Don’t play with matches.

I was at a party in Richmond, Virginia, trying to figure out how to get drunk when this guy (who wouldn’t touch liquor because it upset his stomach) took me aside and started describing a book he was reading by the guy who wrote Brave New World as I would recall for the next 8 years during which I occasionally attempted a futile Google. At Powell’s on my honeymoon I discovered over a dozen books I’d never known Aldous Huxley had written, but nothing about a world in which certain souls are fingered like Jedi to spend their lives studying the most peculiar game you’ve ever tried to describe. Of course Huxley never wrote such a book; the book was Herman Hesse’s Magister Ludi and the game was the Glass Bead Game. Have you read it? U: Don’t know why that link is dead, but the same article is posted here.

Who waits in line at the Clinton book signing in midtown Manhattan? Salon answers the question. (Free day pass, blah blah blah.) By far, the best person profiled is the precocious 10-year-old who came all the way from Westport, Conn.:

And then there was Matt Lloyd-Thomas, who said he was 13, though he was really 10, because the lady at the door had said that the age limit for kids to get signatures was 12. His younger sister, Sophia, who was really 7 and a half, was posing as 12.

"We've just been passing the time, reading," said Lloyd-Thomas, whose skin was brown with suntan and a couple of freckles. "My sister's been bugging me the past few hours. Once the rain started there wasn't much we could do because it was really quite wet and you couldn't sit down." They'd had to wake up at 4, which Matt admitted was hard. But the whole trip had been his idea. "I was listening to NPR one afternoon and they said that President Clinton would be signing books in midtown Manhattan, so I said that's pretty close, why don't we go in?" So Matt, Sophia and their mother, Beth -- all from Westport, Conn. -- came to New York last night and stayed at an uncle's place. "I think it's pretty cool to have a book signed by a former president," said Matt of his reason for marshaling his family into action. But then, Matt is also a kid who a year ago persuaded his whole third-grade class -- some of them Republicans -- to send letters to President Bush asking him not to send troops into Iraq. His mother said that lately he's taken to giving PowerPoint presentations on the benefits of voting for Kerry over Bush. "You know, his father and I are both Democrats but not that involved," she said, shaking her head slightly. "Matt is very much his own thinker." What did he think of the president he was about to meet -- a man who was first elected before he was even born? "Well," began Matt thoughtfully, "not in his personal decisions but politically, I think Clinton was a very good president, especially since he was interested in what was going on in this country more than in foreign affairs." But what about those pesky personal decisions? "Well, I was only 6 at the time, and I didn't really enjoy politics," he said. "But I think that lying about a personal affair is one thing. Lying about weapons of mass destruction or lying about connections between Iraq and al-Qaida -- which affects a lot more people -- is a lot worse." "My sister thinks I'm a news junkie," confided Matt, who said he skims the Times but mostly relies on NPR's "Morning Edition" for his news. Sophia, in a Nantucket lifeguarding sweatshirt and looking very, very, very bored, nodded silently. "We're going to the American Girl Cafe after this," said their mother. "So that they both get something they like out of this trip."

Rocky Mountain News: Books: Raucous times with beat poets.

Kashner arrives in Boulder ready to "eat death and live poetry" at the feet of the these Wild Men of the Fifties, who experimented with drugs, sex, sanity, and words with mad, reckless abandon. What he found were old men: in 1976, William Burroughs was 62; Ginsberg was 50; Jack Kerouac had been dead seven years. As Kashner points out, this was "the Beat Generation in a weird retirement phase."

Not that they had lost all their moxie. No sooner has Kashner settled into his student apartment, than he is enlisted in a midnight drive into the mountains with Burroughs and a few others to harvest a marijuana field the old renegades have been tending.

Pit bulls are not mean dogs, at least not where humans are concerned, but when they decide to rebel against this selfish appropriation of their souls, they can kill. This, to me, is comforting: The ultimate decision about animal happiness lies with the animals themselves.

Also in the Weekly, goodbye to local wild man, and my hero, Zorthian.

originally posted by daiichi

Carl, the first of their children to live past infancy, born on July 26, 1875, in the small town of Kesswil, Switzerland, was an introverted, solitary boy who, in keeping with family tradition, had dual personalities (''a clumsy, awkward, mathematical dunce of a boy living in real time at the end of the 19th century'' and ''an old man living in the 18th century who dressed in high-buckled shoes, wore a powdered wig and drove a fine carriage'') and mystical visions, including one of God dropping excrement on a cathedral.

originally posted by xowie

It's always recognisable, 17 years later. Brooklyn has such a recalcitrance... it wants to be renovated or gentrified, and it tries and tries again, and those changes are enormous, but at the same time there's some deep resistance. The place is so eccentrically and paradoxically itself that it can't ever be completely overturned. So when I walk around here, in my eyes I can see 1972 and 1975, you know, lying around in chunks, where it was left.

Telegraph.co.uk: Brooklyn boy Jonathan Lethem.

Interesting, sad story about the demise of long-time publisher Creative Arts Books, and the screwing of their authors/co-publishers on the way down.

originally posted by xowie

Remotion by Stuart Cormie.

I recount that last part to her -- Delicate and clean, she sits sipping coffee from a chintzy cup -- After an age, the hand holding it starts to shake and I watch tears form at the corners of her brown alive eyes -- "How the hell did you find out?" Ma whispers and before I even start to try to explain she tells me that it is true I am indeed Kerouac's son (she being 'Kathleen' but in reality Catherine) and that (to complete the tale) as soon as Jack discovers she is with-child he disappears never (by her) to be seen again -- And Ma is left alone to raise me eventually meeting Karl whom I always assumed was my real dad but who clearly isn't (and he's no longer around either).

I wonder then what Jack would have made of a son like me -- a boy so ... straight -- and the man he became, so responsible (until now that is) -- his very antithesis -- Shamed, probably, by my lack of resolve.

"Please Don't Kill The Freshman: A Memoir," by Zoe Trope excerpted at Salon.com.

Camped out in front of my locker like a homeless person. Waiting for a security guard to yell at me. They pass by numerous times and do not even look at me. I should be in class. Instead, I open Bukowski's "Tales of Ordinary Madness" and read with a look of confusion on my face. I find this beautiful. No. one. notices ... Cherry Bitch lets me wear her cat-eyed glasses. I feel silly and vain and I like it. I walk home and eventually kiss the Wonka Boy (supposed to be gay). He shoves his tongue in my mouth anxiously, awkwardly. Too much like a child ripping open a shiny Christmas present only to be disappointed. Curry wore a candy necklace today and I tried to bite off some candy and ended up making his neck bleed. What a tragedy. My hands are cold. My feet hurt. Career week only gets worse, I think. Tomorrow we have to write notes to the presenters we saw today (like the woman from State Farm who tried to convince us that selling insurance was a fun, interesting career field ... LYING WHORE). That could take at least two hours ... Vivarin. I believe this calls for Vivarin.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti: It is really much more interesting today than in the 50's. There has been all of this mythologizing of the 50's and the Beat generation in San Francisco and so forth, but it has been wildly overdone, because it was a really depressing period, I thought, on account of the general repressive atmosphere and the political climate. The most interesting writing now is coming out of third world authors and women -- it takes hunger and passion to create great books.

Tangier is on the temperate northwest coast of Africa, just 10 miles from Spain, across the Strait of Gibraltar, and washed in the breezes coming off both the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. But to the average Tanjawi, Europe is a distant dream. Tangier, population 600,000, is extremely poor, almost entirely Muslim, and, like many African cities, growing rapidly. Tangier is a place where you see an amputee child hunched on the sidewalk with a begging cup beside the dusty stub of his truncated leg. Much of Morocco's homegrown hashish travels through the port here, and the quieter beaches outside of town are a prime launch point for destitute Africans who risk their lives, and pathetically seek First World fortune, by sneaking makeshift boats across the strait, toward Spain. Old movies don't tell the whole story.

Under the Sheltering Sky (washingtonpost.com)

This week, I met the Sharif from the Clash song.

Rock the Casbah

“The Don DeLillo Society will not do your work for you. We have work of our own to do.”

Hillary greets everyone with a smile, as her eyes bulge big -- so big that the whites attain 360-degree clearance around her irises. To the people assembled, this expression means different things. To her fans, her eyes say, "I'm one of you--just a gal who likes to stop by Wal-Mart for a Sam's Choice cola and a $1.78 Nacho Chile Pie." To her moderate critics, they say, "Look at me, I'm almost human." To her Freeper-style critics, the eyes say, "Back off, or I'll ice you, just like I iced Vince Foster."

originally posted by xowie

"O my God, this War on Terrorism is gonna rule!" one character tells another in David Rees's cult cartoon Get Your War On. "I can't wait until the war is over and there's no more terrorism!" Few campaigners in poetry's war on war will have hopes as inflated as Rees's clipart man, but the swiftness and volume of responses to the recent Gulf war have already resulted in several online anthologies, public interventions by Andrew Motion, Harold Pinter and Seamus Heaney, and now Paul Keegan and Matthew Hollis's 101 Poems Against War.

originally posted by xowie

Woods Lot remembers Richard Fariña today.

Atlantic interview: Adrian Nicole LeBlanc.

originally posted by xowie

The University of California Press makes about 400 titles available online for free.

"Books, books, always books!" August Kubizek once wrote. "I just can't imagine Adolf without books. He had them piled up around him at home. He always had a book with him wherever he went."

originally posted by xowie

"I am an American," he says after a minute. "I stand with the pope and former President Jimmy Carter. In this country, you say what you think."

originally posted by xowie

R.A.: Most of the drawings in it are of Aline. Is she your muse?

R.C.: Oh, you know. She's around a lot, and she always wanted me to draw her. Back in the 70's and 80's, she'd say: ''I'll pose. I'll pose.'' After about half an hour, she'd say, ''Can I go yet?''

L.E.: Do girls ever dress up like one of your fantasies to meet you?

R.C.: When Aline first met me, she used to dress up to suit my fancy. She kind of got tired of that. She used to put on white knee socks and these little schoolgirl outfits. She was a lot chubbier in the early days. Now she's gotten quite thin. It's a little disheartening to see her derrière go down. But she's happier being that way, so what the heck. But she's still quite muscular. She says her ideal body type now is Lance Armstrong's.

originally posted by xowie

So I’ve been reading the excellent Word Freak by Stefan Fatsis, and studying two-letter word lists, but still can’t beat Janie at Literati. Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, a basketball coach is losing his job, maybe, under the watchful eye of the Coach Wooden Pyramid of Success, which does not seem to apply to Scrabble, by the way. Also, what the heck, here’s an entertaining metafilter thread that might come in handy for some trivia contest yet to come.

originally posted by xowie

Tom Robbins on U.S. aggression:

I’m just not one of those people who believes that American lives are more valuable than the lives of others.

My long experience with human nature - I'm 80 years old now - suggests that it is possible that fascism, not democracy, is the natural state. Indeed, democracy is the special condition - a condition we will be called upon to defend in the coming years. That will be enormously difficult because the combination of the corporation, the military and the complete investiture of the flag with mass spectator sports has set up a pre-fascistic atmosphere in America already.

originally posted by xowie

When it became obvious what a dumb and cruel and spiritually and financially and militarily ruinous mistake our war in Vietnam was, every artist worth a damn in this country, every serious writer, painter, stand-up comedian, musician, actor and actress, you name it, came out against the thing. We formed what might be described as a laser beam of protest, with everybody aimed in the same direction, focused and intense. This weapon proved to have the power of a banana-cream pie three feet in diameter when dropped from a stepladder five-feet high. And so it is with anti-war protests in the present day. Then as now, TV did not like anti-war protesters, nor any other sort of protesters, unless they rioted. Now, as then, on account of TV, the right of citizens to peaceably assemble, and petition their government for a redress of grievances, ‘ain’t worth a pitcher of warm spit,’ as the saying goes.

I've often thought there ought to be a manual to hand to little kids, telling them what kind of planet they're on, why they don't fall off it, how much time they've probably got here, how to avoid poison ivy, and so on. I tried to write one once. It was called Welcome to Earth. But I got stuck explaining why we don't fall off the planet. Gravity is just a word. It doesn't explain anything. If I could get past gravity, I'd tell them how we reproduce, how long we've been here, apparently, and a little bit about evolution. And one thing I would really like to tell them about is cultural relativity. I didn't learn until I was in college about all the other cultures, and I should have learned that in the first grade. A first grader should understand that his or her culture isn't a rational invention; that there are thousands of other cultures and they all work pretty well; that all cultures function on faith rather than truth; that there are lots of alternatives to our own society. Cultural relativity is defensible and attractive. It's also a source of hope. It means we don't have to conitnue this way if we don't like it.

"I don't want to belong to a country that attacks little countries."

originally posted by daiichi

The rebel speaks for herself, by Ben Ehrenreich. (cf.)

originally posted by daiichi

Weep over my corpse, if you can weep tears of wine.
Sigh dejectedly for me, if you are intoxicated and carefree.
Bear me on your shoulders, if you stumble drunkenly along.
Cremate me on that land, where there once was a tavern.

originally posted by xowie

Charters' anthology may be the first book about the Sixties that hasn't made me want to braid my hair, paint peace signs on my cheeks, and go stick a daisy in the barrel of a gun. It is, unlike many of its counterparts, a grown-up book. Wiser. Wryer. No longer the cherubic student activist clutching a tiny photo of Che Guevara. This book is 30 years past any sort of giddy optimism. This book is my dad. Get him talking about the Sixties and I don't care how many times you've read "Be Here Now," you will start to feel disillusioned.

Dumbledore lowered his hands and surveyed Harry through his half-moon glasses. 'It is time,' he said, 'for me to tell you what I should have told you five years ago, Harry.

'Please sit down. I am going to tell you everything.'

Mr. Frayn is playing all the angles. "The ideal resolution would be if Claire won it," he said. "Then I'd feel rather noble, and she'd feel rather bad and rather guilty. It would give me a tremendous moral advantage for the rest of our lives. Whenever we argued, I could say, `I behaved so well over the Whitbread.' "

originally posted by daiichi

Rees has no illusions about the strip's importance; in fact, he almost gave it up altogether after the summer, but started again when the Bush administration made the staggeringly vulgar decision to hire Henry Kissinger to investigate the events of September 11. "When that happened," Rees recalled, "I sat down and said to myself, 'Okay, let's see if I've still got it.'" He did: "Does Bush even know who these motherfuckers are?" asks one of the strip's generic office workers while talking on the phone. "Didn't he get suspicious when he saw Kissinger and John Poindexter licking the blood off each other's hands?"

originally posted by xowie

What I came to see I was writing about, which is something that's of great concern to me as a parent, is what I see as the lost adventure of childhood. I remember a childhood that was the kind of childhood that people had been having in the United States going back at least four or five generations before me. It was rooted in independence and freedom. I'd just go out in the morning on Saturday morning and say "Bye, Mom" and I'd be gone all day long.

She wouldn't know where you were.

She would not have the faintest idea where I was, and I'd come home for dinner. And I'd get into a lot of trouble, no doubt about it, and probably almost died a couple of times, but still that's the world. It dovetailed so completely with what I read, so when I went out to play I could go play in Narnia or I could go play in the Virginia wilderness of George Washington's boyhood if I was reading a biography of George Washington. There was a seamlessness between the world of literature and fantasy and the world that I was living and playing in. That really mirrored what was going on in the fantasy worlds themselves, where there was a seamlessness and a porousness between, say, England and Narnia.

Or even something like Tom Sawyer. Even though I wasn't a boy, there was a Tom Sawyer element to my childhood. Our mother didn't know where we were half the time and there was so much more undeveloped land to play on.

There was more undeveloped land and so much more free space. And now so much of the space we put our children into is created by adults for children. It's licensed by adults, patrolled and permitted by adults. There's nowhere for them to disappear into. They're under surveillance all the time. It's that idea of that lost ... that's the Summerlands, to me, ultimately. That this is imperiled, or probably gone forever, is a very painful idea to me. Maybe that ties into the idea of a lost innocence or a lost boyhood.

Because we don't know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustable well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that is so deeply part of your being that you, that you can't even conceive of your life without it. Perhaps four or five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps 20. And yet it all seems limitless.

If you're actually able to handle the manuscript, you have a kind of contact with the author that you otherwise wouldn't get. At the risk of sounding too obscure, the most advanced physics teaches us that the moment you come into contact with something, it is part of you and you are part of it forever.

David Rees of mnftiu spoke to a crowded house at the doomed Midnight Special bookstore last night, along with cartoon bad boys Robbie Conal and Lalo Alcaraz.

originally posted by xowie

“Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.” – Kurt Vonnegut

Younger readers, including young feminists, are not committed to getting news the old-fashioned way. The locally generated and popular "The List" (formerly "Hannah’s List"), for example, is a well-distributed weekly e-mail, an electronic bulletin board, that combines traditional what’s-going-on information with classifieds, links, and a who’s who in young feminist circles — all with clear emphasis on transgender concerns, an edgy area for some, perhaps, but completely acceptable for most twentysomethings.

originally posted by daiichi

In America, you don't have to be a celebrity like Oprah or Rosie or Martha to put out a magazine devoted to your own personal obsessions. Some energetic souls put out several zines. For instance, David Rees of Brooklyn, who chronicled his kung fu training in a zine called My New Fighting Technique Is Unstoppable, later went on to chronicle his job as a filing clerk in a zine called My New Filing Technique Is Unstoppable.

"Whatever the result, we are going to have to be terribly well behaved about it. We don't want one or the other sulking and moping around."

originally posted by daiichi

There are some 3,000 photographs and undeveloped negatives in the house as well as bullfighting paintings, antelope heads from hunting trips to Africa and unfinished bottles of gin, Campari and Bacardi next to Hemingway’s favourite reading chair.

originally posted by xowie

"I fixed my teeth, bought a new computer and started the project," Saidenberg says. "I wanted to run it as a collective, because of my background working as an activist. It was really important that it not just be me publishing my friends."

originally posted by daiichi

"People to me are like walking Smithsonians, and when they die, all this goes with them unless you document it. (...)

"I never saw an upholsterer in American literature," Ms. Cisneros said. Her father, Alfredo Cisneros, had an upholstery business in Chicago that is now run by three of his sons. "He was such an example of generosity and honest labor," she said. "I didn't want people to erase him."

Until a moment ago, The Roots and Michael Chabon had but a tenuous connection in the map of my head.

