Un palazzo incastrato

In un palazzo incastrato nell’unica strada semideserta di Manhattan, ingombra di giornali spinti dal vento come «granchi giganti», un gruppo di impiegati consuma le proprie giornate nel terrore di perdere il posto.

EH??

Yes! Personal Days is coming out soon in Italy—perfect for your* Italian-speaking brother-in-law! The title there is Maledetti Colleghi. More info at the Fazi page.

In other PD news...a new review at the Independent...I talk vaguely about success at Time Out...the Selfdivider finds Pessoan resonances in PD; I love how he sees The Book of Disquiet as office lit—that's inspired!...(Another book "written" on slips of paper: Vonnegut's Hocus Pocus.)...I'm reading next Thursday (7/31) at KGB—my last reading of the summer (unless someone asks me to read again!)...don't know if I'll read from PD or The Dizzies??? Or Chinese Whispers??? Or the interview in Triple Canopy??? Or if I'll just read David Berman poems again?...Realized that I HAVE NOT YET LINKED to the video of me reading at Google...but I should, right? I'm too self-conscious...(I haven't watched it myself, though I did watch about half of the Jennifer 8. Lee talk, it was great...she goes to a village in China whose sole/main purpose is to train people to work in Chinese restaurants in the U.S.)....OK I'm going to link to the video of me...ED NOBODY CARES...

—I care.
—Who said that?
—It is I, Edward 9. Park, your superego.
—WHATTTTT???





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* = "my"!

Vonnegutiana

1. From the New Yorker's archives, here's Updike on Vonnegut's Slapstick.

2. And from an e-mail last week, here's Chrita Marri on the passing of one of his favorite authors:

I had an idea. I had what seemed initially to be an odd reaction to the Vonnegut thing, which upon further inspection I've decided was closer to appropriate than I'd thought. It's a hard thing to quantify—Vonnegut was my first "favorite writer", and to some degree because of that always will be—but if I had to give it a name, it'd be something like "thank God that's over." Which of course, isn't exactly right, in terms of identification, but it's as close as I think I can get

Here's the thing: there's obviously an element of defeatism, maybe even nihilism, throughout the work, which was leavened by the desert dryness of the humor. So I think that people tend to regard his stuff as something short of truly hopeless, because if taken literally—which I don't think it's necessarily misguided to do--it's just completely soul-crushing. And given that he himself was so present in his work, often literally (literarally?) as a character, you get a portrait of a man that's just been... I dunno, broken. Honestly, I'm hard-pressed to think of any artist who seemed to give as clear a sense of autobiography in his own not-actually-autobiographical work. In other words, I don't feel facetious saying that I felt that I knew Vonnegut, to a much greater extent than anyone else I've never met.

(I remember what might not be there, a passage from one of the nonfiction books, maybe Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons, where he talked about the prodigiousness of his smoking as being a more cowardly form of suicide. Of course, I was fifteen when I first read that and naturally overromanticized the ethical contranianism of a matter-of-fact view of suicide. So it took me a while to realize that he probably wasn't kidding, except maybe himself.)

So here's what I've come to. Is it wrong to think that maybe his death might've been a relief, similar to (but not to the same extent as) we regard the death of those long suffering from a terminal illness? Frankly, if I were younger when he'd died, closer to having read all that for the first time, I might suggest something appropriate in the idea, the unintentially smug cleverness of death as, quite literally, rest punctuated with a "so it goes." It's not right to think that there's something ironic about a man so relentlessly disappointed in life living so long, counterintuitive to try to balance this with the patina of legitimate hopefulness that he used strictly as a breath freshener ("Maybe life is worth living, the finality of his long life a sly winking contradiction of his work"). His death came just as most of us—though not him!—would want it, at the end of a long accomplished life. It's too clever to think of this as an extention of literary irony, too ignorant to just ignore it. So what do we make of the man who lived too much of a life that he quickly realized he never wanted in the first place?

Phrase of the day — The A's have it — More Vonnegut

I.
I liked the Times's description of yesterday's massive storm as "a globular nebula." I also liked this self-referential bit—

Many shops and restaurants that normally would have been open yesterday were shuttered, but without jobs or schools to attend, many people spent the day indoors with the Sunday papers, relaxing with music to go with the silken lash of rain hissing at the windows, dripping on a lazy afternoon.

