A loyal reader sends word that a Kerouac drawing (above) is up for bid at eBay. This is the same auction that will feature his 29 volume set of the 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, among other things.
The Nick Cave penned The Proposition hits theaters this weekend. The Phoenix has the scoop:
Compared with other items in the Cave œuvre — notably his 1989 novel And the Ass Saw the Angel, with its “embranglement of words” — The Proposition relies more on image than language. Its characters are tight-mouthed, tending to disregard speech in favor of a quick squint at the simmering horizon. The exception is bounty hunter Jellon Lamb: John Hurt wheezes out paragraphs of Elizabethan floridity while capering drunkenly in his shack at the foot of the hills. “Once I started writing the scene in the shack, it went for fucking ages, there was way too much of it and they kept having to cut it down, unfortunately, ’cos it was a great performance. . . . He’s just this overeducated dog that’s living out the back of beyond.”
Tom Wolfe continues to be the high priest of The Church of What's Happening Now. His new book will focus on immigration.
Dwight Gardner reminds me that I need to reread Erskine Caldwell's "greasy hairball of a novel" Tobacco Road:
Certainly readers in the South didn't see anything comic about Tobacco Road. While it was published to generally strong reviews, Southerners mostly deplored it. They thought of Caldwell the same way they thought of Faulkner: as a regional traitor, a writer who exposed them as primitives. Tobacco Road was banned for decades in high-school libraries in Caldwell's home town. The local police chief said that if Caldwell ever came crawling back, he'd run him out of town on a rail.
The obstacle that most blocks a book from new readers now is the lack of visibility. With more new titles being published in one year than were written between the dawn of civilizationa and the start of the 14th century, even the best new books can have difficulty in making themselves known to readers. Today, it's often harder to notice neglected books than it is to find them.
And so this site attempts to correct this problem. With over 1,000 titles listed, perhaps it will be a little easier to notice--and find--these neglected books.
{via}
I may be wrong on this but wasn't Caldwell arrested
in Miss or Alabama?
Posted by: Steve Clackson | May 25, 2006 at 06:37 PM