In 2001, the Young Lions Fiction Award was founded by Ethan Hawke, Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, Rick Moody, and Hannah McFarland as a way to encourage and celebrate the work of a young author (“young,” in this case, is defined as under 35). This year, the nominees included Teju Cole (Open City), Benjamin Hale (The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore), Ben Lerner (Leaving the Atocha Station), Karen Russell (Swamplandia!), and Jesmyn Ward (Salvage the Bones). The awards ceremony was hosted by actor Billy Crudup (from Jesus’ Son, omgz!) at the main branch of the New York Public Library on 42nd Street on Monday night.

1. The nominees’ books. Not pictured: Swamplandia!. (Someone must have had a premonition that this title would win and thus snagged the copy off my table.) 2. Hale, Lerner, & Cole, proving that if you want to be a male who is nominated for such awards, you have to own a pair of thick-rimmed, black eyeglasses. 3. Crudup reading for Cole. What a pal. 

Crudup opened the evening by telling us that normally Hawke hosts the event, but he had to be out of the country. Hawke, Crudup said, is able to speak “eloquently and passionately” about art, but as Steve Martin once said, “Some people have a way with words, and some not have way.” Instead, Crudup thought he should get straight to the program.

1. Benjamin Hale with writer Katie Assef & Assef’s husband. 2. Katherine, Sabrina, Julie, Kathrina, and Daniel, rapt. 

Crudup read excerpts of Cole, Lerner, and Hale’s novels, and writer Sloan Crosley (How Did You Get This Number) read excerpts from Russell and Ward’s. All of the excerpts were from the beginning of the books: Cole’s featured a reflection on seeing New York City from an airplane, Russell’s of Hilola Bigtree swimming in front of a crowd with alligators, Hale’s opened with Littlemore explaining the experiment that indicated he was an extraordinary chimp, Ward’s with the storm that shaped her book, and Lerner’s with the scene in the museum of the profound experience of art. It was nice to see that a good book begins with a good beginning, one that immerses the reader quickly and wholly into the world that they are about to submit themselves to. The two readers did a wonderful job of breathing a different life into the work, which was an especially interesting experience for me, since I had heard all the authors except for Ward read their own work before, and I could at least vaguely recall the differences between the two readings. Crudup adorably mispronounced a few words, and this managed to endear him, and his reading of the works, further to me.

1. Crosely reading for Ward. 2. Marx, speaking on the virtues of fiction. 3. Ken channeling Karen. 

After the readings, the New York Public Library president, Tony Marx, offered up a few words. He told us about the Young Lions program, which is “a special membership group for library supporters in their 20s and 30s.” We learned about the award itself, which is designed to encourage writers at an important time in their careers. And Marx spoke on the importance of fiction, which allows us to “think about the unexpected.” And then the winner was announced: Karen Russell. She was in Germany and unable to make it to the event, but her little brother Ken graciously accepted the award and read her speech, which reflected the eloquence and humor that can be found in Swamplandia!.

Russell, by way of Ken, told us that her first nomination, for her 2009 book, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, had given her so much courage and hope, and this enabled her to write her novel. She said that she was honored to be nominated alongside Cole, Hale, Lerner, and Ward, and hoped they would continue writing together until they were “wheezy donkeys.” At one point during the speech, Ken read, “Ken, you are the best brother and my favorite writer,” which caused Marx to briefly interrupt and say, “Does it really say that?”

After the ceremony, the Young Lions, the nominees, and the rest of the crowd celebrated with a deliciously open bar, under the “flattering light” (Russell’s words) of the New York Public Library’s Celeste Bartos Forum.

To join the Young Lions program, please go here.

Open City
by Teju Cole

The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore
by Benjamin Hale

Leaving the Atocha Station
by Ben Lerner

Swamplandia! (Vintage Contemporaries)
by Karen Russell

Salvage the Bones
by Jesmyn Ward

***

–Julia Jackson is the editor of Electric Dish. To find her on the internet, please go here.

 

 

 

 

My Only Wife
by Jac Jemc

Asunder
by Robert Lopez

Blueprints for Building Better Girls
by Elissa Schappell

***
   
–Ryan Chang is from Orange County, CA and lives in Brooklyn. He is staff writer at The Outlet, and his fiction and essays have appeared in Art Faccia and Thought Catalog. He is in the internet here and here.

I came for the inspiration and stayed for the revelations. Sound like church? Yes indeed! An East Village kind of church: the St. Mark’s Bookshop.

The place was just as I remembered it from my childhood: full of fascinating books about REAL people, new avant-garde magazines, and the pervasive sense of safety. The safety, the coziness of St. Mark’s, is provided by its championing of the underground, leftist, bohemian village world of old—the last vestiges of which are disappearing day by day.

