- Joseph McElroy & Frederic Tuten will read at 8 pm on December 9 at Happy Ending (302 Broome St.) as part of the Animal Farm reading series. I hope the MCing will not be as cringe-inducingly awful as the last Animal Farm event I ended up at.
- Competing reading: at the Swiss Institute (495 Broadway) at 6 pm the same night, Ugly Duckling Presse is putting on an event for their edition of Robert Walser’s Answer to an Inquiry.
- And there’s a tribute to Jane Bowles at KGB at 7 on December 5 with a lot of interesting people.
Category Archives: noted
noted
- Ed Park on minor literature with reference to Garret Caples’s Quintessence of the Minor: Symbolist Poetry in English and John Ashbery’s taste.
- Not disconnected: two new translations of Raymond Roussel are arriving in English next year: Mark Mark Polizzotti’s Impressions of Africa from Dalkey Archive (no publicity page yet) and Mark Ford’s New Impressions of Africa from Princeton.
- Wu Ming pops up in the London Review of Books‘s blog, curious.
noted
- James Elkins on looking at Mondrian.
- A new website on Pamela Moore’s Chocolates for Breakfast; includes the fantastic Robert Nedelkoff article from The Baffler years ago. Somebody reprint this and The Horsy Set?
- An annotated gallery of Alasdair Gray’s art at The Guardian.
- Hannah Tennant-Moore on Frederic Tuten’s Self Portraits, which I still need to read, at The New Republic.
- And Harry Mathews has a new book of poems out.
noted
- Joanna Scott on David Markson’s late books at The Nation.
- An attempt to point out who owns who in the American publishing landscape.
- A fine post by Waggish on difficulty in reading and music, with some reference to Steven Moore but mostly to Milton Babbitt.
- A useful breakdown of the works of John Cowper Powys; and John Yau on Christopher Middleton.
- There’s probably something to be said for this Chris Fujiwara essay on cinema and the problem of the contemporary; this seems like an argument that could be expanded beyond that medium.
- And Triple Canopy is putting on Forms of Crisis with Joseph McElroy and Harry Mathews on Thursday October 21; unfortunately, I’ll be in L.A.
noted
- The Paris Review has evidently posted all of their interviews online in usable format: see, for example, Donald Barthelme, William Gaddis, Stanley Elkin, William Gass, Harry Mathews, Edmund White and Guy Davenport. Some surprises: Nathalie Sarraute in 1990, Julio Cortázar (1984), and the weird Henry Green interview with Terry Southern. Plenty of other interesting ones there, especially further back.
- Elif Batuman has a nice piece in the NYTimes magazine on Max Brod and the Kafka estate.
- I’m doing a future-of-the-book talk with Peter Stallybrass and Jim Hicks (editor of the Massachusetts Review) next Wednesday, the 29th of September at U-Mass Amherst. Info here; thanks to Luke Phelan for setting this up.
both are torsoes
“But as the most mutilated torsoes of the perfections of antiquity are not unworthy the student’s attention, neither are the most bungling modern incompletenessess: for both are torsoes; one of perished perfections in the past; the other, by anticipation, of yet unfulfilled perfections in the future.”
(Melville, Pierre, or the Ambiguities, Book XXVI, “A Walk and a Foreign Portrait,” p. 350.)
noted
- A very nice piece in the LRB by Elif Batuman on MFA writing.
- A relatively recent documentary on Ivor Cutler at Ubuweb.
- Geoff Dyer on aura and D. H. Lawrence.
- A discussion of the new audiobook version of J R at The Neglected Books Page.
- And I randomly turn up in an article in the University of Illinois paper. Who knows.
noted, self-promotion edition
- A piece by Linton Weeks at NPR’s website contains part of an interview with me.
- I have a piece in the latest issue of Logos, a Dutch book journal. They appear to be charging $35.00 (plus tax!) to read the article. Hint: this article isn’t worth paying anything for!
- Also I have an essay in The Most Beautiful Swiss Books 2009. I don’t think this is online anywhere, but I might be wrong.
- Less self-promotion: somebody seems to have scanned Barbara O’Brien’s Operators and Things, one of those books that’s probably worth re-reading.
noted, more
- Nicolas Carone has died.
- I wrote a piece about sitting with Marina Abramović for a Tumblr project someone’s putting together.
- The Book Depository’s live map is entrancing, though everyone else has noted that by now.
noted
- My interview with Bob Stein is up at Triple Canopy as part of Issue 9.
- A thread at MetaFilter about Jack Green’s Fire the Bastards!. Tangentially related: David Markson’s library appears at The Strand; some of his Gaddis annotations have appeared online.
- Gary Shteyngart & Joshua Cohen on the Tablet podcast.
- More of Robert Walser’s poetry is coming out in English.
- Joseph McElroy’s Preparations for Search is available from Small Anchor Press; the text was originally published in Formations in Spring 1984 as part of Women and Men, but cut before that book’s publication; Small Anchor’s edition has been “slightly revised”.
- Trevor Winkfield, Miles Champion & Steve Clay present “Poems and Pictures: A Renaissance in the Art of the Book (1946–1981) tonight at 6:30 p.m. at the Center for Book Arts.
- Tomorrow: a release party for Tan Lin’s Seven Controlled Vocabularies at Printed Matter from 5–7.
- Also tomorrow night: Ferry Radax’s documentary Thomas Bernhard – Drei Tage shows at Anthology Film Archives at 7:15 p.m. Also shows on Friday at 9 p.m.