Roundup

  • The Millions’ Garth Risk Hallberg offers “an attempt of a review” for Against the Day.
  • Orhan Pamuk is not pleased with “being secure.” Accordingly, Pamuk has spent much of his spare time combing through the DSM-IV for ways to be insecure. In addition to isolating a large chunk of his friends by revealing TMI at cafe sitdowns, Pamuk has adopted an awkward gait, hunched shoulders, and has started to pen confessional essays similar to Jonathan Franzen’s.
  • Clive Cussler inflating book sales? The next thing you know, he’ll inflate his literary worth!
  • Be sure to drop by the Litblog Co-Op this week for discussion on Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s The Wizard of the Crow, which also made my top ten books of 2006.
  • Poet John Hewitt is set to become a “Statue of Liberty man.” But the more important question, still unanswered, is whether Hewitt was a breast man or an ass man.
  • Norman Mailer: “I’m not as interested in fights as I once was. I used to enjoy a fight. Now I look at (a fight) as something that’s going to use up a lot of the little working time I probably have left. I don’t want to get to the point where I’m frantic about the working time.” Well, then how will the old man get out all that aggression so that he can feed his ego? Cross-stitching? Bocce?
  • Ed Park on PKD’s Voices from the Street.
  • Michael Chabon on McCarthy’s The Road. (via Bookdaddy)
  • Embarrassing books, including Bill O’Reilly’s Those Who Trespass: A Novel of Television and Murder. (via Bookshelves of Doom)
  • Revolutionary Road: the movie? I don’t know about this. With Sam “I’m About As Subtle as CG Petals” Mendes at the helm, I can’t see Richard Yates’ classic novel being given the hard realism treatment it deserves. (via Matthew Tiffany)
  • To those who have asked me to respond to the Gavin Newsom scandal, I truly could not care less. I’m more concerned with, say, affordable housing, the homeless, the social impact of Proposition F, MUNI’s failures, and at least four thousand other issues pertaining to San Francisco. And I’m appalled at how I have been asked nearly every day during the past week to engage or joke on the matter, when what happened is between the involved parties and is frankly none of my business. And for those who might impute that I’m a Gavin apologist, I should also note that I voted for Matt Gonzalez, not Gavin, in the last election.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *