Doing an Interview with Joseph Riippi
I couldn’t stop reading Joseph Riippi’s oddly-named novel, Do Something! Do Something! Do Something! (Ampersand Books 2009).The story concerns three people: an institutionalized guy named Eddie who is an extremely literate critic with a torn up life and questionable sanity; his sister, or step-sister, S., who was raped and subsequently spent some time in an institution herself; and an up-and-coming playwright named Martin, who is in the process of separating with his wife after the death of their 17-day-old baby. Damn.
It sounds oppressive, but somehow, it’s not. The features that carry the book are the vignettes Riippi embeds into their stories, and even though even these are not funny, they are wowing. S. (who is my favorite character) goes to a rock show and gets harassed by a dreadlocked motherfucker and later ties him by his hair to a park bench, then lights his dreads on fire. Eddie gets arrested for attacking a stripper with a broken glass, but he’s really just blacked out blitzed because his ex-girlfriend had security toss him from her art opening. Martin, wasted, nearly shits on a bum. Riippi draws their marrow with a syringe, and the pain he authors is so bad that none of the characters seem as despicable as I just described.
It’s a good book.
The following interview is kind of long, so let’s get to it.
How do you pronounce your last name? READ MORE >
“PAY FOR SOUP / BUILD A FORT / SET IT ON FIRE”
If one were so inclined, one could buy The Whole Livery Line, 1987, by “Jean-Michel-Basquiat [sic] faithfully recreated by hand using the finest art quality linen canvas and Winsor and Newton oil paints” for just $255 from either of these companies – judging from the templates, presumably run by the same “on the fringes of legality ethics” mo-fos. I wonder if people will openly sell forgeries of Rammellzee pieces in ten or fifteen years, when people realize, maybe, that he was, like, really important, and dead. Probably not.
5 moth-beaten mumblings
14. Flash, prose, short thing? This is your last day to enter the Fineline contest.
2. There is a Gordon Lish Facebook page.
7. Ten best short story collections? Maybe…
5. Here is that David Foster Wallace piece about Federer you should read every year around Wimbledon.
1. Sexcast # 8: Interview/podcast with Roxana Shirazi, author of The last Living Slut: Born in Iran, Bred Backstage.
Tyrant/ParkLit Event Thingy TONIGHT
Tyrant Books is participating in ParkLit again this summer and our event is TONIGHT at 6:30! Oh no, that’s really short notice, but anyway, you should come. Susan Froderberg and Eugene Marten will be reading, and Gordon Lish will be doing the introductions.
The reading is supposed to take place outdoors, it being ParkLit and all, but it looks like it’s going to rain, so the event has been moved to upstairs of the Russian Samovar (russiansamovar.com) on 52nd between 7th and 8th Ave, which is a really gorgeous room with lots of leather and marble and they have all kinds of vodka. And not all kinds like Smirnoff or Belvedere, but all kinds like apple and horseradish.
Some info on the readers:
Susan Froderberg (published several times in the Tyrant under the name S.G. Miller) has a novel, Old Border Road, coming out this December by Little, Brown. Her stories have also appeared in Conjunctions, Antioch Review, Prairie Schooner, Alaska Quarterly, and Massachusetts Review.
Eugene Marten is the author of In the Blind and Waste. Tyrant Books is releasing his third novel, Firework, on June 25th.
Hope to see you all there!
love and kisses,
Gian
Let’s Get That City Good and Opened
Three pieces of news from our friends at the other O.C (above, not left).
First, from the Department of How Time Flies- has it really been a year since the last Open City benefit? Well, judging by the fact that the linked-to post is from exactly a year ago tomorrow, I would say “yes.” Last year’s event, at the National Arts Club, featured (among other things) an open bar and a reading by Billy Collins–the two went very well together. This year the benefit is being held in a private residence (wanna bet it’s a nice one?), and will feature a reading by Walter Kirn, author most recently of Up in the Air, which you might remember that Hollywood liked so much they Clooneyed it. (Aside: anyone other than me remember (read= “love”) Kirn’s first book, My Hard Bargain, a taut, brutal little collection of stories edited by some guy named Gordon Lish?) Anyway, it ought to be clear to you by this point that whether it is publishing books and the magazine, or whether it’s fund-raising, the one thing Open City does not do is screw around. These guys define what it means to be indie without being small-time, by which I mean to simply say that I think they are great, but the casual reader may wish to steel her reserve before clicking through to check out all the details and price tickets. If it’s a bit out of your range (dollars-wise or distance-wise), no shame in treating yourself to a shiny new subscription, and/or a couple of books, and calling it a day.
Second, from the Department of Education. The First Annual Open City Summer Writing Workshop will be held at the NYU Writers House over a long weekend in high July. The core faculty is Thomas Beller, Jason Brown, Martha McPhee and Said Sayrafiezadeh. Visiting writers include Mary Gaitskill, Sam Lipsyte, Edmund White, David Goodwillie, and the great David Berman–plus a whole lot more; interested parties should avail themselves of the full details, which live here. Good times!
