Hermenautic Circle blog

Dorothy Parker on Updike's The Poorhouse Fair, Feb. 1959: "Perhaps this is a purely personal matter, but I am always drawn to reading a book about a poorhouse—after all, it is only the normal curiosity to find out what it will be like in my future residence."

She writes like Sloane Crosley!

gojira2012 has added a photo to the pool:

The Girl from U.N.C.L.E.
"The Birds-of-a-Feather Affair"
by Michael Avallone

E. Greens Forlag, Oslo
1967

gojira2012 has added a photo to the pool:

"Edge of the Law"
Amor Bøkene
52
Lommeroman fra Ingar Weyer Tveitan Forlag.

I’m not tagging anyone, but here’s that Things thing, Facebook pals and others.

1. It is very easy to make me feel guilty about almost anything.
2. I am also a champion worrier.
3. I started listening to audiobooks as a way to shut off the hamster wheel in my head and get to sleep at night.
4. I am not as neurotic as 1-3 make me sound.
5. I think.
6. I don’t want kids, but I very much enjoy the children of my friends.
7. I don’t have an office. I write in coffeeshops, at the table, on the couch, at the studio, in bed, etc. Sometimes I think I’d write more if I had a dedicated space, but apparently I don’t think this strongly enough to create one.
8. I am a sucker for intelligent shelter magazines; unfortunately, they never seem to last.
9. I’ve pretty sure I’ve seen more live music so far in my thirties than I did in the entirety of my twenties.
10. I still have the “bouquet” — baby’s breath only — that my friend Kat gave me to carry at my extremely tiny wedding in 1997.
11. I’m not trying for clever artistic effects in my Flickr photos; it’s just that I take them with my phone.
12. I sprained my ankle twice in high school: once while building a house in Mexico with my church youth group, and once while getting ready for a show where I was going to run lights.
13. It’s rare for me to see a first-run movie in the theater.
14. I have no sense of direction, and it delights me when I find out that people I admire (Susan Cooper, Oliver Sacks) share this disability.
15. The only time I got an A+ in ninth grade biology was in the genetics unit, and it was entirely because I had just read Robert Heinlein’s “The Tale of the Twins Who Weren’t.”
16. The worst simile I’ve ever used in a story was when I described something as “spinning like so many coins tossed to determine their fates.”
17. I am the only author I know who has never checked her Amazon ranking.
18. My proudest moment with Spanish comprehension: translating a dirty joke back into English. But I was aided by the accompanying gestures.
19. Sometimes I can’t tell the difference between loyalty and a rut.
20. I hate TV-as-background. If the set is on, let it be showing something I want to see, please.
21. I often dread social events where I’ll be meeting new people, but equally often end up enjoying them tremendously.
22. I’d rather get an extra blanket or a sweater than turn up the heat.
23. I enjoy wandering by myself with no one knowing where I am, but this is an increasingly difficult state to achieve, what with cell phones, etc.
24. Oddly, #14 combined with #23 almost never result in my actually getting lost.
25. I am frequently intimidated by the accomplishments of my friends.

Everybody’s talkin’ about Canada—not as much as before the election of Barack Obama took the git up from so many would-be exiles but even if you haven’t followed Rangers hockey since Phil Esposito retired, Canada is  a tough place to keep out of the conversation. In the large orthodox Jewish community of Midwood, Brooklyn, a bakery at the corner of Coney Island Avenue and Avenue K touts its challah as “Canadian Style,” don’t ask why. In hillbilly music the voices of Wilf Carter and Hank Snow  (born in Brooklyn, Nova Scotia) still sing out across the borough. Hugh Kenner, the great writer upon Ezra Pound and other like minded moderns was from Toronto— a former student of Annie Hall star Marshall McLuhan no less. The Enemy and Tyro himself, Wyndham Lewis spent a couple unhappy years in that city, subject of his novel Self-Condemned, while a province to the east, Montreal poet Louis Dudek showed the world there was way more  sweat, sex, anomie and irreverence— a lot more fun— in the Canadian letters racket than forced exposure to Northrop Frye ever suggested.

