Name That Series

I'm breaking radio silence temporarily to make a request of my readers.

As you probably know, Robyn and I are taking the reins of the Barbes reading series this fall. (If you didn't, well, Robyn and I are taking the reins of the Barbes reading series this fall.) We've got tons of ideas for readers, marketing tools, and we even have a winning concept - we're going to bake and hand out cookies, which to me seems like a very nicemodernist gesture.

So we came up with a name we liked - Made from Scratch. But Barbes management suggests we might like to have something that implies a little bit more of a serious effort on the part of the writers, so I'm trying to come up with something that combines a love of refined sugar with literariness, urban sophistication, and quasi-nicemodernism. So much the better if it's vaguely French, since Barbes itself is vaguely Parisian. (Something involving madeleines would have been perfect but for the fact that before it conjures up Proust it conjures up an image of straw-hatted schoolgirls walking in two straight lines and therefore doesn't quite fit our image either.)

I'll up the stakes - if you're local, and you suggest a name that everyone concerned approves of and winds up using, I'll bake you a dozen of my famous peanut-butter-oatmeal-chocolate-chip-M&M cookies. (Or, if you're allergic to nuts or something, a dozen of the cookie of your choice.) If you're not local and you suggest a good name, I'll send you a lovely handmade thank-you card and make sure everyone knows it was your idea.

Comment here or email your ideas to jessliese at gmail dot com. Management thanks you in advance for your support.

Procrastination was the title of T.S. Garp's first novel

In my blockage-inspired funk tonight, while clicking around looking for other writing-focused blogs, I discovered that one of my current favorites, William Gibson, kept a blog for awhile but abandoned it because, in his words, "it never fail(ed) to underline the fact that if I’m doing this I’m definitely not writing a novel."

It pains me to admit it, but he's got quite a point. He's got such a point he has stabbed me in the head with it and skewered me to the wall, where I dangle helplessly by my thick skull. (But still not unblocked.) If I'm to create any project of substance, I need to unzip its skin, get inside of it, and not come out until I've finished it. This means minimal kvetching in this blog about how I'm not writing it, because if there's any activity that's less writing a novel than blogging, it's blogging pointedly about how you're not writing. Not that I'm not finding it therapeutic to vent in here when my characters have all glassed themselves in and refused to let me in on what they're doing.

So here is my incentive. I'm doing a metaphorical temporary unplug. I will not be returning here until I have written at least five pages.

(Speaking of William Gibson, another post for another time is a musing on the Gibsonian idea of having a "brand allergy". Pattern Recognition is easily one of the best books I've read this year. If you're even further behind the times than I am, I humbly suggest it to you as an example of an awesome read. As a nicemodernist, I want you, my fellow lovers of literature, to be as blown away by this book as I was.)

I feel the story shifting around inside of me and contemplating overruling the blockage, but then again, I also had a Taco Bell Crunch Wrap for lunch today. Also, I just took 5 mg of a popular prescription sleep aid, so my brain plays some odd tricks on me in the final seconds before complete system shutdown. I once opened my paper journal to a page full of totally nonsensical words that I'm sure articulated something very deep at the time. All the good literary substance abuse issues were taken - Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Trainspotting, everything anybody within 5 miles of the Algonquin Hotel wrote between 1920 and 1935, some other examples the brain is refusing to cough up and is instead is playing that little "windows is shutting down your computer" song in my ears, only it sounds sort of surrounded by that weird hollow-static rushing noise you hear inside your head when your ears pop.

Now, I sleep. If I have any readers left in the morning, I'll consider elaborating on brand allergy.

Tenderness On the Block

No doubt you've seen those Scientology booths in the subway with the cheery automatons offering a "Free Stress Test." Over on the red-covered folding table, behind the two dozen copies of Dianetics, there's this little machine with an important-looking gauge on it, and they give you a little electrodey thing to hold onto and the gauge tells you about your stress levels. Then, presumably, the Scientologist administering the test tells you that the official-looking gauge says you are extremely blocked, and reading this wonderful book will help you to unblock.

