2009

"Amazon Erases Orwell Books From Kindle"

Avoid homonyms

Rachel Aviv in this month's Harper's (subscription required):

Last summer, forty Christian missionaries, members of the Child Evangelism Fellowship, roamed the housing projects of Connecticut telling children the condensed and colorful story of Jesus’ life. The goal was salvation, but the missionaries rarely used that long word. They employed monosyllabic language and avoided abstract concepts and homonyms. “Holy” was a problem, the missionaries said, as children thought it meant “full of holes.” “Christ rose from the dead” was also tricky because children mistook the verb for a flower.

(Rachel has just been named a recipient of a Carter Center fellowship for mental health journalism.)

Kettlehead

My latest Astral Weeks is up at the L.A. Times site—a review of Paul Pope's 100%.

"So, who was John Garlic?"

“He was this big guy,” she said, “like 6 foot 2 inches tall, dark curly hair, couple hundred pounds. A former Marine. A super intelligent, super entertaining man. My brother used to say, ‘When John Garlic enters a room, you know you’re going to have fun.’ ”

And he was Greek?

“No, no,” she said. “He was Jewish.”

As we digest the fact that the Father of the American Gyro was Jewish, we ask the obvious next question: Where did he get the idea?

“From me,” Ms. Garlic said. “One afternoon, I was watching ‘What’s My Line?’ and there was a Greek restaurant owner on the show, and he did this demonstration, carving meat off a gyro. I immediately called an operator and asked for the number of a Greek restaurant in New York. The owner I got on the phone said, ‘Go to Chicago, there’s a huge Greek community.’ ” At the time, Mr. Garlic was a Cadillac salesman, in his late 30s, but he quickly saw his future in gyro cones. After finding a Chicago chef willing to share a recipe, the couple rented space in a sausage plant and cranked out history’s first assembly-line gyro cones. They were a hit.

—NYT

"Words make my mouth exercise"

The seventh word

TREADING THE SOIL OF THE MOON PALPATING ITS PEBBLES TASTING THE PANIC AND SPLENDOR OF THE EVENT FEELING IN THE PIT OF ONES STOMACH THE SEPARATION FROM TERRA THESE FORM THE MOST ROMANTIC SENSATION AN EXPLORER HAS EVER KNOWN

—Answer cabled (7/3/69) by Nabokov for publication in the NYT; published "with a disastrous misprint in the seventh word" (published in Strong Opinions)

Destroyer

At Bookforum, fellow Dullblogger Devin McKinney reviews the curiously titled How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll:

The history of pop music is varied enough to generate many conflicting narratives, each with its own supporting data—chart placements, contextual quotes, etc. As Wald writes, “There are no definitive histories because the past keeps looking different as the present changes.” More important than Wald’s data, which are solidly documented, is his failure to charge this chronicle with attitude, drama, and vivid language. Such things matter in a book like this: Revisionist history, if it means to topple shrines and blast platitudes, shouldn’t sound as potted and prosaic as that which it would subvert. Alternative history needs an alternative vision, a third eye to spot miracles on the peripheries. Wald has that eye. What he lacks, or represses, is a style alive with the momentum of change, the juice of rhetoric, or the melancholy of loss. So what if the Beatles destroyed rock ’n’ roll? Wald never gets angry about it. He never even seems sad. I want an alternative.

Designing dogs

Legend has it that Mr. Wheeler’s dog unwittingly did some of the designing. The shape of the Chimaera was said to be based on the results when Mr. Wheeler’s dog bit off part of the front of a foam model. —NYT

Invisible Library goes invisible...

The London exhibit has closed...fortunately, Jenny D was there and has some more details for us. She was especially captivated by the novels of Dorothy Sayers' creation, Harriet Vane:

Dons the rubber suit

Paul Collins in Slate:

Creaky as his apparatus now looks, [Wycliffe] Hill was onto something: Other plot wizards followed, including Plotto, the insanely complex 1928 creation of pulp novelist William Wallace Cook. (His pseudonymous memoir isn't titled The Fiction Factory for nothing: Cook once bashed out 54 "nickel novels" in a single year.) Rare and comically user-unfriendly, Plotto required its own accompanying instruction booklet—which, invariably lost or disintegrated in the intervening eight decades, leaves modern discoverers of the unaccompanied volume bewildered. Plotto resembles a thesaurus filled with cryptic codings and narrative fragments:

1367

(b) (1083) (1287)

A has invented a life preserver for the use of shipwrecked persons * A, in order to prove the value of the life preserver he has invented, dons the rubber suit, inflates it and secretly, by night, drops overboard from a steamer on the high seas ** (1414b) (1419b)

…

1373

(1027) (1418a; 1433b)

A sells his shadow for an inexhaustible purse (1354a) (1357)

Invisible Library ends soon!

As in, July 12!

¡Mañana!

At the Ink Illustration site, I was happy to see details of many of the covers, only a few of which I've glimpsed (and even then only in miniature) on the Ink blog.

I was especially thrilled to see this:



Yes, it's the cover for Hans de Krap's Mexican Fruitcake! Only die-hard Parkians (i.e., ME) know that it's the novel that's being Englished in my short story "A Note to My Translator," which appeared in the anthology Virgin Fiction. I like the illo's dia de los muertos (sp?) vibe; what it has to do with fruitcake remains a delicious, semi-edible mystery...

"A daisy, a fairy, a nonce, a pansy, a swish"

The Limster on Brüno (in Slate).

Tender pixels

Here's Kiwa's full report on the Invisible Library at Tenderpixel Gallery in bookish Cecil Court. (Londoners, exhibit closes on July 12—step to it!) Excerpt:

One Chinese visitor had scrawled a page-full in the book Who is This God Person, Anyway? by Oolon Colluphid, a book alluded to in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, itself a book named after a book that doesn’t really exist....

"Thriller"—Philippines detention center version

(Begin at 4:15.)

Holy mole

I had never subscribed to any religion, but it turned out this god was inhabiting a mole on my left shoulder that I'd always been worried about but hadn't quite gotten around to removing.
—"My Initiation," Lincoln Michel (in L Magazine)

Where I'm calling from

Photo by Monica Teng

The Dare

Globe-trotting Kiwa checked out the Biennale...then snapped some photos of the Invisible Library in its London incarnation!

Visible are works by J.G. Quiggin (Unburnt Boats), Gordon Zellaby (While We Last), Sebastian Knight (Lost Property), and Evan Elliott (The Last Lost Chance), Nicolas (sic) Jenkins (Silent Summer), and others.