Psychogeographies

Greater New York is in some ways like a house. Manhattan is the living room, with the TV and the stereo and the good furniture, where guests are entertained. Brooklyn and Queens are the bedrooms where the family sleeps, and the Bronx is the attic, full of inflammable crap that nobody has any use for. Staten Island is the backyard, and Long Island is the detached garage, so filled up with paint cans, workbenches, and motorboat that you can’t get the car in it anymore. Hudson County over in New Jersey is the basement, with the furnace and the freezer and the stacks of old newspapers, and the Jersey swamps are the toilet. Westchester is the den with paneling and a fake kerosene lamp, and Connecticut is the guest room, with starched curtains and landscape prints. The kitchen is way up in Albany, which means the food is always cold by the time it gets to the table, and the formal dining room was torn down by William Zeckendorf and friends back in the early fifties. —Donald Westlake, Dancing Aztecs (quoted by Sarah Weinman)

*

The morning sun picks out an apartment house, a cigar store, streams through the dusty windows of a loft. The racket swells with the light. These shoes are killing me, she said, taking the cover off the typewriter. Main Central is up to forty-six. Did you read about the earthquake?

Looms, shears, jackhammers, trolley cars, voices, add to the din. And in the quieter streets the hawker with the pushcart moves slowly by. Badabadabada O Gee! Hawkers of vegetables, plants, fruit. Badabadabada
O Gee!

In half a million rooming-house rooms the call penetrates ill-fitting windows. The boy who came to be a writer is waked in his mid-town room and dresses for his shift on the elevator. In Chelsea the girl who came to be an actress launders her stockings. The boy who was going to Wall Street sprawls on his bed, wincing as each cry cuts into his dream of the smell of fresh hay and warm milk. A deep blast rises, drowning the sound of hawkers, children, automobiles. The Conte di Savoia steams up the river; wine from Capri, olive oil from Spain, figs and dates from North Africa.

Shouting screaming kids fill the streets, playing baseball, football, hopscotch, jump-rope, dodging swift-moving trucks and taxis. Down Fifth Avenue marches a May Day parade sixty thousand strong. Solidarity forever, solidarity forever, the portentous tramp, tramp of regimented feet; slogans called, banners flying. Up lower Broadway an open car moves slowly through the yelling throng and on its pulled-back hood, laughing, waving into the snowstorm that flutters thickly downward from high-up windows, sits a returned aviator, explorer, movie actor, champion chess player, the first man to walk the length of Manhattan backwards. —from John Cheever's introduction to the 1939 New York City Guide (quoted by Jason Boog)

Yet [New York] was much more than a glittering modern city for Lovecraft. It was that in the early months of his stay, but it soon came to be seen as a darker, older, and far more protean city—at least on his many walks in the dead of night. As he threaded his way through a maze of tenuous and delicate mental impressions, in the night shadows and dawn glimmerings of New York City he found a new dream-city that could function simultaneously as an inspirational fever-dream, as a text, as an antiquarian reliquary, as a sort of psychic comforter to aid him in his battle against the mundane and horrifyingly noisy reality of daylight hours. —David Haden, Walking With Cthulhu: H.P. Lovecraft as Psychogeographer (New York: 1924–26)

January Believer

The first Believer of 2010 is out! Epic John D'Agata piece on Las Vegas, Robert Ito on weird Japanese folk tales, Sarah Weinman on Don Carpenter! Aleksander Hemon talks to Colum McCann? (Yes.) Francis Ford Coppola talks to Ruth Reichl? (Yes.) Plus Chris Bachelder, Jack Pendarvis, Meehan Crist on a chapbook from the early ’70s, Justin Taylor on the Momus novel, Greil Marcus, and much more!

Donald E. Westlake

Levi has an elegant tribute to Donald E. Westlake, who died on New Year's Eve. Here's a bit:

Donald E. Westlake himself warned us that this day was coming: the title of his twenty-second novel about Parker the heister, Nobody Runs Forever, serves as a reminder that even those of us who work in less risky occupations are nonetheless living on borrowed time. And what better use to make of that time than to sit down every single day at the typewriter and explore the vicissitudes of humanity, inventing characters and getting them into trouble just to see how they might get out of it? Do it long enough, do it well enough, and you just might create something that runs forever after all.

(Westlake, Levi notes, was an Anthony Powell fan.)

(Also: Sarah has a bundle of links. And here is my enthusiastic if brief shout-out to three of his Parker books, written under the pseudonym Richard Stark; they were among my favorite reads of 2008.)

(And here's Sarah's obit at the LAT.)

Not quite a "Table-Talk"

1. I keep thinking this movie I'm semi-watching is called Terror Twilight. No! It's Tropic Thunder!

2. A big part of what I have enjoyed about the growth over the past several years of the world of book blogs is the way they open literary conversation to include books that are not new, bringing in (depending on the blogger) everything from classics to ephemera. In an environment where, for obvious reasons, the official organs of book culture are forever preoccupied with the new, it's wonderful to see that a big swathe of people is perpetually reading from a wide range of eras and styles, that our shared frame of reference really is much larger than one might think at first blush. —Levi's comment on Confessions

The insured loneliness, the invisible library

I. In the NYT—would this count as a volume in the Invisible Library?

In a bookcase in a dark hallway there is another book, not well known like the others. In fact, it is unclear whether anyone other than its author has ever read “Where Yesterday Began.”

Ms. Macefield paid to have her novel published in 1994, under the pen name Domilini. It is set against the backdrop of post-World War I Europe.

An introductory page begins, “This story is for all those who have ever loved — truly, deeply, irrevocably — and in the thrust of disaster. For some, love simply dies — and one moves on. But for a few, love is as lasting as the ages — despite the impossibilities, the separation, the insured loneliness.”

The book is 1,138 pages long, not counting the musical references, from Scottish folk songs to a 1915 work by the English composer Albert W. Ketelbey, and a 16-page glossary of the French, German and Italian phrases sprinkled throughout. “I think it was kind of a love story,” said Mr. Peck, the longtime friend. “I never did read it.”

The book is dedicated to “B. Robert Aigner, M.D.,” with no explanation why. Reached by phone at his home in a Seattle suburb, Dr. Aigner, 80, said he remembered Ms. Macefield was a patient, but nothing more.

Dr. Aigner, a neurologist, was amazed and amused that Ms. Macefield would have dedicated her ambitious work to him. He had never heard of it.

“I have no idea what I was treating her for,” he said.

[Ed. note: Among the works of Harry Stephen Keeler are several dedicated to various physicians.]

II. Dzyd Sarah W. mentioned Keeler in her latest Dark Passages column (looking at pan-Asian crime fiction) at the LAT:

Several novels by Harry Stephen Keeler involve Asian characters or settings but are remembered less for them than for the author's wildly pyrotechnic writing style.

III. Meanwhile, my current Astral Weeks column has been completed—but you can't read it yet! I don't know why! Clicking through gets you to a Page Not Found. (The invisible article?)

UPDATE (IV): Who is the winner of the 2008 honorary Harry Stephen Keeler character award?

Seller - Days

New game: Most evocative, naturally occurring side-by-side phrase formation?


Spotted at Barnes & Noble, Tribeca

Photo courtesy Sarah W.

Ouroboric mail-bag

Dzyd Sarah: "I have just finished AMERICAN EVE, a book about Evelyn Nesbit and the Stanford White murder, that Riverhead is publishing next month. The author is...Paula Uruburu! Not only a palindrome but positively circular!"

(I believe the name "Uruburu" is used in Gaddis's A Frolic of His Own...I always assumed it was made-up!)

A condo made of stone-a!

Hats off to the Idiosynratic Sarah for her blogaversary! This is also an excuse to embed...

Con-undrum

Saw this in a bookstore window last week:



And now the Idiosyncratic Sarah has a review at TONY:

[E]ven though he employs enough point-of-view shifts to give an unintended meaning to his book’s title, the effect works, raising the question: Who is conning, and who is being conned?