Here’s a short podcast with critic and playwright Terry Teachout talking about American mid-century middlebrow culture and his new play, Satchmo at the Waldorf, among other interesting things. (via Books, Inq.)
Category Archives: Authors
Funny Fake Literary Twitter Accounts
Here’s a list of nine Twitter accounts which harken directly to famous literary figures, such as Charles Dickens, James Boswell, and Alexander Pope.
How To Be a Writer
Harlan Coben talks shop on Speakeasy: “As much as we like to think otherwise, it isn’t the act. Writing isn’t about the process. It is about creating. The joy comes not from the process but from the creation.” He recommends three steps to becoming a writer: inspiration, perspiration, and desperation. These will make you a great writer, or perhaps cure you of the writing bug forever.
Criticizing the Rewriting of 'Porgy and Bess'
Terry Teachout writes about the strong criticism Stephen Sondheim has of a rewriting of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. “Rightly or wrongly, it’s become customary for a musical to undergo a fair amount of tinkering prior to being revived on Broadway. . . . But Porgy and Bess is no ordinary musical. It is, in fact, a grand opera . . .”
N.D. Wilson's The Dragon's Tooth
Fear Stinks
Another troll quote. This one’s for you, Loren.
Fair, partly cloudy
The Minnesota State Fair. Artist’s Conception.
It occurs to me that I should have taken pictures at the State Fair on Saturday, like Lileks does. But then I realize, it was hard enough dragging myself around the fairgrounds, let alone taking a camera. I know people have tiny little cameras in their cell phones nowadays, but I’m a straggler on the dragging edge of technology. I only get things after they’re passé (except for my Kindle, which was a gift from… well, I won’t embarrass him again).
It was possibly the most perfect day for the fair I’ve ever seen, from the perspective of weather. Nice temperature, and it started sunny and then clouded over without actually raining more than the occasional tiny spit. This was great for the concessionaires, not so great for Avoidants and Introverts. You know that place in the gospels where Jesus is pushing through a crowd, and stops and says, “Who touched Me?” because (He says) “I felt power go out of Me”? I didn’t heal anybody (may have injured some) but when we pushed through a crowd of teenagers who suddenly appeared around us, screaming for some pop singers (or something) at a radio station booth, I felt the power go out of me, all right. I was a shell of a man by the time I got free of that.
The conclusion was obvious. I need to lose even more weight, and get some exercise. Which I’m trying to do.
Or else give up the fair.
I need to retract an endorsement.
Hunter Baker (funny, I was just thinking about him) commented on my review of Lee Child’s Killing Floor, writing the words I always dread:
I have read a lot of Lee Child books, but had to stop a couple of years back. He revealed himself in a couple of books to be pretty seriously anti-Christian. And made the Reacher character share those views. That did it for me…
I was a major fan of his. It began small with Reacher refusing to fly Alaska Airlines because they put a small Bible verse on each tray. In a subsequent book, there is an extremely bizarre Christian character who is some kind of caricature of American evangelicals. Once I read that one, I just decided Lee Child didn’t need any more of my money.
Sad, but not really a surprise. No more of my hard-earned will flow to Lee Child either.
The Believable with the Unbelievable
Alissa Wilkinson blogs about poet Donald Hall’s rich moments in his memoir, Life Work
Anne Overstreet's "Surviving the Open Heart"
Jeffrey Overstreet’s wife, Anne, has a debut volume of poetry on the shelves at all the best bookstores near you. It’s called Delicate Machinery Suspended: Poems
The hotel fan’s one long drawn exhalation
disturbing the heat that has settled like dust
across the room, the square-cornered chair
the unsteady spool of table. You are broken
into pieces and lie scattered …
Speaking the Simple Truth
The next U.S. Poet Laureate has been announced. It’s Detroit-native Philip Levine.
John Thomas reports: “On the announcement of his being named U.S. Poet Laureate, Librarian of Congress James Billington said, ‘Philip Levine is one of America’s great narrative poets. His plainspoken lyricism has, for half a century, championed the art of telling The Simple Truth — about working in a Detroit auto factory, as he has, and about the hard work we do to make sense of our lives.'”
Here’s a bit of Levine’s work:
The new grass rising in the hills,
the cows loitering in the morning chill,
a dozen or more old browns hidden
in the shadows of the cottonwoods
beside the streambed. I go higher
to where the road gives up and there’s
only a faint path strewn with lupine
between the mountain oaks. (Read on …)