Syntax of Things

Bitterman

According to V S Naipaul, "Publishing has gone down in quality so much in recent years and the problem is that there is no literary life any more because there are quite simply no more great writers."

Does anyone follow the logic of that statement?  It's possible that there are no more great writers but Naipaul's definition of a great writer might mean something different than, say, Barry Hannah's.  And assuming that there are no more great writers, is that really the reason "publishing has gone down"?  Or has publishing itself been to blame?  As for literary life, I'm not even sure what he means by that phrase nor do I see how it is directly related to the lack of great writers?

Maybe I'm just too dense, or maybe we're just hearing the words of a grumpy old Nobel laureate, and a bitter one at that:

His comments follow an authorised biography by Patrick French, which says Naipaul tormented his first wife for four decades, visited prostitutes and kept a mistress for 24 years before he suddenly abandoned her to marry another woman.

Remote

I saw this photo earlier this morning and I can't stop thinking about it.  I don't know why but the idea that there can still be "uncontacted tribes" out there is something that's hard to comprehend.  Apparently there are still more than 100 such tribes with more than half of them in Brazil and Peru. Look at those guys (or gals) aiming their bows at the airplane.  Primitive as can be and amazingly compelling.  More here.

Return to Sender

With BEA kicking off, American Public Media's Marketplace details a frightening trend in the publishing world:

Parks Sisler's publisher is Rudy Shur who owns SquareOne Publishers outside of New York City. He's started to notice a curious thing lately: Bookstores are returning books just before the 90 days are up and the bill is due.

Rudy Shur: And then a week or two later they reorder the books so then they have another 90, 120, 150 days to pay you. So from a publisher's standpoint, it's very frustrating.

Frustrating because it can be months before a publisher sees cash for the books he's shipped. Even if the publisher is lucky enough to get paid, it might have to give a big chunk of it back after six or eight months. That's when bookstores return unsold books for good and expect a refund. In the case of Parks Sisler's cookbook, SquareOne had to take back a quarter of the entire print run -- 2,500 copies.

Robert Love: These are returns, two skids of returns that actually arrived here today.

That's Robert Love. Square One's business manager. He says bookstores are ordering tons of books, more than they can possibly sell. That's because the stores aren't really competing with each other. Instead, they're competing with the Internet. They're afraid that if a customer can't find a title on a shelf, he'll go home and order the book online. So to keep the stores happy, publishers are saddled with the cost of printing too many books and having to take them back.

Love says publishers have themselves to blame.

However, they do sprinkle in some good news in a separate story about how LA's Skylight Books is bucking the trend as an independent bookstore that is actually thriving these days.  Here's how co-owner Karen Slattery explains it:

What's happening now is this: More than any other time in recent years, there is a growing national consumer awareness that big may not be better -- both in small towns as well as large cities. I'm seeing customers consider the environmental, personal and community impact of buying from locally-owned neighborhood businesses. They're realizing there's value in keeping their money -- as well as taxes that support services -- in their own community. People are starting to look around their neighborhoods a little more, and we want to be there for them when they do.

The Air We Breathe

Syntax of Things has a new hero:  ex-Major League pitcher Bert Blyleven (pictured right), who should be in baseball's Hall of Fame not only for being a pretty damn good pitcher but also for what he reveals in this interview:

Q: Speaking of pride, what about this T-shirt you've been photographed wearing that says, "I [heart] to fart"?
BB: I LOVE to fart.
Q: What's wrong with you?
BB: I'm honest. Have you ever farted?
Q: One or two times.
BB: And did it feel good?
Q: Always.
BB: Probably so. That's why I wore it. I love to fart. I do. When the time is right, I do it. I'm not going to hide it.
Q: You're so blunt about your love for flatulence.
BB: Yeah. Well, someone gave me the shirt because of my history of farting, so I wear it. I LOVE to fart. I think I still have it.
Q: What gets you really gassy?
BB: Anything. The air we're breathing right now.
Q: Should I be ready for something?
BB: I have no trouble. It's not one thing that I eat, it's just passed down from my father. My father was a very good farter. I have a sister who's very good at it, too. Probably better than I am.

