Junot Díaz-ed

1. Just the beginning of the line outside NYU Cantor Film Center waiting to hear Junot Díaz read. 2. About 1/18th of Junot Díaz’s wonderful and attentive audience.


At first, I thought the line was for a movie. A special screening of Avatar with bonus features. Apparently the NYU Creative Writing Program’s Fall 2010 Reading Series is the new Avatar. Or perhaps just Junot Díaz is the new Avatar. The line outside the NYU Cantor Film Center last night stretched for blocks, plural, and was made up of over five hundred Junot Díaz fans.
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Just Some Bolaño

1. Charles Keating poses, per the request of another photographer. 2. Michael Stuhlbarg at sound check.


I felt an urge to pregame the Bolaño Selected Shorts night at Symphony Space with a beer and a whisky. I thought this wise because I’d underdressed, and it was cold, but also because I was unaware there was going to be free rum. Twenty-three-year-old free rum, aged in sherry casks, which is really the only sort of rum I’d let past my lips. Three drinks in, I’m more pliable and less likely to remember the fine details of the things  like what people say to me or what your name is, so my urges ended up working out for everyone: my Symphony Space hosts were chatting about some reader or another (I forget the name of the person), and I’m sure they were saying something interesting—or I think they were  anyway, the red chairs were distracting me—because suddenly my presence was felt. “No backstage stuff!” “Huh?” I said, and they replied, “don’t write about this!” This was said kindly, but with enough gentle force to justify my (mis)remembering it as including exclamation points. Ah, memory!
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Second Pass Party

1. EDITOR AND AGENT MAGICAL TRIFECTA! Julie Barer, agent for Barer Literary, PJ Mark, agent for Janklow & Nesbit Associates, & Amy Hundley, editor for Grove/Atlantic. 2. Lauren Sandler, who wrote a book called Righteous, which is about the Christian right (scary!), reader Carlene Bauer, & Melissa Anderson, who writes about film for the Village Voice.

Last night, Melville House hosted The Second Pass‘s first event, a reading and party. The reading portion featured excerpts from works-in-progress by four Second Pass contributors, and also a “largely forgotten work, in keeping with the site’s preoccupations.” The party portion included wine (heavy on the red, light on the white), and enough cheese to choke the audience, as the site’s editor, John Williams, said. Williams promised us that the readings would be “brief and potent,” and he definitely delivered on that promise.
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Four Micros from VISITING WRITERS

Vladimir Nabokov bought my daughter a chess set, with pieces carved from sandalwood by hand. Every little girl should own a chess set, he said, and my daughter nodded in feigned agreement, eager to rejoin her friends. Late afternoon, once the guests had left, my wife sent me to collect the plates and glasses from the backyard. And there was Nabokov, crouched in the garden, his pant cuffs folded to his knees, following a caterpillar across his finger.

**

Italo Calvino stopped at the gas station to ask for directions to the aeronautical museum. I hadn’t been working at the gas station for long, and had only moved to the town a few months earlier. I offered to sell him a map, or I could call my landlord, who knew the town from top to bottom. No matter, he said. I’ll find my way… The day was breezy, warm. He would put his faith in the winds.

**

Jorge Luis Borges asked me to select a record at random. I picked one from the nearest milk crate. Laid it on the turntable, lowered the needle. Borges sat in his favorite red chair with his pipe, nodding along. When the symphony finished, he leaned back, like after a satisfying meal. Fine choice of music, he said approvingly, despite no such choice having been made.
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FRANKLIN PARK KILLS IT

1. Rich, who works on video games, & Justin Mitchell, who read at the Franklin Park Reading series last month. 2. Kenny & Katrina, who came to the series last month and enjoyed it. Nice to know that the reading series isn’t a hit it and quit it kind of event.

The Franklin Park Reading Series is a monthly event that takes place on the second Monday of every month, inside the Franklin Park Bar and Beer Garden. Last night’s reading had a pretty killer line-up, featuring Rick Moody, Ben Greenman, Jenny D. Williams, Monique Truong, and Leslie Goshko.

