10: 01 [Paperback]

Lance Olsen (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 2005

Fiction. You're sitting in a darkened theater, waiting for the movie to begin when American culture explodes all around in I-Max, Sensurround, Technicolor--this is the experience of reading Lance Olsen's brilliant 10:01, a novel in frames that unreels the random thoughts of a random movie audience: a screening of our own moment that Olsen lights with the white heat of a a projector beam. Be sure to check out Lance Olsen's other titles at SPD, including SEWING SHUT MY EYES.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Olsen has written a cunningly original docufiction of the American psyche post-9/11 and perennial." -- Harold Jaffe, Fiction International

Inside the dark of 10:01 they come "to fantasize...to hide out, make out, freak out, speak out." -- Ålvin Greenberg

From the Publisher

Finally a fiction writer who is conscious of the zeitgeist as well as the dominant modes of production which carry us all through our so-called present. 10:01 is not only an experimental fiction, it is what Nietzsche would call a "necessary fiction" -- part of what we tell ourselves about a reality which both exists and does not in every moment. As the author moves from movie-goers head to head we get an inside-out view of the self and society fragmented into bits, bites, and shots. All the world's a cinemaplex.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 187 pages
• Publisher: Chiasmus Press; First Edition edition (January 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0970321260
• ISBN-13: 978-0970321268
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.6 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #425,285 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Audience IS the Movie, April 27, 2005

By 

shewhowatches "shewhowathces" (Portland, OR) - See all my reviews

This review is from: 10: 01 (Paperback)

WHAT A GAS to read...finally a coherent and articulate lens on "the audience" and its effects. This is a terrific set of shifting heads--meaning roving point of view shifts--which utterly atomizes and fragments the movie goer's experience only to recollect it in a shot-reverse shot screening. WOW. Read this book before you go to see your next movie. It shows you how the movie going experience is axiomatic for America (and capitalism, and individualism, and commodification, and identity dissolution, and and and).

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Postcapitalist Arcades Project, August 2, 2005

By 

David H. Wilson (Pseudo City, Michigan) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: 10: 01 (Paperback)

Lance Olsen is a skilled, established author of postmodern narrative, and his latest book, 10:01, sees him flexing his pecs and pointing at the crowd like a true literary Hulkamaniac. This experimental, stream-of-consciousness novel documents the disjointed, mediatized lives of an audience of movie-goers. It is a record of their conscious and unconscious experience as they wait just one tick past ten minutes for a film to begin. In this seemingly static, uneventful period of time, Olsen's sharp wit and imagination explode onto the screen of the page, creating a pastiche of worlds, fantasies and desires that together constitute today's postmodern scene.

Building on the work of the Frankfurt school, Gilles Deleuze, Jean Baudrillard and William S. Burroughs, 10:01 represents reality as a film and the human condition as a pathological production of the mediascape. Each chapter is a short, detailed illustration of some form of mental or physical trauma. These illustrations are mere fragments of experience, existing independently of one another, but also plugged into the universe of fragments that surrounds them. Set in a movie theater located in the Mall of America, a universal emblem of pathological commodity-capitalist culture in the 21st century, the book moves freely between the diegetic reality of the movie theater, the action on the movie screen (i.e. previews), and the action on the mind's screens of Olsen's many characters, whose variable identities are defined by distant memories and potential futures as much as the present moment. The stitched-together narrative structure of 10:01 appropriately reflects its content: the increasingly ultraviolent schizophrenic body of the Americanized world.

Olsen breaths life into this body with vastly original flair, insight and precision. The hyperreal dreamscape imagined here is particularly reminiscent of cultural theorist Walter Benjamin's idea of the 19th century Parisian arcades, a derivative site of spectacular consumer society. Benjamin's The Arcades Project is a montage of notes, images and citations that serve as a map of the dawning capitalist unconscious. 10:01, in comparison, can be read as a map of the twilight of the capitalist unconscious as we continue to move into a new postcapitalist social, psychological, ideological, ontological and metaphysical space. The book is one of the first texts to effectively enter into this as-of-yet uncharted territory. Satirical, existential and theoretical, 10:01 offers a unique, compelling look at the individual and collective human psyche as produced by the technocapitalist machine.

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This book rocks, July 16, 2005

By 

Leah (NYC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: 10: 01 (Paperback)

Lance Olsen's 10:01 is amazing. First of all, it's totally innovative and different from anything else I've read (and I've read a lot of novels!) It paints a picture of Middle America that's totally unsentimental and contemporary. It's multicultural, multilingual and multigenerational. I love the way he uses language - each character feels totally distinct without the trappings of more conventional storytelling. I think my favorite thing about the book, though, is its gritty, unflinching, character portraits - these people are so naked and their lives are so full of violence and pain and longing, but warmth and humor saves them from feeling bleak. Olsen shows us the very flawed nature of his characters, but he never gives up on them.
If you want to read something really exciting and interesting and probably different from anything you've read before, check out 10:01.
the interactive web version is also cool - I'm a book purist by nature and tend to be suspicious of thngs like this but I was pleasantly surprised. The graphics are great and it really captures the feel of the novel without being reductive or obvious.

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