Photos of Famous Literary Drunks & Addicts
Mark Frauenfelder on BoingBoing recommends taking a look at Life magazine’s great photo gallery of famous literary drunks and addicts; it’s pretty cool. One of my favorites:
Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005): Everything
“I wouldn’t recommend sex, drugs, or insanity for everyone, but they’ve always worked for me.”
‘Catcher in the Rye’ Author J.D. Salinger Dies at 91
“People always think something’s all true.”
— J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Chapter 2
Hillel Italie writes on the AP Via Yahoo News:
J.D. Salinger, the legendary author, youth hero and fugitive from fame whose The Catcher in the Rye shocked and inspired a world he increasingly shunned, has died. He was 91.
Salinger died of natural causes at his home on Wednesday, the author’s son said in a statement from Salinger’s literary representative. He had lived for decades in self-imposed isolation in the small, remote house in Cornish, N.H.
The Catcher in the Rye, with its immortal teenage protagonist, the twisted, rebellious Holden Caulfield, came out in 1951, a time of anxious, Cold War conformity and the dawn of modern adolescence. The Book-of-the-Month Club, which made Catcher a featured selection, advised that for “anyone…
Nevermore? No Mystery Visitor to Poe’s Grave for First Time in 60 Years
You can get a more detailed description of the mystery on Wikipedia. Here’s the report from the Baltimore Sun:
A longtime tribute to Edgar Allan Poe may have come to an end with the absence of the “Poe Toaster,” who for more than half a century has marked the poet’s birthday by laying roses and a bottle of cognac at his original grave site.
This is the first time since Jan. 19, 1949 that the person, whose identity is unknown, failed to arrive, said Jeff Jerome, curator of the Edgar Allan Poe House.
“I was very annoyed,” he said. “I’ve been doing this since 1977, and there was no indication he wasn’t going to show up,” Jerome said.
The curator said the toaster usually arrives between midnight and 5:30 a.m. He said he arrived at Westminster Hall at 10:30 p.m., because one year the toaster left his offerings at 11:30 p.m.
He sometimes kneels at the tombstone or puts his hands on it, Jerome said. “There’s no elaborate ceremony — it’s very short and touching,” he said.
The Red Laugh
Forgive me, I realize that literature isn’t often posted on this site… However, anyone intrepid enough to actually finish reading this short story will surely agree that The Red Laugh is supremely relevant to today’s world… From Amagamatedspooks.com:
LEONID ANDREYEV (1871-1919) became the foremost literary figure in Russia between the revolution of 1905 and the communist revolution of 1917. Originally studying and training as a lawyer, he abandoned that career soon after its beginning and dedicated himself wholly to his writing. His first story,“In the Fog,” was published in 1902 and won him immediate critical recognition. His new career, that of an author, had begun.
A pessimistic, moody man (who had already tried to end his life by shooting in 1894), he soon turned this dark sentiment over to an analysis of…
Books You Can Live Without
Now here’s an end of the year/decade literary debate that’s actually quite interesting, versus the morass of “best of lists”, courtesy of the New York Times. Here’s an excerpt from author David Matthews:
Things I will never, ever read:
The authors who get to stay did something the others did not — they saved me.
The biography of Willem de Kooning. Ditto the 600 pages devoted to Wittgenstein’s life and thought. Malraux’s “The Voices of Silence” will remain mute, its spine un-cracked, the book’s presence meant to imply to anyone perusing my “library” that I’m a man of serious ideas and scholarship.
Sadly, I’m too far along to absorb whatever Bertrand Russell’s history of philosophy has to teach me, so out it goes. For that matter, what with the urgency of global warming and…
William S. Burroughs: A Man Within (Documentary)
Via www.burroughsthemovie.com:
The film investigates the life of legendary beat author and American icon, William S. Burroughs. Born the heir of the Burroughs’ adding machine estate, he struggled throughout his life with addiction, control systems and self. He was forced to deal with the tragedy of killing his wife and the repercussions of neglecting his son. His novel, Naked Lunch, was one of the last books to be banned by the U.S. government. Allen Ginsberg and Norman Mailer testified on behalf of the book. The courts eventually overturned their decision in 1966, ruling that the book had important social value. It remains one of the most recognized literary works of the 20th century.
