http://www.catherinelacey.com/
Catherine Lacey is a 2012 NYFA Fiction Fellow. She has published work in The Believer, The Atlantic.com, a Harper Perennial's 40 Stories, Diagram and others. She writes for Brooklyn Magazine rather often and is a founding partner of 3B, a cooperatively operated bed and breakfast in downtown Brooklyn.
Jacob Wren’s latest book, Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed, is pretty awesome and you should know about it. It came out last year from Pedlar Press and is a really fun read. He is also the author of Families Are Formed Through Copulation, a book that is supposed to convince you not to have children. I sent Jacob a 10 sentences assignment and he obliged. Remember 10 sentences? I don’t know, maybe you don’t since it has been a while. (After the jump there is a short interview with Jacob, also.) Enjoy.
1. A sentence that involves poison, an emdash and at least five prepositional phrases.
About to take poison, several pretentious thoughts lash through my mind: that life is a betrayal against which there is no remedy, like this cyanide I ordered on line, looking out the window then as I continue to do now, where little can be seen apart from a bird, a car, a dog – the dog is asleep on his bed (but of course the dog is not asleep on his bed, this is simply one of the examples I found when I googled ‘prepositional phrases’) and, realizing I am unsure whether or not I have reached five, I take the poison, still watching the bird and the car upon which no further grammatical games will be played.
2. A one-sentence answer to a question the speaker would rather not talk about but is tired and answers anyway.
No, I didn’t masturbate yesterday and am not masturbating right now as I type this.
3. A one-line ode to the last inanimate object that you touched that is not your computer.
I read too many books, they are the only objects that give me genuine pleasure, but it is a pleasure tinged with melancholy, the melancholy of being more than a little sick with life.
4.A sentence that someone might call ‘deranged’ which includes the word ‘omelet’ and ‘hallucination.’
Fucking an omelet is, technically, not a criminal act, I thought as I continued to pound away, also wondering if I should have let it cool first, howling in pain but, like so many things in life, unable to stop, just fucking and fucking and fucking, the pain surging through every molecule of my body to the point where I realized I might, at any moment, pass out, and began to wonder if me, the omelet, everything that surrounded us, was merely a hallucination. READ MORE >
That I hate February so much is one of the reasons I love Shane Jones’s Light Boxes. To mark the first of this horrid month, here are two questions I posed to Shane.
CL: Does February feel like it lasts a few years to you, the way it does in Light Boxes?
Shane Jones: It feels long, like another month hiding inside February, but not a few years. It mostly feels like I’m wearing a blanket of sludge-ice and still trying to go to work and smile at everyone in my sludge-ice blanket.
CL: Given the chance, would you actually remove February from existence?
SJ: Probably not because as much as I’ve talked and written about February, I kind of like it. It’s comparable to Oscar the Grouch. You hate Oscar because he’s a scummer, but you also like him because he’s just exactly who he is, Oscar the fucking Grouch. Every once in a while I have a vision of spending all of February in a place like Los Angeles. That would be a different experience from New York.
I read Bryan Charles’s memoir, There’s a Road to Everywhere Except Where You Came From, in that non-stop way that feels like your life depends on it. (A few months ago, Justin ran an excerpt of it.) It was a little funny, a little lonely and a little unsettling, but when one chapter ended I moved on to the next as it I was starved for it. Maybe this is the definition of a compelling voice, one that just makes you listen even when you don’t know why. A friend who had also read There’s a Road, as well as Charles’s novel described him as a particularly earnest writer, and I have to agree, so maybe that’s another reason I read so intently—an earnest voice among shelves and shelves of ironic ones. This interview was conducted over email.
Catherine Lacey: This was a weird book to me. I can’t seem to get comfortable with it. It’s been sitting on my desk for a few weeks and sometimes I consider moving it or hiding it, like we’re having a fight or something. A friend told me he thought of your writing as incredibly earnest, and I’ll add brave and unpretentious to that, but there’s also something really emotionally unavailable about the book, which is odd since it’s a memoir. Do you think of it the same way? How did you feel while writing it?
Bryan Charles: The memoir was begun at a point of frustration. I’ve talked about this elsewhere, but I had initially tried to use some of the same material—mostly the 9/11 stuff—in a novel. Once I realized I could actually write a novel, which only occurred to me after I finished my first one, I knew I would use my experience working in the World Trade Center, the attack, and the aftermath in a book in some way. At that time some of the so-called 9/11 novels had come out, or were scheduled to come out, and I felt, rightly or wrongly, that these books, written by people with no direct connection to the attack—except for maybe being in in the city that day—were totally without merit. I was incredibly territorial about it, probably to a fault. I tried to keep a slightly open mind. I read one of those books, the Jonathan Safran Foer book, and I thought it was terrible and should never have been published. It’s an awful, inexcusable novel. I still think whoever was responsible—whichever editor or publisher—for keeping that flipbook thing at the end, with the 9/11 jumper falling upward—whoever let that slide should be fired. Maybe they have been already. READ MORE >
“The most important and enjoyable thing in life is doing something that’s a complicated, tricky problem for you that you don’t know how to solve.” -William Vollmann
Rejoice! It’s January but I left the house! You know what got me to do this? Only the best reading you could find in New York City: Gary Lutz opening for Robert Lopez. Hot damn. It’s true.
Winter does this to people, especially in any grey city; I mean it makes them suspicious of outside. I know I am. I ran into Sasha Fletcher and we confirmed it; both of us are suffering through the season. It’s almost as bad as Christmas.
But if ever there was a reading during which it was easy to hold good posture, it was this one. When was the last time it was not only easy, but enjoyable to sit up so straight? I am not even sitting up straight right now, though I try. Gary Lutz read from a work-in-progress called Divorcer, which was full of the kinds of things I enjoy: Confused people failing to get away from each other; the phrase “duffel bag”; the following sentence: “All you can ever do with people is back out of them.” We had a great time listening to Gary.
Robert Lopez read all of my favorite stories from his new collection, Asunder. I thought that was true until I got home and looked at my copy again and realized I can not pick favorites in that book. The narrators of Lopez’s are hypnotically unwell. Getting in their little worlds made me feel like maybe January isn’t so terrible after all: For one thing, we’re all laughing, and for another, I am not as unwell as some.
The audience (one that was packed in close and featured glasses) listened well and laughed frequently. Way to go, you all. Good work paying attention. See you in the springtime or at the next thing that warrants stomping through ice.
James Ward
The other day I found myself waiting, and beside my waiting self was a newspaper. I looked at it. Of course, it was full of important stories about important people doing important things, and it would have been good of me to read about something of worth, but the only article I read the whole way through was one about a group of ‘Boredom Enthusiasts’ in London who had a conference last month. I have no idea why I was compelled to read about Boredom 2010 organizer James Ward‘s tie collection, which, as of June 2010 consisted of 55 ties, nearly half of which were solid-colored. “By December, his tie collection had jumped by 36%, although the share of single-color ties fell by 1.5%.” I must be channeling my inner Brit.
Only a day or two later a friend emailed me to ask if I had any favorite novels in which absolutely nothing, or almost nothing, happens. Oddly enough, none came to mind. I think this may be because I am often compelled by what may bore others and my definition of ‘nothing’ can be quite fluid depending on attention span or mood.
Of course there are the books about which people complain about nothing happens (High schoolers, I am looking at you.) The Old Man And The Sea is one but I am sure others (htmlgiant readers) might not categorize it in quite the same way. In David Markson’s Reader’s Block a different kind of nothing is happening, one in which an old man’s brain is sifting thoughts… Is it just me or do old men feature prominently in books about nothing and boredom? Makes it all the stranger that James Ward, mastermind behind Boredom 2010, is only twenty-nine. Someone cue the hand-wringing about the current generation.
Make no mistake: this man is doing nothing.
“I have often asked myself whether those days on which we are forced to be indolent are not just the ones we pass in profoundest activity? Whether all our doing, when it comes later, is not only the last reverberation of a great movement which takes place in us on those days of inaction…”
Ah! So my idle time wasn’t wasted, but necessary to allow eventual brilliance to percolate. Thanks, Rilke!
“Nobody knows how I dread Christmas. Nobody knows. I am not one of those women who can stand things.”
– The Sound and the Fury
They’ve put up all kinds of lights and wreathes in my neighborhood and the girl who made me a coffee this morning sulked under a Santa hat. ‘They made me wear it,’ she said. She is not one of those women who can stand things either.
I don't know. Here's this guy covered in bees. What is happening?
1. A little while ago I put up a note about ghost-writing, wondering if anyone had done it or would. Since then I found out that Ben Greenman ghost-wrote Gene Simmons’s tell-all memoir, which sounds like fun in a weird way. In the interview they don’t ask any follow up questions which is ridiculous considering the title of the piece is “Ben Greenman Ghost-Wrote the Celebrity Tell-All for Gene Simmons.” All I can think of is a boy-faced Greenman trying to have a normal conversation with Simmons as he’s decked out in full KISS attire, or Greenman calling ex-lovers with cigarette-punctured voices to fact check which drugs they were taking when.
2. If you’re in the mood to get upset, have a look at this article about James Frey’s book-factory scheme. A friend who’s working on a book for them suggested I pitch one, too. It seems like basically a terrible idea. I feel greasy just thinking about it. Why are the MFA programs letting this crazy man into their classrooms? I do not know. I am currently abandoning hope. In general, I mean. All hope.
Will some of the trolls please have a look at the article and spew some much-deserved anger in the thread? Thanks. This one is ripe for a shouting match. (If only it were still Mean Week!)
The Faster Times (July 9, 2009 – October 9, 2010) The Faster Times, an online newspaper known for attempting to find a way to make the internet pay writers, was pronounced dead on the scene of what Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz called a “perverse and often baffling” three-day riot and siege of the Cobble Hill brownstone that the The Faster Times just purchased. “Who knew that journalist-bloggers had the upper body strength, let alone the organizational capacity to riot?” Markowitz asked.
Sadly, the Faster Times was torn limb for limb by a mob of seething, red-eyed editors who chanted about revolution, wasted hours and, inexplicably, the crappy font choice. “Justice, I say, Justice!” one editor screamed. The New York Times declared the riot a “a twee, revolution in the journalists’ minor league.”
Among TFT’s greatest advancements to Internet Media during its short but thorough run, was it’s idea that Facebook ‘Likes’ could be converted into dollars, though this plan never actually came to fruition. Had the likes-to-dollars conversion occurred, The Faster Times’s editors and writers could have been the 95th highest paid collective of journalist-bloggers in the first quarter of 2010.
In lieu of flowers, the remaining two editors who didn’t wish the Faster Times a slow and painful death are asking for mourners to “Like” the Faster Times’s Corpse’s Facebook page.