David Fishkind
David Fishkind was born in Worcester, MA in 1990. In 2008 he spent ten days in Nova Scotia. He lives and works in New York.
Friday, May 4, 2012 ——–
It was 2012, or maybe the slightly distant future or past. Actually it must have been 2011, because for part of the time I was back in Germany. It was a systematic thing that was unclear. When you divulge into your consciousness, things happen that don’t seem to matter, and you wake up in a state—economic, emotional, sexual, political. Wake up may not be the right term, and, for these purposes, it’s actually the complete wrong term. More it is a sense of acceptance, wild, trusting and illusory. You grind your teeth, you wipe your face and scratch your sides until they become raw. It was the fall or summer, spring, sometimes winter that day. Surrounded by people you used to know and maybe still do.
Blurbs I’d Like to See
“This book threw me to the floor, naked and racist, desperately gasping for air. A work that could truly only have come from [author’s name]’s extended pregnancy.” – Harper’s
“Bubbling with humility.” – The Independent
“<;-)” – Cynthia Ozick
“The Justin Taylor of the fixed gear scooter generation. Joshua Cohen for your gay Jewish nephew. Just because you don’t get it, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. The codes of these satin pages will bleed you dry with their suggestive, yet ultimately fustian, message. Not to be missed by any fans of Bearbaiting: 2100.” – Paul Auster’s great-great-granddaughter
“If films are the new books, this book is an old film. [Author’s name] tucks you silently into bed and turns out the light on charity.” – New York Times
“[A blurb by a hotdog].” – a hotdog at Gray’s Papaya (6th Ave/8th St. location)
“My girlfriend loved your TV show when you used to have one.” – The Guardian
“Like fingernails across the chalkboard of a Brooklyn coffee-shop. Like music played on a broken giraffe’s carcass. [Author’s name] has given us a gift more permanent than HIV/AIDS, more lasting than the Lincoln assassination, and your kids will be talking about it long after you’ve become the bigot.” – Muareen Corrigan (for NPR)
“An invalid wakes at dawn with a banana-clip necklace. This novel won’t tell you the answer to any age old question, but it may find you choking on a half eaten bagel on the city bus.” – Frank Peretti
“If Nabokov, Updike, Lish, and Baker suffered from psoriasis, [author’s name] can be said to have eczema.” – The Millions
“I was left with a tacit boner.” – Erik Stinson
I’m Gonna Liveblog ‘Rear Window’ Right Here
Hi folks. I’ve never seen Rear Window. I’ve seen Psycho (fell asleep for less than five minutes and I liked it. I’ve also seen an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents about Christmas and a toy plane I think. I’m getting a phone call
The credits ended. I like the way this looks. James Stewart sweating. People on a balcony. I had to pause the movie because too much was going on with the phone call. Seeing a bra-clad woman right now do stuff with her legs. The phone call was my girlfriend. She is coming by to get her wallet. James Stewart is sweating. Broken leg reveal. I saw the trailer for this movie a few days ago before I downloaded it. The way this movie is filmed is very impressive… is it supposed to be one long take? Nevermind.
I took a double shot of whiskey before I started this. There’s a helicopter. This seems very cool. He’s got a week left in the cast. I bought a Rolling Rock tallboy and a big bag of Munchies. My girlfriend is here, but she’s leaving soon, don’t worry. “The place is about to go up in smoke.” She’s gone.
Poured the beer into the jar I drank the whiskey out of. Gives it a full flavor. lots of women with their midriffs showing. Was that innovative? Opened up the chips. Chewing a lot of them right now. I am so very tired.
Walking home tonight I heard some people speaking a very weird language. It sounded like a mix between Arabic, French patois, and Australian English. There was a full moon or an almost full moon.
Fishkind’s Unretraction
It is a beautiful Saturday. Granted, it could be a little warmer, but I can’t really complain. I mean, I can complain, and I will, but that’s my prerogative, n’est-ce pas? I feel like shit. Am I allowed to feel like shit? I don’t feel like shit anymore. I can deduce that this shit-feeling came from my use of French, meant to be a quip. I can’t do that without apology. Consider this my retraction. I must retract a lot of things if I’m ever going to get back to baseline. I don’t know what that means.
I was awoken by my girlfriend’s cell phone at 5am, buzzing in the first email of the rest of her life. Her mother nervous about her brother getting stitches in a racquetball accident around 11pm last night. My girlfriend proceeded to text her brother, who also, inexplicably, was up and aware of this email, a chain of events stemming from his own personal world of hurt, literally, as he claims to have been hit by a racquet at such speed and flection as to have caused serious damage to his… skin? I don’t know why people get stitches. What I want to know is at what level of intensity of a wound does one leave the Band-Aids and peroxide at the wayside and shuffle down to the hospital on a Friday night. Maybe I’ve needed stitches in the past, maybe I haven’t. There’s a story my mother used to tell about my slicing my hand on some glass as a baby and getting “butterfly stitches.” And to me, that sounds worse than real stitches—perhaps implemented only to doctor the lacerations inflicted by a butterfly knife.
