[XMASTIME NOTE] I moved to Brooklyn 25 26 years ago this past January; throughout the year I'll be noting things, no matter how small they are in reality, that I remember & associate with those first few days/weeks/months of living in the greatest city in the world.
For a year or two when I first moved to Brooklyn I was my buddy Keith's silkscreen assistant; on an early Saturday morning we'd meet at his studio down on the lower East Side and start working on silkscreening a few posters before hitting the Ear Inn for that first 10:30am beer. Anyway, one of Keith's friends ran Akashic Books
(now printing money forever for having published the now-iconic Go the Fuck to Sleep book grrrr I am so jelly) and had just realized what I believe was their first title,
The Fuckup by Arthur Nersesian. Keith gave it to me & I rolled my eyes at it but I couldn't help but crack it open and it drew me in like a moth so perfectly, as in the fact that in January 1998 it seemed to have been written perfectly for me & about me:
This is the darkly hilarious odyssey of an anonymous slacker. He's a perennial couch-surfer, an aspiring writer searching for himself in spite of himself, and he's just trying to survive. But life has other things in store for the fuck-up. From being dumped by his girlfriend to getting fired for asking for a raise, from falling into a robbery to posing as a gay man to keep his job at a porno theater, the fuck-up's tragi-comedy is perfectly realized by Arthur Nersesian, who manages to create humor and suspense out of urban desperation.
I read it thrilled to the warmed-up bones on frozen winter night at 232 Ainslie Street with Rrthur
(YES ladies, THAT Rrthur) and Mrs. Rrthur, fresh from moving to Brooklyn USA with everything & nothing in front of me all at once.
1 comment:
I read some Nersesian novels a few years ago. . . .and should try to find them and do some rereading.
Thanks for the reminder, Mr. Wilson.
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