The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

  • The nomadic Irish poet Desmond O'Grady, who had a bit part in Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita, has died, The Irish Times reports . O'Grady lived much of his life abroad, in Paris, Italy (where he met Fellini), the U.S. and Egypt. He told an interviewer: "James Joyce left. So I too had to." Irish President Michael D. Higgins said in a tribute, "From wherever he was writing, be it Cairo or Kinsale, his work invoked a sense of what was Irish in both heritage and contemporary life." In his poem "The Spaniard Inn," O'Grady wrote, "It took me forty years of world wander / before I shipped in here and dropped anchor. / Some voice amid life whispers where to scuttle."
  • Kathryn Schulz profiles David Mitchell in New York Magazine: "You could call Mitchell a global writer, I suppose, but that does not quite capture what he is doing. It is closer to say that he is a pangaeic writer, a supercontinental writer. What is for geologists a physical fact — that the world is everywhere interconnected, bound together in a cycle of faulting and folding, rifting and drifting, erosion and uplift — is, for Mitchell, a metaphysical conviction." (See also: NPR's excerpt of his forthcoming book.)
  • Jessamyn West defends the most maligned font — Comic Sans : "And so Comic Sans joins the ranks of Nickelback and Hot Pockets as a thing you're only allowed to like in a so-bad-it's-good way. But I make posters for the library, and sometimes the puppet show poster looks best in Comic Sans. A victimless crime, no? So why does anyone care? The internet is full of decontextualized symbology that winds up in the Kangaroo Court of Lulz, which finds things lacking in appeal — although they were not those things' intended audience. There are other things to aspire to than being cool or even appealing. Comic Sans is fine. You are fine."
  • Nick Ripatrazone considers the parallels between writing and fishing : "Faith is what brings anglers back to shallow streams, and what brings writers back to imperfect drafts. ... Writing and fishing are both art forms built for optimists."
  • "In my twenties I realized that the muse is a bum. The muse only shows up when you bait her by putting your ass in the chair." Elissa Schappell talks about finding her muse .

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