News
Drupal, Barack Obama and the Dumbest Article of the Year
by Levi Asher on Thursday, October 29, 2009 09:57 pm
It's almost November and we're starting to see the usual "Best of 2009" lists (best books, best songs, etc.), which seems strange since there's a whole lot of year left in 2009. I won't try to name a best book or movie or song of the year today. However, I have just read an article on Slate that is so bad, so incorrect and so unnecessary that I'm going to go out on a limb: "Message Error" by Chris Wilson is the dumbest article of 2009.
This article's young author is attempting to take down Barack Obama's new whitehouse.gov on account of the software the site uses, and he's in way over his head. The level of journalistic ineptitude here makes a typical anti-Darwin or 9/11 truther pamphlet look downright fact-checked by comparison.
Chris Wilson says that the popular open source Drupal software package used to build whitehouse.gov sends the wrong messages and is "a disaster waiting to happen". In fact, Drupal is widely regarded as the best general purpose web publishing package out there today, and is certainly growing faster than any of its competitors.
Les Mouches
by Levi Asher on Monday, October 26, 2009 10:56 pmBeat Generation, Being A Writer, Comedy, Comix, Economics, Events, Existential, Internet Culture, News, Poetry, Psychology, Publishing, Summer Of Love, Visual Art
1. A creepy publicity stunt involving flies carrying little paper advertisements at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Doesn't this make you feel bad for the flies?
2. San Francisco Beat/hippie poet Lenore Kandel has died at the age of 77. Here's an appreciation of her work by John Yates.
3. Carl Jung's awesome visual side.
4. A detailed financial biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald. (And why not? Money was certainly among his major themes).
5. East Village poetry legend and perennial Presidential candidate Sparrow and LitKicks poet Mickey Z. are creating a poetry anthology together and they say:
Calling all feminists, wizards, Queer theorists, ex-Black Panthers, Christians, Green activists, avant-gardists, Kabbalists, vegans, Hawaiian nationalists, kickboxers, Punks, Hip Hop evangelists, New New Leftists, pink-haired emo warriors, organic gardeners -- submit your work for "The Big Book of Revolutionary Poetry," edited by Sparrow and Mickey Z. Send up to 3 poems to: sparrow44@juno.com or info@mickeyz.net
Go for it, I say.
6. Guernica Magazing is turning 5! Jonathan Ames, Howard Zinn, Katie Halper, Mia Farrow and David Byrne will be joining the party this Wednesday, October 28. Wish I could make it (but I can't).
7. The eternal philosophical battle over the real-life ethics of German intellectual Martin Heidegger goes on. Personally, I don't agonize over Heidegger's Nazi past, because I never thought much of his work. You can find the same message -- the utter immediacy of existence -- in Nietzsche or Kierkegaard or Sartre, and with a lot more finesse and humor.
8. Building a brain inside a supercomputer. And here I am just trying to get Drupal to work.
9. I recently posted about Fall 2009 books I'm looking forward to; little did I know that Orhan Pamuk and Kurt Vonnegut books were coming out too ...
10. Jeff Kinney's Wimpy Kid is rocking the cash registers. My stepdaughter reads these books and I think they're hilarious.
11. I love this, from McSweeneys: YouTube Comment, of e. e. cummings?.
12. HTMLGiant on Glimmer Train: "Winning one of their ubiquitous contests is like winning $2 on a $2 scratch ticket or a free small soda during McDonald’s Monopoly promotion." They also admit that Glitter Train was once "a decent, if not rather traditional literary magazine". I used to read them, but I don't read print literary journals much at all anymore.
13. If you've been reading my memoir, some of these events will be familiar: A History of the Internet from 1969 to Today.
14. Speaking of bygone times, one-time high-rolling community website GeoCities is shutting down. Caryn is sad about this, and xkcd posted a tribute.
211th Chorus
by Levi Asher on Wednesday, October 21, 2009 12:53 pm
1. Jack Kerouac died forty years ago today. I'm not doing much to commemorate the occasion, though I am hoping to see the new film One Fast Move Or I'm Gone soon. If I were in Lowell, Massachusetts I'd go on this walking tour tonight, if I were in Northport, Long Island I'd check out Patrick Fenton's tribute play, and if I were in San Francisco I'd go to The Beat Museum this Saturday at 11 am for a walking tour with John Allen Cassady. But I'm not in any of these places, so I think I'll just recite Kerouac's poem "211th Chorus" and hope for the best:
The wheel of the quivering meat conception
Turns in the void expelling human beings,
Pigs, turtles, frogs, insects, nits,
Mice, lice, lizards, rats, roan
Racinghorses, poxy bucolic pigtics,
Horrible unnameable lice of vultures,
Murderous attacking dog-armies
Of Africa, Rhinos roaming in the jungle,
Vast boars and huge gigantic bull
Elephants, rams, eagles, condors,
Pones and Porcupines and Pills --
All the endless conception of living beings
Gnashing everywhere in Consciousness
Throughout the ten directions of space
Occupying all the quarters in & out,
From supermicroscopic no-bug
To huge Galaxy Lightyear Bowell
Illuminating the sky of one Mind --
Poor! I wish I was free
Of the slaving meat wheel
and safe in heaven dead
2. Ian Pearl, brother of literary/mystery novelist Matthew Pearl, has written a riveting Huffington Post article about his outrageous experience with the health care insurance system our Republican Party wants so badly to preserve. Pearl has muscular dystrophy, and his article is called "I Am Not A Dog".
3. On a completely different note yet again: Barnes and Noble presents some new competition for the Kindle: The Nook.
Herta Who?
by Dedi Felman on Monday, October 12, 2009 05:49 pm
Herta who? The news from Stockholm left, as usual, a lot of people scratching their heads. Who is Herta Müller and why haven’t we heard more about her? As someone who has spent almost a decade working to bring the best new international literary work to America, I felt a particular frustration at those first reports: once again, Nobel coverage seemed to be descending into churlishness rather than an eagerness to share important international voices. Not that one can count on the Nobel Prize in Literature Committee to be anything but unpredictable in their choices, but still, wasn’t this the year that one of the well-loved waiters-in-the-wings -- Amos Oz, Ismail Kadare, or, yes, even, Philip Roth -- might be rewarded? Couldn’t this year, at last, yield a global literary love fest? And, of perhaps even greatest frustration for an international literary activist, how had yet another great writer passed America by without leaving a deeper footprint at an earlier stage of their writing career, particularly a writer who clearly isn’t all that obscure?
Quick Hits
by Levi Asher on Friday, October 9, 2009 01:12 pm
1. I've never read 2009 Nobel Prize winner Herta Mueller, but I know a few people who recommend her work (Harold Bloom, meanwhile, is unimpressed). The Literary Saloon has more substantial coverage.
2. Herta Mueller writes about Romania during the painful years of the Nicolai Ceausecsu regime, and coincidentally I've been reading a impressive new novel about the same subject, Velvet Totalitarianism by Claudia Moscovici. You can find an excerpt from the introduction on the author's MySpace page.
On The Roman Polanski Grandstand
by Levi Asher on Tuesday, September 29, 2009 08:45 pmI'm having a tough time with a lot of the grandstanding I've been hearing today about Roman Polanski. Certainly what Polanski did 32 years ago was monstrous, horrible -- he has been suffering for his crime, and he will continue to suffer for it, whether or not he is ever sent to jail. Certainly, also, his talent as a filmmaker and his sad personal history do not excuse his crimes in any way.
So, granted, Roman Polanski will rot in hell -- either in jail or in a fancy French villa. But what about the rest of us? What I'm finding surreal about the media circus following Polanski's arrest is the idea that we need to extradite a Polish/French film director from Switzerland to find a case of child rape to discuss in the United States. Why doesn't Kate Harding's much-praised and much-linked Salon condemnation mention that similar crimes to Polanski's are committed constantly, frequently, unceasingly every day right here in America? Why the sudden intensity of news coverage about this one case? Do we really need a celebrity to be arrested to understand how prevalent sexual abuse is in all our lives?
This is where I'm sensing hypocrisy -- and a disconnection from reality -- in much of this coverage. Think of your loved ones, your friends and family. Look around you on a busy street. It's a good bet that somebody here is a victim of sexual abuse. And here's the harder pill to swallow: it's also a good bet that somebody here is a perpetrator of sexual abuse -- in many cases, unlike Polanski, a perpetrator who will never be caught and stopped. Coercive rape and abuse of children happens all over, from Hollywood to every small town.
What disturbs me about the rabid invective being poured out from all sides about Roman Polanski is the idea that evil is something external, something exotic. "Put him in the cage, lynch him." Point your fingers: there he is, there's the bad man -- over THERE. I'm not buying it.
I am truly at a loss how to think about this. I had a conversation with my wife Caryn about it last night, after I posted a line from the Bible on Twitter:
Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.
"Do you really have to bring Jesus in to defend Roman Polanski?" Caryn said. She has a good point ... though on the other hand it's a fact that Jesus talked about forgiveness a lot. Again, though, none of us really care very much about Roman Polanski, and it's no big concern of ours whether or not he ever gets forgiven.
Forgiveness may be a difficult step, but beyond forgiveness is an even further goal, something harder to attain: understanding. What is it within human nature that makes presumably decent people like Roman Polanski do evil things? I would really like to understand.
We can lynch this one poor sorry fool, but I don't think that brings us any closer to an answer.
So, granted, Roman Polanski will rot in hell -- either in jail or in a fancy French villa. But what about the rest of us? What I'm finding surreal about the media circus following Polanski's arrest is the idea that we need to extradite a Polish/French film director from Switzerland to find a case of child rape to discuss in the United States. Why doesn't Kate Harding's much-praised and much-linked Salon condemnation mention that similar crimes to Polanski's are committed constantly, frequently, unceasingly every day right here in America? Why the sudden intensity of news coverage about this one case? Do we really need a celebrity to be arrested to understand how prevalent sexual abuse is in all our lives?
This is where I'm sensing hypocrisy -- and a disconnection from reality -- in much of this coverage. Think of your loved ones, your friends and family. Look around you on a busy street. It's a good bet that somebody here is a victim of sexual abuse. And here's the harder pill to swallow: it's also a good bet that somebody here is a perpetrator of sexual abuse -- in many cases, unlike Polanski, a perpetrator who will never be caught and stopped. Coercive rape and abuse of children happens all over, from Hollywood to every small town.
What disturbs me about the rabid invective being poured out from all sides about Roman Polanski is the idea that evil is something external, something exotic. "Put him in the cage, lynch him." Point your fingers: there he is, there's the bad man -- over THERE. I'm not buying it.
I am truly at a loss how to think about this. I had a conversation with my wife Caryn about it last night, after I posted a line from the Bible on Twitter:
Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.
"Do you really have to bring Jesus in to defend Roman Polanski?" Caryn said. She has a good point ... though on the other hand it's a fact that Jesus talked about forgiveness a lot. Again, though, none of us really care very much about Roman Polanski, and it's no big concern of ours whether or not he ever gets forgiven.
Forgiveness may be a difficult step, but beyond forgiveness is an even further goal, something harder to attain: understanding. What is it within human nature that makes presumably decent people like Roman Polanski do evil things? I would really like to understand.
We can lynch this one poor sorry fool, but I don't think that brings us any closer to an answer.
Detroit Housewife Writes Play
by Levi Asher on Wednesday, September 23, 2009 12:34 am
1. "Detroit Housewife Writes Play". That's how Joyce Carol Oates says she was received as a young beginning writer as she reminisced during a special event Monday night at the Smithsonian Institution. I've heard this writer speak before and in fact enjoyed it enough to want to hear her again (even though, to be honest, I haven't read a whole novel of hers since Black Water in 1992). This gathering found Ms. Oates in sharp and snappy form. She spoke of her stark one-room schoolhouse childhood, cited Lewis Carroll as her earliest literary influence, and charmingly called her interviewer "naive" for suggesting that she might ever allow her characters to tell her about themselves ("how," she asks, "would a character tell me anything?"). On a roll, Ms. Oates also scolded a questioner from the audience who asked if she'd met famous people such as US Presidents, telling him "perhaps there are more important people in the world than male Presidents for me to meet". As always, Ms. Oates' willowy manner and Pre-Raphaelite affect has a breathtaking impact on audiences, and the folks at the Freer Gallery ate her up. She should be in the movies -- she could win an Oscar. I still don't know, though, if I'll find the time to read her latest novel, Little Bird of Heaven.
2. I think it's great that Oprah Winfrey has picked Uwem Akpan's Say You're One Of Them as her next influential Oprah's Book Club selection. She has made several brilliant choices over the years, and Say You're One Of Them (which was reviewed on LitKicks here) is a bleak, straightforward book with a strong and highly focused humanitarian message about political violence against children in Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, Gabon. I'm sure Oprah intends this book is to stand alongside Elie Wiesel's Night on the bookshelf. The author, a young Jesuit born in Nigeria who has traveled through Africa and the world, is as much an activist as an artist, and the book is short on ostentation and long on horrifying truth. A lot of people -- adults and children, often together, often huddling in their own homes -- get killed in this book, but the book is no thriller. Oprah has made an unusual and brave choice.
