23 August 2011
So we’re finishing up Season 2 of “Breaking Bad” here, and it just gets better and better. If you haven’t watched it yet, run don’t walk. I often find myself saying out loud, “Wow.”
In the most recent episode we watched, Season 2 Episode 13, I think I may have “discovered” a literary reference. It seems impossible to discover anything these days, with so many fan sites and discussion boards and most people being much more current than myself (I mean, here I am, still on Season 2, for goodness sake); but after googling several different combinations of words, I was only able to come up with one discussion page (and the thread is so long I couldn’t find what I was looking for). What I googled was “Breaking Bad Elizabeth Bishop.”
A character named Jane falls off the wagon (heroin), and her father enters her bedroom to dig around. There is a photographic portrait on the wall, and the prominence of it gives an impression that the portrait might be Jane’s dead mother. The woman in the portrait looked very familiar, and I soon recognized her as Elizabeth Bishop. Later, after Jane overdoses and the father is asked by the police for Jane’s mother’s maiden name, he says, “Bishop.” Hmm… Perhaps writer and creator Vince Gilligan is an EB fan.
22 August 2011
Some wonderful friends are still out there letting me know when they see Long for This World in fun places.
At the Fairfield, CT Library – “Travel Abroad Through Books” display
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At the Phillips Andover Academy library (it’s been decades since I’ve seen either of these two souls – don’t they look great?!)
16 August 2011
At the Publishers Weekly news blog, seven writers – Clyde Edgerton, Alix Ohlin, Clancy Martin, Jonathan Evison, Sam Lipsyte, Duane Swierczyski, and yours truly – share summer music stories and lists. Mine is all about the year 1983, which I am starting to think was the most significant year of my life.
4 August 2011
At the Hindustan Times, Sanjay Sipahimalani calls The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books “a breath of fresh air” and quotes my essay in the final paragraph of the review.
It’s Sonya Chung, though, who strives to look at the present in just the right manner. The pendulum will swing back one day, she writes, but meanwhile, “…whether you are optimistic or pessimistic, hopeful or dispirited, it is clear that our needs, desires, fears, and values are at stake; and what could be more exciting for literature?” A new age of Modernism could be around the corner, in other words. As that quartet from Athens, Georgia, might well have sung: It’s the end of the book as we know it, and I feel fine.
An R.E.M. comparison?! Definitely a first.
Read the entire review here.