• Mountain Goats meets Lethem and Moody.
• Becoming Jane: the next Shakespeare in Love?
• The Onion: “I can write 600 words about anything.”
• Elisabeth Bumiller is taking a leave of absence from the New York Times to write a Condoleeza Rice bio. The working title: Betrayal is Easy, It’s the Legs That Take Work.
• Actor Louis Zorich thinks Chekhov has more humanity than Shakespeare. After all, there’s more heart in saying “nuclear wessels” than “If music be the food of love, play on.”
• The latest ridiculous deal: Alan Greenspan’s memoir for $7 million. The hell of it is that it’s all riding on a ten-page proposal. For that kind of advance, you’d think Greenspan would extend the proposal by at least twenty pages. If I were publishing the memoir, I’d demand details! Perhaps a chapter devoted to a spry young Greenspan shacking it up with Ayn Rand for a night of wild animalistic sex. That’s what people buy memoirs for.
• When a teenager has a “porn problem,” he’s taken aside by his parents for a stern but frank talk about sexuality. Alas, Google is no teenager. It’s a major company — indeed, one might argue, an orphan. So instead of the talk, some folks are suing them.
• I believe this was reported first at Maud’s, but the New York Public Library is purchasing William S. Burroughs’ archive. Among the acquisitions: An aborted attempt at a novel called Naked Lunch II: Naked Dinner. Of course, all those large plastic bags filled with randomly snipped text are going to be a bitch and a half for all those unpaid interns to log.
• Centuries later, folks are still arguing over how Shakespeare died. Some say a tumor over the left eye. Some say that the Bard suffered a delayed midlife crisis and attempted to shadow fence himself, with unfortunate mortal consequences. The more eccentric experts, however, suggest that Shakespare actually didn’t die at all and that his body was frozen in a primitive form of cryogenics. This last possibility was apparently where Walt Disney got the idea from.
• People are taking Atwood’s signing device pretty damn seriously.
• A paean to great sportswriting.
• Transcript of Arthur Miller grilled during the McCarthy era.
• RIP Linda Smith.
• The Thomas Wolfe Memorial in Asheville will be getting the Book TV treatment.
• La Haggis has a rememberance of Frederick Busch.
• Can you dig it?

© 2006, Edward Champion. All rights reserved.

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