The Return of "Cow Vase"

Last year I participated in the Significant Objects project, writing a very short story around a knick-knack selected by editors Rob Walker and Joshua Glenn. Now several of those stories have been collected into a book, and I'm happy to be included alongside authors such as Nicholson Baker, William Gibson, Heidi J., Colson Whitehead, Neil LaBute, Sloane Crosley, Tom McCarthy, Jonathan Lethem, Lydia Millett....(I could keep going!)...

It looks like there will be two covers; I wrote about the delightful "Cow Vase" featured on the pink one. The books are out in July and are available for pre-order.

Today the project was featured on Studio 360. There's a contest, and a video...

Lost and found

I.

The tale had all the hallmarks of a baroque Paul Bowles short story, set among the remaindered possessions of Bowles himself: a film director gets a call from a stranger, who says he has stumbled across an original print of the filmmaker’s long-lost first film in a windowless Tangier apartment, coated in dust and insect powder. The director, Sara Driver, at first thought the call might be a joke, but for reasons almost as strange as fiction, she kept listening.[...]

Bowles’s agent granted the rights to Ms. Driver, and the movie — shot in six days near her parents’ house in western New Jersey, with an unlikely cast that included two friends, the writer Luc Sante, little known at the time, and an equally unknown photographer, Nan Goldin — developed a following. The film was named one of the best movies of the 1980s by a critic in Cahiers du Cinéma. —NYT

II. At The Millions, Emily Darrell tracks down one of J.D. Salinger's uncollected stories, "A Girl I Knew":

As I scanned the index I noticed with great surprise and excitement that the book contained a story by J.D. Salinger that I hadn’t read before. It was called “A Girl I Knew.” Greedily, I slid to the floor, crossed my legs, and flipped to page 248, ready to start right in. The only problem was that there was no page 248. In fact, in between John Rogers’ “Episode of a House Remembered” and Alfred Segre’s “Justice Has No Number,” there was nothing. Some sneak had gone and ever-so-carefully removed the Salinger story with a razor.

III. Paul La Farge offers PDF versions of nine small books (of seventeen) that he published with/as Paraffin Press. Each had a print run of two.

IV. Can't remember what link brought me to this site for/about William Gibson's Agrippa (a book of the dead)—a book on disc that destroyed itself as you read it.

Here's to future days

"The only other writer who is as good at chronicling our contemporary milieu, in which the world of things eats itself like an ouroboros, is Douglas Coupland. To read Gibson is to read the present as if it were the future, because it seems the present is becoming the future faster than it is becoming the past."—Scarlett Thomas on William Gibson, NYTBR

(Via Kosiya)

Bruce Conner, RIP

Linksmeister General Thomas sends us two short films—Bruce Conner's Devo video (for "Mongoloid")—



—and Roger Beebe's recent BC tribute, featuring Toni Basil (as she appeared in Breakaway).

* * *

More Dischiana:

The NYT obit, with a wide range of quotes (Norman Rush, Dana Gioia...): "He wrote a series of poems on grammar, for which he was a stickler, including one on auxiliary verbs."

Other Ed's appreciation on the New York site: "[Philip K.] Dick suggested [to the F.B.I.] that [Disch's novel Camp Concentration] contained coded information 'to be read by the right people here and there.' "

William Gibson: "On Wings Of Song, as I've said elsewhere, and more than once, is one of the great neglected masterpieces of late 20th-century science fiction."

I always liked this Disch blurb of the work of Harry Mathews (anyone know the original source?): "I cannot express the extent of my admiration for Harry Mathews, which is well-nigh evangelical. There are now, here and there, other zephyrs blowing—John Barth, Susan Sontag, Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon—but none so strong as this, none that bear so clearly and deliciously the tang of spring."

And more links here.

Table-talk of Parkus Grammaticus for February 22

I. Serial reading: "When I was in middle school, I went through a period where I read little but Agatha Christie novels. (For those of you keeping score at home, that period followed the one wherein I read little but Doc Savage novels and preceded the one wherein I read little but Star Trek novels.)" —I've Been Reading Lately

II. Are my pieces disappearing from the PTSNBN archives? I wanted to find some fact about Henry Darger, which I knew was somewhere in the long piece I did for the PTSNBN Education Supplement...but the article wasn't there anymore! I had to search via Google and then get the cached version. Pretty depressing.

