Syntax of Things

A Little Bobbly

As you can see, certain people are starting to give me the stink eye for not updating Syntax of Things.  No matter that this happens to be the longest break I've had from blogging in three years.  There's always someone who demands more.  So give me one more day and I'll return the favor with a look back at some of my favorite things from 2006.  I'll do books on Tuesday, music on Wednesday, television and movies on Thursday, and miscellaneous stuff on Friday.

Until then, keep it between the lines and enjoy your New Year's Day.

Clean-Up & Recovery

We have way too much interesting stuff to play with right now.  Regular posting will resume in a few days.

Stocking Stuffers

I'm still enjoying and taking advantage of a few more days of much needed hibernation, but I wanted to pop in for a second to wish all of you a Merry insert your holiday of choice here.  To help you celebrate, here are a couple of quickies.  See you in a few days.

• Listen to Bob Dylan reading "The Night Before Christmas"   {via}

• Watch the Kinks perform the best Christmas song ever  {via}

• Some advice from Truman Capote's aunt Marie Rudisill, also known as the Fruitcake Lady

A Gift for You!

Just in time for Christmas (or whatever holiday you celebrate this time of year), my good pal Trevor and I have worked up the second annual Underrated Writers Project.  In case you've forgotten the premise, we polled a bunch of our favorite litbloggers and asked them to give us a list of writers they feel to be underrated.  We never really defined underrated, leaving that to them.  This year, we got responses from 24 litbloggers and the list eventually grew to 66 writers of all stripes and varieties.  Anyway, check it out, share it with your friends, comment on whether or not you think a writer is truly underrated, hell, nominate a few writers you think are underrated.  Most of all, buy some of their books.  I did so last year and it really made for a rich and varied reading list.  I'll have more to say about this experience later.  For now, go check it out.

As for me, I'm going to take a few days to rest up from this.  I'll try to pop back in before Christmas.

+  See also:  the 2005 Underrated Writers Project

A Final Tease

I'm adding the final touches--the bow, if you will--to the gift I've been promising.  I'm thinking you'll be able to see it either tonight (late) or first thing in the morning.  Either way, check back tomorrow and you'll see that I haven't been making empty promises.  This really will be something you'll like if you're a fan of good writers and great books. 

So to keep you entertained in the meantime, here's a little bookshelf porn.  I can't take my eyes off of the third one down on the right.  (Completely SFW)

{h.t.}

Death Alert

Ever since I woke my wife up one morning to tell her that John Ritter and Johnny Cash had died I've been forced to insert some sort of disclaimer into any announcement to her that will include news of death.  We've decided on a rather obvious phrase--"Death Alert"--that I slip in just before I tell her.  This has to be done whether it's in person, over the phone, or an instant message.  It gives her time to prepare for the news or to tell me to keep it to myself.  Well, last night, I walked into the kitchen and gave her the warning.  "Death alert."  She was on the phone with her good friend Lucina Hernandez Contraria Rodriguez Jane DeSoto Palafox, who is also a member of the "death alert" squad. 

"Oh no, who is it?" she asked, interrupting the latest gossip about some celebrity not wearing underwear.

"Joe Barbera.  He died.  He was 90something."

"Who?" I could tell that this wasn't going to be moment-of-silent inducing news.

"Joe Barbera of Hanna-Barbera."

Silence.

"Scooby Doo.  The Flintstones.  Tom & friggin' Jerry?"

"Oh, that news doesn't really do much for me." 

I couldn't believe it.  How can a man that created such a cast of characters, icons of our culture perhaps more well known than the vast majority of the dramatis personae of all of Shakespeare for whole generations of American kids and adults be a shrug of the shoulders when his death is announced?  Maybe it's just me.  Maybe it's the fact that my elementary schoolday afternoons were filled with homework and Tom & Jerry, my Saturday mornings with Scooby-Doo and the Laff Olympics.  Sure, it wasn't a tragic, sudden death, a drug overdose or a car wreck.  He was 95 and lived a full and productive life.  But will he get the sort of send off that Bob Hope or Carson got after their full lives ended?  Not even close.  I'm not sure CNN interrupted its coverage of the missing hikers to even acknowledge his passing.

But I'll stop what I'm doing for at least a moment to tip my hat to his creativity and celebrate the fact that he gave me countless hours of entertainment, helped fill those in-between years after Sesame Street stopped being my it show but before Starsky & Hutch took over as my television obsession. With that said, I'll dim the Syntax of Things' lights for just a moment and give you a little taste of genius.  Rest in peace, Mr. Barbera.

A Little Here, Mostly There

We're still a day or two away from giving you the promised Christmas gift.  I've been working on it all weekend and I'm beginning to think that you'll really like it.  Check back here as soon as tomorrow, but more likely on Wednesday, and bring time and a notepad with you.

Speaking of you, congratulations to You.  I didn't even realize You had had such a great year.  To say that I am jealous would be putting it mildly; however, I guess You deserve some recognition.  Watch out, though.  I, He, She, It, and possibly even They are coming after You next year.

~~~

According to this Reuters article, writers in New Orleans are having a tough go of it post-Katrina:

Novelists, poets and playwrights are struggling to save and rebuild their scene in the city that was setting for classics like Williams' "Streetcar Named Desire," and Toole's "A Confederacy of Dunces" and Rice's popular "Interview With the Vampire."

Some have launched efforts to provide housing assistance and other aid for basic survival so writers can chronicle disaster and recovery in what previously was an affordable Bohemia on the Mississippi.

~~~

According to a survey of over 4,000 college freshman and some 200 professors, there is a huge decline in reading of the "Great Books."  Unless, of course, one of those books happens to have been made into a movie.

~~~

Sven Birketts is no longer sure how to judge a book, but he's figured out the mechanisms behind getting the book to the point that it must be judged:

My conspiracy-minded alter-ego reared up: Suddenly everything started to look like a package, an "initiative." Writing might be the most solitary and soul-concentrated of vocations, but once a book enters the publishing sluice, it is a collectively-finessed object -- and the greater the investment, the more finessing.

I pictured the whole cabal in the conference room -- the editorial people, the publicists, the marketing department, maybe even the sales reps, all thinking how to overpower the obvious curse: the book's utterly forbidding length on the one hand, and the fact of it being literary, which is to say "difficult," on the other. Not that they would downplay the literary aspect completely. Literary can also translate into status, into prizes and honors. Readers like to see themselves reading works of recognized merit, they just don't want to feel inadequate in the attempt. No, the literary can be there, it just has to be pumped up. Think of Jeffrey Eugenides's "Middlesex," Jonathan Franzen's "The Corrections."

