Tloothy in the Sky

I. Levi has been reading that George Plimpton book, and has some quotes from/thoughts on the Plimpton-connected figure I'm most interested in—Harry Mathews! Here's HM on GP*'s

George created the first Paris Review Editions—another moneymaker, he hoped. And the first book they published was James Salter's wonderful A Sport and a Pastime, which was cover-to-cover sex and did well. The second was my second novel, Tlooth (1966), which was a totally weird book, but I worked on every sentence. The story that George always used to love to tell is that on pub day, they would hire a plane to inscribe the letters TLOOTH in the sky above New York to create wonder and bewilderment in the populace; but the winds weren't right, and it was too expensive anyway. Of course, the book—well, it didn't go nowhere, but it didn't do very well.

II. Dzyd Molls has some thoughts and more thoughts on the whole Pope-forgiving-the-Beatles news. Great—irresistible—headline for her dotCommonweal piece: "Mother Superior, jump the gun"!

She also poses this trivia bonus: "Do you know which Beatle was Catholic (by birth)? Hint: it wasn’t Lennon."

Dzyds??


*= George Plimpton, not HM's other great friend Georges Perec!

Freudian slip

From Dizzyhead Brent (whose two-part Rivette epic concludes in the latest Cinema Scope):

I LIKE
Coffee, cigarettes, pasta, pizza, De Quincey, Bresson, Astaire, Kinks, cats, the first and middle fingers

I DON'T LIKE
Most other food, Kieslowski, Updike, The Doors, insects, Freud, the ring finger

I LIKE DON'T LIKE
Nabokov, Beatles, dogs, people, thumb

* * *

Bonus post—etymology of the day: "A 'rival,' for instance, is someone you are bickering with over river water rights." (A.E. Stallings at Harriet)

And: Over at the PEN America blog, David Haglund digs up a great George Plimpton memory, a name-dropper's delight in which a bit of advice from Steinbeck compels GP to address Jean Seberg while writing about going to a baseball game with Marianne Moore.