There may not be a Books by the Bay this year, but one thing that’s more dependable is Paul Reubens Day. It all goes down this Saturday, July 29. Fifteen years after the infamous exposure. (via the SFist)
Month / July 2006
The Hidden Costs of Education
The Chronicle of Higher Education: “The problem is you can’t get to where I am now without going through a decade or more of immersion in a highly politicized and anti-literary academic culture. You have to spend so many years conforming that, by the time freedom presents itself, you don’t know why you became an English major in the first place. You might even have contempt for your seemingly naïve students, who represent the self that you had to repress in order to be a professional.”
Imitation is the Sincerest Form of Jealousy
Hilarious. Thanks for the laughs, Mr. Wolfe.
And, by the way, it should be patently obvious to anyone reading this blog that I don’t have a brain, that I am “psycho-sexual,” that I am “near-misogynist” (I beat my girl the other day and she liked it) and that I am a far from well-adjusted individual. It is only through the slimmest of margins that I manage to hold onto my day job. There is no need for Mr. Wolfe to take away precious time from “working on a book” to prove what he already knows and believes, and what you should know and believe too. No one is more mystified than I am that you continue to read this banal drivel. It is all composed without a single synaptic impulse. It is contrived and hopeless in intent. There is little in the way of insight and I regularly mangle the English language. The only reason why people like John Updike talk with me is because I blow the man in the alley.
J.K. Rowling Channels Her Inner Spanish Inquisition
Our chief weapon is a character death. A character death and another character dying…our TWO chief weapons are a character death, another character dying, and yet another…our THREE chief weapons…
The Social Darwinism of Book Tours
A Jessa Crispin article now making the rounds and riffing on a David Milofsky piece kvetches about “the traditional book tour,” which is presumably defined as an author giving a series of readings across the nation in front of a crowd. But while I certainly advocate any literary event that involves liquor or strange poets braying into a mike, I think Jessa misconstrues Milofsky’s larger point, which is that the languor one associates with an author appearance might be better dispensed with by literary enthusiasts frequenting their local bookstore readings or paying attention to the listings in the newspapers.
However appealing a reading series might be, it still involves a certain social Darwinism: the reading series organizer invites writers who are hip or in or otherwise down with it. But what of the authors who don’t fit into a “Progressive Reading” agenda? Or who aren’t telegenic or charismatic enough to appeal to an 18-34 demographic? Does this not cheapen or detract from the books that the authors have written?