New Literature Wilderness Exploration Group

Spend an evening with two fiction authors whose new books you should know about! Grace Krilanovich and Jarret Middleton (An Dantomine Eerly) will read from their debut novels, and talk with the audience about the future of fiction, getting published on an indie press, death, food, the woods, and more! Enjoy bizarre book-themed gift-basket raffle, booze, and more talk and fun carried on to a nearby bar after the event.

March 11th: The Waypost, Portland, OR - 7pm
March 12th: Elliott Bay Book Company, Seattle, WA - 7pm
March 26th: Stories Bookstore, Los Angeles, CA - 6pm

Trinie Dalton Live

Trinie Dalton, author of the forthcoming Baby Geisha (1/12), will be reading Friday, March 4th @ 7:30pm in Los Angeles @ Pepin Moore in Chinatown with Sarah Manguso, author of The Two Kinds of Decay.

Pepin Moore (the old China Art Objects)
933 Chung King Road
LA 90012
7:30pm, Fri. March 4th

Here or There, by Jay Neugeboren

'Here or There' is a story from the forthcoming (May 2011) collection, You Are My Heart and Other Stories, by Jay Neugeboren.

'Here or There' was originally published in Columbia Magazine.

March 2011 Catalog

Music: Radiohead

Radiohead released a new album last week called 'The King of Limbs.' I do love me some Radiohead. Though this song might be better served sans Thom Yorke's creepy clown dance.

Film: Tree of Life

Terrence Malick is a fucking champ. I cannot wait to see this movie.

Book: Short

The bold caption at the bottom of the front cover to Short reads 'Wall Street Meets The Office,' which boils this debut novel down to the most convenient line for the agent trying to sell a film adaptation. I thought it read more like a Harry Crews/Hunter Thompson combo taking on energy trading. There's a devious plot (or two) (or three) to make the rich richer, but what makes the book most engaging are the characters, each distinct and boldly drawn.

Short is hilarious, seamless, and features one of my favorite characters I've encountered in recent memory, Milt Harkrader. I'd follow him anywhere.

"Milt, like many other ten-gallon-hat-toting brokers in Manhattan, heralded from New Jersey. He needed the hat more than most because his hairline now began behind his ears. Milt had always been a loudmouth. Sometime after his divorce he had to have his jaw wired shut, the outcome of a late-night brawl that had occurred at a 7-Eleven in Rahway. This helped Milt develop a new respect for strangers but didn't stop him from talking so loud in bars, especially around his coworkers and other people he suspected wouldn't take the time to kick his ass."

Milt's on-point when teaching his son the value of confronting a man who calls you a 'bankrupt' behind your back, passing out in the pool of the Hard Rock in Las Vegas, passing out in a snowbank in Vail, being thrown overboard on a deepsea fishing trip after he unclips his harness because he doesn't like the way the 'life jacket straps tug his gut,' and then using the story to later at the bar to get himself laid.

As Milt would say, 'Taste it.'

Thought: Thomas Frank

From the February 2011 issue of Harper's Magazine. Thomas Frank has just begun a regular column dubbed 'Easy Chair.' I already feel confident saying he's freaking awesome and it's fantastic that he has this forum.

This particular quote is from maybe his second piece, titled "Servile Disobedience," in which he encourages poor people -- the serving class -- to withhold their niceness for a single day:

"For decades we have attacked [the government], redirected it, outsourced it, and filled it with incompetents and cronies. Yes, it still works well enough when we need it to replenish the accounts of investment banks or bang some small country against a wall, but those branches of it designed to help out Americans of "lower socioeconomic status," as the scientists would put it, are now bare. The government fails the people of New Orleans when they are hit by a hurricane, fails to notice the cadmium paint in the marketplace, does a lousy job educating our kids, can't keep the libraries open or the park lawns mowed, overlooks the catastrophic shortcuts taken by its pals in the oil-drilling industry -- and all we can do to express our frustration is elect candidates who promise to hack it down even more."

Music: The Kills

The Kills have a new album coming out in April called Blood Pressures. 'Satellite' appears to be the first single. Badass.

Film: Rubber

I don't know what to say, other than that I will be seeing this.

Book: Pieces of a Decade

To commemorate their first decade in print, the Brooklyn Rail published a hardcover book that included some of the editors' (Theodore Hamm and Williams Cole, above) favorite nonfiction articles in an anthology titled Pieces of a Decade: Brooklyn Rail Nonfiction 2000-2010.

I've been reading the book piecemeal since I picked up a copy at last fall's rainy Brooklyn Book Festival. It's a great read. There are articles like 'What They Eat in Brighton Beach' by Marjory Garrison that does little more than chronicle an elderly Jewish couples' eating habits, to an explosive 'Farewell to CBGB' penned by Jason Flores-Williams.

As alt-papers drop like flies across ye olde United States, Pieces of a Decade testifies to the Rail's importance as a relevent and sacred cultural institution.

My favorite piece is the opening essay by Matthew Vaz called 'Coney Island Beer Hustle,' which profiles the characters loafing or stalking the boardwalk, that absolutely nails the place: "We got cold Coronas. We got cold Heinekens. Ice cold! We got Ferrone Malone, Stephon Marbury, and Allan Houston on parole. We got Lincoln High School's finest just tryin' to make some money out here. We got John Freakin' Doe. We got Russian gangsters, dope pushers, thousand dollar hookers, whole blocks - no, whole buildings from Sunset Park. We got Mexicans with long pants planning on getting shorts just happy to be alive breathing the air. We got neck tattoos, C-section scars, and nail tips with the Puerto Rican flag. We got cops checking out tits, just trying to keep everybody safe, and Osama bin Lade is nowhere in sight.

