Ikeabouros — Five for Frightening

Get yours today!

(Via Manguso)

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At Levi's invitation, I listed a few blood-curdling reads over at The Second Pass. Jenny D, James Hynes, Will Schofield, Andrea Janes, Jonathan Crowley, and others weigh in with their seasonal favorites...

My former students will recognize the Poe-Lovecraft-King trifecta...and in a freakish twist, one of my former student's stories is among my picks!

Oulipoboros & more

Levi asks: "Is N+7 an Ouroboros?"

(Harry Mathews says no; others say yes!)

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"Jenny reads the paper":

He may have inherited his knack for industrial design from his maternal grandfather, a mechanical engineer who was one of the inventors of the Kit Kat candy bar and the machinery to mass-produce it.

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Devin brings back evidence of the lost John Lennon/Dr. Who episode.

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Bonus link: Levi's new SF reading list.

I started this post a week ago

I. Jenny D on her new feline: "His name is Max, and he used to frequent a fruit stall in Brighton Beach."

II. Speaking of which: Over Xmas I reread—quite at random!—A Cricket in Times Square...and I just saw David Ulin's appreciation of it at the L.A. Times. I didn't know it was the book's 50th anniversary!

All in all, I enjoyed revisiting the book—though I did raise my eyebrows during the Chinatown scenes...

III. Dogs in New York: The New Yorker
on the NYC cult, ca. , around Charles Portis's great novel The Dog of the South

IV. Speaking of Portis: My friend in Little Rock, John Moran, alerted me to this tidbit in a local paper: one of its bloggers noticed that the film version of Portis's first novel, Norwood, is now streaming on Netflix!

Joe Namath and Dom DeLuise are in it...

Here's what I said about it in a footnote to my 2003 Portis piece in The Believer:

If the film of True Grit somewhat revises the book, the less-known screen adaptation of Norwood (Jack Haley, Jr., 1970), also scripted by Marguerite Roberts, scrambles both Norwood and True Grit. Glen Campbell (Grit’s LaBoeuf) here plays Norwood, and Kim Darby (Mattie) is Rita Lee Chipman; Mattie’s unacknowledged teenage longing for LaBoeuf (“If he is still alive and should happen to read these pages, I will be happy to hear from him,” Mattie writes at the novel’s close) becomes consummated in Norwood, or just about. Roberts’s Grit script shunted Mattie in favor of the bigger-than-life Rooster; for this film the screenwriter dilutes some of Norwood’s cool by revealing that Rita Lee has been made pregnant by another man before they meet—a significant, possibly feminist tweak of the original plot. (Incidentally, the contra-hippie theme that runs through Portis, made more explicit in Gringos, is elaborated in this film, most notably when Campbell-as-Norwood takes the stage after a numbing sitar exhibition. He sings a good-timey country number presciently called “Repo Man” to the uncomprehending, wigged-out crowd, until a more lysergically inclined combo unseats him.) As it’s unlikely I’ll ever have the chance to write about this film again, let it be noted that the date of Norwood’s theatrical release, a year after Midnight Cowboy won the Academy Award for Best Picture, lends Campbell-as-Norwood a certain Voightian frisson during the scenes in New York, where he sticks out like a Stetsoned sore thumb. Which makes the bit in Cowboy where Voight regards himself in the mirror and says approvingly, “John Wayne,” a sort of anticipatory gloss on Wayne co-star Campbell’s future appearance in Gotham. (The celluloid True Grit also spawned a 1975 sequel, Rooster Cogburn, starring Wayne and Katharine Hepburn.)

V. Speaking of New York: Doree Shafrir put together a list of her favorite New York fiction...Personal Days is in there between Joseph O'Neill's Netherland and Richard Price's Lush Life!

Species of spaces

Jenny has a thoughtful, well-argued, and zestily written post about attempting—and failing—to get into the spirit of Anthony Powell (thanks to U. Chicago Press's free e-book offer)...and yet I couldn't disagree more!

I had just (like 15 minutes before) been reading a chunk of the first volume, A Question of Upbringing, on my little ipod* before seeing Jenny's post, and was feeling very lucky to be re-entering Powell's universe. (Can't quite recall when I finished the twelfth and last volume, but it has been well over a decade since I read Question.) The passage she quotes with irritation brought me great pleasure, as did many others; in fact, pre-reading-Jenny's-post, I was trying to figure out how to copy and paste the following little bit to blog. It's Nick Jenkins, talking to his house master Le Bas; Jenkins and his roommate Stringham have just received a surprise visit from Jenkins's black-sheep relative Uncle Giles, traces of whose smoking can still be detected.

'I am afraid my uncle came to see me, sir. He lit a cigarette without thinking.'
'Where is your uncle?'
'I have just been getting Cattle to let him out of the house.'
'How did he get in?'
'I think he came in at the front door, sir. I am not sure.'
I watched Stringham, from where he stood behind Le Bas, make a movement as of one climbing a rope, following these gestures with motions of his elbows to represent the beating of wings, both dumb-shows no doubt intended to demonstrate alternative methods of ingress possible employed by Uncle Giles.

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Powell's pre-war, pre-Dance novels are decidedly comic novels (Afternoon Men is my favorite, but all are pretty good); Dance isn't, but it's full of passages like this—I can't get enough! I love in particular the way it's choreographed, the way we get (almost by surprise) a very particular sense of space: We're focused on the dialogue between Nick and an irate Le Bas, while in another part of the room, visible only to Nick (and us), Stringham is goofing around. (The "Dance," appropriately, is full of such choreographies, particularly in the numerous party scenes.)

I also like how it's not 100% clear to us what Stringham is trying to get across—the humor reaches full impact with the narrator's explanation, which is itself hilarious in its ornateness: "dumb-shows intended to demonstrate alternative methods of ingress."

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*This is a story in itself...

Disambiguations™ for November 18, 2010

I. Levi on Stephen King's Christine! (Ed Trivia: Christine was the first King book I read.)

II. Jenny ends her excellent-quote-reproducing musing on Life with an intriguing parenthetical: "Vision of alternate universe in which Sylvia Plath encountered Keith Richards that winter."

III. Reading this NYT obit for Baby Marie Osborne, I was surprised to see an exclamation point...and then a double exclamation point...and then a triple exclamation point!

In 1933, as her first marriage deteriorated, Ms. Osborne took a job in a dime store. It was a low point. Then came an astonishing call from the superintendent of the Colorado Children’s Home, who informed her that she had been adopted as an infant by the Osbornes! And that a man who said he was her real father, H. L. Shriver, had become a tycoon!! And that he had left her a substantial inheritance!!!

IV. And you can't talk about exclamation points without thinking of...Harry Stephen Keeler! A fresh (2 days old!!) intro to the one-and-only "Paper-blackener of Bagdad on the Lakes" by none other than HSK Society head honcho Richard Polt, at The Chiseler!!!

Book Notes™ With Ed Park

I. Closing out my D&D/RPG "trilogy" of tales (thus far comprising "Welcome to Tyosen™!" and "Cow Vase") is "Dungeon Masters Guide," my contribution to Bound to Last: 30 Writers on Their Most Cherished Book! (Sean Manning put it together.) Pub date is October 26. The interviewer inside my head wants to step in for a moment.

Q: Are all these pieces part of some greater work?

A: I can't answer that right now, I'm sorry!

II. Speaking of "Cow Vase"—it will be included in the forthcoming book Significant Objects (Fantagraphics, 2011)!

III. F.S. Yvonne Woon's YA novel Dead Beautiful is out—what a cool website!

IV. Jenny D on her Kindle experience.

V. Lev G on his Yale experience.

VI. My sister went to Montreal and got me this Ed the Happy Clown comic. Someone should write something about Chester Brown's notes on his old work—the notes are equally fascinating!

