The Nature of Reality

January 29 @ 2:30pm

The Nature of Reality
Roundtable discussion featuring Mark Alford, Deepak Chopra (moderator), Stuart Hameroff, Menas Kafatos, David Kleinberg-Levin

In the concluding chapter of The Road to Reality, mathematician Roger Penrose asks, “What is reality?” He goes on to state, “I do not believe that we have yet found the true ‘road to reality,’ despite the extraordinary progress that has been made over two and half millennia, particularly in the last few centuries. Some fundamentally new insights are certainly needed.... Some readers may still take the view that the road itself may be a mirage. Others might take the view that the very notion of a ‘physical reality’ with a truly objective nature, independent of how we might choose to look at it, is itself a pipe dream.” Penrose’s inquiry provides the parameters for this roundtable—can physics and mathematics fully describe reality? Is it possible that reality will never be fully described within a mathematical framework, thus questioning whether mental processes and consciousness can be fully explained within the physics/mathematics paradigm? Is it possible that a future, yet undiscovered physics/mathematics will accurately define reality?

(Please Note: This event is free and open to the public. It is recommended that you arrive at least 20 minutes early to get a seat. Please do not hold seats for late-comers. Additional seating will be available for a large-screen simulcast one floor down from the event space.)

Philoctetes Center is housed at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute at 247 East 82nd St. in New York City.

Mother

All the fuss about the Oscars got me thinking about my favorite movie that I watched last year, which was Mother. It's pretty fantastic. I also really liked Exit Through the Gift Shop, which inspired a heated debate with Eliza. I didn't see The King's Speech, and thought The Social Network and Winter's Bone were good but lacking some element that would qualify them as 'great.'

Please hit me up with some movie recommendations...

For any horror fans, my pal Sam Freeman co-wrote the script to a flick called Breadcrumbs. I don't know much other than it's getting some positive reviews, and that it's like a reverse Hansel and Gretel.

Miscellany On Ice

I'm trying to catch up from a raunchy Sunday afternoon chock-full of awesome computer viruses and Disney Princesses on Ice.

Yesterday, Xiaoda Xiao's "searing" memoir-in-stories, The Visiting Suit: Stories From My Prison Life got a pretty terrific review from The New York Times Book Review. They said, "[Xiao] recount[s] his struggle in sometimes unexpectedly lovely detail. Against great odds, in the grimmest of settings, he manages to find good in the darkness."

I was glad they seemed to focus on this point. Certainly, it's a bleak story, that of his imprisonment, but what is most striking to me about the work is Xiao and his fellow inmates' desire to survive with their dignities and passion intact.

This past weekend, Grace Krilanovich was interviewed by Jonathan Bastion of Aspen Public Radio as part of the program 'Page by Page's' special segment on "Young Fiction Masters." Grace was spotlighted alongside Adam Levin, author of The Instructions. Check it out!

And, last but not least, the blog Three Guys One Book spotlighted Emily Pullen as part of their Why We Love What We Do feature, allowing Emily to dish on her favorite parts of bookselling and working at Skylight. It's clear that Emily's exceptionally passionate about BOOKS and reading, and we feel really lucky to have her as part of our team.

Also, through Emily, we'll be sharing a booth with Skylight Books at this spring's Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, which we're genuinely excited about. More on that to come.

Fashion Monster

At Kids With Candy, Eli Neugeboren (son of Jay, and designer of the cover to 1940) has teamed up with a fashion designer and photographer to develop a creative and amusing project they've dubbed Fashion Monster.

Per the site:
"Fashion Monster, a project conceived by illustrator/retoucher Eli Neugeboren and photographer Dustin Cohen, combines the designs of Sarah Brashers’ line “Edelweiss by Sarah” with Neugeborens’ “monster” illustrations. In creating a modern film noir feel, the model was directed to act out scenes in which she was being followed by the brightly colored monster characters who were later placed in frame. This project was shot on location around lower Manhattan at the beginning of Fall 2010."

Be sure to peep the Kids with Candy site to see the entire series.

Barbara Browning Bonanza

These readings have been posted on our blog before but never in one tidy place. Here they are.

Big Ups, Mike Brezinski!

Mike Brezinski says it best himself:

"the first time i heard of two dollar radio was while browsing htmlgiant. i noticed that there were a lot of posts devoted to a book with a really weird title and amazing jacket art. shortly after, upon reading reviews and excerpts, my book club friends and i decided to read the orange eats creeps. grace krilanovich punched me directly in the throat and i couldn't have been happier.

