This bleakly hilarious report from the future arrived at Publisher's Weekly, courtsey of one Marjorie Butternook, MLIS, also known as Gary Shteyngart (who, incidentally, is one of the funniest readers I've seen.) Book Expo America 2004: Reading Lives!
She told [eight-year-old] Download he had to keep his Brain Nozzle on standby. “Read a little,” she said, “and then every once in a while try closing your eyes and entering the mind of the author.”
“What's an author?” Download asked.
“It's someone who's not you who wrote the book.”
“But I'm special,” Download said.
“I know you are,” Ruthie said.
Roger Conover, editor of MIT Press, told an anxious Q'er at his talk here last spring that people in publishing love to work themselves up about the apocalypse, that their own Imminent Doom has always been a favored conversation topic. Maybe it is essential in all the arts—we have to / can't help but believe the art is dying, irresistibly (and maybe grandiosely) drawn to the anxiety of immortality. Which is any art-maker's secret impossible hope.
The great thing about seeing bands at the tiny 'Sco is that you couldn't be more than a hundred feet from the stage if you tried. Also, subsidized by the institution, shows are nineties prices. And also, the students sometimes really cut loose and shake it, a refreshing switch from the rigor mortis of Portland audiences, where nodding is a dance move. The crappy things about seeing bands at the 'Sco: the mounting smell of poor hygiene cooked to the surface, plus students yammering at high volume through the whole thing, only pausing to raise the plastic beer cups in their red-stamped fists and holler whoo before turning their attention back to the more pressing matter of Where Is Harper I Thought She Was Coming With James. (Actual conversation overheard at length.) Unless you squeeze into the enthusiastic first few rows (caveat: see hygiene), you're stuck with the live Banality Remix version of the song and trying to suppress some intense Mad Librarian impulses.
What one really needs in this situation is something so loud no one can holler over it, something that immobilizes people in their tracks and drives away the tourists. Thank you, Talk Normal.
When Talk Normal kicked in to their thing, the first thing I scrawled in the dark on the back of a student's manuscript (it was all I had on hand) was SCARY. I meant that in a good way. This was super-loud, heavy, distorted, reverbed, squalling noise. You wouldn't guess it, looking at them. Talk Normal are two smallish youngish women. The guitarist has a Thurston-like vibe of effortless slouch and overgrown bangs. The drummer hits heavy on the tom and bass. Sometimes she flips her drumsticks around and hits with the blunt end and it sounds huge and stern, ferocious and focused on her small kit. Sometimes she rests a guitar on the drumkit and does cacophanous things to it while she pounds and sings.
I rarely listen to noise at home. I only like to hear it live, or through headphones while I'm walking. I think it's music you either listen to upright or flat on your back. It is not sedentary. It has to be all or nothing. I like how noise makes me feel what it feels and at the same time sounds like how I feel. Does that make sense? It's more about feeling than listening, for me. The same way that poetry can feel truer to raw thought—fragmentary, splintered, spliced—noise is like deep feeling, disordered and surging.
All of which is to say Talk Normal kind of made my night.
I've had Tune-Yards' Bird-Brains for a while and I like it a lot, despite my knee-jerk loathing of toggle-case, which reeks of whimsy. (I refuse to reproduce it here.) But seeing her live, I flipped to love. The lo-fi production on the record (all done with a digital voice recorder) makes the music sound odd, clipped and flattened, and that works in a way, but live the songs become big and radiant and and warm. Not discomfiting little curiosities but exuberant feel-good dance songs, expanding to fill all the space around around her ukulele, elemental drum and vocal loops (the girl sure knows her T1).
During the last song the girl next to me started swinging her very long hair and after a few mane-lashings I escaped and watched from the doorway. I didn't stick around for Xiu Xiu--I don't care enough, and I have a one-and-a-half band attention span, and Talk Normal and Tune-Yards got it all. Gladly.
I've been on a serious baking kick since the new year. "Baking" has unfortunate and unfair connotations of Betty Crocker and checkered aprons, but a) my apron is a hot black-and-white abstract print with a red and pink trim, and b) not a brownie nor mix has crossed my spatula. What I am obsessed with is whole-grain breads.
The first whole-wheat loaves I baked were when I was eighteen and stepped into it as a co-op job. This particular eating collective eschewed anything refined (no sugar, no white flour) (yet there was someone who believed that cinnamon had a rightful and prominent place in spaghetti sauce, and made it that way regularly), so I dutifully churned out big whole wheat logs with the Hobart, sweetened with soy milk and brown rice syrup. They came out chewy and dense, and cooled into blunt instruments.
