Alasdair Gray has a blog.

Maybe everyone knows about this already. Lanark: A Life in Four Books is like no other book. He wrote two separate novels, a surrealist nightmare and a realist bildungsroman, split one in half, and stuck the other, in its entirety, in the middle.

First Crowley, now Gray. Or maybe the other way around. Next, Pynchon.

best to write in the dark

In the city you are never alone, but you can create the illusion... Sleep at seven or eight p.m. in order to wake very early. Disable the internet, turn off the lights, lower blinds, close windows, lock bedroom door, remove clothes, wrap body in blanket, smoke a cigarette, eat nothing, drink only water.

What's a "day"? It's an arbitrary, functionally objective unit of measurement. I prefer a functionally subjective day, a contingent day - contingent on when I wake and sleep. The time between 1 a.m. and six a.m. is the day I prefer. Time is fertile there; time is like dirt - some patches don't have nutrients and some do... those hours are fertile.

For each calendar week I try to live two weeks - a day week... and a night week. Darin Strauss told me not to use ellipses unless actually signifying missing words... but I like them. To do this two-weeks-per-week thing it is best to sleep early and wake soon after midnight, then sleep again around six and depart for work at 8 or 9. A secret day between when I arrived home from work and when I headed back.

When I wake again around 8 or 9 sometimes I can't believe how much I wrote in that gap. It's like a present - someone (like me but not me) did it in my sleep and left it for me to see. The amount of work I put forth during the waking hours after midnight seems absurd.

During the second period of sleep I have strange dreams. Last night I was in a falling-apart house that seemed an exaggerated version of the New Haven house in which I rented a room one year. Out the window I saw 50 Cent.

Two book jackets

These books came out less than a year apart. The Crowley last summer, the Roberts next month.

Good job, Harpercollins.

notice, posted by me, on my apartment building's electronic bulletin board

I came home from work today and was sort of puttering around my room when I noticed that my black shoes, which were sitting on the floor, had turned white.

Then I noticed that every surface on my desk was white, too, as if it had snowed.

And the window ledge, too.

And the floor near the window.

I had left my window (facing exchange) open and some kind of horrible white dust had come in during the day and coated everything. It is all over the floor, the rug, everything.

Has anyone else had this happen?

I keep having dreams where I don't have any money and people with ugly, pushy faces are asking me questions that make no sense. Sometimes it seems they're asking me to marry them.

Alex interviewed me

My friend Alex R. interviewed me.

He does interviews in an unusual way. He asks questions, then removes the questions and constructs a sort of solid, coherent statement out of the interviewee's answers, then presents that to the interviewee to make sure it's faithful before posting.

Going to the opening of a Pollock show at the Guggenheim tonight. Then lying in bed. Where is the rain? I liked the rain.

new Zoetrope

The new issue of Zoetrope has four stories. (Well, five, but the fifth is "Tony Takitani," which I also got from Cloverfield Press, so I'm not counting that - I'm reading it later.)

There's one called "Nebraska" which I couldn't read. It may be a skillful story or it may not. I read a few random sentences and they seemed competently written, but I could not read all the story's sentences in order. I tried, but my eyes started drifting off the page, like magnets pressed against a magnet of the same polarity. I have no idea what this story was about.

Another story, by Chris Adrian (I think - the magazine is not in front of me as I type this), was called "Stab." It concerns a spate of animal murders in a suburban town and it is narrated by a little boy whose twin brother has died. Yeah. Hm. Okay. This didn't rouse much enthusiasm in me. Animals in stories. I like animals in stories. But. I find it hard to believe that a small child could kill a horse with a knife. And I didn't believe certain other things, either.

Then there's something called (I think) "Ava Wrestles the Alligator." Karen Russell is the author. I tried to remember where I'd heard her name before. And then I remembered that I saw her read this spring. With some woman who went to Yale and used to be a model and wrote a book called Model Student...which is about a student who is...a model! Karen Russell read something about a school for girls raised as werewolves or something. She was young. Her werewolf story was really good, I thought, although the person I went with shifted in his seat and made sighing noises during it. Well, fuck him.

I also read a story by her in the New Yorker, which I didn't think was good. The narrator was supposed to be eight but his voice was that of a grad student trying too hard. How did it get published there? My mother liked it, though. "Ava Wrestles the Alligator" is pretty good, although not the kind of good that crawls up your spine. The kind of good where you say, "Alligator farm...fat girl having sex with ghosts...interesting stuff...okay, next story."

Wait, no. I'm being too dismissive here. I'm in a bad mood. I should be more forgiving.

For a while I wondered if I was a misogynist and didn't know it, because I despised all the published fiction I was reading by my female peers, since the only things they seemed to know how to write about were perky co-eds who were...models! or...sex columnists! or...plankton! (But then I was relieved because I read Helen Oyeyemi's novel and was impressed.) So it is worth saying that Karen Russell is obviously talented and even when I don't like it, her fiction is interesting and intelligent.

The other story, by (I think) Nam Le, is called (I think) "Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice" from the Faulkner quote. I like this story the best. It is secretly what might be snidely called a "meta" story, although oddly enough you could also make a defensible argument that it is purely realist.

It's a story about how an "ethnic" writer (that is, any writer whose name is something like "Ling Zhao" or "Srini Ganesh" rather than, say, "Miles Teagarden" or "Colin Smithy") can coast by writing stories about parents immigrating or some shit like that.

The main character is also named Nam and is at the Iowa Writers Workshop (where I think Nam Le went, or is) when his foreign-born father comes to visit.

There's a great part where Nam and his friend are walking down a road and the friend is going on and on about Nam's workshop story about "Vietnamese boat people" and Nam notices some people with guns on a porch watching them. I don't feel like explaining.

Yeah, it takes place at the Iowa Writer's Workshop.

If I heard the story described, I would groan.

But it's good.

*******

Also, although I hate Updike, here are some excellent rules he wrote for reviewing a book.

I had a meeting at work to discuss automation of something, the purpose of which is to increase efficiency and profit; here are the minutes from that

click then enlarge

I have a wonderful blurb for the jacket of my novel

I emailed it to my publisher.

Here it is.


"Antosca writes prose the only way it should be written--that is, ecstatically."

--Kaavya Viswanathan


What a good day.

Spiderman 3 is shooting outside my apartment this second

I went outside about two hours ago to get a sandwich and Spiderman 3 is shooting a big crowd scene. None of the stars are there as far as I could tell, but Sam Raimi is. (This isn't unusual. Inside Man was shooting here when I moved in last summer, and it seems like every other weekend there is some commercial or TV show shooting on William or Wall Street or Exchange Place.)

Trying to get through the crowd to the deli, I ended up right in the middle of a scene. Everyone around me was a "background artist" - a paid extra. Most of the women were very pretty, and the men all had "colorful" faces - fat or strange or somehow distinctive. Sam Raimi got on a big chair with a megaphone and gave directions.

He said, "In this scene, two villains have teamed up and they are using this girl for bait to lure Spiderman here! She's hanging off that building up there! Except the building is really going to be a construction site, but we're pretending here - so just look at the building and pretend its a crane..." Then everyone had to gasp when the girl slipped or something. I said (in a normal voice, not yelling), "Look, it's Batman!"

Then another shot - Raimi said, "Now one of these guys, this monster, is going to GROW. First he's this tall...then this tall...then this tall [at this point the monster is apparently as big as a building]...so we need to establish an eyeline. Be scared!"

As an aside, what Spiderman villain can grow? The villains in this movie are Sandman and Venom. What does Sandman do...illusions? Venom doesn't grow.

Anyway, after I was in like five shots, this woman working for the production came over to me and said, "Who are you?"

I said, "Uh, nobody."

She said, "That's what it looks like. Get out of the shot."

Then I went and got a sandwich, which had a ton of bacon, avocado, and brie. Delicious.

Al Gore & strip club

I did two things on Thursday night.

First, I went to see Al Gore's movie, An Inconvenient Truth. Incidentally, the movie was directed by Davis Guggenheim, the son of Charles Guggenheim, who ran Guggenheim Productions and won some Academy Awards. I interned there when I was 16. Charles died a few years ago.

An Inconvenient Truth features Gore using his usual trickery - things like "reason" and "science" - to make a pest of himself by telling people they should change their lives to perpetuate the survival of the human race. Better just to ignore him, folks. By the time Manhattan is half underwater, I probably won't even live here anymore.

Second, I went to a strip club. I had never been to one before, and this one, as strip clubs go, was very "upscale." A friend from college had somehow gotten free passes. EJ, who is a girl, went also. She seemed to be having more fun than anyone at first, but then a dirty alcoholic stripper tricked/pushed her into buying some incredibly expensive drinks that the stripper wanted. Then the stripper tore a button off my shirt and we left. Everyone else in the place seemed rich. One person was a midget.

So, in closing, I encourage everyone to go see An Inconvenient Truth.

the list

Everybody wanted to see the books that only got a few votes (as opposed to the lumbering, mostly dull champions - Jesus' Son, Blood Meridian, and The Known World excepted) in that wretched New York Times poll. And so somebody is trying to dig them up. Even this sampling is a far more exciting list than the NYTBR's list of winners. (Roth, Roth, Roth. Morrison Roth. Updike Roth. Roth Roth. Philip Roth. Tony Morrison. Morrison Morrison Roth. Updike Updike. Morrison. Roth Roth Roth Roth. Redrum. Redrum. Redrum. RedRUM! RedRUM! RedRUM! Roth Roth Roth. Roth. Roth.)

Little, Big was on there. And Carpenter's Gothic. Cool.

And then there's this:

"- The Cider House Rules, by John Irving (nominated by: John Irving)"

Just incidentally, I feel active revulsion when I think of that Owen Meany book. Beyond insufferable.