Stranger Than Fiction: Joshua Ferris & François Beaune

1. Joshua Ferris and his mother, Patty Haley 2. François Beaune. 3. Un homme louche, front and center

If you’ve never been to the Sky Room of the French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF), it’s painted many shades of blue, ordered in wide chromatic sections.  After a while, it starts to feel like an aquarium, or a dream: last night, a dream in which author Joshua Ferris explained the model and virtues of Electric Literature from a writer’s perspective to an audience of his mother and me.  This went on for a solid minute before I realized that, as the person holding the EL business cards, I ought to contribute to the scene instead of continuing my silent admiration of the endearing resemblance Ferris bears to his mom.  I tried, but I learned that putting a valuable and still effortlessly funny sentence together can be a lost battle when you’re up against the master.

This was at the end of the evening, after Ferris and French author François Beaune’s very smart sit-down discussion of “outsider” protagonists in literature.  Both men started with readings from their most recent works, Ferris’s The Unnamed and Beaune’s Un homme louche.  Ferris read from the perspective of his character Tim Farnsworth, suffering from an involuntarily walking problem that leads him out of his office to places like a kebab stand and New Jersey.  Beaune read—in English, which he said he prefers to do—from the notebook of his thirteen-year-old protagonist, Jean-Daniel.  Only a small portion of Un homme louche (unceremoniously titled A Louche Guy in English) has been translated, but the version of Jean-Daniel Beaune revealed emerged from the pages as a more detail-oriented, less-hygenic Holden Caufield: disdainful of his surroundings, using his aversion to showers “to reveal the secrets of those around you … I needed a cover, a mask.”

1. The panel entertains a big’un (question). 2. A sign translator, who was mezmerizing and exacerbated the event’s dreamy quality.


Moderator and Bookforum editor Albert Mobilio initially steered Ferris and Beaune towards a conversation of “subrealism,” tossed around as something like a cousin of hyperrealism, affording the reader a microscopic power of perception to no unanimous end.  (“Louche” carries several French meanings: one like the English of ‘disreputable,’ another closer to ‘cross-eyed’ or too close for focus.’)

When the discussion inevitably turned to the bigger questions of how translation affects meaning, what motivates outsider characters, and “Not to sound like a jackass, but is any really good book written from the perspective of an insider?” (courtesy audience member), the men did their best to keep it serious.  Their shared ability to produce the right reference on demand added a few things to everyone’s ‘should re-read’ list (The Crying of Lot 49, for one, and it’s so short there are no excuses), but the blue walls were wearing us all down slowly.  Except Ferris and his mom, who were of course still on point when we met, and gave the impression that they somehow always are, Sky Room or elsewhere.

–Kai Twanmoh works at a non-profit in New York City and is a recent addition to The Outlet contributing team.

Want more DISH?

Writing So Funny

1. Stephen Aubrey, the Lieutenant Colonel of the Hollow Earth Society, a publishing company, & Lauren Belski of Crew Analog. Both graduated from the MFA in Fiction Writing program at Brooklyn College in 2010. 2. Ellen Tremper, the Brooklyn College English Department Chair, along with her son, author Teddy Wayne.

Brooklyn on My Mind is a reading series that is in its sixth season and hosted by Leonard Lopate. It is located at Brooklyn College, and features authors living in and/or writing about Brooklyn. Last night’s installment was entitled “Writing Funny,” and featured Jonathan Ames of Bored to Death fame, Jonathan Tropper, author of This is Where I Leave You, and Teddy Wayne, author of Kapitoil. In case you couldn’t tell, all of these gentlemen write funny stuff. They’re also all Jewish. Obviously God chose His people to be funny.

But there’s something pretty unfunny about gathering three men, labeling them as funny, and then sitting them down in a formal setting to analyze their funniness. Especially when they’re being interviewed by Lopate, who — bless his intelligent, old-man heart — is extremely unfunny. And especially when the audience, which was heavy on the undergrad population, is acting like some sort of laugh track. Still, the authors covered some interesting territory.

