Catchin' up — New Believer! — Free e-Stark — &c.

I haven't been blogging—I was in Taiwan and couldn't figure how to work Blogger. Did you miss me? [Tumbleweed.]

Now—to business!

I. The September Believer is out. On the site, you can read a Gregory Kornbluh's wonderful piece on master palindromist Barry Duncan, as well as Ross Simonini's (about whom, more later) interview with Jason Schwartzman. But you need to get the whole print issue in your hands. It's great. THERE IS A CONVERSATION BETWEEN DON DELILLO AND BRET EASTON ELLIS. (One of the many things I learned: DD excised 15 pages from a paperback reprint of Americana. I wonder which 15? I wonder why?)

Marc Katz has a mouth-watering essay on Huysmans' Against Nature (which has been lingering on my bookshelf for approximately 9 million years, and which I really now must read!), Nate Pedersen looks at the origins of the "butler did it" mystery trope, Meaghan Winter gets wiggy with Orthodox Jewish hairpieces...There's the usual Marcus/Pendarvis/Handler/Hornby columny goodness, filthy comics, reviews, and more...Verdict: Great issue!

II. The one book I read while away was Lawrence Douglas's upcoming novel The Vices, which is excellent—just my cup of tea. I was a huge fan of his debut novel, The Catastrophist (and profiled him for the PTSNBN, in one of my last articles there); this one shares some of the themes but seems to me even more successful—exhilarating, even.

Try the first page and see if you can stop. It's about a stalled novelist's friendship with the Bernhardesque Oliver Vice, and the prose is pure pleasure: elegant, comic, wise. There are subtle pleasures, too, that I'm not sure I can do justice to. For example, a brief passage in the first half of the book gently triggered a memory of a scene in Nabokov's The Real Life of Sebastian Knight...and many many pages later, the narrator and his friend talk about that very novel, in such a way that the book itself becomes suggestively and satisfyingly unmoored.

I will have quotes for you soon.

III. Levi alerted me to two free e-books by Donald E. Westlake—God Save the Mark (which I reviewed for the PTSNBN; it's perfect light reading) and (as Richard Stark) The Score.

Unhappy campers — a contest

At the Met:

They are so cute, these 16-inch-tall fellows in their floppy robes. Shuffling two by two, 36 strong, behind a choirboy on a black runway in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s cavernous Medieval Hall, they’re like a troop of fairy-tale dwarfs turned to stone by an evil sorcerer. Unhappy campers, they weep, sigh, gesture sadly and pray, mourning the demise of their liege, John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy (1371-1419)....

“The Mourners: Medieval Tomb Sculptures From the Court of Burgundy” was organized by the Dallas Museum of Art and the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dijon under the aegis of Frame (French Regional and American Museum Exchange). (Besides the 37 mourners centrally presented, three more that were separated from the group long ago and are now owned by different museums are also on view in a separate vitrine. One last stray has yet to be found.)

—NYT, May 13, 2010

The basis...for Richard Stark's The Mourner!

The Mourner is a story of convergence—of cultures and of guys with guns. Hot on the trail of a statue stolen from a fifteenth-century French tomb, Parker enters a world of eccentric art collectors, greedy foreign officials, and shady KGB agents....

* * *

Speaking of Parker/Stark, 57th Street Books in Chicago is holding a flash-fiction contest—judged by that Invisible Librarian Levi Stahl. Write the best story (350 words or less) about a Parker book heist...and get the first 12 Parker books in the University of Chicago reprint series!

Disambiguations™ for March 26, 2010

In the Guardian, shades of Steve Hely:

Now, though, what still is – and will continue to be – called literary fiction has also caught the "samey title" virus. At times I suspect there's a computer somewhere that spews out clichéd names for such works, depending on how badly the publishers want it to be Taken Very Seriously Indeed.

The Inheritance of Loss, for example: what a tiresomely predictable title for a Booker winner. Honestly – The Inheritance of Loss? Presumably the marketing department keyed in "self-important, depressing, award-winning, Literary-with-a-capital-L" and hit Return, and this is what the machine gave them. (They also added the fairly redundant subtitle, "A Novel", just in case we might have mistaken it for a comical sports book.) Add to this list of shame such dreadful titles as: Notes from a Turkish Whorehouse. The Reluctant Fundamentalist. The Secret Scripture. The Accordionist's Son. The Storyteller's Tale. (Christ, that doesn't even read grammatically.) The Clumsy. The Trite. The Cynical. The horror ...

(Does the caption to this article really say "A pile of books"??)

