Ken Baumann—
‘Thirty years’ editorial labours produce ‘more comprehensible’ Finnegans Wake’
a) What the hell.
b) Doing it wrong.
35
Gustav Mahler on Writing
“A symphony must be like the world. It must contain everything.”
“I don’t let myself get carried away by my own ideas – I abandon 19 out of 20 of them every day.”
“Fortunately, something always remains to be harvested. So let us not be idle.”
“I am hitting my head against the walls, but the walls are giving way.”
“Discipline, work. Work, discipline.”
“If you think you’re boring your audience, go slower not faster.”
“The real art of conducting consists in transitions.”
“It’s not just a question of conquering a summit previously unknown, but of tracing, step by step, a new pathway to it.”
“I embark on this enterprise rather like a soldier who shoots arrows into the dark at an invisible target.”
“The degree to which the word sustains the sound can be measured when you pass from wordless music to text.”
“The call of love sounds very hollow among these immobile rocks.”
“The pointer of a pair of scales always returns to the center.”
5 More Thangs
1. Nice interview with Eric Skillman, a designer for Criterion DVDs.
2. If you’ve never happened upon Vincent Gallo’s merchandise site, his personal services, are something else. Oldie but goodie. Here’s Yes + Briefs —>
3. Watched Shutter Island the other night. B-. Finally Scorsese’s made a movie I won’t be watching again and again. Memory twist? Really? I guess everyone gets old.
4. If you have questions for Hiromi Ito, author Killing Kanoko, drop them in Johannes’s comments here.
5. The new round of Significant Objects, raising funds for Girls Write Now, is live, with texts written around weird objects by quite a list of people (including our own Justin Taylor, favorites Evenson, Moody, Mellis, Dalton, Greenman, and live right now myself). Watch out and do a bid!
Ways to Spend (a small part of) Your Weekend
image by Lori Nix, via Blood Milk Jewelry
Over at Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow gets around to reading Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational, a study of consumer behavior that challenges the “rational consumer” hypothesis. CD also links us to this NPR story on obsolete professions, such as switchboard operator, ice-deliverer, and “lector,” who is the guy hired by all the cigar workers in the factory to sit in the center of the factory floor and loudly read the workers left-wing newspapers and pro-union propaganda, so that everyone can better themselves and become less alienated from their labor. If this job ever makes a comeback, I want to do it! The NPR piece has photos of each profession and audio clips of very, very old people talking about when these things existed and they themselves–young then–did them.
Dennis Cooper is testing your sight recognition skills at a French wax museum. I already failed utterly.
The Rumpus asks: Would you like to write about poetry (for the Rumpus)?
Tell us about the last poem or book of poetry you loved, no length requirements. The best will be published right here in the blog. Send your entries to poetry-at-therumpus-dot-net.
They’re also looking for people interested in reviewing full-length poetry collections. But FYI: Stephen Elliott and I had a long conversation the other night about the problems with book reviews for sites like his (and ours); we are both highly suspicious of the kinds of “reviews” that read like press releases or protracted blurbs, because they don’t tell us anything we can’t glean from a blurb, which is two lines long instead of seven paragraphs. The site-meters prove that these pieces don’t get read or linked the same way that more incisive, interesting books-pieces do, so neither the book nor the review-author nor the site is benefiting. If you’re going to try and review some poetry for The Rumpus–which you absolutely should–be sure and give them some red damn meat to sink their teeth into–something we’ll want to link to after they publish it, something that tells me something about the book I couldn’t glean on my own from its Amazon page. Good luck!
NYTea Time: Lydia Millet loves on the new Lipsyte, and Laura Miller likes the new John Banville, but Allison Glock seems to like Tammy Wynette less after reading Jimmy McDonough’s new biography of the country star.
The life story of the fame/drug-addled brat is nothing new, but McDonough wants more than for us to appreciate Wynette, he wants us to like Wynette. Because he likes Wynette — a little too much at times. He writes a handful of chatty letters to his subject. Page 1 begins: “Dear Tammy . . . Don’t worry, I won’t spill all the beans — I can’t. There’s just too much about you that will never be resolved.” Putting aside the dubious choice to shoot your biography in the foot on the first page, writing mash notes to a dead woman is oddly creepy — and only grows more so as the letters progress, one recounting a dream he had about her in which she wore “a yellow pantsuit and matching headband.” At another point he admits to having had “the hots” for her.
Yeesh. Also: A book about making moonshine, Sam Lipsyte answers Stray Questions, and Daniyal Mueenuddin won the Story Prize.
Friday Fuck Books, Let’s Get to Trippin’
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbRkM2gD1Ak
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMUKqnelfQM
So much more… READ MORE >
Justin Taylor—
I posted about this yesterday, but I’m not sure it registered in the collective whatever, so here’s another snatch from Joshua Cohen on Seymour Krim at the Forward.:
A literary critic is somebody who lives in a brownstone or penthouse, wears a suit, and is affiliated with either an academic institution or wealthy relatives; a bookreviewer, however, lives in a shabbier apartment, wears shabbier clothes, and drinks and smokes cheaper drinks and cheaper smokables. William Hazlitt and Matthew Arnold were literary critics, and 10,000 summer intern humanities undergraduates become book reviewers when the publications they slave for run short and need a quickie 500 words (those publications that still run book reviews).