I'm not sure if this is how it's done anymore, but a friend told me that the Scientology stress machines were at one point nothing more than simple voltmeters, so your "blockage level" was actually just a measure of how well your body functioned as a conductor. So a fun way to freak out the Scientologists would be to lick your palms before you hold onto the official-looking electrodey things, because wet things, as we all know, conduct better than dry things, and the machine would then register an unusually high conductivity, therefore a low blockage, therefore L. Ron could take a couple of lessons from YOU. (Yeah, I got yer blockage right here, buddy.)

Anyway, this is a very long way of introducing a very simple idea. Blocked is exactly how I feel right now. I feel as though the ideas I want to articulate are on the other side of a thick wall, and I can't really dig into them. The approximately sixteen thousand writing books on the reference shelf in my office nook (On Writing by Stephen King and Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury being the only two that imparted anything useful at all) tell tale after tale of great authors who hit the wall, get over it, and go on to write, like, The Great Gatsby.

(Incidentally, Gatsby is always my touchstone for great literature, and not just because it's a great book, which it is. I cite it constantly because of that scene in John Irving's The Hotel New Hampshire in which Lilly Berry declares that if you don't think you can write a book as good as Gatsby then you'll never get started. I know exactly how she feels. It's a small comfort to imagine that Irving was using Lilly as a mouthpiece for himself when he wrote that. It does, after all, take him three years to finish a book.)

(And I'm pretty sure Fitzgerald was too busy drinking and carousing and having dysfunctional relationships to let something so provincial as writer's block get him down, so Gatsby probably isn't the example I'm looking for. But you get what I mean.)

If only unblocking were really as simple as licking my palms or joining a cult. Unfortunately, the only thing to do is ride it out and try not to be overly negative about it. The latter is actually harder than the former.

Shocked. And stunned. Yeah. Very stunned.

After opening my email, hitting the roof, and then calming back down, I just commented to Quite Contrarian, "wow, for a writer who's never actually been published, I guess I'm doing pretty well."

What prompted this? Well, my pal Ned has done it again. (This is pretty much a repeat of the reaction I had when he told me that Amy Sohn was headlining my Barbes reading, only more flabbergasted, if that's possible.) He just sent me the finalized set for the reading I'm doing at Piano's as part of the Summer Shakes series on July 12th. (For more info, go here.) Take a gander at some of the other names on there, will you? Yeah, you read that right. Jonathan freakin' Ames. Will freakin' Leitch. Now, I'm well aware that they'll probably do their things and be out the door well before I go on, but the fact remains: I'm on a bill with Jonathan Ames. I have no clips to speak of and about 25% of a novel, and I'm on a bill with a critically-acclaimed novelist.

"Okay, so why aren't you publishing?" QC asked me.

And the answer is: I don't know. I mean, clearly I must be a competent writer if people haven't totally abandoned my blog after four years. And on a slightly more serious front, I doubt Ned would ask me to read at another one of his events if he thought I sucked (I mean, at the very least, he has faith that I'll fill chairs with asses, and on that count I hope he's right - the power's in your hands, folks). Since moving to New York, I've submitted articles to 7 or 8 publications of varying stature, and only McSweeneys.net has rejected me. (And I wasn't expecting an acceptance from them, actually. I sort of wanted to get a rejection out of the way so I could prove to myself that I would not dissolve, Last Crusade-style, if a publication rejected me. And even they suggested I should try again sometime.) But every time the prospect of going outside of my comfort zone comes up, I adopt the old George McFly posture and whine that "I just can't take that kind of rejection."

The easy way to not have to confront this, I'll confess, is to be writing a novel. I can prolong the rejection as long as possible by funnelling the bulk of my creative energy into one big project rather than a lot of little projects, and that way it will be months at the bare minimum before anybody will have the opportunity to tell me I don't have what it takes to play in the big leagues.

(Is it any surprise that I don't date very often, either? I acquire boyfriends about as often as I get published. My last breakup coincided with the release of my first Black Table blurb. The relationship before that was going on while my Digital Brooklyn columns ran and ended right before my first public reading. I wrote a piece for Winter Mittens, which I later scrapped before it ran, about the one before that.)

(Hm, perhaps there's a correlation here. The more I write, the more action my love life sees, or perhaps the more I date, the more I write. It's a chicken-egg conundrum. Further incentive to risk the rejection in either arena, at any rate.)

But the fact that on the strength of a few tiny little blurbs and the towering behemoth of That Blog On That Other Site, complete strangers know me by reputation...that astounds me. I feel sort of like Ben Kweller in his Radish days. He'd never played a single live show and major labels were courting him on the strength of a mighty viral-marketing buzz and a low-quality home demo.

I'm not saying I have a mighty buzz, or the Kwelleresque chops to back even my minibuzzlet up, but I do sort of feel like even the smallest effort I make brings about good things. (PS - I'll make the awful confession that I couldn't hum a Ben Kweller song right now if my life depended on it. I have no idea if he has chops or not.)

I hope that writing about it doesn't somehow jinx it.

Ironically, the piece I think I'm going to read is about the physical manifestation of my untapped potential waking me up and kicking my ass.

Spaceless accusations

Thanks to some deft googling on the part of The Talented Mr. Lang, the bitty soda home office has learned that while there is not really such thing as a nicemodernist (well, there wasn't before we invented it), but there is such a thing as a nice (space) modernist.

Because I am a nicemodernist, I feel the need to acknowledge the existence of Dwell magazine's coinage of the space-infused term to connote a certain variant of modernism, and assure them that I'd never heard the term before using it to refer to something else yesterday and do not intend to rip them off, while simultaneously complimenting their use of such a great term.

I imagine that nice modernism is actually something a nicemodernist would enjoy very much, being that we're largely supporters of the domestic arts.

So just to clarify, much like the difference between a boyfriend and a boy friend, a nicemodernist and a nice modernist are different creatures. I'm not an architect, I'm just a cultural critic and post-post-modernist who champions antisnark in this here blog. No space here. (Come on, I live in New York City - we never waste space.)

The Nicemodernist Manifesto

"I'd like to perfect the art of being studiously aloof
Like life is just a boring chore and I'm living proof." -Ani DiFranco

In New York City in 2005, "cool" is synonymous with "cooler than you." Or perhaps the word I want to use is "hip." Whether it's ironic or unironic, the word "hipster" connotes informedness, being on the cutting edge, knowing and being able to parse out the culturally relevant and great from the pedestrian and lame. The stereotypical hipster is a Williamsburg denizen who hangs out in galleries, wears ratty thrift-store goods (Members Only jackets and trucker hats, anybody?), listens to indie rock (however he/she defines it), and holds forth competently on all manner of world issues, large and small. Scratch that, large and infinitesimally small.

In some ways, it's great to finally live in a city and an era where nerds drive the culture. It means that New York is full of thinky, creative, interesting people and things, and there is always something new to see and parse. The downside, however, as any hipster, hipster wannabe, or person who considers themselves above hipsters will tell you, is that with the cultural smorgasbord comes endless pairs of discerning eyes with sharp tongues and critical attitudes.

The hipster mystique is part holdover from the disaffected days of grunge and part embracement of arcane factoids as cultural currency. So with hipsterism comes a veneer of affected negativity. To be cool nowadays is to be a critic. You understand things to the point of dismantling them, be they bands, authors, films, or your fellow hipsters. And in order to continuously reassert your cool status, you must always come across as though you know more than anybody else.

Take Jonathan Safran Foer's new book. In the weeks prior to the release of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, reviews were generally laudatory. GQ called it a "riotous and at times courageous book" and a "cerebral roller coaster." Then the book was published, and became successful, and everyone began talking about it, and that was when the reviews started to get bad. The New York Press even did a cover story about how bad they thought the book was, under the clever title of "Extremely Cloying and Incredibly False". This was only one of a sudden rash of bad press. Was this an instance of someone finally pointing out that the emperor was naked, or was it an attempt to derail the buzz in an attempt to one-up Foer? Wherefore the sudden 180 in public opinion? Granted, I'm a well-known conspiracy theorist so I could be way off-base here (and doubtless 15 people will jump up to tell me so as soon as I hit "post"), but I sure felt like it was cool to like him and uncool five minutes after the rest of the world caught on. Me, I liked him then and I like him now.

Oftentimes this sense of "I knew about it before you did" leads to massive pissing contests, and more often than not it leads to people liking or disliking things for the wrong reasons. On the flip side of the Foer coin, how many times has an absolutely terrible album or book gotten freakishly championed by some influential critic or another, and then, if you think it's terrible, obviously that's because you don't understand it. (I loved the writing in Rick Moody's Believer piece about the Danielson Famile. It was honest and heartfelt and intellectually stimulating. The band he champions, I'm told, is really and truly terrible. Proof positive that you don't have to agree with something to like the way in which it's presented, but that's another diatribe for another meditation on nicemodernism.)

The culture of criticism, unfortunately, also leads to meta-hipsterdom, in which the concept of being hip itself is scoffed at. As soon as a trend hits the mainstream media, you must declare it over and immediately make fun of anybody who's still doing it. To be hip these days is to be concerned with what you are putting out there, and how you come across as the most informed and erudite, not how what you are putting into the world affects others and makes your life and theirs better. If someone defines themselves as cool, it is the other self-defined cool person's job to determine why they are not.

Therefore, to counter the negativity, the self-referentiality, the perpetual breaking-down without building-up, I am starting a countermovement. This countermovement shall henceforth be known as nicemodernism.

What is nicemodernism? Well, it's a form of post-postmodernism that says that nice is the new snark. I'm not talking fakey nice, I'm not talking ironic nice, I'm talking about the importance of being earnest. I'm talking about liking things because they bring you pleasure, and focusing on the things you like.

Nicemodernism involves throwing away your ideals of being The Coolest Of Them All. It rejects snark. Snark laughs at. Nicemodernism laughs with. Nicemodernism is silly. Nicemodernists seek to understand the culture in which they live, but rather than giving you a laundry list of the things they do not like, and phrasing said laundry list in ways that wankily amuse them, the nicemodernist will emphasize the things they do like, and the reasons why those things bring them delight.

I now declare that it is cool to bake cookies. It is cool to ride bikes and eat ice cream and run through the sprinkler. It is cool to bring your mother flowers. It is cool to hug people and dance at concerts and laugh at other people's jokes. If that's what you want to do. If that's what makes you happy.

The recent upsurgence in knitting as a hobby for twentysomethings? That's very nicemodernist. It's creative, it's comfortable, it's relaxing, and it makes lovely gifts for people. More stitch, less bitch.

Drinking PBR? Not nicemodernist. Drinking an arcane $15 imported lager? Not nicemodernist. Drinking the beer you think tastes the best (which could, I suppose, be PBR or the $15 lager, but probably isn't)? That's nicemodernist.

Listening to The Shaggs? Not nicemodernist. Listening to the Eagles, because you grew up with their music and genuinely feel an attachment to their songs regardless of the fact that your friends think they suck? Very nicemodernist.

I'm not intimating that nicemodernists are square, or mainstream, or generally lame. I'm not saying we all drink a glass of milk and go to bed at 9 here. Nicemodernists drink, carouse, rock out, and have sex...if that's what they enjoy doing. They do not, however, do anything for the sake of keeping up appearances, especially when that appearance is one of superiority in any arena, be it the sorts of things that were venerated among the popular kids in high school or the rebellious adult-world triumphs over same by the nerderati in the cultural epicenter.

The current trend in the hip world seems to be: learn as much as you can about something someone else likes so that you can pick it apart and tell the world why you don't like it. The nicemodernist spin is to learn as much as you can about something you like, and pass it on to people to enrich their lives. Instead of flaunting your superior knowledge, you offer it up to others, and spread the knowledge you derived joy from, in case they, too, can derive joy from it. Don't playa-hate, collaborate. Nicemodernists embrace glee, be it their own or that of others.

So if you dare to love the good in culture, take up the mantle of nicemodernism, and because you care about your friends and think it will make their lives better, tell them as well. Maybe bring them some pie, too, while you're at it.

If, y'know, that's what you enjoy.

Slope Fiend

A favorite statistic that Ned often cites is that Park Slope contains the highest concentration of writers of any neighborhood in the country. Those of us not fortunate enough to have Jonathan Safran Foer-esque book deals (and their ensuing bank accounts) and persist in slumming it down in Midwoodsingtonbushmas Park, as I do, may well understand better than Park Slopeians themselves what attracts writers to it, especially after a Saturday night like the one I just had.

You'll see what you mean when you take a walk around the residential streets of the Slope some summer night when it's warm but not too warm and late but not too late. Take in the neat rows of trees and the old, stately limestones brimming with character, and then try to tell me you aren't just itching to grab a notebook and hunker down on the nearest stoop or park bench. The place has dignified, brainy charm coming out of its pores. Perhaps it's residual writer mojo from all of the wordsmiths who call the place home, but I come back from every visit to the Slope feeling rejuvenated and creatively charged.

To be fair, my own neighborhood isn't without its charm, even if it's not necessarily a literary stronghold. My affection for it tends to ebb and flow. I liken the difference between where I live and where I hang out to the difference between family and friends - I love the neighborhood where my apartment is because I'm stuck living with it. Sometimes it is a royal pain in the ass, like those evenings when my pals want to hang out somewhere near the F train and I have to backtrack it up to 34th to catch the Q at 1 a.m. Sometimes I love it because I know I have to, but I don't necessarily like it all that much. And other times it surprises me with something wonderful, like a cheap movie theater or an ethnic food market with an entire aisle devoted to halvah, and I'm proud to be attached to it.

And then, much as your closest friends become your adopted family, I have my adopted neighborhood. Bridging the two is the mighty B68 bus, a relatively recent discovery to this Brooklynite. I lived here four years before I attempted to take a Brooklyn bus. This was a mistake. Not only does it open doors as far as the territory between my apartment and Coney Island (the cheap movie theater is now just minutes away!), it scoops me up mere blocks from my home and deposits me in the thick of my favorite part of the Slope. From my friend Sharon's front door near the southwest entrance to the park to my front door is 25 minutes via the B68 - I spend that much time just walking from her house to the Q train. Also on that path is a good long stretch of beautiful park views and a phenomenal ice cream joint with an outdoor patio. I can't decide if my adopted neighborhood or my actual neighborhood should get the credit for this discovery, so like any good familial authority figure, I'm letting them share it equally.

The added bonus of the bus, as opposed to the subway, is the fact that you can see where you're going, especially on evenings like tonight when the weather is suitable for outdoor revelry. Sure, Coney Island Avenue is not particularly remarkable, but riding on top of the streets rather than underneath them gives you a better sense of geography, and of your place in the universe. I know how far I am from the storied, stately Park Slopeian brownstones and the neighborhood pubs just begging to have a writer or two popping open a laptop or notebook in a quiet corner, both literally and metaphorically. They're close enough to reach out and touch them. Not at all inaccessible.

Therefore, I have a feeling this is a route I ought to travel often this summer - it will be good for me to hole up in one of the aforementioned bars to plug into the creative energy and have a comfortable place to make some real headway on the book. If I finished it before the weather becomes too cold and nasty for riding the B68 between here and there to be fun, I'd be the happiest little Brooklyn girl on earth.

You never see the lies that you believe

With regard to The Believer, it seems that anybody who doesn't know and/or care about literary stuff has never heard of it, and of those who have heard of it, it is incredibly uncool to say anything nice about it.

I don't know where exactly I fit into the literary schema, or where I will fit, but I'm suspecting that compared to the population at large I'm on the "well-read" end of the spectrum, but compared to the literary circles in which I hope to someday travel, I have a lot to learn.

With that in mind, select one of the following paragraphs according to what applies to you:

For those who have not heard of The Believer: Hey, there's this magazine put out by the folks behind McSweeney's, and it's called The Believer, and often it contains these incredibly cogent, esoteric articles by amazing writers. Even though it's eight bucks on the newsstand, you should check it out sometime. This month's is especially awesome, especially if you're into music like I am.

For those who have heard of The Believer: I know it is cool to disparage this publication and its faux-hipness, but more often than not, I actually, legitimately enjoy it, and I refuse to apologize. If this somehow detracts from my reputation as one of the literati (if, indeed, I had one as such), so be it. If loving The Believer is wrong, I don't want to be right.

Maybe it's sort of like how liking, say, the Shins these days is not really edgy for a music fan among certain indie-rock fans, but it's pretty edgy for the folks who forget songs as soon as they fall off the top 40. In any circle of cultural enjoyment, there's always going to be somebody who knows more than you, and thinks your tastes are pedestrian. There's always some record-store basement-dweller who has some CD recorded by some techno-punk-balalaika player in Siberia, of which only three copies actually exist, and which makes your precious Shins look like hacks.

