I still owe you a post on Iceland. This is really embarrassing and terribly uncharacteristic of me. Usually my blog is the only aspect of my life I have together? In any case, that is coming asap, I promise, but in the interim, two quick thoughts:
1. Why hasn’t anyone teamed up with the MTA to create an app where you can scan your Metrocard and find out the balance?
2. Wouldn’t it have been great if this review (which I think about probably twice a week) had been boring?
ID: Need. To work. Cannot.
NG: Oh tell me about it. I haven’t actually written any thing for a whole month. I have mounting fear… going to to look at it tomorrow (?!)
ID: I reworked one paragraph for two hours. I now know what it feels like to be a hamster.
NG: I reworked one chapter for one year. Ditto.
ID: I LOLed at that.
NG: (I have an amusing visual right now btw)
ID: Me on a hamster wheel?
NG: Nibbling a piece of cheese between your tiny paws, actually.
By John William Keedy.
Dear Gary Shteyngart,
So a while back I came across a quote from an interview you did with Modern Drunkard Magazine, and was quite pleased for two reasons. First, I had no idea there was a periodical for my kind of people, and now have added it to my daily blog breakfast, and two, you were hilarious. I think I printed the quote, which began with, “The literary community is not backing me up here,” once before on this blog (#embarrassing!) I know, I know: I have a BLOG, but I promise I’m trying to be brave, and not enable the “antiseptic” status quo. Speaking of literary fisticuffs, I recently saw Zoe Heller, who reviewed Vagina poorly (who didn’t?) at a book party where Naomi Wolf was, and was thisclose to cornering them and saying, “Hey, have you two met?” I mean, I can’t be THAT worried about my image as a writer, because I’m not even on Twitter for chrissake, which is why I have to resort to blogging a plea for you to booze with me.
So then, a few weeks ago, I read that CRAZY fucking article you wrote for The New Yorker about how you dated this girl who also had another boyfriend and you got wasted and pounded on her door to profess your love (kinda) and then she fucking KILLED somebody, and I thought to myself, “Huh. Gary Shteyngart sounds pretty fun.”
(At this point, my boyfriend interjects, “He’s going to think you want to fuck him! Remember that other dude… he totally thought you wanted to fuck him!” By “that other dude,” he’s referring to a famous and enormously talented writer who wrote a book about a big ocean that I won’t name but wasn’t the Pacific, and when I kindly reminded my boyfriend that if the writer had thought that, then he clearly didn’t like the looks of me because he never made a move, my boyfriend felt sorry for me. Win!)
So I’m thinking that although your Modern Drunkard interview states that you have an Asian girlfriend, maybe my neighborhood, which is your psychotic ex lived when you two were dating, might bring back some painful memories. Perhaps you would prefer the excellent looking Wrong Number Lounge in Dyker Heights, Brooklyn? I passed by it while on a trip around Mafia hangouts with a former boss (long story, will tell you over vodka shots) and have been thinking about it probably daily in the ensuing years.
Jack. Pot.
Another great drinking town we could journey to is Baltimore. My favorite bar in Baltimore is called the Midway Lounge and is smack dab in the middle of strip club row and is run by a guy who named Roy who pours drinks 3/4 liquor and 1/4 soda. “I’ve never lost a customer in 30 years,” he says. When I return, which I do about once a year or so, he says, “Little one!” It’s not too far from The Sidecar, a punk bar that has deafening music (I know you aren’t into that) but also a shot called the Dead Nazi, which I suspect might be mouthwash and bourbon.
Although it does seem that you have a penchant for foreign liquor, and I also enjoy traveling the world via alcohol, so perhaps we can locate a liquer called Black Death? I just returned from Iceland, where this is the de facto national drink. I had it once in college, after which I spent hours trying to master the clapping rhythms in “Sinnerman.” Speaking of fun facts, did you know that as recently as 1985, beer was banned in Iceland, but Black Death was a-okay? I’ve also had something called kava in Fiji, but that’s not really alcohol so much as dirt and a little bit of homemade LSD probably made from manta ray piss and coconut.
