"Mount Rushmore Carved With a Swiss Army Knife"

With the theatrical adaption of The Road finally arriving, Cormac McCarthy's ol' mug has been popping up everywhere - newspapers, magazines, online, right here. I remember reading The Crossing in high school, the second installment in his Border Trilogy, and not liking it. Despite its beautifully described violence, which I didn't know could exist, I was confused and too young to understand such a sparse world and such a different view on humanity. The Road, however, destroyed my preemptive and immature view on McCarthy's writing. With 2010 quickly approaching, it will undoubtedly be considered one of the best books of this decade.

This is not my point though. Neither is Hilcoat's film adaptation of the book (I haven't seen it yet, but his previous film The Proposition was certifiably "badass," so I have pretty high hopes). My point comes down to this sweet little bitty right here:

This is Cormac McCarthy's typewriter. As the New York Times article explains, he bought it in 1963 for $50 and typed every novel of his on it.

And he's giving it away.

The proceeds, which are expected to be between $15,000 and $20,000, will go to his beloved Santa Fe Institute. Glenn Horrowitz, the rare-book dealer handling the sale, marvels at the "talismanic" quality to the typewriter that wrote novels like The Road, Blood Meridian, The Crossing, Child of God, etc.: "It's as if Mount Rushmore was carved with a Swiss Army knife."

I love typewriters. I love Olivetti typewriters. I love a writer of a bygone generation who refuses a computer, a word processor, electricity. But is not some part of him sentimental over the typewriter? Despite buying an exact replica on Ebay, won't he be nostalgic for that one he spent so many hours with, clacking away on his novels? I guess, as his literature would also lead you to believe, Mr. McCarthy is not a sentimental person. The typewriter must seem just an incidental tool in the process he loves and slaves over. He says in this great interview with The Wall Street Journal, one of two ever granted (his one with Oprah is dreadful and awkward to watch, but inspiring if you just close your eyes and imagine it's on the radio), writing itself is the vacation:

"I have no desire to go on a trip. My perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper. That's heaven. That's gold and anything else is just a waste of time. [...] I'm not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing."

As always, well said.

In other news, YouWillGetPapercuts will be accepting tax deductible donations, anywhere from $5 to $15,000. Or $20,000. Whatever you can spare.

2666: Fears of a Fiction Writer

"Ivanov's fear was of a literary nature. That is, it was the fear that afflicts most citizens who, one fine (or dark) day, choose to make the practice of writing, and especially the practice of fiction writing, an integral part of their lives. Fear of being no good. Also fear of being overlooked. But above all, fear of being no good. Fear that one's efforts and striving will come to nothing. Fear of the step that leaves no trace. Fear of the forces of chance and nature that wipe away shallow prints. Fear of dining alone and unnoticed. Fear of going unrecognized. Fear of failure and making a spectacle of oneself. But above all, fear of being no good. Fear of forever dwelling in the hell of bad writers."~ Roberto Bolano

I like that he suggests that the day (or that one, shocking, Romantic moment) when a person decides she will be a writer and nothing more can be "fine" or "dark." Now you recognize your own identity but now that you recognize it, fate ties you inextricably to it. And that idea of darkness, I think, Bolano connects with the fear he so aptly describes. Because ultimately who can measure the goodness or badness of writing? What makes one writer better than the next? What makes one writer worse than all the rest? When a serious writer acts as his own judge, how can he accurately and fairly judge himself without severely hating or fiendishly loving everything that he writes? A writer is an egomaniac by nature, and I think Bolano is saying that too because there is a great anxiety about going "unnoticed." We want recognition and validation for our life paths we have chosen (or that have chosen us.) But the writers that inhabit Bolano's world don't just want to be famous writers of the Stephenie Meyer variety. They want to be famous and loved for their greatness and talent and genius, say, like Roberto Bolano himself. Don't we all.

"But the real romance is being young and writing with your friends."

Yesterday I finally had the chance to catch up on my Interview subscription, and in the September 2009 issue with Natalie Portman on the cover, there's a great interview that Aziz Ansari does with Jason Schwartzman. You can read the entire thing here, but I isolated this portion, about Schwartman's experience writing The Darjeeling Limited screenplay.

SCHWARTZMAN: The writing process was incredible. I wrote it with Wes Anderson and Roman Coppola, and it took about two years. We ended up finishing the script in the Himalayas.

ANSARI: Wow! Geez. That's awesome.

SCHWARTZMAN: Yeah, it was fun. And then we came back and had to rewrite it all in New York. It sounds so romantic- and it was romantic, because I was with my two great friends and we really were working on something very personal- but it wasn't romantically beautiful all the time. It was rough at times. But the real romance is being young and writing with your friends.

ANSARI: Do you have any advice for young actors, such as myself?

SCHWARTZMAN: You don't need any advice from me, man. You're incredible! You're like the funniest motherfucker in the world.

ANSARI: Aw, come on.

SCHWARTZMAN: I'm serious. But let's see. I'm not really one for advice other than, if you can write, write. If you have the ability to write, then you should write. Be diligent about it.

Schwartzman knows that a lot of the best art was created by groups of 20-somethings who had nothing better to do than sit around all day drinking and talking shit and smoking unfiltered cigarettes in dingy apartments and unfurnished houses. Think H.D. and Ezra Pound. Think the Beats. Think Warhol's Factory (hello, that's how Interview mag started anyway). Let this Interview snippet be a rallying cry for all you writers out there and get your pens (or keyboards) moving! Jason Schwartzman commands it.

(image from Interview Magazine.)

Anger = Fuel

"I will confess to you now that anything I have ever accomplished as a writer, as somebody doing TV, as anything I have ever done in life down to, like, cleaning up my room, has been accomplished because I was going to show people that they were fucked up and wrong and that I was the fucking center of the universe, and the sooner they got hip to that, the happier they would all be … That’s what’s going on in my head."

-David Simon,

creator of "The Wire"

I am an unabashed fan of The Wire and David Simon has in many ways become the end-all-be-all to me, not only in his being a journalist, a screenwriter, a novelist, a newspaper advocate, etc., but because his anger seems palpable in anything he pours himself into. His ego may seem bigger than Baltimore, but at least he's a screenwriter with convictions.

His statement also brings up one of the bigger(biggest?) questions about writing, whether it's short stories, poems, essays, articles, novels, blogs: Who are you and why does what you're writing matter to me in my separate universe?

Sometimes, definitely in Mr. Simon's case, anger and self-righteousness can help the writer blaze on through that question. Others, as Dubus' quote a few posts back about Hemingway's "lack of talent" shows, have doubts about their worth as writers and their perception on the human condition.

So maybe we should take a lesson from David Simon every once in a while. If we hit a brick wall or come to an impasse filled with doubt, tear that shit down and shout, "I am the smartest motherfucker who ever constructed a sentence."

You Got Served

I'm a waitress and a poet. Sometimes these two roles intersect: I try to focus in on "the image" of a customer who's ordered something specific. What does calves liver say about you? How about French-toast-style bread pudding? So far many assumptions commonly made based on food prejudices have been wrong.

In the case of a woman I call “Veggie Burger,” she is not super friendly and organic-crunchtastic as one would guess. She’s actually a big time complainer and one of the most impatient and unhappy people I’ve ever seen. I don’t know how her husband puts up with it.

And then there are the old men who order spaghetti and meatballs. You expect them to be pretty uptight and a little mean, but they turn out to be the sweetest customers and the best tippers.

How about the guy who always orders orange juice, even with dinner? Is he concerned about his tooth enamel, because if so, I should really give him a straw. Does he have super evolved health consciousness? Is he warding off a cold? Was this his favorite childhood drink? I have so many questions and only one object- a citrus beverage- to act as the answer. So in the spirit of trying to use my day/night job as fuel for my writing, here’s a little poem (it’s bad) that I wrote the other night as an exercise in streamlining my money making talents with my love for lyricism:

orange juice

you ask for

orange juice,

and we’ve joked

about this drink

for weeks—whether

you’ll have that or

cappuccino instead—

and I want to tell you,

“forget the OJ

and take me,”

but I carry the cup

to your table. this glass

of orange juice

is nothing. it’s all the things

I could give you:

watercolor sketches

of west end avenue,

free tickets

to the new museum,

my body to hold

as you sleep,

homemade lentil

soup on saturday

mornings.

In Defense of the Word

"One writes out of a need to communicate and to commune with others, to denounce that which gives pain and to share that which gives happiness. One writes against one's solitude and against the solitude of others. One assumes that literature transmits knowledge and affects the behavior and language of those who read... One writes, in reality, for the people whose luck or misfortune one identifies with-- the hungry, the sleepless, the rebels, and the wretched of this earth-- and the majority of them are illiterate."~ Eduardo Galeano, 1978, translation by Bobbye Ortiz

Andre Dubus' "Letter to a Writers' Workshop"

"We can't make them perfectly, only as best we can. Hemingway once said that he had very little natural talent and what people called his style was simply his effort to overcome his lack of talent. Don't take it lightly. What is art if not a concentrated and impassioned effort to make something with the little we have, the little we see?"

-Andre Dubus
"Letter to a Writers' Workshop"
MEDITATIONS FROM A MOVABLE CHAIR

Hiatus

Youwillgetpapercuts is hereby resurrected.

The summer hiatus is over.

Let the posting begin.

The Romantic Dogs

by Roberto Bolaño, translated by Laura Healy

Back then, I'd reached the age of twenty

and I was crazy.

I'd lost a country

but won a dream.

As long as I had that dream

nothing else mattered.

Not working, not praying

not studying in the morning light

alongside the romantic dogs.

And the dream lived in the void of my spirit.

A wooden bedroom,

cloaked in half-light,

deep in the lungs of the tropics.

And sometimes I'd retreat inside myself

and visit the dream: a statue eternalized

in liquid thoughts,

a white worm writhing

in love.

A runaway love.

A dream within another dream.

And the nightmare telling me: you will grow up.

You'll leave behind the images of pain and of the the labyrinth

and you'll forget.

But back then, growing up would have been a crime.

I'm here, I said, with the romantic dogs

and here I'm going to stay.

Keith Gessen: All the Sad Young Literary Men

Gawker has a longstanding hate-hate (kinda love?) relationship with Keith Gessen, a founding editor of n+1 and young journalist/novelist/blogger/cultural paver/borderline elitist. Gawker’s relentless reports on Gessen’s blog, dating habits, and various random tidbits were really my only exposure to this guy, so when his novel All The Sad Young Literary Men came out in 2008, I foolishly shunned it because I’m a Gawker addict.

Then last year, my co-blogger Dan invited me to an event at Housing Works Bookstore Café where all lit journals could be snatched up at $2 a pop. Score! I happened to pick up a copy of an n+1 Research Branch Pamphlet called WHAT WE SHOULD HAVE KNOWN: TWO DISCUSSIONS. Gessen acted as moderator of two panels that met and shot the shit about the books they wished they had read in college, or books they wished they hadn’t read ever, or books that changed their lives. My respect for Gessen grew quietly (he did lament his late exposure to the Velvet Underground) and my awareness of him morphed from “one to be avoided” to “one to be kind of on top of,” in an intellectual capacity, of course. But it should be noted that he was voted one of NY’s 50 Hottest Bachelors by Page Six in February, 2009. You be the judge:

(Image from here.)

So by the time I moved into my friend Rebecca’s gloriously book-shelved apartment, I found myself unable to stop from picking up Gessen’s first novel and trying on the first page for size. I read: 

“They saved on orange juice, sliced bread, they saved on coffee. On movies, magazines, museum admission (Friday nights). Train fare, subway fare, their apartment out in Queens. It was a principle, of sorts, and they stuck to it. Mark and Sasha lived that year on the 7 train and when they got out, out in Queens, Mark would follow Sasha like a little boy as she checked the prices at the two Korean grocers, cross-checked them, so they could save on fruits and vegetables and little Korean treats. They saved on clothes… To be poor in New York was humiliating, a little, but to be young—to be young was divine.”

Fresh out of a "Save-and-not-spend, Queens-7-Train" situation, this opening passage resonated with me like nothing else that I’d read in awhile. So I read 50 more pages that night and finished the book about a day later. A quick read, even by subway rider standards.

Gessen structures his narrative around three guys: Mark, Sam, and Keith (haha autobiographical!) While all three characters differ, all three are pretty much the same. Mark gets married right out of college to his Russian girlfriend, and he passionately studies and reads and obsesses over Russian history/politics for the next decade. Sam works at a shit Excel temp job and passionately studies and reads and obsesses over the current Israeli-Palestinian unrest. Keith falls in love with Al Gore’s daughter while studying at Harvard, but loses her like Gore loses the 2000 election, and then he spends the rest of the novel passionately studying, reading, and obsessing over US politics. Of course this slapdash generalization drastically oversimplifies, but the aim of Gessen’s story lies in describing the awful (yet pretty elitist; come on, you have to be loaded or lucky to go to Harvard) plight of the young, serious thinker who wants to do something intellectually satisfying that, in this Capitalist country, can at least make life livable, salary-wise.

Equally elitist and media-addled Jonathan Franzen, awesome author of The Corrections, and notably awkward public speaker (from experience, people) loved Gessen’s book, praising, “Cruelty and affection and erudition and innocence are so perfectly balanced in these stories, they almost make me wish I were young again.”

But these “Sad Young Literary Men” don’t just want to “make it” on the merits of their intellects. They also want impeccably complicated, intellectually engaged, vaguely mysterious yet comfortingly familiar, well-dressed and gorgeous young women. And the novel weaves a web of pretty realistic inner negotiations that these guys go through when it comes to fucking or not fucking based on these aforementioned qualifications. Of course with a laundry list like that, most of the women fail and fail hard.

The only girl to show up in each of the three sections is Arielle, who Gessen describes as:

“Arielle wanted more and wanted less: she wanted a life of excitement, witticisms, put-downs, quasi-psychoanalytic late-night discussions, then make-up sex—and no children.”

Sounds pretty ideal, right? Did I mention that when we first meet Arielle, she’s, like, 22 and staying in a sanatorium?

Emily Gould (ex-Gawker editor and rumoured Gessen-ex) wrote a smart piece on the book, comparing it, and I think justifiably so, to a Judd Apatow production. Her qualms mirror mine: the book makes much ado about men’s problems and doesn’t really extend the "Problem Umbrella" to the women that populate the book as background characters. Arielle goes to an insane asylum due to her break-up with Sam. Israeli Talia gives Sam some major agita about whether or not he's Jewish enough. Al Gore’s daughter Lauren can’t allow herself to fall for noble, good-hearted Keith but fucks the Harvard asshole who drinks every night in his pink J. Crew shorts and loafers. Celeste calls Mark’s phone and leaves many hysterical messages. Leslie passive-aggressively forces Mark to come back to her place while he's bombed out of his mind. Sounds a little like the roles played by Leslie Mann and Katherine Heigl in Knocked Up, right?

The only three women in the novel who come close to getting fair treatment are Sasha (Mark’s ex-wife) because she is fundamentally morally good, Katie (the sex writer involved with Sam) because she is smart and good in bed (at least I think that is part of the reason) and Gwyn (Keith’s girlfriend) because by the book’s end she is something like 10 years his junior and constantly avows her love and fascination for men who still live and die by the rules of serious intellectual thinking.

Do I think the book is sexist? Yes, and that should be acknowledged and discussed.

Do I think the book has to be read under that lens? No, absolutely not.

Every problem each man faces in the book, I have faced or am facing. The relate-ability quotient is very high, I think, for anyone who finds themselves lucky/unlucky enough to be 22-23-24-25. Both guys and girls who graduated from liberal arts schools (Ivy or not) find themselves floundering after graduation. We want to use our degrees and passion for whatever it is that drives us to write, read, or think to further ourselves, even if just a little bit, in the world. But in this society it’s not easy to get to a place where you can support yourself doing anything that comes close to what you love, or even, what you can stand behind. 

And then add in all the other problems. We all have to face our heritage, whether it be Jewish or Russian or Agnostic or Martian or Beyond. We all have to extricate ourselves from our families yet simultaneously remain tied to them. We all have to go through the life and death cycles of good and bad relationships, and we all have to deal with the undeniable, biological need for fucking that throws a molotov cocktail into the whole mess.

I mean, a passage like the one below seems pretty universal to me:

“I was twenty years old. When you are twenty years old, and twenty-one, and twenty-two, and twenty-three, and twenty-four, what you want from people is that they tell you about you. When you are twenty, and twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, you watch the world for the way it watches you. Do people laugh when you make a joke, do they kiss you when you lean into them at a party? Yes? Aha—so that’s who you are. But these people are not to be trusted, your contemporaries, your screwed-up friends and girlfriends—that’s not because of you that they kissed you, but because of them, something about them, those narcissists, whereas you were asking about you, what did they think of you? Now you have no idea.”

I think the book is about any person who wants to get to the self-actualized point where he or she can work at a job they love, read The New York Times, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker and all the best-selling and important novels of the time (and the past) on a regular basis, donate money to causes, master the art of culinary awesomeness, cut slacking out entirely, learn 4 new languages, travel to solidify those languages, become engaged in a community (online or in real life), follow sports and care about them, go to concerts, support artists, and have time for a mind-blowing and meaningful relationship. Etc. Etc. Etc.

And, even though we know it is fundamentally impossible, we want to do all of this very important, earnest work before the age of 30.

No wonder we’re “Sad.” The pressure to do everything, the pressure that we put on ourselves, is overwhelming. But the beauty in Gessen’s book hovers in his humor and the moments where emotions overpower the intellectual drive and his three main characters act on instinct instead of book smarts.

So if you can get past the horse-in-blinders focus on MEN AND THEIR EXTREMELY IMPORTANT PROBLEMS in this novel, and the very self-assured comma-happy grammatical structures (which seem a little too cutesy for me; like, as if Wes Anderson’s visual aesthetic had been contained in the form of punctuation) then I highly recommend All the Sad Young Literary Men as a book that anyone our age should read.

And, for what it’s worth, here is Keith Gessen’s List: Books That Changed My Life.

Honoré de Balzac, Lost Illusions (1837-39)

Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (1865-69)

Don DeLillo, White Noise (1985)

Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One: Selected Essays (1986)

Michael Houellebecq, Elementary Particles (1998)

Thomas Frank and Matt Weiland, eds. Commodify Your Dissent (1997)

Irving Howe, A Margin of Hope (1982)

Philip Roth, Zuckerman Bound (1979-85); Sabbath’s Theater (1995)

Adam Ulam, The Bolsheviks (1965)

      Saul Bellow, Herzog (1965); Humboldt’s Gift (1975)

Top Ten Irish Novels, Briefly Annotated

A very worthwhile list from our friend, Dr. David Rosenwasser:


All are novels; none are short collections. All are 20th- or 21st-century, with one exception. Dates are approximate.

1. Molly Keane, Good Behaviour
She is the greatest Irish novelist, and there are other novels by her nearly as good as this one about a large woman with a small mother and a brother with a secret. Keane is Protestant Ascendancy and a gourmet chef: her favorite ingredient as a writer is vinegar. 1985 or so.

2. William Trevor, Two Lives
Two novels bound together by the Protestant writer the New York Times called the greatest living short story writer in English. Why does Trevor bind these two short novels together? Well, both feature a 59-year-old woman . . . Read them and think about it. 1999 or so.

3. Anne Enright, The Gathering
A recent Booker Prize winner and the best novel I have read lately. A woman searches her memory to come to terms with her brother, the Irish past, and her own narrative complicity. Beautifully written, oneiric. 2007 or so.

4. Edna O'Brien, House of Splendid Isolation
Part of a trilogy by the grand dame of Irish fiction (Wild Decembers in the same trilogy is also terrific), this novel tells the tale of a May-December love affair between an IRA terrorist on the run (and he is the May!) and an aging, resentful, reclusive woman whose house he crashes. Around 1995.

5. Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris
Bowen is the most underrated of the great Modernist novelists in English. She is a disciple of Woolf and a pal of Molly Keane (and like her, an Ascendancy Protestant). This novel, one of her three greatest, inhabits the points of view of two kids in a strange house in Paris. There is a long flashback to Ireland. The ingenue is likened to Alice in Wonderland. Around 1935.

6. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Joyce has to be on the list, and although it is not as great as his best work, Dubliners, Portrait becomes great once we realize it is a comedy and not the romantic novel of education some of us thought it was when we were force-fed it in high school. The discourse of Catholic damnation has never been so vividly mocked nor Irishness so subtly sent up. 1915 or so.

7. Roddy Doyle, The Commitments
Thius first slight novel in The Barrytown Trilogy gets better the more seriously you take it and is wonderful to compare with the film, which Doyle co-wrote and changed a lot. A troop of kids on the dole in 90s Dublin form a soul band--and the comedy of cultural appropriation begins.

8. E.O. Sommerville and Martin Ross, The Real Charlotte
S & R are pen names of two Ascendancy women collaborators. This late 19th-century novel is saturated with spite. It is funny, harsh, and unrelenting about Irish men and the women who love them, hate them, and love to hate them, among other subjects. 1893 or so.

9. Flann O'Brien, At Swim Two Birds
Joyce's successor and Oedipal son writes this zany tale about characters who revolt against the novel they are in; the tale is spliced with a brilliant translation of an actual medieval Irish myth, Sweeney Astray, about the anti-hero Sweeney, turned into a bird for opposing Christianity. 1935 or so.

10. John Banville, The Sea
A fairly recent Booker Prize winner and a wonderful novel to compare with The Gathering. A male oneiric voice this time, a recollection of a young love by an old man. Around 2003.

Have any other suggestions? Let us know!

"Everything's okay."

Dov Alfon, editor-in-chief of Israeli newspaper Haaretz, decided to give all of his journalists the day off last Wednesday and have the news scribed by some of Israel's finest living authors instead. It proved to be a worthwhile experiment.

Avri Herling's stock market report:

"Everything’s okay. Everything’s like usual. Yesterday trading ended. Everything’s okay. The economists went to their homes, the laundry is drying on the lines, dinners are waiting in place… Dow Jones traded steadily and closed with 8,761 points, Nasdaq added 0.9% to a level of 1,860 points…. The guy from the shakshuka [an Israeli egg-and-tomato dish] shop raised his prices again…."

The weather, a poem by Roni Somek:

"Summer is the pencil
that is least sharp
in the seasons’ pencil case."

The New York Times would never do something like this. And even if they did, would that New Yorker sensibility get the best of the authors and make the news even more neurotic, paranoid, and pessimistic than it already is?

Thanks to Marcia for the link.

1 person (unemployed) + time = Poet [I can do math too!]

John Patrick Shanley, College of Mt. St. Vincent (commencement speech)

"Not to bring up something upsetting, but when you leave here today, you may go through a period of unemployment. My suggestion is this: Enjoy the unemployment. Have a second cup of coffee. Go to the park. Read Walt Whitman. Walt Whitman loved being unemployed. I don't believe he ever did a day's work in his life. As you may know, he was a poet. If a lot of time goes by and you continue to be unemployed, you may want to consider announcing to all appropriate parties that you have become a poet."

from nytimes.com

Daily Math

This:

Plus This:

Will hopefully turn Dan into this:

Photo 1: I paid $2.95 for this notebook. I spend more than that on bagels some days and this Beach Lady Notebook has proven to be more faithful, knowing, and supportive than any bagel I've ever met.

Photo 2: My brand, spankin' new Olivetti Lettera 35 typewriter given to me for the price of on-the-house, courtesy of The-Now-Retired-Eadie.

Photo 3: Raymond Carver typing away in Syracuse, New York, 1984.

Not pictured: My new short fiction workshop at The New School. I paid $647 for this workshop. I could have bought about 216 of my favorite Beach Lady Notebook for that same price. I won't know what the better investment will be until the workshop ends, but I'll keep you posted.

you will love me for this

Hey everybody. It's Sunday in NYC. It's warm, delicious, and Roger Federer has won the French Open, earning him a career grand slam! I didn't think I could be more excited, until...

Thanks to  JJ, I have a sweet tip that will get you almost 125 free new songs. Just click on this link which takes you to the Urban Outfitters blog, and you can d/load each of their 5 LSTN playlists. #5 has tracks by Lemonade and Grizzly Bears. #4 has Lissy Trullie (my fave!) Little Boots, Tiny Masters of Today (so precious) and nervous breakdown specialist Wavves. #3 has Black Lips! and Mike Bones! #2 gets you Japanese Motors and PB&J. #1 has Dr. Dog (goooo Philly) Albert Hammond Jr. and Black Kids.

So happy downloads, happy iPods, happy summer!

Finally

Yup. She's mine. Don't know what "she" is? Then stay tuned. Plenty more pictures are sure to come.

Just Once

by Anne Sexton

Just once I knew what life was for.

