Audio daily double

I. I did a podcast with Curtis Fox, in conjunction with my recent Poetry Foundation piece on the value of minor literature.

I like the description:

Related Poets

Ed Park

John Ashbery

James Schuyler

II. The Believer offers an audio supplement to the late Barry Hannah's conversation with Wells Tower (in the October issue).

Me and the minor

At the Poetry Foundation, I reflect on the pleasures of "minor" literature. The spark was Garrett Caples's pamphlet from Wave Books, "Quintessence of the Minor: Symbolist Poetry in English"—a must read! (I'm serious!)

A tidbit:

Other figures are important because they put their more famous coevals in context or, in the case of the aforementioned Greenberg, complicate the reception of a major poet and make us question the minor/major distinction altogether. Lines from Greenberg appear, without attribution, in Hart Crane’s work, a theft that Caples deems inexcusable. At first glance, the lines from Greenberg quoted in “Quintessence” are tough going, and gnomic even to Caples. (“Why, of all things, is science ‘the smithy of the sea’?” he asks. “Indeed, what could ‘smithy of the sea’ itself mean?”) Punctuation can be baffling, and “spelling is highly idiosyncratic, occasionally yielding a word of uncertain meaning.” (“What Greenberg meant by ‘woob’ is anyone’s guess,” Caples writes.) But Caples considers Greenberg, who died at the absurdly young age of 23, a master of “sonorousness”: “For all the editorial fussing over his technical and grammatical imperfections, Greenberg never lays a bad line; his poems are sheer song, little musical constructions that resist outside interference.”

(This is the second of three fun, dissimilar pieces I've been working on this fall. The first is here.)

Disambiguations™ for October 1, 2009

I. October Believer is out! A sorta "travel issue": Avi Davis on Dracula and tourism; August Kleinzahler on Alaska; Ginger Strand and James Wallenstein on Cuba; J.C. Hallman on the history of cruise ships...plus Jonathan Ames interviewed, Sheila Heti talking to Agnès Varda, Jack Pendarvis's "Musin's and Thinkin's" Southernish humor column, and more! (Derek Walcott poem... Stephen Burt poetry review...Greil Marcus as always...Regional fast-food chart from Lincoln Michel...still more...including EYE-POPPING interior art by JING WEI!)

II. Amber Tamblyn is blogging at the Poetry Foundation's Harriet?! It's kind of amazing:

"Look at you, spell-checking the word ‘aficionado’ and correcting it. You can’t even spell. You’re a Hollywood actress who can’t spell, who doesn’t even live in Hollywood but none the less that’s what you are, because I am your subconscious and I say so."

III. I'm astonished—or maybe I'm not??—that there's no Nabokov love in the comments at Paper Cuts (vis-à-vis Rosenbaum/Laura/Slate) in fact there's no mention of Nabokov at all.

IV. Thanks to all who came out to the reading last night — that was a lot of fun!

Disambiguations™ for September 17, 2009

I. At the Poetry Foundation, Jesse Nathan talks to Nicholson Baker about The Anthologist, which I want Ed-clone to read for me (after he finishes Inherent Vice).

II. "A remarkable young woman named September": Why Grognardia is my homepage. (The interview also links to the entry on The Awful Green Things From Outer Space, one of the great Tom Wham's games for TSR.)

III. "The Someday Funnies": Epic article in The Comics Journal (excerpted here), on "How Michel Choquette (Almost) Assembled the Most Stupendous Comic Book In the World."

IV. "Madonna taught me how to do this": Sweeney sends along Abby Elliott's Gwyneth/Goop parody (in response to the Paltrovian bibimbap primer).

Gwyneth Paltrow Makes Chicken Goop.com with Abby Elliott from Abby Elliott

IV.1: Quick -- someone write a think piece about the connection between "embedding" videos and "embedding" journalists!

Waterworld

1. My review of Stanley Crawford's Log of the S.S. The Mrs. Unguentine is in the new Bookforum.

2. And here's an article I've been looking forward to: Dzyd Ben's take on the poets who populate the novels of...[take a guess].....[go on]......[you're RIGHT]:

Roberto Bolaño!

3. I always enjoy the Fantasy & Science Fiction "Curiosities" column:

NOW THAT the prospect of an American woman President in 2009 is impossible, it is worth considering that 120 years ago a utopian novel has that feat occur in 2000. Instead of Bush vs. Gore, a woman of thirty-five, Mrs. Washington-Lawrence, with a teenage daughter but no spouse, occupies the White House....

4. Thanks to those who came out to the Believer event last night—I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did!

"I am thinking of you now..."

