On hiatus

Other projects afoot. Stay tuned.

A public service announcement

Now available free online: Dozens of issues of a trend-setting magazine, which throughout its history has published stories from a downright intimidating list of contemporary writers.

It does, however, feature a smidgen of adult content.

This is the future, I'm afraid

The pleasurable act of imagining

• Christy Rodgers appreciates Terry Southern at Dissident Voice.

Another Southern collaboration, with Mason Hoffenberg, produced the novel Candy, in which Voltaire’s iconic innocent Candide is reconceived as a dim but preternaturally sexy small town girl who travels far (and wide) and finds her ultimate happiness in a very preverse manner. On his own, Terry Southern is perhaps best known for the novel The Magic Christian, a less transcendent but intermittently brilliant lampoon of human greed. Both of these stories became not-so-great movies, their wild imaginativeness stunted by a medium that Southern may have had too much confidence in, after experiencing it at its best with Kubrick. Later interviews with him indicate that he saw the medium to which he’d hitched his fortunes with a very jaded eye.

That’s why you need to read the stories. Southern’s short stories, both satirical and “serious,” are distinguished by prose mastery, subtlety and a truly mind-blowing range of genre and subject matter, possibly unique in U.S. fiction, from the magic realism avant la lettre of a Texas dirt farmer battling a mythical sea-monster in his melon patch, through the minutely examined lives of tragically hip expatriates in Paris, and insider views of the French working class, to the anomie and casual sadism of disaffected young boys. Whether the boys in these stories are in south Texas (where Southern grew up) or New York City, the dialogue is always pitch perfect and the milieu is coolly exact.

...Southern, somewhat like his contemporary Lenny Bruce, was fascinated with our night-selves, the unexpurgated utterers of all that language that narrow-minded ideologues of all stripes tend to fear and despise. This marks him as a spirit impossibly out of synch with our times, but quintessential in his own. The stuff he dredged up out of the mid-20th century psyche has all seen the light of day many times over now; concupiscence among the powerful and repressed no longer has the power to shock most of us. Incest, necrophilia, coprophagy, whatever: it’s a commonplace of 24-7 news feeds. And yet, in some way because the times demanded it, Terry Southern made his own uniquely delicious froth out of it all, that’s still tasty today. And still radical, even if it doesn’t shock. (The two qualities are often confused.) Why? Because he forces us to permit ourselves to imagine anything, and his wild and generous humor shows us what a pleasurable act such imagining can be.

Oprah excoriation imminent

• Kaye Gibbons has been a bad girl.

I don't mean to be flip -- this is a sad thing. I hope she can get it together. We need all the good writers we can get.

Kaye Gibbons posed as a Florida doctor so she could fill prescriptions for painkillers, which she said took the edge off as she finished a novel, a prosecutor said at the best-selling author's sentencing Tuesday.

Earlier in the day, Gibbons pleaded guilty to five misdemeanor counts of obtaining property by fraud. She received a 90-day suspended jail sentence, two years of probation and a $300 fine. District Court Judge Ned Mangum also ordered her to undergo a drug assessment and random drug testing during probation.

Her addiction and the pressure of finishing her book pushed her to submit fraudulent hydrocodone prescriptions online and try to pick them up at Raleigh pharmacies under the name of a Florida physician, said her attorney, Roger Smith Jr.

Unseen Bolaño

• There's more Bolaño out there.

...The previously unseen manuscripts were entitled "Diorama" and "The Troubles of the Real Police Officer," reported La Vanguardia.

The newspaper said the documents also included what is believed to be a sixth section of Bolaño's epic five-part novel "2666."

The Wylie Agency, the literary agency, which recently took over the Bolaño estate, declined to comment about the reports. The novels apparently came to light when piles of documents, notebooks and diaries left behind by Bolaño were being sifted through.

Simon beat me to this. Yay Simon.

Last look back

• The New Yorker has selections from David Foster Wallace's last work.

“The Pale King” had many ambitions. It would show people a way to insulate themselves from the toxic freneticism of American life. It had to be emotionally engaged and morally sound, and to narrate boredom while obeying the physics of reading. And it had to put over the point that the kind of personality that conferred grace was exactly the kind that Wallace did not have. In 2005, Wallace wrote in his notebook, “They’re rare, but they’re among us. People able to achieve and sustain a certain steady state of concentration, attention, despite what they’re doing.” It did not escape him that his failing to write the book was rising to a meta level—that he could not write it because he could not himself ignore the noise of modern life.

Wallace made a considerable start, though. He found a style that was amusing and engaging, that captured mindfulness without solemnity. Perhaps someone else reading the novel—Wallace would show it to no one—might have been satisfied. But his own past brilliance stalked him. In his “Author’s Foreword,” he assures the reader, “The very last thing this book is is some kind of clever metafictional titty-pincher.” He also writes, “I find these sorts of cute, self-referential paradoxes irksome, too—at least now that I’m over 30 I do.” And yet there he was, writing about “David Wallace” in long, recursive sentences with footnotes.

The egg has to hatch first

• Conversational Reading brings good sense to the table on the question of potential arts funding.

This LA Times piece on Obama and a possible resurgence in arts funding has been getting some play. It's hard to get too excited though, as the piece is whole bunch of speculation and very little substance...

