MadInkBeard | Derik A Badman

In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him. They will not be imitators, any more than the scientist who uses the discoveries of an Einstein in pursuing his own, independent, further investigations. It is simply a way of [...]

The next two lines [of Ars Poetica by Archibald MacLeish] are similarly structured: “For love / The leaning grasses and two light above the sea.” That is, “For love,” an abstraction, impossible to grasp, the poet should present something concrete: “The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea.” Although I can’t say precisely how [...]

At the same time that he [the poet] is trying to envisage the poem as a whole, he is trying to relate the individual items to the whole. He cannot assemble them in a merely arbitrary fashion; they must bear some relation to each other. So he develops his sense of the whole, the anticipation [...]

A few months ago I transcribed and tacked to my wall something Milch said in the writers’ room: “The tactics of fictive persuasion have nothing to do with reasoned discourse.” Then a couple of days ago I reread a longer transcript of some notes Milch gave regarding an earlier episode. He was talking about the [...]

Au départ Bouvard et Pécuchet ne sont que des virtualités. Le système social leur a retiré la parole de telle sorte qu’ils ne sont plus capables que de copier, l’un dans l’administration, l’autre dans le commerce. Ils se remettront à la copie à la fin du livre, mais un immense chemin aura été parcouru, toute [...]

A theme is an existential inquiry. And increasingly I realize that such an inquiry is, finally, the examination of certain words, theme-words. Which leads me to emphasize: a novel is based primarily on certain fundamental words. It is like Schoenberg’s “tone-row.” In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, the “row” goes: forgetting, laughter, angels, litost, [...]

The latest issue of the excellent online lit journal The Quarterly Conversation is now up for your reading enjoyment and edification. Among other interviews, articles, and reviews it includes my review of David Markson’s The Last Novel. Markson is one of my favorite authors, and for some reason this is the first time I’ve written [...]

Most readers when they think of the way a narrative (novel, comic, tv show) is ordered will think about plot: what Brian Richardson, in his “Beyond the Poetics of Plot: Alternative Forms of Narrative Progression and the Multiple Trajectories of Ulysses,” describes as “a teleological sequence of events linked by some principle of causation; that [...]

Works by the Author: (reverse chronological order) The Last Novel. 1st ed. Emeryville, CA: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2007. Vanishing Point : A Novel. 1st ed. Washington, D.C.: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2004. This Is Not a Novel. 1st ed. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 2001. Reader’s Block. 1st ed. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1996. Collected Poems. 1st [...]

(also see the Bibliography) “Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage.Or of no describable genre?A seminonfictional semifiction? Cubist?Also in part a distant cousin innumerable times removed of A Skeleton’s Key to Finnegans Wake?Obstinately cross-referential and of cryptic interconnective syntax in any case.” -Reader’s Block, p.140 David Markson’s novels are an erudite labyrinth of intertextuality, filled with allusions [...]

This is a week late, but I’m still without internet at home and adjusting to my new housing: 1. Life: A User’s Manual by Georges Perec (1978, Translated by David Bellos, 1987): This large novel alone took up a week of reading time. After all my reading of Oulipian works, I decided it was time [...]

The new issue of The Quarterly Conversation is up, including my review of Stefan Themerson’s novel The Mystery of the Sardine. Go check it out.

I’m a man of habit and schedule. The more I plan and schedule things like comics or blog posts, the more I get them done. So, I’m going to try something new here at the blog. In an effort to keep posting and to keep up with what I’m reading, I’m going to post weekly [...]

Tintin and the Secret of Literature by Tom McCarthy. Granta, 2006. 14.99 pounds (UK only as far as I can tell) A rare book about Tintin in English, Tom McCarthy’s Tintin and the Secret of Literature so far is a UK only publication (you can order it from Granta’s website though), a 200 page hardcover [...]

The Mystery of the Sardine by Stefan Themerson. Dalkey Archive, 2006. 194p., $12.95. There are few novelists equal to the likes of Raymond Queneau. HIs ability to combine the quotidian, the fantastical, the absurd, the humorous, the philosophical, and a healthy does of linguistic play makes his work sui generis. But, if I were asked [...]

The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker (1986). Vintage, 1990 (latest edition). 144 p., $11.95. Sometimes I buy books at used bookstore and then forget I have them. I forgot I even owned this book until I read something about in online and realized it was on my shelf. Am I glad I read this? Yes. What [...]

The other day, Scott pointed to an article on Japanese novelist Yasunari Kawabata. I was in need of something to read on the train, so I pulled down my copy of his The Sound of the Mountain (1954), which I had read a few years ago. I had gone through a period of reading some [...]

Some brief comments on a few books I’ve read recently. More comic reviews soon as I get back into the swing of things. The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne, Translated by Jordan Stump (Modern Library): A massive (600+ pages) novel by one of the grandfathers of science fiction. This one deals with a group of [...]