LORNA SORE

This is me and a unicorn at P.S.1 on Saturday.

Tao Lin wrote a review of Woodcutters: “Woodcutters by Thomas Bernhard has maybe the most shit-talking (percentage-wise) out of the books I have read or movies I have seen. The level of shit-talking in Woodcutters is perhaps equal to some Gmail chats or online message boards, I believe, but the sentences are longer and the shit-talking is done by a man in his 50’s (I think) and also it is sustained for around 200 pages within a concrete situation. The narrator’s shit-talking seems ‘uncontrollable.’”

(That line reminds me that shit-talking is controllable, and that I should probably watch my mouth, and so in addition to being entertaining, this review provided an important public service. Now I have blogged about Tao Lin.)

Pizza Hut Taco Bell by healing and easy listening duo Das Racist. 

FOOD: Last night I baked eggplant and acorn squash and also steamed some broccoli to eat with this cheddar cheese sauce. We had a lot of cheese sauce leftover so we ate it with millet this morning and it was awesome and tasted like cheese grits. Last week I made barley with roasted butternut squash and apples and that worked pretty well. I have switched from coffee to tea.

BOOKS: I have mailed 15 free books to strangers via BookMooch.com. I wish there was a similar website for clothes. I read Elizabeth Costello by J.M. Coetzee and thought it was sort of dull until I finished it and then I thought “interesting” and now I want to read it over again and pay closer attention. Other books are The Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe, Earwitnesses by Elias Canetti, and the poetry magazine Invisible Ear, put out by my friend Seth Landman. Now I am reading Color of Darkness by James Purdy and The Book of Common Prayer by Joan Didion. Didion has signed on to write the HBO biopic of Katharine Graham. I loved Graham’s memoir and can’t wait for this movie.

NEWS: George W. Bush’s email address used to be G94B@aol.com. One of Alice Munro’s books was once referred to as “a big dish of Beluga caviar” sailing in “on a sparkling bed of rice, with a mother-of-pearl spoon.” A South Carolina priest is telling his parish that they won’t be receiving communion if they voted for Obama.

from the LAT.

Today we went to St. Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue for second installment of “Six Saturdays With Messiaen.”

John Scott (the church’s organist and music director) is performing all of Olivier Messiaen’s organ works. Scott plays the church’s incredible Arents Memorial Organ, a Skinner instrument from 1913. It’s huge.

It is wonderful to be in a church when no one is talking! St. Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue is so imposing! I love churches and I love organs and when I think about how it felt to listen to the music today I think “it was restorative” and “I felt stoned.”

“Mr. Scott’s powerful account left no question that he had deeply considered every detail of dynamics and pacing, yet his playing gave the impression of spontaneous invention.”

I’m reading SOME INSTRUCTIONS by Stanley Crawford for a class. I had never heard of this book before. It doesn’t look like Crawford has a Wikipedia page. Last month, Bookslut put up this interview and Deb Olin Unferth interviewed him for Powell’s. Crawford and his wife run a garlic farm in New Mexico. The full title of the book is Some Instructions: Concerning the Upkeep of the House and Marriage and to My Son and Daughter Concerning the Conduct of Their Childhood. Dalkey put it out in 1996. Here are some passages:

From “The Weather”

“And here, in these changes, is an ideal topic of conversation between Husband and Wife, for the weather is something that can often be both vague and precise, certain and uncertain, pleasant and unpleasant, useful and useless, and thus is a subject that can never be truly exhausted and about which never enough can be said. No doubt you have noticed my preference for it above all other subjects. What drama lies in the air around us!”

From “The Goats”

“And as it is with the goats of the barnyard, so it is with those of the Marriage, by which I mean the genitalia, which the Husband and Wife must keep confined or penned up most of the time while also taking care to feed them well with daily rations of fodder of the appropriate kind so that they yeild up and produce the protein-rich products which they manufacture out of mere grasses and dried leaves — milk and manure…

…thus the animals of the barnyard, like those of the marriage, must remain in confinement except at such regularly scheduled times when they are led out of their pens to be milked or groomed or fed, and put back into their pens when such tasks are complete, and not allowed to roam freely about the yard. As you and I have our goats, so will other Marriages have their cattle or rabbits or pigeons or doves or even bees. Nonetheless, despite apparent differences, the principles remain essentially the same.”

From “Putting Toys Away”

“Toys are to be played with (imagine what is small and insignificant to be large and powerful, for example) and not to be employed as implements or weapons or anything else; thus a toy left carelessly about, blocking a hallway or a threshold, is likely to seem something else, that is, an irritation or an obstacle or a barrier.”

From “Reading and Writing”

“In the meantime, it would be of help to you to keep in mind this useful rule, which is that for every object in existence there should exist a corresponding piece of paper — no matter how how small, if even just a scrap.”

I was watching a 1997 interview David Foster Wallace gave to Charlie Rose and then this happened:

ROSE: Can you imagine yourself writing a screenplay? Have you tried?

DFW: No, I haven’t tried. I’ve talked a couple times — my best friend writes mysteries and he and I have talked about doing a screenplay. I think — I think I would have a very difficult time writing something that’s a product that other people would mess with. And the amount of money that’s at stake in movies and the amount of — the dispersal of responsibility for the thing — I mean, the director, the actors, the producer — in order to do — writing is very difficult for me and it takes a lot of time and energy. And once I’ve done it, it’s my thing. I can’t imagine putting in the time and energy to do a good screenplay — I mean, something like what David Webb Peoples can do. He’s a screenwriter I think is really, really superb.

