Assorted stuff that may or may not be of interest:

* Jon Anderson covered the Bellow memorial service in yesterday’s Trib. “[Mayor Daley] recalled, with a chuckle, that Bellow had accompanied him on the campaign trail, once regaling an audience with 40 minutes of amusing tales of the city he loved. To get a chance to talk, Daley said, ‘I had to remind him that it was, well, my campaign.’”

* The Sept 28 TLS reports on six prizes for literary translation into English. Among the winners are John Berger and Lisa Appignanesi for their translation of The Year is ‘42 by Nella Bielski.

* And oh yes — TLS editor Peter Stothard has launched a blog (via Literary Saloon).

* Sebastian Barry may well win the Booker Prize this year for A Long Long Way (he’s on the shortlist), but we won’t know until after his appearance at the Chicago Humanities Fest on November 5.

* Speaking of the Humanities Fest, here are two profiles of literary figures appearing at the fest who deserve to be better known: Naomi Shihab Nye, and Lawrence Joseph.

* One thing I learned from the “multi-volume challenge” is the disheartening though not entirely unexpected fact that girls read (more) girls, and boys read (more) boys.

* I haven’t mentioned Niffenegger’s new book because everyone else is. But here’s a piece from the Sun-Times.

By the way, no word yet from Zadie. I know she’s busy.

Share on Facebook

Chicagoans: Urrea. Selin Davis. Gann. Our man Monson. I think you know where you want to be at 7:30 tonight. Hey, you could even go first to the Newberry at 6:00 to see Ozick. Isn’t that crazy?

Nowhere in the world outside Milwaukee could the mind glut itself on so much buckshee literary truck, as Flann might say. (Buckshee = free. Try to keep up.)

Of course, if you’re in Oak Park and want to go to Barbara’s to see Other Voices Press author Tod Goldberg read with Pam Houston, who could blame you? Not me.

Share on Facebook

Raymond Federman, whom the Forward recently called “an almost unknown genius … an heir to Samuel Beckett … and a writer whose entertainment quotient is all out of proportion with the supposed difficulty of his endeavor,” blogs about “the books that made me.” I liked the bit about Sam B:

But one day Godot entered into my life. Beckett replaced Diderot in my dissertation. The evening when Godot entered into my vocabulary, I told myself, one day I’ll write a book about Thomas Beckett. Yes, that’s what I wrote in my little black notebook after I saw Waiting for Godot. It was in New York. I told Beckett about what I had written, and he said to me, Raymond you cannot imagine how many times I’ve been called Thomas.

Federman has a new memoir, My Body in Nine Parts, and is making a rare appearance in Chicago this Friday at a colloquium at UIC.

(I learned of Federman through Dan at The Reading Experience.)

Share on Facebook

For some reason, Zadie Smith can come to Milwaukee, but she can’t come to Chicago.

Look, if it’s a transportation issue, I’ll go get her myself.

Share on Facebook

Mentioning Hitchens reminded me of his appearance in Chicago last spring at Left of Center Bookstore. The post-event dinner was memorably described by Brian Nemtusak in the Chicago Reader (not online):

“So, do you know who Camille Paglia is?” Hitchens looked exhausted; his chair seemed to have scootched another six inches to the right. But he dove in gamely, with more patience, warmth, and wit than you’d expect from the belligerent caricature his recent columns for Slate and Vanity Fair might suggest he’s become. Every writer has to deal with a disconnect between a whole living breathing idea and what ends up on the page, and for all his skills as a prose stylist, Hitchens’s cheery enthusiasm for argument comes off way better in person. So, by the same token, does the actorly way he plays his shtick to the hilt—down to the smoking, drinking, and occasional bawdy remark. Several drinks and topics later, [Danny] Postel strolled back to check on his charge, most of the well-wishers from the main room having departed. “Christopher,” he chirped, brandishing a fresh carafe of wine. “I’ve come to lubricate you!” “Darling,” said Hitchens with a throaty sigh. “I thought you’d never ask.”

See also Joeff Davis’s photographs of the event, which I cited earlier.

