Wednesday Whatsits

The semifinals of the Tournament of Books has begun. First up, 2666 vs. City of Refuge. Second up, A Mercy vs. Shadow Country. After that comes the zombies.

Philosophy is cool again.

Matthew Cheney discusses the links between Philip K. Dick and poet Jack Spicer at Strange Horizons. Included: a brief scene of strong sexual content, "Beatrice/Shimmering in infinite space," and an imagined goodbye.

The first volume of Samuel Beckett's letters discussed by Nicholas Lezard at the Guardian and Anthony Lane at the New Yorker.

Over at a mysterious place called The Stranger, there's a write-up of a showdown "to determine, once and for all, which popular young-adult fantasy series--Harry Potter or Twilight--is the best." The showdown consisted of a debate between two teams of three girls apiece. The whole thing reminds me of another great battle, that of David and Goliath, except in this case David is a "stereotypically weak girl" with "low self-esteem" and Goliath is an orphan with a chip on his shoulder and a lightning bolt on his forehead. Also, in this case, Goliath wins. [via Omnivoracious]

And in MacArthur Park, tamales and books have joined forces to survive in the face of economic woefulness.

In Between Times

Hello, readers. I planned on posting a thing about the present future of internet fiction and poetry. A sort of round-up of the online world as pertains to literariness. As perhaps should have been suspected, this post seems to be ever-expanding, very much like our universe, except that so far I've avoided any major cosmic accidents. If all goes well, we will avoid the inevitable collapse, though, and the post will eventually exist in an actual way.

Here's things to bide your time with:

Maud Newton judging 2666 vs A Partisan's Daughter. She calls Bolano's work a "brilliant, far-ranging, occasionally trying, meditation on art, life, and the relationship between the two." For Mr. Bernières, she says, "The story is lean, the prose straightforward, the unreliability of the lust object’s narrative almost, but not wholly, plausible." I'll leave the verdict a surprise.

Still more prizes for Joe Hill's ever-expanding Love Your Indie Contest. Originally, it seemed we would all be winners in the sense that we would be supporting local and independently owned bookstores. Now it seems we might all be winners in that the number of prizes is asymptotically approaching the number of entrants.

In case you missed it: Peter S. Beagle has a new book out, a collection of stories called, We Never Talk About My Brother.

Also, in case you missed it: People died this week. At least two of them writers. James Purdy and Millard Kaufman.

Happy Thursdsay, readers.

ttfn.

Tuesday Things

Thing One: The first round of the Tournament of Books, as mentioned here, begins on March 9th. First round highlight: Shadow Country vs. The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks judged by Anthony Doerr. Every battle has it's own judge. Later judges include John Hodgman and last year's winner, Juno Diaz. Bets can be placed here, and for a good cause, too.

Thing Two: Monday was Dr. Seuss's birthday. Him being the man what introduced us all to those indelibly and abstractly named creatures of chaos, Thing One and Thing Two. His books have influenced a lot of people but had very little affect on me.

Thing Three: Kevin Brockmeier on things he loved to read growing up.

More than anything else, I read comic books. And I read a lot of them. And I spent almost all of my allowance money on them. I’m talking just the superhero stuff, the typical Marvel and DC comics. If you’re talking about text, rather than text and picture, my favorite writer when I was a kid was Daniel Pinkwater. He’s still one of my favorites today. He wrote a book called Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars, that I fell in love with when I was about ten years old, and then any number of other great books as well: Lizard Music, The Hoboken Chicken Emergency, basically these funny little fantasies involving average kids in very strange situations. I loved the Choose Your Own Adventure series when I was a kid, too. I’ve got a story in tribute to those books in my latest collection. And then I grew up in the era of Judy Blume and Beverly Cleary and writers like that. All of my classmates were reading them and I was reading them too. But on my own, aside from comic books, I gravitated to the children’s fiction that had elements of science fiction and fantasy to it, and then, when I got a little bit older, to actual science fiction and fantasy.


Tune in tomorrow, readers, for additional things, including more from Kevin Brockmeier on his favorite authors, the mysterious garden in his backyard, and/or the apocalypse.

ttfn.