amphichon

So McSweeney’s does a quarterly thing which they call McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern. Actually the Quarterly Concern came first, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency sort of sprung up from that. You could call the Concern a magazine, if you’re comfortable using the term for something that could be anywhere from a 300-page sumptiously bound hardcover to a rubberbanded bundle of someone else’s correspondence and junk mail.

Anyway what McSweeney’s is about is experimental fiction, mostly short, and a couple of years ago (in McSweeney’s #11) I read a remarkable story called “The Specialist” by Alison Smith. It starts like this:

The first one said it was incurable. The next agreed. “Incurable,” he sighed. The third one looked and looked and found nothing. He tapped her temple. “It’s all in your head,” he said. The fourth one put his hand in and cried, “Mother! Mother!” The fifth never saw anything like it. “I never saw anything like it,” he gasped as he draped his fingers over his stethoscope. The sixth agreed with the first and the seventh agreed with the third. He parted her legs and said, “There’s nothing wrong with you.”

Alice sat up. The paper gown crinkled. Her feet gripped the metal stirrups. “But it hurts,” she said and she pointed.

(Turns out the whole thing is now available online, you can read it here.)

Anyway while I really enjoyed the story, I had mostly forgotten about it until tonight, when I was poking around online and found a reference to Wholphin. Wholphin, as it happens, is another offshoot of McSweeney’s, this one a quarterly DVD release containing “short films, documentaries, animation and instructional videos that have not, for whatever reason, found wide release.” I remember hearing about this and thinking it’d be great to pick up an issue or two, so I hit the McSweeney’s store thinking I could maybe pick up a copy. I found that issue #2 is available, but issue #1 is not listed for some reason. After some more poking around I found out why – Wholphin #1 was actually included with McSweeney’s #18, from late last year. Ironically, McSweeney’s #18 has been sitting patiently on my bookshelf for months, still virginal in its shrinkwrap, and when I flipped it over, there was my copy of Wholphin #1.

So I dropped it in and had a look, and so far it seems to be exactly what I’d hoped – an eclectic collection of intriguing and amusing short films, some conventional, some experimental, sort of a visual take on the whole McSweeney’s vibe. The third piece I checked out was something called “The Big Empty”, a polished piece by Lisa Chang and Newton Thomas Sigel which stars Selma Blair, produced (surprisingly enough) by George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh. Almost immediately it struck me as familiar, and it turns out that this is an adaptation of the story I had so enjoyed before, “The Specialist”, by Alison Smith. (The writeup on IMDB gives the tagline as “A bittersweet tale of Alice, her vagina, and the infinite nature of the tundra.”)

The coincidence isn’t all that surprising I suppose – after all I ran across both versions of the story in McSweeney’s vehicles – but still it was a pleasant surprise, no less so because the film is very well done. Apparently it won some awards last year, and they were very well-deserved; this is one of the best shorts I’ve seen in quite a while. I wish I could point you at some way to view it online, but so far as I can tell it’s not available anywhere outside of Wholphin #1 and the odd film festival at the moment. If you do run across it somewhere though, I can heartily recommend it. In the meantime though, the story, like most everything else on the McSweeney’s site, is well worth the few minutes it takes to read it.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS