A: Reading books.

Thanks to spinmaster Karl Rove, we now know that our supreme leader is not a philistine book burner, but a learned man of letters. In Rove’s new career, to rehabilitate his puppet’s legacy, he offers this WSJ column on how he and W. competed to read the most books and pages over the last few years. While it’s plausible that Bush actually read the listed books, a few investigators have done the math, in particular this analysis over at Book Patrol, which comes to the conclusion that it is unlikely Bush could have plowed through his list in so little time.

The above picture, I’ve just learned, is actually a fake. This was disseminated not long after 9/11 when Bush was reading along with an elementary school class down in Florida as the planes hit the towers. Snopes.com nailed the fraud here. I hadn’t realized though, that the book they were reading, America, A Patriotic Primer, was written by Lynne Cheney. Perhaps the only thing better than Oprah to enhance book sales is to have your husband be the vice president.

A beautiful PR stop motion animation to celebrate a U.K. publisher’s 25th anniversary by AptStudio. Warning: it appears that books were irrevocably harmed in the name of art. The horror! The horror!


This Is Where We Live from 4th Estate on Vimeo.

One of my heroes, Studs Terkel, died at age 96 on Friday. The warm, funny lefty with an unmistakable voice opened up my world with his best-selling social document, Working. He was one of those tough Chicago guys, I thought would last forever. Not long ago, I remember listening to him on Garrison Keillor and loving his sense of humor. Such a great loss for this country. It’s a pity his death coincides with the election because he’s not going to get the attention he deserves. Though with the economy souring day by day, Working may turn out to be a bible of solace as people string together part-time jobs to help make ends meet.

Not a stadium crowd, but a fun night at the U.S. Custom House for LMCC’s final reading of our residency. Me, John Talbird, and LuLu LoLo read pieces from work created while in residence. Photos courtesy of Sean Carrol of LMCC.

I’ll be reading fiction with two other fellow residents, LuLu LoLo and John Talbird.

Click to RSVP.

I had the great fortune to meet Paula Fox and her husband Martin Greenberg at LMCC's office. Paula had graciously agreed to read a long story of mine and give me feedback. She's a real pro and full of lots of life with a nice sense of humor. It was a real honor to meet one of my literary heroes.

Beckett and Baudelaire, among many others...

Lucie Ceccaldi, the 83-year-old mother of Michel Houellebecq, is fighting back. She's tired of being the slut in his books and has decided to trash him in her own memoir, L'Innocente. She dares him to malign her again or "he's going to get hit in the gob with a walking stick and that'll knock all his teeth out, that's for sure." Read about the mother and son here.

First a holocaust memoir turns out to be a total fabrication (Misha Defonseca's Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years), now an L.A. gang orphan story turns out to be fiction as well. Margaret B. Jones' Love and Consequences fooled a lot of reviewers for the best reasons: it was well written and compelling. In Defonseca's case, she was not found out until the book was already a bestseller and a movie. For Jones, we'll see how her career fares, especially since the publisher has cancelled her book tour and is recalling the book. (I wonder if you can sue for the mental anguish caused by memoir deception--WRITERS: a possible short story idea?). It's amazing how well a book can sell when it's labeled as a memoir, but when it's fiction, it's assumed to bear little resemblance to reality and is given much less attention. Reality sells. Though I haven't read her book, Defonseca's supposed raised-by-wolves childhood was probably no less vivid than a great book of powerful fiction thought to be based on some version of the author's youth: Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird.

Here are some photos of the great sculptures and architectural details of the Alexander Hamilton Custom House, designed by Cass Gilbert and built in 1907.

Cass Gilbert's building in 1907. More info here. And some brief history here.

Finally got clearance to use the Custom House!

If you haven't been following Errol Morris' indefatigable research into which of Roger Fenton's two pictures of the Valley of the Shadow of Death came first, it is definitely worth a read (part1, part2, part3). Like a one-manned JFK assassination inquiry, Morris tries to refute Susan Sontag's claim that the photo with the canon balls on the road was staged, "a fake." This whole subject is fascinating for photographers like me who strive to document reality, but know that aesthetics often trump when the subject is mundane. Here are the two photos in question. Now, which was shot first and why?
OFF

ON

Photo by Jill Krementz (his wife)
One of my heroes died yesterday. I started reading the lovable hoosier late in high school and on through my twenties. I must have read every book of his before Galapagos: Breakfast of Champions, Cat's Cradle, Slaughterhouse 5, Player Piano, Mother Night, Deadeye Dick. And I really loved Slapstick, which seemed to be universally panned. He was a true original, a brave patriot, a promoter of free speech. He looked like Mark Twain and smoked as much as George Burns. What a force! What a conscience! I will miss his voice.