April 24

Maurice Richardson's 1950 short story collection The Exploits of Engelbrecht is a "micro-cult" classic that had hitherto escaped my notice, but when John Coulthart at {feuilleton} posted about his design for the Savoy Books reissue, I did a little digging around:

This rare and exceedingly dotty little volume is subtitled "The Chronicles of the Surrealist Sportsman's Club". Maurice Richardson, a British journalist, had read one too many newspaper columns about sport. In reaction he created Engelbrecht: "a dwarf, of course, like nearly all surrealist boxers..." Fifteen sporting episodes explore suitably weird pastimes.
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Richardson, who died in 1978, was one of the old school of hacks; he later became a stalwart infester of the Colony Rooms and the sordid pubs round Soho that teemed with pissed-up talent in the 1940s and 1950s.

http://www.johncoulthart.com/feuilleton/2010/04/23/engelbrecht-lives-to-fight-another-day/

http://sternezine.blogspot.com/2007/05/exploits-of-engelbrecht.html

http://www.sfsite.com/lists/10odd01.htm

http://www.sfsite.com/fsf/2000/cur0007.htm

http://www.savoy.abel.co.uk/HTML/engelb.html

Through this research, I discovered the Welsh experimental fiction writer Rhys Hughes, who published an Engelbrecht follow-up:

His long novel Engelbrecht Again! is a sequel to Maurice Richardson's 1950 cult classic The Exploits of Engelbrecht and is the most radical of Hughes's books, making extensive use of lipograms, typographical tricks, coded passages and other OuLiPo techniques. 

I was also charmed to learn that:

As well as publishing books in English and having those works translated, Hughes has created books especially for foreign language publishers that will never exist in English. For instance, A Sereia de Curitiba will only exist in a Portuguese version, and the Greek version of A New Universal History of Infamy is radically different from the English original.

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

Although Roderick Conway Morris wrote a stimulating piece on the 500th anniversary celebration for the Italian painter Jacopo Bassano (c. 1510-1592), it is not accompanied -- on the Web, anyway -- by a slide-show. The last link below, to the Web Gallery of Art, remedies the deficiency:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/24/arts/24iht-conway.html

http://www.exibart.com/profilo/eventiV2.asp?idelemento=85801 

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

http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/b/bassano/jacopo/

Charles Isherwood of the New York Times is most enthusiastic about Annie Baker's new play The Aliens, which takes place in a Vermont coffee-house:

Ms. Baker may just have the subtlest way with exposition of anyone writing for the theater today....At the risk of appearing hyperbolic, I’ll go so far as to say there is something distinctly Chekhovian in the way her writing accrues weight and meaning simply through compassionate, truthful observation.

http://theater.nytimes.com/2010/04/23/theater/reviews/23aliens.html

If I received that review as a playwright who had not yet reached the age of 30, I would want to make sure that I was not hallucinating. Being compared to Chekhov and Chardin in the same review -- I mean, holy shit!

I just listened to another excellent interview by Jason Crane at The Jazz Session, this time with baritone saxophonist Charles Evans, whose music and comments alike are exceptionally interesting. I especially enjoyed his observations about the relations between jazz and modern classical music:

http://thejazzsession.com/2010/04/22/the-jazz-session-162-charles-evans/

Crane is a terrific interviewer who asks sharp, pertinent questions without crowding his subjects; he's also blessed with a great "radio voice."

Here's another fine podcast interview: Joe Magennis at Baseballisms talks with Ed Achorn, the author of Fifty-Nine in ‘84: Old Hoss Radbourn, Barehanded Baseball, and the Greatest Season a Pitcher Ever Had. Since I'm a lover of early baseball history, this goes on my "must read" list.

http://baseballisms.com/podcast-author-ed-achorn.html

Among notables born on this date are novelists Anthony Trollope and Robert Penn Warren, poet Carl Spitteler (Swiss German), linguist Benjamin Whorf, painters Willem de Kooning and Lyubov Popova, singer/actress/film director Barbra Streisand, film producer/director Wiliam Castle, and actors Djimon Hounsou, Eric Bogosian, Michael O'Keefe, and Shirley MacLaine. Despite my cocking a skeptical eye at Shirley MacLaine's spiritual activities (but hey, it's her life), I have always found her an irresistibly honest and intelligent interviewee. I love what she once said about celebrity: "I didn't want to be frozen in the shadow of my success, hearing the world applaud someone I didn't even know." There are probably a thousand young celebrities who could stand to learn that lesson.