- Jeeves is officially being retired from Ask Jeeves, presumably because paying out a licensing fee to the estate of P.G. Wodehouse was too much of a prohibitive cost. The new site is utterly bland without the literary butler.
- Reports from Comic-Con have trickled in: USA Today, GalleyCat, and many panel reports from Newsarama. Also, a Spawn/Batman crossover is in the works.
- Jeffrey Archer, a hack novelist known for prison time and pointing out the bleeding obvious, has acknowledged that his political career is over.
- Betsy Retallack has found an unusual poetic inspiration: her husband’s obsession with junky cars. The success of her first poetry collection has inspired a second book, Whither the Axle My Sweet Love Gutted for Me from the Yard?
- Is Vollmann’s Copernicus book “an onslaught of taxing concepts expressed in an often wearying style?” Or did Dava Sobel simply not take the time to parse the text? This kind of book reviewing defense/copout seems reminiscent of other prodigious authors.
- To read and possibly respond to later: James Wood on realist fiction. (Thanks, David!)
- Keith Gessen on Russian writer Vasily Grossman.
- Today is Paul Auster Day in Brooklyn. (via Jeff)
- Lev Grossman continues to demonstrate his irrelevance by asking E.L. Doctorow 10 questions that seem to have been prepared in 3 minutes. (via Mark)
- An IHT article on British small presses: are they better than the big guns?
- Are polished podcasts better? (via LHB)
- Dan Wickett plans to read a short story, a poem or an essay every day and comment upon it. Apparently, he got the idea from this interesting blog.
© 2006 – 2007, Edward Champion. All rights reserved.
Expect Ask.com to hit the search engine junk heap within two years. Heaven forbid they should continue spending money on the one thing that made them distinctive–and how onerous could the Wodehouse estate’s terms been anyway?
Ed, I have to respectfully dissent regarding Vollmann. Now, I love Vollmann as much as the next guy (as long as the next guy isn’t you), but every once in a while somebody has got to tap him on the shoulder and say “yeah, we know you’re amazing, but you gotta do some rewrites, and cut some of it too”. Or else it’s just going to get worse and worse.
I tried to read Europe Central — I wasn’t having trouble parsing the sentences, but I was having trouble justifying why I’m going to spend like 80 hours of my life reading it all. Know what I mean?
What exactly do they have going for them, other than Jeeves?
I read UNCENTERING THE EARTH — it’s Vollmann’s most accessible work. It’s a pretty straight exploration of Copernicus’ work. At 240-something pages of text, plus notes, etc., it flies by. It was fun and I learned a couple of things.