Disambiguation

Egging him on

2012-01-31T20:57:00.002-05:00

Isn't it time you visited the "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks? It's been a while, hasn't it?

Overlooked

2012-01-29T20:11:00.004-05:00

In the Times, Believer contributor Robert Ito has the dope on Room 237, a documentary about the mind-boggling array of theories concerning Stanley Kubrick's The Shining:

“Room 237,” the first full-length documentary by the director Rodney Ascher, examines several of the most intriguing of these theories. It’s really about the Holocaust, one interviewee says, and Mr. Kubrick’s inability to address the horrors of the Final Solution on film. No, it’s about a different genocide, that of American Indians, another says, pointing to all the tribal-theme items adorning the Overlook Hotel’s walls. A third claims it’s really Kubrick’s veiled confession that he helped NASA fake the Apollo Moon landings.

What are the other hotel room numbers of note, in film and literature? (Haven't I asked this question before, in this space? I'm sure I have. Annnnnyway...)

1. Room 208 in Trout Fishing in America.

2012-01-28T13:29:00.004-05:00

At The Millions, Marjorie Hakala gives seven goof reasons why you should read Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time. (Our friend Levi pops up in the comments, and notes that narrator Nick Jenkins's oeuvre appears in the Invisible Library.)

Powell’s portrayal of servants is quite funny, actually. At the time when these books were being written, P.G. Wodehouse was already making virtuosic use of the comic possibilities of the English serving class, most famously in the form of the hyper-competent Jeeves. Powell cut against the Wodehouse grain by making his servant characters only middling in competence and by having them intrude in the life of the household at the most inconvenient times, highlighting the strangeness of two entirely different categories of person living in a house together. The aforementioned butler works for an upper-class Communist, who doesn’t want a butler or really believe in having butlers, but can’t manage his enormous house without one, and there’s a sadly droll tone to their interactions.

(Image from the Telegraph.)

Genius, a Bore, or Both

2012-01-25T21:28:00.005-05:00

Great piece on the Paris Review blog by Jenny Hendrix—who is she?—on "jack green" 's "fire the bastards!," his defense of William Gaddis's The Recognitions.

I've never read "ftb," but when I worked at the PTSNBN, I found the full-page ad from 1962 that Hendrix mentions, and made a nice clean photocopy. And I would take a picture of it and post it here...but I'm not sure where it is.

(Also discussed is the Pynchon/Wanda Tinasky affair, which I remember reading about in the pages of the New York Press...)

By sheer coincidence, Linden at Night RPM has a Gaddis-related post up today...

Flaming alphabets

2012-01-22T21:55:00.000-05:00

Over at the Center for Fiction's Director's Blog (whew!), I put in my two cents for some novels I'm looking forward to reading in 2012—books by Ben Marcus, Antoine Wilson, Heidi Julavits, and Sergio de la Pava.

I wish I'd remembered to mention Dylan Hicks's Boarded Windows, which I read some of and really enjoyed, back when I got a review copy...

Flexing against resistance

2012-01-21T21:48:00.004-05:00

Via a comment on Grognardia: Two Amazon reviews by the late Dr. John E. Holmes, who wrote the rules for the first basic set of Dungeons & Dragons.

One is for a collection of stories by the early-20th-century fantasy writer A. Merritt; the other is for the fourth edition to Aids to the Examination of the Peripheral Nervous System:

For every muscle there is a photo of a clinical evaluation showing position of the limb etc and the instructions ("The patient tries to flex against resistance"). For each muscle there is listed the spinal segments and periferal nerve. Included are standard sensory maps and plexus diagrams. Fits into your instrument bag or white coat pocket. Worth getting if you see only 5 neuro-muscular problems a year!

*

Still not sure what the relationship is between this blog and my Tumblr. Are they friends? Enemies?

Annals of coincidence

2012-01-18T19:30:00.003-05:00

Today on the iPod, "How I Wrote Elastic Man" popped up...

When I got home there was a mysterious book/journal waiting for me, entitled Blast Counterblast.

It opened to an essay by Stuart Bailey called "Wyndham Lewis and Mark E. Smith."

The Believer...

2012-01-10T22:23:00.002-05:00

...has a Tumblr!

First post has some Spotify goodness, to listen to while reading Greil Marcus's column. Plus 31 Love Songs to accompany Rick Moody's modest proposal re the Magnetic Fields' masterpiece.

(I will occasionally tumble 4 ya.)

Al B. Sure!

2012-01-04T21:13:00.001-05:00

In September, Ron Artest — the Lakers’ burly, quirky, unfailingly unpredictable forward — legally changed his name to Metta World Peace. The first name is a Buddhist term meaning “loving kindness.” The last name is self-explanatory.

The name also leads to unfortunate assertions, such as a recent story claiming that “World Peace certainly wasn’t winning over many fans” in the preseason.

So World Peace it is — on the back of his jersey, on his locker stall and every time he is introduced by Lawrence Tanter, the Lakers’ longtime public-address announcer. Tanter said he had practice, having been around when Philadelphia’s Lloyd B. Free legally changed his name to World B. Free, in 1981.
—NYT

(Via Jane)

The Tree of Life: Further reading

2012-01-04T20:19:00.003-05:00

Publicly bookmarking these for later reading—two pieces on The Tree of Life, my favorite movie of last year*:

1. A.O. Scott, "Fugue For History and Memory" (NYT)

2. David Haglund, "Adam and Eve in The Tree of Life" (Slate)

*though I saw Lee Chang-dong's Poetry via Netflix Streaming on New Year's Eve—amazing movie....Has The Poetry Foundation done a piece on it yet?

New Believer is out!

2012-01-03T21:38:00.007-05:00

No, that's not some prototype for this month's cover—the whited-out parts are an extension of Jeannie Vanasco's essay, "Absent Things As If They Are Present," one of the last pieces that I edited. It's a lovely, learned piece, combining memoir with a smart take on the aesthetics of erasure—one of my pet interests, fittingly enough. (Discussed are Tom Phillips's A Humument and Jen Bervin's NETS, both of which I regularly taught to my Gallatin students, as well as Jonathan Safran Foer's Tree of Codes, the Jefferson Bible, Mary Ruefle's A Little White Shadow, and more.)

Also in this issue—a great Meghan Daum piece about her encounter with online venom, Daniel Handler/Greil Marcus/Nick Hornby/Jack Pendarvis columnic brilliance, Alec Michod talking to Fred Tomaselli, Amanda Stern chewing the fat with Laurie Anderson, Michael Schulman on Polari (postwar UK gay argot), Benjamin Weissman, Blake Butler, and (what a treat) Laird Hunt talking to the one and only Harry Mathews. And of course there's MORE...

There's always more—but for me, no more, on the Believer front.

In the notes and apologies area of this issue is an amazing, tear-jerking (but funny) piece about...well...me.

It's been a wonderful I-can't-believe-it's-been-nine years. I'm too choked up to get into it right now....I'll save it for my memoirs...........oh, some exclamation points for my amazing brilliant co-editors and constant inspirations: Heidi! Vendela! Andrew!...Dave of course!.....Ross! Karolina!..Andi!...Sheila!...Meehan!...Matthew Derby of yore—Jason Polan—Brandon Stosuy!...Max!...and all the terrific writers and artists (I'm not even going to begin to list them)...(maybe I'll do a post some day and try to list all of them, the ones I've worked with.....)

The farewell asks, "What will we do without Ed Park?" Simple! Continue being the best magazine around!

(I'm blown away by this illo from the pen of Tony Millionaire.)

1924

2011-12-28T16:49:00.003-05:00

"A scaly neighborhood!" he murmured.

The young man's judgment was one at which few people with an eye for beauty would have cavilled. When the great revolution against London's ugliness really starts and yelling hordes of artists and architects, maddened beyond endurance, finally take the law into their own hands and rage through the city burning and destroying, Wallingford Street, West Kensington, will surely not escape the torch. For, though it possesses certain merits of a low practical kind, being inexpensive in the matter of rents and handy for the buses and the Underground, it is a peculiarly beastly little street. Situated in the middle of one of those districts where London breaks out into a sort of eczema of red brick, it consists of two parallel rows of semi-detached villas all exactly alike, each guarded by a ragged evergreen hedge, each with coloured glass of an extremely regrettable nature let into the panels of the front door; and sensitive young impressionists from the artists' colony up Holland Park way may sometimes be seen stumbling through it with hands over their eyes, muttering between clenched teeth 'How long? How long?'

--P.G. Wodehouse, Leave It to Psmith (1924)

There is one profession and one only, namely architecture, in which progress is not considered necessary, where laziness is enthroned, and in which the reference is always to yesterday.

Everywhere else, taking thought for the morrow is almost a fever and brings its inevitable solution: if a man does not move forward he becomes bankrupt.

But in architecture no one ever becomes bankrupt. A privileged profession, alas!

--Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture (1924)

Wild idling

2011-12-28T09:43:00.003-05:00

For reasons unclear even to myself, I am reading a bit of Ian Fleming's Live and Let Die. I just ran across the Ouroboros sighting that Bill alerted me to back in 2008.

These confirmedthat the yacht had put in at irregular intervals over the previous six months and that she always tied up in the Port of St. Petersburg at the wharf of the 'Ouroboros Worm and Bait Shippers, Inc.,' an apparently innocent concern whose main business was to sell live bait to fishing clubs throughout Florida, the Gulf of Mexico, and further afield.

On the occasion of that post, Levi commented that he hoped Fleming was a better spy than he was a prose writer...

Q: How can I recommend L&LD to Levi?
A: Tell him there is a full three pages of straight quotation from one of his favorite travel writers, Patrick Leigh Fermor.

