READ HARD — Believer Music Issue — Beatles post-Beatles — AUGUST 5 PARK-LIT EVENT

I. Read Hard is out! It's a collection of some great pieces from the last five years of The Believer. We could have easily filled several more volumes of equal thickness—and hopefully we will someday...As an appetizer, McSweeney's excerpts my essay on the work of Charles Portis, a piece that appeared in the very first issue of The Believer, back in 2003. I've always like this list of food in Portis's first novel, Norwood:

With reportorial precision, and without condescension, Norwood captures all manner of reflex babble, the extravagant grammar of commercial appeal − stray words bathed in the exhaust of a Trailways bus. This omnivorous little book has a high metabolism, digesting everything from homemade store signs (i do not loan tools) and military-base graffiti to actuarial come-ons and mail-order ads for discount diamonds. Appropriately enough, the characters are constantly chowing down. On one leg of the journey, Edmund B. Ratner (formerly the "world's smallest perfect man," before he porked out) and Norwood's new sweetheart, Rita Lee Chipman, are described as having eaten their way through the Great Smoky Mountains. Norwood's decidedly humble (call it American) menu nails the country's midcentury gastronomy with a precision that today takes on near-archaeological value: canned peaches, marshmallows, Vienna sausages, cottage cheese with salt and pepper, a barbecue sandwich washed down with NuGrape, a potted-meat sandwich with mustard, butter on ham sandwiches, biscuit and Brer Rabbit syrup sandwiches, an Automat hot dog on a dish of baked beans, Cokes and corn chips and Nabs crackers, a Clark bar, peanuts fizzing in Pepsi, a frozen Milky Way.

II. The Believer Music Issue is also out! Q: What's in it? A: A lot.

Arthur Phillips (The Song Is You) on writing about music (or, as they say, dancing about architecture); Brandon Stosuy interviews Phil Elverum (here's a taste); Joe Hagan—author of the classic Bill Fox piece that rounds out Read Hard—on another underappreciated songwriter, Benji Hughes (the online version features two streaming songs that will make your day); Blvr editor Ross Simonini does double duty, writing about Jamaican dancehall and violence, and interviewing Radiohead's Thom Yorke; Greil Marcus; Michael Showalter and Michael Ian Black...a long piece by Michelle Tea...Justin Taylor with an excellent appreciation of David Berman's Actual Air, upon its 10th anniversary...a piece on Lawrence Welk...Ben Greenman...Hilton Als "performing" a sentence (à la Barthelme) about PJ Harvey...the inimitable Paul Collins, and more! Double issue! Get it before the newsstands run out! Because they always do with this one...

And I haven't even mentioned the Daniel Handler-curated CD, a real ear-opener, featuring names you know—Lloyd Cole (?!!!), Dave Wakeling, the Waterboys' Mike Scott, Sam Phillips, Stephen Duffy (!!?), David Sylvian (!!?!), Lisa Germano, and more—all great, but you cannot miss the Mike Scott song. It is an EPIC, like the best Waterboys songs (though also different).

(Blvr music issue trivia question: Who wrote an article for an earlier Blvr music issue entitled "The Song Is You"?)

III. One last thing I'll mention—David L. Ulin imagines the ideal Beatles '70s albums, using material from their disparate solo albums. In a nice bit of cross-magazine fertilization (eh??), the Utne Reader blog did an "imeem" playlist of the Ulin-imagined post-Fab Four album, Too Many People. It's fun to listen to...and it kicks off with "Imagine"...

IV. I won't be in New York for this, alas, and neither will Heidi, but the Believer and McSweeney's will be taking the stage for a Park-Lit event next Wednesday, August 5, at Bryant Park, 12:30 p.m.—lunchtime edification! (Here's more info at New York mag.)

Aforementioned music issue contribs Messrs. Phillips, Hagan, and Stosuy will be there, as will two new McSwy's novelists: Jessica Anthony (The Convalescent) and my old-PTSNBN colleague James Hannaham (God Says No). Amanda Stern hosts. (Copies of Read Hard and the music issue and the novels should be available.)

The bit between my teeth

Parkian verbiage oozing out into the webosphere..........

At the Poetry Foundation, I look at Silver Jews mastermind/Actual Air poet David Berman's book of drawings, The Portable February.........the piece features a slideshow....



