John Grisham did his homework and busted his ass, too. Good on him.

a softer world

Hot stuff! In another commerce-related newsbreak, I just learned that Michaelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point is finally available on US-formatted DVD. Have I mentioned that my birthday is June 29th? Just sayin’.

Hey, do you guys know this site called ireadashortstorytoday.com? I was thinking of starting a site called ireadashortstorttodaytoomotherfucker.com. Maybe because the dude wrote a bad review of one of my stories? Nah.

Good lord man! New ‘abstract comic’ themed Action Yes; new Harp & Altar (w/ Kate Greenstreet, Joanna Ruocco, Lisa Jarnot, Eileen Myles); new Memorious (w/ Aaron Burch, Thomas Cooper, Xu Xi). We’ve got some reading to do.

New York dwellers, get ’em while they’re hot: Yesterday I was up at BookCulture (formerly Labyrinth Books) on 112th and Broadway, where they always have tons of blowout-priced remainder specials, but  yesterday’s findings were so exciting I just can’t keep them to myself: The Collected Poems of Kenneth Koch, in hardback, for $10– marked down from the original jacket price of $40 (!!!). Now keep in mind that this doesn’t include KK’s longer poems, which comprise a volume of approximately equal size and price…oh wait. What? The Collected Longer Poems is sitting right there on that same table, also in hardback, and also just ten bucks. They’ve also got big discounts (I think half off) on handsome hardback first-editions of Notes from the Air (Ashbery’s selected later poems), and Hiding Man, Tracy Daugherty’s ass-kicking biography of Donald Barthelme. Plus like 100 other things, but any one of the above-mentioned is already reason enough to drag yourself uptown.

Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment.

This would be comical if not for the fact that these people have been teaching–or not teaching, more accurately–young Americans about sex. And then there are the assorted ridiculous sex-scare policy decisions–like the FDA holding up over-the-counter status for emergency contraception out of fear that it would make young women promiscuous or even lead to teens forming “sex-based cults.”

Jessica Valenti, author of The Purity Myth, takes on The Virginity Movement over at The Nation.

The first issue of the new online journal Kill Author is up. Exciting to see many familiar and many new names. I like the design a lot.

Tim Gautreaux’s story “Idols” in the latest New Yorker imagines the continued life of Obadiah Elihue, the character from Flannery O’Connor’s story, “Parker’s Back”, which I wrote about here. Good stuff.