Syntax of Things

Happy Halloween from Syntax of Things

Anyone care to guess this costume?

Bear with Me

Since it is Halloween and because I'm feeling more gutted than the two pumpkins sitting on my front porch, I thought I would give you the most frightening thing I've spotted over the course of the year.  Ladies and gents, the man you see above is a true, unadulterated fanatic, Mr. Nathan Davis, formerly of Dothan, Alabama, now of Fort Collins, Colorado.  For those of you not schooled in the ways of Deep South college football, that image on his back happens to be Paul "Bear" Bryant, the legendary coach of the University of Alabama and distant relative of yours truly.  And it's not just the tat that gives Mr. Davis that frightening to the point of terrifying appeal.  That happens when he explains his love of Alabama football and the Bear.  A few select quotes:

"My co-workers and people at the gym are like, 'Why would you put a picture of another man on your body?'," Davis says. "And I'm like, 'That is not just another man. He is a disciple to me.' People don't understand. It's a religion."

"They showed a picture of Bear Bryant, and my grandfather said, `That's one of the greatest men to ever walk this earth beside Jesus Christ and General (Robert E.) Lee," Davis recalls. "Then I heard the coach talk, and I fell in love. I'll never forget it."

"I got divorced, and I would say 50 percent of that was because of my love of football," he says. "She couldn't take Alabama; she couldn't take football. And it is my life."

"One of these local Colorado men asked me, 'What has UA ever done for you?'," he says. "I thought on it for a second and said, 'Sir, my mama always told me it doesn't make a difference how you find God, as long as you find him. And through UA, Bear Bryant, and Van Tiffin, I have found God.'
"He then said, 'You people from the South are weird.'"

Seriously, if you see this man heading down your driveway to collect Halloween candy (I suspect he'll be wearing a houndstooth hat), lock your door.

{via}

Orphans and Father Figures

If you haven't already, you really should read Sean O'Hagan's great feature article on Tom Waits that appeared in the Guardian over the weekend.  Among other things, I still find it difficult to wrap my own sober brain around the fact that Waits hasn't touched alcohol in over a decade.  Just doesn't seem possible.  Anyway, it made me look forward to Waits' new album even more, if that's even possible.  Here's an excerpt from the article:

Both his parents were schoolteachers, but his comfortable middle-class childhood was ruptured when they divorced in 1960. This may have been around the time when he started hearing the world differently. It was definitely the moment he became obsessed with finding another father. I had read somewhere that, as a child growing up in San Diego, he couldn't wait to get old, that he'd even pretend to be an old guy, wearing a hat and talking to the neighbours about hi-fi and home insurance. Salvation of a sort came when he discovered Kerouac and Ginsberg in the Sixties, literary hipsters from the previous decade. Until his wife came along two decades later, the Beat writers were his most important influence. He pays homage to them one more time on Orphans, singing Kerouac's forlorn road song 'Home I'll Never Be', and reciting Bukowski's beautiful poem 'Nirvana', both, in their own way, odes to rootlessness, restlessness, the fleeting, irrevocable moment when things could have been different. The essence, in fact, of a good many Tom Waits songs. Why, I ask, were the Beats so crucial to him?

'They were father figures,' he says softly, his long fingers tracing small circles in the coffee spill on the table. 'They were the ones I looked to for guidance. See, my dad left when I was 10, so I was always looking for a dad. It was like, "Are you my dad? Are you my dad? What about you? Are you my dad?" I found a lot of these old salty guys along the way.'

For those of you who've never read the Bukowski poem mentioned above, I'm making it available below the cut. 

Baby Photo Friday: Goblin

The Club Is Open

I've been meaning to direct your attention to the Litblog Co-op where this week we've been discussing my nominee for this quarter's Read This!, Sidney Thompson's Sideshow.  So far, there have been a few posts about individual stories in the collection, including this one from me, as well as an interview of Sidney by Dandy Dan Wickett and even a little guest blogging by Sidney himself.  I'm pretty sure that today a Bat Segundo and Pinky's Paperhaus podcast will be made available and in it you'll be able to hear me, in all my glory, explain why I nominated this book.  Stop by and let me know what you think.

