Table-Talk of Parkus Grammaticus for June 24, 2008

I. Douglas on the Portland Ukefest:

There is a cultural chasm between people who pronounce “ukulele” yoo-koo-lay-lee and people who pronounce it oo-koo-leh-leh, roughly corresponding to the divide between people who prefer “fun” and people who prefer “authenticity.”

II. Mazel tov to Dizzies Team Member Izzy and "the Citizen"—


I love this picture!

—Photo by Dzyd Jen!

III. A small but nice notice for PD in The New Yorker...what's the pull quote? "Comic and creepy"?!

This comic and creepy début novel takes place in a Manhattan office depopulated by “the Firings,” where one can “wander vast tracts of lunar workscape before seeing a window.” The downsized staff huddle like the crew of a doomed spaceship, picked off one by one by an invisible predator. Crippled by computer crashes (one worker suggests that the machines are “trying to tell us about the limits of the human”), the survivors eddy in a spiritual inertia; when one of them is banished to “Siberia”—a lone desk on another floor—no one can muster the energy even to reply to her increasingly anguished e-mails, until, one day, she is simply no longer there. Park transforms the banal into the eerie, rendering ominous the familiar request “Does anyone want anything from the outside world?”

IV. Today on his Finer Things Club radio show, Dizzies Team Member Hua is joined by one of the more interesting fellows we know—"Vocoder" Dave Tompkins! Here's what Hua has to say:

Join us from 1030am-noon as the great Dave Tompkins hectors the airwaves with a sure-to-be unforgettable mix of inscrutable vocoder jams, suicidal soul ballads, "random rap," John Carpenter, 80s grooves, and a Russian electro single from 1982 credited to "Udytu and his Male Harem."

Tune in here.

V. Pauses that refresh:

"The semicolon allows woozy clauses to lean on each other like drunks for support." —Dzyd Paul, Slate

"Keeler's overuse of the comma stopped even me—a comma-lover of the first rank—dead in my tracks." —Levi on Harry Stephen Keeler's The Box From Japan

VI. "Books like [Roberto Bolaño's] 2666 take on the biggest themes their authors can imagine, and these themes are so large that it takes serious novelistic real estate to even establish them on paper." —Conversational Reading

VII. I apparently can't shut up these days—all this week I am talking to Jason Boog about Personal Days.

VIII. And finally—what would a TTOPG (Table-Talk of Parkus Grammaticus) be without...and Ouroboros?



This comes from the frontispiece of William Gaddis's The Recognitions, accompanying this interview at Splice Today (?!) with Gaddis sage Steven Moore, who put together the indispensable A Reader's Guide to William Gaddis's "The Recognitions", now available online, how do you like these comma splices, I could keep doing this forever you know...? (Via Other Ed.)

Toward the end, it was like completing a gigantic jigsaw puzzle, trying to fill in the gaps that were still missing. Only then did I write to Gaddis and tell him I'd annotated about 90 percent of it, and wondered if he still had a list of sources that I could use to finish up. He said he didn't. I learned later he was very pleased with the book, and wrote me a six-page letter filling in some of those gaps. Looking back, it was the greatest intellectual adventure of my life.

IX. I know that The Recognitions was an important book for the young EP (or do I mean the young PG?), but now realize that ARGTWGTR was maybe equally important—in the writing of Dementia Americana especially, which was written on two levels it seems, as if begging for annotation! E.g.,

And was that his son, listlessly pitching pennies with other dead-end kids in Howard & Sonia, a sitcom about a horror writer's doomed marriage in 1920s Brooklyn?

—a reference to H.P. Lovecraft's brief departure from bachelordom! Which of course I annotated, ten years later...! I'm just going to annotate all my unpublished books now!

From A to B and back again

The Citizen always strikes in twos—here he is at the New York Sun (reviewing the memoir Foreskin's Lament) and at Salon, on sneakers and videogames: “[T]he NES controller had an A and a B button. Confusing! I wanted to play vids, not pilot jets. Give me one joystick, one button, and line up them ‘Space Invaders.’”

I second that emotion!

