Disambiguations™ for November 17, 2009

I. Erasing on the German edition of Infinite Jest:

The minimalist cover design has a somewhat sepulchral quality, drained of color, black type on otherwise blank matte white boards, black endpapers, the back cover a mirror image of the front. With a thoughtful touch: Sewn into the binding are two bookmark ribbons. (One for the main text, one for the 134 pages of endnotes.)

There should be a Pale Fire made this way, too...

II. And now on to an even greater work of art: Cavemen! Sweeney directs us to the blog of Nick Kroll, one of the show's stars. Plenty of links, including ones to unaired episodes! (Time to special-order Michael Marcinkowski's Blvr. piece on the ill-fated series?)

III. Pet Shop Boys cover Coldplay!
(From Dennis)

IV. Department of Possibly Intentional Typos™

4. Given the large volume of material produced for LD, it'd be great to see it all reproduced in a single volume from high-quality scans. I understand that Tadashi Ehara is doing this with Different Worlds. Is this something you'd ever like to see happen?

LD was a fanzine which was not profread or spell checked. If it were retyped and those things done that would be awesome. I would not want it produced "as is". My grammar, spelling and proofreading skills bite! I don't want to reveal that to world.

—Grognardia

Catching up

I. Two of my favorite things—entwined!

I noticed that she wore no wedding ring, carrying in its place on her third finger a large opal, enclosed by a massive gold serpent swallowing its own tail.
—Anthony Powell, The Acceptance World

II. “Philip Guston, the Abstract Expressionist who late in life became a painter of dark, comic images, was a great as-if artist. He wanted, he said, ‘to paint things as if one had never seen them before, as if one had come from another planet.’ He aspired ‘to paint as a cave man would.’ ¶ Of course Guston (1913-1980) was no troglodyte, with all due respect to the Geico cave men....” —Ken Johnson, “The Sophisticated Troglodyte,” NYT (Via Mike)

Morgan Library & Museum

An untitled 1975 drawing by Philip Guston, at the Morgan.

Allegory of the Cave

So Cavemen has become short-hand for "flop," for the foreseeable future (will it become to television what Moose Murders is to Broadway?). But there will come a time—perhaps around 2040 AD—when it will be seen for the minor masterpiece it is...

(Over at Harriet, I share some Gossip Girl gleanings.)

Joining the club

Wasn't going to blog today, but just saw Dave Itzkoff's piece on Cavemen in yesterday's NYT:

"Every year, it seems, one new series is offered up as a sacrificial lamb to the critical gods....In 2007 that show has undeniably been 'Cavemen.'...[T]he 'Cavemen' creators look back and think they were sunk from the start." —"A Sitcom Battles Its Own Prehistory"

The article looks at how hard it was for the Cavemen creators to shed the "this show was spawned from a car insurance commercial" label, but as fellow fan and Dizzyhead Mike e-mailed me, that just means "it's more 'TV' than TV itself!"

As Itzkoff writes: "Some critics shared the opinion of Amy Robinson of The Charleston Gazette, who acknowldged that the bad publicity surrounding 'Cavemen' had influenced her opinion of it." A reviewer for the Daily News gave it zero stars. Looking back: It seems like the writer of this earlier, negative NYT review fell into the same trap—liking Cavemen more than she expected, and unable to justify this feeling, viz., "Let the record reflect: I laughed." OK—well, isn't that a good thing, isn't that what sitcoms are supposed to make you do? Run with it! Don't fight the feeling!

Alas, this post is not the well-shaped argument for Cavemen that I had contemplated writing a few weeks ago. It seems like a lost cause at this point, and there are other things to think about. But to encourage viewership, ABC could do more—they could offer more than just two episodes at a time on their website, for starters. And they could...broadcast new episodes every day of the week. (The article says there are seven episodes yet to be shown.)

We now return you to your regularly scheduled blogging about Gossip Girl.

Dizzies Newsfeeds for November 21

What's the "best remunerated poem in history"? Dizzyhead Rachel sifts through the competing author theories for the Christian verselet "Footprints," with some fascinating excursions into the realm of cryptomnesia...Termite Artist Matt on Lust, Caution (smartly comparing it to Black Book) and...Ruthless People?! (invoking Roger Ebert's definition of "idiots")...Isn't it time you enjoyed an episode of Cavemen?...Best line in a recent e-mail: "I'm on my third Sam Adams in the Pittsburgh airport..."...Josh Glenn has a great slideshow on the possible cinematic influence of Winsor McCay's Dream of the Rarebit Fiend...(For one more film reference and some literary ones, check out this piece by Parkus Grammaticus)...Look at how I persist in neither italicizing nor enquoting names of comic strips...J.G. also takes aim at a very specific fetish found in the oeuvre of certain Boston-based rock legends—including my beloved Modern Lovers:

(Bonus trivia: Did you know that David Lee Roth was from the Beantown area?)

Dizzies Newsfeeds for November 19

Over at Slate, Dizzyhead Jessica looks at Redacted and the meta-movie-ness of recent war films...At Harriet, Steve Burt makes some interesting connections...Landis Everson has died, an apparent suicide...Scott looks for the Brautigan-Jobs connection...First song on the new Jens Lekman sounds like Scott Walker, next song sounds like Bobby Goldsboro!...Still formulating my defense of Cavemen...Arlo sends us a new Destroyer song, "Foam Hands":