Wednesday Linkstorm
It's Leonard Cohen's birthday on Friday. Pro tip: his book of poetry is the perfect gift for your soulful boyfriend. Please jam this jam as you read this roundup.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6q7vCSmUU0In a very special episode of By the Book, Nicholson Baker mentions the Dimond Library: I suppose my favorite library is the one I use the most — the Dimond Library of the University of New Hampshire. It's quiet, full of blond wood, full of neatly shelved books, and in the summer very few people are there in the reading room. I find a table near an electrical outlet and sit and listen to the HVAC system blow through the building — keeping all those books cool, waiting for readers who will want them.Aww yeah! Shout out to the HVAC system. What what.On another local note, Salmon Rushdie is gonna be at the Music Hall in Portsmouth on October 10. I hear he's just doing an acoustic set though. Psych, he's reading from his boring novel. Music Hall calendar here.The Millions links you to reviews and excerpts of the Man Booker Short List. Please get all up into the Man Booker. Don't make me beg.Jimmy Bieble's* mom penned a memoir called Nowhere But Up. Buy it wherever books are sold.*That's what my dad calls Justin BieberApparently there's a lost audiobook out there of Gravity's Rainbow and this guy is really into finding it. Good luck on your quest, fellow, but I'd rather be waterboarded by the Tristero than listen to G's R on tape. That's just too many words to listen to someone saying out loud. It's like, shut up with the words already. (Also why don't they just fax Pynchon about its whereabouts?)Dark Sorceress Joyce Carol Oates on Chuck Dickens for NYRB.Speaking of DSJCO, she's going to be at Brooklyn Book Fest this weekend along with Paul Auster, Tony Danza (!), Colson Whitehead, Dennis Lehane, Esmeralda Santiago, Sapphire (!!), Billy Collins, Dan Savage and many others. You should check it out if you're in New York. I went one year and it was too hot out to function and everyone I was with was at an 8 on the Grump Scale (the Grump Scale only goes to 8) and we got shut out of Richard Price's reading. But don't let that deter you.The new Guernica Editions is out and what do we have here? OH. HARK. A poem that was originally published in Barnstorm. "Homage to Frank Stanford" by Jason Heroux. Read it in our own archive here. Congrats to all relevant parties.Note: Mary Karr doesn't teach Ashbery but she does teach Simic. Let's hear it for the home team! Let's hear it for the UNH library's HVAC system.