Syntax of Things

Geeked on Kerouac

Wired's copy chief, Tony Long, makes the case that On the Road belongs in the "geek's literary canon":

Whether Kerouac was a "great" writer is certainly debatable (define "great," for starters); that he was one of America's most influential writers is beyond dispute. On the Road, at 50, sells more copies in a given year than most new fiction does, so it evidently still strikes a chord somewhere.

Kerouac gets kicked around pretty good in academia and by other writers, mostly East Coast snoots who wrinkle their noses at the idea of automatic writing. It was Truman Capote, remember, who dismissed Kerouac with one of the bitchiest literary putdowns of all time: "That's not writing, that's typing."

Without a doubt, writing on a scroll in a nonstop, three-week frenzy of Benzedrine-fueled inspiration doesn't represent the height of literary craft. But On the Road is a banshee cry for freedom, not pop literature, so in this case Kerouac's improvisation thoroughly guts Capote's measured prose.

While you're digesting that morsel, try this one: On the Road is as deserving of a place in the geek's literary canon as anything penned by Tolkien, Gibson or Dick. Kerouac didn't invent alien civilizations or futuristic worlds, but he helped break down the walls of convention in the real one. If the modern geek is the maverick he often claims to be, then he owes at least a cursory nod backward to a genuine maverick, one who helped pave the way while on a hopeless struggle to find himself.

Fifty years along, On the Road still resonates for those of us possessed of a restless spirit, who see gray conformity as spiritual death, who place the value of the individual above the mere possession of things. For us, Sal Paradise's odyssey stands as the antidote -- and as a warning to keep a close watch on our souls.

Left Behind

I'd love to see this done in the U.S., but we all know that Americans don't read so for now we'll have to be content with this list of "Books Left Behind" at Travelodge hotels throughout England:

The top 10 most discarded books in hotel rooms

1. The Blair Years by Alastair Campbell
2. Don't You Know Who I Am? by Piers Morgan
3. A Whole New World by Jordan
4. Wicked by Jilly Cooper
5. Dr Who Creatures & Demons by Justin Richard
6. The Diana Chronicles by Tina Brown
7. I Can Make You Thin by Paul McKenna
8. Humble Pie by Gordon Ramsay
9. The Story Of A Man And His Mouth by Chris Moyles
10. Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows by JK Rowling

Let's All Go to the Lobby

It's nice to dream of a future, a future somewhat like my past, one when I will scan the fall movie preview lists and begin anticipating the movies that I'll be gleefully attending in the coming weeks.  Unfortunately, one of the many casualties (not that I'm complaining) of becoming a dad has been my moviegoingness.  Now it's become more of a privilege, something I have to save up for by doing untold numbers of honeydos or allowing the wife a day to get her nails or hair or eyebrows or kneecaps done.  For the most part, movies for me are paid-per-view and often not even that, especially if there's a good cop chase show on Court TV.  Anyway, I ramble on just to show you two trailers for movies which will have me doing plenty of honeydos in the next few weeks.  The first, No Country for Old Men, the adaptation of a Cormac McCarthy novel I didn't care too much for but which is directed by the Coen brothers, which means that I'll be in the theater on or close to opening night, exhausted from hanging new pictures on the wall or putting a new toy box together, but happy at the results of my effort and pleased with the movie, I hope.  Here's the trailer:

Or if you need more gore to get you excited about a movie, perhaps the "red band" version will do the trick.

There's always a chance that I'll get to see two movies this fall.  If so, I'm probably going to opt for There Will Be Blood, an adaptation of Upton Sinclair's Oil directed by Paul Thomas Anderson and starring Daniel Day-Lewis:

Is there anything else I should try to see?  I'll save you a little time by telling you that I have little or no interest in seeing the new Dylan biopic, especially if I have to put extra work in.  I'd rather save up that time to go catch a hockey or college football game or something. 

Oh and by the way, can anyone guess what the two movies above have in common?  Possibly more than one thing but if you can guess what I'm thinking I have a copy of Richard Powers' The Echo Maker that I'll send your way.

SoT Announces Week-Long Symposium on the Future of Nose Picking

Details to follow but I can tell you that only those who write about nose picking for established print or print-based or non-blogging based nose-picking review venues will be involved.  We'll also be announcing  our new slogan:  Boogers not Bloggers!

