Pushed to the curb — You know the ring?

How the mighty have fallen! My former student Sandy Gordon spotted this on a sidewalk in Williamsburg:



(Any idea what that other book is?)

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Fortunately, F.S. Sam McLaughlin cheered me up with an Ouroboros he discovered in Terrence Holt's collection In the Valley of the Kings. "In the title story," sez Sam, "the narrator consults an Egyptian Egyptologist":

He [the Egyptian Egyptologist] slumped, if this were possible, deeper in the dim brown heat, the rumples on his suit creasing through his face. —Did you know? I was trained as a chemist. For one year at University, before Nasser. Then the revolution came, and my family left, and I could study anything I wanted. We were all nationalists then, you know--very much so. And I decided that our heritage, our glorious gift to the human race, would be the more fitting study. But today— He pushed the scrap of paper back toward me. —Today I feel nostalgic for the benzene ring. You know the ring? A snake that bites its tail. That is perfection--none of this ringing in of signs from here and there and tomorrow: just carbon and hydrogen making geometry together.

"As personal as ever!"

...so says Leland de la Durantaye, of this common misspelling of yrs truly's name! (I am straining my eyes a bit but this looks to be a PD sighting at the Harvard Book Store...a "staff recommendation"...Heyyy, I'll take it!)



In other "Ed Parks" news, someone recently wrote a really sweet (I mean that in an "awww!" sense and also a kind of frat-boy "suh-weet" sense) review of PD on Amazon, concluding: "Well done, Mr. Parks. I hope this is the first of many novels for you!"

Again: Heyyy, I'll take it!

File under: Smith!

Dzyd Lindy—who has been living in Italy!—sends this shot of PD—errrrrr, MC?—spotted at a bookstore in Bologna.

A new 'Outfit' — The Eyes of Mao — Cubicle Opera

I. A welcome distraction: Three Richard Stark novels, just out from U. Chicago Press. Without planning to, I started with the third one, The Outfit—maybe not a good idea, but the first chapter grabbed me and has not yet let go! You will read this so fast you won't need a bookmark. (Note to self: Save that line for future review?)

Bonus: Part of The Outfit takes place in Buffalo; the wife of the Outfit head lives here. (Did Westlake know Queen City native Lawrence Block already, back in the early ’60s?)

Dzyd Levi (who works for the press) directs me to an interview he and a colleague conducted with Westlake (who wrote the Stark books pseudonymously). Sample gem:

I’ve always been a catholic reader, but also a bit of a sponge, taking on characteristics of what I’m reading, if I’m not careful. If I read too much Anthony Powell, my sentences gradually become longer and longer and less and less gainly.

(Only Westlake I've read previously: God Save the Mark.)

II. Dzyd Rachel has another ponder-worthy piece up at the Poetry Foundation, this time on Mao's verse. Sample goodie:

Although Mao dismissed intellectuals as dumb and disloyal—only those whose feet are “smeared with cow-dung,” he announced, are capable of true art—he could never quite wean himself from the joys of his scholarly existence. He was always neurotic and insecure about his own intellectual abilities, even in comparing himself to his own secretaries. According to one of Mao’s biographers, Jung Chang, Mao slept on a large bed partially covered in piles of books a half foot high, so that when he woke up he could immediately roll over and begin reading. When his vision faltered in old age, he ordered the construction of two factories to print books with characters large enough for his eyes.

III. Nice PD review in Philadelphia City Paper! "This absence of novelized work makes a book that restricts itself to the 9-to-5, like Ed Park's cubicle opera Personal Days shine all the more. Park points out that those dead, stressed hours make up a separate reality..."

IV. Speaking of work novels and Stark, I'll link again to Levi's post on how the Stark novels are work books...There's a scene toward the end of The Outfit that's amazing not because of its violence (as are many of the brutal scenes herein) but because we could be listening to a consultant filling the boss in regarding sloppy management: "The organization is getting too highly organized."