William Faulkner. Eudora Welty. Richard Wright. Tennessee Williams. Thomas Wolfe. Truman Capote. Carson McCullers. Reynolds Price. Zora Neale Hurston. Katherine Anne Porter. Robert Penn Warren. James Dickey. Flannery O'Connor. Willie Morris. Those dogs could hunt.

Granted, they wrote in different styles and with varying degrees of success. But there was still something there. Something solid and familiar and identifiable -- something Southern.

As the South has been swallowed up by America, all that has changed. The region has lost some of its manners and moorings. Irate drivers honk at each other in Jackson. You can buy the New York Times in Mobile. There's sushi everywhere. Faux moonshine, Mason jar and all, is sold -- and taxed -- in liquor stores.

"There some challenges at Jack Kerouac Park, where if you're an advanced skateboarder, there's a challenge in the grinding and things," said Thomas Bellegarde, director of the city's Parks Department. "The skateboard parks we have are for the learner and the inexperienced person."

"We've had some odd occurrences in the store," said Haslam's co-owner Ray Hinst. "The temperature seems to change in certain spots, and books have flown off the shelves." Hinst said a psychic recently went through the store with "little sensing things." "She concluded spirits were around and one was Kerouac. He was restless . . . but comfortable."

October 23, 1979. I was in my bathtub in the wee hours of the morning, as naked as a cartoonist. I put two and two together, and voilà! Just two decades later, my book. (...)

Cartooning is creativity stripped down to its core, because it's removed from the real-world constraints (and consequences) that complicate other applications of the creative mind. It's a form of play which depends on spontaneity and, by extension, creativity.

We bent down and began picking cotton. It was beautiful. Across the field were the tents, and beyond them the brown cottonfields that stretched out of sight to the brown arroyo foothills and then the snow-capped Sierras in the morning air. This was so much better than washing dishes South Main Street. But I knew nothing about picking cotton. I spent too much time disengaging the white ball from crackly bed; the others did it in one flick. Moreover, fingertips began to bleed; I needed gloves, or more expeience. There was an old Negro couple in the field with They picked cotton with the same God-blessed patience the grandfathers had practiced in ante-bellum Alabama; the moved right along their rows, bent and blue, and their bag increased. My back began to ache. But it was beautiful kneeling and hiding in that earth. If I felt like resting I did, my face on the pillow of brown moist earth. Birds an accompaniment. I thought I had found my life's work.

Mr. Dunne, who, naturally, is working on his own bird guide, said birders did not see the guides as competing because they bought everything, and more than one copy. He cited an informal survey he did recently of him and two other birders while they were out in the field. How many Sibley's did each of them own, he wondered. The answers were five, two and five.

My favorite part is when the kid is saying to the other kid you are me. They become friends. They point to each other a lot in the book. The book has marks like a question mark and exclamation point. I liked the book.

There's a Philip K. Dick novel, I can't remember the name of it, but I remember reading it and realizing that in order to understand it, the patterns of thought in your brain have to change. The Sound and the Fury does that, too. The Sound and the Fury reorders your mind. You can't just read it passively; it changes you. To understand it you have to work so hard that when you make the connections there's a physical change in your brain. Since everything the culture gives us is so mindless, and kills the connection in your brain, real art has to find some way to reorder the mind.

I got a 10-disc unabridged reading of On the Road from the library this week – it was like a gift. I mean, I have to give it back, but who knew that such a thing existed, and at my library? This one is read quite well by Frank Muller (a renowned audio book narrator) but to my surprise there are also unabridged readings by Tom Parker and actor Matt Dillon available.

Apparently, when Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote her loosely autobiographical series of novels, she left out two pivotal years -- years she and her family spent in Burr Oak, Iowa. The family moved there after a grasshopper invasion pushed them into poverty and out of Walnut Grove, Minn.

New York Times: Books for Summer Reading.

Did you know how Margaret Wise Brown died?

The "3 Rs" of BookCrossing...

• Read a good book (you already know how to do that)


• Register it here (along with your journal comments), get a unique BCID (BookCrossing ID number), and label the book


• Release it for someone else to read (give it to a friend, leave it on a park bench, donate it to charity, "forget" it in an airliner seatback pocket, etc.), and get notified by email each time someone comes here and records journal entries for that book. And if you make Release Notes on the book, others can Go Hunting for it and try to find it!

Sorry Palestine was a dud. (What happened?) Let’s pick a lazy book for the summer, like Design for Community or I’m Just Here for the Food.

Tomorrow’s New York Times has a special section on children’s books.

“The Weblog Bookwatch searches weblogs that pass through the Recently Changed list at weblogs.com looking for links to books at Amazon.com. The books [listed] were the most frequently mentioned.”

A new translation offers a radically different view of the famous sex manual, and argues that the most widely read English version is riddled with errors and plays down the role of women.

"This translation will change peoples' understanding of this book and of ancient India," said David Shulman, professor of Indian Studies and Comparative Religion at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. "Previous translations are hopelessly outdated, inadequate and misguided."

The Illustrated Complete Summary of Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow” is, I gather, suitably inscrutable.

O is for the Other Things She Gave Me: Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections and Contemporary Women’s Fiction (Jane Elliott in Bitch Magazine)

As Franzen himself pointed out when he admitted that Oprah had picked ‘some good books,’ the Oprah list is neither as middlebrow as its detractors would have it, nor as unfailingly invested in bringing quality to the mainstream as its supporters often claim. Despite the widespread perception of Oprah books as spoon-fed schmaltz, many of the novels Oprah has chosen—like Edwidge Danticat’s Breath Eyes Memory and Joyce Carol Oates’s When We Were Mulvaneys—invite the same sort of thoughtful reading Franzen seemed to desire from his audience. But because it draws unapologetically on one person’s taste, the Oprah list doesn’t reflect a consistent standard of literary merit. Rather, it records exactly the sort of meandering path many habitual readers take through the landscape of the literary, dipping into the comfort of Maeve Binchy’s Tara Road one day and stretching to accommodate the difficulty of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye the next. And just because the same person reads both Binchy and Morrison doesn’t mean she reads them both for the same reason or suffers from any confusion about their relative merits. Just as the presence of male writers on Oprah’s list often gets erased, many critics ignored these quality variations as well, lumping her choices into the general category of what one commentator called ‘earnest, womanly fiction.’ As the pejorative use of the word ‘womanly’ suggests, these generalizations rely on assumptions about literary quality that are close at hand—namely, the longstanding association of female writers, ‘feminine’ forms, and middlebrow status.

ABC Electric Journal: Book Discussion Scheduled – “Interested parties should read the short classic tale on this page and meet back here, at this entry, at nine o’clock EST this Sunday (the fourteenth of April) to unearth its deep mysteries, to sound its fine art.”

Boing Boing discussion: Oprah sez: “Literature is dead”

U: This just in – MetaFilter is not dead: a wonderful discussion about the demise of Oprah’s Book Club in which the “everybody read” phenomenon, the “high vs. low art” debate, and many good authors, books, and bookstores are referenced is well worth your attention.

Picking up the pieces in Ramallah (BBC News)

The men of Amari were taken bound and blindfolded to the Beitounia army camp, where they spent three cold nights under canvas, with little to eat or drink, before their release.

Some families, one of them including three small children, were held captive in their own homes while the troops used them for cover as they occupied the narrow alleyways deep inside the camp.


Their houses had great holes punched in the sides, where the troops had employed the controversial “walking through walls” tactic to avoid being exposed to sniper fire in the alleyways. (…)

The camp’s inhabitants say this was not an “anti-terrorist” operation as the Israeli army maintains, but an operation to terrorise them - and it has worked.

Central Booking - “a Fat Albert club house full of fun stuff to read, useful book-related information and a place for bibliophiles to meet, share, hang out and drink Tang (sort of)."

• Teaching On the Road


• re:read weblog


• Ghost World reviewed

“Booklend is an Internet lending library by post. Sign up, choose a book, and we’ll mail it to you. When you’re done, mail it back. …Booklend is like your local library. Except smaller. And less convenient.”

Visible Darkness is down on Kerouac for all the wrong reasons. Kerouac’s contribution to literature was an unimaginable honesty. The trouble is most people simply aren’t interesting enough to create a masterpiece out of an honest accounting of their lives. His contribution to humanity, however, was much greater than his contribution to literature – the revelation of his tragic spiritual journey, and through it, his compassionate soul.

Some nice thoughts on children’s books at Open Brackets, via wood s lot.

The Eye Begins to See “will be spending the week discussing Kerouac’s On the Road. We’re starting today with a background on Kerouac and the Beat Movement.” Woohoo!

Read Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground (translated by Constance Garnett) at the UVA Library Electronic Text Center.

I’ve mentioned Bee before because it’s one of the best online comics, but I bet you didn’t know Bee’s creator, Jason Little, is (according to Boing Boing) married to Myla Goldberg, author of the bestselling Bee Season.

Science Fiction Weekly: Nalo Hopkinson uses SF to probe the inner and outer worlds of alienation

Before I put fingers to keyboard, I must first figure out how to express the race of my characters, if they are non-white, because I have to think about how I’m going to perform that task of wrenching the center over to the margins. I’ve had white writers tell me that they don’t feel they have to think in those terms when they are creating white characters. Often they don’t think about the fact that the characters are white. I suspect that most writers of color in this part of the world are quite aware of the ethnicities of their characters of color.

