It is still raining. And I just realized that thanks to a fifth-grade production of “Rip Van Winkle” my class put on during elementary school I never hear thunder without thinking “God is bowling.” Or excuse me, “playing nine-pins.”
• A couple things to listen to: Mary Gaitskill reads Vladimir Nabokov’s short story, “Symbols and Signs.” You may think, as I did, that listening to this will be a spinach-y experience — it won’t be. Also amazing, albeit in an entirely different way: Christopher Walken reads “The Raven.” (Second link via Maud.)
• Speaking of Nabokov, scholar and author Alfred Appel, Jr.’s obituary in the New York Times ends with this anecdote:

Speaking at a memorial service for Nabokov in Manhattan in 1977, Mr. Appel recalled telling him about an antiwar protest at Northwestern during which a student had called Mr. Appel a eunuch. Nabokov said quickly, “Oh no, Alfred, you misunderstood him. He called you a unique.”

Sam Jones reminded me that Nabokov also praised Appel’s work in his eccentric “Anniversary Notes” — one of those pieces which ideally would be presented in a fan of index cards.
• Ammon Shea picks his 26 favorite words from Reading The OED. Relatedly, I’m now holding auditions for my new glam rock band, Wonderclout.

I’m also reading Sarah Waters’s new novel, The Little Stranger, this week. I’m about midway through, and so far I’m in agreement with Laura Miller’s praise for the book. On the surface, the book is a creepy, highly readable Gothic ghost story set in post-WW II England. But of course, ghost stories are never just ghost stories, or at least the good ones aren’t, and Miller makes a great argument for what Waters has achieved with the novel, writing: “Ghosts are not supposed to exist, which is one reason why ghost stories are often about things that people try to deny. The rage and sexual longings of lonely, well-bred women, for example, infuse the two great classics of the form: Henry James’ ‘Turn of the Screw’ and Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Haunting of Hill House.’ … [With this novel] Waters has boldly reassigned all these gothic motifs from their usual Freudian duties to another detail entirely: “The Little Stranger” is about class, and the unavoidable yet lamentable price paid when venerable social hierarchies begin to erode.”
The novel’s beautifully written too. Last night while reading, I came across this passage, which reminded me of Elizabeth Bowen in the acuteness of the psychological description. It takes place as the male narrator is leaving a dance with a younger female friend:

The gesture jarred with me. She had had that brandy early in the evening, and, after that, a glass or two of wine, and I’d been glad to see her–as I’d thought of it then–letting off steam. But where, for those first few dances, she’d been genuinely loose and tipsy in my arms, it seemed to me now that her giddiness had something just slightly forced about it. She said again, “Oh, isn’t it a shame we have to leave!”–but she said it too brightly. It was as if she wanted more from the night than the night had so far given her, and was broadening and hardening her strokes against it in an effort to make it pay up.

The last sentence is the one I think is so good; it seems like the perfect description of when the end of the night turns you brassy.

It has been raining in Asheville for the past couple weeks. All varieties: Light rain, heavy rain, rain accompanied by thunder, rain accompanied by tornadoes, dribbling rain, rain rain rain. Somewhere in there Lowell became convinced that the Weather Service knew that the rain was never going to stop but was only forecasting one to two days at a time so as to not “completely destroy the spirits of the people.” We’re lucky to work at home but this kind of weather can make you feel extra confined, as if the circumference of the world has been reduced to the computer and the window with the rain streaking down it. So on Tuesday we played hooky — went to 12 Bones for beef brisket, cornbread and grits, and then downtown to visit Malaprop’s and Captain’s Bookshelf . It was a really lovely outing, which of course I would say because I clearly got to commandeer the itinerary.
At Malaprop’s, I picked up the new Geoff Dyer, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, which looks marvelous. At Captain’s, I got two books I’ve had my eye on for a while, The Collected Poems of Roethke (I’ve had the library’s copy since December and they’d probably like it back) and the collected stories of Elizabeth Bowen. The latter is a very pleasing hardcover edition by Jonathan Cape; beautiful typesetting, pretty engravings by Joan Hassall. I’ve been visiting it for over a year — always looking it over, feeling desire, then returning it to the shelf and acting excessively virtuous about it. But Tuesday, the book fell open to one particular story and I knew I had to bring it home.
It’s the opening of “The Confidante,” one of Bowen’s early stories. The odd thing that day was I’d just spend the entire morning trying to describe a character in my book’s “secret preoccupation” and had finally given up on the paragraph before going out. And then there was Bowen, describing the same emotion so vividly yet economically:

“You are losing your imagination,” cried Maurice.
It was a bitter reproach. He stood over her, rumpling up his hair, and the wiry tufts sprang upright, quivering from his scalp.
Penelope gulped, then sat for a moment in a silence full of the consciousness of her brutality. She had never dreamed that her secret preoccupation would be so perceptible to Maurice. Unconsciously she had been drawing her imaginations in upon herself like the petals of a flower, and her emotions buzzed and throbbed within them like a pent-up bee.
The room was dark with rain, and they heard the rip and rustle of leaves in the drinking garden.

See? It had to come home.

Male character: “Worried about your book?”
Female character: “Oh, there’s my book, the war, the laundry, things I said 15 years ago, the environment, my double chin, unanswered mail, what an ass I am, what a dirty house we have — and I’ve had ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’ playing in my head for days.”
Lynda Barry, What It Is

Speaking of character-limited prose, two Twittery things I’m enjoying: Poetry magazine’s Twitter feed washes up some beautiful, oddly satisfying pieces of poetry flotsam (all of which are more successful metaphorically than I’m being here) and Baby Trotsky, a “Twitterary magazine” that’s new but off to an interesting start.
A while back, Lowell* asked me if people write poems on Twitter, and we postulated the emergence of a new poetic form that would resemble a 140-character haiku: the Twitterku. It’s nice to see this same idea cropping up elsewhere. My most recent favorite arrived via Rebecca Skloot‘s feed: “Book tour haiku: O! To step off a plane / And see your name lovingly / Misspelled on a sign!”
* He’s anti-Twitter, pro-cuneiform.

My friend A. Flurry’s: “What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Supercuts to be shorn?”

• I had seen bits and pieces of Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED talk on creative genius quoted various places but until recently hadn’t realized it was possible to watch the whole thing online. (Thanks, Quiet Bubble.) If you haven’t watched it yet, it’s well worth a look and a think. It skates dangerously near “Dance like no one is watching” territory near the close, but I think Gilbert emerges mostly unscathed.
• Courtesy of Jacket Copy, a gallery of some of the wondrous treehouses photographed by Pete Nelson for his book, New Treehouses of the World. O, I need a new dacha!
• New York mag’s roundtable discussion of Charlotte Roche’s Wetlands isn’t suffering a shortage of strong opinions (“a loathsome little turd of a novel”). Even better, Jessa Crispin and Kate Christensen are two of the readers taking part.
Image: Pete Nelson

Tonight Maud Newton, Lizzie Skurnick, and Kate Christensen read at Housing Works. As I know Terry and OGIC would agree, it’s a dream line-up. The event’s been well publicized, and I trust if you’re in New York and free this evening you already have plans to be there. But for the rest of us, the ardent but geographically challenged supporters, here’s an afternoon coffee break of reading by the three authors to enjoy:
• This week Narrative Magazine is offering an excerpt from Maud’s novel-in-progress, “When the Flock Changed,” as its Story of the Week. Maud’s a dear friend so I know I’ll appear biased, but I am sincere in saying it’s a must-read.
• Lizzie’s book of poems, Check-In, was recently re-issued by Caketrain in an expanded second edition. I have the first edition and it’s wonderful, and I need to order the second edition for the 14 new poems and new sexy cover. You can listen to Lizzie read her poem “Grand Central, Track 23” on PBS’s Poetry Everywhere website.
• If you’re a regular reader of About Last Night, you’ll know that we’re all three great admirers of Kate Christensen’s novels. Her new novel, Trouble, comes out in June, and it sounds amazing. This past weekend she reviewed Arthur Phillips’ new novel, The Song Is You, for The New York Times Book Review; it was (I believe) the first piece of critical writing I’ve read by her, and it was funny and enjoyable to note how directly the pleasures of reading a Kate Christensen novel (intelligence, felicity of phrase) translate into the pleasures of reading a Kate Christensen review.