Parallel lives

The latest issue (#75!) of Keeler News, the gazette of the Harry Stephen Keeler Society, is available online, for free.

This number features a newly discovered Keeler story, that brilliant feature "Chuckles From China" (a page of "Chinese" jokes, from made-up publications like Nankow Military College Topics, that ran in a magazine Keeler edited), the parallel lives of Keeler and Heidegger, William Poundstone on the word "Izzard"...and much more!

Anagram movie reviews

Poundstone's on a roll!

SHUTTER ISLAND = HINT: STARS DUEL

SHUTTER ISLAND = DENIALS / TRUTHS

ALICE IN WONDERLAND = LEWD NONLINEAR ACID

SHUTTER ISLAND = ARTLESS ID HUNT

SHUTTER ISLAND = INSULTED TRASH

Breaking news!

Harry Stephen Keeler only has six followers on Twitter...but one is Levi Stahl, one is William Poundstone, and one is Roger Ebert!

Levi e-mailed me with some important Keeler news: At Jacket Copy, Carolyn Kellogg has blogged about Ebert's love of Keeler! There's some eye-grabbing dustjacket art, too...though I must confess Five Silver Buddhas is one of my least favorite Keelers!

Did you hear about the Poundstone?

William Poundstone reads a menu.

Plus: his anagram reviews. Sample:

DID YOU HEAR ABOUT THE MORGANS? = DIM DUO GUARANTEE HARSH BOOTY

"Because see"

Bill Poundstone's latest Humumentization of Ann Coulter yields something Brainard-worthy! (And here's more on Brainard.)

(And...reminder—Ed—reading—tonight...)

The Eno–Humument connection

I had no idea that the cover image for Brian Eno's Another Green World was taken from a painting by A Humument creator Tom Phillips. Yet another reason to check Bill Poundstone's Ann Coulter: A Human Document!

AC:AHD also points out that Phillips's artwork is featured on The Who's Face Dances album—the WEB tells me that my memory is not quite correct in thinking that the band was touring behind this album when the infamous stampede in Cincinnati occurred (that was 1979, the album was 1981)...

Time to listen to Another Green World! And then "You Better You Bet"!

Emo rats Had Rain, Cans

On the Fourth of July, William Poundstone—a sort of Edgar Cayce for our time—had this dream:

Everyone was talking about the clever new website that takes Ann Coulter's words and subjects them to the Tom Phillips A Humument treatment — producing random phrases of great wit and poetry.

"In the morning," he writes, "I realized that this idea (though stupid) was easily realized."

Putting dream into action, he has started a new blog, "Ann Coulter: Human Document," where he submits the conservative pundit's column to a Phillipsian process to come up with brave new meanings. Here's a small sample:

Hatful of Hollow

Bill Poundstone dropped me a line this morning:

Speaking of "Land of the Lost" trend pieces… Last night I had a brilliant/stupid dream concerning a novel you were writing about cavemen(!) Then this morning, I looked on your blog, and you mention the glut of troglodyte movies. How's that for a Keeler coincidence?

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[Here's the dream. And make sure you check out Bill's Dream Blog!]

July 1, 2009

Ed was telling me about his new fantasy novel of the Hollow Earth, populated by a picaresque group of bikers, gangbangers, and (near the poles) cavemen. My suggestion was that the Hollow Earthers should send some of their scientists up here and conclude we're a bunch of lowlife degenerates. It should all be symmetrical.

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Tonight at 6:30, Korea Society: Me + Janice Y.K. Lee + Sung J. Woo = What is Korean American literature?

3 Feet Tall and Rising

In response to my most recent Westlake post, re Peter Rabe, Dzyd Bill writes:

I know Peter Rabe from a battered copy of "The Spy Who Was 3 Feet Tall." I never actually read it (and certainly didn't dream anyone would link its author to Nabokov and Hammett). The cover copy was well worth the price. The title character is a "pygmy" espionage agent nicknamed "Baby." I just love that premise, he's a spy and has to be inconspicuous.

I didn't know anything else about Rabe, but your mention prompted me to find these websites (www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/r/peter-rabe/ and http://www.mysteryfile.com/Rabe/Tuttle.html). Rabe was born Peter Rabinowitsch, escaped the Nazis, and wrote about 38 novels. After the death of the mass-market paperback, he quit writing and taught psychology at California Polytechnic.

One of Rabe's covers has a blurb from Mickey Spillaine: "This guy is good."

