Lowbrow Reader #7: Gilbert Rogin
Did you know that the imense bones of Orestes, the discovery of which Herodotus relates, are now believed to be those of a prehistoric monster? Of course, the inference is not that Orestes had undergone a metamorphosis in his lifetime, one that was revealed from an examination of his remains; it is rather that the prevalent cult of heroic relics required outsized bones, and conveniently, those of great, lumbering Pleistocene beasts popped up from time to time. More persuasively, it was the other way round, as it often is, the uncovering of the bones leading to the formation of the cult.
But suppose the bones were Orestes’, that he became aware that he was in the grip of a terrible transformation, and that he was unhinged. Could that explain everything that followed? Something to think about early in the morning when your dad’s ghostly, fluent fingers seem to be accompanying the rain.
Who is Gilbert Rogin, exactly? His books are out of print, but he has had 33 stories published in the New Yorker over the years, was once complimented by Joyce Carol Oates in the Partisan Review, likened (in print) to Bruno Schulz by Updike and for years was managing editor of Sports Illustrated.
What?
Later this week I will ask LR editor Jay Ruttenberg how he rediscovered this crotchety literary gem, met up with him and then got Rogin to write in his modest publication. It’s a funny story.
Get your copy of the new Lowbrow Reader here.
The Failure Six is now available for pre-order
Former Giant contributor and author we love Shane Jones will have his book The Failure Six published by Fugue State Press in January 2010, but those who pre-order now will receive the book and a “surprise” in October.
the surprise is similar to the surprise in those boxes of popcorn
could be a chapbook, could be edited pages not included in the book, could be signed copy
could be a picture of gene morgans mom—Shane via a gmail chat
The Fugue State Press site also includes an excerpt from the book here.
See also:
Chris Pell’s Failure Six illustrations.
Personally, I can’t wait to read this.
Breakfast Reading….
Here’s a rumination on pancakes from Donald Antrim’s The Verificationist. The context is that a man is trying to convince his consciousness to fly out of a pancake house but is having trouble separating his mind and body, possibly because he just ate delicious, destructive pancakes…
We eat pancakes to escape loneliness, yet within moments we want nothing more than our freedom from ever having so much as thought about pancakes. Nothing can prevent us, after eating pancakes form feeling the most awful regret. After eating pancakes, our great mission in life becomes the repudiation of the pancakes and everything served along with them, the bacon and the syrup and the sausage and coffee and jellies and jams. But these things are beneath mention, compared with the pancakes themselves. It is the pancake– Pancakes! Pancakes!— that we never learn to respect. We promise ourselves that we will know better, next time, than to order pancakes in any size or in any amount. Never again will we we tempted by buckwheat or buttermilk or blueberry flapjacks. However, we fail to learn; and the days go by, two or three weeks pass, then a month, and we forget about pancakes the domination over us. Eventually, we need them. We crawl back to pancakes again and again.
The Grand Gesture & Other Thoughts About Graduation: An HTMLGiant/Rumpus Joint Publication
A guest post cross published with the Rumpus by Eric Hanson (author of A Book of Ages) http://abookofages.com http://abookofages.blogspot.com
When he was 21 Langston Hughes quit Columbia University. He’d been there only a year. He signed on as a member of the crew on a steamship bound for the Canary Islands and Africa. When the boat was off Sandy Hook, Hughes took his college books on deck and threw them into the ocean.
The grand gesture impressed no one at Columbia University. But grand gestures never impress an audience as much as they impress the person making the gesture. We make some of our grandest gestures when we are young and nobody is paying attention to us. Everybody else is too busy working and we don’t know yet what work is. We are like the guy on the first tee who takes five practice swings and waggles his club around and looks repeatedly up the fairway with a serious expression, and then tops it thirty yards into the deep rough. We are novices, and novices are all about gesture and large ideas.
Dickface Compound Sentence Values Question
Which would be more valuable to you: 100 publications of pieces you liked a lot and were pretty proud of in various journals of small to medium-small circulation and of various reknown (from blogs up to occasional print journals that likely have a print run of 300 or 400 or less) or 1 publication of a story you are very happy with to very proud of in a journal of not megaalien level (ie: not the NYer or Paris Review) but of very well regarded and circulated in stores like Barnes and Noble (ie: Tin House or Ploughshares)? Why?
Gogol’s Nevsky Prospect
There is nothing better than Nevsky Prospect, at least not in Petersburg; for there it is everything. What does this street – the beauty of our capital – not shine with! I know that not one of its pale and clerical inhabitants would trade Nevsky Prospect for anything in the world. Not only the one who is twenty-five years old, has an excellent mustache and a frock coat of an amazing cut, but even the one who has white hair sprouting on his chin and a head as smooth as a silver dish, he, too, is enchanted with Nevsky Prospect. And the ladies! Oh, the ladies find Nevsky Prospect still more pleasing. And who does not find it pleasing? The moment you enter Nevsky Prospect, it already smells of nothing but festivity. Though you may have some sort of necessary, indispensible business, once you enter it, you are sure to forget all business. Here is the only place where people do not go out of necessity, where they are not driven by the need and mercantile interest that envelop the whole of Petersburg. A man met on Nevksy Prospect seems less of an egoist than on Morskaya, Gorokhovaya, Liteiny, Meshchanskaya, and other streets, where greed, self-interest, and necessity show on those walking or flying by in carriages and droshkies. Nevsky Prospect is the universal communication of Petersburg. Here the inhabitant of the Petersburg or Vyborg side who has not visited his friend in Peski or the Moscow Gate for several years can be absolutely certain of meeting him. No directory or inquiry office will provide such reliable information as Nevsky Prospect. All-powerful Nevsky Prospect! The only entertainment for a poor man at the Petersburg feast! How clean-swept are its sidewalks, and, God, how many feet have left their traces on it! The clumsy, dirty boot of the retired soldier, under the weight of which the very granite seems to crack, and the miniature shoe, light as smoke, of a young lady, who turns her head to the glittering shop windows as a sunflower turns toward the sun, and the clanking sword of a hope-filled sub-lieutenant that leaves a sharp scratch on it – everything wreaks upon it the power of strength or the power of weakness. What a quick phantasmagoria is performed on it in the course of a single day! How many changes it undergoes in the course of a single day and night!
–The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol, “Nevsky Prospect” (trans. Pevear & Volokhonsky)
Jimmy Chen—
The first issue of the new online journal Kill Author is up. Exciting to see many familiar and many new names. I like the design a lot.
Sorry Benjamin Kunkel.
The insular, dramatic affirmations just don’t cut it this time.
Speaking from my experience, the internet (lowercase ‘i’) is what lead me to the serious study of literature and philosophy and history. Need I point out how many comprehensive and correct resources there are for said ‘serious’ study? I would use some more time to turn every word in the last sentence into a link for Benjamin and everyone reading this, but my severely addled ADHD brain just won’t let me. I see something shiny. Damn you, Interwebz! And that same ADHD mind is going to pass on your next article, because, hell, there’s so much more pseudo-subsumption to get to.