SWEET: Actors Reading Writers December

This Thursday (12/2) at 7:30 p.m. at Three of Cups (83 First Ave. @ 5th St.) I'll be...well, not reading, but being there while actress Joya Mia Italiano reads from Personal Days! Other performers will do dramatic readings of work by Sonya Chung, Jonathan Dixon, poet Maya Pindyck, and—hold onto your chapeaux—Amanda Filipacchi, whose Love Creeps is one of my favorite comic novels.

(Here's the Facebook page for Sweet: Actors Reading Writers. And here's the same information configured slightly differently on my glorious webpage.)

"The literary bash of the week"

We're all about THE BEST, so it's good to see that Time Out New York has chosen Saturday night's reading/event/free-for-all as one of the Seven Habits of Highly Effective — I mean SEVEN BEST THINGS to do this week:

The multidisciplinary benefit party Impossible Geometries, for the online journal Triple Canopy and the art-film space Light Industries, kicks off with readings by Ed Park and Lynne Tillman, follows with films and music, and promises to be the literary bash of the week.

More info here.

Also check out this poster:

I'll come running (to dry your clothes)

Eno parted ways with Roxy Music in 1973 after a major falling out with Ferry. Later on, Eno claimed that he knew he was through with Roxy Music when he started thinking about his laundry during performances. —Geeta Dayal, Another Green World

Speaking of laundry: I'll be reading next Thursday, November 12, at...the Avenue A Laundromat (97 Avenue A)! Has it come to this??? (A: Yes!) I'll be reading with fellow Korean American novelist/New Order fan Sung J. Woo. It's part of the Dirty Laundry reading series. Things get rolling promptly at 7 p.m. (CORRECTION: 7:30 P.M.!) I'm not sure if you're allowed to do laundry during the reading. (I'll know that I'm through with readings if I start thinking about Roxy Music.)

Fast-forward........Two days after that, I'll be at Page Turner, the Asian American Literary Festival, yapping on a panel ("Everyone's a Critic") with the inimitable Hua Hsu....and Dennis Freakin' Lim...(they should just rename the Sunday Arts & Leisure section the Dennis & Lim section).

It's all happening at 2 p.m. on Saturday, November 14, on the ground floor of powerHouse, at 37 Main St. in DUMBO—here are directions!

Sleepy "Hello!"

Just in time for Halloween—I'll be reading at the Hudson Valley Writers' Center this Sunday, located in Sleepy Hollow. Here are the details! (Click here for directions...I think the HVWC is actually in the same structure as Philipse Manor Station.)

The Comic Novel

Our reading series takes a comic turn on October 25 with two authors whose novels are witty and intelligent, quirky and hopeful.

Christine Lehner, whose new novel, Absent a Miracle, came out this August, was described by the New York Times as a “talented humorist” and the book as “pure, unadulterated adulterous entertainment”. Her previous book was a collection of stories, What to Wear to See the Pope (Carroll & Graf, 2004), and her novel Expecting was published in 1983. Lehner’s short stories and essays have appeared in various literary magazines, including the North American Review, Agni, New Directions Anthologies, Chelsea, Salmagundi, Image, the Southwest Review and The New York Times. She writes the blog Sort Quench & Dump (http://sortquenchdump.blogspot.com/). She lives near the Hudson River with Charles Branch, two dogs, and thousands of bees.

Ed Park’s first novel, Personal Days, published by Random House in May 2008, was a finalist for the PEN Hemingway Award and the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize, and was named one of Time’s Top Ten Fiction Books of the year. He is a founding editor of The Believer and the former editor of the Voice Literary Supplement. His articles, essays, and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Salon, and other publications. For several years he wrote film criticism for The Village Voice, famously ending his review of Clifford the Big Red Dog with the questions: “Why big? Why red? Why dog?” His short fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in various anthologies and journals such as Trampoline, Burn This Book, and Read Hard. He drew a comic strip at Yale and received his M.F.A. from Columbia, where he currently teaches in the graduate writing program. Ed writes a science fiction column, Astral Weeks, for the Los Angeles Times, runs the blog Disambiguation (formerly The Dizzies), and publishes the e-zine, New-York Ghost. He lives in Manhattan with his family.

