Zugenia's Procrastination Salon

1. Atlas Sound - Walkabout
2. Cream - Anyone for Tennis
3. The Cats and the Fiddle - Killin' Jive
4. Wire - Champs
5. Psapp - Dad's Breakdown
6. The Beach Boys - I Just Wasn't Made for These Times
7. Palace Brothers - I Am a Cinematographer
8. Doris Troy - Just One Look
9. Beck - Today Has Been a Fucked Up Day
10. Altered Images - I Could Be Happy
11. The Moldy Peaches - Who's Got the Crack
12. Powder - Snap, Crackle, Pop
13. The Three O'Clock - Fall to the Ground
14. Yonlu - Katie Don't Be Depressed
15. The Walkmen - Lost in Boston
16. Sam Roberts - The Canadian Dream
17. Lady & Bird - Suicide Is Painless
18. Elliott Smith - Wouldn't Mama Be Proud
19. Louis Jordan - Junco Partner
20. Charlie Rich - The Most Beautiful Girl
21. Sufjan Stevens - We Won't Need Legs to Stand
22. Bo Diddly - I'm High Again
23. The Smiths - That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore
24. Doris Duke - Let Love Touch Us Now
25. Bob Dylan - Talking World War III Blues

Download INFINITE JEST: THE MIXTAPE

See also Love in XXXess and Swann in Love

The latest installment of the Literature As Mixtape series is inspired by Eliza Haywood's steamy 1719–20 serial Love in Excess, which you should read if you have not. But first, listen.


Track list:
1. Scout Niblett -- Too Much Love To Do
2. Bananarama -- Move in My Direction
3. Otis Rush -- Violent Love
4. Barbara Lynn -- I Don't Want a Playboy
5. Stevie Wonder -- Part-Time Lover
6. Buddy & Julie Miller -- You Make My Heart Beat Too Fast
7. Ann Peebles -- (I Feel Like) Breaking Up Someone's Home
8. The Toppers -- (I Love to Play Your Piano) Let Me Bang Your Box
9. The Donnas -- Get Rid of that Girl
10. Björk -- Big Time Sensuality
11. Al Green -- One Nite Stand
12. Richard Hell & The Voidoids -- Love Comes in Spurts
13. Prince -- Peach
14. All Girl Summer Fun Band -- Oh No
15. The Boswell Sisters -- Was That the Human Thing to Do
16. Percy Sledge -- You Really Got a Hold on Me
17. The Blow -- Long List of Girls
18. Blondie -- Heart of Glass
19. Little Eva -- The Trouble With Boys
20. Larry Williams -- Make a Little Love
21. Suzi Quatro -- Four Letter Words
22. Saint Etienne -- Only Love Can Break Your Heart
23. David Bowie -- Fill Your Heart

Download LOVE IN XXXESS: THE MIXTAPE


See also Swann in Love

At some point in the past few days, I realized that the review I'd planned to write of Swann's Way had gone from marinating to disintegrating. I'm not saying that I'll never write it, but I'm in the middle of writing a chapter and I can't take the time right now to do it justice. So I did what any self-respecting literary scholar would do instead, and made Swann a mixtape.






Download SWANN IN LOVE: THE MIXTAPE

If you say "moncynnæs uard" out loud (hard "c"), you can hear that it means "keeper of mankind"—or the "middungeard" (soft "g" like "y"), middle-ground, or Earth, the place that God made to keep man. This all from "Cædmon's Hymn," the 7th-century poem considered the first recorded poem in English (in this case, a Northumbrian dialect of Anglo-Saxon):

Nu scylun hergan hefaenricaes uard
metudæs maecti end his modgidanc
uerc uuldurfadur sue he uundra gihuaes
eci dryctin or astelidæ
he aerist scop aelda barnum
heben til hrofe haleg scepen.
tha middungeard moncynnæs uard
eci dryctin æfter tiadæ
firum foldu frea allmectig

My 11th-grade English teacher, Mrs. Hodgman—the same woman who taught us always to staple papers diagonally so that the paper doesn't tear when you flip the page, advice I follow religiously to this day—came to class for weeks carrying a portable record player on which she would play a recording of "Cædmon's Hymn" several times at the beginning of each class until each and every student had it permanently emblazoned in his or her memory. I know it to this day. I recited it at Nightbird Books to get a 5% discount on my purchase during National Poetry Month. And I woke up with it playing on a loop my head at 5:30 this morning.

There's an audio recording at the Norton Anthology website (follow link, scroll down to #2) that sounds remarkably like the recording Mrs. Hodgman used to play us. Maybe it's the same one. In any case, I highly recommend subjecting yourself to this exercise of memorizing—really, fast hard memorizing—a poem in a foreign form of English. First of all, as Mrs. Hodgman told us from the beginning, if you force yourself to hear the words, you will hear the English in Anglo-Saxon, and it is really cool when the lines begin to release their meaning to modern ears. Secondly, there is no greater comfort to someone (like me) constantly worried about her ability to retain information in this, the Google Age, within the hard drive of her own brain, than to be able to call up nine lines of Early English poetry at any time. In fact, I have decided to spend more time memorizing poetry just because I can, so you can expect more posts along these lines.

The text of the poem above is from the University of Toronto's Representative Poetry Online—follow the link for more information on Cædmon and his Hymn, as well as a modern English translation, though I seriously recommend listening to the recording linked above several times before you translate.

For it is Edwin's achievement to have discovered Beauty not in the merely commonplace, not in the merely ugly, not in the merely malodorous and disgusting, but in the lowest of the low, in the vilest of the vile: in the trivial, in the trite, in the repellently cute. And if, with Edwin's permission, I may briefly leave the narrow bounds of the personal for the free fields of the socially significant, I think it is permissible to say that in his immortal masterpiece the false images that feed our American dreams—the technicolor and stardust through which America, poor savage inarticulate giant, expresses her soul—are in a manner purified, are used seriously in a serious work of art but without losing their gimcrack quality, so that every syllable (written in blood, gentlemen, in blood) seems to plead to be taken as a joke only. It is as if Edwin wanted you to discover, as the hidden intention of his book, the cute grin of a cartoon cherub—whereas that grin is itself the mask, beneath which lies a grimace of earnestness. For it was Edwin's peculiar vanity to wish to seem not quite serious.

- Steven Millhauser, Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954, by Jeffrey Cartwright

Does Olaudah Equiano look familiar?




Yes, friends. That's because he is Jay-Z.



Buy the book here!

John Warner on Netherland, which lost in round 1 of The Tournament of Books:

Netherland is essentially porn for hyper-literate New Yorkers, i.e., the sort of people who review books for the New York Times.

Joseph O'Neill lost to Louis de Bernieres's A Partisan's Daughter, which surprises me even though I haven't read the latter.  I guess Warner knows why.

I wish I could take some kind of credit for the brilliance that is Use Your Allusion, since the creator technically was a student of mine last fall, but it's pretty obvious that she was a sparkly genius before I ever got my intellectual hooks in her. For the past few weeks, she's been turning out these collage summaries of literary classics (constructed at Blingee—seriously) at an alarming rate, and I can't look away. Some of my favorites:

Does your worship want me to flay my bum?

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

I am sick as a horse

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne

She is tolerable; but not handsome enough to tempt me

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

That's what they mean by the love that passeth understanding

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

The sunshine does not love you

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

I promise that you have nothing better to do today than go check out the entire collection (so far).

Today, it's because she understands humor the same way I do. If you haven't yet read her wonderful piece from The New Yorker on comedy and death, you must.

In birth, two people go into a room and three come out. In death, one person goes in and none come out. This is a cosmic joke told by Martin Amis. I like the metaphysical absurdity it draws out of the death event, the sense that death doesn’t happen at all—that it is, in fact, the opposite of a happening. There are philosophers who take this joke seriously. To their way of thinking, the only option in the face of death—in facing death’s absurd non-face—is to laugh. This is not the bold, humorless laugh of the triumphant atheist, who conquers what he calls death and his own fear of it. No: this is more unhinged. It comes from the powerless, despairing realization that death cannot be conquered, defied, contemplated, or even approached, because it’s not there; it’s only a word, signifying nothing. It’s a truly funny laugh, of the laugh or-you’ll-cry variety. There is “plenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope—but not for us!” This is a cosmic joke told by Franz Kafka, a wisecrack projected into a void. When I first put the partial cremains of my father in a Tupperware sandwich box and placed it on my writing desk, that was the joke I felt like telling.

What is it about pristine prose that leaves me a little cold? This morning around 5am, I finished The In-Between World of Vikram Lall by M.G. Vassanji. Let me say from the start that Vassanji is obviously an important writer; I intend to read his other novels soon, and Vikram Lall is both historically provocative and beautifully written. Lall, the middle-aged narrator, tells his life story from self-imposed exile in Ontario. He is a third-generation Indian African, born and raised in Kenya; his grandfather labored on the railway system that connected those branches of the British Empire, and Lall comes of age as that empire crumbles, leaving him and the Asian populations of Africa in the tenuous, "in-between world" of the title. Unlike many of their fellow postcolonial subjects, Lall's family remain in Africa as Kenyan citizens instead of fleeing to Great Britain or India, both mythological homelands. As a young man, Lall carves out a life for himself in the unstable and corrupt spaces at the margins of the newly sovereign nation; his story is that of a disavowed citizen, a remnant of a cast-off empire who can lay claim neither to bygone colonial power nor postcolonial national enfranchisement. By the novel's end, it is clear that Lall represents an entire population for whom the "homeland" is split asunder—India and England are mere ideas, represented by postcards from friends and family lore, while Africa is real, visceral, familiar, but will only recognize its Indian children as national embarrassments.

Reading Vassanji's prose reminded me of my past reactions to Chang-Rae Lee, another contemporary literary power. Both write beautifully—and, perhaps more importantly, coherently—about the conditions of fragmentation and alienation that are hallmarks of modern global subjectivity. And both leave me feeling at once impressed and suspicious. In the case of Vassanji's Vikram Lall, I kept wondering how someone so displaced could narrate his life with such pristine authority. This is a version of the problem Zadie Smith discusses in her recent review of Joseph O'Neill's Netherland, of which she writes, "it seems perfectly done—in a sense that's the problem. It's so precisely the image of what we have been taught to value in fiction that it throws that image into a kind of existential crisis, as the photograph gifts a nervous breakdown to the painted portrait." The whole point of Lall's story—of his existence—is that is falls in between the categories on which we rely to structure our understanding of the world, its nations, its peoples. World history does not account for him or his experience. So how is he able to represent himself in such pitch-perfect novelistic realism?

The real question here (it's not exactly a critique, or if it is, it's an academic one) is whether this is a novel that understands literary realism as part of a hegemonic cultural regime—in this case, the very British imperialism whose fissures produce Vikram Lall in the first place. I don't mean to suggest that this would be a better, or more authentic, novel if it were more formally traumatized, in the vein of, say, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee. I just wonder to what extent Vikram Lall's pristine representation of the mess that is human history is aware of how it uses fiction as a refuge, a place where the unrepresented find perfect representation, where the world's in-betweens achieve full, uncompromised authority. In the course of discovering that the world has no place for him, Vikram Lall unhesitantly claims the realm of the novel as his sovereign domain; from sentence one, it is clear that in these pages, he is at home.

I didn't plan to talk about David Foster Wallace in class this week, but today I taught Swift's Tale of a Tub and found myself suggesting that the Swiftian literary "ruse" laid the groundwork for a whole body of brilliant literary work, including novels like Infinite Jest, that approach meaning paradoxically by spinning away from the places we presume it to be.

The NYTimes obituary in its entirety:

David Foster Wallace, whose prodigiously observant, exuberantly plotted, grammatically and etymologically challenging, philosophically probing and culturally hyper-contemporary novels, stories and essays made him an heir to modern virtuosos like Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, an experimental contemporary of William T. Vollmann, Mark Leyner and Nicholson Baker and a clear influence on younger tour-de-force stylists like Dave Eggers and Jonathan Safran Foer, died on Friday at his home in Claremont, Calif. He was 46.

Mr. Wallace was an apparent suicide. A spokeswoman for the Claremont police said Mr. Wallace’s wife, Karen Green, returned home to find that her husband had hanged himself. Mr. Wallace’s father, James Donald Wallace, said in an interview on Sunday that his son had been severely depressed for a number of months.

A versatile writer of seemingly bottomless energy, Mr. Wallace was a maximalist, exhibiting in his work a huge, even manic curiosity — about the physical world, about the much larger universe of human feelings and about the complexity of living in America at the end of the 20th century. He wrote long books, complete with reflective and often hilariously self-conscious footnotes, and he wrote long sentences, with the playfulness of a master punctuater and the inventiveness of a genius grammarian. Critics often noted that he was not only an experimenter and a showoff, but also a God-fearing moralist with a fierce honesty in confronting the existence of contradiction.

“David Foster Wallace can do practically anything if he puts his mind to it,” Michiko Kakutani, chief book critic of The New York Times, who was not a consistent praiser of Mr. Wallace’s work, wrote in 2006. “He can do sad, funny, silly, heartbreaking and absurd with equal ease; he can even do them all at once.”

Mr. Wallace, who had taught creative writing at Pomona College in Southern California since 2001 and before that had taught at Illinois State University, came to prominence in 1986 with a broadly comic first novel, “The Broom of the System” (Viking), published when he was just 24. It used the narrative frame of a young woman’s search for identity to draw a loopy portrait of America on a comic and dangerous spiral into the Disneyesque confusion of reality and artifice.

Mr. Wallace was best known for his mammoth 1996 novel, “Infinite Jest” (Little, Brown), a 1,079-page monster that perceives American society as self-obsessed, pleasure-obsessed and entertainment-obsessed. (The president, Johnny Gentle, is a former singer.) The title refers to an elusive film that terrorists are trying to get their hands on because to watch it is to be debilitated, even killed, or so it’s said, by enjoyment. The main characters are a stressed-out tennis prodigy and a former thief and drug addict, and they give rise to harrowing passages about panic attacks and detox freak-outs. The book attracted a cult of fans (and critics too) for its subversive writing, which was by turns hallucinogenically stream of consciousness, jubilantly anecdotal, winkingly sardonic and self-consciously literary. The following year Mr. Wallace received a MacArthur Foundation grant, the so-called genius award.

In contrast to the lively spirit of his writing, Mr. Wallace was a temperamentally unassuming man, long-haired, unhappy in front of a camera, consumed with his work and its worth, perpetually at odds with himself. Journalists who interviewed him invariably commented on his discomfort with celebrity and his self-questioning. And those who knew him best concurred that Mr. Wallace was a titanically gifted writer with an equally troubled soul.

“He was a huge talent, our strongest rhetorical writer,” Jonathan Franzen, a friend of Mr. Wallace and the author of “The Corrections,” said in an interview on Sunday, adding later, “He was also as sweet a person as I’ve ever known and as tormented a person as I’ve ever known.”

Mr. Wallace was born in Ithaca, N.Y., where his father was a graduate student in philosophy. When David was 6 months old, his father got a job at the University of Illinois, and the family moved to Champaign, Ill., where David became a locally prominent junior tennis player. At Amherst College, he studied philosophy and English, graduating summa cum laude in 1985. It was also at Amherst, said his mother, Sally Foster Wallace, an English teacher who specialized in grammar, that he began to write. One of his two senior theses became “The Broom of the System”; the other was about Aristotle and whether statements about the future can be true.

Mr. Wallace received a master’s degree in fine arts from the University of Arizona in 1987 and began sending out his short stories, many of them collected in the volumes “Girl With Curious Hair,” “Brief Interviews With Hideous Men” and “Oblivion.” He also wrote essays and reported pieces on an astonishing array of topics, from lobsters to Roger Federer, the pornography industry to John McCain, collected in several volumes, the latest being “Consider the Lobster and Other Essays” (Little, Brown, 2006).

In addition to his wife, whom he married in 2004, and his parents, who live in Urbana, Ill., Mr. Wallace is survived by a sister, Amy Wallace Havens of Tucson.

His father said Sunday that Mr. Wallace had been taking medication for depression for 20 years and that it had allowed his son to be productive. It was something the writer didn’t discuss, though in interviews he gave a hint of his haunting angst.

In response to a question about what being an American was like for him at the end of the 20th century, he told the online magazine Salon in 1996 that there was something sad about it, but not as a reaction to the news or current events. “It’s more like a stomach-level sadness,” he said. “I see it in myself and my friends in different ways. It manifests itself as a kind of lostness.”

James Wallace said that last year his son had begun suffering side effects from the drugs and, at a doctor’s suggestion, had gone off the medication in June 2007. The depression returned, however, and no other treatment was successful. The elder Wallaces had seen their son in August, he said.

“He was being very heavily medicated,” he said. “He’d been in the hospital a couple of times over the summer and had undergone electro-convulsive therapy. Everything had been tried, and he just couldn’t stand it anymore.”

Ginger Spice retires from music to focus on authoring children's books featuring character named after ME.

And that's really all I have to say about that.

Ali Smith's Guardian piece on Carson McCullers confirms McCullers as one of My Very Favorite Writers Whose Books I've Never Read.

"Carson burdened everybody who got close to her," Lillian Hellman said. "She was vain, querulous and a genius," Vidal said. But there are very few literary figures who could have two figures such as Marilyn Monroe and the Danish writer Isak Dinesen over for lunch, as she did in 1959, sparking rumours of how well the unlikely pair danced together, and how well she'd danced on the table herself.

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is going to the top of my reading list; I'll get to it as soon as I finish The Golden Notebook.

Because I often wish I were Jenny Davidson, I'm copying her citation of the Times' piece on Oliver Sacks and its delightful photo of its subject:



Oliver Sacks is so invited to my imaginary dinner party. Jenny Davidson, too—though I have hopes of having real dinner with her some day.

This Valentine's Day, I don't think I, or anyone, can say it better than the little girl who authored Love Is Embarrassing.

Last night I couldn't sleep so I read books and listened to the amazing thunderstorms that hit around 3 am. The last few days had been sunny and inappropriately warm, but today is cold, damp, and steel gray through and through. Just as everything is at least twice as difficult with this stupid cast on my arm, my mood swings and insomnia seem to be exaggerated as well. Last night I was awake awake awake. Today the weather has got me down down down. I can't concentrate on anything and I'm bored bored bored.

