- There’s a new blog covering literary Chicago called Literago, which makes me wonder why San Literisco, Bookhattan, Los Angelinotypes, and the like haven’t lexically blended their way into fruition.
- I think between the dreadful I Am Charlotte Simmons and the preposterous answers in this profile that Tom Wolfe is far from the energetic gonzo that once made him so interesting. A real shame.
- Sarah gets the Litminds interview treatment.
- Dirty Books. (via Maud)
- Dominic Cavendish talks with Edmund White.
- Elizabeth Crane is spending her time falling down. Give her two months and she plans to get a buzz cut, glasses, and a short-sleeved shirt, abandon her car in the middle of the freeway, and terrorize the closest person resembling Tuesday Weld in Chicago. All this under the direction of Joel Schumacher. Be careful, folks. Ms. Crane is a powder keg.
- Ron Silliman laments the lack of serious novelists who start off as poets. As it so happens, there are many who do. Here is a haiku written by Chuck Palahniuk in the late 1980s:
I hate you harder
Scum sucking sheltered yuppies
Cut me twice tonightSo you see, the poets are out there. There just doing writing poetry on the q.t. for understandable reasons. Speaking of which, Palahniuk recently appeared on the Agony Column.
- William Gass has won the 2007 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism, rendering Mick Jagger’s 1968 prediction correct. You see, many music critics have spent years struggling to figure out what the hell “Jumpin’ Jack Flash / It’s a gas, gas, gas” actually means. What these critics didn’t know was that Jagger was correctly predicting Gass engaging in a series of unexpected jumping jacks upon winning the award. In fact, the whole song is laden with literary soothsaying. What else could “I frowned at the crumbs of a crust of bread” represent but the woes of a struggling writer?
- John Sutherland wonders if first drafts should be ignored.
- It appears that Jack Herman is bamboozling Canadian playwrights.
- Isak reminds us that the time to sign the petition to save small and indie publishers from exorbitant postal rates is running out. Send letters and the like, if you care about an egalitarian postal system.
- Here’s one of the silliest reviewing ledes I’ve seen this year.
- Bill Clinton is now providing clues for the New York Times crossword.
- I hope George Murray knew what he was getting into with this troublesome blog post headline.
- There’s a new Zadie Smith story in The New Yorker. (via Bookblog)
Month / May 2007
Coney Island to Become Interim Wasteland
Village Voice: “If Sitt follows through with stated threats to wait for a new mayoral administration in 2010, Coney Island’s already diminished amusement district could spend years as a torn-up wasteland, leaving only the Cyclone, Dino’s Wonder Wheel Park, Sideshows by the Seashore, and Nathan’s standing amid a vast empty plain.” (Thanks, Richard Grayson!)
LOLNYTBR
Believe It Or Not, There Are More Podcasts Coming
In case the recent slate of podcasts wasn’t enough for you, there are still a good deal of podcasts to come very soon, including coverage of Alternative Press Expo (which includes an audio intervention with a bunch of people from the CW Television Network), an author who returns for a second appearance (and this interview is crazier than the first), and, of course, Carolyn’s interview with LBC Read This! author Alan DeNiro. Stay tuned!
BSS #114: Marshall Klimasewiski & C. Max Magee
Condition of Mr. Segundo: Vacating from vacations.
Guests: C. Max Magee and Marshall Klimasewiski
Subjects Discussed: Drawing upon compartmentalized personal experience, writing unpleasant characters, sabbaticals, maintaining an ever-shifting narrative, writing short stories vs. novels, characters stuck in environments, protracted scenes, human connection vs. work, locals vs. vacationers, John Ruskin, Charles Dodgson, co-opted misfits, and invention vs. personal experience.
EXCERPT FROM SHOW:
Klimasewiski: The odd thing for me — and I don’t know why this is — is that I found Cyrus so much easier to write, even though I don’t think I’m a writer with a really terrific memory. And so therefore I don’t have this great sense of exactly what it was like to be nineteen, or to live inside my own nineteen year old mind. And yet he was so much easier for me to write than the cottagers, who demographically are much closer to me and to people I know. Yet I had a terrible time making them seem to come alive or feel credible in some way in my mind.
(A co-production of the LBC, Pinky’s Paperhaus and The Bat Segundo Show.)
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