NOISE

Announcing: DIY Subscription

2012-01-30T10:27:00.002-05:00

Starting this 30th of January, we are now beginning to offer you, dear reader, your own choice of subscription option. Because we believe you deserve that option. Because this is 'Merica.

Starting 30th January, we're pleased to offer our new DIY Subscription. You now have the choice of any 5 available or forthcoming titles for just $50.

(Yes, that's a good deal.)

Order now.

Reading Saved My Life

2012-01-18T14:47:00.003-05:00

LA artist Ashkahn did a limited run of 100 "Reading Saved My Life" posters exclusively for Skylight Books. They're selling for $27!

RADIO IRIS excerpt

2012-01-04T10:23:00.000-05:00

And so here, dear readers, is an excerpt of the first handful of chapters from Anne-Marie Kinney's much-anticipated debut novel, Radio Iris.

"Working for a company that might be called Kafka Ballard & Dickinson, bearing a kind of sonic witness to a world of static, Iris likes to listen the way some like to watch. Searching for home, she’s the passenger of her own voice. Anne-Marie Kinney’s Radio Iris is a novel of unsettling humor and elusive terror, a piercing loneliness and the strangeness of the banal, and a hushed power that grows in volume before your ears."
-Steve Erickson

"Radio Iris is a revelation, a whimsical, charming and beautifully observed novel about quotidian life. Anne-Marie Kinney's Iris is a contemporary version of Calvino's Marcovaldo, caught between the rich expression of her own humanity and the random demands of the workaday world."
-T.C. Boyle

"Radio Iris brings new shimmer and depth to the word 'sensory' - Iris's perceptions are both keen and open, so mysterious and grounded, and the book builds a narrative of mystery and longing with visceral, ringing precision."
-Aimee Bender

"In Radio Iris, Anne-Marie Kinney, introduces us to Iris Finch, a young woman of a new lost and lonely generation. With prose as pitch perfect as the Buddy Holly songs Iris loves, Kinney draws us into a world both familiar and quotidian and unfathomable and harrowing."
-Bruce Bauman

Anne-Marie Kinney's work has appeared in Black Clock, Indiana Review, and Keyhole, and has been performed by Los Angeles’s Word Theatre. Radio Iris is her first novel.

Spring/Summer 2012 Catalog

2012-01-03T09:22:00.006-05:00

O 2011, Where Did You Go? A recap of sorts.

2011-12-30T09:17:00.024-05:00

2011 just blew past and we thought we'd take a moment to slow it down and share some of our most memorable TDR moments from the year.

We'd love to hear from other folks, too, readers or authors as to what some of their favorite times from the past year were, whether with our books or others, so please chime in!

Here are some of those moments we'll remember, in no particular order.

Barbara Browning appearing with Keren Ann at Barnes & Noble's Upstairs at the Square.
Barbara's debut novel, The Correspondence Artist, inspired Largehearted Boy to declare the book "one of the true literary breakthroughs of our young century," and thankfully we have this utterly fantastic video of her in conversation with Katherine Lanpher at a joint event with Keren Ann.

Grace Krilanovich's The Orange Eats Creeps makes the editors' shortlist for The Believer Book Awards.
"Grace Krilanovich’s first book is a steamy cesspool of language that stews psychoneurosis and viscera into a horrific new organism—the sort of muck in which Burroughs, Bataille, and Kathy Acker loved to writhe."
And while it didn't win, we're certain it made an impression.

Michael Schaub reviews Jay Neugeboren's You Are My Heart and Other Stories at Kirkus.
"[Neugeboren] might not be as famous as some of his compeers, like Philip Roth or John Updike, but it's becoming increasingly harder to argue that he's any less talented. Neugeboren's new short story collection serves as a convincing piece of evidence of the author's rare talent... dazzlingly smart and deeply felt... Jay Neugeboren is music to our ears."
That's why it was memorable, a better appreciation for this acclaimed author could not have been written.

Francis Levy pisses off Brazil.
The publication of Francis Levy's satirical second novel, Seven Days in Rio, inspired the Village Voice to declare the work "the funniest American novel since Sam Lipsyte's The Ask" and others to praise this "incredibly elaborate and well-crafted satire." There were voices of dissent, such as Brazilian government officials quoted in O Globo, the most prominent daily newspaper in the country, saying they would demand an official apology for the book's publication.
This would have to win for most surreal happening for us of 2011.

Roadtripping with Joshua Mohr.
We were thankful to be able to convince Joshua Mohr to tour the midwest for the third book of his that we published, Damascus, which led to us eating this Chicago-style pizza:

Josh reading in a chapel at Capital University:

And in a basement at Mac's Backs in Cleveland:

While some super-cool things happened with Damascus, such as the Wall Street Journal and New York Times reviews, and the USA Today year-end mention, the most memorable part of the publication for me will be this trip, the camaraderie, talking books and writing and everything else with a dear friend.

Getting some hometown love from The Columbus Dispatch.
When you work out of your house, it can get kind of lonely, and so it was great to get some local print from our hometown paper that allowed us to open our doors and share what we do with our neighbors and community. Plus, it was really wonderfully written.

Farhad Manjoo as Chuck Norris

2011-12-29T11:46:00.003-05:00

I spent last week with a laundrylist of childhood diseases my daughter brought home from kindergarten, heavily medicated and nursing myself with unhealthy quantities of Hulu. I probably saw the commercial for the World of Warcraft videogame that featured Chuck Norris a couple dozen times, and read Farhad Manjoo's smarmy follow-up to his universally despised Slate column. With his cocky yet stock Google-researched voice, I realized that Manjoo was positing himself as some omniscient guru. Not dissimilar to the mythic figure cut by Chuck Norris in jokes. Seen in this light, I began to view Manjoo more as an undeserving knucklehead with a megaphone and mostly harmless. And that’s my prescription for how to successfully quit loathing Farhad Manjoo.

I started writing something comparing the two (Farhad and Chuck), which evolved into a more elaborate appreciation for bookstores. The medication wore off with many of the loose-ends unresolved, and I need to work on other things than this amusement so I'm just throwing it up on our blog for anyone to check out who may get a kick out of it.

Independent Bookselling Will Survive Only Because Farhad Manjoo Allows It to Survive

On December 13, in the thrall of the zombie daze of holiday shopping, Farhad Manjoo, Slate's technology columnist published an article deriding independent bookstores as “some of the least efficient, least user-friendly, and most mistakenly mythologized local establishments you can find.” After a maelstrom of criticism and name-calling (from amongst others, Salman Rushdie), he backtracked somewhat with a piece on December 21, saying 'Independent Bookstores Are Not Doomed,' with the self-righteous subtitle, “Here's how they can fight back against Amazon.” (Not, 'Here's how bookstores are fighting back against Amazon.') In other words, it would be possible for independent bookstores to survive after all... if they heeded the sage wisdom of Farhad Manjoo. And Farhad Manjoo could win a staring contest with his eyes closed.

What was especially irksome about Manjoo's side-step was that he didn't bother speaking with a single bookseller to find out what they were doing to combat digital retail benefits, or how bookstores were already using technology to enhance a shopper's experience. To read Manjoo, you'd think the threat of Amazon on the book trade was newly born, rather than being a credible danger that surviving bookstores have dealt with for the past decade or longer. As someone who finds bookstores difficult to use (as Manjoo admitted in his initial piece), one might think that speaking with someone who operates one, or shops at one, would be in order.

Rather, Manjoo devotes the crux of his latter Amazon prescription to smartphone apps, which I'm actually thankful for, that rather than elaborating on his previous preposterous generalizations the tech guru stuck to technology. He states in closing:

“...apps will become just as important to local retailers as websites are now. If you own a store, I’d suggest you start thinking about building such an app. Right now, Amazon is stealing your customers. This is a way to fight back.”

Rome wasn't built in a day because they didn't ask Farhad Manjoo for help.

There is an indie bookstore app available through Indiebound that allows shoppers to “browse indie bookseller recommendation lists,” download ebooks from independent bookstores, find indie bookstores in their area (in addition to other locally-owned businesses), as well as search and order books. Apparently this tool didn't show up during the exhaustive research Manjoo conducted while crafting the brunt of the argument in his well-informed article. But then again, Farhad Manjoo doesn't scroll with a mouse, he uses a lion.

There is an unfortunate representation by some media of bookstores as places that are adorable and cuddly and demanding of our charity, like a kitten awaiting adoption. I found both of Manjoo's articles to be exceptionally condescending and offensive, and I'm not even a bookseller. Even Will Doig's rebuttal of Manjoo's piece on Salon seemed to hang its hat on the argument that bookstores are an invaluable thread of our cultural fabric and therefore deserve our support, as though we wouldn't otherwise shop there. Which makes me slightly queasy; just because store owners don't have a jazzy title like mortgage consultant doesn't mean they aren't businesspeople. People are choosing the experience of shopping at an independent bookstore, but they are also receiving a service. It isn't a toss-up between cutting a check to a non-profit or shopping at that cute bookstore on the corner.

A recent article in the New York Times reports that holiday bookstore sales are up considerably nationwide over 2010, with R.J. Julia bookstore in Madison, Connecticut, boasting a whopping 30% increase.

Ebook sales statistics abound and I gloss over them warily, preferring to stick with our own internal numbers. At Two Dollar Radio, less than 4% of total per-unit sales are ebooks, which equates to less than 2% of gross income. We have had ebooks fail to break even in sales, which rarely happens for us in print. To give a sample of a recent publication from 2011, a period during which “ebook sales rose 81%,” a book which received reviews from large media outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times Book Review, and several others, sold 3,000 print copies. During that same window, the book sold less than 50 ebooks.

We're becoming increasingly conscious of the fact that the readership of our press and the readership of our authors does not primarily reside in the ebook market. If there is a future for us there, I can't yet spy its promise on the horizon. It is my hardheaded belief that the sum contribution ebooks have made to the book trade and the publishing profession as a whole has been to devalue our product and our livelihoods, and all Amazon is doing is upselling gadgets while attempting to modernize their archaic delivery method. The single greatest champion of small presses isn't Amazon or online retailers, but independent bookstores.

Much of the pity bookstores receive is induced as a result of Amazon receiving unfair tax benefits. However, what bookstores deserve even more than our communal pity is a level playing field. It is outlandish that Amazon, a corporation that has imparted untold damage to our culture and our communities since their inception through their brutish business principles, is still permitted to operate in such a nefarious manner.

It's difficult to put into words the value I believe independent bookstores possess, as it undoubtedly is for so many others, which is why we resort to nostalgia and whimsy. I shop at independent bookstores not out of some social obligation, but selfishly, because I want to, because the package they offer is indispensable. I imagine the same belief is shared by those others I see in the stores as well.

* All Chuck Norris jokes borrowed from chucknorrisfacts.com.

Ricardo Cavolo + Jeff Faerber

2011-12-12T09:43:00.004-05:00

Ricardo Cavolo (work above), the Spanish artist whose work graces the cover to Karolina Waclawiak's forthcoming How To Get Into the Twin Palms (July 2012), has new artwork up at his site, as well as some super-cool tee-shirts and posters available for purchase. Check it out!

In the days of yore, we used to spotlight artists on our website, as well as bands. One of those artists is Jeff Faerber, who has completed a cool series of NYC landscapes done on metrocards (below).

Big Ups, Myron McVeigh!

2011-12-09T09:27:00.004-05:00

A fellow named Myron McVeigh is the latest member of our tattoo club. Myron got inked by Katie Sellergren of Mt Idy Tattoo in Montrose, Iowa.

"My name is Myron McVeigh. I am 31 years old and enjoy nature and reading. I was born and raised in Iowa. I also build acoustic guitars as a hobby. You can see some of my work on my facebook page, Facebook.com/woodenguitars. I work for a heating and air company doing custom Sheet metal. I enjoy moonshine and appalachian folklore. I also collect tattoos. I have decided to join the tattoo club because I enjoy books and have enjoyed Two Dollar radio's books thus far. Plus it's a good excuse to get a tattoo!"

Big Ups, Dan Smith!

2011-12-09T09:19:00.002-05:00

"My name is Dan Smith and I am from Seattle, WA. I work for the City of Redmond and recently graduated from Washington State University. I served in the Marine Corps for six years prior to settling with my wife and our son in the Seattle suburb of Lake Stevens, WA. With all of the rainy days we have here in the northwest, I always seem to find myself curled up with a book from Two Dollar Radio.

"I first heard about Two Dollar Radio from my older cousin, Joshua Mohr. While we did not spend a lot of time together growing up (He is much older than I), I have always had a great deal of respect for him. Also, I must admit, a little envious of his musical and literary talents. Since the publishing of Some Things That Meant The World To Me, I have told anyone that will listen about his astute abilities to craft an imaginative tale. With the tattoo club, I think there is no better way to get out there and spread the word about all of the great literary works available from Two Dollar. With the publishing of Damascus, I felt it was time to put words into action and get my radio tat!

"I had this tattoo drawn up and inked in by Richard Choptij of Tattoo Nemesis in Lake Stevens, WA. It took a little longer than expected to heal, but worth the wait! Now life truly is looking bright and sunny... Now if only I could win the lotto."

Consciousness is Destiny

2011-11-29T15:06:00.000-05:00

by Francis Levy
Freud said “anatomy is destiny”, but one wonders if consciousness hasn’t become the rogue player making personality into a more labile affair. How can one talk about sexual identity without cracking a smile? Flaubert said “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.” Aren’t we increasingly becoming our own creators. Is self invention our most viral secular heresy? Can for example a middle aged married supposedly “heterosexual male” have the sensibility of a woman who loves other women? Or more bluntly have you ever looked at the person you are making love to and wondered what they are? Some marriage counselors have pointed out that we all marry our same sex parent. Therefore a woman making love with her husband is really making love to another woman. Our woman in question has simply married a man who reminds her of her mother. Objection! you will cry. The man has an appendage called a penis which the mother, unless she had reconstructive surgery following her pregnancy, did not. But isn’t too much being made of the penis in an age when sex change operations have become so sophisticated and readily available. Granted the Supreme Court is unlikely to include vaginoplasties with the issues it undertakes to rule on when it considers the constitutionality of Obama’s health plan. For good or bad sexuality has become an intellectual and even ideological affair. Yes biology is involved, but it’s the brain rather than the genitals that is calling the shots.

[This was originally posted to The Screaming Pope, Francis Levy's blog of rants and reactions to contemporary politics, art and culture.]

Melancholia

2011-11-29T09:48:00.000-05:00

by Francis Levy
Lars von Trier is a party pooper. Dunderheads don’t you get it? The whole performance at Cannes was a set up. It’s Melancholia played right before our eyes. Here he is in the limelight at Cannes, creator of Dogma, lionized with Kirsten Dunst, his star at his side, and he reprises the role she's just played in the film. He makes anti-Semitic remarks and finds himself banned from Cannes. Similarly Justine, the character Dunst plays, throws her whole life away, rejecting her marriage and the employer who has just given her a promotion to art director, at the agency at which she works— remaining loyal to the spirit of her depressive mother (Charlotte Rampling) who has instilled in her a deep and abiding hatred of life. All of this mind you while Wagner’s famed Liebestod from Tristan and Isolde plays again and again and again, underscoring the death in life which constitutes what amounts to a passion or calling for her. The lighting is spare and real and so is the message that that there is nothing, no transcendence, no life beyond the aberration known as existence—nothing except, art. The initial montage sequence is a homage to Bergman’s Persona. In Persona you are dealing with an actress who’s had a psychotic break. Freud defined melancholia as a response to loss which includes a lack of interest in the outside world. The close-ups of Dunst’s face in the early montage of Melancholia evince the shrinking from the will to live characteristic of the condition Freud describes. The planet on a collision course with earth that constitutes the second movement of the film is called Melancholia, but it’s as if the catastrophe had already occurred to Justine before the collision ever takes place. She is suffering about something which has yet to be, a brilliant little touch on von Trier’s part (there is another particularly brilliant directorial touch in the little piece of wedding cake on Justine’s face that precedes the breakup the marriage on the very night it’s begun). The parallels with Persona continue in part two of the film which, along with the collision, is devoted to Justine’s sister Claire. If Justine is afraid to live, Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) is afraid to die, but like with Bergman’s nurse and actress the roles switch and then with the big ball of destruction called Melancholia hovering overhead, Justine is exultant. She is finally in her element. As the world comes to an end, Justine becomes a latter day Grand Inquisitor, The Grand Facilitator, helping her frightened sister and nephew to die.

[This was originally posted to The Screaming Pope, Francis Levy's blog of rants and reactions to contemporary politics, art and culture.]

Baby Geisha is coming soon!

2011-11-28T14:47:00.000-05:00

We're out with Trinie Dalton's new story collection, Baby Geisha, in January.

Bookforum just gave the book a glowing review, saying "Half ingenuous and half wily, winningly hard to pin down. The result is a kind of everyday fantastic. Dalton nails the Walserian trick of evincing a sincerity nearly indistinguishable from irony. The effect is a poised instability, more uncanny than the magic the stories sometimes describe."

Publishers Weekly also had this to say: "Though Dalton writes in the minimalist vein, alongside the likes of Lydia Davis, Ben Marcus, and Gary Lutz, her peculiar fascinations give her a singular voice. A pleasurable trip."

We just got proofs for the finished copies of the book. If you're affiliated with a bookstore or media and are interested in checking out a copy, write to eric[at]twodollarradio.com.

Scenes from the Miami Book Fair

2011-11-28T10:29:00.003-05:00

Last week we were in southern Florida for the Miami Book Fair International (and Thanksgiving).

We came prepared to bring the ruckus.

But it rained more than it should have.

So we hung out in our orange tent, and got to talk to some really cool Florida folk.

And were able to introduce our nephew to some books over Thanksgiving.

Now we're back in Ohio, surrounded by the persistent chirp of Christmas music (more Christmas music than I would wish on my worst enemy), already looking forward to next fall's Miami Book Fair.

TC Boyle's blurb Anne-Marie Kinney's Radio Iris

2011-11-08T13:03:00.003-05:00

TC Boyle just provided us with this enthusiastic endorsement for Anne-Marie Kinney's debut novel, Radio Iris (May 2012):

"Radio Iris is a revelation, a whimsical, charming and beautifully observed novel about quotidian life. Anne-Marie Kinney's Iris is a contemporary version of Calvino's Marcovaldo, caught between the rich expression of her own humanity and the random demands of the workaday world."

Here are some of the other sweet sweet blurbs we've received for the book already:

"In Radio Iris, Anne-Marie Kinney, introduces us to Iris Finch, a young woman of a new lost and lonely generation. With prose as pitch perfect as the Buddy Holly songs Iris loves, Kinney draws us into a world both familiar and quotidian and unfathomable and harrowing." -Bruce Bauman

"Working for a company that might be called Kafka Ballard & Dickinson, bearing a kind of sonic witness to a world of static, Iris likes to listen the way some like to watch. Searching for home, she’s the passenger of her own voice. Anne-Marie Kinney’s Radio Iris is a novel of unsettling humor and elusive terror, a piercing loneliness and the strangeness of the banal, and a hushed power that grows in volume before your ears." -Steve Erickson

"Radio Iris brings new shimmer and depth to the word 'sensory'- Iris's perceptions are both keen and open, so mysterious and grounded, and the book builds a narrative of mystery and longing with visceral, ringing precision."
-Aimee Bender

Booksellers or those looking to review the book can write to eric[at]twodollarradio.com to request an advance reading copy.

The People's Library

2011-11-07T09:19:00.003-05:00

Barbara Browning's The Correspondence Artist at Occupy Wall Street's library.

Francis Levy at the East Hampton Library

2011-11-01T08:52:00.001-04:00

Author Francis Levy reads from his new novel, Seven Days in Rio, at the East Hampton Library.

Joshua Mohr Reading at Booksmith

2011-10-29T12:56:00.000-04:00

Ecole de Nettoyage

2011-10-28T14:31:00.000-04:00

Nettoyage is a French word that refers to house cleaning, but the modern école de nettoyage, which grants terminal degrees in house cleaning, generally has a school of continuing ed where you can attend non-credit courses on relieving oneself. Wouldn’t it be great to feel the next time you use an airport bathroom that you will know your way around the faucets, and the next time you hit a rest stop on the thruway you won’t feel that you need to worry about your husband or wife accusing you of having an illicit relationship when you contract an STD from the fowl waters shooting up into your asshole, vagina or penis? Have you ever gone into a bathroom at one of the airports and stuck your hand under the electric-eye controlled soap dispenser? Have you ever then stuck your hand under the electric-eye controlled water faucet to no avail? Have there ever been instances where neither the soap nor the water has come out, no matter how frantically you have waved your hand under the dispensers or faucets? Have you ever gone into a stall on The New York State Thruway and found that the electric-eye controlled flusher flushes while you are still sitting so that the unfriendly waters in the drain shoot up into your orifices? Have you ever been in one of those futuristic affairs where there are no electric eyes, but at the same time no recognizable soap, water or paper towel dispensers? Have you just had to go on your nerve in these strange bathrooms and has it ever seemed to you, once you have entered such an environment, that you are never going to be able cleanse yourself or even go to the bathroom to begin with? In today’s modern world, it is becoming increasingly necessary to attend an école de nettoyage.