Share on Facebook

Christopher Hitchens was apparently able to shake George Galloway off his pant leg for long enough to attend last week’s “Celebration of the Life and Works of Saul Bellow” at the 92nd Street Y in New York. He wrote about it in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal (subscribers only):

I absolutely do not remember Ian McEwan putting on a tie in all the decades I have known him, but there he was as a suited and respectable master of the farewell rite, saying that he had taken the risk of opening his fantastically successful novel, “Saturday,” with an excerpt from Bellow’s “Herzog.” The risk, as he modestly but sincerely said, was that his own prose would suffer by comparison. Martin Amis described the awe he felt at his first meeting with “Saul” — an awe inspired by the uncommon experience of finding that someone is just as good as you dared to hope they might be. James Wood, whose criticism is normally mordant and unsparing, spoke with great diffidence of the honor he felt at co-teaching a class with Bellow at Harvard. Part of this is a respect, perhaps more easily glimpsed by outsiders, for the huge immigrant and American Dream triumph that was announced when Augie March opened his narrative with the blunt claim of right: “I am an American, Chicago born.”

Part of it, too, is a respect for a more English quality of irony and understatement: Bellow coined a silken and deadly phrase that all his fans repeat at every meeting (”The Good Intentions Paving Company”) and was fond of telling how seldom anyone, even on the streets of Chicago, knew exactly who he was, even after he had become a Nobel Laureate. And part of it is the way that, even as he could write with such fluency in American demotic speech, he always had the classical literary tradition at his fingerprints.

Lest you think Chicago can’t memorialize its own, there’s a similar event this afternoon at 4 pm down at the University of Chicago’s Rockefeller Chapel. The roster doesn’t feature the same high-powered literary talent — speakers include Mayor Daley, Bellow’s son Greg, Jeffrey Eugenides, Richard Stern and some of Bellow’s other pals — but there’s a religious service and a musical performance by personnel from the Lyric Opera, so you know Bellow would appreciate the effort to class things up a bit. More details here; it’s open to the public.

Share on Facebook

Amusing item from the NB column in the September 9 Times Literary Supplement (not online):

The TLS reviewer of Evelyn Waugh’s first book, a study of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1928), referred to the author throughout as “Miss Waugh”. The lady’s literary style was “dainty”. Waugh wrote to complain that assuming “Evelyn” to be exclusively feminine was an error often committed by “people of limited social experience”.

Share on Facebook

People used to say to me, look, don’t be mesmerized by the facts. Facts are only facts. But of course, artists love facts. It makes it feel real, that this is the real world.

Now online, part three of Mark Sarvas’s mesmerizing interview with John Banville.

Share on Facebook

A few observations of a technical nature:

* Blogpulse. Finally, an effective replacement for the balky Technorati.

* NewGator Online: pretty nice. I like how you can see inbound links to individual posts. However, it doesn’t (as Bloglines does) show you how many subscribers a given blog has. So: not switching yet.

* Ever since Google launched its blog search, you can no longer use the search bar at the top of my blog to search only my blog. All searches search all blogs, no matter which button you click. And why can’t you omit a specific blog in an advanced Google blog search? Rather mediocre genuises, I’d say. [I now notice the problem with the search bar is partially fixed—it now does search just my blog—though the search results are pitifully incomplete.]

Share on Facebook

* The LitBlog Co-Op web site has been cooking over the past week, with discussions on all five of the titles nominated for the quarterly Read This! event. Today begins a week-long dialogue on the autumn selection, Steve Stern’s The Angel of Forgetfulness, and will feature an appearance by Paul Slovak, the book’s editor, towards the end of the week. I’m on the nominating committee for the winter selection, so I’m busy reading away.

* The Tribune and the Sun-Times faced off this weekend, with competing reviews of Nuala O’Faolain’s The Story of Chicago May. The Trib won, but it had the unfair advantage of Rosellen Brown.

* The Trib also reported on the uncertain fate of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s boyhood home.

* The Trib also reviews Steven G. Kellman’s Henry Roth bio. Donald Weber does the honors.

* Several bloggers have taken up the “multi-volume challenge” I apparently kicked off last week. Kind of cool to see other people’s book collections.

Share on Facebook