We're on his trail

We're heading out to Italy within the next couple of hours and plan to loosely follow the trail of Caravaggio sans Milan (where little is known of his childhood) and Malta. Some consider him the greatest artist of all time. There is a saying that there are two types of art: pre- Caravaggio and post-Caravaggio. I am not yet convinced but hope to be.
'Caravaggio': The Artist as Outlaw
Having spent his brief, tragic and turbulent life painting miracles, he managed, in the process, to create one - the miracle of art, the miracle of the way in which some paint, a few brushes, a square of canvas, together with that most essential ingredient, genius, can produce something stronger than time and age, more powerful than death.

Booker likes Canadians

Three of Canada's most celebrated writers – Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro and Michael Ondaatje – are among the 15 nominees for the 2007 Man Booker International Prize.

R.I.P. Kurt Vonnegut

Novelist Kurt Vonnegut dies at 84 - CNN.com: "Kurt Vonnegut, the satirical novelist who captured the absurdity of war and questioned the advances of science in darkly humorous works such as 'Slaughterhouse-Five' and 'Cat's Cradle,' died Wednesday. He was 84."

Stories by Miranda July - the website

A very creative website for No one belongs here more than you. Stories by Miranda July. Check it out.

Via Presurfer

Seduction

"It's really embarrassing to admit, but I forget why I killed my husband."is the very seductive opening sentence of Catherine Gildiner's psychological thriller, Seduction. It's the tale of two ex-cons who are hired to investigate the director of the Freud Academy. Catherine is a clinical psychologist who wrote her doctoral thesis on the influence of Darwin on Freud so she knows her stuff. ( I worked with Catherine at a Psychiatric Hospital in Toronto 3o some odd years ago. Our paths still cross from time to time, most recently when we organized a reunion of our confreres from "the psych". Could this get-together provide fodder for another memoir? We'll have to wait and see. ) Her wit is as sharp as a needle and it comes across in this weird amalgam of crime fiction and Freudian theory. We get a crash course in the origins of psychoanalysis in between some very snappy patter between protagonists and fellow ex-cons, Kate Fitzgerald and Jackie Lawton. The premise seemed pretty wacky to me: Kate, who murdered her husband, is released on a TA from prison by her psychiatrist in order to find out what dirt the charismatic head of the Freud Academy had on Sigmund. She teams up with Jackie who is as emotionally limited as she is. They fly to exotic locations and bump up against a motley crew of weirdos, including Anna Freud, along the way. Murder ensues. I pushed my skepticism aside as I got deeper into the book; I got sucked in and read it late into the night. I can see this as a movie. At any rate the door is wide open for a second Kate and Jackie caper and I look forward to reading it.

Michael Dibdin

The novelist Michael Dibdin , who has died aged 60 after a short illness, created the
Venice-born detective Aurelio Zen, whose tasks took him to vigorously differentiated parts of Italy that rarely afforded him any peace of mind. Zen's peripatetic life and tangled emotional encounters owed much to Dibdin's own spirit. As with detection, the writer may have always had a goal in view, writing, but things happened along the way.

I'd never heard of this author until I read his obituary. Today Mr. Nag spotted a trilogy of Zen mysteries for $2.00 and bought it to read on our upcoming trip to Sicily.

Cooked Books

Adam Gopnik on food in literature:

There are four kinds of food in books: food that is served by an author to characters who are not expected to taste it; food that is served by an author to characters in order to show who they are; food that an author cooks for characters in order to eat it with them; and, last (and most recent), food that an author cooks for characters but actually serves to the reader. More

Y.P.R.: The Secret Keyboard Shortcuts of Tuesdays with Morrie Author Mitch Albom

Ctrl-A: Generates random touching anecdote told by lovable old mensch in the cluttered storeroom of his candy shop on 34th and Kasser that illustrates the importance of living in the moment

Ctrl-E: Generates random heartwarming anecdote told by eccentric, terminally ill aunt at family reunion in Flint, Michigan, that narrator was originally reluctant to attend, but is now glad he did, because he’s been reminded of the simple power of human love

More

Via Exploding Aardvark

Endgame In London

Great Stories, People, Books & Events in Literary History:
On this day in 1957 Samuel Beckett's Endgame was first performed, in London, in French. Waiting for Godot had premiered in 1953 and become an international sensation, but Beckett could find no one in France willing to risk their theater on a new play which featured one character who could not stand, one who could not sit, and two others unable to come out of their garbage cans.