ma's pretty sharp with the cleavers

sunday short stack

"The trouble with being poor is it takes up all your time." - Willem de Kooning

• In honor of Mother's Day: 21 Creepy Babies in TV and Film and...
• ’90s Alternative Kids: Where Are They Now?
• David Mitchell on historical fiction: "...if History is the family tree of Now, a historical novel may illuminate the contemporary world in ways that straight history may not."
• The 20 Most Shocking TV Deaths
• Flannery O'Connor in a bizarre video from 1932 about backwards-walking animals
• Bill Murray reads poetry to construction workers
• Famous Philosophers and How They Were First Discovered
• Paste: 10 Indie Films We're Looking Forward to This Summer
• I'm not be a student anymore, but you may be - 31 Travel Scholarships, Fellowships, and Grants to Fund Your Next Trip Abroad

52 books in 52 weeks

I'm only five books shy of being on target. Not bad...

5. Free: The Future of a Radical Priceby Chris Anderson

My friend often talks about how much the internet loves him because it gives him all this free stuff. Ha ha, I would say, not actually understanding the real explanation. Now, thanks to Chris Anderson and his concise explanation of the multiple "free" models that structure much web commerce, I get it. I know there was some controversy when this book was published, but I don't remember what it was.

6. In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin

When I first started reading this short story collection, I was taken aback that it had won so many awards because three of the first four stories have basically the same plot. A pretty, poor girl is taken in by a more wealthy landowner/official who denies/abandons her shortly before his death. It was startling and a little surreal. However, the plots and characters vary much more as the collection continues and no doubt, Mueenuddin is a writer to watch.

7. A Dark Matterby Peter Straub

About once a year, I break from my typical reading material and pick up a popular, recently released horror novel with great hopes for spooking. Last year, I read Joe Hill's Heart-Shaped Box, which was pretty entertaining. This year, it was Straub and I sadly, snobbily found the whole production a little silly. I was not spooked and thought all the characters - especially this Eel chick - were a bit insufferable.

8. We Have Always Lived in the Castleby Shirley Jackson

Now, this was spooky and great fun. Just look at the cover of this recent edition! Creepy! Jackson's classic tale of these recluse sisters - whose family was taken by arsenic poisoning years before, for which the oldest sister was tried and acquitted - is suspenseful and richly drawn. The narrator is delightfully unreliable. When their cad of a cousin arrives on the scene, all hell breaks loose.

9. The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University by Louis Menand

I'm not sure who the audience is for this book. I would think it would be me, but I felt I was hearing a lot of what I already knew/could guess. So if it was written for a more non-academic audience, I'm just not sure they'd be all that interested. Beyond that, it's a brief, accessible overview of four different aspects of the current university climate.

10. Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life: A Book by and for the Fanatics Among Us (with Bitchin' Soundtrack)by Steve Almond

I reviewed this for the LA Times on April 29th. Check it out here.

11. Just Kidsby Patti Smith

I did not expect to love this book as much as I did. I thought I'd like to support Smith's writing and learn more about Mapplethorpe. I did not suspect that I would not be able to put this book down, reading every evocative detail with a hunger for that time period in New York that I didn't know I had. I certainly did not know I would finish the book sobbing. Beautiful and moving.

12. Fun with Problemsby Robert Stone

I'm still hungover from Stone's latest story collection. It took me about four attempts to get into the title story, but once I got past that, the remaining stories were lively and pleasantly uncomfortable - full of messy drunks causing messes.

13. Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House by Meghan Daum

I reviewed this for the LA Times on May 9th (yes, in the future). Check it out here.

sunday short stack

"The universe will reward you for taking risks on its behalf." - Shakti Gawain

• Aimee Semple McPherson's Arabian castle in Lake Elsinore is for sale.
• 17 Films About Getting in Way Over Your Head in the Big, Bad City
• 1977: Tom Waits makes a boozy appearance on Fernwood Tonight.
• The 50 Best Book People to Follow on Twitter and 40 Bloggers Who Really Count (as opposed to all those other pesky bloggers, but what is Naomi Klein doing under Food?)
• They did not like Roget's Thesaurus in 1854. At all.
• Were the "mad" heroines of literature really sane?
• I promise to be vigilant against these top 20 most annoying reviewer clichés.
• Historians have long concurred in identifying professional authors as the occupational group most prone to habitual tobacco use (with awesome photos).

los angeles festival of books 2010

Another Festival of Books has come and gone...I may have more commentary at some point, but I'm going to let photos and my panel coverage for Jacket Copy do the talking for now.

The first panel I covered on Saturday was Rebooting Culture with Ander Monson, Nicholas Carr, and David Shields, moderated by David Ulin..You can read the coverage here.


That afternoon was Carol Burnett...


