Monday, December 31, 2018

the last book I ever read (Early Work: A Novel by Andrew Martin, excerpt five)

from Early Work: A Novel by Andrew Martin:

Him him told her that a short story she’d written was “a really nice first effort” and that she should come back to it once she’d read some of the books he thought she’d find useful. (She had not, at this point, made it very far in Mason & Dixon.) She got drunk for courage and emailed the story anyway to a friend who worked at an important magazine, asking him only to tell her she wasn’t crazy for thinking it wasn’t bad. In response, she got a note from the fiction editor a week later, saying that the story was “brilliantly conceived, if not entirely emotionally coherent,” and that while they couldn’t take it, they’d be interested to see more work in the future. It shook her so deeply that she didn’t write a word of fiction for over a year. She didn’t tell Todd about any of it.



Sunday, December 30, 2018

the last book I ever read (Early Work: A Novel by Andrew Martin, excerpt four)

from Early Work: A Novel by Andrew Martin:

In the morning, after Julia got up and went to work, I moved as quietly as I could from the bedroom to the kitchen to make coffee. But when I glanced around the corner, I saw that Leslie was awake, lying across the length of the couch with a book held over her face and a sheet covering her body. I watched her read for a minute, her eyes a model of concentration and tranquility, her mouth twitching downward in a slight frown. I recognized the book, a hardcover anniversary reissue of Blood Meridian that I’d poached from my old job.

“Have you read that?” I said finally.

She didn’t startle, simply turned her head slightly to acknowledge me while keeping the book aloft above her head.



Saturday, December 29, 2018

the last book I ever read (Early Work: A Novel by Andrew Martin, excerpt three)

from Early Work: A Novel by Andrew Martin:

It probably wasn’t a great idea for me to be driving, legally speaking, but I felt good, floating but focused, directing the car’s movement rather than steering. And I loved the blunted calm radiating from Leslie, the coiled potential. I was bringing her back with me. It didn’t matter that nothing could happen between us; it was better that way. She would be in our little house, sleeping under the same roof, and she wouldn’t leave until the morning. On the less positive side, she’d see what a shithole our house was. Which, I realized abruptly, was the thing that would upset Julia about Leslie coming over, rather than anything about her particular. It was 11:30; I could do a quick straightening before she got home. But the fundamental bombed-out quality—the mountains of dog hair, the grime on the windowsills, the creeping mold on the coffee table—was unalterable. I would have been very surprised if Leslie gave a shit about the cleanliness of the house, but Julia would say that wasn’t the point. She cared about how it would look, about what it would say about us, our carelessness as humans. And she was right.



Friday, December 28, 2018

the last book I ever read (Early Work: A Novel by Andrew Martin, excerpt two)

from Early Work: A Novel by Andrew Martin:

Julia came to visit plenty, of course, but it felt forced, us trying to find things to like about New Haven. There was some okay pizza, and we saw the Hold Steady at Toad’s Place. We got mugged. My apartment was huge, filthy, and barely furnished. My mother insisted on helping me buy an expensive bed that proved extremely difficult to get up the stairs and through the door.

In March, Julia was accepted at three medical schools—Pittsburgh, Penn State, and the University of Virginia. Penn State was out—the medical campus was in Hershey, and Julia hated chocolate. We’d heard good things about Pittsburgh but couldn’t find them in action when we visited. The dive bar we’d been recommended was empty. The Vietnamese restaurant was terrible. We’d thought it would be kind of like Philadelphia, but instead it was kind of like Cincinnati. She chose Virginia.



Thursday, December 27, 2018

the last book I ever read (Early Work: A Novel by Andrew Martin, excerpt one)

from Early Work: A Novel by Andrew Martin:

Anna, at the stove, turned to say something to her and caught my eye through the window. Her momentary alarm—this was during my Allman Brothers phase—quickly turned to enthusiasm, feigned or otherwise, at my arrival. I held up my bottle of wine and baguette, raised my eyebrows, and mouthed “Door?” She circled her finger in the air like E. T.: go around, or back home, whichever. So I continued along the path, drawing a tight shadow of a smile from the woman at the cutting board, and eventually arrived at a grand door ornamented with a huge metal knocker. A long moment later Anna appeared with an orotund “Oh, hello,” and I was in.

Anna was magnificently curly headed and just shy of troublingly thin, with a squished cherubic face that seemed to promise PG-13 secrets. She’d grown up in the area and had recently moved back for somewhat mysterious reasons, possibly involving a now ex-boyfriend’s arrest for dealing prescription drugs. She radiated the kind of positivity that suggested barely repressed rage.



Monday, December 24, 2018

the last book I ever read (Rebecca Makkai's The Great Believers, excerpt thirteen)

from National Book Award Finalist The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai:

She expected the film to end right there, but instead, as the laughter died down, the camera lingered uncomfortably on a man collecting his long black hair into a ponytail. On a mother walking by through the last gawkers, pulling her young son by the hand. On Yale and Charlie walking off down the sidewalk, so clearly a couple--inches from each other, but not touching. Around them, a silence as big as the city.

Then the whole film looped again. There they all stood, the Bistro whole. Boys with hands in pockets, waiting for everything to begin.



Sunday, December 23, 2018

the last book I ever read (Rebecca Makkai's The Great Believers, excerpt twelve)

from National Book Award Finalist The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai:

Owning a house. Painting the door, so he could tell his friends to look for the purple door.



Saturday, December 22, 2018

the last book I ever read (Rebecca Makkai's The Great Believers, excerpt eleven)

from National Book Award Finalist The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai:

“Some friends of Modi’s wanted to make a death mask. One was Kisling, the painter, who’d become a friend of Ranko’s in the war. And Lipchitz the sculptor. They had no idea what they were doing. The third was an astrologer. And they invited Ranko to watch. I was jealous, because I’d wanted to say goodbye to Modi, and Ranko, who’d hated him, got to go instead. The trouble was, Lipchitz used the wrong plaster, something too abrasive, so when they took it off”—she glanced at each of them—“it peeled off his cheek, and his eyelids. The men panicked and dropped the cast right on the floor. In the end, they pieced it back together, and Lipchitz ended up essentially carving the face. It’s in the museum at Harvard now, and I’ve no desire to see it.”

Fiona seemed fine but Roman looked pale. The imagination that had been allowing him to picture Ranko so vividly was probably not his friend right now. Yale felt woozy himself.

“It drove Ranko over the edge,” Nora said. “He’d already been a wreck, but I think seeing someone—someone of a great talent, no less—turn into a skeleton before his eyes . . . Well, he managed to tell me the story, but it was about the last thing he ever said to me. I’m sure he’d seen worse in the war, but this was different.



Friday, December 21, 2018

the last book I ever read (Rebecca Makkai's The Great Believers, excerpt ten)

from National Book Award Finalist The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai:

“No, Yale, really, why did I pack this? I’m never flossing again.”

“Sure you are.”

“I’m telling you that I have decided not to. Like, right now. I’ve hated it my whole life, and what’s gonna happen to my gums in the next six months?”

“You’ve got much longer than that.”

“You think any dentist is even treating me again? I’ve got no dentist to yell at me! I’m never going in for another cleaning! I could eat s’mores for dinner every night and not brush my teeth.” He dropped the dental floss on Yale’s lap and grabbed his shoulders. “Ten-year-old me would love this.” And then he collapsed in frantic laughter that Yale couldn’t manage to join.



Thursday, December 20, 2018

the last book I ever read (Rebecca Makkai's The Great Believers, excerpt nine)

from National Book Award Finalist The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai:

Yale kept wishing Julian would leave the apartment, but Julian didn’t want to risk being seen. He wanted to hide here till Sunday, when his flight would leave for Puerto Rico. He had a high school friend out there to stay with—and after that he wasn’t sure, except that it would be somewhere warm. “Maybe Jamaica,’ he said, and Yale said, “Julian, they kill people like us in Jamaica.” And Julian, disturbingly, had shrugged.

Julian spent most of his time locked in the master bedroom, or else working out in the Marina City gym in exercise clothes he’d dug out of Allen Sharp’s dresser. As far as Yale could tell, he was staying clean—but then he didn’t know what went on during the day. At 6:30 each evening, Julian would appear in the living room to turn on Wheel of Fortune, which Yale wojndered if he even enjoyed; he never made any effort to guess the answer. When the winner went shopping in the little showcase after each round, Julian would wonder aloud if the person would choose the Dalmatian statue. That was the extent of his engagement.



Wednesday, December 19, 2018

the last book I ever read (Rebecca Makkai's The Great Believers, excerpt eight)

from National Book Award Finalist The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai:

As the group tunred toward the door, Yale saw another guy—no one he recognized, at least not from this distance—whisper something into Charlie’s ear, then turn back and look straight at Yale. But Charlie never turned.

Yale’s feet stuck to the ground quite a while. The emotions he’d have felt if this had happened yesterday were mitigated by the fact that he wasn’t infected. It hit him now that he’d outlive Charlie, that he’d be the one looking back on this in fifty years, telling Charlie’s story to someone just as Nora had told Ranko’s to him. With less longing, granted. He couldn’t imagine he’d see this as the great lost romance of his life. He wanted to be invisible so he could follow Charlie into the bar, see if he was drowning himself in beer. Instead he walked home, straight into the wind, and by the time he got there his skin was numb.



Tuesday, December 18, 2018

the last book I ever read (Rebecca Makkai's The Great Believers, excerpt seven)

from National Book Award Finalist The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai:

Arnaud said, “Ah, okay, hello! Yes! Your phone was dead all day! But I have double good news. She’s ready to meet with you.”

“She’s—what? Who, Claire?”

“Ha. I’m good, right? Fast. She’s here in the city. Well, she lives in Saint-Denis, not a very nice suburb. But she works at a bar-tabac in the eighteenth.”

Fiona found herself leaning against the wall.



Monday, December 17, 2018

the last book I ever read (Rebecca Makkai's The Great Believers, excerpt six)

from National Book Award Finalist The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai:

The next day, Saturday, Yale went to the movies. He saw Spies Like Us and Out of Africa, but they weren’t as distracting as he’d hoped. He was more absorbed with the people around him, the couples and teenagers and solo film buffs having perfectly normal days himself. It seemed such an alien concept now, to have a normal day. To walk around oblivious, just participating in the world. It seemed unreasonable for anyone to be allowed a normal day.



Sunday, December 16, 2018

the last book I ever read (Rebecca Makkai's The Great Believers, excerpt five)

from National Book Award Finalist The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai:

Yale nearly forgot to go into work the next day. He’d somehow believed that it was Saturday, that after he went to the grocery store and the GNC for Terrence, after he packed up and tiptoed out of the apartment, all he had on his agenda was finding a place to stay tonight, maybe buying a clean shirt. But at ten o’clock, walking down Halsted with a headache, he saw a guy in a necktie and realized it was Friday.



Saturday, December 15, 2018

the last book I ever read (Rebecca Makkai's The Great Believers, excerpt four)

from National Book Award Finalist The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai:

He nodded, pulled a slim laptop from the bag at his feet and, in one fluid motion, opened it and clicked to start the video. That a French café would have Wi-Fi seemed wrong. In her mind, Paris was always 1920. It was always Aunt Nora’s Paris, all tragic love and tubercular artists.



