I love this site. It’s sort of a social network for people who, like yourselves, love words. You log on, list your favorite words, and are linked to other people who like those words. Together, you can discuss your favorites in each word’s annotation section: etymologies, usage notes. It’s insanely geeky but awesome. My profile. A few words on my Favorites list: threnody, diaphanous, interrobang, synchronic, churl and pynchonian.

Noah Cicero is getting published in GREECE!

A Norweigian named ALF is interviewing me next week at THINK COFFEE for a major Norweigian newspaper or magazine!

The largest chinese newspaper in the world is going to interview me!

Support FAIR-TRADE ORGANIC COFFEE!

I am going to watch a movie alone tonight and I feel excited about that!

It is a movie about alienation in Malaysia!

You’ve seen the headlines:

Blog de soldado americano no Iraque ganha prêmio

US-Soldat gewinnt Preis für Irak-Tagebuch im Internet

Le Blooker Prize 2007 pour un blog militaire

Катька над Ираком в камышах

Blooker-Preis für das beste Buch nach einem Weblog

Sách về chiến tranh Iraq đoạt giải Blooker

Now read the press release.

(Okay, I’m sarcastic because my blook didn’t win.)

Not all of the people I wrote about in my 1979 “Some Young Writers I Admire” article were my friends. Although I’ve sometimes seen Brad Gooch around town – I think the first time I noticed him was in the early ‘70s at the GAA Firehouse, where he seemed embarrassed as a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet tried to pick him up – I’ve had only a few conversations with him, the last during a car ride over Biscayne Bay during the 1993 Miami Book Fair International, where I was appearing for the anthology Mondo Barbie and he was promoting his biography City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara.

Back in 1977, though, I was the first person to review Brad Gooch’s first book of poetry, The Daily News — for Charles Plymell’s small press review magazineNortheast Rising Sun. The Daily News was published by Kenward Elmslie‘s ‘s Z Press, an outgrowth of Z, the litmag at the St. Marks Poetry Project, and I was knocked out by its initial sonnet sequence and the other terrific poems in the book.

Since then, Brad’s had an amazingly eclectic publishing career. He’s an English professor at William Paterson University in New Jersey and writes for Travel + Leisure, Harper’s Bazaar, The New Republic, and Vanity Fair. Still living in New York City, he’s published several novels, short story collections, biographies, advice books and volumes of carefully-researched journalism.

Among his many books are Golden Age of Promiscuity, Scary Kisses and Finding the Boyfriend Within. (I especially have taken the last book to heart, as I’m dating myself with these posts.)

For a long time now, Brad’s had far more impressive boosters than I. Commenting on Brad’s last book, Godtalk, Gore Vidal wrote, “On so hot a subject as religion in America, Brad Gooch is as serenely cool as Tocqueville was on an equally hot subject, democracy in America; and as irresistibly readable.”

I just read this paragraph in an essay from one of the smartest, hardest-working students I have. I understand his meaning perfectly.

There some people who think money makes you upper class. If boy from the South Bronx projects, who makes five million dollars from records sales as a rapper, upper class even if he did not finish high school ,and reads at a 8th grade level. He will fix in with the high rollers of the rap entertains, but not would find it very difficult to socialize with the Kennedy’s or Rockefellers. Who are people of old money, educators, and very high society, however if you put Dr. Bill Cosby in the same room with the Kennedy’s and Rockefellers he would excel on all levels.

Do you know about The New-York Ghost? It’s not just for New Yorkers anymore. (Further information can be found here.)

The latest issue features a new piece by Ben Greenman, author of Superbad, numerous show tunes, and the recent A Circle Is a Balloon and a Compass Both.

Summer 2007 LBC Nominations are in. Look:

Always by Nicola Griffith (Riverhead)

Triangle by Katharine Weber (Picador)

Jamestown by Matthew Sharpe (Soft Skull)

Dave’s post on grammar made me think. (Dave, I’ll get you for that. It hurts.) I’d been a law school administrator in recent years before going back this year to teaching college writing (supposedly I’m retired, but I’ve been working part-time at four different schools) and I’ve begun to wonder if I should just stop correcting certain grammar errors that still drive me crazy.

