McNally Jackson Bookmongers

Books that are funny, the month that is the worst: Funbruary! (Previously: Matthew Gallaway, Karen Russell, and our own Douglas.) The latest entry is from Justin Taylor, author of The Gospel of Anarchy, which is just out and great, and the story collection Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever. He’s here tomorrow night.

“Welcome to the age of triage,” writes Jeremy Schmall. “Enjoy the pickles and keep the glass jar / for loose change.” I pulled these lines from somewhere near the middle of this book I love, called Jeremy Schmall and the Cult of Comfort, which is brand-new this Funbruary from X-ing Books. Now before we go any further you may as well know that Schmall’s a close friend, so if you’re the kind of person who gets all worked up about people speaking well of their friends, you might as well stop here. If, however, you believe—as I do—that subjectivity is a valid angle of approach to art (more honest yet than a lot of what passes as objectivity) then let’s talk about this Little Yellow Book with the radioactive smiley face on the cover, and the author’s own name in its title.

Jeremy Schmall and the Cult of Comfort is a dark, weird, smart, raucous, grimly hilarious collection. Not a howl but a growl—maybe from the throat, maybe from the stomach, maybe both. These quick and dirty open-faced poems take the familiar things of life—cubicles and calorie counts; shopping malls and booze—and remind us how strange they are; how strange we are for craving them, for having created them in the first place. “The police don’t want to work today / just as badly as you and your administrator. / The wife that once found me charming / now rarely finds me at all.” Individual poems are untitled but the book is broken into sections with names like “Tumbler full of imitation crab meat” and “Dog in a hot tub.” Schmall makes it safe for us to savor the fundamental obscenity of existence. In his warm arms we are free to laugh until we cry. 

But to end on my carefully confected little blurb-line is hardly in the spirit of The Cult of Comfort, so instead here’s the complete text of a short poem which kind of showcases all the stuff I’ve been talking about, and also contains shout-outs to a perhaps unlikely pair of poetical forebears. One’s John Ashbery. Bonus points if you get the other without googling. 

In the middle distance
a half derelict 
subdivision. The wet pavement.
Overgrowth breeding
condoms beside the street.
Clear bottle filled with urine
beside the vending machine.
Fingernail scars down the face.
Because HIGH SCHOOL CHEARLEADER.
Ex-girlfriend through shattered monocle.
Self-loathing in a convex mirror. 
Five knuckles atop a red onion. 

Funbruary—funny books, worst month—oozes forward, like so much gray snow-juice in 40 degree weather. Matthew Gallaway, author of the The Metropolis Case, chooses Wittgenstein’s Mistress by David Markson:

My new favorite funny book is Wittgenstein’s Mistress by David Markson, which I would recommend to anyone looking to chase away the February blahs. I wasn’t expecting it to be very funny, given that it’s often saddled with the unfortunate (and definitely unfunny) label of “experimental,”  which I guess (besides people feeling compelled to label everything to death) is because it’s written without any dialogue or chapter breaks. It’s basically 250 pages of what you might call “stream-of-consciousness” to the extent that the prose mimics the somewhat jittery and convoluted nature of pretty much everyone’s thoughts (as in how we actually think, not the orderly way it’s generally presented in books), the way we focus on something for a second and then something else (and often, something completely unrelated) for another second before jumping back to the first thing. Or maybe everyone isn’t like this, but the style certainly resonated with me. There’s also the decidedly unfunny “plot” of the book, which involves the narrator (who may or may not be insane, but has definitely suffered bouts of madness — and personal tragedy — in her past) being the last surviving person on earth, a situation that’s presented without any explanation as to how it came to pass. Finally it would be negligent of me not to mention that as a result of this set-up, there’s a pervasive sadness, loneliness, and melancholy to the book, which gets increasingly intense as you approach the end and get more insight into exactly who this woman is and what happened to her, both before and after whatever it was that made her the last person on earth (this situation obviously meant to represent the idea that we are all very much alone in the world, which I guess is probably not too funny when you think about it, but is nevertheless true).

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flavorpill:

INTERVIEWER: Did you know James Joyce?

