James Franco's film of "As I Lay Dying"

Actor/director James Franco, who briefly investigated enrolling in the UAlbany English Department Ph.D. program a couple of years ago (he ended up going to NYU instead, skipping classes, not handing in work, getting poor grades, and annoying a lot of professors), has begun filming his own adaptation of William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying.

From the LA Times:

"Are you feeling like a William Faulkner character? Head to Mississippi, where open call casting sessions for the film adaptation of "As I Lay Dying" begin this week. Don't be surprised if you think you see James Franco; the Oscar-nominated actor adapted the novel for the screen, and will be directing."  More.

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Sexing the Classics

Jo Page, who visited the Institute in March, ponders the forthcoming Fifty Shades of Grey versions of literary classics in Metroland column "Reckonings" this week:

"You’d think with all the sex there is in the world of literature—Poe with his necrophilia, Hawthorne with his adultery, Mailer and Miller and Updike and Roth with all manner of erotic expressiveness—that we wouldn’t need to go looking for more titillation. But maybe we do...."

More.

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Teju Cole visits W. G. Sebald's grave in the New Yorker

Nigerian author Teju Cole, who visited us last February, tells of his pilgrimmage to W. G. Sebald's grave in the most recent issue of the New Yorker.

"Finally, coming around the chancel, I saw S.’s gravestone: a slab of dark marble, a slender marker shaded by a large green bush. There he is, I thought. The teacher I never knew, the friend I met only posthumously. Some water had trickled down the face of the slab, making the “S” of his name temporarily invisible, as well as the second “4” in 1944 and the “1” in 2001. The erasures put him into a peculiar timelessness. Along the top of the gravestone was a row of smooth small stones in different shades of brown and gray. There was a little space on the left. I picked up a stone from the ground and added it to the row. Then I knelt down."   More.
More about Teju Cole here.

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Against the Sci-Fi Boys' Club

Fantasy author Damien Walter writes about why the male culture of science fiction needs to open its doors to women.

He highlights a number of female masters of the genre including Margaret Atwood (who visited the Writers Institute in November 2005), Alice Sheldon, Madeline Ashby and Tricia Sullivan.

"There's a logical fallacy in this club's claims that it welcomes women members, which is rather like the rhetoric of the well-schooled military officer. Of course they want women in the army. It's just, well, a soldier must be physically strong, naturally violent and preferably have a todger so you can pee standing up. Any woman who fulfils those criteria is more than welcome to take the king's shilling!"  More in The Guardian:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/aug/07/hard-sf-women-writers

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Excessive Exclamation Points !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Ben Yagoda writes about the use, misuse and meaning of the exclamation point in email in an op-ed piece in the New York Times:

"My 21-year-old daughter once criticized my habit of ending text-message sentences with a period. For a piece of information delivered without prejudice, she said, you don’t need any punctuation at the end (“Movie starts at 6”). An exclamation point is minimally acceptable enthusiasm (“See you there!”). But a period just comes off as sarcastic (“Good job on the dishes.”). "  More.

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Is Dave Eggers the Norman Mailer of the 21st century?

Pico Iyer wonders whether Dave Eggers (who visited the Institute in 2004) is the Norman Mailer of the 21st century.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/22/books/review/a-hologram-for-the-king-by-dave-eggers.html?pagewanted=all

Mailer visited last in 2007, shortly before he died. He also served as New York State Author under the auspices of the Writers Institute 1991-93.

Eggers' visit:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/eggers_dave.html

Mailer's last visit:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/mailer.html

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On Garrison Keillor's Writers Almanac Today....

Charles Fort, writer, son of Albany, questioner of scientific certainties, the "Hermit of the Bronx," had his birthday celebrated on today's edition of The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor on NPR.

"Charles Fort was born [August 6, 1874] into a fairly prosperous family of Dutch immigrants who owned a wholesale grocery business in Albany, New York State. He was the eldest of three brothers - the others being Clarence, and the youngest, Raymond. Their mother died within a few years of Clarence's birth and Fort's father married again during Fort's teens."

"Beatings by his tyrannical father helped set him against authority and dogma, as he declares in the remaining fragments of his autobiography Many Parts. Escaping home at the age of 18, he worked as a reporter in New York City before hitch-hiking through Europe "to put some capital into the bank of experience." In 1896, aged 22, he contracted malaria in South Africa and returned to New York where he married Anna Filan (or Filing), an English servant girl in his father's house."

More:  http://www.forteana.org/html/fortbiog.html#hermit

Garrison Keillor visited the Writers Institute (the largest crowd we have been privileged to host) in September 2003: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/keillor_garrison.html

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