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Articles by Rick Moody
Grand Finale - We're Running Out Of Time
Running out of time Here is one of my own dreams: I am at an event listening to a big speech about climate change. Afterward, I made my way to the front to talk to the speaker, a man I didn’t know. I told him it was the most impressive speech I’d heard in my life. I was at this event with a companion, a woman who hadn’t made it up to the speaker. I had a message from her to give to him, something she’d written and signed. But it was signed not by her name but just a series of X’s.
One-Eyed Jack, by Rick Moody | Conjunctions — The forum for innovative writing
There were three of us guys, Len, Dave, and me, and we all taught at the community college in town, and once a month on a Saturday evening, during summer break, we played Hearts. You know the card game. Wives accompanied sometimes, excepting that Len didn’t have a wife anymore, because she ran off with Mark’s wife, Mark being the guy who was once our fourth. (He went into landscaping and moved to Vermont.) Dave’s wife, Aileen, was very friendly with mine, whose name is Debby.
Going Cold Hershey
Every year, the novelist, short story writer and sugar addict Rick Moody bans the sweet stuff.
The Joy and Enthusiasm of Reading
I believe in the absolute and unlimited liberty of reading. I believe in wandering through the stacks and picking out the first thing that strikes me. I believe in choosing books based on the dust jacket. I believe in reading books because others dislike them or find them dangerous. I believe in choosing the hardest book imaginable. I believe in reading up on what others have to say about this difficult book, and then making up my own mind.
The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven
I The Ruin — where my friend Jorge Ruiz spent some of his nights — was decorated in twisted car parts and fruitless conversation and postindustrial clutter, in the collision of strangers and in the flicker of lost opportunities. Some of it was decoration; some of it was left over from whatever manufacturing operation had occupied the space in the early decades of the century. There were, on the walls of the Ruin, the melted shapes of obsolete computers, suspended from the wall on old meat hooks.
The Home Key 8 - Salmagundi Magazine
92. Let’s assume it’s not the burning bush, but simply a scraggly, scrubby, denuded tree, depicted here in its wintry raiment, at the time of hopelessness which precedes the coming of new birth, just around the corner, in the repetition compulsion of time. 93.
Willem Dafoe
The legendary actor and issue 29 cover star reflects on his craft with writer Rick Moody Willem Dafoe wears Ermenegildo Zegna AW21 throughout Willem Dafoe’s filmography exceeds a hundred films now. It’s the kind of résumé any working actor would aspire to. It includes work with iconic directors, movies for huge tent-pole franchises, but also the indiest of the indies, high-art projects in which he plays the likes of both Vincent van Gogh and Jesus of Nazareth.
Chloe Shaw on when she first asked, "What Is a Dog?": "I wrote from a place of specified grief"
Novelist Rick Moody talks to Chloe Shaw about dogs, cats, vulnerability, loss, and animals as literary characters By Rick Moody Published July 25, 2021 11:00AM (EDT) Chloe Shaw, author of "What Is A Dog?" and author Rick Moody (Photo illustration by Salon/Flat Iron Books/Rachel Liu) Books about dogs are frequent, and also frequently romanticized, oversimplified, or dumbed down.
New Song Of The Day: Steve Gunn - Other You/Reflection
Today we have not one, but two new songs from Steve Gunn to keep you warm on this chilly Thursday. Steve’s next album, his 6th, is titled Other You and will be released August 27th, but we’ve got two new songs for you today. Here’s the burb with more: Other You is the sixth studio album by American singer Steve Gunn.
Steve Gunn announces new album 'Other You', listen to two-song single 'Other You' & 'Reflection' • WithGuitars
STEVE GUNN ANNOUNCES NEW ALBUM OTHER YOU OUT AUGUST 27TH WATCH VIDEOS FOR NEW TWO-SONG SINGLE ‘OTHER YOU’ / ‘REFLECTION‘ US TOUR DATES ANNOUNCED “I came up with this title when we were recording vocals and Rob was very into harmonies. There was a third part and I just couldn’t find the note. I couldn’t vocalize it. He went in and took my voice and put it into his computer program, then he could playback and “sing” the note with my voice using the computer.
