Literary Doppelgangers
I’ve always thought J.D. Salinger looked like the young Al Pacino in The Godfather, so much so that when reading the former, I would hear ‘HOO-AH!’ sporadically inserted throughout the text. The Glass and Corleone families are very similar; both represent brilliant families slowly falling towards their demise.
And then there’s Leonard Cohen, circa his breathtaking Songs From A Room period. He is said to have written those songs in Hydra, a (then) primarily uninhabited Greek island without electricity.
This got me thinking about doppelgangers, which despite sounding like a kind of gang-bang, is strange since our visual notion of these men are through a stagnant set of photos. We share a collective ‘memory’ of famous people, and I thought it might be fun to talk more about folks who are doppelgangers.
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Haut or Not: Matt Cozart
Melville’s dick on Sister Carrie — that’s all I can think about, and what looks to be a bunch of children’s books on top of Kenneth Koch and William Carlos Williams. Now we know where Matt’s priorities lie: so much depends upon/ a red wheelbarrow / and whether or not it’s nap-time. Such blasphemy doesn’t even compare with John Irving being 3 tiers above D.F. Wallace. [Brief interview with a hideous man: Q) You ever wish your last name began with M?, A) Yes, all the time.] As for O. Henry and O’Hara: O’MyGod
Rating: Not.
Introducing the Underground Library Writers Project
Shortly after I posted about the Underground Library on HTMLGIANT, Ravi Mangla emailed PH Madore and me with an idea to set up a writer ‘buddy system’ of some sort. His idea, as I understood it, was to encourage more personal interaction between those who might not have originally sought each other out. I liked this idea, and will be helping Ravi Mangla put this together.
Ravi Mangla has written up specifics after the break.
Poe sorry for his drinking. Butler, not.
Here:
“Will you be so kind enough to put the best possible interpretation upon my behaviour while in N-York?,” Poe asks New York publishers J. and Henry G. Langley. “You must have conceived a queer idea of me — but the simple truth is that Wallace would insist upon the juleps, and I knew not what I was either doing or saying.”
Compare, contrast to this in the comments.
Best compare/contrast wins a prize. Or two. I have lots of galleys and am cleaning house. Prize packages tailored to the tastes of the winner.
UPDATE:
Apologies for vagueness. In the comments, write a short essay (Oh, even just a paragraph long) comparing and contrasting Poe’s apology for his drunken behavior in New York to the video of our fearless leader screeching drunkenly about smoothies when he visited New York a couple of years ago. The video is linked to the word “this” because I was unable to embed it.
Richard Nash Leaves Soft Skull
Some old news was posted at Soft Skull in February, but thought I’d mention it today to officially mark Richard Nash’s leaving Soft Skull Press.
He writes:
Thanks for everyone out there for making Soft Skull what it is, above all the readers and writers whom we exist to serve and connect, along with my colleagues, paid and unpaid (!), who’ve put in vast amounts of hours, creativity, and intensity in order to bring those writers and readers together to create this thing we call culture.
Follow Nash online on his blog for post-Soft Skull activities.
AGRICULTURE READER #3
Agriculture Reader #3, edited by Htmlgiant’s own Justin Taylor and Jeremy Small, is out and full of amazing work, not to mention that this annual journal of the arts is artfuly made itself by the amazing design firm, X-ing Books. Click here to order your copy. Here’s the full list of mindblowingly great contributors, including Diane Wiliams, Eileen Myles and Matthew Zapruder: READ MORE >
Uncategorized / 9 Comments
March 10th, 2009 / 10:10 am
March 10th, 2009 / 10:10 am
My New Favorite Blog
Is Cake Wrecks the Literary Rejections on Display of food blogs?
Power Quote
“Both writers were inimitable even as they were widely imitated. Carver, younger, less productive, a practitioner of a spare gritty realism often called minimalism, was the junior executive. Donald Barthelme—sparkling fabulist and idiosyncratic reinventor of the genre, practitioner of swift verbal collages, also sometimes dubbed minimalism—was commander in chief. Barthelme’s particular brilliance was so original, so sui generis, despite its tutelage at the feet of pages by Joyce, Beckett, and Stein, that even his own brothers Frederick and Steven, also fiction writers of intelligence and style, wrote more like Carver.”
—Lorrie Moore, “How He Wrote His Songs“
INTERVIEW WITH NATE TYREE OF “BOOKMUNCH”
BOOKMUNCH is a website that reviews books and interviews authors. i recently interviewed NATE TYREE, a contributor for the site.
(interview after jump)
Mean Monday on Sunday Night: PR’s Office
This is my office where I work about six months of the year. I was just there this weekend and I took some pictures to share with you all. I am a slob. I roll around in a pile of dust and books. Make fun of me. Talk about how happy you are that you don’t really know me. I am going to explain stuff and post some nice close-ups after the jump: