Table-talk of Parkus Grammaticus for April 13-14

I. The _________: Dzs Linksmeister-General Thomas sends in Martijn Hendriks's Give Us Today Our Daily Terror, an "[e]xact copy of Hitchcock’s 1963 film The Birds from which all birds have been removed."



II. In the NYT: Going by Marily Stasio's review, a Henry Darger–like character figures in a new crime novel:

The object of unhealthy devotion in THE GENIUS (Putnam, $24.95) isn’t a person, it’s a monumental work of art — some 135,000 drawings comprising a singular vision of a surreal world — discovered when Victor Cracke, the reclusive artist, disappears from the slum apartment where he has spent decades drawing his insane masterpiece and stashing it away in cardboard boxes.

Also: Dzyd/Psychic E. crooner Sarah's "The Cure" is in the magazine's "Lives" section today (an excerpt from her forthcoming book, The Two Kinds of Decay)...The droll Jeff Byles (in last week's City section): "The idea of blocking off streets so children can play rousing games of skelly and the like dates to at least 1916, when worried city officials called for shutting 100 streets in congested areas during certain times of day." (Skelly!)...Also from last week:

The bizarre-looking assemblage, which was once known as Float Bridge No. 4 and which dates to 1911, offers a sharp contrast to the park’s pathways and ornamental grasses, and its presence has not gone unnoticed by local residents.

“It’s junk, and it ought to be removed,” said Jeff Jadin, a retiree who lives in Trump Place, not far from the park, and was staring at the machinery the other day from a bench near the waterfront.... —Martin Pollak, "Hope Floats"

(My Blogger "profile" was taken just up the river...)

III. I'll be doing a pre-publication reading from Personal Days this Wednesday (April 16) at that Keeler-friendly place known as the Mercantile Library, 17 E. 47th St., with Jane F. Kotapish...(I'll be announcing more reading dates shortly—both here and on the soon-to-be unveiled official site, ed-park.com.) ¶ I just got the first copies of the U.K. edition, delightful design!

Table-talk of Parkus Grammaticus for February 22

I. Serial reading: "When I was in middle school, I went through a period where I read little but Agatha Christie novels. (For those of you keeping score at home, that period followed the one wherein I read little but Doc Savage novels and preceded the one wherein I read little but Star Trek novels.)" —I've Been Reading Lately

II. Are my pieces disappearing from the PTSNBN archives? I wanted to find some fact about Henry Darger, which I knew was somewhere in the long piece I did for the PTSNBN Education Supplement...but the article wasn't there anymore! I had to search via Google and then get the cached version. Pretty depressing.

Anyway, I've added the Darger piece to The Unarchivable. And then I remembered that a similar thing happened to my (much more recent) review in the LATBR of William Gibson's Spook Country, so I added that piece to the site as well....I couldn't even find a cached version, so the one I put up might differ from the final edited version. (Similarly, my LATBR review of a Peter Kuper book is nowhere to be found...)

Note for my memoirs: Just because it's online doesn't mean you shouldn't save a copy for yourself! Everything is going to disappear someday!

III. At Vertigo, a Sebald interview (in two installments): "[A]ll kinds of things can be a novel."

IV. The movie Ratatouille contains the word rejectamenta.

V. Over at The Fanzine, there's an excerpt from a novel by Andrew Lewis Conn, author of P.

"The hidden is more interesting": Three case studies

1.

[...]The paragraph quoted above is followed directly by a breathtaking instant of self-exposure: “For me,” Marsh writes, “to see this sour Dave Dexter Jr. is to remember the face of my father.”

My marginal note at that point: Marsh comes clean? Could this explain the gouts of contempt he sprays at Dexter’s ghost, the extremity of which have by this late point rendered the book irretrievably unpleasant? Marsh has written elsewhere — in this and other books — about his father, a Rust Belt racist (“angry,” “square,” “rednecked”) who hated rock ‘n’ roll, belittled his son for loving it, and withal was a working-class exemplar of “jaundiced snobbery and proud ignorance.” Now, father-hatred could be a compelling psychological explanation for the anti-Dexter excess. But no. Marsh lets fall the clear implication, refusing to follow up the psychic connection he has himself made and to which the reader is inevitably drawn — if only because its suggestion of the hidden is more interesting than what Marsh has made visible. —Devin McKinney on Dave Marsh, Hey Dullblog

2.

