Waldo, FL porn bookshop hit with homemade WMD
Cafe Risque — now an adult entertainment chain that runs up into the Carolinas — began in Central Florida. Driving to Gainesville from Miami in the 90’s, you’d start seeing the billboards of bra-clad, open-mouthed women well before Orlando. They always looked a little jaundiced in the renderings.
My favorite signs were [...]
Check back Friday
Really sorry, guys, but it’s that kind of week. A few quick things to feed the RSS:
Public employers retaliating against whistleblower employees? No problem. (Welcome to your new Supreme Court.)
Left Behind Christian apocalypse novels spawn a bigoted video game.
Banville will pen a screenplay based on The Sea; he envisions Anthony Hopkins or Michael Gambon [...]
The Smart Set: Lauren Cerand’s weekly events
The Smart Set is a weekly feature, compiled by Lauren Cerand, that usually appears Mondays at 12:30pm and highlights the best of the week to come. Special favor is given to New York’s independent booksellers and venues, and low-cost and free events. Please send details to lauren@maudnewton.com by the Thursday prior to publication, with the [...]
Signing off
That’s all for me for this week. Maud returns — flush with poker winnings, hangover remedies and a whole lot of recyclables — after her “holiday” weekend. Here in Canada the holiday was last weekend — Victoria Day. Yeah, I don’t know what’s up with that either. I celebrated like all good Canadians — by [...]
Remains of the day: Lazy Friday edition
Vanessa Redgrave to do a one-woman show of Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking! A thoroughly swoonable combination.
Peter Carey is inteviewed at the Independent, and snaps at yet another reporter asking about his ex-wife.
Joseph Bednarik, marketing director of Copper Canyon Press, wonders how we might turn an ever-proliferating pool of MFAs into a resource [...]
Regeneration
The revered Mumpismus points out this tool which will re-gender the language on any webpage, and in so doing asks the question: what do we really learn about language if we take away the basic distinction of gendered pronouns?
Wear your problem
T-shirts about language:
Homophone alert
Bad grammar makes me [sic]
Nothing rhymes with orange
Until next week
I’m off to get started on the long weekend (translation: work on all the things I meant to finish so I could enjoy the extra time off).
The dreamy Annie Reid takes over tomorrow and most Fridays. There’s no Memorial Day up there in Canada, you know. Just Victoria Day, and that [...]
Three responses to Lolita
In August 1954, Edmund Wilson invited Vladimir Nabokov to send along his latest novel. “I’d love to see it,” said Wilson. “[I]f nobody else is doing it, I’ll try to get my publisher, Straus, to.”
But once Wilson actually read Lolita, he was far less sanguine. His response, dated November 30, 1954 (and [...]
Remainders: distracted Thursday edition
Edwidge Danticat, whose Haitian uncle died in Homeland Security custody while trying to enter Miami with a valid visa, offers a reflection on the recent immigration protests. (Via Moorish Girl; image taken from Miami Arch.)
Florida attorney Michael L. Silverman, outraged that the U.F. police are allegedly seeking DNA and fingerprints from a graduate student [...]
Thomson’s Revelation on screen
Spurred by my recent interview with Rupert Thomson, a staff writer for Australia’s Limelight magazine sends word of a preliminary website and brief trailer for the film version of The Book of Revelation.
The screenplay has been adapted by playwright Andrew Bovell & director Ana Kokkinos, who both worked on a film a few years earlier [...]
Wednesday morning remainders
A stranger’s one-word response — “Distinctly” — to the question “Is it worth finishing?” was all the encouragement Joseph Conrad needed to keep working at his first novel. (Bonus Conrad links: Lennard Davis and Laila Lalami on teaching Heart of Darkness.)
Nobel laureate Günther Grass characterized G.W. Bush and Tony Blair as “priests who have blessed [...]
If their books were any good at all
Firedoglake counters the enthusiastic coverage of BookExpo with a report from an independent political publisher who formerly worked as a staff writer for Variety and producer for NPR’s On the Media.
Book Expo … is primarily a ridiculous display of fawning and ass-kissing, a giant corporate junket courtesy of the massive marketing budgets at the Big [...]
Tuesday afternoon miscellany
John Banville, Hilary Mantel, Jonathan Lethem, Francisco Goldman, Rebecca Goldstein, William Gass and other writers reflect on the first novel. (Via Rockslinga; only some of the contributions are available online.)
Tingle Alley’s Carrie Frye kicks off an LBC discussion of Yannick Murphy’s Here They Come.
In the current Voice Literary Supplement, Mark Swartz considers the rebirth [...]
The Smart Set: Lauren Cerand’s Six-Day Forecast
The Smart Set is a weekly feature, compiled by Lauren Cerand, that usually appears Mondays at 12:30pm and highlights the best of the week to come. Special favor is given to New York’s independent booksellers and venues, and low-cost and free events. Please send details to lauren@maudnewton.com by the Thursday prior to publication, with the [...]
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