I invited myself to D.E. Rasso’s place to watch Sarah Palin’s Alaska. It was every bit as vacuous and grating as Nancy Franklin says, and also filled with fundamentalist dog-whistle moments. We wrote about it (after three bottles of wine) for The Awl.
“Why is it that as soon as you hand [your draft] to a reader, you get your best ideas for the story and you want to snatch it out of their hands and make them wait for the results of the next round of revisions?”
The Second Pass is throwing a party at Melville House Bookstore this Wednesday night, and I’ll be reading a very brief excerpt from the novel I’m finishing up. The other contributors reading are Carlene Bauer (Not That Kind of Girl), Will Blythe (To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever), and Jason Zinoman, theater critic for the New York . . .
Joshua Cohen characterizes The Instructions as “a very long joke … that lacks a punch line.” I can see not buying the voice, but, for whatever my goyishe perspective is worth, I completely disagree with his reading. (More & more.)