VII. I think that's all for now...

Two bits

I. Jenny: "[T]hey are like the thinking man's Jonathan Kellerman, but still only the dimly thinking man."

II. Charles Lamb via that epitome of modernity, Levi, mourning the passing of the...sundial:

What a dead thing is a clock, with its ponderous embowelments of lead and brass, its pert or solemn altar-like structure, and silent heart-language of the old dial! It stood as the garden god of Christian gardens. Why is it almost every where vanished?

The wedge

I.

I like the British genre of the review which, while otherwise favorable, enumerates a paragraph or two of errors in the penultimate paragraph:

Murdoch’s youthful mind is as sharp and polished as a sword, but Conradi’s editing is not. Random footnotes pop up like glove puppets interrupting a soliloquy, to explain that “Je t’aime” means “I love you” and that Baudelaire is a French poet. There is no index, there are typos galore and a footnote that refers to the missing last page of Thompson’s final letter to Murdoch is itself tantalisingly unfinished — “how Frank signed off his last letter we will probably never”.

—Jenny D, Light Reading

II.

This is the place in a review where critics tend to wedge in the sentence that says, in so many words, “This isn’t a perfect book.” And “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” surely isn’t. But there isn’t much about it I’d want to change. It has brains and pacing and nerve and heart, and it is uncommonly endearing. You might put it down only to wipe off the sweat.—last paragraph of Dwight Garner's NYT review of Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Disambiguations™ for September 24, 2009

I. I've updated ed-park.com, for the first time in months! A few readings sprinkled throughout the fall...

II. The NYT on The New Literary History of America—our own Hua was on the editorial board. Hua explains:

Each essay is loosely fixed to a moment of "making"--the fashioning of a new idea, the publication of a book, a turning point-of-a-speech, a conversation that would outline a movement, the birth of cool, or simply a fleeting spark of a thought that would continue on as someone else's design for life. As such, our sense of the literary was canonical yet, at times, weird and wide-ranging--the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous and the publication of Linda Lovelace's autobiography seem to be the two non-"literary" entries critics have gravitated toward.

Other Disamiguation-fave contributors include Douglas Wolk, Howard Hampton, Joshua Clover, and more...

III. Dennis talks to Lars Von Trier via satellite.

IV. Andrew Gelman on Steve Hely's How I Became a Famous Novelist (a book I keep thinking about).

V. Jenny remembers Barbara Johnson and reproduces her syllabus from 1992. (Also follow for a link to Lindsay Waters' remembrance.)

VI. The Significant Objects project is still going strong—here's Stephen Elliott ("The Adderall Diaries" = play on "The Basketball Diaries"?) on some Hawaiian utensils:

I bought these Hawaiian utensils, a wooden spoon and fork, while living in Alaska in the mid-eighties with my first wife. We were living outside the Eskimo village Wales on the western edge of the state, three miles outside of Tin City Air Force Station. The Air Force station was the location of a long-range radar for air surveillance. It was originally built in the 1950s but Reagan gave it a serious upgrade during his successful bid to destabilize the Russians. From the top of a snowdrift you could see boats pulling into ports larger than many football stadiums, carrying steel arms more than a mile in length.

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.

Invisible Library goes invisible...

The London exhibit has closed...fortunately, Jenny D was there and has some more details for us. She was especially captivated by the novels of Dorothy Sayers' creation, Harriet Vane:

Wet, unpredictable

Stelarc is commented on in Sheck's A Monster's Notes.

A remix of my remix of my AMN review would include this recent Telegraph story:

Writing on his website, Stelarc explains part of the reason for the ear is a potentially extended Bluetooth system, where the receiver and speaker are position inside his mouth.

Jenny wrote about a book on Stelarc in her "field guide to genetic engineering and bodily enhancement" a while back:

A demonstration of his prosthetic Extended Arm brings tears to one essayist's eyes, reminding her of the persistence and pathos of bodily attachments. Whether it's pierced and suspended from cables, scaffolded in metal prostheses, or penetrated by a miniature camera that broadcasts from inside his intestinal tract, Stelarc's body remains "wet, unpredictable, emotively disorderly, itself a technological marvel."

