YOU + The Collagist

22Aug09

“YOU is the very first time I met [Jonathan Baumbach], and I’m glad I did.”

Take a peek at Anna Clark’s charming and insightful video review of YOU at brand-new literary journal, The Collagist.

– LAUREN CERAND

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YOU + Portland Review

21Aug09

Andrew Madigan reviews YOU or The Invention of Memory in the new Portland Review (Spring/Summer 2009):

“Jonathan Baumbach is the most original and entertaining writer we have. His prose is haunting, his images startling. Each of his works is an important addition to the rickety scaffold of postmodernism, even when he adds by taking something away: he is both Rauschenberg erasing de Kooning and Duchamp scribbling on the Mona Lisa.”

It’s not available online, but I subscribed a while back and so my copy came in the mail the other day, much to my delight! Powells.com sells single print issues.

– LAUREN CERAND

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The New You Project goes out with a BAM!

19May09

Jonathan Baumbach recently introduced a screening of Eric Rohmer’s An Autumn Tale at BAMcinematek, which was perfect as its one of the influences in YOU or The Invention of Memory. Flavorwire covered the event. Here’s Jonathan’s introduction:

“A few weeks ago, circumstantially, I ran into Arthur Penn’s ‘Night Moves’ on TV, another worthy late film, a film in which the private detective hero, played by Gene Hackman, declines to go with his wife to see ‘My Night at Maud’s’ with the witty explanation that viewing a Rohmer film is ‘like watching paint dry.’ I remember the remark getting some knowing laughs in the theater the first time I saw ‘Night Moves.’ Sometimes watching paint dry, the right paint of course, can be a profound experience.

My predilection as a writer of fiction is for formal audacity, more in keeping with, say, early Godard than Rohmer, early or late. And so Rohmer has won me over in the long haul almost without my noticing the change in my feelings, and against my notion of myself. No matter, I still remain hugely fond of Godard’s answer when asked rather huffily if he didn’t think a film should have a beginning, middle and an end. ‘Yes,’ he answered, ‘but not necessarily in that order.’

Rohmer might have answered the same question, ‘Yes, but not so you’d notice.’

‘An Autumn Tale’ is the last of Rohmer’s Tales of the Seasons, which is his third and most recent series and was made when the director, clearly in his prime, was over 70. Over the years, while doing something of the same thing again and again—as Rohmer says in explaining the terms of his first series, ‘what I call a conte moral is not a tale with a moral, but a story which deals less with what people do than what is going on in their minds while they are doing it’—Rohmer’s work, within its limited parameters, has made the same old thing more different and more beautiful as he’s gone along. As we know—the secret has been long out—Rohmer combines in most of his films literate talk about personal matters with an unobtrusively elegant camera.

We are trained to think that personal matters are less important than the global, but in fact the world tends to be too much with us and only of the moment. The personal, which is where we begin and end, is about everything.

The reason I chose ‘An Autumn Tale’ to introduce, beyond its being my favorite Rohmer film is that its basic plot device—one woman for her own self-deceived reasons advertising for a mate for another—is employed with notable variation in my latest novel, You or the Invention of Memory. And the reason for my shameless borrowing of the displaced behavior in Rohmer’s film is because it says so much about character while also being slyly comic. There is always the whisper of self-deceit, as Rohmer has been telling us throughout his extraordinary career, in the noblest of our deeds. Like most of us, like countries themselves, Rohmer’s characters, with the best of misguided intentions, often confuse self-regard with generosity. Ultimately, Rohmer’s art makes us feel good about feeling bad in the comic recognition of a personal and therefore universal hypocrisy shared with his characters. Enough said.

The rest is Rohmer.”

Jonathan Baumbach will be reading from YOU at Mixer in September, and also for The Brooklyn Rail, which is serializing his next novel, to be published as Dreams of Molly by Dzanc Books in 2011. Meanwhile, he’s written about his favorite short stories for the Emerging Writers Network, and is at work on a new collection…

– LAUREN CERAND

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Save the Date: MAY 7

31Mar09

Jonathan Baumbach will be introducing Autumn Tale (Conte d’automne) at BAMcinématek on MAY 7 as part of The Late Film Series. The screening will be followed by a signing of YOU or The Invention of Memory. I have been sitting on my hands waiting for the moment I could announce that news for months and the moment is now. Can you feel the electricity? I sure can.

– LAUREN CERAND

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What they say about YOU (the very latest)

19Mar09

HIPSTER BOOK CLUB: “Jonathan Baumbach, in You or The Invention of Memory has written a book that accomplishes the main goals of metafiction and of good literature: reminding readers of the book as an object and a construct and a contract between the author and reader, and enrapturing those same readers with a complicated love story that plays with memory and identity. Baumbach is clearly a writer at the top of his game…” [More]

MARY PHILLIPS-SANDY: “I opened the envelope and turned the book, which is pleasantly slim, over in my left hand. The NYTBR blurb on the back jacket refers to the author’s previous collection as “more than thirty years of work from an underappreciated writer.” In this context the word “underappreciated” is meant to convey both the quality of the author’s work and the quality of the NYTBR, for recognizing the quality of the author’s work when few others did. Perhaps also the quality of you, for the discerning taste that led you to hold this underappreciated thing in your left hand.” [More]

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Art You Need

11Mar09

20×200’s Untitled (I told my therapist about you) by Mike Monteiro.

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New Work by Jonathan Baumbach

07Mar09

The Brooklyn Rail is serializing a new novel by Jonathan Baumbach, which thrills me! When was the last time a newspaper (or a blog, even) did anything that cool? Well, they’re doing it now.

– LAUREN CERAND

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St. Albans

05Mar09

On Tuesday I spoke to a class of seniors studying “very recent fiction” under the expert tutelage of Gene Campbell at St. Albans School in Washington, D.C. I definitely was not reading sophisticated lit crit when I was that age! We talked about The New You Project and YOU or The Invention of Memory and Jonathan Baumbach as a gateway into a larger conversation about publishing as both an industry and a culture and books and literature and access and technology and the pace of change and life in general. It was really, really fun. I was very impressed by the quality of the questions that the students asked, such as, Have I worked on poetry, and what are the relevant implications for that form? Indeed I have (Supermodel by David Breskin, and I am working on another poetry book this fall, Terese Svoboda’s Weapons Grade, which is all Sex & Death and I’m working with the publisher to create a digital galley so that it can reach as many people as possible). I also talked about the importance of making fiction of-the-moment and creating the perception of urgency which is a challenge when the narrative of storytelling exists beyond the news cycle which dominates our daily lives, and also how so much of what’s changed the world, and changing it, starts out in a novel, where the most dangerous ideas can first appear and subvert the status quo, e.g. Fahrenheit 451, 1984, Native Son, To Kill a Mockingbird. And how it was not so very long ago that books were censored and Henry Miller and Allen Ginsberg and their publishers were on trial to assert their right to express what they felt needed to be said. That’s living as an art form, and its truly powerful. And how publishing is not a meritocracy and the best voices might — indeed, are most likely to — be found outside the mainstream. And just all kinds of cool things and ideas and then they asked me what they should read next and I said I could tell them what I liked, sure, I do it all day, but the best books, the ones that will transform you, you have to go and seek them out yourself, so be curious, be bold, it will serve you well in life.

– LAUREN CERAND

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New Review: Rambles

28Feb09

Rambles is a very cool (and pioneering, c. 1999) online  journal of culture and arts journalism and criticism. Michael Scott Cain reviews YOU or The Invention of Memory and discusses “one of America’s most overlooked novelists” in a terrific review here. Definitely do linger there and take a look around at all that’s on offer.

– LAUREN CERAND

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In Good Company

23Feb09

YOU or The Invention of Memory is now in stock at Vroman’s. Patrick Brown, who is a serious TASTEMAKER (earlier today, he posted on Twitter, “OK, I basically psychotically loved Last Night in Montreal from Unbridled Books. Such an amazing structure, ” and I thought to myself, Psychotically, you say? I WILL BUY IT), recommends YOU thusly:

“This is a love story unlike any you’ve ever read. Baumbach twists the story inside-out, shifting perspectives and even narrators along the way. The result is a sort of Italo-Calvino –meets-Jean-Luc-Godard experience. Perfect for fans of Kafka, Barthelme, and Borges. Truly adventurous literature.”

– LAUREN CERAND

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