1. Lint
2. Marty Beckerman has written a book inspired by Ernest Hemingway called The Heming Way: How to Unleash the Booze-Inhaling, Animal-Slaughtering, War-Glorifying, Hairy-Chested, Retro-Sexual Legend Within… Just Like Papa!.
3. “After watching a real-life spider spin an egg sac above his barn doorway, he determined a likely species for her so that he might learn her characteristics …” On Elwyn Brooks White, the real life animal-lover who wrote Charlotte’s Web.
4. The Legacy of Grace Paley by Leora Skolkin-Smith.
5. Laughing in the Darkness is a new film about Jewish author Sholem Aleichem.
6. A very useful list from The Awl detailing when various profanities first appeared in the New Yorker magazine.
7. New York City poet John Giorno’s 1968 Dial-A-Poem was an early experiment in tech/lit social networking.
8. I’ve also been meaning to tell you about a more current lit/social experiment for genre writers, Book Country, funded by Penguin and dreamed up by the redoubtable Colleen Lindsay. And I just heard about another new venture designed to spread the word about great international literature called “Read This Next“. Chad Post explains.
9. I’ve long heard rumors that Merry Prankster Ken Babbs was holding on to a novel, inspired by his pre-Kesey-era life as a helicopter pilot during the Vietnam War. The book is finally out! It’s called Who Shot the Water Buffalo.
10. Larry McMurtry contemplates Marilyn Monroe.
11. Molly Jong-Fast talks about being the (prudish) daughter of Erica Jong.
12. For those who like this sort of thing: A Visual Exploration of the Filmography of James O. Incandenza and the World of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.
13. Douglas Adams, it turns out, described the Kindle a long time ago in his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
14. Artsy novelist and e-book Luddite Garth Risk Hallberg offers Seven Easy Steps to Kindle-Proof Your Book.
15. Faber Digital, a division of T. S. Eliot’s own Faber & Faber, has meanwhile produced a Waste Land app.
16. I’ve never been much of a V. S. Naipaul fan (I quote myself from 2006: “V. S. Naipaul is a boring author and I have never, ever, ever heard a real person speak with excitement about one of his books. I’ve cracked a couple open myself, and the stuff is instant sleep.”) The esteemed and award-winning author recently shot his mouth off about his superiority to all women writers, and the superb novelist Roxana Robinson has responded.
17. This month marks the 50th birthday of Amnesty International.
18. Somebody has gone to the trouble of listing every reference to Bob Dylan or his songs (there are 70 here, some of them pretty clever) found in comic books.
3 Responses
Re The Heming Way: but his
Re The Heming Way: but his face in the end is so sad.
I’ve really enjoyed the
I’ve really enjoyed the reading of the last part -Bob Dylan in the comix. there’s some fantastic artists !!!
It’s also great to see that Ken Babbs’s book is out ! it sounds like a good book.
I enjoyed Hallberg’s “7 Easy
I enjoyed Hallberg’s “7 Easy Steps to Kindle-proof your book.”