Big news: For the next little while I won’t be here, but here as I guest-blog for the summer at About Last Night, joining two of my favorite bloggers Terry Teachout and OGIC. (Announcement.)

Pleased as punch, etc. etc., with only one concern: I like the people who read here, all dozen of you, and I’ll miss hearing from you in the Comments. So please do join me at About Last Night and feel free to email thoughts, contrarian impulses, suggestions and foundationless gossip (email address is in the upper right corner of this page; although I strongly recommend not using subject lines like “Hi” “Hello” and “I’d like to enlarge your penis” as I only open those if they’re from Clem Snell).

It may get dusty here so I’ve left you with a picture of one of my favorite places in the world: Jacob’s Meat Market in Appleton, Wisconsin. I used to take piano a block from here and after my lesson my dad and I would come here for sausage, which would get fried up in a skillet for dinner (serve with mustard!). I visited at New Year’s and it was astoundingly the same. The woman at the register said that lots of people who’ve moved away stop in to Jacob’s when they’re back in town. Whenever he’s in Wisconsin, Mr. Tingle (who’s a Southerner) likes to intone, “There’s a different mass consciousness at work here.” If that’s true, Jacob’s is a seat of that mass consciousness.

The counter at Jacob’s Meat Market after the jump (warning: not an appetizing shot for vegetarians).
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Tingle Alley’s server was down most of today. It’s been restored but they must have used a back-up version of the site as a couple comments are gone and I’m missing emails as well. On the plus side, I’ve re-received a couple hundred spam deleted earlier in the week, a golden opportunity to reconsider whether I want to “drive my fat friends CRAZY” or respond to Clem Snell’s “Greetings!”

Which is to say:
• No, I didn’t delete your comment.
• If you emailed recently, I may not have received it, or I received it but have no prompt to remind me I received it.

Now for analog difficulties: We went to get a bike helmet today but couldn’t find one to fit my giant “Walking Candied Apple” head. The Women’s size didn’t fit, the Universal size didn’t fit, and the Large didn’t fit either. I’m now going to Google and see if there is some sort of Big & Tall store for heads.

Confidential to one Mr. Snell: Hi!

Just received a call from Liberty Bikes that my bicycle has arrived. It’s an orange Electra Townie, a birthday present from Mr. Tingle. He’s picking it up today — I’m under house arrest until I’ve met a deadline — and then we’ll shop for a helmet tomorrow.

The bike was going to be called Hot Tamale, but I’m now sorely tempted by the name Count Gottfried. (My typewriter is named Helga* and the car is Stella Vine, so it might be nice to add a guy to the stable, albeit one who enjoys “appearing in women’s clothes, set off by lipstick and fishnet stockings” and “exotic designer frock coats.”)

The basket for the doguette is on back order for another month, which is disappointing but probably for the best. It’s been a long time since I rode a bike with any regularity, and when we were test-driving bicycles in the Liberty parking lot I wobbled a lot at take off and needed roughly a 500-yard radius to make a turn without dragging my feet on the ground. This will give me the chance to get on warmer terms with centrifugal force before taking on a passenger. My stepdaughter has pointed out that we’re going to need a wee helmet as well.

In short: !!!!!

* One of my favorite songs as a kid — around the same age it was a great dream to organize the kids I played kickball with in a talent-show performance of “Hello Twelve, Hello Thirteen, Hello Love.” No dice.

UPDATED: Meine Damen und Herren, Mesdames et Messieurs, Ladies and Gentlemen! Count Gottfried is after the jump.
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The 1997 David Foster Wallace interview with Charlie Rose is also available for viewing. I’ve read the interview before in transcript, but it’s hilarious to view. I’ve never seen DFW read or interviewed before, only heard audio; he looks incredibly young here.

If you cannot tell, this post and the one previous are evidence of concerted procrastination afoot at Tingle Alley (read: I’m under deadline). Discovering the Charlie Rose video archives is like tapping a rich gusher of time-wasting material.

If you’re marooned at work today, why not watch this old interview with Anthony Lane on Charlie Rose, during which Lane repeatedly kicks over the traces of Rose’s questions and goes trotting where he wants conversationally.