//
Also (via Casey McKinney’s facebook page) here’s this-
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bse7gZrvV8
It is Friday: Go Right Ahead
Why not dine in the library?
I’ll have to have a drink in my bath.
My brain is unalterable as a ball.
And now the children subscribe to judgment.
I am growing meaner by the hour.
Don’t bother with the fixings!
Honey, drink your beer and get me another one.
Like seeing an orange crow.
We did nothing all day long but drink bathtub gin and play solitaire and smile to ourselves and talk to our animals.
..apocryphal glitter, essential doom.
Hey. Don’t take my rum away.
Green Lantern Press
Green Lantern Press is simply making some of the most beautiful, singular limited run book objects of anybody in the pack. If you haven’t browsed their catalog recently, it’s overflowing: such a wide range of things to dig in, from new translation of Rimbaud, to art space phone books, to indexes and collection, so on.
In particular, I’ve been trying to write a review of THE NORTH GEORGIA GAZETTE AND WINTER CHRONICLE by William Edward Parry and the crews of the Hecla and Griper for about six months now, (“An annotated transcription of the 1821 newspaper, The North Georgia Gazette. The newspaper, written and published aboard an English ship trapped in the Arctic, was an attempt by the captain to lessen the boredom of a long, isolated winter.”) and every time I pick up the book to dig further, I get so consumed in a single page that reading the book as a whole could conceivably go on forever. More on this hopefully sometime soon, but in the meantime: revel in some of this.
Matthew Simmons—
Another quickie: Padgett Powell wrote an about Warren Sapp for ESPN Magazine, but they didn’t publish it. Deadspin did, though. The piece in nice—strong Powell sentences and all. The post-script for the story, though, where Powell talks about taking a couple of hits from a proffered joint to prove he’s not a narc, is pretty funny.
Scroll down to read this
Jack Kerouac was either stoned or zenned out when he wrote the entire manuscript of On the Road without paragraph breaks on a scroll (how he fed this through his typewriter still confuses me). Stream of consciousness is a nice conceit, one deserving to be hosted on a scroll, as long as toilet paper — the most imperative scroll of modern time — isn’t evoked. I remember reading a 1/4 way into On the Road and thinking “where is he going?” Dharma Bums was much better, especially for people in their late twenties who are living with their parents, a plight shared by the narrator.
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Robert Rauschenberg’s Automobile Tire Print (1953) is a 100-ft. print of, um, a tire. He created it with John Cage, who no doubt was mumbling 4’3″ to himself while driving the car. In museums it’s displayed horizontally, mostly in part due to ceiling clearances probably, though this strikes me as a “western” way of seeing things: we read and write from left to right, and stuck on this earth without notions of above, we walk and drive horizontally. Rauschenberg is a more playful and earnest Warhol; his tire print traces the volition of our time — driving nowhere, from left to right.
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I don’t know much about the Torah, except that it’s rules of Judaism. I don’t understand why Jews are the only white people who aren’t white; what the hell happened? I once looked up a list of common Jewish surnames and was like “holy shit I know a lot of Jews!” even including girls I had crushes on. I recently learned that Jews only date Jews; where was wikipedia when I was 17?
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Okay, let’s talk about Asians. I feel like I can freely talk about Asians because I am. Asians read up and down in columns, as it’s easier to pivot your neck up and down as supposed to left and right. I may seem biased, but Asian ways are usually more logical than western ways. If you take a Chinese character written in calligraphy and zoom in, it looks like a Franz Kline. (I had a Greek friend who would argue with me about who invented what first, the Greeks or the Chinese. Stupid ass dunno that Gorillas invented everything.) Do you know what the Chinese character for “patience” is? A knife forever suspended above a heart. The heart looks like a heart; the knife a knife. And the character for “good”? A mother next to her child. I will admit the alphabet is more useful, but Chinese breaks my heart.
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HTMLGIANT contributors have been instructed to insert “READ MORE >” breaks within a 1/3 of screen space out of consideration for the other posts; thus, a sort of “politics of page breaks,” where the longer it takes for a contributor to place a break, the more selfish he or she is deemed. It’s funny how so much time later, devoid of past sacred ties, we use the word “scroll” to describe the act of descending deep and deeper into a website page. Most mouse’s have a “scroll wheel” to help with our profane endeavors. My finger often gets so tired, running across the wheel blindly like a hairless guinea pig. If you’ve made it this far, I think you know what I mean. I worry about this post, for hogging so much “front page,” but I hope you understand the vertiginous verticality of this post is simply in aid to the point offered by its title.