In what must be a first, a literary author is being praised for her fashion sense. Zadie Smith has been named one of Britain’s top 10 “fashion icons” by Harpers & Queen magazine. Here’s a look at Smith in some of those stylish duds.
Zadie Smith: Fashion Plate
Baseball is Back
Those of you who've read this blog for a while know that during the summer I tend to pen the occasional post about baseball. Feel free to skip them if you like, but I just can't help myself. Now, on with it. In Chicago, I'm finding that the start of baseball season seems to awaken a collective joy across the city. Riding the El on Friday, I was startled by the conductor's gleeful announcement that the slowness of our train was due to the Cubs home opener. I also learned that the Cubs typically eschew night games at Wrigley Field because, essentially, night games would wake up the neighbors. Most modern stadiums are surrounded by moats of asphalt, but ancient Wrigley is nestled into a city block and surrounded by rowhouses and city traffic and streets lined with bars and diners. Driving north on Clark Street, the stadium explodes into view, surrounded on game day by throngs of fans. A whole section of the city turns into a clamoring carnival of baseball ferment. And then, a few blocks beyond, one returns to quiet streets lined with leafy trees and brick three flats. In the past few days I have noted the pleasure with which the Cubs fan declares that the season has returned. In my experience, they don't talk about the team's chances this year or the strength of the bullpen or anything pulled from the sports pages, they talk about how it feels to have baseball back. They tell me that it's so great to see people drinking beer in Cubs gear on their front porches and shouting "hey" to fans walking to the game. But mostly they sort of cock their heads back so as to gather in some springtime sun, still new enough to be a novelty. In Chicago, baseball doesn't just mean baseball, it means that the gloomy, icy, sunless winter is over. No more trudging through the ankle-deep snow in the pre-dawn darkness to the El, and no more returning by the same route - stepping in the same holes my feet made that morning - in darkness to a home whose clanging radiators provide a cozy warmth, which, over time, simply seems to be the temperature they have set for your prison cell. But, if you see Cubs fans marching through Wrigleyville, all that can be put to rest and forgotten until October, a whole baseball season away from now. There are some grizzled Chicago vets who insist to me that we're not out of the woods yet, that April chills and snows are not unheard of, but I ignore them because, well, baseball is here!(I should note that my already considerable happiness at the return of baseball season has been further enhanced by the book I'm reading right now, a collection of baseball writing by the incomparable Roger Angell called Game Time : A Baseball Companion)
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Blurb Silliness
Ed points to a great article about silly blurbs, namely Dave Eggers' blurb for Daniel Handler's novel Adverbs: "Adverbs describes adolescence, friendship, and love with such freshness and power that you feel drunk and beaten up, but still want to leave your own world and enter the one Handler's created. Anyone who lives to read gorgeous writing will want to lick this book and sleep with it between their legs." I've noticed that a lot of Eggers' blurbs tend to draw attention to the blurber rather than the blurbee.Another notorious blurber is Jerry Stahl, author of Permanent Midnight. Here's his blurb for Apocalypse Culture II edited by Adam Parfrey: "Adam Parfrey's astonishing, un-put-downable and absolutely brilliant compilation... will blow a hole through your mind the size of JonBenet's fist. This book should be in hotel rooms." And how about this for Mall by Eric Bogosian: "Eric Bogosian writes like an M-16 ripping through the brain pan of Western civilization. A read-till-your-eyes-bleed chronicle of American appetites run amok." There's a whole bunch of them collected in this old LA Weekly piece (scroll down). Interesting note: The compiler of the aformentioned piece called the book store where I was working with the list of books, and I read the blurbs to her over the phone. Ah, the magic of journalism. At any rate, the experience inspired me to, much much later, compile some collected blurbs here, here, here, and here.
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Art Garfunkel is a Voracious Reader
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)
New from Michael Cunningham
Michael Cunningham's follow up to his wildly popular novel, The Hours will be out this June. The trilogy of long short stories is called Specimen Days. Though set in different historical eras, each of the stories, according to publisher FSG, centers around "a young boy, an older man, and a young woman." As with The Hours, Scott Rudin is already signed on to bring the book to the silver screen.
Big Empty: On the Demise of Blockbuster
These were the days when the Internet was new, cell phones were for stockbrokers, and if you missed a movie in the theater, you had to wait six months or even a year or more to catch up. We don’t have to wait for anything now. I’m not sure that’s an entirely good thing.
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Hurricane help
Colleen (a regular contributor at Bookslut) sent me an email about a program she's working on to help kids displaced by Hurricane Katrina. It sounds like a great plan; here are the details:I'm working with a group in Baton Rouge who are helping children sheltered with their families at Southern University. We have put together a couple of wish lists of books and games that the folks at Parkview Baptist Church will happily deliver to the SU kids and other area shelter kids. Feel free to buy off the lists, and send the links on to everyone you know and pass on my email to anyone who has any questions. We've had some success so far and several publishers, authors, illustrators and reviewers are all kicking in copies of books they are sending direct. If any of your readers would like to do that, I can provide the mailing address.
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Parrots, Pirates, and Prostheses
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)