It's true! It includes this footnote from the author: "This [The Traveller's Tree], one of the great travel books, is published by Harper & Brothers, at $5.00"

Also, Bond's sensory intake at the beginning, as he's being driven into Manhattan from Idlewild (quoted yesterday), is remarkable.

1954

2011-12-27T11:23:00.003-05:00

I realized that two books I'm dipping into are both from 1954 (and both from the UK). Here then are two excellent similes from that year:

He ambled stoutly across the wide floor of the bar which looked out on the terrace where the ladies of the club were gathered in deck-chairs—a colourful and decorative picture which looked like the second act of a musical comedy reproduced some twenty years later with the same cast. —Walter Tyrer, Such Friends Are Dangerous (1954)

[Bond] was glad to keep silent and gaze out at his first sight of America since the war. It was no waste of time to start picking up the American idiom again: the advertisements, the new car models, and the prices of second-hand ones in the used-car lots; the exotic pungency of the road signs: SOFT SHOULDERS—SHARP CURVES—SQUEEZE AHEAD—SLIPPERY WHEN WET; the standard of driving; the number of women at the wheel, their menfolk docilely beside them; the men’s clothes; the way the women were doing their hair; the Civil Defense warnings: IN CASE OF ENEMY ATTACK KEEP MOVING—GET OFF BRIDGE; the thick rash of television aerials and the impact of TV on billboards and shop windows; the occasional helicopter; the public appeals for cancer and polio funds: THE MARCH OF DIMES—all the small fleeting impressions that were as important to his trade as are broken bark and bent twigs to the trapper in the jungle. —Ian Fleming, Live and Let Die (1954)

The sea and the sky (late 2011 edition)

2011-12-26T17:37:00.002-05:00

Between the silver ribbon of morning and the green glittering ribbon of sea, the boat touched Harwich and let loose a swarm of folk like flies, among whom the man we must follow was by no means conspicuous--nor wished to be. --G.K. Chesterton, "The Blue Cross," opening sentence

(To be added to these worthies.)

The last tycoon

2011-12-22T22:13:00.001-05:00

Players only love you when they’re playing, or when they’re spirit-possessing you. —Julavits

Mark Asch (L Magazine) on Kim Jong-il, cinephile:

Kim wrote a couple of books about the cinema. 1973's On the Art of Cinema, about merging socialist messages with populist aesthetics, through a filmmaking process in line with socialist principles. ("In the capitalist system of filmmaking, the 'director' carries that title, but in fact the right of supervision and control over film production is entirely in the hands of the tycoons of the industry who have the money, whereas the directors are nothing but their agents. [The director] is a mere worker who obeys the will of the industrialists whether he likes it or not.")

Late 2011 gleanings

2011-12-20T20:35:00.003-05:00

Three books from friends—Victoria Nelson's story collection A Bestiary of My Heart, Jaime Clarke's Conversations With Jonathan Lethem, and Damion Searls's translation of Proust on Ruskin.

Here's D.S. talking about P&R:

"Alfred Hitchcock's Tender Buttons"

2011-12-19T21:25:00.000-05:00

Passings

2011-12-18T22:57:00.003-05:00

In “Let Us Create More Revolutionary Films Based on Socialist Life,” a whopping 28-page talk, Kim sounds like a contemporary U.S. critic dissing Avatar’s plot as a Dances With Wolves ripoff: “As I pointed out some time ago, the new script in which you made the hero a shoemaker has a similar story to that of the feature film The Girl Barber, and there is also nothing particularly new in what the writer wants to say….As a matter of fact, this work differs little from The Girl Barber in theme, plot and mood. The only difference is that the barber, the heroine in The Girl Barber, has been replaced by a shoemaker as the hero.”

—From a piece I wrote on Kim Jong Il last year at Moving Image Source.

I live alone, wear odds and ends, I have resisted vegetarianism and I don't keep cats." —Neaera H., in Russell Hoban's Turtle Diary

From a free book I got when I read at a laundromat with Sung J. Woo

2011-12-13T20:16:00.001-05:00

"In 1404 King Taejong fell from his horse during a hunting expedition. Embarrassed, looking to his left and right, he commanded, 'Do not let the historian find out about this.' To his disappointment, the historian accompanying the hunting party included these words in the annals, in addition to a description of the king's fall."

Via Light Industry

2011-12-10T10:15:00.000-05:00

Written on a scrap of Post-It attached to the front page of a copy of THE BOOK OF DISQUIET

2011-12-08T22:31:00.002-05:00

THE LONG

SIREN

LIKE A

PINK

DOME

SLOWLY

COVERING

THE

WORLD

A site dedicated to...

2011-12-08T17:47:00.001-05:00

Shopping montages!

(Via L.M. Thos.)

"First Time in Print"

2011-12-07T22:00:00.007-05:00

Heidi Julavits has a Tumblr...and things may never be the same again!

Her upcoming novel The Vanishers is ridiculously fun...

...there's a line I'm trying to find from it, describing a wall "varicosed" by ivy.

*

I just finished Pope Hats #2, a comic book by Ethan Rilly. Lovely and surprising. The "B" story, "Gould Speaks," has Julius Knipl-ish observations set to Huizenga-ish graphics, as the titular narrator takes a long bus trip:

See how all the
windows are now smudged by
human hair.

These nodding mops
slowly paint a mural
of long distance travel.

Every panel is unique.

______

Ed. note: "Huizenga-ish"?

Notes from a screening of Grant Gee's PATIENCE (AFTER SEBALD)

2011-12-05T21:10:00.003-05:00

If you allow yrself
to be a writer — aub___che [avalanche?]
whereas if you're a walker—you might be OK.

Pulsing laptop dot—

USE
GOOGLE
MAPS
______

Once you have time[?]—it
becomes easy
to write

(This is a doddle
(takes care of itself)

He's ripe for a cult

They don't want
the freedom
to assemble the
book by themselves
—RM [Rick Moody]

May 18 '44
Dec 14 01

mash
up

The dream life of debris

TACITA
DEAN

An objective
chance method

narrator [emphasis on second syllable]
a game of patience

Skype/speed[irp?][totally illegible]

REMIT

The reenchantment

I want to be in all the boxes. I'm not using a familiar formula. [Sebald quoted as wanting to be shelved in various sections of the bookstore.]

< Barber Hui > [??]

Sopmerleyton

yew

map [?? illegible]

Eine englische walfahrt

re-photocopying

delight

Katie Mitchell

STALKER

_______

Por Nicholson Baker

2011-12-05T21:08:00.000-05:00

The Year of the Lawrence

2011-12-05T21:02:00.004-05:00

New York magazine asked me to name a couple of my favorite books of the year—I gave some more love to Lawrence Block's A Drop of the Hard Stuff and Lawrence Douglas's The Vices. (Wait...didn't Lawrence Weschler have a book out this year, too?)

I love the artwork!

(I wrote more about LB for Time and more about LD—and his alter ego, Lars Arffssen—for Bookforum.)

Notes from a talk given by Nicholson Baker, February 2011

2011-12-04T20:18:00.004-05:00

I wrote these notes earlier this year, when Nicholson Baker came to speak at Columbia—a great talk by an early member of the EP pantheon. (My former student Andrew Eisenman gave the wonderful introduction.) The words are in black ink on both sides of a yellow bank receipt. The handwriting is messy, at times nearly indecipherable; the chronology is unknown, as entries are written horizontally, vertically, every which way. There are some arrows, brackets, and lines of demarcation. (Mostly I am posting this so I can throw away this piece of paper, which has been taunting me for most of this year, daring me to transcribe.)

Dizzies challenge: What book (or what anything) does "DWYDWTD" refer to?

[Reverse side of receipt]

GGM [ = Gabriel García Márquez]

DWYDWTD [ = ?]

bassoon}

early NB compos[itions]}

I love chronology

Heap of self

_____

I forget whole books

[Reminds me of passage in U&I about how little we retain from even the books we like.]

carpet remnants

pillowsize

_____

keep it short)

Copy out good stuff)

Geo. Saintsbury

This American

stiffness,

kind of

Lego [?]

mov[eme]nt

What it's like

to be sitting

in a room

thinking

Churchill [?] magpie/maniac

____

speak-typing

____

DB [= Donald Barthelme] — @50,

starting to count

_____

You gotta face down yr demons! —————> 400 pp. ———> down [???]

—beard [?]

———> There's something fake about a long book.

sign language [There was a woman to his left, relaying the talk in sign language.]

Simp[le?]/complet[ist?] [?]

[Or more likely: "Simple/complexity"]

_____

I thought it was my friend, then remembered my friend was dead. [I have a feeling this could be a note to myself about some story I was working on, or else a line wanted to use in a story.]

Korean actress story [This was definitely a note to myself, to get back to a story I had started/was working on.]

[Front side of receipt]

bassoon: some ridiculous novelty item

Strav[insky], Bartok, Brahms

______

Rubbing brow—

Schumann var. #9

"I wanted it not to be modern."

("Jeez, Eddie Money's not bad.")

_____

Beat your brains (ASL mimic head morts[?]) ["American Sign Language signer mimics head mortifications"?]

Dick Francis is a great comfort to me. First person. Horses. Every single book.

_____

[The] M[e]z[zanine]: The book was aiming at the list

Panasonic 3 wheel vacuum cleaner, greatness of

What a brutal thing to say—& I was probably wrong [? about what?]

If I can surround

it w/words to make it OK. (vid) [??]

