Here’s an author interview with Athol Dickson in Infuze magazine.

We have a new poet laureate. “He’s very hard to describe, and that’s a great tribute to him. His poems have a sequence that you encounter in dreams, and therefore they have a reality that does not correspond to the reality that we perceive with our eyes and ears,” James H. Billington, the Librarian of Congress, said of Charles Simic. Not a native of the States, Simic was born on May 9, 1938, in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. He has lived stateside since 1954, and he is an American poet. Today, he won the 2007 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets for “outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry.”

The New York Times reports:

Mr. Simic said his chief poetic preoccupation has been history. “I’m sort of the product of history; Hitler and Stalin were my travel agents,” he said. “If they weren’t around, I probably would have stayed on the same street where I was born. My family, like millions of others, had to pack up and go, so that has always interested me tremendously: human tragedy and human vileness and stupidity.”

Yet he balks at questions about the role of poetry in culture. “That reminds me so much of the way the young Communists in the days of Stalin at big party congresses would ask, ‘What is the role of the writer?’ ” he said.

Mr. Simic said he preferred to think of the point of poetry in the way a student at a school in El Paso put it when he visited in 1972: “to remind people of their own humanity.”

It’s raining this afternoon. This is a good thing, though they tell us we might get some severe weather later tonight. But that’s OK. I don’t mind a little storm damage. As long as it happens to somebody else.

Gaius at Blue Crab Boulevard got a link from Hugh Hewitt at Towhall.com today.

I hate you, Gaius. Curse you, and your little animal uprising too!

Dale sent me this link to a trailer for the upcoming Robert Zemeckis Beowulf movie. Looks like they’re going the 300 route, which isn’t necessarily bad. It can’t be worse than the recent Icelandic effort with Gerard Butler, which I reviewed a while back. But it doesn’t look like much effort has been made to get the costumes authentic (which the Gerard Butler incarnation at least got right, pretty much the only thing it got right).

We Viking reenactors don’t ask for much. We’d like to see a Viking movie (Beowulf isn’t technically a Viking, but close enough to get on our radar) with historical authenticity and a good story.

So far, the best Viking movie ever made is still The Vikings with Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis. And that movie isn’t really very good (though it’s a lot of fun). The Thirteenth Warrior had its points, but it went so far off the reservation with armor and weapons that it kind of hurts to watch. (Unless you’ve just watched the Gerard Butler Beowulf, in which case it’s like a drink of cold water on a hot day.)

So I’ll see this one. Maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised. I don’t think anyone has ever imagined Grendel’s mother (the part Angelina Jolie plays) as a siren before. I suppose it could work.

Just as long as I’m not supposed to like her. I like Robin Wright-Penn all right, even though she has lousy taste in husbands.

Hollywood! Don’t you realize the world is screaming for a film version of The Year of the Warrior?

The Thinklings have a good, long interview with the author of The Chess Artist: Genius, Obsession, and the World’s Oldest Game and The Devil Is a Gentleman. In the second book, Hallman says he toured the religions of the world with William James as a type of guide. “It’s kind of a revisitation of the basic thinking of William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience,” he says. Is chess a religion? Find out in this interview.

From the AP–“Norwegian author Per Petterson won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award on Thursday for his novel, Out Stealing Horses, which charts how a child’s death and a family breakdown end a teenager’s innocence and haunt him into old age.” Out Stealing Horses is favorably reviewed here by The Complete Review.

C. S. Lewis, in the introduction to the 1961 edition of The Screwtape Letters, tells of one subscriber to the Manchester Guardian, which originally published the series, who canceled his subscription because “much of the advice given in these letters seemed to him not only erroneous but positively diabolical.”

Today I got an e-mail from someone who read my latest American Spectator Online article. In the interest of objectivity, I shall quote a portion of his opening paragraph unedited:

You are the most out-of-touch, backwards-thinking, and plain ignorant author I have read on the subject of Islam. Your blatant, and apparently deliberate, disregard for the abhorrent inequalities and lack of human rights inherent to Islam is despicable.

He goes on to castigate me for my defense of Islamic culture.

Now this certainly doesn’t prove…

a) that I’m as good an author as Lewis, or

b) that my correspondent is as dense as the Guardian subscriber.

It’s possible, for instance, that I’m just a bad parodist, and that thousands of readers came away with the very same impression, but weren’t exercised enough to write to me.

And there’s always the possibility that my reader’s letter was itself parody, and that I didn’t get it.

Author Max Elliot Anderson is hoping the buzz over The Dangerous Book for Boys will stir up sales for his young adult novels. “Guys want to get right to the adventure and action,” he says in a press release today. He appears to publish his own books and blogs at Books for Boys.

From a UK Times interview with Orange prize (fiction) winner, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie:

Perhaps because she is young, beautiful and internationally successful, [Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie] has almost a paradoxical relish in hailing from a global underdog: “When you come from Nigeria, which doesn’t have very much power, you can better examine the dynamics of raw power.”

Something she does not relish, however, is the overriding view of Africa as a doomed basket case: “There is a famous saying, ‘Africa is my brother, but he is my junior brother’, which comes from a 19th-century missionary in the Congo. It really sums up the way that people look at Africa today.

. . . Nobody helps Africa by adopting its children. We need to talk about structural things like loans and trade. I just wish I wasn’t from a continent about which everyone has to feel sorry.”

Adichie is indignant about the type of news coverage that Africa usually ends up with: “On TV you never see Africans involved in helping Africa. It’s always some kind westerner. If I got my information only from American TV, I would think Africans were a bunch of stupid idiots.”

Her novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, tells the story of two sisters living through a Nigerian civil war. (via Books, Inq.)