GRATING SPACE

From the Editors:

As you may or may not have noticed, I have been neglecting my blog. I have a myriad of excuses, most of which deal with me having a full-time job now, plus projects on the side. As a sad replacement for an actual new post, I will do what lots of other bloggers do an tell you, dear Grating Space followers, what I have been up to while not writing here.

1) The job. It’s at a magazine called Stop Smiling. You may have heard of it, if from nowhere else than this blog. I don’t have a job title. I do too many things. Today I called myself a marketing associate when I was writing an email to a fancy art hotel in Miami to see if they would trade some ads for credit and buy some copies of the print magazine to put in their fancy art rooms so their fancy art guests can enjoy it while they stay there. But I am more than a marketing associate. Much more. My editors have no idea what they will call me in the masthead of the new issue. I do too much. I’m too diverse. I told one of them today that when I got my first low-level magazine job at SLUG, my name in the masthead was labeled “Office Bitch.” My parents were so proud.

One thing you might keep up on is the blog on the Stop Smiling homepage, where I post most every day. Recent entries of mine there include “The City of Big Shoulders Slumps,” “Where’s the Latin Love,” and “Unexpected Bounties.” The blog on the homepage links to an actual Stop Smiling WordPress page, where you can read all the brilliant things I come up with in the morning after drinking coffee and reading the news on the clock.

A couple of weeks ago I went to DC to throw the release party of the Stop Smiling DC Issue. It was my first business trip, and a total success. As I sat on the plane waiting to fall asleep across three empty seats on a severely underbooked Southwest flight, I couldn’t help but think of Ed Norton’s character in Fight Club on his business trips, and how he probably wished he was headed to hang out with Ian Svenonius, Thomas Frank, and Anwan Glover each time he boarded a plane for business. Lucky for me, I didn’t have to wish. I also got to see my dear friend Suse, who is by far the coolest East German I know, and hang out in super sweet bars that were filled with both white people and black people, which is an anomaly in Chicago, the most stupidly segregated city in the country.

I will have a couple of pieces coming out in the next issue of the print mag, which comes out in February. They are an interview with Natasha Wimmer, who translated The Savage Detectives and 2666; my interview with her will be part of a larger Roberto Bolaño mega section, which also includes the last interview the author ever did, which we scored from Mexican Playboy. I also wrote reviews of a good documentary and a bad book. Expect versions of this written material to appear on Grating Space. For past work I’ve done for Stop Smiling and copied and pasted into this blog, go here.

2) I’ve also managed to land my first Chicago freelance gig, a feature article on author Nami Mun for Time Out Chicago. I’m reading her new book right now and must say it’s pretty alright. Mun was a teenage runaway in New York City, and her novel, Miles from Nowhere, is about a teenage runaway in New York City. Fancy that. The most satisfying aspect of it is that, as Mun has said in interviews, she feel like she wanted to write the book, she felt like she had to write it. One can sense this from the text. Bataille argues that this is really the only way one can create good fiction, and I tend to agree with him. Those of us untested souls who only really, really want to write a good story are out of luck until some shit hits some fan.

I’ll post the Mun piece when it’s up on the Time Out site.

3) In case you’re not yawning already, there’s more. I’m curating another art show for my friends from Buenos Aires here in Chicago, this time at the city’s premiere heavy metal bar: The Metal Shaker. It’s totally rad. The opening is on Dec. 19, which means I should have already made a flyer and sent out a press release, but I have not. Consider this the initial publicity campaign. The Argentine artists are named Diente, Piraña and Agustin Croxatto (I’ve written abou them before here and here), and they will be showing with some American metal artists, Erik Pertl and Tom Crites. Some wicked punk/metal bands are going to play the opening. Maybe some goats will be slaughtered on site. Who knows? If you’re in Chicago on Dec. 19, let’s go.

4) I went to Denver to hang out with my family for Thanksgiving. They are all doing well, thank you. My aunt and uncle are giving me their heavy bag for Christmas, so come spring I’ll be all diesel and you suckas best watch your backs. I also picked out a selection of books I will receive from my aunt who finds it easier to give me money and let me do my own shopping for myself, rather than tell her what I want and have her buy it, or not tell her what I want and, consequentially, not get what I want for Christmas, which would be an American tragedy. The books I will receive are:

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Celine
Letters to a Young Contrarian by Christopher Hitchens
What Can I Do When Everything’s On Fire? by Antonio Lobo Antunes
Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar

So, if you wonder in January what I’m up to, I’ll probably have my nose in one of those. None of them are written by a white American. This was on purpose. No, none of them are written by women. So sue me. I tout Rebecca Curtis, Deb Olin Unferth, Gertrude Stein and Amy Hempel to everyone I meet. Every. Single. Person. All the time. They are so fucking sick of hearing me go on and on about Curtis this and Unferth that and “So, I was reading The Gradual Making of the Making of Americans the other day,” that they have begun to physically threaten me and, on occasion, act upon those threats after I refuse to stop extolling the virtues of the sentences in “Nashville Gone to Ashes” — their precision and musicality, their rhythms and descriptions. I was getting on the bus yesterday and the driver reminded me of the homeless man in the backseat in one of my favorite stories in Twenty Grand, “To the Interstate,” so I told him so and explained to him what I was talking about when he said to me, “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” and while I was doing it the woman behind me began to complain about the weight of her groceries and the coldness of the air from the street blowing in through the bus door, which was open because there were even more people standing behind her, blocking it from being shut without some sort of mangling or minor accident. She said her produce was about to burst through the bottom of her plastic bag and, restraining myself from commenting on the fact that if she had enough money to afford that much fruit in this economy then she damned-well had enough cash to buy herself a decent durable and reusable grocery bag, I continued to describe to the driver what I meant by telling him he reminded me of the man in the backseat in the Rebecca Curtis story, and he yelled at me to shut the fuck up and move toward the rear or get off his goddamned bus before he punched my pointy nose straight back into my ugly face. The woman with the heavy bag of food began to swing it against my leg and to my surprise it did actually seem heavy enough to complain about, but as I feel the urge to tell everyone I come across about these amazing female authors — an urge that literally burns in me until it blackens the inside of my skin in the summer and makes me look like I have a sun tan — I kept going. I detailed the plot to him, about the little girl and her sister, their escape from the youth home. The trickery of the car doors that would not lock. The fact that the little sister said she hated kissing. Someone shoved the woman with the groceries into my back and she fell over, sprawled across the yellow line you’re not supposed to cross while the bus is in motion. The driver put his rig in park and helped the woman into the handicapped seat at the very front, then turned to me and put his thick hands around my slim, white throat and squeezed until I was no longer capable of producing the necessary air from my lungs to continue to give these unappreciated women their proper praise. The people who had been waiting in the bus doorway and outside on the sidewalk pressed their fleeced and scarved bodies into the vehicle until I was mashed, the driver’s hands still around my neck, against the Plexiglas partition that separates the passengers from the attention of whoever is operating the machine, as more and more of them crammed in.