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!

Use your allusion

My Powell's bloggery continues, with a consideration of Ta-Nehisi's The Beautiful Struggle and Junot Díaz's Book So Famous That I'm Not Going To Write the Title Here....

And by the way: The book is on sale at Powell's, for $9.10!

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The full Time Out review of Personal Days is now online. Rod Smith is yet another brilliantly perceptive critic, I must say!

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.

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

Hands about to detach at the wrists...

...but here is my first post over at Powell's.

Table-talk of Parkus Grammaticus for February 8

I. Over at Powell's, I give the thumbs-up to some of my favorite fiction, nonfiction, and poetry of 2007. But one of the most significant bookish things for me last year was actually going to Powell's in Portland.

II. Like Murakami, I want to buy a house on Kauai.

III. If you're a poet, try your hand at prose...

IV. At Moistworks:

It's hard to like the Kinks because of Wes Anderson. No. I said it wrong. What I mean is that these days it's hard to make sense of exactly how much I like the glory period of the early career of the Kinks, in part because the cultural overtones of those songs have become highly specific as a result of their inclusion in a number of mostly excellent Wes Anderson films. Everyone knows what I mean, right? This is just an introductory paragraph and I don't want it to get too clotted....

V. I had a nice time reading from Personal Days at the Brooklyn Public Library last night — I am very sorry for people who made the trek, only to be denied entrance! There is a nice write-up over at Galleycat.

Messrs. Shteyngart and Winkler were brilliantly funny, and David Rees/Amy Sedaris, I think, could have gone on for hours—very entertaining!

VI. Over at Paper Cuts, Dave Itzkoff on PKD's YA novel, Nick and the Glimmung. Here's the opening:

Nick knew exactly why his family intended to leave Earth and go to another planet, a colony world, and settle there. It had to do with him and his cat, Horace. Owning animals of any kind had, since the year 1992, become illegal. Horace, in fact, was illegal, whether anyone owned him or not....

(Via Educating Alice)

Dizzies Newsfeeds™ for Tuesday, August 21

1. "It’s not too much of a stretch to say that I live in Portland because Powell’s Books is here." (James Tata at Maud Newton)

2. Libraries at the beach. (Via Dizzyhead Thomas)

3. Meaty profile on Jonathan Coe, who has a new novel coming out: In terms of wider literary inspirations...The Rain Before It Falls owes a considerable amount to two rather surprising writers. One is BS Johnson, a modernist novelist of the 1960s and 1970s, who was the subject of Coe’s biography Like a Fiery Elephant, and whose tortured credo that “telling stories is telling lies” haunted Coe during the writing of the new book (he admits, in fact, that his novels have been getting darker ever since the Johnson biography). The other, happier influence is Rosamond Lehmann, whom Coe first read in his mid-twenties, and whom he considers one of the 20th century’s key writers. —Times Online
(Via Dizzyhead Gautam)

4. Jenny D on writing:

I draft the whole thing (we’re talking about novels here) from start to finish, writing in longhand in little notebooks. Then I type up the draft, including a first edit. Then I edit the hard copy, type in revisions, repeat ad nauseam. This latest novel probably underwent at least 10 revision cycles, each one of which potentially involved two or three or four close copy-edits. At some point (usually more than once), I read the whole thing out loud to myself, to make sure the sentences sound right and that I can stand by them.