Update:  The podcast is live.  What the hell happened to my Southern accent?  Ed, you got some sort of fancy dedrawler?

Poet and Didn't Know It

2007's Literary Arts Stamp from the U.S. Postal Service will feature...

Bottle of Smoke

The LA City Beat's Don Waller reviews last week's show by one of the best bands I've never seen, the Pogues:

As for MacGowan, whose predilection for predicating his lifestyle on chasing Brendan Behan’s ghost led to his previous exit (and, since 2001, occasional brief reunion tours), he was in fine, chain-smoking form, whether balancing a bottle of water on his head during an instrumental break, mock-blessing whatever was in that red plastic cup before drinking from it, or waltzing with Jem Finer’s daughter, Ella – who sang the late, great Kirsty MacColl’s part – in a shower of confetti that turned the stage into a living snow globe as they dueted on “Fairytale of New York.”

And if MacGowan periodically strolled offstage to allow, say, Chevron to sing the anthemic “Thousands Are Sailing,” no big deal. MacGowan might look like a large, furry, stuffed animal these days, but his raw, rough-hewn vocals were as ragged but right as ever.

There’s a reason the Pogues’ music still matters 20 years later, why it has been and will continue to be heard in dozens of films and TV shows (all the black cops singing along to “The Body of an American” at a wake on The Wire) and on the jukeboxes of a million Irish bars – not to mention spawning innumerable acolytes. It tells stories, and anyone can remember the melodies.

{image from LA City Beat}

Executioner's Swan Song

Forbes' James Brady attended the Norman Mailer Society (huh?) meeting a few days ago and reports that news of Mailer's retirement from writing are very premature.  In fact, he has a new, and as Brady put it, large novel poised to keep doors open in January:

To start with, the new book is about Hitler. I know, I know, not another one. But this being Norman Mailer, there's a hell of a twist. Quite literally. The Provincetown Arts Theatre was the setting where about 100 members of the Mailer Society, plus as many members of the Cape Cod public who chose to pay their way in, heard Norman read several excerpts from the novel, which is written in the third person (one attendee estimated he read about forty pages).

There's apparently a good deal in there about the Austria into which Hitler was born and about the backgrounds of his mother and father, both of whom had tremendous influence on the kid. "Mailer has or is concocting a great deal of material on the parents and their village," one Society member said. But Mailer's most original and creative character isn't an Austrian at all. "He's a deputy devil."

Not Satan or Lucifer but only a "deputy," though there is "some dialog between Satan and the deputy." What has them concerned is, will Hitler (once he's born and raised) be "up to the job" of doing what they called "the good work" of screwing up the world and causing the maximum amount of trouble? Or must Satan and his deputies come up with "better material" to carry out their devilish plans and conceits?

Who but Norman could possibly have conceived of a novel based on the roots of Adolf Hitler as a literally hellish character backed by the devil?

But how was the reading? "Norman was very vigorous as usual, sprightly, combative and in fine fettle."

Celebrity Skin

I'm just absolutely shocked that Courtney Love's groundbreaking book is coming out next week and all anyone seems to be talking about is the new novel by Pynchon.  Sheesh.  I bet you don't get to see a naked butt on the cover of Pynchon's book.  Anyway, here's what Publishers Weekly says about the new CLove:

Love writes in her introduction: "I have always said that I would never write a book, and I really haven't." It's true-"diaries" is something of a misnomer, as "scrapbooks" would more accurately describe the collection of old photographs, hand-scrawled song lyrics and other documents that fill these pages. The materials assembled by Stander cover every phase of the rock star's "wild pirate life," from a failed childhood audition forThe Mickey Mouse Club to an e-mail exchange with Lindsay Lohan about dealing with negative press coverage. (The compilation is so up-to-date it even includes her shocked reactions to the revelations about JT Leroy.) Along the way there are mimeographed flyers for early Hole concerts, a picture of the actual heart-shaped box that inspired Kurt Cobain to write the Nirvana song and photo after photo of Love herself, from candid backstage shots to more polished celebrity portraits. A foreword by Carrie Fisher and an afterword by political activists Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards (Manifesta ) each, in their own way, celebrate Love as an unrestrained feminist, but the best way to understand her may be to plunge directly into the raw materials. One thing's for sure: you really have never seen a celebrity memoir like this.

