At the Rose Books table on Thursday Chelsea Hodson let me know of a reading Archway Editions was holding on Friday night. And I’ve wanted to see Geoff Rickly read.
Google Maps has its shit together today. I went up Crenshaw then left, then up, then left, then up, did that six more times like tacking a sailboat to Sepulveda. And on to 110, to the 10, another vortex, then Sunset Boulevard.
My exhaustion is beyond catastrophic.
Nonetheless, I said I was going to go to the Little Engines offsite. And I should at least say hi to some people.
It’s weird to not be beholden to do anything but still hold yourself to do it. Like writing even when you’re not getting paid for it. And who does that?
My father-in-law, who lives in Los Angeles, always says that we can stay at his house whenever we like. I’m sure he meant all three of us, not just me. With AWP being in LA this year, I considered it. Being the contributing editor I am, I reached out to the great Tobias Carroll, all powerful editor, to see if I could use Vol. 1 Brooklyn as an excuse to get a press pass to skip registration fees, and in exchange, I’d do coverage of AWP for the site.
V.S. Pritchett spoke in an interview of how Chekhov’s gifts were limited to short forms because he lived in an anarchic and chaotic society, diagnosing the same state of genius to Irish writers like Frank O’Connor and Liam O’Flaherty that came after him. Pritchett said, “the novel depends enormously upon its sense of a stable social structure and the short story does not really depend on there being a social structure at all.” To give form to our fractalizing 21st century chaos, traditional short stories are too neat, wishfully formal, consoling. Adorno believed art worth its salt does not aspire to console. So it may be in the fragments, flash fictions, micro fictions, that we’ll find the form of our current chaos aestheticized.
Poet and scholar (and anime enthusiast) Steven Leyva believes we – the human “we” – have been malformed by cruelty in ways that make it hard to recognize the beauty that moves through our lives and through each other.
In our afternoon reading: thoughts on books by Kristen Arnett and Matthew Specktor, revisiting the music of Dub Syndicate, and more.
The guiding principle of Six Ridiculous Questions is that life is filled with ridiculousness. And questions. That only by giving in to these truths may we hope to slip the surly bonds of reality and attain the higher consciousness we all crave. (Eh, not really, but it sounded good there for a minute.) It’s just. Who knows? The ridiculousness and question bits, I guess. Why six? Assonance, baby, assonance.
It’s March and we’re reading. What are we reading, you might ask? If this list is any indication, a good mix of debut novels and new work from longtime favorites. Throw a literary journal with a lot of intriguing names (and some Vol. 1 Brooklyn contributors) into the mix and you have a very promising month. Here are some of the books that have caught our eyes.