What He’s Poised to Do by Ben Greenman
I recently read Ben Greenman‘s forthcoming What He’s Poised to Do and no book in recent memory has impressed me as much as this lush and thoroughly engaging short story collection. I am not a good book reviewer. All I ever want to do is talk about how much I loved a book and that’s exactly what I’m going to do here. I have no interest in being critical about the reading I do for pleasure. I am breaking my no review policy (which, admittedly, I break so often as to really bring into question the point of having a policy) to talk about this book because it is just that damn good.
Writers are often enamored by epistolary narratives and that is certainly understandable. Letters are interesting. Letters are important and romantic and confessional and all manner of things. There was a time when the only way people could communicate across great distances was through letters. Many people lament when it meant something significant to put pen to paper, to put paper in an envelope, to apply a stamp, to send, to wait, to read, and respond. I have never been much of a traditional letter writer. My penmanship is terrible, and generally evokes a serial killer vibe. My hand always starts to hurt after a few moments. I enjoy writing long, interesting e-mails to friends and others but I have no real nostalgia for traditional letter writing anymore. I don’t know that I ever did. What He’s Poised to Do, however, moved me so much I immediately wanted to write a dense, heartfelt letter to everyone I’ve ever known.
16 Comments
June 11th, 2010 / 11:00 am
June 11th, 2010 / 11:00 am
Ken Baumann—
n. delight in pronouncing the names of your shampoo’s chemical ingredients—cocamidopropyl betaine, polyquaternium-10, methylchloroisothiazolinone—whose crisp syllables snap together like Legos, which momentarily reassures you that life is a cumulative stack of discrete accomplishments, not a shapeless continuum of extracts from abstracted tragedies like family, entropy, or papaya. –The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows
1
“She will continue driving down the Feather River Canyon from Portola to sit in front of the plant where Paul died with signs about work place safety as long as she feels the need”
“Friends and family of Paul Smith toasted him with his favorite drink — Coca-Cola — Wednesday at noon and remembered him on Facebook, exactly two years after he died in an accident at work.” — from the Mercury Register
Hi, reader. Writer of things to be read, probably. You, writer/reader, might have read, as I did, that interview between Jonathan Lethem and David Gates where they get anxious about “putting” the internet in their fiction. Or you might have read things about how brand names shouldn’t be “used” in fiction. Now I invite you to read a story about things that people do while they are trying to live, which may or may not help you to untangle these tough philosophical questions.
Persisting to Be Published.
There are very prolific writers in this world. I’ve learned this because these writers seem to have a bottomless queue of writing they can submit–I’m talking arsenals of hundreds of stories or poems. I don’t mind that many writers will submit every seven days like clockwork. I’m generally excited to see what they’re going to send next and a week is usually enough time for my reading palate to be properly cleansed.
What I do mind is how oftentimes, a new submission from a writer is very similar in tone, subject matter, aesthetic, or form to a previous submission(s). I am fascinated by why a writer would send a story/other creative work that’s exactly like the story rejected a week earlier. To me, a rejection implies that something about a given submission isn’t working so probably, we’re looking for different, rather than more of the same.
Uncategorized / 87 Comments
June 10th, 2010 / 5:09 pm
June 10th, 2010 / 5:09 pm
If You Will Permit a Thought on TV
Throughout the nineties and for the first half of the past decade, there were two dominant strains of sitcom: the blue-collar/white-collar family sitcom (Roseanne, Everybody Loves Raymond, Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Frasier, etc.), and the five-or-so-friends-hanging-out-in-a-city sitcom (Seinfeld, Friends, Cheers, etc.). The former culminated and withered with the end of Everybody Loves Raymond–now most often reiterated ironically by The Simpsons (which was far ahead of its time in that respect) and Family Guy–while the latter still persists in a way, only disguised or retooled as the workplace sitcom (30 Rock, The Office, Parks and Recreation, Party Down), a formula which began in part with Murphy Brown and, in its current mode, with Scrubs and the British Office.
“No–yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,”
Dan: […] I also think that flirting with you sometimes felt like playing with a puppy. Lots of energy without any particular direction, light wrestling, and you’d have no idea what to do with the stick if I threw it for you.
Elissa: I’d know what to do with the stick—
Dan: No, you wouldn’t. I felt old around you. I felt like I did drugs. I felt like a person who got drunk. I felt like an Adult. The problem was that I said shit like, “I won’t sleep with you.” This is maybe important because right then, you are freely allowed to compare yourself with other girls that I HAD slept with.
from “The Exit Interview: A Conversation with My Ex-Boyfriend” by the funniest romper at the Rumpus, Elissa Bassist.
Uncategorized / 2 Comments
June 10th, 2010 / 4:59 pm
June 10th, 2010 / 4:59 pm
Win Evan Lavender-Smith’s From Old Notebooks
As Chris Higgs discussed a while back, ELS’s recent hybrid memoir-philosophic mania-idea machine-joke book-power assemblage From Old Notebooks is simply out of control. In the vein of Markson or D’Agata, but with a manic, hilarious, intense vision that makes it so singular it’s almost its own genre, this is the kind of machine you could keep returning to at any point inside it, any line as much its own as it is a contribution to same insane whole.
Here’s a line at random: “What if God had said to Phil Mickelson, Would you rather shit your pants or shoot a double bogey on the 18th hole in the U.S. Open?”
I have an extra copy of FON to giveaway to the commenter who tells the most compelling something he or she should probably keep hidden. Winner will be selected Saturday morning.
Excerpt reading and purchase here.