Awoken again, about 45 minutes later, her mother was calling, asking about details of the injury. My girlfriend says on the phone she has been asleep, a questionable remark, but what do I know being subject to that very plea. Her mother spoke softly about something I had lost, drifting away again into submission. The phone was placed again on the beside table, to go off again in a few hours.
Writing on Fashion on Writing: A Plug
Zachary German and Adam Humphreys (who is making a film about Zachary German) have created a “gentleman’s casual clothing line” called Goldfarb and Goldfarb. The brand seems to specialize in humorous, self-nullifying statements printed in simple black Helvetica against white t-shirts—statements which are attributed on the t-shirt to “a t-shirt.”
According to the site’s “regarding” page, Goldfarb and Goldfarb “is an extension of Zachary German and Adam Humphreys’ decades long friendship and aims toward furthering their understanding of their own motives as well as those of the people they love.”
Here are some j-pegs:
Some Thoughts on the Books I Checked Out of the Library Today
I am still in college. I think maybe you know that. Monday through Thursday I wake up sometime between 9am and 12pm and drag my sallow little ass from Ave C to Washington Square, where I study, predominantly, English and American literature. Today one of my classes was cancelled, so after sitting through a 75 minute lecture on Chaucer’s “The Miller’s Prologue and Tale” (what a laugh that one is, let me just say), I decided to stop by the university library to take out some books that I could enjoy in the park. Here is a picture of the books:
Below are some thoughts on those books.
A Craving for Swan by Andrei Codrescu
I went looking for a book of selected poems between 1970 and 1980 by this guy. The library said they had it, but the library says a lot of things. I flipped through all the Codrescu they had. As far as I can tell he’s a Romanian with quite a history and a track record of being funny and influential. He works for NPR and has for a long time. Nothing looked appealing. I was about to walk away when I noticed A Craving for Swan. I think maybe it was misplaced or something, or otherwise I didn’t care to look at it when I was flipping through the other books. Anyway, I opened it up. It’s a book of short essays, most less than two full pages, that Codrescu had read on NPR’s “All Things Considered” between 1983 and 1985. I opened to a random page and read one of the essays. I don’t remember what it was about or what it was like. Then I went to the first page. The essay started with something like “One day I found myself with a strong craving for swan” or something. I stopped reading and took the book with me.
Sunday Zen
It is Sunday.
The water in the river is cold.
Here are some images from and words about the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum:
Every surface has a face
if we explore a surface
as a human.
Here we can see a shape
like a hallway.
6
The Top 20 Albums of 2011 According to David Fishkind
20. Go Tell Fire to the Mountain – WU LYF
I noticed a band with a ridiculous name appearing on music blogs and googled the name. Something like World Unite Lucifer Youth Federation came up and I navigated to their website. The page was cryptic and dark. I watched videos of what seemed like old stock footage under the impossible-to-decipher vocals and heavy drum beats. I downloaded the album, and the next day listened to it while picking strawberries in the rain. It was a Friday and I was cold and my fingers began to prune. Later I would drive to my girlfriend’s house 100 miles away.
19. An Empty Bliss Beyond This World – The Caretaker
After a fight with my girlfriend weeks earlier—I think, or later, or maybe just moments earlier (it’s hard to remember a summer anyway)—I found myself on Facebook deleting the majority of my friends. I needed something to listen to, as the process would end up taking two hours. I put on The Caretaker’s new album and thought I’d made a mistake. It was just sounds, old-seeming sounds, like the musical accompaniment to a 1930s black-and-white Looney Tunes, or Louis Armstrong’s “St. James Infirmary Blues.” Weeks later I listened to it again lying on the ground, and then with my girlfriend in bed, where we agreed we would purchase the record on vinyl the following summer once we got a lease and I moved my record player from my parents’ house to New York.
18. Leave Home – The Men
At some point in the summer I wanted to only listen to loud music. But this record came out before then. Recommended by a friend, it took me three tries to get through the first song, usually stopping the track on my iPod at work before even 90 seconds had passed. When I finally did break through that first song, I listened to the album a lot more, mostly driving, once in my girlfriend’s hometown, after we’d purchased Blizzards from Dairy Queen; I remember she asked who the band was and upon my reply, said, “I thought this was from the 80s.” We would lie in her basement and eat the ice cream until one of us, almost definitely me, started to fall asleep.
ToBS R1: literary marriage vs. child of famous author’s novel
[Matchup #11 in Tournament of Bookshit]
So what about Percy and Mary Shelley? That’s a literary marriage I can get into. They lived in a big house in Switzerland and floated around an ambiguous sexual circle and wrote pretty fun shit. I mean, if you’re going to get married to a writer that seems like a fairly successful way to go about it. Personally I’ve always been pretty wary of the idea of being… with… a writer. So maybe the open thing works? Maybe the only reason to marry a writer is so you can have sex with your bros and still be accepted by society? I like Keats and Byron; they seem chill. But that’s not even the best thing about the marriage. Only through such a union would any of us have seen Frankenstein, and I like Frankenstein. The problem with this argument lies in the fact that the sci-fi/horror story directly refutes literary marriage’s win. Mary Shelley was the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, and Mary Wollstonecraft was a famous author, and Frankenstein is a novel. So it’s a draw. Disregard the Shelleys. READ MORE >