Syntax of Things

Return of Here and There

It's back.  First link post in ages.  I forgot how long these can take when one is distracted:

• Chad Post, director of Open Letter Books, and author Dubravka Ugresic discuss the literary translations program at the University of Rochester during an appearance on Rochester's WHAM TV.

• Have the megalisters hurt the mom & pop used-book stores?

• Becoming an old (blogging) man.

• Bob Dylan has two "poems" in the New Yorker. 

The Best Part of Waking Up

Three quickies before I start my day with a nice breakfast of Excel washed down with a warm cup of Project:

1. A few weeks ago after mentioning the fact that I had no idea that Thelonious Monk was born in Rocky Mount, NC, I asked if anyone knew what other famous person spent a significant amount of time in that small town not far from Raleigh.  Well, the News & Observer decided to help you out with the answer.
2. This MetaFilter post is the perfect way to waste away the day, especially if your idea of wasting is checking out what seems to be an endless supply of Nick Cave-related links, including a boatload of videos, all in celebration of the man's 50th birthday.
3. Finally, Luis Alberto Urrera has posted a poem of his that appeared in the recent immigration edition of the Virginia Quarterly Review.  A must read.

Harr/Tharr

If you believe the reports, and I really have no reason to doubt them, it looks like my old hometown fishrag, the San Diego Union-Tribune, is about to cut its standalone book review, one of the last standalones remaining in the country.  Have no fear.  Apparently, instead of a highly useless petition, it looks like protesters are getting ready to launch a chain e-mail bomb campaign.  I bet if that doesn't work, there will surely be enough energy left in their laptops to type out newspaper articles blaming the litblogs for this also.  The maggots live!

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Of course, there's plenty of blame to go around.  Apparently, book clubs just might be bad for reading.

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Meanwhile, my current hometown paper,Raleigh's News & Observer, began a new era of book coverage today with Marcy Smith taking over as the Literary Editor.  Smith has announced a new occasional  feature she calls Spoken Out Loud in which she and guest columnist will write about all things book related, hopefully with a local twist.

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A new (to me) blog, booktwo, which reports on literature and technology, offers up some links to what it calls Google fanfic, including "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by Google" by Bruce Sterling.

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I just have to write it:  fag-pack classics.

And they do look rather authentic, spoofily constructed with fliptop box, cellophane wrap, gold ribbony bit and that traditional insert of matt foil that thumbs away to reveal ... well, not 20 Marlboro, or whatever, but a dinky book you might read in a crowded lift. Yes, just when people might think you were about to light up, and are already calling the police, you start reading aloud from 'The Snows of Kilimanjaro'! Ha-ha.  {via}

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Here's a pretty nice bit of literary trivia:  apparently the only museum in the world dedicated to the memory of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald is located in Montgomery, Alabama.  Why?  I'm sure you're asking.  Well, Zelda was from there and the two actually lived there in the 1930s.

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The film rights to two works by William Faulkner, Red Leaves and Light In August, have been acquired from the author's estate by actor-director James Franco who plans to start filming Red Leaves this year with no date as of yet for Light in August.

Pharma Here/There

I'm back. Thanks Mr. Kaplan, your services in help of the delusionally toothless will be rewarded with something from the Maggot Store!  Maybe a statue or a lunch bag. No, I'm not recovered by any means.  In fact, the dentist extended my work-from-home diagnosis by an additional week in order that it might hopefully speed the healing.  He didn't forbid me from scouring the internet looking for items of interest to pass along to all of you good folks.  Tell me, though, do these things I'm posting about today make as much sense to someone not bubbling under the delusion that Percocet should be given a prettier name?  Like, maybe, Percietta.  I like Percietta. Darcocet could be Delia.

Here are the items, enjoy:

A massive collection of letters from an assorted lot of historical figures was recently found in a filing cabinet in some Swiss laundry room.  Along with letters on various subjects from Winston Churchill, Peter the Great, Mahatma Gandhi, Alexander Pushkin, John Donne and Queen Elizabeth, there's one written by Ernest Hemingway to Ezra Pound explaining why bulls are better than critics:

Bulls don't run reviews. Bulls of 25 don't marry old women of 55 and expect to be invited to dinner.
Bulls do not get you cited as co-respondent in Society divorce trials. Bulls don't borrow money. Bulls are edible after they have been killed.

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Shelia Kohler, you can make it up to us by buying yourself some Maggot Gear!  Unfortunately, I'm not in a position to offer you a discount. 

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Atlanta's Creative Loafing dares interview (and includes the audio) crazy man writer Jack Pendarvis, an Atlantian these days but originally from down Mobile way, about his very good new collection of stories Your Body Is Changing:

While pursuing his literary aspirations, Pendarvis threw out the rules for good writing for his novella "The Mysterious Secret of the Valuable Treasure," which became the centerpiece of the collection of the same name. "I was frustrated with not getting published, so I decided, for that story, to do everything they say not to do. They say, 'No adverbs' – I'm going to put adverbs in almost every sentence." He indulged in excessive use of quotation marks and exclamation points, and never used the word "said" when he could come up with a useless alternative like "blurted." He also defied most literary magazines' standard request for "No simultaneous submissions," and started sending out 20 copies of his stories at a time.

And he started getting published.

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It looks like the band of writer-musicians, the Rock Bottom Remainders, is expanding a little bit.  I can't tell from the photo if they've finally figured out how to make a musical instrument out of Mitch Albom's ears.

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A burned page of Faulkner's poetry manuscript: part of The New Yorker's too brief image portfolio from the Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin.  You can also read D.T. Max's article about the Ransom Center and its archivist Tom Staley here:

During Staley’s two decades in the job, he has bought nearly a hundred literary collections—including papers of Jorge Luis Borges, John Osborne, Julian Barnes, Arthur Miller, Tom Stoppard, Penelope Fitzgerald, John Fowles, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Don DeLillo—and, as he moves toward retirement, his buys are getting bigger. In 2003, Texas bought the Watergate papers of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein for five million dollars. (A sealed file revealing the then secret identity of Deep Throat, Mark Felt, was deposited at a trustee’s office in Washington.) In 2005, Staley paid two and a half million dollars for the collection of Norman Mailer, which included twenty-five thousand of Mailer’s letters, along with the identification tags of his late poodle, Tibo. The archive—weighing twenty thousand pounds in all—came to the center in a tractor trailer. The New York book dealer Glenn Horowitz, who brokered the two deals, says of Staley, “He’s looking for projects that have a culminating quality to them.”

