Who Doesn't Love A Hard Life?
Hard living — God knows we’ve seen our share. Many authors exorcise and/or celebrate their hard lives through books. For better or worse, readers are hungry for such literature. Mary Karr can attest. Her novel, The Liars’ Club, sent shivers up the morally righteous spine of America. Now she’s moved on to new material. But will it resonate? Gawker Media is a big fat Internet success story. One of their bloggers even gets to work from afar, in LA. Media Bistro explains. Bob Arum is an intelligent man. He’s such a whiz, in fact, that much of the boxing world is throwing in the towel. But what about those of us who don’t want to work? Stab yourself, of course. And blame it on the Hispanics. Don’t believe us? Head over to the Smoking Gun for confirmation. Esteemed writers are happy to share their influences, reading online is killing reading, says the Times Online, Márquez’s early life is exhumed in a new biography, and musicians tell the tale of their literary tastes with reverential albums. It’s a hard life indeed. — Kevin Murphy
– The Liars’ Club sent a jolt through the reading public. Its sequel, Cherry, less so, but it brought readers into Karr’s teenage years and her sexual awakening. Now Karr, 54, is back with a third memoir, Lit, which starts at the end of high school year and marches through motherhood, alcoholism, sobriety, a “nervous breakthrough,” divorce and God. – Mary Karr in Chron Life
– Richard Rushfield is one of the few West Coasters that are still kept on Gawker’s payroll. Hell, even Gabriel Snyder had to move back to New York to take the job as managing editor of the online publication. And if that doesn’t make him an outlier enough, Rushfield actually quit The Los Angeles Times (and no, that’s not code for “got fired by Sam Zell” or “took a buyout package”) to take on the role of a full-time blogger. Now he has a book out called Don’t Follow Me, I’m Lost, about what some would call was his counter-intuitive switch from mainstream to digital media. — Richard Rushfield in Media Bistro
You Read Neruda? I Read Neruda!
– “Bob Arum is one of the 10 smartest people I’ve ever met, not one of the 10 smartest boxing people I’ve met,” says longtime HBO executive Seth Abraham, who has known Arum as both a businessman and friend. “He combines, which is extra formidable, traditional book smarts with street smarts, common sense and experience. “You put those things together and he is truly brilliant.” — Bob Arum in USA Today
– Meet Aaron Siebers. The 27-year-old Denver man, a Blockbuster employee, was skateboarding yesterday afternoon when he fell and ripped his uniform pants. Due to work last night–and concerned about getting “written up” by Blockbuster superiors for not wearing his work-issued khakis–Siebers came up with a harebrained idea. Instead of just calling in sick, he stabbed himself in the leg and showed up at work claiming to have just been attacked by three Hispanic males. — AWOL in the Smoking Gun
– Near the middle of the Inferno, the poet Brunetto Latini tells Dante, “If you follow your star, you cannot fail to reach a glorious port.” The scene is doubly poignant. The first prick comes with Brunetto’s encouragement of his former student, a gesture of generosity that Dante answers with a gratitude that “will be found, as long as I live, in my language.” The second and more lasting poignancy arrives when we remember that Brunetto is speaking from a script of Dante’s devising. The teacher says what he says because those are the words his student wanted to hear. — Influence in Book Forum
A Public Perception Of Marquez
– In this book, which focuses on the writer’s life up until 1950, García Márquez works to shape his own public perception. With the masterful storytelling style of what is commonly known as his “magical realism,” he presents himself and his childhood home of Aracataca, Columbia, with every bit as much fantasy as he does the Buendías in their Macondo. – Garcia Marquez in The Critical Flame
– It was inevitable that more than a decade of digital reading would change the way we do it. In a remarkable recent essay in the Atlantic Monthly Nicholas Carr admitted that he can no longer immerse himself in substantial books and longer articles in the way he once did. “What the net seems to be doing is chipping away at my capacity for concentration and contemplation,” he wrote. “My mind now expects to take in information the way the net distributes it: in a swift-moving stream of particles.” — Online Reading the Times Online
– It’s no real surprise that Wikipedia has a thorough list of these, but it’s interesting to parse through the many, and find a neat collection of songs and albums that were based on, or influenced by books. Led Zeppelin has a scatological lyric library referencing JRR Tolkien, but let’s see what else is out there. — Bookish Albums in Neatorama
Video: Tales of Brave Ulysses
