Syntax of Things

Martian Lips

This made me smile:

"Christmas on Mars," which stars Coyne and his Lips bandmates Steven Drozd and Michael Ivins, was shot on the cheap in and around the band's native Oklahoma City. It revolves around the first holiday season on the freshly colonized Red Planet; Drozd is Major Sytris, who aims to marshall Christmas cheer with a big pageant, but a series of events threaten the survival of the colonists, much less their holiday plans. Coyne plays a friendly Martian who offers his assistance.

"If you were to watch a David Lynch movie with someone, you'd experience these moments where music, story and abstract bullshit came together," Coyne says by way of comparison. "You'd understand it, but you couldn't explain it to somebody else. It's like an unspeakable language."

And I love this quote:

"Originally it was going to be shown on an outdoor inflatable screen, but then we started getting bits of information like, 'Wayne just bought a circus tent to show the movie,' 'Wayne is making custom popcorn containers' and 'Wayne will be showing up a day early to supervise the set-up of the movie and hand out custom tickets to the crowd,'" [Sasquatch Festival founder Adam Zacks] says. "It just kept getting better and better. Instead of asking, 'Why?,' which is where most people would stop, Wayne asks 'Why not?!'"

In case you haven't seen it, here's the trailer.  For all of you parents of wee ones out there, be on the look out for Steve Burns of Blue's Clues fame at around the 2:05 mark:

Algorithms

Will BookLamp be the Pandora for books?  Go here and give it a try.  The prototype is rather limited and the fact that I've read all of two books on the list of offerings makes it fairly useless for me to figure out if it has any value.  But I've signed up and will give it some time to build a database before passing judgment.  You can see more about the project in this video.

{via}

Twain Time

{Note:  Typepad keeps eating posts this morning so I'm keeping it brief for now.}

Has anyone seen the new issue of Time?  I keep waiting for my wife to "borrow" a copy from her doctor's office. Here's the cover:

Reading Jail

Raleigh News & Observer correspondent Sean Rowe spent 30 days in jail for doing something "stupid and immoral" and used his time observing the reading habits of those incarcerated with him:

Aside from the weekly canteen, the book cart represents life's most important drama for Wake County's inmates -- 1,173 men and 137 women as of Monday.

Take a guess at the type of book that dominates the book cart. Science fiction? Poetry? Inspirational tales and religious texts? No. Not even crime novels.

Half the books on the cart are just like half the books published and purchased on planet Earth. They definitely qualify as "escapist literature," but they do not include "The Great Escape" by Paul Brickhill or "Papillon" by Henri Charrière.

They're romance novels.

That's right. The street-wise inmates of the Wake County jail are offered mostly "A Knight in Shining Armor" by Jude Deveraux and "Mr. Perfect" by Linda Howard, "Ravished" by Amanda Quick and "Carnal Innocence" by Nora Roberts and "Lord of Scoundrels" by Loretta Chase. (I myself enjoyed "Son of the Morning" and "Duncan's Bride," both by Linda Howard, plus "Sleeping Beauty" by Judith Ivory and "Family Man" by Jayne Ann Krentz.)

Howl

A wordle of Ginsberg's Howl.

Marlie Photo Friday: Happy 4th

Marlie took in her first baseball game last night.  She enjoyed Cracker Jacks, the kiddie play area, the between inning music, and several walks toward the world-famous Durham Bull sign where she would point out all of the drains in the sidewalk.  In other words, we're still a few years away from Marlie being interested in anything between the foul lines.

Tonight's question:  Do we take a kid who is afraid of the sound of vacuum cleaners and car horns to a firework show?  Probably not.

Sweetest Little Bookworm

Leave it to My Morning Jacket to sing a song about a lust that many of us know too well. Enjoy this live version of "Librarian" from their new album Evil Urges, and have a great 4th:

+ My Morning Jacket -- "Librarian" (live at Bonnaroo)

Walk across the courtyard, towards the library.
I can hear the insects buzz and the leaves 'neath my feet...

Ramble up the stairwell, into the hall of books...
Since we got the interweb these hardly get used.

Duck into the men's room... combing thru my hair...
When god gave us mirrors he had no idea...

Looking for a lesson in the periodicals...
There I spy you listening to the AM radio...

Karen of the Carpenters, singing in the rain...
Another lovely victim of the mirror's evil way.

It's not like you're not trying, with a pencil in your hair
To defy the beauty the good lord put in there...

Simple little bookworm, buried underneath...
Is the sexiest librarian, take off those glasses and let down your hair for me.

So I watch you thru the bookcase,imaging a scene:
You and I at dinner, spending time, then to sleep.