“A 7-Eleven has opened up on St. Marks Place,” said Sarah Schulman, opening up her talk. “That is what we are here to talk about today.”

It felt just like an organizing meeting, and indeed– Sarah Schulman’s new book walks hand-in-hand with activism. The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination brings to light the effects of one of New York’s deliberately ignored tragedies: the AIDS crisis.

3. Ittai and Hugh, loving the reading.  4. Sarah Schulman, signing.

Because the AIDS epidemic did indeed affect New York’s rapid gentrification of the ‘80s and ‘90s: from 1981 to 1996, 81,542 people died from AIDS in New York City; many had rent-stabilized apartments in the East and West Villages, Chelsea, the Lower East Side, and Harlem—the very neighborhoods that were to experience the greatest upheaval from gentrification. It’s no coincidence that the partners of those who died from AIDS were not able to inherit their property, or their apartments, resulting in the destabilization of the rent, removal of the partner or other roommates, and subsequent moving-in of the new class of tenant: the children of suburban America that could afford the exorbitant new rent.

The problem in this gentrification was not the race, class, or economic status of these new tenants, but rather that their coming—their replacement of the previous tenants—fomented the erasure of the people that used to live there. The new tenants had new values: comfortability over freedom, and consumerism over ideas—particularly political ideas.

“Facing difference, embracing uncomfortability, that’s what city life was about,” said Schulman, who spoke like an experienced organizer: compelling, and straight to the point—making every sentence count. “We’re all living together in front of each other, and out of that we create something new and beautiful.”

Amen.

It’s the old way artists once filled these now-gentrified neighborhoods. The call to do this once more was the inspiration of the reading/meeting.

The revelation came in beginning to realize what was lost with the death of the early AIDS victims: a whole generation was wiped out, erased, and their radical queer artistry was erased along with them. Unfortunately, the generation that replaced them did the furthest thing possible from taking up their mantle, by embracing the opposite ideology. Tellingly, there are no institutionalized remembrances of the AIDS victims as there are today for the victims of 9/11. One type of victim is considered important—the “right” kind of victim—while the other is not.

The turnout fit nicely between this cozy bookstore’s shelves, and was full of people asking Schulman what to do next, and what the current generation can expect in the current historical moment.

Altogether it was an energizing reading, an uplifting meeting.

The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination
by Sarah Schulman

***

–Emma Rock is the director of the Brooklyn College Women’s Improv Group (WIG!). Their next performance is Friday, June 15th, 7pm at the Brooklyn College Student Center. Free to the public!

Mike Doughty is known to a lot of people as a lot of things: The leader of Soul Coughing, a New York City staple, a poet, a sober drug addict, a successful singer-songwriter. Now, he’s also a memoirist – his Book of Drugs came out earlier this year, and it’s a pretty damn good read. Doughty tells the story of Soul Coughing, with all the gristly details of their break-up included, and then goes on to write about his subsequent solo career. And, of course, there’s a lot of drugs involved.

But it’s more than a rock memoir, or an addiction memoir. Throughout, Doughty’s wry, honest writing seeks to find some kind of clarity, some kind of truth. The result is a fun and funny  – but brutal – trip in and around life, the world, and the music industry.

I met up with Doughty a few weeks ago at House of Small Wonder in Williamsburg to talk to him about his process, identity, spirituality, medication, and — duh — drugs.

Julia Jackson: When did it become clear to you that you needed to write a book?

Mike Doughty: It never did. I would always sort of talk about it, until somebody was like, “Here’s money,” and then my bluff was actually called, and I had to write a book. I get asked that a lot and I just don’t know. [Laughs.] If I may speak cornily, then grace put me in the book path, all of a sudden.

JJ: Yeah, because it seems like the lyrics that you write tend to be on the more poetic side of things than a lot of bands and I know that you do a lot of blogging.

MD: But prose, like long form prose, I’ve never done, and it’s so daunting. Every day it was so hard to get started. I did alright – I could do some thousand-word days – but some days, I’d say to myself, Okay, I’m going to start writing at ten. And then it’d be like, magazines, and then guitar playing, and then it’d be two PM, and I’d be like, Alright. But so much fear came with just starting it.

JJ: I remember in the book you were talking about how you had “book paralysis.” So how’d you get over that?

MD: I went story by story. So whatever I was specifically thinking about was what I would write about, and this was a good trick. And then I just tried not to think about the fact that I’m not, you know, Nabokov. I do love Haruki Murakami, but I think he is such a bad writer. [Laughs.] I mean, he’s really colloquial, and I read somewhere that in Japan his books read like books that have been translated from English. But in English, it’s all clichés, and there’s no style to it. So I thought: If I can love that guy, and he doesn’t have style, then there’s hope.

JJ: Obviously you were writing a drug narrative, as well as a band memoir, and so what did you want to avoid and what did you like in these types of books?

MD: Well, I haven’t read a whole lot of either – I did read Drinking: A Love Story. But it’s a new boiler plate for a story: The Addiction Narrative. There’s Boy Meets Girl, you’ve got Man Challenges the Gods, you’ve got Rags to Riches – there’s the nine stories, whatever that screenwriter guru says, but this is a new one.

JJ: Or you could say it’s Boy Meets Girl, and then Girl Fucks Over Boy…

MD: Totally. But it’s its own kind of variation. And another thing—it’s a hoary form, and whorey – but it’s distinguished by the voice and the individual details. That’s why a zillion people can write blues songs and they’re all like “snowflakes,” because whatever that specific human quality is of the writer imbues it. I also think the story of a band as an abusive marriage is newish, and people haven’t really been writing about that. Which is surprising to me – and I felt like I had something in that. I felt like I had my claws in something that was a little bit new.

JJ: In the beginning of the book, you talk about how memory is an act of imagination. It made me think about the act of presentation of one’s self as an art. Do you think that multiple memories and multiple selves are all true?

MD: A good analogy for it is… I’ve been doing a lot of sampling lately – writing pieces around different vocal samples – and I’ll see movies and think, That, I’m going to sample that. But then I go back five years, seven years, whatever, later – and the way I have it in my head, the phrasing of it – I’ll go back to the movie and it’s totally different. And obviously it was what it was the first time I heard it, but in my mind, it’s changed just a little, and a little, and a little, and a little, until you’re totally surprised by the phrasing. So I guess it’s like that. And the more you think about it, the less you know.

But I’ve also had the experience of talking to ex-girlfriends and having them be like, “That’s not what happened.” So they’ll tell me what they thought happened, and I’ll be like, “That did not happen.” For instance, the woman identified as  Mumlow in the book – genius lady, totally pulsating mind of light – I went back and said, “I’m writing this book, and all this weird shit happened,” and she was like, “I hope you treat me fairly when you write about this.” And I was like, “I don’t remember that. But I did write about this.” And she said, “I don’t remember that.” So it’s ten times more like Rashomon than I thought. It’s really weird. Psychedelic.

JJ: Yeah, and I feel like the truth is always somewhere in the middle of all of this.

MD: Exactly. Or if there is a truth. But I guess it doesn’t really matter.

JJ: Right. Because it’s your story.

 In the book, you had written about how your friend Chris had chosen a “piteous, destructive stasis over what could be a fascinating life.” [Referring to a friend who had traveled the world touring and neglected to really experience the places he’d been because he was too busy shooting up in hotel rooms instead.] And you said that you felt kind of envious of him at the time, until you began doing similar things yourself. It seems like that, as a drug user, there gets to be a point where habitual drug use becomes boring. But it also makes life more difficult and therefore more interesting. So where is that point?

MD: It just didn’t occur to me that life could be good at all without drugs – that you could be an artist without it. I remember listening to Beck and thinking, Well, he must smoke a lot of weed. But someone told me he didn’t smoke weed at all. I thought, What are you talking about? You can’t write ridiculousness without being stoned. But now I know you can. You can be surreal – that Salvador Dali quote, “I don’t do drugs because I am drugs.” Surreality is not exclusively the product of being high.

JJ: Toward the end of your book, you talk about how you now take a “cocktail of pills for bipolar disorder.” I was wondering if you’ve had any trouble integrating “Your” identity with your “Sober” identity with your “Bipolar” identity and your “Artist” identity.

MD: It took a long time to accept that I needed pills. Looking at those pills in my hand in the morning can be a real motherfucker. I really struggled to not have to medicate it, in the literal sense. But finally I went to see the doctor about it. But seeing my mom’s behavior [helped me to reconcile this] – and my brother has it in the extreme. He’s delusional. I had a really good conversation with him about a year ago. I was sort of the only person who had taken him seriously. I said, “Of all the million reasons why that particular car might be parked in front of your house, I guess the mafia being after you could be one.” But then he called me the next day and said, “I know you’re one of them.”

JJ: So do you think the medicated you is your true self?

MD: I don’t think active pain is necessarily useful. I don’t know what it’d be like if I was drawing from a [laughs] happy childhood, but I don’t feel like a false self. The first time I’d started taking drugs for depression – I didn’t know I was bipolar yet; this was before I’d gotten sober – my sexuality shut down. And I was like, this is the first time I’ve felt human in my life! So I’m just going to let it go. It’s [sexuality] a huge part of your identity – but I think I was my authentic self at the time. I mean, was I my authentic self at the time when I took a shitton of E? That weird fake affection stuff?

JJ: Your book ends with you saying “Good luck” to this girl who’s brand new to getting sober as you part ways, and you reflect back on it and say there’s no luck involved in getting clean. But I was thinking that there almost has to be luck, or something else stupid and illogical, because it doesn’t really make sense who gets sober and who doesn’t.

MD: Right. But happenstance versus luck — I think the word “luck” in this context is ill-fitting. It cheapens it in a way. There’s certain things like: I’m in New York City, so there’s amazing meetings, with amazingly smart people, and I can find other borderline atheists who are dark in their spiritual conversations with themselves. It’s tiny moves that put us in these places. For instance, the reason I left Soul Coughing, like the moment, was our manager called us up to fire us. We were on the phone, and I said, “I hate this, I hate this, I’m done with this” — which I’d said a million times to a million people — but he was like, “Okay. That’s a good idea.” So I hung up the phone and called everybody and broke up the band. If he’d been like, “No, it’s not a good idea” and let it linger — I don’t know. It’s moments like that.

JJ: Yeah, I feel like we use words like “luck” not because they’re accurate but because it’s like, how else are you going to explain the unexplainable?

MD: I like words like “grace.” Or “The universe wanted me to.” But the question is, is it just a mindset, or is the universe really talking to me? I read an interview with a cardinal in his seventies who said, “To have faith is to have crises of faith.” I’m so into that. He’s spent fifty years [pursing faith] and he’s admitting to having crises of faith. I think even these evangelical motherfuckers — they wouldn’t talk about it, but at night, they are sitting there thinking, “Oh my god, what if it’s not there? What am I doing?”

JJ: I feel like it’s in human nature to doubt and replay and rehash.

MD: Right. But the other thing is, I find the scientists a little bit frustrating. Stephen Hawking did this interview where he said, “What caused the Big Bang was this, that, and the other thing, and so it doesn’t need a god to start it.” But his idea of god is this guy who strikes a match, he sees it as this dude. Yet string theory says that there is a multiple universe situation, and every single possibility is another universe– meaning an infinite number of universes. Quantum theory is that if you look at a particle, it behaves differently. There’s this immensely bizarre, complicated view of the universe that keeps changing, yet his conception of a belief in a higher power, or creator of the universe, or whatever you want to call it, is so simplistic.

JJ: In the book, you say that there are six or seven Soul Coughing songs you actually like. I was wondering what they were.

MD: [Laughs.] Separating the song from the recording, I think “True Dreams of Wichita” is a really good song, but I hate the recording. I think “Janine” is really great, but that’s fundamentally not a Soul Coughing song; I put it together and it has the bass player on it, but before the band existed as a band. I think “Is Chicago, Is Not Chicago” could have been a really good song. That’s one of those things where I hear it years later and think, “That could have been a single,” but in its state it really wasn’t. I like the “The Idiot Kings,” and “Soundtrack to Mary,” — I think “Sleepless” would have been a really great song if I didn’t have that drummer, that template of a drummer, who can’t ever play the same beat twice. Same with “How Many Cans?” I like “So Far I Have Not Found the Science” as a song, and it’s the only one on that album that was significantly written by — collaborated on — with the sampler player.

JJ: Are there any books that had a significant impact on you, in the way that you write, or want to write, or just on your life?

MD: I loved Grapes of Wrath, but I just went back and re-read it and was like, Wow, this is borderline racist. I guess it’s mostly poets and playwrights. Alan Dugan I fuckin’ love. Sylvia Plath — much slept upon for being the teenage girls’ favorite — she’s so awesome. e. e. cummings — another one in that category. “nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands” — everyone’s like, oh what a corny cliche — but if it wasn’t a cliche, you’d love it. David Mamet — huge for me. When you become a grown-up, you have to give up on Mamet. It’s like, That’s cool, dude. Do your weird, man, woman-loathing thing. But just the rhythm of the dialogue. He’s got a play called The Duck Variations — it’s devoid of all the gender stuff — it’s two old guys on the edge of a lake talking about ducks, and it’s so beautiful and rhythmic. It’s got all the Jedi Mamet dialogue stuff without the horrific content.

JJ: Are there any recent things you’ve fallen in love with?

MD: There always is. I really love that Gotye song. He’s got one of the key lessons in songwriting, which is that a detail kills it. When he goes, “Have your friends collect your records and then change your number” — it’s so specific. Jay-Z throws them out occasionally — I’m trying to remember the song — but he goes, “Three cuts in your eyebrows tryin’ to wild out” — that specificity is giving me chills just thinking about it.

I’ve been obsessed with Bessie Smith lately. But I’m like a repeated song guy, never been an album guy, which is why I’ve yet to buy a turntable.

 

***

–Mike Doughty is a singer/songwriter, but hates that term. He’s written a memoir, a book of poetry, nine one-acts for The 24 Hour Plays, and an Aquaman story for DC comics. He released three albums in the past eight months. He resides.

–Julia Jackson is the editor of Electric Dish. Find her on the internet here.

Parlor New York is a chic, black-walled, members-only nightclub and was a great venue for the evening. As one party attendee told me, “It reminds me of my mother’s place.” I asked him what his mother did for a living, thinking he’d say she was an art curator or psychologist or something else that made her ‘edgy’ and maybe a little ‘neurotic.’ But no– “She’s a middle school lunch lady,” he replied. When I arrived a little after 8, the room with the bar was already packed, and the DJ was spinning ’70s era sexy disco. The crowd was swilling whiskey, because we at EL are very pro-whiskey, and also because the party was sponsored by Tullamore Dew (coincidence? I think not!).

No readings, no lectures, and no PowerPoint presentations interrupted the festivities — the party was pure party. However, midway through the evening, Recommended Reading’s co-editors, Halimah Marcus and Benjamin Samuel, offered a toast and a thank-you to all the backing partners and contributors to the Kickstarter fund (almost $19,000 was raised!). Electric Literature’s co-founder & Recommended Reading’s “Godfather,” Andy Hunter, also offered some inspirational words: He told us that he had had lunch with Mary Gaitskill about a year ago, and he asked her what she thought about current literary fiction. “It’s bloodless,” she replied. “Well, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading promises to only publish fiction that is full of blood,” Hunter affirmed. “We’ll soak our subscribers in blood.”

And it was done.

The party goers danced well into the night, their veins pumping hot blood and cold whiskey.

For more information about Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, please go here, here, or here.

***

–Photos by Kai Twanmoh. Text by Julia Jackson.

Chimamanda Adichie visited Portland for the first time as the season finale speaker for the Portland Arts & Lectures series. Andrew Proctor, Executive Director of Literary Arts, bullied her into coming and held a brief thank-you-a-thon prior to her introduction. I have to agree that the Literary Arts staff is 100% amazing. Adichie said she didn’t mind being bullied by someone like Proctor.

Her talk, A Cultural History of My Writing, began with the words, “As a child in Nigeria . . .” and circled back to #305 Margaret Cartwright Avenue several times as she described her writing life. Adichie has already proven herself in several genres and snagged a genius award. If she cut this lecture to about three and a half minutes and kept the #305 Margaret Cartwright Avenue refrain, it’d probably be an excellent pop song or perhaps a ballad, given that she is drawn to beautiful sadness and has a dark artistic vision which keeps her from writing for children.

1. What do bus drivers do while students are at the event? Eat a sandwich on the bus. 2. Steve and Gretchen were comforted by the fact that Adichie also experiences fear while sitting in front of a computer to write. Seth, not so much—he’s not a writer.

Half of a Yellow Sun, her second novel, gave her an opportunity to explore what it would be like to be deprived of the life you knew. How does it change you? These tiny losses compose the grittiness of being human, being people who eat and have sex. All of the stories were based on real stories collected from interviews and archival research. Her role was to streamline the chaotic nature of life.

1. Melissa appreciated Adichie’s comment on turning facts into truth since she just finished her thesis on Native American Boarding Schools. Mia liked the part about “beautiful sadness” because her thesis was on looking at darkness in order to be whole. I liked their coats. 2. Olivia and Lauren are and were interns for Evan P. Schneider at Literary Arts. Richard, who will eventually be famous, is a Literary Arts volunteer who agrees with Adichie that “fiction does matter.” 3. Judy Peterman, former finance manager for Literary Arts, with Bob Huntington’s fantastic smile.

As a person and a writer, Adichie exudes calm confidence, not necessarily grounded in what she has done, but perhaps in what she would like to do next. I see her as someone who takes inspiration from her own life with gratitude and love.

1. Adichie and Pauls Toutonghi, author of Evel Knievel Days.

 To Adichie, love means time spent. Yet one of the fundamental sacrifices of writing is time. When her writing is going well, she is willing to make that sacrifice and deal with the friend backlash from unreturned calls. At this point in the talk, I got so into what she was saying that I didn’t take good notes on exactly what she said.

