Monday's Body of Work

The Dark Side Can't Touch Us

Monday is a healthy day for competition. Good thing, because we’re announcing a poetry contest. Check out what’s happening by visiting our Poetry Contest Page. Competition aside, the literary world continues to sparkle. And in our crown we hold the jewel of optimism. Yes, today we are confident with the world. We have made peace with our failures. We are eager for the promise of a new day. It wasn’t always like this. Optimism here is usually like a throw-away prize at the bottom of a box of Cracker Jacks, and we don’t eat Cracker Jacks. But today is different. Something has shifted and we feel light. Take for instance an article from the San Francisco Chronicle. It’s about a young woman’s quest for her first orgasm. Normally we would jeer. But not today. You go, girl! Carrying on, we have an account of the Blues, David Byrne’s take on everything under the sun, a debunking of Thoreau’s myth and a review of Pynchon’s new thriller. And that’s not all! Yes, as devout optimists we are sharing more. The Guardian has a gruesomely delicious preview of a story about butchery and the New York Review of Books tackles blogging’s influence on journalism. Ah, so good. Everything is lemon pie, fresh laundry and money in the bank. — Kevin Murphy

– At age 26, Mara Altman had never had an orgasm. In most cases, this observation might have been viewed as a private concern to be worked out with discretion. Or with friends in Marin. But as a graduate of Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism and a recently fired Village Voice staff writer living in New York City, Altman sensed an endeavor worthy of a book. She spent nearly a year researching and writing her memoir-journey, “Thanks for Coming: One Young Woman’s Quest for an Orgasm.” — Orgasms the SF Chronicle

– I reach down into the plastic-lined cardboard box one more time, coming up with an organ weighing probably 15lb, a dense and slippery dead weight, a blood-soaked sponge. I slap it on to the cutting table, and it makes a sound like a fish flopping on the deck of a boat; the risk of dropping it on the floor is not inconsiderable. — Butchery in the Guardian

WC Handy wih his Boom Box

– When I was growing up in the Mississippi Delta, the go-to big city was Memphis, a city that in the 1950s was starkly divided along black/white, rich/poor lines. So how was it that a statue of a nattily dressed black man, frozen in the act of moving his cornet into play, stood sentinel over Memphis’ Beale Street? “Oh, that’s Mr. Handy,” said my father, as if I should already know. — The Blues in the Seattle Times

– Hard-boiled detective fiction may not seem like the ideal vehicle for the often cryptic style and subject matter of Thomas Pynchon, but his newest novel proves otherwise. An account of the adventures of a hippie private eye pursuing assorted nonlucrative commissions in a Southern California beach town around 1970, “Inherent Vice” is a sun-struck, pot-addled shaggy dog story that fuses the sulky skepticism of Raymond Chandler with the good-natured scrappiness of “The Big Lebowski.” — Pynchon in Salon

– Without the vital news-gathering performed by established institutions, many Web sites would sputter and die. In their sweep and scorn, however, such statements seem as outdated as they are defensive. Over the past few months alone, a remarkable amount of original, exciting, and creative (if also chaotic and maddening) material has appeared on the Internet. — Journalism in the NY Review of Books

Thoreau, a Sinner Like the Rest of Us?

– Robert Sullivan’s latest book, The Thoreau You Don’t Know, attempts to recuperate Henry David’s reputation among those who remember him from high school English as a voice of unyielding asceticism. Instead, in Sullivan’s telling, Thoreau was an ordinary sinner like the rest of us. — Robert Sullivan in the Rumpus

– Bicycle Diaries – the title may be an ironic echo of Che Guevara’s The Motorcycle Diaries; who knows? – is a deceptively straightforward book, an impressionistic glimpse of some of the cities that Byrne has explored on his pushbike. As anyone familiar with David Byrne’s oeuvre might expect, it is not really a book about cycling per se, more a book in which cycling is, if you’ll pardon the pun, the cog for Byrne’s thoughts about architecture, music, art, travel, politics, religion, kitsch, decay and – a recurring theme – our “quality of life”. – David Byrne in The Observer

Video: David Byrne, Once in a Lifetime