page-hugging.

Lutz, woo me with your tortured syntactical artistry.
This man has read 250 dictionaries of grammar usage.
He reads books backwards. (I don't always care what happens much either.)
He read The New Yorker in order to analyze punctuation, which is not a bad reason to start reading The New Yorker.

As a follow-up to my previous mention of Gary Lutz, here is a lovely little Q&A with the man,
reposted from Eugene Lim.

Watch it and experience brief self-conscious language paralysis, or seduction.

Reunion

Sorry bloggy, it's been so long! Last we spoke (late, t.v. bound) I was stuck in a word mire that amounted to nothing but practice. But! I started a new story and wrote it in a week and now I'm waiting until I'm slightly less excited about it so I can make some wise revisioning happen. Am I good at structure? Hell no. My hook and push at plot needs work, as in, I don't even consider it. My structure is confusion and lists and terror towards the end and then confused calm, or some strange image that I woke and wrote in the middle of the night. Erratic. The other stuff so far in this story, I think I like.

I heard Mary Gaitskill read from "Don't Cry," her latest story collection, at the NYU Writer's House this evening and she used her eyes in this flashy way while she spoke that I liked, and she has really nice hands. People asked some moderately uninteresting questions and her answers were as unexpected and perceptive and usefully instructive as I had hoped they would be.

Does this reading log I have on the side here mean anything? Is it stupid? Does it seem pretentious? I can't tell. I'm actually a little embarrassed about it because I'm sure plenty of people read more interesting things than I do, and more of them more quickly, but I kind of like seeing it, to remember what I've been through, especially when I'm reading borrowed books. What if I started noting everything I ever read, like every lit journal or story or poem or article or blog post or manual or shampoo bottle or subway advisory? At least I'm not doing that.

I'm reading Chris Ware's graphic novel "Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth" but I only read it for a certain amount of time at home every day because 1) it's heavy and I don't want to lug it around in public and 2) it's so sad. So good, but I've already almost started crying twice and not because of what happened really (well, maybe that scene where the dad has to drop a cinder block and the mouse audience is watching...if that means something to you) but because of a small motion or subtle change between frames that was so striking in its simplicity and weight. Let's just say I'm a happily miserable Ware fan. I'm also reading some Lawrence Weschler essays, htmlgiant obsessively, daily, feedback from classmates on my story, and George Saunders's "Pastoralia." I'm working on a letter to Cameron in Korea and considering making him cookies, but I don't know if they'll make it. I wish I could go to Korea.

One of the Korean students I work with often at the writing center at FIT, this woman Damee who is an amazing artist and toy designer and makes the cutest friggin boards for her toys I have ever seen, told me that when she first came to New York from Korea for a visit, her purse was stolen and she had twenty dollars for one week. She couldn't ask anyone for help and she really wanted to see Van Gogh's "Starry Night" at MoMA so she spent that money to go see it and didn't eat for three days. It was so romantic, this story. I was gaping. I wanted to hold her hand. And then she said something like, "Being hungry is not fun. And the painting was so small." And then we talked about how Chuck Close is a cheater. Chew on that, next time you eat or don't eat, ignoring art. I guess I'd rather eat? People get weird when they're extremely hungry; I'd probably get too weird.