Author Sighting

A friend who has long since gotten out of the literary scholarship racket was once, briefly, quite intent on writing a dissertation entitled "Parrots, Pirates, and Prostheses." I have a vague recollection that the argument was to involve something about how pirates seem often to lose hands, legs, and eyes, and that along with their inanimate prosthetics (wooden legs, hooks, eye patches - if, indeed, eye patches count), they also have animate ones like parrots and monkeys. I am not quite sure where this argument was going. There was, however, an excellent plan to, at the defense of this unwritten dissertation, have a parrot, on the shoulder of the writer, declaim the defense.Though this dissertation (sadly) remains unwritten, it did generate a list of parrot books. Everyone's favorite genre! Behold:Flaubert's A Simple HeartKate Chopin's The AwakeningRobinson Crusoe by Daniel DefoeCharles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (Scrooge recalls Crusoe's Poll in the first stave)Flaubert's Parrot, by Julian BarnesVirgina Woolf's The Widow and the Parrot (this fable-like tale has been published as an illustrated children's book)Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island (Cap'n Flint)20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne (parrot hunting!)Little Women, Louisa May Alcott (Aunt March has a parrot who tells Laurie, "Go Away. No boys allowed here.")Gertrude Stein's "The Good Anna" in Three Lives briefly features a parrot.Saki's story "The Remoulding of Groby Lington"Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (which features a haunting scene of a parrot on fire)Willa Cather's beautiful Shadows on the Rock (Captain Pondaven's African parrot Coco, who sings songs and drinks brandy in warm water)Cather's Death Comes to the Archbishop (at least, I remember vaguely)

Not to be a shill for Amazon, but for those who like to save money on books, you can get a fourth book free after buying three books under ten dollars. They've got lots of paperback classics that fit the bill.

A perfect post to leave you with as we head into the long weekend. Perhaps, like many people, you've been wondering what Art Garfunkel's been reading for... oh... the last 39 years, give or take. Luckily, he's been keeping track.As a result, perusing through the nearly 1,000 books he's read in that time, I now know that:When I was born, Art Garfunkel was reading Letters from an American Farmer by J. Hector St. John De Crevecoeur.When I graduated high school, he was reading "Our Crowd" by Stephen Birmingham.When I graduated college, he was reading Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri.And when I got married, he was reading Love, Groucho, the letters of Groucho Marx.What was Art Garfunkel reading on the important dates in your life? (Thanks to John for sending that brilliant link my way)

CSPAN's Book TV is an odd entity. It seems like it's just used to fill the time, although there are occasionally interesting guests. Though CSPAN has never struck me as particularly publicity-hungry, the nonetheless have the Book Bus, "a mobile television production studio that travels the country promoting Book TV's unique non-fiction book programming." Recently, the Book Bus came through Laurie's town, and she sent in her report:CSPAN's "Book Bus" stopped by the Athens, GA public library for a couple hours on a very wet Wednesday afternoon in February. The two twenty-something female staffers, Ann and MaryAnn, gave tours and explained their traveling broadcast facility. It has a small kitchen and bathroom in the back, but the bulk of the bus is set up with broadcast equipment and a mini-studio for taping interviews. They were just finishing interviewing a local author when we arrived (I think, but am not certain, it was Mary Padgelek talking about her book In the Hand of the Holy Spirit: The Visionary Art of J.B. Murray, a biography of a self-taught Georgia artist). We toured the bus and I asked so many questions you could say they got interviewed for a change, though most of the answers were disappointing. What follows is my best recollection of the conversation:Q: We know BookTV is dedicated to nonfiction, but why so much on politics, American history and American biographies? Why not more on world history, world figures, nature, technology, explorers, science....?A: We do some of that. We're primarily focused on what is of interest to our audience.Q: In that case, when you get to Atlanta in April, will you be interviewing Neal Boortz and Congressman John Linder, authors of The Fairtax Book which came out in 2005 and made the New York Times bestseller list?A: We hadn't planned to, but that's a good idea.Q: Atlanta seems to have trouble attracting good authors for visits. Most of them seem to stick to the Northeast and West Coast. Do you think BookTV could come to Atlanta more often and maybe raise publishers' awareness of our existence?A: We come as often as we can. We recently covered an author talk for the Center for the Book at the Decatur public library, and have covered events at the Jimmy Carter Library.Q: You visit a lot of book festivals. Some great nonfiction has also been written in graphic format yet you've never been to a comics convention. Why not go to one and interview some of the nonfiction authors/illustrators there?A: We do nonfiction.Q: But some good nonfiction has been done in graphic format -- most recently In the Shadow of No Towers by Art Spiegleman, La Perdida by Jessica Abel, Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, Epileptic by David B. and Pyongyang by Guy Delisle, among others. There are even a couple annual conventions near Washington, D.C., your headquarters, that would be easy for you to get to and cover.A: It would be up to the comic book convention organizers then, to contact us about coming.(One of the staff gives out her business card as a contact point. I have no connection to these conventions but may forward the info to the organizers.)Q: Why are you staying in Atlanta for 12 days in early April?A: We're attending a cable producers' convention, but that's not open to the public. We'll basically be reporting to the industry that provides our production budget.Q: Earlier this year you stopped in Katrina-ravaged Mobile, Alabama. What was it like there? How did people with no homes or public facilities respond to a "Book Bus?"A: Another crew handled that, so we can't say, but some interviews were taped that may be broadcast.They in turn asked if I would think up something to ask political theorist Francis Fukuyama for an upcoming 3-hour interview to air on March 5th, and then filmed me asking the question. Who on earth wants to listen to a political theorist for 3-hours?!! Is that their big audience -- cable tv producers closely following political trends? Marjane Satrapi could easily fill one of those Fukuyama hours with the story of her life in Iran before and after the revolution and be a lot more interesting. (Postscript: we taped the show and saw that they aired my question, but I look awful. A friend called and said, "You look better in real life." Thanks.) They rewarded us with free BookTV t-shirts, which come squeeze-packed in the shape of a 2" x 1.5" x 6.25" bus, round wheels and all. My husband opened his and it was less interesting than the way it was packaged. My package is now displayed on a shelf at work, t-shirt still squeezed inside.The BookTV Bus folks wanted to try local food and planned to have dinner at Athens vegetarian institution The Grit. Maybe they got another interview out of it. Too bad Weaver D's only serves lunch; that's truly Deep South soul food - and Weaver's definitely worth an interview by the BookTV bus folk.

For the last several months, the web site of the British Library has been hosting the online diary of Saad Eskander, Director of the Iraq National Library and Archive (INLA). As many readers are likely aware, the Library was looted in the early days of the American invasion, and Eskander has spent much of his time since trying to rebuild his collections under perilous conditions.Reading through the diary it quickly becomes apparent that Eskander and his team are faced with far greater challenges than simply picking up the pieces of the wrecked library. Instead they face daily threats to their lives, and the laundry list of wound and killed friends and colleagues and many more near misses makes one wonder how the library staff can go on living in Baghdad. At the end of 2006, Eskander compiles a list (scroll down) of violent acts committed against INLA staff and their families and determines that 70 have been killed since the conflict began. The number has ticked higher in subsequent months.Last month, Eskander posted an entry (scroll down) about the day that al-Mutanabi Street, the home of Baghdad's outdoor book market and just a short distance away from the INLA, was bombed. "This day will be always remembered, as the day when books were assassinated by the forces of darkness, hatred and fanaticism," he says. "Tens of thousands of papers were flying high, as if the sky was raining books, tears and blood."As a whole, the diary is an incredible chronicle of lives lived under siege and put in terrible danger to keep Iraq's cultural institutions from disappearing entirely.via The Eclectic Chapbook, which also remarks on a BBC program about Eskander and the INLA.