Speaking of, I hope my wife doesn't mind me sharing this little tidbit of wee one lore that she sent out in an email to the family:

The other day,I had her [Marlie] on the bed asking her to make a "happy face, sad face" to cough, to sneeze, to hiccup and then, for kicks, to poot.  She happily obliged on it all except for the pooting--I didn't hear anything...and I thought to myself, "Elaine, maybe I shouldn't ask her this, it could be trouble..." --but then--all of a sudden, the smell wafted its way up to my nose.  A Silent but Deadly she did!  A girl that can poot on command!  Lovely.  Just lovely.

She is her Daddy's daughter, no?

Such talent for a 22-month-old kid.  Does her daddy proud!

Six Degrees of Wikipedia

I warn you:  the following may sound trivial, but it will suck you in and then you'll finally understand that the Internet is a meaningful and omnipotent entity:

Ever heard of the game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon? If you haven't, it works like this: Every actor gets a Kevin Bacon number. Kevin Bacon has a Kevin Bacon number of 0, actors who were in a movie with Kevin Bacon get a Kevin Bacon number of 1, actors who were in a movie with someone who has a Kevin Bacon number 1 get a 2, and so on (Everybody always gets the smallest number possible, so if you were in a film with two people, one with a 4 and one with a 6, your Kevin Bacon number would be 5).

The same idea could apply to the articles Wikipedia. Instead of taking "in the same film" as the relation, you can take "is linked to by". We'll call the "Kevin Bacon number" from one article to another the "distance" between them. It's then possible to work out the "closeness" of an article in Wikipedia as its average distance to any other article. I wanted to find the centre of wikipedia, that is, the article that is closest to all other articles (has minimum closeness).

The site is more than just informative.  You can actually enter two search terms and find out how many wikipedia clicks separate the two.  For instance I found out there were four clicks separating syntax and things.

I think I've spent too much time playing around at this site this already, time I should have spent coming up with something halfway interesting to more people than just me to post here this morning.  Back later.

Abracadabra

To be honest, I could care less about Borders joining the online book-selling business.  I'm still the type that likes to go in a store and pick up the book and hold it in my hands and smell to make sure the pages aren't rotten and then ask the cashier if she thinks this newer Pynchon has a chance to be as good as Gravity's Rainbow.  Ok, maybe not so much the smelling and the asking, but I do like to browse.  Well, it appears that Borders wants to match that experience as much as possible online and has given us something called the "Magic Shelf."  Cue the pan flute:

The dominant feature at Borders.com is something called the Magic Shelf. Borders says the shelf captures the essence of shopping in one of its stores.

Books are placed cover out and side by side on the shelf. Shoppers can move up or down and from side to side. Roll the cursor over a book and a box with details about it pops up.

The shelf can be customized by the user and can show 20 shelves of titles.

"We wanted a real bookstore online," said Kevin Ertell, senior vice president for e-business at Borders, in an interview with the Free Press last week. "What we did to capture that bookstore feel was putting the Magic Shelf on the sign-in page."

Winehouse vs. Raleigh

Imagine if you were set to take your final exam, at Cambridge of all places, and this happened:

Final year students at Cambridge University were stunned recently to discover one of their final papers included a question about jazz sensation Amy Winehouse.

The beehived star has joined the ranks of the literary greats, it seems, as exam-takers were invited to compare the lyrics of the troubled singer's hit Love Is A Losing Game with Sir Walter Raleigh's poem As You Came From The Holy Land.

"It was really bizarre," revealed one of the students who sat the practical criticism paper. "I sat there looking at the paper in shock!"

ThisIsLondon has more, including an assessment of the literary merits of both Raleigh and Winehouse by a university professor. 

The links above take you to the song's lyrics and to the poem just in case you want to try your hand at this compare/contrast. 

Pound House

I have to admit that I had no idea Ezra Pound was born in Idaho, but I don't really pride myself on poet birthplace trivia.  If you do, you might want to read this article about the recent renovation of Pound's birthplace and its opening to the general public. 

Poet Allen Ginsberg arrived in 1993 when the house was privately owned and finagled an invitation to go inside. Novelist and poet Jim Harrison has visited and helped raise money for the house's preservation. Others making the pilgrimage, said Hunt, include Lawrence Ferlinghetti and W.S. Merwin. Doubtless more came and went anonymously.

Pound only lived in the house for about 18 months while his father ran a government land office. The family moved east to Pennsylvania, and Pound never returned, though he sometimes referred to himself as the "Idaho Kid" and occasionally wrote informal letters punctuated with Wild West lingo.

