A new Keeler mystery

My review of P.G. Wodehouse: A Life in Letters is now up on the Bookforum site. Thank you to my editor, Michael Miller, for forcing me to write it!

One thing that got left on the cutting-room floor: For the birth of my second child, the only reading matter I brought to the hospital was...an issue of Bookforum! It was the one with Samuel Beckett wearing shorts on the cover.

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I did a double-take when I saw (via Facebook) that I was in yet another issue of the Asian American Literary Review. Just yesterday I remembered that I had published a piece in the AALR called "Chinese Whispers: On Writing/Not Writing Asian American Literature." So what was this other article by me? It's "vintage Park"—my review of Harry Stephen Keeler's strange, wildly entertaining, ethnic-studies-ready Y. Cheung, Business Detective (1939). In the piece, I reflect on an odd resemblance it bears to a story by Nabokov. I'm happy to see it reprinted. (It originally appeared in 2000—remember 2000?—in issue 30 of the Keeler News.)

(This has got to be one of the worst Keeler jackets. But it's a terribly interesting book.)

Prominent cheekbones?

My Bookforum piece on Jonathan Coe and his latest novel is now online. Here's the beginning:

Painting a word-picture of a woman at a restaurant, the titular narrator of British author Jonathan Coe's new novel, The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim, writes, "She had long black hair, slightly wild and unkempt. A thin face, with prominent cheekbones." Prominent cheekbones? Just as the cliché meter is warming up, Max adds a parenthetical: "(Sorry, I am just not very good at describing people.)" This self-deprecation is enough to win us over, and it lets Max off the hook to unleash a few more lines of workmanlike, tentative details . . . prompting another aside: "(I am not very good at describing clothes either—are you looking forward to the next three hundred pages?)"

Sim city

The new Bookforum is partially online. My review of The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim is only in the paper issue as of now. I like the coverline: "Why Jonathan Coe Deserves an American Audience."

(I've read most of/finished some good pieces already—Ruth Franklin on Joyce Carol Oates, Erik Davis on Robert Duncan's The H.D. Book, Rivka Galchen on Lydia Davis/Madame Bovary...there's something by Paul La Farge...)













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Coe notes:



Thank you to Gautam, who sent me a copy of The Rain Before It Falls several years ago—I talk about it a bit in the piece.






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My essay in the Times about the longest sentence was the original impetus behind rereading Coe's The Rotters' Club. What a book!

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I reviewed Coe's biography of B.S. Johnson, Like a Fiery Elephant, when it came out in 2005, but did not dwell much on the ending. I do so in this Bookforum piece, as it is clearly a source for a chunk of the new novel.

Who was Norton Westermont?

For Bookforum, I've written my meditations on the copy editor's art and the hidden narratives of the evolving Chicago Manual of Style. (Thank you to editor Michael Miller—my former copy-desk colleague [!]—and the U. Chicago Press.)

At 933 pages, the fourteenth was comparable in size to the heralded omnium-gatherums of its era (1996's Infinite Jest, 1997's Mason & Dixon and Underworld). For sheer head-scratching postmodern tricksterism, though, Messrs. Wallace, Pynchon, and DeLillo had nothing on the collaborative deadpan master jam that was the fourteenth. Infinite Jest's reams of endnotes were distinctive but hardly as radical as Chicago's editorial comments for a text that was essentially invisible. "Millicent Cliff was Norton Westermont's first cousin, although to the very last she denied it," 15.47 tells us—but who was Norton Westermont? In this sense, much of Chicago reads like Pale Fire without the poem. On the very next page, 15.51's directions on how to style acknowledgments delivers both a name right out of Pynchonland and a DeLillo-esque consortium: "The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance of Dr. Oscar J. Blunk of the National Cyanide Laboratory in the preparation of this chapter."

This is the first of three articles that have kept me happily occupied this fall...

Beckett goes to the beach

I. Best Bookforum cover ever:


II.
In Print, Jonathan Taylor writes on food logos of yore. I like this phrase: "eclectic stylistic energies."

(Via Jenny D.)

One night only!

Tonight at Housing Works: Park—Kunzru—Gaitskill! Part of Bookforum Reads.

