catherine lacey

Two Serious Ladies

2012-02-06T10:47:00.000-08:00

Hi there. Lauren Spohrer, an associate editor of NOON, has just started a new online magazine to promote the work of ladies she likes called Two Serious Ladies. Today she's running a very short story of mine that has gratuitous nudity, a semi-depressed relationship and dead mice. It takes about a minute or less to read. Happy Monday.

Road trip & a request

2012-01-14T11:22:00.000-08:00

February Roadtrip:

1. DC
2. Virginia
3. Houston, Texas
4. New Orleans

Request:

I am looking for writers who participate in any kind of religious or semi-religious activity.

I'm beginning work on an interview series about writers and their relationships with faith or practice (using the broadest definition of those words.) Meditators of all variety, Quakers, cult-members, Christians, Shinto observers, lazy Catholics, staunch Catholics, comedic Catholics, Jews of any kind, Monks, Nuns and everything in between counts. Esoteric, philosophical, conventional-- whatever. I'll take all of it. The name of the series will be "Practicing" and the venue is yet to be determined.

+Do you fall into this category? I would love to have coffee with you and go to whatever service you may go to and then talk to you a little about it.

+Do you know someone who may fall into this category? If you'd forward this email along I'd be very thankful.

Those who live in or around New Orleans, Houston and New York are of the most use right now, but really any suggestions of anyone anywhere are good. Ideally these will be writers with already established, semi-established or emerging careers. (ie, not your very cool but never-published friend Bob. Sorry Bob!)

Electric Literature reviews the reading....

2012-01-12T11:26:00.000-08:00

And they said nice things!
"Catherine Lacey read three short pieces from a longer work. One included a mother who dropped her children off at the police station, one repeated the refrain “Remove yourself from my automobile,” and the third focused on a think tank. What they all had in common: a sense of estrangement. It was beautiful work, and, as host Penina Roth commented, “haunting.”

A reading and another reading

2011-12-16T11:41:00.000-08:00

Well, it seems that Calamari Press and I are cosmically aligned or something, for the month of January. A little while back Penina Roth asked me to read for her series at Franklin Park with the venerable Gary Lutz (a Calamari author) and the hilarious Sam Lipsyte.

That's happening on January 9 at Franklin Park in Brooklyn,
8-10pm.

Then a few weeks later I got an email from Derek White offering me a chance to say some stuff alongside Chiara Barzini & Joe Salvatore three days later at Pacific Standard, also in Brooklyn.

This is also really exciting because it's to celebrate Chiara's new book from Calamari, Sister Stop Breathing. Also, I had a chance to read with Joseph back in the spring and man oh man is he great.

That's going to be January 12th at Pacific Standard, around 7, I think.

As usual, whiskey sodas and high-fives will be plentiful.

So Many Boats

2011-12-02T16:05:00.000-08:00

A nautically-themed reading in Brooklyn....

Seriously, Brooklyn cannot get more Brooklyn than this. We are out Brooklyn-ing ourselves. I am going to bring my post-ironic disposition and a short story about penguins and babies and dogs. Will be handing out earnest high-fives all night.

Lots of good things

2011-11-04T08:10:00.000-07:00

Next week I'll be reading for Kendra Malone & Matthew Savoca's book release party. Their newest collection of poems, Morocco, is being released by Dark Sky next week!

Pertinent details:
Wednesday, Nov 9th
6:30-9:30
Le Poisson Rouge
158 Bleecker St, Manhattan
Free!

Along with Matthew & Kendra, Dorothea Lasky (Black Life, AWE) and Giancarlo DiTrapano (New York Tyrant & Tyrant Books, editor) will also be reading, and just when you thought it couldn't be better you learn that Sasha Fletcher will be hosting. It's true!

Also, new fiction of mine will soon be posted on Wigleaf and Hot Metal Bridge, a literary magazine run by University of Pittsburgh MFA students. I'm also going to have another story up on 52 Stories soon.

In January (2012! Really!) a micro-interview that I did with Betsy Cohen will be running in The Believer.

The imagine above is what comes up when you google "lots of good things."

What I learned today while trying to find the appropriate way to describe someone's hair.

2011-10-25T16:01:00.000-07:00

coe•len•ter•ate |siˈlentəˌrāt; -rət|
noun Zoology

an aquatic invertebrate animal of a phylum that includes jellyfishes, corals, and sea anemones. They are distinguished by having a tube- or cup-shaped body and a single opening ringed with tentacles. Also called cnidarian .

• Phylum Cnidaria (formerly Coelenterata): four classes.

M Wells on Blackbook

2011-08-19T06:42:00.001-07:00

I wrote a piece about M Wells, a diner in Queens that foodies have been flocking to for bone marrow and duck testicles and greasy, hip charm and it's up on Blackbook today.

So Many Things!

2011-07-09T09:55:00.000-07:00

Do you like Lightening? Lightening Rounds? I'm going to be in one, reading two or three very long sentences totally about two minutes or less. It's a fun thing that Monkey Bicycle does because they are so fun. Details here.

(More readers: Jami Attenberg, Kate Hill Cantrill, Claire Donato, Shelley Jackson, Rozi Jovanovic, Deb Olin Unferth, Dawn Raffel, Lauren Spohrer, Terese Svoboda, Lauren Waterman, Anya C. Yurchyshyn, and others.)

Also, here's a story about The World's Largest Treehouse that Brad & I did. It's up on Time.com.

Last night someone asked me, "Hey, what's up with all these bed and breakfasts in Brooklyn," and I said, "What do you mean?" and she said "Well, I read this thing in the L magazine today," and I said "That's funny. That was me." For some reason she thought our decor was inspired by the Hemingway House, and I said, "No. It wasn't."

Life keeps happening

2011-04-28T16:02:00.000-07:00

All kinds of awesomeness happened in April, despite the lack of sun in New York.

3B is blowing up! We had an open house and it went really well. New York Magazine was all 'hey what's up?' and our bookings are picking up even more.

Also, I have a story on 52 stories today that I am happy with. It's an excerpt from a novel I am working on, a novel that seems incredibly excerptable, maybe because I am micro-editing it all the time.

Geoff Dyer Interview

2011-04-05T08:35:00.000-07:00

I did this interview with Geoff Dyer last month and it's running today on Blackbook. It was awesome to get to talk with him. Such a literary hero of mine.

A favorite moment of the interview was when I asked him about his least favorite artist...

Dyer: Tracy Emin, for example, she's often a name that I grab hold of to make some kind of point. She's not so much a person as much as a horrible pathological symptom of something that's dreadfully going on in the art world.

Pop Art Pop Up

2011-03-14T13:02:00.000-07:00

The other night I went to some kind of bizarre Pop Art thing and wrote about it for Bbook.com. I guess I could say it was 'interesting.' There were women twice my age wearing dresses that look designed for girls half my age. The press table was pretty obviously the press table in that there were no fake tans, hair plugs or bandage dresses. New York is so weird.

I actually have some legitimate news

2011-03-11T06:32:00.001-08:00

I signed with Jennifer Lyons this week to represent my book; I feel really excited and lucky to be working with her.

She also represents Stephen O'Connor, whose fiction and nonfiction I greatly admire, Liza Monroy who has such a fantastic voice in both her essays and her novel, and Oscar Hijuelos, the first Hispanic to win the Pulitzer for fiction, and Jesmyn Ward, a fellow Mississippian and former Stegner fellow whose second novel will be out this August.

Also, here's an amazing and important essay from Roxane Gay, a force to be reckoned with whom I am routinely in awe of. Though I love the Rumpus, it is really strange to me that she is not publishing her work in Harper's or something similar. Editors! Solicit this woman!

See you at Powerhouse tonight?

Htmlgiant, There Is No Year & some news

2011-03-09T08:55:00.000-08:00

The Observer has a piece about Blake Butler & genesis of HTMLGIANT, which I write for a little too sporadically. Feeling a little inspired to post more things, but Roxane Gay has been so goddamn on the money, I feel I need to step everything up.

