Monday's Margins: Blue words; Vocabulary; Putting the Rooster to bed; first class.

... Best blurb: " The asshole Thomas Bernhard -- and I say this even though I dislike speaking ill of the dead -- the asshole Thomas Bernhard, it's fairly certain to say, only wrote a single good book. This book appears only now, even though he already wrote it in 1980, and it demonstrates what an asshole he was." (via Conversational Reading)

... "Schott's Vocab is a repository of unconsidered lexicographical trifles - some serious, others frivolous, some neologized, others newly newsworthy. Each day, Schott's Vocab explores news sites around the world to find words and phrases that encapsulate the times in which we live or shed light on a story of note. If language is the archives of history, as Emerson believed, then Schott’s Vocab is an attempt to index those archives on the fly." (via Readerville)

... The fifth annual Tournament of Books comes to a close this week, with a (relatively under)dog contender going against a couple of heavyweights. Sadly, no Rooster for The Dart League King, which you really should read.

... First class is in session. The American Novel Since 1945:

In this first lecture Professor Hungerford introduces the course's academic requirements and some of its central concerns. She uses a magazine advertisement for James Joyce's Ulysses and an essay by Vladimir Nabokov (author of Lolita, a novel on the syllabus) to establish opposing points of view about what is required to be a competent reader of literature. The contrast between popular emotional appeal and detached artistic judgment frames literary debates from the Modernist, and through the post-45 period. In the second half of lecture, Hungerford shows how the controversies surrounding the publication of Richard Wright's Black Boy highlight the questions of truth, memory, and autobiography that will continue to resurface throughout the course.

Sharing the poetry love

T.S. Eliot might have said April is the cruelest month in The Waste Land, but I personally have a fondness for the first full month of spring. Living in New England means never knowing what sort of weather to expect next, but at least once you get to April, you're that much closer to warmer weather. Not that there's anything wrong with the cold. Dropping temperatures inspire people to stay indoors and read. Yet there's something about the promise of sunny days that can influence our reading choices, and the transition period always makes me want to read poetry. Perhaps it's the awakening of the senses after the long, sometimes cruel winter months.

One of my favorite parts of April is that it's National Poetry Month. In preparation for that, I offer you a podcast from Ann Kingman and Michael Kindness' blog, Books on the Nightstand. I review a new book of poetry put out by Norton and edited by Robert Pinsky, called Essential Pleasures. It's a wonderful new anthology dedicated to the sheer enjoyment of reading poems out loud. Norton is launching a website starting April 1st where Robert Pinsky and other poets will blog about this process. It's definitely a site to add to your bookmarks. In addition to my review, the Books on the Nightstand podcast includes an in-depth interview with Vermont poet Michael Schiavo, and poet & bookseller Marie Gauthier offers her opinion of The Plath Cabinet by Catherine Bowman.

Speaking of poets, one I can't recommend highly enough also happens to be the coolest person in the world. Her name is Mekeel McBride. I studied with her at the University of New Hampshire, and she is truly one of the most free-spirited, talented writers I know. She makes writing seem effortless when we all know it really isn't. Her poems do what poetry can do best: paint dazzling bursts of images. Her poem, "The Mechanics of Repair", published in Ploughshares, starts:

"How did I spend my evening?
By coming home in rain that slowly
translated itself into curtain after curtain
of oriental beads that I brushed through
cold and very tired."

Read more here.

Monday's Margins: Still Hungry, Still in Style, John Wray in 5.

...Happy Birthday to The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

Booktrade: "20th March, the first day of Spring, marks the official launch day of the 40th anniversary of The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle, a book which sells one copy every 30 seconds somewhere in the world, day and night. Translated into more than 45 languages, this special picture book has now sold over 29 million copies."

MediaBistro: "The famed caterpillar actually began his life as an ordinary worm. After some fortuitous experimentation with a hole puncher, Carle got to thinking about a bookworm and created A Week with Willi Worm, which ended with the title character growing into a morbildy obese worm. "I showed it to my editor, Ann Beneduce, and she didn't like the worm so much," explains Carle in a video on his website. "She said, 'How about a caterpillar?' And I said, 'Butterfly!'" And the rest is history.""

...Happy Birthday to The Elements of Style, which was first published ten years before The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

The Seattle Times: "...William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White worked four decades apart, yet the little known turn-of-the-century Cornell University English professor and his universally famous student produced a classic that has become one of America's most influential and best-known guides on grammar and usage. "Strunk and White's The Elements of Style" has sold more than 10 million copies since its initial publication in April 1959. Its present-day publisher, Longman Publishers, has put out a special black leather-bound, gold-embossed edition in tribute of the 50th anniversary. ...The 50th anniversary edition has 95 pages, but also includes several pages of testimonials from famous literary figures past and present, Angell's foreword, an introduction written by White to the 1979 edition and an afterword by Charles Osgood, anchor of CBS News Sunday Morning."

I have a copy here; it's very nice, compliments my Elements of Style audiobook nicely. (I'm not joking.) My only gripe is that Longman did not "omit needless words" when they included a testimonial from "famous literary figure past/present" Ben Affleck. (I'm still not joking.) (Kind of wish I was, though.)

...Finally: John Wray, author of the acclaimed Lowboy, has a story appearing this week at the excellent Five Chapters website.

Google Book Search, National Grammar Day, David Foster Wallace

NY Times on Google Book Search: "The almost comically sweeping attempt to reach the world's entire literate population is a reflection of the ambitions of the Google Book Search project, in which the company hopes to digitize every book -- famous or not, in any language, published anywhere on earth -- found in the world's libraries."

According to The Elegant Variation, today is National Grammar Day.

Birnbaum's waxing about Zen and gardening.

The L.A. Times reports on David Foster Wallace's unconventional posthumous book deal.

The Telegraph reviews Dali and I: Exposing the Dark Circus of the International Art Market.