Anthology fever

I gave a reading last night with Rachel Sherman and Saïd Sayrafiezadeh at the Lillian Vernon Writers' House (it was fun), for the students at the NYU summer session. There I also got to pick up a copy of They're At It Again: An Open City Reader, edited by Thomas Beller and Joanna Yas.

It's huge—I didn't realize it was nearly 800 pages. Who's in it? A quick glance yields Paul Bowles, Jonathan Ames, Geoff Dyer, Bryan Charles, the aforementioned R.S. and S.S., Davids Means and Shields, Sam Lipsyte, Martha McPhee, Mary Gaitskill, Rivka Galchen, Walter Kirn, James Lasdun, Victor Pelevin, Hal Sirowitz, Edmund White, Leni Zumas, Richard Yates (!), Charles Bukowski, Will Eno, Sylvia Foley, Hubert Selby Jr., Jessica Shattuck...the list really does go on...It's satisfyingly heavy, and I'm excited that my story "Bring on the Dancing Horses" (from Open City #30) is included...

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A slimmer book, but with nearly as many contributors, is No Near Exit, an anthology of writing from Post Road magazine, each one selected by a different writer, making for a vertiginous reading experience. Plus, some of the pieces are interviews with writers, and others are writers recommending books by other writers...

Sim city

The new Bookforum is partially online. My review of The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim is only in the paper issue as of now. I like the coverline: "Why Jonathan Coe Deserves an American Audience."

(I've read most of/finished some good pieces already—Ruth Franklin on Joyce Carol Oates, Erik Davis on Robert Duncan's The H.D. Book, Rivka Galchen on Lydia Davis/Madame Bovary...there's something by Paul La Farge...)













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Coe notes:



Thank you to Gautam, who sent me a copy of The Rain Before It Falls several years ago—I talk about it a bit in the piece.






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My essay in the Times about the longest sentence was the original impetus behind rereading Coe's The Rotters' Club. What a book!

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I reviewed Coe's biography of B.S. Johnson, Like a Fiery Elephant, when it came out in 2005, but did not dwell much on the ending. I do so in this Bookforum piece, as it is clearly a source for a chunk of the new novel.

Kafka, Walser, Galchen: An Eternal Golden Braid

At The Rumpus, my F.S. Bekah (aka "M. Rebekah Otto"!) reads Robert Walser by way of/in conjunction with Rivka Galchen:

Why couldn’t I focus on The Tanners? At first I thought the problem lay in my reading style. Since high school I have been a note-taker. Stars, hearts, exclamation points, interrobangs line my notebooks alongside page numbers and brief, fleeting ideas: “pg. 85 does the plot move?” “pg. 98 metaphors?!!!” “pg. 118 art? ‘life is short when you’re distrustful…’”

My notes do not compete with Walser’s microscripts in size, but they may be similarly obsessive. I take notes every other page or so, so it is no surprise that my reading is slow-going. But, a comrade to Walser, I like my notes. I can look back at Atmospheric Disturbances from my own perspective: “she really likes the word ‘ersatz’” “pg. 100 if the novel is a collective fantasy/insanity, is the narrator crazy? the author? the reader?” “pg. 159 ‘the errors of a suspected psychosis.’”

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Safety-deposit Kafka.

Must chase frog out of throat because...

I am reading again—this Thursday at KGB, 7 p.m., mit two excellent novelists: RIVKA GALCHEN and LEV GROSSMAN. It's a benefit for "Behind the Book." I believe there is a $5 donation involved, and a raffle...

Navel academy

At the Louisville Courier-Journal, my former coworker-turned-geniusy-novelist Samantha Hunt has nice things to say about Personal Days.

Other Dzys faves also weigh in, and I get all mysterious about something called Bottomless Belly Button.

"Speaking of": The greatest transition ever? (aka your Weekend Table-Talk)

I. Jenny's mention of Munchman led to me e-mailing video-game expert Ed, who through a series of mental associations then unearthed the Mighty Mouth copyright infringement case:

This 1983 judgment of the District Court of Nebraska found the defendants liable for copyright and trademark infringement of three Midway coin-operated arcade games: “Pac-Man”, “Galaxian”, and “Rally-X.” Midway sold their games to regional distributors, who then sold them to operators, such as arcade owners. The defendants, who were previous operators of Midway games, purchased 10 “copy games” and 3 “conversion kits” and sold them to other retailers. They called the “Pac-Man” imitator “Mighty Mouth,” the Galaxian imitator “Galactic Invaders,” and did not bother to change the name of their copied “Rally-X” game.