—and the fact that a baker's dozen's worth of writers put together the piece (including Dizzies favorite Kareem Fahim).

II.
"Globular nebula" exerts a hold on me because of the repetition of "bula," I suppose—somehow this makes it seem rather globlike and nebulous all at once.

I haven't been keeping up with American Idol this season, but I did see that Sanjaya Malakar survived the last round. Singing/personality aside, perhaps the secret to his staying power lies in his name—univocalic in "a," as the Oulipians would say. (And aside from the "nj" in the first name, each vowel is separated from its neighbor by a single consonant.)

III.
Finally, another side of the late great Vonnegut, from the Phil Nugent Experience:

His words were carefully chosen but angry, and he rounded them off with a promise that shood he ever encounter Jerry [Geraldo Rivera, his ex–son-in-law] again on the street, "I'll spit in his face."

The uses of neglect

Dizzyhead Thomas tips us off to a great site: The Neglected Books Page, "where forgotten books are remembered."

Ever read The Cubical City? No Pockets for a Shroud? 1923's Capitol Hill? Me neither...this suggests another Dizzyhead comment-fest: Favorite truly obscure novels—

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Over at the L.A. Times, a revamped Book Review is announced. I'm happy to report that I'll be contributing a monthly column on science fiction—tips and recommendations are welcome! (My column will be in rotation with three others—Sarah Weinman kicks things off this week with Dark Passages.)

Also at the LAT, book review editor David Ulin has a fond Vonnegut appreciation, and Jonathan Safran Foer is an early favorite for lede of the week honors: "Petr Ginz's parents met at an Esperanto conference."

* * *

I thought you said you weren't going to post for a while!

* * *

Dizzyhead Dennis talks to everyone's favorite shaggy Lacanian over at the New York Times:

In one sequence that redefines bathroom humor, Mr. Zizek connects the shower drain in “Psycho” with the backed-up toilet in “The Conversation” and compares the experience of looking up at a blank screen before a movie to that of staring into a toilet bowl. (Toilets are something of a Zizek fixation. One of his most notorious arguments traces geopolitical differences to variations in toilet design.)

Wining, Reading, Grading

From Tony Hoagland's "When Dean Young Talks About Wine," in What Narcissism Means to Me:

He says, Great first chapter but no plot.
He says, Long runway, short flight.
He says, This one never had a secret.
He says, You can't wear stripes like that.

This suggets a good writing exercise: Elaborate descriptions for wine.

* * *

Dan Rhodes's Guardian list of his favorite books under 200 pages has been much linked to. (Dizzyheads, any candidates?) Off the top of my head, The Mezzanine would be high on my list, something by Richard Brautigan, and of course something by Vonnegut (Cat's Cradle, probably). Bernhard's The Loser is 183 pages. I'm also, randomly, a fan of Isherwood's Prater Violet...and Muriel Spark's The Girls of Slender Means must be sub-200. . . .

* * *

Here is the Guardian obit for Vonnegut—the Times one is more interesting, I think. His official website is here, and today its splash page features an opened bird cage.

Wikipedia mentions Vonnegut's self-assessment of his books (in Palm Sunday); it reminded me of Nabokov's annotated copy of a collection of short stories, in which most things received C's or lower, except Salinger's "Bananafish" (A+) and...something by VN himself, if I'm not mistaken.

Here's Vonnegut's list:
Player Piano: B
The Sirens of Titan: A
Mother Night: A
Cat's Cradle: A-plus
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater: A
Slaughterhouse-Five: A-plus
Welcome to the Monkey House: B-minus
Happy Birthday, Wanda June: D
Breakfast of Champions: C
Slapstick: D
Jailbird: A
Palm Sunday: C

This seems pretty clear-eyed—though I remember seeing this before reading Breakfast of Champions, then thinking BoC must be pretty mediocre...then reading BoC and being pleasantly surprised—the result of lowered expectations? Anyway, what a nice chunk, from Sirens to S-5. Enough for any writer, no?

UPDATE: Excellent set of online Vonnegut resources, compiled by the Mirror Ed.

So it goes

I was writing just now, avoiding the uke, occasionally bursting out into song for no reason. I sang, "I read the news today..." as I clicked over to the Times. And saw that Kurt Vonnegut had passed away. And I stopped singing.