[This was originally posted to The Screaming Pope, Francis Levy's blog of rants and reactions to contemporary politics, art and culture.]

The Skin I Live In

2011-10-27T14:11:00.000-04:00

The notion of the mad doctor or scientist, who kidnaps and imprisons subjects for his experiments, is a staple of horror films. It is a also unfortunately a recurrent staple of reality, where newspaper headlines routinely report cases of imprisonment. In one an Austrian psychopath, Josef Fritzl, actually fathered children with the imprisoned daughter he’d incested. If nothing else Pedro Almodovar ‘s The Skin I Live In exemplifies the director’s obsession with plot. Horror film plots, romantic plots crimes of passion are all gris for this plotmeister. He is the most plotty of modernists. No Bergman or especially Antonioni film was ever so heavy on plots as Almodovar's are and The Skin I live In takes the cake. The enormous reticulations of the plot in question lead to the simple conclusion that however much we change the surface, the inside of the human being is stubbornly unmalleable . The skin we live in is still an intransigent ego, no matter how much it’s tattooed or it the case of the term the film coins, transgenesized. It’s an anti-Pygmalion if you like or another version of Vertigo in which the protagonist falls in love with someone who doesn’t exist. What’s really interesting is the brute grief that lies at the heart of all the desire to remake and reshape reality--another curiously simple, but essential element that is like the sun around which the other planets of the complex story turn. Louise Bourgeois makes a cameo appearance in the form of a book of her work. Bourgeois’ sculptures are psychohistories and testaments to trauma. The appearance of the Bourgeois book also makes a cool art critical point in comparing plastic surgery with her preoccupations. Robert Ledgard (Antonion Banderas) the villainous plastic surgeon who drives the action has lost his wife (a burn victim who jumped out of the window on seeing her reflection) and a daughter (who has never recovered from the trauma of seeing her human cinder of a mother fall to the ground). There is yet another level of the movie having to do with other mothers, the mother of the plastic surgeon and the mother of the kidnapped victim, a young man who undergoes a vaginoplasty. To return back to Vertigo, the movie is vertiginous, highly flawed and much more powerful than some critics are crediting.

This was originally posted to The Screaming Pope, Francis Levy's blog of rants and reactions to contemporary politics, art and culture.]

Stonewalled III: Post Modernist Sexuality

2011-10-26T14:02:00.000-04:00

Sexuality is a biological drive, but it is also a figment of the imagination. If consciousness is ever separated from the body, with our species preserved as pixels of intelligence migrating through cyberspace, then the very notion of what it means to be male and female will revert to being a fiction. Our present culture is obsessed with pornography, which has become infinitely ubiquitous and is still looked at as a virus which distracts unwary minds from a more innocent sexuality—which they might be more prone to undertake had they not become so infected. But is there reason to believe that pornography has become the fuel for migrating consciousnesses that are increasingly separated from the mother ship? We are still men and women, made of flesh and blood and hormones, but increasingly we find our functions usurped by technology. No wonder radically fundamentalist religions are so intent on shielding their followers from the influences of modernity. Enlightenment ideals of reason and equanimity have no place amidst the brute inequities of biology. It’s no wonder that there is so much sexual dysfunction in the battered and defeated armies of heterosexual culture. However, there is a hope. Once mankind has totally done away with its dependence on the body—Ray Kurzweil’s idea of immortality coming in the form of organs made from microprocesssors is only one of a number of possible outcomes—then sex will take its rightful place as one of a number of cultural institutions for which tickets are purchased say like for Lincoln Center or BAM.

[This was originally posted to The Screaming Pope, Francis Levy's blog of rants and reactions to contemporary politics, art and culture.]

Stonewalled II

2011-10-25T14:57:00.000-04:00

Early feminists had railed against pornography and the objectification of women, but feminism was evolving and succeeding generations began to reevaluate the role of the women in the context of Enlightenment notions of freedom and liberty. It would be hard to consider the famous Italian porn star and politician la Cicciolina, who was the wife of the sculptor Jeff Koons, to be an example of a woman who was exploited by men even though she might, in fact, be the object of their fantasies. Entrepreneurial personalities like la Cicciolina and Madonna marketed their own bodies without the need of exploitative male pimps and were in control of their own destinies. By the 1980's Vagina envy replaced penis envy as the manifestation of covetousness between the sexes. As Camille Paglia would point out in Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nerfertiti to Emily Dickinson women had superior powers, both physically (genitally) and metaphysically, of which men were in awe. Men’s need to compensate with increasingly violent pornography centering around the notion of submission, in particular gagging (deep throating) and defiling (facials), were signs of male jealousy rather than male desire (and ultimately exemplified the higher regard in which females were held by their male counterparts). Within the short period of time from 1969, in which the Stonewall riots occurred and gays had begun to assert their rights, heterosexual men and women had begun a journey of their own, characterized by a new dialectic in which self-realization and self-expression challenged both classical feminist and male chauvinist ideals.

[This was originally posted to The Screaming Pope, Francis Levy's blog of rants and reactions to contemporary politics, art and culture.]

Mourir Auprès de Toi

2011-10-25T09:34:00.000-04:00

An amusing short film by Olympia Le-Tan, Spike Jonze, and Simon Cahn.

Mourir Auprès de Toi (To Die By Your Side) from Veronica Christina on Vimeo.

Stonewalled

2011-10-24T14:54:00.000-04:00

In the '50s and even '60s, it was still fun to be a heterosexual. You were part of a group. The guys watched football and maintained a double standard in which they worshipped or defiled the opposite sex depending on whether they were courting their ideal or preying upon unreciprocated love. On the distaff side there were a complementary set of affects, not so much having to do with the dichotomy between romance and lust as with the notions of beauty and femininity. Two of JFK’s love objects were thus Jackie, a lady, and Marilyn, a siren. Then the pendulum shifted and it became more fun to be gay. After Stonewall, gay people came out of the closet in droves and wreaked vengeance against their tormentors. Now it was not only fun to flaunt and turn images of what it meant to be male or female upside down, it was a cause. Sexuality was not merely a matter of desire, but of rights, and so a whole class of gay and lesbian people who’d had to hide their inclinations fought for the right to be legally married (and call their male partner “wife” or their female partner “husband”) and join the military. Male heterosexuals were literally left walking away with their tails, or penises, between their legs, for masculinity, at least in its heterosexual form, was troubled and impotence was on the rise. If only impotence and loss of desire were a cause, some guys might have been able to walk away with shit-eating grins. But now the troubled heterosexual was in the position of the still-closeted homosexual of the '50s. Our new all-American male had something to hide. And how did the post feminist heterosexual female fit into the picture? (To be continued.)

[This was originally posted to The Screaming Pope, Francis Levy's blog of rants and reactions to contemporary politics, art and culture.]

Steve Erickson blurbs Radio Iris!

2011-09-22T13:25:00.003-04:00

"Working for a company that might be called Kafka Ballard & Dickinson, bearing a kind of sonic witness to a world of static, Iris likes to listen the way some like to watch. Searching for home, she’s the passenger of her own voice. Anne-Marie Kinney’s Radio Iris is a novel of unsettling humor and elusive terror, a piercing loneliness and the strangeness of the banal, and a hushed power that grows in volume before your ears."

-Steve Erickson
=================

Radio Iris, a novel by Anne-Marie Kinney, is scheduled for publication May 2012. You can write to eric[at]twodollarradio.com if you're interested in receiving an advance copy for review.

Brooklyn Book Festival Sale

2011-09-18T10:17:00.003-04:00

Stop by our booth at the Brooklyn Book Festival today - #156, conveniently located next to the North Stage where Barbara Browning will be appearing at 11am!

For those not in Brooklyn, from 10am - 6pm, we're offering the same deal online as what we're offering at the fest: any book for $10, any 2 books for $15! (Including pre-orders, which won't ship until book is actually published.)

Brooklyn Book Festival Sale!

2011-09-17T17:04:00.003-04:00

We'll be at the Brooklyn Book Festival tomorrow (Booth 156!) hocking our wares, be sure to stop out and sale hello.

For those that aren't in Brooklyn, we'll be offering a Brooklyn Book Festival sale through our website from 10am - 6pm (the same hours of the fest), where you'll be able to buy any book online for just $10, or any 2 books for $15.

That's just tomorrow, Sunday, September 18 from 10am - 6pm.

Brooklyn Book Festival

2011-09-15T09:43:00.003-04:00

Be sure to stomp out to the Brooklyn Book Festival this Sunday. We'll be at booth #156.

Barbara Browning will be there! She gets to take the downtown train to appear on the 'Who? New!' panel, 11:00 A.M. @ The North Stage (conveniently located right beside our booth).

"Brooklyn Book Festival presents debut novelist picks Peter Mountford (A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism), Barbara Browning (The Correspondence Artist), Haley Tanner (Vaclav & Lena) and Samuel Park (This Burns My Heart). Introduced by Téa Obreht."

The Brooklyn Book Festival is Sunday, September 18, from 10 AM – 6 PM.

And be sure to check out the above promotional video, featuring Barbara Browning on the uke!

You're Invited!

2011-09-02T22:46:00.002-04:00

THE COMMITTEE FOR THE DEFENSE OF THE FICTIONAL IMAGE OF RIO, EVEN IF IT MEANS BURNING BOOKS AND CREATING THREATENING EFFIGIES OF DESPISED WRITERS, INVITES YOU TO A READING AND PUBLIC RECANTING

WHEN: SEPTEMBER 8, 2011

WHERE: THE SIDEWALK CAFÉ (94 Avenue A at Sixth Street NYC)

TIME: 6:15

Mr. Levy has allowed himself to be put in stocks for this reading so that he may demonstrate how sorry he is for offending not only the people of Rio, but mankind in general. Since publishing SEVEN DAYS IN RIO, Mr. Levy accepted an invitation from the Brazilian government to view the destruction that his novel has wrought. After touring devastated areas of the city, Mr. Levy described being shocked by all the untruths that his character Kenny Cantor perpetrated in the novel.

Mr. Levy saw no evidence of pickpockets anywhere and performed a test whereby he left $l0,000 in small denominations on a public bench near the Copacabana. When he came back from a walk on the beach, the money was all there and his frenzied attempts to find thieves or anyone who would take it were unsuccessful. One resident of the city suggested that the reason why the money wasn’t taken is that the Brazilian economy is booming and $10,000 American dollars is not worth the trouble for the city’s affluent populace. Eventually, Mr. Levy had to hire a cleaning service to sweep the money away— in order to avoid getting a ticket for littering.

As for prostitutes, Mr. Levy is not sure where Kenny got his ideas from. Mr. Levy found that the Copacabana, one of the most famous beaches in Brazil, was filled with nuns in habits. Not able to find any members of the world’s oldest profession in a city where women who might have sold their bodies now earn higher wages selling derivatives, Mr. Levy hired a private detective service, Three Guys, named after the popular coffee shop opposite the Whitney. Three Guys helped him to locate some alumnae working girls in the financial services industry. But Mr. Levy was shocked to find that none of the former prostitutes he interviewed had ever heard of Susan Sontag. Through no fault of his own, Levy again found that he’d been duped by his own character.

“Basically, I was receiving misinformation from this fictional individual. I have no intention of shirking responsibility for my crimes. I’m not trying to say that I was just taking orders, but I’m clearly a victim too. I also think that Kenny’s attitude towards psychoanalysis is totally distorted. He treats psychoanalysts like whores who bilk their wealthy patients. Anyone who has ever been psychoanalyzed knows this is a myth. The average psychoanalyst is happy to listen to neurotic patients expressing the same fears four times a week without receiving a penny’s worth of compensation, and he or she is happy to work nights on the loading dock of a supermarket to support his passion for listening to repetitive drivel. In sum, I am more than ready to accept any punishment that the people of Rio and the profession of psychoanalysis wish to dole out. It is the only way to relieve me from the huge burden of guilt that I am carrying for my transgressions. I would suggest that I be spanked, lashed and crucified, with my naked body hammered to a cross, but I’m afraid I would enjoy those punishments too much. Instead let me be yelled at and nagged to death. Let the punishment fit the crime.”

COME EARLY SEATING IS LIMITED!

Big Ups, Caleb Ward!

2011-09-02T12:33:00.003-04:00

A warm welcome to the 13th member of our tattoo club, Caleb Ward. Caleb got his tattoo at Port City Tattoo Co. in Wilmington, NC, from "Little" Brian Leebrick, who has to be thinking these radio tattoos are good for business.

According to Caleb:
I'm a twenty-year-old junior at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. I'm a double major in both English Literature and Film Studies. I was just recently published for the first time and can't wait to see what the future holds. Two Dollar Radio is not only the reason why I'm planning to conquer the world, but it's also a great publishing house.

Unicorn-Level Tees Are Here

2011-09-01T11:54:00.002-04:00

We now have tee shirts for sale through our website. A notch above Reindeer-Level, our Unicorn-Level Books Tee is sure to impress.

The shirts are American Apparel (made in the US, workers paid fair-wage), super-comfy, and will look super-good on you.

Unicorn-Level Tees are Unisex and available in Medium or Large sizes.

Through September 16th, we're offering tees for a discounted price of $16!

Order.

Brazilgate 2011

2011-08-30T16:59:00.003-04:00

The most prominent daily newspaper in Brazil, O Globo, quoted government officials saying they'll request an apology for the US publication of Seven Days in Rio by Francis Levy, as well as write a letter to the US Embassy. The article elicited nearly 350 comments from readers of the paper, some outraged while others found the matter trivial. O Globo quotes Aparecida Gonçalves, the secretary for combating violence against women, a government body that reports to the presidency, insisting that all Brazilians must be "treated well, even in fiction."

We include a fiction disclaimer on the copyright page of all our books, but in addition, the author penned a prologue that kicks off the novel, stating:

"None of the characters in this novel are real, nor are the places or the psychoanalytic movements, even though the name Rio may conjure the real city of Rio de Janeiro. Lacanian analysis as described in the novel bears no resemblance to the branch of psychoanalytic practice initiated by the French analyst Jacques Lacan. Even the duration of time stated in the title bears little resemblance to what is commonly known as seven days. So don't start writing irate letters to my blog correcting this or that or asking for refunds."

We understand it to be natural for people to feel protective of their community. It was clear from the comments posted to the O Globo website that there is a greater cultural discussion ongoing, and we don't believe a work of satire by an American writer, never presented as anything other than fiction, belongs in that cultural discussion. It is also apparent from the O Globo article that the quoted official never read the book before demanding an apology, which is unfortunate.

Joshua Mohr pointed out to me that this all sounded familiar to when government folk in Brazil got in a tizzy in reaction to a Simpsons episode. According to BBC, "Simpsons father Homer was kidnapped by an unlicensed taxi driver, and he and son Bart were robbed by street children... Bart was at one stage swallowed by a boa constrictor, and Rio's slums appeared to be dirty and dangerous."

Big Ups, Brad Wojak!

2011-08-29T08:54:00.000-04:00

Really happy to have as the 12th member of the tattoo club, Brad Wojak. We have listed in our criteria that we won't ship books internationally for the club, and Brad lives in Canada. But he sent us a really nice note and he seems like good people, so we agreed to make an exception for him. Tattoo courtesy of Art House Inc in Calgary.

In Brad's own words:
"I have worked in bookstores since I was in High School, and except for a brief decade when I also worked as bartender (to help pay the rent), I really don't know anything else besides books. I am super excited to join the Two-Dollar Radio tattoo club, as I hope it will provide an example to my 3 year-old daughter that you should always follow your passions."

Big Ups, Casey Jordan Mills

2011-08-19T20:23:00.002-04:00

Big ups to Casey Jordan Mills, the latest member of our tattoo club!

Casey was inked by "Little" Brian Leebrick at Port City Tattoo Company in Wilmington, North Carolina.

In his own words:
"My name is Casey Jordan Mills. I live in Wilmington, North Carolina. I am a rising junior at the University of North Carolina in Wilmington. I am studying English Literature, Creative Nonfiction, and Journalism. I get tattooed at Port City Tattoo Co. in Wilmington. I support Veganism, a drug free lifestyle, and Two Dollar Radio."

Thanks for the support. As a member of the tattoo club Casey gets free Two Dollar Radio books for life.

Baby Geisha Galleys!

2011-08-17T15:12:00.000-04:00

We now have galleys in hand of Trinie Dalton's forthcoming story collection, Baby Geisha, and they look mighty fine!

Any media/bookseller folk interested in perusing a galley, write to eric[at]twodollarradio.com.

Grace Krilanovich on KQED's Writer's Block

2011-08-17T12:10:00.002-04:00

Today, KQED broadcast Grace Krilanovich reading a selection from The Orange Eats Creeps on their 'Writer's Block' program. Enjoy...

Fav Lines from Seven Days in Rio

2011-08-17T09:51:00.000-04:00

Francis Levy's Seven Days in Rio got a killer-sweet review on Chuck Palahniuk's site, The Cult the other day.

From the review: "It's like an erotic version of Luis Bunuel's The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. Levy is matter-of-fact in his raunchiness, which is try-and-suppress-your-laughter-because-people-are-beginning-to-stare-at-you funny. The man is fearless in his exploration of human sexuality."

The review, by Joshua Chaplinsky, referenced the laugh-out-loud nature of some of the lines so we thought we'd revisit this original post featuring some of our favorite lines from the novel.

Seven Days in Rio, a novel by Francis Levy, will be out on July 4 of this year. Here are some meaty gems from the book that I thought I'd share with you to whet your appetite:

"Author's Note: None of the characters in this novel are real, nor are the places or psychoanalytic movements, even though the name Rio may conjure the real city of Rio de Janeiro. Lacanian analysis as described in the novel bears no resemblance to the branch of psychoanalytic practice initiated by the French analyst Jacques Lacan. Even the duration of time stated in the title bears little resemblance to what is commonly known as seven days. So don’t start writing irate letters to my blog correcting this or that or asking for refunds."

"Besides sex, one of my obsessions is clean air, and I try to engage in sexual acts that don’t release any toxins into the atmosphere."

"I sometimes think that there should be a support group for people who, like myself, are always missing something."

"Our parting had felt a little like the last scene of Casablanca. There was no plane waiting to take her away from me, there was no heroic resistance leader standing between us, no war, and I wasn’t a hardened American expatriate named Rick. Yet I felt I could hear the strains of “As Time Goes By” playing on the piano in some beat-up North African café."

"“I’m a traveler who has become waylaid,” I said holding out a real. “I’m a little like Odysseus. I started out my journey looking for beautiful prostitutes, but I have been experiencing famine amongst plenty. Now I feel like Robinson Crusoe. Except I haven’t been washed up on an island, and consequently have found no Man Friday to show me the way.”"

"He looked like the kind of guy who had spent his life as a night watchman and now, in retirement, just watched over things on a recreational basis."

That's just a sample. Like the sampler appetizer you can order at Applebee's.

Q&A With Francis Levy

2011-08-16T10:17:00.000-04:00

This Q+A was posted at some point last year, but with today being the official publication date of Seven Days in Rio, we figured we'd revisit it.

In 2011, we'll publish Francis Levy's second novel, Seven Days in Rio. In 2008, we published his first book, Erotomania: A Romance, which may have received the most amusing pull-quotes from reviews of any book we've published.

The Village Voice called Levy "Nicholson Baker and Mary Gaitskill's French-kissing cousin." Inland Empire Weekly said he was "our generation's DH Lawrence, Henry Miller and Charles Bukowski rolled into one." And the Los Angeles Times said "Levy's excellent too, like Miller and Bukowski, on the mechanics and energy and animal filth of rumpy-pumpy." (Rumpy-pumpy?)

Here's a brief Q&A with Levy to mark the occasion:

Erotomania made some year-end best-of lists and got some over-the-moon postive reviews, but there were places, such as the Seattle Stranger, who "abandoned" reading the book. As an editor, I found the love/hate knee-jerk reaction to Erotomania both exceptionally rewarding and enjoyable -- what is the point of art if not to inspire and provoke. What was your reaction as a writer?

FL: I'm a naturally provocative person. It doesn't take much for me to provoke and there was a time in my career when the provocation actually produced it's desired effect which I suppose was to steel myself up against anticipated rejection. I for instance had written a series of letters from Jews to Herr Hitler asking to be excused from the Holocaust.The letters played upon all the elements of Jewish self hatred that were evident amongst the ambitious, assimilationist crowd I grew up around. People in my little fiction would plead to be excused from the Holocaust because they didn't look or act like the other Jews. The piece by the way was called "Passive Resistance," a title that also got me into trouble since that mode of social protest was tied to folks like Gandhi and Martin Luther King who most educated readers idolize. "Passive Resistance" was appreciated by some, but reviled by others and managed to create the effect someone has when they walk into a room after soiling themselves, even though it never actually got published.

Then I wrote another parody "Joseph Mengele:Man of Science" and yet another one in which Hitler is in a rehab for recovering dictators and tells his story, how he took the Sudetenland, but it was not enough. He was portayed like a sexual compulsive who is addicted to conquests. In those years, I was actually enraged and the rage was barely sublimated so the net effect was to give the reader material they found hard to digest. Mind you others like Phillip Roth and Wally Shawn had dealt satirically with subjects like Jewish self hatred and facism. It's the same material that Mel Brook's dealt with in the original movie of The Producers with its infamous number "Springtime for Hitler."

