Month / May 2007

by Richard Grayson

Peter Cherches: Downtown Made Him

Another one of “The Young Writers I Admire” from my 1979 essay was Peter Cherches. Over 30 years ago I was in the first class of MFA students at Brooklyn College and Pete was in an undergrad fiction writing class with my teacher and mentor, Jonathan Baumbach, who introduced us. But I’d already read and liked Pete’s work; like me, he’d published a story he wrote as an undergrad in the London-based Transatlantic Review. Pete is one of the smartest, funniest, nicest writers I know. He uses language with a sense of play that ranks him among the best “experimental” writers. But I’ll let Pete tell his own story:

Long before I reinvented myself as a food and travel blogger, long before there were blogs, I was a “downtown” writer and performance artist.

The recent publication of the anthology Up Is Up, But So Is Down: New York’s Downtown Literary Scene, 1974-1992 (NYU Press) has inspired this reminiscence.

Over the years I’ve published fiction and other short prose pieces (which some choose to call prose poems) in many literary magazines, most with pretty small circulations. Anthologies have exposed my work to wider and quite different audiences. In The Big Book of New American Humor I shared pages with Woody Allen, Seinfeld, Peter DeVries, Garrison Keillor and Philip Roth, among others, a fact that led me to proclaim that I was the only writer in the book I had never heard of. Poetry 180, Billy Collins’ website and anthology originally aimed at exposing high school students to contemporary American poets, surely garnered me my largest audience yet. My entry in Guys Write for Guys Read, Jon Scieszka’s adolescent boys’ literacy project, surely garnered me my youngest audience.

This new anthology represents my work within the sociocultural context in which it came to maturity, the downtown scene of the 1980s. A large, sprawling compendium of texts and documents, Up Is Up, But So Is Down is a scrapbook of an era. The interesting thing about that time in that place is that while there were surely many individual “scenes,” one could also truly speak in terms of an overarching downtown scene.

Of course, downtown New York was always the hotbed of Bohemianism and experimentation. By the time of my downtown, however, Greenwich Village no longer had any real significance in the equation. I’d say that the downtown scene I worked within was born largely of the convergence of the sixties East Village counter-culture and the genre-crossing SoHo scene of the seventies (even if that was really just a heating up of things that had started brewing in the sixties). While collaborations among artists, writers and musicians had a long history in New York, in my downtown the distinctions between who was what had blurred. My downtown was a stew.

I moved to the East Village from Brooklyn in 1979. I had found the perfect apartment to be a downtown writer in. It was a dark, gloomy first-floor tenement apartment on East 10th Street, just west of Tomkins Square Park, on the block with the Russian Baths, a Ukrainian Church, and the Boys Club, not to mention Carlo Pittore’s Galleria dell’Occhio, the mail artist’s window gallery. My apartment had a bathtub in the kitchen, a tiny water closet, crumbling walls and a ceiling that once ended up on my floor. At least I had my own toilet. Some buildings still had shared toilets down the hall.

zone7lg.png

By this time I had been publishing my work in literary magazines for a couple of years and was also editor of my own magazine, Zone. I had moved to the East Village because all sorts of interesting things were happening there, and at age 23 I needed to be in the thick of it. Over the next eight years, which I’ll nostalgically declare the chronological heart of the downtown scene, things got out of control in all the best ways. New magazines and performance venues seemed to be launched every week. Writers and painters formed rock bands. Painters made performance pieces, writers made performance pieces, writers, painters and musicians collaborated on performance pieces. I started performing.

To read the rest, go here

by Erin O'Brien

Who is Erin?

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Erin O’Brien is a Cleveland writer with a massive head of hair who sometimes answers to the name Jenna Jameson. Her work has appeared in The Cleveland Plain Dealer and The Cleveland Free Times, as well as more disreputable publications. She is a member of a neighborhood Bunco group, a housewife of questionable repute, a Playmate and director (Wrestling with the Laundry, the Cleveland Cringe Festival) and a fiction writer (novel: Harvey & Eck). She has decided not to employ a brassiere during the writing of this bio and apologizes to anyone who is inadvertently injured because of it. Se can cook up a pretty good SLT but she cannot make a decent pan of Hamburger Helper to save her life. She also feels very entitled when writing bios about her myriad accomplishments.