And on Sunday, I had the pleasure (ahem) of covering Bret Easton Ellis.

sunday short stack

“This is what I thought: for the most banal even to become an adventure, you must (and this is enough) begin to recount it.” - Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

• Are the Wachowski Brothers adapting Cloud Atlas?!
• 25 Notable Recluses
• This is almost (but not quite) too precious to post: Cute Boys with Cats
• 10 Weird Duets
• When a Bad Movie Has One Incredibly Great Scene
• A recovered survey from 1992 reveals the sex lives of librarians.
• The 10 Most Epic Stage-Dive Fails
• The Creepiest Children's Books Ever
• President Obama has two tickets to that thing you like.
• 10 Songs for English Majors and Other Word Nerds
• I love Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" - more people should talk about it all the time.

people hang on his every word, even the prepositions

-

He really is...

sunday short stack

"Never apologize for showing feeling. When you do so, you apologize for truth." - Benjamin Disraeli

• From Flavorpill: 10 Films about Music We Can't Wait to See and Our 35 Favorite Music Moments in Film
• From The Top 13: Best Acting Performances by Musicians
• Now Playing: The Audreys
• Sophie Blackall creates illustrations to accompany Missed Connections.
• The Top 10 Places You Don't Want to Visit
• I think I must have this pinnacle in packaging from Tank Books.
• Glimpse Banksy in the "the world’s first street-art disaster movie."
• The shortlist for the "lost" 1970 Booker Prize has been announced.
• Hemingway Novel Character or "Match Game PM" Star?

I like samantha mathis in anything

and more of the best movie posters of 2009.

sunday short stack

"Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive." - Anäis Nin

• Write or Die (!) starts erasing what you've written if you stop typing.
• 10 Literary Ladies in Desperate Need of a Gay Friend
• Donatello doesn’t call it “TV” because nicknames are for friends...and more from Hipster Kitty.
• Sam Lipsyte takes us on a walking tour of Astoria.
• Top 10 Movie Gang Fights
• Check out Richard Ramirez's letterhead. That's just wrong.
• I want 4 by Poe.
• 15 Witty Pieces of Text Graffiti
• This is a "pretty insane project": A Reference Of Female-Fronted Punk Rock: 1977-89
• Jon Stewart tries out Chatroulette.
• The 16 Best Dystopian Books of All Time
• I didn't say this anywhere else and I should have: Mary Gaitskill's reading at the Hammer this past week was thrilling.

52 books in 52 weeks

Ridiculous! I cannot believe I've only read four books this year so far. Time to step it up...

1. Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann

This novel is the epic undertaking critics claim, painting a great world within the borders of Manhattan. Characters converge around the 1974 walk of Philippe Petit between the World Trade Center towers, and while some characters are more memorable than others, the whole book is greater than the sum of its parts. More balance between the chapters would have made it a bit better read for me, but others may disagree.

2. The Best American Short Stories 2009

Alice Sebold was this year's editor, and she chose some memorable selections, especially "Hurricanes Anonymous," which I can't get out of my head. Unfortunately, the pace of the collection staggers somewhat dramatically toward the end. I've never seen this happen before in a BASS collection, and I don't think Pitlor, Sebold, or the last 3-4 writers alphabetically are singularly responsible, but it was not a strong finish.

3. Blame by Michelle Huneven

I adore Michelle Huneven's writing. It's as simple as that. She takes the stuff of ordinary life and seemingly does nothing all that groundbreaking with it, but her novels stick with me in a way few do. I also stop and linger over some of her sentences and think, "Damn. I wish I had written that sentence." I can think of no other writer - except maybe Francine Prose - who infuses the accessible with insight and truth quite as well.

4. Tinkers by Paul Harding

I can't tell whether the hype for this book ruined it for me, or whether I hate nature writing, or whether I just wasn't in the mood for such indirect prose after Blame, but at times, I almost walked away without finishing it. Yes, there is some beautiful writing, and I admire what Harding was attempting, but the narrative just did not flow for me.

crab-bucket syndrome?

Maria Bustillos compares the hatin' on Dave Eggers to that directed at Wyndam Lewis.

Part of the reason it took so long for the Vorticists to come into their own is that Wyndham Lewis was a very questionable specimen. Lot of things to dislike about this guy. He was wildly anti-Semitic; he even managed to write a whole book in favor of Hitler in 1931 (Hitler, it is called.) The man just shot his mouth off like crazy. As you can imagine, Lewis felt pretty bad when he found out what was actually going down in Nazi Germany when he went to Berlin in 1937! So he took it all back, which is at least something. (His idea of contrition was to write a book called The Jews: Are they Human?, in 1939.) Wilde’s friend Robbie Ross called Lewis “a buffalo in wolf’s clothing.”

All this brings me to Dave Eggers, you may be surprised to hear. Dave Eggers, though evidently not an openly combative or buffalo-like person, is like Lewis in being both talented and roundly disliked; an outsider in his own circle.

Dave Eggers is a thorn in many a side in today’s America, my own included. His bizarre combination of fame, enthusiasm and sentimentalizing drives a lot of people up a tree. It’s safe to say that Eggers is currently the most detested man in American haute-literary circles. To support this contention, I’ve made a table of Google searches using the phrase “I hate _________,” and put in a lot of divisive-seeming haute-literary names...

Read more.

sunday short stack

“What passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human … is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic.” - David Foster Wallace (via Slaughterhouse 90210)

• Who says girls can't play drums?
• The Best of Journalism (2009)
• The A/V Club lists literary works that should never be adapted to film or TV again.
• Is luck a skill you can learn?
• Flavorwire wants you to read these books from LOST.
• Faulkner’s brother John claimed that he would often fake being drunk to avoid work.
• What happens to record stores after they die?

sometimes the good life wears thin

Here's the trailer for Strange Powers: Stephen Merritt and the Magnetic Fields, ten years in the making.



And here are my two favorite Magnetic Fields songs.

I Wish I Had an Evil Twin - Th...

All My Little Words - The Magn...

do I advise the housekeeper on where to buy fish?

David Mitchell's forthcoming novel The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet won't be out until June, but you can read an excerpt here.