Salon.com > The Weeklings http://www.salon.com Mon, 20 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Goodnight, sweet print http://www.salon.com/2013/05/12/goodnight_sweet_print_partner/ http://www.salon.com/2013/05/12/goodnight_sweet_print_partner/#comments Sun, 12 May 2013 19:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13295600 The Weeklings
THE YEAR IS 2001 and I am on the subway. It is the Number 1 train, going uptown, and I am heading to a reading of Slab Rat, my first published novel. (It’s my first ever reading, too, and I’m nervous.) It’s four in the afternoon and the car I’m on is not crowded. I see, directly across from me, a gorgeous, olive-skinned brunette sitting and reading a book. She’s not tall enough to be a model and not quite emaciated enough, but she is on the flawless side (her nose is a bit long, but who cares?). I swallow and tell myself not to stare and I follow through on it: I do not stare, for that would just be wrong. But then, while nobly avoiding eye contact, I see what book she is reading. It’s Slab Rat! Oh my God! She’s reading my book and, I can tell, she’s enjoying it, too. Perhaps she’s also on her way to the reading?

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/05/12/goodnight_sweet_print_partner/feed/ 14 Hillary in the (White) House http://www.salon.com/2013/05/11/hillary_in_the_white_house_partner/ http://www.salon.com/2013/05/11/hillary_in_the_white_house_partner/#comments Sat, 11 May 2013 14:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13295579 The Weeklings
I DREAM of Iowa.

Hillary Clinton has just made her first public appearances since resigning as Secretary of State, and I am enthusiastic about her presumed candidacy; it’s making me dream of Iowa. I long to go there to work on electing the first woman president.

I watched Barack Obama there last November at the final stop of his final campaign, just before midnight on the chilly evening before election day in Des Moines, the crowd of 20,000 strong doing call and response along with our president. “Fired up!” “Ready to go!”

This is not post-racial America, despite what some would try and have us believe. This is still racist that-nigger-messed-up-the-country America and I am crying from true joy to think that 20,000 mostly white folks are out there in Iowa — in Iowa! — for our president. For Barack Obama. For a black man. A black man! (I don’t believe that Iowans are any more likely to be racist than the rest of us, but the heartland of America is not the first place that jumps to mind when I think of racial progress.)

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/05/11/hillary_in_the_white_house_partner/feed/ 97 How to avoid writing an awful screenplay http://www.salon.com/2013/04/22/tk_5_partner_13_partner/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/22/tk_5_partner_13_partner/#comments Mon, 22 Apr 2013 22:05:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13278974 ALL MY ADULT life, I’d avoided writing screenplays. I didn’t know very many happy screenwriters. I didn’t know any, in fact: even the most successful among them, the ones who had sold pitches for six figures or seen their work solidly produced were miserable, touched with a kind of self-loathing unique to the breed. “A real writer,” says the magnificently-compensated television staff writer to the penniless novelist. “You’re a real writer.” Once, at a party, an Oscar-nominated writer/director—multiply-nominated, in various categories, for almost every film he’s ever made, winner of various other major awards likewise—turned to me and sighed. “To succeed in this business, one must make friends with despair.” It’s always been this way, and yet—

Yet, when I was offered a chance to write a script, I said yes. Of course I did. It was 1999, a period in which the narrowing window of “independent film” (scare quotes necessary to indicate I mean not truly independent cinema, but rather corporately-funded inexpensive movies) allowed the possibility of making literate adult dramas. Harvey and Bob Weinstein still ran Miramax, and the other studios—Sony, Paramount, even Warner Brothers as well as 20th Century Fox—had classics divisions. It seemed non-suicidal to attempt an adaptation of a difficult novel, an ambitious book that was, nevertheless at its core, a love story. I adored the novel, but my reasons for taking it on as a screenplay were fundamentally mercenary. As old, then, as the profession itself.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/22/tk_5_partner_13_partner/feed/ 1 When we all smelled like teen spirit http://www.salon.com/2013/04/21/smells_like_teen_spirit_nyc_1993_at_the_new_museum_partner/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/21/smells_like_teen_spirit_nyc_1993_at_the_new_museum_partner/#comments Sun, 21 Apr 2013 19:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13276464 The WeeklingsRIGHT NOW ON the Bowery you can step into a time machine. It will carry you back to 1993 or thereabouts. It spreads over five floors in a great gleaming building, and to first acclimate you, a line of boxy Samsung televisions broadcast highlights from the year. This was before TVs were flat-screen or LCD or HD, when the initials that stood for high-tech – or any tech – in home entertainment were VHS. Here was a moment before the Internet was big, the World Wide Web did not exist yet (not really), AIDS was still “uncured,” Clinton had just been inaugurated, and it was a watershed moment for art.

This five-story teleportation device is an exhibit at the New Museum called “NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set Trash and No Star.” Ignore the subtitle. It’s from a Sonic Youth album that doesn’t appear in the show and was, in fact, released in 1994. Though, I’ve read some pretty baroque interpretations of why it fits with such a close textual analysis they veer on New Criticism.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/21/smells_like_teen_spirit_nyc_1993_at_the_new_museum_partner/feed/ 1 Why do we love to look at strangers’ family photographs? http://www.salon.com/2013/04/11/why_do_we_love_to_look_at_strangers_family_photographs_partner/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/11/why_do_we_love_to_look_at_strangers_family_photographs_partner/#comments Thu, 11 Apr 2013 16:58:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13268060 ONE OF NEW YORK’s most sophisticated galleries of interactive art used to be on St. Mark’s Place. And I do mean on St. Mark’s, out on the sidewalk. Itinerant street vendors would set up tables piled with the detritus of anonymous lives, cast off books, earrings, scarves, toy trucks, every item compressed under the weight of a small sadness. It almost seemed unkind to look, as if you were staring at a stranger weeping in private grief. But the collection of black-and-white photographs shoved under a table practically sang out its conspiratorial invitation: Complete me.
The Weeklings

I’ll never forget the moment when, after fishing blindly in this box of a thousand dead memories, I pulled out a work of art.  It had not been intended as one; it was just a snapshot.  But it was aesthetically bewitched.  The time it took for a shutter to open and close in, oh, I don’t know—a sheared-off sliver of one second in Depression-struck 1932?—was the exact amount of time it took the eye to remake it. A picture of a picture, this time taken by the beholder.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/11/why_do_we_love_to_look_at_strangers_family_photographs_partner/feed/ 3 You can judge a book by its title http://www.salon.com/2013/04/01/tk_5_partner_6/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/01/tk_5_partner_6/#comments Mon, 01 Apr 2013 18:27:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13257977 The Weeklings IT GENERALLY TAKES awhile to write a novel. Although there are authors who can write a quality book every year, they’re the exceptions; it’s more typical to spend three, five, or even seven years to complete a draft. If you’ve never attempted to write anything of a novel’s length, imagine having a friend or relative visit you for roughly that length of time, for three or five or seven years. Imagine a person, a person with whom you are not enjoying anything like traditional sexual congress, leaving their little hairs and toenail clippings in your sink, sprinkling their droplets of pee on your toilet seat, cluttering your surfaces with their weird pocket stuff, sticking things in the wrong cabinets, being underfoot and distracting you constantly for three or five or seven years. Let’s be honest: even if it was your favorite cousin, and even though you sort of invited him, after a year or so, you would owe it to yourself to give, at minimum, tacit consideration to murdering this person. This is the unique affliction of writing books: the endeavor is such that you can never entirely stop thinking about it. Picture the houseguest that is your novel, day after day, chewing cereal with his mouth open, his butt cratering the seat of your favorite armchair, and you will begin to understand.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/01/tk_5_partner_6/feed/ 1 Have personal essays gotten too personal? http://www.salon.com/2013/03/17/have_personal_essays_gotten_too_personal_partner/ http://www.salon.com/2013/03/17/have_personal_essays_gotten_too_personal_partner/#comments Sun, 17 Mar 2013 17:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13242528 People are generally after the truth. Whether they’re reading fiction or nonfiction or something in between (and the in-between is vast), I suspect they usually want something that feels genuine, honest, real — even those who don’t think of themselves as earnest types. Nonfiction lately is hip. Essays, in particular, have a veneer of currency right now. It’s a form that can be perfectly direct and also contain a world of subtleties. And there’s often as much imagination and craft and contrivance to a great essay as there is to a work of fiction.
The Weeklings

Recently a piece in the New Republic appeared that lamented the current state of the essay. In an article that was both right on and full of blind spots, Adam Kirch wrote that even though it seems like we’re living in a “golden age” of the essay, these essays are not really "Essays." He invoked Montaigne as the sort of ideal and “modern inventor” of the personal essay, and focused on contemporary writers David Sedaris, Davy Rothbart, Sloane Crosley, and John Jeremiah Sullivan, whose work has “little in common with what was once meant by that term.”

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/03/17/have_personal_essays_gotten_too_personal_partner/feed/ 4 We let Charles Krafft fool us http://www.salon.com/2013/03/11/we_let_charles_krafft_fool_us_partner/ http://www.salon.com/2013/03/11/we_let_charles_krafft_fool_us_partner/#comments Mon, 11 Mar 2013 21:25:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13225622 The Weeklings CHARLES WING KRAFFT, the self-taught painter turned postmodern ceramicist, is famous for his ‘Disasterware’ collection, a term he coined for the melding of violent, often Fascist imagery with tawdry vessels. He’s fashioned everything from ceramic grenades with bio-weapons decaled in antiquated blue to perfume bottles appliquéd with swastikas. Krafft’s work has been featured in prominent news outlets such as Harper's and The New Yorker and is on permanent display at the Seattle Art Museum. He’s received endowments from the Soros Foundation and the NEA. Enthusiasts celebrate, or at least used to celebrate, what they believed to be Krafft’s insidious sense of irony that took a darkly comedic take on twentieth-century disasters, not to mention a vicious stand against political iconography in all forms. In 2009, art critic Jen Graves of The Stranger featured Krafft’s ceramic AK 47 on the magazine’s cover, admittedly duping herself concerning the artist’s perceived identity as an ‘iconoclast.’

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/03/11/we_let_charles_krafft_fool_us_partner/feed/ 14 I shook hands with a Klansman http://www.salon.com/2013/03/10/i_shook_david_dukes_hand_and_lived_to_tell_the_tale_partner/ http://www.salon.com/2013/03/10/i_shook_david_dukes_hand_and_lived_to_tell_the_tale_partner/#comments Sun, 10 Mar 2013 13:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13223470 AS THE POLISHED brass elevator doors closed, she pressed her back against the side wall. She was traditionally pretty, this legislative page, as most of the young female pages were. Her navy blue blazer fit well, although it bunched as she drew in her shoulders. She was probably a sorority girl or a political science major, or both.

The Weeklings

I nodded in silent greeting. Perhaps she assessed me, too, with my hippie-long hair tied in a ponytail, no make-up, T-shirt, and jeans. Just another random student worker. An English major, she might have thought, or something in the hard sciences.

We were alone on a long ride along the 34 floors of the state capitol building.

She glanced at me, her eyes troubled, her expression grim. “David Duke wants me to go to his office,” she said.

