A FEW NIGHTS AGO, I WAS VISITED BY AN EMAIL. Back before the world gasped, my brother, the doctor, hardly ever wrote me anything beyond a “dinner Friday y/n,” and yet here he was, in the breathless thick of it, attaching a file of 7,241 words. I’d thought that he was far out in the boroughs intubating the sick or putting them through dialysis—and he was—but somehow he’d also found the time and adrenalized energy to put more language down on the screen than I, the ostensible writer, had managed to eke out in weeks, even months. The instructions that
A pregnant couple transitioning from a single room situation to an extra room situation . . . a pair of grown siblings who’d already evacuated their geriatric parents into a nursing home from out of a classic 6 condo they were looting. . .
View through Olafur Eliasson’s 2001 work Viewing Machine at Kistefos Museum, Norway, 2009. When considering time travel, one thinks more often of the metaphysics involved in altering one’s own present condition than, for example, the terrors or joys of inadvertent incestuous sex. But these two concerns can be contorted into one, as if entwined in […]
“Listen, I’d rather not talk today. I want to go watch old tennis players be displaced by young tennis players and the crowd weep as they retire and then start cheering for the new cocky-bastard upstarts who have sent them to pasture. This I want to do today, and nothing else. I want a cool soda water in my hand and a hat on my head and to not be overweight myself watching the elderly depart. I can from this position think gently of my own death.”
March over to Europe to gawk at its churches and what are you told? The tour guides, the tour-guiding priests—they tell you that the greatest cathedrals are left unfinished, and do you know why? Don’t be afraid to raise a hand. The answer is because God’s work is unfinished—because we are unfinished.
So I went to a party in Bushwick, Brooklyn, some weeks ago, the height of summer’s heat wave. Tao Lin was leaning against an air conditioner. I’d just been asked to review this book—his second novel, Richard Yates. I went over, told him I’d been asked, and offered him the opportunity to write the review himself, which I would submit under my own name. Bookforum would then publish the review, and a day or so later Lin would reveal the truth on his blog, etc.
So here I am at midnight, sitting in a Barcalounger, reading the Collected Fictions of Gordon Lish while idly masturbating. Idly, that is, not idol-ly, because Lish is no god of mine so much as he is a lazy indulgence. And if what comes of this is merely tedium with the occasional spasm of delight, then so be it. Nearly all of these one hundred Collected Fictions are written in the first person—no other people exist for Lish—which will explain this guilty pleasure: me speaking as me, but imitating him.
Gilbert Sorrentino’s last novel, The Abyss of Human Illusion, perfects a technique a decade in the making. In 1997 a story called “Sample Writing Sample” presented literary anecdotes followed by extracurricular endnotes; in 2002 Little Casino, a novel of skewed beauty, featured similar episodes, these about Brooklyn Days—from Bay Ridge love to Coney Island lust—each followed by a brief paragraph of commentary. Abyss marks a return to endnotes, which isolate lines of body text to remark on them after the body itself has concluded.