On Meritocracy And Faith
Were one to attempt a response to, a refutation of, Ross Douthat’s New York Times column of April 10, 2021, “Can Meritocracy Find God?,” it might be necessary to begin with the title of the work, to begin with the interrogative found there. For the title seems to want to generate questions in reply, such as: In any rigorous theological discussion, does the question being asked here, in this title, make any difference at all? And that’s before you even get into the substance of the piece.
Rick Moody on How a Photograph Can Tell an Entire Story
My wife, no stranger to photography workshops when young, is fond of recounting a tried-and-true bit of photo advice she heard at the Museum School in Boston, when she was an undergraduate. It goes like this: “Q: How do you take a good photograph? A: You take a photograph of some people and you put it in a drawer for thirty years.
Funhouse
On “Funhouse” Everyone knows Shanna McNair is one of the great citizens of NYC writing circles, an indefatigable leader of workshops and a thinker about how to publish, where to publish, who’s good in publishing (and who’s not), a thinker about how to conceive of the writing workshop, about how to make it do something useful, a leader of the community, a generous and selfless person.
Swinging Modern Sounds #104: Paradise
Swinging Modern Sounds #104: Paradise Mia Doi Todd’s music is work of subtlety and immense power, gentle at first glance and then, upon exploration, remarkably strong, expansive, even insistent and, more often than not, emotionally overpowering. Her remarkable development over a long career of consistent excellence is particularly instructive and illustrative—it tells us directly and indirectly about how music has changed in the last twenty years.
The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel
Synopsis Amy Hempel is a master of the short story. This celebrated volume gathers together her complete work -- four short collections of stunning stories about marriages, minor disasters, and moments of revelation. With her inimitable compassion and wit, Hempel introduces characters who make choices that seem inevitable, and whose longings and misgivings evoke eternal human experience.
Swinging Modern Sounds: Observations on the Occasion of a 100th Column
Swinging Modern Sounds: Observations on the Occasion of a 100th Column 1. Music has changed a lot since I started writing the Swinging Modern Sounds column in 2009. 2. For example, when I started the column I was still primarily listening to music on compact disc. 3. I was still buying most of my music at Other Music in lower Manhattan—that was about three years after Tower Records, across the street, had closed. 4.
Collected Stories of Amy Hempel by Amy Hempel
From Powells.com Synopses & Reviews Amy Hempel is a master of the short story. This celebrated volume gathers together her complete work four short collections of stunning stories about marriages, minor disasters, and moments of revelation. With her inimitable compassion and wit, Hempel introduces characters who make choices that seem inevitable, and whose longings and misgivings evoke eternal human experience.
The Best Book Club Books for Winter 2020
If you’re on the hunt for the next juicy read for your book club this winter, then look no further! This list covers all the bases with the best picks for every kind of taste. Whether your group only reads award winning works, loves books they can compare to their movie adaptations, speeds through heart-pounding thrillers or flips through swoon-worthy romances—we’ve got you covered.
Rudy Giuliani Is a Colossal Asshole
A sign out front says, MEET THE MAYOR, and there’s a picture of Rudy Giuliani smiling his ghoulish public smile, with his cavernous dimples and aspirin-white teeth. The grin is utterly horizontal, a perfect straight line, as though a ruler and a razor together had cut it into his face. Five hundred people have gathered inside the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale in the Bronx, and Giuliani is standing before them, above them, on a stage. He is wearing a black suit.
Three Questions for Kramer
The producer and songwriter and multi-instrumentalist who goes by the name of Kramer had a streak, in the eighties and nineties, of selecting and developing for his label Shimmy-Disc albums by some of the most influential bands of the period (such as Daniel Johnston, Ween, and King Missile, to name but a few) as well as producing seminal recordings by Galaxie 500, Half Japanese, Low, Royal Trux, Urge Overkill, Palace Brothers, Pussy Galore, and on and on.
Three Questions for Kramer
The producer and songwriter and multi-instrumentalist who goes by the name of Kramer had a streak, in the eighties and nineties, of selecting and developing for his label Shimmy-Disc albums by some of the most influential bands of the period (such as Daniel Johnston, Ween, and King Missile, to name but a few) as well as producing seminal recordings by Galaxie 500, Half Japanese, Low, Royal Trux, Urge Overkill, Palace Brothers, Pussy Galore, and on and on.
