McSweeney’s 33, the newspaper one, the San Francisco Panorama, has been sitting on my coffee table for weeks. I’ve only read the book review section, because it’s in the form of an actual magazine. All this experiment has done for me is remind me how cumbersome the newspaper format is and how obnoxious a daily one would be stacking up on my coffee table.
The magazine and book forms are convenient and welcome breaks from staring at a screen—they’re an experience. Newspapers, though, will only be missed when you’re going to dye Easter eggs or paint or start a fire.
It was $16, though, so one day I’m going to have to suck it up and sit on the floor with it.
After three and a half weeks of near-continual work, I am back into…getting frustrated about my own writing, among other things.
I played in a Scrabble tournament for 826NYC today, and my team lost in the first round. It taught me Scrabble is about the abuse of language—all that strategizing, all those little words. (I probably should’ve known this going in, and also I get dramatic when I lose.) My knee-jerk reaction of disgust when someone tried to pass off “mit” as a word almost saved us, but alas. We (my friend Kerry and I) like to play words that use up all our stupid one-point letters and leave triple word scores open. Life! (We lost by ~20 points.) Libresius and the Editaur live on, though not as a Scrabble team ever again. Paul Rudd and John Oliver also lost in the first round, and I backed up into Peter Dinklage because that’s exactly the kind of thing I would do when in a room with Peter Dinklage.
Stuff about what I’ve been reading and buying coming soon. When I wrote the first sentence I remembered some work I had to do…
Via picadorusa, Zach Galifianakis and John Wray sort of have a conversation about Wray’s Lowboy. Whether this makes any sense for the book or is just nonsense, it definitely makes me feel more inclined to pick it up than I already was.
Last night I went to HarperPerennial night at WORD bookstore in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. I overheard an employee say 80 people came out to pack the tiny basement where there were only 39 chairs (spelled out in my notebook as 6x6+3). We were there for two recently released works of dirty working-class Americana, Justin Taylor’s short story collection Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever and Kevin Sampsell’s memoir A Common Pornography. It was a straightforward reading, with a heartfelt introduction from their editor, but it illuminated much about the writing for me to hear them read pieces aloud (as it always does). The Q&A was painless, with only one person asking them what they’re working on now (Sampsell: chapbooks for Future Tense Books; Taylor: handed in a novel manuscript a few weeks ago, an anthology of literary tattoos). I had read both books over the past two weeks and was, honestly, surprised by how original and sentimental and funny they both were, in different but complementary ways.
Taylor is someone whose posts and comments on HTMLGiant I loved, yet for some reason thought maybe his fiction would be over-the-top happy with itself in an inaccessible way. Everything Here proved me wrong over and over. Each story has layers, different roads it could travel, and his prose has poetic rhythms. It wasn’t surprising to learn he “revises by ear.”
Nobody knew Estrella’s real name was Anne. Even the ones who had been with her didn’t know. She was that good. Sometimes she almost forgot she had a real name—she was that good.
Whether the character is an anarchist, a hedge-funder, a regular lost soul, there is a youthful restlessness and slight nihilism that is palpable but never smug. The voices he brings to life are experiencing a dull terror, giving the name of the collection the air of a prayer rather than being yet another long-winded cutesy title (maybe that was how I first read it…). This became clear in the story “Tetris,” where video games, relationships, and the Bible intermingle at the end of the world. Just that brief description captures our “generation’s” collective preoccupations; the piece itself makes your heart sink.
At the reading he read “A House in Our Arms,” in which the aforementioned hedge-funder chases a not-exactly girlfriend from college and gets into a second nebulous relationship with an older gay art critic. There is sex and humor, there is desperation. There is stuff about the subway that got a lot of laughs (“Do I get on here or walk five blocks and have one less stop?”), and was all the more relevant in a bookstore you have to take the G train to get to.
