Weekend Disambiguation

The Second Pass shares a favorite long sentence (from Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff), and a commenter mentions a fun-sounding game:

Many years ago, I bought a deck of large cards, called Shuffle Cards, at the MOMA in New York City. The cards were illustrated with drawings on each side. On one side of each card were the words, “and the” followed by a noun; on the other side was a verb. You would shuffle the cards, lay them out, and have a wonderful, nonsensical story to enjoy with children.

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Have you listened to any Aimee Mann lately? I was going to delete a bunch of songs off my iTunes, then started listening. She's so good! (This part of the post sounds like an e-mail to my sister.)

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Dwight Garner's NYT review of Timothy Ferriss was like a gift that kept on giving:

"He is said to be very good at Chinese kickboxing."

"If a movie were to be made of Mr. Ferriss’s life, it would star Matthew McConaughey in little rectangular eyeglasses."

"Mr. Ferriss likes to pose without a shirt — in some photographs he sprouts chest hair; in others, it’s been waxed away — and to describe the veins that run across his abdomen. He tosses around words like 'thrashing' and, to refer to inanimate things, 'bad boys.' "

" 'The 4-Hour Body' reads as if The New England Journal of Medicine had been hijacked by the editors of the SkyMall catalog."

[Now that's the way to do an x-meets-y line in a review.]

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You know who's on a roll? Paul Collins is on a roll. First his Lapham's Quarterly piece, now this NYTBR essay on the first detective novel!

Three great reads

1.
Here I am at an antiwar rally in Central Park (that’s me with the peace button on my shirt). I have arrived at what I think of as the summit of the world. Everything is within my reach in New York, and the intoxication of it is such that I will be expelled from that high school before the end of the year. —Luc Sante, "This Long Century"

2.
In the latest Lapham's Quarterly, Paul Collins writes about child prodigy Barbara Newhall Follett, who published her first novel, The House Without Windows, to acclaim at age 12; at 26, she disappeared. An excerpt from Lost Island, her third novel:

Not even a cat was out. The rain surged down with a steady drone. It meant to harm New York and everyone there. The gutters could not contain it. Long ago they had despaired of the job and surrendered. But the rain paid no attention to them…New York people never lived in houses or even in burrows. They inhabited cells in stone cliffs. They timed the cooking of their eggs by the nearest traffic light. If the light went wrong, so did the eggs…

“I don’t like civilization,” she said, to the rain.

(Shades of Daisy Ashford...and Lee Tandy Schwartzman...)

3.
Adam Kempa, who wrote about unusual vinyl-groove techniques in the Believer's music issue, has picked his top one book of 2010: Touchable Sound: A Collection of 7-Inch Records From the USA. Adam's recommendation turns into an interview turns into a multimedia extravaganza...

Can you say

"treasure trove"??

Over 100 Paul Collins articles, up at his spiffy new site!

Foenetic speling

From Paul Collins's article "Buzzkill" in the September 2008 Believer:

“I have a packet that I’ll be giving to presidential candidates when they come through Iowa for the campaign,” she says before handing me a plain blue folder:

LOOKING FOR A FAIL-SAFE
EDUCATIONAL ISSUE FOR
THE 2008 CAMPAIGN?
SIMPLY SIMPLIFY SPELLING.

Inside are hand-annotated photocopies and an Ed Rondthaler on Spelling Reform DVD. Rondthaler, at 101 years old, is the last living link to spelling reform’s Edwardian heyday. The DVD consists of the centenarian’s vaudeville routine on spelling, followed by Rondthaler accosting an expressionless young woman in a library to explain his reforms. Rondthaler whips out a list of hundreds of nonphonetic letter combinations and begins reading them, all of them, to his unfortunate hostage. I imagine some sleepless McCain aide watching this on a laptop in Cedar Rapids, staring out his Travelodge window and wondering, When did my life go so horribly wrong?

Read more about Edward Rondthaler in his NYT obit:

Mr. Rondthaler first became known more than 70 years ago for his seminal work in photographic typesetting. In the mid-1930s, he and a colleague, Harold Horman, perfected a phototypesetting device that helped streamline the traditional art of setting type. Known as the Rutherford photo-lettering machine, it was one of the first such devices in wide commercial use.

Armed with their new machine, the two men founded Photo-Lettering Inc., a highly respected New York typographic house whose clients included many of the country’s best-known magazines and advertising agencies.

But over time, Mr. Rondthaler came to feel his beloved letters were traducing him with their unruly behavior on the printed page. So he took up the standard for spelling reform. For decades afterward, he championed SoundSpel, a simplified English spelling system he had refined from an earlier model.

“Foenetic speling wil maek reeding and rieting neerly automatic for evrybody,” Mr. Rondthaler wrote in SoundSpel, in a passage quoted by The New York Times in a 1977 profile.

