Recent Antkind News

A little while back, Francis Ford Coppola was partway through Antkind and praised it on his Instagram account. Well, a couple weeks ago he finished it and delivered the final verdict.

Well, I just finished reading Charlie Kaufman’s ANTKIND to the last of its 750 pages. I am still thinking about it’s ending. It was worthwhile (and enjoyable for me), very funny - what he says at the end I think is true. I want to think about it. (Source)

Thanks to u/pavingmomentum!

Great shout out to Charlie's Antkind on Instagram today, from none other than Francis Ford Coppola. He's reading the novel and calls it "unique, bold and fantastic."

Recently, I am reading a novel which amazes me, and unlike most of my reading these days which tend to influence my present work (up to now @megalopolisfilm ) this book is influencing how I see my life. It’s a first novel by brilliant screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, and it’s called ‘ANTKIND’ and it is unique, bold and fantastic. I recommend it to anyone who is puzzled about this illusion we hold of ‘life’ and its contradictions. (as I am) - not that it matters when one is in this frame of mind, but it seems to have gotten universally great reviews. (Source)

Awesome.

Thanks, Julie!

Great news for Charlie's fans in China: Antkind is out now, and with a spiffy cover to boot!

Thanks to Xu Jinglu, Charlie's editor in China, who tells me that Charlie has a lot of fans there! Nice.

Charlie's Italian fans should be thrilled to know that the Italian version of Antkind has hit the shelves! Not a bad cover, too. Little bit plain, maybe?

Andrea, who sent the news, tells me: "It's called Formichità (Ant is Formica in italian) and was published by the prestigious Einaudi publishing house." Nice!

Don't forget, Charlie has a short story coming out in May, too.

Hello! Couldn't access my hosting account for a bit (probably gonna change hosts at the end of the year), but the good news is none of us have missed much. That's also the bad news, because there's nothing CK on the immediate horizon.

However! Antkind was published in France earlier this year and, while doing some press for its release there, Kaufman said he's writing a new novel. Via BCKster Jérôme:

[...] in the magazine "L'Obs", he says he's currently writing a new novel ("I must have liked it [writing the first] because I'm writing a second one").

Jerome notes that you can sp[ot the word "second" in the scan below:

Remember Slammy's, the fictional fast food joint in Antkind? (Not as cool as Mick Burger on p.9, but I digress!) Redditor u/15millionschmeckles created this cool logo for the place:

Slammy’s by day is a whole different creature: a bright, cheerful roadside beacon. Its mascot, a smiling and proud bipedal hammer donning a red superhero cape and blue unitard with a big “Slammy’s” emblazoned across his chest and holding a hamburger and a spatula and seemingly being chased by an unseen assailant… (Antkind)

Antkind is out now in paperback. (Affiliate link!) Check out the new cover:

Sexy, no?

Here's the Random House page.

David Hernandez has done what the rest of us are too lazy to do, and annotated Antkind. Amazing. You can check out the 7400-word document here, and if there's something he has missed or goofed, you can let him know in this Reddit thread.

So, I hope you’ll enjoy skimming these references that took me many hours to annotate. For readers who finished Antkind, maybe you’ll enjoy revisiting; for new readers, perhaps this can be a companion.

Comment in this thread with any references I’ve missed and I’ll do my best to amend. Some references I may have plainly got wrong. There are several apocryphal quotes, genuine quotes, and genuine quotes that have been misattributed. (Source)

Also, over on Letterboxd, Jack Moulton has catalogued all the films referenced in Antkind.

I've always thought Antkind deserved something like the Pynchon Wiki, and now we have this.

This is a neat concept. Station 451 (or Станція 451) is a Ukrainian podcast that discusses filmmakers who've also published books (Cronenberg, Alex Garland, Martin McDonagh etc.), and of course CK has been given the Station 451 treatment! BCK and myself get a mention @01:06:25, WOOHOO.

SoundCloud is below, or you can check it out at Apple Podcasts.

Thanks to host Oleksandr for the heads up!

Critic Mark Kermode didn't seem keen on his Antkind cameo, but he has moved on. This from December 31st, via r/kaufman:

Also this in August:

Clearly more a fan of one-way relationships between critics and artists, yeah?

Contrast this with A.O. Scott's response to his own Antkind cameo, via his Ending Things review.

Ah well.

Once upon a time, UK critic Mark Kermode reviewed Eternal Sunshine and really liked it. Then he reviewed Synecdoche, New York and liked it less.

When Anomalisa came out and didn't win the Oscar, Kermode and co-host Simon Mayo interviewed Charlie and Duke Johnson on Radio Five Live, kicking things off with a bunch of questions about Pixar films (who did win the Oscar).

