“All of the Money, None of the Vomit:” A Conversation about Making Scenes

The author of Making Scenes, who was known as Adrienne Eisen at the time the book was published, is now known as Penelope Trunk. Penelope Trunk is a successful career coach and popular blogger.  Adrienne Eisen is the author of a transgressive, disturbing and awesome novel.  Emily Gould spoke to Penelope on the phone last week and they tried to reconcile these ideas.

E: What were the circumstances around the publication of Making Scenes?

P: Well, I started writing little snippets in the early 90s.  It was just when the Internet was coming into existence. My boyfriend was in this group of people in Hollywood that was looking for content for non-linear media.  They had all this technology and nothing to put on it.  People were talking about how they were going to, like, dissect James Joyce and put it in a new order and I was like, wow, that’s a really stupid idea, that’s gonna be really bad.  And so I brought my little snippets to the meeting and said, hey, this makes sense if you read it in any order.  And I became this darling of the new media world, because I could churn out content that they could throw onto their new technology.  But then it wasn’t really a world that was taken seriously at that time. Like, if you were a writer you wrote a book. I could tell people that I was writing on the Internet, and they didn’t even know what the Internet was.

E: We’ve come so far, since then! Haha.

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The Not-Nice Novel

Helen DeWitt’s books aren’t apologetic, cute or kind. In an Extremely Sentimental and Curiously Twee literary marketplace, we need her work more than ever, argues Rich Beck

In the last fifteen years, the Precocious Child has become one of the American novel’s favorite protagonists. Whimsical, ingenious, and verbose, the Precocious Child knows simultaneously more and less than his adult readers. He may be a tennis prodigy (Infinite Jest) or a twelve-year old farm boy who wins science prizes from the Smithsonian Institute (The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet). But he’s impeded by his youth and something else, too: autism (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime) or amusingly bad English (Everything Is Illuminated) make it difficult for him to understand or articulate adult feelings. This tension between extraordinary competence in some areas and lovable haplessness in others is what gives the Precocious Child novel its appeal.  

            The Last Samurai belongs to this genre—in fact, it is one of the very first Precocious Child novels—but it also obviates it. It seems to have been written, point by point, to reject everything the Precocious Child novel would come to stand for.

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“A Glory Hole Would Have Ruined EVERYTHING.” An Interview with Helen DeWitt

Helen DeWitt is the author of EB pick Lighting Rods. She is also the author of The Last Samurai and the blog paperpools.  Andy Selsberg  is the author of You Are Good at Things: A Checklist and teaches college freshman composition.   They had a fascinating recent email conversation about Lightning Rods and the ethical and physical practicability of some of the acts described therein. You should certainly follow both Helen’s and Andy’s twitters.

AS: Eureka, FL, Electrolux, Encyclopaedia Britannica, characters who say
“Jumping Jehosophat”: these all seem to set the story in a mythical
American past (or at least a parallel America). Did you do this to
give the story an air of fable or allegory? (If not, what drew you to
this setting? It is one I’m sucker for.) At any point you consider
about making it more now—maybe have Joe hustling ads for a website,
or going after venture capital for a startup? Would that have changed
the essence of what you wanted to do with the novel?

HD: I think what I had in mind was the simplified America(s) of TV sitcoms of the late 50s, 60s, 70s. It struck me that when Joe was growing up the popular culture that was his frame of reference would not all have been contemporary, it was common to have endless reruns of shows that had aired years, even a decade earlier. (I suppose one could see that as a kind of mythical past.)  His outlook feels more dated than one would expect if one thought only of his age (hits 30 sometime in the 90s); that seemed to matter somehow, that this simplistic, outdated view of the world should find a foothold in a real world that had left it far behind.  Which, in turn, is possible because 1 person in the 1000 he tries shares the same dated point of view and is in a position to give him his first sale.  I don’t think that particular irony would have been possible if Joe had been brought up to date, been more recognizable as a modern businessman.

I don’t mean to imply that the book is particularly profound, but this does seem to be a fictional instance of something that is genuinely shocking about our world: most of its structures were put in place, are now kept in place, by people who couldn’t even IMAGINE the resources taken for granted by the young.

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Lapsus

by Minna Proctor

I was introduced to the idea of Monica Sarsini this way: My college boyfriend— from Florence, Italy—said, “You have to meet my mother’s friend. She’s a writer. She’s strange and beautiful. She’s anorexic. She’s agoraphobic. She lives downstairs. You should read her.” He produced a slender book from his mother’s jammed shelves. The title was Crepapelle. A nonsense word. With peculiar childlike pleasure, he went on to describe the book as menagerie of fantastical hybrid animals. The dense sonorous other-dimensional language was too difficult for me, with my remedial Italian, to read at that time. But I took the book away with me, and kept trying.

I was introduced to the actual Monica Sarsini shortly after, when she held an open studio in her living room to show a friend’s paintings. She was beautiful and tiny, an exquisite skeleton. But unlike the haunted neurasthenic I had conjured, she was sunlight—laughing loudly, mouth open, teeth flashing. She grabbed both my hands firmly, fixed her face to mine and told me that she was absolutely delighted to meet me. I was nineteen and she embodied feminine perfection. Large black eyes, heavily lined with kohl, cheekbones like bird-wings, thick black hair pinned in a messy upsweep. She wore high heeled boots (always) but didn’t teeter. She clomped and stood her ground. She was ferocious, not sickly.  It was months before I worked up the courage to speak in her presence.

After we’d grown close—once I’d recovered my tongue—she told me about books.

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A Mentor by Nature

by Lauretta Charlton

I read Sempre Susan in one sitting, enthralled. You can never fully anticipate a book having that sort of impact on you, but when it does, it’s hard to ignore. Sigrid Nunez is unsparingly honest about her experience with Susan Sontag, and this creates a queasy tension in the reader: I felt embarrassed for Sontag, a woman who, despite her fierce intellect, could be petty and odd. She could also be authoritarian, unforgiving and without sympathy. And sometimes I resented Nunez for portraying her this way.

It’s interesting to be made to feel like shit by the person you’ve wanted to impress most. That kind of relationship has a funny way of making us learn more about ourselves.
 
When I worked in book publishing I was more self-conscious than I’ve ever been in my entire adult life. I was the only black person in the editorial department. Never mind that most of the peers I was surrounded by all seemed to maintain an auspiciously comfortable lifestyle despite earning a salary so small it hurts me to even think about it. It didn’t matter. I had something to prove and I knew exactly how I would do it: I would work for the most hard-nosed, no-bullshit, “everyone hold your breath, omg she’s coming” editor in the book business. That’s how I would prove my mettle.

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