The house was gifted to The Sun Valley Center for the Arts in 2005 after languishing for several years under ownership of another nonprofit initially called the Ezra Pound Association that couldn't bring in enough money.

The Sun Valley Center simply calls the house The Center, Hailey, and makes little of the Pound connection; the arts organization's main building is in nearby Ketchum

McCrum's Crumbs

It seems that Robert McCrum has been moved to clarify his position about blogs (see previous post), doing so, in all places, at the Guardian's book blog:

People - readers - complain about change, but I like it. Change is good, and change has served global literature well, on balance. The world of books is in better shape than for a very long time.

Call me a crazy optimist, but I conclude my piece by suggesting that we live in a golden age of self-expression, of which the 175, 000 blogs are just one example. Who knows what it amounts to? We cannot say. Only our grandchildren will be able to judge the literary quality of these 10 years.

What's not in doubt is that it's a huge democratic moment: more people than ever before are being able to share their ideas and feelings with a global audience, and to engage in a vivid contemporary dialogue about the meaning of culture, in books, film, music, theatre and art.

How bad can that be?

What else can I say?  To see a man back away from what seemed to be his original sentiment--that blogs have somehow been responsible for the demise of the newspaper book review which in turn has led to diminished standards of what is being published and read--to become what sounds like a proponent of technology in general, and if you read into it enough, even blogs is quite a sea change in twenty-four hours.  But hey, that's the power of blogs.

Good Morning, UK (Or, Haven't We Been Here Before?)

It looks like Robert McCrum, the outgoing literary editor of the Observer, has given yours truly a bit of a mention in this Guardian article about the ten things he sees as revolutionizing the book world.  And as always, litblogs don't necessarily come across as a good thing.  In fact, they (we) are blamed for the fall of the great newspaper book review dynasty.  Hell, if I knew I had that much power, I'd start a wiffle ball team and take down the New York Yankees franchise forever.  Or I'd karaoke so well that I'd be able to rid the world of Madonna once and for all.

This week, I'll settle for the "Briefly Noted" section in the Tucumcari Times.

I kid.  I don't think there is a Tucumcari Times. 

Anyway, here's the part where we, the cancerous democracy of litblog book reviewing spreading across the globe at an alarming rate--also known in some parts as maggots--come in:

Chapter 8 Blogs Vs Reviewing

If you believe, as I do, that Britain still sustains a vigorous and independent literary culture, look at America. The omens are not encouraging. American democratic instincts have transformed its literary landscape as surely as its colossal market has revolutionised bookselling. Anyone can review books - and now, in America, everyone does.

Book blogs such as emergingwriters.typepad.com, maudnewton.com and syntaxofthings.typepad.com now have such power and influence that a publisher's editor in Manhattan is likely to advise a new novelist not that they will be reviewed in the New York Times but that they will be covered on curledup.com. This, according to Trish Todd of Simon & Schuster, 'is the wave of the future'.

Occasionally, in the past year, this wave has threatened to sweep away many of the old landmarks on the coast of literature. In California, the LA Times merged its stand-alone book review section into a 'comment' supplement, while the San Francisco Chronicle's book review shrank from six to four pages. But the news that hit the headlines and inspired widespread head-shaking was the decision by the Georgian daily newspaper Atlanta Journal-Constitution to abolish its books editor. Howls of pain reverberated across the States. The New York Times, which still publishes an excellent books section, noted mischievously that a certain Dan Wickett, a former quality-control manager for a car-parts manufacturer, was now singlehandedly writing 'half as many reviews as appeared in all of the books pages of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution'.

That's the same Dan Wickett that helped start a new publishing company that, I'm sure, will get plenty of play on the litblogs as time goes on but will struggle to get in the pages of the sacred.  Why?  Well, when you all cover the same twenty books every year by the same twenty authors, then it all starts to make sense.

There's more:

Readers had been posting reviews on Amazon for year. Now these book blogs - in Britain, for example, a highly responsible site like Vulpes Libris - could take over and hand the power back to - time honoured term - the Common Reader. My view is that the Common Reader generates more heat than light. On closer scrutiny, we find that this creature, as fabled as the hippogriff, is just as uncertain as everyone else. The equation of Amazon plus Microsoft has left the Common Reader dazed and confused. How else to explain the extraordinary success in 2003 of Eats, Shoots & Leaves...?*

No qualification of highly responsible.  Did I miss the seminar or not read the pamphlet that listed the qualifications of responsible book reviewing?  Damn, I'll have to Google around for it.  Then again, it could be that it's written in invisible ink on the back of the hand that feeds everyone this crap and calls it a gourmet meal.  Highly responsible for what?

Here at Syntax of Things, we are highly responsible and possibly, in the eyes of outgoing literary editors for major newspapers, highly contemptible for reading books published by a former quality-control manager for a car-parts manufacturer.  AND ENJOYING THEM, TELLING YOU ABOUT THEM, AND BRINGING RUIN TO THE SACRED EMPIRES.

God, I love having this power.

_______

*McCrum may need to tip his hat to Motoko Rich for much of the content of the above paragraphs.  Much of it comes directly from her article last year in the NY Times.  While McCrum does mention the article when referring to Dan, he actually takes a lot more without giving credit than I would be happy with if I were his editor.  But I guess he's "highly responsible" so it's probably okay. 

Getting to the (Barley) Root

UMass MFA candidate and instructor Michael Carolan believes that there has been an unwillingness to examine certain writers' works in light of their rather obvious alcoholism, so he's decided to do it himself and he's going to be teaching all about it this summer:

Carolan has been working to remedy that oversight with his class "Dionysus Hitting Bottom: The Alcoholic Narrative in Film and Literature." He has a 6-week session coming up through the UMass Division of Continuing Education starting June 2.

"The modern American canon would not exist without all this madness and alcohol," he said, "so let's look below the surface with a clear eye and explore the relationship between alcoholic authors and their characters."

The class reflects the relatively new area of inquiry known as "addiction studies," a multidisciplinary field that combines literary criticism with sociological and historical perspectives. It developed in the 1980s with the founding of Dionysus: Journal of Literature and Addiction and the publication of several related books, including "The Thirsty Muse" and "Alcohol and the Writer."

Carolan said his class also brings together fields of addiction medicine, film studies, psychology, sociology, cultural and gender studies.

Fanatical

I think I was starting to miss Chuck Klosterman.  Not that he went anywhere; it's just that I sort of forgot to look at anything he's been writing for one of the six dozen outlets that he pens his various and sundries for on a daily basis.  But he does come up with an interesting little article for the Guardian about the uber-fan.  You know who you are:

As I've said, I am not an authentic fanatic; I lack grit. But I spend a lot of time thinking about fanatics and I've concluded that the following 10 artists have the most dedicated, least rational fan followings:

1. Slayer
2. Tori Amos
3. Sublime
4. Kiss
5. Bruce Springsteen
6. Black Sabbath (particularly the Tony Martin era, for some reason)
7. Jimmy Buffett
8. Iron Maiden
9. Guided By Voices
10. Morrissey

The obvious follow-up question, of course, is why. Why do these particular musicians engender such sincere, unadulterated idolatry? In the case of Sublime, the answer is the evergreen popularity of recreational drug use; in the case of Springsteen, working-class optimism. But the other examples are more complex. My suspicion is that highly prolific artists - especially ones slagged off by cultural elitists - unknowingly present themselves in such a way that audiences recognise elements of themselves within the sonic iconography. If a musician a) ignores public criticism while b) producing a substantial body of work, an unwavering fanbase will self-select itself. They will see the artist as extra-human, will feel they "understand" how that artist's music reflects (and replicates) their own experience, and will immerse themselves in the musician's catalogue. The Smiths did not exist to be liked by anyone; either you loved them or you didn't care. Within the idiom of fanaticism, there is no benefit to emotional caution. You have to go all the way.

De-Reinvented

R.E.M. will appear on Austin City Limits this weekend.  Here's video proof:

Good lord that makes me feel old.

Jerk

Question:  Does the five-second rule apply even if at least a second of the five was spent in a dog's mouth?

Answer:  When there are high-pitched toddler screams involved, there are no rules.

If you make it to the end, you'll see a beautiful lesson in forgiveness.

Bitter Me

Okay, I'm still a little upset over the cost of a single Tom Waits concert ticket.  I mean, come on, you've made a career out of writing songs about the down-and-out and a significant percentage of your fanbase is probably either in that category or hasn't been out of it long enough to be able to plop down $100 per ticket without it significantly cutting into their budget.  And you're playing towns like Mobile, Alabama, and Tulsa, Oklahoma, where $100 is a little more than what it would probably be for your average joe in, say, L.A. 