Anyway. One thing I'm going to do instead of writing a post for HTML is read at the final night of Blake's 4-day marathon launch of There Is No Year. It's going to be this Friday at Powerhouse Books in Dumbo at 6:30. There will be drinks. Blake, Kendra Grant Malone, Lincoln Michel, Adam Wilson, Ben Greenman and others will read, too.

Also, tomorrow night I am covering this insane Pop-Art Pop-up restaurant that will be designed to feel like "the inside of Andy Warhol's mind circa 1982," with a menu by some 15-year-old wunderkind chef. Craziness if why I love New York.

Also #2: Did a ton of interviews last month: Geoff Dyer, The Oakes Twins, Betsy Cohen and John Fraser among them. Have some favorite quotes I need to share once I get organized to find them...

Also #3: really exciting news coming....

What Happens When

2011-02-28T10:50:00.000-08:00

A couple weeks ago I went to What Happens When, a temporary restaurant in Soho to do a piece for BBook.com & today it's live with photos by Brad DeCecco. It's such an amazing project being put on by some really inventive people like chef John Fraser and all-around creative person, Emilie Baltz. Check out her website; it makes me wish she was my best friend.

Fiction at Matchbook

2011-02-11T04:24:00.000-08:00

I have a new piece up on Matchbook. Actually it went up almost 2 weeks ago, but it will still be on the front page for a few more days. It involves someone catching fire during church.

I like Matchbook's format. They run 1 story for 2 weeks on the front page and then archive them. Also, they run a note from the writer about the story. I liked the 'critical thought' on Blake Butler's story.

The Outlet reports on Cousin Corinne's launch party...

2011-01-28T12:11:00.001-08:00

It was fun, despite the ice pellets.

Brave the Ice Pellets!

2011-01-26T06:19:00.000-08:00

Weather Underground isn't even trying to be nice about it-- the forecast today in Brooklyn is "Ice Pellets," lasting past nightfall. (Is this some kind of joke? What ever happened to hail?)

Still, it would mean a lot to me if you came to the Cousin Corinne's Reminder Launch at Bookcourt tonight. Starts at 7. It's going to be a nice time and there will be nice people and everyone will be a little high on the ice storm. Everyone is going to look around the room at everyone else with that "can you believe this shit?" kind of look. Lots of people are reading: Priscilla Becker, Todd Colby, Stanley Crouch, Adam Wilson and me. That is a lot of people and there will be wine. What else can you want? Oh, how about a nice picture of a beach?

Remember that: there is a warm place in this world, somewhere.

Bryan Charles Interview

2011-01-20T08:15:00.000-08:00

Here's this interview I did with Bryan Charles about his memoir, There's A Road To Everywhere Except Where You Came From. I think I come off as a bit of a crank at one point, but I am still pretty happy with it.

Something Kind of Funny

2011-01-19T08:39:00.000-08:00

Thought Catalog asked me a while ago to contribute to this compendium of Types of People On The Internet and they put it up today. My entry is People Who Have Forgotten What They Were Supposed to Be Doing and I feel I have a more or less comprehensive definition of that type of person. Jimmy Chen's entry is People Who Are Dads and it's great. Go on now; waste some more time.

Super Awesome and Completely New Stuff

2011-01-05T08:05:00.000-08:00

I have a piece of fiction up on Everyday Genius today. It's a newer one from a collection I've been working on over the past year.

Yes, I still blog for htmlgiant. For the last few months I've had basically nothing to say and have been working like mad on 3B and my own work with pretty intense tunnel vision. However, today I put up a tiny post and I am working on posts about Bryan Charles and Jacob Wren.

I interviewed Robert Lopez for Bookslut. You need to go buy Asunder right now and start taking notes because that is how it's done, yes sir.

You know what the best present in the world is? Surprise travel. That is a fact. I am leaving tomorrow and don't know where I am going.

Google Voice Poetry #2

2010-12-31T14:19:00.000-08:00

You Know Anything

Hey generating
maybe the says that I've reached your voicemail.
I like your feet Jim.
And I go to some coffee shop
and work on school
But I see you're still down.
See you.
6th Floor,
battery resume and you know.
Take a look at.
From kitchen, fax,
So let me know.
Again, it's, you.
I think the F train,
see you.
Second Avenue in I will.
And of course,
Hi there
and If you can just walk down the Barry.
They're going to be present in 12,
30 and 1
that'll be perfect.
So, okay
You know anything. Ohh.

Google Voice Poem #1

2010-12-31T14:15:00.000-08:00

In a new high of digital laziness, I have been having my voicemails transcribed and emailed to me for a few months now. Mainly, I have to say, it's for the entertainment. Add line breaks, find title, and here we go...

I Was Wondering If You're Out There Offering To Somebody

Hey darling.
Your in reference to your department
and I was wondering
if you're out there offering to somebody,
or. Hey, you moved
cos he's been totally different,
bye.

Cousin Corinne's Reminder

2010-12-25T14:10:00.001-08:00

I've been reading the current issue of Cousin Corinne's Reminder lately and it's really good. Last night I read these stories by Sophie Rosenblum that made me so very happy. Also some poems by Nick Flynn, a favorite, of course. Also there are some really great photographs in there. I find myself returning to a few of the pictures just to stare, Tierney Gearon's and Cheryl Dunn's work, in particular. I have some short pieces from my nonfiction book in there too, which is both exciting and terrifying. This is the first time I've ever even sent work from the book out into the world.
Also, I found one minor typo, which I know is going to make my mom shudder because that's how I felt about it too. We both feel pretty serious about grammar, but I am also a little dyslexic, so these things happen and what can you do? Shudder, mostly.

Reading Tomorrow

2010-10-22T10:42:00.001-07:00

I am reading tomorrow at the Trnsfr Magazine launch at Pete's Candy Store, 6-7:30. Shya Scanlon, Molly Gaudry and Thom Donovan are also reading.

Alban Fischer is staying at 3B this weekend, so I have copies of the magazine already and I must say, they look amazing and are filled with good stuff. Matthew Simmons, Chelsea Martin, Blake Butler and J.A. Tyler have stuff in there too, just to name a few. There are even postcards from Michael Kimball inside and a whole fold-out poster in the back. It's awesome to be a part of a brand new literary magazine endeavor when it looks this nice.

HTMLGIANT

2010-09-24T07:10:00.000-07:00

A Random Few Lines From What I Am Working On Beacause I Feel Like It Needs To Get Outside Of My Computer

2010-09-01T16:16:00.000-07:00

I hope you do come back from The Commonwealth of Dominica and if you’ve lost some crucial part of your body, a toe, a whole limb, I won’t ask why. We’ll charge off the shore of Tuvalu and I’ll let you sink until you take everything back. Don’t forget I know your face underwater. Don’t forget that I’m the only one of us who can breathe down there.

The moon is Waxing Gibbous

2010-08-23T05:37:00.000-07:00

The moon is waxing gibbous and tomorrow will be two minutes and thirty seconds shorter than today.

'Jonathan Franzen Smug' = 7,250 hits on Google

2010-08-12T06:25:00.000-07:00

I wrote this review of Jonathan Franzen's newest novel for Black Book and I want you to read it. Thanks.

We Are All On The Internet!

2010-07-17T06:51:00.000-07:00

I am doing things again.

I served as a reporter on the 'no news' beat for Robert Lopez's blog.

The first piece of my novella that has ever been outside of my computer is going to be printed by Trnsfr magazine.

A prose thing of mine is going to be in the next issue of the Oxford, MS based journal, Kitty Snacks.

I am a part of a collective of people who are renovating and re-launching a bed and breakfast in Downtown Brooklyn. We need a name! Ideas?

Interview with Lee Rourke

2010-06-23T04:10:00.000-07:00

I did an interview with Lee Rourke over at htmlgiant where I learn that yes, in fact, foxes and swans do freely roam the suburbs of east London.

Three Questions

2010-05-26T14:18:00.000-07:00

Karl Wenclas mini-interviewed me for no apparent reason other than my position at Htmlgiant. It was fun, though.

