Hello from Oxford, Mississippi
June 27, 2007 | Comments Off
Sorry for the silence. I’m in Oxford, Mississippi, where I have consumed approximately fifty-nine pounds of fried catfish and seventy gallons of sweet tea and enough wine to give an ox a migraine.
I won’t start getting into everything I ate in the Delta, but if you ever find yourself in Greenwood, don’t miss the Crystal’s coconut pie. It’s a near-religious experience, provided you don’t slip into a diabetic coma.
Tomorrow we drive back to Nashville and I fly home to Brooklyn. Though it’s hard to imagine so much as rousing myself from this public computer to walk downstairs to my hotel room, I’m sure I’ll somehow manage to waddle out to the taxi line with my overloaded suitcase. I can’t wait to tell you about Rowan Oak, etc.
Meanwhile, you can watch the hilarious trailer for Shalom Auslander’s forthcoming memoir, Foreskin’s Lament (which really got Hollywood book scouts talking at Book Expo).
He’s also got a new personal history piece, “Save Us,” in The New Yorker (print only, unfortunately) this week.
Image of Faulkner’s grave taken from this Ole Miss site.
Quick note (from the Delta) on Faulkner’s childhood
June 25, 2007 | Comments Off
Poor Billy Faulkner. From Carolyn Porter’s forthcoming William Faulkner, the latest installment in Oxford University Press’ Lives & Legacies series:
While Murry Falkner was a figure of weakness in his first son’s eyes, his wife Maud was the opposite. On her kitchen wall hung a sign saying “Never explain. Never complain” (a Victorian maxim traceable to the British prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli). However disappointed she was in her husband and her marriage, she was determined to raise her sons according to her own lights, her oldest son in particular. For example, having observed that Billy was not going to be as tall as her younger boys, Maud bought him a kind of corset (a canvas vest that laced up in the back and held the shoulders back) at age thirteen and forced him to wear it for almost two years so that he would stand as straight and upright as possible, as his great-grandfather was reputed to have done. (She apparently succeeded; many would notice Faulkner’s markedly erect posture throughout his life.) Faulkner neither explained nor complained, apparently, even though the brace precluded his playing baseball, among other athletic endeavors he enjoyed…. His cousin, Sally Murry, a partial model for the adventurous little girl Caddy Compson, was similarly cursed at this time, but she so despised the corset that she got her friends to untie it. [Emphasis added.]
“William Faulkner, 1947,” a photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson, is taken from this site.
The Smart Set: Lauren Cerand’s weekly events
June 25, 2007 | Comments Off
The Smart Set is a weekly feature, compiled by Lauren Cerand, that usually appears Mondays at 12:30pm and highlights the best of the week to come. Special favor is given to New York’s independent booksellers and venues, and low-cost and free events. Please send details to lauren [at] maudnewton.com by the Thursday prior to publication, with the date in the subject line.
MONDAY, JUNE 25: Join us for a rare treat as Jean Thompson, praised by ELLE for her “stirring prose and masterfully funny repartee,” gives her first reading in New York since 1999 (when she was nominated for the National Book Award for her last collection) from her widely acclaimed new collection of short stories, THROW LIKE A GIRL. At Barnes & Noble, Astor Place. 7PM, FREE [full disclosure, as always: Jean is one of my PR clients].
TUESDAY, JUNE 26: I like to dance around my apartment to this song, so that’s what I’ll probably do on Tuesday night. There’s also the “Emo-Thug 2 Release Party.” I have no idea what that means but it sounds great. So does this reading series, Other Means.
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 27: In a rare appearance (her first time in New York since 1999, when she was nominated for the National Book Award for her last collection) Jean Thompson reads from her widely praised new collection of short stories, THROW LIKE A GIRL at the season finale of Amanda Stern’s wildly popular Happy Ending reading series, along with Alison Bechdel and Eliza Griswold, with music from One Ring Zero. Doors open at 7, show at 8 sharp, FREE.
THURSDAY, JUNE 28: If Tuesday night’s dance party wasn’t enough creative expression for you, you can always make an experimental film (or unearth one): “SPLICE recently celebrated its first anniversary of bringing eclectic and underground sounds and performers from around the world to New York audiences. If you are a VJ, video/multimedia artist, or experimental filmmaker, we invite you to submit your contact details and information about your work. WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR: Multimedia artists who create both sound/music and video; Video artists interested in projecting their work, by itself or in collaboration with musicians; VJs who can generate live and remixed video during DJ sets and musical performances; Filmmakers with experimental (preferably short-form) works.”
FRIDAY, JUNE 29: “The launch of a new online journal, Essays & Fictions is to be celebrated at a reading open to the public at La Plaza Cultural Community Garden in the East Village, 9th St and Ave C – Friday June 29 6 p.m., with a rain date of Sunday, July 1st. Danielle Winterton, David Pollock, Adam Golaski, Jeff Paris and others will read from the premier issue.” Recommended.
SATURDAY, JUNE 30: At the pacesetting downtown gallery jen bekman [full disclosure, as always: where I used to be the PR director, but now we are 'just friends'], A New American Portrait, a group exhibition of photographs featuring artists at the vanguard of contemporary portraiture in America, is shaping up to be the most talked about show of the season judging from the opening night photos.
SUNDAY, JULY 1: How intriguing– is “Broken English” the story of your life?
Happy weekend from the road
June 23, 2007 | Comments Off
I left for my Tennessee-Mississippi sojourn sans laptop (R.I.P.), cell phone (forgotten at work), and socks (oops).
Updates will be sporadic for the next week or two, but I’ve got a camera, and just finished rereading As I Lay Dying, so I should at least get some photos and some Faulkner quotes up. (Did you know the people of Oxford used to call him “Count No-Count“? I didn’t, or had forgotten, until my uncle mentioned it offhand tonight.)
The emaciated horse in the photo above pulls a covered wagon containing three passengers who are identified on the back as “Grandpa, Martha, and myself.”
Martha is my grandmother. Grandpa is, I believe, Sylvester Kinchen (pictured below with his wife, Martha Caroline). And I’m guessing that “myself” is Martha’s sister Louise.
From Newbury with Love, through the Iron Curtain
June 21, 2007 | Comments Off
Marina Aidova was a young girl when her father, Slava, was imprisoned for plotting to set up a printing press. While he served time in one of the U.S.S.R.’s most notorious camps, Marina and her mother, Lera, were very much alone.
Lera’s coworkers left rooms when she entered. Neighbors crossed the street to avoid her. Even old friends were afraid to fraternize with the family lest they too be put under surveillance.
The Aidovs’ only company arrived in June 1971, in the form of letters from an English antiquarian bookseller, Harold Edwards, and his wife Olive. Harold selected Marina from an Amnesty International list of children of political dissidents both because her birthday was the day before his and because of his lifelong fascination with Russian literature and culture.
The correspondence began in July 1971 with a postcard that read only: “With love from Newbury. Berks. England. Harold and Olive.”
A good third of the letters and packages that followed were delayed for weeks or months, or never received. But over the years the families exchanged clothes, food, and books, remembered birthdays, and debated that age-old question: Tolstoy, or Dostoevsky? (Dostoevsky.)
The formality of the exchanges (collected in the forthcoming From Newbury with Love), and all the things that are left unsaid, evoke the Cold War era in much the same way that the adolescent preoccupations recorded in Anne Frank’s diary gain poignancy once the reader understands that the “Young Girl” of the title never gets to become a woman. But unlike Anne Frank, Marina is alive today. And she attributes her career as an English translator largely to the correspondence with Harold and Olive.
From Newbury with Love (Melville House) appears early next month. The book was published in the U.K. — see “Write back in the USSR” — last fall.
See also current Amnesty International letter-writing campaigns, which include “Justice for Anna Politkovskaya” and “Safeguard freedom of expression in Russia.” The “2007 Greetings Card Campaign” begins in November.
The Elements of Iris Murdoch
June 20, 2007 | Comments Off
I’ve winnowed down the 87 books I wanted to take on my trip. Now I’ve got a manageable stack of five.
One of these is Iris Murdoch’s The Black Prince, recommended by the same friend who steered me toward The Sea, The Sea, a strange and discursive novel fashioned as the semi-sociopathic journal of a former theater director. It’s become one of my favorites.
In anticipation of The Black Prince, I’ve been reading up on Murdoch’s life and writing, and I found my way to Tom Phillips’ portraits and explanatory essay. He writes of the difficulty he had capturing her “luminous presence” for a work commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery.
[T]he visual metaphor that my head created was of an electric light bulb in that gloomy corner, glowing, casting out darkness. I suppose this is what people of a mystical bent call an ‘aura’.Unfortunately on the canvas itself I lost this vision about half way through the work. Iris started to shrink and began to lose heavily to the Titian. Taking advantage of a longish break I thought hard about how to get out of this impasse without faking. By her next visit I had started from memory four very large drawings whose scale challenged the painting. Each one of the drawings seemed to deal with a different element and I came to think of them as representing earth, air, fire and water. In more practical terms they taught me that the historiated aspects of Iris’s face, its lines and creases, were not really important to her actual presence. Thus I found my way back to the original light-bulb image.
It makes sense to me, somehow, that a writer of such complexity would be difficult to evoke on a single canvas. I don’t know about you, but I’m more captivated by The Elements (above) than by the official portrait.
The Smart Set: Lauren Cerand’s weekly events
June 18, 2007 | Comments Off
The Smart Set is a weekly feature, compiled by Lauren Cerand, that usually appears Mondays at 12:30pm and highlights the best of the week to come. Special favor is given to New York’s independent booksellers and venues, and low-cost and free events. Please send details to lauren [at] maudnewton.com by the Thursday prior to publication, with the date in the subject line.
MONDAY, JUNE 18: Says Emilie Stewart of Smart Set fave The Reader’s Room: “We were awash last week in stunning, startling poetry, and this week we return to a poetic ‘state’ of mind of a sort, as we host a night of readings from LIVING ON THE EDGE OF THE WORLD: New Jersey Writers Take on the Garden State (just published by Touchstone/Fireside). Funny, irreverent, nostalgic, heartfelt, this book will make you wonder, “Why didn’t I get to grow up in Jersey?” Contributors Lucinda Rosenfeld and Joshua Braff will read, and the ever delightful editor, Irina Reyn, will introduce.” At Mo Pitkin’s. 7PM, one drink minimum. In Brooklyn, “Brooklyn Independent is pleased to present a selection of short films from the Lake County Film Festival.” At Barbes. 7PM, FREE.
TUESDAY, JUNE 19: PAGE series at the National Arts Club co-director (and all around lit star) Wah-Ming Chang reads from her work with other NYFA Fiction Fellows at the Drawing Center: “Please join Jenny Offill, Shamar Hill, Wah-Ming Chang, Vestal McIntyre, and Emily Blair as they present new work. Ernesto Mestre-Reed will moderate discussion. The readers are 2006 Artists’ Fellowship recipients of the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA). This presentation is co-sponsored by Artists & Audiences Exchange, a public program of NYFA.” Highly recommended. 6:30PM, FREE. And the discerning Michelle Lin sends word about another SoHo event: “I’m writing to invite you to the opening of the Atlantic Gallery’s latest exhibit, Playing for Keeps: Toys and Their Side Effects. “When TOYS are cherished by adults the quest of the TOY becomes a lifestyle and a contact sport. The days of playing marbles, blocks and jacks seem so distant when games are played by grown-ups on a global scale. Atlantic Gallery invites artists to play with TOYS and consider the side effects, spiritually, culturally, economically, and politically about the games we play.” The reception is this Tuesday, June 19th from 6-8 pm, and the Atlantic Gallery is at 40 Wooster St., between the Canal and Spring St. stops on the A,C,E lines.”
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 20: The monthly Mixer series takes place on Wednesday evening at Cakeshop, with “Readings by Mark Doty, Paul Lisicky, Jennifer Murphy, and introducing Caitlin Delohery. Music by Schwervon!” 7-9PM, FREE.
