Syntax of Things

That's Why I'm Easy

I'm running a little behind this morning thanks to some tech issues.  I'll try to pop in later with a few things if time allows.  In the meantime, check out this year's Sundance lineup.  Nothing really stands out upon first glance, but a few seem promising, especially in the documentary category.

Oh, and while I'm at it, I've done gone and set me up one of them myspace thingies.  From what I understand from the wife and from good friend Lucina Hernandez Guerrero Diaz Vazquez Johnson, the myspace can be a little addicting what with having to check and make sure that Friend A has put you in her top 8 and that all comments are reciprocated, and I hear you have to post at least one nude photo of yourself.  That's what I'm told anyway.  I don't really understand it, but it seems like an interesting study in herd sociology.  Now this means I have to actively recruit friends seeing as I have only two in real life. I'm probably asking a little much by setting a goal of twenty for myspace.  So if you have an account, let me know.  However it is you do that.

He Should Have Stopped at Grunts

"Everything is pure white as we're lost in a commotion of grunts and squeaks, flashing unconnected images and explosions of a million little particles."--from Twenty Something by Ian Hollingshead,* the winner of this year's Bad Sex in Fiction award.  He beat out the likes of Thomas Pynchon, Mark Haddon, and David Mitchell** to take home the honor.  And wouldn't you know that this year's announcement was made by none other than Courtney Love.

*A fitting name.
**Will David Mitchell ever win an award?

You Can Take the Boy out of the South

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The South That's a Southern accent you've got there. You may love it, you may hate it, you may swear you don't have it, but whatever the case, we can hear it.
The Midland
Philadelphia
The Northeast
The Inland North
The West
Boston
North Central
What American accent do you have? Take More Quizzes

Here & There

Before anything else today, I want to echo Slushpile Scott and wish Barry Hannah a speedy recovery.

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I've mentioned before that I'm a huge fan of UbuWeb.  Now they've made it a little easier for all of us to enjoy their videos by making them available for streaming as well as downloading.  To get you started, here's a 47-minute documentary on Borges that you can watch during your lunch hour. {via}

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The LA Times details (second item) the courageous attempt being made by one brave screenwriter who is working on an adaptation of Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury while at the same time writing a screenplay on the life of porn star Linda Lovelace.

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Pitchfork has a recap of Stephen Merritt (Magnetic Fields) and Rick Moody's joint appearance at NY's 92nd St. Y:  "Between sips of Chivas Regal, Merritt also performed the Magnetic Fields' 69 Love Songs classic 'The Book of Love'. Turns out Moody chose this song to be played at his own wedding. Merritt asked him why he didn't pick a selection from Meat Loaf's catalogue instead."

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From a Legal Times review of Howl on Trial:

Before any other judicial interpretation of the Supreme Court’s modern obscenity law (set forth in Roth v. United States in 1957), there was San Francisco Municipal Judge Clayton W. Horn’s application of that doctrine to protect the publication and sale of “Howl.” He was a Sunday school teacher who had raised Cain only months before by sentencing five women shoplifters to view “The Ten Commandments” and write essays on the moral lessons they learned. In People v. Ferlinghetti, by memorable contrast, Horn preached the gospel of the First Amendment. The opinion vindicated Ginsberg (then vacationing in Paris), liberated Ferlinghetti (the publisher of Howl and Other Poems, who, during his obscenity trial, prominently displayed the book in his store window), and celebrated the First Amendment as a constitutional haven for cultural outsiders.

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I worked for many years in the scientific publishing world and know for a fact that there is a journal that deals with everything known to man, and many things unknown.  Therefore, I'm not surprised to see that a new journal has been created around the theme of plagiarism:

To bring together the various strands of scholarship which already exist on the subject, and to create a forum for discussion across disciplinary boundaries, the new scholarly journal Plagiary exists. Devoted specifically to the scholarly, cross-disciplinary study of plagiary and related behaviors across the disciplines, articles in Plagiary address the issue of fraudulent contributions to disciplinary discourse communities and the potential (and actual) corruption of the professional literature and other genres of discourse as a result of such derivative and/or fraudulent "contributions" to discoursal interchange.

