ReadEasy is a new feature for 2015 — because life’s hard enough already, amIright? https://twitter.com/jenniferweiner/status/570321074988175360 Last Wednesday Tom McCarthy joined Dennis Lim, director of programming at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, to discuss his new novel, Satin Island (Knopf, 2015), and to screen two avant-garde classics he considers to be in conversation with it: Antony Balch’s 1963 Towers Open Fire, starring William S. Burroughs, and Johan Grimonprez’s 1997 hijacking documentary, Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y. It was an extraordinary evening, with McCarthy and Grimonprez (a surprise and very welcome additional guest) at ease in an eclectic and ever-expanding frame of reference: Marvell, Spinoza, Cocteau, Tarkovsky, Lévi-Strauss, Warhol… Quoting Don DeLillo, in Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, Grimonprez’s narrators comment on the capacity of terrorists for “raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated.” While the figure of the terrorist haunted McCarthy’s debut novel, Remainder (2005), it’s the figure of the Writer, Inc. — in the form of corporate anthropologist U. — who’s at the center of Satin Island. The migration of ideas from universities into corporations, appalling to some, is evident in the metaphors for contemporary being that emerge in U.’s digressive narration: metadata, buffering, and so on. It’s an excellent novel. Grimonprez and McCarthy also screened the promotional short […]