The men first talked about their decision to be funny — and it turns out that it wasn’t much of a decision. Ames said that he’s unable to write without humor, because he can’t take himself very seriously for very long, and without it he gets bored. Tropper said that he never set out to be a “Comic Writer,” it just happened this way. His voice as a writer just happens to be funny.

We also heard their thoughts about being labeled comic writers. Wayne feels that the term is a derogatory one, since we wouldn’t call most highly-regarded books Unfunny Novels, although this is what they often are. Tropper said that he doesn’t identify as a comic novelist, and that he prefers to be thought of as a novelist who is occasionally funny.

1. My Two Jonathans: Ames & Tropper. 2. Christine Rath, senior editor of Forté Magazine, Joanna Cantor, & Liz Stevens. All of these lovely ladies write fiction and either went to or are currently attending Brooklyn College for their MFAs. Rath wants to know where the hell the funny Brooklyn womenz be at.

Next, we heard selections of the authors’ books. Wayne read a scene from Kapitoil, in which the protagonist, a Muslim named Kareem who has a limited and extremely technical understanding of the English language, goes to a party and takes two huge bongloads in hopes of impressing a love interest. It was funny (surprise!) but also touching, and made me really want to read his book.

Tropper was going to read a marijuana-tinged scene from This is Where I Leave You, but decided against it due to the fact that Wayne had already played the pot card. Instead, he read one of the opening scenes, in which the patriarch of the family dies so the family returns home to sit shiva– except that the father was an atheist. The family depicted was prone to repressing their emotions through wisecracks and irony, which is a method I can get behind.

Ames read last, and we heard a selection from Wake Up, Sir! I thoroughly enjoyed it because the protagonist pondered if perhaps Judaism was the 12-step group for Jews, which made sense because “most AA meetings are held in churches” and instead of “12 steps, there are ten commandments.”

The session ended with some questions from the audience, which were all totally lame and un-noteworthy.

–Julia Jackson is working on her MFA in fiction at Brooklyn College, and is a regular contributor for Electric Dish.

Want more DISH?

Jennifer Egan At McNally Jackson

1. McNally Jackson’s own Steve, & nonfiction and literary criticism writer Walton Muyumba. Muyumba says that Egan is one of the best, most interesting contemporary writers out there, along with others like Junot Diaz & Edwidge Danticat. 2. Jennifer Egan & Glenn Kurtz.


Last night McNally Jackson hosted “Conversations on Practice,” which is “an interdisciplinary discussion series exploring how artists go about their daily work,” and was moderated by Glenn Kurtz, the author of Practicing: A Musician’s Return to Music. The speaker was Jennifer Egan, who first read a section of “Selling the General,” a story which is included in her newest book, A Visit from the Goon Squad. The story is about a publicist with a very difficult client. To make this client appear less malevolent, the publicist instructs him to wear a fuzzy blue hat. At first, the strings attached to the hat are bow-tied under the client’s chin, with less than favorable results: the client looks like a fat baby with cancer. But the publicist insists on the hat, although she instructs her client to cut its strings so that the hat has the intended result–and then it does! Publicity genius.


Kurtz said, as the talk with Egan began, that cutting stings off a fuzzy-blue hat seemed like an apt metaphor for writing, and the rest of the talk functioned like a fiction-writing crash course, echoing many of the wisest things my MFA professors have said to me–like that the best stories go places that are both surprising and inevitable. For once, I wasn’t the only one in the audience who was scribbling furiously into a notebook.

1. Painter Alexandra & Adam, who writes plays and fiction. 2. Jenny, who is a fiction writer and will be applying to MFA programs in the future.