"a friend of mine (also in book club) told me about the promotion and, well...yeah. here we are. i'm excited to read more of what y'all have published.

"a couple things: yes, that is a burning man tattoo. yes, the placement of the radio is kind of a nod to say anything. no, i've never actually seen the movie. i'm kind of weird like that, i guess.

"the tattoo was done by my friend mikey vigilante (who also, coincidentally enough, executed sanjay bisht's tattoo) at our friend sean's place in the mission district of san francisco."

Big ups, Mike.

The Correspondence Artist

The Correspondence Artist, the oustanding debut novel by Barbara Browning, is now at the printer.

Earlier this week, Publishers Weekly raved about the book, saying "Browning relentlessly explores her theme of love's many faces, giving readers a rewardingly offbeat novel that's by turns sexy, humorous, and insightful."

For those who may have missed it, Bomb Magazine ran an excerpt last summer, and The Fanzine excerpted in the fall. There are plenty more good things on the way. Barbara's an extraordinarily graceful and witty writer, and I feel confident that this first novel will leave readers feeling satisfied.

Also, The Correspondence Artist marks the first time we will be working with a new printer -- Friesens, out of Canada. Who cares, right? The printers we've worked with in the past have been unable to print our books on 100% recycled paper content. Due to the size of our print runs, we have to print with paper stock the printer keeps warehoused, which is whatever the corporate presses use. So, beginning with The Correspondence Artist, all our books will be published on recycled paper. They'll still feature French flaps and deckle edges, and apart from the cool stamp on the copyright page (pictured below) you likely won't notice any difference. So you can read and feel good about it.

Big Ups, Debbie Paredes!

Big ups to Debbie Paredes, the latest member of our tattoo subscription club!

Debbie, out of Vacaville, CA, who "loves peanut butter and drawing," gets extra credit for getting it done grande, making the boys look like wusses (I'm including myself in with the wusses with my baby wrist tat -- although it could be argued that the inside of the wrist was a pretty painful spot).

Welcome to the fam, Deb.

You Are My Heart galleys

We're in the process of getting galleys of You Are My Heart and Other Stories, Jay Neugeboren's fourth (and our first!) story collection printed. The stories travel from the secluded villages in the south of France, to the cattle crawl in the Valley of a Thousand Hills in South Africa, to the hard-knock adolescent streets of Brooklyn, while Neugeboren examines the great mysteries and complexities that unsettle and comprise human relationships.

Stories from the collection have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, The Notre Dame Review, Columbia Magazine, Hadassah, and one story -- 'Comfort' -- is forthcoming in everyone's favorite lit mag Black Clock, due out this spring (I believe).

There's a quote from Wayne Koestenbaum from a Bookforum review he wrote of Bolano's Last Evenings on Earth, in which he says that he is addicted to the haze that floats above Bolano's fiction. When I read that blurb something clicked, because that's how I feel about Jay's stories. Although I've come to understand that this "haze" is not murky, but the magic associated with wandering into the complete and fully rendered world of the author.

Anyone interested in getting an advance reader copy of You Are My Heart can drop a line to Brian at brian[at]twodollarradio.com.

Bradfield Holiday Cheer

Get yourself into the spirit of the season with a short story from Scott Bradfield's 2005 collection, Hot Animal Love, called 'The Anti-Santa' which will be broadcast Christmas Eve on Renassiance 104.4 sometime between 8pm and Midnight. I'm sure there's some way to stream the broadcast from the web. Or you can go to the source and download the recording from the Spoken Ink website.

The Washington Post has called Bradfield "a master chronicler of the absurdity, emptiness, and beauty that riddle modern life," and 'The Anti-Santa' sounds as though it fits the bill:

"Christmas is a-coming and Santa, throbbing with fairy dust and subliminal advertising, is out with the prezzies. Poor old Anti-Santa who wants children to grow into mature, well-rounded and responsible citizens, is not having a very good night. Things go from bad, to worse to awful when his present of parsley is turned down by a six year old and he gets attacked for being a smart-ass."

Kassie Rose, book critic at WOSU, our NPR-affiliate here in central Ohio, raved about Bradfield's fifth novel, The People Who Watched Her Pass By upon it's publication in April, saying: "This short novel is a wake-up call shouting Bradfield's humorously erudite take on modern American life." The book made the critic's year-end best-of list as well, which is very cool and very much appreciated.

