At The Millions, Marjorie Hakala gives seven goof reasons why you should read Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time. (Our friend Levi pops up in the comments, and notes that narrator Nick Jenkins's oeuvre appears in the Invisible Library.)

Powell’s portrayal of servants is quite funny, actually. At the time when these books were being written, P.G. Wodehouse was already making virtuosic use of the comic possibilities of the English serving class, most famously in the form of the hyper-competent Jeeves. Powell cut against the Wodehouse grain by making his servant characters only middling in competence and by having them intrude in the life of the household at the most inconvenient times, highlighting the strangeness of two entirely different categories of person living in a house together. The aforementioned butler works for an upper-class Communist, who doesn’t want a butler or really believe in having butlers, but can’t manage his enormous house without one, and there’s a sadly droll tone to their interactions.

(Image from the Telegraph.)

Ikeabouros — Five for Frightening

Get yours today!

(Via Manguso)

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At Levi's invitation, I listed a few blood-curdling reads over at The Second Pass. Jenny D, James Hynes, Will Schofield, Andrea Janes, Jonathan Crowley, and others weigh in with their seasonal favorites...

My former students will recognize the Poe-Lovecraft-King trifecta...and in a freakish twist, one of my former student's stories is among my picks!

Lyrics matter

More great comments on Hey Dullblog—on favorite unreleased tracks, Seinfeld and nothingness, and the theory that "Yesterday" and "The Night Before" are thematically identical—from Devin, Nancy, Glavin (Garvin? Gavin? Garmin? Glaven), and Mr. Levi Stahl. A smattering:

Devin: "Seinfeld": it was fatuous and lazy for commentators to use that phrase "show about nothing" as if it spoke the whole truth. But I think it was legitimately used by some to encapsulate the show's peculiar and innovative charm -- that unlike "The Brady Bunch," say (which like all children of the '70s I LOVE), episodes didn't require a moral or even a resolution. The "something" we'd all been spoonfed (by shows like "The Brady Bunch," which did I mention I LOVE) was the real nothing: bourgeois values and stale homily. (LOVE.) Whereas "Seinfeld"'s "nothing" was really "something"--the vigor, absurdity, and random magic of ordinary life, heightened and tweaked to perfection.

Glaven: As for "Yes It Is" ... Formally, it's a lot like "This Boy", in that the chord progression of e verses is exactly the same as TB, just transposed from the key of D to E; also, the rhythm guitar strumming pattern is exactly the same. This suggests that it may have started out as a rewrite of TB, but I agree with you that it is far superior to the earlier song, and, taken all-in-all, is a far different and far richer song. And Ithink the only way one could conclude otherwise, could see it as a mere knockoff of TB, is by ignoring the far superior lyrics. Lyrics matter. Sometimes I think people forget that.

Nancy: My favorite unreleased Beatles track is Lennon's "Child of Nature." I read somewhere that it was left off the White album because it was too close in subject to "Mother Nature's Son," but I think these two songs would have made a great double A-side.

Catchin' up — New Believer! — Free e-Stark — &c.

I haven't been blogging—I was in Taiwan and couldn't figure how to work Blogger. Did you miss me? [Tumbleweed.]

Now—to business!

I. The September Believer is out. On the site, you can read a Gregory Kornbluh's wonderful piece on master palindromist Barry Duncan, as well as Ross Simonini's (about whom, more later) interview with Jason Schwartzman. But you need to get the whole print issue in your hands. It's great. THERE IS A CONVERSATION BETWEEN DON DELILLO AND BRET EASTON ELLIS. (One of the many things I learned: DD excised 15 pages from a paperback reprint of Americana. I wonder which 15? I wonder why?)

Marc Katz has a mouth-watering essay on Huysmans' Against Nature (which has been lingering on my bookshelf for approximately 9 million years, and which I really now must read!), Nate Pedersen looks at the origins of the "butler did it" mystery trope, Meaghan Winter gets wiggy with Orthodox Jewish hairpieces...There's the usual Marcus/Pendarvis/Handler/Hornby columny goodness, filthy comics, reviews, and more...Verdict: Great issue!

II. The one book I read while away was Lawrence Douglas's upcoming novel The Vices, which is excellent—just my cup of tea. I was a huge fan of his debut novel, The Catastrophist (and profiled him for the PTSNBN, in one of my last articles there); this one shares some of the themes but seems to me even more successful—exhilarating, even.

Try the first page and see if you can stop. It's about a stalled novelist's friendship with the Bernhardesque Oliver Vice, and the prose is pure pleasure: elegant, comic, wise. There are subtle pleasures, too, that I'm not sure I can do justice to. For example, a brief passage in the first half of the book gently triggered a memory of a scene in Nabokov's The Real Life of Sebastian Knight...and many many pages later, the narrator and his friend talk about that very novel, in such a way that the book itself becomes suggestively and satisfyingly unmoored.

I will have quotes for you soon.

III. Levi alerted me to two free e-books by Donald E. Westlake—God Save the Mark (which I reviewed for the PTSNBN; it's perfect light reading) and (as Richard Stark) The Score.

Lazy Literary Gleanings™

Levi comes right out and says it: "There's a reason this is my favorite book in the world, folks; I'll be reading and re-reading it for a long, long time to come."

Read his two posts on re-reading Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time.

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Two excellent things from the new issue of Triple Canopy: David Levine's "Matter of Rothko" and Claire Barliant's "The Hanging at Mankato."

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Wow: Stephen Burt has a great review of my old teacher Bruce Smith's latest book of poems, Devotions, in the NYT.

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Not done with this yet, but Douglas Wolk's "Comic-Con Strikes Again" is really good. It's an Amazon Single. (Has anyone read the Vollmann Amazon Single?)(Does anyone read this blog anymore?)

"Often as not a boy or girl of normal height resulted"

Today on his blog, Levi goes from Portis to Peter the Great to Portis again. He wonders if he should quote quite so much from the bio he read last week (Robert K. Massie's Peter the Great, 1980), but I'm glad he did! And I'm going to just copy the passage he quotes because it's so wild. (I kept thinking: Really?)

The King's most famous obsession was his collection of giants, for which he was renowned throughout Europe. Known as the Blue Prussians or the Giants of Potsdam, there were over 1,200 of them, organized into two battalions of 600 men each. None was under six feet tall, and some, in the special Red Unit of the First Battalion, were almost seven feet tall. The King dressed them in blue jackets with gold trim and scarlet lapels, scarlet trousers, white stockings, black shoes and tall red hats. He gave them muskets, white bandoleers and small daggers, and he played with them as a child would with enormous living toys. No expense was too great for this hobby, and Frederick William spent millions to recruit and equip his giant grenadiers. They were hired or bought all over Europe; especially desirable specimens, refusing the offer of the King's recruiting agents, were simply kidnapped. Eventually, recruiting in this way became too expensive--one seven-foot-two-inch Irishman cost over 6,000 pounds--and Frederick William tried to breed giants. Every tall man in his realm was forced to marry a tall woman. The drawback was that the King had to wait twenty years for the products of these unions to mature, and often as not a boy or girl of normal height resulted. The easiest method of obtaining giants was to receive them as gifts. Foreign ambassadors advised their masters that the way to find favor with the King of Prussia was to send him giants. Peter especially appreciated his fellow sovereign's interest in nature's curios, and Russia supplied the Prussian King with fifty new giants every year. (Once, when Peter recalled some of the giants lent to Frederick William and replaced them with men who were a trifle shorter, the King was so upset that he could not discuss business with the Russian ambassador; the wound in his heart, he said, was still too raw.)

Pseudobibliophilia

At Salon, Laura Miller writes about...invisible libraries.