But since I have been doing some extracurricular reading in my extra waking hours, here are some book reviews.

Haruki Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase

Murakami, like other Japanese fiction writers, dwells on the minutiae of mundane human life until it begins to give up its metaphysical secrets—revelations about our tenuous grasp on our own existence that rise out of boredom and daily repetition, and a blurring of life and death that settles into normality like vague, perpetual drunkenness. Not as complex as come of his later narratives, but uses the skeleton of a detective story to send its protagonist out on a search for something only vaguely defined—which turns out to be the limit of what a person can understand without really trying.

Haruki Murakami, After Dark

Of all the Murakami novels I’ve read, this one is the most deliberately cinematic. The narrator reminds us periodically that we are a mere “point-of-view” moving through different scenes, observing objects from specific angles, and each character study in this slim account of several individuals’ movements through one night between the hours of 11:56 pm and 6:52 am focuses on the problem of how much you can know a person by observing him or her in this cinematic framework. What can possibly be going through the mind of a businessman in the office between the hours of 2 and 4 am who has just severely beat a young prostitute in a “love motel” a few blocks away? What does a self-absorbed, pill-addicted young model think about when isolated from the rest of the world? The novel makes no attempt to answer such questions, but makes surreal spectacles of these subjects’ inscrutability; the result is a study of human character absent of the explanatory narratives of psychology, which makes the idea of human depth strange, mysterious, and appropriately dark. So why entitle it “After Dark”? As the spare, tense prose moves toward the first hints of sunrise, it gradually reveals that each human subject is, like any cinematic object, a play of light and dark—or, rather, of dark and light. After the darkness of subjectivity has been established—the inscrutable, inexplicable, and invisible—the glimmers of light that animate the individual and make him or her perceptible to others come through that much more brilliantly.

Laurie Halse Anderson, Twisted

Laurie Halse Anderson nails the voice of a withdrawn suburban teenager yet again, this time a young man on the cusp of eighteen struggling to acclimate himself to his newly adult body, perspective, and social responsibilities. High school in Anderson's books is such fresh hell it's painful to read, but, as with her earlier novel Speak, I couldn't put this one down.

My grades are all in. My social obligations are all met.

I'm going to spend today reading Achewood from the very beginning.

Every time Shelley Jackson creates something, I wonder whether This Is The Coolest Thing Ever. And it usually is. You need only cruise through her website, Ineradicable Stain, to confirm that what I say is true. Her most recent novel, Half Life, delights in various states of in-betweenness, particularly enjoying its own ambivalence as a story both pre- and post-modern in its sensibilities, and therefore neither. This is not to say that it is thus “modern” by default, but that it perplexes the unities that make things pre- or post-, now or then, here or there—and, importantly, it does so while being narratively compelling, not just clever.

I only just discovered (due to a timely tip-off) another of her projects, the Interstitial Library, which pursues the same mind-bending relationship between the written text and the everywhere-and-nowhere. The Interstitial Librarians write:

The Interstitial Library's Circulating Collection was founded in 2004 by Head Librarians Christine Hill and Shelley Jackson to serve those members of the public unable to visit The Interstitial Library's permanent collection, located in the labyrinthine corridors of the Interstitial States of America (also known as the Dewey States).

The Interstitial Library's Circulating Collection is located at no fixed site. Its vast holdings are dispersed throughout private collections, used bookstores, other libraries, thrift stores, garbage dumps, attics, garages, hollow trees, sunken ships, the bottom desk-drawers of writers, the imaginations of non-writers, the pages of other books, the possible future, and the inaccessible past.

In a sense, this library has always existed. However, until now it has had no librarians, no catalog, and no name.

The Interstitial Library does not aspire to completeness. Indeed, we champion the incomplete, temporary, provisional, circulating and, of course, interstitial. Above all, we aim to acquire and catalogue those books that are themselves interstitial: that fall between obvious subject categories; that are notable for qualities seldom recognized by traditional institutions; that no longer exist, do not yet exist, or are entirely imaginary.

Yes, it is clever, but it’s thrilling too. Jackson is clearly an author who understands writing as more than a profession, a market, or a mouthpiece—writing is, for her, a living if not sentient creature that shapes the world, fills it, without ever fully manifesting itself within it, or as part of it.

(Crossposted to A Confused Aggregate of Rays.)

Is the week after Thanksgiving maybe the saddest week of the entire year? Points of evidence:

1. If you've left Fayetteville for the holiday and now returned, you find the temperature has fallen a solid 30 degrees in your absence and the leaves, too, have dropped for good.

2. If you've taken a full week off to go to New York for the holiday, you've given yourself a little taste of vacation time only to discover that the semester has not, in fact, ended.

3. Most importantly, it's now a full year until the next Thanksgiving dinner.

Richard Prince's scary nurses!

Anyway, I'm back in the AR after a fantastic week with Derek and the family in the NYC. D and I caught Lamorisse's The Red Balloon (1956) and White Mane (1953) at Film Forum and Eagle Pennell's The Whole Shootin' Match (1979) at Walter Reade; we saw a spiral of Richard Prince pieces at the Guggenheim and roomfuls of portraits at the Frick Collection; we strolled through the rainforest at the Central Park Zoo and cruised The Strand; we ate Cantonese noodles and Koronets pizza and drank Turkish wine and caipirinhas and tasted the best trendy vegetarian cuisine since Zen Palate...

Yummy heritage turkeys!

... and that was all when we weren't partaking of my dad's special Thanksgiving heritage turkey and, leading up to it, a series of Kitchen Support Vodka Shots.



I think I'm returning to New York next month to catch sillygirl84 on her brief visit home from London, but before then I need to finish the semester, get an article manuscript out, and get D completely moved in. I'm also going to start writing book reviews again, but not until the next post; for now I'll just say that I'm reading Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and I love it. You can read the Wall Street Journal's interview with this M.I.A. sensation here—recommended to any other readers out there who've been waiting for his reappearance since 1996's Drown.

I have work to do, so I really shouldn't be here. Especially considering that I already spent some time this morning creating a new blog:

Is It Racist?

I couldn't help myself. Now collecting submissions.

But I also wanted to share the good news: according to New York Magazine's Vulture blog, the screenplay for Where the Wild Things Are adapted by Dave Eggers and Spike Jonze looks AWESOME. Yay!

The results of Wednesday's poll suggest that many of you are engaged in an evil conspiracy to get me in shape through the torture known as "exercise." At least now I know.

It's Friday and I'm not sure how I feel about Minus the Bear.

But I do know how I feel about the new biography of Joan Collins, reviewed by Jan Moir in the Telegraph. I feel, very deeply, that I must read it. I believe my fascination with Ms. Collins is fairly well documented among these pages, so this should come as no surprise. But even if I weren't already mildly obsessed with the green-eyed force of nature, the Telegraph's review would have sold me. Did you know, for example, that

During her first assault on Hollywood, Collins slept with so many men that she was known as the British Open. In later years, she would grandly claim that she was a proto-feminist exploring her sexuality and using her power to bewitch as leverage to get ahead in a man's world.

Others saw it differently. 'Joan's had more hands up her than the Muppets', was how one actress deftly put it.

And that

During the late 1950s and early 1960s, when she was living in Los Angeles and trying to make it in films, she was at her sexual peak, thirsting for young men like a vampire thirsts for blood.

Driving a pink Thunderbird – no, that's not a euphemism – she roared around Hollywood in chinchilla stoles and emerald bracelets and was rarely without a lover. 'It doesn't count on location', she remarked, of various saucy infidelities.

And that

Collins cheated on [cheating lover George Englund, apparently the great love of her life] with the son of a Dominican Republic dictator, who bought her a diamond necklace.

Her lover was furious, but Joan placated him by secretly buying a cheap copy of the necklace and flinging it into the Pacific on a romantic beach stroll to prove to George how much she loved him.

And that, according to Barry Cryer,

he was once commissioned to write a monologue for her one woman show, but claiming that she had been too nervous to remember half of his jokes, Collins only paid him half of his fee.

This stuff is simply too awesome. If I ever had any thought of doing something respectable with my weekend (which, let's be honest, is unlikely), such thoughts have been roundly spanked into submission by the prospect of spending the weekend with Joan.

A few years ago, I reread Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, and—at the risk of sounding like an asshole—I found that it didn't hold up as well as many of my childhood favorites. But the fact that I've become a fussy adult doesn't diminish the impact the Time Quartet had on me as a kid. And it must be said that, even in the rereading, the IT is sublimely creepy, and Aunt Beast remains one of my favorite literary characters of all time.

L'Engle passed away yesterday at the age of 88. From the NYTimes obit:

The “St. James Guide to Children’s Writers” called Ms. L’Engle “one of the truly important writers of juvenile fiction in recent decades.” Such accolades did not come from pulling punches: “Wrinkle” is one of the most banned books because of its treatment of the deity.

“It was a dark and stormy night,” it begins, repeating the line of a 19th- century novelist Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, and presaging the immortal sentence that Snoopy, the inspiration-challenged beagle of the Peanuts cartoon, would type again and again. After the opening, “Wrinkle,” quite literally, takes off. Meg Murray, with help from her psychic baby brother, uses time travel and extrasensory perception to rescue her father, a gifted scientist, from a planet controlled by the Dark Thing. She does so through the power of love.

