Preach it

• Farhad Manjoo spotlights one of my biggest pet peeves at Slate.

Finally, someone exposes this error for the foul offense it is:

What galls me about two-spacers isn't just their numbers. It's their certainty that they're right. Over Thanksgiving dinner last year, I asked people what they considered to be the "correct" number of spaces between sentences. The diners included doctors, computer programmers, and other highly accomplished professionals. Everyone—everyone!—said it was proper to use two spaces. Some people admitted to slipping sometimes and using a single space—but when writing something formal, they were always careful to use two. Others explained they mostly used a single space but felt guilty for violating the two-space "rule." Still others said they used two spaces all the time, and they were thrilled to be so proper. When I pointed out that they were doing it wrong—that, in fact, the correct way to end a sentence is with a period followed by a single, proud, beautiful space—the table balked. "Who says two spaces is wrong?" they wanted to know.

Tenacity, endurance, persistence

• Dark-horse NBA winner Jaimy Gordon is profiled by the New York Times.

For much of the ’70s Ms. Gordon was part of the experimental arts scene that flourished in Providence, attracting creative types from the Rhode Island School of Design and from the Brown writing program, then famously avant-garde. She wrote poetry, plays and a verse narrative, “The Bend, the Lip, the Kid, the Lip: Reallife Stories,” about a jailbird named McMagus who is convinced that the reason men become criminals is that their penises are unnaturally curved.

“I wasn’t writing about anything in the real world,” Ms. Gordon said. “I was just writing about the language that was thronging in my brain. I didn’t write realism until I was 35.”

To write a novel that was even remotely commercial, she went on, she had to get out of Providence, where even to think of such a thing was considered a sell out, and yet even after she moved, success did not immediately come her way.

“I had to confess that I do think about an audience, and I don’t think that’s so bad,” she said. “I’m a reader, and so I know what it’s like. That power — I wanted it so badly.”

My keyboard is broken

When I try to spell "WRITE" it comes out on the screen as "PROCRASTINATE."

Weird.

Thoughts of a random nature while writing

GalleyCat's National Novel Writing Month tips have been really cool so far. Some of the tools they point you to were already on my radar but most weren't. The OneLook Reverse Dictionary, spotlighted today, is a particularly helpful one.

And now, Mr. Waits:

You got to get behind the mule
In the morning and plow.

While I was out

I wrote the liner notes for Film Score Monthly's limited-edition CD release of Ennio Morricone's score to the Samuel Fuller film White Dog.

I also wrote "13 Chills: Thirteen Memorable Moments in Horror Film Music," in collaboration with Howlin' Wolf Records.

Other projects included a couple of screenplays, and some short fiction. Blogging to resume soon.

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"