Well! It’s been quiet around the shop here the last few days. I’m suffocating under a pile of grading and other such end-of-semester work, and Gorjus was briefly hospitalized for an overdose of awesomeness. And also for rickets.
A few notables: Fans of Jack Butler, of whom I know there are many out there: You can satisfy your JB jones, albeit briefly, in the latest issue of the Oxford American, which includes Butler’s tribute to his good friend Don Harington, the first recipient of the Oxford American Lifetime Award for Contributions to Southern Literature. In fact, the OA has generously made Butler’s piece available online, along with encomiums by Molly Giles, Miller Williams, and Kevin Brockmeier. (And by the way, if you haven’t read Brockmeier’s The Truth About Celia—sweet, creepy, and heartbreaking by turns and sometimes all at once—you really should.) Really, though, you should plunk down some money for the print verison, because there’s also a story by Brockmeier, an essay on noir by Barry Hannah, and an essay by Chris Bachelder, whose U.S.! delighted me so much this summer that I’ve added it to my American lit syllabus in the spring just to give myself a good excuse to read it again. If Gorjus had turned me on to The Folk Yous back when I first read it, I would surely have linked to their cover of “Don’t Stop Believing” when I quoted that paragraph about the folksinger deploying a Journey cover as part of his earnest effort to give the proletariat a good night out.
Watch this space for more Jack Butler news in the very, very near future. In the meantime, I’m going to dig my way out of this pile, and Gorjus is going to see if he can find someone to throw an air conditioner through a window so he can make good his escape from the hospital (the hospital that he is in no way actually in, I stress). Soon, though, we’ll be chillaxing—is that how the kids say it?—like the master, Mr. William Faulkner himself:
Good to see get a brief report. Will be glad to hear more of your Jack Butler tales soon, when you can stay more are ready to chillax, like the master, even if there is some debate about that nomenclature.
PRETTYFAKES: FOR ALL YR FAULKNER UPSKIRT NEEDS SINCE MAY 2004
i really need to start smoking a pipe and stop wearing pants.
hey, thanks for encomium! much better than blurb!
oh, and fury, otherjay sent me a galley of Love is a Mix Tape to read. I highly reommend it to you as a fan of both pop music and the belief in love. Hell, I recommend it to everyone. Otherjay says it is by far the best book his imprint has ever released.
sorry for the thredjack.
That does indeed look interesting, Diplo—thanks for the recommendation.
I spent a lot of time trying to choose between “encomiums” and “encomia.” Both are right, but I finally decided that latter sounded pretentious. History will be the judge.
PRETTYFAKES: FOR ALL YR TOPLESS FAULKNER NEEDS SINCE MAY 2004
girj is just looking to draw in the twisted hordes who spend countless hours googling “nobel laureate upskirt”