[The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard is out today from the Library of America. In homage to his singular writing, I’ve decided to create an “I Remember” of my own.]

I remember picking apples at Eckert’s orchards.

I remember waking up in the wrong bed entirely.

I remember trying on hats with my sister.

I remember reading Joe Brainard for the first time. I thought I Rememberwas a joke at first, then a wistful way to look at the world, then the only way I should look at my life.

I remember tearing a marigold out of our garden because I thought it was just a weed. My mother was so upset with me, even though she knew it was a mistake.

I remember when I got into college. There was a thin envelope, and the words didn’t say “we regret,” so I couldn’t understand it and I had to give it to someone who could read it to me.

I remember the first real date I went on. The first real date, when neither of us were trying to be grown-up or impress each other. Three hours later, I didn’t want it to ever end.

I remember learning how to make crêpes.

I remember making them far too often after that until everybody was tired of eating them.

I remember my first and my last cigarette. I got bored and gave it back to the friend who had let me try it.

I remember flipping the light switch up and down until I was able to hold it at exactly the point to make the whole room very dim but still lit.

I remember when I figured out that I’d never had Brussels sprouts in my life, ever. Then I told my mother that was one thing she had done right.

I remember watching Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining with my little brother on Halloween weekend: him petrified as the suspenseful music rose and rose, and me bored as I couldn’t hear it.

I remember setting the hands into the face of a clock I’d made out of wood. It’s still on the wall at home, ticking away.

I remember all six warts I had on my fingers (three on my left pointer finger alone).

I remember learning that Lucian Freud had died and recalling first that one of my close friends called him her favorite portraitist ever, and second that he had offered to sketch the actress Joan Collins about which she wrote, many years later: “To my great regret, I said sorry, no, as I had to get back to my afternoon studies.”

I remember a ten-foot-high inflatable globe that I stepped into. I couldn’t find any of the countries because I was looking at the world inside-out.

I remember watching the first season of Lost on DVD, and realizing three days and twenty-five episodes later that I was completely hooked.

I remember every house I moved out of.

I remember, I do remember.

Image credit: joebrainard.org

I was walking down the Upper East Side as evening came on. I turned the corner and saw a familiar face: quirky haircut, aquiline nose. We walked toward each other, and I noticed his slightly-too-large ears. Our eyes locked for about two seconds—“a look of glass,” just too long for it to be a random glance on the street—and then (to keep borrowing from John Ashbery) I walked on shaken: was I the perceived? Did he notice me, this time, as I am, or was it postponed again?

I had never met him, nor he me. I had heard his name in vague contexts: he was the friend of a brother of a guy I’d barely known back home. And he was what, five years older than me? How would I have introduced myself to him? We were just from the same part of the Midwest! Still, I had looked him up on Facebook when I'd moved to the city, whereupon I learned that we didn’t have any mutual friends. So I stopped wondering about him. And then I saw him on the street.

I walked on shaken: was there anything I could have said, really, at 5:20 in the afternoon in the middle of a crowded intersection? That moment could have only happened in the twenty-first century. This is the age of the Internet, and we’re all voyeurs, for better or for worse. I keep thinking about how Facebook’s Mini-Feed legitimizes this: I can just mention something I shouldn’t have known, and claim I saw it on my Mini-Feed. But I had no way that I could say I knew him; there was no Mini-Feed keeping us apprised of each other.

I’m more interested in this moment than in the novel I’m working on. It's more honest. Which is why, after the Canadian author Sheila Heti had gotten tired of imagining characters and stories when her actual friends were more vivid and interesting, she had decided to write How Should a Person Be? The book is a pastiche of conversations, emails, philosophical thoughts, and other mishmash centering on her friends. It’s strangely appealing. Her book is a model of the twenty-first century first-person narrative: not a neatly closed-off story, nor a megalomaniac epic that attempts to swallow the world whole, but a clear and direct record of the world as it is, as it goes on, without the artificial struggle for narrative structure.

Making sense of this encounter is my way of finding a new kind of closure. My friends were puzzled that I never went up to him and asked him if he was from the Midwest, too. I wasn’t so bothered, just surprised. I’ll probably see him again somewhere, at a party or a bar where it makes sense to say hello. And if I never see him again, well, I suppose I never actually knew him.

Image credit: journeyphotographic.com

“I'll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination,” writes the narrator of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. It’s story set on a faraway planet named Winter, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the narrator's “homeworld” was planet Earth.

We live in a time and a place where we watch Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert for the news, where we relish the scandal of James Frey making up his memoir but gasp at Kim Kardashian getting divorced after a multi-million-dollar wedding that depicted a perfect couple.

If someone fudges the facts and fesses up, that’s not such a scandal. But if we figure out that we’ve been lied to...hoo boy.

This American Life recently released an episode retracting Mike Daisey’s reportage, on a previous broadcast, of the labor issues in China's Apple factories. The process of discovering the falsehoods in Daisey’s story recalls that of the people who managed to get beneath the veneer of Stephen Glass, the ambitious young journalist at The New Republic who was caught fabricating quotes, sources, and entire stories. In both instances, the recalcitrant writer at the center devolves the quest for truth into a game of he-said-she-said.

And yet, when John D’Agata goes back on himself in About a Mountain andLifespan of a Fact, he doesn’t outrage us. He tells us that he’s lying, so we can forgive him the lie. And when David Sedaris embellishes his family tales, nobody seems quite as infuriated.

The dividing line is unmistakable: one one side, we have the author telling us that he lied; on the other, we find out that he lied. It's the difference between a an amused, engaged reader and a disgruntled one.

Truth is a matter of the imagination. But even animals can lie—so what use is the truth, as we mutually perceive and imagine it?

“The truth” is exactly as useful as the words we speak to communicate with each other. We understand each other because we agree on what the words of our language mean, and how their syntax creates meaning. If the rules changed, we would still be able to talk, so long as we all knew what had changed. But when we choose to disagree on what “really happened,” the disconnect can be traumatizing.

Mike Daisey says, rightly, that “This American Life is essentially a journalistic—not a theatrical—enterprise, and as such it operates under a different set of rules and expectations” from his theatrical performance, but his statementcomes far too late. We can’t trust someone who evidently refuses to play by our rules. Humans are a social species, but we can only be social so long as we share—the words of our language, and the manifold, contradictory, and deeply necessary figments of our collective imagination.

image credit: Will Temple via flickr.com/photos/grubbymits/5352592011/

Every so often, people will ask me why I read so many novels. They sneer: Why don’t I want to know about real life?

Marilynne Robinson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of When I Was a Child I Read Books, writes that she read “to experience that much underrated thing called deracination, the meditative, free appreciation of what ever comes under one’s eye.” Even more fundamentally, she read because she wanted to.

But to fiction skeptics, “Because I want to" usually doesn't cut it. I like nonfiction, sure. James Gleick’s The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood caused me to miss a subway stop. But I don’t care about politics, at least not as much as I should. Or about the biographies of great men and women. Honestly, the Times is all the “real life” I need most days.

Sometimes I read fiction for the sheer beauty of other people’s words. Over winter vacation, I brought along Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty. I came across these lines—

"Far from it," said Nick. "No, no—he spoke, as to cheek and chin, of the joy of the matutinal steel." They all laughed contentedly. It was one of Nick’s routines to slip these plums of periphrasis from Henry James’s late works into unsuitable parts of his conversation, and the boys marvelled at them and tried feebly to remember them—really they just wanted Nick to say them, in his brisk but weighty way.

—and quite suddenly, because Hollinghurst’s writing is so baroque and perfectly rendered, I found myself thinking and speaking with those “plums of periphrasis” for the next week. Other people can’t change my tone like that. The world around me can’t change my thoughts like that.

But the best, the most important reason that I bother with the figments of an author’s imagination is to understand other people. Annie Murphy Paul explains that when we read, we interact with the characters as if they were real. “The brain...does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life,” she explains; “in one respect novels go beyond simulating reality to give readers an experience unavailable off the page: the opportunity to enter fully into other people’s thoughts and feelings.”

It’s true: I tend to imagine the characters I’m reading a little too well. I had to stop reading Watchmen when Dr. Osterman was destroyed in an Intrinsic Field Subtractor. And when I read Teju Cole’s Open City, I found myself unable to separate Julius’s view of New York from my own. I never had an invisible friend as a child; it looks like books took care of that for me.

Hence my answer: I can read nonfiction to understand how the world works, but I’d rather read fiction to understand how people work. What about you?

image credit: litfestalberta.org

There are plenty of fine, virile men in American literature today. Elaine Blair doesn’t think so: in a New York Review of Books article, she easily recognizes Michel Houellebecq’s sucky protagonists because she says contemporary American lit is filled with men who are losers, from Philip Roth’s Alex Portnoy to Sam Lipsyte’s Milo Burke. So where are all the big, strong, literary men?

John Galt from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.

For an unhealthy dose of American exceptionalism, there’s nobody better to read about than John Galt, the ultimate anti-loser and the Atlas who decides to just shrug off the world:

"There is only one kind of men who have never been on strike in the whole of human history...the men who have carried the world on their shoulders, have kept it alive, have endured torture as sole payment, but have never walked out on the human race. Well, their turn has come. Let the world discover who they are, what they do and what happens when they refuse to function. This is the strike of the men of the mind.”

The Judge from Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.

One of Cormac McCarthy’s most hair-raising creations, the judge stalks the long flat terrain of America and preaches a violent form of justice, without regard to femininity of any sort.

“It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.”

Patrick Bateman from Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho.

From his rapturous descriptions of music albums and finely tailored suits to his soulless ravages of New York’s restaurants and women, Patrick Bateman might be stretching the envelope for being "human," but nobody would dare call him a loser.

“I felt lethal, on the verge of frenzy. My nightly bloodlust overflowed into my days and I had to leave the city. My mask of sanity was a victim of impending slippage. This was the bone season for me and I needed a vacation.”

Tyler Durden from Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club.

The two men at the center of the novel and the movie have no interest whatsoever in slacking off, and the result is Tylder Durden's speech, easily one of the most bizarre and fascinating manifestos of masculinity in recent times.

“I see in the fight club the strongest and smartest men who've ever lived. I see all this potential and I see squandering...our great war is a spiritual war, our great depression is our lives, we've been all raised by television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars, but we won't and we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.”

Mike Schwartz from Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding.

Baseball novels are full of beefy sluggers, but this one has grandiloquence to match his skills at coaching:

“Me, I hearken back to a simpler time.” Schwartz patted his thick, sturdy midriff. “A time when a hairy back meant something...Warmth. Survival. Evolutionary advantage. Back then, a man’s wife and children would burrow into his back hair and wait out the winter. Nypmhs would braid it and praise it in song. God’s wrath waxed hot against the hairless tribes. Now that’s all forgotten. But I’ll tell you one thing: when the next ice age comes, the Schwartzes will be sitting pretty. Real pretty.”

Gender typecasting be damned! There are plenty of strong men—and women, too!—in the contemporary American novel out there. The French can keep Michel Houellebecq to themselves; we’ve got Pynchon and Palahniuk and Wells Tower leading the way for our All-American macho men.

image credit: guardian.co.uk

Will you participate in the March Madness that is the Tournament of Books?

You could even ask your best brogrammers to help you trick out your bracket.

Just don't underestimate the power of erotic housewife novels, especially if they're Twilight-centric.

Then again, erotic sci-fi is also giving it a run for its money.

Whatever erotica strikes your fancy, you can bet that the Brooklyn Public library will print it out on demand.

But make sure you're reading those books at the same rate you're churning them out.

And if you're writing rather than reading, make sure you're citing your Tweets in MLA format.

In fact, make sure your entire online curatorial style is completely up to date.

Then test it out by trying to spot all the references in this insanely intricate Cartier commerical.

Image source

What do New York twentysomethings talk about while sipping glasses of wine and sharing bites of compost cookie? Grocery shopping, of course.

          "I mean, I love how it says something about you if you shop at Trader Joe's," I said.

         "Like, you want to be cool, you want to be fun, you want to wait in line for twenty minutes?"

         "But I get the peanut butter cups. That totally cancels out the line."

         "I'll toast to that." And we clinked glasses for the fourth or fifth time.

         "What about Whole Foods, though?" she asked. "You know there's going to be a new Whole Foods in Brooklyn."

         "Hmm. It's a way to say, I care about my food being organic, I care about it being classy, and I don't care how overpriced it is."

         "You don't shop there, do you?"

         We both cracked up.

         "Okay, I’m not sure about this. Whole Foods is almost too perfect for Brooklyn. There's nothing ironic there."

         "But it’s honest! And it’s natural and organic and pure.”

         “Trader Joe’s is like David Foster Wallace. It’s big and crazy and disjointed and human. And the footnotes are great.”

         “Coming soon! Based on the book! And the movie! And the video game! And the fast-food-chain kiddie-meal toys! Infinite Jest: The Grocery Store!”

         “Isn’t that exactly right, though?”

         “Hmm, yeah, you’re pretty spot-on.”

         “So then what’s the book version of Whole Foods?”

         “Huh, a Whole Book..."  We took long sips of wine.

         “Everything in there is very beautiful. Carefully presented. If it’s there, it’s there to be appreciated and savored.”

         “Ann Patchett?”

         “Oh, I liked Bel Canto, but that’s not it.”

         "Okay, fine, not music. But she's good. She pulls together everything into a tight little book."

         “We've got to think bigger. Whole Foods isn’t Jonathan Franzen, is it?”

         “No, I don't think so. Well, I haven’t read Freedom yet. But yeah, something all-encompassing.”

         Time to pour more wine.

         “Wait." She took a swig and looked at me. "I've got it. Jhumpa Lahiri.”

         “Unaccustomed Earth! That's it! Whole Foods is virtuous and organic and beautiful, and so is Jhumpa Lahiri!”

