L☀RNA S☁RE

Reading and re-reading the Gary Lutz talk: “but there are some writers whose mission is sometimes to deliver us from conclusion to conclusion instead of necessarily bogging us down in the facts, the data, the sorry particulars leading to each conclusion.”

From the Gordon Lish interview in postcards:
Dear Gordon Lish,
Below is a list that I posted over my bed that you, Gordon Lish, created about writing. Can you tell me a story that explains this list?

1.) Loosened association.
2.) Antic behavior.
3.) Autism.
4.) Morbid ambivalence.

John Lee

Gordon Lish replies: The items listed concern the devising of a method I once advocated as productive of a state conducive to the creation of an act of imaginative writing different from all other acts of the kind, the aim being to bring about an artifact of singular character. There might have been a fifth cue also possessed of an initial A. But there just as well might not have been. How many components would you say contrive to effect the singularity of a City Bakery peanut-butter cookie?

I want to make this split pea soup but it has liquid smoke in it. Is liquid smoke safe?

Soderbergh’s Che movie is 4 hours and it’s good. It’s my favorite movie since There Will Be Blood.

I just wrote this on someone’s blog as a joke but it sums up my holiday vacation: “if you wake up make coffee and watch these shows in this order it is equal to reading the old gawker: martha stewart, the bonnie hunt show, style by jury, charlie rose, ellen, oprah.”

These are the free Bookmooch books I have receieved or am waiting to receive:

Ava - Carole Maso
SNOW WHITE  - Barthelme
Disgrace - J. M. Coetzee
Extravaganza - Gordon Lish
Distortions - Ann Beattie
Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
Vox - Nicholson Baker
Everybody Who Was Anybody: A Biography of Gertrude Stein - Janet Hobhouse
Without Precedent: The Life and Career of Eleanor Roosevelt - Joan Hoff-Wilson
A Feather on the Breath of God: A Novel - Sigrid Nunez
Lightning Field: A Novel - Dana Spiotta
Diary of a Nobody - George Grossmith
LOVING. LIVING. PARTY GOING - Henry Green

‘Not Easily Broken’ certainly has its own, fairly transparent, ideological agenda, but is nonetheless a thousand times more honest, and more humane, than Mr. Mendes’s preening work of ersatz art.”

This soup recipe is good, but I used 4 cloves of garlic and no lemon juice. On my way to see Revolutionary Road. UPDATE: I cried in the book but not in the movie. Unknown actors would have been better. Kate Winslet didn’t do April right — I went looking for corroboration that her voice was weird and found it here: “In the past, Winslet has played American women without straining, but this time she enunciates with laborious precision—you can see her propelling vowels and consonants like smoke rings.”

David Denby goes on: “She and Mendes (her offscreen husband) have worked out a conception of April as a will-driven, semi-hysterical female defined solely by her relationship with Frank. Forcing herself to extremes, April is either electrified by her husband (“You’re the most beautiful thing in the world—a man”) or disgusted by him; she will turn him into a god or destroy him, and Winslet keeps her back rigid, her shoulders high, her jaw set. DiCaprio, by turns cocky, supplicating, and enraged, gets the externals right, but he seems a little afraid of revealing the depths of Frank’s shallowness. Frank is a liar, an adulterer, and a compromiser who betrays himself as much as his wife, but DiCaprio projects a natural heroic sweetness—it’s in his movie-star genes—which, in this case, is at odds with the character he’s playing. If you think of Paul Newman’s acid moments in “The Hustler” and “Hud,” you can imagine how the role might have been done.”

RELATED: “About 15 percent of New York City adults, or some 883,000 people, engage in binge drinking at least once a month — with binge drinking defined as having five or more drinks on one occasion.”