by natalie Dee

I live in Brooklyn which means I can’t even leave the house without twisting my ankle as I trip over an author, often one whose book is already on my shelf. Just yesterday this guy was asking me if I had any spare change and I said, “Wait isn’t this you?” and held up the book I was reading. He just blushed and ran away. They are a timid species.

This would be a happy problem if I had just remained a reader and writer, but I started reviewing books last year and recently I got an assignment from Time Out New York to review Tao Lin’s newest, Richard Yates. READ MORE >

From Flickr user samelovesherdog

I’m not happy right now. A few days ago I read this article in The Guardian that included phrases like “unapologetically female” and tried to link all contemporary writing by American Women back to Candance Bushnell, author of the Sex & The City column which spawned a book and the HBO series and the most obnoxious 25% of the female population of New York City. I know it’s probably silly and naive and suspiciously female of me, but I expect more from The Guardian than an article like this.

Full disclosure: I didn’t know that Sex & The City was based on a book or that the book came from a column written in the 90’s in the New York Observer. That still doesn’t make any of it interesting to me. The whole Sex & The City phenomenon probably did have an effect on making Americans a little less prude in the way they talk about sex, and I can appreciate that from a distance. People in their 40’s and 50’s might be ‘more comfortable talking about sex’ now, but the 20 and 30 somethings I know were teenagers before sex & the city and already talked about sex more candidly than a bunch of white chicks drunk on vodka. We didn’t need their permission, but this is really beside the point.

The point is, I am not OK with The Guardian trying to find the root of a literary shift in Sex & The City. The tail didn’t wag the dog; the culture shifted. Nonfiction and memoir have been on the rise in America for a while now and trying to connect all female essayists back to Sex & The City is just lazy and absurd. Lazy and absurd and irritating.

READ MORE >

I’ve been thinking a little this morning about the appeal of books you could categorize as intelligent fatties: Ulysses, Infinite Jest, other books I have started but haven’t finished.

People experience joy reading these kinds of books and that makes me happy in the same way that some people like having gay sex makes me happy. I don’t have gay sex but I am happy that it’s being had and enjoyed because uniformity of desire scares me. It reminds me of that acidic feeling I had in sixth grade when a classmate told me all men wanted to have sex with Pamela Anderson.

But my question is this: Does anyone openly admit that they experience joy reading an ‘intelligent fatty’ because it makes them feel smarter than other people? Is that part of the appeal or is that the dirty little secret of the appeal or is that not even a factor?

Bored of the same old interviews, I’ve decided to start something new. It’s pretty self-explanatory.

1. A sentence using three or more words you consider ‘personal favorites.’ She was a college girl, waylaid by a bad fan belt – he had tried using the word “morass” in his pickup line, but she’d slapped him just like the townie girls always did.

2. One sentence about your grandmother: Nana rubbed my gums with ice cold gin, unless she’d already drunk it all.

3. A sentence using a really bad metaphor and too much punctuation: I realized, suddenly, that Misty and me, we were like that tetherball there on that school playground – spinning violently around that cold steel pole and that the cold steel pole was like OUR DEAD FATHER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

4. A sentence spoken by the thirteen-year-old you once were: “Hey fuckstick — watch this!”

READ MORE >

This weekend in Brooklyn:

POPSICKLE 2010 is two-day festival of readings, performances and screenings that will take place at Market Hotel in Brooklyn, 1142 Myrtle Ave, Bushwick.

