Against the "A"

The Psychic Envelopes want to participate in this Times contest—"In Search of the Lost Chords"—but they're not entirely sure they get it.

Love these two epigraphs, though:

The sweetest sounds I’ve ever heard are still inside my head.
— Richard Rogers

We discussed the widespread contempt in which ukulele players are held - traceable, we concluded, to the uke’s all-but-exclusive employment as a producer of chords - single, timeless events apprehended all at once instead of serially. Notes of a linear melody, up and down a staff, being a record of pitch versus time, to play a melody is to introduce the element of time, and hence of mortality. Our perceived reluctance to leave the timelessness of the struck chord has earned ukulele players our reputation as feckless, clownlike children who will not grow up.
— Thomas Pynchon from “Against The Day”

Born in Dizziness

Update: Literary dizziness in the aforementioned L.A. Times. My PKD piece is in this latest installment, which I just discovered also has a piece by (LATBR editor) David Ulin on (Dizzyhead!) Howard Hampton's Born in Flames (considered along with the latest by Joan Acocella)...and BiF is a book that contains several pieces I edited...OK, I need to sit down.

Here's a bit from the Ulin:

With "Born in Flames," Hampton moves from "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" to Thomas Pynchon, from the Clash to Plastic People of the Universe to Tiananmen Square. In one essay, he compares the proto-punk band the Mekons with "Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," Fredric Jameson's "ornate, pitiless mausoleum of a book." [...] When, in an essay on Los Angeles music, Hampton cites the fictional Lola Heatherton, "the greatest of [Catherine O'Hara's] SCTV characters, the second-tier alcoholic-pillhead singer-dancer-actress par excellence," to illuminate the kitschy power of singer-songwriter Dory Previn, we get a vivid glimpse of the critic's mind at play. This is writing that exposes an imagination's workings, overlapping, a floating stew of reference points that encompasses high culture, mass culture and everything in between.

Ruthless — HoMu sapient — Snarkwatch 2.0

From Dizzyhead Thomas:

January 7
Ruth Cleveland

1904. Ruth Cleveland, daughter of President Grover Cleveland, dies on this day at age thirteen of diphtheria, four years before her father. They lie near one another in Princeton Cemetery in New Jersey. Born between her father's two terms, she had been adored by the public, and a candy bar was even named for her: Baby Ruth. —James and Kay Salter's Life is Meals

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The Times jumps on the HoMu BKLYN story—alas, without a mention of Samantha Topol's in-depth piece in the Believer's current visual issue.

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UPDATE: This just in via Dizzyhead Brent, an LYT-caliber review (that word should be in quotes) of Pynchon's Against the Day, in the Boston Dig. (Link fixed!) It has to be read to be believed:

To call reading this book a waste of time is almost an insult to activities like picking your toes and staring at the wall.

Everything else aside, it’s the Chums of Chance—boy adventurers who travel the world by hot air balloon—who serve as the absolute nadir of the book, and perhaps all books everywhere, ever written, in history.

I'm beginning to think it's a parody?