"The Good Fight"

The new Believer is out—it is just WOW—you need to have it. Adam Thirlwell (whom I've dubbed "too good to blog about")...Jason Boog on GI Joe and war...Greil Marcus on Joy Division and more...short reviews...Bishop/Lowell letters.........interviews with Will Eno, Bruce Jay Friedman (by Amy Sohn), Nico Muhly, Diane Williams....a Joshua Clover poem!?—and this piece by Dzyd James, about a failed run for a state house seat........:

I was a Democrat who disdained most other Democrats—suicide in a Democratic primary—and finally hired my old assistant, a fearless twenty-six-year-old who shared my “I love it because I hate it” philosophy of politics. Aryah’s job for the first few days was to stand behind me while I talked to voters at their doors, then ridicule my performance. I was nervous, talked too fast, apologized when I asked for someone’s email address, and generally squirmed like a kid whose ball had gone through each voter’s window. Aryah’s attitude was that we were trying to help people by interrupting their dinner and telling them about the great James Browning. He told old people that I was going to make universal health care a reality, people with toys in their yards that I was going to get more money for the public schools, people with Chesapeake Bay license plates that I would do something about Maryland’s terrible air quality. Listening to Aryah talk, I started to like the sound of this Browning guy and lost some of my shame.

Thursday Grab-baggery

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

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

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

One Ouroboros and maybe two more

I. From Dizzyhead Dan—a classic!:



—Tintin in the Congo

I.5 Joke: If you don't turn down the volume on that audiobook version of the new Hergé biography, you might get TINTIN-nus.

II. Is the movie Once a sort of Ouroboros? After the recording session, the producer takes the band for a ride so that they can listen to the CD in the car...a CD that would (in the world of the movie) be more or less identical with the Once soundtrack (in the world of the world).

II.5 Joke: When Glenn Hansard's group covers "Oblivious," they are known as the RODDY FRAMES.

III. I finally found my copy of Adam Thirlwell's delightful book-length study of literary style The Delightful States, which I had begun around the time of the BIRTH OF DUNCAN and then misplaced......it was under a stack of books by the couch, OF COURSE THAT'S WHERE IT WAS, anyway it was nice to stumble upon it, and I finished the chapter I was in the middle of.

Ummmm————oh yes, Ouroboros. So all of a sudden, on p. 302, he writes: "Just as when reading Cervantes, Flaubert, or many other novelists in The Delighted States..." Referring to your own book by its title before it is over! Love it! Dizzyhead challenge: Other books where this happens?

Table-talk of Parkus Grammaticus for January 28

I. Heath Ledger: "I was obsessed with an artist by the name of Nick Drake." —Pitchfork

II. Vocabulary from the NYT Suharto obit:

songkok, the flat traditional Indonesian cap.

dukuns, spiritual advisers and soothsayers who were believed to be in touch with natural forces

III. I don't know why this obit is so fascinating...

He was so poor that he once had to change schools because he could not afford the shorts and shoes that were the required uniform. His education ended with junior high school. He found a job in the bank in his village, but resigned after he tore his only set of work clothes in a bicycle accident.

IV. A nice line:

Many Indonesians benefited from his programs, but none more so than members of his family, who became billionaires many times over.

V.

[H]is wife, Siti Hartinah Suharto, known as Madame Tien, handled the family’s business affairs. She became the object of quiet criticism, with her detractors calling her “Madame Tien Percent,” a reference to what were said to be commissions she received on business deals.

VI. Lost positives:

TO the small group of photography experts aware of its existence, it was known simply as “the Mexican suitcase.” And in the pantheon of lost modern cultural treasures, it was surrounded by the same mythical aura as Hemingway’s early manuscripts, which vanished from a train station in 1922. —Randy Kennedy, "The Capa Cache," NYT

Dizzyhead project: Other famous (or interesting) lost manuscripts?

In (I believe?) the introduction to Lake Wobegon Days, Garrison Keillor writes about early stories, lost on a train...

There's a lost Flaubert translation (on which F. worked closely) mentioned in Adam Thirlwell's The Delighted States...