Rick Moody Finds a Sense of Home
Domestic Lives Nov. 10, 2010 THE street addresses of my life, and there have been a great number of them, have often felt less like home to me than the places I’ve written about. The New Canaan, Conn., of 1973, when I was writing about it in the early ’90s. The Arizona of the near future, in a recent novel. I love landscapes of the imagination, less so the topographies of the so-called real world. And I suspect that’s the case with many writers of fiction.
Why Teaching Literary Arts Over Zoom Doesn’t Quite Work
I skipped the Literary Arts departmental meeting of Monday, March 9th, and I shouldn’t have. Item seven on our agenda, “COVID-19,” suddenly became item No. 1, and the upshot, as I soon learned, was that we, the teachers of creative writing at Brown University, were now to begin the process of teaching writing “remotely,” meaning, as we all have come to know, via Zoom, or Google Hangouts, or Canvas, or Whereby, or Slack, or Padlet, or similar platforms.
Padgett Powell pops the question again and again
Padgett Powell pops the question again and again The Interrogative Mood: A Novel? BY Padgett Powell. Ecco. Hardcover, 176 pages. $21. Purchase this book: Indiebound • Amazon Yes, it’s true. Padgett Powell’s new “novel” is a highly allusive prose work composed entirely of questions. Many reviewers of this book, I suspect, will attempt to admonish the questioner with further questions, wondering at the gumption of the thing. But it might be useful instead to answer some of the questions posed.
Ball - Electric Literature
Tara Ison Tara Ison is the author of Reeling Through Life: How I Learned to Live, Love, and Die at the Movies. Ball Tara Ison Tara Ison is the author of Reeling Through Life: How I Learned to Live, Love, and Die at the Movies. Share article by Tara Ison, recommended by Rick Moody My sweet little dog, Tess, is what they call “apricot.” She has tiny blue eyes, almond-shaped and set close together like Barbra Streisand’s, and the prettiest little dog vagina.
‘Three Christs,’ Schizophrenia & Us
‘Three Christs,’ Schizophrenia & Us IFC FilmsBradley Whitford as Clyde, Peter Dinklage as Joseph, and Walton Goggins as Leon in Three Christs, directed by Jon Avnet One does not have to go that far back in cinema to find another film besides Jon Avnet’s newly released Three Christs that is based on medical case history.
The Pain, Hidden in Plain Sight, of John Cheever's Darkest Work
Bullet Park was the first work by John Cheever of which I was made aware, the first in which I was alert to the author as a particular person with a style and set of interests. This was in a high school creative writing class, by which I mean boarding school, citadel of privilege in the Northeast, among the children of a Cheeveresque social stratum. The teacher of the creative writing class was a lugubrious and hilarious chemistry teacher of my school, Mike Burns, who wrote fiction on the side.
Swinging Modern Sounds #73: Prince Rogers Nelson, Guitar Player: A Symposium
Swinging Modern Sounds #73: Prince Rogers Nelson, Guitar Player: A Symposium The passing into the afterlife of Prince Rogers Nelson was sudden, it was unwarranted, and, because of his very reasonable wish for privacy, it was inexplicable. The outpouring of sentiment that followed has by and large orbited around things we know well about Prince Rogers Nelson—we know the high period of his celebrity, his unparalleled showmanship, the variety of his output.
Rick Moody on the Case of the Cursed Charles Manson Autograph
If I were to pick an emblem, an objective correlative for the year 2013, it was a Charles Manson autograph. The story comes from the writing world, at least initially, and it starts like this. I knew this literary fellow who was doing some hard time. I think a number of writers knew him. Another writer told me that this guy, doing the hard time, wanted to write to me, and would I write back?
He Said, He Said: One Writer’s Account of His Second Act (Published 2019)
Nonfiction Aug. 6, 2019 THE LONG ACCOMPLISHMENT A Memoir of Hope and Struggle in Matrimony By Rick Moody Rick Moody wants you to know that he knows.
Dear Rick Moody: How Can I Manage My Self-Loathing?
Dear Rick, You know how you can’t always tell what people are like on the inside? That’s me. I have a wonderful, privileged life and I am grateful for it. My marriage and kids are great, I enjoy my day job, am a published author, have great friends, etc. but inside I am full of crippling self-loathing about my weight and appearance. I know why I have it and have been to years of therapy and take medication to help overcome years of childhood abuse.
An Interview with Loudon Wainwright III
“If families didn’t break apart, I suppose there’d be no need for art.” Things Loudon Wainwright III Doesn’t Do: Conceal experience Play music every day Know what it all means It’s fifty years since Loudon Wainwright III—son of the exemplary Life magazine columnist, Loudon Wainwright Jr.—began writing and recording his songs—fifty years of astounding music, fifty years of bleak passages and struggle, fifty years of confessional lyrics on a scale few have attempted, fifty years of openly...
An Interview with Loudon Wainwright III
“If families didn’t break apart, I suppose there’d be no need for art.” Things Loudon Wainwright III Doesn’t Do: Conceal experience Play music every day Know what it all means It’s fifty years since Loudon Wainwright III—son of the exemplary Life magazine columnist, Loudon Wainwright Jr.—began writing and recording his songs—fifty years of astounding music, fifty years of bleak passages and struggle, fifty years of confessional lyrics on a scale few have attempted, fifty years of openly...
Brian Turner: A Music That Suits Our Time on the Planet
Image courtesy of Brian Turner. Brian Turner’s poetry, of which I first knew Here, Bullet (2005), does what the best literature always does: it serves as a conscience of our times. Turner got his MFA from the University of Oregon and subsequently enlisted in the American military, serving initially in the Balkan crisis of the 1990s and later in the first Iraq war (where he was an infantry team leader).
Swinging Modern Sounds #87: The Low and Dishonest Years
As the dubious year 2017 ticked over into the just as dubious 2018, I did, as befits a music critic, spend some of my discretionary hours attempting to come up with the “year’s best” music, despite the fact that many of the albums from 2017 seemed to pass by me at high speed, never stopping for the kind of measured deliberation that I favor. The list-making enterprise, that is, came to naught. The list-making impulse seemed empty and ritualistic.
One Small Blow Against Encroaching Totalitarianism: Obfuscation is the Enemy
From now until at least the midterm elections in November, we’ll be featuring essays from powerful cultural voices alongside one simple thing, chosen by the author, that you can do to take action against the paralyzing apoplexy of the daily news. Maybe it’ll be an organization that deserves your donation; maybe it’ll be an issue that deserves greater awareness. Whatever it is, our aim is to remind you, and ourselves, of the big and small things we can do to work toward justice and change.
Dear Rick Moody: How Do I Accept My Illness and My Inability to Write?
Dear Rick Moody, Life Coach: I’ve been ill for a few years, mostly bedridden. While there is reason to hope I’ll find some form of recovery in the next year or so, it’s not a given—and in any case, I want to cherish my life as it is today. I am writing you because I don’t know how to do that. I’m a writer, but mostly unable to write. Such a huge part of my identity has been ripped from me. Many days I’m simply unable to think over or through the physical pain.
Seven Years of Identity Theft
Dear Most Honorable President of Nigeria, Muhammadu Buhari, It all started at the Crossroads Literary Festival in Macon, Georgia, on October 2, 2011. Or that is my guess. I was at the festival to give a reading and serve on a panel, and I had flown a great distance, from El Paso, Texas, to be there. I suspected the festival would be modestly attended, and in this I was not wrong. I read to an audience that was both warm and small. Illustrations by Hanna Barczyk Here is the relevant part of the story.
Swinging Modern Sounds #24: A Magician Of The Highest Degree
The millennium is not very old, it’s true, and yet today is the day on which I feel obliged to anoint a best song of the millennium, and to risk open debate on the subject, even though I recognize that these kinds of assertions are rash, and, in the main, unwarranted. But here it is, nonetheless. The best song of the millennium is “Mexican Blue,” by Jolie Holland, and it appears on her album Springtime Can Kill You, which was released on Anti Records in 2006.
Denis Johnson’s Death-Infused Last Stories
THE LARGESSE OF THE SEA MAIDEN Stories By Denis Johnson 207 pp. Random House. $27. Let us review what is so good about Denis Johnson. I have often performed this exercise, with a modicum of writerly envy, over the decades of reading his work: What exactly is the alchemical magic in these pages? Everyone who started writing seriously in the 1980s or 1990s can tell you where he or she first consumed the morsels that eventually made up “Jesus’ Son,” Johnson’s breakthrough 1992 story collection.
