To the guy at McNally Jackson whose preferred use of my time was to argue with me that non-fiction is categorically more important and more life-changing than fiction: let me respond, now that my hangover has ebbed to a less threatening level, with as huge a generalization. Non-fiction tells you what to think, and how. Fiction gives you something to think about. Also, I remembered what is the best book about atheism, and it’s not by Richard Dawkins. It’s by Hemingway. Byeeeeeee.

I have never written a proper book review. For one thing, I haven’t been asked. For the second, I find it trickiest to write about writing. Dancing about architecture makes more sense than dancing about dancing, I think. I’m not saying I will never review a book. David Balzer’s book, though, which I just finished in its beautiful .pdf entirety, will not be the first. 

This is cos I adore David. I’ve written about a lot of people I adore, but those are people who do things I can’t and don’t do; this would be different, too obvious, too make-lovey. There are times his book—it is a book of short stories and it’s titled, adequately, Contrivances—makes me envious. There are times it makes me uncomfortable. These are not good feelings but they’re good compliments.

Once, in the summer just past, David and I went to the island. It was a weekday and the two of us. I remember what I wore because I bought it that day (a wide-striped tent of a dress, made to float) and because he liked it. I remember our conversations eidetically. We talked and read and talked; we were surprised by some clandestine similarities. He told me about his childhood and about his book. It seemed the second one wouldn’t exist without the first; is that true for all writers? For all first books? It’s so thrilling to me that he has this first book, which you can and should order today, and that he is proud of it, which he can and should be. 

David’s writing doesn’t feel “natural” or “effortless.” I don’t prize effortlessness, you should know. As an art critic, he’s formal and rigorous and sophisticated, and this book, which comprises many lessons about why we have art (to protect us from each other, is one answer), is no less so. It’s richer though, and funny. It’s needle-pointy. It’s full of startling flesh. He is not afraid to get strange in the greater interest of making something true. (Also, his reference library, I MEAN: “Old Hollywood, Gothic novels, art-world gossip, and maybe a Lifetime movie or two…”)

David writes, I think, like he’s painting in a great tradition. You can see the individual strokes, the painstaking word choices, the small wrought movements, and it’s so descriptive that you think you see all there is to see. You don’t really understand what you don’t see until you step back from the whole thing and sigh.

P.S. David, we need to talk about The Abortion.

On Patti Smith, Briefly

My best friend flew in from Paris and we went to see Patti Smith at Housing Works and now I regret every other time I said something was “perfect” because those times were shit, comparatively. Patti Smith has one of those inseparable names. To say just Patti is practically sacrilege and to say Smith means nothing. It’s true I can’t think of a better Smith, but still. Patti Smith makes everything make sense for me. She is a rare person who did not become a woman, not in the de Beauvoirian way, not in the Butlerian way, and she is the exception to my rule that no interesting person is unpretentious. Or perhaps it is that she so fully and wholly and fucking admirably believes in her pretentions, in the things that save her from a world that probably doesn’t… deserve her.

I love her too much. Like Didion, like Francesca Woodman, who Patti Smith referenced in a heartstoppingly casual way. 

She said that when she wrote music she wanted everyone to hear it, to love it. She was very against the kinds of idiots who said she sold out when she showed up on Billboard or whatever. But she said also that when she wrote, she wrote of her own concerns; it did not matter whether anyone would read, say, her poetry. Well I guess no one reads poetry at all you could say. But I think there’s something else to be drawn from this distinction; I just wish I knew what it was. I could work much better, I think.

List of Books I Had a Panic Attack About Leaving Behind and Am Making My Friend Sarah Bring to Me Now

Daphne DuMaurier, Rebecca.

Gertrude Stein, Ida.

Patti Smith, Just Kids.

Lorrie Moore, Self Help.

Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby.

Joan Didion, Play It as It Lays; Democracy; The White Album.

Milan Kundera, Laughter and Forgetting.

Also I bought new fancy editions of This Side of Paradise and All The Pretty Horses, which I’ve never read, and Wuthering Heights duh.

UPDATE FOR MY TWO REALLY CONCERNED FRIENDS: I did not “forget” these books; I put them in a box and left them at the old apartment and then ran out of time and room in suitcases. They will be with me soon. Breathe easy.