The reading will be introduced by Marilyn Johnson, author of The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries. Marilyn’s latest, This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All, is due out from Harper on February 2, 2010—and Marilyn will read for us at the Writers’ Center just a few weeks later on February 28!

Suggested Donation: $5 ($3 for HVWC members)

Must chase frog out of throat because...

I am reading again—this Thursday at KGB, 7 p.m., mit two excellent novelists: RIVKA GALCHEN and LEV GROSSMAN. It's a benefit for "Behind the Book." I believe there is a $5 donation involved, and a raffle...

Disambiguations™ for September 29, 2009

I. Richard Russo was on NPR's Morning Edition today, talking about some of his favorite office lit—including Personal Days! Listen here. (Full show here.)

II. "I don't buy it, and, more, I don't really even want it": Levi Stahl on The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

III. The anatomy lesson: My favorite brainiac Meehan Crist gets to dissect, at Lapham's Quarterly:

The earliest lesson in dissection comes not from the West but from the East, in the pages of the Sushruta Samhita, an ancient Sanskrit text meant for students of the surgical arts who probably lived about six hundred years before Christ walked the streets of Galilee. It instructs its readers to find the body of a person—not too young and not too old—who has not died of poisoning or severe disease. Remove the intestines. Wrap the body in grass, hemp, or bast, the inner bark of trees. Place the wrapped figure in a cage, for protection from animals, and lower the cage into a river with a gentle current. Leave it there, bobbing in the rhythmic rush of water, “the body left to soften.” When you return a few days later, bring a brush made of grassroots, hair, and bamboo. Use the brush to remove one softened layer of the corpse at a time. “When this is done, the eye can observe every large or small, outer or inner part of the body, beginning with the skin, as each part is laid bare by the brushing.” In this way, you will travel beneath the skin and through the body to the very core, whisking away bits of bloated flesh until nothing is left, the body disappeared and your hands, empty.

IV. I also noticed, in the same issue of LQ, an essay by John Crowley:

Once last fall, world stock markets lost a trillion dollars in value in a single day, or maybe it was a week, and I found the evident impossibility of this somehow at once appalling and exhilarating. I wondered why—why it was exhilarating, that is. Was it the suggestion, the proof even, that this supposed value had not been actual at all, had been nothing, a projection, a magic trick? Why would that be exhilarating? Some of my own money was vanishing (as my wife reminded me, asking why I was laughing), and to most humans, the sense of a vast and necessary structure dissolving into thin air like Prospero’s cloud-capp’d towers might be gloom-inducing in the extreme.

Along about the same time, the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland was being set up for its first test run, and there was speculation that the machine could so focus the random possibilities of particle collision as to swallow up the planet and all of us with it. A mini black hole might be created, doomsayers warned, a spot of “true vacuum” that could actually draw in the entire universe at the speed of light—all matter and energy and all time and space—and leave nothing at all behind. Nothing at all.

This possibility, like the vanishing trillions of cash value, was exhilarating too, only awe-inspiring rather than appalling—godlike laughter as against demonic glee.

V. And...Columbia folk: I'm reading tomorrow...where is "Mathematics Hall"?

Getting Personal with Ed Park

Wednesday, September 30, 8PM

203 Mathematics Hall

Columbia Professor and acclaimed novelist and critic Ed Park will give a reading from his novel Personal Days, followed by an open Q&A. Personal Days, one of the Time’s top ten fiction books of 2008, was a finalist for the PEN Hemingway Award and the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize. Park is a founding editor of The Believer magazine, former editor of the Voice Literary Supplement and a contributor to the New York Times and LA Times, among many other publications.

The Columbia Review and 114 Rue de Fleurus, the writers’ house of Columbia University, are co-sponsoring the event. Attendance is open and no RSVP is required.

I've been putting this off for a while...

...but I'm going to take a break from blogging here, till the end of May or so. (Team Dizzies members are strongly encouraged to post, though!)