Reich’s preference for the exaggerated, at least in part, led him down the orgonomic path of starry-eyed prophetic cloud-busting. Reich’s story can thus be read as kind of allegory about psychoanalytic thought itself. Reich took up the least appealing parts of Freud and pursued them to their most absurd ends. Our inclination to ridicule Reich every few years becomes a way of conducting proxy skirmishes in the perpetual debate about Freud’s legacy and relevance. When we exaggerate the discontinuity in Reich’s life, casting him in dual mythical roles as Freud’s most promising student and Freud’s most berserk deserter, we seem to be staking out our own ambivalence to Freud’s discomfiting ideas. We incarnate in one person what seems most preposterous about psychoanalysis, and then we place that person at once as close to and as far away from Freud as we can. —Gideon Lewis-Kraus on Wilhelm Reich, Nextbook

3.

I think something curious and heretofore unacknowledged has been taking place, an unconscious disavowal on the part of some viewers and critics—a phenomenon that could make for a chapter in The Discovery of the Art of the Insane. Through misquoting, mishearing, and misreading, people have turned this careful scholar into a veritable Kinbote, a moral scapegoat to whom can be assigned all the darkest theories—as if he were the one who had applied the delicate wash of watercolor blood at the base of a severed head, or imagined the force-feeding of body parts to children. What do we want from John MacGregor? Perhaps this: to saddle him with all our deepest anxieties about the possible actions of Henry Darger, so that the madman-scholar can be rejected with a show of presumptuous indignation. It is the secret expiation required to enjoy Darger without tears. —EP on Henry Darger and John MacGregor, PTSNBNES

Shooting the Breeze

Over at The Millions, appropriately enough, there's information on the world's longest novel, Richard Grossman's Breeze Avenue. Four thousand (!) volumes, of 750 pages each...though it seems that not all of it is written, per se:

Thousands of pages of poetry are translated into other languages—among them, Hebrew, Chinese, American Sign Language and various programming languages— and then back translated to create interchangeable sub-elements of which Grossman claims there are 1,000,000.

The post also has a great Henry Darger quote I've never come across before (H.D.'s novel was 15,000+ pages long):

Darger is said to have commented: "This is what you can do when you have no radio or television."

(Via Conversational Reading.)

Knock it off

Somehow I never tire of these articles about counterfeit Chinese Harry Potter books.

These include “Harry Potter and the Half-Blooded Relative Prince,” a creation whose name in Chinese closely resembles the title of the genuine sixth book by Ms. Rowling, as well as pure inventions that include “Harry Potter and the Hiking Dragon,” “Harry Potter and the Chinese Empire,” “Harry Potter and the Young Heroes,” “Harry Potter and Leopard-Walk-Up-to-Dragon,” and “Harry Potter and the Big Funnel.”

Some borrow little more than the names of Ms. Rowling’s characters, lifting plots from other well-known authors, like J. R. R. Tolkien, or placing the famously British protagonist in plots lifted from well-known kung-fu epics and introducing new characters from Chinese literary classics like “Journey to the West.”

This reminds me of the way Darger had his Vivian Girls meet characters from The Wizard of Oz and other books. I'm also reminded of this bit in Dizzyhead Douglas's excellent Reading Comics, re the early success of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles:

Within months, comics stores' shelves were flooded with knockoffs and parodies and parodies of knockoffs—Adolescent Radioactive Black-Belt Hamsters, Aristocratic Xtraterrestrial Time-Traveling Thieves, Pre-Teen Dirty-Gene Kung-Fu Kangaroos (I swear I'm not making this up)...

* * *

In other news: Woah, the reading tonight has been written up at this cool blog called NYTimes.com!

And—New York mag likes the New-York Ghost, calling it "a wonder of both style and substance"!

Endings

To continue with today's sermon: I just read, in the current Artforum (Summer 2007), Lynne Tillman's piece on Stephen Shore's 1973 roadtrip journal/artwork, in which he just entered the facts of the trip—photos with brief descriptions, credit card receipts, meals, etc.

More curious than Shore's goal of an objective diary is his last entry on the last page.

AUG 11 1973
MIL[E]AGE: 8268
BREAKFAST: GABRIELLE'S PANCAKE HOUSE,

Shore stopped after a comma. He stopped midthought. He just gave it up. [...] [H]is abruptness or falling away, his refusal to follow his routine to the last, is a mystery that recasts the entire project.

This most tentative of conclusions reminded me of Henry Darger's journal, which ended with "What will it be?—" "Darger's terminal dash now seems fraught with drama—as if he knew, all along, that his time would come," wrote someone in the PTSNBN.