When white writers write almost exclusively white characters, that usually passes without comment. When writers of color create mostly characters of color, it’s seen as something remarkable. I try to write from my center. In order to do that in a literary milieu that presumes ground zero to be white middle-class experience, I have to shift the reader’s vision over to the margins. Even if that reader is from a marginalized community, the worldview they will have been used to seeing reified in literature, in popular culture, in the media, is for the most part the “normalized” one. By performing that shift, I’m not moving and I’m not taking over the privileged position; I’m wrenching the focus over to my context. I just tell my story.

If we do end up reading Palestine, we won’t be the first book club to discuss comics. So who’s down?

Dig Steinbeck?

originally posted by xowie

“Literary Traveler is an online magazine dedicated to the exploration of the literary imagination. We hope to bring you inspiring, informative, and unique articles about writers, and creative artists, and the places they traveled.”

De preacher was up preaching and he said, 'Every tongue got to confess; everybody got to stand in judgment for thyself; every tub got to stand on its own bottom.'


One little tee-ninchy woman in de amen corner said, 'Lordy, make my bottom wider.'

Did you know? Some people enjoy sharing books via binary newsgroups and even p2p!

originally posted by xowie

Rachel’s Compendium of Online Book Discussions, et al. – “Currently there’s a lot of interest in book clubs, and, as far as I know, there’s no place on the Web to find a listing of all of them. Hence, I’ll give it a shot. To be a book club, in my mind, I believe there needs to be some type of time-sensitive element, and, preferably, some type of guided discussion. I’d further classify book clubs in four ways: Web-Based (text and comments on the web); Web-Enhanced (books read off-line and discussed via a web site); E-mail-Oriented (discussion occurring via an e-mail list); and Live Chat (via IRC or some other medium).” This page has a good set of links to mine for active book clubs and other resources.

Palestine has finally been published. I wonder if it will sell out quickly given the Current Situation. You can order it from the publisher Fantagraphics which is probably the best option, or from Amazon if like me you don’t care about all those patents and things you pretend to care about when it’s fashionable.

It was a dark and stormy month… (eastbayexpress.com)

From his Oakland apartment, they watched in wonder as thousands of total strangers vehemently debated NaNoWriMo protocol and formed writing klatches groups on the official Yahoo site and dozens of unaffiliated ones. On MetaFilter, people posted queries such as “I wonder if it would be cheating to put together an outline before the November 1st start date?” and “Is it within the rules to use Benzedrine to fuel the fury?” There also were dissenters, who called the idea “fantastically horrible” and likely to produce “a stream-of-consciousness crapfest.” “I was avidly following all of these things with my mouth agape,” says Baty.

That MetaFilter book club people were talking about starting now lives at Yahoo! Groups : MeFiBooks.

From Follow Me Here:

Michael Moore’s publisher tells him his forthcoming book Stupid White Men and Other Excuses for the State of the Nation will not be distributed, and the print run will be destroyed, because the content is offensive and he is intellectually dishonest for not saying that the President has done a “good job” in recent months.

Library Juice 4:44

“There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty and vice versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you."

Doris Lessing

Seattle Metaphysical Library

Q: Given the trend just after the attacks to revise popular culture and pull images of the World Trade Center or terrorism out of any entertainment, were you concerned about the content?

FM: [Laughs.] Well, it's on the press.

originally posted by xowie

Yahoo! News Full Coverage-Literary News

The God of Small Things Study Guide

‘Your job is to say, ‘Fuck you, God! Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!’ Because nobody else is going to say it. Our politicians aren’t going to say it. Nobody but the writer is going to say it. There’s time in history when it’s time to praise God, but now is not the time. Now is the time for us to say, ‘Fuck you! I don’t care who your daddy was. Fuck you!’ And get back to our job of writing.’

originally posted by xowie

The kids over at MetaFilter are agitating to start a book club. I’ll be surprised if it happens on mefi proper, as that doesn’t seem to be the way creator Matt Haughey wants to go with mefi, but I’ll be equally surprised if it doesn’t happen somewhere. Mefi has already spun off several projects and communities, and I think there are many more waiting to be born.

If you’re coming from MetaFilter, welcome and make yourself at home. If you want to join in the discussion just email us.

A visit to the Brautigan Library by Jessamyn West.

DC’s own Politics and Prose Bookstore and Coffeehouse presents an annotated reading list titled Books For Understanding Old and New Worlds.

The new L.A. novel is supposed to be rough, tough and gritty. Rachel Resnick’s Go West Young F*cked-Up Chick is all of that, and I enjoyed it immensely, although maybe that’s because half the book is about one of my favorite ex-girlfriends.

