REVIEW: The Seamstress and the Wind by César Aira

The Seamstress and the WInd

by César Aira (translated by Rosalie Knecht)

New Directions

144pp/$12.95

Reading The Seamstress and the Wind is like reading a story written by a five-year-old. It’s delightful and hilarious, it’s divorced from reality, and at the end you pretend like you understand. But here’s the great thing about Aira: You don’t have to try to understand. You can just lean back and enjoy.

Part of the delight of experiencing a child’s story — like Axe Cop, or the short film made by the child actors of Super 8 — comes from how children parrot the rules of storytelling imperfectly, remaking them in the process. They’ve absorbed all of our cultural clichés and conventions in a very short time, but haven’t limited their imaginations to them; their stories make the clichés and conventions fresh and new.

Aira does this, but on a sophisticated level; what is delightful in Axe Cop is pure joy in The Seamstress and the Wind. There are a lot of cool things going on that deserve careful literary criticism, but what’s most interesting is how well the book functions as a story while breaking all the basic rules of storytelling. Aira’s central experiment in Seamstress is to wrest the craft of storytelling from its moorings to see if it floats. And, like the shape-shifting “local candy” of the book’s setting, it does.

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Gary Shteyngart at powerHouse Arena

1. A packed house at powerHouse Arena was excited for the reading to begin. 2. Author Gary Shteyngart signed many a book Tuesday night.

Gary Shteyngart’s book tour for Super Sad True Love Story came to a triumphant finish Tuesday night at powerHouse Arena in DUMBO, Brooklyn. “This is the end of 340 days of touring that have taken me to such diverse countries as Canada…and America,” Shteyngart announced to the packed bookstore.

Throughout the evening, Shteyngart shared his own views on modern culture and technology. When asked if he was concerned that some of the futuristic details of the novel would become outdated, he said that has already begun. “I created Onionskin jeans as a joke. Two months after the book came out, models in Paris were wearing completely transparent jeans on the runway.”

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Jennifer Egan is a Bad Motherf&*(%er

1. Jennifer Egan before the movie.  She’d be back before we could say blueberry pie.  Blueberry pie. Well, maybe not that fast. 2. The ticket they made for Egan:  Jennifer Egan as Uma Thurman.  Brilliant!

Having served four hard years of film school just up the street, I wasn’t sure just how much pontification I could stomach when I signed up to attend a new series at the Crosby Street Hotel, “Under the Influence: Writers on Film.” The pairing sounded good: Pulitzer Prize winner Jennifer Egan discussing the effect Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction had on her book A Visit from the Goon Squad. However, while I was stoked to hear Egan talk about her writing, I’ve already sat through enough nerd-boy conversations about Pulp FIction (“It’s Marcellus Wallace’s soul!” “Dude, the gimp scene was messed up!”) that I was kind of dreading the experience.

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Those Are Pearls That Were His iPad (a review of The Waste Land App)

The Waste Land

by T. S. Eliot

Faber and Faber & Touch Press

$13.99/iPad

In our culture of distraction, in which I find myself unable to sit through the entirety of a one-minute video of a dog taking tiny steps on its hind legs to flamenco music before wanting to click on to the next thing, poetry occupies a strange purgatory of time-commitment. While less active reading time is required than, of course, a novel, or even your average short story, in my experience most poems require several re-reads, a ponder, a reconsideration in a different mood. And it’s hard to find that perfect moment to return to the poem when there is an ever-growing pile of headlines, posts, emails, and alerts pouring in.

I was curious, then, to explore The Waste Land app for iPad (published by Touch Press), to see how it addressed this issue: how would it adapt a rather long, rather difficult poem for the medium on which I recently caught two scenes of Tron: Legacy over the shoulder of the guy sitting next to me on the subway?

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Riding with Jesus Part II: a badbadbad tour blog

Editor’s Note: Jesús Ángel Garcia, author of “badbadbad,” is blogging his book tour. This is the second installment.

SKYLIGHT BOOKS (Los Angeles, CA)

Big upside to the SoCal summer is how even during the gray haze of “June gloom” many women strip down to sashay the streets in short shorts, short skirts, tanktops, bare midriff blouses, strapless dresses. In L.A., it’s often with the high heels too, leather straps snaking toward sweet sculpted calves. Bondage outerwear never goes out of style, not in the City of Fallen Angels. It’s sad, though, when the beautiful people nosedive on the pavement. That’s what I was thinking while unloading my gear outside Skylight Books where a mad homeless woman lay in the awning’s shade, tickling pretend piano keys on her blistered brown arm. If she couldn’t make her Hollywood dreams come true, what made me think I could?

In truth, I expected nothing from L.A. In fact, I expect nothing from this whole tour. I only plan to truck from town to town, do what I do, see what I see, and let what happens happen. It’s better that way: zero disappointment when you’re not attached to outcomes. More fun as well when you’re wide open to however your work is received.

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CLMP Face Out

1. Reader Elizabeth Streb & poet Danita Geltner 2. Jamie Schwartz, the Managing Director of the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses, & Dan Machlin, a poet and executive editor of Futurepoem Books.

For the past two years, CLMP has been working with five different writers for their program called Face Out. What is Face Out? In short, it highlights the relationship between writers and their publishers, especially emerging writers working with small, indie presses. Last night CLMP hosted a reading and reception at Greenlight Books to celebrate the culmination of this project. Readers and their works were as follows:

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Down the Rabbit Hole

1. Angela Lovell winds a yarn about a burglar with a hilarious punchline. 2. Brian Russ from Backwords sings to flashing buffalo on the Super 8 projected prairie.

In case you never had the pleasure of a butterscotch krimpet in your brown-bag lunch, this is how you unwrap a tastykake:  put the package icing-side down against a smooth surface and rub in a circular motion.  For how long?

“Until you know it’s ready,” Kate Hill Cantrill, curator of the new Rabbit Tales reading series, explained as she unwrapped the package to reveal two sweaty yellow cakes, their icing still in perfect condition.

The audience snacked on said delicacies, along with the grown-up version of a juice box (boxed wine) while different artists shared work that riffed off of the inaugural Rabbit Tale theme, “Flash”, a concept that paired flash-fiction writers, visual projections and live music, and – wait for it – glow sticks.

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REVIEW: The Storm at the Door by Stefan Merrill Block

The Storm at the Door

by Stefan Merrill Block

Random House

368pp/$25

It has been said that fiction writers tell lies to discover the truth. And of course these lies (and these truths) are not random; we choose to illuminate and magnify things that haunt us, obsess us, things that, at first, we don’t understand. We create fictions in order to understand ourselves, the world and our place in it that much more completely.

Stefan Merrill Block takes this idea to the extreme in his new novel, The Storm at the Door. In it, he fills in the blanks of his own history by telling a fictionalized version of what his grandparents, Katherine and Frederick, went through in the 1960s, when his grandfather was institutionalized for bipolar disorder. The story is based in fact: the institution was, in real life, McLean Hospital (renamed in the book as The Mayflower Home for the Mentally Ill), which is known for its list of famous patients, including mathematician John Nash and poets Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell.

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Literary Death Match: Pride Edition

1. LDM ticket: Proceeds from this edition went to The Trevor Project, supported by POZ and Out Media. 2. Eddie Sarfaty, Jason Stuart, and Jason Schneiderman and their judging eyes

In honor of Pride week here in NYC, Literary Death Match put on a Pride edition of its series last night. Show host and executive producer Ann Heatherington was joined by judges Jason Schneiderman (literary merit), Jason Stuart (performance), and Eddie Sarfaty (intangibles).

First up, Frank Anthony Polito read from his novel Drama Queers! Choosing a scene involving a young boy’s first performance at a drag bar in Detroit [*], Polito stepped up for his performance requirement and found himself doing ballet steps across the stage, book in one hand and microphone in the other. Judging Polito, Schneiderman said he was happy that a reference to Emmanuel on Taboo Island and had made it into the book. Jason Stuart, however, chided Polito for pronouncing the word “apropos” incorrectly. Heatherington immediately cut in to remind him to stop being a dick.

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“We don’t have to choose who’s more to blame between writer and subject”: an Interview with Author Gil Reavill

Editor’s Note: This post is part of the writer Caleb J. Ross’s blog tour, Stranger Will Tour for Strange.

When I started writing Stranger Will an embarrassingly long time ago, the world of human remains cleanup was one relatively undocumented. There were a few occupational descriptions online, and I found the occasional survivors forum peppered with personal anecdotes about a daughter having to scrape brains of her suicidal mother from the refrigerator herself because insurance didn’t cover body cleanup. These references were helpful—and added much needed viscera to my novel—but it was Gil Reavill’s Aftermath, Inc. that allowed me to supplement the reactionary emotion with real life context.

Aftermath, Inc. beautifully lures the morbidly curious with the promise of graphically depicted crime scene aftermath, but delivers in addition the story of those charged with cleaning the messes. The subjects of Reavill’s book discuss their work with impressive detachment. While Reavill may be fighting nausea, the Aftermath, Inc. crew would methodically organize what they call a three-step biowash. “Kill it, pull it away from the wall, and deodorize it” (pg. 71). Sometimes, just to keep from getting sick while they worked, the crew might perform a trick called the “mouthwash fix”: saturate a bath towel with mint Listerine and within a day the place will smell like a “crystal clean garden” (pg. 93). Job site discussions might be about where to get lunch that day, or, just as easily, the home life of any of the Aftermath, Inc. employees. Cleaning human stains is a job to these guys. But to readers of Aftermath, Inc., it is an incredibly systematic and honorable profession, deserving of Gil Reavill’s amazing account.

Caleb J. Ross: While researching Stranger Will, Aftermath, Inc. was one of the many books I picked up to help give my story some occupational authority. I would have been happy with a few choice terms like decomp and bioremediation. I came away with not just beautiful terminology, but with a very unexpected human story to those involved in human remains removal. What was the impetus to this project and what did you expect going into it?

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