Resist Psychic Death!
GIRLS TO THE FRONT: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution, by Sara Marcus
Harper Perennial; September 28, 2010
384 pages; $14.99 list; $10.79 at Barnes & Noble.com, $10.11 at Amazon
.
[NOTE: A vigorous subjectivity is hereby asserted]
.
I was thirteen in 1994, born a few years too late and too many hundreds of miles away from DC or Olympia to catch the first wave of Riot Grrrl, before the media declared Courtney Love its leader and made short skirts, ripped fishnets and combat boots another uniform to choose from, on the rack next to grunge and goth and punk. The punk rock girls in Miami sort of had the right idea. We wrote zines and covered our hands (and arms and shoes) in magic marker, wore too much black eyeliner and publicly made out with one another, smoke and drank and bragged about the good drugs we could find, and applied duck tape to the rips in our backpacks and notebook covers and black jeans. But we were copying the look from MTV, not inventing it ourselves, and we were more interested in intoxicants than radical feminist politics. We mixed up Riot Grrrl with trampy adolescent showboating, equated it with bands like Hole and L7 and the Lunachicks, plus local favorites Jack Off Jill (more Manson-fanclub than feminist, but at least female), and generally, in the way of all younger siblings aping their older sisters’ trends, didn’t exactly get it right.
Luckily Sara Marcus is here to set the record straight.
8 Comments
September 28th, 2010 / 12:18 pm
September 28th, 2010 / 12:18 pm
The Fiction of New Russian Realism
Rasskazy, an anthology of “new fiction from a new Russia” presents a reviewer with an interesting challenge: how to write about these texts as though they had something in common with each other. The book is held together by the assumption that the authors share not only a common language, but that their work is representative of “new Russia” in at least two important ways: in the authors’ political and cultural engagement and in their continuation of “the great Russian literary tradition.” In their preface to the anthology, editors Mikhail Iossel and Jeff Parker frame the texts within the politics of the Putin-era Russia that they see as “turning back the hands of Russia’s sociopolitical clock” and implicate all authors as opposition to this political process. The editors’ ideology in approaching this collection comes across in statements such as: “Russian writing has once again found itself invested with a higher purpose. The writers in today’s Russia derive their sense of relevance from having been adjudged irrelevant by the country’s rulers (i.e., nonthreatening to the latter’s political agenda).”
6 Comments
September 24th, 2010 / 1:37 pm
September 24th, 2010 / 1:37 pm
Criswell Predicts
Jonathan Franzen’s new novel Freedom will be the next Oprah Book Club selection. Between the two of them, nice will be made.
And remember: future events such as this will affect you in the future.
Word Spaces (20): Terese Svoboda
I bought the $25 desk at a museum sale in California. The rolltop doesn’t function, one of the legs is coming off, and I have to pry the drawers open, but I like how the desk part slides a little forward. It makes me feel as if I always have secret extra space, the way our apartment includes a long frosted glass window with a light behind to suggest that there’s another room. The French doors open to the living room/dining room/everywhere else room. A Murphy bed fronted with bookshelves folds down beside the desk for optimum concentration. My office is essentially the bedroom. I don’t know what to say about that.
15 Comments
August 17th, 2010 / 10:03 am
August 17th, 2010 / 10:03 am
Word Spaces (19): Lee Rourke
We bought this place in east London last year. The study isn’t finished yet, so I do most of my writing on the dining room table. It mostly always looks like this – unless our two cats have been on the table and knocked the books on to the floor, which is something they do from time to time. I know they enjoy doing this when I am out of the room. It doesn’t bother me that much, because cats will be cats. I didn’t write The Canal in this room; we moved here after I had finished it. I wrote The Canal in various cafés and pubs in Hackney, east London and I’m afraid I didn’t take photos of them.
I write longhand and then edit as I type it up on to my laptop. My laptop is quite old now and sometimes gets very tired, but it still does the job, so I can’t really complain. READ MORE >
24 Comments
August 13th, 2010 / 11:44 am
August 13th, 2010 / 11:44 am
David Berman and Epistemological Closure in the Propaganda State
"There is no leisure with dignity in an unfinished world." – DCB, at NYU Writers House, 7/25/10
by Jeremy Schmall
.
