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Niccolò Tucci, futurist

I am here tonight to (not so very dogmatically) assert that this particular webcam trained on the Rue de Rivoli in Paris is predicted by the little-boy narrator in “Terror and Grief,” Niccolò Tucci’s short story in the 11/15/1958 New Yorker. The relevant sentences:

Just as we always looked for our parents in the post cards they sent us, so we looked for them in the picture books on the living-room table. “Today they are in Paris. Let’s try to find them.” The big green book with “Vues de Paris” in gold on the cover was placed on the carpet and opened. … (A) new image was before us—the Rue de Rivoli taken with a camera in full daylight, the shadows quite visible and clouds in the sky.

“Here they are, entering this car.”

“No, they are here. See? There’s Father.”

“Oh, no, you are mistaken. I think they are back here, clear outside of the page. They will reach it tomorrow.”

“No, they are right here in this car, and we can’t see them.”

This was only a game and we knew it, and yet the longing for our parents was such that to look at those crowds in the streets of Paris was like being close to them. If anyone had told me that a new person had come into a certain page, I would have believed it—or at least I would have looked, with an absurd hope in the back of my mind. And I did, in fact, look every morning, knowing that this was madness. Had those been drawings and not photography, I would never have thought of doing such a thing, but photography was real; that was exactly what those people had looked like in the Rue de Rivoli. Only one more thing was needed—that the picture go right on developing itself after it had been taken and after it had been printed in this book. And some day, by means of other inventions, such as the waves in the ether, perhaps this would be possible.

“Terror and Grief” is included in Tucci’s The Rain Came Last & Other Stories, which I bought thanks to Thomas Beller, who read and discussed Tucci’s “The Evolution of Knowledge” for the January 2012 edition of the New Yorker Fiction Podcast. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve listened to that one.

One last thing: Follow Thomas Beller on Twitter because of stuff like this, which started its life as a batch of 55 tweets before Salon published the whole thing.

“

M: Haha I was reading your book intensely for days and people started asking, “Ok ok, what is this book?” What is this book you are so enraptured by? And I said “Well it’s a book I’ve been waiting for for a long time.” I am very excited it exists.


K: That’s really wonderful to hear Mary. I hope—I guess you always hope you will be read, really read. I wrote the books for girls like you and me and our former selves. For depressed girls too, for girls who keep Tumblrs, the girls in community college, the girls behind the counter.

- Mary Borkowski interviews Kate Zambreno about Heroines in The New Inquiry.

Zambreno, whose work and ideas I only know since reading a Believer interview this morning, also told Borkowski this:

… when Henry James or Scott Fitzgerald writes their Daisies, it’s not taboo. They are not judged for being their characters, their lives are not the ones judged instead of the books. I think so often, especially if the work is perceived of as being drawn from life, the woman, not her book, is reviewed.

… The big rhetorical leap I’m taking in Heroines is that the impulse to discipline the self or the excessive out of our literature, comes from modernism and is mostly about moral attitudes of the time. In modernism we see this happen more with women writers, whose work and behavior was often critiqued as being TOO MUCH. Too excessive, too autobiographical, and then, not literary enough. There was a simultaneous horror for as well as fetishizing of the feminine in modernism. And now, think in terms of how Sheila Heti’s book was often reviewed. I’m curious why our conversation about fiction seems to often pivot on how fictional a work is.

“
Writing (sex scenes) feels like a test to see how well I know the characters. That, to me, seems to be the only reason characters should have sex in books: they’re trying to tell us something about themselves.
- Saeed Jones
(this post was reblogged from theferocity)

fathers and vanished sons

Here’s the passage of Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue that made me tweet this and get the deep and near-instant satisfaction of this:

“Distractions.”

“Yeah.”

“Getting off your main focus.”

“That’s right.”

“Which is what, again?”

“Huh,” Archy said. “Hey, Mr. Jones? What’s wrong?”

Mr. Jones was up and out of his chair. He reached up a hand to Fifty-Eight, and the bird sidled up the gangplank to its inveterate perch.

“Mr. Jones, what did I say? Why you leaving? I’m not quite done, but I’m almost.”

“Just bring it to the gig,” Mr. Jones said. “It don’t work, fuck it.”

He started toward the back of the van, wanting—or feeling that at the very least he ought—to tell Archy about Lasalle, born and died April 14, 1966. Tell him about the two hours and seventeen minutes’ worth of the pride and the joy that Archy had been squandering for fourteen years. He went to the Econoline, slammed the doors on the empty cargo bay. Mr. Jones helped the bird onto the headrest of the driver’s seat, where he liked to ride, clutching the shoulder belt with one claw to keep its balance.

“Maybe you need to start trying to focus on the distractions instead,” Mr. Jones said. “Maybe then they wouldn’t be so distracting.”

“Mr. Jones! Hey, come one, now. What’d I say?”

Mr. Jones got into the van, started the engine. Even over the slobbering of its three-hundred-horsepower V8 Windsor, he could hear Archy repeating uselessly, “Mr. Jones, I’m sorry.”