I'll occasionally update my website and the Personal Days blog, so please click through if you're interested in readings/appearances and other odds and ends. (Here's the tour schedule part of the site...I say "tour" because I'll be in Poughkeepsie!)

My Astral Weeks column will still appear in the L.A. Times, and I might crank out a Ghost or two.

Here's to the future!



xoxo,
Gossip Ed

(Photo: L.G. Thos.)

Tonight!

I'll be jumping on the 2/3 and taking it to Times Square and then taking the 7 into Queens and then (whew!) getting on the G train to Greenpoint*, Brooklyn, and emerging there to read at the Word bookstore. Please come if you live (or linger) in that area! Reading is at 7:30. Brian Baise and Deb Olin Unferth are also reading.

Here's the Word store site; here's what some site says; and this is from something called the Brooklyn Based Tip Sheet (I think that's what it's called):

THURSDAY: Word of the Ghost
Word bookstore's ongoing Indie Press Night returns with two glittering literati: novelist Deb Olin Unferth, whose lauded debut novel, Vacation, was published by McSweeneys, and Believer founding editor Ed Park, author of Personal Days and publisher of the quirky New-York Ghost. 7:30 pm, 126 Franklin Street, Greenpoint.

* * *

Otherwise...if you're in the Morningside Heights area, go see Dzyds in conversation at Book Culture:

Join Columbia University professor Jenny Davidson for a discussion about her latest book, Breeding: A Partial History of the Eighteenth Century. She will be joined by Vassar professor Julie Park**, for a conversation about the book.

JENNY DAVIDSON is an associate professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. She is the author of two novels, Heredity and The Explosionist, and a critical work, Hypocrisy and the Politics of Politeness: Manners and Morals from Locke to Austen.

JULIE PARK is an assistant professor of English at Vassar College. She was an editor of Eighteenth-Century Fiction from 2003-2008. Her book, The Self and It: Novel Objects and Material Subjects in 18th-Century England, is forthcoming this year from Stanford University Press. She has published articles on the history of the novel and the dolls, automata and fetishes of eighteenth-century England in several academic journals.

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*where someone is looking for a time machine
**no relation

Table-Talk of Parkus Grammaticus for February 24, 2009

I. Booking Bands: You Shall Know Our Velocity Girl...Things They Might Be Giants Carried...you get the idea....Can you think of one that's not already on the list?

(From Dzyd Jen)

II. "A rather aggressive exercise in point-missing": Mike Rutherford's album based on a science-fiction oddity from 1964, Peter Currell Brown's Smallcreep's Day.

III. Odd choice of verb?

Born into an immigrant family living in public housing, Mr. Locke, 59, made it to Yale University and served as a prosecutor, state legislator and King County executive before his election as governor. —NYT

IV. Major Beatles find posted at Hey Dullblog.

(Thanks, Eric)

V. On the red carpet the other night, James Franco gave a nod to Carl Wilson's Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste!



VI. I'll be reading in Brooklyn this Thursday at 7:30...wait, let me copy the "upcoming readings" stuff from the PD blog!

Thurs., 2/26 Word Books, Greenpoint, Brooklyn, 7:30 p.m., with Deb Olin Unferth (Vacation) and Brian Baise

Tues., 3/3, New York Society Library, 10 a.m. (WHAT?!)—not a reading, more a panel

Thurs., 3/12 Gallatin Teachers' Reading, 6:30 p.m., Bronfman Center (7 East 10th St.), first floor

Tues., 3/31, First Proof Series at Vassar College, 5 p.m., Class of '51 Reading Room, Vassar Library, Poughkeepsie, NY. (More info here.)

Readings

I'll be reading this week (Wed. 2/18, 8 p.m.) at Manhattan Valley/Morningside Heights' own Ding Dong Lounge (929 Columbus, 105/106), following some current Columbia writing division students.

And I'll be reading next week (Thurs. 2/26) all the way in Greenpoint at the Word bookstore, with Deb Olin Unferth and Brian Baise.

(More info and links here. Some more appearances in March, and April, and I think early May.)

