Books
1. By Herself, poems by Debora Greger
2. Metaphysical Dog, poems by Frank Bidart
3. Reread all of Gjertrud Schnakenberg’s books of poems (I read her earlier books as an undergraduate and feel I should read them again)
Movies
4. The Wolf of Wall Street
5. August: Osage County
6. The Invisible Woman
It seems my only wish, ever, is to get through the stack of books on my bedside table. You know, the stack that’s about twenty-three books high now and is ever-growing. The stack that’s a smorgasbord of new and old and prose and poetry. A sampler:
1. Don DeLillo’s White Noise
2. Sylvia Plath’s Collected Poems
3. Ocean Vuong’s No
4. Indivisible (Banerjee, Kaipa, & Sundaralingam’s Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry)
5. Mark Strand’s Hopper
6. Eula Biss’ Notes from No Man’s Land
7. Jamaal May’s Hum
8. Matt Rasmussen’s Black Aperture
9. Matthew Zapruder’s The Pajamist
10. Emilia Phillips’ Signaletics
…but something tells me even that abbreviated list is a tad ambitious.
I’m also particularly excited to see Blue Is The Warmest Color, Kill Your Darlings, and Anchorman 2. (And no, I’m not ashamed. Stay classy, San Diego.)
Welcome to Radar, our (with any luck) weekly roundup of what we’re reading from the literary web (and beyond).
That’s all for this week! Be sure to follow us (@OSUtheJournal) on Twitter!
The Journal is very pleased to announce the winners of our annual contest in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry for 2013.
Fiction: “She Threw Herself,” by Lia Silver.
Silver received her MFA in fiction from Washington University in Saint Louis, where she also went on to hold a residency. She lives in Athens, Ohio with her family, and her fiction has appeared in the Michigan Quarterly Review.
In the words of judge Claire Vaye Watkins:
“She Threw Herself” is a terribly witty, slyly melancholy story about a couple whose youthful whimsy deposits them in the foothills of Southern Ohio. The main character, Glenna, resignedly tromps through a warped pastoral that might have been conjured by Lore Segal or Lorrie Moore. But the writing is completely its own: playful descriptions, fond characterization, and a bold, self-assured structure. “She Threw Herself” is dark, charming, confident, and extraordinary.
Nonfiction: “The Story,” by Rebecca James.
James was born in Hershey, Pennsylvania and graduated from Susquehanna University in 2013 with a degree in creative writing. She is currently pursuing an MFA in fiction at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.
Judge Ira Sukrungruang had the following to say about “The Story”:
I won’t say “The Story” is brave or courageous or any of the other things critics like to label nonfiction that deals with rape. I don’t think I need to. It was not the topic of this essay that had a profound effect on me. It was its expert execution. Its stunning revelations, its well crafted prose. Reading “The Story” made me feel like I was in conversation with the author and her various voices, as if she were in my ear. It’s what Phillip Lopate says is essential in the personal essay, one person’s moment made universal. This was a tough read, a lovely read, a necessary read. A piece of nonfiction is not brave or courageous because of its topic. It is brave and courageous because of its insight. “The Story” provides just that.
Poetry: “Home,” Safiya Sinclair.
Sinclair was born and raised in Montego Bay, Jamaica, and received her MFA in poetry at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Catacombs, a chapbook of essays and poetry, published by Argos Books. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, The Cincinnati Review, Devil’s Lake, The Atlas Review, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a writing fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Amy Clampitt Residency Award, an Emerging Writer Fellowship from Aspen Summer Words, and an Academy of American Poets Prize; she has won the 2013 Devil’s Lake Driftless Prize in Poetry and The Journal Annual Poetry Contest in 2013. She is currently pursuing a PhD in literature and creative writing at the University of Southern California, where she is a Dornsife Doctoral Fellow.
Judge Aimee Nezhukumatathil explains her choice:
This poem’s musicality simply electrified me from the get-go. I marvel at the way such a strange and somber beast—a poem confronting diaspora—gets depicted in elemental architecture and sensuous language. This is a full-bodied poem, quietly disarming in its cool and mysterious reflections on what it means to be home.
We are thrilled to be publishing the winning entries in our Winter Issue, coming out this January. We’d like to thank all our contestants for giving us the privilege of reading their great work and our wonderful judges for lending us their time and keen eyes. Until next year!
Things I’ve been…
READING:
The thing I read that has stuck with me the most this summer has been “Ghosts,
Cowboys,” the first story in (OSU MFA alum) Claire Vaye Watkins’s debut collection Battleborn. I admire it for its scope and structure, for the way it made me re-think how it’s possible to tell a story that spans a long period of time in a way that feels urgent and also reverberates. I also can’t express enough enthusiasm for my friend Joff Winterhart’s graphic novel Days of the Bagnold Summer, a story of a do-nothing summer, featuring affectionately wrought characters—one a single-mom librarian, the other her heavy metal-loving teenage son—that’s revealed in extraordinary funny/sad moments. And I’m still laughing about this multi-part hoot of a story by Simon Rich called “Sell Out” (from The New Yorker) that I read a few months ago.