During the Q&A, she mentioned writing better about Nigeria while in the US and writing better about the US while in Nigeria. She is an avid note-taker, constantly recording facts which may become truths in the service of fiction. The details may become sharper with distance. Whether she is at her family home in Nigeria, or Philadelphia, or wherever, her writing ritual is to wander around the house to get into the creative space. If that doesn’t work, she mentioned online shopping and watering her thoughts with writers she loves.

After each Portland Arts & Lecture series event, I typically feel a bit stalked by creative space and allow my thoughts to wander. I don’t always go to the reception because sometimes I need a bit more time to consider what I’ve heard before I can hold my end of a conversation. This time, I happily trotted to the reception while chatting with Spillman and Raymond, grabbed a glass of red wine and a tiny dessert, and ran around talking to people about key phrases from the lecture. Althought the talk was a cultural history, it was also about inclusion, specifically the ways in which fiction brings us together to tell our unique stories in a way that seems communal.

***

—Judith Ossello currently lives and writes in Portland, Oregon. Find her at www.writerloop.com.

It is appropriate that my last post as a writer for The Outlet covers a reading close to me and what I think is simply one of New York’s best readings to hear immediate, affective, and electric literature.

This past Saturday’s annual Veterans’ Reading at the Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House, while having a connecting theme of veteran readers, features in its production the diversity and contradiction that is often missed at other readings around the boroughs. There are men and women; unpublished writers, like Jeremy Warneke; and heavy-hitters, like Rick Moody. It takes place in a picturesque townhouse in the West Village, yet is held under the tutelage of a University. There are young writers and MFA holders, poets and novelists, musicians and photographers, Army and Navy, activists and ambassadors, all housed under the same roof to hear stories from one very particular community: a community of veterans.

1. Workshopper Phil Klay, whose short-story collection will soon be put out by Penguin (congrats!). 2. Warrior Writers curator Lovella Calica with Brooklyn IED expert and workshopper, Matthew Mellina.

The stories from this community are immediate, because regardless of your political leanings, the time we live in is swallowed in conflict. Conflict is necessary. At least when plot is concerned. And, as such, the reading developed its own narrative, starting with a subtle edge in the fiction of Eric Fair, resting in the middle with meditations in Matthew Mellina’s prose-poetic urbanity, and ending in the tears of Rick Moody as he read from Moby Dick, Chapter 23, The Lee Shore (may I offer an invitation to reread it?). This particular offering was mentioned throughout the reception after, particularly when Moody stopped to say, “I’m so moved by you guys.”

I’m so moved by you guys. The affective nature of the writing, and let us not forget, reading, is standout. There are many biases motivating my coverage of this event, but all of them fall short, and thus irrelevant, to the simple fact that you cannot help but have an elevated emotional experience here.  Two attendees, Sonya and Keerthi, came alone to the event but found each other after, to talk about what they heard and felt. Sonya, a Pace University marketing major, came with “no expectations” and nodded in agreement with Keerthi’s praise of the “enlightening” reading. I left the two in their conversation and newfound company, something I think the veterans would appreciate.  One attendee, the founder of the Warrior Writers Project, Lovella Calica, captures what I think is at the root of the uniquely affective nature of this reading. She says, “They’re good people, they’re good writers, and they’re an important community for our time.”

That is, it is not that they are just good writers, but they have narratives behind their narratives.  I have covered a variety of events for The Outlet, from brothels to synagogues and Barnes & Nobles to dive bars (yay!).  I have heard wonderful readings from strangers and trained back to Harlem feeling changed. However, the added effect of hearing a story read by a veteran is that you can assume part of their biography; it gives you a literary “in” which allows you access to the reader. And in doing so, amplifies your connection to their work. Sometimes this can be precarious, as assumptions frequently are, but when you hear Joseph Wades read: “past the line of hardship / cracked on a singer’s face / where eyes don’t dare linger,” you know at least two things about this man: at some point he signed up to fight a war, and now he’s reading you poetry. My eyes don’t dare linger because I feel I may owe him too much. Or I feel something I can’t quite identify, both patriotic and shameful at the same time. Something complicated and electric.  Something to get the majority of the audience to stay after and talk and mingle and say to each other, “Wow. That was amazing.”

—

The reading is funded in great part with the help of Ambassador Jean Kennedy Smith and the Disabled American Veterans Charitable Service Trust. Their support puts three MFA students through college, offers a free, no application writing workshop to veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, and, at the end of the academic year, puts forth a stunning reading and an anthology of their work (in ever increasing quality) titled Nine Lines, which is available for free.

—

Veterans Word-Cloud: goodbye, zero, thanks

***

—Craig Moreau, author of Chelsea Boy, has just finished a book tour and is currently drinking a beer. He is interested in identity, democracy, and word-clouds.