"Like a palindrome spelled with acts of corruption"

I. From Levi:

From the Chicago Reader blog, about our galactically stupid and corrupt soon-to-be-ex-governor (the third Illinois governor out of the last five to be arrested!!!!!):

"Chicagoland correspondent KC:

'If I'm reading the Sun-Times article right, then:

'Blago contemplated appointing himself to the Senate seat because he'd get better lawyers to defend himself for trying to sell the Senate seat that no one wanted to buy, which is why Blago contemplated appointing himself to the Senate seat.

'It's beyond circular logic, it's like a palindrome spelled with acts of corruption instead of letters.'"

II. Irony! The PTSNBN puts PD on its list of the Best Books of 2008...

In a prelapsarian New York populated by surging, infinity-sign-shaped real estate developments, an office is undergoing endless layoffs....Park's unsettling, uproarious debut delights as much in sending up various crimes against language as it does in satirizing workplace culture....

(Via Other Ed)

III. The mystery of language, cont'd: "Two cases of compulsive swearing—in sign language."

(Via Uncertain Times)

IV. At A Journey Round My Skull, Will has some "Musings and Thunderings of Leon Bloy":

"My existence is a sad country where it is always raining...."

V. Parenthetical of the day: "First, I must preface this conversation by saying that from time to time (hourly) I google myself." —Ta-Nehisi

AAWW-some

Tonight: I'll be reading with Monica Ferrell (The Answer Is Always Yes) at the Asian American Writers' Workshop, 16 W 32nd St., 7 p.m. (More details here.)

Then I am silent for a time! My reading copy of Personal Days is so marked up that it needs time to recover...

Turn it up—that's enough—so you know—

I'll be on WBAI's Asia Pacific Forum tonight (10/21), beginning around 8:40 until 9 or so. New Yorkers can tune in to 99.5 FM, and the show also streams on the WBAI website.

(More about Asia Pacific Forum here.)

And at 7 p.m. on Thurs., 10/23, I'll be reading at the Asian American Writers' Workshop (16 W. 32nd St., 10th floor) with Monica Ferrell (The Answer Is Always Yes)...and then I'm going to get some soup here...

Ferrell, Gelman, Park: An Eternal Golden Braid

I. Come to my last New York reading (for a couple of months at least)! I'll be at the Asian American Writers' Workshop on Thursday 10/23 (7 p.m.), along with Monica Ferrell. Here's more info at Time Out, and at the AAWW site.

The space is vertiginously located on the 10th floor of 16 West 32nd Street. And 32nd Street, of course, means...Korean food????

II. I've been enjoying reading what things Andrew Gelman thought while reading PD...I especially liked the connection to Jonathan Coe, and to this bit in Gödel, Escher, Bach:

Hofstadter writes about how, when you read a book, you know you're coming to the end, which affects your expectations, unlike in real life stories or in a movie of indeterminate length, when the end can come as a surprise.

What's surprising is that I've been having all these ideas regarding surprise ("the aesthetics of surprise"), maybe Hofstadter will shed some light on this (or not, per Gelman!). Anyway—he finished my novel!

Ed Park reading on 10/19 and 10/23!

I thought I'd refer to myself in the third person!

1. This Sunday, 10/19, I'll be reading something shortish (PD excerpt? "A Note to My Translator"? something that I cook up between now and then?) at Pianos for an Obama/Biden fundraiser. The lineup: Paul Beatty (The White Boy Shuffle and Slumberland), Nick Flynn (Another Bullshit Night in Suck City), Elissa Schappell (Use Me), Gary Shteyngart* (Absurdistan and The Russian Debutante's Handbook), Anthony Swofford (Jarhead and Exit A), and actress Lili Taylor.

(Pianos: 158 Ludlow St. Event goes from 7:30 to 9. Trains: F or V to Second Ave. JMZ or F to Delancey St. $25 admission, which you should fulfill on the website pre-event, goes to the Obama/Biden campaign. I think I am even paying for the privilege to read!)

[Weirdly, this turned up last night: "Ed Park is a Democrat."]

2. Next Thursday (10/23), I'll be reading at the Asian American Writers' Workshop. Also reading: Monica Ferrell, author of the novel The Answer Is Always Yes.