Sterling Memories

Sterling Lord recounts his struggles shopping Kerouac's On the Road to publishers and Kerouac's struggles dealing with the books success once it was published:

As we started working together, I came to respect him. I was impressed with Jack’s commitment to serious writing. I felt that his was a fresh, distinctive voice that should be heard. For more than four years I could not find an editor or a publisher who felt the same way. During that time, discouraged by my lack of success, Jack wrote me (it was June 28, 1955) that he wanted to “pull my manuscripts back and forget publishing.” I thought I knew Jack well, so I ignored his request and continued submitting. Twelve days later, he changed his mind and we went on merrily together.

The rejections of two editors both highly regarded and employed by major publishing houses with literary reputations were typical of the reactions. Surprisingly, each of these editors was approximately Jack’s age, which in my mind should have increased the likelihood of their responding positively to the manuscript. The most striking rejection was the following: “Kerouac does have enormous talent of a very special kind. But this is not a well made novel, nor a saleable one nor even, I think, a good one. His frenetic and scrambling prose perfectly expresses the feverish travels, geographically and mentally, of the Beat Generation. But is that enough? I don’t think so.”

That was six months after the following rejection came in from another publisher: “I know this will be discouraging news for you and Jack Kerouac, for you’ve both waited so long and patiently. Our response to Kerouac’s work was singular almost to a man, in that there was genuine admiration for his vigorous prose, his capacity to create a living sense of America, of life in this country, and the force and originality of his conception. But there were serious objections to the people and situations he writes about, whether they would be of compelling interest to many readers.... [A]ll I might suggest is that he should strive for a clearer vision of the novel itself.”

After almost four years of trying to sell Jack’s manuscript—now called On the Road—to a U.S. publisher, I sold a piece of his to the Paris Review. A few months later, I sold one piece of the manuscript, and then another, to New World Writing. Shortly after the second story appeared in New World Writing, I had a call from Keith Jennison, a young Viking editor. He, Malcolm Cowley and Tom Guinzburg were the strong Kerouac fans at Viking, and of course Malcolm Cowley had had the original scroll.

“Dammit, Sterling,” Keith said, “we can’t let that manuscript go unpublished any longer.” He made me an offer of $900 against royalties. I said no, and I got him up to $1,000 and closed the deal. Jack took the good news in stride. It was as if he knew it would eventually be published, and that it was happening now was merely a confirmation of his belief.

Little Wings

It's a hellofa note when you can't trust your ability to save something for later.  If this were the ideal world in which my premature ejections from web pages wouldn't cause untimely deletion of posts, you would be reading about my decision to "relaunch" Syntax of Things next Tuesday.  Basically, that just means that I'm going to go from this minimal approach I've been using to save time and energy back to the old way, which means little or nothing in terms of content but it sounds good to say.  I'm working on an unapologetic mea culpa for my lameness which I hope to have up as part of Tuesday's relaunch.

For now, more of the same, including videos like the one below, which happens to be one of the funniest things I've watched in many a moon.  It comes to you from Pensacola, Florida, where the mullets are fried and the Bibles are beaten.  Enjoy.

Her Journey, Boo Hoo

You know we can't let August slip by without JT LeAlbert making an appearance in the NY Times.  Is she paying them?

You can learn a lot about a person on an eight-hour road trip down California’s blue roads, and that holds true for Laura Albert, as complex a character as one is wont to meet. The drive, down Highway 101, was ostensibly conducted to get the reporter to an interview with David Milch, the television writer (and one of Ms. Albert’s best and last supporters). Yet like many highway journeys through the state, it had a rather strange existence of its own.

Over 400 miles the trip turned out to be a dreamlike blend of Kerouac and Freud, a barnstorm through the Santa Lucia range, with tears, antics, confessional moments and crab-meat enchiladas. Ms. Albert wore a pageboy cap and a pendant of a typewriter dangling at her neck; the film director shared the driving with the Cuban-Dutch designer; the in-car snack food was abundant and carefully selected as organic. Ms. Albert’s crimson wig (brought for a photo shoot to be held at journey’s end) sat atop a plastic-foam mannequin’s head, wedged amid the duffel bags in back. “I’m totally aware it sounds wacky,” Ms. Albert said somewhere south of Pismo Beach, “but I never really thought of it in terms of right or wrong, truth or lie. It was more like two computer programs running in my head. There was him, and there was me.”

That's about as far as I got before I gagged on my own eyeballs.  Nothing against Ms. Albert, but let me know when she and James Frey get a spot on that kookycrazy VH1 reality show where they put yesterday's news in a house together and make it fun for the whole family.

{thanks Frank}

Ginsberg Cross

I'm sure some of you have been wondering how Cate Blanchett would pull off Dylan in the Dylan biopic, I'm Not There.  Myself, I've been trying to picture David Cross as Allen Ginsberg.  Well, here's a little clip to help all of us out.

Bringin' on the Heartbreak

Keep in mind that Raleigh is in the midst of a severe drought.  Here at Syntax of Things headquarters, we haven't had more than a couple of drops of rain to water the weeds since early July.  But I'm pretty sure that when Ma Nature sat down to read what was happening in the Triangle tonight and saw one particular event, she couldn't resist:

THE DEF LEPPARD/STYX/FOREIGNER SHOW SCHEDULED TO TAKE PLACE TONIGHT, AUGUST 21, AT WALNUT CREEK AMPHITHEATRE WAS UNABLE TO TAKE PLACE DUE TO SEVERE WEATHER AND IN THE INTEREST IN PUBLIC SAFETY.

WE ARE MAKING EVERY EFFORT TO RESCHEDULE THE DATE. MORE INFORMATION REGARDING A POSSIBLE RESCHEDULED DATE WILL BE ANNOUNCED SOON. PATRONS ARE ENCOURAGED TO HOLD ON TO THEIR TICKETS AS TICKETS PURCHASED FOR TONIGHT’S CONCERT WILL BE HONORED IF THE DATE IS RESCHEDULED.

IF PATRONS WISH TO REFUND THEIR TICKETS, REFUNDS WILL BE AVAILABLE AT POINT OF PURCHASE STARTING FRIDAY AUGUST 24.

Anyone care to interpret "in the interest in public safety"? 

Sad/Funny

I'm glad I still have enough time in my day to check the "Most E-Mailed" news items on Yahoo!  After all, I need to give my psyche a good old-fashioned emotional workout.  How else would I know that according to a recent poll, one in four Americans read ZERO books last year.  And it hurts even more if you read the article, assuming you can read:

The survey reveals a nation whose book readers, on the whole, can hardly be called ravenous. The typical person claimed to have read four books in the last year — half read more and half read fewer. Excluding those who hadn't read any, the usual number read was seven.

"I just get sleepy when I read," said Richard Bustos of Dallas, a habit with which millions of Americans can doubtless identify. Bustos, a 34-year-old project manager for a telecommunications company, said he had not read any books in the last year and would rather spend time in his backyard pool.

Emphasis, sadly, is mine. 

But have no fear, one quick glance down the list of "Most E-mailed" gets you this great headline:

British dwarf's penis gets stuck to hoover

Emphasis mine.

Harper Lee Speaks

Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god.  Harper Lee actually said something in public.  While being inducted into the Alabama Academy of Honor (not an oxymoron, I assure you), she actually uttered the phrase, “Well it’s better to be silent than to be a fool."  It is believed that the world stopped spinning for just that second and a half it took her to say that obviously off-the-cuff remark.  I think I'll take the rest of the day off from work to mark this sacred occasion.

Oh, and you can actually see a photograph of her at this site.  Be careful, legend has it that if you see an image of Harper Lee, you have to stare into a mirror and say "Atticus Finch" five times backwards or a rabid liberal mockingbird will peck your eyes out.

Asher on NYT Book Review

I'll be honest.  I haven't read the NYT Book Review section in a few months now.  In fact, I haven't read a newspaper book review in weeks.  With everything else on my plate, I just don't have the time.  Still, when I saw that this week's NYT Book Review was going to be dedicated to Kerouac, I thought I might go out and grab a copy.  Levi Asher saved me from that mistake.  I disagree slightly with Levi on Sante's review, but I also see his point.  Thankfully, we have folks like him warning us away from what could be time not-so-well wasted.  It's just too bad the guy's a Mets fan:

Let the cliches explode in the sky, like roman candles that burn, burn, burn and everybody says "awww". The New York Times Book Review is a Jack Kerouac theme issue today, and I wish they'd just kill me instead.