Provocation is really the comic form of tragedy, or tragic comedy. Look Erotomania is a tragi-comedy. James and Monica exemplify evolution on an ontogenic basis. They start as animals and the overly developed cerebral cortex gets in the way. The higher brain activities cause them to lose all the fun. The only problem is they wouldn't have realized they were not having fun unless they had consciousness, nor would they have had the pleasure of getting to know each other and getting to experience other forms of enjoyments such as mimesis, such as art, such as food. Freud wrote about this in Civilization and Its Discontents. I don't know why that book is not a perpetual bestseller. It should be in the drawer of every motel room like the Gideon Bible once was, giving the lonely traveler a little bit of gospel and the solace of knowing why he is so torn.

In a nutshell, Erotomania wasn't provocative because of the sex, though there was almost as much of it in the book as there is in life. It was provocative because of its rather upsetting message, which is again Freud's message i.e. that in the course of being human and socializing, man must forego certain things. Instinct will become compromised by the inhibitions that accompany consciousness. The book was also upsetting because my couple, who I really fell in love with myself, eventually embark upon a project which causes them to explode. Here again, hyperbole was simply underlining a truth: that we all separate and individuate only to be reunited again with common matter in death. My feeling is that some people simply don't want to read these things. It's like Spielberg's A.I. A lot of filmgoers didn't like the movie, but not because it was a bad movie. Rather the movie said something that was upsetting in the case of A.I. that the species could perpetuate itself, consciousness could exist without the body.

On the surface level, Erotomania was the arc of a couple as they perfect their relationship, is Seven Days in Rio the story of a man searching for the perfect relationship . . . with a prostitute?

FL: Not really. In essence Seven Days is about a sex tourist who gets waylaid at a psychoanalytic convention. It's not an autobiographical novel in any sense of the word. To begin with, I have never been to Rio, but it's far more more personal in a poetic way than Erotomania was. In essence I'm the sex tourist who got waylaid at the psychoanalytic convention, though to bookend I have never been to a psychoanalytic convention either.

However basically in some harum scarum way Seven Days tells my story. I recently published a piece about my own analysis in American Imago, a scholarly journal founded by Freud and Hanns Sachs in l939. It's called "Psychoanalysis: The Patient's Cure" and it tells the story of my own analysis. In one of the early parts of the piece I describe how I was beaten up outside a bottomless bar called Diamond Lil's which was on Canal near White Street in the 70's. I don't know what caused me to get worked over by the bouncers. I must have done something provocative to get back to the subject of the kind of provocation that doesn't delight audiences. For instance back in those days I had the habit of getting blind drunk and doing things like pulling on a fellow nudie bar aficionado's beard. People don't like that kind of provocation, but I didn't know that. I had to be told, in fact, that this was very naughty, very bad and that it would provoke the ire of those to whom it was done. That same night I went down the street to a famously violent Punk Rock place called the Mudd Club where women and I suppose some men were routinely raped in the bathroom. I had been knocked out during the beating and when I got up my arm was hanging out of its socket, but I thought "this is pretty cool" and proceeded on my merry way, drinking and using my dangling limb as a conversation piece with bug-eyed women blasted out of their minds on who knows what. In any case, the incident was one of many in which I was playing around with my own death. My self undoing had reached a certain pitch were it became apparent that I might truly succeed in having an ending like that of some of my idols, from Jackson Pollock who rammed his car into a tree, to Janice Joplin and Sid Vicious and in a more literary vein, John Berryman and Sylvia Plath. I had to really think about it at the time: did I want to live or die?

In the Myth of Sisyphus Camus says this is the only real philosophical question, but this wasn't intellectual matter for me. At the time, I simply hated myself and every night I went out on the town in the pursuit of so-called pleasure, I had yet one more opportunity to tempt fate. That's the odd thing about the thing that people call pleasure. Often what people call pleasure or ecstasy masks the search for oblivion. Epicurus is a philosopher whose name is often associated with pleasure, but he believed in the golden mean. Pleasure for him was not indulgance in excess, but a realization of limitation. These are some of the themes are set out to explore in Seven Days.

Seven Days in Rio begins with an amusing disclaimer of sorts: "None of the characters in this novel are real, nor are the places or psychoanalytic movements, even though the name Rio may conjure the real city of Rio de Janeiro. Lacanian analysis as described in the novel bears no resemblance to the branch of psychoanalytic practice initiated by the French analyst Jacques Lacan. Even the duration of time as stated in the title bears little resemblance to what is commonly known as seven days. So don't start writing irate letters to my blog correcting this or that or asking for refunds."

FL: Kafka wrote a novel called Amerika, though he never visited America. I was studying romantic French literature of the l9th Century like Chateaubriand's Atala. I started to read certain kinds of novels based on the writer's imagination of places they only partially knew. I suppose the advent of the New World inspired much fantasy. Being a person who baths in a world of sexual imagery (like most human beings, even if they might not always realize it or want to realize it), I am always imagining my Erewhon, my Utopia, both in terms of sex and its cousin therapy. I have no illusions about Rio or Bangkok or anything. In fact, after all these years of living what many people might called a hum drum existence (being a father and husband and parenthetically loving these activities), who at the same time conjures up altenative universes (I hope none of the family of man takes offense at my claiming that this is also being a trait of the species), I think I might commit suicide were I to confront the banality of pleasure.

The allusion to Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil," the famous phrase she used to describe Eichman is not coincidental and in part explains the disclaimer at the beginning of the novel. Were I to journey to a sexual and/or therapeutic paradise where I could finally meet a beautiful analyst who consented to sleep with me I would in all likelihood be disappointed. It's much better to write about these things. Then I'm free to come and go as I please with minimum destruction to other human beings.

You recently published a very thoughtful and reflective piece in American Imago on your relationship with your own psychoanalyst. How has psychoanalysis informed and furthered your fiction writing?

FL: I have already inadvertently answered this, but let me approach it from another angle which is to say the general question of the inner life. Analysis places a great amount of importance on the inner world. This may sound like a simple idea, but think about it. Most people go into therapy to solve a problem. Some men for instance go into therapy because they are having problems with sex; they have performance anxiety which leads to erectile dysfunction, in lay terms not getting it up. This is a serious matter for a man. I have a feeling that this is what Goethe's Faust is all about. Men will do anything for knowledge about how to solve this difficulty, even going so far as making a Mephistolean bargain.

Okay, I'm being facetious, before the lynch mob of comp lit scholars comes after me, I'm only kidding (not!). In contradistinction to this the analytic enterprise, looks at the whole human character. It's not that some symptoms aren't treated, rather it's a cart and horse matter. Instincts and desires are a part of the humanity of the individual. The idea is that something is getting in the way and that something becomes the subject of the analysis. In the course of this, you embark on a kind of inner life party. I was already fairly practiced in doing emotional striptease before I got into analysis, but the analysis opened up a rich territory which became my palette and eventually the raw stripping, in which I would get attention by exhibitionistically revealing everything, got turned into a ballet, then a piece of modern dance, then a tableau vivant a la Robert Wilson and then novels like Erotomania and Seven Days. I also started to produce a blog called The Screaming Pope. I've also written over 2000 poems, numerous humor pieces and short stories. I don't know if my analyst is totally aware of it, but all his years of treatment created a Frankenstein.

As co-director of the Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of Imagination, you come into contact with some of the most relevent thinkers of our time -- what are some of your memorable moments from the Center?

FL: I'm a bit of an intellectual groupie. I like all kinds of weird thinkers known and unknown. I've become friends with several writers published by Two Dollar Radio. Larry Shainberg, the author of Crust, and the classic Ambivalent Zen recently joined a panel on religious extremism called "The Politics of Ecstasy." Barbara Browning, whose The Correspondence Artist, you are publishing this year, was on the David Shields panel "The Lure and Blur of the Real" and that's an example of the the kind of thing that thrills me. The fine line between reality and fiction was what Shields was writing about and along comes Barbara Browning whose fictional characters (are they fiction?) engage in dialogues with real people on line and elsewhere. We had touched on something in the zeitgeist and it was a very exciting and contentious too. Shields and Rick Moody really fenced off on the issue of fiction qua fiction as opposed to reality as fiction or fiction as reality. John Cameron Mitchell who directed one of my favorite movies, Short Bus, was also on that panel.

Okay now I'm going to behave like the kind of asshole I hate. We had Turturro and Edward Albee talking about Beckett. We had Nicholson Baker and Judith Thurman on biography and autobiography. We had Dan Rather on civil wars in Afghanistan and Bosnia. We had the astrophysicist Brian Greene talking to the Harvard esthetician Elain Scarry about math and beauty. We had Christopher Ricks and Sean Wilentz on Dylan, the Nobel prize winning Neuroscientist Gerry Edelman talking about disenchantment in a panel on norms, Phillip Pearstein, Chuck Close, Kiki Smith. The list goes on. I'm proud of it so fuck me if I'm namedropping. Fuck me, fuck everyone. How's that for provocation?

Here's the opening to Seven Days in Rio:

"I went down to the Copacabana on my first night in Rio. I was told that most of the women were prostitutes who would gladly sleep with me for a hundred American dollars. I saw a sexy looking woman wearing high heels and an abbreviated bikini and decided that there was no sense in discriminating, since all the women were going to turn out to be whores and, from what I’d heard about the lovemaking habits of Brazilians, one would be as talented as the next. I pursed my lips and made purring sounds like a pussycat to get the idea across, but the woman didn’t seem to notice me, although I was wearing a seersucker suit from the Brooks Brothers 346 collection. There aren’t too many men, or women, wearing Brooks Brothers suits (or any suits for that matter) down by the Copacabana, and I would have thought I stood out from the crowd.

"I have always found communication between myself and other human beings to be a problem, and often worry that I haven’t succeeded with women where I otherwise might because my words get caught between my teeth. So I just held out my hand to her as she waited for the traffic light to change. “I’m Kenny,” I said. “I have a big dick. Do you understand Anglais? I am new to your country and I wanted to introduce myself while also initiating myself into your highly permissive sexual culture. I will put my cards on the table. I’d be glad to engage you to perform sexual acts on me for a fee.”"

Immigrant Movement International

2011-08-13T09:44:00.000-04:00

Here are the opening lines of Sam Dolnick’s Times story about the performance artist Tania Bruguera, a “have” whose work of art is to live like a “have not”: “Tania Bruguera has eaten dirt, hung a dead lamb from her neck and served trays of cocaine to a gallery audience, all in the name of art. She has shown her work at the Venice Biennale, been feted at the Pompidou Center in Paris and landed a Guggenheim Fellowship” (“An Artist's Performance: A Year as a Poor Immigrant,” NYT, 5/19/11). Many Times readers probably saw Dolnick’s story and thought, “I could do that. After all, it’s not Marina Abramovic, who has to sit totally still for 736 hours and 30 minutes. What if I simply go home to my apartment with the clanking steam pipes, turn on the CBS Evening News, watch coverage of the interminable Palestinian-Israeli struggle and crack open a couple cans of beer while reheating yesterday’s meat loaf, with its little squiggle of ketchup, in the toaster oven. What if I take out a package of frozen peas and put them in boiling water? What if I am totally alone or have a significant other who hates me almost as much as he or she hates him or herself, and what if we reenact a piece of performance art about this very fact over dinner every night? Will I get a Guggenheim for my troubles? Will I be invited to the Biennale? Will I be feted at the Pompidou?” Dolnick describes how Bruguera, who is Cuban, formed her artwork/advocacy group, Immigrant Movement International, and moved into an unheated, cramped apartment, living on a “minimum wage salary, which she wrote into the project description.” People usually get Nobel Prizes or MacArthurs for their contributions to peace or for original research. But why go to the trouble when misery is so munificently rewarded?

[This was originally posted to The Screaming Pope, Francis Levy's blog of rants and reactions to contemporary politics, art and culture.]

Weiner's Inferno

2011-08-12T09:42:00.000-04:00

The representative’s wiener has been roasted, but hopefully he will not end up in Schwarzeneggerdom, deprived of the loving embrace of his wife, Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin. However, if he doesn’t mend his ways, he may descend to the 9th circle, reserved for only the worse sinners, and now renamed the Strauss-Kahn wing of hell. Yes, he was bad, but he didn’t touch like Arnold or force (allegedly) like Dominique. He didn’t drown like Ted in Chappaquiddick or cajole with power like JFK or with charisma like MLK. Nor did he hit a hole-in-one like Tiger or take part in monkey business like Gary or used illegal campaign contributions to hide his extra-marital family like Edwards. He certainly didn’t run after (and devour) child pole dancers like Silvio. No, all the democratic firebrand did was show his chest and wiener. Although he didn’t solicit prostitutes, Weiner comes from the same mold as Eliot Spitzer: he’s an evangelical reformer who fell victim to the very sin he railed against, hypocrisy. But what’s wrong about “holding up a handwritten sign reading ‘it’s me’” (“Weiner Admits He Sent Lewd Photos; Says He Won't Resign,” NYT, 6/7/11)? It could easily have been homework for a phenomenology course at The New School. It all seems about as harmless as a children playing doctor. But then we get into another circle of the Inferno, occupied by Martha Stewart, who was convicted not of the crime for which she was originally called to task, but of lying to mommy and daddy when they asked, “Martha did you do something bad?” Weiner’s wiener is being roasted because he didn’t bite the bullet from day one and make his “it’s me” sign visible to the general public.

[This was originally posted to The Screaming Pope, Francis Levy's blog of rants and reactions to contemporary politics, art and culture.]

On What Matters

2011-08-11T09:22:00.000-04:00

by Francis Levy

Peter Singer is a great utilitarian philosopher and the author of a classic tome called Animal Liberation. He supports euthanasia for certain people, while decrying the confinement of pregnant pigs. In the May 20 issue of the TLS, Singer reviews Derek Parfit’s On What Matters, a book that takes aim at the ethical relativism that derives from Hume. Singer writes, “Reason applies to means not ends. Hence, Hume famously held, it is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of a finger, and equally not contrary to reason to choose my total ruin to prevent a trivial harm to a stranger.” What is so delightful about philosophical treatises like Parfit’s two volumes (which run to 1,400 pages) and Singer’s review-length response, are the examples used to illustrate the points themselves. You also find this in treatises that deal with the Trolley Problem or the Prisoner’s Dilemma, which try to parse the subtleties of ethics and morality. As Singer points out, finding objective truths about human action inevitably leads back to “…Kant’s famous but imprecise idea that it is wrong to act on any maxim that could not be a universal law….” But this is too broad for Parfit, who adopts what Singer describes as an “intuitionist” approach. What if the earth is destroyed by some natural phenomenon? Was the advent of human life and culture worth it? “Our answer may depend,” Singer says in summarizing Parfit’s thinking, “not only on how we balance the suffering that has resulted from human existence against the happiness it has brought, but also on what weight we give to the badness of the fact that some people suffered greatly without having anything to compensate them for their suffering.”

[This was originally posted to The Screaming Pope, Francis Levy's blog of rants and reactions to contemporary politics, art and culture.]

Francis Levy: Ship of Fools

2011-08-08T07:46:00.003-04:00

by Francis Levy

Herr Boehner looked out at the storm clouds on the horizon. He couldn’t see land and in a way he didn’t want to, since he knew that when they pulled into port he would have to deal with the angry crowds at the docks. He had ordered his favorite schnitzel and a glass white wine and after dinner he would sit on the deck with his digestif and his bible as he did every night. Herr McConnell sometimes joined him and they would laugh heartily at the sight of Herr Reid and Frau Pelosi, their old rivals, who took their nightly coffee at the Captain’s Table. Herr Boehner had been jealous of the obvious affection that the Captain had for Herr Reid and Frau Pelosi, but he consoled himself with the notion that the crew would likely undergo a change once the ship pulled into port. He imagined himself at the new Captain’s table, maybe even being the Captain himself, and regaling Frau Bachmann with his tales of the rough seas and huge swells he’d had to cross before finding his way back to the land, where the intent of the original signers of the Constitution was reestablished as the law of the land, and where the deficit was no larger than it was 234 years before. Herr Boehner had never understood why his children should suffer the sins of their parents. He was thinking how unfair it was to saddle future generations with so much debt when all of a sudden he heard a sickening crack. In the darkness of the night, the unthinkable had happened, and before the Captain, Herren Boehner, McConnell and Reid and Frau Pelosi knew what was happening to them, the ship sunk in the icy waters, leaving only a few bubbles where the proud vessel had once stood.

[This was originally posted to The Screaming Pope, Francis Levy's blog of rants and reactions to contemporary politics, art and culture.]

Francis Levy's second novel, Seven Days in Rio, is out next week. Publishers Weekly called the book "hilarious," "riotous," "intellectually provocative," and "ridiculous."

Rush Hour

2011-08-08T07:45:00.002-04:00

by Francis Levy

Thankfully, the Alexander McQueen show at the Met is finally ending. Under the right conditions, it might have turned into another Happy Land disco, where a fire took the lives of 87 New Yorkers back in 1990. Even the threat of fire could have caused one of those mass stampedes like the one that killed a Wal-Mart worker and injured shoppers on Black Friday in 2008. The most significant esthetic effect of the show is the way it so accurately duplicates the claustrophobic experience of an MRI. Once you have entered, you realize you are not getting out until, like sludge, you finally make it to the end of the sewage pipe. Alexander McQueen made clothes, but is this an example of the Emperor’s New Clothes? Oh, you Philistine, this accusation is like saying that anyone could paint a Pollock. No, it’s worse! It takes great talent to put one over on the public. Romanticism and Scottish nationalism are constantly used to tout McQueen’s work, which is more reminiscent of the Addams Family than anything else. One keeps waiting for the articles of clothing to come to life and reenact the famous Forth Bridge scene from Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps. Instead one is inflicted with a mirror behind which one finds video of a naked woman blanketed by moths, which is arguably the most fashionable image in the show. As you may glean, behind the disruption his work caused at the normally serene old Met, McQueen had things to say, but this is neither the time nor the place to preach to the ever-increasing choir of admirers. Getting back to the experience of actually attending the exhibit, what other comparisons can be made? Rush hour on the 1-2-3, Heathrow during one of its frequent work stoppages or after the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull. Oh what fools these mortals be!

[This was originally posted to The Screaming Pope, Francis Levy's blog of rants and reactions to contemporary politics, art and culture.]

Get Your Customized Book Recommendation

2011-08-05T11:56:00.003-04:00

So an interesting thing happened when I did this barter deal with the nice folks at Drag City (who are reissuing Rudolph Wurlitzer's Slow Fade in hardcover, paperback, and audiobook). I was poking around their site, unsure of which CDs to ask for, pondering a couple, when their publicist just asked me for some bands that I liked. She sent me a couple books they've published, along with an album by Ty Segall called 'Goodbye Bread' that I love.

It struck me that we should offer a similar service on our website. Say you've landed on our site, poked around some, found several titles interesting but are unsure where to start. We'd like to encourage anyone to drop us an email to twodollar[at]twodollarradio.com mentioning a few writers, books, or even movies that they like, and we'll respond with a customized Two Dollar Radio book recommendation. We'll also do this through Twitter (@TwoDollarRadio) or Facebook.

Have a fantastic weekend.

Big Ups, Columbus

2011-07-28T10:00:00.002-04:00

Creative Cities International released their 'Vitality Index,' which "is a cultural impact study that models the human experience of the city at its heart."

The Index ranked the top 35 cities in the US based on quantitative and qualitative factors. The complete report, which lists what these factors are, can be found here.

I've been fairly obsessed recently with the idea of opening a bookstore/community cultural mecca in the neighborhood where we're moving next month, so I was encouraged to find Columbus ranked #8 in Creative Cities' index.

Big ups, Columbus. Too bad there's no prize for finishing 8th.

This is sick.

2011-07-27T09:35:00.000-04:00

Just when you think Trinie Dalton/Baby Geisha can't get any more rockstar, she goes and gets more rockstar by getting this rockstar endorsement from Thurston Moore.

Media/bookseller folks interested in checking out an advance copy of Baby Geisha, stories by Trinie Dalton, should write to eric[at]twodollarradio.com.

This Week in Links

2011-07-17T08:28:00.000-04:00

Matthew Baker interviews Michael Martone at HTML Giant [must-read]: link.

Interview with Oscar Hijuelos about his native tongue, assimilation, and Donald Barthelme at Guernica Magazine: link.

State by state map of Amazon's tax battles: link.

Art on Air's recording of Jay Neugeboren & Barbara Browning reading at 192 Books in May 2011: link.

Pre-publication reviews of Francis Levy's Seven Days in Rio in Publishers Weekly and New York Journal of Books;

Joshua Mohr's Damascus in decomP Magazine and the Blank Slate Press blog.

Trinie Dalton Live

2011-07-11T10:01:00.000-04:00

The Sad Drag Monologues is a series that appears in Trinie Dalton's forthcoming collection of stories, Baby Geisha (January 2012), with corresponding images.

This is from Trinie about a new press she's started and the initial undertaking, which will be available at her reading JULY 14, 7pm with Jodi Wille of Process Books at Synchronicity Space, Hollywood:

"I'm not sure if I told you, but I started a risograph press (got the machine, looks like xerox but with colored inks). And this gallery invited me to do something so I decided to make a wall piece with The Sad Drag Monologues and made a limited-edition zine of the art surrounding the texts, as both an art object and an anticipation/promotion for Baby Geisha...