(AAWW: 10 W. 32nd St., btw Bwy & 5th Ave., 10th floor; event starts at 7; suggested $5 donation.)




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*Mr. Shteyngart joins an elite group of brave writers who have shared the stage with me twice. The other members are Rivka Galchen and Chuck Klosterman.

Last week

A scene from the Brooklyn Book Festival:


(From L to R: Laura Sinagra, moi, Chuck Klosterman, Charles Bock)

(Via Keenduck's Flickr)


While we're at it: This is from Rocketlass—hungry yet?

This weekend — BROOKLYN BOOK FESTIVAL!

This Sunday I'll be at the Brooklyn Book Festival for the second year in a row—despite not living in Brooklyn!—joining Chuck Klosterman and Charles Bock. We'll all be reading from our debut novels—CB from Beautiful Children, CK from the impending Downtown Owl, EP from that old chestnut Personal Days.

It's on Sunday, 9/14, at 5 p.m. on the Mainstage! More here.

See you there?!

And of course there are tons of other great readings/panels going on...

I hope the weather holds up....

I hope someone doesn't climb onstage and pat my head like last year.



Scene from last year's BBF: Chuck Klosterman, Rob Sheffield, and me. (I?)(Me.)("EP.")

Up to and after — Reading tonight

Hello...this is Ed Park in a photo by Sylvia Plachy speaking...Remember when I said I'd remind you about my upcoming readings etc., constantly?

So...

I'll be reading tonight at 7 at KGB (85 E. 4th St.). Here's what New York has to say:

Ed Park, while a founding editor of The Believer, is really making his name with his debut novel, Personal Days, which was inspired by how shitty it was to work at The Village Voice in the time leading up to—and after—the paper was bought out by the weekly-paper conglomerate known as New Times. If that book were not such a fantastic leap away from his specific experience (we were there), into realms more universal, and more hilarious, you might think the new short story he’ll read tonight would just take a spade to the same territory. But Park digs deeper—wider, even!—and we can’t wait to hear what he does in the short form, and how his impish language sounds out loud. — Nick Catucci

(Does this mean I'll be reading a short story? I guess...??)

(Full info here...I'll be reading with April Wilder, whose story is also in the current issue of The L Magazine.)

* * *

Thursday morning bonus: The conclusion to Dzyd Douglas's ukulele musings.

And while we're talking music? You need to check out Dzyd Bbbecky's latest post, on "Sleng Teng," and download those two songs! (It's a tantalizing form—essentially, these are ecstatic variations on a rigid theme: "Sleng Teng was created on a Casio keyboard...The riddim has been versioned near two hundred times...") The first song especially is a TOTAL KNOCKOUT. Maybe I will just play it tonight in lieu of a story...

Naive theories of irrigation

"Variations on Original Sin," another chapter of the novel-in-progress known as The Dizzies, is part of L Magazine's fiction extravaganza. First paragraph!:

Marjorie’s father, Poindexter Bantam, was my philosophy professor at Rue University. Set at the edge of a collapsing milltown, Rue was a power in the short-lived Modern American Football League and did not have much of an academic reputation back then. I attended on the G.I. Bill, intending to major in agriculture and minor in economics, but found my naïve theories of irrigation so profoundly challenged that I wound up in the infirmary for a week. My regulation crewcut grew improbably lush, and for minutes at a time I didn’t recognize the face that met me in the mirror. Nurse Nancy diagnosed melancholy and proposed a course of therapeutic massage. I accepted. A few days after I was released I picked about a thousand flowers and manhandled them into a sad bouquet. But the receptionist told me Nancy had gone off to get married that morning, and I never saw her again.

I'll be reading from this or something else tomorrow—Thurs., July 31—at KGB—7 p.m.!—85 East 4th Street...

"That's what they say about the summer..."

The National Post has a summer reading pick...Personal Days by Ed Park!

And The Stranger's Paul Constant writes: "[P]ark's love of language elevates the novel to that rarest of levels: the vocabulary becomes almost another character in the story. Every word belongs exactly where it is."

Heyyy I'll take it...

See Ed (moi) read on Thursday, July 31, at KGB!