I caught him in his bathroom dumping live fish / on account of he was moving house. If he loved me / he’d set the fish down right this instant! / He didn’t love me but he liked me well enough / to stop, to drive across town, over speed bumps, / to his new place, me with that half-filled tank . . .
Something awful happens when you start to achieve a degree of success as a writer. All of a sudden, people sidle up to you at parties, stick up their hands at your readings, and ask questions about things other than your book. At first, all they really want to know about is your “writing process”: What kind of chair do you sit in? Do you have a favorite font? Do you line up your highlighter pens in a little rainbow every morning before you start?
In the first 10 pages of Jordy Rosenberg’s second novel, Night Night Fawn, the walls are already closing in on the novel’s narrator, Barbara Rosenberg. She is trapped in her cramped 14th-floor apartment on East 69th Street and Second Avenue — “an address in which, as everybody knows, there is no honor” — the same “shrunken little apartment every Striver-Jew . . . moved to by the 1960s,” where she has lived her entire adult life. She is dying of cancer, addicted to opiates, and her mensch husband, Stephen, is dead.
Late this January, encouraged by the sheer familiarity of a vertical motion — snow’s impersonal descent over the neighborhood, creaking freshly underfoot; its vicious rise, so steep, to the mnemonic occasion — questions around the ugliness of everything began to take on renewed urgency across the mind’s more circular regions. To help make much-needed headway on This Truly Fascinating, Very Subtle and Entirely Sincere Question, facilitator Leon Teener . . .
Ironically, the Greeks and Romans were pretty goth. As a Roman tombstone tells us, “We are, and we were, nothing. See, reader, how quickly us mortals come from nothing and return to nothing.” Okay, maybe that’s a little long for a Hot Topic t-shirt, but how about this one? Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo — “I was not, then I was, now I’m not, I don’t care.”
Cards on the table: there is no God, and Christian rock cannot achieve greatness. Chances are you agree with the latter; to each their own with the former. John Jeremiah Sullivan, in his GQ classic “Upon This Rock” of 2004, claimed the genre had “excellence-proofed itself”: It’s message music for listeners who know the message cold, and, what’s more, it operates under a perceived responsibility—one the artists embrace—to “reach people.”
The crisper drawers / are the refrigerator’s calves. / The backsides of tires / are the calves of cars. / As high as the mist rises up / from where the white cords of falling water / plunge into the blue lagoon / is how high the calves / of a waterfall are. / A campfire’s calves / are comparatively low / for they’re its glowing embers. / Why can’t we see / the Statue of Liberty’s calves?
The hottest, driest summer on record is coming to an end, and all through the digital ether the call is going out: “THE MOVIES ARE BACK. THE MOVIES ARE BACK.” This month marks my first year as film critic at The Metropolitan Review, so perhaps it’s time to editorialize and examine the claim. Are “the movies” indeed “back”? Are young people about to witness a renaissance the likes of which no generation has seen since those rolling New Waves of the ’60s?
The coroner said the manner of death was suicide, with “blunt or injury to the head, trunk and extremities.” The dead man’s coworkers probably heard the crunch of breaking bones as his body hit the floor from stories above in the Amazon warehouse. It’s a strange sound, human bones cracking, hard to place, and it only becomes disgusting once you realize what you’ve heard.
I’d told Delahaye that I was done stealing cars, or at least done stealing whole cars. Carjacking was a noble trade once upon a time, with a mannered and cordial community around it. Even considering the ideological schism between the whole-hog hotwire or key-fob clone artists and the more targeted hubcap and wheel men, who may be better considered as a subspecies of bipper (these being not so much car thieves as they are general purpose thieves in the habit of stealing from parked, unoccupied cars) we could count ourselves lucky to conduct business like gentlemen.
The initial pleasure of an Éric Rohmer film is the pleasure of a beautiful face. The initial response of any viewer is a dazed enchantment with his titillating aesthetics. The faces, yes, but also the French landscape and the youthful, lithe bodies that populate it. Despite its name, even Rohmer’s A Tale of Winter begins with tones of blush pink and sparkling summer azure. A seagull flies overhead to the dulcet notes of a piano. A couple lounges on a beach in nude, edenic delight.
Richard Russo fans will recognize some familiar markers of his fiction in his latest novel, Under the Falls. The setting is a landscape of physical, economic, and emotional desolation — Stone Mountain, a hardscrabble, down-on-its-luck upstate New York town where the old lakeside amusement park rides are dismantled and rusting. This is “a place that doesn’t yield many good outcomes,” where Russo’s characters are merely scrambling to survive. Unhappy as they are, they are mostly unwilling or unable to leave.
I was a great collaborator with / wartime cigarettes, an artist / with the conical scream-sighs / of life under bombardment. / I trust you more under / a broken street lamp, under / a shattered sky space, / where time stills / Than I ever did at dinner / tables pushed together on / sidewalks where some grand / conspiracy was hatched beneath . . .
For some of us avid readers, the joy of reading novels is nearly matched by the pleasure of recommending them to our most simpatico friends. Thoughtful criticism can play this role writ large. I can still remember the reviewers who first stimulated my interest in particular authors: Martin Amis’ collected reviews of various J. G. Ballard novels in The War Against Cliché; Alan Hollinghurst’s insightful review of Bryan Washington’s first novel Memorial and Washington’s excellent collection of interconnected short stories, Lot; or Rachel Kushner’s paean to Denis Johnson in The Hard Crowd.
AT THE END OF MARCH, I was sitting at a departure gate at JFK, having endured a brutal frigid winter exiled upstate in a yurt in the woods, about to fly to Tokyo to bury my maternal grandmother, when I got a strange and unusual email. From a woman, Kirstie, who said she lived in Scotland, on the Isle of Lewis, in the Outer Hebrides, and that she wanted to fly me out and feed and house me for two weeks over the summer solstice.