This is why I stopped writing about the Beats on LitKicks (which launched in July 1994 with Jack Kerouac above the fold). I love Kerouac no less today than I did that innocent summer, but I have been exposed to too much bad writing about him, all of it fervently "pseudo-Beat" in style. Today's cover article on the publication of the unedited On The Road: The Original Scroll by Luc Sante is a perfect example.

Critics often try to sound energetic and fitful and passionate when writing about Kerouac, all the while covering up a journalistic yawn. So in Sante's words Kerouac "feverishly pounded out" the first draft of On The Road like Jackson Pollock "fighting and dancing his work into being", inspired by thoughts of Neal Cassady "with his need to move, his vast yahooing enthusiasm and his insatiable priapic drive", in a voice that's allowed to "wail and swoop and riff without the commas that hobble it in the novel".

Sante on On the Road

Luc Sante does a decent job of reviewing the new "scroll version" of On the Road.  Bad news is you have to be a Times Select sucker to read it in the NY Times.  Good news is you can read it for free here:

Contrary to legend, the scroll was not a roll of teletype paper but a series of large sheets of tracing paper that Kerouac cut to fit and taped together, and it is not unpunctuated - merely unparagraphed, which makes a certain physical demand on the reader, who is deprived of the usual rest stops. Also contrary to received ideas, Kerouac by his own admission fueled his work with nothing stronger than coffee. The scroll is slightly longer than the novel as it was finally published, after three subsequent conventionally formatted drafts, in 1957. The biggest immediate difference between the first draft and the finished product, though, is that while we know "On the Road" as a novel - the great novel of the Beat Generation - the scroll is essentially nonfiction, a memoir that uses real names and is far less self-consciously literary. It is a dazzling piece of writing for all of its rough edges, and, stripped of affectations that in the novel can sometimes verge on bathos, as well as of gratuitous punctuation supplied by editors more devoted to rules than to music, it seems much more immediate and even contemporary.

In some ways, the differences are minor. "On the Road" in all of its versions is the story of a series of cross-country trips made by Kerouac between 1948 and 1950 - "trips" rather than "travels," because they are all about covering ground, whether by hitchhiking, by bus or by drive-away car. The cardinal points are New York City, Denver and San Francisco, with spikes down to New Orleans, the San Joaquin Valley and finally Mexico. The trips are sometimes motored by impatience - if only the Rockies began on the other side of the Lincoln Tunnel! - but most often Kerouac revels in speed as an ecstatic medium, a way of concentrating as much experience and as many aesthetic and spiritual highs as possible into a week or less. Essential to the whole enterprise is Kerouac's relationship with Neal Cassady (called Dean Moriarty in the novel), who is one of the greatest characters in American literature without any need for imaginative tinkering on the part of the author.

This Do in Forgetfulness of Her

Did anyone else happen upon that mess of an Elvis tribute on CNN the other night in which an awfully frightening old man hobbled around Graceland arm and arm, then plastic cheek to plastic cheek, with a widowed Queen, who herself is looking a bit long in the tooth and stretched in the face.  But even that rather ghastly display of inanity, even on a day in which folks such as I tip our venti coffees and Percocet prescriptions skywards, when we can say that it's one of our earliest memories, this day thirty years ago when I was in Arkansas just across the Mississippi from the throne in which the king was deposed, even all of that cannot take away from the fact that this day always will be marred, that we'll not be able to have our moment to simply remember the king in death, but we may one day have people who will turn from the hips of rock'n'rollness to genuflect at the spandex of she who destroys all goodness.  August 16th is her birthday.

Elvis help us!

Liam Rector, 1949 - 2007

In case this hasn't filtered through to you yet, I just wanted to share the sad, sad news that poet Liam Rector committed suicide yesterday.  Although he had suffered a number of health problems over the past decade, this is quite a shock to all those in orbit around him.

