The swans of North America

At Triple Canopy, Dan Torop's virtual Bowery (via The Rumpus.)

"Tempting little rectangles"

The Spam cook of the year.

"I like the cut of your J.I.B."

At the FT, Michael Moorcock on lost Londons (site registration required).

Miscellanous linkage

Michael Jackson bits from Ta-Nehisi Coates (via The Dizzies), Annalee Newitz, Ed Champion and Phil Nugent. (Also: Martha Southgate's 2006 review of Margo Jefferson's book on Jackson and an interesting interview with Jefferson about the book and its subject.)

Thoroughly unrelated: Reassigned Time explains why it's worth taking longer to write a dissertation if it means laying the foundation for a productive life on the tenure track.

The fantastical capybara

"When he's happy he sounds like a Geiger counter." (Thanks to Brent for tipping me off to the BoingBoing bit I missed.)

Cookstrips

The reissue of Len Deighton's cult cookbook.

The fabric of the world

The day's page quota came fairly easily today - I am having a productive week of novel-revising, though still with a slightly anxious eye on my August 1 deadline. Right now I'm in the midst of a stretch of entirely new writing, which is enjoyable though somewhat nerve-racking (due to the aforementioned time issues) and causes me to contemplate Samuel R. Delany's description of what it means to revise fiction, which seems to me by far the best thing I have ever seen on the topic.

I read a great book this past week, Peter Terzian's collection Heavy Rotation: Twenty Writers on the Albums That Changed Their Lives. I've been looking forward to this book ever since I first heard about it, and it well lived up to expectations. Only a handful of the albums written about here play any significant role in my own internal discography, so it is perhaps not surprising that two of the essays I liked best are both on albums that matter to me also: Benjamin Kunkel's "Still Ill" (The Smiths, The Queen Is Dead) and Colm Toibin's "Three Weeks in the Summer" (Joni Mitchell, Blue). (The first of these two in particular is an unmissably good pieces of writing!) I also liked pieces by Sheila Heti, Martha Southgate and Peter Terzian for reasons that had nothing to do with the albums they described.

But the real standout here for me is an odder and more unusual piece that struck me as absolutely and divinely sublime, to the point that I have just Amazoned its uncanny subject American Primitive, Vol. II: Pre-War Revenants (1897-1939). I've been a huge fan of John Jeremiah Sullivan ever since I read his book Blood Horses: Notes of a Sportswriter's Son, and this essay is basically the thing I magically most wanted to read in the world without at all knowing it yet!

Check out this paragraph:

In what is surely a trustworthy mark of obscurantist cred, one of the sides on Pre-War Revenants was discovered at a flea market in Nashville by the person who engineered the collection, Chris King, the guy who actually signs for delivery of the reinforced wooden boxes, put together with drywall screws and capable of withstanding an auto collision, in which most 78s arrive for projects like these. The collectors trust King; he's a major collector himself (owner, as it happens, of the second-best of three known copies of "Last Kind Words Blues") and an acknowledged savant when it comes to excavating and reconstructing sonic information from the wrecked grooves of pre-war disc recordings. I interviewed him a couple of years ago. A perk of magazine journalism is you can call up fascinating strangers and ask them questions on absolutely no pretext. King, like Fahey, graduated with degrees in religion and philosophy. He described "junking" that rare 78 in Tennessee, the Two Poor Boys' "Old Hen Cackle," which lay atop a stack of 45s on a table in the open sun. It was brown. In the heat, it had warped, he said, "into the shape of a soup bowl." At the bottom of the bowl he could read the word perfect: that's a short-lived hillbilly label. "Brown Perfects" are precious. He took it home and placed it outside between two panes of clear glass--collector's wisdom, handed down--and allowed the heat of the sun and the slight pressure of the glass's gravity slowly to press it flat again, to where he could play it. Now he could begin finding out what it remembered

The next two paragraphs are equally good - the volume is worth picking up for this piece alone (and you really do have to read that Smiths essay!).

Here's a playlist Peter did recently for the Paper Cuts blog at the Times.

(And here's a bonus link which I missed at the time, Lee Child's earlier installment in the same series! Much of it doesn't particularly catch my eye, but check out this description of why Child thinks of Pink Floyd's "Money" when he writes the action scenes in a Jack Reacher novel: "The lyric is O.K., but what I really like is the time signature change between the saxophone solo and the guitar solo — at that point, we really get down to it, and that’s a feeling I try to replicate whenever I start a major set-piece scene. Like saying: You want action? Try this." It is no surprise that this fellow is such a genius of light reading....)

"Eeegaads!"

D. Graham Burnett interviews Anthony Grafton for Cabinet on deception, forgery and the early modern historical sense (via Bookforum):

In the early fifteenth century, an exceedingly learned Latinist, Lorenzo Valla, rolled up his philological sleeves and red-penciled a copy of the Donation. “Wait a second,” he says, “this doesn’t look to me like the kind of Latin they were writing in the fourth century!” And he amasses this magnificent demonstration that the Donation could not have been written when its author claimed. They just didn’t use the language of the document in those days. Now, people had argued about this text since forever, but everyone before Valla had basically been preoccupied by its juridical elements (as in, exactly what implications did it have for the proper relationship between emperors and popes, etc., etc.). Valla bracketed those thorny legal questions and went after the document in a different way.

­He went after it historically.