Friday, December 14, 2018

the last book I ever read (Rebecca Makkai's The Great Believers, excerpt three)

from National Book Award Finalist The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai:

Yale was able to nod honestly. He did know a lot more about art than the average money guy, a huge asset. He had a joke now, a practiced line, about how he could have told his dad either that he was gay or that he was majoring in art, and he’d picked gay because it seemed like less trouble. In reality, during the whole ride home for sophomore winter break, Yale had silently rehearsed the news that he was switching from finance to art history—and then that night, his boyfriend had called and mistaken Yale’s father’s voice for Yale’s (“I miss you, baby,” he’s said, and Yale’s father had said, “How’s that? and Marc, as was his wont, had elaborated), and so the rest of vacation had been devoted to that bombshell, to their mutual avoidance, their silent eating of leftover spaghetti. Yale had planned to tell his father about the professor he could do an independent study with next fall—about how he wasn’t in love the same way with finance, about how with this degree, he could teach or write books or restore paintings or even work at an auction house. He’d planned to explain that it was Caravaggio’s Saint Jerome that had sent vibrations down his arms, made the rest of the world fall away—Caravaggio’s light, oddly, and not his famous shadows. But Marc’s call ruined it; Yale would have been too humiliated to say that all now. Not just gay, but a gay art major. He went back to school in January and lied to his adviser, told her he’d had a change of heart. But between finance classes, he audited course after course, sitting in the backs of lecture halls illuminated only by slides of Manet or Goya or Joaquin Sorolla.



Thursday, December 13, 2018

the last book I ever read (Rebecca Makkai's The Great Believers, excerpt two)

from National Book Award Finalist The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai:

He walked through every room on the ground floor, opening every door—pantry, coat closet, vacuum closet—until he was greeted with a wall of cold air and descending cement steps. He found the light switch and made his way down. Laundry machines, boxes, two rusty bikes.

He climbed back up and then all the way to the third floor—a study, a little weight room, some storage—and then down to the second again and opened everything. Ornate mahogany bureaus, canopy beds. A master bedroom, all white and green. If this had been the wife’s work, it wasn’t so bad. A Diane Arbus print on the wall, the one of the boy with the hand grenade.



Wednesday, December 12, 2018

the last book I ever read (Rebecca Makkai's The Great Believers, excerpt one)

from National Book Award Finalist The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai:

Fiona had wanted to trick her parents, to exchange Nico’s ashes with fireplace ones and give the real ones to Terrence. It was hard to tell if she was serious. But Terrence wasn’t getting any ashes, and he wasn’t getting anything else either, besides Nico’s cat, which he’d taken when Nico first went into the hospital. The family had made it clear that when they began dismantling Nico’s apartment tomorrow, Terrence would be excluded. Nico had left no will. His illness had been sudden, immediately debilitating—first a few days of what had seemed like just shingles, but then, a month later, moon-high fevers and dementia.



Tuesday, December 11, 2018

the last book I ever read (Domenico Starnone's Trick, excerpt seven)

from Trick by Domenico Starnone (Translated from the Italian by Jhumpa Lahiri):

The child studied me attentively.

--Are you sick?

--A little, I’m old. The cold and the rain can make me sick.

--And die?

--Yes.

--When will you die?

--Soon.

--My dad says when mean people die you don’t have to be sorry.

--I’m not mean, I’m distracted.

--Even though you’re distracted I’ll cry when you die.

--No, your dad said you don’t need to feel sorry.

--I’ll still cry.



Monday, December 10, 2018

the last book I ever read (Domenico Starnone's Trick, excerpt six)

from Trick by Domenico Starnone (Translated from the Italian by Jhumpa Lahiri):

I closed my eyes, I opened them again. The lard was still there, thick with tiny living faces, overwhelming me with nausea. Aghast, I tried to get rid of the hallucination with other images, but I only managed to replace it with one that seemed immediately more threatening. I saw the main door that Mario would have to run to if one of the tenants from the first floor were to ring the bell. The vision was hyperrealistic, I pictured the brown sections of the door, the dark iron of the armor plating, the handle, the knob of the bolt. And I realized that even if the whole family had come: father, mother, Attilio, his brothers; even if they rang the bell with furious persistence; even if I were able to communicate with Mario and send him to the door, the child would never be capable of opening it, because I myself had closed up from the inside, to keep him from going back down to his friend’s place. Mario could only reach the brass knob of the bolt by climbing a ladder. But he’d never be able to carry it out of the closet, open it, set it down properly. And even if he were able to, what good would it do? The child’s hands wouldn’t be strong enough to make the two turns of the knob necessary to open up.

An endless moment passed. I’m worn out, I thought, I’m cold, it’s about to rain, I don’t want to die on the little balcony that I hate, it’s time to break something. And since I could think of no reason not to, I shifted the bucket to my right hand and struck the glass with whatever strength I had left. I expected the door to be reduced to a thousand shards, I tried to keep my distance so I wouldn’t get hurt. But the bucket sounded like a rubber ball against an obstacle and bounced back without damaging anything. I lost my wits and started to strike doggedly, one strike after the next, accompanied by shouts that seemed to rend my throat. Since this had no effect on the glass, I stopped, worn out completely. My wrist hurt and I rubbed it. Nonetheless I was about to proceed to kicks, but I remembered just in time that I was wearing slippers. I would have broken my bones while doing no damage to the glass door. I gave up.