FRANK O’CONNOR: As well as one can know a man one has met a couple of times and corresponded with. He was shy in a different way from Faulkner—he was arrogant in a way that Faulkner is not arrogant.

INTERVIEWER: Joyce’s looks were sort of against him, don’t you think?

O’CONNOR: An extraordinarily handsome man! He gave the impression of being a great surgeon, but not a writer at all. And he was a surgeon, he was not a writer. He used to wear white surgeon’s coats all the time and that increased the impression, and he had this queer, axlike face with this enormous jaw, the biggest jaw I have ever seen on a human being. I once did a talk on Joyce in which I mentioned that he had the biggest chin I had ever seen on a human being, and T. S. Eliot wrote a letter saying that he had often seen chins as big as that on other Irishmen. Well, I didn’t know how to reply to that.

You know how 92Y sees other people tumblring about things that are related to their events, reblogs them, and then plugs their events? It’s a good trick—I’m always jealous. (Everyone is always tumblring about things relevant to their interests!) But now I get to do it.

This Sunday at 4 we have Robert J. Seidman—author of Ulysses Annotated—to celebrate Jim Joyce’s 128th birthday. There will be Guinness.

orbooks:

It’s Tuesday and we here at OR Books are proud to participate in that most sacred of weekly online rituals and recommend a few of our favorite Tumblr blogs. Our recommendations have a “literary” theme today since this is a publishing house and all. You’ll have to talk to Joana if you want recommendations on the best sports blogs Tumblr has to offer, but first I think you should ask yourself why you came to OR Books looking for sports blog recommendations. That just doesn’t make any sense.

Housing Works Bookstore Cafe

McNally Jackson Bookmongers

Lazy Self-Indulgent Book Reviews

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Co-signed!

thingsiatethatilove:

“I did have an amazing experience last year: I had the von der Heyden fellowship at the New York Public Library. It’s like The Price Is Right super mega-win for fiction writers. You get this office at the New York Public Library; it’s like nerd Valhalla. I had a real desk, with drawers that opened soundlessly…people would bring you cookies, you could order any book you wanted…now I’m back in my old Starbucks. It’s like a video game where you have a superpower for a little while and then it runs out.”

— Karen Russell’s novel Swamplandia! is out today.  I interviewed her for Goodreads; I like these interviews because the questions about writing habits are mandatory and I will always find other people’s writing habits fascinating.  It’s amazing anything ever gets written considering all the time people spend feeling guilty about all the not-writing they’re doing.

Speaking of Karen Russell.

Kicking off Funbruary—our series of the funniest books in the worst month—is Karen Russell, who got back to me the fastest of anyone. Which is why she goes first! That and her new book, Swamplandia!, is out today. She chose Elisa Albert’s The Book of Dahlia:

I’m feeling horrifyingly unfunny at the moment, wearing the “free pair” glasses covered by my insurance that make me look like Colin Powell and staring blankly at a huge sea of snow, so I don’t know if I can bring the yuks personally. But here’s who can: Elisa Albert. In The Book of Dahlia, she writes about a twenty-nine year old woman dying of brain cancer, structuring the book around the cheesy aphorisms from a self-help guide, and if that set-up doesn’t sound like an obvious source of comedy, you’ve got to watch Albert at work. Publishers for some reason love the words “searing” and “blazing” (these adjectives they seem to have cadged from the Food Network ), but in Albert’s case they apply—her humor is ablaze with pain and rage, it has a bite to it, a ferocity that acknowledges all the sorrow of loss, the terror and senselessness of death. Her narrator, Dahlia Finger, refuses to go gently into the night or refer to said night as “good.” Her sentences really do tattoo themselves across your eyelids, unforgettable, hilarious, pitch-dark, humane. The line between hilarity and total devastation she walks in The Book of Dahlia is amazing—and then after reading it you, too, can alarm your friends by recommending a book about terminal brain cancer as “totally hilarious.”

Karen Russell is the author of St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves and Swamplandia! which is out today. She was one of the New Yorker’s 20 Under 40, and she reads at McNally Jackson with Kevin Brockmeier on April 6th.

