the literary scene

Emily Sipiora's Victim Radio presents Mark de Silva on the literary scene.

I wear blue jeans and write about New York City.

"Lastly, a writer dressed in blue jeans and a dress shirt, read from his book Fight for Your Long Day. He said in his introductory comments, “If I want to sell the book, I guess I need to let you know who I am. My name is Alex Kudera.” The audience clapped enthusiastically. His reading described a day in the life of a very tired adjunct in New York City. So much of what he dealt with Heather could relate to: trying not to leave anything behind, rushing in and rushing out of the classroom, the students desperately trying to talk while you are trying to make it to your next gig and don’t have time to listen, the colleagues and chair who say demeaning things to you but are impervious to the way they talk down to you. It felt good to laugh about it instead of the daily grind of dealing with it, day in and day out."

~~ from Adjunct Headquarters, "Subconference of the MLA" by Lydia Field Snow

"Behold My Suit!"

Although Gary Shteyngart interrupts the narrative to brag about the elephants he's slaughtered with his bare hands as well as his Herschel-esque 40-yard-dash time and subtle mastication of both Iron Mike's ears (no double entendre), Hong-Kong Gary manages nevertheless to produce a humane and humble narrative that illuminates a world neither the author nor much of the audience has had access to in any detail. I highly recommend an hour or three away from it all to read the March Atlantic Monthly's "Behold My Suit!"

Eighty if I must.

"Anyway, it looks as though we'll be coming to New York to live. I don't know what rents are now, but I wouldn't like to pay much more than sixty or seventy. Eighty if I must. As for the size of the flat, that depend on the section we move into. In a neighborhood where I could find a room to write in, we wouldn't need six rooms. Four to six, let's say then. The bigger the better."

~~ Saul Bellow to Monroe Engel, April 30, 1950

that illusion of stability

"That was when I checked my phone. It was a small flip phone that I sometimes forgot about for days on end. It was always dropping calls. I had bought it from the back door of a bodega on Graham and Conselyea along with a packet of calling cards that gave you pretty modest minutes unless you were calling Yemen, in which case your time lasted forever. I had four new messages, all from unknown callers. I sat down on the stoop of a brownstone to listen to them. They were all made from that same rock from the same quarries in Pennsylvania, the stuff that looked like it could survive any kind of calamity, natural or man-made, legal or otherwise. The neighborhood was full of them and that was part of its charm, that illusion of stability."

~~ from An Honest Living by Dwyer Murphy

He had been poor once

"He smiled a thin-slipped, distant smile and slid back further into his chair. We were sitting in plush leather armchairs and every now and again he would cross or uncross one of his legs. He seemed awfully proud of himself, sitting there. He had fought and clawed and believed it meant something that he had. He had been poor once, when he was young, and now that he wasn't anymore he thought it all had meaning: his rise, his marriage, his bribes and permits, the cotton robe he was wearing and letting slide open to show off his old man's skin, all pocked and flaccid."

~~ from An Honest Living by Dwyer Murphy

Kazin on 14th Street

 "This old-fashioned house. Studios. Man downstairs playing Bach. Only on the bottom, on greasy, broken down 14th Street are people at home on Memorial Day playing Bach. Like something out of Willa Cather's Stories of Washington Square."

~~ from Alfred Kazin's Journals, Selected and Edited by Richard M. Cook

Hunger 2020

"City Harvest, a nonprofit that distributes food donated by restaurants and other retail outlets to nearly 250 food pantries and soup kitchens citywide, says it delivered 6.6 million pounds of food between March 9 and April 12, or almost 5 million pounds more than the year-earlier period, according to Racine Lee Droz, City Harvest’s director of food sourcing. . .

"Food Bank for New York City — the biggest anti-hunger organization in the city — says the number of users could double or even triple from the pre-coronavirus level of 2.5 million. . .

"As of last week, 791,000 New Yorkers had applied for unemployment benefits, according to the Department of Labor. A New School study found that the state has lost 1.2 million jobs so far, and estimates that one-third of the city could soon be out of work.

"On Wednesday, Mayor de Blasio announced a plan to spend $170 million on food for the hungry. . .

"Now, Rethink Food, a local nonprofit, has launched a pop-up soup kitchen outside the church and is doing 600 to 1,000 meals a day, five days a week. “We could easily do 5,000 meals a day,” Rethink founder Matt Jozwiak said — and lines would be even longer if it weren’t for fear of infection."

~~ from The New York Post, April 19, 2020

Kimarlee Nguyen, R.I.P.

"Ms. Nguyen earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Vassar in 2008 and a master of fine arts degree from Long Island University Brooklyn in 2016. Her writing has appeared in PANK, Hyphen Magazine and The Adroit Journal; she has had numerous fellowships and residencies and was at work on a novel, Lion’s Tooth, about a Cambodian-American family living in Cambridge, Mass."

Lux Chen in New York City

"At night, I kept having this dream in which I went back to school to finish my doctoral degree but could not find my classroom. Once, when I finally followed the crowd into a giant, round auditorium, what greeted me was a sparkling black coffin at the center of the podium, surrounded by candles, flowers, and a children’s choir. It was not a class, but a stranger’s funeral. Or was the funeral for me?"

from Lux Chen's "How The Great Gatsby Saved My Life"

(This essay can also be read in Chinese.)

Arthur Nersesian

When people are young, they are inclined to see the world in absolutes. Young writers want to MAKE IT AS A WRITER, or they are LOSERS. To me success is a daily task. At best it varies from book to book, and though it would be nice to have security, at very least, these precarious conditions do make life interesting. I won’t deny that for most, this is a tough life. You really have to want it, but it can be rewarding.

 ~~ Arthur Nersesian, from "Words from the Wise"

my coffee and pie with andre

28 years late to the restaurant, I rent a VHS tape of My Dinner with Andre and watch the film. I remember hearing the title in my childhood, and although my father had already slipped me past the guard in search of movies like Jane Fonda's Barbarella and The Band's The Last Waltz, neither of my parents took me to this Wallace-Shawn joint.

Like so many of the movies of Spike Lee and Woody Allen, it is in its own way a tribute to New York City, and in this case, a tribute to the kind of conversation that could only make it there. In other words, if you're from South Carolina, or at least living in these quieter parts the past few years, there's a good chance your reaction to the movie will be like mine: these people talk too much! And so, not too late at night, you'll get exhausted midway through, and you'll finish watching the next day with the aid of dessert and strong coffee.

And yet of course, it is a rather excellent film although I could not tell you why this is so.

I may watch it again before returning it to its quiet, resting place among all the other stodgy films no one ever checks out of the university library. (I cannot be certain, but I have a feeling the members of our community who would watch and enjoy it are people who have already seen it; most students would ignore it because it is VHS, and they have only packed a DVD player for their movie-time leisure.)

For now, I find myself trying to place it in the early 1980s and wondering what it was doing there. After all, as a nation, were we not high on Lake Placid gold in Olympic ice hockey as well as the chest beating of Reagan's election and subsequent freeing of the American hostages? How dare these two characters sit down and talk so much about the kinds of things they talk about. And yet, there is something remarkable about how late in the film, in front of his patrons, the waiter takes a drag and then extinguishes his cigarette. I do not believe for a moment that the screenwriters intended for us to believe this silent server could be mafia or KGB.

FYI: http://www.amazon.com/My-Dinner-Andre-Criterion-Collection/dp/B001WLMOLE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1259179536&sr=1-1