How Should A Person Be?: A Novel From Life By Sheila Heti Henry Holt & Co., 306 p. Sheila Heti’s How Should A Person Be?: A Novel From Life has taken a roundabout path to publication in the United States. Excerpts first appeared in n+1 in late 2010, but the book had no US publisher at the time; it was floating around in Canada for just over a year before the book came out in the US this week. What […]
Rosecrans Baldwin and Eleanor Friedberger Will Be Here Next Monday
Oh hey, Rosecrans Baldwin and Eleanor Friedberger of the Fiery Furnaces (and a rad solo album) are the names on the marquee for the next installment of Farrar, Straus and Giroux’s Originals series, moderated by David Rees. We’re psyched. Presumably Baldwin will be reading from his latest, a memoir of his time living in France called Paris, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down. In case you forgot, Vol. 1’s own Jason Diamond talked to him about it at […]
Giving Idiocy Its Due: “The Lowbrow Reader Reader” Reviewed
The Lowbrow Reader Reader Edited by Jay Ruttenberg Drag City Books; 297 p. I won’t speak for everyone, but I can say on solid footing that I take the Internet and its hivemind for granted. Recently I revisited the cult TV show Freaks and Geeks, and I began to think that my cockeyed view of the show’s significance is likely born out of spending a lot of time online, where there are numerous opportunities to extol the virtues of basically […]
Hating Mississippi and Fearing the Government: A Conversation With Michael Robbins
Michael Robbins really hates living in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. The poet, whose book Alien vs. Predator was recently released by Penguin, is teaching there until June, and then he’s getting out of dodge. “Hattiesburg smells like a sewer,” he emphatically told me in the middle of our conversation. “You can go online and Google the Hattiesburg smell, it’s an actual thing. I think they actually have wooden water wheels to aerate the sewage. There’s just way too much sewage to properly aerate […]
Wide Awake on Memories: A Look at Jonathan Lethem’s 33 1/3
Talking Heads’ Fear of Music by Jonathan Lethem Continuum; 160 p. I am so glad I wasn’t born when Jonathan Lethem was born. Now that he is middle-aged and recounting his love of Fear of Music, the third full-length album by the Talking Heads, he has many albatrosses to contend with (nervously, mockingly). His friend, for instance, insists Jerry Harrison’s involvement before the recording of 77 signaled the end of “pure” Talking Heads. He sounds like a barrel of laughs. […]
Graham Greene’s Cocktail Breaks Rules, Is Pretty Great for Summer
Last week, Luke Honey wrote a post for The Dabbler about the Graham Greene Cocktail, a drink invented in a Hanoi hotel when Greene was a correspondent for Paris Match. According to Honey the drink officially came into this world in 1951, and I’ve seen elsewhere that the drink was concocted around the time Greene was writing The Quiet American. It was, by all accounts, his drink of choice, and the result has been deemed both “heinous” and “surprisingly good.” […]
Conversation: Justin Vivian Bond on Kate Bush, Joan Didion, and “Silver Wells”
Justin Vivian Bond is a transgender writer, singer, painter, and activist constantly adding projects to an already lengthy list of accomplishments. Having played Carnegie Hall and Broadway as Kiki DuRane, the more vocal half of beloved punk-lounge act Kiki and Herb, Mx. Bond made the transition to solo work under v’s own name with the 2011 album Dendrophile. V’s next album is called Silver Wells, after the fictional hometown of Joan Didion’s protagonist in Play It As It Lays, and […]
Juliana Barwick & Grouper at the Guggenheim
On Friday night I made my way to the Guggenheim for the first night of Divine Ricochet, a three-part series celebrating the work of the sculptor John Chamberlain with live music as a soundtrack. The first evening was a double feature of Juliana Barwick and Grouper, and I was readying myself for an evening of sculpture and noise with cold medicine to cure my chest congestion. My ascent up the rotunda’s famed stairs was dizzier than usual. The security guards […]