The 2011 Pulitzer Prizes have been awarded. In fiction, Jennifer Egan won for A Visit From the Goon Squad. Other finalists were The Privileges by Jonathan Dee and The Surrendered by Chang-rae Lee. If your book title begins with the word “the” statistics show you have a 66% chance of not being awarded a professional accolade. Oddly, no award was given in the Breaking News category which surprised me. One of the finalists, The Miami Herald and El Nuevo Herald, had some amazing coverage of the Haiti earthquake. No explanation was given though reports say the journalists in the newsrooms of all three finalists were overhead lamenting, “We were robbed but we’re not sure why.”

Writer Greg Mortenson has found himself in a bit of trouble as reports emerge that there are inaccuracies (lies) in his memoir Three Cups of Tea. 60 Minutes did a feature on the controversy last night. The author has responded. I’ve not read the book. Once again, this opens an interesting conversation about how much the truth matters where memoir is concerned.

I admit it. I’ve been googling myself again. It’s Sunday afternoon. I’m stalling. Around page nine of my name –a few entries away from the really strange link asking if I want to find intelligence on my father–I stumbled across (not to be confused with Stumbling Upon, which would have been way less creepy) an excellent review in The Rumpus of Dean Young’s The Art of Recklessness by Darcie Dennigan. The review includes Walt Whitman’s semen in a conch shell, Peter Pan, Gertrude Stein on a spring day, and lots of oceanic hullabaloo, including shipwrecks. I’m always quoting Leopardi: How easeful to be wrecked in seas like these.

Poets are dreamers who don’t understand capitalism. Poets are sandwiches who don’t understand fried chicken. And some of them are going to be reading for Supermachine tonight @ 8PM at the Outpost (1014 Fulton Street) in Crooklyn. And by some of them I mean all of them are good: Paige Taggart, Justin Marks, Jeannie Hoag, and our own troublemaker Andrew James Weatherhead.

Vice has an excerpt from James Frey’s forthcoming The Final Testament of the Holy Bible. I loved Bright Shiny Morning so I’m really looking forward to this book. (Thanks for the heads up, Sean Doyle)

Truly remarkable… what weird fun Yahoo! Answers is to read.

(via Stephen Elliott’s twitter)

“All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it. And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations. But the man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air. What is evoked in him, then, is of another order, more terrible because it has no words, and triumphant, too, for that same reason. And his triumph, when he triumphs, is ours.” — James Baldwin, “Sonny’s Blues”

WUZZUP // Heather Christle‘s poem “Basic” appears in this week’s edition of the New Yorker!! // WUZZUP

Two cool readings coming up in NYC:

1) Tonight April 9th  @ 7PM @ Unnameable Books: Big Other Presents John Haskell, Jamie Iredell, and John Madera
2) Monday April 11th @ 8PM @ The Poetry Project: Rachel B Glaser & Amy Lawless

Feel free to give a shout out for elsewhere readings in the comments.

Cool article on Mark Hogancamp in today’s NY Times.  Hogancamp was the subject of the documentary Marwencol, which I posted about when I saw it a few months back.  I can’t encourage you strongly enough to see this documentary, it’s one of the best films I’ve ever seen about the process of and the reasons for making art.