Elizabeth Minkel

[“Take a short story and carve it on a bullet and just fire it into my skull.”]

I’ve got a new piece up at The Millions: 

George Saunders and the Question of Greatness

It actually began as a little tumblr post—reactions to Saunders’s appearance on Colbert shortly after “Tenth of December” came out in January, and then a reading he gave at Greenlight, and then (finally) attempting to read the book. I was going to post it here, but it kept spinning into something longer, so off it went to The Millions. Here’s the paragraph about Greenlight—I think it encapsulates a lot of the feelings:

It must have been a week or so before that, when my friends and I were huddled in the very back corner of Greenlight Bookstore here in the middle of Brooklyn, just a few feet from the stockroom, so many shelf-lined antechambers away from the man that we may as well have been in a different city, listening to him read a teasing bit of “Escape from Spiderhead” and answer questions over the PA system, and the first one was that old chestnut, where’s the novel we’ve all been waiting for?, and after he said that he lacked the momentum to “accrue pages”—“I think of my stories as kind of like those little toys and you wind ’em up and put it on the floor and it goes under the couch”—the guy beside me let out this soft, disappointed sigh, like he’d just learned exactly why his child had been sent to the principal’s office, or he was watching the scene in a movie where two lovers fated to die come this close to finding each other—but not quite.

Over at The Millions today, I’m one of six staff writers who contributed to a piece called “I Read About It: Music, Food, Poetry, and Lifestyle Suggestions We’ve Taken from Literature,” in which Janet Potter asked us: “What works of art have you been introduced to by other works of art?” I’m deeply susceptible to certain references in books—the most notable trigger these days is people drinking tea, or more often, people making tea, like to the point where I find myself suddenly hovering over the kettle with no knowledge of travelling into the kitchen. There are more dangerous habits, I suppose.

My blurb here, though, is a little twisty: in my freshman year of college, obsessed with jazz, I bought a book about it, Geoff Dyer’s “But Beautiful,” and by the time I’d finished with it, I’d all but given up the music—I’d turned back to books, wholeheartedly. Geoff Dyer does that to people. It was the Lester Young chapter that did me in. That’s him, up there. Fading away.

[image source]

I have feelings about this VIDA awfulness, how the 2012 stats are out and the pie charts look worse than ever but, well (I am calling the pie charts awful, not VIDA. They seem solid). It’s a shitty and complicated situation. Better things than that could be/should be/have been said about it. But I was looking through a thread on Facebook about this and gender/byline iniquities a few days ago and someone linked to this writing “gender guesser”, where you paste in your text and it guesses the gender of the writer. I just finished a short story; I was curious. The site says something like “make sure you put in at least 300 words for more accurate results” so I pasted the entirety of my 9,000-word story into the box. Behold, the results.

It’s nice to be misleading/confusing but maybe this is also just right. “Informal” means blogs and chat logs and “formal” means fiction and nonfiction, and about 98% of this story is dialogue between a man and a woman. A British man and a British woman. (!) “Weak emphasis could indicate European.” I thought I was being insulted but maybe they’re telling me I did it correctly.

You know I love “Downton Abbey,” right? Or I did? I still do. I don’t know anymore. I give up.

A new piece for “The Millions” on the show and Julian Fellowes’s general writing decisions (yes, I know, not all of this is his fault, but a lot of it is):

Stages of Television Grief: On the Decline of Downton Abbey

(I couldn’t resist a cricket image. Every television show should have a big cricket showdown.)

[image source]

And here’s the aforementioned piece on “The Love Song of Jonny Valentine” by Teddy Wayne, over at The Millions. I’m actually pretty proud of this one:

http://www.themillions.com/2013/02/the-kid-is-alright-on-teddy-waynes-the-love-song-of-jonny-valentine.html

Please check out if you are interested in any of the following:

• Justin Bieber
• Pretend Justin Bieber
• One Direction
• The Rolling Stones
• Simon Cowell
• corporate Urban Outfitters indie pop
• Justin Timberlake
• questions of fame v. authenticity v. talent v. branding v. ?
• really good books about pop culture

And 10 points to whoever made that super amazing image.

My “Year in Reading” for The Millions went up yesterday!

http://www.themillions.com/2012/12/a-year-in-reading-elizabeth-minkel.html

[Basically one more chance to freak out about “Pradeep Mathew,” and to fangirl over Stephen Fry. Which I try to do as often as possible.]