Tonight!

I'll be jumping on the 2/3 and taking it to Times Square and then taking the 7 into Queens and then (whew!) getting on the G train to Greenpoint*, Brooklyn, and emerging there to read at the Word bookstore. Please come if you live (or linger) in that area! Reading is at 7:30. Brian Baise and Deb Olin Unferth are also reading.

Here's the Word store site; here's what some site says; and this is from something called the Brooklyn Based Tip Sheet (I think that's what it's called):

THURSDAY: Word of the Ghost
Word bookstore's ongoing Indie Press Night returns with two glittering literati: novelist Deb Olin Unferth, whose lauded debut novel, Vacation, was published by McSweeneys, and Believer founding editor Ed Park, author of Personal Days and publisher of the quirky New-York Ghost. 7:30 pm, 126 Franklin Street, Greenpoint.

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Otherwise...if you're in the Morningside Heights area, go see Dzyds in conversation at Book Culture:

Join Columbia University professor Jenny Davidson for a discussion about her latest book, Breeding: A Partial History of the Eighteenth Century. She will be joined by Vassar professor Julie Park**, for a conversation about the book.

JENNY DAVIDSON is an associate professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. She is the author of two novels, Heredity and The Explosionist, and a critical work, Hypocrisy and the Politics of Politeness: Manners and Morals from Locke to Austen.

JULIE PARK is an assistant professor of English at Vassar College. She was an editor of Eighteenth-Century Fiction from 2003-2008. Her book, The Self and It: Novel Objects and Material Subjects in 18th-Century England, is forthcoming this year from Stanford University Press. She has published articles on the history of the novel and the dolls, automata and fetishes of eighteenth-century England in several academic journals.

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*where someone is looking for a time machine
**no relation

Your most humble and obedient servant: Table-Talk for December 26, 2008

I. Dzyd Brian revisits his teenage sonneteer self, and more:

An hour or two ago I dreamt that I and some coworkers were missing our top rows of teeth. On the bare gums in the tops of our mouths, we wore "reversible" dentures.

II. John Lennon's "paranoid close readings of some lyrics from Ram." (Via.)


III. Dzyd Andrew's Flaubert's Parrot :

I prefer to think that this newspaper was clipped in Manhattan, where the paperback was purchased by a wonderful bespectacled clean-shaven man. My dad lived in Manhattan at the time, and I lived with my mom across the Tappan Zee Bridge in Rockland County. I visited dad in 80s Bachelor Manhattan every other weekend, sometimes every weekend. I might’ve touched this newspaper when I was four years old!

(Also see: "an ouroboros of one's own").

IV. An interview with Jenny D. at the Columbia Political Review:

When I sign a letter “Your most obedient and humble servant,” is that a falsification of my relationship with the person to whom I have addressed the letter? What about if I ask my servant to say that I am “not at home” to visitors—is that safely perceived as a conventional “white lie,” or do I actually degrade my own truthfulness by practicing these forms of supposedly innocent deception?

Shades of The Young Visiters...

...in Jenny D's The Purple Cow! This tantalizing page contains the line: "Just two years ago, he had won seven cars."

Last week — Teaching notes

I. Via L.G. Thos.: George and Weedon Grossmith's The Diary of a Nobody is now online as a blog. (I'll be teaching this book next semester.)

II. Speaking of teaching: Last Tuesday, for my final short story class, I had my students read various short-shorts, including the liner notes to The Best of Leonard Cohen, which is one of my favorite very short collections of very short prose—exquisitely world-weary, self-deprecating, droll, and surprising.

Lady Midnight
This was finished in the Henry Hudson Hotel on 58th Street in New York. Yafa was doing tricks with her silver bangles. I owe her the last verse. It was recorded in Nashville. The voice is uncertain. In those days it took me fifteen minutes to decide whether or not I should wear my cap when I went outside and a half hour whether or not I should take it off when I came back.