THURSDAY, JUNE 21: At McNally Robinson, “Writing From The Edge”… “a historic appearance by Tommy Trantino, the prison author whose book Lock The Lock (Knopf, 1974) was lauded by luminaries such as Henry Miller, Allen Ginsberg, Kurt Vonnegut and William Burroughs. Trantinto was convicted of the 1963 murder of 2 New Jersey police officers and spent many years on death row before his sentence was commuted to life. It was while in prison that he turned to art as a means of self-preservation, and his art and writing exudes a powerful influence on the underground writing scene. Tony O’Neill’s work has been championed by such important names in the American underground as Dan Fante, Dennis Cooper and John Giorno. He is the author of Digging The Vein, Seizure Wet Dreams and his latest, Songs From The Shooting Gallery: Poems 1999 – 2006. Tommy and Tony will read selections from their work as well as taking part in a Q&A.” 7PM, FREE.
FRIDAY, JUNE 22: Don’t miss “BOOKED! The Books Through Bars Benefit Art Auction and Party!” featuring “Street Art Inspired by Issues of Reading and Incarceration” by 35 artists at ABC No Rio, “Auction and Closing Party benefits Books Through Bars. No Cover Charge. Cheap Beer. Auction over and art gone by 10:30 – So come early!” 7PM, FREE.
SATURDAY, JUNE 23: “Jonathan LeVine Gallery is proud to announce E Pluribus Venom, a solo exhibit of new works by Shepard Fairey. This show will be the artist’s first solo show at Jonathan LeVine Gallery and will feature a second, off-site exhibition space for the artist to exhibit large-scale installations and murals on wood and canvas. Shepard Fairey’s provocative collection includes politically charged paintings, screen prints, stencils, album covers and mixed media pieces rich with metaphor, humor and seductive decorative elements.” Opening reception: 5-9PM, FREE.
SUNDAY, JUNE 24: Say Nita Noveno and Caroline Berger of Smart Set fave Sunday Salon: “To celebrate our fifth year, we came up with a grand idea– skydiving en masse! That’s right, imagine leaping off a cliff and soaring over the ocean blue, eye level with the gulls, and trailing above a pod of killer whales! How awesome would that be? Then, the logistics sunk in, you know, airfare, bus fare, guides, wind factor, lunch… for how many again? Anyhow, it was a fine thought for a celebration, but we are going to stick to what we know best, equally breath-taking yet no movement required (unless you feel like it). Join us by singing in our fifth year with four effusively talented writers and musical guest. Books by our featured writers will be on sale and so will the finest of NY beers and wines at our home: Stain Bar, 766 Grand St (take “L” to Grand and walk one block west) in Williamsburg. The stars have aligned this month. We’re celebrating on the same day our sister Salons in Chicago and Nairobi are holding their readings. Check them out (and go if you’re in the area). (What’s that? NY Salon alumnus, Jeff Allen, reading in Nairobi? Yes, indeedy!) [Full disclosure, as always: Jean Thompson, one of my PR clients, is reading at Sunday Salon Chicago]. 7PM, FREE.
Joseph Clarke visits the Creation Museum/Fortress
June 18, 2007 | Comments Off
Joseph Clarke (my brother-in-law) sends this brief report following his recent tour of Kentucky’s Creation Museum.
Also, after the photos, he and his brother Max note the museum’s contrast between the idyllic world of Genesis and the filthy and depraved modern era. Joseph invokes Derrida, and Max puzzles over the American Museum of Natural History’s new “Mythic Creatures” exhibit.
I just got back from a visit to the recently-opened Creation Museum, located across the Kentucky border not far from Cincinnati. The place crackles with all the animatronic and multimedia glitz that one might expect from a museum founded by a former Universal Studios executive, and it seems to be doing a booming business.
Rather than present a coherent argument for a particular view of life’s origins, the exhibitions encourage visitors to question the scientific method and the institutions of modern science. A Genesis-based history in which creation occurred 6000 years ago is offered as an alternative, but, notwithstanding all the fossils on display, the museum doesn’t make an evidence-based case for its claims. Instead, a sensory overload of animations, dioramas, and plaques about contested scientific theories seems to dissolve any kind of rational engagement with natural history; in this digitally-enhanced intellectual fog, the only sure anchor is given in the immutability and univocity of a literal reading of Genesis as an “eyewitness” account.
