Sasha Frere-Jones will be reading the first piece he wrote for The New Yorker (*) on Wednesday, January 23rd, at KGB Bar, on East Fourth Street. The theme of the evening is “Design Criticism.” The organizers are being more than kind to think that his take on Arthur Russell constitutes a fruitful engagement with the concept of design. But he is told that someone will be playing the Russell songs mentioned in the piece, and that is a thing worth leaving the house for, as is the opportunity to hear his co-readers: Jody Rosen, Rob Giampietro, and Stuart Bailey. Even if you already have the Russell records, you do not have these people on your shelf. So come on out.

People seem to like the place.

(*) To tempt you to click through, I'll excerpt the opening sentence:

This story begins, as many good ones do, with a gay man from Oskaloosa playing cello in a closet in a Buddhist seminary.

SFJ at KGB on 01/23

Jessica Hagy is a different kind of thinker. She has an astonishing talent for visualizing relationships, capturing in pictures what is difficult for most of us to express in words.

At indexed.blogspot.com, she posts charts, graphs, and Venn diagrams drawn on index cards that reveal in a simple and intuitive way the large and small truths of modern life.

Praised throughout the blogosphere as “brilliant,” “incredibly creative,” and “comic genius,” Jessica turns her incisive, deadpan sense of humor on everything from office politics to relationships to religion.

With new material along with some of Jessica’s greatest hits, this utterly unique book will thrill readers who demand humor that makes them both laugh and think.

On sale February 28; pre-order now.

Indexed, by Jessica Hagy

Here is your chance to weigh in on one of the most troubling dilemmas in contemporary literary culture. I know I'm hopelessly conflicted about it. It's the question of whether the last unpublished work of Vladimir Nabokov, which is now reposing unread in a Swiss bank vault, should be destroyed—as Nabokov explicitly requested before he died.

Nabokov wanted his last work destroyed. Should it be?

"People are always knocking on my door and asking about it," he says. "There's something about neon that people just love."

I think I have an idea ...

                  Scene 7: INT.  TRENT'S CAR - NIGHT

                             MIKE
                        (counting bills)
                   I took out three hundred, but I'm only
                   gonna bet with one.  I figure if we buy
                   a lot of chips, the pit boss will see and
                   they'll comp us all sorts of shit, then
                   we trade back the chips at the end of the
                   night.  You gotta be cool though.

                             TRENT
                   I'm cool, baby.  They're gonna give Daddy
                   a room, some breakfast, maybe Bennett's
                   singing.

                             MIKE
                   I'm serious.  This is how you do it.  I'm
                   telling you.

                             TRENT
                   I know.  Daddy's gonna get the Rainman
                   suite.  Vegas, baby.  We're going to
                   Vegas!

                             MIKE
                   Vegas!  You think we'll get there by
                   midnight?

                             TRENT
                   Baby, we're gonna be up by five hundy by
                   midnight.  Vegas, baby!

                             MIKE
                   Vegas!

Love neon art? Well, look up this address

Design Police on the beat:

Am I the only one who finds the FBI's newly redesigned Ten Most Wanted Fugitives page to be, well, a little cheesy?

I mean, it looks like something designed for a low-budget variety show, not for a list that includes the likes of Osama bin Laden.

Wanted: a new graphic designer

Graduate students often lack concrete advice on publishing. This essay is an attempt to fill this important gap. Advice is given on how to publish everything from book reviews to articles, replies to book chapters, and how to secure both edited book contracts and authored monograph contracts, along with plenty of helpful tips and advice on the publishing world (and how it works) along the way in what is meant to be a comprehensive, concrete guide to publishing that should be of tremendous value to graduate students working in any area of the humanities and social sciences.

Paper by Thom Brooks, of the Newcastle Law School at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne.

Publishing Advice for Graduate Students

UK Parliament OS&T:

Synthetic biology aims to design and build new biological parts and systems or to modify existing ones to carry out novel tasks. It is an emerging research area, described by one researcher as “moving from reading the genetic code to writing it.” Prospects include new therapeutics, environmental biosensors and novel methods to produce food, drugs, chemicals or energy. This POSTnote outlines recent developments, the possible applications and risks of synthetic biology and examines policy options for the development and governance of the research.

See also previous posts on synthetic biology.

Synthetic biology

“HAVE YOU SEEN THE ROMANIAN MOVIE?” This somewhat improbable question began to circulate around the midpoint of the 2005 Cannes Film Festival. For some reason, the critics, journalists and film-industry hangers-on who gather in Cannes each May to gossip and graze rarely refer to the films they see there by their titles, preferring a shorthand of auteur, genre or country of origin (“the Gus Van Sant”; “the Chinese documentary”; “that Russian thing”). It’s a code that everyone is assumed to know, and in this case there was not much room for confusion. How many Romanian movies could there be?

More than most of us would have predicted as it turned out.

New Wave on the Black Sea

It's said that Art Tatum's technique persuaded a great many aspiring young pianists to become insurance salesmen. Edmund Wilson's chops were equally phenomenal; not as sheerly, immediately dazzling, perhaps, but in range, erudition, penetration, clarity and unfussy elegance, no less jaw-dropping. And just as Tatum's multivolume The Complete Pablo Solo Masterpieces is one of the summits of piano jazz, the Library of America's new two-volume issue of Wilson's essays and reviews from the 1920s, '30s and '40s is one of the summits of twentieth-century literary criticism.

A Great Deal of Work

Neighbors, friends, elected representatives—I am Margaritaville. My father was a simple shrimp-boat captain who set course for a sleepy fishing village almost 40 years ago. He didn't want much. A little plot of land, some skanks, maybe a flask of rum to warm his swollen belly. I'm not sure a little boy was in the plans, but he raised me with love and, more importantly, a love of this land.

From the crisp scent of vomit-soaked pizza boxes baking in the sunrise on East Sound Pier, to the pink-and-orange sunsets softly shimmering behind the West Railyard prostitute encampments, I love every inch of this town. I took my first body shot right around the time I spoke my first word, and that word was "body shot."

And yet I fear that our children might not grow up in the same Margaritaville we've been able to enjoy. A Margaritaville where you can get shithoused on a quiet jetty and think about what it would be like to get a dolphin high. A Margaritaville where you can take a dump on a snow-white sand dune and swear at a baby pelican. A Margaritaville where college dropouts, irrespective of race or creed, can listen to Pink Floyd and dry-hump below a rainbow. These are the experiences I cherish, and I know that I am not alone.

Toward a Sustainable Margaritaville