http://advanced.jhu.edu/ft/forum/index.cfm?forumid=1 FuseTalk Enterprise Edition http://advanced.jhu.edu/ft/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=16&threadid=132 2007-02-27T19:23:54 -05.00 Juan Gaddis 1 Bird by Bird will read from her new book Grace (Eventually) on Friday, March 23, 2007 at 7:00 p.m. at the Round House Theatre. The event is ticketed (2 tickets with the purchase of a book or $12.00) and is sponsored by Politics and Prose. Round House is next door to the AFI theater in downtown Silver Spring on Colesville Road. For more details check out Politics & Prose's website at www.politics-prose.com ]]> http://advanced.jhu.edu/ft/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=16&threadid=128 2007-01-31T06:06:11 -05.00 Mary Stojak 1 http://advanced.jhu.edu/ft/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=16&threadid=127 2007-01-29T12:58:52 -05.00 Bob Jones 1 http://advanced.jhu.edu/ft/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=16&threadid=126 2007-01-29T12:45:09 -05.00 Bob Jones 1 Idiot's protagonist, Noel "Satan" Dorobek, believes that wearing tinfoil on your head blocks harmful gamma rays and that there are inner earth societies. He becomes a celebrity because of it. ]]> http://advanced.jhu.edu/ft/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=16&threadid=116 2007-01-03T10:47:05 -05.00 Eddie Jeffrey 12 The Devil's Larder and was pretty blown away. He's got this really compact style that's efficient yet colorful at the same time. I mean colorful in that his descriptions are amazing, but he doesn't run off the page with anything. He's pretty fond of listing things, which gives these layered effects to his descriptions, but his use of language is precise. Unfortunately, I think Larder is out of print. I think you can buy a used/new copy from "other" sellers at Amazon.com, but you can definitely pick up most of his stuff from Enoch Pratt or at the JHU library. Anyway, he's worth looking into.

P.S. Sorry, Victor, haven't gotten around to The Sea quite yet. ]]> http://advanced.jhu.edu/ft/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=16&threadid=108 2006-12-01T20:31:13 -05.00 Victor Valcik 22
Interested to hear any thoughts on The Sea.

Victor

Just received the new Banville detective novel in the mail. It's called Christine Falls by Benjamin Black. After looking through the first chapter, it appears as though he reincarnated the character Quirke from Eclipse. I have a feeling Banville had fun with this one. ]]> http://advanced.jhu.edu/ft/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=16&threadid=87 2006-09-24T21:45:32 -05.00 Juan Gaddis 8
She is going to be at the Smithsonian (actually the Navy Memorial) on Tuesday and at George Mason on Wednesday.

Yours truly is the chair of the 2007 Washington Writers Conference and I have invited her to be our keynote speaker (she's accepted). The conference is June 9 and typically Hopkins is a co-sponsor. ]]> http://advanced.jhu.edu/ft/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=16&threadid=85 2006-09-22T13:46:24 -05.00 Whitney Poole 9
"In an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing and running the risk of flattening all communication onto a single, homogeneous surface, the function of literature is communication between things that are different simply because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of the written language."
-Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium ]]> http://advanced.jhu.edu/ft/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=16&threadid=74 2006-09-06T09:49:38 -05.00 Jerri Bell 3 New Yorker. For the longest time, I didn't like the stories that they were including. When I lived in New York, I had no money; and it seemed like the magazine was aimed at people in some parallel New York, one in which I did not live. So I stopped reading it. But I enjoyed a couple of stories in my brother-in-law's subscription the last time I visited the City, and so I re-subscribed. I found the stories in the last two editions really interesting.

In the 04 September edition, Antonya Nelson's "Kansas" does a lot with allusions to The Wizard of Oz. Poor reader that I am, I didn't "get it" until the last two paragraphs -- the story of how a family in Wichita reacts to a possible kidnapping was so engaging (hit my mother-of-two-small-children button?) that I totally missed everything beyond the basic plot the first time I read it. Now I'm looking for enough time to re-read the story carefully to look for all the other things. I really enjoy good allusions, and the combination of flat, hungover narrative with references to the movie version of The Wizard of Oz tickled me. (It reminded me a little bit of a night on spring break of my junior year when a couple of film-major girlfriends and I put away an entire bottle of Virgin Islands rum, watched The Wizard of Oz, and then cabbed out into the wilds of Poughkeepsie to catch a midnight showing of "Rocky Horror Picture Show." Ah, such were the early 'eighties!....)

And I highly recommend Cate Kennedy's "Black Ice," in the September 11th edition of the magazine. That story was a little more straightforward (I think!) -- but the ending really horrified me. It shouldn't have been the surprise that it was, in retrospect. It's foreshadowed perfectly in the incident with the narrator's father and scalding water. The story seems to raise all sorts of interesting questions about human and animal nature, conservation, and social tension when a neighborhood starts to change. I want to go back and re-read it, too.

Three other items of interest:

1. For those of you who are NOT children's book aficionadoes, this week's New Yorker cover is a take on a famous children's book, Mordecai Gerstein's The Man Who Walked Between the Towers. Seems apt.

2. If anyone plans to be in New York the weekend of 06 October, there's a series of interesting-looking readings in a sort of festival format. The authors include Tobias Wolff, Edwige Dantikat, and Tom Stoppard. Unfortunately, too many good ones are scheduled at the same time -- 7PM on Friday night! And the weekend seems a little light on poetry.

3. Alice McDermott's After This got a decent review (the critic busted her just a little on sentimentality) in the 11 Sep edition, too. And supposedly the book was reviewed in the Sunday Post, but we were busy Sunday with a tree that fell in the front yard & took out the gutter above the bathroom window (that was a close call!), so I didn't pick up the paper. Anyone seen that?

Anyone else read the last two stories, or find anything else interesting in New Yorker? ]]> http://advanced.jhu.edu/ft/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=16&threadid=37 2006-07-22T19:43:48 -05.00 Eddie Jeffrey 4
His book, Eunoia, which is the shortest word in the English language to contain all the vowels (aside from that unreliable double agent 'Y') and means 'beautiful thinking', is comprised of 5 chapters, each dedicated to only 1 vowel. This means that each chapter may only USE 1 vowel. Other limitations the author imposed:


All paragraphs are 12 lines long
Each chapter must address each of the following situations: the act of writing, nautical travel, the act of eating, "a prurient debauch, a pastoral tableau"* and "the text must also exhaust the lexicon for each vowel, citing at least 98 percent of the available repertoire."*


The book, taking Mr. Bok seven years to complete, is 112 pages long and was originally published in 2001. I just heard about it, and will be purchasing a copy ASAP. I was turned on to it by the June 2006 issue of HARPER'S in which they printed the entirety of the chapter 'I'. This is a MUST have for anyone interested in those things we like to call 'words'.

*Source: HARPER'S June 2006 ]]>