Pryor arrests

This is not an Ouroboros, but should be:

PRYOR, Okla. – A dog waiting in a car while at a car wash slipped the vehicle into gear and drove in a loop before the car came to a stop. Pryor police officer Brent Crittenden said the dog's owner was washing the vehicle when the 70-pound pit bull jumped on the dash and somehow shifted the car into reverse.

(Via Jane)

Late-Night List

Vertigo, the laudable W.G. Sebald blog, is putting together a list of novels with photographer characters...My contribution: Saul Henchman from Powell's The Fisher King.

Here are the first few:

Adolfo Bioy Casares, La Aventura de un Fotografo en la Plata. Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores, 1985 (translated as The Adventures of a Photographer in La Plata in 1989)

Italo Calvino, Gli Amori Difficili. Milan: Mondadori, 1993 (contains the story translated as The Adventure of a Photographer in Difficult Loves in 1983) [the story can be read online here]

Julio Cortázar, Las babas del diablo, in Las Aramas Secretas. 1959 (translated in 1967 as Blowup, in Blowup and Other Stories) [the source for Antonioni's film Blowup]

Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves. NY: Pantheon, 2000

Delia Falconer, The Service of Clouds. Sydney: Picador, 1997

* * *

This is sort of an Ouroboros? Me noticing author/Columbia statistics prof Andrew Gelman's guess that I was a Democrat, including it in my previous post (which was actually written last night, auto-posted this a.m.), and then him mentioning that post in his subsequent post?

The The

“He turned up to the letter ‘H’ and climbed above it,” Mr. Pabon said, referring to the letter H in the “The” of the New York Times logo, which is painted in giant black letters on the ceramic rods on the Eighth Avenue side of the building. —NYT

* * *

1. There are eight thes in the above sentence.

2. Is Times coverage of someone climbing the Times building something of an...Ouroboros?

I am not that interested...

...in the closing of Florent—except as it pertains to Ourobori!:

For many, the cruel irony of Florent’s closing comes from the sense that Morellet is being devoured by his own creation: forced out of a neighborhood that is now a historic landmark thanks to his tireless lobbying, a neighborhood in which he is known as the Unofficial Mayor of the Meatpacking District (or, as he prefers, its Unofficial Queen). —New York

This is not a true Ouroboros, maybe qualifies as a pretzel or something...

Table-talk of Parkus Grammaticus for April 25, 2008

1. Levi runs with the tag!

2. Becky plays Carcassone! (Carcass 1? Carcass own?) Remind me to tell you about playing Settler of Catan, translating slowly from the German!

3. Madonna's "Four Minutes"! I feel like this is an Ouroboros....I'm calling everything an Ouroboros these days...OK...maybe it's just a pretzel thingy...a song that it about its own duration!


Also those vivisectional views are very unsettling, like the cover of this Ballard Re/Search thingy!









4. Molls: "Whew! Are you poped out?"

5. Is that Jude Law in the window of the Beatles' limo?...Various new Personal Days notices...I thought this headline [Jennifer Lopez to star in a TLC reality series (AP)] meant that J.Lo was starring in a series based on TLC the group...

All My Ourobori

Ouroboros? Or maybe just a pretzel:

Barely two months after [All My Children's] Kendall, who is played by the actress Alicia Minshew, set down those first few deathless words, “It was one of those brutally hot, muggy days in August,” her first novel “Charm” was released in the fictional small town of Pine Valley, Pa., as part of the soap’s story line. Concurrently, “Charm” — an actual hardback with a list price of $21.95 — became available in real-life bookstores around the country.

“Charm” was published by Hyperion, which like its sister company that owns “All My Children,” Disney-ABC Television Group, is a Disney property. It has sold more than 100,000 copies and made its debut in February at No. 13 on the New York Times best-seller list. (It has Kendall’s name on the cover but the name of the actual writer is being kept secret.)

Making things even more convoluted, the Hyperion executive editor, Gretchen Young, and the publicity director, Beth Gebhard, had walk-on parts in the publishing party scene on the show, and a fragrance called Charm, which is a product of the cosmetics company in the novel as well as a plot point on the soap, will be on sale in Sears stores nationwide beginning April 14.

—Joanne Kaufman, "The Book Is Real Enough. It's the Author That's Fake," NYT

Thursday Ourobori

I.
Dzyd Luc writes: "I'm reading Bolaño's The Savage Detectives and there's a moment (p. 77) when the narrator is being shown the layout of an avant-garde poetry magazine":

"Look, this is the magazine's logo."
A snake (which might have been smiling but more likely was writhing
in a spasm of pain) was biting its tail with a hungry, agonized
expression, its eyes fixed like daggers on the hypothetical reader.
"But nobody knows what the magazine will be called yet."
"It doesn't matter. The snake is Mexican and it also symbolizes
circularity. Have you read Nietzsche, Garcia Madero?" he said
suddenly.

II.
This might be more of a Möbius strip or just a pretzel or something: The current Hemispheres magazine—wait, you don't know that obscure lit-mag Hemispheres???? the one they give you on United Airlines????—features approximately 900 articles on James Bond and Bondiana and how we are all children of Bond and living in the Bond Age (bondage???) and so forth. There's a long, trivia-filled article about Ian Fleming (whose centenary this is)...then later, we get an interview with Sean Connery, in which we read the following exchange:

Q: I understand much of [Dr. No director Terence] Young’s personal style is reflected in Bond, even down to the clothes he recommended that you wear—that he even had you visit his personal tailor?

A: That’s right. Personally, I’m not that concerned about clothes either way. I just like comfort. But that was an element. It’s funny—and John Cork talks about this in his piece in this issue of Hemispheres (which is a very fine article, by the way)—how, though times have changed over 40-some years, Bond’s style has had such an influence. It’s faded and then come back. The clothes he wore: the blazer, the tie, the shorts, the gray pants, soft, muted colors, English tailoring. People still put on a blazer and a tie when they go to a club. It’s got that kind of stamp. And Terence, although he was born in Shanghai, was very, very English. In actual fact, his family was Irish, but he was like the consummate Englishman. We used to have real jousts about English/Scottish situations!

So—what happened? Did Connery read Cork's piece before it went to print? Maybe he surreptitiously guest-edited the issue and hence knew what was going to be in it??? (Ghost-edited?) Or did the Hemispheres editor just add that line? "In this issue of Hemispheres" is worthy of Escher! It is also a sentence I can't imagine anyone would say in normal conversation! (The Dizzies, as you know, is a fan of American Way editor Sherry Gulcyzinski Burns's spazzy introductions.)