– SHARPEN YOUR GAZE: Over at Blogging L.A. yesterday, I gave Faboomama a Nathanael West-inspired lecture (second comment in) on why she should not openly laugh and guffaw at L.A.’s faux architectural styles; as is par for the course at BLA, any attempt at intellectual discourse has thus far been non-engaged. I guess stories about asinine “rebel” bicyclists taking to the L.A. freeways in some sort of “daring demonstration showing exactly how inefficient driving a car in Los Angeles can be sometimes” is their idea of an engaging dialogue. (Well, actually, it is).

– WHAM, BAM, THANK YOU, MA’AM: Over at Be Not Inhospitable To Strangers, Scot Young has crafted a nice haiku sonnet, 17 Syllable Sex, inspired, he says, by the online journal of my brief return visit to L.A.

– SEARING! Our own John Shannon has received a nice notice from Publishers Weekly for his new Jack Liffey novel, The Devils of Bakersfield:

In Shannon’s searing 10th novel to feature Jack Liffey (after 2007’s The Dark Streets), Jack and his pregnant teenage daughter, Maeve, run into trouble in Bakersfield, Calif., after stopping there for the night on their way home to Los Angeles. When a sleepless Maeve leaves their motel for a walk, she’s falsely arrested for dope possession and jailed for a short time with Toxie, a rebellious teen with whom she discovers she shares a passion for Jane Eyre. Worried about Toxie, Maeve later returns from L.A. to Bakersfield, where Dennis Kohlmeyer, the paranoid pastor of the 10,000-member Olive Grove Evangelical Church, has incited his flock to hysteria against devil worshippers. Scenes of book burning, exorcism, wholesale jailings and worse may strike some as exaggerated, but Shannon cites actual examples of Bakersfield’s long history of racial and social prejudice throughout. The plot-driven action builds to an either/or ending on which readers are invited to vote on the author’s Web site.

– AND FINALLY … I ALWAYS HATED MAMET: Ah, sweet justice. It is being reported that a massive audience walkout ensued at a recent solo reading by David Mamet of his adaptation of Dr. Faustus in NYC:

At first one or two left, dignified and quiet, as if they had to get home to relieve the babysitter.

Then coats started rustling, whispers became impolitely perceptible, and the audience grew ever more restless. The Kaufmann Auditorium in the 92nd Street Y was turning into an unhappy, however cultured, hubbub.

But David Mamet droned on, inexorably reading what I remember as the manuscript version of his Dr. Faustus. And he seemed amused that the audience wasn’t amused.

The evening had taken an odd turn indeed. After being lushly entertaining in his cultured Robin Williams way, he had squandered our good will and anticipation with a vigorous reading of the kind of play-in-verse that could give plays-in-verse a deadly dull reputation.

 

Previously: Lit Blogging 5.0