February 28, 2007
There's a new Susanna Clarke story, "The Dweller in High Places", at the BBC as part of Blood Lines, their new series of short stories.
A Pittsburgh mother is irate after her teenage daughter came home from school with a explicit poem she says her teacher gave her.
That teacher is now suspended while the district investigates.
Tell us what the poem is, damn it!
Yale University has awarded the $100,000 Bollingen Prize in Poetry for 2007 to Wellesley College English professor Frank Bidart. (You can read Bookslut's interview with Bidart here.)
Laura Shapiro notes an interesting fact from Tristram Stuart's The Bloodless Revolution: most of the important thinkers who advocated vegetarianism still ate meat themselves.
They had senses comparable to our own, he argued, and even possessed a mode of reasoning. "They emit their own peculiar cries," he wrote to Descartes, "and employ them just as we do our vocal sounds." Nevertheless, Gassendi ate meat and had no intention of quitting. "I admit that if I were wise, I would abandon this food bit by bit, and nourish myself solely on the gifts on the earth," he wrote. "I do not doubt that I would be happier for longer and more constantly in better health."
Chris Ayres, author of War Reporting for Cowards, a book I thrust upon friend after friend, reports from the Oscars.
Guests swayed, ashtrays rattled. The room was crowded, so I did what anyone with experience of commuting on the Northern Line would do — I used my elbows.
Doing the exact same thing but in the opposite direction was a slim, blonde woman in a salmon-coloured dress. Before I knew it, my wine glass had connected with her stomach and the liquid inside was sloshing violently. “Oops,” I said, looking up and wincing. Gwyneth Paltrow was looking back at me.
David Barash examines books trying to bridge the gap between religion and science, books like Barbara J. King's Evolving God and Carl Sagan's Varieties of Scientific Experience (next on my reading list). You have to get past this sentence: "Polls consistently show Americans more likely to vote for a presidential candidate who is an anencephalic ax murderer (but religious) than the most admirable atheist." But once you do, it's worth it. (Thanks to BJK for the link.)
February 27, 2007
Praising Bourdain almost always requires qualification but not here. Last weekend at the South Beach Food and Wine fest he took the stage, having just weeks earlier lambasted the festival’s new sponsor, the Food Network and eviscerated many of its “stars.” Now, with these stars in attendance, within several hundred yards of the Rachael Ray book-signing line no less, Bourdain stood to speak his mind in person, no hiding behind the safety of a blog.
Michael Ruhlman has more information about the fall out.
Nick Cave talks to the Sydney Morning Herald about his new writing projects, that mustache, and his new song "No Pussy Blues."
"I changed the sheets on my bed, I combed the hairs across my head/I read her Eliot, I read her Yeats, I fixed the hinges on her gate/I patted her revolting little chihuahua, still she didn't want to".
I was excited for the new Nerve interview with Martin Amis, hoping he'd say something as crazy as "women don't like porn because it wastes sperm" from the last Nerve interview he did. Alas, it's not as exciting. He discusses his new novel House of Meetings, the Russian curse, and sexual jealousy.
You don't want your girlfriend to have fucked everybody, but you hope that she's had a nice time.
Totally My Type, Parts 1 through Infinity: he carried himself with the same intellectual hauteur as my abusive ex-boyfriend, Stephen. They had both gone to the Catholic boys' school in New Orleans renowned for turning out bright, Latin-spouting young men with acute Madonna/whore complexes.
Dark at the Roots author (and future Bookslut Reading Series author) Sarah Thyre writes the latest Bad Sex column for Nerve.
February 26, 2007
Good Magazine lists the best magazines ever, going so far as to list the specific years in which they were the best. Today's Esquire would never top a list of anything, really (best information provided on cufflinks, maybe?), but 1961-1973 Esquire? Hell yes, it's at number one.
Just as an aside, did I seriously hear a writer use the word "funnest" last night at the Oscars? Isn't there a quality control committee or something that could have sent someone to rip the award out of his hands for that?
With the latest Nextbook podcast, Sara Ivry interviews André Aciman about his new book Call Me By Your Name.
Hollywood and publishers need to come up with some sort of arrangement wherein if a studio has plans to destroy the adaptation of a novel, they can let the publisher know so that they hold off on releasing a copy of the book with the movie poster. This will help me out as well, so that when I see the paperback of The Painted Veil I am not overcome with an urge to vomit. Thanks, Edward Norton, for toiling away for years to bring about an adaptation of a book by my favorite author that presents the complete opposite of W. Somerset Maugham's intentions.
