Disambiguations for July 22, 2009

I. Over at Driftwood Singers Present:

Remember when your whole M.O. was to avoid living a life of "quiet desperation"? Books and music were going to save us. By the time you realize your liberal arts education was designed to fulfill the self-indulgent solipsism of youth, you've become a "content provider" scraping for a shred of dignity in the digital age. How poetic! Then one day you wake up and find yourself on your knees on the sidewalk flipping through boxes of crappy $1 vinyl like some vagrant off his meds: Hey, maybe this Strawbs album will be good. Pathetic. (Btw, it's horrible.)

II. A little oeuvre sleuthing over at Paper Cuts, on Nabokov and Lolita:

Nabokov himself may well have deplored this combing of his work for clues to his life, or vice versa. The alchemy between the two was among his great subjects, and even in this memoir (subtitled, significantly, “An Autobiography Revisited“) he suggests there can be no literal translation from life to literature. But he wasn’t averse to leaving a trail of bread crumbs; indeed, he left so many of them that his books sometimes seem like solid loaves of hints and puzzles.

(Solid loaves! Very funny.)

III. Re-reading around the edges: Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections. This book is TOO GOOD. I can't write about it here.

IV. The Believer music issue is also TOO GOOD to be blogged about..................I'll just say GO GET IT.......then tell me which song you liked best on the CD. (The CD is really good but there is one song in particular that is TOO GOOD to be blogged about.)

V. Why is "The Dizzies" now called "Disambiguation"? (For that matter, why was it briefly "As I Please"?) These questions are TOO MYSTERIOUS to be blogged about.

VI. Laird Hunt has an original take on the Living With Music playlist-format at Paper Cuts. Example:

6) Inflammatory Writ, Joanna Newsom. “Oh, where is your inflammatory writ? Your text that would incite a light, ‘Be lit’ ?” “The Exquisite” was, I’d like to hope, my inflammatory writ.

“Ray of the Star”: Written in one mad six-week sprint during the fall of 2007 after a visit to La Rambla in Barcelona, where the most elaborate living statues coexist with newspaper stands, flower stalls, bird vendors, locals and tourists. My fever-dream version of Barcelona includes bathing ghosts, haunted shoes, bargains with devils and demonic art critics.

Love that he ends with Sonic Youth's "Providence." (Secret source for the Psychic Envelopes "Providence #3?). Mix idea: Songs with/mentioning/utilizing answering machines/their ingoing/outgoing messages...Replacements, "Answering Machine"...that weird tidbit at the end of one of those early TMBG singles/EPs...uh...the list goes on...

VII. Am very late on this: Joshua Glenn and Rob Walker's Significant Objects project...I have written something for it (not posted yet)...More info at Paper Cuts (your one-stop shop for Disambiguation fodder)....also more at Jacket Copy.

VIII. On Sung J. Woo's site: Photos from the 7/1 Korea Society panel.

Table-Talk of Parkus Grammaticus for July 7

I. "South Korea in two vertically standing problem of identity than their New York office workers wanted to write about life."

[?!!]

Korea's Chosun Ilbo covers Personal Days, and Google's translation function makes hay...

II. I'm reading at (in?) the St. Marks series on 7/10! More info soon.

III. Maybe all my Feelies blogging made this happen? Over at the Personal Days blog, hotographer Ennis Mild captures a PD reader at last Friday's Feelies/Sonic Youth concert! Very cool!

IV. I forgot what IV was for...

V. (That's like that Violent Femmes song!)



VI. Two great science-fiction-related posts from Dzyd Paul—

A) The Onion's great paperback bloggery, featuring "the most famous fantastic novel of all time" (not).
B) Ubik—the aspirin?!—at Mark A. Rayner's "Vintage Ads of Fictional Futures."

VII. Did you know Richard Wright wrote (tongue-twister!) —

A) A novel with all white characters?
B) An unpublished novel called The Island of Hallucination?

(More here.)

VIII. Oh wait maybe this was IV. — I missed WKW's My Blueberry Nights (well, nearly every theatrical release of the last seven or eight months!), and the reviews were savage, but no less a tastemaker than Mike Atkinson dug it:

My Blueberry Nights (2007) Catching up with this critical hot potato – nobody seemed capable of dismissing or faintly praising it fast enough – I was entranced. In a few years, after all the gotchas and one-ups have been forgotten, it’ll reappear as classic Wong.

Heyyy, I'm sold! "Add to queue"!

(At the Moving Image site, Atkinson writes on William Holden, Jessica Winter looks at Mad Men, and more...this is a great site! This is like the PTSNSBN of yore!)

IX. Vaguely self-serving Ouroboros!