In memory, here's a piece by him, admired by me for its judo:

The Worry of the Far Right

The Reverend Donald Wildmon, executive director

Of the American Family Association in Tupelo,

Mississippi, birthplace of Elvis Presley, he who

 

Unleashed the libido of a generation, announced today

That he, the Reverend, wanted again an America

In which he could drive his convertible into town,

 

Park it, leave his keys in the ignition,

And worry only that it might rain,

Rather than worry about Liam Rector.

Original self-effacement aside,  I think it's a tribute that, despite outliving Liam, the Reverend Wildmon will *always* have to worry about him.  Let's not let him down.

Lookee There

Not too long ago, all folks in my birth state could say when folks made fun of us for being the dumbasses of the country was "Thank God for Mississippi."  Well, things are looking up.  Now we can say "Thank God for Mississippi, Florida, Louisiana, New Mexico, South Carolina and Washington, D.C."

Guess What?!?

Would you believe that On the Road is turning 50?  Well, according to the New York Times and its completely mailed-in article about the anniversary of the book's publication, 'tis true.  By my count, there's at least one factual error in the article and if you can spot it, leave a comment and I'll reward you with a book from the TBR..  Not all's a loss, however.  At least they managed to get a quote from Ferlinghetti:

At City Lights Books, the San Francisco literary landmark (it sells 1,000 copies of “On the Road” every year), Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the Beat poet and publisher and co-founder of the store, mused on the continuing success of the book.

Mr. Ferlinghetti, 88, contrasted Kerouac’s work with Thomas Wolfe’s “Look Homeward, Angel,” which he said was “the kind of book that you read when you are 18 and it’s just wonderful but if you read it when you are 35 or 50 you are embarrassed by its over-romantic tone and its flowery exuberance.” But having read “On the Road” when it first came out and he was in his 30s, and just last month, Mr. Ferlinghetti said, “It is really still ‘with it,’ you might say.”

Update:  Levi's right (see comment section).  Alma mater ain't what I thought it was.  Nevertheless, Kerouac didn't graduate from Columbia.  Was, in fact, booted from the school. 

Nightmare

It may not be the sole reason, but seeing a Tom Waits song used on one of those "You Think You Dance Better Than You Pick Your Nose" reality show has me reconsidering my decision to be a part of this society.  I'm thinking of growing my sideburns long, tearing holes in all of my already holy t-shirts, and writing angry letters on the back of matchboxes to the media conglomerates responsible for this latest decline.  Actually, I just want to cry but I don't have any tears left:

{via}

Perils of Southern Living

Raleigh or Yuma? This follows two straight days at or near 100, including yesterday's 102. It doesn't show you the Heat Index, which hit 115 yesterday. At 9:00 last night, it was still 94 degrees.

Barroid

I've been trying to figure out the best way to express the unmitigated disgust I've felt since waking up this morning to find out that the walking, talking arse ***** ***** cheated his way to the home run record that rightfully belongs to Hammerin' Hank, but I think I'll leave it to one of the class guys to ever play the game to say it for me:

"Barry's a great player, there's no question about it, but he put an asterisk by his name on his own," [Dale] Murphy said Monday on AM radio 1280 The Show. "He's deserved all the negative publicity that he's getting. I mean, people are calling up and complaining, I've heard the last few weeks, that that he's being treated unfairly. You know, life just usually isn't like that. You don't usually get treated unfairly. You usually get what you deserve. This is what Barry deserves. He's a hard guy to like. He's a hard teammate to have and, you know, he's set a terrible example for our kids."

"Even in a court of law you can have ... a preponderance of circumstantial evidence to convict somebody," Murphy said. "Now, maybe I'm wrong, but when you get enough stuff on a guy, you can make a decision and it's just really a no-brainer. The guy would have become one of the great ones, anyway. ... But now, he sucked the fun and the life right out of it. I mean, there is enough evidence to me to say without a doubt he used performance-enhancing drugs. He hit 73 home runs when he was 37. I mean, Hank would have hit 855 if he had the same advantage."

{via}

Always Forever Amen

Make sure to get yourself over to the Litblog Co-op this week and in the weeks to come for discussions on this quarter's books.  The current roundtables and cross-posts on Always have been stellar.

