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.)

The last tycoon

Players only love you when they’re playing, or when they’re spirit-possessing you. —Julavits

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Mark Asch (L Magazine) on Kim Jong-il, cinephile:

Kim wrote a couple of books about the cinema. 1973's On the Art of Cinema, about merging socialist messages with populist aesthetics, through a filmmaking process in line with socialist principles. ("In the capitalist system of filmmaking, the 'director' carries that title, but in fact the right of supervision and control over film production is entirely in the hands of the tycoons of the industry who have the money, whereas the directors are nothing but their agents. [The director] is a mere worker who obeys the will of the industrialists whether he likes it or not.")

"First Time in Print"

Heidi Julavits has a Tumblr...and things may never be the same again!

Her upcoming novel The Vanishers is ridiculously fun...

...there's a line I'm trying to find from it, describing a wall "varicosed" by ivy.

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I just finished Pope Hats #2, a comic book by Ethan Rilly. Lovely and surprising. The "B" story, "Gould Speaks," has Julius Knipl-ish observations set to Huizenga-ish graphics, as the titular narrator takes a long bus trip:

See how all the
windows are now smudged by
human hair.

These nodding mops
slowly paint a mural
of long distance travel.

Every panel is unique.

______

Ed. note: "Huizenga-ish"?

Rorty's wake

No one writes like Heidi Julavits: "The daughter of dour pragmatists who prefaced many a conversation with the phrase, 'In the wake of Rorty,' my wife initially mistook me as a source of peculiar brightness."

Read her short story "Wooden Apple Core" at Significant Objects, as Believer week draws to a close.

Believer notes — update!

V. This week, worlds collide, as Believer writers take the Significant Objects challenge and imbue random objects with enormous meaning for eBay hijinks/charity.

First up is Damion Searls (translator extraordinaire, author of the superb collection What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going, editor of Thoreau's journals, president of the United States) on a Bubblebath Teapot. Coming up: Justin Taylor, Trinie Dalton, Miranda Mellis, and...Heidi Julavits!

(My Significant Objectifying last year: this attractive cow vase.)

Disambiguations™ for August 26, 2009

I.
Just a bit more on the Invisible Library and the I.L. exhibit at Poets & Writers and on the American Short Fiction blog...

II.
From an old Light Reading post:

Amy Hempel was not born in 1851. The last name of the novelist who edits The Believer is Julavits rather than Julawitz. Balzac’s first name is Honoré, not Henri.

III.
Paul Krugman:

In my column last Monday, I made a joke about the Swiss that fell flat with some readers. Also, the Swiss don’t wear lederhosen.

IV.
More Jing Wei—yaks!

V.
Sweeney on The Sin of Harold Diddlebock.

Goats and raves

In the NYT, Dennis on the films of Brillante Ma Mendoza: "But the one scene that gained instant notoriety at Cannes was less confrontational than surreal: a stray goat wanders into the theater, setting off an antic chase. The reality that inspired it was, if anything, stranger. “In that province there was a crocodile that went inside one of the cinemas,” Mr. Mendoza said.

Stray questions for Heidi: "I’m writing lyrically maximal allegories about the absurdly doomed human condition of pregnant ladies at bath house raves."

"Multiple sticks of butter"

I.
At 46, Doreen Giuliano reinvented herself. She dyed her hair blond and tanned at a salon. She left her white seven-bedroom, colonial-style house for a spare basement apartment three miles away. She took on a new name, and for about a year, she said, she rode her bicycle around her new neighborhood, trying to attract the gaze of a young man whom she badly wanted to get close to.
This was no midlife crisis, though. It was a one-woman sting operation.
—Kareem Fahim, "Disguised Mother woos Juror in Bid to Free Son," NYT

II.
His writings were not the unpunctuated breathless screedlike verses you might expect, but on the other hand they weren't much better. He had apparently decided that the crime novel was the essential building block of literature, the constituent unit of its DNA, and he had set about reducing and recombining it—I could just about see the wheels turning in his head—much the way punk rockers had cloned and distilled and chopped up the standard Chuck Berry guitar riff. Each story, if that's what those things could be called, was a paragraph long, titled and signed, and each resembled a page of a crime novel if you were trying to read it while it whipped by on a conveyor belt. —Pinakothek

III.
I must now reveal my grievous shortcoming as a cuber: I never learned the algorithms — the sequences of moves that, when performed a set number of times, guarantee that the colored squares will line up right. I worried that these tools, borrowed from someone else, might interfere with the intense intimacy with nonverbal thinking that the cube affords. And when you solve it by your own lights: the relief! When it first clicked for me, in 1983, I allowed myself a moment of pure self-admiration: I had pursued the right roads, doubled back on the right occasions, executed the right programs, kept the right goals in my head and seen the thing through. It seemed amazing: my brain works.
—Virginia Heffernan, The Medium, NYT Mag


IV.As rents have moved up, however, and all I have done is move my bed to where my dresser used to be, those solicitous questions have grown fewer. It’s not rent control, but I am fast approaching the rent level known as “the steal,” the place where one becomes the object of envy.
I have earned this by doing nothing (much like a bottle of fine wine that improves by simply sitting on a shelf, or, more accurately, like the leak in my ceiling that always dries itself out eventually), but that is O.K. Every day in this city, people earn far more doing far less.
—Sloane Crosley, "Little Victories," NYT

V.
Spelt, to my eye, didn’t look like farro, and from a stovetop behavioral standpoint, it quickly distinguished itself. In a panic I called my personal farro expert, Jennifer DeVore, explaining I couldn’t find farro so instead I bought. . . . “Oh, no,” she interrupted. “You didn’t buy spelt.” Farro cooks in about 45 minutes; we cooked our spelt for four hours, and even then the result was extremely al dente. We threw in multiple sticks of butter, gallons of stock and $13 worth of grated Parmesan, but the spelt remained stoically flavor-impervious. We served it anyway. Contrary to the claims of Hildegard von Bingen, a 12th-century spelt enthusiast, our guests did not find that eating it “makes the spirit of man light and cheerful.”
—Heidi Julavits, NYT Mag

Table-Talk of Parkus Grammaticus for November 12, 2008

I. Everything and nothing: In Slate, Dzyd Jessica identifies a headline habit at the NYT:

Consider: "Bigger Is Better, Except When It's Not"—a 2007 article looking at body size in sports. "Smaller Can Be Better (Except When It's Not)"—a tech piece from 2004. "A Marriage Penalty, Except When It Isn't"—on couples and the tax code, 2003. This is the Times headline as koan, inviting readers to suspend in-the-box thinking and seek enlightenment below the fold. The style presents thesis and antithesis; it embraces binary thinking yet disavows it; it builds dichotomies and collapses them. There are good uses of this technique, except when there aren't, as a sampling from the last three months attests.

II. New Triple Canopy.

III. The return of Pinakothek—vintage Sante:

"Florence" has reached our couple two decades after its release through the medium of oldies radio--a medium of chattering middle-aged men, audibly overweight, short-sleeved even in the dead of winter, who are capable of putting on the spookiest sides without seeming to notice the weirdness as they jabber on about trivia before and after.

(Thanks to Levi for the nudge)

IV. Speaking of Sante: I'll be on an LWC panel with him and some others on 11/22 (Sat.) at 11:45 a.m. The topic? "From Blogs to Books and Back." Back—to what, blogs??? Then do I get to go back again, to books?

V. Speaking of Levi: More Bolaño material at I've Been Reading Lately. And here he imagines Maud Newton's flight, via Anthony Powell.

VI. Annnnnd...one last time: Me + Heidi + Alec Baldwin + Will Eno + more = tonight.

Table-Talk of Parkus Grammaticus for July 28, 2008

I. Short-story wizard Deb Olin Unferth's first novel, Vacation, is coming out soon (the unofficial prequel to Personal Days?!)—and there's already a nifty trailer for it:



There is a plan for Deb and I to read together at KGB in December, along with the mysterious Heidi Julavits........and speaking of HJ—she and I will be introducing something Believer-y at Symphony Space in November.

No need to mark your calendars now—I will remind you about these things constantly in the intervening months!

II. Wait—speaking of KGB—I'll be reading there this Thursday! More reminders soon...

III. Dzyd Mollie wonders:

[S]ay you were to construct a speculative Venn diagram of 'People who are familiar with the movie Once and/or independent Irish rock band the Frames' and 'People who are familiar with Mary Worth (in a nonironic fashion).' You would probably project a very, very small overlapping space..."

(That's an exceptionally limiting Venn diagram...but can it match this one?)

IV. There should be a flip-book about...the making of a flip-book.

V. Rounding out today's Table-talk, a note from Dzyd Luc:

"Here's an interesting variant on the Ouroboros. It's an emblem by Maurice Scève—the viper's suicide: 'to give you life I give myself death'—and I found it on the excellent blog A Journey Round My Skull."


Hard to tell exactly what's going on here, but: Is the serpent spilling its own blood to provide nourishment for its spawn? Eagle-eyed Dzyds, please call in.

(Speaking of Luc: new post—at last!—up at his Pinakothek.)

Dizzies Newsfeeds™ for Saturday, August 4

1. Via Jane:

“There’s a huge market for it with very little advertising,” Ms. Herald said. “Customers are great and spread it by word of mouth.”

What is she talking about? Would you believe—accessories made of duct tape?

2. An interesting post on OgreCave, regarding criticism of role-playing games, that mentions Heidi's inaugural Believer essay.

Reading — reviewing — powering up

Just a reminder that I'll be reading tonight at Tompkins Square Park (no relation), with Lore Segal and Lynne Tillman. More info here and here. It's for BOMB again.

I'm planning to read another bit of The Dizzies, but the day's still young—maybe I'll read something else?

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My review of Taylor Antrim's debut novel, The Headmaster Ritual, is up today at Salon.

Speaking of reviews, "The Crisis in American Book Reviewing," a panel at this year's BEA, featured Believer Heidi. You can listen to it here.

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From audio to video—Dizzyhead Brent sends us "Scenes From an Idiot's Marriage":

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Gotta go address Powerful Goodness now—see you tonight?!

Heidi — Mollie — Visualization

I was going to post this yesterday—Heidi is interviewed by Robert Birnbaum. (Via the other Ed.)

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In other developments, intern of yore Mollie Wilson now blogs! Her site is called Restricted View, dwelling mostly on matters theatrical. (Sample lede: "Quick, what’s your favorite Restoration comedy? I’ll wait while you decide.") But she also writes about Law & Order, the show she loved so much she once gave it up for Lent! Highly recommended.

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And via Equanimity, check out this Periodic Table of Visualization, which reminds me of Michael Gerber and Jonathan Schwarz's Periodic Table of Rejected Elements (originally in The Atlantic, reproduced here).