PUBLISHED: May 1, 2008
1) Judging from his profile of Augusten Burroughs, New York Magazine’s Sam Anderson has a second career as a private investigator.
For all I know, [Burroughs has] just memorized a couple of trivial details in order to unleash them on me at exactly this kind of strategic moment.
Now that he’s being brazen, I decide to test him: What else does he remember?
2) The Virginia Law Women sell t-shirts that read, “Be the lawyer your mother always wanted you to marry.” Perhaps VQR needs some that read, “Be the tortured/starving/anemically-published artist your mother never wanted you to marry.” You can undergo years of therapy, or just buy an empowering t-shirt.
3) Porn for the Blind - “Porn for the Blind is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to producing audio descriptions of sample movie clips from adult web sites. This service is provided free of charge.”
4) Fake authors scam bookstores for cash. What a compelling story. I predict that these fake authors will soon have real book deals.
“Berman speculated that this gang has several members – one black man, one English guy, one woman – to make impersonation easier. “It’s like the Mod Squad or something.”
Vroman’s has hung up on someone claiming to be Ray Bradbury and, in late February, Ramos said, Russell Banks.
5) Cornelia Hesse-Honegger paints bugs mutated by radiation. See her artistic renditions of tree bugs from Chernobyl and harlequin bugs from Three Mile Island.
6) There are more bad writers than good readers. Someone should write a book about this.
“American literature has never been deeper and stronger and more various than it is now,” [Mark McGurl, associate professor of English at UCLA] said in an e-mail message. Still, he added, “one could put that more pessimistically: given the manifold distractions of modern life, we now have more great writers working in the United States than anyone has the time or inclination to read.”
7) Radar puts a chic-lit cover on the Bible.
8) Scientific American calls for “more novels about real scientists.”
A good work of fiction can convey the smells of a laboratory, the colors of a dissected heart, the anxieties of a chemist and the joys of an astronomer—all the illuminating particulars that you won’t find in a peer-reviewed article in Science or Nature.
