A Patrick Leigh Fermor Glossary

Since completing the first two parts (A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water) of Patrick Leigh Fermor's as-yet unfinished trilogy (the final, posthumous volume is apparently being assembled for publication as early as next year) recounting his journey between Holland and Constantinople in the early 1930s, I've been compiling a list of some of the more unusual and striking words he uses in these books. Many of them come from the worlds of medieval European architecture, horsemanship, agriculture, warfare, and nobility/heraldry, among other more or less arcane subjects, along with Britishisms and a few archaic words that Fermor must've just liked the sound of. It's a tribute to Fermor's writing that somehow these books make for very smooth and enjoyable reading despite being minefields of obscure words.

I'm not sure whether I'll be able to summon the courage to go through this exercise with Between the Woods and the Water, but here are some of the best and, to me, most unusual words I found in A Time of Gifts, presented roughly in the order they were encountered in the text:

impecunious - penniless
teazles - plant, genus Dipsacus
spinney - a small wood with undergrowth or a thorny thicket
pursuivant - officer of arms, ranking below a herald
aedile - type of Roman official
puttee - strip of cloth wound spirally around the lower leg or a leather legging covering the same area
oleograph - color lithograph in imitation of oil paint
jonkheer - Dutch honorific, “young lord”
besom - broom made of bundled twigs
punctilio - minute detail of (often ceremonial) conduct
aurochs - European wild cattle, ancestors of domestic cattle, Bos primigenius
impedimenta - baggage or objects that impede or encumber
gorgeted - wearing a collar-like piece of armour to protect the throat or (on a bird) having differently-colored feathers covering the same area
mangolds - Swiss chard
postilion - rider guiding the horses of a coach
beetle (noun) - heavy, wood-splitting maul
beetle (verb) - to be suspended over or overhang
caracoling - performing a half turn (by a horse and rider)
margravine - female aristocrat w/ military responsiblities in border territory of a kingdom (margrave is male)
ramify - to have complicating consequences or to divide into branchline parts
toper - drinker [interestingly, my search for this word also returned an image of Amy Winehouse]
undercroft - traditionally, a brick cellar, storage room or crypt, often vaulted
shako - tall cylindrical military cap
comitadjis (or komitadjis) - a band of resistance fighters or irregulars
machicolated - having machicolations - openings btwn. corbels of a projecting gallery or battlement through which stones, etc. could be dropped on attackers
velleity - slight or mild wish or inclination
puggaree - light scarf wrapped as a band around a sun helmet
sabretache - flat bag or pouch worn from the belt of a hussar calvary soldier along with the saber
uhlan - Polish or Prussian light cavalry
czapka - Polish cavalry hat
aigrette - tuft or spray of feathers (esp. from an egret) worn as a headdress
bustards - large, terrestrial European birds
capercaillies - large European grouse
roodscreen - ornamental partition separating choir from nave in Medieval churches
brindled - tawny or grayish with obscure streaks or spots of a darker color
fimbria - Latin for fringe, often used in science and medicine
monstrance - vessel for display of the Eucharistic host in Catholic churches
congener - a person or thing like another in character or action
ostler - stableman, esp. at an inn
purulent - suppurating, full of or discharging pus
ewer - vase-shaped pitcher
scumbled - softened or dulled color by application of thin opaque coat
grisaille - decorative painting in shades of gray, often to represent three-dimensional relief
hawser - thick nautical cable or rope for mooring or towing
loden - water-resistant material made from sheep’s wool, usually green and associated with Austrian traditional dress
junkers - landed nobility of Prussia and eastern Germany (perjorative)
mediatization - process by which a lesser state is annexed by a greater state, permitting ruler of lesser state to retain title
hospodar - Slavonic lord or “master”
boyars - Bulgarian or Old Russian aristocrats
quinquereme - ancient Roman galley with five banks of oars
cicerone - a museum or gallery guide for sightseers
pavane - slow, stately dance of the 16th and 17th centuries
baldachino (or baldacchino or baldachin or baldaquin) - canopy of state over an altar or throne (as Bernini’s in St. Peter’s), originally fabric, later of costlier materials
jocund - cheerful and lighthearted
cincture - belt or sash worn as a liturgical vestment
forage-cap - non-dress (“undress”) military cap, originating with the cap worn by 18th-century British cavalry while gathering forage for their horses
pelf - money, esp. acquired by dishonesty
guerdon - reward
fardel - pack or bundle
creel - wicker fisherman’s basket
kepi - cap with a flat circular top and a visor, associated with the French military
crapulous - marked by intemperance in eating/drinking
noctambulism - sleep walking
crosier - stylized pastoral staff carried by high church officials
manege - a riding academy
lavolta - a Renaissance dance
coranto (or courante or corrente) - a triple meter dance of the late Renaissance and Baroque era
limpet - type of gastropod/mollusk/snail
yatagan - Ottoman knife or short saber
damascened - decorated (metal) with patterns of inlay or etching
sapper - combat engineer
spahis - light cavalry of the French army recruited from North Africa
deracination - act or process of uprooting or displacement from native environment
tarn - glacial mountain lake or pool
spoor - track, trail, trace or scent of animal or person being tracked
danegeld - originally a tax raised in Anglo-Saxon England to pay tribute to Danish invaders or finance protection against them
virago - noisy, domineering woman or strong, heroic woman
swart - swarthy
puszta - Hungarian grassland/prairie
crockets - hook-shaped decorative elements in Gothic architecture
diapered (architecture) - decorated w/ geometric patterns
stickle-back - type of scaleless fish
banneret - rank of knight who led troops under his own banner
ogee - architectural molding in the shape of an s-curve
incunables - books printed in Europe before 1501
uncials - Greek and Latin capital-letter script used from 3rd to 8th Century
imberb - beardless [http://obsoleteword.blogspot.com/2008/05/imberb.html]
pargetted - plaster-coated, as a wall or chimney, often ornamental
irrefragable - irrefutable, indisputable
apricocks - apricots (archaic)
twigged - realized, understood
nacreous - pearly, iridescent (esp. of a cloud)
charabanc - open-topped horse-drawn or early motor coach used for sightseeing outings
dolman - Turkish robe-like garment or uniform jacket worn by hussars

Slava + The Raj

I recommend watching the entirety of this BBC documentary on the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, but if you need to be convinced, the two minutes or so starting at approximately 42:30 contain some of the best live performance footage I've seen of any musician.

---------------------

I finally finished the book I've been reading since late last year, Raj by Lawrence James, an appropriately lengthy but mostly fascinating history of the British in India. One of the things that kept me going was the succession of amazing names, mostly British. A sample:

The Marquess of Tweeddale
Sir Montstuart Elphinstone
Ba Maw
Maud Diver
Sir Bampfylde Fuller
Sir Hugh Gough
Lord Minto
Tanti Topi
Sgt. John Ramsbottom
Major Henry Broadfoot
Lieutenant Hooke Pearson
L. Marsland Gander
The Faqir of Ipi
Francis & George Younghusband
Field Marshal Viscount "Weevil" Wavell
Lord Pethick Lawrence (referred to in the book as "the Etonian vegetarian")
Field Marshal Sir Claude "The Auk" Auchinleck

Gedney at Duke

I've just started reading Geoff Dyer's newish essay/review collection Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, and Dyer has already led me to an amazing find - the online William Gedney archive at Duke University. Dyer co-edited a book of Gedney's photographs and writings (most of which apparently went unpublished during his lifetime), and the photos of India seem to have been a major influence on Dyer's excellent Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi. The book, What Was True, seems to be out of print and selling for four to five times its original $35 list price online, but the Duke website will do nicely until I can get my hands on a copy. Besides the Benares/Varanasi photos and the photos of Kentucky, Haight-Ashbury, and Brooklyn (Gedney was a longtime resident and chronicler of Myrtle Ave - his notebooks on the subject are like the Brooklyn Arcades Project) that Dyer mentions in his essay, my favorite find so far in the archive is a mockup of a planned book on contemporary composers, with great photos of just about all the big names of Gedney's time - Partch, Feldman, Wolpe, and the big Bs and Cs: Babbitt, Barber and Bernstein, Cage, Carter and Copland.

Martin Amis' Joystick (Not a Metaphor or Euphemism)

Though today's Slate article on Martin Amis' arrival in Brooklyn was thoroughly unnecessary, covering ground that had already been trampled by herds of Brooklyn blogs in the past several months, I am thankful to Troy Patterson for one piece of information in the story. I had no idea, and still can't quite believe, that Amis published a book on video game tactics. As in, how to get high scores on Asteroids and Space Invaders. Check it out - seeing the recognizable Amis style applied to the minutiae of old skool arcade gameplay is mind-bending.

All Souls

While reading Javier Marías' three-part Your Face Tomorrow, I didn't realize that the main character/narrator had appeared in some of the author's earlier works. When I came across that piece of information, reading some of the YFT discussions at Conversational Reading, I went out, bought and read All Souls, where (as far as I know) Marías originated his Oxonian Madrileño character, Jacques/Jaime/Jacobo Deza. Even though the action of All Souls takes place some years before the plot of Your Face Tomorrow begins, reading the first novel second enhanced my appreciation of both books and my understanding of Marías' style and thematic preoccupations. There are many parallels and resonances between the books - both have key scenes involving the main character following/observing someone in a museum, and both build up to the story of a suicide. Besides these parallel features, there are also many "callbacks" from All Souls in YFT - characters, stories, quotations, ideas - a theory of horror illustrated by a gypsy flower seller and a three-legged dog, to name one of the most memorable.

It doesn't seem as if Marías planned for All Souls to be the first in any kind of series of books featuring the character Deza (in fact, he isn't even named in All Souls, perhaps deliberately tempting the reader - despite a warning at the front of the book - to identify him with the author). In YFT, it seems that Marías had to find a way of bringing a character that he killed off in All Souls back to life because he wanted to write more about him. The solution, inventing a surviving brother with very similar life experiences, may seem contrived but it's hard to imagine how YFT could have existed without Marías solving this problem in some way, so central is this character (Rylands/Wheeler, revealed at the end of YFT to have been based on a real Oxford mentor figure of the author's) to the story. Apparently, there are other Marías novels with shared characters, including the follow-up/sequel to All Souls, Dark Back of Time, which I plan to read soon. Brief, brilliant, and surely one of the greatest "campus novels" (though it transcends that genre) outside of Lucky Jim, I can recommend All Souls without reservation to be read as an introduction to Marías or as a warm-up for or follow-up to Your Face Tomorrow.

Your Face Tomorrow

I finished the final volume of Javier Marías' Your Face Tomorrow over the weekend. I'm definitely not done thinking about it, but I might venture a few tentative thoughts.

The structure of this three-volume,1200+ page work is one of the most intriguing things about it. I'd like to see somebody chart the plot of YFT, to show how frequently the action jumps backward in time only to return to the main story, the whole of which is being related after the fact by the narrator/protagonist. [The chart probably wouldn't need to be as complicated and this or this. Maybe it would look something like this.] This narrator, Jacques Deza, comments several times on how a few of the main characters, himself included, share the ability to never "lose the thread", no matter how many tangents they follow or parentheses they insert into a conversation. And this is exactly what Marías does. Although the timeline of the main story may only advance by a matter of minutes in hundreds of pages, as happens in the second volume, Marías/Deza never lets go of the thread, always finding his way back from the innumerable digressions, asides, speculations, backfills, and recollections within recollections. In retrospect, it becomes clear that the digressions are really just as much part of the story, just as important, as the main thread. Though the material is much different, the way that stories lead to other stories, or memories to other memories, in YFT is not unlike the book-within-a-book in Michal Ajvaz's The Golden Age (which I discussed here), with the key difference that Ajvaz's narrator does lose the thread as he's pulled deeper and deeper into "the Book".  

