Table-Talk of Parkus Grammaticus for June 5: Chicago Edition

I. Passive-aggressive reminder! I'll be reading TONIGHT at 7 p.m. in CHICAGO! The Book Cellar! More info at the usual places and at Literago.

II. Dzyd Ed on Charles Broskoski:

As if taking a one-man stand against the alleged decline of bibliophilia in the digital age, Charles Broskoski read 356 books in 400 days, ending his own personal Reading Olympics in early 2008. If that doesn't sound grueling enough to you ADHD types, consider this: the books he perused were a collection of O'Reilly tech-guide e-books downloaded as a single torrent in late 2006: fat tomes with such alluring titles as Linux Device Drivers, XSLT Cookbook, Essential System Administration and ASP.NET in a Nutshell.

Go to Broskoski's site for some dazzlingly numbing photos.


III. New Ghost is out!

IV. West Coast Personal!

From Pegasus Books, where I'll be reading on 6/19.

(Photo from Rachel Marcus)

V. And: At last! Dzyd Dennis's Museum of the Moving Image website is up—a resource/calendar/journal featuring pieces by a few of our favorite names/Dzyds, including B. Kite, Michael Atkinson, Ed Halter, and Joshua Clover. From the Kitean review of Richard Brody's Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard:

So how did Godard greet his future biographer when they met in Switzerland in 2000? Quite amiably at first. Brody at that time was working on the New Yorker profile that served as the seed of his book. Godard said he liked the magazine's cartoons. They spent the day together, and Brody harvested a number of Godardian aperçus, including one that became the title of his book. They parted after dinner, with plans to resume discussion in the morning. But come the dawn:

I found the curtains drawn over the wall-sized window and the glass door, to which a note inscribed "Mr. Brody" was taped. Godard had written that he could not continue the interview because it was "not a real discussion" and was "flou"—out of focus, vague—but he wished me a better "game" with people I'd be seeing in Paris.

Ouch.

As I looked through the articles, I realized this is something I've been waiting for—not essays on cinema per se, but the return of Dennis Lim as an editor, an editorial sensibility. It's been a while—welcome back!