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Does it get any better than a new Charles D'Ambrosio story in the New Yorker? {thanks Mr. Tiffany}

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A few weeks ago I mentioned that Jerri Hall, Mick Jagger's ex, plans on making her poetry debut in a few weeks at a UK literary festival.  Apparently, she's been giving sneak previews.  Here's a little something about her ex-hubbie:

He is a hollow hyperbole/ the crowd plays him like a flute/ the crowd lives out their fantasy/ through his mirror door they see/ an image of the person/ they wish that they could be/ he fucks their women/ and fights their battles against mediocrity/ but when he comes home to me/ all that's left is Vd.

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I'm one of those people who hates hearing songs by his favorite band(s) used in television commercials and whose opinion of said band(s) often takes a big turn downward once he does hear the advertisement.  Well, now I have to face the sad reality that one of my all-time favorites has, well, ican'tevensayit.

Here_There

I had no idea but am glad to hear that Andrei Codrescu is shooting a documentary about the Mississippi River:

"Big River Blues" is a travel documentary using the Mississippi itself as "an instrument to gauge where we are now," Codrescu said.

It's intended to echo the work of wide-eyed travelers such as Jack Kerouac and Charles Kuralt, he added.

"I don't see those big cross-country journeys anymore. I see a lot of historical documentaries and CNN stories about disaster, but I don't see a seeker just going to find out what's there in the belief that America's an incredible place."

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I somehow missed the news last week that the University of California, Irvine, has dropped its lawsuit against the family of Jacques Derrida:

The school, where Derrida was a part-time professor until his death, reached an "amicable agreement" with his family to keep a collection of his letters, speeches and academic writings from 1946 to 1998 but relinquished a claim to other papers, the university said in a statement Monday.

The university also agreed to pay about $16,200 of the Derrida family's legal fees.

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A big chunk of some of that recently discovered Steinbeck material, including a handwritten first-draft of a novel called Sweet Thursday, went unsold at auction on Thursday.

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Flannery O'Connor slept here.

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The Independent Florida Alligator has more on the accusations of plagarism surrounding Mark Mitchell, the managing editor of the University of Florida's literary journal, including the withdrawal of Mitchell's book by the University of Indiana Press.

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Speaking of people of questionable honesty, Ron Hogan tracked down the former JT LeRoy, Laura Albert, who is writing the liner notes for the new Smashing Pumpkins album/yawner.  And news came out last week that those of us with copies of James Frey's A Million Little Pieces purchased on or before January 26, 2006, will be able to get a full refund.

(T)Here

The Albany Times Union's Paul Grohndahl has written a nice article about native son and recent American Academy of Arts and Letters award winner David Markson:

In 1966, he struck literary gold when he published "The Ballad of Dingus Magee," which sold well and was made into a movie starring Frank Sinatra. The book earned him a six-figure payday.

He's struggled financially ever since. He even sold off a collection of first editions inscribed by literary friends when he was strapped for cash. He is divorced from Elaine Markson, a noted literary agent.

Markson counted among his close buddies Malcolm Lowry, Dylan Thomas, Jack Kerouac and Kurt Vonnegut -- all deceased. Many of Markson's memories of them involve heavy drinking.

"Kerouac was always drunk. He'd ring my doorbell and crash on the couch in my apartment every time he came through New York," Markson recalled.

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The Coen brothers adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men is getting a lot of praise after its showing at Cannes.

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Guest blogging at Ed's, Erin O'Brien writes about her six-year correspondence with the great Larry Brown.  You should also check out her post about her brother, the novelest John O'Brien.  Great stuff.  Erin's regular blogging can be found here.

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The Contra Costa Time's Randy Myers goes behind the scenes of a Chuck Palahniuk reading and gives us all a little insight into the types of people you might meet if you go to one.  You can see some photos from one of his events and listen to Pahalniuk discuss his own planning for one his readings in the "On a Rant" audio slideshow.

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Levi Asher tips his New York Mets hat to the Sopranos as "one of the most bookish television series ever, which is one of many reasons it will be missed after two more episodes complete the run."  I previously noted the use of a William S. Burrough's voiceover on the show.

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The Mobile Press Register's John Sledge re-examines Brad Vice in light of the re-publication of his controversial collection, The Bear Bryant Funeral Train:

Happily for Vice, he had a big fan in Jim Gilbert, editor at Montgomery's River City Publishing. Almost as soon as Georgia recalled the collection, Gilbert began to study whether he should acquire and republish it. If he did, he would include all the appropriate attributions as well as essays from scholars about the dust-up.

During a recent e-mail interview, Gilbert explained why he wanted to take on Vice's tarnished collection. The decision was, he declared, "Very simple: these are great stories ... in all the hubbub, people seemed to forget how strange and moving and original stories like 'Mojo Farmer' and 'Artifacts' and the title story really are." Gilbert admitted that it didn't look like a bad business decision, either: "As an editor I'm also a capitalist. Here was something notorious and missing from the marketplace."

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Joshua Ferris's debut novel, Then We Came to the End, has been optioned by HBO Films.

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Mick Jagger's ex-wife Jerry Hall plans to debut her "pretty dark" poetry at the Ledbury Poetry Festival in July.

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Wilco's Jeff Tweedy talks to The Independent about the new album and about his lifelong battle with depression:

But, I say to him, you have two kids (Spencer, 11, and Sam 7), you have a gorgeous wife (Sue, who Tweedy met when she was the owner of Lounge Ax, one of Chicago's seminal indie venues in the 1980s and 1990s), you are in, perhaps, the greatest rock band of my lifetime... "Well," he interrupts, "that's one of the diabolical things about depression and any sufferer will tell you that. Intellectually, you can look around and count your blessings, the problem is that you can't make yourself feel any better. Panic disorder makes you feel as if you're being chased by a lion. You know that you're not, but you are still incapable of stopping your body and your emotions from feeling as if they are."