February 23, 2007
"If the media refer to Martin Amis as 'Britain's greatest living author' once more," wrote Kathy Love from south London, "I shall kill myself. The fact that such a misconception exists at all is enough to make most people with a passion for books want to emigrate to Uruguay immediately. Please save my life and don't do it again."
I feel the same way about Philip Roth.
I miss the days when our writers were allowed to be crazy assholes.
Iain Banks is interviewed at Times Online about his new novel The Steep Approach to Garbdale and the video game he made so complex that no one else can play.
For a while it was frustrating to watch the books that came after Peggy Orenstein's. After her (far superior) Schoolgirls was released, Reviving Ophelia with its ramped up touchy feeliness hit the bestseller lists. After Flux, dozens of books about where feminism left us hit the shelves, none ever quite as good. Now, however, she focuses on herself in Waiting for Daisy. Over at Nextbook, she has the first in a three part series about the miscarriage that began the journey to her new book.
Catherynne M. Valente is interviewed at Fantasybookspot about her new collection of short stories Orphan's Tales. (Valente will be reading at the April 11 Bookslut Reading Series.)
My grandmother used to read to me from the Bible during the day and the Ramayana and Arabian Nights after bedtime, if you can imagine the effect of that kind of demarcation of the known universe has on a little girl.
February 21, 2007
In honor of our Bookslut Reading Series science writers night tonight, Ali G interviewing scientists. Just don't call him a homo sapien.
Stephanie Coontz, the author of Marriage: A History, reports for the Boston Globe that the smarter you are, ladies, the more likely you are to have healthy marriages, conventional wisdom be damned.
In 1838, a prominent marriage adviser labeled intellectual women "mental hermaphrodites," less capable of loving a man or bearing a child than a "true" woman. In 1873, Dr. Edward H. Clarke, a prominent professor at Harvard Medical School, noted that the rigors of higher education diverted blood from a woman's uterus to her brain, making her irritable and infertile.
The lead up to the new Alasdair Gray book is a long one, so let's get suitably excited, shall we? Someone has posted a short clip of Gray revising his mural of Jonah and the Whale onto YouTube. That is your Gray tidbit for the day.
Michael Dirda re-examines the work of Clark Ashton Smith, a SF writer whose books are being reprinted with introductions by Bookslut's comic book columnist Jeff VanderMeer.
February 20, 2007
And I leave you today with an essay by William James, because really, why not? "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings." If it weren't unbelievably snooty to say something like, "He's my favorite philosopher," I would say he's my favorite philosopher. You can't quite imagine any other philosopher writing a passage like this:
Take our dogs and ourselves, connected as we are by a tie more intimate than most ties in this world; and yet, outside of that tie of friendly fondness, how insensible, each of us, to all that makes life significant for the other!—we to the rapture of bones under hedges, or smells of trees and lamp-posts, they to the delights of literature and art. As you sit reading the most moving romance you ever fell upon, what sort of a judge is your fox-terrier of your behavior? With all his good will toward you, the nature of your conduct is absolutely excluded from his comprehension. To sit there like a senseless statue, when you might be taking him to walk and throwing sticks for him to catch!
I love him beyond all reason. (Thanks very much to Laura for the link, who was also nice enough not to snort at me when I tried to explain why I love The Varieties of Religious Experience after three martinis.)
The Morning News has announced its list of contenders for their annual Tournament of Books, of which I am a judge. Vote for your favorite and get it to the final round. (Please don't vote for Emperor's Children.)
Christian sex cults weren't the only group to put out strange comic books: J. Edgar Hoover got involved as well. (In comics, not the sex cult. As far as I know.) He writes the introduction to Treasure Chest's "This Godless Communism," produced by the Catholic Guild. The Authentic History Center has scanned the comic and put it online. Learn about communism to fight against communism. (Thanks to Jim for the link.)
Ladies! If you ever want to get married, better keep those legs closed and bake some muffins! Don't be a louse! Wait for your spouse!
If anyone can claim to be writer, craftsman and artist at the same time, it is surely Alasdair Gray, warmly received as he read from his first major novel for more than a decade. Old Men in Love - a working title - is scheduled for publication in October by Bloomsbury.
This made me squeal with delight, not easy to do with only one cup of tea so far this morning. (Read Lanark, read Lanark, read Lanark.) It also makes up for the fact that I have not been able to find a novel worth reading since Winterwood two and a half weeks ago. My apartment is littered with barely started books, bookmarks still at about the 50 page mark. Today I'm giving up on anything contemporary and turning to W. Somerset Maugham.
I really need to clean out my bookmarks. I'm just getting around to listening to Shalom Auslander's This American Life story about how he walked from New Jersey to Madison Square Garden for a Rangers game in order to avoid God's wrath. (Starts at the 36 minute mark.)
This week's Guardian Digested Read: Yo, Blair by Geoffrey Wheatcroft.
It is now almost a platitude to say that Tony Blair has become the president's poodle. But that won't stop me repeating it several times because it's the first resort for every self-regarding iconoclastic hack who can't resist shooting fish in a barrel.
February 19, 2007
On Tuesday, Chicagoans should make a trek to our lovely suburb, Oak Park. Not only can you visit the Frank Lloyd Wright visitors center and hear how soulless bastards and buying his houses and tearing them down because they're not spacious enough, you can hear Julian Rubinstein read at Barbara's (note to Barbara's Bookstore's webmaster: it's February, yo) from his book The Ballad of the Whiskey Robber. Also, the Whiskey Robber himself has a MySpace page, where he has a blog:
I was sentenced to 17 years here for carrying off 29 post office, travel agency and bank robberies in Hungary during the 1990s. Sometimes I am called the "modern day Robin Hood." I'm still not sure how I feel about that. First of all, I didn't give money to the poor.
I'll see you there.
I don't want to know how they came up with this list so fast, but Gelf Magazine offers a list of other children's books that contain the word "scrotum."
Aline Kominsky Crumb's website for Need More Love has a charming video blog.
Ninthletter has a video of Ander Monson's reading the title poem from his collect "Vacationland," accompanied by chalkboard illustrations. They also have a video interview of Monson talking about Other Electricities.
Renee French, author of The Ticking and The Soap Lady, is interviewed at Inkstuds radio show. The Ticking, which is incredible, has become something of a children's book by accident. While parents are freaking out over the word "scrotum" or what have you in children's literature, it is reassuring that children are finding their way to French's book about how parents can inadvertently damage their children while trying to help them.
Yet there it is on the first page of “The Higher Power of Lucky,” by Susan Patron, this year’s winner of the Newbery Medal, the most prestigious award in children’s literature. The book’s heroine, a scrappy 10-year-old orphan named Lucky Trimble, hears the word through a hole in a wall when another character says he saw a rattlesnake bite his dog, Roy, on the scrotum.
You can pretty much write the rest of the story about parents' reaction yourself by now.
February 16, 2007
Seven or so years later, and people are still trying to figure out how to read House of Leaves. When you get to Only Revolutions, folks, let me know.
(I tried to read it, failed, just couldn't find a rhythm to it at all. Then I heard Danielewski read it out loud, and it made perfect sense. Finally! I can read the damn book! When I opened it and tried to read it off the page, I was lost again. Obviously the only solution is that Danielewski is going to have to come to my apartment and read it to me. I would be perfectly okay with that.)
Nerve talks to Roz Chast about her new cartoon collection Theories of Everything.
Anne Ishii, who sent me this To Terra sf manga that I'm totally addicted to now, attended the Aline Kominsky and R Crumb event and blogs about it. Why, oh why do event coordinators still allow for questions at the end of readings?
“This next question is for Robert…”
“Robert, how are your brothers?”
“How’s your band, Robert?”
I’m sorry, did no one see the ginormous screen announcing Aline’s book?
The Guilty Pleasures of Literary Greats.
February 15, 2007
Today I am in love with Ander Monson's website for his new collection of essays, Neck Deep and Other Predicaments. Monson's the author of Other Electricities, a book Michael Schaub brought up in just about every conversation we had until I broke down and fell in love with the book myself. But I'm going to be playing around the site for a while. (Monson will also be the first author we've brought back to the Bookslut Reading Series, reading with Jeannine Hall Gailey and Catherynne M. Valente in April.)
This never gets old: Comic books of 1970s Sex Cult!
Blake Bell offers more on Ayn Rand's interview with Mike Wallace from 1959.
Aleksandar Zogrof is interviewed at the High Hat about his new book Regards from Serbia.
I noticed that during wartime or a big turmoil people get obsessed with their collective position in the universe, and the conflict gains mythical proportions, even if it’s just ugly bloodshed that is actually going on. Then all these projections of “leaders” and “enemies” or national symbols suddenly get so vivid because a huge number of people focus on them. I had a feeling that it was something like a dream dreamt en masse, or a hallucination observed by the collective mind. So I tried to reflect that in some of my comics. It simply came out of an effort to present many different aspects of things that are happening in such dramatic points in the life of a nation. Usually all that is left for history are the lists of the battles or the names of the generals and politicians who sign the papers, but behind that there are the strangest developments and formations within the mind of the masses.
February 14, 2007
Blake Bell has a rundown of what he considers romantic Valentine's Day links for the day, including Cerebus (the comic book written by a man who thinks there is a feminist conspiracy that extends to punctuation rules), other notorious misogynists, and ... a video of Ayn Rand discussing love. That should put some bite back into your holiday. (Link from Journalista.)
Publishers Weekly profiles the science fiction manga series that Vertical is publishing, Keiko Takemiya's To Terra.
Nerve has a list of 20 good comics you should read (Oh, how I miss Alias -- not at all tied in with the show), but for some reason labels them as comics that will change your life.
Simone Lia has written a graphic novel about a cute fluffy bunny looking for a dad. It's called Fluffy. I am not the intended audience for this book. Lia is interviewed at the Guardian.
"A lot of the stuff you see at comic festivals I don't like," she says. "It's just gross for the sake of it, so it's not shocking, it's just boring. And then you find the stuff that is just uplifting and it's like a breath of fresh air."
New Yorkers should head to see Aline Kominsky Crumb and R. Crumb speak at the New York Public Library tonight for Valentine's Day. Aline has the new graphic memoir Need More Love, which I'm enjoying despite my cold nature, and R Crumb has the new collection The Sweeter Side of R Crumb. They are both interviewed at Fresh Air, and it's the only romantic thing you can listen to today that will not make you want to vomit.
Dreamhaven Books in Minneapolis (a store I make Emily take me to every time I'm in town -- hi, Emily!) was burglarized and trashed. Go buy things in their online store and help them out.
Remember, women, if you don't have a date tonight, you might as well read some depressing Russian literature and then throw yourself under a train.
February 13, 2007
Yesterday was Darwin Day. A Blog Around the Clock recaps, in case you missed it like I did.
Guardian is looking out for you; you don't have to read the new Norman Mailer, The Castle in the Forest, because they've digested it for you.
My name is Dieter. But you can call me DTs, as these are the symptoms you will manifest if you continue much further with this book.
In case you were doubting the Spidey Spunk comic was real, Scans Daily has the pictures.
The court case against Gordon Lee has certainly been covered in the two and a half years since the incident (a 9-year-old received a comic book with nudity on Free Comic Book Day, Lee brought up on charges of disseminating graphic material to minors), but Nerve has a refresher with a few quotes from the artist of the offending content.
February 12, 2007
Related to the radioactive sperm story: do not take sex advice from comic store clerks.
How can I convince my girlfriend to go down on me more often without seeming pushy or demanding?
Just tell her that what you've got in your pants is the Hammer of the Mighty Thor, the Mjolnir. Tell her, "Those who are deemed worthy may hold it. Are you worthy?"
And now it's time for this week's "I seriously can't believe that Marvel did that" moment. I'm very surprised that I've not seen more online outrage about the reveal, this issue, of what killed Mary Jane: Spider-Man's cum. And for all of you who think I'm joking, here's the dialogue from the book itself: "Oh God, I'm sorry! The doctors didn't understand how it happened! How you had been poisoned by radioactivity! How your body slowly became riddled with cancer! I did. I was... I am filled with radioactive blood. And not just blood. Every fluid. Touching me... loving me... Loving me killed you!"
Sadly, this is not a story from the Onion. Link from Journalista.
Nick Mamatas has released his book Move Under Ground for free online, under a Creative Commons license.
The Chicago Reader speaks with On the Street Doing Life author Anne Keegan about her new book, her column with the Chicago Tribune, and how she's not "a Gen Xer boring everybody with what I think."