David Berman’s life has been one of failure and refusal. At least, that’s what he said at the very rare talk he gave at NYU on July 25th, the concluding event of the inaugural Open City Summer Writing Workshop. Although the idea of Berman being a failure was news to me—I am an enormous fan of his book of poems (Actual Air) and his former band (Silver Jews)—he does have a point. He didn’t follow up his book with another book, he refused to tour with his band for years, and when he finally capitulated, and the touring started to eke out money and win over a committed fan base, he quit music to fail at writing a memoir, and then nearly created a TV show based on his life, but walked away when he realized what that would look like. But both writing and music are behind him now. What he’s after instead—and which he communicated through a wide-ranging, associative, often sublime speech marked by long, meditative silences—focuses on his father, Richard Berman, a high-paid PR man who creates and disseminates misinformation on behalf of corporate giants. His work effects the choices we all make everyday.
Alas, David: Finding Markson’s Library, by Kevin Lincoln
There are five books that used to belong to David Markson in my apartment right now.
There are also two books by David Markson. These have his name on the front, like you’d expect: on The Last Novel, written in thin, spare black lettering in the sky of the cover illustration, a foggy graveyard ephemeral below it; in the other—This Is Not A Novel—written in all-white lowercase below the novel’s—it is a novel, despite the—title, which features the interjection of an illustrated female nude as seen from behind and waist-up, a slight crescent moon above her. As for the five that once belonged to him, they have his name written inside the front binding, in a hand that grows less ragged, looser, more fluent as the years go by:
in The Lime Twig by John Hawkes,
Markson
NYC ‘65
in Carpenter’s Gothic by William Gaddis
Markson
East Hampton ‘85
in The Counterlife by Philip Roth
Markson • NYC
‘89
in A Frolic of His Own by William Gaddis
Markson
NYC • 1993
in Agapē Agape by William Gaddis
Markson
—— 2002
My experience with David Markson, appropriately enough, began with and is inextricable from The Strand, the New York City used bookstore he loved during his life.
THE FROWNING SUN by Ariana Reines
[Regular readers might recall that back in March, Ariana Reines was trying to raise some money to send herself to Haiti as a translator for a group of trauma clinicians. We helped her, and then checked back in a month later. Today we’ve got something very special- over the approximately five pages that follow, Ariana offers an original piece of nonfiction, two paragraphs of journalism, a reading list, an explanation of WHAT [SHE] DID, an appendix, and some links. You can download THE FROWNING SUN as a .pdf, or click through and read it all here on the site. – JT ]
.
THE FROWNING SUN
One day two years ago I was drunk and angrily fucked my boyfriend while the movie Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti played on ubuweb with the volume turned up loud. Eight months ago, that boyfriend found my subsequent boyfriend in bed with me and beat him severely in the head, screaming “You fucking rapist”. Now the former is married and the latter is far away.
While I was in Haiti, about five weeks ago, the man I referred to above as “my boyfriend,” “that boyfriend,” and “the former” got shot in the stomach by a neighbor in what the internet reported as a “dispute over a dog.” I hope he is alright and can continue to eat spicy foods, which he enjoys, and that his career of violence, like mine, is at an end.
Risky Business
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (Random House)
pp. 288, $25.95 list ($14.27 at above-linked B&N)
Reviewed by Jennifer Bassett
.
Jennifer Egan’s latest novel A Visit from the Goon Squad is a hard to put down cross between trashy rock n’ roll fiction and post-modern masterpiece. It glitters as much as it stumbles—but overall, it further affirms Egan (as did her last novel The Keep) as one of the most interesting and exciting writers working today.
The novel, which reads more like interrelated short stories circles around aging punk rocker turned big-time record exec Bennie Salazar and his kleptomaniac assistant Sasha. From here, we learn of the various people they are associated with – from Bennie’s past as a punk kid in San Francisco circa 1979 to Sasha’s years in seedy Naples as a teenaged runaway. There’s also the would-be starlet who shuns the spotlight after an interview gone awry and the failed publicist who takes a job helping out a Latin American dictator in order to support her daughter and revitalize her career. Overall, these characters are all united through their relationship to time and music—the music bringing the characters back to one pivotal moment that, even as the age, they still seem to exist in.
Uncategorized / 11 Comments
June 21st, 2010 / 11:29 am
June 21st, 2010 / 11:29 am