Role Models

2010-05-21T12:23:00.000-07:00

I reviewed John Waters's Role Models for Time Out New York. I think I meant to give it three stars instead of four stars, but I feel a bit dubious about the star system anyway...

In any case, I liked spending time with that book.

What to do in case of a Tsunami

2010-03-25T19:39:00.000-07:00

If you ever find yourself out surfing while Tsunami alarm bells sound, what you do is this: get in a boat and go away, not towards, the coast. Go out as far as you can in about fifteen minutes and then wait for the longest hour of your life. Return. Experience deepest joys and deepest sorrows.

I met a pair of travelers the other day. A couple. The guy was surfing off the coast of Samoa when the tsunami came and the girl was back on the shore. Alarms went off. He got in a boat. She was put into a car. He went out. She went up. The both lived. They picked grapes with me the other day. I imagine (romanticize) that hard labor feels better to them somehow. It felt pretty good/ok for me, but surely they relished it in some way. Maybe not.

(Picture from Shane Lavalette)

A month away; A new Internet friend

2010-03-04T21:43:00.000-08:00

This is where I am right now. The trees are a part of the Wellington Botanical Gardens. At night, I've heard, the ground lights up with glow worms.

No, I can't confirm the glow worms yet. Going to try to confirm that.

Languages spoken in the house where I am right now: English, Italian, German, Hebrew, French, etc.

An Israeli man and German lady are dancing aggressively to bluegrass music. Today is someone's birthday. Decorations are still up from the last person's birthday. A banner in the kitchen says: HAPPY BIRTHDAY

No punctuation.

Tonight I am going to see Ben Hur performed by seventy-five characters but only three actors. Tomorrow another play. Last night a poetry reading.

The only problem with Wellington is the wind, I think. Other than the wind it's a nice place, especially in the summer.

I have been away from home for over a month but this blog has been largely silent.
Sorry.
I do have things to say.
I have been making lists.
I will post them, maybe.

In non-travel news, I made a new internet friend! Matthew Savoca wrote me a few months ago to say he liked Young Revolutionaries. I sent him another story that I think I just finished. I like this video he made.

untitled from matthew savoca on Vimeo.

He's neato.

The Smell of not being in America

2010-01-29T19:32:00.000-08:00

I forgot that there is this smell that I only smell when I'm not in America. It was in the rice paddies in Japan and it was in a small town in Belgium and it was in Paris in the morning when it seemed like the whole world might be asleep except for me and overnight baguette bakers. The smell is part Chanel number 5, part molasses and part freshly cut grass. It's a weird smell. I never smell it when I am in America. I smelled it yesterday but not today, or at least not yet.

If you type in "Weird Smell" in google this is what you get.

I went to the royal botanic gardens yesterday, and yes, you can friend them on facebook. I sat under some varietal of oak and ate the best sandwich. Hard-boiled egg, grilled zucchini, tomato, snowpea shoots and french mustard on multigrain bread. Ridiculous.

Cross-posted from HTMLgiant: A Child's Mind, Travel and Failure

2010-01-22T07:32:00.000-08:00

This morning as I was catching up on MobyLives I came across a video of David Foster Wallace discussing the productive failure of traveling. It was filmed in 2006 while he was in Italy and if you watch it you will hear DFW say, "Everything that is a failure is also a victory," and you will see Jonathan Franzen chuckling to himself and leaning back in his chair, which, as we all know, is Jonathan Franzen's favorite pastime. In any case, 2006 was the first (as only?) time that DFW had been to a country where English was not the predominate language and his failure to be able communicate caused him to feel like a child, or more accurately an infant. He had to pay closer attention to others faces and gestures. He had to slow down.

I am leaving the country on Wednesday and I won't be back until winter has left this hemisphere. I'm doing this for a number of reasons but the most interesting of which is to write. I suppose what I'm writing doesn't matter much because any plans I have now are sure to change. The point, I think, is to put myself in an environment where I am clueless, where I have to pay closer attention to the banal, where I am forced to adapt, to learn and to fail.

The first time I spent a significant chunk of time around non-English speakers was in 2003 when I was alone in Japan for a summer. I felt a little like a famous dog then-- everyone petting my hair and stopping me in the street to take a picture-- but I think my mind fundamentally changed then and I started writing not just for fun but as if my life depended on it. This is what travel and/or solitude have done for me since then-- made me feel like a failure and forced me to find a way to not feel like one.

Eat When You Feel Sad

2010-01-11T07:40:00.000-08:00

Zachery German's novel Eat When You Feel Sad is going to come out from Melville House in February. He asked me to make him a promotional video so I did.

Eat When You Feel Sad-- a book trailer from Catherine Lacey on Vimeo.

Novel-Nausea

2009-11-21T08:48:00.000-08:00

[Cross-Posted from HtmlGiant.com]
Zadie Smith has a long essay in The Guardian that is half about David Shields's forthcoming, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, and half about her own frustration with novel writing. Go read it. It's longish, but it is completely worth the time. I am not going to include an excerpt here. Once you've read all of it, read the rest of this entry.

Ok..... done? Pretty good, right? I invited David to speak on a panel discussion last year and he gave me the galley to give Zadie, so I feel personally very happy that she read it because now that essay exists, which deepens my understanding of Reality Hunger. However, I disagreed very slightly with her perspective on the book and when David emailed me to say that her essay was on the Guardian this morning I replied to him with this:

...She assumes that enthusiasm about the book equals an act of "literary hara-kiri" and that enjoying Reality Hunger is a form of "grave-dancing." Not at all! I read Reality Hunger as an encouragement to write a more risky, honest book, be it memoir or novel or something in between.

Also, she seems to get a little bent out of shape when thinking about your and Coetzee's praise of "novels that don't look like novels." She assumes that this taste is meant to be "in some way unusual, the mark of a refined literary palate," but I don't think that's what you meant at all. I think you're just encouraging writers to bend the boundaries of the novel or story or memoir as we understand it now. She seems to believe that too, and says so in the next sentence: "But even the most conventional account of our literary "canon" reveals the history of the novel to be simultaneously a history of nonconformity." Yes. Nonconformity. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought that Reality Hunger was encouraging more nonconformity, particularly in the realm of incorporating "nonfictional" or "true" elements or questions into the novel form. Also, when she says that "underneath some of these high-minded objections, and complementary to them, there is another, deeper, psychological motivation, about which it is more difficult to be honest," does she think that is so contrary to what Reality Hunger advises? Because it seems to me that is exactly what your book is encouraging us toward.

In any case, I really enjoyed reading about what she thought while reading your book even if it seems she agrees with it more than she thinks. The idea of "novel-nausea" seemed to be an astute diagnosis...

We were high school sweethearts.

2009-11-20T19:13:00.001-08:00

It's true. We're back together. Forever. Me & Harold Pinter.

Almost Over

2009-10-26T17:07:00.000-07:00

I took this picture earlier this spring at the big end of the year MFA party. That's someone's dad I guess. He just couldn't take it anymore.

... So I am almost done with my manuscript. Turning it in December 1st. Then it's really, really over. Over over.

Serious Reflection on Education

2009-10-03T08:35:00.001-07:00

An Essay is Out There

2009-09-28T15:21:00.000-07:00

An essay I made out of pieces of Blake Butler's Tour of a Drowned Neighborhood is in this little e-book here. Brian Evenson, Matthew Simmons, Elizabeth Ellen and others that I haven't read yet have stories in there too.

Featherproof has just started publishing ebook remixes of their real books and this is the first one. I am happy to be a part of it.

The Grass is Smiling

2009-09-19T17:39:00.000-07:00

I have applied for my visa to New Zealand. Still taking advice on maybe why I am going, and what exactly I should do. Just finished The Boat by Nam Le and Scorch Atlas by Blake Butler. Both awesome. Nam & Blake are both challenging writers in different ways.

Listened to the Radio Lab episode titled Where Am I? I was in Brooklyn Bridge Park, lying on the grass, and the grass was smiling.

