Recovery (Electric Literatures Recommended Reading Book 4)

In some ways this was actually better than having Mr. Keitel physically on the premises. He bought roach stuff and a gasket at a hardware store that had probably been there since He bought a bucket, dry plaster, and a trowel.

10 Books You Can Read in One Commute

He bought an item of signage indicating that sanitary products should be disposed of in the receptacle provided, and a receptacle. La dolce vita was on at the Angelika!!!!!!!!!!!!!! He had some time to kill, and while killing time he passed a bookstore, just walking down the street, and in the window was a collection of essays by John Cage!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Which in future he could read over his pancakes in a place where, at any moment, Harvey Keitel might walk in. After the film he got to talking to some dudes in the lobby, who invited him back to a party in their loft on Canal Street. In no time at all he was doing lines of cocaine with three investment bankers!!!!!!! Which was exactly why it was worth waiting to see La dolce vita in New York. At the age of 12 Gil had decided not to experiment with drugs, he wanted his first cocaine to be special, he wanted to try cocaine for the first time in New York, and it was definitely worth the wait.

Because now, see, it was part of this whole experience of dressing like Bret Easton Ellis [6] , seeing La dolce vita for the first time and going back to a loft to get high with three dudes from Morgan Stanley. Gil started talking to a girl called Loopy Margaux, who said her dad had left his old job and gone to work for a hedge fund because it was less stressful. Gil explained about the dudes upstairs and about the treehouse and such. With coke-fueled eloquence he elaborated on the sound system he had installed in his treehouse. I should introduce you to my dad.

If he took the business elsewhere word would get out and he would be ostracized. But if one of my friends came over it would be okay. Plus the offer of two tickets to Lohengrin in return for fixing more minor stuff another dude was temporarily unable to pay to get fixed. Plus other prepaid entertainment opportunities too numerous to mention. Dude B Steve said the dudes were thinking at this point they might be actually better off if they just went open source.

If they went open source they would be dealing exclusively with their fellow hackers, and it would be fun. There was friction among the dudes, because Steve was a Perl guru, whereas Dave was a total Pythonhead not that Dave could not grok Perl or Steve Python, it was the philosophical issues underlying white space , but at least it was a relationship of mutual respect [7]. Recently Dave had presented the software, which had some powerful mojo under the hood, to investors. The display had yet to be finalized, it was just this black-and-white thing.

But all the investors could talk about was the display. So I started doing Gantt charts in Excel.

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• Short reads you can finish in an hour or two;
• Go North, Young Lady: Reflections on Letting Go of the Past and Moving Forward.
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• “Recovery” by Helen DeWitt – Electric Literature;
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A single brilliant idea occurred to the triumvirate. As things stand, using Dave for presentations, they are losing a minimum of one-third of their brainpower to fundraising crap. Instead of having three geniuses at work on the actual development they have two, and the work of those two is being delayed, in many cases, because they do not have stuff that Dave should have been developing. In the short term they will not have to pay him a salary.

One with, you might think, little to recommend it at the worst time in history for an internet flotation. Little to recommend it, at least, to a man with solid treehouse customization skills. Gil, though, as it happened, though, had spent his teens fine-tuning his business plan, first just using Excel, then enhancing with a dashboard constructed in MicroCharts [8] , and he had also spent countless happy hours playing around with R, an open source statistical graphics package.

Then, as a senior at the University of Iowa [9] , he had picked up a free academic license for Inference for R, a plug-in for Word and Excel which enables the user to insert R code and graphics directly into Word, or, as it might be, Excel. You set up your dataframe in R, you attach it to your document in Word or Excel, and hey presto! Or, as it might be, Excel! But, just before leaving home Gil had gotten an e-letter announcing an upgrade, such that Inference could now be used with PowerPoint.

Now, anyway, here was a chance to actually try out Inference in PowerPoint, with Lattice plots, in a legitimate business activity! And it was only his third day in New York! He talked to some dudes who were studying film at NYU and had just won a prize for a short at Sundance. He went to fourteen galleries on 11th Street, four of which were having vernissages that very night. He met a transvestite who had unresolved plumbing issues.

On his sixth day he met Mr. Margaux, who said his sound system had a mind of its own, with an IQ of about There seemed to be no tactful way to say that he had better speakers in his treehouse. His treehouse, admittedly, did not have a triptych by Francis Bacon, a Rauschenberg, a Jackson Pollock, and four flags by Jasper Johns. He mentioned, shyly, the thing uppermost in his mind, the amazing Inference in Powerpoint presentation on which he had been working for the past four days, and Mr.

A New Short Story by Helen DeWitt Recommended by Sheila Heti

Gil walked back down the island through Central Park. A troop of men on fixed-wheel bikes sped past. Pedestrians told them to fuck off. On his seventh day in New York Loopy Margaux had scary news. She had decided to move to Berlin. Loops was 26 years old and had nothing to show for it. She was throwing her life away to keep a roof over her shoe collection. This was the gist. What have I been thinking? If Loopy had explained that she had just tried cannibalism, and that human flesh actually tasted better than pork, this he could have coped with, because cannibalism, this is something that you can imagine a New Yorker, not any New Yorker but some kind of New Yorker, doing.

