July 13, 2004
JENNY ON THE BLOG
John Shaw throws two coins into the fountain.
"On the blog-ancestry front I was going to say Benjamin's One-Way Street, but I realize he got the style from Kraus, and so did Kurt Tucholsky, whose Deutschland Deutschland Uber Alles also comes to mind. And then there's Ring Lardner's parody of Walter Winchell..."
Andrew from Dawson's Books send this:
"As for the "what I ate" mode, Georges Perec, another Oulipean, recorded everything he ate and drank in 1974 in a fearsome list (re?)printed in Species of Space and Other Pieces. (His Things: A Story of the Sixties is an anticipatory critique of the inventories of preference that comprise Friendster pages, etc: it's a catalogue, in the conditional tense, of the desires of young Jerome and Sylvie, Parisian market researchers.)
Paul Metcalf. Melville's great-[great?]-grandson, sold real estate for a living and was a genius. Zip Odes are short paeans to the States made up of place-names taken from a 1968 Postal Service Directory. Fast. I-57 is a map drawn in words of that grand interstate as seen during Metcalf's 57th year, its legend and lines gleaned from road signs and whatever else. Fast and personal. Both are in his Collected Works, Vol. 2 along with much else that's worthwhile. Collage, pastiche, episodic weirdness. Interview with him here
Evan S. Connell, in cranky ruminator mode: Notes from a Bottle Found on a Beach at Carmel, The Alchemist's Journal. Even Son of the Morning Star kind of fits, if you imagine him floating above Little Big Horn with a steam-powered laptop."
Posted by Sasha at July 13, 2004 10:18 AM | TrackBack