Judson Merrill Goes to Career Day

My literary career is young, but it’s never too early to begin hoarding canned food in the panic room 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.)

 

Miss Audrey Penniwether,

Bianca recently informed me that you’re having a career week at her school and some of the parents will be coming in to talk to the kids about their line of work. As you likely know, I am a novelist and, despite working in a very challenging professional landscape, I’ve had some success. I think it’s important that, in addition to accountants and firemen, the children hear from someone in a creative industry. So I am volunteering my time to come in and speak with your students. Also, I’m writing a pretty hard-hitting novel about a first grade teacher and would love to pick your brain. Thursday is the only day that works for me.

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Granta: “Horror” at B&N with Don DeLillo and Paul Auster

1. John Freeman, writer, literary critic and editor of Granta. 2. Paul Auster. He signed my copy of Sunset Park.
 

 

Ascending the massive complex of the Union Square Barnes & Noble is not unlike reading a Don DeLillo novel. Somewhere along the third escalator ride, symbols of hysterical consumerism begin to reveal themselves and it’s like you found a pair of the X-ray sunglasses from John Carpenter’s “They Live.” Then, all of a sudden, you’re ashamed of your Barnes & Noble membership card. Then you hear a voice over a loudspeaker giving instructions. Then a security guard directs you to a line, where you join others who will also buy some books.

 

This event celebrated the celebrated literary magazine Granta. The new issue, edited by John Freeman (the reading’s host), features stories by DeLillo and Paul Auster, as well as some other faves like Joy Williams and STEPHEN KING (the issue’s theme is ‘horror’). They sold mad copies, I was standing by the register.

LITERARY ARTIFACTS: “THIS IS A FREE BOOK”

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.

What exactly is a book worth?

The Oprah-stamped and Pulitzer-winning novel Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides will cost you around $15 these days at most brick and mortar booksellers.  On Amazon you can order it for $10.20 and pay for shipping, or you can download instantly it to your Kindle for $9.99.  There are 37 different used copies listed on Amazon for only $4, shipped.  At The Strand in Manhattan, the same will run you $7.50.  You can borrow it, of course, from the New York Public Library – but you’ll have to wait.  Currently, all 34 copies owned by the New York Public Library are out, as are the 5 eBook copies recently made available for rental.

Only every reader knows that a book’s worth is not the same as its cost.  We’ve all paid too much for an unreadable dud, just as we’ve all grabbed lifelong favorites for just a buck or two.

But what if you could your own pristine copy of Middlesex for absolutely nothing?

To find out, I journeyed to Baltimore, to a little place called The Book Thing where Eugenides’s novel and thousands of others are always absolutely, 100% free.

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From P-Town… Fiction on Two Wheels

1. In one corner, Powell’s of the Pearl District. In the opposing corner, a juggler. 2. A few seats left in the Pearl Room, minutes before the reading began.

 

Evan P. Schneider read from A Simple Machine, Like the Lever in the Burnside Powell’s last Tuesday, on a night that messed with the accuracy of street jugglers, caused street signs to tremble, and prompted many bike commuters to ask someone for a ride.

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ORGY – Independent Press Night at The Old American Can Factory

1. Jimmy Newborg (fiction forthcoming in Art Faccia), Julia Kayser, & Holly Hilliard from Hillsboro, Ohio, all fiction writers and the interns for One Story. 2. Zach Pace, editorial staff at Akashic, and Lonely Christopher sharing an intimate moment.
 
4th Avenue is a wind tunnel, and as my umbrella fought to survive in the rain and wind on my way to Independent Press Night at the Old American Can Factory in Gowanus last Tuesday night, turning onto 3rd Street felt like I was stepping into a parallel reality. In this inconspicuous building down the way from a Staples, five–FIVE!–independent presses with serious street cred publish stellar literature. At the risk of melodrama, the prospect of hearing work representing Akashic Books, Archipelago Books, One Story, Ugly Duckling Presse and Habitus: A Diaspora Journal + snacks felt a little like a haven.

 

The reading was held in the Issue Project Room of the OACF, which is a long room with a lofted ceiling and low couches that pretty much scream sex. The building — which was built in 1886 and manufactured cans — now houses over 200 people working in creative industries. This isn’t a factory where ideas are manufactured. Here, the vehicles of these ideas are assembled with verve. The room was filled to capacity by the time the readings started, and the energy in the room was palpable: everyone buzzed with excitement and love for the work these five presses do and what literature provides. To experience it in one night seemed like a wet dream.

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REVIEW: Zone One by Colson Whitehead

Every age seems to get the monsters that reflect its deepest anxieties.

In the Late Victorian era, an age of sexual repression and widespread, often fatal sexual diseases, it was the vampire and the werewolf. In the Fifties , when our  two biggest fears were nuclear annihilation and Communist takeover there were body snatchers and a series of monsters created by atomic radiation. In the late Sixties and early Seventies, at a time when it seemed like our society was abandoning traditional religion and losing its moral compass, it was the devil (Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, The Omen).