Last but not least, the 2010 RRofihe Trophy is currently accepting submissions, and will be through October 15. At first I thought (read=”hoped”) that this somehow had something to do with Katie Roiphe, but it turns out to really about short fiction, which is pretty good, too. It’s a contest, to be judged by Rick Rofihe of anderbo.com, and the winner gets $500, an actual trophy, and publication in Open City.
And that’s pretty much everything I can possibly tell you about Open City, short of the colors of their underwears. Reader–would that I could.
Will the Open City benefit look like the above? Mischa Barton wonders, but is sad because she knows that she will probably never find out.
Do You Really Want To Live Forever??
[Giancarlo Ditrapano sends word of Lish’s upcoming class in NYC -BB]
So you still want to be a writer? Ah man, you are relentless! Good for you and all, but it’s getting kind of annoying, so here’s your last chance for a shot at immortality. (But if it doesn’t pan out for you after this class, you’ve got to promise me you’ll just go to law school and give up your dreams, okay? Okay.) Here’s your golden ticket, Charlie. Don’t choke on it: The Mercantile Library in NYC and Noreen Tomassi have organized another superb class for this summer. Every Monday, starting June 7th and ending on the 23rd of August, Gordon Lish will be teaching again. He took a little break (ten years) but started up again last summer. Due to how wonderfully that went, he is coming back for more. The classes run from 5 o’clock until around 11 or 12. Whew! That is a lot of hours, huh? So many hours! And all beside each other, one after the other! But you won’t believe how fast the hours fly by. The energy in that room could power a train.
N.B. If you have any ego whatsoever, or your feelings are easily rattled, or you think you’ve got Gordon’s number and you just might have something to teach the class yourself, then you should probably bag it. You are already dead in the water, my friend. But if you are prepared to throw it all away and start anew, here is your chance. Yeah, yeah, I know what you’ve heard about the Lish classes. I’ve heard it too. Who hasn’t? But instead of sounding like an idiot after spewing a bunch of garbage about them and then saying you’ve never taken one or even met Lish, why don’t you take the class so you can really back that garbage up, huh? Wouldn’t that be great? For once talking about something you actually know about? What do you have to lose? No, really. What do you have to lose?
Here’s the link. And you’re welcome.
Famous Authors ‘Nude’
I’m trying to do anything but write today but I’m still at my desk. I started googling famous authors + the word ‘nude’ to see what would come up. Here’s what came up:
‘Don Delillo nude’
‘Rick Bass nude’
Hypothesis: Collaboration and Alienation
There is a split in experimental fiction, it would seem, which is hardly a split: a duality which is hardly dual. Articulating it, in addition, will not add to or subtract from what I’m provisionally calling “experimental fiction.” I am not going out of my way to break open or unmask a binary which has, till now, subsisted in relative silence. The following is a brief and incomplete diagnosis–neither positive nor negative, or else both at once. Most importantly, perhaps, these are not two distinct regimes (again, a split which is hardly, or is not, a split). Nor should this be taken as a statement of fact, but as a condition which I’ve begun, more and more, to see in what I read.
I. Fontana on Publicity
[This is a comment–regarding some recent posts here–that I. Fontana posted and also sent out to me & Ken, and we thought it was worth presenting on the main page for those who missed it. I. Fontana knows whereof he speaks, and he’s one of my favorite “new” writers out there. Love his short stories, which I’ve linked on HTMLGIANT before, and I know he’s got some other stuff in the works that I’m very, very excited to see published. –N.A.
Nick says it: I. Fontana says it. Presented with no further ado: –K.B.]
Superagent Nat Sobel said in an interview last summer that he chooses at most one in 500 unsolicited manuscripts to represent in a given year. Grove/Atlantic, HarperCollins etcetera — all the major New York publishing houses, in other words — explicitly announce that they will not read any manuscript which does not come from an established agent.
In the early 19th century, literature (and in particular the novel) evolved into a popular art form generally serialized each week in newspapers, which meant that in order to keep the particular novel being read, there had to be narrative pull, even cliffhangers — in general, plot. But this meant that the socalled “unwashed masses” now were exposed to such writing, so that writers no longer had to hang around court or otherwise suck up to aristocrats, publishing their books by subscriptions to the wealthy (which constriction obviously required that the wealthy find such books pleasing). Democracy means including the lowest common denominator as well as the connoisseur.
Blake Butler—
Zack Wentz’s new web journal, New Dead Families, styles itself as “a cross between H.L. Gold’s Galaxy, and Gordon Lish’s the Quarterly, and/or Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds and Bradford Morrow’s Conjunctions.” New text by Stephen Graham Jones, Carol Novack, Colette Phair, myself, and several other wilds.
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