As a young writer, I was told a few things: 1. Never write about Kafka. Read Kafka, study Kafka, but actually writing about Kafka will make you look like a second-year graduate student, which is worse than being an undergraduate sophomore. You think you know everything, so you talk a lot, and you are obnoxious, because you know zilch. This old school philosophy held true, or so I thought, until I was sent out to cover a Lynne Tillman event on Kafka at the KGB over the summer of 2009 for Words Without Borders and learned that I was, bluntly put, wrong about the Kafka thing. Actually, I think my editor sent me over there specifically to change my mind about the issue. 2. I was told to never write dream sequences. Dream sequences are akin to having a drunk character, an unreliable character, an overdone easy give that doesn’t have to explain itself or earn a damn thing from anyone. Then I got even deeper into translated writers, and learned, oh man, that professor must have meant something else when they said don’t write dreams because Marquez, to me, was an example of a writer writing, this to me was glorious sentencing, painting, weaving, craft, and all I wanted was the David Lynch walking dream state all the time, all I wanted to write were dreams, and oddly-crafted, unreliable, artful, mind-melting dream sequences. The question I had to ask myself was: Was it an easy give? Was it easier to create a surrealist atmosphere under the guise of sleep? Was I just riffing around like a young writer does? There are, of course, other literary go-to’s for these deviant tricks such as inebriation/drug use, take Trainspotting, for example. There is amnesia, take the movie Memento, for example. On first read I kept thinking about these artworks as well as Atwood’s novel Lady Oracle in which a young woman fakes her own death, and begins sending post cards back from Italy. Then I was also thinking about Agualusa’s Book of Chameleons, in which a shape-shifting Gecko who lives on a wall can enter and change people’s dreams. It’s a little bit of a bait-and-switcheroo when you think about it. Less accountability. This going, “We’re writing, we’re reading, we’re going along. Oh hey, it was all a dream. Last page now, thanks for your time, bye.”

What we have here, in the Baumbach, instead, are levels on higher levels, but not without clues through dreams throughout. The clues begin from sentence one: “It was not the same. It was all the same.” We are told we are working with a writer who is writing, but we later learn, he may in fact also be dreaming. Our hint toward the dreaming theory actually comes from the—to my mind, glaringly obvious—clue, which is that each section is titled, “35th (or following number) Night.” Most people sleep at night, obviously. Each chapter heading tells us, we are at night, we come to feel as though we are reading from a dream diary. We are given better explanation as to why, for example, female visual artists appear out of nowhere, why a woman may be present, but may be gone. Or, another way of looking at it, is that Molly dumped the writer and what he’s trying to do is in his dreams, and while writing, perhaps both at the same time, is grasp out to her, and explaining the actual departure to himself by saying some sort of ill doing has been bestowed upon her, and rather, she needs to be brought back to herself physically and mentally, and in doing so, perhaps back to the pining author also physically and mentally. Our plot is murky. The writer’s wife may have been kidnapped, she may not have been kidnapped, she may—as in Atwood—have been running from her life, she may—as in Baumbach—be running from the author himself, but what he is also positing, I think, is that she “kidnapped herself” as it were, she is running from herself. Or, maybe she wasn’t, and the narrator himself just can’t admit that she just doesn’t want to be with him. This is a book about a man obsessed with a woman, and his objectification of her in that obsession is pronounced loud enough by Seighman’s objectifying cover art alone: A blurred woman’s face with the author’s name stamped in black right across it. She is there and not there, though at times actually there, and at times, decidedly not there. I think he may have been dumped by a woman he loved and this entire book is a dream dictionary he’s catalogued of plot his head has come up with in an effort to understand the heartbreak, but much more complicated.

A rather genius questioning of the self and what each of us mean to one another, and the perceptions and realities therein. A moving work, though also, incredibly heartbreaking. Like, 137 pages of a middle-aged man reaching for an old love sort of feels like watching an old friend repeat the same mistakes again and again while we shout, “Please stop doing that, why are you doing that?” We are comforted later, when we come to the eventual realization our narrator has known this part all along, and we in turn realize our author has been so very, very in control of the meta wheel, and just spent 137 pages saying, “I’m asking you to think about how much you think about others and what that does to you.”

The post Walking Dream State All the Time: TFT Review of Dreams of Molly by Jonathan Baumbach appeared first on The Faster Times.

A great majority of Tillman’s writing reads like a Polaroid as it develops: the image appears slowly, never fully crystallizing into the sharp, fine lines that a fancy DSLR camera would produce; it remains fuzzy around the edges and a little out of focus. This moment captured makes sense when it happens, and the people who share the experience know this as well. Tillman’s unique deciphering of life’s subtlety and most routine moments is thrilling in some instances and inducing of quiet contemplation in others. The paragraphs sound good in one’s head. The reader can hear the narrator speaking, can feel the way the words in the story might spill from a sad or happy mouth.

Take this example, for instance, from “The Substitute”: “Rex’s hands weren’t well-shaped, beautiful. If she concentrated on them… But she wondered: would they stir me, anyway. She shut her eyes. She liked talking with her eyes shut, though she couldn’t see her analyst’s face. Dr. Kaye wore a long tie today. It hung down over his fly and obscured the trouser pouch for his penis.” Tillman’s focus here is cerebral; the details of each debacle are irrelevant, it’s what was felt and feared by the individuals involved that is important.

In “Playing Hurt” Tillman is able to flawlessly capture the beginning middle and end of a high stakes relationship between a self-made investment banker named Abigail and a lost-it-all-in-the-crash-playboy named Nate, who makes the mistake of asking to borrow a million dollars from his rich wife, while refusing to relinquish his little black book of former loves (he hides it in a safety deposit box at the bank where Abigail works). But it is unclear exactly who is wronging who, and who is right, and Tillman likes it that way. The narratives leaves it up to the reader to decide if Abigail actually distrusts Nate, or is just so in love with the emotional security of her solitude as a single woman. When the pair meets for the first time, Nate “whispered words that infuriated [Abigail], but her breath stopped anyway…. He could make her happier, babies, if she wanted, millions of orgasms.” Nate stops drinking and tries to get his life in order but Abigail can’t get past the financial problems of their marriage and one night turns him away from “adding to her orgasm count” telling him to “make money not love.” The phrase hangs in the paragraph like a rusty nail in a clean white wall. It is painful to read. Tillman cuts immediately to the core of the couple’s problems and issues. Nate is hurt, and Abigail finds the little black book that he said he’d thrown away. They split—he goes back to drinking and Abigail goes back to helping animals in shelters as she did in law school, as the last line in the story notes: “When people at the office asked why, she’d explain she trusted cats and dogs, humans domesticated them, so they’re defenseless without us. But people, she occasionally added, people usually deserve what they get.” The slight inversion of the relentlessly overused cliché lingers in the creamy blank space following it in the page, and the reader pauses to discern the difference. Do people get what they deserve, or deserve what they get? The semantic nuance of the question is a delightful microcosm of Tillman’s insightful work.

This inversion of reality in the imagination is also apparent in two witty and interesting pieces about actual people, whom Tillman fictionalizes and perhaps even critiques in a way, with her characteristic nonchalance and forceful voice. These stories lack the depth and feeling of her others, however, and indicate that Tillman might be best when picking her scenarios out of the thin air, or everyday life. “Give Us Some Dirt” takes its title from the hearings regarding Justice Clarence Thomas in 1991. Tillman imagines the Justice sitting alone in his office in D.C., contemplating life, laughing at everyone who said he couldn’t make it, the belching noise that is his laugh escaping his mouth like a “runaway slave,” an obvious metaphor that seems out of place in Tillman’s rich repertoire, and ends with Thomas noting that “they’d all pay in the end.” The short piece holds up, but only because of the pillars surrounding it.

Similarly, in “Later,” Tillman creates a moment out of time where Marvin Gaye and John Lennon get together to make music. The story works on the fundamental level, but Tillman’s imitations of the ways that Mr. Gaye and Mr. Lennon speak and interact are problematic. “Hey, Marvin, what’s going on?” Lennon says. Marvin replies: “I’m splitting to London, I’m all played out, this business is killing me… I don’t know about the duets, John. I’m fucked up.” The story reads a little flat, and is certainly a differently shaped link in the otherwise strong emotional chain that Tillman strings along through her book. These two tales lack the raw honesty of a scarred soul that makes the others in the collection such a pleasure to read.