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Today's valuable lesson from the nutjobs:  English professors at our universities are corrupting our morals, undermining our culture, and teaching young adults how to read between the lines.  Seriously, be careful reading this interview with Elizabeth Kantor of the Conservative Book Club (no joke!) whose new book is called The Politically Incorrect Guide to English and American Literature.  Here's a quick sample:

The book really does two things. On the one hand, it exposes what's gone wrong in our English departments. I quote chapter and verse from the English professors' own writings, which are unintentionally hilarious. You have to laugh so you won't cry, when you remember that these are the people to whom we’ve entrusted the transmission of our culture to the next generation.

I've included a critique of the kind of literary analysis going on in English departments today. And there's a chart that helps untangle the mind-numbing postmodernist jargon that English professors use--and exposes its hidden assumptions, which are a mish-mash of Marxism and some other radical agendas. I’m hoping this part of the book will be a real help to students who are stuck in English lit. classes being taught by feminists, deconstructionists, Marxists, and so forth.

Cue Lee Greenwood.

Updated: Howling at a Concrete Moon

In case you missed the original airing, the last ten minutes of The Simpsons episode featuring Tom Wolfe, Gore Vidal, "Thomas Pynchon," J Franz, and Michael Chabon have made their way to the YouTube and can also be seen beneath the cut.  I'm guessing that it probably won't be free and legal for long, so if nothing else, be sure to skip ahead to the 8:15 mark for the Franzen/Chabon fist fight in which Franzen breaks a picture of Snoopy over Chabon's head and Chabon responds with the great line, "You fight like Anne Rice!"

Enjoy!

Shelved

I've mentioned before that I'm under spousal mandate to buy a new bookshelf so that the ever growing stack of books will have a proper home, one that doesn't involve hallway closets or fireplace mantels or baby cribs.  The only problem is finding a bookshelf that fits in with the general decor and one that will have the right temperament to play host to the Vollmanns and Faulkners and Kerouacs.  You can't just rush out to Target and grab any old particle board p.o.s. and expect the books to automatically be drawn to its bland personality and chemical smells.  It takes time and effort.  And most important, it takes a careful eye because sometimes you never know what you're getting.  For example, this is what happens when good bookshelves go bad:

The body of a missing US woman has been found by her family, wedged upside down behind a bookcase in her room.

Mariesa Weber, 38, is believed to have fallen over and become trapped as she tried to reach behind the bookcase to adjust the plug for a TV set.

Her family spent nearly two weeks searching for her, fearing she had been kidnapped from the house she shared with them in Florida. {via}

Brawler

24/7 Tom Waits continues for at least a few more days at Syntax of Things with today's link courtesy of Pitchfork:

Pitchfork: You sing Jack Kerouac and Charles Bukowski on this record. To what extent has literature influenced your music?

Tom Waits: I'm usually more concerned with how things sound than how they look on the page. Some people write for the page and that's a whole other thing. I'm going for what it sounds like right away, so it may not even look good on the page. But I'm still a word guy. I'm drawn to people who use a certain vernacular and communicate with words. Words are music, really. I mean, people ask me, "Do you write music or do you write words?" But you don't really, it's all one thing at its best. Sometimes when you're making songs you just make sounds, and the sounds slowly mutate and evolve into actual words that have meaning. But to begin with, most people who make songs just start out with [Waits makes noises].

Pitchfork: Sure, and the Beats were very musical writers.

Tom Waits: And the Beats were performing their work in clubs, shouting their work. That's another element of it.

Leftovers

Along with thinking that it's just a big, thick, hunk of a book, Time's Lev Grossman sees some Dickens in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest:

But it's a mistake to lump Infinite Jest in with its successors. Think of it instead in terms of its forebears. Think of it as a Dickens novel. It's a book about two socially disparate groups--the tennis players and the drug addicts--and the various plot strands that bind them together. Granted, Wallace's plot strands are way more confusing than Dickens', and Wallace leaves his story lines dangling in a way that Dickens never did. But Dickens was a synthesizer, writing in an attempt to knit the world together. Infinite Jest holds up a mirror to the world's brokenness.

