I Am Not Spalding

Concerning these little AudBlogs you may or may not be listening to — I want to assure the small audience here that I am not a drone, that I stutter on a regular basis, that just this week I forgot in conversation the first name of a good friend’s great love from 1997, that I was flogged by said friend over the strains of some Yardbirds track, and that I often do not know where in hell these anti-lucidities are going. Spalding Gray remains missing and these audio things, uttered on a cell phone near odd palazzos, adjacent to coiffed, besuitted, beautiful and not so beautiful people who remain hopeless perplexed by any talk outside brokering a deal, only serves as cheap surrogate and handy experiment until Mr. Gray’s hopeful return to crazed modern life. This has been a disclaimer.

Bright Lights, Big Menu

I was going to pull some second-person take on Jay McInerney as New York Times restaurant critic. But, dammit, Liz Spiers beat me to it.

Kate DiCamillo has won the Newberry this year for The Tale of Despereaux. The book concerns a mouse who falls in love with a princess, which is a story that (in all seriousness) I’m likely to get behind. In her early days, DiCamillo collected more than 470 rejection letters, which shows not only that persistence pays off, but that it probably kills a lot of trees in the process.

Monotori Kishi’s Misshitsu, a comic book depicting gonads and, well, a lot of sex, has been ruled obscene in Japan. The obscenity precedent was laid down in 1957 with a Japanese translation of Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

Meanwhile, here at home, the Supreme Court has said no to an appeal in the Tony Twist/McFarlane battle.

Marginalia and Other Crimes shows library book damages in all their sad glory. (via Maud, who’s now back from her trip in Florida).

And, damn, Spalding Gray is missing. (via Bookslut)