"I never wrote about myself," she says. "They [her Tribune editors] may have decided I didn't write enough silly stuff about my kids' diapers. Or about my twins. Or my psychiatrist. Or how I found a coyote in my yard. I may have led a very interesting life, but there are people whose stories are far more fascinating than mine. When I went to Thailand and wrote about the Cambodian refugees did I write, 'I stood there and watched them crawl across the border'? Oh, please! I wrote about the nurses who picked them up. You don't say, 'Oh, I stood there.' You write about Lisa the nurse from Skokie holding a little boy laden with malaria.
Times Online is in love with the French book How to Talk About Books that You Haven’t Read, hopefully to be translated into English soon, so that I can do something other than sneer when the conversation turns to Thomas Pynchon or Richard Ford books. The British could evidently really use a translation as well.
The British dislike a Noam-know-it-all; we like our intellects to be approachable, unpretentious, fancy-a-pint-down-the-pub types. Which is in itself, of course, just as pretentious as wanting everyone to know you’ve read Dante (not just the Inferno, though — everyone has read that, ha ha — but Paradiso, too, which is terribly dull, being as it is entirely devoted to the Heavenly Host and utterly devoid of the colourful descriptions of torture that made Inferno such a blockbuster in its day).
John Ghazvinian is the author of Untapped: The Scramble for Africa's Oil, and if it's as good as his article in Virginia Quarterly Review "The Curse of Oil," I'll probably devour the book the minute it's in my hands. (Sidenote: VQR, I love you madly, but your fiction is boring me lately. Except for the Daniel Alarcon story in the last issue.) Ghazvinian was interviewed at Charlottesville–Right Now radio show, archived here.
Joanna Scott, who will be reading at our Bookslut Reading Series on March 8th, is interviewed at Powells about her charming collection of short stories Everybody Loves Somebody.
The Campaign for the American Reader blog conducts the "Page 69 Test" on books on their blog. (Go to page 69, read it, determine the quality of the book from that page. I always heard page 40, but anyway.) This week they're testing Bookslut's own Barbara J. King's Evolving God.
I've had this in my bookmarks for a week now, and just now got around to reading it all the way through: Alec Michod interviews Richard Powers about his new book The Echo Maker. Maybe it was Power's first response to a question: "Since The Echo Maker is about the intuitive and emotional foundation of cognition, I’m especially pleased to hear that the book’s intellect and emotion felt fused to you." I needed a lot of caffeine to get through that.
February 08, 2007
Joan Didion has adapted her book The Year of Magical Thinking into a one woman play. Didion will be portrayed by Vanessa Redgrave. Redgrave and Didion are interviewed at NPR.
Louise Welsh, author of the excellent The Cutting Room, discusses Robert Louis Stevenson, perhaps explaining why women would rather read him than have sex.
"Alan Breck was the classic romantic hero - dashing, rough and mysterious. I'll admit I probably had a bit of a crush on him when I was younger."
So now when they do agree to sleep with you, you have to worry that perhaps they're pretending you're Breck. Sorry, lads.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is interviewed about her NBCC-nominated novel Half of a Yellow Sun at the Critical Mass blog.
Nick Antosca discusses musical influences for his novel Fires at Largehearted Boy.
Two podcasts you should listen to:
Nextbook has an interview with Aline Kominsky Crumb about her new graphic memoir Need More Love.
At StarShipSofa, you can listen to two men with thick accents discussing Samuel R. Delaney. And outside toilets.
Arthur Magazine has put up their 2004 interview with Grant Morrison. He discusses America's adolescence, that creepy superhuman baby from Germany, and the coming apocalypse.
For my part, I honestly see people like Bush and Blair as having been caught up in and being forced to carry currents of historical energy, or whatever you want to call this thing, these growing pains that occur. They can’t help it. They’ve been put there. George Bush got us through this ghastly time as the boatman of the Abyss. Look at him! Who but this gimlet-eyed, alpha casualty of history would you trust to boat us through the Abyss? Nixon’s the only other one I’d trust.
Words Without Borders has a new issue up, and it's comics in translation. Of particular interest is this piece by David B., author of Epileptic.
Kinky Friedman remembers Molly Ivins at the LA Times.
