Thursday Grab-baggery

Will they ever say this about me? "Now a devout Jew, he’s more alive then ever." (Crawdaddy on David Berman)...More Priscilla Ahn, I am all about the half-Korean songstresses these days...Eh? Dunkin' Bagels?...Gnarly triathlon jellyfish details from Jenny D...Levi reads Born Under Saturn (which I reviewed for Modern Painters, though I never saw my review!)...Speaking of MP, Dzyd Phyllis has a rather wizardly review of Christopher Priest's The Inverted World...you know, the guy who wrote the novel The Prestige!...I loved the movie The Prestige...I agree with Ta-Nehisi about this new forger-turned-memoirist (profiled in today's Times)—it was very soul-killing reading this piece; in theory I am interested in tales of forgery, particularly when it's in the realm of fiction (see this weird review of mine for some examples), but there seemed to be an additional level of wrongness to this—a level of moral WRONGNESS!...I fear the O key on my laptop is loose...Fear? It is loose, it fell off last night! I fear that it will fall off and stay off...It's all very PERSONAL DAYS...........Wyatt Mason's Sentences blog has a lengthy interview with Adam Thirlwell, whose The Delighted States is great (I don't know why I haven't blogged about it, nor about John Darnielle's Master of Reality, which I recently read and loved)...(THOUGHT: Some things cannot be blogged about!)(Don't quite know why)...ANYWAY the Mason/Thirlwell interview has lots of interesting stuff, & dwells on A.T.'s translation of a Nabokov story (which appears as an appendix to TDS):

And then there were two moments were I tried to translate and was rebuffed. First, there was the man who operated the lift in their St. Petersburg home—called by V.N. “le Suisse.” Which interested me because Switzerland, in the piece, is a symbol of exile, and so it seemed unlikely that V.N. would have used the word without thinking, but on the other hand a Suisse is also slang in French for any kind of person who helps out (it’s even there in Shakespeare’s English, when in Hamlet Claudius asks for his bodyguards, his “Switzers”). I couldn’t gauge how far it was being used literally or slangily: in the end, I went for “the man,” and D.N. corrected this to “the Swiss chap”...

(I felt like this weirdly harsh review read like a review of a completely different book!)