We're delighted to regurgitate the completely phenomenal news that the snarky ladies behind one of our favorite blogs, the most triumphant Go Fug Yourself, have just landed book deal worth at least a quarter of the total value of Sienna Miller's capri leggings collection:

Publisher's Marketplace reports the sale of "Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan's The Fug Awards, fashion critiques of celebrity outfits from the authors of a popular website, to Jeremie Ruby-Strauss at Simon Spotlight Entertainment, in a good deal, by Scott Hoffman at Folio Literary Management (NA)."

You may ask, why would anyone want to purchase a gossip book when we can spend our salaries on weekly tabloids that offer the trash on a budget (or get it free on the Internerd)? And didn't blogger book options jump the shark after former SPIN editor Sarah Lewitinn (aka DJ Ultragrrrl) turned blogger failed to produce a phenomenon with The Pocket DJ?

Perhaps. That aside, this is huge, friends. We are rooting for this one. We want to see it on bestseller lists. The New York Times. The Post. We want to give The Fug Awards away as gifts. People need to experience the joys of fugly fasion -- the whole world should know. So suffice it to say, we'd totally fork over the cash for a coffee table tome about wealthy celebrities with "an unfortunate dress sense" -- as long as its authored by these two. 

When the Fug website (at less than a year old) was linked by Defamer, it found its way to the bookmarks of countless fashion editors and landed the Fug Girls commentary spots on VH-1's Awesomely Badder Fashion. They haven't been nicknamed the Joan and Melissa Rivers of the web for nothing. Except they're younger and hotter, and have even better TV jobs (Cocks is a senior story producer for America's Next Top Model).  

An example, for your pleasure, entitled Califugia, which we adored to such a degree we have a print out hanging above our desk at home. Jessica takes down one of the Fuggers' prime victims: the lovely Mischa Barton. Despite her obvious beauty, her "acting"/modeling career that place her in the paparazzo spotlight, and her natural ability to make Keds look cool again, Mischa makes appalling errors in style and taste on a disturbingly regular basis. We aren't just referring to her long-term relationship with Brandon "firecrotch" Davis and unnerving decision to rebound with gross-to-the-max Cisco Adler. It's the fact that she can look gorgeous one day. Stunning. The next, she's willing to walk about in public wearing items that should be regulated to people who just came home from their high school prom circa 1989, were too tired to fully change into PJs but also didn't want to totally remove their rumpled finery from their bodies because they were really excited they got to dress up for a party and dance with the super tall point guard on Varsity. We're getting ahead of ourselves:

"Is that what you're doing? Is this a conscious ploy for my attention? A cry for help? Or is this some kind of sartorial version of You Got Served? Is this like the part where the kid spins around on his head, except the spinning has been replaced by purple velour sweatpants worn -- sweet God, no -- with a RICK-RACK SEQUINED CARDIGAN?

Do you REALLY want to do this to yourself, Mischa? Do you really want to hurt me? Do really want to make me cry? Do you want to make my eyes bleed? What other reason could you possibly have for dressing like your boyfriend's grandmother,  Barbara Davis, from the waist up? Not to mention the fact that, according to W magazine, Barbara Davis raises kajillions of dollars for charity each year and when she sees you in those pants, she may very well think the you need some of that money to BUY YOURSELF PANTS THAT ARE APPROPRIATE TO WEAR WITH A CARDIGAN and, oh, will it be embarrassing when she tries to write you a check at brunch next week."

LOLZZ HAHA OMG. It's almost too much! But not really. If you like that, check out the Fugger's Mischa Barton/O.C. Gang archive. The Ashlee & Jessica Simpson and Lindsay Lohan posts are utterly priceless. And huge confidence builders! When the mood strikes, the Fug Girls are known to indulge in short one act plays, or spoof diary entries. They've recently initiated a running feature called "Ask Aunt Fugly" -- it's incredible to witness the kind of creative verbal diarrhea that bad fashion can inspire in two great writers.  It's all splendid, and we're sure the main cast of characters will get the attention they deserve in the forthcoming book. However, the real glowing jewel here, and what we hope to see expanded upon considerably in The Fug Awards, are Britney's Letters of Truth. In light of her shitshow of an outfit for her 2004 Billboard Awards appearance, the Fuggers unite World History, Ice Capades, and Mrs. K-Fed in one riotous post. Oh, how the mighty have fallen:

"But let's talk about my outfit because it is so totally cute. When the salesgirl at the Dress Barn told me that I looked like a lampshade, I knew I had to have it. Also, when I was getting ready and Jamie Lynne was helping me and brushing my hair -- and she brushed it really, really hard, y'all, I almost cried -- and she told me I looked like a refugee from a Third World road tour of the Ice Capades, I knew it was the right choice for tonight because Jamie really loves ice skating. Then she said something about how at least my hair doesn't look like I brushed it with a Mix Master and I totally don't know what that means but I am pretty sure it was nice."

Last year, Nina Garcia, the fashion director of Elle magazine, made the mistake of telling one Project Runway contestant (was it Santino? we can't remember) to "Relax...it's just fashion." Clearly, Nina, it is not JUST fashion. And unlike the detractors who claim the Fuggers are setting back feminism or don't know what the hell they're talking about, we say, shut your face! Fug On, Fug Girls. NOBODY looks pretty in red bloomers. Not even you, Duff.

ELSEWHERE:
* Jossip on the Fuggers
* Gawker on the Fuggers
* NPR's Alex Chadwick intervews Jessica Morgan
* Ostrich Ink hearts the Fuggers
* Leggings: Fug or not Fug?

Tomorrow night. Grub Gone . . . Sweaty. We hyped it here a couple weeks back, but it’s worth mentioning again. Tickets remain, but they’re going fast, and the best way to get one is to sign up here. If you were at last summer’s soiree, you know it was a debaucherous sweat-fest. Place was packed and everyone was drenched. Tomorrow night’s party should be just as dancey and debauched – with Steve “I hate Condi Rice” Almond behind the decks, and quickie readings by author Stephen McCauley (Alternatives to Sex), socialite Ondine Brent, Agni editor and Believer contributor Billy Giraldi, plus Sue Williams and Carmen Nobel, and all sorts of beer and wine – but with less actual perspiration than last summer. Grub Street HQ just installed a couple of air conditioners. Tickets are eight bucks. Get one fast.

 "I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn't know who I was -- I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds."

David Perry reports in The Lowell Sun that Jack Kerouac's On the Road will be republished by the end of 2007 in, get this, its "original, scroll version." Wait a sec -- the rambling druggy tirade that we really loved but (and we hope we're not alone here) secretly skimmed through several chunks of because we were more flummoxed by the order of Sal's travels than we were trying to figure out the color symbolism in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man -- that was the edited version? Oh. Hah.

The Lowell-born beatnik left his literary estate in care of John Sampas, who just signed a contract with Viking/Penguin. "'Incidents in the original were edited out of the published version because of the censorship of the time,' says Sampas, who said that at least portions of the edited sections refer to drugs and sex."

Sampas assures Kerouac-heads that the story about On the Road being written in a magical 21-day burst is true. However, the author was a careful note-taker. He spent five years drafting the book, and two mansucripts went through heavy edits before the book was published in 1957.

So who is going to lovingly put the misadventures in On the Road back together again? Sampas has enlisted "a group of four young Kerouac scholars well-studied in British and American literature to help edit the project." Before these fresh-faced whippersnappers schooled in the Beats and beret-wearing buckle down, they're going to take 20 Jägerbombs with Red Bull and flip a candy roll. Because that's what you do when you're serious about your job.

"My argument was that if you really want a story that is going to portray the organization in all its fullness, then I need to be there to see all that."

Gay Talese should be proud of Vanity Fair writer (and former Phoenix contributor) Seth Mnookin for taking the hardcore New Journalism to Fenway Park. You think you already know everything about the Sox? Well, was the stuff you’re reading written by a guy who spent weekends talking shop with John Henry? Red Sox Nation will have multiple heart attacks over Mnookin’s Feeding the Monster: How Money, Smarts, and Nerve Took a Team to the Top. After spending a year with the unluckiest team in baseball, Mnookin explains exactly how the stars aligned for the World Series win. But this isn’t just another rundown of a historic event: there’s more juicy insider scandal in here about Nomar, Pedro, Theo, and the rest of the gang than that the Shiloh Jolie-Pitt issue of People (or, come to think of it, today's Lance Bass edition). Ask Mnookin if he got to keep his key to Fenway when he reads tomorrow, July 27th, at the Borders Bookstore Café, 10-24 School St, Boston | 12:30 pm | Free | 617.557.7188. Word Up does not endorse Mnookin's fugly farmer shirt (see above) but we heart the writing! And that's what counts.

ELSEWHERE:
* SethMnookin.com and the author's blog
* Mike Miliard on Brains, Balls, and a Key to Fenway
* The Black Table on Mnookin's first book, Hard News: The Scandals at the New York Times and Their Meaning for American Media
* We kind of wish everyone, including Mnookin, would leave James Frey alone
* Read an excerpt from Feeding the Monster on ESPN: "I just felt empty," says Garciaparra. "Just like, no way." He hung up the phone and walked out of Francona's office. "I go to my locker and I see D-Lowe there, and I go, 'Don't worry, it's not you, it's me. See ya, bro.' And word starts spreading around and I'm just trying not to cry." Garciaparra packed his stuff, left Minnesota, and got on a plane to Chicago."
* The Globe and the Globe Magazine cover Feeding the Monster

Full disclosure: we’re obsessed with Scotland. Truly, what’s not to love? Bagpipes, sheep, rolling green hills, brawny dudes who wear short plaid skirts with more flair than we ever could. Of course, that’s not quite Irvine Welsh's Edinburgh -- in 1996, he gave us Trainspotting, a blistering black-humor account of the capital’s seedy underbelly, complete with stylish junkies, heroin addicts, raging psychos, and foul-smelling toilets. Uplifting, wasn’t it? Welsh is back with The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs, which pegs a womanizing restaurant inspector against a nerdy Uni-grad. A creepy celeb chef, a mysterious disease, and an impromptu jaunt stateside keeps the plot fast and furious. Welsh will advise you to choose the job, the family, and the fucking big television at the Coolidge Corner Theatre, 290 Harvard St, Brookline | August 16 @ 6 pm | $2 | 617.566.6660. So buy your tix early and ditch your fantasies about the writing life:

"It might just be because I'm fucking lazy or whatever, but I've no fucking respect for the writer's craft. It's a lot of fucking nonsense. It's all application. It's nothing to fucking do with skill." -- Irvine Welsh

ELSEWHERE:
* IrvineWelsh.com
* Your resource for all things Ewan "Rent Boy" McGregor (um, swoon)
* Which Trainspotting Character Are You?
* The Guardian UK: Welsh's play Babylon Heights and a review of Bedroom Secrets
* Listen to a Robert Burns poem read with a Scottish accent, and fall in love
* The Edinburgh Fringe Festival

Word Up approved lit-links for your case of the Mondays:

*This half of Word Up doesn't buy as many comics as she used to, but check out Galley Cat's intellectually exhaustive coverage of San Diego's Comic-Con Festival. Holler, tons of important, extremely famous people got their geek on (including Sameul L., promoting New Line Cinema's SNAKES ON A PLANE.) Seth Cohen was there, too. It appears Brody wrote an actual comic called The Red Menace, loosely based on U.S. Senator Joe McCarthy's communist witch hunt, which had a stranglehold on Hollywood in the 1950s (what wouldn't we give for a graphic novel of Atomic County...) with Rachel Bilson's DAD?

*From Carla Blumenkranz’s My Life and Times in American Publishing (via Maud Newton). Think being a publishing intern is an easy gig? "Then Kristy told me to find the new Jesus. Those weren’t the exact words she used. Her superior (a sturdy, headbanded woman named Kate) had commissioned Kristy to find a new spiritual leader. The market was ripe for it, Kristy explained. All we had to do was find him. I would know him when I saw him, because he was a clean-cut, non-white, Christian male. He had a manifesto already on the market (so Emperor could easily buy the rights) and a sizable cult or congregation (so he’d be good on television)."

* The Globe's Gail Caldwell gets down with Pynchon conspiracy theories.

*The Future of Borders: "George L. Jones, the newly appointed chief executive of Borders Group, one of the nation’s largest book retailers, is a onetime aspiring rock star who went on to help Target create its bargain upscale aesthetic and revived the Scooby-Doo character for Warner Brothers."

*Warning! These Pretty Packages May Contain a Lot of Long Words. The Observer mourns publishers sexing-up and dumbing-down the classics. (via MediaBistro)

*Perusing the Bookshelf of the Undulating Curve of Shifting Expectations!: The Backlash to the Backlash = Keanu Reeves. So best.

Thanks to a press release that came with a copy of Lois Lowry's new book, we learned that The Giver, a book my little brother cites as one of his alltime faves, is being made into a movie by the same folks who recently did Narnia (we haven’t seen it, but have little faith that it could beat the 1979 animated version), and directed by Vadim Perelman, the same guy who adapted Andre Dubus III’s House of Sand and Fog to the big screen.

We’ve learned two things from some IMDB sleuthing. One: a la Pleasantville and The Wizard of Oz, The Giver will be in color and black and white. Two: Jeff Bridges (a co-producer) is "attached" to star in the title role. Clearly he's into roles where his name begins with “The.”

It's not just Tom Cruisazy's game anymore. Katie's looking rough, and we haven't seen so much as the tiniest glimpse of their L. Ron Hubbard-approved lovechild Suri, but now we've got the insider info on Thomas Pynchon's sixth novel, Against the Day, due in December from Penguin Press.

This is the stuff of dreams! The internerd's crazy Pynchon cult has got its collective groupie panties in a twist over the author's not-so-anonymous Amazon.com posting. Gosh, writers DO use Amazon for more than just checking their ratings and micro-managing nasty review commentary (holler at ya, Anne Rice)! Publisher's Marketplace reports:

The description of Thomas Pynchon's forthcoming novel AGAINST THE DAY referred to in Slate yesterday, pulled down from Amazon's official product page but preserved by a site visitor on Amazon's discussion board, is indeed by the author, confirmed by Tracy Locke at Penguin Press.

Locke adds that the Slate piece incorrectly claimed she "disavowed all knowledge" of the post. "I explained to Troy Patterson that I was unaware that any sort of book description had been posted on Amazon and that I'd not seen it -- and therefore could not comment on its accuracy."

Amazon's Sean Sundwall tells the AP it was Penguin that asked for the posting to be withdrawn, "due to a late change in scheduling on their part."

A late change in scheduling? Whatever. God, we adore Pynchon fans. Here's one example of their breathless speculation before Penguin confirmed that it was indeed Pynchon who authored the post: "All new counter cultures are hypertextual, web-based, the best way for Pynchon to push the envelope is to bring the new subculture into the 'game' the best way to do that is hypertextually by entertaining 'tickling the creature' about what they are obsessed with (they are obsessed with Pynchon the recluse, the hoax photos, what have you)." That is, like, totally what we were thinking.  

ELSEWHERE:
Gawker on Pynchon
The archived Amazon.com post
Join the chatter on the Amazon.com Pynchonian Discussion Board
Pynchon's insanely comprehensive Wiki

Check out this sparkle in homeskillet's eyes.
And that smile! So post-modern! We got your back, Thom.

