Still rereading and thinking about Pereira Declares, I came across an interview with Tabucchi by Asbel Lopez, from the Unesco Courier, November 1999:

This book [The Lost Head of Damasceno Monteiro] continues your debate with the Italian semiologist and writer Umberto Eco. What’s the root of your disagreement with him?

Eco sees the intellectual as an organizer of culture, someone who can run a magazine or a museum. An administrator, in fact. I think this is a melancholy situation for an intellectual. I claim the right to take a stand once in a while. When something strange happens in the world or in your home, you have to look into it to see if you can pin it down, work it out, talk about it and sound the alarm: “Look out! This is happening in my home, in my town, in the world, which is also my home.” On the other hand, an intellectual would be totally witless if he said: “Something terrible is happening in my home but I can’t get interested in it because I’m putting together a catalogue for an exhibition of paintings in my local museum.”

Charles Baxter is in Chicago today for a Heartland Literary Society luncheon. Last week, Marta Salij profiled Baxter in the The Detroit Free Press.

(I’m not sure what “anti-protagonistic” means, but I love it when books push readers and readers push back.)

“Saul and Patsy” happens to be the April pick of the Free Press/Magic 105.1 Book Club. It’s also this year’s pick of the “Everyone’s Reading” community program, sponsored by seven Oakland and Wayne libraries. Baxter will be reading at the Bloomfield Township and Rochester Hills libraries Thursday and Friday as part of Everyone’s Reading.

“Saul and Patsy” is also the Book Club novel that has inspired the most “huhs?” from readers in the year and a half since we started the reading group. Some people thought it was brilliant and thought-provoking, but others wondered whether the book was a satire of dysfunctional families. Some wondered whether it was a tragedy. Others thought the characters were just unlikable.

“Perhaps I am sadly missing the point and this is just one of many infamous ‘anti-protagonistic’ tomes that defies explanation,” wrote David Berge.

Until I read Ron Hogan’s post this morning, I had no idea that novelist Kenneth Fearing also wrote poetry. Ron gives a good account of the Library of America American Poets Project reading in New York last week.

Gazing once again into that Narcissian pool known as Site Meter, I note the continuing popularity of my 2002 Literary Tour of the Art Institute (compressed).

To be honest, I think some art class is probably studying Joseph Wicar’s Virgil Reading the Aeneid to Augustus, Octavia, and Livia, and Google is sending them my way.

By the way, I’m still looking to expand my list of literary-themed pieces in the Institute’s collection, so send any suggestions my way and I’ll post a revised tour.

Courtesy of Kevan Davis, The Diary of a Nobody, which I mentioned a couple months back, is getting the weblog treatment — la Pepys Diary (via Blog.org). Today’s entry:

At the office, the new and very young clerk Pitt, who was very impudent to me a week or so ago, was late again. I told him it would be my duty to inform Mr. Perkupp, the principal. To my surprise, Pitt apologised most humbly and in a most gentlemanly fashion. I was unfeignedly pleased to notice this improvement in his manner towards me, and told him I would look over his unpunctuality. Passing down the room an hour later. I received a smart smack in the face from a rolled-up ball of hard foolscap. I turned round sharply, but all the clerks were apparently riveted to their work. I am not a rich man, but I would give half-a-sovereign to know whether that was thrown by accident or design.

From V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas, in honor of Pete’s new place:

He was struck again and again by the wonder of being in his own house, the audacity of it: to walk in through his own front gate, to bar entry to whoever he wished, to close his doors and windows every night, to hear no noises except those of his own family, to wander freely from room to room and about his yard . . . in his own house, his own half-lot of land, his own portion of the earth. That he should be responsible for this seemed to him, in these last months, stupendous.