Big Ups, Sanjay Bisht

Apparently we belong on the West Coast. I feel like it would be kinda like the Bee Girl finding all those other Bee People in the Blind Melon video for 'No Rain.' We lived in San Diego for two years and are often haunted by the urge to return.

Here's another West Coast-er who has gotten the TDR tat, Sanjay Bisht out of San Francisco. I think Shawn Mitchell, of Carbondale, IL, is the only one not stationed on the left coast who has gotten the tattoo.

From Sanjay: "After touching down in the middle of the delta blues in the middle of the pouring rain, I went to sit in the dock of the bay, and ran into my teenage hobo vampire junkie friends. We sucked down GK's Orange Eats Creeps, and craved more Two Dollar Radio blood and hence the tattoo!"

Big Ups, Brian Manning

Here's a guy named Brian Manning out of Portland, Oregon, who heard about our Tattoo Subscription offer (get a Two Dollar Radio-logo tattoo, get TDR books for free for life) from the MobyLives blog.

Brian claims to have a video, so you may be seeing that sometime soon . . .

Big Ups, Shawn Mitchell

Shawn Mitchell done got inked up in November, and while we've had his pic up in our virtual wall of fame since then, I'm just now getting around to posting a note to this here blog.

Shawn is "pursuing my MFA in fiction at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale. I contribute to the Fiction Writers Review, and my fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Torpedo, NANO Fiction, and Crafty Magazine. This bio sounds so formal compared to the others. I like your books. I like your colophon. I'm looking forward to having both around."

You should also lay your eyeballs upon this often hilarious interview Shawn did largely concerning his tattoo with Fiction Advocate.

CAVELIGHT FILMS: Cost of Construction

Cost of Construction Pitch Reel from CaveLight Films on Vimeo.

Our friend, Jordan Ehrlich, started his own production company called CaveLight Films. From the start they've been putting together some fantastic and impressive projects. Their latest is a documentary on the safety of American workers, called 'Cost of Construction.' The film unravels a national scandal, where the race for profits trumped the safety of American workers while the country’s top safety agency failed to enforce their own regulations - all during the most expensive commercial construction project in the United States. Apparently, an average of 4 workers die every day in America.

'Cost of Construction' is on its latest stage of production and could use some financial shoving to help it cross the finish line. To help support CaveLight's efforts, you can make a tax deductible donation here.

And be sure to check out the other CaveLight happenings on their website.

Yet Another Solution to the Health Care Crisis

Walgreens now provides flu shots, advertising that they’re covered by most health insurance policies and you don’t have to bother with long waits and the difficulty of getting an appointment from your healthcare provider. If you go into a Walgreens, the pharmacist will come out from behind the cash register where he or she normally takes prescriptions, put on rubber gloves and expertly plunge the syringe into your bicep muscle. With the Obama health plan still jeopardized by Republican attempts to whittle down its impact, discount pharmacy chains, which are proliferating virally, may soon take up the slack. Does it seem implausible that pharmacists will do prostate and colorectal exams? Will there be a room in the back of Walgreens with stirrups so that the pharmacist can offer Pap smears on the go? If I’m having chest pains, will I go into a Walgreens to get an EKG? And if I’m suffering from a headache, might I pop in for an fMRI before I bother to take two Tylenols. Pharmacists are not trained to take the place of doctors—they fill prescriptions rather than prescribing. But there are a thousand other tasks associated with your yearly physical that could easily be handled by a discount pharmacy chain. Amongst these are the taking of pulse and body temperature, X-raying the lungs, examining the eyes for dilation (something many pharmacists who are experienced in dealing with addicts have practical experience in doing) and measuring for height and weight. And who’s to say that the average pharmacist can’t triage, performing minor and even major surgery when necessary? Is it farfetched to think that the solution to our healthcare crisis may lie in the big discount pharmacy chains: Walgreens, Duane Reade, CVS and Rite-Aid? What about having a triple-bypass at Duane Reade instead of merely renewing your Lipitor? What about having a prefrontal lobotomy, which makes it unnecessary to continue coming back for SSRI’s. Want therapy? What better place to start than under the harsh white light of the pharmacy, with its shelves of condoms, lubricants and pregnancy test kits? Suffering from appendicitis? Walk over to your CVS in the next decade and the infected organ will be removed by liposuction. Perhaps Walgreens and the other big chains will start making deliveries, and not just of drugs. A pharmacist is not a licensed doctor or surgeon, and some procedures might not work out. But what M.D. bats a thousand?

[This was originally posted to The Screaming Pope, Francis Levy's blog of rants and reactions to contemporary politics, art and culture.]