INCREASINGLY PRESUMPTUOUS QUESTIONS I WISH I COULD ASK YOU, DEMURE WHITE GIRL DRINKING A PERRIER

By Lee Tipton

So: you like Perrier, huh? How much do you like it, though? Are you aware of how slowly you’ve been drinking it? Why don’t you put the cap back on your Perrier when you’re not drinking it? Are you supposed to let Perrier breathe or something? Aren’t you concerned that the bubbles will dissolve?

Do you realize its been something like twenty minutes since you last took a dainty little sip of the Perrier? Is it because you’re just planning on buying fresh Perrier after class? Will you buy Perrier-in-a-can from the Veggierama downstairs, or will you travel to the cafeteria in search of some Perrier that comes in a glass bottle? Will you take a cab there?

If I asked you what your favorite color was, would your response be “subdued olive”? Is that a color? Is green actually your favorite color, but, when prompted, do you tend to offer “subdued olive” because that’s what Karl Lagerfeld is calling green fabric right now?

What’s your favorite flavor? Is it “subdued olive”, also? Is that a flavor? Is “Perrier” a flavor?

When you fly home to mummy’s for the summer holidays, do you find increasingly metallic refrigerators with each year that passes? When was the last time you chose to swim in the ocean that undoubtedly flanks your family’s estate? Why do you always decide on the infinity pool that only pretends to consort with the shoreline? Do you have any hands-on experience with Tupperware?

Which one of your parents is the publicist, and which one is the failed expatriate sculptor who ultimately abandoned the drafty sky-parlors of Lyon to “dabble” in the futures market for the next three decades?

Speaking of entitled jaunts across the continent, how was your impromptu whirl through Milan last autumn? How would it compare to your other impromptu whirls through Milan, if you averaged them all out to a mean value of parasols and brunch? Is there anything on your bedroom walls that isn’t framed? Was your North York prep school sponsored by the makers of Celexa? Is your paternal great-grandfather a high-ranking Boer War veteran with his own mausoleum and a significant Wikipedia entry?

Remember when your mom, buzzed as she was off of Grey Goose and jet lag, staggered into your room at 5:20 am the day after your birthday for her bi-annual back-pat? Was that to comfort or to be comforted? Was there some semblance of human warmth between you, or just a byproduct of what little friction could develop between your 400 thread count satin duvet and her unnaturally taut flesh? Does the sad jadedness visible in those inoperable places behind mom’s eyes ever remind you that you will one day inherit her analyst?

Why is it that, though I find your neck too thin and your skin too pallid and your nose too prominent, when I take in these traits simultaneously I am forced in spite of myself to realize that you are objectively beautiful?

When was the last time you had someone who you weren’t currently fucking touch their hand to your face without feeling the need to mentally archive it as an increasingly rare “human moment”?

Still — this wasn’t always you, was it? I’ll bet you weren’t always this subdued olive, half-flat Perrier you that I’ve silently come to fear over the past forty minutes, were you? I’ll be that all those years ago it wasn’t you who named your first dog — that beautiful Sheltie who you hugged and loved and knew everything about except that she was pure bred — it wasn’t your idea to name that dog after an Austrian chair designer, was it?

Of course it wasn’t.

But Ari Holzknecht II got used to it, didn’t she?

ANIMALS THAT DESERVE TO DIE

by EDWARD PETRENKO

Nature, by its very, uh, essence, is a cruel, savage, merciless, last-cookie-stealing bastard. It’s got absolutely no tact – it’ll hang out with you, then date your ex-girlfriend without telling you. Nature, in the span of one conversation, once managed to insult my mother, dismiss Darfur, and repeat my own joke as if it was its own. Nature, this one time, even tried to slip this girl at this party GHB – my buddy Josh found out about it, and totally laid a whompdown on it, though. In all seriousness, nature is a total wad.

So, when I say that the following animals deserve complete and total annihilation, it’s not to say that it’s me who hates their guts. I mean that they simply don’t have the chops to hack it in this uncaring, libertarian-voting world. Also, I may, in some vague, roundabout way, personally hate some of them. In any case, after repeated viewings of Planet Earth, I’ve got a pretty balanced view of all lifeforms on this angry, angry globe, and so presented for you are the Jimmy Carters of the natural world.

Tiny Dogs. Whose idea were these things? I guess it makes some sense as a guard dog, in that a small dog gives you all the barking, alarm-raising ability of a big dog, but with half the poop. But, at the same time, any intruder who is stopped by a Chihuahua is not destined to be an intruder for very long. Also, people who own small dogs tend to be the human equivalents of these tiny breeds, completely incapable of opening a pickle jar, let alone interrupting a burglary in any meaningful way. You know what, people who own small dogs? You just got added to the list.

Panda Bears. Panda bears have evolved to eat only the shittiest bamboo shoots, which grow only in the shittiest part of China, and provide the shittiest milk to raise their babies, which are the laziest, weakest things in the animal kingdom. Yet, because they’re pretty, they always get the most attention from conservationists. They’re like the absolutely wretched girl who’s popular because her tits always point true north. You know the type – pretty since kindergarten, so they never had to learn any social skills or talents? This one, Julia, god, what a bitch. No joy anywhere except in manipulation, and you know she never had a pimple. I hope you’re still into Sylvia Plath, Julia, because you’re on the list.

Flies That Constantly Bump Into The Venetian Blinds. God, shut up already! Fly somewhere else – what, are you eating the blinds or something? Jesus! I can’t sleep ‘cause your wings keep hitting the blinds, amplifying your buzz, like some pretentious noise rock band. Seriously – who loves noise rock so much that they need to make a band devoted to it? It’s not a style, it’s a joke on everyone involved – audience, band, and society included. I can’t wait for forty years from now, when your eardrums all wither up like sundried fruit, and your shitty musical tastes keep you from hearing any music at all. Noise rock bands, you deserve extinction.

