Winter Break Reading List + 1 Question

OK. So now that I am close to done, I am about ready to declare what I will read over break that has nothing to do with SCHOOL!! I decided that I would read books by friends and almost-friends over break. I hate having not read my friends' books because of school. School. Sometimes it stops you from reading.

1) Aaron Kunin -- The Mandarin
2) Michelle Koerner -- First dissertation chapter in manuscript form on Deleuze and American Lit (roughly speaking)
3) Fred Moten -- Hughson’s Tavern
4) Lucy Corin -- Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls, A Novel
5) Ali Liebegott -- The Beautifully Worthless

Alright, if I get through that by January 8th and write my Melville paper, I will be psyched.

Real Question: So, how do I get free new books? I have to spend all my money on school books and thus feel like I can't keep up with all the new poetry and fiction I want. I know a bunch of you are poor like me, and yet I see on GoodReads etc, you all get your hands on the new stuff. Tell me, please.

The Wound of Things

Hello. It seems like my life of finals keeps extending itself. I am finishing up a paper on Arnold's "Culture and Anarchy" and starting to think about a Melville paper, which I image as a talk to writers rather than academics. I am thinking about Meliville's Billy Budd as a corrective to the problem of my book (or maybe I just mean "of writing") in relationship to the real world. Something I keep thinking about. For more on this, see the X Poetics feature (link to the left). But until I turn into the Handsome Sailor (I would like to exist that way, minus the hanging), my interview on the local NC public radio station show (The State of Things) can be heard
here.

Also, I want Jacob Russell to be my own personal critic. I feel like he really gets my book and I am grateful for all the time he has taken to write about it on his blog. It's very generous of him. And makes me feel understood, which is a rare feeling for anyone, I imagine. His latest post is
here.

And NY, I look forward to seeing you on Tuesday. Until then, think kindly of me.

NYC on TUESDAY!

Next Tuesday—at a triple book party—the final QT of 2008—the pleasure of your company is requested—

QT: Queer Readings at Dixon Place presents:

DOUGLAS A. MARTIN
Your Body, Figured (Nightboat)
+
MATTILDA BERNSTEIN SYCAMORE
So Many Ways to Sleep Badly (City Lights)
+
MAGDALENA ZURAWSKI
The Bruise, winner of the Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize (FC2)

Tuesday, December 9, 2008 at Dixon Place: 161 Chrystie Street, between Delancey and Rivington doors (+ snacks + drinks + hangouts) at 7 / reading at 7:30

DOUGLAS A. MARTIN is the author of two novels, Outline of My Lover and Branwell; a book of stories, They Change the Subject; a lyric narrative, Your Body Figured; three volumes of poetry, most recently In The Time of Assignments; and a new novel, Once You Go Back, forthcoming in 2009. He is an English professor at Wesleyan University and teaches in the low-residency MFA Program at Goddard College in Vermont.

MATTILDA BERNSTEIN SYCAMORE is an insomniac with dreams. Unfortunately sometimes the dreams are awful and the next day is worse. This pattern may have influenced Mattilda's new novel, So Many Ways to Sleep Badly (City Lights 2008). Mattilda is also the author of Pulling Taffy (Suspect Thoughts 2003) and the editor of four nonfiction anthologies, most recently Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity (Seal 2007) and an expanded second edition of That's Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation (Soft Skull 2008). She is currently at work on a new anthology, titled Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots? You've probably asked that question yourself.

MAGDALENA ZURAWSKI was born in Newark NJ and grew up in Edison NJ, but Providence RI feels like home because that's where she started writing and meeting writers and thinking of herself as a writer. Currently, she lives in Durham, NC, where she is studying 19th-century American literature at Duke. The Bruise, out now from Fiction Collective Two, is the winner of the 2006 Ronald Sukenick prize for innovative fiction. It is her first book.

QT: Queer Readings at Dixon Place
http://qtreadings.blogspot.com
qtreadings@gmail.com

I'm Working On Finals

I will be in my bunker, procrastinating and working, but will emerge on Thursday, November 20th. At 12:40pm you'll be able to here me on WUNC, 91.5 on the local NPR show "The State of Things." Hopefully, all this paper-writing will not have reduced me to a blob of incoherent flesh. If you hear lots of static, that might be me. More likely is that I'll blather on shamelessly and regret it later.