Yes, philologically. And to do that, you really have to have a very deep sense of how language works, to be sure, but you also need to have an equally deep sense of how time works; you need to understand that a given period has a style in everything that it does, from plumbing to personal relations, and that any product of the period has to show the traits of that period and style.

Impasto

William Boyd on the Leopold Museum and the paintings of Egon Schiele. On Schiele's “Self-portrait with Head Inclined” (1912):

Most unusually, Schiele has a moustache in this portrait—the only image of him moustachioed that I can recall. Luckily for posterity, Schiele was fond of being photographed and in all the many photographs we have of him he appears clean-shaven. I don’t mean to be facetious, but Austro-Hungarian Vienna was, among everything else, the city of facial hair. Was it a mark of rebellion not to grow a beard or a moustache in those days and thus distinguish yourself from the hirsute complacent burghers and whiskered bemedalled soldiers? I think of another of Schiele’s Vienna contemporaries, another harbinger of the modern 20th century and a ground-breaker in his field, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein—lean, ascetic and permanently clean-shaven, like Schiele. Does the demonic stare in this portrait, the added black stripe of the moustache, gesture towards the schizophrenic nature of Viennese society in those days before the Great War? This may be the wisdom of hindsight but another contemporary of Schiele (and of Wittgenstein and Freud) in pre-war Vienna was Adolf Hitler, then an embittered and near-destitute down-and-out, roaming the streets, living in squalid hostels, nurturing his paranoid fantasies. Twenty years later he would be chancellor of Germany.

(I am thinking I must have seen the Schiele exhibition at the Royal Academy in December 1990 - it certainly made an impression on me...)

"Pouring linseed oil on the school cormorant"

Henry Gee on the need for new cliches.

"Novelistic gloss"

Facebook movie?

"Inauthentic as well as disgusting"

At the TLS, Peter Parker reviews two new editions of Kenneth Graham's The Wind in the Willows:

Food and drink are vital elements of the novel, and while Gauger supplies a delightful history of Burton’s Ale as well as a recipe for Captains’ Biscuits from Robert Wells’s Bread and Biscuit Baker’s and Sugar-Boiler’s Assistant (1890), and reproduces instructions for making “Mr Grahame’s Coffee” to his exacting standards, she supposes Palermo to be the home of a famous sherry, and her description of trifle, with its “layers” of, among other things, ice-cream and gelatin, is inauthentic as well as disgusting. She also occasionally gets into chronological muddles: in depicting Otter as a “gentleman adventurer”, Grahame can hardly have had in mind T. E. Lawrence, who was an obscure undergraduate at the time, and the horse in Milne’s Toad of Toad Hall cannot be “an early version of Eeyore in the Pooh books”, since these books predate the play.

"Perversity incarnate"

The inimitable conversational style of Thomas Bernhardt (link courtesy of Linden):

What is that, a publisher? I could put the question to you: What is a publisher (Verleger)? A bedside rug (Bettvorleger), there's no doubt what that is. But a publisher, without the bed, that's harder to answer. Someone who misplaces (verlegen) things, a muddled person, who misplaces things and can't find them anymore. That's the definition of a publisher, someone who misplaces things. A publisher, he misplaces things and manuscripts which he accepts and then he can't find them anymore. Either because he no longer likes them or because he's muddled, either way they're gone. Misplaced. For all eternity. All the publishers I know are like that. None of them is so great as not to be the kind who misplaces things. Who publishes something and then it's either ruined or impossible to find.

Proxy battles

The Cute Cat Theory of Internet Censorship. (Courtesy of Amy.)

Light reading catch-up

Before I left New York, I obtained a huge pile of books by Barbara Hambly and Patricia Wrede via the BorrowDirect library system - spinoffs from the original Jo Walton recommendation. These are the sorts of books that are difficult to get hold of usefully through the library, a used bookseller of quality would be better - it is often hard even to tell where something is in a particular series (it only gradually dawned on me, as I read Traveling with the Dead, that it must be a sequel - it is the publisher's rather than the author's responsibility to mark this in some way! - and Wrede's The Magician's Ward is also a later installment in a story begun elsewhere, though in this case it was both marked inside the book by way of a list of titles in various series and also more effectively handled by the author).

These books are well-written but derivative - in particular I find Wrede's novels very delightful (I was halfway through another one, too, only didn't want to pack library books in my luggage!), only too strongly derivative of Georgette Heyer, who invented a world and an idiom that continue to influence popular fiction of various kinds in a fashion that is interesting to observe.

I have finished the Ross MacDonald (Jack Reacher avant la lettre!) and Cold Comfort Farm (hmmm, some funny moments, but I cannot say I was captivated by it - I kept on wishing I were reading I Capture the Castle instead!).

On the plane the other day I gulped down Michael Connelly's The Scarecrow - Connelly is not my personally absolute favorite crime writer, but I think he really is a genius of light reading, he is such a compelling and skillful writer of genre fiction, absolutely and wonderfully reliably so - and Gillian Flynn's Sharp Objects (could have been better plotted, but for the most part very appealing).

I've got a bit of a hodgepodge of light reading with me on this trip. I am planning to restock at several junctures: an expensive and thus necessarily modest amount of precautionary book-shopping at the excellent Caymanian Books & Books, a thrillingly chancy bet that there will be 10-12 hours' worth of stuff at some airport store in Miami that I would be willing to read and then an absolutely lavish spree at Heathrow for the trip home and beyond!