Wednesday, August 15, 2007

Brainiac grab-bag

Sorry to post such a long Brainiac entry, but I am on the road with limited Internet access from now till the end of the month. I had most of these items circling the runway already, and I decided to land them all at once. Keep reading -- there's a caption contest at the end.

You may not hear from me again until I return to Boston. Enjoy the rest of August!

* Last week, ex-Ideas columnist James Parker published a truly amazing essay on what he calls the "Ubu Ghraib" phenomenon, in the pages of the Boston Phoenix, where he is now a staff writer. Excerpt: "'Ubu Roi,' the play, has dated. Read today, it has the rude and jittery eccentricity of a vintage stag film. But Ubu himself is more with us than ever. The Abu Ghraib photos, with their obscene raptures, their drunken, sadistic pride, and above all their demented aesthetic sense, are a gallery of Ubu-isms."

* Also, you may have heard that postpunk impresario Tony Wilson died last Friday. Who was he? Now is the time to read Parker's 2002 review of "24 Hour Party People" in The American Prospect.

* I've written about Douglas Rushkoff's Torah-meets-21st-century comic book "Testament" once or twice before. Rushkoff recently announced that the series will end in the near future.

* I've also mentioned that Chad Post, formerly of the Dalkey Archive Press, was assisting in the creation of a literary translation program at the University of Rochester and starting a new literary imprint dedicated to publishing translations. Post now reports that Three Percent, a University of Rochester website dedicated to international literature, is now up and running. (The name refers to the percentage of works in translation published in the US annually.) Meanwhile, the U of R's new publishing house, Open Letter, will be doing 12 works of international lit a year, says Post, with the first title (Dubravka Ugresic's "Nobody's Home") coming out in the fall of 2008.

* I see that my friend Alex Beam finally has a new photo on his Globe columnist page, one snapped at some point after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In his error-riddled column today, Beam (who in addition to racquetball squash and kayaking sculling, is an aficionado of soccer football) claims that "the road to international soccer glory runs through EBA, Everywhere But America." As with most Beam columns, he's a decade behind yours truly. I joke, as Don Rickles says, because I love. (Another thing that I love is Beam's hatemail podcast; as Beam hoped, the very existence of this podcast has caused him to receive even more hatemail than he used to. July's podcast features the voice talents of Boston.com editor David Beard and Sidekick staff writer Meredith Goldstein. Strong language.)

* The great humorist David Rees, whose "Get Your War On" comic strip punctured one White House bubble after another during the American military action in Afghanistan, penned a brilliant response, in the Huffington Post, last week, to liberal hawk Michael Ignatieff's NYT Magazine Iraq apologia (login required). Rees's post is a must-read, for lines like this: "In conclusion, this part of Ignatieff's essay should have been called 'All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten-- But It Didn't Actually Sink in Until Thousands and Thousands of Iraqis Went to Heaven.'" (Thanks, Scott.) NB: Two summers ago, Ignatieff was the subject of an Ideas story, when he left Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy in order to seek political office in his native Canada.

* Keith Gessen of the journal n+1 (he has also written for Ideas) writes to recommend fellow n+1 editor Marco Roth's continuing series of memoirs at Nextbook.org. "They're really quite remarkable," he says. Here they are: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4. | Bonus.

* Speaking of n+1, painter Dushko Petrovich, who writes about art both for that journal and Ideas, is co-editor of a new, twice-yearly journal of art. Called Paper Monument, it launches next month. Petrovich, who spent the past year as the Starr Fellow at the Royal Academy in London, also tells me that he's been given a two-year position at Boston University as Resident Fellow, and will return to this city shortly. That's good news for Boston!

* Philip K. Dick, a writer and thinker about whom I've written many times, both for the Globe and elsewhere, is back in the news because of the Library of America's new edition of four of his '60s novels. (I was pleasantly surprised to discover that most of Adam Gopnik's New Yorker essay about Dick was unobjectionable, maybe even good.) Even if you already know Dick's work well, you may be excited to hear that Erik Davis, author of the endlessly rewarding books "Techgnosis" and "The Visionary State: A Journey through California's Spiritual Landscape," will shortly be teaching an online course on PKD. Davis, who is working on a PKD book now, consulted on the script for Richard Linklater's "A Scanner Darkly."

* Sometime Ideas contributor Mark Oppenheimer, who is based in New Haven, wanted to let Brainiac/Ideas readers know that he and some friends are launching an annual book review, the New Haven Review of Books. Also, Oppenheimer notes that he's co-producing a cultural-academic-political-artistic podcast series called Castaway. Here's the first installment.

* I still haven't been to Lowell to see Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" manuscript, but I think I'll go up there on September 5, to see the marathon (10 am - 10 pm) reading at Olive That & More, on Market Street. Having perused the list of readers, I'm aiming to get there between 6 pm, when someone identified only as "Chantal, Kerouac fan" will read, and 8 pm, when the talented and funny Boston poet Charles Coe takes the stage. For sure, I'll be there at 7 pm to cheer on UMass Lowell's Robert Forrant, a gentleman and a scholar. For more information on the Lowell reading schedule, visit ontheroadinlowell.org or call 978-446-7162. (PS: Watch the New York Times, this Sunday, for an essay by Luc Sante about how the manuscript of "On the Road" compares to the published version.)

* You don't care about this, but it's exciting to me. I learned today that the official publication date of my forthcoming book, "Taking Things Seriously," is September 5.

* Forget City Weekly's caption contest. Here's Brainiac's: I spotted this guy (below) in Copley Square yesterday. He's wearing a Boston Globe jacket but hawking free copies of the Boston Herald. Captions, please.

Posted by Joshua Glenn at 02:46 PM

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