Doris Day might be alive, but she probably won’t factor into your weekend. But here are some things that will—some you might have forgotten about, and some you haven’t had the chance to remember.

FRIDAY

Nearly every week, NYU’s public reading series opens its doors to whoever for a chance to listen to some of the most innovative, current voices in poetry and fiction. Starting at five Joshua Beckman will be reading from his new poetry collection Take It. The reading will be held at the Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House on 58 West 10th Street, between 5th and 6th Avenues.

SATURDAY

Art Hack Day is a celebration of artists and hackers—especially those who are both. Although the events at 319 Scholes kick off earlier in the week for collaborators and online audiences (on what? We don’t know), the doors only open to the public on Saturday for a closing exhibition, performances, and a blowout party.

SUNDAY

It’s nice just to be reminded once in a while of the KGB’s Sunday Night Fiction, although many of you probably don’t need reminding. This week Rebecca Gee, Lucinda Holt, Martha Qualben and Rachael Nevins will be presenting. 7:00 pm–9:00 pm. As usual.

MONDAY

The MoMA ps1 is exhibiting the latest work of Clifford Owens. Over twelve different composers submitted scores that Owens supplemented with video photographs and objects, in addition to live performances that he will present sporadically over the course of the show. If you can’t make it this week, don’t worry. The show runs until March 12, while the next live piece will take place Saturday, February 11, at 3:00 pm.

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BOMB’s Greatest Hits is a new archeological project that unearths the best of the BOMB archive from the past 30 years.

Jeffrey Eugenides and Jonathan Safran Foer

Photo: Karen Yamauchi.

Some of the best interviews split down the middle of the Q and the A for something less tiered and more along the lines of the talk that happens when the yard work’s all done and the lawn chairs are out. Back in 2002 Jonathan Safran Foer sat down with Jeffrey Eugenides while he was working on Middlesex. Somewhere in the tug and pull between the young Foer, whose career has again leveled up with a screen adaptation of one of his books (this time Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close), and his former professor Eugenides, who had similar luck after his first book The Virgin Suicides, they come around to the question old enough to make them both seem young: How do you balance a lit tendency with everything else?

Jonathan Safran Foer It’s been an awfully long time since we last spoke. Four years? And it’s been a long time since the reading world last got new material from you. About seven years? What’s been going on?

Jeffrey Eugenides I’ve been writing a book.

JSF Have you been happy?

JE I’ve been absorbed.

JSF One of my biggest problems as a writer is that I get tired of what I’m working on. Or rather, I feel that a project can’t keep up with how I think about writing and how I think about the world. How were you able to commit yourself to one story for such a long period? And how did the passage of time influence what you were writing?

JE Well, one of the hardest things about writing Middlesex was trying to stay true to the original impulse. I felt young when I began the book but something more like middle-aged by the time I finished it. All sorts of life-altering things happened to me while I was writing it, too. My father died in a plane crash. I became a father myself. William H. Gass says it’s difficult writing a long book because as you go along, you get better, and then you have to go back and try to bring the rest of the book up to the same level. I did a lot of that. I obsessively went back and reworked the early parts of the book. Even so, I made sure the later chapters had the same voice and spirit as the early chapters.

JSF And what about fatigue when writing? How’d you deal with that?

JE My fatigue was alleviated by the structure. Nearly every chapter of Middlesex takes on new historical or emotional terrain. Once I was finished dealing with the Greco-Turkish War, I had to summon up Detroit during Prohibition, and then later I launched into genetic and sexological concerns. Middlesex has lots of different storylines in it, so when I had done all I could with one I could refresh myself with another. The book allowed me to grow along with it. But there was pain, sure. There was lots of pain.

There must have been some kind of perverse comfort, too. I had this torture waiting for me every day, but at least it was my torture. The book was my jailer and we became friendly. I was like Patty Hearst with her Stockholm Syndrome. Little by little the book expanded to fill every inch of my consciousness. It lasted as long as the Trojan War. But I didn’t want to be Harold Brodkey. I knew before things got really ridiculous I had to set sail for home.

JSF Along these lines, Middlesex strikes me as a book that begins as a fairy tale (albeit a violent, racy, political fairy tale) and develops into a coming-of-age story. You have a daughter. Do you think the development of the style was influenced by her development?

JE My daughter was born midway through the composition of Middlesex. Her influence shows up in the plot, not the style. There’s a preoccupation with birth and fetal development in the book. There’s a lot about what women go through during pregnancy, and how beside the point men feel in the process. I see my daughter’s fingerprints in those details, but the book took shape long before she arrived on the scene.

Read the full interview here

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Win $500 and have your work featured in an upcoming story or film.

This winter, FSG Originals and BOMB Magazine team up to invite readers, artists, and designers to submit a work of art inspired by the writing of by Israeli short story writer, filmmaker, and graphic novelist, Etgar Keret. The Something out of Something Design Contest, which takes its name from a passage found in Keret’s forthcoming story collection, Suddenly, a Knock on the Door (April 2012), will be run on a Tumblr site of the same name, where submissions can be viewed and commented on by other entrants, readers, and Keret fans.

