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.

Mythologies

...speaking of The Believer—interviews editor Ross Simonini is one half of NewVillager, and this NewVideo (for their song "RichDoors") is not only a lot of fun—"an IntegratedEvent in ten parts depicting the NewVillagerMythology"—but also features, around the 1:15 mark, our outgoing mg. ed., Andrew Leland! (And just found this, HTMLGiant likes it, too!)(And here's more on the video, at IFC News.)



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Everyone knows about this already: the latest McSweeney's is a box (painted like a head) full of good stuff: a shard of Michael Chabon's abandoned, post–Mysteries of Pittsburgh novel, Fountain City, replete with annotations; a long and funny piece by (Blvr. columnist) Jack Pendarvis, "Jungle Geronimo in Gay Paree"; a "standard" issue of McSwy's; a screenplay; a regular play; a short illustrated story...also a fun surprise by Angela Petrella and her sister. Also the box is great for putting other stuff (pamphlets!) in...



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An antipodean bookseller talks about McSweeney's/Blvr./etc.

READ HARD — Believer Music Issue — Beatles post-Beatles — AUGUST 5 PARK-LIT EVENT

I. Read Hard is out! It's a collection of some great pieces from the last five years of The Believer. We could have easily filled several more volumes of equal thickness—and hopefully we will someday...As an appetizer, McSweeney's excerpts my essay on the work of Charles Portis, a piece that appeared in the very first issue of The Believer, back in 2003. I've always like this list of food in Portis's first novel, Norwood:

With reportorial precision, and without condescension, Norwood captures all manner of reflex babble, the extravagant grammar of commercial appeal − stray words bathed in the exhaust of a Trailways bus. This omnivorous little book has a high metabolism, digesting everything from homemade store signs (i do not loan tools) and military-base graffiti to actuarial come-ons and mail-order ads for discount diamonds. Appropriately enough, the characters are constantly chowing down. On one leg of the journey, Edmund B. Ratner (formerly the "world's smallest perfect man," before he porked out) and Norwood's new sweetheart, Rita Lee Chipman, are described as having eaten their way through the Great Smoky Mountains. Norwood's decidedly humble (call it American) menu nails the country's midcentury gastronomy with a precision that today takes on near-archaeological value: canned peaches, marshmallows, Vienna sausages, cottage cheese with salt and pepper, a barbecue sandwich washed down with NuGrape, a potted-meat sandwich with mustard, butter on ham sandwiches, biscuit and Brer Rabbit syrup sandwiches, an Automat hot dog on a dish of baked beans, Cokes and corn chips and Nabs crackers, a Clark bar, peanuts fizzing in Pepsi, a frozen Milky Way.

II. The Believer Music Issue is also out! Q: What's in it? A: A lot.

Arthur Phillips (The Song Is You) on writing about music (or, as they say, dancing about architecture); Brandon Stosuy interviews Phil Elverum (here's a taste); Joe Hagan—author of the classic Bill Fox piece that rounds out Read Hard—on another underappreciated songwriter, Benji Hughes (the online version features two streaming songs that will make your day); Blvr editor Ross Simonini does double duty, writing about Jamaican dancehall and violence, and interviewing Radiohead's Thom Yorke; Greil Marcus; Michael Showalter and Michael Ian Black...a long piece by Michelle Tea...Justin Taylor with an excellent appreciation of David Berman's Actual Air, upon its 10th anniversary...a piece on Lawrence Welk...Ben Greenman...Hilton Als "performing" a sentence (à la Barthelme) about PJ Harvey...the inimitable Paul Collins, and more! Double issue! Get it before the newsstands run out! Because they always do with this one...

And I haven't even mentioned the Daniel Handler-curated CD, a real ear-opener, featuring names you know—Lloyd Cole (?!!!), Dave Wakeling, the Waterboys' Mike Scott, Sam Phillips, Stephen Duffy (!!?), David Sylvian (!!?!), Lisa Germano, and more—all great, but you cannot miss the Mike Scott song. It is an EPIC, like the best Waterboys songs (though also different).