The pace of YFT's main story seems to pick up a bit in the third (and longest) volume, as Marías starts to pay off on a lot of things he'd set up much earlier - hints, allusions, questions, obsessively repeated words or quotations of initially unclear import. Still, the bare facts of the plot could have been related in conventional novelistic fashion in a matter of a few hundred pages, even taken at a leisurely pace, pausing frequently to describe rooms and sunsets. So what does Marías need three volumes for? I wouldn't call YFT an experimental novel. Structurally, Marías is not doing anything more radical than Proust (and certainly less radical than Sterne). He does, however, find a way of representing his narrator's consciousness, his internal monologue, that may not be new but certainly is distinctive and effective. The voice and storytelling method Marías has fashioned is even, to indulge in a book jacket blurb cliche, compulsively readable despite the sheer length that results from this approach. If you can get on Marías' wavelength in the first book, you'll be with him for the long haul, all the way to the end of his epic London-Madrid sort-of-spy story.

With YFT, Marías makes a case for the novel's continued relevance as a form uniquely suited to shed light on the mysteries of human consciousness and human behavior. I'm pretty sure he's also given us some deep insights on the perennial (and interrelated) subjects of history, memory, war, and violence, but these (especially the last two) are the aspects of the book that I feel I'm still unpacking, and writing about them would probably merit a whole separate (and much longer) post.

[After finishing this post, I've started working my way through the series on YFT at Conversational Reading, which I'd specifically avoided - along with almost all reviews - until I finished the book.]

The Golden Age

Here is a good, short summing up of an excellent book I read recently.  My own attempt to write a good, short summing up of The Golden Age ended in failure, so I recommend you read this one and, more importantly, read the book.

Although I abandoned the original post I was working on, I'll throw in a few scattered points here:

The Golden Age is very much connected in my mind with Borges.  Although JLB is constantly being cited as an influence, it does seem particularly clear in this case.  That's not to say the book is derivative, but to me, it reads a bit like a Borges story (successfully) expanded to novel length.  Calvino and his Invisible Cities is another obvious reference point that I've seen mentioned, but I see Borges as the ultimate source.  Calvino isn't necessary to explain Michal Ajvaz's invention in the same way I think Borges is.  I wasn't at all surprised to learn that Ajvaz had written a book on Borges.

One thing to watch for in The Golden Age is a particular, complex form that keeps recurring, leading the reader to believe that it may be some kind of key to the island civilization being described.  Perhaps the most concrete presentation of this form is in the description of the river that forms the geography of the island's upper town.  It comes together from divergent sources, flows for a while as a sort of braided stream, with small islands of rock where the houses of the town have been built, and then splits apart into a delta.  This coming together, flowing for a while as a more-or-less unified force, and then breaking apart again also serves as an approximation of the process by which the island's sole Book changes as it passes through the hands of the islanders, who are simultaneously its readers and editor-writers.

Dalkey Archive Press, Ajvaz's US publisher, is surely up there with the very best small-to-medium size presses, along with maybe New Directions and I don't know who else.  I had a hard time choosing between The Golden Age and The Other City when taking advantage of a sale Dalkey was running.  Now I'm thinking I should've bought both.

The Spirit of Al-Andalus, Between Two Slices of Bread

I recently finished reading Maria Rosa Menocal's The Ornament of the World, about the rise and fall of Al-Andalus.  Though it leaves readers to draw their own conclusions about its relevance to the modern world (with the book nearly ready for publication on Sept. 11, 2001, Menocal resisted the urge to make any changes to her text), the book clearly celebrates the cultural richness of medieval Spain as a product of religious tolerance and laments the fundamentalism (both Christian and Muslim) that brought this luminous era to a close.  Despite the fact that it was published eight years ago and deals mostly with Spain in the 10th to 14th centuries, it is literally difficult to think of a more topical read.