Yes, I'm still steamed.

But not too steamed to link to this interview of Waits by Waits.  By the way, notice the third question below.  What if that Motel 6 ran you about $400.  Now you know how some of us feel:

Q: List some artists who have shaped your creative life.
A: Okay, here are a few that just come to me for now: Kerouac, Dylan, Bukowski, Rod Serling, Don Van Vliet, Cantinflas, James Brown, Harry Belafonte, Ma Rainey, Big Mama Thorton, Howlin Wolf, Lead Belly, Lord Buckley, Mabel Mercer, Lee Marvin, Thelonious Monk, John Ford, Fellini, Weegee, Jagger, Richards, Willie Dixion, John McCormick, Johnny Cash, Hank Williams, Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong, Robert Johnson, Hoagy Carmichael, Eurico Caruso.

Q: List some songs that were beacons for you.
A: Again, for now... but if you ask me tomorrow the list would change, of course.
Gershwin's second prelude, "Pathatique Sonata", "El Paso", "You've Really Got Me" (Kinks), "Solider Boy" (Shirelles), "Lean Back" (Fat Joe), "Night train", "Come In My Kitchen" (R.J.) "Sad Eyed Lady", "Rite of Spring Ode to Billy Joe", "Louie Louie", "Just a Fool" (Ike and Tina), "Prisoner of Love" (J.B.) "Pitch a Wing Dan Doodlec (all night long)" H. Wolf, "Ringo" (Lorne Green), "Ball and Chain", "Deportee", "Strange Fruit", "Sophisticated Lady", "Georgia On My Mind", "Can't Stop Loving You", "Just Like A Woman", "So Lonesome I Could Cry", "Who'll Stop The Rain?", "Moon River", "Autumn Leaves", "Danny Boy", "Dirty Ol' Town", "Waltzing Mathilda", "Train Keeps a Rollin", "Boris the Spider", "You've Really Got a Hold On Me", "Red Right Hand", "All Shook Up", "Cause Of It All", "Shenandoah", "China Pig", "Summertime", "Without a Song", "Auld Ang Syne", "This is a Man's World", "Crawlinking Snake", "Nassun Dorma", "Bring it on Home to Me", "Hound Dog", "Hello Walls", "You Win Again", "Sunday Morn' Coming Down", "Almost Blue", "Pump It Up", "Greensleeves", "Just Wanna See His Face" (Stones), "Restless Farewell", "Fairytale of NY", "Bring Me A Little Water Sylvie", "Raglan Road", "96 Tears", "In Dreams" (R. Orbison), "Substitute", "Good Time Charlie's Got The Blues", Theme from Rawhide, "Same Thing", "Walk Away Rene", "For What it's Worth", theme from "Once Upon A Time In America", "Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing", "Oh Holy Night", "Mass in E Minor", "Harlem Shuffle", "Trouble Man", "Wade in The Water", "Empty Bed Blues", "Havanagila"

Q: What's heaven for you?
A: Me and my wife on Rte. 66 with a pot of coffee, a cheap guitar, pawnshop tape recorder in a Motel 6, and a car that runs good parked right by the door.

Backwards

I've made no secret of my dislike for the rock 'n' roll reunion tour (with the possible exception of the Replacements and a few others) and it seems that more and more folks are coming around to my way of thinking (of course, at the rate I'm going, the next live show I see may be the Arcade Fire reunion show in 2023):

It seems that no matter how storied the split, almost every band is bound to get back together — and that could make the magic of an anticipated reunion a little less magical.

"If you can say it's a reunion of some sort, it does make it feel special and unique," said Michael Endelman, senior editor of Rolling Stone magazine. "But some you hear and it's exciting and some you hear and say, 'Didn't they just tour last summer?'"

The reunion-tour trend is inspired by money and the alluring power of nostalgia — for both fans and artists — so don't expect any slowdown, Endelman said.

"To go back on stage in front of an adoring crowd and relive some of these great moments and play all these old songs of theirs, psychologically it must be very seductive and very powerful for them," he said. "Because it's become so profitable for so many bands, it's become very attractive and it's bringing out a lot of bands to try that. ... There's a lot of money to be made in cashing in on people's nostalgia for things they were excited about when they were teenagers."

