Tomorrow! "The Origin and the Distance"

Tomorrow (Weds. 7/1) I'll be appearing on a panel at the Korea Society with the novelists Janice Y.K. Lee (The Piano Teacher) and Sung J. Woo (Everything Asian), discussing what it means to be a Korean American fiction writer...There's a reception at 6, and the event proper starts at 6:30.



More info from the Korea Society site:

A growing number of Korean American authors have found both critical and commercial success in the past decade. Does this "literary wave" mean that Americans of Korean origin have successfully moved from the margins to the mainstream of American literature, writing simply as a "writers" and not as "ethnic writers?" Join us for a literary conversation with novelists Ed Park, Janice Y.K. Lee, and Sung J. Woo, as they discuss issues of acculturation, isolation, cultural alienation, race and class, in relation to their own works.

$10 for members and students, $20 for nonmembers
(Walk-in registration will incur an additional charge of $5.)
Buy tickets
For more information or to register for the program, contact Patrick Clair at 212-759-7525, ext. 328, or emailThis e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .

About the Authors

Ed Park is a founding editor of The Believer, a four-time finalist for the National Magazine Award. His novel, Personal Days (Random House, 2008), was a finalist for the PEN Hemingway Award and was shortlisted for the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize. He writes a monthly book-review column for the Los Angeles Times and contributes to many other publications, including the New York Times, Bookforum, and Modern Painters. He was an editor and writer at The Village Voice for many years, where he was also the editor of the Voice Literary Supplement. Park teaches creative writing at Columbia University.

Janice Y. K. Lee was born and raised in Hong Kong, where she currently lives, and went to boarding school in the United States before attending Harvard College. A graduate of Hunter College's MFA program and a freelance writer, she is a former features editor at Elle and Mirabella magazines in New York. Her critically acclaimed first novel, The Piano Teacher, a New York Times bestseller and Richard and Judy Summer Read pick. The book will be published in 23 languages.

Sung J. Woo’s short stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, McSweeney’s, and KoreAm Journal. His debut novel, Everything Asian (Thomas Dunne Books, 2009) has received praises from the Christian Science Monitor, Publishers Weekly, and Kirkus Reviews. His short story “Limits” was an Editor’s Choice winner in Carve Magazine’s 2008 Raymond Carver Short Story Contest. A graduate of Cornell University with an MFA from New York University, he lives in Washington, New Jersey.


The Korea Society
950 Third Avenue @ 57th Street, 8th Floor
(Building entrance on SW corner of
Third Avenue and 57th Street)

Air keyboard

OK guys, for this first shot, I want you to pretend you're playing your instruments....yeah....I know it looks weird but believe me it's gonna look amazing when we actually put the instruments in....yeah.....yeah.........what's that, Steve? Well......no, I guess you'll just keep on doing what you're doing.......I mean, we can't just suddenly give you an instrument, right? That would be too disorienting for the viewer....so just.....keep pumpin' away.....yeah, just keep....just.....keep doing that......right............

"Uncle Andy's Giggle Shack"

Andrew Leland—impressionistic Web 1.0 vision-quester.

"Moonwalker"

(Via Brian.)

What Would Papa Do?

Michael Atkinson's Hemingway Deadlights—coming to your bookstore in August!


(More info at his new website.)

UPDATE 1: NYT has excerpt and piece on the "restored" A Moveable Feast.

UPDATE 2: Trailer for Mike's book! (Watch for EP blurbage at the end!)

"We wore that tape out"

Ta-Nehisi has reposted his post from two days ago about Michael Jackson. It now includes extra material, like this note from his father:

enjoyed the michael jackson piece. only thing is i remember your mom as loving that album. shortly after it came out we drove to atlanta. we wore that tape out. and knew most of the lyrics by the time we got there. i haven't spoke to her but that's my clear memory.

dad

With great intensity

Siobhan Dowd, a friend from PEN days, has won the Carnegie Medal posthumously:

A novel completed just three months before she died made Siobhan Dowd today the first ever posthumous winner of the most prestigious prize in children's literature, the Carnegie medal.

Bog Child, the story of a teenage boy who finds the body of a child in an Irish bog, was finished by Dowd in May 2007. She died of cancer that August at the age of 47, having only turned to writing in 2003. In just four short years, she penned four children's books: her first, A Swift Pure Cry, was also shortlisted for the Carnegie.

