READIN’ AND RHYTHM

1. Trumpeter Mike Shobe of The Dymaxion Quartet. 2. Jennifer Werner and Jin Cordaro, rockin’ the literature.


Last night I hustled over to Union Hall in Brooklyn for the first-ever “Readin’ and Rhythm,” a series organized by online music magazine Knocks from the Underground that aims to put indie musicians and writers together.  The effect is a show that is part rock-and-roll, part reading.  I have to say, like peanut butter and bananas, Sarah Silverman and Matt Damon, some pairings are just plain satisfying and this is one of them.  With the booze flowing, the leather-clad hipsters jiving and the writers and musicians emoting, the whole thing was pretty groovy.

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Gender Outlaws

1. The scene at Verlaine: full of glowy things! 2. Readers Kian Goh & Tamiko Beyer.


Last night, Verlaine hosted the launch party of Tamiko Beyer’s new chapbook, bough breaks. There were free cupcakes, and also readings featuring contributors to Gender Outlaws! There were six readers, including Beyer.

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Everybody Poops Genius Pieces, or, An Evening With Michael Showalter

1. The security lady was really harshing my mellow, but spotting downtown comic Todd Barry made me happy again 2: My view of the reading:  sweaty.


My love/hate relationship with the Barnes & Noble continues.  Was I stoked to see Michael Showalter (who I fell in love with after watching The State and Wet Hot American Summer, like, a million years ago)?  Heck yeah.

Was I even more stoked he was going to be joined on-stage by singer-songwriter Neko Case (who I more recently fell in love with)?  Of course!

Did I appreciate being shoved into the upper floor of the behemoth’s Union Square location with a thousand other sweaty people, where I’d have to lean against a metal pole for an hour and strain to hear the speakers? Uh, no.

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One Story PARTY

1. Jess Lacher, Sarah Goffman, & Phil Klay, who are all in the fiction MFA program at Hunter College. 2. The readers for the evening: Amy Hempel, Hannah Tinti, & A.M. Homes. Notice the braids!


I was beginning to think the music world and the lit world switched their ideas about the start times for events. Lately, every music show I have been to has started more or less on time, while the lit events have begun at least thirty minutes after the advertised start time. So I was a bit disappointed when I walked in to The Stone at 8:05 last night and found the room dark and crowded; it was standing room only. Or rather, sitting room only, as the gentleman who took my $10 handed me a foam cushion to sit on.

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THE TOWN DRUNK by Thomas Lombardi

The town drunk’s living room was remarkably orderly. In fact, it kind of emanated a mid-century charm, what with its Danish couch, art deco coffee table, and asbestos crackers.

“Living rooms,” said the town drunk, taking a seat across from me, “are incapable of emanating.” He was wearing a tuxedo with an orange bow tie; his face so freshly shaven I wanted to run a pen across its cheek.

“Can you read my mind?” I asked.

“State your purpose!”

“There is someone,” I offered, my throat beginning to quiver slightly, “I want . . . dead . . . someone very close to me.”

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People Who Need People

“And the Story, Full of Longing and Intrigue, Began”: Both Ways Is The Only Way I Want It by Maile Meloy

“The raspberry bushes that hung over the garden had been cut so the branches lay with their crushed fruit on the ground.  The smell was of wet dirt and sweet berries and green leaves and rot.  Valentine sat among the ruined heads of lettuce, and her mother lay down with a little moan and rested her head on Valentine’s knee.” – in the wake of a boyfriend’s destructive exit, “Nine”

In Maile Meloy’s short story, “Nine,” a nine-year-old named Valentine is caught in the undercurrents of her mother’s emotional life after her parents’ divorce.  The story’s locale is a mystery – a college town, presumably somewhere out West, somewhere not California.  California is where her father has gone.  Valentine’s landmarks, the way she knows the place she lives from anywhere and everywhere else, are the people who inhabit her home: her mother’s boyfriend, Carlo, an Italian professor at the local college, his son Jake, a mercurial 10-year-old, and, of course, her mother, whose grasping for adult intimacy veers unsettlingly toward her daughter.

