Sarah McCarry's Blog, page 10

Painting Lessons

I have a long history of painting rooms badly.

My bedroom in Portland: what was meant to be a festive, springy green came out of the can a radioactive, fluorescent nightmare. My friend Jess helped me paint. "Gosh," he said, "this is bright." It looked awful but I lived with it for years because I couldn't bear the thought of painting the room a second time. In my bedroom in Bellingham most of the paint ended up on the ceiling or the floor, but that house was such a disaster the mess in my room seemed more an homage to the prevailing aesthetic. Kitchens, bathrooms, bedrooms: even if I taped the edges, put down dropcloths, whatever, I'd end up with streaky drips and swipes of paint in places that shouldn't have been possible. The insides of cabinets, the backsides of shelves, sometimes other rooms altogether. I dated people who were better than me at the things I wasn't good at and made them paint my rooms for me (once, at four in the morning the night before my mom came to visit; that's love).

I knew in my head how to paint but it was like there was no straight path for the message to travel to my body. Like some part of me would just give up and then spontaneously upend the paint can out of dread. But a year and a half ago I moved into an apartment by myself, the first time I have lived alone in something like a decade, and the first time I have lived alone with indoor plumbing ever, and this weekend I painted the bathroom by myself, and I did a good job. Not a great job, but a good one. The edges are mostly even and there is no paint on the ceiling or on the floor, and I didn't spill anything, and the walls are an even, pleasant blue. And I don't know what happened exactly, how suddenly I was better at something I had always been bad at, and I am not going to belabor this metaphor, which is so obvious it has already been utilized by The Karate Kid, but work teaches you something about how to work, and sometimes the lesson is so subtle you do not know it has taken root until you are doing a thing you did not entirely know you could do.

It is repetition, and practice, but also something that is bigger and more intangible than both. It happened to me when I learned to print letterpress. I was a bad printer for a long time, and then I started to care about being a good printer while I was still a bad one, and then one day I set up a print in the press bed and pulled a proof and it was good. And after that the press itself seemed to behave better and it was like my hands had a new way of speaking, like when you are struggling to learn a language and one morning you wake up and realize you had an entire dream in your new tongue. I think of it now in my yoga class when my teacher tells us to hold a pose and I know I can do it, not only because my arms are stronger than they used to be but because my knowledge of myself has expanded to include the possibility I am good at something I was not good at before. Like writing, or being in love, or painting a room: there is no clear path between not knowing how and knowing, no obvious task that will get you there, other than the doing of the thing until it becomes a part of you, until you are big enough to hold the knowing. Until you learn to see yourself as someone who can.

We Don't Doubt, We Don't Take Direction

If a person is going to wear the same thing every day, she might as well have a palette to work from, is my philosophy. In celebration of the pending release of my first book, here are the greatest treasures of my band shirt collection. Still looking for Faith No More, New Order, and Dead Can Dance if anyone is holding. You can preorder All Our Pretty Songs from the fine folks at WORD.

Bauhaus.

Concrete Blonde.

The Cult.

Depeche Mode.

Gene Loves Jezebel.

INXS.

Jane's Addiction.

The Jesus and Mary Chain.

Ministry.

Nine Inch Nails.

Nirvana.

Pushead (not technically a band, but whatever).

Nirvana.

Sisters of Mercy.

Yes, I need two.

Tool.

Happy Birthday to Me

Here is a picture of me from when I was eighteen or nineteen years old and did not know anything about the world except that I wanted to be in it, running around.

On Monday I will be thirty-four and in a couple of months, in July, my first book will come out, and the month after that, in August, I will have lived in New York for five years exactly. I am not sure if I know more now than I did when I was eighteen or nineteen, but the things I know now are different.

I am reading Rachel Kushner's The Flamethrowers; I am only fifty-seven pages in, but it is already living up to the hype, which is both lovely and rare in a book. "I'd thought this was how artists moved to New York, alone, that the city was a mecca of individual points, longings, all merging into one great lightning-pulsing mesh, and you simply found your pulse, your place," her narrator says. Five years after I moved here New York is still a romance, even as it is also just the place I live; the resonant echoes of other people's dreams catching you up on street corners, in bodegas, as you look out the window of the Q train on its trundling journey over the Manhattan bridge. Today I went into a shoe store in Soho and that Biggie song came on: remember when I used to eat sardines for dinner, now we sip champagne when we thirsty, et cetera. I drank two glasses of not very cheap sparkly wine at the Lucky Strike because it was ninety-five degrees already at noon and the bar was cool and nearly empty. The summer light came through its front windows and pooled golden on the worn floorboards and I thought about what an amazing feeling it is to have two glasses of not very cheap sparkly wine at noon on a Friday and not have to worry about how you will eat the week after, which is a new feeling in my New York life, although let me tell you, I am not having any trouble accustoming myself to the considerable improvement in my fortunes in the last year. Sipping champagne when I am thirsty. New York does not teach you to save, but it certainly teaches you to live.