~~~

The nonist is doing his part to spread some holiday cheer.  Go check out the Christmas cards he's created for us to print out and send to everyone on our list.

~~~

Finally, what a great idea:  Peter Darbyshire asks the band Blood Meridian, named after the Cormac McCarthy book, to review McCarthy's latest novel, The Road:

READ THIS: So it's an emotional kind of beauty you see in The Road?

JEFF: It's so simple and basic. There's long periods of bleak nothingness, but then there are these bursts that are just intense.

MATT: Sometimes McCarthy's use of language, it doesn't work for me. It's too epic for the book it's written for. He's using this lofty language that's just way above the characters in the story. It works for Blood Meridian, and I think it works for The Road too.

READ THIS: Did you think The Road uses McCarthy's usual epic language? I thought it was stripped down for his work.

JEFF: It was less stripped down than No Country for Old Men. There was more poetry to The Road. For The Road, I probably read every sentence twice, but for Blood Meridian I probably read every sentence three or five times. You not only need to grasp the meaning of it, you also need to grasp the feeling of it, and the visual he's trying to paint for you.

MATT: There are similarities in the ways he uses his language between the books. Awful grammar. My high-school English teacher would cringe.

Baby Photo Friday: A Marlie Merry Christmas to You

Early Xmas Present

Mr. Wickett pointed out a link to a Mississippi Public Broadcasting program called Writers.  There's so much there that it's hard to figure out where to begin (think William Gay, Ron Rash, Tom Franklin, Edward P. Jones, Tim Gautreaux, and a ton more).  Just go and look around and before you know it the night'll be almost over, the sun'll be coming up, the dogs'll need to be walked, you'll be considering calling in sick to work so that you won't have to leave the site, and you'll be thankful that the state of Mississippi exists, if only for this series alone.

To get you started, here's a direct link to Barry Hannah speaking and reading from "Water Liars" from Airships.

Thanks Dan!

Shhhh!

Syntax of Things is going to be in silent mode the next few days.  I have projects up to my eyeballs right now and I need to concentrate on getting those done.  One of these will be something to give to all of you next week, so stay tuned.  I know you'll like it.

Before I go, below the cut I've embedded a YouTube video of an interview with Jan Kerouc, daughter of Jack, talking about her father.  It's really a sad clip, hearing her discuss her father as he was in the last few years of his life, an old drunk in his late 40s, sitting in a rocking chair in his blue plaid shirt, slugging whiskey and watching the Beverly Hillbillies, dependent on his own mother for even the small things in life like buying socks.  All the while not being much of a father to her. 

Laura LeRoy

The woman formerly known as JT LeRoy, who seems to be calling herself Laura Albert these days and dismissing the fact that her little act of therapy resulted in a lot of red faces and who seems to be ignoring the notion that what she did is called lying, speaks with Pop Candy about her time as JT LeRoy.  It's pretty nauseating.  I liked her much better as JT:

And if the truth hadn't come out, would you have kept JT around?

Yeah. ... You know, I did a ton of therapy as Laura and I was so disconnected from my pain. And I was so full with everyone else's pain that I understood the weight of it.

The thing about Jeremy, the thing is, I was healed. It was like I was a Siamese twin and we shared a lung, and slowly I developed my own lung and I could breathe on my own, but I did not have faith. But everyone around me knew.

Like, when I was down in Deadwood, David Milch said to me -- because I was gonna write an episode -- he said, "How would you like your name to appear?" And at the beginning of the season, I said, "Well, JT Leroy." And then towards the end, when all this was coming out, he was very protective of me. He asked me the question again, and I said, "Laura Albert." And he said, "That's what I had hoped." So it was a gift, ultimately. It was a gift. And I have to remember that.

(Starts to cry) It's hard, you know? It was a really hard (expletive) year. It was a magical year, too. Imagine, like, a Sleeping Beauty waking up. It was like I was awake, but I was asleep.

Three Foers

Just when you thought it was safe to walk the streets of New York City, now comes news that there's another Foer with a book deal.  Youngest of the three Foers, Joshua, who is 24, received a $1.25-million advance for his first book.  And the movie rights have already been optioned.  I guess that alone could make any family proud, but the Foers don't have time for pride; they're more interested in complete and utter literary domination.  Anyway, read all about the Foers, described as "three nerdy brothers from D.C.," and the Foer family in this NY Observer article:

Certainly no one could accuse them of being unmotivated. The eldest Foer, Franklin, 31, is the editor of The New Republic; Jonathan Safran Foer, 29, is the author of the literary novels Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close; and Joshua, after interning at Slate and dabbling in freelance journalism, is at work on his book, titled Moonwalking with Einstein, about his descent into the world of memory competitions (the book was already optioned for film).

The intrigue that surrounds the Foers in New York literary circles is such that one editor who considered Joshua’s book proposal whispered a piece of Foer lore: the rumor that when they were growing up, the three boys were required to make presentations to their parents during dinner each evening as a sort of training for the public stage.

“Family dinners were a big thing,” Franklin Foer, who lives in Washington, D.C., said by phone. “You’d turn off the nightly news and then sit down and eat.” Franklin described his father as a highly experimental cook, and mentioned his dad’s “falafel spaghetti sauce” as one particular dish that left an imprint on his palate.

“Dinner-table conversation had its share of current events and historical discussion, and, you know, analysis of French symbolism … but also its share of fart jokes,” he said.

Estate Planning

You often hear stories about people with an insatiable desire to hoard, the pack rats who can't even move through their house because they've saved every newspaper since the Hoover administration?  It makes you wonder what would happen if these folks had a focus to their hoarding.  Take for instance Mayme Clayton, who recently passed away at age 83.  Imagine being left this in a will:

By the time she died in October, at age 83 of pancreatic cancer ("I've got a so-so body with a go-go mind," she said in her later years), Mayme Clayton amassed almost 30,000 rare, first-edition and out-of-print books. She was especially strong on the writers of the Harlem Renaissance, obtaining first editions and correspondence from Langston Hughes, Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston.

Her trove includes the first book published in America by an author of African descent, Phillis Wheatley's "Poems on Various Subjects Religious and Moral," dated 1773, when she was a slave in Boston. Clayton has the only known copy signed by the author; she paid $600 for it in 1972, far more than she usually spent. Her collecting style was more bargain basement than Sotheby's auction. She'd prowl used bookstores, flea markets, estate sales. When old people died, she'd get into their attics.

In the garage, it still feels like a treasure hunt. There are the first issues of Ebony magazine (She picked up Vol. 1, No. 1, for a dime). A book about Denzel Washington next to "The Negro in Tennessee: 1865 to 1880." There's a "How to Box" manual by Joe Louis lying on a box of Jim Crow cartoons with the label "Negro Jokes" beneath the original movie poster for "Porgy and Bess."

Mapplethorpe Bulge and More

Two very rare Borges manuscripts valued at over $950,000 and presumed stolen after the owner, John Wronoski, the owner of Lame Duck Books in Harvard Square, couldn't find them upon his return from a visit to Germany were discovered stuffed behind a Robert Mapplethorpe photo that Wronoski had also taken to Germany with him.  Of course, who would suspect a "bulge" in a Mapplethorpe photo to be hiding something that valuable?  That's the kind of thing that can only happen to Borges' works.