"It's infuriating that she didn't start writing earlier, that she couldn't go on. We've lost one of our great new voices, and they don't come along that often, not at Siobhan's standards," said her publisher and editor, David Fickling, who accepted the Carnegie medal on her behalf this lunchtime. "Bog Child was written with great intensity, when Siobhan was at the height of her powers, all the while being very ill ... You get to the end and are uplifted, and that's what she was like in person, too. She buoyed you up."

The book is "an absolutely astonishing piece of writing", said the librarian Joy Court, chair of the judging panel (the Carnegie medal winner is selected by 13 librarians from around the UK). "To be able to write like that when she was going through what she was going through is just astonishing – the sheer beauty of the language, the descriptions of the environment; she has such an amazing sense of place."

The circular ruins

(From Fred; found here)

Bibliothèque invisible!

Love those guillemets:

L'imagination, la plus scientifique des facultés, disait Baudelaire, qui, tout bougon qu'il soit au quotidien vis-à-vis des mutations de sa société, aurait pu apprécier ce que INK vient de réaliser.

En effet, ces derniers viennent de mettre à jour une liste de 40 livres, sur leur blog The Invisible Library, qui recense des ouvrages complètement imaginaires. Cette idée, décrite comme « moitié aventure esthétique, moitié exercice métafictionnel », sera présentée le mois prochain à Londres dans la galerie Tenderpixel. —ActuaLitté

Meta-coverage

Omnivoracious reviews the remix of the notes on A Monster's Notes, after first reviewing the original review.

Nice!

We're not done yet.

OR ARE WE.

(Stitching in this side note: Tom tantalizingly suggests the upcoming Vollmann, Imperial, is the contemporary Anatomy of Melancholy.)

Wet, unpredictable

Stelarc is commented on in Sheck's A Monster's Notes.

A remix of my remix of my AMN review would include this recent Telegraph story:

Writing on his website, Stelarc explains part of the reason for the ear is a potentially extended Bluetooth system, where the receiver and speaker are position inside his mouth.

Jenny wrote about a book on Stelarc in her "field guide to genetic engineering and bodily enhancement" a while back:

A demonstration of his prosthetic Extended Arm brings tears to one essayist's eyes, reminding her of the persistence and pathos of bodily attachments. Whether it's pierced and suspended from cables, scaffolded in metal prostheses, or penetrated by a miniature camera that broadcasts from inside his intestinal tract, Stelarc's body remains "wet, unpredictable, emotively disorderly, itself a technological marvel."

The end of a single-spaced page

The Voidoid

by Richard Hell

with drawings by Kier Cooke Sandvik

published by Josh Smith's and Todd Amicon's 38th Street Publishers (https://www.38street.com/b/). Richard will give a quick reading from the book, and Richard and Kier, who's briefly here from Norway, will sign copies for interested parties. There will be refreshments.

As Hell wrote in the intro to the 1996 edition of the novelina:

“The Voidoid was written in 1973 in a little furnished room on East 10th St. I was staying with Jennifer ('my thoughts and me are like ships that pass in the night’) in her apartment down the block overlooking the graveyard at St. Mark's Church. The Neon Boys was stalled because we couldn't find a second guitar player... Every day I'd take a bottle of wine with me across the street to the $16-a-week room I'd rented for writing. The method was I’d keep going till I got to the end of a single-spaced page, which was pretty far. I'd wake up an hour later and have to drink a whole lot of water.”

TIME:

Saturday, June 27th
5:00 - 7:00 PM
Free

PLACE:

Printed Matter (http://printedmatter.org/)
195 Tenth Avenue (betw. 21st St. & 22nd St..)

New York City

Two jokes from April of last year

FOUND! In my overnight bag: Notebook from 2008 (cover: This Is a Public Space), presumed MIA. It's full of jokes like these:



"She went to the Rhode Island School of Dasein."

"He owned a bakery called the Bun Also Rises."

Weekend screening: "Fat Man on a Beach"

(Via Me and My Big Mouth, which has a report on a recent screening of novelist B.S. Johnson's film and TV work, hosted by Jonathan Coe.)

(For more on BSJ, here's my review of Coe's biography.)

