Bill Murray reads poems by Billy Collins, Lorine Niedecker, and Emily Dickinson to the workers who built the Poets House literary center in museum. The applause after “I dwell in possibility” is golden.
The Believer‘s annual reader survey is always kinda sorta interesting. Here’s the top 20; linked titles go to Biblioklept reviews:
Read the rest of the list–honorable mentions–here. Read Biblioklept’s Best of 2009 list here.
Vice Magazine has published an excerpt from William T. Vollmann’s new book Kissing the Mask: Beauty, Understatement, and Femininity in Japanese Noh Theater. Read the excerpt here. The picture above is Mr. Vollmann in drag, one of the themes of his new book. Here is an excerpt from Vice‘s excerpt:
The best mask of my self (never mind my soul) may well be a chujo; my forehead will soon begin to wrinkle in a pattern like roots, and I often bear the sparse mustache, gaping mouth, and blackened teeth of the loyal bewildered lieutenant; perhaps I belong to the Komparu school. What the artist inscribed on the back of my face I will never know, being unable to see myself objectively the way a professional Noh actor would. Most of the time I am a sturdy man who wears the same clothes often, preferring garments of lifelong reliability; I shave carelessly and shrug off my latest wrinkles, because anyhow I never possessed even a waki’s hope of being beautiful, nor felt the loss.
From Human, All Too Human (aphorism 193):
Draconian law against writers. One should regard a writer as a criminal who deserves acquittal or clemency only in the rarest cases: that would be a way to keep books from getting out of hand.
Cartoonist Kate Beaton lampoons F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby at her site Hark, A Vagrant. Wonderful send-up of what has to be one of America’s most overrated novels.
Next month (May 20th, 2010 to be precise), the fine folks at indie publisher Melville House will honor the best–and worst–book trailers. The invite promises awards for “Best Cameo,” “Best Author Appearance,” and, of course, “Best Trailer” (“both Big and Low budgets”). Melville House honcho Dennis Loy Johnson will host and author John Wray (Lowboy) will be among the special cadre of envelope-openers. Judges include Carolyn Kellogg (LA Times) and Slate’s Troy Patterson, who wondered if books really needed trailers last year. Nominate trailers here. Not sure how I feel about book trailers, but I like this one for Pynchon’s Inherent Vice, probably mostly because he reads the damn thing and it cracks me up–
Flavorwire has compiled a fantastic collection of David Foster Wallace quotes from David Lipsky’s new book, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself. A few excerpts:
On book tour sex:
“I didn’t get laid on this tour. The thing about fame is interesting, although I would have liked to get laid on the tour and I did not….People come up, they kind of slither up during readings or whatever. But it seems like, what I want is not to have to take any action. I don’t want to have to say, ‘Would you like to come back to the hotel?’ I want them to say, ‘I am coming back to the hotel. Where is your hotel?’ None of ‘em do that….I just can’t stand to look like I’m actively trading on this sexually. Even though of course that’s—I would be happy to do that.”On Blue Velvet:
“I remember going to see Blue Velvet. . . . It absolutely made me shake. And I went back and saw it again the next day. And there was somethin’ about…it was my first hint that being a surrealist, or being a weird writer, didn’t exempt you from certain responsibilities. But it in fact upped them. . . . David Lynch, Blue Velvet coming out when it did, I think saved me from droppin’ out of school. And saved me maybe even from quittin’ as a writer. ‘Cause I’d always—if I could have made a movie, right at that time? That would have been it. I mean, I vibrated on every frequency.”On the origin of the trademark bandana:
“I started wearing bandannas in Tucson because it was a hundred degrees all the time. When it’s really hot, I would perspire so much that I would drip on the page. Actually, I started wearing it that year, and then it became a big help in Yaddo in ’87 because I would drip into the typewriter, and I was worried that I would get a shock. And then I discovered that I felt better with them on. And then I dated a woman who…said there were these various chakras, and one of the big ones was what she called the spout hole, at the very top of your cranium. And in a lot of cultures, it was considered better to keep your head covered. And then I began thinking about the phrase, Keeping your head together, you know? …. It’s a security blanket for me. . . . It makes me…feel kind of creepy that people view it as an affectation or trademark or something. It’s more just a foible, it’s the recognition of a weakness, which is that I’m just kind of worried my head’s going to explode.”
ReadRollShow‘s Dave Weich interviews Sam Lipsyte. Great little short clips, perfect for internet viewing. They have three up so far, all embedded below–
Subtly titled Sex, issue 110 of the long-running literary journal Granta hits stands this week, and it looks like a doozy. There’s a story by Roberto Bolaño called “The Redhead” about “a disturbing encounter between an eighteen-year-old girl and a narcotics cop.” Charming. No description for Tom McCarthy’s “The Spa,” but presumably it will involve sex, and Dave Eggers’s drawings “Four Animals Contemplating Sex” promises to be self-descriptive. Lots of other stuff too, of course. Order Granta 110 here. The journal has also produced short videos for four of the pieces in Sex, all directed by Luke Seomore and Joseph Bull. You can see them at the oh-so-cleverly titled website This is not a purse; the vid for Bolaño’s “The Redhead” is embedded below.