Kevin Sampsell’s A Common Pornography is a memoir written in the form of memory, short pieces that feel like they were just set off by a sight or smell a moment ago but are fully formed. Its title may be jarring (and there is a tutorial on how to obscure it for public reading), but works. There is the literal pornography of innocent pubescent curiosity and the adolescent reality of sex, but mostly there is the common experience of life’s confusing vulgarity, indifference, and unpredictability.
Fatherhood and masculinity—how one becomes a man, what is a man—are basically the book’s reason for being. “I would call my son honey,” he writes, hoping to never be his own callous, creepy father. Unapologetic honesty about all the things we did in secret as kids— Sampsell made paper records with his song titles written on them, and when Reagan was shot he hoped he would die because he “craved a tragedy for everyone”—makes you cringe and go “aw” simultaneously. The openness about all the things lots of people probably haven’t done—slept with a prostitute, dealt with a disgusting family secret—make it interesting as narrative. The plain tone sometimes gets monotonous, but it brings you back in and doesn’t end with any easy redemptive flourish. It’s the porn that is life, not a classic memoir, and it’s good. And also makes you think, “A major publisher put this out?”
After the reading I browsed books and eavesdropped, and from what I gathered it seemed most people there were in publishing or critics or writers in general. The books aren’t esoteric, though: they appeal to something just under everyone’s skin.
• Justin Taylor on NYT’s Paper Cuts: “It’s like, the novel is napping right now so I’m going to spend some time with this book review, or return these e-mail messages, or put a blog post up — but whatever I’m doing I’ve still got one ear on the room where the novel is, because I know it never stays down long, and it’s going to wake up hungry. Always does.” • The Second Pass says, “The more I read about David Shields’ new book, the more I want to read it, to see if it could possibly annoy me as much as I think I will.” I was afraid to say it myself, but, yes, exactly. • Julie Klausner at The Book Bench: “I also think that “Kermithood,” for lack of a better term, is a culturally sanctioned way to seem intelligent, sadly. Look at that Katie Roiphe essay about the declining libido of the literary titans. Look at Michael Cera’s career. I’m at the point, frankly, where I’d rather deal with a misogynist with a copy of Tucker Max’s book in his backpack over someone in sensitive emo-boy clothing, because both are misogynists, only the one with the backpack is more honest about just how scared of women he is. The modern model of misogyny has to do with marginalizing people who are sexual and thinking of them as dumb, or not serious, or not cool or tweedy enough to take seriously, for fear of seeming like one of the guys from “Jersey Shore.” The sex is so much more present in sexism than, I think, ever before.” Did not want to read it before—seemingly fluffy stuff about unsuccessful hetero relationships isn’t my thing—but it seems to be about a cultural trend I have a lot of struggles with myself. And at least because I’m life partnered it won’t make me want to die.
• I enjoyed these thoughts on criticism versus book reviews at The Reading Experience (How’d it get in my Reader?):”The assumption seems to be that a review must be free-standing, shorn of the useful context consideration of existing commentary on a book might offer. This is a practice that only reinforces the impression of book reviewing as “lifestyle reporting” rather than actual literary criticism, and it’s a shame reviewers like Athitakis are not able to engage in real critical dialogue in the reviews they write.” • Idlewild Books has a world literature column on the Huffington Post now, if that place doesn’t hurt your eyes too much. The first post covers the Best Translated Book Awards and general stuff about translation (DID YOU KNOW: ONLY THREE PERCENT OF THE WORLD’S LITERATURE IS TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH!). • HTMLGiant asks, “Have you ever freaked out about your writing?” Ha. Duh. • Sam Anderson, book critic for New York Magazine, has begun a literary Twitter experiment. He’ll post the best sentences he’s read each day, and with recent picks from Justin Taylor and Junot Díaz, I’m sold.
McSweeney’s 33, the newspaper one, the San Francisco Panorama, has been sitting on my coffee table for weeks. I’ve only read the book review section, because it’s in the form of an actual magazine. All this experiment has done for me is remind me how cumbersome the newspaper format is and how obnoxious a daily one would be stacking up on my coffee table.
