L☀RNA S☁RE

“Sir! Ma’am! For the safety and security
of you and your family,
I need you to get the fuck
back into that burning plane.
For the 245 whites of Shanksville, PA,
bombed from eight weeks in the future,
recovered into historical memory
from the pixel debris connecting
the monitor to the hardpoint,
please, get the fuck
back into that burning plane.
A finger prodding you through an array
of channels and devices:
lab, factory, prison, school.
Into the time-period you go,
fluctuating like a canister,
handed yourself by the bursar
and the ombudsperson
like a glass of gravitas.
You lick the bottom of the glass;
there is candy there.
You lick the wreckage of racialized vespers;
there is a nation here.
We are living in a serialized world,
and I am the Aleph and the Omega Manifold.
I am there at helpdesk, on holiday in Apartheid Villages.
Wherever information processing continues
indefinitely along one world-line gamma
to the future c-boundary of the universe,
I, cable news, am there, bringing you the federal
double-wide prank of dematerialized corporate America,
but only if you get on the plane.
Get back on the plane, now.
The plane, madam, please, the plane,
get yourself the fuck back to it.”

Pre-order from Ugly Ducking Presse.
Pub date: March 2009
hand-bound with letterpress wrap
$10 ($7 direct from UDP)

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.”

I ate deer and my first pulled pork sandwich. It was from Interstate Bar-b-que in Memphis.

James Yeh tagged me in this game where you say seven things about yourself, but seven things! In public! Here are some true things, though: Last night I ate a duck. I am reading Distortions by Ann Beattie, who was once married to David Gates. I got the book free from Bookmooch. Heidi Julavits has a great story in the January Harpers. it’s called The Santosbrazzi Killer. If that link doesn’t work, email me or comment and I will send you the story as a PDF (holiday gift). This is a picture of me with Lawrence’s sister’s cat Lucy, in Lawrence’s childhood bedroom, writing this post. She is a very talky cat and helps me cope with the fact that Stephen and Stephen’s Friend are in small cages back in Brooklyn. I wish these statements were true of me: “laid-back, cool and collected” and “He gives off a little oasis of calm.”

The Mercantile Library of NY
Center for Fiction
17 East 47th Street
New York, NY 10017
212-755-6710
www.mercantilelibrary.org

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CONTACT:

Noreen Tomassi
212-755-6710

RENOWNED WRITING TEACHER GORDON LISH WILL EMERGE FROM RETIREMENT TO LEAD A WRITING CLASS IN SUMMER 2009 IN NEW YORK CITY

December 11, 2008 — The Mercantile Library Center for Fiction, the only literary arts center in the United States devoted entirely to the art of fiction, announces that author, editor, and renowned writing teacher Gordon Lish will lead a class beginning in June 1, 2009 and ending August 17, 2009. The class will meet on Mondays from 5pm to approximately 11 pm. Tuition for the 72-hour course is $2800. College credit may be available through the experiential learning division of universities and colleges.

Applicants are asked to send a three-page writing sample by January 30, 2009 to Noreen Tomassi at the Mercantile Library Center for Fiction, 17 East 47th Street, New York, NY 10017. For more information, visit www.mercantilelibrary.org or email us at info@mercantilelibrary.org.

About Gordon Lish
From 1986 to 1996, Gordon Lish was founder and editor of The Quarterly. He was an editor at Alfred A. Knopf from 1977 to 1995 and fiction editor of Esquire from 1969 to 1977. He is the author of the novels Dear Mr. Capote, Peru, Extravaganza, My Romance, Arcade, Zimzum, and Epigraph; the short-story collections Mourner at the Door, Selected Stories, Self-Imitation of Myself, Krupp’s Lulu, and What I Know So Far; and editor of the anthologies New Sounds in American Fiction, The Secret Life of Our Times: with an introduction by Tom Wolfe, and All Our Secrets Are the Same. Lish has taught imaginative writing at Yale, Columbia, and New York University, and is known for his many years of presenting private classes, each session of which was six to ten and a half hours in duration. No few of Lish’s students have gone on to notable careers in writing and teaching.

While at Esquire, Lish championed the work of Don DeLillo, Cynthia Ozick, Harold Brodkey, Barry Hannah, Joy Williams, and Raymond Carver, and brought out, while at Knopf, books by Denis Donoghue, Mary Robison, Amy Hempel, Raymond Carver, Sheila Kohler, Lily Tuck, Dawn Raffel, Anne Carson, Raymond Kennedy, Thomas Lynch, Ben Marcus, Walter Kirn, Christine Schutt, Roy Blount, and others. Lish is the source of the information that he was fired from every job he ever had.

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.