Frances Johnson music video

Some smartypants named "Chioubacca" made a music video of Stacey Levine's book Frances Johnson!

reading and prowling

Beachwood and I read the new Tin House in the kitten room last night. We read Stacey Levine’s story, and Beachwood would’ve meowed, but she doesn’t know how to meow yet. We also liked a story by Miranda Mellis,who wrote a book called The Revisionist
that we now want to read.

There were several stories we did not feel like reading, either because they seemed annoying or were written by women who seemed annoying or did not contain enough cats. Suddenly, it was time to fly through the air and practice prowling.

Stacey Levine Interview

I met Stacey Levine in Seattle in the late 90’s at the Jade Pagoda after a reading. Our mutual friends were sleeping under some tables, and she was wearing a knitted hat and had to go home, I believe, to write. She has a new story in the current issue of Tin House, and I cannot wait to read her forthcoming book, The Kidney Problem: Tales and Stories.

Venom Literati: People seem to assume that, because your work is so admired and name-dropped, you are super rich and famous and probably work out of some fancy library that houses your collected works. What would you tell those people?

Stacey Levine: I'd tell them to get over it, and to go home, cook something nice to eat, take a shower, call their mother or grandmother, and go to bed early.

VL: What do you think about day jobs? Are they better than teaching workshops as far as saving one's writerly soul, as they say?

SL: I've done both, but I'd rather not talk as much on the job as teaching requires. So I have another kind of job and I think that's good for me. Teaching is a good way to make money, though, if you can stand it.

What was the weirdest job you ever had?

SL: I worked as a spy for a guy who was in international adoption. He wanted me to find out the practices of another adoption agency. This was in D.C. He met me in the alley behind his office to pay me in cash. I was a lousy spy then, but I bet I'd be better at it now.

VL: If you were to get some windfall of money, the Guggenheim or the MacArthur Genius Grant or something, would that change your work?

SL: It might make me work more. I'm a slow writer.

VL: You live in Seattle, where there are plenty of independent bookstores. Do you find that most of the stuff in bookstores is still a bunch of crap you don't want to read?

SL: Yes, in the big guns NY publishing industry, there's the practice of putting out gimme-marketing, gimmicky literature, isn't there? Standards are shot. Contrary to what some people say, high standards are not a form of elitism. In any case, there's some amazing writing coming out of smaller presses, and lit in translation is nice to
explore. Haldor Laxness from Iceland is an author I've enjoyed recently.

VL: Where is the disconnect between the good books being written and the tiny, tiny number of them that seem to appear on shelves?

SL: This question refers back to the coarsening and stupidifying of the culture in general. And I guess this coarsening and stupidifying points to a current sickness in the American spirit. Everybody knows about it, but it's difficult to find focused discussions about it.

VL: Recently you gave me a great plot idea for a book. I don't want to give too much away and have someone steal it, but basically, it involves the gradual and possibly useless whittling away of a piece of cheese. Do you have any other plot ideas for writers who can't or won't write their own plots (or for poets, who, to put it kindly, are unable)?

SL: No. It takes much practice, and the above example is a case in point.

VL: What kitchen appliance is best as an author self-promotion tool?

SL: Um, something to help me clean up my apartment?

Frances Johnson: the minutes

Observations about Frances Johnson, all of which are copular sentences (I think):

Munson is a lock-in.

Dr. Mark Carol is sexy.

Nancy is Frances' therapist.

Kenny is evil.

Frances' procedure is some kind of women's troubles remover (e.g.: period flowbee).

Curly-Dawn is an awesome name.

Mostly, when we like stuff (as was the case here), we spend a lot of time reading our favorite parts out loud, like the scene where Frances jokes with Nancy by smushing her legs on the hassock: "With a confused, myopic gaze, Nancy tried to withdraw her legs so slowly that the unpleasant dryness of stockings and skin scratched along Frances' legs, even as the woman completed the movement with a sudden jerk that made her hair fly." And so on. That whole scene is so good.

Quotes out of context

"I'm too busy and important to read things. I skim."

"They can still see up people's skirts though."

"He said 'sexy' six times!"

"I picture Stacey Levine looking like Jennifer Jason Leigh."

"Currently I make zero dollars."

"Oh, the tranny 'ho!"

"I'm sure he got the best BJ of his life later."

"Boys don't have friends unless they're all single and hang out in a pack."

"My marathon party will consist of people coming over to the deck to put ice bags on me."

Special guests

David Lee Roth did not show up, although I do admit I gave him very short notice. Still. You'd think he'd have made an effort.

Also, we missed Meghan.

From Hotel Woman to...Munson Resident

After weeks of believing myself to be a hotel woman, I am now pretty certain that I live in Munson, home of Stacey Levine's Frances Johnson. There are lots of reasons why. Most importantly, though, is my recent deep attraction to margarine. I used to be a butter girl: all butter, all the time. I scoffed at Parkay-eaters (just like I used to scoff at Diet Coke drinkers, before I developed cravings for that, too.) But last week there was margarine in our frig, and I fell in love with it. Butter seems gross to me now. I will eat margarine on crackers forever. And olives on crackers, like Mal.

Also, I love Dr. Mark Carroll. He is hot. He might be Dr. Manhattan in disguise. In fact, I am certain that he is. I picture him being so attractive in a tan and plastic-y way. I will jump Dr. Mark Carroll if I run into him tonight at Mal's love shack or dressing chamber or whatever the hell it is.

Is there any way, by any stretch, that Frances Johnson will, by the end of the book, become a hotel woman, so that I can go back to being a hotel woman? Because I feel like she has it in her. And Mal can be a hotel woman, too, because anything with an olive on or in it is close to a martini, especially pimento loaf. I preferred being a hotel woman to being Frances Johnson, because Kathy, I am Frances Johnson, too.

When I typed in Munson to google images, the picture above is one thing that came up. The picture is correct: this is the kind of hotel woman that lives in Munson and goes to dances. Frances Johnson must get out.

Strangely-Shaped Books

I think it is good how the last three books we have read have been interestingly shaped and sized.

Eeeee Eee Eeee: small and squareish, with text that doesn't claustrophobically fill up the whole page so that there are fields of white space around it. Hotel Theory bigger and square, double-fonted, columned. And Frances Johnson so cute and teensy, so it can snuggle in your pocket. All childrens books should be this size, I think.

It is a good sign when a book is strangely-shaped. I am only going to buy oddly-sized-and-shaped books from now on. I think that if something is an odd size and shape it is necessarily good.

I got a copy of Baudelaire's Poems in Prose today--it is beautiful: square, and hard-covered, with a man's face etched into the front cover, and with smooth, thick, white paper. I am in love with it.

Objects, absence, authors

Objects

My phone stopped working, and I have a loaner for the next five days. It is oh-so-very early 90s: bulky, square alarm-clock-numbers in the display. It is an exact replica of the phone owned by the individual who previously held my position at work.

My hand on it looks like hers. I remember things now, like how she ate hot cereal in the morning and took time when she needed it. Is she my Nancy? Maybe not: I remember her eating raisins with gusto, when, clearly, they are repulsive.

Absence

One of the things Kathy and I will be doing in the next few days is attending a workshop at which I will learn how to position things under headlines. No further comment.

Authors

We need to write to Don DeLillo and Miranda July. I want to start:

Dear Don DeLillo,

Does the very thought of having a society devoted to studying your work cause a pleasurable sensation in your special place?

Dear Miranda July,

Have you ever slept with any movie stars? Which ones? Details, please.

Technically, we should be writing to Stacey Levine this week, but because we're going to interview her, I think we should discuss the questions on Saturday. And plus also too, she gets the two questions Wayne could not answer.

Oh yeah...some books are good

Lacking a literary collective (or even a book club) in the last couple of years, I spent a lot of time at the library being overwhelmed. To remedy this problem, I beelined for the new books section and chose lots of books at random, based mainly on title and graphics and size--what some might call "cover."

I read a lot of crap, developed a penchant for first novels and began cultivating The Dread.

The Dread is the feeling that no one will ever, ever understand what you are doing, so you should change it. It feels a lot like being a teenager. It sucks the fun out of writing. It just sucks.

I got Frances Johnson in the mail this afternoon. Hooray for Frances Johnson. Because oh yeah, some books are good.

Also, I like its cover.

A Disturbing Phenomenon

I am having this weird experience lately where everything I eat while inside my home tastes the same, or: has the same weird taste attached to it.

I made cookies a couple weeks ago that had this taste. Then today there was some cheese. There are other things, too. There is everything. How these things taste is the same as this smell that is in my house, too.

I can't describe the smell/taste. It's sort of medicine-y. Or detergent-y. But vaguely. It is an innocuous taste/smell, that neither the boyfriend or the kittycat notice.

It did make me think of Stacey Levine. Or, rather, the fact that it's Stacey Levine week made me think of her in relationship to the taste/smell. Maybe because it's Stacey Levine week I am trapped in one of her stories.

I could see her writing this story, only she would write it well, so it would be weird and scary that everything had this same vague smell/taste attached to it. The smell/taste would be so vague one would question the sanity of the narrator. A benign and possibly nonexistent smell that would drive the narrator (ie: me) crazy.

Like how she wrote "Cakes" which is the weirdest and scariest story ever and which I still think is about me.

Stacey, will you write it?

PS: if Wayne doesn't respond, his interview questions automatically go to Stacey. I definitely want to ask Stacey what to do about this taste/smell. Or what she would do about it.

Stacey Levine week continues

As suggested by celebrity guest Tao Lin, Stacey Levine's book Frances Johnson will be our next book club selection. We still wish someone would publish her new, new book, The Kidney Problem: Tales and Stories. I've started a promotional page for it on my microwave.

Literature to make out with...

Making out with Jane Bowles reminded me there is a whole genre of literature with which one might like to make out. Unfortunately, much of this writing is hard to find because people are too busy making out with books whose authors are naturally talented at self-promotion. We would like to get our greasy fingerprints all over Stacey Levine’s new book, but someone needs to publish it first. Please, someone, publish Stacey Levine’s new book! Put the title in a nice sans-serif font. We will promote her with quirky You-Tube videos and websites drawn on refrigerators in dry erase marker. Publish, and publish soon, because October is our most creative month.