~~~

Well, it took less than a day for Zak Smith's illustrated Gravity's Rainbow with it's original title intact to show up on eBay.  A signed copy even!  {via}

~~~

The NY Sun has more on the Hunter S. Thompson documentary that I mentioned yesterday and news about "A Sad Flower in the Sand," a documentary about John Fante that will be airing on PBS.

~~~

Beat historian Gerald Nicosia thinks that the canonization of Allen Ginsberg needs to be reconsidered:

However, I am starting to feel a little trepidation at what appears to be an ongoing campaign of Ginsberg hagiography. He was not a saint by any stretch of the imagination. Reading Silberman's quote from Ginsberg's "Memory Gardens" -- "I'll do the work ... to ease the pain of living" -- you might think him a predecessor of Mother Teresa. In the last few years of his life, he turned his back on his goddaughter, Jan Kerouac (daughter of Jack Kerouac), who pleaded with him to help her recover and preserve her father's estate, which was being divided up and sold off to collectors and dealers by people with no blood connection to Kerouac. Ginsberg even had her removed by police from New York University in 1995 when she asked to address an audience at a conference about her own father.

Ginsberg's rejection caused Jan an immense amount of pain, but Morgan avoids dealing with their relationship altogether in his book, as he avoids many other dark sides of Ginsberg, including his determination to get friends such as Gregory Corso committed to a mental institution -- all the more ironic considering Ginsberg's own supposed defense of madness in his poetry.

~~~

Reuters examines the success of Raleigh's own Lulu, a vanity publisher which now puts out upwards of 2,500 titles per week.

