As I scrambled toward the center seats at BAM Rose Cinemas on Tuesday night to see “Being Flynn“, based on Nick Flynn’s memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, I wondered, what if writers could answer simple questions? Tuesday was also the release date for Flynn’s most recent memoir, The Reenactments, his response to the question: what was it like being on set for the filming of his memoir?
“It took me a book to answer it,” Flynn told the crowd afterwards, in a Q & A with director, producer, and screenwriter Paul Weitz. And it took Weitz seven years, thirty drafts, and three studios to make it happen. “Being Flynn,” which came out last year in a limited release, has an all-star cast: Robert De Niro, Julianne Moore, Paul Dano, and such like.
The film is largely faithful to Another Bullshit Night in Suck City—a favorite saying of Flynn the elder, and my favorite memoir title of all time. While Nick Flynn’s life gave him every reason to write, it also gave him every reason not to: his narcissistic, fabulist father abandons him early on, and his hardworking mother kills herself after reading his first short story. In a sick twist of fate with which Flynn fans are now familiar, the site of their father-son reunion is a homeless shelter in Boston—Nick is an employee and his father is a guest.
We have many exciting treats for you this morning!
Firstly, We’re thrilled to present a new Recommended Reading story, courtesy of the good folks the The Coffin Factory. “A Talking Cure” by Justin Taylor (who last week curated a most excellent literary mixtape for The Outlet) is a veritable potpourri of intellectual, neurotic, literary delights. An engaged couple, both academics—she New Media, he Comp Lit—decide to confess their sexual histories à la Barry Hannah’s “Water Liars,” but soon find themselves admitting some hard truths about their sexual present:
So I admit that, yes, I sometimes fake with him. Not very often, I’m quick to add, trying to be kind here, and pulling it off, I think, though this is admittedly something I’ve been looking for a way to talk about.
“Well, when was the last time?” He isn’t looking at me. He’s at the counter, fixing us fresh drinks. Gin and tonics with zests of lime, because even though we can joke knowingly about “the peculiar institution” and “The War of Northern Aggression” we are still the kind of people who live in Philadelphia with their citrus zester. Anyway, I give him the truthful answer about my faking: “Tuesday.”
Guest editors Randy Rosenthal and Laura Isaacman praise Taylor’s writing as “intelligent, poignant, and scrupulous,” “able to capture the tone of a generation crippled by privilege and opportunity… At 30, Taylor is already a master of the craft, using subtle techniques that engage and move the reader in ways that are both startling and sentimental.” We couldn’t agree more.
Unusual reptiles and uneasy desires lurk beneath a sunny Los Angeles facade
Pop psychologists use the term “the reptilian brain” to refer to the part of the human psyche ruled by such primitive instincts as dominance, aggression, and lust. A person who’s “cold-blooded” is cunning, selfish, and devoid of compassion. Someone making a calculated display of emotion in order to manipulate others is said to be crying “crocodile tears.” Such metaphors reveal a subconscious belief that empathy is a warm, furry, mammalian thing.
So it’s no coincidence that the “pets” of Diana Wagman’s fourth novel, The Care and Feeding of Exotic Pets, are reptiles. This is a novel about desire and its complications, the struggle to reconcile the conflicting demands of id and ego, and the figure of the reptile is a potent one for such a project. The star reptile here is Cookie, a gigantic iguana, eight feet long from nose to tail. He is rusty orange, his eyes “small and rimmed in red,” and there is “something horribly humanoid” about his appearance. His hands have “five long jointed fingers, and wicked sharp nails. Each finger could articulate on its own.” Massive and inscrutable, alien and yet humanoid, Cookie is an unsettling and mysterious presence.
Since I moved back home to work on a novel, people keep asking me what my book is about. Like anyone who gets asked the same complicated question often, I have a canned answer: “It’s a fictional account of me, getting sent to a boarding school on a farm in Oregon, when I was sixteen.” If I know the person a bit better, or have reason to want to put them off/believe they won’t be put off, I will throw in that the boarding school was for “troubled youth.”
If they know something about books and publishing, they will often ask me why I’m not writing a memoir. The answer to this, too, is complicated.
The first is a practicality issue. My memory is shit. There are moments and images that I remember with perfect clarity, but there are mostly huge chunks that I have zero recollection of.
Factors that may have contributed to my shit memory:
I have taken more psychotropic drugs than I can count.
I have taken more recreational drugs than I can count.
Some points in my life were really terrible, and perhaps I am saving myself from myself by not remembering them.
Because of my shit memory, I don’t think an honest portrayal of what was supposed to be my junior year in high school is possible.
Just about anything that’s popular (Gangnam Style, Pinterest, Twilight) goes through an amazing-to-annoying lifecycle. Technology, in particular, is innovative and then irritating.
When I first got an iPhone, it was liberating. I could do anything from anywhere. Now it feels more like I’m tethered and tied to all parts of my life all at once and the only escape is accidentally dropping my phone in the toilet of a Chinese restaurant.
That feeling should be more or less familiar to anyone over twenty, we “digital immigrants” who didn’t take our first breath and then tweet about it immediately afterwards. But it’s also a feeling that has been around for years and years.
“One-hundred years ago when the landline was making its market penetration in the United States, the two most significant arguments against getting the landline were information overload and invasion of privacy. So the point is: Whenever we have any kind of new technology paradigm, we come from the present context of its newness and think that it’s overwhelming.”
But what’s a digital immigrant to do?
“Just because it rings doesn’t mean you have to answer it. Just because you get an e-mail doesn’t mean you have to read it now. You always have to have a new discipline for something new. You learn to turn it off, and if you can’t, don’t complain.”
Predictions about the future are inherently dubious, but I think it’s safe to say there’ll always be plenty to complain about.