Step into the arena, University of Toronto philosopher Mark Kingwell: professor, sportsman, critic, mixologist and all-around exemplar that a life of the Canadian mind can thrive as a laugh riot of rigor and impulse. While some of Mark’s work is necessarily pitched towards academics, the majority of his writing is accessible to anyone who digs intellectual heft with their reportage (a rare thing) and laughter with their philosophy (even rarer). Like a one-man Concert at Massey Hall*, the range of Mark’s recent work is pretty staggering: there’s Opening Gambits: Essays on Art and Philosophy (2008); Nearest Thing To Heaven: The Empire State Building and American Dreams (2007); Classic Cocktails: A Modern Shake (2007), his introduction to the “shit-heel”-loving Idler’s Glossary by Joshua Glenn and the thrilling  volume under discussion below, Concrete Reveries: Conciousness and the City (Viking, 2008). On a warm autumn afternoon, I met Mark by the Glenn Gould statue outside the CBC studios in Toronto. Since he wasn’t sure what I looked like, upon approaching Mark and Glenn I inquired in a deadpan Newfoundland accent, “Excuse me, Sir, which way to the Greyhound?”

“Vodka and grapefruit juice, over ice in a collins glass,” Kingwell replied without hesitation.  That’s the way to a Greyhound, mate! Ting soda may replace the grapefruit juice to make a Caribbean Whippet.”

* On May 15, 1953, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Charles Mingus and Brooklyn-native Max Roach performed at Massey Hall; they were not then all friends.

Brian Berger: Before concrete there was ______

Mark Kingwell: Stone.  Concrete is the rendering of earth into the ultimately pliable material.  It’s not carved or smelted, it’s mixed and poured, like cake batter.  That means it has an almost infinite formal elasticity.  Such a shame that so much of the concrete around us is in the forms of slabs and walls and paved-over green spaces.  Concrete can really be so much more. (more…)

read more

1. I hate dill.

2. I am neutral to mildly negative about nutmeg (it seems to me clearly inferior to cinnamon and cloves as far as that sort of spice goes), but I become vituperatively against it when it is put into creamed spinach. THAT IS JUST WRONG.

3. I have a bad habit of leaving bits of trash – an apple core, a piece of chewing-gum wrapped in paper, a few used tissues – on the floor by the couch I have been reading on.

4. When I want to, I can read absurdly quickly – my eye moves down the middle of the page in a straight line and takes everything in. This is bad for light reading purposes (because there is actually not enough perfect light reading in the world) but good when it comes to work.

5. When I started graduate school, my raised hand and voice would shake with nervousness when I asked a question after a talk. My friend Emily Steiner and I made a pact that we would overcome nerves by asking a question at every single talk we ever went to, and it is now one of my trademarks.

6. My English grandmother, when any hint of gloominess or self-pity entered into the manner of my grandfather or anyone else, would say, bracingly, “Buck up, old chap!” Sometimes I say these words to myself – I like them because they make me think of her, but they also seem to me very good advice!

7. I understand and appreciate the difference between good food and bad food, but I cannot be bothered to cook anything myself – food is fuel, some of it is tastier and/or more nutritious and some less so, but it does not interest me to experiment with producing lovely foods myself.

8. Ditto for clothes and also for interior decoration – if it were possible to do so without attracting unwanted attention, I would wear a navy-blue boiler suit every day and not have to worry about clothes at all, and I cannot be bothered to pay any attention to my living environment, which is accordingly fairly monastic/spartan.

9. I am fond of miniature things! Pastel-colored petits fours strike me as the height of desirability on the cake front.

10. As an art, oil painting does not mostly speak to me – I much prefer watercolor as a medium.

11. When I’m out for a run with friends, I unconsciously pick up my pace as soon as we begin to talk about plans for training and racing.

12. I used to play a lot of different wind instruments: clarinet, oboe and recorder as the primary ones, but I also enjoyed the spinoffs (English horn, bassoon, saxophones of different sizes, random early instruments like krumhorns).