Not all reunion tours are created equal. They must be examined on a band-by-band basis, said Erik Pedersen, music coordinator and news editor at The Hollywood Reporter. Some are really for the fans, some are really for the bands and some are really for the money.

Submit

The Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival has announced the details of its first ever fiction writing contest.  The judge is Richard Ford.

Grand Prize

• $1,500
• VIP Festival Pass ($500 value), March 25-29, 2009
• Publication in the New Orleans Review
• Domestic Airfare and Accommodations to attend the Festival in New Orleans
• Public Reading

Second Prize: $200, a Public Reading, and Festival Pass

Third Prize: $100, a Public Reading, and Festival Pass

Eligibility: Short stories, written in English, up to 7,000 words

Deadline: November 15, 2008 (postmark)

Entry Fee: $20

Mailer Spins

Looks like there's a little controversy brewing over the purchase of Norman Mailer's mistress' saucy archives by Harvard.  A family friend is claiming that Harvard's purchase of the allegedly salacious material was sour grapes after the university lost out on the writer's papers to the University of Texas.  Not so, says Harvard:

But according to Leslie A. Morris, Harvard’s curator of modern books and manuscripts, Harvard did not purchase Mallory’s archive as a retaliatory act.

“Anger is not a part of the purchasing of this archive,” she sai.

Harvard was never in negotiation with Mailer about his papers, according to Morris.

Dealers are aware that Harvard is not a “big league player” when it comes to the purchasing of multi-million dollar collections like Mailer’s, Morris said, adding that the collection was “too expensive for Harvard to even consider.”

Harvard libraries only use endowed funds to purchase collections, Morris said. While these funds have increased over the past years, so has the price of contemporary literary collections.

Morris said that the purchasing of manuscripts, rare books, and collections is not the highest priority for the University. With other competing interests and the procedural difficulty of making a purchase, such buys are more complex than they seem, according to Morris.

Morris said it is understandable for Mailer to have chosen to sell his documents to the University of Texas.

“Money is always a consideration,” Morris said. “Whether or not it’s the most important one is a very individual decision.”

Freyed

The Snitch tells the story of Jan Frel's protest (of sorts) at a James Frey reading in San Francisco:

It's Friday evening and I'm standing outside Slim's with Jan Frel, his wife, Hadley Suter, a can of mace and a stack of papers. The papers are stapled copies of John Dolan's essay "Whose Fault Is Frey?" a document that lambastes author James Frey, whose memoir of drug addiction and subsequent recovery, A Million Little Pieces, was exposed as a partial fabrication after it took the best-sellers lists by storm. Frel is an editor at progressive Web site Alternet.org, and the founder of Down With Frey, an organization that consists of himself, his wife and a blog where one can vote on whether or not Frey is a "hack writer," a "sad sack" or an "abomination." Inside Slim's, a metal band is gearing up to play a set before Frey takes the stage to read an excerpt from his new book, A Bright Shiny Morning, which will be sold in the fiction section and garnered a glowing review from the New York Times.

A little later, Frey decides to confront Frel, with bodyguard in tow:

It's obvious that Frel has thought out ahead of time what he would like to say to the author's face, but now that it's really happening, things just seem awkward. He tells Frey that he's a disgrace, that he's a fraud, and that his continuing popularity is symptomatic of the attitude that allows George Bush to retain office after committing war crimes. Frey is nodding in response to this and tells Frel that he's entitled to his opinion. The whole time, Black Hair Tattooed Guy, a member of the opening band, 3rdrail, is at Frey's side, mad-dogging Frel, fists clenched. The confrontation sputters out, and Frey walks away.

"You mess any shit up…." Black Hair Tattoed Guy hisses into Frel's face.

"And what?" Frel asks.

"Guess!" BHTG barks, and turns heel.

Kill Devil Hills

We just got back from dipping our toes in the sand of North Carolina's Outer Banks where we stayed in the shadow of the monument dedicated to the Wright brothers and their first flight.  We didn't see any wild horses and I still haven't figured out what Michael Stipe is singing about in this song.  Despite the rogue wave that introduced Marlie to the cold Atlantic and the sand flies that threatened to sting me to submission, we survived the trip with the only regret being that we didn't have another few days to explore the whole of the OBX. 

Dear Tom Waits

I know I said that you were perhaps the only musician that I would travel any distance to see these days.  And I know that you are perhaps the only musician/band that I haven't seen in my life that I really do want to see.  And despite the fact that my wife thinks I'm crazy for it, and I probably am, I have to tell you this.

