*

A photo essay of the great depression in America:

Bud Fields and his family. Alabama. 1935 or 1936. Photographer: Walker Evans.

*

Kathleen Maher’s review of Winged with Death has gone up on the NewCritics Site.

*

Mario Orlando Hamlet Hardy Brenno Benedetti, Uruguayan writer, born 14 September 1920; died 17 May 2009: “When I’m buried/ don’t forget to put a Biro in my coffin.”

What happened to Woody Allen? The picture on the left (credited to Steve Granitz/WireImage) was given to a computer, where a software program used a mathematical formula to alter the face into a theoretically more attractive version, on the right, while maintaining an “unmistakable similarity” to the original.

What do you think? Is the guy somehow improved? There are more photographs of men and women at The New York Times, adding fuel to the debate around the complex and sometimes disturbing questions about how we perceive beauty and a beauty ideal.

In another part of the magazine Platon discusses his photographs and his subjects on a podcast.

Here are some portraits of writers by the late Fay Godwin. The photographer’s archive, acquired by the British Library contains over 11,000 photographs and letters. The selection here includes this delightful study of Jean Rhys, as well as the young Salman Rushdie, Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Doris Lessing, Tom Stoppard, Angela Carter, Margaret Drabble, Saul Bellow and Edna O’Brien.

*

*

“It’s an old disease in Iraq – people spend their money on books, not on food. Iraqi intellectuals are very poor because of it.”

The district was attacked by a suicide car-bomber last March, but is now beginning to open up again.

Iraqis looking for bargains at the weekly open air book market at al-Mutanabi street in central Baghdad in May 2006. Booksellers of every description showed their stock at al-Mutanabi’s street-level spaces. You could shop here for technical manuals, ornate copies of the Quran or a selection of pirated software.

“The book market has always been a favorite for international TV crews. In Saddam’s days, it was the place of choice for thoughtful interviews and good English.While there, we’d often rummage through the fascinating array of new and second hand books.

Sometimes, amid the stock-in-trade Iraqi government propaganda, we’d come across a favorite old out-of-print paperback or a must have memento, like an elegantly illustrated book of Arab love poetry that I found one day.”

After the blast, which claimed the lives of more than 100 people, Iraqi intellectuals gathered amid the ruins on the 8th March 2007. Baghdad poets read extracts from their work on what remained of the street.

*

Over at Chekhov’s Mistress, another review of the Sony Reader:

At the fashionable yet oddly cold Sony store on Madison Avenue I checked out the much ballyhooed e-book reader. It’s light – much more so than even a paperback book – it’s readable – much more so than even a paperback book – and it’s amazingly functional – much more so than even a paperback book – but I’m afraid you can’t sit on it.

*

I went to a session at the central library here with Val McDermid and Jenny Roberts in conversation and reading from their books.

Val McDermid read a short story from her latest collection, Stranded (Flambard Press) and Jenny Roberts read from a work in progress, which is the first draft of a spy story. The spy story was compelling and full of suspense and frustrating because it’s not published yet and we’ll have to wait a long time for it.

Val McDermid was full of driven power and the kind of charisma which keeps you on the edge of your seat in case you might miss something she says.

That was lunchtime.

*

PRBlogger has listed the top 100 most influential blogs in the UK, based on Technorati data, and this blog comes in at number 75. I’ve never been on a list before.

*

OUT TO LUNCH
Outside a photographer’s studio in Oslo was a sign printed in capital letters:
OUT TO LUNCH: IF NOT BACK BY FIVE, OUT FOR DINNER ALSO . . .
Thanks to Tom Baker for this.

*

Apparently, what caused Zinedine Zidane, the former French football captain, to head-butt his opposite number in front of millions of television viewers, was an instance of sledging.
Consider this from the Oxford English Dictionary:

1977 World of Cricket Monthly June 5/1 Lillee had his views on intimidating batsmen on Melbourne television. And on sledging—the term comes from subtle as a sledge~hammer.

According to Bhaswati over at At Home, Writing, Sledging now refers to the technique of ‘needling’ opposing players in any team game. There are many examples of sledging in Wikipedia, of which the following is only one:

Glenn McGrath to Zimbabwean cricketer, Eddo Brandes, after Brandes had played and missed at a McGrath delivery: “Oi, Brandes, why are you so fucking fat?” to which Brandes replied: “Cos every time I fuck your wife she gives me a biscuit!”

*

Oh, and to make a long post even longer, I couldn’t resist this: