Egging him on

Isn't it time you visited the "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks? It's been a while, hasn't it?

My friend David has today's big scoop.

Perhaps — No — Selling

Appearing at City Lights tonight at 7: The Believer's Ross Simonini, the novelist/Adderall Diaries memoirist/Rumpus maestro/Blvr. writer/everything Stephen Elliott, and Joe Meno, about whose latest book, The Great Perhaps, I happily gushed:

Joe Meno's fiction has it all--humor and heart, moral gravitas, and a formal playfulness that catches you pleasantly by surprise.

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James Hannaham's God Says No (McSwy's) tour dates here -- coming back to NYC on 6/30, but first Gainesville, Nashville, Chicago, and other places.

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Long awaited: David Suisman's Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music (Harvard) is out now! (Some tantalizing sound files here.)

(The Suis wrote about Enrico Caruso's monkey trial for the Blvr way back in ’03—read it here.)

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Intermittent tweeting.

Better headlines

What did Dzyds think of my headline "Exile on Maipu Street," for that link to the interview in which Borges's widow, Maria Kodama, reveals his fondness for the Beatles, Stones, Pink Floyd, et al.?

(a) Liked it
(b) Didn't like it
(c) Undecided

It left me a little unsatisfied. Dzyd David e-mailed me this idea: "Tlön, Uqbar, Ummagumma."

Excellent! How about "Piper at the Gates of Tlön"?

"Keith Richards, Author of the Quixote"?

Now the ideas are flowing...please send more...

Whale of a time

From my 2003 Believer article on Charles Portis:

[In Dog of the South,] Dr. Symes’s mother, a missionary, periodically grills Midge on his knowledge of the Bible, a knowledge he repeatedly professes not to have. “Think about this,” she says, pointedly fixing his thoughts to the matter of last things. “All the little animals of your youth are long dead.” Her companion Melba promptly emends the truism: “Except for turtles.”

I wish I could find that line in Borges about being the last person alive to remember seeing something—something small, not a major cultural event but the way the sky was on a certain day in a certain part of the country. (Shades of "Funes the Memorious"; am I actually just misremembering that story?)



Borges and Portis came to mind when Dzyd Arlo sent me this link to the Times's NHL blog, in which Jon Baum reflects on the increasing rarity of hockey players associated with the now defunct Hartford Whalers (favorite team of this brilliant historian).

I like that the Whalers had a regionally relevant name, and one referring to an outdated trade; now Whalers are becoming as scarce as whalers; but perhaps all hockey players will be whalers soon enough.

[Cue: "Bob Marley and the Hartford Whalers."]