Egan’s writing process relies heavily on the more intuitive subconscious mind. She begins with a sense of time and place, and hand-writes drafts on a legal pad. Next, she types it all up. Her writing is so messy and cryptic that occasionally she can’t even decipher it — which is sometimes good. Then, she prints out a hard copy to read, which can be painful because she finds the writing to be bad, and full of cliches. This is where her analytical mind comes in, and often, she has to “lop off” large sections. Her work goes through numerous drafts, and she numbers each one– in her novel Look at Me, certain chapters went through 70-80 different drafts.

Egan is part of a reading group whose members have shifted over time, though the group has existed for over twenty years. This reading group is unique because the work is read aloud, which has many benefits over a traditional workshop. First of all, there’s no homework, since you’re all listening to the work at the same time. You also don’t have to come up with comments that make it appear like you’ve read the work more carefully than you actually did. Egan says that she is also able to really hear where the language works, sense where the story is slowing down, and where it is really engaging. The listeners are also unable to get caught up in the little things, and due to all of this, this reading circle produces the highest quality feedback that Egan has ever experienced.

1. Jeff LeBlanc of Out of Print Clothing & Chris. Chris says Egan has made him hate PowerPoint a little bit less. 2. The McNally Jackson Cafe ceiling. HOW MANY TITLES CAN YOU RECOGNIZE?


We also got to hear specifically how Goon Squad was written. In its inception, Egan knew the shape of the book — that it would be told my numerous people, would be about the record industry, and would be very similar to a record, a concept album in particular. She also knew that she would be playing with time a great deal. Initially, she intended the book to be told in reverse chronological order, but later realized that this diminished its power. When she let go of the constraints of chronology, the book reached its full impact.

We also learned about “Great Rock and Roll Pauses,” which is a story told entirely in PowerPoint. Egan sold the book without this story, but was later hit with a “demonic” determination to write it. She was pleased with the result: the story lifted the book up. I definitely found this story to be one of the most moving in the whole collection, which is obviously an accomplishment given its format. This led into talk about technology and writing, and Egan said she is both afraid and excited for tech impact on written works. It’s important that people still pay attention to a contained narrative, she said, but also interesting to figure out how she as a writer can utilize the impact.

–Julia Jackson is working on her MFA in fiction at Brooklyn College, and is a regular contributor for Electric Dish.

Want more DISH?

Literary Death Match 100: New York City Edition

1. The shinies: Host Ann Heatherington in her sparkly blazer & 2. Todd Zuniga, LDM founder, in his shiny blazer.

Dish! readers, in my freshman attempt to bring you some news from the literary scene last week, I told you that the Poetry Society of America packed the house at Cooper Union, and I didn’t say it for nothing because there was nary an empty seat in the place. But if I had any prescience, I would have reserved the phrase for Thursday night’s Literary Death Match at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City.  There, the house was so packed that an actual seat was a cute joke, filled so quickly that some people, including me, began perching on anything they could fit half an ass and many others remained standing in a back-room crowd (conveniently by the bar).

For all the bodies, the evening began calmly enough (our own Jesús Ángel García, who was spotted at LMD100: San Francisco earlier this month, has already explained the phenomenon more pithily than I could dream to).  Event hosts Todd Zuniga, LDM founder, and Ann Heatherington welcomed, wearing the shiniest and sparkliest blazers ever, respectively (his: brocade, hers: black sequins).  Round 1 pitted five-time Jeopardy champion and author Arthur Phillips against Electric Literature bestie Rick Moody.  Philips showed off an uncanny internal timer, using the first five minutes of his slot to tell us about the new and never-published Shakespeare play discovered in a Philips family safe deposit box.  He confessed that he has come to believe the work is a forgery, but legal hoo ha and that running timer prevented him from fully explaining.  He concluded with a reading from the play, delivered in juicy rich iambic pentameter.  Rick Moody followed with an excerpt from his Four Fingers of Death about stars in the night sky, so luxuriously written that most of the crowd was swooning by the end.

1. Arthur Philips, being pitted. 2. Rick Moody, being crowned winner.

Judges Liesl Schillinger (New York Times book critic), Kenny Mayne (ESPN correspondent), and Jena Friedman (comedian)—all damn funny—livened things up and gave the win to Rick Moody.  Round 2 pitted supermodel-turned-author Paulina Poritzkova against novelist Amanda Filipacchi.  Poritzkova showed off her multilingualism with a reading from her first-person book about a teenage model in France who, upon seeing a billboard of herself thinks, “I wanted to kiss myself, lick myself.”  Then Filipacchi made it rowdy; she was almost drowned out by the laughter in the room as she read about Alan, the protagonist of her Love Creeps, sculpting a Play-Doh vagina in a college class about female self-love.  It’s tough for someone as gorgeous as Paulina Poritzkova to lose, but the victory was easily Filipacchi’s. Kenny Mayne delivered the ruling: “vagina this, vagina that … the vagina’s gonna win every time.”  Jena Friedman had called Poritzkova’s book a memoir but before the round 2 competitors left the stage, was corrected, “it’s a novel,” causing no one to stop imagining Paulina Poritzkova licking herself.

1. Paulina Poritzkova’s enviable cheekbones. 2. Amanda Filipacchi in the middle.

For the LDM championship title, the room split into teams as Rick Moody and Amanda Filipacchi squared off for a game of name-that-tune with songs that have literary references.  Drinks went flying as people leapt over each other to hit the name-that-tune “buzzer” (the high-five hand of an LDM staffer).  Arthur Philips took his vengeance on Moody by scoring a point for team Team Amanda, but ultimately Team Rick prevailed and Moody was crowned LDM king.

I could not continue on to the afterparty at Bowery Electric, but it was clear that the crowd by the bar had taken advantage of their location and the room was still abuzz from Poritzkova’s cheekbones and the many intonations of the female anatomy (Friedman said she preferred the pronunciation “ragina”). Did the hosts’ fabulous blazers end up elsewhere?  Did Philips take the ‘death match’ thing too far and turn the night into a Bard tragedy? If you were there, let the truth set you free and keep the LDM magic alive in the comments.

- Kai Twanmoh is a lover of books and bookish things.  She lives and works in New York City.

Want more DISH?

You Got a Problem With That?

1. A Public Space. 2. Wagah on screen.


A Public Space took over BAM Café last night with its series Between the Lines. The event, co-curated by A Public Space and BAM, aptly titled You Got a Problem With That?, focused on the idea of innovations in the face of problems. By problems I refer to the entire gamut of the word’s meaning: Southeast vs. Deep South; India vs. Pakistan; Boy vs. Girl; Evangelical vs. Muslim; Rye vs. Bourbon.

Tom Drury reads.

Author Tom Drury opened the event with the first chapter from an upcoming novel. This was followed by a screening of a short documentary by Supriyo Sen entitled Wagah. While Drury’s contribution was predictably awesome, it was Wagah that set the tone for the evening.

The film centers on the nightly flag ceremony at the only road border crossing between India and Pakistan. Soldiers from both sides aggressively goose-step around each other to an audience of roughly 20,000 on either side. The performance is both aggressive and fraternal as the soldiers approach and finally fold their flags before again locking the gate that divides the two countries. A young boy from India who sells bootlegged DVDs of the ceremony says to the camera, “If the two countries were together, we could sell more DVDs. I wish we could play with the kids on the other side.”

Manhattan Valley Ramblers.


The film segued into Eliza Griswold‘s recap of her time on the 10th Parallel in Sudan with Franklin Graham, son of Evangelical leader Billy Graham, in which he met with Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir. After a brief introduction, Griswold read an excerpt from her book  The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam. Griswold ruminates on the meeting between Graham and al-Bashir in which they attempt to convert each other. After a bleak warning of a possible continental war following the next Sudanese elections (in which Southern Sudan may or may not secede), Griswold finally lifted the heavy air with a reading of her poem “Bed Bugs.”

