Weekend screening: "Fat Man on a Beach"

(Via Me and My Big Mouth, which has a report on a recent screening of novelist B.S. Johnson's film and TV work, hosted by Jonathan Coe.)

(For more on BSJ, here's my review of Coe's biography.)

Machado about *something*!

The NYT has a piece on the centenary of the death of the great Brazilian writer Machado de Assis (Dom Casmurro, Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubás).

Here's an excerpt from Dom Casmurro...here's a review of DC and PMOBC (a/k/a Epitaph of a Small Winner) from 1998...And here's the 1953 NYT review of DC!

UPDATE: L.G. Thomas provides the following backup: A piece on MdA in Context, written by Zulkifar Ghose:

He is like one of those monuments in a city square that people drive past presuming he must be someone important but do not stop to read what it is he has accomplished; some, catching the name, might have an obscure recollection which they associate with another culture’s history, but otherwise his only devotees appear to be a small flock of students whose work is not unlike that of pigeons upon a statue—alighting upon him with a belly full of the latest theoretical jargon which might accidentally have highlighted a curious feature of his anatomy were it not indiscriminately deposited on the whole body.

That name of Ghose will ring a bell for B.S. Johnson fans—he was Johnson's great friend.

An interview and a game

I. The mighty Ed Champion interviewed me last week for his Bat Segundo Show—and it's online now! We met at the Metro Diner on 100th Street, where I ate half a stack of blueberry pancakes. Ed had a bagel.

Topics discussed: Personal Days, my unpublished novels (The Diet of Worms and Dementia Americana!), B.S. Johnson, Harry Stephen Keeler, Mark Moskowitz, The PTSNBN, and much more!

II. The mighty Scott David Herman has devised a game using the cover of Personal Days!

Dizzies Newsfeeds™ for Tuesday, August 21

1. "It’s not too much of a stretch to say that I live in Portland because Powell’s Books is here." (James Tata at Maud Newton)

2. Libraries at the beach. (Via Dizzyhead Thomas)

3. Meaty profile on Jonathan Coe, who has a new novel coming out: In terms of wider literary inspirations...The Rain Before It Falls owes a considerable amount to two rather surprising writers. One is BS Johnson, a modernist novelist of the 1960s and 1970s, who was the subject of Coe’s biography Like a Fiery Elephant, and whose tortured credo that “telling stories is telling lies” haunted Coe during the writing of the new book (he admits, in fact, that his novels have been getting darker ever since the Johnson biography). The other, happier influence is Rosamond Lehmann, whom Coe first read in his mid-twenties, and whom he considers one of the 20th century’s key writers. —Times Online
(Via Dizzyhead Gautam)

4. Jenny D on writing:

I draft the whole thing (we’re talking about novels here) from start to finish, writing in longhand in little notebooks. Then I type up the draft, including a first edit. Then I edit the hard copy, type in revisions, repeat ad nauseam. This latest novel probably underwent at least 10 revision cycles, each one of which potentially involved two or three or four close copy-edits. At some point (usually more than once), I read the whole thing out loud to myself, to make sure the sentences sound right and that I can stand by them.