Funes, WNY, Part II

(From Matthew)

Le Cool

Nestled between the old bookshops of Cecil Court is the Invisible Library. Its shelves are lined with books that don’t exist, but have appeared in other books. Rachel Gannon, Fumie Kamijo and Chloe Regan of the INK collective were inspired by The Invisible Library blog, and have taken works such as those of the prodigious Benno von Archimbaldi, from Roberto Bolano’s 2666, and made their imagined versions. They have asked real authors to begin writing some of the stories inside, and they invite the public to do the same: yes, you can take books from the shelves and scribble. ‘We do quite a lot of book illustration in our day-to-day work,’ Rachel told me at the opening, as visitors perched with pencils and scratched their heads for good opening lines. ‘So this felt like a natural progression.’

—Le Cool (London)

MUSICAL MYSTERIES 3

WHY WAS THE ROD STEWART SONG CALLED "YOUNG TURKS" WHEN HE ACTUALLY SINGS "YOUNG HEARTS BE FREE TONIGHT?"

RELATED, IS THIS FOR REAL???

Notes on Notes on "Notes" (for Jacket Copy's "PoMo Month")

Last week, columnist Ed Park reviewed "A Monster's Notes" by Laurie Sheck.

This is his remixed, expanded, deconstructed/reconstructed remake of that review.

—Jacket Copy (L.A. Times)



A SAMPLE:

Page 271, in its entirety: ". . . The monks in their patchwork rags . . . and I a patchwork . . . the workings of each mind a patchwork, each self roughly stitched as you stitched me."

“Winter darkness pulls over like a monk’s cowl, enclosing us in worlds where strange things take place, where anything can happen, where the mind goes where it’s never gone before, and stays.” -- Gretel Ehrlich, "The Future of Ice"

Fungibility of the notebook mode. Juxtaposition is easy, at times even arbitrary; effects perhaps no less revelatory or pungent.

On Amazon’s Omnivoracious blog, Tom writes: “Ed Park's notes on 'A Monster's Notes' by Laurie Sheck: ‘I started this review before finishing the book, in the form of notes. I didn't know I was writing the review yet. I have another file just as long. Fungibility of the notebook mode. Juxtaposition is easy, at times even arbitrary; effects perhaps no less revelatory or pungent.’ [His notes weren't really revelatory for me -- what do you think?]”

I think you’re wrong.

And we’re not done yet.

-----------------------------------
Photo: Director James Whale, left, with actor Boris Karloff on break from the 1931 filming of "Frankenstein." Credit: Los Angeles Times

Not so good

It's time for my Atkinson vitamin:

In Tempo di viaggio (1983), the doodle Andrei Tarkovsky and Tonino Guerra made for Italian TV as they prepped Nostalghia, the great struggling Russian answers a question about genre films by saying that his Solaris (1972) is “not so good,” essentially because it is science fiction, because it is a genre film. You can easily understand why Tarkovsky felt this way, given his topos and metaphysical concerns, but what’s shocking is how little the filmmaker apparently understood about his own film, and about the purpose of science fiction in general. The key to the genre is its functionality as metaphor—if it’s merely space opera (Star Wars or the new Star Trek or whatever), then it’s kiddie stuff, and as close to real science fiction, as it’s evolved, as the old Buck Rogers serials. Real science fiction, the only genre defined by ideas, is closer to satire than to fantasy or horror: its battery of metaphors is used as speculation and commentary about the present, hyperbolically exploding whatever mitigations might couch an issue in real life, so we can see the fallout rain down. (In ideas begins morality, and pulpist Edmund Crispin was only the first to note that science fiction is “the last refuge for the morality tale.”) The critic who got this best was the late Brit writer Philip Strick, whose modest but electrically philosophical 1976 volume Science Fiction Movies was an epiphany for me as a movie-struck tween.

—Michael Atkinson, Criterion Collection online

The Invisible Library, Part XVIII

Not only is Steve Hely's How I Became a Famous Novelist so funny that I kept posting quotes on my Facebook page until they revoked my newsfeed-rights—but it's full of Invisible Library candidates!

For a deeply satisfying sample, download the ersatz NYT Bestseller List from...the NYT Paper Cuts blog.

