Who: Joseph O’Neill
What: Award-winning author Joseph O’Neill reading from and discussing his latest novel, The Dog (Vintage Contemporaries, June 2015, 415.95)
Where: Donaghy Theatre, Irish Arts Center, 553 West 51st St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves., 866-811-4111
When: Wednesday, December 2, $12, 7:30
Why: “Perhaps because of my growing sense of the inefficiency of life lived on land and in air, of my growing sense that the accumulation of experience amounts, when all is said and done and pondered, simply to extra weight, so that one ends up dragging oneself around as if imprisoned in one of those Winnie the Pooh suits of explorers of the deep, I took up diving. As might be expected, this decision initially aggravated the problem of inefficiency.” So begins Joseph O’Neill’s latest novel, The Dog, a satire of the modern world as only he can tell it. O’Neill, who is a professor at Bard and won the 2009 Pen/Faulkner Wward and the Kerry Fiction Prize for the marvelous Netherland, will be at the Irish Arts Center on December 2 to discuss The Dog, about a man who tries to rediscover himself in Dubai. And he should know be quite the expert on international relations, having been born in Ireland and raised in Mozambique, South Africa, Iran, Turkey, and Holland.
Named Best Documentary at numerous film festivals across the country, Marwencol offers a surprising look inside the creative process and the fine line that exists between art and reality. On April 8, 2000, Mark Hogancamp was nearly beaten to death outside a bar in his hometown of Kingston, New York. He spent nine days in a coma and more than a month in the hospital before being released, suffering severe brain damage that has left his memory a blur. To help put his life back together, he began using toys and dolls — Barbies, celebrity replicas, army men — to re-create his personal journey. He makes dolls of his friends and relatives, the people he works with, and others, constructing an alternate WWII-era universe he calls Marwencol, complete with numerous buildings and plenty of Nazis. He captures the detailed story in photographs that are not only fascinating to look at but that also help him figure out who he was and who he can be. This miniature three-dimensional world is reminiscent of the two-dimensional one carefully fashioned by outsider artist Henry Darger in his fifteen-thousand-page manuscript, The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion, which also features an alternate reality involving military battles set amid stunning artwork. Director, producer, and editor Jeff Malmberg makes no judgments about Hogancamp, and asks the same of the audience. In his first full-length film, Malmberg shares the compelling story of a deeply troubled, flawed man suddenly forced to begin again, using art and creativity to bring himself back to life. He speaks with Hogancamp’s mother, his old roommate, the prosecutor who handled his case, and others who are first seen proudly holding the doll Hogancamp made of them. And Malmberg doesn’t turn away from the more frightening aspects of Hogancamp’s daily existence. Marwencol is an unforgettable portrait of lost identity and the long road to redemption. The film is screening November 10 at 8:00 as part of the IFC Center series “Stranger Than Fiction” and will be followed by a Q&A and book signing with Hogancamp and producer Chris Shellen, who collaborated on the new book Welcome to Marwencol (November 3, Princeton Architectural Press, $29.95).
