The opening image is of a young girl, twenty going on twelve, pale enough to make you worry if she’s ever seen the sun. She’s sitting in an antiseptic lab having a tube shoved ever so slowly down her mouth, inch by inch. The male scientist, leaning above her says, “You’re doing a great job,” as she swallows every inch of his tube, gagging along the way. …more

Set in a dive bar, Joshua Mohr’s new novel, Damascus follows a weird gang as their lives crumble. Somehow it’s still life-affirming. …more

If you don’t know by now, THE THING is an object-based quarterly, created by artists Jonn Herschend and Will Rogan, where different artists create an object that incorporates text. All of the designs are objects you can use. …more

I basically hurt myself with excitement when I read that the San Francisco Film Society was presenting Mauritz Stiller’s 1919 silent film classic Sir Arne’s Treasure with live musical accompaniment by indie rock icon John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats.

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Please enjoy the 2010 Miss TSA Calendar.

After you’re done laughing, why not purchase a Rumpus Women Literary Calender?

The Bots are a band of two brothers, Mikaiah Lei, 17, and Anaiah Lei, 13, hailing from Glendale, California. Mikaiah sings and plays guitar while his younger brother Anaiah holds it down on the drums. …more

Arthur Ganson is referred to as a kinetic sculptor, but I think his machines are more like spiritual beings.  He largely makes what’s known as Rube Goldberg machines, overly complex machines that execute simple tasks. …more

To Humbert Humbert of Nabokov’s Lolita: “Hey Humbert, How’s jail? I hope it’s as bad as they make it out to be in those undercover exposes. I mean, I really hope you’re suffering, I want to be clear on that from the outset.”

To A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh character (affectionally called Edward, the original name of Milne’s bear): “Dearest Edward,  Have you gone mad, Bear?  I noticed that you’re wearing a shirt, not just into the pool anymore but all the time. You’ve changed. Are you embarrassed or something?” …more

Woman at Taco Bell on 14th Street. Man Sleeping on a bench in Madison Square Park, May 30, 2010.  He is wearing 3-D Movie Theatre Glasses. Lewis Lapham. Three people out of the current 8,008,278 people of New York City. That’s 8,008,278 people that artist Jason Polan is attempting to draw in his Every Person in New York project.

Polan: “I am trying to draw every person in New York. I will be drawing people everyday and posting as frequently as I can. It is possible that I will draw you without you knowing it. I draw in Subway stations and museums and restaurants and on street corners. I try not to be in the way when I am drawing or be too noticeable. If you would like to increase the chances of a portrait of YOU appearing on this blog please email me (art@jasonpolan.com).”

Then attesting to the endearing and absurd impossibility of the project he states, “When the project is completed we will all have a get together.”

If films were fighters, Mike Ott’s second offering, Littlerock, would weigh in at 123 minutes, placing it in the featherweight division, a deft, gentle movie, lithe and light during its two hours in the ring. Not to suggest that it’s diminutive — this indie sleeper is rich and moving and packs an emotional left hook. …more

We keep reading tributes to Salinger by famous authors or, more worth noting, written by adults.  But what about teenagers, the main readership of Catcher in the Rye?

Over at The New York Times’ Room for Debate a discussion panel recently focused on the role of Cather in the Rye with young audiences today. They asked writers and teachers: “Does Catcher in the Rye resonate with teenagers today? Does the Holden Caulfield version of alienation speak to a generation connected on Facebook?”

In what was not the smartest editorial move, the NYT didn’t have a young adult on the panel. Luckily, and true to form, teenagers showed up in full force in the comments section to weigh in on the discussion.

A lovely morsel from one young reader: “Well, I am sixteen and find it shocking how cynical all of you adults are about our generation. We just read this book a few months ago and each and everyone of us loved it and felt a deep connection between ourselves and Holden. Times have not changed as much as you think. We are not as shallow as you think. Salinger’s novel is as universal as it is timeless. But I’m beginning to think that maybe Holden was right about all of you.”

It might be new news or old news to you, but Amanda Palmer is engaged to Neil Gaiman, and because Coraline (based on Gaiman’s book) was nominated for best animated feature, Amanda Palmer ended up walking the red carpet at the Golden Globes.

Here’s her absurdly lengthy and hilarious account of her trip there, including photos of her in a “naked dress” (really just a little see-through) sporting pit hair, with a more conservative dress for the after parties tucked into her ukulele case, which she carried with her down the red carpet.  She even had Neil take a photo of her lying down on the red carpet as “dead amanda palmer on the carpet.”

