Pinky's Paperhaus

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.

Lebanese, closer to home

Kassab's.

I never would have remembered the name. I do remember that in 1992, after months of fast food that got so bad I even longed for Dunkin' Donuts, the place was like heaven. A little dive, down a side street in a marginal part of town. But with tabouli and babaganoush and fatoush salad and a salad I'd never had before, with black eyed peas, all so fresh and delicious that I wished I could stay right here in Pittsburgh and eat there every day. That salad, I never found it again.

Sleek.

So simple, eh? With spinach and bulghar wheat, I think, and olive oil and I'm not sure what. Sleek is good. SO GOOD.

Kassab's has moved onto the main drag, and the place is quite nice. That part of town, the South Side, now has a strip of mall stores where, in '92, empty steel wharehouses stood. But Kassab's. What is in the shwarma? Is it nutmeg? Something flavorful and a little sweet. I am sure that Kassab's is an open secret in Pittsburgh, but for me it was a discovery. A rediscovery, even. It's really here! It's still here! With sleek!

Delicious, cheap Lebanese food. Kassab's. 1207 E. Carson St.

As good as you can eat outside of Lebanon, I'll bet. Not that running to Lebanon for a meal is much of an option right now, except for Tony Bourdain and his crew.

shocked and dismayed

I really wish Israel would cease its war on Lebanon and the Lebanese people; today tanks and soldiers crossed the border after days of massive bombing. Hundreds of civilians are dead. I wish the international community would stand up and stop this naked act of agression -- I remember we got our panties in a bunch about that Hussein guy who went over the border into Kuwait in 1991 -- but I fear its America that's standing in the way of justice. We're the bully behind the bully.

I can only hope that us NY Times-reading, NPR-listening Americans are getting inadequate coverage of how the bombings are playing outside of Peoria. While the NY Times seems squarely in Israel's corner -- "With Israeli Use of Force, Question Over Proportion" -- the UK's Guardian has a bigger perspective, with headlines like "Conflict Drives Lebanon Back Into Syria's Hands," and "US to Israel: You Have One More Week to Blast Hizbullah."

Meanwhile, the International Red Cross' director is telling the press, "The high number of civilian casualties and the extent of damage to essential public infrastructure raise serious questions regarding respect for the principle of proportionality in the conduct of hostilities." Laila updated casualty numbers earlier today, which I'm sure have changed since this morning.

With all this bad (truly awful) stuff going on, it's hard to imagine that people are still blogging,  but I'm glad they are. Me, I joined 67,000+ others and signed this online petition. It's not much, but at least it's something. 

He, the jury

Yes, that's Mickey Spillane, who died yesterday at age 88. And yes, that's Karen Black, ubiquitous '70s film actress, now Scientologist. A quick imdb search indicates they never worked on the same movie, so I'm not sure what she's doing on his lap. Your hypotheses are welcome in the comments.

Sure, Spillane was a major writer of crime fiction, but I don't agree with Sarah at Galleycat that "Without him, amoral characters would not have become iconic archetypal heroes." His first book, I, The Jury, came out in 1947, 8 years after Chandler's book The Big Sleep, in which detective Philip Marlowe may not be amoral, but he is both morally ambiguous and our hero. And back in 1931 The Public Enemy -- in which James Cagney, the gangster, smashes a gradpefruit half in his wife's face -- was a wildly popular film with an amoral hero. Spillane was a tough, sloppy writer with an outsize ego and a sense of humor, but in my book, he wasn't an innovator -- he did what other people were doing, just more brutally. And he got lucky.

That said, Sarah's got great, exhaustive coverage of Spillane across the web on her blog. And most people have higher opinions of Spillane than I do.

Summertime Read This!

The smart folks at the LitBlog Coop have begun the discussion of their crop of 4 eminently wonderful summer reads. What is the final Read This selection?  Michael Martone's Michael Martone, a kind of non-autobiography.

I don't feel icky about praising the fabulous-looking, talented and all-around brilliant folks at the LitBlog Coop for now, because this discussion and selection was made entirely without my help. In fact, I'm still plugging away at the first of the 4 novels on the list. But starting next round, no more compliments from me, because they've invited me to join in, and I'm thrilled. So take a look at their summer reads, which are really an excellent batch. That my completely (for now) unbiased opinion.