Anastasia curls her rubber-flex vavoom body up on a restaurant booth seat, her black bra poking through a stained and tattered black vest that’s missing a button, babbling lovely as a backwoods brook released from the fetters of a makeshift dam, boldly racing from Kant to cryogenics to Lorena Bobbit’s trial, all the images sparkling like skybound drops of water shining with exuberant randomness and rapture, and as she rambles she doodles on a tablecloth, a balloon-bursting head, tiny dot eyes and mouth. She then fills in the frame of the skull with a million stars. “This is my head,” she says.

originally posted by xowie

"People are reading," Henry said hopefully. When I asked what they were reading, he said, "Nostradamus, and books about germs." Myself, I wanted to buy every book in the store and stack them into a windowless castle for myself, I wanted to stroke their papery bodies, I wanted, a little, to burn the store down. Language is metaphysics, and I hate metaphysics today. I hate the religious and philosophical lies which estrange me from the immediate life in favor of lost or imaginary kingdoms and gardens, in favor of paradisiacal or hellish afterlives, all lies. Today I want to eat and fuck.

The Book Forager is a neat interactive tool that I can’t seem to explain right now so just check it out.

Jack, or "Ti Jean" ("Little John"), as he was known, was born on March 12, 1922, at 9 Lupine Road, in the upstairs apartment of a shabby duplex building in a Lowell slum called Centralville. He was delivered at home by Dr. Victor Rochette, whom Kerouac later described as a lonely, desolate man, unwanted and unloved. According to a neighbor, Reginald Ouellette, Dr. Rochette's wife had died in childbirth and he'd never remarried, which struck Jack, who grew up in a close-knit family that spoiled him, as tragic. In a December 28, 1950, letter to Cassady, Kerouac disclosed that his birth occurred at 5 P.M. and that Gabrielle later gave him a blow-by-blow account of his delivery. As Jack was born, his mother could hear Pawtucket Falls a mile away, crashing into the Merrimack River, heavy with spring-thaw snow and ice. Her lurid description of the way he was forcibly dragged from her body, and then yelled at and spanked into life, led to his belief that birth was the beginning of the tragedy of consciousness, the dance of life that ends in death. The processes of nature, which most writers extol as symbols of renewal and eternal life, were always seen darkly by Kerouac.

I love those books.

The next time you Napster, instead of rushing to download the latest flavor of Grammy-approved pop why not take a chance on something you’d never risk your hard-earned cash on? What have you discovered on Napster that surprised you, like full audio books (The Hobbit & Lord of the Rings are out there), spoken word (Kerouac and Ginsberg), rare live & cover versions? Let’s [discuss]!

If you’re planning to buy a copy of Blu’s Hanging, be sure to get it from the Asian American Writers' Workshop.

Unfortunately, I’ve been super busy getting ready for our baby and so have had to crap out on this round of reading, but I noticed a handful of Zadie Smith links on this weblog. “Writing is the exact opposite of therapy.” I have no idea where that quote came from.

What are we to make of the exclusive publication of an early Kerouac novella fueling the launch of a new proprietary Windows-only ebook reader? Tell you what, they’ve already got my $3.95 – but I’ll be ripping the text from that file faster than you can say “the one thing we yearn for in our living days, that makes us sigh and groan and undergo sweet nauseas of all kinds, is the rememberance of some lost bliss that was probably experienced in the womb and can only be reproduced at death,” even if I have to print, scan, and OCR the fucker. Email me if you want a copy.

Speaking of things Indian, I’ve been wanting to read Edward Said’s Orientalism.

Found some words and pictures about Ishmael Reed and Mumbo Jumbo.

How could a Ralph Nader story be interesting? He has been turned into the national scold, just as I am referred to as the national gadfly (I assume that's because 'intellectual' is too difficult a word to spell). He has been made the bore of all time.... But he's not boring, he's presented as a bore, as a nag. [The corporate media] have made him the bore of all time. [They] could just as easily have made him interesting, but it did not serve the purposes of General Motors -- the first big corporation to go to war against him -- so he's really marginalized.

Now when you get somebody really exciting who talks about change, like Jesse Jackson, they start playing hardball. Imagine smearing him as an anti-Semite? I can imagine as anti-white you might make a case -- but an anti-Semite is about as wild as you could get from Jesse Jackson. But the point is, "Eliminate him!", "Eliminate him!". You get rid of anybody who wants to make change.

You are about to be put into a time machine and sent back 1,100 years, never to return. You must make your way in a hostile, alien environment, armed only with your wits and three books. You can choose any books you like -- as long as you've actually read them sometime in the last five years. What three books do you take?

• One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  On OHYoS: What qualities of life does this novel celebrate?
• Desolation Angels by Jack Kerouac
  Jack's encounter with madness at Big Sur
• Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
  the annotated Watchmen