It is, however, the sacred duty of the troublemaker to stir the putrid pot of humanity every now and again, to make people see that there is something more important than political correctness and that is moral correctness, and to challenge the prayers and the promises of the heartbroken land she loved. And she did it mostly with wit and humor, the kind of humor that sailed dangerously close to the truth without sinking the ship. There are two kinds of sailors, they say: the sailor who fights the sea and the sailor who loves the sea. Molly loved the sea.
February 07, 2007
Eddie Campbell corrects Alex Beam's article on the relationship between Lichtenstein and comic book art.
Irvine Welsh referred to Patrick McCabe as the "Rolling Stones of Irish literature" in his review of Winterwood. McCabe takes offense.
"I don’t want to be seen as someone who tramps around in a tracksuit at the age of 80. Maybe I’d like to be described as the Rolling Stones of 1964."
Winterwood has obliterated my ability to read any other novels. Nothing else is quite as good or disturbing.
Granta has put up a 1987 interview with Ryszard Kapuscinski, conducted by Bill Buford.
You mustn't forget that for my generation the outside world did not exist. There was no outside world, or, if there was, we knew little about it. A place like India wasn't a country. Africa wasn't a continent. They were fairy-tales. And I wanted, really, nothing more than the opportunity to see what the world was like.
Even though it is so cold in Chicago that we're actually excited that today it might reach 15 degrees, we have a new issue of Bookslut. It was a difficult one, once I realized there was no way to work on my laptop from the bathtub. Although it has warmed up a bit since I taped pillows to my bedroom window to block the draught. Ohh, winter.
Did you know that "tears shed for emotional reasons differ appreciably in chemical make-up from tears that flow because we’ve been poked in the eye?" Me either, and yet I'm completely charmed by that. That fact comes from Barbara J. King's feature on what makes us human. Edmund White talks Nabokov and Proust, and he reveals:
I’ve never done anything over and over. I used to go to Fire Island again and again, then I stopped. I used to go out dancing every night, then I stopped. I used to live in Rome, then I stopped. I used to live in France, now I don’t think about it. I don’t seem to be able to build up habits. I have no work habits. So anyhow, I just teeter around and try different things
Donna Seaman talks to Robert Olen Butler about his book of beheadings and Ned Vizzini interviews Nick Antosca. Heather Smith judges book covers about food, Justine Larbalestier talks about women's role in science fiction, and there are also interviews with Clifford Chase and Heidi Julavits.
We have reviews of the latest by Gillian Flynn, Tom McCarthy, Joanna Howard, Cherie Priest, Lee Smolin, Patrick Suskind, Louise J. Kaplan, Julianna Baggott and more. In columns, Liz Miller is unenthusiastic about the best adapted screenplay Oscars, our new Magazine Whore columnist delves into the world of Rachael Ray (poor thing), we celebrate the return of Banned Bookslut, Elliott David admits his devotion to Granary Books, and more.
February 06, 2007
Just in case your self esteem was a little too good these days, men:
A survey of 2,000 people showed lovemaking was fourth in a list of "favourite activities" when hitting the sack, behind reading, watching TV - and going to sleep.
Women were more likely to prefer to read at night, according to the survey by hotel chain Travelodge.
The most popular books of the moment were The Da Vinci Code, Lord of the Rings, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, To Kill a Mocking Bird, and Treasure Island.
Your wives and girlfriends would rather read Treasure Island than have sex with you. Suicide watch starts now.
Read today:
Paul Pope's (Heavy Liquid) contribution to Nerve's Comics issue, "Airplanes."
Primo Levi's short story in the New Yorker, "A Tranquil Star."
Wells also tells us that he has never entirely loved any one person, place, or thing. It was not in him, he observes. Now that he is looking more closely at himself, he perceives something odd in his own make-up. “I am,” he confesses, “rarely vivid to myself.” That is, “not wholly or continuously interested, prone to be indolent and cold-hearted. I am readily bored.”
Vivian Gornick re-reads HG Wells.
For your awkward viewing pleasure: the visit to the Letterman show when Harvey Pekar is informed he will not be returning.
February 05, 2007
The Poetry Foundation has asked comic book artists to interpret poems from their archives. David Heatley (whose contribution to the Best American Comics 2006 "Portrait of My Dad" I just loved) starts with Diane Wakoski's "Belly Dancer."
I'd like to read this article about the six movies based on Jane Austen coming out in 2007, but I can't seem to get past the second paragraph:
The life and works of the author, who died a spinster at the age of 41 in 1817...
Over two hundred years of literary dominance, and still being harped on by would-be disapproving mothers.
I want to send Shalom Auslander my leftover hydrocodone.
I had completed my manuscript, my editors, here and abroad, were pleased with the results, I had read essays on a number of national radio programs, I had a story published in a prominent magazine. I was a wreck.
It's an old story by now, but... teenage girls, coming of age while reading Sandman. Although this is a new angle: "Sandman made me torture men for sport when I was fifteen." Nerve has been one long stream of nostalgia lately, first for Sassy, then for the time when everyone was bisexual, now for Sandman. But then the Nerve crew all has kids now.
Norman Mailer says people are 'going to have a shit fit' over his new novel, The Castle in the Forest, about the childhood of Adolph Hitler, narrated by a devil, inhabiting the body of an SS officer, Dieter. 'At a given point,' he says, 'you snicker to yourself and you say, "Oh, they're going to be livid."' The writer seems unfazed by this inevitability. 'It's impossible not to identify to some small degree with the protagonist [Hitler], so the book is going to be offensive to a lot of Jews. They won't like it. The right wing will hate it. God not all-powerful? Not all-loving? I expect there'll be considerable resistance,' he goes on with glee.
Or, more likely, the only people who will ever read the thing is a handful of reviewers (and then not all of them) and any others will know he's an old fool. Wake me up if he stabs someone again.
February 02, 2007
Joyce and Beckett play golf. (Link from TMN.)
The Critical Mass blog is continuing their 30 days on the 30 books nominated for the NBCC awards. Of particular interest was their day on Terri Jentz and her book A Strange Piece of Paradise. (That's the book I'm rooting for in the autobiographical category.) You have to scroll to the February 1st entries, for some reason Blogger permalinks are not working for me today.
The San Francisco Chronicle profiles the troubles Kitchen Sink magazine has been having.
Thanks to everyone who came out to the reading last night. It was a miserable, 20 degree, snow disaster of a night, and we appreciate it when you lug on your boots and head out to hear authors. The night opened with Laird Hunt reading from The Exquisite about squatters who live in houses still occupied by blind and deaf men, crazy dentists with rotting teeth, and the fantastic line, "Hello, said the murderer."
Continuing a theme we had going of "dark material read by the nicest, friendliest people you will ever meet," we had Simone Muench reading from her unpublished manuscript about the Orange Girls of the Restoration. She also read from Lampblack & Ash. In between poems, she told stories of taking her boyfriend back to visit her hometown of approximately 15 people in Louisiana. I first heard Simone read her Orange Girl poems at a fundraiser here in Chicago, and have been completely charmed by her ever since.
I don't know that anyone has made the Bookslut audience cry before. But when Gerard Donovan read the part of Julius Winsome where Julius discovers his dog has been shot, there was a lot of sniffling going on. Especially since he had prefaced the reading by saying the book was born after his own dog was shot by hunters. (His dog lived. Hence no killing spree.) My favorite part of the night, however, was having more than one person stop me to say they had just recently finished Julius Winsome and "it's fucking amazing, isn't it?" Yes, it is.
Our next reading will be February 21st. We're having three science writers explain various parts of the universe to us. Jennifer Ouellette will explain physics and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Chris Mooney will explain the politics of science, and Deborah Blum will tackle the afterlife for us, by way of William James.
February 01, 2007
David Lynch showed up at the Agony Column to discuss his new book on meditation Catching the Big Fish.
Gerard Donovan is interviewed at Time Out Chicago about his surprisingly lovely novel Julius Winsome.
“I have no interest in any outside accounting in terms of morals,” says Donovan, 47, in an e-mail interview from his native Ireland. “I’m troubled by fiction that seems designed to uphold community standards: moral tales, characters who in the end demonstrate what good people they are.”
And you can hear Gerard Donovan read tonight at the Bookslut Reading Series, along with Laird Hunt and Simone Muench.
Ooh, ooh, you can now read an excerpt of Eddie Campbell's Black Diamond Detective Agency online.
"I have written the greatest work of literature of all time. I'm so gonna get laid."
I can't believe Molly Ivins had to die in a world where George W. Bush was still President.
Syndicated columnist and best-selling author Molly Ivins has died of breast cancer at the age of 62. As editor of the Texas Observer during the 1970s, Ivins became famous for her biting wit as she chronicled the political antics of the Texas legislature.