Dons the rubber suit

Paul Collins in Slate:

Creaky as his apparatus now looks, [Wycliffe] Hill was onto something: Other plot wizards followed, including Plotto, the insanely complex 1928 creation of pulp novelist William Wallace Cook. (His pseudonymous memoir isn't titled The Fiction Factory for nothing: Cook once bashed out 54 "nickel novels" in a single year.) Rare and comically user-unfriendly, Plotto required its own accompanying instruction booklet—which, invariably lost or disintegrated in the intervening eight decades, leaves modern discoverers of the unaccompanied volume bewildered. Plotto resembles a thesaurus filled with cryptic codings and narrative fragments:

1367

(b) (1083) (1287)

A has invented a life preserver for the use of shipwrecked persons * A, in order to prove the value of the life preserver he has invented, dons the rubber suit, inflates it and secretly, by night, drops overboard from a steamer on the high seas ** (1414b) (1419b)

…

1373

(1027) (1418a; 1433b)

A sells his shadow for an inexhaustible purse (1354a) (1357)

Toward a radical middle

Dzyd Paul at Paper Cuts:

I construct my books in a bridge-building fashion: I create the beginning, then the end and then I write inwards toward the middle.

Alphabetical order

Dzyd Paul on George Herter in the NYTBR:

Herter’s magnum opus, though, was “Bull Cook,” a wild mix of recipes, unsourced claims and unhinged philosophy that went through at least 15 editions between 1960 and 1970. Herter claimed one million copies sold; Brown guesses it was closer to 100,000. Either number is impressive, and the wild curveball of the book’s opening lines remains unmatched in American literature: “I will start with meats, fish, eggs, soups and sauces, sandwiches, vegetables, the art of French frying, desserts, how to dress game, how to properly sharpen a knife, how to make wines and beer, how to make French soap and also what to do in case of hydrogen or cobalt bomb attack, keeping as much in alphabetical order as possible.”

Also in the NYTBR: Dzyd Douglas has the lowdown on some recent comics...

(...which reminds me, I need to read Incognegro!)

Monday grab-bag, or My new sweet style

...what if I wrote my next novel like this?...Actually the followup to Personal Days has been written, by the inimitable Deb Olin Unferth. It's called Vacation....If I were a saxophonist who played on the street for money, I'd learn "Careless Whisper"...The place name "Multnomah County" gives me the heebie-jeebies...Heffernan: "In his vertiginous free time, he crash-diets, cheats at kickboxing and persuades people to give him money"...Finally finished watching a movie—My Blueberry Nights—is it just me or does some of it feel quite Blockian? Some of the dialogue (esp. between Jude Law and Norah Jones)? And the AA stuff...I'm on the fence about it over all, well, no, let's say I liked it...why not...I used to be a film critic!...The soundtrack should've had Prefab Sprout's "Blueberry Pies"—the lyrics are even almost appropriate: "So if I come begging with take me back eyes/All you have to tell me/All you have to tell me are blueberry, blueberry pies"....WHATEVER!!!......Speaking of food: Korean food....Also in the NYT, a Q&A with American Teen director Nanette Burstein, talking about "her own intense high school experience two decades ago in Buffalo"...ummm....yes...she and yr correspondent were classmates!...Did someone say Buffalo? Yes: The Stubblemeister did, with a tip for Dizzyheads....

Under the chalk

"Didn't mean to startle you." He offered his hand, dry and strong under the chalk. "I'm Paul Collins, your pilot. Recognized you on the passenger roster."

—Joe Haldeman, Marsbound (2008)

UPDATE: "My" Paul Collins has discovered the solution: "...It's a shout-out to the Australian sci-fi Paul Collins!"

Distant Worlds Australian SF & F 4

Collins, Paul, Series Editor

[ISBN: 0909117098]

St Kilda, Victoria: Cory and Collins, 1981. 242 pp. Cover slightly edgeworn and a little rubbed. Spine uncreased. Pages uniformly yellowed, but clean, unwrinkled and tightly bound. Foreword by Joe Haldeman. Stories by Jack Wodhams, Cherry Wilder, Darrell Schweitzer, Trudy Rose, Michael Hailstone, Wynne N. Whiteford, Howard Goldsmith, John J. Alderson, Keith Taylor, David J. Lake, and Leanne Frahm and Paul Collins.. First. Paperback. Good+. 12mo - over 6¾" - 7¾" tall. (more information)

Offered by Wormhole Books (Australia)

Riddle of the Enhancing Editornym

Paul Collins's signature is worth $27!

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!

Genius! Notes on the new Believer

From Dzyd Brandon's "A Blaze in the North American Sky," in the new Believer music issue:

A little over a year ago I went to the Norwegian city of Trondheim to attend a mostly indie rock, non–heavy metal festival so I could meet Snorre Ruch, a.k.a. Blackthorn, a black-metal musician likely best known in for his connection to the murder of another black metaller, Øystein Aarseth, a.k.a. Euronymous, on August 10, 1993.

