Dear Readers,Thank you for your support as I anticipate the coming of my 7th book this spring, "Japanese Film and the Floating Mind." I wrote this book last year as a challenge to myself to develop a working understanding of Japanese cinema, culture and history. I hope I succeed to some extent in illuminating these rich subjects with my own perspective.Has all of this been blessed somewhere? I live on a street that bears the same name as my biggest publisher, a coincidence that we have joked about. Perhaps I am only coming back home?I am eternally grateful to those who have supported and continued to support me. It has not been the easiest thing being a non-academic in the field of writing and scholarship; a gay man in a straight world; and an extremely open person in what feels like one of the most defensive and uptight eras we have ever known. You sometimes feel as if you are always walking on banana peels! But a lot of that is put out as negative energy by people who want you to second guess yourself, as I have found. I've gotten along through seven books now, using these methods of curiousness, productivity, openness, and staying true to myself, so hopefully the coming years will be filled with creativity as well!Thank you to all,Justin VicariMy mom is doing much better, eating solid foods again and doing physical therapy now. We are all very proud of how well she is recovering!And in other happy news, I am grateful to Kirkus Reviews for their very nice appreciation of my soon-to-be-released translation of Octave Mirbeau's 21 Days of a Neurasthenic:An ailing iconoclast, driven to despair by his own ennui, retreats to the Pyrenees for a rest cure.Film critic and translator Vicari (Male Bisexuality in Current Cinema, 2011, etc.) offers a distinctly modern translation of this turn-of-the-century expressionist novel by the avant-garde French novelist Mirbeau (A Chambermaid's Diary, 1900, etc.). By using contemporary references and giving the language a florid, conversational tone, Vicari rescues the work from its own artifice and lets its arch humor breathe in a way that might not have come through in a more conventional translation. The narrator is Georges Vasseur, a cynic whose weariness with the world has saddled him with "neurasthenia," an antiquated diagnosis that would today be likened to anxiety, depression, or neurosis. In short vignettes, Vasseur describes his days at a sanitarium high in the mountains near the Iberian border. Mirbeau uses the framework to offer pointed criticisms of the politics, culture, and social structure of the Third Republic, peppering his text with real-life figures from the age. Vasseur's friends include Robert Hagueman, a lusty character who could just as easily occupy a Beat novel, and Clara Fistula, an adolescent transgendered genius who preaches asexuality. The novel is acidly funny, though it takes work to understand the context of some of Mirbeau's acerbic wit. That said, some passages are timeless, like the early fragment where Vasseur adopts a hedgehog that quickly succumbs to its owner's decadent lifestyle. "Total alcoholic inebriation. Cause of death: dropsy. An unprecedented case among hedgehogs," writes Georges' doctor. The novel gets to some dark places as its narrator plunges deeper into depression, but Mirbeau's mischievous humor and keen observations about uncertainty as the cause of existential anxiety have much to offer contemporary readers who are willing to take the plunge.A scandalous artifact from an earlier age that has more mileage than one might expect from an experimental novel more than a century old.https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/octave-mirbeau/21-days-of-a-neurasthenic/Thank you to everyone who has expressed concern about my mother, who is trying to recover from gall bladder surgery in hospital. She is fighting hard, and we are all hoping for the best.Look for new poems of mine coming soon in New York-based Barrow Street and in Spoon River Poetry Journal, two awesome literary journals that I am very proud to be published in!On a less happy note, I have to say I have not too thrilled that Amazon has gobbled up Goodreads, a wonderful site that has maintained a consistently high standard of balanced, knowledgeable and excellent opinions on books. Never a marketing site, Goodreads has not been befuddled by the kind of bulk ratings and bulk reviews that often plague Amazon. I am suspicious and even somewhat pessimistic of the direction that Goodreads could go in now, as an Amazon subsidiary. Keep Goodreads literary and unsullied by commercial motives!Great news! My Octave Mirbeau translation is back on track and being readied, even as we speak, for its close-up. This is one for the true misfits ... like us! As a lover of forbidden books of all degree and kind, I couldn't be more proud. Thank you Dalkey Archive Press! In further great news, this year I have joined forces with the brilliant young Wakefield Press to bring you a previously untranslated novella by the great Joris Karl Huysmans! This book might only take you an afternoon to read, but I guarantee it will have you thinking for the rest of your life. Arm yourself with books, they make the best weapons!Happy New Year, kids, and keep the love flowing in the Oh-Fifteen!Hi everybody, I just wanted to say thank you to everyone who preordered my translation of Octave Mirbeau's epochal satire 21 Days of a Neurasthenic. The production of this book has been pushed back to July 2015 due to massive backlogs at the amazing Dalkey Archive Press (Jeremy M. Davies, I miss you!). But it will be appearing for your summer reading pleasure. And in the meantime I have some new translation surprises on the horizon. Stay tuned.Thank you to my readers, and I could not be more pleased that they reside all over the world, an international readership. It pleases me because many of the thinkers and creators who have influenced me the most have been from France, Germany and other international locales. I am updating my bio because I am proud to announce the spring release of my new book, "Nicolas Winding Refn and the Violence of Art." I am a fan of Refn's films, and I hope that his fans will find, if they read this book, that I have been fair and supportive, even more a sort of advocate for the kind of art film that Refn is making. Like all my books, I intended for this to be of general interest as well, even for readers who might not be familiar with Refn or with current cinema in general. There is much in the book that explores metaphysics today, life in a surveillance state, the changing nature of political commitments in a world where no one can escape the reach of corporatocracy, the changing nature of art in a world where art is no longer confined to an off-limits elite, and the nature of violence as a unique driving force in the development of culture and in particular the development of the narrative arts.What I am also concerned with is the fact that we have become largely post-mythic, which is to say post-content. We have fewer convincing ways of uniting our polis through stories. The left has largely abandoned poetry and given itself over to debunking (often worthwhile) and also to making sure that no one is ever considered "less than" anyone else (also worthwhile). These aims go against the meritocratic nature of art, however, as well as the imaginative uses of myth. As such, we have left myth in the hands of those who would exploit it, and us, by bludgeoning us with the same old-same old. I view Refn as someone striving to create new, positive myths about our holistic oneness.Again, this is something I have tried to do with all my books of cultural theory. In The Gus Van Sant Touch, I wanted to ask why we are locked into the more dehumanized aspects of postmodernism, why we can't rediscover a vital cinema that stands for things of importance, as I feel Van Sant's does. In Mad Muses and the Early Surrealists, I wanted to question why we still invest so much conceptual energy in the outmoded theory of castration anxiety, especially in a current world that is all but abolishing gender imperatives. The great Sandra Bernhard once said, "This is theater my way, boys and girls," and I can say the same thing about theory, this is theory my way, salty, empirical, unafraid to challenge entrenched positions and burgerize a few sacred cows. I hope you will join me in my explorations -- I have several new projects in mind, and I look forward to sharing them with you in the (near) future.I have always believed that writers should not specialize in a single genre or form, and so I became a poet, a critic of film, literature and culture, and a translator. No matter what work I am doing, I am telling truths about myself and the world around me. My own life story is right there in my works of criticism as much as it is in my poetry. Even my translations are, as much as anything else, creative acts.My most important influences are all from when I was very young: Rimbaud and the French surrealists, Jean-Luc Godard, William Burroughs, Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Jean Genet, Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, Patti Smith, Gus Van Sant. They helped form me and they remain formative to this day. I feel very much like a spiritual offspring of the energy which animated art and culture in the 1960s, that spirit of exploration. Anyway that is what I'd like to be -- an offspring of that energy. As a writer I feel more like a child of the 60s than of the 80s, which is when I did grow up, but it's sort of my own private version of the 60s, so it's probably less complicated and contradictory than the 60s themselves actually were. To me it just means a certain passion that I often feel is missing from a lot of what is being written today.