The other day I was on a book-blogger live quiz show at Housing Works hosted by Ken Davis and my team won all four rounds. We were on fire. It was great. Ed Champion, Jason Boog and Buzz Poole were all on my team. Miracle Jones challenged us twice and she knew her stuff. Also, fellow blogger Sam Sacks represented by playing with the audience members which, sadly, lost every time.

Also, please go read my post at The Rumpus about the beautifully bizarre Kalup Linzy.

This video is involved:

Want to read Edith Wharton's novels. All of them. Embarrassed I haven't do so already.

New Zealand, other things.

2009-09-08T12:58:00.000-07:00

Who knows something about New Zealand? Has anyone been there? Do you know of a good place to live for a while there, a nice agrarian village close to the water? A rural patch of land within biking distance of a place where you could find more people?

The other day I read this sentence somewhere: Many people suffering from depression feel much better after eating a banana. I thought it was a funny sentence.

Today my almost done book is about 54,948 words long. At its longest it was 112,122 words. A lot of those words were superfluous. I've been editing. I expect the finished product to be about 61,098 words. That's my bet. That's my estimate of the beans in the jar. Taking bets if you've got them.

I want to read essays by Vivian Gornick and Leonard Michaels.
I want to read Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem.

I just read Sarah Manguso's Two Kinds of Decay and Strong Motion by Jonathan Lethem.

Picked for Review a Day

2009-08-19T13:17:00.001-07:00

My review of Bodies by Susie Orbach was picked for a Powells review-a-day, so now the full text is available online. It's a great book and I recommend it to anyone with a body.

Weeds and Banana Peels

2009-08-01T20:23:00.000-07:00

Labeling Urban Blight:

via Posterchild

Here is why I love Nicholson Baker:

2009-07-27T16:09:00.000-07:00

Nicholson Baker has written a review of Amazon's Kindle for the New Yorker and it's hysterical.

On the Kindle's supposed earth-friendliness:

"A Kindle book arrives wirelessly: it’s untouchable; it exists on a higher, purer plane. It’s earth-friendly, too, supposedly. Yes, it’s made of exotic materials that are shipped all over the world’s oceans; yes, it requires electricity to operate and air-conditioned server farms to feed it; yes, it’s fragile and it duplicates what other machines do; yes, it’s difficult to recycle; yes, it will probably take a last boat ride to a Nigerian landfill in five years. But no tree farms are harvested to make a Kindle book; no ten-ton presses turn, no ink is spilled."

On the Kindle's lack of page numbers:

"If you want to quote from a book you’ve bought, you have to quote by location range—e.g., the phrase “She was on the verge of the mother of all orgasms” is to be found at location range 1596-1605 in Mari Carr’s erotic romance novel Tequila Truth."

Nicholson Baker is goddamn fabulous and so are books. Real. Physical, library-smelling books.

Mid-Year List Of What I've Read:

2009-07-23T16:12:00.000-07:00

In somewhat chronological order

1. Varieties of Disturbance by Lydia Davis (twice)
2. Best Non-Required Reading 2007
3. Bodies by Susie Orbach (Galley. Reviewed for Rain Taxi. Interviewed Orbach for Bookslut.)
4. Best Non-Required Reading 2008
5. The Moviegoer by Walker Percy (re-read for class)
6. Hunger of Memory by Richard Rodriguez
7. D'Agata's The Next American Essay
8. Reality Hunger by David Shields (Galley for Jonathan Lethem's class. Comes out in 2010 and is going to rock your world.)
8. The Things They Carried - Tim O'Brien
9. In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
10. Let's Talk About Love: Journey To The End of Taste by Carl Wilson (Part of the 33 1/3 series.)
11. I Remember by Joe Brainard (Weirdly mesmerizing, but I didn't really like it.)
12. Dakota by Kathleen Norris (The worst book I've read so far!)
13. Reader's Block by David Markson
14. Another Bullshit Night In Suck City by Nick Flynn (I read this three times. It's tied for my favorite memoir with #21)
15. Running in the Family by Michael Ondaatje (Reread for a class. Still great the second time.)
16. Low Life by Luc Sante
17. The Virgin Suicides by Jeffery Eugenides (Why why why did I wait so long to read this book? Amazing.)
18. Lying by Lauren Slater (Almost as bad as Dakota!)
19. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen (Also not sure why I waited so long to read this. He is one of my favorite essayists.)
20. Interpreter of Maladies by Jumpha Lahiri (I did not like it. Everything was tied up with a bow. None of the stories had a life of it's own.)
21. Life on the Outside by Jennifer Gonnerman
22. The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead by David Shields (Everyone should read this book.)
23. The Question of Bruno by Aleksandar Hemon
24. The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald
25. Herzog by Saul Bellow (It seems, mostly, that women don't like this book.)
26. At The Bottom of the River by Jamaica Kincaid (Did not like it)
27. The Adderall Diaries by Stephen Elliot (Insanely good. When I finished it I instantly went back to the beginning to start again.)
28. Indecision by Bejamin Kunkel (It's really, really good for the first 100 pages and by the last 40 pages it's barely ok.)
29. Middlesex by Jeffery Eugenides (I'm really pissed off that he hasn't released a third, fourth & fifth novel by now and I feel like Jeffery owes me and everyone who can read an apology.)
30. Mexico High by Liza Monroy (Going to interview Liza for HTMLgiant this summer)
31. The Verificationist by Donald Antrim
32. Shoplifting From American Apparel by Tao Lin (Funny funny funny and very good)
33. The Bird Room by Chris Killen (Depressing in a good way)
34. The Sound the Fury by Billy Faulkner (I can call him Billy because he is my fellow Mississippian. When I was a little girl I gave him a hug and by him I mean a bronze statue of him sitting on a bench in Oxford, MS.)
35. My Girlfriend Comes To The City and Beats Me Up By Stephen Elliot (Because I liked The Adderall Diaries so damn much and since I did the Lending Library I didn't have my copy of it anymore.)
36. The Tunnel by Ernesto Sabato (good novella)
37. During my Nervous Breakdown I Want To Have A Biographer Present by Brandon Scott Gorrell (Oh, I don't know. I feel generally ambivalent about poetry. It made me laugh a few times but I felt like I was laughing at the book instead of with the book.)
38. The Pharmacist's Mate by Amy Fusselman (re-read. just checking to see if it was still good and it is.)

A conclusion you can make about me based on this list:
That I am Massively Chauvinist. Of the 38 books on this list, 9 were written by female writers, and 29 were written by male writers. All three of the books that I hated were written by women. All of the books I like the most were written by men. I am such a jerk. I need to go read some Virgina Woolf and pray to Saraswati.

Phillip Roth's Jewish Shouting Ringtone

2009-07-02T13:56:00.001-07:00

James Marcus had one of those jobs that makes your jaw drop when you find out that it even existed, not to mention the fact that you didn't have it. He interviewed incredible authors for a living-- Susan Sontag, Salman Rushdie, John Updike, Tom Wolfe, Nicholson Baker, Haruki Murakami, and other big dogs for a little website you might have heard of... Amazon.

But Marcus worked for Amazon from the mid 90's until 2001; he got out when things got ugly and corporate and book-hating. Back then they published original content other than the member-written rants and Marcus got to do a ton of the interviews.

Anyway, to the point... One day Marcus got to interview Phillip Roth and he asked him what he thought about the film adaptation of Portnoy's Complaint. Roth said, "Unspeakable. It's a movie about shouting. Jewish shouting," and then proceeded to do a little demo of Jewish Shouting. Marcus, also an accomplished DJ, took the recording of Phillip Roth's shouting and remixed it into a one minute club track. MobyLives, the blog for Melville House now has a ringtone-sized version of the song too.

(picture credit: DJ Jazzy Phil from Jewlicious.com)

Because Dicey Brown is "temporarily" defunct...

2009-06-07T19:56:00.000-07:00

I had this story up at Dicey Brown but then Maize had some life catastrophes (seriously, her house burnt down) so I think Dicey Brown is going back into hiding for a while. In the meantime I am going to post the story that was there here for your amusement.

