Blog of a Bookslut

Michael Schaub — 2009-07-03T14:00:38-06:00

Okay, so exactly nine (9) people would�ve bought Mark Sanford�s boring-ass book about �fiscal conservatism,� because Mark who? But the rumors were that Sanford would �rejigger� the manuscript into a sexy adulterous family-hating Argentine-fucking line-crossing literary tour de force, the Southern Gothic Emo-Yacht Club-Preppie Le Scaphandre et le Papillon of our time.

Related and also hilarious: Larry Hughes on what he'd like to see on C-SPAN's Book TV this weekend.

Michael Schaub — 2009-07-03T13:54:33-06:00

Entertainment Weekly's Jean Bentley asks: "Sex and the 'Harry Potter' movies: Does anyone want this?" (Jean, trust me: You do not want to know the answer to that.)

Michael Schaub — 2009-07-03T13:42:29-06:00

Twenty-five years after the publication of William Gibson's Neuromancer, PC World looks at "what it got right [and] what it got wrong." (Via up-and-coming German book blogger "Jessica Crispen," whose name sounds vaguely familiar somehow. Viel Gl�ck, Jessica!)

Michael Schaub — 2009-07-03T13:38:51-06:00

Why do some writers disappear? (My first guess was "They're dodging creditors," but that turns out not to be the case.)

Michael Schaub — 2009-07-03T13:18:47-06:00

Nathan Rabin, one of my favorite American cultural critics, writes about the biographies of three US icons: Johnny Cash, George Plimpton, and Sammy Davis Jr.

Michael Schaub — 2009-07-03T13:09:57-06:00

Los Angeles Times:

The Justice Department on Thursday said it had launched a formal antitrust investigation into the proposed settlement over the Google Inc. project to scan millions of books into a digital format.

Jason B. Jones — 2009-07-02T22:53:19-06:00

Valerie Eliot attended a reading of Eliot's poems this week, which she almost never does. The readers? Seamus Heaney, Jeremy Irons, Dominic West, and Anna Cartaret. (It's a *great* picture.) Yeah, that would get me off the couch.

Jason B. Jones — 2009-07-02T22:52:47-06:00

So, Michael Moorcock, Iain Sinclair, and Alan Moore walk into a bar . . . (via 3am Magazine). The good news: Alan Moore says that �Jerusalem� disproves the existence of death from a scientific standpoint. Well, if it's scientific then . . .

Jason B. Jones — 2009-07-02T22:52:13-06:00

Bill Watterson, on Krazy Kat, available online at This Recording: With the possible exception of Pogo, no other strip derives so much of its charm from its verbiage. Krazy Kat's unique "texture" comes in large part through the conglomeration of peculiar spellings and punctuations, dialects, interminglings of Spanish, phonetic renderings, and alliterations. Krazy Kat's Coconino County not only had a look; it had a sound as well. Slightly foreign, but uncontrived, it was an extraordinary and full world.

Jason B. Jones — 2009-07-02T22:51:22-06:00

Kate Bolick reviews a big Futurism retrospective in Milan, and reminds us of Marinetti's cookbook: he denounced pasta as "an absurd Italian gastronomic religion" that made people sluggish and lethargic and argued for "absolute originality" in food, as well as "a battery of scientific instruments in the kitchen." Goodbye, beloved carbonara and checkered tablecloths; hello, chicken stuffed with ball bearings and carnation scent spritzed from spray bottles.

Jason B. Jones — 2009-07-02T22:48:42-06:00

The Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival has been posting videos of poets reading, including this week Ted Kooser, Maxine Kumin, Naomi Shihab, and Sharon Olds's "Ode to a Composting Toilet" and "Ode to a Tampon."

That gives me an excuse to link to this funny post from last year on fashion at the festival, seen recently at The Vowel Movers.

Jason B. Jones — 2009-07-02T22:48:02-06:00

Via Slate's "Brow Beat" blog, a transcript of Saddam Hussein reading his poems to an FBI "interviewer."

Jason B. Jones — 2009-07-02T22:45:03-06:00

How the US military is using "poetry, FM radio, and Web 2.0 technologies" as counterinsurgency strategies in Afghanistan: Broadcasting poetry to an audience that appreciates verse meets the key requirement of any strategic communications campaign: "Audience-focused communications. You need to meet the audience where they are at," said Bill Salvan, a reserve Navy public affairs officer and president of Signal Bridge Communications, a public relations firm in Phoenix.

Michael Schaub — 2009-07-02T11:29:05-06:00

Vikram Seth will release A Suitable Girl, the sequel to his 1993 novel A Suitable Boy, in 2013. If you started reading the 1,488-page A Suitable Boy the year it was released, you might actually be finished by the time the sequel comes out.

Michael Schaub — 2009-07-02T11:05:13-06:00

Francine Prose is one of the few American authors who seems to get better and better with each book. Her novels Blue Angel and A Changed Man are two of my favorites; both are emotionally charged but also brutally honest and unsentimental, and both are well worth seeking out. Prose talks to NPR about her new book, the YA novel Touch.