The Best Loft Party in Manhattan

1. The directors, calling YOU out… 2. The actors.

 

“Welcome to our loft party, Emotive Fruition!” announced one of the program’s directors,  Thomas Dooley. The loft, owned by Bob Holeman, features murals, poems, and last night, a new, radical way to experience the written word. Emotive Fruition is a collaborative performance between actors and poets. Poets submit their work to directors Dooley and Rachel Karpf who then organize selections of the poems and assign them to actors, who are allowed to “own” the text and act it on stage. The effect is similar to hearing four actors perform monologues, but as Dooley states, “poems written for the page become emotional, confessional narratives,” delivered by people who “are trained to bring out the heartbeat in the written word.”

In short, it is both a courageous new way to experience an anthology, and as stated by one of the poems (and its actor), is “hot enough to hurt.”

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REVIEW: The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

The Marriage Plot
Jeffrey Eugenides
FSG
416 pp / $28

In the weeks since its release, Jeffrey Eugenides’s latest novel, The Marriage Plot, has been basking in the glow of a warm welcome. Attention for the book (there’s even a sexpot billboard in Times Square) is well placed: Between The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex, Eugenides is one of the most impressive and important novelists working today.  It’s exciting to see a literary superstar treated at least as well as a reality television star.

But there’s not much left to say about the book. One feels a bit like a college senior, out of her league in Semiotics 101. So, because The Marriage Plot is a book about other books, here’s a review of other reviews:

 

Mitchiko Kakutani, The New York Times
“Looking for Love, by the Book”

Expectations:  Kakutani loved Eugenides’s debut, The Virgin Suicides, with an uncharacteristic fervor. This is a very different book. Willing to bet she’ll be disappointed.

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AURAL PLEASURE — Best American Short Stories at Selected Shorts

1. Isiah Sheffer, host and short lit proselytizer. 2. The dais: Cristin Milioti, Marin Ireland, Brooks and Dylan Baker.

The host was Isaiah Sheffer, the venue was Symphony Space, and the idea was simple: have professional actors from Hollywood and Broadway read great fiction, then broadcast across the nation. Selected Shorts’ formula for success sounds obvious enough, but in reality, most readings these days suffer from piss-poor presentation. Great writers don’t always equal great readers, and after listening to enough mind-numbingly dull readings over the course of my time as an Electric Literature blogger, I’ve developed a deeper appreciation for public speaking skills. When I got the word I had tickets to last night’s Selected Shorts installment, a smorgasbord of short lit organized around Best American Short Stories 2011, my ears were totally relieved.

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Judson Merrill Applies to the Iowa MFA

My literary career is young, but it’s never too early to begin flying the buttresses 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.)

 

Dear Iowa Writers Workshop,

I’ve just mailed in my application to your graduate fiction program. To help you spot mine among the many thousands of manila envelopes, I wrote a pretty amazing piece of flash fiction on the back. It’s about a blind rug-weaver who learns to love again. Happy reading!

Sincerely,

Judson Merrill

PS- I thought you should know that yours is the only program to which I applied. Once you offer me a spot, I’ll be able to accept immediately, which should save all parties some headaches.
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44 Booker Prizes in Brief

44 Booker Prize winners described in 25 words (each) – could anything be more bloggable?

At the B&N Review, Harold Augenbraum, Executive Director of the National Book Foundation, offers up brief summaries of every winner in the Booker/Man Booker Prize’s history. Augenbraum’s summaries are pithy and smart – again instant blog fodder.

Here are some highlights:

1969 – Something to Answer For by P. H. Newby — Who? Shockingly good. Graham Greene crossed with Steve Erickson: Personal and political melt into a man without memory. Appropriate that the Booker was a newbie.

1989 – The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro — I have read three perfect novels in my life, and this is one of them. The British class system as realism, symbolism, and metaphor. Brilliant.

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REVIEW: Luminous Airplanes by Paul La Farge

Luminous Airplanes
Paul La Farge
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
242 pp / $25

 

Located at the intersection of memory and imagination, nostalgia is something that defines linear narrative, the same way a datebook, no matter how accurate, never really recreates the sensory memory of how it felt to live one particular day. In Luminous Airplanes, Paul LaFarge’s inventive new book, nostalgia is a device that allows for both an accurate rendering of the dot-com boom years as well as a compelling narrative drive. LaFarge knows that nostalgia crosses boundaries of time and place and that this, in some sense, is the strength of combining the written text with an “immersive text” online, which allows the reader to experience non-linear time and reinterprets nostalgia for the modern age.