Lucie Brock-Broido on Thomas James's Letter to a Stranger:

"In the three decades that I’ve hankered backward for this book, toward whence it came, almost everything and everybody that has had a connection to Thomas or to his work has disappeared or died along the way. So peculiar have these vanishings been, I admit that I am slightly spooked to be the vessel to bring this extraordinary text back into the world...."

Quality and cohesion

Steve Almond, on being a "Poet for a Year":

I did some checking into this manuscript business, and it turned out they didn’t have to be very long. I had perhaps four or five manuscripts on my hands. But how to release them into the world? All at once? No, that seemed greedy. Two at a time, like a double album?

It was my pal Dave who gently suggested that most poets did a fair bit of winnowing, that there was a certain internal logic to a book of poems.

“Right,” I said suspiciously.

One might write literally thousands of poems before amassing enough for a manuscript.

“Sure,” I said.

It wasn’t about quantity, but quality and cohesion.

At this point, I began tuning him out.

Syllabus

Fanny Howe on Edward Dahlberg (at TPF) — how many have you read?:

We met in cafes in New York and once at Elaine's where he was disgusted by what he saw. I was proud to be with him, my secret teacher, and only Frank MacShane shared my interest, my desire to please him. He sent me a list of writers I was instructed to read by June, 1967. This is that list, verbatim:

Osiris by Wallis Budge
Egypt by Maspero
The Book of Job by Morris Jastrow
The Song of Songs
The Gentle Cynic
The Voyage of the Beagle by Darwin
L'Amour by Stendhal
Physiology of Marriage by Balzac
Enquiries into Plants by Theophrastes
The History of Greece
Greek Poets by John Addington Symonds
Lives of the Greek Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius
Last Essays by Eric Gill
Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion by Jane Harrison
Amiel's Journal
The Goncourt Journals
Imaginary Conversations by Landor

And later he handed me a further list:

Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy
Sir Thomas Browne
Twelve Caesars by Suetonius
Animals and Birds by Buffon
Les Characteres by Lydell
Love of the Nymphs by Porphyry
Gil Blas by Le Sage

Weekend hilarity

From Gary Rudoren's "Poetry by the Numbers," up at the Poetry Foundation site.

2. Get Thee into a Journal
No matter what your style, true poetry fame is guaranteed to start when you get your work published in any of these popular poetry powerhouses. Go for it—stamps don’t cost much, and e-mail is even cheaper.

• The King of Prussia Review
  
• Avenue Cool
  
• Word Crash Quarterly
  
• Freak Werks
  
• Readysetwrite
  
• Stuff from Bob's Wallet
  
• Butte Review
  
• Gam Yrteop
  
• Words for a Big Blue Marble

[Bonus: Check out the great Paul Hornschemeier illo!]

Mini Table-Talk of Parkus Grammaticus for June 19, 2008 — EP in Berkeley

I. Dzyd Luc's phenomenal word-glutted muxtape (via Paper Cuts, via Jenny D)...

II. Levi starts The Box From Japan (yay!), declares, "Ed Park frequently is even more like Harry Stephen Keeler than Harry Stephen Keeler himself!"

III. In The New Yorker, James Wood reviews Rivka Galchen?!

IV. Jesse Nathan on Shel Silverstein's early career.

V. I'm reading in Berkeley TONIGHT, at 7:30 — Pegasus Books Downtown! (7:30 p.m., not a.m., as their site says...at least, it better be p.m.!) And tomorrow: L.A.!

In for a Pound

If we can get part of a Canto of Pound’s—and if I find it good which is highly probable—I don’t see why we should shun it. The energies of words are hard to find—I should want my issue to be entirely a matter of the energies of words.
—Louis Zukofsky to Harriet Monroe, from Peter O'Leary's article on Poetry's 1931 "Objectivist" issue, at the Poetry Foundation.

Table-Talk of Parkus Grammaticus for May 27, 2008

I. Oughtables:

Scott: "A few weeks ago Laura has The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin checked out of the library, and I keep thinking the front cover reads The Early Diary of An Assassin."

Yesterday, reading The Week, I thought I read (in a Rauschenberg obit): "But by switching to his left hand, and with the help of assassins, he kept working." (He actually had assistants.)

II. Over at TPF, Mike Atkinson on Philip Schultz. (Who? Exactly.)

III. Ouroboros alert! The L.A. Times review of Personal Days got recycled for the Chicago Tribune's online edition. Under the "Layoffs and Downsizing" tag, you can see that the photo being used is...the one that appeared on The Dizzies!



(Shouldn't "Arlo Ogg" get a photo credit?)

