Author / Richard Grayson

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.

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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 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 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 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.”)