Now playing on Otherppl, a conversation with Chelsea Hodson. Her new essay collection, Tonight I’m Someone Else, is available from Henry Holt. It is the official June pick of The Nervous Breakdown Book Club.
This is Chelsea’s second time on the program. She first appeared in Episode 340 on January 7, 2015.
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June 12, 2018
The last thing on earth I ever thought I’d do was write about fashion.
I equated the industry with the worst of capitalism: defining human beings as consumers, tricking them into thinking they need the “new look” simply to make a profit. I equated the industry with patriarchy and women’s internalized misogyny: the command to dress as the object of the male gaze, the message that you are subhuman, at best, monstrous, at worst, if you don’t comply. Fashion, it seemed, was the perfect vehicle for what Louis Althusser called the interpellation of the subject by an ideological apparatus.
That is, until I read Valerie Wallace’s House of McQueen (Four Way Books 2018).
Now playing on Otherppl, a conversation with Aja Gabel. Her debut novel The Ensemble is available from Riverhead Books.
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How’s the erotic poetry business?
Funny you should ask. JUNKIE WIFE, my erotic chapbook chronicling my first, dysfunctional, drug-fueled marriage, has just been published by Moon Tide Press, with a foreword by the great Bill Mohr. I’m reading all over town. (Details on my website.)
1.
when I see I’ve overwatered it again, I jab
the turkey baster into the rust-colored runoff
before the water spills over,
onto the hardwood floor.
in our mid-town apartment,
the harsh light sears the spiky leaves.
it reminds me of summer,
when you left me here on Beachwood Dr.
and I shot Demerol
my rust-colored blood backing up in the syringe,
the same pierce of yellow light,
the sharp spike breaking my skin.
Now playing on Otherppl, a conversation with Jonathan Evison. His latest novel, Lawn Boy, is available from Algonquin Books.
This is Jonathan’s third time on the program. He first appeared in Episode 1 on September 14, 2011, and again in Episode 382 on September 30, 2015.
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At first glance, Susan Tepper’s novella Monte Carlo Days & Nights seemed on the light side: an American man and woman, she on the north side of her twenties, an attractive Airline “stew,” he a fortyish executive for a music company, on a weeks’ vacation together in Monte Carlo, a place that has always seemed to me as comically ersatz and overblown as Fredonia – though I like Susan’s work, particularly her masterful short fiction.
For me the sense of lightness, however, was quickly dispelled by her control of her means, whatever else she might be up to. In this work she marries the intensity of focus, the crisp delineation and the vivid, but pruned imagery of short fiction, with the unfolding of a novelistic narrative and a long look at character, dovetailing the two in short bits that are somewhat complete in themselves but also serve as chapters in the longer narrative, which for the most part, plays out over their week in Monte Carlo.
Now playing on Otherppl, a conversation with Michelle Dean. She is the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle’s 2016 Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. Her new book is called Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion, available now from Grove Press.
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Let’s start with that cover – it is both lovely and bizarre. Where did it come from?
Isn’t it? It’s an illustration from an early 17th-century anatomy textbook on fetal formation by Adriaan van Spiegel and Giulio Casseri I came across in the process of researching historical medical texts. The governing idea of this manuscript was the concept of maternal imagination – that a mother’s thoughts and experiences, especially traumatic ones, affect fetal formation and can be responsible for monstrous births. This illustration seemed to embody both of those – specific anatomical detail of pregnancy combined with that imaginative presentation of the baby blooming from the mother’s abdomen. And I love how the book designer curled the mother’s hand around the C.
Mary Toft knew how it felt with child –
three birthed, one dead – but in the field,
heavy with her fourth, up starts a hare.
The effect is more than Mary can bear:
the rabbit all day long ran in my head.
That August, a large lump of flesh bled
from her body, and by October: rabbits,
litters of them, enough for every Cabinet
of Wonder in London. But was it fair or fake?
Methought they there a burrow tried to make.
Mary, Mother Incarnate, carny
of the most marvelous yarn –
the rabbits all day long ran in my head –
snared hare, lapful of lapins bred
in her Welsh rarebit, follicular,
cuniculous, mad with rabbit fever,
rabid with fervor to birth, quaint
trickster, canny coney, cunning cunt.
Now playing on Otherppl, a conversation with Adrian Todd Zuniga. His debut novel, Collision Theory, is available from Rare Bird Books. He is also the founder and host of the popular reading series Literary Death Match.
This is Adrian’s second time on the program. He first appeared in Episode 403 on March 9, 2016.
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Now playing on Otherppl, a conversation with Sloane Crosley. Her new essay collection, Look Alive Out There, is available from MCD Books.
This is Sloane’s second time on the podcast. She first appeared in Episode 424 on July 27, 2016.
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Now playing on Otherppl, a conversation with Tao Lin. His new book is called Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation, and Change (Vintage). It is his first book-length work of nonfiction and is the official May pick of The Nervous Breakdown Book Club.
This is Tao’s third time on the podcast. He first appeared in Episode 180 and Episode 181 (a two-part interview) in June 2013 and again with Mira Gonzalez in Episode 371 on July 19, 2015.
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Now playing on Otherppl, a conversation with Jonathan Ames . His latest book is called You Were Never Really Here (Vintage). It has recently been adapted into a major motion picture starring Joaquin Phoenix. Ames also writes for television, having created the shows Blunt Talk (Starz 2015-2016), starring Patrick Stewart, and Bored to Death (HBO 2009-2011), starring Jason Schwartzman and Zach Galifianakis.
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“Her heart was not hardened but her skin was thick,” writes Jean-Patrick Manchette of the titular protagonist in his last, unfinished novel, Ivory Pearl, translated from the French by Donald Nicholson-Smith with a superb ear for Manchette’s incomparable voice that easily shifts between the grit of the hyperfactual—“…in his right hand he held a semiautomatic Sauer Model 38 chambered in .380 ACP and fitted with a silencer”—and the nimble ability to sketch with the sparest of words the heart of a character, laid out, in this case, in three easy steps: “She wanted to become a professional photographer. She dreamt of meeting Robert Capa. She had an alarming predilection for images of dead bodies.” Ivy is a survivor who at one point casually, almost happily, admits having conveniently lost her appendix when she “caught that Viet round in ‘52.” And like so many other of Manchette’s characters, she also knows her jazz. Everything helps when you’re on a mission.