II. Dept. of You Can't Go Wrong: At the U. Chicago Press blog, Levi talks to Hard Case Crime's Charles Ardai about Donald E. Westlake (and Richard Stark). (Further Levi thoughts here and here.)

III. Am teaching B.S. Johnson's "book in a box," The Unfortunates, next week. Realized I'd read about the holes in Albert Angelo's pages, but I'd never seen them. (The edition I have, the ND paperback, does not have the holes cut out.)

Here it is!


Other books with holes: Salvador Plascencia's People of Paper:

(More on Johnson here.)

Parker parks the car

(Via Levi)

Postscript to the Invisible Library — Parker druthers

One of the longer titles in the Invisible Library is Mattie Ross's unpublished MS, “You will now listen to the sentence of the law, Odus Wharton, which is that you be hanged by the neck until you are dead, dead dead! May God, whose laws you have broken and before whose dread tribunal you must appear, have mercy upon your soul. Being a personal recollection of Isaac C. Parker, the famous Border Judge."

Readers of Charles Portis's True Grit get a glimpse of Parker; now, Bookgasm reports, Loren D. Estleman has written a book about the (real-life) "hanging judge" of Arkansas:

Parker believed that executions should be public — not to provide entertainment, but to teach a moral lesson. Murderers and rapists should receive in a public display the wages of their sins. With hangman George Maledon as the man with the rope, and deputies of the caliber of “The Three Guardsmen” — Bill Tilghman, Chris Madsen and Heck Thomas —the Hanging Judge was ready to get to work....

Work for Parker was made up of holding court six days a week, for up to 10 hours a day. In 21 years as the judge presiding over the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Arkansas, Parker sentenced 156 men and four women to death by hanging. Only 79 eventually dangled from one of the six nooses — “Parker’s Tears” — for which Maledon cared.

(From Elijah)

* * *

Speaking of Parkers: Darwyn Cooke is promoting his graphic novel adaptation of the first of Richard Stark's Parker novels, The Hunter, by giving away copies of the book to the best five reader illustrations. Here's my favorite so far, by George Pfromm II:

Table-Talk of Parkus Grammaticus for December 12, 2008

I. I'll be reading this Sunday at KGB with Deb Olin Unferth and Heidi "Olin" Julavits! Sort of a McSweeney's night (Deb's novel, Vacation, is out from McSwy's)...and my last reading of the year! Then I will rest my larynx!

II. Over at The Millions, I give the much coveted EP nod to a few books (one of which I don't think I've written about here: Lewis Shiner's Glimpses)*...the others of which I have rambled about: those Richard Stark reprints....

III. Recently observed: Paul La Farge's article on Tintin and Tuten is available online at Blvr. central...The Khongster has a new blog...I enjoyed this, by a secret blogger...which reminded me of this...Book Nerd hearts Crozzles!...listening to: THE TOUGH ALLIANCE...Dzyd Adrian sent along this video..."Soup Dragon"!



...is there a band yet named "The Clangers"?




IV: How I wrote certain of my posts: I am actually not up at 2:30 a.m. writing this—it is in fact just before noon on Thursday! I frequently adjust "Post Options" so as to not seem like a perpetual blogger.








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*..........the backstory is that I bought the book at Powell's in ’07, having heard of it from Mark Moskowitz, the director of Stone Reader..........it was a wallet-shattering $35, a signed first edition! I never buy such things, really, but I had never come across the book before and figured, "Well, I'm on vacation"....................it took me nearly a year before I actually cracked it open.......

I've been copy-pasting lately

What if I just stopped blogging and simply copied stuff from Levi's blog?

Doesn't this sound like fun?

I picked up Richard Stark's Ask the Parrot (2006) on my lunch hour the day before Thanksgiving and dove into it as I sat in my office waiting for a call from rocketlass to say that she was ready to leave work. By the time she was free, I was 100 pages in, and as she pulled up in front of my office, I had to break the news that my driving services would be unavailable for the next 188 pages....

And here he is on the latest Hard Case Crime novel, which clearly I need to read (as this is the second time I've linked to this post!):

In addition, Ardai has given his novel another twist: it consists of fifty chapters, named after (and related to) the titles of each of the books in the series. Being familiar with the series, I found myself looking forward to how this Oulipian conceit would force Ardai to figure out ways to finagle his way around such unpromising titles as A Diet of Treacle, Lemons Never Lie, and Grave Descend; I particularly liked his solutions to David Dodge's Plunder of the Sun and the Robert Bloch two-fer Shooting Star/Spiderweb.

* * *

In other news, I finished a review copy of Caitlin Macy's Spoiled, out in the spring, that has some great entries for the Invisible Library...

Like something out of Stark...

...or Keeler? A scheme in Seattle:

“I came across the ad that was for a prevailing wage job for $28.50 an hour,” said Mike [Ruth], who saw a Craigslist ad last week looking for workers for a road maintenance project in Monroe.

He said he inquired and was e-mailed back with instructions to meet near the Bank of America in Monroe at 11 a.m. Tuesday. He also was told to wear certain work clothing.

“Yellow vest, safety goggles, a respirator mask … and, if possible, a blue shirt,” he said.

Mike showed up along with about a dozen other men dressed like him, but there was no contractor and no road work to be done. He thought they had been stood up until he heard about the bank robbery and the suspect who wore the same attire.

From there, the crook made his watery escape in a creek that dumps out into the Skykomish River. One witness said the robber swam away, but another said he used an inner tube to get away.

“We did get an inner tube that was about 200 yards from the place where he entered the water and took that for evidence,” said Debbie Willis, Monroe Police.

—University of Chicago Press

(Via Levi; check out what Donald E. Westlake, alias Richard Stark, has to say about it)

Powers to Powell

I. Dzyd Levi at Inside Higher Education, on the Nobel flap:

What writers might be on the verge of a Nobel-level career? I’m placing my bet on Richard Powers (as did the MacArthur Foundation several years ago): His oeuvre to this point has shown him to possess a restless, inquisitive mind that is unlikely to allow him to repeat himself or settle into a rut, while his ambitious attempts to marry the language and insights of science to psychological realism seems like a reasonable formula for the sort of sweeping masterpiece that could get the Nobel committee’s attention.

Ah, but who else does he like? Read on...

II. Levi also points me to this rather arcane (think Venn diagram) tidbit, a treat for Richard Stark fans who are also Anthony Powell fans, and vice-versa:

By the time he'd unpacked and desanitized everything, the air in the room had a bit of life in it. Sternberg stripped to his boxer shorts, turned down the bed, settled himself comfortably with the pillows behind his back, and opened the Anthony Powell novel he'd started on the plane. It was Magnus Donners he wanted to identify with, but he kept finding his sympathies going to Widmerpool.
—Richard Stark, Plunder Squad

Table-Talk of Parkus Grammaticus for September 24, 2008

Time Out Chicago on U. Chicago's reprint of Richard Stark's first three Parker books—a project spearheaded by none other than Dzyd Levi...I recommend all three books wholeheartedly...they will "hold you up"...!

When worlds collide: A recent Gossip Girl had Chuck speaking disdainfully of Blair's British beau as a "Bertie Wooster"...

Scott Bradfield—fan of Cavemen? Read his new story (up at The Fanzine), "Mankind Through the Ages," to find out...

At the Poetry Foundation*, Dzyd Jordan on Joe Brainard's Nancy paintings and Dzyd Mike on the importance of a good book title....

Who is "Kongthin Pearlmich"? "All his life he has been a recluse. He has avoided the art establishment like the plague." ¶ "A spokesman for Canterbury Cathedral said: 'The work has been offered to Canterbury Cathedral and we are certainly considering it, but we don't know much about the artist.' " ¶ "Experts at Sotheby's and Christie's said they did not recognise the artist's name."...

Strange embedfellows: Google lets you embed books! Not quite sure what this means. (Via L.G. Thomas)...Is it like this, where you can search inside Personal Days?....Speaking of which, is morale low at your company?...

From Dzys Team Member R.E.S.: "Not your grandfather's Moby Dick"....

The mighty Sampson Starkweather has a thing (poem?) in Typo 12—here's an excerpt from "A Limitation of Birds":

Browsing through used books on 32nd Street, I heard a young man say into his cell phone
Hi, is this the number I’m supposed to call if I find a dead bird in the street?
Later, I saw a pigeon lying in the gutter, some boys without shirts on
were poking it with a stick. I wanted to say something
but I didn’t know what number to call.

Speaking of poetry—this excerpt from Dzyd Mike's (different Mike's) Colored Squares will have you scratching your head and twitching your fingers—and saying: "More??"...

This Saturday (9/27): Dzyd Leland, Ron Rosenbaum, Robert Polito, and others hold an all-day New School conference on "Lolita in America"....

One more PD reading added: I'll join Paul Beatty, Gary Shteyngart, and other authors to read at an Obama fundraiser on October 19. More info here...

ALL DZYS TEAM MEMBERS please post items of interest!



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*where—contra the bio read at the Brklyn Book Fest!—I no longer work

Context: Richard Brautigan/Stark

"There were so many blackberries back in there that it was hard to believe. They were huge like black diamonds but it took a lot of medieval blackberry engineering, chopping entrances and laying bridges, to be successful like the siege of a castle."

That's form a story called "Blackberry Motorist." The title caught my eye, as if it were written yesterday. Motorists using Blackberries while driving! But actually it's from Richard Brautigan's Revenge of the Lawn: Stories 1962–1970.

Reading a tense passage of description in one of Richard Stark's Parker novels, I realized it wouldn't seem tense without the setup. It would just seem like Parker was looking to buy a used truck.

Table-Talk of Parkus Grammaticus for August 14, 2008

I. Your next desktop pattern?

II. Your favorite president—rendered in hair. Is Franklin "Pelano" Roosevelt a beautiful typo?! (Via MUG)

III. Poetry update:

A) Dzyd Carla on memoirs by Manguso and Lavinia Greenlaw.

B) BoingBoing picks up on R. Kikuo Johnson's "Poem as Comic Strip" take on A.E. Stalling's "Recitative"—perfect for summer! Although it's actually not that hot out here these days...

IV. Terry Teachout on Richard Stark, in Commentary—Stark is being republished by University of Chicago Press:

The Hunter” (208 pp., $14 paper), “The Man with the Getaway Face” (224 pp., $14 paper) and “The Outfit” (224 pp., $14 paper) can and should be read in sequence as a trilogy–I would have published them in an omnibus volume–rather than separately.

I read "The Outfit" first, not knowing these three were linked, and there was a chapter of recapping that made me think I'd made the wrong decision...but then it was on with the show!

As I read on in admiration, I formed some mental connections....reading "outfit" in a clothing sense...this was one well-fitting outfit...which reminded me of Sasha Frere-Jones's New Yorker piece on Spoon, and their song "Fitted Shirt"...Though I slightly misremembered SFJ's conclusion ("Daniel is not about to tell jokes or put on a lampshade, and if this makes the band’s performances predictable the effect is balanced by the dignity that comes from self-control")—the dignity/self-control part is certainly true, though The Outfit is pretty unpredictable, especially the rather radical (and exciting!) messing with chronology...a precursor to Pulp Fiction...

A new 'Outfit' — The Eyes of Mao — Cubicle Opera

I. A welcome distraction: Three Richard Stark novels, just out from U. Chicago Press. Without planning to, I started with the third one, The Outfit—maybe not a good idea, but the first chapter grabbed me and has not yet let go! You will read this so fast you won't need a bookmark. (Note to self: Save that line for future review?)

Bonus: Part of The Outfit takes place in Buffalo; the wife of the Outfit head lives here. (Did Westlake know Queen City native Lawrence Block already, back in the early ’60s?)

Dzyd Levi (who works for the press) directs me to an interview he and a colleague conducted with Westlake (who wrote the Stark books pseudonymously). Sample gem:

I’ve always been a catholic reader, but also a bit of a sponge, taking on characteristics of what I’m reading, if I’m not careful. If I read too much Anthony Powell, my sentences gradually become longer and longer and less and less gainly.

(Only Westlake I've read previously: God Save the Mark.)

II. Dzyd Rachel has another ponder-worthy piece up at the Poetry Foundation, this time on Mao's verse. Sample goodie:

Although Mao dismissed intellectuals as dumb and disloyal—only those whose feet are “smeared with cow-dung,” he announced, are capable of true art—he could never quite wean himself from the joys of his scholarly existence. He was always neurotic and insecure about his own intellectual abilities, even in comparing himself to his own secretaries. According to one of Mao’s biographers, Jung Chang, Mao slept on a large bed partially covered in piles of books a half foot high, so that when he woke up he could immediately roll over and begin reading. When his vision faltered in old age, he ordered the construction of two factories to print books with characters large enough for his eyes.

III. Nice PD review in Philadelphia City Paper! "This absence of novelized work makes a book that restricts itself to the 9-to-5, like Ed Park's cubicle opera Personal Days shine all the more. Park points out that those dead, stressed hours make up a separate reality..."

IV. Speaking of work novels and Stark, I'll link again to Levi's post on how the Stark novels are work books...There's a scene toward the end of The Outfit that's amazing not because of its violence (as are many of the brutal scenes herein) but because we could be listening to a consultant filling the boss in regarding sloppy management: "The organization is getting too highly organized."

V. More PD news, from our correspondent on the Continent, Dzyd Christine:

No PD sightings in Europe so far (I thought it would be fun to send you one, but alas), but when chatting with the ladies at Shakespeare's in Paris yesterday I asked if they had it, and they said they used to have a few, but if it was good they'd order more. I assured them it is, and they did (!). Very sweet.