meez me

This is a reasonable facsimile:

I never do write what I say I am going to

Maud Newton posts selections from the Hermione Lee biography of Edith Wharton, focusing especially on the writing process:

When Wharton talked in old age about her writing methods, she said (as many novelists do) that her characters “arrived,” “coming seemingly from nowhere,” complete with their names. They “then began to speak within me with their own voices.” It sounds from this as though she subscribes to the idea of the writer as a kind of unconscious medium, through which the narrative flows onto the page. But she also says, firmly, that her characters never “walk away with the subject”: she knows “from the first exactly what is going to happen to every one of them.” So she describes a double operation (which parallels the mixture of cool analysis and deep emotion in her fiction). The process of writing “takes place in some secret region on the sheer edge of consciousness” but “is always illuminated by the full light of my critical attention.”

the air of revolution

The Guardian recently explored the influence of The Clash in France.

The Théâtre Mogador - a magnificent music hall near Gare St-Lazare - squeezed in around 500 more than its official 2,000 capacity each night for the sold-out residency. The Clash - along with their large retinue and support acts the Beat and Wah! - stayed out in a tower block on the eastern banlieues of Paris. "There were too many of us to stay at a fancy hotel all week," says Jones. "So we were out in what looked like a rough estate in the suburbs. I remember hearing a lot of hip-hop and Arabic music that week. Generally, we spent a lot of time in France. We played proper tours there, not just one date in Paris, like most British bands did, but the whole country. They went mad for it. They love their rock'n'roll."

sunday short stack

"Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?" - Henry Ward Beecher

• No one belongs here more than you.
• Stream the new Nine Inch Nails album (via Ed).
• A genetic disorder may be partially responsible for the feud between the Hatfields & McCoys.
• Otter Love
• I'm sorry, Swedish mommy, you cannot name your daughter Metallica.
• I want you to notice when I'm not around.
• The 10 Real Reasons Why Geeks Make Better Lovers
• Does it suck?
• Watch Episode 1 of the TV version of This American Life.
• PowerPoint is bad for your brain.
• The fact that I'm not friends with Tom Waits is a tragedy. I don't even know him, but I love him.
• Rap Covers by Non-Rap Musicians (via Neatorama)
• Harpers now offers subscribers full access to their entire archive.
• When Computers Get Uppity, Part I and Part II
• Screw it! Today I am frizzy!

the awful/awesome debate continues...

Introducing the New Balance Joy Division edition:













...and the (RED) Ramones Chuck:

equal opportunity opprobrium

The Post has excerpts from the new Christopher Hitchens' diatribe, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.

*On creationism and intelligent design: "The inculcation of compulsory stupidity."

* On Gandhi: "A fakir and guru" whose belief in primitive farm-based living meant that "millions of people would have starved to death if his advice had been followed."

* On Billy Graham: "His absurd [post-9/11] sermon made the claim that all the dead were now in paradise and would not return to us even if they could."

* On the Dalai Lama: "A hereditary king appointed by heaven itself. How convenient!"

* On Moses: "Commandingly authoritarian and bloody-minded" and given to "genocidal incitements."

Topic: Iraq

MoveOn has arranged a virtual town hall meeting with most of the candidates of note. Tune in...

fortunes chinoises

Last night, as a gift for a friend's birthday, I gave her a "parlour game" I had discovered in a Silverlake shop. The game is called Fortunes Chinoises and it's more fun than a manufacturer of antibilious pills. This type of quirky, archaic language is reproduced from the nineteenth century version of these cards, and let me tell you: they're magic. Each Card of Destiny has a title such as "The Qualities for Which You Are Beloved" or "What Will Cause Your Death." Beneath each title are 12 predictions or characterizations. You choose a number from another deck of 12 cards, and your fortune is revealed. My friend and I had to stop playing when the revelation I received was an exact reiteration of what we had been discussing less than an hour earlier. Here's a sample card (for fun, pick a number before you read on):

Will You Marry?

1. Sooner than you think.
2. If you do not tire with waiting.
3. When you are wiser.
4. Yes, unfortunately for you.
5. You will make an interested marriage.
6. Never; so console yourself.
7. Upon your first opportunity.
8. At forty.
9. In three months.
10. If you change your conduct.
11. Yes, with a person you do not love.
12. You will marry young or not at all.

52 books in 52 weeks

7. The Stories of Mary Gordon

This collection contains both reprinted and new stories; it's a testament to Gordon's proficiency with the genre.

8. The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai

This book has had more of an impact on me in the weeks following than it did when I was reading it; the details return. At the time, I was a little anxious to move on.

9. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomicby Alison Bechdel

Where have graphic novels been all my life? This moving, bizarre memoir has ignited a new obsession for me.

10. Here Lies My Heart: Essays on Why We Marry, Why We Don't, and What We Find There

The best thing about this anthology is the title of Amy Hempel's essay: "It Takes a Hell of a Man to Replace No Man at All."

11. Winterwoodby Patrick McCabe
12. Julius Winsome by Gerard Donovan

Reading these two novels in such close proximity was an intense experience. Both Irish authors take the reader on a harrowing exploration of the macabre events that become possible within a world of extreme loneliness. They're great.
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her hopping about is here and there hardly bearable

LA Weekly describes Leni Riefenstahl as "pretty as a Swastika" in this review of Stephen Bach's new biography of the Triumph of the Will filmmaker. The article provides a compelling portrait of Riefenstahl in Hollywood in the 1930s.

One wonders what might have been her destiny had Riefenstahl simply upped sticks and immigrated to Hollywood wholesale, along with the rest of the German UFA diaspora, in, say, the late ’20s, long before she ever met Adolf Hitler. Certainly, she would have found a large German-exile community to nourish her, and a studio system hungry for German talent. And, possessed as she was of sharp elbows, a functionally sociopathic determination to rise, a bottomless appetite for attention, and the bulldozing drive of a Joan Crawford, who knows how she might have rewritten the history of women directors in Hollywood?

In this fantasy, Riefenstahl — who, it transpired, would never make a conventional studio-based movie — might have taken her place on the honor roll of German talent that continually invigorated Hollywood at its high tide: Murnau, Von Sternberg, Stroheim, Lubitsch, Lang, Siodmak, Wyler, Wilder, et al. But it was already too late; indeed, by this time, Leni Riefenstahl’s filmmaking career was effectively already over (Bach perceptively titles his section covering the 64 years of her post-1939 existence “Aftermath”). She would spend the rest of her life issuing a blizzard of shifting denials, rationalizations and lies, and of libel suits against anyone who raised a voice against her. And in court, seasoned as she was by her lachrymose appearances before postwar denazification tribunals, she was very rarely bested. Thus, the only list she topped was a dark litany of those who flew too close to Hitler’s black sun: Albert Speer, Max Schmelling, Herbert von Karajan, Martin Heidegger, Winifred Wagner, Werner von Braun ... Among these, there was none in the end more notorious, and none closer to or more steadfastly beloved by the Führer, than Leni herself. It was small consolation, but she ran with it anyway.

sister spit

I have to call your attention to the hottest summer tour of the season - Sister Spit: The Next Generation.

Based on the legendary Sister Spit Ramblin' Road Show of the late 90s, Sister Spit: The Next Generation hits the road in early Spring 2007, nearly a decade after the first Spit van set sail, reviving the rowdy, raucous literary adventure with a mixture of fresh faces and seasoned road dogs.

Catch Ali Liebegott, Eileen Myles, and Michelle Tea with special guests in a city near you. And do your homework before you go: buy The IHOP Papers now. I have it on good authority that this episode makes an appearance.

national poetry month

In honor of National Poetry Month, all the text accompanying the April photos over at Everything Loose will be poems.
Stop by...

this is the man she marries

The New Yorker has an excerpt from Don DeLillo's new novel.

He began to think into the day, into the minute. It was being here in the apartment, alone for extended periods, that made this happen, being away from routine stimulus, all the streaming forms of office discourse. Things seemed still, clearer to the eye, oddly, in ways he didn’t understand. He began to see what he was doing. He noticed things, all the small lost strokes of a day or a minute, how he licked his thumb and used it to lift a bread crumb off the plate and put it idly in his mouth. Only it wasn’t so idle anymore. Nothing seemed familiar, being here, in a family again, and he felt strange to himself, or always had, but it was different now, because he was watching.

let's say jeffrey dahmer came to your bar mitzvah

Jon Stewart's even cute when he's rapping.

the bombs of atheism and of communism and of anarchy

The Aimee Semple McPherson iron is hot. NPR has a piece this morning on Matthew Avery Sutton's new book, Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America. If you listen to the broadcast, you can hear her preach. There's also an excerpt:

McPherson smiled and bowed. Then, in her high-pitched, nasal, singsong voice, strained by decades of preaching without amplification, she shouted, "America! Awake! The enemy is at your gates! They have penetrated your walls! America! You are in danger! An enemy power is penetrating your strongholds! There is death in their hands—the bombs of atheism and of communism and of anarchy! America! Awake! Defend your own!" Responding to her cry, Uncle Sam jumped onto the stage. He sprinted forward and grabbed the villain, issuing him a ticket back home—"a ticket back to Red Russia, a ticket that will take him to the lands where the Stars and Stripes do not wave." At the end of the scene, McPherson approached the Capitol. With the entire audience cheering her on, she removed the subversive's flag and returned Old Glory to its position atop the dome. The crowd again erupted into applause. Thanks to McPherson and Uncle Sam, the Christian foundations of the nation were safe once more.

Click through to read more. I'll take this as a sign from Aimee's God that it's time to strike.