Centennial literary observations are frequently billed as occasions of rediscovery, opportunities to revisit a forgotten writer and observe again what made them memorable, or even merely fashionable, to begin with. What though of the case where a writer never really went away at all? That’s the situation in many ways of Eudora Welty, whose 100th birthday takes place in April. For many readers, she requires no reintroduction, and particularly in the Deep South her work still maintains a certain pleasant familiarity. I suspect that most people who would fail the softest literary pop quiz would instantly know that the e-mail software they use was named in homage to the author of “Why I Live at the P.O.”

The University Press of Mississippi is one of the happy beneficiaries of all things Welty. Photographs, the collection of the author’s camerawork that the press brought out in 1989,…

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Blossom Dearie, who died in New York on Saturday at age 82, will I hope justly go down with Sarah Vaughn, Ella Fitzgerald, Keely Smith, and Anita O’Day as one of the great vocalists of the twentieth century, an unlikely, untorchy stayer whose restaurant-row whisper could turn the hoariest of standards into something absolutely fresh and idiosyncratic and unique. Whitney Balliett once wrote that her voice could hardly reach the second floor of a doll house, but her emotional range hit highs and lows more extreme than the human ear was evolved to receive and transmit to the brain. Her “Down With Love,” an ironic reveille for anyone who’d ever been dumped, was a confetti parade of fizzy happiness, and who could ever rhyme Colorado and Nevada in the civic-minded geography lesson of “Rhode Island Is Famous for You” with such an infectiously perfect yet seemingly tossed off bounce of the …

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Laurie Fendrich has already done such a fabulous job commenting on the ramifications of the decision of the Brandeis mandarins to shutter their lapidary art museum that I hesitate to jump in at this point. But for anyone who requires a primer in how utterly and woefully rotten the deal is, please read Roberta Smith’s article in today’s New York Times.

Putting the Rose’s collection up for sale is an idiotic decision on every level. Students of art history feel that their diploma is debased. Donors rightfully feel swindled. Curators and museum staff were caught unawares — Rose director Michael Rush late last week was imploring Brandeis alumni not to send donations, since the museum had done the wonderful job of balancing its books without depending on the university at all. (Not only was the museum costing Brandeis nothing, it kicked back 15 percent of all its independent fund raising to…

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Nothing quite confers on dates a crown of cultural and monetary significance like a big fat zero on the end of a number, and the annual Burns Night this Sunday is no exception: The mushy celebration of poetry, whiskey, and haggis, which this year occurs on the 250th birthday of Robert Burns, looks to be the biggest ever. The Scottish government is attempting to convert the annual visitation of the event into actual visitation, launching a Caledonia goodwill campaign this weekend with Homecoming Scotland (the promotional campaign hopes to entice the 80 million or so folks worldwide with connections to Scotland to visit). A visit to the Web site of The Scotsman pulls up on-line ads for Burns Night Tools (promising “instant toasts in 60 seconds, 100% Refund if not satisfied”) while the newspaper itself promises its weekend readers a complimentary CD of Burns’s songs and a special issue…

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I have been reading Lily Tuck’s concise Woman of Rome: A Life of Elsa Morante, the biography of one of the greatest figures of postwar Italian literature, best known in the States for her 1957 novel Arturo’s Island. Tuck’s book is a fascinating study of literary fortunes, and it begins with the claim that, “had Elsa Morante and her husband, Alberto Moravia, been French, they would have been as much celebrated as Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.” The comparison seems a bit invidious, but it does at least put front and center the goal of the biography — to question why Morante isn’t better appreciated as a world writer than she is. (It must be said that in Italy it is only fairly recently that Morante has been canonized.) Might the answer lie at least in part in the declining prestige of Italian as a world language?

Don’t expect the number of students learning Italian to…

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On Christmas Eve I was thinking not of sugarplum fairies and trimmings and trees but of a dipsomaniacal Pittsburgh Pirate pitcher who threw a no-hitter while on an acid trip (if you’re wondering, he walked eight batters in the process) and once attempted to hit every batter in the Cincinnati Reds lineup (he made it through the first three guys before Tony Perez ducked his way out to a base on balls and he tossed one at the head of Johnny Bench and the umpire ejected him). Dock Ellis, he who wore his hair in curlers so the perspiration dripping down would make his spitball easier to, um, actualize, had died the weekend before, and I wanted to get my hands on the memoir he wrote with a future poet laureate, Donald Hall. Maybe I’d write something quickly about this crazy collaboration. Heck, I’d buy two or three copies and give them as late stocking stuffers to a couple of buddies who …

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(RNA molecule image at Wikimedia Commons)

Is the future of science publishing unfolding in the free-for-all of Wikipedia?