The interview was a little awks.

Then Antkind came out, and in this 700 page book there is one gag about Kermode. Kaufman has stated several times that Antkind is, in part, a comment on the usually one-sided relationship artists have with critics.

Kermode has mentioned this gag on Twitter a couple of times in the last few weeks.

Simon Brew at Film Stories has a decent write-up on this whole Kermode-Kaufman thing, which is worth checking out if you are interested in such dramas.

What I didn’t appreciate until I went behind the scenes of that programme earlier this year and asked about it was that words had been spoken just before the show went on air. That in the seconds before the show was going out live across the UK, Kaufman had spoken to Kermode, taking issue with a previous review (presumably for Synecdoche, New York). Then, suddenly, the news bulletin ended and a notoriously frosty interview ensued.

[...] What I’d suggest it goes to is the simmering that feels ever-present under the surface of criticism, the biting of lips on both sides of the critical divide, and the fact that human beings are human beings. In this particular case, Charlie Kaufman has the platform and resources to get his word out, and has chosen to use it. Kermode is in a position to take it, even though he may not want to or feel it fair. But the world is such that on we go, and social media will look elsewhere for its scalps tomorrow. (Source)

I do not mind that there is a Mick Burger on page 9.

Charlie was interviewed on Australia's Radio National today--my neck o' the woods, hooray! I think it's the first time I've heard Kaufman being interviewed by someone with an Aussie accent. In this case the someone was Claire Nichols, host of The Book Show. I can't find a way to embed it here, but you can follow the link. (The interview goes for about half an hour, and opens the episode.)

There were a few nuggets I've not heard before. We know Charlie has been in New York for the past few months, but here he mentions that he went there to work on a movie, and coronavirus hit the world while they were in post-production. What movie? Ending Things? But if that were the case I'd think he would mention it by name. Or not? Anyway. He also talks about his experience seeing Sátántangó, a movie 7-and-a-half hours long, at the New York Film Festival, and provides a little more insight into what exactly he knew would be in Antkind before he started writing it. Bonus: you can listen to Charlie read the opening of Antkind's first chapter.

Big thanks to @bionicgirlinoz for the heads up!

I thought this piece by Jon Baskin was going to be an Antkind review, and then as I read I thought Oh, it's an essay on Charlie's use of post-modern techniques to explore ideas of self and whatnot... and then it turned out to be indeed a review of Antkind. But it's a pretty cerebral review, taking in the wider context of Charlie's work and other post modern writers who hit it big around the late 90s/early 2000s, and it's an interesting read. Contains spoilers, though.

In their most successful works, artists like Wallace and Kaufman reassured their audiences that earnest emotion remained possible, even at the end of history. That these artists used so many postmodern techniques in the first place, however, testified to their sense that sincerity in an age of irony was no simple matter.

[...] It makes sense that Kaufman, one of our deepest and most imaginative thinkers about the self, would want to write a novel, one of our most conspicuous channels for self-investigation. That novel, "Antkind", has arrived, and, due to its length and slapstick sense of humor, it has already been labelled Pynchonesque. But the author referred to most often in the book is Samuel Beckett, and this offers a better clue about the tradition Kaufman aspires to belong to. In contrast to Pynchon’s political epics, Beckett’s work is one of the landmark achievements of literary introspection. "Molloy", the first book in his mid-century trilogy (and the one most often alluded to in “Antkind”), contains no secondary characters and hardly any events. It is famous partly for showing that great art can emerge solely from a mind wrestling with itself. (Source)

Longtime BCKster David Rosen is a musician and podcaster, and he points us to a recent episode of Piecing It Together, in which he and Kris Krainock tackle Antkind and discuss the other books and art they believe may have been an influence on CK's novel. (Ordinarily this is a film podcast with the same approach, but this is CK, and for CK exceptions can be made!) It's a great listen but it's spoilery, so beware.

Couldn't find a way to embed it here, but you'll reach it if you follow the link.

On the 137th episode of Piecing It Together, we do something that we’ve never done before… Cover a book! But it’s not that surprising that I’d want to talk about Charlie Kaufman’s first novel on the show, considering he’s the writer of my favorite movie Adaptation and a number of other films I love. Joining me is returning co-host Kris Krainock who did a great job of filling in the literary gaps with some puzzle pieces I’d have never been able to come up with unless I had another decade or two to read some more books… Did I mention I’m a slow reader? (Source)

It makes sense if you've read Antkind. Or if you've seen Malkovich, for that matter.

Thanks to @catnip2221!