"This reading I'm doing is also the launch for Rainbow Riso, and its first edition. If I sell the first edition out it will enable me to fund the next project. :) It's a special edition zine printed in red/blue/black, edition of 100, $10/ea, handmade by moi, super small-run but a major undertaking in the risograph realm...the zines will be available at the reading and also through my website (sweettomb.com)."

This Week in Links

2011-07-10T10:50:00.000-04:00

We're starting a new, weekendly blog post called This Week in Links. During the course of the work-a-day week we're bogged down with publishing industry news, most of which is uninteresting. However, every so often we stumble upon some news that is cool/amusing and we'd like to share. We'll try to keep them book-specific (otherwise you'd be getting weekly updates on Dan Savage's Google-bomb on Rick Santorum, which I find frankly hilarious).

Call Heather Christle and she'll read you a poem from her new collection The Trees The Trees: link.

The FBI followed Hemingway until his death: link.

California is forcing Amazon and other online retailers to start collecting retail tax: link.

Still interesting stories from last week:
Long time publisher at Coffee House Press steps down: link.

Slate takes a look at North Korea’s comic book propaganda: link.

Awesome People Reading: link.

Q+A with Karolina Waclawiak

2011-07-08T10:11:00.003-04:00

We just signed a new novel, a debut by an exceptionally talented writer named Karolina Waclawiak. The book, How To Get Into the Twin Palms (summer 2012), puts a hilarious twist on the typical immigrant story, where Anya, a young Polish-American woman living in a Russian neighborhood in Los Angeles, decides to try to pass as a Russian rather than assimilate into American culture.

"It was a strange choice to decide to pass as a Russian. But it was a question of proximity and level of allure."

The mecca of Russian-ness in her neighborhood is a nightclub called the Twin Palms. It is Anya's goal to gain entrance to this club.

Cutting right to the chase: Is the Twin Palms a real Russian nightclub? And the natural follow-up: Have you ever made it inside?

KW: The Twin Palms was a nightclub on Fairfax that seemed to exist there forever. I’m pretty certain it was a mobster establishment as they were hardly ever open for business. I was completely mesmerized by it and when there were actually parties there the surrounding streets would be filled with idling taxis and Russian men smoking cigarettes. I was dying to know what went on in there. I didn’t get a chance until a few years after I left Los Angeles and was already writing the book. By then it was under new ownership and called Maxim’s. The doorman said he’d let us into the private party going on (maybe a Sweet 16???) for $100. It was tempting but I didn’t do it. So, I guess, I’ve actually never been inside. Just in the stairwell. He let me peek through a small hole in the frosted glass of the ballroom door entrance. There were a lot of flashing lights. Not at all as I had imagined it

Los Angeles is a real and vibrant character in the book with the city literally smoldering to the ground surrounding Anya – how did you set out to personify the city, and also it’s Russian and Polish communities?

KW: Los Angeles, to me, is a mythical place. I’d been wanting to run away there from the 5th grade when I discovered hair metal and the Sunset Strip. It just seemed so exciting. Much more exciting than my cul-de-sac and suburban world. I ended up getting on a plane when I was 18 and moving there. At first, I hated it. It seemed impenetrable to me because I didn’t have a car. I eventually found native Angelenos who showed me small pockets of the city that most people didn’t go to. Mainly around East LA. I always felt like we were trapped from all sides and was strangely comforted by this fact. Mountains, ocean, desert and Orange County. Trapped. It was interesting that the people I sought out were essentially all natives when there are so many people who run there and are just wandering around and looking for their place in Los Angeles. I felt like I needed to get some kind of inside track to really know and understand the city.

The seminal book about Los Angeles, for me, is The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West. The anger at the city, the feelings of alienation, the desert trying to purge itself of the city, were all things that I frequently thought about when there and I wanted to write about it. But, Los Angeles, being Los Angeles, the city has been written about so much and so well, (for the most part) that it seemed really daunting to find a new way to write about LA. Enter the Russians. Los Angeles has a giant Russian community and living there, as a Polish person, was interesting. I moved around a bunch and finally ended up living in the Melrose/Fairfax area which is sort of the epicenter of the now fading Russian community. I initially wanted to capture a time and landscape that I was worried would disappear with all the old shops on Fairfax closing and being replaced with skate shops and hip restaurants. I wanted people to see it how I saw it.

I really felt like an observer, rather than a participant living there. Everyone was just watching each other from their windows with those white crocheted Eastern European curtains. I guess I transferred my fetishizing this “other” into my book. I didn’t start writing the book until I moved to New York and was really missing my old neighborhood . I requested weekly updates on the goings on of Clinton Street from my old roommate.

Anya used to work placing workers at a temp agency but survives off unemployment checks and the $50 a week she gets paid for calling numbers at Bingo at the Polish church, which feels like a very true scene – have you ever hosted Bingo at the church?

KW: I haven’t hosted bingo at a church but I am big, big fan of bingo. I called numbers at a bar bingo in Los Angeles once and think I fared pretty well. It was when I was a regular at a Sunday night bingo in Eagle Rock. When I moved to Brooklyn I started going to a bingo game on Friday nights at St. Cecilia’s church with my 82-year-old neighbor. She plays about twenty bingo boards and doesn’t use a blotter. She just goes on memory. I didn’t believe she really could do it but she was pointing out numbers I was missing and then I was a believer. Friday night at St. Cecilia’s is a very cut throat bingo match. Those ladies don’t miss a thing. And there’s mass hysteria if someone calls bingo incorrectly. I definitely don’t have the guts to call bingo at that game. Although I am proud to say that I was asked call numbers there.

I think bingo is a really therapeutic game. You shut your brain off and just focus on the numbers for three hours. A lot of those ladies, it’s the only time they get out of the house besides doctor visits, so it’s a huge deal. They respect it and you have to too.

Your background is split between screenwriting and creative writing – what are some of the differences between crafting the two?

KW: I think screenwriting is much easier, for me. The parameters are so strict because you really only have 120 pages to work with and you have to hit certain beats on certain pages. To me it’s a puzzle and fun problem solving. Find a story, create the moving parts and making those pieces fit on the board. Writing a book, I approached it similarly but felt it was much more daunting. Who are my characters, what’s the location, what’s the “problem” the main character is facing and what’s she going to do to fix it. Well, I eventually tried to get away from the structure that I’ve come to depend on with screenplays and ended up with an essentially plotless novel. It’s as vast and wandering as I think Los Angeles is. I was tired of hearing about character and story arc and character redemption and just let the narrator take me where she wanted to. Hopefully, to some interesting places people haven’t seen before.

Your family came to the U.S. in the ‘80s. Much of the book is about what you’ve referred to as the 1.5 generation – children of immigrants who are torn between assimilation and retaining their parents’ culture. In Twin Palms, Anya resorts to a third option, the Russian option; if you could fold into any culture yourself, which would it be?

KW: I honestly prefer to be an outside observer. A culture tourist.

To request a galley, write to Eric Obenauf at eric[at]twodollarradio.com.
Pre-order a copy of the book.

Readings Galore

2011-06-23T09:56:00.002-04:00

Readings! Galore! Tonight!

Folks in the greater NYC/Brooklyn area can check out Jay Neugeboren reading from his new collection of stories, You Are My Heart, alongside Barbara Browning, author of The Correspondence Artist, at BookCourt at 7pm.

Also, on the left coast, Grace Krilanovich will be reading from The Orange Eats Creeps at Vroman's Bookstore at 7pm along with Wyatt Doyle.

Big Ups, Kyle Pratt

2011-06-17T12:33:00.003-04:00

A gentleman named Kyle Pratt has recently gotten himself a new tattoo.

Here's Kyle himself on the process:

"I currently live in western Massachusetts and am studying English as an undergrad. I first heard about Two Dollar Radio through a guy who read part of Grace Krilanovich’s The Orange Eats Creeps aloud in my creative writing class. He was so giddy about it, about what the book was doing and the kind of books Two Dollar Radio was publishing. I was intrigued. He also suggested Joshua Mohr’s Some Things That Meant the World to Me.

"Well, I picked up Mohr’s book a few days later, and here were some of my thoughts while reading: does this novel really have a male main character named Rhonda? Did he just hug that bag of pruno? Hold on, there’re multiple Rhondas in this novel? I’m sold. I hadn’t read anything quite like it, but I wanted more.

"Later, while poking around your website a bit, I found this business about the tattoo. I liked the design and I liked the books, so why not? I had already been considering a tattoo, and what better one than this?

"It took me roughly 6 months before I finally got my radio. My friend’s girlfriend — who is a tattoo artist near where I live — did it for me. The pain was considerably less than I had imagined. (Worth it.) The tattoo has also generated multiple conversations, so that the rate at which I interact with other human beings has improved dramatically. My new life begins now."

Times New Viking

2011-06-17T08:57:00.002-04:00

Times New Viking - No Room to Live from Merge Records on Vimeo.

I'm enjoying this band, Times New Viking. They have a new-ish album out from Merge Records called 'Dancer Equired.' Band gets extra credit points for being out of Columbus, OH. Big ups, Columbus. It's all happening here. Like I proclaimed at BEA, it's the new mecca for publishing. I was saying it sarcastically, but if it comes true then I'll claim I was serious. Although, maybe publishing is too narrow. With the football coach booted in shame and the university football team in shambles, maybe culture can take over the driver's seat. It's all happening.

BTW, anyone who wants to go halfsies on a bookstore in Columbus should write to me.

Barbara Browning Upstairs

2011-06-15T12:36:00.002-04:00

Here's the video from that reading/discussion Barbara Browning did with musician Keren Ann at Barnes & Noble's Upstairs at the Square series this spring. Makes for some good viewing. I particularly enjoy Barbara's deflection of the pointed question from Katherine Lanpher . . .

Q+A with Editor: Anne-Marie Kinney

2011-06-07T09:54:00.003-04:00

Radio Iris is a first novel by an exceptionally talented young writer named Anne-Marie Kinney that we have slated to release on May 15, 2012. I'm really excited to unleash this book and I hope you'll be excited to read it. Most movies or books I can think of that portray water-cooler culture are overtly masculine and most often slapstick. Radio Iris takes the recycled air, mechanical dings, and paper jams and transforms them into this highly artistic, existential, ambient dream of a novel. What were some of your inspirations in crafting this world, and also in imagining its hazy ambiance?

There’s a bit from the Maria Bamford show where her character says, about her office job, “I’m experiencing a deep, unceasing boredom. It’s almost spiritual.” It’s a perfect description of certain jobs wherein one is expected to do very little, but be present, in one spot, for eight hours a day. I had one such job. If no one was calling or emailing me, then I was to…wait for them to call or email me. In such a position, it is very easy to slip into a kind of trance. You start to listen very closely to the silence, and to dissect it until it isn’t silence at all. Your heart jumps when the door opens, and it’s the mailman, handing you the mail. Like Iris, you may become fixated on a window located very high up on a wall, and wonder what its purpose could be, where no one can see into or out of it. And, you begin to notice any minute variation in your surroundings, be it the trajectory of a bug skittering along the wall, a note jotted down with a different pen, or a clue that a stranger is living in the office next door. Spiritual is exactly what it is. If you’re bored enough, you can make the air hum.

As an aside, I encourage everyone to watch the Maria Bamford show in its entirety: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-oQd59rGVA&feature=related

Iris Finch works for Larmax, Inc. She doesn’t know what the company does or how it makes money. Her boss describes himself as a businessman. In what could be a portrait of our age of downsizing, Iris’ fellow employees seem to vanish one by one almost without her realizing it. Does any of this come from your own personal experience in corporate America?

I’ve worked in a lot of offices, both long term and temping, and I’ve had the experience of working in large departments where you see the same people every day, but you don’t really know most of them, or ever say anything more meaningful to each other than “Good morning” or “Have a good one.” And you may memorize someone’s wardrobe (He wore that shirt last Monday too- is that his Monday shirt?), or recognize the sound of their shoes as they come down the hall, but then maybe you don’t immediately realize that they haven’t been around in a while. You ask somebody, “Hey, where’s that one guy…?” And it turns out he’s gone. Maybe you were out sick the day they had cake for him in the break room, and now you’ll never see his Monday shirt ever again. What happens in Radio Iris is an amplification of that phenomenon. What if you go to work every day and do everything you’re supposed to do, and then, gradually, without any great fanfare, you find yourself alone?

Oldies music plays a part in the novel, where it’s sort of always there and also not there. If your life were an oldies tune, which would it be?

I don’t know how to define “oldies tune” anymore, because my local oldies station, KRTH 101, plays Michael Jackson songs now. And new wave! They were playing I Melt with You the other day. What the hell? I’m not sure any song can encapsulate a life, but when you say “oldies,” I think of the songs I taped from the radio as a kid, and would listen to over and over on my walkman, under the covers at night, with the volume turned down real low - Everyday by Buddy Holly, You Were on My Mind by We Five, Bus Stop by The Hollies - all that achingly romantic stuff. Those songs can be pretty trance-inducing too.

You originally went to college at USC to pursue acting before deciding to pursue creative writing – what was that transition like?

I did think I wanted to be an actress when I was growing up. Truth is, I just liked dressing up in costumes and receiving flowers. But anyway, when I arrived at USC with theatrical aspirations, I got involved with this scrappy little troupe called Brand New Theatre (that’s a shoutout), and quickly figured out that I was having a lot more fun writing sketches than I was performing in them. I found my way to the creative writing department, where I got to study with such amazing writers as Aimee Bender, T.C. Boyle and David St. John, and that’s how I figured out what I really wanted to do. I guess that’s a pretty boring story.

You mention in your bio that your “Frisbee dog” has won trophies. Explain.

My dog, Dee Dee Ramone, an Australian Cattle Dog/Chow/Lab mix, knew how to play Frisbee without any instruction. One Saturday, for the hell of it, my husband Abe threw a Frisbee at her in the empty parking lot of the Social Security office, and she caught it. We each threw it several more times, and she caught every single throw. Clearly, this talent needed to be nurtured, so Abe started taking her to a weekly Frisbee class to learn tricks, like having her jump over his leg to get the Frisbee, and do really long distance throws. They participated in some competitions and won two trophies over the course of her Frisbee career, but ultimately, the competitions were a drag. You’d have to drive to some park way out in Fullerton or wherever and mostly sit around all day waiting for your dog’s turn. We still play Frisbee pretty much every day, but strictly on an amateur basis.

Hogdog

2011-06-02T12:51:00.000-04:00

Anthony Neil Smith, noir writer, taco critic, Midwesterner, all-around nice guy, and author of our first-ish book, The Drummer, has been making his latest work available digitally for the bargain bin price of $.99. Side-step on over to his blog to check it out.

BEA Round-Up

2011-06-02T09:20:00.003-04:00

We just returned from Book Expo America, which is always mildly amusing/mildly fun. I say mildly, because there are certainly those super-fun things, like chatting with booksellers or publishers you only get to see once a year, and then those things that don't grade as high on the fun barometer, such as when the dude with the cocked eyebrow asks suavely "So tell me what is Two Dollar Radio?" so he can not really listen to your response only to pitch you on his newsletter service, or something equally benign. Or the business books publisher who told me "You guys should totally publish Tony Hawk" I suspect because I wasn't wearing a suit.

I kid. It was all gravy. (Although I do remember making a blood pact with Gavin of Small Beer that next year, rather than fork over the money on a booth to catch-up with one another, we'd save money by staging our reunion in Hawaii. So, Hawaii 2K12 it is!)

In other news, we came up with our own Two Dollar Radio gang sign:

You Are My Heart Launch Party @ BookCulture

2011-05-20T13:02:00.002-04:00

On the heels of this oustanding review by Michael Schaub of Bookslut in Kirkus Reviews -- saying "[Neugeboren] might not be as famous as some of his compeers, like Philip Roth or John Updike, but it's becoming increasingly harder to argue that he's any less talented. Neugeboren's new short story collection serves as a convincing piece of evidence of the author's rare talent... dazzlingly smart and deeply felt... Jay Neugeboren is music to our ears." -- Jay Neugeboren celebrated the publication of his fourth collection of stories, You Are My Heart, at BookCulture last night. Here are some photographs from the event, courtesy Michael Friedman.

LATFOB

2011-05-13T13:59:00.002-04:00

We got to be a part of the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books this year thanks to Skylight Books, who let us rent a half-table in their space. It sounds like it was a load of fun. Maybe we'll make it in person next year. Here are some pics:

Every Once in a While Something Cool Goes and Happens

2011-05-11T08:51:00.003-04:00

Way back when we received an email from Hernan Ortiz, who was contacting us from a nonprofit in Colombia called Fractal, a group whose aim is to use fiction, art, science, and technology to approach Latin American issues. Annually they produce a conference that brings in speakers and involves school children and is broadcast on local television. Hernan said they were looking for "innovative fiction" for discussion and to promote at the conference. He also said that if we mailed shirts he and his partner, Viv Trujillo, would wear them at the event.

When I say "way back when" I mean last fall. We sent a package of books and a couple shirts and then sort of forgot about it until we got an email from Hernan this spring letting us know that the conference was a rousing success. He directed us to this conference diary (sounds like conferences in the jungle are way better than conferences not in the jungle) and sent us some pictures. Fractal would be the "something cool" referred to in the blog heading.

This Section Involves Potheads and the Donner Party

2011-05-09T09:03:00.003-04:00

The National Book Foundation put on a really fun, laidback party for the 5 Under 35 honorees last November. Here's an interview they did with Grace at the opening of the evening, as well as Scott Spencer's introduction to The Orange Eats Creeps, followed by Grace's reading from a section of the book that "involves potheads and the Donner Party."

Little known fact for all you fans of trivia out there: it was the only reading that night that involved potheads or the Donner Party.

Jay Neugeboren: The Two Bobbys

2011-05-06T09:11:00.003-04:00

My brother Robert experienced his first psychotic break in 1962, and has been in and out of mental hospitals and halfway houses ever since. In 1997 I published Imagining Robert: My Brother, Madness, and Survival in which book I set Robert’s particular history as a mental patient in the context of our family history: our childhood, his life in and out of mental hospitals, and our relationship through the years. In 1999, I published Transforming Madness: New Lives for People Living with Mental Illness, where I wrote about people who had been institutionalized for mental illness—some for as much as 15 years—but who had made their way back to full, viable, and gloriously imperfect lives, and where I also told the ongoing story of Robert’s life. The essay reprinted below, which brings Robert’s story forward to recent times, was published originally in The Huffington Post on the first anniversary of Bobby Fischer’s death, January 17, 2009 (Robert and Bobby Fischer were in their high school’s chess club together), and then, somewhat revised, in Midstream (Winter, 2010).

The Two Bobbys: Fischer and Neugeboren

by Jay Neugeboren

In the spring of 1956, when my brother Robert was thirteen, I gave him a chess set for his Bar Mitzvah. Robert was an excellent chess player, and when, at 14, he entered Erasmus Hall High School as a sophomore in the fall of 1957, he joined the chess club. Bobby Fischer also entered Erasmus that fall and he too joined the chess club. By this time, at 14, he had become the youngest player ever to win the United States National Junior Championship. Yet when Robert, who would spend most of his adult life as a mental patient, would try to get Fischer to play with him, Fischer would refuse. “’With you, Neugeboren, I don’t play,’ he always said to me, Robert says. Why not? “Because,” Robert says, smiling, “he said I played crazy.” (Bobby’s sister Joan, five years older than her brother--I was five years older than Robert--had introduced Fischer to chess when he was six by buying him a chess set from the candy store over which they lived.)

In 1972, at the age of 29, in Reykjavik, Iceland, Fischer defeated Boris Spassky and became the first American-born player to become international champion. In the remaining 35 years of his life, he did not, except for a rematch with Spassky in 1992 that resulted in Fischer’s permanent exile from the United States, ever play tournament chess again. He became an itinerant madman and recluse--chess was nothing more than “mental masturbation,” he declared--and his primary antagonist when he surfaced periodically, often in rambling broadcasts from the Phillipines, became the international Jewish conspiracy.

Jews were a “filthy, lying bastard people,” hell-bent on world domination through ruses such as the Holocaust (“a money-making invention”), and the mass murder of Christian children (“their blood is used for black-magic ceremonies”). On September 11, 2001, he told a radio audience that the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were “wonderful news.” What he wished was for the United States to be “wiped out.”

“We all started together at Erasmus, but then the three Bobbies dropped out--” Robert often says “--Bobby Fischer, Bobbi Streisand, and Bobby Neugeboren.” Fischer dropped out of Erasmus during his junior year, after he won the United States Chess Championship for the first time. Robert dropped out a few months later when our parents moved from Brooklyn to Queens, and, at the beginning of his senior year, transferred him to Forest Hills High School. Soon after, he dropped out of both Forest Hills High and our parents’ apartment, and, at 16, moved into a run-down apartment with several older men on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

Three years later, when Fischer’s sister and mother, Regina, moved out of their Brooklyn apartment, Fischer, who had been traveling in South America and Europe, moved into the apartment and lived there by himself. His mother joined a peace march, across the United States and Europe to Moscow, and on the walk met a man she later married and with whom she settled in England. During the remaining 38 years of her life, Fischer saw her rarely, and became deeply distraught when, in 1997, he was unable to attend her funeral. Our mother left New York for Florida in 1973, and during the remaining 20 years of her life, so traumatized was she by Robert’s illness, that she saw him only twice.

