A Conversation With Paul La Farge

Tomorrow (that is, Wednesday, October 19) I'll be talking to Paul La Farge about his terrific new novel, Luminous Airplanes, and grilling him about his life in general. It's at McNally Jackson (52 Prince St.) and it begins at 7.

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Wait...his book trailer was directed by Hal Hartley??



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Background reading: All of Paul's Believer pieces.

Sim city

The new Bookforum is partially online. My review of The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim is only in the paper issue as of now. I like the coverline: "Why Jonathan Coe Deserves an American Audience."

(I've read most of/finished some good pieces already—Ruth Franklin on Joyce Carol Oates, Erik Davis on Robert Duncan's The H.D. Book, Rivka Galchen on Lydia Davis/Madame Bovary...there's something by Paul La Farge...)













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Coe notes:



Thank you to Gautam, who sent me a copy of The Rain Before It Falls several years ago—I talk about it a bit in the piece.






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My essay in the Times about the longest sentence was the original impetus behind rereading Coe's The Rotters' Club. What a book!

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I reviewed Coe's biography of B.S. Johnson, Like a Fiery Elephant, when it came out in 2005, but did not dwell much on the ending. I do so in this Bookforum piece, as it is clearly a source for a chunk of the new novel.

Lost and found

I.

The tale had all the hallmarks of a baroque Paul Bowles short story, set among the remaindered possessions of Bowles himself: a film director gets a call from a stranger, who says he has stumbled across an original print of the filmmaker’s long-lost first film in a windowless Tangier apartment, coated in dust and insect powder. The director, Sara Driver, at first thought the call might be a joke, but for reasons almost as strange as fiction, she kept listening.[...]

Bowles’s agent granted the rights to Ms. Driver, and the movie — shot in six days near her parents’ house in western New Jersey, with an unlikely cast that included two friends, the writer Luc Sante, little known at the time, and an equally unknown photographer, Nan Goldin — developed a following. The film was named one of the best movies of the 1980s by a critic in Cahiers du Cinéma. —NYT

II. At The Millions, Emily Darrell tracks down one of J.D. Salinger's uncollected stories, "A Girl I Knew":

As I scanned the index I noticed with great surprise and excitement that the book contained a story by J.D. Salinger that I hadn’t read before. It was called “A Girl I Knew.” Greedily, I slid to the floor, crossed my legs, and flipped to page 248, ready to start right in. The only problem was that there was no page 248. In fact, in between John Rogers’ “Episode of a House Remembered” and Alfred Segre’s “Justice Has No Number,” there was nothing. Some sneak had gone and ever-so-carefully removed the Salinger story with a razor.

III. Paul La Farge offers PDF versions of nine small books (of seventeen) that he published with/as Paraffin Press. Each had a print run of two.

IV. Can't remember what link brought me to this site for/about William Gibson's Agrippa (a book of the dead)—a book on disc that destroyed itself as you read it.

Underwater New York/From the Parkives: "An Oral History of Atlantis"

These private oracles served as a fix, but I passed my days in a benthic haze: I wanted to swim again, to be by my blowhole familiar. Unable to resist, abject as any addict, I finally made a return visit uptown, but the entire district had been rezoned; the mayor, linking Metaphor to vice, had decreed that only pizza parlors could operate there now. They’d renamed it MUNGO, for Municipality near North Grosvenor and Orange, as if that would make people forget...

—"An Oral History of Atlantis"

An introduction.
In November of last year, Nicole Haroutunian asked if I had any stories that might be suited for Underwater New York, an online lit and art anthology that she co-edits. A few months had to pass before I remembered this story. "An Oral History of Atlantis" was written in the early summer of 2001, for a reading at the old Galapagos in Brooklyn. It was a beautiful evening; I remember we ate delicious corn outdoors at Veracruz afterward. The reading was for a San Francisco–based journal called 6,500 (long defunct), guest-edited by my friend Paul La Farge. (6,500 had just run a different story by me; when I can, I still like to write original pieces for readings, mostly as a way to get myself writing anything at all.)

Later that summer I gave the story to Manuel Gonzales at Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art; he published it in the 35th issue, circa late 2002. "An Oral History of Atlantis" is thus both a pre-9/11 story (it was fun to imagine my city falling apart), and a post-9/11 one (I stopped writing like this for a while).

I believe this was my fourth published story. Indeed, this story is so old that the version on my computer can't be read by two out of three people I've sent it to. (Old hard drives, old word-processing programs might constitute the secret Atlantis of our time.) So I'm very happy to see it resurface, after nearly a decade, at the perfectly named Underwater New York; it's also a nice surprise to be teamed up with my friend and New-York Ghost photographer Adrian Kinloch, himself a frequent contributor to Underwater NYC.

You can read "An Oral History of Atlantis" in full here. The only other thing I'll say is that I've always liked the title.

Addendum to last couple of posts

I. Speaking of D&D, two recent fictions of mine—in PEN America and for the Significant Objects project—found me reimagining my RPG past.

II. More small Read Hard reviews! This one's from The Guardian:

It all sounds distractingly kooky, but the Believer's writing is generally sharp, funny and insightful enough to keep you hooked, even when you could have sworn you had no prior interest in Malibu-based 50s surfer gal Gidget or what happened to the guy who invented Dungeons and Dragons.

(That last reference is to Paul La Farge's incredible piece, "Destroy All Monsters.")

III. This is not related to anything: Dennis Lim—the Man Who Never Blogs—is blogging from Sundance!