{"id":16082,"date":"2011-05-26T14:15:28","date_gmt":"2011-05-26T18:15:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=16082"},"modified":"2013-01-09T11:48:08","modified_gmt":"2013-01-09T16:48:08","slug":"a-week-in-culture-matthew-specktor-writer-and-editor-part-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2011\/05\/26\/a-week-in-culture-matthew-specktor-writer-and-editor-part-ii\/","title":{"rendered":"A Week in Culture: Matthew Specktor, Writer and Editor, Part 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is the second installment of Specktor\u2019s culture diary. Click here<\/a> to read part 1. <\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"

Photography by Lisa Jane Persky.<\/p><\/div>\n

DAY FOUR<\/h3>\n

8:30 A.M.<\/strong> Breakfast, and a chunk of The Pale King<\/em>.<\/p>\n

11:40 A.M.<\/strong> I meet up with The Los Angeles Review of Books<\/em>\u2019 splendid poetry editor, Ms. Gabrielle Calvocoressi. Knowing her is even better than saying her name, which you could, if you wanted, skip rope to. We talk about Fairport Convention, Vietnam metaphors, 2001: A Space Odyssey<\/em>, Joe Boyd<\/a>, Frank Bidart, Richard Howard, and Led Zeppelin. (Always, Led Zeppelin<\/a>!) We eat soup. I walk away feeling the way I always do after talking with Gaby, namely that I got the better half of the bargain.<\/p>\n

3:20 P.M.<\/strong> Nicolas Jaar<\/a>, and a nap. My draft of Zeroville<\/em> is very nearly almost done, and I\u2019ve gotten my licks in on a few more LARB essays. I feel semijustified in caving in to fever, and so, do.<\/p>\n

\"\"8:15 P.M.<\/strong> I find myself standing in an intolerably humid Skylight Books, listening to an invisible Bret Easton Ellis\u2014he\u2019s somewhere up there, obstructed by the mob\u2014read from Imperial Bedrooms<\/em>. He then answers questions about The Hills<\/em>, Glee<\/em>, Twitter, screenwriting, loneliness. Just about everything except books. He\u2019s charming, patient, funny, articulate, and reminds me how odd it can be when the reality of an author\u2014or of anything\u2014gets eclipsed by reputation. Lethem has a piece in his forthcoming Ecstasy of Influence<\/a><\/em> in which he argues that notoriety is the only form of postwar American literary fame. He\u2019s persuasive, dividing fame from regard among readers and suggesting that knife fights (Mailer), feuds (Vidal), and censorship (Nabokov, Ellis) are the royal road to visibility. Maybe. But this place is packed, largely with people half my age who are carrying thoroughly destroyed\u2013looking Vintage editions of Ellis\u2019s older books. Someone\u2019s reading him, and that\u2019s a good thing, regardless of what strains they\u2019re locating in his work. A stray tweet I read later refers to \u201cbeing here with other weirdos waiting to hear Bret Easton Ellis read.\u201d I take that as proof positive that literature has not nearly outlived its use.<\/p>\n

11:45 P.M.<\/strong> Home, doped up on Theraflu, and listening to the entire Faces discography while engaging in a thoroughly academic e-mail dispute about the Rolling Stones disco period. I should go to sleep. I should make some less virtual friends. I should listen to \u201cDebris\u201d again. And again<\/a>. Yes, \u201cHey Negrita<\/a>\u201d is a masterpiece, better than anything on Aftermath<\/em>. And yes, I have awakened from even more troubling fever dreams than that one.<\/p>\n

DAY FIVE<\/h3>\n

8:00 A.M.<\/strong> Miraculously, I feel better. I disable my Internet connection and plow into fiction. What once was second\u2014hell, first\u2014nature now feels a little like a reward.<\/p>\n

\"\"10:30 A.M.<\/strong> Editing, and titling pieces for LARB. The latter is not my strength. I conjure, and discard, one lame pun after another. Evan Kindley, our nimble-witted managing editor, comes to my rescue, as he so often does. For Jeff Wasserstrom\u2019s Orwell-Huxley essay<\/a>, he proposes \u201cHot Dystopic.\u201d Nicely done.<\/p>\n

11:00 A.M.<\/strong> E-mail Stephen Elliott<\/a>, asking him for permission to excerpt something. Of course, he says. \u201cMy writing is your writing.\u201d The sentiment pleases me. I\u2019ll skip the whole copyright\/plagiarism debate for now and just note that I appear to be awfully fond of socialists. Elliott is someone I admire tremendously. His work seems to me infinitely generous, wonderfully alert. The Adderall Diaries<\/a><\/em> is a beautiful book.<\/p>\n

1:30 P.M.<\/strong> Lunch in Culver City with Tommy Pallotta<\/a>, an insanely gifted director-producer. We talk about a TV show we might develop together, and then about our experiences with different specialty arms of film studios. Specifically, about the cluelessness that tends to dominate the more the bankers and lawyers horn in. He tells a story about an investor claiming to have developed an algorithm that would calculate hit movies. I\u2019d be more amused than depressed if this sort of thinking\u2014rearguard, retrograde, and defensive in the extreme\u2014didn\u2019t seem to have a toehold in other industries as well. Books, for example. Time spent surfing publishers\u2019 fall catalogues this morning reminds me of that sad tendency to use past successes to predict future ones. Sometimes it works. Others, not so much<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"8:00 P.M.<\/strong> Bedtime for Wonder Woman. I read her a big chunk of The Phantom Tollbooth<\/a><\/em> and wonder what she makes of the Princesses Rhyme and Reason, the lattice of puns that makes up the bulk of that text. Probably more than I can imagine. I fall asleep not long after she does, after catching a sliver of Rio Bravo<\/a><\/em> on TV.<\/p>\n

DAY SIX<\/h3>\n

1:00 P.M.<\/strong> I\u2019m doing a panel at the Silverlake Jubilee<\/a> and Beard Expo<\/a>. Ben Ehrenreich, Grace Krilanovich, Cecil Castellucci, Tom Lutz, and I are set to discuss \u201cThe Electrocution of The Book,\u201d whatever that means, before a rapt crowd of thousands<\/a>. Actually, the audience does seem pretty into it. It\u2019s hot. The dosa truck is delicious. And the green room is mixing up cocktails involving coconut water and tequila, which I\u2019m smart enough not to get into before the panel. Grace is needlessly self-effacing about her groovy and psychedelic novel<\/a>. Cecil<\/a> admits that she\u2019s writing something about hoboes. Ben continues to be dashing on the topic of biblionecrophilia<\/a>, and Tom Lutz is his urbane, infinitely charming self<\/a>. I provide interstitial stammering and semi-adequate responses to unanswerable questions, mostly revolving around print versus screen. In truth, I don\u2019t really feel that I have a dog in that fight. I write, and edit, texts. How people choose to ingest them matters very little to me, although whatever encourages the texts\u2019 wide, easy, and immediate availability can only be a good thing. It feels like a great time to be a writer and, perhaps, a lousy one to be a publisher or a retailer. Fair enough. It\u2019s been the other way around for too long anyway.<\/p>\n

\"\"3:00 P.M. <\/strong>I work the LARB booth at the Jubilee, which we share with Black Clock. People wander past, ask questions, eyeball our swanky new Emily Dickinson T-shirts. Occasionally, we grab the attention of passersby ourselves. \u201cHey, d\u2019you like to read?\u201d I ask a handsome couple who linger for a moment in front of the booth. \u201cNot really,\u201d one of them says. I believe him. He\u2019s just too good looking. If a book really is a mirror dawdling down a lane<\/a>, he\u2019d be struck blind by his own radiance if he ever opened one.<\/p>\n

5:15 P.M.<\/strong> Green room. Now I let myself at the tequila, and then at the beer. Lots of smoking, lots of very hairy dudes<\/a>. I feel distinctly, but not at all unpleasantly, middle-aged. My friend Heather abducts me, and we go eat vegetarian food in Echo Park.<\/p>\n

DAY SEVEN<\/h3>\n

8:00 A.M.<\/strong> It\u2019s Wonder Woman\u2019s birthday. I lie in bed on a sort of culture diarist\u2019s holiday. Ignoring the paper, reading William Gerhardie\u2019s Futility<\/em>, which is either the greatest Russian novel ever written by an Englishman or vice versa. Listening to Spacemen 3\u2019s Dreamweapon<\/a><\/em>, which appears to meet some minimum definition of the term music<\/em>, assuming you don\u2019t ask for anything fancy like a chord change. It\u2019s lovely, in fact. The sort of music I listen to\u2014in fact, the only sort I can listen to, these days\u2014when writing.<\/p>\n

11:00 A.M.<\/strong> Swimming, and cake. Really, how much more culture does a person need? I\u2019ll wrap up the day having dinner with my folks, my father the talent agent and stepmother the clothing designer. Both self-made successes with massive personalities and only a passing interest\u2014at best\u2014in literature. I love them to pieces, in part for that reason. For being the Los Angeles I have always known and will never stop quarreling with. A productive quarrel, as I\u2019ve known it thus far.<\/p>\n

Matthew Specktor is the author of<\/em> That Summertime Sound<\/a> and<\/em> The Sting<\/a>. He is senior editor at the<\/em> Los Angeles Review of Books<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is the second installment of Specktor\u2019s culture diary. Click here to read part 1. DAY FOUR 8:30 A.M. Breakfast, and a chunk of The Pale King. 11:40 A.M. I meet up with The Los Angeles Review of Books\u2019 splendid poetry editor, Ms. Gabrielle Calvocoressi. Knowing her is even better than saying her name, which […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":179,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[2373,828,217,2361,2374,2370,2371,2375,2372],"class_list":["post-16082","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-culture-diaries","tag-beard-expo","tag-bret-easton-ellis","tag-los-angeles","tag-matthew-specktor","tag-silverlake-jubilee","tag-skylight-books","tag-stephen-elliot","tag-tequila","tag-the-phantom-tollbooth"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nA Week in Culture: Matthew Specktor, Writer and Editor, Part 2 by Matthew Specktor<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"May 26, 2011 \u2013 This is the second installment of Specktor\u2019s culture diary. Click here to read part 1. DAY FOUR 8:30 A.M. 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