More literary New Orleans
For lack of anything more useful to do, besides donating money, reading the news and the blogs, and maybe signing up for the Red Cross volunteer course, MaudNewton.com continues its homage to literary New Orleans.
Dave G. passes along a link to Romanian poet and essayist Andrei Codrescu’s New Orleans Geographic, published earlier this month.
“I wonder,” [...]
The Hemingway home hotline* presents
Hemingway’s Ketchum, Idaho home won’t be open for tours, after all.
* We’re weirdly obsessed with his residences around here.
And God said, “Let there be imbeciles”
The Acton Institute, which brings us such titles as the Christian Social Thought Series, cites the Bible in furtherance of its “argument” that price gouging in the wake of natural disasters like Katrina is ethical rather than unconscionable, and may actually save lives. (Thanks, Paul.)
Now that right there’s some ironclad logic.
But since even the [...]
News from down South
My favorite living New Orleans writer, Pia Z. Ehrhardt, checked in this afternoon. She and her husband and son are with family in Houston, and they’re not optimistic that they’ll have a house to go back to. Pia guest-blogged for this site in June, 2003, and wrote then about flooding during a New [...]
When life in the Big Easy was easy
Tennessee Williams & Pancho Rodriguez, New Orleans, 1946
As the situation in New Orleans grows ever more perilous, readers have been responding to my call for links about the area’s literary history. Evangeline of Baton Rouge points to this Lost and Found Sound episode featuring bits of “cardboard recordings” playwright Tennessee Williams left in a [...]
Turkish government: “To prison with Pamuk! (But please let us into the EU.)”
In February, criminal charges were filed against internationally acclaimed Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, for saying, “30,000 Kurds and 1 million Armenians were killed in Turkey. Almost no one dares to speak out this but me, and the nationalists hate me for that.”
Now a reader sends an excerpt from a Reuters News Wire article that [...]
Truth in advertising
Amazon UK has launched its back-to-school campaign with this ad. Why not just go all the way and replace the graduation cap with a mirror and a bag of white powder? (Thanks, Paul.)
The old “New Journalism” debate* — now with JT Leroy
Marc Smirnoff, editor and publisher of Oxford American, reponds at Syntax of Things to John Nova Lomax’s recent Houston Press article portraying Smirnoff as a clueless and possibly unscrupulous yahoo who, in the latest issue of the magazine, misleadingly characterized JT Leroy’s piece on Lorreta Lynn as an “essay” instead of “creative non-fiction.”
Smirnoff says, [...]
Remainders: the trying to give you what you want edition
Robert Calasso’s “approach of disclaiming a sustained argument and offering, instead, a galaxy of essaylets” in a new study of Kafka “is either modest or frustrating, according to taste.”
In this week’s bookish news of the weird, Dutch libraries are “lending out people,” including junkies, lower-income people, lesbians, and other volunteers “from outside of the Dutch [...]
Let freedom ring
From Amendments to the New Iraqi Constitution, by J.M. Houk:
Fourth Amendment — Protection from Unreasonable Search and Seizure
The right of all Iraqis (except women, Sunnis, and Kurds) to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects shall not be violated, except in where determined to be an enemy combatant or supporter, and a warrant [...]
Life in these United States, #2
According to A.P. photo captions, black people loot, white people borrow.
Faulkner in the French Quarter
Today’s New Orleans Times-Picayune was distributed only electronically, via the newspaper’s blog, after the staff had to exit the flooded building. In a recent post, “Can New Orleans survive?,” staff writer James Varney reflects on the city’s current predicament and its legacy, and notes
William Faulkner was first published in The Times-Picayune while he was [...]
Battle of New Orleans
Salon provides an excerpt from John McPhee’s 1989 The Control of Nature, which deals in part with New Orleans’ efforts to tame the Mississippi River.
Torrential rains fall on New Orleans — enough to cause flash floods inside the municipal walls. The water has nowhere to go. Left on its own, it would form a lake, [...]
Review assignment lottery
Adam Langer (Crossing California) “learns from conversations with newspaper editors that it can be easier to get into Harvard than to get one’s book reviewed.”
Still preoccupied
On the face of it, there’s something more than a little presumptuous, I freely admit, about a Brooklyn blogger taking so manic an interest in Katrina and her wake.
Throughout my childhood and into my college years, I spent part of every summer on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. My sister and I flew [...]