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.

Dizzies Press Release: Samantha Hunt

Please come enjoy a lunchtime performance in one of New York City's most storied squares. You are invited to the Word for Word event at the Bryant Park Reading Room. Let us write the latest chapter of history!

First Bryant Park was a forest where sweetgum and bloodroot grew.

THEN it was a hunting ground

THEN it was an escape route for General Washington’s defeated troops after the bloody Battle of Brooklyn

THEN it was a potter's field (we are lunching on top of dead bodies!)

THEN it was the site of the Civil War draft riots (an event triggered by New York City's most gruesome moment: the burning of the Colored Orphan Asylum)

THEN it was the site of the dreamy Crystal Palace

THEN it was the site of the Crystal Palace's charred remains

THEN it fell under the dangerous shadow of the Sixth Avenue El where it would stay for 56 years

THEN it was called "one of the most disreputable parks in the city" by Architecture Magazine

THEN it was the site of copious muggings and delirious drug deals

THEN it became the well manicured site of Midtown working stiff half-hour lunches

AND NOW THINGS GET REALLY WEIRD! On Wednesday, August 20 from 12:30pm to 1:45pm Samantha Hunt will read from The Invention of Everything Else, a novel about the life of heroic Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla -- a man who not only fed the pigeons of the Bryant Park daily but also believed he was married to one of them!

She will be joined by her friends and musical idols PINATALAND as they conjure the strangeness of history, drawing inspiration from the all-but-forgotten events of the past 200 years for their brand new album, Songs for the Forgotten Future Vol. 2.

Let's relive the good old days!

Rain Venue:

The General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen

20 West 44th Street between 5th & 6th Avenues)

For more information:

www.samanthahunt.net

www.pinataland.com

Partial magic in the garden

My latest Astral Weeks column, a look at Catherynne M. Valente's In the Cities of Coin and Spice and Tin House's "Fantastic Women" issue, is up at the L.A. Times. This one has all your, I mean my, faves: Borges, Keeler, Cloud Atlas, Samantha Hunt, and so on!

Up in the old hotel

The New Yorker has a nice piece this week on Tesla, the New Yorker Hotel, and Samantha Hunt's forthcoming novel, The Invention of Everything Else.

But Ghost readers read about Hunt's obsession with the Tesla/New Yorker Hotel connection way back in issue #4 (Oct. 2006)—a first-hand account of the mysteries underneath the building...by Samantha Hunt herself!

Isn't it time you subscribed to the Ghost? Visit the site for more information.

False etymologies

At the Poetry Foundation, Samantha Hunt talks to Heather McHugh about Vesalius.

I love this question:

I remember once being tempted to read the etymology of “desire” as “from or of the father.” What are some of your favorite false etymologies?

New Dizzyhead challenge?

Against the Grain

I love this—Trong G. Nguyen's First Chapters (The Prince, Faust, Autobiography of a Yogi, Radio Free Albemuth)(2007):



(Thanks to Dizzyhead Sam.)

In the company of j'aime

Dizzyhead Bill writes:

Shirley Jackson (who'd be in my J'aime list) did a like/don't like passage in her unfinished novel "Come Along With Me":

"...I like everything about big department stores except shopping in them. I do not like salesgirls and their manners, and having to buy my dresses in a special behemoths department, and I do not like the stupid mockery of people who enjoy keeping you waiting; I do not like credit offices, but I enjoy quarreling over a bill."

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Shirley J. brings to mind Shelley Jackson, who'll be reading with Samantha Hunt, Kelly Link, and Lucy Corin this Friday—what a lineup! It's for Tin House's Fantastic Women issue.

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False Etymology of the Day: the word gem comes from a corruption of j'aime.