Archive for the ‘Books’ Category
Nerd Journal: Zork, Gischler, Greene
faked by Professor Fury Monday, July 12th, 2010Happy Vampire A Go-Go Day!
faked by Professor Fury Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009Yes, I realize it’s not an official holiday yet. But it will be. And don’t you want to be able to say you were ringing in the season back before it got all commercialized, back when people remembered the real reason for Vampire A Go-Go Day? That is, celebrating the release of PrettyFavorite Victor Gischler’s new novel Vampire A Go-Go, which you can read more about here and which you can purchase here or at your local seller of quality books about, among other things, “gun-toting Jesuit priests”?
Local folk: All the Baton Rougeans of good taste and discerning judgment will be at the Citiplace Barnes and Noble on Thursday night at 7:00 for a reading, signing, and exorcism by Gischler. FIRST TWO ROWS WILL GET WET.
Don Harington Alert
faked by Jack Butler Monday, June 1st, 2009Don Harington, the great novelist, is in the hospital with pneumonia and a broken hip. If you’ve read his novels and admired them (and I frankly do not see how you could read them and not admire them), you might wish to send him a note at kimharington at sbcglobal.net. Kim is his wife and will deliver the messages. If you don’t know what to say, put yourself in his place: You suffer from diabetes, in the last ten years you’ve had throat cancer, a broken ankle from a disastrous auto accident, a broken hip, pneumonia twice, you can’t eat or drink (because of the throat surgery), but have to take glucerna several times a day, and although you are one of the most brilliant and beautiful writers this country has ever had, all your life you have been routinely neglected in favor of fakes, frauds, wannabes, also-rans, incompetents, and suck-ups.
Not that you have to address all of that. Hell, one line will do. Just tell the man what his writing means to you. Just say something, anything.
This culture is so obsessed with the new that we neglect the true achievers. Harington’s not just some factory process to produce stories. He’s a human, and right now a human in pretty serious trouble. He could use a bit of encouragement.
PULP BOY: Emerson LaSalle Gets What He Deserves
faked by Professor Fury Wednesday, February 25th, 2009This is the news and it is good: As reported on EmersonLasalle.com, the good people at Explosive Entertainment Motion Pictures will be producing the stranger-than-fiction Emerson LaSalle biopic PULP BOY, from a screenplay by Victor Gischler and Anthony Neil Smith.
Victor Gischler offers more details about the development of the screenplay here, and Anthony Neil Smith provides his take here. Other links of interest:
The official PULP BOY web site.
Emerson LaSalle on Wikipedia.
In Last My Heart is Murder: The Emerson LaSalle Blog
Emerson LaSalle on Pretty Fakes:
Modem Mama
Never Again, Forever
“Remembering Emerson LaSalle, Novelist”
Let’s just breathe it in: Emerson LaSalle biopic. EMERSON LASALLE BIOPIC. Okay, I stopped breathing it in and started huffing it there at the end. So pure. So sweet. So mucous-membrane dissolving.
Review: Teenagers from the Future: It’s a Klordny Fest!
faked by gorjus Monday, February 23rd, 200952.2k9.
faked by gorjus Tuesday, February 10th, 2009Let’s take another shot at trying to get culturfied. I’m telling myself I’m going to read a book a week—and try to regain my love of cinema at the same time. We’re going to have to shoehorn in my twin loves of comics and video games somewhere in there. These are all current as of today, and officially started January 1.
Shall we begin?
The Infinite Library: Choctaw Books (Jackson, Miss.).
faked by gorjus Monday, February 2nd, 2009Hearing blank verse in all the wrong places
faked by Jack Butler Monday, January 12th, 2009Shakespeare has an overwhelming affect on some of us. I remember my youthful frustration that one could no longer write Shakespearean blank verse and be taken seriously. (A fact I discovered in the trial, by the way.) But some of us can’t give up that easily.
Bayer aspirin, W. B. Yeats, and native Americans with toothaches
faked by Jack Butler Monday, January 12th, 2009“Only connect,” writes James Dickey in a poem about a powerline worker. I make a few small connections from time to time, and they always give me pleasure. Not much to do with them otherwise but report them, so here goes.
Here’s one: We have all frequently heard the phrase “common sense,” usually together with the popular remark, on the verge of cliche itself, that it isn’t really common at all. I suspect there is a confusion here between two senses of the word “common.” In the modern sense, we mean “to be found anywhere.” I suspect the phrase originally meant “common” in quite another way. The older meaning is “basic, fundamental.” In other words, if you had even the elements of the most basic rules of making sense, you had common sense. The implication is that it does not require a genius of logic or philosophy to tell what is what, but that even “common” or basic sense will suffice.