~~~

Guy buys a Velvet Underground acetate at a yard sale in New York for 75 cents.  Guy ends up selling what turns out to be the only known copy of Velvet Underground's discarded first album for $155,000.  I think I'm going to start accompanying my wife on her weekly yard sale adventures.

~~~

Congrats to the Flaming Lips for getting an alleyway named after them in their hometown of Oklahoma City.  You can take a video tour of the Flaming Lips Alley and hear Wayne Coyne's comments on the honor, including his claim that this could be the most stolen street sign in the history of street signs. 

By Any Other Name

Georgie Lewis at Tin House sends word that there's been a little problem with the publication of Zak Smith's illustrated Gravity's Rainbow.  Here's the press release:

PORTLAND, OR.  The highly anticipated publication of artist/provocateur Zak Smith’s visual homage to Thomas Pynchon’s seminal novel Gravity’s Rainbow took a bizarre turn last week. 

Pynchon’s publisher, Penguin USA, believing the book’s original title, Gravity’s Rainbow Illustrated: One Picture for Every Page, was misleading, demanded Tin House Books change the title or face a lawsuit.

Smith’s book will now be known as Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon’s Novel Gravity’s Rainbow, the title of the original series of artwork showcased at the 2004 Whitney Biennial.

Books stickered with the new title will be available for purchase from Tinhouse.com starting Tuesday, December 12, and in bookstores before the Christmas holiday.

Because of the buzz surrounding the book, as well as raves from Newsweek and Vanity Fair and the fact that, coincidentally, publication of Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon’s Novel Gravity’s Rainbow coincides with that of Pynchon’s new novel, Tin House Books expects the modest print run of 5,000 paperbacks and 500 slip-cased limited editions to sell out quickly.

Here & There

If you're lucky enough to have the Starz movie channel as part of your cable or satellite package, then you can tune into it tomorrow night (12/12) and catch "Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride: Hunter S. Thompson on Film."  If not, you can read about it and watch some clips here.

~~~

A movie adaptation of Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera will hit theaters around this time next year.  The Boston Globe details what it has taken to get it from book to screen.  And possibly the most fascinating part of the entire article comes in the last sentence of this excerpt:

[Producer Scott] Steindorff fell in love with this novel four years ago and immediately called the author's agent, who said the writer had no desire to see an English-language movie made. It took one and a half years of phone calls and faxes before he got a hearing. "I told him I was [main character] Florentino and I wasn't going to give up till I got the prize, and he loved that," Steindorff recalled.

Steindorff paid the author about $3 million for the rights, and "I gave him my word that I would not 'Hollywood-ize' it. Like [screenwriter] Ron Harwood said, 'Why would I try to outsmart García Márquez?'"

García Márquez sent about half a dozen pages of "very tart notes on the first draft, which were really quite helpful," [director Mike] Newell said. The novelist also persuaded his friend, Colombian pop idol Shakira , to write a few songs for the film.

~~~

Apparently, Murakami isn't much beloved in Japan:

In truth, he is a cultural hybrid. He has spent time living in the U.S., and in our conversation he jumps back and forth between English and Japanese. His own books are dotted with Western cultural references, and he has translated several American classics into his native language, such as the work of J.D. Salinger, Raymond Carver and F. Scott Fitzgerald. He claims to be somewhat of a black sheep in his home country, in part due to his distaste for drinking parties or social conversation. How about Karaoke? "I hate it," he says in Japanese. "If I enter a store and there is a Karaoke machine there, I leave immediately."

~~~

The Associated Press profiles a great little radio show from Oxford, Mississippi:

From junior high kids performing a play in Latin to Nobelist Orhan Pamuk and author Martin Amis reading from their own work, the homegrown Thacker Mountain Radio embraces everything from the quirky to the sublime.

It's a Southern-fried version of A Prairie Home Companion, minus the skits - think cornbread instead of powder milk biscuits.