Here-->There

I've been wondering how the weather in Palm Springs was treating Anne Rice, who, if you remember, couldn't take La Jolla's cold weather after she moved to the California seaside town from New Orleans.  Well, seems she's settling in just fine and just threw a lavish garden-party along with her son Christopher.  Tickets went for $150 a pop and all money raised went to the Lambda Literary Foundation.  Now, suddenly, I fell a little too much like TMZ.  Back to normal programming.

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A writer is asking the public to submit one word and £1 to his "I Want a Word" project.  He's hoping to collect 10,000 words (read: around US$20,000) and then he'll cobble all of these words together along with a few that he'll throw in for free and put them into a book which he will publish and distribute for free.  Generous guy, huh?  You can also send me a dollar and a word and I'll be your friend for a minute for free.

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First they take away the book reviews, next they'll come for the reporting.  Actually, it's a small online community newspaper and they've decided to outsource some reporting to India but that kind of news travels fast in this rather job-sensitive time we live in.  Actually, this comes as absolutely no surprise to someone who worked for a major publishing company that decided to outsource its copyediting and proofreading to the subcontinent.

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Looks like a couple of the editors of the University of Florida's new literary journal, Subtropics, have some 'splainin to do.

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Richard Ford stole Terre Haute; Edmund White is stealing it back.

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The $10,000 Lulu Blooker prize was won by Colby Buzzell for his blog-inspired book My War: Killing Time in Iraq.

Here{There}

"During the past few weeks a literary St. Valentine's Day massacre has occurred in the nation's newsrooms in response to economic pressures," writes Raleigh's News & Observer book editor J. Peder Zane who in his final column in that role thanks those who have written reviews for the N&O.  As for Zane, he isn't going very far; he will now be the N&O's idea writer, whatever that is.

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Meanwhile, the inevitable:  book review editors coming to the defense of their pages while misrepresenting the stance taken by bloggers.  Here's an instance from the Cleveland Plain Dealer's Karen Long:

Because even as the National Book Critics Circle gathers signatures and stages a protest in front of the bricks-and-mortar Atlanta Journal-Constitution, a number of bloggers are borderline gleeful, ready to polish their dancing shoes for a nice tap across the graves of old mainstream media.

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And while the great bemoaning of the loss of book review pages continues, something with even more potential to destroy the future book loving is happening in the public schools across the U.S. thanks to the No Child Left Behind Act.

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Gary Black, a former teacher in South Carolina who in 1973 was arrested for distributing pornographic material to minors because he had given his students copies of Slaughterhouse-Five to read, tells the Charlotte Observer of how Kurt Vonnegut offered to come to his aid.

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The Akron Beacon Journal profiles a rising star in the literary publishing world, Rager Media, a small press based in Akron, Ohio.

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Michael Chabon sits down with the Borders Book Club to discuss his new novel, The Yiddish Policemen's Union.

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If you're going to be in New York for BEA, perhaps you should consider staying in the Library Hotel in which rooms are numbered by the Dewey Decimal system and the books in each room follow the subject matter indicated by the room number. It should be no surprise that "The most requested room is 800.001, Erotic Literature."

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Beginning this week, the town of North Andover, Mass., will put on display a manuscript by the person believed to be America's first published poet, Anne Bradstreet.  "Meditations Divine and Morall" is "the only extant manuscript by Bradstreet...It is also believed to be among the few surviving literary manuscripts from that era."

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The Edmonton Journal details the larcenous ways of an American theater producer who has been stealing plays by Canadian playwrights and producing them in the U.S.:

Since 1999, Jack L. Herman has been acquiring the scripts of Canadian plays, putting his own name on them, claiming copyright over them, and sometimes staging his own productions at his amateur theatre company, as well as authorizing productions of the stolen plays by other companies. "He is a thief, a fraud, a plagiarist," says one of his victims, Edmonton playwright David Belke. "The whole situation has been shocking in its intent and almost comedic in its brazenness."

[...]

The plagiarized plays include at least three prominent plays: Suddenly Shakespeare written in 1988 by Selody, The Reluctant Resurrection of Sherlock Holmes written in 1992 by Belke, and I'll Be Back Before Midnight by Peter Colley.

Back to Work Here & There

Mercy, take a day off and things get a little crazy. 

Greetings to all of you visiting by way of Gawker.  Hope you'll take a few minutes to tour the site and a few more minutes to visit some of the great bloggers listed in my "Go Read Now" section. 

I do want to add that while it may have seemed from my post on Friday that I have a huge axe to grind with the Book Reviewers (note the caps), I'd like to make it perfectly clear that I'm with them and the NBCC folks as far as saving the Book Reviews goes.  Sometimes it just seems like the litbloggers need a champion (and not just Ed).  Not that I'm volunteering, mind you.  It's as if the mainstream media BRers need to be reminded that we're not in this as a big fuck you to them.  Nor do we want to see a single one of their pens stilled.  I know most of them know this and they're well aware that we do this for the same reason that many of them do (minus the paycheck): the love of books. 

By the way, no one does blogging/reviewing/bookloving with more passion than Dan Wickett, and that's why you should read what he has to say about this whole thing. 

As for the promised reviews, my plan is to have a couple up by Friday.  We'll see.

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Speaking of Dan, he's transitioning from poetry to short stories this month over at the Emerging Writers Network.  I'm going to try to join in, especially seeing as almost half of the books I've read so far this year have been short story collections.  If you want to dip your toe in the lake of classic short fiction, check out this site.

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It's Larry Brown Week over at Things I'd Rather Be Doing, which for my money, I'd rather be reading Larry Brown and/or about him than just about anything, so this project pretty much makes my week.

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David Lynch has a plan to put a stop to school violence:  meditation.  Seriously.  {via}

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Littourati is back and has picked up his cartographical rendering of Kerouac's On the Road.  If you haven't already, link to his site and continue to follow along.  Right now, he's in California's Inland Empire, including a trip to Bakersfield, the city in which I spent the first night of my marriage to Elaine.  Before you laugh, we happened to be on our way to San Francisco, but needed a break.  A hotel on Buck Owens Boulevard seemed a perfect place.

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Nahma Sandrow of the NY Sun explores Big Sur: 

Very few people choose to live here. There's a single post office and a smattering of shops, gas stations, restaurants, and spas. Most houses are tucked beyond view into the slopes above or below the highway. Stringent regulations restrict building and forbid the mounting of billboards. In winter, when even the public bus service ceases to operate, Big Sur appears nearly deserted. And that's the way residents like it.

"Big Sur," the manager of Deetjens Big Sur Inn, Bruce Neeb, said proudly, "is a magnet for oddballs."

Since the 1920s, those eccentric personalities have included photographers Edward Weston and Ansel Adams, writers Henry Miller, Robinson Jeffers, and Jack Kerouac, and the builders whose offbeat inspirations have become tourist destinations.

Here & There

Just in case you didn't know--godknows I didn't--this is TV Turnoff Week.  And while I'm all for it, I'm afraid that it's a proven fact that depriving your wee one of her daily dose of Boobahs can cause irreparable damage.  If you don't believe me, I can provide video evidence of her face when I cut off the Boobahs while explaining to her that the tele is rotting her developing brain.  Of course, you'll have to wait until next week to watch it.

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According to this story in The Columbus Dispatch, nonfiction is kicking fiction's arse in Ohio schools.  Teachers teaching toward the No Child Left Behind exams is given as a major reason, but I'm willing to bet that part of it is that nonfiction is much easier to teach and much easier to find teachers able to teach it. 

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Reason Magazine takes a look at the online audiobook service, LibriVox:

On Libri­Vox, the fact the recordings are free is but a fortunate by-product of a larger process with broader economic and philosophical implications. LibriVox is an example of what the Yale legal scholar Yochai Benkler—author of The Wealth of Networks, an influential analysis of “open source” economic networks—calls “commons-based peer production.” It’s a commons because it has no links to the marketplace in which goods and services are exchanged for money and because nothing is proprietary. It’s peer production because its volunteers coordinate their activities themselves without a traditional workplace hierarchy.

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A quote to help you with your morning coffee:  "The entire poem [50 Cent's "Ghetto Qu'ran"], we can agree, never quite reaches the heights of Notorious BIG's "Somebody's Gotta Die" - but surely beats anything by Keats."  From this New Statesman article judging the growing brawl, not between East Coast/West Coast, but between Rap itself and some of the big boys of the literary canon.

Taking its cue from that article, Guardian Book blogger Miles Johnson believes that today's poets can learn a thing or two from the rappers:

Of course, some learnt this lesson 200-odd years back. Lord Byron was the Original Gangster of English poetry. As the first "celebrity poet" he had a notorious string of hos and always kept some duelling pistols handy in case some playa hater started mouthing off about his mama. In Don Juan's notoriously scornful dedication, he also successfully merked his rivals in the poetry game: Bob Southey, Coleridge and Wordsworth. Just as rappers thrive off having tiffs, Byron was famously enraged with the Lake Poets going soft whilst he remained authentically gangsta.

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The winner of Britain's National Short Story prize has been announced.

Here/Everythere

A 17-year-old Iowa boy who plans on going into "the ministry" says that the dirty language and the using of Jesus' name in vain that he found in Of Mice and Men made him uncomfortable, so he wants the Newton, Iowa school board to remove it from the classroom.  Will there be any books--other than the Good One--left in Iowa and Kansas?  Stay tuned.

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Meanwhile for some news that proves that all ain't bad in the classrooms, an English teacher at a New Jersey school who amazingly is being allowed to teach On the Road this year will have her students do their reports on the book using typewriters instead of computers.  Damn good idea.

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Fiction meets reality, Big Brother edition: according to this story, there are thirty-two closed-circuit TV cameras within 200 yards of George Orwell's flat in Canonbury Square in Islington, North London.

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Scientists in England plan on studying the smells emitted by aging books at Cambridge University's library in order to discover the whats and hows of book decomposition and to find ways to better preserve the collection.

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Baton Rouge's The Advocate looks at the new noir anthology from Akashic Books:

The theme of these books is the dark side — usually involving some criminal activity. Every city has this underside, this hidden subculture whose members wouldn’t fit in suburbia. New Orleans is a natural, and crime writer Julie Smith, a resident of Faubourg  Marigny, exploits the seamy side of the city in her detective stories. She’s a perfect choice to edit a noir fiction collection set in New Orleans.

New Orleans is really two places now: the city that was before Hurricane Katrina and the city that is left. Or, as Smith notes in her introduction, “pre- or post-K.” To accommodate both New Orleans incarnations, Smith has divided the stories in this collection into two parts, the first 10 stories, pre-K, are grouped in the section “Before the Levees Broke,” the second part, post-K, is called “Life in Atlantis.”

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The Boston Globe's Frederick Burger examines Faulkner as a tourist attraction and gets this great quote from writer Bill Emerson who was sent to Oxford in 1954 to interview Faulkner for Newsweek:

"He couldn't have been more surly.  He was wearing cutoff khaki pants and was bare chested and had a bristle beard. I didn't care how he looked, but I thought it was a fairly uncouth and primitive reception. There was the not-too-veiled suggestion that I might suffer physically for the intrusion and that the intrusion infuriated him. . . . He was a feisty cat, a plucky nipper. He had plenty of fury, but he also had a magnetic quality. He was short, but you didn't get a sense that he was little."

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Benjamin Percy has been awarded the Paris Review's Plimpton Prize for his story "Refresh, Refresh".

Broken Eggs Here & There

The litblogosphere's favorite punching bag, Sam Tanenhaus, spoke at the 22nd annual Literature Lecture in El Paso and one attendee left more than a little disappointed:

When the guero is finished with his talk, I buy his book so I can ask him what role he thinks Chicano literature is going to play in American letters. And because I asked straight up like that, he couldn't bring up Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who we both know ain't Mexican-American. The pobre had to answer something, and you know what he told me? He just doesn't see it having a big role in literature, such as other media and the Internet.

