The Bibliothecary

Check out Art Blog by Bob for "The Most Arrogant Contest in Blogging."  Bob's giving away a beautiful new art book:

“I am the most arrogant man in France,” Gustave Courbet once bragged, doing his best to live up to that reputation through the boldness of his art and personality. Thanks to the generosity of the awesome people at Abbeville Press, Art Blog By Bob hosts the first Art Contest By Bob in which a copy of Ségolène Le Men’s Courbet will be given to one lucky reader.

More details here.

The second Noir at the Bar at the Tritone in Philly will be this Sunday night, July 6 at 6PM.  Jonathan McGoran who writes under the name DH Dublin will be reading from his books and I'll do a Q&A with him afterwards.  Last month's Noir at the Bar with Swierczynski was a great event.  This one should be excellent, as well.  More info from the host of the events: Pete Rozovsky's Detectives Beyond Borders.

Hope to see you there.

John Lahr's review in the New Yorker of NY's Public Theatre production of Hamlet gives away the surprise ending in the very first paragraph.  This would piss me off if I were going to see the show.  Alas, Philadelphia is a provincial town when it comes to Shakespeare (a few worth seeing, but no "big" productions and very limited selections) and a trip to NYC is tough to do when you have young children.  So I'm interested to read about the details of a production that I won't get to see. 

This review also interests me because, in his criticism, Lahr infers how Hamlet should be performed (I hope I don't infer how books should be written when I review them):

Shakespeare fulfills the genre’s requirement for violence, but in a new way; irony becomes the antidote to histrionics, enforcing an intellectual detachment that echoes Hamlet’s lecture to the travelling players.

But most of all, I find Lahr's criticisms odd, in that one could read many of his examples and approve of them.  Maybe a listless, non-threatening Ghost adds something interesting to this play.  Maybe a manic rather than melancholic Hamlet is a good choice for this production.  What I'm getting at is Lahr seems to be reviewing this Hamlet not on its own merits, but on the merits of his own ur-Hamlet.  Always a dangerous thing to do when reviewing.

The Kelpius Society is having an event at the Kelpius Site along the Wissahickon Creek tomorrow:

The Kelpius Site, Hermit Lane off Henry Avenue, at Fairmount Park in Philadelphia, Saturday June 21st, 11:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m.  The program will feature guest speakers, and a presentation and demonstration of plans for the commemorative sundial whose design will display not only the ongoing 'movement' of the sun, but the sun's position at the arrival of Johannes Kelpius and his followers in 1694.

Unfortunately, I won't be able to make this event, but I will be going on Sunday for a tour of the Wissahickon.  More info on the Quaker City blog.

Or, where I hope to be (child coverage has not yet been attained) this Saturday, June 21:  Port Richmond Books in Philadelphia for the book release party of Kenneth Milano's Remembering Kensington & Fishtown, Philadelphia's Riverward Neighborhoods, a collection of Milano's history columns from a local community newspaper.  Some very interesting stuff here about William Penn's treaty with the Lenni-Lenape at Shackamaxon, famous people from Kensington like WC Fields and Albert Barnes, and the first US Navy submarine (built at a Kensington shipyard in 1861-2).  There's even a short piece on Edgar Allan Poe writing about the Kensington railroad riots of 1840.  Poe?  Philly?  You betcha. 

As soon as I find out the time of the event, I'll update this post. 

Spent the last night and day reading stories from Gregory Frost's Attack of the Jazz Giants and other stories.  It's a collection of fantastical short fiction, but not of the Tolkienian or SciFi variety.  These stories seem closer to the magical realism kind.  In the afterword, John Kessel likens Frost to Nathanael
"In the Sunken Museum"West's "American Social Surrealism."  Many of the stories are inspired by other art/literary works:  Wilde's Dorian Gray, Carlos Fuentes, Wallace Stevens' poem "Mozart, 1935," Elvis (the King, not Costello).  "In the Sunken Museum" is a phantasmagoric trip through Poe's mind in his last hours of life.  "The Road to Recovery" is Frost's take on a Bing Crosby and Bob Hope Road movie.  Really great stuff here.  I especially liked the title story, a Southern Gothic allegory of race relations that takes it cue from the Granddaddy of all gothic novels, Walpole's Castle of Otranto.  The artwork by Jason Von Hollander is  very cool, too.

Greg will be in Clinton NJ this Fri at the Clinton Bookshop with Jonathan Maberry and Jon McGoran/DH Dublin, both of whom have new books out that I'll be posting about soon. 

In the NYTimes Magazine Gore Vidal gives one of the all-time great curmudgeon interviews:

How did you feel when you heard that Buckley died this year? I thought hell is bound to be a livelier place, as he joins forever those whom he served in life, applauding their prejudices and fanning their hatred.

Read the rest here.  Man, I'd love to hang out and bitch with this guy.  I have a secret desire to be an old curmudgeon one day.

Here's a wonderful discovery: Strange Maps.  I've just lost myself for an hour or so going through the
More's Utopiaentries.  Check out Sherlock Holmes' 221B, Homer's worldview, Charles Joseph Minard's statistical map (of which I have a copy and have always loved) showing the loss of Napoleon's troops in his invasion of Russia, tracking a Wordsworth poem, and my own little kingdom.  I could go on and on here.  A very cool blog. 

Just finished Dorothy B Hughes' In a Lonely Place, a searing trip through a serial killer's mind. Very noir:

“The criminal doesn’t escape,” Dix smiled wryly.

Brub said, “I won’t say that. Although I honestly don’t think he ever does escape. He was to live with himself. He’s caught there in that lonely place. And when he sees he can’t get away—“ Brub shrugged. “Maybe suicide, or the nut house—I don’t know. But I don’t think there’s any escape.”

and a very cool style:

She knew what a man wanted, coffee, now, not later.  He lighted her cigarette, realizing her as he leaned acorss the table.  She was real, not a begging dream in his loneness.  She was a woman.

Sarah Weinman, who spoke about hughes at NoirCon this year, wrote a good review of Feminist Press' reissue of the novel a few years ago.

I may not be checking out Lulu Lollipop on Thursday night, but I will be at Robin's Bookstore on Tuesday night to hear Daniel Hoffman and Elaine Terranova read from the new collection of Elizabeth McFarland's poetry.  McFarland, who died in 2005, was Hoffman's wife and also the poetry editor of the Ladies' Home Journal from 1948-1962.  You wouldn't think it now, but the Journal used to publish poetry from the likes of WH Auden and Marianne Moore.

The McFarland celebration starts at 6PM.  More info here.

You can read Frank Wilson's review of the posthumous collection.