Viggo and Cormac

Actor Viggo Mortensen is close to signing on for the big screen adaptation of Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Road, MTV.com reports.

I'd rather see Viggo Mortensen in the movie version of On the Road, but that's just me. Mortensen's Eastern Promises will be released this month.

You will recall that Tommy Lee Jones is in No Country For Old Men, which also stars Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin and Woody Harrelson. That release date is coming up, this November.

The Easy Way to Slow Global Warming...

...is to eat less meat, according to a study cited by the Associated Press.

Eating less meat could help slow global warming by reducing the number of livestock and thereby decreasing the amount of methane flatulence from the animals, scientists said on Thursday.

Disturbing, isn't it, that we warehouse so many animals in feedlots that their flatulence, their farting, has an effect on our climate. And there really is no need to eat as much meat as most of us do, we're just responding to an age-old craving for protein from the days when we were protein-starved. Now, overeating is the problem.

Powles and his co-authors estimate that reducing meat consumption would reduce the numbers of people with heart disease and cancer. One study has estimated that the risk of colorectal cancer drops by about a third for every 100 grams of red meat that is cut out of your diet.

"As a society, we are overconsuming protein," Brewster said. "If we ate less red meat, it would also help stop the obesity epidemic."

"When Women Stop Reading, The Novel Will Be Dead"

A couple of years ago, British author Ian McEwan conducted an admittedly unscientific experiment. He and his son waded into the lunch-time crowds at a London park and began handing out free books. Within a few minutes, they had given away 30 novels.

Nearly all of the takers were women, who were "eager and grateful" for the freebies while the men "frowned in suspicion, or distaste." The inevitable conclusion, wrote McEwan in The Guardian newspaper: "When women stop reading, the novel will be dead."

At NPR.

And from NPR's Maureen Corrigan, "...there always comes a moment when I'm in the company of others -- even my nearest and dearest -- when I'd rather be reading a book." From Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading.

I suppose that could get to be a problem if it happens before you're ever in anyone's company. It does happen to me, but not as frequently as it might. Example: Do I want to go to the library and vote on the proposed expansion, meanwhile meeting half the people I know in town, hearing their side of it and killing a couple of hours, or, do I just stay home and read? The expansion was voted down by a huge majority. Anyway, I like our library the way it is.

On a More Encouraging Note

Thank you to agent Noah Lukeman, who offers a free book download, How to Write a Great Query.

You will need Adobe reader, but you can also download that free online. His other books are available at Amazon.com. I read The First Five Pages a couple of years ago. He says that in order to stay out of the rejection pile, you have five pages to wow 'em. I find it a little depressing to think that it's only five pages -- I mean, I can understand if those first five are really bad, straight to the circular file, but if they're well-written, literate, but just not full of action yet? Let's hope he exaggerates.

Your Manuscript is Hopeless

And other charming rejections from Knopf. At the NY Times.

...a dreary record of typical family bickering, petty annoyances and adolescent emotions.

And,

"get rid of all that Indian stuff.”

All of which goes to show us writers that we have to stand by our guns. Or is that too western-sounding?

Robber Hits Karate School

Police rescue him and take him to the hospital.

R.I.P. Luciano Pavarotti

I think this clip of Nessun Dorma is the most moving of the videos of him. His expression at the end especially.

You can also see him with James Brown:



And, with Meat Loaf:

On the Road: 50th Anniversary Links, cont'd

Slate's Memories of Beat acquaintances, friends, lovers.

Read the original New York Times review that got Millstein fired, and "made" Kerouac, in his own words.

More from the New York Times, after changing their tune.

Books from exes: Joyce Johnson’s Minor Characters
Edie Kerouac Parker's You'll Be Okay
Carolyn Cassady's Off the Road

Kerouac's Heir?

Denis Johnson, I mean. He reads from his new novel, Tree of Smoke at Front Porch Journal. Includes a link to more audio by Denis Johnson. His work is also outsider-centered (like that image?). Tree of Smoke is on my to-read list.

Did he really kill the Sixties?

The Boston Globe review has much more confidence in the author.

Perfect Crime Writer Gets 25 Years

WARSAW (Reuters) - A Polish crime writer has been jailed for 25 years after authorities found he had committed a murder that had been described in one of his thrillers, officials said Wednesday.

We knew it.

More Kerouac links...and, he did wear khakis

Kerouac links at NPR. Hear him read from On the Road, Dr. Sax and Visions of Cody. Hear him discuss William Burroughs with Neal Cassady. Video as well. This page is a great source for links. Also Carolyn Cassady on Allen and Neal.. (Note that this link on NPR site is broken.)

Jack on writing:

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
4. Be in love with yr life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You're a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

And his Essentials of Spontaneous Prose.

Kerouac's Agent and Jimmy Breslin

At Publisher's Weekly.

Our response to Kerouac’s work was singular almost to a man, in that there was genuine admiration for his vigorous prose, his capacity to create a living sense of America, of life in this country, and the force and originality of his conception. But there were serious objections to the people and situations he writes about, whether they would be of compelling interest to many readers....

Thanks to Nathan Bransford for that link.

Books that Should Not Be Forgotten: The Charterhouse of Parma

Signorina Clelia...while on the verge of marrying the Marchese Crescenzi, the richest man in the State of Parma, was nonetheless making love, insofar as prison walls permitted it, with the generous Monsignore del Dongo.

A funny and astute book of Parmesan goings-on.

Click here for the Observer's list of the not-to-be-forgotten.

Read this Article

And never feed your pet commercial pet food again. In the NY Times.

these diets commonly consist of byproducts cooked into sterile and viscous masses, sheared into the simulacrum of a bone or a patty, and then, according to a report by the National Research Council in Washington, spray-dried with minuscule beadlets of fat, protein and calibrated savor.

I'm relieved there isn't a photo of the six female hound dogs with permanent tubing coming out of their sides, who are only permitted outside twice a week. It might be prudent to ask ourselves what kind of people could work with animals in these conditions, and to what remote and inhospitable emotional lepers' colony we should banish them.