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The Independent examines the reclusive writer:

Pynchon's reluctance to become a "public figure" would resonate with Cormac McCarthy. In what was then his only interview (with The New York Times, granted as a favour to his cherished departing editor Albert Erskine) McCarthy's second (now ex-) wife was quoted as saying that no amount of penury could persuade the author to sell out.

"We lived in total poverty," said Annie DeLisle, "we were bathing in the lake. Someone would call up and offer him $2,000 to come speak at a university about his books. And he would tell them that everything he had to say was there on the page. So we would eat beans for another week."

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A letter written by Lewis Carroll which was stolen from Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library turned up on eBay, but no one is sure how the letter got into the hands of the seller in the first place.

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The Australian takes a look at some of the places, specifically hotels, where Oscar Wilde spent his last days.

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So what has Savannah Knoop been doing with her days and nights since taking off the JT LeRoy mask?  The SF Chronicle has the scoop on Knoop:

These days, she is out of the literary limelight and back pocketing tips on the night shift at Soi 4, a Thai restaurant in Oakland's Rockridge district. Her customers would no doubt be shocked to learn about the entry on her in Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, for playing LeRoy.

In the daytime, Knoop works out of a cluttered Market Street studio designing clothes under the label Tinc (www.tincwear.com). Tinc, a Thai word meaning "to throw away,'' is a concept Knoop thinks our society takes too much to heart. "My clothes are sturdy and meant to be worn for a long time,'' she says. "I also like that the word is like 'tinker.' "

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Over at The Elegant Variation, Mark talks to Jonathan Lethem about his introduction to Daniel Fuchs' The Brooklyn Novels.

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David Mitchell and Thomas Pynchon are on the shortlist for the 2006 Bad Sex in Fiction Prize, which will be announced on Wednesday.

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Tonight on the boob tube, the Sundance Channel will air "The Writer of O" (thanks George):

For decades, the identity of Pauline Réage, the pseudonymous author of the erotic international bestseller The Story of O, remained a mystery. Shortly before her death at age 90, Dominique Aury, a successful editor and translator at a leading French publisher, admitted to being Réage. Looking into Aury’s life story, her literary motivation and her tale of bondage and sexual power, filmmaker Pola Rapaport presents a dramatic examination of the origin and continued popularity of one of the most notorious books of the 20th century.

Baby Photo Friday: Warhol Marlie

Thanks Anyway

Thanks to dogmatika for pointing the way to this video of William S. Burroughs reciting his "Thanksgiving Poem."  Maybe a tad too cynical for those of you who might enjoy this day.  In fact, wait until tomorrow before watching it.  Don't let it spoil your fun and feasting.  Everyone else...go for it.  And thank you for stopping by here and making Syntax of Things a part of your holiday.  I'll see you at the Chinese buffet.

{Full text can be found below the cut.}

Orphans, L'Amour, and Moonshine

I ventured out in the pouring rain yesterday afternoon, risked wind and high water, let too much puddle overtake the holes in the bottom of my shoes, just to get an actual copy of the new Tom Waits.  I couldn't wait another four days for the eMusic subscription to renew, plus I wanted the actual product this time.  So I have it.  Now, like with everything else in my life, I need to find some Jeff time to listen to it.  Thank goodness for Thanksgiving.

If you'd like a little Waits fix this morning, take a look at this footage of the man in studio with Les Claypool recording Kerouac's "Home I'll Never Be."  Blurry, but good.

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In this week's edition of uncovered works by literary giants, the NY Sun reports that a new and rare short story by Eugene O'Neill called "The Screenews of War" has been found by a professor at Central Connecticut State University.  From the sounds of it, I'm guessing that unlike works by Plath and Frost which have appeared in small presses in recent months this one is headed to the highest bidder for a pretty penny.

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Also in the Sun a new Faulkner biography by M. Thomas Inge is reviewed by Carl Rollyson, who discusses what it means to be a Faulknerian biographer and what it's like to read Faulkner:

Faulkner appeals to us on a gut level. We want to know who his characters are, why they are telling their stories, why others contradict their stories, why, in the case of "Absalom, Absalom!," all of them are fixated on Thomas Sutpen, who came to Jefferson, Miss., where he built himself a mansion and started a dynasty and then somehow destroyed it all. Albert Camus was right when he said Faulkner had brought Greek tragedy into detective fiction. 

