“Jim Carroll, the poet and punk rocker in the outlaw tradition of Rimbaud and Burroughs who chronicled his wild youth in ‘The Basketball Diaries,’ died on Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 60. . . . “As a teenage basketball star in the 1960s at Trinity, an elite private school on the Upper [...]
Archive for the ‘Books’ Category
R.I.P. – Jim Carroll (1950-2009)
Posted in Books, Counter Culture, Obituaries, Poets & Poetry, Popular Culture, Rock 'n' Roll, Writers & Writing on September 13, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Oh Julia, Where Art Thou? or, The End of French Food?
Posted in Books, Europe, Food & Wine, Foreign Travel on July 18, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
“On Bastille Day, as chefs from the Flatiron District were holding a benefit in Madison Square Park inspired by food from around the world, a couple of blocks away Michael Steinberger was sounding the death knell for the most legendary cuisine of all. The occasion was the launch, at Idlewild Books, of his book ‘Au [...]
25 Years After: Orwell’s “1984″ Turns 60
Posted in Books, Literature, Writers & Writing on June 9, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
“[Orwell's] classic was published on 8 June 1949 – and has had a deep impact on millions. Andrew Johnson talks to writers about it – and asks them to cite their favourite reads.” (via The Independent)
Baseball’s Slang, or: “Setting the Table” with “Muffins” & “Jelly Beans”
Posted in Baseball, Books, Language, Popular Culture, Sports on May 15, 2009 | 1 Comment »
“Slang is like a breeze; it softly comes and goes, as new times bring new buzzwords. Some stick (‘cool’ defiantly endures); some induce cringes when dusted off (‘groovy’ is now in the dustbin of irony). It’s obvious when slang becomes less funny or less meaningful through overuse: ‘Internets,’ for example, has become too widespread to [...]
Kerouac at the Bat: Jack Kerouac’s Personal Fantasy Baseball Game
Posted in Baseball, Books, Museums & Exhibitions, New York City, Popular Culture, Sports, Writers & Writing on May 15, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
“Almost all his life Jack Kerouac had a hobby that even close friends and fellow-Beats like Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs never knew about. He obsessively played a fantasy baseball game of his own invention, charting the exploits of made-up players like Wino Love, Warby Pepper, Heinie Twiett, Phegus Cody and Zagg Parker, who toiled on imaginary teams named either [...]
Ancient Manuscripts in a Digital Age: Reading Crumbling Texts with X-Rays, Multispectral Imaging
Posted in Ancient History, Archaeology, Books, Literature, Religion, Science & Technology on May 12, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
“In a 21st-century version of the age of discovery, teams of computer scientists, conservationists and scholars are fanning out across the globe in a race to digitize crumbling literary treasures. “In the process, they’re uncovering unexpected troves of new finds, including never-before-seen versios of the Christian Gospels, fragments of Greek poetry and commentaries on Aristotle. [...]
Thy Name is “Black Alabama”: Amazon Kindle Mispronounces Barack Obama
Posted in Books, Magazines & Newspapers, Obama, Science & Technology on May 8, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
“The Amazon Kindle, an electronic reader, has been lavished with praise by hopeful newspaper and book executives who say they believe it has the potential to do for newspapers and books what the iPod did for music. “But if the Kindle, which not only displays the news but also speaks it with a computerized voice, is ever to be [...]
The Unburied: Corpses Having Sex, Coffee Table Book on Cadavers
Posted in Art & Artists, Books, Education, Europe, Health & Medicine, Human Behavior, Museums & Exhibitions, Performing Arts, Photography, Science & Technology, Sex & Gender on May 7, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
“Visual explorations of how the human body works have had us riveted since before Leonardo da Vinci sketched the famous Vitruvian man sometime around 1487. That fascination is the focus of what may be one of the most gruesome coffee table books ever. “Dissection: Photographs of a Rite of Passage in American Medicine 1880-1930 contains [...]
Dead Poets Society: Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Cervantes Share April “Death Day”
Posted in Books, Literature, Poets & Poetry, Writers & Writing on April 27, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
“The 23rd of April is a bad, bad day to be a poet. It’s the cruellest day in the cruellest month, as TS Eliot almost said. “Lots of people know that today is the day William Shakespeare, the greatest poet in the language, was born in 1564 and that it’s the day he died in 1616. [...]
When She Was Good: Has the Culture Caught Up with Mary Gaitskill?
Posted in Book Reviews, Books, Literature, Sex & Gender, Writers & Writing on April 24, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
“Good writers show us new places. Great writers give us new ways of looking at the old one. Just as Ruskin enabled a generation of Europeans to see the landscape that was actually in front of them rather than the conventionalized approximations they carried around in their heads, so is Gaitskill one of those rare [...]
Happy 445th Birthday, William Shakespeare! . . . or Not?
Posted in Birthdays, Books, Europe, Literature, Plays & Playwrights, Poets & Poetry, Writers & Writing on April 23, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Baptized on April 26, 1564, William Shakespeare‘s actual birthday is unknown but is traditionally observed on April 23rd, St. George’s Day. But how likely is it that today is the Bard of Avon’s real birthday? “There is no evidence, alas, to support the popular belief that William Shakespeare was born — as fifty-two years later he was to [...]
Today’s Sign of the Apocalypse: Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” Sells as Self-Help Guide in India
Posted in Asia, Books, Business, Crimes & Misdemeanors, Jewish Life, Sign of the Apocalypse on April 23, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
“While it is regarded in most countries as a ‘Nazi Bible’, in India it is considered a management guide . . . “Sales of [Mein Kampf] over the last six months topped 10,000 in New Delhi alone, according to leading stores, who said it appeared to be becoming more popular with every year. “‘Students are [...]
Earliest Known Book Dust Jacket Found at University of Oxford Library
Posted in Antiques & Folk Art, Books, Collectors & Collecting on April 21, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
“A librarian digging through the archives at the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford has found the earliest known example of a publisher’s dust jacket. The dust jacket, which had been separated from the book it was created for, was found bound with other booktrade ephemera. (Click image to enlarge) “It belonged to: Friendship’s Offering for 1830. London: Smith, [...]
British Art Publisher “Thames & Hudson” Celebrates 60th Anniversary
Posted in Architecture, Art & Artists, Books, Business, Europe, Jewish Life, Photography on April 21, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
“During the late Thirties, some of Britain’s most distinguished architects, artists, musicians, film-makers and others, many of them Jewish, arrived on our shores with their meagre belongings having escaped from the Nazi threat in continental Europe. Many of them made their homes here and went on to leave a lasting mark on our intellectual and [...]
Digital Tea Leaves: On eBooks & the Future of Reading & Writing
Posted in Books, Business, Science & Technology, Writers & Writing on April 20, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Whatever the future holds for printed books, this much is certain: there is no shortage of ink being spilled presently by writers offering their visions of the digital future – In “How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write,” author Steven Johnson points to two key developments, “the breakthrough success of Amazon’s [...]
Smart Jews: Can Genetic Theory Explain the High IQ of Ashkenazi Jews?
Posted in Anthropology, Books, Health & Medicine, Human Behavior, Jewish Life, Religion, Science & Technology on April 19, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
The presence of many lethal genetic diseases affecting the brain among Ashkenazi Jews may also increase their intelligence – so say Gregory Cochran (bottom), a physicist and genetics buff, and geneticist Henry Harpending (top), authors of the recently published, The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution. From the Los Angeles Times: “The biological basis for intelligence can [...]
Obscene: Maverick Publisher Barney Rosset Completes Autobiography
Posted in Books, Business, Counter Culture, Crimes & Misdemeanors, Literature, Magazines & Newspapers, Plays & Playwrights, Popular Culture, Writers & Writing on April 18, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
From NPR, a profile of publisher Barney Rosset, former owner of Grove Press and The Evergreen Review, in advance of the publication of his autobiography, The Subject Is Left Handed, which takes its name from his FBI file. The article includes a clip from “Obscene,” a film biography (2007) of Rosset, in which Rosset discusses acquiring Samuel [...]
“Lolita” Redux?: Penguin to Publish Nabokov’s “The Original of Laura”
Posted in Books, Business, Literature, Writers & Writing on April 17, 2009 | 1 Comment »
“Penguin is to publish Vladimir Nabokov‘s unfinished final novel, The Original of Laura. Penguin Classics editor Alexis Kirschbaum bought the book, together with continuing rights to the Nabokov backlist, in a six-figure deal through Andrew Wylie. The Original of Laura will be published as a Penguin Classics hardback at £25 on 3rd November, and simultaneously by Knopf in [...]
R.I.P. – Judith F. Krug (1940-2009)
Posted in Books, Literature, Obituaries, Politics on April 15, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
“Judith F. Krug, who led the campaign by libraries against efforts to ban books, including helping found Banned Books Week, then fought laws and regulations to limit children’s access to the Internet, died Saturday in Evanston, Ill. She was 69. . . . “As the American Library Association’s official proponent of the First Amendment’s guarantee of [...]
R.I.P. – Eve Sedgwick (1950-2009)
Posted in Books, Literature, Obama, Sex & Gender, Writers & Writing on April 13, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
“Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick died in New York yesterday, at the age of fifty-nine, following a long battle with breast cancer. The literary critic, who taught most recently at the CUNY Graduate Center, is best known for her formative work in the field of queer theory (in the books ‘Between Men’ and ‘Epistemology of the Closet’), including [...]