Word Up knows more about books than hip-hop, but there's bigdeal publishing news for Cambridge-based hip-hop critic Brian Coleman. His highly acclaimed, self-published Rakim Told Me: Hip-Hop Wax Facts, Straight from the Original Artists, an oral history of seminal hip-hop artists from the ’80s, recently got picked up for publication by Villard/Random House for release in mid-2007. In addition to 21 chapters on the likes of Ice T, Slick Rick, and Chuck D, the book will be updated with 30 to 35 new chapters including interviews with Cypress Hill, the Fugees, the Roots, Naughty by Nature, Wu-Tang Clan, Digable Planets, and A Tribe Called Quest, among others. Coleman, who writes for XXL, URB, and the Phoenix, among other publications, has called his compilation “invisible liner notes,” and has sold about 2000 copies to date, primarily in record stores and online at turntable.com and dustygroove.com.

As for how the pick-up came about, Coleman did most of the leg-work himself, he explains over email, getting friends with connections to put the book into the hands of editors at a few major publishing houses, letting them know he was working on Volume Two with plans to self-publish again. He ended up with two offers (as well as the bragging rights for being included in an MTV news rundown with Justin Timberlake, Mariah Carey, and Ludacris.)

“In the end,” he wrote to Word Up, “I think I was in a good bargaining position since I knew I could sell Vol. 2 on my own, so I was prepared to walk away from any dealings.”

As for how much more work he has in front him: “TONS!” In addition to the 30-35 new chapters, there will be an additional 50 interviews at least. “I’m finishing up my interviews by August and handing in my first draft soon thereafter. But the new version will be the definitive one, with much better layout, lots of artist photos, and actual distribution.”

Check out A hip-hop history interview and podcast with Brian Coleman and Jeff Chang, author of Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation.

WBUR may have just idiotically yanked their arts coverage, but public radio is still what the brainy boys and girls like to listen to. Lisa Phillips, a former radio reporter-cum-SUNY journalism professor, is as passionate about talk radio as commercial stations are about their pre-selected Top 40 playlists. In Public Radio: Behind the Voices, Phillips pays tribute to NPR darlings Ira Glass (This American Life) and Terry Gross (Fresh Air) -- both of whom, oddly, declined to be interviewed for the book. A section on News and Information includes portraits of Bob Edwards (he left Morning Edition for Sirius Satellite); another on Music profiles hosts such as Marian McPartland of Piano Jazz. Phillips will sound off about her various broadcast heroes tomorrow, July 20th at the Brookline Booksmith, 279 Harvard St, Brookline | 7 pm | free | 617.566.6660.

ELSEWHERE:

Phillips's website is in need of a redesign

POP VULTURES, one of the coolest PRX shows ever, got the axe in 2004 after only a dozen eps received airplay (too hip for the oldsters) but you can find your way to streamable versions here. You will not be sorry, friends.

Stream This American Life staff favorites. All are amazing, but check out Notes on Camp, My Experimental Phase, and Pray if you want your mind blown. Without visual stimulation!

Terri Gross is a brilliant interviewer. She can make or break an author on her show. Unlike Oprah, Gross has both good taste AND self-control. Okay, so Gross had Augusten Burroughs -- and he might be a little nuts, but it's not like he's the conductor of his very own Cruisazy Train. Check out the Fresh Air archives for more book reviews, stories, and author interviews than you'll know what to do with.

Just a friendly reminder from the Word Up crew that Al Gore will be signing copies of An Inconvenient Truth at noon today at the Harvard Book Store. You want to know why it's so freaking hot out? He may tell you, if it doesn't hold up the line too much. But no pushing. You'll all get your face time in.

He's all business now. Why so serious, Al? Oh, it must be because we're killing the planet. I totally forgot because I was having a heart attack over the Carmen Electra & Dave Navarro split. Sigh.

There are two issues in the news that I will be fussing over all day today. The first is the conflict in the Middle East, and obviously, I'm both disturbed and obsessed with that. Second is the fact that a certain Ms. Avril Lavigne has gotten hitched with her one and only Sk8tr Boi, Deryck Whibley of the pop-punk band Sum 41. I care deeply about both of these items, although it's obvious that the former is...er...more significant and of a greater concern than the latter. From my perspective, though, they're both important. I adore Hollywood gossip. I follow the dating misadventures and marriages of pretty, young, strange Canadian pop stars with a vengeance. International affairs, though...well. Tomorrow I'll forget that Av's on her honeymoon, and I'll be worrying about Hezbollah and Israel's next move. But know I'll still be interested in whether she and D-dawg make it through the first year. And I expect to be told.

Which brings me to Gail Caldwell's rumination, "Beyond Measure," in yesterday's Boston Globe. Her Critic's View piece muses over last year's NYTBR's "Best" poll, which asked 200 writers and editors (fiction authors included) to choose the best work of the last 25 years. After receiving 124 responses, Toni Morrison's Beloved was deemed the winner. There were plenty of weird and annoying discrepancies in the poll -- the fact that Morrison only gleaned 10% of the vote, and Philip Roth split it between seven of his books. Some writers voted for themselves, and didn't select what is widely regarded as their superior work. Some writers voted for other writers. Some writers didn't bother to vote at all, or couldn't pick just one work, and tried to justify that with essays and alternative suggestions.

