After reading about it at Shaken & Stirred (see discussion in the comments), I’ve downloaded a free trial version of Scrivener, hailed (by someone somewhere) as ” the biggest software advance for writers since the word processor.” So far I’ve only managed a single index card on the corkboard, but it’ll be fun to play more. I especially like how the software allows you a place to keep all the detritus — the stray thoughts and oblique parentheticals (“fear of abandonment, God”) — that gets sloughed off the main manuscript during editing. Up till now I’ve been sticking those in catch-all Word documents where they are never seen again. And who knows what gold is in those hills!
Meanwhile, over at Pinky’s Paperhaus, Carolyn asks a pertinent question: “Are [programs like Scrivener] truly organizational tools, or are they just software-based stalling tactics?”

This weekend’s New York Times Book Review featured Liesl Schillinger’s review of two new books by Tessa Hadley: a novel called The Master Bedroom and a collection of short stories entitled Sunstroke.
Schillinger writes, “Hadley is so good at miniature — at close focus on a small scene that could be missed if you didn’t look twice — that it’s almost frustrating to read her longer works.” I feel the same, except with the “almost.” Both Accidents at Home and Everything Will Be All Right branched off into multi-generational storylines, and as I read I kept wanting to lop off entire branches of story. As a rule, I’m a great fan of Middlemarchian sprawl, but here the “epic-ness” felt like dead weight: Like seeing a beautifully tailored dress with two sheets tacked onto its hem, trailing out behind. So while I look forward to reading The Master Bedroom, I’ll be reading Sunstroke first.
A few of Hadley’s stories that can be read online:
• “The Surrogate”
• “Sunstroke
• “The Swan”
• “A Mouthful of Cut Glass

I was saddened to learn of the death of Aura Estrada. A gifted writer, she was killed in a swimming accident on July 25 while on vacation in Mexico. A memorial website has been created, and it includes a collection of her writings as well as a remembrance, “Mi Aura,” written by her husband Francisco Goldman, which I urge you to read. Words Without Borders has also created a page in her memory that contains links to other tributes as well a couple of her essays available online.
I met Aura at a wedding last fall. She was the dear friend of dear friends and so I had heard a great deal about her before the meeting. She was exactly as she’d been described: Radiant and lovely, quickly intelligent and humorous. What I mostly remember about the wedding, though, is watching her and Frank dance; they themselves had been married only the year before, and their joy in each other was obvious. That weekend wasn’t enough time to get to know Aura well, only long enough to understand why her death is such a terrible loss to the many friends and family she leaves behind.

Confidential to Phillip A. Evans Jr., vice president and chief communications officer for Turner Enterprises:
Now might be a good time to visit a certain house in Tallahassee. Once you’re there, rip the phone cord from the wall and disconnect the modem. You may be interrupted here by a man who is eager to continue “setting the record straight.” In a gentle, firm voice say to him, “Bob, why don’t you just sit still for a bit.”
Then make the man a nice big plate of scrambled eggs, some toast and a little Mandarin tea. For dessert, pour him out some whiskey. Let him choose what the two of you watch on TV.

In honor of new Poet Laureate Charles Simic, three prose poems from his book The World Doesn’t End (all untitled):

I was stolen by the gypsies. My parents stole me right back. Then the gypsies stole me again. This went on for some time. One minute I was in the caravan suckling the dark teat of my new mother, the next I sat at the long dining room table eating my breakfast with a silver spoon.
It was the first day of spring. One of my fathers was singing in the bathtub; the other one was painting a live sparrow the colors of a tropical bird.
* * *
We were so poor I had to take the place of the bait in the mousetrap. All alone in the cellar, I could hear them pacing upstairs, tossing and turning in their beds. “These are dark and evil days,” the mouse told me as he nibbled my ear. Years passed. My mother wore a cat-fur collar which she stroked until its sparks lit up the cellar.
* * *
I am the last Napoleonic soldier. It’s almost two hundred years later and I am still retreating from Moscow. The road is lined with white birch trees and the mud comes up to my knees. The one-eyed woman wants to sell me a chicken, and I don’t even have any clothes on.
The Germans are going one way; I am going the other. The Russians are going still another way and waving good-by. I have a ceremonial saber. I use it to cut my hair, which is four feet long.

