It’s true: fiction got fucked in the face by the Pulitzers. The reason I’m bummed is because it’s one of the few opportunities to do something exciting for a writer and the literary community, especially the booksellers. We need these prizes to celebrate our collective industry no matter how political and corrupt it often seems. It sounds like the process must have been grueling. WHat’s worse than coming up empty handed? Having your dick cut off? Okay, here at betsy.com let’s have our own vote. The three finalists are Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams, David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, and Karen Russel’s Swamplandia.
So cast your vote for one of these three writers OR nominate someone else. The winner of the BetsyPulitzerPrize will be invited to have a q&a here, I will make love with the winner, and he or she will get a free copy of THe Forest for the Trees and a free lifetime subscription to the blog.
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Over the weekend, I visited my niece who had moved into her first apartment. I was filled with nostalgia for that time in my life even though most of it was miserable. Her place had one large window which looked out on a classic New York landscape of apartment buildings, inside each window a short story in progress. I could have stared out of it all day. She had only begun to furnish it with a few pieces from Ikea, couch, tables, one chair. The first piece of furniture I bought when I became a full editor was a couch. It was black leather and the arms and back were curved and you could stretch out on the whole thing and read all day, which is exactly what I did. That couch followed me to three houses before it was finally retired to that great couch heaven in the sky.
It’s kind of amazing, if you think about it, that poetry gets its own month. There’s a lot of important and vital shit out there that doesn’t get its own month, like Stem Cell Month or Bi-Polar Month or Mountain Dew month. I’m all in favor of it, don’t get me wrong. A little poetry never hurt anyone, though the road to hell is paved with poets. Which came first: iambic pentameter or the desire to self-destruct. Or the desire to put pressure on language, flip it, douse it with gasoline, light a match. Daddy you do not do. The asshole is holy. My body electric. Hush Saxon, say it again. He forced the underbrush and that was all. Pablo Picasso, they never called him an asshole. Darkness my name is. I remember Richard Howard, glass raised to his eye, reciting The Moose. Someone said it was an egg nestled in the eyebrows of Milosz. Or Denis Johnson silent as a stone. People ask me if I still write poems: no. Though today, leafing through an old journal, one fell out. You’d’ve thought I found gold, that letter from another life. .
I’m not writing. I’m not doing it. I’m taking a break. A big fat fucking break. I’m going to the gym again, not that it shows. And no I don’t feel better. I’ve got some kind of freak anhedonic response to working out, so instead of a runner’s high when I finish, I wind up bawling in the showers most days. And lately, it takes very little to set my chin aquiver. I told my psychodrama that I was teary a lot lately, but that it actually felt good. “How does feeling bad feel good?” he asked. Really?
Sans plus adieu, un billet de blog de la perche de la publication de la bien-aimée et séduisante Vivian Swift…
Where do I begin to tell the story of how great a love can be? Tonight, friends, it begins with American’s sweetheart 
I did it. I added to Lion’s Gate’s coffers, buying a ticket to the 300 plus million dollar gross and counting for Hunger Games. I heart Catniss. You had me at bow and arrow. Lips untouched by Botox. Chariots and Stanley Tucci in a blue hairdo. (Just for the record, I also saw a rare print of Orson Welles Chimes at Midnight and the brilliant Iranian movie The Separation, which I feel I need to tell you the way you might tell your nutritionist that you had some salmon and broccoli along with the Sno-Caps and Goobers. ) High art v low. Critical v. commercial. Those standards don’t smoke themselves. It’s an argument I’m always vexed by since I go both ways. When interns and assistants ask me what I’m looking for when they read the slush, I always say the same thing: prize winners or page turners. Are they mutually exclusive? Once something gets really popular it seems to go down in the cultural estimation, where obscurity, should it by chance (or design) come out of obscurity, will get a certain kind of praise for its “authenticity.” I liked the fucking Hunger Games. Sue me.
I went to 
Took a new client out to lunch today to celebrate the sale of her first novel. The Riesling was dry, the beets glazed with extra (extra!) virgin olive oil, and the waiter equal parts flirtatious and pretentious. This is the best part, being the straw, the slide, the spoon. Corner man. Fairy god. Icing. Cake. Saying one right thing. You’re hot shit. Watching a story turn into a snow storm. Spotting a nest in a high branch. Getting up at dawn. Weaving hay into gold. Sentences unfurled like mardi gras beads of gold. Tiny yellow patent leather shoes. A girl’s hot head dreaming on her pillow. The waiter brushing crumbs from the table.
Betsy Lerner 