WATCHING:
Over this past year I have finally been watching The Sopranos for the first time, start to finish. I now understand what every bit of fuss was about. While I didn’t necessarily like inhabiting that world of Jersey McMansions and strip joints and butcher shop back rooms, I felt so invested in the characters, even the ones (Janice, Meadow, A.J.) I detested. AND THAT FINAL EPISODE…I’m still reeling from it, mainly because I don’t have anyone else to discuss it with, everyone else having expressed their theories and close analyses and “oh my gosh”es back in2007. Currently, my husband and I are hooked on The Killing, which we watch even though we resent the constant barrage of red herrings and have started to doubt any new clues even as they’re being revealed. Also, as someone who dislikes heat and sunburns easily, in the summer it seems I want to spend as much time as possible in darkened rooms watching movies. My two favorites I’ve seen this summer are Bonnie and Clyde (so tragicomic!) and Springsteen and I (What’s not to love about a movie comprised of Springsteen fans trying to tell the camera what his music has meant to them?).
RESEARCHING:
Since I’m about to enter my thesis year, I spent a good chunk of time this summer doing research. While books and online databases can give you a hell of a lot of information, there is nothing like going on location to a local library and pulling up forty-year old microfilm images of newspaper front pages, or sitting down in a historical society (surprise! historical societies are awesome!) next to a lifelong resident of anytown who can show you your grandparents’ yearbooks and help you look up your immigrant ancestors’ immigration records. This summer I also started digging through old shoeboxes, belonging to my mom and grandma, and became slightly obsessed with the amazing old photos I found. Like this one of my grandmother lounging in a garden. And this one of her in a mask. And this one of three unidentified poodles.
LISTENING TO:
I am deep in the midst of a phase where all I want to listen to are songs about
overcoming the daily grind of the working week, sung by jean jacket-clad
everymen who pause their “woo-oh-oh oh”s occasionally for guitar solos. So
that means I’ve been enjoying things like Eddie and the Hotrods, Billy Bragg,
The Replacements, Bill Fox, and The Mice, and that I’ve been listening to Bruce
Springsteen as if I’ve never heard him before. And Ted Leo. Always, Ted Leo.
Also on heavy rotation:
In my lazy time (it’s not spare time because I don’t feel like I ever have that), I watch too much TV. Dexter and Breaking Bad are my favorite shows. I started out the summer watching reruns of both so that everything was fresh in my head for the new seasons. Dexter is half-way through its last season now and Breaking Bad just ran the first episode of its last season. Dexter seems to receive a lot more criticism than Breaking Bad, and while I think Breaking Bad is a slightly better show, I love Dexter, not Walter. In general, the criticism of Dexter seems to be that the show and the character aren’t developing anymore, but to me, Dexter’s developing relationship with his sister Deborah is of paramount importance to the show’s finale. That’s something that has just started to work itself out in these last couple of seasons and will continue to develop until the very end. Unlike Walter, Dexter cares about his relationships, or at least he wants to care; that’s what makes him a lovable and sympathetic character. It’s hard for me to criticize a show that has successfully manipulated its audience into loving, liking, and/or sympathizing with a serial killer. We cheer for Walter, too, but he’s so manipulative and self-centered that we like him less and less each season. Still, we cheer for him because he’s television’s ultimate badass, and as the protagonist, he makes us feel like we can be him, too. Dexter is just as manipulative but not necessarily self-centered. It’s the latter characteristic that makes viewers have such different feelings toward these characters.
Orange is the New Black has become my show of the summer. I haven’t really watched a whole lot of shows with a female protagonist—probably in large part because there haven’t been that many, but also, I’m more attuned to and bothered by stereotypes of women on TV, so perhaps I subconsciously avoid them. This one, however, is different. I admire the way each show focuses on a character’s backstory, humanizing them obviously, but also playing against the criminal-in-prison stereotyped profile; they all come from different backgrounds. For nearly every character, there is a drastic juxtaposition between the person she was before prison and the person she’s become while in prison, and because the cinematography moves so fluidly back and forth from prison scene to past life, it augments those juxtapositions without feeling didactic.
The best book I’ve read this summer is the memoir Five Years of My Life by Murat Kurnaz. He spent five years in Guantanamo Bay as a completely innocent man. The United States government knew after two years of holding him that he did nothing wrong, but we wouldn’t release him, partly because Germany, where he was a legal resident, refused to take him back. Even when the US knew he was innocent, we continued to beat, torture, and interrogate him. Our government claimed that we captured him on the battlefields of Afghanistan when we actually kidnapped him in Pakistan while he was on a trip to study the Qur’an. While my respect for our government and military has waned over the past decade or so because of the use of water-boarding; the well-documented sexual and physical abuses at Abu Ghraib; the persistent use of drone strikes, one of which killed an American teenager; and because I could go on and on, this memoir is so shocking in its accounts of systemic abuses, that I feel as if I have no respect left. I can respect individuals who enter the military with altruistic motives, but I cannot respect the military as an institution.
It’s not my temperament—God knows why I’m allowed to work here—to write a serious book review. I can only muster the strength to write one when particularly indebted to a new work. So here’s the deal: last week a book chose me.
“Chosen” is the way I feel when the book I need is the book I get. I was so moved I read it again the following day and bought copies for friends. Justin Torres’s We the Animals, a 125-page novel published in 2011 to prophetic reviews, has obviously chosen a lot of other people, too. (I’m not jealous, I’m just late to the party.) It’s a wrenching, brilliant book about boys and anger and love. Each chapter is self-contained, lending it the compression and feel of a story collection, but the focus and ambition of a much bigger novel. Each move, every sentence, resonates. If you like that kind of thing, you’ll love Torres, who is also apparently super attractive: Salon’s Sexiest Men.
When you spot We the Animals on a friend’s shelf, take it. If the book has been lingering in your Amazon shopping cart since 2011, go ahead and treat yourself. Pair with a piña colada and slippers, and you’ll have a fantastic, blubbering Saturday afternoon. It’s an all-at-once kind of read so please, hydrate well, make time, and enjoy.
Reading Mary Ruefle and Matthea Harvey is changing the way that I see what a poem can do. I loved roaming through Ruefle’s Selected Poems and I’m excited to read her essay collection Madness, Rack, and Honey. I found Matthea Harvey’s Modern Life unnerving and at times howlingly funny (the first line of the first poem: “The ham flowers have veins and are rimmed in rind, each petal a little meat sunset”). Her loosely abecedarian sequences “The Future of Terror” and “Terror of the Future” rocked my world with their formal constraints and eerie visions of subjugation.
I devoured the new Netflix show Orange is the New Black in 48 hours. Finally, a show created by a woman about female friendship featuring women of color, lesbians, disadvantaged women, and a token artisanal soap entrepreneur—and it’s a hit! It’s wildly entertaining and thought-provoking, combining startling moments of joy with real talk about how America treats its prisoners. I’m also digging the latest season of Project Runway for adding more Tim Gunn and unconventional materials challenges. I’ve been with the show since the beginning and have found that much of the runway critique applies to a workshop poem: Does it look well made? Is it familiar (and therefore boring and safe)? How are the lines working to create form? How does it relate to what’s happening now and what’s been done before? Highlights from this season so far: Helen’s Bilbao sombrero dress, Dom’s stripetastic bowtie sheath dress, Bradon’s everything, and Karen’s “futuristic Great Gatsby” dress bedazzled with black rice, coconut shavings, and glitter. I’m rooting for Dom to take it all.
It was a dark summer in Ohio so I mixed the 90s R&B jams of my youth with Jessie Ware and Geographer. Ware’s debut album Devotion is an intoxicating mélange of 90s big-beat dance, nocturnal Aaliyah grooves, 80s Whitney, and a healthy dose of Sade. She’s got that retro-modern thing going on. She recently paid tribute to two monster dance hits with the xx in a live mash-up of Stardust’s “Music Sounds Better With You” and Modjo’s “Lady (Give Me Tonight)” and it was everything that I love. Geographer is a San Francisco-based indie band that remains at the top of my playlist. Vocalist Mike Deni and his two Berklee-trained bandmates make magic using synthesizers, cello, and guitar and the result is gorgeously vulnerable music that can be stripped down or built up. I’m psyched to see them on tour and encourage people to check them out. Their latest album, Myth, is great, but their Animal Shapes EP is something special.
I spent much of the summer elsewhere. After I finished my second year as an MFA candidate in fiction at Ohio State, I taught at a boys’ school in DC for six weeks and then moved on to Eau Claire, Wisconsin. At the start of summer, I embarked on a reading regime of John Updike (the Rabbit tetralogy) and Richard Ford (two–thirds of the Bascombe trilogy) and Edward St. Aubyn (the Melrose novels). I see the theme, in retrospect: books by white men who don’t treat women very well; books full of serious passages of interiority and cultural reflection. Lovely and serious literature. And I had nearly read all of Adam Johnson’s novel The Orphan Master’s Son when I realized that I could not read another torture scene; I had stopped understanding what was literally going on in the book. My brain was broken.
Literature is beautiful and powerful and important. As a fiction editor for The Journal, I look for writing that feels inspired and unique and like a hand reaching out to me, the reader, to say, Let me tell this story.
But dear lord I was tired.
So I turned to mysteries. Those books relegated to their own section of the library, with their titles in large font and shadowy houses on the cover. Those books that come out in hardcover every year or so, then are quickly printed in mass-market paperbacks with gray pages. Books that pose a clear problem at the start—Here’s this dead body!—and end with a solution. Often, the books are fast-paced, with snarky narrators. The writing is often quite good. And most importantly: the books are fun. They are a pleasure to read. I had forgotten books could be like that.
