• “World’s Bliss,” “Clinical Thermometer Set With Moonstone, “II–The Person That You Were Will Be Replaced,” three poems by Alice Notley whose collection Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems 1970-2005 was just awarded the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize by the Academy of American Poets.
• The infamous Blackwood’s review that dashed Keats.
• Cheer up, poet! Star Wars and superhero dog costumes will banish ennui. The Yoda and Princess Leia slave dog outfits merit particular scrutiny.

• Read Roxana Robinson’s introduction to the NYRB collection of Edith Wharton’s New York stories.
• As research for a project I’ve been dipping now and again into this early 1900’s account of New York. It’s oddly charming, with chapters that start like this: “Three o’clock is the hour when the heaped-up people in the lower city begin to move outward again.”

• Limey critics continue their hegemonic reign over American letters: Christopher Hitchens’ (very sharp) review of the new Philip Roth for The Atlantic, and James Wood makes his staff-writer debut at the New Yorker with some talk about God. As Lee Ann Womack sings, there’s more where that came from.
• Jezebel revisits Candace Bushnell’s old Sex & The City columns to see how well they’ve held up. Raising the question, who doesn’t love a man in a nice trilby hat?

A fun writing class last night. I felt cruddy on the drive over — it’s my week to turn in pages, and I don’t like the creepy little story I’ve been working on — but class cheered me back up.
A lot of the discussion was generated by Andrew Furman’s piece on “the creative nonfiction crisis” in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers (not available online), the article dovetailing with questions like, when describing a real-life event, where’s the line between artistic license versus the deliberately misleading: Recreated dialogue? Compression of events?
Several of my classmates are writing personal essays or memoir so these are real, worrying issues for them; for me, they’re happily abstract. When I got home I went looking for an old Mary Karr interview where she recounts giving the manuscript of The Liars’ Club to her mother to read. I haven’t found that particular interview yet but I did come across this snippet:

The task [of writing Liars’ Club] was searing: “When I started unpacking my memory and sitting in the middle of it all day, I had the most bizarre experiences–I’d write an hour and a half or two hours and then lie down on the floor of my study and sleep the sleep of the dead.” Taped above her computer was a letter from [Tobias] Wolff offering her this advice: “Take no care for your dignity. Don’t be afraid of appearing angry, small-minded, obtuse, mean, immoral, amoral, calculating, or anything else. Don’t approach your history as something to be shaken for its cautionary fruits. Tell your stories, and your story will be revealed.” Karr’s mother, on the other hand, put it more bluntly. “Hell, get it off your chest,” she counseled.

I like Wolff’s advice, which seems equally applicable whether you’re writing fiction or nonfiction.

• George Saunders gives a reading in Pittsburgh and discusses his writing and revising process. (Today I’m taking particular comfort in the quote, “What comes out in a first draft isn’t really you.”)
• “Light,” a new short story by Kelly Link which appears in the “Fantastic Women” issue of Tin House, is available online. That said, the entire issue looks worth seeking out, with stories by Judy Buditz, Shelley Jackson, Rikki Ducornet and others.
• Susan Cooper hints at what you already suspected after seeing the trailers: That the movie adaptation of Dark Is Rising is going to suck eggs.
(Latter two links via Gwenda, beloved sponsor of today’s ALN.)

Asheville got a nice write-up in the New York Times last weekend. Two of my favorite restaurants, Mela and Early Girl, get a shout-out. Even better, and stranger, is the inclusion of the “world famous Root Bar # 1,” which the Times describes (accurately) as “a dive bar with a great beer selection” where you can listen to great music and play “a game of rootball, a cross between horseshoes and bocce invented by the bar’s former owner, Max Chain.”*
As readers of Tingle Alley know, the Root Bar is my husband’s and my local, with Mr. Tingle holding honors as a one-time East Coast champion of rootball and a dedicated ambassador of the sport. Gwenda alerted us to the article; after reading it, Mr. Tingle remarked, “I hope you feel like I’m doing something that’s culturally important now. You know, instead of just going to a bar.”
*What a Zagat-y sentence that turned into.

• So how good is the writing produced by the Underground Literary Alliance anyway? Dan Green assesses two novels published by the group, James Nowlan’s Security and The Pornographic Flabbergasted Emus by Wred Fright.
• BASS guest editor Stephen King opines on the health of the short story. (Via Ed.)

• “Whereas its city counterparts at New York magazine have taken aggressively to the Web with blogs and videos — and skyrocketing traffic (27 million page views in June vs. 3.5 million in June 2006) — the New Yorker, it seems, moves at the pace of a New Yorker story: slowly, methodically, uniquely their own .” (Via the OUPblog.)
• While the New Yorker eases into YouTube like an old man getting into a tub, others have less timid in plumbing its deep and marvelous waters. There be no dragons, but there be Eartha Kitt.
(I know: Clumsy segue, transparent ploy. But really, that clip will delight and invigorate your afternoon, I promise! Also, I need help figuring out what exactly the male dancer is doing around the 2:04 mark.)