Edward Champion's Return of the Reluctant

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While you await the inevitable long-form posts:

CURRENT AFFAIRS:

• Portuguese poet Eugenio de Andrade has died. He was 82.


• The San Francisco Chronicle declares Michael Houellebecq one of the "most compelling novelists today." He's also been claimed the "most hated man in Europe." No word yet on whether Houllebecq will be accused of molesting an infant or whether he will be appearing as a mafioso in an upcoming reenactment of the Kefauver trials for Court TV.


• Is there a detente in literary London?


• Apparently, there's a concerted effort to break the long-term reading record. 100 hours of continuous reading, according to Guinness. That doesn't seem so tough, but then I'm an inveterate reader and an insomniac..


• Who is Trevanian?


• Lionel Shriver: "I acted like a man." That still doesn't explain the way she kissed her Orange Award.


• Apparently, there's another version of No Exit written by "John-Paul Sartre." Was this Jean-Paul's brother? Or some fly-by-night impostor? Hopefully, the Centre Daily Times fact checkers here will be more diligent in their pursuits than their copyeditors.


• Current theatrical plays are "excellent television scripts" but very few "really show a sense of how to write for the theatre." That's the verdict of some anonymous literary manager at a theatre. But if theatre is transforming into what is essentially live television (and the many "theatrical" reenactments of films and television, with their one-man performances of the Star Wars trilogy and the like suggest that this is the case), the interesting question here is how theatre can draw in the short attention spans while remaining true theatre.


• And we'll be a lot less lazier than this when we offer our final BEA upcoming titles post.

STEPHEN DIXON: For those who caught my post at the LBC site this morning, here's some more Dixon info:

• Small Mouth Press interview: Dixon has published 425 stories and has "another fifty stories" lying around.
• Stephen Dixon on Thomas Bernhard: Was Dixon influenced by Bernhard's long paragraphs? (Rain Taxi)
• "Shoe" -- early excerpt from I (from 1999).
• From McSweeney's: J. Robert Lennon, Jonathan Lethem, a Dixon interview, and another excerpt from I.
• Stephen Dixon at work.
• Excerpt from Phone Rings.

Posted by DrMabuse at June 13, 2005 11:53 AM