Dear Rick Moody: Half My Family Knows the Truth About Me
My mother and I have a near-antagonistic relationship, separated by language, distance, and cultural differences. The time we spend together is when we photograph each other for my picture-making. For her, the experience remains a mystery but there’s an understanding that it is important, somehow. At times, homophobic remarks belong to her voice, and I refrain from revealing my sexuality to her. I grew up without a father—I relate to Wonder Woman and Buffy Summers the most.
The PhotoBook as a Literary Form
The PhotoBook as a Literary Form Teju Cole’s first photobook unfolds the possibilities of text and image. By Rick Moody Is there not a formidable hybridization going on these days that conjoins literature and photography? Teju Cole’s Blind Spot, a moving and playful fusion of text and image, would appear to be a solid contribution to this emerging hybrid activity (whose origins perhaps lie in books like Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, by James Agee and Walker Evans, or in the novels of W. G. Sebald).
How to Become a Cat Lady – Electric Literature
I had always read to my daughter before bed, but now she shoved Pinocchio and The Velveteen Rabbit aside and patted her belly, insisting I scratch it. When I did, she murmured, a throaty hum. I liked to imagine she was Grievous’s littermate, a second cat we had rescued from the snow. Grievous slept under the covers, her tail in Neda’s face. Perched on the window ledge, Grievous stared at finches.
Watching Them Sleep
Author Rick Moody on the subject of young love, whose tenderest moments, though fleeting, give birth to some of our most profound and long-lasting emotions Illustration Tim McDonagh At 17 I thought I knew all there was to know about love. In part I believed this because I was reading Byron, Shelley and Keats in a literature class in my senior year of high school, and in part because I had a large crate of LPs in my dorm room, and this crate was filled with love songs.
Dear Rick Moody: What Should I Say About My Scars?
Twelve years ago, at the age of 31, I was in a very stressful situation in my life. My mother had become angry with her parents when they called her out, in front of my stepfather, for lying about having worked her way through college as a private detective, when they had, in fact, paid her tuition.
Swinging Modern Sounds #83: On George | The Rumpus.net
There really is not a day that doesn’t go by that I don’t stop at some moment and think about George Harrison. With the rerelease of Sgt. Pepper, and the commencement of the Sirius/XM Beatles channel, likewise the appearance of the Beatles catalogue on Spotify, we are at another moment when the four lads from Liverpool have again had a refreshing opportunity to make an impact on contemporary music.
Swinging Modern Sounds #82: Joni Mitchell’s <em>Court and Spark</em>: A Symposium | The Rumpus.net
There have been only a very few albums of music in my life whose impact on me has been because the album sounded like nothing else I had heard before, and because I was unprepared for the novelty and spooky originality of the work. I would include, for example, What’s Going On? by Marvin Gaye, Are You Experienced?
The Revealing Science of Prog: David Weigel
Dave Weigel’s recently published The Show That Never Ends: The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock (Norton) is as unusual a marriage of writer and subject as you are likely to come across this year. Weigel is best known as a writer on politics (these days, for the Washington Post), specifically a wise and informed observer of the conservative and libertarian movements—though with an admirable astringency that prevents him from being reverential of anyone, left, right, or center.
Swinging Modern Sounds #80: I Just Don’t Want to Wait Around Anymore | The Rumpus.net
Longtime readers of this column may remember a narrative piece about Mark Mulcahy and the band Miracle Legion from 2010. And I also wrote about him for another publication on the occasion of his last solo album, the excellent Dear Mark J Mulcahy, I Love You.
Swinging Modern Sounds #67: The Franchise Restaurants of Song | The Rumpus.net
In our household, we play Owen Ashworth (who these days records as Advance Base) the way certain other households play Leonard Cohen. He’s someone we revere. He’s the interior decorating, honest, unflashy, hilarious, genuine, astringent, lasting, true. Each new release is a statement on the maturation and individuation process; each new release is a bulletin on where we are now. His most recent album, Nephew in the Wild (which has to be one of the great titles of recent years) is no exception.
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