Now I remember...

...why I called the column "Astral Weeks"!



*

An archive of sorts is available at the L.A. Times site; there are numerous omissions, alas.

Some of my favorite columns concerned a Charles Fort biography; an 1881 New Zealand novel; a discursus on the Ouroboros; secret histories; structural vertigo in Catherynne M. Valente; Joe Haldeman; wow I wrote a lot of columns!; repetition (via Robert Silverberg and Osamu Tezuka); Christopher Miller's overlooked PKD takeoff, The Cardboard Universe; the forgotten pulp writer/physician Miles J. Breuer; Dash Shaw's Bodyworld; a DeLillo rarity; D&D stories; John Crowley (and again).

And then I wrote some things that could only loosely be called "columns": a cento; a J.G. Ballard abecedary; a two-part meditation on short stories; notes (and notes on notes). Editors David Ulin and Nick Owchar were always willing to go with these somewhat unorthodox formats—amazing!

Disambiguations™ for January 3, 2011

I. Paging Charles Fort:

State scientists believe one thing to be almost certain: that the bird deaths were not related to the roughly 85,000 fish that died a few days before near Ozark, in the western part of the state, the biggest fish kill in Arkansas that anyone can remember. —"4,000 Blackbirds Drop From the Sky," NYT

II. I wrote a little note on the NYT's Paper Cuts blog—a followup to my "One Sentence Says It All" essay. (Most of it has been covered here at Disambiguation, with one new twist...)

The New Catalogue of Metaphors

A while back, I wrote in the L.A. Times:

What are metaphors for? Before finding fame as the 20th century's greatest compiler and theorist of weird news, not to mention one of its most audacious and influential autodidacts, Charles Fort (1849-1932) was a journalist and pulp-story writer who amassed inventive ways to describe one thing in terms of something else. Among the few to glimpse these scraps was no less a literary titan than Theodore Dreiser, who was Fort's early magazine editor and steadfast champion. Bowled over, Dreiser offered to buy the odd collection from Fort. "They are better than any thesaurus," he raved, "a new help to letters."

And...........this sort of demands to be its own blog, but I was thinking, why not set down, here, in the spirit of Fort, a New Catalogue of Metaphors? By which I also mean simple old great similes.

Let's kick it off with one from Russell Hoban's Turtle Diary:

1. The bench was empty, the square was green and vacant in the early light like one long uninflected vowel.

Cogito ergo yum!

Social media simply consolidate and lend greater force to the anxiety felt by the characters of Personal Days. Weblogs, Facebook, Twitter provide the treadmills necessary to fuel this anxiety. They become much more than communication devices; they become the very means by which people secure an effective ontology: “I tweet, therefore I am.”
—from Anton Steinpilz's interesting consideration of Sergei Tret’iakov and Personal Days, at Generation Bubble

I think: therefore, I ate breakfast.
—Charles Fort, Wild Talents

Table-Talk of Parkus Grammaticus for June 14–15: West Coast Tour Preparatory Edition

I. From Monday to Friday next week, I'll be hopping down the West Coast to read from and talk about Personal Days. Hope to see some of you! (Thank you, Bostonians, for coming out to the reading on Thursday! And thank you Newtonville Books! And: So great to see people at Happy Ending on Wednesday! That was a lot of fun.)

Thumbnail schedule—more info at the website.

MONDAY: Seattle, Elliott Bay Books, 7:30 [TIME CORRECTED]
TUESDAY: Portland, Powell's Books (Burnside), 7:30
WEDNESDAY: San Francisco—Google in the a.m.; then Booksmith at 7
THURSDAY: Berkeley, Pegasus Books, 7:30
FRIDAY: Los Angeles, Book Soup, 7

II. My latest Astral Weeks column is up at the L.A. Times site—a meditation on Charles Fort, prompted by Jim Steinmeyer's new biography.

Following up on Dzyd Rachel's Triple Canopy interview with me*, I meditate some more on metaphor. Here's the first graf of this month's column:

What are metaphors for? Before finding fame as the 20th century's greatest compiler and theorist of weird news, not to mention one of its most audacious and influential autodidacts, Charles Fort (1849-1932) was a journalist and pulp-story writer who amassed inventive ways to describe one thing in terms of something else. Among the few to glimpse these scraps was no less a literary titan than Theodore Dreiser, who was Fort's early magazine editor and steadfast champion. Bowled over, Dreiser offered to buy the odd collection from Fort. "They are better than any thesaurus," he raved, "a new help to letters."

III. Digression 1: A line in Janet Maslin's review of The Story of Edgar Sawtelle made me raise an eyebrow:

Its voice is so natural and unfettered, so free of metaphor or other baggage, that even the simplest moments can have extraordinary grace.

So metaphor is "baggage," rather than that which makes us human???

IV. Digression 2: "Is [Rivka] Galchen a modern day Charles Fort?" —New York Observer

V. Digression 3: A hilarious example of interior dialogue as practiced by Fort (spinning off accounts of people awaking from fugue states, nude and in public):

Don't cats and horses and dogs go around without clothes on?
But they are clothed with natural, furry protections.
Well, Mexican dogs, then.

...which brought to mind this demented trailer (via Jenny D).

VI. Sukie Park (no relation!) of the Joongang Daily profiled me—we also had a fascinating conversation (not reflected here) about various Korean directors....


_________
*Rachel e-mailed me this link, from the new Atlantic: "The process of adapting to new intellectual technologies is reflected in the changing metaphors we use to explain ourselves to ourselves. When the mechanical clock arrived, people began thinking of their brains as operating "like clockwork." Today, in the age of software, we have come to think of them as operating "like computers." But the changes, neuroscience tells us, go much deeper than metaphor. Thanks to our brain's plasticity, the adaptation occurs also at a biological level."

Table-Talk of Parkus Grammaticus for May 27, 2008

I. Oughtables:

Scott: "A few weeks ago Laura has The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin checked out of the library, and I keep thinking the front cover reads The Early Diary of An Assassin."

Yesterday, reading The Week, I thought I read (in a Rauschenberg obit): "But by switching to his left hand, and with the help of assassins, he kept working." (He actually had assistants.)

II. Over at TPF, Mike Atkinson on Philip Schultz. (Who? Exactly.)

III. Ouroboros alert! The L.A. Times review of Personal Days got recycled for the Chicago Tribune's online edition. Under the "Layoffs and Downsizing" tag, you can see that the photo being used is...the one that appeared on The Dizzies!



(Shouldn't "Arlo Ogg" get a photo credit?)

IV. A letter to the Times from 1986: "The Sun Was Eclipsed by Fields of Ice"

V. What did Levi leave in New York?

Then there's the question of where I checked said mysterious object. The ticket bears no writing aside from that red "28," and gives no clue to its origins. I suppose the next time I'm in New York I could retrace my steps, presenting this claim check at every bar and restaurant I visited this time around, enduring blank stare after blank stare until, finally, someone takes the ticket with a brisk nod, spins on a heel and disappears into the back room to return moments later with . . . what?