This is not the case with today's bread. This hardcore Peter Reinhart book (a gift from my clever enabler/beneficiary) tipped me over the edge, and now I'm all, autolyse, biga, soaker, enzyme strands, and does it pass the windowpane test? The making of a single loaf spans days. I have made 100% whole-wheat, endless combinations of multigrains, naan, paratha (plain and aloo-stuffed), wheat thins both herbed and plain, focaccia, and scores--literally--of pizza crusts.
(On the right there I'm brushing garlic-chili oil over a brand-new naan; below, stuffing paratha with potatoes before rolling it flat again and cooking it on a griddle.)
But the winning loaf, the most exciting yet, was the SPROUTED WHEAT LOAF I made this week, which took longer than anything yet, and involved
1) soaking wheat berries for 24 hours
2) rinsing them and leaving them for another half-day until
3) they started to sprout tiny white tails and then
4) grinding them to a pulp, which tasted amazing, the texture of steel-cut oatmeal but cool and sweet and with a fresh faintly grassy flavor,
5) and finally baking that into a bread, which came out like this
and tastes beautiful.
I'm seriously one step away from getting a grain mill to grind my own flour. Then all I will have to do is start up a little wheat patch in the yard, and it's Willa Cather time.
I went to the Park Rapids Enterprise homepage to renew my subscription, suffering severe Incident Report deprivation, and found that not only has the Akeley (pop. 412) bank been robbed, but there is an important poll for readers to answer.
Guess which one is winning? I will draw back the curtain in the comments.
These were savvily placed side-by-side at McNally Jackson bookstore in New York. I went to New York for a week in January to meet up with my friend Mona. (She flew from Cairo, I flew from Ohio. New York seemed at least metaphorically equidistant.)
In the first few hours before Mona arrived, I browsed McNally Jackson for a while and then went to find a seat to write at Housing Works Used Bookstore Cafe. I wondered, How did I ever live here? Did I love it? I know I did love it. I mean, there's a lot to love about it. But everyone in McNally Jackson's cafe looked roughly the same, and everyone in Housing Works looked roughly the same. Different ethnicities, sure, but the same scuffed polish, bookish stylishness, turn-of-the-thirties, knowledgable and aspiring. Basically they all looked like they had MFAs, were getting their MFAs, or aspired to an MFA. I'm not exempting my own MFA'ed ass here. But it was totally disconcerting to be among such a blatant Demographic, and it gave me not the feeling but the reminder of the feeling of panic and self-doubt and competitive anguish I used to feel when I lived in New York and tried to comprehend My Future As A Writer.
I think it's good to have a handful or two of writers in your everyday life but too many might mess you up. This is one reason why the Stegner program was way easier on the soul than Iowa. This is also why I like to keep company with people who make other things. Scholarly research, videos, music, art, advertisements, movies, coffee, drinks, photographs, baskets, hand-hewn cross-country skis*, whatever. I feel a lot calmer now than I did back when I lived in New York and was supposed to be in the Center of It All. It didn't stimulate me, it distracted and paralyzed me. I have only written one story ever that took place in New York, about my very first job at the very strange magazine Opera News, and it's an oddly-structured mess. I can't even revise that story because every time I go back into it I come out feeling disconsolate and unmoored all over again.
But anyway, then Mona showed up and the rest of the trip was more like this.
And this.
I have known Mona since 1996. She was one of my best friends in Oslo. I used to wonder, Who are the people I will know my whole life? Sometimes I am surprised at the ones who fell off, or my younger self would have been, but more and more I love how the answers become clear.
*I'm not just making this up. My polymath woodsman brother Nate made me a pair of cross-country skis by hand for Xmas. It blows my mind too.
1. When people call coffee "java."
(Endemic to quippy newspaper and magazine articles where the writer apparently believes it's a faux pas to use the word coffee twice, and to the names of bad coffee shops. No coffee shop with "java" in the title is any good.) Runner-up: "joe." Who in real life calls it "joe," honestly?
2. The term "gal pal."
(Again, common to bad magazine writing.)
CORNISH, NH—In this big dramatic production that didn't do anyone any good (and was pretty embarrassing, really, if you think about it), thousands upon thousands of phonies across the country mourned the death of author J.D. Salinger, who was 91 years old for crying out loud. "He had a real impact on the literary world and on millions of readers," said hot-shot English professor David Clarke, who is just like the rest of them, and even works at one of those crumby schools that rich people send their kids to so they don't have to look at them for four years. "There will never be another voice like his." Which is exactly the lousy kind of goddamn thing that people say, because really it could mean lots of things, or nothing at all even, and it's just a perfect example of why you should never tell anybody anything.
On the one hand, it's terrible to lose two greats on the same day. On the other hand, as long as you've got to leave this life, why not go hand-in-hand, temporally speaking, with another luminary? I'm fascinated with these accidental pairings: Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett. Zinn and Salinger. Who else?
The brand-new issue of Avery Anthology arrived yesterday with one of my stories in it. One of the great things about Avery is that it is gorgeously designed, with elegant font choices and illustrations for every story (why do so many literary journals look like they were laid out in Word, with a discount abstract postcard for cover art?) Another great thing is that it's only ten dollars. Another great thing is that I really love the fiction they publish. So I'm stoked to be included. My story is called "Devices." Here's the first paragraph:
Once there were an artist and an inventor.
The artist and the inventor live together in the first floor of a building that used to be a saloon in the 1800s and now has been painted dark blue with purple and red trim so it looks like a saloon in a traveling carnival. They are right up next to the sidewalk, and the inventor is always drawing the curtains shut and the artist is always opening them. The artist needs light. The inventor needs privacy. In other words, they are deeply in love. But both of them are a little bit more in love with the artist.
I originally wrote it to be read out loud, so on the page it is a brisk read. If you want more, here's where you can get this Avery 5, which also contains Steve Almond* and Claire Hero, in whose company I have not been since 1989, when we were in eighth grade together in Northfield, MN. True! I have no idea if she remembers me, but her name is caught forever for no reason in my memory, which has a remarkable retention of useless pre-millennial trivia and arcana and alarmingly vast gaps ever after. (I want to blame the brain-destroying recalled aerosol grout sealer I bought from Home Depot when I tiled my bathroom floor. But it's really probably the internet.)
(*Here is Steve Almond deconstructing Toto's "Africa" at the Tin House tenth-anniversary reading in Portland last summer. I was there and it slew me.)
This evening I read Maggie Nelson's book Bluets by the fire, all the way through. It's a beautiful little book, only 95 pages, lyric nonfiction, an exploration of the color blue, sight and perception, memory, and heartbreak. I don't know if these excerpts will convey how lovely the whole of it is, but flipping back through, here are a couple of parts I re-read even the first time:
36. Goethe describes blue as a lively color, but one devoid of gladness. "It may be said to disturb rather than enliven." Is to be in love with blue, then, to be in love with a disturbance? Or is the love itself the disturbance? And what kind of madness is it anyway, to be in love with something constitutionally incapable of loving you back?
37. Are you sure--one would like to ask--that it cannot love you back?
38. For no one really knows what color is, where it is, even whether it is. (Can it die? Does it have a heart?) Think of a honeybee, for instance, flying into the folds of a poppy: it sees a gaping violet mouth, where we see an orange flower and assume that it's orange, that we're normal.
And later:
193. I will admit, however, upon considering the matter further, that writing does do something to one's memory--that at times it can have the effect of an album of childhood photographs, in which each image replaces the memory it aimed to preserve. Perhaps this is why I am avoiding writing about too many specific blue things--I don't want to displace my memories of them, nor embalm them, nor exalt them. In fact, I think I would like it best if my writing could empty me further of them, so that I might become a better vessel for new blue things.
... 195. Does an album of written thoughts perform a similar displacement, or replacement, of the "original" thoughts themselves? (Please don't start protesting here that there are no thoughts outside of language, which is like telling someone that her colored dreams are, in fact, colorless.)...
I looked down to find that I was dressed all in blue--sweater, jeans, scarf, even socks. My favorite blue is the blue of winter light, specifically in the evening, specifically with snow, and the blue I've seen in Norway, both in the winter when the sun barely rises and in the summer when it hardly sets. My least favorite blue is the wedgewood-ish blue of the kitchen in a Victorian shotgun apartment I once lived in; all the way back, it was the saddest room in the house. Never paint a kitchen blue. (This one came that way.)
My New Year's Eve indulgence. I have only ever seen this treat at Minneapolis restaurants, but they all seem to have it. The Vietnamese places, the Taiwanese places, the Chinese places: they've all got the cream-cheese wontons on the appetizer menu. That is right: deep-fried and stuffed with nothing but cream cheese. This may be the Minnesota equivalent of fusion cuisine.
Served with a glossy red dipping sauce that seems to be part ketchup, part sweet-n-sour, part cherry Kool-Aid. My love for them is equal only to my subsequent regret.
