King Kullin'

"You are young," said the palaces and the temples and the shrines, "but we are old. The world was wild with youth when we were reared. You and your tribe shall pass, but we are invincible, indestructible. We towered above a strange world, ere Atlantis and Lemuria rose from the sea; we still shall reign when the green waters sigh for many a restless fathom above the spires of Lemuria and the green hills of Atlantis and when the isles of the Western Men are the mountains of a strange land.

"How many kings have we watched ride down these streets before Kull of Atlantis was even a dream in the mind of Ka, the bird of Creation? Ride on, Kull of Atlantis; greater shall follow you; greater came before you. They are dust; they are forgotten; we stand; we know; we are. Ride, ride on, Kull of Atlantis; Kull the king, Kull the fool!"

—Robert E. Howard, "The Shadow Kingdom" (1929)

(Via Grognardia)

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Speaking of Atlantis, I'll be reading next Wednesday (!) at 12:30 as part of the "Word for Word" series at the Bryant Park Reading Room. It's outside, free! It's Underwater New York day; the other readers are Deb Olin Unferth, Nelly Reifler, Said Sayrafiezadeh, and—new addition—Jennifer Egan! Plus Ben Greenman with a letter-writing activity and music from Michael Hearst.

Too many writers are dying

1. John Leonard archives at New York magazine and at The New York Review of Books and at Harper's.

2. My thoughts on an evening last year in which he helped Richard Powers perform a piece called "The Moving Finger," and then interviewed him onstage at the Morgan Library.

3. On Maureen Howard (Big as Life) in the NYTBR: "From sex and money as family secrets, to marriage and children as botched experiments, to art and history as magnetic compass points, to writing and teaching as the calisthenics of moral intelligence."

4. The eternal blurb (JL on One Hundred Years of Solitude): "You emerge from this marvelous novel as if from a dream, the mind on fire. . . With a single bound, Gabriel Garcia Marquez leaps onto the stage with Gunter Grass and Vladimir Nabokov. Dazzling." (A blurb that's been as influential as any book to me—"the mind on fire"!)

5. I always loved this 1997 piece, from The Nation, which contains the line: "I review Atlantis books once a decade, whether they need it or not." (Shortly after reading this piece, I began not ignoring Atlantis books that entered my field of vision...now I have many and I have finished none.)

6. This doesn't mean anything: When he talked about The Believer on Sunday Morning, years ago, they did a close-up on a page from inside....it was my Portis piece. This doesn't mean anything but of course in my mind I pretended it did.

UPDATE: Renata Adler's Speedboat is another touchstone for me...or was I perhaps once again thinking of a JL blurb? Here's his review, plus the rest of his Harper's archive.

Table-talk of Parkus Grammaticus for February 19

I. Parkian rarities: I've unearthed some blurbs from yesteryear, and am wincing/chuckling at some probably unconscious (but maybe not?) repetitions.

Tortilla Soup
This Chicano cover version of Eat Drink Man Woman is a must-see for Hector Elizondo completists and scopophilic foodies. Others will find it a revival so indifferent as to be perverse, with enough crypto-incestuous wish fulfillment to make a Freudian blush. (Park)

Atlantis
Disney's archaeological-quest caper begins gamely enough, but by the time the dependably multicultural crew reaches the sunken city, narrative drive has taken a back seat to the sort of spiritual gibberish that would make a Theosophist blush. At least it isn't a musical. (Park)

II. And here's a construction that mirrors that in the Tortilla Soup blurb—viz., specifying a very small part of the population as a potential audience:

Happy Accidents
Session 9 director Brad Anderson lays a low-key time-travel romance in a Manhattan of singleton simpering and significant street signs—the perfect date movie for unreconstructed Whovians and the Ouspensky-reading Marisa Tomei fans who love them. (Park)

III.

Finally, this one's for Powellians—really just an excuse to use that quote:

The Dog Show
William Wegman, the weimaraner's Boswell, opens an exhibit that sniffs out the ways in which dogs and literature go hand in paw. Watch for networking scribblers and shutterbugs on the make: As the late cat-fancying novelist Anthony Powell remarked, ``People who prefer dogs are essentially interested in power.'' Reservations required. Wednesday at 6:30, Bobst Library, Fales Collection (3rd Floor), 70 Washington Square South, 998-2596 (Park)

IV. Bookcase spotters: John Freeman has responded!