The biggest surprise for me was the extreme security regime. The museum, located in the middle of nowhere, is surrounded by a sturdy iron fence with a gated entry. Patrol vehicles, security guards, and heavy bollards surround the building; inside, it is full of security cameras and listening devices, and polite uniformed attendants are always in sight. The crowd of happy white suburbanites shuffling through the exhibits and whispering “amen” during the movie presentations certainly didn’t show any outward signs of paranoia, but with its scenography stripped away, the museum is a fortress.
Happy weekend from the Free Text Book custodians
June 15, 2007 | Comments Off
Textbooks devoted to Caesar, Cicero, and Virgil were part of the State of Texas’ high school curriculum in my grandmother’s day, evidently.
Welty v. Maxwell on autobiography in fiction
June 15, 2007 | Comments Off
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Speaking of Eudora Welty, not long ago I came upon a fascinating set of conversations that Virginia Ross and Sally Wolff had with Welty and her friend and former editor William Maxwell about each other in 1999. Maxwell died the following year.
The two writers discussed, among other things, their opposing perspectives on using people and events from their own experiences in their fiction. Welty clearly disapproved of Maxwell’s reliance on autobiography. “I’m not used to people writing real things about their lives,” she said.
I can’t accept it. I try to protect people from it. Bill has written a lot of fiction that is autobiography. They’re very different forms. That’s the thing what would chain me back the most — if I had real life staring me in the face. I can only write fiction if I feel I’m not being tied down to reality. Bill is absolutely the opposite. It’s the method he uses to work from.I understand the feeling he has when he reads The Folded Leaf now — trying to decide who is invented and who is remembered. Bill sticks closer to the facts than I do. He is scrupulous about facts. I never write about my life automatically, except when it was obvious that’s what I was doing, as in One Writer’s Beginnings. Otherwise, it would never occur to me to do so. His life was pretty sad, whereas mine was carefree — so we weren’t the same.
Maxwell, on the other hand, couldn’t imagine writing fiction that didn’t start with his own life.
I think Eudora may have had a moral disapproval of [my use of autobiography in fiction]. If I had had to write only about imaginary people, I would have had to close up my typewriter. I wrote about my life in less and less disguise as I grew older, and finally with no disguise — except the disguise we create for ourselves, which is self-deception.
A case for accidentally discovering some other things
June 14, 2007 | Comments Off
Many of the essays in Michael Bierut’s Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design originally appeared at Design Observer, the group blog he co-edits.
The book opens with a cautionary piece, “Warning: May Contain Non-Design Content,” that should be required reading for practitioners of any art who believe it must be practiced and considered in a vacuum. To tide you over until you can track down the whole essay, here’s a passage cobbled together from the opening and closing paragraphs.
I write for a blog called Design Observer. Usually my co-editors and I write about design. Sometimes, we don’t. Sometimes, for instance, we write about politics. Whenever this happens, in come the commenters: “What does this have to do with design? If you have a political agenda please keep it the other pages. I am not sure of your leaning but I come here for design.”I come here for design. It happens every time the subject strays beyond fonts and layout software. (“Obscure references … trying to impress each other… please, can we start talking some sense?”) In these cases, our visitors react like diners who just got served penne alla vodka in a Mexican restaurant: it’s not the kind of dish they came for, and they doubt the proprietors have the expertise to serve it up….
[T]he great thing about graphic design is that it is almost always about something else. Corporate law. Professional football. Art. Politics. Robert Wilson. And if I can’t get excited about whatever that something else is, I really have trouble doing good work as a designer. To me, the conclusion is inescapable: the more things you’re interested in, the better your work will be.
Bierut’s most recent Design Observer post is “Everything I Know About Design I Learned from The Sopranos.”
Christian bookstores in the family, and their wares
June 14, 2007 | Comments Off
From the department of odd relationship coincidences: Max’s grandmother founded the Miami Christian bookstore that my mom was inspired by, and reacting against, when she set up her own bookstore/storefront church a couple miles down the road, back in 1983. (See teenage loser essay for details.)