The bar was crowded when I got there at a few minutes to eight (and DARK), but we managed to find seats at a table on the side of the stage. Williams read first, with two short pieces entitled “Spirit of the Staircase” and “Sleep Lab.” I was certainly not the most unbiased member of the audience, considering that Williams and I are in the same MFA program, but I’d like to think that even if I didn’t know what a lovely person she is that I’d still find her writing to have a striking yet quiet eloquence, and that both pieces would still manage to give me goosebumps.
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Meanwhile, in Philly: PHILADELPHIA NOIR

1. Laura Spagnoli (author of “A Cut Above”, part of the collection) and Halimah Marcus (author of “Swimming” (ditto) and EL staffer) 2. Carlin Romano, editor of Philadelphia Noir, and Diane Ayres, author of “Seeing Nothing” also in the collection.

Derelict el trains, dead bodies dumped in municipal pools, and monstrous rats with sugar-encrusted eyes: the city of Philadelphia offers plenty of grisly detail for the noir aficionado.  Yet despite such dark subject matter, longtime Philadelphia Inquirer lit critic Carlin Romano – editor of the new collection Philadelphia Noir (Akashic Books) – curated perhaps the most warm and fuzzy release party ever for a noir compilation this Sunday, at the Moonstone Arts Center in Philadelphia’s Gayborhood.
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Your Own Personal Jesus

“Playing the Saint Is Bad for One’s Health”: The Death of the Adversary by Hans Keilson

“A small, plain-looking man, in the grip of something stronger than himself, was speaking as though he were strangling himself.  He stood there like a damned soul.  A torch was wavering at a crossroads.  He had to choose…  During those moments he became alienated from himself, and that which took hold of him was simply something alien.  But at other times he thought that it was his own self.  Then he felt himself as great and strong and irresistible as a river.  He began to urge, to scream, and to rave.  He could not contain himself, he burst his banks.  But he did not understand what he was doing.  To me he sounded like a drowning man who was screaming for help.” – The narrator of The Death of the Adversary on Hitler

Among other things, Adolf Hitler was a failed artist.  Whatever it was that denied him advancement as a painter along the artistic strata of Weimar Republic Germany—insufficiently fine technique, lack of original vision, shortage of commitment or an underlying character flaw (‘and… how,’ says History)—he was able, as firebrand and chief of the Nazi state, to pillage galleries across the country, to decree what was and was not fit for German citizens’ aesthetic appreciation.  For lack of precise criticism, brute force made for an obvious answer.  As portrayed in the 2004 German film Downfall, Hitler resembles at his end nothing so much as a megalomaniacal magazine editor, unable to grasp the fact of collapsing advertising revenue and terrified to allow crass foreigners, the invasive other, to compromise his dream of an immortal Berlin.  Alone with Nazi architect Albert Speer in a massive room where the city has been modeled in white plaster at reduced dimension, Hitler takes one last longing look, a boy forced to quit his toys forever and confront in life what it is he has done.

The name of the adversary in Hans Keilson’s WWII novel, first published in Germany of 1959 and recently re-released in the U.S. as a paperback, is never stated, a single initial serving to identify the man.  In complement, the specific identity of the narrator and his people is not made overt, only the fact that they have been singled out.  What The Death of the Adversary directly addresses is the intellectual conception of a Hitler-like figure in the mind of one of the persecuted. “In compensation for having to play the role of the vanquished,” thinks the narrator, “I conceived the intoxicating fantasy of being in an unassailably superior position, so that finally I succumbed to the idea that the way towards him and through him was the way to my own self.”

With a manuscript secreted into the hands of a stranger, Keilson’s novel begins; that stranger, a lawyer, having buried it until the war is over, subsequently presents the pages to a literary personage, to hear his estimation of their content.  This framing device encloses the novel proper, the first-person account of a man delineating his relationship, largely imagined, with an adversarial figure whose deathly ire is first petty, then pitiable, then consuming, then terrifying, then something else entirely, as it takes root in a stricken republic.

Through a sort of titanic idiocy the narrator self-identifies with his sworn enemy.  But that self-identification is no simple delusion, even if not a shred of it is present in the head of his other.  Advises a friend of the narrator, “What are you after?  You’re dissatisfied with the whole creation and rack your brains about your enemy.  You brood.  Do you think he broods over you?  He acts.”