I became enraptured with Sujata Massey’s Rei Shimura mysteries, featuring a plucky Japanese-American antiques dealer living in Japan trying to deal with the death that pops up around her all the time. (This is a constant theme in the mysteries, I noticed: if the character is not a Detective Inspector or a private investigator, at some point the author is obligated to reference the lead character’s necessary proximity to death.)
Jon Loomis, a poet, has written three Frank Coffin mysteries, all set in Provincetown. Frank is a detective, hoping for a quieter life in the often kooky and gender-bending town, but—as is necessary—death keeps finding him.
I also spent an inordinate amount of time on Netflix, watching the British mystery series Rosemary & Thyme (about Rosemary Boxer, a professional gardener, and Laura Thyme, a former policewoman, who travel around fixing people’s gardens and solving mysteries; you do get the pun of the title, yes?) and Inspector George Gently, in which a London-based, grizzled DI takes a job in a small town after the death of his wife, only to find his new, young constable challenging. Death, of course, follows George like a shadow.
And then there is Murder She Wrote. Has any show ever so much glamorized the life of a writer? There’s Jessica Fletcher, teacher-turned-writer, working diligently on her mystery novels—it’s meta, as only CBS can do—all while traveling around and solving murders. It’s worth noting that in the world of the show, Jessica is well known and makes quite a bit of money from her books.
I’m sure I’ll plunge back into capital-L Literature soon. Perhaps this is the year I’ll read War and Peace. Or more Turgenev. Or I’ll crack open those collections by Mavis Gallant, VS Pritchett, and Peter Taylor.
But it’s not all bleak. I’ve recently read two collections that are killers. Ben Stroud’s Byzantium is almost too good for words; it’s the sort of collection that reminds me of the silliness of those “the short story is dead” arguments. And my former teacher, Erin Flanagan, has a new collection It’s Not Going to Kill You, which is wise and skilled and beautifully written. But even more than that, stuff actually happens in these stories. Plot stuff—as if Stroud and Flanagan decided to throw caution to the wind and have fun with fiction. It’s wondrous.
I am addicted to a show about meth—is there a counseling group for that? But really: it’s a problem. It may sound counterintuitive, but as I watched pasty, middle-aged Walter White stumble through the desert in his underwear at the beginning of the first episode I knew that Breaking Bad was going to become my new favorite TV drama. To my concurrent excitement and dismay, the final season is almost here; soon I’ll find myself in a state of withdrawal, scrounging the internet for lingering Bad memes and scanning the channels for another worthy distraction. But for now I’m biding my time, re-watching one episode of Season 5 a night in anticipation of seeing the shit hit the fan as the final season unfolds.
What I like most about Breaking Bad is its ability to convey moral complexity. This is a show that isn’t afraid to challenge the way we think about the world, blurring the distinctions between “good” and “evil” as our central protagonist gradually morphs into one hell of an antagonist. And yet our loyalties do not switch quite as seamlessly. Badness has a seductive quality, and no matter how appalled we are by Walt’s actions as the series progresses, we cannot help but root for him just a teeny, tiny bit. We keep watching because it’s a rush to see someone break all the rules and get away with it. It’s a rush to watch the shy, humble schoolteacher who can’t hold a gun without cringing become a black-market badass.
I have no doubt that in its final season, Breaking Bad will take the classic good versus evil dichotomy and artfully melt it into an intriguing hue of gray. We will be forced to ask ourselves, as viewers, where our own loyalties lie. Because while we might think we want to see Walt slammed against the hood of a cop car and handcuffed, we all know that deep down there’s a guilty little part of ourselves that wants to see him ride off into the sunset wearing a smug sliver of a grin, whispering for the last time “I won.”
I have to admit that I’ve never really understood the concept of “beach reading.” Not that I don’t enjoy a good mystery or romance now and again, but I never saw the point of the distinctions we make between the lowbrow and the high, between what one should read while slathered in sunscreen sitting in a plastic chair and what one should read while curled up at home or in the library. Time to read is always a privilege, and whenever I find myself blessed with such time, I fill it with as many books—from any particular genre or style that happens to strike my fancy—as possible. Once upon a time, that meant I found myself reading Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer (exposed nipple on the cover and all) while at the beach with my family. It was a little awkward.
But, regardless, without further ado, my favorite books (and TV and music, etc.) from the summer of 2013:
The Dud Avocado, Elaine Dundy
There are a number of words that come to mind to describe this delightful 1958 novel about a young American gallivanting abroad. First, the nouns: romp, joyride, lark, caper. Now, the adjectives: effervescent, intoxicating, silly, sweet. Sally Jay Gorce, a 21-year-old Missourian, is spending two years abroad, sleeping with an aging relic of the lesser aristocracy, and yearning after an actor named Larry. It sounds simple and yet, there’s intrigue! And surprises! (Like, legitimately, not many twists really surprise me, but I think I was reading this book at a coffee shop when the third-act switcheroo came about and I was all, “Wahhhhhhaaat?” aloud. Part of this, admittedly, may have been due to certain not-entirely-correct assumptions I had about what people were allowed to write about in 1958.) Anyway, download it, check it out from the library, buy it from your local bookshop, surreptitiously take it from a friend’s apartment. (Just kidding—don’t do that last thing. Just ask. They’ll probably be happy to give it to you.)