The original Invisible Library disappeared from the Web in the mid-2000s (though you can still find snapshots of it in the Internet Archive Wayback Machine), and since then other pseudobibliophiles have opened their own "branches," although these too have a tendency to end up abandoned. The novelists Ed Park and Levi Stahl created a catalog of imaginary titles that inspired an interactive exhibition at a London art gallery, but they have only occasionally updated it since 2008. Loss of interest is, perhaps, inevitable, since when you maintain such a list, tiresome people are constantly proclaiming their disappointed astonishment that their particular obscure favorite isn't listed.

Actually, Levi and I still update our Invisible Library—our "site" is so primitive (i.e., it's a blogspot blog) that we need to keep those 2008 timestamps intact in order to preserve alphabetical order. In other words, we need to get a real site. (No comment about the "tiresome people" statement.)

If you thought we were lying low, you might have missed this one from a few months ago:

SHEFFIELD, (Professor) Peter: Who Indeed: A Critical Analysis of Television's Who's the Boss?; What WAS Happening: An Analysis ofWhat’s Happening?;
—from Community (season 2, ep. 20)

Pole position

Levi quotes my favorite bit from the letters Nabokov wrote to Véra (printed in a recent New Yorker) while he was on a college lecture tour in 1942.

At the station in Springfield I was met . . . by the club secretary, a creepily silent melancholic of somewhat clerical cast with a small stock of automatic questions, which he quickly exhausted. He is an elderly bachelor, and his profession consists of doing secretarial work for several Springfield clubs. He livened up and flashed his eyes one single time--got awfully nervous, having noticed that the flagpole by the Lincoln mausoleum had been replaced by a new, taller one. It turned out that his hobby--or, rather, the passion of his life--is flagpoles. He sighed with relief when a watchman gave him the exact information--seventy feet--because the pole in his own garden is still ten feet taller.

Some gleanings

Levi on Donald E. Westlake's The Hook—and its sketch for his soon-to-be-published-for-the-first-time posthumous novel, Memory. (It's less complicated than it sounds.)

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At The Morning News, Robert Birnbaum talks to Arthur Phillips. Highlight of the conversation:

AP: [...] I read Ed Park’s Personal Days recently. A few years ago two separate novels came out about office politics and both [were] written in the first person plural. One of them was Personal Days. That was a wonderful book.

RB: Is he married to one of those Believer editors?

AP: I don’t know who he is married to.

RB: I look to you for some gleanings of New York book-world intelligence.

AP: What, am I Walter Winchell? The other book I liked, sort of the highlight of the year, was Cards of Identityby Nigel Dennis, which is from 1955. Ed Park recommended it to me because I had this Shakespeare play in my book. And I panicked and went out and read it and it has a new Shakespeare play in it. It is spectacular.

Lazy Literary Musings™

I liked that Levi appreciated The Dog of the South last year, but felt that...well, his appreciation of Charles Portis was a touch restrained. So it's fun watching him rave over Portis's Masters of Atlantis—in two posts (and counting?)!

And it's also great to see him enjoying Frederick Exley's A Fan's Notes.

I will just say that I finished Barry Gifford's Wild at Heart last night. What a book! I was reading a few other things and suddenly Wild at Heart overtook them. (I'm hoping Levi will read it and write something about it.) It's the first in the single-volume Sailor and Lula: The Complete Novels, which Seven Stories put out last year.

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I like this fake book cover by Scott at Erasing:

Front-table brethren

Levi on Jonathan Coe's The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim:

[...]Coe unexpectedly transforms The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim from a good, diverting book, into a an amazing one, making a decision so daring, yet so effective, that I still can't quite believe it....Coe's ability to use complicated structure and narrative game-playing not to show off but to flesh out his thematic concerns is one of his his greatest gifts (see The Winshaw Legacy)--but it is also his riskiest habit as an author....In this new novel, the risk Coe takes is even more striking, and, while I expect there will be a lot of disagreement about this, I think it works, brilliantly.

If you've not tried Coe...start with The Rotters Club. But do eventually find your way to Maxwell Sim, if for no other reason than that it's daring, and wholly distinct from its front-table brethren--and surely daring and distinction should be rewarded?

Oulipoboros & more

Levi asks: "Is N+7 an Ouroboros?"

(Harry Mathews says no; others say yes!)

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"Jenny reads the paper":

He may have inherited his knack for industrial design from his maternal grandfather, a mechanical engineer who was one of the inventors of the Kit Kat candy bar and the machinery to mass-produce it.

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Devin brings back evidence of the lost John Lennon/Dr. Who episode.

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Bonus link: Levi's new SF reading list.

I've been on a roll lately

I. Levi, on a Westlake jag:

What must it have been like to be [Donald E.] Westlake's agent? You'd know you were going to get a manuscript to sell every nine months or so, and you'd know that it would never be less than a well-crafted piece of work . . . but that's about it. You'd hope, one assumes, for a Dortmunder novel or a Parker novel, but instead you might get, say, a Dortmunder novella, two novellas related to the film industry assembled into a single book, or a satire of the publishing industry. And those are just the ones I happened to read this week! —IBRL

II. Levi, on building a new drink for Chicago:

As research, I ordered a Manhattan. It’s smooth. So smooth. A broad Fifth Avenue of sophistication. It knows how to tie a bow tie. It tastes like all the best parts of bourbon and none of the parts that used to be so helpful in battlefield surgery. Did I mention its smoothness?

The Loop should not be like that. Here’s how The Loop should be. The first sip opens your eyes wide, so you look like one of those just-graduated-from-UW kids falling for the dude running the shell game on the “L.” The second sip makes you wonder whether your shoulders are broad enough that you can read Carl Sandburg’s three-volume biography of Lincoln. The third sip knows a guy who knows a guy who can get you seasonal work driving a snowplow at O’Hare. The fourth sip has you fishing in your wallet for a Big Jackson so you can get in on some of that shell game action. The fifth sip convinces you to take out papers to run for alderman. The sixth sip convinces you that it’s not even worth taking the trouble to go vote. No one has ever taken a seventh sip.

The Loop could come with a little blown-out umbrella.

—IBRL, the annex

Minority report

I. Levi Stahl on "the minor T.E. Lawrence":

After the [translation of] Odyssey, Lawrence put in good order a compilation of poems he had liked over the years: Minorities, consisting, with his typical taste for paradox, of minor works by major poets, or major work by minor poets.

II. Another recent L.S. post ("William Dean Howells and the pleasures of the minor writer" ) quotes from Indian Summer:

"Oh, call us a passage from a modern novel," suggested Colville, "if you're in the romantic mood. One of Mr. James's."

"Don't you think we ought to be rather more of the great world for that? I hardly feel up to Mr. James. I should have said Howells. Only nothing happens in that case!"

(Fictional characters talking about their creators! Some other examples, aside from Don Quixote?)

(Ah...just remembered this other "Indian Summer"...)(Remember "MySpace"?!)

III. Levi's posts reminded me that I accumulated an unusual amount of notes for my Poetry Foundation article from last year, "Minor Poets, Major Works"—notes that I wound up not using. Why not post some of them here?

5. In Bookforum, Geoff Dyer considers Thomas Bernhard’s My Prizes: “[W]hat a great idea, to offer slivers of autobiography in the guise of self-deprecating moan-boasts about all the honor-insults heaped on one’s head! So much so that one wonders, while reading these outbursts, if it’s not the well-established forms of literary expression—big novels with vast roll calls of characters, enacting the big themes of life and fate, war and peace—but the minor ones, forms that are not even recognized as such, that offer the most challenging test of literary genius.” [BF Sept/Oct/Nov 2010]

Minor applies to form. (Caples mentions the novelist Edgar Saltus, who wrote a 40-pager entitled Oscar Wilde, An Idler’s Impressions—“a puffed-out account of a man he only met twice.”)[22]

6. Minor or major? B.R. Myers begins his scorched-earth Atlantic review of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom like this: “One opens a new novel and is promptly introduced to some dull minor characters. Tiring of them, one skims ahead to meet the leads, only to realize: those minor characters are the leads.”