Funny I really was waiting for  "David Foster Wallace at his best" but I guess the PW folks didn't get the memo.

D'OH!

I've managed to get through a few dozen pages of the newest Best American Nonrequired Reading, a book that I make an annual read alongside its older sibling Best American Short Stories.  This year, the Eggerian staff has added a new section to kick off the collection.  Basically, it's a hodgepodge of items spotted on the Internet, such as a sampling from the hilarious Chuck Norris Facts Website.  Yesterday, I found out that Chuck Norris has written a column responding to this website and all of the purported facts.  This sounded like a possible fount of entertainment until I heard that it was actually the debut of a regular column that Norris, whose tears can cure cancer, will write at the righter than right conservative site WorldNetDaily.  Well, so much for the fun.  In the article, Norris tells us that he doesn't so much mind the "facts" but he wants folks to remember that "without him, I don't have any power. But with Him, the Bible tells me, I really can do all things – and so can you."  That's how he responds to all of the facts about him.  Humor interruptus.  Ah well.

Anyway, this year's BANR has been blessed with a great introduction by Matt Groening.  I guess it should be pretty obvious after watching The Simpsons all these years that Groening is a heavy reader, but you can tell from this excerpt that he's an addict.  Hell, he even mentions "the book blogs":

Even though there’s not time enough in the day to fulfill all my pressing obligations, I am still finding new ways to obsess over books and reading. I decided in 1999 to plow through the great books of the twentieth century, chronologically, and here in mid-2006 I have finished H.G. Wells’s Love and Mr. Lewisham; Jack London’s first collection of short stories, The Son of the Wolf; Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie; L. Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz; and Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, all published in the year 1900. At this rate I should be finished with the great works of the previous century sometime in the next three hundred years.

Then there’s The New Yorker, now available in complete form on several annoying CDs. These too I’m plowing through chronologically, and after a year I am almost done with 1925, the first year of The New Yorker’s existence. I’ve been reading jazzy quips about Charlie Chaplin, Prohibition, and the Scopes Monkey Trial. The most intriguing thing from 1925 so far is an ad for a Ring Lardner book, What of It?

And of course we mustn’t forget the book obsessive’s treasure trove of books about books: the reading guides, the long lists, the shortlists, the book blogs, and the reading journals. I have collected a few dozen book guides, ranging from the squaresville How to Read a Book, by Mortimer Adler, to the breezy Read ’Em and Weep: My Favorite Novels, by Barry Gifford. My favorite is Martin Seymour-Smith’s Guide to Modern World Literature. He seems to have read every novel in every language, and has a pretty cranky opinion about almost all of them.

I try to surprise myself by reading outside the genres I usually gravitate to. Fed up with the repugnant current political scene, I decided to bury my sorrow through biographies of all the American presidents. Currently I’m reading 1776, Washington’s Crossing, and His Excellency, George Washington, so I have a ways to go. And at a beach house a couple summers ago I found a tattered copy of The Best Sports Writing of 1947, which contained “Lethal Lightning,” a great article about Joe Louis by Jimmy Cannon, and now I’m thinking I gotta read more sports books. And recently I discovered the weird, outsidery pulp fiction of Harry Stephen Keeler, the author of such intriguing titles as The Man with the Magic Eardrums, The Riddle of the Traveling Skull, The Case of the Transposed Legs, and Y. Cheung, Business Detective.

And I still want to read all of Dickens, Wodehouse, Twain, Pynchon, Patrick O’Brian, and John le Carré — one of these days.

You’ve gotten this far, so you’re probably as messed up as I am about reading. Let me conclude with a list that will keep you up late at night when you’re supposed to be sleeping or making love: Wolf Whistle, by Lewis Nordan; You Play the Red and the Black Comes Up, by Eric Knight; Dog of the South, by Charles Portis; The Fan Man, by William Kotzwinkle; The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon; and short stories by Steve Almond, Bernard Malamud, Flannery O’Connor, Matthew Klam, and Shalom Auslander. And don’t forget the pieces in this very anthology. They’re not too shabby either.

