From P-Town… What Do You Want to Know?

1. Portland has a Broadway, and the Schnitz lights it up. 2. Wine can be taken into the auditorium if it resembles a soda. 3. Jeanne and Rosemary had tickets that looked different, but they’ve been sitting in the same front row seats forever. 

  

 

Last night, the Portland Arts & Lectures season brought Stacy Schiff to the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall where she was accidentally awarded the Nobel Prize during her introduction. Portland is now her favorite city. She said so, at least twice.

Everything Schiff says counts. As a biographer, she wants to know too much without saying too much. When discussing her writing process, she mentioned creating roughly 100 pages of consolidated research for each chapter in a biography. She’d rather go to cities you’ve never heard of rather than write, so take a guess at the amount of research that gets consolidated.

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Meanwhile, in California: Norman Rush Discusses “Subtle Bodies”

1. I wanted to know what she was reading, but she looked peaceful and I didn’t want to interrupt her. Nina, the female lead in Rush’s forthcoming novel, has a compulsion where she must know “exactly” what other people are reading. “She didn’t like people who covered the books they were reading with homemade paper sleeves. She saw it as a challenge.” 2. A jazz trio played before the reading, which was a first for me. Simpson thanked them graciously, adding she once taught the cellist in a Chekhov class. This felt fitting, as Rush named the Russian realist as one of his major influences, along with James Joyce, Dostoevsky, and Joseph Conrad.

 

On Tuesday night, I headed out to The Hammer at UCLA to hear Norman Rush read from and discuss his forthcoming book, Subtle Bodies, with his wife, Elsa Rush, and author Mona Simpson. As I took one of the remaining seats in a room buzzing with dedicated fans and mellow jazz, I wasn’t expecting to hear some of the most valuable insights on writing I’d ever heard, but that’s exactly what happened.  I felt like I got another piece of the map.  I am new to Norman Rush’s work, which Mona Simpson compared to eclipses– things that “arrive rarely, but assert themselves massively.”  His first book, Whites, a collection of short stories, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and his following novel, Mating, won the National Book Award.  Simpson dotted the author’s loaded timeline to trace the path of his success.  At age eighteen he was imprisoned as a conscientious objector to the Korean War, from 1978-1983 he and his wife, Elsa, served as country directors in Botswana for the Peace Corps, and at age fifty-three he published Whites, though he had been writing novels since he was a teenager.  Simpson said she loved writers like Rush whose knowledge comes from their “burning mass of experiences, rather than a ball of facts.”

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REVIEW: Ghost Lights by Lydia Millet

Ghost Lights
Lydia Millet
W.W. Norton & Co.
256 pp / $24.95

A question for the gentlemen – what would you do if your wife was cheating on you?  Would you confront her, raising a domestic scene worthy of COPS? Or, would you keep quiet, letting the betrayal turn into a lifetime of passive aggression?  If your name is Hal Lindley, and you’re the protagonist of Lydia Millet’s new novel Ghost Lights, your reaction would fall somewhere in between: a drunken offer to rescue your unfaithful partner’s obnoxious boss from a tropical jungle.

Let’s take a few steps back.  Hal works for the IRS and has settled into a complacent suburban life with Susan, his ex-hippie of a wife.  She works for Thomas Stern, or “T.” as he prefers to be called, who vanished during a trip to Belize.  Since T.’s disappearance, things start to fall apart for Hal, particularly after he catches Susan sleeping with the young sexy paralegal at her office.  Later, Hal gets a little too libation-happy at his daughter’s dinner party, and as the conversation moves to the subject of T., he blurts out that he will fly to Belize in search of the mercurial businessman.

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REVIEW: Pulphead by John Jeremiah Sullivan

Pulphead by John Jeremiah SullivanPulphead
John Jeremiah Sullivan
FSG
384 pp / $16

About once a year, you find a book that you can unimpeachably recommend to everyone, like Cloud Atlas or Beat the Reaper. This year, and just in time for holiday gifts and small talk, John Jeremiah Sullivan has given us that book in Pulphead.

A collection of essays and long-form journalism published, over the years, in GQ, The Paris Review, Oxford American, Ecotone, and Harper’s, the book touches on topics as diverse as these publications: Axl Rose’s best dance, the unexplained giant ocean noise known as the Bloop, a tragedy in Sullivan’s family, the Tea Party, and the quintessential Real World bro, among others.

But there’s a common thread connecting the touching personal essays for The Paris Review with the sexy, weed-soaked assignments for GQ: Each is a lesson in generosity.

To be a great magazine journalist, you have to be likeable, both in person and in print. The former because you have to convince strangers to spend long hours with you and share their stories. And you’re starting out at a deficit—everyone knows journalists have a knack for making decent people look stupid. Some journalists overcome this by stealth, like Joan Didion; Sullivan does it by being a good guy.

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Meanwhile, In California… Justin Chin at City Lights

1. City Lights’ Peter Maravelis introduces the program. “Justin Chin has a new book—that is an event in itself.” 2. Justin Chin reading from 98 Wounds upstairs at City Lights. “All hope suffers from its own insufficiency.”

 

 

Last night, Justin Chin read from his new book 98 Wounds at City Lights. It’s the fourth book Manic D Press has published of Justin’s work and the first since Gutted, which received the 2007 Thom Gunn Award for Poetry.

“Justin Chin has a new book—that is an event in itself,” said City Lights’ Peter Maravelis in his introduction to the poet. Michelle Tea, Ali Liebegott, and Beth Pickens from RADAR Productions were also there, all smiles, eager to appreciate the new work. Tea told me RADAR helped fund the completion of the book through a grant, and I watched Justin sign at least five books for Pickens.

