Terry Gross with Jonathan Franzen

TERRY GROSS: A lot of people think we look very similar, would you care to comment on that?

JONATHAN FRANZEN: Well Terry, you do sort of look like a man; no offense, and I’m dating a feminist, so we’re on the same team here. Most women have long hair and softer features, which is where the problem is. I just think Americans really need to step back and realize it’s not all about capitalism and gender. My new novel Freedom aims to expose the underbelly and subconscious of the American pathos.

TERRY GROSS: Thanks, that was really touching — speaking of which, what am I hearing under the table?

JONATHAN FRANZEN: Well Terry, I’m under contractual agreement with my publishers to “pound away at [my] future,” and this moment I’m focusing on DNA.

TERRY GROSS: Gross.

JONATHAN FRANZEN: Franzen.

Scrambler Books—which (like Flatmancrooked) manages to be awesome despite being based in turd-haven-of-a-city Sacramento—is releasing two upcoming books of poetry that I’m stoked about: Kendra Grant Malone’s Everything Is Quiet and Matthew Savoca’s long love poem with descriptive title. You can get these books separate or together, or together in a hardcover edition, which is pretty fancy for indie lit, right? Click here and here for sample poems from Malone and here and here for Savoca poems. These are sure to both be tender and exhausted collections that feel like drinking the wrong beverage at the wrong time and somehow having that be the only thing that makes you feel better. Can’t wait.

previous generations of American writers pointed the way

and why would he be murdered when everyone in town knew he had terminal cancer?

i wanted to be “a pure mathematician” more than anything else (the mathematician as artist)

and for a while I even lived in a tree house

i was still drinking in the minor leagues at the time

bees don’t stop drinking

excuses to go to the store

warm beers in the attic again

a flag flew, lit by a spotlight, indicating the man was in residence

three reasons why alcohol and the writer go so well together.

1. Trance-like states

2. Nothing is free on planet E

Just got this in the mail… kind of really excited about it: The Orange Eats Creeps by Grace Krilanovich, coming from Two Dollar Radio. It speaks for itself I think, I kind of want to marry it for its description alone:

It’s the ’90s Pacific Northwest refracted through a dark mirror, where meth and madness hash it out in the woods. . . A band of hobo vampire junkies roam the blighted landscape—trashing supermarket breakrooms, praying to the altar of Poison Idea and GG Allin at basement rock shows, crashing senior center pancake breakfasts—locked in the thrall of Robitussin trips and their own wild dreams.

A girl with drug-induced ESP and an eerie connection to Patty Reed (a young member of the Donner Party who credited her survival to her relationship with a hidden wooden doll), searches for her disappeared foster sister along “The Highway That Eats People,” stalked by a conflation of Twin Peaks’ “Bob” and the Green River Killer, known as Dactyl.

With a scathing voice and penetrating delivery, Grace Krilanovich’s The Orange Eats Creeps is one of the most ferocious debut novels in memory.

“Like something you read on the underside of a freeway overpass in a fever dream. The Orange Eats Creeps is visionary, pervy, unhinged. It will mess you up.”
-Shelley Jackson

“Wandering back and forth between the waste spaces of the Northwest and the dark recesses of its narrator’s mind, The Orange Eat Creeps reads like the foster child of Charles Burns’ Black Hole and William Burroughs’ Soft Machine. A deeply strange and deeply successful debut.”
-Brian Evenson

[You can preorder this book now from Two Dollar Radio for $10. It ships soon I believe.]

Mike Alber is large, he contains multitudes. He is also the proud owner of a case of Crystal Pepsi from 1994. A recent graduate of Ohio State’s MFA in fiction writing, Mike has come to L.A. to sell out to the film and television industry. Also, a warning to the ladies: Mike Alber will knock you up as quick as look at you. Those who aren’t on Nuva-Ring are recommended not to make direct eye contact with the screen, instead viewing the novel through a hole punched in a shoe box.

Read now, exclusively on Hippopants

I posted this video for the line, “You gotta pay your dues before you pay the rent,” but watching it now and digging it, I’m struck by how the whole thing applies to Joseph Young’s new novel, NAME. Not the tone or the shots from Lollapalooza, but all those crowd scenes juxtaposed with Mark Ibold looking all lonely has its parallels. So just watch that video but listen to Bauhaus and right there you’ve made the movie adaptation of Joe’s book.

Dues paid, Joe wrote NAME last month to pay next month’s rent. You can buy the book for a donation of at least $10 to this cause. Well, hell, that’s cool, and pretty cheap for a 25,000 word novel. That it was written in a matter of weeks, to me, makes it even better. Look what this guy can do. READ MORE >

Julie Doxsee is doing a “blog tour” for her terrific new book, Objects For a Fog Death, so I asked Julie to write about her 5 favorite object combinations and her 5 favorite objects to leave by themselves. She did us better than my essaystic suggestion and wrote these “fabley little poem paragraphs.” I have used sophisticated Google Image Search techniques to jimmy up some complements. Enjoy!

Giraffe tooth/Helmet

You pull into a nook in the alley and my helmet clunks yours and this is a kind of talk we’re having but in the talk there is a kill wish and a rocket launch and a bright laser-beam lengthening our hearts across the sidewalk end to end.  There is blood and light.  You pull a giraffe tooth from your pocket, center it in your palm and say have you ever seen one of these?  From under my tongue I pull a giraffe tooth. I center it on my palm and say yes.  We sit this way until the shadows disappear. READ MORE >

I mentioned Dave Mustaine yesterday on twitter jokingly and then realized today that dude just published a memoir. Shit yes. I am going to put on my fat kid clothes and read this while eating cereal.