(I like the laziness in that last line.)

II. Speaking of Dzyd Ed, here he is on Jerry Lewis's The Total Filmmaker.

III. Dept. of What Am I Talking About?: Yesterday I thundered/joshed—

“I've been on a mild anti-Doors/JM kick for the last, oh, 15 years or so—amazing that in seven short paragraphs, Klinkenborg can make me interested again.”

—and yet also posted at The Millions on Lewis Shiner's Glimpses, which includes some great sequences involving Jim Morrison! This blog is not to be trusted!

IV. Speaking of The Millions: Just noticed that Dzyd/Envelope Sarah's Millions picks went up right after mine: Bonfiglio's books (which for some odd reason I never cottoned to, I should try again) and on James Laughlin's memoir-dossier-thingie (which I've only longed for in bookstores), of which she writes, "It's a made thing, a crafted thing. It's a rescue from the tedium of what happened."

[V. Speaking of Psychic Envelopes/Sarah/"what happened": "Something Happened" and other PE originals are back up at the Myspace page, complete with an annoying "click" starting off two tracks...not part of the recording, but the work of some Myspace gremlin.]

VI. Speaking of Best Reads of the Year, Rivka (Dzyd status: unknown) at Granta feels the same way I do about James Lasdun's The Horned Man:

I’m trying to overcome the grade school favourite band instinct that makes me not want to let any but the truly ‘deserving’ know about James Lasdun’s 2002 novel, The Horned Man. (I feel I don't deserve to know about it, simply because I didn’t already know about it.) Lasdun’s prose is, well: dappled, counter, spare, original, strange. Narrated by an awkward expat literature professor, one who remains steadfastly unaware of being himself the origins of the very mystery bedevilling him, The Horned Man is the descendent of both Saint Augustine and Buster Keaton. It’s odd, unfathomably beautiful, very (very, very, very) funny, charismatic and a shade miraculous.

Saint Augustine and Buster Keaton—together in one sentence at last!

Minimal Table-Talk

If I had a clone and a time machine...

I would send Ed1 back to Saturay to attend the New School's Lolita conference, take a "disco nap," and then go to this FSG Lit Crawl event, which featured multigenre wizard/Psychic Envelope Sarah Mangoozles, my reading twin Rivka Galchen, ex-Buffalonian John Wray, and Wells Tower—a towering talent!

But there is no clone, and there is no time machine...

This Song Is Great

It just popped up on the iPod on Friday and I didn't know what it was (I have a shuffle) and I rewound (?) it about five times...

(I'm not sure about the video...)

Listen for Duran Duran cleverness at 1:25.

Parenthesis of the Day

A group of three "Islamic extremists" put a firebomb in the North London home of Gibson Square publisher Martin Rynja late Saturday night, and were promptly arrested by Scotland Yard in "a preplanned intelligence-led operation," according to a police spokesperson. (The company's offices are in the same building.) —Publisher's Lunch

PD tour blog, 6/16

Packing on Saturday, I e-mailed Jenny D, my life coach, regarding what books to bring. I was up to four or five—clearly too many:

Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives (which I thought was a shoo-in)
Rivka Galchen, Atmospheric Disturbances (halfway done, so maybe not much bang for buck, space-in-suitcase-wise)
Paul Park, Princes of Roumania (hadn't opened)
George Gissing, New Grub Street (just started, one chapter in)
Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise (just started, two chapters in)
Charles Stross, Saturn's Children (just started, five pages in)

She talked me down to Park and Gissing, and allowed me to bring Rivka's book, which I finished on the flight to Seattle. Verdict: Go read it!! It's a good sign when one keeps reaching for a pen to scribble down excellent little lines. (One I liked: "Everybody with their dogs," said in a sort of exhausted tone.) I think the comparisons (in reviews etc.) to Pynchon might be slightly misleading—the style really isn't anything like Pynchon's; there's paranoia, but it seems more in line with Borges, say. (And that makes sense, actually—some of the action takes place in Argentina.) The book is written in a slippery, funny, complex first person, with huge gusts of sudden sadness roaring through...One of those books that makes you want to write!

After Atmospheric Disturbances, I read Rachael Ray's Lake George–area recommendations in the in-flight magazine, then saw her yammering cheerfully about great meal bargains in the mid-Atlantic and Pacific Northwest states on Food Network. What would my life be without Rachael Ray? (A: Quieter.)

Then I read a few chapters of Paul Park—very good!

