"So, who was John Garlic?"

“He was this big guy,” she said, “like 6 foot 2 inches tall, dark curly hair, couple hundred pounds. A former Marine. A super intelligent, super entertaining man. My brother used to say, ‘When John Garlic enters a room, you know you’re going to have fun.’ ”

And he was Greek?

“No, no,” she said. “He was Jewish.”

As we digest the fact that the Father of the American Gyro was Jewish, we ask the obvious next question: Where did he get the idea?

“From me,” Ms. Garlic said. “One afternoon, I was watching ‘What’s My Line?’ and there was a Greek restaurant owner on the show, and he did this demonstration, carving meat off a gyro. I immediately called an operator and asked for the number of a Greek restaurant in New York. The owner I got on the phone said, ‘Go to Chicago, there’s a huge Greek community.’ ” At the time, Mr. Garlic was a Cadillac salesman, in his late 30s, but he quickly saw his future in gyro cones. After finding a Chicago chef willing to share a recipe, the couple rented space in a sausage plant and cranked out history’s first assembly-line gyro cones. They were a hit.

—NYT

"Words make my mouth exercise"

The seventh word

TREADING THE SOIL OF THE MOON PALPATING ITS PEBBLES TASTING THE PANIC AND SPLENDOR OF THE EVENT FEELING IN THE PIT OF ONES STOMACH THE SEPARATION FROM TERRA THESE FORM THE MOST ROMANTIC SENSATION AN EXPLORER HAS EVER KNOWN

—Answer cabled (7/3/69) by Nabokov for publication in the NYT; published "with a disastrous misprint in the seventh word" (published in Strong Opinions)

Destroyer

At Bookforum, fellow Dullblogger Devin McKinney reviews the curiously titled How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll:

The history of pop music is varied enough to generate many conflicting narratives, each with its own supporting data—chart placements, contextual quotes, etc. As Wald writes, “There are no definitive histories because the past keeps looking different as the present changes.” More important than Wald’s data, which are solidly documented, is his failure to charge this chronicle with attitude, drama, and vivid language. Such things matter in a book like this: Revisionist history, if it means to topple shrines and blast platitudes, shouldn’t sound as potted and prosaic as that which it would subvert. Alternative history needs an alternative vision, a third eye to spot miracles on the peripheries. Wald has that eye. What he lacks, or represses, is a style alive with the momentum of change, the juice of rhetoric, or the melancholy of loss. So what if the Beatles destroyed rock ’n’ roll? Wald never gets angry about it. He never even seems sad. I want an alternative.

Designing dogs

Legend has it that Mr. Wheeler’s dog unwittingly did some of the designing. The shape of the Chimaera was said to be based on the results when Mr. Wheeler’s dog bit off part of the front of a foam model. —NYT

Invisible Library goes invisible...

The London exhibit has closed...fortunately, Jenny D was there and has some more details for us. She was especially captivated by the novels of Dorothy Sayers' creation, Harriet Vane:

Dons the rubber suit

Paul Collins in Slate:

Creaky as his apparatus now looks, [Wycliffe] Hill was onto something: Other plot wizards followed, including Plotto, the insanely complex 1928 creation of pulp novelist William Wallace Cook. (His pseudonymous memoir isn't titled The Fiction Factory for nothing: Cook once bashed out 54 "nickel novels" in a single year.) Rare and comically user-unfriendly, Plotto required its own accompanying instruction booklet—which, invariably lost or disintegrated in the intervening eight decades, leaves modern discoverers of the unaccompanied volume bewildered. Plotto resembles a thesaurus filled with cryptic codings and narrative fragments:

1367

(b) (1083) (1287)

A has invented a life preserver for the use of shipwrecked persons * A, in order to prove the value of the life preserver he has invented, dons the rubber suit, inflates it and secretly, by night, drops overboard from a steamer on the high seas ** (1414b) (1419b)

…

1373

(1027) (1418a; 1433b)

A sells his shadow for an inexhaustible purse (1354a) (1357)

Invisible Library ends soon!

As in, July 12!

¡Mañana!

At the Ink Illustration site, I was happy to see details of many of the covers, only a few of which I've glimpsed (and even then only in miniature) on the Ink blog.

I was especially thrilled to see this:



Yes, it's the cover for Hans de Krap's Mexican Fruitcake! Only die-hard Parkians (i.e., ME) know that it's the novel that's being Englished in my short story "A Note to My Translator," which appeared in the anthology Virgin Fiction. I like the illo's dia de los muertos (sp?) vibe; what it has to do with fruitcake remains a delicious, semi-edible mystery...

"A daisy, a fairy, a nonce, a pansy, a swish"

The Limster on Brüno (in Slate).

Tender pixels

Here's Kiwa's full report on the Invisible Library at Tenderpixel Gallery in bookish Cecil Court. (Londoners, exhibit closes on July 12—step to it!) Excerpt:

One Chinese visitor had scrawled a page-full in the book Who is This God Person, Anyway? by Oolon Colluphid, a book alluded to in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, itself a book named after a book that doesn’t really exist....

"Thriller"—Philippines detention center version

(Begin at 4:15.)

Holy mole

I had never subscribed to any religion, but it turned out this god was inhabiting a mole on my left shoulder that I'd always been worried about but hadn't quite gotten around to removing.
—"My Initiation," Lincoln Michel (in L Magazine)

Where I'm calling from

Photo by Monica Teng

The Dare

Globe-trotting Kiwa checked out the Biennale...then snapped some photos of the Invisible Library in its London incarnation!

Visible are works by J.G. Quiggin (Unburnt Boats), Gordon Zellaby (While We Last), Sebastian Knight (Lost Property), and Evan Elliott (The Last Lost Chance), Nicolas (sic) Jenkins (Silent Summer), and others.

The bit between my teeth

Parkian verbiage oozing out into the webosphere..........

At the Poetry Foundation, I look at Silver Jews mastermind/Actual Air poet David Berman's book of drawings, The Portable February.........the piece features a slideshow....



And back in May—remember May? I don't—I pondered Edward Gorey's unproduced screenplay, The Black Doll, for Moving Image Source. (More of me on Gorey here.)......"The Freud Notebook" is in the current issue of Post Road (#17)......

Coming soon: READ HARD (Blvr anthology)[UPDATE: Available now!]—


—and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Exilée and Temps Morts (for which I wrote an essay).................

* * *

Also: the Believer music issue is out, about which more soon—but for now check out Joe Hagan's "The Ballad of Benji Hughes"; the site features two B.H. tracks that I think you'll like....one has the great title "I Went with Some Friends to See the Flaming Lips."

Who dubbed Sarah Palin what?

1) Sarah Barracuda
2) Caribou Barbie


a) Gail Collins
b) Maureen Dowd



-------------------
Answers: 1a; 2b

Londoners! Invisible Library to disappear soon...

Some nice pics of people scribbling in the Invisible Library are up at Londonist. And here's what the site has to say:

Sometimes we hear of an idea that's so brilliantly simple, we wonder why nobody's tried it before. And so it is with the Invisible Library exhibition at Tenderpixel on Cecil Court. The illustration collective INK have chosen 40 books that don't exist in the real world - only within the pages of other, real-world books - and brought them to life by illustrating their covers.

But it doesn't stop there. These books are unwritten, apart from the opening or closing pages, and you're invited to go in and add to their stories. The exhibition's already been running for several weeks so if your creative juices aren't running, you can always read what others have done (we recommend taking a look at Oolon Colluphid's "Who is This God Person, Anyway?", part of which has been filled in by someone who's clearly never read any Douglas Adams). Other fake works come from Roberto Bolano, John Wyndham and Vladimir Nabokov.

Invisible Library runs until 11 July at Tendepixel, 10 Cecil Court WC2N. Gallery open Tuesday-Saturday 10.30am-7pm. For more information, visit Tenderpixel or INK Illustration's websites.

Net gains

“Crabs don’t take holidays,” Mr. Jeong scoffed.
—"Jobless Koreans Turn to Manual Labor," NYT

Vacation settings

(More amazing Jing-work here.)

Ghost world

'Do you believe in ghosts?' asked Mr Mulliner abruptly.

I weighed the question thoughtfully. I was a little surprised, for nothing in our previous conversation had suggested the topic.

'Well,' I replied, 'I don't like them, if that's what you mean. I was once butted by one as a child.'

'Ghosts. Not goats.'

'Oh, ghosts? Do I believe in ghosts?'

'Exactly.'

—P.G. Wodehouse, 'Honeysuckle Cottage'