http://www.catherinelacey.com/
Catherine Lacey is a 2012 NYFA Fiction Fellow. She has published work in The Believer, The Atlantic.com, a Harper Perennial's 40 Stories, Diagram and others. She writes for Brooklyn Magazine rather often and is a founding partner of 3B, a cooperatively operated bed and breakfast in downtown Brooklyn.
Jonathan Franzen on David Foster Wallace:
Somebody could write a whole monograph on how deliberately and artfully he deploys the modifier ‘sort of.’
Shannan Hayes is one of my favorite young artists, especially her project Social Exchange, a series of 180 thank you cards.
Super Funny True Apocalyptic-Minded Banter with Gary Shteyngart
Correspondent: Super Sad Love Story is your final book.
Shteyngart: Super Sad…True.
Correspondent: Yes, I know. It has too many modifiers.
Shteyngart: Oh my God! Modify this! This is definitely it. I’m hanging up my gloves and I’m becoming a duck farmer in Maine.
(Read more here at Ed Champion’s blog. I love that guy.)
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 >
I just got an email from the fine folks at Melville House inviting me and my “colleagues” to this event and since I work for myself I guess that means you people. You can nominate trailers here. (Formal attire!)
(Found Magazine)
A little while ago I was assigned the seemingly menial task of re-typing a chapter of Hans Fallada’s Wolf Among Wolves since, at the time, there was no digital copy in existence. What seems like it might have been a mind-numbing endeavor was actually one of my favorite chores while I was interning at Melville House. You can learn a tremendous amount about a writer by faking being them for a little while. You get to see the scaffolding of each sentence and you’re really forced to pay attention to every single syllable of every word. After I read something I really admire (or sometimes during) I often open up Word and start typing it in, word by word, sometimes spending hours on it. (And I wonder why I can’t find the time to post here.) I suppose it’s a dangerous habit to get into if you’re not the type to stop a project before it’s finished, but I still love wasting time this way.
Going to AWP? Like Shane Jones? Ok, good. You qualify for this free thing.