That Dostoevskian labor of self-identification with an enemy, no matter how remote—in this case, literally, Hitler—figures, at last, as an act of heroism, a vote for humanity, no matter how doomed or prone to contradiction the effort.  Though the novel effectively ends with a joke, the breadth of its content defies any punch line.  Driven from his home, the persecuted keens:

Even if you should think—but it is not true—that you are fighting me not because I hold different opinions or have differently colored hair, or because my nose has a different shape from yours, all that you are fighting against is your own; and the more you try to keep it from yourself and do not want it to be true and cannot accept it and start cheating, the more furious becomes your fight against it in me, carried on with a hatred that is no longer on the side of life.  But there, where you are struggling with yourself, in that primal place, I want to take hold of you and be held by you; there, in that place, I stand beside you.

“A Tricky Guy”: God Says No by James Hannaham

“Disney World was the only thing I believed in as much as God.” – Gary Gray

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DOGEN: LOST & FOUND IN TRANSLATION

Zen Lunch (L) and Buddha (R)

“Each moment is all being, each moment is the entire world.” – Dogen


From the rebel-yelling Beats of North Beach back alleys to the debauched Lit Crawlers in the bars, bookstores and sex shops of the Mission, San Francisco’s literary wild side is widely recognized by book fetishists across the nation. Perhaps lesser known, though no less a cultural institution, is the San Francisco Zen Center, a Hayes Valley neighborhood hub for the city’s dynamic Buddhist community. Founded in 1962 by the late Japanese expat Shunryu Suzuki, a beloved teacher whose primer “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind” has served as a beacon toward mindfulness for millions of readers worldwide, the SFZC has long sponsored the creation of new literature and modern translations of signficant texts of the past. The organization’s latest endorsement, “Dogen: Treasury of the True Dharma Eye,” is a complete, two-volume, English interpretation of Soto Zen founder Eihei Dogen’s “Shobo Genzo,” a 1000-page collection of dharma (truth) talks—including essays, stories, poems and provocative linguistic and philosophical puzzles—written nearly 800 years ago. On Saturday, a dozen or so authors and speakers gathered at the Zen Center and Fort Mason to celebrate the release of this monumental project. The takeaway? Dogen’s message of mindfulness, acceptance and action is still resonant in 2010 and of particular value to writers.

Poet Peter Levitt (L) and Artist Kazuaki Tanahashi (R)


Introducing the book’s associate editor, poet Peter Levitt, Zen Center abbot Ryushin Paul Haller remarked how both the project and zazen (mindfulness meditation: the foundation of Zen practice) are about “doing the impossible and discovering that the merely difficult is not such a challenge.” The concept of making the impossible possible is the ethos of the project’s editor, artist Kazuaki Tanahashi, who dedicated the past 50 years of his life to translating Dogen, first from medieval to modern Japanese and then, with the support of the SFZC for more than three decades, into English. Tanahashi’s principal partner, Levitt, confessed at the start of his dharma talk: “If we knew what we were doing, we probably never would have started.”

The inside joke is, of course, they knew. Dogen’s got a rep for being one of the thorniest deep thinkers of all-time. His ideas—progressive to this day on issues of language, community and gender relations (not to mention living and breathing and embracing, as Dogen heir Suzuki put it, “things as it is”)—are so layered with nuance, ambiguity and complex paradoxes, it’s assumed that most of his monastic students (from 1233 until his death in 1253) never understood him. And yet, his words live on.

Levitt broke it down like this: According to Dogen, “the world is the function of intimacy, which is way beyond being close. Intimacy is thoroughness, completeness, being drenched [in everything], all-inclusiveness. There’s no gap” between anything, ever. You and the person next to you on the subway, the mountains and the sea, an incipient story and the blank page are all one. He argued that when we understand life moving together in this way, then we feel the warmth of all creation because everything is more than just part of us: it is us. No gap. No separation. He said we must be courageous “to come closer. Don’t let anything stop you from going all the way… to know the world on its own terms.”

For writers, this is especially poignant. “To come into language,” Levitt said, “we have to go outside of language, to be intimate with the world.” How else will our writing be truthful unless we acknowledge—then engage—with the world as it is?

For Dogen, the world is mind. “Not my mind or your mind,” as Levitt put it. “Just mind.” Mind is the world. So if we can realize this—embody this—then our words will not only reflect the world but be the world as it is. Levitt said, “Never forget the place from where the words come out from.” He emphasized the two froms in this phrase to convey the concept of source, the springboard of mind, world, word. One and the same. No gap.