His grandparents attended the very Baptist church my parents tried to compromise on before the elders kicked our family out. We were booted over “doctrinal differences,” i.e. Mom’s gleeful arguments in her adult Sunday school classes that tongues are still alive today and God calls some women to be preachers.
My friends raised without religion don’t get that, even among Protestants — even among born-again Protestants — there’s a great deal of disagreement about The Way Jesus Wants You to Live. A PCA Presbyterian is not a Baptist is not a Charismatic, etc.
The wares at Mr. Maud’s grandma’s shop tended toward James Dobson and Pat Robertson and C.S. Lewis, while my mom’s tended toward Jimmy Swaggart and Marilyn Hickey. These distinctions probably don’t mean much to you — yet. But I’ve got some of these books lying around. Why not share the joy?
Here we have a few scans from a copy of Dobson’s What Wives Wish Their Husbands Knew About Women, distributed to Mr. Maud’s grandparents in the mid-70s at the 27th Annual Christian Booksellers Association banquet.
None of what Dobson says in these short passages is particularly surprising, given what he stands for, but I really enjoy his unique brand of glib and patronizing “support” for mothers. All jobs are boring, you know, ladies!
And don’t miss his exhortations to fathers, whose “ego-needs” are of course fulfilled by their important jobs, to let their wives whine about the kids at night and even give them a break “at least once a week.” Or Zeebah’s favorite part, where Dobson plays a “game” with his infant son that involves “let[ting] the point of a pin scrape his skin.”
Dear Nostradamus, et al.: Othmer on futurists’ wrath
June 13, 2007 | Comments Off
James P. Othmer is a fellow contributor to the high school loser anthology. His debut novel, The Futurist, sits in my to-be-read pile. Below he discusses the enraged reactions of trend forecasters to his fictional portrayal of the profession.
Last summer, Ted Genoways, editor of The Virginia Quarterly Review, which published the first chapter of The Futurist, was approached at a book fair by an actual futurist. She said she had recently discussed my novel, its potential fallout, and damage control strategies at a convention with other futurists. If she were truly good at her job, she would have been able to forecast my eventual hardcover sales and then, realizing the folly of her concern, dismiss the book’s laughable threat with her colleagues at the futurist convention happy hour.
Then there was the TV interview on a Toronto business show about our culture’s obsession with what’s next, for which the producers tried without success to convince a futurist to appear with me. I just wanted to discuss my novel with a wildly inappropriate target audience, not have a cage match with, say, Alvin Toffler, but the futurists feared I would make them look bad.
Apparently that’s what the producers were hoping for, too. When I saw the replay of the interview, the words on the scroll bar read, “Is futurism just a bunch of BS?” Which didn’t exactly help my case.
I have no beef with futurists. Really, I’m very much pro-future. In fact, I distinctly recall having the sensation of kind of looking forward to something the other day (I think it was a nap). And once, that same day, I heard myself thinking, What if…? Shit, I even have a calendar (America’s Ballparks) on my wall that occasionally shows the current month. Which anyone can see makes me a big believer in the future, if not a proponent of all those who claim to be able to foretell it.
Yet futurists keep bugging me. Despite the fact that over the years I’ve met and been impressed by many futurists, despite the fact that I’m a huge fan of the writing of Philip K. Dick, Stanislaw Lem and William Gibson, these futurists write angry emails saying things like, Who are you to tell me that I don’t know what’s really going to happen on the sub-continent in 2012? Or, What makes you think I’m so wrong about predicting that sports cars with prescription lens windshields will be the next big thing for aging baby boomers? And, Who are you to write a book (let alone a novel) that renounces my very high-paying yet hard-to-define profession?
I think one reason futurists are upset with me is that my eponymous protagonist is a plagiarizing, lying, self-absorbed, borderline alcoholic fraud. But really, does this mean that all futurists are, too? I mean, just because Rabbit Angstrom is a sleazy car salesman, are all car salespeople sleazy? Okay, but still…
Another theory is that these angry prognosticators simply haven’t read the book. The fact that the number of angry futurist emails (587) exceeds actual book sales (563*) reinforces this hypothesis. Then again, if they had read the book there’s a strong chance that they’d still be pissed.
But it’s not all bad between me and the present day Oracles at Delphi. Faith Popcorn, whose fictional self appears without her permission in my novel, recently called me to tell me that she had read it and “fell out of bed I was laughing so hard.” Which I took as a very good sign, and not just because she didn’t call to say she was suing me. Read more
Bad News Hughes’ Diary of Indignities in paperback
June 11, 2007 | Comments Off
At last Patrick Hughes’ Diary of Indignities is headed for a bookstore near you. I believe the angelic lad on the cover (above) is Hughes himself — pre-D&D Magistrate days.
The book’s statistically improbable phrases include “poo water,” “ass blood,” and “saltwater catfish.” Says Hughes:
You just ain’t getting Party Melon and poo water and ass blood and Skinhead Katrina from regular books, and Amazon proves it. (I do know a guy who suspects he got ass blood, and maybe poo water too, from Skinhead Katrina, but they got ointments for that kind of shit these days so let’s not dwell on it.)
If you aren’t familiar with Bad News Hughes and his travails, start with Christmas 2005, his mom’s 60th birthday party, a chronicle of his anal fissure, or a dispatch from the Hoggetowne Medieval Faire.
The Smart Set: Lauren Cerand’s weekly events
June 11, 2007 | Comments Off
The Smart Set is a weekly feature, compiled by Lauren Cerand, that usually appears Mondays at 12:30pm and highlights the best of the week to come. Special favor is given to New York’s independent booksellers and venues, and low-cost and free events. Please send details to lauren [at] maudnewton.com by the Thursday prior to publication, with the date in the subject line.
The Smart Set is late today because I slept in. Since I woke up, I’ve been drinking sweet tea, enjoying the breeze, listening to Chet Baker and not compiling events at all. My picks for the week will be up either tonight at 12:30am or tomorrow at 12:30pm; until then, I recommend all of the above.
UPDATED:
TUESDAY, JUNE 12: From the French Embassy: “I just wanted to let you know about the new French play opening Wednesday, The Devil on All Sides. It will be previewed tomorrow, Tuesday June 12, at 8:30pm, and will open to the public the following day (it runs through July 1). The play is set during the war in ex-Yugoslavia, and follows the haunting story of a Christian who falls in love with a Muslim. When it premiered in 2002, it was hailed as the “Best French Play of the Year” and “the Theatrical Discovery of the Year” by the National Critics’ Syndicate. For its U.S. premiere, it is being staged by FoolsFURY, with a unique combination of physicality and poetry.” At PS 122. P.P.S: “Use code FRA for $10 tickets!”
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 13: MaudNewton.com guestblogger Pia Z.Ehrhardt reads as part of Amanda Stern’s Happy Ending Series, in the usual good company. 8PM, FREE.
THURSDAY, JUNE 14: Barnes & Noble’s “Upstairs at the Square” celebrates its first anniversary with June’s edition, featuring Armistead Maupin (Michael Tolliver Lives; is it or isn’t it a sequel to Tales of the City?), and Elk City, a band whose lead singer the Village Voice describes as “like a female Bowie engaged in a three-way with Hope Sandoval and Patti Smith.” [Full disclosure, as always: I am the PR consultant for this project] 7PM, FREE. And, the PAGE Series at the National Arts Club presents Min Jin Lee (Free Food for Millionaires), Manuel Munoz (The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue), and Helena Maria Viramontes (Their Dogs Came with Them). [Full disclosure, as always: I'm working with Min Jin to publicize her debut] 7PM, FREE.
FRIDAY, JUNE 15: The main thing I miss about growing up in the suburbs is all the sweet tag sales. Fortunately, charming historical landmark John Street Church holds a “courtyard sale,” from 10 – 4pm.
SATURDAY, JUNE 16: Yuka Honda (of Cibo Matto), “celebrated for her soulful lyricism, funky breakbeats, and heartfelt melodies,” continues Abron Arts Center’s Blurring Boundaries Series. 8PM, $15.
SUNDAY, JUNE 17: Antoine Wilson reads from his buzzed-about debut novel, The Interloper, at KGB. 7PM, FREE.