Fact Check

Can you spot the obvious error in this article:

Rock 'n' roll legend Elvis Presley ceded his crown to Nirvana lead singer Kurt Cobain on Forbes.com's list as the top-earning dead celebrity.

The list, published on Tuesday, said grunge rocker Cobain earned $50 million between October 2005 and October 2006. Presley wound up in the No. 2 slot with $42 million, down from last year's $45 million.

Forbes.com bases its dollar amounts on licensing deals for using the deceased celebrities' work or image in advertising or elsewhere.

This was Cobain's first time on the list in its six years of publication. Presley has ruled the roost since its inception, said Forbes.com staff writer Lacey Rose.

Cobain's coup was due to his widow, actress and singer Courtney Love, who sold a 25-percent stake in the Seattle grunge group's song catalog to New York music publishing company PrimeWave.

Ranked after Presley is "Peanuts" cartoon strip creator Charles Schulz at $35 million.

Rounding out the top five were Beatle John Lennon at $24 million and groundbreaking physicist Albert Einstein at $20 million, whose estate profited from such licensing deals as the popular "Baby Einstein" educational videos.

Other celebrities on the list include Theodore Geisel, better known as children's book author Dr. Seuss; rhythm & blues pioneer Ray Charles, silver screen legend Marilyn Monroe and reggae superstar Bob Marley.

Past top earners include songwriter Irving Berlin and actor Marlon Brando.

Answer here.

No Joke

Hard to believe it took this long, but finally after years of waiting, readers in Czechoslovakia will be able to get their hands on an official, authorized, Czech-language version of Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being.  According to Kundera's Czech literary agent:

I don't think that Milan Kundera was ever against the book being published in Czech officially, even after many years. Kundera's concern really rested with editing the book properly, and preparing it for publication in Czech. At first glance this doesn't appear to be a big deal, but in the case of Milan Kudnera, who is known for his perfectionism, this is a huge job. Also because the Toronto edition was published under difficult circumstances, and therefore Kundera had to read the entire book again, re-write sections, make additions, and edit the entire text. So given his perfectionism, this is was a long-term job, but now readers will get the book that Milan Kundera thinks should exist.

Magnolia Bloom

If you've spent any time looking around the Internet for information on Mississippi authors, you have surely come across the Starkville High School Writers and Musicians Project's Web site.  The Clarion-Ledger has the story behind this great site:

All those nuggets of information about some of Mississippi's greatest authors were uncovered by a group of students at Starkville High School, between 1996 and 2004, while working on required papers in Nancy Jacobs' English literature class....

Sadly, the project ended when Jacobs retired in spring 2004. "I wanted someone else to pick it up," Jacobs says, "but teachers are being required to do so much more these days ... all the state testing being done ... their plates are full. I did most of the work on the Web site during my free time, and it's harder for teachers to do that these days."

Starkville High principal Kathi Wilson says the school's English department "has talked about" reviving the project, and calls it "an enormous source of pride" to her school.

But nothing is guaranteed, except the precious profiles already written and the updates that students - many of whom are now in college or in the working world - send to Jacobs, who puts the new information on the Web site.

I Feel For You

According to a study in the Journal of Research in Personality, people who read fiction tend to be more empathetic and score higher on tests of social understanding and awareness.  Unfortunately, the article itself is under lock and key, but the British Psychological Society's Research Digest sums it up thusly:

[The researchers asked] 94 participants to identify the names of fiction and non-fiction authors embedded in a long list of names that also included non-authors. Prior research has shown this test correlates well with how much people actually read. Among the authors listed were Matt Ridley, Naomi Wolf (non-fiction), Toni Morrison and PD James (fiction).

The more authors of fiction that a participant recognised, the higher they tended to score on measures of social awareness and tests of empathy – for example being able to recognise a person’s emotions from a picture showing their eyes only, or being able to take another person’s perspective. Recognising more non-fiction authors showed the opposite association.

The researchers surmised that reading fiction could improve people’s social awareness via at least two routes – by exposing them to concrete social knowledge concerning the way people behave, and by allowing them to practise inferring people’s intentions and monitoring people’s relationships. Non-fiction readers, by contrast, “fail to simulate such experiences, and may accrue a social deficit in social skills as a result of removing themselves from the actual social world”.

I have some connections to the publisher of this journal, so I'm hoping to get my hands on a copy of this article.  And tell me you don't love its title:  Bookworms versus nerds: exposure to fiction versus non-fiction, divergent associations with social ability, and the simulation of fictional social worlds.

Sometimes a Pony Gets Depressed

They may not be pretty to look at unless you have a soft spot for baby blue or urine yellow, but this brief note in the NY Times' "Inside the List" may make you reconsider the beauty of the galleys:

Book critics who hung on to their advance reader’s editions of “Cold Mountain” made a wise decision. These rare copies are selling for as much as $750 on some Web sites. The Penguin Press, the publisher of Thomas Pynchon’s forthcoming novel “Against the Day,” is trying to keep tabs on where Pynchon’s coveted advance editions end up. They’re writing the critic’s name in each copy of “Against the Day” they send out. I suspect, in a few cases, this could make the editions even more valuable. On the used book site abe.com, for example, you can buy — for a mere $4,750 — John Updike’s copy of Tom Wolfe’s “Man in Full,” the same copy Updike read and marked up before writing his memorably negative review in The New Yorker. (“ ‘A Man in Full’ amounts to entertainment, not literature, even literature in a modest aspirant form.”) According to the ad on abe.com, Updike’s marginalia includes “ha,” “vulgar writing” and “whole book a lecture by stories.” But back to Pynchon: his novel is due to be released on Nov. 21. His last one, “Mason & Dixon,” spent eight weeks on the list in 1997.

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Here's the first review that I've seen of Dave Egger's new novel, What Is the What.  Many, many more to follow, I'm sure.

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Seems I remember reading about it a while back, but still, I kept waiting for the punchline in this article about the plans for the Charles Dickens theme-park, Dickens World.  By the way, the park already has a wiki page and an incredibly slow-to-load web site.

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It doesn't take much to keep me from reading a Stephen King novel and after reading Ed's review of King's new book in the Philly Inquirer and this review in the Guardian make it even less probable.

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This photo of Mark Z. Danielewski made me sympathetic for the copyeditors of his books.

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The NY Times examines the Starbucks aesthetic:

These days the so-called long tail model of cultural consumption — the 1.5 million songs on iTunes, the 55,000 films on Netflix — is getting a lot of attention among business theorists, and teenage boys are getting a lot of attention from the entertainment complex. But Starbucks relies on a previous model: a narrow range of blockbuster hits geared toward an older, educated audience.

The book publishing industry could benefit from such a tastemaking force, said Laurence Kirshbaum, founder of the LJK Literary Management agency. “One of the big problems in the book industry is that outside e of Oprah, there’s no really widely accepted authority to recommend books,” Mr. Kirshbaum said.

That gives me a headache just copying and pasting it.  Starbucks as an arbiter of book sales?  With that in mind, don't forget that this Thursday is Mitch Albom day at your local Starbucks. 

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The Chicago Tribune looks at Halloween books for all ages.

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"[Richard] Ford was born in Jackson, Miss., and attended the same high school as Eudora Welty. The two writers later became friends, and Ford was named Welty's literary executor after her death."  A few more facts about Richard Ford here.

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At PopMatters, Roger Holland remembers the glory days of the Pogues and frontman Shane MacGowan.

This Day in 1969

{Image borrowed from BeatScene Online}

Baby Photo Friday: 1000 Ships

Heavy Pages

It's finally happened.  I've thrown up the white flag.  Given up.  I can't fight this feeling anymore.

Gone are the days when I could come home, say hello to the beautiful wife, eat my dinner, then scurry up to the reading room and settle into a book. That's over now.  I have more pressing things on my daily agenda, namely a little baby who smiles when she first sees me most afternoons, a smile that makes me immediately forget that the stack of books keeps growing.