3. Somebody recently asked "Should literary blogs get political?" Yeah, well, I think we should. It's not like critical issues aren't at stake, like the health care debate, which I find myself following carefully these days. I strongly support a health care bill and a public option, I am 100% behind Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid as they deal with this difficult challenge, and I really like Will Ferrell's latest commentary on the whole thing.
Relics: Jim Carroll's Funeral Card
by Levi Asher on Monday, September 21, 2009 07:14 pm
1. Catholic boy to the end ... from Cassie Carter's long-running fan site, here's Jim Carroll's funeral card.
2. Hemingway does Hemingway: actress Mariel Hemingway intends to create a movie based on her grandfather's gossipy classic A Movable Feast (via The Millions).
3. St. Francis College in Brooklyn is hosting a conference on Walt Whitman and the Beats and has issued an open call for papers.
4. I don't know what to expect from the new film version of J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace. I hated John Malkovich's overacting in A Portrait of a Lady, and I'm concerned that he'll turn this book's blank narrator into a volcano of emotion, as is his way. Still, I am looking forward to seeing the film and I hope for the best. Here are some reactions via Literary Saloon.
5. I'm skeptical when everybody gets excited about a newly found lost work by a great author, especially when very few of these people have read any of the already-published works by said great author. Still, Carl Jung's "Red Book" has a hell of a back story. Jung is a LitKicks favorite and I recommend him highly, though I think newcomers are better off jumping in with The Undiscovered Self or Memories, Dreams, Reflections rather than this new apparent beast.
6. Don DeLillo, Paul Auster, Eve Ensler and Art Spiegelman will appear at a PEN America event to read from recently released USA government memos about torture.
7, Aquinas (via Books Inq.).
8. If Charles Bukowski were Charles M. Schulz.
9. A new book provides a sideways glance at Moby Dick by including only the parts a different "easy version" of the book left out. Let's just hope nobody gets a brilliant idea for "Moby Dick and Zombies".
10. Maud Newton gathers expressions.
11. Jamelah Earle evaluates words.
12. A new Jason Reitman/George Clooney movie called Up In The Air is based on a novel by Walter Kirn, one of the better regular critics at the New York Times Book Review.
13. Interesting thoughts about how a book's intended level of sophistication may affect its chosen point of view.
14. Like Fire is a new literary blog created by Lisa Peet and other refugees from Readerville.
15. Two months ago I wrote a post titled "Not the Jack Kerouac Estate Battle Again". If you didn't catch it the first time, I wrote this because a new court ruling has upset a long-running dispute about the Kerouac archives, and I just knew we'd be getting into it again. Since then, many interested parties have responded to this article's comments thread, including several notable individuals connected to Jack Kerouac in one way or another.
As I've said before, I don't take this battle as seriously as many of the principals do. With Jack Kerouac long safe-in-heaven dead, the battle has narrowed to a catfight over the disposition of his relics, and I've never been particularly interested in any writer's relics. Some observers locate the blame for Jack's daughter Jan Kerouac's troubled life and early death on this mess, but I don't see a clear connection there. Anyway, the conversation in this comments thread are fascinating in their own way, and I wonder if someday somebody will write a book about the Jack Kerouac estate battle. If they do, the discussion in this thread may provide some raw material. It's not a book I'd want to write, though I probably wouldn't be able to resist reading it.
Jim Carroll: People Who Died
by Levi Asher on Sunday, September 13, 2009 10:32 pmJim Carroll, Basketball Diaries author, poet and one-hit-wonder punk singer, has died. He was 60. His hit single was "People Who Died":
Teddy sniffing glue, he was 12 years old
Fell from the roof on East Two-nine
Cathy was 11 when she pulled the plug
On 26 reds and a bottle of wine
Bobby got leukemia, 14 years old
He looked like 65 when he died
He was a friend of mine
Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died
G-berg and Georgie let their gimmicks go rotten
So they died of hepatitis in upper Manhattan
Sly in Vietnam took a bullet in the head
Bobby OD'd on Drano on the night that he was wed
They were two more friends of mine
Two more friends that died
Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died
Mary took a dry dive from a hotel room
Bobby hung himself from a cell in the tombs
Judy jumped in front of a subway train
Eddie got slit in the jugular vein
And Eddie, I miss you more than all the others
And I salute you brother
Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died
Herbie pushed Tony from the Boys' Club roof
Tony thought that his rage was just some goof
But Herbie sure gave Tony some bitchen proof
"Hey," Herbie said, "Tony, can you fly?"