13. I like cardigans with zippers.

14. I do not like wearing socks, and the weather has to drop into the teens for me to be willing to put on a pair in everyday life. (But socks are necessary in running shoes.)

15. When I hear about something interesting or intriguing, I cannot rest until I have tracked down a satisfactory account of it.

16. I love the library stacks.

17. I am also disproportionately fond of certain Library of Congress call numbers.

18. I do not like talking on the phone.

19. I do not have a driver’s license.

20. My bicycle is a Specialized Roubaix.

21. I am not yet in love with cycling, but I am hoping that I might fall for it sometime later this spring.

22. I believe that as long as the desire is strong enough, it is possible to accomplish almost anything with sustained hard work.

23. My talents as an academic are more striking than my talents as a novelist, but certain gifts cross over. Perhaps the most striking of these are the ability to think clearly and a related talent: the development, over many years, of a flexible and precise writing voice that is so thoroughly and strongly congruent with my thoughts that I rarely find myself at a loss for words.

24. If I had to choose between three days without reading and three days without eating, I would have to give up eating. It would not really be a choice – reading is essential!

25. My first pet was a brown-and-white short-haired guinea pig called Linda.

Check out the upcoming lecture on a book about Stalin’s head of the secret police —-2/5/09 Yezhov: The Rise of Stalin’s “Iron Fist” at the UCLA Center for European & Eurasian Studies.

Amy Davidson is blogging at the New Yorker!

(Amy and I met the first week of our freshman year of college, when we were seated next to each other at all of the placement tests you have to take in that sort of situation; we soon became known as the Davidson Twins, we have been best friends now for more than half our lives, and it is also the case that certain other friends still introduce us in a sort of string: "Jenny-Davidson-and-Amy-Davidson-no-relation"!)

(I have also made a tiny private joke in the punctuation of the previous sentence which only Amy will appreciate!)

Via Levi, the Beinecke Library offers a daily post from Johnson's Dictionary.

The Woolworth Building and other monuments of urban planning.

This is an irresponsible illustration for a serious news story! (Thanks to my dad for the link.)

When will Soft Skull publish the juvenilia of Jenny D? The latest excavation features vivid painting, fruit aplenty, decals, a "Muswell Hill" address, and a triumphant final exclamation.

In what may be one of the oddest cinematic adaptations of all time, First Showing’s Alex Billington reports that Run Lola Run/The International director Tom Tykwer is hard at work attempting to adapt David Mitchell’s imposing novel, Cloud Atlas, for the big screen. He has enlisted the Wachowski Brothers for help. While Mr. Billington seems to possess an unfamiliarity with Michell’s great novel, asking Tykwer “which of the six he would be focusing on” (which, uh, sort of defeats the purpose), what’s interesting here is that Tykwer, who has written all of the scripts for his films, is even trying to adapt what is possibly an unfilmable novel. Whether or not Tykwer has asked the Wachowski brothers to read several books before reading Mitchell’s novel and getting to work on the script remains unknown. (Hat tip: mdash)

finsbry has added a photo to the pool:

Until I read this book I was convinced she was wearing a bathing suit and the umbrella was from the beach. Not so, at least according to the plot. She’s certainly at attention, as it were.

finsbry has added a photo to the pool:

An unusual way to wrap a beach towel.

The Eastsider LA: Occidental College names new president post has all the details about the installation of one Jonathan Veitch, who has served as the dean of Eugene Lang College at the New School in New York.

On Wednesday, I grabbed my best girlfriend and headed to UCLA for a lecture by noted design critic, Steven Heller. He opened his presentation with the observation that it was good to be in warm L.A., far from frosty Manhattan where “snow makes people angry.”

Here’s the write up I just posted on LAObserved.com

Earliest known work by JMD! Not sure whether I was three or four when I dictated this story to my mother, but certainly I was already in thrall to the absurd notion that the only thing really worth doing with one's time was writing a book....