Updike redux; Crumley recalled; Washington Post abandons 'World'
Another view of John Updike if offered by Kris Collins, Pittsburgh poet and editor of The New Yinzer, a literary magazine of the Web:
"Like many readers I simply assumed the man would always be there. "I first read Rabbit Run during a gloomy post-collegiate winter in a little apartment in Friendship. I can honestly say that book taught me more about the art of the novel and the possibilities of writing fiction than four years at the university beating my head against the writing department."
The New Yinzer is running its own appreciation of the late James Crumley, who shuffled off in September at 69, after a career writing hard-boiled crime fiction and teaching briefly at Carnegie Mellon U. Read it at: http://www.newyinzer.com
More on Crumley: Chuck Kinder, no stranger to the writing life, knew Crumley well. His recent thoughts
"Those who think Jim is really gone are mistaken. He is actually just on another long road-trip to wherever-the-hell-he-feels-like-going, beerjoint to beerjoint, whorehouse to whorehouse, wandering through the West making new best friends wherever he stops on a whim, changing lives, rescuing people who don't even know they need rescuing, & doing it pretty much by just being real smart & real polite, just by being himself, a great old boy with no pretensions whatsoever. For somebody who could drink about anybody I ever met under the table & clean out a badass roadhouse pretty much single-handedly if the occasion called for it, Jim Crumley was a Calm Center. I've called him the Mayor of Montana before, but he was the Mayor of a much bigger state than Montana, & that's where he is right now, taking care of business. Clearly I have had about one too many toasts to old Jim tonight. But here's one more for him, to Jim Crumley, the last best legend.
Brauchli, on Book World
An internal email from Washington Post Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli, obtained by FishbowlDC:
Colleagues, we are announcing today a couple of changes in our Sunday
paper and the way we cover books and literature.
Starting on Feb. 22, our book coverage will appear in Style throughout
the week and in the Outlook section on Sundays. We will end Book World's run as a stand-alone print section but will revamp and rebrand our books section online as Book World, where we'll offer readers a robust, well-organized site dedicated to our coverage and reviews of books.
This new arrangement recognizes the tremendous importance of books,
ideas, literature and reading to our audience.
In the daily paper, Style will run a daily "Book World" review, as well
as coverage of literature and publishing. Big events in the book world,
as well as interviews or profiles of authors, will be featured in Style, more often on the cover and more prominently than in the past.
On Sundays, Outlook will become the primary venue for books coverage,
with a focus on non-fiction books and ideas alongside its traditional
package of lively journalism and thoughtful essays from outside
contributors. Outlook will carry Jon Yardley's column, our Best Seller
list and other features.
In addition, we will continue to publish occasional special tabloid-format Book World sections on Sundays, built around themes such
as Summer Reading or Children's Books. We also have started a syndicated product called "Book Digest" that will bring Post reviews to other newspapers around the country.
Running this coverage will be Rachel Shea, whose skills and knowledge
have been honed during her successful tenure as Marie Arana's deputy and acting successor. The Book World team remains intact and the group's mission will be to serve all Post venues--Style, Outlook, the special tab sections and our online Book World section. This is a model for how we want to approach a number of coverage areas at The Post: with reporting groups that serve all our platforms, in print and online.
In addition to these changes in the news department, the editorial and
op-ed pages that now appear Sundays in Outlook will migrate from that
section into the A section. We will add a third page of opinion on
Sundays.
The Close To Home page, which features opinion contributions from and
about people in our area, will move to the Sunday Metro section and,
like all of this content, will continue to be run by the editorial page.
The changes outlined here will take effect in the third week of
February.
In other words, about the same amount of content, just sprinkled throughout the daily paper and in the Post's Sunday opinion section.
A Post Book World editor blogs about his hopes:
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/shortstack/2009/01/preservation.html?wprss=shortstack