Quarterly Round-Up of Work: Winter, 2013

By Brian | Published: March 25, 2013

I’ve been a Quentin Tarantino fan since seeing Pulp Fiction in high school, and his latest, Django Unchained, blew me away. I was surprised to find so much of the press around the movie focusing on its historical accuracy, or shocking use of racial language. I think Tarantino is underrated by critics because he trades in violence and low-brow culture – exploitation films, and the like. This turns many people off, but doesn’t mean he’s not one of the smartest, most talented directors working today. Even fans applaud his use of collage and homage, but rarely write about why he makes his movies in this way, or muse on what he might be trying to say. In an article for Salon, “Quentin Tarantino Talks to Himself,” I use the theories of Russian intellectual Mikhail Bakhtin to take a closer, more in-depth look at the provocateur.

With theory on the brain, I then turned to the subject of the hip-hop duo OutKast. Why is Andre Benjamin so often lauded as the artistic visionary of the group, when Big Boi’s dropped two fantastic solo albums largely without his partner’s help? I borrow from film critic Manny Farber’s essay “White Elephant Art vs Termite Art” to help shine some light on Big Boi’s genius, in “The Revenge of ‘Speakerboxxx’: How Big Boi Flipped the OutKast Script,” for The Atlantic.

I continue to review novels for The Rumpus – Ben Schrank’s Love Is A Canoe, and Lenore Zion’s Stupid Children are my latest. Of the two, Zion’s novel was a blast to read, and a lot of fun to write about. She rocks! I’m working on another review now.

On top of all of this, I’ve begun blogging for Babble’s Dad section. The essay “I Caught My Son French Kissing My Wife” bears special mention, as it got picked up by The Huffington Post and generated the most comments of anything I’ve ever posted online – over 800! Guess that’s what happens when you write about a toddler kissing with tongue.

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Recent Writing about Books

By Brian | Published: December 13, 2012

I considered spinning this post as an end-of-year “best of” list, but I’ll be honest – I’ve been delinquent (alright, lazy) in updating this blog and so have a backlog of pieces to share. Over the past few months, I’ve had the opportunity to write several pieces about great books and authors:


Three Square Meals with Occasional Torture, stories by Julie Innis
Innis’ debut short story collection is a marvel, with stories that veer from the fantastical to the largely realistic, all told with sizzling wit. Innis’ world is like the South Park of literature, something I mean as a great compliment. Just when you think a story has gone as far as it can, she pushes it over the edge, and next thing you know a woman’s having sex with a fly. Brilliant stuff. I wrote about how green Innis’ work made me in a post for The Lit Pub.


The Lost Episodes of Revie Byrson, a novel by Bryan Furuness
This debut novel covers great distance, starting in off in a theological mode, then morphing into something of a family drama with a dash of early teenage lust, or maybe it’s a story of sexual obsession with an undercurrent of mother issues? Throughout, Furuness weaves his themes tight, and the characters are so fully realized – Revie in particular, one of those guys you relate to while at the same time moaning “no, no, don’t do that!” — that the novel covers diverse terrain while retaining integrity, never feeling piecemeal. I reviewed the book for The Rumpus.


Jonathan Mugan’s The Curiosity Cycle: Preparing Your Child for the Oncoming Technological Explosion is a rare one for me, a parenting how-to book that I actually enjoyed reading. Normally, I hate being told what to do. The great thing about Mugan’s book is that dictating what parents should do would actually be antithetical; he seems more concerned with inspiring parents to approach the world with a zeal for knowledge and childlike restlessness of intellect, thereby encouraging the same in their kids. Instead of prescriptions, he offers suggestions and opportunities for how to do this, though I did tease out some guidelines, which I wrote about for Babble.


Melissa Clark delights readers of The New York Times every Wednesday with her column, “A Good Appetite.” If you’ve been to a potluck or dinner party in the past few years, chances are good someone’s made a dish that came from Clark’s column. In the course of co-writing over thirty cookbooks, she’s soaked up the acumen of numerous master chefs and cooks, and channels this encyclopedic knowledge through a natural love of food and down-to-earth approach that even the most amateur of home cooks can relate to. For The Inquisitive Eater, Clark talked with me about her journey from cookbook ghostwriter to food guru, and of course we discussed food too.

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Wordsprouts: Dad Bloggers Talk Food, Family, and Writing

By Brian | Published: October 10, 2012

I’ll be reading and—oy veh—talking about writing and fatherhood at Word Sprouts, The Park Slope Food Coop reading series, on Friday, October 19th, at 7pm. Come learn what made this once avowed child-hating baller the poster-boy for stay-at-home breeder-dom I am today. It’s a sad tale.

As if that’s not enough, headliner John Donohue, who blogs at Stay at Stove Dad and edited the bestselling anthology Man With a Pan, is awesome. And Paula Bernstein, author and Babble columnist, will host.

The event takes place at the coop itself, on Union Street between 7th and 6th Avenues in Brooklyn. There will be snacks! (Read: hummus.) This is open to everyone, giving you non-card-carrying comrades a glimpse into the inner-sanctum of socialism that not even The Daily Show was allowed to film. You’ll have the opportunity to grill me in an audience Q&A, during which I promise to be evasive and use language no parent should ever use when discussing their children.

If you’re in the New York area, I hope you’ll come.

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A Bit of Byrne Criticism

By Brian | Published: October 10, 2012

A couple of weeks ago I saw David Byrne in Philadelphia, playing with St. Vincent and an eight piece brass band. They tore through the majority of their new album, Love This Giant, and took turns doing solo pieces re-worked for brass. (The highlight being an awesome rendition of the Byrne/Eno song “Strange Overtones” from Everything That Happens Will Happen Today.) The show rocked! But while their performance brought vitality to some Love This Giant songs that sound a bit stilted to me, it didn’t change my overall opinion of the album, and, in particular, Byrne’s songwriting, which I wrote about recently in two pieces.

Television Man: David Byrne on the Couch, on The Paris Review Daily, shines light on how Byrne’s critical edge has dulled over the years by looking at three of his songs about television. My approach leans heavily on Jonathan Lethem’s analysis of the song “Cities” in his book on the Talking Heads album Fear of Music, where Lethem locates “Cities” on a continuum of songs that express the band’s view of places other than New York City. My acknopologies, Jonathan!

David Byrne Needs to Open Up Again, for The Atlantic, looks at Love This Giant, and also Byrne’s book How Music Works. I really wanted to love this book, but mostly found myself disappointed with Byrne’s cold, removed view of his own career, especially his low opinion of lyrics and lyric-writing. I landed on the word “personal” to describe my problem with Byrne’s view, which I don’t think is quite right. A better, more nuanced word might be conviction.

Byrne wrote somewhere—on his blog, I think, not in the book—about how a singer’s technique can mask his emotion. A singer staying in perfect pitch, he postulates, lacks the emotional impact of someone just tearing it up and going for it, perfection be-damned. I think Byrne’s become a victim of this very thing, with songs that new emphasize melody and long lines over the more percussive, emotional outbursts of his earlier work. Not just how he sang, but what he sang grabbed me so much more, whereas now I often find his lyrics interesting, but rarely heartfelt. Maybe I ask too much of him, who knows, but I don’t feel his work the way I used to, and this piece tries to get at why.

Herein ends my writing about David Byrne and Talking Heads, at least for the foreseeable future. I think I’ve said all I want to about them for now, a conclusion which feels good to arrive at.

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Investigations into Inspiration

By Brian | Published: May 29, 2012

Whenever I talk with a writer, I talk process. How people make art fascinates me. I’m not one of those struggling authors searching for a magic bullet, some tip or secret that another writer’s stumbled on that I too can adopt and so solve all my writing woes. (And I tell ya’, woe is is me when it comes to writing—fiction, anyway.) There is no cure-all other than to keep scribbling, and that’s all process talk boils down to, ultimately: a writer in front of the page, forging ahead word by word, decision by decision. It’s banal. Still, the small details of how each writer moves forward, or back and forth, or laterally, through their work end up being as unique as every author’s personality. It’s those idiosyncracies I love discussing, and believe me, I can talk about the creative process ad nauseum. My wife has a good appetite for this stuff, but on more than one occasion she’s had her full!


