Two events and a non-event

1. Tonight—a reading for Brandon Stosuy's Up Is Up, But So Is Down, featuring Lynne Tillman, Bruce Benderson, and others:




2. Tomorrow—a panel discussion at Housing Works on David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, which celebrates its 10th anniversary. Speakers include Time critic (and Codex novelist) Lev Grossman and John Krasinski—who plays the tall, amiable guy from the American Office, and who is adapting DFW's Brief Interviews for film.

3. A few days ago, reading Harry Mathews (The Case of the Persevering Maltese), I mused (I do a lot of musing of late) that Dalkey Archive—publisher of Mathews and multitudes more—is a national treasure. I'd been mildly excited by their impending move to Rochester, New York (vaguely envisioning some sort of Western New York, Rochester-Buffalo cultural/literary renaissance). And then today, via several blogs, I see that it is not to be. Apparently a key grant fell through, making the move to the "East Coast" too costly. Alas! Whither Dalkey? (They will lose their current home, Illinois State University, at the end of the year.)

Favorite Dalkey books of The Dizzies include the Mathews oeuvre, Nigel Dennis's Cards of Identity, Stanley Crawford's Some Instructions to My Wife..., Felipe Alfau's Locos, Ben Marcus's The Age of Wire and String, Flann O'Brien's The Third Policemen. Then there is the longer list of Dalkey titles that exert their strange power over me despite the fact that I haven't finished them (William Gass's The Tunnel) or even really started them (Louis Paul Boon's Chapel Road)...just the fact that they exist is quite inspiring.