IV. A letter to the Times from 1986: "The Sun Was Eclipsed by Fields of Ice"

V. What did Levi leave in New York?

Then there's the question of where I checked said mysterious object. The ticket bears no writing aside from that red "28," and gives no clue to its origins. I suppose the next time I'm in New York I could retrace my steps, presenting this claim check at every bar and restaurant I visited this time around, enduring blank stare after blank stare until, finally, someone takes the ticket with a brisk nod, spins on a heel and disappears into the back room to return moments later with . . . what?

Table-talk of Parkus Grammaticus for May 15, 2008

I. Some diverse Dzyd writings! First off, Levi on the art of the poet's notebook, at the Poetry Foundation:

Despite the best intentions, poets cannot spend every waking moment writing poetry. Life and the stuff of the world are always conspiring against them, offering up laundry to be folded, garlic to be minced, blogs to be read, children to be dressed. But all the while, the mind races; what is one to do with its scattered, variegated fruits, what poet Gabriel Gudding calls “[m]y many many 5 minute ideas”?

II. And here's Jessica, on procrastination (part of a package at Slate)—specifically the "prolonged anticlimaxes" of Ralph Ellison and Truman Capote:

What is the difference between severe procrastination and writer's block? Are they part of one continuum, like a Möbius strip?

III. I'm still blogging at Powell's! My wrists are falling off! Sample mystifying sentence:

I'm so glad I went with what I'm going to call my "Darnielle opening," because there are so many ways I can go with it. I feel like (mandatory obscure sports reference) Joe Cribbs!

IV. The fourth installment of "The Oblivion Arms" is up at Five Chapters today—entitled, after Burton, "Act Three: The Third Partition: 'Love-Melancholy'"...It contains what might be my favorite part of the story, a sequence in which Murray Adipose watches an aerobics show on TV. Sample:

"And two. And three. And once more to the right and take it up. And down."

BONUS: It also contains an Ouroboros (I think I've pasted this here before):

Her finger, trailing across the wall, gathered a heap of dust that fell, with a dreamy slowness, to the floor. She found herself looking at a scrap of the underlying wallpaper, most of which had been painted over in a graying white. The paper was patterned with the hotel's emblem: embedded letters, an A within an O, the latter composed of three bolts of lightning, the former a serpent that looped to bite its own tail.

Table-talk for April 18, 2008

Good morning! It is April 18, 2008! We are in New York City!



[...]



Oh I'm sorry—I thought I was talking to Duncan!

I. At the L.A. Times, Scott Timberg talks to me and two other editor-novelists...

NEW YORK—Is it possible to lead a dedicated literary life in the billionaire-filled, media-crazed New York of today? To be heedless of the material world as you burrow into novels and ideas the way the old Partisan Review gang did in the '40s and '50s, to come up with notions that rock the intellectual landscape? And if so, who exactly is still paying attention?

Those are questions three reasonably young men are asking now in much-awaited first novels that emerge over the next few weeks.

As a friend suggested, maybe a fact-checker made him slip "reasonably" in there....

II. Free Godzilla at the Guardian! (Via Dzyd Sam.)

III. Team Dizzies Member Izzy has a diverting piece on the longest poem in the world (or is it?), over at poetryfoundation.org. (Check out the cool illo as well.)

They came up with the idea in their 2003 self-help parody, This Book Will Change Your Life, which offers a self-improvement exercise for every day of the year. As Carey explained, "Helping to write the longest poem in the world was one of the tasks. It naturally seemed best suited to the web." They put the poem on their site in 2003, instructing their webmaster to use the line "Mercy, cried the popinjay to the Pope"—picked specifically because it was hard to follow.

[...]I think it's far to say that I've read more of "The World's Longest Poem" than anyone. In the interest of research, I scrolled through 500 pages on my Internet browser. I could fit 19 lines on a page, so I moved in units of nineteen, noting the last line on every page. When I gave up several hours later, I'd gotten about halfway through and counted 9,500 lines. I'd seen several themes develop: The antagonistic relationship between the popinjay and the Pope, recurring bits about badgers and penguins, various teenagers declaring their love, various teenagers abusing their classmates, a lot about soap (especially on a rope), and a running gag of declaring the poem over. I'd identified lyrics from R.E.M., the Pogues, George Michael, Public Enemy, Belle and Sebastian, and the entire Monty Python song "Every Sperm is Sacred." And I'd discovered that, like all open Internet forums, the content eventually turned dark, freakish, and threatening. I went to bed shortly after reading line 9,500 and had disturbing popinjay dreams.

IV. Levi's been blogging from London....Douglas is nominated for an Eisner for Reading Comics....and after protracted negotiations with ed-park.com, Personal Days got its own Facebook page!

