LORNA SORE

Earlier today, Fmsbwtozau told me a great story about the all-time best television show, The Cosby Show. In 1987, Lisa Bonet played “Epiphany Proudfoot” in a sex movie called Angel Heart. The movie was so at odds with Bill Cosby’s do-it-my-way fortitude that he had Bonet fired, she threatened to sue, and the producers compromised by creating A Different World.

This is like Kirk Cameron deciding in 1990, five years into Growing Pains, that the show featured too much Boner and pizza eating and not enough proselytizing. He kept threatening to quit unless they cleaned up the already generic family love show. Remember he had babysitter Julie (she has a MySpace page) fired for posing for Playboy?

The point is, Boner.

“Want a pickle? Oh. Spilled my pickles all over my bag here. You see, I’m on this diet, and I can only eat pickled goods and seafood, but that is gonna be a tough smell to get out. What an idiot! If it weren’t for bad luck, I’d have no luck at all. “

“These were the first six songs that played on my ipod in shuffle mode after I heard about Barbaro: 1) The Fallen 2) Let the Four Winds Blow 3) Shine It All Around 4) You’re the Reason I’m Leaving 5) All the King’s Horses 6) Thank You. Completely random? Somehow, I think there is a connection…Trying not to cry as I write this.”

[Deadspin]

“We like our apartment. We enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors d’oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph, and inviting in a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex.”

[Shary Boyle]

“I suspect, to test reviewers’ persistence, Thomas Pynchon has inserted on page 853 of his new novel a lightly coded, only slightly tongue-in-cheek abstract of Against the Day, a passage that pleads to be quoted:”

The Book of the Masked . . . [was] filled with encrypted field-notes and occult scientific passages of a dangerousness one could at least appreciate, though more perhaps for what it promised than for what it presented in such impenetrable code, its sketch of a mindscape whose layers emerged one on another as from a mist, a distant country of painful complexity, an all but unmappable flow of letters and numbers that passed into and out of the guise of the other, not to mention images, from faint and spidery sketches to a full spectrum of inks and pastels . . . visions of the unsuspected, breaches in the Creation where something else had had a chance to be luminously glimpsed. Ways in which God chose to hide within the light of day, not a full list, for the list was probably endless, but chance encounters with details of God’s unseen world.

Tom Leclair reviews the novel at length in Bookforum:

As always, Pynchon is a master purveyor of compressed atmospherics, the “spidery sketches” of the abstract: the minute, webbed details of physical setting, what people are eating, drinking, smoking, wearing, and hearing—and the feelings his characters project upon their surroundings. He has to do atmosphere well because his characters frantically change locations (they are the Traverses, after all) and his narrative rapidly shifts focus among the four siblings, their lovers, the acquaintances of the lovers, the sidekicks of the acquaintances, the crazed people met in bars, the voices of their dreams, and so on. Sympathy is expressed for members of the underclass wherever they are found—in Chicago slaughterhouses, Colorado mines, Italian tunnels, Mexican fields—but Pynchon rarely lingers long enough in a scene to dramatize the cause and effect the naturalists unmasked.

Here are the highlights from Sunday’s truly great wedding announcement for David Mandel (Seinfeld writer and executive producer of “Curb Your Enthusiasm”) and Dr. Rebecca Whitney.

1.) “I don’t like human beings,” he said, only half in jest. “I’m bothered by real and perceived slights, and I hold grudges for billions of years.” He lives in a dark Los Angeles apartment with blackout shades covering all of the windows to protect his collection of comic books, toy robots and “Star Wars” stormtrooper helmets.

2.) Mr. Mandel’s response was to write “a ‘Seinfeld’ episode about her,” he said. “It’s the modern equivalent of a Shakespeare sonnet.” He explained that in the episode, called “Bizarro Jerry,” Jerry Seinfeld dates a woman with “man hands.” Dr. Whitney, who winces when he mentions it, chimed in, “I would like to clarify that my hands are farm hands and not man hands.”

3.) The couple had prepared personalized vows, which Rabbi James Kaufman spoke. “You are the only one I know who will never bore me,” he recited, as he stood with them beneath a white canopy surrounded by soaring marble columns.

Q: You’re editing Clarkesworld Magazine and three issues have run. How is it going so far?

A: It’s going fairly well. Reading all the unsolicited submissions is a tedious chore, and there is what I can only call widespread confusion over what good writing is, but I enjoy the chance to discover new writers and pay them well, and I love the stories I’ve bought so far. The main issue is that with Clarkesworld I want language and voice to be important, and 90% of the writers who submit their work to me have absolutely no interest in language and voice. Imagine running a factory and soliciting bids to create some necessary widget that must be made out of platinum, and getting twenty proposals a day for pewter widgets. No matter how slowly or carefully I say “plat-i-num,” most of what I get involves someone holding up their story and saying, as
slowly, but surely not as carefully “Peeeeew-tuuuur.” Then some small fraction gets huffy. Everyone wants pewter widgets, dammit. In fact, pewter is so popular that cultural alchemy takes place and it becomes platinum.

Q: And you’re currently earning an MFA. How has that experience been for you so far?

A: It’s been shocking, honestly. I’ve never had a very high opinion of the MFA experience, as I’ve heard many tales from friends of mine who have been through some pretty prestigious programs — and I’ve read plenty of mediocre stories from grads — but I still was not prepared for just how viciously passive-aggressive some of the students can be toward their classmates and their teachers. The things I heard as anecdotes — the flip-outs, the sneering at any level of success other than their own, the posing, the incessant brown-nosing and validation-seeking oriented toward the faculty — are too often the actual rhetorical currency of the program. Of course, this is still a small minority of the students, but their volume belies their numbers.

Q: Herbert Weinberg, Roof’s twelve-year-old narrator, is telepathic and sometimes wise beyond his years. How hard was it to nail his voice? Did it change in the process of writing the book?

A: It was very easy to nail Herb’s voice. I was an annoying twelve-year-old once as well, after all. I stopped writing the book to move across country, and then I wrote a little bit more, and then I moved across the country again and wrote the rest of it. In the midst of all this, I truly became an adult by joining the conspiracy against children of which we’re all a part. I encountered some school kids being chaperoned across the street by their teacher and she pointed at me and told a couple of misbehaving children that if they didn’t stop, she’d let me have them. Without thinking I raised my arms and growled to play along with the teacher’s attempt to intimidate and terrify these dangerous six year-olds. After that, I realized what the ultimate message of the book had to be.