And yes, that's me in the comments section, telling people to check out Steve's Believer piece, "Short Takes on Books That Don't Exist"—made even more geniusy by the faux book covers conjured by McMülls and a crack team of designers:


THUD!

* * *

UPDATE: The Second Pass and the Guardian pick up on the Invisible Library exhibit/blog/meme/thing.

Postscript to the Invisible Library — Parker druthers

One of the longer titles in the Invisible Library is Mattie Ross's unpublished MS, “You will now listen to the sentence of the law, Odus Wharton, which is that you be hanged by the neck until you are dead, dead dead! May God, whose laws you have broken and before whose dread tribunal you must appear, have mercy upon your soul. Being a personal recollection of Isaac C. Parker, the famous Border Judge."

Readers of Charles Portis's True Grit get a glimpse of Parker; now, Bookgasm reports, Loren D. Estleman has written a book about the (real-life) "hanging judge" of Arkansas:

Parker believed that executions should be public — not to provide entertainment, but to teach a moral lesson. Murderers and rapists should receive in a public display the wages of their sins. With hangman George Maledon as the man with the rope, and deputies of the caliber of “The Three Guardsmen” — Bill Tilghman, Chris Madsen and Heck Thomas —the Hanging Judge was ready to get to work....

Work for Parker was made up of holding court six days a week, for up to 10 hours a day. In 21 years as the judge presiding over the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Arkansas, Parker sentenced 156 men and four women to death by hanging. Only 79 eventually dangled from one of the six nooses — “Parker’s Tears” — for which Maledon cared.

(From Elijah)

* * *

Speaking of Parkers: Darwyn Cooke is promoting his graphic novel adaptation of the first of Richard Stark's Parker novels, The Hunter, by giving away copies of the book to the best five reader illustrations. Here's my favorite so far, by George Pfromm II:

When's the last time you said "rad"?

An update on the materialization of our Invisible Library:

There are certain galleries in London that almost always seem to be doing something interesting. Tenderpixel is very much one of these: their best shows display an ability to combine attractive aesthetics with something conceptually intriguing - a pretty rare feat in this old town.

Invisible Library is no different, and in fact looks like being one of Tenderpixel's best shows to date. The brilliant INK Illustration are constructing a library full of books that have hitherto only been mentioned in novels. They've given them cool cover designs and transformed the gallery into a rad little book shop - which works pretty well amongst all the antiquarian oddities on Cecil Court.

—Spoonfed

Gemology

At Union Square on Sunday most new and popular titles had long since been gobbled up. In relative abundance, however, were Virgin-branded black T-shirts ($1), Guitar Hero action figures ($1.39) and a variety of Jonas Brothers memorabilia. Yet there were still some hidden gems. Mr. Beliech, the customer and former employee, scored CDs by, among others, the British folk-experimental group Current 93 and the hyperkinetic Japanese band Melt-Banana.
—NYT

More on the Invisible Library in London

As reported earlier, the Invisible Library has inspired an exhibition and workshop by Ink Illustration, the UK art collective:

Once selected the hidden novels will have their covers illustrated by INK. The Invisible Library will ask best selling writers, cultural and musical figures, and gallery attendees to write the opening or closing page of a ‘hidden novel.’

Each book cover is not only the beginning of a story, but also a personal journey and porthole into the imagination.

Here are the invites, here are some behind-the-scenes glimpses, and scenes from the private view, during which visitors were invited to write the beginning or end of one of these imaginary (yet now illustrated) books.

The exhibit runs through July 12 in London. Londoners, please visit!

TENDERPIXEL GALLERY
10, Cecil Court, London WC2N 4HE
Tuesday- Saturday: 10:30am to 7pm





(Levi has more.)

Ghost world

(From Jing)

Musical Mysteries 2

WHY WAS THAT GROUP CALLED "SIMPLY RED"? BECAUSE THE SINGER'S HAIR WAS RED?

How Korean is it?

On Weds., July 1, I'll be speaking on a panel at The Korea Society ("New Currents in Korean American Literature: The Origin and the Distance") with Piano Teacher (not that Piano Teacher!) novelist Janice Y.K. Lee (whom I spoke to on the phone back in 1995) and Everything Asian author Sung J. Woo.