The story “Love Sentence,” located toward the end of the book, begins with quotes from Shakespeare, Wharton, Verdi, and Kafka, all about love in a way, then meanders into a few quick words about a girl named Paige: “Everything Paige thought about love, anything she felt about love, was inadequate and wrong. It didn’t matter to her that in some way, from some point of view, someone couldn’t actually be wrong about an inchoate thing like love. ‘An inchoate thing like love’ is feeble language. If my language is feeble, Paige thought, isn’t my love?”

For Tillman, language is the truest representation of love, and love is only available to human beings through that language. Tillman loves the language she employs, except where she hates it, and the distinction is a wonder to admire. Paige cannot separate her ability to love from her ability to express that love through language, and the disconnect between the emotions of the heart, and the cold reality of the ink on the page creates a chasm within the piece, and another lifetime’s worth of contemplation for the reader. Tillman gives us the history of her love, and what it means to transcribe that love from the physical page to the ephemeral screen: “Once upon a time the impassioned word was scratched into dirt, smeared and slapped onto rough walls, carved into trees, chiseled into stone, impressed onto paper, then printed into books. On paper, in books, the words waited patiently and were handy, always visible, evidence of love. In that vague, formative past, love was written with a flourish and it flourished.” Tillman eulogizes the care, time and effort that first went into the recording and explication of love and all its pain and pleasure; in the past, love was written with the body, in the physical world. But that truly isn’t the case now. She continues: “Is the computer screen an illuminated manuscript, evanescent, impertinent, but with a memory that is no longer mine or yours? Is love a memory that is never mine, never yours?” Unlike a cave wall, where the first inscriptions of love were placed, our Facebook pages evaporate and change with every passing hour. What will become of the memory of our love now? Tillman wonders if we’ll ever be able to record it in the same way.

In the final piece in the collection, “Save Me from the Pious and Vengeful,” a meditation on being remembered and the fear of being forgotten, Tillman speaks of the link between the two and the strength it takes to recognize such a link. “I remember terrible dreams and not just my own,” she writes. “Memory is what everyone talks of these days. Will we remember, and what will we remember, who will be written out, ignored or obliterated. Someone could say: They never existed. It’s a singular terror.” As a writer who has had a successful and long career, the candor in the last moment of Someday This Will be Funny brings the reader fully into the claustrophobic yet oddly comforting folds of the book. Tillman can hear time marching and is aware of the way history can treat a good writer: with disdain and forgetfulness, but also celebration and memorial. Tillman is aware of the pain this might cause and how it can affect one’s life. The repetition of creation and recording, and publishing, and forgetting: “The year changes, the millennium, and from one day to the next, something must have been discarded, or neglected, something was abandoned, left to wither or ruin. You didn’t decide to forget. People make lists, take vitamins, and they exercise. I bend over, over and over.”

But Tillman’s approach to this disheartening idea is utter fearlessness, and she makes sure that the reader understands her own position in the press of the seasons. “I’m not good at being a pawn of history,” she writes, making it clear that she will write her own true history when she’s ready, and not a second sooner.

The post A Review of ‘Someday This Will Be Funny’ by Lynne Tillman appeared first on The Faster Times.

The premise is simple: to each participant, Cotner gives two very simple, very basic lines to recite to passersby. The lines (which Cotner lovingly describes as “oceanic”) are, generally and in essence, positive observations about something that passerby is currently doing as a means of initiating a brief, but positive, social exchange. For example, “That looks like a good spot for a picnic,” said when passing someone eating on a bench, a blanket, or doorstep; or “It’s a good day to have the feet out,” said when someone approaches with a carriage in which at least one inhabitant is shoeless.

To value social encounters as worthy of the reverence normally reserved for art is a movement that has recently gained traction among certain contemporary artists. I thought of Tino Sehgal’s exhibition “This Progress” last year at the Guggenheim (an exhibition in which Cotner was a participant) where the entire show was temporal and completely objectless: no paintings, no photographs or sculptures. Aside from a dance performance in the middle of the atrium, the show, in its entirety, consisted of a walking tour and directed conversation with your tour guide, who asked questions such as “What’s progress to you?” More than a few tourists could be heard, at the end of the walk, demanding their money back from the box office.

“Some might find calling this poetry deeply offensive,” Cotner said to me last Thursday, during the first of four planned Spontaneous Society walks. “[But] those who would resist calling Spontaneous Society ‘poetry’ are those for whom ‘poetry’ is connected with jumbled syntax, brain knots, and occasional dull readings. What I’m trying to do with Spontaneous Society is bring poetry back to its ancient function of social address. Here, for example, is an early Sappho fragment:

Tell everyone

Now, today, I shall sing beautifully for my friends’ pleasure

“This fragment offers a vivid picture of Sappho’s poetry, how she understood the poet’s life,” said Cotner. “For Sappho, poetry is a public act that creates pleasure.” It’s in this spirit that Cotner led me and the four other Spontaneous Society participants. Before walking, Cotner addressed us with the primary purpose of our walk: “We’re going to focus on generating good feelings—what might be called ‘good vibes.’ In this fleeting existence, why would we want to use speech to spread humiliation or harm?” Cotner handed us our lines, which we practiced out loud and for each other a few times—he stressed that the lines themselves were somewhat meaningless, that so much of their power came from the delivery and intent—and then we began.

“That’s a good-looking umbrella,” said one of us, to a passerby carrying an umbrella.

“It is,” said the umbrella carrier, nodding and continuing on.

“That looks like a handy cart,” said Cotner as we passed a young woman pulling a handcart.

The woman laughed. “I know,” she said, “I look like a grandma, right?”

“That’s a good-looking dog,” another one of us said to a dog-walker (the most common and probably successful line of the night—dog-walkers on the streets of New York are plentiful and, surprisingly, almost universally pleasant, if not friendly), and the dog-walker smiled and told us the dog was sixteen.

“He must come from a good home,” said Cotner to the dog-walker. As we were walking, Cotner mentioned how it was “important” to affirm things like that to the people we talked to. Cotner did not explicitly say why he believed that, but I imagine it was so that the people we talked to did not feel used as part of some kind of social/artistic experiment, that they were, instead, to paraphrase the philosopher Immanuel Kant, regarded as ends in themselves.

“[These lines] might appear to have been lifted from an ESL textbook,” said Cotner, later, over email. “But I don’t consider that disadvantageous. In fact, their comprehensibility makes them powerfully communicative. Adults, kids, even non-human animals have responded to these lines. The other day, for example, I told a man with a white parakeet on his finger: ‘That’s a good-looking bird.’ The bird smiled and smoothed its feathers. He then said ‘Good evening.’”

One of our most successful encounters of our night was improvised, though certainly in keeping with the spirit of the walk. We were by this time in Whole Foods in Time Warner Center, where we had gone to take shelter from the rain, when one of the members of our group, Lou, a poet, observed a shortish older woman staring wistfully at a wall of orange juice cartons. Lou intervened, gently, politely asking if she would like any help. He pulled a small carton of orange juice from the top shelf and handed to the woman. “Is this a good date?” he inquired, and the woman said yes, smiling and thanking him.

Although, at times, a few of our given lines felt a bit unnatural—the most poorly received line was, easily, “That’s a nice place for a smoke,” which, in the two instances of Cotner’s utterance, received medium-to-highly negative responses; one of the responses to the line was so negative, it actually led to a man sprinting up behind the group, demanding, almost violently: “What the fuck is that supposed to mean? What you mean by that?” (After the encounter Jon posited, generously, “He must have been having a bad day. Something besides us must have been bothering him.”) But even these kinds of encounters seemed part of the larger (and, I would argue, delightful) unpredictability of human nature.

Of course, many of us tend to think we already know this—we’ve all seen the movies and various television programming to get a sense of it, those awfully produced shows hosted by dopey/loving/laughing hosts showing homeshot videos of sons and daughters acting precociously (or hitting their fathers in the groins). People can be so interesting, funny, surprising, and so on, if we’d only talk to them. Sure, I get it. And yet, the thing is, when is the last time you actually said to someone, totally outside your peer group, totally without any intention besides positive communal feelings, that where they were sitting was “a good spot for a picnic?” Or that the three or more dogs they were walking formed “a good-looking wolfpack?”

The idea is not to mechanically mimic Cotner’s lines for canned interaction, but to inhabit their intent so that the lines and, moreover, the sentiments of the lines, the spreading of good vibes, become one’s own. It’s here where the real spontaneity starts to happen, after the initial recited line.

“Each line spoken during Spontaneous Society is addressed to someone,” explained Cotner. “These lines exist for the sake of intensifying pleasure within the flow of mundane existence. They’re not spoken in a void. Nor are they spoken to baffle or impress, or to sound impressive via bafflement—an increasingly common literary affliction. The lines have the humble social aim of producing laughter and smiles among people who might otherwise walk dogs, push carriages, pull suitcases, or go about general daily business with unconscious gravity. Both the speaker and recipient come away with renewed awareness of their fleeting circumstances. And because death is inescapable, it seems important to lose as few moments as possible in this life.”

After a night of Spontaneous Society concluding with what Cotner described as a “symposium,” in which the six of us shared a communal meal while discussing the encounters, insights, and challenges of our night, we stepped out of Time Warner Center and into the warm, damp world. Here, the job of the reporter becomes difficult. How does one say this—that, as I stood there, outside, taking it all in, something big and inarticulate was welling up in me, that our walk that night had contained and framed so much of that which is people? Beauty, surprise, possibility and communion. The rain, which had been going all night, had now stopped. In front of us were the enormous fountain and traffic circle, the bustling centerpiece of Columbus Circle. Colored lights lit up the interior of the fountain so that the water appeared in glowing, orange arcs. There were even lights—newly installed, Cotner pointed out—to illuminate every single blade of grass next to the fountain. Everything seemed so close and possible, bursting out for us. “It’s like the Bellagio,” someone said. We stood there in front of all this, hugged again, thanked each other, wished each other well. We parted, released.

Now, the real walk begins.

Tickets for Friday’s walk are sold out, but tickets for Thursday’s walk are, at the time of this article’s publication, still available.

The post A Good Day to Have the Feet Out: A Review of Jon Cotner’s Spontaneous Society appeared first on The Faster Times.

I talked to Founder Gaudry yesterday over a “shared” Google document (Gaudry’s suggestion) about what it is exactly that The Lit Pub will do, whether The Lit Pub would ever represent Philip Roth (or Woolf, or Borges), and whether what they’ve got planned is dedicated and meticulously scrappy enough to maybe just work.

THE FASTER TIMES: What were you doing today before sitting down to answer these questions?

MOLLY GAUDRY: Well, because tomorrow’s our launch, I woke up this morning pretty frazzled. But I pulled it together and went out for coffee, bought some Tyvek Grip-Seals, which are more expensive than you would expect ($40 for 50 envelopes!, but necessary because they are lightweight and waterproof and therefore great for shipping T-shirts), and then on the way here I chatted with my banker, and now I am answering emails.

TFT: What exactly is The Lit Pub? Where did the idea come from?

GAUDRY: The Lit Pub, in simplest terms, is a book publicity company/online bookstore. But we are more than that, too. “Pub” may stand for publicity and publishing but it’s also meant to work as “pub,” a gathering place, a hangout, a comfy spot to chat with friends.

I would say that the idea started at AWP this year. I asked a bunch of publishers if they wanted to go in on a large batch of ISBNs (which Bowker will not actually allow us to do). But then this idea of pooling resources quickly became larger than ISBNs, and in the end what we have here is the result of many months of brainstorming with Christopher Newgent, Matt Bell, Erika Moya, Mike Bushnell, and about 40 publishers that gave us feedback about what we might be able to do for them.

TFT: Who are some of the authors you’re representing first?

GAUDRY: In June, I’ll be representing Lidia Yuknavitch; Chris Newgent will be representing Ethel Rohan, and our guest publisher for the month, Mike Young, will be representing Ofelia Hunt.

We each also have our own library of recommendations (like, hey, if you like my featured book you might like these, too), and the authors represented there collectively are: Selah Saterstrom, Claudia Smith, Lydia Millet, Daniel Bailey, Mary Ruefle, xTx, Aaron Burch, Joe Young, Jason Bredle, Rachel B. Glaser, Stacey Levine, Jamie Iredell, and the five authors from Rose Metal Press’s recent anthology: Elizabeth J. Colen, John Jodzio, Tim Jones-Yelvington, Sean Lovelace, and Mary Miller.

TFT: What are some of the things that The Lit Pub will be able to do for writers that we wouldn’t be able (or want) to do ourselves?

GAUDRY: One thing for sure is that we’ve got an awesome website (thanks, Fuzzco!) that is built to hold a lot of content. It’s user friendly and intuitive, and everything will always be archived and update-able. So in this way, we are able to provide authors with a working “home page” for their book that has a ton of information—blurbs, trailers, reviews, interviews, purchasing options, and tons of content that others have written about the book in one easy location.

We will be working our butts off to create a buzz about our books, on our own website and on Facebook and Twitter, on behalf of our authors. This is the kind of Internet publicity some authors simply don’t have the time for, or desire to do themselves. Particularly when you consider that we’ll be generating ongoing conversations about these books for months at a time. How many authors would want to ask people to talk about their books on their own websites? That is almost an impossible task, but that’s where we come in.

TFT: What you said about creating buzz via Facebook and Twitter is interesting. I mean, we both know many writers of our generation are already using those mediums (some, very heavily) to promote their own work. Could you talk a little more about how The Lit Pub will be working in ways that might be more effective than the writer simply posting about something they wrote in their status updates?

GAUDRY: Well, I’m not sure there is any difference if the writer or The Lit Pub posts an update. However, how many times can the writer post an update about one book? We’ll be posting updates about our posts, about people commenting on our posts, about people who reblog or Tweet or Facebook about our posts, and then we’ll also update about reviews and interviews and all of that. So it’s like this: the author can self-promote, yes, and many of our friends and colleagues do this just fine on their own, but The Lit Pub is, in addition, going to cultivate a fan base around the book, on behalf of the author.

TFT: How might what you’re doing differ from the in-house approaches that a larger publisher might offer their writers?

GAUDRY: I think an in-house publicist needs to try really hard to get their authors’ books reviewed; they probably also need to try to set up the authors’ reading tours and maybe even a radio tour. We’re not going to do those things. We’re going to focus our energies on our own website, and maybe in the future the in-house publicists will contact us about their upcoming releases in advance, to see if we’d be interested in featuring the book on our site. We’d love to hear from the in-house publicists; we’d love to receive ARCs to consider. In fact, Lidia’s publisher, Hawthorne Books, has an in-house publicist, and we’re all working together on Team Lidia!

TFT: Would The Lit Pub ever take on a client who was on a major publisher such as, say, Random House? Would The Lit Pub represent Philip Roth?

GAUDRY: This is a good question. And the answer is no. If there comes a time when we have really expanded and brought on many more publicists and multiple guest publishers at once that can devote their time to the indies, then that could change, but for now I’m going to say no.

I don’t know where I’d be without the independent publishing community; I mean, I wouldn’t have a book; I wouldn’t have read in as many cities as I have; I certainly wouldn’t have the online presence that I do. So there’s no reason not to try this thing and see if it can give back to the community as much as the community has given me.

TFT: I don’t mean this to necessarily be an absurd question, but would The Lit Pub represent a deceased author, on behalf of their estate or publisher? Would The Lit Pub represent Virginia Woolf? Borges?

GAUDRY: Interesting. I only see one flaw with this, and it has to do with our mission, which is to connect readers with the writers we represent. Loosely, yes, we could introduce readers to deceased authors’ writing, but we can’t really introduce them to the actual authors. Part of what’s cool about TLP is that we have these relationships with authors that are willing to get involved and engage with our audience. So I guess we’ll just have to deal with this one if and when it presents itself in reality?

TFT: What made you want to seek work as an independent publicist?

GAUDRY: Simple: I need a second job. For the past several years I have always taken on adjunct work at whatever university will have me. But this is tiring and there’s no joy in it for me. Some people are meant to teach freshman composition. I think, maybe, not me. Or, at least, not as an adjunct who gets no benefits and no job security from semester to semester. So to be perfectly honest, I wanted to find a long-term solution that would allow me to do something I would enjoy (and I definitely enjoy reading books and talking about them) and I also wanted to find a way to make money doing it. So far, I’m in a fair amount of debt because of The Lit Pub, but that’s an investment I was willing to make. I believe in The Lit Pub, and I believe it has the opportunity to positively impact the independent publishing industry.