Last week I voiced my fervent desire that Netflix — “Taking agoraphobics to the movies since 1998!” — start shipping Saturdays. After I posted I began to wonder uncertainly if there was some dumbfoundingly obvious reason why the company hasn’t already moved to this schedule, as one sometimes does after making a modest proposal on the Internet (shades of violins on TV).
So I sent an email to the proprietor of Hacking Netflix, who pointed me to an interview he conducted with Netflix CEO Reed Hastings last year. Here’s the relevant portion:

HN: Why don’t you work on Saturdays? It seems to be such a competitive advantage for Blockbuster, and everybody’s interested in getting more movies… Is it cost-prohibitive?
Hastings: Prohibitive is a strong word. It’s a cost tradeoff, right, because then you can’t run a standard five day shift. So when you move to a 6th day, then you’ve got not one management team, you’ve got staggered. So the cost is not just 15% more, because you’ve got to figure out dual management, and how you’re going to infringe on people on people’s weekends and yet give them a life. So we make sure that the Monday through Friday works well, and that’s the focus.

According to the MSNBC report, Netflix profits this year are expected to be between $42.4 – $52.4 million. Maybe by the time they’re clearing $60 mill., they’ll have figured out how to get those Saturday shifts manned.

Alas, today finds me in a “I don’t care if you have to cry and cut, but you better cry and cut” state of deadline, so I have little to offer but scattershot and brimstone.
A couple items that caught my fancy this morning:
• From Carol Blue’s 1996 New Yorker profile of Salman Rushdie:

Rushdie excels at what might be termed Shakespeare trivia. Once, in the course of a literary word game, he was challenged to rename a Shakespeare play as if it had been written by Robert Ludlum. He was asked, first, to retitle “Hamlet” in the style of the author of “The Bourne Ultimatum” and “The Scarlatti Inheritance.” With no advance notice and almost no hesitation, he said, “The Elsinore Vacillation.” A palpable hit but, the other participants thought, sheer luck. Bet you can’t do it twice. What about “Macbeth”? “The Dunsinane Deforestation.” More meditated offerings included “The Rialto Forfeit,” “The Capulet Infatuation,” “The Kerchief Implication,” and “The Solstice Entrancement.”

Blue’s piece is quoted in a Ludlum-rich entry over at Light Reading (like Jenny, I find Chrisopher Hitchens’ variation of the Rushdie anecdote interesting).
• Ed Park gives a favorable review to Taylor Antrim’s The Headmaster Ritual today at Salon. Trolling for other reviews of the novel, I came across one by Ron Charles for The Washington Post, which begins with the best lede I’ve read in a while:

The only good thing about the first year of teaching is that it can happen to you only once. Through a haze of cringing horror, I remember when I insisted that Ring Lardner was a fictional character, made fun of a deaf student, reduced a recently orphaned girl to tears, and, while swaying dramatically behind a wooden lectern, drove a long splinter through my pants and into my groin.

Other dashed thoughts and links:
• It’s been widely linked to but if you haven’t read it yet, Hilary Mantel’s essay on Orpheus and Euridice is worth your attention.
• Two Amazon customers argue about what is “verifiable” in Swedenborg’s Heaven and Hell.
• Speaking obliquely of Hitch and God (they’re like Burton and Taylor, those two), the number of holds before me in the library queue for Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great: 16. Sixteen!

Over lunch I finally got to “that bonobo article” everyone’s been talking about in last week’s New Yorker. Not far into the article, Ian Parker mentions meeting “a tall man in his forties who went by the single name Wind … who had driven from his home in North Carolina to sing at the [bonobo fund-raiser]. He was a musician and a former practitioner of ‘metaphysical counselling,’ which he also referred to as clairvoyance.” (Favorite sentence: “Wind told me that he once wore a chimpanzee T-shirt to a bonobo event, and ‘got shit for it.'”)
Something about this description — call it clairvoyance, or call it a decade of standing at parties chatting to men with names like Raven and El Niño — made me think that the city from which Wind hails in North Carolina might be Asheville. And, unless the guy has a flute-playing, bonobo-supporting doppelganger, that turns out to be correct.