Manratten murder mystery

Startling Dutch detective fiction covers at A Journey Round My Skull.

Disambiguations™ for April 1, 2010

I. The mysterious-yet-friendly Twenty % Tippers, whose travails have appeared in Ye New-York Ghost, get some love from Pop Dose.

Eventually, I talked to Ken Sorkin, the band’s founder, impresario, and short-story writer. The Tippers were not some odd hoax put together by McSweeney’s interns, but rather a band that had played in bars in New York in the early 1990s. “I put the band together because I wanted to get these songs realized,” he says. “But I knew that no one would want to see a band that they’d never heard of, so we wanted to create a mailing list as soon as possible.” In those pre-Internet days, that meant putting up fliers around Manhattan and setting up a telephone hot line (646-335-3390). Those who signed up received notices about upcoming dates and one of Sorkin’s short stories telling of the fictional alternative life of the band and its members.

Visit the Tippers website for more...

II. I need one of these? So do you? The Inspiratron!



(At A Journey Round My Skull)

Weekend wowsers

Will at Journey Round My Skull has posted some eye-widening Dutch dustjackets (say that five times fast). This one's for E. Phillips Oppenheim's The Mayor on Horseback.

Any EPO readers out there?

The sting

A Journey Round My Skull has posted book-jacket art by Milton Glaser. It's a treat to see MG's design for Robert Kelly's novel The Scorpions, one of my favorite weird novels. (I've never seen this cover before.)

Reversibles

Two backward tales:

1. F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," now a David Fincher movie (starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett):

Benjamin, as he says in his voice-over narration, “was born under unusual circumstances” on Nov. 11, 1918, the last day of World War I. As the doctor attending him describes the strange little creature, “He has all the deterioration, the infirmities, not of a newborn, but of a man well in his 80s on the way to his grave.” —NYT

(The FSF original begins around the time of the Civil War.)

2. Frigyes Karinthy's "The Moral," from Soliloquies in the Bath:

Ten years later my hair began to turn black and my teeth gradually returned to my mouth. I was deprived of my pension and had to sit at the office doing my work from the end right to the beginning. My employers were very kind to me, but after twenty-five years they ceased to know me and engaged me on trial at fifteen pounds a month. So there I stood, back to front of course, without money and without a job, but with a wife who grew prettier and loved me more every day.

(Via A Journey Round My Skull)

Ouroboros yoga

Last week, Dzyd Will—curator of A Journey Round My Skull—wrote:

My own ouroboros-sighting fascination comes from a friend's drawing on my dry-erase board. It was kind of a yoga stick-figure ouroboros. She did this at least 6 years ago, but I still think about it.

He managed to locate and photograph the original "creepy stick-figure-man-ouroboros" in question:


The original creator noted, "It is, I have to say, slightly more painful than I remember it being." It now exists on her blog as well.

Alter-boros

My God, My God, why have you forsaken me...

Alone amidst the wolves. And I am the cascade of dreams where the wolves drink their fill.

Alone amidst the four cardinal points furiously battered by the hurricane of the planets.

They have abandoned me here in the middle of a river which tilts on its axis, which runs in circles, bending back upon itself like a warped wheel or a snake which bites its own bewitched tail.

—Vicente Huidobro, "The Seven Oaths of the Poet" (transl. Gilbert Alter-Gilbert)

(Via A Journey Round My Skull)