(Blvr music issue trivia question: Who wrote an article for an earlier Blvr music issue entitled "The Song Is You"?)

III. One last thing I'll mention—David L. Ulin imagines the ideal Beatles '70s albums, using material from their disparate solo albums. In a nice bit of cross-magazine fertilization (eh??), the Utne Reader blog did an "imeem" playlist of the Ulin-imagined post-Fab Four album, Too Many People. It's fun to listen to...and it kicks off with "Imagine"...

IV. I won't be in New York for this, alas, and neither will Heidi, but the Believer and McSweeney's will be taking the stage for a Park-Lit event next Wednesday, August 5, at Bryant Park, 12:30 p.m.—lunchtime edification! (Here's more info at New York mag.)

Aforementioned music issue contribs Messrs. Phillips, Hagan, and Stosuy will be there, as will two new McSwy's novelists: Jessica Anthony (The Convalescent) and my old-PTSNBN colleague James Hannaham (God Says No). Amanda Stern hosts. (Copies of Read Hard and the music issue and the novels should be available.)

Perhaps — No — Selling

Appearing at City Lights tonight at 7: The Believer's Ross Simonini, the novelist/Adderall Diaries memoirist/Rumpus maestro/Blvr. writer/everything Stephen Elliott, and Joe Meno, about whose latest book, The Great Perhaps, I happily gushed:

Joe Meno's fiction has it all--humor and heart, moral gravitas, and a formal playfulness that catches you pleasantly by surprise.

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James Hannaham's God Says No (McSwy's) tour dates here -- coming back to NYC on 6/30, but first Gainesville, Nashville, Chicago, and other places.

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Long awaited: David Suisman's Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music (Harvard) is out now! (Some tantalizing sound files here.)

(The Suis wrote about Enrico Caruso's monkey trial for the Blvr way back in ’03—read it here.)

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Intermittent tweeting.

From Barth to Baldwin

In the NYT Magazine, Dzyd Ross traces TV's recent digressions to the work of postmodern littérateurs. A teaser:

To the television watcher, constant asides are now recognized as a basic component of the contemporary sitcom vocabulary. Verbal digressions — “Remember the time when . . . ” or “What would it be like if . . .” — often lead to alternative scenarios, tangents and realities, each with new characters and sets that can consume long stretches of the show’s running time. Much has been made of how “30 Rock” is revitalizing the classic “Frasier”/“Friends”/“Seinfeld” sitcom, but Fey’s program is, like most of the deeply funny and cutting-edge comedies of the last few years, a bold experiment in narrative.

reflections on a gift of a monotype ouroboros

Ouroboros hunters/Blvr. editors Ross and Andrew spotted a fine specimen on the streets of San Francisco:



It's the office of Aurobora Press!



Like many of our young people today, Andrew is inspired to become an Ouroboros:



(According to the website, "Aurobora Press is an invitational fine art press located in San Francisco dedicated to the monotype medium.")

Here's one more, for good measure:

Genius! Notes on the new Believer

From Dzyd Brandon's "A Blaze in the North American Sky," in the new Believer music issue:

A little over a year ago I went to the Norwegian city of Trondheim to attend a mostly indie rock, non–heavy metal festival so I could meet Snorre Ruch, a.k.a. Blackthorn, a black-metal musician likely best known in for his connection to the murder of another black metaller, Øystein Aarseth, a.k.a. Euronymous, on August 10, 1993.

Now that's a lede!

The cover is genius (can't explain it here), the CD (masterminded by Ross Simonini) is quite different from that of previous years but also genius in its own way, there are articles that are genius, it is an embarrassment of riches (Dzyd Douglas on "A review of the only known mechanically reproduced copy of a really great record"; Ange Mlinko! Haruki Murakami?!! Dzyd Paul on music and...dentistry??), I am perhaps overusing the word genius but last night I read the Barthelme story "The Genius" and hence that is our theme today! (Two things by Rick Moody! John Adamian's notes on liner notes! Lavinia Greenlaw......interview with Fugazi dude...) MORE!