While everyone else either enjoyed the warm evening in a park or participated in Occupy’s May Day “festivities,” a handful of us found ourselves at CULTUREfix in the LES for another stellar Vol. 1 Brooklyn reading. This time they celebrated and launched Matt Bell’s —  editor at The Collagist and Dzanc Books –  novella-in-shorts, Cataclysm Baby. The Vol. 1 boys know how to throw a good reading, and brought Melissa Broder (MEAT HEART), Jacob Silverman, Lincoln Michel (Founding Editor at Gigantic) and EL’s own Julia Jackson to make it a literary evening full of lasagna, spontaneous assisted suicide attempts, a new authoritative history of the United Statesian religion, and a daughter’s voice that, if recorded, probably sounds like doom metal octave fuzz.

1. Here we see the Julia Jackson in a comfortable habitat. Note the unique contrapposto stance JJ employs. A rare sight indeed. 2. Jacob Silverman: “I got that swampy feeling around my genitals anytime a girl went down on me.”

Our own Julia Jackson opened up the night with two shorts set in Southern California. The first, a piece titled “Reduction,” finds a drug-addled couple navigating through couple and individual life while dealing with the narrator’s abortion. Though it didn’t seem like it. “‘Lasagnas are nutritious’ [Mom] said,” it opens, “and freeze well.” The piece’s voice skated somewhere between complete abandon and a pressing need to be heard, lending a line like “We made lasagna. I got pregnant” a darkly comic undertone. Jackson closed out her reading with a story about a first date with a “good man” at a California beach. At a grunion run. Many of you might not know what a grunion is, but pair that with the post-beach sex couple running to the break picking up slimy “grunions fucking.” This is what kids in SoCal do. I know it’s weird.

Tobias Carroll introduced the next reader, Jacob Silverman, as not only the sole Jeopardy champion–\m/–in the room, but also the only one to piss off Michael Chabon’s wife. Silverman read his story “To The End of The Line.” If you’ve ever wondered what happens to those people you make small chat with on train rides, I recommend you seek this story out. “We only have a few chances in life,” the narrator, Monty, starts, “and I don’t want to talk to a mouth full of rotting teeth.” Monty’s attitude quickly changes as he converses with Edward, the stranger, and tells him his reasons for traveling to Bradock: suicide. Tortured by a story, Monty had to “get the story out of [his] head,” and resolves to jump into the river. “It’s very Romantic, in that big-R sort of way,” Edward says, “so what happens? I don’t know a lot about physics.” Monty begins to get nervous, to which Edward offers the most sincere, albeit weirdest, form of help. “I’ll walk with you the whole way,” he says. “Thank you,” Monty says. Sweet.

1. Lincoln Michel: “Who knew what or whom?” 2. Melissa Broder in action. Her, Julia and I had a nice chat about naked people. We agreed that Purple Fashion brought the bush back.

Lincoln Michel was next, and he was very funny, almost terrifyingly so. Michel read four pieces–a poem, two shorts, and a longer short–all of which alliteratively dazzled and shimmered. Michel’s marriage of the deadpan and totally absurd is a perfect iteration of the Uncanny, and it rules. The highlight of Michel’s reading was, by far, a story about John Adams, which is forthcoming in an anthology of the Presidents (Matt Bell is included too), titled “What We Have Surmised About the John Adams Incarnation.” “Recent drone investigations into the damned continent … have found a union of George Washington. The first of 50 tyrants.” Adams gets the unfortunate honor of being a “pale, bloated” incarnation, while Washington is a “shape-shifting and eternal” incarnation. It’s clear that Adams is a lesser god, a “kinder Thomas Jefferson.” So what to make of this? “Early United Statesians: a proud and terrified people.”

We just ran an interview with Broder, and in one of her answers she compares heroin to Slim Jims: both are vehicles of humans’ desire for the out-of-body experience. Broder’s poetry seems hungover from, like, a vision quest colored in black-and-white technicolor. They’re almost in reality but conscious that they’ll be forever psychedelically tinged. “I’m afraid of turning purple / of hearing voices underneath my hair.” Broder is also hilarious, and is exceptionally good at being simultaneously serious and hilarious. Lines like “Jealous women jealous me into being a jealouser” and “I am proud of my no game” get me really stoked on poetry. Also, in one of her poems, she says “Jon Benet” three times after a list of very Romanesque names. Radical.

1. Matt Bell. I’d like to know how often you think about Canada. I think about it a lot. 2. Jason Diamond is not demonstrating a human-bird flight technique. Instead, he is discussing the finer points of his booming “Jewy” voice, and how it doesn’t need a microphone.

