L☀RNA S☁RE

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.”

Do you know what kind of dog this is?

“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?