But since disembarking, it's been all about the Gissing. GREAT!

Seattle has approximately five trillion independent bookstores!

(Off to find this taco place that Rachael Ray recommended! Elliott Bay TONITE!)

Table-Talk of Parkus Grammaticus for June 14–15: West Coast Tour Preparatory Edition

I. From Monday to Friday next week, I'll be hopping down the West Coast to read from and talk about Personal Days. Hope to see some of you! (Thank you, Bostonians, for coming out to the reading on Thursday! And thank you Newtonville Books! And: So great to see people at Happy Ending on Wednesday! That was a lot of fun.)

Thumbnail schedule—more info at the website.

MONDAY: Seattle, Elliott Bay Books, 7:30 [TIME CORRECTED]
TUESDAY: Portland, Powell's Books (Burnside), 7:30
WEDNESDAY: San Francisco—Google in the a.m.; then Booksmith at 7
THURSDAY: Berkeley, Pegasus Books, 7:30
FRIDAY: Los Angeles, Book Soup, 7

II. My latest Astral Weeks column is up at the L.A. Times site—a meditation on Charles Fort, prompted by Jim Steinmeyer's new biography.

Following up on Dzyd Rachel's Triple Canopy interview with me*, I meditate some more on metaphor. Here's the first graf of this month's column:

What are metaphors for? Before finding fame as the 20th century's greatest compiler and theorist of weird news, not to mention one of its most audacious and influential autodidacts, Charles Fort (1849-1932) was a journalist and pulp-story writer who amassed inventive ways to describe one thing in terms of something else. Among the few to glimpse these scraps was no less a literary titan than Theodore Dreiser, who was Fort's early magazine editor and steadfast champion. Bowled over, Dreiser offered to buy the odd collection from Fort. "They are better than any thesaurus," he raved, "a new help to letters."

III. Digression 1: A line in Janet Maslin's review of The Story of Edgar Sawtelle made me raise an eyebrow:

Its voice is so natural and unfettered, so free of metaphor or other baggage, that even the simplest moments can have extraordinary grace.

So metaphor is "baggage," rather than that which makes us human???

IV. Digression 2: "Is [Rivka] Galchen a modern day Charles Fort?" —New York Observer

V. Digression 3: A hilarious example of interior dialogue as practiced by Fort (spinning off accounts of people awaking from fugue states, nude and in public):

Don't cats and horses and dogs go around without clothes on?
But they are clothed with natural, furry protections.
Well, Mexican dogs, then.

...which brought to mind this demented trailer (via Jenny D).

VI. Sukie Park (no relation!) of the Joongang Daily profiled me—we also had a fascinating conversation (not reflected here) about various Korean directors....


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*Rachel e-mailed me this link, from the new Atlantic: "The process of adapting to new intellectual technologies is reflected in the changing metaphors we use to explain ourselves to ourselves. When the mechanical clock arrived, people began thinking of their brains as operating "like clockwork." Today, in the age of software, we have come to think of them as operating "like computers." But the changes, neuroscience tells us, go much deeper than metaphor. Thanks to our brain's plasticity, the adaptation occurs also at a biological level."

TONIGHT! "Personal Days" at Happy Ending — TRIPLE CANOPY MEGA-SIZED INTERVIEW

I. Tonight! I'll be reading from Personal Days at Happy Ending, which is at 302 Broome St. @ Forsyth — you take the B/D to Grand, or the F/J/M/Z to Delancey. (Wait—there's a Z train?!)

Doors at 7! (Not these kinds.) Event at 8! I'm reading with Rivka Galchen and Craig Morgan Teicher! (Rumors have been floating that a ukulele will be wielded, that voices will be lifted plaintively to the rafters. I cannot confirm these rumors at this time.)

II. Rachel Aviv! Is great! Our longish e-mail dialogue, which she masterfully directed, is in the latest issue of Triple Canopy, an excellent new web publication (of which she is an editor).

It was a very different experience from being interviewed by phone or in person; many of my responses were typed out late at night, and I found myself thinking in ways that might not have been possible in the bright light of day...a different sort of clarity, an insomniac's clarity. (I am more emphatic when I type than when I speak.) In "Only Connect," Rachel and I talk—er, type—about process, metaphor, Keeler, Julian Jaynes, my abandoned oeuvre, the web, "bad art," and more. (Plus: SATURNHEAD!)

Happy Ending/Ouroboric twist: This issue of Triple Canopy also features Rivka's "Case Notes of a Medical Student, East Harlem Psychiatric ER, Winter 2002."