Due Date with Nate Lippens
where we ask our favourite WRITERS to fill in a Library Card with the books they have on loan, reserved, lost & found and on their top shelf.
Inspired by library sections and driven by the curiosity to get to know the books behind our favourite writers, tune in every month as we reveal what titles fill their bookshelves. What they’re currently reading, what they’re going to read next, what vintage classic they can’t get out of their heads and what book is their favourite of all time. Find out on DUE DATE.
Introducing Nate Lippens!
Nate Lippens is the author of three novels: My Dead Book, a finalist for the Republic of Consciousness Prize; Ripcord, a New Statesman Book of the Year; and Bastards forthcoming from Pilot Press in September.
ON LOAn: What are you currently reading?
Mechanical Fantasy Box by Patrick Cowley
I’m working on a novel structured as a sex diary or ars blow-etica, so I’ve been revisiting old favorites. I just re-read Patrick Cowley’s Mechanical Fantasy Box (as one online wag reviews it: “best described as a quick read and best read it alone”). The electronic dance music pioneer’s journal spans 1974 to 1980, ending on his 30th birthday. It’s in the realm of Renaud Camus’s Tricks, John Rechy’s Numbers, and the London cottager passages of Joe Orton’s diaries, but without any literary pretense. A cruiser’s récit that tallies his sexcapades in blunt, unadorned language. Less florid, more lurid; less spank bank, more spank credit union. I mean, sex as member-owned sociability. Cowley cuts to the chase.
RESERVED: WHAT ARE YOU excited to read next?
My Private Property by Mary Ruefle.
Last year, Poets House in New York presented Erasures, an exhibition of books Mary Ruefle altered with markers, gouache, Wite-Out, and collaged found images to create new poetic texts (my favorite art is stuff I would have been grounded for doing as a kid) and I picked up this book. Then it languished in the limbo of my nightstand pile of ambition and defeat. But recently, I read a beautiful essay by poet Mark Wunderlich about her and her work and immediately plucked this from the stack to read next. The title piece opens: “It is sad, is it not, that no one today displays any interest in the art of shrunken heads.”
LOST & FOUND: WHAT IS A classic YOU loved reading or HAVE recently rediscovered?
Tropisms by Nathalie Sarraute
A section of my work-in-progress (jerk-in-progress?) is called Gropisms and is based on the uncategorizable, nearly indescribable Nathalie Sarraute 1939 proto-nouveau roman classic Tropisms. It’s a book without plot or characterization, built on sensations and the limits of consciousness. Then I rewatched Agnès Varda’s devastating Vagabond starring Sandrine Bonnaire. The movie is dedicated to Sarraute, who is interviewed in the DVD extras and says, “I found a world which was already mine.”
TOP SHELF: What’s your favourite book ever?
Horse Crazy by Gary Indiana
This is probably the novel that has impacted my own writing the most, along with Jean Rhys’s Good Morning Midnight and E.M. Cioran’s The Trouble with Being Born. I first read Gary Indiana’s Horse Crazy when it was published in 1989. I’d been reading serialized excerpts from it in BOMB magazine (the novel was then tentatively titled Burma) and his art criticism in the Village Voice at the public library before that (some archived in print, some on microfiche, and some on the much-dreaded microfilm). I return to this book all the time, as well as Gone Tomorrow and Do Everything in the Dark, the two other novels of this sort of loose trilogy.