There’s an interesting bit near the interview’s end about Shakespeare films. Rose observes that many actors he’s known have spoken of the difficulty of doing a “great Macbeth” (as opposed to a “great Hamlet”). This reminded me of something I read recently in Mark Van Doren’s Shakespeare. The chapter on Macbeth starts with an elegant bit about the shallowness of Macbeth as a character, which I’ve always felt to be true. (I think the same of Lady Macbeth; and one of my disenchantments with Bloom’s Shakespeare, as brilliant as it often is, came with Bloom’s hothouse read of Lady Macbeth’s character, which credits her with all sorts of complexities, and made it seem as if he were intent on seeing every character as Falstaffian in depth, even those who are merely Longoria-ish.) Where was this going? Oh yes, and this quality of shallowness might be part of why it’s hard to act a great Macbeth, because it’s simply not as deep a character as Hamlet.

I’ll post the relevant Van Doren passage later today — I also need to re-read the Bloom essay on Macbeth to see if he really runs as hot as I keep reproaching him for, or if it was just the Amontillado.

* Lane on T.S. Eliot.

Query: Does anyone out there have an electronic version of Geraldine Brooks’ article on Bronson Alcott, “Orpheus at the Plough,” published by The New Yorker in 2005? It’s been awhile but I remember it as an excellent piece.

I wanted to re-read it as I’m very interested in Louisa May Alcott right now, on two fronts: Her Unitarian-ness as well as her pulpy Gothic fiction side. Earlier today, I picked up Madeleine B. Stern’s biography of Louisa May Alcott from the library. Whenever I get into a subject like this I enjoy researching around online about what books to read, and I’ve noticed that books on the American transcendentalists seem to attract a particularly exacting & scathing class of Amazon reviewer. I suppose it’s the historical society tartars. Not necessarily people you want to dive into gin & crumpets with but clearly knowledgeable, and they say Stern is the way to go.

RELATED LINK: “Concord Writers on the Web”

• You should visit Maureen McHugh’s chart illustrating her “understanding of the process of writing a novel.” It’s a brilliant thing. And if you haven’t read it already, I highly recommend laying hands on Maureen’s collection Mothers & Other Monsters; more enthusing about it here. (Via that Bond Girl.)*

• As an extension of an article about the African literary scene in their July issue, Vanity Fair suggests additional African titles worth exploring, including Laila Lalami’s Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits. (I wish the main print article was available online but it’s not.)

• Bolaño Bolaño Bolaño!! Even if you thought you’d ODed on reviews of Savage Detectives, Francisco Goldman’s essay in The New York Review of Books is worth your time. See also the Mumpsimus on Bolaño, which includes a great list of related links. (First link via Maud.)

* I’ve only met her once, but Maureen played a part in one of my favorite conversational exchanges of the last few years. It was on a night she read at Malaprop’s with Kelly Link and Christopher Rowe. Mr. Tingle and Gwenda were in the audience with me, and after the reading, we all went across the street to Bier Garden.

The bar was noisy, but we had a nice big table, with me seated next to Maureen and Gwenda across the table. Maureen and I talked about her experience with Hodgkins (which she’s chronicled at her blog), and how it had left her with a heightened sense of the world’s fragility. “Sometimes,” she said, “I even find myself worried about bunnies.” Gwenda overheard the last bit and said in a very reassuring tone of voice, “Well, of course you do. Like little bioterrorists in fursuits, aren’t they?”

Sorry for the unannounced silence. We were traveling and I always have an idea that I will blog from the road and then never do. The trip included stops to the Bond-Rowe household in Lexington, a night in Milwaukee, and then a weekend in Madison for the wedding of my friend Eric, who I’ve known since high school, and his fabulous bride Molly.

A few highlights:
• Recent trips have convinced me that if I ever leave Asheville, it will be to set up residences in Milwaukee and Antwerp, Belgium (with some sort of share in a house in Austin). They really are my favorite cities. In Antwerp, I would bicycle around all day with my small dog in a basket, trying not to be run over by diamond traders. In Milwaukee, I would join the Brewcity Bruisers and when you came to visit me I’d always have a pot of cheese-and-beer soup simmering on the stove.

• I didn’t make it to Schwartz’s in Milwaukee this trip, but I did hit Shakespeare’s in Madison. It’s a used bookstore near the Capitol building that I used to visit in college. I picked up a great copy of Eudora Welty’s collected short stories with this inscription: “My darling, I hope these stories give you as much pleasure as you give me… at this Charleston Christmas in 1980 and every day of the year. Tom.”

