Can You Feel It?
Positive reactions bleed good feelings, right? But some days it’s a struggle just to stay positive. One way we keep the serotonin flowing is to think about our dog (seriously), and how happy he gets when we give him positive reinforcement. That said, today we have positive reviews and negative reviews, which will make some writers happy and other writers unhappy. Just like opinions, everybody has a memoir, including Patti Smith. Paul Constant has a couple of words for The Kingdom of Ohio, there’s a look at Rachel Sherman’s debut and a look at William Styron’s finale. Somewhere after the first but before the last comes a review of Mavis Gallant’s early stories. In other optimistic/pessimistic news, Paige Williams and Dolly Freed fall off, and then climb back on the grid. And finally, if mid-January does have you feeling glum, remember Judi Charmberlin. She spent her life fighting the blues and then turned her experiences into a book. Read it and be happy. – Andrew Geer
– When Patti Smith first began to release albums in the late 1970s, she seemed to have magically eluded all of the shackles imposed on women in the rock ‘n’ roll world. She was neither angelic muse nor bad-girl sexpot, a tomboy willing to be photographed in a pale peach slip, flashing a patch of unshaven armpit hair that shocked the record-store boys I knew more than just about anything any girl had ever done. Rumors went around that she claimed to masturbate to photographs of herself, a concept that baffled me; I was so naive I didn’t understand yet that people (i.e., men) masturbated to photographs, and the idea of being sufficiently aroused by one’s own image to do so was unfathomable. — Patti Smith in Salon
Mr. Constant Said To Mr. Flaming
– On Saturday, I wrote about an author named Matthew Flaming. Flaming was at Third Place Books, reading from his debut novel, The Kingdom of Ohio. I apologized for not having read the book yet. “I wish I had read Ohio in time for this reading,” I said, adding, “It looks like something amazing. I’m sorry I didn’t get to this book before this event.” — The Kingdom of Ohio in The Stranger
– In her first novel, Living Room, Rachel Sherman singles out the most repulsive of her characters’ experiences: diarrhea, oral sex on a flaccid old penis, suicide flashbacks, screaming matches, and alcohol poisoning. These are experiences which could mark a book as gritty or realistic, but because the characters living them feel unexplored, the ugliness reads as false and gratuitous. — Rachel Sherman in The Brooklyn Rail
– The late William Styron produced epic, often controversial novels that ambitiously explored themes of family dysfunction, race, sexuality, and madness. Styron’s critically acclaimed 1951 debut, “Lie Down in Darkness,’’ looks at a vulnerable young woman and her troubled Southern family. “The Confessions of Nat Turner’’ won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1968, but also triggered a sizable backlash for its portrayal of the aggressive sexuality of a black man directed toward a white woman. — The Suicide Run in The Boston Globe
Early And Uncollected Flying
– People who like short stories love Mavis Gallant. For nearly 60 years she has produced controlled, sharp-witted observations on the 20th-century diaspora of the rootless and the disconnected. This volume of “early and uncollected” stories brings together many that have hitherto only appeared in The New Yorker, Gallant’s platform since 1951. It concludes with a 1971 novella, “The Burgundy Weekend”. — Mavis Gallant in Telegraph
– In 1978, at age eighteen, she wrote Possum Living, a frugal-living book that made her briefly famous amid an infamous economy. Then she went off the grid in the most unexpected of ways—she went mainstream. Now Dolly—and her book—are back. — Dolly Freed in Paige Williams
– Judi Chamberlin, who died this weekend at age 65, was a civil rights hero from a civil rights movement you may have never heard of. She took her inspiration from the heroes of other civil rights movements to start something she liked to call Mad Pride — a movement for the rights and dignity of people with mental illness. — Judi Chamberlin in NPR
Video: William Styron on Charlie Rose
