Humor Bits Published on Cricket Soda

The day I met Ethan Hawke and the other day when I met Angela Lansbury.

Music Reviews Published on Silent Uproar

Wooden Stars' new album People are Different. Also, the Ocean's 13 Soundtrack.

Illustrations on an Illustrious Website

There's a great blog that showcases illuminated manuscripts, illustrations in old books and visually stunning paper ephemera. Interested in browsing their images? Take the BibliOdyssey.

You Can Write, But Are You Attractive?

There's an interesting story in The Phoenix about how the publishing industry is turning young authors into sex symbols. Briefly, from the article...

Literature, unlike so many other media industries, is technically a meritocracy. But that won’t stop book marketers, bloggers, critics, and the literary community at large from collectively slobbering over a pretty author. No, the literary rules changed ages ago. Books no longer need to be serious in order to be published; there are fewer and fewer venues available for reviews (rendering competition more intense with every passing catalogue season), and critics aren’t doing their job unless they are merciless. Perhaps as a response to all of this, publishers have begun to count on their authors to do double-duty — to act as sex symbols as well.

Oh man, am I ever in trouble if that's the case (see above).

Stories Coming Soon in Northwest Travel Magazine

I've recently finished up writing a couple short one-page stories for Northwest Travel Magazine. They were fun to write because they're close to home to me, in more ways than one.

The first was a profile about Vashon Island, the place I call home. For those that don't know it, Vashon is a small rural jewel of a place between Seattle and Tacoma. It's home to artists and aging hippies, lawyers and organic farmers. With a population of 10,000 +/-, you get to know your neighbors, and get to know the deer that eat your rose beds and the bald eagles who soar above your roof. There's nothing better than spending a Saturday morning with my daughter in town eating a pastry near the town park. I don't plan on leaving any time soon.

The second was a story about spending the day in Olympia with children. I grew up in Olympia so going back there, so my daughter can visit her grandparents and other assorted Shipley people, is a treat. Seeing Olympia through her eyes makes me appreciate where I grew up. There's the Farmers Market (where she insists on eating "those pepper meat stick things") and the Capitol Building, the children's museum and the used bookstores where you can sit in a fluffy chair and read Sylvester and the Magic Pebble. All in all, it was great fun researching a story with my kid.

Great Portuguese Writer Jose Saramago

Profiled in New York Times Magazine.

David Sedaris on the Family Dinner

In the recent issue of The New Yorker, David Sedaris, amongst other writers (Donald Antrim, Gary Shteyngart, etc) writes about the family dinner.

For me, our family dinner consisted of several items, most completely devoid of nutrition.

1) Liver. Yuck. Liver coated with flour and then pan-fried with old bacon drippings found in a small crock above the stove. Mmmm....

2) Jell-o. Not so bad. But, how about Jell-o (lime) with celery and apple bits encased within it? Mmmm...

3) Spaghetti w/sauce. Not so bad. But, how about spaghetti (sticky enough to stick to the ceiling for hours) with a small dabbling of Western Family spaghetti sauce? Mmmm...

4) Powdered milk. Mmmm.....

Of course, my mom had to feed six of us kids and she did the best she could. Thanks mom! Though I'll never forgive her for the tuna sandwich/carrot raisin salad combo thing. Never.

Quote of the Week

Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.
- Hermann Hesse

Into the Wild

One of my favorite books, an amazing account of the life and death of Chris McCandless, is soon to be a movie that's been adapted and directed by Sean Penn. In response to the renewed fascination with the young man's life, Outside Magazine is making available the original story, one that appeared in Outside's pages in January of 1993 written by the soon to be famous writer Jon Krakauer, who has since written the magnificent Into Thin Air (about his Mt. Everest climb that turned tragic) and Under the Banner of Heaven (a tale of violence and religious fanaticism within the Mormon church).

Horton Foote - The Oldest Working Screenwriter in Hollywood

In the New York Times Magazine, there's a warm profile of Horton Foote, a 91-year-old playwright and screenwriter still busy at work. In fact, his script, "The Great Debaters," is in production now, a film that stars Denzel Washington. I know of Foote because of his Oscar win in the 1960s for his screenplay adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird. The magazine article touches on his career in Hollywood but its main focus is on his strong longevity as a writer for the stage.

Also to note, if you're in the Seattle area, Tony Award-winning Intiman Theatre is continuing its "American Cycle" series (they've thus far done productions of Richard Wright's Native Son, John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and Thornton Wilder's Our Town) with a Christopher Sergel adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird, showing in September and October. I'm eager to see how it plays on stage.

86 Best Travel Books of All Time

Conde Nast Traveler, as part of their 20th Anniversary issue, highlights the 86 best travel books of all time. How can one pick "the best"? They asked 45 of their favorite writers (including Jonathan Raban, Monica Ali, Stewart O'Nan, Gore Vidal and Jim Crace) for the travel books that "changed the way they considered a certain culture or place or people, that inspired them both to write and to get out into the world themselves." Their choices are varied, to be sure. Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is mentioned. So is Matsuo Basho's The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches published in 1694. Who is most represented? There's quite a few Paul Theroux and Mark Twain tomes, great travelers and great writers both.

