Edmond Caldwell, a longtime Millions commenter and member of the golden age of lit blogging, has passed away. Caldwell was the founder of The Chagall Position and Contra James Wood. Read a tribute to Caldwell by his friends Boyd Nielson and Joseph G. Ramsey at Dispatches, here.
A Worthy Send-Off
Cooking with 2 Chainz
“Put on your Versace apron,” and “if wearing a four-finger ring, carefully place it on a side table before starting to cook.” It’s time to explore the 28-page “cookbook” included in 2 Chainz’s latest album, B.O.A.T.S. 2 #Metime.
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Yuks of the North
“A Canadian author, a farmer, and a First Nations teenager went fishing. The farmer mostly sat there quietly while the author and the teenager tried to find common ground, even though the gulf between them felt massive.” A Canadian literary scene joke book.
A Selected Weapon
Sylvia Plath’s final days have long been a source of fascination and horror for many readers. In a forthcoming unauthorized biography of Plath’s husband Ted Hughes, it is claimed that one of Hughes’s more contentious poems, "Last Letter," was written after an argument the couple had the night before Plath took her own life. Ted Hughes: An Unauthorized Life is out next week.
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To the Choir
It can be hard for critics to strike a balance between high theory and accessible prose. For James Wood, the key is to retain enough theoretical knowledge to come up with an insightful point, while still retaining the ability to write in a natural dialect. In The Guardian, he talks about his own relationship with books.
Amazon Releases Fourteen Pilots
Amazon, which recently entered the world of original broadcast content, has subverted television’s traditional “pilot season” by forgoing a staggered release schedule in favor of plunking all fourteen of its pilots onto its website at once. The idea is for audiences to watch the eight comedies and six animated shows for free, and then help the company decide which options are the most promising for long term development. Just a tip: Alpha House features appearances from John Goodman and Bill Murray.
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Carolyn:
Thanks for mentioning EC (and Boyd and Joe’s worthy tribute)! This is just to point out that, far more than being a blogger, EC was a dedicated and deeply-educated writer who had lots of short stories out there, as well as having had a well-reviewed novel, Human Wishes/ Enemy Combatant, print-published in 2012. To quote Jacob Bacharach, at HuffPo (from a piece called “All Good Books are Weird Books”):
“And then there’s my recent favorite, a small-press novel called Human Wishes / Enemy Combatant by Edmond Caldwell, which manages to combine the surreal landscapes of airport hotels with a living Matryoshka doll with a wrenching account of the massacre of Lydda in the 1948 Palestine War with a rambunctious conspiracy to abduct and replace James Wood—yes, that James Wood—with a subversive double.”
Edmond had another novel to his credit, as well, unpublished, that I hear was also quite wonderful. Here’s to hoping that both books find a new life in the coming years. Once in a blue moon quality does (or should), briefly, rise to the top…