And what then would I say to you, lying there in bed?
These words, with a kiss, I would plant in your head:

"What is it inside our heads that makes us do the opposite?
Makes us do the opposite of what's right for us?
Cause everything'd be great... and everything'd be good...
If everybody gave... like everybody could."

Sweetest little bookworm. hidden underneath...
Is the sexiest librarian...
Take off those glasses and let your hair down for me.
Take off those glasses and let your hair down for me.

Simple little beauty, heaven in your breath.
The simplest of pleasures, the world at it's best.

He Said What?

Here's some trivia for you in case you feel like trying to win a few free drinks off of your book-loving buddies at the bar tonight:

“If God does not exist, everything is permitted.”

The sentence does not appear, nor anything close to it. Nor does it appear in any of the other four Dostoevsky novels whose complete English texts are available online. The fact that a nonexistent text can be widely attributed to a famous author reveals the limitations of pre-computer scholarship. The fact that I could so quickly prove it erroneous highlights the opportunities for modern scholars. It is true that “If God does not exist, everything is permitted” is an accurate capsule description of the belief espoused by Ivan Karamazov in the early chapters of The Brothers Karamazov. Ivan has concluded, or pretends to conclude, that there is no God, no immortality. As what he claims is a logical consequence, “everything is lawful.” However, Ivan never speaks the sentence in question, and neither does any other character in the novel! The phrase, “everything is lawful,” is used frequently by other characters as an idea that they got from Ivan. And once, Ivan says “If there is no immortality, there is no virtue.” But the magic sound-bite sentence is not to be found. Jean Paul Sartre has said that all of French Existentialism is to be found in Ivan Karamazov’s contention that if there is no God, everything is permitted. But what did Dostoevsky say?

King Dork

Frank Portman, founding member of The Mr. T Experience and author of the very good King Dork (which just went up as an audiobook on eMusic) discusses the difference between crafting songs for a punk band and writing a book:

With the records — and I love them all as I would my own learning-disabled children — they were deeply alternative in terms of the market, put out on a $300 budget by a very small label. To have a book published by Random House is very different. I took songwriting seriously but there is an inadvertently ephemeral aspect to music. With a book it feels much more significant and permanent.

With anything, you spend your time doing all these things and everything you do leads you to a network of people. Maybe they latch onto one of those things and if it becomes a cultural phenomenon to any degree, it does reinforce the other littler things you’ve done, so I think in the long term, having a successful novel, given that it shares the theme of so many of my songs, will draw attention to them and they will reinforce each other.

Bookslut

I KID!  Actually, I just wanted to put this here to remind myself that I'd really like to get this made into a poster.

{via}

Don't Call Me_______, Moron

After reading this piece on the offensiveness of Bookslut--the moniker itself more so than the blog (though the writer does have a problem with the lack of male nudity on the site, it seems)--I have to declare to the litblogging public at large that if I ever see a blog called Bookshorty, I'm going to write something similar.  I'll never forget that day when I was twelve, coming out of a Piggly Wiggly in central Alabama, holding my mother's hand as we crossed the parking lot singing "Don't It Make Your Brown Eyes Blue" when the town bully pulled up on his Huffy and called me shorty.  Mom sang louder but I heard the taunt and before I knew it I had missed a couple of notes and ruined the whole singalong.  I was short then; I'm short now.  I cringe when I hear the word shorty to this day.   

In fact, I'm even a little offended by the term short story.

So no Bookshorty.  You've been warned.

Update: I give Bookdwarf a pass. 

Balmy

When Sam Tanenhaus offers up this:

No literary work captures the languid menace of summer better than “A Streetcar Named Desire,” its characters squeezed into a sweltering tenement in New Orleans, all gnawing at one another. “Temperature 100 on the nose, and she soaks herself in a hot tub,” Stanley Kowalski growls when his sister-in-law, Blanche, the corrupt hothouse orchid, hogs the only bathroom in his cramped, overheated apartment.

I, as someone who has spent more than 2/3rds of my summers in the South and who knows all about the "languid menace of summer", would offer up this.  It probably doesn't fit Tanenhaus's thesis for this article, but to say "no literary work" is a stretch, even for Sam. 

One Person's Crap...

I think I would lose my blog tagline if I didn't point out that the History Channel will give us 120 minutes of premium television with the debut of All About Dung tonight at 9ET:

Join host Monty Halls* as he investigates the historical, medical, scientific and evolutionary importance of poop on an excremental safari guaranteed to fascinate even the most squeamish of viewers. You'll be surprised by the amazing manner in which the world puts dung to use. Discover that through a 14,000-year-old human dung deposit it has been determined that humans inhabited North America 1300 years earlier than previously thought. Climb a 100-foot mountain of bat guano in Borneo that is teeming with insect life. Travel to India and view housewarming rituals using sacred cow dung as good luck. Finally Halls drinks coffee made from poop and investigates, through their large droppings, why mammoths might have disappeared.