V. More PD news, from our correspondent on the Continent, Dzyd Christine:

No PD sightings in Europe so far (I thought it would be fun to send you one, but alas), but when chatting with the ladies at Shakespeare's in Paris yesterday I asked if they had it, and they said they used to have a few, but if it was good they'd order more. I assured them it is, and they did (!). Very sweet.

Personal Days — the board book!

It's been a while since I posted any PD sightings — here are the first ones from across the pond—the Waterstone's in Islington, to be exact! Looks like I'm shelved between David Park and Dorothy Parker...







(That's my sister-in-law, with Duncan's cousin, Coco—who looks quite amused!)

(Photos: Stefano Bolis)

Table-Talk of Parkus Grammaticus for July 7

I. "South Korea in two vertically standing problem of identity than their New York office workers wanted to write about life."

[?!!]

Korea's Chosun Ilbo covers Personal Days, and Google's translation function makes hay...

II. I'm reading at (in?) the St. Marks series on 7/10! More info soon.

III. Maybe all my Feelies blogging made this happen? Over at the Personal Days blog, hotographer Ennis Mild captures a PD reader at last Friday's Feelies/Sonic Youth concert! Very cool!

IV. I forgot what IV was for...

V. (That's like that Violent Femmes song!)



VI. Two great science-fiction-related posts from Dzyd Paul—

A) The Onion's great paperback bloggery, featuring "the most famous fantastic novel of all time" (not).
B) Ubik—the aspirin?!—at Mark A. Rayner's "Vintage Ads of Fictional Futures."

VII. Did you know Richard Wright wrote (tongue-twister!) —

A) A novel with all white characters?
B) An unpublished novel called The Island of Hallucination?

(More here.)

VIII. Oh wait maybe this was IV. — I missed WKW's My Blueberry Nights (well, nearly every theatrical release of the last seven or eight months!), and the reviews were savage, but no less a tastemaker than Mike Atkinson dug it:

My Blueberry Nights (2007) Catching up with this critical hot potato – nobody seemed capable of dismissing or faintly praising it fast enough – I was entranced. In a few years, after all the gotchas and one-ups have been forgotten, it’ll reappear as classic Wong.

Heyyy, I'm sold! "Add to queue"!

(At the Moving Image site, Atkinson writes on William Holden, Jessica Winter looks at Mad Men, and more...this is a great site! This is like the PTSNSBN of yore!)

IX. Vaguely self-serving Ouroboros!

The loves of Parkus Grammaticus

[PD muscling in on Palahniuk/Pamuk/Parker/Patchett turf at the Borders in Portland, Maine. Photo from Matthew Tiffany.]

I love getting "Rick-rolled."

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I love the photo that goes with this caption, in the Guardian: "The NEA makes a convincing case that young people are reading less, but it completely excludes reading done on computers."

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I love this minimalist author bio, on the ARC for the forthcoming The Poems of Mao Zedong:

Mao Zedong (1893-1976) founded the People's Republic of China in 1949.

[Cue: MC Hammer, "Can't Touch This."] (From Dzyd Rachel)

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I love McCain for President...of the Dizzies Discussion Group!: "I think the guy's a medical mess and here are the highlights which were buried in the other news...
"—He has dizzy spells.
"—He suffers from vertigo..."

(From Dzyd Ed)

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I love everything about this song!

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I love that I completely misread this headline yesterday! I thought it said "dialectics"!

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I love that I saw some of you in Chicago, and that I will see some of you tomorrow (Downtown at Happy Ending) and Thursday (Beantown)!

Table-Talk of Parkus Grammaticus for June 5: Chicago Edition

I. Passive-aggressive reminder! I'll be reading TONIGHT at 7 p.m. in CHICAGO! The Book Cellar! More info at the usual places and at Literago.

II. Dzyd Ed on Charles Broskoski:

As if taking a one-man stand against the alleged decline of bibliophilia in the digital age, Charles Broskoski read 356 books in 400 days, ending his own personal Reading Olympics in early 2008. If that doesn't sound grueling enough to you ADHD types, consider this: the books he perused were a collection of O'Reilly tech-guide e-books downloaded as a single torrent in late 2006: fat tomes with such alluring titles as Linux Device Drivers, XSLT Cookbook, Essential System Administration and ASP.NET in a Nutshell.

Go to Broskoski's site for some dazzlingly numbing photos.


III. New Ghost is out!

IV. West Coast Personal!

From Pegasus Books, where I'll be reading on 6/19.

(Photo from Rachel Marcus)

V. And: At last! Dzyd Dennis's Museum of the Moving Image website is up—a resource/calendar/journal featuring pieces by a few of our favorite names/Dzyds, including B. Kite, Michael Atkinson, Ed Halter, and Joshua Clover. From the Kitean review of Richard Brody's Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard:

So how did Godard greet his future biographer when they met in Switzerland in 2000? Quite amiably at first. Brody at that time was working on the New Yorker profile that served as the seed of his book. Godard said he liked the magazine's cartoons. They spent the day together, and Brody harvested a number of Godardian aperçus, including one that became the title of his book. They parted after dinner, with plans to resume discussion in the morning. But come the dawn:

I found the curtains drawn over the wall-sized window and the glass door, to which a note inscribed "Mr. Brody" was taped. Godard had written that he could not continue the interview because it was "not a real discussion" and was "flou"—out of focus, vague—but he wished me a better "game" with people I'd be seeing in Paris.

Ouch.

As I looked through the articles, I realized this is something I've been waiting for—not essays on cinema per se, but the return of Dennis Lim as an editor, an editorial sensibility. It's been a while—welcome back!

Ghost of a smile

Mediabistro reports on the Personal Days party at the New York Society Library. Here I am with my editor, Julia Cheiffetz; comic novelist extraordinaire Amanda Filipacchi is visible off my left shoulder.

(Photo by Adrian, Ghost lapel pin by Sarah!)

Why hello! This is not really a 'Table-Talk'!

Q: When will I stop posting photos of Personal Days?
A: As long as you keep sending them in—never!

PD has been spotted in Brooklyn's Book Court:



(Photo courtesy Sari Aviv)

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Some nice new reviews are out in the L.A. Times, Bookforum, the Daily Mail (UK), the News & Observer (Raleigh/Durham), and the Dayton Daily News. From the first one:

The modern corporate office is to Ed Park's debut novel Personal Days what World War II was to Joseph Heller's Catch-22—a theater of absurdity and injustice so profound as to defy all reason....Personal Days proves that Park may be in line to fill the shoes left by Kurt Vonnegut and other satirists par excellence.

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That ellipsis takes us from the first paragraph to the last!

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Did I tell you I only recently "figured out" the title The Raw Shark Texts? (Has anyone read it? Should I read it?) I was just walking around, thinking of something else, when it hit me.

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Dzyd Martin, who knows whereof he speaks, cites PD as an example of "Valet Lit." (Mild spoiler alert?) See here for his earlier finds: Kerouac, Salinger!

Is it a 'Table-Talk' if I don't use Roman numerals?

Levi e-mailed me recently, pondering whether to start on Nabokov's Ada. William Grimes's piece on 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, in today's NYT, gave him pause:

Drop the bloated, self-indulgent “Ada” from an otherwise correct Nabokov list (“Lolita,” “Pale Fire,” “Pnin”) and insert “Laughter in the Dark” or “The Gift.”

I can't argue with those substitutes; I might add: "Or Glory, or Bend Sinister, or The Real Life of Sebastian Knight..."

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The Grimes piece mentions Brautigan's In Watermelon Sugar; I wonder if this edition of 1001 Books still includes RB's Willard and His Bowling Trophies?

I actually bought a Brautigan recently—$10 for Sombrero Fallout, hc, with dj! On the streets of New York, baby! (Good bookseller on the sidewalk on Columbus in the 70s.)

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Confession: I heart VN and RB but have not read Ada or IWS! Summer project? Who's with me?

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Random thought: Start a list of 1001 essential books on this blog? Write to me [thedizziesATgmailDOTcom] and I'll post...

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A list of essentials from Jenny D, including The Fountain Overflows. (Um, which I also haven't read!)

