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Saturday, 12 June 2010

New fiction

The New Yorker continues to be a great source of summer reading. The current issue (June 14 and 21; they are slower in the summer!) has eight short stories by young writers (part of "20 under 40," which features 20 writers under the age of 40). Two stories caught my eye.

Rivka Galchen contributed "The Entire Northern Side was Covered with Fire," a story about a woman who can't focus on her husband's departure, or a meeting about movie rights to her book or her pregnancy. Instead, she's thinking about the mail she gets from prisoners and the Tunguska event (to which the title refers).

She talks to a friend about her husband:
Then he said, “I thought it was a work of fantasy, Trish. I mean, I guess I should have told you about it—”
“What?”
“The blog,” he said. “His blog. I-Can’t-Stand-My-Wife-Dot-Blogspot-Dot-Com—”
“Are you going through one of your sleepless phases again?”
“Trish, I know it makes me sound snoopy, but Jonathan always seemed a little off to me, you know? So after he left your apartment one time, when I was alone there, I don’t know, I’m sorry, I opened up his laptop, and I looked through the browser history. I was curious about his porn. I thought maybe there would be some really weird porn—”
“There was weird porn?”
“None at all, actually. Which in itself was kind of weird. No porn. Just his blog. And—”
I like the ending.

Did I then take that movie meeting, all unprepared, after dressing in a way to accentuate my pregnancy, then to downplay it, then changing outfits again to accentuate it? Did I have no ideas? Did I start talking about the Kantian sublime, and about meteors and about love? A trans-generational love story with an old shepherd in Siberia, and a latter-day woman who knits, and a transfigurative event, and the sense that life is an enormous mystery but with secret connections that, you know, knit us all together? I did. All those things which I so studiously knew nothing about. Meteors enter the Earth’s atmosphere every day. I was betraying so many, I felt so clean. ♦

You can read it here.

The other one that I read "Lenny Hearts Eunice" by Gary Shteyngart starts out as a romance between two Americans in Rome, told from their two very different perspectives.

His:

"But don't bury me yet, judgmental diary. A new Lenny heart beats more convincingly than the old one. Eunice Park will save me. You just watch.

He's in love.

Hers:
"P.S. I met this old, gross guy at a party yesterday and we got really drunk and I sort of let him go down on me. There was another even older guy, this sculptor, trying to get into my pants, so I figured, you know, the lesser evil.

It's a love story, and I won't spoil it for you. The writer says (in his interview)

"Good fiction makes me turn off all the other parts of my brain, so that I become quiet and submissive, entirely at the mercy of the work at hand.

Give it a try.

Saturday, 16 August 2008

I love New York so bad it's good

Theirs was a New York love, a checkered taxi ride burning rubber, and like the city their passion was open 24/7, steam rising from their bodies like slick streets exhaling warm, moist, white breath through manhole covers stamped "Forged by DeLaney Bros., Piscataway, N.J."
Garrison Spik
Washington, D.C.
Winner, Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest

This is the winning entry in the 2008 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest for bad opening sentences to imaginary novels.

Official web site: bulwer-lytton.com
2008 winners
One more for those who don't want to click the link (Winner for Detective):
Mike Hummer had been a private detective so long he could remember Preparation A, his hair reminded everyone of a rat who'd bitten into an electrical cord, but he could still run faster than greased owl snot when he was on a bad guy's trail, and they said his friskings were a lot like getting a vasectomy at Sears.
Robert B. Robeson
Lincoln, Nebraska

Saturday, 22 March 2008

China is cracking down on Tibet. Western journals have been made to leave some areas. The unrest has spread to neighboring provinces as well (Yunnan and Sichuan, even Chengdu). The official news agency is saying that they will "resolutely crush" anti-government demonstrations by Tibetans.

It looks like the 2008 Olympics will be hosted by a country in disgrace.

Tuesday, 22 January 2008

Today on Wall Street

To anyone who works in equities: keep your head and good luck today.

Sunday, 06 January 2008

J. M. W. Turner

I went to the National Gallery of Art and saw the Turner show. It is great!
Unfortunately, also it's over (ending today).
I love his ability to capture luminosity, as illustrated in this picture, "The Fighting Téméraire tugged to her last Berth to be broken up". (1838)

Links:
wikipedia
National Gallery of Art exhibition (permanent collection)
WebMuseum