Friday's Literary Grab Bag

Literary Feud-Inspired Comic Found At Last!

Friday dawns. It’s hot here in the Northwest. And everywhere the stores have sold out of fans. Oh, the horror. We drip as we write, dear reader. But take heart, we’re listening to old school R&B. There’s something good and sweaty about Roberta Flack, the way she makes the heat a part of her music. As any old school musician knows, atmosphere is important. Let’s use that as today’s motivation. We move through the cool cool beats, the deep-heart chill, to our literary brethren. Jacket Copy looks at infamous literary feuds. The original works (read unedited) of Carver have been posthumously released. The Times debates which is the real deal. After his beer with Obama, Skip Gates travels to Martha’s Vineyard, where he will participate in a literature festival. An Indian author will not go gently into the night, the Science Times has the skinny on men who live too long at home, and the ongoing mystery of what Thomas Pynchon looks like is answered by a forensic artist. Also, Vollman’s latest tome is reviewed, the curiosities of writing in a book’s margins are explored, and Slate explains how “Hit by a Bus” became a catastrophic cliche. Here’s to your survival. — Kevin Murphy

Fitzgerald and Hemingway were not the only writers to have a public falling-out. Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne might have been the first high-profile American writers to have a friendship publicly sour. Melville dedicated “Moby-Dick” to Hawthorne, but two years later ceased corresponding with the more successful writer, perhaps because Hawthorne had failed to secure Melville a government job. — Feuds in Jacket Copy

– From a personal perspective, however, the most fascinating example of margin prose I have encountered was inside a first edition of Alone Through the Forbidden Land, by Gustav Krist, published in 1938. The book is an account of an Austrian adventurer’s clandestine journey through the states of Soviet Central Asia in the mid 1920s. — Marginal Writing in the Guardian

Research Says Stay at Home Sons are...

– Young men who stay at home with their parents are more violent than those who live independently, according to new research at Queen Mary, University of London. The new study* indicates that men still living at home in their early twenties have fewer responsibilities and more disposable income to spend on alcohol. — Disgruntled Young Men in Science News

– The community center is apt to be filled to overflowing well before the 11 am opening on Sunday when Nobel prize winner and Chilmarker Robert Solow introduces best-selling author, Island resident and national newsmaker Henry Louis (Skip) Gates Jr. — Skip Gates in the Martha’s Vineyard Times

Why We Argue When We Edit

– What We Talk About When We Talk About Love was welcomed for its masterful minimalism, but the amplitude of Cathedral was there all along (to follow Gallagher’s logic), just waiting to be liberated from the suffocating suppressions imposed by Lish. In a Paris Review interview in 1983, Carver himself rejected the label that had been pinned to him and for which he was celebrated. — Raymond Carver in the Times

– Hundreds assembled to listen to noted writer and columnist Shobhaa De and Amitav Ghosh speaking on relevance of literature in contemporary society. “Literature cannot be killed nor voices be silenced. I cannot imagine a world without words. Words give shape to thoughts and imagination. And literature will always exist with its relevance,” De said. — Literature in the Times of India

Pynchon, Is That You?

– About three years ago, EW commissioned New York forensic artist Stephen Mancusi — a guy who’s done deliberately aged likenesses of everyone from JonBenet Ramsey to Marilyn Monroe — to use his professional techniques to render what reclusive author Thomas Pynchon might look like now. His drawing was based on Pynchon’s 1955 high school yearbook photo, one of the last known snapshots of the Gravity’s Rainbow scribe, and accompanied Ken Tucker’s grade-A review of the then 69-year-old writer’s novel Against the Day. — Pynchon in Shelf Life

– The earliest instance the Explainer could find of a bus accident as a generic rather than literal example of misfortune is from Joseph Conrad’s 1907 novel, The Secret Agent: “But just try to understand that it was a pure accident; as much an accident as if he had been run over by a ‘bus while crossing the street.” — Cliches in Slate

– TEN years in the making, William Vollmann’s latest book, “Imperial”, weighs in at a back-cricking four pounds (1.8kg). Were the author to devote the same attention to all the other 3,140 counties in America that he has to Imperial County in the extreme south-eastern corner of California, the result would stretch to more than 4m pages. Even for Mr Vollmann, that would be a tall order. — William T. Vollmann in the Economist

Video: Vollmann Reading Riding Toward Everywhere: