07 March 2010

Smorgasbord!

So my feed reader where I pick up all my bloggin' goodness has been acting up, making it temporarily appear now and then as if there were no new entries to read anywhere. How could all my blogmigos go on blogcation without me? When it is working, like now, I'm overwhelmed with stuff I missed, plus I'm totally pre-posting this because today I have to go to Washington Heights to get my ass kicked, (and then go home and reconsider my life choices?), so here are some items of note that may be slightly out of date:

First and foremost, we have a landing date:


That's the Tuesday before Labor Day, so you know not to go anywhere this year. Perhaps by then J-Franz will have a working website for hopeful readers to visit, but that is a completely different topic of discussion.

Yann Martel was pretty stoked to get a fan letter from President Obama. But who wouldn't be? (via Galleycat)

This street art exhibit is one of the coolest things I have ever seen. The artists, originally from Madrid, spread out 800 books on a street in Brooklyn (that's the Brooklyn Bridge at the end of the street in the first photo) over two hours one night and called it "Literature finally won the traffic battle in New York."

CBS has ordered a comedy pilot for this fall about a "book editor at a boutique New York publishing house" called "Open Books." I don't expect much coming from a producer of "Will and Grace," but I am slightly curious now that they've cast Patti LuPone and Laura Benanti in it.

Billy Crudup will take on the role of a controversial writer Off-Broadway this spring in a new play by one of my favorite playwrights, Adam Rapp. The play, "The Metal Children," is about a YA author who goes to the small town where one of his books has been banned -- something Rapp went through in Pennsylvania a few years ago with his YA novel THE BUFFALO TREE. I was on board this hype train before Crudup got involved but it's always good to see him when he's not all blue and glowy. You can also see him this summer as Elizabeth Gilbert's ex-husband in "Eat, Pray, Love."

Finally, via Flavorwire, the trailer for Seth Grahame-Smith's ABRAHAM LINCOLN, VAMPIRE HUNTER (not for kids):



Frankly I've seen better Lincolns in the national park system. If only I could remember where.

1 comment:

Wade Garrett said...

Perhaps this is inevitable, but the casting decisions in those "Under the Tuscan Sun" and "Eat, Pray Love" movies drive me crazy. For all I know, their authors are beautiful women and lovely people, but casting Diane Lane or Julia Roberts in the "Look how lovely this woman OF A CERTAIN AGE is!!!!1 Your heart should go out to her!!1 You should support her for her search for . . . whatever it is she's searching for." Nothing against Elizabeth Gilbert, but Hollywood's desire to turn books like this into romantic comedies starring gorgeous mega-stars is exactly the sort of thing that Charlie Kaufman wrote about in Adaptation.