Read “Town of Cats,” a Story by Haruki Murakami

Biblioklept4 Comments

Today, The New Yorker shares “Town of Cats,” a short story by Haruki Murakami. First paragraph—

At Koenji Station, Tengo boarded the Chuo Line inbound rapid-service train. The car was empty. He had nothing planned that day. Wherever he went and whatever he did (or didn’t do) was entirely up to him. It was ten o’clock on a windless summer morning, and the sun was beating down. The train passed Shinjuku, Yotsuya, Ochanomizu, and arrived at Tokyo Central Station, the end of the line. Everyone got off, and Tengo followed suit. Then he sat on a bench and gave some thought to where he should go. “I can go anywhere I decide to,” he told himself. “It looks as if it’s going to be a hot day. I could go to the seashore.” He raised his head and studied the platform guide.

At that point, he realized what he had been doing all along.

Fun fact: I used to live in Shin-Koenji, right near Koenji, and I took the Chuou to work every day.

Hark, a Vagrant! Does the Romantics

Biblioklept1 Comment

Kate Beaton is the best. 

The Sleep of Sorrow and the Dream of Joy — Raffaelle Monti

BibliokleptLeave a comment

Books Acquired, 8.28.11

BibliokleptLeave a comment

20110828-082813.jpg

My mom brought over a bunch of stuff tonight including a collection of early ’70s Doonesbury strips in a four volume box set. I guess this was my dad’s? I’ve never understood a single Trudeau strip, ever, although I haven’t read one in years.

20110828-082821.jpg

Butch Cassidy’s Death Mask

Biblioklept3 Comments

RIP Stetson Kennedy, Florida Folklorist, Writer, and Human Rights Activist

Edwin Turner3 Comments

Stetson Kennedy died today at 94 in his native city, Jacksonville, FL.

Kennedy began his career collecting folklore throughout the South in 1937 after leaving the University of Florida. Kennedy worked for the Works Progress Administration’s Florida Writers’ Project, traveling with Zora Neale Hurston to collect oral histories and folk tales from both black and white Floridians alike. In the 1940s, Kennedy worked for the Atlanta office of the CIO. He also infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in the 1940s and ’50s, exposing many of the racist organization’s secrets and alerting the world to the intrinsic injustice of the Jim Crow system in Southern states.

When Kennedy ran (quite unsuccessfully) for Governor of Florida in 1952, Woody Guthrie wrote the song “Stetson Kennedy” to support his good friend (Wilco and Billy Bragg put the lyrics to music decades later). Kennedy’s anti-Jim Crow, early Civil Rights platform didn’t win him much popularity throughout the state, and when his home in Fruit Cove was firebombed, he moved to France. It was there that the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre published Kennedy’s The Jim Crow Guide—but the book was too controversial for US publication, despite multiple translations across Europe. Even more incendiary was Kennedy’s expose The Klan Unmasked (1954), which helped to undermine the organization’s secret authority in the South.

Just as Kennedy’s contribution to the Civil Rights movement cannot be underestimated, neither can his work in collecting and preserving Florida folklore (as well as Southern folklore in general). Kennedy helped found the Florida Folklore Society and also served as president, and volumes like Palmetto County and Grits and Grunts: Folkloric Key West will remain staples of Florida folk culture. In 2009, Kennedy bequeathed his papers and personal library to the Civic Media Center in Gainesville, FL, a nonprofit info center and alternative library devoted to human rights, environmental protection, and other causes. Kennedy was closely involved with the CMC since its inception in 1993.

Kennedy was a vibrant fount of cultural and historical force, a man who worked his entire, long life not just to preserve folklore and its history, but also to show the radical place that folk culture occupies throughout time, linking core human values from generation to generation. Stetson Kennedy will live through his legacy.

Kennedy’s website sheds light on his final moments—

He was with his wife and stepdaughter, He was in no pain. And as recently as 4 days ago he was lucid and talking. The doctor, checking his mental faculties asked him questions “where are you from”, Kennedy replied, “The planet Earth”

Stetson’s wishes were for a party and not a funeral. A luncheon at Beluthahatchee will be held October 1st.

Kennedy on This American Life.

Read a 2011 interview with Kennedy in Vice Magazine.

See the Trailer for The Rum Diary — Johnny Depp Plays Hunter S. Thompson (or at Least His Alter Ego) Again

Biblioklept2 Comments

Read our review of Hunter S. Thompson’s The Rum Diary.