The Patrick Melrose Cycle, Edward St. Aubyn
A definite swing in the opposite direction from The Dud Avocado (though this one also takes place in France!), this series of five novels (the first four of which, Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother’s Milk, have been collected in one volume, while the fifth, At Last, was only released last year) follows the life of its titular aristocrat as he evolves from an abused and neglected little boy to a troubled man approaching middle age still haunted by the memory of his toxic parents. The books are certainly not light, but St. Aubyn brings a restrained hand to his sad (and somewhat autobiographical) tales. The major revelation of the first novel is that young Patrick is sexually abused by his domineering and dissolute father, and St. Aubyn manages to make the reader feel the horror of such abuse without ever making that horror even a little titillating. And while St. Aubyn is primarily concerned with Patrick’s mental agony and self-sabotage, he always cuts the psychosexual drama with a healthy amount of social satire, skewering the leisure class that Patrick both longs to escape and desperately clings to.
The Rules of Civility, Amor Towles
Beautifully written and elegantly structured, The Rules of Civility is a rare book: an engaging story with elements of wish fulfillment (spoiler alert: our hardscrabble heroine does land a wealthy husband, though maybe not the one you expect) that nonetheless touches upon (ever so lightly, as is his way) those eternal questions of love and loss that are the primary goals of literary fiction. Towles has just released a follow-up of sorts, an e-book-only collection of stories that follow the stubborn and beautiful Eve Ross as she makes her way in 1940s Los Angeles.
Pulphead, John Jeremiah Sullivan
This is basically as good as everyone said it was, and I am honestly just a bit embarrassed that it took me this long to read it. Sullivan writes in a way that looks easy but is unimaginably difficult, bringing warmth and humor and heart to topics such as the biggest Christian Rock festival in the nation, the legacies of disgraced musicians like Axl Rose and Michael Jackson, and the surreal experience of letting your house be used as a set for the teen soap One Tree Hill. Oh, not to mention the provocative (if heavily fictional) essay that suggests animals could be turning on humans in response to climate change, or the exploration of America’s considerable stash of hidden caves, or what it’s like to watch your brother reconstruct reality after several hundred (or is it thousand?) volts of electricity fry his brain. He blends personal anecdote and historical truths with astonishing ease, and with such subtlety that I never felt he was inserting himself into a story unnecessarily. Worthy of the hype, worthy of your time.
I didn’t spend all my summer reading, however. And, if I’m being honest, the art/culture that had the greatest impact on my psyche, and kept me better company during those unusually soggy summer months, was Bob’s Burgers.
The animated series, which follows hamburger restauranteur Bob Belcher (voiced by Archer‘s H. Jon Benjamin), his wife Linda (voiced by John Roberts), and their three kids as they navigate life along something vaguely resembling the Jersey shore, is funny, warm, and uses original music better than just about any show on TV. (The AV Club even wrote about it.)
To wit: my favorite episode, the episode I returned to again and again, was “Topsy” from the show’s third and most recent season. In it, the youngest Belcher, Louise (voiced by Kristen Schaal) plots revenge on her new science teacher, a Thomas Edison impersonator who refuses to let her recycle last year’s science fair project (a classic papier-mâché volcano) and orders her instead to do one on his favorite inventor. Louise, incensed (as well as egged on by a trouble-making librarian), decides to stage a reenactment of Edison’s shameful electrocution of a circus elephant named Topsy. She enlists her older sister Tina (voiced by Dan Mintz) to play Topsy, and brother Gene (voiced by Eugene Mirman) to play Edison. Gene, however, has other plans, as he instead decides to compose a love song—”dramatic yet danceable!”—between the legendary inventor and the doomed elephant that he calls “Electric Love.” Oh, and have I mentioned that Gene and Tina can’t sing, so they have to enlist the honeyed-voiced help of their landlord Mr. Fischoeder (voiced by Kevin Kline) and their emotionally unstable Aunt Gayle (voiced by Megan Mullally)?
Hijinks, oh how they do ensue. “Electric Love” is a sweeping, melodic number worthy of Tin Pan Alley, whose comic lyrics (“I never noticed the curve of her trunk/And I never noticed his electric junk”) do nothing to detract from its majesty. Basically, when the curtain pulls back to reveal members of the marching band and the school choir, who then all join together in the final chorus? My heart, dear reader, it sings.
And my heart wasn’t the only one. Stephin Merritt, of the Magnetic Fields, was so taken with the song that he recorded a cover (along with Kenny Mellman) on a segment called “Bob’s Buskers.” I still prefer the original, myself, but I applaud Merritt’s always excellent taste.
Speaking of Merritt, one of his innumerable side projects, Future Bible Heroes, released a new album this summer, Partygoing, that’s full of all the synths that have been missing from the last few Magnetic Fields records. And its title (ish) song, “Living, Loving, and Partygoing” is (I assume) a reference to Henry Green’s informal trilogy of novels (called, respectively, Living, Loving, and Partygoing) that I swear I’ll read someday. But the title track isn’t my favorite: that honor goes to a sprightly little number called “Keep Your Children In A Coma.”
Now the semester is under way, my reading and watching and listening have all been seriously curtailed, but I’m hoping to finish Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, and to get started on OSU MFA alum Doug Watson’s The Era of Not Quite (reviewed by The Journal’s own Elizabeth Zaleski in the latest issue) before it gets too chilly outside.
[Warning: Contains spoilers.]
I have been on a serious Bates Motel kick. (For those of you who don’t know, Bates Motel is a new show on A&E, and a prequel to Hitchcock’s Psycho.) Thus far, ten episodes and one season in, we’ve seen quite a bit of both taxidermy (oh, right, Norman’s motel office in Psycho is filled with taxidermied birds and stuff) and mama issues running rampant, which I (who am a bit Psycho-obsessed) appreciate. I applaud the rarity and intensity of uncomfortably sexually charged moments between Norman and Norma, as well as the fact that taxidermy takes somewhat of a back seat (maybe not all the way in the back, just, you know, in the middle seats of a van or something) to the as-yet-unexplained, corrupt political atmosphere of White Pine Bay, Oregon. The show, set in present day, remains, politically and socially, situated outside of the current atmosphere, allowing sinister turns that a “realistic” setting would, I think, hinder. Of course, the season’s last episode—in which Norman kills his teacher, Miss Watson—sent me back on a Hitchcock spree; this summer I re-watched Psycho and Rear Window. I’ve also had “Que Sera, Sera” stuck in my head for what feels like years.
For five gloriously warm weeks, I was in Charleston, South Carolina, my hometown, crashing at friends’ places, drinking as much local beer as I could afford (I know how lame I sound), and getting entirely too tan for my own good. So when I haven’t been shamefully listening to bad pop because that’s just what driving to the beach calls for, I’ve been overdosing on Lorde’s “The Love Club,” which HuffPost has called “the perfect pop song.” I might modify that label to “the perfect indie pop song written by a sixteen year old musician from New Zealand and HOLD UP, she’s sixteen?!” “The Love Club” features simple yet affecting lyrics (“You’ll get punched for the love club” / “The other day I forgot my old address” / “The card games and ease with the bitter salt of blood”) that are delivered with an air of nostalgia, longing, and despair that I would not easily or readily attribute to so young a musician. These are lyrics and harmonies and gloriously melodic electronics that are not to be ignored. According to LastFM, her first shows in New Zealand sold out in 73 seconds. So you should probably listen to her.
I wasn’t intending on making a list for this blog post, but once I started I realized how much I like the practice of taking inventory of my entertainment consumption. I have a terrible memory, and I usually rely on music or poems to remind me of different phases of life. A good song or poem is so useful in that way. If they do their job properly the first time around, when you return to them forgotten events and feelings appear like magic. It’s like we are storing little parts of ourselves in the music and literature we consume so we can return someday to be surprised and reminded. Within this list: I’m reading poolside in Los Angeles as my dear friend gets ready for her wedding. I am driving to Indiana to try to make a long distance relationship work. I am sitting on a porch in Alabama remembering my mentor in his hometown.
Summer listening…
Phosphorescent – Ride On / Right On
Robert Glasper – Afro Blue – feat. Erykah Badu
Damien Jurado – Museum Of Flight
Blake Mills – It’ll All Work Out
Songs: Ohia – Farewell Transmission
Summer Reading…
All of Larissa Szporluk’s books of poems
Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red
Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer
Andrew Hudgins, The Joker
Jake Adam York, Persons Unknown
Karen Green, Bough Down
Summer Watching…
Francis Ha
Before Midnight
Despicable Me 2
Kings of Summer
The Wages of Fear
The Graduate
Ten Great Books I’ve Read This Summer, in No Particular Order:
Right now I’m in the middle of Gillian Flynn’s wildly popular Gone Girl, and I’m intrigued but still undecided. Next on my list? Holly Goddard Jones’ The Next Time You See Me, which arrived on my doorstep from Amazon not ten minutes ago. If it’s even half as wonderful as her story collection, Girl Trouble, I’ll be happy. Also in that package from Amazon are Andrew Hudgins’ memoir, The Joker, and David Small’s graphic memoir, Stitches.
The yawning stretch of summer made me anxious, so I returned to old loves and bad habits. I drank obscene amounts of coffee and kept irregular sleep patterns—too much or not enough, usually at the wrong time of day. Soothing my nerves meant consuming Appalachian murder ballads and spacey electronica, “true” ghost stories, murder mysteries, and sexytime TV. I read gritty, interesting (as well as ho-hum and silly) nonfiction essays/memoirs, graphic novels, and short stories. I forgot nearly everything I learned in guitar class last spring, but I sang to myself more often while I played air-guitar, my heart twisting in my throat. I also came up with at least three top-secret, totally legit band names, despite the fact that I haven’t touched a string since May.
