1. Jerome David Salinger was born on January 1, 1919 — ninety years ago today. Charles McGrath offers some new observations about the relationship between J. D. Salinger and his second most enduring character, Seymour Glass, and wonders what might motivate Salinger’s ongoing and unyielding pursuit of solitude and silence. I have no answer, but I would compare Salinger on one hand to Beat poet Bob Kaufman (who was similarly obsessed with silence) and on another hand to Kurt Cobain, who like Salinger was dreadfully afraid of being phony.
2. It was nice of Books Inq, AuthorScoop and Jason Boog of GalleyCat to call attention to our 2008 Action Poetry randomizer. GalleyCat even excerpted some verses from a sonic nurse ode to Billy Joel.
3. From Sonic nurse to Sonic Youth.
4. Cartoons from the Twilight Zone magazine.
5. Elizabeth Foxwell takes the long view on the publishing industry’s growing pains.
6. Goddammit! Will somebody please create an e-book app for the Verizon LG Dare? ScrollMotion and Lexcycle, I’m talking to both of you. Do I have to get a petition going? Believe it or not, people who don’t only buy products from Apple sometimes read books too.
7. Happy New Year!
8. But no new year can be truly happy as new battles rage in that murderous clusterfuck, that land of fools known as the Middle East. I think it’s incredible that anybody thinks anything good will come from Israel bombing the Gaza Strip. Both sides are motivated by internal politics: the Israel leadership is playing to the February elections, and the Hamas leadership is playing against Fatah in the West Bank. The voices of moderation cannot be heard at times like these. And that’s precisely the idea, for both sides.
9. Happy new year anyway. And, congratulations to my brother Gary for winning first place in a poker tournament (the latest in a long string of tournament wins) at Mohegan Sun over the holidays. This reminds me that I really need to play more poker in 2009.
4 Responses
Happy New Year.
We are
Happy New Year.
We are supposed to have flying cars by now, Weren’t we promised this once upon a time.
Re Sal, I don’t get his schtick if it is schtick. The recluse stuff I can understand and admire. Not publishing anything I don’t get. Supposedly he writes a lot. The thing about it is Catcher was pretty good, but it wasn’t all that.
Thanks for the link. To each his own.
Re 8, see Pynchon Gravity’s Rainbow.
I believe Sophia Coppola has optioned the Tales Inspired by Sonic Yawnth for her 2012 project, but there was some sort of Thurston related mix-up and Jim Backus’ Dirty Old Man routines are finally going to get their rightfull tinseltown due. Dunst Johanson (David) and Murry play Jim Backus as Thurston Howell III, the Magoo years.
Levi dont play poker with a
Levi dont play poker with a man named Doc, he’s a sore loser and a dentist profession, Plays cards like extracted teeth one at a time face upwards.Does pairs on public holidays.
There is no point to writing without publishing. It amounts to no more than luxuriating in the banality of nothingness. And as Pearl sings ‘Nuthin aint nuthin but nuthin, its a negationist expression of unwrit and unseen scribbling existentialist vanity.
Until the Palestinians have
Until the Palestinians have their own piece of the pie, or land, there will be no peace.
Sacco’s Palestine opened my eyes to the Palestinian problem of survival, which is also Israel’s. In the graphic novel Palestine, olive trees are chopped down again and again by Israeli troops which is only scorched earth policy, defintely not win-win.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestine_(comics)
Joe Sacco’s graphic novel, Palestine, won the National Book award in 1996.
http://powells.com/biblio/1-9781560974321-2
“Based on several months of research and an extended visit to the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the early 1990s (where he conducted over 100 interviews with Palestinians and Jews), Palestine was the first major comics work of political and historical nonfiction by Joe Sacco, whose name has since become synonymous with this graphic form of New Journalism.”
“This new edition of (the graphic novel) Palestine also features a new introduction from renowned author, critic, and historian Edward Said (Peace and Its Discontents and The Question of Palestine), one of the world’s most respected authorities on the Middle Eastern conflict.”
Kathleen E. Bennet, The Stranger: “Palestine, the place, as Sacco describes it, is full of contradictions, family love and inhuman violence, horror and humor.”
The Catcher and the Rye:
The Catcher and the Rye: Salinger’s immortality. Cobain had a couple good ones, Heart Shaped Box, About a Girl.