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In the NYT piece, I concur with Grimes as to the other Powell books! I think those are the two best non-Dancers.

A little more Anglophilia might have been in order. Anthony Powell shows up with “A Dance to the Music of Time” — which is actually 12 novels, so Professor Boxall cheats — but I would have made a play for a few of the pre-“Dance” novels, like “Venusberg” or “Afternoon Men.”

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Personal Days surfaces in Hoboken:

















This edition of PD likes to go to Maxwell's and listen to Yo La Tengo! And is "for dog lovers"!

(Photo courtesy Hannah Frank)

Dizzterical! The Remix

Dzyd Ed writes: "Have you seen this version of the Personal Days ad? I found it online in some hardcore Ed Park fan forums..."



Hmm, it should move...like this?

'Personal' ad

My fondness for Cavemen aside, is it possible to get excited about an advertisement?

Yes—when it's for Personal Days! Today at GalleyCat!

PD in SF

Next to Dorothy Parker!



Photos courtesy Theo Schell-Lambert.

Weekend photo supplement

My first sighting: Barnes & Noble, Lex @ 86th St., 5/13



Later, that evening: Barnes & Noble, Broadway @ 82nd St. Diminutive customer looks uninterested.



Barnes & Noble, Lincoln Triangle, 5/14:



57th St. Books, Chicago, 5/15 (Via Rocketlass):



Powell's Books, Portland, OR, 5/16:


Amazing placement at Borders, Columbus Circle:



Just kidding—it was really here:



...somehow the placement (Palahniuk/Park/Porizkova) made me think of that Billy Bragg song that begins, "Between Marx and marzipan in the dictionary/there was Mary/Between the deep blue sea and the devil/that was me..." (Ah yes: "The Short Answer"!)

A Dance to the Bloggery of Powell's

My final blog post is up at Powell's! It's a doozy! Topics covered: browsing, bookshelf neighbors, Anthony Powell, Edward Payson Vining, Henriette Mertz's Pale Ink, Pale Fire, Gossip Girl, Levi Stahl's notebook article for TPF, a mysterious book called The Logogryph, and...oh yes, Personal Days!

(Find all my posts here, and marvel how I got through the whole week without mentioning Keeler. And this is how Personal Days looks on the Powell's shelf.)

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Also—there are signed and illustrated copies of Personal Days on sale at St. Mark's!

Crowing

From Jane Dark's Sugarhigh!:

Born four years apart: two faces of one feeling...both in their own languages named after the crow...

Who is he talking about? (Click through to find out.)

A few recent Astral Weeks topics have featured this bewitching bird—Ekaterina Sedia's The Secret History of Moscow and Endless Things, the culmination of John Crowley's Aegypt sequence. (Crowley's Livejournal page is found at crowleycrow.livejournal.com.)

Now feast your gaze on the ominous crow symbol on the keyboard of the Personal Days cover (and done white-on-black on the spine)...What does the crow signify in my novel? You will have to read it to find out! Get your copy online today—or stroll over to the store and purchase it!

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Check out the crow at Crawford Doyle on Madison Avenue:



UPDATE: Rocketlass sends in a PD sighting from 57th Street Books in Chicago!

Seller - Days

New game: Most evocative, naturally occurring side-by-side phrase formation?


Spotted at Barnes & Noble, Tribeca

Photo courtesy Sarah W.

Dementia Americana — and helloooo, Canada!

My latest Powell's post is up—H.P. Lovecraft, John Darnielle, and more! Dementia Americana! What am I going to write about tomorrow?

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Dzyd Scott, of Erasing fame, sends us this first international sighting of Personal Days:



Chapters, Mississauga, Ontario

Very Personal!

“Ed Park’s whodunit-cum-office-horror-show romp shimmers with menace from page one…Park makes his story one any office drone with a hint of resentment can relate to. This is easily cubicle comedy’s darkest artifact to date, and its most subversive.” —Time Out New York


—Barnes & Noble, Transit Road [?], Clarence, NY

Photo from my mom!