The Decemberists – Calamity Song
The unembeddable music video (/grumble) recreates a section of DFW’s Infinite Jest. The NYT describes the scene:
Adolescents from a New England tennis academy are seen ritualistically serving balls on a court onto which a map of the world has been superimposed. The balls, which represent five-megaton nuclear warheads, are aimed at objects labeled as military targets — power plants, missile installations — while a lone child oversees the game from a nearby computer terminal.
All in all, it ain’t exactly Battleship. Wallace himself wrote that the athletic skills required by Eschaton separated it “from rotisserie-league holocaust games played with protractors and PCs around kitchen tables.”
That Inspired Extra Seventh
Scholars at the Hebrew University have spent the last 53 years studying variations on the ancient text in order to publish an authoritative version of the Hebrew Bible. Along the way, they made some interesting discoveries about the evolution of the holy book:
The Book of Jeremiah is now one-seventh longer than the one that appears in some of the 2,000-year-old manuscripts known as the Dead Sea Scrolls. Some verses, including ones containing a prophecy about the seizure and return of Temple implements by Babylonian soldiers, appear to have been added after the events happened.
Interesting to see that the predictions of biblical scholars are now being verified – though, I imagine for many, these sorts of things won’t matter. Fun fact: the last member of the original team of scholars, who started with the project in 1958, died last year at age 90.
Sleepingfish X
I’ve started Sleepingfish back up (online) & posted some work by Vincent Standley (an excerpt from his forthcoming novel, A Mortal Affect, which is coming soon from Calamari Press) & a collage of sorts called Heartscald by Gary Lutz (whose new book, Divorcer, is also forthcoming from Calamari). Stay tuned.
My Favorite Katherine Anne Porter Story
when your love for goats goes too far…
more from Naples reading Raymond Queneau…
A fine book by Robert Coles
I just finished The Call of Stories:Teaching and the Moral Imagination, and I recommend it.
I love this passage:
At one point he (William Carlos Williams) reminded us that an important part of our lives would be spent “listening to people tell you their stories”; and in return, “they will want to hear your story of what their story means.”
tweet of the day
human pedigree
Ta-Nehisi Coates has been reading through The Federalist Papers, which, as way leads to way, led him to this thought:
When you are a young intellectual black kid, you often find yourself in this desperate search for some sort of anti-Western tradition. That Saul Bellow quote–”Who is the Tolstoy of the Zululs”–really captures a lot of the dilemma for those of us looking for a “native” tradition. That search ends all kinds of ways for different people. But for us, I think it ended in the rejection of the premise, in the great Ralph Wiley riposte that “Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus.”
That line was sorcery for me. It found me a black pathologist, and set me free by revealing that my own search for something “native” was an implicit acceptance of the very racism that I sought to counter. The way out was not to find my own, but to reject the notion of anyone’s “own.” If you reject the very premise of racism–the idea skin color directly contributes to genius or sloth–then all of humanity becomes “native” to you. And so empowered, I could–out of my own individual identity–create my own intellectual and artistic pedigree, and I was free to have it extend from Biggie to to Wharton to Melville to Hayden.
(Thanks, Noah.)
R.I.P. Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915-2011)
‘A dangerous mixture of sophistication and recklessness’: Patrick Leigh Fermor in Saint Malo, France, in 1992. Photograph: Ulf Andersen/Getty Images
Not unexpected. And he led a long and wonderful life. But I am tearing up. This is someone I never met who meant a lot to me in ways that are hard to explain just now. So here is the Guardian obituary. And I hope you will read at least one of his books.
Patrick Leigh Fermor, who has died aged 96, was an intrepid traveller, a heroic soldier and a writer with a unique prose style. His books, most of which were autobiographical, made surprisingly scant mention of his military exploits, drawing instead on remarkable geographical and scholarly explorations. To Paddy, as he was universally known, an acre of land in almost any corner of Europe was fertile ground for the study of language, history, song, dress, heraldry, military custom – anything to stimulate his momentous urge to speculate and extrapolate. If there is ever room for a patron saint of autodidacts, it has to be Paddy Leigh Fermor.
Donkeying to Nzambani rock
For Cindy.
More from the Kitui region of Kenya (reading Alain Robbe-Grillet & Alan Moorehead).
“Not recommended”
by the Bulletin of the Children’s Book Center, The University of Chicago Library (December 1954):
Dixon, Ruth. Scalawag the Monkey; photographs by Rie Gaddis. Rand McNally,1953. 30p. (A Book-Elf Book). 25¢. Scalawag, the monkey, runs away from his organ-grinder boss Murdstone Mastiff and has various adventures at a play school for puppies and kittens. The coy text is painfully contrived to go with the pictures which are color photographs of animals dressed like people, and looking hunted and uncomfortable. (Pre-school)
See also: “No animals were harmed . . . “
from the spam
Mate, you you are like Shakespear.
words I wish I wrote
James Richardson from Interglacial:
First I have to learn to love myself, always make me writhe. I’m the last person I want to hear I love you from, the last I want to say it to. The part of myself I like is the part that works, like a good tool. The part of myself I love is the part that loves you.