Sunday, December 9, 2018

the last book I ever read (Domenico Starnone's Trick, excerpt five)

from Trick by Domenico Starnone (Translated from the Italian by Jhumpa Lahiri):

What stupid lack of foresight, I only cared about the inessential. I was still crouched against the glass, I was afraid even to stand. I was like those people who hate flying and spend the whole time never going to the bathroom, never even crossing their legs, terrified that if they simply leave their spot the plane will tilt, wobble, flip over, and plummet to a crash. On the other hand I had to come up with something, shout, seek—let’s see—to attract the attention of neighbors, of passersby. But how? I was on the sixth floor, peripheral to all that was happening on the street, overwhelmed by the noise. Never mind the fact that, if no one noticed the screaming voices from the cartoons, who would register my own cries, choked by the cold? I sighed, I was cooking up excuses and I knew it. What really prevented me from waving my arms and calling out for help was shame. I’d wanted to be more than the place I’d grown up in, I’d sought out the world’s approval. And now that I was at the end of my life and taking stock of it, I couldn’t bear looking like a hysterical little man who screamed for help from the balcony of the old house in which he’d been a young boy, the one he’d fled from, full of ambition. I was ashamed of being locked outside, I was ashamed that I hadn’t known how to avoid it, I was ashamed that I hadn’t known how to avoid it, I was ashamed to find myself lacking the controlled haughtiness that had always prevented me from asking anyone for help, I was ashamed of being an old man imprisoned by a child.



Saturday, December 8, 2018

the last book I ever read (Domenico Starnone's Trick, excerpt four)

from Trick by Domenico Starnone (Translated from the Italian by Jhumpa Lahiri):

I was sleepy, without even the slightest energy to work. I made sure I was the only possible ghost wandering through the house, that there were no thieves motivated by poverty, or murderous thugs from the camorra. I shut off the gas, I secured the dead bolt, two turns. I have to keep it shut all day tomorrow, I told myself, the knob is high up and even if he got up on a chair, Mario, a miniature homo faber, could reach it with his hands, open up, and go off to his pretend friend on the first floor. I backtracked, turning off one light after another behind me. As I finally got into bed, careful not to trip over any toys, I thought I could relax. All the ghosts were in the old house of my adolescence. That house—now as I was drifting off I realized it—formed a big frame around the one Mario and I were in. I saw then and I would draw them, soon, but from a space where I felt safe.



Friday, December 7, 2018

the last book I ever read (Domenico Starnone's Trick, excerpt three)

from Trick by Domenico Starnone (Translated from the Italian by Jhumpa Lahiri):

I was forced into playing both ladder and horse. The first made me yawn, constantly. It consisted of pulling the stepladder out of the closet, opening it and making sure it was sturdy, climbing to the top, and then climbing down again. At first he proceeded rung by rung and I held him from behind so that he wouldn’t fall, something that drove him crazy since, in his opinion, there was no reason for me to spot him. Then, by means of cautious but continuous protests, he convinced me to let him climb while I stayed at the bottom of the ladder and held him by the arm. In the end he rebelled outright:

--I know how to climb by myself, don’t hold me.

--And if you fall?

--I won’t.

--But if you do, I’ll leave you to cry on the floor.

--Okay.

--And let this be clear: You climb three times, that’s it.

--No, thirty.

--How much is thirty, in your opinion?

--A lot.



Thursday, December 6, 2018

the last book I ever read (Domenico Starnone's Trick, excerpt two)

from Trick by Domenico Starnone (Translated from the Italian by Jhumpa Lahiri):

Mario must have thought that the time for high jinks had now begun. Actually I’d simply meant to throw him a bone and then get back to work. We ate Sally’s food, which was delicious, and already, as we ate, I tried to capture one of the images that had come to me. I brought a morsel to my mouth with one hand and I quickly sketched small dense figures with the other, though I had to admit they weren’t turning out very well. The child’s fault: He never quit, he suggested, endlessly, that we play games after lunch that were, according to him, incredibly entertaining. In the end I gave in. Let’s cleam up and then we’ll do something fun, but just for a while, you know that Grandpa’s busy.



Wednesday, December 5, 2018

the last book I ever read (Domenico Starnone's Trick, excerpt one)

from Trick by Domenico Starnone (Translated from the Italian by Jhumpa Lahiri):

That evening it finally clicked that the conference in Cagliari was, above all, a prime opportunity for Betta and Saverio to evade the eyes and ears of their child and fight hard. If, in the course of the afternoon, they only rarely spoke to each other, with perfunctory sentences, at dinner they didn’t even bother with those. Instead they talked to Mario and to me, so that the boy would know all my exploits and I’d know his. They both carried on in childish voices and almost always started the conversation with you know that Grandpa or show Grandpa how you. As a result, Mario had to learn that I’d won many prizes, that I was more famous than Picasso, that important people displayed my work in their homes; and I had to learn that Mario knew how to answer the phone politely, write his name, use the remote control, cut his meat with a real knife, and eat what was on his plate without throwing a tantrum.

It was an interminable evening. The whole while the child never took his eyes off me, as if fearing I would disappear, he wanted to memorize me. When I showed him some dumb old tricks that I’d used to entertain Betta when she was little—like pretending that my thumb, clenched between two fingers, was a piece of his nose that I’d snatched away—he hinted at half indulgent little smiles, half amused, striking the air with his hand as if to punish me for such foolishness. When it was time to go to bed, he tried to say: I’ll go when Grandpa goes. But both parents stepped in, almost in unison, both suddenly strict. His mother exclaimed: You go to bed with Mommy tells you to go to bed, and his father said: It’s time to sleep, indicating the clock on the wall as if his son already knew how to tell time. Mario put up a little resistance then, but all he managed was to make sure I watched how he got undressed without help, and how, still without help, he put on his pajamas, and how he squeezed the toothpaste neatly onto his toothbrush, and how he knew how to brush his teeth, ceaselessly.



Tuesday, December 4, 2018

the last book I ever read (Phone Booth (Object Lessons), excerpt nine)

from Phone Booth (Object Lessons) by Ariana Kelly:

Outside of the church, various species of confession occur in therapy, autobiography, and in conversation, but it remains, in the words of Foucault, “a ritual that unfolds within a power relationship, for one does not confess without the presence (or virtual presence) of a partner who is not simply the interlocutor but the authority who requires the confession, prescribes and appreciates it, and intervenes in order to judge, punish, forgive, console, and reconcile. . . . For me, confession of a kind occurred in a dirty phone booth in New Haven, a city I had not found to be a haven at all. The phone booth preserved the anonymity of my disclosures, even when I was speaking to the people who knew me best. The invisibility, however nominal, is what made the admissions possible. The space simultaneously consecrated the exchange and maintained my distance from everything that had driven me to it: opportunities lost, failures sustained—the accumulation of the person I had somehow come to be.



