Madtown opera-goth Zola Jesus got a decent notice in the NYT this morning:

Pitchfork has an interview.

Fowler worked for Offthebus, a citizen journalist organization set up for the 2008 campaign. It had it's ups and downs. via

The writer, married to a successful corporate lawyer and with two daughters in graduate school, admits now that she at times sank into the sort of elitism she loathed in others. She complained she wasn't getting enough attention from overseers at Huffington Post. Yet at the end of the campaign, the website treated her as a star, paying expenses that she said one month reached $15,000.

"I was becoming more than a prima donna," Fowler writes, "in some surreal twist of circumstance I was turning into what I had once mocked."

 

 

@BurroughsBot  retweets every Twitter posting mentioning William S. Burroughs.

Anthony Burgess' formalist poet Enderby encounters William S. Burroughs in Tangiers. He has entered a bar to retrieve a letter, and finds a nest of American expat writers:

(From Enterby Outside)

There are other characters in this scene. I don't know if they are based on real people or whether they are central-casting beatniks.

Enderby doesn't have much use for this sort of thing, but Burgess himself is apparently more open-minded. Later, when the Muse takes Enderby to dinner, its clear that she is as much interested in Burroughs as she is in Enderby.

Scott Esposito wants to bring back the mass market paperback as a viable format for "literary" fiction. Count me in; I'd rather have a pocket book size edition of Joshua Ferris' latest than a cutting edge eBook with all the bells and whistles.

I’d really like to see it happen. As I understand things, there are two possibilities for why this hasn’t already happened: 1) we as a reading public just don’t have the interest in serious fiction to support mass market paperbacks as a business proposition like we used to. Or 2) maybe publishers are missing a golden opportunity.

Either way, I love going to the used book store and seeing all the top-flight authors (e.g. Pynchon, Barthes, DeLillo, etc.) who got the mass market treatment. Over at The Constant Conversation, we’re having a big nostalgia-fest, jumping off of Scott Bryan Wilson’s excellent post (with pictures) on the mass market paperbacks he owns and loves. Here a taste of the discussion:

I’ve been an advocate for the return of this format for ages, because like all of us I discovered so much literature from bargain-bin paperbacks and books left in my parents’ basement. Everything from Pynchon to Kawabata, Mishima, Portis, and Marquez.

Problem is that so many of these books (with exceptions like the sturdy Penguin Pocket series) are crusty and poorly made, with miniscule print and condensed formatting. Hard to complain when you’re getting the book for free or nearly so–

Popular Science Magazine, in partnership with Google, has scanned and archived 137 years worth of back issues. Among other things, this is a great resource for exploring the "retro future".

Patricia Travers, a violin prodigy, died in February, age 82. Between ages 10 and 23 she performed extensively. After a 1951 performance of the Brahms Violin Concerto with the Boson Symphony, she disappeared by hiding in plain sight, by living with her parents in Clifton, NJ. She seldom spoke of her career. Sudden disappearances are actually quite typical of prodigies. According to Ellen Winer of Boston College, "What it takes to become a prodigy is very different from what it takes to become a major creative adult". Henri Salmide died, age 90. Salmide was a German naval officer ordered to stockpile explosives to destroy the port facilities of Bordeaux in 1944. Instead, he followed his "Christian conscience", blowing up the storage bunker instead and killing 50 German personnel but saving the port from great devastation. He hid out for the rest of the war with a Resistance family and became a naturalized French citizen after the war. He was given the Légion d’Honneur by the French government only in 1994.

Marguerite Duras, The War: A Memoir. (translated 1986, Barbara Brey). A short collecton of pieces by Duras about the period between Liberation and VE Day. The first piece, "The War", is a journal from spring 1945 when Duras awaited the return of her husband, Robert L., from a camp. Robert L. had been arrested and deported about a year previously and was feared dead; the statistics showed that only 1 in 50 detainees ever returned from Dachau. Then, he's back, picked up in Germany by Resistance associates with forged papers, and driven to Paris. He lies near death with a 106 degree F fever for nearly 17 days. He recovers, but is weakened for years. Duras divorces him and marries another Resistance veteran. Plent of tough and simple writing about what the war did to people.

"Monsieur X, Here Called Pierre Rabier", is a memoir of an odd Gestapo agent who had a personal interest in Duras and her husband. He's not a good officer, and has strange ideas about opening an art bookship in Paris after the War, as if the war would have meant nothing. Duras is encouraged by her Resistance colleagues to maintain a personal relation with Rabier, which is a rather frightening thing to do. After Liberation, he's shot by the Resistance. Duras refers to his "illusion that a person may exist solely as a dispenser of reward and punishment".

Four short pieces follow. "Albert of the Capitals" describes an incident where Duras tortures a collaborationist. "Ter of the Militia" is about the fate of another collaborationist who joined a pro-German militia simply because it made him a big man. "The Crushed Nettle" may be about Ter after he escaped detention. The very short "Aurelia Paris", about an abandoned Jewish girl, is slightly fantastic and deserves to be read twice.

Andy Pollaine had an interesting point about Twitter a couple of years ago:

I was watching the general tweeting going on from those I follow on Twitter and have started noticing a lot of “goodnight everyone” kinds of tweets. That along with the @reply made me realise that Twitter is really just a giant MOO, just without the rooms.

Or is it really without the rooms? I think that the ‘rooms’ that people used to make in places like Lambda MOO are now personal blogs. When you ‘look’ at a person in Twitter, you go to their Twitter page and then usually onto their blog, much like you used to see a description of them in a MOO and then maybe visit their room/space.

Twitter is a bit more public and gives you the ability to follow people, but it’s amusing to see that people are still the most interesting content online just as it was in the earliest days of the internet.

Chatroom, forum, MOO; Twitter has bits and pieces of all three.

Patricia Travers, a violin prodigy, died in February, age 82. Between ages 10 and 23 she perfromed extensively. After a 1951 performance of the Brahms Violin Concerto with the Boson Symphony, she disappeared by hiding in plain sight, by living with her parents in Clifton, NJ. She seldom spoke of her career. Sudden disappearances are actually quite typical of prodigies. According to Ellen Winer of Boston College, "What it takes to become a prodigy is very different from what it takes to become a major creative adult".

Henri Salmide died, age 90. Salmide was a German naval officer ordered to stockpile explosives to destroy the port facilities of Bordeaux in 1944. Instead, he followed his "Christian conscience", blowing up the storage bunker instead and killing 50 German personnel but saving the port from great devastation. He hid out for the rest of the war with a Resistance family and became a naturalized French citizen after the war. He was given the Légion d’Honneur by the French government only in 1994.