October 4, 2012 Bulletin What We’re Doing Tonight: TPR at Greenlight Books! By Sadie Stein Tonight! Join us for a panel discussion of The Paris Review’s new fiction anthology, Object Lessons, and readings from Donald Antrim and David Means, moderated by our very own Lorin Stein. Free! Greenlight Bookstore686 Fulton StreetBrooklyn, NY 11217 7:30-9:30 See you there! P.S. There will be wine. [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]
October 4, 2012 First Person Meeting Joan Didion By Lucy McKeon Each Sunday, we would walk down Lexington together, the conversation taking the tempo of our steps: slow, meditative, purposeful. She’d always be in immediate need of a coffee, so we would head for our café. The one on Seventy-something, a fifteen-minute walk from her place. We would never spend too much time in her apartment beforehand. I would go up to get her, maybe sit in her kitchen for five minutes while she got her things together, keys jangling, and we’d leave. I would try to take in the walls of books, visually inhaling the pillows collected over years and continents, and those curtains—thick buttery beige, like icing. Framed photographs from the seventies—the nuclear family—lining the bookcases, soaked in that sunny filter of the era, then sun-soaked again by the morning light. At the café, we’d speak of her writing, about what she was working on, what movies we’d each recently seen and if they were any good. If we’d spotted any celebrities downtown, we would share what they’d been wearing and she would tell me her dreams. We would sometimes order two scoops of vanilla ice cream to share, and she’d urge me to finish the last bite. If conversation lagged, I might tell her I felt a West Coast phase coming on. She would read my writing and tell me what was good and what wasn’t (she’d never say anything like she “saw great potential” in me—nothing like that, nothing that might threaten eyes to roll). She’d advise me as a professional equal and as a child, which is exactly how I would feel sitting across from her, two times her size and one-third her age, her books overstuffing my backpack. “You don’t think in terms of suddenly making it,” she would tell me, remembering when Play It as It Lays first came out. “You think you have some stable talent that will show no matter what you’re writing, and if it doesn’t seem to be getting across to the audience once, you can’t imagine that moment when it suddenly will.” I would nod. “Gradually,” she’d add, “gradually you gain that confidence.” She wouldn’t always be nice to me. She might be in a foul mood and take it out on me a bit, but then she would always be fair. That’s how I’d know she was taking me seriously. I would be aware then, I wouldn’t have to wait until I was older to recognize, that this acknowledgment, this leveling, was more valuable than anything else. Her secrets would be my secrets, and mine hers—in so much as people share their secrets. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, she’d say knowingly, eyeing the stacks of journals overflowing my lap, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss. I would shrug and scribble a note or two. I’d learn her way of being, how she took up space. How she liked her eggs, where she’d sniff after words and what that meant, which was her favorite linen dress. And I’d learn to sketch maps of her intellectual processes. I suppose she would learn mine as well. She had many friends, of course, so it wouldn’t be like I was giving her something to do. She would meet with me for some other reason, one that would never be entirely clear to me. Years later, I would still wonder. Read More
October 4, 2012 Arts & Culture The Flanders Duck By Cody Upton Perhaps you’ve seen it: that building out on Route 24, in Flanders, Long Island, that looks like a duck. Thirty feet long and twenty feet tall, it weighs a little over eight tons. It is called the Big Duck, and its white cement body sits in a permanent squat. At the center of its breast is a door that opens into a one-room museum and gift shop. There, three or four days a week, throughout most of the year, Barbara Bixby sits alertly behind the counter. Babs, as she prefers to be called, is a trim sixty-six-year-old with long auburn hair and bangs that fall over her eyes. Her accent is difficult to place. Not Long Island. Not New England. She draws out her words like an old film actress and speaks with great enthusiasm. She is infectiously friendly. On a Saturday last winter, I trekked out to Flanders to spend an afternoon in the Duck with Babs. I traveled by train and by taxi, and when I arrived just past one P.M., Babs was entertaining a large, dark haired man and his young daughter. The shop smelled of potpourri. The Little Rascals played in black and white on a television set built into the wall. Babs wore a rose-colored sweater (a little threadbare at one elbow), a floral scarf, and a ring on nearly every finger. After the man and girl had gone, she turned to me and said, “What a sweet little lady!” Babs is one of two duck sitters, and though she insists there is no hierarchy, she is more or less the head duck lady. Read More
October 4, 2012 On the Shelf Poetic Prescriptions, Banished Words By Sadie Stein Get a prescription form from the Poetry Pharmacy. A poem written by Sylvia Plath as a college student has surfaced. This year’s “List of Words Banished from the Queen’s English for Misuse, Overuse, and General Uselessness.” Orson Welles and Hemingway had a relationship. It was “very strange.” Mark Twain: “Apparently, the Concord library has condemned Huck as ‘trash and only suitable for the slums.’ This will sell us another twenty-five thousand copies for sure!” Writers respond to having books banned. [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]
October 3, 2012 Arts & Culture Dead Authors at Fashion Week: Part 5 By Katherine Bernard Gertrude Stein takes notes from the front row at the Céline Spring 2013 collection. Pause Play Play Prev | Next
October 3, 2012 First Person Letter from a Haunted House: Part 1 By Amie Barrodale I rented my apartment, a large studio on the top floor of a three-story house listed in the National Registry of Historic Places, sight unseen, through Craigslist. When my mom asked me, months later, for its address, I had to do a Google search. Among the results was a mention of my place being haunted. I didn’t click on the link. I did mention it to my husband, Clancy, in passing. On the day I moved in, without giving it any thought, we started to refer to one storage space—there are three, two low-ceilinged ones on either side of the pitch-roofed room and one closet—as “the bad area.” We had barely walked in, we (at least I) had forgotten the ghost, and here we were—“the bad area.” In fairness to the rational-minded, the bad area was just that. It had a white door on hinges that came to my chest. The floorboards were unfinished. Brown insulation fiber had come loose in the ceilings and was all over the floor. It was dusty and full of cobwebs. An industrial, kevlar-and-aluminum fire-escape ladder was in one corner. The previous tenant lived here three years. I don’t think he swept in there one time. I don’t think anyone did. (The other storage area was half open, clean, with finished floors.) Read More