It happens. 

Not saying for a second that this is the end of a long reading career.  Just a hiatus. One of these ...  Just a few more weeks or months of not feeling like I need to read, of feeling that I'm being an irresponsible reader, that I'm missing out on something.  Miss it already, that's for sure.  I'm reminded every day, every time I walk by the TBR pile.  Reminded every time a new book arrives in the mail or a new review goes up on a favorite blog.  But being reminded from now on will not come with the guilt that has often accompanied it.  After all, those books aren't going anywhere.  They will be there unchanged, each word intact, just as I left them when I abandoned them for what to me right now are better things.  Unlike those books, Marlie is changing seemingly with every passing minute, her blank pages filling with the simplest of type, unseen footnotes waiting to be referenced, chapters becoming outlined.  I plan to be a major character in this novel. I aim to cherish as much of these brainstorming days as I possibly can.

So how is it that I still don't have time to read or don't take the time to read once I've spent time with Marlie?  Call it a lack of attention span.  Call it a lack of desire to invest time or energy in a book.  Whatever you want to call it, I'm just not interested right now.  How long will it last?  Who knows.  Might not last out the weekend. 

In fact, I doubt it will.

Foggy Day Things

The new (to me) blog The Beat reprints a recent sermon on Beat Spiritualiry given by Kerouac biographer and poet Gerald Nicosia at the First Unitarian Universalist Church in San Francisco a few weeks ago:

Quite simply, Beat writing is filled with religious imagery from first to last. Thus it was no surprise that Kerouac spent years reading the Holy Scriptures and religious writers like Kierkegaard and St. John of the Cross, and that so many of the Beat writers studied or practiced Buddhism. These writers were always asking the big questions about human life and man’s place in the universe—that was what first attracted me to them. They are on a genuine spiritual quest, motivated by their own intense suffering, as most spiritual seekers are.

It was Kerouac’s great genius to frame the quest as the movement from beat to beatitude, from suffering to joy, from misery and “sin” to blessedness. Neal Cassady, who is the model for the character of Dean Moriarty in On the Road, was a womanizer, a car thief, and a substance abuser of prodigious proportions. Yet in On the Road, Jack Kerouac called him a “saint,” and this drove the critics—as well as the guardians of public morality—mad. “Is Kerouac sponsoring juvenile delinquency?” they asked.

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LA Weekly's Marc Weingarten reviews Bill Morgan’s I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg.

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The Albany Times Union profiles the folks behind the State University of New York Press, which is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year.

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Former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky will serve as honorary chairman of a campaign to restore and rehabilitate Henry David Thoreau's birthplace:

The historic farmhouse has both local and national significance. Built ca. 1730, it retains many of its early architectural features and is an integral part of the agricultural landscape of Concord's East Quarter. The land surrounding the house has been cultivated for more than 300 years....

Unfortunately, the house, which is on the National Register of Historic Places, is in serious disrepair and continues to deteriorate. The Trust needs to raise $800,000 by June 2007, to take title to the house from the town of Concord and nearly $1 million to complete the project. The Trust has received two significant local gifts, which have propelled the campaign toward its halfway mark.

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Toronto's NOW Magazine asks a few of the authors who will be in town for the city's International Festival of Authors the burning question:  What literary character do you wish you could sleep with? Authors were also asked about their bathroom reading.

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From Wired:

Afternoon tea is one of the enduring conventions of this unconventional place, the Santa Fe Institute. Since its founding in 1984, the nonprofit research center has united top minds from diverse fields to study cellular biology, computer networks, and other systems that underlie our lives. The patterns they've discovered have illuminated some of the most pressing issues of our time and, along the way, served as the basis for what's now called the science of complexity. Support for the revolving cast of about 35 investigators, who generally stay between three and six months, comes from corporate and private sources. Perhaps the most surprising discovery lurking inside SFI is the gray-haired man in cowboy boots and jeans nibbling on a cookie in the kitchen. He's Cormac McCarthy, the acclaimed and reclusive novelist, who has quietly become the institute's unlikely muse. "As a writer, he represents what we want our scientists to be," SFI president Geoffrey West says. "He's a maverick."