Laughing with Kafka
It’s not that students don’t “get” Kafka’s humor but that we’ve taught them to see humor as something you get — the same way we’ve taught them that a self is something you just have. No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke — that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.
From a speech given by David Foster Wallace in 1998 at a symposium to celebrate the publication of a translation of The Castle by Schocken Books.
this picture of Faulkner always cracks me up
Sit down. Shut up. (I’ve done this before — and some audiences actually laughed.)
Brian Beatty in Minnesota Playlist on how and why he does what he does:
Poetry entered my stand-up sets because I wanted to up the “snob” factor of my stage persona, to increase the comedic tension.
The Milan Review
The Milan Review looks to be a promising new literary journal/press started by Tim Small, the editor of Italian Vice. Their inaugural issue/project [The Milan Review of Ghosts] features stories by Dave Cull, Jonathan Dixon, Glen Hirschberg, Noy Holland, Jonathon Keats, Tao Lin, Clancy Martin, E.C. Osondu, Dawn Raffel, Nelly Reifler, Rebecca Rosenblum, Deb Olin Unferth, Corinna Vallianatos and Brent Van Horne and illustrations by Matt Furie and Maison Du Crac. You can preview it here.
wanted misc garbage (my treasure items)
kids
wagon tonka
toys funnels clay
pots
concrete statues chandelier (or
chandelier parts) clear
glass plates metal pipes
mailboxes
twigs large plastic spice
containers
lattice tea
cups with saucers bottles
different shapes and sizes extra
large metal cans license
plates
coffee
containers
scrap wood door knobs/handles (any kind)
old pool liners (can not have holes in the bottom)
like the kind with the blow up ring at the top
the ring can have holes
just not the bottom
bird
baths wind
chimes metal trash
can
lids marbles
shed storm
doors sliding
glass
doors will pick up in a central location (like at walmart or krogers)
unless you have a lot of item
you cannot experience it all
Seriously, you can’t, it’s impossible, so just stop trying, and surrender to the goodness you do see:
Consider books alone. Let’s say you read two a week, and sometimes you take on a long one that takes you a whole week. That’s quite a brisk pace for the average person. That lets you finish, let’s say, 100 books a year. If we assume you start now, and you’re 15, and you are willing to continue at this pace until you’re 80. That’s 6,500 books, which really sounds like a lot.
Let’s do you another favor: Let’s further assume you limit yourself to books from the last, say, 250 years. Nothing before 1761. This cuts out giant, enormous swaths of literature, of course, but we’ll assume you’re willing to write off thousands of years of writing in an effort to be reasonably well-read.
Of course, by the time you’re 80, there will be 65 more years of new books, so by then, you’re dealing with 315 years of books, which allows you to read about 20 books from each year. You’ll have to break down your 20 books each year between fiction and nonfiction – you have to cover history, philosophy, essays, diaries, science, religion, science fiction, westerns, political theory … I hope you weren’t planning to go out very much.
quote out of context
ANYWAYS: An Antarctic Mystery, as far as I can tell, is based on the idea that The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym is, in fact, completely true, and these later adventurers are going to follow up on his report. I am certain that I am failing to communicate how completely awesome this is, that Jules Verne is in some meta, wonderful way based an entire novel on the premise that the framing of yet another foundational adventure novel is in fact not a framing but a true thing. And he spends SIXTY PAGES setting this up.
Atlas Shrugged
Love this:
As you may have surmised from the occasionally snarky tone of what I have written thus far, I am not exactly a fan of Ayn Rand, though my objection to her is based less on her philosophy and more on the fact that her books are virtually unreadable garbage that feature narratives that play like bizarre fusions of a year’s subscription to “The American Spectator” and dime-store romance novels that are written with the kind of prose stylings rarely seen outside of meatpacking guides, hideously unlikable and unsympathetic characters and philosophical arguments so simplistic and silly that the B team of a typical high school debate club could easily poke enormous holes in it in only a few minutes.
Shelf Space
Do you remember when we first met?
When you were lost in a city strange to you, where I helped you get your bearings, set a course by dead reckoning, that first week, when we flouted all norms, flouted the three day rule, is this now lost to you?
Remember exploring each other’s self: the time you whispered to me, when we were coming in from the rain, your hair all wet and mussed from running from the airport shuttle which delivered you to that little bistro down the block–where I had waited an hour for you that one time when you said Logan was grounded–that no word, in all its varied meanings, was more evocative than “crush”.
NOON 2011
Besides having a rather handsome hyena on the cover, the new NOON features fellow flocker Brandon Hobson (where is he these days anyway?) as well as Gary Lutz, Kim Chinquee, Christine Schutt & other usual suspects, as well as some new faces including my fellow Roman friend Chiara Barzini.
Chiara will be reading at the launch party with Brandon, and Diane Williams on May 5 in NYC.
I’d also like to take the opportunity to announce that Calamari Press will be publishing new books later this year by both Chiara Barzini and Gary Lutz, that will include these stories in NOON.
from the comments
My sister’s gonna take me to get a toilet seat mine is broke it was sliding I almost fell off of it WHOA.
the iSwindle™
Matilda re-imagined for the digital age. You’ll want to read the whole thing.
(via)