____

Every day that I)

write is a new file)

[NB starts a new computer file for each day—title is the date]

____

Boringness is really

an interesting thing

____

[On the editing process:]

The places where I fell

asleep I took out

______

The most modern I

ever got, I think,

was Geo. Eliot

_____

Maeve Brennan [what he was reading lately]

Snap-T

2011-12-01T20:52:00.002-05:00

The first-generation fleece, called Synchilla (as in synthetic chinchilla), was used in Patagonia’s seminal Snap-T pullover (1985), which was subsequently made famous by family ski trips across the Northeast. “For many, many years,” says Rob Bondurant, vice president of marketing at Patagonia, “Synchilla was the Kleenex of fleece, if you will.” —"The Evolution of Fleece, From Scratchy to Snuggie," NYT

(Via Jane)

Quote of the day

2011-11-28T18:48:00.001-05:00

In the night sky, at certain seasons when the Inner Moons are on the other side of our primary and the starry skies are clear, I can (I fancy) see the earth. A remote and insignificant spark of blue fire it seems from this distance; a tiny point of light lost amid the blackness of the infinite void. Can it truly be that I was born and lived my first twenty-four years on that blue spark—or was that life but a dream, and have I spent all of my days upon this weird world of Thanator? It is a question for the philosophers to settle, and I am but a simple warrior. —Lin Carter, "Jandar of Callisto" (at Grognardia)

Infinite sentences

2011-11-26T20:59:00.004-05:00

Living in a country occupied by the Russian army, deprived of my passport and so without any possibility of leaving, I found it very difficult to defend myself. I succeeded, nevertheless, in publishing a letter of protest in the Times Literary Supplement and even in bringing about the publication in Britain of a revised, complete version, that is, without deletions and with the chapters in their original sequence (Penguin Books, 1970). My satisfaction with this turned out to be only relative: a glance through the book showed me that the translation was still very free; for example, an obviously important matter of punctuation: Helena's monologue, composing all of Part Two, in which each paragraph is one long "infinite" sentence in my original, had been broken up into many very short sentences. I decided to close the book and know no more of it.
--Milan Kundera, "Author's Note," The Joke (Definite Version), 1992

A list of stuff

2011-11-22T21:01:00.004-05:00

1. At Shadowplay, David Cairns shares two pretty good tales out of Fred Zinnemann, An Autobiography.

2. An anonymous commenter at "my" Beatles blog, Hey Dullblog, turned me onto the videos of Michael Sokil, who has taught himself how to play the guitar, bass, drum, and piano parts to every Beatles song.

3. My old friend James Browning, now of Common Cause in Pennsylvania, talks about fracking with MSNBC.

4. This is just a list of stuff!

Paradoxes of self

2011-11-21T20:31:00.004-05:00

My review of Lawrence Douglas's excellent novel The Vices—and my consideration of Lars Arffssen's parody, The Girl With the Sturgeon Tattoo—is now up at Bookforum:

Our narrator is so fluently revealing, even as he peppers his conversation with white lies, that it's a shock to realize that we never learn his name. Is he, in fact, not so much a narrator as a narrative device, a way to tell The Real Life of Oliver Vice? Douglas, or his surrogate, creates exceptionally memorable set pieces: a lust-and-magic-ridden party in commemoration of Beggars Banquet; a Christmas dinner in New York with Oliver's bewitching mother and corpulent, Churchill-worshipping brother. And though the novelist has a seamless voice, he allows other characters to reach us, unfiltered, via their correspondence. Oliver's frequent missives from abroad have the bitter-hilarious tang of a Thomas Bernhard rant:

But her apartment stinks of cigarettes, and I can't stand being there—the odor is so vile, it makes me physically ill. But here's the catch. The cigarette odor in S.'s studio is no different from the smell in my mother's apartment, which has never bothered me. In fact, I would go so far as to say that I find the smell in my mother's apartment pleasing.

Even more impressive are the glimpses of Oliver's masterpiece, the Wittgensteinian treatise Paradoxes of Self. It's one thing for a novelist to invent a genius-author character; it's another order of difficulty to include excerpts of said genius's work that are brilliant enough to convince us of the character's literary chops. The five pages of Paradoxes of Self that Douglas presents—i.e., writes—are so good that you'll wish the book existed in full, on the shelf.

Triple Canopy - "Invalid Format"

2011-11-14T19:19:00.002-05:00

Triple Canopy, "How to print an Internet magazine" from triple canopy on Vimeo.

I'm in this!

*

Which reminds me, when am I going to update ed-park.com?

The Brothers Ouroboros

2011-11-10T21:16:00.001-05:00

A Writer’s Diary is his miscellany of reactionary diatribes and editorials, over 1,400-pages long in the full two-volume edition, and for years I avoided it because I thought it must be insufferable. I assumed it was nothing but Dostoevsky riffing on the forgotten news stories of his time, devouring them to feed his extremism and intolerance. That turns out to be true as far as it goes, but I should’ve also realized Dostoevsky could never sustain his opinions without repeatedly coiling back and swallowing his own tail. —Kevin Frazier, Bookslut

(Via Excited Stoat)

Music time

2011-11-06T00:03:00.004-04:00

Unsurprisingly, for both men producing at such a rate resulted in works of varying quality. This reality, combined with Dickens’ and McCartney’s investment in audience response, led to ego-bruising encounters with criticism. Despite popular success, both men were stung by accusations of sentimentality and shoddiness, and both constructed a public persona as a screen for this vulnerability. Dickens cultivated his image as “Boz,” the friendly champion of the common folk, and McCartney has usually played the role of upbeat performer still in touch with everyday people. These personas are not lies, I would argue, but selective presentations of their real personality traits and values. Born performers, Dickens and McCartney strove to combine getting the audience and acclaim they needed with protecting a private life genuinely important to them. —"McCartney as the Dickens of Rock," guest blogger Nancy, Hey Dullblog
*

“He had a peculiar way of bending the strings,” Mr. Gibbons said, citing Mr. Hill’s linebacker build as the source of an audible physicality he brought to his sound. “The natural way of bending a string is pushing it upwards on the neck. Instead of pushing three or four times and getting a vibrato effect, he would push the note up to the higher note, return back to zero, and then pull the string down and it would stretch up to that same note. You have to be stronger than an ox to do it.” —"Finally, an Album for a Rock Star Who Never Was," Andy Langer, NYT

The Believer — the 2011 Art Issue

2011-11-02T21:50:00.003-04:00

The new Believer is out—the art issue!

Check out Chinnie Ding's meditation on the meaning of the screensaver, and a conversation between James Franco and Carter. (There is a part with a Ouija board that made me laugh out loud.)

There are artists' paper airplanes inside...

Ikeabouros — Five for Frightening

2011-10-29T20:55:00.003-04:00

Get yours today!

(Via Manguso)

At Levi's invitation, I listed a few blood-curdling reads over at The Second Pass. Jenny D, James Hynes, Will Schofield, Andrea Janes, Jonathan Crowley, and others weigh in with their seasonal favorites...

My former students will recognize the Poe-Lovecraft-King trifecta...and in a freakish twist, one of my former student's stories is among my picks!

Species of spaces

2011-10-25T21:43:00.002-04:00

“We can look at ducks, and afterwards, we can look at the pictures and talk about ducks.”

—"Screen Time Higher Than Ever for Children," NYT, 10/25/11

The creature periodically erects barriers inside its shell as it grows, leaving a series of unoccupied spaces behind. —"Loving the Chambered Nautilus to Death," NYT, 10/25/11

What is this a metaphor for?

A Conversation With Paul La Farge

2011-10-18T20:22:00.002-04:00

Tomorrow (that is, Wednesday, October 19) I'll be talking to Paul La Farge about his terrific new novel, Luminous Airplanes, and grilling him about his life in general. It's at McNally Jackson (52 Prince St.) and it begins at 7.

*

Wait...his book trailer was directed by Hal Hartley??

*

Background reading: All of Paul's Believer pieces.

The waist land

2011-10-17T20:47:00.001-04:00

Jim Duquette remembers Dotel as an engaging kid with the most limber arm he had ever seen.

“I remember going down to the Dominican Republic with Eddy Toledo, the scout who signed him,” said Duquette, a Mets minor league executive at the time. When they met Dotel, Toledo asked him to show Duquette something. Dotel locked his hands behind his back and rotated his arms completely over his head to his waist, and back again.

“I’d never seen that before,” Duquette said. “It was like watching someone turn his head in a complete circle.” —NYT

(via Jane)

The late show

2011-10-15T21:10:00.004-04:00

ON a rainy afternoon last month, Elizabeth Olsen apologized profusely for pushing back by more than an hour a luncheon interview at a restaurant in the Gramercy Park neighborhood of Manhattan. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I really hate being late.”—"An Olsen Sister Finds a Spotlight All Her Own," NYT, Arts & Leisure, 10/15/11

Chris Martin, the lead singer of Coldplay, is one of the world’s biggest rock stars, a species for whom tardiness is all but a right. Yet he was full of apologies when he popped through the door of a Midtown Manhattan restaurant, no entourage in sight, for a recent interview.
“I’m sorry I’m late,” he blurted, wearing a slightly stained “Don’t Mess With Texas” T-shirt and loudly colored sneakers, though he had no sunglasses, hat or any other means of celebrity disguise.
But Mr. Martin was actually five minutes early....—"Chris Martin of Coldplay Asks: What Would Bruce Do? ," NYT, Arts & Leisure, 10/15/11

Friday shorties

2011-09-30T08:12:00.001-04:00

I.(Via F.S. Andrew B. Eisenman)

II. From a great annotated interview of HK director Tsui Hark, by Grady Hendrix, in Film Comment:

So besides the midnight previews, what else accounts for this extremely fast editing technique you use? I mean, your movies really do scream along.
We are very nervous people. That’s why our movies go faster than other movies. I think we were a little bit faster than normal people in those days because we felt like we had to tell a longer story in a shorter time.

(Via R. Emmet Sweeney)

III. At Tor, Saladin's Sundrarium looks at the RPG art of David A. Trampier (aka DAT, "Tramp"), whose illustrations include "arguably the most iconic piece of art in all of RPGdom." A great list (for those who remember his work), with a completely unexpected postscript. A must read!

(Via Grognardia, naturally)

Dudely lulls

2011-09-29T07:53:00.003-04:00

The literary critic, theorist and Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt’s new book, “The Swerve: How the World Became Modern,” is partly about an obsessive book collector, and it begins, appropriately enough, with a book purchase of the author’s own.

In the mid-1960s, when he was a student at Yale and searching for summer reading, Mr. Greenblatt came upon a prose translation of Lucretius’ 2,000-year-old poem “On the Nature of Things” (“De Rerum Natura”). He plucked it from a Yale Co-op bargain bin for 10 cents, partly because he liked its sexy cover, a pair of disembodied legs floating above the Earth in an apparent act of “celestial coition.” —Dwight Garner, NYT

There were other goodies in yesterday's art section. Ben Ratliff's review of the Foo Fighters show had a line that made me laugh: "Mr. Grohl and his tastes may be the only carbon-based link between the Boredoms and Tom Petty, whose 'Breakdown' the Foo Fighters played during a dudely lull." Dudely lull!

And Dave Itzkoff's piece on Dylan's Asia paintings, some of which appear to be based on famous photos, mentioned the Confessions of a Yakuza controversy...which reminded me of this lyric:

I dreamed I saw St. Augustine alive as you or me
Then in the year I turned 16, a man who came to recruit laborers for the Ashio copper mines asked me if I cared to work there.
—PTSNBN

Weird sisters

2011-09-28T16:23:00.004-04:00

"How I loathe that kind of novel which is about a lot of sisters. It is usually called They Were Seven, or Three-Not Out, and one spends one's entire time trying to sort them all out, muttering, 'Was it Isobel who drank, or Gertie? And which was it who ran away with the gigolo, Amy or Pauline? And which of their separated husbands was Lionel, Isobel's or Amy's?'" —Rachel Ferguson, The Brontës Went to Woolworths

Enter Sandman

2011-09-27T07:55:00.000-04:00

"Sandman may not be the strangest game ever published in the annals of the hobby, but it's probably the strangest game I ever purchased. As you might guess based on the ad's description of Sandman as a "game of dramatic entertainment," Sandman presented itself as something different from the average roleplaying game. Each player took on the role of an amnesiac traveler in a surreal world with which they weren't familiar, so there was no need for character generation or world information, which theoretically made it suitable for complete novices. The idea was that the players would learn about the game's weird setting and their characters through play over the course of many adventures, four of which were included in the initial Map of Halaal boxed set...

"Had the game line continued, there'd have been several more boxed sets, each of which provided more clues about the nature of the characters, the setting, and the titular Sandman, a mysterious being who seems to know who the characters are and may or may not be responsible for their presence in the game's bizarre world. Discovering the identity of the Sandman was also the goal of a contest offering a $10,000 prize to the winner. So far as I know, no one ever won the prize, but that might have more to do with the fact that Pacesetter went out of business sometime in 1986 or thereabouts." —Grognardia (where else?)

Psychogeographies

2011-09-24T07:30:00.006-04:00

Greater New York is in some ways like a house. Manhattan is the living room, with the TV and the stereo and the good furniture, where guests are entertained. Brooklyn and Queens are the bedrooms where the family sleeps, and the Bronx is the attic, full of inflammable crap that nobody has any use for. Staten Island is the backyard, and Long Island is the detached garage, so filled up with paint cans, workbenches, and motorboat that you can’t get the car in it anymore. Hudson County over in New Jersey is the basement, with the furnace and the freezer and the stacks of old newspapers, and the Jersey swamps are the toilet. Westchester is the den with paneling and a fake kerosene lamp, and Connecticut is the guest room, with starched curtains and landscape prints. The kitchen is way up in Albany, which means the food is always cold by the time it gets to the table, and the formal dining room was torn down by William Zeckendorf and friends back in the early fifties. —Donald Westlake, Dancing Aztecs (quoted by Sarah Weinman)

The morning sun picks out an apartment house, a cigar store, streams through the dusty windows of a loft. The racket swells with the light. These shoes are killing me, she said, taking the cover off the typewriter. Main Central is up to forty-six. Did you read about the earthquake?

Looms, shears, jackhammers, trolley cars, voices, add to the din. And in the quieter streets the hawker with the pushcart moves slowly by. Badabadabada O Gee! Hawkers of vegetables, plants, fruit. Badabadabada
O Gee!

In half a million rooming-house rooms the call penetrates ill-fitting windows. The boy who came to be a writer is waked in his mid-town room and dresses for his shift on the elevator. In Chelsea the girl who came to be an actress launders her stockings. The boy who was going to Wall Street sprawls on his bed, wincing as each cry cuts into his dream of the smell of fresh hay and warm milk. A deep blast rises, drowning the sound of hawkers, children, automobiles. The Conte di Savoia steams up the river; wine from Capri, olive oil from Spain, figs and dates from North Africa.

Shouting screaming kids fill the streets, playing baseball, football, hopscotch, jump-rope, dodging swift-moving trucks and taxis. Down Fifth Avenue marches a May Day parade sixty thousand strong. Solidarity forever, solidarity forever, the portentous tramp, tramp of regimented feet; slogans called, banners flying. Up lower Broadway an open car moves slowly through the yelling throng and on its pulled-back hood, laughing, waving into the snowstorm that flutters thickly downward from high-up windows, sits a returned aviator, explorer, movie actor, champion chess player, the first man to walk the length of Manhattan backwards. —from John Cheever's introduction to the 1939 New York City Guide (quoted by Jason Boog)

Yet [New York] was much more than a glittering modern city for Lovecraft. It was that in the early months of his stay, but it soon came to be seen as a darker, older, and far more protean city—at least on his many walks in the dead of night. As he threaded his way through a maze of tenuous and delicate mental impressions, in the night shadows and dawn glimmerings of New York City he found a new dream-city that could function simultaneously as an inspirational fever-dream, as a text, as an antiquarian reliquary, as a sort of psychic comforter to aid him in his battle against the mundane and horrifyingly noisy reality of daylight hours. —David Haden, Walking With Cthulhu: H.P. Lovecraft as Psychogeographer (New York: 1924–26)

Winning streak

2011-09-19T14:50:00.001-04:00

"When the Tigers' 12-game winning streak ended on Thursday, there was actually an air of relief in their clubhouse. That's because manager Jim Leyland and batting coach Lloyd McClendon were finally able to change their underwear. Superstition has always been a big part of baseball, but Leyland and McClendon may have taken it a little too far when they elected not to change their underwear as long as the Tigers kept on winning." (Source unknown)

(Via Jane)

The Diary of Parkus Grammaticus, Sept. 14, 2011

2011-09-14T18:38:00.003-04:00

I. Last night I had the honor of presenting the Ambassador Book Award for American Studies to Rebecca Skloot, for her book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Skloot was sunable to attend, but it was a fun and interesting evening. Alan Brinkley won the nonfiction award for The Publisher, his biography of Henry Luce; Christian Wiman picked up the poetry prize for Every Riven Thing; Janet Malcolm received a lifetime achievement award; and—arriving at the last possible minute!—Deborah Eisenberg collected the Amby (we don't actually call them that) for fiction, for her Collected Stories. Tony Judt's widow, Jennifer Homans, gave an incredibly moving speech in accepting the posthumous award (for a "book of special distinction") given to The Memory Chalet.

English-Speaking Union 2011 Ambassador Book Award winners with committee members:

(l to r) Adam Kirsch, Ambassador Book Awards Committee Chair; Jennifer Homans accepting on behalf of Tony Judt, for The Memory Chalet(The Penguin Press); Molly Stern of Crown Publishing accepting on behalf of Rebecca Skloot for The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Crown); Alan Brinkley for The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century (Alfred A. Knopf); Deborah Eisenberg for Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (Picador); Committee member Benjamin Taylor; Lifetime Achievement Award winner Janet Malcolm; Committee members Ed Park and Maureen Howard.

II. Afterward I skedaddled downtown to KGB, where I managed to slip into a very crowded room—what a turnout! Thanks to Karolina and Max for running this baby, and to (F.S.) Rebecca Taylor, Justin Taylor (no relation), and Rozalia Jovanovic for reading. Sadly I missed most of Rebecca's reading, but the end was tantalizing: footage from one of the no-budget horror flicks that she starred in (as recounted in her Believer piece, "Virginia Mountain Scream Queen"). (Anyone shoot video of RT?) Justin read a wonderful little memoir about (among other things) once being Tao Lin's roommate. And Rozi read her music issue feature on the band Salem, to a smoke machine and a series of enigmatic/spooky/funny slides. So great to see so many people having fun.

Crying Birds™ for September 12, 2011

2011-09-12T16:14:00.000-04:00

Albert Pujols had no comment about a derogatory tweet the Brewers' Nyjer Morgan posted after being ejected from a game against the Cardinals, but manager Tony La Russa did.

Morgan, whose handle is @TheRealTPlush, referred to Pujols as Alberta and criticized Pujols for running to the mound and making sure Morgan's confrontation with Cardinals starter Chris Carpenter didn't escalate in the ninth inning of a shutout over Milwaukee on Wednesday night.

"Alberta couldn't see Plush if she had her gloves on!!!" Morgan tweeted, and added, "Wat was she thinking running afta Plush!!! She never been n tha ring!!!"

Earlier he referred to the Cardinals as crying birds.