Then I countered with como puedes decir eso with so many Mexicans coming into this country, only I say it in English so that he can understand me, and he shrugs his shoulders and says that the Internet and blogs are going to have a huge impact and no one can predict where literature is really going. {SoT:  My emphasis. He really said that?  Sam Tanenhaus said the blogs are going to "have a huge impact?"}

And I'm satisfied, because that's right: He has no idea where literature is going. I thank him y me despido de el.

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Lionel Shriver, one of Raleigh's most well-known writers--despite the fact that so few know that she's actually from Raleigh--will be reading here on Tuesday in support of her new novel The Post-Birthday World.  The News and Observer profiles her:

"When I look back on it, I realize it was a rich childhood and I'm glad I grew up there," she said in a phone interview last month from New York City, where she visits friends and family each year. "I feel a sense of identity. True, I didn't stay there. I haven't set a whole string of novels in North Carolina. But if the state wants to claim me, they can have me."

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More than just dust collects atop Miranda July's fridge. {via}

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Jane Campion plans to bring the story of Keats' love affair with Fanny Brawne to the big screen.

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Over at The Boston Globe, Jan Freeman writes about "wanton eggcorns."

Smoke-free Here & There

I'm not sure when I'll be back to normal.  After so many attempts, I should be used to this run-down, useless, agitated state of cigarette withdrawal.  I'm getting my nicotine but it ain't the same.  For now, I'm going to keep it brief but may pop in from time to time as events warrant.

The folks at LitMinds offer up a brief recap, complete with pictures, of the Jack Kerouac Alley re-dedication in San Francisco.

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The newest episode of PBS's American Masters series will veer from its usual format of concentrating on a particular "master" and instead will offer up a two-hour overview of the American novel:

The two-hour survey of American literature combines re-enactments, creative photomontages and academic voiceovers to evoke the stories, explore the themes and discuss the authors of classic American novels.

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I missed posting this a few weeks ago, but it's worth noting now that it's about to be released:  The Oxford American is set to release its first-ever DVD, which will accompany the upcoming Southern Movie issue of the magazine due out this month:

The OA DVD is a “visual mix tape” featuring short films, scenes from essential Southern movies, historic footage, spectacular surprises, and much more.  Special highlights include works by such directors as Craig Brewer, Ross McElwee, Joey Lauren Adams, Ray McKinnon, Phil Chambliss, and Roger Corman (along with many others).

The aim of this project is to share the diversity and range and power of Southern cinema with the outside world (which might have some misconceptions about whether there is diversity and range in Southern cinema).

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The University of Georgia Press is holding its White Sale now through August 31st.  Seventy-five percent off of selected titles and some good ones at that.

Pollinated Here & There

The Guardian's Philip Hoare pens an interesting article about the Turnstall whale, widely believed to be the "real life" inspiration for Melville's Moby Dick and whose largely entact skeleton will go on display next week in London:

In 1825, a huge bull sperm whale stranded on the beach at Tunstall, north of Hull. Crowds gathered to gawp at the monster thrown up from the abyss. A medieval act - still in force today - decreed that any whale, dolphin, porpoise or sturgeon washed up on English shores is the property of the monarch. But on this stretch of coastline, that right devolved to the Lord Paramount of the Seigniory of Holderness, Sir Clifford Constable. And so the whale was taken to nearby Burton Constable Hall, where its skeleton was articulated as a sort of gothic folly in the grounds.

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Stanford professor Carol Schloss has settled her suit against the James Joyce Estate and Joyce's batcrazy grandson Stephen:  "As part of an agreement reached this week, the Joyce estate said it would not sue scholar Carol Schloss for copyright infringement if the books, manuscripts and other documents she wants to cite both in print and on a Web site were only made available in the United States."  You can read more about the case here.

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A PhD candidate at the University of Leeds has disproven a widely held belief that erotic literature consumption in the 18th century was a solitary affair.  Jenny Skipp's research shows that "the erotic texts were read aloud everywhere from alehouses to coffee shops."  More here.

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Hugh Grant plans on joining the ever-growing list of actor-turned-writer, but he's concerned that his celebrity status might make things a little too easy for him, so he says, "When I've finished it, I'll send it to an editor, anonymously, in order for it to be judged objectively. Because we all know about editors don't we?  I could copy out the Yellow Pages and they would still publish it simply because I'm a celebrity.
This way at least, my manuscript could be turned down by some 21-year-old publisher and I would walk away totally humiliated."

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The Houston Chronicle profiles five cowboy poets.

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Not sure this qualifies as a "school book ban" shocker considering the writer being banned, but a Texas school has removed Henry Miller's name from a list of authors approved for research assignments.  Here's a, um, taste of Tropic of Cancer {link to playboy.com.  No nuddie photos but url might be an IT red flag}.

Here & There

Fence is moving from New York City to the New York State Writers Institute in Albany, NY.

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It seems that writers pay being on the level of fifth-grade lemonade-stand attendees isn't just a U.S. phenomenon.  From Korea:

Last week, statistics released by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism confirmed a time-tested adage in Korean that "art is a hungry thing.'' The data, based on a survey of 2,000 people in art and culture circles, showed how economically hard life is for most of artists.

Among the eight fields surveyed--literature, (painting) art, photography, architecture, traditional Korean music, music, theater, dance, film and popular entertainment--those earning a living from applied or commercial arts, such as architecture or entertainment, fared relatively well.

But for writers, things could not be more grim. Ninety-four percent of the 200 respondents said they earn 500,000 won [US$530] or less per month on average from activities related to their original job--writing--with 37 percent earning nothing.

The International Herald Tribune profiles Irma Boom, a book designer who is set to be awarded a gold medal at the Lepzig Book Festival:

Winning prizes is nothing new for Boom. Working with a single assistant in her Amsterdam studio, she is also accustomed to struggling — in one way or another — to make each of her books as inspiring and surprising as possible. Over the years, she has experimented with everything from elaborate color-codes and hidden motifs to scented bindings, printing on filter coffee paper, producing a 2,136-page book with no page numbers or index, and hacking page edges with a circular saw.

