The Mumpsimus

Hitting this parenthetical , I knew I was in the wonderful Land of Clute: --Ajvaz has made it clear he does not want the reader to be reminded of Magic Realism in his work, that his texts do not valorize any hero bearer of sigils out of the swamp nor any origin tale at the heart of the delta of tales untold-- Since the death of John Leonard , I've come to cherish Clute more than ever. I've always had an admiration for Clute -- for though my ability to embrace his ideas has often been tempered by my (quasi-irrational?) antipathy to taxonomy vs. his career of it, I love his rhythms and diction, and more than that, I love his willingness to follow the words into a realm more of sound than sense, something Shakespeare did now and then, and all the best poets, and John Leonard, too, who was nearly unique in offering that quality as a book reviewer. Nearly unique. I think of Leonard and Clute as the Jazz Johns of Bookchat. I wish they'd had the chance to play a session t...

In NYC recently, the Imperial City, they remembered John Leonard . Had there been any way to do it, I would have been there, even if I couldn't have gotten inside with all the literati; heck, I would've been happy just to stand in traffic for a bit and get the taxis honking in tribute. But no. I'll rely on reports. Such as this one from Charles Kaiser at CJR : Family members, former colleagues, important writers, and intimate friends gathered yesterday to praise the critic John Leonard for his “love of the life of the mind,” his “incomparably informed generosity,” his reluctance to “pan books or movies or TV shows or children, except when absolutely necessary”—and his unlikely dependence on just ten words: “tantrum, cathedral, linoleum, moxie, thug, dialectic, splendid, brood, libidinal, and qualm.” It's a nice piece, and best of all, peppered with Leonard's own words. Here's what he once said about Fran Lebowitz: To a base of Huck Finn, add some Lenny Bruc...

What I look for and care about in these various bunkers is the slice of the strange, the surprise of the Other, the witness not yet heard from, the archaeologies forgotten or ignored or despised. What I think about almost anything, from Henry Kissinger to Deng Xiaoping, from the doctrine of transubstantiation to the theory of surplus value to a tax on capital gains, from Murphy Brown to Thelma and Louise to Jelly's Last Jam , is a mess of juxtapositions, miscegenations, transplants and hybrids, atavisms and avatars, landlords and tenants, ghosts and gods; grace-notes and cognitive dissonance -- Chaos Theory, with lots of fractals. --introduction to The Last Innocent White Man in America Isn't it kind of stuck-up, wanting to live forever? --"Tropic of Cancer" All through my teen years, if I happened to sleep past 9 am, one of my parents would yell, "John Leonard's on!" and I would be awake and rushing downstairs to see the brief segment of ...