The evening rounded off with a reading by J.D. Daniels and a performance by the bluegrass group Manhattan Valley Ramblers. I have to say, I love what the people at A Public Space are doing, be it putting out issues of their magazine featuring scantily-clad Russian men on the cover or putting on a show beneath the giant electrified breasts that are indicative of BAM’s amazing architecture. The next installment, Help Me Help You, will feature stories on help from friends, strangers, and bail bondsmen. As the line goes from the Simpsons’ version of Streetcar! The Musical, a stranger’s just a friend you haven’t met. I’m just excited to see how it’ll all go down.

–John Zuarino is a freelance writer and editor in Brooklyn. He spent several years writing for Bookslut.com and other blogs. He also edits textbooks in hopes of not accidentally corrupting the youth of America.

BOOKSLUT 100

1. The Bookslut herself, Jessa Crispin, with reader Shalom Auslander. 2. Guy Cunningham, a fiction writer who writes reviews for Bookslut, & Talia Page, who is working on a novel and a publishing company, which will be called MSS Page.


September saw the release of Bookslut’s 100th issue, and so last night Melville House Publishing hosted a party for the occasion. We mingled, snacking, drinking beer and wine while surrounded by copies of Melville House books in their DUMBO office. The crowd was mostly insider types: friends of the readers and Melville House employees. I managed to overhear a conversation about a certain man (let’s just call him “Chris”) who saw the breasts of one past intern. When I asked if this was some good literary gossip, “Chris” said no, but that he had also spanked a different intern, licentious interns being the takeaway.

1. Anne Horowitz (who is the assistant editor of Softskull Press, but they’re closing their New York office so she is soon to be out of a job. Let her use her skills to put out wonderful books! The world will be a better place because of it!), Molly Lindley (who works for Simon and Schuster), & Nicole Pasulka (who is a nonfiction writer). 2. Writers Austin Grossman & Joanne McNeil.


Daniel Nester opened up the evening. He wondered about other possible domain names that the “one-person institution” behind Bookslut, Jessa Crispin, had not bought, such as afterbirth.info or bookskank.com.

Kathryn Davis read first, a “virgin reading” of her not-yet-finished upcoming novel. The piece felt like a sci-fi fairy tale, sci-fi because it was set in an alternate future, and fairy because there was a sorcerer who managed to turn a toy bear into a baby named Blue Eyes. The writing was elegant and captivating, and although the logic to this world was foreign, I was immediately seduced by it.

Shalom Auslander read next. He first became acquainted with Crispin about five years ago, when he received an invitation to visit Chicago from Bookslut. It was not what he expected, he said, and this made it awkward for the both of them. Auslander is currently working on a novel, but it’s “shitty,” so instead he read an article published in a German newspaper shortly after the earthquake in Haiti entitled “I Miss God,” which covered tragic events, the earthquake and Auslander’s own son nearly dying from pneumonia, personal struggles, like renouncing God, and the cowardice and outrageous statements of Jerry Falwell and Pat Buchanan. It was touching and thought-provoking, and yet still very, very funny, even inducing snort-laughs from the audience.

1. Christopher King, the art director of Melville House, Jason Bennett, the publicity director, & Brittany Banta, who is a pretzel lover and a member of the secret illuminati book club. “Melville House is the best publisher ever,” they say. “Especially the covers. And the pretzels.” 2. Melville House books! And art!


In the final portion of the evening, the publisher of Melville House, Dennis Johnson, interviewed Crispin. When Johnson asked what was up with Bookslut’s name, Crispin explained that she probably bought the domain when drunk because she doesn’t remember why she did it. She was, however, working at a “pro-choice women’s clinic” in Austin at the time, and was surprised when people had problems with the name. The blog had humble beginnings: Crispin started it because she had an office job with a lot of time in front of the computer. Back in those days, she’d Google her favorite authors and was disappointed when not much about them came up. When she did find something, she’d e-mail it to her friends, but eventually, she decided that having a blog of her findings would be a lot less obnoxious.