At 7pm that same day, I'll be reading at The Regulator bookstore in Durham. Information is at the left.

Also, of you are on FB and like my novel, please become a fan
here.

My Two Coats

This week I saw "On the Waterfront" for the first time. I know. It's terrible. I am the opposite of Frank O'Hara. I never watch any movies. I've hardly seen any movies. When I lived in SF, Jocelyn Saidenberg would take me to the movies and because of her I saw La Dolce Vita, which I think is the best movie ever, but that's another story. But anyhow, I am TAPPING this semester and that's basically like being a TA in training. It's for a Cold War Culture class. So I had to go to the screening of "On the Waterfront". And it revealed a lot to me about my childhood. See, when I grew up in NJ it was the '70s. There weren't many white immigrants coming in from anywhere. We were sort of a fluke that way. At first we lived in an older suburban neighborhood that still had traces of its farmland roots. But by the time I was ten, Edison was all suburban sprawl.

My family was the only family in the neighborhood that I knew of, until my early teens, that wasn't American. My parents were professionals, so we didn't have any need of living in an urban area in a Polish community, or at least not after my mother got pregnant with me. So we were this Polish family in the suburbs. I had to go to the mall and ask the saleslady questions for my mom. She was embarrassed of her accent. That kind of thing. Of course there was a Polish neighborhood in Brooklyn (Greenpoint before the hipsters came) but my mom always spoke of it as this terrible place filled with lowlifes. We never went there. So clearly there was a class thing separating my parents from the Polish community we could have had. I guess all I am trying to say is that we lived in the suburbs and everyone around us was non-ethnic white. Or at least that's the way I saw it as a kid.

So when I was watching "On the Waterfront" this weekend it felt really familiar in this strange way and I started to remember that when I watched TV alone as a kid I sought out films that I thought were set in "Brooklyn". Like, I think, I must have watched a lot of James Cagney movies without even knowing it. And I am wondering now if I hadn't watched "On the Waterfront" by accident. Because I remember always wanting to be a guy like that. A guy with a Jersey or Brooklyn accent and kind of tough and working class. I remember going into the basement and looking through old clothes, hoping to find a leather jacket and then finding some seventies blazer and putting it on and looking in the mirror and feeling like I was sexy like the Fonz. I was maybe six. But it makes sense now. All the guys in those movies are Irish or Italian. It's the closest thing to being Polish in NJ. It's like I watched this old black and white world to try to understand my own immigrant experience, which was neither urban nor working class. But that Hoboken or Brooklyn world seemed like where a family like ours should have landed and didn't. Of course all the guys in those movies were Catholic and Catholic School I had plenty of. I understood the role of the priest in all those films. Those people were white like me, I thought.

And so it was especially interesting to notice Marlon Brando's coat this week because it is a plaid coat not unlike the one in my novel. And the one in my novel is based on a real coat I bought on the men's sales rack in the mall in RI. But the coat, it was so much like Marlon Brando's and when I got it at 19 or 20, I felt like I did in the basement in that terrible blazer as a kid. And so I am wondering now, if I hadn't seen the film as a kid and if Marlon Brando's plaid coat is the only thing I remembered from it. And then there was another coat. A leather coat that I dreamed of in college. And after I woke I walked out of the dorm onto Thayer Street and bought a coat just like the one in my dream. And a few days later I realized it was just like the coat Springsteen wears in the band shot on the back of The River. And of course I wanted to be like him, too, when I was a kid. And even now, but I avoid playing air guitar in front of mirrors, lest I be caught. But Springsteen -- he was Irish/Italian Catholic, much closer in age and place to me, and the coolest thing ever.

So in college I got these two coats. One was for Brando and the other for Springsteen. But when I bought them I was really buying them for my six-year-old self, who really wanted to believe "I could walk like Brando, right into the sun, and dance just like a Cassonova." But, of course, I was just a nerdy middle-class Polish school girl, reading books and stuff. In my mind, though, I looked better. I was much cooler.