January 31

Concept for an animated series:

The Legal Beavers -- Two litigating rodents represent the animals of the forest in environmental class action suits and other matters, assisted by their trusty para-weasels!

I had this idea some 25 years ago, actually, and a friend who was an amateur cartoonist did a concept sketch for me of a pinstriped beaver carrying a briefcase. It looked great.

Speaking of cute titles, how about a new German novel called Axolotl Roadkill? I eagerly await the translation:

http://lovegermanbooks.blogspot.com/2010/01/helene-hegemann-axolotl-roadkill.html

Here is one of the more offbeat ten best films of the decade lists that I've seen:

http://blackforests.blogspot.com/2010/01/top-10-favourite-films-of-dacade-2000.html

The Millions, in its "Difficult Books" series, offers a helpful reading by Garth Risk Hallberg of Vladimir Nabokov's Ada, or Ardor. Loving Nabokov's Pale Fire as I do, I really ought to tackle this novel:

http://www.themillions.com/2010/01/difficult-books-ada-or-ardor-by-vladimir-nabokov.html

Animalarium brightens my day with bird art:

http://theanimalarium.blogspot.com/2010/01/bestiarium-wilkonia-birds.html

Levi Stahl at I've Been Reading Lately ponders the subtleties of translation by concentrating on different versions of one short phrase in War and Peace. I really liked this:

http://ivebeenreadinglately.blogspot.com/2010/01/fair-field-clear-course-or-hunting-for.html

Among notables born on this date are baseball players Jackie Robinson, Ernie Banks, and Nolan Ryan, singers Eddie Cantor and Mario Lanza, bluesman Charlie Musselwhite, composers Franz Schubert, Francois Devienne, and Philip Glass, monk and memoirist Thomas Merton, graphic novelist Grant Morrison, Western novelist Zane Grey, folk musicologist Alan Lomax, film director Derek Jarman, Founding Father Gouverneur Morris, Sex Pistol Johnny Rotten, novelists John O'Hara, Norman Mailer, and Kenzaburo Oe (Japan), and actors Tallulah Bankhead, Carol Channing, Lynn Carlin, Jean Simmons, Suzanne Pleshette, and Anthony LaPaglia. A lot of favorites of mine today! I saw a reference the other day, in Louis Auchincloss's Times obituary, to the greatly gifted and enormously cranky John O'Hara, who tended to get very cross when he felt people were not giving him his due, which was always. You could have given the guy the Nobel Prize for Literature every week and that wouldn't have satisfied him; why didn't you give it last year? Auchincloss, who worked similar socio-economic turf to O'Hara, gave the older novelist offense:

Some critics compared [Auchincloss] with other modern novelists of manners like John O'Hara and J. P. Marquand. In an essay in The Nation in 1960, Mr. Auchincloss said both O'Hara and Marquand had illusions about the resiliency and endurance of American social classes and hierarchies. O'Hara wrote him, saying: "You obviously have not read all my novels, and I have not read one of yours. I don't know anything about your importance as a lawyer, but in my league you are a still a batboy, and 43 is pretty old for a batboy." Over the years Mr. Auchincloss would send his reviews to O'Hara with a cover letter signed, "Batboy." O'Hara was not amused.