++++

Little Babies Speaking French

A man was speaking into a cell phone, but absently staring at Anne's scarf as they walked towards each other on a stretch of sidewalk. She could tell he was leaving a voicemail from the way he was moving his lips. She couldn't hear him yet.
No one else was standing or walking or loitering along the side of this un-widowed warehouse where this stretch of sidewalk was stretching. There weren't any pigeons milling around or homeless people snoring or teenagers blithely gliding on skateboards. There was only Anne, moving slowly east and this man on his cell phone, moving west.

The man was leaving a voicemail for his cousin, a software engineer living in Iowa who had been threatening suicide. The man, still approaching Anne, was not yet close enough to her to see the color of her eyes. Anne was frowning but she didn't know it.
When Anne had crossed 1st avenue a few blocks ago, a van driven by a plumber had honked at her, intending for the honk to somehow say, "hey baby!" Anne had interpreted it as "get the fuck out of my way," and this had reconfirmed a fear that she was always in someone's way.

Anne was close enough to the man to hear what he was saying ("…ope you arre feeling appier…") just as the man noted her eye-color (a milky green.) As they each reached opposite corners of the block he thought abstractly about the shade of her eyes, which reminded most people of melted mint chocolate chip ice cream but without the chocolate chips.

She thought about how his French-tongue had left the H's out. She wondered what he was doing with all those un-used H's, those brand new H's still in the plastic.

She thought about turning around and running after him. She would drop her purse on the sprint down the block. The wind would whip around her head and flip off her little hat and unfurl her scarf and she wouldn't care. She would grab him by the shoulders and say, "Stop. Let's just stop. Can we stop now? Do we have to keep going?"

And then he would have to say, "Ow did your eyes become this color?"

They would have curious, blond, bilingual children in a few years. These children would not grow up. They would always say "Would you please pass the Haricot Verts, please. Thank you." They would kiss their parents on both cheeks. They would win spelling bees.

Anne crossed another street and another van, maybe the same one, honked at her again, and she thought about how there were men and women in Paris having sex to avoid being bored and there would be men and women having sex to avoid boredom until the world melted or got hit by an asteroid.

++++

Also, here is a video I found on Kendra's blog that matches a little too well:

True Stories: A Panel Discussion

2009-04-08T08:00:00.000-07:00

When: Friday, April 17th at 7 pm
Where: Housing Works Bookstore & Cafe (126 Crosby Street, NYC)
What: Smart people talking about smart things and making the audience smarter.

What constitutes truth in a creative work? Is truth and fact the same thing? How does a writer mediate the line between fact and creativity?

The panel will include David Shields, Rachel Zucker and David Ebershoff. Brenda Wineapple will moderate.

David Shields is the author of the New York Times Bestseller, The Thing About Life is That One Day You'll Be Dead and eight previous books that have won him awards and accolades. He's won every fellowship and published essays in every magazine any writer could ever hope for.

Rachel Zucker has published three books of poems including The Bad Wife Handbook and is working on her fourth collection. She has taught at Yale, NYU, Fordham Univeristy and Makor. She earned her MFA from the University of Iowa and has published her poems in Prairie Schooner, Epoch, American Poetry Review, Fence and many others.

David Ebershoff is the author of three novels and a collection of short stories. His most recent is the bestselling novel, The 19th Wife. He has taught creative writing at Princeton, NYU and currently teaches in the MFA program at Columbia University. He is also an editor at large for Random House.

Brenda Wineapple has written acclaimed biographies on Nathaniel Hawthorne and Jenet Flanner, a book about Gertrude and Leo Stein and White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. She's also won a myriad of fellowships and awards and has published work in The New York Times Book Review, The Nation and many others. She teaches in the MFA program at Columbia and The New School.

Wine and cheese will be provided.

***All attendants of the panel will experience a two-point increase in IQ and/or the revelation that will lead to a stunning and timely completion your memoir, novel, collection of essays and/or book of poetry.***

The Fidelity Gene

2009-02-14T08:55:00.000-08:00

Prairie voles are monogamous; they groom each other; they nuzzle each other. It's excruciatingly cute. Meadow voles, on the other hand, have sex with whichever meadow vole waddles into their vicinity and they don't bother to call the next day, and none of the other meadow voles would have it any other way. This makes being a vole pretty easy as far as mating is concerned. If you're a prairie vole, all the other prairie voles want to get hitched, just like you, and if you're a meadow vole everyone's slutting it up.
Some scientists started to wonder why this was, and when they scanned the little critters' brains they found that in prairie vole, those faithful rodents, there was a higher concentration of a certain neuropeptide (Fyi, a neuropeptide is a compound in the brain that transmits information from hormones and enzymes, etc.) This certain neuropeptide was responsible for delivering Aginine Vassopressin (AVP) in the brain, a hormone related to mood, aggression, love, etc. Meadow voles had far less AVP action in the brain.
Meadow voles and Prairie voles are almost genetically identical, but one of the main differences was a portion of one specific gene that encoded Arginine Vassopressin.

So the scientists took this a step further and extracted the gene that was encoding AVP in prairie vole and transgenically implanted into some meadow voles. And guess what? The genetically altered meadow voles quit their messing around and got serious, just like their cousins in the prairie.
This specific study came out in 2004 to much fanfare. They had found the fidelity gene! It's only a matter of time before we could just pop a pill and suddenly be happily married. Well, not quite. Human DNA and vole DNA isn't quite the same, though there is a homologous region of the human genome that also codes for Vasopressin. You'll find it on chromosome 12q14-15 where there are three sequences that are polymorphic (meaning that they can differ from person to person instead of being the same in all humans, which, surprisingly, is how a staggering majority of our DNA reads.)
Anyway, some Swedish scientists got to work studying how these three sequences might be affecting human behavior when it came to sex, fidelity, marriage and what they call "pair-bonding." They collected information from 522 pairs of male twins (238 identical and 318 fraternal.) The subjects had to have been in a serious relationship for the past five years. 82% of the subjects were married and 18% were unmarried but living with their partners.

They collected information from the men in three ways: genotyping (aka, a DNA test), surveys about the status of their marriages/relationships and an interview with their partners/wives about their perceived quality of the relationship. The surveys used questions about how much they felt they could rely on each other, how much their parters seemed to listen to them, how often they had sex and if there was a major crisis or threat of divorce in the last year. The men were assigned a number of the Pair Bonding Scale (PBS), a rating of how healthy/successful or unhealthy/unsuccessful their relationships were.
Of the three DNA sequences that were genotyped, only one had an effect on the PBS rating: the RS3 polymorphism. Men who carried the 334 allele in that polymorphism scored significantly lower on the Pair Bonding Scale. About 40% of the subjects carried Allele 334, either homozygously or homozygously.
Even more notably, 34% of those who carried allele 334 admitted to a "major marital crisis" and/or the "threat of divorce" in the past year, while only 15% of non-carriers said divorce had been a possibility.
Also, the RS3 polymorphism has also been found to have an effect on other social behaviors like altruism, age of first sexual encounter and autism.

The Moviegoer & Moving & Movement

2009-01-28T17:02:00.000-08:00

I re-read Walker Percy's The Moviegoer this week, one of the coldest weeks since I've been in New York, a week that paled my skin. Then a particularly nasty slush storm hit New York, combined with my Moviegoer-generated New Orleans nostalgia and created the perfect atmospheric conditions to scan French Quarter apartment listings on Craigslist.

"...Beautiful half creole cottage and free-standing slave quarter. Very Private... one bedroom/one bath with double parlor configuration, high ceilings, five sets of french doors, hardwood floors, exposed ceilings joists, lots of natural light and kitchen with gas stove... Second freestanding building is a studio with one bedroom/one bath, high ceilings, french doors, washer/dryer, exposed brick walls... Between the two buildings is a large lush courtyard with fountain..."

I think that only women look at apartment listings and salivate over the hardwood and stacked washer-dryers.

I want a "large lush courtyard with fountain."

Belated Christmas

2009-01-17T07:41:00.000-08:00

I was a part of the HTMLgiant Secret Santa thing: I was Kevin O'Neil's Secret Santa and Kevin O'Neil was my Secret Santa. I pre-ordered him a copy of Chris Killen's book and I got a package from him today: A copy of The Drawbridge and The Coming Race (a 'lost classic') by Edward Bulwer-Lytton and they were even wrapped.

Having Christmas in January is fun because January is pretty depressing otherwise. People are going out for evening strolls only to keel over in a frozen heap at the end of their driveway. It's a gruesome month.

Interview

2009-01-16T05:50:00.000-08:00

Chris Killen interviewed me the other day and I forgot to post it here. I like Chris's interviews & his wikipedia thing he was doing a while ago. I had been weary of writing lately, but doing the interview cured it somehow. It was really relaxing.

Also, both Chris Killen and Blake Butler have their first books out now. Congrats!

I like this:

2008-12-01T20:23:00.000-08:00

My Bother Has Already Outlived His Life Expectancy by Three Years

Kendra is lovely.

I'm getting reviewed and I didn't even know it.

2008-11-21T17:52:00.000-08:00

Noo Journal is publishing a review of Young Revolutionaries and I found out just now. Happy Cobra Books is still in the process of getting funding & a full-fledged website up and I support any and all efforts towards this. People should start sending Matthew Simmons boxes of cash.

Literary Immediacy and its Discontents

2008-11-17T09:38:00.000-08:00

Justin Taylor (moderator of Columbia's last literary panel) wrote something awesome on HTML Giant last night. I have been wanting to say something on this topic: the way that the immediacy of the internet produces some seriously bad fiction, poetry and criticism on blogs and online journals. Over-eagerness and under-revision are the usual culprits in creative work, but improper use of literary terms (avant-garde, experimental, etc.) are other points of annoyance.
(Image from The Stranger)

Getting out of bed is, like, patriotic and some shit. Or whatever. I don't know.

2008-11-04T13:14:00.001-08:00

I've basically been gorging myself on voting-related media for the past three weeks but today I think the internet broke the world record for it's-kind-of-news news. Among the highlights is this gem from The New York Observer. Apparently "it's all about fucking Obama." Boy do I feel left out! I thought it was all about electing him This article also mentions a 39-year-old Williamsburg resident who says she's "never seen this neighborhood care before." Isn't that crazy! Someone over thirty actually lives in Williamsburg! Maybe she hasn't found out about Park Slope yet.

In other news, Manhattanites actually waited in line for something other than a nightclub or a cupcake. And I meant WAIT. I got to my polling place at 7 am and waited an hour. When I left the line stretched half way down an avenue block and down one and a half street blocks. So, way to go Obama. You made New York stop what they were doing (even in Williamsburg!), Ben & Jerry's is giving away ice cream for free, and Starbucks loves you so much coffee is on the house for EVERYONE.

Be Rich & Famous

2008-10-07T10:04:00.000-07:00

Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art is now accepting submissions for our 2009 Contests in Poetry, Fiction, & Nonfiction. Winning entries in each category will be awarded $500 and will be published in Issue 47, due out in the spring of 2009. All entrants will receive a copy of Columbia.

Judges:
Diane Williams, fiction
Philip Lopate, nonfiction
Henri Cole, poetry

Deadline: Dec. 1, 2008
Entry fee: $12.00

Fiction and nonfiction entrants may submit up to 20 double-spaced pages. Poetry entrants may submit up to five poems.Visit our website for details on how to submit at http://columbiajournal.org/contests.htm

*Please be aware: The Journal cannot accept submissions by any author who currently attends Columbia University or who has graduated from Columbia within the past five years.

Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Fine Art

2008-10-04T08:04:00.000-07:00

Literary Dichotomies

What it is: A panel discussion hosted by Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Fine Art

Who will be there:
Heidi Julavits (co-editor of The Believer and novelist)
Mark Greif (writer and co-editor of n+1)
Shelley Jackson (novelist / artist)
Nathaniel Rich (senior editor at The Paris Review and novelist)
Justin Taylor will be our moderator.

When will it happen: Friday, October 17, 2008 at 7 pm

Where to be when it happens: Housing Works Bookstore in Soho, NYC

The panel will examine the criteria used to place works of literature into categories like minimal, plot-driven, character-driven, literary, genre, post-modern, etc. It will examine past schools and movements in literature and parse out the impulse we have to categorize and draw lines between types of stories.

Zagat Review of The Brooklyn Hospital ER Waiting Room

2008-10-01T07:55:00.000-07:00

Don't believe the "hype;" the wait here can be "six hours long" and the service "leaves much to desired." The crowd is "eclectic" but also "disgruntled" from dealing with desk-nurses who seem to "prefer that you would drop dead."

a reading & a big few months

2008-09-07T18:59:00.000-07:00

I'm reading at a place called the ding dong lounge in new york city on Wednesday September 10th at 8:30 pm. If you are around you should go. It's an MFA-related event, so it should be full of MFAers tossing back whiskeys and talking about classes even though they swore they were going to stop talking about classes. It would be nice to see some non-MFA people there too.

Do you like Binnie Kirshenbaum? You should. She will also be reading there.

the hipster thing

2008-08-16T05:03:00.000-07:00

Two weeks ago when that article in Adbusters about Hipsters came out, everyone was saying how great it was. Meanwhile I was sitting on the other side of my room, gritting my teeth, staring down the adbuster website and starting to worry I had contracted early-onset curmudgeonism.

That article was really pathetic.

It equated style/fashion to culture. It's fashionable to wear really tight pants, preferably high-waisted, right now. In a decade that will look horribly dated and silly. This is how style works. Things come and go. Right now people aged 15-25, who don't have a "real job" yet and/or spend most of their free time trying to cultivate a personal sense of style, are probably going to look a lot like an American Apparel ad. That or a mannequin in the window of a vintage store. These people (though there are many of them) have little to no impact on "culture" as a whole. Go watch a play at BAM or 2nd Stage or read a book by someone over 30 or look at some art (as long as it's not at the New Museum* or the Whitney Biennial) and you'll know that those kids loitering outside of American Apparel trying to out-cool each other have nothing to do with the cultural world at large, despite their ever-inflating egos.

Secondly, every generation comes up with a prevailing hierarchy of fashion. Right now it is the hipster look-- a mis-mash of all past fashions with emphasis on the 80's and trying to look as whimsical or careless as possible. But in the 90's it was grunge and that went away. Grunge kids now are pushing baby strollers through Park Slope. They did not reach into the sky, grab the intangible mass of culture and pull it down to the gritty earth. They grew up, gave their flannel away, got jobs and got on with it.

By saying that hipsters are signaling the downfall of all "culture" just tells me that the author of said article is probably imbibing too much of the fashionable, trendy shit that every generation gets a lot of. He probably read James Frey's new novel and said to himself, "Oh, my. This novel was highly anticipated, so I suppose that hipster-dom is responsible for the downfall of all culture." No. Writers write bad books. Sometimes bad books sell a lot of books because they are "a true story" or they have a "riveting plot" though "no artistic merit."

The Adbusters author tries to blame the over-prevalence of irony in fashion for the over-prevalence for irony in everything, but doing this just burdens hipsters more power than they could ever handle. True Hipsters don't have power. They don't have time to do anything powerful because they're spending half the day trying to create their little niche in hipster-dom. It takes a long time to create a personal "look." Anyone who has a consistent "look," who always looks perfectly in character, probably doesn't spend much time writing or reading or finding whatever it is that makes them happy.

Hipsters are harmless.

*Jerry Saltz, art critic for New York magazine is a genius. If anyone thinks that art criticism is boring, read everything he has written. He is brilliant. That review of The New Museum is worthwhile if you care about contemporary art in any way.

Young Revolutionaries

2008-08-13T18:16:00.000-07:00

It was raining yesterday and I ran out into the rain towards Kinkos to cut the paper down to make these chapbooks. I was all over that paper cutter, I tell you.

Things were beeping and buzzing and people were cursing and breaking down in tears. Everyone was damp. Everyone's shoes were five shades darker and squeaking when they walked.

