If there was ever anyone’s ire you should avoid, it was Hunter S. Thompson’s. The man knew how to vent his frustrations. So when the late author’s “DVD, uh… I don’t know what the hell brand it is” doesn’t work the way he anticipates, and all the new wiring causes massive confusion with his own audio/video system, he gives the company who installed it for him an earful on their answering machine. After some yelling of expletives and threats, he finally concedes that if they don’t do something about this problem immediately he will write something nasty about them. “Go to any bookstore, any magazine rack and look, you can see what the fuck I can do to you. And I will!”

Edit: There’s been some skepticism about the authenticity of this recording around the internet. Some argue that it doesn’t exactly sound like a phone recording would and that Thompson’s voice was a little bit deeper than what the recording purports; maybe these people have accepted Johnny Depp’s Thompson as the truth? Still, the attitude is there and the flow of thought sounds, to me at least, to be authentic. The way he moves from one thought to another, how he speaks to someone in the room with him, how he gets flustered as his anger leads him places… What do you think?

Thanks to Gizmodo.

Mark your calendars.  If you didn’t know, the nook, Barnes & Noble’s eReader is finally available this week since it sold out immediately after its November unveiling.  According to an announcement by the behemoth bookseller on Monday, its online store would have the nook (purposely spelled with lowercase “n”) for sale and that stock would begin shipping out to its stores, nationwide, throughout the week. Reviews of the nook have ranged from “pretty great” to “long on promises and short on delivery.” Its dual display, a touch screen for navigation and an e-ink monitor for reading have give some to wonder if  it a could be a “Kindle Killer.”

When I asked Doug Gottlieb, Barnes & Noble’s Vice President of Digital Devices, via e-mail what made the nook so different from all the other digital readers on the market (including the Kindle), he claimed that it started with making the technology around the user, not the other way around. “With nook, we’ve created an eBook reader that provides an immersive and intuitive reading experience,” he wrote back, adding:  “Our device puts the focus on the consumer, not the technology.  Using a combination of color and touch, we make eReading simple, even for the tech novice.”  Gottlieb also pointed out that being tied in with the Barnes & Noble brand “gives us an excellent opportunity to expand the market for eReading.”

So is the nook worth all the hype? Well, whether or not you remember, I’m a big Kindle guy.  And after spending some time playing around with the in-store model, there doesn’t seem to be much of difference. It takes a millisecond or two longer than my first gen Kindle to load a page.  The touch screen is pretty sweet and a great way to navigate (a big step up from the Kindle’s clunky keyboard) but takes some time to get used to.  For me the key feature that stuck out was the book’s LendMe program.

“We know our customers love to read, so our approach to design focused on creating an immersive reading experience,” explained Gottlieb, “one that provides the same joys of reading and sharing a physical book.  With LendMe technology, nook lets you lend eBooks to friends free of charge for up to two weeks at a time.  You just choose the book you want to share, then send it to your friend’s nook, compatible eBook readers, or B&N eReader-enabled iPhone and iPod touch, select Motorola and BlackBerry smartphones, Mac or PCs.” Alright, brand loyalties aside… that’s freaking cool!  I’m pretty sure that’s how George Jetson recommended books to Jane, his wife.

When it comes down to it, is the nook better than the Kindle?  It’s arguable.  But with a wireless delivery system and an exhaustive eBook catalogue (as with the Kindle), the nook is definitely competitive. So mark you calendars, because starting this week: the new reader is finally in town.

One of the things I’m reading right now is The Habit of Being, the collected volume of Flannery O’Connor letters edited by Sally Fitzgerald.

In a January, 1949 letter to her agent, Elizabeth McKee, O’Connor  notes that “James Ross, a writer who is here [at Yaddo], is looking for an agent.  He wrote a very fine book called, They Don’t Dance Much.  It didn’t sell much.  If you are interested in him, I daresay he would be glad to hear form you.  Right now he wants to sell some stories he is reworking.”  Don’t we all.

For much of 1949, O’Connor was in conflict with Rinehart over Wise Blood. We all know who she became in the years to follow, but They Don’t Dance Much (originally published by Houghton Mifflin in 1940), like Ross, seems to have only grown in obscurity.  Obscure might not quite equal lost, but by 1975, Southern Illinois University dubbed They Don’t Dance Much lost enough for reprint in their Lost American Fiction series.  This book is also mentioned by Raymond Chandler in in his collected letters, and the (count them!) three reviews on Amazon are overwhelmingly positive.

Since before my time in Divinity School, I’ve been fascinated by the idea of lost texts, missing sources, and phantom documents.  Things we only know about because they’re quoted or listed in still-extant works.  They Don’t Dance Much feels like one of those pieces, so when I found out that it actually exists, I ordered it.  I’ll review it here in the coming weeks.

It took Ross 35 years to go from obscure to lost and back.  What books first published in 1975 have a similar story now, 35 years hence, and deserve another look?

The man responsible for sparking my interest in both reading and writing, Jerome David Salinger, has died. BBC News is reporting that he “died of natural causes, his son said in a statement released by his literary agent.”

I’m sure I’m not alone in wondering what kind of craziness is going to ensue from this. If you remember, Salinger hasn’t published anything since the 60s. But that doesn’t mean he had stopped writing. With the dubious stuff his children have done in the past (“Dream Catcher,” anyone?), I’m sure we’re going to see the floodgates open up and a deluge of previously unpublished work come out. Think of all the money a lot of people stand to make off this sad news.

For now, though, as we wait to see what happens next… check out my previous feature about my own personal Salinger Library including links to places on the internet where you can read his entire (published and uncollected) oeuvre.

Dear people:

Today I stumbled upon the very awesome blog Letters of Note. In their own words, “Letters of Note is an attempt to gather and sort fascinating letters, postcards, telegrams, faxes, and memos.” From the letter of a child detailing his rocket ship designs “to a top scientist,” to a letter from Einstein proclaiming that “the word God is nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness,” this blog could entertain you for hours. But what struck me was a letter from Kurt Vonnegut Jr to his family after he escaped Dresden at the end of World War II. The experiences outlined in Vonnegut’s letter are both horrifying and incredibly worthy of respect. And on an even more visceral level, it makes me feel like writers today are all academic pansies. How many modern writers do you know “were put to work carrying corpses from Air-Raid shelters” or lived through a massive bombing raid that “killed 250,000 people in twenty-four hours and destroyed all of Dresden?” Horrible as it may be, it’s also pretty badass.

This experience of Vonnegut’s and the events outlined in this letter are what inspired his novel Slaughterhouse-Five, which was what his underground slaughterhouse-cum-prison was known as to his German captors. Vonnegut’s letter is not only an enlightening piece of literary history, it is a fantastic document of world history as well. It demonstrates to us how awful war is, how children writing to their parents had to begin letters with statements like “I’m told that you were probably never informed that I was anything other than ‘missing in action.’”

I’ve posted the scans of the letter below, which were originally available here at archive.org. If you check out Vonnegut’s letter at Letters of Note, you can read it transcribed as well and may soon find yourself sifting through all the other letters in their collection.