• Finally, I rarely talk about my athletic triumphs on this blog as I rarely have any to report. But on Saturday, I hit three bullseyes in a row playing darts. Not three passersby, three bullseyes.

• When you’re agitated in spirit there is something very soothing about reading notes from the past Annual Meetings of the Barbara Pym Society. The next conference, focusing on The Sweet Dove Died, will be held August 11-12 in Oxford (more details here).* Luckily, the Chuck Palahniuk Appreciation Club is not scheduled to meet until Aug. 15, thus averting the chance of a rumble.

• Also from the Dept. of Amusing Probably Only To Me, but I’m currently preoccupied with imagining a sit-com based around Christopher Hitchens. Tentatively called “Everybody Pisses Off Hitch,” it features a wacky female neighbor who, even though she works some great prop comedy and hilarious visual gags, never manages to amuse the star, who sits at the kitchen table drinking Scotch and blinking like a mordant eagle caught in the rain. The show’s signature catch-phrase is, “I find that boring and irritating,” and on a very special holiday episode Hitch gets very drunk and regales the neighborhood kids with the story of the lost weekend he and Kingsley Amis spent in Tijuana.

* Lately I’ve been forcing myself to attend the coffee hour that’s held after services at my church, with the rule that I have to introduce myself to at least one stranger before leaving & going to the park next door to read. I haven’t quite got the hang of it yet (I’m better in bars), and it’s hard to escape the sense that I am swooping in on people. The whole thing — the self-improving resolution, the church, the presence of “hot beverages,” the awkward dithering of the conversations themselves — feels acutely Pym-like. Next thing you know I am going to be helping someone with his index.

This weekend I’m taking myself to see Terpiscorps’ production of The Many Deaths of Edward Gorey. It’s an original ballet and it looks odd & wonderful with dancers playing various Gorey characters while the performer playing Gorey swirls around the stage in a long faux-fur coat. See Alli Marshall’s spotlight of the show for Xpress, and Paul Clark’s profile in The Citizen-Times (which includes the great factoid that Gorey was a Buffy fan).

I’m confused by the John Casteen essay in this summer’s VQR. Is what’s available online the entire piece? Because if so, doesn’t it seem like Casteen is chastising David Orr for employing “ad hominem tactics” against Dana Goodyear by employing ad hominem tactics against David Orr?

Casteen notes that, along with fellow Poetry contributors Peter Campion and Dan Chiasson, Orr’s criticism “tends toward the arrogant, masturbatory, spiteful, bombastic, and mean-spirited hatchet job,” without ever citing specific examples of their hatchet-work, nor does he mount a coherent argument about where Orr went wrong in his response to Goodyear’s New Yorker essay.

And who is this “us” and “we” Casteen keeps invoking; is he writing in his capacity as secretary for the Pro-Intellectual Bent Society?

And why did he have to drag poor Randall Jarrell into it?

In an essay cum rant on the intense stupidity of Esquire’s Angelina Jolie cover story, Ron Rosenbaum writes:

Before I begin quoting from this amazing essay, I would like to say that I don’t regard this piece as an attack on the writer (whose noncelebrity work I’ve often admired), but as an attempt to rescue him, to save him from further assignments of this nature. It’s a losing game: The desperate attempt to endow celebs with Deep Meaning is not worthy of his talent.

It seems strange that the writer in question never gets named (did I miss it?), even though Rosenbaum’s intervention goes on for four pages.

All in all, reading the Slate piece is like being followed around the house by an outraged Rosenbaum as he waves the magazine around and reads aloud the bits that really piss him off. I know what this behavior looks like as it’s precisely what I did when the Vanity Fair yoga issue came in the mail. “Oh great, Guru Karan.”

QUASI-RELATED LINK: “How To Make People Buy Books,” a Q & A with Chip Kidd in Esquire’s June issue.

UPDATED: Timothy Noah takes Rosenbaum to task for omitting to name Tom Junod as the author of the Esquire piece. Writes Noah: “The author turns out to be a journalist of long experience, a winner of two National Magazine Awards who has been nominated for 10. In other words, a very big boy. If he can’t endure harsh-but-thoughtful criticism from a respected colleague, I don’t know who can.”