There is no way I'm paying $85 to see you play in Mobile, Alabama.  And that doesn't include the $9.25 Ticketbastard charge, or the $2 "building facility charge."  That's almost $100 and it's the cheapest option.  Then there's the whole thing about actually getting to Mobile, which would run me another two-to-three hundee.

No thanks.

That is all.

Love,

A fan.

Value of Worst

If you're looking to add to your growing poetry collection, you should know that the works of William McGonagall, known as the "world's worst poet," will go on auction today.  And as a bonus, many of the thirty-five pieces are autographed:

Alex Dove, from auctioneers Lyon and Turnbull, said: "Poetry didn't really come to him until I think he was 47 and the voices in his head told him that he'd be able to write poems.

"Then he thought he was the best thing since sliced bread, he thought he should be the poet laureate and all sorts.

"He tried to hawk these poems around the streets of places like Dundee and he was notoriously encouraged to give performances just so people could make fun of him.

"Poet-baiting became an ongoing activity, they used to throw vegetables at him and all sorts."

The poems which are being auctioned in Edinburgh are expected to fetch more than rare first editions of James Bond novels, a Mickey Mouse book from 1931 and a first edition of Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

If you're interested in learning more about McGonagall, you should check out this extensive collection of all things McGon.  I've included the masterful "The Demon Drink" below.

The Past and Present of the Future

The Phoenix takes a look at Steampunk:

There is no typical Steampunk. Its practitioners are anyone and everyone: European re-enactors, middle-aged steam enthusiasts, carpenters, illustrators, sculptors, urban clotheshorses. “I think steam engines are beautiful,” says Zachary Rukstela, a musician and industrial artist. “Steampunk was borne of the counter-culture,” Magpie Killjoy, a writer, editor, and self-described “professional ex-worker,” tells me. Libby Bulloff, an anachro tech-fetishist designer living in Indiana, has been attracted to “the tarnished decadence of Steampunk technology” for years. “I sort of see this as a big Venn diagram, with Steampunk as the box and a bunch of overlapping circles of interest,” adds von Slatt. While Steampunks — self-described or not — don’t always see eye to eye on their metaculture’s boundaries, they all have at least one crucial thing in common: a lasting, passionate fascination with Victoriana. The period roughly spans the length of Queen Victoria’s rule, when early scientific discoveries thrust society headlong into the Industrial Revolution, allowing part-time craftsmen who were captivated by the means and methods behind these inventions to advance breakthroughs of their own.

The gravitational center of Steampunk is a longing for a past that never was. It was a time when a computer could indeed run on steam, when dapper gentlemen with clean shirt cuffs and pocket watches could be mad scientists by night, and when an object’s uniqueness and aesthetics were just as important as its functioning guts. If you think of it as an exuberant amalgam of the modern with the 19th century, you begin to get the idea, but you’re barely dipping your toe into the ocean, because Steampunk isn’t merely a not-so-secret fringe culture any longer. It has developed a set of values that, for some, go deeper than a hobbyist’s nostalgia for an age they weren’t around to experience. The Steampunk ideology is in no way uniform — like the culture itself, it can be taken apart and put back together to suit its makers — but it seems to be ingrained in a combination of radical politics, an anti-corporate, do-it-completely-yourself ethic, and an acceptance that we are already living in the dystopian future we’ve been warned about.

Essential Man

The Art of Manliness offers up its list of 100 Must-Read Books: The Essential Man's Library.  I'm not sure what an "Essential Man" is, but I will say the list is somewhat surprising and not just because it's not a list of the 100 best issues of Playboy.  For instance, I did not expect to see this book listed:

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

Arguably the best work from the ever-quotable Wilde, this novel is a guide for how to live a life of pure decadence. Packed with impeccable wit, clever one-liners and an excessive amount of egotistical vanity. At the very least, this book will show you the glory and the pitfalls of being the best looking chap around.

Also, I would have spent some time talking about this article, but I haven't gotten around to reading it yet.

{first item via}

"I've Made Some Big Mistakes"

The reviews of James Frey's "first" novel have been about two to one negative, with many of them leaning toward the "horrible" end of the spectrum.  That's probably inspiration enough for me to pick up a copy and read it.  Think "car wreck neck."  Anyway, here's Frey doing the Today show and, well, he has nice glasses.