TFT: Many of us already know you as a pretty serious and dedicated fiction writer. How’s it going, balancing The Lit Pub with your work as a writer? I imagine there’s a fair amount of interplay between the two—or not?

GAUDRY: I am not writing anymore. If I drop dead today, I’ll be upset that I didn’t get to see The Lit Pub launch, but I won’t care about my writing. If the only book I had in me was We Take Me Apart, then that’s what I’ll leave behind, proudly.

TFT: That’s some dedication.

GAUDRY: Eh, it’s more like having decided some time ago to not feel bad or guilty for not writing. It comforts me to think that I’m the kind of writer who just waits for another book to come. And until it does, I’ll wait, happily and guilt-free.

TFT: A few years ago, an editor friend of mine once told me that my starting a literary magazine was “going to cost me a novel.” At the time I resented him for this statement—it seemed incredibly presumptuous to me, also kind of rude—but three years later, I can see where he’s coming from, that he was speaking from a kind of personal experience. Do you have this fear, that starting something as ambitious and work-intensive as a new business will have a negative effect on your literary output? How have you been navigating it?

GAUDRY: I totally understand where your friend was coming from. And I worry all the time about how this business might take over my life—but maybe it already has. Still, I just keep thinking about how I believe it’s a good idea, and all we really have to do is find readers and ways to keep them coming back to our site. The bigger our audience, the bigger our potential. Eventually, I’d like to have multiple guest publishers at once, and it would be great to have many more publicists. The great thing about an online business is we can all work from home… but one day I think it would be cool to have offices. To have our bricks and mortar bookstore on the ground level and to have some cool lounge-area offices upstairs, where we all work together and goof off on the Internet as our full-time day jobs. Seriously, I mean, you know?

TFT: What can we look for or expect from The Lit Pub in the near future?

GAUDRY: As soon as our loans are paid off and we have generated some income, The Lit Pub will begin funding film projects—book trailers, short films, and documentaries.

The post The Pub Is Here: An Interview with New Indie Lit Company Founder Molly Gaudry appeared first on The Faster Times.

The bold, new, Italian-based journal (founded by Vice Italy editor in chief Tim Small) promises big things, for their debut issue–contributors include Tao Lin, Deb Olin Unferth, Matt Furie, and Clancy Martin, to name a few–and for their New York party: according to the invitation, “there shall be beautiful books on sale, there shall be mirthful music and cool (free!) refreshing beer, and there shall be warm, blithe, charismatic people. Everyone will have a great sense of humor.”

Readers for the evening are Deb Olin Unferth, Nelly Reifler and E.C. Osondu. Beer by Asahi. Facebook invite here. Event goes from 7-9pm.

The post Party with Ghosts: ‘The Milan Review’ Launch Tonight at Powerhouse Arena appeared first on The Faster Times.

Stories must be twenty-five words or less. There is no entry fee. First place gets $100 and a prize package of indie books and publications; second place $50; third $25.

For more details, check out the Hint Fiction website.

The post Hint Fiction Contest with Joyce Carol Oates Judging Ends 4/30/11 appeared first on The Faster Times.

The book opens with a short meditation on amateur pornography sharing in the ‘90s, dial-up connection and all. After being broken up with, David finds reprieve by trading amateur photographs of nude, anonymous women with other nameless collectors on the net. What begins as a diversion from the real world becomes an obsession to which David brings self-described “enthusiasm and honest perversion.” It isn’t until David adds his own contribution in the form of nude shots of the ex-girlfriend who had so recently spurned him that he snaps out of his funk. The pictures of his ex find their way back to him through another trader. David masturbates to the “new” photos, ruining his computer in the climax, then throws the laptop into a bathtub full of water. Fleeing his apartment, he meets an old acquaintance named Thomas dumpster diving and is brought into the fold of the aforementioned Fishgut, a small community comprised of the sentient refuse of society.

This relatively short, though important, episode is a moral parable for the rest of the book. To Taylor, porn seems to be a representative microcosm of consumerism, in general, and the harm it causes. David only breaks free when he has reached his moral and financial bottom—the destruction of his laptop stands in for the metaphysical chains of existing on the grid. As David buys further and further into the ideas being pronounced on the grounds of the commune and touted by its anarchist interlocutors, the question then becomes this: Will David give in completely and forsake the world for his ideas, or will he crumble like so many who have come before him?

Upon entering Fishgut, David encounters a somewhat predictable mix of transients: there are the aging hippies and Deadheads, the homeless youths, the itinerant religious fanatics, the anarchists and protesters, and of course, the goers-off-the-grid. David enters a love triangle worthy of Stein’s Q.E.D., falling under the spell of Katy, a green-haired spiritualist with unshaved armpits and quasi-religious tendencies, and Katy’s girlfriend and disciple Liz. Taylor takes great pains to craft and present the religious fervor and philosophy that Katy and Liz are consumed with daily. It is through this catechistic language, which Taylor employs with an excited flourish, that David’s transformation from listless college dropout into born-again anarchristian begins to slowly gain speed, and the drugs and sex only fuel the change. The act of coitus in the threesome is described as a religious experience:

Liz can feel Katy’s heat, radiation, and rain, the raw and blessed pleasure her girlfriend takes and produces. God is both the knower and the thing unknown, as well as the act of knowing that unites them…This is a slice of infinity made manifest, reified, captured in Katy’s act of fucking and being fucked.

Taylor’s mixing of straightforward erotic talk and more nuanced religious and philosophical musing is a nice touch, serving to ultimately soften the blow of the telepathic dream discovery of the Notebook of Parker, the lost founder of Fishgut, whose shrine-like tent still inhabits the backyard of the commune. By this point in the narrative, David’s reinvention of himself is almost complete—he will eventually assume the role anarchist acolyte and preacher of Parker’s creed. Katy and David pore over the spiral-ringed book, culling from the cryptic musings and undefined travelogues what they believe Parker meant to ultimately say. But it remains unclear whether Parker ever meant to really to say anything. What follows is a rumination on the dynamic of the teacher and student, the discovery of the sublime, core philosophy, and the zealous interpretations of the fanatical discoverer. Much like Marx and Stalin, or Proudhoun and the birth of fascism, the initial idea of the thinker tends to differ greatly from its implementation. While Parker’s idea of anarchy is more in line with Max Stirner and the egotist anarchist than Conrad’s terrorists in The Secret Agent, David begins to subvert the text of the would be mystic’s notebook and preach a self-righteous and cult-creating policy, disseminating Parker’s good word in a publication called The Good Zine.

Any person who was doing anything literary in the ‘90s will be touched with a hint of nostalgia as the act of homemade zine and chapbook-making is lovingly described and tended to in The Gospel. Katy’s declaration “Oh fuck, I’ve got it!…We should do it as a zine” comes off as endearing, taking the reader back to a time before blogs and Twitter.) The problem with The Good Zine, as Taylor sees it, is the fact that the message has been tainted by falsehood and invention. In a rage over the fervor surrounding Parker’s words, Thomas—ever the doubter—writes a line of his own into Parker’s notebook. As David and Katy edit The Good Zine, Thomas’s line about how “longing warps the arc of the world’s emergent truth” becomes the seventh and most important commandment in the Seven Theses of Anarchristianity, and the existence of the falsity is never revealed to David and Katy. Thomas’s insertion invokes a type of sordid irony about belief and redemption through that belief. If one follows a thinker like Paul Ricoeur and his hermeneutics of faith, then belief in the system is enough, and conviction will make it so. But there are always the seeds of doubt and a house built on a false foundation will never stand—a faith is only as good as its philosophy. Taylor is aware that even the idea of anarchy, without a total overthrow of the system is a hypocritical existence; if the Fishgut revelers didn’t have society’s dumpsters to dive in, how would they eat? The idea is addressed in the Good Zine:

They will say that we are hypocrites because we take from—in many cases, rely on—a system whose existence we oppose. This is a fair and accurate critique—Kierkegaard: it is the eleventh hour! confess your sin!—but if it is the worst thing we can be accused of, then our hearts are more pure than they have ever been… If the organism dies, the parasite moves on.

The eventual destruction of Fishgut by fire and David’s final inner monologue, worthy of any postmodern stream of consciousness climax, a la Under the Volcano or even Call it Sleep, solidifies Taylor’s stance on the fringe and the anarchists that inhabit it: A parasite, no matter how effective, is still just a virus.