I keep darting over to see how the McSweeney’s eBay auction is doing. The current highest bid is $5,100 for original Chris Ware art, with bidding for the Dave Eggers’ painting of George W. Bush as a double amputee at $4,225.

My reason for monitoring the auction was the promise of items from Marcel Dzama. Five pieces are currently for sale, although I’m afraid they’ve already passed out of my range. My favorite is “Drummer Girl” (currently at $1,500). However, this one would make me nervous to have in the house.*

EARLIER: PSA about the McSweeney’s and Soft Skull book sales; see also Matt Cheney’s recommendations for titles to consider.

* In that way it reminds me of two clown paintings that used to hang in the basement of the house I grew up in. They were done in oil, and the white face of the sad hobo clown in particular had a spooky way of floating out at you even when the lights were turned off. A friend of mine used to request that this painting be removed to the bathroom whenever she slept over.

• Tom Bissell on the Loch Ness monster.
• The Barbarella sofa.
• Beetles and butterflies with clockwork innards at Insect Lab. Do the latter count as Nabokovian?
(Insect Lab link via Mighty Goods.)

• Blogging over at theinferior4+1, the great Katherine Dunn writes about the funny in Moby Dick. (via Gwenda.)
• Melville’s travels in the Holy Land: not such a barrel of laughs.
• From the vaults: James Wood’s excellent essay on Melville.
• At NPR, Rebecca Stott describes Moby Dick as a “cauldron into which Melville, demented alchemist, tipped everything that fascinated him” and offers an excerpt. (via Bookslut.)

Please know that if we were together I would never recite poetry aloud to you in any setting that did not involve a podium and a tray of stale cheese cubes. In high school I dated a guy who was a repeat poetry reciter. He would get you alone in the moonlight, seated on a picnic bench in the park, and then stride back and forth reciting his complete works. I was very much in thrall to him but one part of my brain would inevitably break away & float spectrally above thinking, “Jesus H.”

Of course, as soon as I type that I can think of several situations where reciting poetry in company would be acceptable: Lovely, geekish exchanges with former college roommates and bookish friends, for example, or staying up late doing shots of ouzo with a tableful of poets, at which Joseph Brodsky is mysterious presiding, etc. I don’t mean to be prescriptive, but here’s a simple rule: Kids, if you’re going to recite poetry aloud make sure it’s consensual!

All of which is a preamble to this bit from Book IV of Paradise Lost. I’m trying to memorize it today and I put it here because it is so kickass beautiful and it may please you too:

But rather to tell how, if Art could tell,
How from that Sapphire Fount the crisped Brooks,
Rolling on Orient Pearl and sands of Gold,
With mazy error under pendent shades
Ran Nectar, visiting each plant, and fed
Flow’rs worthy of Paradise which not nice Art
In Beds and curious Knots, but Nature boon
Pour’d forth profuse on Hill and Dale and Plain,
Both where the morning Sun first warmly smote
The open field, and where the unpierc’t shade
Embrown’d the noontide Bow’rs: Thus was this place,
A happy rural seat of various view;
Groves whose rich Trees wept odorous Gums and Balm,
Others whose fruit burnisht with Golden Rind
Hung Amiable, Hesperian Fables true,
If true, here only, and of delicious taste:
Betwixt them Lawns, or level Downs, and Flocks
Grazing the tender herb, were interpos’d,
Or palmy hillock, or the flow’ry lap
Of some irriguous Valley spread her store,
Flow’rs of all hues, and without Thorn the Rose:
Another side, umbrageous Grots and Caves
Of cool recess …

RELATED: Dan Chiasson’s New Yorker piece on the poetry of Les Murray, which notes the pastoral as “a mode that was shaped by city sensibilities for city audiences.” (via Ed.)

Speaking of marginalia, the other weekend I was browsing around Captain’s Bookshelf and came across a nice copy of Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (review here). Inscribed on the flyleaf was this message: “To [Harry], Hope you feel better soon.” Emphatic swoopy handwriting (the message took up the entire page), black marker.

So many questions:
• What was Harry’s ailment?
• Who was Harry? And who was his friend, the person who felt Anatomy of Melancholy was just the thing to bring to a sickbed? (I don’t mean this as a pejorative. Personally, I’d be thrilled by such a gift.)
• Even in paperback, Anatomy of Melancholy is fairly weighty, and this was a hardcover edition, so even heavier. Did the size of the book present problems? I keep picturing Harry, with his pale spindly invalid arms, struggling to hold it up, then setting it down exhausted after a paragraph, and clicking on “General Hospital.” No wonder he ended up selling it.