I found a kindred spirit in Celia Blue Johnson, who set out to discover how inspiration works in her book Dancing with Mrs. Dalloway: Stories of the Inspiration Behind Great Works of Literature. She weaves lovely little tales about how fifty awesome – and disparate – books came to be. The only thing each creation story has in common is that no author came to their great idea in the same way, and often, it took some amount of trial and error before they struck literary gold. When I interviewed her, she told me:

I found that [even great authors] were very human. … [They] drafted and re-drafted their work. They doubted themselves. They doubted whether their books had merit. Harper Lee, for example, threw her entire manuscript of To Kill A Mockingbird out the window into the snow. Thank God her editor told her to run out and pick it up.

You can read more of my interview with Johnson on The Huffington Post.


Rebecca Serle’s delightful debut novel When You Were Mine tackles the classic story of Romeo and Juliet from a unique point-of-view: that of Rosaline, Romeo’s first, and then forgotten, crush. When I asked Serle about the inspiration behind such a thought provoking re-imagining of the canonical tale, she surprised me with a very personal response.

I was heartbroken because someone had pulled a Romeo on me. I was over at my best friend’s house, talking about love stories and eating ice cream. We hit on Romeo and Juliet and wondered, ‘Whatever happened to Rosaline?’ Immediately something clicked in my head. I started writing the next day.

You can learn more about Serle and When You Were Mine from this piece I wrote for The Daily Beast.

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Three Pieces about Jonathan Lethem and Talking Heads

By Brian | Published: April 21, 2012

Try pinning yourself to the page; you’re a moving target. As much as I love some of my parenting essays on HuffPo and Prospect Heights Patch, they are so anchored to particular parenthood moments that looking back on them I feel displaced from the internal struggles they document, like how when I calm down from being furious or jubiliant about something I have trouble understanding what got me so fired up in the first place. These essays provide glimpses onto a constantly changing set of relationships, between me and my son, and my wife, and my understanding of fatherhood, and sense of identity. (You know, the little things in life.) As a fiction writer, a lover of narrative, I find them frustrating, because they don’t have any sharp end–life goes on! Perhaps years from now, I’ll have a clear idea of where my story as a stay-at-home dad goes, and be better able to tell it. Right now, I’m too in the thick. Hence my hiatus from parenting writing.

It’s been a while since I’ve produced works that strike me as in some way conclusive, but it just happened with three pieces on Jonathan Lethem’s excellent new book about the Talking Heads album Fear of Music.

photo from the 33 1/3 blog

For a while in high school, Talking Heads was about all I listened to. Through them, I discovered their contemporaries – Television, Blondie, Patti Smith – and then delved into The Velvet Underground, Brian Eno, funk. Even Al Green came to me through the band’s cover of “Take Me to the River.” All I had to do was work backwards, to find what influenced David, Chris, Jerry, and Tina – and this is a band who wears its influences on its sleeve – and there would be something I dug too. The sensibilities of the band’s sound – aggressive but clean, bottom heavy and percussive, thick and layered – still predicts the kind of music I like and don’t like.

Strangely, I sometimes hold my work on the page up to their example, though music and writing are so fundamentally different artforms. Writing must go first through the mind before it hits the heart; music goes right for the jugular. Still, I insist upon thinking, if I could somehow get something similar to the energy and fun and clarity of the early Talking Heads albums on the page, I’d be all set.

