Table-talk of Parkus Grammaticus for April 25, 2008

1. Levi runs with the tag!

2. Becky plays Carcassone! (Carcass 1? Carcass own?) Remind me to tell you about playing Settler of Catan, translating slowly from the German!

3. Madonna's "Four Minutes"! I feel like this is an Ouroboros....I'm calling everything an Ouroboros these days...OK...maybe it's just a pretzel thingy...a song that it about its own duration!


Also those vivisectional views are very unsettling, like the cover of this Ballard Re/Search thingy!









4. Molls: "Whew! Are you poped out?"

5. Is that Jude Law in the window of the Beatles' limo?...Various new Personal Days notices...I thought this headline [Jennifer Lopez to star in a TLC reality series (AP)] meant that J.Lo was starring in a series based on TLC the group...

Table-talk of Parkus Grammaticus for March 27, 2008

I.

Scott’s device had a barrel-shaped horn attached to a stylus, which etched sound waves onto sheets of paper blackened by smoke from an oil lamp. The recordings were not intended for listening; the idea of audio playback had not been conceived. Rather, Scott sought to create a paper record of human speech that could later be deciphered. —Jody Rosen, "Researchers Play Tune Recorded Before Edison," NYT

II.
Is the "Join or Die" snake an Ouroboros gone awry?


The link also has this interesting fact: "The undulations of the snake’s body broadly suggest the curves of the North American east coast."

(Thanks to Dzyd* Jen)
(*=new abbrev for 'Dizzyhead')

III.
I try not to use the blog as a place to complain about stuff, thinking that nobody wants to read that. But I kind of like reading Mollie's complaints!

IV.
Back to matters lit’ry: Spotting Philip Roth puts Selfdivider in mind of Stendhal (and Sebald, and...). (His mention of the Korean film Untold Scandal gives me an excuse to link to my brief review for it in the PTSNBN.)

Dizzies Press Release — Brooklyn Book Festival

Though I don't live in Brooklyn, I'll be on a panel at next Sunday's Brooklyn Book Festival, with Chuck Klosterman and Rob Sheffield! It's at 5 p.m., on the main stage at Borough Hall Plaza. (OK, I have no idea where that is...) Lots of good stuff going on—more info here....

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In other news...Restricted View on For Better or For Worse..............Does one italicize comic strip names?................Speaking of copy-editing mysteries: Molls on Pilates—or is that pilates?.............................New Psychic Envelopes single is out..........(more info here).................................Slate says no to exclamation points (via Dizzyhead Jen)...but Jenny D is on a quest to reclaim them! So am I!.............Jonathan Franzen: "It sat in a drawer for twenty years".............Jonathan Lethem: "the hapless and poignant Julian Lennon"..........Thought: My favorite humor site might actually be Cracked, when they do their musical lists........Thought: This lyric (from Cream) has always bugged me:

I told you not to wander 'round in the dark
I told you 'bout the swans, that they live in the park
Then I told you 'bout our kid, now he's married to Mabel

...........................Mabel?...This also doesn't sound so great, alas (via Dizzyhead Brent):

Across the Universe takes place in a ‘60s England and America in which there are no Beatles, only Beatles songs. Jude, a Liverpool dockworker, jumps off a steamer in America to find his father; at Princeton, he meets up with happy-go-lucky soon-to-be-dropout Max and his ethereally beautiful sister Lucy.

I've just seen a banner ad

Sean Lennon: World's most interesting face?

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And—I was looking for something else to post here—Dizzyhead Devin's Boston Globe piece on Beatles covers—and wound up at Vertiblog, a U2 site. The flashing banner contains some interesting trivia:

U2 was in Buffalo the night Lennon was shot
U2 will be in Buffalo again on December 9, 2005
The 25th anniversary of Lennon's murder...

(Well, the date's off by a bit, but you get the idea.)

Then you can print out this little graphic/posterette to wave at the concert.

