• This profile of Bret Easton Ellis is about a hundred times more interesting than you’d think. Or, than I thought it’d be. Ellis’ novels aren’t favorites but I think they’re smarter thought experiments than they get credited for (if sometimes wildly uneven in the follow through). For cultural juxtaposition, I suggest reading the profile while viewing this terrifying footage of Demi Moore talking about her “leech therapy.”
(First link via TEV.)
• Three books I’m desperate to read, with links to the why’s and wherefore’s so you can be desperate to read them too: Jiang Rong’s Wolf Totem, Roger Deakin’s Wildwood, and Richard Fortey’s Dry Store Room No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum. I’m also already hearing great things about Jincy Willett’s new novel, The Writing Class, which comes out in June.
• From the vaults: Marianne Moore’s zealous editing wasn’t confined to her friends’ poems, she was just as active at hacking away at her own. In a 2003 essay for The Believer, Dan Chiasson writes:

“Omissions are not accidents,” was the adage, self-minted, that served as the epigraph to Moore’s 1967 Complete Poems. That book was anything but “complete,” except in the sense of “finished off.” It seemed more a tally of subtractions than additions; Moore had radically revised some poems, and radically erased others. The resulting dainty book misrepresented her, and Moore has seemed, though never less interesting, somehow less ambitious than her male counterparts, Stevens, Eliot, and Williams.
Grace Schulman’s new collected Moore, The Poems of Marianne Moore (November 2003), prints every significant poem Moore wrote, including many she later suppressed and several she never printed at all. It is not a desecration of Moore to do so; as Schulman points out, “change” was at the heart of her aesthetic, and had she lived another thirty years she most surely would have found her own Complete Poems inadequate.

Terry, OGIC, and I are all big fans of Kate Christensen’s work, so it was thrilling to hear that her most recent novel, The Great Man, has received a well-deserved honor, taking home the 2008 Pen/Faulkner Award for Fiction.
I was also pleased to learn from Galleycat that Sonya Hartnett, author of the phenomenal Thursday’s Child and other novels, has received the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award for children’s literature. Yay yay!

• Julian Barnes writes about Flaubert’s late correspondence in the Times Literary Supplement. Barnes quotes a letter the author wrote near the end of his life where he said, “Giving the public details about oneself is a bourgeois temptation I have always resisted,” killing hopes that if Flaubert lived today he would be on Tumblr (URL: farouche.tumblr.com).
• I also finally got to Hilary Mantel’s essay on Chambers Dictionary of the Unexplained and think you should get to it too:

To many of us, a great deal of what we encounter daily is unexplained. If you are in mid-life now, it is possible to have received what was described at the time as a good education and still know nothing of science or technology. Those on the other side of the cultural divide complain that the artists are proud of their deficiency, but this is seldom so. It’s easy, if you can read, to brush up your Shakespeare, but not so easy to use your spare half-hours to catch up on the inorganic chemistry you missed. It’s the people cringing from their scientific illiteracy who buy Stephen Hawking books they can’t read, as if having them on the shelf will make the knowledge rub off; they snap up tracts on atheism, too, to show that if they’re ignorant they’re at least rational.

If she’d only mentioned that never-read copy of Gödel, Escher, Bach, it’d be like she was seeing into my soul.
(Both these links purloined over various months from Jenny Davidson.)
• Also, finally, against my better judgment, and with fear that I will make my dear co-bloggers grip their heads and exclaim, “What have you done to our blog! Our beautiful arts blog!” but I have to share my outrage with everyone, I am including a link to David Cook doing unspeakable things to “Eleanor Rigby” on American Idol. Just watching this performance nearly turned me into Seymour Glass, it was that phony, and people are praising it! Simon! Joe R.! I look forward to next week when David will freestyle for ten minutes, then break his guitar over the speaker while performing “The Sound of Silence.”

“Girls, take my advice, marry an animal. A wooly one is most consoling. Find a fur man, born midwinter. Reared in the mountains. Fond of boxing. Make sure he has black rubbery lips, and a sticky sweet mouth. A winter sleeper. Pick one who likes to tussle, who clowns around the kitchen, juggles hot baked potatoes, gnaws playfully on a corner of your apron. Not one mocked by his lumbering instincts, or who’s forever wrestling with himself, tainted with shame, itchy with chagrin, but a good-tempered beast who plunges in greedily, grinning and roaring. His backslapping manner makes him popular with the neighbors, till he digs up and eats their Dutch tulip bulbs. Then you see just how stuffy human beings can be. On Sundays his buddies come over to play watermelon football. When they finally get tired, they collapse on heap of dried grass and leaves, scratching themselves elaborately, while I hand out big hunks of honeycomb. They’ve no problem swallowing dead bees stuck in the honey.”
— Amy Gerstler, “Bear-Boy of Lithuania,” included in Medicine

While the Ted Hughes moment is afoot, now is maybe a good time to publicly wish that his book Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being be brought back into print. It’s such an eccentric and dazzling piece of criticism, it seems terrible that it’s fallen out of print in both the United States and England.* Especially since Hughes claimed writing it gave him cancer — the least we could do is keep the book circulating a while longer.
Faber & Faber? NYRB? Anyone?
* Currently, the cheapest copy on Abebooks is $88; a used copy on Amazon.uk is 80 pounds. Every time I check out the local library’s copy, I worry that I’m going to misplace it somewhere and have to wash dishes in the library kitchen forever.
RELATED: A nice piece about Hughes and myth from the Journal of Mythic Arts.

“Usually his wit was austerely pure, but sometimes he could jolt the more cynical. Once we were looking at a furnished apartment that one of our friends had just rented. It was overbearingly eccentric. Life-size clay lamps like flowerpots remodeled into Matisse nudes by a spastic child. Paintings made from a palette of mud by a blind painter. About the paintings Randall said, ‘Ectoplasm sprinkled with zinc.’ About the apartment, ‘All that’s missing are Mrs. X’s illegitimate children in bottles of formaldehyde.'”
Robert Lowell, “Randall Jarrell, 1914-1965: An Appreciation”

From Rachel Cohen’s A Chance Meeting:

After they had been friends for six years, [Elizabeth] Bishop sent Moore a new poem, “Roosters”–“At four o’clock / in the gun-metal blue dark / we hear the first crow of the first cock.” Bishop described her roosters “marking out maps like Rand McNallys” with: “glass-headed pins, / oil-golds and copper greens, / anthracite blues, alizarins.” Marianne Moore and her mother were so upset by “Roosters” that they stayed up until three o’clock in the morning rewriting it, taking out everything that smacked of vulgarity, particularly a most objectionable reference to a “water-closet.” Bishop kept the poem as she had written it, but she and Moore remained close friends–testament to how loyal and sure they both were.

In his introduction to One Art, a collection of Bishop’s (amazing) letters, Robert Giroux observes that Moore (and her mother) even changed the title of “Roosters”, noting parenthetically, “their choice was ‘The Cock’.”
Rewriting of “Roosters” aside, Moore, it should be noted, was an early and important champion and mentor of Bishop’s. She also sat on a panel that awarded Sylvia Plath a first prize in a poetry contest while Plath was at Smith. Yet, a few years later, when Plath sent her a group of poems and requested a reference for the Saxton grant (Moore had previously written a reference for Plath’s husband Ted Hughes), Moore was less supportive. As Anne Stevenson writes in her biography of Plath, Bitter Fame:

In July, to Sylvia’s surprise and keen distress, Miss Moore sent her in reply what Sylvia saw as “a queerly ambiguous spiteful letter… ‘Don’t be so grisly,'” she commented; “you are too unrelenting.'” And she added “certain pointed remarks about ‘typing being a bugbear.'” Sylvia concluded that Miss Moore was annoyed because she had sent carbon copies instead of fresh top sheets. That seems unlikely. While Marianne Moore usually admired Ted’s work, she never warmed to Sylvia’s, disliking the early traces of the very elements that later were to carry her to fame: macabre doom-laden themes, heavy with disturbing colors and totemlike images of stones, skulls, drownings, snakes, and bottled fetuses — hallmarks of Sylvia’s gift.

I will forever love “Don’t be so grisly!” as a remark to Plath.
RELATED: Marianne Moore’s suggestions for the naming of a new model of Ford, submitted in 1955. Alas, the car company didn’t pick The Utopian Turtletop, The Mongoose Civique orThe Turcotingo, and went with the Edsel instead.

“Do
You still hang your words in air, ten years
Unfinished, glued to your notice board, with gaps,
Or empties for the unimaginable phrase–
Unerring Muse who makes the casual perfect?”
Robert Lowell, “For Elizabeth Bishop 4”