Eat the Document

Sam Frank's great "The Document"—in the current issue of Triple Canopy*—is a must-read for any fan of David Markson, Thomas Bernhard, Saul Bellow, Anthony Powell, Dawn Powell...not to mention

Walter Abish, Kathy Acker, Max Apple, Paul Auster, John Barth, Frederick Barthelme, Ann Beattie, Raymond Carver, Michael Chabon, Andrei Codrescu, Laurie Colwin, Evan Connell, Robert Coover, Coleman Dowell, Deborah Eisenberg, Stanley Elkin, Bret Easton Ellis, Mary Gaitskill, Kenneth Gangemi, William Gass, Donald Goines, Barry Hannah, Jim Harrison, Janet Hobhouse, William Kotzwinkle, Cormac McCarthy, Joseph McElroy, Jay McInerney, Leonard Michaels, Steven Millhauser, Kem Nunn, Tillie Olsen, Grace Paley, Walker Percy, Richard Price, James Purdy, Ishmael Reed, Philip Roth, Gilbert Sorrentino, Richard Stern, James Wilcox, Joy Williams, Tobias Wolff, and Al Young...Waugh, Compton-Burnett, De Vries, Henry Green, Spackman, Colwin, Elkin, Colin MacInnes, Gaddis, Sorrentino... Hobhouse...Paley, Eric Kraft, Beckett...Donald Antrim, Mark Costello, Susan Daitch, Jeffrey Eugenides, A. M. Homes, Jonathan Lethem, Richard Powers, David Foster Wallace, Colson Whitehead...Lorrie Moore...

An incredible piece of writing—it is its own thing. And Triple Canopy's presentation is amazing; I haven't found another site that presents articles in such a readable way for the screen. (Make sure you click on the footnote—two videos.) Shouldn't e-tablet companies be hiring 3C as consultants? Or I don't know, maybe they already are...

(March! This month I've already been blown away by Rebecca Taylor's "Virginia Mountain Scream Queen," in the new Believer—now this!)

(It's also a must for Richard Stern–o-philes—basically me and Jason McBride. "Dick" Stern has a nice cameo.)

(I had a few more reflective paragraphs here but I will stop now. Please read Sam's piece. It is one of the best things you'll read this year...and it also seems to me to be the Writing of the Future.)

_____

*and published in the new, "Failure" issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction, guest-edited by Joshua Cohen...whom I mentioned in my recent Jonathan Coe piece for Bookforum:

After several days of enforced and enjoyable reacquaintance with the Coe canon, I went to a party, where I tried to find someone with whom I could rave about Coevian greatness. One writer I met said, "I think I've heard of him . . . Palladio?" Ten minutes later, another narrowed his eyes as he searched for some connection, coming up with the hopeful "He wrote . . . Witz, right?"

Here's an exclusive bonus for readers of this lonely old blog (who BLOGS anymore??): About five minutes after the above episode, who should walk in but...Joshua Cohen himself! Who then regaled me and Alan Gilbert (not the NY Phil. maestro but the critic-poet whose first book of poems, Late in the Antenna Fields, is now out) with an account of distant relatives of his who were also writers.

Bonus #2: The party was for what turned out to be the final issue of Open City, as immortalized here and here.

Bonus #3: As I was about to leave the party, who should stumble in but...Sam Frank!

Aren't you glad you still read The Dizzies (er, Disambiguation)??

A: MAYBE.

Silver bullets and amber

I had the idea when I was younger that by reading an encyclopedic novel, if it were the right one, that I might suddenly understand the world, or at least culture. This is ridiculous, of course: I was hoping for a silver bullet which didn’t exist (and which would be, honestly, disappointing if it were possible). But this is a book that comes, I think, from that same urge, flipped around: the idea to encapsulate everything, the Joycean desire to preserve a day of Dublin in amber, even after Sterne, at the dawn of the English novel, had pointed out the folly of even attempting to capture a single life. I think, on the whole, that I’ve taken more from Sterne than Joyce; but I still admire the attempt. —With Hidden Noise: Dan Visel, reviewing Joshua Cohen's Witz

Rachel Aviv tops "20 Top Nonfiction Writers Under 40"!

Yes, I know, the list (at the New Haven Review) is in alphabetical order, but still! (Hold onto your hats—R.A. could qualify for the top 20 under thirty.) Here are some Avivian Blvr. pieces.

The list also includes Ta-Nehisi Coates, Josh Glenn who turned 42 yesterday, Lindy West (whom I started reading this year, hilarious), Brendan Koerner, and many authors who have written for The Believer, some of whom I've edited: Tom Bissell, Eula Biss, Chuck Bissterman I mean Chuck Klosterman, Joshua "Witz" Cohen, John D'Agata, Touré...Gideon Lewis-Kraus...I am probably missing some...

...the writer behind the list, NHR editor Mark Oppenheimer, is also a Believer contributor—check out his great piece on Evan Connell from 2005.

Best "Stray Question" response

Describe a typical day in your writing life.

You mean after my manservant brings the muesli?

—Joshua Cohen in the NYT's Paper Cuts

Brodsky beat

From Dzyd Joshua:

Probably the strangest mass-market asterisk movie is *batteries not included from 1987, in which alien machines save a New York "tenement" from destruction. But the best asteriskwork in any medium has to be ***: a novel from 1994 by forgotten Michael Brodsky....In his book *** is a cipher, a late commercial version of V: it's a product, an artwork, a mystical (Kabbalistic) force.

Table-Talk of Parkus Grammaticus for May 20, 2008

I. Come down to McNally Robinson tomorrow! I'll be reading from Personal Days, then talking to my editor, the mighty Julia Cheiffetz.


II. Am I the only one having technical difficulties using Gmail in Firefox?

III. Dzyd Joshua has memes aplenty up at Capsules Exquis. Normally he consolidates news articles/reviews:

Rush Hour 3
Directed by Brett Ratner

$247,538,093. $328,883,178. $453,796,824. DVD revenue, fairly ludicrous. Threequel, again. Bloodlessness isn’t the worst of the summer. Complacency is. One-dimensional glut. A global conspiracy of mutual abasement and self-humiliation: people are desperate and static, tired, lack originality; Paris seems to be the location of choice this year.

Straight man Chris Chan von Zhang is played as an adult, delivers vulgar African bang with Asian sexual neuter. Tenuous chemistry — anti-Gallic, tautological. Bad detectives bumble and slog. Who’s to blame? Roman Polanski is threatened, decamps. Nostalgic, hubristic. Bergman really is dead.

Sources:

Kevin Crust, Los Angeles Times Manohla Dargis, The New York Times Claudia Puig, USA Today

...and now he's composing nifty acrostical poems:

An Acrostic Poem for/on James Frey

Just
As
My
Eyes
Suspected:

For now,
Redemption is quick,
Easy, and —
Yuck.

IV. Levi's post on Oblomov/office novels/PD featured a bizarre photo of what looked like a potato chip in the midst of a heated phone conversation. He explains that it's actually a hash brown—and that the inimitable Rocketlass did a whole series of Hash Brown at Work!

Table-talk of Parkus Grammaticus for April 28, 2008

I. Martin Amisbouros? (From yesterday's NYT Book Review.)

II. THEY AREN'T OFFERING GOSSIP GIRL ONLINE??

III. Dzyd Joshua reads at Hallwalls in Buffalo.

IV. More on Personal Days in the latest Details...Coming soon to the website (designed by the one and only Brit in Brooklyn, a/k/a Adrian Kinloch)—my interview with British magazine Dazed & Confused! (Why not pre-order a copy or two?)

V. Haven't quite deciphered the method yet, but looks great: Gillian K Ferguson's genome poetry.

Table-talk for April 11, 2008

I. Nabokov and Trilling in Canada (via...I can't remember!)





II. What was going on with those luminous, anonymous photos on Spinster Aunt? Read the enchanting debriefing!

III. Dzyd Joshua has a review of S.Y. Agnon's To this Day in the Forward. Hmm, any Ourobori? Why yes!

It's public knowledge or should be that only true love can sunder what science fiction calls "the time-loop": Only the fervid pounding of our hearts can break the chokehold of Ouroboros, the Greek snake that swallows its own tail and serves as our oldest symbol for infinity.

IV. Not me!

Ed Park, who was one of the children in the Players' version of "It's a Wonderful Life," is now at Yale Opera School. He recently was named one of the top five young opera singers in the country.