The Elegant Variation

SPIOTTA PODCAST

Everyone's favorite Bat turns the mic on Dana Spiotta, author of Lightning Field and, most recently, Eat the Document.

Katherine Ann Power as inspiration, the ambiguities of terrorism, comparisons and similarities between Eat the Document and Lightning Field, witty political activists, the Billboard Liberation Front, cinematic influences, Don DeLillo, plotting, reader expectations, on stopping just short of September 11th, justifying pop cultural references, food as a Balzacian character indicator, the Beach Boys, literary influences, dialogue, how people talk in restaurants, the rise in contemporary novels dealing with 1960s & 1970s activism, innocence, and unanswered questions for the reader.

WELL, IT SAVES HIM THE TUXEDO RENTAL

Turkmen writer Rahim Esenov has been given an honor by PEN American Center that he'll be unable to collect.

However, Esenov, who is 79, has been unable to leave the country since his arrested in February 2004 for allegedly smuggling 800 copies of his book into Turkmenistan. He was officially charged with "inciting social, national, and religious hatred." All copies of his book in Turkmenistan were burned.

Esenov was later released but his passport was confiscated. He signed a document pledging not the leave the country.

FOUR TRUCKLOADS OF IT

The Murray archive - consisting of 155,00 items - has arrived at its new home in Scotland.

The archive is focused on the 19th century, when the family published the works of many of the greatest figures of the day.

The 155,000 items range from the heavyweight ledgers used to record the business of the firm, to precious letters. Among the most valuable are the Darwin records, including the letter in which he proposed The Origin of Species to his publisher, and the firm's original printed file copy of the work, which is valued at about £100,000.

The Byron material is also enormously valuable and includes the manuscript of Childe Harold and love letters from Lady Caroline Lamb, as well as letters from a mystery love.

TODAY'S DOSE OF TWAIN

We're absolutely second to someone in our devotion to things Twain but we thought we'd pass on these two interesting items ... first, a controversy brewing over a frontier church Mr. Clemens helped build:

Church officials have said that restoring the building would cost as much as $5 million, more than double the cost of building a new one, but the National Trust for Historic Preservation and other groups argue that it would be a mistake to tear down the humble brick church.

Not only is the church a rare link to Nevada's territorial days, preservation proponents say, but it's one of only four remaining buildings associated with Twain in Nevada.

Church officials say that though they appreciate his fundraising, they think that too much is being made of his minor association with the church. Twain was not a member of the congregation, they said, and there's no proof that he ever set foot inside the church during his nearly three-year stay in Nevada.

... and over at Librivox - which specializes in "acoustical liberation of books in the public domain" you can check out an audio version of several chapters of Twain's autobiography.

BLOGROLL UPDATES

Every year or so we get off our lazy asses and update our blogroll.  You wouldn't think it was such a chore but somehow it manages to elude us for months on end.  At any rate, welcome the following sites into the fold - and stop by and check 'em out. 

Books Inq (site of Frank Wilson, Book Review Editor for the Philly Inquirer), CESLIT (Central European and Slavic Literature in Translation), Contemporary Literature, European Reader, Literary Kicks, everyone's favorite Anointer of Nitwits Miss Snark, Peter Stothard (editor of TLS), The Beiderbecke Affair (site of the writer Brendan Wolfe), The Midnight Bell (the return to the blogosphere of Sean Walsh), and Words Without Borders.  All linked at left for your daily viewing convenience.

We also add our one cycling link, 'cause it's our blogroll and we can do whatever we want - go check out the Fat Cyclist.  He'll make you laugh.

If we missed you this round, don't have a cow.  We'll get to you by next year.  Promise.

MORE ON TSOTSI

We recently posted on Athol Fugard's novel Tsotsi, which was the basis for the recent Oscar-winning film of the same name.  Writing for The Mail and Guardian, Andie Miller takes a look at the novel's tortuous path to publication.

Speaking two-and-a-half decades later, from Del Mar near San Diego in Southern California, where Fugard spends part of each year, he points out that credit must go to writer and scholar Stephen Gray for the novel ever seeing the light of day. “I owe him a profound debt of gratitude.”

A long and fascinating tale ensues.  Check it out.

BLOG NOMINATED FOR JOHNSON PRIZE

The blog Baghdad Burning joins the likes of A.N. Wilson and Geoff Dyer on the longlist for the Samuel Johnson Book Prize.

The 18th-century man of letters Samuel Johnson famously remarked that a woman’s preaching was like a dog walking on its hind legs. “It is not done well,” he told James Boswell. “But you are surprised to find it done at all.”

So he would be doubly shocked to learn that a contender for a £30,000 book prize in his name is not only female, but a diarist who publishes her writing on a device known as the internet.

Baghdad Burning is a visceral first-hand account of how the war has destroyed the lives of ordinary Iraqi citizens. The author, a 20-something university graduate who writes under the pseudonym Riverbend, chronicles the “three years of occupation and bloodshed” the city has endured and calls for the withdrawal of US troops.

Apparently it's been published in book form but that's not absolutely necessary per the rules.

Note to the web editors of the Times:  When you run a story about a blog, you'd serve your readers well to include an actual hyperlink to said blog - just like that.  See how easy?  We're not even going to touch the whole internet-is-a-device nightmare ...

L.A. EVENT - SARAH WATERS

Sarah Waters will be signing her new book The Night Watch at Dutton's Brentwood this evening at 7 p.m.

ROOSTER HEATS UP

Make sure you keep your eyes on the bloodshed over at the Tournament of Books.  Last Friday, The Historian went down against Home Land.  You've actually got the opportunity this year to vote on the judges each time, which gives us the cold sweats.  But do check it out, it's good clean family fun.

BANVILLE ON BECKETT

As expected, John Banville lends his voice to the Beckett Centenary with this typically fascinating essay on the influence of painting on Beckett.  (Banville himself tried his hand at painting in his youth.)

Here, as in everything, Beckett was exhaustive. Knowlson suggests that his ability to discern even the most subtle affinities between paintings from different hands and periods indicates that he had a photographic memory. His friend, the painter Avigdor Arikha, said in Knowlson's account that Beckett "could spend as much as an hour in front of a single painting, looking at it with intense concentration, savouring its forms and its colours, reading it, absorbing its minutest detail".

Given such a capacity to concentrate, it is no surprise that he passed much of his time in the great galleries, especially in the early years - he even applied, unsuccessfully, for a job as assistant curator at the National Gallery in London, and when he lived there for nearly two years after the death of his father in 1933 the National was a regular haunt. He was in London to undergo an extended course of therapy with the celebrated psychiatrist WR Bion, and no doubt the tranquillity of the London galleries - besides the National there was the Tate, the V&A, the Wallace Collection and Hampton Court - and the beauty of the pictures were a balm for his deeply troubled soul.

(Thanks to Adrian Marley for the link.)

If you're fortunate enough to be in New York, you can check out Banville this evening at the 92nd Street Y.  (Yes, we almost came out.)