December 2010 – Biblioklept

“A Song for New Year’s Eve” — William Cullen Bryant

December 31, 2010December 28, 2010 BibliokleptLeave a comment

“A Song for New Year’s Eve” by William Cullen Bryant–

Stay yet, my friends, a moment stay—
Stay till the good old year,
So long companion of our way,
Shakes hands, and leaves us here.
Oh stay, oh stay,
One little hour, and then away.

The year, whose hopes were high and strong,
Has now no hopes to wake;
Yet one hour more of jest and song
For his familiar sake.
Oh stay, oh stay,
One mirthful hour, and then away.

The kindly year, his liberal hands
Have lavished all his store.
And shall we turn from where he stands,
Because he gives no more?
Oh stay, oh stay,
One grateful hour, and then away.

Days brightly came and calmly went,
While yet he was our guest;
How cheerfully the week was spent!
How sweet the seventh day’s rest!
Oh stay, oh stay,
One golden hour, and then away.

Dear friends were with us, some who sleep
Beneath the coffin-lid:
What pleasant memories we keep
Of all they said and did!
Oh stay, oh stay,
One tender hour, and then away.

Even while we sing, he smiles his last,
And leaves our sphere behind.
The good old year is with the past;
Oh be the new as kind!
Oh stay, oh stay,
One parting strain, and then away

Ernest Hemingway Writes Archibald MacLeish About Ezra Pound’s Craziness

December 30, 2010December 29, 2010 BibliokleptLeave a comment

Ernest Hemingway writes Archibald MacLeish about Ezra Pound. Here’s the letter, via the excellent folks at Letters of Note, also responsible for the bit of transcription we’ve excised below–

Thanks for sending the stats of Ezra’s rantings. He is obviously crazy. I think you might prove he was crazy as far back as the latter Cantos. He deserves punishment and disgrace but what he really deserves most is ridicule. He should not be hanged and he should not be made a martyr of. He has a long history of generosity and unselfish aid to other artists and he is one of the greatest living poets. It is impossible to believe that anyone in his right mind could utter the vile, absolutely idiotic drivel he has broadcast. His friends who knew him and who watched the warpeing and twisting and decay of his mind and his judgement should defend him and explain him on that basis. It will be a completely unpopular but an absolutely necessary thing to do. I have had no correspondence with him for ten years and the last time I saw him was in 1933 when Joyce asked me to come to make it easier haveing Ezra at his house. Ezra was moderately whacky then. The broadcasts are absolutely balmy. I wish we could talk the whole damned thing over. But you can count on me for anything an honest man should do.

Gordon Lish on Beckett’s Boils and Other Matters of Literary Import

December 29, 2010 BibliokleptLeave a comment

Hey. Do yourself a favor and listen to Iambik’s first podcast, a raucous, rambling conversation with legendary editor/short story author Gordon Lish. I finally got around to listening to the discussion between Lish and his publisher John Oakes. (Why the delay? I’ve been listening to and very much enjoying another Iambik recording, an audiobook of Lydia Millet’s Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, and I needed to get to a decent stopping place before the Lish (review of the Millet forthcoming)) . I had already listened to Lish reading a selection of his own stories which was nine kinds of awesome (thanks again to the good folks at Iambik, whose hooking me up with the sweet mp3age has in no way affected my fondness for their operation (review of the Lish selections forthcoming)).

Hearing Lish in this conversational, easy manner is revelatory. Wise and funny, erudite and crafty, you’ll learn something and be entertained:

Iambikcast #1a (mp3)
Iambikcast #1b (mp3)

What does he talk about? I’ll crib from Iambikist Miette’s write-up, which hardly sums it up but does a nice job of surveying the discussion–

In the first part of the conversation, Lish covers Beckett’s boils and other afflictions of our literary heroes, remembrances of Neal Cassady, and the writer as witch doctor.

The second part focuses on Lish’s (as always, uncensored) assertions on the state of contemporary American letters, in which we’re imparted with opinions on Allen Ginsberg and Philip Roth, achieving religious experience through DeLillo, the finer points of book blurbing, and encouraging the further crimes of Tao Lin.