Monday, December 3, 2018

the last book I ever read (Phone Booth (Object Lessons), excerpt eight)

from Phone Booth (Object Lessons) by Ariana Kelly:

In July of 1999, the Holy Spirit directed Rick Carr, a fifty-one-year-old Texan, to travel a few hundred miles from his home to answer the calls made to a phone booth in the middle of this desert. Located near the California-Nevada border at the intersection of two dirt roads, seventy-five miles southwest of Vegas, the phone booth shared property with desert tortoises, saguaro cactii, and sagebrush. It is a landscape of asceticism and religious vision, at whose edges the American military hovers—there are seventeen United States military sites scattered throughout the Mojave, one of which is the largest Marine Corps bases in the world.

Carr did not take this decree lightly: he camped beside the booth on the desert plays in scorching heat for thirty-two days. During that time he answered over five hundred calls, many of which came from someone named Sergeant Zeno, who said he was phoning from the Pentagon. What was there, in the middle of the Mojave, was a ghost of what had been there: a phone booth positioned along phone lines stretching from central Washington to Southern California that had been installed during the Second World War and would, the government and telephone companies believed, be immune to a potential attack from the Japanese.The phone booth was installed at the civilian request of Emerson Ray, on behalf of the local volcanic cinder miners who would be well served by having access to a public phone. Initially a hand-cranked magneto, it eventually became a coin-operated pay phone, first equipped with a rotary dial, then a touchstone.



Sunday, December 2, 2018

the last book I ever read (Phone Booth (Object Lessons), excerpt seven)

from Phone Booth (Object Lessons) by Ariana Kelly:

The ghost of this relationship remains in how pay phones often still work in situations when cell phones go dead. On the morning of September 11, for example, most of New York City was a cellular dead zone, but landlines still worked. Ironically, after September 11, pay phones with booths were often targeted for removal—as in the bank of sixteen phone booths in the Western Union Building at 60 Hudson Street. A “nerve center for several telecom companies,” the building became a potential terrorist threat, and while the phone booths had once offered valuable privacy and insulation, they now offered, in the public imagination at least, a perfect place for a terrorist to hide a bomb. A security guard needed to be dispatched every time someone needed to make a telephone call, which quickly resulted in the phones becoming off-limits for public use.



Saturday, December 1, 2018

the last book I ever read (Phone Booth (Object Lessons), excerpt six)

from Phone Booth (Object Lessons) by Ariana Kelly:

Phone booths are good places for nervous breakdowns. Charade was released in 1963, the same year as Hitchcock’s The Birds. When the deadly birds resume their attack on Bodega Bay, Melanie Daniels, played by Tippi Hedren, leaves the diner from which she had been watching the maelstrom and runs outside to a phone booth. From a viewer’s perspective her decision is inexplicable—there is a working phone in the diner—but Hitchcock’s reason is clear. The scholar David Trotter explicates Hitchcock’s choice quite succinctly when he writes, “What he gets from Melanie’s mistake is an image of isolation and exposure, as she twists and turns in torment in her transparent cubicle, and the glass shatters.” What drives Melanie into the telephone booth, and what cannot get her out, is a more acute threat than the birds.



Friday, November 30, 2018

the last book I ever read (Phone Booth (Object Lessons), excerpt five)

from Phone Booth (Object Lessons) by Ariana Kelly:

When Howard Hughes became a regular at the Beverly Hills Hotel, in 1942, he was in his late thirties and already one of the wealthiest people in the world, famous as a film producer, aviator, and entrepreneur. He was also becoming infamous for the obsessive-compulsive disorder that would intensify and come to dominate his life over the next several decades. The disorder manifested itself in myriad ways, most readily in his distaste for being around other people, exacerbating an already eccentric personality. Toward the end of 1947, after Hughes survived the first of several near-fatal plane crashes, he locked himself in the screening room of a studio near his home for four months, reputedly living off of chocolate and chicken, distracting himself from near-constant physical pain by watching movies. Soon after Hughes emerged, he rented a bungalow in the Beverly Hills Hotel, reserving individual rooms for several associates and girlfriends. He put the hotel staff through their paces, demanding that they place roast beef sandwiches in the crook of a particular tree, hide pineapple upside-down cakes for him throughout the grounds, and, finally, install a phone booth in his suite. The hotel, of course, had personal phones as well as public phone booths, but by that time Hughes felt that most of the world could not be trusted. “They’d switch different booths in and out of different bungalows,” reported producer Richard D. Zanuck to the Los Angeles Times, “because he [Hughes] didn’t want to go through the hotel operator.” Hughes had the requisite power and money to remove himself from the fray as much as he wanted, enjoying both the psychological and physical shelter provided by a literal phone booth.



Thursday, November 29, 2018

the last book I ever read (Phone Booth (Object Lessons), excerpt four)

from Phone Booth (Object Lessons) by Ariana Kelly:

The phone booth suggests a world in which communication is precious, urgent, clandestine, contingent. People talking in phone booths and at phone kiosks often exhibit an angle of repose—what is, in geology, “the maximum slope, measured in degrees from the horizontal, at which loose solid material will remain in place without sliding.” Virtually no one stands up straight; nearly everyone leans, usually against the triangular shelf beneath the telephone, or against the wall of the booth itself. They follow the line of the telephone, which follows the line of the face. It is an angel of nonchalance, absorption, self-importance, seduction; they are on the verge of sliding. David Bowie played with this lean beautifully on the back cover of his album Ziggy Stardust. In the photograph Bowie, as the alien Ziggy in a turquoise jumpsuit, stands in a British telephone box, arm resting on his hip, the other on the telephone, ready to call home from London.



Wednesday, November 28, 2018

the last book I ever read (Phone Booth (Object Lessons), excerpt three)

from Phone Booth (Object Lessons) by Ariana Kelly:

In her 1970 novel Play It As It Lays, Joan Didion’s main character Maria Wyeth senses an atmosphere fraying at its edges when she observes an unnaturally long line to use the pay phone at the grocery store: “The telephone in the apartment was out of order and she had to report it. The line at the pay phones in Ralph’s Market suddenly suggested to Maria a disorganization so general that the norm was to have either a disconnected telephone or some clandestine business to conduct, some extramarital error.” As ubiquitous as elevators, but used much more rarely, public phone are intimately linked with varying degrees of disorder—from the incidental to the truly catastrophic, which is the context that gave rise to their existence in the first place.



Tuesday, November 27, 2018

the last book I ever read (Phone Booth (Object Lessons), excerpt two)

from Phone Booth (Object Lessons) by Ariana Kelly:

Calls made from pay phones and phone booths create their own mode of communication. It’s a mode that revolves around urgent contact, finite contact, emergency contact, ubiquitous contact, democratic contact—the phone booth could provide asylum to anyone, be he ne’er so vile. It’s a mode that wears its heart on its sleeve, so many public phones being etched with the tragedies of their users that their tragedies become shared tragedies. It’s a mode that offers the promise of privacy and the possibility of anonymity. It’s a paranoid mode. It’s a mode, once upon a time, that seemed more our speed. It’s a mode that is in motion and also a pause in motion. As Holden Caulfield wanders through New York City, delaying his arrival home after being kicked out of prep school, he is constantly entering and exiting phone booths, never quite knowing what he wants to say when he gets someone on the line, and often just sitting, as if phone booths are places to simply be, as much as they are places from which to call.



Monday, November 26, 2018

the last book I ever read (Phone Booth (Object Lessons), excerpt one)

from Phone Booth (Object Lessons) by Ariana Kelly:

Standing in a garden in ÅŒtsuchi, a small town in the Iwate prefecture, on the east coast of Japan, there is a nonworking telephone booth that has nevertheless been used by more than ten thousand people since the spring of 2011, when a 9.0 earthquake and massive tsunami killed fifteen thousand people and dislocated hundreds of thousands more. Built by Itaru Sasaki, a sixty-nine-year-old resident of the area, so that people could communicate with loved ones who were killed or missing, the wooden-framed booth—which has plate glass windows and a door that closes—is named “Kaze no Denwa Box,” or Phone Booth of the Winds. Although he installed a rotary dial telephone within the booth, Sasaki never connected the line; instead, there is a small notepad on the shelf beneath the telephone where people can leave messages and trust that the wind will carry the contents to their intended recipients.



Sunday, November 25, 2018

the last book I ever read (Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of the Great Gatsby, excerpt ten)

from Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of the Great Gatsby by Sarah Churchwell:

While Scott consorted with the New York ghosts who haunted him, Zelda concentrated on the present. Alone with his manuscript over the phantom wash of the Mediterranean, Scott did not notice that Zelda and the aviator Edouard Jozan were becoming closer, but everyone else on the Riviera did. Rumor began to quicken and race, as her oblivious husband remained lost in the pages of his novel.

But oblivion, like love, can’t be trusted to last forever. “The Big Crisis” came on July 13, Scott wrote in his ledger. Two weeks after the papers recalled the Hall-Mills case, matters appear to have come to a head over Zelda’s feelings for Jozan. Stories differ, as they always do. Some say that Zelda asked Fitzgerald for a divorce, telling him that she wanted to chase her chance for happiness; others that Scott confronted her and demanded that she end whatever was happening. Gossip has been speculating about what exactly that was ever since. Zelda’s romance with Jozan may have been a serious affair, or as insubstantial as a flirtation and a moonlight kiss. But it is clear that for Scott and Zelda, the affair, whatever its particulars, was deeply damaging; Zelda genuinely cared for Jozan, it seems, and Scott did not forgive easily.



Saturday, November 24, 2018

the last book I ever read (Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of the Great Gatsby, excerpt nine)

from Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of the Great Gatsby by Sarah Churchwell:

The Times reported that on the same Thursday in December President Harding had told the Senate, “When people fail in the national viewpoint and live in the confines of a community of selfishness and narrowness, the sun of this Republic will have passed its meridian, and our larger aspirations will shrivel in the approaching twilight.” It is possibly the only wise statement Harding made during his presidency—until he supposedly confessed just before he died under the pressure of the corruption scandals that engulfed his administration in the summer of 1923, “I am not fit for this office and never should have been here.”



Friday, November 23, 2018

the last book I ever read (Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of the Great Gatsby, excerpt eight)

from Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of the Great Gatsby by Sarah Churchwell:

Four days after Beer stood him up, Van Vechten invited around a poet named Wallace Stevens, who brought the manuscript for Harmonium, his first collection of poems, which Van Vechten had helped persuade Alfred Knopf to publish; it would come out in early 1923 and become one of the defining events of American modernism, including such now-classic poems as “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” and “Anecdote of the Jar.” “I do not know which to prefer,” Stevens famously wrote in Harmonium, “the beauty of inflections or the beauty of innuendoes.”

In life, however, it seemed that Stevens had less difficulty identifying his preferences. After drinking “half a quart of my best bourbon,” Van Vechten reported, “Wallace told me he didn’t like me” and left. So much for the beauty of innuendoes.