Brad. I forget your last name, but fuck it – you don’t deserve one. We were best friends all through grade 7 – why’d you start to pick on me? Was it your chain-smoking parents? Did you green hair dye poison your mind some? Oh, wait, that’s right, you’re just an asshole. Who yells out (in grade 7, no less) that their tiny best friend has a crush on the popular girl in school? Fuck, I barely had pubes – I couldn’t have dealt with it even if she liked me, which she never would’ve. I’m glad I shoved you down that time in music class, and I hope nature sends, like, a volcano like the one we made for science class to end your stupid jerk butt.

Well, that’s the list for now – stay tuned for frequent updates. It’s sad, and one can’t help but feel sympathy for these poorly adapted, fragile individuals, but nature, red in tooth and claw, will reap us all yet. The best we can do is to isolate ourselves from our environment, and become as self-sufficient as possible, because anything we depend on will die, or worse, take us down with it. It’s a vicious steak buffet, but incredibly satisfying to those of us unafraid to adapt – except Brad, even if he could.

INTERVIEW: SAM LIPSYTE

A few weeks ago we were lucky enough to interview Sam Lipsyte over e-mail. Lipsyte is a writer based in New York City and a professor of creative writing at Columbia University. His work has appeared in McSweeneys, the Believer and various collections of contemporary short fiction. He already has two novels under his belt as well as a collection of short stories.

His latest book, “Home Land” is hilarious. Its about a guy named Teabag. As if that isn’t enough, it is also a pretty real take on the formulaic high school coming of age story and sheds some crucial insight into what it means to sort of flounder around in your home town when it has very little left to offer you. Without ever really mentioning bands (aside from the fake corporate rock group Spacklefinger) it manages to still be probably the best punk rock novel ever written, though perhaps that isn’t really such a mighty title. And though part of its charm lies in how relatable it is to anyone who has ever had troubles fitting in, it is so well crafted that you probably don’t even have to be/have once been a total loser to find it funny.

So permit us to break from what has been our blog formula. I know that our legions of adoring fans will become infected with rage, ingeniously hack their ways into finding out our IP numbers and all of our home addresses (1627 st hubert) and send us hurtful messages scrawled on packages of poop. when they see that this is neither an invented interior monologue of some verbose literati performing a base or mundane task nor an example of how we imagine all dumb jocks sound when they talk to themselves in their heads. This is actually an interview with an actual writer whose work we actually enjoy.

Like several other pieces posted on this blog, this has already appeared in STEPS magazine.

Where is your home land?SL: I’ve been based in New York for 16 years, but I guess New Jersey is still my home land. I’d like to think of myself as a citizen of the world, but I’m not sure I’ve got the right pants.

 

Are there a lot of Teabags hanging out in New Jersey diners? Does NJ breed teabags?

SL: There is a Teabag inside each of us. And yes, also in certain New Jersey diners, especially along Route 9W near the George Washington Bridge.

Can you describe Lewis for someone who has never read the book?

SL: He’s the narrator of a novel you should read.

What do you think is the relationship between a writer and their home town? Do you think that writers are ever stuck in the place that they are from?

SL: Some people think that place is everything in fiction. I’m not one of those people, but the setting was certainly a big factor in this book. When my first book of stories came out a lot of people from my home town were pissed off, or so I heard. I didn’t go back but word leaked out to me that I’d somehow betrayed them. Maybe they were afraid the suggestion that sad, confused people could come from such a place might drive property values down.

Do you think that the notion of a writer’s identity has changed since the web boom? Often writers come to be associated with the city that they come from or write about most frequently. Do you think that online publishing and and the rise of the Internet in general risks loosening the connection between writer and land?

SL: Well, sure, but it’s not just writers, it’s everybody. We’re all floating around in our wireless limbos. If we’re disconnected from the land it’s because the land is likely owned by some conglomerate. There are a few hold-outs, of course, and you have some writers like Thomas McGuane who writes about ranching with the authority of somebody living on the land, but as fewer and fewer people live that life fewer writers will be able to write about it. I don’t think the internet is a cause. It’s a symptom, and an implement, of a larger phenomenon.

Life on this planet has changed in the last few decades. Conceptually, it’s grown smaller, with the advent of the global idea. The notion of nation states has has both withered and grown in reaction to these changes, wealth is becoming ever more concentrated, communities exist over vast distances while many live among strangers.

In the 90s you worked at FEED magazine. Has your work been influenced at all by working with e-hypertext or any aspect of the online medium? Since “Home Land” is written in short public installments, it is almost as though Lewis maintains and updates an offline blog.

SL: There is something bloggy about the updates, to be sure. Especially as halfway through the book Lewis starts to submit them electronically. The work I did at Feed was mostly to commission and edit the kinds of culture pieces that could run in Harper’s, or, say, The Walrus, so I wasn’t so involved with hypertext. I was familiar with the burgeoning forms in college, where writers like Robert Coover were beginning to plug into those possibilities back in the early nineties. But though the ideas and the technology were exciting, I often found that the writing sometimes suffered. Perhaps because they were so enamored of the gizmos, people weren’t paying as much attention to their sentences. If you’re a great writer like Coover, it’s not a problem. But if you are just starting out, it might be. I’ve seen some cool stuff though. A lot of it also serves as a good reminder of what’s still possible on the page, if people can break out of set ideas about fiction.

Gary pops up in Home Land as well as some of the stories in Venus Drive. Who is Gary?

SL: Gary is the one-thumbed beast who stalks me through all of my writing. I guess I keep writing about him because I’m not really sure who Gary is.

Have you ever been teabagged?

SL: Only by history.