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Borders has announced the nominees for its 2006 Original Voices Award.  I'm happy to see Kevin Brockmeier nominated in the fiction category, but does anyone else find it a little telling that Borders completely ignores the poets?

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Here's something that my grandfather would have loved: the Louis L'Amour Center.  No, there's not one yet, but folks in North Dakota aim to build one.

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I love this idea but I'm guessing that Barney Fife would be a tad displeased:

Jon Clinch's debut novel, Finn, imagines the life of Huck Finn's violent, alcoholic and racist father, who was left dead by Mark Twain 120 years ago. It's a story that "seems soaked in corn whiskey," says Will Murphy, a senior editor at Random House. That inspired a full-proof publicity campaign. Advance copies of the novel, to be released in February, were delivered to a dozen magazines and newspapers along with a jar of actual Tennessee moonshine.

Randomness

As excited as I should be by today being the release date of Tom Waits' Orphans boxset, I'm actually going to have to hold off until my eMusic subscription renews in a few days.  But for those of you who are heading out to your local independent record store to buy it, enjoy!  Let us know what you think.  As for Mr. Waits, the papers and internet are full of stuff about him and the album.  The Phoenix takes a look at the four modes of Tom Waits:  the crooner, the beat poet, the explorer, and the auteur:

The beat poet | “Diamonds on My Windshield,” with its Lord Buckley–inspired narrative, was a signpost on 1974’s The Heart of Saturday Night that Waits was leaving the province of Hoagy Carmichael for the land of Jack Kerouac. He explored that terrain for five albums, playing piano and giving his lyrics a cabaret jazz framework. The best of these discs is 1975’s live Nighthawks at the Diner, whose “Emotional Weather Report” broke onto radio and immortalized the line “I’m so horny the crack of dawn better watch out,” and 1980’s Heart Attack and Vine (all on Elektra), which expanded on his small-ensemble sound. But a soft heart kept beating beneath the scowling hipster persona he’d cultivated. Heart Attack and Vine’s dewy ode to working-class lovers, “Jersey Girl,” was recorded by Springsteen. The tune fits so perfectly in Bruce’s canon that many assume the Jersey guy wrote it.

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I'm still trying to get over the fact that the NY Times devoted book review space to Courtney Love's new memoir.  Call me a hater, but aren't there plenty of deserving writers out there who would die for a review yet this B-list musician gets there by reprinting her diary pages?  And no, reviews of books about Bukowski, Ginsberg, and Neal Cassady don't make up for this one.  Though the Ginsberg one by Walter Kirn is pretty good.

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The Cornell Daily Sun chats with JS Foer:

The Sun: When you look at writing, do you look towards other Jewish writers, like Saul Bellow, Philip Roth or Franz Kafka?

Foer: Some, although honestly when I look at writing I don’t look at other writers. I look toward visual artists or musicians. When you read a writer for inspiration it’s hard not to imitate them, but when you see something visual that inspires it’s easier to imitate because you can make it something your own. Also, I just get more inspiration from the visual arts than I do from writing. I love to read — although these days it’s non-fiction, which might mean that I just seek inspiration in things I don’t do myself.

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The Tuscaloosa News has an article about writer Michael Martone, author of the Summer LBC Read This! selection by the same name, and his story "The Death of Derek Jeter" which appears in this month's Esquire:

The free-association process by which Martone arrives at these thoughts is almost unconscious, but for example:

How many other Dereks do I know? Derek and the Dominoes (the Eric Clapton and Duane Allman band). What’s their big song? “Layla." How does the chorus go? “Layla, you’ve got me on my knees." Dominoes.

And somehow out of that comes the second section of the piece, Derek Jeter and the Domino Theater of Eternal Stories, which begins “I am down on my knees."

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Here's an interesting question from Toronto's Globe and Mail:  In a market where 'skyrocketing' sales mean five books sold a week, do poetry prizes make any difference at all?

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Some letters written by J.D. Salinger to a woman who had sent him a nasty note sold at auction for $32,500.

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If only, Rake: "But seriously, Mr. Pynchon: This is certified check for $49, in honor of YPTR's favorite novel of yours. Here it is. A check made out to you, Thomas Pynchon, for $49. All you have to do is type up a few words. 'A screaming comes across the sky.  This message courtesy Rake's Progress.' That's $49 right there. You know the words - it'll be easy."

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If anyone is interested in coming to visit me, you might want to plan it around the Full Frame Documentary festival this spring.  Check this out.

Whine & Zen

Hard to believe three days off from work went by and I managed zero gain on my TBR pile, barely opened up Bloglines to check in on the frequently read blogs, caught only a few minutes of the Auburn victory--fifth straight--over the lowlifes from Tuscaloosa.  That's the way it is these days.  It's really not due to a lack of effort.  More so just a lack of time.  Sixty hours of work per week, a four month old baby, a wife, this blog, two dogs, a cat, a yard full of leaves, a gate that needs installing...should I go on?  I keep fighting off this completely irrational guilt that I'm not being as productive, reading-wise, as I would like and then I remember that I don't owe it to anyone but myself to be productive, so what good is feeling guilty.  Well, I guess it gives me something to write about.

Anyway, my one read this busy weekend:  the Observer interview with Robert Persig:

RP: It was when I was teaching I started thinking about the ideas that were in Zen. One day in class this lady asked a question about quality and I was so intensive about it, I thought I had to solve it. That part of the book is Zen is extremely accurate. Then one of the professors asked me: Is quality in the subject, or is it in the object. That was considered the killer question. I thought a lot about that. And then I decided that the way through it was that quality was independent of the two. If I had not had that oriental background I would not have arrived at that conclusion. And it was kind of growing organically after that.

TA: Were you reading a lot then. Kerouac and so on? Did you feel part of that revolution in a way?

RP: I was having some of the same problems. I admired them, too [the Beats]. It was Eisenhower and the usual Republican stuff was going on, taxes went down for the rich and up for the poor, all the public projects disappeared, and people were angry. They were not hippies yet, they were beatniks. There was a generation gap; the guys who had come out of the War had rebuilt America, worked hard. But there was a new group. It's best parodied in The Graduate, you know, when someone says [in the film, to Dustin Hoffman]: 'Boy, you got to get into plastics'. If he had got into plastics of course he would have made a fortune because they were so good for all sorts of things. But not everyone wanted to do that. [laughs] When I read Kerouac's book the first time, I was very impressed. With all those early people. They were very idealistic. But it decayed quite rapidly. I remember someone saying there was one week in the summer of 1967 when everything was perfect. [laughs]

"You Fight Like Anne Rice"

In case you missed it last night, you might want to keep your eyes out for the inevitable YouTube link to The Simpsons episode featuring the writers Chabon, Franzen, Wolfe, and Vidal (pictured above in all their animated glory).  I caught only a few minutes thanks to my Dad duties, but did manage to see the fight between Chabon and Franzen toward the end.  Maybe Rachel Donadio will have something intriguing to say about it soon. 

{image via}

Baby Photo Friday: Marlie & Me

Left: Marlie today.  Right: Me a few years ago.

Three Six

Birthday boy wakes up to rain, a quiet house, sleeping wife and baby, and a pile of cat puke on the kitchen floor.  Drives to work, a downpour, shitty windshield wipers, CD skipping, what doesn't skip plays through worn out speakers.  Birthday boy wants today to be a national holiday.  At least for him.  He doesn't want to be sitting at his desk all day playing around with Microsoft Project, trying to figure out why he can't get the damn calendar to remember that next Thursday is a day off.  Not for him to worry about.  Today should be a day off, for everyone.  Or at least for him.

Birthday boy looks forward to leaving work early today.  He spends the morning craving raw oysters and a beer, but the latter won't happen.  Unfortunately.  He appreciates the fact that George Singleton, one of his favorite writers and a damn good guy, wished him a happy birthday during his reading last night.  He was glad to finally meet George in person.  Wishes he could have spent a bit more time talking to him.  Next time.

