I swear to God I didn’t write it myself!

A new essay of mine, “Dutcher’s Notch,” has just gone up on the Threepenny Review’s website (it’s also in the Summer 2010 print issue, for those of you who still consent to handle paper). The essay’s not so new actually: I wrote it all the way back in 1999, but when I showed it to my agent she said that only someone who knew me would be interested in reading it. Her response was sharp enough that I buried it in my computer and didn’t look at it for more than a decade, until I stumbled over it while sorting through my uncollected nonfiction to see if I have enough material for a book (I do; but I’m not going to publish it for a while). Anyway, I reread the essay, liked it, showed it to a friend, who also liked it and encouraged me to send it out, sent it to Wendy Lesser at Threepenny, who has a habit of rejecting 50% of what I send her (but also of publishing 50% of what I send her), and got a one word response: “Yes!!!” (I might be exaggerating the number of exclamation points, but I’m 99% sure there was more than one.) And so anyway, here, eleven years later, is my attempt to sort out the relationship between my panic attacks and my creative process. Read, or not, as you will…

This is literally the first award I’ve won outright since I was a senior in high school. And that was a hella long time ago. Three cheers for Sprout!

This Thursday at 7 pm I’ll be reading as part of the Animal Farm series, which is held, appropriately, at Happy Ending, located at 302 Broome St. I haven’t decided fully decided what I’m reading yet, but it will be something unpublished, and I promise sex or violence, and quite possibly both. Full description below.

BE ADVISED:

THURSDAY, MAY 13 IS MORE ANIMAL FARM READING SERIES:

DALE PECK,
GABRIELLE ZEVIN,
SAM MUNSON,
DANIEL GUZMÁN

“All reading series are equal, but some reading series are more equal than others.”

In the spirit of that heroic leader of animals, Napoleon, in George Orwell’s novel, Animal Farm, the Animal Farm Reading Series is dedicated to the promotion of equality between writers—especially the most famous and respected writers.

Animal Farm is your destination for the newest and best writing with a satirical and/or critical sensibility. The series features literary fiction, genre fiction, nonfiction, and poetry—the important thing is that every writer’s work in some way or another derides, attacks, or quibbles with something external to itself.

In addition to new writing by great writers, every event at Animal Farm will also feature Field Reports. For the uninitiated: Field Reports are essays, written by accomplished writers, about other readings in New York’s readings scene that the writers have gone to see at some point.

Animal Farm is the second Thursday of every month at 8:00 pm. The location is Happy Ending, at 302 Broome St., between Forsyth St. and Eldridge St. The events are free.

ANIMAL FARM ANIMAL FARM ANIMAL FARM

On Thursday, May 13, authors Dale Peck, Gabrielle Zevin, and Sam Munson will read their work.

Daniel Guzmán and Patrick W. Gallagher will read Field Reports.

Daniel Guzmán’s stories have appeared in New York Press, L Magazine’s Literary Upstart series, Mama D’s Arts Bordello, Rosebud Magazine, and the Moth Storytelling Series. www.danielguzman.org

Patrick W. Gallagher is the Host of Animal Farm (HOAF). His stories and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Glasses Glasses, The Adirondack Review, The Battered Suitcase, PopMatters, Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, Wheelhouse, and elsewhere. He is a former managing editor of Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood and currently a contributing editor to Open City. Plus, Patrick is writing his PhD thesis in the department of Comparative Literature at NYU.

Sam Munson’s writing has appeared in the New York Times and the Times Literary Supplement, among other venues. He is the former Web Editor of Commentary magazine, and he graduated from the University of Chicago in 2003. Doubleday will publish his first novel, The November Criminals, in Spring 2010. Munson is also the grandson of Norman Podhoretz.

Gabrielle Zevin’s four novels have been translated into over twenty languages and received many honors. Her most recent book, The Hole We’re In, was a New York Times Editor’s Choice. She also wrote the screenplay for the movie Conversations with Other Women, for which she was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award.

In August, Dale Peck will publish Shift, the first volume of the Gate of Orpheus trilogy, which he co-authored with Tim Kring (a.k.a. “the Heroes guy”). It will be his tenth book. That’s a little misleading though—he’s actually written something like thirteen or fourteen. Some of them just weren’t good enough to be published. Although who knows, a lot of people, many of whom are employed by the New York Times Book Review or Dave Eggers, would say that the books he did publish weren’t so hot either. So there you go.

Peck’s also had stories and essays in most of the major magazines and newspapers—usually just one per venue, which might or might not mean something—but the New Yorker still hasn’t touched him. Ditto Harper’s. The Atlantic did publish him however. Twice, in fact. They even came back a third time—for a review of Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day if you can believe that—but Peck was so late with the piece that they finally stopped emailing, and anyway, it was just the Atlantic, which everyone knows isn’t even as good as Harper’s, let alone the New Yorker. And besides, you can always read the review on Peck’s website if you want to, which is pretty much the same as reading it on the Atlantic’s, the only difference being that you might experience the internet equivalent of watching a tumbleweed roll the length of a dusty street between rows of boarded-up buildings as you scroll down Peck’s beautifully designed but largely unvisited homepage, whereas with the Atlantic you get the sense that other people, mostly in Cambridge, MA, and Berkeley, are reading with you, although not as many as read Harper’s or the New Yorker, let alone something like, I don’t know, a truly literary magazine like Esquire, which publishes James Franco, or HTMLGIANT, which makes fun of Esquire for publishing James Franco.

So, uh, what else? He’s scored a couple of O. Henry Awards, a Pushcart, and all the way back in 1993 or 1994 he got a Guggenheim (the fact that his publisher’s mother’s maiden name was Guggenheim had nothing to do with this). This year he’s up for his third or fourth or maybe even fifth Lammy, which are the gay awards if you’ve never heard of them—the gay writing awards, as opposed to the awards for being gay, which is what GLAAD gives out—and anyway, you shouldn’t feel bad if you haven’t heard of them, since most of the stuff that gets nominated for a Lammy makes the stuff that appears in the Atlantic look better than the stuff in Harper’s, maybe even the New Yorker. And, too, Peck’s pretty sure he’s going to lose yet again, and to a former student no less.

So yeah: lots of books, lots of stories and essays, lots of unwon Lammies. “Lammie,” by the way, is the diminutive of Lambda, which is the Greek letter that looks a little bit like an upside down V (uppercase) or upside down y (lowercase) and is for some reason associated with homosexuality, even though neither version of the letter looks like a penis. Also by the way: the student who’s going to beat him, Nick Burd, whose novel The Vast Fields of Ordinary couldn’t even have been written without Peck’s help, came out of the New School’s Graduate Writing Program, where Peck has taught since 1999, which shows sticktoitiveness if nothing else. Alas, there aren’t any Lammies for that, although it will get you a job in the Catholic Church. More recently, Peck co-founded the Mischief and Mayhem writing collective with four other writers he’s not going to name here because he’s too lazy check the spelling of all their names—or who knows, maybe he just wants to hog the spotlight a little longer, although that’s a bit Quixotic, isn’t it, given that Mischief and Mayhem hasn’t actually done anything yet and, you know, this is the Animal Farm Reading Series, which isn’t exactly Happy Endings—and anyway, if you want to know their names you can always go to his website, where you can also read his review of Thomas Pynchon’s very, very, very long novel, Against the Day.

Please, go to his website. He paid a lot of money for it.

And so anyway, yeah, that’s pretty much Peck’s career, or at least the broad strokes. To recap: slapped by Stanley Crouch, photographed by Stephen Wright, had his Manhunt profile forwarded to Gawker—although you would only know the last thing if you were employed by Gawker Media, Inc., since a friend of Peck’s who worked there at the time kept it out of general circulation. Come to think of it, you might also know it if you were the douchebag who forwarded his profile to Gawker in the first place, in which case: get a life, dude. Really. For the record, though, Peck wouldn’t have minded too much if Gawker had posted his profile, since he didn’t have any naked pictures on that particular site, let alone anything like Andrew Sullivan’s “big hairy thighs squatting 8 plates” on barebackcity.com, and plus Manhunt brought Lou Peralta into his life, who as of January 30th is his (Peck’s, not Sullivan’s) legal husband in five states and the District of Columbia. Peck would tell the other forty-five states (and Puerto Rico, and Guam) to go fuck themselves, but some of them are nice places to go for vacation. Especially Puerto Rico, which is probably why the US stole it from Spain in the first place.

My friend Guillermo got a review in the Times for his very first show. Way to go, GZ. Apparently you couldn’t've done it without me…

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/22/fashion/22ROW.html?ref=fashion

If you’re in New York City, you should check out my friend Guillermo’s show, which opens tonight at the Milk Gallery in Chelsea…yours truly wrote the exhibition essay, which I’ve included below the invite.

Nature can still astound us. Who knows, maybe it’s the only thing that can genuinely astound us in an age of global spectacle, of exhibitionism, voyeurism, and an ever-growing disconnect between images and the things they depict. Usually we associate that awe with upheaval and destruction rather than peace or wonder: a tsunami in the south Pacific, a hurricane over New Orleans, an earthquake underneath Haiti. Every day we awaken to fresh images of a world consuming itself—although, tellingly, what we think of as being destoyed is not the natural world, but our world. Bodies washed out to sea, buildings crushed or flooded, the fester of disease and death that follows any major calamity. The counterpoint, of course, is the incredible havoc—revenge?—humanity wreaks on the environment, be it the desertification of north Africa or the deforestation of Amazonia, the destruction of the Great Barrier Reef or the ever-increasing extinction of entire species. For all its vastness and power, the world we live in is also extraordinarily fragile, delicate even, and few things symbolize this delicacy more than the butterfly, its brilliantly colored wings as translucent as stained glass, its body so light that a fluff of breeze buffets it about like a raft shooting whitewater rapids.

Yet this ethereality, like so much else in our understanding of the world, is, if not an illusion, then more complicated than appearances would seem to indicate. This is especially true for the king of North American butterflies, the Monarch—so named, according to entomologist Samuel Scudder, because it “rules a vast domain.” Vast indeed: each year the Monarch fans out from a few concentrated winter refuges in the Pacific Southwest and Mexico to blanket the entire United States and southern Canada. The longest of these migrations reaches from the Oyamel forests in the Mexican states of Michoacán and Mexico to Ontario and Manitoba and back again, a five-thousand-mile journey that spans the life of four or five generations, and whose navigation remains a mystery to modern science. Once back in Mexico, millions of Monarchs shroud the sacred firs in jewel-toned Rastafarian beards, waiting out the winter in a remarkable state known as diapause. Unlike hibernating bats and bears, whose metabolic processes actually slow down while they sleep through the cold months, diapausal animals remain active: they eat, they sleep, they fly. They just don’t age. Though most Monarchs live barely two months, those born at the end of summer can live seven, eight, nine months, a Methusalan generation awaiting the return of warm weather to head north again, and breed, and die.

These are the butterflies Guillermo de Zamacona has captured in Project: Monarch—animate yet living in a state of suspended animation, which condition is mimicked by the camera’s habit of snatching moments out of time. In some ways, the thousands of butterflies that flap and waft their way through these images are no more significant than a single one—there’s nothing transformative in their accumulation, as when millions of raindrops gather into a flash flood or the spark from a lightning strike erupts into a forest fire; nor do they build something through collective labor, an ants’ nest or beehive. Rather, each of these butterflies is as important as any other, such that a thousand instances of incandescent beauty are captured in every one of Zamacona’s photographs. It’s only fitting, then, that the human portion of the pictures be equally beautiful: if you’re going to gild the lily, after all, you might as well do it with 24-karat gold. Indeed, calling them pictures of butterflies is a bit misleading, since they’re actually pictures of people in which hundreds (or hundreds of thousands) of butterflies just happen to be visible. Nature’s bounty is juxtaposed with human beauty—models, couture, styling, an acrobat’s flip or Catholic iconography—not exactly in competition with each other, but not quite symbiosis either. Rather, like the flight of the butterflies themselves, the delicate balance created in these images is transitory, an intersection between nature and culture, past and future, that captivates us yet refuses, both literally and metaphorically, to cohere into a fixed shape before it’s gone. The only constant isn’t visual but rather aural, namely, the omnipresent sussuration of the butterflies’ wings, which fills the air like leaves rustling in a breeze or water spilling down the side of a mountain or murmuring voices heard through a wall, speaking a language we don’t understand. The human imagination tends to monumental acts, but it can never be bigger than the world that made us. But sometimes it can make the world a little bigger, and when that happens there’s more room for all of us to live.

Check it out in Bookforum.

Cool writer, sometime acquaintance, and friend of Mischief and Mayhem Pagan Kennedy has just launched a new website on bookfuturists, or bookfuturism, or the future of the book (and people who read them) that looks like it could turn into something really interesting. Check it out at www.writer2point0.com.

I just finished an interview with the ACT UP Oral History Project. I’m embarrassed to admit that I was unaware of the project before Sarah Schulman asked me to participate in it, but, having seen it, I wanted to take a moment to say what an important endeavor I think it is. This is a moment in history that few poeple under thirty remember, let alone understand the importance of. Because of ACT UP, hundreds of thousands if not millions of people are alive today who wouldn’t be otherwise. I could go on and on about how important ACT UP was, to me and to the world, but in this case I don’t have to, since it’s all there online. Take a moment to check it out.