You know that guy who you didn’t invite to your party but shows up anyway, wielding his guitar like a blunt musical instrument, trying hard to be soulful, earnest, totally in love with music but totally and absolutely horrible at making it? That’s me playing chess. I love the game… to the point of literal [...]

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[1955 cover from WikiMedia Commons]
Dolores Haze– the “nymphet” of Vladimir Nabokov’s greatest novel (rightfully found in many lists of best novels)– would be 62 this year… in America at least, where Lolita wasn’t published until 1958.
[photo via David Zellaby]
What would Dolores/Lolita be like today? Would she be a brassy, hyper-sexualized doyenne? A dolorous, [...]

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[photo by abbyladybug]
While browsing Brian’s trove of links, a pointer to an Esquire article caught my eye. It tells the story of the discovery, attempt at authentication, and subsequent wrangling over the ownership and authenticity of what might be a new photo of Robert Johnson. It’s a fascinating article that not only prompted me [...]

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I’m no fan of Sarah Palin, but I’ve received numerous messages this morning purporting to contain a list of books Palin attempted to have banned from the Wasilla city library when she was elected mayor. This is clearly a myth.
First, this list has been circulating, in various incarnations, for ages and is just one [...]

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In "The Book Collection that Devoured My Life" Luc Sante ponders the obsession of book collecting (it strikes a bit close to home for me as well) and concludes:
"Many books are screwy, a great many are dull, some are irredeemable, and there are way too many of them, probably, in the world. I hate all [...]

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  [picture by wader]
From "Flying Off the Shelves":
…An overabundance of shoplifters can put bookstores out of business. One local bookstore owner can famously talk about shoplifters with total strangers for hours, with the detail and passion that some people reserve for sexual conquests.
There’s an underground economy of boosted books…

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[photo by mrtwism]
In one of those strange, but regularly occurring intersections of my life and the rest of the world, a friend’s insightful Twit:
I’ve heard “Fahrenheit 451″ is about banning books. No, it’s about forgetting What Life Is For.

crossed my screen at the same time as I read an article about Victor Levy-Beaulieu, a [...]

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Thanks to a reference by Reginald Shepherd I discovered Robert Philen’s blog. Why is his name so familiar to me? Anyway, a lot of fun reading to be had there (before I go on, a nod toward his entertaining and oh-so-true post on why punk rock is so boring). I recommend checking out his favorite [...]

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The Secret Museum of Mankind is online, scanned in its entirety, with links to large versions of all the photos. Astounding.

Here’s the site’s description of the strange set:
Published in 1935, the Secret Museum is a mystery book. It has no author or credits, no copyright, no date, no page numbers, no index. Published by “Manhattan [...]

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Books That Make You Dumb is a clever bit of visualization based on university average SAT/ACT scores and the books students from those institutions report as favorites. My clipping is just an excerpt from the top of the visualization (others are available)… many more books listed. Incidentally, the vertical dimension doesn’t mean anything:

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Petroski’s The Book on the Bookshelf is a fascinating exploration of the evolution of the form of books and the way that we handle and store them. Much of the history of what eventually became the books we know (scrolls, codices, illuminated books, etc) was familiar to me, but Petroski has a knack for bringing [...]

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I picked Black Cross up in the airport bookstore thinking the the author, Greg Iles, was someone else. There’s nothing horribly wrong with this World War II thriller of covert action behind enemy lines– it just seems interchangeable with a hundred other action-packed tales of derring-do, replete with larger-than-life heroic characters performing amazing feats in [...]

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Like many who have studied philosophy, Socrates has long had an established place in my intellectual pantheon. How could the man who essentially created Western philosophy occupy any lesser place?
After reading I. F. Stone’s The Trial of Socrates I am left shaken. How could I have read so many works and listened to so many [...]

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I read two different versions of Beowulf, another on my long-neglected list. The first was an old Norton critical edition with a prose translation by E. Talbot Donaldson, the second also a Norton edition, but this time a verse translation by Seamus Heaney.
The Donaldson translation is good. I’m no expert, but it felt more ‘authentic’ [...]

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My first thought when I finished Crumley’s relatively short novel The Last Good Kiss was “how have I never heard of this guy before?” That was followed quickly by “I have to find some more of his books.”
The Last Good Kiss is a private eye novel of the decidedly jaded variety. C. W. Sughrue is [...]

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It’s not all that often that I wholeheartedly agree with Ron Silliman… and on a topic of wider import than poetics too!
Says Ron addressing the happily infamous Andrew Keen (link added):
“Andrew Keen is getting a lot of play these days for his book, The Cult of the Amateur, which argues that the web has opened [...]

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The Terrors of Ice and Darkness, by Christoph Ransmayr, is a stunning work of fiction and history. It combines the awful and awesome true story of an expedition towards the North Pole in the 1870s and the story of a fictional Italian man who is obsessed with that story and in 1981 attempts to follow [...]

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Perhaps because I don’t follow the genre(s) involved closely, though I do read quite a bit in them, I had never paid attention to the term “Slipstream” until now. Via Bryan Alexander come two great links that inform me I’ve been reading quite a lot of Slipstream titles without even knowing it. First, a slipstream [...]

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A blog post put me on the trail of lists of rejected children’s book titles, from which I culled a few favorites:

Juggling Knives is Easy
You Can Get Sucked Down the Drain
Your First Day at School and Why You’ll Never Come Home Again
You Can Make a Plastic Bag Space Helmet
Fun Experiments with Fire
Little Hands, Big Toasters
Harry [...]

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Peggy Shumaker, who I was privileged to have as an instructor long ago, has a new book of poetry coming out called Just Breathe Normally. Word on the street is you can pre-order and get a 20% discount if you use the code AF71. Just buy it (you know you want to).

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