Carolyn Kellogg: Not a Fan of Don Lee
Written by Edward ChampionPosted on July 5, 2008
Filed Under Uncategorized
Pinky’s Paperhaus: “It’s OK if you have a guy leave a highly successful NY art career, even a People’s 50 Most Beautiful People kind of successful art career, for a smalltown California Brussels sprouts farm, and it’s OK that he’s the last holdout against the evil corporate developers who want his land for a golf course, it’s even OK, despite the fact that we’re to believe he’s the misanthropist of the century, that he makes friends with a local surfer, of all the local surfers the one who lost a foot in a freak shark attack, I’m still OK, even here, but it’s not OK that the farmer has teamed up with said surfer to grow some pot on his property, the same property he so desperately is trying to save from the developers, and accidentally grows too much and he can’t believe the surfer has told his friends about it… because none of that fits.”
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Books To Jump Up and Down Over
Girl Power by Marisa Meltzer. During the 1990s, artists such as Liz Phair and Bikini Kill came very close to unsettling the patriarchal pop hierarchy. And this small yet thoughtful volume delineates many connections between girl bands and post-Beauty Myth ruminations, suggesting that we may have come closer to a musical revolution than we realized, but settled for less.
Reality Hunger by David Shields. This book, challenging both "originality" and the conventional narratives we accept in literary "masterpieces," is mandatory reading for every working writer. It's almost designed as a litmus test carefully designed to uproot charlatans. (Indeed, Zadie Smith confessed last November in The Guardian that she could not write a novel after reading this book. Interestingly, her essay is no longer available online.) The book presents numerous thoughts and maxims: some contrived, some taken from other sources (see the numerous endnotes), and some sincere. And even if you don't agree with the sentiments, you'll come away from the book rethinking your perceptions of the novel and possibly galvanized to reapproach your own work. 
Psycho Too by Will Self. This handsome followup to Psychogeography containing the last half of Will Self's New Statesman columns and accompanied by Ralph Steadman's gloriously savage illustrations -- seems to have escaped the attention of most American newspapers, save for a widely syndicated Alexandra Fuller review in The New York Times Book Review. Small wonder that in a universe happily handing over its glass-encased brains to the likes of People and TMZ that Fuller would accuse Self of penning a "densely written" book and focus her interests more on Self's "rakish behavior" from fifteen years ago rather than his post-Debordian meditations on the dérive. That's too bad. Because Self's enjoyable and hyperliterate essays, laden with cranky asides and thoughtful considerations about the fixed manner in which humans unwittingly accept their spatial limitations, deserves your consideration.Or send materials to:
315 Flatbush Avenue, #231
Brooklyn, NY 11217
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