Eat the Document

Sam Frank's great "The Document"—in the current issue of Triple Canopy*—is a must-read for any fan of David Markson, Thomas Bernhard, Saul Bellow, Anthony Powell, Dawn Powell...not to mention

Walter Abish, Kathy Acker, Max Apple, Paul Auster, John Barth, Frederick Barthelme, Ann Beattie, Raymond Carver, Michael Chabon, Andrei Codrescu, Laurie Colwin, Evan Connell, Robert Coover, Coleman Dowell, Deborah Eisenberg, Stanley Elkin, Bret Easton Ellis, Mary Gaitskill, Kenneth Gangemi, William Gass, Donald Goines, Barry Hannah, Jim Harrison, Janet Hobhouse, William Kotzwinkle, Cormac McCarthy, Joseph McElroy, Jay McInerney, Leonard Michaels, Steven Millhauser, Kem Nunn, Tillie Olsen, Grace Paley, Walker Percy, Richard Price, James Purdy, Ishmael Reed, Philip Roth, Gilbert Sorrentino, Richard Stern, James Wilcox, Joy Williams, Tobias Wolff, and Al Young...Waugh, Compton-Burnett, De Vries, Henry Green, Spackman, Colwin, Elkin, Colin MacInnes, Gaddis, Sorrentino... Hobhouse...Paley, Eric Kraft, Beckett...Donald Antrim, Mark Costello, Susan Daitch, Jeffrey Eugenides, A. M. Homes, Jonathan Lethem, Richard Powers, David Foster Wallace, Colson Whitehead...Lorrie Moore...

An incredible piece of writing—it is its own thing. And Triple Canopy's presentation is amazing; I haven't found another site that presents articles in such a readable way for the screen. (Make sure you click on the footnote—two videos.) Shouldn't e-tablet companies be hiring 3C as consultants? Or I don't know, maybe they already are...

(March! This month I've already been blown away by Rebecca Taylor's "Virginia Mountain Scream Queen," in the new Believer—now this!)

(It's also a must for Richard Stern–o-philes—basically me and Jason McBride. "Dick" Stern has a nice cameo.)

(I had a few more reflective paragraphs here but I will stop now. Please read Sam's piece. It is one of the best things you'll read this year...and it also seems to me to be the Writing of the Future.)

_____

*and published in the new, "Failure" issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction, guest-edited by Joshua Cohen...whom I mentioned in my recent Jonathan Coe piece for Bookforum:

After several days of enforced and enjoyable reacquaintance with the Coe canon, I went to a party, where I tried to find someone with whom I could rave about Coevian greatness. One writer I met said, "I think I've heard of him . . . Palladio?" Ten minutes later, another narrowed his eyes as he searched for some connection, coming up with the hopeful "He wrote . . . Witz, right?"

Here's an exclusive bonus for readers of this lonely old blog (who BLOGS anymore??): About five minutes after the above episode, who should walk in but...Joshua Cohen himself! Who then regaled me and Alan Gilbert (not the NY Phil. maestro but the critic-poet whose first book of poems, Late in the Antenna Fields, is now out) with an account of distant relatives of his who were also writers.

Bonus #2: The party was for what turned out to be the final issue of Open City, as immortalized here and here.

Bonus #3: As I was about to leave the party, who should stumble in but...Sam Frank!

Aren't you glad you still read The Dizzies (er, Disambiguation)??

A: MAYBE.

Table-Talk of Parkus Grammaticus for October 29, 2008

I. Jacket copy: "El demento supremo!" —Tom Robbins on Todd McEwen's Fisher's Hornpipe
(And—wow—you can get a copy for 99 cents!)

II. Jenny has adopted the versatile "Table Talk" format...Here she mentions the squabble between two sisters over the manuscript of Hedge Fund Wives...Here's more...and more again...(The book's website, alas, appears to have been taken down; it contained an excerpt that ended with this boldfaced declaration, complete with Keeleresque name: "And that's when I made up my mind that I would rather lose every single penny of my money, rather than let Thorne Van Buren get his pasty little hands on it.")

III. The PTSNBN now links to this blog?!

IV. Sloane Crosley's favorite essayists.

V. Jacket Copy II: Richard Stern's (actually Richard "G." Stern's) Europe: Or Up & Down With Schreiber and Baggish (1961) has a blurb-filled bio on the back. I raised my eyebrows at Terry "Sothern." But then came...Jean Didion!

VI. "Sometimes I re-use floss...": NYT on digital-jingle-meister Joel Moss Levinson:

After a few semesters at George Washington University, where he declared that his major was medieval weaponry, he dropped out. Soon, he was living out of his car — happily, he says.

I was told there'd be blogging

1. So there have been other reviews of Laura Warholic! Check out what Dizzyhead Darren dug up—Dizzies fave Richard Stern writing on Theroux in the Chicago Tribune. It begins:

Want to know what J. Edgar Hoover's three favorite drag ensembles were, or the names of the women who invented the safety pin, goat cheese, the child's car seat and the circular saw, or the kind of patrons a "doom-dark," "cavernous" club called The Sewing Circle attracts? Want to read brilliantly virulent tirades against women, whites, blacks, Jews, Christians, Generation X, the U.S. and mankind a la Alexander Pope's "Dunciad" and Juvenal's satires?

If so, the novel "Laura Warholic; or, The Sexual Intellectual" is the book for you.

(Can't find a link, but will e-mail the text if you like.)

2. Why I love country music: The Sweenster on Porter Wagoner:

I feel especially lucky because my wife and I were able to see him perform twice this year—once at the Opry on our trip to Nashville, and again at MSG when he opened for The White Stripes, which we saw the night after we were married. Porter was there for us when we needed him...

3. Via Hua, Buffalo's own Mercury Rev covers "Isolation."

4. Excited about these recent arrivals on the new doorstep—two less similar books, there can not be!: Sloane Crosley's I Was Told There'd Be Cake and Lynne Sharon Schwartz's Emergence of Memory: Conversations With W.G. Sebald.

From the desk of...

...Dizzyhead JMcB:

The New New Journalism, Robert Boynton
What Am I Doing Here, Bruce Chatwin
The Girls Who Saw Everything, Sean Dixon
The Tunnel, William Gass
The Quick and the Dead, Joy Williams
Almonds to Zhoof, Richard Stern
Guide, Dennis Cooper
A Partial List of People to Bleach, Gary Lutz

"I have a big desk--and some of these books seem to be always on it.
Perpetual inspiration!"

Monday morning quarterbook

Dizzyhead Jason, our Canadian correspondent, has devised this dazzlingly lustmordant spinal narrative:

Stern warning

Richard Stern writes on his late friend Saul Bellow in the Chicago Tribune:

In the books, there are portraits. The day after Bellow's Nobel Prize had been announced, a professor he knew said, "I see that you've just been added to the ranks of Grazia Deledda and Sully Prudhomme" (two of the least-distinguished winners of the literature prize). More than 20 years later, Bellow's anger at this rude remark generated a magnificent portrait. It appears in his last published novel, "Ravelstein":

"Rakhmiel was neither a large man nor a healthy one, but he was physically conspicuous just the same -- compact and dense, high-handed, tyrannically fixated, opinionated. His mind was made up once and for all in hundreds of subjects and maybe this was the sign that he had completed his course. . . . [He] was, or had been once, a redhead, but the red hair had worn away and what remained was a reddish complexion -- in medieval physiology, sanguine: hot and dry. Or better yet, choleric. His face wore a polite expression and he often looked, walking fast, as if he were on a case -- on his way to serve a warrant or make a pinch. . . . He looked like a tyrant with the tyranny baked into his face. . . . My belief is that on the side he grew a little herb garden of good, generous feelings. He hoped, especially when he was wooing a new friend, that he could pass for a very decent man."

If you knew the portrait's original, as I did, you felt as Michelangelo's friends must have felt when they recognized a mutual acquaintance dangling from a devil's claws in the artist's "Last Judgment": "Thank God it's not me up there." Even in my abbreviation of the portrait, one can see how complex it is, the physical details, olfactory and gustatory, as well as visual, interspersed with general remarks from medieval physiology or English police work, and then its concession that Rakhmiel also "grew a little herb garden of good, generous feelings." Years ago, Bellow told me that writing fiction forced you into being open-minded, tolerant and just. Rakhmiel is not a simple expression of Bellow's anger or revenge. He's a complex portrait by the writer who may be the greatest portraitist in our literature.

I know some people actually prefer Stern to Bellow. Those people include Dizzyhead Jason and Dizzyhed ME. Not that it's a competition!

Which reminds me, I have two unread Sterns on the bookshelf...