Thursday, November 22, 2018

the last book I ever read (Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of the Great Gatsby, excerpt seven)

from Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of the Great Gatsby by Sarah Churchwell:

On the chilly, rainy Monday evening of November 6, most of the writers of the Algonquin Round Table gathered at the premiere of a musical revue they had written with Ring Lardner. The ‘49ers played for a grand total of fifteen performances, until November 18, when it fell flat on its face.



Wednesday, November 21, 2018

the last book I ever read (Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of the Great Gatsby, excerpt six)

from Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of the Great Gatsby by Sarah Churchwell:

On Sunday, November 5, Carl Van Vechten attended a cocktail party that appeared to be hosting “all the kept women & brokers in New York.” One of the other guests was twenty-four-year-old George Gershwin, who entertained the party by playing his hit song from The Scandals of 1922, “I’ll Build A Stairway to Paradise.” It could have been the theme song of Jay Gatsby, who would see a stairway to paradise on the streets of Louisville as he kissed Daisy Fay for the first time. The bandleader Paul Whiteman, who recorded “Stairway to Paradise” in 1922, would commission Gershwin two years later to compose a serious, full-length jazz composition; the result was “Rhapsody in Blue,” which premiered in February 1924, two months before the Fitzgeralds quit New York for the blue Mediterranean.

Gershwin’s invention was inspired, he said, by the daily rhythms and noises of urban life, sounds of modern America being born: “It was on the train, with its steely rhythms, its rattle-ty bang, that is so often so stimulating to a composer—I frequently hear music in the very heart of the noise . . . I heard it as a sort of musical kaleidoscope of America, of our vast melting pot, of our unduplicated national pep, of our metropolitan madness.” Gershwin’s original title for the composition about metropolitan madness was “American Rhapsody,” until his brother Ira suggested that he model himself on the titles of James McNeil Whistler's paintings, such as Nocturne in Black and Gold.



Tuesday, November 20, 2018

the last book I ever read (Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of the Great Gatsby, excerpt five)

from Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of the Great Gatsby by Sarah Churchwell:

The cheating Black Sox, Rosy Rosenthal, and Charles Becker are all transposed directly into the fictional world, where they anchor The Great Gatsby in an actual American history of murderous corruption. He divagated over Gatsby’s various vices, but Fitzgerald always knew that his central character was a gangster: this is a story about cheating. Gatsby admits to Nick that he has been in the drug business and the oil business: by 1925, both enterprises were notoriously corrupt. The oil industry was at the heart of the scandal that would bring President Harding’s administration crashing down in 1923. Gatsby is implicated in the era’s widespread financial swindles as well: eventually Nick learns that he was fencing stolen bonds. In the drafts of Gatsby, Nick reports hearing that Wolfsheim was later “tried (but not convicted) on charges of grand larceny, forgery, bribery, and dealing in stolen bonds.”

Gatsby’s crimes are not merely an array of prohibition-era get-rich-quick schemes, although they are that. They are swindles, frauds, and deceptions, suggesting fakery and dishonesty. Everything about Gatsby is synthetic, including his gin—everything except his fidelity.



Monday, November 19, 2018

the last book I ever read (Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of the Great Gatsby, excerpt four)

from Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of the Great Gatsby by Sarah Churchwell:

Max Gerlach has haunted Fitzgerald scholars for decades, and some years ago a few hired a private detective to run him to ground. A man named Max Gerlach ran a garage in Flushing in the 1930s and attempted suicide by shooting himself in the 1950s. When Gerlach joined the U.S. Army in 1917 he was required to give character references; two of his references were Judge Ariel Levy and George Young Bauchle. Levy was known as a fixer for a gangster named Arnold Rothstein and Bauchle was an attorney and the front man for a floating gambling club run by Rothstein, called the Partridge Club.

Fitzgerald's first biographer, Arthur Mizener, was contacted by a man named Gerlach in the 1950s, who identified himself as “the real Gatsby,” but Mizener declined the invitation to meet. Perhaps he was uninterested in anyone capable of the category error of declaring himself a “real” fictional character, or of believing that a catchphrase and a history of black market dealings suffice to define one of literature’s most popular inventions. Maybe Mizener was also remembering a bootlegger named Larry Fay, who was famous for the trunkloads of brightly colored shirts he boasted of having shipped from England, or the extravagant parties of a bootlegger named George Remus. Perhaps he was remembering how much of himself Fitzgerald later said he had shared with Gatsby. Years later Fitzgerald inscribed a copy of Gatsby with what he perceived at the time to be its failings: “Gatsby was never quite real to me. His original served for a good enough exterior until about the middle of the book he grew thin and I began to fill him with my own emotional life. So he’s synthetic—and that’s one of the flaws of the book.” Max Gerlach may have believed that he was the real Jay Gatsby, but for Scott Fitzgerald he was only the original—assuming Gerlach is indeed the man to whom he referred.



Sunday, November 18, 2018

the last book I ever read (Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of the Great Gatsby, excerpt three)

from Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of the Great Gatsby by Sarah Churchwell:

Swope helped inspire not Gatsby’s house, but his parties. Everyone who was celebrated or witty was invited to the Swopes’ renowned gatherings. The Fitzgeralds were great favorites for a time until, rumor has it, at one party Zelda took off her clothes and chased Mrs. Swope’s shy, sixteen-year-old brother up the stairs. He locked himself in the bedroom and for the rest of his life he would be teased for the opportunity he passed up. Mrs. Swope, it is said, banned the Fitzgeralds from returning to her house.

But all that was yet to come—if it is true. In the first heady months of their festivities among the Swopes and their guests the Fitzgeralds, thronged by a crowd of admirers, would stroll out to the gardens, where they would settle down with a few bottles of Swope’s first-rate bootleg whiskey: he claimed never to serve alcohol that hadn’t first been tested by chemists. People would picnic out on the grounds or stroll across the quiet road down to the beach. In the late afternoon sun they would stretch out on the porch or in the garden and go to sleep. When they woke, the band would have arrived; they’d change into evening clothes and thenext stage of the festivities would commence. Songwriter Howard Dietz said the Swopes’ parties were so dependable that if you were in Great Neck and “happened to be hungry at four in the morning, you could get a steak. Everybody drifted Swopeward.”



