Maybe it was just their generation. Because it seems like younger women don’t have that same problem. My mother just hates this book! She says: “Lightning Rods! Ah! I hate that book!” Then when it got a publisher, she said, “I’m going to try to read it again.” My loyal mother! And so then she got up to “tight, wet twat” and she just couldn’t go on. More…
“I felt that Samurai was a very generous book in various ways, there were all these quotations. And with Lightning Rods, I wasn’t consciously trying to be ungenerous, but I had this sense from the beginning that it would be a very self-contained book, that it would not give anything away. It would be like The Producers. It would be funny.” More…
The group here was much larger than the one gathered around Moore, but it didn’t feel like a crowd—people were calm, attentive, at ease. A lot of them were sitting down. In order to be heard, speakers relied on “human microphones”: they’d say a few words, then pause while the group repeated their statement. After an explanation of the assembly process for the sake of any newcomers came reports from working groups. More…
Before the “general audience” ascended to power, aristocratic benefactors ruled the art world. For centuries, authors subsisted outside the open market. Their readers were their patrons; the audience, in theory, an audience of one, plus the hangers-on. Patronage relationships spilled into erotic ones. Eleanor of Aquitaine was surely a lover of the arts, but a Troubadour could serve multiple purposes. More…
In L. J. Davis’s excellent A Meaningful Life, published a year after Desperate Characters, Lowell Lake, married managing editor of “a second-rate plumbing-trade weekly,” impulsively purchases a brownstone in Fort Greene. Once home to an industrial baron, it is now a half-decayed rooming house. The novel is dense with details of Lowell’s labor: by its final third, neither he nor the narrative leaves the house. More…
This February in Baltimore, a mysterious rash appeared on my arms and chest. I showed it to one of my graduate school classmates, who said: “bedbugs.” I spent the following weeks searching through hundreds of images of bugs and bites and stained sheets (a crushed bedbug leaves behind a bloody mark that resembles felt-tip pen) and shed exoskeletons (they look sort of like peanut skins). More…
Good movies, or at least pleasurably bad movies, make the worthless ones even worse. They remind us that watching Kick-Ass was not inevitable, that there are other, better ways to spend a Tuesday afternoon, an afternoon that will not come again. Maybe you can get your money back but not your time, and so whatever worth Kick-Ass has is only as a memento mori. More…