Before you go Amish, head to VQR for more great insight into the future of creativity, information fatigue, and the increasing need for curation (there were apparently 1.8 zettabytes of data created in 2010, and a zettabyte is pretty much one less than infinity).
*** —Benjamin Samuel is co-editor of Electric Literature. You can send him a telegram here.
Best part about secrets? Passing them around the interwebs like a gabby detective. Second best? Doesn’t matter if they’re true. (Didn’t Ralph Waldo Emerson admit to the beauty of the lie? And does the mockumentary not stand proud and tall next to its documentary brother?)
Well, mocku our docu because “The Secret History of the Blurb,” featuring blurb wizard Gary Shteyngart and a sampling of the hundred or so authors he’s blurbed, far exceeded our interest in The Truth.
How would we blurb it? “Ho, ho and ho! Insanely funny and terrifically offensive.”
***
—Erika Anderson is one half of the online editorial team at Electric Literature. The other half is here.
I had a lot of ideas about how to approach this project—none of them very good. I thought about a “winter” mix, but this has been an eerily easy winter, at least in Brooklyn. (Last week, at my girlfriend’s parents’ home in the Florida panhandle, we watched live local news coverage of a tornado as it formed over a nearby Alabama town and then ripped through it.) I thought about trying to relate my mix to my short story “A Talking Cure” [available next week at Recommended Reading] but music doesn’t play a role in that story so I felt like anything I’d come up with would be a stretch. I decided, finally, to make the case for the longer song (9 to 16 minutes, say) which is a form I like a lot and that I believe—perhaps incorrectly—most people don’t like nearly as much as I do.
I picked out five songs in a variety of styles with a collective running time of just about an hour and was satisfied, though also nervous. A novel may wait an age to find its true readership, but the Grooveshark playlist longs to be played now. So I broke down and threw in some shorter songs as breathers between the longer songs. The shorter songs have nothing in common except for the fact that I love them. The result is a potpourri, though I realize as I’m writing this that, formally, the playlist adheres to the same basic structure as the interval training I’ve been doing at the Y. Those of you in the Park Slope area may be interested to know that new members are entitled to four consultations with a “personal coach” and that registration fees are waived through February 4th. I didn’t have an appointment with my coach today, but he happened to be out on the floor when I was there earlier, and seemed pleased to find me engaged in executing the routine he had designed for me. I should or should not mention that he is twenty-four years old. I hope you enjoy these songs.
1. “Let It Rock” – Jerry Garcia Band, The Jerry Garcia Collection Vol 2: Let It Rock
A smoldering take on a two-minute Chuck Berry toe-tapper. This recording, from 1975, captures Garcia at a moment when the Grateful Dead were on hiatus—temporarily, as it turned out, but for all anyone knew at the time they might have been done for good. So if you’re interested in the biographical aspect, just imagine being him and having that in the back of your mind. Anyway, I love Garcia’s jazzman instinct for taking tight little pop songs and stretching them out into spacious, even cavernous environments, possessed of their own weather, suffused in their own mood. This version of this song, to me, is all about lazy energy, force gathered but unspent, a lion at rest on a rock in the sun, one eye open, half awake.
2. “O My Stars” – Michael Hurley, Snockgrass
An old freak-folkie I discovered when I was watching Deadwood and got obsessed with a song called “Hog of the Forsaken” that played over the closing credits of one episode and it turned out to be his. I bought the whole album that the song appeared on (Long Journey) but then it turned out he’d recorded different versions of “Hog of the Forsaken” on three or four albums over the years, and I’d actually bought the wrong one, so I bought all the others, too, and by the time I figured out which one was the “right” one I was a fan. “Hog” isn’t the only song he has recorded on multiple records. Re-recording is kind of a thing with him, which I have to say didn’t hurt in terms of getting me into him. I own two versions of “O My Stars” but not this one; I just found it on Grooveshark and thought it was pretty. My friend Mathias says this is his favorite love song—over Facebook, granted, but I think he really meant it.
We’re delighted to present this week’s Recommended Reading, “Our Education” by Lincoln Michel. It’s Lord of Flies meets 1984 meets The Breakfast Club, and it’s tragic, funny, and very brilliant (also, it comes with this awesome Single Sentence Animation):
“Obviously we no longer learn anything at the school or, perhaps more accurately, we learn many things, but not the things that we were meant to learn. We learn about love and pain and friendship. A few of us even learn about fornication, most by watching from afar (twice Carmichael, a small and sickly boy, and I have snuck behind the bleachers to watch the more muscular and nimble students tear off each other’s gym uniforms). History, mathematics, and biology are subjects lost to another time. Most of our textbooks have been repurposed for fuel. There is an ongoing fire in the back corner of the cafeteria.
… Much of our hushed hallway discussion concerns the teachers. Surrounded by the pale orange lockers, nasty words are uttered. The whispering is merely a habit. The teachers are all dead. Or else they are sleeping. Or in hiding. All that is known is that the teachers have disappeared and the teachers’ lounge is barricaded from the inside.”
In this animation for Recommended Reading, a free fiction magazine, Grier Dill animates and scores a sentence from “Our Education” by Lincoln Michel.
The sentence: “Did we as students, in our weakness, fabricate whole memories from these scattered, pointless items?”
Single Sentence Animations are creative collaborations. The writer selects a favorite sentence from his or her work and the animator creates a short film in response.
“Our Education” is available to read for free online or as an eBook. Find it here.
As I scrambled toward the center seats at BAM Rose Cinemas on Tuesday night to see “Being Flynn“, based on Nick Flynn’s memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, I wondered, what if writers could answer simple questions? Tuesday was also the release date for Flynn’s most recent memoir, The Reenactments, his response to the question: what was it like being on set for the filming of his memoir?