If you had told me when I was eighteen or nineteen years old that I would be here, now, in this life, in this summer, the cicadas crawling out of the earth like memory, I would not have believed you. I never liked New York before I lived here; I thought it was dirty and the people were mean. In truth it is dirty and the people are busy. I cannot imagine any other life I would rather have for myself. It is not everyone who is lucky enough to say that, and it is luck as much as labor that's brought me here--which is to say, a formidable amount of luck to match a formidable amount of labor. The last five years have been the hardest of my life and there were vast, bleak stretches that I often saw no way out of, but every time I have nearly given up in this city, every this-is-my-last dollar I have spent, every miserable job I have worked and subway ride I have cried on, has made me so grateful for this afternoon in that bar in Soho, looking at myself in the grainy old mirror behind the rows of bottles, thinking, that person, that person is a writer. I am getting sentimental, I know, but it's true. I came here to be a writer, and I fucking did it. Here is a champagne toast to all of you, who've been reading all this time. Thank you.

Guillotine #4 Presale

I cannot even TELL YOU in the LANGUAGE OF WORDS how excited I am to be publishing Mimi Thi Nguyen and Golnar Nikpour's conversation on punk. No lie, friends, this chapbook is going to melt the fuck right off your face. You can preorder it now; it'll ship in mid-June. Use the discount code PUNKSNOTDEAD for $2 off your order between now and May 31. All the proceeds from the special edition will benefit the POC Zine Project's Race Riot! 2013 tour; more about that here. And if you are in New York City, you can come see Mimi in conversation with supergenius Jenny Zhang at the chapbook release party, hosted by WORD bookstore in Greenpoint. LOOK HOW AWESOME YOUR SUMMER IS ALREADY.

SHIPS JUNE 2013

Mimi Thi Nguyen and Golnar Nikpour






PUNK






32pp. Guillotine Series #4. June 2013.

"Punk is a moving target": Punk is an unwieldy object of study--because of fictions that circulate as truth, absences in archives and the questionable subject of recovery, and the passage of “minor” details into fields of knowledge. A conversation about the politics of methodology, and historiography, of subculture.

MIMI THI NGUYEN is an Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and the author of The Gift of Freedom. She has made zines since 1991, including Slander and the compilation zine Race Riot. Nguyen is a former Punk Planet columnist and a Maximum Rocknroll shitworker; she is also a frequent collaborator with Daniela Capistrano for the POC Zine Project.

GOLNAR NIKPOUR served as co-coordinator of Maximum Rocknroll between 2004 and 2007. She is also a founding editor of B|ta’arof, a magazine featuring art, literature, historiography, and cultural critique related to Iran and its diaspora. She was born in Tehran, Iran, and lives in New York City.

GUILLOTINE #4: SPECIAL EDITION

Includes a copy of PUNK and a limited-edition broadside print of PUNK IS A MOVING TARGET.

**All proceeds from the sale of the Special Edition will be donated to the POC Zine Project, whose mission is to make all zines by people of color easy to find, distribute and share. Donations will directly fund the 2013 Race Riot! Tour.

For the lady who has weathered the time I dropped out ...

For the lady who has weathered the time I dropped out of college and ran away with the circus, the time I lived in a truck, the time I wore a blanket to school, the time I thought showering was a tool of the hegemonic capitalist state, and a number of other times perhaps best left unmentioned with equal aplomb; and who taught me three of the greatest lessons ever: trust yourself, love your friends, and make your enemies live in holy terror of your wrath: Happy Mother's Day. I love you, Mom.

Here Are Some More Thoughts I Am Having About Myself

I am in that strange limbo between turning in a draft and waiting for my edits to come back, and I haven't quite figured out what to do with myself.

Last night I dreamed that I was still working for the literary agent, and I sent out a tweet, filled with misspellings, demanding that the authors who had submitted manuscripts to the agent tell me at once what their favorite books were, and I woke up in a terrible state of panic before remembering that I have not worked for the literary agent for some time now. I often wonder what people who are not trying to write books or make albums or embark on some other creative project do with their free time; I do not mean this at all in a patronizing way, but in a very literal one. Watch television? Read? Learn to make frittatas?

The other day I ate a brunch and then went to the park and looked up at the sky and did not think about anything, and fell asleep on the grass for awhile, and that was nice. I have been thinking about writing essays on various things I am currently displeased by (the state of Publishing; young adult book reviews; the Patriarchy; a terrible werewolf terrorists book I recently read in which a female character is raped at length in a basement for no reason; et cetera) but each time I try I write a single, very splendid sentence, and then look at it for a while, and then become exhausted by the thought of any further effort.

