Kristen Iskandrian
Kristen Iskandrian is the author of Motherest. She is the co-owner of Thank You Books, a newish independent bookstore in Birmingham, Alabama.
Kimora Lee on Writing
“I am anorexic.”
“After I had my babies I was thick.”
“I’m the boss. I don’t need the money. I’m filthy fucking rich!”
“My life is very—big!”
“Tell Deebo to bring me my supplements!”
“She felt my titty!”
“It’s a state of being.”
“I will beat a bitch’s ass!”
“Let me take off my glasses…I want you to see my eyes. I will beat a bitch’s ass!”
“I’m a girl’s girl. I’m a woman’s woman. I’m a cool girl. I’m not a bitch. There’s a difference. And the girls that try to take him are bitches. And I know every one of them in my mind.”
“I wear fur and if somebody throws shit on me I’m gonna whup your ass! I wish somebody would throw shit on me.”
“I seen your titty, but I haven’t seen you.”
“Literally. Literally…I will drag a bitch—drag her through this dirt, literally.”
“We are going to kick his ass and eat his leg.”
Say When
What’s your reading cessation policy for any given book, if you have one? Is it “I’m going to give this until page 25/75/150 and if I still don’t like it…”? Does anyone “slog through” books anymore, or is “life too short”?
And, although I’m sure we’ve asked before, has the internet affected your readerly stamina? Expectations?
I associate the “endure-it posture,” let’s call it–I will finish this book because I started it and because it’s an ‘important’ book for such-and-such reasons or because so-and-so adores it–with a younger self, a self I sometimes miss because she was more disciplined in certain regards than I am now. It’s also the posture, often, of the student, an entity that I am no longer. I withstood a lot of D.H. Lawrence when I really wanted to be reading Beckett in the bathtub.
I’ll say now: I read until I stop caring. But that’s a loaded statement. Has my care threshold been eroded? I’m really still mostly interested in my original question, and I don’t want this little thing to ooze into issues of what we like/don’t in a work , etc…but I’m wondering, tangentially at least, about our stop-and-go signals, and how they might be peer- or culturally influenced.
BUMMER and other stories, by Janice Shapiro
I’m in the midst of a move, which has reminded me how much I hate moving, the constant sense of inventory, the where-should-this-go, the box that contains socks and a spatula and that really important piece of paper that I won’t find, ever. Almost all of my books are still boxed up, but I’ve been keeping in my purse, on my person, Janice Shapiro’s debut collection just out from Soft Skull. These stories have a narrative fluency I admire (reflecting, I’d wager, Shapiro’s screenwriting background). Overall, they’re sure-footed in both their pacing and their prose, and the book itself, as a collection, feels thematically and tonally right–a true collection, and not just an assemblage of work. Shapiro’s women, as subjects and objects, are likable and funny, and she handles their neuroses, compulsions, and heartaches with a deft hand. What I have appreciated most about Bummer this week is how it has entertained me, offered levity and tenderness without demanding anything more than that I grin and feel. This book shows up without showing off.
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November 2nd, 2010 / 11:06 am
November 2nd, 2010 / 11:06 am
Kristen Iskandrian—
Ariana Reines on Acker, Gallo, genital life, and “the absence of a living moral referent.” Via her bewitching blog.
Widows’ Work
This sentence–“David was a big sweater, and I just remember the sweat marks on his pillow when I changed the cases”–I just feel it in my gut. And then there was this, also from last week. Can the “artistic value” of the work of the widow, the work that specifically pertains to the widow’s widowhood, ever eclipse the grief itself, the heartbreak-response of the audience? Can such work ever obtain its own terms? No, it seems to me. Which is also sort of heartbreaking, or at least one tentacle of the heartbreak.
Word Bigot
There are some words that, when I come across them in a work, make me unhappy, sometimes even upset. Maybe for all of us, this is true. We are accustomed to groaning over phrases (too cliche, too idiomatic), tropes, themes, etc., but it strikes me as peculiar, on this particular night, that individual words, taken individually, can also bring the cringe. They’re just words! And yet, certain ones seem dirty, cheap somehow–carrying more than their fair share, evoking too much, taking some of the onus off the writer and moving it onto some collective, anthological poetic consciousness. Too, is word-disdain the equivalent of that prevalent relationship theory–that when you dislike a certain person, you’re disliking the part of yourself you see in him or her? Are you, here, rejecting the part of yourself that secretly, shamefully, is prone to using the blacklisted words, or uses them still? For me, words that put me off tend to be ones I cherished at some point, maybe when my expectations of language were different, but ones that I’ve since, I don’t know, outgrown? That’s not quite right. Can you grow out of words? Have you? Which ones? Let’s burn some up. Or, burn some sage and get a few back.
“Please, sir, I want Pessoa.”
I was sick with flu and fever for a few days. In my state I hallucinated a tiny antique piano being fixed by a giant; his fingers were enormous pillows and he used them very delicately. The piano could be mine for fifty bucks. There was also a cartoon faucet that wouldn’t turn off. I wasn’t able to read or watch TV. When the grueling thing left my body, I sipped some mothermade gruel and convalesced not for the first time in The Book of Disquiet: READ MORE >
Kristen Iskandrian—
So is the published work the apotheosis of the work, or its death? Or both? Does it die to you the moment it lives for others? Or is it then born? Or reborn? When and where does the work best live? Oh I’m so tidbitty lately, so curious.