Birthday boy wonders what his wife got him for his birthday.  Thinks about birthdays of the future, ones that should be national holidays, and smiles at the thought that his little girl will celebrate them with him.  And maybe the cat won't puke on those birthdays.

Birthday boy needs to get to work, finish off the money-making, bill-paying part of his birthday.  He'll be back to blogging tomorrow, after he finishes raking leaves--if that tasks can ever be truly finished--and he may just tell you all about his birthday evening, which will include eating raw oysters and seeing the band Lucero.  Hopefully, it won't include cat puke.

I'm Just an Old Chunk of Coal

Move over Pynchon, here comes Nicole Richie, whose "electrifying first novel" The Truth About Diamonds* caught my attention at the book store yesterday.  You can thank me later for giving you this much, but be careful, it's powerful stuff:

The nightclubs of L.A. are like soap operas, except they're not Days of Our Lives; they're more like Passions—crazy stuff happens, and no one bats a fake eyelash. There's always some bizarre drama that plays out every night, and everyone in the cast—I mean, everyone—is great looking, stoned, and/or drunk. It's like a traveling freak show that stars the youngest and hottest in Hollywood. It's about fun, and sex, and pseudo-danger.

Chloe Parker was practically born in a club. It's like she spontaneously generated one night in 1981 during a fourteen-minute remix. As a child, she could dance before she could walk and sing before she could talk. Dressed in a tie-dyed onesie and a tutu, her head a tangle of golden curls, Chloe was destined to haunt the clubs of her adoptive city as soon as humanly possible.

Chloe had been going to the hottest clubs in Hollywood since she was this many, wearing L.A. Gear sneakers everywhere she went. Like me, Chloe has always been tiny, which meant we could both sneak into The Viper Room under the noses of the bouncers when we were thirteen. She was a kid partying with adults who treated her like a peer. Every important marker of her life had to do with clubbing. She wore her first bra to a club. She went out without a bra for the first time to a club. Her first kiss, her first crush on a gay guy, the first time she saw Jimmy Choo sandals, the first time someone passed her a joint—all happened in a club.

Seriously, I don't think anything I'll read the rest of the year will top those three paragraphs. 

*I did not get a free ARC from the publisher.

{thanks to ATL Malcontent for the ht}

Infinite Means Forever, And That's a Mighty Long Book

It was ten years ago that millions of innocent trees became pages upon pages of endnotes. Perhaps it is to those trees that we owe a debt of gratitude.  Depending on your tolerance of such things, you may be happy to know that these trees and the book for which they were felled are being celebrated with a $10 reissue, perhaps cheapening their sacrifice but ensuring that the book will end up weighing down the backpacks of a new legion of lithipsters.  The new edition does include an introduction of sorts from the man some call E----, but we still call him Dave.  Here's Dave Eggers on Infinite Jest:

Here’s a question once posed to me, by a large baseball cap-wearing English major at a medium-sized western college: Is it our duty to read Infinite Jest? This is a good question, and one that many people, particularly literary-minded people, ask themselves. The answer is: maybe. Sort of. Probably, in some way. If we think it’s our duty to read this book, it’s because we’re interested in genius. We’re interested in epic writerly ambition. We’re fascinated with what can be made by a person with enough time and focus and caffeine and, in Wallace’s case, chewing tobacco. If we are drawn to Infinite Jest, we’re also drawn to the Magnetic Fields’ 69 Songs, for which Stephin Merritt wrote that many songs, all of them about love, in about two years. And we’re drawn to the 10,000 paintings of folk artist Howard Finster. Or the work of Sufjan Stevens, who is on a mission to create an album about each state in the union. He’s currently at State No. 2, but if he finishes that, it will approach what Wallace did with the book in your hands. The point is that if we are interested with human possibility, and we are able to cheer each other onto leaps in science and athletics and art and thought, we must admire the work that our peers have managed to create. We have an obligation, to ourselves, chiefly, to see what a brain, and particularly a brain like our own — that is, using the same effluvium we, too, swim through — is capable of. It’s why we watch Shoah, or visit the unending scroll on which Jack Kerouac wrote (in a fever of days) On the Road, or William T. Vollmann’s 3,300-page Rising Up and Rising Down, or Michael Apted’s 7-Up, 28-Up, 42-Up series of films, or ... Well, the list goes on.