For those who aren’t familiar with that name, or whose recollections are vague, David Duke became nationally famous after running for Louisiana’s governor in 1991. He had a documented past of carrying books and posters bearing Nazi swastikas while a student at Louisiana State University, served as the Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, and was the founding president of the National Association for the Advancement of White People.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/03/10/i_shook_david_dukes_hand_and_lived_to_tell_the_tale_partner/feed/ 29 Thanks for nothing, Purell! http://www.salon.com/2013/03/04/thanks_for_nothing_purell/ http://www.salon.com/2013/03/04/thanks_for_nothing_purell/#comments Mon, 04 Mar 2013 17:18:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13218294 The Weeklings MY HISTORY OF getting sick just prior to going on vacation began years ago when I almost ruined the first international trip with my partner, Tony. Days before we were to leave for France, I came down with a horrible cold accompanied by a severe sinus infection, and the doctor advised me not to fly. “So, are we going or not?” Tony said, like a 12-year-old preparing himself for disappointment.

That was just the first time my congested nasal passages threatened to sideline a highly anticipated getaway. Now we’re about to take a big trip at the beginning of March, and I absolutely cannot be ailing. Not this time.

I have never been accused of being a hypochondriac or germaphobe. I have always freely shared water and food, hugged and kissed friends and relatives with abandon, and wrapped my palms around dirty subway handrails when there was no room to sit. That is, until the beginning of this year. 2013 began with flu running wild through New York, and I suddenly transformed into a Purell-toting member of the Howie Mandel-Woody Allen club, where our motto is, keep away from me you germ-infested person.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/03/04/thanks_for_nothing_purell/feed/ 17 Snowmaking is the most dangerous part of skiing http://www.salon.com/2013/02/23/snowmaking_is_the_most_dangerous_part_of_skiing_partne/ http://www.salon.com/2013/02/23/snowmaking_is_the_most_dangerous_part_of_skiing_partne/#comments Sat, 23 Feb 2013 13:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13207716 DECEMBER a couple years ago, I am on the back of a snowmobile. The gas fumes are overpowering, and the two-stroke engine too loud to hear anything over. I race up a hill with 30 feet of hoses trailing behind me. These are not some small rubber garden hoses but the size of ones firefighters use. I’m clutching onto someone named Nolan, who’s steering. Dusk is settling; the hill is steep, and I worry we’ll tip over as he rounds a bend. Nolan has a first name but doesn’t use it. He’s thirty with rust-colored hair hidden under a hood and balaclava. He wears insulated everything: Carhartts, gloves and blown-out snowboarding boots patched together with duct tape. He’s head of snowmaking at a small ski hill in the Catskills near where I live, and until this afternoon I have no idea what it takes to make snow, the very work involved.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/02/23/snowmaking_is_the_most_dangerous_part_of_skiing_partne/feed/ 2 Illness is big business http://www.salon.com/2013/02/20/sick_business_partner/ http://www.salon.com/2013/02/20/sick_business_partner/#comments Wed, 20 Feb 2013 20:29:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13206802 The Weeklings

WHEN I WAS in my early twenties I lived in New Zealand for several years, working on a television series. Our series was stunt based and one day I almost broke my ankle. New Zealand has a national healthcare system. Even though I was not a New Zealand citizen, I still was taken to a doctor who x-rayed my ankle. Once he deemed the foot not broken he prescribed me a regimen of physical therapy. A trained therapist came to my house and rubbed my swollen and quite purple foot twice a day. None of this cost me anything– of course the production company was taking care of that– but that original doctor was a public one, in a public emergency room. When he finished up his exam and knew that my foot-bones were still intact, that simple extra step he took prescribing me physical therapy was his way of treating his patient’s whole care, not just the condition.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/02/20/sick_business_partner/feed/ 13 Detroit: A city in foreclosure http://www.salon.com/2013/02/14/in_detroit_empty_houses_tell_sad_stories_partner/ http://www.salon.com/2013/02/14/in_detroit_empty_houses_tell_sad_stories_partner/#comments Thu, 14 Feb 2013 21:06:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13201562 The Weeklings A BOAT LIES on its side in an empty lot. Abandoned in a neighborhood miles from the water, a neighborhood where no one can afford boats, let alone the truck and the trailer that would haul the boat there. But there lies the boat. Now multiply that boat by fifty or even a hundred, tossed over the years in lots all over the city. It isn’t a metaphor. They come from the suburbs, dumped in Detroit because that seems to be the easiest and cheapest way to dispose of such a thing. They dump other things too, none of it legal, and it all becomes a part of a neighborhood.

