bedtime stack

What's getting me to sleep these days:

Bad Habits by Cristy C. Road
This Is Not It by Lynne Tillman
In The Time of the Blue Ball by Manuela Draeger

Two things about Lynne Tillman's Some Day This Will Be Funny

1. In this book there are stories that include characters making tea, drinking tea and watching the things in your house move or not move ('That’s How Wrong My Love Is'). This is important to me. it is diffcult to write about thoughts and the spaces between them.

2. Sometimes Tillman uses words like "trousers" and "make love" and loses me ('Love Sentence'). But then, the perfect description of a feeling will pull me right back in. She writes about psychoanalysis and I don't care. It is too New York to be real, so I discard it. In 'The Substitute,' however, the character's time with the analyst, scraping away at him and herself, is part of an altered reality, so it works for me.

i am a house

After much crybabying-around I changed my password for the BPL and went a-holds-placing. This weekend I was rewarded with two books instantly on the hold shelves for me, proving yet again that I am either a resourceful lady sleuth or simply so out of step that I get what I want when I want it. (A good strategy for the urban brunette with many needs).

I walked and walked this weekend with Lynne Tillman's new collection Someday This Will Be Funny. The first story that I opened to, “The Way We Are,” is exactly the thing, my coping and not coping and living. It is also a story about going to the movies in another country. I am dipping in and out of the book, rationing it while I cook foods and clean corners and plan. To distract myself, I ran to the aforementioned shelves and got Haunted Houses by Tillman (1987) and seemingly the only freely had, non-library-use-only, non-The Hearing Trumpet copy of Leonora Carrington's fiction in English in NYC—The House of Fear. I took one of the houses, the haunted one, with me on the train and almost missed my stop because, really, who wants to get off in Midtown when you've got a good book and a seat and possibilities?

I am trying to write fiction, I am writing fiction, really for the first time these days. Since I've returned from Vermont I feel excited about trying new stuff, about failing and failing and finishing thoughts. It is distracting and fun and awful. When I feel like talking I talk too much and when I don't will stare at you all spooky. Don't worry, don't worry, don't worry, my mind is elsewhere.

Cast In Doubt by Lynne Tillman

Right now I am reading Absence Makes the Heart, a short story collection by Lynne Tillman. It’s really great so far and brings into perspective what I find compelling about Tillman’s work: She crawls inside of fictional people and seems to channel her first person characters. You forget that you are reading the work of an author. The main characters of the books I’ve read so far are experts of some kind, which shapes the kind of self-talk done by the characters.

In Cast In Doubt the protagonist is a seventy-something American expat named Horace living in a small town in Greece. He becomes obsessed with a young American woman, Ruth, who rents a rotting house across from him. He ruminates on his interactions with her, obsessed with his obsession, weaving in and out of memories of his past and observations of his present. He is also writing a book about his ancestors that is just not getting done, whereas ideas for his moneymaking project, a detective series, just keep popping up. I like Horace best when he is being catty about others in clever ways, just like a good elder-gay should.

Horace’s voice is strong and his history is rock solid—when he laments the repressed yet sexually charged forties you do too, even if it is with a little eye roll for the psychic indulgences of a privileged old man. And when the story gets turned about a bit there is shock and questions. Mostly Cast In Doubt made me want to drink gallons of the cold white wine so sensually described by Horace.

I liked the book, but feel a tepidness towards it, most likely because I cared less for Horace than I did for American Genius’s skin-obsessed inmate.

*No picture because I returned this ages ago. No library jail for me!

GAH!

Why oh why do I have to miss Shelley Jackson and Lynn Tillman together in one of my favorite places in NYC?

Since I can't go, you should:
Fiction from Fence Magazine
Monday, March 09, 2009 at 7:00 PM
Housing Works Bookstore Cafe
126 Crosby Street, New York, NY 10012 :: 212-334-3324

Afterwards, you can tell me all about it.

American Genius: A Comedy by Lynne Tillman

This book became a nightmare and an addiction once I was able to get into the wordy drone of the protagonist’s voice. The narrator (we learn her name very late in the book and it appears like a dug-in tick after weeks of stress-free hiking) is living in an institution that seems a cross between a writer’s colony, a fraudulent rehab spa and a summer camp, where each day is passed waiting for the next meal and not much is done, seemingly, to actually help any of the eccentric guests.

