Spring Reveled

1. Fran Lebowitz and Gay Talese, very good sports about letting me interrupt their conversation. 2. Sarah Lassek and Sarah Hassan, friends, avid readers and self-proclaimed nerds


Last night was The Paris Review’s 2011 Spring Revel and I have to say: God bless George Plimpton.  Perhaps invoking God is in bad taste, but I can’t help myself.  Because of Plimpton – and the legendary Paris Review that he stewarded through five decades of publication – I spent last evening at Cipriani Midtown in what I can honestly say was one of the top three most pleasant evenings I’ve ever enjoyed on this earth.

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Jim Shepard Movie Time

1. James & Cheryl. Cheryl works for Scholastic, and James loves Jim Shephard, so Cheryl surprised him with tickets for the event. 2. Casey Walker, editor for Simon & Schuster and writer Karen Thompson Walker, & editor for One Story and writer Hannah Tinti.

Last night I headed over to The Crosby Street Hotel in SoHo to catch the second installment of the “Under the Influence: Writers on Film” series, a screening of Aguirre, the Wrath of God followed by a Q&A with writer Jim Shepard. This is when writing for DISH comes in handy—tickets went for $35, normally the kind of event that I can’t afford to go to. The audience seemed to agree with this line of thinking, as they were, in general, older than the audience at the free events that I normally frequent.

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Medvedev means “the bear,” and other things I don’t know about Russian politics

Day of the Oprichnik

by Vladimir Sorokin

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

208pp / $23

The thing about the future is, it’s bound to disappoint. For decades now we’ve been fed images of the technological glories that await us: interplanetary travel, teleportation. Hoverboard skateboards—rumored to have been produced, released, then quickly recalled—dogged my childhood. And while the Internet is pretty damn cool, it hasn’t launched us into any new galaxies (yet). So far it’s been just the opposite. Last week while at the opera, sitting in the mezzanine I watched, at intermission, as one by one screens below me alighted, faces turned towards palms and slackened. No, the most advanced technology we have has turned us into zombies, insensible to our surroundings as we shuffle along, trying to walk and send e-mail at once.

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Two Fables by James Guida

The Fall

In fact, it was God’s tactful nature that led to the Fall. Hearing Adam and Eve wax delusional about snakes and apples and even conversations he was supposed to have had with them, though he had obviously been far too busy at the time, he realized that the surfeit of leisure in Heaven had been a mistake. Not wanting to embarrass them, he sent them to their expected destination, Earth, that other prototypical place, hoping that there they might do better. An important side effect of all this, incidentally, was God’s hitting upon the idea for both apples and snakes.

The Popular Clone

The geneticist hated that there wasn’t time enough in life, and decided to clone himself – that way he would be able to keep working and go to the party, or on the same day off both see friends and fritter the day away in heavenly solitude. The idea was that he and the clone would later catch up and enjoy a feeling of wholeness, of not having missed out on anything. A certain and surprisingly lengthy amount of time passed, as the clone was made, educated, groomed. At his first party he was very much a hit on account of his novel origins: he told amusing stories about his master, was invited to things, made several acquaintances and found a lover. Pretty soon there were too many plans to keep track of, so the geneticist had no choice but to clone himself over and over, the result being that everyone was busy and he didn’t see much of any one of them, and more opportunities than ever were slipping away.

–James Guida is the author of Marbles, a book of aphorisms published by Turtle Point Press. He is currently at work on a book of fables. www.jamesguida.com

Punks at powerHouse

I forgot to charge the camera battery! It died before I could get any pictures : ( So in lieu of me actually doing my job: 1. Here is a pic of the powerHOUSE Arena, taken by our own Kai Twanmoh. 2. Here is a picture of Cheetah Chrome, stolen from here, taken by Jesse Fisk Cravens. Now add large Ray-Ban-type aviator glasses and that’s pretty much what he looked like last night. 3. Here is a picture of the “average attendee,” as MS Painted by the MS Paintmaster herself, Sunny Katz.



Last night, Cheetah Chrome (of The Dead Boys), Mike Hudson (of The Pagans), and Bob Pfeifer (of Human Switchboard) stopped by the powerHOUSE Arena in DUMBO on their twenty-somethingth stop for their “Cleveland Confidential” book tour. They were joined by Eric Davidson (of The New Bomb Turks), and Luc Sante (of the New York Review of Books) moderated. All four of these musically-inclined gentleman have just released new books, hence the tour and last night’s event.

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FSG does Robert Pinsky + Paul Muldoon at Russian Samovar

1. Abby Deutsch, Andrew Flynn, Daniel Wenger, and Alexander Fabry. Alex is with Art.sy, the “Pandora for art” start up. 2. Paul Muldoon reads.

