FERRARA & NHR & EOTN

I just watched Bad Lieutenant on TV... saw it probably ten years ago and remembered it being good, but not that good.  What a fantastic movie.  Somehow it hit me a lot harder now than it did when I was a teenager.  Something about the patterns of relentless behavior and the visceral self-loathing and the inability to comprehend selfless behavior (even while groping toward an imitation of it)... this time it was just physically and viscerally jarring.  Fucking awesome film...  For some reason I guess I'd had an idea in my head of Ferrara as a really sloppy filmmaker with big vivid flashes of talent, but after seeing this again (and seeing Body Snatchers not too long ago), it's clear there was at least a period in the early 90s when he had enough discipline to deploy that talent really judiciously.

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I have a story in the new issue of the New Haven Review.  Issue 9.  It's not out yet, comes out soon.  It's called "Migrations."  I believe it will make me the only author so far to have had two pieces of fiction in the NHR.  Proud!  Brian Francis Slattery and Bennett Lovett-Graff at the NHR have been very kind.

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Currently reading John D. MacDonald's The End of the Night.  It's about four young people who go on a killing spree.  It's told in a non-linear but fairly gripping fashion.  I got it because Stephen King said, "John D. MacDonald has written a novel called The End of the Night which I would argue is one of the greatest American novels of the twentieth century. It ranks with Death of a Salesman, it ranks with An American Tragedy."  I'm halfway through.  It's definitely good so far.