Some of my favorite authors achieve this, I think, with work that raises my pulse and echoes after I put it down, not unlike a great song. Jonathan Lethem is one. I discovered his work not long after moving to Brooklyn in 1999, a transitional point in my life on-par with my teenage days. When his novel Motherless Brooklyn came out, it was the talk of the web development studio where I worked. I loved the book so much – the sharp playfullness of the language, the neighborhood locales spun cockeye with noir tropes – that I checked out everything I could find by him. (As a sci-fi fan, As She Climbed Across the Table continues to be my favorite of his early novels.)

One of the highlights of my MFA experience was interviewing Lethem for my thesis project about how his reading influenced his writing. Lethem, like Talking Heads, who he’s a big fan of, sometimes deliberately allows other artists’ work to impact his own, and again like the band, he has no qualms discussing this. When the interview concluded, I asked him about Talking Heads. Lethem told me how he saw the expanded ten-piece line-up of The Name of this Band is Talking Heads and heard “Swamp” played live well-before Speaking in Tongues came out. I experienced a moment of geek fan bliss.

I had the opportunity to talk with him again about his book on Fear of Music, during which Lethem said, “I write to enter into a conversation that books on shelves are having.” Writing about his book, I found myself proud to have something interesting to add to the dialogue — a bit of expertise from having spent years mulling over and being inspired by both Talking Heads and Jonathan Lethem — a satisfaction I rarely feel when penning pieces about parenting.

You can find my review of the book – The Strange, Tense Power of Talking Heads ‘Fear of Music’ – on The Atlantic. An interview with Lethem about the project – Jonathan Lethem’s ‘Perfect’ Album – appears on Salon. Our conversation also led to an article – Jonathan Lethem on the Power of Talking Heads’ ‘Fear of Music’ – on The Daily Beast.

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Note: I originally published this post before The Daily Beast piece went live, but updated it to include that link.

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Three Interviews: Gates, Lethem, and Tillman

By Brian | Published: January 31, 2012

A few years ago, for my graduate school thesis, I interviewed novelists David Gates, Jonathan Lethem, and Lynne Tillman about how their reading informs their writing. I was motivated the advice – attributed, though I have no idea if this is true or not, to Jonathan Ames – that a first time novelist should select a successful novel that he loves, then rip off the structure so as to be able to focus on character and language without having to worry about story. Rumor had it, Ames had done this with P.G. Wodehouse.

Whatever the veracity of this anecdote, I took it to heart. Through most of my graduate school writing life, The Catcher in the Rye and The Sun Also Rises sat on my desk, and whenever I confronted a problem in my novel-in-progress, be it a sentence or turn of the plot, I’d flip one or both of them open and try to crib a solution. Seeing as I never completed my book, I’m not sure I can recommend this strategy. It did, however, lead me to wonder how other novelists allowed their reading to, or tried to prevent it from, influencing or guiding their writing; hence the interviews.

The authors I talked to presented a fantastic study, as each mine very different territory in their work.


David Gates, whose wonderful debut novel Jernigan was shortlisted for the Pulitzer, explores mostly male antiheroes, malcontents with wicked senses of humor who are somehow at odds with the life they find themselves leading.


Jonathan Lethem, particularly in his novels since The National Book Critics Circle Award-winning Motherless Brooklyn, throws literary realism, genre tropes, and a sense of the fantastic into a blender, binding it all together with a smart, culturally savvy tone. His essay “The Ecstasy of Influence” (which later gave title to a collection of his nonfiction work) is a bravura piece of theory that both proves and demonstrates – or more aptly, proves by demonstrating – how all art is indebted to what came before it, an idea he touched upon in our discussion.


Lynne Tillman, author of the profound American Genius, A Comedy, writes voice driven stories about eccentric, brilliant people who hide their insecurities behind facts and observations, just as she hides puzzle pieces of narrative amid breathlessly long sentences that seem ripped straight from the minds of her protagonists.

All three put to page some of the best sentences found in contemporary literature, and infuse their work with sharp humor, which perhaps explains why I love their books so deeply. The David Gates interview posted on The Iowa Review Online last September, the same month the Jonathan Lethem interview went up on AGNI Online. You can find both of them by following the links. I’m happy to announce that the Lynne Tillman interview, refreshed to address her latest short story collection, Someday This Will Be Funny, will be featured in issue 11 of Slice Magazine, out later this year.

