Pinky's Paperhaus

When bookshelf means book shelf

I don't know if this will merit the uber-urban LuxLotus windowlicker, but the bookshelves-from-books do look kind of awesome to me.

To boldly go where no auction has gone before

On October 5-8, venerable auction house Christie's gets its hands dirty with Hollywood-style spacedust with 40 Years of Star Trek stuff. From a redshirt outfit from the original series to tables from Quark's bar, bad Kirk movie outfits (no hairpiece, thankfully) to Voyager ephemera, it's a treasure trove of Trek. There are 3-D chess sets and late-series tricorders; the Deanna Troi minidress at left is expected to go for $2,000-$3,000.

If you've got that kind of dough, you don't have to fly to New York to participate in the auction -- online bidding is available to people who pre-register before the Sept. 29 deadline.

PS There have been previous Trek auctions. I just couldn't resist the headline.

Noah Webster

My sister is driving around New England with her patient boyfriend in tow and she sent me this picture. We're not big sticklers for spelling, nor are we dictionary fiends. So why the visit to the Noah Webster house?

You probably know that Noah Webster crafted the first American dictionary which is called, logically, Webster's. Maybe you even know that his house is a museum in West Hartford, Connecticut.

What you might not know is that my great grandmother brought up my grandmother and her brothers in that house. Then after the kids were grown the family built another house on the property and gave the Noah Webster house to the state. I think that other house, the newish one, is where we visited my great grandmother when she was in her 90s; I was completely oblivious to the literary history across the lawn.

RSS means Random Shutdown Syndrome

Sadly, this is my new favorite website.

Monday: party school, weenie-tinis, awards, talk and Pluto

Today is my first day of school. Of course I am nervous and excited. What should I wear? What should I bring to class? Well, this bit from Galleycat reinforces one of my creeping suspicions: people believe that MFA women and party girls are two entirely different creatures. But... but... Maybe I should bring a bottle of champagne to tonight's writing workshop.

Or maybe this: with homemade weeniecello (hot-dog-infused vodka), you can make a mean Weenie-Tini (via MeFi).

In less loopy news, Tod Goldberg is up for the Southern California Booksellers Award for fiction, in fine company (Aimee Bender, Susan Straight, Carolyn See, Jennifer Kaufman & Karen Mack).

The Happy Booker hosts an interview by The May Queen editor Nicki Richeseon with Lily Burana, the author of Try -- she calls it an alt.western rodeo novel.

Nostalgic for the days when Pluto was a planet? This bumper sticker is for you.

Once classes start this will stop

I'd like to think that it's bone structure and dewey skin, but what I seem to share most with these celebrities is bangs (or as Daniel Day Lewis would prefer, "fringe.") Via Cecil and Alan, who uploaded Hellraiser's face instead of his own.

Bat kicks butt, accents, dystopias, Dylan and dough

Good golly, Bat Segundo has done it again! Not one but two new podcasts are available for download, and they're doozies: AM Homes and Jonathan Safran Foer. Go, Bat, Go!

Max at The Millions explains how to pronounce some oft-misprounced literary names (via Maud). I'll play, as long as no one forces to me to say the correct but pretentious "por-shuh" for "porche."

Dennis Lehane stops in at the CBS Early Show to talk about his latest, Coronado, which is short stories and a play. It's worth watching the video just to hear him do a mashup Southern-Boston accent, "Y'all wanna go to a pahty?" (via Sarah).

Also, anyone who's been watching TV has probably seen this, but as I've given it up I was surprised by the promo I had to sit through before the Lehane clip: Jericho is a series-long Day After knockoff starring Skeet Ullrich. I would so watch TV for that. Post-Apocalypse in the American heartland? Oh, maybe I should read Amnesia Moon by Jonathan Lethem instead.

Seems Jonathan Lethem has been busy interviewing Bob Dylan for the cover of Rolling Stone; the beginning of the piece is available online. If you've got Rhapsody installed, you can listen to a bunch of "stray gems" while reading. (via The Rake).

In more literature-meets-music fun, the Revenge of the Book Eaters Los Angeles performance is tomorrow night at UCLA's Royce Hall and $35 tickets are still available. Proceeds go to support 826LA; attendees go to hear Jenny Lewis, Aimee Mann, Dave Eggers, Sarah Vowell, The Mountain Goats/John Darnielle, Jake Gyllenhaal and host Andy Richter.

hello new york!

Looks like The Mysteries of Pittsburgh will be a movie, shot in ... Los Angeles! Public radio station WDUQ had announced that the Pittsburgh film office would be moving to LA, which made sense to me. But the timing -- and the loss of a film so clearly Pittsburgh-y -- just when the film office head is  marrying her LA-based boyfriend looks, eh, not so good.

Speaking of other cities, I'm in NYC for a few days and of course checked Lauren Cerand's events listing on Maud Newton's site, but mostly it just made me sad that I missed Gary "Absurdistan" Shteyngart's reading Wednesday. Oh, that fab NYC photo is from this guy on flickr.

It's waiting on my iPod: Bat Segundo interviews John Updike. Like, major wow.

And speaking of wow, congrats to Jeff and his wife and new baby Marlie.

I*N*G*O*

When I watch DVDs I tend to imdb them. I just get curious. So while watching M*A*S*H* -- which I'd never loved, until this time around -- I discovered that its producer, Ingo Preminger, died about a month ago. Ingo was 95.

Ingo was not in the habit of producing films -- he was a literary agent. In particular, he was a literary agent who repped a lot of writers who'd been blacklisted by Hollywood. One of those guys was Ring Lardner, Jr., who had read this book by Korean war vet Richard D. Hooker Jr. and written the M*A*S*H* screenplay. But none of the first round of directors wanted to make the film, the story goes, and they ended up with Robert Altman, who wanted the movie to be about Vietnam, so he purged all concrete references to Korea. Then most of the rest of the script disappeared as his actors were encouraged to improvise, as in all Altman's films. Ring Lardner was furious, but he got an Oscar for the screenplay, and Altman always credited him with creating the insubordinate tone of the characters and the film. Ingo must have been stuck in the middle, and it couldn't have been comfortable.

In Naming Names, Victor Navasky lauds Ingo Preminger for bucking the studios and dodging the red baiters to get work for his clients, like Lardner and Dalton Trumbo, under pseudonyms and with other writers providing an authorial front. Maybe Ingo had an informed perspective on the paranoid, hateful rhetoric of the Red Scare -- he was born in Austria and fled as the Nazis came to power. He eventually moved to California where his brother Otto was directing movies and started his agent thing. Which ended up being, in his case, a mighty challenging, brave thing.

Hats of to Ingo. We could use more of you these days.

Pity the fool

Jim did a pictorial roundup of last month's Vermin on the Mount. Note to self: tipping head down is bad.

I listen to NPR about 28 hours a day, but somehow I missed Xeni Jardin report on podcasts of books read by fans, like the excellent LibriVox.

I pity the fool who doesn't click on this.