9. In Hungary in the 10^th century: “People saw bright spherical objects shining like stars, along with a bright torch, moving to and fro in the sky.”

9.[sic] This is a notebook, a minor form. But some of my favorite books are notebooks, diaries, correspondence, collections of columns and reviews. The Nabokov-Wilson Letters. The Weight of the World. Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung. Literature that doesn’t realize it's literature.

12. Most writers live under no illusion of being major. Or is that just me? Even writers whose books invariably land on the bestseller list must know how few _______.

13. One of the appeals of the minor is that we are even reading it—that gives one hope for our own _______.

December interlude

You know how I'm always talking about Anthony Powell? Like, I can't shut up about him?

Now's your chance to read the first novel in his Dance to the Music of Time sequence/meganovel as a free e-book, for this month only, thanks to the University of Chicago Press. The entire series is being reissued electronically (and of course you can still buy the physical books, in four omnibus volumes.) Amazon seems to be the easiest way to take advantage of this offer.

Read more about it from Levi, who is conveniently wearing both his UChicago Press hat and his Powell-championing hat!

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Next step: Getting Afternoon Men, A View to a Death, and the other pre-Dance Powells back into print!

Disambiguations™ for November 18, 2010

I. Levi on Stephen King's Christine! (Ed Trivia: Christine was the first King book I read.)

II. Jenny ends her excellent-quote-reproducing musing on Life with an intriguing parenthetical: "Vision of alternate universe in which Sylvia Plath encountered Keith Richards that winter."

III. Reading this NYT obit for Baby Marie Osborne, I was surprised to see an exclamation point...and then a double exclamation point...and then a triple exclamation point!

In 1933, as her first marriage deteriorated, Ms. Osborne took a job in a dime store. It was a low point. Then came an astonishing call from the superintendent of the Colorado Children’s Home, who informed her that she had been adopted as an infant by the Osbornes! And that a man who said he was her real father, H. L. Shriver, had become a tycoon!! And that he had left her a substantial inheritance!!!

IV. And you can't talk about exclamation points without thinking of...Harry Stephen Keeler! A fresh (2 days old!!) intro to the one-and-only "Paper-blackener of Bagdad on the Lakes" by none other than HSK Society head honcho Richard Polt, at The Chiseler!!!

Notes on the comic novel

I was enjoying Levi's meditation on James Wood's vision of the comic novel...even before he so luxuriously quotes from a little book called Personal Days!

Lake effect

I. Has anyone read more Donald E. Westlake than Levi Stahl? Instrumental in getting the Parker books back into print via UChicago, he's been reading books by one of Westlake's other pseuds., Tucker Coe.

II. Did Donald E. Westlake ever meet William Eastlake?

III. Hey 33 1/3 — there's another dots-template holdout, besides Disambiguation (aka The Dizzies): the invaluable cinephile blog Termite Art.

I'm saying that it's not too late to come back to the dots-fold. All is forgiven!

Two bits

I. Jenny: "[T]hey are like the thinking man's Jonathan Kellerman, but still only the dimly thinking man."

II. Charles Lamb via that epitome of modernity, Levi, mourning the passing of the...sundial:

What a dead thing is a clock, with its ponderous embowelments of lead and brass, its pert or solemn altar-like structure, and silent heart-language of the old dial! It stood as the garden god of Christian gardens. Why is it almost every where vanished?

What!

I.

'You patted his face.'
'I never. I was feeling his moustache.'
'It's the same thing.'
'It's not. Sidney, it's fastened on with glue!'
"What!'
—P.G. Wodehouse, Quick Service


II. Levi on Reality Hunger:

This seems like a perfect demonstration of what Shields doesn't seem to get about fiction: he’s right about what would happen if you were to take the plot out of Hamlet—but he doesn’t realize that the result would be terrible. A Hamlet who riffs forever? Could anyone really want that?