“Who is Don Draper?” is the loaded question that began the fourth season of Mad Men. In the middle of an interview, meant to promote his new agency, Don instead extends the reporter his usual mixture of vague answers, false modesty, and self-indulgence. Viewers waiting to catch a glimpse of your beloved side character beware; […]
Jacob Schraer
Posted inTV
Mad Men Season 4 Starts Sunday!
The Frisky And by the grace of the editors I’ve been allowed to do weekly posts on it. I’m so fucking stoked that I’m drooling. Now beware, I’m a little bit of an obsessive fan boy with Mad Men. This quiet, intense, enthralling show has been gaining steam for the past three years through awards […]
Posted inComic Books
Portland Comic To Kick Off New Imprint
At Comic Con this weekend, in the fair city of San Diego, Robert Kirkman, the outrageously successful writer of the Walking Dead series, announces and previews his new imprint, Skybound. The purpose of Skybound, which does not have a website I could link to, is to expose and promote new, undiscovered talent and it kicks […]
Posted inBooks
Things To Do In Portland When You’re Writing
Local magazine Tin House is hosting their Summer Writer’s Workshop this week with events at Reed College. Workshops are sold out but there are some great seminars and readings which cost $15 and $5, respectively. Seminars include information and advice on humorous writing, morality and complexity in fiction, why MFA programs are bogus, and one […]
Posted inCats
Raymond Chandler Loved Cats!
Raymond Chandler, one of the most prominent mystery authors of the 20th century, author of The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye, was just as retarded for cats as most of the Mercury staff members and Blogtown readers. Here’s him writing to a friend about his cat, Taki: Our cat is growing positively tyrannical. If […]
Posted inBooks
The Novel Dies…Again.
Here’s an article from the New York Observer by critic Lee Siegel that’s causing a shit storm through book pages everywhere. In it he decries the fall of the American novel, and the downturn of fiction in general. In direct response to the New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 list (which Siegel calls “self-promoting” and “vulgar”) […]
Posted inBooks
Hot Poetics
Tonight at Ampersand on Alberta local author Kevin Sampsell is hosting a poetry reading featuring Seattle poet Evelyn Hampton along with local poets Emily Kendal Frey and Bryan Coffelt. Read Sampsell’s blog post talking up Hampton here. Hot Poetics is free and starts at 7:30. Ampersand is located at 2916 NE Alberta.
Posted inBooks
Book News Round Up
Some interesting articles out there in the literary world. Dzanc Books blog compiles a list of twenty young writers to watch as an answer the New Yorker’s chosen ones. Allen Barra of the Wall Street Journal savages the legacy of Harper Lee’s classic To Kill a Mockingbird in an infuriating editorial. I should have known […]
Posted inBooks
&Review Issue No. 2 Release Party
&Review, a free (and quality) local arts publication is gathering at Tiga tonight at 6:30 pm to celebrate the release of their second issue. You can preview the content at their website, or download the issue as a PDF file. The theme is Islands, in every sense of the word, and these photos of kitchen […]
Posted inTV
And I’ll Form the Head!
Peter Keefe, the creator of Voltron, has died at 57. This has special significance for all us ’80s kids who spent time linking arms and legs with friends, pretending to be Voltron. Also in middle school my group of friends was referred to by some outsiders as the “Voltron Crew,” though to this day I […]
Posted inBooks
20 Under 40
For the first time since 1999, the New Yorker magazine, a “made-it” destination for ambitious writers of short fiction, has anointed twenty writers under age 40 to highlight in its Summer Fiction issue. It’s a pretty good list from what I can tell, though the writers featured are hardly unknowns. I’ve been enjoying ZZ Packer […]
Posted inBooks
I Was Looking for a Street
Charles Willeford fits oddly into the history of crime writers. He wrote the occasional pulp in the 1960s and ’70s, then in the ’80s, four years before he died, started producing a detective series centered around Hoke Moseley, a Miami homicide investigator with dentures. In the last year of his life he wrote a memoir […]