Also, I would recommend reading books set in a place in which you are visiting. For instance, when I traveled to Spain with my beautiful wife I brought with me Cees Nootboom's Roads to Santiago: Detours and Riddles in the Lands and History of Spain and was drawn into the countryside even further because of his words. When I went to Kauai recently I brought with me a collection of Jack London's short stories, all based in Hawaii. When I went to Chicago I read Studs Terkel's non-fiction and Stuart Dybek's tremendous short stories. Whenever I go camping in the woods I bring with me Thoreau's Walden and read a few passages that fill my spirit even more than the woods and mountains do. Next time you're going to Bora Bora or Baltimore, Wichita or Wales, bring a book along with you set in that locale. It'll make your trip that much more memorable.

As a brief side note, World Hum offers the 10 Greatest Fictional Travelers that includes Huck Finn and the pilgrims from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.

T.S. Eliot and Portishead

T.S. Eliot reads "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" with accompaniment by English trip hop group Portishead. Enjoy. Also, for a further Prufrock kick, go here for an animated version.

The Continual Reinvention of Crime Fiction

BBC News has an interesting story about the evolution of crime fiction, from Edgar Allan Poe's first foray into crime fiction in 1841 ("The Murders in the Rue Morgue") to Arthur Conan Doyle's famed Sherlock Homes series to Patricia Cornwall. The newest evolution? Agatha Christie stories told via comic books.

25% Of Us Don't Read Books

In USA Today there's an overview of a study that's been done that highlights rather grim statistics about book reading. That is, a lot of us aren't reading books. One in four adults say they read no books at all in the past year.

Some other factoids revealed in the news story...
When the Gallup poll asked in 2005 how many books people had at least started — a similar but not directly comparable question — the typical answer was five. That was down from 10 in 1999, but close to the 1990 response of six.

In 2004, a National Endowment for the Arts report titled "Reading at Risk" found only 57% of American adults had read a book in 2002, a four percentage point drop in a decade. The study faulted television, movies and the Internet.

Damn internet.

Though we don't read books that much, we sure dream of writing them. According to a poll amongst Britons (story in Guardian Unlimited), their number one dream job is to be a writer.

Ever Want To Watch a Movie about a Sans-Serif Typeface?

Me either. That doesn't mean Helvetica: The Movie doesn't sound like a rather interesting DVD to check out.

And, if you're interesting in a Helvetica quick fix of facts, history and info, look here.

Bill Bryson on William Shakespeare

It's not as though we need another book on the life and times of William Shakespeare. Put Shakespeare as a keyword on the Barnes & Noble website and it brings back some 12,353 books. There are books on the mystery of who really authored the plays, books on his love life, books that are biographical from cradle to grave, books about the times in which he lived, books, books, books.

Add to that a new book, William Shakespeare: The World As Stage, part of Harper Collins' Eminent Lives Series written by one of my favorite authors Bill Bryson. If you haven't read Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything and The Mother Tongue (my favorite very accessible book to the English language and its history) I recommend you do so. Bryson throws his literate hat into the ring trying to illuminate the shadowy life of Shakespeare and establish the real facts of his life.

The U.K.'s Times Online has an excerpt.

Quote of the Week

Life-transforming ideas have always come to me through books.
- Bell Hooks

Self-Published Gay Love Story or Oprah Book Club Choice?

Both! Want an interesting story (care of the Weekly Dig)? How's this? A guy in Provincetown self-publishes through iUniverse a novella entitled Crossed Paths. Set in 1976, it's a gay love story. Sales aren't going well. The guy decides to tell the world that Oprah chose the book for her famed book club. A lie. The lie gets more interesting. He states that he went on Oprah's show in May to talk about the book and then fabricated a five page transcript of the "show". For instance...

Oprah: Bill, I must tell you that I immediately fell in love with this book when I first read it.

Schneider: Thank you. Thanks very much.

Oprah: Crossed Paths is truly a gem of story. Tell me how you came to write this very poignant book ...

Oprah: I was very impressed with how well you developed the characters in Crossed Paths.

Schneider: Thanks.

Oprah's team isn't pleased, as you might imagine, particularly after getting burned with the whole James Frey fiasco.

Arthur Miller's Missing Act

The playwright Arthur Miller had a life that seemed well-filled. He wrote The Crucible, Death of a Salesman, A View from the Bridge. He was married to Marilyn Monroe. He won the Pulitzer Prize. He bravely refused to give evidence to the House Un-American Activities Committee. He was a social activist. Full indeed. However, his life wasn't as full as it could have been in that he deleted his Down-syndrome child from his life. The disturbing story is in Vanity Fair.

Mysterious Poe Toaster Revealed

Who is the Poe Toaster? The tradition began in 1949 when, on Edgar Allan Poe's birthday, a mysterious black-clad figure came to Poe's grave, leaving three red roses and a half bottle of cognac. It's occurred every year since. Now, according to this report on CNN, the mysterious man was 92-year-old Sam Porpora. Will the tradition continue this next year? And what happens when Porpora passes on? Will another step in with the roses and cognac?