Sure, Al-Andalus had its Arabic-speaking Jewish warrior poets, its Muslim Aristotelians, its immortal works of architecture, but I'm proud to live in a city where one of the best places to get a Jewish deli sandwich is a Muslim-owned restaurant (that closes for Friday prayers) in a neighborhood synonymous with hip-hop culture.  If I was hungry enough, I might even say that this compares pretty favorably with the Alhambra as a work of art.

Ride A White Swan (Update)

A few months ago I linked, not without skepticism, to a report that one of The Selected Ballads' favorite writers, the great, underappreciated-in-America Iain Sinclair, was collaborating on a project that somehow involved the 2012 Olympic site and a river journey by pedal-driven swan boat.  Not being familiar with his collaborator, filmmaker/artist Andrew Kötting, it seemed too strange to be true. Now, it turns out there's online documentation [via] that it really happened, though the photo of Sinclair and Kötting in their swan boat being lowered into the water by helicopter is almost enough to make me start doubting the whole thing all over again.  More documentation, some of it via pinhole camera, on the impressively pseudonymed Anonymous Bosch's Flickr (his non-swan-related photos of London and Londoners are also well worth a look).

As fanciful as the project still seems, it makes more sense to me after finishing Sinclair's latest book, Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire, in which the swan is something of a motif, a recurring and shifting symbol or totem.  There's swan graffiti, a gory swan massacre, and even the mysterious Dr. Swan (aka Swanny), a seedy character who Sinclair tracks through a Hackney underworld (one of many underworlds Sinclair explores, including the Hackney Mole Man's literal one) of day-drinkers, self-medicating doctors, and disgraced morgue attendants haunting abandoned hospitals.

Four Things Found On The Internet

1
This photo book, from Thurston Moore's new publishing concern and featuring the work of former Village Voice photographer James Hamilton, looks like it could be some kind of milestone in the photos-of-musicians genre.  That Johnny Rotten photo!  He looks downright huggable, almost angelic. [via]

2
The limited exposure I've had to Tao Lin's work (like the majority of the small minority of people who've heard of him, I have a greater familiarity with his self-promotional stunts and shenanigans than his writing) has left me intrigued but a bit doubtful of the success (in literary terms) of his admittedly distinctive project.  I didn't really "enjoy" but was at least semi-engrossed by his recent account of being arrested for "trespassing" at NYU, but this piece in Canteen is a pretty impressive literary performance, bordering on heroic feat of sustained concentration (actually, I think "heroic feat of sustained concentration" might more accurately describe the act of reading the piece).  I hate to go here, but it did remind me a little bit of a DFW footnote (like, say, some of the longer ones in Brief Interviews) in its "how long can he keep this up?"-ness.

3
I'm glad somebody (Ben Ratliff, though there are probably others by now) has written about the "new" (1940) Savory recording of "Body and Soul", a sample of which was posted by the Times yesterday.  I don't really have enough knowledge of the state of jazz saxophone circa 1940 to know just how far ahead of its time Hawkins' playing is in this sample, but it seems like he's making some pretty strikingly radical choices here.  The playing is so much more modern-sounding than the recording that it produces an exciting friction (frisson?) - there must be a good analogy, but I can't come up with it.  It's not like he's into Dolphy territory exactly, but it's hard to believe anybody else was playing like this 70 years ago.  It's also hard to believe that I'm posting about a 47-second sample of something.  Obviously, I'm eager to hear the whole thing.

4
And last but far from least, rare foulmouth Elvis blues (with commentary by Nick Tosches!).  The Hound should be declared King of the Internet, at least for today, for posting this.  Go listen before somebody makes him take it down.

Stranger Than Fiction

The John Lurie piece in the new New Yorker is really something.  One of those (less than weekly) occasions when I'm glad the Selected Ballads household has a New Yorker subscription. 

I may have been primed for the which-one-is-crazier story of Lurie and his friend/stalker by having just finished John Gilmore's Hollywood memoir Laid Bare, in which fame and its frequent companion self-destruction are major themes.  I might do a post of some of my favorite quotes from Laid Bare, which will certainly include the description of Dennis Hopper as "a goat in Miss Tweedle-dum's parlor". 

If you haven't already seen it, you've probably at least had someone recommend it to you, but I can't let a post mentioning John Lurie and Dennis Hopper end without urging you to rent, buy, or YouTube Lurie's Fishing With John.  Or, at a minimum, the legendary Tom Waits "fish in his pants" episode.

A Marginal Note Re: Missed Opportunities

Good Lord.  I was in the Strand last week, having a grand old time browsing, thinking a bit about the recently departed Strand habitue David Markson, and I had no idea that big, annotated chunks of Markson's personal library were for sale all around me.  David Markson's copy of Tristram Shandy, $5.  Sh*t.  It's not so much that I regret missing out on buying these books.  Though it would be a cool thing to own a book from the library of a writer I admire very much, it might feel a bit ghoulish to go bargain hunting for a dead man's possessions.  What I regret is missing out on the thrill/chill I would have experienced in pulling a book off the shelf at the Strand, looking inside, and realizing it had belonged to David Markson.

[Update: HTMLGiant, as expected, is all over this thing. And in the comments to that second post, I noticed that there's a Facebook group for people who've acquired Markson's books, a virtual reassemblage of his library.]

Of Film Diaries & Biopics, Philosophers, Aliens, and Prog Keyboardists

Good interview with London writer and Selected Ballads favorite Iain Sinclair here [via].  The video, a sort-of guided tour of Hackney with Sinclair, is the real highlight, and a must-see if you're a fan, as it includes bits of his 8mm film diary from the '60s and '70s.  I really want to see more of this footage.  Maybe someone could collaborate with Sinclair on editing a couple hours of highlights from the diary, fly him over, and screen it at Anthology Film Archives (with live narration?).

Speaking of Anthology, their Anti-Biopic series (in its final week) was a brilliant idea well executed.  I've seen only two of the films so far, Ken Russell's over-the-top-of-the-top Lisztomania and Derek Jarman's cerebral, irreverent, and altogether engrossing Wittgenstein, but the impressive range of the series and the film knowledge that went into putting it together is clear from just reading through the program.  With Roger Daltrey (as Liszt), Ringo (as the Pope), and Rick Wakeman (as an Aryan FrankenThor - you just have to see it - and the man responsible for the soundtrack), Lisztomania makes Tommy seem restrained, as if Pete Townsend's conception was holding Russell back from really letting his freak flag fly.  Lisztomania is as quintessential a '70s movie as any of the gritty, realistic Dog Day Afternoons that are now so associated with that decade.  [Update: I just saw that Lincoln Center is about to kick off a Russell retrospective, including appearances from the master himself.]

Wittgenstein, the biography of a notoriously difficult-to-understand (and yet highly quotable) philosopher filmed against a black backdrop, could have easily been as dry as Lisztomania is juicy.  Though it runs at a decidedly cooler temperature, Jarman's film has its fair share of sex and eccentricity, integrated with, rather than providing relief from, the philosophy at the core of the story.  The most memorable example of this integration is the glockenspiel-playing "little green man" from outer space who engages the young Wittgenstein in a philosophical dialogue.  Had this dialogue been set in a Greek temple with phallus-shaped columns and scored with some wicked prog synth, it would've been worthy of Ken Russell.

The Children Are The Future

Some great writers have passed on recently, but thanks to the younger generation, the future of literature is bright.  No, I'm not talking about this crowd.  These kids are the ones to watch.

Speaking of scouting out up-and-coming talent, I'm reminded of this.