"This is Russia, Puerto Rico, Mexico, Surfside Gardens, Marlboro Projects. We got whatever you need out here. This is Coney Island, Brooklyn, New York City."

Thought: Coffee House Press & McSweeney's

There's a fantastic, lengthy interview with Allan Kornblum and the rest of the Coffee House Press staff over at The Huffington Post.

The editors dish on the press' history and their relationships with authors, the present state and future of poetry, and the publishing industry at large.

Kornblum: "In December 1969, I was working the midnight-to-eight-thirty shift at the Grand Central Station post office in NYC, and attending poetry workshops at the St. Mark's Church Poetry Project. One evening, the workshop leader told us that we had been asked to help collate the pages of a mimeographed magazine. In one of the back rooms of the old church, we were greeted by a group of 2 x 6 foot tables, each with five stacks of 250 pages. When I completed my assigned portion, I sidled up to the editor, told him how much I liked his magazine, asked if he'd like to see some of my work. He looked off in the distance, sighed and said, "I've always thought poetry should be as hard to break into as the Longshoreman's Union." To hell with him, I thought--I'll start my own. I've always been grateful for that kick in the pants, which can sometimes be far more productive than well-intended encouragement."

Also, McSweeney's announced this week that they're launching a half-page of "games, puzzles, comics, and activities for all ages, available for weekly publication in newspapers across the U.S. and Canada."

A few more thoughts on obscenity

The first time my narrator, Vivian, actually encounters Tzipi Honigman in the flesh, they’re driving to a fancy restaurant in Tel Aviv and Tzipi asks her if she knows any of her poems by heart, and if she could recite one to her.

“With my heart in my mouth, I did – an unrhymed sonnet about failed love. It was called ‘Obscene.’ She looked over at me, smiling just a little. I felt extremely naked.” (p. 9)

I didn’t reproduce the sonnet in the novel, although I did include some of Vivian’s other poems. But I thought you might want to see the one she recited to Tzipi in the car. The epigraph is from Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse.

Obscene

“Discredited by modern opinion, love’s sentimentality must be assumed by the amorous subject as a powerful transgression which leaves him alone and exposed; by a reversal of values, then, it is this sentimentality which today constitutes love’s obscenity.”

No one would have raised an eyebrow at

the little sexual accoutrements

of their love. These might provoke a smile

but little more. She e-mailed him a file

called “dirty pictures” in which she appeared

in all her glory playing with sex toys.

Even that phrase, “sex toys,” goes to show

how innocent they were. He sent her back

a picture of his hard-on. She was charmed.

The thing that was obscene, the dirty secret,

was neither flesh nor fetish. It was love

itself. Bataille describes the sentiment

in all of its vulgarity—a massive

throbbing organ. An embarrassment.

Can we all say, "I love Karen Finley"?

The Feminist Press has just brought out The Reality Shows, a collection of her performance texts from the first decade of the millennium – commencing with “Make Love,” her response to 9/11 through a channeling of Liza Minelli which is, in Finley’s own estimation, “a complex amalgam of pee-in-the-pants humor, pain, and compassionate outpourings of sorrow” – and closing with “The Jackie Look,” which brings Jackie Kennedy Onassis back to ponder trauma, history, fashion and femininity as well as “the demands of being the first lady.” In between, Finley dwells with Terri Schiavo, Laura Bush, George W. Bush, Martha Stewart, Condoleezza Rice, and Eliot Spitzer. The texts are accompanied not only by photographs of Finley’s performances, but also by some of her own uncanny, disturbing and often very beautiful drawings.

I attended almost all of these shows, and each one stayed with me long after I left the performance space. In fact, the narrator of my novel went to see “The Passion of Terri Schiavo” and “The Dreams of Laura Bush” in 2007. She tries to explain Finley in an e-mail to her foreign lover. She recounts the NEA controversy, and the charges of obscenity. She says, “She is obscene. She is also fantastic and beautiful and sexual, and hysterical in the fullest sense of the term, and frightening and funny and deeply sad. I was very moved.” (p. 93) So was I.

The Reality Shows has a preface by Kathleen Hanna of the bands Bikini Kill and Le Tigre, and an introduction by my friend the brilliant psychoanalytic theorist Ann Pellegrini. I. Love. Karen. Finley.

Narcissism

A few reviews have come out of The Correspondence Artist. So far they’ve all been pretty positive, although one guy wasn’t crazy about the images, and another wasn’t crazy about the end. When I read these things, mostly I’m just thrilled that the person actually read the book. Then I feel a little bad for a minute if they express some reservation, but I get over it pretty quickly.

The person, for example, that didn’t like the ending so much said it seemed a little “narcissistic” because the narrator is more in love with her own fiction than she is with her actual lover. But, being a narcissist, I decided to take this as a compliment.

My narrator has the same tendency. She writes an e-mail to her lover in which she quotes a passage from Nietzsche on women writers:

“The complete woman perpetrates literature in the same way as she perpetrates a little sin: as an experiment, in passing, looking around to see if someone notices and so that someone may notice.”

She says she knows the general consensus is that Nietzsche was a misogynist, but she finds some of the things he says about women kind of charming and totally recognizable in relation to her own person.

This may also explain why she put up for so long with Santutxo’s weird gender politics (see pp. 127-130).

Speaking of gender politics, I’m reading from the book and talking about feminist autobiographical fiction with Linda Schlossberg and Carmelita Tropicana on the 22^nd. Please come! Information here.