Quentin Tarantino Talks About Being A Writer

Biblioklept1 Comment

Books Acquired, 8.26.11

Biblioklept2 Comments

20110826-045537.jpg

Double—or triple, really, Witold Gombrowicz grabs at the bookstore today. I love this cover for Ferdydurke (even the ink stain doesn’t really detract too much from its plain elegance). Intro is by Sontag! Should this be my next step after Trans-Atlantyk?

20110826-045545.jpg

Also picked up this Grove Press edition that collects both Cosmos and Pornografia. I’m not a fan of omnibus editions in general, but, hey, why pass up a chance to pick up a used copy of what is likely a not-so-easy-to-find book.

Hurricane Tips for Yankees

BibliokleptLeave a comment

You’ll need this—

A bunch of these—

Lots of these—

—and/or these—

Some of this—

And some of this—

Never hurts to have one of these around too—

It’s also a good idea to fill up the tub with water (Galifianakis and ducklings optional)—

In all seriousness though, good luck and stay safe.

“I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream for Ice Cream”

BibliokleptLeave a comment

A favorite scene from a favorite film.

“The Monstropolous Beast Had Left His Bed” — Zora Neale Hurston’s Hurricane

Biblioklept1 Comment

In Chapter 18 of her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston imagines a hurricane descending on the Everglades as a cosmic monster. Her description comes in part from accounts of the 1928 Great Lake Okeechobee Hurricane—

Ten feet higher and far as they could see the muttering wall advanced before the braced-up waters like a road crusher on a cosmic scale. The monstropolous beast had left his bed. Two hundred miles an hour wind had loosed his chains. He seized hold of his dikes and ran forward until he met the quarters; uprooted them like grass and rushed on after his supposed-to- be conquerors, rolling the dikes, rolling the houses, rolling the people in the houses along with other timbers. The sea was walking the earth with a heavy heel.

“Backwood Names” — F. Scott Fitzgerald

BibliokleptLeave a comment

F. Scott Fitzgerald puts his imagination to work. From Notebooks—

BACKWOOD NAMES.
Olsie, Hassie, Goba, Bleba, Onza, (Ozma—my own), Retha, Otella, Tatrina, Delphia, Wedda, Zannis, Avaline, Burtryce, Chalme, Glenola, Turla, Verlie, Legitta, Navilla, Oha, Verla, Blooma, Inabeth, Versia, Gomeria, Valaria, Berdine, Olabeth, Adelloyd.

“I’m Not a Good Reader” — Witold Gombrowicz

BibliokleptLeave a comment

I Watch The Decemberists’ David Foster Wallace Video

Edwin Turner6 Comments

I’ll be upfront: I don’t care for the music of The Decemberists. I’ve tried, after being told repeatedly how “deep” or “clever” or “literate” the lyrics are, and how good the music is—but it all strikes me as awfully bland stuff, like someone’s shitty take on R.E.M.

Anyway, I do very much like David Foster Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest, the “inspiration” (yes, I’ll put the word in suspicious quotation marks) behind The Decemberists’ new music video for “Calamity Song.” Here’s their singer/songwriter Colin Meloy (via NPR)—

I wrote “Calamity Song” shortly after I’d finished reading David Foster Wallace’s epic Infinite Jest. The book didn’t so much inspire the song itself, but Wallace’s irreverent and brilliant humor definitely wound its way into the thing. And I had this funny idea that a good video for the song would be a re-creation of the Enfield Tennis Academy’s round of Eschaton — basically, a global thermonuclear crisis re-created on a tennis court — that’s played about a third of the way into the book. Thankfully, after having a good many people balk at the idea, I found a kindred spirit in Michael Schur, a man with an even greater enthusiasm for Wallace’s work than my own. With much adoration and respect to this seminal, genius book, this is what we’ve come up with. I can only hope DFW would be proud.

I’m not going to conjecture whether Wallace would be proud or not. That seems like total asshole move. But, I am interested in seeing a filmed version of Eschaton, and I do like Michael Schur’s show Parks and Recreation. So I’m going to watch the video now—unmuted and everything—and then post a reaction. Here’s the vid—

Okay. Nice production values, I guess. I think that’s the band, right? I like it when bands are in their own videos and “act.” I guess they’re playing the older ETA kids who are watching the game this Interdependence Day. The singer is Pemulis, that seems clear. It snows in the Escahton episode, but it looks like only some rain here. I like the Otis P. Lord kid, but I don’t know if the other kids look right. This is weak criticism, I know. Hmmm. The song . . . well, I’m not into this song, but I guess it’s pleasant enough. It’s terribly competent. Bits of it sound like a sped up version of R.E.M.’s “Talk About the Passion.” Some of the lyrics seem to reference or play off of Infinite Jest maybe—like “Year of the Something Something”  or something.