Unexpected though Boom's books look, feel and smell, there is always an underlying logic to their design. The rough-hewn edges of Hicks's book evoke the selvages of her textiles, and the white cover was chosen as a contrast to their rich colors.

{via and more links at metafilter}

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Slushpile Scott spreads the Larry Brown love over at Beatrice.

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"The Stan Laurel Correspondence Archive Project hopes to collect and catalog as many of Stan's letters as is possible, and make their content available to fans and researchers all around the world allowing everyone to better understand his life and celebrate his comedic genius."

A Miracle Here & There

This week, Larry Brown's final novel, A Miracle of Catfish, goes on sale, and hopefully we'll be reading a lot about it and Brown over the next few months.  In the Jackson (MS) Clarion-Ledger, there's a brief review of the book; a great profile of and conversation with Brown's widow, Marie Annie;  and a short article about Marie Annie's decision to allow Algonquin to handle the unfinished novel. 

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I somehow missed this last week and just heard about it on a local-access TV interview.  It appears that the Raleigh News & Observer's book coverage, like so many other papers across the country, will be undergoing some major changes, starting with the move of J. Peder Zane from editor of the book review section to an "ideas" columnist, which I suppose is a promotion(?).  While the News & Observer insists that there will be not be a reduction of its two-pages in the Sunday paper, one can't help wonder if we Raleighites can expect more reviews of the syndicated variety.  Meanwhile, Bob Hoover has more on the shrinking coverage of books in newspapers.

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The LA Times has an interesting article about the Los Angeles Corral of the Westerners historical group, an organization that is

...dedicated to ensuring that storytellers separate the truth from tall tales. Its Los Angeles Corral members — half of whom are professional historians and half amateurs — have published more than 1,000 accounts about major episodes in the history of the West, including Gen. George Armstrong Custer at Little Big Horn and Billy the Kid, a.k.a. William Bonney.

They have sifted fact from fiction about vigilante groups, gunfights and lynchings, the lasting legends of Pony Express riders and the route of the Butterfield Overland Mail stagecoach. Their findings are compiled in nearly 250 issues of quarterly booklets called the Branding Iron, as well as in 22 Brand Books and 33 commemorative pamphlets.

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50 Cent the writer/rapper has helped make urban lit a highly profitable venture, even though sales don't translate to a spot on best-sellers lists:

Publishing industry sources say the books have been flying off the shelves, so far. And at a cultural moment in which rappers are shilling everything from wireless networks to air fresheners, 50 Cent's expansion of G-Unit has made him the "gangster-style Oprah" in the opinion of Vibe magazine Editor in Chief Danyel Smith. "There's a whole generation of people who feel underserved by the types of books that are often categorized as 'mainstream,' " Smith said. "50 and his management team are going to exploit that and hopefully serve some readers at the same time. From a marketing perspective, I think it's genius."

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The Brooklyn Rail's Ryan McDermott offers up a number of quotes on oppression.  My favorite is from James Baldwin:  "The world’s definitions are one thing and the life one actually lives is quite another. One cannot allow oneself, nor can one’s family, friends, or lovers—to say nothing of one’s children—to live according to the world’s definitions: one must find a way, perpetually, to be stronger and better than that."

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It appears that Ed Champion had some of the same issues with Joshua Ferris' much-praised Then We Came to an End that I did.  Namely, the first-person plural rubs us the wrong way after a couple of dozen page. 

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The AP gives us a look at H.P. Lovecraft's Providence.

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Newsweek lists a few literary social-networking site.

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The language blog HeiDeas posts its third annual found-up of Simpsons linguistic humor. {via}

π

Good news for the New York students who so brazenly uttered the word vagina during their public reading of The Vagina Monologues:  Their one-day suspensions have been rescinded. 

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I know you've probably read this elsewhere, but I would have to turn in my William Carlos Williams Fan Club membership if I didn't mention that an unpublished Williams poem that has been a treasured heirloom of a Missouri family has been donated to and will be published by Southeast Missouri State University:

Williams wrote “About a Little Girl” in 1921 after diagnosing Michael and Carl Lund’s mother with leukemia when she was 11. Along with his literary career, Williams had a medical practice in Rutherford, N.J.

Lund said Williams was a friend of his mother’s family, and thought after reviewing medical tests that she was likely to die. The poem contrasts a happy, outgoing “angel” of a child with the death he believed would overtake her.

As it turned out, Williams’ diagnosis was wrong and the child, Marian Macy, lived until 2002 — two weeks short of 92. The poem, which Williams signed with his initials, WCW, was passed from Marian’s mother to Marian, then to her two sons.

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Be sure to stop by theBookseller.com and vote for your favorite shortlisted title for The Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year.  Your choices: 

• Tattooed Mountain Women and Spoon Boxes of Daghestan
• How Green Were the Nazis?
• D. Di Mascio?s Delicious Ice Cream: D. Di Mascio of Coventry?An Ice Cream Company of Repute, with an Interesting and Varied Fleet of Ice Cream Vans
• The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification
• Proceedings of the Eighteenth International Seaweed Symposium
• Better Never To Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence

You can read more about this illustrious prize here.

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Google software engineer Matthew Gray explains his project to "map the world, based on the frequency of its locations mentioned in books."

We've all seen views of the Earth from space, where the numerous pinpoints of light on the ground combine to yield a speckled map of the world. I wanted to show the Earth viewed from books, where individual mentions of locations in books combine to yield another interpretation of the globe. The intensity of each pixel is proportional to the number of times the location at a given set of coordinates is mentioned across all of the books in Google Books Search.

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NSFW:  the Rare Book Room.  Okay, no nudity or strong language or anything that would cause your cube-mate to call you out for having porn up on your screen, unless he or she considers high-quality scans of some of the worlds rarest books to be porn, which for some they may be. 

Monday's Here & There

On April 7th, the fifteen libraries in Jackson Country, Oregon, will close due to lack of funding, including the loss of nearly $7 million in federal money this year.  This is being called the  largest library shutdown in U.S. history.

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The San Francisco Chronicle looks at the growing field of hip-hop studies.

