Bites: That guy from The Princess Bride, chapbook reviews, Grouper at ATP, intellectual bankruptcy, and more


Lit.

Wallace Shawn (above),  the guy who was in The Princess Bride is the son of former New Yorker editor William Shawn?  Wallace Shawn, the guy in Clueless, has a book of essays out?  What awesome weird universe have I woken up to this morning?

Everybody thinks Joyce is a fricken genius.  I still don’t get it.

The Millions releases the group of nominated books that did not make it on their best fiction of the millennium list.  James Wood, Margaret Atwood, and Gary Shteyngart all make appearances.

Three Guys One Book discuss The Complete Stories of JG Ballard.  Mention the Jonathan Lethem essay.

Tobias Carroll reviews Those Bones, a chapbook by David Ohle.

What do Coolio, Nabokov, and Captain Beefheart have in common?


Politics

The Daily Beast discuss Obama failing to deliver the Olympics to Chicago.

Intellectual bankruptcy” and the right.  Is the right fucked?

Music

The Rumpus pick possibly one of my top three favorite songs of all time as their tune of the day. (Hint, it’s a Kinks song)

Grouper played ATP, WFMU wrote about it.

New Built to Spill album being streamed!

DJ Mr. Magic died.

Film/Theater

Scallywag and Vagabond are the only site that are giving us the Polanski updates we care to read.

Philip Seymour Hoffman is BOMBING! Vol. 1 Brooklyn is rooting for ya Phil!

Guys from Mighty Boosh are going to be in a film called “Bunny and the Bull”

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  1. Wallace (or Wally Shawn) is one of my favorite playwrights. I’m still surprised more people especially in the NY literary scene only know of him ‘as that guy from Princess Bride’.

    Its a shame because he and Andre Gregory
    are sometimes credited with essentially inventing ‘indy film’ with their ‘My Dinner With Andre’ in the early 80’s.

    In addition to writing articles of political commentary for The Nation and publishing progressive issues of work by Chomsky, and Jonothan Schell, his short and long-length plays have run the spectrum of extreme sexual spectacle to crippling social commentary.

    I recommend ‘The Fever’ – an hour and a half length monologue of a Western businessman pent up in a foreign motel room…

    or ‘A Thought in 3 Parts’ – for near impossible sexual schematics.