*In case you're wondering, it's not the Let's Make a Deal guy.  That would be Monty Hall.  Though it would probably be damn good television if they could get Monty Hall talking to Monty Halls about dung.

Go Gay!

You may have heard that a new ("wind"-aided) 100-meter record was set yesterday at the U.S. Olympic trials.  The guy who broke the record is named Tyson Gay.  Well, guess what happens when his last name meets the robots at a Christian fundie site. 

I wonder what happens when their robots get ahold of this guy's name.

{via}

Warm Family Moment

The NY Times has more on the upcoming Hunter S. documentary, Gonzo:

As the documentary demonstrates, the bottom for the pair came when Mr. Thompson was assigned to cover the Rumble in the Jungle, the fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in Zaire in 1974. Mr. Steadman explains in the film that in an act of enormous cocaine-assisted hubris (or perhaps fear that Mr. Ali, one of his heroes, was about to take a huge beating), Thompson gave away his tickets to the fight and went for a swim in the hotel pool. In doing so, he missed one of the greatest upsets in boxing history and, more important for a journalist, did not get the story.

By the accounts of many Thompson never recovered from that episode, gradually morphing into the character of Uncle Duke that Garry Trudeau introduced in “Doonesbury,” a cartoon figure who fired automatic weapons from his sun deck at apparitions and enemies that only he could see. He became the sum of his trademarks — the sunglasses, cigarette holder and inchoate rage — and ended up imprisoned by them.

“He was the master persona maker,” said Douglas Brinkley, the historian and friend of Thompson’s who serves as executor of the estate. “If Ernest Hemingway was going to go big-game hunting in Africa, Hunter wanted to use a submachine gun to hunt wild boar in Big Sur, Calif. He was dangerous, like handling nitroglycerin, and he liked to keep it that way.”

In the end everyone wanted to be around Thompson except Thompson. And on a bright winter day in Woody Creek, with his son in the house — Juan Thompson sardonically terms it a “warm family moment” in the film — he called his own bluff and blew his brains out.

He was infirm at the time, spending time in a wheelchair. Given his fundamental allergy to institutions like hospitals, his decision to set the terms of his exit is unsurprising.

“Hunter was very much one to share the pain when things went wrong, but he would share the glory as well,” said Anita Thompson, who married him in 2003. “He was a generous person, but he ended up surrounded by leeches and hanger-on-ers. It is the curse of fame.”

Stet //

Following up on the post last week about the imminent demise of the newsroom copyeditor, an emailer sent along this link to a similar article by Gene Weingarten in the Washington Post.  There's even a little copyediting test that goes along with this one:

The inessentialness of copy editors is underscored by the advent of sophisticated spellchecking systems which have introduced a hole new level of error-free proofreading. No longer can we say that the editor's penis mightier than the sword. The sword's main foe is a computer now, and the computer is up to to the task.

But nowadays, things have changed. "Scoop" is gone. Young reporters are all named "P. Laurence Butterfield Jr." and they arrive at their first newspaper jobs fresh-faced and competent, straight from New Haven, Conn., with their high-faluting Princeton educations. They don't need copyeditors.

Truth to tell, I feel badly for all copy editors whom, I'm afraid, will suddenly find themselves out of a job. Time has past them by, however, efeated the Red Sox 6-5 in extra innings and it doesn't make sense for us to weep for copyeditors anymore than it makes sense for us to lament the replacement of bank tellers with automated ATM machines.

Save It for Later

I mentioned last week that one of the highlights of seeing centro-matic live was hearing them finish their set with a great The English Beat cover.  Well, now you can hear the cover, courtesy of captains dead (and me, of course).

+  centro-matic  --  "Save It For Later" --Live, Denton, TX, 5/30/08

You can grab the entire Denton show here.

Going Once

A couple of interesting items have gone up for auction the last few weeks.  Of course, they are/were out of my price range, but a man can dream, can't he?  Anyway, see if you can guess what these are.

Answer here.  {via}

Answer here.

0-5

O, The Oprah Magazine, gives us "The wisest poetry, the most extraordinary prose: five top-shelf books that will blow open your understanding of the world."  Interesting selections considering the source.  I do wish the almighty O could give us the choices on one page so that we could read without clicking through.  Does she really need the page view revenue from her site advertisers? 