“He said I have wonderful cleavage,” Valentine’s mother tells her after a night with Carlo. “Do you know what that is?” When Valentine responds that she doesn’t, her mother explains, “It’s the space between your breasts.” “Your breasts”: Meloy’s compression of telling detail speaks volumes.  We can at once feel the mother’s exultation, her childlike seeking of affirmation, the way her ego has blurred with her daughter’s, and, finally, how that blurring can only enthrall Valentine, while alienating her from the reverie of being nine years old.  A violation that isn’t quite.  The story’s title stands there itself, opaque and monolithic, outside the time of the narrative proper: half, indictment for a felt transgression, half, willful claim to pride.  Thoroughly, irrevocably, in between.

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Alternate Versions of the History of the United States of America, in Which the Losing Candidates Won and Their Favorite Books Had Something to Do with it

(Special to Electric Literature, for Presidents Day. With apologies to everyone. Thank you to Walter Mondale, and Jonathan Franzen.)

Michael Dukakis (1988): Swedish Land-Use Planning; author unknown

In the lead-up to the 1988 presidential election, a Time magazine profile reports that then-Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis couldn’t remember the last book he read, but also that “he once took on a family vacation a book entitled Swedish Land-Use Planning.” In the days leading up to the presidential election, this literary smear/factoid is used amply against the candidate’s literary credibility. Nonetheless, Dukakis beats President Mondale with 525 electoral votes. It is only midway through the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner in 1989 that President Dukakis finally reveals it was not “Swedish Land-Use Planning” brought with him on family vacation to Hyannis Port in 1987, but rather an unauthorized novelization of the 1968 mondo film called Sweden: Heaven and Hell, a previously unknown work adapted in 1983 by New York literary scenester Cookie Mueller. As the original film is chockablock with teen nymphos, suicide, and saunas, Dukakis admits he was embarrassed to be seen with such a book, but can no longer hold back. President Dukakis is praised for his honesty in the press, and the more upbeat Mah Nà Mah Nà replaces Hail to the Chief at all public appearances beginning in 1990. The late, great Cookie Mueller is posthumously named Poet Laureate of the United States.

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Meanwhile in California: Derrick Brown

1. Scooter Magoo (musician Scott Huckaby) leading an opening sing-along which touched on, among other things, his yearning for a brachiosaurus friend. 2. Derrick reading his Valentine the Porcupine Dances Funny with its polka-dotted illustrator Jennifer Lewis in front of a rapt, drooling audience.

When one of your favorite poets and indie publishers (whose roster includes six poetry slam champions among other immeasurable talents) starts writing children’s books, you start asking some God damn questions.

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Lit 19 Launch Party

1. Anshul Mathur (right), founder of a Pandora-for-books start up, and friends Lawrence and Abid. 2. Best button ever.

LIT threw a nice little release party last night at the Housing Works Bookstore Café in Soho.  The magazine—property of The New School MFA program—is now nineteen issues strong and chock full of good stuff from more than two dozen writers.  When I showed up to Housing Works, a pleasantly sized crowd was mingling. (Re. the pleasant size: if you haven’t been there, there is something new to knock over every time you take a step or think about turning around, so LIT, thanks for putting the right number of people in such a frightening space.) An unusual feeling augmented the usual lit scene bonhomie in the room. I speak [touching all wood surfaces in reach] of warmth: the front door was open and inside it was downright toasty and not because of baseboard heating. Forgot that feeling existed, right?  Me too, but winter is finally releasing its maniacal grip on NYC.  About. Damn. Time.

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Dictated, But Not Read

Open City

By Teju Cole

Random House

272 pages / $25

There are two happening, New York-parties in Open City, and both go down toward the ending. Julius, the novel’s psychiatrist narrator, is unable to enjoy either.

He is lured to the first, held in the twenty-ninth-floor of a Washington Heights condo building – a corner apartment – with the promise of an unfettered nighttime view of the Hudson River, city buildings glinting in the distance. So in the wee hours, when the lingering guests start passing out, and the cigars have been passed, our narrator goes where he’s most comfortable: out on the balcony, away from everyone else. Third glass of Champagne in hand, Julius takes in the view, then turns to survey the well-appointed apartment of his host. Inside, along the balcony windows is a tidy row of “stocky, ancient, and gnarled” bonsai trees. These kinds of carefully tended things occupy and impress Julius the most: “each had within its trunk and roots the genetic secrets that would ensure that it would outlive us all.” When John, the party’s host, arrives with a newly refilled flute of bubbly, he draws Julius’s attention to one particular specimen, a Japanese maple that’s been kept ornamentally small and pruned for the last 145 years. Under other conditions, John says, such a tree can grow 70 to 80 feet. “But this game is not about the size now, is it?” he asks, with a chuckle.

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