Did I mention I have a dozen of these at my disposal?? Holler at me, Happy Cobra Books/ Matthew Simmons, Chelsea Martin or Ellen Kennedy if you want one.

Inside you will also find
"Things [Chelsea Martin] Know[s]"
"Spending Too Much Time Around People Who Like [Catherine Lacey]"
"[Ellen Kennedy] Is Probably Going To Die Alone"

Thanks to Blake Butler for a spectacular blurb. Hope that tattoo is healing well, Blake.

Today I feel:
lucky to be alive
pissed off at drunk drivers
older than I am (to an elderly degree)
thankful for all my limbs being entact
like I can't wait to be asleep

Today I:
saw my sister
ate sushi
called 911
walked
made mistakes
read

Yesterday I felt like a cave woman:
I went to the grocery store to buy food to make dinner for a man. I felt kind of frantic in the grocery store, like there might not be enough food for him, like he's been fighting wildebeasts all day and has worked up an unquenchable appetite. I was worried he would be hungry after I fed him. He was. Men are this way. I had to make him cinnamon toast after dinner.

Dinosaurs.

2008-08-05T11:32:00.000-07:00

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, gee, Catherine Lacey, with thesis workshop coming up in the fall and that panel for the Columbia Journal that needs planning, I bet you're really working super hard. I bet you're getting lots of work done.

Maybe I am. But maybe I'm doing things like writing a wikipedia entry on dinosaurs for Chris Killen's blog.

I like his idea to have wikipedia-style entries on his blog. Ideas like that should be encouraged. I mean, you could be a really diligent student and spend your summer preparing to crank out thirty pages every other week. But then... you know... there's the dinosaurs.

queens, 2008

2008-07-19T11:34:00.000-07:00

In Honor of Jeremy's Fiftieth Birthday

2008-07-15T16:49:00.000-07:00

There were twenty of us. We had pasta salads and wine and cheese and we were talking too loud and other more serious music fans were shushing us. We did not shush, though. I talked to many people, most of which were twice my age. A man taught me how to play a Bagammon. I knew how to play already, but he re-taught me. I won. Then I went to get more wine.
After I got some wine I talked to a woman named Yona and she had an unidentifiable accent.
I asked Yona, "Where are you from, Yona?"
Yona said, "I am from Costa Rica."
There is this little pause after people tell you where they are from and it's in that little pause that they realize that a single place doesn't really explain that person, doesn't really do them any justice.
Here is the truth: Yona is a Jewish woman born and raised in Costa Rica. She was raised in a Jewish household by a Mexican-Jew whose parents immigrated from Poland and a Costa Rican Jew whose parents came from France. That makes her Jewish, Costa Rican, Mexican, French and Polish. That's a lot of things to be. She was a small woman, a culturally compact woman. Her father and mother were members of the Communist Party just before the McCarthy era and the American government put them on a black list. They dis-affiliated with the communist party when the U.S.S.R. sided with the Arabs and Yona's parents decided to become radical Zionists. Her father was a cardiologist but a part-time political activist. He later owned a radical newspaper that was boycotted by the opposing political party. He also had a radio show where he interviewed famous activists and writers and artists of Spanish/Hispanic/Jewish/ and/or Latin descent. He interviewed Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
That is all I have to say about Yona's father.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez was the cherry on top.
Yona married a Nice American Jewish boy and they have two kids. 9 and 14. Liam and Luis. Luis is the same age as Jeremy's daughter, Isabel. Jeremy said to Yona, "If Luis lays a hand on Isabel I will break his knees." He said it jokingly and then we ate ice cream together but I could see Jeremy repeating it in his head. Break his knees. I will break this 14 year old's knees.
It would be really hard to make a move on a girl after her father has broken your knees. Also, I don't think Yona and her Nice American Jewish Husband would come to a birthday party or even just a dinner party of the man who broke their son's knees. Broken knees have effects on many things.

*I don't know the people in this picture and I am glad.

...shamelessly out of context

2008-07-03T00:30:00.000-07:00

When I read "Emergency," a short story by Denis Johnson, I was 19 and I thought, "I don't care for drugs or drug-related things, so this has nothing to do with me." I did a good amount of growing up around people who listened to Widespread Panic and Phish and that stupid dancing bear band; I grew to resent most drug-related things because I resented most drug-related people. I resented them for being only half alive. I resented their reddened eyes and stupid, constant grins.

It's a shame that I put Jesus' Son in this catagory, but this is what humans do. We make huge catagories of things we don't care for and we carefully tuck things into that catagory when we don't have the time or patience to deal with them.

What I was most unprepared to find in Johnson's violent, drug-frenzied collection was that most of the stories are punctuated by compassion. Here is a paragraph taken wildly out of context:

"The Vine had no jukebox, but a real stereo continually playing tunes of alcoholic self-pity and sentimental divorce. "Nurse," I sobbed. She poured doubles like an angel, right up to the lip of a cocktail glass, no measuring. "You have a lovely pitching arm." You had to go down over them like a hummingbird over a blossom. I saw her much later, not too many years ago, and when I smiled she seemed to believe I was making advances. But i was only that I remembered. I'll never forget you. Your husnad will beat you with an extension cord and the bus will pull away with you standing there in tears, but you were my mother."
- From Work

Hello.

2008-06-25T09:32:00.000-07:00

I am back in New York now.

On Friday (6-27) I'm reading at The Lucky Cat (245 Grand) in Brooklyn at 8 pm. It's 5 dollars but it includes a drink.

Also reading:
Christen Clifford
Richard Scheiwe
Niina Pollari
Amber West

http://www.earshotnyc.com

Atmospheric Disturbances

2008-06-12T08:46:00.000-07:00

Book is about:

psychology
weather patterns
studying yourself as if you are an outside observer
doppelgangers
people and their dogs
people and their crying
falling out of love
how to lie
how not to lie

Sentences taken shamelessly out of context:

"I'd suffered a dream in which what was happening to me was exactly what was happening to me."

"My heart always goes out to beautiful people, which I realize isn't fair, but at least my heart goes somewhere."

Go buy it from a book seller that you love.

New Orleans

2008-06-08T13:10:00.000-07:00

Some of y'all might know that I moved from New Orleans to New York a year ago. You may have even been subjected to one of my New Orleans-related rants. I just found this blog that tops them all though...

New Orleans Murder Blog

In a city this small (the population still hasn't recovered from Katrina) an entire blog dedicated to murder reports shouldn't be updated as often as this one is.

Kindred spirits in music and writing.

2008-06-07T08:42:00.000-07:00

Based on color, voice, content and/or tone:

Sunset Rubdown, Frog Eyes = Vonnegut

Bjork = John D'Agata

The Shins = Nick Hornby

...

Music that is Word-like.

2008-06-06T10:27:00.000-07:00

When we were babies our minds did this:

Your mother put mushed plums in your mouth and you felt like you were swimming in cotton balls.

You got locked into a car seat and the faint smell of old compost filled your tiny nostrils.

Your dad turned on Bach and tasted buttered corn on the cob.

Your nose, eyes, ears, tongue and nerves are bombarded every moment of the day when you're brand new to this world and your mind doesn't know what to do with it. Maybe it's this foundation that makes cross-sensory metaphors so enjoyable. What color is your favorite song? How does a smell feel against your skin?

For the past few months I've been thinking about a different sort of cross-sensory metaphors. Certain musicians, artists, illustrators, etc make work that has the mental effect (at least on me) of a good short story or novel.

Jens Lekman is the first singer-songwriter who comes to mind. It's not that his song lyrics are almost always narratives, which they are, it's that the music that he puts around the simple lyrics add what isn't in the words themselves. They give a tone and voice to the stories and when you're done with a song, you get the same sensation you do when you finish reading an essay or a short story. It's a different kind of satisfaction than you get from listening to other kinds of music.

More on this later...

A Young Woman's Insane Act

2008-05-03T11:27:00.000-07:00

I have been doing some research on the south lately and I was looking for a different story from Rhea County, TN when I came across this...

