Disambiguations™ for December 2, 2009

I. Exciting news: Dave Tompkins's decade-in-the-making How to Wreck a Nice Beach: The Vocoder From WWII to Hip Hop. The Machine Speaks is forthcoming from Stop Smiling/Melville House next spring. (A sample of his vocoder musings can be found in an old Believer.)

The book's title, we learn, is "from a mishearing of the vocoder-rendered phrase 'how to recognize speech.' "

A Rousselian distortion! It's a trend: Last week I saw a New Yorker listing for the group Alice Donut, and learned that the band name came from a similar homophonic smudging, of the movie Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore. (The full name was "Alice Donut Liver Henry Moore.")

II. Earlier this year, Richard Polt—not just the esteemed editor of Keeler News (and the founder of the Harry Stephen Keeler Society) but the editor of ETCetera: Journal of the Early Typewriter Collectors' Association—was good enough to set me up with a Lettera 22, which I brought along to the wilds of Wyoming. (I had feared that my laptop would give out on me.) Here is the evidence:

It's a lovely, jade-by-way-of-pea-soup-colored machine that was a joy to use...until last week, when a bit of connective tissue snapped. I plan to get it fixed soon, and in the meantime blame my non-writing on its injury.

Here's Sylvia Plath with her Lettera:



And here's Mark Sarvas mentioning his old Lettera a while back...

And of course, the most recent news: Cormac McCarthy's trusty Lettera 32—is going up for auction. He wrote all his books on it (including three unpublished novels), and estimates an output of 5 million words over the years. As someone in the piece puts it: "It’s as if Mount Rushmore was carved with a Swiss Army knife."

Dean Young — Yesterday? — Harry Mathews interview

Today's poem is Dean Young's "Static City," from Embryoyo (published by Believer Books). Here's a bit: "Imagine a frog/in your mouth, struggling./Now imagine you're that frog."

(Just saw and am checking out a pretty funny conversation between Young and Tony Hoagland at the PoFo site: Memory is "the bad breath of time?")

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What about yesterday's poem? My students came up with some great Oulipian poems, but I'll save them for another day. I just want to assure you that I have been reading at least one poem a day during this most National of Poetry months.

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Dizzyhead Jessica alerted me to an interview with Harry Mathews (in my pantheon, up there with Nabokov, Powell, and Portis) in the new Paris Review. (I've had HM on the brain, thanks to my recent Oulipo/Roussel musings—The Conversions is an especially Rousselian concoction; see Dizzyhead Laird's note.) I debated whether to buy it or not, thinking it might just cover the same old (albeit fascinating) ground—aaaaaand...I wound up saying YES to shelling out $12 and had to stop myself from reading the whole thing last night. I'm going to try to make it last at least another day.

Some choice quotes:

"I couldn't hammer a nail until I was seventeen. I spent all my time in dreamland, listening to obscure music and reading Henry James."

"We reached Plymouth in a parody of English weather—fog, rain, darkness."

On Ashbery and Schuyler's delightful collaborative novel, A Nest of Ninnies: "Auden had once said that it's impossible to describe meals in contemporary fiction. So there is an endless number of meals in the book."

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Best idea: Buy the PR with a $20 bill, and instead of tipping the cashier $8—as is your wont—use this "mad money" to purchase the new Believer!

Animal corrective

Once the Roussel bug bites, everything seems devised according to secret principles of composition. This is a story from CNN entitled "World's tallest man ties knot"—

Bao was in the news in December after he used his long arms to save two dolphins by pulling out plastic from their stomachs.

The dolphins got sick after nibbling on plastic from the edge of their pool at an aquarium in Liaoning province.

Attempts to use surgical instruments to remove the plastic failed because the dolphins' stomachs contracted in response to the instruments, Chinese media reported.

Roussel might have distorted that headline and take the meaning of "ties knot" literally, and painstakingly described this giant's fingers executing all sorts of interesting convolutions on a length of rope.