In which I say some things about writing
Tim Ljunggren interviewed me for the second anniversary issue of Insolent Rudder, new out today.
Jason DeBoer’s “Richard Widmark” is also in the latest issue. Here’s an excerpt:
I wanna sneer like Richard Widmark in Kiss of Death. The twitching lip, the iron face, the hate ecstatic. I wanna shove crippled old ladies down [...]
Band leader, Nazi flag, etc.
Don’t even get me started. (Via GMB.)
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From Claudia Smith’s “The House I Left Behind“:
The house I left behind rattles at night in the wind. There are no screens on the windows. My mother tries to shake my father out of his slumber. “Do you hear that? Do you hear that Rod?” My father doesn’t answer. He never does. He doesn’t sleep, [...]
So, just out of curiosity, what does a score above 40 mean?
Courtesy of the NYU School of Medicine: 24 or greater. Highly likely to have ADHD.(Thanks to Annie at FIPNTRA for the link.)
And all this time I thought I was merely suffering from a severe and undiagnosed case of OCD.
Experience with casting couch a bonus?
Casting Call: Vice Magazine/Pregnant Teenagers. Not to worry, though: the “young pregnant girls” will be “wearing all major labels.” (Via Gawker.)
Fit
Surprisingly, of the fifty-five condom sizes, not a single one is “small.”
Ex-Texan
Robert Birnbaum interviews Gail Caldwell, chief book critic at The Boston Globe. An excerpt:
RB: Are you still able to read recreationally?
GC: Yes. Oddly, more so now than when I was first reviewing. There is some conscious and unconscious sense that unhinges – that I do not have to take notes, remember specific arguments, things [...]
Paris Review, more
The Paris Review plans to hold its 50th anniversary celebration despite Editor George Plimpton’s death. Plimpton had planned to attend a Hemingway festival in Havana and a Playboy anniversary party this week. (Both links via MobyLives.)
Barnes & Noble will reissue The Stones of Summer, Dow Mossman’s debut novel. The book fell into [...]
Reading and testing in the British schools
At a secondary school in South Wales, boys and girls are being given separate reading material. School officials hope to spur the boys’ interest in literature by having them read Beckham’s My Side. The boys, aged from 12 to 15:
will also study fantasy books like Lord Of The Rings and Terry Pratchett’s novels and [...]
Lemony
The Bookslut just helped me pick out part of my stepdaughter’s birthday gift: a new Lemony Snicket book. Ms. Crispin also links to an interview with the author, Daniel Handler. And here’s an old Fresh Air interview.
A “simple and practical moral calculus”
William T. Vollmann’s Rising Up and Rising Down, “a 3,000-page meditation on the ethics of violence,” will be published “in seven volumes by McSweeney’s in October (and in abridged form by Ecco next year).”
There’s an entertaining debate about Vollman here. Says sjtennent:
I found it a bit frightening that the article mentions [...]
Borges on Canada, more
Here’s an excerpt from a 1968 interview with Jorge Luis Borges:
DB: Borges, if you were preparing a radio program about yourself and you wanted to introduce it by describing yourself and your work, what would you say?
JLB: Well, I suppose I think of myself as a writer, and I also think of myself as a [...]
Hemingway’s son
The sad story of Ernest Hemingway’s transsexual son, Gregory, has “carried over beyond the grave”:
The last of his four wives and five of his eight children are battling over his estate in court, and his sex change could well prove to be the key to resolving the case….
At one point in the 1990s he [...]
But only the top 100 matter
Publishing companies are beginning to view a book’s Amazon sales ranking as “an early indicator of consumer enthusiasm.” (Via Arts Journal.)
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