February 16

One day past Presidents Day, here is a fun gallery of our most bibliophilic presidents from The Daily Beast:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-02-14/the-best-read-presidents/

The terrific blog Caustic Cover Critic comments on a new Penguin series, "Victorian Bestsellers," which is exciting both from textual and graphic standpoints, reviving "sensation novels" by Wilkie Collins, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, William Harrison Ainsworth, and others with beautiful, eye-catching covers:

http://causticcovercritic.blogspot.com/2010/02/flexibility-in-design-interview-with.html

The great actor Ed Harris is burning up the Los Angeles stage in a recent Neil LaBute monologue play, Wrecks, which he had already performed in Ireland and New York:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2010/02/theater-review-wrecks-at-geffen-playhouses-audrey-skirball-kenis-theater-.html

The Rumpus, a website which meets the definition of multiculturality I gave yesterday by covering most everything, has a nice interview with Romanian novelist Dumitri Tsepeneag:

http://therumpus.net/2010/02/the-rumpus-international-rivers-interview-4-dumitru-tsepeneag-on-the-danube/

The Beiderbecke Affair has done excellent historical investigative work in uncovering an 81-year-old imposture -- a 1929 newspaper "interview" with jazz trumpeter Bix Beiderbecke that was entirely cooked up from other sources:

http://beiderbecke.typepad.com/tba/2010/02/bix-beiderbecke-the-interview.html

The Groovy Age of Horror rediscovers the periodically resuscitated proletarian tough-guy novelist Jim Tully:

http://groovyageofhorror.blogspot.com/2010/02/circus-parade-by-jim-tully-black.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Tully

The rock guitarist's rock guitarist, Jeff Beck, is thoughtfully profiled in the New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/arts/music/14beck.html

While we're on rock music, here is yet another list of significant list of rock novels (only one of which, Don DeLillo's Great Jones Street, overlaps with a similar list I posted on January 30):

http://flavorwire.com/36472/from-great-jones-street-to-garden-state-the-best-in-rock-fiction

Among notables born on this date are German explorer Heinrich Barth, novelists Richard Ford, Iain Banks, and Nikolai Leskov (Russia), memoirist Henry Adams, literary critic Van Wyck Brooks, German naturalist Ernst Haeckel, actor LeVar Burton, singer Patty Andrews (of the Andrews Sisters), historian George Macaulay Trevelyan, film directors Robert Flaherty and John Schlesinger, and the two George Kennans -- the explorer (1845-1924) and the diplomat (1904-2005) (they were cousins twice removed). Although Van Wyck Brooks's meaty, rich literary histories -- The Flowering of New England, New England: Indian Summer, and so on -- may be out of fashion these days, they still make remarkably good reading and illuminate the world of 19th century American literature. "World" is one of Brooks's key words (The World of Washington Irving), and he builds up a vivid sense of the worlds he writes about through the re-animation of personalities, telling ground detail, and gorgeously written novelistic prose.