RIP Rosie

It is with great sadness that I report that Rosie, the great labrador who accompanied Robert Birnbaum on his interviews, passed away last week. I was lucky enough to meet Rosie a few years ago. A gallery of Rosie in action can be found here. (via Matthew Tiffany)

Bobby-B In Da House!

Robert Birnbaum talks with Susanna Moore.

Birnbaum Alert

Robert Birnbaum talks with Colum McCann and conducts the interview in a car! Also, I think this may be the only interview in which the journalist in question picks up his son from school midway through the conversation. As always with Birnbaum, there’s more to this interview than quirky environmental variables.

Birnbaum Alert

Robert Birnbaum talks with Donald Hall.

Birnbaum Alert

Robert Birnbaum chats with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

Ed Jones

Robert Birnbaum talks (a second time) with Edward P. Jones.

Birnbaum vs. Benedict

Robert Birnbaum, who I appear to be synchronized with on a similar interview update schedule, talks with Elizabeth Benedict at the infamous Mt. Auburn Cemetery. Thankfully, Birnbaum resists any and all easy jokes about eggs.

The Bat Segundo Show #60: Robert Birnbaum

Author: Robert Birnbaum

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Detached but amused by the pair-up.

Subjects Discussed: The value of conducting interviews at a cemetery, Ed Champion’s arrest, the current state of the literary world, literary feuds, Richard Ford and Colson Whitehead, Stanley Crouch, Nicholson Baker, Leon Wieseltier, Anthony Burgess, US vs. UK journalism, Cynthia Ozick, the literary blogosphere, Birnbaum’s participation at the Oscar blog, West Coast vs. East Coast weather, reading and page limits, the “importance” of the New York Times Book Review, Gilbert Sorrentino, Sam Tanenhaus, Thomas McGuane’s Nothing But Blue Skies book tour cancellation, Laura Miller, an attempt to stop the interview by a Mt. Auburn employee, examining a Mt. Auburn Cemetery leaflet of rules, John Updike, Joan Didion, comparisons with the publishing and the music industry, the NYTBR contemporary fiction coverage, list-making, classic vs. contemporary literature, Paul Collins, small presses vs. large presses, the onslaught of galleys, BEA, Birnbaum as editor, party pictures, celebrity culture, visionary magazines, Henry Luce, artistry vs. Photoshop, California fruit labels, the advertising world, who Birnbaum will talk with, Nicole Richie, authors having emotional breakdowns, the current state of literary journalism, and staying humble.

Birnbaum Alert

The man talks with Sebastian Junger.

Birnbaum Alert

Birnbaum talks with Susan Straight.

Birnbaum Alert

Robert Birnbaum talks with Eduardo Galeano.

Bookish Journalism Summit

The extremely entertaining tale (along with the inevitable podcast) on how the below happened will follow shortly. (I even got to meet Rosie.) For now, I’m still decompressing from the flight. So bear with me as I adjust back to PDT again. Many thanks to El Rojo himself and Megan Sullivan for providing assist on this.

(Top photo courtesy of Ms. Tyrieosa.)

Birnbaum Alert

Robert Birnbaum talks with Lawrence Weschler and the marvelous George Saunders.

There’s Always Room for Bob

I’m still waking up here and I’ve had scant sleep. Don’t expect a coherent blog post until the late morning. But in the meantime, do check out Mr. Birnbaum’s interview with Thomas Beller.

Roundup

This may very well be a first. Dan Wickett has launched an Emerging Writers Network Short Fiction Contest, in which he’ll be reading all of the short stories and passing 20 finalists on to Charles D’Ambrosio. Talk about using the Internet for an innovative purpose. The prize is $500. And the rules seem more ethical than most literary fiction contests I’ve seen.
Robert Birnbaum talks with Alberto Manguel. Borges fans should check it out.
The Octavia Butler Memorial Scholarship has been announced. (Thanks, Tayari)
Wordstock, which has no relation to a flighty yellow bird or flighty hippies, is happening on April 21-23, 2006 in Portland. Word on the street is that Chuck Barris may challenge Dave Eggers to a fistfight, with Ira Glass as referee.
And speaking of literary festivals, Frances digs up this Leah Garchik item: “Books by the Bay, the 10-year-old Yerba Buena Gardens book festival sponsored by the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association, is kaput. The association’s Hut Landon said the festival, featuring author talks, panel discussions and displays by various vendors and publishers, had cost $20,000, and organizers felt it didn’t get enough attention to warrant the expense.” Frances opines that if Debi Echlin were still around, the NCIBA would have figured out a way to make up the shortfall. I’m inclined to agree. Last year’s Books by the Bay (interested parties can find my report here) happened to take place on a beautiful and sunny day, but I don’t recall seeing flyers or posters, much less heavy promotion, in indie bookstores to get people there. If there was any lack of attendance, I blame the NCIBA for failing to get the word out. It’s almost as if the organizers wanted Books by the Bay to die. I think enough individual donors or even a few more sponsors could have picked up the slack. I’ll be very sorry to see Books by the Bay go, but hopefully Litquake will be able to pick up the slack.
Over at Mark’s, a number of the smart and lovely women contributing to the forthcoming anthology, The May Queen, are guest blogging. A substantial chunk of the contributors are going to be at A Clean, Well-Lighted Place on April 3. I’m almost finished with the book and I’ll express my thoughts (less rushed this time) in a future 75 Books post.
Laird Hunt on “Nonrealist Fiction.”
The Morning News Tournament of Books continues, although Kate Schlegel is out of her mind to say no to Mary Gaitskill’s Veronica.
The Rake faces a dynastic contretemps just before his 30th birthday.
A.S. Byatt: “I shall never write an autobiography. The fairy stories are the closest I shall ever come to writing about true events in my life.”
More patriarchal bullshit: “the indispensible literary spouse.”
“The Dreamlife of Rupert Thomson.” (via Maud, who I understand has a Thomson interview of her own coming soon)
Gideon Lewis-Kraus on Black Swan Green: “Most recent bildungsromans stock tinseled epiphanies and fresh-baked-bread redemptions. Though they’re ostensibly about the character coming of age, the bad examples tend to be about coming-of-age itself. But Mitchell has refused the scaffolding on which he might hang a climax. By allowing Jason the stumbling progress of a novel in stories, Mitchell has given him an actual youth, not one smoothly engineered in retrospect.”

Roundup/Update

Podbop: Enter your city and listen to MP3 snippets of bands touring in your town this week. (via Irregardless)
C. Max Magee, having now shifted to a more RSS-friendly home, offers a thoughtful take on the future of the book and gets a surprise response from George Saunders.
Robert “Prolfiic Is My Temperament, Prolific Is My Interviewing” Birnbaum talks with Andrew Delbanco.
Well, I guess Jessa Crispin hates such “desperate” works as James Joyce’s Ulysses, e.e. cummings’ No Thanks, Lord Byron’s early poems, Willa Cather’s One of Ours, Waltman’s Leaves of Grass, Thoreau’s Walden, Virginia Woolf’s early novels, and Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style (which was initially self-published).
Haven’t forgotten about the Black Swan Green discussion with Megan. It’s coming. The ball’s in my court. But there are many things currently going on. Hopefully, we’ll get up the copious correspondence next week.
I have a little under ten books to log for the 75 Book Challenge, including my long and long-delayed thoughts on Perlman’s Seven Types of Ambiguity. Again, spare moments, hopefully soon.
Segundo: Three podcasts to finalize, some very special authors (including one HUGE surprise!) coming in the upcoming weeks, including Jonathan Ames, who also got a chance to talk with Pinky’s Paperhaus when rolling through Los Angeles.
Nor have I forgotten about the Naughty Reading Photo Contest. I apologize to all the entrants for the delay.
Do you have any more coffee?

Birnbaum Watch

Okay, an effort at moving forward. It won’t be easy.

For now, check out Birnbaum’s interview with James Lasdun. Lasdun’s latest book is Seven Lies, which somehow made its way into my hands at BEA. I don’t really remember how this happened, but, for the most part, I dug the book, even if it seemed to borrow just a tad too much of its feel from John O’Hara and Christopher Isherwood for my tastes.

Needlessly Snarky (Due Possibly to Being Subjected to Fourteen Listens of “The 12 Days of Xmas” Over the Past 72 Hours) Roundup

Ready Steady Book has a comprehensive Books of the Year 2005 symposium.
Another year, another end-of-the-year panel, another set of pages that isn’t formatted properly for Firefox. But despite the usual platitudes from the usual people, Mr. Birnbaum maanages to offer a defense of Hitchens that many of his naysayers (including this blogger) might wish to consider.
Question: Will the moralists now go after Chuck Palahniuk with the same vigor that they go after music, films, and video games? Come on, you fundies, you’ve got your smoking gun!
First, Orhan Pamuk. Now Abdullah Yildiz. In Turkey, it’s all literary persecution, all the time! Note to the hypersensitive Turkish nationalists: Georgie Porgie only served you pudding and pie and kissed the girls and made them cry! Let the little fucker run away and learn to deal.
Rodney Whitaker (aka Trevnian), author of the source material for the worst Clint Eastwood movie ever made, has passed on.
Do crime writers get a bad rap?
An interesting review of Park Honan’s Marlowe bio, wondering how much of biography is fiction.
The playwright Gary Mitchell has received serious death threats and was attacked by men with baseball bats and gasoline bombs. Serious shit.
Another million dollar debut deal. This time, for Diane Setterfield, a Yorkshire French teacher whose turned out a gothic novel in the vein of Jane Eyre, et al.
Jack Anderson: last of a dying breed?
Dan Green wonders why critics are picking on John Barth.