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Getting Dirty! Dirty! Dirty! at The Museum of Sex with Mike Edison

1. Doctor of Cultural Studies Kristina Pearstein, who I met last year at the Banned Books Party, & Philly Abe, who is a “minor cultural icon.” 2. Micha Warren, a photographer, Mickey Finn, a keyboardist (he plays for Left Banke and Boss Hog, and also backed up Edison during his reading), & writer/New Bomb Turks and Livids frontman Eric Davidson.

 

I got invited to Mike Edison’s release party for his new book, Dirty! Dirty! Dirty!, which was held at The Museum of Sex last night. My thought process went something like this: Sex + Books + Party = Done. And then I got a packet in the mail with the information on the book, and it included 3-D glasses for the book’s trailer, which sent me straight from Excited to Smitten. I mean, all things involving sex should be 3-D, right?

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SOLITARY – A Public Space Issue 14 Launch Party

1. Chalk sign protected from the rain :( 2. John Haskell talking about homemade East German quince cake. 3. Geoff chillin’ hard.
  

 

Last night thirty-some-odd Brooklynites trekked to BookCourt through the wet and the cold to celebrate the release of A Public Space’s 14th issue.  Featuring readings from contributors Teju Cole (Open City) and John Haskell (American Purgatorio), the issue meditated on its theme of the solitary walker in the city. When I walked into the back room I was stoked to see a huge projector screen pulled down next to the podium. I’ve noticed that multimedia readings, both audio and visual, have been getting more popular lately, and they’ve been consistently awesome (watch this man). After ten minutes of an idle bright blue on the screen, someone pulled up Lydia Davis’ Twitter feed and the ten or so early birds pretended not to gawk at Ms. Davis. I flipped through some of the new Pearl Jam book and sipped on a Stella, and felt maybe I had looked too long at a color photo of Bill Clinton seemingly enamored with a serious-looking Eddie Vedder. I noted that five wine bottles had been dusted before introductions were made.

LITERARY ARTIFACTS: Damn the Man, Save St. Mark’s!

Each month in the Literary Artifacts space, writer Kristopher Jansma writes about his encounters with rare books, writerly memorabilia, and other treasures in New York City and around the world, hoping to discover how the internet age is changing the face of literature as we know it.

This week, St. Mark’s Bookshop announced that despite the massive outcry from the reading public, the store’s Cooper Union landlords have not agreed to lower their monthly rent in order to help save the independent bookstore. The news came after weeks of furious blogging, tweeting, and Facebooking on the part of readers throughout New York City. A petition to save the bookshop has gathered 43,825 signatures as of the time of this posting. High-profile activist Michael Moore dedicated much of his October 3rd book-signing to speaking out about how St. Mark’s is actually the price we are being asked to pay for Wall Street’s greed, and in recent weeks, members of Occupy Wall Street have made stops at the store to help rally against the landlords. Bookshop owners, Bob Contant and Terry McCoy, say that it remains to be seen if the recent surge in customer support will be enough to keep the bookshop’s doors open.

Like many other New York City readers, I have followed the saga of St. Mark’s closely, and when the news first broke, I signed the petition, forwarded it to all my friends, watched Michael Moore’s speech on YouTube, and immediately set out to 3rd Avenue and 9th Street to buy a book. Good for me!

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OCCUPY WALL ST.: We’re Getting On and the Zero Emission Book Project

Lucky, prior to Waiting for Godot by the 99% Theater Company

At 11:00AM On Friday, October 14th, I sat in the back of a casting room in Manhattan, listening to actors audition for a film called Family Games, which I co-wrote, and which four days before had officially entered preproduction. Earlier that morning, Mayor Bloomberg had attempted to evict the Occupy Wall St. protesters from Liberty Square in the financial district, on the pretext that the grounds had become unsanitary. Brookfield Properties, which technically owns the plaza, planned to clear the demonstrators and their tents so the park could be “decontaminated.” Occupy Wall Street’s counter-action was simple: if Brookfield Properties was arriving at 7AM, an OWS cleaning crew would work all night to make sure there wasn’t a mark on the granite, or a shred of paper outside a trashcan; the 99%, so they hoped, wouldn’t get displaced on a technicality.

I had planned to attend the clean-up before auditions, but instead I went to a coffee shop and worked on a script re-write. I don’t think I realized how heavily my inaction was weighing on my conscience until one of the actors scheduled to read for us came in looking as if he hadn’t slept. “Sorry if I seem a little exhausted,” he said. “I was up all night sweeping Liberty Square.” I glanced down at his headshot and résumé. He’d just finished a play on Broadway.

Having, out of guilt, avoided the news all morning, I asked him if they’d staved off eviction. “We sure as hell did,” he said. “3,000 people turned up 6AM for a standoff with the city. Bloomberg couldn’t do a thing about it. We had the place sparkling by sunrise.”

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Getting More Rooster at LDM in San Diego

1. LDM champion Heather Fowler, reading about COCKS, and the all-male judges, Kyle Ray, Jim Ruland, & Patrick Eugene Stewart. 2. Ryan Bradford, getting all vampiric. 

 

On Tuesday, I ventured to the third annual San Diego Literary Death Match, which was put on with the help of So Say We All, a non-profit artist collective. The show was held at Space 4 Art in Downtown San Diego, and it certainly lives up to its name. Inside, there is ample space for your art. They also have an outdoor stage and seating area, which provides space for your art. You can smoke in the outdoor section whilst you are enjoying the show. However, this does not always happen in San Diego due to people being “assholes” about “lung cancer.” As someone who enjoys burning the insides of their lungs and throat, I was very excited about this. There are also a couple of shopping carts that have been converted into chairs. So not only are they mobile, but they have storage space for all your crap!

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