SATURDAY | July 24

3:00 – 4:00 PM            WHAT’S UP + Brandon Downing—video

3:45 – 4:15 PM            Parker Phillips & Jesse Gold

4:15 – 5:00 PM            Lauren Russell, Marc Nasdor

5:00 – 6:00 PM            Brett Price & Dani Levanthal—video, Nicole Trigg, Alaina Stamatis, Jamie Peck

6:00 – 7:00 PM            Michael Barron, Eddie Hopely, Anna Fitzgerald, Jordan Michael Iannucci

7:00 – 8:00 PM            Jarrod Shanahan, Gina Abelkop, Timothy Donelly

SUNDAY | July 25

1:00 – 2:00 PM            Evan Burton, Carter Edwards, Paige Taggart

2:00 – 3:00 PM            Ben Fama, Natalie Lyalin, Emily Pettit, James Copeland

3:00 – 4:00 PM            RAFFLE + SNACK TIME

4:00 – 5:00 PM            Dan Magers, Leigh Stein, Joshua Mehigan

1. I love when authors I love leak a little information about what they’re working on, so I was basically salivating as I read this interview with Jeffrey Eugenides at FSG’s Work in Progress blog. Anyone else excited about this? I don’t think I have ever met anyone who doesn’t like Eugenides and surely his likability pisses someone here off.

2. Ever since I finished the Vicarious MFA series here, I have been trying to think of a new series and I finally did. It’s called 10 sentences and it’s something like an interview, something like a game, but not exactly either. The first one will be with John Jodzio & you can expect it Monday or Tuesday.

Robert Lopez has started putting up guest posts on his blog for Kamby Bolongo Mean River. All posts are titled ‘No News Today.’ Seems like more will be forthcoming. I’ve added it to my google reader & you should add it to yours. It is one of the only blogs that guarantees to be newsless, unless you are somehow still reading Gawker. Here is the first one from Sam Ligon:

There are reports of startling news from the recent or distant past. Something about oil or a flood somewhere. Something about a military leader being dismissed or named emperor. Something biblical, maybe, involving slaughter and men lying with beasts. Nothing has been confirmed by reliable sources. It’s all very unclear, people, and shaded by gossip, rumor, innuendo. Therefore, and as always, there is no news today.

Lee Rouke’s debut novel, The Canal has just been released in the the States and will be hitting the UK in less than a month. I’ve already said good things about it & so have Shane Jones & John Wray . I conducted this little interview with Lee over email.

First, an excerpt, then another after the interview:

She addressed him only.

“Do you remember me?”

There was a long pause.

He looked at the woman next to him, then back at her, then back at the woman. He looked nervous, rubbing his thumb into the palm of his hand. The woman’s eyes began to narrow and her whole face started to contort. He looked back up at her.

“Er . . . I’m . . . afraid . . . I’m afraid I don’t, sorry. Er . . . Have we . . . Should I?”

“You tell me.”

“I’m sorry, I’ve never seen you before in my life. I fear you may have mistaken me for another person, someone else in your life . . . I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry?”

“Yes.”

“You’re sorry? That’s all you can say? Sorry? Don’t you remember me at all?”

READ MORE >

http://billmurray.tumblr.com/

A bunch of poets and poetry enthusiasts, including Anne Carson and Bill Murray walked across the Brooklyn Bridge and the Wall Street Journal wrote about it:

The predominately bespectacled army of attendees wore sensible shoes. Mr. Murray’s were a hybrid sneaker/hiking boot, quite popular among the crowd, and Ms. Carson wore brand-new, shiny, bright-red Adidasesshe picked up “in the outlet malls in Toronto where I was this weekend.

Who knew that anyone at the Wall Street Journal has a sense of humor?

At first, the earnest verse appreciators ambled awkwardly. They annoyed runners and bicyclists, and people who like to walk fast. They were joined, unintentionally, by The Brooklyn Bridge Boot Camp, a gang of eight heaving women who followed their leader’s barking orders through a variety of laps, leg lifts, and squats.

All you Brooklyn dwellers should come out to Melville House tonight and be the first kids on the F train to read Lee Rourke’s The Canal, a strange explosion of a book that is out as of today. Lee is in town from London & there will be a launch party tonight at Melville’s space in Dumbo, complete with a reading, beer, wine, snacks and people. 7 pm. 145 Plymouth St.  Come say hi.

An interview I did with Lee will be posted here in the not so distant future. Today? Tomorrow? Who can be sure?

Shannan Hayes is one of my favorite young artists, especially her project Social Exchange, a series of 180 thank you cards.

READ MORE >

This morning on Mobylives, I found an essay by The Nation’s book editor, John Palattella, about how everyone in the publishing, books coverage and bookstore world has been wringing their hands since 2007 because of the kindle and the disappearance or reduction of many newspapers’ books sections and, of course, the advent of HTMLgiant. (OK maybe he doesn’t read us, yet.) But Palattella is optimistic in the essay and disagrees with the idea that reduced newspaper coverage of books is representative of larger cultural problems.

Palattella writes, “I think there’s no better time than the present to be covering books. The herd instinct is nearly extinct: newspapers inadvertently killed it when they scaled back on books coverage en masse; and the web, for all its crowds and their supposed wisdom, is a zone of unfederated cantons. The field is wide open. If you can’t take chances now, if in such a climate you can’t risk seeking an air legitimate and rare, when can you?”

Maybe this is news to readers of The Nation but, yeah, tell me something I don’t already know.

Still, I think I will miss print coverage of books. I am going to miss the days when a damning or rave review in The New York Times was something that a lot of people knew about whether or not they agreed with it.  It’s like having a rich, arrogant bully on the playground that we can all love to hate together, but secretly hope she’ll invite us to her birthday party because she has the best toys. Plus it’s really fun to say Michiko Kakutani. Am I alone in this? If there’s no herd (and it seems less and less like there is) what can we point to as the mainstream? Does that even matter?

I have been stark-raving-obsessed with Marina Abramović’s The Artist is Present. I’ve spent hours at MoMA; I’ve interacted with the interactive website; I’ve scrolled through the Flikr;  I’ve learned about other obsessives; I’ve read essays and reviews; I’ve watched this nifty video; And yeah, I’ve seen that blog that is just the pictures of people crying. (Love that one.) I know Ken has posted links to it twice since it’s been going on, but I’m posting them again, at risk of redundancy, because to me (and many others) this was a huge moment in art history and I think anyone who is alive and creating things right now should know about it.

Memorial Day was the last day for the exhibit and now Marina has given a pretty interesting exit interview to the WSJ blog Speakeasy. It’s full of such non-native-English-speaker sentences like, They made a lot of interesting drawings of how I pee. I didn’t even have urge. and This is an enormous amount of eyes. The interview also refers to an earlier statement she has made that “nobody ever changes when they do things they like.”

I am not sure if I entirely agree with that but it does raise some interesting questions. I know a lot of writers who say they hate writing, but they do it anyway. I don’t know how to react when someone tells me this. Are they masochists or do they feel like they can’t do anything else?  I often find writing  really difficult and trying, but I almost always like it. So will I never change or grow as a writer because I enjoy it so much? READ MORE >

Here’s a cool new thing if you’ve got the cash to spare: The Rumpus has started up a book club in which you’ll be sent an advance copy of some anticipated novel each month in exchange for twenty-five dollars. At the end of that month you’ll be invited to “a moderated online discussion” with the author.

“It used to be that only people in the media got advance copies of books but that wall has come down quite a bit. Now everybody’s a reviewer.”

Really? Are we all reviewers now?

Just read Rick Moody’s suspiciously effusive review of Charlie Smith’s Three Delays. I get the feeling that Moody wants every living writer to go out and read Three Delays, and I am not sure if I will, but I like this idea of the characters devouring a story. It reminded me of a book I recently read– Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell.

A friend told me to read Mrs. Bridge a few years back and I asked what the book was about. She said something like, “Oh, it’s just about Mrs. Bridge, who lives in Kansas and is married and has three children and a maid and a big house and she is faintly unhappy all the time.”

(I should mention that this recommendation was given while we were at a Halloween Party and my friend was dressed as Mrs. Bridge and she had gone through some trouble to get the 1940’s style costume; she loved the book that much.)
READ MORE >