Now that's a lede!

The cover is genius (can't explain it here), the CD (masterminded by Ross Simonini) is quite different from that of previous years but also genius in its own way, there are articles that are genius, it is an embarrassment of riches (Dzyd Douglas on "A review of the only known mechanically reproduced copy of a really great record"; Ange Mlinko! Haruki Murakami?!! Dzyd Paul on music and...dentistry??), I am perhaps overusing the word genius but last night I read the Barthelme story "The Genius" and hence that is our theme today! (Two things by Rick Moody! John Adamian's notes on liner notes! Lavinia Greenlaw......interview with Fugazi dude...) MORE!

If you're thinking about reading Keeler...

Dizzyhead Paul has a bunch of good ones up on eBay!

Dizzies Newsfeeds for January 14–15

I. The Stubblemeister on an ancient stereo system! Proust had one!
II. Dizzyhead Jessica on a "supernatural picaresque"! Wow!
III. Team Dizzies recruit Devin on Edmund Wilson! Hello to all that!
IV. The unstoppable Levi: Donald E. Westlake—Anthony Powell fan?!
V. Dizzyhead Ben's top reads of '07...including a little curtain raiser for his Frank Stanford article (appearing soon)...yowsa!
VI. The Crude Futurist on a random wild booksore find: FUP, by Jim Dodge. Keeleresque? Sure, why not...anything to get more people "hooked on HSK"!

Dizzies Newsfeeds for December 2

"Things happen to me with accents on 'em!": Dizzyhead Hua in the N.Y. Sun on the delightful-sounding All About H. Hatterr...Selfdivider with another great post, this one on Percival Lowell, Theodore Roosevelt, and King Kojong...The Stubblemeister has a great NYTBR piece on the story behind the placement of cigarette ads in paperbacks (from A.E. Van Vogt to The Bluest Eye; oddly, the title bar on my browser says, simply, "Essay about Cigarette Advertisements in Paperback Books"!); as a bonus, he fills his blog with a wealth of related links, and Levi picks up the scent, chasing down the possible meaning behind a pseudonym used by a book reviewer tapped by the industry to write a positive review of Smoking and Society: Toward a More Balanced Assessment, and finally pointing us Luc Sante–ward..now that's what I call Dizzyhead synergy!...Snowing in New York, time for the Psychic Envelopes' "Winter Losses" (what happened to "Indian Summer"?!)...Over at Erasing, the Batman–Proust connection...Finally saw that Gossip Girl episode Hua was blogging about, wow, in some ways the best one yet?...(More Gossip Girl stuff in today's Times: "Not that we’re obsessed or anything”)...Gotta get my hair cut...xoxo...You know you love me....GOSSIP ED....wha....

Late-day post

New Believer is out—the incredible visual issue! Sheila Heti interviews Dave Hickey...Claudine Ko talks to Ai Weiwei...temporary tattoos...Paul Collins...Alexander Provan on Las Vegas carpetry and Dizzyhead Fhyll on Eileen Chang...the first review I've read of Alexander Theroux's massive new novel Laura Warholic....plus more Dave Hickey...and more more more, it's really good!

And the new New-York Ghost is out—the incredible letters issue!

Correction in two parts — 10 novels in 14 months

1. Thomas Bernhard (from Harper's, via Weekend Stubble):

Well, people say a lot of things in fifty years of life. If a reporter is sitting in a restaurant somewhere and hears you say the beef's no good, then he'll always claim you're someone who doesn't like beef, for the rest of your life.

2. Levi on PKD:

Dick asks us...to shed our usual blithe acceptance and instead confront those those inexplicable moments on their own terms. Might these hiccups in reality that we accept as internal events, products of our own brains, instead be actual disjunctions, even signs or warnings? Might they be indications that all is not well? What if the reality we see right now isn't the reality that was there mere moments ago?...What if our memories are not our own? Then, the ominous question that inevitably follows: who might be manipulating our perceptions, and to what end?

Dizzies Newsfeeds™ for Monday, July 16

Light blogging till at least midweek—?!

1. Dizzyhead John, the brains behind Team Knucklehead and the "Theme From the New-York Ghost," alerts us to a free download of The Format's new album, Dog Problems. Today's the last day!