McCarthy, 73, is known for his literary explorations of violence and the American West in books like All the Pretty Horses and Blood Meridian. But he has more in common with the researchers than his fans might think. McCarthy harbors a deep interest in science, and he admires his SFI colleagues' willingness to take risks. "These are people who aren't afraid to color outside the lines," he says.

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Finally, Wilco's show tonight from DC's 9:30 Club can be heard on NPR.org and wilcoworld.net. 

Classic Binge

I can't imagine Faulkner being turned loose in a place like Brazil, but apparently he was.  Brazzil Magazine has a fascinating article (in three parts) about the time he spent in that country.  And wouldn't you know it, the first item discussed is "binge drinking":

During Faulkner's six-day stay in São Paulo, he took almost no part in the International Writers' Congress he was to attend. It was reported that the severe spinal injury Faulkner suffered during his time in the military caused him to be afflicted by intense onslaughts of arthritic pain. For this reason, the public was told Faulkner was forced to miss the sessions in order to recover in his room at the Hotel Esplanada.

The prevailing rumor, however, is that Faulkner was too intoxicated to function before such an audience. One legendary story has it that upon arrival in his hotel room, Faulkner threw open a window, looked out over the rapidly industrializing city, muttered "I hate Chicago," and began a drinking binge that lasted the duration of his State Department sponsored stay.

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The Daily Iowan talks to Michael Chabon (bugmenot: tacobell@tacobell.com):

Despite - or perhaps, because of - his success, Chabon remains committed to his craft. The writer fervently believes in his self-imposed formula for novelistic success: talent, luck, and discipline. Of these, discipline is the only aspect he said he can control, and control it he does. Cooped up in a little office behind his Berkeley, Calif., home, he cranks out at least 1,000 words a day.

And he has no intention of slowing down. Though his Pulitzer places him among the literary elite, Chabon laughed at the idea that he would simply disappear from the writing scene.

He's also interviewed by the Capital (WI) Times.

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The NY Sun has an interesting piece in their Food and Drink section about the restaurant Il Buco, whose cellar is believed to have been the inspiration for Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado."

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Erin offers up some helpful words of wisdom for those of you planning on participating in National Novel Writing Month for the first time.

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I've been meaning to congratulate Pete for making the pages of The Atlantic Monthly.

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Finally, a great way to kill some time today: 

Garrett County Press asked favorite artists to "color in" pages from Kevin Stone's latest project, The Pat Robertson and Friends Coloring Book. The artists, who range from Philadelphia designers to Bangkok street artists, were given simple instructions: pick your favorite page and have fun.

Sidetracked

Yesterday, the Litblog Co-op kicked off this quarter's readings and discussions with the announcement by Ed that Sam Savage's Firmin, a story about a book-eating, fast-talking rat, has been chosen as the Autumn Read This! selection.  Today, I reveal my first-ever nomination, Sidney Thompson's short story collection Sideshow.  Do check back next week for our week of Sideshow and the following weeks when we'll be talking about the other nominee and ultimately our Read This! choice for Autumn.

The Naked and the Not Quite Dead

According to the NY Sun, Alice Denham, a former Playboy Playmate, has written a memoir detailing her rather interesting time spent mingling with celebs in Greenwich Village in the 1950s and 60s:

Denham also recalls that [Norman] Mailer, one of her literary heroes, turned out to be a bit weird. At one party, Mailer and his second wife, Adele, stripped and began jumping up and down on a bed, with Adele trying to coax Denham to get naked, too. "Norman was just square, no particular waist or pectoral definition, sturdy legs, large at the knees," and an "ordinary" sex organ.

When novelist [Phillip] Roth, who was married, hit on Denham, he didn't waste any time. "Roth was clearly a makeout artist. It was in his actions, his movement, and he was ever cocksure. Philip expected. Philip got," Denham writes. " 'Come here, baby,' he snarled as his shoulders and arms and flat athletic body . . . surrounded me in full athletic grope . . . Philip was a sex fiend." But Denham got turned off when Roth next suggested a threesome with his wife and then refused to listen to her as she tried to describe a novel she was writing. "Only the young and naive do that. I don't rap about it; I do it," Roth scolded her.

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The Independent lists the top ten reads for Autumn.  Makes you wonder what book they suddenly cut out to put Kiran Desai's Booker Award winner as #2.  Ah, but I'm being cynical, aren't I?

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Also, the Independent has an excerpt of Heddonist in the Cellar; Adventures in Wine by Jay McInerney.

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At least one person thinks there's a problem with the fact that the Nobel Prize for Literature hasn't gone to an American in over a decade:

Whatever happened to the age of authors like Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, authors who commanded attention without having to be from another country? I don’t mean to sound overly nationalistic, as I read authors from outside the grand U.S. of A. all the time, but at the very least, I would like to recognize the name of a winner once in a while.

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A recent survey by Sisters-in-Crime, a not-for-profit organization that provides networking and support for female mystery writers, found that male readers are more likely to read books written by female writers.  You can read more about the survey here.

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Colin Meloy doesn't seem to be a fan of the "literary pop" label people slap on his band: 

"The whole 'literary pop' thing, the 'The Decemberists are smarter than you are' thing, started very early on," Meloy says. "It's unfortunate that pop music writing is so bad that if you try to explore the English language, you're labeled some sort of literary elitist.

"The challenging thing is to make sure you build a voice and stay true to it, without tipping over into novelty."

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Before you die, be sure to check out some of the things culled from those books that tell you what you must do before you die.

I Dreamed of an Angel on My Chest

A few days ago, I heard the sad news that Farrah Fawcett has cancer.  It reminded me of something I wrote in the early days of Syntax of Things, something I'm going to repost here.  Get better soon, Farrah.

Long before my wife Elaine or my first wife Jen, long before the numerous declarations of love I made as a high schooler or the crushes on the likes of Ashley Judd and Juliette Binoche, even before the fling I had with a sixth grader when I was in third grade, I fell in love with Farrah.  It wasn't exactly the living, breathing Farrah who talked to the invisible Charlie and who tracked down dangerous criminals with her fellow Angels.  It was actually this image. I was seven when I first spotted her hanging on the wall of a T-shirt shop in the Selma Mall.  Of all the options available, the cars and comic book characters, I wanted nothing more, would think of nothing but having her ironed on the front of a light blue shirt, my name in dark blue letters on the back.

I no longer know what inspired this need.  Was it the pearly whites casting some sort of hypnotic spell?  Was it the hair?  Was it the, well, obvious?

So I was seven and being given the privilege of picking out my own design because I had scored perfect S's on my first report card.  Being a budding scholar did not give me the freedom of choice I had expected.  It seems the one image in the entire shop that my mom refused to allow on a T-shirt was the one I coveted.  No matter how much I begged, no matter that I offered to buy it with my own money, my mom refused to see beyond the implied pornography.  After all, what would the other mothers think?  What would my dad think?  What was her seven-year-old boy thinking?

This story could end with a plot hatched by a precocious thwarted lover to convince an older cousin to buy the shirt for him.  Or some fashion of rebellion in which I refused to eat my lima beans until I could wear my love on my chest.  But it ends with a distant second choice, an image of Bo and Luke Duke leaning against the General Lee.  Despite the jealousy of my friends,  John Schneider and Tom Wopat could not ease the pain of my unrequited love.

Baby Photo Friday

Here's Marlie's reaction after I told her that she couldn't have Deep-fried Coca-Cola at the North Carolina State Fair:

Three Bullets Before Work

• First she loses out on the Nobel Prize, now Joyce Carol Oates has to apologize for her most recent New Yorker story.
• The Portland Mercury looks at some of the newer McSweeney's titles.
• In the process of republishing John Ehle's long out-of-print book The Land Breakers, the folks at Press 53, a new, very small publishing company in North Carolina, managed to get a blurb for the book from none other than Harper Lee.