Double play, or, The Complete Guide to Andy Selsberg Coverage

Now the other piece by Citizen Truth gets some play, over at the WSJ's The Informed Reader blog:

Works such as “The Yuppie Handbook” (1984), “The Official Slacker Handbook” (1994) and “The Hipster Handbook” (2002) derive their laughs from people’s discomfort with the existence of a class system in the U.S., journalist Andy Selsberg writes in arts-and-culture magazine The Believer.

(Yesterday, we noted that the NYT blog had picked up on the new issue of The Believer, which includes this piece; Paper Cuts also raved about the latest Oxford American...in particular, a piece by Andy on eating like a man.)

* * *

Over at Restricted View:

Seen on the street yesterday: a snake! Seriously! I did not move to New York City to nearly step on a snake! Especially while wearing sandals! But there it was! A smallish, presumably harmless snake, but nevertheless a snake, slithering across my path! On Broadway! I am still freaking out!

New Believer is out!

For a taste, check out Dizzyhead Andy's piece online, "The Official Guide to Official Handbooks." Other fun stuff: Elizabeth Gold on '70s pop feminist fiction (Erica Jong, et al.), Dizzyhead Robert on Fletcher Hanks, that Hornby/David Simon (The Wire) interview I mentioned before, and much more...oh yes, the naming article! And something on Boris Vian! It's a great issue!

Fangs for the memories

My latest Astral Weeks column is up at the L.A. Times. This month I cover Liz Williams's Detective Inspector Chen novels and David Wellington's fangfest 13 Bullets.

But enough about me: Dizzyhead Hua rhapsodizes over a single LCD Soundsystem song over at Slate, and the Oxford American features two Dizzyhead contributions: Devin McKinney on William Bradford Huie and Andy "Citizen Truth" Selsberg on what it means to eat like a man. (And still seen on the stands recently: The first part of B. Kite's "Rivette-iad," in Cinema Scope.)

Freaky Friday

1. Well, it's not that freaky, indeed perhaps not freaky at all. And now that I've trotted out this stunning headline, I can't re-use it here at The Dizzies for when something truly freaky happens.

2. National Poetry Month madness continues here at The Dizzies. From "God Went Rollerblading," by Cynthia Rylant (thanks to Dizzyhead Regina):

He loved it.
He wasn't very good at it.
He fell twenty times.
But God always
bounces back.

(For more on God, visit the Saturnhead archives.)

3. Citizen Truth is like poetry, I think:

Bread

Where do they grow these chicks?
Is he their dad-figure or what?
(We were there for the shift change.)
(It seems fun here.)
(We cheer for what we recognize.)
(I'm part phlegmish.)

4. I thought of a joke the other day, but perhaps it's already been done? Check it out:

"Apple just announced a new iPod geared toward colorful sports figures of yesteryear. It's called the 'Icky Shuffle.'"

I might have to jazz up the wording a little. Shortly after coming up with this joke, I had a three-minute fantasy in which I became a standup comedian, despite my intense aversion to standup comedy. But then I couldn't think of any more jokes.

5. Don Imus! I've never listened to his show, but the recent fiasco dredged this up from the memory banks: Years ago, I was sifting through the book-reject pile (at a magazine where I was interning) and picked up Imus's novel, God's Other Son. I had no idea who Imus was. I opened the book, and on the very first page, possibly the first sentence or two, there was a gratuitous dig at African American women, something along the lines of: I (the other son of God) am a white male, and people who think that God could have, say, a black woman as a child are just plain PC-nuts.

That's my memory of it; I could be off on the details—I've tried to "look inside" the book at Amazon (this passes for research here at The Dizzies). In any case, there was something so instantly depressing and distasteful (Imus going out of his way to make such a bizarre insult, right off the bat) that I shut the book, and forevermore grumbled internally at any mention of his name.

Amazing—to so completely turn a reader off before the end of the first page! To completely turn off a reader for life!

6. Dizzyhead Hua's Palace has a beguiling Korean rocker up today...more dope on the band, San Ul Lim, here.

7. Dizzyhead Drew now blogs at The Ballad of the Cagener...

8. And finally: Dizzyhead Chrita, proprietor of the now defunct Crisis/Boring Change, will join Team Dizzies as soon as we get all the contract work vetted. He will focus on comic books and amusing anecdotes from his life.

(By the way—I'm loving the sub-200-page-novel reading suggestions—keep ’em coming! I am going to make myself scarce, or at least scarce-ish, for a while—Team Dizzies, start posting!)