I’m rereading Paradise Lost right now. I read it for the first time in college, and my copy is littered with margin notes left by my college-age self. Reading these is a little like being haunted by the Ghost of Dumbass Past.

Next to Milton’s synopsis of Book V, “God to render Man inexcusable sends Raphael to admonish him of his obedience, of his free estate, of his enemy near at hand…” I observed, “Not a nice god.”

From Book X:

“So having said, awhile he stood, expecting
Their universal shout and high applause
To fill his ear, when contrary he hears
On all sides, from innumerable tongues
A dismal universal hiss, the sound
Of public scorn; he wonder’d but not long
Had leisure, wond’ring at himself now more;
His Visage drawn he felt to sharp and spare,
His Arms clung to his Ribs, his Legs entwining
Each other, till supplanted down he fell
A monstrous Serpent on his Belly prone,
Reluctant, but in vain, a greater power
Now Rul’d him, punisht in the shape he sinne’d
According to his doom …”

Next to this is written, “Kickass image.”

And next to Book IV’s description of Adam and Eve, “Hee for God only, shee for God in him,” a simple “ugh,” which is, to tell the truth, the sort of note I would probably still generate.

The class was English poetry (1600-1900?), so I would have spent the semester in some anxiety that my inability to scan would be uncovered. It was taught by Prof. William Pritchard (later my thesis advisor) and the margin notes also include a dutiful if muddled transcription of his observations and recommendations. Under a biographical note on Christopher Ricks, who edited the edition we were using, I added: “Frank Kurmod — modern critic.” I also have a really happy memory of watching Prof. P’s face as one of the guys in class laid out the parallels he’d noticed between “Paradise Lost” and the lyrics to “Sympathy for the Devil.”

The AMS bankruptcy fallout continues. Right now two great indie presses McSweeney’s and Soft Skull are trying to raise some ready cash by offering their books at radically reduced prices. According to the McSweeney’s announcement, their press lost approximately $130,000 in earnings as a result of the bankruptcy.

McSweeney’s sale, going on for the next week, includes an auction of contributor art (Dzama!) and other one-of-a-kind items. Soft Skull’s sale continues until June 30th.

From McSweeney’s, Tingle Alley recommends picking up Yannick Murphy’s Here They Come (I nominated this book for the LBC last spring; discussion here — note the pretty pony on the cover, which makes it a great gift for a post-Black Beauty reader), Dustin Long’s Icelander, Lawrence Weschler’s Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences, Harry Stephen Keeler’s The Riddle of the Traveling Skull, and Chris Adrian’s The Children’s Hospital (not on sale but what the hell, go for it). You can also pick up a copy of Salvador Plascencia’s People of Paper right now for less than the paperback.

From Soft Skull, Tingle Alley suggests anything by Lydia Millet (particularly Oh Pure and Radiant Heart), Douglas A. Martin’s Branwell, Matthew Sharpe’s Jamestown (an LBC nomination this time around), and Jenny Davidson’s Heredity. Outside of fiction, you may also want to cruise Lisa Carver’s Drugs Are Nice: A Post-Punk Memoir (unfortunately, the collected Rollerderby looks to be no longer available) . There’s lots of good stuff here — take a look around.

A few developments in the lit-blog world noted happily and, most likely, extraneously:
• Dwight Garner’s “Inside the List” column has become the first thing I flip to when a new NYTBR comes in the mail. So far Garner’s new blog, Paper Cuts, is just as charming and thoughtful as the column.

• TEV has introduced a new feature called Second Look that “will serve as an opportunity to give some closer consideration to a title that we might have missed the first time around, for any number of reasons.” First installment: An appreciation of Tim Krabbé’s The Rider. I love the idea of more online writing about books independent of their publication dates. When posting there’s an inexorable pull toward the new — to be the first with a link, a review, a news item, etc., before it goes stale, which is great for gossip, bad for books.

• I hope someone tapes tonight’s Jessa Crispin-Dennis Johnson discussion about “Bridges, Burning: The Death of Newspaper Book Reviews and the Future of Book Publishing.”