March 5, 2012
In Tiny Furniture, nobody goes to clubs or Broadway. Nobody even really goes outside.
Duly initiated in sock videos, artists graduate to a handful of galleries, where their advanced degrees reassure collectors.
Female Trouble
November 1, 2011
Tutor! Donate sperm. There are ways to monetize your intelligence that doesn’t do damage to your craft.
A Joke from God, Part Two
October 28, 2011
If I’m trying to work on something, I try to be reading the things that are relevant to that book.
A Joke from God
September 29, 2011
After an explanation of the assembly process for the sake of any newcomers came reports from working groups.
Back at Zuccotti Park
June 23, 2011
Against Reviews
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.
January 5, 2011
Bugs were spotted all over the city, including at the 311 call center itself.
Bugs
We are always in search of fiction that is willing to meet the world as it is.
Fictional Capital
August 23, 2010
We All Die There Now
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.
November 2, 2009
Gentrified Fiction
Brooklyn’s recent crop of nostalgic novelists
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.
