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 appearedonline.
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.
A group show named “Resurrectine” at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts: somehow Raymond Roussel is more appreciated by the world of visual arts than the literary realm.
The first issue of Wild Orchids features “new and affectionate writing on Herman Melville”.
Tan Lin has an event at the Kelly Writers House for his exciting new Seven Controlled Vocabularies; I won’t be able to make it, but I’ve written a couple of pieces for his editing pleasure. See also: Thom Donovan’s piece in Harriet; an interview with Tan Lin in Bomb; his online appendix to the book; and the Amazon page for the book, with blurbs in the reader review section.
Everyone should go see Ben Vershbow’s production of Bartleby at Triple Canopy; on Sunday, it follows a reading by Joshua Cohen and Joseph McElroy, also very much recommended; I wish I were going to be in town.
A long interview with Guy Maddin about his films and books; Michael Silverblatt comes up.
Fake Fountains in the Economist: somewhere Duchamp is laughing.
Two parts of a Michael Silverblatt interview with Joseph McElroy (from the time of Actress in the House) are online at KCRW: part 1, part 2. See also his interviews of Stanley Crawford, William Gass (1995, 2004), Harry Mathews (on the Oulipo Compendium) – it’s hard to think of a better reader of American fiction working today.
David Bellos pops up in The New York Times to talk about the perils of machine translation.
Wakefield Press looks to be putting out some interesting-looking books. By way of A Journey Round My Skull, where there’s also a newly translated passage discarded from Raymond Roussel’s Locus Solus.
Ben Vershbow’s annotated Candide at the NYPL deserves more attention than it’s received.
And I have a talk at the Center for Book Arts tomorrow night.
From the archives of the New York Times: a letter from Pamela Moore, author of Chocolates for Breakfast, defending Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke. (See also Robert Nedelkoff’s Facebook group.)
Marjorie Perloff’s consideration of Guy Davenport in Sibila is interesting in her focus on how his book reviews functioned.
More Guy Davenport: an essay by Jeet Heer at Sans Everything considers Davenport as a cartoonist. Missed this before.
And the Abbeville Press edition of the Codex Seraphinianus seems to be online in its entirety. One assumes this won’t last very long, as Rizzoli has it back in print; buy your own copy here (which comes with a “Recodex” booklet compiling criticism of the work, including the Italo Calvino introduction). One notes as well that Serafini seems to have written an introduction to an Italian edition of Jules Renard’s Natural Histories published last year.