Insomniac Links

Items found on the web between 3 and 6 am while not sleeping in Nice:

Japanese consumers, always just ahead of us in techno-life, are reading full-length books on their cell phones. Wired’s witty headline: Cell Phones Put to Novel Use.

Three days before Darlene and I plunge into French immersion at Institut de Francais at Villefranche-sur-mer, I am testing the water with these blogs: le blog litteraire, les republiques des livres, la Muselivre and lafeuille.

Barry Hannah, a captivating Southern novelist who visited the Bennington MFA program while I was there, is doing better. (via Denver’s celebrity lit blogger, The Rake, soon to tell all in a wide-ranging interview coming in Wazee Journal, conducted by the staff of The Chronicles.)

Robert Creeley died Wednesday. A fine poet and a fine human, qualities not always celebrated in the same person. Voluminous poet blogger Ron Silliman posts a heartfelt tribute here and links to obits in The Washington Post and The Times of London.

UPDATES(via Beatrice): Creeley’s NYT obit here. A 1998 interview here that includes this typically guileless quote by Creeley about why writers write:

Williams says he’d rather go off and die like a sick dog than be a well-known literary person in America. A poll taken on the streets of Manhattan discovered that less than one percent could tell who Norman Mailer was. Poets write, I do believe, because they have to—it’s something nothing else quite satisfies. One has to do it—compulsively. I remember Carl Rakosi saying before we were to teach at Naropa some years ago ( we were musing over just how to proceed): “Well, the last thing poets need is encouragement!” They’ll do it come hell or high water. My own “acceptance and recognition” came from peers, as Olson, Duncan, Paul Blackburn, Denise Levertov, Cid Corman—and elders like Williams and Zukofsky. The company is what matters.

Darlene has been gamely trying to sleep as I click away on the Vaio next to her in the dark. As usual, I resent sleep’s demands: log off now or pay for it this afternoon in stumbling fatigue as we roam Nice on our first full day in France. Over and out…

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