And get into a time-travel machine, as it looks like the blog hasn't been updated in a while...Still, an interesting bit of trivia for Buffalo/Beatles/U2 enthusiasts.

M-A-L-E?

"In the grand scheme of things, what gets written in dry-erase marker on the door of my Esprit dressing room is not important." —Restricted View

Double play, or, The Complete Guide to Andy Selsberg Coverage

Now the other piece by Citizen Truth gets some play, over at the WSJ's The Informed Reader blog:

Works such as “The Yuppie Handbook” (1984), “The Official Slacker Handbook” (1994) and “The Hipster Handbook” (2002) derive their laughs from people’s discomfort with the existence of a class system in the U.S., journalist Andy Selsberg writes in arts-and-culture magazine The Believer.

(Yesterday, we noted that the NYT blog had picked up on the new issue of The Believer, which includes this piece; Paper Cuts also raved about the latest Oxford American...in particular, a piece by Andy on eating like a man.)

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Over at Restricted View:

Seen on the street yesterday: a snake! Seriously! I did not move to New York City to nearly step on a snake! Especially while wearing sandals! But there it was! A smallish, presumably harmless snake, but nevertheless a snake, slithering across my path! On Broadway! I am still freaking out!

Bourne free

Quote of the day—of the year?—from Dizzyhead Thomas:

"Did you think 'And it will take me anywhere' seemed too hackneyed? I am obsessed to accelerate and simplify every phrase I set down."

—Marianne Moore, in a letter to Elizabeth Bishop

These days I am obsessed not only with filtering out cliché ("filtering out cliché"—that's not bad, not cliché!) but also splitting apart any too-cosy adverb-verb or adverb-adjective combos. Where does it end? What is the point?

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Dizzyhead Benno's reviewing films over at L Magazine—check out his take on The Bourne Ultimatum. This line cracked me up: "Not to get all André Bazin on [director Paul Grengrass's] ass, but since when is editing a film to within an inch of its life considered the summit of mimesis?"

(Which reminds me, the headline for this fascinating piece on the Robert Ludlum thriller-writing franchise should have been "Bourne Again"!)

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Molls asks: "What global not-for-profit will I find petty fault with tomorrow? Come back and see!"

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UPDATE: Dizzyhead Alex on "Poetry in Motion."

Dizzies Newsfeeds™ for Thursday

Mollie on stamps!...New Ghost!....At Hua's place, Dave Tompkins has some Frampton-vocoder madness....In the latest Cinema Scope, Dennis talks to Abel Ferrara! Jessica gets (so to speak) Knocked Up!.....And now it's time to get really overheated with some "Soul Raga Cookin'," circa 1969, by a group called—The Believers! (Via the invaluable Office Naps)

Seal vs. Shark

From Mollie's review of a rare theatrical treat:

What followed was a fascinating mix of processional and site-specific theatre, postmodern dance, metatheatrical audience interaction, boldly avant-garde prop use and highly unorthodox storytelling....

"I hope the end will come soon," another spectator ventured. The Seal approached and whispered in my ear, "The play will end when we start the ending." Then he slithered off to crouch inside an overturned wicker table....

Eventually there was a snarling showdown between Shark and Seal, with the Seal, on his belly in the grass, doing most of the snarling (as the Fish ran around, shouting, "Glub! Glub! Glub!"). The younger, startled Shark protested, "You're a Seal! Seals are nice!" "We're not friends yet," the Seal reminded him, and us. "We're still mean friends." Then he raised himself to look the Shark in the eye and growled, "If you don't start being good, I will kill you."

Things We Said Today — Three is the magic number

Some last notes on the McCartney kerfuffle from Brooklyn Ed and West Coast Mike. And for good measure, Our Molls weighs in a final time.

