A pal of mine attends a sex writers reading and a burlesque show, lives to tell the tale and invents an impromptu game on the spot: “I started playing a game with myself during the opening of the burlesque show, where I’d ask in my best inner announcer voice, if what was going on on the stage was Porn or anti-Porn. If you find it exciting (oops, almost wrote ‘arousing’ but my inner prude balked at that word) the answer is ‘porn’ and if its not, its ‘anti-porn.'”
Month / June 2006
Roundup
- Lest you believe that Texas (outside of Austin) is a bad place, I should note that this year is Conan’s 100th birthday and the folks in Cross Plains, Texas do know how to celebrate a native son. (via Slushpile)
- It seems that US Senators have plenty of time to write books, but it can’t be an accident that most of the writers are Democrats. Call me a man of civic responsibility, but shouldn’t the Demos be putting all their energies into fighting the Republicans and gearing up for the midterm elections?
- Colm Toibin’s The Master has won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Strangely enough, Toibin is the first Irish novelist to win the award since its 1996 inception. He is also the first novelist named “Colm” to win any award whatsoever. The IMPAC people are now scouring the Irish countryside looking for more writers named “Colm,” hoping that they can be enlisted to keep IMPAC money in Ireland’s good hands.
- This isn’t book-related, but since I’ve been listening to a lot of the Stranglers lately (perhaps, along with The Damned, the most underrated UK punk band to come out of the 1970s), I should note that Hugh Cornwell, the man who penned such unforgettable lyrics as “Whatever happened to Leon Trotsky? / He got an icepick that made his ears burn,” has a new solo album and gets the profile treatment from the Sydney Morning Herald.
- RIP Ingo Preminger.
- Billy Bragg is pissed at MySpace. (via Ron Silliman)
- Mr. T Experience frontman Frank Portman has a book out. (via Largehearted Boy)
- James Wolcot on The Complete New Yorker.
- Stephen Joyce is an asshole.
- An interview with The National’s Matt Berninger.
Karl Rove Conjures Up Michael Brown-Style, Post-Alberto Relief Plan to Cover Up Indictment Charges
The Case for Human Aestheticism
Dan Green riffing from David Ulin’s review of Faulkner’s early novels: “That some modernists/postmodernists are preoccupied with aesthetic questions is true enough, but why are these kinds of questions not considered properly ‘human’? Isn’t the ability to formulate the concept of the aesthetic one of our defining features as a species? Presumably Ulin wants Faulkner’s books to be sources of wisdom, while I want them to be sources of aesthetic delight. But I can see no reason why the former rather than the latter should be the deciding factor in judging a writer’s work sufficiently ‘profound’ to be art.”