Kerouac's unusual activity

The fine folks at TSG have posted Jack Kerouac's Navy file from 1943, which details his honorable discharge for psychiatric reasons. Without any particular training or back ground, this patient, just prior to his enlistment, enthusiastically embarked upon the writing of novels. He sees nothing unusual about this activity. Physical and neurological examinations are negative and mental examination reveals no gross evidence of psychosis....

I Hear They Serve Amazing Champagne

Yes, I am aware that this is my THIRD Guardian post of the day, but since it's Hemingway's birthday today, I thought I had to post this article about two bars in Miami fighting (and suing!) over which was Hemingway's favorite (from yesterday, and via Bookslut, of course)....

Seth, the "Self-Pitying Melancholic" We Love

Your DG editors are big fans of Seth, born Gregory Gallant*, the Canadian indie comics artist (or "graphic novelist," in the parlance of our times). In fact, we like him so much that we bought an original drawing a few years ago at a signing at Million Year Picnic in Cambridge, Mass. Interviews with Seth are fairly rare, so we were thrilled to see this one in Bookslut, in which he discusses, among other things, his notorious nostalgia: The modern world is very ugly… and the pop culture is so mind-numbingly dumb that you have to make a conscious effort...

Aims, Shoots & Levels

The New Yorker's Louis Menand takes to task Lynne Truss's grammar manifesto Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation for the (apparently copious) punctuation errors in her book. After cataloguing the book's lapses in commas and parentheses, Menand laments the publisher's decision not to amend the American version of the book to account for differences between American and British usage (this really does make no sense). A money quote: The supreme peculiarity of this peculiar publishing phenomenon is that the British are less rigid about punctuation and related matters, such as footnote and bibliographic form, than Americans...

Marginalia

Like Billy Collins in his poem "Marginalia," I find notes in the margins of books fascinating. While they often can be distracting, other times they are sufficiently strange to arouse more than a passing curiosity about the person who wrote them. For instance, I have a used copy of A Confederacy of Dunces with the scrawl, "Go to E.R. and ask for sedative. You're upset." then the big letters "EMERGENCY ROOM," with an arrow to "E.R." Was someone upset by the book, so much so that he or she needed to be immediately medicated, or was the 1982 First Revised...

Love Lessons

I'm late to this one, but when I read that one of my favorite authors Mary Gaitskill had written an essay for the Washington Post magazine, I knew I had to find it. Although she's been somewhat of a literary recluse since her 1998 collection of short stories, Because They Wanted To, I count her first book of short stories, Bad Behavior, among my favorite collections. The WaPo essay "Love Lessons," the story of Gaitskill and her husband's experience taking in two urban kids in a summer program, is thoughtful and poignant without being condescending. And as in her fiction,...

Rachel Cohen was Lisa Simpson's imaginary Jewish friend

She's also a real-life writer who just wrote an intellectual history inspired by a very, very long roadtrip around America. Her book A Chance Meeting is a compilation of non-fiction encounters between artistic giants: Much of the book's delight is in the detail. Charlie Chaplin turns up, unannounced, at Hart Crane's flat at two in the morning. The photographer Richard Avedon tapes a negative of his sister's portrait on to his shoulder until it creates a kind of tanned tattoo. Norman Mailer bids farewell to James Baldwin beside the Playboy mansion pool while recovering from a 36-hour bender. The book...

Another Dumb 'Blonde' Joke

I spent this first weekend of glorious spring weather very productively — I read Plum Sykes's novel Bergdorf Blondes. I couldn't put the idiotic thing down, it completely took over my life for about 36 hours. I have to say I'm glad to be rid of "Moi" the nameless fashion magazine writer and her department store heiress best friend, Julie Bergdorf, but I found our time together illuminating in a few ways. Things I need now to be a real New York girl, apparently: a Bellini at Chip's (that Cipriani's to you mere mortals), a ride in a private jet...

Fight This Generation

Nothing exceeds like excess. 21-year-old author Marty Beckerman already has two books under his belt. In an interview with Bookslut, the writer of "Generation S.L.U.T." says without irony that Most (young writers) kind of suck. There are certain authors who are getting contracts when they're 14 years old, for a quarter million dollars, to write their memoirs. A 14-year-old has no perspective on his or her life. I mean, I wrote a book in high school, and it's good for the bitter rantings of a 16-year-old virgin, but it has no real perspective. Clearly when MTV publishes fiction about teen...

Madeleine L'Engle in The New Yorker

This week's New Yorker features a profile (not available online) of author Madeleine L'Engle. In the profile, the author Cynthia Zarin writes: "When I was in college, I remember a friend saying to me, 'There are really two kinds of girls. Those who read Madeleine L'Engle when they were small, and those who didn't.'" I was the kind of girl who read Madeleine L'Engle. Although I wasn't crazy about the Austin series, I read all of the Murray series -- A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door, A Swiftly Tilting Planet (perhaps an odd choice as my childhood...