October 23, 2012 On Music Helpless: On the Poetry of Neil Young By Brian Cullman There was a fascinating if incomplete musing on the New Yorker website this week regarding Neil Young’s insularity and on the incomprehensible idea that he never reads. It seemed strange that someone who doesn’t read would decide to write a book, though it’s often true that writing and reading aren’t necessarily two sides of the same coin. They are often very different coins, operating in very different currencies. When you go to a bank to make change, the exchange rate is never in your favor. I forwarded the piece to my friend Bill Flicker, out in Los Angeles, who wrote back that he never listens to Neil Young’s words, that they are simply placeholders or crumbs that are scattered on a walk through a musical forest. Actually, I do listen to his words. Not always. But when I listen, they’re remarkably visual and evocative: Blue blue windows behind the stars. Yellow moon on the rise. Purple words on a grey background To be a woman and to be turned down How did those windows get behind the stars? I don’t know, but I can see them clearly. Sometimes as a child’s drawing. Sometimes as a reflection on an airplane window. There may not be logic involved, but there is something deeper than that. Read More
October 23, 2012 Video & Multimedia Postcard from San Francisco By Sadie Stein Greetings from the West Coast! While visiting the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art over the weekend, I was struck by Ed Osborn’s piece, Night-Sea Music, in which a series of music boxes play via rubber cables. Visually arresting and haunting to listen to, it would have been engaging on purely aesthetic terms. But the caption tells a whole other story: The piece is titled after a John Barth story, “Night-Sea Journey,” which is narrated by a confused and not altogether enthusiastic single spermatozoa on its journey in search of … well, something (the narrator is not very clear on the concept). The twisting and spasmodic movements of the piece alludes to those tiny twitching travelers whose brief existence is a suicidal mission to carry information through a difficult environment. The music boxes all play the old folk tune “The Merry Widow,” which serves as a wink and a nod towards the overwhelmingly futile energies expended by all those determined sperm. Night-Sea Music @ SFMOMA from Ed Osborn on Vimeo. [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]
October 23, 2012 First Person Letter from a Haunted House: Part 2 By Amie Barrodale The story so far… Usually I go to bed early, but given all the recent ghost activity in my house, I was getting a little spooked. So I was still up at eleven P.M., in bed and on the phone with my husband, Clancy. While we were talking, something black circled my bed twice, so fast I wasn’t sure I saw it, and then flew into a storage area where I have been slowly setting up a shrine. I yelled out twice while it circled me, but somehow Clancy didn’t hear me and continued talking. I said, “There’s a bat or a bird in my apartment.” “Is it a bat or a bird?” “I don’t know. It may be a bird. I think it’s a bat.” It had flown through so quickly, now I wasn’t sure I’d seen it. I said, “I think he’s in my shrine.” I got a broom and went to look. It was only my second experience with a bat, and I didn’t know if he would get scared and come flying at me. On the far wall, hanging from a pipe, was a very small thing. It might have been a clump of dust, or a piece of metal pipe with a cap over it, or it might have been a very tiny bat, hanging upside down, wings folded. Read More
October 23, 2012 On the Shelf The Mo Yan Culture Experience Zone, and Other News By Sadie Stein Call now! How to Sharpen Pencils comes to a TV near you. Robert Gottlieb talks about editing the lurid novel The Best of Everything. “A Dog barks, someone eats a watermelon, a car drives away”: the signifiers of literary fiction. “Harriet Klausner claims to be a speed-reader. In the last decade, this former librarian has reviewed over 28,000 books on Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other sites.” On unmasking an online phenomenon. Following Mo Yan’s Nobel win, the Chinese government has announced plans to turn his childhood home into the “Mo Yan Culture Experience Zone.” [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]
October 22, 2012 Bulletin See You There: The Paris Review in L.A. By Sadie Stein Los Angeles friends! Please join us tomorrow as we celebrate the art of the short story at the Hammer Museum! Author Mona Simpson, Paris Review editor Lorin Stein, and yours truly will discuss literary life and read selected stories from the new Paris Review anthology Object Lessons, with Q&A to follow. Event details here. [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]
October 22, 2012 At Work Heroine Worship: Talking with Kate Zambreno By Christopher Higgs Kate Zambreno’s first book, O Fallen Angel, won Chiasmus Press’s “Undoing the Novel” First Book Contest, and her second book, Green Girl, was a finalist for the Starcherone Innovative Fiction Prize. So it should come as no surprise that her provocative new work, Heroines, published by Semiotext(e)’s Active Agents imprint next month, challenges easy categorization, this time by poetically swerving in and out of memoir, diary, fiction, literary history, criticism, and theory. With equal parts unabashed pathos and exceptional intelligence, Heroines foregrounds female subjectivity to produce an impressive and original work that examines the suppression of various female modernists in relation to Zambreno’s own complicated position as a writer and a wife. It concludes by bringing the problems of the modernists into conversation with the contemporary by offering a timely consideration of the role of the Internet and blogs in creating a community for women writers. What was it about the modernist wives that first interested you? I think I came to the wives through an initial discovery of more neglected modernist women writers—Olive Moore, Anna Kavan, Jane Bowles, maybe I’d add Jean Rhys to that list. I was living in London working in a bookshop and not doing much in terms of trying to write a novel, so I pitched to Chad Post at Dalkey that I write an essay on Kavan. And because I had nothing else to do, I sat in the British Library and read everything by her. And started reading all these other experimental women writers, like Elizabeth Smart—not the Mormon abductee, but the one obsessed with the poet George Barker, an obsession she documents in the amazing By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. Not a modernist, I know, but I sat at the British Library and read the communal notebook she kept with Barker and thought about Vivien(ne)’s hand on “The Waste Land” manuscript. I began to be really interested in ideas of literary collaboration. Read More