Grace Reading Series

You know that thing where your heart grows a size? That just happened to me--my students read tonight and were amazing. I am still beaming with pride and happiness. The basement reading room (decorated like a rec room by the owner, Clyde, complete with faux paneling and a giant mural of evergreens) at Lolita was packed--about 40 people in the audience--and it was a warm, fabulous crowd. Everyone read with such presence and conjured all kinds of power. Gorgeousness. I was transfixed.

I am so grateful for my job--I love teaching these classes so much. I'm gushing. I'll admit it. I get the best students.

Right after the reading I left town for my patriotic holiday destination and I drank so much diet coke, chewed so much gum, and listened to so much Led Zeppelin (don't ask--I think if you're driving to Jersey in the summer you just sort of have to) to stay awake that my teeth still kind of hurt.

But now there will be ocean and I hope sun soon and I get to sink into the big pile of books, including the new ones from Jennifer Egan and Curtis Sittenfeld, so exciting.
xxooElizabeth

Posted by Elizabeth Merrick at 02:10 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Join us for drinks at 6:30, reading at 7pm this Thursday, 6/29.

Lolita: 266 Broome St. at Allen.

My Novella Class this round are rock stars, each and every one. I think about 10 people will be reading about 5 minutes each, with a break for delicious snacks someway midway through. It will be a lovely evening--i'd hate for you to miss it, definitely come hang out.

The novella reading is always amazing, but this crew is especially surprising & on point. I can't wait.

Posted by Elizabeth Merrick at 11:39 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I took my mom to her doctor at Pennsylvania Hospital today, in Philly. It's the oldest hospital in the country, has been there since 1751. Imagine that. It was there when there were slaves being traded a few blocks away just north of South Street. Horrifying. I was in The Worst Mood when we left there and I felt so guilty about it--just super crabby and cranky and evil and I was supposed to be taking care of my awesome mom.

When we got home and I calmed down and everything stopped seeming super fucked and terrible my mom told me she forgot to warn me. The place has serious vibes. That's when she told me how long it's been a hospital and that the first time she went there the same sort of horrible mood descended on her and she finally figured out it was just that it's been this place of intensity and suffering for a really long time.

She forgot to tell me! Jesus. I thought it was just PMS.

Anyway, then I was thoroughly cheered up by this interview with my Feminist Hero of the summer, Alan Moore. (I just finished reading From Hell in which violence in a specific place echoes through the centuries.) He talks about Lost Girls but also some about how his next novel is restricted to a few blocks in his hometown.

I, however, think that I maybe am not sticking nearly so close to mine this summer as I had originally kinda thought--apparently there's some stuff going on elsewhere I might want to check out. Oh I'm terrible but I will tell you later.

And the magic doc at the scary haunted hospital seems to have done the trick--mom is much better, thanks & knock wood. This magic doc's offices are special and have this superfabulous wood paneling and are sort of a separate wing. Weird.
xxooElizabeth

Posted by Elizabeth Merrick at 08:32 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The inner life is the enemy of crowds, because the life of crowds snuffs the mind's murmurings. Mind is many-threaded, mazy, meandering, while every crowd turns out to be a machine--a collectivity of parts united as to a purpose. And with the ratcheting up of technology, every machine turns out to be a crowd. All these contemporary story-grinding contrivances and appliances that purport to capture, sometimes to mimic, the inner life--what are they, really, if not the brute extrusions of the principle of Crowd?...The very disappearance of telephone booths--those private cells for the whisperings of lovers and conspirators--serves the mentality of crowds, where ubiquitously public cell phones announce confidential assignations to the teeming streets.

The same angry fascination we have with our corners of the world being consumed (see Elizabeth's previous entry on the Foxes of Pennsylvania), can be turned full-wattage on our dwindling inner lives. The waters are getting shallow, we no longer have spooling landscapes OR big novels in which to escape from the crowd. Everywhere is an airport, you know?

I recommend Cynthia Ozick, any book will do, but this new one is electric, honeys. This is who I want to be when I grow up. A woman who calls the novel a "word-woven submarine" and understands the need to dive deep.

Posted by Emberly Nesbitt at 10:43 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

your days seem numbered, at least on Old Kennett Road. (I am out in the country writing by the way, not having an elaborate nature hallucination in Brooklyn). I saw the vixen dead last week and two more little ones this weekend. She'd been poking her head around the bend in the road so many times--I'd seen her for months on the drive from the train station in Wilmington. Hovering by the road, sometimes dashing out of the trees. I never saw one before, actually. My grandfather used to sometimes drive me out in his little Celica to watch the foxhunts in Unionville but I only ever saw the horses and hounds. I never caught a glimpse of the fox. They hide.

Starting with her, though, I've now been seeing foxes regularly. It's weird & upsetting & it feels like it should be someone's job to pay attention to this but I don't think that is happening.

I'm absorbing the changes in this place that have happened since my childhood in my little stay out in Chester County this summer. You never, ever saw a deer--maybe twice by the time I was fourteen and left home. Now of course they are everywhere, overpopulated. This is old news; just drive slowly during their mating season in the fall.

On Friday, however, on my walk with the dog through our little park next to the highway, I saw two groundhogs (like fat spastic teenage boys at the arcade, running clumsily away), seven rabbits, and a turtle (popular with the dog). I never saw any of these growing up--they have nowhere to go now because the mcmansions keep coming and coming. So the creatures are now in the yard, they're on the playground, the driveway. How many mcmansions can you build? It's the most repellent thing. Fucking golf pants motherfuckers. I was going to go see the Wyeth show at the Art Museum tomorrow but I am bailing because it is too depressing. Chester County uses his landscapes and art as a tourist pull as they sell the landscape to golfers and Hummer drivers and parents of trophy anorexics.

The beauty of the landscape here is intertwined with everything in me. I was pissed off for a long time at how fast they can destroy something gorgeous. This summer, though, I think I'm letting go of it as it disappears. I've left and come back here and it's gone more each time I'm back--I think I am ready to really let it go and know there isn't anything to come back to, not in earthly everyday reality, at least, here. It's as real to return in my imagination.

While I'm here for the next couple months though, I intend to hold tight to the line from "Barons of Suburbia": piecing a potion to combat your poison. It is generally good for the writing for me to be pissed of in a deep way and hence not everyday-crabby way.

Posted by Elizabeth Merrick at 11:41 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The filmmakers understand that fashion people don't possess artistic souls but actuarial ones, that they are energized more by fear than by desire.

Posted by Elizabeth Merrick at 09:52 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The MoCCA Art Festival was fabulous this past weekend at the Puck Building and it was such an abundance of smart beautiful work. My last job-job was at the Puck Building and it would be funny to see the different groups of people in for various events in the big space they rent out (the weird line-around-the-block of Carrie Bradshaw knockoffs for this one freaked me out the first time it happened but like everything you get used to it.) It felt like the crowd at MoCCA was the most fun bunch of people I could imagine in one place. It is sort of what, in 1987, say, I thought being a grownup in a city was going to feel like, if that makes any sense to anyone. Sort of like Sammy and Rosie Get Laid meets a Public Enemy album.

I didn't get to stay as long as I wanted to, but I did get to hang out with cartoonist Ariel Bordeaux who is going to be doing some fabulous stuff with us here at Grace this fall. She's so cool--she made this rad new zine Hen Party in about a week and I am so jealous that she can write AND draw. It's gorgeous.

ALSO: they have a show up now at MoCCA of women cartoonists! Not to miss.

Posted by Elizabeth Merrick at 09:25 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

i feel exactly like jeanne moreau walking around paris in Elevator to the Gallows today.

Posted by Emberly Nesbitt at 12:04 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Ridiculously in love with Chip Kidd blogging over at Powell's. I am especially into his to-do list. Yum.

Posted by Elizabeth Merrick at 08:34 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Grrreetings! It's Emberly again and you probably already know, if you follow these sorts of things, that Zadie Smith won the Orange Prize for "On Beauty." If you want to go all Da Vinci code on her ass and stick your nose right up to some of the paintings she uses in the novel here is an incredibly detailed site. I'm more wowed by the detail on this site than I am by the book, the win, the tears, and the fact that victory comes with a statue named Bessie?