Update! Time Out says:

When we saw Ed Park read last Saturday, he cracked us up, sharing a new, technology-infused story narrated by a man disgruntled with his girlfriend (a reviewer of übergeeky sci-fi and a grad student who studies “robot literature”) and his parents (who are selling all of his stuff on eBay). We’re not sure he’ll read the same thing tonight at an event organized by Bookforum, but it’s a safe bet that he’ll present something imaginative, idiosyncratic and deeply funny. Adding gravitas to the evening will be Mary Gaitskill—whose brave, chaotic and beautiful Don’t Cry was a 2009 TONY favorite—and Hari Kunzru, author of My Revolutions.

Triangulation

Here I am at "Impossible Geometries"!

That triangle is mesmerizing...

(Thanks to Light Industry and Triple Canopy...and to everyone for coming out!)

(Via Chapman/Chapman)

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My next reading is—Wednesday! At Housing Works, 7 p.m., with Mary Gaitskill and Hari Kunzru.

Check out this banner ad....Hmm, it looked bigger on the Bookforum site. If you click on it, though, you'll get a version that's about the right size for a bookmark. Print out, laminate—enjoy!

(Reminds me of Luc Sante's intro to the latest batch of Richard Stark novels—has a great line about never having to invest in a bookmark!)

(Click here for more info about the reading.)

Second/final tour date added!

A mere four days after the "Impossible Geometries" reading...I'll be at Housing Works with...



!!!

(More here.)

(I am pretty sure this will be the last time I'll be reading this winter/spring.)

Silence, cunning, exilée

From the new Bookforum, a review of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Exilée and Temps Morts:

The intergenre artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha made her reputation with the experimental novel Dictée, published in 1982, a few days after she was murdered by a stranger in New York. A speculative history of Korea as it intersects with the life of Cha's mother, Dictée intercuts oneiric prose with family photographs and political documents. English, French, and Korean shape the book's voices.

Cha's small but multilayered archive also includes films, objects, and performances, and in 2001, Berkeley Art Museum curator Constance M. Lewallen organized a retrospective of Cha's art called "The Dream of the Audience," which traveled in the United States, Korea, and Europe. Exilée and Temps Morts: Selected Works, edited by Lewallen with an essay by novelist Ed Park, is a companion to the exhibition's catalogue. As Park explains, the texts "Exilée" and "Temps Morts" originally appeared in a 1980 anthology called Hotel, which included contributions from Laurie Anderson and Jenny Holzer. But copies were boxed before the ink was dry, the pages stuck together, and few people have ever seen the book.

Waterworld

1. My review of Stanley Crawford's Log of the S.S. The Mrs. Unguentine is in the new Bookforum.

2. And here's an article I've been looking forward to: Dzyd Ben's take on the poets who populate the novels of...[take a guess].....[go on]......[you're RIGHT]:

Roberto Bolaño!

3. I always enjoy the Fantasy & Science Fiction "Curiosities" column:

NOW THAT the prospect of an American woman President in 2009 is impossible, it is worth considering that 120 years ago a utopian novel has that feat occur in 2000. Instead of Bush vs. Gore, a woman of thirty-five, Mrs. Washington-Lawrence, with a teenage daughter but no spouse, occupies the White House....

4. Thanks to those who came out to the Believer event last night—I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did!

Table-talk of Parkus Grammaticus for January 24

I. While Ron Rosenbaum drums up drama over at Slate regarding the fate of The Original of Laura, we Table-Talkers were reminded of another, more crucial Nabokovian debate: Did VN ever read Harry Stephen Keeler?

Sounds like a bad joke, eh? We-ell...

Finally available at The Unarchivable is my (our?) unprecedented work of Naboko-Keelerian scholarship, "The Oblique Case," originally published in Keeler News way back in 2000. (A brief variation on the same topic appeared from our pen in 2004 in the PTSNBN.) Here is a taste:

The tale of detection embraces contests of mind; the more devilish the design, roughly, the more successful the mystery. Perhaps the same impulse in the human imagination seeks out both puzzles and stories. Strange, then, that the “serious” reader should balk at fiction that seems cross-bred. A story that engages our sense of play is reduced to a toy—or worse, a machine, coldly contrived to spit out a result. The artifice is too apparent, and the writer is deemed an egghead (or a fool). Can such works be anything more than glorified parlor games?

This note concerns a single such parlor game, as played by two writers rarely mentioned in the same breath: Harry Stephen Keeler and Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov. They were rough contemporaries, with the latter’s years transposed about a decade forward. Their legacies could not be more dissimilar: recent Nabokovian garlands include a biography of his wife and a second celluloid version of Lolita, while Keeler’s work remains obscure.

Stylistically they are at opposite ends of the spectrum, if not the universe. Even Nabokov’s interview responses read like prose poems, whereas no Keeler creation would be complete without stunningly awkward descriptions and breathless dialogue that barely has time to reflect upon itself. (It is possible we cherish one writer for his scruples, the other for his shamelessness.)

Y. Cheung, Business Detective (1939) and “The Vane Sisters” (written 1951; first published 1959) appear to be as different as their creators. The former is a novel about a Chinese American sleuth who takes on, as it were, two cases—one professional, the other cryptogrammatic. In Nabokov’s dozen pages, a professor of French learns of an acquaintance’s death, and reflects upon her theories of undead communication.

We are startled, then, to find at the heart of each story a “death message”—and to discover that both unlock to the same key.

II. Actually, it was as much RR's Laura piece as this delightful story (via the PF) about a Thai poet who acrostitched a political message into a Valentine's Day poem (and got thrown into the slammer for his efforts). The message was "Power Crazy Than Shwe," which perplexed me all of yesterday, until I realized "Than" was the first name of General Shwe, the victim of this encrypted attack!

Bonus: A decidedly odd picture of the culprit, in which he's shown holding...a computer monitor...with his head circled in white...




III. New Bookforum is out...Levi directs me to the fact that Kingsley Amis wrote three books on drinking:

How’s Your Glass? is neither worth reprinting nor buying secondhand unless for the purpose of completing a Kingsley Amis collection. It consists of difficult and dated quiz questions unlikely to be of use even to men on the lavatory: “Can you define the following: a. Tokay Aszru, b. Tokay Escencia, c. Tokay Szamorodni?”

(Hmm, there's that "completist" construction, about which Parkus Grammaticus has advised: Avoid!)

IV. In Melanie Rehak's review of Jennifer 8. Lee's book on Chinese food (it was weird just now typing that "8."), she apostrophizes:

I had to read up only to page 31 before stumbling across the name of my beloved noodle palace in her chapter on the birth of Chinese-food delivery in New York in 1976, “The Menu Wars.” Oh, Hunan Balcony, what sweet memories of you I cherish. This was where I learned to eat with chopsticks and where my sister and I poured obscene amounts of sugar into our tea....

Taking a little stroll with a visiting Levi a couple weeks ago, we passed Hunan Balcony; he did a double take. "I thought it said Human Balcony."

—Ed 8. Park

Slap shot

At Bookforum, Gerald Howard looks at Amazons—one of "DeLillo" 's best? (We thought so!)

"Reviews were appreciative of the book’s off-center humor (one inevitably called it “puckish”), and then a sharp critic for the Worcester, Massachusetts, newspaper decided that, simply on the basis of style, Amazons had to be by Don DeLillo."

Dizzyforum

New Bookforum is out—with a strong showing by known Dizzyheads! And my mentor Maureen Howard (Dizzyhead status: unknown!) reviews Ha Jin.

The Believer Music Issue...is out!

Hats off to Dizzyhead Brandon for putting the excellent CD together—it includes toe-tappers from Yacht, Oxford Collapse, Page France, Deerhunter, I'm From Barcelona, Clogs, and more...you can sample the startling Sufjan track here.

Among the readable treats in the issue: Joe Hagan's quest to Cleveland in search of Bill Fox, a superreclusive power-popster-turned-plangent-folkie (who also appears on the CD with a lovely song called "My Baby Crying")—this is truly a must read; an interview with the guy from Of Montreal (also on the CD) and the artist formerly known as Terence Trent D'Arby; Miranda July interviewing Khaela Maricich from The Blow (yes...also on the CD!); a bonbon in the shape of Dave Tompkins's ruminations on the vocoder; Mr. Paul Collins on "rock's rarest instrument," the Birotron; and more. Worth $10?! I'd say YES.

Buy it here!

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Also: the new Bookforum is out...pieces include Luc Sante on Simenon, a glimpse at Kurt Andersen's bookshelves, Michael Wood on DeLillo, my intern of yore Janine on Wayne Koestenbaum, my other intern of yore Carla on Anne Fadiman, Ben Strong on Richard Lange...You can also read my review of Matthew Sharpe's Jamestown.

Killer Rapp

My review of Adam Rapp's The Year of Endless Sorrows is out in the new Bookforum—my first piece for them. (Alas—it's unavailable online!)