The strange book of Von Junzt

Aside from my teaching, I had for some years been engaged in various anthropological projects with the primary ambition of articulating the significance of the clown figure in diverse cultural contexts. I was interested in original sin and had dabbled in esoteric philosophy; my remote ancestors had been Salem witches. I owed the formation of my character chiefly to accident. I shall not pretend to determine in what degree I was credulous or superstitious. I shall tell you what occurred, and let you judge for yourself.* --from my cento review of American Fantastic Tales (ed. Peter Straub), in the L.A. Times.

UPDATE: Also at the LAT, my editor Nick Owchar's Siren's Call column on Clark Ashton Smith (and a little Robert E. Howard) is a nice companion piece to this month's Astral Weeks...and for those curious about what CAS's sculptures looked like—Grognardia has the goods:





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*The sentences in this passage come from Thomas Ligotti, "The Last Feast of Harlequin"; Julian Hawthorne, "Absolute Evil"; Charles Brockden Brown, "Somnambulism"; and F. Scott Fitzgerald, "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button"

Peice of mind

From the table of contents to F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tales of the Jazz Age:

THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON
This story was inspired by a remark of Mark Twain’s to the effect that it was a pity that the best part of life came at the beginning and the worst part at the end. By trying the experiment upon only one man in a perfectly normal world I have scarcely given his idea a fair trial. Several weeks after completing it, I discovered an almost identical plot in Samuel Butler’s “Note-books.”
The story was published in “Collier’s” last summer and provoked this startling letter from an anonymous admirer in Cincinnati:

“Sir—
I have read the story Benjamin Button in Colliers and I wish to say that as a short story writer you would make a good lunatic I have seen many peices [sic] of cheese in my life but of all the peices [sic ] of cheese I have ever seen you are the biggest piece. I hate to waste a peice [sic ] of stationary [sic ] on you but I will.”

Reversibles

Two backward tales:

1. F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," now a David Fincher movie (starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett):

Benjamin, as he says in his voice-over narration, “was born under unusual circumstances” on Nov. 11, 1918, the last day of World War I. As the doctor attending him describes the strange little creature, “He has all the deterioration, the infirmities, not of a newborn, but of a man well in his 80s on the way to his grave.” —NYT

(The FSF original begins around the time of the Civil War.)

2. Frigyes Karinthy's "The Moral," from Soliloquies in the Bath:

Ten years later my hair began to turn black and my teeth gradually returned to my mouth. I was deprived of my pension and had to sit at the office doing my work from the end right to the beginning. My employers were very kind to me, but after twenty-five years they ceased to know me and engaged me on trial at fifteen pounds a month. So there I stood, back to front of course, without money and without a job, but with a wife who grew prettier and loved me more every day.

(Via A Journey Round My Skull)

The Connections: Yin-Yang Edition

Jon Pareles on Jarvis Cocker:

Between songs Mr. Cocker chatted about how shifting exchange rates made it hard to keep songs realistic, and of his disdain for experiencing a concert through a cellphone screen. He explained what he had been reading lately in philosophy: that it was possible to hold two opposing ideas at the same time, opening up gray areas between virtue and evil. —NYT

EP in Triple Canopy:

I always show my students these two quotes—a warning against referential mania, or perhaps just notes toward an aesthetic:

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.”
—H. P. Lovecraft

Dizzies Newsfeeds™ for Thursday, September 19

Quotables™: Chuck Klosterman at the Brooklyn Book Festival: "Even with something you absolutely love, if you think about it long enough, you can make it seem horrible."...At the galleries: Duncan Hannah at James Graham (1014 Madison) through 10/7, featuring this delightful scene:



Here's what the young F. Scott Fitzgerald's Buffalo home looks like today (photo from Dizzies team member Arlo):



Haven't read yet: A nicely obsessive Philip K. Dick blog, plus an interview with Jonathan Lethem on PKD...Significant misreading: "Meat" for "meta"...(via BoingBoing, which seems to have a lot of book-related things today.)

Dizzies Newsfeeds for Monday, September 17

I had a nice time at the Brooklyn Book Festival...there was an odd incident in which a woman walked onto the stage...and patted me on the head; most unnerving. By coincidence, today I listened to "The Poetry Assassination of Kenneth Koch" (a podcast from the Poetry Foundation/NPR)...After the panel I saw an injured rat hobble across the plaza and take shelter underneath a garbage can...

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Ed Halter has (finally!) started a blog. Entitled "My Life and Prophecies," it looks to be graphically (or "graphikally") oriented, with an emphasis on psychics and other odd phenomena of the mind...Most amusing: A teenage Ed took issue with a controversial passage in a Billy Graham book (Deliverance for You). Graham wrote:

Twenty years ago we used to go down to the seaport to watch the ships come in, but now it is the airport to watch the planes come in.

To which an understandably incensed Ed scrawled: "What? Who does this?"

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Dizzyhead Arlo reminds us that F. Scott Fitzgerald (who has been surfacing on The Dizzies lately) spent some formative years in Buffalo, where his father was employed by Procter & Gamble.

At 7, Scott already showed the style that would be his hallmark. So polished was he that his father joked he'd give $5 to hear Scott swear.

Gaaaaah

"...he already saw his best years fading behind him though he was only thirty-seven..."