Justin Taylor, with The Gospel of Anarchy, has achieved a near-perfect balance between writing a great novel about lost youths and a history of the late ‘90s counterculture. The work exudes the authenticity of someone who may actually have lived in an anarchist commune in Gainesville, Florida, circa 1999. Even though Fishgut fails, along with dial-up connections and chat room porn-sharing, there is nothing to say that the commune might not rise again; after all, that was 1999. Who’s to say that this type of rebellion wouldn’t work a little better today, say, maybe, on a barge floating in the East River?

—

Photo by Bill Hayward.

The post Anarchristians, The Good Zine, and Honest Perversion: A Review of The Gospel Of Anarchy By Justin Taylor appeared first on The Faster Times.

(1) There is a pageant.

(2) The pageant is colonial.

(3) In this pageant, we all begin to intricate.

(4) The form of the book will be the entrance to this pageant.

The reader immediately asks a few questions:

(1) What does it mean for a pageant to be colonial?

(2) What does intricate mean when it is used as a verb?

(3) How to you write a book in the form of an entrance to a pageant?

The question about intricate-as-verb is the thorniest title question, because it is a provocation (intricate is an adjective meaning complex or complicated or having lots of entangled parts) and also a battle cry (the title is announcing that the book will require a resituation of our relationship to it as readers, starting with grammar.) When intricate moves from adjective to verb, the reader asks: Does this mean the we of the title will all begin to get complicatedly entangled? Does it mean something that the sounds of the words enter and intricate are very similar? When we get it as an active verb, we’re looking for motion. Is that motion into or tangling-around or both? If it is, as it seems, a going-in, are we meant to think of it as a penetrating motion, which means that we’ve got in some way an act of violence or violation in play? If we do, who is we? Is it the writer or the characters or the reader or all three? And if we do, what is being penetrated or pierced, and what complicated thing is happening inside, during or afterward?

The next thing worth noticing about that title is that it is presented as a sentence is presented – the first letter capitalized, the rest of the letters not capitalized, and the whole thing ending in a period – rather than the way that a title is ordinarily presented—all the letters of the major words capitalized, and no period. And the sentence the title comprises is not a complete sentence, with a subject and a predicate. It is a fragment—a subject without a predicate. The reader asks: The entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate…is what or does what? So the title sentence is deceptive in a second way: It is not declarative the way a sentence that ends with a period usually is. It is an open question: What is the predicate?

One way to read the title is to think of the rest of the book as the predicate.

Another way to read the title is to think of the title as a promise that what the book offers will be fragmentary the way the title is fragmentary.

Another way to read the title is to think that the book will be simply an entrance, period.

Another way to read the title is to think that the we of the title will include in its we-ness the book’s speaker and also include the other characters in the book as part of the we.

Another way to read the title is to think that the we of the title will include in its we-ness the book’s speaker and also the reader.

None of these readings contradict the others, and the book doesn’t do anything to discourage any of them. Lawrence Weschler, in Vermeer in Bosnia, wrote: “It’s one of the great things about great works of art that they can bear—and, indeed, that they invite—a superplenitude of possible readings, some of them contradictory.”

The book opens with a “Note on the Production,” which is worth quoting in full:

The main scene should be full of ornaments and crime. The words attributed to the characters do not necessarily have to be spoken; they can be acted out, or played on an archaic tape-player.

The second stage is an abandoned factory in downtown South Bend, IN, where during the entire performance my daughter Sinead dances while changing in and out of various costumes: the Hare Mask, the Cartoon Face, the Red Robe of History, the Reversible Body. She is only once actually seen by the audience, on a video screen streaming live from her dance. Mostly she is hidden because she represents that which is hidden.

The third stage is a mall, where the Natives stand still, watching, interviewing and photographing the Customers. Sometimes I feel a certain tenderness towards the Natives. Other times I want to stab them in their plug-ugly faces.

Here is a bit of extra-textual information that Facebook has confirmed for me: Göransson has a daughter named Sinead. So Göransson is inviting the reader to consider at least the possibility that the first person narrator is Göransson, or some analogue or fictional version of Göransson. And because everything that follows will be “the production,” we are invited to consider several possibilities. Perhaps this is an actual production, and if it is, it is a massive and transgressive one, since it will take place at least partially in the public space of the mall, and at least partially in an abandoned place—that factory in South Bend—which means at the very least young Sinead will have to trespass in order to perform her role of dancing while changing in and out of costumes. Since the main scene, full as it is, can be acted out (the dialogue can go unspoken) or played on an archaic tape player, perhaps the entire performance will only take place at the behest of the most dedicated and motivated of all readers, who becomes, then, the producer. Or perhaps the entire performance will only take place in the mind of Göransson. Or perhaps the performance primarily takes place in the act of engagement with the pages of the book, the reader in collaboration with the author who is no longer present except on the page. So the pageant, conceptually, is dislocated in space and time along many different axes, and since so many choices about its staging have been left to its stagers, every iteration of the pageant will be a different performance and a different sort of experience for everyone involved, even though they will all be playing the same beats. Thus, strangely, by the end of page one, the very specific stage directions by a very specific author, have already been opened up to invite a universalizing reading: The things that happen in this pageant, and the ways in which they happen, will have some correlation to the bigger pageant we’re all performing across the great stage of the planet which includes but is not limited to South Bend, Indiana, that shopping mall, and the scene of ornaments and crime. It is worth noting, here, that the book is only 82 pages long, that it is cut small enough to fit in a coat pocket, and that the pages have a lot of white space. Yet because of the work done by page one of the book, its size in the mind of the reader has expanded to include all of human experience.

The performance begins. In the book it’s given as a progression of dramatic monologues, entirely in dialogue, and already we’re reading them in multiple ways, because we know that in some versions of the performance, many of these parts won’t be spoken at all. They will be performed. The first time through the book, the reader might try to hold competing versions of the performance in mind. The second time, the reader might realize that a better way to go might be to make definitive choices and proceed from them in imagination. Using this second reading technique, the reader might realize that the reader has become the producer of Göransson’s pageant, and that Göransson’s pageant has now become the reader’s pageant, which means the responsibility for what goes on in it has suddenly slid in the direction of the reader, and Göransson—that trickster—has caused the reader to self-implicate. If the reader can bear up under the pressure of this self-implication, there might be a third reading, and if there is a fourth, then there might as well be a fifth, sixth, seventh, seventieth, and seven hundredth, because since the book has opened itself to choice-making, and since the book functions as a performance rather than as, say, an conventional novel, there is no limit to the number of unique performances the book might offer. And once the book has done this, the book has then invited the reader to think about the experience of reading other books, even books of the most conventional variety, and in how many ways those experiences, too, are the reader’s performance.

In quick succession we’re introduced to our cast, or at least the ones who get speaking or acting-in-place-of-speaking roles: The Passenger, Nurse Marble, The Girlfriend, Miss World, The Promoter, Father Future, The Natives, Stagehand, The Repulsive Man, Father Literature, Daughter, Father Exchange, Father Voice-Over, My Girlfriend’s Body, Father Insect, The Virgin Father, Little American Girl, The Oil Daughter, Nurse I Would Die For, Mother Empire, A Cheering Nation, Charlotte Brontë, Hollywood, The Genius Children, The Iconophobic Daughter, A Looted Model Speaks Out for Symbolism, The Visual, and so on.

We see The Passenger first, and we will follow the passenger throughout the story. At first he is admitted and asked a series of intrusive questions, to which we learn he is answering “no” with a bag over his face. He undergoes a surgery, and blood pours from his head. There is a lot of blood. Already we’re thinking about the verb intricate. The Passenger has entered, has been admitted, and upon admission complicated things are happening to him. He undergoes a surgery, blood pours from his head, and we’re thinking about the violence and the violation of entry. The surgical instruments have penetrated his skull.

Nurse Marble, who speaks next, declares the thread of passengers to Our Children, and now we’re thinking about the promise made in the Note on the Production about the mall and those Natives. Clearly this book is preoccupied with the matters of inside and outside—who is in and who is out, who belongs and who does not, whether people who do not belong are a threat to those who do, and what responsibilities accrue to each party.