Jon Lovitz’s Writing Tips

December 29, 2010 Biblioklept1 Comment

Jon Lovitz does AV Club’s Random Rules today. Here, he gives some pretty good writing advice. Context: he’s describing coming back as the host of the show in 1997, and going to the writer’s meeting on Monday. The “They” is the SNL writers–

They’d say, “We have an idea for a sketch. You’re a teacher, and the student brings you an apple.” I go, “Right.” “And then another comes in and another brings you an apple, and then another brings you an apple.” I go, “Then what happens?” They go, “No, that’s the sketch. They’re just all bringing you apples.” I said, “That’s not a sketch. That’s just a premise.” They didn’t know what I was talking about. I said, “A sketch is supposed to have a beginning, middle, and end. It’s like a movie. It’s supposed to have a story. You have a who, what, where—the beginning, and the conflict, and it builds and builds. That’s how you do improv. You’re filling in all those spots to make the scene work. It builds to a climax. Then there’s a resolution, which is the ending. It takes hours to write the ending. It’s hard to come up with them.” They just looked at me blankly.

I think the writers thought I was a jerk, because I was like, “Then what happens?” to all of it. They’d go, “That’s it.” Maybe they didn’t like that. They wrote a first draft, and, “Who are you to touch our brilliant first draft?” Writing is rewriting.

“Declaration on the Notion of ‘The Future'” — The International Necronautical Society

December 29, 2010December 28, 2010 BibliokleptLeave a comment

At The Believer, you can read the entirety of “Declaration on the Notion of ‘The Future’” by The International Necronautical Society (aka Simon Critchley and Tom McCarthy (although we’re pretty sure that the essay’s authorization code TMcC010910 indicates that McCarthy is its author)). Playful and provocative stuff. A sample–

5. The INS rejects the Enlightenment’s version of time: of time as progress, a line growing stronger and clearer as it runs from past to future. This version is tied into a narrative of transcendence: in the Hegelian system, of Aufhebung, in which thought and matter ascend to the realm of spirit as the projects of philosophy and art perfect themselves. Against this totalizing (we would say, totalitarian) idealist vision, we pit counter-Hegelians like Georges Bataille, who inverts this upward movement, miring spirit in the trough of base materialism. Or Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, who, hearing the moronic poet Russel claim that “art has to reveal to us ideas, formless spiritual essences,” pictures Platonists crawling through Blake’s buttocks to eternity, and silently retorts: “Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.”

6. To phrase it in more directly political terms: the INS rejects the idea of the future, which is always the ultimate trump card of dominant socioeconomic narratives of progress. As our Chief Philosopher Simon Critchley has recently argued, the neoliberal versions of capitalism and democracy present themselves as an inevitability, a destiny to whom the future belongs. We resist this ideology of the future, in the name of the sheer radical potentiality of the past, and of the way the past can shape the creative impulses and imaginative landscape of the present. The future of thinking is its past, a thinking which turns its back on the future.

“The Old Year” — John Clare

December 28, 2010 Biblioklept1 Comment

John Clare’s poem “The Old Year”—

The Old Year’s gone away
To nothingness and night:
We cannot find him all the day
Nor hear him in the night:
He left no footstep, mark or place
In either shade or sun:
The last year he’d a neighbour’s face,
In this he’s known by none.

All nothing everywhere:
Mists we on mornings see
Have more of substance when they’re here
And more of form than he.
He was a friend by every fire,
In every cot and hall–
A guest to every heart’s desire,
And now he’s nought at all.

Old papers thrown away,
Old garments cast aside,
The talk of yesterday,
Are things identified;
But time once torn away
No voices can recall:
The eve of New Year’s Day
Left the Old Year lost to all.

“There Must Be Some Level of Indignation” — William Gaddis

December 28, 2010December 27, 2010 Biblioklept3 Comments

A Scene from Infinite Jest in the Xtranormal Style

December 27, 2010 Biblioklept3 Comments

Mario can’t sleep. Hal tells a joke. Not sure how I feel about this.