Crispin also discussed her new life in Berlin. She really enjoys living there: rent is cheap and you can go to the Berlin Opera for eight Euros and they sell cheese-covered pretzels. She also doesn’t fear for her life in her apartment anymore, because review copies of books are now sent to Michael Schaub, the managing editor of Bookslut, in Portand. But her favorite part of life in Berlin? The twelve-year-old girls lugging copies of Follett books on the subways, with whom she falls in love immediately.

–Julia Jackson is working on her MFA in fiction at Brooklyn College, and is a regular contributor for Electric Dish.

Graywolf Night at McNally Jackson

1. Helen’s fan, editor Helen Atsma of Grand Central Publishing,  and events coordinator at McNally Jackson, Sara Ortiz. 2. Two men of the wild: Benjamin Percy and author Josh Weil.

The thoughtful, imaginative, and contemporary Graywolf Press hooked up with McNally Jackson for the third consecutive year last night, noted events coordinator Sara Ortiz. Fiona McCrae, a publisher at Graywolf since 1994, introduced Benjamin Percy, author of The Wilding and first reader: “a studly man” on the front wave of the studly-wild-man movement currently afoot.

Has anyone ever noted Ben Percy’s voice? [YES--it's got an an epic 'coming to a theater near you' lowness] Before reading two short excerpts, Ben, appropriately for this man-ly fiction, conveyed two pieces of advice he had received from his father: (1) “Get better titles” (something more like Men in Black) and (2) “The problem with your short stories is that they are too short,” this piece of advice having led to Ben’s “shnovels” and novels.

Jessica Francis Kane’s novel The Report was put in motion by serendipity (while living in London, she ran into an event where the Bethnal Green report was released) and, ten years later, has become a novel which is nominated for The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Jessica was fascinated with the point of view of Laurence Dunne, the man solely responsible for compiling the report about the disaster, something made more fascinating by today’s reports, which are (if made) made by committee of opposing parties in a tug-of-war.

1. Jessica and Fiona, just doing some last minute editing. 2. Sherman Alexie recommends as the t-shirt of The Wilding.

















Fun things Ben talked about in Q&A

  • His collection of images pinned to a board by his writing desk, which emerge in constellations into stories.
  • The shirt Sherman Alexie emailed Ben about, “the t-shirt of The Wilding,” which, in an exciting turn of events, Ben revealed to us under his button-up.

Fun things Jessica talked about in Q&A

  • Twitter! She’s into the community of booksellers she has found there.
  • The feeling of a novel, something for a long time present in the writer’s head alone, suddenly present in readers when the book is published.

Anna Prushinskaya edits The Outlet.

Social Media Theater?

No matter how much I enjoy fiction I’ve found it difficult to sit through a good book lately. Though I know I am still reading a lot. I read news articles, blog posts, and watch videos on the web. I participate in social network sites. I receive real-time updates on my phone. So for the most part, I seem to be getting my fix from “reality.”

One morning over a year ago, I was flipping between reading a Malcolm Gladwell article on The New Yorker and checking my Twitter feed on my phone. In the article was an excerpt from The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, in which T.E.  Lawrence writes: “We could not lightly draw water after dark, for there were snakes swimming in the pools or clustering in  knots around their brinks.” And then I thought…

What if Lawrence of Arabia walked among the living today? What if I had been following him on Twitter (perhaps somehow involved in his campaign) and the excerpt above was a post he had just made as he led the revolt across the desert? Fast forward to today: Twitter announces it is now serving 1 billion queries per day. The general audience is fast figuring out how social media can be useful, be it for personal or professional use, and we are fast embracing it as a utility. But what about explicitly for entertainment as well?

Read the rest of this entry »

An Evening in Solidarity with Mexican Journalists at PEN American

Paul Auster opened proceedings, reading from the controversial Diario de Juarez editorial published on September 18th this year, after El Diario photographer Luis Carlos Santiago (the second of two El Diario journalists) was murdered by a Juarez drug gang. Stating, “What do you want from us?” the piece addresses the drug gangs as the “de facto authorities in this city.”