But Tony couldn't fly, Tony died
Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died
Brian got busted on a narco rap
He beat the rap by rattin' on some bikers
He said, "Hey, I know it's dangerous, but it sure beats Riker's"
But the next day he got offed by the very same bikers
Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died
Teddy sniffing glue, he was 12 years old
Fell from the roof on East Two-nine
Cathy was 11 when she pulled the plug
On 26 reds and a bottle of wine
Bobby got leukemia, 14 years old
He looked like 65 when he died
He was a friend of mine
Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died
G-berg and Georgie let their gimmicks go rotten
So they died of hepatitis in upper Manhattan
Sly in Vietnam took a bullet in the head
Bobby OD'd on Drano on the night that he was wed
They were two more friends of mine
Two more friends that died
Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died
Mary took a dry dive from a hotel room
Bobby hung himself from a cell in the tombs
Judy jumped in front of a subway train
Eddie got slit in the jugular vein
And Eddie, I miss you more than all the others
And I salute you brother
Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died
Fall 2009: Six Books To Look Forward To
by Levi Asher on Tuesday, August 25, 2009 10:33 pmFall 2009 promises to be a big season for fiction. Here are six books I'm particularly excited about:
Summertime by J. M. Coetzee
Dead serious even at his most metafictional, J. M. Coetzee is one of the most important writers in the field today. Summertime is another third-person autobiographical outing, continuing the thread begun with Boyhood and Youth.
Generosity: an Enhancement by Richard Powers
Richard Powers' latest query into human nature involves an Algerian refugee and a "happiness gene". Will it equal his last novel, the resonant Echo Maker? We'll find out.
True Confections by Katharine Weber
I can't wait to tell you more about enigmatic novelist Katharine Weber's wild new book, which I've already read (though it won't be out for a few months). Crazy people running a candy company. Delicious.
The Cry of the Sloth by Sam Savage
Another great one I've already read -- a pitch-perfect literary satire about a failed writer who edits a failed journal called Soap, from the author of Firmin.
The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown
So what do you want from me? I like Dan Brown. I enjoyed Da Vinci Code, even though I knew the history was goofy. The new book appears to take place in Washington DC, lately my own adopted city, which makes it extra interesting for me. Note: the fact that I approve of Dan Brown does not imply that I approve of Tom Hanks.
Then, finally: the writer I mention so much here that you all probably want to shut your ears when you hear the first syllable. What can I say? I like this writer very much:
The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker
Baker's spin on the poetic mind may have something in common with Sam Savage's literary satire (or it may not -- I haven't read it yet).
That's my list. I plan to write more here about each of these titles later this year.
So what about you -- what are you reading now, and what do you plan to be reading soon?
Summertime by J. M. Coetzee
Dead serious even at his most metafictional, J. M. Coetzee is one of the most important writers in the field today. Summertime is another third-person autobiographical outing, continuing the thread begun with Boyhood and Youth.
Generosity: an Enhancement by Richard Powers
Richard Powers' latest query into human nature involves an Algerian refugee and a "happiness gene". Will it equal his last novel, the resonant Echo Maker? We'll find out.
True Confections by Katharine Weber
I can't wait to tell you more about enigmatic novelist Katharine Weber's wild new book, which I've already read (though it won't be out for a few months). Crazy people running a candy company. Delicious.
The Cry of the Sloth by Sam Savage
Another great one I've already read -- a pitch-perfect literary satire about a failed writer who edits a failed journal called Soap, from the author of Firmin.
The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown
So what do you want from me? I like Dan Brown. I enjoyed Da Vinci Code, even though I knew the history was goofy. The new book appears to take place in Washington DC, lately my own adopted city, which makes it extra interesting for me. Note: the fact that I approve of Dan Brown does not imply that I approve of Tom Hanks.
Then, finally: the writer I mention so much here that you all probably want to shut your ears when you hear the first syllable. What can I say? I like this writer very much:
The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker
Baker's spin on the poetic mind may have something in common with Sam Savage's literary satire (or it may not -- I haven't read it yet).
That's my list. I plan to write more here about each of these titles later this year.
So what about you -- what are you reading now, and what do you plan to be reading soon?
