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Letters from a Young Whatever #6: Living a Life with Ardor

People will say that MFAs are bullshit. You don’t become a good writer by going straight from college to graduate school, by sitting around tables and talking about books. People say that MFAs teach us the “correct” way to write: how words are supposed to sound, what details we’re supposed to use, the proper shape of a plot, the way an ending’s supposed to feel. People say that MFAs produce writers who produce the same old boring story.

I remember reading some article, shortly before I began my MFA program—I think it was in Poets & Writers—which talked about how writers have this reputation of being crazy and drunk. The author of the article was saying her grad program was the opposite—that they all stayed in during the weekends and wore braces at the keyboard to prevent carpal tunnel.

Review: Iris Has Free Time, by Iris Smyles

A darkly comic, affecting portrait of a 20-something with literary ambitions

Some stories set in New York seem so instantly familiar that they might as well be their own genre, as rigidly coded as the western, or the Gothic horror tale. You know the New York story I’m talking about: jaded but immature youngsters want to be artists, care very deeply about seeming to care very deeply about exhibits and plays, and date one another neurotically—all presented in a satirical tone.

Iris Smyles’s Iris Has Free Time follows a young woman named Iris through her 20s as she does many of the things one expects a 20-something-year-old New Yorker to do in a novel like this: she adapts to college life—roommate, academics, the city; she interns at The New Yorker; she works on an autobiographical novel and hunts half-heartedly for a “real” job; she dates a slew of eccentric, self-centered guys; she attends a “humanities” graduate program and teaches freshmen; she starts a literary journal, blogs, and writes a sex column; she travels to Europe with a boyfriend. And she drinks, and drinks, and drinks.

Review: Idiopathy, by Sam Byers

A debut novel portrays the derangements of modern life with blistering satire and gallows humor 

As its title indicates, Idiopathy is about what bloody idiots people are. While delivering one laugh-out-loud zinger after another (many of them too raunchy to be quoted here), Byers lampoons, with excoriating wit, the hash we have made of modern life, and the hash it has made of us.

In the English city of Norwich—which may bring to mind Slough from the UK version of The Office—Katherine, Daniel and Nathan compulsively reject the promises of potential intimacy that keep rearing up between them. Meanwhile, Bovine Idiopathic Entrancement Syndrome is spreading through Britain’s cattle population. The cows now stare, motionless, into space; and halfway through the book, the disease has spread to sheep. The implication being, we’re next.

The novel is a triple portrait, told in smoothly rotating points of view. Daniel and Katherine are ex-lovers who fight ceaselessly and viciously. Nathan, their erstwhile drug dealer, used to provide a point of triangulation for them. Now that Nathan, newly sober, is out of rehab, their old dynamic doesn’t hold, but none of them can walk away.

The Lit List: May 6-12

The Lit List is a sometimes-weekly compendium of New York’s finest literary events and readings. Something we should know about? Email dish@electricliterature.com

Monday, May 6

Ben Greenman launches his novel The Slippage at Franklin Park with Sam Lipsyte, Touré, Claire Vaye Watkins, Amelia Grey. You might have heard of them.

Sackett Street folks Nick Dybek, Julie Sarkissian, Amy Shearn and Jill Di Donato read to the masses at Book Court. 

Shut the Fuck Up–It’s Opening Night

How Monday’s Opening Night Reading for PEN’s World Voices Festival of International Literature began: Salman Rushdie walked on stage and said super eloquent things like, “The other meaning of courage is real artistic risk… When we try and find new ways of saying things.”

Then a man with an anti-government sign yelled out, “You were for the war in Iraq!” He held up his smartphone, “I have it right here in front of me! A war based on lies that killed a million people!”

“The only lies being told here is by you, Sir,” Rushdie said. “As president of this organization, I led this organization against that war, so you can shut the fuck up. It doesn’t matter how you shout, sir, it doesn’t make what you say correct. That is the technique of the bully throughout history—to try and shout other people down.”

With those words, and Rushdie’s cold-eyed stare hardened by assassination attempts and knighthood, the man shut the fuck up.

The Lit List: April 29-May 5

The Lit List is a sometimes-weekly compendium of New York’s finest literary events and readings. Something you think we should know about? Email dish@electricliterature.com

Monday, April 29

Slice contributors play exquisite corpse at Housing Works. Theme? Obsession. What will happen? C’est mystère … More informations here.

PEN World Voices begins with just a few notables: A. Igoni Barrett, David Frakt, Darrel Vandeveld, Joy Harjo, Jamaica Kincaid, Ursula Krechel, Earl Lovelace, Vaddey Ratner, Mikhail Shishkin, Najwan Darwish and host Baratunde Thurston. Cooper Union for $20/25 (member/nonmember)

CELEBRITY BOOK REVIEW: Art dealer Larry Gagosian on Matthew Specktor’s “American Dream Machine”

Oh, I can tell you about the American dream. The son of Armenian immigrants, I spent the early 1970s living in a friend’s walk-in closet on Venice Beach, working as a valet because I’d been fired from my secretary position at William Morris. And then I started selling posters beachside, except I already had an eye for added value. I sold mine framed.

Today, I’m at the head of the most expansive art enterprise in the world. So when Peter Brant suggested that I read a book about a man with a journey similar to mine (from arriviste, to demigod, to whatever it is I am now), I listened. I mean, the man is married to Stephanie Seymour. He’s got pretty good taste.

Reader as Endangered Species: Renata Adler at the Center for Fiction

At the Center for Fiction, on the occasion of the rerelease of Renata Adler‘s novels Speedboat and Pitch Dark (in beautiful new editions by the New York Review of Books), Adler speaks not quite anecdotally, not quite aphoristically – and a crowd of readers and writers, apparently an endangered species, crane delicate necks, laugh well-timed laughs.

1. “Do you all write? It looks like you all write.”  2. Richard Avedon’s iconic 1978 shot of Adler in Saint Martin

“Maybe we are all the last generation of readers, and writers too,” Adler says, but I hope she doesn’t believe it. I must concede that she’s certainly at least considering it – like her narrators, Adler will not say what she doesn’t mean.

Every few minutes, Adler checks in – should she keep going with this weird hybrid thing, this reading, this conversation? Emphatically the audience says yes. We nod. We laugh. She continues. The books, those weird hybrid things we keep saying yes to.

1. First you await Adler’s reading (anticipation!)                   2.  Then you await Adler’s signing (contemplation!)

“Pitch Dark has more of a plot,” she says, “but people don’t seem to like it better.” The bits taken from life, she says, are often ridiculous, and the made-up ones are not unlikely to have happened. For instance – a passage from Pitch Dark, about Penelope, who couldn’t have been doing all that weaving and unweaving, not really: “we’ve known ever since we learned, not what love us, but what reporting is and what public figures are … how much more than we were ever taught to expect is really lies.”

Outside what was once the largest circulating library in the United States, night settles. We line up for autographs, all carry an image of an eternal braid outside with us, determined not to be the last.

***

–Elina Mishuris is in a perpetual state of cat-sitting.

Photographs provided by the Center for Fiction

Meanwhile, in California… The LA Times Festival of Books

1. Attack of the book nerds. 2. Tod Goldberg wonders if these things are giant breast pumps.

 

Over 150,000 people converged this past weekend at USC’s campus in downtown Los Angeles for the 18th annual LA Times Festival of Books. A two-day affair, the event featured food trucks, exhibitors, family fun (apparently Lisa Loeb is doing the children’s music thing these days), and readings and panels with hundreds of writers and industry insiders. The weather was sunny and the crowd was varied; there were the expected literary hipsters, sweater-wearing book nerds, and sweaty genre-writer wanna-be’s wearing hats that said WRITER (“Finally, a reason to wear my writer cap!”), but there were also plenty of people who would look more natural holding a meth pipe than a book. God bless LA.

Review: A Thousand Pardons, by Jonathan Dee

A novel confronting the politics of apology, and the obstacles to redemption 

On the surface, the plot of A Thousand Pardons is not unfamiliar: the breadwinning husband of a well-to-do household, mired in ennui, bursts into a fit of destructive, albeit temporary, insanity that lays waste to his home life. Drastic upheaval; everyone changes. Like its predecessor, The Privileges, Dee’s latest novel is about the disintegration and tenuous re-construction of a family, bristling with keen observations, sharply realistic dialogue, and propulsive sentences in which even mundane events are freighted with tension.

When a novel that plumbs the domestic sphere as a way to address larger societal issues is written by a woman, we call it a kitchen-sink drama; when it’s written by a man, we nominate it for the Pulitzer. But never mind; that’s not Dee’s fault—and anyhow, the book’s domestic minuet (and its subplot about a movie star who may, or may not, have done something unspeakable) is only a delivery system for a scathing indictment of the lack of personal responsibility that Dee sees as currently rotting every timber of Western life.