Musical Table-Talk for May 27, 2008

I. Friend Ian (a Dzyd? I don't know) has started posting his acoustic blues stylings on YouTube, under the nom de ax "Barefinger Bill"—a real treat:



II. It was a conversation with Ian at a party (early '07?) that eventually led me to start experimenting with GarageBand and creating the Psychic Envelopes; my guitar-playing is pat-ball to Ian's great game (as VN said of his English vs. Joyce's), but it's been a lot of fun for me to finally get these songs recorded. (Most of the PE originals date from the mid/late ’90s!)

Mysteriously, and a little distressingly, the second Psychic Envelopes Muxtape appears to have deleted itself...has this happened to any muxtapers before? (The first one is still up.)

III. Ian curates (cocurates?) an occasional musical program called the Good Coffeehouse at the Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture, and this Friday's show features two interesting-sounding performers:

Tokio Uchida is Japan's best-known acoustic blues guitarist. He has released five solo blues and fingerstyle CDs, and last summer he and Stefan Grossman released their first duet CD, Bermuda Triangle Exit. Bob Brozman says of Uchida:"His playing is soulful and, most importantly, very original and adventurous." Stefan Grossman has had perhaps a greater influence than anyone over the past four decades in popularizing country blues guitar playing. A onetime student of legendary bluesmen such as Reverend Gary Davis, Mississippi John Hurt, Skip James and Son House, Grossman has been a performer, producer, teacher and record label founder. He is a master of most blues and ragtime guitar styles and runs Stefan Grossman's Guitar Workshop, which has educated thousands of budding guitar players over the years through video and DVD lessons.

Table-Talk of Parkus Grammaticus for May 27, 2008

I. Oughtables:

Scott: "A few weeks ago Laura has The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin checked out of the library, and I keep thinking the front cover reads The Early Diary of An Assassin."

Yesterday, reading The Week, I thought I read (in a Rauschenberg obit): "But by switching to his left hand, and with the help of assassins, he kept working." (He actually had assistants.)

II. Over at TPF, Mike Atkinson on Philip Schultz. (Who? Exactly.)

III. Ouroboros alert! The L.A. Times review of Personal Days got recycled for the Chicago Tribune's online edition. Under the "Layoffs and Downsizing" tag, you can see that the photo being used is...the one that appeared on The Dizzies!



(Shouldn't "Arlo Ogg" get a photo credit?)

IV. A letter to the Times from 1986: "The Sun Was Eclipsed by Fields of Ice"

V. What did Levi leave in New York?

Then there's the question of where I checked said mysterious object. The ticket bears no writing aside from that red "28," and gives no clue to its origins. I suppose the next time I'm in New York I could retrace my steps, presenting this claim check at every bar and restaurant I visited this time around, enduring blank stare after blank stare until, finally, someone takes the ticket with a brisk nod, spins on a heel and disappears into the back room to return moments later with . . . what?

Why hello! This is not really a 'Table-Talk'!

Q: When will I stop posting photos of Personal Days?
A: As long as you keep sending them in—never!

PD has been spotted in Brooklyn's Book Court:



(Photo courtesy Sari Aviv)

* * *

Some nice new reviews are out in the L.A. Times, Bookforum, the Daily Mail (UK), the News & Observer (Raleigh/Durham), and the Dayton Daily News. From the first one:

The modern corporate office is to Ed Park's debut novel Personal Days what World War II was to Joseph Heller's Catch-22—a theater of absurdity and injustice so profound as to defy all reason....Personal Days proves that Park may be in line to fill the shoes left by Kurt Vonnegut and other satirists par excellence.

* * *

That ellipsis takes us from the first paragraph to the last!

* * *

Did I tell you I only recently "figured out" the title The Raw Shark Texts? (Has anyone read it? Should I read it?) I was just walking around, thinking of something else, when it hit me.

* * *

Dzyd Martin, who knows whereof he speaks, cites PD as an example of "Valet Lit." (Mild spoiler alert?) See here for his earlier finds: Kerouac, Salinger!

PD & EP

[Cue voice of Gossip Girl narrator, Kristen Bell] Spotted at Broadway @ 82nd B&N: Ed and his paper baby. Let's hope Little D. isn't too jealous.

Weekend Table-Talk for May 23–25, 2008

I. That title is to fool myself into not blogging this weekend!

II. Via Sarah, an article on fellow Buffalo native Lawrence Block—author of the Scudder and Rhodenbarr (and Keller and Chip Harrison!) novels (among others), screenwriter for Wong Kar-wai's My Blueberry Nights, and one of many good reasons to read the Hard Case Crime line.

III. The Morning News hails The New-York Ghost for "Online Excellence"?!:

"By offering each issue through email only, what the Ghost has managed to do—unlike many of its web compatriots—is turn the expectation of content into the thrill of finding a new issue in your inbox."

IV. The Daily Mail says of Personal Days: “Having a character called ‘K’ acknowledges the Kafkaesque nature of the book–but it’s a lot more fun than Franz ever was.”

V. I gotta go return a library book!



UPDATE (Via Weekend Stubble): Contra Heinlein!

Is it a 'Table-Talk' if I don't use Roman numerals?

Levi e-mailed me recently, pondering whether to start on Nabokov's Ada. William Grimes's piece on 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, in today's NYT, gave him pause:

Drop the bloated, self-indulgent “Ada” from an otherwise correct Nabokov list (“Lolita,” “Pale Fire,” “Pnin”) and insert “Laughter in the Dark” or “The Gift.”

I can't argue with those substitutes; I might add: "Or Glory, or Bend Sinister, or The Real Life of Sebastian Knight..."

* * *

The Grimes piece mentions Brautigan's In Watermelon Sugar; I wonder if this edition of 1001 Books still includes RB's Willard and His Bowling Trophies?

I actually bought a Brautigan recently—$10 for Sombrero Fallout, hc, with dj! On the streets of New York, baby! (Good bookseller on the sidewalk on Columbus in the 70s.)

* * *

Confession: I heart VN and RB but have not read Ada or IWS! Summer project? Who's with me?

* * *

Random thought: Start a list of 1001 essential books on this blog? Write to me [thedizziesATgmailDOTcom] and I'll post...

* * *

A list of essentials from Jenny D, including The Fountain Overflows. (Um, which I also haven't read!)

* * *

In the NYT piece, I concur with Grimes as to the other Powell books! I think those are the two best non-Dancers.

A little more Anglophilia might have been in order. Anthony Powell shows up with “A Dance to the Music of Time” — which is actually 12 novels, so Professor Boxall cheats — but I would have made a play for a few of the pre-“Dance” novels, like “Venusberg” or “Afternoon Men.”

* * *

Personal Days surfaces in Hoboken:

















This edition of PD likes to go to Maxwell's and listen to Yo La Tengo! And is "for dog lovers"!

(Photo courtesy Hannah Frank)

Question

Last night, as I was gleefully signing books at McNally Robinson, I suddenly decided it would be a great idea to add the date. Was my inscribing of "5/20/08" a foolish mistake—or an oblique reference to the song quoted in the book's epigraph (which has the lyric "I don't know what day it is")?

What does it mean?

Quite at random, I opened up one of my long-forgotten bookmarks, and clicked through to this version of "Country Roads," by the Ukuleles of Halifax.

Then, sitting down with a sandwich, I opened this new biography of Charles Fort, and immediately hit this sentence:

Without enough chairs, the guests sprawled on the pine floor and avoided the clusters of burning candles; Masters read from his Spoon River Anthology and another guest picked out a tune on the ukelele.

Table-Talk of Parkus Grammaticus for May 21, 2008

I. Alice Boone has a lengthy, thoughtful post on Nicholson Baker and the method at work in Human Smoke.

II. Interestingly, AB favors Baker's Double Fold and recent Wikipedia essay (and the weird little story "Subsoil") over his earlier work; I find all aspects of Bakerdom interesting, but in the end I think it's those first three books—The Mezzanine (which I've been trumpeting loudly in interviews for PD), Room Temperature, and U & I—that establish him in the EP pantheon.

A few months ago, I don't know that I would have put RT up there—but a recent re-reading made me think that this was possibly his best book. Incredible! Some of this clearly has to do with my current situation—after all, the entire book takes place during the time it takes for the narrator to give his infant daughter her bottle. It's also, I think, a supremely well-conceived (and breathtakingly–ha!—written) variation on Burton's "Digression of the Air."

