Un palazzo incastrato

In un palazzo incastrato nell’unica strada semideserta di Manhattan, ingombra di giornali spinti dal vento come «granchi giganti», un gruppo di impiegati consuma le proprie giornate nel terrore di perdere il posto.

EH??

Yes! Personal Days is coming out soon in Italy—perfect for your* Italian-speaking brother-in-law! The title there is Maledetti Colleghi. More info at the Fazi page.

In other PD news...a new review at the Independent...I talk vaguely about success at Time Out...the Selfdivider finds Pessoan resonances in PD; I love how he sees The Book of Disquiet as office lit—that's inspired!...(Another book "written" on slips of paper: Vonnegut's Hocus Pocus.)...I'm reading next Thursday (7/31) at KGB—my last reading of the summer (unless someone asks me to read again!)...don't know if I'll read from PD or The Dizzies??? Or Chinese Whispers??? Or the interview in Triple Canopy??? Or if I'll just read David Berman poems again?...Realized that I HAVE NOT YET LINKED to the video of me reading at Google...but I should, right? I'm too self-conscious...(I haven't watched it myself, though I did watch about half of the Jennifer 8. Lee talk, it was great...she goes to a village in China whose sole/main purpose is to train people to work in Chinese restaurants in the U.S.)....OK I'm going to link to the video of me...ED NOBODY CARES...

—I care.
—Who said that?
—It is I, Edward 9. Park, your superego.
—WHATTTTT???





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* = "my"!

Table-talk of Parkus Grammaticus for April 21, 2008

I.
The best Shadowplay yet? From "Things I Read Off the Screen in 'They Drive By Night'":

Many are the ads for Player’s Cigarettes in this film! I won’t reproduce them all or you will be hypnotised into craving the Smooth Smoke Doctors Recommend, and I don’t want that on my conscience. The items offered by CHARLIE’S include TEAS, you will note. For a hard-boiled crime drama, this film shows quite a lot of tea being drunk. It’s an odd effect.

II.
This bit in the TLS review on Lee Siegel novel Love in a Dead Language

which is about the death of a Sanskrity scholar, Leopold Roth, who specialized in studying sentences made up of identically ordered letters, which differ only in terms of the number of spaces between those letters. Roth's dissertation is titled Oflyrricheros, which, depending on the spacing, reveals either the disappearance of love (O Fly Rich Eros), or a paean to poets (Of Lyric Heros), and he encourages readers to puzzle over the relationship between the identically lettered question "Am I able to get her?" and the fantasy "Amiable together."

reminds me of—you knew it was coming!—Keeler's The Marceau Case:

The Marceau books hinge—or do they?—upon a single line of a manuscript, which reads: “ ‘Blimey, ‘Erb! Little?’ Lu Caslow’s dreary eyes”. Is the culprit Meyer B. Li? Or a midget funambulist named Little Lucas?

III.
Selfdivider on early Ishiguro.

IV. Via Very Short List, "Charlie Rose by Samuel Beckett" (aka "Waiting for GoDot.com"):

Dizzies Newsfeeds for December 6 — From the Parkives, XXVII

At the Poetry Foundation, Geoff Dyer traces some interesting artistic-novelistic-poetic connections...Selfdivider on Korea and German literature: "But in [my uncle's] private study, which was only a dark, tiny room with a low sit-down table, he had shelves of books with names that seemed almost mythical to me. Fichte, Hegel, Nietzsche, et al."...Halterius views a rarely seen "disasterpiece," the video-theater version of Merrill's The Changing Light at Sandover...Levi argues that the novels of Richard Stark (Donald E. Westlake) are about work...leading me to dust off this nugget from the Parkives:

GOD SAVE THE MARK
By Donald E. Westlake
Forge/Otto Penzler Presents, 268 pp., $14.95

Fred Fitch, the gullible narrator of Westlake's 1967 novel, receives 300 grand from an uncle he's never met—and then his problems really begin. Sniped at, seduced, and ceaselessly solicited, Fred wises up just enough to keep his life, not to mention his loot. A neighbor fishes for some Fitch funding to self-publish his neglected masterpiece, Veni Vidi Vici Through Air Power, a book that asks one burning question: What if Julius Caesar had had access to a couple of biplanes? Fred himself recalls—or foreshadows—Charles Portis's Dog of the South übernebbish, Ray Midge, prone as he is to wonderfully absurd digressions that you can't help but read aloud: "I wanted to call him Ralph, I really wanted to call him Ralph. I wanted to start my answer with Ralph and end my answer with Ralph and put Ralphs in here and there in the middle of the answer, and answer only in words which were anagrams of Ralph." E.P.
—June 29, 2004, PTSNBN