George Washington was a biblioklept. MobyLives hipped us to Ed Pilkington’s Guardian article. From the article:
Founder of a nation, trouncer of the English, God-fearing family man: all in all, George Washington has enjoyed a pretty decent reputation. Until now, that is.
The hero who crossed the Delaware river may not have been quite so squeaky clean when it came to borrowing library books.
The New York Society Library, the city’s only lender of books at the time of Washington’s presidency, has revealed that the first American president took out two volumes and pointedly failed to return them.
At today’s prices, adjusted for inflation, he would face a late fine of $300,000.
The library’s ledgers show that Washington took out the books on 5 October 1789, some five months into his presidency at a time when New York was still the capital. They were an essay on international affairs called Law of Nations and the twelfth volume of a 14-volume collection of debates from the English House of Commons.
The ledger simply referred to the borrower as “President” in quill pen, and had no return date.
Want to celebrate William Shakespeare’s birthday (Shakes would be 446 today)? Sure you do. And, undoubtedly, you wish to do so in the geekiest way possible, right? Check out Geekosystem’s post, The Five Geekiest Ways to Celebrate Shakespeare’s Birthday.
Sylvia Beach was the nexus point for Modernist and ex-pat literature for much of the first half of the twentieth century, running the Left Bank bookstore Shakespeare & Company until the Nazi occupation of Paris in 1941. She was the first publisher of Joyce’s Ulysses, she translated Paul Valéry into English, and was close friends to a good many great writers, including William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, H.D., and Ernest Hemingway. In The Letters of Sylvia Beach, editor Keri Walsh compiles many of Beach’s letters from 1901 to just before her death in 1962. Framed by a concise biographical introduction and a useful glossary of correspondents, Letters reveals private insights into a fascinating literary period. There’s a sweetness to Beach’s letters, whether she’s inviting the Fitzgeralds to come to a dinner party or asking Richard Wright (“Dick”) how much he thinks a fair price for a record player is. The Letters of Sylvia Beach is out now from Columbia UP.
I’m a couple of chapters into William T. Vollmann’s 1993 novel Butterfly Stories, one of his (three? four? Dude’s prolific) books about prostitution. The bullied butterfly grows up to be a boy who wants to be a journalist and then a journalist/inept sex tourist in southeast Asia. Good stuff. Here’s a mordantly elegant passage:
Once he began to combine cutting his wrists and half-asphyxiating himself he believed that he’d found the ideal. Afterwards he’d dream of mummy sex with the gentle girl, by which he meant her body being suspended ropelessly above him, then slowly drifting down; when her knee touched his leg he jerked and then went limp there; her hands reached his hands, which died; her breasts rolled softly upon his heart which fibrillated and stopped; finally she lay on top of him, quite docile and still soft . . . He knew that the others didn’t like mummy sex, but that was because they didn’t understand it; they thought that it must be cold; they thought that she must paint her mouth with something to make it look black and smell horrible and soften like something rotten . . . He wanted to open her up until the pelvis snapped like breaking a wishbone. Would that be mummy sex?
Here’s a one-star review of the book from Amazon: “This book is a sordid collection of junk. I picked it out at random from a library shelf and did not enjoy/like/sympathize with even one thing about it. Don’t waste your time.” Guy didn’t like the mummy sex, I guess.
Been working through my reader’s copy of Dave Eggers’s The Wild Things, new in trade paperback from Vintage. I’m having a hard time envisioning a kind of review of the book that escapes the context of the book; that it’s a novelization of a movie script of a Maurice Sendak book of maybe a few dozen words. I loved that book growing up, so no reason that it should be adapted into a feature film, but hoped for the best due to Eggers’s involvement and the fact that the incomparable Spike Jonze was at the rudder. Or helm. Or whatever naval metaphor you wish. Anyway, I absolutely hated the movie–it was mostly melancholy and downright depressing at times. Whereas Sendak’s book channels the joys of transgressive energy while reiterating the need for stable familial order, Jonze’s movie was all sorrow and loss, the hangover of youth, each ecstasy overshadowed in darkness. Too much yin, not enough yang. Anyway. I’ll try to give the book its proper, fair due on its own terms without all that baggage. Full review forthcoming.
From Burt Britton’s collection of self-portraits, um, Self-portrait. McSweeney’s 34 has taken the work as inspiration. See a full gallery here, including portraits from Jorge Luis Borges, Maurice Sendak, and Margaret Atwood, among others. This goofy Cormac McCarthy self-portrait is priceless, especially from a guy famous for images of trees hanging with dead babies.
From McSweeney’s 34, out now.
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