Caldwell's been a book critic for quite some time, and she's got the smarts and the perspective to prove it. Which is why even a year after the poll, her thoughts here are still awfully relevant:

"And with 150,000 books published each year, somebody has to thin the herd. That's where reviewers -- and booksellers, book clubs, prizes, polls, and your own Aunt Margie -- come in. I know one snobbish writer who, whenever a stranger would ask her for a reading recommendation, would smile thinly and reply, 'Try Middlemarch.' I hope my own response is broader and kinder: Read what you like, what your friends like, what a trustworthy critic recommended this season. Read Charlotte's Web, or Humboldt's Gift, or Parade's End, or Michael Chabon and Ian McEwan and Zadie Smith and Rachel Cusk and Claire Messud and Colm Toibin and...oh good Lord, even Irving, I suppose."

You'll like what you're going to like, right? If you want to rip through The Da Vinci Code one weekend, or on your morning commute on the T, why not let yourself enjoy it? Why hide the dust jacket from view? Then, if you want to tackle The Sound and the Fury the next day, there's nothing wrong with admitting you heart Dan Brown. It passed the time, it made you happy for a few hours, and it brought you pleasure -- maybe not the same level that reading a classic work by a beloved American talent would, but pleasure all the same.

When people ask me what my favorite book is, I usually either say one of four: Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand, Welcome to the Monkey House by Kurt Vonnegut, or The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers. It is difficult for me to choose one. But you know what I really love? The Baby-sitters Club by Ann M. Martin. Any of them. All of them. The whole series. The Super Specials and the Mysteries and the spin-offs.

I love them, and sometimes I reread them when I go home to visit my parents, when I get bored from their lack of cable. Just a few weeks ago, I watched The Babysitters Club movie for free on Comcast On Demand. And I enjoyed every last second of it. Stacy is my favorite character. She doesn't just dress the coolest. She IS the coolest.

This month Topic magazine dedicates their 9th issue to Music. Sufjan Stevens, every indie-yuppie’s (and blogger's) favorite nü-folk multi-instrumentalist singer-songwriter, has contributed the lead essay. And you know what? It’s really, really fucking good. Obviously Suf is a scribe; lyrically, his songs are lovelier and more publishable than a book of Jewel poems. Of course, instead, Ms. Saaaave Your Soul got the stupid book deal and Sufjan just dashes off a random piece for a pretty-yet-overpriced, proud to be on the fringes pop-culture mag. As if there aren’t enough of those. Still, there’s something in this essay. I’m thinking maybe Sufjan ought to take a little break from the music, hole up in a rat-infested basement, and start crafting his memoirs. The brief peeks into his childhood that he offers here could rival one of David Sedaris’s or Augusten Boroughs’s lingering, freeze-frame gut-busters. Except Sufjan isn’t going for a laugh. He doesn’t need to.

In the obscure backrooms of my  memory, there is a gauzy portrait of me drumming pots and pans on the kitchen floor. I am a bumbling infant, top-heavy, lower-lipped, thumb-suckling, encountering gravity for the first time, buffered by an afghan laid out on the linoleum, banging on the consequential music of kitchen utensils: a chopstick on a glass lid, a plastic spoon on a rice steamer, the tap dancing of a whisk on a box of spaghetti. This is my first performance. I am eleven months old. I am a drum major. I am a ragtime rhythm section. I am a wild animal knocking rocks on the hard shell of mother earth, the prehistoric paradiddle. I am nerves and muscle gaining strength.

Sufjan casts three minute magical charms with his songs: his turns of phrase and brutal poetry set to exquisite lullaby-like chords evoke the best parts of Elliott Smith and Jim O’Rourke. Some are are like prayers to God, others are ruminations on his life, but many are about tiny, obscure details — particularly those associated with Sufjan's two state-themed releases, Greetings from Michigan: The Great Lakes State and Illinois. His goal is to record an album about each of the fifty states. But first he had to learn how to play the instruments nobody else wanted to rock in band.

In sixth grade, Ms. Zeisler tricks me into playing the oboe. I want to play the trumpet, the trombone, the royalty of brass. The king and the queen. Look in the mirror, she says. Your lips, your overbite, your jaw. You have the mouth of an oboist. I resign myself.

He eventually found his way to a guitar, too. Then came the whole granola-worship period, which he brushes over nicely without over-glorifying it.

In college, I wear sandals with socks, cut the edges of my jeans and grow my hair...another friend lends me a guitar with nylon strings and a plastic back...I hold the instrument like it’s a small child, a newborn, wiggling and kicking in my lap. I have two left hands, stumbling with the simplest of chords. Right brain and left brain begin to fuss and fight, but after two months they come to terms. They hold hands.

The oft-debated fiction writing workshop question: Should you write what you know? Many seasoned authors say that it’s hardest to write about the things that you are closest to, yet that’s often where one’s best work can find its way to the page. Or should you risk writing what you don’t, realistically, know anything about at all, and find great success in the challenge? Sufjan says he takes the first path. But then where does a song about a notorious rapist and serial killer come in? John Wayne Gacy, Jr. has the kind of unforgettable melody that could depress a dead person. So I guess it isn’t surprising that Suf ends here by lamenting his unavailable mother and other assorted piles of emotional baggage. If the whole album per state thing falls through, keep your eyes peeled for some kind of one-man memoir performance side-project with a backing band in tow. Sufjan Stevens and the Noise-Makers-cum-Abandonment-Issues? Yeah, he’s definitely a writer’s writer.

Write what you know, I am told, so I look around the room and serenade the laundry hamper, the soda cans, the psychology textbook. I sing about the loneliness of oboes, the cabbage leaf, loose teeth and Cindy Seasons, who has since been in and out of rehab...I sing about my mother, the loneliest of oboes, who had left us years ago, hands cupped over her ears to keep out the orchestra of her children, the music of everyday life which was too much to bear...This song will find its home in the hymnals of churches. This song is sung in the loneliest of bedrooms, behind closed doors, by young men and women who fear they are the last ones on earth.

ELSEWHERE:

Lyrics and a guitar tab to John Wayne Gacy, Jr. (from Illinois)

Matt Ashare on The Strange New Face of Indie

Sufjan's MySpace

P-fork hearts Sufjan 4-Eva

DOWNLOAD:
All Sufjan on Elbo.ws, all the time

The Henny Buggy Band (MP3), off The Avalance: Outtakes & Extras from the Illinois Album
 

If you were trying to defy the aging process, wouldn’t you take the advice of a tennis legend who at 49 is still playing Wimbledon, and who can hustle a neon green tennis ball over a net at what may well be the speed of light? Martina Navratilova's Shape Your Self: My 6-Step Diet and Fitness Plan To Achieve the Best Shape of Your Life doesn’t mince words. She's a shining beacon of fitness, and she's ready to tell you how you can stop time from passing, the clock from ticking, and keep you looking (and feeling!) younger than a fabulous Hollywood “It” girl. 

Even L. Lo is looking a bit ragged these days (can you believe she’s already 20?), so learn the secrets of the Grand Slam of Health when Martina brings it to the Harvard Coop, 1400 Mass Ave, Cambridge | 10 am | free | 617.499.2012.

Of course, none of this means she isn't down with the senior stuff. In a recent interview with ESPN, Navratilova declared: "Now that I'll be collecting AARP discount, it's time to move on with life." Reap the benefits.  

In honor of its 10th issue and fifth year, Quick Fiction, a lit mag based in Jamaica Plain, is putting together a special issue and getting real benevolent. Literary magazines normally need every nickel to stay afloat, but for July and August, if you pre-order special issue ten, 15% of proceeds will go to Jumpstart, a national non-profit that works to build literacy skills in at-risk kids. Quick Fiction specializes in flash fiction, short-shorts, micro fiction, whatever you wanna call it; all stories are, at longest, 500 words. Here's a particularly lovely example by Andrew Michael Roberts. To pre-order issue ten, click here. 

Good gracious. First, a Harvard University freshman fucked up a two-book deal worth a cool half-mil. (For those living under a rock, Kaavya Viswanathan plagiarized a nice chunk of her YA novel, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life--just your basic tween saga on ditching a super-scheduled, uptight over-achiever persona for some juicy high school dramarama.) And now it looks as though a few pseudo-perfectionist dullards in academia took a leaf from Kaavya's book. The profs who are supposed to teach the illustrious Youth of America about how Wrong It Is to Copy Other People's Work can't even keep their facts straight and their analysis fresh. The New York Times explains in Schoolbooks Given F's in Originality. By the way, not all textbook authors slack so hard they can't even cover up their own mess. Some actually do care about what their name is printed on. It's their lazy publishers who don't:

"Wendy Spiegel, a spokeswoman for Pearson Prentice Hall, which published both books and is one of the nation’s largest textbook publishers, called the similarities 'absolutely an aberration.'

She said that after Sept. 11, 2001, her company, like other publishers, hastily pulled textbooks that had already been revised and were lined up for printing so that the terror attacks could be accounted for. The material on the attacks, as well as on the other subjects, was added by in-house editors or outside writers, she said.

She added that it was 'unfortunate' that the books had identical passages, but said that there were only 'eight or nine” in volumes that each ran about 1,000 pages.'"

Oh, great. So, like, if you lift under ten assorted portions of SOMEONE ELSE'S WORK, it's all good. But no more than ten graphs! Hear that, pre-frosh? The mighty texbook publishers have spoken. But I wouldn't recommend taking their advice.

Not all birthday parties end with presents and a wrapping-paper tiara. Take Heidi Pitlor’s wrenching, Sue Miller–esque debut, The Birthdays. On Joe Miller’s 75th, his children gather to celebrate, each of them nursing wounds. One daughter is pregnant by a sperm donor whom her husband’s infatuated with, another, the youngest, is about to have a baby and doesn’t know who the father is. Distressing but absorbing reading from a Houghton Mifflin senior editor at Harvard Book Store, 1256 Mass Ave, Cambridge | July 13 @ 6:30 pm | free | 800.542.READ.

Elsewhere: Entertainment Weekly reviews The Birthdays
"The Mircacle of Rosas" in Plougshares

It's nice to know I'm not the only one who is regularly disturbed by the New York Times' Modern Love essays. This week, Theodora Stites takes us into the bone-chilling world of the online social networking scene. Way to pick up on the trend stories. People keep in touch via the Web?!!

Stites spends most of her word count here bragging about the many online communities to which she belongs--it's an exhausting laundry-list, and I'm wondering whether she's at all embarrassed by the amount of thought she puts into not only maintaining her personal pages, but her shameless admission that she'd rather experience a well-connected fake life on a machine than in reality. Worse yet, she says most of her (my) entire generation operates this way. Huh? Yeah, I like my extended network as much as the next person. This, though, is unnerving: "I live for Friendster views, profile comments and the Dodgeball messages that clog my cellphone every night. I prefer, in short, a world cloaked in virtual intimacy. It may be electronic, but it is intimacy nevertheless." What the fug? She probably reads Chuck Klosterman books on her BlackBerry so that she can scroll down instead of turn the page.

It's astonishing that despite the immense amount of self-justification, Stites refrains from divulging exactly how many friends she has. How coy. So how come I can't find her anywhere on MySpace or Friendster? Don't hide, Theodora. I need to know who else you roll with, besides the dude that runs Flavorpill and Dennis Crowley--both of whom you gratuitously name-drop, just to make sure we know that you're for real. And that you do hang out with hip, important people on weekends. You're not home alone, playing D&D in meta-looking Yahoo chat rooms.

Usually, Modern Love will at least devote a couple of sentences on the author's exploding, dead, or dying relationship with someone. There's an epiphany. A moment where some deeper understanding has been reached for author and reader. They're always well-written, though lacking in subtlety. What does Sites tell us? That she is hopelessly, completely, head-over-heels in love with the Internets. 

I'm terrified. But I can't look away. This is even scarier than the stuff they run in Weddings & Celebrations.

Elsewhere: The Black Table: A Modern Love Story 

Hooray for Small Beer Press. We came across the tiny Northampton publishing house when Kelly Link and her astounding, bizarre, genre-waltzing second collection of short stories Magic for Beginners crossed our path. Small Beer puts out work that’s more literary than typical sci-fi or fantasy. More fantastical than literary fiction. And Word Up was thrilled to receive an email from Gavin Grant, the man behind Small Beer, and Link’s husband, announcing a new collection of short stories by Minneapolis writer and poet Alan DeNiro.

Like Link’s work, the stories in Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead, DeNiro’s debut, don’t slot comfortably into genre. Think Aimee Bender and China Miéville and George Saunders. Think authors who blur the surreal with the political with the emotional with the fantastic. In the title story, which was shortlisted for the O. Henry Award, an 18 year old kid in a suburb called Suddenly writes his college essay on debating whether to get gills to be with the girl he loves. “I was beginning to learn how a person’s mind could be like a nipple or an earlobe, how a person could fall in love with a person from what they say instead of how they look.” In “The Centaur,” a soldier’s leg is amputated and a fairy tale is sewed on in its stead. You can get the “fun size” edition of the collection here on DeNiro’s blog.

And tomorrow night, July 11, he’s reading at Porter Square Books at 7 pm with Theodora Goss. And Kelly Link will provide the introductions.

Across town in Brookline, another away-from-the-real reading is taking place tomorrow night. At 7 pm at Brookline Booksmith, Pagan Kennedy reads from her Confessions of a Memory Eater, a novel about a memory drug, identity, and whether it’s better to live in the present or past. You can read an interview thePhoenix.com did with Kennedy here.

T. Coraghessan Boyle — better known as T.C. — is back with his 11th novel, Talk Talk, an identity-theft thriller that traces the framing of Dana Halter, a deaf woman who is in danger of disappearing into the criminal-justice system. Her heroic boyfriend, Bridges, is ready to risk it all for Dana’s love, and the two set out on a road trip across the country to clear her name. Sounds simple enough, but Boyle, an Iowa Writer’s Workshop grad and the winner of a PEN/Faulkner and a slew of other awards, writes like a true Mark Twain disciple, working the balance of humor and the ruthless nature of human society with his deftly layered language. He’ll read in the Boston Public Library’s Abbey Room, Copley Square, Boston | July 11 @ 6 pm | free | 617.859.2212. Click here for Peter Keough's Phoenix review of Talk Talk.

Elsewhere:
Boyle's official website

Boyle's Wiki

The New York Times reviews Boyle's other books, and Ms. Kakutani hates on Talk Talk: "In any case, it's a sorry and pallid conclusion to what might have been one of this gifted writer's more winning novels."

Boyle takes a sweet vacation

Writers are known to spend days in self-imposed, lonely isolation. So when they decide to unwind, they do it up right. Grub Street, Word Up's fave independent writing center, is hosting Grub Gone...Sweaty, the second in a series of reading parties that are geared to get you drunk and slam-dancing to Steve Almond's DJ stylings, or at least mix and mingle a little with some other local scribes. It's July 28th, 7 pm doors, Grub Street HQ. Tickets are $5 for members; $8 non-members. And we're giving you a few week's notice to plan your outfit and get going on the first draft of your best literary pick-up lines (none of these apply), because Grubbie events do sell out. Quickly.

Readings by Stephen McCauley, Billy Giraldi, Sue Williams, Ondine Brent, and Carmen Nobel start at 8 pm -- but the alchy will be flowing all night, and the wild hip-shakin' can commence any damn time you please. Just don't do anything you'd regret to see "fictionalized" in someone's short story submission for a fall workshop class.

Not only did Al Gore invent this here Interweb, he also knows a shitload about why the world is going to hell in a handbasket. It has less to do with blaming politicians, more to do with everyone in sight ramming their gas guzzlers across highways and sucking down natural resources faster than a D&D iced-coffee. This half of Word Up saw An Inconvenient Truth last week, and when I got out of the Coolidge, I felt like I had to go pick up trash and install some solar panels on my roof. Global warming is scarier than Mitchiko Kakutani when she likes a book. Did you SEE that final "through the roof" chart?

Our friends at the Harvard Book Store (who alluded to this on glorious Updike night, but we kept our traps shut just in case it didn't happen) sent out the word that the former Vice Prez will be signing copies of An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It on Tuesday, July 18 from noon-1 pm, no tickets required. That's less than two weeks to get your energy emission rates down to zero, friends. He'll know if you've been leaving all your lights on.

It’s not necessarily news in the new sense, but Word Up just got wind of Spike Jonze’s latest project: production begins this summer on an animated version of Maurice Sendak’s classic Where the Wild Things Are to be released in 2008. And who wrote the screenplay? None other than Dave Eggers.

Eggers, prince of a publishing empire, literary do-gooder, infamous author of the man-boy memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, told Salon last year that up till then, he’d avoided screenwriting, “but Spike is one of my favorite directors and "Malkovich" in particular is one of my very favorite movies. I don't know how much detail I can or should go into about "Wild Things," but it's very -- as you would expect from Spike -- it's not really what you would expect. It's what Maurice wants for the book.” Indeed. The almost-octegenarian Sendak told Maud Newton: “If Spike and Dave do not do this movie, now, I would just as soon not see any version of it ever get made."

Arch twee? Or for-real rumpus? It’ll probably depend on the soundtrack.

In the meantime, I’ll admit to excitement.

(And thanks goes to Sam for the heads up.)

I just Googled Heidi Pitlor for info so that I could write up a blurb about her upcoming reading at the Harvard Book Store. Got completely distracted by the top link, to this four-year old Village Voice literary supplement piece: Young, Gifted, and Workshopped.

Right now I've got a few friends who hate their jobs and are just deluded and brilliant enough to want to go back to school for their MAs, but I don't know many who think about going for an MFA as though it's a make you or break you life choice. For the most part, grad school is either a way into academia or a guaranteed break into the higher earning bracket of your chosen field. When you get an MFA in fiction writing, though, you're spending a couple of years in proverbial isolation, workshopping your heartbreaking short stories with ten other doe-eyed, equally heartbroken people who write in equally heartbreaking ways that are actually, probably more heartbreaking than yours. So now you get to be insecure about your god-given talent. Especially if you go to the Iowa Writer's Workshop (more competitive than HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL!), a place that, for me, inspires a reaction akin to a death (what the hell do you do in Iowa City except hang out in the cornfield and sit in front of your computer, wishing you were as good as the other geniuses in your workshop) alternating with utter and complete joy (um, two years to concentrate on nothing but the craft and study in a place that has churned out more famous writers than I can bear to think about--my raving fantasies about luxurious book tours and offers to be the celeb writer guest judge/taster on Iron Chef have no outlet other than this). Even if it isn't Iowa, you're basically saying yeah, I'll put my life on hold for a couple of years and happily go into debt, and I won't even come out with a real Masters. It's a Master of Fine Arts--which means you can get out and teach, but that's it--all the while hoping that an agent sees your school on the letter you stuck in with your unpublished, unsolicited manuscript bound by nothing but your own terror and the sweat of your intelligently furrowed brow.

I'm intrigued by the article's discussion of the fact that so many short story collections, and even novels, are getting, as Pitlor describes, too "workshoppy." I easily fall for a really gut-busting epiphany or a neatly tied up ending that isn't quite disastrous, but isn't all sugar and happiness either--readers like to imagine they're reading something that could actually happen, I think. The piece does make a good point, though, about crisis points escalating in an all too familiar manner, contrived resolutions that are overly tidy, revelations that are satisfying but fit too well in the puzzle. Workshoppy, indeed. Except isn't that what thousands of new writers are going to school to learn how to do? Does this mean getting your MFA won't get you any closer to Oprah's couch on Book Club day? Frankly, that's a frightening thought on many levels.

Of the examples listed, I guess I can agree that the ever-present Steve Almond falls into that category--even knowing that, though, I still adore him. I'll read him anyway. So it doesn't matter that he's "workshoppy"--because he's marketable. But does that make him even worse? Are MFA grads just a manufacted products of their own manufactured environs? My head hurts. 

Oh yeah, and I'm kind of in shock and awe over the mention of Raul Correa, who used to be my creative writing instructor back at a summer writing program I was in when I was 16 (yep, I liked my summers to be as nerdy as possible). I remember him telling our class about his book, which was still in drafts at the time. I have to get I Don't Know, But I've Been Told now, immediately, yesterday. This is the same guy who used to tell our class over and over again that "bad writers borrow, good writers steal," (so true), and now he's got a novel long out with a narrator that Publishers Weekly describes as "a cross between Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield." And PW