Yesterday Nature reported that RNA Biology, which publishes research on families of RNA molecules, announced it will begin requiring that geneticists who submit their work to the journal agree to write a Wikipedia entry summarizing their findings. They’ve done so with the noble goal of using “the opportunities of mixed science publishing to bring reliable research resources to wider scientific and lay audiences,” as editor-in-chief Renee Schroeder wrote in the press release accompanying the announcement. It’s a curious twist that embraces in part the Googlish mantra that more data is better data, but puts the breaks on the more troubling fact that anyone who accesses Wikipedia faces: the authority of the information found on its pages. Those Wikipedia entries …

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Remember all those think pieces about the bleak future for the English language in the era of text messaging? That GR8 and OMG would level the ornate syntax of the tongue while rendering the young and their dexterous thumbs incapable of grasping the finer points of grammar and punctuation? Newsweek took up the debate a couple of months ago with the cheeky title “The Death of English (LOL)” while the BBC challenged its readers to decipher this particular hobgoblin of TXTese:

“My smmr hols wr CWOT. B4, we used 2go2 NY 2C my bro, his GF & thr 3 :- kids FTF. ILNY, it’s a gr8 plc.”

The argument over the baleful effect of TXTing is probably a Seinfeldian debate about nothing, and I particularly enjoyed Lynn Truss’s retort
in The Guardian in July about the pleasures of learning (and subverting) this relatively young medium of communication (“As someone who sends texts messages more or less …

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I am in Miami, where a cultural sector — contemporary art — is staring into the financial abyss and hearing the hoof beats behind it that may butt it over the cliff. Art Basel Miami, the satellite December art fair put on by its elder Swiss organization, and the many-ringed circus of smaller fairs held at the same time are going forth for the next five days with the hope of the dealers who populate them that, some way, they can hold out against the contracting economy. Anecdotally most people on the money side of the art market — gallerists, collectors, auctioneers, etc. — will tell you that recessions take a good nine months to a year to roll from the economy at large to the contemporary-art coffers. So far, at least, they look right. Though sales were sluggish at best at recent auctions and the big London fair Frieze, I can count the number of good contemporary-art galleries that have …

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Happy Birthday (a few days early) to Claude Lévi-Strauss, born one hundred years ago this Friday, November 28, in Brussels.

In France, the centennial celebration has been the occasion for a year-long fête, with essays and articles devoted to his life, work, and intellectual legacy. The highpoint took place in May, when Gallimard made Lévi-Strauss the newest addition to the 198 authors whose collected works appear in its Bibliothèque de la Pléiade series — the publishing equivalent, begun in 1931, of election to the Academie Française. The Bible-paper volumes of the Pléiade, in their concise and perfect Gallic elegance, are a perfect lure to book fetishists, and the Lévi-Strauss edition is no exception. At a budget-busting price of 71 Euros, it has nonetheless sold more than 20,000 copies in six months.

It’s rare for a living figure to appear in the Pléiade — in fact, with Julien…

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It’s NBA night in New York — and thank goodness this has nothing to do with the Knicks. Tonight the National Book Foundation award winners are announced in four categories — fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and young people’s literature — drawn from a pool of 1,258 books submitted by 200-plus contributing publishers. In recent years university-press titles have fared about as well at the NBAs as Ivy League basketball teams in the NCAA tournament — which is to say, not very.

One university press does turn up with a finalist this year — LSU Press has been named one of the five finalists in poetry, for Reginald Gibbons’s Creatures of a Day. It is the second year in a row that LSU Press has been represented with a finalist in the category. And if university presses are underrepresented tonight, the same can’t be said for high-profile university administrators. Drew Gilpin Faust, whom you may…

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This has nothing to do with university presses, but I can’t resist a final post on the election — promise!