Early in 1962, in the same year that Fischer moved back into his mother’s apartment, Robert, following a drug-enhanced cross-country trip to California, where he lived for six months, moved back into our parents’ apartment, became floridly psychotic, attempted to kill our father, was taken away in a straitjacket, and was incarcerated on a psychiatric ward at Elmhurst Hospital in Queens.

Both our mother and Fischer’s mother were Registered Nurses, and in both families they were the ones who put food on the table and paid the rent. Fischer’s father, Hans-Gerhardt Fischer, a German biophysicist, abandoned the family and divorced Regina when Bobby was two, after which Regina raised Bobby and his sister on her own.

Although our father did not abandon us (throughout our childhood, however, he and our mother constantly threatened divorce), he failed at every business he tried, and it was our mother who, working at various jobs, including 16-hour double-shifts as a nurse, supported the family.

Like Fischer’s mother, our mother was a crusader for a peaceful, non-violent world, and in the four small rooms of our apartment regularly went on tirades about how religion, by setting people and nations at war with one another, were “the cause of all evil in the world.”

During Bobby and Robert’s teenage years, both mothers, fearing their sons were deranged, arranged for psychiatric evaluations. Fischer’s mother took her son to the children’s psychiatric ward at Brooklyn Jewish Hospital; our mother took Robert to the Director of Adolescent Services at Brooklyn’s Kings County Hospital. Whereas the doctor at Brooklyn Jewish Hospital declared Bobby Fischer healthy, the doctor at Kings County told my mother that Robert should be hospitalized immediately, and that he would probably have to live in a mental hospital for the rest of his life.

A day or so later, Robert confided that he’d “cheated” at the interview--“I passed the admissions test!” he exclaimed proudly--by giving the psychiatrist answers he knew the psychiatrist wanted. Why? Because he wanted to find out what a mental hospital was like. Well, you might be able to get in, I said, but once you’re in, it might not be so easy to get out. Robert agreed to a second evaluation, which I arranged at Bellevue Hospital, where the Director of Adolescent Services declared him to be totally healthy.

In the fall of 1962, at about the time Robert was leaving Elmhurst Hospital for an eighteen-month stay in a psychiatric facility that specialized in treating adolescents, Fischer began living at a YMCA. He also began denouncing the Russians, accusing them (with justification) of rigging their tournaments, and railing against tournament promoters for stealing money from him. He played in fewer and fewer tournaments, began moving from apartment to apartment, living in seedy hotels, and carting around suitcases filled with vitamins and herbal remedies he believed could stave off toxins secretly being put into his food and water by Soviet agents.
In 1968, when he was 25, he moved to California, where he spent his days riding busses and reading chess books, and his evenings prowling parking lots and placing white supremacist leaflets under windshield wipers. It was in California that he became infatuated with Hitler and the Third Reich, and began collecting Nazi memorabilia. Although Jewish, he joined the Worldwide Church of God, which was based in Pasadena, and which believed in baptismal immersion and the imminent coming of Christ, in following strict Sabbath proscriptions, and in Jewish dietary laws.
In 1972, he emerged from seclusion to defeat Spassky, but after this victory his whereabouts and life again faded into a self-willed obscurity.

During the years Fischer was living in California, Robert often talked of returning there--his months in California, he said, were the happiest of his life--but after living outside a mental hospital for more than a year, during which time he completed his second year at C.C.N.Y., he broke down again, and was committed to an insulin coma ward at Creedmoor Hospital in Queens, where he would reside for four-and-a-half of the next half-dozen years.

When Fischer defeated Spassky in 1972, and when, a year later, our parents moved to Florida, Robert was a patient on a locked ward at Creedmoor. Three years later--Robert was then in his first lock-up at Staten Island Psychiatric Center, where he would live, on and off, for the next two decades--our father, without ever having seen Robert again, died.

During these years, and ever since, Robert became obsessed with Jewish dietary laws, demanding of each emergency ward, hospital, and group home in which he lived that they provide him with kosher food. He often celebrated the Sabbath and Jewish holidays, and would ask me to say Kaddish with him for family members. At the same time, though without Fischer’s anti-Semitic venom, he would also regularly disavow his Jewish identity, claiming to have been born a Baptist, to have converted to Christian Science, and to have evolved into a Buddhist.

During these years, there were long stretches when Robert and I lost touch, and I would usually locate him again only when I’d receive a call from a hospital psych ward, asking if I were Robert Neugeboren’s brother. Fischer, too, disappeared for long periods of time during these years, living, for the most part outside the United States--in Budapest, the Phillipines, Switzerland, Japan. At one point, worried that secret agents might be manipulating him by sending signals through his jaw, he had all his dental fillings removed. “If somebody took a filling out and put in an electronic device, he could influence your thinking,” he explained. “I don’t want anything artificial in my head.”

By the time Robert was in his late thirties, he had lost all his teeth--they had either rotted, been pulled, or been knocked out--and had begun wearing dentures. Earlier, he had sometimes believed that alien forces were speaking to him through his fillings. And when, some time in the mid-eighties, the staff at South Beach punished him by taking away his dentures--and subsequently losing them--Robert refused to be fitted for new dentures. He has been toothless ever since.

In the decades that followed on his 1972 defeat of Spassky, Fischer often turned down lucrative offers to play chess publicly, including a $1.4 million dollar offer from the Hilton Corporation to defend his title in Las Vegas. In 1992, however, when the movie, Searching for Bobby Fischer was in production (Fischer was enraged that the producers used his name without permission), he emerged from his 20 year retirement to play a $5 million dollar rematch against Spassky on the island of Sveti Stefan in Yugoslavia.

At the time, United Nations sanctions had been imposed on Yugoslavia and its President, Slobodan Milosevic, and Americans were forbidden to do business there. Fischer denounced the ban, and the Department of the Treasury warned him that if he played chess in Yugoslavia, the penalty could be a $250,000 fine, ten years in prison, or both.

At a press conference preceding the match, Fischer took the Treasury Department letter out of his briefcase and spat on it. He also stated that he was not an anti-Semite (since he was pro-Arab, and Arabs were Semites too), and demanded that tournament officials raise the toilet in his bathroom to a level higher in the air than anyone else’s.

The Treasury Department responded by indicting him and issuing a warrant for his arrest. Fischer played the match, defeating Spassky easily, but now officially a fugitive from justice, he continued to live in exile, never again in the remaining 16 years of his life returning to the United States.

A dozen years after the second Spassky match, in July of 2004, while Fischer was attempting to board a plane scheduled to take him from Tokyo to Manila, the Japanese government accused him of trying to leave their country with an invalid passport, and imprisoned him for nine months. A year later, in 2005, he moved to Iceland, which had offered him citizenship, and he lived there until January 17, 2008, when, at the age of 64, following a long illness, he died of kidney failure.

When I called Robert and told him that Bobby Fischer had died, he said he’d already heard the news.

“I don’t believe it’s true,” he said.

He didn’t believe that Fischer had died? But it was in The New York Times this morning, I said.

“The New York Times? All the news that’s fit to spit, if you ask me,” Robert said, and repeated his belief that Fischer was still alive. “He lived on our street, you know,” he added, “at the Nostrand Avenue end, across from the candy store
--where all the Irish lived.”

We talked about how things were going for him at his home, a supervised residence for about two dozen former mental patients that was located in the Hell’s Kitchen section of New York, and just before we said good bye, he mentioned Fischer again. “I don’t think I look like him,” he whispered.

During his childhood, Robert was called Bobby, but once he entered his teen years--at about the time he joined the Erasmus chess club--he stopped using the name Bobby. When he was Bobby, and beginning when he was three years old, he was famous in our neighborhood for his singing, tap-dancing, and imitations of Eddie Cantor and Al Jolson. He performed on street corners, in candy stores and barbershops, and at family gatherings. During his teenage years, he acted in school and summer camp productions, where he usually had the lead, and where people were forever telling him he was going to be the next Danny Kaye or Fred Astaire.

Robert was also a gifted writer, publishing poems in little magazines when he was in his teens, becoming editor of the weekly newspaper at our summer camp, and of a mental hospital newspaper during his first long-term hospitalization.

In 1957, after Fischer won the United States Open Championship, The New Yorker described him has having “a mischievous, rather faunlike face,” and noted that “though school tests have shown [Fischer] to have generally superior intelligence, he does no better than average in his studies, displaying little interest in most of the subjects taught and being restless in class.”

The New Yorker could have been describing Robert, who, until he ballooned up in recent years from side-effects of antipsychotic medications, had had a playfully mischievous and faunlike face. And though Robert won a New York State Regents Scholarship to college, and though he did well on annual State Regents exams, his teachers (and our parents) repeatedly complained about his poor grades, his restlessness, and the ways in which he would, with jokes and banter, delight and distract other students.

In competition, Fischer was, from his early years, known for his killer instinct--“I like the moment when I break a man’s ego,” he told Dick Cavett after his triumph over Spassky. But ruthless and mean-spirited as he could be in matches and in his anti-Semitic and anti-American rages, with friends, as long as they did not betray his whereabouts, Fischer had a reputation for being exceptionally generous and kind. In Reykjavik, when he was playing against Spassky, he left thousands of dollars under pillows for the maids who cleaned his room.

Although Robert complained ceaselessly about money--“I have no money! I have no money!” he’d cry again and again--he regularly gave money away to other mental patients, even though the giving left him broke. When I once asked why, he shrugged and gave an answer that seemed to him self-evident: “Because they’ve had very hard lives.”

But he could also be nasty, especially with those paid to care for him in mental hospitals: screaming at them, hitting them, biting them. And in the months before and after Fischer’s death--in his own sixty-fourth year--Robert’s health, like Fischer’s, began to decline precipitously, and as it did, the rage he had previously vented on hospital workers, he now poured forth on the staff and residents of his group home.

He began, also, to be hospitalized every few weeks: for heart problems, lung problems, incontinence, and--most of all--from myriad problems associated with Parkinsonian symptoms (tremors, drooling, troubles with balance and walking, lack of impulse control), which symnptoms were themselves a result of the massive amounts of antipsychotic medications he had been taking for more than four decades.

The more his physical condition deteriorated, the nastier he became: screaming at people in his residence, striking staff members, refusing to shower, refusing to clean his room, or to clean up after himself in bathrooms and communal spaces.
Until a year or so before this, he had been enjoying the best period in his adult life. Whereas he had never, in the preceding five decades--when he had been hospitalized approximately 60 times for psychotic episodes--lived outside a locked facility for even two full years, he had now been living in a group home, the Clinton Residence, on West 48th Street, for more than seven years without even a single hour of hospitalization.

Early in 2006, not long after Fischer moved to Iceland, the staff psychiatrist at Robert’s residence recommended that Robert move to Wanaque House, a block away, where he could enjoy greater independence. At Wanaque, Robert had a room of his own, cooking privileges, and less supervision.

But at Wanaque, almost from the day he arrived, he started having serious physical problems, and the more his physical health failed, the more his irritability rose. He began urinating and defecating in public spaces, and stuffing large amounts of paper towels in toilets and sinks; he became unable (or unwilling) to dress himself, wash himself, or get up or down staircases without assistance; he began using racial slurs against young black residents who, the staff feared, might retaliate.

In September of 2007, on a morning when Robert was unable to move his legs or feet, he was taken to Roosevelt-St. Luke’s Hospital, where doctors concluded that his problem was due not only to drug-induced Parkinsonism, but to anemia, which condition had probably been aggravated by a severe loss of blood brought on as a result of an anal fissure for which Robert had been hospitalized a few weeks earlier. Roosevelt-St. Luke’s transferred Robert to the Kateri Residence, a skilled nursing and rehabilitation center, for physical therapy.

At Kateri, Robert did exceptionally well for a week or so, and was calm, lucid, and in playfully good spirits. When I visited him with my two sons, Aaron and Eli, and mentioned that on the following day, I was going to City Hall with my fiancée, Kathy (she was 57, I was 69), to get our marriage license, Robert wept softly, gave me a hug, then turned to his nephews. “This is very good news, you know,” he said, “because this way, if they have children, the children won’t be bastards.”

A day or two later, the director of Wanaque called to tell me that the director of Kateri had hung up on her after accusing Wanaque of “dumping” Robert on them. When I attended a conference at Kateri later that day, Robert’s social worker said Wanaque was refusing to take Robert back, and that Kateri would, therefore, discharge him to a nursing home as soon as possible. She handed me a small brochure. “Pick out five nursing homes,” she said, “and we’ll do the paper work.”

She told me that the people at Wanaque and Fountain House were a bunch of liars and that I shouldn’t believe anything they said. She also said I should only look for nursing homes outside Manhattan.

But Robert only knew people in Manhattan, I protested.

The social worker again insisted that no facility in Manhattan would take him.

But why not? I asked.

“Because he’s schizophrenic!” she declared.

After the conference, I found Robert in a lounge, and from the calm, joking man he had been a few days before, he had regressed to the raving wild man he had been 20 or 30 years ago, during his worst times in state hospitals. He began shouting at me, ordering staff around, and soaring off into flamboyant riffs that were comprehensible only if, like me, you knew him across a lifetime and could decode his references.

A day later, the Kateri social worker telephoned to report that Robert had become so unruly that they had transferred him to an inpatient psychiatric ward at St. Luke’s hospital.

When I visited Robert the next day, he was as floridly psychotic as I’d ever seen him. Given Robert’s history of stability during the previous eight years, the chief of psychiatry was baffled, and I explained what I thought had happened: Robert had been caught in a crossfire between two institutions--one telling him he could never go back to where he was living, and to the neighborhood that had been home to him for eight years, and the other telling him he’d been dumped on them and they were shipping him out to a nursing home.

At this point, I called the director of Wanaque, who now assured me that Wanaque would take Robert back, at least until they could find a nursing home for him. I also called people I knew in the city’s mental health system. Three days later, Robert was discharged to Wanaque, and back at Wanaque, his psychotic symptoms vanished as suddenly as they had appeared.

The staff psychiatrist at Wanaque, however, was “at his wit’s end,” he confided some weeks later. The problem, he explained, was that medications used to reduce Robert’s Parkinsonian symptoms (by producing more dopamine in the brain), had the opposite effect on his psychotic symptoms (where medications were used to reduce the amount of dopamine in the brain), and finding a pharmacological balance was fine-tuning of the most difficult and treacherous sort.

In addition, the nursing homes to which the staff had been making application were rejecting Robert. The logistical problem--true for thousands of others in Robert’s situation--soon became clear: group homes such as Wanaque were ill-equipped to care for elderly people with histories of mental illness who developed disabling medical problems, while nursing homes that could provide such care were ill-prepared--and/or unwilling--to accept people who had psychiatric conditions and histories.

By Thanksgiving, 2007, Robert had become the only person at Wanaque who had a (temporary) home health aide assigned to help him with the ordinary stuff of life--getting dressed and washed, cleaning his room, getting to and from meals and medical appointments. When he developed a blood clot in his left leg, the hospital saw to it that a physical therapist visited two mornings a week for a while, and, Robert’s physical health continuing to fail, he was given a wheel chair, and home health aides were assigned to him ten hours a day, seven days a week.

Although Robert continued to live in the city in which he was born and had resided his entire life, and dozens of his cousins and old friends lived in the city, in the eight years he had been out of a mental hospital, I could count on the fingers of one hand the number of visits he had had from any of them. So that just as his brilliance and fame had been less spectacular--more local--than Fischer’s, so his state of exile was less spectacular, and considerably less newsworthy.

In limbo, then, between two states of misery--Wanaque, and a place yet to be found--he continued to live in a room that was less than a hundred feet square, and contained a bed, a dresser, a chair, a small desk, and a broken TV set on a broken cabinet. Kathy and I visited often, and many visits were delightful (while waiting in the street one day to let two men who were lugging a huge TV set pass, one of the men turned to Robert. “Thanks for your patience,” he said. “Why?” Robert replied without missing a beat. “Do you think I’m a doctor?”). His memory, especially long-term, remained intact, and he delighted in reminiscing about friends and relatives, about homes and hospitals he’d lived in, about Erasmus, about California, about growing up in Brooklyn.

Bobby Fischer, he informed us at lunch one day, had moved into Wanaque and was living in a room on the floor above his. Really? I said, and when Robert insisted it was true, I told him that I still had the chess set I’d given him, and I offered to bring it. He said it was better that I keep it because everything in his room that had any value--and much that didn’t--was always being stolen from him. Then he talked about walking home with Fischer from school, and about a satchel, containing a chess set, that Fischer always carried with him.

Fischer’s death, and Robert’s friendship with him when they were boys--and the sad, uncanny parallels in their lives--had put into relief, yet again, the sorrow of Robert’s life: his early brilliance, flair, and sweetness, and how they had devolved into an ongoing misery whose pain and despair I could only imagine. And yet, it occurred to me, the mad thoughts and acts that had marked most of his adult life had served, I believed--as with Fischer--to defend against feelings and thoughts immeasurably more terrifying than the symptoms of madness he, or Fischer, exhibited.

Madness itself, in addition to being a defense, was also a kind of exile, as was, in both their lives, years without end in which these men were disconnected from almost everything--friends, relatives, places, work, passions--that had held meaning and pleasure for them when they were boys.

How had it happened? How could it be that such otherwise bright, gifted young men had descended into a darkness from which they never fully emerged? And what--in their biology or their situations--in their genes, their families, their choices, or their sheer bad luck--had brought about conditions of madness and misery that had, across lifetimes, proven refractory to amelioration or reversal?

How could it be that the sweet giggling infant I would, in our Brooklyn bedroom, lift from his crib and take into my bed, so we could snuggle and laugh together--how could it be that this child, ablaze with promise and delight once upon a time, had turned into the agitated, fearful, heavy, shapeless old man--all flab and dead weight--who, as I discovered on the evening of one of his hospitalizations, I could barely lift.

Taken to Roosevelt-St. Luke’s because of a fall that left him badly bruised and confused, Robert was, when I arrived, lying on a gurney in a dark corridor, covered in his own piss and shit, and unable to keep from screaming at me while I maneuvered him into a wheel chair so that he could continue moving his bowels. An hour or so later, after he was settled in his room, we talked in the easiest way--about Wanaque, about summer camp, about his niece and nephews--and when visiting hours were over, I kissed him good bye and he smiled at me. “I really appreciate your coming here, Jay,” he said, and he did so in a calm, natural voice, as if he were a man in whose life nothing had ever gone wrong.

In April, 2008, Robert celebrated his sixty-fifth birthday, and became eligible for a permanent home health attendant. Three months later, a nurse arrived at Wanaque to to evaluate his eligibility. When she introduced herself and put out her hand, Robert shook his head sideways. “I don’t shake hands,” he said angrily.

The nurse moved away. “You can do what you want,” I whispered to Robert, “but if you screw up this interview and you’re not approved for a home health attendant, you can count on Wanaque shipping you to a nursing home as soon as they can.”

“Okay then,” he said, and for the rest of the interview, and the physical exam, he was a model of cooperation, charm, and sanity. A few days later he was approved for a permanent home health attendant.

A month later, I told him that Kathy and I would visit with him on Labor Day.

“That’s good,” he said, “as long as we don’t have to work too hard.”

By this time, the staff psychiatrist having found a workable balance in Robert’s medications, and Robert no longer fearful he would have to spend the rest of his life in a nursing home, he was in generally good health and spirits, so that when it came time to eat dinner on Labor Day, he made his way to the dining room without a wheel chair, a walker, or even a cane.

When we were done eating, Robert reached over and, eyes moist, took my hand. “Glad you could be my guests today,” he said to me and Kathy. “It’s been a good day, don’t you think?”

And just as I had been wondering how it could be that the spirited young man I had grown up with had turned into a debilitated, lifeless old man, so I now wondered about the mystery--and miracle--of his resilience. It never ceased to amaze: that people who had had the most wretched and unenviable lives were able, as Robert was, to survive and to do more than survive: to retain an ability to be themselves in all the complexities and contradictions of their identity, history, and feelings, and to be capable still of taking ordinary pleasure in this often cruel and incomprehensible world.

Jay Neugeboren: Perfect Health, but for the Quintuple Bypass

2011-05-04T19:36:00.001-04:00

A dozen years ago I had emergency quintuple bypass surgery that saved my life. But the surgery would never have taken place, and I wouldn’t be here, if a life-long friend of mine—Rich Helfant, a cardiologist—had not listened to me tell my story. I also told the story in a book, Open Heart: A Patient’s Story of Life-Saving Medicine and Life-Giving Friendship, published by Houghton Mifflin in 2003. The article reprinted here appeared on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times, April 2, 2004.

Perfect Health, but for the Quintuple Bypass

By Jay Neugeboren

Two surprising medical studies -- one questioning the value of so-called good cholesterol and another finding that extremely low levels of cholesterol may reduce the risk and severity of a heart attack -- have put the debate over coronary disease back on the front pages. And while any new scientific knowledge is of course a good thing, I worry that our continued focus on medical testing and prescription drugs as the primary ways of preventing heart disease will distract us from a more important element in treating illness: the well-trained doctor who knows his patient.