Literature is a college party: throw in enough depressed people with personality disorders, and someone is bound to get laid. At around 11PM, the bad boys enter, high on red-bull and vodka. I miss the days of Hemingway or Bukowski, where manly self-destruction came from self-hatred and happened before the photo shoot. If James Frey, per the constant middle-fingered vector of his “fuck you,” is today’s “bad boy” (sorry Bret Easton Ellis, your suit’s too good), then we have lost the battle of soul grasping. Of course, he’s just operating off of the fake memoir public image disaster — but I just worry about someone, anyone, who engages with the world, a world in which one has acquired moderate success and comfort, with such affected and insincere hostility. I find Sartre’s 1964 Nobel Prize decline a much more compelling “fuck you”; that, or a gunshot to the head. Frey will be just fine. I’d like to think, save those two little fleshy spears, he’s just reaching out for a hug.

4. Big-ass Paris Review Jonathan Lethem interview.

I was one of those creepy dropouts who moves into his girlfriend’s dorm room. She stole meals from the dining hall in a Tupperware container hidden in a hollowed-out textbook, and I sat in her room and wrote an unpublishably bad first novel.

14. Angelina Jolie’s favorite book is Vlad the Impaler: In Search of the Real Dracula. If you were wondering.

77.

2. The Australian on Light Boxes by Shane Jones.

The historian and critic Tony Judt died this weekend from complications related to Lou Gehrig’s disease (ALS). He was 62. From the obituary in the Times.

An impassioned left-wing Zionist as a teenager, he shed his faith in agrarian socialism and Marxism early on and became, as he put it, a “universalist social democrat” with a deep suspicion of left-wing ideologues, identity politics and the emerging role of the United States as the world’s sole superpower.

[...]

“Today I’m regarded outside New York University as a looney-tunes leftie self-hating Jewish communist; inside the university I’m regarded as a typical old-fashioned white male liberal elitist,” he told The Guardian of London in January 2010. “I like that. I’m on the edge of both, it makes me feel comfortable.”

There’s a wealth of links on the obit page to articles by and about Judt. I recommend “Israel without Cliches” (6/9/10). Also, here are excerpts from Judt’s most recent book, Ill Fares the Land at the NYRB and at the Times. Here’s all of Judt’s NYRB work (not sure how much is accessible without a subscription). Also check out “Bush’s Useful Idiots” from the LRB. And here’s an interview with Marc Tracy at Tablet, and another on Fresh Air about living with ALS.

At the table inquire, “Anyone not for beer?”

Throw yourself about, do imitations, maybe even fight a little

x drinks drunk in y moments are more potent than x drinks drunk in 2y moments

He resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again

At least a hangover is the truth

Put a broad hand on the beer-engine!

Sometimes being a friend means mastering the art of timing

Have some bitter and go to the prom

Being drunk is one big ellipsis

Mayonnaise will remove stains

Some of Poe’s tales convey perfectly the idea of a hangover

I am a flashy dresser and I shout a lot!

I should stop, but it is OK to get drunk if a certain thing goes wrong. It has. So here I go

Haruki Murakami has a lot of issues (not talking about his various extra copies of The New Yorker in which he published) and being alienated in Tokyo with a hard-on is not one of them. Does thinking you have hypochondria make you a hypochondriac? What if you really suffer from thinking you suffer? I suspect Murakami, during and in between writing novels and their respective advances, has a handful of time on his hands — and should those hands be populated with parts of his failing body, then we are not to judge. Everyone loves a sensitive man, but lay off the Bengay.

I couldn’t stop reading Joseph Riippi’s oddly-named novel, Do Something! Do Something! Do Something! (Ampersand Books 2009).The story concerns three people: an institutionalized guy named Eddie who is an extremely literate critic with a torn up life and questionable sanity; his sister, or step-sister, S., who was raped and subsequently spent some time in an institution herself; and an up-and-coming playwright named Martin, who is in the process of separating with his wife after the death of their 17-day-old baby. Damn.

It sounds oppressive, but somehow, it’s not. The features that carry the book are the vignettes Riippi embeds into their stories, and even though even these are not funny, they are wowing. S. (who is my favorite character) goes to a rock show and gets harassed by a dreadlocked motherfucker and later ties him by his hair to a park bench, then lights his dreads on fire. Eddie gets arrested for attacking a stripper with a broken glass, but he’s really just blacked out blitzed because his ex-girlfriend had security toss him from her art opening. Martin, wasted, nearly shits on a bum. Riippi draws their marrow with a syringe, and the pain he authors is so bad that none of the characters seem as despicable as I just described.

It’s a good book.

The following interview is kind of long, so let’s get to it.

How do you pronounce your last name? READ MORE >

"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.

READ MORE >

Kind of feeling like the HTML Giant Grim Reaper. James Greer’s blog mentioned the death of cartoonist John Callahan.

When Callahan was 21, he was in a car accident that left him a quadriplegic. He was, as the video above illustrates, a drunk. He and a friend were bar hopping when the accident happened.

He held his pen between both his hands to draw his cartoons. His drawings were, because of that, simple and crude. His humor, too, could be crude—sometimes juvenile, sometimes a little (or a lot) discomfiting. He poked fun at his disability, and at the 12-step recovery process that pulled him out of his alcohol addiction. He was, way back when the phrase meant something, politically incorrect*. And because of that, he was kind of brilliant. READ MORE >