I seem to do this every fall, but I’ve got more work than I can handle and still manage a blog, so I’m pulling back again. If you want to do a private book club, I’ve got a lot on my shelf right now:

• Jane Smiley’s Good Faith
• Vargas Llosa’s Conversation in a Cathedral
• The selected stories of Andre Dubus
• Still going on the selected stories of Alice Munro
• Michael Byers’s The Coast of Good Intentions
• Barry Hannah’s Long Last Happy
• Patricia Henley’s upcoming story collection, Other Heartbreaks
• Ron Rash’s upcoming poetry collection, Waking

I’m also taking recommendations. (Volt and Desert Gothic are already on my list.)

• I’m dipping in and out of quite a few books lately: Camus’s The Stranger, Percy’s Signposts in a Strange Land, The Essential Kierkegaard (trans. Hong and Hong), and Tyler Cowen’s The Age of the Infovore. I might have a separate post down the line about the Cowen, which is interesting reading about the cognitive patterns of autism and how our current information economy favors some of those characteristics.
• My friend Anna has started a new collaborative blog, So You Have an MFA, which I might contribute to on occasion. The overall theme is: Now what?
• Hollywoodland is a very good period piece noir about the death of George Reeves, who played Superman on TV in the ’50s. Was it suicide or murder? Adrien Brody plays a private investigator who sets out to discover the truth. Also starring Ben Affleck and Diane Lane.
• In 2009, Steve Earle released Townes, an album of Townes Van Zandt covers, which is as good as it sounds. Highly recommended.
• Inventors: Check out Quirky, a social media product development company. I saw their founder give a talk the other day. He’s a real young guy who when in high school convinced his parents to take out a second mortgage on their home so he could market an invention (a kind of iPod cord that helped him listen to music in class without the teacher catching on). With Quirky, you can submit invention ideas, and a network of roughly 60,000 members collaborate to make the invention workable, and then Quirky builds and distributes it and you get the royalties. Things are for sale in Bed Bath and Beyond, among other major retailers.

At Ron Rash’s reading yesterday, he mentioned a few things that collectively were like an epiphany to me. He said he rewrote Serena 14 times and that somewhere in those revisions he discovered the character Rachel. He said that while Serena remains somewhat constant, he needed a character who changed — for instance, he said, Gatsby is static, whereas Nick Carraway changes. He also mentioned he structured the book like an Elizabethan drama, and on a related point he had the character Serena speaking in iambics. All kinds of conscious decisions the critics will be parsing over for years.

Point being, Serena was wrought from incredible hard work. In emulation of my literary hero, and because I’m not an innate genius, I’m off to the grindstone with renewed vigor after this weekend’s festival. Thus, I’m putting this blog on hiatus. I’ve announced a hiatus for the blog before, but I really don’t have the time to be an artist and a commentator, and really only one of those identities means anything to me. I’ll keep the publications page up to date.  Otherwise, if you’d like to chat about books, shoot me an e-mail or find me on Facebook.

I stumbled on this today, an article about a mass of users supposedly quitting Facebook on May 31 because of privacy concerns, boredom et cetera. This isn’t really news, and I wonder if Facebook has become too embedded in our culture to just wither away (they’re planning my 10-year high school reunion with a Facebook group: I can’t quit! I have to get the reunion scoop!), but did enjoy this paragraph from last August’s NY Times:

Is Facebook doomed to someday become an online ghost town, run by zombie users who never update their pages and packs of marketers picking at the corpses of social circles they once hoped to exploit? Sad, if so. Though maybe fated, like the demise of a college clique.

• Grumpy old man.
• Guns in Wyoming. (Watch out, federal agents.)
• DeLillo interview.
• James Wood taking a fiction nonbeliever to task, and then commenting on Chang-Rae Lee’s new novel.
• Courtesy of Bookninja, the NY Times has an essay about novelists and work.
• Finally, courtesy of Tyler Cowen, here is a photo of a bird’s stomach.

• The auction begins
• Desktops irrelevant?
• Serena: the movie – I’m not sure I would have pegged Angelina Jolie, but whatever gets the movie made, I’m OK with.  (Now if we could just get Ron Rash on Entertainment Tonight…)
• More on Barry Hannah
• Regarding Hannah, is this tacky? I didn’t read close enough to tell.
• Eliot Spitzer: “Only government can ensure integrity, transparency, and fair dealing.”

No new posts lately because I’m in the middle of a few big books:

• Steve Coll’s Ghost Soldiers, about U.S. involvement in Afghanistan from 1979 to Sept. 10, 2001. It’s a good, thorough read, but I’ve read most of that information elsewhere before (or saw it in Charlie Wilson’s War). I did like the line, “Terrorism is theater,” a quote from analyst Brian Michael Jenkins.
• Robert Stone’s Damascus Gate. This is sort of a thriller set in Jerusalem in 1992, about a burned out and spiritually lost journalist. I’ll write more about this later, but I will say that I can’t think of the last time I read a better scene than chapter 29. This is a big book, but I’d highly recommend checking out of the library and reading that one chapter, if nothing else. The journalist and these two women are smuggling something – guns, probably – into Gaza in a UN van.
• The Norton Anthology of Southern Literature. Across the board, I tend to read more deeply than widely. I’ll find an author I like and read and reread everything he wrote, but it’s at the cost of a lot of famous stuff. Since I’m working in the southern tradition, I’m trying to give myself a survey. I’m especially unread in the poets – Ransom, Tate, Jarrell. One tension this anthology is highlighting is that during the Southern Renaissance (Faulkner’s time) the twin impulses were to look back at the Antebellum (agrarian) South with either nostalgia (because of the ugly industrial life) or with shame (a progressive move make things right). The anthology ends with the generation born around 1950. I’m coming 30 years after that, and I’m wondering just how much of that regional tension still exists and is unique to the South. One thing I’ve noticed is that there are race issues all over the country, and tensions between urban (progressive, industrial) and rural (agrarian, conservative), so is there anything uniquely southern anymore that’s not partly a construct (i.e. my grandma on the mountain)?