Consider my experience. Five years ago, at the age of 60 and without any conventional risk factors or symptoms, I received a diagnosis of coronary artery blockage -- over the phone, from a cardiologist 3,000 miles away -- and underwent emergency quintuple bypass surgery.

Two doctors had examined me in the previous months (I had been experiencing some shortness of breath and a burning sensation between my shoulder blades), but they failed to discern my problem. This may have been somewhat understandable. For the previous 25 years I had swum a mile a day and regularly played tennis and basketball. I had never been a smoker. My cholesterol and blood pressure levels were normal. And, at 5 feet 7 inches tall and 150 pounds, I was perhaps five pounds heavier than I was in high school.

One of the doctors performed an electrocardiogram and an echocardiogram and diagnosed a viral infection of my heart muscle. Fortunately, I had also been talking frequently to a childhood friend who was the former chief of cardiology at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. When I told him that my cardiologist thought the problem was viral, he replied, ''It's not viral -- I want you in the hospital as soon as possible!''

Within a few days I was admitted to Yale-New Haven Hospital, where an angiogram revealed that two of my three major coronary arteries were 100 percent blocked, with the third 90 percent occluded. In a six-and-a-half-hour emergency operation, my life was saved.

Since then, I have been thinking: as miraculous as the technology is that saved my life, if not for the clinical judgment of an old friend who took the time to consider my entire case, all the medications and machines in the world would have been useless.

In cardiology, I've learned, getting the diagnosis right is no simple matter. If you add up all the commonly known risk factors -- smoking, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, obesity, lack of exercise, genetics -- they account for only about half of heart disease cases. Moreover, according to the American Heart Association, 50 percent of men and 63 percent of women who die suddenly from heart disease have no previously known symptoms.

Although baby boomers tend to obsess about cholesterol scores the way we used to obsess about SAT scores, such figures are often meaningless or misleading. Add to this the fact that the way doctors are now taught, and the way the health care system is now run, have undermined the traditional doctor-patient relationship. Not only do doctors have less and less time to meet with us, but, given the vagaries of health insurance, the doctor we see one time may not be the same doctor we see the next time, and so we often remain strangers to one another.

It is also not comforting that a study in 1997 of 453 residents in internal medicine and family practice revealed that they failed to identify the distinctive sounds of common heart abnormalities with a stethoscope 80 percent of the time. True, using a stethoscope, listening to the patient and taking a careful history may not be the only ways to accurately diagnose heart disease. But in the words of Dr. Bernard Lown, inventor of the defibrillator, listening to the patient and taking a careful history remains ''the most effective, quickest and least costly way to get to the bottom of most medical problems.''

My old friend the cardiologist has similar concerns. ''The diagnostic acumen of the physician at the bedside, on the phone or in the office, has been severely compromised,'' he told me. ''Because the mind-set has become, 'Well, the tests will tell me anyway, so I don't have to spend a lot of time listening.' ''

This, I suspect, was the mind-set I ran into. I was seemingly healthy, two doctors who examined me failed to discover the gravity of my condition, and I nearly died.

So, while it is surely important to pay attention to cholesterol research and advances in technology, it might do at least as much good if hospitals and insurers would simply give doctors the time to know and hear us. The dictum of the great physician William Osler -- listen to the patient and the patient will give you the diagnosis -- still holds true.

P.S. My friend Rich Helfant’s line to me was, “It’s not viral, goddamnit! I want you in the hospital as soon as possible!” The NY Times cut the word “goddamnit.”

Jay Neugeboren: Hitler's Doctor is Living in the Bronx

2011-05-03T09:20:00.003-04:00

Any folks in the NYC area, head out tonight to 192 Books to check out Jay Neugeboren and Barbara Browning reading!

In 2008 Two Dollar Radio published my novel, 1940. It was my first published novel in more than 20 years (though during those years I had not, as writer, been idle: I’d published three non-fiction books, two collections of stories, one young adult historical novel, and had had a screenplay produced). But I had begun my writing life as a novelist — had, in fact, written 5 unpublished novels by the age of 23 before I ever wrote my first short story — and it was sheer joy for me to return to a form that, as reader and writer, had been my first love. “Hitler’s Doctor is Living in the Bronx” tells, in part, how 1940 came to be. It was originally published in The Huffington Post on July 21, 2008.

Hitler’s Doctor is Living in the Bronx:
How 1940 Came to Be

by Jay Neugeboren.

Ten years ago, while reading Ron Rosenbaum’s Explaining Hitler, I came across a fact that was, to me, a revelation: Hitler’s doctor, it seemed--a man named Eduard Bloch--was Jewish, and had lived in the Bronx all through World War Two. So grateful was Hitler to his childhood physician that in 1940 he intervened to provide Dr. Bloch and his family with visas that enabled them to escape Austria and the Holocaust.

Rosenbaum devoted only a half dozen pages to Bloch, but what I read took up residence in a small room of my mind, and I tried to find out more. Other than some basic facts of Bloch’s life, however, these derived largely from articles Dr. Bloch wrote for Scribner’s (“My Patient, Hitler”), and from U. S. intelligence agency (O.S.S.) interviews, the man himself remained a mystery. And so I began conceiving a story in which I conjured up what such a man--one who’d not only known Hitler intimately, but had been the unique beneficiary of his generosity--might have been like.

At the same time, I’d been doing research for a novel about a woman, Elisabeth Rofman, who was a medical illustrator at Johns Hopkins Hospital, and whose fictional incarnation was inspired by the obstetrician who had delivered my youngest child--a woman who had started out as a medical illustrator. “But while I sketched,” she’d once told me, “I kept watching all these doctors perform operations, and thinking: This isn’t so hard. I can probably do what they’re doing.” And so, in mid-life--during World War Two--she’d entered medical school and had become a doctor.

Then, one day, while an artist was showing me how, by dipping dry sable brushes into carbon dust, medical illustrators achieved their effects, I suddenly realized that Elisabeth and Dr. Bloch were part of the same story--that they were going to meet, and that they might even, against all predictability, fall in love. And so my novel began: while visiting her father in the Bronx, Elisabeth calls on Dr. Bloch, bringing regards to this newly arrived exile from a nephew, who (due to Hitler’s largesse to the Bloch family) is practicing medicine in Washington, D. C.. And thus did 1940 begin to breathe, and come to life . . . .

Jay Neugeboren: Fiction vs Non-Fiction

2011-05-02T09:48:00.004-04:00

'Fiction vs. Nonfiction: the power of a well-made story' appeared in the May 5, 2006 issue of Commonweal. It began as a belated response, not so much to James Frey and his book, but to the hullabaloo/circus surrounding it, and the inanity of so much of the public dialogue. The title was not mine, for, as my brief remarks indicate, I don't see fiction and nonfiction as being at war with one another. They are--like the short story and the novel--simply different ways of telling stories. The assumptions we bring to a story, however, do depend upon what a writer (or publisher) calls that story--fiction, nonfiction, memoir--and thus, how, in the privacy of our reading experience, we relate the story, via memory and imagination, to what we take to be the actual world and actual events and people in it.

by Jay Neugeboren.

In the spring of 1965, my literary agent called to tell me that Harper's magazine wanted to publish a short story I'd written. The story, "Luther," told of a New York City teacher's longtime friendship with a black student who, while serving time in jail, becomes a Black Muslim. There was one problem, however, my agent said. Harper's assumed the story was derived from my experiences as a New York City teacher, and the editors wanted to run it as nonfiction.

"But I made it all up!" I protested.

The next day my agent called to tell me that since the story was not "true," Harper's had decided not to run it.

I was reminded of this when I read, in the media hullabaloo concerning James Frey's A Million Little Pieces, that Frey had originally submitted his work as fiction, but that when there were no takers, he decided to call it a memoir.

The question, then: Why, in such instances, are publishers and the public more willing to embrace a story when told that it is "true"--that it actually happened--than when told that it is, on the same subject and with the same narrative line (or even, the same words!), a work of fiction? Why this curious belief that nonfiction, because it is "true," may not only be stranger than fiction, but that it is, ipso facto, stronger?

'Twas not ever thus. In the early part of the twentieth century, large-circulation magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post, Collier's, Scribner's, Smart Set, and the American Mercury routinely ran a half-dozen or more short stories (along with novellas and serial installments of novels) in each issue, and only one or two nonfiction articles. This began to change in the early 1930s: fiction started to slip, nonfiction to rise, coinciding with H. L. Mencken's heralding of "the sociological article as the important form of literary interpretation of American mores." In our own time, influenced in part by the advent of the New Journalism and the "nonfiction novel" (see Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote), only one large-circulation magazine, the New Yorker, continues to run fiction in each issue.

The element of voyeurism can explain some of this: the frisson of seeing into the lives of the rich and famous, the glamorous and the unsavory, whether the person be Donald Trump or O.J. Simpson, Paris Hilton or Hillary Clinton. When we read of the private lives of Humbert Humbert, Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina, or Gregor Samsa, it would seem to be peeking less into their bedrooms (though we do that) than into their psyches, while simultaneously journeying into the imaginative and emotional recesses of our own hearts, fears, and desires.

There is this too: that James Frey's life, like the lives of those who have written confessional memoirs (Kathryn Harrison, Brooke Shields), becomes a public commodity. What was it like to be a drug addict? To have sex with your father? To suffer from a mental illness? We can talk with those who tell us the "true" stories of their lives; neither we nor Oprah can ever talk with Emma Bovary or Gregor Samsa.

We are often told that writers "should write what they know." True enough. Yet we come to know things in various ways, and not solely by experiencing them. (One thing I discovered during several decades of college teaching, for example, was that young men and women often write better about love--and sex--before they experience it than after.) "Desire is creation," says a character in Willa Cather's The Song of the Lark, and this speaks to what often inspires the writing of fiction (and the living of any interesting life), for it suggests that what may be most interesting about us lies not in what happens to us, but in what we dream might happen to us.

Left alone with a novel--with a world where privacy and possibility reign--to have a novel's characters and story mingle with our own stories, is to create a mix that may be more complex than that which results from reading about what has actually taken place. For when we do the latter, our engagement with the work is largely and necessarily conscious, and deliberate.

When a story is invented, it has the potential to move beyond ordinary reality, beyond its individual characters and their tales, thereby giving us entry to a world that may be unsettling and revelatory precisely because it speaks to elements of our lives that remain ultimately mysterious. I've sometimes said about my own works of fiction that (as with "Luther") I hope readers will find them at least as real as if they had never happened.

While the preeminence of fiction may be on the decline, the power of a well-told invented story remains: a world of let's pretend, though child-like in its origin, is anything but childlike in mature works (think: Proust, Nabokov, Munro, Trevor, Saramago, Chekhov, Kafka). Perhaps, then, we sometimes prefer that our stories correspond directly to that world we read about in the newspaper and see on TV, because this is more comforting than considering the possibility that what we or others imagine may be at least as real as the world we can see, touch, hear, smell, and feel, may yet, in ways beyond predictability and beyond our control, prove true.

Jay Neugeboren: Writing for My Life

2011-04-28T12:07:00.003-04:00

In 1957, at the age of 19, I was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Disease—operated on, and irradiated—and, believing I had a year to live, I wrote a novel. Charles Van Doren had been my freshman English teacher at Columbia the previous year. This was before he was on the quiz show Twenty One. By the time I completed the novel, he had become, arguably, the most famous professor in the country. He had become a mentor and friend, and had encouraged me to write the novel; when it was done, I showed it to him. He was enthusiastic—compared it to Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, and recommended the book to several publishers on my behalf. For a brief while—until the rejections began coming in—I believed I might become, at 19, the American literary equivalent of France’s Francoise Sagan. I recall walking from class with him one afternoon (a class in 18th century English Literature), and telling him about the rejection I’d received the previous day. I said it hadn’t bothered me at all, and he said, “Really? I can’t believe that. Seems to me it would be as if someone had told you you your child was ugly.”

“Writing For My Life” appeared in the Spring 2008 issue of the Auithors Guild Bulletin.

by Jay Neugeboren.

In February, 1957, a few months before my nineteenth birthday, I was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease. The malignancy, in my neck, was surgically removed, as were adjacent glands, and I was irradiated on both sides of my neck. In the half-century since, I’ve never had a recurrence.

Chance, Pasteur famously wrote, favors the prepared mind. When it comes to medical survival, it would also seem to favor those whom it chooses to favor.

At nineteen, my life was saved because, rarely sick, I became concerned about some swollen glands that appeared during an ordinary winter cold and didn’t go away when the cold did. Visiting on a Sunday afternoon with a cousin who was doing her medical residency, I asked her if she’d take a look at my throat. She looked at my throat, palpated my neck, and suggested that I get things checked out at my college health service. The next day, I went to the Columbia College health clinic, which was housed at St. Luke’s Hospital, where a young resident felt my glands, after which he called in another doctor. This doctor--a tall, elderly man with white hair and a neatly trimmed straw-colored moustache--felt my glands, nodded once, then told me to make an appointment to come in to the hospital at the end of the week for a biopsy.

In 1957, I didn’t know what a “biopsy” was (I figured it was some kind of test for an infection connected to swollen glands) and so I was a bit taken aback when, after telling my mother and father that I’d be staying overnight at St. Luke’s Hospital on Friday for a biopsy, they cloistered themselves in their bedroom, where I heard my mother, who was a Registered Nurse, weeping hysterically while my father kept trying to calm her down. When my mother emerged from the bedroom, she told me that everything was going to be all right--I shouldn’t mind her tears, she’d had a hard day at the hospital--and that there was no reason for me to have the biopsy done at Columbia. Instead, she would make some calls to doctors she knew and worked with in Brooklyn.

She did, and two weeks later, a biopsy was performed at a Brooklyn hospital, and the surgeon, after opening my neck and seeing the glands, removed all that he could find--“stripped” them, in my mother’s words. When the results of the biopsy came through ten days later, and I asked my mother what the report said, she told me that the excised lymph nodes had turned out to be ‘completely benign’ and, again, that there was nothing to worry about. It was not until I had occasion to review my medical records twenty years later that I discovered, definitively, that two pathologists (one was Sidney Farber) had, in 1957, confirmed the diagnosis of Hodgkin’s disease.

On February 12, 1999, forty two years after the biopsy, and a few months before my sixty-first birthday, despite being physically fit (swimming a mile a day, playing full court basketball with teenagers), and having no conventional symptoms or risk factors (no chest pain, nausea, dizziness; I’d never smoked; I had normal blood pressure and cholesterol scores, and no positive family history of heart disease), and despite not having had a heart attack, an angiogram revealed that my coronary arteries were more than ninety-eight percent blocked.

I’d been experiencing some occasional shortness of breath while swimming (but if, while swimming my daily mile, I rested for thirty seconds or so, I could complete the mile), and some intermittent burning sensations between my shoulder blades (which I figured was ‘swimmer’s shoulder’). Still, I was concerned--I just didn’t feel right--and called my family doctor. His nurse, to whom I reported my symptoms, noted that I hadn’t been in for a check-up in two-and-a-half years, and she scheduled me for an exam. I went for the exam three weeks later, and given that I was sixty years old and had never had a stress test (or seen a cardiologist), my family doctor recommended I make an appointment with a local cardiologist. I went for the stress test/exam a week or two later, and although neither my family doctor nor the cardiologist saw any urgency in my situation, I did.

And so I telephoned several childhood friends who were physicians, reported what was happening and how I was feeling, and when the local cardiologist, after an electrocardiogram and an echocardiogram, diagnosed a virus of the heart muscle, one of my doctor friends, Rich Helfant, with whom I’d gone to Hebrew School and High School, shouted into the phone from three thousand miles away (he was in Palos Verdes, California, I was in Northampton, Massachusetts)--“It’s not viral, goddamnit! I want you in the hospital as soon as possible.”

Eighteen months later, visiting with this friend, and talking with him about his having gotten the diagnosis right by phone from across the country, he smiled. “Let’s face it,” he said. “You and I wouldn’t be sitting here today and talking if you hadn’t gone to high school with the right guys.”

We know many things--the percentages of those who survive cancer and heart attacks, and from which cancers and what kinds of heart attacks, and for how long, and how we can successfully treat some cancers and most kinds of coronary artery disease--but there remain many things we don’t know, and what we often overlook in our desire for answers and for “scientific” truths, are, simply, the facts of luck and of mystery. Why do some people who are in great shape and follow all the recommended rules (e.g., Jim Fixx) suddenly keel over in the prime of life, while others, who seem to follow none of them (e.g., Winston Churchill), live full lives into advanced ages?

And there’s this too: given my mother’s often histrionic penchant for dwelling on illness, and my parallel penchant, when I was growing up, never to allow that anything was wrong with me, what prompted me on that Sunday afternoon, with my mother nearby, to ask a cousin to check out what might, on another day, have seemed the ordinary aftermath of an ordinary cold? And why did I, forty-two years later, despite the lack of urgency expressed by doctors who physically examined me, persist in pursuing, with friends, what might, at another time, have seemed groundless anxieties?

When I was told at nineteen that I didn’t have cancer, part of me believed this was so. But if there was no cancer, why was I being radiated? Believing, then, in another part of me that I was going to die within a year, and, romantic soul that I was, wanting to leave something behind, I decided to write a novel. (The novel, two hundred pages long and satiric in intent, told the story of a young man who, convinced he is going to die within a year, feels compelled to deliver a message of hope to the world; through a series of improbable events he becomes a hero, dispensing homilies far and wide. At novel’s end, the rumor of his death has become non-existent.)

At twenty, I wrote a second novel, and by the time the magic five year period arrived when, supposedly, I didn’t have to worry about cancer anymore, I’d completed another three (unpublished) novels. It was as if I somehow believed that as long as I kept making up stories, I could stay alive.

So: grateful for the gift of life given back to me at last three times (doctors, operating on me for a ruptured appendix when I was two-and-a-half, lost my vital signs for thirty seconds), and without underestimating the supreme importance of surgical skill, biological luck, and the good fortune to have had access to doctors who knew me and listened to me, I sometimes think that the element of chance that favored me--that, against all odds, gave me life and kept me going--was enhanced, at least in part, by my desire, born fifty years ago, to spend my working hours imagining lives different from the one I was actually living.

For even even while I may occasionally receive, from within, physical signals of alarm unheard and unseen by others, when I sit down to write fiction--to make things up--I also see worlds nobody has seen: worlds of possibility, where anything, for good or for ill, and against predictability, might occur.

Jay Neugeboren: Making Stories

2011-04-27T10:07:00.004-04:00

"Making Stories” appeared in somewhat different form as the introduction to my third collection of stories, News from the New American Diaspora and Other Stories, published in 2005. I begin the essay by telling about the 70-80 page novel I wrote when I was 8 years old—and it still amazes me that I did. Of interest too: I never, until a dozen years later, thought of becoming a writer. Although I remained a voracious reader all through elementary school and high school, I did not do especially well in English, and scored below average on the SAT English aptitude test my senior year in high school. When I entered college, I listed as possible careers: architectural engineering and advertising. Once I was away from home, however (as a commuter to Columbia from Brooklyn on the IRT, an hour-plus each way), the passion for making stories returned. It was enhanced, as we’ll see in tomorrow’s blog, “Writing for my Life,” when, at 19, I was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Disease. But there was this, too, I think: that in order to protect my deepest desire, I sent it so far underground that even I didn’t know it was there—not until I was, in effect, living away from home (spending as much time at Columbia as I could), and from those strains of our family life that I must have sensed would have aggrandized and taken away what was most precious to me.

by Jay Neugeboren.

When I was eight years old, inspired by Hugh Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle books and Howard Garis’s Uncle Wiggily tales, I wrote my first novel. My mother typed the manuscript for me, the top halves of the words coming out, magically, in red, the bottom halves in black, and for several months I would stand in front of my fourth grade class at P. S. 246 in Brooklyn each Monday morning and read a new chapter of the book. The novel, made up stories that recounted the adventures of a family of pigs, ran to about seventy or eighty pages, and afterwards, at lunch hour, recess, and on the way home, my classmates would crowd around me and ask: What happens next?

My answer: I don’t know. Until I actually sat down and wrote--until I gave myself up to my characters and their lives--I never knew what was going to happen next.

Seventeen years later, I was substitute teaching in a Brooklyn Junior High School that had a largely black and Hispanic population, and was assigned to what the Vice Principal told me was the school’s most unruly eighth grade class (“Just try to make sure nobody gets hurt,” he advised). “You the sub?” a student called out when I entered the room. “Yes,” I answered, and I asked the class to please take out their notebooks and begin writing a composition about how they had spent their summer vacations. The students cursed and groaned, several of them packing up their stuff and heading for the back door, when--a survival instinct?--I shouted, “And you don’t have to tell the truth!”

This stopped them. You mean we can lie? a student called out.

“I didn‘t say that,” I said. “I just said that you don’t have to tell the truth.”

For the next half-hour or so, the students worked quietly and diligently. I was amazed (as was the Vice Principal when he came by to see how things were going). When the students were done, they brought their stories to me, I made corrections and suggestions, they worked on revisions, they read their stories to one another, and for weeks afterwards when I would meet some of them in the hallways, they would ask what I had thought of their stories, and if I would read new stories they had been working on.

