Jeff Vandermeer, friend to all, shares the journey of his book Finch, from inception to interior layout.  I think Jeff is remarkable; he’s prolific AND he spends a lot of time on the internet.    

I really look forward to this:  The Interview Project, from David Lynch.  

A profile of the man who created the much-emulated cliché ‘Hollywood Agent Type’, Irving Lazar.

An interview with William Gass.  This one’s so full of good.  An excerpt:

As for youthfulness: I value experimentation.  In that area I am one of the youngest writers now writing.  I smile when I see all these old young people still treating a sentence as if it had been a child of Dick and Jane.  A sermon of Donne’s often has more ideas, more energy, certainly more art, than these writer’s entire books.  And the meters of Sir Thomas Browne are confounding and should astonish everyone.  Age is not a function of time but of mind, the old old old saying goes.  Try a novel by the great Spanish writer, Juan Goytisolo.  He’ll measure how young you are, not the New Yorker.  I recently had to do a retrospective piece.  It was a horrible experience.  Don’t look back; complete immobility may be gaining on you.

More stuff after the jump.

Here’s a trailer for Transcendent Man, a film about Ray Kurzweil (futurist, guy who wants to live forever):

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntY01qoIdus&fmt=18

Book ads from 1962-1973.  My favorite is the Cormac McCarthy ad.  His floating head is handsome.

Ray Bradbury talks about love.  I think more ‘critical’ reviews should be written with love in mind.  I do.     

And two blocks of words I’ve found to be connected in a hidden way:  A NYT correction about astronauts and Zen monks, and Gene Morgan’s description of finishing a poem.