The Gist Street Reading n BBQ

That's Aaron Burch from the excellent lit journal Hobart and the tireless Dan Wickett of the Emerging Writers Network (and the LitBlogCoop) on the street in Pittsburgh, unable to buy a Sacred Heart of Jesus because the store was closed. They drove four hours, from Michigan, for the Gist Street Reading Series -- a few pictures here.

Since this was the Gist Street summer BBQ, it was held outdoors, in an overgrown oasis behind tall gates in a vacant/rundown part of Pittsburgh called Uptown. Pittsburgh has almost 200,000 fewer people now than it did in 1950, and there are dozens of areas like Uptown which make you imagine buying a rundown old building with a bunch of outdoor space and making an oasis of your own. Well, they do that to me.

In any event, the reading was very well attended, the BBQ was well consumed, and the homemade icecream was delicious with some brownies on top. The readers, all from Graywolf Press: noted poet Martha Collins and newcomer Joe Campana; poet-turned-novelist Susan Wheeler; and novelists Paul Lisicky and Robert Hill. I'd be most interested in getting my hands on a copy of Hill's When All Is Said and Done, a midcentury family drama-farse with a memorable Jewish mother.

Since it was my first literary event in Pittsburgh, I ran around and met everyone I could! Um, no, I sat on the sidelines with a beer. Next time, I'm sitting up in the funky balcony area, tho -- those people seemed to win all the raffle prizes.

Read read unread

Fans of Miss Snark have come up with their awesome-of-the-last-decade reading list, totalling 285 works on paper.There are a few dupes, a couple real stinkers, and unfortunately 3 separate books by Chuck Palahniuk. Nevertheless, I counted how many I'd read: 25. Erin has read 55. The real question: how many do I want to read? About 17.

You may find yourself asking, as I did, How did What Makes Sammy Run (published 1941) and The Disenchanted (1950) make the list?  But perhaps you'll be cheered enough to hear that author Budd Schulberg, 92 years old, is still of this earth. Anyway, the complete list after the jump.

Hey, SA!

LA poet SA Griffin gets his due with the cover story of LA Alternative this week. Well, it would be nice if it were the NY Times Magazine instead, but at least it's some attention. SA has been a generous and kind fixture on the LA literary scene for years. He met Bukowski, he let Beck play his little songs at poetry readings, and has even has been the minister at a number of weddings. He was on Pinky's Paperhaus once, too, but sadly the recording was lost to a technical glitch.

SA has the heart of a true poet -- beat or punk style, that is. Basically, he does his thing. He doesn't care if you're cool, and he doesn't care if you think he's cool or not.

SA started doing southwest poetry tours in the '80s, ending with the grandest of them all, a 1991 bus tour that flopped horribly. Part of the flop was that they were freaks in a breaking-down bus that was painted freakishly -- we all got together with spraypaint (I had a lot of spraypaint then, and I wasn't the only one) and made sure the bus would stand out. Out in the desert, they didn't like that so much. I don't think it helped that the bus was full of drunken poets. Drunk drunk drunks.

I would quote one of SA's poems here but his website is down -- too busy. Hooray! Good for SA Griffin!

My secret TV past life

One of those listy things, picked up from Gwenda, who got it from Rarely Likeable. I've happily moved into the TV-less realm, in prep for grad school and also because I can be something of an addict. Like "addict" really gets a qualifier -- honestly, am entirely a victim of TV addiction. Here's the drill: bold the ones you've seen at least three episodes of, add italics for those you've seen every episode of, and a star for the ones you actually loved/love, etc. Be honest. After the jump.

Katha, you can send me a book

Katha Pollitt has been publicly obsessing about her Amazon.com stats; to goose her rankings she's been buying books for everyone she knows, including "a Legal Aid lawyer I’d met on the train." (As well as writing an op-ed about it in the NY Times). Well, Katha, I can't bear the thought of you plummeting down to 3,000 again. So when your numbers dip, feel free to buy me a copy of your book. Send it to

Carolyn Kellogg
297 46th Street
Pittsburgh, PA 15201

Not to give you a new obsession, but I hear it's fetching between 7 and 8 bucks on ebay.