Every election acts as an incubator for annoyingly repeated catchphrases. Here are the ones I most look forward to never having to hear again:

“Throw someone under the bus.” — This was a conservative favorite. It was a little funny and a tad evocative the first time it was uttered, but the autopilot usage emptied it not only of its punch but of the direness of its implications. If I ever hear some anchor use it again, I vote for throwing him or her under the bus.

“someone, i.e., Joe the something or another“ — Call me Eric the Aggrieved, but this rhetorical device was as noisome as they came. “Vlad the Impaler” is great; “Tito the Builder,” insipid.

“a game-changer” — this is bad enough as a sports metaphor, but it was entirely empty whenever it was applied to campaign…

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The very sad news has circulated of the passing of John Leonard earlier today. The word of his death sent me back immediately to an essay he contributed to The Nation about the strange corporate thickets the contemporary cultural critic had to inhabit. I still remember the sense of frightened awe the article left on me. He began by ticking off his publication CV:

“I was a Wunderkind. Now I’m an Old Fart. In between I’ve done time at National Review, Pacifica Radio and The Nation; the New York Times and Condé Nast; New York magazine during and after Rupert Murdoch; National Public Radio and the Columbia Broadcasting System. I was a columnist for Esquire, whenever Dwight Macdonald failed to turn in his ’Politics’ essay; at the old weekly Life before it died for People’s sins; at Newsweek before the Times made me stop contributing to a wholly owned subsidiary of its principal competitor; …

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(Warhol dollar print at warhol.org)

The timing of the paperback publication of sociologist Elizabeth Currid’s The Warhol Economy: How Fashion, Art & Music Drive New York City could not have been better. I received a new copy of the book last week from Princeton University Press just as I began to seriously wonder whether the three skeletal frames that had sprouted up behind my back window, threatening to permanently obscure the serendipitous view across the East River of an already dimming midtown Manhattan, would ever be completed and rented. Its moment of suspended construction seems like a conceit for the city as a whole as we sit and wait to see just how deep the fallout from the economic downturn will be. If the neighborhood where you live happens to be Williamsburg (as in my case), or the Lower East Side or Chelsea, the strength of the arts economy will inevitably be a part of…

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I think this Halloween, I’ll go as Edward Said. Professors of Middle Eastern culture seem to have just become the newest national bogeymen in an election season marked by a conveniently renewed vendetta against “elites.”

Forget for the moment the malicious nonsense about Rashid Khalidi being doled out by the Republican candidates, a sour ragout of mendacity and meanness. Two paragraphs leap out in today’s New York Times article about Rashid Khalidi’s introduction to the politics of character assassination. If you are looking for a textbook definition of guilt by association in action, Daniel Pipes all but supplies it:

“If one’s talking about American political life, he’s at the extremes, at the margins. If one’s talking about the field of Middle East studies, he’s in the middle of it. But the field itself is dominated by professors who do not permit other points of view.”

Oh, I see…

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Score one for the Empire. The British Library announced yesterday it had acquired a sizable chunk of former Poet Laureate Ted Hughes’s archive. Coming on the tenth anniversary of the poet’s death on October 28, and coinciding with the release of a pair of CD recordings of Hughes reading from his work, the acquisition of more than 220 boxes of Hughes’s manuscripts, files, and ephemera, at a cost of roughly $880,000, represents a coup for the UK literary community.

Beyond the question of the scholarly worth of the archived material — which is substantial, given that much of the material involves the publication history of Hughes’s Birthday Letters, the highly personal collection that appeared just after the poet’s death and that relates most intimately to his relationship with Sylvia Plath — the acquisition represents a victory for those in the UK have long argued that the…

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Is it a sign of a particularly parochial and particularly American form of cultural isolationism that the initial response — even among the very well read — to the announcement of this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature seemed to be, “Jean-Marie Gustave Le Who?”

John Sutherland, blogging in The Guardian, sees the selection of Le Clézio — who despite his lack of renown in the States has (a) taught here frequently and (b) fiercely fought in his work against the past and present of imperialism in the Americas — as a provocative thwack aimed straight at smug American sensibilities. Regardless of the intentions of the Swedish body, ignorance should set the curious off in a race to find a sample of the writings of the son of a Mauritian-born doctor and author of 30 novels and several collections of essays, and the route to experience Le Clézio runs straight through two university presses,…

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