Göransson clearly does not subscribe to the now-fashionable notion that literature ought not traffic explicitly in symbolism. Characters wear masks, their names are often simply descriptions of the type they describe, their actions are often transparently stand-ins for abstract things outside the story. But, as promised by the verb intricate, these starting places are quickly undermined by way of special language, special syntax, special turns of character. Miss World, for example, is a five year-old boy in a basketball jersey. The characters of the Father and the Daughter seem to actually shift personas while remaining a constant if disrupted continuum of the two characters Father and Daughter. The second time we see the Daughter, she is “television horny.” The Natives are often given the task of asking people intrusive questions in the mall they are using as their staging area. Hollywood is played by a heap of dead horses. The character named Stagehand, who is literally a stagehand, is made to fall into obsessive love with an audience member before castrating himself, and this progression happens very quickly. He has castrated himself harmless to the audience member by page nine.

By the end of the performance, everything is going to hell. Audience members have been pressed into service to perform impromptu the Fall of the House of Usher in whiteface in collective portrayal of the character The Primal Scene. All sorts of abstractions by now have become characters. Mimesis lives in the movie theater, where he seduces women and steals their children. The Welfare State dares the audience to look at her in her nakedness, without shame. Trauma suddenly seizes the stage and repeatedly harangues everyone. A lot of time must have passed, because suddenly Miss World is a teenager. Suddenly so many characters are wearing hoods, as The Passenger did at pageant’s beginning. There is a mock execution. There are 5 Outfits for the Execution. The final scene has Father Voice-Over shouting “NO!” as Sinead “dances with her hare-head for approximately 2 minutes.”)

If these descriptions sound to you like spoilers, I have five things to say in response:

1. This book cannot be spoiled by a recitation of some or all of its parts, because it does not bear up to summary unless that summary is approximately 7.2 times the length of the book (I estimate), since the book’s plot resides not in a progression of events but rather in a reader’s response to the interplay among disparate parts, fragments of language, intentional but complicated symbology, dislocation of character, the many levels of point of view that make each sentence point-of-view-wise a hall of mirrors, and conflation of character with setting with stage direction with actor with audience member with writer with reader.

2. If by spoil, you mean something akin to ruin, impair, damage, plunder, take by force, decay, pillage, or perish, then the book is already spoiled, or else it is

3. a document of spoil, or else it is

4. a mirror held up to spoil, or else it is

5. an invitation to spoil and/or be spoiled.

When I said in the first paragraph of this review that this is a book that requires the reader to learn how to read it and that teaches the reader to learn how to read it, I meant it in an active and ongoing way. The book continues to teach, and the reader continues to learn, and perhaps eventually, the roles reverse, and the reader begins to teach the book, but the book refuses to learn, and perhaps in time the book grows angry and turns on the reader, or perhaps all along the book has been angry and has been preparing the reader to be turned upon, or perhaps all along the reader was angry and the book held up a mirror to the reader, and the reader turned upon him- or herself, and here I think we’re getting closer to the question of what intricate means when it becomes a verb, when it gets inside you and twists around and there’s a hole where it entered.

The post An Expansive Review of Entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate. by Johannes Göransson appeared first on The Faster Times.

–

(from Conversations over Stolen Food)

Jon Cotner & Andy Fitch

We recorded forty-five-minute conversations for thirty straight days around New York City. Half these talks took place at a Union Square health-food store which, for legal reasons, we call “W.F.” Other locations included MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Opera House, Central Park, Prospect Park, and a Tribeca parking garage. Here’s the Union Square Park conversation.

2:26 p.m. Thursday, January 12–Union Square Park

A: …sign says Seeded Lawn: No Access. Though pigeons and sparrows ignore it.

J: Yeah they’re gobbling the grass seed, as anxious squirrels track down a misplaced acorn supply. Soon you’ll meet Ron Padgett to discuss…

A: At De Roberti’s pastry shop…

J: your research.

A: a classy choice on his part.

J: Already you have much in common.

A: My um favorite intimation of infinity comes while eating a napoleon on warm—hot summer nights at De Roberti’s, with a water glass and The Supremes playing. This happened once, or I made it up, but I’ve taken solace from the moment since.

J: Do you know in some ways (since we talked later than ever last night, then today met early) I feel we’ve talked through the night?

A: I just slept and worked on my dissertation.

J: I’d got no chance to sleep. Your fan agitated the cat, who kept…

A: Oscillations? Noise?

J: me up four straight hours…

A: Of…

J: from 5 a.m. until 9.

A: Really.

J: [Bird calls] almost raised a screen to free the cat. Still I feel this sensation of of talking through the night. Of course the setting’s different. We’ve met in open air…

A: I’m squinting.

J: again. You squint at sun.

A: I like squinting so top teeth hang from your lip. Your gums breathe extra oxygen; your crinkled nose looks cute in photographs. It’s both a smile and squint at once. It glints as does this broken glass spread in concentric circles—where we sit with backs to the Declaration…

J: Yes, I didn’t get this statue’s title. We’re pressed for time. You’ll meet Ron and I should head home to Brooklyn.

A: Now have you prepared? For your big night?

J: Well I stopped by the…by a Duane Reade on First and asked the enormous salesgirl where they put condoms, not wanting to ask about lube and…

A: Right.

J: found the Astroglide you’ve recommended.

A: You hear by the way, as we speak, somebody playing Led Zeppelin licks? [Pause] Hey la-dy.

J: That…

A: Remem…

J: Yeah I know little classic rock, which separates me from most people our age. The producer…the people making Astroglide boast of authentic wet…

A: Did they say you can get some on your mouth?

J: Through…

A: [Muffled] dry lips one winter.

J: I haven’t read far down the package. Do you notice sun glinting off strands of straw?

A: How great.

J: Isn’t that great? And I find this light, though brighter than streetlamps and park lamps last night, much more hospitable. I’ll squint yet could look endlessly.

A: You’ve screened your eyes like you’re at the masthead. I enjoy as well this winter light: not gold, nor does it penetrate things. Of course less color comes out in winter.

J: We’ve started a migration onto the field. [Bird calls] pair of friends our way.

A: The woman carries a green, high-tech bottle. Does…

J: Sipping…

A: everybody under twenty-five own these bottles?

J: Often they’ll hang strapped to one of many backpack straps. The bottles, called Nalgene bottles, which…

A: That’s the material? Nalgene? But um before we leave the Astroglide topic, I recommend not applying it yourself.

J: Why would I do that?

A: Um.

J: Amanda called from Boston’s South Station. She sounds excited to return to New York.

A: Will she have her first Fung Wah experience?

J: This is Amanda’s first Fung Wah bus, yes. I revealed Fung Wah to her. Before she took Greyhound.

A: She’ll save…

J: Which now costs twice as much as a Fung…

A: Well…

J: Wah. Greyhound has stopped trying to crush its Chinese competitors.

A: I’m glad they didn’t succeed.

J: They’ve recognized Fung Wah’s inherent superiority and resumed charging outrageous prices.

A: So will Fung Wah resume playing matchmaker? Trying to seat single young men beside young single women, as…

J: They had that great promotion, a great unadvertised…promotion. On multiple trips from Boston to New York, from the moment I sat until we pulled along the curb at Canal (139 Canal Street), I’d talk nonstop with a pretty girl. Conversations continued along city sidewalks. I still see one woman now and then.

A: Has this turned terribly uncomfortable?

J: Yeah, the relief sculpture on…

A: This monument…

J: juts into my lower back—a second contrast from last night.

A: We’ve lodged against allegorical figures raising an infant, star-haloed, up toward the sun. Our nation…

J: You’re right.

A: lies represented by a babe.

J: With the thirteen stars encircling his head.

A: Do you find it intentional that of forty-eight to fifty triangular stones on which we could have placed our feet, that you touch Massachusetts…

J: Hmm.

A: while I took New Hampshire? The pleasant…

J: And Alex shot film scenes in New Hampshire, though people think he stayed in Minnesota.

A: Perhaps speak less…

J: I’d guess we should eliminate that.

A: No just…I made eye-contact—don’t look Jon—with a Parks Enforcement Officer.

J: Oh, did he pull out tickets?

A: Yes but not, I don’t think for us.

J: He gave those guys tickets?

A: Well they are the ones yelling.

J: He took out more tickets. He seems not to have enough tickets right now. Maybe he’ll ticket the Zeppelin guitarist.

A: Let’s spin around this statue. Did he look…

J: He’s he approached the guitarist and several guys packing beers in a black duffle bag. [Pause] We could say we didn’t see the sign.