Saturday, November 17, 2018

the last book I ever read (Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of the Great Gatsby, excerpt two)

from Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of the Great Gatsby by Sarah Churchwell:

In 1922 Long Island remained a series of small villages deep in farmland, connected by country roads along which horse-drawn carriages clopped, slowing down the shiny new roadsters. The Long Island Expressway would not be constructed for decades: the red touring car took the Fitzgeralds and Dos Passos along Jackson Avenue, Route 25A, now Northern Boulevard. Past cobbled slums presided over by the dark saloons of the previous century, they drove through rolling hills. The population of Queens gradually thinned as the land extended east, from the small working-class neighborhoods edging New York City just across the bridge, through large swaths of land unburdened by buildings. Jackson Avenue carried them into Flushing, one of the first of the Dutch settlements on Long Island, after driving through Astoria, where Nick and Gatsby would scatter light with fenders spread like wings.

About halfway between New York and Great Neck, just beneath Flushing Bay, stood the towering Corona Dumps, vast mountains of fuel ash that New York had been heaping on swampland beyond the city limits since 1895, in a landfill created by the construction of the Long Island Rail Road. By the time the ash dumps were leveled in the late 1930s (and eventually recycled to form the Long Island Expressway), the mounds of ash were nearly a hundred feet tall in places; the highest peak was locally given the ironic name Mount Corona. Created to protect the city’s inhabitants from the constant grime of coal ash on the streets, the Corona Dumps were soon piled high with all manner of refuse including manure, and surrounded by stagnant water. By 1922 desolate, towering mountains of ashes and dust stretched four miles long and over a mile across, alongside the road that linked the glamor of Manhattan to the Gold Coast. In the distance could be seen the steel frames of new apartment buildings braced against the sky to the west. Refuse stretched in all direction, with goats wandering through and old women searching among the litter for some redeemable object.



Friday, November 16, 2018

the last book I ever read (Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of the Great Gatsby, excerpt one)

from Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of the Great Gatsby by Sarah Churchwell:

His wife, chic, provocative Zelda, was considered a great beauty, a woman of “astonishing prettiness,” although it is agreed that photographs never did her justice, failing to convey “any real sense of what she looked like . . . A camera recorded the imperfections of her face, missing the coloring and vitality that transcended them so absolutely.” Zelda’s honey-gold hair seemed to give her a burnished glow and her éclat was soon legendary.

Her greatest art may have been her carefully cultivated air of artlessness; Zelda understood the aesthetics of self-invention. The flapper was an artist of existence, Zelda said, a woman who turned herself into her own work of art, a young and lovely object of admiration. Her behavior was calculated to shock. Meeting Zelda for the first time nine days after her marriage to Scott, his friend Alec McKaig wrote in his diary, “Called on Scott Fitz and his bride. Latter temperamental small town, Southern Belle. Chews gum—shows knees. I do not think marriage can succeed. Both drinking heavily. Think they will be divorced in 3 years. Scott write something big—then die in a garret at 32.”



Thursday, November 15, 2018

the last book I ever read (The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, excerpt ten)

from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald:

I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made. . . .

I shook hands with him; it seemed silly not to, for I felt suddenly as though I were talking to a child. Then he went into the jewelry store to buy a pearl necklace—or perhaps only a pair of cuff buttons—rid of my provincial squeamishness forever.



Wednesday, November 14, 2018

the last book I ever read (The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, excerpt nine)

from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald:

“God sees everything,” repeated Wilson.

“That’s an advertisement,” Michaelis assured him. Something made him turn away from the window and look back into the room. But Wilson stood there a long time, his face close to the window pane, nodding into the twilight.



Tuesday, November 13, 2018

the last book I ever read (The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, excerpt eight)

from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald:

I couldn’t sleep all night; a fog-horn was groaning incessantly on the Sound, and I tossed half-sick between grotesque reality and savage, frightening dreams. Toward dawn I heard a taxi go up Gatsby’s drive, and immediately I jumped out of bed and began to dress—I felt that I had something to tell him, something to warn him about, and morning would be too late.



Sunday, November 11, 2018

the last book I ever read (The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, excerpt seven)

from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald:

Daisy and Tom were sitting opposite each other at the kitchen table, with a plate of cold fried chicken between them, and two bottles of ale. He was talking intently across the table at her, and in his earnestness his hand had fallen upon and covered her own. Once in a while she looked up at him and nodded in agreement.

They weren’t happy, and neither of them had touched the chicken or the ale—and yet they weren’t unhappy either. There was an unmistakable air of natural intimacy about the picture, and anybody would have said that they were conspiring together.



Saturday, November 10, 2018

the last book I ever read (The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, excerpt six)

from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald:

There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind, and as we drove away Tom was feeling the hot whips of panic. His wife and his mistress, until an hour ago secure and inviolate, were slipping precipitately from his control. Instinct made him step on the accelerator with the double purpose of overtaking Daisy and leaving Wilson behind, and we sped along toward Astoria at fifty miles an hour, until, among the spidery girders of the elevated, we came in sight of the easy going blue coupé.

“Those big movies around Fiftieth Street are cool,” suggested Jordan. “I love New York on summer afternoons when every one’s away. There’s something very sensuous about it—overripe, as if all sorts of funny fruits were going to fall into your hands.”



Friday, November 9, 2018

the last book I ever read (The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, excerpt five)

from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald:

Over the great bridge, with the sunlight through the girders making a constant flicker upon the moving cars, with the city rising up across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a wish out of non-olfactory money. The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.