Likewise, for every five or so Lethem- and Chabon-heads (of which yours truly is one), there are about 100 people who never read books at all, another 50 who think The DaVinci Code is good literature, and one person whose library contents make Lethem and Chabon look like, well, Dan Brown. It's a spectrum of cool - someone out there is always going to find you edgy and someone is always going to find you square.

And so it is with The Believer - some people find it fringey, some find it pedestrian. Very few, in any case, seem to really like it without irony or poserdom. But I do.

Now, as overrated (albeit talented) as I think Dave Eggers and his little circle might be, there aren't many magazines anymore that put an in-depth, academic spin on the arcane as well as the mundane, and The Believer, in my opinion, does this often and well.

Yesterday (as Daryl and some other blog, maybe Gothamist or Gawker, pointed out in the last 24 hours), The New York Times ran an article castigating The Believer for being too narrow in their indie-rock-specific focus. And I see their point, I guess - to some extent, it DOES seem to be feeding into the hipster zeitgeist - but take what's there for what it is, and the majority is damn good. To wit:

• Steve Almond's profile of kid-rockers Smoosh is adorable. I just finished Almond's Candyfreak last weekend, so I'm very much in love with him right now in general, and he doesn't disappoint even when he's not waxing rhapsodic about AbbaZabbas and Clark bars.
• Rick Moody delivers what starts out as a review of the Danielson Famile's oevure but veers off into a thought-provoking meditation on faith. And I have never had a kind word to say about anything Rick Moody has written before this.
• And then, on the opposite end of the Jess Spectrum of General Adulation, there's Douglas Wolk. Ah, Douglas Wolk. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I've never read anything by this guy that I didn't like. In this issue, he manages to enmire me in his own enthusiastic, emotional connection to the Fall, whose work I'm not at all familiar with. (If I've even heard them at all, it was probably on a mix CD given to me BY Douglas Wolk after I friendstered him an obsequious fan letter.)
• (See, now half of you are shaking your heads at my total un-hipness at having never heard The Fall, and the other half are accusing me of being a pretentious hipster because I dropped a music critic's name and used "friendster" as a verb. I just can't win with you people.)

Speaking of CDs, this issue, like last year's music issue, comes with one. This year, it's a compilation of cover songs, most of which were previously unreleased. As a big flashing target for both the folks who are too hip for The Believer and those who are not hip enough for it, there's even a cover of a Postal Service song by the Shins**, which even I recognize as the poster child for that chasm where the truly edgy hate it but the plebes can't really access it either. My scalp itches with the pseudo-hipness of a phantom trucker hat just listening to it.

However, there are a number of quite lovely songs on the CD, including the Spoon cover of Yo La Tengo's "Decora" and Josephine Foster's absolutely gorgeous rendition of "The Golden Window" by the Cherry Blossoms. The CD alone is worth the eight bucks, if my opinion holds any weight at all with you.

**I don't mean to unfairly bust on the Shins. Truth be told, I have no opinion on them either way. They're just a convenient target due to this Times piece. However, any busts I make on The DaVinci Code are both fair and completely intended. That book is a piece of shit.

Silly pla la.

I could be all coy here and pretend that this is my first-ever blog post, and venture forth wide-eyed and innocent into the big bad blogiverse, but anybody who knows me at all knows that I'm definitely no stranger to the blogging world. No, I keep a scarily popular journal on some other site, and if you know me as a writer, that's probably where you've seen anything I've written because let's face it, my crippling fear of rejection has kept me from doing much else of significance.

No matter. I'll get there.

Anyway, if you're just surfing through, let me bring you up to speed. My name is Jessica. I work for a big magazine company in Manhattan but live and play in Brooklyn. I've written some stuff for some publications you may or may not have read - most recently I had my first (and hopefully not my last) little blurb published on Black Table. Starting this fall, I'll also be co-curating the Barbes Reading Series.

The big project, though, and my first love, is my novel-in-progress. Someday it will be a real book, and you will all be able to say you read my blog back before anybody knew who I was. (Not that anybody will know who I am when you say this, mind you, because people probably still won't know who I am.)