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.

Tabular Talkage for Tuesday, December 9, 2008

1. At Print, Hillary Chute talks to Art Spiegelman about the rerelease of his Breakdowns. (The interview runs in five parts this week.)

2. Dennis Cooper has more Oulipo links/photos/videos than you can shake a stick at...(Via L.G. Thos.)

3. Jenny's latest book!

4. Next Psychic Envelopes cover?



or



(Anyone know anything about the musicians who wrote/performed these songs?)

5. ”Beethoven learned to add and subtract but never learned to multiply. If he had to multiply 65 by 59, he wrote 65 in a column 59 times and added it up.” —Jan Swafford, “How the Illuminati Influenced Beethoven,” Slate

Dust never sleeps

Bruce Sterling on Hartmut Bitomsky: Oulipo meets True Grit?

(Via L.M. Thomas.)

Table-talk of Parkus Grammaticus for May 1, 2008

Dizzyhead Bill fires the first shot in the Falindromes contest—make that the first three shots!

"I am a bad hobo" — Obama I

Wow, Live DJ! Yes, & Jersey Devil! Wow!

"U.S. food delish!" lied doofus.

(The Oulipo, by the way, had a term for writing that appears to have a constraint, but doesn't: a clinamen.)

II. Doesn't this word seems like it should be anagrammable into something else?

g’neeza, "a burial plot for damaged Torahs, prayer books or other papers containing God’s name"

(In James Barron's piece "From Auschwitz, a Torah as Strong as Its Spirit," NYT)

III. Would love to see "the Tennessee fainting goat, which keels over when startled..." —NYT

Ed Park's Return of the Reluctant

Catching up! Thanks for all the kind words and e-mails and shout-outs attendant to the arrival of DUNCAN.........

I'm going to try to ease my way in.......Hats off to Team Dizzies (including newest hire Devin McKinney—a/k/a THE HAWK) for their excellent posts, please please keep posting.......

For now—a little summary of recent "action"!

1. Over at Mr. David Cairns's Shadowplay, which has been on a roll from day one, my moment of cinema euphoria gets its day in the sun. (Until rewatching the clip, I'd forgotten that Alec Baldwin narrated The Royal Tenenbaums—nice!) "These Days" inadvertently became D.'s lullaby this morning....a bit melancholy but very pretty—

2. I'm perpetually finding and losing an article about the Oulipo that I wrote back in 1999; last night, looking for something else, I found it again, and I figured I'd better type it out on the computer just to have a record. This is early EP, so be kind! There are a few bum notes, and some sentences strain under the weight of LEARNEDNESS, but there are also some nifty things that I'd forgotten and a brief look at Harry Mathews's Cigarettes. (You can find the article at The Unarchivable, along with two other rarities, one from New York, one from Modern Painters.)

3. Jump back in time with me: In this month's Astral Weeks column (out for a while now), I read (and re-read) Joe Haldeman, with a little shout-out to Duncan!

4. Novel news: The cover for Personal Days can be seen on its Amazon page—and also right here!


I must say that I love it! (I'll post the U.K. cover as soon as it goes up—different concept, but very cool indeed!)

I'll also be posting, occasionally, to a Personal Days blog — some news about the novel, but mostly (I hope) links to interesting work-related articles and fun time-wasters.

5. This deserves a post of its own—the 50th Believer is out! I can't "believer" it! I'm an old man! It's a suitably great issue.....More on it later.....you can catch a glimpse here for now.

Two new things

1. New Believer is out! Rick Moody on The Rings of Saturn (=best book ever), Michael Miller on Lydia Davis, Dizzyhead Khong interviewing a toy inventor, a piece on the mysterious Codex Seraphinianus...

2. New (?!) New-York Ghost is out—or is it new? Is it even the Ghost? Oulipians need to read this. Subscribe here.

3. I'm happy to report that the Poetry Foundation site has won a "Webby."

4. Hope to have some good news here later*. For now...via one of my students, the second of three Van Morrison perfs ("Cold Wind in August") described by Lester Bangs in "Astral Weeks."



(For "Cyprus Avenue," go here.) And via Dizzyhead Drew's blog, here's Van the Man crooning and saxing his way through "Warm Love."

*UPDATE: Alas, The Believer didn't pick up an "Ellie" today—we were nominated in the Design and Single-Issue categories. But happily, McSweeney's won in the Fiction category (which reminds me, I just read the Wells Tower story in #23, highly recommended—the great Deb Olin Unferth also has a piece in there)...

Letter by letter

Today's poem: Joshua Clover's "Antwerp Rainy All Churches Still Haunted," from The Totality for Kids (U. California).

Lots of good lines here—each line ends with a period. It's like a good-line contest!

Three to mull over:

"Being constructed letter by letter like a labyrinth."

"Like she had seen into each pocket of you and found no money there."

"Words on the yellow streetcars riding their one empirical sentence."

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I dreamed about this book last night, or rather this morning.

I had opened it and J.C. had written a poem about another poet.

The poem only used the letters present in her name.

The Oulipians call this a "beautiful in-law"

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Over at the FSG National Poetry Month blog, maintained by Ami Greko, we learn the provenance of the cover photo for Frederick Seidel's Ooga-Booga: It's one of four clicked at the photo booth at Lakeside Lounge.