By the way, some of you may remember that I answered my call to duty a few years ago after many failed attempts, and I must say that I do feel better because of it.  Why?  Well, mostly because I was able to cross it off my list of things that I felt compelled to bitch and moan about, and trust me, it's a long list.

Kerouac in French

Check out this Radio-Canada interview with a somewhat bloated Jack Kerouac [update: YouTube link] from March 7, 1967.  I have no idea what's being said, can pick out only the familiar English, but still, it's interesting to hear Kerouac speaking and singing in his native patois.  There's also some footage of Lowell, Mass., and interviews with a couple of French Canadians in the town (presumably acquaintances of Jack's).  About what, I haven't a clue, but Jack seems to be getting a kick out of listening to them.  You can also see action footage of Kerouac in a bar playing pool.  Any Francophones interested in giving up the gist of the interview are encouraged to do so in the comments?

Blood Sucking Faulkner

Holy pot liquor:

As the exclusive representative of the William Faulkner Literary Estate, producer Lee Caplin ("Ali") has had access to the vaunted Mississippi writer's letters, sketches, notes and other literary works for years. So when Jill Faulkner Summers, the novelist's daughter, found a manuscript seven years ago in the piles of material her father left behind when he died in 1962, she passed it on to Caplin. He was stunned by what she'd found: Faulkner's only un-produced, feature-length screenplay.

But here's the kicker: Faulkner, the Pulitzer and Nobel prize-winning writer of "As I Lay Dying," "Light in August," and "Absalom! Absalom!," had harvested his astonishing talent to write ... a vampire film.

Whale of Day

"Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off--then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can."

--Moby-Dick, my favorite novel, was published 155 years ago today.

Toast

Shane MacGowan is interviewed at Diary at the Centre of the Earth:

DE: What would you like to say to those curious about your work who have just heard Fairytale Of New York and nothing else?

SMG: Check out the five Pogues albums I’m on. And if you like, try the two I’m not on. And also the SMG & Popes albums: The Snake and The Crock Of Gold (ZTT Records). And the official live album: Across The Broad Atlantic; recorded mainly in Dublin and partly in New York when for some reason there were two St Patrick’s Days.

DE: Which 5 Pogues / solo tracks would you recommend them to legally download for starters, Fairytale aside?

SMG: That’s an impossible question. But off the top of my head right now I’d say - personally - Star Of The County Down, Rainy Night In Soho, Waxie’s Dargle (The Pogues), Yeah Yeah Yeah (Pogues), Victoria (SMG & The Popes).

Incidentally the Popes have an existence of their own that grew out of being my backing band and friends. I would recommend listening to their recordings. I was heavily involved in the recording of the first album they put out without my name: Holloway Boulevard. I did SOME singing, writing and producing and wrote the sleeve notes. However the second album is as different as it is more accomplished. Take it from there, yourself…

Moving On

Wasn't it just a few weeks ago that Dalkey Archive Press announced its move from Illinois to upstate New York?  Now it appears that they're looking elsewhere:

An employee in the University of Rochester communications office, Helene Snihur, issued a statement yesterday saying that the university and Dalkey Archive "have mutually agreed to dissolve the contract."

The associate director of Dalkey Archive Press, Chad Post, released a statement saying: "Though the Press was eagerly looking forward to working with the University of Rochester faculty and students, the Press felt that a move to the East Coast was not feasible."

More Ferlinghetti

I'll never shy away from a link to a Lawrence Ferlinghetti item (see this morning's post), especially when said item is a special Opinion item in the SF Chronicle written by the man himself to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Howl's publication:

The Beat poets, joining this San Francisco scene in the 1950s, furthered the postwar cultural synthesis, and "Howl" became the catalyst in a paradigm shift in American poetry and consciousness. The Beats were advance word slingers prefiguring the counterculture of the 1960s, forecasting its main obsessions and ecstasies of liberation, essentially a "youth revolt" against all that our postwar society was doing to us (even as Henry Miller in the 1940s had sensed that "another breed of men has taken over" in an air-conditioned nightmare.) When the Beats -- namely Ginsberg, Gregorio Nunzio Corso, Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Peter Orlovsky -- first appeared in San Francisco, they hardly looked like world shakers. When Ginsberg first walked into City Lights and handed me the manuscript of "Howl," I saw him as another of those far-out poets and wandering intellectuals who had started hanging out in our 3-year-old bookstore, which The Chronicle had already started calling the intellectual center of the city. Bespectacled, intense, streetwise, Ginsberg showed me "Howl" with some hesitation, as if wondering whether I would know what to do with it. Later that month, when I heard him read it at the Six Gallery, I knew the world had been waiting for this poem, for this apocalyptic message to be articulated. It was in the air, waiting to be captured in speech. The repressive, conformist, racist, homophobic world of the 1950s cried out for it.

That night I went home and sent Ginsberg a Western Union telegram (imitating what I thought Emerson had written Whitman upon first reading "Leaves of Grass"): "I greet you at the beginning of a great career," and adding, "When do we get the manuscript?" (Despite Allen's saving every scrap of writing, this telegram is not to be found in his archive.) When City Lights published "Howl and Other Poems" in 1956, the holy unholy voice of the title poem reverberated around the world among poets and intellectuals, in countries free and enslaved, from New York to Amsterdam to Paris to Prague to Belgrade to Calcutta and Kyoto.

Gossip

Ah, time for another week of the best gossip your hard-earned blog-reading dollars can buy.  After all, we're pretty sure that's all we're good for these days: gossip.  Might be the only thing litbloggers are good for in general.  Some people seem to think so.  God forbid that anyone who reads our blogs should ever go out and buy a book based on a review or recommendation, and you should probably wait a few weeks for the mainstream outlets to pick up on something that you might see first on a litblog, because the mainstream is so much more reliable and timely.  And you should spend some of the money that you waste on the litblogs buying the paper and ink highbrows because they're doing such an amazing job helping to carry on the great literary tradition of building ivory towers.

Anyway, I have plenty of gossip and I hope you find it to your liking.  There will probably be more just like it tomorrow.  And the day after...:

The San Francisco Chronicle has a great piece on SoT favorite Lawrence Ferlinghetti's military service during World War II.

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I'm not sure anyone could be fully prepared for the mental image that Allen Ginsberg friend and biographer Bill Morgan gave to a class at the University of Pittsburgh, so brace yourself:  "His bathtub was in his kitchen (of his East Village apartment) and he thought nothing of sitting there nude in the tub or walking around naked in front of guests."  The rest of the article isn't nearly as daunting...I promise.

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The Feds are investigating patient care at The Oregon State Hospital, a place made famous by Ken Kesey in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

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The Boston Globe talks to Henry Louis Gates Jr. about The Annotated Uncle Tom's Cabin.

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This weekend, Why Melville Matters, a three-day trans-disciplinary celebration, will be held in Albany, NY.

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I'm pretty sure you've never seen a Pynchon novel compared to a toaster.  Until now:

At 3 lbs. 6 oz., Against the Day weighs just 3 oz. less than my toaster. But my toaster doesn't offer the tantalizing music of Pynchon's voice, with its shifts from comic shtick to heartbroken threnody, its mordant Faulkneresque interludes, its gusts of lyric melancholy blown in by way of F. Scott Fitzgerald, its ecstatic perorations from Jack Kerouac. And my toaster will never lay before me a vision of a world in which technology is stripping away all the ancient, vital magic while shepherding mankind to the brink of destruction. On the other hand, my toaster makes toast, and nothing quite so graspable ever pops out of this predictably bewitching, predictably bewildering book.

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Bat Segundo has been on a roll lately and his (its?) latest batch of interviews are just great.  Be sure and take the time to listen to the Mark Danielewski one, where you'll hear the following:  "I don’t think I’m an experimental writer."

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Speaking of Bats, David Lynch, who is batshit crazy, wants us to check out his new movie, Inland Empire, and to spread the word, he and a live cow sat on the corner of Hollywood and La Brea (youtube link).  In my opinion, you can't have the Inland Empire without cows, lots of them, and their smells.  So maybe he's not so crazy.  Never mind.  He is.