Otterboros

From the Daily Otter, via Sarah.

"I could feel my face not knowing what to do with itself"

Coming June 11 from New York Review Books -- Russell Hoban's TURTLE DIARY!



There's an introduction by me...

Llove it!

Missile command

Ford Madox Ford, on the usefulness of books: Books can be useful from so many points of view. In my early days, for example, I used to use the Encylopedia Britannica as a trouser-press and certainly the house that was without it was to be pitied. Books are also very useful for pulping; bibles and other works set over the heart will deflect bullets; works printed on thin india paper are admirable if you happen to run out of cigarette papers. Their use for that purpose is in fact forbidden in France where there is a tobacco monopoly. In fact, if you are ever without a book you are certain to want one in the end. For the matter of that, my grand aunt Eliza Coffin used to say: "Sooner than be idle, I’d take a book and read." According to her the other uses of books were (1) for the concealing of wills (2) for the ditto of proposals of marriage by letter; (3) for pressing flowers; (4) folios piled one on the other will aid you to reach the top row in the linen cupboard; (5) they have been used as missiles, as bedsteads when levelly piled, as wrappings for comestibles; (6) as soporifics, sudorifics, shaving paper etc. Via—who else?—Levi.

Hollow men

The great Devin McKinney reviews Jake Arnott's The House of Rumour for Critics at Large:

Engrossing as pure story, the novel is also an education, as the broad outlines of World War II and the ensuing half-century are reconfigured in and by the voices of people whose split decisions nudged the levers of history, or whose visionary hunches foretold its outcomes....[R]eading the novel, I thought of Robert Anton Wilson (especially Masks of the Illuminati, which germinates from similar principles), James Ellroy (American Tabloid, in its interconnections and narrative density), Thomas Harris (canny prose incorporating deep research into language, history, art, science), and David Thomson (Suspects and Silver Light, novels built from the secret parts of familiar, albeit fictional, lives). 

[...] Yet Arnott’s mesh of fantasy and fact holds together as a novel. He makes scenes live, both in their moments and as parts of a whole. He has no trouble slipping into his characters’ skins, transmitting empathically from their often lonesome, disturbed interiors. His Ian Fleming is a mesmerizing creation. As the MI5 agent tasked with, among other things, investigating the Hess premonition, Fleming also lives out a tormented dynamic with his never-named “other self . . . the hollow man of his imagination” – he who will, after the war, emerge as James Bond. This cold, deadly cipher, “the empty hero of Fleming’s private narrative,” is the void into which Fleming can deposit his own depths, themselves empty of any passion save masochism. More than brilliant, it is revelatory, even moving, of Arnott to depict Bond as his creator’s tortured and torturing doppelgänger, the cruel Quilty to Fleming’s suffering Humbert. (And upon meeting the aged diabolist Aleister Crowley – England’s most notorious hedonist, tapped by MI5 for his insight into Nazi occultism – Fleming finds the prototype of Le Chiffre, Blofeld, Goldfinger: Bond’s fat, grinning supervillains!)

Don't try this at home

"For it must be remembered that at the time I knew quite nothing, naturally, concerning Milo Payne, the mysterious Cockney-talking Englishman with the checkered long-beaked Sherlockholmsian cap; nor of the latter's "Barr-Bag" which was as like my own bag as one Milwaukee wienerwurst is like another; nor of Legga, the Human Spider, with her four legs and her six arms; nor of Ichabod Chang, ex-convict, and son of Dong Chang; nor of the elusive poetess, Abigail Sprigge; nor of the Great Simon, with his 2163 pearl buttons; nor of--in short, I then knew quite nothing about anything or anybody involved in the affair of which I had now become a part, unless perchance it were my Nemesis, Sophie Kratzenschneiderwümpel--or Suing Sophie!"

—Harry Stephen Keeler, THE RIDDLE OF THE TRAVELING SKULL (p. 3)

And I still think that there can be no neater way of putting in a nutshell the outcome of the super-sticky affair of Nobby Hopwood, Stilton Cheesewright, Florence Craye, my Uncle Percy, J. Chichester Clam, Edwin the Boy Scout and old Boko Fittlesworth—or, as my biographers will call it, the Steeple Bumpleigh Horror.

—P.G. Wodehouse, JOY IN THE MORNING (p. 2)

Labyrinths

The Believer turns 10 this month—incredible! 

I'm honored to be in the 10th-anniversary issue, now on the stands/in your mailbox, with a piece that took me years to write. It's not even that long. It's about Borgesian aspects of beloved children's books like Pat the Bunny. 



Slate has published the piece as well, which is thrilling for me—I've never been published by Slate. There are some nice comments amid the clueless ones; best of all, the great John Crowley has weighed in!

Those metafictional devices that remind us that a book is not the same as life may bring on existential angst for you. It made me laugh in delight -- like the infinite progression of little cats in "The Cat in the Hat Comes Back" ("It is fun to have fun but you have to know how," as the Cat says.) I think most kids are on the delight side not on the dread side. How do you feel about songs like "The Tennessee Waltz" that are about a song that has the same title and often tells the same story as the supposed titular song? Do I make your flesh creep? The inserted pictures from other books are doing what Russian formalists call "baring the device" -- telling us frankly that a book is not the world and can have the same book inside it..

I meant this must be the John Crowley, right? 

Right?

I mean...right?

CdXxXxXx

Among his early dispatches was a multipost account of the time John Franco and Bret Saberhagen tied him up, covered him with bread crumbs and left him outside on the pitchers’ mound. A dozen sea gulls feasted upon him. —"Mets Publicist Embraces Social Media With Fervor and Occasional Typo,"Andrew Keh, NYT

(Via Jane)

Genre as simile

I did not really know where I was going, so, when anyone asked me, I said to Russia. Thus my trip started, like an autobiography, upon a rather nicely qualified basis of falsehood and self-glorification.
—Evelyn Waugh, Labels

Lined with lindens of medium size, with hanging droplets of rain distributed among their intricate black twigs according to the future arrangement of leaves (tomorrow each drop would contain a green pupil); complete with a smooth tarred surface some thirty feet across and variegated sidewalks (hand-built, and flatrering to the feet), it rose at a barely perceptible angle, beginning with a post office and ending with a church, like an epistolary novel. 
—Vladimir Nabokov, The Gift

Ruined maps

To complete her remarkable book about an Italian film director, Streetwalking on a Ruined Map: Cultural Theory and the City Films of Elvira Notari (1992), Giuliana Bruno faced a seemingly insurmountable obstacle: none of the director's silent films had survived. Yet through sensitive analysis of tangential materials (photographs, reviews, news, stories, interviews, letters, memoirs, business records), Bruno reconstituted Notari's work and produced an insightful analysis of her place in and contributions to the history of cinema. —Tom Trusky, James Castle: His Life & Art

Streets ahead

My piece on Harry Mathews begins:

On June 19, 1997—a few weeks shy of my 27th birthday, and fifteen years nearly to the day that I am writing these words—I stopped by Book Ark, a used bookshop three steps below ground level on West 83rd Street in Manhattan, and bought my first Harry Mathews. 

It should be noted that Book Ark was on West 81st, not West 83rd!

The first footnote in the piece runs:

Or was I indeed already living in the tiny studio on West 81st, putting me within two blocks of my goal?

But I was living on West 83rd, not 81st! What does it mean that I mixed up the streets?