Here is a meditation on breakfast:
“People often want to recite the tragic events that have deformed their lives, offering up their pasts as a series of tableaus of deceptions, or unspeakable insults, since people blame others endlessly, and these assaults and imprecations clutter, like a dog’s defecations on the street, their lives and stories. What is said is often unremarkable, though sometimes horrible, but it’s still easy to feel the tiresomeness of another’s life, as well as your own, since interest in other people is also an interest in yourself, because human beings are interested in themselves and in ways of survival. All stories are somehow survival stories, with bad or good fortunes.”

As you get deeper into the novel and into the flow of the narrator’s speech, certain patterns of reminiscences and obsession emerge. Among them are the institution’s meals, her childhood pets, skin (“skin doesn’t lie”), Leslie Van Houton, the Zulu language and archaic sexual phobia. One her biggest preoccupations is design:
“When I was first here, no chair gave me what I wanted…The chair designer Harry Betoia sad, “The urge of good design is the same as the urge to go one living. The assumption is that somewhere, hidden, is a better way of doing things,” and that’s sensible, or in my life it is, because I’m looking for a chair that fits m and in which I can feel at home, since homeyness is easier to locate in things than in people, or even in animals, but I like cats, dogs, an chairs almost equally, thiugh I have more control over chairs, which are inanimate, but any cat or dog is in some way pleasing, while most chairs aren’t.”

My favorite part of this book, though difficult, is the voice. The narrator seems so far away (not knowing her name until very late is part of this) until one time you pick up the book and her obsessions seem almost normal because one can so clearly understand her reasoning, and how she gets from one thought to another. You gotta be hypnotized to have that much detail work and after the difficult adjustment to the rhythm of the book, I dutifully stared at Tillman’s swinging watch until the end. Another thing that made American Genius different from most other books I have read is that while a few mysteries pop up in the book, postcards from a familiar but unknown sender, an unsettling woman from town, a destroyed career, a missing brother, they never become the way the book advances; if anything, those tantalizing bits lead to even more blind corners.

Even though being firmly inside of the mind of mentally ill was exceedingly uncomfortable for me (in large part because so little of it seemed alien), the experience was exhilarating. Wow. American Genius kind of reminded me of Edith’s Diary, a brilliant book about the descent into mental illness written by the queen of creeping horror, Patricia Highsmith. Don’t read either if you are feeling fragile.

leftovers from 2007 I

I have returned from England with a rash-covered face and a spring in my step. I n an effort to bring the blog up to this fresh feeling 2008ness here the rest of the short story collection reviews from 2007.

Top Top Stories edited by Anne Turyn
I picked up Top Top Stories at Ejay’s Books in Pittsburgh. It was in the Beat section for some reason, perhaps because it was published by City Lights in 1991. From the book jacket, I learned that Top Stories was an experimental fiction journal published by Turyn in the 80s and 90s. In this collection there are a bunch of [my] household names: Jenny Holzer, Kathy Acker, Lynne Tillman, Cookie Mueller and more. Mueller’s piece which features a few short stories to begin to tell how to get rid of pimples (”How To Get Rid of Pimples” [excerpt]) really opened her up to me. I loved the stories, with their quiet wonderful rhythms: “In a suburban house with white shingles and black shutters, Ioona, a woman of forty lived with her mother, a woman of sixty-four.” This sentence maybe isn’t the most enticing, but imagine wave after wave of listing tweaked facts and “circumstances of cures [for acne]” leading up to the regime, a list of actions that now seem mustily extreme in the days of Proactiv. It practically rocked me into a contented stupor, feel-good but not feel-dumb. I now get a feeling of what was so beguiling about her to John Waters and Nan Goldin and everyone else.

The stories also include a few entries that mix text and illustration. Lynne Tillman & Jane Dickson’s piece, “Living With Contradictions,” is a surprisingly affecting story that seems to ask what is settling in romantic love? Dickson’s wet and heavy illustrations take up most of the page and Tillman tells the story in short bursts of a few sentences and it is perfect.

This book has made me curious about finding other work by these authors and learning more about Turyn, which was, perhaps, exactly what it was going for.

The Best of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet edited by Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant
Sigh. As much as I hate to say it, this was a disappointing affair. Even with over thirty poems and stories, the reader doesn’t really get a sense of the weird wonderfulness that Link and Grant wreak by doing what they do, which is cultivating (and publishing) a group of writers with voices that creep into your brain and tug at the loose stuff, scaring and awing you in the process.

The upside is that it reminded me to check out their catalog and make a list to check twice. You should do the same.

Mountains of Madness and other stories by H.P. Lovecraft
The title story was of the utmost creepiness and beauty. Details, details made it perfect and it turns out, the penguins are real. Tantalizing enough for you? The other stories were not as good, though I did enjoy the one that used an elbow as an element of revolting horror.