Not A Nice Young Jewish Boy
Imagine our surprise when we learned from an inside source that DSM contributing editor, Mr. Andrew Geer, is in bed with the Wall Street Journal. Don’t get us wrong, we respect the Journal for regularly publishing journalism of the highest order. But Geer’s allegiance to that prayer-piece of conservative dogma is downright sinful. Word on the street is he sleeps in a pair of WSJ nighties, which is enough to make the subjects of today’s stories micturate in their trousers. Philip Roth doesn’t do conservative, even if his next novel is a slim 160 pages. Edgar Allan Poe died drunk in the gutter — ’nuff said — but at long last Baltimore is giving him a proper burial. Jean Rhys is known for her saucy demarcations; The Nation dries her out and puts her back together. Michael Jackson, that ambassador of popstar flooziness, is dead. But live on he does in Simon Crump’s new book. The Rumpus has a liberal interview of Alasdair Gray, Salman Rushide gives extremists another reason to hate America, as he is awarded the Carl Sandburg Award, and a documentary about Kerouac’s Big Sur has some left-leaning all-stars riffing to bebop. Where’s Buckley when you need him? — Kevin Murphy
– When Philip Roth pokes his head around the conference room door of the New York office of his literary agency, he looks familiar to me — but not because his photograph gazes out from the jackets of his books. I grew up on the Upper West Side of this city, where Roth keeps an apartment these days for when the winter weather at his Connecticut home becomes too severe. — Philip Roth in the Times Online
– As bagpipers played “Amazing Grace,” pallbearers in black armbands wheeled Poe’s body – a rendition of it, in truth – into the former church’s interior, where a succession of actors and speakers, some posing as Poe’s contemporaries, began a celebration of the life of a man whose life was so often a celebration of death. — Edgar Allan Poe in the Baltimore Sun
Take Off Those Jammies, Drew
– Rhys is usually reduced to a chronicler of drunk, sexually promiscuous and frequently mad women. Indeed, the novel she is best known for, Wide Sargasso Sea, is a retelling of Jane Eyre from the perspective of Mr. Rochester’s first wife–who in Brontë’s novel has been confined to the attic. — Jean Rhys in the Nation
– “If I was born with a name like Simon Crump,” said Chris de Burgh, “I would spend the rest of my life trying to get all that anger and resentment out of me by being very rude about other people.” I recently reviewed Neverland: the Unreal Michael Jackson Story,Crump’s latest book. — Simon Crump in Asylum
– Author Salman Rushdie has been selected to receive the 2009 Carl Sandburg Literary Award, presented annually by the Chicago Public Library Foundation and the Chicago Public Library in honor of a significant body of work that has enhanced public awareness of the written word. — Salman Rushdie in Chicago Public Library Foundation
Alasdair As Imagined By Alasdair
– Writer and artist Alasdair Gray is his own best nightmare. It took the modern Scottish bard twenty-five years to finish Lanark: A Life in Four Books (1981), his fat, strangely inspirational novel of urbanism gone awry. Interweaving the story of a young art student in pre- and post-War Glasgow with a parallel, cannibalistic dystopian fantasy set in a city called Unthank, Lanark pulses with an addictive blend of postmodern farce and stunning realism. — Alasdair Gray in the Rumpus
– Curt Worden, who directed One Fast Move or I’m Gone: Kerouac’s Big Sur, uses various artists, including Tom Waits, John Ventimiglia and Patti Smith, to voice Kerouac’s prose. As he tells Renee Montagne, it was important to allow the audience to connect with the author’s words. — Jack Kerouac in NPR
Video: One Fast Move or I’m Gone