Facts of the end of winter

At the Poetry Foundation, the one and only Paul La Farge takes a look at two Frenchies from yesteryear, Félix Fénéon (Novels in Three Lines) and Victor Segalen (Stèles). A taste:

One might suspect that Fénéon was a fictional character, if only his biography did not contain so many improbable contradictions. A Frenchman born in Turin, Italy, he placed first in a civil service exam and went to work for the War Department, where he delighted so much in writing reports that, when he had completed his own, he would write those of his colleagues. At the same time, Fénéon was a committed anarchist. He took over the Anarchist Review when its editor went into hiding, and he was a friend to Émile Henry, who threw a bomb into the aptly named Café Terminus near the Gare Saint-Lazare, killing 20 strangers. Fénéon himself was suspected of bombing a different café, and was arrested when the police found mercury and detonators in his office at the War Department. (He claimed his father had found them in the street.)

"A philosophizing deaf castrato"

The world of Stanford’s imagination—that “unknown country where my dreams jump and shout”—found its fullest expression in the work for which he is best known, The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You. Like the lost text of some esoteric faith, many people have heard of it, but few have laid eyes on a copy. The Battlefield is a single poem, almost entirely unpunctuated, more than 500 pages long in its first edition, and until its reprinting in 2000 almost impossible to find. Borrowing the author’s first and middle names, Francis Gildart, the dreamy, rebellious child narrator (“knight of the levees and / rivers and ships keeper of tears and virgins and horses with lucky markings”), will be familiar (by voice if not by name) to readers of Stanford’s early poems, as will much of The Battlefield’s levee-camp cast of characters, to which Stanford adds, among many others, Count Hugo Pantagruel, the world’s smallest man; a blind astronomer; the tragically costive Rufus Abraham; Vico, a philosophizing deaf castrato; and Sylvester the Black Angel, whose lynching young Francis yearns to avenge. Christ and the apostles drop in for a while. So does Hank Williams. He’s drunk. Sonny Liston weeps alone in a short-order café. When he falls asleep, Francis kisses the back of his neck.

—Ben Ehrenreich, "The Long Goodbye"

Of comic disappointment and tragic poets

I. In PW, New-York Ghost contributor Sloane Crosley describes how an e-mail (to yours truly!) led to a literary career in comic disappointment!

II. I'm going to post more on this Monday, but if you're looking for a great read this weekend, check out Ben Ehrenreich's epic piece on Frank Stanford...months in the making...I'm really happy with how it turned out.

A near truth

Remember Dizzyhead Rachel's article on the disputed authorship of the poem "Footprints"?
Now two of the claimants have written comments. (One signs off with "Child Prodigy-World Renowned Faith Poet-Author.")

In related news: Who wrote "'Twas the Night Before Christmas"?

List List Revolution

In the ink-and-paper (I think?) L.A. Times, I run down some of the SF/fantasy/slipstreamy things I've enjoyed this year. I've written about most of these in my Astral Weeks column, though there are some extra goodies here, including Cathy Park Hong's Dance Dance Revolution...(You can also listen to CPH on DDR over at the Poetry Foundation.)

(Via Counterbalance)

Dizzies Newsfeeds for December 6 — From the Parkives, XXVII

At the Poetry Foundation, Geoff Dyer traces some interesting artistic-novelistic-poetic connections...Selfdivider on Korea and German literature: "But in [my uncle's] private study, which was only a dark, tiny room with a low sit-down table, he had shelves of books with names that seemed almost mythical to me. Fichte, Hegel, Nietzsche, et al."...Halterius views a rarely seen "disasterpiece," the video-theater version of Merrill's The Changing Light at Sandover...Levi argues that the novels of Richard Stark (Donald E. Westlake) are about work...leading me to dust off this nugget from the Parkives:

GOD SAVE THE MARK
By Donald E. Westlake
Forge/Otto Penzler Presents, 268 pp., $14.95

Fred Fitch, the gullible narrator of Westlake's 1967 novel, receives 300 grand from an uncle he's never met—and then his problems really begin. Sniped at, seduced, and ceaselessly solicited, Fred wises up just enough to keep his life, not to mention his loot. A neighbor fishes for some Fitch funding to self-publish his neglected masterpiece, Veni Vidi Vici Through Air Power, a book that asks one burning question: What if Julius Caesar had had access to a couple of biplanes? Fred himself recalls—or foreshadows—Charles Portis's Dog of the South übernebbish, Ray Midge, prone as he is to wonderfully absurd digressions that you can't help but read aloud: "I wanted to call him Ralph, I really wanted to call him Ralph. I wanted to start my answer with Ralph and end my answer with Ralph and put Ralphs in here and there in the middle of the answer, and answer only in words which were anagrams of Ralph." E.P.
—June 29, 2004, PTSNBN