“
He’s attractive enough, in a small-market weatherman kind of way.
- Elizabeth Crane reading from the opening of her novel on the Skylight Books podcast.
“

DEBORAH TREISMAN: Why do you think (Jessamyn) West tells us nothing about the mother?

SHERMAN ALEXIE: So we can feel the absence as clearly and strongly as the characters do. You know, as you read it, you think Where’s the mother? Where’s the mother? Where’s the mother?, which is a subconscious echo that I think makes the story even sadder.

TREISMAN: Most stories that have this kind of setup, you expect they would build up to this scene in which you would discover how the mother died.

ALEXIE: Yeah. You would get flashbacks. There’d be a structure wherein you would have that scene where you see how loving and amazing she was and how good their lives were before and then the death scene, the final words. And yeah, none of that happened. I guess that’s when the story becomes literary, right?

- from this month’s installment of the consistently satisfying New Yorker fiction podcast.

It came out yesterday. So far, I’ve listened twice.

“
What follows is a condensed version of our conversation, edited lightly for clarity and with all of Díaz’s frequent swearwords removed.
- Sam Anderson talks with Junot Díaz
“
You were at the age where you could fall in love with a girl over an expression, a gesture. That’s what happened with your girlfriend Paloma—she stooped to pick up her purse, and your heart flew out of you.
- from Junot Díaz’s “Miss Lora”

“a dream’s opposite”

I started the audiobook of Jess Walter’s Beautiful Ruins today. Some favorite passages so far:

Then, only three months into the job, Claire was reading a middlebrow bestseller, some big gothic chub of sentimentality, and she got to the ridiculous deus ex machina ending (a windstorm dislodges a power pole and an electrical line whips the villain’s face) and she just … changed it. It was as simple as being in a clothing store, seeing an uneven stack of sweaters, and just straightening them.

And this:

If she were still in the market for signs, this would be a good one: her career-challenged, strip-clubbing lunk of a boyfriend has just gotten up—at twenty minutes to noon—and texted her this one-word unpunctuated question: milk. She pictures Daryl in front of the refrigerator in his underwear, seeing no milk and texting this inane question. Where does he think this extra milk might be? She types back washing machine …

And this:

… it was in the run-up to his divorce that his soon-to-be ex-wife (So tired of your shit, Shane …) dropped a bombshell: the Bible phrase he and his father endlessly quoted, “Act as if ye have faith …,” never actually appears in the Bible. Rather, as far as she could tell, it came from the closing argument given by the Paul Newman character in the film The Verdict.

This revelation didn’t cause Shane’s trouble, but the news did seem to explain it somehow. This is what happens when your life is authored not by God but by David Mamet …

And finally this:

Twenty meters away, Pasquale Tursi watched the arrival of the woman as if in a dream. Or rather, he would think later, a dream’s opposite: a burst of clarity after a lifetime of sleep.

“
Sometimes I believe that love is essential, and sometimes I believe that the only reason love is essential is that otherwise you spend all your time looking for it.

— Nora Ephron’s narrator in Heartburn (via Emily Gould, who posted a longer passage)

On a semi-related note, here’s Hemingway in “Soldier’s Home,” which I somehow only recently read for the first time:

Vaguely he wanted a girl but he did not  want to have to work to get her. He would have liked to have a girl but he did not want to have to spend a long time getting her. He did not want to get into the intrigue and the politics. He  did not want to have to do any courting. He did not want to tell any more lies. It wasn’t worth it.

He did not want any consequences. He did not want any consequences ever again.


- David Quigg, 7/6/2012

(this post was reblogged from emilygould)

“temp, temp, temp”

I love it when a writer makes a list and gives it some unexpected — even awkward — twist, so this paragraph from Keith Gessen’s All The Sad Literary Young Men made me happy tonight:

It was 1998. Mark and Sasha and their friends held down the following jobs: translator, gallery assistant, New York Times copy clerk, Web temp, investment banker, temp, temp, temp.

I also liked this paragraph, which has nothing to do with lists but felt straightforward and true and real:

And here something happened to me that had happened to me once or twice before, always with women: a moment of unpremeditated screaming honesty, of saying out loud what had remained in my mind only a kind of vagueness, a foreboding, not even a thought.

I’m not far enough into this novel to vouch for it, but you can read its prologue here.

Helen Dewitt’s anti-ode to cheap suits

Lightning Rods, the Helen DeWitt novel that “should be sold in a plain brown wrapper stamped, Age Restricted: 21 and over only,” has many funny, true moments. This is one:

Seeing himself in the office mirror had come as a shock. In fact it had made him wonder whether he had actually been sane when he bought that suit in the first place. Why would anybody buy a shit-colored suit? Why would that have seemed even momentarily a good idea? All right, it was on sale at the time. Originally a $99.99 suit, it had been reduced to $49.99 with choice of tie. But wouldn’t you think you would at least wonder why they hadn’t been able to sell it at $99.99? Wouldn’t you think you would look at it and think Oh, I’ll bet the reason they couldn’t sell it at $99.99 was that nobody wanted to buy a suit that went with their turds. But no, he’d just gone in and said, “Hey! $49.99! And it fits! And it’s 100% polyester so it won’t get wrinkled!” Jesus.