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The Guardian's Giles Foden defends the term literary:

This genealogy of literariness is something of which we should all be proud, writers and readers alike. We should certainly not pretend literariness is something other than what it is, though there is actually a long tradition of doing just that. At some point in the history of English literature, literariness became a bad thing, something elitist, decadent and sexually ambiguous, certainly not socially useful or morally pure.

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From Variety: "Director Mark Romanek was scouting locations for WB's adaptation of "A Million Little Pieces" when author James Frey went from literary darling to pariah after admitting that parts of his book were fictionalized. The pic stalled when Frey was vilified on "Oprah," but now Warners and producers Plan B and John Wells are still trying to figure out if it can be salvaged. The latest: Tod Williams is attempting a new draft that will include the Frey controversy as a plot point."

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Jonathan Lethem, who will be making an appearance at Raleigh's Quail Ridge Books & Music on March 26th, is interviewed by the Boston Globe.

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Nick Cave talks about his new band, Grinderman.

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The Columbus Dispatch interviews the great rock critic Greil Marcus:

Q: Is there a record you have no qualms about calling perfect from start to finish?
A: The first Rolling Stones album because it was just so audacious. It still is so audacious. It doesn’t matter whether what they’re playing is good or bad. The spirit is there, first moment to last.

Any other album that I’d say "Oh, this is a great record; this is what it’s all about" is definitely going to have one song on it that I hate — like, say, Time Out of Mind and Make You Feel My Love. Oh, please: Where is Engelbert Humperdinck when we need him?

Have They Announced the Best Picture Yet?: Here and There on a Monday Morning

Tomorrow marks the 200th anniversary of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's birth.  The Boston Globe's Michael Kenney examines the role that Longfellow may have played in the antislavery movement.  Recently, Longfellow's Cambridge, Mass., home was placed on the "Network to Freedom," a program by the National Park Service to recognize sites on the Underground Railroad. 

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J. Peder Zane gives us the books to look forward to in the Spring.

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Here's a list of participants for this year's Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival.

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The NY Sun's Paul McLeary reviews William T. Vollmann's new book Poor People, which hits shelves this week.

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The operatic version of David Lynch's Lost Highway doesn't go over very well with this critic from the NYT.

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The Southern Independent Bookseller's Association has announced the nominees for its SIBA Book Award.

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It's my distinct pleasure to give you one of the most asinine first lines ever written for an Esquire article:  "It has now been five days since Britney Spears became Xavier McDaniel."  Thank you, Chuck Klosterman.

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Another baseball season, another profile of pitcher/poet Miguel Batista.  This was old news right around the time the Yankees last won a World Series.  Still, it's always nice to see the copare/contrast of the locker room: Tolstoy v. Field & Stream, etc.

Happier Than Yesterday Here and Theres

Gotta keep it short and sweet this morning.  Piles have sprouted overnight.  Plus, there's this little thing I've been working on called a short story for something I'm calling SoTShoStoWriMo.  I do wonder what inspired this act of insanity on my part on a daily basis:

Dzanc Books is really getting its act together in the wake of receiving their tax exempt status.  That's a great lineup and they're just getting started.

Did you know that Sam Lipsyte has a fan page on myspace?  If you go there, you can find a short story from 2006 Underrated Writer Richard Grayson.

For the second year in a row, a man--gad!--has made it to the shortlist of the Romantic Novel of the Year Award.  Only the sixth man to do so in the award's 46 year history.  I'm not sure, but I'm guessing there's probably a man law that covers this.

Speaking of, Books by You will make you the main character, even put you on the cover, of a romance novel.  If you pay them that is:  "Customers answer 20 to 30 questions about themselves and their beloved, ranging from body type to pet names. Then the details are woven into one of the company’s eight formatted novels."  Seriously, what do pets have to do with it? 

Getting Ready to Be Alone Here & There

A bill introduced by a Massachusetts legislator would make Moby-Dick the official book of Massachusetts.  Another bill would make squash the state vegetable.   

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The LA Times takes a look at the sad demise of the local bookstore: "A good bookstore...is unlike any other retail space. Where else can you linger, sample the merchandise and then casually reject it if not quite right? Your local pizzeria would frown on such behavior. In a culture that worships money, bookstores are one of the few commercial institutions where cost doesn't trump all other considerations. Massive bestsellers share shelf space with the most obscure tomes."

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Folks in Scotland, including Ian Rankin, are up in arms over the government's refusal to help save the house in which Arthur Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes because he "does not occupy a significant enough position in the nation's consciousness."

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You have to check out this story about yet another outraged, hyperzealous parent who is seething mad about a book (I Saw Esau, The Schoolchild's Pocket Book) being available in her daughter's school library, but don't worry about reading the article; check out the photos in the sidebar.  Okay, you at least need to get the mom's brilliant quote: "I understand that it is a book of poetry, but there is a fine line between poetry art and porn and this book's illustrations are absolutely offensive in every way."

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A friend of Syntax of Things sends word of an interview with Jack Butler which will appear in the next issue of the Mississippi Quarterly.  I don't know what I can do short of changing the name of this blog to "Read Jujitsu for Christ for Christ's Sake" to convince everyone who stops by here to read this man's work.  You won't be sorry.  Anyway, there's no direct link to the interview but my friend did send me a copy and I'm giving you an excerpt, one of the many quotable portions of the text (beneath the cut):

Groundhog's Day Here and There

If you happen to be in the area of Brick, New Jersey, especially in the vacinity of bookstores, and you see a guy running around in a Speedo, don't be alarmed.  He's trying to sell his book.

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An unemployed Japanese man was busted for stealing over fifty books from his local library.  His excuse:  he wanted to learn how to write an award winning book.

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The University of Akron postponed a planned author visit and canceled a common reading by incoming freshman of Jimmy Santiago Baca's A Place to Stand because the author has a criminal past.

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Time profiles Ishmael Beah, whose A Long Way Gone is Starbucks' next book club pick, or whatever they're calling it.

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NASCAR is continuing its relationship with Harlequin and plans to release upwards of 20 books in 2007.

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Does anyone else get the feeling that Penguin's wiki-novel, while an interesting concept, is going to end badly?  Still, it could be fun to watch. 

