I’m excited to interview Sarah Waters this Thursday night about her creepy haunted house novel, The Little Stranger. We’ll be at B&N Lincoln Triangle, 7:30 p.m.

As you can see, I have the best in-laws. That’s Larry on the left, and Jane on the right, and though they divorced years ago — long before I met them — they’re both still this fun and campy.

Right now I’m reading Old Mortality, a gift from Larry. He figured I would appreciate Sir Walter Scott’s meditation on fanaticism, violence, and repression, and I do, very much, even though it’s subtly weighted toward the Tories.

On Friday night I’ll be introducing Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie as she opens the last event of Girls Write Now’s Chapters series with a reading from her short story collection, The Thing Around Your Neck. I’ve written about my admiration for her work many times; since then, she’s won a MacArthur Fellowship and earned a place on The New Yorker’s 20 under 40 list.

Her first novel, Purple Hibiscus, which I once stayed up until 5 a.m. on a work night to finish, centers on a girl about the same age as those Girls Write Now serves. My favorite of her short stories, “Cell One,” appears in the new collection.

At the event we’ll also debut our 2010 anthology, which features an introduction by Nami Mun, whose Chapters reading from Miles from Nowhere earlier this year was astonishingly good. The event will be held at the Center for Fiction, starting at 6 p.m.

I can’t believe I forgot to link to the second installment of my Paris Review Daily Culture Diary.

It’s not any sexier than the first, I’m afraid, but if you’re craving more usage pedantry, solo drinking tips, or line-editing blow-by-blows, you won’t want to let this one pass you by.

Here’s one of the mouse-over notes:
After reading Brad Gooch’s biography of Flannery O’Connor last year, I internalized her (and Elizabeth Hardwick’s) prohibition against allowing the same word to appear twice on a page, and my prose strains in places as a result. I wonder: did O’Connor read Muriel Spark? If so, confronted with such hilarious and inarguably brilliant repetitions — see, e.g., the sticks* — how could she have continued to adhere to her rule? Also how did Spark reuse words so imaginatively? She built humor through the sameness but somehow made the descriptions fresh every time. I wish she could revise this scene I’m getting ready to work on now, the one with the dogs in the car.

Somewhat relatedly: as predicted, Caitlin Roper’s issue of The Paris Review was waiting in the mailbox on my return from Florida. I turned first to my friend Victor LaValle’s essay, which is just great, and then to the R. Crumb interview, which you won’t want to miss if you’re a fan, and then, fingers quivering with years of accumulated anticipation, I read the Katherine Dunn excerpt, which made me want to read more.
 

* Mouse-over note from the first installment: “By now there are passages I could almost quote from memory — especially the post-funeral scenes involving the writer with rheumatoid arthritis slouched over ‘two sticks,’ making his way among the funeral flowers as the other elderly characters goggle at him. The novelty of the Scottishism (’sticks’ rather than ‘canes’) tickles me, of course, but it’s the perfect, deadly repetition of the word — all the glimpses of the ‘clever little man doubled over his sticks’ — that makes this section so funny.”

Jonathan Franzen says “there isn’t a more hilarious narcissist in all of literature” than Sam Pollit of The Man Who Loved Children, which my friend Robb Forman Dew has been urging on me.

I’m back in New York, at least for now, but while I catch up you’re better off checking my Twitter feed than waiting on the RSS.

The first part of my Culture Diary — chronicling things I read, watched, and did the week before last — is up at The Paris Review Daily. Featured: Muriel Spark, Kingsley Amis, Sam Lipsyte, Damages, Jenny Diski, Jimmy Buffett, Rebecca West, Panir Sabzee, Jonathan Franzen, alcoholic beverages…

The silence around here may continue for a little while. I’m unexpectedly in Florida with Max and A.; we’re visiting my father-in-law, who’s in poor health. Here he is (pictured), reading aloud the entry on “alright” (“all wrong”) from my copy of Kingsley Amis’ The King’s English. Not long after this usage bonding moment, he presented me with his pristine copy of Fowler’s 1908 book of the same name.

The next issue of The Paris Review, edited by Caitlin Roper and probably waiting in my mailbox back in Brooklyn, features an interview with R. Crumb, an essay by Victor LaValle, and long-awaited new fiction from Geek Love author Katherine Dunn.

Oxford American’s fifth annual Best of the South issue includes my ode to Miami’s Biltmore Hotel, which I grew up thinking was haunted. Here’s an excerpt:
By day, the hotel was a dingy institutional white, its roof stained with age and half its windows blocked up, but when I first saw it lit against the night sky, barred minaret gleaming from within, I half-expected the whole thing to vanish. It looked, to my six-year-old eyes, like an apparition, an enchanted castle with a single turret. My mother walked me to our crumbling slab of a dock for a better view.

We’d moved into a house along the Coral Gables Waterway, a limestone channel dug during the ’20s land boom. The air smelled of muck and salty reeds with subtle notes of motor oil. Young peacock bass — quicksilver in the dim light — leapt out of the water and dropped almost soundlessly back. At the canal’s head, a half-mile away, rose the vacant hotel. In a land of strip malls, the mouldering Jazz Age relic was the most beautiful building I’d ever seen.

You’ll have to track down the rest to read the part about gangsters, ghosts, and thwarted attraction.

Obviously that’s the hotel, above, and here’s another old South Florida postcard showing a view of the canal. My childhood wasn’t all long afternoons of slow-flowing water and grand limestone sea-walls, but despite everything, I’ll always miss that house.

Fingers crossed, my copy of the magazine will be waiting when I get home tonight, and not just because I have a piece in it. I look forward to this issue every year. My personal favorite best-of essay so far is Sean Rowe’s 2008 “Insider’s Guide to Jailhouse Cuisine.” I’m also partial to Karen Russell’s, on a field trip to the Coral Castle.

The 2010 contributors listed on the magazine’s website are great, but they’re only part of the picture. Facebook tells me that something by Josh Weil was also included, and I know from experience that work from other writers I like will have been, too. Once I have the full table of contents in front of me, I’ll do a giveaway.

ThermoPoetics contends that some ideas about nature — and thermodynamics in particular — manifested themselves in literature before being articulated scientifically. (Via.)

This month The Paris Review Daily celebrates one of the magazine’s longtime contributors, Dr. Strangelove scribe Terry Southern.

On June 12, Save NYC Libraries is hosting a We Will Not Be Shushed read-in to support restoration of funding to our local library systems. To get everyone in the spirit, here are some librarians adapting Lady Gaga. (Link swiped from Alison Bechdel.)

If you haven’t sent in your postcard yet, now’s the time.

Even if we didn’t have Elizabeth Bishop’s and Robert Lowell’s letters to each other, we would have their conversations in poetry. See previously.

Herman Melville once declared his Redburn: His First Voyage “trash,” but the novel’s digressions prefigure Moby-Dick, says Ron Silliman.

I doubt I would have been so ticked off at Garrison Keillor’s death-of-publishing op-ed this morning if a friend hadn’t called yesterday to tell me how insulted she was by similar comments he made at a recent Authors Guild gala, but seeing newspapers endorse this sort of twaddle does get tiresome.

Judy Berman invited me to elaborate on my Twitter comments, and you can read my and others’ responses to Keillor’s article over at Flavorwire.
 

See also Douglas Adams’ 1999 essay “How to Stop Worrying and Love the Internet” (“anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really”).

In what he later called “a rather clever undergraduate essay,” Kingsley Amis argues that Keats was not a great poet, just “an often delightful, if often awkward, decorative [one].”

Organization, as you may recall, is not a virtue I possess in excess. And it depresses me when plans are drawn up and fail. So I hadn’t attempted to outline my novel draft in a couple of years. Now that the project has changed so fundamentally, though, I decided to spend a couple hours this weekend mapping out the story on my iPad.

The easiest thing would’ve been to type it all up in Pages, or to forgo technology altogether and plot everything out in my notebook (for some reason, I take comfort in keeping provisional things handwritten). Instead, I downloaded a new app and spent a little time teaching myself to draw letters with my index finger. (See practice effort, above.) Then I put together an outline. At the time this seemed, if not sensible, like a reasonable way to spend the morning. Later, less so.

But now I have the whole scheme in a handwritten PDF that, after many more hours’ work on the book, I’ve updated twice, once from home and once from my office. Maybe the effort wasn’t a complete boondoggle, after all.
 

See also Kitty Burns Florey’s Script and Scribble, on the death of cursive.

Willing Davidson shaped 1900 pages of a late Henry Roth manuscript into the posthumous novel An American Type.

Novelist Maureen Gibbon processed her rape by visiting a sex offender in jail. She and Susanna Moore discuss murderous women and Gibbon’s new novel, Thief, on June 7.

Further thoughts on everyday drinking, from Sir Kingsley Amis, who settles the question of regional whiskey spellings and marvels at the fortitude of the gunslingers of yore:
Whiskey in the USA has a long, colourful history. (Note that it is indeed spelt with an “e,” along with Irish whiskey — the Scotch and Canadian varieties are both plain whisky.)

One of the most illustrious early American distillers was George Washington, who manufactured the stuff commercially at his place near Mount Vernon in Virginia [Ed. note: reconstructed distillery above], and was very proud of the high reputation of his merchandise. I’m sure it was great for its time, but then and for long afterwards the general run of whiskey must have been pretty rough. I’ve often thought that the really amazing achievement of the Western hero wasn’t his ability to shoot a pip out of a playing card at fifty paces, nor even his knack of dropping crotch first into his saddle from an upstairs window, but the way he could stride into the saloon, call for whiskey, knock it back neat and warm in one and not so much as blink, let alone burst into paroxysms of uncontrollable coughing.

All that, of course, is changed now. American whiskeys are second to none in smoothness, blandness, everything that goes to make a fine spirit…

George Washington’s distillery has been resurrected, and I’ve been meaning to try the stuff.

Further reading: The spirits of 1776; archaeologists’ notes on the excavation of the Mount Vernon distillery; Hangover reading with Kingsley Amis; Charles Dickens’ eggnog (according to Eudora Welty); The Newtons, blood, and bank-robbing cousins. Cheers!

“There is no historical figure who fills me with as much frustration as does Alice James. Whiny, petulant, bratty, arrogant, useless Alice James. And yet I cannot stop reading about her.”