People Who Died: Jim Carroll

Sad.  Punk poet Jim Carroll, author of “The Basketball Diaries,”  died of a heart attack in his Manhattan apartment on Friday.  He was 60.

I happened to see him read, or rather struggle and shuffle and digress in the attempt to read, at the Brooklyn Book Festival two years ago.  He looked aged beyond his years, but was still scrappy and engaging.

Jim Carroll, I salute you brother. Read the New York Times obit here.

Ephemera: Forgotten Bookmarks

If you are the kind of person who frequently acquires your reading material from libraries and used book stores, as I am, likely you find, stuck between the pages of your recent acquisition, random scraps that have served as the previous owner or checker outer’s placeholder –  a receipt, or a ticket stub, a sticky note with a hastily jotted grocery list, maybe.  These weird fragments, these little artifacts of another person’s existence.  These scraps.  They illuminate something and yet nothing at all. They are mostly mundane trash, but specific trash from a specific individual.  I’m kind of fascinated by it.  Windows into strangers’ lives, and all that.

Anyway!  How wonderful is the site Forgotten Boomarks, a blog started by an employee at a used and rare bookstore, who posts these left behind and “personal, funny, heartbreaking and weird things” that are found.  Do give it a look.

Forgotten Bookmarks [via Quiddity; Andrew Sullivan]

Pretty Things: Book Covers by Ruben Toledo

Renowned Cuban artist Ruben Toledo illustrated the covers to the Penguin Classics Deluxe Editions of The Scarlet Letter, Wuthering Heights, and Pride and Prejudice.  They are rather fantastic. [Nylon]

For When You Want to Share Your Dream Cast of a Mary Higgins Clark Book With the Internet

Paul Constant at the Slog does not think much of Storycasting, the site where you can play casting director with your favorite books.  “What a weird, unnecessary little website”  he says. Which is not untrue!  But then:  welcome to the internet! It’s already cluttered with forking roads and distractions and trifles, so what’s one more?  Cubicle monkeys cannot live by keyboard cat clips alone. I suppose there must needs be these time wastery websites.  And boy howdy do people want to cast some Janet Evanovich and Jodi Picoult, though not so much James Purdy or Mary Gaitskill. Still! Maybe you want to be the first.  If, you know, you see the “the movie in your mind.”

The Harry Potter Delusion: Richard Dawkins Is Your New Voldemort

Evolutionary biologist-slash-author-slash-atheist Richard Dawkins — the man who coined the term meme — is turning his staunch efforts to institute strict rational thought from disproving the existence of God towards another enemy of his, one Harry Potter. More specifically, “anti-scientific” fairytales. Though! Fun fact: He admits to not having actually read a single volume of the “Harry Potter” series. Actually, he’s just using the myths and the magics as a backdoor to go after his favorite topic, religion. He says of the book project, “I plan to look at mythical accounts of various things and also the scientific account of the same thing. And the mythical account that I look at will be several different myths, of which the Judeo-Christian one will just be one of many.”

In fact, he thinks kids reading about all this hocus pocus can be downright detrimental. “Prof Dawkins is targeting children as the audience of his next project because he believes they are being ‘abused’ by being taught about religion at school and labelled Christian, Jewish or Muslim from a young age.”

Jack was busy tending to his beanstalk and could not be reached for comment. Rose Red, on hearing the news, said Dawkins “could go fuck himself.”