William Burroughs was one of the first to cross the dangerous boundaries of queer and drug culture in the 1950s, and write about his experiences. Eventually he was hailed the godfather of the beat generation and influenced artists for generations to come. However, his friends were left wondering, did William ever find happiness? This extremely personal documentary breaks the surface of the troubled and brilliant world of one of the greatest authors of all time.
How Philip K. Dick Predicted The Future
Author Jonathan Lethem is also the man who edited Philip K. Dick’s anthologies for the Library of America. In this new interview, Lethem notes that Philip K. Dick correctly predicted our future.
“I think that Dick saw the makings of the contemporary reality we experience so profoundly. And this speaks to the different layers of reality in his work — the way time moves at one clip according to the calendar, but other ways in terms of mental time, psychological time, social time, American historical time.
“Like if you look at the terms of this absurd, hysterical healthcare debate — it’s basically McCarthyism again, the Red Scare. Socialism is coming to get us. ”
“Mid-50s America was overwhelmingly alive in his vision, in such a way that he saw it simultaneously as a…
Anais Nin on LSD’s value
via Arthur
[Huxley] reminded me that drugs are beneficial if they provide the only access to our nightlife. I realized that the expression “blow my mind” was born of the fact that America had cemented access to imagination and fantasy and that it would take dynamite to remove this block! I believed Leary’s emphasis on the fact we use only one percent of our mind or potential, that everything in our education conspires to restrict and constrict us. I only wished people had had time to study drugs as they studied religion or philosophy and to adapt to this chemical alteration of our bodies.
[LSD's] value is in being a shortcut to the unconscious, so that one enters the realm of intuition unhampered, pure as it is in children, of direct emotional…
Action Camus, the Superman of Nihilism
Was reading Boldtype’s “10 Awesome Books to Give Your Nonreading Friends” where I came across the work of cartoonist R. Sikoryak. Here’a an article about him from The New Yorker:
For twenty years, the cartoonist R. Sikoryak has been creating parody strips of literary masterpieces, casting familiar cartoon characters in classic roles — Little Lulu as Pearl Prynne, Little Nemo as Dorian Gray, Charlie Brown as Gregor Samsa. If you’re like me, and you sometimes like your serious literature with a side of Beavis and Butthead (see Sikoryak’s take on “Waiting for Godot”), you will probably laugh out loud over Masterpiece Comics, a collection of thirteen of these strips, just out from Drawn & Quarterly.
Here is R. Sikoryak’s take on an existentialist superhero:
Check out the The New Yorker link for a Kafkaesque Charlie Brown tale.
Winner Of Bad Sex Award Announced
From Reuters:
Jonathan Littell, who won France’s prestigious Prix Goncourt in 2006 for “The Kindly Ones,” has picked up another prize for the same work — the Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction Award.
The annual prize was contested this year by literary heavyweights Philip Roth for “The Humbling,” John Banville for “The Infinites” and Paul Theroux for “A Dead Hand.”
The judges praised what they called Littell’s “ambitious and impressive” novel, which was originally published in French.
“It is in part a work of genius,” they said.
“However, a mythologically inspired passage and lines such as ‘I came suddenly, a jolt that emptied my head like a spoon scraping the inside of a soft-boiled egg’ clinched the award for The Kindly Ones…
William Gibson’s ‘Neuromancer’ Read by Porn Star
Porn star Sasha Grey did a 6-hour reading reading of William Gibson’s classic science fiction novel Neuromancer Sunday at New York City’s New Museum of contemporary art!
They used sculptures to simulate virtual reality – and artist Brody Condon promised to combine “Gibson’s 1980s dystopian techno-fetishism with early twentieth-century abstraction.”
Kurt Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse Five
On the fascinating site Letters of Note:
In December of 1944, whilst behind enemy lines during the Rhineland Campaign, Private Kurt Vonnegut was captured by Wehrmacht troops and subsequently became a prisoner of war. A month later, Vonnegut and his fellow POWs reached a Dresden work camp where they were imprisoned in an underground slaughterhouse known by German soldiers as Schlachthof Fünf (Slaughterhouse Five). The next month — February — the subterranean nature of the prison saved their lives during the highly controversial and devastating bombing of Dresden, the aftermath of which Vonnegut and the remaining survivors helped to clear up.
Vonnegut released the book Slaughterhouse-Five in 1969.
