Dirty Dancing Redux: Charlyne Yi and Channing Tatum.

OMG, HILARIOUS.

Ok Go makes me feel like I'm failing 7th grade science all over again.

... ahhh, memories ...

Astrobarry nails it & I wonder why I ever left him behind.

Adrienne posted her wildly accurate horoscope, reminding me of just how long it's been since I've checked mine.

Also known as: frittering away the last hour I had tonight to revise a short story.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): If you're finding yourself unwilling or unable to steal those much-needed hours of self-imposed isolation, Taurus, let me suggest there may be a deeply ingrained belief about productivity that's inhibiting you from simply taking time out for yourself. Earth signs are notorious for valuing the practical and the pragmatic over, say, less-tangible goals like providing self-nurturing by embracing stillness or leaving one's mind open to mystical inspiration from untraceable sources. While that valuation surely serves you well when it comes to 'taking care of business every day', it simultaneously holds you back from relishing a profounder experience of everyday life that's about more than just how much you got accomplished and what concrete results came from it. Without taking moments like this to silently reflect, spacily daydream, and/or purposely tune out, you might easily lapse into wondering, 'Is this all there is?' Doing what you're 'supposed' to do on the material plane (or what your inflexible inner ethicist claims you must do, in order to be worthy), while refusing to allow yourself to periodically drift into imaginative other-worlds, merely creates superficial success… with all the outer pieces in their so-called rightful place, but a hollow core of unexamined purpose inside.

Ummmmm, yep. This is exactly what my life is like right now. Almost word for word. Uncanny.

Mai Sato proves that pole-dancing should be an olympic sport.

This is just gorgeous! "Ballet on a pole," indeed.

How to salvage a terrible day.

You wake up sick at 7:30am, consider going back to sleep, but the dog has to go out. It's early enough so you take her to the park during off-leash hours. You go in your sweat-stained running clothes, a ball cap and glasses on, with no makeup and both hair and teeth unbrushed. You look like a teenage boy who hasn't yet discovered that grooming goes over well with the ladies. What you haven't computed (likely because you haven't had coffee) is that Spring has sprung, and worse it's a Saturday, which means every single cool person living in Fort Greene and Clinton Hill is at Fort Greene Park in cute dog-walking outfits, like jeans that they don't want dogs to jump on. You're too tired and sick to even care how uncute you look, and you shrug because, man, it was stupid of them to wear nice jeans. You actually want your dog to jump on them, just out of spite.

All day, you manage to do nothing useful aside from taking the dog to the park, bathing her, remembering to actually feed her, hoovering down two huge mugs of coffee, and uhmm, actually nope that's it.

You are useless.

And unmotivated.

What is wrong with you! Why do you bitch and moan about deadlines and never getting a break, but then when you have the chance to actually get ahead, you blow it reading novels and magazines and watching hours of crime-riddled TV that saturates your dreams a viscous red?

But your head hurts. It's the sinuses, see. And your throat aches. It's the sinuses dripping nastyness down, understand.

And then you decide to call your mother. The conversation is lovely. It is fine. She sounds well and happy and full of plans. But perhaps calling her was not the right idea because eventually you end up talking about your upcoming graduation, and things get slightly heated (maybe just warmed), and then you're not sure if you got hung up on, or her boss caught her on the phone when she has to work this Saturday, or maybe she got mugged in the Honolulu Clinic parking lot. Or what. You do not know. All you know is there was a voice on the line and now there is not.

You try to be reasonable. There are a million explanations. First and most obvious, it was a bad connection. So you call her cell again. And then her cell again and her office. And then five minutes later, you try her cell, office, and pager. You repeat with cell and office 15 minutes later, then 15 minutes later, then 10 minutes later. You stop. You're getting obsessive. You call again a hour later.

You get mad. You get frustrated. You get worried.

Your husband comes home. You tell him you are mad, frustrated, and worried. He says, sorry, honey, i love you, i have to take a nap.

He naps. You decide you need to go for a run. A run would be good. You've missed two running days and one yoga session because of being sick. You're still sick, but fuck it, a run would be good.

...

