Beat poet Allen Ginsberg once threw out a surprisingly decent first pitch at a San Francisco Giants game while wearing a pocket protector. Seriously. Here’s our own Bill Morris with a little more on Ginsberg, Beats, and film.
Holy the First Pitch!
Paranoid Much?
At The Awl, Brian O’Neill makes the case that following the events of September 11th, America finally caught up to the mindset of Thomas Pynchon.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Hermann; Burgess; Scotton; Howard; Metcalf; Leger; Hogan; Zourkova; Bergman
Out this week: The Season of Migration by Nellie Hermann; Uncle Janice by Matt Burgess; The Secret Wisdom of the Earth by Christopher Scotton; Driving the King by Ravi Howard; Against the Country by Ben Metcalf; God Loves Haiti by Dimitry Elias Léger; A Pleasure and a Calling by Phil Hogan; Wildalone by Krassi Zourkova; and Almost Famous Women by Year in Reading alum Megan Mayhew Bergman. For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great 2015 Book Preview.
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Stanford Online Courses
Stanford's next round of free online courses includes Cryptography, Human-Computer Interaction, and Game Theory.
Some links: Penguin Podcast, Lawyers on Google Print, Chicago Literature
Penguin Books UK has started a podcast. I've added it to my Literary Podcasts post. (via)Law blog Groklaw has a good post explaining the Google Print project and the controversy surrounding it, and Lawrence Lessig has news of a program coming up at the New York Public Library on November 17 called "The Battle Over Books: Authors and Publishers Take on the Google Print Project."Golden Rule Jones has a list of this year's Chicago fiction, and at Pete Lit, Pete tells us about Chicago Noir, a collection edited by Neal Pollock with stories by Adam Langer, Kevin Guilfoile and others.
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Move Over, Wittgenstein’s Mistress
Frankly, it's just pretty hard to beat Raskolnikov's Inbox.
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Thoughts of the Enemy
In the new Granta, Adam Johnson writes about the mind-bending experience of traveling to North Korea, an experience which informed his Pulitzer-winning novel The Orphan Master’s Son. Perhaps the saddest anecdote -- and there are a lot of sad anecdotes -- is the one about the North Korean tour guide who couldn’t believe the author didn’t want to buy knockoff goods.
The Artist as Activist
"No one was more grimly adamant that the world was in mortal peril, or had more fun trying to save it from itself." Over at The New Yorker's Page Turner blog, Alexandra Schwartz considers the life and work of Grace Paley, noting that Paley's slim output "is a great shame, if not so surprising. Activism, like alcoholism, can distract a writer from the demands of her desk." Also of note: this tribute to Paley that our own Garth Risk Hallberg wrote upon her death in 2007.
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