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Interview with Novelist Helen Schulman

By Brian | Published: August 9, 2011

The free-ranging discussions of writing workshop sessions, while helpful in so many ways, sometimes frustrated me. If the conversation circled back on itself, or went all over the place, I’d leave with pages of disorganized notes on my piece and no clear idea of where or how to begin processing the criticism.

Not so in Helen Schulman’s workshop. She ran a tight discursive ship, requiring readers to separate their comments on language, story, and the overall feel of the piece. She encouraged people to slow down and respond to one another, prompting conversations rather than a flurry of unrelated critiques. One piece of story advice she gave still sticks with me – asking yourself, how is this day different for the character, why does the story pick up at this particular time and place?

I was thrilled recently to have the opportunity to talk with her about her new novel, This Beautiful Life, in a former haunt from my graduate school days. To prepare I entered into what essentially became a master class in Helen Schulman.

Reading her novels, you find the interior lives of the characters richly developed and textured in voice. More impressively, and refreshing, I think, Schulman doesn’t shy away from honing in close during their worst moments, not just behavior wise, but physically as well. They sweat and smell bad, they’re concerned about aging, they’re vain in utterly relatable ways. (At least for this reader, who, as I’ve written about over at The Good Men Project, has a thing for hair.)

In her most recent books – A Day at the Beach, This Beautiful Life – she doesn’t follow just one character, but explores entire relationships from multiple points-of-view. In This Beautiful Life, about a teenage Internet sex scandal, not just the family at the heart of the controversy, but also Daisy, the girl who sparks it, have a voice. Daisy’s sections bookend the novel, and make for a surprising and smart way to end the story.

I asked Schulman about whether this kind of decision, which breaks the consistency of the novel’s POV, actually makes the work stronger, even though in workshop readers pounce whenever story elements (like tense, the type of narration, or the POV) don’t align. Schulman responded:

That may be true. Writing should never be by committee, and sometimes you feel that pressure in a workshop setting.

I think that workshops are great for saving time. All the things you might learn on your own are illustrated to you early. You can get saved from going off on the wrong track. Also, you learn to dissect literature and discuss it, including live, growing literature in class, which is very useful. But at a certain point you should outgrow it.

It takes me years to show anything to anybody because it’s too nascent and fragile. If they tell me it sucks I’ll be so afraid to continue that maybe I won’t. And I want them to be able to hit me with everything they’ve got.

You can find more of Schulman’s insightful discussion on The Paris Review Daily.

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The Playground Enforcer

By Brian | Published: July 7, 2011

Yesterday, my Fathering from the Hip column “Playground Justice” looked at my son’s Lil’ Napoleon complex – his insatiable desire for other kids’ toys, his insistence that it’s perpetually his turn. But on the unruly rubber-safety surface of the playground, especially one littered with communal toys as ours is, the aggressor can quickly become the aggrieved.

Mr. F had been doing his thing – devouring crackers, flirting with the sprinkler, jacking water balloons – when two girls, a blonde and a brunette, caught his attention as they played in a toy house. I’m talking about the kind of structure that dots suburban yards, made of molded plastic logs with lots of rose colored shutters for kids to open and close and smash their fingers between. (How anyone lugged this bulky, boxy thing to our urban playground, I’ll never know.)

Ever interested in the opposite sex, my son followed the girls at top speed, getting to the house before me. The girls, sadly, did not reciprocate his interest. The brunette closed the door on him, pushing him away with wails of “Noooo.”

He teetered back onto his well-padded butt. Uninjured and undeterred, he tried wresting the door from her once more as I pulled up to the scene. I told her, “You’ve got to be gentle with the little guy. He’s a lot smaller than you.”

“This is our house. We want to play alone,” the blonde whined.

Sporting a pink bikini and a bratty pout, I couldn’t guess at her age. Six going on fourteen? She became the spokesperson for the pair, and I’m going to stop using the word whine to describe her voice, as she drew every sentence into a sing-song that at once expressed both self-pity and loathing of all things parental. She raised the hair on the back of my neck. Talking to her left me feeling soiled.

My son remained at the door, trying to get inside, but hesitantly. Surely the size of these two had him put off, or else he could smell their stank attitude. I put a protective hand on his shoulder and told the Lil’ Princess that if she wanted to play alone she should have stayed home. “The toys on the playground are to share.”

I gave the lightest of squeezes to my son, hoping that this message, which I’ve repeated to him countless times the past few weeks, would resonate for him as well. I hoped – though this is a long shot for a toddler, I know – that he might recognize that he was now the one being bullied and experience how it felt. That’s me, always looking for the goddamn teachable moment.

The Princess let out an over-exaggerated world-weary sigh, then said to her friend, “Let’s find a better place to play.”

They did not walk pass my son gently.

“That’s good,” I said. “We don’t like playing with mean girls anyway.”

It was all I could do to not stick out my tongue.

“I’m not mean! Gawd.”

The exchange brought me back to the classroom, dealing with smart-ass eighth graders. You give an inch and those kids take a mile. But while it left me feeling good—sticking up for my son in a peaceable manner, and for the spirit of sharing in general—I’m not sure my son gained anything, other than a few moments to make pretend chocolate cake in the house in solitude. Though who knows. He’s a sponge at this point, taking it all in. Not that teaching him a lesson was the point.

My experience, both in content and tone, echoes my latest project, Kung-Fu Daddy. If you enjoy reading about parenting, or kung-fu movies, and certainly if you are one of the rare breed who like both, then please check it out! I won’t flood this blog with promotional pieces about it, though you may hear a little more as it gets up and running.

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There Goes the Neighborhood

By Brian | Published: June 5, 2011

Once Williamsburg was news.

When I moved to NYC in ’99, the Brooklyn neighborhood made headlines, as long squatting artists found themselves priced out of their warehouses by a wave of gentrifying youth – some of whom I knew. A friend lived on some dark, deserted street in an old spice factory. The place still smelled of cinnamon and clove. It wasn’t too far from Cokies, a dive bar with an in-house drug dealer. Sometimes my buddy would stop for a bump on his way home from work – a lil’ pick-me-up.

Not long thereafter the ‘burg became known as a haven for just-out-of-college hipsters. It was the place to spot trends before they happened, to marvel at extreme fashion, and scoff at the pretentiousness of it all. Irony – vintage tee-shirts, mullets, seventies-style handlebar mustaches – ruled the day.

Last night, I went back for the first time in years. As we walked down Bedford Avenue, now crowded with pedestrians and full of cafes, one of my friends cracked the old joke about not being dressed well enough for Williamsburg. But it lacked the punchline, because we were.

Aside from a couple young men with teased out hair and awesomely awful jackets in Hawaiian print, we fit in just fine. A family with a baby even sat across from us at the bar, and while you know my feelings on drinking with baby, I had to wonder – is there any part of the city where tots and shots remains passe?

Maybe that’s what happened to Williamsburg – the hipsters all had kids. Or maybe the rising real estate prices pushed the cooler fringe outward to Bushwick. Though my wife tells me the artists in that neighborhood don’t emit quite the vibe Williamsburg did in its heyday – it’s not the same fashion zoo.

I wonder if that moment has moved on, for Williamsburg as for New York City as a whole. The city is safer than when I moved here, or at least gives the impression of being so. But it’s also blander. The Disneyfication of uptown has slid down. SoHo is a mall. The Meatpacking District a tourist trap. They give out user-friendly gallery guides for visiting the LES. The Brooklyn waterfront sports big box stores. Maybe the whole city’s been blunted. We’ve lost our edge. Sold our soul. Or had it taken from us.

Guess this is a sign of being a real New Yorker. Pining for a city that once was, even though it probably never was the way you imagine it.

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