Kate Beaton Spoofs Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”

December 27, 2010 Biblioklept1 Comment

At Hark, A Vagrant!, Kate Beaton spoofs Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s seminal feminist/horror short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”–

“Getting Closer” — Steven Millhauser

December 27, 2010December 27, 2010 BibliokleptLeave a comment

The New Yorker publishes Steven Millhauser’s “Getting Closer.” First paragraph–

He’s nine going on ten, skinny-tall, shoulder blades pushing out like things inside a paper bag, new blue bathing suit too tight here, too loose there, but what’s all that got to do with anything? What’s important is that he’s here, standing by the picnic table, the sun shining on the river, the smell of pine needles and river water sharp in the air, somewhere a shout, laughter, music from a radio. His father’s cleaning ashes out of the grill, his mother and sister are laying down blankets on the sunny grass not far from the table, Grandma’s carrying one of the aluminum folding chairs toward the high pine near the edge of the drop to the river, and he’s doing what he likes to do best, what he’s really good at: standing around doing nothing. Everyone’s forgotten about him for a few seconds, the way it happens sometimes. You try not to remind anybody you’re there. He loves this place. On the table’s the fat thermos jug with the white spout near the bottom. After his swim he’ll push the button on the spout and fill up a paper cup with pink lemonade. It’s a good sound: fsshh, psshh. In the picnic basket he can see two packages of hot dogs, jars of relish and mustard, some bun ends showing, a box of Oreo cookies, a bag of marshmallows which are marshmellows so why the “a,” paper plates sticking up sideways, a brown folded-over paper bag of maybe cherries. All week long he’s looked forward to this day. Nothing’s better than setting off on an all-day outing, in summer, to the park by the river—the familiar houses and vacant lots no longer sitting there with nothing to do but drifting toward you through the car window, the heat of the sun-warmed seat burning you through your jeans, the bottoms of your feet already feeling the pebbly ground pushing up on them as you walk from the parking lot to the picnic grounds above the riverbank. But now he’s here, right here, his jeans tossed in the back seat of the car and his T-shirt stuffed into his mother’s straw bag, the sun on one edge of the table and the piney shade covering the rest of it, Grandma already setting up the chair. And so the day’s about to get going at last, the day he’s been looking forward to in the hot nights while watching bars of light slide across his wall from passing cars, he’s here, he’s arrived, he’s ready to begin.

A Kidnapping in Milan: The CIA on Trial — Steve Hendricks

December 27, 2010April 4, 2012 Edwin Turner1 Comment

Steven Hendricks’s A Kidnapping in Milan: The CIA on Trial details the story of radical imam Abu Omar. Omar, an Egyptian radical who sought political asylum in Italy, was the focus of an investigation by the Milan police force, who, via wiretaps and other forms of surveillance, were building a case against Omar for recruiting a network of Islamist terrorists. In early 2003, the Milanese case fell apart when Omar was disappeared in what turned out to be one of the most conclusively documented cases of the CIA’s “extraordinary renditions.” Omar was kidnapped, relocated to Germany, and then returned to Egypt, where he was tortured and held by Egypt’s SSI–under the watchful eyes of the CIA. Italian prosecutor Armando Spataro, erstwhile protagonist of Kidnapping, reconstructed the evidence of the CIA’s extraordinary (and extra-legal) rendition, leading to the prosecution of twenty-six CIA operatives for kidnapping; twenty-three were convicted.

Hendricks combines journalistic clarity with the structure of a detective novel in Kidnapping, giving his book the urgency of a modern thriller, all the more striking for its cold reality. The book is well-researched; Hendricks interviewed, among others, Spataro, Omar, and even some of the indicted CIA agents–but Kidnapping never reads as a dry recitation of facts or a ponderous series of analyses. Additionally, Hendricks fleshes out his story with a consideration of the CIA’s history in Italian politics, with an emphasis on why Milan is such a hotbed for clandestine activities. Guiding the narrative is a refined sense of moral outrage against the idea that dark deeds done in the dark make our world somehow safer. While there are some that will remain unmoved by his descriptions of Omar’s torture — the cleric is a “bad guy,” in the Bush admin’s parlance, after all — Hendricks builds a clear case that the “outsourcing of torture” is a vile practice, and one antithetical to the spirit of our Constitution. And, even if the Obama administration is unwilling to shed further light on such crimes, it is good to know that there are writers who will.

