Written on a scrap of Post-It attached to the front page of a copy of THE BOOK OF DISQUIET

THE LONG

SIREN

LIKE A

PINK

DOME

SLOWLY

COVERING

THE

WORLD

Notes from a screening of Grant Gee's PATIENCE (AFTER SEBALD)

If you allow yrself
to be a writer — aub___che [avalanche?]
whereas if you're a walker—you might be OK.

Pulsing laptop dot—

USE
GOOGLE
MAPS
______

Once you have time[?]—it
becomes easy
to write

(This is a doddle
(takes care of itself)

He's ripe for a cult

They don't want
the freedom
to assemble the
book by themselves
—RM [Rick Moody]


May 18 '44
Dec 14 01

mash
up

The dream life of debris

TACITA
DEAN

An objective
chance method

narrator [emphasis on second syllable]
a game of patience

Skype/speed[irp?][totally illegible]

REMIT

The reenchantment

I want to be in all the boxes. I'm not using a familiar formula. [Sebald quoted as wanting to be shelved in various sections of the bookstore.]

< Barber Hui > [??]

Sopmerleyton

yew

map [?? illegible]

Eine englische walfahrt

re-photocopying

delight

Katie Mitchell

STALKER

_______

Notes from a talk given by Nicholson Baker, February 2011

I wrote these notes earlier this year, when Nicholson Baker came to speak at Columbia—a great talk by an early member of the EP pantheon. (My former student Andrew Eisenman gave the wonderful introduction.) The words are in black ink on both sides of a yellow bank receipt. The handwriting is messy, at times nearly indecipherable; the chronology is unknown, as entries are written horizontally, vertically, every which way. There are some arrows, brackets, and lines of demarcation. (Mostly I am posting this so I can throw away this piece of paper, which has been taunting me for most of this year, daring me to transcribe.)

Dizzies challenge: What book (or what anything) does "DWYDWTD" refer to?

*

[Reverse side of receipt]

GGM [ = Gabriel García Márquez]

DWYDWTD [ = ?]

bassoon}

early NB compos[itions]}

I love chronology

Heap of self

_____

I forget whole books

[Reminds me of passage in U&I about how little we retain from even the books we like.]

carpet remnants

pillowsize

_____

keep it short)

Copy out good stuff)

Geo. Saintsbury

This American

stiffness,

kind of

Lego [?]

mov[eme]nt

What it's like

to be sitting

in a room

thinking

Churchill [?] magpie/maniac

____

speak-typing

____

DB [= Donald Barthelme] — @50,

starting to count

_____

You gotta face down yr demons! —————> 400 pp. ———> down [???]

—beard [?]

———> There's something fake about a long book.

sign language [There was a woman to his left, relaying the talk in sign language.]

Simp[le?]/complet[ist?] [?]

[Or more likely: "Simple/complexity"]

_____

I thought it was my friend, then remembered my friend was dead. [I have a feeling this could be a note to myself about some story I was working on, or else a line wanted to use in a story.]

Korean actress story [This was definitely a note to myself, to get back to a story I had started/was working on.]

*

[Front side of receipt]

bassoon: some ridiculous novelty item

Strav[insky], Bartok, Brahms

______

Rubbing brow—

Schumann var. #9

"I wanted it not to be modern."

("Jeez, Eddie Money's not bad.")

_____

Beat your brains (ASL mimic head morts[?]) ["American Sign Language signer mimics head mortifications"?]

Dick Francis is a great comfort to me. First person. Horses. Every single book.

_____

[The] M[e]z[zanine]: The book was aiming at the list

Panasonic 3 wheel vacuum cleaner, greatness of

What a brutal thing to say—& I was probably wrong [? about what?]

If I can surround

it w/words to make it OK. (vid) [??]

____

Every day that I)

write is a new file)

[NB starts a new computer file for each day—title is the date]

____

Boringness is really

an interesting thing

____

[On the editing process:]

The places where I fell

asleep I took out

______

The most modern I

ever got, I think,

was Geo. Eliot

_____

Maeve Brennan [what he was reading lately]

Notes to a note on the notes

My story about the notes of cartoonist Chester Brown, which went up at the Toronto Standard website recently (under the title "Text Appeal"), now has its own notes!

It's Chester Brown week at the Comics Journal's wonderfully overstuffed website, where you can read my "Notes to a Note on the Notes of Chester Brown."

(Thanks to TCJ's Tim Hodler for the initial prompt and the subsequent publishing.)

_____________
A side note: The first note happens to quote from Geoff Dyer, who apparently quoted/cited one of my favorite novels, Renata Adler's Speedboat, at a McNally Jackson event the other night. File under: Note to Some Notes to a Note on the Notes of Chester Brown.

A Brown study

Last year I mentioned the voluminous notes that cartoonist Chester Brown has made on his various comics. Today, the new site Toronto Standard has a piece up by me on this topic, entitled "Text Appeal." It begins:

If years ago, when I was in college, someone had dubbed me a tape of The Best of Leonard Cohen, I’m not sure what I would have made of the music. There’s a chance I would have become a fan. But I happened to buy an old copy of the LP, the back cover of which is given over to Cohen’s notes on the songs. None exceeds seven lines in length; the shortest is 12 words long. They masquerade as compositional backstory, but really comprise a sly autobiography in prose poems, perfect compressions of wanderlust and good old-fashioned lust. A persona is being erected even before the record is out of the sleeve. (Indeed, it includes a comment on the jacket portrait: “I rarely ever look this good, or bad, depending on your politics.”) Cohen’s notes didn’t deepen my experience of the music, but rather replaced it. The songs took a back seat to the life lived, a life recorded telegraphically but indelibly on that tan back cover. The pleasure, the point, of The Best of Leonard Cohen was not where I thought it was.

(Thanks to Jason McBride, and to Tim Hodler at The Comics Journal, and to Hillary Chute!)