And while I’m here: please check out the Years in Reading of two old mentor-y figures of mine, Alex Chee and Paul Ford (the former was my professor; the latter was my boss). Both are super excellent (the posts as well as the people):

http://www.themillions.com/2012/12/a-year-in-reading-alexander-chee.html

http://www.themillions.com/2012/12/a-year-in-reading-paul-ford.html

A friend and I took the train out to Montauk on Sunday. We had this running joke about reenacting “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and also weeping in the dunes, but the real joke was that neither of us could remember much of the film at all. Though to be more accurate, we took a whole series of trains—Atlantic Terminal, transfer at Jamaica, transfer to a bus at Babylon, back onto a train at Bay Shore, and then watch the trees drop away and scrubland rush past, and then it was all weathered brown wood and friendly white trim until we finally reached the edge of the earth. I live three blocks from the western tip of Long Island; I could’ve started my morning at the docks, at the Kane Street Container Terminal—for symbolism. But it was nine in the goddamn morning on a Sunday, and I needed coffee.

I am descended from Long Islanders but I’d never been past Nassau County before Sunday. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but Montauk seemed more like other strange, coastal outposts than what I’d heard about the neighboring Hamptons. Cheesy t-shirts with pictures of reddish donkeys captioned with “Burned my Ass in Montauk,” that sort of thing, the same sort of thing I’ve seen on islands in North Carolina, or Key West. By virtue of the off-season or a Sunday or maybe just a trick they were playing on out-of-towners, everything was either closed or in the process of closing. Mostly, things seemed to have closed ten minutes before we approached any given business. It was ferociously windy out on the beach, but not particularly cold. It felt like the end of summer, not the middle of October, though the sun was hanging pretty low, casting the beach in this wistful Instagram-filter gold. A few scattered fisherman braved the tides, and a pair of devoted beach-goers sat bundled up on folding chairs by the dunes. My friend and I got sand everywhere, in ways that no fully-clothed person should be able to manage. When we tried to approach a brewery and the sign informed us they’d close in eight minutes—at five p.m.—we decided to head home.

We caught a cab, thinking we’d just make the 5:30 train. But the platform was full of confused and pristine hipsters, some beautiful cable-knit sweaters up there, all trying to analyze the only message from the LIRR we would receive: the little flashing board that said the next train wouldn’t be here until nearly seven. The “Montauk Train Station” is a gross overstatement; it is a platform, with some paper schedules that have no bearing on the trains’ actual movements. No physical person, electronic ticket machine, or anything that would make us feel like we weren’t stranded at the end of the world. We called 511 and they confirmed that yes, that 6:55 was the one and only train rolling through that night. My friend and I still didn’t totally believe him. Most other people wandered off for the hour and a half wait; we sat next to the railroad tracks in the fading light, drinking Heineken out of brown paper bags.

Was it strange that we spent ten hours in transit and three hours at our destination? Thinking back to my last few proper trips, it was par for the course, really—all of this was nothing compared to that flat tire in rural Wales, the one that so quickly spun out of control. On the Montauk to Bay Shore leg I read the fourth section of Cloud Atlas, which includes a farcical account of English train travel that rings true for anyone who’s ever silently (or audibly) cursed the National Rail while stranded in some strange corner of the West Country. It’s like every journey leaves this mark, a little impression. And it seems like every time this stuff happens—when we’re shuffling between trains, watching the hours slip away, thinking about how every step (or misstep) up until that moment has led you to be sitting next to the railroad tracks drinking beer out of brown paper bags, when you look out at the darkness flitting past and think, I can’t believe all of this happened in just one day—the impression becomes a groove, pressed deeper, physical evidence left behind. We need these grooves, I think. Reminders that, no matter what happens, we’ll make it home eventually. Or so one hopes.

Back in Brooklyn, we emerged at the Barclays Center just as some event was letting out, and the streets were packed with surprisingly sedate people shuffling towards the trains. It was warmer at this edge of Long Island. We walked that stretch of State Street with those little flickering lanterns next to every stoop. At Hoyt, we parted ways; soon enough, eventually, I was home. 

I’m incredibly excited to announce that I’m joining The Millions as a regular staff writer this month. (!) To kick things off, the aforementioned “much longer and hopefully much more thoughtful” piece about The Legend of Pradeep Mathew. It’s a survey of the history—and literary history—of cricket, and I discuss Pradeep Mathew and Netherland at length:

http://www.themillions.com/2012/10/wickets-and-wonders-crickets-rich-literary-vein.html