L☀RNA S☁RE

I can’t wait to begin Sam Lipsyte’s new novel The Ask – which is reviewed by Lydia Milliet in this Sunday’s NYT: “These are the kind of unlikable, lovable protagonists we miss; these are the self-loathing, mediocre secret geniuses who can set our people free.”

Gigantic Issue 2 looks established. I bought it at St. Mark’s last night but have not yet read one word. The paper is shiny, feels authoritative. I also bought Dorothea Lasky’s book Black Life, and another Wave book, Bluets, by Maggie Nelson. I had never heard of Nelson until we read her in Sarah Manguso’s class. We read an excerpt from the beggining of Bluets and I had a really intense reaction. I was dismissive and judgmental, but as I kept reading, which I wouldn’t have done if not for the class assignment, I felt disturbed. I felt like the project had a lot to teach me about “talky” writing (I feel this way about Dottie’s work, too) and I became very, very protective of Nelson’s book during our class discussion. It makes no sense to me. How can it be so provocative and so difficult when it has perhaps the most yuck premise I have ever encountered (she falls in love with the color blue). I also got a lovely hardback from Four Corners Books called:

It’s part of their “Familiars” series in which artists choose and illustrate a novel or short stories. It’s an exciting time for reading and writing. Lots of friends are getting published! Spring is coming! And, I’ve got some nonfiction pieces coming out in The Rumpus (on Joseph O’Neill) and The Faster Times (reviewing a book about the Yugo) in the next fews days, and this weekend I am going to make Barry Hannah’s 3 Bean Soup.

diana mini camera, skins, eat when you feel sad by zachary german, “the moors” by ben marcus (in the latest tin house), the amy bishop saga, juicer, kate zambreno’s blog, drugs: a very short introduction by leslie iversen, dottie lasky’s poem in the new yorker

1 Marry somebody you love and who thinks you being a writer’s a good idea.

2 Don’t have children.

3 Don’t read your reviews.

4 Don’t write reviews. (Your judgment’s always tainted.)

5 Don’t have arguments with your wife in the morning, or late at night.

6 Don’t drink and write at the same time.

7 Don’t write letters to the editor. (No one cares.)

8 Don’t wish ill on your colleagues.

9 Try to think of others’ good luck as encouragement to yourself.

10 Don’t take any shit if you can possibly help it.

From The Guardian, via Ed Park

Catherine Lacey

Annie DeWitt

Roxane Gay

Rachel B. Glaser

Rozi Jovanovic

Dottie Lasky

Natalie Lyalin

Kendra Grant Malone

Chelsea Martin

Alexandra Sears

Anya Yurchyshyn

items I am reading slowly and recommend:

why animal suffering matters by andrew linzey, dad says he saw you at the mall by ken sparling (courtesy of sasha fletcher), mindfulness in plain english by bhante henepola gunaratana, the stories of vladimir nabokov, light boxes: a novel by shane jones.

items to physically attend, see you there?

1.) March 5-28 at the Met: Shostakovich opera of Gogol’s “The Nose.”

2.) Wednesday, February 10 at Housing Works: Harper’s hosts “Love: A Rebuke,” a reading with Colson Whitehead, Heidi Julavits, and Sam Lipsyte.

3.) Saturday, February 27 at Space Space: Poetry Time with Lawrence Giffin, Lucy Ives and Chris Martin.

objects of my virtual affection:

4.) Ben Marcus has a nice new website with his writing and other people’s.

5.) I reviewed a british history book for The Faster Times. Stand by for my review of The Yugo: The Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History. I really enjoyed reviewing A.N. Wilson’s book. May I always review nonfiction and never review fiction. May I never be reviewer-y.

6.) My new passion: “Skin Deep is a safety guide to cosmetics and personal care products brought to you by researchers at the Environmental Working Group.” I threw away a lot of money my perfumes, which was really upsetting. I know it’s kinda mommy but I really like to wear perfume. I had no idea it was so toxic. Fortunately, my friend Annie came through with the best replacement: Sweet Marriage: “Scent: Joy inducing and sensual. Divine jasmine with a hint of orange. Purposes: Brings love and sensuality to a union. Refreshes love, increases intimacy and communication, strengthens commitment and promotes monogamy.” (I am getting married this summer) P.S. check out The Successful Marriage Resource.

6.) Gigantic has some new stuff up, and is asking for 300 word biographies of famous Americans!

