My mom thinks Alzheimer’s is “old timer’s” because that’s the demographic. When she says Blockbuster really quick it sounds like “black bastard,” though she rarely says it anymore because she’s given up on movies. The word “that” in Chinese Mandurin is “nigga.” Salmon does not carry salmonella. I used to think “croque-madame” (a french ham and cheese sandwich with a sunny side up egg on top) was named that way — as supposed to the sans egg “croque-monsieur” — because women have eggs and men don’t, or that the egg looked like a breast; turns out the egg resembles a women’s hat, that’s all. In Lost Boys of Sudan, the african dudes newly arrived to the United States made soup out of crackers because crackers don’t have intructions. I witnessed a therapist at a physiatric ward ask a bunch of suicidal paitents “If you had only 24 hours to live, what would you do?” She was trying to get them to think about the good things in life, though it was misphrased. She played “Everybody Hurts” by R.E.M and told us that is an example of how sad feelings are strong, and to be careful. (Don’t worry, I was not a patient there). Bastards are impossible, thanks to sperm. Asian massages are more than massages. Asian messages are more than messages. “Live as though you are already dead,” said some monk. I would, but I have to get groceries.
BROOKLYN BOY MAKES GOOD
Like a sermon described in the novel, the language in “Witz” is “scripted to sound,” designed to capture the verbal distortions of East Coast speech. We hear of “Mortal Beach” and “Soygens General.” But while the scale of the sentences comfortably exceeds the lung capacity of most readers (Cohen isn’t afraid to unfurl a five-page sentence), the prose constantly highlights language’s sonar qualities: “At lot’s edge, last scattered lungs of leaves still hang from the boughs, breathe uneasy.” Cohen’s sentences are fluid, living things: “This lulling, ship’s loll, . . . a remnant, a reminder of the darkness, . . . and, flying across that sky a fish lands on the deck, at the forecastle, the fallen castle.”
Read the full review. And kudos, l’chaim, and cheers.
June 12th, 2010 / 3:37 am
Katherine Dunn hasn’t published a novel in the 21 years since Geek Love. But she’s been working on one, and an excerpt is coming out in the Paris Review soon, thanks to an entreaty from editor Caitlin Roper. Also, remember that time last winter when she showed a mugger what’s up?
1. On Kickstarter, Astrophil Press is raising money to rerelase Brian Evenson’s Contagion. The video contains an interview he did on TV in France. I like how she says ‘pee-doh-file’.
2. At Transductions, David Rylance considers David Lipsky’s David Foster Wallace book. Triple D.
Dead in the Water
On Tuesday, I took a walk along the beach in Perdido Key, Florida, where my parents have a condo. It is my favorite place. The sand is white and cool even in summer; the water is clear and, since the Gulf is shallow, it gets warm enough to swim comfortably by late spring. The condo itself, six stories up, wrapped with balconies and floor-to-ceiling windows, is consolation for my parents’ selling the much-beloved house I grew up in (for far more than they paid sixteen years earlier, to people who razed it except for the chimney and put a McMansion in its place).
This is the part of Florida known as the Redneck Riviera. A mile down the road from us is the Flora-Bama Lounge, where donated bras crowd clotheslines across the ceiling and where you can play the LobsterZone (like those games where you grab for a plush toy with a metal claw, except instead of toys there are live lobsters). On nights when we don’t feel like cooking, we choose between the Crab Trap and the Shrimp Bucket. I usually opt for some kind of fried seafood–gulf shrimp, gulf oysters–with an appetizer of fried (blue) crab claws, a dish that I’ve never seen outside of the Florida/Alabama gulf area. Much more so than in Atlanta, where I’m from, there is truly a local cuisine in those environs. Smoked tuna dip. And the famed Royal Red shrimp — a lobster-like variety that swim through our waters for only a very short period during the year. Add some slaw and hushpuppies, plenty of tartar and cocktail sauce, maybe some new potatoes or sweet corn, and you’ve got a proper panhandle supper.
So I was on this walk. Nothing was different yet. A hermit crab grumped along the edge of the water in his chickpea-sized trumpet shell of a home. Gulls did their dive-bombing and toddler-with-food stalking. A great blue heron strutted around looking typically elegant and above it all. A (human) couple waded to hip-depth and canoodled, aware that being in water is the international PDA carte blanche. READ MORE >
A Few Tidbits on That Whole Over/Under 40 Fancy Writer Genius Thing
Music is great and people like to listen to it.
1. Here at Stereogum, a bunch of musicians phone in their tributes to the record Meat is Murder, and then Drew Daniel from Matmos schools the rest of them with a really fascinating, considered, kind of beautiful tribute to the record Meat is Murder.
2. Blake’s favorite band, Wavves, have a new record, and it’s not as fucked up and distorted as the last one. So someone fucked up and distorted the first single:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKJkE1l5pH0&feature=player_embedded
Mini editing prompt: take something you just wrote, compare it to one of your first published pieces, and then try to rewrite the new thing as if you were still the writer you were when you first started writing in earnest.
3. Last night, Aaron Burch drunkenly decided to have a summer West Coast tour. I propose we all send him mixed tapes. Or mixed CDs. Or whatever the hell kids do these days.
How important is the presence of specific clothing/architecture to your writing? Do you write about them well? Do you ignore them to some extent? Are you scared of them, like I am?
Psychedelic Hoo-haha
Like my obsession with Brian Eno, some things never change.
How do you think the means of publication for poetry and poetry itself are related?
-Amy King, at the Huffington Post.