...Sorry, but if these are the straws that arts funding is grasping at, then that is a commentary in and of itself. Not that I don't think Obama isn't an arts-friendly president, but I'll wait for something a little more solid than his Facebook page before I get my hopes up.

CR also links to a NYT piece about the humanities which I read earlier this week; the gist of it is that during times of greater penny-pinching, funding for the arts usually goes down, not up.

Pay respect to your elders

• Scientists have identified the world's oldest words.

Reading University researchers claim "I", "we", "two" and "three" are among the most ancient, dating back tens of thousands of years.

Their computer model analyses the rate of change of words in English and the languages that share a common heritage.

The team says it can predict which words are likely to become extinct - citing "squeeze", "guts", "stick" and "bad" as probable first casualties.

Somehow I doubt that last one will happen...

The NSS Awards #30

From the AP: "Audit: KY airport execs racked up lavish expenses"

He ain't dead yet

• Philip Roth has two more books on the way.

I have a bet going with a friend that Roth will be the next big-name writer to kick the bucket. Of course, I would love to be proven wrong about this.

Publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt announced Wednesday that the Pulitzer Prize-winning author will have a novel out this fall, titled "The Humbling," about an aging stage performer. Next year, he'll have another book, "Nemesis," set during a polio epidemic in 1944.

Roth, who turns 76 next month, has been averaging a book a year for the past few years.

Her trash, our treasure

• Michiko Kakutani pans Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones in The New York Times.

Why is it that a Kakutani slam makes me want to read the book in question even more?

The novel’s gushing fans, however, seem to have mistaken perversity for daring, pretension for ambition, an odious stunt for contrarian cleverness. Willfully sensationalistic and deliberately repellent, “The Kindly Ones” — the title is a reference to the Furies, otherwise known in Greek mythology as the Eumenides — is an overstuffed suitcase of a book, consisting of an endless succession of scenes in which Jews are tortured, mutilated, shot, gassed or stuffed in ovens, intercut with an equally endless succession of scenes chronicling the narrator’s incestuous and sadomasochistic fantasies.

Indeed, the nearly 1,000-page-long novel reads as if the memoirs of the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss had been rewritten by a bad imitator of Genet and de Sade, or by the warped narrator of Bret Easton Ellis’s “American Psycho,” after repeated viewings of “The Night Porter” and “The Damned.”

Off to the valley

• Philip Jose Farmer, 1918-2009.

...Farmer's career mixed acclaim, and daring that courted infamy. With stories like "The Lovers," which won him a Hugo for "most promising new writer in 1953, and novels such as Flesh, Farmer made great strides toward bringing sexual frankness into science fiction.

Farmer also found fertile grounds in the margins of other creators' works, revisiting and revising characters such as Doc Samson and Tarzan, both of whom became subjects of Farmer's fictional biographies. He also published a novel under the name of "Kilgore Trout," borrowing the name from Kurt Vonnegut's fictional writer, reportedly much to Vonnegut's chagrin. Farmer found his greatest following with a pair of ongoing series: The Riverworld and World Of Tiers cycles.

Quite the name he made for himself

• Alfred A. Knopf Jr., 1918-2009.

...When his father refused, blaming his mother’s resistance (she apparently didn’t like Mr. Bessie), Mr. Knopf said in an interview in 2005, Mr. Knopf (pronounced with a hard “k”) decided to join Mr. Bessie and Hiram Haydn, an editor at Bobbs-Merrill, in founding Atheneum. They lined up four backers, each willing to put up $250,000, and established their offices in a four-story brownstone on East 38th Street. Cornelia Schaeffer, who would later become Mr. Bessie’s wife, joined the house as an editor about a year after its founding.

Atheneum got lucky fast. Its first three lists produced three No. 1 best sellers: “The Last of the Just” (1960), a novel about the Holocaust by André Schwarz-Bart; “The Making of the President, 1960” (1961), the first in Theodore H. White’s series on presidential campaigns; and “The Rothschilds: A Family Portrait” (1962) by Frederic Morton. These books were acquired by Mr. Bessie, although by informal understanding each of the founders had to agree on every book the house published.

Other projects, if not best sellers, also did well for the house. The first list included Jan de Hartog’s crime novel “The Inspector,” Wright Morris’s “Ceremony in Lone Tree” and William Goldman’s “Soldier in the Rain.” Atheneum later published Edward Albee’s play “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” (1962), which sold more than 70,000 copies in hard- and softcover editions. On the other hand, having published Mario Puzo’s second novel, “The Fortunate Pilgrim” (1965), the house turned down “The Godfather” (published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons in 1969). Mr. Haydn thought it “junk,” Mr. Knopf said.

Glad they cleared that up

• Over at Galleycat, Amazon's e-book sales numbers are examined.

Following up from an earlier post, the fine folks of Galleycat posted this clarification:

Following the advice of readers, GalleyCat asked an Amazon spokesperson for clarification. They reduced that early number: "Kindle sales make up more than 10 percent of sales of books that are available in both traditional and e-book form."

It's still not a number to quickly dismiss. I've never seen or used a Kindle but I keep hearing better and better things.