A Kidnapping in Milan is new in hardback from W.W. Norton.

12/84 Number of robots FAO Schwarz expects to sell this Christmas season: 10,000

12/84 Total number of recordings of “White Christmas” that have been sold: 150,431,669

12/84 Chance of a white Christmas in New York: 23%

In Minneapolis: 73%

12/85 Percentage of Jewish households in the United States that had Christmas trees in 1984: 12

12/85 Rank of “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer,” among all Christmas singles, in sales last year: 1

12/87 Price of a pound of reindeer meat at Lobel’s Prime Meats in New York City: $14.98

12/88 Estimated cost of a partridge in a pear tree, retail: $39.95

12/89 Percentage of Americans who say they didn’t get what they wanted for Christmas last year: 6

12/89 Percentage of Americans who say they ate plum pudding last Christmas: 1

12/89 Ratio of U. S. households that have real Christmas trees to those that have artificial Christmas trees: 1:1

12/90 Average number of Christmas cards received by an American household each December: 26

12/91 Estimated number of cookies that will be left out for Santa Claus this Christmas Eve: 84,000,000

12/92 Price paid at auction in October for a 1942 Christmas card signed by Adolf Hitler: $3,025

12/93 Maximum speed at which the seeds of the dwarf mistletoe are expelled when ripe, in miles per hour: 60

12/93 Price of a life-sized computer-controlled triceratops, from the Neiman Marcus Christmas catalogue: $93,000

12/93 Percentage of Americans who say they enjoy Christmas shopping “a great deal”: 28

12/93 Pages of forms an applicant must fill out to be considered for the position of elf at Macy’s: 10

12/95 Fee charged by a California design firm to place a string of lights on an outdoor Christmas tree, lights not included: $75

12/96 Estimated number of Americans hospitalized last year for injuries involving the ingestion of Christmas ornaments: 687

12/97 Chance that an American adult can name all of Santa’s reindeer: 1 in 4

12/98 Year in which Christmas celebrations, plum pudding, and mince pie were outlawed in England: 1647

12/00 Minutes required to take in “the true story of Christmas ” at Little Rock’s Living Nativity drive-through: 2

12/01 Number of Montreal stores vandalized last year for mounting Christmas displays in November: 14

12/02 Chances of getting a hotel room in Bethlehem on Christmas in 2000 and 2001, respectively: 0, 9 in 10

Chance that a Bethlehem hotel expects to be open this Christmas: 1 in 5

12/02 Rank of a burning Yule-log video loop among the top-rated 8-10 a.m. TV shows in New York City last Christmas: 1

12/03 Estimated number of artificial Christmas trees displayed in U.S. homes each year for every real one: 2.6

12/05 Miles per hour of two low-flying Danish fighter jets in February when they startled a reindeer named Rudolph to death: 450

Amount his owner, a professional Santa, was paid by the Air Force in September to buy a new Rudolph: $5,000

12/06 Number of worldwide incidents last Christmas of “Santarchy,” which involves roving mobs of unruly Santas: 29

Number of fruitcakes that drunken Santas catapulted into the air at the event in Portland, Oregon: 6

1/07 Percentage change since 1970 in the height of the National Christmas Tree: +63

12/07 Number of golf clubs a Phoenix tourism group is sending to troops overseas as part of its “Operation White Christmas”: 14,000

12/07 Number of Christmas trees FedExed last year to U.S. troops: 11,854

12/07 Number of seconds it takes a synthetic Christmas tree to burn: 32

12/08 Percentage of U.S. Christmas trees purchased in 2001 and 2007, respectively, that were artificial: 21, 36