In Boston, quite suddenly, I understood;

walked there along the Charles River,

watched the lights copying themselves,

all neoned and strobe-hearted, opening

their mouths as wide as opera singers;

counted the stars, my little campaigners,

my scar daisies, and I knew that I walked my love

on the night green side of it and cried

my heart to the eastbound cars and cried

my heart to the westbound cars and took

my truth across a small humped bridge

and hurried my truth, the charm of it, home

and hoarded these constants into morning

only to find them gone.

you are no myth unless i choose to speak

How Roses Get Black

by Frank O'Hara

First you took Arthur's porcelain
pony from the mantel! and! dashed
it against the radiator! Oh it was

vile! we were listening to Sibelius.
And then with lighter fluid you wet
each pretty floored rose, tossed

your leonine head, set them on fire.
Laughing maniacally from the bath-
room. Talk about burning bushes! I

who can cut with a word, was quite
amused. Upon reflection I am not.
Send me your head to soak in tallow!

You are no myth unless I choose to
speak. I breathed those ashes secretly.
Heroes alone destroy, as I destroy

you. Know now that I am the roses
and it is of them I choose to speak.

What You Don't Know Makes You Nervous

This article by Daniel Gilbert in the New York Times attempts to explain why everyone our age hates their lives. (Lately you've heard the term "quarter-life crisis" being thrown around like frisbee at a Memorial Day bbq, right?)

It's not the fact that we're coming of age in the shittiest economy since 1929 or that we watched the Twin Towers fall during our formative years or, even, that our TV dosages are steadily subsidized with bad "reality" programs that make you wonder if people really are that stupid/vapid/obscene/annoying (and if you are really that pretentious/righteous/self-actualized, etc.)

Apparently shock volunteers in an experiment at Maastricht University felt less nervous when they knew they would be zapped with high voltage everytime than when they didn't know if their shocks would be tiny or earth-shattering.

So we are miserable because there is no certainty, and we don't know how big the electric shocks will be. We have no idea what will happen next. We're all running around cracked-out on coffee in the mornings, stomachs nervous about absolutely nothing and everything, and then we go to the bars and drown our consciousness with gallons of beer: the vicious cycle of our generation.

Novel Approach

"After all, one may hear the most private affairs of other people, but only in a spirit of respect for the struggling, battered thing which any human soul is, and in a spirit of fine, discriminative sympathy. For even satire is a form of sympathy. It is the way our sympathy flows and recoils that really determines our lives. And here lies the vast importance of the novel, properly handled. It can inform and lead into new places the flow of our sympathetic consciousness, and it can lead our sympathy away in recoil from things gone dead. Therefore, the novel, properly handled, can reveal the most secret places of life: for it is in the passional secret places of life, above all, that the tide of sensitive awareness needs to ebb and flow, cleansing and freshening.

But the novel, like gossip, can also excite spurious sympathies and recoils, mechanical and deadening to the psyche. The novel can glorify the most corrupt feelings, so long as they are conventionally "pure." Then the novel, like gossip, becomes at last vicious, and, like gossip, all the more vicious because it is always ostensibly on the side of the angels."

- D.H. Lawrence, LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER

no stonecutter more obstinate

"No work could defeat him, no matter how hard or humiliating it was, no salary, no matter how miserable, could demoralize him, and he never lost his essential fearlessness when faced with the insolence of his superiors. But he was not an innocent, either: everyone who crossed his path suffered the consequences of the overwhelming determination, capable of anything, that lay behind his helpless appearance... Florentino Ariza moved through every post during thirty years of dedication and tenacity in the face of every trial. He fulfilled all his duties with admirable skill... Without intending to, without even knowing it, he demonstrated with his life that his father had been right when he repeated until his dying day that there was no one with more common sense, no stonecutter more obstinate, no manager more lucid or dangerous, than a poet."~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

Upon not sleeping I find three poems...

I Want to Sleep

I shall be still stronger,
Still clearer, purer, so let
The sweet invasion of oblivion come on.
I want to sleep.

If I could forget myself, if I were only
A tranquil tree,
Branches to spread out the silence,
Trunk of mercy.

The great darkness, grown motherly,
Deepens little by little,
Brooding over this body that the soul-
After a pause - surrenders.

It may even embark from the endless world,
From its accidents,
And, scattering into stars at the last,
The soul will be daybreak.

Abandoning myself to my accomplice,
My boat,
I shall reach on my ripples and mists
Into the dawn.

I do not want to dream of useless phantoms,
I do not want a cave.
Let the huge moonless spaces
Hold me apart, and defend me.

Let me enjoy so much harmony
Thanks to the ignorance
Of this being, that is so secure
It pretends to be nothing.

Night with its darkness, solitude with its peace,
Everything favors
my delight in the emptiness
That soon will come.

Emptiness, O paradise
Rumored about so long:
Sleeping, sleeping, growing alone
Very slowly.

Darken me, erase me,
Blessed sleep,
As I lie under a heaven that mounts
Its guard over me.

Earth, with your darker burdens,
Drag me back down,
Sink my being into my being:
Sleep, sleep.

- Jorge Guillen, translation by James Wright

Moonrise


Will you glimmer on the sea?
will you fling your spear-head
on the shore?
what note shall we pitch?
we have a song,
on the bank we share our arrows;
the loosed string tells our note:

O flight,
bring her swiftly to our song.
She is great,
we measure her by the pine trees.

