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.

Somewhat Self-Serving Table-Talk of Parkus Grammaticus for June 27–29

I. Personal Days gets covered in the New York Times Book Review! Mark Sarvas's thoughtful review invokes Unamuno, makes comparisons to Bellow and Beckett and Bloom (Molly)—heyyy, I'll take it!—and says:

[W]itty and appealing...[A]nyone who has ever groaned to hear ‘impact’ used as a verb will cheer as Park skewers the avatars of corporate speak, hellbent on debasing the language....Park has written what one of his characters calls ‘a layoff narrative’ for our times.

But don't settle for my bracket-happy synopsizing...read the whole thing—it's very good (I'm not biased)!

II. Hmmm, does Sarvas read The Dizzies? I started reading Harry, Revised and found this compelling evidence on page 2:

He does this a lot, this strange circular thinking, Harry the Ouroboros, watching himself watching himself watching, often emerging many minutes later, foggy-headed and thick-tongued as if waking from a deep sleep.

Case closed!

III. Sick of Personal Days? Want some different Ed Park fiction for a change?

[Readership: Wha?]

The web-only, Canada-based Joyland, a "hub for short fiction" that officially goes up on July 1, has a terrific old-newsletter look...and an excerpt of the chipper, vertiginous, interminable novel in progress known as...THE DIZZIES!

Read "Trilobite and Isle of Wight." (You can find other dizzying excerpts in The Fanzine, BOMB...and a forthcoming issue of a free New York periodical, to be revealed soonish!)

IV. To add to the pinch-me-I'm dreaming-ness of this week: The new Time magazine picks "Three First Novels that Just Might Last"...including ye olde Personal Days—heyyy, I'll take it!