Another Waits Tours (sorta)

I'm almost tempted to check my frequent flyer miles and vacation days remaining for this one:

New L.A. Bus Tour and Book Follows in Tom Waits' Youthful Footsteps

WHAT: Esotouric debuts "Crawling Down Cahuenga: Tom Waits' Los Angeles" bus
tour, followed by a group reading and signing of host David Smay's new book
"Tom Waits Swordfishtrombones" (Continuum's 33 1/3 series)
WHEN: Bus tour is Saturday August 30, noon-4pm, reading follows at 6pm
WHERE: Bus tour departs from The King Edward Saloon, 131 E 5th Street,
reading at Metropolis Books, 440 S. Main Street
COST: $62/person
MORE INFO: visit esotouric or call 323-223-2767

Of course, I'm the same person who wouldn't pay $100 to see the man himself in person.

Stet

Are we in the last days of the newsroom copy editors? The NYT's Lawrence Downes thinks so:

The job hasn’t disappeared yet, but it is swiftly evolving, away from an emphasis on style and consistency, from making a physical object perfect the first time. The path to excellence is now through speed, agility and creativity in using multiple expressive outlets for information in all its shapes and sounds.

As newspapers lose money and readers, they have been shedding great swaths of expensive expertise. They have been forced to shrink or eliminate the multiply redundant levels of editing that distinguish their kind of journalism from what you find on TV, radio and much of the Web. Copy editors are being bought out or forced out; they are dying and not being replaced.

Webby doesn’t necessarily mean sloppy, of course, and online news operations will shine with all the brilliance that the journalists who create them can bring. But in that world of the perpetual present tense — post it now, fix it later, update constantly — old-time, persnickety editing may be a luxury in which only a few large news operations will indulge. It will be an artisanal product, like monastery honey and wooden yachts.

Spud

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I had no idea that Ezra Pound was from Idaho.  I definitely do now.  The Boise Weekly gives us an extensive look at the impact that the state with the most interesting shape had on the poet:

Some scholars now theorize that it was Pound's childhood in the Idaho silver mining town that shaped his view of global economics, which in turn led to his fascist and anti-Semitic leanings.

Pound set out to change not only the world of poetry, but the world of banking and finance as well. His plan to eliminate debt by taking control of credit from central banks, and giving it to communities was fatefully tied to his apparent belief in an international conspiracy of Jewish bankers to rule the world through financial bondage. He accused these conspirators of "usury"—charging high interest rates on loans—which he claimed made slaves out of the citizens of a nation and pawns of their governments.

While Pound's Jewish conspiracy theory may seem wildly misguided today, the perennial mistrust of the rulers of capital is still as fresh as a daisy in his hometown, where his childhood home now houses the Sun Valley Center for the Arts.

Between the two World Wars, Pound became one of the giants of literary modernism; editing T.S. Eliot's poem "The Waste Land," trading conversation for boxing lessons with Hemingway, and coming to the aid of many of the writers of his generation who worked, as he did, to free English verse from the moralistic, Victorian constraints of the 19th century.

Nobody Move Moves

In case for whatever reason you've been a little hesitant to grab a copy of Playboy, and I can't imagine why, well, it should make you happy to know that the Denis Johnson novel that is now being serialized in the magazine will be available in book form from FSG in the Spring of 09.  No word on whether or not photos will be included.

My Momma Says...

Canada's National Post discusses the books they claim that you are embarrased to be seen reading in public, and they somehow managed to get a quote that only Forrest Gump could love:

But there will always be literary snobs. British Columbia romance novelist Nancy Warren, author of The One I Want and Harlequin's NASCAR series of novels, says she was recently arguing with a friend who writes comic books about who gets dumped on the most. She says books like hers are "like a very nice piece of chocolate. You wouldn't want to live on it exclusively, but you would never want to deny somebody such a nice and delicious treat."

Warren says she's heard all the criticism, and has learned to brush it off. Although she prefers to the term beach read to the "trash" tag her books are sometimes slapped with.

Sometimes I'm thankful that I'm allergic to chocolate.  Because really, I can't think of anything I'd rather not read than a NASCAR Harlequin, and I don't care if I am dumping.

Agonizing

Times Online asked various literary types to name books "that made them angry just thinking about them; that were once clotted with extravagant critical praise....And that, from either category, we now realise are close to worthless."

Many mentioned Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Carlos Casteneda’s interminable drug-soaked hippie ramblings, which I thought I was terribly cool to be reading as a kid. Luke Rhinehart’s The Dice Man scored heavily, too, and the names of Colin Wilson and Mervyn Peake were invoked with a sort of guttural sneer and one or two expletives on several occasions. Yet two names kept cropping up when my respondents were asked for the misbegotten stuff of serious literature, the people who still today have a reputation: John Fowles and Anthony bloody “Pole”.

My immediate response would be most anything Jane Austen, but I need to give it some more thought.  I'm hoping to do a new round of bookshelf organizing in the next couple of weeks, so maybe at that point I'll be able to come up with my own stack of cringe-worthy books.  Anything immediately come to mind for you?

You can see the list of nominations that Times Online came up with here.