The book used concepts that Ms. L’Engle said she had plucked from Einstein’s theory of relativity and Planck’s quantum theory, almost flaunting her frequent assertion that children’s literature is literature too difficult for adults to understand. She also characterized the book as her refutation of ideas of German theologians.

I love ballsy YA authors and ballsy old ladies, and Lady L'Engle seems to have been both. I think I'll go back and reread the rest of the Time series in her honor.

The Scooter has moved on to that big Yankee Stadium in the sky. (Not the one I wrote about in terza rima for an 11th-grade English assignment inspired by Dante's Inferno, in which George Steinbrenner is condemned to an eternal home game in which the Yankees flub every possible play—under the management of the then-recently-late Billy Martin—and George is perpetually prevented from firing anyone by the divine intervention of baseballs that fly out of nowhere and down his throat every time he opens his mouth. No, I'm certain Phil is chillin' at the game further upstairs.) From the NYTimes obit:

Phil Rizzuto, the sure-handed Hall of Fame Yankees shortstop nicknamed The Scooter, who punctuated his extended Yankee life as a broadcaster with birthday wishes to nuns and exclamations of “Holy cow!” died today. He was 89.

...

He was a 5-foot-6-inch, 150-pound sparkplug who did the little things right, from turning the pivot on a double play to laying down a perfect sacrifice bunt. He left the slugging to powerful teammates like Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, Tommy Henrich, Charlie Keller and Yogi Berra.

“I hustled and got on base and made the double play,” he said of his role. “That’s all the Yankees needed in those days.”

His career statistics were not spectacular: a batting average of .273, 38 home runs and 562 runs batted in. But in his best season, 1950, when he hit a career-high .324 and drove in 66 runs, he won the American League’s Most Valuable Player award.

Rizzuto was frequently compared with other shortstops of his era, among them Pee Wee Reese of the Brooklyn Dodgers and Marty Marion of the St. Louis Cardinals. But to DiMaggio, his teammate for eight seasons — each man lost three seasons to military service during World War II — Rizzuto was the best.

“The little guy in front of me,” said DiMaggio, one of the game’s great centerfielders. “He made my job easy. I didn’t have to pick up so many ground balls.”

Though he may have been the "little guy" on the field, Rizzuto towered over other commentators in the great game of Divergent Baseball Announcement. Quoth the NYT: “Rizzuto’s ramblings and pro-Yankee sentiments maddened detractors, who felt he paid too little attention to the game. But fans adored Rizzuto as they would a delightful uncle, and colleagues were fond of recalling his scorecard notation of 'W.W.,' for 'Wasn’t Watching.'”

If you've never read O Holy Cow!, a collection of found poems based on Rizzuto's broadcasts, now would be the moment to do so. A sample (courtesy of the Comic Baseball Association, which has considerately posted a few of the pieces online so I don't have to run home and dig out my copy of the book and come back and transcribe—they've got more over there, so pay a visit):

Chess

I.

A lot of money in that chess.
I'll tell you that.
It's gotta be..
Can't be...
Not a good game for television.


II.

I'm not knocking it.
But it's not a spectator sport.


[September 4, 1992
Texas at New York
Rich Monteleone pitching to Rafael Palmeiro
Seventh inning, no outs, bases empty
Yankees lead 6-3]

Hall and Nokes

So second time around
Mel Hall and Matt Nokes
Solve Tapani's pitch
Heh Heh
That's right
John Moore's on the ball.
It does sound like a good rock group.
Hall and Nokes.
Oh?
Hall and Oates?
Oh yeah?
That's one I missed.
I'll have to go out
And buy some of their records tonight.

[June 11, 1991
New York at Minnesota
Kevin Tapani pitching to Alvaro Espinoza
Fifth inning, two outs, two base runners
Twins lead 1-0]

Reversal of Opinion

And he hits one in the hole
They're gonna have to hurry.
THEY'LL NEVER GET HIM!
They got him.
How do you like that.
Holy cow.
I changed my mind before he got there.
So that doesn't count as an error.

[July 10, 1992
Seattle at New York
Dave Fleming pitching to Andy Stankiewicz
First inning, no outs, bases empty
Mariners lead 1-0]

And finally, in memoriam:

Prayer for the Captain

There's a little prayer I always say
Whenever I think of my family or when I'm flying,
When I'm afraid, and I am afraid of flying.
It's just a little one. You can say it no matter what,
Whether you're Catholic or Jewish or Protestant or
whatever.
And I've probably said it a thousand times
Since I heard the news on Thurman Munson.

It's not trying to be maudlin or anything.
His Eminence, Cardinal Cooke, is going to come out
And say a little prayer for Thurman Munson.
But this is just a little one I say time and time again,
It's just: Angel of God, Thurman's guardian dear,
To whom his love commits him here there or everywhere,
Ever this night and day be at his side,
To light and guard, to rule and guide.

For some reason it makes me feel like I'm talking to
Thurman,
Or whoever's name you put in there,
Whether it be my wife or any of my children, my parents
or anything.
It's just something to keep you really from going bananas.
Because if you let this,
If you keep thinking about what happened, and you can't
understand it,
That's what really drives you to despair.

Faith. You gotta have faith.
You know, they say time heals all wounds,
And I don't quite agree with that a hundred percent.
It gets you to cope with wounds.
You carry them the rest of your life.

[August 3, 1979
Baltimore at New York
Pregame show]

Last week I moved out of the box I've been living in for the past year and into an absurdly beautiful house. When I return to Fayetteville, I will have entered the third decade of my life and will begin to unpack it into all kinds of new spaces. But for now, I'm in upstate New York. nkb_vp_ltl is getting married tomorrow and I'm reading this e e cummings poem—

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

—at the ceremony in Buffalo. I know this is a wedding fave (the internet told me so), but NKB hand-selected it and I think e e cummings writes a beautiful love poem, especially for a poet with the name of a porn star. Also, he has a way with parentheses (my favorite punctuation marks).

I'm spending the last few days of my twenties hot, harried, and needing a pedicure.

Not that any one death is any more tragic than any other over in Iraq, but there's something about a poet, journalist, and peace activist getting blown up that brings the ongoing travesty into momentary, devastating focus. The Houston Chronicle reports:

June 25, 2007, 3:56PM
Blast kills Iraqi peace poet

By SAMEER N. YACOUB Associated Press Writer

BAGHDAD — The poet Rahim al-Maliki wrote about his dreams of Iraqi unity in a place where such appeals are drowned out by daily bombings. One of them took his life on Monday.

Al-Maliki — whose fame grew by hosting two shows on state-run television — was among 13 people killed in a suicide attack at a Baghdad hotel, where he was filming tribal leaders about their decision to join U.S.-led forces in the fight against factions linked to al-Qaida. Four of the tribal sheiks from the western Anbar province were among the victims.

In one of his shows, "The Guesthouses of our People," the 39-year-old al-Maliki visited Sunni and Shiite groups and used his poetry to open dialogue about ways to end Iraq's sectarian bloodshed. In Anbar, many tribal elders have agreed to help U.S.-Iraqi troops fight groups linked to al-Qaida in an alliance that the Pentagon considers an important blow to the insurgency.

Al-Maliki's other show on the state-run Iraqiya television was "Feelings," which examined love poetry written in the style he favored: the ordinary Iraqi dialect rather than classical Arabic.

Al-Maliki, a Shiite who is not related to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, received several honors in recent years, including the top prize for patriotic poetry in 2006, colleagues said.

Under Saddam Hussein, he was imprisoned twice on accusations of criticizing the government and expressing sympathy for fellow Shiites who suffered widespread crackdowns after a failed uprising in the wake of the 1991 Gulf War. He did not publish his work during Saddam's regime, but he read his poems at gatherings — and they were passed along by admirers who memorized the verses.

Al-Maliki became well-known across the country after his shows were aired by Iraqiya.

In one episode of "Guesthouses," he was shown wearing Arab traditional dress among tribal chiefs and policemen in Ramadi, the main city of Anbar, calling for all Iraqis to be united. He also wrote poems praising Anbar tribes for taking up arms against al-Qaida.

Al-Maliki lived in the Baghdad district of Sadr City with his wife and four children.

In one of his poems, he called upon all Iraqis to understand their shared stake in the country.

"If you do not love Iraq

Then do not pray with me

You, Iraq, the land of well-being

When you stand tall, we stand tall

They throw stones at your windows

But your glass has destroyed their stones."

The rolling body count over there can be mind-numbing for those of us following the war at a distance, but a story like this should jumpstart our senses of sorrow and horror.

I'm reading Penelope Aubin's The Noble Slaves (1722), in which a Spanish princess transplanted to Mexico by her father ends up shipwrecked on an island where she is saved by an Indian who is actually a Chinese-speaking shipwrecked Japanese tradesman and where she meets a couple of similarly shipwrecked star-crossed French lovers before finding her (also) shipwrecked lover Don Lopez and the whole lot of them try to get back to Mexico via Japan but end up (guess what) shipwrecked and then there's this, as they explore an ancient temple made by "some Chinese or Persians, who had inhabited that Place in antient times":

They descended by some Stairs, and entered a large Room, where a Lamp was burning before a hideous Image, whose Face was bigger than a Buphalo; his Eyes were two Lights like Torches; his Mouth stood open; his Limbs were proportionably large, made of burnished Brass; on his Breast was a Lion's Head; his Feet were like a Camel's: He had a Bow and Arrow in his Hands, a Mantle of curious Feathers hung over his right Shoulder: He stood upon a Crocodile of Stone, whose Jaws seemed open to devour all that entered: Skulls and Jawbones, with Locks of clotted Hair, hung up against the Walls of this dreadful Vault, and Skeletons of Cats, Wolves, and Screech−owls: Several Grave−stones were in the Floor. As they entered the Bones began to rattle, the Image shook, the Crocodile's Teeth gnashed, and distant Thunder seemed to roar. The Christian Heroes, tho' surprized, went not back, but falling on their Knees, besought God to assist and keep them. As they prayed the Lightning flashed from the Image, the Graves opened, and Voices were heard in the Chinese Language, which they understood not. At last the Lion's Mouth opened in the Image's Breast, and a Voice pronounced these Words in French: 'Christians, you have conquered: Adored by Pagan Indians, long I have been worshipped here, and human Sacrifices offered to this hideous Idol, by which I was honoured. But now my Power is taken from me; the God you serve has silenced me. Depart, through this Room you will find a Way leads under the great Hill, by antient Persians made. There are Christians will assist you to depart from this sad Place and Isle. Avoid the Indian Shore, and Men. It will be long e'er you will see your native Country, and Friends again. My fatal Hour is come, and I am henceforth dumb.' Here the Image fell in pieces, the Graves shut, the Lamps in its Eyes went out; and by the Light of the Lamp before it they departed, full of Wonder…

It looks like Lady Z may have the opportunity to edit and publish the first edition of this text since the eighteenth century—quick poll: should she do it?

I have received my first official LJ "nudge" to remind me that I've been quite lax in my procrastination for the past week or so. I'm technically at work right now, if "work" can be defined as "getting completely sidetracked from 17th-century Jesuit accounts of China by the trashy novels of one Mrs. Penelope Aubin, a popular fiction-writer of the 1720s who successfully combined the popular romance style of other trashy lady novelists with Defoe-esque overseas adventure themes and occasional Christian moralizing." Which I suppose it can in my profession, so hey.

Mrs. Aubin first caught my eye with her outstanding titles. To wit:

The NOBLE SLAVES: or, the Lives and Adventures of Two Lords and Two Ladies, who were shipwreck'd and cast upon a desolate Island near the East-Indies, in the year 1710. The Manner of their living there: The surprizing Discoveries they made, and strange Deliverence thence. How in their return to Europe they were taken by two Algerine Pirates near the Straits of Gibraltar. Of the Slavery they endured in Barbary; and of their meeting there with several Persons of Quality, who were likewise Slaves. Of their escaping thence, and safe Arrival in their respective Countries, Venice, Spain, and France, in the Year 1718. With many extraordinary Accidents that befel some of them afterwards.

Being a History full of most remarkable Events.

How can you not read a book with a title like that? Nevertheless, Penelope Aubin is woefully neglected, even in this age of excavating neglected female and other minority writers of English literary history. I did find one article devoted to her on JSTOR, "Mrs. Penelope Aubin and the Early Eighteenth-Century English Novel," by William H. McBurney (published in the Huntington Library Quarterly in May, 1957). Professor McBurney writes,

Mrs. Aubin's method of composition was simple and undoubtedly explains her ability to produce lengthy novels rapidly, by slight variations on a basic pattern. From fictional and dramatic sources she borrowed a group of stereotyped characters, who differ from novel to novel only in nationality. Her heroine, whether English, Welsh, Irish, French, or Spanish, is invariably endowed with good birth, beauty, inviolable honor, and "solid sense." The hero, a male counterpart of the heroine in beauty, is an ardent lover and often an erring husband; the villain is a lustful pirate, Turk, Moor, or Londoner. Among the minor characters are the female confidante, who ... may lack unwavering virtue and thus serve as a foil to the heroine; the blackamoor slave, who is always named Domingo; and the benevolent Catholic hermit, who is usually a noble and repentant sinner.

This description really spoke to me, because I've long held that the only thing missing from NBC's sublimely weird daytime drama Passions were a few lustful pirates and a blackamoor slave named Domingo.

Mrs. Aubin also translated a French "History of Genghizcan the Great" in 1722, so I'm going to go read that now.

I can't tell you how good it is to live in a major city again. No offense to the smaller towns where I've hung my hat—not that I have a hat—of late, but I'm finding it rejuvenating to wake up every day and walk into streets full of people, to carve out a routine in a culture thick with routines. I love the anonymity of city life, and how people park themselves at tables on the sidewalk with a book and a coffee and that's what they're doing for the day, and how, at the end of the day, when you think, What should I do now?, there are all these things to do.

Here's what I've done in the past week, besides read 17th-century travelogues at the Newberry:

• Saw Andrew Bird play a free show at his alma mater, Northwestern. One of the most gorgeous live performances I've ever seen. He's a classically trained violinist and a one-man troubadour who tours with a violin, a guitar, a looping device, and an immaculately dressed sock monkey. He speaks quietly, seriously, like he's turning ideas into lullabies; he sings like he's thinking aloud in musical phrases. I've been listening to his latest album all week, thinking about how he makes words mean what they sound like. Frankly, I'm a little in love with him.



• Karaoke at Friar Tuck's, where the bartender knows everyone's name and I saw a guy turn 21 and drink an obligatory shot out of the ass of an inflatable sheep.



• Saw the live show screening of Guy Maddin's recent creation, Brand Upon the Brain!, performed at the historic Music Box Theater with (in the words of the promotional material) "an 11-piece LIVE orchestra, a 5-piece LIVE Foley (sound effects) team a LIVE celebrity narrator [Crispin Glover], and Castrato supplementing the filmic image to comprise a one-of-a-kind cinematic spectacle." Freakin' amazing!



• Drinks at our local lesbian bar, The Closet, with Chris's friend Igor, a charming novelist who apparently won the equivalent of the "Croatian Pulitzer" for his first book, and who was slightly disappointed by the relatively low lesbian turnout at the bar that night. "I like it," he said, "you know—a little bit gayer."



• All-you-can-eat fish & chips at The Duke of Perth with esteemed colleagues David & Gwynne, who graciously picked up the check despite the fact that I misjudged the time of our date by over an hour. I also joined them the next day to see a film at my neighborhood Landmark Cinema.

In the coming weeks, Chris and I have tickets to see The Rosebuds and The National, and my sister's flying out next week for a Cubs game (did I mention I live blocks from Wrigley Field?), and tonight I'm going to see Kelly Link, Nick Mamatas, Ron Currie, Jr., and Lance Olsen read their stuff, because it turns out I'm living in the city where the Bookslut Reading Series happens.

I'm like a fish that's been tossed back into the lake.

I'm nearing the end of my first day at the Newberry, where I've been reading Johannes Neiuhoff's Embassy from the East-India Company of the United Provinces, to the Grand Tartar Cham, Emperour of China (1669). I don't really have anything to report; I just came across this awesome passage on the natives of Java and had to share:

The Natives of this Island, who call themselves Javaners, are generally of a middle stature, and round visaged; most of them go naked, having a cloth only about their middle to cover their secrets. They are counted the most civilized people of all the Indians, but yet they are great Gluttons, Proud, Deceitful, Impudent, and not to be trusted when they have passed their words. For when a King of Java had falsifyed his word and his promise, and was handsomely rebuked for it, he gave for answer, that the Tongue of a Man was not made of Bone; as if he had said, it ought to be more plyant to the flexibilities of the mind and various resolutions. They are also represented to be Cruel, Blood thirsty, and hardly appeased when once offended: As also that they were wont to eat the dead bodies of their Friends.

I love "to cover their secrets," and "passed their words," as if they were gas. God, ethnography is weird.

ETA: This digression on the history of Holland's settlement in Java only gets better. Check out this account of the Hollanders' scatological defense strategy against a native siege on one of the forts of Batavia (Jakarta):

The greatest attempt which the Enemy made, was upon the 20. of September in this night, but they were likewise forced to Retreat with a great Slaughter, whose dead bodies was no small annoyance unto the Besieged: Against this inconvenience they burnt several odoriferous Gums, to prevent Contagion which might proceed from thence. Amongst the remarkable passages which happened during this Siege, is that Storm most to be admired, which this Enemy made upon a Fort situated at the furthest corner of the City, which was only guarded by sixteen Souldiers, who shewed far greater Courage in making their Defence, than the Assaulters in the Attempt with their whole Army; for after that they had spent all their Powder and Shot, they untiled the very Fort, and with the shards thereof did the very great execution upon the Enemy; which Ammunition being likewise spent, and having nothing offensive, they at last emptied the House of Office with Chamber-pots, and flung the Excrements, and so at once perfumed and painted the naked bodies of the Enemy; who at last perceiving that those of the City intended to Sally out, and relieve their Fellow-Souldiers, they raised the Siege, and cryed out in their Language, O you stinking Holland Devils, You fight with your Tantoblins, and your Arms are Turdy Pistical.

(According to the OED, "tantoblin" is a 17th-century word for turd, and "pistical" refers to "pistick nard," or "spikenard," "An aromatic substance (employed in ancient times in the preparation of a costly ointment or oil) obtained from an Eastern plant, now identified as the Nardostachys Jatamansi of Northern India." We are doing so much learning, people! Now go use "turdy pistical" in a sentence of your own devising.)

I finally finished grading the final exams for my 18th-Century Novel class. This semester I taught them Oroonoko, Robinson Crusoe, Pamela, Joseph Andrews, Evelina, The Castle of Otranto, Northanger Abbey, and the Utter Cultural Importance of National Karaoke Week. The last question of the exam was this:

If any one of the characters we've read this semester could experience the glory of National Karaoke Week, what would he/she sing?

Some of the best answers:

"Leonora [from the embedded story 'The Unfortunate Jilt' in Joseph Andrews] would undoubtedly sing 'Achey-Breaky Heart' by Billy Ray Cyrus. And if she were too depressed to sing, I'm sure that Pamela would step in and sing 'Like a Virgin.'"

"Joseph Andrews: 'On the Road Again,' 'King of the Road.'"

"Oroonoko: 'Buffalo Soldier'—Totally!"

"Evelina would sing 'Don't Stop Believing' by Journey because she is just a small town girl."

"Mr. B would sing 'She Bangs' (think the Hung boy from American Idol) to Pamela at his happiness of being able to finally have her."

"I believe Robinson Crusoe would sing 'All By Myself' by Celine Dion."

"Robinson Crusoe would sing Styx's 'Come Sail Away.'"

"Robinson Crusoe would sing 'Welcome to the Jungle' by Guns n Roses."

"Robinson Crusoe would have sung 'Eye of the Tiger' while killing the cannibals."

"Mr. B—'Let's Talk About Sex, Baby.'"

"Evelina: 'Who Is that Girl I See' from Mulan." (One of the identifications on the exam was the passage from Evelina in which she has her hair dressed in the city fashion for the first time, and she feels alienated from her own image.)

"Get ready for this. Imagine: Catherine and Henry Tilney are at their wedding reception party, which is, of course, a karaoke party. They say they have a special performance for their friends.... The orchestra starts to play the music from Grease, 'You're the One that I Want,' and Catherine and Henry sing and dance and look extremely adorable. The performance is a big hit, especially with General Tilney, who decides to become a back-up singer. :)"

"Oroonoko—'Love Stinks' by the J. Geils Band?"

"Theodore: 'Stayin Alive' by the Bee Gees (because this character actually lived)"

"Catherine—'Just a Girl' by No Doubt"

"Pamela would probably sing 'I'm Every Woman,' but her tune would change to Beyonce's 'Crazy in Love.' I also think Catherine would probably sing 'Crazy' by Gnarls Barkley."

"I think Pamela may have sung 'Eleanor Rigby' by the Beatles, but only during the part that she's locked away. Maybe after the marriage she would have sung something by the Beastie Boys, the fight for your right to party song...'cept she didn't really get to party with all those rules..."

"Robinson Crusoe would sing 'It's My Prerogative' by Bobby Brown."

"Evelina—'I'm Coming Out'"

"I believe Robinson Crusoe would sing The Police's 'Sending Out an S.O.S.'"

"Evelina's cousins, like our wonderful instructor, would sing 'Naughty Girls [Need Love Too].'" (I believe T. T. Tucker was responsible for releasing this information to the student body.)

I particularly enjoyed how the suggestions for Pamela were pretty evenly split between a Richardsonian Pamela (Chaka Khan's "I'm Every Woman," Aretha Franklin's "Respect") and a Fieldingesque Pamela (Kanye West's "Gold Digger," Black Eyed Peas' "My Humps"). Could it be they actually learned something? ;)

Recall, if you will, the opening of Kafka's The Metamorphosis:

When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin. He was lying on his back as hard as armor plate, and when he lifted his head a little, he saw his vaulted brown belly, sectioned by arch-shaped ribs, to whose dome the cover, about to slide off completely, could barely cling. His many legs, pitifully thin compared with the size of the rest of him, were waving helplessly before his eyes.

Carrying over the theme of yesterday's disturbing insectival encounter, these very lines flashed through my mind as I read the following story from Reuters:

BERLIN (Reuters) - A 91-year-old German sparked a rescue operation when he slipped mending his roof and got stuck fast in tar "like a beetle on its back," police said on Tuesday.

Passers-by were so shocked to see the elderly handyman working on the roof they first thought he was planning to commit suicide, according to police in the eastern city of Magdeburg.

"In fact he was just re-coating the roofing with bitumen. But then he slipped," said a spokesman for police.

"When we got there, he was like a beetle on its back, with his arms and legs sprawled out and completely glued to the roof," he added. "Due to his age, he couldn't free himself from his unfortunate situation."

Local firemen carefully detached the man using ropes and ladders. He was unharmed, but had sticky clothes, police said.

Lest you think I am callously amusing myself with the poor gentleman's anguish, let me point out that my favorite line in The Metamorphosis is actually at the end of Chapter 1: Gregor's father is chasing him violently back into the bedroom, through a too-narrow doorframe that crushes the edges of his beetling body, and the narrator informs us that "now this was really no joke anymore"—as if, up till this point, waking up to find himself transformed into a "monstrous vermin" had been quite a laugh. In fact, what I love about this line is how it marks its own moment of metamorphosis, the moment at which a tragic situation tempered with the comedy of the absurd—a man changed in his sleep to a giant bug, or, perhaps, a 91-year-old German man repairing his own roof—suddenly becomes a situation in which the absurdity is itself tragic. Thus the moment "this is really no joke anymore" is precisely the moment neither the character, nor we as readers, can free ourselves from the "unfortunate situation."

Plus, nothing sucks more than being publicly humiliated and sticky to boot.

You know, in case the whole academe thing doesn't work out. The NYTimes is just now getting its paws on a story to which o_jenny alerted me months ago: the Harlequin-Nascar Romance:

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla., Feb. 16 — After a year of courtship, Harlequin, the leading publisher of romance novels, has entered into not a marriage, exactly, but what a Harlequin heroine would call a meaningful relationship with Nascar, the stock-car racing association.

Last year, with Nascar’s approval, Harlequin successfully published three Nascar-theme books, including one in which the heroine, an ex-kindergarten teacher, falls in love with a Nascar driver after first being hit by his car and then driving his enormous motor coach from race to race. The company is now embarking on a 16-book paperback series, all of which will have Nascar settings, and the first and last will feature cameo appearances by Carl Edwards, a real-life Nascar driver who has consulted with the author, Nancy Warren, to help create a suitable fictional representation of himself. [Mr. Edwards finished 23rd in the Daytona 500 on Sunday.]

And check out the clever promo staged in Daytona a few days ago—a speed dating session:

Some 50 men and women, roughly divided between Harlequin fans and diehards who belong to the Nascar Members Club, sat at a big U-shape table and, waved on by a checkered flag, moved over every few minutes to talk to someone else. They ranged in age from 20-somethings to people who had possibly begun dating back in the dirt-track era. Most of the men wore caps, and many of them had on racing jackets as well.

It was not clear whether any of these participants experienced the same life-changing emotions felt by Kendall Clarke, the mousy-seeming heroine of the first novel in the new series, perhaps not coincidentally called “Speed Dating.” Clad only in a demi-bra, high-cut panties and a slip, she finds herself sitting in a sports car next to the fictional Nascar driver Dylan Hargreave on the night when she is supposed to receive the Sharpened Pencil Award given to Actuary of the Year. “She’d never done anything this wild in her life,” she thinks. “Oh, it felt good.”

Well done—the punny title; the vision of the first Nascar Romance as an episode of Actuaries Gone Wild. This is exactly the kind of innovative thinking the supermarket-aisle publishing industry (not to mention the academic one) needs. Mainly because modern women—actuaries, academics, you name it—are complicated. As "Michelle Renaud, a public relations manager for Harlequin, said of the matchup between racing and romance, 'We know it’s working, for sure,' and added, 'Harlequin has a book for every woman’s mood.'"

I'm not giving away the concept of my own future contribution to the genre, but I will drop these hints: a junior professor sexually frustrated in the Ivy League 18th-century studies circuit; a seemingly tragic but ultimately fortuitous move to a southern state university; an international scandal surrounding the Asian invasion of American stockcar racing; and steamy cameos by Tony Stewart and Clint Bowyer (who, incidentally, tore his number 07 Jack Daniels Chevrolet across the finish line at Daytona yesterday on its roof, which was totally hot).

Thanks a lot, Pierre Bayard. Whatever happened to honor among thieves? However will I keep my professional cocktail-party credibility, that certain je ne sais quoi about the epically well-read English professor that is my only cultural compensation in crowds of better-paid citizens, now that you've explained to the layman Comment Parler des Livres que l’on n’a pas Lus (How to Talk about Books that You Haven’t Read)?

Yes, folks, the scholarly world of letters is all abuzz about Professor Bayard's latest book, which gives the lie to the hallowed belief that well-read people got that way by actually reading books. Adam Sage reports in the Times Online:

A distinguished professor of literature at Paris University has become a bestselling author with a work explaining how he comments authoritatively on books that he failed to finish, has forgotten or has never read.

Pierre Bayard, 52, who specialises in the link between literature and psychoanalysis, stunned specialists with the admission that he is anything but an assiduous reader.

He says that he often makes references in lectures, meetings, reviews and conversations to works that he has not read — without being found out.