Jose Saramago

Markson, and now Saramago.  We're losing the best we've got.

Maybe more later, but for now, a few recommendations if you haven't read Saramago and are wondering where to start.  You can't miss with any of these:

The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis
The Gospel According to Jesus Christ
Blindness
The History of the Siege of Lisbon

David Markson

Just heard that David Markson has died (via HTMLGiant).  He was one of those authors who became a favorite the first time I read one of his books (This Is Not A Novel, which I started with just because it was the one that was on the library shelf when I went looking).  He didn't have to grow on me.  I was hooked almost immediately.  I'm guessing Markson's work is like that.  You either get it right away or it leaves you cold.  Instead of trying to describe his style to the curious, I'd recommend opening one of his books at random and reading a couple of pages.  You'll know if it's for you or not.  But if, after reading those couple of pages, you were to ask, "is this all there is?", I would tell you that the answer is both "yes" and "no".

To me, and I think it's been said before, he was a magician.  There was something going on in the spaces between all those entries, something that accumulated in the course of reading one of his books.  I don't know how he did it, but it was a strong magic. 

Wittgenstein's Mistress just came in the mail over the weekend, before I heard the news.  It's probably mentioned more often than any other as his best book, thanks in part to David Foster Wallace saying that it was "pretty much the high point of experimental fiction in this country".  So, obviously, I'm pretty excited to get started on it.

Also, did the man who assembled his books out of notecards really have a Twitter?

Ride A White Swan

Iain Sinclair has been one of my favorite writers since I discovered his Lights Out for the Territory before a trip to London several years ago.  His style can be a bit daunting (or straight up off-putting for some), but I always feel that I've come out ahead after finishing a Sinclair book, like I've been paid back in full and then some for whatever effort I've put in.  And his books do require effort - his fiction and non-fiction (it's usually a fine line) are nearly as densely packed and idea- and image-rich as his poetry (he was a poet first), except that they go on for hundreds of pages.

Although Sinclair seems to be a fairly well-known figure in the UK (and especially in London), he's nearly invisible in the US.  I had to order his latest book (Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire) online from an English bookseller (it's already in paperback there) via Abebooks, and I don't know when he last read in New York City (though he did appear in April with Michael Moorcock at UT-Austin, which, somewhat improbably, houses Sinclair's archives).  Until recently, there wasn't much information available about him online, at least relative to what I felt was his rightful stature in the literary world.  He doesn't seem to be much of a self-promoter.  So, I was excited to discover that he now has an increasingly active, "official unofficial" website, which seems to consist mostly of updates that Sinclair emails to the person that runs the website.  I'm posting about this now because of the update I saw this morning:

I’ve been out, doing a series of walks with Andrew Kötting, as preparation for a proposed voyage, on swan pedalo, from Hastings to the Olympic site, by sea, river, canal. A book of some kind, and an exhibition, are being assembled.
Iain

For someone that knows his writing, this almost reads like some kind of Sinclair parody.  I had to Google "swan pedalo" to make sure it was that I thought it was, and, indeed, it is.  As hilarious as the image is, I suspect that Sinclair might be serious (I'm sure he's serious about the walks and the voyage, but the swan boat?!? A bit of dry humor?), and if he is, I'm sure he'll turn the experience into a book that I'll want to read.

Ross & Iverson On Broadway: Rockin' The Glass Canyon

Very glad I happened to see the last-minute announcement that Alex Ross and Ethan Iverson were doing their program on twentieth century music (mostly classical, some jazz) at the Upper West Side Apple Store last night.  It's a simple format: Ross reads from his book (which I, shamefully, have not yet purchased despite getting the highest recommendations of it from multiple sources) and Iverson plays pieces by the composers being discussed.  Surprisingly, Ross is something of a ham onstage (doing voices when reading quotations, employing props), which, in combination with his wry humor (I'll pass on the obvious pun lurking in this sentence) and the piano accompaniment gave the event something of an "educational vaudeville" feel.  If you weren't there, you'll have to take my word that it was much better than that description makes it sound (actually, I think it was being recorded, so you might get the chance to hear for yourself). 