Then today I saw that someone at The Millions blog included them on Friday (as part of its year-in-reading series)!

III. Also last week: Jenny D's post on Oscar Wilde's reading habits mentioned W.H. Mallock's book The New Republic. Why did the name "Mallock" ring a bell?

A: Because he is the author of A Human Document, which Tom Phillips transformed into A Humument...topic of my final Friday class!

I was also happy to find that A Human Document is available in its entirety as a Google Book.

Dizzies Press Release: "Jonathan Safran Foer: Literature and Terror"

At Columbia next Tuesday (12/2), DLC* Jenny D moderates a conversation with Jonathan Safran Foer at Columbia's Institute for Religion, Culture, & Public Life.

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Marie M.M. on that LWC books & blogging panel...

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LIGHT POSTING HERE FOR A WHILE—HAPPY THANKSGIVING...





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*Dizzies Life Coach

Table-Talk of Parkus Grammaticus for October 29, 2008

I. Jacket copy: "El demento supremo!" —Tom Robbins on Todd McEwen's Fisher's Hornpipe
(And—wow—you can get a copy for 99 cents!)

II. Jenny has adopted the versatile "Table Talk" format...Here she mentions the squabble between two sisters over the manuscript of Hedge Fund Wives...Here's more...and more again...(The book's website, alas, appears to have been taken down; it contained an excerpt that ended with this boldfaced declaration, complete with Keeleresque name: "And that's when I made up my mind that I would rather lose every single penny of my money, rather than let Thorne Van Buren get his pasty little hands on it.")

III. The PTSNBN now links to this blog?!

IV. Sloane Crosley's favorite essayists.

V. Jacket Copy II: Richard Stern's (actually Richard "G." Stern's) Europe: Or Up & Down With Schreiber and Baggish (1961) has a blurb-filled bio on the back. I raised my eyebrows at Terry "Sothern." But then came...Jean Didion!

VI. "Sometimes I re-use floss...": NYT on digital-jingle-meister Joel Moss Levinson:

After a few semesters at George Washington University, where he declared that his major was medieval weaponry, he dropped out. Soon, he was living out of his car — happily, he says.

The art of the index

I.
René Daumal (at AJRMS)

II.
Jenny Davidson

III.
Laura Miller

Table-Talk of Parkus Grammaticus for August 14, 2008

I. Your next desktop pattern?

II. Your favorite president—rendered in hair. Is Franklin "Pelano" Roosevelt a beautiful typo?! (Via MUG)

III. Poetry update:

A) Dzyd Carla on memoirs by Manguso and Lavinia Greenlaw.

B) BoingBoing picks up on R. Kikuo Johnson's "Poem as Comic Strip" take on A.E. Stalling's "Recitative"—perfect for summer! Although it's actually not that hot out here these days...

IV. Terry Teachout on Richard Stark, in Commentary—Stark is being republished by University of Chicago Press:

The Hunter” (208 pp., $14 paper), “The Man with the Getaway Face” (224 pp., $14 paper) and “The Outfit” (224 pp., $14 paper) can and should be read in sequence as a trilogy–I would have published them in an omnibus volume–rather than separately.

I read "The Outfit" first, not knowing these three were linked, and there was a chapter of recapping that made me think I'd made the wrong decision...but then it was on with the show!

As I read on in admiration, I formed some mental connections....reading "outfit" in a clothing sense...this was one well-fitting outfit...which reminded me of Sasha Frere-Jones's New Yorker piece on Spoon, and their song "Fitted Shirt"...Though I slightly misremembered SFJ's conclusion ("Daniel is not about to tell jokes or put on a lampshade, and if this makes the band’s performances predictable the effect is balanced by the dignity that comes from self-control")—the dignity/self-control part is certainly true, though The Outfit is pretty unpredictable, especially the rather radical (and exciting!) messing with chronology...a precursor to Pulp Fiction...