Erin O’Brien will contribute something funny or bawdy or irritating or sad more or less once a day on these pages until Our Fearless Leader returns.

by Nick Antosca

what is this

I’m not sure what this place is or what I’m doing here. I got an email with a login URL, a username, and a password. I forgot about it for half a day then emailed back asking what I should be doing with this. Then I remembered a few days earlier, someone asked me if I wanted to guest blog somewhere. But I didn’t know when. Now I realize that when is now. The reason Ed didn’t return my email is because he’s away; that’s why he needs guest bloggers.

I’m a stranger here, I think.

Here’s an interview with me that was posted on Michelle Lin’s blog today.

In the interview I talk about my book and about how my dog attacked me when I was five. We put the dog “to sleep.” That’s a phrase I like.

Here’s my book, which is called Fires.

Another novel you might like is The Magus by John Fowles. It’s very good.

I’m tired. I ate many oysters tonight, as well as some mango sorbet.

Here’s the beginning of a new novel, which I may never finish:

passing through

Strangelets pass through the planet at 900,000 miles per hour. Space is a great river, the earth is a porous cloth, and in the water are strangelets. (Or you might say they’re a part of it, actually.) Other things in, or of, the water: neutrinos on their way from the sun in the trillions of trillions, muons careening out of deep space, and perhaps even the ghostly and sluggish Weakly Interacting Massive Particle, which no one is sure exists. Those things are all passing through the planet—easily, in numbers beyond comprehension. They are passing through your face now—your eyes and teeth and hair.

Here’s a post on my blog about accidentally going to a gay pool party this weekend.

bored

by Tao Lin

THE MOOSE AND THE GERBIL

I was going to blog about this Marco Roth, n+1, Benjamin Kunkel thing (which happened after this Marco Roth thing) and type some things about censorship, different kinds of people, and concrete reality vs. the world of abstractions but stared at the computer screen for a long time with a concerned facial expression then bought and ate a salad then came back and typed this post called “THE MOOSE AND THE GERBIL.”

THE MOOSE

The moose is forthcoming in The New Yorker but feels conflicted because its short story was edited a lot, to the point that the moose believes it is a “completely different story.” Sometimes at night the moose goes outside into the woods and headbutts trees while interminably thinking, “What is the function of art?” The moose’s life partner tells the moose it’s okay because “look at the art, not the artist,” but the moose stopped taking its life partner’s advice seriously over half a year ago during an epiphany where he distinctly thought the following sentence, including punctuation, “This moose is not someone I would be with if I were not as lonely and irritable as I am; actually I would talk shit about almost everything this moose says and thinks if I were less lonely and more attractive and less irritable than I am.” The moose lives in a studio apartment in mid-town Manhattan and is a senior editor at Riverhead.

THE GERBIL

The gerbil is an aspiring writer who has just discovered the online writing community called Zoetrope. It has completed three short stories but is unsure which to post for feedback. All three of the stories are very autobiographical and the gerbil has read many disaparaging remarks about autobiographical stories. The gerbil has brown hair and often feels alienated from its peers, despite that it has almost always received only praise for its “kind-hearted nature,” “intelligent-looking, beautiful blue eyes,” and “quirky sense of humor.” Its only friend, who it talks with almost every day through email and gmail chat, lives 4000 miles away, in Norway. The gerbil itself lives in a four-person apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, which it found on Craigslist.

by Richard Grayson

I’d appreciate if anyone could give me their [sic] opinion

Dave’s post on grammar made me think. (Dave, I’ll get you for that. It hurts.) I’d been a law school administrator in recent years before going back this year to teaching college writing (supposedly I’m retired, but I’ve been working part-time at four different schools) and I’ve begun to wonder if I should just stop correcting certain grammar errors that still drive me crazy.

When I first taught, in the ’70s, I used to correct “who” and “whom” all the time. I stopped. Now I correct only when students use “whom” when they mean “who,” not the other way around. I still use it sometimes because I’m old, but basically I favor whom‘s doom.

But I’ve still been correcting the pronoun shift in the title of this post: a writer will start with the singular anyone, everyone, someone, anybody, or the ubiquitous a person and then she will invariably use the plural personal pronoun they, them, their later in the sentence.

