“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.
. 
SS: You’ve published in every issue of Noon since 2006. I find the stories in there comparable to anything that you’d find in Harper’s or The Paris Reviewor The New Yorker, but outside of serious literary circles it’s relatively unknown.
CM: I agree. I think that the stories in Noon can go toe to toe with stories in the very best places publishing short fiction in the world. And I know a lot of very smart people who hold the exact same opinion, including people high up in the world of publishing. I think in the fullness of time, Noon will be much more widely known than it is today, when people look back on this period of literary history. Diane Williams has an incredible ear, and she has an eye for all different kinds of stories. This is a cliché, but I think she has this kind of ear for authenticity. If there’s one thing that she taught me — writing for Diane was really my MFA — it’s how to carve all of the bullshit out of my writing, all of the literary pretension, any kind of fake word, any kind of cheap trick, anything that didn’t sound original. Link
I am so happy to have a piece in the summer fiction issue of the Mississippi Review Online.
It’s called “Boys and Girls in America Have Such a Sad Time Together” (a line from On the Road). Here’s the link to my story.
Another thing that happened since I last updated is this interview with Ryan Manning. Also Frank Bruni wrote about my favorite topic, Neapolitan pizzas in NYC. And Lawrence and I went to California. This was our cabin at Deetjen’s in Big Sur.
4/17 NOON Launch Reading & Party - Rebecca Curtis, Clancy Martin, Christine Schutt The Mercantile Library Center for Fiction, 17 East 47th Street. Free, 7PM.
4/18 “I’m Your Main Target Come and Help Me Ignite, Ow!” - Tao Lin, Adam Wilson, Alexandra Sears, Cesar Polonia, Dylan Nice, Annie Dewitt, James Yeh, Brie Bouslaugh, Garret McDonough, Rozalia Jovanovic, Ted Hodgkinson, Lincoln Michel, Ana Saldamando, Lauren Spohrer, Lawrence Giffin, Ramon Campos. Free, 9PM.
4/19 Alice Notley at Zinc Bar, 82 West 3rd Street. Free, 6:45PM.
4/22 Ding Dong Reading Series - Zadie Smith, Katherine Morris, Ben Pease, Garrett McDonough, Julie Limbaugh & Rachel Riederer. Ding Dong Lounge, Columbus Ave. near 106th St. Free, 8PM.
4/24 Lawrence Giffin and Nico Vassilakis at the Poetry Project, St. Mark’s Church, 131 E. 10th St. 10PM.
4/25 Ellen Kennedy “Sometimes My Heart Pushes My Ribs” book party at Cafe Orwell, 247 Varet St, Brooklyn. Free, 7PM.
4/25 GIGANTIC Launch party and Benefit - Lauren Spohrer, Justin Taylor, Adam Wilson, Anya Yurchyshyn, Kristen O’Toole, and Kenny Aquiles. Starr Space, 108-110 Starr Street, Brooklyn, $6, 8PM. The Ellen Kennedy event and the GIGANTIC event are close together. You can walk or take the train one stop!
“But, as Wallace saw it, irony could critique but it couldn’t nourish or redeem. He told McCaffery, “Look, man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is?”
17 East 47th Street
“almost inhumanly brave as her illness ground her along on her long passage to death. In the hospital the spring before she died, she worked between blood transfusions — she joked that she was hearing a celestial chorus but the song, over and over, was ‘Clementine’ — correcting the galleys of the marvelous short story ‘Revelation’ and completing another, ‘Parker’s Back,’ which she had been working on and revising for years. Always, always in her work, she struggled to find the delivering image, the delivering word that would offer ‘experienced meaning.’” (Stranger Than Paradise)
I have a story coming out in a new magazine called GIGANTIC. They put up one-sentence prose previews.
For the Diane Williams workshop we typed up our favorite sentences from books and stories…here’s what I’ve got so far:
______________________________________________________________
I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly consider’d how much depended upon what they were then doing;—that not only the production of a rational Being was concern’d in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;(and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost:— Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,—I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me.
______________________________________________________________
“Chuck, what is that up in that tree?” Marie said.
Chuck walked to the window. “A man,” he answered.
“A man? What’s he doing up there?”
“Don’t know.”
______________________________________________________________
Moldenke would remain.
______________________________________________________________
He made his fortune by by and by by by and by he made his fortune by and by by and by he made his fortune.
______________________________________________________________
She told her daughter as she might a lover such things her lover said were best kept secret from a girl.
______________________________________________________________
KEY:
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentlemen Laurence Sterne
“Chuck, What is That?” Laurence C. Peacock NOON 2008
Motorman David Ohle
A Novel of Thank You Gertrude Stein
Nightwork “Teachers” Christine Schutt
The iPhone application Electric Smoke allows you to inhale over the iPhone microphone while smoke appears on the screen. The harder you inhale, the more smoke you see coming from your iPhone cigarette.
Electric Smoke works with another application called Sonic Lighter. If you have the Sonic Lighter application you can light your friend’s Electric Smoke cigarette by touching iPhones.
“Electric Smoke is a game as well,” according to the official description. “Challenge your friends to see who has the biggest lungs, who can smoke faster, and who can smoke more.”
