The Vacuous Grimoire

From Grognardia, quoting Gygax's Dungeon Masters Guide:

 A book of this sort is totally impossible to tell from a normal one, although if a detect magic spell is cast, there will be a magical aura noted. Any character who opens the work and reads so much as a single glyph therein must make 2 saving throws versus magic. The first is to determine if 1 point of intelligence is lost, the second is to find if 2 points of wisdom are lost. Once opened and read, the vacuous grimoire remains, and it must be burned to be rid of it after first casting a remove curse spell. If the tome is placed with other books, its appearance will instantly alter to conform to one of the other works it is amongst. 

My question: What are the fictional (invisible) books that are bad for a reader's mental health? The Necronomicon (and other Lovecraftian creations); the manuscript in Amis's The Information...

Location, location, location

There was something curiously touching in the fact that the Amazon should treasure this childish literature. He turned to the fly-leaf to see if her name was there. On the fly-leaf was written:
Ella Darroll,
Form III
Newbridge High School
Newbridge,
Gloucestershire.
England
Europe,
The World
The Universe.
This was surrounded by a fine section of coloured transfers.

—Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time (1951)

It might help if we knew where we lived. Each of us, after all, has the same address. Every child has memorized it. It goes something like.

This or That Number,
This or That Street,
This or That Conurbation,
This or That County,
This or That Country,
This or That Continent,
This or That Hemisphere,
The Earth,
The Superior Planets,
The Solar System,
Nr. Alpha Centauri,
The Orion Spur,
The Milky Way,
The Local Cluster,
The Local Supercluster,
The Universe,
This Universe. The One Containing:
The Local Supercluster,
The Cluster,
And So On. All the Way Back To:
This or That Street,
And This or That Number.

—Martin Amis, The Information (1995)


As children most of us will have occasionally written our address not as the bare minimum, "20-4 Ferguson Street, Palmerston North," say, but as an expansive maximum, adding something like "North Island, New Zealand, Pacific Ocean, Southern Hemisphere, the World, the Solar System, the Milky Way, the Universe."

—Brian Boyd, On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction (2009)

Bon Amis

Everything, in other words, is ripe for capers, and Amis seems to have all kinds of giddy fun orchestrating them: a shared bathroom, whispered invitations, a spiked drink, faked illnesses, secret trysts. It’s like NC-17 P. G. Wodehouse. It’s so mean and fun and gossipy that I found myself, more than once, literally shaking my head with satisfaction. —Sam Anderson on The Pregnant Widow, New York

Disambiguations™ for May 13, 2010

1. Is there a connection between Martin Amis's Money and his scriptwork on an SF movie called Saturn 3?

2. Underwood Stories publishes short stories...on vinyl! (Do I listen to enough short stories? Probably not. But maybe on vinyl I would?)

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 of Parkus Grammaticus for January 20

I. The TLS ranks the 50 greatest UK writers (including poets) since 1945.....

19. Martin Amis

20. Anthony Powell

Umm...Levi? I'm going to need backup on this one! (Bring Westlake while you're at it.)

II. Those Driftwood Singers know me all too well: A recent post about lost-’90s janglepoppers The Reverbs (one of whom went on to form Velvet Crush) hooked me, and concluded:

You can almost listen to this LP as a field recording of a time when there was still an underground in America, when the disaffected could only find obscure bands through 'zines and when wearing black really meant something. I think the snapshot on the back of the album was worth the 99 cents, don't you? Something tells me The Dizzies will go ga-ga for this.

!

III.

I remember buying the Velvet Crush album Teenage Symphonies to God along with three other used CDs from a small store on W. 81st Street...I don't know that I ever finished listening to it. And I never made it to the end of another album purchased on that trip, Maxwell's Urban Hang Suite. (Two tickets to Boringville, please!) But I think one of the other albums was Pulp's Different Class, so it all worked out!

—From the Memoirs of Parkus Grammaticus

IV. Jenny D shares a Xanth memory, jumping off the post on Florida as Korea—I love it!

Can I say that when I was in 6th grade I was obsessed with Piers Anthony and the
Xanth books?!? I wrote him a huge long fan letter—and then went off for the summer to visit UK relatives, amazingly when I got home there was a response from him...only I had slightly grown out of fandom by that point. But one of the incredibly nerdy but enthusiastic questions I'd asked him concerned whether he had ever written a novel using limericks in any capacity, and he wrote back with one that he had been thinking about using but couldn't because he didn't have author/attribution for it. So I stayed up all night reading some anthology of limericks after some obsessive other library researching, finally found it with an "anonymous" attribution and wrote back to him with the information. he sent a postcard of thanks, and put my name in the acknowledgments section of the next
Xanth book—which I believe was Crewel Lye: a caustic yarn about an unkind untruth.

Seems strange to me now that at one time I thought those books the pinnacle of genius...

V. And I responded with my Xanth memory...

[O]ur school had a "book fair" and I bought one of the Stephen R. Donaldson tomes, probably not the first, found it befuddling, and traded it to a friend for...the latest Xanth (Dragon on a Pedestal ) + the first six in the series (I hadn't read them before; he had them at home). I think I got the better deal. Now this fellow is...covering the Huckabee beat for the NYT!

—From The Light Reader–Grammaticus Correspondence

VI. ...and discovered that Piers Anthony is still Xanthing along:

From Publishers Weekly
In this meandering 31st Xanth novel, Hugo, son of the Gorgon and Good Magician Humfrey, vanishes from his cellar, where the body of a murdered man just as suddenly appears. What's worse, Humfrey's book of answers has been scrambled, and blind Wira, Hugo's wife, has no idea how to solve a mystery. Her prayers are answered by 13-year-old Debra, visiting from Mundania in hopes of lifting the curse that makes her name sound like De-bra to any man she meets. Without the book, the curse cannot be cured, so the Gorgon temporarily turns her into a naturally bra-less flying centaur in exchange for her help. As they hunt down Hugo and the killer, Debra and Wira encounter the usual crop of terrible puns and characters both new and familiar. Acknowledging that reader loyalty keeps this venerable series going, Anthony includes an extensive afterword, providing credits for 140-odd (in some cases, very odd) suggestions and updating fans on everything from the state of his health to the length of his hair. (Oct.)

VII.
Have been watching Season 1 of The Wire, the best show ever made according to many. It's.................pretty good? So far? I'll stick with it?

I had to start in media res (Disc One had a "very long wait" on Netflix). There was one scene (two detectives trying to figure out the ballistics, repeating one unprintable word about 20 times) that was pretty great...............Q: Is it as good as episode 1 of Season 3 of Gilmore Girls?

VIII. That sound you hear is the plummeting of Dizzies site traffic.

Against the Ray

The first run of the 1994 London Everyman Press edition of Lolita replaced John Ray Jr.'s foreword with one from Martin Amis. —Leland de la Durantaye, Style Is Matter

Unrelated question: Did the author John Wray (né Henderson) choose his surname as a tribute to "John Ray"? (Or Fay Wray? Or both?)

I like how Leland's name resembles that of Paul Delalande (a philosophical writer of VN's invention).