-H.D.

Evening


I am strange here and often I am still trying
To finish something as the light is going
Occasionally as just now I think I see
Off to one side something passing at that time
Along the herded walls under the walnut trees
And I look up but it is only
Evening again the old hat without a head
How long will it be till he speaks when he passes

-W.S. Merwin

I remember being young, sitting on my mother's lap in the front seat of our station wagon on the way home. It was past my bedtime and everything, even houses we had passed on the way home again and again, was suddenly exhilarating. I could see the moon through the windshield and no matter how fast we went or what turns we made, the moon was always still there, neck and neck.

"Why is the moon following us?" I asked mom. The rest of the family giggled at me.
"No, honey," she said. "It only looks that way. It stays right there, always."

Clarence Thomas Loves Egg McMuffins

This hilarious post at The Curious Life is definitely worth a look. Bill Geerhart posed as a young boy and wrote letters to the Governator, Charles Manson, Richard Ramirez, Clarence Thomas, and others. Some are very very creepy (looking in your direction, Ramirez), while others, like Clarence Thomas' declaration of love for all things McDonald's, are just downright heartwarming.

This reminds me of something ominous I have been thinking about for a while. Unfortunately, letter writing is on its way to being deader than dead. Here's an eerie question: in the future, will Knopf or RandomHouse or any other publishing house be publishing The Collected Emails of So-and-So? Will the opus DiStefano: The Complete GChat Correspondences someday be lost in a Barnes & Noble clearance bin?

What can we do to change something like that?


(Thanks to Marcia for the heads up)

Tragic Age

"Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habits, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen."

-Opening paragraph of LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER
D.H. Lawrence, 1928

20x200

Need good art for decorating your apt on the cheap? Then check out Jen Bekman's 20x200, a site where you can buy limited edition prints for $20, $200, or $2000 depending on the size.

Right now I'm coveting this piece by Matt Jones:

And I'm absolutely in LOVE with this print by Christine Berrie:

20x200 has art for every aesthetic, and it's all tastefully chosen, so you can't really make a wrong move. And with 8 x 10 inch prints at 20 bucks a pop, your walls will sing with the triumph of teenage girls home from their back to school shopping trip!

We're big LOST fans

Embrace your inner gamer because LOST Season 5 is about to wind down and leave us fiending for Season 6 like whoa. With only 4 hours left in the season, it might be time to brush up on your Locke-knowledge on the wonder that is Lostpedia. Like Wikipedia, Lostpedia provides a tangled web of links that can explain, confirm, or disprove all ideas, theories, or speculations with the help of the online LOST fan community. I could literally spend 6 hours a day going from fan theories on Richard Alpert to a mini-section on "Ben's painting" to a list of cultural references in "The Constant."

hmm?

Don't even get me started on the pages that explain the LOST writers-and-producers-created alternate reality games like The Lost Experience that reveal the mythology behind the show. This shit can get CREEPY, like a little too Dungeon and Dragons for me, but if you're up for a challenge/scare, you could really waste a work week going through it.

Buggin'

Currently my favorite theory on Lostpedia is that Ben's childhood best friend Annie from the Season 3 classic "The Man Behind the Curtain" is actually the little kid version of Kate's mom Diane Janssen. (Diane... hmm, DI-Anne as in Dharma Initiative Annie? Kate's middle name is Anne, after all.) That could mean that Kate was born on the island and it would create a whole new potential of crazy! Of course my theories are always wrong (I really really really wanted Matthew Abbadon to be future Walt), but who cares!

The best part about the site: no spoilers.

If that doesn't help you waste enough time @ work, then check out this awesome LOST-Muppet Babies mash-up that's been floating around the net for a few weeks.

Bruthuh?

Or you could write something and submit it to us. LOST-related or not.

Career Shmareer

Pamela Slim has a great article in the New York Times about the economic downfall being as good a' reason as any for leaving your career and pursuing the dream job you've always been, well, dreaming of. Check it out.

If this article makes you turn off your work computer, book it toward the elevator, and happily march off into the sunset never to be seen again by your employers and coworkers, then we at YWGP salute you.

Thanks to Steve for the heads up.

*Any article link we suggest can be reached simply by clicking on the word "article." We're working on changing the link color, but get off our back, we're at work.

To MFA or not to MFA?

NYTimes has a great article by Charles McGrath about two new books that weigh the merits of getting your MFA in creative writing. For those of us here at youwillgetpapercuts, the MFA debate looms at the back of our brains. Should writers go to school to learn how to write, and pay a huge tuition bill in the meantime, when, as McGrath points out, "few of even the most ardent teachers of creative writing believe it can really be taught" ??? The world may never know, but the inner debate will surely rage on. May this article be added to the mental blaze as we measure the hypothetical pros and cons.

Mark Zuckerberg Has Dorm Syndrome

Well, it's lunch time in the Cave, which usually means eating at my desk and watching Woody Allen movies on NetFlix, or facebook-ing. Yes, I am ashamed of myself for using the word "facebook" as a verb, but thanks to Mark Zuckerberg (or Suck-erberg, hahaha, fistbump!), the word is very much a part of the cultural lexicon.