Should I just leave it alone?

How about the use of you in a sentence like this:

In my high school you had to work very hard to get good grades.

I always write something like, “I didn’t go to your high school. Use you only when addressing the reader.”

(I also would like to have a quarter for every time I correct the placement of the close quotation mark and the period or the incorrect use of its, it’s, its’ [sic] and i’ts [really sic].)

We’re talking about formal expository essays, business letters, argumentative writing, not narratives. Am I being an old fart to correct a person/their and the general you?

by Jeff Bryant

On the Menu

There’s a time and a place for good literary discussion. I’m assuming that’s why Ed lined up so many fine folks to fill his rather unfillable shoes this week. And then there will be my posts, straight from a basement in Terre Haute to you. Ed claims to be doing a little relocating this week, but I’ve done some investigating, and I know, for a fact, that he’s in Wisconsin enjoying some fine dining:

Wisconsinites have deep-fried cheese curds, candy bars and Twinkies. They now have deep-fried livestock testicles, too.

More than 300 people paid $5 for all-you-can-eat goat, lamb and bull testicles Saturday at the ninth annual Testicle Festival at Mama’s Place Bar and Grill in Elderon in central Wisconsin.

“Once you get over the mental (aspect) of what you’re eating, it’s just like eating any other food, and it tastes good,” Buster Hoffman said.

If Buster Hoffman says it’s so, then it’s gotta be so. Have fun, Ed! But don’t eat too much.

Update: Because I can, I will. I’m Jeff from Syntax of Things, one of the original Superfriends from way back when. I’ve never tried testicles; I’m allergic to some nuts. I do like some cheese curds though.

by Matthew Tiffany

A ghost is bored.

Free from the constraints of a supposedly all-lit lit-blog, here I go with some reflections on music. (I’m allowed – there’s a category for it, see?) Internets, ho!

Pitchfork has a pretty clear-eyed look at Wilco’s new album. The whole thing should be read for the full effect, but here’s the money shot:

Jeff Tweedy’s restlessness has always been one of his greatest strengths. Since Wilco’s inception more than a decade ago, his willingness to explore an ever-widening spectrum of sounds and genres, and to keep the revolving door of the band’s line-up well-oiled, has paid off in a discography that’s as diverse as it is indispensable. Though his songwriting DNA was bound tight during the later days of Uncle Tupelo, Tweedy has nurtured it in different ways with each successive album, from the transitional sunset country-rock of the first two, through the keyboard-thick pop of Summerteeth, the fractured deconstructions of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and the languid abstractions of A Ghost Is Born. Following that last record, Wilco swelled to its largest and (according to Tweedy himself) best lineup ever, with the addition of guitar hero Nels Cline and utilityman Pat Sansone. Charged up and bursting with eccentric and experimental talent, Wilco Mk. 5 seemed poised to generate the band’s finest– or at least most interesting– music yet. Instead, it produced Sky Blue Sky.

An album of unapologetic straightforwardness, Sky Blue Sky nakedly exposes the dad-rock gene Wilco has always carried but courageously attempted to disguise. Never has the band sounded more passive, from the direct and domestic nature of Tweedy’s lyrics, to the soft-rock-plus-solos format (already hinted at on Ghost’s “At Least That’s What You Said” and “Hell Is Chrome”) that most of its songs adhere to. The lackluster spirit even pervades the song titles: “Shake It Off” is probably most accurate (not to mention the album’s worst track), but “On and On and On” and “Please Be Patient With Me” are both strong alternatives.

I agree with this assessment. I’ve listened to this album a whole bunch, with pretty mixed results. “Either Way” and “You Are My Face”, early pre-released tracks, are solid; the latter more so, with some fine singing from Tweedy. “Either Way” is unoffensive, and dad-rock sums it up nicely. (Sums up the whole album nicely. Being a Dad, this is appealing at times; I do like the mellow. Have you heard Neil Young Live at Massey Hall? You should. At other times, Tweedy for fuck’s sake I get a whole lot of being a dad when the kid needs to be carried downstairs at 3 am for a pee break, can I please rock out in my truck a bit, thanks) From there, the album goes completely off the tracks with the horrid “Impossible Germany”. Sorry, that isn’t a good guitar solo. Not at all. “Sky Blue Sky” and “Side with the Seeds” are very nice. “Shake It Off” – god, I want to like it, I want to imagine them wailing on it live, but it just won’t gel. “Please Be Patient with Me” is ok, but Tweedy solo is better for this track. Same with “Walken”, which is pretty bad – I saw one review declaring it to sound just like ZZ Top, which couldn’t be too much more wrong.

“Hate it Here” sucks.

“Leave Me Like You Found Me” seems to be holding up the best under repeated listens. (“Please Be Patient with Me” sounded like I’d heard it 3,000 times the fourth time I heard it. This is not good.) “What Light” is good enough, as is the closer. But as a whole, the album is sub-par Wilco. Comparisons to The Band are legion for this album, but there’s enough rootsy Band-ish tracks on their other albums for you to burn onto one CD that really deserve the comparison. The gentle-Tweedy tracks on this album have too much cliche to them; there are no rockers, no “Spiders (Kidsmoke)” anywhere near this album. And why did they exclude the mighty fine “Is That the Thanks I Get?”

For all my grousing, the album is not destined for the dustbin; some music you need to let soak into you over time. I hope this is the case here. If not, well, pass the Summerteeth.

by Ed Park

Call of Chthonic

Poetry fans: Check out, if you haven’t already, this excellent interview with Guy Maddin about his new Brand Upon the Brain!, a mind-meltingly good silent movie (“A Remembrance in 12 chapters”) with a lot of exclamation points. It’s being screened as I write this along with live narration, an 11-piece orchestra, a castrato (!), and fun sound effects.

In the interview, Jessica Winter asks Maddin about the aesthetic kinship he shares with John Ashbery, who narrated a performance of Brand! last night in New York.

(This is neither here nor there, but did you know that Akira Kurosawa’s elder brother, Heigo, was a benshi—a narrator of silent films? I’ve had this factoid lodged in my brain for nearly five years, ever since writing this article; I wasn’t able to deploy it then, but I’m glad I can share it now.)

Back to Brand Upon the Brain!:

New Yorkers, you have until tomorrow to watch it!

Other people, the show might come to your town! (Here’s the schedule.)

UPDATE: Just as this post was “going to press,” Jessica W. e-mailed me about last night’s Ashbery-voxed perf:

Ashbery’s authoritative monotone and deliberate pace, familiar from his readings, made a perfect complement with the feverish melodrama onscreen—just as it underlined his own influence on Maddin’s intertitles. As the story flung itself toward its climax, the effect of Ashbery’s steady intonations became—maybe I just love a chance to use this word, but—chthonic, like an ancient voice from long ago and far away was just reaching us. We were spellbound.

by Dave White

For My First Post: I’m going to cheat

Hey guys, I’ve posted this piece a couple of places, but I wanted to see what reaction it would get from a different audience. Originally I posted this at my blog and over at Crimespace, so if you’ve seen this post there, my apologies for the cross post. More original work to follow in the coming days.

There’s a conversation going on on Crimespace about pet peeves of incorrect grammar. Everybody has one. Mine is people saying “I could care less” when they mean “I couldn’t care less.” But I have another argument as well.

Grammar is not important.

Well, I’ll back off of that… simple grammar is something everyone should learn young and grasp. But after that, who really cares?

What is important, and what I stress when I teach, is meaning. A student has to be able to put together an argument or a storyline or a sentence that has meaning. They have to learn how to put together a logical progression and THEN you can go back and fix grammar.

Hell, look at a lot of writing in books these days. People break grammar rules all the time, whether to sound colloquial or to create effect. I understand that you have to understand grammar to break the rules, but grammar should still not be the end all be all of writing.

It should be the least important thing.

National tests these days do not grade on grammar and spelling. They let most errors go as long as it does not affect meaning. Hence, meaning is where we should focus. That’s what I work on.

If a story starts:

“Me and you went to the store. Your a giraffe and heads spilld across the road.”

I am not going to sit there and help fix the “me and you” and the correct “your” first. I’m going to ask why is there a giraffe in this story, why were there head’s spilling across the road, and what does that have to do with the store you went to.

