October 23, 2013 Weird Book Room Mole Catching: A Practical Guide By Sadie Stein Selected from AbeBooks’ Weird Book Room.
October 23, 2013 On the Shelf The History of Letters of Note, and Other News By Sadie Stein “An assignment from a stationery retailer didn’t, at first, appear much better: they wanted an article related to writing paraphernalia for their website. But then I had an idea: what if I put something together about famous letters from history?” The story behind the wonderful Letters of Note. Courtney Love’s memoir is set for an early 2014 release. Talking about her influences to Rolling Stone in June, Love said, “I’m reading Just Kids again because I know [Patti Smith] wrote that by herself, and My Booky Wook by Russell Brand, which I think is a great book in terms of just his voice. And then I found an old Tallulah Bankhead book where she is very fabulous. So it’s a combination of those three books. [Keith Richards’] Life was just so bloody long, I didn’t even finish it.” Speaking of musician tell-alls! Morrissey’s Autobiography is number one in the UK. “Cole and Sarah stayed to see the two grooms off. Waiting until the last guest was out the door, he walked up to her. Even though they’d gone on with the reception as planned, he knew the paparazzi raid was uppermost in both their minds.” Speaking of coauthoring books! A (tame) excerpt from Jenna Jameson’s erotic novel, Sugar.
October 22, 2013 On Music See No Evil By Jason Diamond I stood up when they called my name, and began to read from the piece of notebook paper in my hands: Well, I’ve got something to sayI killed your baby todayAnd it doesn’t matter much to meAs long as it’s dead Sweet lovely deathI am waiting for your breathCome sweet deathOne last caress They ate it up; I awed the basement audience in that coffee shop, with its beat-to-hell couches and chairs acquired from the local Salvation Army. My friends and I had driven there that night so we could all participate in the open mic poetry session, because when you’re fifteen or sixteen, you want to be something, and nothing at all, you want to define yourself, but you don’t want to get stuck doing one thing or another. That was the period when we collectively chose poetry, and even though I didn’t deserve it, there was a lot of buzz about my work on that night; for a few hours I was a phenom among the suburban poets. One person told me he heard the pain behind my beautiful words, and that I really had something special; he said I was a natural poet, that I should never stop writing, and that I should close the night out with one more. I obliged, not telling him, of course, that last poem was actually just Misfits lyrics, and that the one before that, about living in my van, was a Descendents song. I just let them all believe that, at sixteen, I was special, and that my reading, of what inadvertently became the last poem ever read at the Buzz Spot (the place closed a few days later), was a God-given gift. Had I actually read from the spiral notebook filled with my own writings, they’d hardly have been impressed. Read More
October 22, 2013 Quote Unquote Clairvoyance By Sadie Stein LESSING I know people say things like, “I regard you as rather a prophet.” But there’s nothing I’ve said that hasn’t been, for example, in the New Scientist for the last twenty years. Nothing! So why am I called a prophet, and they are not? INTERVIEWER You write better. LESSING Well, I was going to say, I present it in a more interesting way. I do think that sometimes I hit a kind of wavelength—though I think a lot of writers do this—where I anticipate events. But I don’t think it’s very much, really. I think a writer’s job is to provoke questions. I like to think that if someone’s read a book of mine, they’ve had—I don’t know what—the literary equivalent of a shower. Something that would start them thinking in a slightly different way perhaps. That’s what I think writers are for. This is what our function is. We spend all our time thinking about how things work, why things happen, which means that we are more sensitive to what’s going on. —Doris Lessing, the Art of Fiction No. 102
October 22, 2013 Arts & Culture Art House: On “John Ashbery Collects” By Albert Mobilio Installation view of “John Ashbery Collects: Poet Among Things,” at Loretta Howard Gallery, New York. So just what is the “thingness of the thing” that Heidegger was talking about? The phrase’s riddlesome poetry could easily have been penned by John Ashbery, instead of the crusty German phenomenologist. Is Heidegger suggesting that material things possess an essence, an abstract quality that both defines and constitutes, say, a shoe—its shoeness? Perhaps, but Ashbery, in fact, offers a more straightforward assessment of the unseeable stuff that makes stuff stuff in the opening lines of “Grand Galop”: “All things seem the mention of themselves.” Such are my thoughts as I roam the rooms of Ashbery’s Hudson, New York, home … well, only to the degree that the galleries at Loretta Howard, in Chelsea, have been decorated with trompe l’oeil drawings—wainscoting, doorways, mantels—to look like the rooms of the poet’s well-appointed nineteenth-century house. Thoughtfully curated by Loretta Howard Gallery and poets Adam Fitzgerald and Emily Skillings, the show offers a selection of Ashbery’s own paintings, prints, collages, bric-a-brac, and furniture; it’s all cozily arranged to conjure as much domestic atmosphere as might be had in a gallery space. Kitschy figurines, VHS tapes (Daffy Duck and Jack Benny among them), bawdy toys, and hand-painted plates line the shelves of cabinets and bookcases that could have been lifted whole from Ashbery’s parlor. Other items, like the French Provincial chairs and Oriental rugs, have been. They complement a piano drawn on a wall on which are hung several selections of early twentieth-century sheet music (“Mr. and Mrs. Is the Name,” “Flirtation Walk”), as if resting on the instrument’s music desk. Alongside such homey items (the cartoons playing on the TV jangle in a familiar way with the filigree wallpaper designs) are pieces by many of the poet’s friends and artistic confederates, such as Joan Mitchell, Fairfield Porter, Larry Rivers, Trevor Winkfield, Jess, Alex Katz, Jane Freilicher, and Willem de Kooning. There’s a gemütlich vibe, equal parts wry and melancholic, generated by this assemblage of things cultural that ably recalls the mood and manner of Ashbery’s writing. To elucidate this point, the curators include wall text featuring apt passages of his verse that treat the world, if not the mind, as a congeries of curios, a kind of Cornell box. Of course, the show includes a few of those; with poems populated by Popeye, Henry Darger, Chopin, Faust, Parmigianino, and a myriad of other, less identifiable references, it’s no surprise that Ashbery is a devotee of Cornell’s eclectic connoisseurship. Both share an affinity for the metaphysique d’ephemera, an aesthetic that elevates the trivial to the transcendent. Read More
October 22, 2013 Bulletin Double-Bind By Sadie Stein Last night posed a geographical dilemma for poet, Daily contributor, and Paris Review softball outfielder Rowan Ricardo Phillips. We had known for a while that Rowan was due to receive the 2013 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry for his collection The Ground. But when we learned he was also the recipient of a 2013 Whiting Writers’ Award, on the same evening, and several blocks northwest, we wondered how exactly he’d work the geography. In the end, it was tight; when the PEN Awards started, Rowan was not onstage with the other recipients. But he finally arrived, was there to accept his second award of the evening, and both times made impressive extemporaneous remarks, somehow seamlessly working in Catalan, Shakespeare’s sonnet 116, and heartfelt tributes to his mother and wife, between thank-you’s to editors, publishers, and friends. All in all, a good night’s work! Hearty congratulations to Rowan and all the evening’s talented honorees.