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The British are gearing up for World Book Day on March 1st.  Organizers of the event want to know the ten books "you can't live without."  Wouldn't it be fun to stuff the ballot to give it an American flair?  Maybe not.

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Here's why I'm taking the Colts to win the Super Bowl: "He plays guitar, meditates and has a horseshoe tattooed on his shoulder. He considers the late author Hunter S. Thompson a hero and paid nearly $2.5 million to buy Jack Kerouac’s original coffee-stained manuscript of “On The Road.” He’s even fought an addiction to painkillers."

Here, There, and Congrats

Before I get on to the links this morning, I would like to extend a congratulations to friend and collaborator Trevor Jackson and his wife who welcomed their first child into the world yesterday.  Will is a good looking boy and I'm sure the family, including Great-Grandmom Creekside, is proud. 

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The AP takes a look at the return to the stage of Amari Baraka's The Dutchman.

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The North Carolina Writers' Network will be hosting a brunch fundraiser to honor favorite son Will Blythe and the Blythe family's contribution to the literary arts in North Carolina.  No word on whether or not Duke fans will be allowed to attend.

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Mediaweek profiles longtime Harper's editor Lewis Lapham who will be inducted into the Magazine Editor's Hall of Fame next month.

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I guess it's only natural that there would be a James Joyce Irish Pub in Atlanta. Right?

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Robert Fulford of Canada's National Post discusses the rejection letter, including this mythological Chinese one:

"We have read your manuscript with boundless delight. If we were to publish your paper, it would be impossible for us to publish any work of lower standard. And as it is unthinkable that in the next thousand years we shall see its equal, we are, to our regret, compelled to return your divine composition, and to beg you a thousand times to overlook our short sight and timidity."

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My head nearly explodes every time I go to a good library book sale.  I don't think I would survive the Chicago International Remainder & Overstock Book Exposition. {via}

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Will Leith uses the "Meet the Author" site and writes about his experience for the Guardian:

People who write books are for the most part solitary individuals, who do not look or sound anything like the people you usually see on your screen. They have normal faces and normal teeth, rather than screen faces and screen teeth. But this is the information age; whoever you are, the digital camera will find you eventually. Right now, it is the turn of writers to be caught in the net. And the net, in this case, comes in the form of Meet the Author.

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Almost time to celebrate the fifth birthday of the best blog ever, but you don't have to bring gifts to Largehearted Boy.  He's giving them to you.

This & That

A professor at the University of Montana has uncovered what he believes to be a previously unknown work by Coleridge.  What makes this even more interesting is the fact that the work is a verse translation of Goethe's "Faust".  Read more about the story of the discovery here.

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Speaking of Goethe, ever wondered why he doesn't get more recognition as one of the greats, especially in the English-speaking world? 

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Even if I weren't a member of the Litblog Co-op, I would be highly recommending this quarter's Read This! title.  Head over to the LBC site and check it out and set aside a good chunk of time to sit down with this book.  It's a long one but so worth your time.  Trust me.

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The New York Observer's Chris Schott takes a look at one of Jack Kerouac's favorite New York dive bars, The West End.

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Denver's Westword helps you out with a map of the city's literary landmarks (and manages to publish one of the worst "artistic" renderings of Kerouac I've ever seen.)  Also in Westword, Amy Haimerl takes a look at Kerouac's first trip to the Mile High City:

It was just ten days, 240 hours, 14,400 minutes, but it forever intertwined the destinies of Kerouac and the Queen City of the Plains. No longer just a cowtown, now an epicenter of the Beat Movement. Something, someplace. Producer of an American original that only a post-war America could embrace. A place to search for identity and meaning. The magnetic pull of 5,280 feet above sea level sucking back the Massachusetts boy in body and mind, covering him with the sense of possibility.

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The 2007 Conference on Southern Literature kicks off Thursday in Chattanooga.

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A scientific study shows that winning the Nobel Prize could add a few years to your life.  The researchers claim that while their study focused on the Nobel winners, this could very well extend to folks who win other prestigious prizes.  No word on if winning the Quill actually decreased your lifespan.

This and That

Over thirty years after their mysterous fight in a Mexican cinema, it appears that Gabriel García Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa may have finally made amends or at least it would appear that way.  According to this report in the Guardian, Vargas Llosa has penned an introduction to a special 40th anniversary edition of García Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.

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Atlanta's Emory University has acquired Ted Hughes's love letters to his mistress Assia Wevill, letters Hughes had asked be destroyed upon his death.

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Here's a conceptual art installation that I would love to attend:  free books!  Of course, I would be going for the sake of art...of course.

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Just what the world needs...another MTV reality show.  This one, however, pits six wannabe writers against each other for a chance to win a contributing editor position at Rolling Stone.  I guess it does beg the question, which has sunk lower, MTV or Rolling Stone?

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Perhaps only interesting to those in the Triangle area of North Carolina, but the small town of Hillsborough, just a few miles from where I sit, has decided to form a committee to name a town poet laureate.  Before you laugh, consider that "The county seat is a 'literary town' with many writers, said Eric Hallman, a Town Board member who brought up the idea in October. A number of well-known writers, including, among others, the novelists Lee Smith and Allan Gurganus, call Hillsborough home." 

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In the New York Sun, Benjamin Ivry examines Baudelaire's place in contemporary America:

Baudelaire's life was grim, highlighted by unrequited love, penury, lack of critical acceptance, prosecution on charges of obscenity, and illness leading to his early death at 46 from syphilis. Some American fans have tried to add humor to alleviate the gloom, like the San Francisco writer Daniel Handler who in his mock-ghastly Lemony Snicket series of books for young readers dubbed his protagonists the "Baudelaire Orphans." "Say it with Flowers" Baudelaire T-Shirts and tote-bags are sold online (cafepress.com) by Leaping Dog Press, a small literary publisher in Raleigh, North Carolina, and Baudelaire Soaps, a Swanzey, New Hampshire-based company (baudelairesoaps.com) explains that its bath and beauty products are named in honor of the poet, "or ‘Chuck' as we call him around here."