Friends and I were drunkenly discussing the facebook phenomenon, critiquing its new format, debating on whether it's ahead of the times or if the times simply adapt themselves to whatever facebook decides. We came to a sad conclusion that on the most part, present company included, a drastic change in facebook is usually met with a lazy shoulder shrug, a wave of the hand, and an obligatory, "Eh, just trust facebook, I'll adapt to it sooner or later."

So is facebook taking advantage of our generation's rampant ennui, or is Signore Zuckerberg the patron saint of our collective apathy? He is only a 24 year old college dropout who started a website to rate the ladies of his not-quite-alma-mater. This site, however, has morphed into the facebook you all know and love, landing him on Time Magazine's The World's Most Influential People List for 2008, the cursed cover of Forbes magazine, and into the hotseat of being one of the country's youngest CEO's ever. Pretty impressive, until you actually see this douchebag:














Boom. Adidas sandals? And I trusted this asshole? Adidas sandals, every time all the time. This isn't a fucking swim meet, you rich prick. We're not in a dorm shuffling from our bedroom to the showers. We're running a multimillion dollar company and cyberstalking each and every one of our clients. At least wear dress socks. Or better yet, lets do a little Mark Zuckerberg Exchange Program: I'll slip around in your sandals and NorthFace fleece, chestbumping my fellow douches all day, and you come wear the dorkyasssshit I wear to work and put in a 9-to-5 in the Cave. You wouldn't last an hour.

Zuckerberg looks like the kind of dude who roofies the Gatorade at a high school girls field hockey game. So it's no wonder his newly amended Terms of Service is essentially an internet gangrape on your rights, allowing facebook ownership of anything and everything you post, always and forever. Beware Zuckerberg. I know you're standing on the mountain that is facebook, looking down at your minions, chanting "I own you" while high fiving yourself, but there will come a day when you're nothing more than a synonym for Friendster.

So I have a new motto: Don't Trust Facebook. In order of this motto, I will be making t-shirts:



Contact youwillgetpapercuts@gmail.com if you're interested in purchasing one.

Delusional Downtown Divas

Watching someone else’s quarter-life crisis is much more fun than dealing with your own. Delusional Downtown Divas, directed by Lena Dunham, hilariously takes care of all your 20-something Schadenfreude needs.

The web tv series, available on Index Magazine’s site, documents the lofty goals and lazy realities of best friends Oona, Swann, and AgNess (and their sometimes friends and roommates Jazzy and Molly.) Oona dreams of falling in love with New York art star Jake Pheasant, played nonchalantly by Nate Lowman. Swann, while not teasing her bleached blonde hair into a beehive of terror, choreographs private performance art to prepare for showing at Miami Basel. AgNess takes a brief stint as a Brooklyn artist’s assistant to buy bicycles so the fearsome threesome can stalk Pheasant. In the meantime, the trio runs into famed curator Clarissa Dalrymple, Art Production Fund’s Yvonne Force Villareal, and renowned sage Isaac Mizrahi, among others.

All 10 episodes celebrate the insular yet international art world and skewers it in all its ridiculousness at once, but ultimately DDD is about three young, creative women trying to make it into the New York scene. Through their clueless, traipsing adventures they stand by each other in times of mood lipstick, bad fruit jewelry, and droopy smiley face balloons, and by the end of the series, we’re left wishing to be a part of their own flamboyant, cutely sarcastic and naive scene based in AgNess’s father’s Tribeca loft.

Inaugural Collage

The Cave-Dan

This is where the magic happens. Co-workers have affectionately called this "The Cave." Since there is another Dan working at (Blank) & (Blank) and having two people with the same name in the work place is apparently frowned upon, I have been nicknamed "The Cave-Dan."

Having no sunlight makes it impossible to even have a plant back here. So in some ways, The Cave-Dan is a rare specie. It thrives under artificial light and little human contact; has a regimented diet of packed lunches and high speed internet; is recognized by its poor posture and carpal tunnel syndrome.

Even if I had a window, I'd only be able to see across Park Ave and into other people's offices.

Hi, my name is YouWillGetPapercuts

We at YouWillGetPapercuts are recognizing a sad trend. Is our creativity dying a little from our day jobs, or just getting really stifled? We are firm believers that writers, no matter how “successful,” will write through anything, even a nine-to-five.

We created this space for people like us: young and bright folk who are underpaid, overqualified, and bored.

Admit it. You should be making photocopies, listening in on that important conference call, or getting papercuts while mailing packages off to exotic countries. Instead you're doing character sketches for your first novel, writing song lyrics on the back of a receipt, or making a life-size replica of Michael Jackson's head out of chewing gum and white-out.

Whatever it is that you're doing, show us what you've got. Send us what you’re writing, let us see what pictures you’re taking, clue us in to what we should be listening to, and tell us why you hate your boss and how much better of a job you could do.

We will read anything and everything you send us, but we will only publish what we like.

Work in Progress

Hello friends, family, and internet brethren. We have just begun this experiment and will hopefully update soon....