I want to get to the point where someone will write “Me and you went to the store. You bought skittles and I bought a soda.”

Then we can go back and fix grammar.

I think people worry about grammar because it’s easy to fix. You can–when you edit someone’s piece–say well this is wrong and this is wrong and it’s easier than saying, but there’s a plot hole here on page 202 and I don’t know how you can fix it. That involves a back and forth and a conversation.

I’m always willing to talk about writing, be it with students or with other writers. I’m always willing to brainstorm plot ideas and why a paragraph works as a thought. But folks, what it comes down to is this: Whether you are in 8th grade or writing for ten years, most grammatical errors can be fixed by just reading your sentence out loud.

Meaning, however, takes work.

What do you think?

FOR THE RECORD: This is in no way an attempt to trash teachers. I am a teacher and I believe in teachers. All teachers want to make students smarter and more well rounded young men and woman.

However, I think there is an old fashioned thinking vs. a new type of thinking among all citizens of the United States on whether or not grammar should be the key to good writing.

by Matthew Tiffany

Roundup?

Until we guest-bloggers pool our collective blogginess and figure out how to keep together Ed’s excellent Roundups, I offer you some reading from elsewhere. Consider it a bite-sized roundup. Particularly as I don’t know how to make WordPress do bullets, or pretty much anything useful. Ed: WordPress?

Bullet!: Books are not sweaters. This post made me sweat until I bled.
Bullet!: Harry Matthews goodstuff.
Bullet!: A good review for Chuck P’s Rant.
Bullet!: Your online writing hideaway.
Bullet!: Books we want and books we need.
Bullet!: A good place to go, every day. Well, go with your browser. You know what I mean.

by Richard Grayson

Some young writers I admired in 1979: part one

Assembling was an annual compendium of “otherwise unpublishable” avant-garde art and literature compiled by Richard Kostelanetz and others between 1970 and 1982. Contributors were invited to send in up to four pages of 1,000 copies of 8 ½ x 11 pages, which were assembled alphabetically and bound into books.

I can recall taking my contributions to several editions of Assembling to Hanging Loose Press’s Bob Hershon at downtown Brooklyn’s Print Center, used by many artists and writers in those days before cheap copying.

My first few were prose experiments, but for 1979’s A Critical (Ninth) Assembling, I wrote a piece called “Some Young Writers I Admire” about ten people, several of whom were friends.

Three of the ten I lost touch with; I’m pretty sure they’ve stopped writing. There are a lot of casualties in literature.

I’d like to post about some of the others in the coming days, people still around, writing and publishing, like me, after more than 30 years.

The one pick you’ve probably heard of was then a poet. I praised his chapbooks Tiger Beat (Little Caesar Press, 1978) and Idols (The SeaHorse Press, 1979) and the little magazine he edited, Little Caesar, which I subscribed to. At the time I wrote the piece, he was the director of programming at Venice’s Beyond Baroque center, which had published several of my stories in their literary magazine.

I did not mention that once he had sent me a folded-over piece of paper on the outside of which he’d scrawled: Prepare to meet thy God. Inside, when I opened it, I found a rare colored Xerox photo of Leif Garrett.

The poet and editor I admired is famous today as a novelist: Dennis Cooper.

http://archive.salon.com/people/feature/2000/05/04/cooper/story.jpg

More of my admired no-longer-young writers in coming days.

by Matthew Tiffany

The rooster has left the coop.

My name is Matt. I’m from Condalmo. Ed has, apparently, left the building. He’s left the place to some guest bloggers; I’m one of them. Allow me to lay my first egg (so to speak)…

My name is Matt. I’m from Condalmo, a website at which I have thrown multiple rockin’ literary parties. Ed has, apparently, left the building. He’s left the place to some guest bloggers; I’m one of them. Allow me to lay my first egg (so to speak)…

suckas image

The Modern Letter Project is a site I stumbled on the other night. I shudder at the inclusion of the instant-turn-off term pen pals, but here’s the deal:

The Modern Letter Project is a collaboration between Corie Trancho-Robie and Youngna Park that seeks to revive the lost art of snail mail pen pals. Beginning in March 2007, 140 people joined with us on this journey of letter writing, eager to connect with others the old fashioned way and engage in the fun of new stationery and decorated envelopes, the slowness of postal services and mostly, the thrill of real mail once a month that wasn’t a credit card offer.