Matt Bell’s new book Cataclysm Baby sort of scares me into wanting to read it, one part masochism, and one part dare. Bell’s imagination is massive. And dark. And I want to know why. In the most general sense, this book is about failed family authority figures, and in a less general sense, a collection of tales about the instability so often found within notions of stability. Bell read three selections from the book that concerned sisters. It was difficult to find where my head-feet should land in the stories, but that’s part of the experience of hearing this book. Instead, I latched onto sentences. “I catch my own face in the vast amber beyond … A face like my face.” Bell has work in the newest issue of UNSAID. Bell thanked its editor, David McLendon, for helping him start the drafting of what would become Cataclysm Baby. The dark edges of Bell’s sentences definitely echo UNSAID aesthetics, and to wonderful results. Like so: “Could no longer give place to the words ‘no,’ to ‘stop,’ to the words ‘no please stop.’” I just listened to his interview on Other People, and he is a totally nice, warm dude who thinks often about Canada, which makes his imagination much more terrifying and awesome.

Find Cataclysm Baby and MEAT HEART in the internet or at your favorite local shop. On 5/14, catch Vol. 1 Editor Jason Diamond in conversation with Rosecrans Baldwin at Greenlight. Party.

Cataclysm Baby
by Matt Bell

Meat Heart
by Melissa Broder

 
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—Ryan Chang is from Orange County, CA and lives in Brooklyn. He is Staff Writer to The Outlet, and his fiction and essays have appeared in Art Faccia and Thought Catalog. He is the internet here and here.

As one unversed in the art of failure, I was terrifically bemused by Levin’s luckless characters. In “RSVP,” for example, the pathologically shy Donald pens “the world’s greatest love letter—four lines long, a mere seventy words” to the even shyer Janet, who, through a series of literal wrong turns, is promptly eradicated by a bus before receiving said letter. In “Scientific American,”—my favorite tale, I think—a hapless couple is rendered even more so by the appearance of a nihilistic gel oozing from their bedroom wall. When the nameless hero schedules an appointment with the builder for a time when neither he nor his wife can be present, this oversight causes him such overwhelming embarrassment, he comes to see himself as “a great imposition, not only on the builder but on his wife, the whole world.” Guilt, disorganization, disappointment, flailing—it’s fearful, the catalog of emotions experienced by people incompetent in life.

Another thing worth mentioning was the way in which Levin, subconsciously or not, both pointed to and perpetuated his generation’s disinterest in general erudition—in facts, truths, or principles of any kind. In “Jane Tell,” for example, our narrator informs us that he has accompanied his paramour (the eponymous Jane Tell) “to buy whatever part it was Tell thought she needed to replace to get her truck running.” In this excerpted sentence, their intellectual shortcomings are plainly on display: it is highly improbable that Jane Tell knows what part she needs, either, and if she happened to tell her boyfriend the name of the part earlier, well—he wasn’t listening. Whatever it is, whatever they need, whatever they lack can be “Googled;” back-ordered; Mapquested out. Long gone is the need to learn.

Levin’s metacognitive awareness of his generation’s intellectual slothfullness finally endeared me to his work. At one point, in the title story, upon seeing a garbage truck with a bouquet of multicolored balloons affixed to its grille, a character asks her companion if it is “some desperate form of graffiti.” I found myself wondering the same thing as I worked my way through Levin’s spastic, hyperactive, discordant prose. Has McSweeney’s merely provided Levin with a figurative tumbling mat for his verbal acrobatics, or is Hot Pink a serious examination of the various ways in which we fail to pay attention, and the desperation, disappointment and overriding sense of guilt that arises from neglect?

Electric Literature was unable to provide me with the fiscal motivation to pen my customary 12,397-word review, and so, I am going to prematurely conclude here by citing Adam Levin himself from “The Extra Mile.” “Our wives are all dead and we sit around warping. We can’t remember what made them laugh.”

Adam Levin’s Hot Pink made me laugh in two separate places—not out loud, mind you—but it was guttural, nonetheless. For this, I am grateful. Perhaps even moved.

Hot Pink
by Adam Levin

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— Courtney Maum is a fiction writer based in between the Berkshires of Massachusetts and New York City. Her work has recently appeared online in Tin House, Blip, The Rumpus, Vol.1, Anderbo and others. A frequent reader at NY-based series and a Literary Death Match champion, she’s currently working on a collection of comic fiction. Find her on Twitter at @cmaum

Editor’s note: Any resemblances to actual celebrities — alive or dead — are miraculously coincidental. For more Celebrity Book Review, click here.