L☀RNA S☁RE

Summer GENRE reading series starts in a few weeks. The more the merrier — please email me or comment here if you wanna sign up.

WHAT IS THAT: Many people reading something very short (2 minutes) they’ve written specifically for the occasion. One of a kind custom GENRE only.

WHERE IS THAT: Blue Angel Wines in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. 8-10PM

Thursday, June 23 - Horror
Thursday, July 7 - Sci Fi
Thursday, July 21 - Victorian
Thursday, August 11 - Erotica
Thursday, August 25 - Noir

Reception to follow at Bushwick Country Club.

Harry Mathews, The Art of Fiction No. 191

INTERVIEWER: Which of Roussel’s methods interested you?

MATHEWS: One method he used for short stories involved making the first and last sentence identical except for one letter. Each word has one meaning in the first sentence and a different one in the last. A word like train might be a choo-choo to start with and a trailing skirt-end afterward. In the longer works, he would take fragments of nursery rhymes and parrot them phonetically and then use the new words to construct a story. For instance, the song “J’ai du bon tabac” becomes “Jade tube onde aubade.”

INTERVIEWER: What is the point of such a method? What does it achieve?

MATHEWS: It’s very liberating. It allows you to make up something that you never would have if you didn’t have this nasty problem to solve. For example, in Selected Declarations of DependenceI gave myself the task of writing a story using the one hundred and eighty-five words that were found in forty-six proverbs. This is a forbiddingly small vocabulary. It was hard to know what to do with them. Then I started putting words together and a few words would lead to a sentence and then eventually it became this sweet love story. It was as though you were wandering through a jungle and suddenly you came into a clearing that is a beautifully composed garden. It’s extraordinary, the feeling it gives you.

INTERVIEWER: You also invented something called a perverb. What’s that?

MATHEWS: A perverb—Maxine Groffsky coined the word—is a result of crossing two proverbs that can be divided easily into halves. For example, “All roads lead to Rome” and “A rolling stone gathers no moss” yield two perverbs: “A rolling stone leads to Rome” and “All roads gather no moss.”

Henry Green, The Art of Fiction No. 22 Interviewed by Terry Southern

INTERVIEWER: And how about “subtle”?

GREEN: I don’t follow. Suttee, as I understand it, is the suicide—now
forbidden—of a Hindu wife on her husband’s flaming pyre. I don’t want
my wife to do that when my time comes—and with great respect, as I
know her, she won’t . . .

INTERVIEWER: I’m sorry, you misheard me; I said, “subtle”—that the message was too subtle.

GREEN: Oh, subtle. How dull!

Jim Harrison, The Art of Fiction No. 104, 1986

INTERVIEWER: Along these lines, Faulkner once said that nothing could ruin a first-rate talent, to which Norman Mailer replied that Faulkner made more asinine remarks than any other major American novelist.

HARRISON: Except for Mailer.

Tonight I am reading a story and debuting my illustrations at the launch party for GIGANTIC Issue 3! The event is listed in the New Yorker! Congratulations Ann DeWitt, Rozalia Jovanovic, Lincoln Michel, and James Yeh.

I interviewed Tao Lin’s new wife, Megan Boyle, for The Rumpus. She answers my questions about the latest MDMAfilms production — a documentary about 17-year-old model/fashion blogger Bebe Zeva. I was planning to write a review of the film, but after the premiere I had to admit that I had almost no idea what Bebe Zeva was talking about (”entry-level” and “post-ironic” and Formspring) so I asked Megan Boyle for help.

This is my first collage. I am self-taught.

I have not been writing here because I am extremely over-employed. There isn’t much anyway, although I am now the two-time champ of Slice Magazine’s Piethos series. I have won two pies. I have a tiny story called “Stacks” coming out in Wigleaf any day now, and some day soon Lawrence Giffin and I will have a joint chapbook, a marriage of minds (ha), on Agnes Fox Press.

I have read and really loved: Jane Eyre (first time!) Farewell, My Lovely (first Raymond Chandler!), and a million essays about Dame Edith Sitwell. I am so grateful to Kim Rosenfield for introducing me.

I have quit Facebook (everything is nicer now) but have uppped my Twitter use. Tweet me! @lornasore

Today ruled because Ben Marcus read with Deb Olin Unferth at Bowery Poetry Club. Diane Williams introduced them. Ben Marcus read from the beginning of his new novel, The Flame Alphabet. It seems sad and mysterious. Deb Olin Unferth read two NOON stories, “Pet” and “My Daughter Debbie.” It was free and under one hour. Absolutely the best reading!

I am still dwelling on (and feeling condemned by) something Ben Marcus said in an interview with We Are Champion: “with a few exceptions I was writing the usual dismal stuff back then, fiction destined for compost.  People with real human bodies failing to get something they thought they wanted.  I lacked compositional authority and those forms never released any language from me that I could care about.  It wasn’t really work that was native to me.”

People with real human bodies failing to get something they thought they wanted. So funny! And also like, oops!

I have a very short piece up on his website: ”Your Body Bears Witness” and I’m looking forward to SKEIN 6 featuring Michelle Taransky, Mark Leidner, Joshua Bolton, Heather Christle, Ari Feld and Sara Blaylock, Sean Casey, Christopher DeWeese, Brad Flis, Lawrence Giffin, Seth Landman, Natalie Lyalin, Anjali Khosla Mullany, Nathaniel Otting, Emily Pettit and me with a story called PENIS IN SKY WORLD.

So happy to make the Wigleaf longlist for my Mississippi Review piece, “Boys and Girls in America Have Such a Sad Time Together“

Other thrills: graduation, The Facebook group “I want Tracy Morgan to show up to sit across from Marina Abramovic at MoMA,” The Starz show Party Down (streams on Netflix), The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell.

I have a new story up on Failbetter.

I’ve got a very short story (around which I am building a novel) up on the GIGANTIC website, with a very nice illustration by John Dermot Woods. I’ve also got a piece about Joseph O’Neill’s life in the Chelsea Hotel up at The Rumpus, and a review of Jason Vuic’s The Yugo: The Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History up at The Faster Times. And how awesome is Anna Bond:

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.