“The Situation”
Mike Sorrentino
Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino calls himself “The Situation” because his abdominal muscles, per his perception of them, are so extreme in their contour and firmness, that it has become, well, a situation. To refer to oneself in not just the third-person, but as an incident, is freaking awesome. I was immediately drawn to Mike very early on in the show because of his difficulty with women. Despite the hot tubs, Korbel, body lotion, and other courting paraphernalia, he never quite scored. Here, a neurotic man under a sheath of muscle. In the season finale, he makes out with roommate Snooki — a sad letdown to a season full of potential snatch, in which two scratched hearts (he was quickly rejected by Sammi after a brief window of interest) mend each other with the wet gauze of tongues. I was actually subdued by their awkward, tentative compassion, as it was very sad.
NO SMOKING
i forgot until *after* posting this that i once smoked a cigarette with martin amis outside a PEN event. nice guy, rolls them by hand.
When Stephen King’s wife radically rerouted his career by pulling the manuscript of Carrie out of the trash, she had to clean the cigarette ash off of it before she could read it. Later on he said that his pace as a writer slowed down for years when he quit smoking; without the nicotine, his pace was simply slower.
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Read, Listen, Think, Go
The Rumpus has got Steve Almond on “Why I Went Ahead and Self-Published.”
TNR’s The Book has reprinted Auden’s “A Preface to Kierkegaard” from their May 15, 1944 issue. First sentence: “In a just world, translators would be paid ten times as much as authors.”
NYT reports that the diary that Faulkner used as the inspiration for the grandfather’s ledger in Go Down, Moses has been discovered. “The original manuscript, a diary from the mid-1800s, was written by Francis Terry Leak, a wealthy plantation owner in Mississippi whose great-grandson Edgar Wiggin Francisco Jr. was a friend of Faulkner’s since childhood. Mr. Francisco’s son, Edgar Wiggin Francisco III, now 79, recalls the writer’s frequent visits to the family homestead in Holly Springs, Miss., throughout the 1930s, saying Faulkner was fascinated with the diary’s several volumes. Mr. Francisco said he saw them in Faulker’s hands and remembers that he ‘was always taking copious notes.’ ”
The Poetry Foundation has got Tao Lin analyzing five love poems by Michael Earl Craig, Matthew Rohrer, Joshua Beckman, Chelsea Martin and Ben Lerner. Quoth Tao from the thesis: “I have limited my thoughts to a context of “romantic relationships.” I have included, as the last sentence of each set of thoughts, when I would most like to be forced to read each poem for the first time (if I hadn’t already read them).” And on Ben Lerner’s “Mad Lib Elegy”: “Out of the poems in this essay I think I would most be interested in a psychology experiment—of which I would also like to be a participant—where one hundred people who have just been “dumped” to emotionally devastating results in the past hour are forced to read this poem then interviewed about their experience, with accompanying brain-scans.”
Ian Vanek from Japanther on Note Books at Largehearted Boy— Note Books being the feature where musicians discuss books like they like, as opposed to Book Notes, where authors discuss music they like.
And for NYC folks, tonight is the Greatest Three Minute Rock N Roll Story Ever at Bar Matchless in Lower Greenpoint. I’ll be one of over a dozen readers, including Jami Attenberg, Zachary German, Kendra Grant Malone, Franz Nicolay, Lincoln Michel, and James Yeh, who is also hosting the event along with Jason Diamond of Vol 1 Brooklyn, which itself is the site I ganked the DeLillo and Japanther links from. Come on out and see us why don’tcha? There’ll be booze specials, The Wailing Wall will play, and each reading will run 3 minutes or less.
Spec Rad Trial
Smart blog post on experimental short story by Charles May.
When Donald Barthelme’s first collection of stories, Come Back, Dr. Caligari, appeared in 1964, critics complained that his work was without subject matter, without character, without plot, and without concern for the reader’s understanding. For Barthelme, the problem of language is the problem of reality, for reality is the result of language processes.
Some Things to Do Today that Aren’t the Super Bowl
Not that I’m against the Super Bowl, but hey, maybe you are. Or maybe you’re just killing time Until. Anyway, here are some ways to do whatever it is you’re doing.
There’s a new installment of Weiden+Kennedy’s Story Time. They’ve got Patrick deWitt reading from his first novel, Ablutions, with music by his brother Nick deWitt, whom you may also know as the dude from Pretty Girls Make Graves and/or Murder City Devils. NdW also offers an entry into WKE’s mixtapes series.
You could (read=should) also check out the video for Rock Plaza Central’s “(Don’t You Believe the Words of) Handsome Men.”
Oh and last but not least, after watching the “I Am Not a Lawyer” Mr. Show clip that Blake posted in a comment thread about something else, I started playing the YouTube association clickaround game, and stumbled upon this open letter from David Cross to Larry the Cable Guy.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDimQTJMjB0
Stuff White Guy Likes
Do you know Tolstoy’s “Three Hermits”? You should.
A Joshua Cohen double-shot– Reviewing Gilbert Sorrentino’s The Abyss of Human Illusion for Bookforum; and at Tablet:
And now it’s Rumpus Double-up Interview Sex Time- for Recession Sex Workers #8, Stephen Elliott interviews Antonia Crane; and Steve Almond interviews his former student Jason Mulgrew.
This Santa Fe Institute economist claims that 1 in 4 Americans is employed guarding the wealth of the rich.
Joanna Scott on J.M. Coetzee at The Nation, because hey why not?
And now, in what I’m more or less convinced will be officially known as NYTea Time: Will Blythe likes Bolano’s Monsieur Pain; Joel Brouwer goes high-low on the new Tony Hoagland; Geoff Dyer is unimpressed by the new DeLillo (this seems to be the general trend of opinion, but I still want to see for myself; also, in the opening lines of the review, Dyer sketches his view of the best and worst DeLillo; to the extent that my two favorite DeLillo books (Mao II and Cosmopolis) are the ones he thinks are the worst, may be safe to say our tastes may diverge); Deborah Solomon talks to Douglas Coupland about Vancouver; and Francine du Plessix Gray on the new Amy Bloom collection, Where the God of Love Hangs Out. She likes it quite a bit–no surprise there. I’ve never heard a cross word said about Amy Bloom, who seems to be one of the highest-regarded contemporary writers I’ve never quite gotten around to reading. There’s a copy of her book Come to Me that I can see on my shelf from where I’m sitting. Tell me friends, is it high time?
New Excellent Crawl
“He’d say, ‘If it is familiar, it has not eaten you yet.’ ” -on cognitive fluency and disfluency.
GW: My only interest in photographing is photography. That’s really the answer. -an interview with photographer Garry Winogrand.
Yes yes yes! Bookforum editor and The Awl contributor Chris Lehmann has signed a book deal with Or Books–he’s expanding Rich People Things, a series originally for The Awl. Details here. Congratulations, Chris!
Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process. -Garry Kasparov on chess and computers.
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It is Friday: Go Right Ahead
Not usually this early in the morning, but as a mild laxative.
Go easy on the beer. And lay off the hard liquor until I get back.
Honey, drinking is war.
Surprised?
Drinking is a way of ending the day.
Got tight last night on absinthe and did knife tricks.
Are you stiff?
Don’t try to make a mystery of it.
Do I know you?
Was the young mechanic drunk?
You’re very glum. My sore throat is over. Let’s swim now.
Cream Pies
In Meeting People is Easy, that boring-as-hell documentary about Radiohead from back when Radiohead was an important rock band, Thom Yorke goes to a fancy restaurant but can’t get in. (A maitre’ d with taste!) As he’s walking away, one of the meatheads in line goes, “Hey Radiohead, write a song about it!”
I love heckling, and I love getting heckled. Probably the funniest jab at me came when I was playing an Elvis Costello song at an open-mic when a soggy guy at the back of the bar yelled, “Hey, do you know any Elvis Costello?”