THE 2010 MUSIC ISSUE — THE BELIEVER

It's here! The Believer's MUSIC ISSUE!

Joe Hagan's epic look at Nina Simone's life and career, through her (previously unseen) diaries and letters...Saki Knafo (aka the Best Journalist in the World) on "Orientalist Party Music" (read it here)...the fascinating Adam Kempa on unusual vinyl groove-tactics (WOW)...Rick Moody on drum machines...Ken Tucker on Tammy Wynette's other anthem...Sad TV theme songs, Rush (!?), a chart by Ben Greenman, and MORE...

There's a CD with songs—aka your summer soundtrack! Janelle Monáe! Nina Simone! MORE! Actually here's the track listing:

1. “SELF!,” DEEP COTTON
2. “HYDRA FANCIES,” OF MONTREAL
3. “DEPRAVED VALET,” ROMAN GIANARTHUR (FEAT. KEVIN BARNES)
4. “COME BACK LIKE SPRING,” CODY CHESNUTT
5. “B.S. IN A TAMPON,” SAUL WILLIAMS
6. “COLD WAR (WONDAMIX),” JANELLE MONÁE
7. “IIETYS,” BLK JKS
8. “CHAOS,” SPREE WILSON
9. “REWIND,” SCAR
10. “VELVET ROPE BLUE,” ROB ROY
11. “HAVE YOU EVER MADE LOVE TO A WEIRDO?” HOLLYWEERD
12. “OFF THE GRID,” FEAR & FANCY
13. “TURN OFF THE TV,” GEORGE 2.0
14. “BORN FREE,” M.I.A.
15. “ONE,” HOT HEAVY & BAD (JOI)
16. “COLD BOY,” TENDABERRY
17. “CLOSER 9 ¹⁄₂,” MOTHER NOVELLA
18. “I NEVER CRY,” NINA SIMONE

WOAH!!

Plus interviews! Joshua Clover coming out of music-critic retirement to interview M.I.A...Robert Christgau and Carola Dibbell talking to Go-Betweens' Robert Forster...Erik Morse convenes a forum on Warp records...Plus: regular columnists Nick Hornby, Jack Pendarvis, and Greil Marcus...plus poems and MORE...

Table-talk of Parkus Grammaticus for May 9, 2008

I. Saki Knafo, a/k/a the greatest journalist in the world, is still on the paragraph symbol beat. We thought it was just called a pilcrow...until he came across this in a recent New Yorker:

"Alinea" is the word for the backward "P" symbol that proofreaders put at the beginning of a new paragraph.

II. A really smart take on Personal Days is up at Barnes & Noble Review—it's long and thoughtful and basically pull-quote-proof, and I'm doing it an injustice by cutting and pasting, but here's a taste:

In a nameless Manhattan office, a group of be-cubicled peons huddle in fear on the staticky carpeting. They are proofreaders, perhaps, or copywriters, or fact-checkers —at any rate their work (never discussed) is unfascinating and redolent of squandered IQ. Neon-blanched, sharing an intimacy that cannot thrive—that dies immediately, in fact—outside the strange conditions which created it, they have nonetheless made a world: pet names, in-jokes, the minor voodoo of office life....The fragmented narrative and shaggy-dog tangents of Personal Days operate in the service of a seeping, slow-build paranoia, of the sort that has sustained whole seasons of ABC’s Lost.

"The minor voodoo of office life"!

III. Save the date: I'll be giving my first post-publication PD reading on May 21 at McNally-Robinson. Then I'll chew the fat with my editor, Julia Cheiffetz, whose name I am invoking for the first time on The Dizzies!

He means the 'Ghost'?

A pilcrow is one of these: ¶. I didn’t know that. The little printer’s mark is unvoiced but eloquent, sundering streams of prose, heralding new paragraphs or staking out subclauses. It crops up often in legal and academic documents, but in fiction you would only expect to see one as an avant-garde manoeuvre, pegged into a page by an author who wanted to interrupt a conventional illusion, to alert the reader to something imposed or artificial. I suspect McSweeney’s uses them a lot. —Keith Miller, "The Clever Nostalgia of Adam Mars-Jones," TLS, March 26, 2008

UPDATE: Saki Knafo, aka the greatest journalist in the world, found this punctuational free-for-all in an AP story. Here Shaquille O'Neal appears to be visualizing his words in cartoon bubbles:

Of Riley's comments, O'Neal said colorfully, "I don't [care] how he interpreted it."

Reminded that reporters couldn't use the quote because of the expletive, he said, "Sure you can. You can quote me, brother. You can put an 's,' then the tic-tac-toe, the 'at' sign and then the other symbols."

Very good, Yojimbo!

Saki Knafo, a/k/a the greatest journalist in the world, has a nice piece today on contemporary Gotham butlerdom. It includes a bit of demented play-acted dialogue:

MR. ROBINSON: Oh, God! Oh, who is this?
MR. CHARTER: It’s the butler, sir.
MR. ROBINSON: Oh, Edward, is that you?
MR. CHARTER: Yes, it is, sir.
MR. ROBINSON: Oh, thank you! Oh, God! You’ve rescued me from the most hideous of nightmares, Edward.

There is also this alarming quote: “Ironically,” Mr. Negron said, “a lot of people don’t realize that samurais originally developed from butlers. The word means someone who served. The lords were rich people, and the samurais would do everything, including protection.”