Of the piano pieces, all performed flawlessly by Iverson on a Steinway (at least they sounded flawless - I'm certainly not qualified to assess the accuracy of anyone's playing of the 20th-century classical repertoire - if nothing else, though, this program certainly proves Iverson's versatility as a pianist - from the "Spanish Tinge" to 12-tone), the highlight for me was probably the "Alcotts" movement from Charles Ives' Concord Sonata.  A moving, deeply dug-in performance that snuck up on me and delivered a big clout.  It was also great to hear Iverson improvise on Charlie Parker's "Moose the Mooche" as an encore.  Apparently, he typically plays it as-written, as he does with Jelly Roll Morton's "New Orleans Blues", when performing with Ross. 

One quick note on the sound:
The Apple Store was clearly designed as an electronics showroom, not a concert hall.  I had to strain a bit to catch everything Ross was saying and I'm sure some of the nuances of Iverson's playing were lost, but I was annoyed when I saw someone approach the sound man to complain during the performance.  I don't know that much about live sound, but with the cavernous, highly reflective space and less-than-state-of-the-art sound system he had to work with, the guy was probably making a heroic effort to make things as clear as they were.
 
Bonus Links
Iverson's comments on the individual pieces are here, and Ross' reports from the duo's earlier appearances can be found here.

Once Again, I Am Befuddled By The Modern World

"Trailers" for books is enough of a thing now that somebody is giving out awards for them?  At an actual awards ceremony?  I've never even watched one of these things.  When I see the words "book trailer", I picture something like this or this (the last one is really more of a "book truck", I guess).  I have no idea what's going on anymore. [via HTMLGiant]

On First Looking Into Thomson's Have You Seen

I picked up a cheap, mint hardcover copy of David Thomson's Have You Seen...? at the Housing Works bookstore the other night.  I began casually paging through it after I got home, and the next thing I knew, a couple of hours had gone by.  The same thing has happened to me many times with Thomson's Biographical Dictionary of Film.  Have You Seen...? (subtitled "A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films") is perhaps a more conventional film book than the Dictionary, being an alphabetized collection of capsule review/essays, at least superficially similar to the ones many other critics have published.  Thomson's style is unmistakable, though.  While he occasionally produces a sentence that leaves me stumped, even after multiple readings, the condensed format generally keeps Thomson sharp and critically focused, while allowing him to show off his mastery of the pithy summation. Many of the entries, in both books, end with a well tuned, instantly memorable line (on Audrey Hepburn: "...Audrey - in eyes, voice, and purity - rang as true as a small silver bell. The great women of the fifties had a character that is in short supply now."; Eyes Wide Shut: "It is a shock to find that the film is only 159 minutes. Every frame feels like a prison"; or his most succinct tagline of all, re: His Girl Friday: "Bliss").

Hopefully, Thomson will get the chance to revise and perhaps extend Have You Seen...? as he's done with the Dictionary (currently in its fourth edition), but even in its current form it's great fun, the one-page-per-movie format yielding some wonderful juxtapositions (part of Thomson's plan, as he explains in the introduction), perhaps none better than Bringing Up Baby opposite Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (imagine those two movies mashed together every time the book is closed!).

One remarkable piece of trivia gleaned from Have You Seen...?:  
Sunset Boulevard and In a Lonely Place, arguably the two finest "dark side of Hollywood" movies, came out in the same year, 1950.  I say "arguably" because I think Mulholland Drive (or to be accurate, Mulholland Dr., a fine distinction Thomson makes a lot of) deserves to be considered a peer of those two films.  Before seeing In a Lonely Place, I thought of Mulholland as, among other things, a kind of homage to Sunset Boulevard, but in fact it has echoes of/affinities with both earlier films.  And what's this I hear about Lynch planning a sequel?