NOON
DFW, Annotated
Kottke links to the newly established David Foster Wallace archives at the University of Texas. The image above is the inside cover of Wallace’s heavily annotated copy of John Updike’s Rabbit, Run.
High Lonesome
Barry Hannah, the quintessentially Southern author of “Geronimo Rex” and “High Lonesome,” has died, The Associated Press reported. He was 67 and died on Monday at his home in Oxford, Miss. The Lafayette County coroner told The A.P. that Mr. Hannah died Monday afternoon of “natural causes,” but declined to elaborate until he had provided details to the author’s wife, Susan. The coroner said the death was not under investigation.
Barry Hannah, 1942-2010
“Voice comes to you through a spell, a trance.”
Harvard Book Store gets Espresso Book Machine
What forward-thinking authors and publishers are after is a means of leveraging the “long tail” principle, which holds that declining distribution and inventory costs have made it possible to profit by selling tiny quantities of many different products rather than—as was formerly the rule—immense quantities of only a few products. By bridging the still-pronounced divide between electronic and “tangible” publishing, advances like the Espresso Book Machine could represent the realization of this model in the familiar space of the bookstore. “Even with conservative assumptions about demand, we will profit from this service,” Heather Gain, marketing manager of the Harvard Book Store, told Bookselling This Week.
See Poets & Writers article here. Heads up, Andrew–although you have probably already seen this article.
March elimae
Enjoy. (It’s free.)
My peculiar
fantasia on Philoctetes, Sophocles and translation (inspired by Fortunato Salazar’s kind invitation) is now published at Everyday Genius.
Imagery
I once watched a well-dressed gentleman physically tear the pages from a novel with his own teeth, then dispose of the remains into the rushing air through an open window.
– Nick Cernis, convincing us to read a book a week.
(via)
Yours for a freer New Albany
New Albany, Mississippi, birthplace of William Faulkner, will allow beer sales for the first time in over half a century. Faulkner himself pled for tolerance in 1950:
“Yours for a freer Oxford,” wrote Faulkner, who had a long history of drinking binges, “where publicans can be law-abiding publicans six days a week and ministers of God can be ministers of God all seven days in the week.”
Indeed.
February elimae
is now posted.
Kim Chinquee
and Oh Baby get some attention.
Faulkner Fashion
From the Life collection of Famous Literary Drunks and Addicts.
‘I don’t recommend those old stories to anyone.’
The stories in question have been mentioned here before.
J.D. Salinger dies
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.
Fuck me.
My ideas about Looking-glass House
First, there’s the room you can see through the glass–that’s just the same as our drawing room, only the things go the other way. I can see all of it when I get upon a chair–all but the bit behind the fireplace. Oh! I do so wish I could see THAT bit! I want so much to know whether they’ve a fire in the winter: you never CAN tell, you know, unless our fire smokes, and then smoke comes up in that room too–but that may be only pretence, just to make it look as if they had a fire. Well then, the books are something like our books, only the words go the wrong way; I know that, because I’ve held up one of our books to the glass, and then they hold up one in the other room.
(From CHAPTER I. “Looking-Glass house.” Through the Looking-glass. Lewis Carroll.)
from the comments
This many-monkeys-typing-Hamlet thing has always interested me for oblique reasons. What are the odds that a person would arrive at the point of thinking about monkeys or randomness in this way? And what happens when we throw in the probability that monkeys would evolve over a few billion years of typing? I know I know, that’s not the question being asked. But it reminds me of many aspects of complexity theory (Santa Fe Institute, et. al.), and the notion that growth toward complexity isn’t just a curve of the most basic incremental steps, given that whole ordered parts may be assimilated along the way. Instead of giving them typewriters, read and perform Hamlet for the monkeys many times. Soon you would see great “To Be, or Not to Be” poses all over the place, and wonderfully elastic lip movements.
This is going to take a while…
How long would it take all those monkeys to type the complete works of the bard?
There are about fifty keys on a standard typewriter keyboard. Even ignoring capitalization, the chance of a monkey typing “h” is one in fifty. The probability of typing “ha” is one-fiftieth of one in fifty, or 1 in 2,500. The probability of typing “ham” is one in fifty time fifty time fifty, or 1 in 125,000. The probability of a monkey typing out a phrase with twenty-two characters is one divided by fifty raised to the twenty-second power, or about 10^-38. It would take billion billion monkeys each typing ten characters per second, for each of the roughly billion billion seconds since the universe began, just to have one of them type out “hamlet. act i, scene i.”