And then suddenly the whole day is changed. You are running, and everything works. The legs, the arms, the center of you, your smile, your sense of rhythm, all of you. Everything works so well and the sun and the wind feel so good on your face and you realize you can see the Williamsburg Bridge. Can you follow its lines and run beneath its arches? Can you find your way? You say, just to the end of this junkyard. Pass that group of Hasidic Jews. And then, there she is, the Bridge. Yes! You could! Triumph! You have done it, old gal, and you've passed your two-mile goal for the day! But you're not tired, and the sun is shining, and fifty people in shorts and sunglasses and smiles go by on their bicycles. You keep running. It still feels good. You say, pass the spot where you turn up to go to Marlowe & Sons. To the end of that brick building. Shit, it's kind of long. Ok, you can rest now. Walk. Oh, look, there's a park. Kinda. Or maybe what passes for a park in these parts. There's a red lighthouse-looking structure. And a patch of beach and another of grass. Benches. And everywhere hipsters with ironic sunglasses and cruisers, nautical stripes and floral prints. Walk through here. Try to look cooler and less caring than you are. Get back out of that "park" and keep running. WTF, there is a surf store here. And then hit 2.5 miles and realize you gotta still go back. Turn around. Go back. Go back and back, past all of it, stop once to tie your shoe, but you are still running, and you are still triumphant, and everything works, and it all feels good.

Quote of the day: Greta Gerwig, in New York Magazine.

"My mom said that people were starting to think that I'm really inarticulate. And I was like, 'Mom! Who speaks in full sentences anyway?' Well, Barack Obama, maybe. You can hear that man's commas.'"

--New York Magazine, March 15-22, 2010: pp. 104

Spring has sprung.

The last few days have been glorious. It seems like more people live in the neighborhood, more people walk the streets, everything is just more than it was. And this morning, Fort Greene Park was in full swing. Everything felt like it had finally come alive and was exulting in that fact. Dogs were rushing at each other with unusual joy. People were wearing sunglasses and smiles and bright colors and flower-printed patterns. Bushes actually had leaves on them--this is major.

I'll say this for you, New York: you sure know how to make people appreciate some good warm sunshine. All you have to do is deprive them of it and bundle them up over half the year, and boy are they grateful when even 50 degrees rolls around again. You get them up to the 60s, and they are ready to buy up all your stock. You get them to the mid-70s and they are half-naked in a park, a sort of glazed, hedonistic look in their eye, open and loose to anything.

Yes, it's all been glorious... except that Dave and I have been laid low by some kind of awful head cold/allergy combination. He's actually been sick for over a week, while I've just had it four days now. That said, that first day was really bad: I was running a temperature (~102 degrees) and had gone deliriously dramatic, demanding to know when I'd have brain damage from my brain getting cooked. My throat was sore, it hurt to swallow, my sinuses ached so strong it felt like my head was a bubble and all I could do was look forward to the pop. And boy did I whine and moan and make little whimpering noises. Just ask poor Dave, who, while sick himself, had to bow to my clearly more advanced dramatic portrayal of Ailing Maiden, Both Fetching and Fair. I mean, really, it is a pretty spectacular performance. And heartfelt. But there the poor man was, making clucking noises and fetching me tea and making a whole pot of chicken soup to make me feel better. [Note to self: Be nicer to him next time he's sick. For example, don't whack him for snoring and make him some soup instead of teasing him for his whimpers.]

So , anyway. Allow me to link to something a little more upbeat and springy than my current self: this ridiculous edible Easter art project.

Now, it's a little too advanced Martha for me but maybe some of you--especially some of you with kiddos--might wanna give it a shot. The picture was enough to do the trick for me. You know, as I lay pale and weak, gasping for breath, on my deathbed in the pure spring morning light.

Review of Apparition & Late Fictions for LibraryThing Early Reviewers program.

There are two kinds of lives possible. One is that of the utterly pulled together and polished author. The kind of person always in control. Who is never guilty of typos. Who revises each thing unto its death, so it can live blameless and perfect on a page in a book on a shelf.

And the other life is that which I spent a long time resisting. A sprawling life was how I used to see it. Messy, disorganized, reaching in a million directions, not content to be full to the brim, spilling over, and over, and over. Typos and interests and thoughts and feelings and thoughtfulness and forgetfulness abound. I’ve come to see that life as an embrace. Now I see it as the writer Philip Graham gently suggested to me: as a chance to fail, inventively, in a million ways, a different one each time but to never take “failure” as a negative thing—rather to see it as an active process of recognizing the ever-undoneness of our work. Of our lives. And isn’t that better? Isn’t that actually even more humble? To acknowledge the imperfections of one’s person and life?

Thomas Lynch, in Apparitions & Late Fictions, is definitely the latter kind of writer. I can sense the trembling sides of his stories, the weak thudding flanks, but how better to at least be filled with life? There is nothing cold, collected, or controlled about the stories. They sprawl, crawl, veer too far in spurious directions, but they also breathe. I can see where the stories that make up this slender volume would get deconstructed in a fiction workshop, but they are not any less good stories in the moments that they do veer away from the expectations of Literary Fiction with Important Capital Letters. It means only that Lynch had the bravery and imagination to experiment. The willingness to not necessarily succeed.

“Catch and Release” and “Bloodsport” are your standard-length short stories; “Hunter’s Moon” and “Matinee de September” are more sprawling; and, finally, the title story of the collection “Apparition” is novella-length at about 90 pages. It is as if, as you go through the collection, each story emboldens the next to be twice as long.

The vividness of detail, the large and importantness of theme, all make me recall other “grand stories” I’ve read and ideas for ones I want to write. It’s exactly what I want in a book, highly preferable to “perfection”—whatever that is, anyway, doubt it exists. I want a story that opens things up, that flings my own imagination open wide and far, that makes me see things that are possible in my own work or allows me to understand events in my own life.

These are quiet and quirky little gems of story. Very small arcs. Lynch’s use of backstory is noticeable but pretty quickly dispatched. His prose is gorgeous, and he particularly wields skillfully the jargon-heavy worlds of fishing, autopsy/funeral preparation, academia, the popular religion book circuit: skillfully navigating between unexplained authenticity (not dumbing it down) and showing readers just enough to get by.

Throughout, what hangs above the heads of these people is death and what one has made of one’s life. Sometimes it is the death of others and sometimes the harbinger of one’s own imminent demise, but either way, all of these living characters are haunted. Lynch’s characters are withdrawn into themselves and stuck inside their own minds and stuck with their own selves.

New rule for lit events.

New Rule: I’m always allowed to buy books at readings/panel events—especially if (a) I liked the writer’s reading and (b) having a book for them to sign will give me an excuse to interact with them.

This may turn out to be an expensive New Rule.

Tiphanie Yanique at Greenlight.

A week ago, I went to a really wonderful event at Greenlight Bookstore in Fort Greene: Tiphanie Yanique (below right), of Brooklyn and the U.S. Virgin Islands, was reading from her debut collection of short fiction, How to Escape from a Leper Colony. The Q&A was to be moderated by Tayari Jones (below left), of the fantastic Leaving Atlanta and more recently The Untelling.

First of all, if you haven’t been to Greenlight, GO. It is such a gem of an addition to Fort Greene. Before Greenlight, I was trucking back to Barnes and Noble in Brooklyn Heights and feeling mighty unsatisfied. I mean, if I had to go that far, I might as well go all the way to BookCourt, since that’s at least another indie bookstore–and one, I might add, that also houses an excellent reading/event series.

I strongly agree with Khaliah Williams’s notion that “The sound of an author reading his own work can change everything.” I will add to that thought that the reading/Q&A is also a chance for an author to really stick a foot in it, to turn me off almost completely to his or her work—for example, if she or he is overly cocky or completely incoherent without a charming shyness being the source of the incoherence—but that’s another story entirely.

I had never heard of Tiphanie Yanique before receiving the Greenlight mailer about their upcoming readings, but when the book was described as “a collection of stories and a short novel set in her native Virgin Islands. It's part oral history, part postcolonial narrative, and tells odd and magical stories that are both epic and intimate,” I was sold.

Hearing Tiphanie read and bearing witness to the conversation between Tiphanie and Tayari changed everything. Tiphanie is on my radar now and in a large way. She is a writer after my own—admittedly selective and stupidly public about my selectiveness—heart.

First off, she was a fabulous reader, confident and sure, standing staunchly by her work, unashamed, proud. This is notable perhaps only to me, one of the world’s least confident readers.

Second, in the single piece she read (the title story of the collection), Tiphanie managed to hold up to the light all of my favorite notions: explorations of insiderness and outsiderness, feeling or being Othered, visibility in women and people of color, of needing to overcome histories that tell you your experience is not a story worth telling, a confused notion of “home,” of lacking the culture or language to consider oneself at home anywhere, what searching for where you belong and radically finding it in a person, not a place. “Home is where my husband is,” says Tiphanie. The epigraph to the collection reads: “‘Lead us toward those we are waiting for, those who are waiting for us.’ From the prayer to Saint Raphael, patron saint of lovers and travelers.” Tiphanie explains that this was the notion that tied the collection together for her—that in each story, a character finds his or her home in another character.

Third, there is Tiphanie’s person. She swears freely, which we know is a quality I like, but holds that, palm up and balanced, with a notion of herself as a “Church-going writer.” She is not a difficult personality or writer, doesn’t hold herself as an eccentric or an artistic type with a more edgy/sensitive temperament. “I’m not one of those writers with processes,” says Tiphanie. “I don’t need, like, a glass of Chardonnay.” At her reading, she was the absolute opposite of aloof, warmly speaking with anyone who wished to speak with her. Which might be explained by what she bubbled forth with during her Q&A: “I like people. I really like people. I know that’s weird to say. But some people only like a few people.” This quote was in answer to a question about how she gets her story ideas—she gets them from people, but not just from eavesdropping or stealing their experiences, but by listening, talking to, and being with them. She is funny and has such a grounded sense of both humor and self that she can combine the two. Relaying an anecdote of a high school teacher who told her there were no black philosophers, Tiphanie turned to her audience and very matter-of-factly said: “I got enough shit going on. I don’t got a daddy. Can’t I at least get a black philosopher?!” If I hadn’t already been in her pocket, I would have climbed up and in for that honest gem of a moment right there (especially the daddy comment, as we all know I have daddy issues)--and for her gentle defense of this teacher to the audience who had audibly grimaced at the teacher’s mistake. Listen, she told us. He was wrong, but he was trying to encourage me. He said, there are no black philosophers, so why don’t you be the first?

Finally, I admired with all my self her confidence in her self, her writing, and the particular pushes and pulls within her history and self: the colonization of the U.S. Virgin Islands, being a woman of color, and the internal self censor. As she explicates in her essay “My Superhero Secret,” she has utterly learned to trust her own voice and defend her own self: “It’s about being able to protect your own incredibleness when it seems others can’t accept it. It’s a private joke. It’s a quiet knowledge to hold above people when you feel they’ve kept you down.”

I've not gotten to crack the spine of How to Escape from a Leper Colony, but it's on the top of the bedside table pile. I'm sure this won't be the last time I write about such a talented and inspiring writer--especially after being introduced to her in such a perfect setting and way. Thanks, Greenlight. Thanks, Tayari, for being an excellent moderator. And thank you, most of all, to you, Tiphanie, for writing what you write and inspiring the way you do.

On the work of others.

I’ve been having some misgivings about blogging negatively about the work of others. Not that I think my opinions matter to (a) the public at large or (b) the writers themselves, but these feelings have followed neatly on the footsteps of the entry about Veronica and Shoplifting. So, just to get it out of the way, I hereby apologize, heartfeltedly, to the authors of those books, although I do thank them for writing their to-my-mind flawed books, such that I could stupidly blog about them, feel bad about it, and then uncover a larger, more interesting question about the conversations we as artists/intellectuals can/should not have.

Here is how the argument goes.

Me A: Well. I have opinions, and this blog is a reflection of them and me, and this is what I started a blog for: to process everything in my life, the writing, the cooking, the growing up, all of it, so why should I hold myself back now?

Me B: Because it isn’t nice.

Me A: Everyone has opinions.

Me B: But, interestingly enough, not everyone feels the compulsion to blog their opinions. I maintain: if it isn’t nice, maybe you should just keep it to yourself.

Me A: But if I am trying to live a literary life, shouldn’t I be practicing my critical eye and voice? Part of that life is reviewing the work of others to see what has been tried and what has been accomplished. I need to practice

Me B: Do you really? Or is the Internet just allowing you the certain vitriol mixed with just enough anonymity/facelessness that you feel bold enough to stir shit in a way you would never do in person?

Me A: Ooooh. Touche.

Me B: That’s right, bitch.

Me A: But what about any publicity is good publicity?