La Russa said that Morgan was a good player but that he needed to "get a clue." La Russa added, "I'm aware of him. The less you talk about him, the better off you are." --AP

(Via Jane)

2. Over at The Literarian, the Mercantile Center for Fiction's magazine, I pick a few SF-ish titles that I like. (Oddly, when I was first asked to come up with a list, all I knew for sure was that I wanted to mention Joe Haldeman's The Forever War...which I forgot about until it was too late!)

3. Fans of interviews in The Believer will want to check out the latest issue of Jeff Lemire's Animal Man...done as a Believer interview!

(Via Douglas)

4. Tomorrow! A Believer event at KGB, featuring Justin Taylor, Rozalia Jovanovic, and f.s. Rebecca Taylor!

Lyrics matter

2011-09-09T11:51:00.000-04:00

More great comments on Hey Dullblog—on favorite unreleased tracks, Seinfeld and nothingness, and the theory that "Yesterday" and "The Night Before" are thematically identical—from Devin, Nancy, Glavin (Garvin? Gavin? Garmin? Glaven), and Mr. Levi Stahl. A smattering:

Devin: "Seinfeld": it was fatuous and lazy for commentators to use that phrase "show about nothing" as if it spoke the whole truth. But I think it was legitimately used by some to encapsulate the show's peculiar and innovative charm -- that unlike "The Brady Bunch," say (which like all children of the '70s I LOVE), episodes didn't require a moral or even a resolution. The "something" we'd all been spoonfed (by shows like "The Brady Bunch," which did I mention I LOVE) was the real nothing: bourgeois values and stale homily. (LOVE.) Whereas "Seinfeld"'s "nothing" was really "something"--the vigor, absurdity, and random magic of ordinary life, heightened and tweaked to perfection.

Glaven: As for "Yes It Is" ... Formally, it's a lot like "This Boy", in that the chord progression of e verses is exactly the same as TB, just transposed from the key of D to E; also, the rhythm guitar strumming pattern is exactly the same. This suggests that it may have started out as a rewrite of TB, but I agree with you that it is far superior to the earlier song, and, taken all-in-all, is a far different and far richer song. And Ithink the only way one could conclude otherwise, could see it as a mere knockoff of TB, is by ignoring the far superior lyrics. Lyrics matter. Sometimes I think people forget that.

Nancy: My favorite unreleased Beatles track is Lennon's "Child of Nature." I read somewhere that it was left off the White album because it was too close in subject to "Mother Nature's Son," but I think these two songs would have made a great double A-side.

Believer event next Tuesday at KGB!

2011-09-09T04:55:00.000-04:00

The White Album and other hot messes

2011-09-07T04:14:00.007-04:00

Over at Hey Dullblog, the Beatles blog for today's modern listener, Mike asks readers for their favorite unreleased Beatles song. This turned into a skewering of the White Album:

That's my biggest issue with White, how it's totally fashionable and false, just like most Beatle's solo output, and not like what came before. Both it and Let It Be seem like the triumph of each band member's persona over their authentic selves; they are their final refusal to change, when change was what The Beatles did best. Lennon's "honest" and politically aware (in a rockstar way) and intentionally grimy. McCartney's that much more eager to please (which is why his music hall thing gets out of control). Harrison's either wafting away on a cloud or acidly angry. Starr is a good ol' boy who just happened to be born in the North of England...I don't like the White Album anymore than I like The Beatles' cartoon, for the same reasons.

There follows a spirited back and forth with the almighty Dev, who decrees:

It's all a matter of what you hear. If you hear something and love it, you'll find ways to give personal context to the importance it has to you. If you don't like it, you'll find those reasons. What you hear as "the Beatles' final refusal to change" I hear as drama--four individuals joined under the skin, that skin withering and wearing, their unity telepathic even as their verbal communication breaks down, fighting within the skin to work together and push the group to new lands: and all of that without, I believe, any conscious intent. White, in the best Beatle tradition, doesn't intend, it IS. Whereas "Abbey Road" for all its magnificent passages is an acquiescence, an abrogation of conflict for bliss, consequently lacking (overall) in drama and even a little inhuman.

White Album is the first principle and the last. It is Moby-Dick. And you thought you were fed up with the praise before!

("Everyone Knew Her As") Nancy steps in, to smooth some feathers:

There's something spooky about the White Album's tendency to engender intense, often negative feelings, both at the time and now. Much as I love parts of it, I can rarely listen to more than a couple of songs from it at a time.

Devin, I agree with you about the way John's comments ("backing band") color the way we hear this album. Certainly there was plenty of tension and bad feeling, but listen to a song like "Dear Prudence" -- what amazing collaboration, especially between Lennon's melody and McCartney's sublime bassline. The evidence of collaboration and enjoyment in many songs makes the overall effect of the album all the sadder.

A lot of food for thought. Great stuff!

And—sorry, Mike—I fall into the pro-White Album camp...I was utterly thrilled when I listened to it for the first time (long before I read any rock crit); if memory serves, a local radio station played an old "classic" album in its entirety every Friday night, beginning at 11. I taped The Beatles off the radio in its entirety, marveling at whole continents of stuff I'd not heard before. Still thrills me. Still have the tape, for that matter!

Catchin' up — New Believer! — Free e-Stark — &c.

2011-09-02T21:37:00.003-04:00

I haven't been blogging—I was in Taiwan and couldn't figure how to work Blogger. Did you miss me? [Tumbleweed.]

Now—to business!

I. The September Believer is out. On the site, you can read a Gregory Kornbluh's wonderful piece on master palindromist Barry Duncan, as well as Ross Simonini's (about whom, more later) interview with Jason Schwartzman. But you need to get the whole print issue in your hands. It's great. THERE IS A CONVERSATION BETWEEN DON DELILLO AND BRET EASTON ELLIS. (One of the many things I learned: DD excised 15 pages from a paperback reprint of Americana. I wonder which 15? I wonder why?)

Marc Katz has a mouth-watering essay on Huysmans' Against Nature (which has been lingering on my bookshelf for approximately 9 million years, and which I really now must read!), Nate Pedersen looks at the origins of the "butler did it" mystery trope, Meaghan Winter gets wiggy with Orthodox Jewish hairpieces...There's the usual Marcus/Pendarvis/Handler/Hornby columny goodness, filthy comics, reviews, and more...Verdict: Great issue!

II. The one book I read while away was Lawrence Douglas's upcoming novel The Vices, which is excellent—just my cup of tea. I was a huge fan of his debut novel, The Catastrophist (and profiled him for the PTSNBN, in one of my last articles there); this one shares some of the themes but seems to me even more successful—exhilarating, even.

Try the first page and see if you can stop. It's about a stalled novelist's friendship with the Bernhardesque Oliver Vice, and the prose is pure pleasure: elegant, comic, wise. There are subtle pleasures, too, that I'm not sure I can do justice to. For example, a brief passage in the first half of the book gently triggered a memory of a scene in Nabokov's The Real Life of Sebastian Knight...and many many pages later, the narrator and his friend talk about that very novel, in such a way that the book itself becomes suggestively and satisfyingly unmoored.

I will have quotes for you soon.

III. Levi alerted me to two free e-books by Donald E. Westlake—God Save the Mark (which I reviewed for the PTSNBN; it's perfect light reading) and (as Richard Stark) The Score.

Analyze this

2011-09-02T10:50:00.002-04:00

Chain reaction

2011-08-18T22:13:00.000-04:00

"For those who may deem the story too long, and the characters too numerous the Author can only beg their pardon for any tedium that they may have undergone before giving it up." —Charlotte M. Yonge, Preface to The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations: A Family Chronicle, Feb 22 1856

Reality Hunger — Summer 2011 edtition

2011-08-18T22:01:00.000-04:00

This book is a work of fiction, although it also deals with historical events. Those segments of the work that are historical in nature are based on extensive research and interviews. Some real persons, both deceased and alive, are mentioned in the work. However, to the extent those persons are depicted as interacting with the narrator of the novel, their actions, motivations, and conversations are entirely fictitious and should not be considered real or factual.

There's no either-or division with poems. What's made up and what's not made up? What's the varnished truth , what's the unvarnished truth? We don't care. With prose you first want to know: Is it fiction, is it nonfiction? Everything follows from that. The books go in different places in the bookstore. But we don't do that with poems, or with song lyrics. Books of poems go straight to the poetry section. There's no nonfictional poetry and fictional poetry. The categories don't exist.

"The cow that wants to be a deer"

2011-08-17T11:52:00.001-04:00

The activists have been using an infrared camera to find the six-year-old dairy cow, who has been lying low during the day and grazing at night, like a deer. Previous attempts at luring Yvonne back to captivity include bringing in Waltraud - a cow with whom she was "best friends" - as well as her own calf. —BBC

(Via Jane)

Plush life

2011-08-16T22:48:00.001-04:00

Doug Melvin thought he was getting a speedy backup outfielder with a checkered history when he acquired Nyjer Morgan from the Washington Nationals late in spring training.

“I wanted Nyjer Morgan,” Melvin said. “I didn’t know I was getting two people for one. I got Nyjer Morgan and an alter ego to be named later.”

At a moment’s notice, and frequently in range of a television camera, Morgan becomes Tony Plush, a fun-loving personality who creates words and nicknames, much like the Hall of Fame pitcher Dennis Eckersley.

Also known as T-Plush, Morgan calls the fundamentals of his game like bunting and moving up runners Plushdamentals. Morgan’s teammates often salute T-Plush by forming a timeout signal with their hands.

Tony Plush is not a new invention. Morgan said he and two buddies from home in San Jose, Calif., created personas for themselves about 10 years ago. One friend was Frankie Sleaze, the other James Dot Dean, and Morgan became Tony Plush.