I don’t know. What can I say here? I hope no one tries to make a movie out of Infinite Jest. It was all I could do to fast forward through most of Jim from The Office’s movie of Hideous Men.

Book Acquired, 8.25.11

Biblioklept1 Comment

20110825-023856.jpg

In the mail today: Michael Cunningham’s By Nightfall, in trade paperback from the good folks at Picador. From novelist Jeanette Winterson’s review of the hardback edition, printed last year in the NYT—

Cunningham has taken on the classic plot of the uninvited or unexpected stranger or guest whose arrival brings chaos, self-knowledge, tragedy, the ruin of one kind of life that may or may not lead to something better. It’s a story we know from variants as classic as Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” to Mark Twain’s “Mysterious Stranger” to contemporary versions like “The Accidental” by Ali Smith. Cunningham is drawn to simple, potent plots (think of the triptych in “The Hours”), saving his energy for the hearts and minds, the groins and guts, of his characters. Yet he makes you turn the pages. He tells a story here, but not too much of a story. You aren’t deadened by detail; you’re eager to know what happens next.

Cunningham writes so well, and with such an economy of language, that he can call up the poet’s exact match. His dialogue is deft and fast. The pace of the writing is skilled — stretched or contracted at just the right time. And if some of the interventions on art are too long — well, too long for whom? For what? Good novels are novels that provoke us to argue with the writer, not just novels that make us feel magically, mysteriously at home.A novel in which everything is perfect is a waxwork. A novel that is alive is never perfect.

A List of Things Roberto Bolaño Discussed with His Friend Rodrigo Fresán

Biblioklept3 Comments

From the entry “All Subjects with Fresán,” in Bolaño’s collection Between Parentheses, a list of stuff the late writer talked about with his good friend, which includes (as usual) plenty of references to writers, poets, directors—and some funny jokes as well. Read part of Fresán’s essay “The Savage Detective” — it was the piece that first got me to go pick up a Bolaño. Here’s the list—

1) The Latin American hell that, especially on weekends, is concentrated around some Kentucky Fried Chicken or McDonald’s.

2) The doings of Buenos Aires photographer Alfredo Garofano, childhood friend of Rodrigo and how a friend of mine and of anyone with the least bit of discernment.

3) Bad translations.

4) Serial killers and mass murders.

5) Prospective leisure as the antidote to prospective poetry.

6) The vast number of writers who should retire after writing their first book or their second or their third or their fourth or their fifth.

7) The superiority of the work of Basquiat to that of Haring, or vice versa.

8 ) The works of Borges and the works of Bioy.

9) The advisability of retiring to a ranch in Mexico near a volcano to finish writing The Turkey Buzzard Trilogy.

10) Wrinkles in the space time continuum.

11) The kind of majestic women you’ve never met who come up to you in a bar and whisper in your ear that they have AIDS (or that they don’t).

12) Gombrowicz and his conception of immaturity.

13) Philip K. Dick, whom we both unreservedly admire.

14) The likelihood of a war between Chile and Argentina and its possible and impossible consequences.

15) The life of Proust and the life of Stendhal.

16) The activities of some professors in the United States.

17) The sexual practices of titi monkeys and ants and great cetaceans.

18) Colleagues who must be avoided like limpet mines.

19) Ignacio Echevarria, whom both of us love and admire.

20) Some Mexican writers liked by me and not by him, and some Argentine writers like by me and not by him.

21) Barcelonan manners.

22) David Lynch and the prolixity of David Foster Wallace.

23) Chabon and Palahniuk, whom he likes and I don’t.

24) Wittgenstein and his plumbing and carpentry skills.

25) Some twilit dinners, which actually, to the surprise of the diner, become theater pieces in five acts.

26) Trashy TV game shows.

27) The end of the world.

28) Kubrick’s films, which Fresán loves so much that I’m beginning to hate them.

29) The incredible war between the planet of the novel-creatures and the planet of the story beings.

30) The possibility that when the novel awakes from its iron dreams, the story will be there.