When I first taught, in the ’70s, I used to correct “who” and “whom” all the time. I stopped. Now I correct only when students use “whom” when they mean “who,” not the other way around. I still use it sometimes because I’m old, but basically I favor whom‘s doom.

But I’ve still been correcting the pronoun shift in the title of this post: a writer will start with the singular anyone, everyone, someone, anybody, or the ubiquitous a person and then she will invariably use the plural personal pronoun they, them, their later in the sentence.

Should I just leave it alone?

How about the use of you in a sentence like this:

In my high school you had to work very hard to get good grades.

I always write something like, “I didn’t go to your high school. Use you only when addressing the reader.”

(I also would like to have a quarter for every time I correct the placement of the close quotation mark and the period or the incorrect use of its, it’s, its’ [sic] and i’ts [really sic].)

We’re talking about formal expository essays, business letters, argumentative writing, not narratives. Am I being an old fart to correct a person/their and the general you?

Many thanks to the guest bloggers who have kindly taken up the slack. For an update on how things are going, I think this video pretty much sums things up:

Poetry fans: Check out, if you haven’t already, this excellent interview with Guy Maddin about his new Brand Upon the Brain!, a mind-meltingly good silent movie (“A Remembrance in 12 chapters”) with a lot of exclamation points. It’s being screened as I write this along with live narration, an 11-piece orchestra, a castrato (!), and fun sound effects.

In the interview, Jessica Winter asks Maddin about the aesthetic kinship he shares with John Ashbery, who narrated a performance of Brand! last night in New York.

(This is neither here nor there, but did you know that Akira Kurosawa’s elder brother, Heigo, was a benshi—a narrator of silent films? I’ve had this factoid lodged in my brain for nearly five years, ever since writing this article; I wasn’t able to deploy it then, but I’m glad I can share it now.)

Back to Brand Upon the Brain!:

New Yorkers, you have until tomorrow to watch it!

Other people, the show might come to your town! (Here’s the schedule.)

UPDATE: Just as this post was “going to press,” Jessica W. e-mailed me about last night’s Ashbery-voxed perf:

Ashbery’s authoritative monotone and deliberate pace, familiar from his readings, made a perfect complement with the feverish melodrama onscreen—just as it underlined his own influence on Maddin’s intertitles. As the story flung itself toward its climax, the effect of Ashbery’s steady intonations became—maybe I just love a chance to use this word, but—chthonic, like an ancient voice from long ago and far away was just reaching us. We were spellbound.

Assembling was an annual compendium of “otherwise unpublishable” avant-garde art and literature compiled by Richard Kostelanetz and others between 1970 and 1982. Contributors were invited to send in up to four pages of 1,000 copies of 8 ½ x 11 pages, which were assembled alphabetically and bound into books.

I can recall taking my contributions to several editions of Assembling to Hanging Loose Press’s Bob Hershon at downtown Brooklyn’s Print Center, used by many artists and writers in those days before cheap copying.

My first few were prose experiments, but for 1979’s A Critical (Ninth) Assembling, I wrote a piece called “Some Young Writers I Admire” about ten people, several of whom were friends.

Three of the ten I lost touch with; I’m pretty sure they’ve stopped writing. There are a lot of casualties in literature.

I’d like to post about some of the others in the coming days, people still around, writing and publishing, like me, after more than 30 years.

The one pick you’ve probably heard of was then a poet. I praised his chapbooks Tiger Beat (Little Caesar Press, 1978) and Idols (The SeaHorse Press, 1979) and the little magazine he edited, Little Caesar, which I subscribed to. At the time I wrote the piece, he was the director of programming at Venice’s Beyond Baroque center, which had published several of my stories in their literary magazine.

I did not mention that once he had sent me a folded-over piece of paper on the outside of which he’d scrawled: Prepare to meet thy God. Inside, when I opened it, I found a rare colored Xerox photo of Leif Garrett.

The poet and editor I admired is famous today as a novelist: Dennis Cooper.

More of my admired no-longer-young writers in coming days.

David Carr’s Media Equation column in The New York Times today looks at the possibility that cutbacks and layoffs may not be enough to save The Star-Tribune in Minneapolis.

(Full disclosure: In December 1979, The Star-Tribune’s pre-merger predecessor, The Minneapolis Tribune, gave my first book the most perceptive review it received: “Richard Grayson’s anthology of short stories is unbelievably bad, bad, bad. How bad is it? Well, after a writer reviews his chosen book, he gets to keep it…I am not keeping this one. I want to give it to someone I really despise.”)

Immense thanks to Ed for letting me guest-blog, and I ask for your patience with someone new to this. Although the number of us over 55 seems limited among lit-bloggers (there’s Frank Wilson at Books, Inq., Lynne W. Scanlon at The Publishing Contrarian and Michael Allen at Grumpy Old Bookman — if there are more, please let me know) and I find myself more and more playing the old man card to excuse all my failings, I’ll try not to do so here.

On the other hand, blogs, like the daily newspaper, tend to focus relentlessly on the present. Having graduated from an MFA program over 30 years ago and published my first book in the 1970s (when even my astute copy editor did not catch my error of referring to a “silicone [sic] chip”), I probably can’t add that much that’s unique to most discussions of what’s going on now in literature, so I figured I’d write about stuff from the past.

Like I wanted to write something about my friend Scott Sommer, who was my age and whom I met in 1979, the year our hardcover fiction books were published by the same publisher and edited by the same editor. He died in 1993, of a sudden heart attack, at only 42. Writing in The New York Times Book Review 22 years ago, Ed’s good friend Sam Tanenhaus said that Scott “displayed a unique comic voice, at once acerbic and melancholy, as if Holden Caulfield had teamed up with the young Samuel Beckett to recite the woes of lovelorn hipsters lost in a daze of Quaaludes and Kierkegaard.”

Yeah, there were hipsters in 1985, too.

…and yet in the absence of Ed there is another Ed: your humble narrator, Ed P., occasionally referred to on this blog as East Coast Ed.

There are so few Eds roaming the landscape that we need to band together. (So it is written in the Ed Manifesto.) It’s a strange name—Edward‘s not strange, but Ed is so abrupt. And yet I like it, Ed C. likes it—there is the idea that you are getting the maximum possible impact from two letters.

To kick things off, I want to share my favorite recent blurb: Sarah Manguso on poet Jennifer Knox’s forthcoming Drunk By Noon (Bloof Books). The blurb itself is like a poem!:

Since Knox favors premise over conclusion, her poems simply speak—they do not explain. In this way they are not entirely unlike scripture. The part that is unlike scripture is the one that’s like “Wait, I was reading these poems and laughing but my hearing aid fell out and then my face just kind of blew off in a beautiful rainbow spray of bullshit-dissolving napalm.”

Due to current existential circumstances, I will be taking a break from this blog for the next two weeks. Don’t worry. All is well. And I’ll have more to say about all this later. I’m only sorry that I wasn’t able to turn out more podcasts, but I’m doing the best I can.

A number of people have kindly volunteered to guest blog in my absence. If you’re interested, email me. But I can’t guarantee that I’ll get to your email immediately.

Their crazed musings should start to appear here tomorrow.

In the meantime, take a walk around your block with your slippers on and hug someone who needs it.

Josh Getlin gets his facts wrong in this article about the so-called litblogs vs. print war. The quote that Getlin attributes to me is actually from Colleen Mondor:

It’s okay for the lit blogosphere to exist as a version of your Mom’s book club – it’s okay for us to talk books and authors and compare notes on favorites, as long as we keep our place. Have you got that? We must not think for a moment that we contribute anything beyond serving as accessories to the real literary discussions.

I should point out that Getlin contacted me by email. I offered to talk with him over the phone and clarify my points. He never returned my call. But I did send the email he quoted.

And I’m glad that he at least noted the fact that Michael Dirda and I have been emailing. But I’m baffled that Getlin didn’t get a quote from John Freeman.

[UPDATE: One other correction to Getlin’s piece. For those who don’t know the story, here is the history of events. Dirda didn’t write his words in The Washington Post, as Getlin claims, but he contributed them to the NBCC blog Critical Mass. I was the first person to leave a comment on that post. I wondered why Dirda was so hostile to blogs. I called for harmony between print and online voices. Other figures, such as Colleen, Bookblog’s Marydell, Ron Hogan, Dan Wickett, David Montgomery, and numerous others, have asked the same question I have in various threads at the Critical Mass site as well as various posts at their respective sites: Why is the NBCC so hostile to the very literary enthusiasts who need to be involved in the campaign? John Freeman attempted some spin control with this post at Critical Mass on April 30, only to suggest, merely a week later on the Leonard Lopate Show, that newspapers should steal from blogs in order to survive. The question then is why Freeman constantly waffles in his clear animosity towards blogs (I certainly have no animosity towards Freeman, but he seems to confuse criticism of his writings with criticism of him as a person) and why he can’t quell these troubling prejudices in favor of a united front for literary coverage in all conduits.]

[UPDATE 2: The Los Angeles Times will be correcting the piece.]

Also, for the record, I think Josh Getlin is, in general, a pretty good reporter. I think this was simply a case of Getlin not understanding blogs very well.

My review of Haruki Murakmi’s After Dark can be found in this Sunday’s Los Angeles Times Book Review. Here’s the first paragraph:

The title of Haruki Murakami’s latest novel may connote the smoke-hewn, jazz-strewn flow of Hugh Hefner’s old television show. But the book’s post-midnight Tokyo is a lonely place where the trains have stopped running and the love hotels and the family restaurants are sanctuaries for the loners and the sad sacks stuck working graveyard.

I’m honored to be in there with Sven Birkets, who reviews the new DeLillo book, and Sarah Weinman, who reviews a Sara Paretsky volume.

I’m worried about Michael Orthofer. He hasn’t updated the Literary Saloon since Monday. He hasn’t returned emails. And the phone number I have for him is now disconnected.

If anyone knows if Michael’s okay (or if Michael himself might let us know), please leave a comment in this thread.

[UPDATE: Mark Sarvas tells me that he’s talked with Orthofer. He’s just been having computer problems. So no worries, folks!]

If I have been responding to your emails from a year and a half ago, please do not be afraid. I am quite well-adjusted and not sociopathic. This is merely a matter of having a small time window to respond properly to your various messages, and nothing more.

Jason Kottke: “Maybe kottke.org has been intentionally excluded because I’ve been so hard on them in the past. Or maybe it’s just a glitch (or two) in their system. Or maybe it’s an indication of larger problems with their service. Either way, as the company is attempting to offer an authentic picture of the blogosphere, this doesn’t seem like the type of rigor and accuracy that should send reputable media sources like the BBC, Washington Post, NY Times, and the Wall Street Journal scurrying to their door looking for reliable data about blogs.”

BBC: “Tony Blair has announced he will stand down as prime minister on 27 June.”

New York Times: “‘Everyone felt very strongly that we needed a white character or a part-white, part-Indian character to carry a contemporary white audience through this project,’ Daniel Giat, the writer who adapted the book for HBO Films, told a group of television writers earlier this year.”

And I’ll fourth it.

I first encountered the stories of W. Somerset Maugham as an undergraduate in an out-of-print two-volume set that I was extremely lucky to find at an estate sale a few years later. Maugham’s stories were hardly “a creaking reminder of distant colonial days.” Like Graham Greene and Anthony Burgess, Maugham was an expert in depicting British expatriates escaping to tropical isles, attempting to find meaning through run-ins, both carnal and conversational, with these new environs. I’ll have more to say on all this, as well as his Ashenden stories, in a future post when I can find the time.