Paradoxes of self

My review of Lawrence Douglas's excellent novel The Vices—and my consideration of Lars Arffssen's parody, The Girl With the Sturgeon Tattoo—is now up at Bookforum:

Our narrator is so fluently revealing, even as he peppers his conversation with white lies, that it's a shock to realize that we never learn his name. Is he, in fact, not so much a narrator as a narrative device, a way to tell The Real Life of Oliver Vice? Douglas, or his surrogate, creates exceptionally memorable set pieces: a lust-and-magic-ridden party in commemoration of Beggars Banquet; a Christmas dinner in New York with Oliver's bewitching mother and corpulent, Churchill-worshipping brother. And though the novelist has a seamless voice, he allows other characters to reach us, unfiltered, via their correspondence. Oliver's frequent missives from abroad have the bitter-hilarious tang of a Thomas Bernhard rant:

But her apartment stinks of cigarettes, and I can't stand being there—the odor is so vile, it makes me physically ill. But here's the catch. The cigarette odor in S.'s studio is no different from the smell in my mother's apartment, which has never bothered me. In fact, I would go so far as to say that I find the smell in my mother's apartment pleasing.

Even more impressive are the glimpses of Oliver's masterpiece, the Wittgensteinian treatise Paradoxes of Self. It's one thing for a novelist to invent a genius-author character; it's another order of difficulty to include excerpts of said genius's work that are brilliant enough to convince us of the character's literary chops. The five pages of Paradoxes of Self that Douglas presents—i.e., writes—are so good that you'll wish the book existed in full, on the shelf.

Better headlines

What did Dzyds think of my headline "Exile on Maipu Street," for that link to the interview in which Borges's widow, Maria Kodama, reveals his fondness for the Beatles, Stones, Pink Floyd, et al.?

(a) Liked it
(b) Didn't like it
(c) Undecided

It left me a little unsatisfied. Dzyd David e-mailed me this idea: "Tlön, Uqbar, Ummagumma."

Excellent! How about "Piper at the Gates of Tlön"?

"Keith Richards, Author of the Quixote"?

Now the ideas are flowing...please send more...

Even the name of the club is evocative

Beatles vs. Stones:

On July 26, 1968, Mick Jagger flew from Los Angeles to London for a birthday party thrown in his honor at a hip new Moroccan-style bar called the Vesuvio Club—“one of the best clubs London has ever seen,” remembered proprietor Tony Sanchez. Under black lights and beautiful tapestries, some of London’s trendiest models, artists, and pop singers lounged on huge cushions and took pulls from Turkish hookahs, while a decorative, helium-filled dirigible floated aimlessly about the room. As a special treat, Mick brought along an advance pressing of the Stones’ forthcoming album, Beggars Banquet, to play over the club’s speakers. Just as the crowd was “leaping around” and celebrating the record—which would soon win accolades as the best Stones album to date—Paul McCartney strolled in, and passed Sanchez a copy of the forthcoming Beatles single “Hey Jude/Revolution,” which had never before been heard by anyone outside of Abbey Road Studios. Sanchez recalled how the “slow, thundering buildup of ‘Hey Jude’ shook the club”; the crowd demanded that the seven-minute song be played again and again. Finally, the club’s disc jockey played the flip side, and everyone heard “John Lennon’s nasal voice pumping out ‘Revolution.’” “When it was over,” Sanchez said, “Mick looked peeved. The Beatles had upstaged him.” —John McMillian, in the new Believer

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Great to see so many Dizzyheads last night! (What I read was a trimmed version of the second half of the excerpt that appears in the brand new BOMB.)