Since (paraphrasing T.S. Eliot here) February is the worst month, all month long I will be posting favorite funny books—some from our staff, but a few from store friends as well—on this tumblr.

I call it Funbruary. Funbruary is the coolest month. Gird yourselves!

About the Shark, phlegmatical one, 
Pale sot of the Maldive sea, 
The sleek little pilot-fish, azure and slim, 
How alert in attendance be. 
From his saw-pit of mouth, from his charnel of maw 
They have nothing of harm to dread, 
But liquidly glide on his ghastly flank 
Or before his Gorgonian head; 
Or lurk in the port of serrated teeth 
In white triple tiers of glittering gates, 
And there find a haven when peril’s abroad, 
An asylum in jaws of the Fates! 
They are friends; and friendly they guide him to prey, 
Yet never partake of the treat— 
Eyes and brains to the dotard lethargic and dull, 
Pale ravener of horrible meat.

Here are some recent memoirs (or near-memoirs) that might change Genzlinger’s mind:

• Elif Batuman’s The Possessed
• Maggie Nelson’s Bluets
• Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage mostly counts (or, if not that, then the personal chunk of Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, his collection of essays coming soon from Graywolf)
• The last chapter of Tom Bissell’s Extra Lives
• The forthcoming Revolution, by Deb Olin Unferth
• John D’Agata’s About a Mountain should also mostly count
• And Emily Gould (author of And the Heart Says Whatever) recommends forthcoming memoirs by Jon-Jon Goulian and Sigrid Nunez

theparisreview:

“There was deep snow on the ground. I was in a sleigh, wearing my red wool hat and wrapped in my fur cloak. I had lost my boots that day, on my way to see an exhibition of savages from Africa. All the windows were open, and I was smoking my pipe. The river was dark. The trees were dark. The moon shone on the fields of snow: they looked as smooth as satin. The snow-covered houses looked like little white bears curled up asleep. I imagined that I was in the Russian steppe. I thought I could hear reindeer snorting in the mist, I thought I could see a pack of wolves leaping up at the back of the sleigh. The eyes of the wolves were shining like coals on both sides of the road.”

— Ten Stories from Flaubert, Lydia Davis

Speaking of Lydia Davis, did you guys see this?:

We have the best selection of Valentine’s Day cards in our short but illustrious history. The entire first spinner is devoted to love.

Now you know. 

housingworksbookstore:

“Art is not a religion, but the making of it and the reception of it can both qualify as devotional acts. The earliest draft of this novel, which was really more like a long short story (twenty thousand words, give or take) was written in one sitting in a cafe in the East Village. This was about four years ago, on a snowy day around Christmas. It took ten hours and a whole legal pad, and there are no words to describe how powerfully good and right it felt. When it was over my arm was killing me, and the draft itself was utter junk (next to nothing from it survives to the finished book) but what I salvaged from what I wrote was far less important than the experience of the writing, and having the memory of that experience to draw on when I sat down to re-write it and re-write it. The most amazing part of this anecdote, it seems to me, is that the baristas let me hang out for that long when all I’d bought was a small coffee in the morning. And granted, I was a regular at that place, but still. If you’re looking for evidence of things not seen, I’d say start there.”

— The Rumpus Interview With Justin Taylor

Justin is here in February reading from The Gospel of Anarchy, his new novel about the punks. 

I’m listed in Tumblweeds, a user-generated community directory that rates Tumblr bloggers by their number of followers. Find me listed in #books, #literature, #newyorkcity

towirr:

“And though the calendar appeared to be continuing its slow plod whenever she checked it, Margaret was dogged by a peculiar sensation. She felt that somehow, somewhere along the way when she had not been paying careful attention (and how could she have been so heedless?), time had come to an end. Now it was only a matter of a short interval before the world faded out entirely. Sometimes she was even gripped by a strange suspicion, unlikely as it seemed, that every last thing was already gone. All that now met her ears and eyes was a vestigial flare or after-impression, like the shape of the sun burnt on the retina.”

— Ida Hattemer-Higgins, The History of History

Ida reads here tonight at 7 pm; she’ll be in conversation with Chris Glazek of n+1 & the New Yorker.

wwnorton:

The life span of black ink in disposable plastic pens is estimated to be about four and a half years. The blue ink in plastic pens starts to fade away in two. And newsprint is only intended to last for a day.

