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Michael H. Miller

By Michael H. Miller 3/12 7:25pm

books

Sam Lipsyte. (Photo by Ceridwen Morris)

Beautiful Losers: Sam Lipsyte’s Literature of Lowered Expectations

It was snowing, big wet chunks falling everywhere. Morningside Avenue and Morningside Drive are two different things, and this particular afternoon in February was a bad time to realize that, because they’re separated by a park with a steep cliff that drops off sharply, and I was at the bottom of the cliff. I believe I already mentioned the snow. By the time I arrived at the writer Sam Lipsyte’s apartment—40 minutes late—at the higher point of the journey, my clothes were soaked through with cold water and sweat and the sole of my right shoe had fallen off. Mr. Lipsyte answered the door looking surprised. I coughed twice.

This wasn’t the graceful entrance I was hoping for, but there was something appropriate about it; Mr. Lipsyte’s fiction is about lowered expectations. In his 2010 novel The Ask, the middle-aged protagonist, Milo Burke, a failed idealist and former artist who’s recently been fired from his job asking people whose lives worked out better than his to donate money to a university, thinks to himself, “How little I resembled the man I figured for the secret chief of my several selves.” The novel is a comedic masterpiece, but depending on where the reader is in life, it can seem much less funny. Read More

By Nate Freeman 3/05 7:37pm

books

Hell Richard credit Iniz & Vinoodh

No Fury: The Bowery’s Changed, But Richard Hell Doesn’t Mind

In January, I was on the Bowery with Richard Hell, who invented punk rock. We went into an art bookstore on Bond Street and he found a collection of pictures by Richard Prince. After a minute, he jabbed me on the shoulder.

“Check this out!” he rasped, surprised, pointing at the book. It was a Read More

By Justin Taylor 2/26 8:06pm

books

William Gaddis.

It Ain’t Easy: William Gaddis’s Life in Letters

In 2002, Jonathan Franzen published an essay in The New Yorker titled “Mr. Difficult,” in which he detailed his changing readerly relationship with William Gaddis—who had died in 1998—over the course of his own coming of age as a novelist. For a time, Mr. Franzen wrote, he was infatuated with writers who “shared the postmodern suspicion of realism” that he himself felt—or rather, felt obliged to feel—in the late ’80s and early ’90s. (Thomas Pynchon, Donald Barthelme and Robert Coover are just a few of the names checked alongside Gaddis’s.) A marathon reading of Gaddis’s novel The Recognitions got Mr. Franzen through what sounds like a fairly serious depression. Mr. Franzen titled his novel The Corrections partially in homage to The Recognitions, but when he later tried to read other Gaddis novels, he found that he didn’t want to, and—more importantly, at least to Mr. Franzen—he couldn’t bring himself to care that he didn’t want to. Older, perhaps wiser, and certainly more world-weary and pressed for time, he wasn’t interested in the brick-thick novels of mostly unattributed dialogue that constitute Mr. Gaddis’s other major works, JR (1975) and A Frolic of His Own (1994), both of which won the National Book Award. “Mr. Difficult” concludes with a bitter dismissal of The Rush for Second Place, a nonfiction collection, and Agape Agape, a very short novel, both published posthumously in 2002. For a younger generation of readers, it’s likely that Mr. Franzen’s epic kiss-off to “Mr. Difficult” was the first and only thing they ever heard about him. Read More

By Michael H. Miller 2/26 7:30pm

books

center for fiction

How Literature Saved My Psyche: Attending a Book-Themed Therapy Session at the Center for Fiction

It was a delightful cocktail of paranoia, depression and a crippling fear of dying that led me to three different therapists before the age of 20. The first was a hairy, stout ball of a man who sported a dirt-colored 5 o’clock shadow. He was a strict Freudian and, not being much for countertransference, would just sit there and look at me. I took to just sitting there and looking back at him, engaging in a 45-minute-long staring contest that usually culminated in my shouting that he was a bastard for not caring about my problems, which were fascinating. He didn’t look nearly enough like my father for this to be productive.

I don’t want to talk about the second one.

The third was an attractive woman of about 40 who’d nod her head furiously in encouragement as I talked. And I really talked, too, until one day—our final session—she interrupted me and said, “Where are you from?” I’d only been talking my head off about where I was from for weeks! She hadn’t been listening to a word I said. Read More

By Michael H. Miller 2/12 4:11pm

books

Portrait Of Paul Muldoon

Poet Crossing: Regarding ‘Word on the Street,’ Rock Lyrics by Paul Muldoon

Paul Muldoon’s new collection of poems feels nearly inevitable: it is actually a book of rock lyrics, complete with an accompanying CD of a band called Wayside Shrines playing some selections. Mr. Muldoon famously collaborated with Warren Zevon, and much of the poet’s work has played with lyric in some way. The title poem of his last collection, 2010’s Maggot, is a cycle of nine modified Petrarchan sonnets, each woven together by a common refrain at the volta, which toys as much with pop-music sentiment as the rest of the poem does with lyric in the more classical sense of the word: “Where I’m waiting for some lover / to kick me out of bed / for having acted on a whim.” He’s also written a poem, loosely structured as a blues song with one short line repeating twice, about Bob Dylan receiving an honorary degree from Princeton, where Mr. Muldoon, who was born in Northern Ireland, now lives and teaches. The long poem “Sillyhow Stride” is a free-verse elegy for the late Mr. Zevon set at the 2004 Grammy Awards. Read More

By Rachel Wetzler 1/22 8:30pm

books

Kirill Medvedev.