Here is how it works:

Each participant receives one address per month for twelve months. For each of those months, they write a total of at least two letters:

1. To the address sent to them
2. A response to the person who has written to them

It is our hope that, at end of the year we will have a network of new pen pals, friends, and a collection of letters to treasure.

I feel it worth sharing because letter writing is a drum I beat from time to time at my site. Like you, I am somewhat chained to my e-mail – kind of difficult to run a blog without it, and easy to use, fast, “free” – wonderful for what it does. But listen: you know it’s different when you need to pay forty-whatever cents to send a letter, and when you’re writing it you want it to be worthwhile, thoughtful, not just something dashed off (as in “dude, I picked up the new Wilco, what’s on for next weekend, signed matty”) – email is to letter as instant message is to e-mail. Shorter and shorter, cramming it in.
With a letter, you’re putting something physical out there, something that can be held, saved. I have a letter from my grandfather. His handwriting was shaky, unsure. His thoughts were unsure. You won’t get that same feeling through an e-mail. Who wants to leave behind no trace for their offspring, no sense of their thoughts and ideas and actual physical presence, save electrons (or whatever) in Google’s massive mainframe? And who is going to weed through your thirty thousand e-mails to find that one important thing you wrote?
E-mail has recused people from letter writing, but I’m here to tell you it’s worth the time. Check this out, and get signed up at the LWP.

(oh, and why does WordPress have to completely suck? Gave me such a hard time with the image, the formatting, etc. Does it always suck this much? I can’t figure out how to add a “guest blogging” category for us, and am done trying, so this one gets filed under Erin O’Brien’s “Breasts”)

by Richard Grayson

Memo to NBCC: it’s not just the book review sections that may disappear

David Carr’s Media Equation column in The New York Times today looks at the possibility that cutbacks and layoffs may not be enough to save The Star-Tribune in Minneapolis.

(Full disclosure: In December 1979, The Star-Tribune’s pre-merger predecessor, The Minneapolis Tribune, gave my first book the most perceptive review it received: “Richard Grayson’s anthology of short stories is unbelievably bad, bad, bad. How bad is it? Well, after a writer reviews his chosen book, he gets to keep it…I am not keeping this one. I want to give it to someone I really despise.”)

by Erin O'Brien

Hello. My name is Erin O’Brien.

I have big tits and I drive a Mini Cooper and everything I say is right.

Eff off.

Now here’s a book: Flatland by Edwin Abbott.

This baby is 118 pages and was first published in 1884. It crackles and giggles and winks. It is little and quirky (Jeepers! This book is a lot like me!). In Flatland there are only two dimensions (I have more) and all of the characters are geometric shapes (I am not).

The circles are priests: the controllers of our conduct and shapers of our destiny, the objects of universal homage and almost of adoration.

Irregular polygons are shunned:

I for my part have never known an Irregular who was not also what Nature evidently intended him to be–a hypocrite, a misanthropist, and, up to the limits of his power, a perpetrator of all manner of mischief.

All the women are lines:

For if a soldier is a wedge, a Woman is a needle; being, so to speak, all point, at least at the two extremities. Add to this the power of making herself practically invisible at will, and you will perceive that a Female, in Flatland, is a creature by no means to be trifled with.

You bet your ass I’ve got a point at both ends. As for all you Irregulars out there, why don’t you come up and trifle me sometime?

Since there is no High Priestess category available to me, all of my entries in these pages shall be listed under Breasts as well as others that I deem appropriate.

Oh yeah, I’m a writer.

Erin O'Brien

by Richard Grayson

A newbie guest blogger attempts to post something

Immense thanks to Ed for letting me guest-blog, and I ask for your patience with someone new to this. Although the number of us over 55 seems limited among lit-bloggers (there’s Frank Wilson at Books, Inq., Lynne W. Scanlon at The Publishing Contrarian and Michael Allen at Grumpy Old Bookman — if there are more, please let me know) and I find myself more and more playing the old man card to excuse all my failings, I’ll try not to do so here.

On the other hand, blogs, like the daily newspaper, tend to focus relentlessly on the present. Having graduated from an MFA program over 30 years ago and published my first book in the 1970s (when even my astute copy editor did not catch my error of referring to a “silicone [sic] chip”), I probably can’t add that much that’s unique to most discussions of what’s going on now in literature, so I figured I’d write about stuff from the past.

Like I wanted to write something about my friend Scott Sommer, who was my age and whom I met in 1979, the year our hardcover fiction books were published by the same publisher and edited by the same editor. He died in 1993, of a sudden heart attack, at only 42. Writing in The New York Times Book Review 22 years ago, Ed’s good friend Sam Tanenhaus said that Scott “displayed a unique comic voice, at once acerbic and melancholy, as if Holden Caulfield had teamed up with the young Samuel Beckett to recite the woes of lovelorn hipsters lost in a daze of Quaaludes and Kierkegaard.”

Yeah, there were hipsters in 1985, too.

by Ed Park

No Ed, per Dan…

…and yet in the absence of Ed there is another Ed: your humble narrator, Ed P., occasionally referred to on this blog as East Coast Ed.

There are so few Eds roaming the landscape that we need to band together. (So it is written in the Ed Manifesto.) It’s a strange name—Edward‘s not strange, but Ed is so abrupt. And yet I like it, Ed C. likes it—there is the idea that you are getting the maximum possible impact from two letters.

To kick things off, I want to share my favorite recent blurb: Sarah Manguso on poet Jennifer Knox’s forthcoming Drunk By Noon (Bloof Books). The blurb itself is like a poem!:

Since Knox favors premise over conclusion, her poems simply speak—they do not explain. In this way they are not entirely unlike scripture. The part that is unlike scripture is the one that’s like “Wait, I was reading these poems and laughing but my hearing aid fell out and then my face just kind of blew off in a beautiful rainbow spray of bullshit-dissolving napalm.”

by Dan Wickett

While he’s away…..listen

So. No Ed for two weeks. We’re forced to rely on guests for ranting these next fourteen days or so.

If you’ve not yet done so, I highly recommend you take this time where Ed won’t be posting, and listen to some of the Bat Segundo podcasts. I’ve not listened to them all, but if I were going to suggest a few:

21. Monson, Crane, Jones and Magee
28. Dana Spiotta
48. Colson Whitehead
59. Jeff VanDemeer
60. Robert Birnbaum
82. Kelly Link

by Edward Champion

Behold the Guest Bloggers!

Due to current existential circumstances, I will be taking a break from this blog for the next two weeks. Don’t worry. All is well. And I’ll have more to say about all this later. I’m only sorry that I wasn’t able to turn out more podcasts, but I’m doing the best I can.

A number of people have kindly volunteered to guest blog in my absence. If you’re interested, email me. But I can’t guarantee that I’ll get to your email immediately.

Their crazed musings should start to appear here tomorrow.

In the meantime, take a walk around your block with your slippers on and hug someone who needs it.

by Edward Champion

BSS #116: Alan DeNiro & Carolyn Kellogg

segundo116.jpg

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Procrastinating at the last minute.

Guests: Carolyn Kellogg and Alan DeNiro

Subjects Discussed: Small Beer Press, genres, Jim Monroe, on being a post-science fiction author, picking from years of fabulism, on being a genre agnostic, weaving between genres, literary fiction, creepiness, letter-writing action, wordplay, Dungeons & Dragons, absurdity, contemporary income disparities, dread, footnotes in fiction, jolts of emotion, reversing polarity between poetry and fiction, the rust belt, and the loneliness of Wal-Mart.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

DeNiro: I’ve always kind of considered myself science-fiction influenced. Or another way I’ve kind of thought of it as — and I don’t know if adding “post-” anything is really vain or pretentious or whatever — but almost kind of a post-science fiction, of kind of looking at the whole field of hundreds of years of fantastic literature and definitely being within that larger tradition of fabulism and the like.

(A co-production of the LBC, Pinky’s Paperhaus and The Bat Segundo Show.)

by Edward Champion

BSS #115: A.M. Homes II

segundo115.jpg

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Remarkably terse.