Me B: But what about "do unto others?" Would you have them do this unto you?

Me A: You're really "on" today. Were you in high school debate or some shit? Perhaps while I was stuck in detention for that D in biology? I mean, shit. You make me want to give up on today and just go back to bed.

So. I don’t know.

Let me be clear: I NEVER, EVER think it is okay to launch ad hominem attacks. I never want to be guilty of having said negative things about a person’s person. I don’t even want to be guilty of having said negative things about a work, without clarifying that this particular work didn’t do it FOR ME. Specifically. Because I am the arbiter of only my own taste.

Other authors, what do you think? And more importantly what do you DO in your literary life? Is it career suicide or bad camaraderie to discuss negatively the work of others?

Winging it is the new delicious.

Dinner last night=

brussel sprouts dressed liberally in bacon so my husband doesn't notice he's eating a notorious vegetable (their adorable recommendation that you cut up two slices very small, like crumbles, just didn't fly in our household where we used six slices and left them as nice slabs of bacon)

+

gnocci (from a package, don't judge)

+

winged-it elegantly pink vodka sauce (Dave Lieberman's recipe, reposted here, but without the basil, and with the addition of porcini mushrooms and half a vidalia)

+

a couple of glasses of white wine from The Greene Grape's cheapo bottle area, in this case, a Laurent Miquel 2009 Chardonnay-Viognier blend.

OK. I may be drinking fast on an empty stomach, but right now I think I am a GENIUS for having pulled this meal together on the fly. BACON!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Mmmm, smoky fish chowder.

From Real Simple. I was a little dubious to begin with--halibut and chorizo, really? Yes. Really. This meal was AWESOME. The chorizo really loaned the meal this delicious smokyness, only enhanced by our sprinkling with kiawe smoke sea salt from the KCC Farmer's Market, our treat to ourselves the last time we were home.

Admittedly, it was not the cheapest meal ever, with halibut at $20/pound at Choice Greene, but MAN was that a good meal.

On "Shoplifting."

I just finished reading the first of the two novellas I bought from the Mercantile Library reading: Shoplifting from American Apparel by Tao Lin.

And I just don't get it. I mean, I feel almost angry, having finished my read of it. Like what the fuck was that, even? It was just this long relay of events. The main character, Sam, felt "emotions" and had "neutral facial expressions." He stole things for no apparent reason and wrote books. He had vague relationships with handfuls of other characters, all of whom were named and none of whom were physically distinguished from the others and most of whom appeared but once in the 103 pages and never again. Characters found themselves in a lot of different settings. Characters talked about a lot of clever things.

But I didn't once feel close to or connected to any of the characters.

I couldn't feel Tao Lin's "craft hand" in the book, which would be a compliment except that I suspect it is because he didn't really shape the narrative. It merely was what it was on the page. It began with a bowl of cereal in soymilk and ended with a two-liner conversation between Sam and his won't-be lover about what he wanted to be when he grew up. ("A marine biologist.")

I closed that slender thing's cover and thought: he has no more idea than me what a novella is. He just wanted to get in the Contemporary Art of the Novella series--just like he said at the panel.

I thought: Fuck, I'm pissed.

Then I thought: But why am I pissed? I am not pissed at him. He is an artist and it is his prerogative, his RIGHT, to make his art the way he wishes. But I am pissed at the Publisher, that this is what they want. I am pissed at the too-cool hipster readers with their ironic glasses and their useless, decorative facial hair. Because they are so drawn in. It is almost like they don't quite understand it, but won't admit it, and so find it clever and are taken in by its formlessness and meaninglessness. And/or maybe I am projecting. Maybe I'm so infuriated because I myself don't get it, and it feels like being the loser in a circle of eight people where everyone is laughing in earnest, but you spaced out on the punchline, so now you're standing there laughing just as hard as everyone else, but you know your laughter sounds different, it is edged with a kind of desperation or hysteria.

Moving swiftly along... so I did some recon on what I'm supposed to feel about the book. Lin explains the style of the book as follows (see Wikipedia):

"concrete, with all the focus on surface details, with no sentences devoted to thoughts or feelings, and I think that results in a kind of themelessness, that , in its lack of focus on anything else, the theme becomes , to me, the passage of time."

And, OK, I'll give him that. I like the way he explains what he is trying to do. And I think he does what he tried to do.