I have been reading a lot, though: I am reading Richard Panek's The 4% Universe for research, which is very entertaining (astronomers! even meaner to each other than writers, who knew), and I read Emily St. John Mandel's newest book The Lola Quartet, which is cool and lovely and subtle and marvelously written. Each of her books gets better and better. I read L.P. Hartley's The Go-Between, which is a book about a boy in which nothing happens and yet I loved every page of it. I am just about to start Brigitte Lozerec'h's book Sisters, which I am quite excited about, and I found an Amanda Hocking book about mermaids or something in the free pile at one of my freelance jobs. I am hoping for underwater sex. And I am EXTREMELY EXCITED for the pending release of Sara Gran's new Claire DeWitt book next month. (Have you read Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead? GO READ IT. GO GO GO.)

I turned off the comments so you can't actually tell me what you have been up to, but I hope your springs are all very productive and filled with good things, and nice things to eat and people who love you, and walks through the park or hiking in the mountains or skinny-dipping--I guess it is too early for skinny-dipping, maybe, but I'm getting a little homesick. If all goes well I will be out on the peninsula this summer thinking deep thoughts and writing my third book (how is this EVEN MY LIFE now, I need to send the universe a really big flower arrangement) and swimming in the ocean and maybe bicycling around and sleeping under the stars. But for now maybe I will blow off the term paper I am editing and go sit in the park again.

This and That

Last night I sent the second draft of my second book to my editor, and felt very pleased with myself, although it is always humbling to realize the extent to which one determinedly over-uses certain words.

I can see the great shimmering mass of the third book, suspended before me in the ether, in that lovely and glorious state when it is still unwritten and perfect and I have yet to begin the dispiriting labor of hacking my way towards it. For now I am just reading about dark matter and celestial navigation and the seafaring activities of the ancient Greeks and looking out the window in a thoughtful manner. Spring has come to New York in fits and starts and seems settled at last on sprung (if you will forgive me). Susan Miller says I will become engaged or depressingly broken up with on May 25; as I am not particularly interested in matrimony, I am uncertain what to make of this augury. After a long time of feeling as though I was at the bottom of a well it is nice to be out in the daylight again, looking around and making things.

If you are in New York please come visit me this Friday or Saturday at the CUNY Chapbook Festival, where I will be with Guillotine. Please also come see my very dear, wildly brilliant friends Bojan Louis and Kate Zambreno read at Melville House on May 8, and afterward I will ask them some Deeply Profound Questions I have not thought up yet but are sure to be Deeply Profound, and then maybe we will all paint banners and arm ourselves and march out into the night, demanding a better world than the one we have been given. Not totally likely, but you never know.

xxoo
sarah

Some Books I Have Been Reading Lately

Daphne Carr
Pretty Hate Machine
192pp. Continuum. 9780826427892

Daphne Carr's entry in Continuum's 33 1/3 series is a wickedly smart and tremendously insightful look at Trent Reznor's first studio album as Nine Inch Nails, Pretty Hate Machine. Carr's book contextualizes the ways in which Reznor's entire oeuvre became a vehicle for suburban angst and post-industrial Rust Belt disaffection, and her respect for the band's fans is as evident as her love of the band itself. (Or himself, I guess.) Carr combines biography, oral history, and music criticism to dissect what it is exactly that made NIN such a fucking great pop band.Even NIN's most ardent fans, the working-class white male Rust Belt fans whose oral histories make up the central section of the book, acknowledge there is something fundamentally adolescent about the band ("The lyrics aren't very good on paper," observes one subject of the oral history section; "...if you weren't familiar with the album, you would think some fourteen-year-old had written [them]"). But for all of Trent Reznor's palpable misogyny and dopey suburban-goth affectations of torment, he figured out how to translate directionless adolescent rage into the best dance party ever, and Daphne Carr's smart and often very funny (the chapter on the combined rise of Nine Inch Nails and Hot Topic alone is worth the price of admission) short book is both a fantastic piece of scholarship and a heartfelt but clear-eyed tribute to a band that is still one of my favorites.

Nicole J. Georges
Calling Dr. Laura
288pp. Mariner. 9780547615592

As a child, Nicole Georges was told that her father had died of colon cancer when she was a little girl. When she was twenty-three, a psychic told her that her father was very much alive. This wistful, funny, and well-drawn graphic memoir is the story of what happens next, covering coming out, crazy families, big and little secrets, lesbian processing, and the care and upkeep of urban chickens. Oh, and Dr. Laura Schlessinger.

Mimi Thi Nguyen
Slander
44pp.

