Category: Yo Ivanhoe

  • Great Blurbs From Book Jacket History, Part One, And Other Miscellaneous Nonsense

    –The day of Samuel Beckett’s Funeral. December 26, 1989. Montparnasse Cemetery, Paris. The Spam hat was my own humble offering. This is just the book to give your sister if she’s a loud, dirty, boozy girl. –Dylan Thomas’s blurb on the front dustwrapper of the 1966 first American edition of Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds (Walker…

  • I Know I'm Not Fooling Anyone

    I’ve gone by a lot of different names over the years, every one of them, I’m sure, transparently phoney. I now recognize that I was laboring under some fairly serious delusions, and harbored the misguided notion that these names I’d choose –and choose carefully, I might add– demonstrated a certain flair. What they actually were,…

  • Yes I Can

    My instincts at the moment are pretty minimal. Maybe instincts isn’t the word I’m looking for. I’m not sure what word I’m looking for, to be perfectly honest with you. Appetite? My appetite at the moment is pretty minimal? While that’s certainly true, it’s hardly what I meant to say in the first place. It’s…

  • If You'd Be So Kind

    —James Dankert I need some new links. I love most of the folks over there in the column to the left, but they’re all pretty much holdovers from my old site, and I’ve noticed lately that some of them are no longer active –a lot of them, actually, which I’m sure is a reflection of…

  • Uncle Jumbo's Playground

    –Illustration by James Dankert Here’s the deal: years ago —years ago– I spent a few holiday seasons working at one of those sausage and cheese kiosks at a local mall. I did this, as I do most things, purely out of laziness. The employee discount was attractive to me at the time, and I thought:…

  • Fragmented Transmission From A Ghost Satellite

    The head running slow, churning, moving up a long, steep hill in the last hours of darkness. Already a few early birds, noisy, to keep me company. Here, take a look at my disaster movie, my shoebox full of footnotes, my personal wasteland. All my sleepless nights. While you are sleeping, while you are dreaming,…