One would have been enough. Either Robert Pinsky or Paul Muldoon would have drawn a standing room only crowd to the top floor of the Russian Samovar, but FSG—sticking it to the man who sets fire code—brought both poets on Wednesday night as part of their regular reading series. Every seat was taken early and anyone less than on time (including yours truly) took a leaning post instead. I found a banister, but others found the bar, which was conveniently manned. And because this was the Russian Samovar, the only offering was a dozen-bottle rainbow of infused vodkas.

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Heliopolis

1. J Grabowski, who helps run Heliopolis. 2. Reader Anne-E. Wood & fan Laura Vinocur.


Heliopolis is an artists’ space in Greenpoint that operates out of a tiny storefront off Manhattan Ave. I was weary as I entered the room – everyone was young and hip and seemed to know each other. I’ve been to readings like this before, I thought, DIY-style readings held among friends, where people read work that is high on irony but low on substance. But the people I talked to were friendly and engaging, so I decided to go with it anyway. Plus, there was a painting on the wall that looked suspiciously like the female version of Goatse.

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Review: Other People We Married by Emma Straub

As a transplant Brooklynite, sometimes I feel as if I am living in a strange experiment:  rooftop vegetable gardens, yuppie intellectual weed-smoking med students, parents who bring their babies into bars, baristas with PhDs, Maggie Gyllenhaal shopping at the Park Slope Food Coop – where should I stop?

What is Brooklyn anyway?  And why would I, sometimes when I was in college, just google the word?

In Emma Straub’s Other People We Married there’s a lot of Brooklyn – or at least a particular upper-class face. Straub herself calls the borough home, and is also a bookseller at the popular BookCourt.  Stories such as “Rosemary”, where a bored, ex-editor-turned-stay-at-home-mom hires a pet psychic to help track down a lost cat, seem poised to light a candle in the dark corners of Brooklyn’s “cultural revolution.” Is there art, racial harmony, classical music, and farm-fresh ice-cream here?  Sure.  But there are also those that are painfully evolved, like Claire from “Rosemary”, who chooses to paint her son’s room “cerulean, not Navy. Nothing nautical. Nothing that would make him want to join the Army, or play with slingshots.”

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Jim Shepard at Greenlight

Last Monday night I headed Greenlight Bookstore in Fort Greene, enticed by an email that promised an evening of free beer and Jim Shepard, a “writer’s writer,” if you believe what you read.

I was not the only one who got the memo. By 7:30, a crowd that ranged from grey-haired to questionably-of-age gripped bottles from Brooklyn Brewery, Goose Island and something suspiciously blackberry flavored, ready to hear Shepard read from his new collection of short stories, You Think That’s Bad.

Shepard, the author of six novels, four story collections and a full-time professor at Williams College, sports a glasses-mustache combo that bears a vague resemblance to a Groucho Marx disguise. He proved to be the sort of person who can work both “frisson” and “close third person” into conversation without making you want to rub your face against a splintered bench.

After some initial self-deprecatory remarks, Shepard began what he said would be “unsatisfying” reading from his new book, by which he meant he would read only the beginning paragraphs of three stories. They were:

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Sparknotes for Judson Merrill’s UPSIDE THE HEAD

My literary career is young but it’s never too early to begin recording shows onto the DVR of posterity. For the benefit of scholars and fans alike, I will use this space on The Outlet, on a semi-regular basis, to release a selection of my correspondence and other papers. Enjoy. (Universities interested in acquiring the complete Judson Merrill archive should contact me through my web site.)

Context

Born in the late twentieth century, Judson Merrill’s young adult life was marked by scandal and disaster. It has long been hinted that he had an affair with a former First Lady and was framed for murder by the Secret Service. This difficult period served as fodder for his very-likely-best-selling but never-released-because-of-institutional-cowardice memoir, Federal Passions, Federal Crimes. Merrill followed that book with a series of groundbreaking novels. His influence on twenty-first century letters is difficult to calculate.

Plot Overview

After being driven from his home by his harpy of a wife, Jeronas Hectus is struck in the back of the head by a small meteorite. The experience rattles Jeronas. He sets off on a search for life’s meaning, first checking with a series of prostitutes to see if enlightenment can be found in the throes of paid-for ecstasy. This highly erotic section of the book is a must-read, but leaves Jeronas devoid of meaning and riddled with social diseases. After consulting a series of spiritual advisors, none of whom provide clarity, Jeronas experiments with increasingly potent drugs that send his first-person account into a hundred-page, semi-lucid rant. (Charges that this section is pointless and incoherent reveal flaws in the reader, not the author.) Finally, Jeronas crushes the meteor and snorts it. An angel descends from heaven and reveals unspeakable truths to Jeronas. Divine revelation or spacerock-induced hallucination? Either way, the sex Jeronas then has with the angel is ridiculously hot.

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