From the Onion

“Coming in at an exhausting 7,000 years long, music is weighed down by a few too many mid- tempo tunes, most notably ‘Liebesträume No. 3 in A flat’ by Franz Liszt and ‘Closing Time’ by ’90s alt-rock group Semisonic,” Schreiber wrote. “In the end, though music can be brilliant at times, the whole medium comes off as derivative of Pavement.”

That reminds me that I’ve been mulling over “The secondary stumbles because the cadence of the count has led them astray; pray their intuition leads them crashing into bodies in a perfect way.” The detached, tonally inappropriate description of football figures in several of their songs. A refutation of Massenpsychologie? (Last night, I was asking Clancy which VH1 show would have horrified Adorno the most: The Pick-Up Artist or Rock of Love? It’s not an easy question. Adorno, you may remember, glossed increasing cartoon violence as a message to workers to take their own abuse smiling, and I’m sure that he could have found ample f-type leanings in the cheap mesmerism and utopic Svengalitistics of the latter. All thoughts welcome, etc.)

Some Further Reflections on the Mayday Materials

Conrad, in his magisterial post on the Mayday Matter, advanced two complementary ideas: 1) that the ads themselves are the expression of an aesthetic sensibility and have no other discernible purpose and 2) that the community of random annotations that has arisen at Bryan Hance’s site is in itself perhaps more noteworthy and interesting than what they seek to explain. I believe that the creator of these materials has had a lifelong interest in educational methods, particularly those influenced by behaviorism. My general theory is that they are sole-creator, many-partial-reader. I mean by this that they cannot be fully decoded, but that they are designed to be partially decoded in such a way as to instruct the attempter in doctrine or factual information the creator deems important. The apparatus of conspiracy and mystery is designed to elicit interest. This is a university newspaper, after all, and the library resources available to the intrepid (these appeared and were complicated in what was effectively a pre-internet, or at least pre-search engine era) would have mostly sufficed for the annotations that follow (though it would have been considerably more of a trial. The recent pieces seem to have undergone some preliminary google-proofing.) The most direct evidence of this I can find is in the omitted section of the “leitmotiv” from the 2/8/89 ad:

An Unknown Source for Kafka's The Metamorphosis?

This piece [JSTOR] in Science from 1892 describes how a grapevine beetle came to love and obey a young woman, until it was accidentally dropped.

Poor grapevine beetle. (I know that the chances of Kafka having read this are almost nil, but still.)

I N L A N D  E M P I R E And Finance Capitalism

I only saw it last week. Circumstances permitted a discussion with film scholar Chuck Tryon over the weekend, and I told him that I was overwhelmed by the film in divers ways. In particular, Poland.

I’ve been reading reviews, and the one cogent comment on that aspect seems to be from Carina Chocano’s LA Times piece: “A lament for Hollywood production jobs lost to Eastern Europe?”

Also, “Black Tambourine” was apt in a way that “The Hexx,” for example, would not have been.

Some Amazon Data

Using a modified (and depleted) version of this script written by digital historian blogger William J. Turkel, I tried to see how useful of an automated source generator Amazon’s Statistically Improbable Phrases and Capitalized Phrases data would be for Gene Wolfe’s Solider of Sidon:

SIP red land

Atlantis: Insights from a Lost Civilization Soldier of Sidon Red Land Yellow River: A Story from the Cultural Revolution The Golden Star of Halich: A Tale of the Red Land in 1362

Update

First day of school tomorrow. Mood:

Actually, not at all like that. I seem to recall Rushdie begrudgingly crediting Le Carre with skillful plotting in Tinker, Tailor. It would be interesting to chart the geography of the novel, particularly that of Tarr’s (an allusion?) movements. The board above is also too monochromatic (the amber spectacles for life’s eclipse!).

John from Cincinnati Cancelled

I’ve only caught a few episodes of this in hotel rooms, but it seemed sublime. (But the affectless intrusion of the marvelous also seemed to be something I think of as a wounded trend in contemporary American fiction.) I’m not at all surprised that it was cancelled, given that its obvious lack of popular appeal. It also captured the dilapidated beachside community well, though I have more personal experience with the East Coast versions.

On Sybil Shade's Vocabulary

It’s far more likely that Mrs. Shade would have known the definition of “sempiternal” than “grimpen” (PF 46).

The Lost Glove Is Happy

I’m contemplating the following as a syllabus:

• Metamorphosis

• Ficciones

• The Street of Crocodiles

• Pale Fire

• Imaginary Magnitude and/or A Perfect Vacuum

But I think something is missing. I don’t think that something is The Waves, though there are reasons to think so. Nor Calvino. (But were there an affordable edition of the Codex Seraphinianus!) It’s not Barthelme or Danielewski or Zadie Smith. Byatt, maybe. If those books form a series, what is the next term?

Incomplete Lists

Fiction in which Jacques Monod appears:

Kosinski, Jersy. Blind Date.

I would like to hear from anyone who’s read both this book and Lem’s Chain of Chance (Catarrh).