When I was growing up in Brooklyn in the years during and after World War Two, I lived on the margins of two worlds, one Jewish, the other American. Both sets of my grandparents, and many of my aunts and uncles, were born in the region of Russia and Poland that is now the Ukraine. My father’s family (he had eight brothers and sisters, all married, all with children) were Orthodox Jews. They kept kosher homes, and observed the Sabbath and all Jewish holidays, on most of which days they did not ride, write, cook, turn lights on or off, or use the phone.

My mother’s family (she had four sisters and one brother, all married, all with children) was non-observant, and my mother was fierce in her belief that religions were the cause of most of the world’s ills. Although I attended synagogue each Saturday, and, starting at the age of thirteen, prayed in our living room six mornings a week alongside my father, first putting on my talit (prayer shawl) and tefillin (black leather straps I wound around arm and head), I also, on the Sabbath and Jewish holidays, cooked, wrote, turned on the radio and TV, used the phone, rode the subways, played ball, went to movies, and worked at part-time jobs.

In my neighborhood, distant by about a dozen blocks from the Crown Heights neighborhood in which most of my father’s family lived, I was the most observant of my (non-observant) Jewish friends; when I visited with my father’s family, I was the least observant of my aunts, uncles, and cousins. Thus, not only was I endlessly navigating the borders between the Jewish and American worlds into which I was born, but within my Jewish world, I found myself continually moving back and forth between two very different worlds, and wondering always: Which world was, or might be, mine?

Feelings, thoughts, and dreams engendered in my childhood by living in several worlds but feeling at home in none of them--these, along with the discoveries and joys that came from the reading and making of stories--shaped me as much then as, six decades later, they do now. Like the black and Hispanic students I taught, I too felt safe--and happy--when I could imagine a life different and more exotic than the life I was actually living. To be able, in my imagination, to be anyone I wanted to be, and to travel anywhere and do anything I wanted to do--this, then as now, both saved my life and gave me life, for the worlds that lived in my imagination were rich in ways the actual world was not, even if what both worlds were often rich in were misery and madness.

Through the years I’ve published books and essays in which I’ve written directly about my actual life--about living for several years in a village in the south of France; about teaching for three decades in a rural area of Western Massachusetts; about life-long friendships that helped save my life before and after a quintuple coronary bypass; about my involvement in the civil rights and anti-war movements; about being a single parent to my three children; and about being caretaker, for five decades, of my brother Robert, who has been a mental patient during these years.

Although the places in which I set my fiction are usually places I have known first-hand, because I am often unaware of where the stories set in these places have come from--because they rise up from wells of memory and desire I don’t know exist until I write the stories they have helped generate--they are usually, for me, like remembered moments of dreams--more vivid and more deeply felt, more intense, mysterious, resonant--than my non-fiction.

All through elementary school, I would go to my local library several times a week, bring home four novels (the limit), and return them a few days later so I could take out another four. At school, I made up stories for my classmates and friends, and daydreamed so constantly that my parents were asked to come to school and talk with my teachers because, though my grades were excellent, I seemed alarmingly distracted much of the time.

My imagination was my best friend, and seemed the most real and safe place I knew because living in it I didn’t have to tell the truth. When I was reading stories or making them up, though I might be writing about loss, I never felt lost. Although I sometimes feared I might, like my brother, wind up living in a fractured, illusory world, when I was making up stories, I felt whole and safe--able, in words, to make sense of a world that often seemed to make no sense. Though I might conjure up stories about matters weird, dark, and grim, I could also, in the people, landscapes, and tales I created, delineate moments that suggested at least the possibility of joy, or happiness, or relief from pain.

And whatever else I have written since I wrote that early (and lost) first novel--memoirs, essays, screenplays poems, reviews--I have through the years returned again and again to my first love, and to what continues to inspire: the sheer magic that accompanies that crafting of lies that tell the truths stories tell.

Jay Neugeboren: My Father's Eyes

2011-04-26T09:37:00.001-04:00

A year or so ago while I was visiting with Oliver Sacks, he asked me to close one eye and look into a machine—a stereopticon. Then he asked me to open the closed eye, which I did, and of course, the scene—mountains and lakes—changed magically from two dimensions to three dimensions. Oliver was fascinated with the phenomenon—the difference between monocularity and binocularity, a subject he was writing about in his book The Mind’s Eye — and I said that this was not a new experience for me, and was one that, as with him, had always interested me because my father was blind in one eye. I told Oliver that I used to walk around my house, when I was a boy, a hand or piece of cardboard over one eye, so that I could see the world the way my father saw it. I tried to hit and throw and shoot baskets with one eye closed, and gloried in stories about one-eyed athletes. “You should write about this,” Oliver said. And so I did.

The following appeared in the latest, Fall 2010/Winter 2011 issue of the Author's Guild Bulletin.

by Jay Neugeboren.

In 1936, the year my father and mother married, my father suffered a detached retina and lost all sight in his right eye. His left eye was already severely compromised; without glasses, he could not read the large one and two-foot high numbers on advertisements in supermarket windows unless he pressed his nose right up to the glass. I was born two years later, in 1938, and throughout my childhood I’d often walk from room to room of our small four-room Brooklyn apartment while covering one eye with a piece of cardboard so that I could see the world as he saw it. At Halloween and other dress-up occasions, I always chose to be a pirate, a patch over my right eye.

When, at eleven, I was a member of a Cub Scout pack, I earned an arrow point by demonstrating how, despite not being able to perceive distance, my father could score in basketball by calculating angles so that the ball would slam off the backboard and carom down through the hoop.

But why, with one good eye, couldn’t he see in three dimensions?

My Cub Scout den chief drew a diagram and explained that, since our eyes were lodged asymmetrically in our heads (and were not equidistant from some central point), they each saw objects and scenes differently--with binocular (as opposed to monocular) vision. If you were looking at a ball, for example, your left eye would see the ball from a different distance, and angle, than your right eye did. Actually, he explained, each of your eyes was seeing a different image of the ball, which images were somehow combined instantaneously in the brain so as to enable those of us with binocular vision to see the ball--and the world--in three dimensions.

The great passion of my early years, along with reading novels, was sports: I lived as much of my life on ballfields and in local schoolyards as I could, and when I was thirteen, in the concrete backyard to our building, my father taught me how to throw a curveball. When I tried out for the baseball team at Erasmus Hall High School--I was five foot three and weighed one hundred ten pounds--facing guys older and bigger, I not only struck out the side twice in a row but attracted dozens of players to the chain link backstop, and they seemed as amazed as I was that the ball could leave my hand, head for the batter’s head or shoulder (if he were batting right-handed), and then, thanks to my father’s coaching, dip swiftly and suddenly away from him in a two-to-three foot arc, and cross the outside corner of the plate.
But how, I wondered, not being able to perceive distance, was my father able to throw and catch a ball? And how was he able to shoot baskets, or drive a car? And what would happen to him if he lost vision in his one good eye?

The summer I was six years old, my parents rented a two room bungalow in Long Beach, New York. My father slept in our Brooklyn apartment during the week, and on Friday evenings took the train to Long Beach to be with us for the weekend. The first thing he’d do after he arrived would be to get out of his suit and tie and into a bathing suit, after which I’d walk to the beach with him. And all week long I’d hope it would be raining on Friday night, because when we got to the beach, he’d take off his shirt, then hand me his eyeglasses to hold for him while he went swimming in the ocean.

He never hesitated--just handed me the shirt and glasses, ran to the water, waded in, and dove straight into the first line of waves. He’d thrash his way out to where it was calmer, and then would swim further and further out while, his glasses tight in my fist, I’d stare as hard as I could--as if by concentrating with all my might I could keep him from going under--and I’d pray that he’d return quickly (by this hour the lifeguards were gone), for what would I do if, one evening, he disappeared, and I had to walk home alone? What would I tell my mother?

Most weekday nights, on his way home from work, he stopped at the local candy store where he’d take out a novel from their rental library, and he’d spend most evenings lying on the living room couch, reading, a hand cupped over his good eye to shield it from the glare of the lamp.

Through all the years of my growing up, my father worked in the printing business as what was called a ‘jobber’: he had ‘accounts’--businesses and individuals who would place orders with him--for stationery, invoices, business cards, invitations--which orders (jobs) he’d take to various printing shops around the city to get the work done, after which he’d pick up and deliver the order (or, on school vacations, have me deliver them) to his customers. Sometimes, when I asked about his business, he’d show me how he prepared material for the printers--how he wrote out the words, and created columns, charts, and designs with a straight-edge ruler, a protractor, and stencils--and I was always astonished at how neat and clear his handwriting was, and how graceful his script.

I remember wondering why it was that a man so compromised in his vision had chosen to spend so much of his life having to look at words on paper, but I never asked him about this. Later on, though, after I’d begun publishing books, I’d sometimes find myself attributing my own love for words and story--for how magical it was that words on a page, in my mind and feelings, could be transformed into entire worlds--to those times we were together in printing shops and factories, where what had been blank sheets of paper would fly out from the presses--across rows of small blue flames, positioned there to dry the ink--with words on them, words that in my life, as in my father’s, were suffused with enormous power.

I recall, too, when I was in the fifth grade and we had a unit on people who, like Helen Keller, had overcome physical disabilities, going to the front of the room, and telling the class that my father was blind in one eye, yes, but that because he was, his hearing had improved miraculously and he could now hear things, especially music, better than most people.

Although what I told my class was largely a sentimental wish, it turns out that, neurologically, I may have been on to something, for we now understand that the nervous system has astonishing plasticity, and that when areas of our brain ordinarily used for one function--seeing, for example--are disabled for that function, that region of the brain can often be taken over--reallocated--for other sensory functions such as hearing.

At about the time I was trying out for my high school baseball team, Tommy Thompson, blinded in one eye when he was a child, was the starting quarterback on two Philadelphia Eagles championship NFL football teams. A few years later, Bob Schloredt, a one-eyed quarterback for the University of Washington Huskies, was voted the Most Valuable Player in the Rose Bowl. I doted athletes like these, who, despite handicaps, had succeeded: Whammy Douglas, a one-eyed pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates, Pete Gray, a one-armed outfielder for the St. Louis Browns, Gene “Silent” Hairston, a deaf Golden Gloves champion, and on others who, later on, would occasionally make their way into the ruminations of characters in my early stories and novels.

My father failed at the printing business, and it was my mother, a Registered Nurse, who, often working double-shifts and taking on extra jobs, brought home the money that paid the rent and put food on the table. Although they fought about money constantly--my mother railing at my father for not earning a living, and my father retreating into a depressed silence because he’d failed to provide for us, I never recall either of them, even in their most heated arguments, referring to the fact of my father’s impaired vision.

From the time I was about ten years old--1948--until my father’s death in 1976, at the age of 72, however, my mother would chastize him at least once a day for having given up his driver’s license, and he would respond with the obvious: that he couldn’t see well enough to drive, especially at night, and that he didn’t want to endanger us or others. Although their cruel dance--a painful mix of rage, guilt, venom, shame, and humiliation--was a constant in our lives, in this one thing, and with a confidence he rarely showed on other occasions, he’d state his case and stick to it.

And though he occasionally threatened to put an end to my mother’s misery (and his own) by killing himself, he never, to me, or to her, or to anyone else I knew, excused his failures or moods by reference to his faulty vision. So that, when I walked around the house with one eye covered, I was identifying with that part of him which, though wounded, was also a source of strength. When I closed one eye while shooting baskets, or throwing a ball, or crossing a street, I was training myself to do what he and men like Tommy Thompson and Bob Schloredt did: I was noticing shadows, and which way they fell; I was becoming aware that the smaller objects were, the further away they were likely to be, and that the brighter similar colors were, the closer they were likely to be. I was noticing the way people and things overlapped, whether they were arms or legs or curtains--and I was paying attention to the infinity of small and large markers that, like roadsigns on highways and yard lines on football fields, defined space; by being attentive to such things, I could, in my mind--the way all of us do when we watch (2D) movies or look at photographs--turn two dimensions into three. In this way I could not only see the world the way my father saw it, but I could also, briefly, be my father, and could be close to him in ways that eluded us through most of our lives.

In the decade before he died, I began publishing stories and novels, and he talked to me about them in ways he’d rarely talked to me about anything else. He even bragged to others that I’d not done the expected or the predictable--become a doctor, lawyer, or engineer--but had become, his emphasis, a writer and maker of stories. How sweet, it occurs to me, that I had somehow chosen a vocation whose task, as Conrad reminds us, is “by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel--it is, before all, to make you see.”

Jay Neugeboren: A Writer's Odds

2011-04-25T11:24:00.000-04:00

"A Writer’s Odds” originally appeared in the Fall 2008 issue of the Authors Guild Bulletin.

by Jay Neugeboren.

I recently sold a short essay on Ingmar Bergman to The Notre Dame Review, which was especially welcome news since I’d written the original version of this essay in 1962--46 years ago--and had been submitting slightly revised versions of it, if intermittently, ever since.

A few months after I’d written the Bergman essay, as it happens, I sold my first short story, by which time, at the age of 24, I’d accumulated, by count, 576 rejections. By this time, too, I’d written five unpublished novels, and it would be another three years, and nearly 2000 more rejections, before I sold my first book.

During those years, in order to keep track of where things were, I kept a scoreboard pasted to the wall beside my desk on which I listed the title of the work, the place I’d sent it to, the date on which I’d sent it, and the odds. Most stories went out at somewhere between 500 and 1000 to 1, novels usually had odds of about 10,000 to 1, although, depending on the early morning mood of the handicapper, these odds could, on any given day, ascend to several hundred thousand to one. At the bottom of the scoreboard I posted additional opportunities: a Best Bet, a Long Shot, a Hopeful, a Sleeper, and a Daily Double. Shrewd bettors in those years, undismayed by previous losses--the odds became outrageous once a story collected more than thirty rejections--could have cleaned up. Several times, in fact, after sending a story around for a few years, I’d change the title and send it back to a place I’d previously submitted it to, and it would, the second or third time around (this happened at The Atlantic, for example), be accepted.

Things didn’t change much after I began publishing. Thus, my eighth book, The Stolen Jew, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and winner of Best Novel of the Year Award from the American Jewish Committee (and still in print), was rejected 17 times during a two year period, and a non-fiction book published a decade ago, Imagining Robert, also still in print and also a New York Times Notable Book, along with being a Book of the Month Club Selection, a Featured Selection of the Quality Paperback Book Club, and the basis for a prize-winning PBS documentary--was rejected, during a three year period, by 41 publishers.

During the years I taught writing, what I used to say to my students, as to myself, was that while it was hard not to feel rejections personally, one shouldn’t take them personally. Given the long list of commercially successful books turned down by publishers--from Catcher in the Rye and Peyton Place to A Separate Peace and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance--who could figure out how to figure--how to tout--the vagaries of the literary marketplace? Best was to keep your eye on the object: to write the books and stories you wanted to write, and to hope that, with persistence and luck--and never underestimating either--your work would see its way into print. And once it did, as in any good story or--or any interesting life, since the essence of both was unpredictability--anything could happen.

And sometimes I’d console myself, or celebrate, as with the Bergman essay, by reciting a faith-based mantra learned during the basketball playing days of my Brooklyn youth: If you keep making the right moves, eventually the shots fall.

You Are My Heart and Other Stories: Jay Neugeboren

2011-04-25T09:01:00.002-04:00

Next week we're out with Jay Neugeboren's fourth collection of stories: You Are My Heart. The stories included in the collection have appeared in an esteemed crop of literary magazines, such as The Notre Dame Review, Gettysburg Review, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, Columbia Magazine, Hadassah Magazine, and Black Clock.

Madison Smartt Bell says: "The stories in Jay Neugeboren's new collection are astonishingly good, each one fresh, startling, sometimes shocking in its originality -- with a complex and subtle substructure binding the whole group together."

Jim Shepard says: "Jay Neugeboren's You Are My Heart is an object lesson in imaginative empathy and observational intelligence. His fiction for years now has had the courage to be quiet and careful and comprehensively humane, but it's in no way slight. One of his great subjects has been the damage that even the most caring and thoughtful can inflict, and though these stories take place all over the world, they're at heart about the difference between the America to which we aspire and the America in which we live."

Here, also, are some upcoming readings in the NYC area:
Tuesday, May 3 @7pm - 192 Books
192 Tenth Ave @21st St.

Thursday, May 19 @7pm - BookCulture
536 W. 112th St. @Broadway

Thursday, June 23 @7pm - BookCourt
163 Court St. (b/t Pacific & Dean)

Over the course of the next two weeks, we'll be posting articles by Jay that have been published throughout the years. The pieces discuss accumulating rejection notes before finally finding success, his father's hindered eyesight, and his own quintuple bypass. We hope you enjoy.

Barbara Browning's Elephant

2011-04-12T13:03:00.007-04:00

So while some folks like jmww and The Rumpus got into The Correspondence Artist this past week, Barbara Browning's been hard at work on her second effort, a novel called I'm Trying to Reach You, which we'll be publishing next spring 2012.

The book incorporates choreographed YouTube dance videos as Gray Adams attempts to unravel the mystery of who may be murdering the world's most famous dancers.

One of the videos is performed to the song 'Elephant' by Pattern is Movement. The band dug the choreography, so did Deli Magazine, and the video has been getting some play. Check it out.

Film: Melancholia

2011-04-09T12:42:00.001-04:00

I'm excited to check out this new Lars von Trier movie. Anti-Christ gave me an ache for weeks, and Dogville is one of my favorite films.

Simon 2012

2011-04-06T13:36:00.004-04:00

Just when you start to believe that your hard-on for David Simon can't possibly get any harder. It gets harder. Bill Moyers did this fantastic, extensive interview with Simon for Guernica Magazine that should be required reading. Who cares that Obama just launched his campaign for re-election. David Simon, baby. PS I credit Barbara Browning's The Correspondence Artist for making it okay for me to refer to my hard-on.

Barbara Browning Upstairs

2011-03-28T10:13:00.002-04:00

Barbara Browning read from The Correspondence Artist last Thursday with musician Keren Ann as part of their 'Upstairs at the Square' series with host Katherine Lanpher. The good folks at B&N captured the event on video, which is now posted on their website for your viewing pleasure.

Thought: Religion Extinction

2011-03-26T09:12:00.000-04:00

From 'Organized religion 'will be driven toward extinction' in 9 countries, experts predict' by Richard Allen Greene, CNN:

"Organized religion will all but vanish eventually from nine Western-style democracies, a team of mathematicians predict in a new paper based on census data stretching back 100 years.

"It won't die out completely, but "religion will be driven toward extinction" in countries including Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the Netherlands, they say.

"It will also wither away in Austria, the Czech Republic, Finland and Switzerland, they anticipate."

Galleys of Joshua Mohr's Damascus

2011-03-25T11:41:00.000-04:00

We're about to have back in hand the galleys of Joshua Mohr's forthcoming third novel, Damascus (out October 2011).

"Mohr is the bard of the underbelly, and the Mission District is his playground. Part Harry Crews, part Charles Bukowski, and part Franz Kafka, Mohr will make you squirm, laugh, recognize, and take pause. Behind his wayward and dissolute characters, burns the clear-eyed moral vision of a very unique artist."
-Jonathan Evison

"We're in the belly of the whale, man. We've been swallowed whole."

"It's 2003 and the country is divided evenly for and against the Iraq War. Damascus, a dive bar in San Francisco's Mission District, becomes the unlikely setting for a showdown between the opposing sides.

Tensions come to a boil when Owen, the bar's proprietor who has recently taken to wearing a Santa suit full-time, agrees to host an art show by an ambitious artist longing to take her act to the high-wire by nailing live fish to the walls as a political statement.

An incredibly creative and fully-rendered cast of characters orbit the bar. There's No Eyebrows, a cancer patient who has come to the Mission to die anonymously; Shambles, the patron saint of the hand job; Revv, a lead-singer who acts too much like a lead-singer.

By gracefully tackling such complicated topics as cancer, Iraq, and issues of self-esteem, Joshua Mohr has painted his most accomplished novel yet.

Parties interested in receiving a copy for review or perusal, write to Brian Obenauf at brian[at]twodollarradio.com.

Support Philoctetes

2011-03-25T09:45:00.000-04:00

Letter from co-directors of The Philoctetes Center, Francis Levy (author of Erotomania: A Romance and forthcoming Seven Days in Rio) and Edward Nersesian, M.D.:

Dear Friends,

We are always happy to share a few highlights from our current season of programs. Unfortunately, at this time, we have to leaven our good news with some bad news.

First, the good news. The Philoctetes Center's 2011 programs are off to a great start. The January 29 roundtable “The Nature of Reality,” moderated by Deepak Chopra, attracted a standing-room-only audience, many of whom returned for the subsequent roundtables in our “Big Questions” series—“The Limitations of Mental and Physical Reality” and “Theories of Everything.” In fact, turnout for our events has never been greater, and archival videos on our YouTube channel regularly attract thousands of online viewers.

Our poetry and music series continue to showcase the peerless talents of artists and scholars like Jane Ira Bloom, Lewis Porter, and Heather Dubrow, who have organized and hosted events featuring the likes of Marilyn Nelson, Jonathan Culler, Min Xiao-Fen, and Ken Wessel. And our activities have been recognized with renewed support from the New York State Council on the Arts, The New York Department of Cultural Affairs, The Axe-Houghton Foundation, The Aaron Copland Fund for Music, The Elsie Wunsch Trust, The Lindemann Abend Foundation, and Bloomberg, along with new grants and contributions from The New York Council for the Humanities, The Educational Foundation of America, Anthony Low-Beer, and, most importantly, supporters like you.

