LORNA SORE

Nietzsche Shirt

“Prose impressionist Christine Schutt describes the painstaking intensity that allows her to perfect her cadences and the precision of her imagery. Her stories are built up draft upon draft, variation upon variation, until Schutt achieves a density that is both poetic and conclusive.”

Gawker is just better lately. Here are some recent posts I loved.
Emily Gould wrote three of them. I can’t put my finger on what’s better about them, but it might be that Emily includes herself in her posts a little more, and she’s funny, so it’s funny to read what she says to people, and what crazy bullshit they say back. But also I think Gawker feels downright feminist these days, in a nice, opposite of BUST Magazine way.

From Joshua Harmon’s blog:

One of the features there is Gerald Howard’s reminiscence on editing Gordon Lish. Howard notes Lish’s somewhat famous “slash and burn handiwork” (which as far as I’m concerned is what made Raymond Carver readable; it’s inconceivable to me how anyone could prefer the sentimental ramblings of “A Small, Good Thing” to “The Bath”), and describes working with Lish (when Howard was an editor at Norton) on the publication of Lish’s infamous novel My Romance. The essay doesn’t really offer much of interest—a broad recounting of Lish’s editorial influence at Esquire and in the classroom (Lish’s work for Knopf gets but one passing mention, and The Quarterly none at all), along with the contention that Lish himself exhibited “control-freak obsessiveness,” as evidenced by his desires to write his own jacket copy, choose the art director for the cover of his book, and oversee the typography of the novel—the horror! a writer who cares about the public presentation of his work!—as well as by his lawsuit against Harper’s for their publication of a letter to his writing students.

I suppose Howard’s brief background on what Lish meant to fiction is necessary for many readers, given that Lish’s public profile is now far diminished from what it was from the 1970s through the 1990s, but to fail to include The Quarterly as part of that discussion, or to limit the discussion of the writers Lish edited to those such as Carver, Joy Williams, Cynthia Ozick, Barry Hannah, Amy Hempel, and Mary Robison seems to ignore much of Lish’s importance today. The Quarterly was, for my money, the literary magazine that mattered most in the late 1980s and early-to-mid-1990s, and though the writers Lish was publishing at that time—Diane Williams, Noy Holland, Ben Marcus, Yannick Murphy, Christine Schutt, Victoria Redel, Jason Schwartz, Dawn Raffel, Brian Evenson, Gary Lutz, Mark Richard, et. al.—never achieved the widespread commercial/critical reputation of some of Lish’s earlier writers, they have certainly been more important to me and to a new generation of writers (even if only as an unrecognized, trickledown influence) than, e.g., Carver. (Though Robison, Hempel, and Hannah are indeed high on my list.)

Stella McCartney allegedly designed a “one leg necklace” as a tribute to her enemy and former stepmother Heather Mills.

“The silver, single-limbed pendant was unveiled to a select group of fashion industry players in Paris last month as part of McCartney’s debut jewellery collection, and is set to launch for spring/summer 2008.”