Anyway, I've added the Darger piece to The Unarchivable. And then I remembered that a similar thing happened to my (much more recent) review in the LATBR of William Gibson's Spook Country, so I added that piece to the site as well....I couldn't even find a cached version, so the one I put up might differ from the final edited version. (Similarly, my LATBR review of a Peter Kuper book is nowhere to be found...)

Note for my memoirs: Just because it's online doesn't mean you shouldn't save a copy for yourself! Everything is going to disappear someday!

III. At Vertigo, a Sebald interview (in two installments): "[A]ll kinds of things can be a novel."

IV. The movie Ratatouille contains the word rejectamenta.

V. Over at The Fanzine, there's an excerpt from a novel by Andrew Lewis Conn, author of P.

Pass the mic

Dizzyhead Dennis interviews William Gibson over at Salon. It's the second DL/WG interview (the first was a snippet at the PTSNBN) and it's terrific. An appetizer:

You recently did a reading in the virtual world of Second Life, where you are a kind of patron saint. I got shut out—I didn't realize capacity would be an issue—but I caught up with it afterward on YouTube. Did the event turn out as you'd expected?

Apparently there's always finite space in Second Life. I was actually in a room at the Centre for Digital Media in Vancouver with a live audience so I wasn't paying much attention to the Second Life aspect, which is probably a good thing in terms of my performance. I had a laptop open so I could see it as if I was watching from within Second Life. What I saw I found a bit distracting—people levitating and sitting on top of the microphone.

The real vertigo

We hit a point somewhere in the mid-18 century where we started doing what we think of technology today and it started changing things for us, changing society. Since World War II it's going literally exponential and what we are experiencing now is the real vertigo of that—we have no idea at all now where we are going. —William Gibson

(Via Jenny D)

The Pattern Recognitions

Via a comment on Light Reading: Someone going by "Patternboy" is posting chapter summaries of the new William Gibson novel (which I reviewed in today's L.A. Times).

He also provides links to this UK-based Spook Country site...and a website for the fictitious Node magazine.

Here's Gibson's Second Life avatar, answering questions.

Just say Node

Speaking of Gibson, my review of his latest novel, Spook Country, is up at the L.A. Times. (It's not one of my columns, just a stand-alone piece.)




















(Thanks to Bowen for the scan.)

Labyrinths, bakeries, and more

1. William Gibson on Borges's Labyrinths (via Ed of the Ranting)—definitely my pick if I could only take one Borges book to a desert island.

Speaking of which, I figured out what I would say if I were allowed only one book, period, to take to a desert island. I would ask for a ukelele (or guitar) chord book, if I were also able to take a uke or guitar as well.

(Wait—why am I thinking I'm about to be marooned on a desert island?)

2. Dizzyhead Mollie's on a roll over at Restricted View: How one publisher mangled Middlemarch.

3. UPDATE: Time to check out the latest issue of Cinema Scope, featuring B. Kite on Rivette, Jessica Winter on Idiocracy . . . (Alas, these pieces aren't available online.)

* * *

4. Brit in Brooklyn was on the scene yesterday after the collapse of Ward Bakery. (Visit the site for more photos.)

* * *

5. Congrats to Dizzyhead Sarah—recipient of the 2007–8 Rome Prize!

6. Have you seen The Norman Rockwell Code?

7. Tomorrow there's a Believer Nighttime Event at the New School. It's part of the PEN World Voices—participants include Miranda July, Uzodinma Iweala, and John Hodgman. (Eric Bogosian is MCing.)

8. Any Humbert Wolfe fans out there?

9. This article about ravens is great!

Their skills when it comes to tricking and cheating, for example, have not been thoroughly explored. Ravens are cunning enough to set up mock hiding places in order to distract their thievish fellows from their real food stores. They're generally very inventive when it comes to tricking those who would snatch away their food. But how much truth is there to reports according to which ravens play dead next to carcasses in order to simulate a case of food poisoning?

(Via Arts & Letters Daily)