The bad news is that these funds only cover a portion of our roughly $200,000 annual budget, which has been streamlined to cover our most basic expenses: rent; utilities; salaries for our small, hardworking staff; and videography expenses (so that we can continue to share our events with an international online audience). As it stands, we currently have funds to get us through the next two months of programming. After that, we truly don’t know how we are going to continue providing what we believe is an important public service—enriching, one-of-a-kind programs that are free and open to the public.

Now more than ever, we rely on contributions from the people who enjoy our programs. Please consider supporting the Philoctetes Center with a contribution. You can access our Support page here and make a contribution by check or credit card.

Support Philoctetes

Warmly,

Francis Levy & Edward Nersessian, M.D.
Co-Directors

The Perverted Hobo, by Trinie Dalton

2011-03-24T09:20:00.003-04:00

Word Bookstore selected The Correspondence Artist by Barbara Browning as their Word-to-Your-Mailbox pick for February. We gave them a chapbook of a story from Trinie Dalton's forthcoming collection, Baby Geisha (January 2012), to include in their subscriber mailing. It's called 'The Perverted Hobo,' and is about Eugene, Eugene Sr, and Eugene's husky named Bob.

Barbara Browning + Keren Ann

2011-03-21T16:13:00.002-04:00

Hot Shit: This Thursday, be sure to stop in and stake out a seat at Barnes & Noble's 'Upstairs at the Square' series, which will feature Barbara Browning and Keren Ann, hosted by Katherine Lanpher.

Barbara will be reading from The Correspondence Artist while Keren Ann will perform songs from her new album, 101.

'Upstairs at the Square' will take place at the Union Square Barnes & Noble (also known as Francis Levy's Barnes & Noble) on March 24 at 7pm.

This event promises to be super-fantastic. We hope to see you there!

Thought: Bookstores

2011-03-12T09:24:00.003-05:00

"As paper books become a niche product, niche retailers will be the best place to buy and sell them. Book lovers will always want a place to gather and hear recommendations from a bookseller who knows their reading habits, and their community. . . we may have to go back to shopping for books in stores that let dogs wander through the stacks, and don't even serve coffee."
-Edward McClelland, 'How Borders Lost Its Soul,' Salon.com

While McClelland's piece very much looks back, Jack McKeown and Don Linn look forward at the "supply gap" resulting from the Borders closures in an essay at InVerso. They propose the development of a Neighborhood Bookstore Development Bank, "modeled after a similar initiative that has worked successfully for independent grocery stores. Its mission would be to spearhead the deployment of capital to a new generation of bookstore entrepreneurs, as well as existing booksellers looking to branch out or upgrade their spaces."

From a 2009 piece by Jack McKeown: "A thriving neighborhood bookstore is recognized as a key element in the social, cultural and economic fabric of any community. This is an opinion widely shared by urban planners, government planning boards, Smart Growth advocates, landlords and real estate developers around the country."

I went to see Andre Schiffrin speak at The New School last fall as part of a series of discussions sponsored by n+1. He shared the view of McKeown and Linn, asking the audience if they needed a Duane Reade on every corner, and said, "It's a question of preserving urban civilization."

Slow Fade

2011-03-08T08:46:00.002-05:00

Drag City has just released an audiobook of Will Oldham with D.V. DeVincentis reading Rudy Wurlitzer's Slow Fade, which you can download as an mp3 or a 5-disc set.

Per the site: “The story alternates between [Wesley] Hardin in Santa Fe, Mexico, and New York — shooting a last-stand Western until the producer blows the whistle and shuts off the funds, generating a cinéma vérité chronicle of his own life — and A.D. and Walker writing their script on the road, so that each movement in the present is complemented by an additional piece of the past uncovered. Apart from generating a respectable amount of plot suspense, this narrative counterpoint allows Wurlitzer to pursue a satirical bent as he charts both fantasy trips, which becomes a contrast between the spiritual excesses of two generations: Yosemite Sam and Mr. Natural, each on a suicide mission.” — Jonathan Rosenbaum

Book: House of Leaves

2011-03-05T14:15:00.001-05:00

This book provided an incredible experience. I took my time with it, maybe finishing it in three months or so. It reminded me in the basic skeletal premise to another book I loved, Jonathan Lethem's As She Climbed Across the Table, but much much darker and taken in an entirely different direction. House of Leaves is engrossing, substantial, and proves yet again the value of book as object.

Thought(s): Francis Levy

2011-03-05T10:11:00.000-05:00

Francis Levy, author of Erotomania: A Romance and the forthcoming Seven Days in Rio has a parody of The New York Times' 'Corrections Column' in The East Hampton Star. Here are some favorites:

"In a front-page story our country was mistakenly identified as United States of America. The correct name is The United States of America."

"In Tuesday’s article about the budget, several erroneous statements were made. Offering Social Security benefits only to those in the highest income brackets in order to stimulate investment while eliminating Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements is not part of the current plan to reduce the trillion-dollar deficit."

"In Tuesday’s edition of Science Times, it was reported that the Large Hadron Collider, the most powerful particle accelerator in the world, could create a black hole, which would swallow up the universe. This report was based on rumors among a poll of college art majors and has not been substantiated by particle physicists who have studied the project."

"The Times reported on Thursday that Congress was increasing N.E.A. funding tenfold to bring American arts funding up to the level of France and England. The sentence in question should have read: “Congress has approved a 10 basis points or one-tenth of one-percent increase in arts funding.”"

New Literature Wilderness Exploration Group

2011-03-04T09:12:00.003-05:00

Spend an evening with two fiction authors whose new books you should know about! Grace Krilanovich and Jarret Middleton (An Dantomine Eerly) will read from their debut novels, and talk with the audience about the future of fiction, getting published on an indie press, death, food, the woods, and more! Enjoy bizarre book-themed gift-basket raffle, booze, and more talk and fun carried on to a nearby bar after the event.

March 11th: The Waypost, Portland, OR - 7pm
March 12th: Elliott Bay Book Company, Seattle, WA - 7pm
March 26th: Stories Bookstore, Los Angeles, CA - 6pm

Trinie Dalton Live

2011-03-02T11:04:00.000-05:00

Trinie Dalton, author of the forthcoming Baby Geisha (1/12), will be reading Friday, March 4th @ 7:30pm in Los Angeles @ Pepin Moore in Chinatown with Sarah Manguso, author of The Two Kinds of Decay.

Pepin Moore (the old China Art Objects)
933 Chung King Road
LA 90012
7:30pm, Fri. March 4th

Here or There, by Jay Neugeboren

2011-03-01T10:52:00.001-05:00

'Here or There' is a story from the forthcoming (May 2011) collection, You Are My Heart and Other Stories, by Jay Neugeboren.

'Here or There' was originally published in Columbia Magazine.

March 2011 Catalog

2011-02-28T09:48:00.001-05:00

Music: Radiohead

2011-02-27T13:43:00.000-05:00

Radiohead released a new album last week called 'The King of Limbs.' I do love me some Radiohead. Though this song might be better served sans Thom Yorke's creepy clown dance.

Film: Tree of Life

2011-02-27T12:31:00.002-05:00

Terrence Malick is a fucking champ. I cannot wait to see this movie.

Book: Short

2011-02-26T14:09:00.000-05:00

The bold caption at the bottom of the front cover to Short reads 'Wall Street Meets The Office,' which boils this debut novel down to the most convenient line for the agent trying to sell a film adaptation. I thought it read more like a Harry Crews/Hunter Thompson combo taking on energy trading. There's a devious plot (or two) (or three) to make the rich richer, but what makes the book most engaging are the characters, each distinct and boldly drawn.

Short is hilarious, seamless, and features one of my favorite characters I've encountered in recent memory, Milt Harkrader. I'd follow him anywhere.

"Milt, like many other ten-gallon-hat-toting brokers in Manhattan, heralded from New Jersey. He needed the hat more than most because his hairline now began behind his ears. Milt had always been a loudmouth. Sometime after his divorce he had to have his jaw wired shut, the outcome of a late-night brawl that had occurred at a 7-Eleven in Rahway. This helped Milt develop a new respect for strangers but didn't stop him from talking so loud in bars, especially around his coworkers and other people he suspected wouldn't take the time to kick his ass."

Milt's on-point when teaching his son the value of confronting a man who calls you a 'bankrupt' behind your back, passing out in the pool of the Hard Rock in Las Vegas, passing out in a snowbank in Vail, being thrown overboard on a deepsea fishing trip after he unclips his harness because he doesn't like the way the 'life jacket straps tug his gut,' and then using the story to later at the bar to get himself laid.

As Milt would say, 'Taste it.'

Thought: Thomas Frank

2011-02-26T09:50:00.000-05:00

From the February 2011 issue of Harper's Magazine. Thomas Frank has just begun a regular column dubbed 'Easy Chair.' I already feel confident saying he's freaking awesome and it's fantastic that he has this forum.

This particular quote is from maybe his second piece, titled "Servile Disobedience," in which he encourages poor people -- the serving class -- to withhold their niceness for a single day:

"For decades we have attacked [the government], redirected it, outsourced it, and filled it with incompetents and cronies. Yes, it still works well enough when we need it to replenish the accounts of investment banks or bang some small country against a wall, but those branches of it designed to help out Americans of "lower socioeconomic status," as the scientists would put it, are now bare. The government fails the people of New Orleans when they are hit by a hurricane, fails to notice the cadmium paint in the marketplace, does a lousy job educating our kids, can't keep the libraries open or the park lawns mowed, overlooks the catastrophic shortcuts taken by its pals in the oil-drilling industry -- and all we can do to express our frustration is elect candidates who promise to hack it down even more."

Music: The Kills

2011-02-20T13:03:00.000-05:00

The Kills have a new album coming out in April called Blood Pressures. 'Satellite' appears to be the first single. Badass.

Film: Rubber

2011-02-20T10:59:00.000-05:00

I don't know what to say, other than that I will be seeing this.

Book: Pieces of a Decade

2011-02-19T12:28:00.000-05:00

To commemorate their first decade in print, the Brooklyn Rail published a hardcover book that included some of the editors' (Theodore Hamm and Williams Cole, above) favorite nonfiction articles in an anthology titled Pieces of a Decade: Brooklyn Rail Nonfiction 2000-2010.

I've been reading the book piecemeal since I picked up a copy at last fall's rainy Brooklyn Book Festival. It's a great read. There are articles like 'What They Eat in Brighton Beach' by Marjory Garrison that does little more than chronicle an elderly Jewish couples' eating habits, to an explosive 'Farewell to CBGB' penned by Jason Flores-Williams.

As alt-papers drop like flies across ye olde United States, Pieces of a Decade testifies to the Rail's importance as a relevent and sacred cultural institution.

My favorite piece is the opening essay by Matthew Vaz called 'Coney Island Beer Hustle,' which profiles the characters loafing or stalking the boardwalk, that absolutely nails the place: "We got cold Coronas. We got cold Heinekens. Ice cold! We got Ferrone Malone, Stephon Marbury, and Allan Houston on parole. We got Lincoln High School's finest just tryin' to make some money out here. We got John Freakin' Doe. We got Russian gangsters, dope pushers, thousand dollar hookers, whole blocks - no, whole buildings from Sunset Park. We got Mexicans with long pants planning on getting shorts just happy to be alive breathing the air. We got neck tattoos, C-section scars, and nail tips with the Puerto Rican flag. We got cops checking out tits, just trying to keep everybody safe, and Osama bin Lade is nowhere in sight.

"This is Russia, Puerto Rico, Mexico, Surfside Gardens, Marlboro Projects. We got whatever you need out here. This is Coney Island, Brooklyn, New York City."

Thought: Coffee House Press & McSweeney's

2011-02-19T10:14:00.001-05:00

There's a fantastic, lengthy interview with Allan Kornblum and the rest of the Coffee House Press staff over at The Huffington Post.

The editors dish on the press' history and their relationships with authors, the present state and future of poetry, and the publishing industry at large.

Kornblum: "In December 1969, I was working the midnight-to-eight-thirty shift at the Grand Central Station post office in NYC, and attending poetry workshops at the St. Mark's Church Poetry Project. One evening, the workshop leader told us that we had been asked to help collate the pages of a mimeographed magazine. In one of the back rooms of the old church, we were greeted by a group of 2 x 6 foot tables, each with five stacks of 250 pages. When I completed my assigned portion, I sidled up to the editor, told him how much I liked his magazine, asked if he'd like to see some of my work. He looked off in the distance, sighed and said, "I've always thought poetry should be as hard to break into as the Longshoreman's Union." To hell with him, I thought--I'll start my own. I've always been grateful for that kick in the pants, which can sometimes be far more productive than well-intended encouragement."

Also, McSweeney's announced this week that they're launching a half-page of "games, puzzles, comics, and activities for all ages, available for weekly publication in newspapers across the U.S. and Canada."

A few more thoughts on obscenity

2011-02-18T11:29:00.001-05:00

The first time my narrator, Vivian, actually encounters Tzipi Honigman in the flesh, they’re driving to a fancy restaurant in Tel Aviv and Tzipi asks her if she knows any of her poems by heart, and if she could recite one to her.

“With my heart in my mouth, I did – an unrhymed sonnet about failed love. It was called ‘Obscene.’ She looked over at me, smiling just a little. I felt extremely naked.” (p. 9)

I didn’t reproduce the sonnet in the novel, although I did include some of Vivian’s other poems. But I thought you might want to see the one she recited to Tzipi in the car. The epigraph is from Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse.

Obscene

“Discredited by modern opinion, love’s sentimentality must be assumed by the amorous subject as a powerful transgression which leaves him alone and exposed; by a reversal of values, then, it is this sentimentality which today constitutes love’s obscenity.”

No one would have raised an eyebrow at

the little sexual accoutrements

of their love. These might provoke a smile

but little more. She e-mailed him a file

called “dirty pictures” in which she appeared

in all her glory playing with sex toys.

Even that phrase, “sex toys,” goes to show

how innocent they were. He sent her back

a picture of his hard-on. She was charmed.

The thing that was obscene, the dirty secret,

was neither flesh nor fetish. It was love

itself. Bataille describes the sentiment

in all of its vulgarity—a massive

throbbing organ. An embarrassment.

Can we all say, "I love Karen Finley"?

2011-02-17T10:33:00.003-05:00

The Feminist Press has just brought out The Reality Shows, a collection of her performance texts from the first decade of the millennium – commencing with “Make Love,” her response to 9/11 through a channeling of Liza Minelli which is, in Finley’s own estimation, “a complex amalgam of pee-in-the-pants humor, pain, and compassionate outpourings of sorrow” – and closing with “The Jackie Look,” which brings Jackie Kennedy Onassis back to ponder trauma, history, fashion and femininity as well as “the demands of being the first lady.” In between, Finley dwells with Terri Schiavo, Laura Bush, George W. Bush, Martha Stewart, Condoleezza Rice, and Eliot Spitzer. The texts are accompanied not only by photographs of Finley’s performances, but also by some of her own uncanny, disturbing and often very beautiful drawings.

I attended almost all of these shows, and each one stayed with me long after I left the performance space. In fact, the narrator of my novel went to see “The Passion of Terri Schiavo” and “The Dreams of Laura Bush” in 2007. She tries to explain Finley in an e-mail to her foreign lover. She recounts the NEA controversy, and the charges of obscenity. She says, “She is obscene. She is also fantastic and beautiful and sexual, and hysterical in the fullest sense of the term, and frightening and funny and deeply sad. I was very moved.” (p. 93) So was I.

The Reality Shows has a preface by Kathleen Hanna of the bands Bikini Kill and Le Tigre, and an introduction by my friend the brilliant psychoanalytic theorist Ann Pellegrini. I. Love. Karen. Finley.

Narcissism

2011-02-16T08:38:00.002-05:00

A few reviews have come out of The Correspondence Artist. So far they’ve all been pretty positive, although one guy wasn’t crazy about the images, and another wasn’t crazy about the end. When I read these things, mostly I’m just thrilled that the person actually read the book. Then I feel a little bad for a minute if they express some reservation, but I get over it pretty quickly.

The person, for example, that didn’t like the ending so much said it seemed a little “narcissistic” because the narrator is more in love with her own fiction than she is with her actual lover. But, being a narcissist, I decided to take this as a compliment.

My narrator has the same tendency. She writes an e-mail to her lover in which she quotes a passage from Nietzsche on women writers:

“The complete woman perpetrates literature in the same way as she perpetrates a little sin: as an experiment, in passing, looking around to see if someone notices and so that someone may notice.”

She says she knows the general consensus is that Nietzsche was a misogynist, but she finds some of the things he says about women kind of charming and totally recognizable in relation to her own person.

This may also explain why she put up for so long with Santutxo’s weird gender politics (see pp. 127-130).

Speaking of gender politics, I’m reading from the book and talking about feminist autobiographical fiction with Linda Schlossberg and Carmelita Tropicana on the 22^nd. Please come! Information here.

Why do I tell you these things?

2011-02-15T11:43:00.003-05:00

There’s a poem by John Ashbery called “This Room.” It ends:

… Why do I tell you these things?

You are not even here.

I love this poem. I also love the name of the volume it’s in: Your Name Here. I thought of this book, and especially of this poem, often while I was writing The Correspondence Artist. One of the disconcerting things about writing is that sometimes you think you’re writing to someone, but then realize that person isn’t there: you’re writing to yourself. In the novel, I reflect on this in relation to Lacan, but you don’t really need psychoanalytic theory to understand it.

Anyway, whether you’re writing an e-mail or a letter or a novel, something funny happens when this fact dawns on you. It’s a little liberating, and a little sad.

As with so many things, Fats Waller probably said it best:

I’m gonna sit right down and write myself a letter

And make believe it came from you

I’m gonna write the words so sweet

They’re gonna knock me off my feet

A lot of kisses on the bottom

I’ll be glad I got ‘em

I’m gonna smile and say, “I hope you’re feeling better,”

And close with love the way you do

I’m gonna sit right down and write myself a letter

And make believe it came from you

This is like that letter I wrote to/from Djeli on pp. 108-109 in The Correspondence Artist.

Oh, but I should also mention one other song: the “Love Theme from Spartacus,” which I will always think of as the “Love Theme with Tzipi Honigman.” I mean the version on the Bill Evans album, Conversations with Myself. Improvising with oneself is a lot like writing letters to oneself. I explain why this song makes me think of Tzipi on pp. 90-91 of the novel.

Happy Valentine's Day

2011-02-14T09:02:00.005-05:00

The Correspondence Artist is a book! That is, although the official release date is March 1, 2011, it’s printed and bound and you can order it here or you can go to your local independent bookstore and order it there (ISBN: 978-0-9820151-9-3) or if you really have to you can find it on Amazon or B&N but we all know you get extra karmic points for doing it the first or second way.

This being Valentine’s Day, I should mention that it makes the perfect Valentine’s gift. Buy four – one for each of your lovers!

If you are in or near New York City and are looking for something to do this evening, please come by St. Mark’s Church (10th St. and 2nd Ave.) at 8. Caroline Bergvall and Kim Rosenfield are reading poems (info here). Kim is reading from a new project called “I’ll Be Seeing You.” In honor of her reading, I made her this:

When I sing this song, I always cry a little when I get to the line about the moon. That’s because of that night that Djeli and I were looking at the moon from his terrace in Montmartre (p. 140). Or maybe it’s because of the night that Tzipi and I were looking at it from her terrace in Neve Tzedek (p. 150).

GatesofStPeter.com

2011-02-09T10:03:00.000-05:00

“Travelling to funerals was once an important family rite, but with greater secularity and a mobile population increasingly disconnected from original hometowns, watching a funeral online can seem better than not going at all.” Thus writes Times reporter Laura M. Holson in a front-page story in this Tuesday’s paper (“For Funerals Too Far, Mourners Gather on the Web,” NYT, 1/25/11). Event by Wire, Funeral One and Service Corporation International, the company that controls “2,000 funeral homes and cemeteries, including the venerable Frank E. Campbell funeral chapel on the Upper East Side of Manhattan,” represent some of America’s hearty entrepreneurial spirit harnessed to this effort to add a cybernetic dimension to the mourning process. It’s all so simple when you read the Times piece, it almost no longer makes sense to attend a funeral at all. For busy Americans who already multitask around the clock, funeral attendance may turn out to be just one more app on their iPhones. “Two weeks ago a friend of Ronald Rich, a volunteer firefighter in Wallace, N.C., died unexpectedly,” Holson goes on to explain in her Times piece. “When Mr. Rich called the mother of his friend to say he could not make the eight-hour drive to the funeral because a snowstorm threatened to close roads, he said the mother offered to send an e-mail invitation so he could watch the service online.” But the question is, will those who avail themselves of these funeral webcasts simultaneously pay their bills, check their Facebook accounts, and go into seedy chat rooms with dominatrixes who tantalizingly offer to shove their stiletto heels into their mouths and listen to the Dead Kennedys, all while friends and family members are being eulogized?

[This was originally posted to The Screaming Pope, Francis Levy's blog of rants and reactions to contemporary politics, art and culture.]