CONGRATULATIONS To my most G client, William Todd Schultz on the publication of his new biography of Elliott Smith, TORMENT SAINT.
Here’s a spotify list: http://open.spotify.com/user/meg.ernst/playlist/6fpTyvd96SC2ZZ4pXUtYnk
Please tell every Elliott Smith fan you know. Or people interested in the Portland indie music scene. Or understanding the tragic lives of young, gifted artists who didn’t make it. Todd has also written books about two of my favorite artists, Diane Arbus and Truman Capote. Brilliant psychological portraits that don’t attempt to explain a person’s life or choices, but brings you in as close as possible to understanding the forces and obsessions that compelled each artist to do their work, and how their work failed to save them.
October 3, 2013,
Randall Roberts, Los Angeles Times
Ten years ago this November singer-songwriter Elliott Smith, then 34, died in an Echo Park bungalow from two knife stabs to the chest. According to William Todd Schultz’s “Torment Saint: The Life of Elliott Smith,” a clear-eyed and devastating new biography of the gifted and troubled artist, his death, likely a suicide, was inevitable. The only questions were how and when. read more…
http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/torment-saint-9781608199730/
What’s the saddest song you know?
Filed under: Client, Publicity, The End of the World as We Know It, Uncategorized | Tagged: biography, Elliott Smith, Indie music, Portland, William Todd Schultz | 39 Comments »
Novels are flying at my head. Thousands of pages flapping like seagulls at Brighton Beach. Stories from land locked countries, from the mouths of bats, from trains that never leave the station. From the station itself. How did you come up with so many sentences, so many girls named Cara or Carla or Quintana, or Ray. Did it start on a stair, a hill, a bucket, a pail? What’s it about? Well, that’s a good question. The beach, the mountains, a multi-generational tale of raisin bran. You are nothing like a summer’s day. Why do sympathetic characters bring out the sadist in me? Does anyone really change? Are you my beginning, my middle or my ass wipe? Hi, I’m Betsy and I’m addicted to prose. Oh, Daisy. Grow up. There is a big canister somewhere. Dear Betsy: I am writing to see if you would be interested in my five novels, a 874,000 word quintet about two slugs fucking in a snot can. Do you feel me? Oh mighty novelists with your big boots and musky armpits. Where would we be without you?
Did you finish your memoir, your novel, one lousy stinking poem? Did you read War and Peace? Rescue a dog? Yourself? Did you jump on the Yonana craze? Lose a notebook with all of your best work? Did you pick peaches? Fuck your wife? Fuck up your life? Did you take up cycling? Wonder why you couldn’t write. Did you talk to a woman at the farm stand? Was your family trapped by a rabid raccoon who attacked your dog and bit off half your finger? Did you think about everyone who died? Did you imagine their airless life? Did you give money to the guy at the entrance to the highway because his sign said he was hungry and for once you felt more compassion than fear? What does it take to write the sentences of your life? To live inside the mole hole? And come out with that grin on your stupid dirty face.
August. The month of my birth. The month of Helter SKelter. The month Jerry died. Guess who’s elevating? August, the beloved curmudgeon, cursing out some feckless bank teller. Vivian, creative genius pottering. Stacy Horn back to press. SSS on it. What was the world we had? Slipped away. Came back when most expected. Least longed for or the other way around. I am waiting for a kiss. A sweet embrace against a brick wall where we made out in 1985 and 1986 and then broke up and I wrote four last songs. What about two solid weeks to revise the document I call Fuckmedead. What about a dog’s leg resting in the crook of your arm? When did wheelhouse come into the parlay? Not in my mental house. Not in this physical body. I have lost the thread. So what? The thread lost me.
The results are in. Sheri Booker has spoken. The top three winners of the funeral contest are:
I met Teri on Friday night here in New Haven. She was here for a writer’s conference and looked me up. She was here last year, too, and got in touch. But I successfully avoided her then. I couldn’t do it again. I have not relished the idea of meeting anyone who reads the blog, even those I’ve come to love through their comments. First, it scary. Second, I know I can’t possibly live up to any expectations. Third, like most writers I’m the fraud behind the curtain. I send out these the sentences with the hope of a fortune in a stale cookie. I’ve got this persona and the one I bring to my work as agent fairly well developed by now, but it doesn’t make me okay, or any more real. Or at least not more real than sitting behind a computer or with a notebook at a cafe describing the girl across the way, her wool socks on a summer day.
Guys, guys, guys, guys. It’s Book Expo in New York. I just tripped over Scott Turow. I didn’t get invited to the Malcolm Gladwell party. I didn’t get invited to my own publisher’s party. That I take as a badge of pride. I ran into a book rep I haven’t seen since the Fifties, but he’s still wearing that bolo and I still remember Miami. I saw a machine that makes books on demand. I saw a vampire in broad daylight. I saw my beloved Japanese agent and she was wearing a gorgeous floral skirt that she bought at thrift shop, then corrected herself: Vintage. I met with a mother-daughter team who sell audio books. When I told the daughter she looked like Kim Kardashian she seemed to be insulted. I wandered through the booths thinking about all the publishing jobs I had, all the bosses I didn’t blow, all the massive excitement I used to feel helping books come into the world and learning how to galvanize my passion. Or how I could get high off the smell of books fresh out of the carton. Or the party I once threw for a first collection of stories, decorating my apartment with candles and peaches.
Betsy Lerner 