Auster then quoted the great Russian poet Osip Mandelstam (who died in transit to a Stalinist gulag), who’d quipped that the regime must be afraid of poets, and must, therefore, respect them. But, Auster noted, Mandelstam had, sadly, got it wrong. Poet Luis Miguel Aguilar’s impassioned speech developed this: “If they kill journalists, it is because they do not respect journalism, which is to say that they do not respect us as a society where free journalism is one of our absolute truths.”

According to The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), “more than 30 journalists and media workers have been murdered or have vanished” since the election of president Felipe Calderón in autumn 2006 (more than 28,000 people have died in the drug war).

Left to right: Carmen Aristegui, José Luis Martínez, Nancy I. Adler (interpreter), Rocío Gallegos, Julia Preston (moderator)

Readings by Calvin Baker, Francine Prose, and Don DeLillo addressed linked issues of official attempts at silencing. All led up to the evening’s center piece, a conversation with journalists Rocío Gallegos, Carmen Aristegui and José Luis Martinez, moderated by Julia Preston, all of whom have been on the front line of reporting on Mexico’s drug wars. (Nancy I. Adler simultaneously translated the conversation.) Aristegui noted that what The CPJ has described as the drug gangs’ attempt to control “the flow of information” is leading to self-censorship. But while the televised media (via a dual monopoly that limits competition) has begun to silence itself, according to Martinez, print journalism “has a lot of spaces where plurality exists, where journalists are protesting the situation of violence.” Gallegos, who has worked at Diario de Juarez for 14 years, was asked by Preston: “what is it like to go out onto the streets of Juarez every day?” (My paraphrase) The answer: “there is a sense that things are breaking down; but the community still demands freedom of expression.”

In the spirit of moving towards a possible solution, the panel noted links between government corruption and drug gangs (“organized crime has taken over pieces of the national territory”). They also pulled no punches in noting that the USA’s addiction to drugs, cocaine in particular, and its “cult to guns” (“amoral gun selling”, Jennifer Clement later termed it) is killing thousands of Mexico’s citizens. Drugs move north, while weapons made in US arms factories travel south of the border. Gallegos concluded: “we need to take co-responsibility. The drug war can come to the USA.”

Jennifer Clement (PEN Club de México) closed with the chilling remarks that, in Mexico, “narco messages appear in the classified sections of newspapers in thug text messages. …Words are carved onto victims’ bodies… We read a skin graffiti… in a land where the storyteller has become the story. But don’t think that this, which seems so specific, is Mexico. No. This is the world we are all living in.”

Listen to the entire event here.

More events at Cooper Union,

–David McLoghlin is an MFA poetry candidate at NYU. He blogs at http://newyorkperistalsis.wordpress.com. His first collection will be published in 2012 by Salmon Poetry.

Image courtesy of PEN American.

Part 2: Dispatches from Dream City: Zadie Smith and Barack Obama

PART 1 of this essay is located here.

IV

But let’s return to Obama. In the essay “Speaking in Tongues,” originally a talk delivered shortly after Obama’s election, Smith discusses her acquired flexibility of voice, the consequence of imposing the Cambridge English voice “with its rounded vowels and consonants in more or less the right place” on the voice of her childhood  home, working-class North London. She ruefully admits that the two voices have narrowed into one, the educated voice, and that people are in general suspicious of voice-shifters:

We feel that our voices are who we are, and to have more than one, or to use different versions of a voice for different occasions, represents, at best. A Janus –faced duplicity, and at worst, the loss of our very souls.

This leads to Shaw’s Pygmalion, nominally “the unambiguous tale of a girl who changes her voice and loses her  self…undercut by the fact of the play itself, which is an orchestra of many voices, simultaneously  and perfectly rendered.”  Another orchestra of many voices is the skillful memoir of the new President, Dreams of my Father:

For Obama, having more than one voice in your ear is not a burden, or not solely a burden—it is also a gift.

Read the rest of this entry »