However, Bayard — who has never finished Ulysses by James Joyce and forgotten what Steppenwolf, Hermann Hesse’s classic novel, is about — claims that this in no way devalues his opinion.

“It’s possible to have a passionate conversation about a book that one has not read, including, perhaps especially, with someone else who has not read it."

Well, duh, Pierre. If this turns out to be literary criticism's break-out, sell-out, million-dollar crossover idea (the book's publisher Minuit, according to the Times, "now wants to get it on supermarket and airport bookshelves"), I am going to be so pissed. Not because of the betrayal, the exposure, the way it inadvertently confirms to the world that we are all the frauds they always suspected we were, but just because Mr. Big-Shot Tenured Frenchy Pants published it before I did. I'm sitting here slaving away on a manuscript on 18th-century British literature and I could have ended up on the bestseller list by revealing that it's possible to talk about a book one hasn't read, including, perhaps especially, with someone else who has not read it? What's the next big idea in literary scholarship going to be? It's possible to talk shit about a movie one hasn't seen, including, perhaps especially, to someone else who has not seen it? It's possible to wax nostalgic about an experience one hasn't had, including, perhaps especially, to someone else who has not experienced it? It's possible to laugh at a joke one doesn't get, including, perhaps especially, with someone else who doesn't get it? Did Bayard just get high for the first time? Is that what's going on?

Personally, I'm with Sarah Vine, whose commentary also appears in the Times:

The book that I’d part company with hard cash to get is this: How to Avoid Talking About Books You Shouldn’t Have Read — But Have. Such as Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, or anything by Jackie Collins, or Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus — or the ultimate literary embarrassment, The Da Vinci Code. I don’t know anyone with an ounce of intellectual pride who will confess to having read it, and yet statistically some of them must be lying. Maybe I should start a Da Vinci Anonymous association. All welcome, even French professors.

Now, you may recall that, as I am entirely devoid of intellectual pride, I have actually admitted to reading The Da Vinci Code. Nevertheless, I think I'm a pretty good candidate for some kind of book-disavowal therapy, as are most academics I know. Our problem is clearly not that we haven't read enough books, but that we have consumed all manner of disgraceful cultural dross, and that it occasionally surfaces at inopportune moments. Did I mention that I extemporaneously invoked an early interview with Britney Spears in order to explain Ian Watt's reading of Robinson Crusoe in my 18th-century novel class the other day? Well, I did. Such are the perils of knowing too much.

And now I must excuse myself; it's Sunday and I have to go not read something.

And if not, why not?

In yesterday's Boston Globe, James Parker reviews a new book on karaoke by Zhou Xun and Francesca Tarocco, forthcoming from University of Chicago Press. Now, I've never met the authors, nor this Mr. Parker, but it seems they not only understand but share my belief in the uniquely sublime power of karaoke in this, our age of postmodern cynicism:

As the book suggests, something of the mystery of karaoke is contained in its etymology: The word is a compound abbreviation of two Japanese words meaning "empty" and "orchestra." Karaoke is above all a space, an absence haunted by the missing vocal line. The instrumental accompaniment, generally a synthetic redaction of the original track, is ghost-music, tinkling with its own deadness -- and that unsung melody is spectrally beckoning, beckoning. The heart of the karaoke performer swells: Into this vacancy he must project his beautiful essence, his soul. He -- or she (karaoke knows no gender) -- may be emboldened or confused by alcohol; wild with a private grief; or, worst of all, suffering from a genuine desire to excel before his peers. Regardless, in the performance that ensues, something will be brought to light.

I don't know if you're taking the piss, James Parker, but frankly, I don't give a damn. You have captured the haunted, tortured beauty that is The Karaoke. And Zhou Xun and Francesca Parker, wherever you are, I salute you, and look forward to the day we celebrate traded renditions of Pat Benetar and John Cougar Mellencamp with round after round of emboldening, confusing spirits.

P.S. Did I mention it's a snow day? Can today possibly get any better??

You know how every Christmas, there's one gift that is clearly the Hit Gift of the Season, the toy that everyone wants to play with, that monopolizes the collective attention and steals the thunder from all the seemingly more momentous gifts (the new bike, the new bed, the new pet)?

The first time I remember this happening was when Santa delivered Chatbot to our house, feeding my already well-developed obsession with robotkind. (That was the same year Santa delivered Kabuki, our little Siamese kitten, and I cannot tell you with what holiday glee my sister and I sent Chatbot chasing the poor kitty around the house, croaking, "COME HERE KA-BU-KI. COME TO CHAT-BOT." Chatbot's voice—enabled by an internal tape recorder that simply taped whatever you said to it, and played it back by a touch of the remote control "play" button—was our voices doing a Robot Voice, which was a mechanical drone modeled in equal parts after Speak 'n' Spell and Number 5 from Short Circuit. That's what robots sounded like in the mid-80s. Another of Chatbot's robotic duties was to make his way to the kitchen with his attachable tray in hand and demand snacks: "FEED ME. CHAT-BOT NEED PICKLES. CHAT-BOT STAAAAARVING.")


Well, last year's Chatbot was again in a box delivered to me, this one containing the illustrious SortASaurus, a stegosaurus-shaped coin sorter. My mother explained his arrival thus: "I needed one more gift for Lady Z, and I was on my way into Staples, so I said to myself, I need either a coin sorter or something to do with dinosaurs. And there it was!" (This explanation was as cryptic to us then as it probably is to you now. My fascination with dinosaurs is at least as long-standing as my obsession with robots, but why my mother fixed on a coin sorter is anyone's guess. Not that I didn't want a coin sorter. I just didn't know I wanted one. And don't even think of asking why my mom was doing her last-minute Christmas shopping at Staples. This is the woman who one year raided a hobby store to fill our stockings, so that my sister got a 2-pound bag of multicolored pipe cleaners, and I got the same quantity of multicolored fuzzy acrylic balls. We tried not to sound ungrateful as we asked, "So...what are we supposed to do with them?" "I don't know; make stuff!" mom enthused. "I just thought they were so neat. There are so many of them!" And yes, there were.)

SortASaurus has since become my mostly companion, and this morning he really came through in a way that can only be described as heroic. My financial situation is, shall we say, Less Than Desirable right now (what pessimists might call Downright Dire, seeing as how the glass that is my bank account passed the point of Half Empty some time ago, and now stands resolutely at Entirely Depleted, Nay, Overdrawn). For the past week I've been living off the charity of friends and the canned goods lurking in the back of the cabinet—I made a surprisingly good Pantry Scraps Pasta Salad, featuring baby corn, Spanish olives, garbanzo beans, soy sauce, and the rest of the balsamic vinegar—but this morning I awoke to The Horror! of having run out of coffee. The problem with mooching coffee is that there is absolutely no way I can be charming enough to mooch anything off of anyone before I've consumed my first cup of coffee. (This is a version of the perennial paradox of my not being able to function well enough to make coffee before I've had my coffee—a problem only recently solved by the purchase of a programmable coffee maker that I can set up the night before.) What to do? No cash, no credit, no coffee. I had woken up to find myself living in the saddest, shittiest country song ever. But then SortASausus gallantly rose to the occasion, as I realized his feet contained at least enough change for a Neverending Cup of Coffee at Arsaga's.

And so, friends, I ask you to join me in hailing SortASaurus and his wondrous pieds d'argent, without whom I would still be curled in the fetal position in bed, cursing my wretched, uncaffeinated existence.

In other news, I recently realized that I never did my end-of-the-year tally of Books Read, mainly because I fell off the review wagon and stopped keeping track of the books I was reading. But in the interest of trying to salvage some sense of order in my life, I give you the closest approximation of Books Read in 2006 I can muster.

( Books Read in 2006 )

Remember when I used to read books? I do, vaguely. I haven't completed a non-work-related book that contains more words than pictures in who knows how long. But I'm almost done with several, including The End of the Series of Unfortunate Events, so I'll be back to reviewage soon.


The last book I purchased, however, needs no review, as its hilarity is self- and fully evident. I speak of the new, bound collection of McSweeney's Lists, Mountain Man Dance Moves. Yes, of course you can read all of these lists online for free. But there is something sublime about flipping through pages upon pages of such demented tomfoolery, without the white frame of cyberspace, the lag of a lazy wireless connection, tempering the experience of each. It feels, truly, like gorging oneself to the point of illness at a smorgasbord of lunacy. I laughed so hard at this one my stomach hurt the next morning:

Popular Songs Renamed Along the Lines of the Cattlemen's Beef Board Ad Campaign "Beef, It's What's for Dinner."

BY GEOFF SMITH
- - - -

Me, It's What's for Leaning On

Wu-Tang Clan, It's What Ain't Nothing Ta Fuck Wit

Back, It's What Baby Got

The House, It's What's Burning Down

Alles, It's What California's Über

The Street, It's What's for Dancing In

Penis, It's What's Detachable

Dead, It's What Ed Is

The Dust, It's What Another One Bites

Hellhound, It's What's on My Trail

The Bong, It's What Hits Are From

U, It's What I Would Die 4

London, It's What's Calling

Brooklyn, It's What There's No Sleep Till

Fault, It's What's Nobody's but Mine

Thang, It's What's Nothin' but a "G"

The Volume, It's What's Pumped Up

Bigger, It's What Some Girls Are Than Others

Behavior, It's What's Human

- - - -
So, yes. You should buy this book. And while I'm on the topic of book consumption, I should mention that the next time you go internet book shopping, you should stop by BooksPrice.com, my new favorite price comparison engine. I used not to make a move toward online book purchases without consulting addall.com, but I find BooksPrice much easier to use. (They actually sent me a book to say something nice about them here, but it truly is a good site, so I have no qualms about selling out to them. Plus they sent me Snow by Orhan Pamuk, so they seem like my kind of people.)

And no, I haven't forgotten about the NASCAR post.

Yes, he is. With the funniness.

A brief sample of this week's Shouts & Murmurs, "Proclamation":

My friends, I am a simple man. That is why you elected me. I have never been anywhere other than our beloved country. I actually haven’t even been to that many places here in our beloved country. I have pretty much been here in my beloved house, non-stop, since the seventies. In my beloved room. With the door locked. Having nightmares in which Hulk Hogan is waiting outside my room—look, as for Hulk Hogan, do not mention his name ever again! He will be referred to, if we even need to refer to him, which I doubt, as “Blond Blondie, Big Blondie!” In this way, we will disrespect him! In this way, he will be driven from my dreams! No more sneaking up behind me, “Blond Blondie, Big Blondie!,” and putting me in a headlock, and I am naked, and have forgotten to study for all my exams!

No. For us, all Western decadence is finished. McDonald’s, chief villain of the American imperialist program, will henceforth be known as “Burger King.” That will really mess with everybody’s head. Some enemy of the revolution here in Tehran goes into a McDon— Do we still even have McDonald’s? I used to really like the cheeseburgers. The “snack that is surprisingly caloric because, you sense, there is even sugar in the bun.” Anyway, some enemy of the revolution goes into a McDonald’s, orders a Big Mac, and—ha ha!—he is really in Burger King. I love it! He is undone.

Oh, it hurts. Go read the whole thing while I laugh myself into an early grave.

From Pepys's Diary, on the Coronation Day of King Charles II (23 April 1661):

...I went in with Mr. Thornbury (who did give the company all their wines, he being yeoman of the wine-cellar to the King) to his house; and there, with his wife and two of his sisters and some gallant sparks that were there, we drank the King's health and nothing else, till one of the gentlemen fell down stark drunk and there lay spewing. And I went to my Lord's pretty well. But no sooner a-bed with Mr. Shiply but my head began to turn and I to vomit, and if ever I was foxed [i.e. trashed] it was now—which I cannot say yet, because I fell asleep and sleep till morning—only, when I waked I found myself wet with my spewing. Thus did the day end, with joy everywhere...

Ah, yes. "Joy."

Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

I've seen the word "macabre" used a lot in reviews of Eugenides's first novel, and I think it's appropriate, but for all its darkness this is certainly a novel with a heart. The bleak cynicism of its portrait of middle-class cluelessness (a community's inability to understand or care for its teenage daughters; the flailing, insincere attempts to "deal with" tragedy through therapy and both official and inofficial memorials to untimely death; and the flimsiness of individuals' concern for their neighbors, in the 20th-century American suburbs that claim to be "neighborhoods," through which a desperate sense of fear and self-preservation is constantly breaking) is balanced by the uncharacteristic tenderness of the teenage boys who observe the five doomed Lisbon sisters with an unrequited longing that is the closest thing this lifestyle offers to true love.

I read Eugenides's second novel, Middlesex, a while ago, and enjoyed it very much, but I think I liked The Virgin Suicides better. I was trying to explain to Z what I liked better about it, fumbling with how Middlesex is sprawling and narrative-oriented and this is weirder and somehow about something other than the story, but it won't quite give up what, and he did a much better job of articulating what I was trying to say: "It sounds," he said, "like The Virgin Suicides is modernist, while Middlesex is Victorian." Duh—that's exactly it. And then this morning, I came across this interview with Eugenides (by his onetime student, Jonathan Safran Foer), in which he says,

I always say it like this: my generation of writers grew up backwards. We were weaned on modernism and only later read the great 19th-century masters of realism. When we began writing in high school and college, it was experimental fiction. I think now that a certain kind of academic experimental fiction has reached a dead end. Middlesex is a postmodern book in many ways, but it is also very old-fashioned. Reusing classical motifs is a fundamental of postmodern practice, of course, but telling a story isn't always. I like narrative. I read for it and write for it.

I'm not of his generation, but I did cut my teeth as a serious reader on modernism (I spent my senior year of high school cultivating an obsession with Virginia Woolf, and she remains a standard of intelligent writing for me, whether I will it or not), which explains my attraction to the style Eugenides is trying to outgrow. I look forward, then, to Eugenides's third novel, whenever it appears, because I anticipate we will see a fusing of the styles he has learned to master into something fresh—not the tired and imprecise "postmodern," but whatever it is that comes afterward; the new generation of narrative fiction.

Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty


In 1753, British artist William Hogarth published The Analysis of Beauty, one of several 18th-century attempts to establish formal rules to standardize aesthetic taste. The title of Hollinghurst's Booker Prize–winning novel The Line of Beauty is taken from Hogarth's famous S-curve, which he declared inherent to all beautiful forms. According to Hogarth, "the waving line, or line of beauty, varying still more [than a combination of straight and curved lines], being composed of two curves contrasted, becomes still more ornamental and pleasing, insomuch that the hand takes a lively movement in making it with pen or pencil": the principle of beauty is the pleasure of constant variety and motion—of the hand, for the artist, and of the eye, for the viewer—and the play of contrasts of a line winding first this way and then that provides the ideal form of such pleasure. Hollinghurst's novel, which is, in addition to a consideration of Hogarth's aesthetic theory, an homage to Henry James and a portrait of London's uppermost upper class in the mid-1980s, deftly winds through various manifestations of the S-curve, and the effect is indeed one of astounding beauty. The novel's protagonist, Nick Guest, an Oxford-educated "aesthete" and James devotee who has (unwittingly?) insinuated himself into the glittering lifestyle of Britain's rich and famous, has an eye for form, and describes waving lines everywhere, from the fence that keeps the masses out of the private garden to which he himself possesses a key (as a permanent guest—ha!—of the wealthy and politically powerful Fadden family) to the posts of the bed he secretly shares with one of London's most celebrated young heirs, a kind of modern-day oriental prince. Hollinghurst, too, has an eye for winding lines, and a better sense than his protagonist of the way beauty necessarily curves its way through both dark and light—Nick will have to discover the dark side of each luminescent edge of his fast and furious life in his own time. This is a beautiful novel because all of its lines are under strict control: each sentence is balanced, each scene is minutely plotted, and the narrative unfurls in a continuing series of flights and falls, careening through thrills that plunge into tragedy with a sense of epic inevitability.

But the novel's greatest strength, I think, is not its mastery of the line of beauty, but its occasional forays into Hogarth's three-dimensional "line of grace," or "serpentine line": "the serpentine line, by its waving and winding at the same time different ways, leads the eye in a pleasing manner along the continuity of its variety, if I may be allowed the expression; and which by its twisting so many different ways, may be said to inclose (tho' but a single line) varied contents; and therefore all its variety cannot be express'd on paper by one continued line, without the assistance of the imagination." While he ruminates obsessively about the line of beauty, Nick never (as far as I recall) considers the line of grace, and the moments when the novel seems to embody this more complex and more sinister line are the moments when the writing appears to have escaped the obsessive control of its "master"—whether that is Nick, or his imaginary mentor James, or the conscious vision of Hollinghurst himself—and soars forward tracing a path through the world that has itself been set in motion. Appropriately, since Hogarth and even James are best remembered as satirists rather than pious students of beauty, The Line of Beauty's moments of sublimity appear in its graceful but savagely funny sequences of dialogue, when the characters reveal through their own lines the simultaneous heights of comedy and tragedy contained in the relentless progress of human folly. An example: While young Catherine Fadden's manic depression traces out one of the novel's lines of beauty, it is the conversation about her "episodes" that fleshes this conceit out and propels it forward into the more twisted line of grace:

"Oh, it's pathetic!" shouted Catherine, with the rush and stare of someone hurtled along by a strong new mix of emotions. ...she smacked the table hard, but still somehow childishly and comically; there were one or two nervous smiles. She jumped her chair back over the flags and hurried indoors.

"Um ... should I ...?" said Jasper, and sniggered.

"No, no, I'll go," said Rachel. "In a minute or two."

"Experience suggests to wait a bit," said Gerald, as if explaining some other local customs to his guests.

"An emotional young lady," said Maurice Tipper with a grin of displeasure.

"She's a very emotional young lady," said Jasper, in a cowardly mixture of boasting and mockery.

"She's quite unbalanced," Lady Partridge agreed confidentally.

Gerald hesitated, peering over his raised wine glass, but took his daughter's part. "I think I'd say she's just very softhearted," he said; which it seemed to Nick was just what she wasn't.

I'm not sure Hollinghurst himself would pick out a moment such as this to illustrate his best talents as a writer—the novel is certainly full of more beautiful passages—but this is where the writing seems to me most wise, in a serpentine kind of way, exposing its characters in a heady mix of comic derision and profound insight into the things people don't know about themselves, and which will only appear to the more vigilant observers in retrospect, after the full movement of the narrative line has been completed.