Birnbaum Watch

Missed it while my legs were locked under wintry work, but Bob-B has talked with Marc Estrin and Barbara Ehrenreich.

Burn Balm

Robert Birnbaum insists that he has “chewed the fat” with Ron Rash. This strikes me as a potentially dangerous activity, particularly if you are watching your carbs. If I were of a more carnivorous mindset (it is, after all, the morning), I would fully expect Mr. Birnbaum to “chew the thin” at some point — ideally, sacrificing a few anorexic chickens into the barbeque.

But no matter. This is a silly question of semantics. The important thing here is that Birnbaum has talked with yet another writer, squeezing more Southern writers into the talk than chicken into jambalaya.

Birnbaum Alert

Bob “He Puts the Cream In Your Coffee But Asks You First In Case You Take It Black” Birnbaum talks with recent MacArthur fellow Jonathan Lethem. There’s also a sweet photo of Lethem with a certain canine friend.

Birnbaum Alert

Robert Birnbaum, who, contrary to current rumors, is not interviewing book warehouse workers, talks with Frederick Busch. And since proper beer nomenclature is of pressing importance these days, I should point out that Mr. Busch has no relation to any novelist named Anheuser.

In any event, these two cats talk about everything from poetry to nameless dogs to Stephen King to the four greatest Hollywood novels. Joe Bob says check it out.

The Long Colloquy

We’ve ribbed James Howard Kunstler before for his extraordinary cynicism. Nevertheless, having read The Long Emergency and remaining quite concerned about the issues expressed therein, we’d be remiss if we didn’t point you over to Birnbaum’s latest interview with Mr. Kunstler himself. Rather interestingly, The Long Emergency did not receive a single review in any major newspaper. Bobby B made efforts to contact several book review editors and none chose to respond.

See How the Other Half Writes

In light of the recent Washington Post scandal, Ms. Tangerine Muumuu digs out this interview between one Robert Birnbaum and one Marianne Wiggins.

The “We Were Too Sluggish From Tuesday Night’s Festivities” Roundup

Robert “Two Sheds” Birnbaum is at it again. This time, he talks with Camille Paglia. The real question here is whether Camille was ever confused for a pirate incarnation of Princess Leia.
The Tireless Dan Wickett is now talking with publicists as part of his latest panel series. We suspect that Mr. Wickett will be interviewing some of the people in the warehouse before the year is up.
We could honestly care less about the Quills Awards, largely because Nick Hornby and Sue Monk Kidd should not be encouraged any further. But if you care, the nonsense can be found here.
A new symposium will compare Bruce Springsteen’s lyrics with Walt Whitman and Samuel Beckett.
Apparently, The Almond: The Sexual Awakening of a Muslim Woman is, according to the Daily Star, “no more original than that of the film 9 1/2 Weeks, without the soundtrack to keep it going.”
Yo, Book Babes, it’s Epileptic, not Epilepsy.
A sketch of Ted Hughes drawn by Sylvia Plath is up for auction this fall.

Take That, Birnbaum!

Today’s Word of the Day is “jejune.”

jejune \juh-JOON\, adjective:
1. Lacking in nutritive value.
2. Displaying or suggesting a lack of maturity; childish.
3. Lacking interest or significance; dull; meager; dry.

Were I to make this public now, it would be dismissed as the raving of a mind at the end of its tether, unable to distinguish fiction from reality, real life from the jejune fantasies of its youth.
–Ronald Wright, A Scientific Romance

By the inflection of his voice, the expression of his face, and the motion of his body, he signals that he is aware of all the ways he may be thought silly or jejune, and that he might even think so himself.
–Jedediah Purdy, For Common Things

A while ago, Michael Kinsley wrote that Jewish Americans envied Israelis for living out history in a way that made the comfort and security of life in New York or Los Angeles seem jejune.
–Geoffrey Wheatcroft, “The Big Kibbutz,” New York Times, March 2, 1997

Jejune derives from Latin jejunus, “fasting, hence hungry, hence scanty, meager, weak.”