In the new millennium, teenagers may be vampire-crazy, but the monster of choice seems to be the zombie. In the last ten years, we have had remakes of Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, 28 Days Later and its sequel, 28 Weeks Later, zombie comedies like Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland, even erotic zombie movies. The biggest hit on cable is The Walking Dead. And now Colson Whitehead, the author of rarefied novels like The Intuitionist and John Henry Days, tries his hand at the genre with the novel Zone One.

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Three Muppet Conflicts & How They Were Resolved

Torture! Muppet-Haters! Hurt Feelings!

The Muppets comes out today. Last month, an article full of undisclosed sources came out in The Hollywood Reporter saying many long-time Muppets performers and crew were unhappy with it. I’m gonna see it on Friday, but a part of me wishes we could just go back to the good ol’ days… the Classic Muppet years, when everything functioned smoothly and harmoniously.

Or did it?

Drum roll, please

In 1977’s Emmet Otter’s Jug Band Christmas, there is a scene in which puppeteer Frank Oz loses his mind. Jim Henson had storyboarded a perfect bit of movie magic: a drum must roll out the door, hit some fire buckets, bounce down the steps, and then collapse in front of them, rock around on its rim until the clatter turns into a loud vibration, and then stop. In the test, they got it, “Just what Jim wanted,” in puppeteer Jerry Nelson’s words.

But reproducing that perfect percussive brr-rr-rr-smack drum roll was hard, two-hundred-thirty-three-takes hard. Oz and Nelson had to be on set for every take, had to perform in character, their “heads” “watching” the roll, following it with the puppet’s eyes, and then delivering their lines. Then they started to improvise.

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Roberto Bolaño and ZOMBIES!

Jane Austen isn’t the only undead game in town. There’s Zone One, the new novel from Colson Whitehead that’s been getting so much coverage it’s spreading across outlets like, well, a zombie contagion. And now Granta has released a “black, white, and blood-red animated graphic novel inspired by Roberto Bolaño’s short story ‘The Colonel’s Son.’”

The story, which is available in Granta 117, the star-studded horror issue, follows the “reckless adventures of Colonel Reynolds, his son and the girl he loves as they make their way through a treacherous landscape laced with bullets and monsters.”

Before you disregard this as “genre fiction” (which you should stop doing anyway), take a cue from Colson’s recent interview with the Atlantic:

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Meanwhile, in California… The Nervous Breakdown at Book Soup

1.Lenore Zion kicking off the reading with her essay, “Community Service,” where she explores and upends the guilt ridden magnetism of social work.  On her retirement facility foster child: “You tell him everything.  Everything…That you’ve always lied about your biggest emotional trauma…then you cry…later you stand up and show him your breasts.” 2. Ben Loory reading from his short story collection, Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day.    He feels like a rich, hopeful cross between Russell Edson and Kelly Link– imagining fantastic landscapes only to reveal what’s most human about them. 3. Greg Olear, the editor of TNB, reading from his novel Fathermucker.  Describing a play date gone sour– “Iris growls, ‘I don’t like Beatrice and Brooke.  I want to go home.’  What he’s learned: if your child wants to end the play date, what you do is end the fucking play date.”

  

Across LA, Friday night crowds were driven indoors by gloomy, scattered showers clearing the way for Fall, and in West Hollywood’s prolific Book Soup bookstore and magazine stand, it was standing room only.  People finally had reason to wear their black coats with their black pants and I was feeling right at home with these fans of, and contributors to, The Nervous Breakdown, as a day rarely passes where I don’t gaze long into some cruel, shame-filled abyss.  Founded in 2006 by fiction author Brad Listi, TNB is an online magazine and literary community that posts and reviews a wide variety of contemporary art, including work by Mindy Nettifee, Buddy Wakefield, and The Outlet contributor Jesus Angel Garcia.  The readers were some of The Nervous Breakdown’s hardest working –and most well-reviewed — monthly contributors, and subjects of the evening included an old, nose-less leper, a skydiving moose, farts, and an at-home dad wrestling with toddler rage.

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Interview with Brad Listi of the “Other People with Brad Listi” Podcast

A few weeks ago, I first listened to a new literary podcast: Other People with Brad Listi, which I found through Melissa Febos‘ Facebook profile. She was interviewed on it, as well as other people that I admire and am interested in: Victoria Patterson, Megan Boyle, Steve Almond, Emma Straub, and more. While I expected the podcast to be interesting I was blown away, finding it downright enjoyable — and now I’m hooked. In a world full of distractions — where almost everything I encounter is practically begging me not to write — Brad Listi‘s podcast has made me hit the pause button on my iTunes, blow off social obligations, and sit my ass down in a chair and write. The show is funny, insightful, entertaining, affirming, and, more than anything — inspiring. It easily one of the best podcasts on the web. Because I am now such a fan I wanted to ask Brad a few questions, and he kindly obliged.

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