I Cannot Read Without Books

A Bit on Abbreviations

I'm glad that nobody is reading this blog (yet), because I have yet to figure out exactly what the heck it is. But, just in case I have one reader (I remember telling one person about it at a recent conference, and he added it to his Firefox bookmarks, but I'll assume that he's since deleted that mistake), there are 4 abbreviations that I feel I need to provide.

DFW - David Foster Wallace
JCO - Joyce Carol Oates
WTV - Willliam T. Vollmann
TCB - T.C. Boyle

So, in that vain, two links of interest to DFW fans:

1) A transcript of a commencement address he gave this past May.
2) A hopeful piece on getting a Q&A with DFW, but winds up just talking about his books.

More on "Consider the Lobster"

Plumbing depths, from dinner to dictionaries

"Consider the Lobster carries a subtext, which is "Consider the Writer." It is difficult to know from the printed page how much of his quirkiness is organic and how much of it is studied. Whatever the answer, it is always welcome."

DFW v. SAW

David Foster Wallace vs. Strunk And White

"On one hand, The Elements of Style has been considered the de facto usage and style bible for more than 80 years. And yet, our preeminent American stylist naysays many of its rules. Let's compare the two to see just what the f*** is going on."

Test

TEst

Dailies

A book about a show about finding a book about a show? Very confusing

An article about banning a book about book banning – More confusion.

Some middle school students are doing their own version of the Newberry Awards.

Michael Kransey of KQED will be interviewing Joyce Carol Oates tomorrow. Tune in at 10:00AM PST or tune out and grab it from the archives when you have a chance.

Dailies

The Noneuclidian Café opened up shop today. James Swingle, the editor, writes: “I created Noneuclidean Cafe to be a place where we can test some premises, and where people and things that don't always get a chance to meet can come together: Where personal growth and the arts can sit down together; where unconscious and conscious are given voice to express themselves; where all change modalities find a chair; where traditional wisdom and Western science have a place at the table; where personal and social change are invited; and where all lines, whether straight or not, have the right to get married if they want.”

Time Magazine is listing their top 100 novels of all time. How many have you read? More importantly, how many have you enjoyed?

Dailies

Nan Goldberg, on the lasted Scott Turow.

Michael Kenney on Witchﬁnders: A Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy, by Malcolm Gaskill.

Sarah Tomlinson on Drugs Are Nice: A Post-Punk Memoir, by Lisa Crystal Carver.

Janet Maslin on The Truth (With Jokes), by Al Franken.

Tom Zeller, Jr. on Gary Benchley, Rock Star, by Paul Ford.

Orange County Register: “Ryan Gattis, 27, is a rising star in the literary world. He's that rare cultural mix-master who can both lecture on Victorian poets and write a novel about the "`gangbanger' Armageddon" that's a hot property in Hollywood.”

Ack, a book review all in bold.  I guess that means we should pay attention?

Yet another way to break into the publishing biz: “Starting in August, any author (established or self-published) who has a book for sale on Amazon.com can submit a previously unpublished fiction or non-fiction piece (2,000-10,000 words) for customers to download as a web page, PDF, or plain-text e-mail for $0.49 each.”

Dumbest. Headline. Ever.

Noam Chomsky: “The beauty of concision is that you can only repeat conventional thoughts."

Surfer fiction.

The cover of the new Amy Tan shocked the heck out of me when I first saw it this weekend.  Alas, don’t judge a book…

Dailies

Mike Wallace has written a second memoir.

An interesting premise for a second novel by Lori Lansens called, The Girls: “The Girls, Rose and Ruby Darlen, are on their way to becoming the world's oldest surviving craniopagus twins - they are attached at the head - if they live to their 30th birthday. Abandoned at birth, they are adopted by a no-nonsense middle-aged nurse and her Slovakian-Canadian husband who try to raise them in as normal an environment as possible on a farm in southwestern Ontario.”

The Canoe reviews “San Francisco Is Burning: The Untold Story of the 1906 Earthquakes and Fires”, by Jason Smith. It will go in my ‘maybe’ pile.

John Roderickap on “Mao: The Unknown Story”.

The French translation of the latest Harry Pothead is 120 pages longer. 120 painful pages longer, I assume.

Picked up today from the library for the next two weeks of commuting:

Tooth and Claw, by T.C. Boyle

One Matchless Times: A Life of William Faulkner, by Jay Parini

Tori Amos: Piece by Piece, by Tori Amos and Ann Powers