Luminous Airplanes is essentially a coming-of-age tale that moves fluidly from past to present, from San Francisco to New York City to Thebes (a sleepy town in upstate New York). The narrator himself is a failed historian-slash-computer programmer – both professions concerned with reconstructions of a sort – during the halcyon years before 9/11, a time when nostalgia feels particularly piercing. He returns to Thebes to clean out his grandparents’ house, which leads him to seek out testimonial and documentary evidence about his father, whom he never knew, and rekindle a flame with his childhood crush, Yesim. The book itself is presented as a written document produced by the narrator in an attempt to reclaim and rewrite part of his personal history.

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Wilfrid Sheed’s Office Politics Reconsidered

When I picked up Office Politics recently (the last time I read it was a hasty skim twenty five years ago), I had the vague notion that I might write about it because it had some relevance to the contemporary workplace. Work for many people has gotten a lot shittier in the last forty years, and the Work is Hell genre has correspondingly expanded, e.g., novels like Something Happened and Now We Come to the End and TV shows like The Office and movies like Office Space, Company Men and Horrible Bosses.

At first glance, Office Politics resembles many of the novels, shows and movies that reflect the worsening of the contemporary workplace: there is the same atmosphere of exhausted cynicism, dread and bad faith; the faux-genial manipulation; the heavy drinking; overeating; ulcers and other neurotic manifestations of people who toil in bureaucracies. There is also the disruption that comes to the office without warning. But the big difference is that the change comes from within and below, not as it does in our increasingly corporate workplace in which decision-making is often centralized to a remote location, from above and far away: it is the lower-echelon staff of the magazine, not a CEO based in another office or another country, that tries to shake things up.

The office in Office Politics (1966) is a drab, almost windowless collection of partitioned rooms somewhere on the east side of Manhattan.  The walls are peeling, the furniture is falling apart, and the fire exit is blocked by a filing cabinet. The office belongs to a bimonthly liberal magazine called The Outsider, a ‘broken-down opinion machine’, circulation 21,000 and falling.

The Outsider is edited by the British expatriate Gilbert Twining, who, one of his underlings sourly notes, attended a finishing school where he “took the tripos in self-satisfaction, poise and the thrill of being me.” His ascendancy derives from his ability to intimidate his rebellious but easily cowed staff with his Englishness and his unerring instinct for their weak points. His raised eyebrow, we are told is ‘a beautiful piece of miniature engineering.’

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LDM at Drom in NYC

1. Nozlee Samadzadeh, an editor at The Morning News, Miranda Popkey, who’s an editorial assistant at FSG, & reader/excellent speller Emily Gould. 2. Ben Greenman is doing very important, literary merit judge-type work.
 

 

Last night was Literary Death Match time in New York again, and I was stoked to head over to Drom in the East Village, which is LDM’s new venue. I’d never been to Drom before, and I was pretty impressed by it– large yet still maintaining an intimacy, fancy chandeliers hanging from the high ceilings, a waitstaff that weren’t nazis about their 2-items-to-sit-at-a-table policy. Definitely a far cry from some of the liquor-dispensing venues that also sit on Avenue A, since it didn’t smell like cheap beer, vomit, OR disinfectant. Alphabet City’s moving on up!

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Nocturnes at Franklin Park

1. Readers Scott McClanahan & Blake Butler, just chillin in the VIP section at Franklin Park. Is that a Swans shirt I see peeking out from Butler’s button-down? 2. Poet Abigail Welhouse, who is a publicist for OR Books, & Franklin Park alum Eliza Snelling.

 

Franklin Park Reading Series went nocturnal for this month’s edition in order to celebrate the release of Blake Butler’s new nonfiction book Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia, which came out yesterday. Five readers shared their thoughts on the theme and the results were everything from eloquent to strange to hilarious.

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Holden Caulfield + Esther Greenwood = <3

Some literary figures have been adored, even loved, for years – just listen to the creepy ways people talk about Harry Potter characters.

But a post over at Flavorwire asks which characters long to shed the pages of their own books and sneak between the covers of another.

The list features some classics like Alex Portnoy (from Portnoy’s Complaint)  and Myrna Minkoff (of A Confederacy of Dunces). And of Holden and Esther’s romantic aptitude, Flavorwire claims “Esther’s condition is much like Holden’s, although, ahem, way less phony.”

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