March 14, 2013 On Poetry Marks on Paper: Eileen Myles’s Chelsea Girls By Rachel Hurn At Bluestocking Books, my favorite indie bookstore in Hillcrest, San Diego, I pick up a glorious-looking object. The cover is textured, beige with a blue inside flap—a look typical of the publisher Black Sparrow Press. On the front is a painting by Nicole Eisenman of twenty women in a brawl, or having sex, or both. All over the cover and among the cream pages are hand-scrawled notes. It looks like a literature student once owned the book. Probably someone studying creative writing. Probably someone at UCSD. I hold up the paperback to the woman behind the register, and ask, “What is this?” “That’s Eileen Myles. She’s a lesbian poet. She’s amazing.” That day I read the entire thing. Read More
March 14, 2013 On the Shelf Elements of Style, and Other News By Sadie Stein Classics, Strunk and White style. “The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin.” And other surreal opening lines. Fans rally around San Francisco’s beloved (and endangered) Adobe Books. “How many other books had I been fooling myself about?” When you think you’ve read books … but you haven’t. Get the knives out: any discussion of the best food memoirs is sure to be contentious.
March 13, 2013 Quote Unquote Happy Birthday, Jack Kerouac By Sadie Stein “I spent my entire youth writing slowly with revisions and endless rehashing speculation and deleting and got so I was writing one sentence a day and the sentence had no FEELING. Goddamn it, FEELING is what I like in art, not CRAFTINESS and the hiding of feelings.” —Jack Kerouac, The Art of Fiction No. 41
March 13, 2013 Arts & Culture Festival Guide: A List of Don’ts for the Lady Music Writer By Natalie Elliott Image via jennwinter.com. Don’t be fun. “Fun” is your former life. Now you are expected to responsibly imbibe all of the complimentary beverages available to you over the course of the ten hours (per day) you are attending live sets (even if they are stone boring), factoring in an extra two to three hours set aside for the after- and after-after-parties. If you insist on remaining fun, you should be sober, like, one-beer sober or recovering-alcoholic sober. And if you’re sober and not semifamous, be aware there is a forty percent chance that band people will be less inclined to chat with you. It’s all right; they’re going to give the hastiest interview possible. It’s a festival. Don’t be a music journalist when you’re broke, even if it’s the primary way you earn income from your writing. Among other reasons, if you’re broke, you’ll drink the free alcohol. Too much of it, probably. Read More
March 13, 2013 On the Shelf The Sixty-Nine-Years-Overdue Library Book, and Other News By Sadie Stein “An Estonian man has returned a library book sixty-nine years late, partly blaming a World War II aerial bombing that damaged the library for the late return.” They bought this excuse; no fine was levied. “Maurice, aged seven, drew the illustrations for ‘They Were Inseparable,’ and his brother Jack, who was twelve, composed the text. The book was dedicated to their sixteen-year-old sister with whom they were both infatuated.” Avi Steinberg on the Sendak family. Is this the best palindrome of the year? (Were there others?) The Bloomsbury guide to surviving London disasters. The nominees for the Women’s Prize for Fiction (née Orange Prize) have been announced.
March 12, 2013 At Work Underwear Life: An Interview with Francesco Pacifico By Adam Thirlwell Francesco Pacifico’s novel The Story of My Purity is narrated by Piero Rosini. This Piero seems like most other modern schlubs—thirty, overweight, bourgeois, in a sexless marriage, you know it—but the thing that makes him unusual is his deep belief in Christ. This is the most Catholic narrator in contemporary literature. He is also the funniest Catholic narrator in contemporary literature. And what happens to Piero is some kind of picaresque adventure that takes him from Rome to Paris and beyond, into all the problems of his innocence. What else do you need to know about Piero’s creator? Francesco Pacifico is also a translator from English into Italian, and translation is something we talk about a lot. In fact, he has almost definitely read more fiction in English than you have. And if an inglese italianato is the devil incarnate, then what does that make an italiano americano? I just mean that Francesco Pacifico is one of the least innocent novelists I know. There’s a moment where Piero says “nobody’s Roman,” and this setting of Rome is crucial to the book’s opening. So my first question is, are you Roman? I am, and I’m not. I was born in Rome and have lived there all my life. But I don’t know how to cook trippa and pajata, I know nothing of Rome’s cuisine pauvre, my family’s half-assed culinary traditions are half abbruzzese and half everything. My father’s side comes from L’Aquila, Abbruzzio, where my granddad’s family was big during the Fascist era, or so I’m told. My mother’s side is from everywhere, the hills of Sabina, and remotely Spain and France, and they travelled the country as my granddad was an engineer for the electric company—Milan, Genoa, Terni. I don’t feel Roman. You can spot a real Roman from miles. Savvy, gritty, ironic. I’m not. And now—to keep with first things first—could you talk a little about this theme of purity? It seems such a gorgeously perverse subject for a contemporary novel. What’s the beauty of purity? I experimented with not having sex for years. And I am a renowned lover of women. There was a time in my midtwenties where I thought of my life as an ongoing piece of performance art, and I realized the big thing I should try was to stop having sex. I had this romantic view of my love for my girlfriend being exalted and enhanced by abstinence. I became impotent. Read More