We’re looking for visual art submissions that incorporate themes or are somehow connected to Keret’s works, whether it’s fiction, films, or comics. Submissions can take the form of anything really—paper sculpture, action figures, painting, diorama, animated video—you name it, we’ll consider it.

Make this opportunity your chance to make Something out of Something, and get noticed! Click through for more details and official contest rules. Media Sponsor: Tumblr

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Janelle Iglesias + Lisa Iglesias = Las Hermanas Iglesias. The sisters share their reflections on collaboration, collection, and the absurd with Martha Moldovan.

My sister still bares a little scar on her cheek from the time we fought over a tube of Pringles—a permanent vestige of a sibling rivalry that no longer manifests itself around food. Luckily Lisa and Janelle Iglesias have not moved completely past such childhood quarrels and activities. Their video “Cherry Contest” (from the Sibling Rivalry series) shows Lisa and Janelle sitting at a table facing the camera in matching salsa-red jumpsuits. They shove cherries into their mouths in a competition to see who can more efficiently ingest the fruit. Through their collaborative project, Las Hermanas Iglesias present their versions of impromptu races, piñata parties, and scavenger hunts. Yet beneath their whimsical sculptures and performances dwells a chain of serious cultural inquiries.

Martha Moldovan Tell me about how your collaborative project was born.

Las Hermanas Iglesias Our collaboration started while we were both in grad school with a long stretch of I-95 between us. Neither of us had substantial art school training prior to grad school and we were feeling pretty overwhelmed as well as experiencing the same sort of existential questioning and vulnerability that many MFA students have. To deal with these feelings, we started sending drawings back and forth in the mail. Without any rules or verbal conversation about the marks, the drawings were purely a visual dialogue. We were interested in teasing out and discovering parallel tendencies in the images and palette we were using as well as to get to know each other’s practices more intimately. We both decided to move back to New York City after school not so much because of the art world but more because New York was ours and we missed it—our friends, foods, haunts—and it is a home we collaborate from.

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Art Hack Day

BOMB Bits is BOMBlog’s frequently updated outlet for ephemera, notes, and thoughts about culture. Enjoy and check back soon for more!

The term “hacker” overheard in conversation often evokes images of vitamin-D-deprived wunderkinds lit by the harsh green glow of code cascading across a wall of monitors. Accurate or not, the mythos attached to the word is warranted with computers currently holding rank as the most popular artistic and political tools.

The effectiveness of technology will be further explored from January 26th through the 28th at 319 Scholes’s “Art Hack Day.” Hackers, artists, and maybe even one or two Luddites seeking liberation will gather together to create new work, utilizing the capabilities of open source technology and exploring the nature of collaboration between human and computer. The public will be able to view and interact with the participants’ creations online during the initial two days and are encouraged to stop trolling alone and show up to a closing exhibition and party at the space.

Hacking begins Thurs Jan 26, 7pm Exhibit / closing party Sat Jan 28 7pm @319 Scholes St, Brooklyn

—Natalie

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Courtney B. Maum and Arda Collins on poetry and Fudgie the Whale.

I met Arda Collins because I had to apologize to her. At a reading she gave last summer at the Bread Loaf writers’ conference, I gasped so loudly during The News that she stopped mid-sentence at the lectern, looked directly at me and said, “No gasping!”

Haunting, inescapable, and frankly, kind of creepy, Arda Collins’s poetry has seemingly little in column with Arda Collins herself. She exudes the kind of self-effacing charm that makes people want to make snow angels. Here’s an example: She showed up for our interview with a jar of homemade tomato sauce as a gift. And yes, I am going to go there, I am going to compare her cooking skills to her verbal deftness: the sauce was complex but abbreviated, with a stunning amount of garlic. I ate it with a spoon.

Arda’s first collection of poetry, It Is Daylight (2009) was awarded the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize. Her poetry has illuminated the pages of The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, and jubilat, among others. Currently, she’s a Doctoral candidate at the University of Denver where she’s working on a new manuscript of poetry.

We met in an aptly named bar in Amherst, MA called The Moan and the Dove over two steins of Beer of the Gods and a vegetarian pizza to discuss horseback riding; her daily walks to the pond; her writing process (which involves dancing); and the existential angst in Tom and Jerry cartoons.

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Jennifer Lindblad experiences Carsten Höller and discusses the ways in which his work explores contemporary theories of body.

In 1961 Maurice Merleau-Ponty published “Eye and Mind”, his seminal essay on the role of perception in our understanding of the world. Much of the text is concerned with corporality, in asserting that the body is not only a thing in the world, but the vessel for—and condition of—experience. Carsten Höller’s exhibition Experience, which just ended at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, played on some of these concepts.