Early on, an intense affair with David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments made me woozy with wordlust and repent my sins (namely, tasteless suicide jokes and footnote-bashing). In particular, D.F.W.’s essay detailing the Illinois State Fair was masterful—all meat, no filler, just clean prose with exquisite details and a wicked sense of humor. It became painful to so fiercely enjoy his work, posthumously—it was the sort of sickness that makes you keep plucking at a splinter in your thumb, feeling a swoop in your stomach but unable to stop. David Foster Wallace: better than splinters.
I devoured two of Cheryl Strayed’s gorgeous books, woodchipper-style. Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar made me want to play Gary Jules’ cover of “Mad World” on repeat, mostly so I could feel productive while being all torn up and weepy. Ditto for Strayed’s brutally honest memoir, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, except that Rufus Wainwright’s cover of “Hallelujah” seemed more applicable (sins, redemptions, a quest for peace, etc.).
I also revisited Chuck Klosterman’s Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story, a travel narrative that manages to combine sex (or love, whatever), the death sites of rock stars, and some interesting sidebar conversations with people he met along the way. It seemed natural to follow this up with Steve Almond’s Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life: A Book by and for the Fanatics Among Us.
In between there were stacks of books that I read through or just skimmed for pleasure, on various subjects—composting, coal mining, a cultural history of the rabies virus, memoirs.
To calm myself, I listened to beloved tracks—albums like Moby’s Play, Neko Case’s Canadian Amp (especially “Poor Ellen Smith,” since it falls in the murder ballad category), and a new favorite, Of Monsters and Men’s My Head is an Animal. I also zoned out to Hearts of Space radio while I work. It sounds like a cross between moody driving music and a meditative yoga workout mixtape.
I finally became acquainted with the weirdos of Twin Peaks, which was oddly enjoyable. It was apparently a summer to forgive unrealistic dialogue and improbable scenes, because I also enjoyed the 1994 cult classic The Crow. I needed clunky diversion this summer. This lead to the late-night guilty pleasure of watching the trashy Deadly Women and the slightly more sophisticated Paranormal Witness. I’m still catching up on last season’s Louie and Mad Men. I’m so disappointed in a certain character right now.
Favorite new cocktail: Dark and Stormy (ginger beer makes it classy)
Favorite random sandwich: Brie, honey, blackberries
I read pretty compulsively. Someone actually challenged me to quit reading for one week this summer—so that I’d have more time for writing and other creative pursuits I neglect in order to sit inside with my books—and I failed miserably. So I’m just going to touch on a few favorites rather than trying for a comprehensive list here.
Right now I’m working through Patricia Smith’s latest collection, Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah. I’d read her previous four books, all of them more than once, and I was a little afraid this one wouldn’t be as spectacular. I’ve thought of her as a guiding star for years, and so many writers fade after bright early works (or maybe I’ve just got an abandonment thing?) but she’s taken this formal turn that’s really fascinating. The new book has a crown of sonnets, a longish poem in syllabics, bops, some kind of modified villanelle, etc. You could see that developing in Blood Dazzler, but it’s in full effect here.
And I recently read Angelo Nikolopoulos’s first book, Obscenely Yours, for the second time. A thread of “auditions” runs through it, and the book’s structure is heavily informed by pornography and cruising. He’s dancing with these very tenuous forms of connection. I love how cleverly, how flirtatiously his lyrics transgress.
As for journals, I’ve admired Indiana Review and The Kenyon Review since I began paging through literary journals in college. Memorious and Guernica are some of my favorite online magazines right now. And Forklift, Ohio has a really neat aesthetic both in terms of the poems and the magazine as a physical object. Their summer issue has a green chalkboard-cover, and also includes a piece of chalk and a recipe for white bean salad. The previous issue was peppered with vintage recipes for concocting bulk perfumes.
Over the past couple of months, I’ve sat through the first four seasons of The Wire utterly hypnotized. I don’t usually watch much TV, but I started out thinking of it as research for a series of poems I’m working on in the voices of queer gangsters and their lovers. And they do a wonderful job with the queer characters, but I’ve actually become more interested in how the show treats informants. We tend to see informants cast as minor characters, cowardly or amoral, but in The Wire they’re complex and relatable. And if you look at the Whitey Bulger trial that’s been in the news recently, it seems like the informant system has really altered the nature of “justice” in this country in ways we’re still grappling with.
At the same time, I’ve been revisiting a number of movies from my childhood. I fell in love with Beauty and the Beast around the time I figured out how uncool it was for a little boy to dig a musical about a princess, so I revisited that as an adult with very different concerns. And I recently wrote an ekphrastic poem about The Land Before Time, which actually scared the shit out of me as a kid. I think as writers it’s important for us to respond actively to media and history, rather than just consuming.
I’m teaching a fiction workshop for the first time this fall, and while putting together my syllabus I realized that a couple of the stories I’m having my students read are ones that make me sob every time I read them. I wondered if maybe I should put an asterisk next to these assignments, with a note to not read these stories in public or in the presence of a skittish boyfriend, but decided I’ll probably just mention it in class, where the opportunity to embarrass myself is richer.