This is what I bought Lawrence for Christmas:

1.) “How, I wondered, would the landscape change if the New Yorker published Diane Williams, Gary Lutz, Ben Marcus, Lydia Davis? What renaissance might ensue?” from Loads of Learned Lumber

2.) I am reviewing A.N. Wilson’s Our Times: 1953-2008 for The Faster Times. From A.N. Wilson’s Wikipedia page:

In August 2006 Wilson’s biography of Sir John Betjeman was published. It was then discovered that he had been the victim of a hoax and had included a letter (to Anglo-Irish writer, Honor Tracy) which purported to be by Betjeman detailing a previously unknown love affair, but which he acknowledged to be a fiction, when it was pointed out that it contained an acrostic spelling out an insulting message to him. The letter was sent to Wilson by “Eve de Harben”, who then wrote to a journalist to reveal the hoax. The acrostic spelt out “AN Wilson is a shit” and “Eve de Harben” is an anagram of “Ever been had“. Bevis Hillier, Wilson’s arch rival and Betjeman’s authorised biographer, was an immediate suspect but initially denied all knowledge. A week after the hoax was publicised, however, Hillier admitted responsibility, stating that “When a newspaper started billing Wilson’s book as ‘the big one’, it was just too much.” Wilson later claimed that he has struck back with a hidden message of his own in a reprinting of the book. That has yet to be discovered.

3.) Popcorn is my favorite food and this is the worst news: ”A large tub of popcorn at Regal Cinemas, for example, holds 20 cups of popcorn and has 1,200 calories, 980 milligrams of sodium and 60 grams of saturated fat. Adding just a tablespoon of butter adds 130 calories. And do not forget that it comes with free refills. Not so hungry? The medium size popcorn, which comes in a bag, contains the same amount as the large. And even the small, at 11 cups, delivers 670 calories, 550 milligrams of sodium and 24 grams of saturated fat.”

4.) The Jay Z/Alicia Keys song “Empire State of Mind” came on in Grey Dog’s and I got choked up.

At the end of November I wrote about T. Gertler’s book Elbowing the Seducer and wondered about T. Gertler’s identity, and what happened to her. I don’t know a lot more than I knew then, but I’ve finished her novel. The book is dedicated to R.D., M.D. and (the symbol for the Latin cum = with) Gravity. I haven’t read a sexy/plotty book like this since Rona Jaffe’s The Best of Everything and I really enjoyed myself.

New York Magazine reviewed the book and has a picture of T. Gertler, and in 1984 Janet Maslin wrote the following for the NYT:

Concerning the Wikipedia claim that the character of Howard Ritchie is based on Gordon Lish: Howard Ritchie is described as a “midwife to literature” and he calls himself Captain Marvel (Lish is known as  ”Captain Fiction”). I thought Ritchie’s literary magazine, Rosemary, resembled the Quarterly, but Lish founded the Quarterly in 1987 and Gertler’s book came out in 1984 so I guess if it’s Lish it could possibly be about Esquire? Does that make Vincent Bask Barry Hannah? Or Richard Ford?

Here are some passages from Elbowing the Seducer:

“Rosemary was descended from the Review, which had established a respectable reputation circulation among college libraries and large bookstores in college towns. The intricate woodblock R on its masthead had been carved by a student, Dickie N. Thornton, forty years before; thirty-five years later his widow; Lydia with plumed moles, provided a fund to perpetuate the magazine, with the provision that Dickie’s R should also endure…

The word submission summed up the problem he faced. He didn’t want writing to crawl to him, hat in hand…

He wanted to be disarmed, he wanted to be aroused. He was listening for a voice that unmistakably, stubbornly insisted on itself, couldn’t be anything but itself, faithfulness as instinct or, if instinct failed, faithfulness as an act of courage.”

Shary Boyle and Carly Waito are two of my favorite artists — and both are Canadian. Here’s Carly Waito’s exhibition page at the Narwhal Art Space.

Amazing! Way better than I expected.

The best things I’ve read lately were both recommended by Ed Park, The Notebook by Agota Kristof and Speedboat by Renata Adler.

Tao Lin was interviewed by Michael Silverblatt for KCRW’s Bookworm, and in his post Tao links to a bunch of other great writers’ interviews from the Bookworm archives, including an interview with Gordon Lish. Listening to it I went to Lish’s Wikipedia page (which has been markedly expanded since I last checked) and that’s where I read this:

T. Gertler’s novel, Elbowing the Seducer, has a character who is a book editor and womanizer who is apparently based on Lish. It is unknown who Gertler really is — this writer only published on story in Esquire and one novel.

In 1984 she told Don Swaim her name is Trudy Gertler and doesn’t at all seem to be assuming a fake identity. Maybe Wikipedia is wrong. There isn’t any citation for that detail.  Anyway here’s an interesting bit from the interview:

T. Gertler: When I was a little girl and I’d read the Miami Herald, which is quite different now, but at the time I would read that so-and-so was a good woman writer, and then there would be Steinbeck or Faulkner and they were writers. And at the same time it would say so-and-so is a great dancer and so-and-so is a good black dancer. And I got this notion that there were categories and subcategories and I wanted to be in the main category and I despaired it and I just thought well there are always writers and there are women writers and being a writer is the thing to be, even if you’d be the least of all the writers, it’s still better than being the top of the women writers if that’s a subcategory. You know I just wanted to be a writer. So I thought maybe that wasn’t a reasonable thing to want to be….and I didn’t have an strong push in the opposite direction…I think part of my predicament was preposterous…my thinking that…

Don Swaim: Well not really because, particularly in the past, women have trapped themselves into writing about women’s themes to a great degree and not universal themes. And this still happens…to a degree, and I think that this is changing now.