On the air now for nine years, Thacker Mountain Radio is a weekly one-hour show that reflects the literary and musical heritage of this north Mississippi town that, five years ago, elected a bookstore owner as mayor.

~~~

The OC Register takes a look at the renewed interest in the art and vision of one of the first hot-rod car builders Ed Roth, the man behind Rat Fink and whom Tom Wolfe wrote about in The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby.

Ding Dong, The Dictator's Dead

While most people will think of a ruthless dictator responsible for thousands of deaths in Chile during his twenty-year rule, I will always think of a little song by Camper Van Beethoven when I hear the name General Pinochet. 

+  Camper Van Beethoven -- "Joe Stalin's Cadillac"

Baby Photo Friday: Polar

A Worse Vice

Remember Brad Vice, the Alabama native who had his book, The Bear Bryant Funeral Train, pulped and who was stripped of the Flannery O'Connor Award for short fiction after being accused of plagiarism? Well, he's got an essay defending his actions in the new issue of Oxford American, and after reading this quote I have a feeling that Mr. Vice might want to drive many a mile out of his way before crossing into the state of Alabama again:

Bear Bryant was always smiling from signs and billboards looming over the highway, and his houndstooth hat was painted on awnings, rooftops, and rotating signs.  In this regard, it couldn't have been much different to grow up in Berlin in the 30's or Baghdad in the 90's.  I almost called my book The Ayatollah of My Hometown.

Plagiarism is one thing but out-and-out stupidity is another.  If you're going to be selling your book to Alabama fans, people who for the most part put the Bear at the left hand of God Almighty, then you can't be calling him the Ayatollah and drawing even loose comparisons with Hitler and Saddam.  It's a bad, bad idea.  Trust me, I lived in the state for too many years not to come away with a healthy respect for the things you can and cannot talk about.  I think it was Eddie Murphy who once said that you can speak bad of me all you want but you best not talk bad about my mother.  In Alabama, they don't care if you say bad things about Mom, but you damn sure better tip your houndstooth and pay all due respect to the Bear.

Sure, the essay does get better and there are some redeeming qualities, but I'm not sure many people will forgive that Ayatollah comparison.  In fact, I'd be willing to bet that a vast majority of folks stopped at that point, called Mr. Vice a pinko-commie leftie atheist Auburn fan with half a brain, and sent crayoned letters of complaint to the Oxford American, probably asking for Vice's mailing address so they could send him a little something. 

There are just some things you shouldn't do:  plagiarize and criticize the Bear are two big ones.

Come on, Brad, even an Auburn fan knows that.

+  See also, Michelle Richmond's take on the Vice controversy.

Unsuggesting

Most of you probably read about the new search toy at LibraryThing. They're calling it the Unsuggester, and it's basically as it sounds: You enter in the title of a book, it scours the LT database and using a complex algorithm and some sort of black magic it then suggests some unperfect matches, what could be seen as the anti-recommendation for what you're reading.  Anyway, after reading about it and playing around with it for too long yesterday, I decided to put it to good use.  I've always wondered if there's a book out there somewhere that might could and possibly should be considered the book I'm least likely to read in my lifetime.  Even without the Unsuggester I could give you a few titles, but those would be based on a gut feeling, a particular loathing of a specific genre or author.  In other words, I could change my mind and suddenly become a fan of Anne Rice.  The Unsuggester, however, gives me cold, hard, indisputable proof that there are books that I'm likely never to own, much less read.

Here's how it worked.  Strapped for time, I decided to ignore my initial impulse, which was to come up with my ten favorite novels for use in this experiment.  I can't sit around all day listening to Mark Twain scream in my ear that William Vollmann is a pervert and shouldn't be in sniffing distance of the top ten while he gets shunned yet again.  So I decided to go to the so-called experts.  I searched out some of those too exciting top ten all-time lists and after much hand wringing I found one that contained ten books that I've read and for the most part enjoyed.  From there, it was a matter of plugging in the title and noting the top (bottom?) five results for each book  (see below).

That's why I can now say with a fair amount of confidence that I will never read a single book by "New York Times bestselling author" Sherrilyn Kenyon.  In fact, I'm ready to declare Ms. Kenyon the anti-literary novelist, assuming of course that she writes novels.  She appears so often on the list that picking out just one of her books, say Seize the Night, might not do her justice.  Sure, Christine Feehan and Laurell K. Hamilton give her a run for the glory, but Kenyon just wasn't to be denied.

One day I may take the time to narrow the search, using books that I consider the best or my favorites, but for now, I'm pretty confident that I've found what I was looking for.  Now how much do you want to be that I'll get Sins of the Night for Christmas?

New OA

The new issue of Oxford American, one of my favorite magazines, has a great essay by Barry Hannah, one of my favorite writers, about teaching noir:

I came to noir late, because of my thin judgment after I picked up a Mickey Spillane novel and wanted to see what the man who nearly outsold the Holy Bible had to teach, but found the writing beneath even decent adolescent lit. Another baffling case was Louis L’Amour, with his mega-nation of readers. Such rank dumbo prose from the man President Reagan awarded the Medal of Freedom, which I didn’t win despite staying so near the phone waiting. Evil and good were black and white in the worlds of these millionaire scribes, all right, but were chased after by men with a child’s crayon. Noir would have helped L’Amour, whose tales needed less light on the subject—and please let there be scheming broads and dames with cleavage, mystery, and the gritty naturalism of hard-boiled fiction. Lawyers, guns, and money, to steal from Warren Zevon. Meanness, a sine qua non. Crimes of murder and theft motivated by wild greed or love. Some heartless nastiness. Guns are dispensable in much current noir, but I, the mentor of fine students at Sewanee and Ole Miss, own a nickel-plated Smith and Wesson .38 revolver with a two-inch barrel, bought in a local pawnshop, because the pistol was a souvenir from my diving into the greats and their times—Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain—the classic noirs. Of course, I am a fool but also of an age to hold license to be a goddamned fool, still clinging to the sad myth of tough boy at sixty-four as I roar down hell’s highway on my cherished Kawasaki 1500cc cruiser. Who knows if I’m carrying my piece in my handlebar bag, searching for evil and its minions as well as the boring good?

I’ve also done deep research in preparing for the noir studies of my golden years by turning ungolden, with bile and spleen rising. My twenty-year career in alcoholism is a clichéd bore, but sober for most of sixteen years, I can live more intensely the ever-sordid hunger for booze that marks all classic noir.

Dr. Jack

Kerouac will finally get his degree, and a doctorate at that:

The Lowell-born writer who authored Dr. Sax will soon become Dr. Jack.

What he never got in life -- a college sheepskin -- Jack Kerouac will receive next spring, nearly four decades after his death. Kerouac will receive an honorary doctorate of letters degree during the June 2, 2007, commencement ceremony at UMass Lowell.

Though he is widely considered an important American writer, and 1957's On The Road has been embraced by generations of readers around the world, it will be the first time Kerouac has received such an honor from academia.

No BCS

Anyone care to guess what famous person is photographed here as a very young college football player, the one standing nearest the chalkboard?  Check back later today and I'll give you the answer.

Update: Ugh, Typepad doesn't like the image.  Click on it for a much better (still not great) version.

Update 2: It is Jack Kerouac, circa 1940 or so, getting instruction from Columbia coach Lou Little prior to his first game as a college player against then powerhouse Army.  You can read a NY Times article about the game at Paul Maher's site or here.

Humpback Eye

Believe it or not, Mississippians can read...and write and this campaign has been created to make sure that you know not just about its famous writers but about all the good stuff that has come from the Magnolia State. (Peavey amps?)

Okay, I'll fess up to being one of those people who has, many, many times in the past, made fun of good old Mississippi.  After all, I was born and raised in Alabama and Alabamians thank the good powers that be for Mississippi, for without that state Alabama would finish last (or first, depending on your perspective) on every one of those godawful list.  Not to mention what kid hasn't had a chip on his shoulder since fifth grade geography and the days of having to spell states on a test for the first time?  And no, that damn song doesn't work, because you simply can't make me want to utter "humpback" and "crooked letter" out loud or in my head too much.  It's not healthy.  Aside from that, the only thing positive an Alabamian would say about the inferior state to its left would be that five of them makes for the perfect count for rushing the quarterback in a game of pickup football.

Anyway, now that I'm older, I'm not afraid to admit that I may have been wrong.  I've spent a few very enjoyable days in the state, won--and lost--a few bucks at its casinos, browsed books and felt Faulkner's presence in Oxford, had a few drinks in Hattiesburg, good times enough to know that Mississippi ain't all bad.  In fact, I'll go so far as to admit that if someone held a gun to my head right now and made me move to one of the two states, it might just be Mississippi.  Or I might just let them pull the trigger.  Still, no more Mississippi jokes from me.  I think I'll spend more time making fun of Florida.

Crash & Breathe

I couldn't agree more with Slushpile Scott that something has to be done about those damn car crash commercials.  I don't know how many times I've been drawn in by the casual conversation of the couple in the Volkswagon only to have it all come to a screetching, airbag-filled end.  Disturbing.  I'm to the point of DVDing everything so that I don't have to sit through that damn commercial again. 

Anyway, I need a day to catch my breath.  Be sure to take a few minutes and check out the Read Now! list to your left and don't miss  Genevieve Tucker's piece about litbloggers in the Australian Literary Review.