Screen Tests audiobook

Screen Tests is an artfully poised lineup of quasi-Warholian novels and films. Kate Zambreno makes a strong case for each of these put-upon female artists, while the collection is also a shimmering delight in and of itself.

A few passages from Screen Tests:*In a recent interview, I was asked to name a book I thought should be remembered. And I chose the Québécois writer Catherine Mavrikakis’s A Cannibal and Melancholy Mourning. The narrator hotly mourns all of these friends who have dies of AIDS, all named Hervé. The narrator says she loves works that are tender and cruel, and that is what this is for me, a jeremiad, a beautiful complaint. The book is inspired by Hervé Guibert’s autoportrait, To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, fictionalizing his friends Michel Foucault’s death from AIDS, which also documents Guibert’s own diagnosis, like a French companion to Close to the Knives. The interviewer asked me to talk about New Narrative, and I told him that it was an avant-garde queer mostly American literary scene circling around community, and especially, memorializing friends and lovers who died of AIDS, refusing their disappearance. I rattled off names of New Narrative writers: Bruce Boone, Dodie Bellamy, Kevin Killian, Kathy Acker, Gail Scott. The interviewers asked me if I thought there would ever be another movement where writers could be angry in force again, if there would be another crisis that would allow for a political literature.I have thought about this question for a while now, and I think it connects to more than just writing – it’s about art making, it’s about a way of life that is opposed to a mainstream, homogenized success.And I said to his that there is always something to be angry about, always something to rage against.*If I could only write throughout my entire life with the electricity of the amateur.*There needs to be a word, I’ve realized, for the parasitism of middlebrow art and literature that steals from interesting and radical art but in the process strips it of its ferality, its political urgency, its queerness, its threat. (Sarah Schulman uses the term “gentrified,” also connecting it to Acker.)*Writer’s block. How boring. I am supposed to be working on an essay, this essay in fact, but something stalls me. I cannot enter into it. I am unsure what is the use of all this first person anymore.

Det här var min första sommarledighetsbok och den brukar jag känna starkt för. I stort sett är det här en parad med alla mina popkulturella passioner, även mer obskyra 'obsessions' - för att använda författarens beskrivning av bokens innehåll - ur konsten och litteraturen. Kanske inte vurmar för Warhol lika mycket som Zambreno gör, men väl Cy Twombly, Jean Seberg, Patty Hearst, Jean Rhys, Plath och Pessoa m.fl. Känner mig så lycklig när Zambreno från djupet av sitt "archive of loneliness and longing" skriver om Wojnarowiczs Rimbaud-foton i New York, hemmafrufilmen om Jeanne Dielman, den franska livskris-soffalkis-sångscenen från Broadcast News eller stilinspo från Meg Ryans utväxt blonderings-biker-look från Addicted to Love. De två senare tillhör saker man nästan glömt. Zambreno är en soulmate, sans doute.

a little gossipy which i love. full of references of her obsessions with writers and old movie-stars (which if u read kate zambreno a lot, you already know them) and quick memories that come and go. i have a soft spot for that chapter about her dad watching john wayne movies on his tv. funny, i had just finished 'airless spaces' by shulamith firestone and 'close to the knives' by david wojnarowicz before reading this. and yeah i've read 'suite for barbara loden', but zambreno's last essay on 'wanda' was def the most stunning chapter. in my opinion, kate zambreno could write a whole book about living in wicker park chicago in her early 20s, i would devour it.

reading kate zambreno essays and short stories as a writer myself is always like being thrown into a cool pool only to realize that the water is the same temperature as your body. maybe that’s a cheesy comparison but it’s the easiest one i can think of, i adore the feeling of reading about her obsessions as well as her depression and her fears because often enough the emotions in her writing mirror my own at any given moment.

Wish that every interesting author living an intense intellectual life would share a glimpse into it with the readers, allowing us to have an illusion that we're part of it. Bridging different contexts and artists, Zambreno shows that she's a generous author. In Screen Tests, she weaves a meaningful nexus on creating, art and female talent that holds a lot of power.

In the tradition of Benjamin, Sontag and Barthes, Kate Zambrero creates her own. Her fictional persona, even if it is closed to her real self, moves through culture reshaping the establishment. Her voice(s) is evocative of a Joan of Arc who struggles while achieving, like Beckett's Watt and like Dostoevsky's the Idiot, not knowing the lasting impact of her words. This last thing is meant as compliment. Not that many contemporary writers are unafraid to recognize the fragment self and that our consciousness is always in deep struggle with depression.

Kate Zambreno writes essays that make me: scramble to find a pencil (or pen?!) to underline, yelp in recognition, and pause to collect myself. In other words- the best kind.Topics covered I could read another thousand pages on: Anne Collier's photographs, angry women writers, Elia Kazan and Barbara Loden, contradictory thoughts on Sontag, and female beauty + genius.

Screen has multiple meanings. Zambreno's book, of course, invokes Andy Warhol's droll experiments with cinema, but the screen is also something blank, like a canvas. Her computer screen that shifts between writing and YouTube rabbit holes. There is also the kind of screen that filters, keeps the bugs out (though fleas at one point attack the writer's dog, Genet), but don't keep out the atmosphere. The very compact stories are like phone screens, hand held pictures captured at unexpected moments, with barely there narratives. They feel true to life, autobiographical. They are about writers, women, the horror of having one's author photo taken. Zambreno, in the essays, alternates fiction and fact, the lives of film stars, writers, artists (Louise Brooks, Frances Farmer, Barbara Loden, Kathy Acker, Valerie Solanas, Meg Ryan) and people from her past, all of whom have faced difficult transitions and untimely ends. These pieces seem effortless, yet full of struggle-- a dynamic juxtaposition.

Whatta writer Kate Zambreno is. I read Heroines an loved it, and this collection is similar in tone - centered loosely on the idea of failure, and the obstacles placed in front of female artistic and literary success by a patriarchal society. The final essay in particular is equal parts crushing and hopeful and uplifting. Zambreno is also very FUNNY. There's bravery to her work, in that she is seems terrified of sounding stupid or revealing herself too much but does so anyway - which creates incredibly and uniquely relatable moments, especially if you're the sort of person who feels the need to "do well" in therapy sessions. Additionally, as someone who champions other writers and artists, Zambreno ends up giving you a wonderful list of women to read / watch / listen to afterwards. I liked it!

Screen Tests is about observation in many forms, internal and external. Zambreno spends many passages inspecting the lives of celebrities and cult figures. While the tales are interesting in and of themselves, I found Zambreno's interest in the tales particularly revealing. Zambreno's observations

Found this completely by accident. But reminded me of lots of books That I used to try and read and get frustrated with and often not finish. What I found frustrating was not knowing the works or artists referenced in the fictions or essays. This just doesn't bother me as much anymore. I count this as proof of incremental personal growth. The first section, described in the blurb as "flash fiction" felt like micro personal essays, reflecting on the authors maturing career. They reminded me a lot of Lydia Davis, but less fictionalized and much more center on "I". The essays were all wonderful. Both personal and literary. The Essay on Kathy Acker, whom I have not read, and Barbara Loden's Wands, which I have not seen, were both stunning and harrowing in equal measure.

"Perhaps the objects of our obsession, our characters we fictionalize, can be a way to try to figure out something of ourselves, of our pasts, how our presents could have been different somehow." This quote, from Zambreno's musings on Wanda, really feels like the sum of her argument in Screen Tests (as well as a through-line in some of her other work, such as Drifts.