…and they wouldn’t even capitalize properly.
portrait of the artist as a young man
A water color of the young Edgar Allan Poe will be shown publicly for the first time at auction this Saturday.
It is unclear what Poe thought of the finished watercolor — though he was not fond of Smith’s sketch. In 1844, he wrote to James Russell Lowell, “You inquire about my own portrait. It has been done for some time now — but is better as an engraving, than a portrait. It scarcely resembles me at all.”
It’s unknown who paid the artist, and the painting’s whereabouts before 1978 are unknown. That’s when Krainik bought the portrait from a collector’s vast estate in Charlottesville, Va. He knew immediately that it was Poe and paid only a few dollars for it, he said.
“I knew it was of historic importance,” Krainik said. “I didn’t think of it like, ‘This is a steal.’”
The doppelganger of William S. Burroughs
has been haunting Greenwich Village:
A mini-crime wave among the boutiques and specialty shops of Greenwich Village has a face, and it looks an awful lot like William S. Burroughs’s.
nevermore
A mysterious visitor who left roses and cognac at the grave of Edgar Allan Poe each year on the writer’s birthday failed to show early Tuesday, breaking with a ritual that began more than 60 years ago.
“I’m confused, befuddled,” said Jeff Jerome, curator of the Poe House and Museum. “I don’t know what’s going on.”
Clustersourcing
Do you recognize any of these books?
It’s my friend’s bookshelves, the one whose house burned down. She can’t bear to look at it (another friend retrieved it from her Facebook account for me), but she asked if I could somehow to enhance it enough to identify some of the books. It’s too low-resolution to sharpen, unfortunately, and I can only make out the Chicago Manual of Style. Maybe you have a more varied library than I do?
If you see anything you recognize, could you please add a note to the photo at Flickr or leave a comment? Thanks.
Twelve Meditations on a Dollhouse | IV. Meditation on the Great Hall
The Great Hall. Colleen Moore’s Fairy Castle. (Museum of Science and Industry. Chicago.)
(We have skipped past Cinderella’s Drawing Room, where “the vases at each side of the door going into the Great Hall are made of carved amber over 500 years old. They came from the collection of the Dowager Empress of China.”)
“As you go around the corner, stop and look through the clear glass in the center of the chapel window. You will see the altar, and on this altar is a little tabernacle. On top of the tabernacle you will see a beautiful golden sunburst. In the center is a glass container holding a sliver of the true cross. This was given to me by my friend, Clare Booth Luce, when she was the Ambassador to Italy and had her first audience with the Pope. He gave this to her, and she gave it to me to put in the chapel of the Fairy Castle.”
quote out of context
He went on to say, “the extent to which you think writing is about something other than words then you will fail.”
Whittaker Chambers on Rand
An old National Review article that susses out why we have no business ever taking Atlas Shrugged seriously. To put it simply, Randian philosophy is incapable of being any more than pseudo-intellectualism grounded in unfounded egotism:
Something of this implication is fixed in the book’s dictatorial tone, which is much its most striking feature. Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal. In addition, the mind which finds this tone natural to it shares other characteristics of its type. 1) It consistently mistakes raw force for strength, and the rawer the force, the more reverent the posture of the mind before it. 2) It supposes itself to be the bringer of a final revelation. Therefore, resistance to the Message cannot be tolerated because disagreement can never be merely honest, prudent, or just humanly fallible. Dissent from revelation so final (because, the author would say, so reasonable) can only be willfully wicked. There are ways of dealing with such wickedness, and, in fact, right reason itself enjoins them. From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: “To a gas chamber — go!” The same inflexibly self-righteous stance results, too (in the total absence of any saving humor), in odd extravagances of inflection and gesture-that Dollar Sign, for example. At first, we try to tell ourselves that these are just lapses, that this mind has, somehow, mislaid the discriminating knack that most of us pray will warn us in time of the difference between what is effective and firm, and what is wildly grotesque and excessive. Soon we suspect something worse. We suspect that this mind finds, precisely in extravagance, some exalting merit; feels a surging release of power and passion precisely in smashing up the house. A tornado might feel this way, or Carrie Nation.
January 10, 2010
I am not staying at a Hilton tonight.