         “She’s amazing.” My friend pulled her e-reader out of her purse. “Listen to this: ‘He still had the power to stagger her at times—simply the fact that he was breathing, that all his organs were in their proper places, that blood flowed quietly and effectively through his small sturdy limbs. He was her flesh and blood, her mother had told her in the hospital the day Akash was born.’”

         “God, that’s gorgeous.”

         “Yep, we’ve got it.”

         She poured the last of the wine into both glasses.

         “Now what about Gristedes and D’Agostino’s?”

image credit: washingtontimes.com

I am not always the best listener and I do not always enjoy readings. Oftentimes there are the agitated shoulders, glancing eyes, and requisite hands-holding-drinks-while-pointing gestures of some sort of edgy literary scene. Authors tend to swallow their words or make too much of a self-conscious mess of themselves to be heard clearly. For some reason, I usually feel a need to urinate and spend the reading vaguely uncomfortable and distracted. Last night's Housing Works reading, with Diane Williams, Ben Marcus, and Deb Olin Unferth, was a distinct and delightful departure.

I have to give some credit to Housing Works, an organization that uses all proceeds to help people living with HIV/AIDS. Its bookstore and café are incredibly inviting: tall shelves, plenty of dark wood moldings, thin windows that stretch above the bookcases beside them. It is utterly unpretentious while maintaining a lot of class.

The most credit, however, has to do with how well our three authors read. My love for each of the night's readers is a matter of public record; cf. my posts about The Flame Alphabet and Vicky Swanky is a Beauty. But it had been a long time since I really felt pleasure from hearing a text rather than simply being alone with it. For the most part, I prefer reading alone and am often jarred when an author’s voice doesn’t align with the voice I’ve conjured in my head. And while none of the three authors read in the voice I had imagined, each brought to the text something I hadn’t heard before.

I don’t know how this happens. Surely, our three authors are not amateurs and experience has to have something to do with it. But there was something in their voices, in their presence while reading, that surpassed a person reciting text. They weren’t mere vehicles for words, but they weren’t actors either; there wasn’t an insincere sense of performance. I think what mattered was a sincere investment in the words themselves. A desire, firstly, to bring the sentences forth.

Maybe it was only that Deb Olin Unferth has an adorably high, authoritative voice and then Ben got up there with a really deep voice and spoke measurably slow but bitingly, and then Diane spoke in unpredictable cadences and with grace and movement. Maybe they used these devious tricks in order to delight me. And it worked. 

So let's get off our computers. Stop texting or tweeting or scanning or browsing. Go listen.

Image: housingworks.org

I was lucky enough to attend last Wednesday's National Book Critics Circle Finalists’ Reading. Held at The New School’s Tishman Auditorium, free and open to the public, the true intrigue of the night was how the hell they were going to have twenty finalists read without us all killing ourselves or each other. As it turned out, the answer was quite simple: three minute time restraints.

The award ceremony itself was held Thursday, so the winners have been announced, the National Book Critics Circle failing, inevitably, to chose who I considered to be the winners. (Although I don't have a great history for picking winners.) I was, however, duly impressed by a number of finalists who read that night, in addition to not even killing myself. Turns out, having twenty readers read for three minutes, from works in six different categories, is actually kind of great.

John Jeremiah Sullivan (a finalist in nonfiction) has gotten some press for his collection of essays, Pulphead, but I didn’t expect to be reading 217 pages of it in one sitting this afternoon. He was the first reader of the evening and it was a fantastic start. I sat up straighter listening to his prose. I’m only taking a break from it to write this, which I do so reluctantly, because I’d like to go back to reading Pulphead.

My favorite in the criticism category was Dubravka Ugresic, who is Croatian and therefore my automatic favorite because I love all Eastern Europeans and Russians and Polacks—really anyone remotely Slavic. I concede to them all authority in terms of the truth about the human soul. This woman was talking about masking death with karaoke. Winner.

My impression of biography was that I didn’t think it was all that kosher to claim an omniscient narrator as a biographer, but I guess biographers just go ahead and say their subject’s thoughts and feelings all the time.

Autobiography was great: Luis J. Rodriguez got up and read for three minutes about his failing, pedophile father, and then Deb Olin Unferthhad to get up on stage right after him and be funny—and she did it!

I can’t talk about the poetry or fiction finalists because I am very personal friends with the clear winners in those—more important—categories.

The best prize that I took home that evening (besides my friend leaving behind his copy of Pulphead at the bar, thereby allowing me to take it home and spend my whole day reading it) was hearing so many different kinds of writing all in one place, all being celebrated. Yes, three minute intervals, but everyone. Even biography.

images: iopoetry.org and danaspiotta.com