Tanahashi suggested that we consider this no-gap way of interacting when confronted with “violence and divisions. We face impossibilities,” he said, “which might make us feel helpless or feel like not engaging.” But, he argued, “Dogen believed in the power of action, however small,” and in the certainty of the ripple effect of mindfulness as we intimately move through the world. The point? In Dogenspeak: to go beyond, to actualize buddha (enlightened) nature, to be “buddha-going-beyond-buddha,” and in so doing, to uplift yourself and the world around you.

Steven Heine, Taigen Dan Leighton, Susan Moon, William Bodiford (L) and Jeff Bickner, a teacher at Everyday Zen (R)


In a panel discussion, “Visions of Awakening Space & Time” author, Taigen Dan Leighton, reiterated the point above, explaining how translations of Dogen’s texts are crucial as “an ongoing awakening of buddha-beyond-buddha.” If we acknowledge that “there’s always more” to what we initially tend to perceive (and settle for or attached to), then we can know “the mountains and ancestors are a single line,” one all-encompassing unbroken lineage, from which we can derive boundless joy (aka enlightenment).

German medical doctor Friederike Boissevain presented her understanding of Dogen within the powerful context of healing. She said, “Opening is healing… starting anew is healing… trusting yourself is healing… never looking back is healing… not knowing is healing… asking questions again and again is healing… healing is now… healing is forgiving… healing is always possible.” Her courageous, compassionate aphorisms struck a chord: How many writers are often compelled to put words on the page from a place of pain? How many struggle with their own insecurities regardless of external validation? How many are healed through the creative process, by immersion in the moment, by making the impossible possible?

Author Brad Warner (L) and Composer Masayuki Koga (R)

“Hardcore Zen” author, Brad Warner, brought a fresh perspective to Dogen by connecting the “intensely moral” ethos of early ‘80s punk rock—“trying to find something deeper than conventional social morality”—with Zen, which he first encountered as a young punk in college and recognized right away as “the most punk rock thing I’d ever come across.” Echoing the classic argument against the MFA Literati, he said it’s “important to take Buddhist studies out of academic scholarship” and away from “Buddhist nerddom” to get the ideas into popular culture. For better or worse, this has already been happening via commercial appropriations in the guise of the Dogen character on the TV show “Lost,” the Zen Republic Energy Drink and the Buddha Bar. Blasphemous? Perhaps. But Warner sees these unusual rip-offs with an open heart, calling for less rigidity (non-attachment) by Zen purists and more faith (acceptance) in the ability of future generations to understand Dogen in ways the ancestors could never have imagined.

There’s a lesson in this for all of us: let go of preconceptions, trust in not-knowing, welcome everyone and everything, and finally, convey the dharma (make possible the impossible) in a language that speaks directly from one mind.

–Jesús Ángel García is the author of “badbadbad,” a transmedia novel about the perils of living in an e-world with eyes wide shut. Print publication (on New Pulp Press) is set for May 2011. Previews of the 3xbad text, soundtrack and film are available on http://badbadbad.net.

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NY ART BOOK FAIR

1. Scene out in front of P.S. 1, circa 5 p.m. 2. Anthony Bryant & Matthew Goodrich, who said the books and posters were really cool but also expensive. Still, they managed to get a lot of “free shit.”

This weekend, P.S. 1 hosted the fifth annual New York art book fair, which consisted of “over 200 international presses, booksellers, antiquarian publishers, artists and publishers from twenty countries, offering the best in contemporary art book publishing.” The fair began on Thursday evening with a preview, and is open today through five o’clock, so we decided to check it out yesterday evening, and man, was it CROWDED. The scene outside of the museum in the amphitheater out front was of people relaxing, and we stopped to talk to some of the attendees before going inside. Let me tell you this: artfags are infinitely more stylish than litfags.