And there's a classic Jenny D post up, on the power of threes in exercise, professoring, and music:

My great pleasure in those years was sightreading chamber music in some farfetched variant--you know, like reading the viola part in a string quartet on the clarinet--or else having a maniacal week of rehearsals in the small orchestra for a school musical, when my genius music teacher Al Clayton realized that he could rent me an instrument at the beginning of the week & I would be able to play it by the end of the week & it was both cheaper and more educationally valuable than paying a pro! So I had those funny little stands where you can rest your clarinet and your English horn or whatever funny combination of instruments you need depending on the orchestration of the particular show. And in general the work you do on each instrument is specific to that instrument and yet also has some cumulative benefit for your playing in general. And triathlon is just like this, it's a threesome of activities each of which has different sub-challenges (climbing versus sprinting on the bike, different sorts of running at different distance, working on the transitions between) and all of which go wonderfully well together, and it is what I am most excited about doing in future!

The Unsinkable Mollie Wilson

Dizzyhead Mollie didn't care for the New Yorker's piece on Paul McCartney, and her reasons were sound and stylishly put. (I would expect nothing less! M. wrote the inaugural "Essay" for me, over at the PTSNBN, a delicious skewering of Madonna's shouldn't-have-been-a-book, Mr. Peabody's Apples.) Mollie's so good her post made me rethink my own enthusiasm. (That's probably too strong a word—I wrote here that I found the repetition of hoary Beatles chronology comforting, like an origin myth. OK, I'm a sap.)

I linked to her post yesterday. This morning, Dizzyhead Devin mentioned some sort of kerfuffle over at Restricted View...lo and behold, there is time for fussing and fighting, my friend: The author of the piece has posted several miffed comments on Mollie's blog, and the whole thing was picked up by the Huffington Post. Mollie responds as civilly as she can...but the New Yorker writer continues to get massively worked up; he throws in plenty of generalized "zingers" about blogging, which are juvenile in a way Mollie's criticisms never are. ("If only bloggers ran the actual publishing world!" "Damn, this blogging stuff is fun! You just kind of type away...") Most irksome is his sense of superiority; of course he's a better writer than our Molls; he writes for the New Yorker! She's just a blogger...

Mollie's headline today: "I could make it longer, if you like the style..."

Game, set, match: Wilson!

Not enough people are named Edna these days

No time to blog! Except to say Julian Maclaren-Ross is my new favorite writer. Well, maybe he's tied with Dizzyhead Mollie, whose most recent post at Restricted View considers a pungent edition of Show Boat:

I can't attest to the handsomeness of the new edition firsthand, but it has to be better than the edition on my shelf. When I was researching that piece, I worked from a beat-up Fawcett paperback printed in 1971 or shortly thereafter. It had tiny print, a musty smell, and a torn front cover -- which unfortunately did not do much to obscure the cover illustration, a hideous, borderline-psychedelic collage of playing cards, women in large hats, riverboats and other plot elements. A Google search has turned up nothing, but when I get my hands on a digital camera I will have to show you what it looks like, because trust me, this cover puts the "mar" in "mass-market paperback." (Did you like that? Should I have gone with "ass" instead? I was torn.)

Murphy's law

Nobody reads the theater section like Restricted View:

[W]hat this article doesn't discuss is the role the Times played in the whole mess. Ben Brantley, never one to review an entire production when he can write a lopsided appreciation of its star, reviewed Wonderful Town as though [Donna] Murphy's performance were the only reason to buy a ticket. It was a very valid reason, certainly; he wasn't wrong about that. But he hardly noticed that the show has two leads -- perhaps the Encores! concert was billed as a star vehicle for Murphy, but in reality the role of Eileen is just a smidge less central than that of Ruth, and Jennifer Westfeldt more than held her own. Brantley had little to say about her contribution (though he noted that she made a "charming" debut); the vast majority of his review was dedicated to worshipping at the feet of Donna. I admit, I was slightly less in love with Murphy's comedic stylings than Brantley was -- I was irritated by the way she delivered all of her dialogue out of one side of her mouth, in a style so mannered and "jokey" it made Roz Russell look like Olivia de Havilland.

