A Pan-English Dictionary (for readers of Harry Mathews’s The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium)
And while on the subject of reposting literary resources: here’s a Pan-English dictionary I made for the benefit of anyone reading Harry Mathews‘s early masterpiece, the epistolary novel The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium.
Odradek presents the correspondence of newlyweds and amateur sleuths Zachary McCaltex and Twang Panattapam. Separated by the Atlantic, they exchange letters in which they “try to trace the whereabouts of a treasure supposedly lost off the coast of Florida in the sixteenth century, while navigating a relationship separated by an ocean as well as their different cultures.”
Twang, who hails “from the Southeast-Asian country of Pan-Nam,” peppers her letters with snatches of her native language, “Pan.” Fortunately for her husband and the reader, she also translates it on the spot. I’ve collected all of the Pan and its English equivalents and presented them below.
The Weaklings Library
An impressive compilation of Books Dennis Cooper Loved appears at The Weaklings Library.
Wittgenstein’s Mistress: An Index
A while back, I published an index for Wittgenstein’s Mistress. Blake’s recent post about WM got me thinking that I should repost it here. Please feel free to copy/distribute it/whatever; my goal is to assist anyone reading or doing research on the book, which I think one of the two greatest novels of the past 25 years.
Notes:
- Be warned! I’m sure there are errors. (If you find any, please let me know, as well as any other revisions, comments, or suggestions.)
- Underlined entries are incomplete; underlined page numbers are uncertain. (If you can expand/confirm any of these in the comments, I’ll update the index, thanks!)
The Index
I have become dead to your book recommendations.
Roxane recently mentioned one of those weird, unspoken things about writers: we are constantly pretending to buy and read each other’s books. Publish something yourself and you’ll quickly see what I mean. You get an e-mail every time someone makes an order. The e-mail tells you the buyer’s name and even where he or she lives. So when someone says on Facebook, “I can’t wait to get this book!” and they tag you in the post so you’ll definitely see it, you get really excited about the order and you look forward to mailing them the book that you’re sure they’ll enjoy, and you wait and you wait for that e-mail with the person’s name and address, but the order never comes, and because you want to stay friendly with the person you tell yourself that it wasn’t a lie, that they probably just forgot. And sometimes they really did forget.
Sometimes they say, “I just ordered this book, you should too!” and you can plainly see that they haven’t ordered the book, and this is harder to forgive, but really, who cares? Why should anybody care?
The Milan Review of the Universe
The Milan Review’s second issue is out, and of course it is gorgeous. And if you’re in New York, there’s a party for/with it (featuring Seth Fried, Robert Lopez, Lynne Tillman, Tim Small).
The issue features writing from Iphgenia Baal, Amie Barrodale, Chiara Barzini, Blake Butler, Matthias “Wolfboy” Connor, Seth Fried, Amelia Gray, Shane Jones, Robert Lopez, Clancy Martin, Francesco Pacifico, and Lynne Tillman & art from Massimiliano Bomba, Carola Bonfili, Milano Chow, TJ Cowgill, Joe DeNardo, Francesco de Figueiredo, Roope Eronen, Frédéric Fleury, Christy Karacas, Taylor McKimens, Brenna Murphy, and Toony Navok.
The best HTMLGIANT posts as chosen by you the readers of HTMLGIANT or at least some of you
Last November, I put out a call for the best HTMLGIANT posts. Folks responded, and then the thread devolved into a perplexing debate about Noam Chomsky and Gilles Deleuze. Nonetheless I combed through all of it to bring you the results (which I think especially appropriate now, after No Comments Week).
By far, the most votes went to:
Blurbs
“This grilled cheese is a sandwich that depicts hope, and the absence of hope, in modes that are simultaneously personal and universal. The surface of the sandwich may appear simple, but one is always engaged by a deeper fullness, richness and multivalence. A triumphant debut.”
“At times both funny & heartbreaking, these three emotionally rich & incisive musketeers weave the remembered with the present. A postmodern classic.”
“If there’s a more thoroughly brilliant and exciting new muffin than the blueberry…well there just isn’t.”
“A dill pickle continually engages and surprises. In its rhetorical honesty, emotional lucidity and lyric vivacity, it captures the simultaneous joy and dejection of young men caught in the ‘industrial pull’ of our time.”
“Belief: An Essay” by Jamie Iredell
The always awesome thought-space continent. has an excerpt from Jamie Iredell’s forthcoming nonfiction book, Last Mass, a memoir about growing up as a Catholic in California, and about the Spanish missionaries who first settled the state.
I can only imagine how golden the whole book will be, given that this brief excerpt covers dinosaurs, hallucinogens, Sir Francis Drake, Wallace Stevens, quantum physics, The Sound of Music, and the Devil, just to name a few. Here’s a snippet, then check out the whole thing:
My sister tells me that she sits next to a handsome man on a flight across the country. After chitchat, she withdraws her book. She’s reading Kevin Sampsell’s A Common Pornography. After a few moments, the handsome man also reads from his book—his leather-bound Bible. Sister thinks, Oh, Jesus—too bad. She falls asleep. Later, settled in Nashville, she opens her volume and out falls a Jesus-covered card that reads, You can still find God and Salvation! Because that handsome God-fearing young man saw that word—pornography.
The Feeling of Floating, Like the Body is Absent: My Favorite Books of 2011
Reality meant that I could neither afford nor have time to read every book that came out this year that I wanted to read, but out of what I did read (which was, coincidentally, a lot more books than I normally read that are released/realized in the year I currently exist in), the following were my favorites.
FANGED NOUMENA by NICK LAND
The first book on this list I haven’t even finished reading, an immense 560 page tome collecting virtually all of Nick Land’s writings from 1987-2007–excepting only the full-length text The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism–is a massively important text, because Nick Land is, in my opinion, one of the most important thinkers of our present. Land takes apart the world and rebuilds it, offering particularly apt readings of Kant, Nietzsche, Bataille, Heidegger, and more that really flows new light into the dusty thoughts of many often-over-valued thinkers (can a known philosopher be over-valued? maybe not, but often the most known/taught readings of said thinkers certainly can be). Land pioneered the idea of the theory-fiction, using fiction as a tool to explore critical theory, a technique now practice by many affiliated with the book’s press, Urbanomic. This book is a map towards the next level, and as the jacket copy proposes: “Can what is playing you make it to Level 2?”
Buy from Urbanomic (in the UK) or Sequence Press (in the US)
THERE’S NEVER BEEN A DAY THAT DIDN’T REQUIRE KNIVES LIKE THESE by JEFF GRIFFIN
Jeff Griffin is a poet who is, sometimes, from Iowa, who writes some of the most amazing contemporary poetry I’ve encountered. THERE’S NEVER BEEN A DAY… is, as the Human500 website describes, “A book composed of transcriptions of found papers from the desert and original poems by Jeff Griffin.” It’s a hazy mess of desperation and excitement, the desert being a place of secrets, magic, and despair. I read this hung-over in a train-station after I missed my train and had two hours to kill, and upon finishing it I relished my hang-over, smiled to myself, shut my eyes, and blissed out until it was finally time for me to board my train.
Out of print from Human 500