(Via Jane; not sure where the original article is from)

An idiotic story

2011-08-16T11:48:00.003-04:00

To read: F.S. Adam Z. Levy on Dezső Kosztolányi*, in the Los Angeles Review of Books. The novel sounds promising:

The story begins when Esti and an unnamed narrator — a fictionalized version of Kosztolányi himself — meet up on a “mad, excited day” in spring after ten years of silence to revive their former friendship and co-write, not surprisingly, the book in your hands.

“But our styles are poles apart,” Esti says to the narrator:
You’ve recently been favoring calm, simplicity, classical images. Not much decoration, not many words. My style, on the other hand, is still restless, untidy, congested, ornate, racy. I’m an incurable romantic. Lots of epithets, lots of images. I won’t let you cut that out.
And so they settle on the terms: half Estian exuberance, half the narrator’s control. “But one thing I insist on,” says Esti. “Don’t glue it all together with an idiotic story.”

________

*How do you pronounce this?

The anxiety of affluence

2011-08-12T22:33:00.001-04:00

What a knockout of a piece this is!

What makes hip-hop such a durable form is its capacity to scramble fiction and fact; the artifice and the realities that art conceals or amplifies become one. In this way, Watch the Throne feels astonishingly different. It captures two artists who no longer need dreams; art cannot possibly prophesy a better future for either of them. All of this — the luxury goods, the art collection, private compounds, the Oprah-level American Dream — is their reality. This isn't to discount all the personal travails or the fantastic demons unimaginable to the nonfamous. But to speak passionately about contradiction offers narrative cover for the truth that one simply knows better, and the album's anxieties feel like an hour-long quest for the authority to rule from above, a justification to luxuriate. —Hua on Kanye and Jay-Z in Grantland

First principles

2011-08-08T22:19:00.003-04:00

Any advice for struggling writers?

Read. Don’t be afraid to imitate. Develop your ear for rhythm and voice and tone and register.

Reread what you’re working on again and again and again. Pay attention to every word and every punctuation mark. Print out what you’ve just written and then retype it, slowly. Don’t let anything go out that’s not perfect, and that includes typos–nothing is too small for your attention.

Reread your work through the eyes of a dozen people–a former teacher, a high-school pal, a no-bullshit person of great intelligence but little education, etc.

Be flexible but also mulishly stubborn.

Constantly return to first principles. Try to cut 25% of the words in any manuscript. Be satisfied that 75% of your ideas and (if applicable) 95% of your research won’t appear in the final product.

Always address others–keep them entertained and usefully informed–but remember at the same time that you have no control over how others read your work. You have to satisfy yourself.

But remember: self-doubt is what will keep you young. The minute you are self-satisfied you’ll be ready for the glue factory.

—Luc Sante, interviewed by The Believer's Karolina Waclawiak, at The Days of Yore

Lazy Literary Gleanings™

2011-08-07T18:06:00.006-04:00

Levi comes right out and says it: "There's a reason this is my favorite book in the world, folks; I'll be reading and re-reading it for a long, long time to come."

Read his two posts on re-reading Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time.

Two excellent things from the new issue of Triple Canopy: David Levine's "Matter of Rothko" and Claire Barliant's "The Hanging at Mankato."

Wow: Stephen Burt has a great review of my old teacher Bruce Smith's latest book of poems, Devotions, in the NYT.

Not done with this yet, but Douglas Wolk's "Comic-Con Strikes Again" is really good. It's an Amazon Single. (Has anyone read the Vollmann Amazon Single?)(Does anyone read this blog anymore?)

Byah byah byah byah

2011-08-04T12:30:00.003-04:00

Today at 2 on WNYC (93.9 FM in NYC, also online), listen to Soundcheck's show on the cultural history of the bassoon. Among other guests will be Eileen Reynolds, who wrote a terrific piece about the so-called "farting bedpost" for the current (music) issue of The Believer. (Here's an excerpt.)

Get a room!

2011-08-04T12:10:00.000-04:00

My kind of place!

(Via Levi)

The eponymous labyrinth

2011-08-03T10:01:00.000-04:00

More higher order thinking about RPGs from Grognardia:

For me, the banality of The Nightmare Maze of Jigrésh is its real value.

Anatomies

2011-08-02T20:43:00.003-04:00

From two books picked up and dipped into over the weekend:

It needed an effort to obey his signal, but she did it. He closed the French window, drew down the blind again, and–

"Oh, don't let's," said Elfrida.

"Nonsense," said Edred; "there's nothing to be frightened of. It's just like our rooms at home."

It was. They went all over the house, and it certainly was. Some of the upper rooms were very bare, but all the furniture was of the same kind as Aunt Edith's, and there were the same kind of pictures. Only the library was different. It was a very large room, and there were no pictures at all. Nothing but books and books and books, bound in yellowy leather. Books from ceiling to floor, shelves of books between the windows and over the mantelpiece–hundreds and thousands of books. Even Edred's spirits sank. "It's no go. It will take us years to look in them all," he said.

"We may as well look at some of them," said Elfrida, always less daring, but more persevering than her brother. She sat down on the worn carpet. and began to read the names on the backs of the books nearest to her. "Burton's Atomy of Melon something," she read, and "Locke on Understanding," and many other dull and wearying titles. But none of the books seemed at all likely to contain a spell for finding treasure. "Burgess on the Precious Metals" beguiled her for a moment, but she saw at once that there was no room in its closely-printed, brown-spotted pages for anything so interesting as a spell. Time passed by. The sunlight that came through the blinds had quite changed its place on the carpet, and still Elfrida persevered. Edred grew more and more restless. —E. Nesbit, The House of Arden

II.

"After I talked to him, what's his name, Mott, I went down to the Malibu Library and checked out that book of yours, Anatomy of Terrorism."

"Anatomy of Terror," Stallings said, unable to resist the correction.

"Yeah. Right. Well, I read it. Most of it, in fact, but then I quit about three-quarters through. Want to know why?"

"Not really."

"Because I couldn't figure out whose side you were on."

"Good," said Stallings.

—Ross Thomas, Out on the Rim

"Often as not a boy or girl of normal height resulted"

2011-07-27T22:41:00.003-04:00

Today on his blog, Levi goes from Portis to Peter the Great to Portis again. He wonders if he should quote quite so much from the bio he read last week (Robert K. Massie's Peter the Great, 1980), but I'm glad he did! And I'm going to just copy the passage he quotes because it's so wild. (I kept thinking: Really?)

The King's most famous obsession was his collection of giants, for which he was renowned throughout Europe. Known as the Blue Prussians or the Giants of Potsdam, there were over 1,200 of them, organized into two battalions of 600 men each. None was under six feet tall, and some, in the special Red Unit of the First Battalion, were almost seven feet tall. The King dressed them in blue jackets with gold trim and scarlet lapels, scarlet trousers, white stockings, black shoes and tall red hats. He gave them muskets, white bandoleers and small daggers, and he played with them as a child would with enormous living toys. No expense was too great for this hobby, and Frederick William spent millions to recruit and equip his giant grenadiers. They were hired or bought all over Europe; especially desirable specimens, refusing the offer of the King's recruiting agents, were simply kidnapped. Eventually, recruiting in this way became too expensive--one seven-foot-two-inch Irishman cost over 6,000 pounds--and Frederick William tried to breed giants. Every tall man in his realm was forced to marry a tall woman. The drawback was that the King had to wait twenty years for the products of these unions to mature, and often as not a boy or girl of normal height resulted. The easiest method of obtaining giants was to receive them as gifts. Foreign ambassadors advised their masters that the way to find favor with the King of Prussia was to send him giants. Peter especially appreciated his fellow sovereign's interest in nature's curios, and Russia supplied the Prussian King with fifty new giants every year. (Once, when Peter recalled some of the giants lent to Frederick William and replaced them with men who were a trifle shorter, the King was so upset that he could not discuss business with the Russian ambassador; the wound in his heart, he said, was still too raw.)

Sentence of the day

2011-07-27T08:33:00.001-04:00

"Nobody becomes a sponger without their mother being a sponger, but not all daughters becomes spongers." —NYT

Oh Kei

2011-07-26T22:29:00.002-04:00

He has made some friends in New York, but not many, he said. In the five years he has maintained an online diary, he has rarely mentioned another person. The only photo on his personal blog is a picture of himself, jogging alone. —Bill Pennington, "Kei Igawa: The Lost Yankee," NYT

Korean stuff

2011-07-22T11:03:00.000-04:00

These things popped up

1. I am a big fan of David Mitchell's novel Cloud Atlas—and the movie version will star Bae Doona, one of my favorite Korean actresses (Linda Linda Linda, Barking Dogs Never Bite, Take Care of My Cat, The Host, et al.). (iamkoream)

2. Iris Shim's documentary, The House of Suh, sounds hair-raising. Music is by Michael Hearst, of One Ring Zero fame. (Also from iamkoream)

3. Joshua Davis, in the Stanford alumni magazine, has an interesting story about Korean pop star Dan Lee (Epik High), whose academic credentials (a B.A. and M.A. in 3.5 years) were assailed even after multiple attempts at clarification.

(Via Paul)

4. Did North Korea fake a flood picture to attract aid? (Business Insider)

Not me

2011-07-21T11:07:00.000-04:00

My friend Ed Park once told me a story about a native of the country of Lebanon, a serious chukar hunter.

—Pat Wray, A Chukar Hunter's Companion

Dack Rambo

2011-07-20T22:40:00.002-04:00

I'm a fan of these new afterwords/introductions that Lawrence Block is appending to his old books as they get released in e-reader form. From his postscript to Deadly Honeymoon (1967):

The film did get made, and was released rather tentatively in 1973, with the title Nightmare Honeymoon. It starred Dack Rambo and Rebecca Dianna Smith, with Pat Hingle as the crime boss, and it was set in New Orleans, and, let us come right out and say it, it stank on ice.