2. Added to Queue: The Karate Killer (1973), which I think will give me deeper insight into the East Asian political situation:

Japanese forces have moved into Korea, threatening the neighboring nation of China. Patriotic to the core and eager to contribute to the cause that freedom fighters have espoused, young Chin pledges her life to aid the resistance efforts. Her commitment takes her deep into enemy territory, where she ventures bravely under the guise of a prostitute who will serve the Japanese army in this martial-arts actioner.

3. New activity over at the Psychic Envelopes site.

4. Very funny McSwy's piece online about choosing your password.

5. In the Times, Motoko Rich has a thorough look at newspaper book review sections and literary blogs, though it also feels like an endless conversation at this point. (Still, I enjoyed the "Wait, I know her...and him...and her!" sensation: she talks to the editor of my novel, my L.A. Times editor, and some frequent Dizzies linkees.) Also: Richard Ford slags Terre Haute!

Labyrinths, bakeries, and more

1. William Gibson on Borges's Labyrinths (via Ed of the Ranting)—definitely my pick if I could only take one Borges book to a desert island.

Speaking of which, I figured out what I would say if I were allowed only one book, period, to take to a desert island. I would ask for a ukelele (or guitar) chord book, if I were also able to take a uke or guitar as well.

(Wait—why am I thinking I'm about to be marooned on a desert island?)

2. Dizzyhead Mollie's on a roll over at Restricted View: How one publisher mangled Middlemarch.

3. UPDATE: Time to check out the latest issue of Cinema Scope, featuring B. Kite on Rivette, Jessica Winter on Idiocracy . . . (Alas, these pieces aren't available online.)

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4. Brit in Brooklyn was on the scene yesterday after the collapse of Ward Bakery. (Visit the site for more photos.)

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5. Congrats to Dizzyhead Sarah—recipient of the 2007–8 Rome Prize!

6. Have you seen The Norman Rockwell Code?

7. Tomorrow there's a Believer Nighttime Event at the New School. It's part of the PEN World Voices—participants include Miranda July, Uzodinma Iweala, and John Hodgman. (Eric Bogosian is MCing.)

8. Any Humbert Wolfe fans out there?

9. This article about ravens is great!

Their skills when it comes to tricking and cheating, for example, have not been thoroughly explored. Ravens are cunning enough to set up mock hiding places in order to distract their thievish fellows from their real food stores. They're generally very inventive when it comes to tricking those who would snatch away their food. But how much truth is there to reports according to which ravens play dead next to carcasses in order to simulate a case of food poisoning?

(Via Arts & Letters Daily)

"Loud reading annoys your neighbors"

I'm not supposed to be blogging today—but I've already posted two thingies this a.m., so here's a third, and then there will be radio silence on this end for a while. (Ha!)

Over at Restricted View, Dizzyhead Mollie has a great post about silent-movie title cards:

One of the cards said..."Please be patient while the operator changes a reel." I paired it with another request: "Please read the titles to yourself—loud reading annoys your neighbors." A simple request, but totally revealing, no? It communicates something concrete about the everyday experience of going to the movies in the pre-talkies era, a detail that isn't part of the official film-history account and is therefore not part of anybody's mental image of what moviegoing was like in its early years, even though it seems totally obvious now that I think about it. Of course people read the titles out loud!

Heidi — Mollie — Visualization

I was going to post this yesterday—Heidi is interviewed by Robert Birnbaum. (Via the other Ed.)

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In other developments, intern of yore Mollie Wilson now blogs! Her site is called Restricted View, dwelling mostly on matters theatrical. (Sample lede: "Quick, what’s your favorite Restoration comedy? I’ll wait while you decide.") But she also writes about Law & Order, the show she loved so much she once gave it up for Lent! Highly recommended.

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And via Equanimity, check out this Periodic Table of Visualization, which reminds me of Michael Gerber and Jonathan Schwarz's Periodic Table of Rejected Elements (originally in The Atlantic, reproduced here).