Genius, a Bore, or Both

Great piece on the Paris Review blog by Jenny Hendrix—who is she?—on "jack green" 's "fire the bastards!," his defense of William Gaddis's The Recognitions.

I've never read "ftb," but when I worked at the PTSNBN, I found the full-page ad from 1962 that Hendrix mentions, and made a nice clean photocopy. And I would take a picture of it and post it here...but I'm not sure where it is.

(Also discussed is the Pynchon/Wanda Tinasky affair, which I remember reading about in the pages of the New York Press...)

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By sheer coincidence, Linden at Night RPM has a Gaddis-related post up today...

W or the memory of passages from Ulysses

Books you were going to write with letters for titles. Have you read his F? O yes, but I prefer Q. Yes, but W is wonderful. O yes, W. Remember your epiphanies on green oval leaves, deeply deep, copies to be sent if you died to all the great libraries of the world, including Alexandria? Someone was to read them there after a few thousand years, a mahamanvantara. —Joyce, Ulysses*

Time's Top 10 Books With One-Letter Titles includes V., M, Z, S., and C.




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*This passage also appears in the 14th ed. of The Chicago Manual of Style

Who was Norton Westermont?

For Bookforum, I've written my meditations on the copy editor's art and the hidden narratives of the evolving Chicago Manual of Style. (Thank you to editor Michael Miller—my former copy-desk colleague [!]—and the U. Chicago Press.)

At 933 pages, the fourteenth was comparable in size to the heralded omnium-gatherums of its era (1996's Infinite Jest, 1997's Mason & Dixon and Underworld). For sheer head-scratching postmodern tricksterism, though, Messrs. Wallace, Pynchon, and DeLillo had nothing on the collaborative deadpan master jam that was the fourteenth. Infinite Jest's reams of endnotes were distinctive but hardly as radical as Chicago's editorial comments for a text that was essentially invisible. "Millicent Cliff was Norton Westermont's first cousin, although to the very last she denied it," 15.47 tells us—but who was Norton Westermont? In this sense, much of Chicago reads like Pale Fire without the poem. On the very next page, 15.51's directions on how to style acknowledgments delivers both a name right out of Pynchonland and a DeLillo-esque consortium: "The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance of Dr. Oscar J. Blunk of the National Cyanide Laboratory in the preparation of this chapter."

This is the first of three articles that have kept me happily occupied this fall...

The Collected Blurbs of Thomas Pynchon

Rachel Donadio on blurbs (NYTBR):

Sometimes a blurb is news. The reclusive Thomas Pynchon seems to elicit excitement each time he breaks his public silence, as he has by endorsing, among others, “The Testament of Yves Gundron” (1999), the first novel by Emily Barton; Jim Knipfel’s memoir “Slackjaw” (1999); and “The Restraint of Beasts” (1998), a Booker-nominated novel by Magnus Mills, which he called “a demented, deadpan-comic wonder.” (Pynchon has also written the liner notes for “Nobody’s Cool,” the second album by the alt-rock band Lotion.) Recently, Post Road magazine published Pynchon’s collected blurbs from the years 1966 to 2003 — more than two dozen in all.

I love Post Road's occasional aggregations: I recall something about John Cheever characters (or places? in any case, a list of all of them), and I read a great thing featuring the jacket copy (not blurbs, just descriptions) of every Joyce Carol Oates novel.