Psychogeographies

Greater New York is in some ways like a house. Manhattan is the living room, with the TV and the stereo and the good furniture, where guests are entertained. Brooklyn and Queens are the bedrooms where the family sleeps, and the Bronx is the attic, full of inflammable crap that nobody has any use for. Staten Island is the backyard, and Long Island is the detached garage, so filled up with paint cans, workbenches, and motorboat that you can’t get the car in it anymore. Hudson County over in New Jersey is the basement, with the furnace and the freezer and the stacks of old newspapers, and the Jersey swamps are the toilet. Westchester is the den with paneling and a fake kerosene lamp, and Connecticut is the guest room, with starched curtains and landscape prints. The kitchen is way up in Albany, which means the food is always cold by the time it gets to the table, and the formal dining room was torn down by William Zeckendorf and friends back in the early fifties. —Donald Westlake, Dancing Aztecs (quoted by Sarah Weinman)

*

The morning sun picks out an apartment house, a cigar store, streams through the dusty windows of a loft. The racket swells with the light. These shoes are killing me, she said, taking the cover off the typewriter. Main Central is up to forty-six. Did you read about the earthquake?

Looms, shears, jackhammers, trolley cars, voices, add to the din. And in the quieter streets the hawker with the pushcart moves slowly by. Badabadabada O Gee! Hawkers of vegetables, plants, fruit. Badabadabada
O Gee!

In half a million rooming-house rooms the call penetrates ill-fitting windows. The boy who came to be a writer is waked in his mid-town room and dresses for his shift on the elevator. In Chelsea the girl who came to be an actress launders her stockings. The boy who was going to Wall Street sprawls on his bed, wincing as each cry cuts into his dream of the smell of fresh hay and warm milk. A deep blast rises, drowning the sound of hawkers, children, automobiles. The Conte di Savoia steams up the river; wine from Capri, olive oil from Spain, figs and dates from North Africa.

Shouting screaming kids fill the streets, playing baseball, football, hopscotch, jump-rope, dodging swift-moving trucks and taxis. Down Fifth Avenue marches a May Day parade sixty thousand strong. Solidarity forever, solidarity forever, the portentous tramp, tramp of regimented feet; slogans called, banners flying. Up lower Broadway an open car moves slowly through the yelling throng and on its pulled-back hood, laughing, waving into the snowstorm that flutters thickly downward from high-up windows, sits a returned aviator, explorer, movie actor, champion chess player, the first man to walk the length of Manhattan backwards. —from John Cheever's introduction to the 1939 New York City Guide (quoted by Jason Boog)

Yet [New York] was much more than a glittering modern city for Lovecraft. It was that in the early months of his stay, but it soon came to be seen as a darker, older, and far more protean city—at least on his many walks in the dead of night. As he threaded his way through a maze of tenuous and delicate mental impressions, in the night shadows and dawn glimmerings of New York City he found a new dream-city that could function simultaneously as an inspirational fever-dream, as a text, as an antiquarian reliquary, as a sort of psychic comforter to aid him in his battle against the mundane and horrifyingly noisy reality of daylight hours. —David Haden, Walking With Cthulhu: H.P. Lovecraft as Psychogeographer (New York: 1924–26)

New "Believer"

I. September Believer is out! The one and only Magic Molly (aka Molly Young) on the world of immersive retail; Geoff Dyer (!!? wow!) on Roland Barthes; Damion Searls, translator of Hans Keilson, the centenarian "genius" (F. Prose, NYTBR), on the writer's work—and how his interest in H.K. began with a mistake any bookstore wanderer can identify with ("Ingeborg Bachmann’s perfect autobiographical story ‘Youth in an Austrian Town’ mentions a movie, Romance in a Minor Key, and I misremembered the title, thinking that this book, Comedy in a Minor Key, by Hans Keilson, was it”); Jason Boog with a fascinating look at the epitome of N.Y. bohemia in the ’30s, the Raven Poetry Circle—check out this tantalizing bit:

D’Harcourt may have wooed her with his favorite topic, his unpublished novel entitled Ro Dran and the Year 90,000. He described it this way: “It is an erotic story of love. It is greater in its imaginative quality than The Arabian Nights. It is the most fantastic, most imaginative, most swiftly moving, most romantic story ever written.” D’Harcourt believed, like generations of frustrated writers both before and after his odd lifetime, that a novel could save him.

—plus your Hornby/Pendarvis/Marcus columns, reviews, a Weird Al Yankovic interview (!), some poems, a report from the Gulf, sandwiches in literature...and more...



II.

Speaking of Nick Hornby—why am I just learning about this collaboration with Ben Folds? (Which also includes Pomplamoose?!) And how great is it that N.H. is wearing a Believer T-shirt?? (A: Very!)

Boog-ie down productions

Levi reads one of the most enjoyable books of last year, Christopher J. Miller's The Cardboard Universe and thinks to bounce it off both Steve Hely's How I Became a Famous Novelist (the other most enjoyable b. of l.y.) and Elif Batuman's The Possessed. (Perhaps not coincidentally, The Cardboard Universe found its way onto the Believer Book Award's shortlist.)

Here's a link to my take on Miller (from the L.A. Times), and to Jason Boog's related musing on "enhanced eBooks that don't exist yet" (at Galleycat):

Still, the encyclopedia format begs for some simple HTML coding in the eBook edition. When reading the book's individual encyclopedia entries, the reader should be able to jump between entries with the same ease as a print book--but the clunky Kindle interface just isn't built for this kind of browsing. With an iPad or tablet computer version, the author could actually embed a few sly Wikipedia entries or websites to help the reader find out more about the real life science fiction author lurking behind the pages of this funny book.

Which reminded me (prompted by Levi?) of my disappointed reaction to Eoin Colfer's Hitchhiker's Guide sequel:

"And Another Thing . . . " punctuates its increasingly tedious story line with entries from the "Guide," some of which show a glimmer of Adams-like spark. What if Colfer had let Arthur, Zaphod and company rest in peace and, instead, given us some approximation of the "Guide" itself? Rather than follow the pesky rules of plot, Colfer might have created something truly anarchic, in the spirit of the original, but in a form Adams could only dream of.

A book consisting only of discrete entries might sound daunting, but, in fact, the structure would be liberating. And any time the reader got confused, a button could be depressed, and those two beautiful words -- DON'T PANIC! -- would come swimming out of the e-ink ether.

Unrelated thought: Levi should become a "book model"! Dapper dude!

"The Good Fight"

The new Believer is out—it is just WOW—you need to have it. Adam Thirlwell (whom I've dubbed "too good to blog about")...Jason Boog on GI Joe and war...Greil Marcus on Joy Division and more...short reviews...Bishop/Lowell letters.........interviews with Will Eno, Bruce Jay Friedman (by Amy Sohn), Nico Muhly, Diane Williams....a Joshua Clover poem!?—and this piece by Dzyd James, about a failed run for a state house seat........:

I was a Democrat who disdained most other Democrats—suicide in a Democratic primary—and finally hired my old assistant, a fearless twenty-six-year-old who shared my “I love it because I hate it” philosophy of politics. Aryah’s job for the first few days was to stand behind me while I talked to voters at their doors, then ridicule my performance. I was nervous, talked too fast, apologized when I asked for someone’s email address, and generally squirmed like a kid whose ball had gone through each voter’s window. Aryah’s attitude was that we were trying to help people by interrupting their dinner and telling them about the great James Browning. He told old people that I was going to make universal health care a reality, people with toys in their yards that I was going to get more money for the public schools, people with Chesapeake Bay license plates that I would do something about Maryland’s terrible air quality. Listening to Aryah talk, I started to like the sound of this Browning guy and lost some of my shame.

Dizzies Newsfeeds™ for September 5

New Believer is out!...Mediabistro has an article ("Scoring an Article at Your Dream Pub") about an article in this issue (Jason Boog's excellent "Skinning the Americans"), which I can't read, as it's behind a subscription wall; it possibly contains some quotes from me...who knows?!...Really cool piece on Borges by Gustavo Turner...Some Psychic activity...Alter-Ed has news of Nicholson Baker's upcoming book...(I guess you can't say he never does the same book twice—A Box of Matches and Room Temperature were perhaps variations on the strategy of The Mezzanine—but his range is impressive and I'm thinking about Perec these days and Baker might be one of the more Perecqian writers working today, in terms of appetite, range? This new book is "an 800-page opus"!...vs. the superslim Checkpoint, which really would work as a playlet)...("writers working today" = FormulaWatch™ would not be pleased!)...Want to inaugurate a new meme/contest via Jenny D but will do so next week...Sure, it's preaching to the converted, but this might be the hottest Atkinson blog post yet..."smirking Barbary ape"..."every limb-scattered intervention"..."teeters on the cliff-edge of nonsense"...This Poetry Foundation podcast is pretty great (listening to New Yorkers read aloud from those "Poetry in Motion" things on the subway)...