ROSE: What’s he written?

DFW: He’s written “Blade Runner” and he wrote “Unforgiven,” the Clint Eastwood Western which –

ROSE: Did you like it?

DFW: I thought — “Unforgiven”?

ROSE: Yeah.

DFW: I thought “Unforgiven” is the first really smart Western since, I don’t know, early Peckinpah.

ROSE: I do, too. I loved it.

DFW: What’s interesting is I don’t know a single female who likes the film. It’s very odd. I talk to all these people –

ROSE: It’s interesting you say that.

DFW: — about “Unforgiven” –

ROSE: It’s interesting you say that because –

DFW: — and females think, “Western? It stinks.” And if you can get them to watch it, it’s not a Western at all. I mean, it’s a moral drama. It’s — you know, it’s Henry James, basically. But it’s very odd.

ROSE: My girlfriend and I — Amanda hates the film and it’s the one film that I just have a wider difference with her than any other film that we’ve seen together.

Later this happened:

DFW: Feminists are always saying this. Feminists are saying white males say, “Okay, I’m going to sit down and write this enormous book and impose my phallus on the consciousness of the world.”

ROSE: And you say?

DFW: I — I — if that was going on, it was going on on a level of awareness I do not want to have access to.

ROSE: Do you still play tennis?

I finished The Black Prince and started Murdoch’s The Sacred and Profane Love Machine. For school I’m reading Remainder by the International Necronautical Society’s Tom McCarthy. (Their First Manifesto declared that “Death is a type of space, which we intend to map, enter, colonize and, eventually, inhabit”).

In 2001, Tom McCarthy told an interviewer: “…metaphor is a sort of vehicle that autodestructs even before the task is quite done. It will carry meaning a certain distance and then the vehicle sinks, founders and again you’re left with a very sincere failure…”

I read The Easter Parade by Richard Yates at some point in the last few weeks and it was the shiz and I love Emily Grimes & the name Grimes. I learned that Yates has a book called Young Hearts Crying.

FLORIDA: Last summer, Lehman Brothers hired Jeb Bush for its in-house investing arm. And now “The bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, a prestigious Wall Street firm, will touch Florida’s pension funds and the state-run insurer because both hold its securities. The State Board of Administration holds $322 million in Lehman stock and bonds. The SBA manages the state’s employee fund and more than two dozen other funds, including assets for the Florida Hurricane Catastrophe Fund and the Florida Prepaid College Plan.” Go Noles!

If I ever wanted an “oh snap” t-shirt, it would be the one Feministing made that says “A woman candidate is not the same thing as a woman’s candidate.” Going to Portland, Oregon on Wednesday for Jamie and Nicole’s wedding of the century. And hiking! Then home to see the Ashbery collages at Tibor de Nagy and finish my new story, which is called Wanda.

Amy Goodman - the host of Democracy Now! was arrested while covering the RNC, along with about 77 others.

Amy Dickinson (of “Ask Amy”) married a childhood friend this weekend.

Rush Limbaugh thinks Sarah Palin is a “babe.” From the same piece I found out why her kids have the names they do - Track is named after high school track meets, Bristol for Bristol Bay where they did commercial fishing, Willow for a community in Alaska, Piper is just a cool name and Trig is Norse for “strength.” So Mo-Dowd treated me right, for once!

Forbes’ list of the World’s 100 Most Powerful Women came out this weekend - Angela Merkel was #1, followed by Sheila Bair, the Chairman of the U.S.’s Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and Indra Nooyi, the chairman and chief executive of PepsiCo. Condoleezza Rice was #7,  Nancy Pelosi came in at 35, followed by Hillary Clinton at 36.

Finally - in this impromptu feminist news tour:

A new study from York University in Toronto shows that what important executive women prize above all is emotional support, “a partner who listens to her and backs her respectfully when she’s angry or upset.” Researchers studied the attitudes of 20 married senior and executive women toward their husbands. When asked why housework was less significant, “the women explained that household help can be bought, whereas emotional support cannot.”

I am no longer embarrassed to admit how much I like classical music and jazz. I especially enjoy streaming Jazz 88. It makes me feel relieved, the same relief I feel after washing all of the dishes and then wiping off the kitchen table. I have already written here about my lack of interest in music, and how as I get older people’s music-intensity makes me uncomfortable and feel “dried up.” I’m reading The Black Prince by Iris Murdoch and got a big kick out of her description of one character as “rather aggressively fond of music.”

I hope that I’m not aggressively fond of anything except like maybe Jack Handey. Other pleasures this week include the Janet Frame story “Gorse is Not People” in The New Yorker, watching Star Trek TNG with Lawrence, reading Wonkette and making salads with sprouts, strawberries and tomatoes.

R E A D I N G

CHRISTINE SCHUTT AND DIANE WILLIAMS
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 5 — 7:00 P.M.
NATIONAL ARTS CLUB
15 Gramercy Park South
212-475-3424

I don’t know if it means that I’m no longer a newcomer, or that I’m still an outsider, but this really got on my nerves.