Published in the New York Times October 27, 1883:

A YOUNG WOMAN'S INSANE ACT
Chattanooga, Tenn., Oct. 26- A beautiful and accomplished young woman, the daughter of Benjamin Schoolfield, of Rhea County, aged 17, while delirious this morning escaped from her bed and threw herself in front of the south-bound Cincinnati Southern train. She was hurled from the track by the pilot of the engine, terribly bruised, and her death is hourly expected.

The hierarchy of detail here is unmatchable. Her father's name and the fact that she threw herself in front of the south-bound Cincinnati Southern train is pertinent, but her first name is left out. "...her death is hourly expected."

In literary-related news, Zachary German and Tao Lin did a great reading last night and then we went with Kendra Grant Malone, Chris Killen, and friends to eat vegan food and buy books at midnight. Chris gave me a copy of Paul Simon, and Zachary gave me a copy of his poetry chapbook The Name Of The Band Is The Talking Heads. Also, I bought AM Homes's book The Mistress's Daughter and the other day I bought Heidi Julavitz's book The Effect of Living Backwards.

All reviews are dependent on me finishing an assignment for Monday. Then I will probably start blogging too much.

"a significant burp in literary history!"

2008-04-27T21:31:00.000-07:00

I always knew that Ross Simonini was the best. Read about what he thinks of Lamination Colony and Happy Cobra Books.

Power Lunch With James Frey

2008-04-16T12:49:00.000-07:00

The School of the Arts at Columbia University has a habit of inviting the most brilliant and talented artists of the times to give a talk about their craft, have some lunch and answer the questions of a few pre-screened, pre-approved students. This week, however, they invited James Frey (pronounced "Fry" as in, "He fried his brain on drugs and booze for so long that he had no problem single-handedly debasing an entire literary genre, and pissing off millions, including Oprah, in the process.)

So imagine my delight in receiving an invitation to have a "Power Lunch" with none other than Mr. Fuckthebullshititstimetothrowdown, James Frey! After the tumultuous upheaval of every bit of credibility he ever had, I thought it was really great that he was going to be able to set the record straight with the youngest generation of the creative underclass, especially since we all hate him. Plus, who doesn't love a free lunch?

Dressed inexplicably in a purple velvet suit and escorted by a lawyer who was carrying a monocle, Mr. Frey entered the classroom in Dodge half an hour late claiming he was "Emotionally Prompt." His lawyer interrupted Frey's lecture ever other sentence, whispering into his ear, ripping up one of his note cards, and then slipping them into his briefcase. I have no idea what the lecture was about, partially because of all the censorship and partially because I wasn't listening to any of it.

Finally, the floor was opened for questions. Of course, my hand shot up instantly and James and I locked eyes for a second. (Oh, James. Fragile, addicted, trying-so-hard James.)

"James," I said, "do you feel that you lied enough in Million Little Pieces Of Shit?"

"I'm sorry, what did you say?"

"Do you feel that you lied enough in Million Little Pieces? That's it."

"I feel like I probably didn't lie enough," he said, "I mean, looking back on it, I would have lied more if I had known how popular lying was going to make me."

"What do you feel makes your novel-memoir more awful: the fact that it's poorly written or the fact that it is wildly exaggerated," someone else asked.

The lawyer whispered into Frey's ear, making wild hand gestures and flinging his monocle around.

"Uh, no comment," Frey said, folding his hands.

*Disclaimer: I didn't actually go to the James Frey Power Lunch, but this is the Emotional Truth of said lunch for me, and therefore it kind of actually happened even though almost everything above has been "fabricated." Since the above narrative is Emotionally True (at least to me) the result is, in a way, more true than the actual truth, and therefore completely "True."

Favorite line read tonight

2008-04-13T18:44:00.000-07:00

"The old lady is like a thing made of paper, left out for a long time on a windowsill."
-From Saturday in the Quality Save by Chris Killen

Moody Wastes Genuis Blood On Wrong Date

2008-04-09T08:05:00.000-07:00

So we got the Rick Moody apology... (if this is confusing see the post from April 2.)

"I just got back from going over to Housing Works, dutiful, on-time, only to find that I was on time on the wrong day. I am very sorry and horribly ashamed of leaving you guys high and dry. I trust I am somewhat in the doghouse at the journal right now, but if I can make it up to you somehow, please consider me eager and willing. I wrote down the wrong day, back at the beginning of this, and never did correct it, despite your reasonable attempts to make clear to me which day the event was taking place. As I say, you have my keenest apologies, and I hope you will convey the same to everyone there.
Sincerest regrets,
Rick M."

I hear he's taking applications for a personal assistant, or, if he's not, he should be. Also, any suggestions about how we can get him to "make it up" to us?
(In all seriousness, I am sure Rick Moody is a cool guy, not a Chump as I posited earlier, but I would have liked to have heard him say smart things on the panel.)

Rick Moody is a Chump

2008-04-02T18:31:00.000-07:00

Tonight I went to a panel discussion organized by Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Fine Art that was meant to discuss the good/usefulness or danger/uselessness of going to an MFA program (for writing, specifically.) Panelists included a professor who has gone to an MFA program, an adjunct professor who does not have an MFA, a writer who did neither, a journalist who teaches writing, and two writers who have MFAs: one who thinks the MFA is a pretty good idea and one guy who thinks it's mostly a bad idea.

The guy who thought it was mostly a bad idea was Rick Moody and though he told editor-in-chief, Kristin Vukovic, he had it "written in blood on his calendar," he did not show. Moody, in fact, has his MFA in Fiction from Columbia, but it seems he didn't have such a good time. He wrote about it for Atlantic Monthly. Here's a shamelessly out of context quote:

"The creative-writing workshop that is shorn of all ornament, that pre-emptively restrains the eruption of personality, that simply goes about its business—photocopying stories, handing them out, collecting responses, handing back the responses—is, similarly, creative writing by committee. And because it is creative writing by committee, it hews to the statistical mean, which is to say the mediocre."

His feelings about whether or not an MFA programs create mediocre writing are not why I think he's a chump. He's a chump because he (out of either flakiness, unavoidable calamity, or malevolence) didn't show up. Without his counter opinion, the discussion fell a tad flat. There was a little discussion about alternative ways of getting what an MFA program has to offer, but mostly the discussion had a congratulatory effect. Most of the audience were MFA students, past, present and future, (In case you're wondering, no one mentioned Tao Lin, who actually got up and left before the thing even started. Thanks, Tao.)

If Moody sends an excuse or apology to the editors at the Journal, I will let you know. Mostly, though, I think he is just a chump.

It seems like I have less and less time

2008-03-03T13:56:00.000-08:00

In honor of March

2008-03-01T13:55:00.000-08:00

I want to tell you about Maria Kalman if you don't already know about her. She is an illustrator with the mind of a good writer. I wish I could be a writer with the mind of a good illustrator. Maybe in many years that is what I will be.
Here is something that Maria Kalman drew and posted on her blog:

I dislike February. I am glad it is gone. Good Riddance.

Readings, Writers

2008-01-10T13:41:00.001-08:00

I went to a reading the other night at a place called Dixon Place and this guy Mark Edmund Doten read and let me tell you that I was blown away. I'm not exaggerating. I go to a lot of readings and I usually expect one of the following:

1. Tepid Amusement
2. Mild Boredom
3. To be checking my watch every few minutes.

But none of these things happened. Mark read a story about two boys stomping through iced over puddles and I can still see it. It made me happy. He has a novel coming out called Green Zone Kidz. Keep an eye out. You heard it here first. (maybe)

Also, Dale Peck read and he was really good as well. He read an excerpt from a new novel called "Sprout," which is being marketed as a "Gay Young Adult Novel." But it sounds good too. This reading was held by the QT Series. I don't know who they are, but they're alright in my book.

Glory At Sea

2008-01-10T13:41:00.000-08:00

This is a trailer from a movie that a few of my friends were working on in New Orleans. I don't know when it's coming out or where, but I will try to find out.

Also, check out their website.