The big deal arts-wise in Asheville this weekend is the inaugural WordFest, a poetry festival featuring a number of local and visiting poets at readings and talks around the city. It kicked off last night, and events continue through Sunday night. The website features live video so, if you can’t make it, you can tune in remotely.
I tend not to share my jetting-around calendar here because, as you may have gathered from all the excitement about the Jane Austen marathon on PBS a while back, there’s usually not much to report. But I’m looking forward to this weekend:
• Friday: Drinks with my friend Robert McGee, who has a new story in the just-launched Raleigh Quarterly.
• Saturday afternoon: Blue Ridge Rollergirls recruitment session at Malaprop’s.*
• Saturday night: Fatemeh Keshavarz and Galway Kinnell reading at Asheville WordFest.
• Sunday: Harold and Kumar Escape From Guatanamo Bay!!
* This has bad idea written all over it, but I can’t help it: I want to roll! I went to a match last weekend and it was, not to put too fine a point on it, awesome. Also, I seem to have come to the point in writing the book where even getting body-checked sounds more appealing than sitting in front of the computer any longer.

• Jessa Crispin files a great, candid dispatch from the London Book Fair:

If Book Expo America is a carnival — full of people desperately trying to draw attention to themselves with costumes, sway, and the occasional barely dressed woman — then the London Book Fair has all the atmosphere of an accountancy seminar. We are here at Earl’s Court to make deals and sell product, with brief breaks to discuss why we are not selling much product anymore.

• Small Beer Press is making Maureen McHugh’s book of short stories, Mothers & Other Monsters, available for free download. This news has already been widely linked to, but it’s a fantabulous book, one of my favorite collections of the last few years, and so I wanted to draw your attention there just in case. If you follow that link, you’ll see it’s the third book the press is making available this way — the two others are Kelly Link’s Stranger Things Happen (which I trust you’ve read, but David Orr fears you haven’t) and John Kessel’s The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories (which I haven’t read yet, but which comes highly recommended from a trusted source.)
• “He’d dead, Jim.”
Here’s where I can insert that at our local Asheville Pizza & Brewing Company, a very good pizza joint with a dollar theater attached (and a place where you should always tip handsomely because my stepson works there), there’s a menu item called the William Shatner Cheese Quesadilla. If you click through and watch the item above, there’s a moment that’s like a giant, delicious mouthful of William Shatner Cheese Quesadilla.
• While you were asleep last night, William T. Vollmann was hopping a train with a couple bums in Taipei. While you were brushing your teeth, he was sleeping with a hooker in Mexico City. And while you ate your cereal this morning, he banged out 10,000 pages on his next book. (Even as I type this he is teaching some Filipino convicts the routine to “Thriller.”) So, maybe it’s not too surprising that with a writer of such profligacy, sometimes he lands his metaphor … and sometimes he misses.

Howdy, and sorry so quiet here. Like Terry, I’ve been working like crazy on my book although unlike Terry (I suspect) my definition of “like crazy” includes time for Scrabulous. It’s a brave new world for me, Scrabulous. And it turns out, a fairly addictive one! I keep wondering how much games like this will figure in future literary biographies, i.e., “Work on the trilogy then halted as he strove to get under 5 minutes on the Hard level of Web Sudoku.” But mostly, I’ve been concentrating — I want to be finished with this thing by summer. Till then, full warning, I’ll be a little tired and not as polished as I wish I were (not to claim that I’ve ever operated like a ray-gun of insight and incisive comment) — because really, when I take a break lately, all I want to do is stand around & chat nonsense & have nonsense chatted back at me.
• Edith Wharton’s The Mount needs to raise $3 million to stay open after April 24 (Thursday). The situation sounds dire; the worst part of the story is that Wharton’s personal library, which was re-acquired by the estate only a couple years ago, may have to be sold to make up the funds. I’ve been hoping to visit The Mount for a while now, and so was glad the story includes a slideshow tour of its interiors. So many author houses are a disappointment — you go there looking for something that’s only in the books — but with Wharton, with her love of design and ornamentation, it doesn’t seem so extracurricular.
• Isabel Fonseca, author of the incredible Bury Me Standing and the new novel Attachment, and who I feel oddly protective over as people seem bent on dismissing her as being only Martin Amis’s pretty wife when Bury Me Standing is a formidable, great piece of nonfiction, profiled by Charles McGrath for The New York Times. Going over her history, McGrath compares her entertainingly to the Max Beerbohm character Zuleika Dobson, “a beautiful young woman who turns up at Oxford and makes all the undergrads suicidal with longing.” (Via TEV.)

A couple cool watch-able things:
• PBS’s American Experience is making its one-hour special on Walt Whitman available online. (Via SoT.)
• Yale’s roster of open courses includes a modern poetry class with lectures on such poets as Yeats, Bishop, Eliot and Moore. (Via Crooked House.)

5 x 5 Books … is a recommendation of five books that appears regularly in this space. Today’s installment comes from critic Michael Gorra. Michael teaches at Smith College and is the editor of The Portable Conrad (Penguin). I’m about to embark on a bunch of Conrad reading and so prevailed on Michael to set out the perfect primer. As you may remember, he also recently obliged us with a 5 x 5 Books related to Henry James.
But is a scene an incident, or a setting? My list includes both, and while I don’t know if that ambiguity obtains in other languages it seems entirely suited to Conrad. He thought that English words lacked hard edges. There was a fundamental lack of clarity to the language itself in a way that allowed one meaning to penetrate or maybe infiltrate another. So the simplest word might mean several different things — and clearly that confusion suited him.
1. The Secret Agent. I could fill this list with my favorite moments from this novel — it’s sick, I know, but reading this book always cheers me up. Still, I’ve got to skip over the wonderful negatives in the prose of the opening page, or the police constable’s report of his actions with a shovel. Let’s go instead with that “Hyperborean swine,” Mr. Vladimir, who in Chapter 2 instructs the title character to have “a go at astronomy” by bombing the Greenwich Observatory. He is the provocateur’s provocateur, a comic — indeed camp — version of the great tempters of nineteenth-century fiction, like Balzac’s Vautrin or Dostoevsky’s Svidrigailov.
2. Lord Jim. A setting here — the dinner Marlow gives to Jim at the Malabar House in Singapore. I haven’t counted, but it seems to take a hundred pages, in which Jim unfolds his history, protests, doubts, talks entirely too much… And Marlow listens, and then talks to us, tells us of the impression the man has made, ruminates. I wrote that last word unthinkingly, but it’s true: He does chew it all over a few times. It’s the point at which Marlow takes over the narrative, and his voice is so powerful that almost everybody forgets that the book starts in a more-or-less (well, less) conventional third person.
3. Nostromo. Not the scene in the silver-laden boat at night, the one that all readers remember. I like the more grotesque moments. Nostromo — our man — has swum ashore from that boat into the middle of a revolution; everyone believes he is dead. He sleeps all day in the sun, and at night makes his way into the Custom House of the city, drawn by two lighted windows in what should be darkness. He makes his way upstairs, and then stops, arrested by the shadow of a man upon the wall. He is unarmed, and so waits for a moment before going forward. But the shadow is that of a corpse.
4. Victory. English fiction has lots of novels about white men falling to pieces in hot countries. That’s a part of Conrad’s legacy. But nobody ever did it better, not even Graham Greene, and this late novel has a wonderful sequence set in a shabby island hotel, where a ladies’ orchestra plays to a crowd of colonial flotsam. The whole world is cheap and sweaty and shabby; there’s a trio of fabulous villains; and the hotelkeeper is the most wonderfully mediocre of souls, the hollowest of the hollow men. There is a hero, who wants nobler things, but he’s almost an afterthought; the book is most alive in its cheapest moments. I’m surprised Puccini never set it.
5. Under Western Eyes. The student Razumov, having betrayed a man who had trusted him with his secrets and his life, tells a police examiner that he wants “simply to retire.” Which makes his confessor ask, softly, “Where to?” No reader of Conrad will be surprised to learn that what then happens both fulfills the literal terms of Razumov’s desire and proves no retirement at all.

“One realizes that even in harmonious families there is this double life: the group life, which is the one we can observe in our neighbour’s household, and, underneath, another–secret and passionate and intense–which is the real life. . . . One realizes that human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life; that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them. In those simple relationships of loving husband and wife, affectionate sisters . . . there are innumerable shades of sweetness and anguish which make up the pattern of our lives.”
Willa Cather, Not Under Forty (as quoted and elided in Nancy Mildford’s Savage Beauty)

• At Library Thing, a wiki-type group is cataloging the libraries of the great departed, including those of Samuel Johnson (Terry, I’m looking at you), Sylvia Plath, and Walker Percy. (Via The Mumpsimus, who hopes they get to Borges soon.)
• Asheville alert: Junot Díaz reads at Warren Wilson College this Friday, April 11. It’ll be his first appearance since winning the Pulitzer for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. I expect it’ll be a MADHOUSE, enough so that it’s been a real war of conscience for me whether to even spread the word (and thus possibly lose a chance at a seat). What you’re seeing here is the triumph of moral fiber.
Also worth a look, this charming interview with Díaz from Newsweek.

• Whence sprang Miss Havisham? Charles Nickerson argues that a Disraeli novel, Venetia, based on the lives of Byron and Shelley, may have been an inspiration. (Australia responds, “*cough* Emily Eliza Donnithorne.”)
• Dan Chiasson on the poetry and personality of Frank O’Hara: “… where most poets deposited words with an eyedropper, O’Hara sprayed them through a fire hose.”