In Lieu of Meaning

Sun-Soaked Roundup

AMR

Who Wants to Be a Literary Billionaire?

J.K. Rowling joins the billionaires club. Unfortunately, since writing the Harry Potter series has largely involved the act of one, there has been nobody for Rowling to downsize. So Rowling, in an effort to turn the maximum profit from her stories, has made it a habit of regularly firing and rehiring herself for 17 cents an hour, only to resell her labor for the greatest price.

The Daily News has more on the Jayson Blair tell-all: “Zuza [my girlfriend] took pictures of me prancing around the newsroom wearing a Persian head wrap that covered my face, Kermit the Frog on my shoulders and a giant fake fur coat. I did a full tour de newsroom in this ?peculiar uniform. It is hard to know what I was feeling, other than it was exhilarating to shock everyone. Perhaps I was crying out for attention.” Crying out for attention? Nah, Jayce, sounds like you were trying to recall some obscure Polynesiasn ceremony that involved Kermit the Frog. But anyone trying to invent horrible euphemisms like “tour de newsroom” needed to be stopped.

Hemingway’s favorite daiquiri bar, the Floridita, is being recreated in London. The original Floridita created a double-strength daiquiri bar for Papa. And it was not far from the original bar that Hemingway began work on For Whom the Bell Tolls. The London managers, however, have planned to throw out all soused writers from the new place. Unless, of course, they demonstrate that they can pay their tab.

The Guardian confirms that Richard and Judy are the Oprah of the UK. Literary champions are hoping to replace Richard with Punch, just to “spice things up.”

Rynn Berry is obsessed with Hitler’s diet, believing that Hilter wasn’t the vegetarian everyone claims him to be.

Brian Greene: The Bill Bryson of physics?

Quickies

The Guardian has an excerpt of Carol Shield’s unfinished novel, Segue, which she was working on at the time of her death.

Terry Gross interviews Stephen King. Hearing Terry Gross describe the beginning of Gerald’s Game in such clinical intellectual terms (apparently, without irony) is pretty hilarious, as are the additional queries that jump from third-person to first-person (”Let’s get Stephen King to the kind of gore and terror and suspense that you create.”). But the second interview has King talking about his accident.

The Globe and Mail features a New Year’s-themed article on the description of drinking in literature that’s also unintentioanlly funny. Really, I couldn’t make this stuff up: “You can, with a little licence, trace an arc in 20th-century drinking literature that follows the act of drinking itself. In Hemingway’s work, the drinking was never-ending, and often celebratory when it wasn’t the weary duty of the lost generation. Hangovers were left largely undescribed, something that could be walked off in the clear air of the Pyrenees, or washed off in a fine and true Michigan trout stream.”

More fun from J.M. Coetzee in the latest NYRoB.

Speculation in the Age on 2004’s Australian heavy-hitters.

Tony Kushner gushes over Eugene O’Neill.

Biggest surprise: USA Today names both Living History and The Five People You Meet in Heaven as worst books of 2003.

Stavros has a translation of the Lost in Translation commercial scene that reveals (no surprise) remarkable caricatures.

And about 70 books on Mao were published in China this year. Perhaps because the 110th anniversary of Mao’s birth was yesterday.