III. Spinster Aunt: "I've been reading short stories; I read an Ellery Queen story in which the perp was a man named Harry Potter."

IV. Huge thanks to everyone who came out for the reading/discussion last night at McNally Robinson! That was fun! (Next reading is Chicago, 6/5; next NYC reading is at Happy Ending on 6/11—more details here.)

V. Have said it before—will say it again: I like when Mollie complains! I've had grumblish dealings with the exact same post office she mentions, and reading her post made me want to reopen the case of "Why did you send a mailperson bearing a slip for an Express Mail package two days after I was supposed to get the package instead of just having her deliver the package itself"!

VI. I like that the NYT called me a poet—I'm not! I'm just a poet of...life?! Wha...

Tonight at 7! PERSONAL DAYS reading, signing, discussion!

I.
I'll be reading from Personal Days at McNally Robinson (52 Prince St.) tonight at 7...then I'll be talking about the making of the novel with my editor, Julia Cheiffetz...and then signing...

Come pick up a copy (if you haven't) and say hi...

From Flavorpill:

Welcome to the working weak: reading Personal Days — the debut novel by Ed Park, a founding editor of The Believer — is like staying late at the office, drunk on cough syrup, and coming across the diary of the person who occupied your desk a year before you did. In this intricate, hysterical novel, an unnamed New York office is being downsized according to indecipherable commands. Park's hilarious take on such cubicle routines as ordering lunch, hunting for a stapler, and joining the softball team will strike a chord with anyone who's ever done the 9-to-5, while the shocking shifts in tone perfectly convey the violence of corporate downsizing.

II. Levi's got another installment of Oblomov-Personal Days affinities! Which is which?

(A) Maxine's new outfit was completely inappropriate for winter, in fact for any season or situation. It had two kinds of pink going on, and ornate beaded strappy things, and a fairly explicit bondage motif. There were parallelograms of exposed flesh that were illegal in most states, a bow in the back that looked like a winding key. One area involved fur. Her hair had a fresh-from-salon bounce that clashed with the rest of the getup, but this being Maxine, everything kind of went together in the end. . . . Pru and Lizzie instinctively flinched. They might as well have been rolling on the ground like bowling pins, with xs for eyes.

(B) The brother tip-toed into the room and responded to Oblomov's greeting with a triple bow. His tunic was tightly buttoned from top to bottom so that it was impossible to tell whether he was wearing any linen underneath. His tie was knotted with a single knot and the ends were tucked inside the tunic. He was about forty with a tuft of hair sticking straight up from his brown and with two identical tufts sprouting, wild and untended, from each temple, resembling nothing so much as the ears of an average-sized dog. His gray eyes never settled on their target directly, but only after some stealthy reconnoitering in its vicinity.

III. And! Neon thumbs!

Personal Days is featured on BBC 6's George Lamb show today—you can listen here. The discussion with books person Ernest Hemingway (her real name?) begins just before the 1 hour mark (you can press on the "play" button to fast-forward to 56:30 minutes or so).

GL: "It's The Office!"
EH: "It's slightly even cleverer...I'd even say Kafka-esque."

"Anyone who's sat at a computer and wondered what the hell they're sitting there for would enjoy this." —Ernest Hemingway

When asked how many thumbs up she would give PD, she says: "I would have two neon thumbs up!"

IV. UPDATE: The NYT's Urban Eye picks up on tonight's appearance!

BOOKS

Literary Overproductivity Alert

You may know Ed Park as an editor of The Believer or of the mysterious journal The New-York Ghost, as a poet or fledgling garage rocker. Now you can also know him as a novelist. "Personal Days," his debut, is an office comedy/whodunit about an unraveling New York workplace. Tonight this former editor at The Village Voice (a clue, perhaps?) reads at the McNally Robinson bookstore, where he'll also talk with his editor about why he likes to make other writers look so darned lazy.

Making do

Walruses want so much to be with other walruses that if there are no other walruses around, they will make do with the next available large object. —NYT

Let's try this again!

Yesterday I posted the secret alternate Personal Days ad but couldn't make it do the thing it had to do.

