It can be difficult to know you're in a golden age. You might be too busy working. You might be too caught up in the hum of everyday life. You might live in Omaha. But here's a hint: there are usually a lot of white guys in bow ties smoking indoors.
Police have confirmed to Gawker that David Foster Wallace, novelist and essayist, was found dead of an apparent suicide in his home in Claremont, California, where he was a professor at Pomona College. It's been reported that his wife found him after he hanged himself. Foster Wallace, longtime darling of grad students and civilian PoMo lit fans, was often very funny in print (see his famous essay skewering the cruise ship experience, "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again"), but as his 2005 speech at Kenyon College implied, he was not unfamiliar with the heft of existence:
Maybe being a professional poet isn't a romantic escape from the drudgery of work and intellectual boredom. Being the Poet Laureate of the United States is kind of a pain in the ass—full of events and obligations, you're lucky to find time to write. But being Britain's Poet Laureate is even worse: the current one, Andrew Motion, is counting the days 'til his term is up next year because he's miserable:
Budding authors: give up right now. Lauren Conrad, the pleasantly vacant star of scripted reality show The Hills, just got a three-book deal with HarperCollins for young adult novels. The topic? Use your imagination: it'll be about a girl who moves to Los Angeles and "unexpectedly" ends up starring in a reality show. It will be called L.A. Candy. It will "definitely influenced by [her] own life," as she told People. It will be the best YA series of all time. [Usmagazine; illustration: The New Yorker]
Geez, not two months after potato-loving NYT reporter David Carr was declared the next big thing in druggie memoir publishing, the literati is already turning its attention to Bill Clegg, the next druggie memoir star. Which we note mostly so that we can use this picture that we took with our cameraphone last night: David Carr underneath a Barnes & Noble banner with his very own picture on it! Ain't that a kick? Click to enlarge.
Ira Silverberg is a well-known literary agent and a well-known gay—his partner is the former New York Times etiquette columnist Bob Morris. He has borne not one but two children via his sperm, reports the Observer. “For years I’ve had one very close friend who always said, ‘When I have a child, I’d like you to think about being the father'... [then] the call came and I hit it on the first shot. Delivered in a baby food jar." Thanks for that, Ira. Kid's gonna love reading this. Remember: privacy begins at conception! [NYO; photo Fishbowl NYC]
Last night I had an argument with Balk (he is like the Dalai Lama of Gawker Media*) re our favorite prose stylist Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan. Balk said Peggy Noonan's whole "struggle" over what presidential candidate she was supporting had, like everything else she writes, been a total fraud designed to adhere to a premeditated narrative arc whereby she would eventually come around to the Republican side duh. I said…something else, I was drinking. Anyway, now we know what Peggy intended to be the culmination of said narrative arc: a return to something called "patriotic grace" in a nation consumed by a "mood of change" and "tired of the old partisan divisions and the campaign tricks that seek to widen and exploit them." Apparently "the stresses and divisions of the Bush years have driven us apart to a point that is unhealthy and destructive"!! What an unexpected change of heart last week, Pegs. [Harper Collins]
Critic John Sutherland said that he'd eat his copy of Salman Rushdie's Enchantress of Florence if it didn't win the Man Booker Prize. "I'll curry my proof copy and eat it," he wrote in the Financial Times. Well, it didn't even make the prize's shortlist. Will he indeed eat the curried book? Hell, no, he says: "So there." Coward! He's no Warner Herzog, the film director who ate his shoe after losing a bet to Erol Morris, saying Morris would never complete Gates of Heaven. (If you're clamoring to see someone eat something inappropriate, click through.)The fun with Herzog's shoe begins at about two minutes.
Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling won her case against an unauthorized Harry Potter's Lexicon that would explain all the words used in her book. The court ruled it a no-go because it "appropriates too much of Rowling's creative work for its purposes as a reference guide." Rowling said that the "proposed book took an enormous amount of my work and added virtually no original commentary of its own." [Reuters]
Robert Giroux, who helped build one of the most important publishing houses of the 20th Century, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, died in his sleep yesterday morning at an assisted living facility in Tinton Falls, NJ. He was 94. The legends that he published amount to a stunningly daunting list that includes T.S. Eliot, Flannery O'Connor, Seamus Heany, Bernard Malamud, Jack Kerouac, Susan Sontag, and George Orwell."'The single most important thing to happen to this company was the arrival of Bob Giroux,' [Roger] Straus, who died in 2004, once said."
It's been more than three years since the identity of Bob Woodward's famed Deep Throat source was broken in Vanity Fair rather than in Woodward's Washington Post, as he had planned. So perhaps the newspaper is not all that bitter that Woodward, a longtime editor there, has yet let another book project emerge first in a competing news outlet. Last night it was Fox News Channel, not the Post, with exclusive first details of Woodward's fourth book on President Bush, The War Within. Among them was the revelation that John McCain, while standing in the West Wing, clenched his fists and said of the Bush team, "everything is f—-ing spin." Now that's a revelation that's well-timed for the McCain campaign. Wonder who leaked to Fox?! (*McCough.*) Anyway, the Post apparently had its own Web story ready on a hairtrigger, and published it, bringing forth slightly terrifying revelations like how a cadre of generals organized to do something about the inept civilian Commander in Chief:
For some strange reason, the Post's Page Six today published a long item on the book Black & White And Dead All Over, a newsroom roman a clef by a 40-year Timesman. The timing is a bit odd because this book was reviewed in the Post in late July, around the time we posted our second item on it, and according to Amazon it's been on sale since July 29. But Page Six does reveal the book contains a hard-to-believe interaction we somehow missed, between elder Arhur "Punch" Sulzberger and his son Arthur Jr.:
Where does the Wall Street Journal's Tina Gaudoin find the time for her hectic trans-Atlantic lifestyle? She'll tell you, in book form! Gaudoin, the yoga mogul who edits the business paper's new glossy weekend magazine, somehow found time to write an autobiographical book about "the ins and outs of the most glamorous and bitchy of industries" (magazines!). After the jump, the semi-grammatical Amazon summary of Gaudoin's Not Just Prada: Real Life Adventures in Magazines (Paperback) [sic]:
William Clegg, now a literary agent at William Morris, was the subject of much speculation back in 2005 when he just disappeared—stopped coming in to work, etc. And then there was the whole rumor-truth that he ended up with a male FSG editor. Soon, we will no longer have to dance around all this gossip—Radar has learned that he's written a memoir, which will start looking for a buying editor today. [Radar]
After Random House pussed out on publishing Sherry Jones's historical novel Jewel of Medina about one of the wives of the prophet Muhammad—they were scared that it might incite violence from extremists, which is kind of the publishing equivalent of some big dude calling the cops on a girl—she told Leipziger Volkszeitung that a German publisher would print the book in English, inshallah. [NY Sun]
Seriously, who isn't returning their library books? The failure to return borrowed books is a very real, very pressing problem these days. We've brought you two jail-time examples of rogue library borrowers this week alone. Now we've received a list of various offenders from the fuzz—a Southern library is being robbed of their possession of something called The Amazing Panda Adventure! Don't worry: the police department is on the case.