2. Dizzyhead Devin has posted the text to his talk, "Hotter Than a Crotch," which he delivered at the recent Dylan symposium in Minneapolis (and which was mentioned in Time magazine). Here's how it starts:

In November of 1972, Bob Dylan went to Durango, Mexico to play a small part in Sam Peckinpah’s Western Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. The production was cursed by all the expected crises, but there was one element on the set that no one saw coming. Peckinpah’s biographer, David Weddle, writes that, “The topsoil of Durango was permeated with animal manure that dried up, blew around with the fine silicone dust, and lodged in people’s lungs, causing chronic pulmonary infections.” One of the film’s stars, James Coburn, said that in Durango, “It was really cold and damp, there was wind, and a thousand years of horseshit floating around in the air.”

3. "TUNING FORK SCREECH PUTS OUT 24-INCH FLAME; FUTURE FIREMEN TO STAY HOME, SAYS SCIENTIST." In other words, Paul Collins rules!

4. Any further thoughts on the Ouroboros? Discussing ouroboric films with Dizzyhead Dennis, it seems that there is some crossover to another favorite motif/symbol/thingy—the Möbius Strip! Dennis asks if Lost Highway counts as one or the other, as it "opens—and ends—with someone saying "Dick Laurent is dead" into an intercom and it turns out the speaker and listener are the same person..."

Jawbone's recent comment reminded me of this nifty review by Angela Starita from the PTSNBN:

But despite a jacket photo of the jowly Manganelli facing down a Pinocchio doll, Centuria is a wonderful read for its endlessly inventive send-ups of narrative conventions. Manganelli's "novels" telescope time so that his characters end where they started, like the ouroborous of the subtitle—an ancient symbol of renewal showing a snake that bites its tail.

UPDATE: From Dizzyhead Stubes, responding to our challenge (as "JMS"):

Perhaps of some small interest, my solution (if it counts as such) to your question #3 was, like your friend Izzy’s, orthographically derived, tho not a misreading. I merely noticed the similarity of the two words (then again, it was late—maybe my eyes were crossing). But I didn’t know the Sante passage, per se. Also interesting that Sante was on the verge of realizing a wonderful… something--not quite sure it qualifies as a pun--when he compared the coil of the outerboroughs to the Ouroboros, but missed his chance. Ah, well…

5. Also via Dennis, from Anna Karina's Sweater, this amazing look at two precursors to "2046" (the room/year of Wong Kar-wai's titular film)—can Dizzyheads think of more?

6. Team Dizzies members are encouraged to post—I'm hoping Sweeney will link to a Buffalo mixtape in the making...?! Singer will interview himself? Izzy will post a picture of the Colonel disemboweling a Michael Pollan book? Hua will do a dance? Arlo will post her avatar? Chrita?

Dizzies Newsfeeds™

Over at the L.A. Times, Dizzyhead Dennis looks at two of my favorite recent Japanese movies, Linda Linda Linda and (all-time Dizzies fave?) The Taste of Tea. To my great relief, it looks like he enjoyed both of them.

At Salon, (d)Izzy Grinspan's article about the performance art aspect of trashing your wedding dress draws dozens of letters...as did the excerpt from Douglas's new book, Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean...(On the other hand, a grand total of five people chimed in on my Ian McEwan review!)....Jenny D has news about her novel, musings on George Herbert's "The Temple," and a preview of an excellent upcoming Luc Sante piece. And at Weekend Stubble, Paul looks at the future of bookselling. (After you get depressed by that, watch the Conchords video on his blog to cheer up.)...In the Times: “We’ve never seen this guy,” Mr. Voorsanger said, speaking of the imaginary client as if he were real—and elusive. “He refuses to see us. He just writes us letters and communicates through e-mails. He said he was enormously moved by Cormac McCarthy’s new book, ‘The Road,’ in which everything is black. Chip Kidd did the cover.”...In the latest Modern Painters I was reading a piece by Mike Atkinson about CGI and was bowled over when he quoted my immortal Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow review...that really was a good movie, wasn't it? I mean for what it was?....A blurb on the front page of the acoustic version of Friday's NYT said A.O. Scott thinks Ratatouille is one of the best portraits of the artist put onscreen—does he say that in the review?!...RIP Edward Yang..."In the age of the iPod, do the Beatles still matter?" Umm...Brian Eno is great....So is Can—in theory! (Via Dennis)....

TECH NOTES: If you double click in the space between two words, both words will be selected.

The Epicure's Dilemma

Seen Reading is a nifty Toronto-based blog that records what people have been...seen reading...on public transportation. (Via Dizzyhead Levi)

Two days ago I was on public transportation (in New York) five times, and saw:

Two people (different times of day) reading Angela's Ashes
One person reading The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
One person reading The Omnivore's Dilemma (which at first I registered as The Epicure's Lament!)

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Other treats: Via Dizzyhead Paul—the Modern Mechanix blog. Up at Slate, Paul has a piece on radioactive eBay items (!), and Believer contributor Jana Prikryl has a fun Culturebox piece on "What the First Moviegoers Saw." (Question: Why is it called "Culturebox"?) And via Levi, the Annandale Dream Gazette.