Author: A.M. Homes

Subjects Discussed: Expanding the New Yorker piece to book form, the rules of memoir, inventing deposition testimony, being “dished up” by the Roiphe sisters, the false connection between Homes’ novels and the memoir, Joan Didion, the culture of confessional memoirs, truth stranger than truth, speculating upon parents, being fact-checked by The New Yorker, negotiating with Granta and The New Yorker, declarative sentences, deciding what to reveal, court documents, judging other people, not running from the truth, Daughters of the American Revolution, on being excluded by family, and maternal fantasies.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Homes: The lawyers kept saying to me that you should sue your father for paternity. And I kept thinking, I don’t really want to do that. And a couple of things became clear to me. One was how interesting it is that one person’s decision to exclude you from your family history excludes you from all of your family history. Hundreds and hundreds of years, and yet you’re no more or less related to any one person than another. And how interesting is that someone could remove you from all that. So that was kind of fascinating to me. And then I was thinking about, if we did sue him, what would happen? And essentially, he would be legally compelled to not only produce some sort of a test or a document, but also to really answer all of the questions that had never been asked. And I also thought as an artist or writer that was most interested in these, by that point the reader knows who my biological father is well enough to participate in the reading, that I could just ask the questions and not even have to provide answers.

by Edward Champion

In Which I Am Misattributed by Josh Getlin

Josh Getlin gets his facts wrong in this article about the so-called litblogs vs. print war. The quote that Getlin attributes to me is actually from Colleen Mondor:

It’s okay for the lit blogosphere to exist as a version of your Mom’s book club – it’s okay for us to talk books and authors and compare notes on favorites, as long as we keep our place. Have you got that? We must not think for a moment that we contribute anything beyond serving as accessories to the real literary discussions.

I should point out that Getlin contacted me by email. I offered to talk with him over the phone and clarify my points. He never returned my call. But I did send the email he quoted.

And I’m glad that he at least noted the fact that Michael Dirda and I have been emailing. But I’m baffled that Getlin didn’t get a quote from John Freeman.

[UPDATE: One other correction to Getlin’s piece. For those who don’t know the story, here is the history of events. Dirda didn’t write his words in The Washington Post, as Getlin claims, but he contributed them to the NBCC blog Critical Mass. I was the first person to leave a comment on that post. I wondered why Dirda was so hostile to blogs. I called for harmony between print and online voices. Other figures, such as Colleen, Bookblog’s Marydell, Ron Hogan, Dan Wickett, David Montgomery, and numerous others, have asked the same question I have in various threads at the Critical Mass site as well as various posts at their respective sites: Why is the NBCC so hostile to the very literary enthusiasts who need to be involved in the campaign? John Freeman attempted some spin control with this post at Critical Mass on April 30, only to suggest, merely a week later on the Leonard Lopate Show, that newspapers should steal from blogs in order to survive. The question then is why Freeman constantly waffles in his clear animosity towards blogs (I certainly have no animosity towards Freeman, but he seems to confuse criticism of his writings with criticism of him as a person) and why he can’t quell these troubling prejudices in favor of a united front for literary coverage in all conduits.]

[UPDATE 2: The Los Angeles Times will be correcting the piece.]

Also, for the record, I think Josh Getlin is, in general, a pretty good reporter. I think this was simply a case of Getlin not understanding blogs very well.

by Edward Champion

New Review

My review of Haruki Murakmi’s After Dark can be found in this Sunday’s Los Angeles Times Book Review. Here’s the first paragraph:

The title of Haruki Murakami’s latest novel may connote the smoke-hewn, jazz-strewn flow of Hugh Hefner’s old television show. But the book’s post-midnight Tokyo is a lonely place where the trains have stopped running and the love hotels and the family restaurants are sanctuaries for the loners and the sad sacks stuck working graveyard.

I’m honored to be in there with Sven Birkets, who reviews the new DeLillo book, and Sarah Weinman, who reviews a Sara Paretsky volume.

by Edward Champion

Michael Orthofer

I’m worried about Michael Orthofer. He hasn’t updated the Literary Saloon since Monday. He hasn’t returned emails. And the phone number I have for him is now disconnected.

If anyone knows if Michael’s okay (or if Michael himself might let us know), please leave a comment in this thread.

[UPDATE: Mark Sarvas tells me that he’s talked with Orthofer. He’s just been having computer problems. So no worries, folks!]