So. Here's the thing, I guess. Tao has figured out how to make a splash into/onto the literary scene--whether a positive splash or one with back(sp)lash. He has peopled his "fictional" (??) universe with droll, dry, clever, bored people. In this world, there are no larger meanings or overarching themes--just like life. Time passes. People eat cereal and think and feel "things." They treat each other vaguely and badly.

It's life, all right.

But is it art?

And is there even a single answer to that awfully judgy-wudgy and pretentious question?

I'll say, then, only this: he's not the author for me. I turn to books to be drawn into a wild and wonderful world, to feel close to people different from me, to find meaning. I want to read a book and feel like there is more to life than Gchat and standing around awkwardly at parties, failing to connect.

The (contemporary) art of the novella.

Went to a panel at the Mercantile Library Center for Fiction* a few nights ago on "The Contemporary Art of the Novella," featuring Melville House Press's Senior Editor Kelly Burdick as moderator and novella-ists Lore Segal (Lucinella) and Tao Lin (Shoplifting from American Apparel). I had just finished reading the novella "Apparition" by Thomas Lynch (forthcoming in Apparition & Late Fictions) and have found myself thinking about the novella a lot lately.

I wrote a short story, "Drunk on a Holy Day," of which I am quite fond, love the characters, feel passionately about the story I am trying to tell, etc., but it is sprawling and out of control, feels more like the beginning of a novel with the amount of backstory and scene and character development (of just TWO characters) it is trying to plow through. So, the other day I sat down to write a new story, and the next thing I knew those same two characters had taken over the party. And while that story remained pretty well contained--indeed, an actually short story, from Mayumi Shimose Poe, wtf! only 12 pages, one of which I suspect can be cut--I did begin to suspect that the pieces would fit together, that they were reaching for the same truth on the same high shelf that neither could reach yet, but that maybe if one stood on the other's shoulders, they might at least get closer to the truth.

So. Thought this panel might help. But as it turns out, no one can quite put a finger on what a novella does or is--not even the people writing them. "A novella means a certain length," said Tao Lin. "15,000-40,000 words." I had been hoping for something a little more substantive than just length. I wanted to know what makes a novella breathe and live differently than a short story and/or a novel. And there were vague murmurs about length, or about character development, or about tangents, but really what I took away from the panel was this:

you write and you rewrite until one day you stop majorly rewriting as much and decide (not know) that you're done. Whatever length it is, it falls into one or another category.

And while I wanted a different answer, the one I got might actually be the most helpful. It is freeing, and it is matter of fact. There is no more alchemy to a novella than to a short story or a novel. You don't sit down thinking of a size, says Lore Segal. "I have nothing in my head when I sit down ... nothing except a taste in my mouth." You write until you stop writing, and then you rewrite until you stop rewriting. And when you've stopped, it's because you've gotten to where you felt you needed to go with a piece.

Well, OK, then.

Lore Segal (whose novella Lucinella is next up on my bedside table) also suggested an interesting way of choosing books to read: "Take any book, read page 99, and see how you like the tone. You'll know if this is a mind you want to spend time with."

I was going to conclude this entry with the reiteration of how lucky I feel to be here, attending two lit events in one week (still have to blog the other one, a fantastic reading) that open up my mind and imagination in exciting, expansive ways ... but I don't want to let myself dwell on the leaving. I should dwell on the still being here, dwelling only on the still dwelling.

---

* Please note when you visit the Mercantile's website: one of the next big events is a talk by Mary Gaitskill. Which, of course, made me giggle to myself and remember the time that, trying to prove to my VCFA advisor that I could be cool and independent and mingle at the literary event he had brought me to rather than sit in the corner like a loser, I sat Mary Gaitskill down in a corner and asked her her name. And then continued to obsess about my gaffe for entries to come. Oh, well. I know I am supposed to love MG, and bow down to her, and scrape and praise and flutter and flatter, but honestly? Even before I made the social boo-boo, I hated the one book of hers that I read. Like they say, there's no accounting for taste, right? I should probably give poor Mary another go, though. How much would I hate it if people judged my writing on the basis of ONE work. OH WAIT, SHE ALSO WROTE "Secretary." I just remembered this. I haven't read it (yet) but I f-ing loved the movie ...