NINA MACLAUGHLIN

Ghost writer

NINA MACLAUGHLIN — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 04:55:20 GMT

The haunted world of Kelly Link
Salted throughout Kelly Link’s stories, you’ll find Buffy , Bust , Doc Martens, IM-ing, Target, Google, Vicks VapoRub, a T-shirt that reads I’M SO GOTH I SHIT TINY VAMPIRES.

FUNNY AND DARK: Aliens, young love, magic, and summer camp — all are grist for Kelly Link’s mill.

Salted throughout Kelly Link’s stories, you’ll find Buffy, Bust, Doc Martens, IM-ing, Target, Google, Vicks VapoRub, a T-shirt that reads I’M SO GOTH I SHIT TINY VAMPIRES. But while Link is not an author who shies away from referencing pop- and commercial-culture, nor is she some glib chronicler of the right-now. Her work — realm-straddling blends of fantasy, science fiction, fairy tale, and capital-L literature — possesses a mythic quality. She’s the rare writer who’s able to mix these of-the-moment items, products, and activities with the eternal, the timeless: quests, coming of age, entering a new world, death, and the day-to-day mysteries of being human.

“I am very, very fond of the kinds of fiction that get sort of stuck off in their own separate pens,” says Link over a smoothie on a sunny September morning this past week at Back Bay’s Trident Café, across the street from her now-shuttered former employer, Avenue Victor Hugo Bookshop. “There’s an energy there, and you’re able to break rules in more interesting ways.”

As author of acclaimed short-story collections Stranger Things Happen, Magic for Beginners, and, most recently, Pretty Monsters, Link has the ability to pull readers into her universe, and make them believe, even if only for a moment, in ghosts and zombies and haunted hats, in world-holding handbags, underworld visits, alien abductions, sinister rabbits, young love, and magic.

Writing the fantastic has long appealed to her. “The stories I wrote beginning in college” — she went to Columbia — “have always been stories that had ghosts in them, or gods, or stories that I thought of as fantasy or science fiction, and had elements in them that I felt did not belong with realistic or mimetic fiction. I wanted my fiction to read like mimetic fiction” — capturing the texture of real life — “but I wanted to be able to incorporate all the stuff that I really love as a reader.” In other words, her intent is to create stories that hold a mirror up to the world that we know, as well as toss in some fantastic special effects.

Salon’s Laura Miller, an early and ardent champion of Link’s, claims that Link has a voice unlike any writer she can think of. “She’s fearless about incorporating things that writers at that high level of artistry might be fearful of, like pop-culture, like genre,” says Miller over the phone from New York. “She refuses to see the need to corral that stuff off into a sub-literary area. All of it is grist for her mill.”

Literary import

NINA MACLAUGHLIN — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 03:42:28 GMT

Ploughshares lands a new editor
One of the first things Ladette Randolph tells me is that she’s a fifth-generation Nebraskan, that her great-great grandparents settled there, that the landscape there, particularly in the western part of the state, where her novel is set, is “like being in the middle of the ocean — that kind of erasure.”

Horse Feathers | House With No Home

NINA MACLAUGHLIN — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 23:24:01 GMT

Kill Rock Stars (2008)
It’s not a sad album, but it is mournful, in the hushed and satisfying way that Sunday afternoons in November can be.

David Foster Wallace — 1962–2008

NINA MACLAUGHLIN — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 19:42:03 GMT

Overhead baggage
A story called “Forever Overhead” by David Foster Wallace appeared in the 1992 edition of Best American Short Stories .

A story called “Forever Overhead” by David Foster Wallace appeared in the 1992 edition of Best American Short Stories. It’s told in the second person; the “you” is a boy on his 13th birthday; and the whole of the story takes place in the time it takes the boy to walk along a pool, climb up the high-dive ladder, and stand at the edge of the board. It's a story that made me want to be a writer. Underneath the crystalline imagery and the perfectly captured adolescence, a subtle sense of terror presents itself. Thirteen, on the symbolic precipice of adulthood, the boy, on the diving board, faces the abyss — to leap is to disappear.

Four years ago, about the time DFW’s short-story collection Oblivion came out, I revisited the 1992 anthology, and read DFW’s author statement at the back of the book. “I’m not all that crazy about this story,” he wrote. To him, it “seemed the product of a young writer who was straining to make a personal trauma sound way deeper and prettier and Big than anything true could ever really be.”

DFW, who hanged himself this past Friday in California, possessed a brain that was crowded with doubt — about his own ability, sure, and in the larger sense, the ability of any of us to adequately express anything.

But when it comes to expressing, DFW is unmatched in his ability to project images on the front of a reader’s brain; he makes the reader see and feel with such clarity, such precision. In his piece on tennis star Roger Federer, the game is so viscerally rendered, you hear the pop of the ball off the racket, feel the muscles between your own shoulders tense in anticipation of the next swing.

Best known for his magnum opus Infinite Jest, DFW was oft lauded for being funny. But his great strength was not provoking laughs; it was provoking horror.

And not horror born of disgust or repulsion at the gruesome or monstrous (though there’s some of that). More so, he evoked the low-grade panic, the twitchy boredom, the unbearable tedium of what he referred to in his 2005 commencement address to Kenyon College as the “day-to-day trenches of adult experience.” In “The Soul Is Not a Smithy,” from Oblivion, a child has nightmares “about the reality of adult life,” the type of nightmare “whose terror is less about what you see than about the feeling you have in your lower chest about what you’re seeing.” An apt description of the way it feels to read DFW’s work.

Hoot and challah

NINA MACLAUGHLIN — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 14:24:52 GMT

Silver Jews, Middle East Downstairs, September 5, 2008
Watching Berman on stage, you couldn’t be sure. Is he into it? Does he like this?

Love us, don't leave us

NINA MACLAUGHLIN — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 20:47:23 GMT

Advice from sadder but wiser Bostonians
Let’s skip the sugarcoating. Boston can be a tricky place.

Let’s skip the sugarcoating. Boston can be a tricky place. We’re a grouchy lot, set in our ways. Our winters are cold, our bars close too early, our rents are too high, and the chip we wear on our shoulder turns us into grizzled provincial hunchbacks. But before you hop a bus back to mom and pop in Dallas or Trenton or Butte, please know, it’s not all bitching and bitterness. In fact, what you’ll find here — if you let it, and you should — is that Boston provokes a singular sense of loyalty.

Over time, slowly, it will burrow beneath your skin, lodge itself in your heart and head. As you shotgun beers in sweaty Allston hovels. As you feel the heady press of humanity riding on the Green Line. As you cross the Mass Ave bridge, on foot or bike, and your heart swells to see Boston rise above the river in all its grace and majesty. If it doesn’t happen right away, don’t fret. You’ve got a lot to learn; Boston’s got a lot to teach you. And lucky for you, wide-eyed younglings, freshmen and -women, we’ve been wandering this city for a while. Below, staffers here discuss some of the things they wish they’d known about Boston, and offer tips on how to get the most out of this place, your new home.

Pedal pushing
I wish that someone had told me sooner to get a bike, and ride it everywhere, even in the winter. Sure, narrow streets and aggressive drivers abound, and pedaling around the place is frightening at first. But what you’ll quickly learn is that pretty much anywhere you want to go is easy to get to by bike. Cambridge to Allston? Fifteen-minute ride. Newbury Street to South Boston? Twelve minutes. And there’s the added bonus that you can always park right in front of wherever you’re going. No longer will I sacrifice hours of my life searching for the only two visitor parking spots that exist in the North End. And you don’t need to go to the gym because it’s a workout just getting to and from where you want to go. Take that, freshman 15!
— Caitlin E. Curran

Can the Natty Ice and know your local brews
There may not be more breweries per capita in Boston than in any other American city, but the ones we do have are truly world-class. So here’s some advice: drink well.

Out of this world

NINA MACLAUGHLIN — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 16:00:56 GMT

Benjamin Rosenbaum’s The Ant King
The worlds Rosenbaum creates feel less like a separate or “alternate” reality and more like a colorful, if complicated, extension of the one we know.

PLAUSIBLE: An abundance of sensual detail grounds Rosenbaum’s alien tales in the familiar.

The Ant King and Other Stories | By Benjamin Rosenbaum | Small Beer Press | 234 pages | $24

You could file Benjamin Rosenbaum’s debut collection of genre-blurring short stories under a number of categories: speculative or science fiction, fantasy, fairy tale, surrealism, irrealism, slipstream, postmodern parables. But the description that proves most accurate comes from one of Rosenbaum’s own stories: plausible fabulism. Put out by Small Beer Press in Western Mass, The Ant King and Other Stories zips along in a way that is lively, bizarre, and funny as well as dark, sinister, and sensual. Comparisons with Kelly Link and Aimee Bender are natural; there are also glimmers of Barthes, Barthelme, and Calvino — and, of course, a fleet of science-fiction writers.

Rosenbaum sent his first story to the New Yorker at age 13. He quit writing as a sophomore at Brown, where he pursued computer programming and religious studies, became a programmer, and then started writing again at 27. His dual university pursuits dance throughout the collection.

In the title story — a corporate-culture send-up and classic rescue quest, with echoes of Orpheus and Eurydice and on-line gaming geekdom — a character named Vampire spouts code-toadery: “What do you know about NetBSD 2.5 routing across multiple DNS servers?” In “Embracing-the-New,” there’s a sense of mythmaking. “How can the Godless really be godless,” asks an apprentice idol carver. “For without a god, a person would just be a shifting collection of memories.”

And though these stories are populated by wish-granting hedgehogs, a world-ruling piece of fruit, and a pack of kids out real-estate shopping, the worlds Rosenbaum creates feel less like a separate or “alternate” reality and more like a colorful, if complicated, extension of the one we know. There’s a sensuality that helps ground us in the otherwise alien scenarios. From “The Valley of Giants”: “The giants whisper and hum, placing their great soft lips against your belly, your back. They stroke your hair, and their fingers, as big as plates, are so delicate. . . . The giant women feed you from their breasts. . . . The milk is sweet and rich like crème brûlée.” In “Orphans,” a woman falls in love with an elephant. “He would hold me to his chest, and I would be bathed in the deep smell of him, wild and rich.” In “Red Leather Tassels,” a woman whose husband is eyeing another woman has sex with an ancient woodpecker. “George’s wife felt a pleasant, feathery tickling.”

Parlor salon

NINA MACLAUGHLIN — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 20:40:13 GMT

Spreading the words in Salem

Exte: Hair Extensions

NINA MACLAUGHLIN — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 18:31:30 GMT

Creepy and bizarro hair-raising horror
The film rises above satire with chilling and deftly shot set pieces of hair strangling, flinging, and burying its victims.

My Father My Lord

NINA MACLAUGHLIN — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 15:50:55 GMT

Hushed, dun-colored, and beautifully shot
Volach overdoes the quoting from the Torah, but the intimacy of each shot and the quiet force from each character elevate the film to the level of parable.

Confessions of an editor

NINA MACLAUGHLIN — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 20:07:16 GMT

DeWitt Henry's candid new collection of essays meditates on manhood
There’s a quiet courage in these essays, and a revelatory sense of the continuing challenge of pressing on.

In Safe Suicide, an assemblage of revealing, interrelated essays, DeWitt Henry — Emerson professor, writer, and founding editor and longtime guiding creative force behind literary magazine Ploughshares — offers up to us his world, honest and intimate. The essays concern his family life growing up in the Philadelphia suburbs (sexually charged; alcoholic father looming); his marriage and struggles over his own possible parenthood (questions of sacrifice as well as his readiness, willingness, and even ability to be a father); the birth, adoption, and raising of his two children; the genesis and development of Ploughshares and the literary scene in Boston from the seventies onward; plus, thwarted ambition, marathon training, fatherhood, friendship, and the lifelong challenge of how and where to focus and divide your passions. Taken together, the essays become an extended — and elegant — meditation on manhood.

Henry’s candor in writing about his childhood and adolescence can be disarming — is he actually telling us this? In “Subversions,” the strongest piece in the collection, Henry recalls himself as an eleven-year-old when his mother asks him to please rub Ben-Gay on her aching back. “She tells me harder, more, and I feel queasy, and even angry, rubbing as high as under her brassiere strap and as low, at her insistence, as the top of her buttocks and buttocks crevice.” We’re squeamish with him, cringey, discomforted. Later in that same essay, he reveals that as a 13-year-old, toeing the threshold of sex, he asked his 20-year-old sister if he might see her naked. A bold request. Bolder still: she obliges, in the fullest possible way, “showing me more than I had understanding to see.” Henry’s writing is confessional, yes, but these episodes don’t feel designed to shock. More so, they’re an acknowledgement of the strange, strained intimacies we share.

Henry takes a more guarded, distanced approach in describing his father, a recovering alcoholic, “perpetually brooding, silent and withdrawn.” The overriding attribute ascribed to him is of impotence, “of utter flaccidity.” It’s a motif (and a condition) that will echo in Henry’s life as well. In “Arrivals,” another highlight — which, paired with “Subversions” carries much of the emotional ballast of the collection — Henry parallels his reluctance over starting a family (“just a little longer”) and eventual acceptance (due in part to advice from writer Richard Yates: “Think of the girl”) with the beginnings of his literary life and the founding of Ploughshares. His exhilaration and pride, over his new daughter and the literary magazine, are richly felt. But infertility, of body and mind, will afflict and nearly cripple him. It takes balls to admit that your novel gets repeatedly rejected, that you can’t make your wife pregnant. And here again, Henry’s candor gives access to great depths of frustration and fear.

A Jihad for Love

NINA MACLAUGHLIN — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 15:33:26 GMT

Potent subject matter overshadowed by special effects
Homosexuality is illegal and highly punishable in the Muslim world (being stoned to death is a possibility); the faces of many of Sharma’s subjects are blurred to conceal their identity.

Bigger, Stronger, Faster*

NINA MACLAUGHLIN — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 17:22:27 GMT

Steroids and a culture of competition
The film, both informative and poignant, is peopled with a cross-section of users, experts, politicians, pro athletes, and gym rats with melon-sized biceps.

Refusenik

NINA MACLAUGHLIN — Wed, 28 May 2008 22:16:58 GMT

Potent but trudging
As one activist says, “It’s the naïveté of young people that can change history.”

Obama bicycle cycle

NINA MACLAUGHLIN — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 18:08:22 GMT

Mat Honan will start your new online fad
In case you haven’t already heard, Barack Obama is your new bicycle.

In case you haven’t already heard, Barack Obama is your new bicycle. He also came to see your play, thought you could use some chocolate, fixed your car, wrote on your FunWall, remembered your birthday, built you a robot, and helped you move a sofa. So it is according to the Web site barackobamaisyournewbicycle.com, a campaign 2008 meme if ever there was, featuring about 40 phrases in simple, all-caps purple letters describing acts of benevolence and caring carried out by your close personal friend Barack Obama.

But what’s this about? A pro-Obama celebration? An argument for Obama as our ultimate wish-fulfiller, our new best friend? He’d unify the country and pick us up at the airport! He’d end the war in Iraq and laugh at our jokes!

Or is it a skewering of Barack fervor — a comment on the naïveté behind the feeling that he’s the vessel in which to pour our hopes? Turns out, none of the above, at least as intended by Mat Honan, a 35-year-old freelance writer and contributing editor for Wired, who created the site — which has had more than 2.3 million page views since it went live on February 13 — as a private joke with his wife.

“She’s a fanatic cyclist,” Honan explains over the phone from San Francisco. “It’s her main topic of conversation.” But then his wife got into the Obama campaign — she makes calls, gives money, held signs on Super Tuesday — and “now that’s what she talks about all the time.” Thus he kidded with her on a Saturday afternoon: Barack Obama is your new bicycle.

“I can’t tell you what people like about it,” says Honan, who admits to being an Obama supporter, though a less ardent one than his wife. “People have read it both ways,” he says. “Most see it as an Obama supporter site. But a lot of other people see it as a criticism. I didn’t intend it as either.”

In part, says Honan, he wanted to “make a joke about how passionate people are about him. Basically, I was just trying to make a toy that you click on and it would say funny things.”

The “. . . is your new bicycle” trope took off, and there’s since been knockoffs for John McCain (“. . . is not going anywhere”), Michelle Obama (“. . . unfroze you in freeze tag”), Ron Paul (“. . . glanced at your daughter’s chest”), and Hillary Clinton, whose taglines are perhaps most telling about the state of her campaign: “. . . hates This American Life,” “. . . is overusing emoticons,” “. . . owns a Zune,” “. . . secretly hates your new haircut,” “. . . left the dishes in the sink,” and “. . . is using your deodorant as an art supply.” Then there’s the ridiculously meta isyournewbicycle.com: “The ‘. . . is your new bicycle’ meme made an ASCII portrait of you”; “The ‘. . . is your new bicycle’ meme can has your cheezburger.”

Renewal

NINA MACLAUGHLIN — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 18:02:42 GMT

Religious groups and the environment
They avoid religious cheerleading and tree-huggery; instead, their film demonstrates that when it comes to keeping the earth from getting wrecked beyond repair, it isn’t a matter of us versus them.

Academy Award Nominated Shorts 2007

NINA MACLAUGHLIN — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 18:45:14 GMT

Unchallenging and underwhelming
“Madame Tutli-Putli,” about a woman on a nightmarish night train, has the look of an animated Egon Schiele drawing.

Doodle bugs

NINA MACLAUGHLIN — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 18:24:23 GMT

Brushes with greatness
Every teen mag worth its weight in heartthrobs can tell you what your notebook doodlings reveal about your personality.

Note By Note: The Making of Steinway L1037

NINA MACLAUGHLIN — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 16:55:43 GMT

Loving, but tedious
Tuners with perfect pitch tighten and loosen strings for hours by ear.

Prison professor

NINA MACLAUGHLIN — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 18:00:47 GMT

A literary prize that really helps
There are lots of small presses. Dzanc Books, based near Detroit, is one of them, but it’s not like the rest.