But it got me thinking about how great it can be to cry sometimes, whether out of a desire for some innocent catharsis, or just to feel anything at all after months of being dead inside. So when I was asked to share some favorite things, I immediately thought about these crying stories. If you’re hankering for the sweet ache of despair, prepare a cool, wet cloth for your soon-to-be-puffy eyes and tuck in to these stories.
“Safari” by Jennifer Egan
“Safari” is a perfect counterargument to those who claim that literary short fiction is limited to airless narratives about writers and professors, written by writers and professors, for writers and professors. I mean, a rockstar gets mauled by a lioness! Don’t worry, I’m not really giving anything away—that’s not the sad part. It’s the final few paragraphs where the magic really happens. The ending gives the reader selective access to the future, and it’s as if Egan is giving us the point of view of god, if there were a god, and if he cared what happened to people. Man, knowing the future would probably be the saddest superpower.
“Puppy” by George Saunders
I don’t know how much I would appreciate the virtuosic point of view shifts in this story were I not a writer, but I think the overall emotional impact would be the same: devastating. The reader is given enough of the interiority of two characters to completely understand why they think what they’re doing is right, and the ways in which they’re tragically wrong. Somehow, I care more about what is happening to the people in the story than to the titular pup, which might be a first for me.
“In The Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried” by Amy Hempel
I’d like to remind you that since you aren’t my student, you don’t have to read any of these stories, because this one is, uh, really sad. It forces me to recognize that everyone I have ever loved (myself included!) will die one day. I mean, we all know this all the time, but how often do we really feel it? Basically never, thankfully. But forcing ourselves to acknowledge our mortality is probably a good thing to do, occasionally, by reading this story. Thanks, Amy Hempel!
Let’s say you read these stories, and get to thinking about how at this moment you’re the youngest you’ll ever be again, and how you’ll die one day. You want to cling to those last scraps of youth, and simultaneously stave off death, right? Better head to the gym! You’ll need some music to listen to. So I figured I’d share a couple of the songs that are currently keeping my workouts bearable.
Animal Collective, “Purple Bottle”
Shout Out Louds “Hurry Up Let’s Go”
Broken Social Scene “Stars and Sons”
Snowden “Black Eyes” (This song has the additional perk of reminding one of the dashing Edward Snowden.)
Alternatively, maybe confronting your own mortality just makes you want to get pretty wasted. Keep it classy while you get trashed by indulging in innumerable French 75s. Fun fact: you can totally make these by the pitcher-full if you have company, or if you’ve read yourself into a super-sized sadness. Pour a bottle of champagne into a pitcher, add about 5 oz. gin or cognac, 2.5 oz. fresh lemon juice, and 2.5 oz. simple syrup. Stir gently, then serve in champagne flutes with a lemon twist. Don’t serve over ice, like some recipes suggest—what sort of a brute are you? Drink up, and pretend you’ll live forever.
To kick off a new year at The Journal (as well as a new school year here at Ohio State), I’ve asked all our editors to write a short (or, in some cases, long) post about what they’ve been reading, watching, and listening to this summer.
We’re gonna kick things off with second year MFA student and associate fiction editor Kate Norris. Take it away, Kate!
Submissions open September 1st for the annual OSU Press/The Journal Wheeler Prize for Poetry. We’re moving everything online this year, so save yourself some shipping and send those puppies in through Submittable!
Each year, The Journal selects one full-length manuscript of poetry for publication by The Ohio State University Press. In addition to publication under a standard book contract, the winning author receives the Charles B. Wheeler prize of $2500.
Entries of at least 48 typed pages of original poetry must be electronically submitted during the month of September. Your name or other identification should appear only on a separate cover page. All manuscripts will be read anonymously.
Manuscripts must be previously unpublished. Some or all of the poems in the collection may have appeared in periodicals, chapbooks, or anthologies, but these must be identified in the acknowledgements page.
A nonrefundable handling fee of $28.00 will be charged for each entry. Entrants will receive a one-year subscription to The Journal.
The winning entry, screened by the editorial staff of The Journal and chosen by The Ohio State University Press’s Poetry Editor, Kathy Fagan, will be announced the following January.
Submit via Submittable starting September 1st: https://thejournal.submittable.com/submit
Corey Van Landingham is our 2012 winner for her first collection, Antidote, out this fall. Corey recently completed her MFA at Purdue University and is now a Stegner Fellow at Stanford. Previous winners over the past twenty-seven years include: Rebecca Hazelton, Edward Haworth Hoeppner, Kary Wayson, Lia Purpura, Mark Svenvold, and Mary Ann Samyn.
The Journal is looking for visual art for our upcoming print and online issues. We are interested in visual art of all kinds and accept work that both excites us and demonstrates a strong awareness of concept and craft. We offer a monetary payment of $100 upon acceptance. With your submission, please include up to eight pages of work along with a brief artist statement/bio. To get a better sense of who we are and what we do please visit our archives.
Thank you, we look forward to seeing your work!