Höller himself comes from a background of science. Born in Brussels in 1961, the same year Merleau-Ponty’s “Eye and Mind” was published, Höller earned a doctorate in biology in 1988 with a specialization in Insect Communication. He subsequently embarked on a career as an artist, with his previous work in entomology informing his artistic practice. Experimenting with social and institutional norms, as well as delving into conceptions of the self, Höller employs playful, interactive installations to discuss themes of childhood, safety, love, the future, and doubt. In an October 2011 interview with The Art Newspaper, he noted, “The real material I work with is people’s experience [. . .] I think of life as an experiment on oneself. Subjective personal experience in science is a no-no. In starting to make art, I wanted to bring in what had been forbidden.”¹ Without recorded data or objective results, visitors are able to experiment with themselves freely, considering complex ideas and opening them up to the realm of possibility and personal discovery.

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Filmmaker Gary Tarn talks to Pamela Cohn about adapting Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet into a stirring visual odyssey set in the local homes and streets of Beirut.

Poet and writer Khalil Gibran, was born in Lebanon in 1883, and emigrated with his family to the United States just two years later. When Gibran was twelve, he returned to Beirut to study and learn Arabic. After losing a beloved sister in 1902, amidst other family tragedies, he went back to America, eventually settling in New York. In 1923, Gibran had a small book published entitled The Prophet. The story is of a dying man who arrives by boat to the shores of a fictional city called Orphalese where he encounters the inhabitants of the city there to greet him.

In a series of short poetic essays, the people of Orphalese ask the journeyman to tell them about what he knows of the world. The chapters are headed thus: Love, Marriage, Children, Giving, Eating and Drinking, Work, Joy and Sorrow, Houses, Clothes, Buying and Selling, Crime and Punishment, Laws, Freedom, Reason and Passion, Pain, Self-Knowledge, Teaching, Friendship, Talking, Time, Good and Evil, Prayer, Pleasure, Reality, Religion, and, finally, Death. Since its original publication almost ninety years ago, the book has been read by millions of people in twenty different languages and has, remarkably, never been out of print.

Composer and filmmaker, Gary Tarn, started shooting footage for his latest feature film, an adaptation of The Prophet, when his first film, Black Sun, played at the Magnificent 7 Film Festival in Belgrade, Serbia in 2006. Black Sun is a nonfiction feature narrated in first person by its subject Hugues de Montalembert, a French painter living in New York City. As the artist eloquently describes what life is like for him after being completely blinded in an attack in 1978, Tarn takes us on a cinematic journey with stunning and potent visuals and a deeply affecting original score, beautifully interpreting de Montalembert’s brave and moving story. It is one of my favorite films.

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The man behind the Reanimation Library, an assemblage of discarded texts and cultural detritus, talks to BOMB about how to put life back into works ranging from taxidermy to a million random numbers to a 19th-century dentist’s rewriting of the Bible.

Zack Friedman What does it mean to reanimate books?

Andrew Beccone I think that on balance, most people would look at the kinds of books that I collect and have trouble seeing much value in them, aside from being a kind of minor historical curiosity. By collecting, cataloging, and making these books available, I am really hoping to demonstrate their continuing relevance and facilitate their further use. So rather than sitting in a basement or rotting away in some thrift store, they can continue to be of value. Perhaps the books have outlived their original intended purpose, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t other ways to use them.

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BOMBlog talks to singing drummer Neal Morgan, who’s played with the likes of Bill Callahan and Joanna Newsom, about his remarkable new solo album IN THE YARD. Listen to his new single and check out his Mixtape after the jump.

When I found out that Neal Morgan, best known as the drummer (both live and on record) for Bill Callahan and Joanna Newsom, was opening for Bill Callahan, I was in disbelief.

“What an ego on this guy!” I said to my friends. “The drummer gets to open SOLO for the real deal? Who does this guy know?” I expected a Tommy Lee-routine, complete with a drum solo mid-air. Or maybe it would be something like Fred Armisen doing his Jans Hanneman routine.

But, to my legitimate surprise, Morgan’s incredible opening set was just singing and drums (and about 30% of it was a cappella). Now, he is following up his astounding work on 2010’s Have One On Me and last year’s Apocalypse with his second solo record, IN THE YARD, out January 24th on Drag City. Last month I caught up with him fresh off a European tour with Callahan to discuss his drumming technique, dealing with noisy crowds, and his other plans for 2012.

GARY CANINO I understand you just returned from Europe?

NEAL MORGAN Yes, it went great. Playing those songs is such a special honor and so fun for me. And I was able to open a few of the nights, which was great.

GC The first time I saw you perform was opening for Bill Callahan, in Greensboro, NC. That seemed to be a rough show for you, people were talking, there was a security alarm that kept beeping during your a cappella parts that seemed to be messing with your singing. Are audiences in Europe more polite?

NM I’ll say first that I don’t necessarily find people talking over an opening set to be impolite. Well, maybe I do. I guess it all depends. It seemed like people were there to have fun, they were drinking and catching up and that was an incredibly loud room, so I wasn’t at all upset or thrown off by the talking. There were moments when I did a few things up there that corralled the talkers, and that can be interesting during a set that is a lot of improvisation. But you asked about European audiences—I guess I would say that I’ve had more talking over my sets in the states than in Europe, but I don’t know, the sample size is fairly small.

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