Norwegian Wood—the movie

(Via Galleycat)

Table-talk of Parkus Grammaticus for February 8

I. Over at Powell's, I give the thumbs-up to some of my favorite fiction, nonfiction, and poetry of 2007. But one of the most significant bookish things for me last year was actually going to Powell's in Portland.

II. Like Murakami, I want to buy a house on Kauai.

III. If you're a poet, try your hand at prose...

IV. At Moistworks:

It's hard to like the Kinks because of Wes Anderson. No. I said it wrong. What I mean is that these days it's hard to make sense of exactly how much I like the glory period of the early career of the Kinks, in part because the cultural overtones of those songs have become highly specific as a result of their inclusion in a number of mostly excellent Wes Anderson films. Everyone knows what I mean, right? This is just an introductory paragraph and I don't want it to get too clotted....

V. I had a nice time reading from Personal Days at the Brooklyn Public Library last night — I am very sorry for people who made the trek, only to be denied entrance! There is a nice write-up over at Galleycat.

Messrs. Shteyngart and Winkler were brilliantly funny, and David Rees/Amy Sedaris, I think, could have gone on for hours—very entertaining!

VI. Over at Paper Cuts, Dave Itzkoff on PKD's YA novel, Nick and the Glimmung. Here's the opening:

Nick knew exactly why his family intended to leave Earth and go to another planet, a colony world, and settle there. It had to do with him and his cat, Horace. Owning animals of any kind had, since the year 1992, become illegal. Horace, in fact, was illegal, whether anyone owned him or not....

(Via Educating Alice)

I've been liking lately...

Dizzyhead Levi contributes a dazzling list to the j'aime/je n'aime pas contest—here's a sample:

Likes: Rocketlass, baseball, distance running, Anthony Powell, cooking, gin martinis, Wodehouse, well-written history, Don Knotts, Jim Edmonds, film noir, crime novels, pizza, my bicycle, vintage suits, penguins, Chicago, New York, London, Murakami, public transit, steaming bowls of chunky vegetable soup, fake-meat bratwursts, sudden downpours on city streets, birds, Emmylou Harris, Melville, singing along at the top of my range to Sam Cooke's Live at the Harlem Square Club, Johnny Mercer songs, chili, James Kochalka, Iris Murdoch, Spider-man, Peter O'Toole, Yi Yi...

Dislikes: telephones, pre-packaged food, gardening, The Old Man and the Sea, Sting, the Olympics, The Corrections, the Yankees, the Green Goblin, Bush, Cheney, sophistry, cars, anise, absinthe, tattered used books, The Science of Sleep, non-gin martinis, the fact that Idaho and Illinois have the same number of senators, Finnegans Wake, prog rock, smoky bars, mass-market paperbacks...

Make sure you check out the rest at his superior blog, I've Been Reading Lately.

Weekend read?

Via Ed: A PDF of the hard-to-find Pinball 1973, one of my favorite Murakami novels, maybe a tie with Norwegian Wood.

Tall vs. Short

Competition heats up on the penultimate day of the "title bout" challenge. Gautam returns with what we believe is the highest stack to date, entitled "Divorce":



Dizzyhead Daren sends us this acoustic version:

Here's what I'm staring at on my bookcase...the titles on the right of the shelf second from top seem, weirdly, to work as narrative): Great Expectations, Duet for Cannibals, A Sad Affair, The Loser, Please Kill Me, Extinction. I think I'm going
rearrange all my books tomorrow.

And a coda:

Something Happened, Watt.