Already, scientists are experiencing difficulty in deciphering the technology that’s used in Univac, the earliest working computer from the late 1960s.

And even the laser-encrypted plastic that we put on compact disks is likely to start peeling off in about forty years.

A color photograph, says Kodak, will last for thirty years. Videotape for fourteen. Magnetic tape, seven.

The life span of skywriting is about nine minutes.

The life span of a sunbeam is six.

And the light that reflects off the Moon every night is traveling so quickly that it only lasts a second.

-from About a Mountain by John D’Agata

This is now in paperback, it’s great, and it’s on our front table. See you later.

I have a job. And my job is to be the tumblr for this bookstore. Or, you know, that’s not actually my job, but it’s part of it. Mostly I do it from home so I don’t “get paid” for it—besides the point.

Listen, what I’m trying to say here is I do this for work and as part of my job I am going to ask you recommend this tumblr if you like when I reblog my sister and make fun of our friends at Housing Works.

carpentrix:

A wall is real. A piece of baseboard that hides the gap between wall and floor, that’s real, too. I’ve spent a lot of my life mixed up with words, and carpentry has been a relief from that. Words make me stumble. I have chaos in my head and I’m not the best at sifting through the feelings or ascribing the right actions to the right feelings, or expressing those feelings in words.

Cutting a piece of trim, I don’t have to worry about how to explain what’s making me feel sad. I don’t have to worry about getting lost in the translation from emotion to language. A measurement, a cut, sawdust in my lungs. And the piece of wood slides in to fit tight after a few taps with a hammer. It’s this stripping away of bullshit, a stripping away of anything abstract or emotional or confusing.

This reminds of the way I feel about skateboarding, and also that excellent piece by J.D. Daniels about fighting in the last Paris Review.

And that great line of Romeo’s: O, teach me how I should forget to think!

powells:

Lignin, the stuff that prevents all trees from adopting the weeping habit, is a polymer made up of units that are closely related to vanillin. When made into paper and stored for years, it breaks down and smells good. Which is how divine providence has arranged for secondhand bookstores to smell like good quality vanilla absolute, subliminally stoking a hunger for knowledge in all of us.

Finally, an explanation!

This does not explain the way Housing Works smells.

So it seems like everyone is telling me to read Updike first. Except Dustin. Dustin said read Baker first, which is what I was hoping everyone would say. (Thanks, Dustin.) See, I love Nicky B—what if, what if I read Updike and hate it, and then read Baker on Updike and lose respect for him?

I remain undecided.

Yesterday I bought Nicholson Baker’s U and I—his enthusiastic reading of John Updike. Coincidentally, I also got a copy of the first two Rabbit novels. I haven’t read much Updike (maybe really only “A&P”?), but I am already lightly skeptical: narcissist, misogynist, etc. etc. So, Q: Do I read the Baker first to temper my skepticism, or Updike first and then Baker?

lazybookreviews:

Somehow Geryon made it to adolescence.

-

Then he met Herakles and the kingdoms of his life all shifted down a few notches.
They were two superior eels
At the bottom of the tank and they recognized each other like italics.
Geryon was going into the Bus Depot
one Friday night about three a.m. to get change to call home. Herakles stepped off
the bus from New Mexico and Geryon
came fast around the corner of the platform and there it was one of those moments
that is the opposite of blindness.
The world poured back and forth between their eyes once or twice. Other people
wishing to disembark the bus from New Mexico
were jamming up behind Herakles who had stopped on the bottom step
with his suitcase in one hand
trying to tuck in his shirt with the other. Do you have change for a dollar?
Geryon heard Geryon say.
No. Herakles stared straight at Geryon. But I’ll give you a quarter for free.
Why would you do that?
I believe in being gracious. Some hours later they were down
at the railroad tracks
standing close together by the switch lights. The huge night moved overhead
scattering drops of itself.
You’re cold, said Herakles suddenly, your hands are cold. Here.
He put Geryon’s hands inside his shirt.