New Believer is out!

No, that's not some prototype for this month's cover—the whited-out parts are an extension of Jeannie Vanasco's essay, "Absent Things As If They Are Present," one of the last pieces that I edited. It's a lovely, learned piece, combining memoir with a smart take on the aesthetics of erasure—one of my pet interests, fittingly enough. (Discussed are Tom Phillips's A Humument and Jen Bervin's NETS, both of which I regularly taught to my Gallatin students, as well as Jonathan Safran Foer's Tree of Codes, the Jefferson Bible, Mary Ruefle's A Little White Shadow, and more.)

Also in this issue—a great Meghan Daum piece about her encounter with online venom, Daniel Handler/Greil Marcus/Nick Hornby/Jack Pendarvis columnic brilliance, Alec Michod talking to Fred Tomaselli, Amanda Stern chewing the fat with Laurie Anderson, Michael Schulman on Polari (postwar UK gay argot), Benjamin Weissman, Blake Butler, and (what a treat) Laird Hunt talking to the one and only Harry Mathews. And of course there's MORE...

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There's always more—but for me, no more, on the Believer front.

In the notes and apologies area of this issue is an amazing, tear-jerking (but funny) piece about...well...me.

It's been a wonderful I-can't-believe-it's-been-nine years. I'm too choked up to get into it right now....I'll save it for my memoirs...........oh, some exclamation points for my amazing brilliant co-editors and constant inspirations: Heidi! Vendela! Andrew!...Dave of course!.....Ross! Karolina!..Andi!...Sheila!...Meehan!...Matthew Derby of yore—Jason Polan—Brandon Stosuy!...Max!...and all the terrific writers and artists (I'm not even going to begin to list them)...(maybe I'll do a post some day and try to list all of them, the ones I've worked with.....)

The farewell asks, "What will we do without Ed Park?" Simple! Continue being the best magazine around!

(I'm blown away by this illo from the pen of Tony Millionaire.)

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!

Bruce Conner, RIP

Linksmeister General Thomas sends us two short films—Bruce Conner's Devo video (for "Mongoloid")—



—and Roger Beebe's recent BC tribute, featuring Toni Basil (as she appeared in Breakaway).

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More Dischiana:

The NYT obit, with a wide range of quotes (Norman Rush, Dana Gioia...): "He wrote a series of poems on grammar, for which he was a stickler, including one on auxiliary verbs."

Other Ed's appreciation on the New York site: "[Philip K.] Dick suggested [to the F.B.I.] that [Disch's novel Camp Concentration] contained coded information 'to be read by the right people here and there.' "

William Gibson: "On Wings Of Song, as I've said elsewhere, and more than once, is one of the great neglected masterpieces of late 20th-century science fiction."

I always liked this Disch blurb of the work of Harry Mathews (anyone know the original source?): "I cannot express the extent of my admiration for Harry Mathews, which is well-nigh evangelical. There are now, here and there, other zephyrs blowing—John Barth, Susan Sontag, Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon—but none so strong as this, none that bear so clearly and deliciously the tang of spring."

And more links here.

Ed Park's Return of the Reluctant

Catching up! Thanks for all the kind words and e-mails and shout-outs attendant to the arrival of DUNCAN.........

I'm going to try to ease my way in.......Hats off to Team Dizzies (including newest hire Devin McKinney—a/k/a THE HAWK) for their excellent posts, please please keep posting.......

For now—a little summary of recent "action"!

1. Over at Mr. David Cairns's Shadowplay, which has been on a roll from day one, my moment of cinema euphoria gets its day in the sun. (Until rewatching the clip, I'd forgotten that Alec Baldwin narrated The Royal Tenenbaums—nice!) "These Days" inadvertently became D.'s lullaby this morning....a bit melancholy but very pretty—

2. I'm perpetually finding and losing an article about the Oulipo that I wrote back in 1999; last night, looking for something else, I found it again, and I figured I'd better type it out on the computer just to have a record. This is early EP, so be kind! There are a few bum notes, and some sentences strain under the weight of LEARNEDNESS, but there are also some nifty things that I'd forgotten and a brief look at Harry Mathews's Cigarettes. (You can find the article at The Unarchivable, along with two other rarities, one from New York, one from Modern Painters.)

3. Jump back in time with me: In this month's Astral Weeks column (out for a while now), I read (and re-read) Joe Haldeman, with a little shout-out to Duncan!

4. Novel news: The cover for Personal Days can be seen on its Amazon page—and also right here!


I must say that I love it! (I'll post the U.K. cover as soon as it goes up—different concept, but very cool indeed!)

I'll also be posting, occasionally, to a Personal Days blog — some news about the novel, but mostly (I hope) links to interesting work-related articles and fun time-wasters.

5. This deserves a post of its own—the 50th Believer is out! I can't "believer" it! I'm an old man! It's a suitably great issue.....More on it later.....you can catch a glimpse here for now.

The Connections: Library Edition

Instant Desert Island Books

What books are on your desk right now? These are your desert island books!

To my left I have:

The Case of the Persevering Maltese, Harry Mathews
The Beatles. The Beatles. The Beatles. 100 Hits for All Keyboards (sheet music; this is a book I bought in Korea about 14 years ago; the phoneticized Korean title is "Beatles Memory 100.")
Aubrey's Brief Lives, ed. Oliver Lawson Dick, foreword by Edmund Wilson
Beowulf: An Illustrated Edition, transl. Seamus Heaney

A strange batch! (Send your list right now to thedizziesATgmailDOTcom.)

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Dizzyhead Susan sends in this short list:

Likes: ferns, geese, telepathy

Dislikes: the news, telephony

To tell the tlooth

Further evidence that the I've Been Reading proprietor is my Midwestern clone: He's a Harry Mathews fan!

Two shorties from the home team

Dean Young — Yesterday? — Harry Mathews interview

Today's poem is Dean Young's "Static City," from Embryoyo (published by Believer Books). Here's a bit: "Imagine a frog/in your mouth, struggling./Now imagine you're that frog."

(Just saw and am checking out a pretty funny conversation between Young and Tony Hoagland at the PoFo site: Memory is "the bad breath of time?")

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What about yesterday's poem? My students came up with some great Oulipian poems, but I'll save them for another day. I just want to assure you that I have been reading at least one poem a day during this most National of Poetry months.

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Dizzyhead Jessica alerted me to an interview with Harry Mathews (in my pantheon, up there with Nabokov, Powell, and Portis) in the new Paris Review. (I've had HM on the brain, thanks to my recent Oulipo/Roussel musings—The Conversions is an especially Rousselian concoction; see Dizzyhead Laird's note.) I debated whether to buy it or not, thinking it might just cover the same old (albeit fascinating) ground—aaaaaand...I wound up saying YES to shelling out $12 and had to stop myself from reading the whole thing last night. I'm going to try to make it last at least another day.

Some choice quotes:

"I couldn't hammer a nail until I was seventeen. I spent all my time in dreamland, listening to obscure music and reading Henry James."

"We reached Plymouth in a parody of English weather—fog, rain, darkness."

On Ashbery and Schuyler's delightful collaborative novel, A Nest of Ninnies: "Auden had once said that it's impossible to describe meals in contemporary fiction. So there is an endless number of meals in the book."

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Best idea: Buy the PR with a $20 bill, and instead of tipping the cashier $8—as is your wont—use this "mad money" to purchase the new Believer!