The name of the week

2011-07-20T18:46:00.003-04:00

Did you see this NYT article about Diana Nyad, who is attempting (at age 61) to swim the 103 shark-infested miles from Cuba to Florida?

And did you think:

(1) Her name is sort of a palindrome; and

(2) It's also very nomen-omen-y (see Naiad)

The Mystery of the Anonymous Supplement Writer

2011-07-20T16:43:00.001-04:00

I regularly bemoan the fact that GDW allowed the Third Imperium to become not merely an example setting for their SF RPG Traveller but the setting for it. I continue to feel that, by doing this, it so firmly yoked Traveller's ruleset to a single setting that it subtly discouraged players of the game from making up their own settings and instead to rely on GDW and its licensees for more setting information to use in their campaigns. One such licensee was Judges Guild, which produced several Traveller adventures and sector supplements, one of which was Ley Sector, published in 1980 by an unknown author (there is no writer credited anywhere in the text). —Grognardia

What if it's a "Purloined Letter" scenario—and the author's name is "Ley Sector"?

For whom the Ellsbury tolls

2011-07-18T23:48:00.001-04:00

Nicknames that you can read all about on Baseball Reference but almost certainly never hear or use.
• Jacoby Ellsbury: Tacoby Bellsbury
Apparent origin: In 2007, Ellsbury stole a base during the World Series, winning a free taco for everybody in America who isn’t afraid to eat Taco Bell. A Boston Globe reader named Jeff Dockum submitted the nickname on Boston.com.
Frequency of use in respectable press: Nine instances on LexisNexis, most recently in July 2009."
—The Score

(via Jane)

Two bookish things

2011-07-14T10:10:00.001-04:00

I. The comments on this very blog have spawned—another blog! Yes, it's The World's Least Popular Book Club, devoted to the reading, at a deliberately slow pace, of Marguerite Young's Miss MacIntosh, My Darling. My fellow adventurers include some of my favorite littérateurs...

II. Via Twitter, I arrived at the site of Juliette Tang, photographer of books—just great! Her style would be so well suited to depicting/mirroring Young's lush, lyrical prose...except that MMMD, in all the editions we know of (Scribner's hardcover, two-volume slipcased paper, Dalkey reprint), has a fairly hideous cover...

(The photos on the left are from Juliette Tang's site.)

Midnight confessions

2011-07-14T00:02:00.002-04:00

I learned a lot about the Grass Roots from yesterday's obit for Rob Grill, the singer. (One thing I learned is the name of the Grass Roots' singer.) I think I thought they were Canadian before.

This was "wow":

The Grass Roots began life as a phantom. In the mid-1960s, two Los Angeles songwriters, Steve Barri and P. F. Sloan, were asked by their label, Dunhill Records, for songs that would capitalize on the growing appetite for folk-rock.

They wrote “Where Were You When I Needed You” and, as the Grass Roots, recorded a demo. When the song had some success on the radio, they cast about for an existing band to become the Grass Roots.

They enlisted a San Francisco group named the Bedouins, who recorded the first Grass Roots album, also titled “Where Were You When I Needed You.”

In 1967, after the Bedouins decamped, Mr. Barri and Mr. Sloan recruited the 13th Floor, a Los Angeles band comprising Creed Bratton, Rick Coonce, Warren Entner and Kenny Fukomoto. (Mr. Bratton, the lead guitarist, later worked as an actor; he is known for playing the eccentric quality assurance director — also named Creed Bratton — on the American sitcom “The Office.”)

Is that common knowledge? That Creed from The Office was in the Grass Roots? (And for the Asian-Americanists: Who was Kenny Fukomoto?)

Several years ago—let's say 10—I was walking along one of the streets in the East 60s, an ordinary day, and suddenly from the basement (?) of a high school on the block came a live-rehearsal brass-band rendition of "Midnight Confessions." It put a spring in my step!

Do you remember the Blake Babies' cover of "Temptation Eyes"? Do you remember the Blake Babies? Did their name have to do with William Blake? (How terrible/great/funny!)

(I've never seen this video before.)

Kill Bill

2011-07-12T09:39:00.005-04:00

Paris Review: Egan’s story of how she wrote Goon Squad has been repeated on many occasions—she was frustrated with writing the novel she was supposed to and so she began to write interlocking stories about a handful of characters—but she admitted that evening that she owes a great debt to Quentin Tarantino for the way Goon Squad plays with chronology and narrative. “I had to completely let go of any kind of linear chronology,” Egan told us before playing the movie. “But it was interesting how hard that was to do. There was something in me that didn’t want to do it, even though I knew that the most fun of the book, even as I was working on it, was not going forward.”

Ed writes: The other day I was thinking about The Sound and the Fury, its radical, complex, time-bending structure. Then I seemed to recall that Quentin Tarantino was named after S&F's Quentin Compson. Is that true? Has QT ever talked about Faulkner as an influence? (I know he's acknowledged a debt to Salinger's Glass stories.)

The headline to this post doesn't really make sense, but it sort of does if you don't think about it.

Play of the year

2011-07-07T11:20:00.001-04:00

Veronica Liu of Fractious Press (and Seven Stories Press) sent an email about Word Up, the pop-up bookstore in Washington Heights.

Over the past two weeks we've hosted readings by zinesters, novelists, comic book artists, performance artists, poets—both famous and first-time, English and Spanish, teen and adult; live music—free improv, hip-hop, Latin jazz, poetry/performance; informative publishing Q&As; children's story hours; knitting and crafting circles; women's self-defense clinics; lit journal showcases; and even a solo play about community organic farming performed from the point of view of the soil!

Pseudobibliophilia

2011-07-05T21:56:00.002-04:00

At Salon, Laura Miller writes about...invisible libraries.

The original Invisible Library disappeared from the Web in the mid-2000s (though you can still find snapshots of it in the Internet Archive Wayback Machine), and since then other pseudobibliophiles have opened their own "branches," although these too have a tendency to end up abandoned. The novelists Ed Park and Levi Stahl created a catalog of imaginary titles that inspired an interactive exhibition at a London art gallery, but they have only occasionally updated it since 2008. Loss of interest is, perhaps, inevitable, since when you maintain such a list, tiresome people are constantly proclaiming their disappointed astonishment that their particular obscure favorite isn't listed.

Actually, Levi and I still update our Invisible Library—our "site" is so primitive (i.e., it's a blogspot blog) that we need to keep those 2008 timestamps intact in order to preserve alphabetical order. In other words, we need to get a real site. (No comment about the "tiresome people" statement.)

If you thought we were lying low, you might have missed this one from a few months ago:

SHEFFIELD, (Professor) Peter: Who Indeed: A Critical Analysis of Television's Who's the Boss?; What WAS Happening: An Analysis ofWhat’s Happening?;
—from Community (season 2, ep. 20)

Stout fellow

2011-07-05T21:35:00.000-04:00

I came upon an article about Sigurd Snake-in-the-Eye, who "was born with the image of the ouroboros, a snake or dragon biting its own tail, encircling the pupil of his left eye." As far as I can tell, however, the snake served no literary purpose. —Glass-Bottom Blog

(Via Jenny D)

All glory to the Hypnotoad

2011-07-05T10:46:00.000-04:00

Believer 2011 Music Issue

2011-07-01T10:12:00.004-04:00

...is out! Check out the cover (which looks even more amazing when you're holding it in your hands)! Check out Ross Simonini's great interview with Trey Anastasio of Phish! Ross also put together the excellent CD, of new classical music.

Brian Eno in conversation with David Mitchell! David Byrne talking to Tom Zé!

Frances Cha on K-pop fandom....Eileen Reynolds on the bassoon...Paul Collins on the short-lived craze for turntables in your car...Hua Hsu on telephone calls in pop songs...the Australian festival scene...Much more! Nick Hornby on North Korea (!)...Martha Wainwright! Daniel Handler on Kawabata! Jack Pendarvis...more...more...go...buy...listen...enjoy...it's great...Greil Marcus....more...

Circular logic

2011-06-28T21:56:00.000-04:00

The mathematical constant pi is under threat from a group of detractors who will be marking "Tau Day" on Tuesday.

Tau Day revellers suggest a constant called tau should take its place: twice as large as pi, or about 6.28 - hence the 28 June celebration.

Tau proponents say that for many problems in maths, tau makes more sense and makes calculations easier.

"I like to describe myself as the world's leading anti-pi propagandist," said Michael Hartl, an educator and former theoretical physicist.

"When I say pi is wrong, it doesn't have any flaws in its definition - it is what you think it is, a ratio of circumference to diameter. But circles are not about diameters, they're about radii; circles are the set of all the points a given distance - a radius - from the centre," Dr Hartl explained to BBC News.

By defining pi in terms of diameter, he said, "what you're really doing is defining it as the ratio of the circumference to twice the radius, and that factor of two haunts you throughout mathematics."

[...] —BBC (via Jane)

The Mettamorphosis

2011-06-27T15:23:00.002-04:00

"LOS ANGELES -- Los Angeles Lakers forward Ron Artest wants to change his name to Metta World Peace...."

Pole position

2011-06-26T16:06:00.003-04:00

Levi quotes my favorite bit from the letters Nabokov wrote to Véra (printed in a recent New Yorker) while he was on a college lecture tour in 1942.