Just one of the many priceless gems from her account: “There was a huge black dude at a table next to us and he had an awesome facial tattoo and I almost went up to compliment him.  He looked really familiar.  I found out a few days later it was fucking mike tyson.”

As we mentioned earlier this morning, Dave Eggers, arguably one of the most actively engaged and socially involved writers (almost the living antithesis of Salinger) paid tribute to Salinger for The New Yorker, probing the question of why Salinger retreated so deeply away from the public eye. But Eggers is not alone in his remembrance:

Lillian Ross on her long friendship with Salinger.

Adam Gopnik on how Salinger “remade American writing in the fifties and sixties in a way that no one had since Hemingway.”

John Seabrook on Salinger making him popcorn for movie night.

Our own Jason Roberts remembers J. D. Salinger.

Cuba’s progressing fast when it comes to recognizing the rights of transgendered peoples.  First the ban was lifted on sex-change operations in 2007, and now not only are the surgeries being performed in Cuba, they’re being paid for under the government’s universal health care plan.

It probably doesn’t hurt that the president’s daughter, Mariela Castro, runs the Center for Sex Education in Cuba, helping to prepare people for the procedures. And Mariela Castro’s plans to bring about change don’t stop there.

The first weeks of 2010 are inevitably flooded with top ten lists of 2009, because people apparently can’t live without them.

But maybe instead of reading the same top ten lists, we could have interesting lists of overlooked, underrated, left behind things.  Yeah, we know that Inglorious Basterds is probably on most top 10 film lists, but what about those films that we missed?  Here’s a list of the ten great movies of 2009 that may have passed you by.

Harper’s has a condensed, slightly humorous (not funny haha) and downright offputting review of 2009.  From “Scientists in San Diego made a robot head study itself in a mirror until it learned to smile” to learning that the actual Man in the Mirror died, 2009 was a rough go.

Some highlights?

- Newspaper circulation in the United States declined to its lowest level in 70 years.

-Sea levels continued to rise, and a 40-yard-wide asteroid just missed the earth.

-Thirty-nine million Americans were on food stamps, 54 percent of graduating U.S. business majors lacked job offers, and two gunmen robbed a man of one dollar in the parking lot of an Ohio Wendy’s.

Haven’t had your fill?  Read on here.

It seems that people will only grow to love David Foster Wallace more as the years go on.  It’s what usually happens when you can’t get someone anymore.

Here’s a great link to more DFW morsels from Lincoln Michel over at The Faster Times, from the anticipation of Wallace’s unfinished novel, Pale King (due to be released this year), to a great video of him drinking from an empty glass while talking about getting irritated with people who make him parse unnecessarily.

An excerpt:

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Ron Rosenbaum over at Slate, has been chronicling catchphrases for a while, and now at the dawn of 2010, he picks the catchphrase of the decade, and also does away with the awful ones by “throwing them under the bus.”

For example, who doesn’t hate “it is what it is”? …more

Laura Miller, staff writer at Salon as well as a frequent contributor to the New York Times Book Review, has come out with a new feature called What to Read.

Salon’s not doing away with it’s exceptional book coverage, from reviews to interviews – rather it’s just adding to it.  How?  Well, in Miller’s words: …more

Rumpus contributor Zak Smith has made known his top three books of the year over at HTMLGIANT.

Smith’s picks are a delightfully eclectic mix:  The Original of Laura by Nabokov (a fragmented, not meant to be published, unfinished novel), Ugly Man by Dennis Cooper, and Death of Bunny Munro by Nick Cave.

Missing from Zak Smith’s list? Bolano. And we only mention this because Smith makes a point to. Following the suit of the Gene Simmons line, “Music critics like Elvis Costello because music critics look like Elvis Costello,” Zak Smith writes, “Book critics like Roberto Bolano because book critics look like Roberto Bolano.” And, in true Zak Smith style, he doesn’t stop there.

“Why should only famous people be famous? Fuck that! Fame for all! Even if it’s just the tiniest bit (which turns out to be the perfect amount).” …more

If you haven’t caught a whiff of the hubbub surrounding Werner Herzog’s latest film Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, that might be because you’re not much of a cinephile, which it turns out, neither is Herzog.

His latest movie starring Nicholas Cage  is essentially, maybe, sort-of, a very slight non-remake remake of Abel Ferrera’s 1992 movie Bad Lieutenant.

Why do I hem and haw and call it a non-remake remake? …more

Seriously.

Time Magazine originally started out selecting a “Man of the Year” as a way to sell magazines in the down holiday season, which then turned into “Person of the Year”.  Now they’re thinking of naming Twitter as 2009′s Person of the Year.  It seems we’ve thrown out the concept of words having meanings. …more

Rates of PTSD for Iraq war veterans have been estimated as up to 35% in a Stanford University study.   The Army has reached out to alternative therapies from yoga to reiki to holding and petting an animal, and now a South Carolina psychiatrist is trying to bring Ecstasy into the mix.

Michael Mithoefer has been testing MDMA’s effects on veterans with PTSD.  Ecstasy has long been used in therapy, particularly in the 1970′s as a way of getting patients to process things with less fear and inhibition.

“I heard about it and I decided to give it a try,” a former Army Ranger tells Military.com. “It’s an extremely positive thing. I feel so lucky that I got to take part in the project… It’s basically like years of therapy in two or three hours. You can’t understand it until you’ve experienced it.”

I’m not sure why Philip Roth seems so concerned about the future of the novel; perhaps because he’s about to die, he thinks the novel should go with him?  Or maybe he’s talking about it because he has a new book just out, The Humbling.

In this Guardian article, Roth, who at 76 has been more prolific than ever, showers pessimistic forecasts about the future of the novel.  He predicts that the form will “dwindle to a ‘cultic’ minority enthusiasm within 25 years.”

And the death of the novel will be because of “the screens.”  Roth says, “the book can’t compete with the screen. It couldn’t compete [in the] beginning with the movie screen. It couldn’t compete with the television screen, and it can’t compete with the computer screen.  Now we have all those screens, so against all those screens a book couldn’t measure up.”

My sentiments on this are in alignment with Jeff Jarvis’ quote: “I wish we could declare declaring things dead dead.”

I remember all the nights I spent tucked into bed with my other sisters and our mother perched on the end of the bed reading Goodnight Moon to us.  Those were the days; now I just stay up late at night reading to myself.  It doesn’t sound like anything now, just a quiet void.

To fill that void comes a project called Listen Here, profiled here, which offers free weekly readings of short stories across New Haven coffee shops.   Bringing life to the stories will be actors from the New Haven Theater Company.

“It’s first and foremost a community endeavor; it’s not, per se, a literary endeavor,” said Bennett Lovett-Graff who started the series with David Brensilver.  The two men are trying to bring back the tradition of being read to.   “In the end, Mr. Brensilver said, “It’s more about let’s just sort of unplug, take your iPod ear buds out, shut down the laptop and let’s just appreciate some great writing. Pretty simple.”

You saw it coming.

Your grandma has a blog and your friend’s tweets are invading whatever small sliver of silent privacy you had left.  We’re all becoming authors.  Is this trend inevitable? …more

This week in the New York Times, Google co-founder Sergey Brin wrote an op-ed about Google’s efforts in the realm of digitizing so-called orphan books.  Despite ongoing legal drama, Brin insists that their efforts are for the good of everyone, and for all important texts that would otherwise be lost.  

Erick Schonfeld, co-editor of TechCrunch writes in his piece covering the latest press meeting, “The main objection to the settlement is that it will give Google a monopoly on out-of-print, or orphan books.” Brin provides a retort to that argument in his op-ed : “The agreement limits consumer choice in out-of-print books about as much as it limits consumer choice in unicorns.”  The unicorn defense!

Jonathan Ames has a great blog about his HBO TV series Bored to Death.  In this post he talks about the irony of engaging in an S&M session with his former student and then the very next evening being part of a presentation on torture put on by the  PEN American Center and the ACLU.  Then he goes on to give sweet and interesting behind the scene details on each of the show’s episodes.  It’s like being able to travel alongside Ames’ writerly life, from his love of Russian spas to his affinity for the Brooklyn coast, all with a little flogging along the way.

The popular software Pl@giarism used to detect cheating students by comparing their papers against published texts was recently used by Sir Brian Vickers, an authority on Shakespeare, to determine whether or not Shakespeare collaborated with Thomas Kyd on The Reign of King Edward III.

The debate on whether or not Shakespeare contributed to the play has been raging for over 150 years, and now some scholars feel that Vickers’ work puts the question to rest.  Apparently authors have literary fingerprints that can be used to compare and contrast texts to determine if they have collaborated or plagiarized other works.

Others disagree with the idea that Shakespeare collaborated; but it’s nice to think otherwise, as Jonathan Bate, Professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature at the University of Warwick, puts it: “I think it creates a more realistic image of Shakespeare than perhaps the romantic view some have of him as a solitary genius.”