Or if she had confessed to a string of serial killings. But moving to Berlin? And the whole shoe stockpiling thing, the point is, this is a very New York thing to do. Loops was saying she had sacrificed her goals, her dreams, everything she ever wanted to achieve, just to live in the City. This sounded totally reasonable to Gil, who did not really care whether he ended up being a bartender, waiter, short order cook, or homeless dude living out of a shopping cart as long as he could stay in New York [12] , but Loops made it sound like some kind of indictment. Gil went back to the loft in Dumbo.

Brooklyn was already starting to feel like exile. At some point he was going to have to break the bad news to Benny, namely that another dude must be found who had not read the Automatika series as a kid. When he got in there was no sign of Benny. I had to come into town on business. Gil had heard so much about Mr. Not a flamethrower in sight. Gil said something polite. He wanted to try something new for his PowerPoint presentation. He took out the Sony Vaio and was soon deep in thought. Gil explained the MicroCharts backstory, he explained about R and Bill Cleveland and Deepayan Sarkar and Hadley Wickham, and as he explained he did, in fact, generate a plot in Inference for R using ggplot2.

Gil remembered his chagrin at the belated release of Inference for R with PowerPoint interface. He could totally empathize. If they ever make the movie this kind of thing would be perfect for the Automatika machine. What is there about the concept that is hard to grasp? They want me to get it notarized. He extended a longfingered, largeknuckled hand and gently stroked the glossy metal. I was trying to think of something fun for the new Automatika book. This looks like something kids would get a kick out of. Maybe I can do some actual work for a change. Have you ever wondered whether the Church of Scientology might be behind it?

It would explain so much. Gil went back to tinkering with ggplot2. When he looked up five hours later Mr. Bergsma was at the far end of the loft, typing morosely into an antiquated IBM Thinkpad. Gil went out to the kitchen for a cold Sam Adams. The contract was in the trash.

He took it out. He started looking through the clauses, and for sure the contract went on a long time. Margaux, who turned out to be the woman with electrocution issues. High to Low Avg. White Dialogues Sep 17, Available for download now. Only 7 left in stock more on the way. That's Not a Feeling: A Novel Oct 02, Only 5 left in stock - order soon. Available for immediate download. Homes , Halimah Marcus. Provide feedback about this page. There's a problem loading this menu right now. Get fast, free shipping with Amazon Prime.

Get to Know Us. We got home too late for more than a slice so I ate it for breakfast, day after. Dwarf iris, dog violet now drenched or frosted on lawns all over. Storms outside on my dream roof, red tin. Say I reached the horizon of happiness: Your medallion, aureate under my clothes. Have all my indoors: One trouble becomes another, or holds. The house opens, closes, keeps roses and oven smells. I make with your arm around me in the warm room, loitering: He is one of the founding editors of Vetch: The Recommended Reading Commuter publishes here every Monday, and is our home for flash, graphic narrative, and poetry.

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For other links from Electric Literature, follow us, or sign up for our eNewsletter. I s there a difference between writing a book and making a book? A stutterer since childhood, she founded the school as a haven for stuttering children. But she is an early explorer in the field of necrophysics. Stutterers, Sybil Joines, argues, have the capacity to communicate with the land of the dead.

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Their stutter is a hiccup in time that allows stutterers to straddle both worlds. These children are also a resource for her studies. But when a student disappears, the school starts to get the wrong kind of attention. But story is not all this book is made up of. Riddance is a physical artifact, a material object you need to hold in your hands to fully understand.

Riddance defies the existing categories we have for understanding what writing is so Jackson can make space for a new argument about what writing can do. How does she do it? Reading Riddance is an experience in being haunted, not by ghosts per se, but by the growing sense that writing itself is a haunted enterprise. Riddance is haunted by undead histories, undead traumas, undead authors, and undead words that were never really our own, that illuminate why a book that is not only written, but made. Riddance is this great assemblage of different writing spaces: Riddance began with an essay on the relationship between language, mediumship, speech impediments, and ghosts.

Though I was exploring real ideas, I did so through a fictional lens: More pieces followed, elaborating on the history of the school I had imagined, its customs, its philosophy, its homework assignments. I thought it might be a fake. I was interested in the way you use the historical lens of the spiritualist movement. And then there are also the excerpts from textbooks and scholarly articles on necrophysics.

What about that moment in time when science and spirituality were so entwined was important for you in writing Riddance? I was struck by how these spheres that we normally think of as unrelated were for a time joined. For a while, because of scientific advances in our understanding of reality, stranger things suddenly seemed possible. Writing rests on a similar sort of faith, that feelings, dreams, ideas, memories can move the world.

Not because I use a computer to write, but because for me language itself is a sort of machine or device, but one through which spirits blow. One of the most interesting pieces and there are many! They create an uncanny medical history narrative of their own. My designer did too.

The body has figured heavily in so much of your work, I was wondering if you could talk more about how your focus changes from a project like SKIN, where the literal bodies of volunteers were tattooed with words in your story , to Riddance. In SKIN I was mainly interested in the written word, in the way it bodies forth its meaning, but also competes with it. Riddance is deeply rooted in the 19th century, and I wanted it to feel like a distant relative of the books that gave rise to it, and to take its place among them. That is something time does not permit. Is it already true in being said?

Can I, then, determine the future? I suppose it is what dying must be like. But writing is like being haunted in a different sense too. Language is handed down to us from the past.

The words of people long since dead are in our mouths. I think writers feel this more keenly than other people do, for the obvious reason that we are more concerned with language, and more aware of how much of what we write is borrowed almost everything. We are spoken to and through by writers of the past, and speak back to them in our work. One of the recurring sections of Riddance is told from the perspective of the scholar studying language, who believes that language is born out of mourning. Language is fixed in some way for him. There was nothing to be stuck in or to stick, only boundless elasticity, boundless subtlety, clarity, rarefaction, light and space and freedom; in a word, joy.

Writing is more fixed than everyday speech: Of course I knew all these things already. But I would say my awareness deepened as I worked, for years, and as I tried to make my fictional philosophy as sound as nonsense could ever be. I was trying to mean what I said on some level, despite my fantastical premise, and I kind of succeeded.

This body had various names: I did not recognize it…. What I still called my self flickered around this marker, homeless and very nearly voiceless. Jane is an attempt to reckon with the real-world consequences of a philosophy that valorizes silence and self-erasure, like the one the headmistress promotes. Is the voluntary silence of a sovereign subject the same thing as the silence of someone denied full personhood by a racist culture?

Are the consequences the same for Jane as for the headmistress, who is white? Is there actually a paradoxical power to an openness so radical that it resembles total disempowerment, or is the headmistress, blinded by her relative privilege, playing right into the hands of a not only racist but sexist and ableist culture? I was hoping we could talk more widely about ghost stories. It alters to fit our fears.

We wait for the reckoning, with dread and longing. Do you think the ghost story is immortal? And as we know from the movies, the undead are really hard to kill.

A story about marriage, cheese, and depression

Yes, I do think the ghost story will stagger on, in whatever form. I want to return to something you mentioned earlier about death and authorship. This is not so much because dead writers seem alive in their words, as because the living ones seem already dead in theirs. Is writing, for you, a form of corresponding with the authors that have come before you? Stories are letters to dead authors, letters to dead readers, letters from dead authors to living readers, letters from dead authors to dead authors… Life is a temporary condition, a sort of prep school for future dead folks.

Then I start singing the theme song to Betty Boop: Finally our playlist of pixelated Fleischer cartoons, both public domain and pirated, loads. Jack calms down enough to exit the Snot Cycle. Black-and-white cartoons are a history, in miniature, of racial and patriarchal oppression. Take a series of animated cartoons developed for a certain situation: These cartoons are decidedly not for children. These cartoons are trying to outdo the competition, upping the ante with physical comedy and sexiness and straight-up weirdness, to ensure their continued purchase and distribution.

In short, these cartoons were never meant to be watched over and over again, back to back, for months. Despite the fact that these cartoons were never meant to have continuity, you assign them continuity. He, being attracted to Betty, sees her as a dog like himself. The results of the experiment are in. You have developed a headcanon. This is different from fanon, which is agreed upon by a large camp within a fandom.

While headcanons and fanon are similar features of participatory culture, their motives and aims are distinct. But a headcanon is personal, idiosyncratic, offered with caveats and apologies. Headcanons tend to be more about denial and wish-fulfillment than they are about reason and plausibility.

When he was about a year and a half old, Jack got into Bubble Guppies. He was mesmerized by the gang of six young merpeople and their preschool teacher, an orange fish named Mr. The show got us through a lot. Only a certain number of episodes are available on Netflix and Amazon Prime. There are 80 episodes of Bubble Guppies , but Jack, my wife and I have only seen about I could tell you all about Mr.

I can tell you a lot about Nonny, the redhead merboy with glasses.

Recovery Period – Electric Literature

In my headcanon, Nonny is a malcontent. In Season 2, episode 8, the other guppies spend an entire musical number pressuring him to smile. On screen he is forced to relent. But in my heart, I know Nonny finds all their well-oiled cheeriness fake. We never see his parents in the show, or any other adult merpeople. In fact, one blogger posed the idea that the guppies are orphans, the last of an endangered species.

“On the Town” is a fantasy tale about having competent people in charge

In my headcanon, though, the guppies have parents. Someone has to pack those crazy lunches. And despite being a bit of a screwup, Gil is front and center. The ensemble cast is diverse enough; but Gil seems to be the de facto lead simply by white, hetero-normative, male default. Other characters experience anxiety over a friend with a broken bone or loss over a toy truck buried at a construction site.