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Further notes:

1. Sharp-eyed Dzyds will recognize the Rabe title from...the Spinal Narratives/Title Bouts competition!

2. Dzyd Sarah W. also had this to say:

Rabe is a criminally underrated writer, one whose work I'm less familiar than I ought to be. He wrote primarily in the 40s and 50s and Hard Case Crime is reissuing one of his books, STOP THIS MAN! in August, I think. Stark House has also reissued a number of Rabe novels, too.

Jesse Helms

Jesse Helms has died..."Beacon of conservatism," per the Times—and Keeler fan?

I wrote letters to several members of Congress, trying to get support for a postage stamp commemorating the centennial of Keeler's birth (HSK 1890–1990). Not that it would ever happen, of course, but I thought it would be swell to read their responses. It was. Several wrote back—all favorably. One was Jesse Helms. (Piss Christ, no. Keeler commemorative, yes!) Another was Alan K. Simpson. The Simpson letter was particularly good because he said quite a bit about Keeler, calling him a "great American author."
—From William Poundstone's Harry Stephen Keeler Home Page

Table-talk of Parkus Grammaticus for May 1, 2008

Dizzyhead Bill fires the first shot in the Falindromes contest—make that the first three shots!

"I am a bad hobo" — Obama I

Wow, Live DJ! Yes, & Jersey Devil! Wow!

"U.S. food delish!" lied doofus.

(The Oulipo, by the way, had a term for writing that appears to have a constraint, but doesn't: a clinamen.)

II. Doesn't this word seems like it should be anagrammable into something else?

g’neeza, "a burial plot for damaged Torahs, prayer books or other papers containing God’s name"

(In James Barron's piece "From Auschwitz, a Torah as Strong as Its Spirit," NYT)

III. Would love to see "the Tennessee fainting goat, which keels over when startled..." —NYT

Clarkesworld

Clarkewatch! There's my LAT appreciation, and (taking a similar his-books-are-sciencey-but-religious approach) Edward Rothstein's in the NYT (with a nice mention of "Rescue Party," possibly the first Clarke story I read, in the anthology Great Tales of Action and Adventure!); LAT's Nick Owchar blogs about Clarke (focusing on "The Star") on Jacket Copy, as does David Ulin, who looks at Clarke's EGOgrams (kind of like his Walter Keyhole....or New-York Ghost?!)

Also in the NYT today: A great review of Dizzyhead Bill's Gaming the Vote, which I/you/we need to read ASAP!

William Poundstone’s “Gaming the Vote” arrives amid unusually high reader interest in equitable voting. And Mr. Poundstone is a clear, entertaining explicator of election science. He easily bridges the gaps between theoretical and popular thinking, between passionate political debate and cool mathematical certainty. These dichotomies can be drastic. If politics is a realm in which emotions run high, he notes, mathematics is “one of the few fields where it doesn’t matter what other people think.”

Table-talk of Parkus Grammaticus for February 25

I. ARG: With the passing of Robbe-Grillet, it's time to re-read Dizzyhead Bill's review of AR-G's Repetition, from the PTSNBN:

Repetition is the high concept that made Robbe-Grillet's reputation. In his first novel, The Erasers (1953), he devoted many paragraphs to a pointlessly repetitious description of the configuration of seeds in a slice of tomato. The equally redundant description of the rows of banana trees in 1957's Jealousy was such an outrage to conservative critics that it was read for laughs on French radio. These notorious passages have given Robbe-Grillet a reputation as a difficult author; in America, he is more known of than read. The actual effect of the repetitious passages is playfully hypnotic, roughly the way that Morton Feldman's music is. Long before the Internet, Robbe-Grillet recognized that we all live in a world of senseless and irrelevant information, one lacking grand narratives.

II. And speaking of bananas...

III. Realized this weekend that the books in my reading queue form a spinal narrative!
The Explosionist (J. Davidson)
The Flash Press (eds. Cohen, Gilfoyle, Horowitz)
Human Smoke (N. Baker)

Once you think about 26...

...you'll start seeing it everywhere. (You can thank me later.)

Levi found this in Donald E. Westlake's The Hot Rock:

"The number 26 lit over the door, and the elevator came to a stop."

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And Dizzyhead Bill writes in:

Your request for 26 significa led me to the WikiPedia page for 26. The two highlights, for me:

Scoring 26, by hitting 20, 50, and 1, is a "joke throw" in darts that "usually results in sneers or laughter from the audience."

A Rubik's Cube can always be solved in 26 moves or less.

How numinous is that?

Now he's openin' the cabinet...

The latest Keeler News has another great Poundstone piece, in which he looks at the similarities between R. Kelly's Trapped in the Closet and HSK's webwork novels. A must-read, with a meditation on so-called "bad art" that I subscribe to (in a nutshell, it's easier for the hoi polloi to think about something like Trapped or The Man With the Magic Eardrums—not that the h.p. ever thinks about TMWTME!—as comically inept failures, rather than deliberately wild works of art in which the creators strived for—and attained!—very specific, peculiar effects).

A fun little chart also points out that Keeler died on January 22, 1967 in Chicago...the same month and city in which R. Kelly was born!

Right here, right now

Dizzyhead Bill writes:

As a precocious reader, I long failed to connect the printed word "nowhere" to the spoken word. I read the printed word as "now-here" and understood it to mean "the here and now." I'd read that someone came out of "now-here," or vanished into "now-here," and took that to be a poetic trope in which now-here can mean an omnipresent limbo.

Readers of this blog will now have added insight into Bill's Keeler parody, "The Box From Nowhere!" in the current issue (No. 65) of the Keeler News! Sample line: "Did you know that, under medieval French law, a reptile is considered to be a 'person'?..."

It's a wonderful list

Poundstone delivers!

J'aime:
Morels, pear butter, hush puppies (fried batter!), coconut ice cream, crème brulée, cold sesame noodles, Noah's Bagels (faux-New York bagel chain found only outside of NY), the smell of gasoline, the smell of calamine lotion, the odd euphoria you sometimes feel when entering a tunnel, early risque comedy albums (Rusty Warren, Blowfly, etc.), New York tabloid headlines, Bizarro (newspaper cartoon), Mark Twain, Cyprian Ekwensi, Robert Benchley, Ludacris, Jane Austen, Chick Austin, Richard Dadd, the Museum of Jurassic Technology, Disney Concert Hall, Euler's equation, Gödel's proof, Moebius strips, iPhone, contrails, cumulonimbus clouds, drug stores (to browse, not to buy anything), foreign candy bars (just to look at the packaging), junk mail, case histories of "abnormal psychology," Edgar Allan Poe on gardening and interior design, chihuahuas, CuteOverload.com.

Je n'aime pas:
Chocolate-chocolate chip, buffalo wings, the portrait drawings-from-photographs the Wall Street Journal runs, the abbreviation "IMHO," Don Quixote, The Tale of Genji, Charles Dickens, impressionism, Leger, Damien Hirst, country music, torture porn, Microsoft Windows, William Faulkner, Ernie Kovacs, It's a Wonderful Life

In the company of j'aime

Dizzyhead Bill writes:

Shirley Jackson (who'd be in my J'aime list) did a like/don't like passage in her unfinished novel "Come Along With Me":

"...I like everything about big department stores except shopping in them. I do not like salesgirls and their manners, and having to buy my dresses in a special behemoths department, and I do not like the stupid mockery of people who enjoy keeping you waiting; I do not like credit offices, but I enjoy quarreling over a bill."

* * *

Shirley J. brings to mind Shelley Jackson, who'll be reading with Samantha Hunt, Kelly Link, and Lucy Corin this Friday—what a lineup! It's for Tin House's Fantastic Women issue.

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False Etymology of the Day: the word gem comes from a corruption of j'aime.

The Bottomless Pit

Great web project by Bill Poundstone. Go ahead...click Start.

Dizzies Newsfeeds™ for Monday, July 23

I keep saying "woah" while reading this piece on Sontag by Eliot Weinberger.

It is a Hollywood cliché that a beautiful actress needs an element of ugliness to become a great star, and one might say that a genius needs an element of stupidity, or something wrong, to become a great imaginative writer. Sartre certainly had his. But Sontag seems to have had nothing stupid about her at all. Arguably the most important American literary figure or force of the last forty years, she may ultimately belong more to literary history than to literature.

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Our "Title Bouts" are over, but that doesn't mean we can't enjoy a recent submission from the great Poundstone. Dig in!

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"It’s sort of like a surrealist game." —Alison Bechdel on web research (what a beautiful way of thinking about it! I am always playing surrealist games these days!)

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Love this poem: My old teacher Bruce Smith's "Devotion: Baseball" is featured in the summer issue of Poetry.