By gum, I'm going to get around to some literary stuff today.
To begin then: Washington Post runs a Jonathan Yardley review of a new biography of Ogden Nash, he among my pantheon of literary heroes. Such a nimble wordsmith. And a hero to those of us who find that our poetic talents lie entirely in the realm of light verse ("At least you think it's funny," Alan Cheuse once said to me ((she said, managing to be self-deprecating while name-dropping all at the same time. Neat trick, huh?)). Well, yes, there's that.) If you've never read Nash, you oughter. He had this particular knack for winding up an impossibly long sentence with a perfectly unlikely rhyme. I have a multi-volume collected set of Nash verse, formerly my father's until I appropriated it, that I now feel the urge to go uncover from whatever box it ended up in following the Dark Days of Hurricane Isabel.
And here I read in Yardley's review that Nash once collaborated on a Broadway musical with S.J. Perelman (another pantheon-dweller). Oh dear me the glory days of linguistic tomfoolery, and I missed 'em.
The Post quotes Nash, and I quote the quote:
"...humor is a shield, a weapon, a survival kit. . . . So here we are several billion of us, crowded into our global concentration camp for the duration. How are we to survive? Solemnity is not the answer, any more than witless and irresponsible frivolity is. I think our best chance lies in humor, which in this case means a wry acceptance of our predicament. We don't have to like it but we can at least recognize its ridiculous aspects, one of which is ourselves." What he said.
British science writer Philip Ball wins the Aventis Prize for science writing for a general audience for his book Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another. According to the BBC, "the book was considered a rank outsider to win by the bookies." Not as much of an outsider as Electric Dreams, which I FedExed across the ocean to contend for the Aventis prize for science writing for high-school readers, inspired by that important scientific principle, "Hey, why not?"
Bookcrossing passes the 2 million mark and wins two Webby awards.
Over at Beatrice, today's guest author is Steve Leveen, founder of Levenger (the catalog for the bookish set. Pens. Blank books. Comfy chairs. The famous lap desk, among the ranks of owners of which I count my own self). Interestingly, Leveen says "until two years ago, I was barely a reader." Huh.
Here in the Hinterlands, we toasted the publication of local author Colleen Curran's arrestingly titled Whores on the Hill at a book-release party at our one of our fave independents, Fountain Bookstore.
Memorable quote of the evening: "I wanted to write a book about teenage sex."
Which leads me, of course, to the bird-feeder report for the morning: 2 cardinals, sir and madaam, the reliable crowd of goldfinches, more of those purplish finchy things and another bird which I tentatively name a warbler on no authority whatsoever. Or possibly a nuthatch. Don't laugh--it's not as if they obligingly stay still long enough for me to thumb through my Peterson's.
And that's it from the Department of Discerning Ornithology.
And almost finally, Elmore Leonard is profiled in the NYTimes. I get the impression from the title of this piece that I'm not the only one given to referring often and repeatedly to Leonard's rules for writing.
Meanwhile, it's a balmy -25.7 C at 75 Degrees South, and I gotta tell you that I had a moment of pure, giddy, "how cool is that?" (metaphorically-speaking, I mean) to get a note back from Simon at the bottom of the Earth.
Now, if you will all kindly go order my books, I can claim with a perfectly straight face that I have not been procrastinating all AM here in the Hinterlands.
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