Actually, It’s Pretty Good! Keith Gessen and Co. Bring Kirill Medvedev to American Readers

There is a curious disclaimer in the colophon of It’s No Good (n+1/Ugly Duckling Presse, 280 pp., $16), the first comprehensive collection of translated writings by the Russian poet Kirill Medvedev to appear in English: “Copyright denied by Kirill Medvedev, 2012.” After achieving a degree of success in the Moscow literary world as a poet and translator in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Mr. Medvedev announced a retirement of sorts in 2003: he would continue writing, but he would no longer take part in any of the other activities typical of the “professional” poet, refusing to give readings, accept awards or, most importantly, publish his work through conventional channels.

In a statement published on his website that year, Mr. Medvedev described what he saw as an oppressive cultural situation in which the artist was necessarily compromised by governmental and commercial interests. He renounced all copyright to his work, declaring in his 2004 “Manifesto on Copyright” that any future print editions of his writings would be “PIRATE EDITION[S], that is to say, WITHOUT THE PERMISSION OF THE AUTHOR, WITHOUT ANY CONTRACTS OR AGREEMENTS.” He began posting poems and essays on his personal blogs and, more recently, on his Facebook wall, instead of in books and literary magazines. This was not, he insisted, a “heroic pose, or ‘PR’ stunt,” but rather an earnest attempt to posit an alternative to the circumstances faced by contemporary artists and writers, suggesting that such a position might offer a way toward a “more honest, uncompromising, and genuinely contemporary art in my country.” Read More

By Michael H. Miller 1/01 4:52pm

books

Ashbery in 1996. (Ulf Andersen/Getty Images)

The Meaning of All This: Talking to John Ashbery About His Past, Present and Future

When he was 8 years old, John Ashbery stopped writing poetry. He’d just finished a poem about the battle of the snowflakes and the bunnies. It rhymed. He was pleased enough with it to pound it out on a typewriter. His parents sent a copy of the poem to his mother’s cousin. The family lived on a farm outside of Rochester in a rural town so small that it didn’t even have a kindergarten. The cousin was married to the son of the famous mystery novelist Mary Roberts Rinehart, the “American Agatha Christie.” Rinehart lived on Fifth Avenue and read the poem aloud at her Christmas celebration. It would not, Mr. Ashbery believed, get any better than this. He figured he’d quit while he was at the top of his game.

His retirement didn’t last long. In December, Ecco published Quick Question, his 26th book of original poems. In 2008, he was the first living poet to have his collected poems published by the Library of America. The first volume is a thousand pages long and only covers the years 1956-1987, the first three decades of Mr. Ashbery’s career; a second volume is in the works. He’s been called the greatest 20th-century American poet so many times that he’s been dismissed almost as frequently as overrated. Read More

By Jenna Sauers 11/27/12 8:36pm

books

Grace Coddington with Anna Wintour.

Out of Vogue: Grace Coddington’s Meandering Memoir Ditches Fashion Mags for an Army of Ex-Husbands, Cats

Although long familiar and widely revered in fashion-industry circles, Grace Coddington, the creative director of Vogue, burst into the wider public consciousness as the cussing, henna-haired breakout star of The September Issue, the 2009 R.J. Cutler documentary about the production of the Sept. 2007 issue of American Vogue. An 840-page monument to pre-recessionary tastes that included a Roman travel diary in which Sienna Miller wore a lot of feathers and a Dolce & Gabbana dress that cost $61,000, it was at the time the largest monthly issue of any American magazine ever published. (The Sept. 2012 Vogue finally eclipsed it in overall page count—but in its number of advertising pages, it has never been surpassed.) The movie made much of the relationship between Ms. Coddington and Vogue editor Anna Wintour. Ms. Wintour is chilly and superior—one of the documentary’s most entertaining moments comes when a startled assistant jumps out of her way like a vole before an owl—while Ms. Coddington is warm and generous to peers and underlings alike. Colleagues shrink and wither under Ms. Wintour’s judgments, but Ms. Coddington challenges the boss like an equal.

After the film came out, Ms. Coddington writes in her new memoir, Grace (Random House, 416 pp., $35), she started getting recognized on the street. Her newfound popular appeal was judged to be such that Random House paid a reported $1.2 million to acquire the memoir. But was this acclaim earned? It is no great task to seem warm-hearted next to Anna Wintour, and the creative director is hardly bold. In one sequence in the film that is, in retrospect, a bit of a reach, the camera lingers as Ms. Coddington surveys the palace of Versailles while sharing insights like, “It’s sort of strange to think how old it is.” Let that $1.2 million sink in. Read More

By Michael H. Miller 11/27/12 4:35pm

books

Gary Shteyngart. (Photo by Elisabetta A. Villa/Getty Images)

Leninglad! Celebrating 10 Years of Gary Shteyngart, Contemporary Literature’s Hairiest, Funniest Author

Early on in Gary Shteyngart’s first novel, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, which celebrated its 10th anniversary this year, the fickle protagonist, Vladimir Girshkin, a 25-year-old employee at the fictional Emma Lazarus Immigrant Absorption Society in New York, has gone to Westchester to receive his perennial guilt trip and a free meal from his parents. Vladimir’s mother has become a moderately successful businesswoman in the U.S. after the family’s departure from their native Leningrad, the city from which Mr. Shteyngart himself emigrated when he was 7. When Vladimir attempts escape to catch the 4:51 train back to the city, his mother, drunk on rum, detains him and makes him pace the house’s master bedroom.

“You walk like a Jew,” she tells him. “I’ve been keeping my eyes on you for years, but it just hit me today, your little Jew-walk. Come here, I’ll teach you to walk like a normal person.” Vladimir braces himself for a long afternoon. Read More