The Return of "Cow Vase"

Last year I participated in the Significant Objects project, writing a very short story around a knick-knack selected by editors Rob Walker and Joshua Glenn. Now several of those stories have been collected into a book, and I'm happy to be included alongside authors such as Nicholson Baker, William Gibson, Heidi J., Colson Whitehead, Neil LaBute, Sloane Crosley, Tom McCarthy, Jonathan Lethem, Lydia Millett....(I could keep going!)...

It looks like there will be two covers; I wrote about the delightful "Cow Vase" featured on the pink one. The books are out in July and are available for pre-order.

Today the project was featured on Studio 360. There's a contest, and a video...

Late 2011 gleanings

Three books from friends—Victoria Nelson's story collection A Bestiary of My Heart, Jaime Clarke's Conversations With Jonathan Lethem, and Damion Searls's translation of Proust on Ruskin.

Here's D.S. talking about P&R:

Sign language

From my Astral Weeks review* of Wolf Mankowitz's A Kid for Two Farthings:

First published 56 years ago, "Kid" . . . conjures a time and place that feels remote -- a mostly Jewish milieu of garment workers and sign writers and prizefighters, of "Shafchick's vapour baths" (containing "the hottest room in the world") and baigels and ads on sandwich boards. Here, the height of technology is the Superheat Patent Steam Presser that Mr. Kandinsky covets: "You put in your trousers -- so. Close it -- so. Press a handle. Pouf. Up comes the steam. Open. There is your trousers pressed. No smell, no consumption."

I wish I had the book here to transcribe the lovely/funny bit about sign writing—but coincidentally, Jenny has linked to a review of a book on "lost London," and quotes this:

The late-19th century was the heyday of ornamental sign-writing, before the advent of neon, and the hand-painted signs covering every shopfront appeal to all possible shades of public interest — those who wish to keep up appearances (“Gentlemen’s Hats Polished for Sixpence”), the desperate (“Hammer Guns and Automatic Pistols Bought, Sold and Exchanged”), the hopeful (“Our Noted Lucky Wedding Rings”) and the moribund (“Funerals To Suit All Classes”). Sunlight soap and Colman’s blue and starch are advertised even in blackest Bermondsey, which suggests that poverty did not necessarily mean dirt. The constant advertisements for patent medicines are a reminder that the average age of death in the East End in 1900 was 30, and 55% of children died before they were five. Signs outside eating-houses indicate keen competition. For fourpence you can get a rasher of bacon and two eggs in a coffee shop near the Tower, or a pint of tea, two slices of bread and a plate of cold meat in Borough High Street. Harris’s restaurant in Aldgate offers pork sausages with bread (“Always Hot Always Ready”) for twopence.

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In other news, the San Francisco Panorama and Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City are staggeringly, inspiringly great...I don't want them to end.


*The review is still almost impossible to find on the L.A. Times site.

Jupiter jones — Lush life — Buffalo architecture

Jonathan Lethem's "Walking the Moons" is up at Joyland, that "hub for short fiction."

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In the NYTBR, Graydon Carter kicks off the front-page review with...Powell!

It can reasonably be said that “A Dance to the Music of Time,” Anthony Powell’s monumental 12-part novel about English manners, society, politics and power, still begs for an American counterpart. Lush and majestic, the book traces the years from 1921 to 1974 — pretty much the period we like to romanticize as “the American century.” But if no novel over here quite tracks Powell’s course, the life of George Ames Plimpton, impressively recorded in this glorious new biography, “George, Being George,” offers a potential substitute. Powell, in his novel, described four types of men: the artist, the romantic, the man of will and the cynic. —NYTBR

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The NYT's Nicolai Ouroussoff has a long look at Buffalo's architectural heritage:

At a time when oil prices and oil dependence are forcing us to rethink the wisdom of suburban and exurban living, Buffalo could eventually offer a blueprint for repairing America’s other shrinking postindustrial cities.

Touring Buffalo’s monuments is about as close as you can get to experiencing firsthand the earliest struggles to define what an American architecture would look like.

Another candidate for Name of the Year — "Every human name"

"Dr O'Dor":

The research into the evolution of deep-sea octopuses was part of a programme called the Census of Antarctic Marine Life (CAML), explained Don O'Dor, CoML's co-senior scientist...

The species could all be traced back to a shallow-water octopus called Megaleledone setebos, which is only found in the Southern Ocean.

Dr O'Dor added that the BAS researcher's work also enabled her to identify how changes in the region's ocean played a pivotal role in the development of the new species, especially the emergence of a "thermohaline expressway". —BBC

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That great Lethem review of 2666!!! Begins with Philip K. Dick...has some HPL ("the puzzle of their devotion to a writer who declines their interest — declines, in fact, ever to appear — inches like a great Lovecraftian shadow over their lives")...and DFW, and Denis Johnson...and then:

Bolaño has been, because of his bookishness, compared to Jorge Luis Borges. But from the evidence of a prose always immediate, spare, rapturous and drifting, always cosmopolitan and enchanted, the Bolaño boom should be taken as immediate cause for a revival of the neglected master Julio Cortázar. (Cortázar’s name appears in “2666,” but then it may seem that every human name appears there and that Bolaño’s book is reading your mind as you read it.)

UPDATE: Dzyd Ben reviews 2666 for the L.A. Times.

Dizzies Newsfeeds™ for Tuesday

Friend Leland de la Durantaye's book on Nabokov, Style Is Matter, is out—am excited to get my hands on this....check out the photo on his homepage...Why did he put eggs on his eyes?...Matthew Sharpe reads from Jamestown....This looks like it'll be a fun read: Joyce Carol Oates on this year's The Raw Shark Texts and Remainder, Sebald's Austerlitz (2001), and the Lethem-edited Vintage Book of Amnesia (which came out ages ago)....Speaking of Lethem, has anyone noted how his name invokes Lethe, the river in Greek mythology whose waters cause forgetfulness? I can't remember [rim shot!] if I've seen that anywhere before. [Or no wait, put the rim shot here.]...Also: Dizzyhead Matt goes Kwik-E-Mart krazy!

Psychic Boatmen

No wonder we got obsessed with the new Lethem even before we read it!

"Oh, you dizzy kids."
—You Don't Love Me Yet, Jonathan Lethem, pg.191

(Via Dizzyhead Kosiya)

Ampersand after ampersand

1. Over at Weekend Stubble, Dizzyhead Paul posts some bonus material for his article on Leo Guild, author of The Werewolf vs. Vampire Woman, The Loves of Liberace, Street of Ho's, et al. (At the PTSNBN, the proper spelling was 'ho; the style guide asked, "Does this make any sense? 'No.") Guild writes:

I forgot to mention that werewolves are very strong. Their diet includes such things as animal blood, ailing grandmothers and rancid chicken fat. And they also thrive in the night air.

2. And Dizzyhead Martin's co-blogger Kevin C translates some Anglo-Saxon:

755. Here Cynewulf and the West-Saxon council deprived Sigebryht of his kingdom for wrongful deeds, except for Hampshire, and he had that until he slew that earl who had long lived by him. And then Cynewulf drove him off at the Weald, and there wounded him until a swineherd stabbed him on Privet channel; and he avenged the earl Cumbran. And Cynewulf often fought great fights with the Welsh. And 31 winters after he had had the kingdom, he wanted to drive off a prince who was called Cyneheard; and Cyneheard was the brother of Sigebryht. And then the prince learned of the king being with a small host in the company of women at Merton, and he surrounded him there and attacked the chamber from outside, before the men discovered him who were with the king. And then the king perceived that, and he went to the door, and then bravely defended himself, until he saw the prince, and then he rushed upon him and wounded him greatly; and all were fighting against the king, until they had slain him.

And he notes: "This is one of the earliest prose artifacts in the history of our language. Isn’t it something? Look at that Estilo! It’s like a rhinoceros! Consider how reliant our author was on the word 'and' to get a sentence or clause rolling. Homeboy uses it 17 times."

3. And here's an excellent New Yorker piece alert: Larissa Macfarquhar's piece on a man who tracks down counterfeiters. (Abstract online.) Loads of great details. I especially love the way it begins—several paragraphs in which someone is talking. Pure quotation—she doesn't even identify the speaker. You're carried along solely by his colorful speech and the interesting things he's saying.

4. And isn't it time for some Faye Wong?

5. And in the NYTBR, David Kamp reviews Jonathan Lethem's You Don't Love Me Yet, a Dizzies obsession: "As they’d say in the rock magazines, this new release is worthwhile for the Lethem completist, but perhaps not for the first-time buyer." And a group called The Night Time "covers" the song "Monster Eyes" on their Myspace page—an original song featured in the novel (via CDTMIP).

6. And this is from the TLS via the Light Reader, on Balzac

... his Herculean labours were taking their toll. His hair was turning white and falling out “by the handful”. He was suffering from back pains and dizzy spells. Sometimes he fell into a stupor, and even his special blend of coffee failed to reactivate his brain.

Last Vulgar thoughts

It seems likely* that Lethem's upcoming novel is a tip of the hat to that song on the Vulgar Boatmen's second album. And I always assumed that the group's first album, 1990's You and Your Sister, got its title from the song by ex–Big Star member Chris Bell. (The VB album also has a very good song by the same name, though not a cover of the Bell song.)

Bell was recording a solo album when he died in a car crash in 1978; it was released as I Am the Cosmos by Rykodisc in 1992, around the time I started listening to the Vulgar Boatmen. Whether this reflects Bell's final vision for his first album (six years in the making) can't be known—my feeling is that it's a shadow of his ideal version. The title track and "You and Your Sister" are seared in my memory—gorgeous, stately, the voice making hairpin turns in the ether—but the rest of the album has faded. (There are 15 tracks, but the last three are alternate takes of the two aforementioned tunes, which Amazon tells me shared either side of a single, the one solo release in Bell's lifetime.)

(Much more detail at this site called "Wikipedia.")


I like the idea of the Vulgar Boatmen titling their first album after a song by an artist who was barely there. (The VB album precedes the release of the Bell album by two years, so they must have been fans of the single—released, Amazon tells me, by dB'er Chris Stamey's Car label, the name grimly ironic given Bell's death.) Hopefully the Lethem book will create an uptick in interest in the Vulgar Boatmen...I'd like to end today's sermon with this quote from Charles Portis's Gringos:

Frank didn’t write anything, or at least he didn’t publish anything… The Olmecs didn’t like to show their art around either. They buried it twenty-five feet deep in the earth and came back with spades to check up on it every ten years or so, to make sure it was still there, unviolated. Then they covered it up again.





*But—maybe I'm completely off base! Check out what the Driftwood Singers have posted—a Roky Erikson tune also entitled "You Don't Love Me Yet," from 1985, which might actually be closer to the time period of the new Lethem book. (Curious iPod-as-memory fact/coincidence: In the early ’90s, I liked the band Poi Dog Pondering; the only PDP songs that have survived in iPodded form are the covers of "Love Vigilantes" and...Roky Erikson's "I Had to Tell You," which came up on the shuffle yesterday. And the only currently iPodded VB song I have is "You Don't Love Me Yet." This all connects somehow, yes?)

UPDATE: Breaking news — Dizzyhead Benno reports that the book's epigraphs are quotes from both the VB song and the RE song. Brilliant!

UPDATE (2/23): From Rob Sheffield's memoir Love Is a Mix Tape—check out the first song on the first mix (via Very Short List):

'Japan Minister Rapped on Women' — Notes on Lethem

This BBC headline conjured visions of a soberly dressed statesman 'busting out' rhymes and delighting the pop-mad J-teen masses. Plus I could combine it with yesterday's post to do a Rapp/rapping "connections"!

Alas, the story turns out to be not so exciting: Japan's health minister called women "birth-giving machines," and was rebuked by the PM.

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Dizzyhead Pete directs us to Jonathan Lethem's website, where the novelist has kicked off his "Promiscuous Materials Project"—offering filmmakers and dramatists the opportunity to adapt one of his stories for the grand sum of $1. (Check out JL's interesting patchwork piece in the recent Harper's for some clues into the thinking behind this move.)

Even more exciting to me—Lethem's upcoming novel is entitled You Don't Love Me Yet, after the Vulgar Boatmen song. It might be overkill to call it my favorite song from 1991-92, but it's definitely one that's stayed with me—partly, no doubt, because the chiming riff is very simple to play on guitar! If I were mp3-savvy I'd put a link here to a YouSendIt account. Maybe someone at Beautiful Regalia or Driftwood Singers will someday...

For now, here's a glance at the album cover:


UPDATE: Visit the Driftwood Singers for a limited-time-only listen!