1. Max Eisenberg, aka DJ Dog Dick, Jonas Asher, & Zeljko McMullen. Mr. Dog Dick will be DJing at P.S.1 Sunday afternoon. 2. Alice, a fashion designer, Azul, an actress, & Valeria, who works in advertising. Alice & Azul are from Argentina and Valeria is from Uruguay.
Once inside, we were overwhelmed again, this time by the massive selection of everything that was going on. P.S. 1, if you’ve never been there, is kind of a confusing place, with its three floors and multiple stairwells. I texted my artist roommate for suggestions and he gave us a couple ideas of booths to check out, so began a sort of arty scavenger hunt. Before heading upstairs, we wandered around the first floor, which featured independent/alternative presses and therefore more inexpensive wares.
1. Chris Billias, who is a poet who began writing with conviction again about five years ago. Since then, he has written about 300 poems. 2. The Guerrilla Girls booth. 3. David Rogers-Berry, of the band O’Death. He was disappointed that so few people were actually buying things.
1. The crowd in front of P.S.1 from the second floor, circa 6 p.m. 2. Sam Gould of Red 76, standing in front of his confusing t-shirts. Apparently, the words on the t-shirts were North American political slogans which were translated on the internet into Spanish, and therefore got mangled. This project shows a “solidarity in miscommunication.”
The second floor had the bigger guns, and you could buy things like salt and pepper shakers labeled “Heroin” and “Cocaine” for a measly $125. Or, if living is more your kind of thing, then you could buy coffee mugs that said Fuck Death, for the more reasonable (although still far too expensive for people who live off a salary of breadcrumbs and sawdust) price of $15.
1. Susan Sontag sighting #1, along with some pretty awesome patches. Feel free to buy these for me and then mail them to the EL office, as I don’t have $12 to spend on patches, no matter how awesome they are. 2. Susan Sontag #2. AIDS!!!!! METAPHORS!!!!!!!!
The third floor had a room dedicated solely to artist zines, which uncoincidentally smelled like hippies–and I don’t mean that it smelled like patchouli. By then the heat and confusion of the museum was getting to us, and it was almost closing time–we’re still trying to figure out what new or useful things we gleaned about art.
1. Conrad Bakker, who works with a lot of wood, and came to the bookfair with this “cite-specific project.” In his Book-of-the-Month,  subscribers receive a surprise “book,”hand-painted and carved, each month. 2. Colin Turner, the Associate Publisher of Last Gasp Books, which publishes such favorites as Banksy, Coop, Mark Ryden. Colin showed us a couple of his favorites (Hi-Fructose and Onikage: The Art of Toshio Saeki) I found Saeki’s art to be particularly intriguing, as he depicts his personal psychological fears, in hopes that others share theirs as well.

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

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CIVIC PRIDE

1. WORD Audience.  Among others: beers, our own Scott Lindenbaum (second left) and John Wray on the very right.

It’s a chilly fall evening while I’m rushing through Greenpoint. The sidewalks are slippery because of all the fallen autumn leaves, and I pass by an elderly lady, slightly depriving her of balance who whispers a Polish swear word. Too bad I can understand Polish. But I am on the run because I am hurrying to Word where  Vol. 1 Brooklyn, a blog for literary minded, is hosting the first event of the ongoing reading series, Civic Pride, “The Best of Chicago.” Each of the Civic Pride evenings will feature authors from a particular region, and Chicago is on the schedule for tonight.

WORD is full of fans of literary Chicago. Not to be forgotten, there is free beer, brought in directly from a Chicago brewery, Goose Island, which is a very neat step towards an even more enjoyable literary experience.

The first on the line to read is Jami Attenberg, born and raised by Chicago, adopted by Brooklyn. Jami reads a piece from her book Instant Love: Fiction.

1. Jami Attenberg (& her shadow on right): “They met because of the same New Order T-shirts they were wearing. She knew this guy was going to like her.”

Next on the line is Molly Tolsky. Molly authors the one and only Jewish celebrity baby gossip blog on the Internet. Interesting niche.

The third to read tonight is Adam Levin. Current resident of Chicago walks onto the stage with his respectable 1030-page book The Instructions. Adam is a guy with whom you want to sit in a pub for hours and let him tell you the entire story of a 10-year old boy who may or may not be the messiah.

1. Molly Tolsky: “He said: ‘I hadn’t bought a ring or anything, but sure I know the size of your finger.” But I wasn’t ready to commit to marriage, not even the future one.’” 2. Adam Levin: “We yell, but it’s not like we argue, although it sounds like that. We’re just yellers.”

–Katarina Hybenova is a writer and a photographer based in Brooklyn, the author of www.bushwickdaily.com

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