ThoughtGallery.org > Everything Is Personal: Laurie Stone With Marco Roth

Everything Is Personal: Laurie Stone With Marco Roth

Everything is Personal, Notes on Now is a collage of hybrid narratives that begin with the stunning events of November 2016 and challenge Laurie Stone, a longtime feminist and writer for the Village Voice, to feel good when everything is bad. Stone travels to D.C. to bird-dog senators ahead of the hearings for Brett Kavanaugh, considers the pleasures and terrors of the #MeToo movement, and remembers her 25 years at the Voice after the announcement of its demise. Freely jumping between social commentary, criticism, memoir, and fiction, Stone reconsiders the legacy of Valerie Solanas and recalls the way that in 1968 the sense of power and hope made you feel it would always be 1968. The pieces are constructed the way dreams and films are: juxtaposing images, racing along with dolly shots, moving in for close-ups, and pulling back for a sweeping sense of time. Woven through the volume are chunks from Stone’s Facebook posts called “The Clock” that read like tender and funny postcards written to everyone from a time that is unimaginable, even as it’s being lived.

Introduction by Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick. Afterward by Marco Roth, Founder and editor of N+1

SOME ADVANCE PRIASE FOR EVERYTHING IS PERSONAL, NOTES ON NOW

Laurie Stone’s Everything is Personal is a galvanic account of our era, a trumpet blare aimed at sleepwalkers. In essays and diary entries that are sharply observant, grieving and generous, Stone seeks links between 1968 and now, meditating with wit and complexity on her own intimate and intellectual history, the question of separating the artist from the art, sexual violence, romantic love, friendship, comedy, television and more. A voice unlike any other, she’s a fearless thinker in an age submerged in fear. –Emily Nussbaum, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, TV critic for The New Yorker.

‘Every new language sounds harsh at first,’ writes Laurie Stone. Everything is Personal belongs on the shelf with Debord’s Society of the Spectacle and Adorno’s Minima Morialia, books that deliver great wisdom in rolling waves of epigrams. Stone knows that in a world crowded with opinions, a thought can’t just be good, it has to be elegant. Her powerful sentences smile at their own precision, they don’t just make a social point but offer a model on how to think, how to think in this time. As she says, ‘What offends you is always going to be my endangered devotion, and vice versa.’ As she says, ‘About the matter of redemption, as far as I am concerned, human beings don’t fall and therefore do not need to be redeemed. We are not on a path, period.’ —Michael Tolkin, author of The Player and cowriter of Escape at Dannemora.

To read Laurie Stone’s Everything is Personal, Notes on Now is to read Laurie Stone, is to experience a present tense intimacy with a lusty, testy, ebullient, scintillating mind, a woman’s mind, a woman who remembers the summer of ’68 and is living, right now, in this instant, through the Trump years, indeed is surviving the Trump years through documenting her perceptions and memories, her fierce judgments and sweeping opinions about everything from the Brontes to butter, Norman Mailer to Louis CK, Junot Diaz to bird shit, #MeToo to The Handmaid’s Tale, piranhas to praying mantises, The Village Voice to Andy Warhol’s shooter and author of SCUM Manifesto, Valerie Solanas, crystalizing, meanwhile, nuances of feeling—sanctimony, remorse, grief, desire desire desire, and then to keep us sane, to keep herself sane, moments like this: “It was chilly this morning, and I wore a black jacket with a paperclip for a zipper pull. The grass was the green of electricity, and the trees were heavy with grapefruits and lemons. It was silent. Ducks and geese paddled in the shape of a wedge. It reminded me of pie, and I missed my sister.” Read Laurie Stone.

Read this book. —Diane Seuss, author of Four-Legged Girl and Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl











When: Thu., Jan. 16, 2020 at 7:00 pm
Where: McNally Jackson Williamsburg
76 N. 4th St.
718-387-0115
Price: Free
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Everything is Personal, Notes on Now is a collage of hybrid narratives that begin with the stunning events of November 2016 and challenge Laurie Stone, a longtime feminist and writer for the Village Voice, to feel good when everything is bad. Stone travels to D.C. to bird-dog senators ahead of the hearings for Brett Kavanaugh, considers the pleasures and terrors of the #MeToo movement, and remembers her 25 years at the Voice after the announcement of its demise. Freely jumping between social commentary, criticism, memoir, and fiction, Stone reconsiders the legacy of Valerie Solanas and recalls the way that in 1968 the sense of power and hope made you feel it would always be 1968. The pieces are constructed the way dreams and films are: juxtaposing images, racing along with dolly shots, moving in for close-ups, and pulling back for a sweeping sense of time. Woven through the volume are chunks from Stone’s Facebook posts called “The Clock” that read like tender and funny postcards written to everyone from a time that is unimaginable, even as it’s being lived.

Introduction by Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick. Afterward by Marco Roth, Founder and editor of N+1

SOME ADVANCE PRIASE FOR EVERYTHING IS PERSONAL, NOTES ON NOW

Laurie Stone’s Everything is Personal is a galvanic account of our era, a trumpet blare aimed at sleepwalkers. In essays and diary entries that are sharply observant, grieving and generous, Stone seeks links between 1968 and now, meditating with wit and complexity on her own intimate and intellectual history, the question of separating the artist from the art, sexual violence, romantic love, friendship, comedy, television and more. A voice unlike any other, she’s a fearless thinker in an age submerged in fear. –Emily Nussbaum, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, TV critic for The New Yorker.

‘Every new language sounds harsh at first,’ writes Laurie Stone. Everything is Personal belongs on the shelf with Debord’s Society of the Spectacle and Adorno’s Minima Morialia, books that deliver great wisdom in rolling waves of epigrams. Stone knows that in a world crowded with opinions, a thought can’t just be good, it has to be elegant. Her powerful sentences smile at their own precision, they don’t just make a social point but offer a model on how to think, how to think in this time. As she says, ‘What offends you is always going to be my endangered devotion, and vice versa.’ As she says, ‘About the matter of redemption, as far as I am concerned, human beings don’t fall and therefore do not need to be redeemed. We are not on a path, period.’ —Michael Tolkin, author of The Player and cowriter of Escape at Dannemora.

To read Laurie Stone’s Everything is Personal, Notes on Now is to read Laurie Stone, is to experience a present tense intimacy with a lusty, testy, ebullient, scintillating mind, a woman’s mind, a woman who remembers the summer of ’68 and is living, right now, in this instant, through the Trump years, indeed is surviving the Trump years through documenting her perceptions and memories, her fierce judgments and sweeping opinions about everything from the Brontes to butter, Norman Mailer to Louis CK, Junot Diaz to bird shit, #MeToo to The Handmaid’s Tale, piranhas to praying mantises, The Village Voice to Andy Warhol’s shooter and author of SCUM Manifesto, Valerie Solanas, crystalizing, meanwhile, nuances of feeling—sanctimony, remorse, grief, desire desire desire, and then to keep us sane, to keep herself sane, moments like this: “It was chilly this morning, and I wore a black jacket with a paperclip for a zipper pull. The grass was the green of electricity, and the trees were heavy with grapefruits and lemons. It was silent. Ducks and geese paddled in the shape of a wedge. It reminded me of pie, and I missed my sister.” Read Laurie Stone.

Read this book. —Diane Seuss, author of Four-Legged Girl and Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl

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