And back in May—remember May? I don't—I pondered Edward Gorey's unproduced screenplay, The Black Doll, for Moving Image Source. (More of me on Gorey here.)......"The Freud Notebook" is in the current issue of Post Road (#17)......

Coming soon: READ HARD (Blvr anthology)[UPDATE: Available now!]—


—and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Exilée and Temps Morts (for which I wrote an essay).................

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Also: the Believer music issue is out, about which more soon—but for now check out Joe Hagan's "The Ballad of Benji Hughes"; the site features two B.H. tracks that I think you'll like....one has the great title "I Went with Some Friends to See the Flaming Lips."

Thursday Grab-baggery

Will they ever say this about me? "Now a devout Jew, he’s more alive then ever." (Crawdaddy on David Berman)...More Priscilla Ahn, I am all about the half-Korean songstresses these days...Eh? Dunkin' Bagels?...Gnarly triathlon jellyfish details from Jenny D...Levi reads Born Under Saturn (which I reviewed for Modern Painters, though I never saw my review!)...Speaking of MP, Dzyd Phyllis has a rather wizardly review of Christopher Priest's The Inverted World...you know, the guy who wrote the novel The Prestige!...I loved the movie The Prestige...I agree with Ta-Nehisi about this new forger-turned-memoirist (profiled in today's Times)—it was very soul-killing reading this piece; in theory I am interested in tales of forgery, particularly when it's in the realm of fiction (see this weird review of mine for some examples), but there seemed to be an additional level of wrongness to this—a level of moral WRONGNESS!...I fear the O key on my laptop is loose...Fear? It is loose, it fell off last night! I fear that it will fall off and stay off...It's all very PERSONAL DAYS...........Wyatt Mason's Sentences blog has a lengthy interview with Adam Thirlwell, whose The Delighted States is great (I don't know why I haven't blogged about it, nor about John Darnielle's Master of Reality, which I recently read and loved)...(THOUGHT: Some things cannot be blogged about!)(Don't quite know why)...ANYWAY the Mason/Thirlwell interview has lots of interesting stuff, & dwells on A.T.'s translation of a Nabokov story (which appears as an appendix to TDS):

And then there were two moments were I tried to translate and was rebuffed. First, there was the man who operated the lift in their St. Petersburg home—called by V.N. “le Suisse.” Which interested me because Switzerland, in the piece, is a symbol of exile, and so it seemed unlikely that V.N. would have used the word without thinking, but on the other hand a Suisse is also slang in French for any kind of person who helps out (it’s even there in Shakespeare’s English, when in Hamlet Claudius asks for his bodyguards, his “Switzers”). I couldn’t gauge how far it was being used literally or slangily: in the end, I went for “the man,” and D.N. corrected this to “the Swiss chap”...

(I felt like this weirdly harsh review read like a review of a completely different book!)

Gleanings

As a way of getting in touch with my origins,
every night I set the alarm clock
for the time I was born, so that waking up
becomes a historical reenactment
—from "Self-Portrait at 28," David Berman, Actual Air

The road was very bleak, wandering like the handwriting of a dying person over the hills.
—Richard Brautigan, The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western

You half-expected fireflies to rush out of his mouth.
—last line of Fleet Foxes concert review, Amanda Petrusich, NYT

Lord Jeffrey Stillingfleete, Earl of Kislingbury, richest man in the en-tire world, gazed troubledly down at the slender American milltown girl, in cheap black cotton dress, with 10-cent-store white trimmings at the neck and elbows, whom he held fast in his arms. —first line of The Crimson Cube, Harry Stephen Keeler

Last call...

The dust clears...a few final entries are visible...Here's Carla's final (?) sally, a narrative of enclosure and release:



[We Have Always Lived in the Castle; Housekeeping; The Long Loneliness; My Most Secret Desire; The Stranger; The Body; Possession; The Varieties of Religious Experience; Aureole; Second Skin; Actual Air]

But Poundstone's not taking it lying down. He writes: "Over lunch, I became obsessed with using my paperback copies of Gerald Kersh's On an Odd Note and Peter Rabe's The Spy Who Was 3 Feet Tall (a 1966 James Bond rip off featuring a Mbuti spy named 'Baby').