Below is a letter he wrote to his family that May from a repatriation camp, in which he informs them of his capture and survival:
Scientist Announces that she is Call Girl and Blogger Belle de Jour
From the Guardian:
One of the best kept literary secrets of the decade was revealed last night when 34-year-old scientist Dr Brooke Magnanti announced she was the writer masquerading as call girl Belle de Jour.
The author behind the bestselling books detailing her secret life as a prostitute decided to come out to one of her fiercest critics, Sunday Times columnist India Knight, after claiming anonymity had become “no fun”. “I couldn’t even go to my own book launch party”, she said.
Until last week, even her agent was unaware of her name. But now Magnanti, a respected specialist in developmental neurotoxicology and cancer epidemiology in a hospital research group in Bristol, has spoken of the time six years ago she worked as a £300 an hour prostitute working through a London escort…
U.S. Map Of Banned Books
There are hundreds of challenges to books in schools and libraries in the United States every year. According to the American Library Association (ALA), there were at least 513 in 2008. But the total is far larger. 70 to 80 percent are never reported.
This map is drawn from cases documented by ALA and the Kids’ Right to Read Project, a collaboration of the National Coalition Against Censorship and the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression. Note that the cases mapped are only from the past three years (2007-2009).
‘Wild Things’ Author Maurice Sendak To Concerned Parents: Go To Hell!
Great find from Charlie Jane Anders on io9.com:
If you’re worried about taking your kids to see Where The Wild Things Are after reports of crying children having to leave screenings of the rough cut, halfway through, then Maurice Sendak has a message for you: “Go to hell.”
A story in the Oct. 19 Newsweek contains this classic exchange:
What do you say to parents who think the Wild Things film may be too scary?
Sendak: I would tell them to go to hell. That’s a question I will not tolerate.
Because kids can handle it?
Sendak: If they can’t handle it, go home. Or wet your pants. Do whatever you like. But it’s not a question that can be answered.
Jonze: Dave, you want to field that one?
Eggers: The part about kids wetting their pants? Should kids wear diapers when they go to the…
Behind Afghan War Debate, a Battle of Two Books Rages
Peter Spiegel and Jonathan Weisman report in the Wall Street Journal:
WASHINGTON — The struggle to set the future course of the Afghan war is becoming a battle of two books — both suddenly popular among White House and Pentagon brain trusts.
The two draw decidedly different lessons from the Vietnam War. The first book describes a White House in 1965 being marched into an escalating war by a military viewing the conflict too narrowly to see the perils ahead. President Barack Obama recently finished the book, according to administration officials, and Vice President Joe Biden is reading it now.
The second describes a different administration, in 1972, when a U.S. military that has finally figured out how to counter the insurgency is rejected by political leaders who bow to popular opinion and end the fight.
It has been recommended in multiple lists put out by military officers, including a former U.S. commander in Afghanistan, who passed it out to his subordinates.
The two books — “Lessons in Disaster” on Mr. Obama’s nightstand, and “A Better War” on the shelves of military gurus — have become a framework for the debate over what will be one of the most important decisions of Mr. Obama’s presidency…
Fair Use Copyright Advocates Go One Up On Joyce Estate Copyright Thugs
For all of you who are rooting for a more flexible and practical copyright law, this should be hailed as a significant victory, as reported by Andrew Albanese in Publishers Weekly:
In what Fair Use advocates this week hailed as a vindication for the rights of scholars to use copyrighted materials for critical works, the literary estate of James Joyce has agreed to pay $240,000 in legal fees to settle a copyright lawsuit sparked by what attorneys called “threats and intimidation” by Stephen James Joyce, in his efforts to deter author Carol Shloss from quoting Joyce family documents or works in her book and in a subsequent Web-based supplement. The settlement, attorneys say, suggests a rather novel concept: sometimes the best fair use defense is a good offense. “This case shows…
BookGlutton Eats Up Jim Marrs’ New Novel ‘The Sisterhood of the Rose’
For all you Jim Marrs fans out there, our friends at BookGlutton are offering the first three chapters of his new novel The Sisterhood of the Rose, due out in hardcover November, for free on their site. What’s cool about it is that their technology allows readers to comment and chat with each other about the book. It’s akin to being a part of a reading group or book club, except it’s virtual. Check it out:
