Expat Fever
I went to see Midnight in Paris last night. It was silly and predictable and obvious. And I loved it. Owen Wilson played a great Woody Allen. Rachel McAdams, a truly hateful soon-to-be wife. But their story is really just a vehicle to get the actual narrative rolling. When Wilson’s character, Gil, a hack screenwriter trying to be a novelist, starts going back in time on some freak Cinderella-story midnight stroll and meets up with the Fitzgeralds, Hemingway, Picasso, Stein, Dali, Man Ray, Cole Porter, TS Eliot–there are many more–I couldn’t help but be giddy. I’ve always wanted to see these people in action–and there they were. Hemingway talking in Hemingway sentences, Zelda Fitzgerald’s buzzing mania, Dali rambling incoherently about rhinos, Picasso a little bald, Stein the gentle aunty. Sure, Allen’s depiction was as Disney as it gets. Sure, Allen was indulging in pure fantasy, and I fell hard. I left the movie theater…dancing. This is not a movie review. I’m not generally a Woody Allen fan, even. This is a note about surprise. I went to see Midnight in Paris because there was nothing else worth watching, and I wanted to sit in the local art house theater with a very full glass of Pinot Noir, some Dots, and a handsome date. I’m surprised that make- believe can still give me joy. I’m happy that I haven’t totally given up on the fairytale. And it’s cute to see Wilson playing Cinderella.
Friederike Mayröcker and some scattered thoughts on writing spaces
Look at this clutter. Kind of glorious, no?
Is a messy mind the mark of a good writer or is that something dysfunctional people tell themselves in order to find comfort in the heaps of scattered pages? What is your writing space like? I don’t really have one, as I’m always on the move these days. I will say that it’s hard for me to sit at a desk. The closest I ever came to incorporating a desk into my erratic work routine was when I would go to IHOP in the middle of the night and stay until morning downing cup after cup of decaff coffee while scribbling in my notebook all bleary-eyed and delirious. But if it were socially sanctioned, I probably would have sat on the IHOP floor. Mostly I do everything while lying down in my invisible bed or sitting on the floor, perhaps because I am lazy…? I don’t believe in furniture. Probably am just undomesticated, feral. At a writing residency last year I had a normal room with a desk and a bed. And what did I do? Pulled the mattress onto the floor and probably didn’t sit at the desk once.
.
.
.
“I MUST FORGET EVERYTHING in order to finish this work, you have to get yourself in harness, no enmeshed, once you get involved in a writing project a writing diktat, there is no going back, or everything will be ruined, isn’t that right, maybe it’s getting your claw hooked into the robe of language, you attach yourself, you get snared, you get snagged in language in the MATERIAL in the TEXTURE, etc., and in the same way language seems to get hooked, attached, it hooks its claws into us the moment we acquiesce, so, we lead we guide each other, in equal measure . . .”
–Friederike Mayröcker, brütt, or The Sighing Gardens
Got a manuscript? Enter a contest.
Les Figues Press is having a contest. Find out more about here. 1k + publication. All entrants get a free TrenchArt book of their choice. And there are many good choices.
Alternative Names for “The Guggenheim”
The Googleheim
The Googleshine
The Google Doctrine Display
Maker’s Mark presents “The Guggenheim”
The Gigglebutt
Gmail Chat
The Guggenhymie
The Guggenwop
The Windowchime
The Bitchenheim
The Windowbitch
The Googlehymen
The Bitchhymen
The Hymenbitch
The Hymenbond
The Boddington’s Pub Ale
The window maker READ MORE >
Blake Butler—
What’s the last book you reread that you had loved before? Did it hold up, get better, feel worse/different?
55
Book and Beer: Pabst Blue Ribbon and Tongue Party
Whether corporeal or euphemism or just name for a Tuesday evening out with some new friends, Tongue Party is something you would want to attend. It is also a book by Sarah Rose Etter. It is the winner of the 2010 Caketrain Chapbook Competition. To glow this award is a good thing, and when Deb Olin Underth is the judge, I’d go ahead and say great thing. Also has anyone else noticed Caketrain’s chapbooks look and feel better than a lot of people’s book books? Just saying.
Pabst Blue Ribbon is a beer from Los Angeles. Los Angeles is a town where people will stab you in the back as you are climbing a ladder. PBR has a taste sort of like rain, rain gutter, corn and a hint of pale malted irony. Develops a bit of a yeast flavor as it warms. What is irony? I’m not totally sure but Kenneth Rexroth’s third wife left him for their marriage counselor. Bon Jovi plays the radio. A bird hunter pal of mine asked a bird watching pal of mine for advice on binoculars. In the last 5 years PBR has ironically doubled in price. Etc.
I was wondering if Sarah Rose Etter was being ironic in her opening of the first story, Koala Tide, as she seemed to mimic certain Hemingway devices, especially the use of the word “very.”
“The sun was very big and very hot that day.”
“The sky was very blue.”
“Fred wore blue swim trunks and had a very hairy chest.”
But then Etter took us away from this tone, spun us into something detached, this Koala Tide, tide of actual Koalas or again a euphemism or local jargon or objective correlative or perceptive lens of a child during that age, that Bildungsromanian blur, where childhood bleeds [emphasis on bleeds] into adulthood, where pain is introduced as possibility, where we learn not only are adults not Gods, they are slow, aging, stupid, stumbling sub-gods, mumbling who-knows-what into their lipsticked cans of warming beer? This story is evocative and disturbing and badass. You can read it here, and should.
Then Disappear & Then Rise Again: An Interview with Ben Loory
Ben Loory’s first book, Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day, will be published next month.
Shane Jones works in an office building 40 to 50 hours a week in Albany New York.
* * *
Shane: After reading your book I got really excited because it’s very fairy-tale land, weird, new, and a major press is publishing it. How did it come about that Penguin accepted it? Were you surprised?
Ben: Well, maybe it’s strange, but I don’t think of my stories as weird. I mean, they’re classically structured and very straightforward. In my mind, they’re a mix between Aesop’s fables and The Twilight Zone; I’ve always seen them as a very mainstream thing. The new stories I’ve been writing, the first-person ones, I think are much, much weirder. But for some reason they seem to be read as more “normal.” I haven’t yet been able to make sense of the whole thing.
Five Things About The Mutation of Fortune by Erica Adams
1. The Mutation of Fortune by Erica Adams, is available, now from Green Lantern Press and this is a book you definitely want to get your hands on because it is imaginative, original and darkly provocative.
2. Three fortunes were written for the book which was given to psychics for readings. The second fortune, written by Alchemilla V. Midnight, is below. You can also read the book’s first fortune (written by Thordis Bjornsdottir) and third fortune (written by Rowland Saifi aka Dr. Victor A. Schwert).
Dear Book,
This is not your first life as a book and it is not your last. Many lifetimes ago, you were not material, but existed in the hearts and memories of rough bearded and tough footed folk. You were breathed to life by firelight and whispered by older sisters at midnight, under cool linen. Book, you have made tender chests beat so quickly, fluttering as if there were butterflies, actually more like thick moths, attracted to the glow of your stories that lived in these hearts. Now here you are, a book, and it is no surprise to you, but perhaps surprising that so many will read you and be changed in their own ways, thereby changing you. Don’t be afraid of this change, Book. Allow yourself be devoured, remembering another life as biscuits or bison. You will become something else then and you already are, your being dissolving into the person holding you in her hands. As you rest here in these hands, dissolve into the next thing. Be like vapor.
13 Comments
June 10th, 2011 / 5:24 pm
June 10th, 2011 / 5:24 pm