Check it out now!





(Thanks to Ed!)

ASTRAL WEEKS bonus material

Remember my last Astral Weeks column, the one about the lost 1881 New Zealand science-fiction novel, The Great Romance? The "all-caps" declaration at the beginning is a calligram of sorts in the original form:

I

WILL

TELL YOU

A TALE WILDER

THAN POET EVER DREAMED!

YEA, STRANGER THAN

THE VISION OF

THE MADDEST

PROPHET!

What is that shape supposed to represent? (It's a shade squatter in the book.) Some sort of hat? Urn/vessel? Masonic thingy?

An interview and a game

I. The mighty Ed Champion interviewed me last week for his Bat Segundo Show—and it's online now! We met at the Metro Diner on 100th Street, where I ate half a stack of blueberry pancakes. Ed had a bagel.

Topics discussed: Personal Days, my unpublished novels (The Diet of Worms and Dementia Americana!), B.S. Johnson, Harry Stephen Keeler, Mark Moskowitz, The PTSNBN, and much more!

II. The mighty Scott David Herman has devised a game using the cover of Personal Days!

Table-Talk of Parkus Grammaticus for May 20, 2008

I. Come down to McNally Robinson tomorrow! I'll be reading from Personal Days, then talking to my editor, the mighty Julia Cheiffetz.


II. Am I the only one having technical difficulties using Gmail in Firefox?

III. Dzyd Joshua has memes aplenty up at Capsules Exquis. Normally he consolidates news articles/reviews:

Rush Hour 3
Directed by Brett Ratner

$247,538,093. $328,883,178. $453,796,824. DVD revenue, fairly ludicrous. Threequel, again. Bloodlessness isn’t the worst of the summer. Complacency is. One-dimensional glut. A global conspiracy of mutual abasement and self-humiliation: people are desperate and static, tired, lack originality; Paris seems to be the location of choice this year.

Straight man Chris Chan von Zhang is played as an adult, delivers vulgar African bang with Asian sexual neuter. Tenuous chemistry — anti-Gallic, tautological. Bad detectives bumble and slog. Who’s to blame? Roman Polanski is threatened, decamps. Nostalgic, hubristic. Bergman really is dead.

Sources:

Kevin Crust, Los Angeles Times Manohla Dargis, The New York Times Claudia Puig, USA Today

...and now he's composing nifty acrostical poems:

An Acrostic Poem for/on James Frey

Just
As
My
Eyes
Suspected:

For now,
Redemption is quick,
Easy, and —
Yuck.

IV. Levi's post on Oblomov/office novels/PD featured a bizarre photo of what looked like a potato chip in the midst of a heated phone conversation. He explains that it's actually a hash brown—and that the inimitable Rocketlass did a whole series of Hash Brown at Work!

Dizzterical! The Remix

Dzyd Ed writes: "Have you seen this version of the Personal Days ad? I found it online in some hardcore Ed Park fan forums..."



Hmm, it should move...like this?

'Personal' ad

My fondness for Cavemen aside, is it possible to get excited about an advertisement?

Yes—when it's for Personal Days! Today at GalleyCat!

Toward a history of the office novel

The BBC Open Book program(me) I was on mentioned Wodehouse's Psmith in the City and the Grossmiths' Diary of a Nobody (which I love; you can read it here) as early office novels; now Levi shares some great scenes from Oblomov (1859):

At home, he had heard that a boss or a supervisor was a father to his subordinates and had formed an image of such a personage, an image as beaming and benign and indulgent as a member of his own family. He saw him as a kind of second father who lived and breathed only to reward his subordinates and to cater, unceasingly and unremittingly, regardless of their merits, not only to their needs but even to their pleasures. Ilya Ilyich thought that a superior was so intimately bound up in the welfare of his subordinates that he would inquire anxiously whether he had had a good night's sleep, why his eyes were a little cloudy and whether he might not have a little headache.

His first day on the job was thus a rude awakening. The moment the supervisor appeared, everyone started hustling and bustling and bumping into each other from sheer agitation, some even nervously fingering their clothing in case he might deem them not sufficiently presentable. The reason for this, as Oblomov subsequently became aware, was that in the person of a subordinate scared out of his wits and rushing to pay his respects, a certain type of boss saw not only proper respect for his person, but a mark of zealousness and indeed at times even of competence.

Any other favorite early office novels/stories? Bartleby the Scrivener, of course...what else?

Table-talk of Parkus Grammaticus for May 19, 2008

I. Don't the new Reese's peanut-butter cup ads resemble the web art of William Poundstone?

II. From the Only Now You Think This? Said in a Vaguely Yiddish Accent Dept.:

“I find as I plow through my 40s that I can no longer tolerate The Eagles.”

III. This Wednesday! Reading! McNally-Robinson! Personal Days!

PD in SF

Next to Dorothy Parker!



Photos courtesy Theo Schell-Lambert.

Weekend photo supplement

My first sighting: Barnes & Noble, Lex @ 86th St., 5/13



Later, that evening: Barnes & Noble, Broadway @ 82nd St. Diminutive customer looks uninterested.



Barnes & Noble, Lincoln Triangle, 5/14:



57th St. Books, Chicago, 5/15 (Via Rocketlass):



Powell's Books, Portland, OR, 5/16:


Amazing placement at Borders, Columbus Circle:



Just kidding—it was really here:



...somehow the placement (Palahniuk/Park/Porizkova) made me think of that Billy Bragg song that begins, "Between Marx and marzipan in the dictionary/there was Mary/Between the deep blue sea and the devil/that was me..." (Ah yes: "The Short Answer"!)

A Dance to the Bloggery of Powell's

My final blog post is up at Powell's! It's a doozy! Topics covered: browsing, bookshelf neighbors, Anthony Powell, Edward Payson Vining, Henriette Mertz's Pale Ink, Pale Fire, Gossip Girl, Levi Stahl's notebook article for TPF, a mysterious book called The Logogryph, and...oh yes, Personal Days!

(Find all my posts here, and marvel how I got through the whole week without mentioning Keeler. And this is how Personal Days looks on the Powell's shelf.)

* * *

Also—there are signed and illustrated copies of Personal Days on sale at St. Mark's!

The Anatomy of Squandermania

I. "The Oblivion Arms"—one of the long, long-lost tales in my longer, longer-loster novel Dementia Americana—comes to a conclusion over at Five Chapters. I've enjoyed seeing it out there, and hope to publish more of DA soon...

II. Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy plays a big role in the "Arms"...and I'm not the only one obsessed! My sage and deeply hilarious Poetry Foundation colleague Don Share's recent book of poems, Squandermania, is also Burtonized to the max. Check out Erin Belieu's take in Boston Review:

Much like its ancestor, Squandermania springs from a gigantic, nearly overwhelming frame of reference, moving relentlessly from arcane economic and scientific theories (“ontogeny // recapitulates phylogeny,” or Gary Becker’s Rotten Kid Theorem) to Greek colloquialisms (“ardzi, bourdzi, and loulas”) to lesser-known Latin phrases and popular films. Dr. Evil’s “Boo-fricking-hoo,” from the Austin Powers movies, shares a property line with a reference to signum prefixum. No borough of thought or culture is off the map in Share’s verse; the imagistically goofy, grand, and obscure are all put to his poems’ service.

III.
The other inspiration I can recall for "The Oblivion Arms" was Maurice Maeterlinck's Life of the White Ant.

Next week: Reading from Personal Days!

As previously mentioned, I'll be reading next Wednesday (5/21, 7 p.m.) from Personal Days—the first reading after publication!—at McNally-Robinson Booksellers. A discussion with my editor follows. Flavorpill has the full scoop.

See my website for tour details; I'll be posting all the dates here soon as well...would be nice to see you!

Volcanic impetus superadded

My latest L.A. Times column is up early. This month I look at a strange, unfinished tale from 1881 entitled The Great Romance, by a New Zealander sporting the insoluble nom de plume "The Inhabitant."

Here's a sample:

Perverse by design or accident, the Inhabitant conveys an improbably gripping scene of mortal danger (in Volume 2) in a series of rhetorical questions, including this humdinger:

"Vast was the speed of the Star Climber, but might not some erratic fragment have a speed still vastly greater—hurled from the bosom of a monstrous volcano, whose pent-up pressure had consolidated diamonds, like mountains, and whose terrific discharge should leave the shattered ruby masses like an avalanche of loosened rock, and hurl outward fragments, large as little worlds, flying with all the speed of the parent orb, and all the mighty volcanic impetus superadded?"

(Shades of Keeler's famous sentence from Traveling Skull!)

* * *

James Parker's nuanced reading of Personal Days takes the lead slot over at the Barnes & Noble Review.

Use your allusion

My Powell's bloggery continues, with a consideration of Ta-Nehisi's The Beautiful Struggle and Junot Díaz's Book So Famous That I'm Not Going To Write the Title Here....

And by the way: The book is on sale at Powell's, for $9.10!

* * *

The full Time Out review of Personal Days is now online. Rod Smith is yet another brilliantly perceptive critic, I must say!

Crowing

From Jane Dark's Sugarhigh!:

Born four years apart: two faces of one feeling...both in their own languages named after the crow...

Who is he talking about? (Click through to find out.)

A few recent Astral Weeks topics have featured this bewitching bird—Ekaterina Sedia's The Secret History of Moscow and Endless Things, the culmination of John Crowley's Aegypt sequence. (Crowley's Livejournal page is found at crowleycrow.livejournal.com.)

Now feast your gaze on the ominous crow symbol on the keyboard of the Personal Days cover (and done white-on-black on the spine)...What does the crow signify in my novel? You will have to read it to find out! Get your copy online today—or stroll over to the store and purchase it!

* * *

Check out the crow at Crawford Doyle on Madison Avenue:



UPDATE: Rocketlass sends in a PD sighting from 57th Street Books in Chicago!

Hell freezes over! Well, not quite...

Over at the PTSNBN, I provide free content. Eh, it's for a good cause: Keelerdom!

Ed Park
The Marceau Case, by Harry Stephen Keeler
This 1936 book is a hilarious blast of cablegrams, photos, newspaper columns, and other diverse material—some of it beautifully irrelevant to the story at hand, about the mysterious slaying of a man on an immaculate lawn. The solution is outrageous and mind-boggling. I've never read a book like it, unless it's the sequel, X. Jones—of Scotland Yard, which takes the same formula and lifts it into even dizzier realms.

Park is the author of Personal Days.

—"Our Favorite Writers Pick Their Favorite Obscure Books," Alexander Nazaryan

Table-talk of Parkus Grammaticus for May 15, 2008

I. Some diverse Dzyd writings! First off, Levi on the art of the poet's notebook, at the Poetry Foundation:

Despite the best intentions, poets cannot spend every waking moment writing poetry. Life and the stuff of the world are always conspiring against them, offering up laundry to be folded, garlic to be minced, blogs to be read, children to be dressed. But all the while, the mind races; what is one to do with its scattered, variegated fruits, what poet Gabriel Gudding calls “[m]y many many 5 minute ideas”?

II. And here's Jessica, on procrastination (part of a package at Slate)—specifically the "prolonged anticlimaxes" of Ralph Ellison and Truman Capote:

What is the difference between severe procrastination and writer's block? Are they part of one continuum, like a Möbius strip?

III. I'm still blogging at Powell's! My wrists are falling off! Sample mystifying sentence:

I'm so glad I went with what I'm going to call my "Darnielle opening," because there are so many ways I can go with it. I feel like (mandatory obscure sports reference) Joe Cribbs!

IV. The fourth installment of "The Oblivion Arms" is up at Five Chapters today—entitled, after Burton, "Act Three: The Third Partition: 'Love-Melancholy'"...It contains what might be my favorite part of the story, a sequence in which Murray Adipose watches an aerobics show on TV. Sample:

"And two. And three. And once more to the right and take it up. And down."

BONUS: It also contains an Ouroboros (I think I've pasted this here before):

Her finger, trailing across the wall, gathered a heap of dust that fell, with a dreamy slowness, to the floor. She found herself looking at a scrap of the underlying wallpaper, most of which had been painted over in a graying white. The paper was patterned with the hotel's emblem: embedded letters, an A within an O, the latter composed of three bolts of lightning, the former a serpent that looped to bite its own tail.