A: Sure.

J: And…

A: Argue…

J: apologize profusely.

A: at most two signs hang in this park.

J: Then we ought to stay put. Moving implies we’re guilty.

A: Right, he’d have to break the law by com…

J: I should stop looking at him. He…

A: [Muffled] conflict of interest.

J: glanced and caught me looking at him.

A: Just now? You’re doing it again.

J: Or…yeah I can’t stop. But so um what a pleasant site. Do you see that pigeon sleeping amid incandescent strands of straw?

A: The little Brancusi there? I do.

J: She took a nap after gobbling all the grass seed.

A: Did you skip lunch Jonny? From checkout lanes I scanned…

J: I’ve stopped eating at W.F. That store’s probably responsible for my sickness. I hate cold food yet more—I detest cold food and detest just as much eating food warmed from a microwave. Such food has become inedible to me. [Dog barks] Brooklyn long as possible, then crossed Washington Square before meeting you. I’ve found those animal flashcards you donated last…

A: I’d love a brief quiz.

J: spring. Well I don’t have them on me, but I read through a card for the brown bear.

A: You remember no questions?

J: Um ok, I can ask a question: What is the largest brown bear?

A: The Alaskan Brown Bear?

J: The Kodiak.

A: Aren’t they the same? Kodiak did come to mind as well…

J: Ok.

A: and Kodiak Island.

J: It sometimes weighs seven-hundred…

A: Or used to. I think they’ve lost weight since—screams to the left now. That’s probably in our favor.

J: Hmm.

A: The greater the public disturbance…

J: Oh.

A: the less concern our mild…I’d wanted to say truancy (using it in an abstract way) but…

J: You could call this a minor transgression. We’ve lodged literature where it ought to be, right? The realm of minor transgressions? Though here’s another brown bear fact: Does it have good vision? [Pause]

A: No.

J: However…

A: Scent.

J: Right…

A: Great scent.

J: accompanied…

A: Hearing.

J: Very good—its smelling, the sense of smell and hearing remain…

A: Tremendous.

J: its most powerful senses. So so as I’d crossed Washington Square Park I pretended to be a brown bear. I paid less attention to what I saw but tuned into sounds and smells. Thanks to this metamorphosis I made a delicate auditory observation.

A: Which was?

J: A saxophonist played in one corner of the park, and a trumpet player started fifty yards south, and listening to the saxophone I couldn’t hear the trumpet, so I walked towards the trumpet player, and at the midpoint separating them that trumpet blended with saxophone…

A: Right.

J: rhythms. I stood listening. Then I continued toward this trumpet…

A: Look…

J: and lost the saxo…

Parks Enforcement Officer: You guys have IDs?

J: What’s that?

P: I got to see your IDs.

J: But why would our…

P: Because you’re on Union Square’s lawn. You cannot sit on this lawn.

A: Oh.

J: But I didn’t know that.

A: Yeah we didn’t know.

P: Well I got to see some ID.

J: Oh my.

A: How should, how could we sense not to sit here?

P: Excuse me?

A: How how—this is always the case? How would a…

P: Always: there’s signs all around the park.

J: Right, we didn’t see your signs. When we’d crossed through…

A: Where are these signs? [Tape stops]

***

J: [Muffled] guess we might talk now.

A: I can’t believe you stopped the tape. He he’s gathered other licenses as well.

J: Yes the couple who followed—sir could we just leave?

P: Hmm?

J: Can we leave now?

P: After I write y’all a summons.

J: A summons?

A: But no…

J: Sir we didn’t see a sign. Our…

P: Alright sir, you should…you can fight this if you want to.

J: Could you warn us and we’ll leave?

A: You’d never asked us to go…

J: Off, officer please. [Officer radios headquarters; tape stops]

***

A: [Muffled] the worst—sitting in court all day.

J: Yet we’ll have to plead our innocence.

A: We can bring the recorder, design some…

J: Kristin lives near this courthouse?

A: [Muffled]

J: Well should we stand and gesture like we’re ready to go? We can pin the mic to your collar.

A: No let’s not do that.

J: Ok I’ll hide [Tape stops]

***

J: Will they fine us officer?

P: Excuse me?

J: Is there a fine?

P: Yes.

A & J: How much?

P: Fifty dollars.

J: Fifty dollars, but we’ll plead innocent and and wait in line all afternoon, without…

P: What to fight this ticket you mean?

J: Absolutely.

P: Well you can fight the ticket.

J: Yeah I’ll fight it—I’ll fight it with my dying breath.

P: Alright.

J: Don’t you understand how silly this is? We’re all…

Man from California: Yeah come on. How about you…

J: human beings; it’s the sunniest day…

M: give us warnings so we’ll…

J: of winter. Just give us a warning.

P: Honestly speaking with you guys? Honestly speaking with you? This never came from me. This summons is about…this comes over my head right here.

J: But our—over your head? Who…

M: Came over…

J: would enforce it?

A: [Muffled] screaming?

P: This comes over my head right here, why I’d issue a summons. I could really care less about this right here.

J: Then officer you should…

A: [Muffled]

J: let us go.

M: Right now.

J: And make your own decision.

P: Let you go?

M: Since we’d all promise…

P: My superior’s here.

J: No he’s not.

P: What I need to lie for? [Silence]

J: Where is he? We should talk with…

M: Yeah, let’s speak to him.

A: [Muffled]

J: Let’s speak with your superior.

M: Can you still make the flight?

Woman who lives in London: No.

J: Could you radio him over, so we can talk? I mean we’ll…it’s sunny. We came to celebrate the lunch hour. We’re busy industrious New Yorkers, and the last thing we need is to to waste entire days in court pleading innocence with our dying breaths. Instead we all should laugh about this. If you catch us back on the lawn of course arrest us. [Pause] It would be great to speak with your superior.

W: God I have to get going. [Muffled] no just leave him…

P: The ticket’s automatic since I’ve started writing. I guess you don’t believe me.

J: But did you inflict that upon yourself or does it truly come from above?

P: Honestly? Seriously? I could care less about this right here.

A: [Muffled] so far with the mic.

W: Though at least let me come on a Monday.

J: Peop…

W: Dude I just…

M: Look we’re not even from New York. Why would you give us tickets? We’ll never return here—our…

P: [Sigh] Alright don’t pay it then. So don’t pay it.

M: Well can I have my ID then?

P: Yeah you’re gonna get it back.

M: Let me have it now. [Pause] Please?

J: He’d rather write the ticket first.

M: Terrific.

J: You’ll have a souvenir. Where did you two travel from, California? I’d noticed the California…

M: Yeah I’m from California. But she…

W: I live in London.

J: Oh London, yeah?

M: She’s not even a citizen of the United States! Come on this…

A: I think you could be set; I think you ought to walk away fast.

W: He has my vis—he took my ID.

A: Oh. Then maybe…

J: Don’t worry: I promise not to litter officer. That that’s my cup. Spare…

P: You got a good personality, you know?

J: Though it hasn’t saved me from your ticket. I guess the ID’s fake anyway. I should run…a joke. That’s an authentic Missouri license man.

A: This might push us to engage in um deviant behavior. If you have to issue a ticket-quota I may as well do drugs or something.

J: So so many people doing drugs in this park. So many thefts and rapes going on…

P: So find ’em for me, alright?

J: across this city.

P: So help me out.

J: What do you mean?

A: We’ll stay too busy checking our backs. We never know which cop’s gonna nab us.

P: If there was so much drugs in this park you wouldn’t be in the park. Why would you surround yourself around that?

A: Because big lawns spread…

P: That’s a good question, right?

A: open…

J: Officer I’m fiercely committed to sobriety.

A: This city built parks to help claustrophobic citizens cramped in offices.

J: Where plant-life looks the same all year. How nice to to come experience—oh he, what now has, hair? He noted your brown hair.

P: It’s on the license.

J: That hair’s been brightening in the springtime sun. You might want to call it brown slash blond. [Pause] What does the violation say, Andy?

A: Park Rules Number 9.

J: What’s that short piece of prose?

A: Um that it was found, or I’ve been found, on Union Square’s…

J: The fifth…he scheduled your hearing for the fifteenth of February.

A: Today is…

J: The eleventh?

P: Twelfth.

A: So we’ll go on Sunday? Saturday?

P: That’s a Wednes…

A: Oh oh this is January. Not…

P: What he say?

J: I thought the hearing took place a few days from now. So we could plead anytime before then?

P: It’ll probably come after the fifteenth.

A: How does that work?

J: Why would…

P: It has to be a Wednesday. It depends how crowded the courts are.

J: But should I go some—can I go next week and protest my ticket?

P: You could try but I doubt it.

J: Because I’m visiting New York and won’t be here.

P: Oh, you can’t be there? [Pause] You really want to fight this ticket?

A: [Muffled]

P: Well what’s your argument? I’ve just, I’m curious…

A: We didn’t see fence…

J: There’s no fence.

A: or a sign I mean.

P: There is a fence. You’re looking at the fence. What…

A: The sign—where’s the sign?

J: New Yorkers sun themselves by by hopping fences.

P: How you know since you don’t live around here?

A: Is it only spring that…

J: I’ve lived here once. Now I’m visiting.

P: Then for sure you’d seen the sign.

J: There’s no sign.

P: Right there: Keep Off Lawn. Look at this other side: Keep Off Lawn.

J: Yeah, two two signs for…

P: Alright so that can be your argument. You want it to be your argument?

J: Yes exactly…

A: Or could you recommend…

J: and I’ll bet it holds…

A: any arguments…

P: That hold up?

A: [Muffled] particularly successful?

P: Huh?

A: Do you have recommendations for…

P: For your defense? Well if I’d botched a summons—which of course I didn’t.

J: I’m sure you didn’t.

A: The ticket looks clean.

P: Let me let me see your license.

A: Because of some mistake?

P: Still really there ain’t no mistakes here.

J: Park rules. [Pause] Where’s the supervisor? We’d like to talk. Do do you know where…

P: You think I’d call my superior to discuss this?

J: What is your superior getting his jewels polished? Has he gotten ten blowjobs as we speak or something? [Silence] I see so many people pulling flasks from duffle bags. You think they’d get fines.

P: Hold on.

J: Did he make a mistake?

A: He just added to my license number.

P: No that wasn’t a mistake.

J: I think you’re free. [Police sirens] He made a mistake.

P: My boss knows y’all here. He expects me to come back with four summonses.

J: So you radioed before you wrote the tickets out?

P: He’d seen y’all before I saw you.

J: How does—really? Would he he have come after us if we had run away? Oh well.

P: Have a nice afternoon…

J: I’d…

P: and get that defense ready.

J: Well officer: I’m sure we’ll never make a defense. I’m also sure I won’t mail any…

P: Go ahead.

J: Thanks I’ll just recycle the ticket. [Pause] Supervisor my rear. I’d bet the supervisor’s his fucking superego. I think the guy’s brainwashed.

A: I thought he stayed low-key in fact. As soon as he started writing the summons, when it all turned inevitable, I liked him more.

J: Yeah from…

A: He seemed not to enforce law in normative ways. He’d…

J: He didn’t…

A: kept very pragmatic about it.

J: Or wasn’t spiteful.

A: Not in the slightest. I’d guess our…how about we sit Jon.

J: You don’t want to find some sun? I feel we might catch cold here. Though sun still remains off limits, right? Each bench in sun’s illegal? We should…

A: No need for the continued defense.

J: Yeah sorry. You’ve started shivering. I can’t afford to get sick again.

A: Nor [Tape stops]

***

J: So today’s conversation…phenomenologically it lasts much longer than usual.

A: This bank calls itself Maine for some reason, “Almost Maine.”

J: Well let me tell you: outside W.F.’s predictable atmosphere we run risks.

A: With lunch my basic—have you worried about…

J: I prefer to stand.

A: flu from this bird feces?

J: Wow look at that. This is absolutely disgusting.

A: Today I felt sloppy. I’d put half my lunch in a bag, or coat I mean, folded it and paid for fruit.

J: Really?

A: Yes a shoddy move I never should have attempted.

J: What did you stow in the jacket?

A: Tandoori chicken. Rolls. Yesterday—for cold medication—I brought a paper and crinkled things around it in line, as if reading. Items small and expensive…

J: Right.

A: make newspapers firm like cardboard.

J: We had…

A: [Bird calls] watch this girl spill coffee.

J: been discussing my obser observation made in Washington Square Park: how, equidistant from the saxophone and trumpet players, I heard sounds fuse harmoniously.

A: Oh I’d wanted to say (as the cop approached) that in Union Square I sensed, just before you brought it up, a similar effect with the different sounds—the gravelly urban-motion sounds coming left and right. But talk more about your Washington Square experience.

J: Hearing sounds converge I felt like a brown bear. I noticed one…I’d detected food smells on the breeze. My nostrils caught aromas from styrofoam containers, and tobacco scents from distinct cigarette brands. Though my eyes blurred as a a brown bear I saw, on hexagonal paving stones, pools of gold light brighter than sun. That concluded my experience as…

A: So I should regain a sense of smell tomorrow? Does…

J: I never lost my sense of smell. We have two separate sicknesses.

–

Art by Dushko Petrovich.

–

Dushko Petrovich is a founding editor of Paper Monument, and he’ll be showing his paintings at Soloway in May.

The post Seeded Lawn: No Access appeared first on The Faster Times.

Over the course of twenty years and thirty issues, Open City published the work of influential writers such as Mary Gaitskill, David Foster Wallace, Diane Williams, Dean Young, Robert Stone, Jonathan Ames—the list goes on. In 1993, Open City was the first American venue to publish the work of Irvine Welsh. In that same issue, their third, Open City also published an excerpt of the novel Richard Yates was working on at the time of his death.

Open City will always be remembered as the first to publish and champion the writing of many young, and at the time, relatively unknown writers, including Sam Lipsyte, Leni Zumas, Rachel Sherman, and David Berman (although Berman was known, he was known for his talents with The Silver Jews, not his poetry).

Here are just a few of the highlights:

“Cremains” by Sam Lipsyte (from issue #9):

Once she told me the story of the time a minor movie star was leaving a party and motioned her to join him in the elevator. She hesitated. The door shut.

“I was waiting for your father,” she said. “He was in the can.”

“That guy just wanted to fuck you,” I said.

“How do you think anything beautiful begins?”

“Dragons May Be the Way Forward” by Leni Zumas (from issue #22):

My mother is blattering about grace and bravery. They have launched a new rocket and its astronauts are so graceful and brave. Her favorite channel shows their faces, miles above Earth in airless air. That one’s a schoolteacher, she says. Far left—see? She’s got guts, that teacher. Maybe she’ll write a book about her adventures. I was stretched on a towel in the backyard, fourteen and no friends, when I first read Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. When the page said, “And spiders spread ghosts of suns between branches,” a nerve I’d never felt before throbbed between my legs.

“Uncertain Times” by Richard Yates (from issue #3), transcribed from Amazon “Look Inside!”:

William Grove believed he could afford to be almost at peace with the world when the new year of 1963 broke over New York. At an early, tipsy hour of that morning he was walking home down Seventh Avenue with his arm around Nora Harrigan, and they were singing old songs.

“Classic Water” by David Berman (from issue #4):

I remember Kitty saying we shared a deep longing for the consolation prize, laughing as we rinsed the stagecoach.

I remember the night we camped out and I heard her whisper “think of me as a place” from her sleeping bag with the centaur print.

I remember being in her father’s basement workshop when we picked up an unknown man sobbing over the shortwave radio

and the night we got so high we convinced ourselves that the road was a hologram projected by the headlight beams.

I remember how she would always get everyone to vote on what we should do next and the time she said “all water is classic water” and shyly turned her face away.

At volleyball games her parents sat in the bleachers like ambassadors from Indiana in all their midwestern schmaltz.

She was destroyed when they were busted for operating a private judicial system within U.S. borders.

Sometimes I’m awakened in the middle of the night by the clatter of a room service cart and I think back on Kitty.

Those summer evenings by the government lake, talking about the paradox of multiple Santas or how it felt to have your heart broken.

I still get a hollow feeling on Labor Day when the summer ends

and I remember how I would always refer to her boyfriends as what’s-his-face, which was wrong of me and I’d like to apologize to those guys right now, wherever they are:

No one deserves to be called what’s-his-face.

Christian Lorentzen over at The New York Observer gives the full story.

Michelle Legro of Lapham’s Quarterly compiles all thirty covers:

The post Open City Folds: The End of A Literary Era appeared first on The Faster Times.