Jon Stewart on Fox News. Incredible.

http://airamerica.com/entertainment/10-30-2009/watch-jon-stewart-eviscerates-fox-news/

 

The Fall of the Berlin Wall

I was driving to work and listening to World Have Your Say on the BBC, and it suddenly occured to me: My book is primarily centered around the fall of the Berlin Wall.  And today is the 20th anniversary of that fall. And my book just came out in German, in March. And I haven’t said anything about it on my website. Nothing!

And so I wonder: Why are authors such terrible promoters, by and large?

Bad, bad Pauls.

Thanks to Amy Lemmon (whose book of poems, Saint Nobody, is wonderful, and just came out this year from Red Hen Press) for reminding me, as well. Why not post my cover? Why not link to the amazon.de page for the book — which has a nifty trailer? Why not, indeed?

Coming soon: A short bit about a book by the journalist Tom Krattenmaker…

 

Health Care Reform

You can read it, here!

I didn’t know what was in it! Then I read it. Here’s the link. Scroll down a bit to reach the .pdf. It’s only 42 pages to understand it! I printed it out and read it over lunch. It was actually kind of exciting.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/11/05/health.care/

 

Sad News, Today: Claude Levi-Strauss Has Passed Away

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/04/world/europe/04levistrauss.html

Claude Lévi-Strauss, the French anthropologist whose revolutionary studies of what was once called “primitive man” transformed Western understanding of the nature of culture, custom and civilization, has died at 100.

His son Laurent said Mr. Lévi-Strauss died of cardiac arrest Friday at his home in Paris. His death was announced Tuesday, the same day he was buried in the village of Lignerolles, in the Côte-d’Or region southeast of Paris, where he had a country home…

 

Swallowed by the semester

There are three books I want to read — badly enough that it’s making me worry about the fact that I don’t have any time to read them! But this is not a bad thing, in some ways. It just clarifies my reading list for the Winter Holidays.

Here they are. Perhaps talking about them will ease my distress over not reading them:

Eating Animals, by Jonathan Safran Foer

Manhood for Amateurs, by Michael Chabon

The Museum of Innocence, by Orhan Pamuk

The first two titles have particular resonance for me, personally. And the last: Well, I heard an interview with Pamuk saying that he was actually building the museum from his novel, this year, in Istanbul. If that’s not amazing, I don’t know what is.

I am reading a little bit right now: The Night Counter, by Alia Yunis.

This is a great novel!

More soon…

 

 

 

More.

Bless you, Anderson Cooper:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/15/tea-party-leader-melts-do_n_286933.html

 

Thank God.

John Stewart is back on the air:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/15/jon-stewart-returns-slams_n_286906.html

No wonder things went nutty for a while.

 

And now, I find myself worried for our President

The uptick in vitriol from his opponents has me deeply worried… How can we get distracted from the health care debate at a time like this? Please — do what you can to bring calm to this debate…

 

1:00 AM on the first Thursday night of the semester finds me…

Grading papers!
Ha!

 

100th Post and Josh Weil

Good morning. WordPress is telling me that this is my hundredth post on paulstoutonghi.com. This seems fabulous, to me, and it means I’ve been averaging about one post every 8 or 9 days. That seems like a good amount — especially over a two-and-a-half year period.

Blogging is interesting because it’s a public journal. It’s not quite internal, emotional diary writing — at least not for me — but it’s close.

That said: Josh Weil’s The New Valley.

The New Valley got a fabulous review in the New York Times. I’m not going to break new ground in book reviewing, here, in this informal venue. Much of what Anthony Doerr (another excellent writer whose book The Shell Collector is one of my favorites) writes makes sense to me. The novella is indeed perilous territory, territory between the novel and the short story. And, yes, Weil is the real deal. He negotiates this perilous territory with skill and grace.

These three novellas are set in a river valley that’s a borderland — situated between rural Virginia and West Virginia. This is a rough country, and the landscape here is presented with much of its rawness intact. Indeed, the land haunts these novellas.

I liked all of them, but of the three, “Saverville Remains,” was particularly beautiful. It had the kind of prose — in the voice of its narrator — that astonishes you with its economy and power. I’m at the back of a long line of reviewers praising Weil, sure, but it’s a line I’ll gladly stand in.