She wrote about Friday Night Lights in NYRB recently.
― Eddie 2012: Demand The Cardigan (Eazy), Sunday, 11 September 2011 01:14 (twelve years ago) link
i am reading like life, mildly bemused to find the pinefox had revived this thread nine months ago to make much the same points i was going to make, huh
― thomp, Tuesday, 26 June 2012 10:58 (eleven years ago) link
i consider like life and anagrams her juvenilia.
― scott seward, Tuesday, 26 June 2012 11:48 (eleven years ago) link
or wait no i think i mean self help and anagrams. her 80's stuff.
― scott seward, Tuesday, 26 June 2012 11:51 (eleven years ago) link
oof reading what i wrote about that last book...makes me sad. i wanted to love it!
― scott seward, Tuesday, 26 June 2012 12:03 (eleven years ago) link
i think the 80s pair are more assured than 'like life', on current showing; probably if i hadn't read 'birds' before i'd like it more -- it seems to be in the same mode but not quite there yet: a little glib, some lapses of attention, some overly story-ish things happening
― thomp, Tuesday, 26 June 2012 14:47 (eleven years ago) link
apparently she shows up every once in awhile at the bar down the block for grad student things, i'm sure i wouldn't recognize her though
― 40oz of tears (Jordan), Tuesday, 26 June 2012 14:50 (eleven years ago) link
she looks like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Dz7kbgH6T8
― scott seward, Wednesday, 27 June 2012 13:25 (eleven years ago) link
"about as happy as she got -- a sigh with some light in it"
― thomp, Sunday, 1 July 2012 06:47 (eleven years ago) link
it has taken me until p194 to 'get' the title of 'a gate at the stairs'
― thomp, Sunday, 1 July 2012 20:36 (eleven years ago) link
also i kinda liked it
― thomp, Tuesday, 3 July 2012 10:03 (eleven years ago) link
pinefox's point four above is like the epitome of pinefoxian-bafflement-via-misprision, i think
― thomp, Tuesday, 3 July 2012 10:04 (eleven years ago) link
http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/authors/profiles/article/60360-the-leaping-mind-lorrie-moore.html
― That's So (Eazy), Saturday, 15 February 2014 15:39 (ten years ago) link
test
― charlie h, Tuesday, 18 February 2014 13:17 (ten years ago) link
Another profile:http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/18/books/lorrie-moores-new-book-is-a-reminder-and-a-departure.html?ref=arts
― That's So (Eazy), Tuesday, 18 February 2014 19:44 (ten years ago) link
The story 'Foes' in BARK is one of the most entertaining fictions I think Lorrie Moore has written in a long time.
― the pinefox, Thursday, 24 July 2014 08:52 (nine years ago) link
I loved Bark when I read it but I realised while I was reading it that it was very much in the same way that I love a new album by a band that sounds comfortingly similar to their other loved material. When I'd read my fourth or fifth story in a row in which characters exchanged delightful verbally-inventive quips I started to wonder whether or not they were doing this because the character or situation actually demanded it, or just because that's what characters in Lorrie Moore stories do. I was very rarely not entertained (and her skewering of a kind of 00s US indie rock mentality is a lot more adept than, say, Jonathan Franzen's) but I started to wonder whether this was a writer content to operate within her comfort zone.
In general I feel she's at her weakest when she's at her most explicitly political - the second half of Gate At The Stairs, etc, and found the twist involving the antagonist in Foes to be a slightly cheap shot as far as narrative devices go.
― Matt DC, Thursday, 24 July 2014 09:13 (nine years ago) link
the capitalization of BARK confused me and made me think we were discussing a literary journal
― ♛ LIL UNIT ♛ (thomp), Thursday, 24 July 2014 09:20 (nine years ago) link
I do remember having to put down the book after reading the first paragraph and just thinking "I am so happy I'm reading this", it was like listening to a New Order record and hearing a new Peter Hook bassline for the first time, you know exactly what it's going to do but in the moment it feels perfect.
― Matt DC, Thursday, 24 July 2014 09:20 (nine years ago) link
DC I basically agree but isn't that roughly what one might have felt about LM for about 15 years?
The Rock thing you mean, I assume, is in the 'Wings' story?
Probably agree re politics, but 'Foes' is tremendously written and funny !
― the pinefox, Thursday, 24 July 2014 12:33 (nine years ago) link
Only realized toward finishing 'Wings' that it was a rewrite of Henry James.
Odd that it's a song about ROCKERS but is presumably not a joke about the band WINGS.
If only Peter Miller were here to humour me.
― the pinefox, Friday, 25 July 2014 18:32 (nine years ago) link
And 'Referential' is 'after VN' which I take is Nabokov - which story, I am unsure, but there seems to be an 'intertextual exercise' motif here.
remembered what I was going to say about 'Wings' -
I didn't really get - or believe! - the motivation esp of the central woman, right up to her final dealings with the house
although I realize that 'the mystery of motivation', 'the ambiguity of people's desires' is the Jamesian schtick she is referring to.
― the pinefox, Friday, 25 July 2014 18:34 (nine years ago) link
I've only just seen this 2009 review of LM, by a notable writer on climate breakdown. Well informed and worthwhile I think.
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/lives-lorrie-moore/
― the pinefox, Friday, 11 November 2022 09:41 (one year ago) link
“I feel like I’ve got five years to live,” says Agnes, in “Agnes of Iowa,” having made a brief go of things in New York. “So I’m moving back to Iowa so that it’ll feel like fifty.”
That is so good.