I’m going to admit upfront that I haven’t read a lot of stuff you’ve authored––just a few Shouts & Murmurs, something about American Airlines sucking, and, of course, the aforementioned pieces––but if we meet this way, then I can always learn about your oeuvre from the drunken horse’s mouth, so to speak, which is always ideal. I can picture you rolling around on the street in Brooklyn, passersby aghast at the bearded man stranded on his back like a cockroach screeching, “First read Super Sad… Super Sad, True Super… HAHAHAHA… SUPER LOVE STORY!”
Thirsty when you are,
ID
I had a dream in which I overcame the fact that I was taught to type TWO spaces between sentences and started to instinctively (and correctly) only use one. Pathetic.
I had a pretty genius thought earlier when I was in the bathroom, but I lost it, and so instead of giving you that pearl, which you certainly deserve, I’m going to just transcribe the conclusion to “Raw Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl.” I know you don’t care, but this shit is like manna to me.
“The Young-Girl is presently the most luxurious of the goods circulating on the perishable goods market, the flagship-commodity of the fifth industrial revolution, which serves to sell all the others, from life insurance to nuclear power plants; the monstrous and very real dream of the most intrepid and fanciful of tradesman: the autonomous merchant that walks, talks and commands attention, the thing that’s finally living, which no longer understands life but just digests it. Three thousand years of ceaseless labor of millions of fat shopkeepers’ existences, generation after generation, have no found their brilliant crowning achievement in the Young-Girl, since she is the commodity that it is forbidden to burn, stock that stocks itself, inalienable and untransferable property which must nonetheless be paid for, property/virtue that endlessly converts to cash; she is the hooker that demands respect, the dead body moving by itself––she is the law and the police all in one… Who has not caught a flashing glimpse, in her definitive and dismal beauty, of the sex-appeal of the inorganic?”
AH I REMEMBER MY GENIUS THOUGHT: the oral history is the new listicle. You heard it here first.
Tomorrow: Iceland!
I’m leaving tonight for Iceland, so of course I checked the weather the other day before packing. Below is what I was told to expect.
Um.
At least it will be a nice departure from the life-sucking heat of NYC?
Also, before I go somewhere, I usually look into the literature of that country, and this time was drawn to the work of Halldor Laxness, a Catholic turned Socialist, who worked in about every genre. Here’s the synopsis for the book of his, entitled Under the Glacier, that’s quickly risen to the top of my to-read list.
Nobel laureate Halldór Laxness’s Under the Glacier is a one-of-a-kind masterpiece, a wryly provocative novel at once earthy and otherworldly. At its outset, the Bishop of Iceland dispatches a young emissary to investigate certain charges against the pastor at Snæfells Glacier, who, among other things, appears to have given up burying the dead. But once he arrives, the emissary finds that this dereliction counts only as a mild eccentricity in a community that regards itself as the center of the world and where Creation itself is a work in progress.
What is the emissary to make, for example, of the boarded-up church? What about the mysterious building that has sprung up alongside it? Or the fact that Pastor Primus spends most of his time shoeing horses? Or that his wife, Ua (pronounced “ooh-a,” which is what men invariably sputter upon seeing her), is rumored never to have bathed, eaten, or slept? Piling improbability on top of improbability, Under the Glacier overflows with comedy both wild and deadpan as it conjures a phantasmagoria as beguiling as it is profound.
I’ve always wondered if this “treatment/exercise method” still exists:
“Gordon Baldwin: I think [Edie’s] idea was to model in New York. Much of that summer she went to a salon where they literally pounded her legs into shape. Her legs were not good in those days––piano legs––but by the time the course was over she ended up with those legs that were so famously beautiful.”
–– Edie: An American Girl by Jean Stein and George Plimpton
Text from KM: Where have all the mariachi bands gone?
KM: Not that I’m complaining, just curious.
ID: The show time guys beat them up and left them for dead in an alley.
An apple, made of hair!
Itinerantdaughter's Blog 