This Goat's Life

(Via Dzyd Zach)

An anecdoted discography of chance

John Darnielle reviews "everything that happens to be stacked up against or near the stereo." (Here's installment two.)

Sweet leaves

My latest Astral Weeks is "live" (as we say in the web column biz)—my take on two excellent rock-and-roll novels, Martin Millar's Suzy, Led Zeppelin, and Me and John Darnielle's Master of Reality.

(Are they science fiction? Read on!)

This article is a favor to Holly

I spoke to the Guardian at length about some good bands that write "literate" lyrics. What you get: Just a few lines on Vampire Weekend and Hold Steady!

That's OK. I like all of the bands that the writer wanted to talk about (which also included the Silver Jews and Fleet Foxes, though I don't know the latter too well), and I also talked a lot about the Mountain Goats (I had just finished John Darnielle's Master of Reality, a book I enjoyed so much that I forgot to blog about it) — it's hard to lump all these groups together, since the Vampire Weekenders have a cumulative age of about 32 and the Silver Jews have been around since...early '90s? (Same with the Mt. Gts.?) But it's all good—heyyy, I'll take it!

Thursday Grab-baggery

Will they ever say this about me? "Now a devout Jew, he’s more alive then ever." (Crawdaddy on David Berman)...More Priscilla Ahn, I am all about the half-Korean songstresses these days...Eh? Dunkin' Bagels?...Gnarly triathlon jellyfish details from Jenny D...Levi reads Born Under Saturn (which I reviewed for Modern Painters, though I never saw my review!)...Speaking of MP, Dzyd Phyllis has a rather wizardly review of Christopher Priest's The Inverted World...you know, the guy who wrote the novel The Prestige!...I loved the movie The Prestige...I agree with Ta-Nehisi about this new forger-turned-memoirist (profiled in today's Times)—it was very soul-killing reading this piece; in theory I am interested in tales of forgery, particularly when it's in the realm of fiction (see this weird review of mine for some examples), but there seemed to be an additional level of wrongness to this—a level of moral WRONGNESS!...I fear the O key on my laptop is loose...Fear? It is loose, it fell off last night! I fear that it will fall off and stay off...It's all very PERSONAL DAYS...........Wyatt Mason's Sentences blog has a lengthy interview with Adam Thirlwell, whose The Delighted States is great (I don't know why I haven't blogged about it, nor about John Darnielle's Master of Reality, which I recently read and loved)...(THOUGHT: Some things cannot be blogged about!)(Don't quite know why)...ANYWAY the Mason/Thirlwell interview has lots of interesting stuff, & dwells on A.T.'s translation of a Nabokov story (which appears as an appendix to TDS):

And then there were two moments were I tried to translate and was rebuffed. First, there was the man who operated the lift in their St. Petersburg home—called by V.N. “le Suisse.” Which interested me because Switzerland, in the piece, is a symbol of exile, and so it seemed unlikely that V.N. would have used the word without thinking, but on the other hand a Suisse is also slang in French for any kind of person who helps out (it’s even there in Shakespeare’s English, when in Hamlet Claudius asks for his bodyguards, his “Switzers”). I couldn’t gauge how far it was being used literally or slangily: in the end, I went for “the man,” and D.N. corrected this to “the Swiss chap”...

(I felt like this weirdly harsh review read like a review of a completely different book!)

Table-talk of Parkus Grammaticus for May 15, 2008

I. Some diverse Dzyd writings! First off, Levi on the art of the poet's notebook, at the Poetry Foundation:

Despite the best intentions, poets cannot spend every waking moment writing poetry. Life and the stuff of the world are always conspiring against them, offering up laundry to be folded, garlic to be minced, blogs to be read, children to be dressed. But all the while, the mind races; what is one to do with its scattered, variegated fruits, what poet Gabriel Gudding calls “[m]y many many 5 minute ideas”?

II. And here's Jessica, on procrastination (part of a package at Slate)—specifically the "prolonged anticlimaxes" of Ralph Ellison and Truman Capote:

What is the difference between severe procrastination and writer's block? Are they part of one continuum, like a Möbius strip?

III. I'm still blogging at Powell's! My wrists are falling off! Sample mystifying sentence:

I'm so glad I went with what I'm going to call my "Darnielle opening," because there are so many ways I can go with it. I feel like (mandatory obscure sports reference) Joe Cribbs!

IV. The fourth installment of "The Oblivion Arms" is up at Five Chapters today—entitled, after Burton, "Act Three: The Third Partition: 'Love-Melancholy'"...It contains what might be my favorite part of the story, a sequence in which Murray Adipose watches an aerobics show on TV. Sample:

"And two. And three. And once more to the right and take it up. And down."

BONUS: It also contains an Ouroboros (I think I've pasted this here before):

Her finger, trailing across the wall, gathered a heap of dust that fell, with a dreamy slowness, to the floor. She found herself looking at a scrap of the underlying wallpaper, most of which had been painted over in a graying white. The paper was patterned with the hotel's emblem: embedded letters, an A within an O, the latter composed of three bolts of lightning, the former a serpent that looped to bite its own tail.

Abridged Table-Talk of Parkus Grammaticus for Monday, May 5, 2008

I. Time to pre-order Personal Days!

II. John Darnielle is blogging at Powell's...or wait—it looks like he just finished. (I will be blogging there next month.)

III. Side B of the Psychic Envelopes' Cryspace now available as a Muxtape!

IV. Remind me to return my library book!

V. Via Linksmeister General Thomas: "The question of an international language has now become important..." (1936)

Learn the International System Of TYpographic Picture Education! (Is there a term for an acronym in which the first two letters of one word get snatched up, as above?)