T. Gertler: Well to a degree, there is one other point I could make about that, about universal themes, which is that men and women do have, to a degree at times, different preoccupations sometimes merging sometimes not and that often when a woman writes badly people saw oh this is female writing, this is bad. When a man writes badly we should say that he is also exaggerating the worst in himself and we’d say he’s writing male-ly. He’s overmacho or he’s emphasizing that part of himself, the male part…

Don Swaim: Or we say he’s writing junk.

T. Gertler: Yes and so women can write junk and men can write junk. But the preoccupation is when your human, and when they pertain to the truth or the need of the man or the woman is good writing, usually. Emily Dickinson is certainly a genius. Some of her poems are not very good and criticism has been that they are too female. Yeats is a brilliant, wonderful, wonderful poet and at times some of his poems are less than marvelous and that’s when he’s pursuing his male themes to the exclusion of his female self, he’s not in balance either, nor is she at times. So  I take a minor exception to what you just said in that I don’t think it’s been the confinement to certain interests that’s been the problem for women, but the lack of perception, critically, that when men are failing they are failing in their work because they are doing parodies of being men and that when women fail in their work they are doing parodies of being women and neither is acceptable.

Also did you know…
Rozalia Jovanovic is writing surreal and wonderful “reviews” for The Rumpus

Alison Kelly reviewed NOON for the Times Literary Supplement

This is Seth Landman

“If I stress the various facets of unhappiness, it is because I believe unhappiness should be studied very carefully,” he told an interviewer. “This certainly is no time for anyone to pretend to be happy, or to put his unhappiness away in the dark. You must watch your universe as it cracks above your head.”
60th Anniversary of Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky

I just read SHOPLIFTING FROM AMERICAN APPAREL by Tao Lin and I kept thinking about the story collection LAST EVENINGS ON EARTH by Roberto Bolano.

Both books have lots of grinning and shy smiles. Both are about writers, but actually, they aren’t similar at all, except for what I’m gonna call a haphazard-but also-logistically attentive “this happened, and then this happened and then this” style, even detailing where characters walked, for how many minutes, and everything they see (”They sat looking ahead, away from the house, at some tents and a fence and another house” -SLFAA). Also Tao Lin only uses first names, sometimes Bolano only uses letters, but more importantly, neither describes anything that isn’t “happening” in the scene.

One huge difference is we infrequently get the thoughts of Tao Lin’s characters, while we know a lot, a lot about the thoughts of people in the Bolano stories. This difference doesn’t really diminish whatever it is that’s shared — a looseness, a journalistic lack of ambiguity, a devil-may-care abruptness. It’s like these books are casually dressed for a fancy party, but on purpose, but not annoyingly on purpose. It’s interesting to think about this looseness in response to terse, super-polished, abstract fiction.

Anyway, SHOPLIFTING FROM AMERICAN APPAREL is funny, goes by really fast, and when I was reading I felt hyper, like I was in the book and had a lot of easygoing friends to sit in a park with.

I realized I have no clue what Tao Lin means when he writes about “neutral facial expressions.” I think he uses that expression a lot on his blog. I tried it and I don’t think I can make my face neutral.

The main character Sam gets a lot of ass.

Here are some parts I really loved:

“I was in fucking McSorley’s…the oldest bar…you motherfuckers. This isn’t fair.”
“Life isn’t fair,” said an African American policeman.
“You,” screamed the drunk man loudly. “Life. You. You are bringing life into this? Don’t do that you motherfucker. Don’t fucking do that. You are bringing life into this.”

Sam picked up a very long stick and said he was going to stir his drink with it.

“People with high motivation to have sex all the time don’t like Lorrie Moore.”

Sam told Audrey to scream “red shirt” at people across the street walking in the same direction as them. “Red shirt,” screamed Audrey. A woman in her forties, two teenagers, and a person in a bright red shirt who was maybe twenty turned their upper bodies and looked at Audrey while walking forward. “It’s a family, I think,” said Sam. “They’re ignoring it. That’s so bad for them, a family, it’ll probably be all they talk about later, like when they’re eating.”

decadent salad:
1 can chickpeas
red grapes
avocado
cherry tomatoes cut up
red onion
2 cloves raw garlic, minced
pecorino romano
olive oil

The awesome banners at the top and bottom of the new Alice Munro novella in Harper’s are by Lorenzo Petrantoni, his website is beautiful. 

Tao Lin is putting book news at the top of his blog now. It’s funny: ’pindeldyboz’ still exists’

I finished teaching creative writing at Columbia’s summer high school program. It was really fun, I felt like I was at camp. I taught with Tom Hummel, a poet with a sweet press, Hand Held Editions. 

I am curious about Unsaid Magazine. They’re hosting a reading tonight at the new Unnameable Books, Dawn Raffel is reading. 

We grilled pizza with Erica and watched Pretty in Pink on Friday so it’s not like I’ve forgotten that Steff is awful. But looking through this John Hughes “Style Tribute” it’s so obvious he’s king! Total Chuck Bass of 1986. 

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