Flying to My Bookshelf

I'm with Callie, this news from Richard Nash is enough to make a grown man and/or woman cry:

Flying to America
45 More Stories

A new collection of stories from one of our most important and original writers

Donald Barthelme was one of the most influential and inventive writers of the twentieth century. Through his unique, richly textured, and brilliantly realized novels, stories, parodies, satires, fables, and essays, Barthelme redefined a generation of American letters. To John Hawkes, he was “one of our greatest of all comic writers.” Robert Coover called him “one of our great citizens of contemporary world letters.” And to Thomas Pynchon, who coined the term Barthelismo, his work conveyed something of “the clarity and sweep, the intensity of emotion, the transcendent weirdness of the primary experience.”

This collection presents all of Barthelme's previously unpublished and uncollected short fiction, as well as work not published in his two compendium editions, Sixty Stories and Forty Stories. Highlights of Flying to America include three unpublished stories, “Among the Beanwoods,” “Heather,” and “Pandemonium”; fourteen stories never before available in book form-from his first published story, “Pages from the Annual Report” (1959), to his last, “Tickets” (1989); and the long out-of-print Sam's Bar, with illustrations by Seymour Chwast. With Flying to America, fans and new readers alike have the huge pleasure of a new collection from one of America's great literary masters.

Six Degrees of William Burroughs

By now, I'm sure you've heard that Charles Simic (or as Fox News calls him, Immigrant Simic) has been named the the 15th poet laureate of the United States, but did you know that if it weren't for William S. Burroughs (and a little stretching of both reality and the imagination) Simic may have never reached such a lofty position:

[The] Winter 1959 issue of the Chicago Review [the issue in which Simic's first published poems appeared] was the second Winter 1959 issue that had been prepared for publication. The first was suppressed by the University of Chicago in a censorship scandal; when the contents of that issue eventually saw the light of day, they did so only under a new title.

The story starts in 1958. CR had been gathering steam under the stewardship of editor Irving Rosenthal and poetry editor Paul Carroll; they had published an important issue on San Francisco poets with a preface by Jack Kerouac, and their Summer 1958 Zen issue collected favorable notices from The Nation and Time. (Not all were pleased: CR’s faculty advisor, the novelist Richard Stern, told Rosenthal not to “turn [Chicago Review] into a magazine for San Francisco rejects,” and said of the Beat work they’d published: “This is as if garbage had garbage.”)

The suppressed issue was assembled by Rosenthal and Carroll and was supposed to include “Old Angel Midnight” by Jack Kerouac, “The Sorrows of Priapus” and “The Garment of Ra” by Edward Dahlberg, and three poems by Gregory Corso. Most significantly, it was also to include “Ten Episodes from Naked Lunch” by William S. Burroughs.

As you might have guessed, the editors caved to internal and external political pressures and pulled the original issue, putting in its place the second Winter 1959 issue containing poems by a then unpublished Charles Simic.  It's a fascinating story and one that you can read more about at digital emuction.

reGrid

You would think that after being away for nearly three weeks I would return to blogging with a long post or two full of insight and declaring that I'm happy to be back and that from here on out this blog will be this or that and that you will do yourself the greatest favor by making this the first and last stop on your daily blog-reading trail.  Three weeks ago I hoped that a break from blogging would do me some good.  To be honest, however, I spent the three weeks going from elated at being freed of the daily routine to stressing over not having the routine, from overjoyed at being away to missing it like crazy, all the while trying to convince myself that continuing Syntax of Things is a good idea, and although I can't think of many good reasons to continue, neither can I find equally compelling ones to stop.  So for now, I'm going to operate in a minimalistic mode, still trying to fight away post-surgery, father to a one-year-old, just general getting older fatigue and the fact that it's summer in the South and the boiling, over-saturated, lung searing air tends to get to me what with my self-diagnosed seasonal affective disorder.  Give me rain and cold.  Maybe fall's colors and that first breezy day of autumn will help inspire. 

So bear with me as I underwhelm you with little more than nothing until I (or you) figure out whether or not this is even worth it.

Wednesday Night at Tompkins Square Park: Ed Park, Lynne Tillman & Lore Segal for 100 issues of BOMB Magazine

Thanks to Jeff for letting me back to tell you about a really special event I went to last night.  And thanks to Ed Champion for telling people not to pick on me -- though, really, that was all a joke, as everyone has been extremely kind.

So it was another Wednesday evening, another park: this time, Tompkins Square Park in the East Village.  (These ParkLit events by the way have been sponsored by Open City, so thanks to Thomas Beller and company.)  But no "literary death match" this Wednesday; instead, it was a celebration of a magazine I called "venerable" in a post a few days ago: BOMB, which has just published its 100th issue.  And it featured readings by eminent or soon-to-be-eminent fiction writers of three different generations, befitting BOMB's role in the literary history of New York City.  If BOMB were a building, the Landmarks Commission would make sure it would be standing forever (unless Donald Trump wanted to build on it).

BOMB first appeared in 1981, and while it's very much associated with the period of Lower East Side/East Village ascendancy in its early years -- best documented in Brandon Stosuy's excellent literary history Up Is Up But So Is Down: New York's Downtown Literary Scene, 1974-1992 -- the magazine has remained indispensible as it continues to fulfill its mission of "facilitating conversations between artists of all stripes" and paying close and serious attention to new developments in art and writing, regardless of their commercial appeal.

With the East Village undergoing what appears to be a similar process of gentrification that previously undid Soho (see Richard Kostelanetz's Soho: Rise and Fall of an Artists' Colony), one of the few advantages is that Tompkins Square Park, in the 1980s filled with homeless people and lots of drug addicts (although the spectacle of seeing them gather by the monument to Temperance was pretty funny), is a much more pleasant place to hang out today than it was in the old days, when I avoided it. 

The park is filled with people bicycling, strolling, watching their pets at the famous dog run (supposedly one of the best in the world), doing tai chi, hanging out.  It's about 87 degrees and humid at 6:30 p.m., the scheduled start for the event.  About forty white plastic chairs are set out in front of a microphone and a banner for Park Lit, just in front of one of the park's amazing American elm trees (a rare collection now that Dutch elm disease has decimated most of them in the U.S.).

There's a crowd of about 35 as BOMB's Paul Morris gets the festivities underway, but another 25 or so will join the group as the reading goes on.  Paul says it's an appropriate setting for the 100th issue celebration, since the East Village is where the magazine began (it's now headquartered in Fort Greene, Brooklyn).

Nicole Steinberg, whose poetry I enjoyed last Friday evening, joins Paul for the first of a series of re-enactments of the interviews for which BOMB is famous. From its plastic container, they take out a 1978 issue and Paul, as interviewer Craig Golson, questions Nicole, as playwright Christopher Durang (a favorite of mine; I was in the first-night audience at The Marriage of Bette and Boo at the Public Theatre; it contains the classic line: "I don't think God punishes people for specific things; I think He punishes them in general for no reason") about who Chris hates and whether he considers himself whimsical ("I change from day to day.")

Then Paul introduces the first reader, the young dynamo -- founding editor of The Believer, former editor of the Village Voice Literary Supplement, the Los Angeles Times Book Review's science fiction columnist and presidential adviser Ed Park, whose first novel Personal Days will be published next year by Random House.  He's in the 100th issue, copies of which are being given away free this evening.

I've heard some truly great readings from novels which at the time hadn't been published -- at Bread Loaf thirty years ago John Irving's The World According to Garp and Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon -- and I can't say if Personal Days will be a classic like those books but I haven't heard one I liked as much as I did Ed's book. 

The little episodes --featuring a group of office workers who come to each other cubicles to speculate about co-workers' crushes, give unwanted back rubs, help with unwanted double lines popping up in MS Word documents (if it's your resume, you can't ask the IT people for help, can you?), Googling themselves and ex-lovers ("Every time you feel a tingle in your fingers, someone somewhere is Googling you") -- are insightful, hilarious and authentic.  As one character notes, we spend a lot more time with our co-workers than we do with our friends or even with our significant others.

I anticipate reading the novel with pleasure.  Its deadpan rhythms and knowing vignettes (you never want to be called into the boss's office to be told you're doing a fantastic job because it's sure to mean a layoff is imminent) remind me of a favorite novel of the 1970s, Renata Adler's Speedboat.  As it would for the rest of the evening, the repeated bites on my legs of one or perhaps a series of flying insects didn't deflect my attention, though at the moment I am awaiting early signs of West Nile disease.