It is not really a secret that Mimi Thi Nguyen is one of the smartest human beings alive, and everything she writes is so brilliant and insightful and well-thought-out and deeply grounded in both lived experience and an encyclopedic knowledge of critical theory. Slander #8 packs a tremendous punch in just a few pages, covering punk rock, punk studies, the death of Ronald Reagan, and what is very likely the greatest movie ever made, Times Square. Slander #8 also includes Golnar Nikpour's pointed and super-smart review of White Riot: Punks and the Politics of Race. Mimi Thi Nguyen is a writer whose work makes me glad to live in the world just to see what she'll write next.

Mia McKenzie
The Summer We Got Free
242pp. Black Girl Dangerous Press. 9780988628601

In the 1950s, Ava Delaney was a precocious, fiercely talented, and wild young girl; by the 1970s, she's a broken-hearted shell of her former self, forever altered by a violent event that tore apart her family. Trapped in her childhood home with her mother, her father, her husband, her sister, and the ghost of her twin brother, she is a woman indifferent to the world around her. And then one day her husband's estranged sister, Helena, shows up on her front porch, and her world changes again. McKenzie's prose is so rich it's almost edible, and her polyphonic narrative masterfully weaves together the present and the past to create a tapestry of a book that's unputdownable.

Imogen Binnie
Nevada
250pp. Topside Press. 9780983242239

Maria Griffiths is a young trans woman living in New York, internal-monologuing her way through a shitty retail job, a dead-end relationship, and her (often hilariously) punk ethos. When her girlfriend tells her over brunch that she's cheated on Maria, Maria's barely-held-together life falls apart completely, and so Maria steals her girlfriend's car and takes off on a cross-country bender. As one does. Maria is by turns hilarious and poignant, and her razor-sharp self-awareness keeps this sometimes deeply sad story from ever taking a turn for the maudlin. PLus: road trips, knuckle tattoos, car-hotboxing, and really excellent fashion.

Happy International Raistlin Majere Day!

As long-time readers and dedicated nerds are perhaps aware, today is International Raistlin Majere Day, a holiday dedicated to a personage one either loves wholeheartedly or has no idea exists. As a wildly pretentious, alienated, and deeply arrogant young person, I found much to admire in Raistlin, a character who is ambitious, self-centered, better than everyone at everything, and, when it really counts, deeply compassionate. What's not to love? In honor of everybody's favorite creepy time-conquering friend-betraying wizard (who, I might add, is the ORIGINAL sparkly paranormal super-powered hunk), here are some suggested activities for a day dedicated to his awesomeness.

1. Call in sick to work. Raistlin doesn't need a fucking job. Sit in the park and read the whole original trilogy back to back while drinking smelly tea and making terrible faces at children.

2. RED BATHROBE. OBVS. Or black one, if you want to go all Bad Raist.

3. Call your brother and ask him to forgive you.

4. Some dude harassing you on the street? Just be all like, "SHIRAK, MOTHERFUCKER," and throw a fireball at him.

5. Super important! Let us not forget that Raistlin was always kind to the disenfranchised and generous to people without power. I tell you what: I will give a signed advance copy of my book and an entire set of Guillotine chapbooks to the first person who donates over a hundred dollars to their local abortion access fund in the name of Raistlin Majere, I am not even a little bit joking, just email me your receipt. Otherwise just, like, tip your waiter extra and be really nice to people today, unless they oppose you, in which case send them to another dimension.

6. Just assume for a little while that you are better than everyone around you. It's not a great idea to do this, like, ALL the time? But it's pretty fun for an afternoon.

7. And of course, prepare for International Buy A Dragonlance Book Day on May second, which I totally did not make up and is a real thing. We want our Dragonlance books back! Right? Since you are here already, do me a favor and buy your Dragonlance books from your beloved local independent bookstore, okay?

Happy International Raistlin Majere Day, friends!

Yesterday

was very sunny, and today is sunnier still. The elderly gentleman who plays the erhu on the Q platform launched, briefly and unexpectedly, into a few bars of "Happy Birthday," although there was no one standing near him whose birthday it might have been. Even in the subway it feels like spring.

Last night I saw an old friend, who I met many years ago, very literally by the side of the road as I was bicycling down the Pacific coast. It is funny to spend time with people who knew you when you were a different person, and to think of all the different people you have been in the interim, and how all those people were only stops on the way to the person you are now, and how at some point in the future it is likely you will be a different person yet again. He looks much more like a grownup now than he did when I met him. Probably so do I. We walked around the East Village. The young people of that region had garbed themselves in hotpants, and scampered through the streets shrieking, as is their seasonal custom, although it is not yet warm.

The cat is rampageous with the ecstasies of spring and at night runs about the apartment, leaping from surface to surface. I bought her wheatgrass at the farmer's market but she disdains it, preferring to chew upon the houseplants instead. The cat, it is true, has only ever been the cat.