At the station in Springfield I was met . . . by the club secretary, a creepily silent melancholic of somewhat clerical cast with a small stock of automatic questions, which he quickly exhausted. He is an elderly bachelor, and his profession consists of doing secretarial work for several Springfield clubs. He livened up and flashed his eyes one single time--got awfully nervous, having noticed that the flagpole by the Lincoln mausoleum had been replaced by a new, taller one. It turned out that his hobby--or, rather, the passion of his life--is flagpoles. He sighed with relief when a watchman gave him the exact information--seventy feet--because the pole in his own garden is still ten feet taller.

Interesting!

2011-06-24T11:32:00.000-04:00

...Monaco, which is about half the size of Central Park. —NYT

Eighteen minutes

2011-06-22T23:41:00.005-04:00

Dan Visel commented on my recent post about Marguerite Young and her mammoth, many-years-in-the-making novel Miss MacIntosh, My Darling (1965). He sent me a link to her 1977 Paris Review interview, which (he writes) "is full of things like this":

I met Norman Mailer at a cocktail party after Miss MacIntosh was published. I had never seen him before. He came up to me and said, “Were there any fighters in your family?” I answered, “Why yes. My half-brother was a champion in the ring.” “I knew it,” he said, “I knew you had a fighter in the family.” “Well, what made you think that?” I asked. He said, “Because it took a lot of strength hanging out in the sawdust ring like that, punching away for eighteen years the way you did.” Then he wrote to my publisher to say I was a “gentle Hercules in highheels.” My publisher's publicity department gave that letter to a cartoonist at the Herald Tribune who did it up and showed it to me—a cartoon of me punching it out with Mailer with that caption, “a gentle Hercules in highheels.” So Mailer was congratulating me for the stamina of spending so many years on a novel. I suppose it took stamina in a way, but it takes stamina to write anything for eighteen minutes.

Question: Have any of you read this book? Was it great?

The corrections

2011-06-20T17:04:00.000-04:00

The family later moved to Brookline. But Mrs. Bloomberg said the landlord there wanted the apartment, so when Michael was about 4, they made a final move, to Ronaele Road in Medford. (“That’s ‘Eleanor’ spelled backwards,” his mother noted.) —NYT

The entire field of outdoor sports

2011-06-19T21:47:00.003-04:00

"Her dress of sleazy silk was bright burned orange painted with black sail-boats sailing over purple trees and red football players playing over steeples and white skiers skiing over sail-boats cascading to the hem and locked acrobats, the entire field of outdoor sports, it seemed, being on her body, for her scarf was painted with spidery tennis players and tennis nets and ice-skaters skating on silver ponds and red polo riders riding red horses, and there were little footballs hanging from her charm bracelets, tennis rackets and ice-skates and golf clubs and numerous other trophies, some of field and stream, satin fishes running around the hem of her chiffon petticoat edged with yellow lace, butterflies embroidered upon the knees of her thin silk stocking, and her skirts came up high above her knees, higher when she moved, showing her yellow satin garters and pairs of stuffed red valentine hearts dangling from ribbons and faces which were painted powder puffs, and the coat seemed shrunken or a size too small like something she might have worn in a remote youth." — from p. 2 of Marguerite Young's 1198-page Miss MacIntosh, My Darling (1965)

Some gleanings

2011-06-18T23:15:00.003-04:00

Levi on Donald E. Westlake's The Hook—and its sketch for his soon-to-be-published-for-the-first-time posthumous novel, Memory. (It's less complicated than it sounds.)

At The Morning News, Robert Birnbaum talks to Arthur Phillips. Highlight of the conversation:

AP: [...] I read Ed Park’s Personal Days recently. A few years ago two separate novels came out about office politics and both [were] written in the first person plural. One of them was Personal Days. That was a wonderful book.

RB: Is he married to one of those Believer editors?

AP: I don’t know who he is married to.

RB: I look to you for some gleanings of New York book-world intelligence.

AP: What, am I Walter Winchell? The other book I liked, sort of the highlight of the year, was Cards of Identityby Nigel Dennis, which is from 1955. Ed Park recommended it to me because I had this Shakespeare play in my book. And I panicked and went out and read it and it has a new Shakespeare play in it. It is spectacular.

They should just call it "Ed's"

2011-06-16T10:00:00.003-04:00

In Buffalo, a famous family hot-dog business splits—now there's a "Theodore's" to compete with "Ted's." (Full story at the Buffalo News.)

That's part of the reason Theo's Fring, a mixed order of French fries and onion rings, is not called Ted's Fring, and why burgers are called the Big T and the Little T, rather than the big and little Ted.

In non-hot-dog news, tonight I'm on a panel at the Asian American Writers' Workshop—"How to Get Your Book Published: From Writing a Query Letter to Signing a Contract." (It's at 7 p.m., 110-112 W. 27th St., 6th floor.)

Brain salt

2011-06-15T08:12:00.000-04:00

Via MUG

Forty drafts

2011-06-11T02:09:00.002-04:00

He wouldn’t go on to the second paragraph until the first paragraph was perfect, and sometimes he’d do 40 drafts of them. And so on, and each paragraph he polished as he went along to an astonishing degree. He wrote one short story a year, and sent it to Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, got $1.98 for it and was happy. Strange.
—Lawrence Block on Stanley Ellin (to Ethan Iverson, on his blog, Do the Math)

(Via Rob)

Once bitten

2011-06-08T09:51:00.002-04:00

Murphy said that the taunting and chippiness that has marked this series — much an outgrowth of the incident in which Vancouver’s Alexandre Burrows bit the finger of Boston’s Patrice Bergeron in Game 1, followed by episodes in which players on both teams thrust their fingers toward opponents’ mouths, culminating in a rash of misconduct penalties at the end of Game 3 — was garbage. —NYT

Some highlights from a recent NYT article

2011-06-05T10:51:00.000-04:00

Nauru, facing the depletion of its most valuable resource, phosphates formed from bird droppings, severed diplomatic relations with Taiwan in 2002, then restored them three years later, prompting a Chinese official to grumble that the islanders were “only interested in material gains.”

Vanuatu’s government faces a dizzying task, trying to govern a wildly diverse population scattered in 82 volcanic islands over a territory of almost 5,000 square miles. Daniel Scott, a travel writer who recently returned from there, described one ethnic group, the Yaohnanen, who worship Britain’s Prince Philip, believing that he is the incarnation of one of their ancestral spirits, and believe he will one day return to their island and rule the world.

...[I]ts official Web site promotes an active volcano that is small enough for tourists to approach safely, usually.

—NYT

Annals of Copy-Editing

2011-06-04T21:24:00.001-04:00

So what exactly does it mean for American Airlines, having its name on the arenas and stamped on the courts of the two NBA finalists?
The Fort Worth, Texas-based airline carrier no doubt is enjoying a dream matchup with the Dallas Mavericks and Miami Heat slugging it out for NBA supremacy for the second time in five years, even if the building names could get somewhat confusing.
The Mavericks ply their trade at American Airlines Center, and the Heat call AmericanAirlines Arena home. Yes, there's a space between "American" and "Airlines" in North Texas, while the words run together off South Beach.

(Via Jane; I'm not sure where it's from.)

Song of myself

2011-06-03T10:47:00.005-04:00

The exciting newish academic confraternity known as Post45 met this spring in Cleveland (I was slated to go and speak, but couldn't)—and now they have a forum on their website called "Contemporaries." Boston College's Min-Hyoung Song's piece, "Race and Racelessness in Ed Park's 'Personal Days,'" is uncannily good. (I'm biased, I know, but...)

His main focus is on the racial (and post-racial, and proto-racial) aspect of the novel, which most reviews ignored, and he articulates more or less what was on my mind in this respect (some very conscious maneuvers). The conclusions he draws are surprising and exciting (and in some cases aren't ones I necessarily had in mind, but which I totally buy). And especially thrilling is his defense of PD as a book—as a story told using the superficially simple technologies of the novel to deliver stuff that another medium couldn't. Very cool. (As I said on FB, it makes me want to write another novel!)

I'm excited for his book-in-progress, of which this will be (I think) a chapter.

I'm thinking of a quote from Sherlock Holmes: "What one man can invent, another can discover."

Min Song wrote the citation for Personal Days when it was a finalist for the Asian American Literary Award—which reminds me that I'll be taking part in a panel at the Asian American Writers Workshop on June 16. The topic: "How to Get Your Book Published." I'll be joining novelists Ed Lin, Wendy Lee, and Monique Truong, editor Zohra Saed, and agents Kirby Kim and Jin Auh. More details here.

Anthology fever

2011-06-03T08:35:00.004-04:00

I gave a reading last night with Rachel Sherman and Saïd Sayrafiezadeh at the Lillian Vernon Writers' House (it was fun), for the students at the NYU summer session. There I also got to pick up a copy of They're At It Again: An Open City Reader, edited by Thomas Beller and Joanna Yas.

It's huge—I didn't realize it was nearly 800 pages. Who's in it? A quick glance yields Paul Bowles, Jonathan Ames, Geoff Dyer, Bryan Charles, the aforementioned R.S. and S.S., Davids Means and Shields, Sam Lipsyte, Martha McPhee, Mary Gaitskill, Rivka Galchen, Walter Kirn, James Lasdun, Victor Pelevin, Hal Sirowitz, Edmund White, Leni Zumas, Richard Yates (!), Charles Bukowski, Will Eno, Sylvia Foley, Hubert Selby Jr., Jessica Shattuck...the list really does go on...It's satisfyingly heavy, and I'm excited that my story "Bring on the Dancing Horses" (from Open City #30) is included...

A slimmer book, but with nearly as many contributors, is No Near Exit, an anthology of writing from Post Road magazine, each one selected by a different writer, making for a vertiginous reading experience. Plus, some of the pieces are interviews with writers, and others are writers recommending books by other writers...