MUSICAL MYSTERIES

WHY WERE THEY CALLED R.E.O. SPEEDWAGON? WHAT'S A "SPEEDWAGON"? WHAT DOES "R.E.O." STAND FOR?

"Everything I Know I Learned From Dungeons & Dragons"

When I was a kid, the country went through a full-fledged Dungeons & Dragons hysteria, where the fantasy role-playing game was accused of everything from turning kids onto Satanism to encouraging them to kill themselves.

Decades later, we’ve now reached a point where D&D is seen as sort of a harmless, if incredibly geeky pastime.

But isn’t there a third option? Dungeons & Dragons isn’t a dangerous, evil force in the world, nor is it just harmless fun; it’s actually one of the most worthwhile activities ever created, and there is literally nothing better for turning a kid into a thoughtful, creative, passionate, open-minded adult.

—Brent Hartinger, The Torch

(From James)

New to the marginal links: a blog called Grognardia, "an exploration of the history and traditions of the hobby of role playing." From a recent post:

One of the difficulties in discussing old school gaming is that the tradition of treating "D&D" as a very broad term is alive and well. Now, as I said, this practice has deep roots. So too does the practice of claiming that too much deviation from the core concepts of the game -- whatever those may be -- results in one's playing "not-D&D." Consider, for example, the cases of both Empire of the Petal Throne and Arduin. In both cases, you have games that are clearly derivative of OD&D, using not just the same terminology but in many cases the very same mechanics. And in both cases the very conception of what a roleplaying game is shows the clear influence of D&D.

The armor of the venetian blinds

New Astral Weeks, on Laurie Sheck's A Monster's Notes:

R. e-mails me that our friend J. has to take blood pressure medication because she drinks too much coffee, which makes me laugh. But also that J. "had this horrifying story about recently running into a crime scene near her house where a man had been cut into little pieces in a box." Which makes me think I will never get to sleep. I do, but in the middle of the night a storm centers itself overhead. I am not dreaming and now I understand the term "rolling thunder," the noise caroming like a ball in a roulette wheel, a ball the size of 20 baseball stadiums, a wheel with a diameter the length of Manhattan. Car alarms go off. I silently count the seconds before, or is it after, lightning penetrates the armor of the venetian blinds, to scrape my eyes and shock the bedsheets silver.

Two great stories in one article

The headline says it all: "Seagulls Help Indians Beat Royals and MLB Catcher Nearly Trampled by Chorizo."

Bonus: "Indians Right Fielder, South Korean native, Shin Soo Choo lined up the middle to Royal’s Center Fielder Coco Crisp..."

(From Jane)

"Hedgehog in the Fog"

(From Jing)

Ahn and Ahn

Ego-rebuilder

Nice (yet pungent) words from Richard Russo on PD (from a BEA panel with John Irving and Charles McGrath).

(Also: The Independent weighs in on PD.)

The third largest coffee in America

Come on!

By the middle of 1978 I noticed that Alex [parrot] occasionally produced a "nuh" sound in situations where "no" would have been appropriate. "OK, Alex," I said, "why don't we train you to say it right?" Within a very few sessions, Alex replaced "nuh" with "no" in distress situations, such as not wanting to be handled. Very soon he used it to mean No, I don't want to. Here's an example of Alex with a well-developed sense of how to use "no." Kandis Morton, a secondary trainer, was working with Alex in April 1979:

K: Alex, what's this? [Holding a four-corner wood]
A: No!
K: Yes, what is this?
A: Four-corner wood [indistinct].
K: Four, say better.
A: No.
K: Yes!
A: Three … paper.
K: Alex, "four," say "four."
A: No!
K: Come on!
A: No!

—NPR (from Jane)

"We can't afford to hesitate"

Annals of octothorpia

The flight had gone smoothly until the plane hit the birds, with a few exceptions. One was the bulletproof cockpit door, which was apparently sticky. Captain Sullenberger complained soon after the recording began, “oh, that # door again.” (The transcript uses the “#” sign to denote expletives.)

—"Captain Testifies at Flight 1549 Hearing," NYT

Perhaps — No — Selling

Appearing at City Lights tonight at 7: The Believer's Ross Simonini, the novelist/Adderall Diaries memoirist/Rumpus maestro/Blvr. writer/everything Stephen Elliott, and Joe Meno, about whose latest book, The Great Perhaps, I happily gushed:

Joe Meno's fiction has it all--humor and heart, moral gravitas, and a formal playfulness that catches you pleasantly by surprise.

* * *

James Hannaham's God Says No (McSwy's) tour dates here -- coming back to NYC on 6/30, but first Gainesville, Nashville, Chicago, and other places.

* * *

Long awaited: David Suisman's Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music (Harvard) is out now! (Some tantalizing sound files here.)

(The Suis wrote about Enrico Caruso's monkey trial for the Blvr way back in ’03—read it here.)

* * *

Intermittent tweeting.

Pickwick and the Bs

I. Dickens turned out a number of Pickwick every month from March 1836 to November 1837--but November of 1836, Dickens also took on the editorship of Bentley's Miscellany, and in January of 1837 he graced its pages with the first installment of Oliver Twist. From there on, for nearly a full year, Dickens wrote both novels simultaneously, a task which, the Companion rather flatly notes,

he accomplished by devoting the first two weeks of each month to the Miscellany and the latter half of the month to Pickwick.

—I've Been Reading Lately

II. The problem is not Baker himself. The problem is that, as long as Baker lasts, the B’s last, because whenever I am onsite I get caught up in Nicholson’s near neighbors—the Pat Barkers and the Julian Barneses and the John Barths of the stacks. The Bolanos and the Brautigans.

—Theo Schell-Lambert, "The Real Cost of Books, Footnoted" (from Flatmancrooked)

Visualizing the Invisible Library

Tenderpixel is pleased to present the first solo exhibition of the illustration collective INK. The collaborative Invisible Library project will transform the gallery space into an imaginary library filled with books that have been alluded to in novels, but have never actually existed...until now. INK will collaborate with the literary foundation Real Fits, taking up residency at the gallery for a month of unique events, workshops and talks.

Part aesthetic adventure and part Metafictional exercise, INK has chosen forty imaginary book titles from the Invisible Library Blogspot and illustrated their covers. Working with some of Real Fits best selling writers and novelists, as well as high profile cultural and musical figures, the opening or closing pages of these forty empty books with illustrated covers, will be penned in advance of the exhibition. The collaboration continues throughout the exhibition as gallery attendees and workshop participants are invited to temporarily 'sign out' these library books and carry on writing the developing narratives within. Thus by the close of the exhibition, the once blank pages of each book will be enlivened with imaginative poly-vocal stories.

INK and Real Fits will host a programme combining illustration, creative writing, reportage and music. The four-week schedule of workshops and events reaches out to a diverse age-range of individuals. They are invited into the heart of literary London and renowned Victorian bookshop thoroughfare, Cecil Court. The results of these collaborations and workshops will also be subsequently published and exhibited.
Special Events during the exhibition include:

Empty Gallery Interview with INK Illustration pre-exhibition: 9 June 6:30-9PM
Breaking News Launch (INK in Collaboration with Real Fits): 3 July 6-9PM
Pages in Plectrums: Curated by Kieran Leonard 8 July 6-9PM

INK Illustration is a London based collective founded by Chloe Regan, Rachel Gannon & Fumie Kamijo at the Royal College of Art. The group works individually as well as collaboratively on a wide range of commercial and personal projects including; curating, editorial work, retail, museum installations, craftwork and exhibitions.

Transmigration

The jockeying has put the Dalai Lama and the Chinese Communist Party in surprising positions. The Dalai Lama said late last month in an interview with The New York Times that all options for choosing his reincarnation were open, including ones that break from tradition. That could mean that the next Dalai Lama would be found outside Tibet, could be a woman or might even be named while the 14th Dalai Lama was still alive, before his soul properly transmigrated. Meanwhile, the party, officially atheist and accused of ravaging Tibetan culture, insists that religious customs must be followed. —NYT

The next 3 billion years

Funes the Memorious, Western New York version

Description:
"Typical mid-afternoon commercial fare from WKBW TV in Buffalo, NY. 1. Shield Soap 2. Triaminic Cold Syrup 3. Ty-D-Bol 4. Lee Press On Nails (Active Length) 5. ABC Promo- Ryan's Hope"

[Circa?]

Buffalo 66, alternate universe version

(Via Sweeney)