There are other stories that are harder to see. An empty, boarded-up house might represent someone who has moved on, a symbol of the abandonment this city has seen as thousands of people have, over time, moved out beyond the city limits.

But that emptiness might indicate another history.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/02/14/in_detroit_empty_houses_tell_sad_stories_partner/feed/ 8 The best author profile you’ll read this week http://www.salon.com/2013/01/21/the_best_author_profile_youll_read_this_week/ http://www.salon.com/2013/01/21/the_best_author_profile_youll_read_this_week/#comments Mon, 21 Jan 2013 20:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13177071 The Weeklings THERE’S A POPULAR series of Youtube videos called “Kids React,” where kids watch a viral video—say, the “Gangnam Style” one—and the viewer gets to watch their faces as they’re reacting to the video. I’m imagining a similar series called “Writers React,” where writers read an article about another writer and we watch their faces as they betray feelings of envy, bitterness, revulsion, self-loathing, despair, and possibly, occasionally, actual happiness for the fellow writer.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/01/21/the_best_author_profile_youll_read_this_week/feed/ 0 Novels about the Internet can still be compelling http://www.salon.com/2013/01/19/can_novels_about_the_internet_still_be_compelling/ http://www.salon.com/2013/01/19/can_novels_about_the_internet_still_be_compelling/#comments Sat, 19 Jan 2013 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13176431 The Weeklings Last week in Part I, Sam Byers looked at the “death” of the novel as it got killed off by too much technology.

THE EFFECT OF regarding technology as some insidious external force threatening books (and our sense of self) from “over there” (where technology lives) is that it encourages us to regard novels as a last bastion of existential honesty which must be defended against technology’s cruel advance. The defense, of course, must be mounted both externally (the book as object, shielded from the encroachment of devices) and internally (the book as work of art, immunized against the insidious spread of techno-speak and cyber-babble). The result, sadly, is a discourse of denial that traps the novel in an illusory and self-defeating antiquity.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/01/19/can_novels_about_the_internet_still_be_compelling/feed/ 4 Is the novel beyond saving? http://www.salon.com/2013/01/14/is_the_novel_beyond_saving/ http://www.salon.com/2013/01/14/is_the_novel_beyond_saving/#comments Mon, 14 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13169414 The Weeklings  Over the next four Thursdays, Sam Byers is going to take on the state of the novel, specifically the state of the novel today with technology, when everyone thinks technology, the internet and internet-inspired distraction are killing fiction. Read on, and at the end of the month we will be co-publishing the essay as (what else?) an eBook.

NOVELISTS ARE A nervy bunch. This is, in many ways, forgivable, or at least understandable. We’re paid to worry, in both senses of the word. We pick away at stuff. Things bother us, and we, in turn, bother them right back. Since we spend all day worrying on behalf of others, it shouldn’t come as much surprise that when we turn away from the worries we’ve just set down on the page we quickly start sniffing around for something we can fret about in our spare time. And what more appropriate subject than the novel itself?

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/01/14/is_the_novel_beyond_saving/feed/ 18 “Django Unchained’s” secret political triumph http://www.salon.com/2013/01/11/django_unchaineds_secret_triumph/ http://www.salon.com/2013/01/11/django_unchaineds_secret_triumph/#comments Fri, 11 Jan 2013 00:02:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13167730 The Weeklings
 OVER THE WEEKEND I had the luxury of seeing Django Unchained, Quentin Tarantino’s slavery-centered revenge fantasy. Like everything the gore-obsessed culture monger has produced, from Pulp Fiction to Kill Bill, I found myself wrapped up in a narrative so inventive I was in no time cheering along as the taskmasters bled out. I’ve had long conversations with more film-savvy friends on Mr. Tarantino’s artistic merits. Sure, some of them are enamored, but others find him too liberal with his tendency to borrow—more of a master of post-modern pastiche than an authentic auteur, while posing as the latter. I can’t say I don’t sympathize. As someone interested in authenticity (in literature, especially), I can’t fault those who take Tarantino’s obsession with Kung Fu movies, Spaghetti Westerns, and scene stalking to task. Still, with each release I find myself unflinchingly in awe; whether or not I’m being spoon-fed what’s already been done, Tarantino’s films accomplish the goal of playing with a viewer’s perception of past and present. He does wonders with rendering violence surreal, while, of course, polarizing the hell out of his audience.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/01/11/django_unchaineds_secret_triumph/feed/ 24 Nick Carraway is gay and in love with Gatsby http://www.salon.com/2013/01/09/was_nick_carraway_gay/ http://www.salon.com/2013/01/09/was_nick_carraway_gay/#comments Wed, 09 Jan 2013 18:28:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13165982 The Weeklings I HAVE READ The Great Gatsby more times than any other novel. With each reading, my understanding of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s greatest work deepens, and I pick up something I missed previously. My first time was in high school, when our English class discussed the symbolism of the green light and the eyes on the billboard and the silk shirts in the vast closet. In college, I was drawn to Gatsby as tragic romantic and giver of epic parties of the kind I wanted to throw. After I moved to New York, I read the book again and finally understood its geography.

Subsequent readings have been slower, more careful. I parse the words—there are not many in this masterpiece of economy—and delve into the text in a way I was not capable of as a teenager. I’m reading like a writer, in Francine Prose’s phrase. As an adjunct professor, I always include the novel on my syllabus. My Gatsby lecture was a high point of my three semesters as an adjunct.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/01/09/was_nick_carraway_gay/feed/ 54 When I learned to hunt http://www.salon.com/2013/01/06/when_i_learned_to_hunt/ http://www.salon.com/2013/01/06/when_i_learned_to_hunt/#comments Sun, 06 Jan 2013 01:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13162565 The Weeklings THE FROST GLITTERS darkly. It sparkles as if all the constellations of the sky are knit to the ground. Walking down the block in the predawn light, I have on a hat, ridiculous orange, I’m embarrassed of even with no cars on the street and no one to see. It’s 5:30 AM, and I wear two of everything as if I’m preparing to flee or dressed for some Noah’s Ark of winter: two pairs of long johns, two wool sweaters, two hats, two pairs of gloves (plus hand warmers) and one old down jacket (dark purple, just to add to my ridiculous color scheme. I also carry an orange backpack, less bright than the hat, but still…). My winter boots have soles so thick I’m a full inch and a half taller. I’m not sure how to dress, but it’s 17 out, and I’ll be sitting for hours – not moving, not talking. Waiting, watching things rustle and the sun rise and the day shape over a hill by a field in upstate New York. I am going hunting.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/01/06/when_i_learned_to_hunt/feed/ 34 Jews dig Christmas too http://www.salon.com/2012/12/25/jews_dig_christmas_too/ http://www.salon.com/2012/12/25/jews_dig_christmas_too/#comments Tue, 25 Dec 2012 21:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13153278 The Weeklings For a Jew, I’ve been getting a lot of email from Christian Mingle lately. Of course, I’m all, “spam folder!” But at the same time, I’m all, “Moi?” Because as far back as I can remember, Christianity has been a glittering swimming pool through a chain-link fence. It started thirty-some-odd years ago at the mall, when I urinated on the Easter Bunny’s lap and he registered my name on the black list. As I got older, I noticed that my Christian friends did fun things without me. In the winter, they decorated trees in their living rooms. In the summertime, they vacationed in cottages. For dinner, they ate Cornish game hens. They had blue eyes, a prerequisite for attracting romantic partners. By the time I was a teenager, I knew what I wanted to be: a blue-eyed, steel-bladdered blonde who perched on Santa’s knee wearing a slutty dress and tinsel.

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