Wednesday Linkstorm
It's Ray Bradbury's birthday today. This is a Ray Bradbury blog. All Ray Bradbury, all the time. (No, but did you see this? It is great.)It seems some FBI files are being released that confirm Sylvia Plath's pops Otto Plath had German sympathies during WWII. Can we all just agree that every single person ever named Otto was a Nazi? Details will be released at something called an International Plath Symposium which has me picturing one thousand people of different nationalities wearing berets and smoking clove cigarettes and heaving world-weary sighs.Michiko Kakutani calls Martin Amis' new book Lionel Asbo: State of England a 'weary new novel... [that] reads like a pallid variation on “Money,” lightly seasoned with some Dickensian overtones.' DAG MICHIKO. That's rough stuff. I'm gonna read it anyway though.Friend of Barnstorm Rose Whitmore has a story in The Missouri Review! Read an excerpt here and then buy that journal at places where that journal is sold. How does it feel to be so famous, Rose? Would you say you're more or less famous than Beyonce and Jay-Z's baby Blue Ivy Carter? I would say more. Yeah, definitely more famous than Blue Ivy Carter.Speaking of Barnstorm pals, did you guys catch this piece about juvenalia on the Paris Review Daily?Here's a list of 50 Books that will make you a better writer. Yeah okaaaaaay. Here's my personal list of 50 books that will make you a better writer: your 50 favorite books.P.S. If you ever catch me reading The Hero With A Thousand Faces please do a bad ass Will Smith style kill on me because it will be an alien inhabiting my skin (see above).Charles Simic's column for NYRB is wonderful as usual. Apparently y'all poets aren't gonna get rich? Yeah, I dunno. First I'm hearing of that.You could read this excellent essay about Lester Bangs by Maria Bustillos on the New Yorker blog. OR. You could read this review of Astral Weeks by Lester Bangs which is (forgive me) sublime. Sorry for how web 1.0 it looks, that's the only complete version I could find. Excerpt: "Madame George" is the album's whirlpool. Possibly one of the most compassionate pieces of music ever made, it asks us, no, arranges that we see the plight of what I'll be brutal and call a lovelorn drag queen with such intense empathy that when the singer hurts him, we do too. (Morrison has said in at least one interview that the song has nothing to do with any kind of transvestite - at least as far as he knows, he is quick to add - but that's bullshit.) The beauty, sensitivity, holiness of the song is that there's nothing at all sensationalistic, exploitative, or tawdry about it; in a way Van is right when he insists it's not about a drag queen, as my friends were right and I was wrong about the "pedophelia" - it's about a person, like all the best songs, all the greatest literature. Okay gotta go quit writing forever cause the best thing has already been written. See you guys never!--Erin Somers