It is Friday: Go Right Ahead
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.
Doing an Interview with Joseph Riippi
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 >
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
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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.
And now John Callahan?
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 >
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.
10 Sentences: John Jodzio
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!”
Live Giants #7: Mairéad Byrne
The seventh installment of Live Giants will feature Mairéad Byrne, a va-va-voom poet and professor and all-around great person. She will be the first in the series with an accent.
Her latest book, The Best of (What’s Left of) Heaven, was just released by Publishing Genius.
Her earlier book, Talk Poetry, had me in stitches, but when I saw her read from it in Chicago I was like, what, wait, these prose poems is kinda sad.
Tune in next Thursday, July 29, at 9pm to find out if it will be funny or sad or what-all. No cover.
Aquarius Rising by Ben Fama
Now available from Ugly Duckling Presse comes Ben Fama’s Aquarius Rising…
“how much do you rely on planets? Ben Fama poses this question in his astounding astrological sequence of poems, Aquarius Rising. He doesn’t depend on planets: he sees signs in all that’s around him — sky, sea, sequins. A poetic horoscopist, he knows that there is nothing more difficult or fun than attempting to make sense of the present. For Fama, the present presages another present, and then another; and he reads it with wit and wonderment and wily smarts. I take his words to heart. Fama is the future.”
-DEREK MCCORMACK, author of The Haunted Hillbilly and The Show That Smells.
“If you love someone you might want to call her and leave Ben Fama’s poems as messages on her voicemail. The messages would be informative and casual and glowing. They would be a big deal—a glamorous shrug from the heart!”
-HEATHER CHRISTLE, author of A Difficult Farm
Gordon Lish Interview @ BOMB + Harry Crews
1. Fantastic new interview with Gordon Lish at BOMBBLOG, on the occasion of his revision of his work for the Collected publication.
GL: The less I have in mind, the more my mind can be counted upon. Unhappily, for me, mind is scarcely the whole of what applies. Call it the art of the bricoleur—making do with less. Making much out of little, a mountain out of a molehill.
2. Edited manuscript, plus photo and brief audio excerpt of Harry Crews teaching in Florida in 1980, at This Long Century.
