truly want to support those struggling lit mags, but so
many of them seem filled with stories that go nowhere but are somehow
deemed "good" due to minor details as opposed to overall cohesiveness.
 I will admit that it is possible that due to their nature - a handful
of stories all different that require different approaches / modes of
thought in such dense proximity - I may not be able to remove myself
from their presentation enough to treat each with the honesty they
deserve.  But it is the overwhelming feeling that I get when I open a
lit mag.

(hello, tangent).

On 11/25/06, Ya Sam <takoitov at hotmail.com> wrote:
> this is NOT that self-multiplying article about 'fans still passionate'
>
> Book Notes
> Sunday, November 26, 2006; Page BW11
>
>
> Pictures of Pynchon
>
>
> All of Zak Smith's obsessions, he says, trace back to his teenage years in
> Prince George's County. "The same sort of projects are interesting to me,"
> he explains. "I liked girls then. I like girls now." He also likes comics
> and big philosophical novels. Thomas Pynchon's 1973 novel Gravity's Rainbow
> has long been his favorite book.
>
>
> Here's where the obsession comes in: In 2003, Smith spent nine months holed
> up in his Brooklyn apartment drawing Gravity's Rainbow page by page. In the
> process, Pynchon's images popped out at Smith in ways they hadn't when he
> was just reading the book for pleasure. "I noticed that grids or graphs or
> grid-like shapes were in the language a lot," he says. He also ran across a
> lot of challenging pages containing little more than two people talking.
> "You're like, I don't know what I'm going to do with this," he recalls. And
> the book hardly ends with a visual bang: "The last page is the same two
> people talking!"
>
> Smith trained as a fine artist at Yale and Cooper Union -- his specialty is
> portraits -- so it makes sense that the end result of his endeavor is less
> an illustrated novel than a series of eerie, high art interpretations. None
> of the 760 images contains any of Pynchon's text, for example, though each
> is numbered to match a page in the novel's Viking Press edition.
>
> When the Whitney Museum displayed the series in its 2004 Biennial show, it
> took up an entire wall. Pynchon fans hovered around it pointing out their
> favorite spots. There was Pirate among the banana trees! There was Slothrop
> in the pig costume! There were the B-57 bombers!
>
> Now fans who missed the show can join the fun: Tin House has collected
> Smith's drawings into a volume called Gravity's Rainbow Illustrated, which
> will be released November 28th, just a week after Pynchon's new novel,
> Against the Day, hit stores.
>
> It's not likely that Smith will take on that 1,085-page book, though. "All
> my work is very labor-intensive," he says, "so I don't like to do the same
> project twice." In fact, his last big series, "100 Girls and 100 Octopuses,"
> was conceived as the "anti- Gravity's Rainbow." An arrangement of 98 surreal
> paintings, each showing a woman in a room with an octopus, the series has no
> narrative in it at all. Only when he was deep into the project did Smith
> realize he'd been foiled: The image of the girl with the octopus appears in
> Gravity's Rainbow, too.
>
>
> -- Marcela Valdes
>
> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/22/AR2006112201580.html
>
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