Posted by Emberly Nesbitt at 11:16 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Jessa Crispin blogs at Jane magazine. Don't miss this. I am loving it. xxooElizabeth

Posted by Elizabeth Merrick at 07:38 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

When I was at BEA, hanging with my homey Kathleen from A Great Good Place for Books, I spent some time talking to our dear Elizabeth how I walked around for many years thinking that I was this very quiet, shy blonde girl who was, like , prevented from doing certain things because she was somewhat terrified/horrified of the world. And then I realized that what I was afraid of, and running from, and twisting myself into shapes over, was boredom. I hate to be bored and I don't mean the world bores me because, honeys, I am no sad, sorry teenager. I mean that I want to be in the world, functioning and operating and mingling in a non-boring way. The onus is always on me to find something sharp, a notion, a book, a song, an idea, a person to perk me up and dig me out of myself. Dig?

So I'm bored with a lot of the books I'm currently reading. Some of them are good, but not interesting. Some are just the glaze on my donut. Music has been the motor lately. I know what I like in books, but music, man, I'm open. Lists, suggestions they help.

Posted by Emberly Nesbitt at 12:05 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Look at this cute picture of Anne out at a book party! (Scroll down a little, there you go). To my delight she's pictured with the wonderful Felicia Sullivan. I feel like I'm in an alternate universe. I'm out in the country fixing up my little writing garret in order to get my next big thang underway this summer. I go to Ikea and Lowes a lot, and I sometimes have paint in my hair. My whole French boyfriend plan isn't looking very likely, but I did get asked out by a very nice guy at Ikea who was purchasing about 5 rooms worth of furniture. (It was really a remarkable sight.) "Divorce apartment," he explained.

Anyway--not being in New York full time is giving me lots of time to meander and revisit things, like this fabulous interview with Kathryn Davis over chez Jessa from the May edition of bookslut (as we eagerly await the June). I love Davis and her novel The Thin Place is so good that it made me not want to write anymore, not in a depressing way, but in a thank-god-someone's-totally-on-top-of-that-way. Here she explains the book:

The thin place is a term from Celtic mythology. I first heard about it when I was visiting a friend who was a lay member of a religious community, a bunch of sisters at a convent in Peekskill. They were talking about how they were going to have to sell the place where they lived because they couldn’t afford to keep up these huge, gorgeous, drafty buildings for only a handful of nuns. They were sad to be leaving, they said, because it was a thin place. I’d never heard the phrase before, so I asked what it meant and one of the sisters explained that a thin place is a place where the membrane between this world and the other world -- the world of spirit, the part of life we can’t see -- is very, very weak. So things leak back and forth between the two. I knew then that that was my title. I didn’t know precisely where the book was going to be set. I thought maybe it was going to be the seashore, a place I’ve always wanted to visit, but this wasn’t the book to do that. I also knew that there were going to be lots of living things in it. That was kind of all I knew.

The Thin Place is full of creatures. I think of it as a symphony of consciousnesses.You tune into the consciousnesses of dogs and cats, and even plants, corn and lichen. You capture the energy and sense of constant communication and communion in nature.

Posted by Elizabeth Merrick at 08:58 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Teenagers who take pledges to remain virgins until marriage are likely to deny having taken the pledge if they later become sexually active. Conversely, those who were sexually active before taking the pledge frequency deny their sexual history, according to new study findings.

Duh.

I feel like we are all this very grizzled old guy sitting on a porch. He knows how things work and is not surprised by anything. But then some of us need a study ten years later to tell us what we already know. Some of us meaning white guys in power who don't want to give it up. Obviously I am putting this virginity shit up because the delineation of the stolen 2004 election in Rolling Stone has me looking for a French or Norwegian or British boyfriend and my passport. A little search which of course will pass. But each time the menace of our totalitarian government is more and more revealed what do you do? That gasp in you has to go somewhere.

Posted by Elizabeth Merrick at 11:16 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)