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I know someone who had dinner with Andre. An friend of mine, through some art world connections, found himself across the table from the man, chatting between mouthfuls of pasta or sushi or some such. My apologies if this bombshell has caused you to drop your mug of coffee or to fall down a well, IPhone in hand, mouth agape. It is shocking, but I assure you it’s true.

If you aren’t shocked, it’s only because you’re thinking, “Andre? Andre Agassi?” Heavens no. This wasn’t some binge of crystal meth and Oedipal rants. “Andre the Giant, then?” Sadly, that glandular wonder is dead, and even if he was alive, I suspect a dinner with Andre the Giant would involve massive turkey legs and troughs of gravy as opposed to the stimulating discussions for which the Andre I refer to is famous. “And which Andre, pray tell, is that?”

In the 1980s, if you wanted to make a joke about intellectualism, Louis Malle’s My Dinner with Andre was always a good place to start. It was a film featuring Wallace Shawn, most famous to the masses for his “inconceivable” role in The Princess Bride and now for his joyously goofy part on Gossip Girl. In the film, Wallace (or Wally, as he’s known to pals) eats dinner with Andre Gregory. They talk about art retreats and existentialism and all things well-heeled and white. And that’s it. Roll credits.

As much as people were baffled that this could be a movie, there were critics such as Roger Ebert, and plenty of turtle-necked philosophy majors, who ate the junk up. I saw it when I was green and impressionable and while I can say it wasn’t an entire bore, I definitely didn’t buy into it. Just like I didn’t buy into Waking Life or I Heart Huckabees or similar exercises in navel-gazing cinematic blather. That said, should I ever be invited to a dinner with theatre stalwart Andre Gregory, I would be honored and humbled. Because it is the equivalent of winning the culinary/conversation lottery.

Really, it is. Think about it.

Let’s say Andre eats dinner every day, a safe assumption. Let’s also say he eats at home most often, but regularly goes out with his wife or friends, and occasionally dines at art openings and parties and business functions. From this, we can make a generous guess and assume that, on average, Andre eats dinner with a person he has never met once every five days. Now you can’t count any person who happens to be in the room while he cuts a t-bone. Having a conversation with Andre is essential to having dinner with him. So all things told, for each year of his life, Andre has had about 73 new dining companions. It’s been almost 30 years since the film. In that time, it multiplies to 2,190 folks.

Now let’s roun

I'm happy whenever one of my favorite playwrights, Wallace Shawn, gets some attention.  Andrew Ervin has written an interesting personal essay at The Quarterly Conversation about Shawn and white privilege, his thoughts sparked by Shawn's latest publications, Essays and Grasses of a Thousand Colors.

I wrote about those two books and Shawn's whole career as a writer for the most recent print issue of Rain Taxi.  While you'll have to get your hands on the dead tree magazine itself to read it all (for now), here are three paragraphs from it to whet your appetite...

More than a decade after The Designated Mourner, Grasses of a Thousand Colors received its world premiere in London (a city that has been more hospitable to [Shawn's] plays than any other). Soon after, Essays was published, collecting, in fewer than 200 pages, more than twenty years of occasional writings, including interviews with the linguist and activist Noam Chomsky and the poet Mark Strand. Shawn breaks his essays into two groups: "Reality" (mostly political commentary) and "Dream-World" (commentary on the arts), and these twin realms could apply as easily to Grasses of a Thousand Colors, wherein a wealthy and successful scientist begins by reading from his memoir (in which he justifies the work that, we soon realize, destroyed the Earth's food chain), continues by talking about his high regard for his penis, moves into a surreal and erotic variation on elements from the old story of "The White Cat" by Madame d'Aulnoy, and ends with the borders between the dream-world and reality unclear. The scientist, named alternately in the Theatre Communications Group edition of the script as The Memoirist, Ben, and He, is as unreliable a narrator of his life as any of Shawn's other characters, though perhaps more obviously compromised in his morality -- he did, after all, intentionally develop a way for animals to

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Rain Taxi Review of Books is a marvelous magazine, and they've just begun their annual auction, which is an event I always look forward to because of the wide variety of items they have to offer, including dozens of signed books.

The new print issue of RT includes an essay I wrote about the work of Wallace Shawn, a playwright and essayist whose face and voice many people know from some of his iconic roles in movies and TV shows, but whose writing is vastly less known -- he's one of those writers who is more popular outside of his native country than in it.

Aside from a couple short stories that are currently wending their way through the submission process, my major writings since this summer have been the Shawn essay for RT and the essay on Coetzee for The Quarterly Conversation. The effect of spending so much time reading and re-reading the writings of both men is obvious in my latest Strange Horizons column, "On the Eating of Corpses".

The majority of the books I receive from publishers and writers are, unfortunately, not ones that spark my interest. They find homes at local libraries, with more appreciative readers, etc. (unless really desperate for cash, I don't sell books I get for free).

The ones that do, for some reason or another, arouse my curiosity are still more plentiful than I have time for. Consider, for instance, two current piles of books I intend to do more than just glance at the cover and publicity materials for...



And that's just stuff that's arrived in the last few weeks...

Some of these are books I will definitely read -- indeed, one of them, Lev Grossman's The Magicians, I read this past weekend. (Not sure if I'm going to write much about it anywhere, because I had exactly the response M.A. Orthofer had at The Complete Review, and I don't think I have anything to add beyond what he said. But we'll see.) I'm writing a piece for Rain Taxi on Wallace Shawn, so will be plunging into his two, as well as brushing up on all the rest of his books, this week. Beyond that, well...

I'm intrigued by each of the Night Shade books, but am most excited by Paolo Bacigalupi's first novel, The Windup Girl, since I've had a few things to say about his short fiction in the past. I intend to read the others, but if I only get to one of them, it will be The Windup Girl.

The little book on top of one of those piles is an advance copy of The Original Frankenstein from Vintage, and it's an interesting attempt to reconstruct the earliest manuscripts of Frankenstein. Editor Charles E. Robinson seeks to show the exact nature of Percy Shelley's influence on the novel, and makes what appears, at least at first glance, to be a strong case for Percy as a collaborator with his wife on the book. The collaboration is complex, though, and for anyone who has previously been fascinated by the changes between the published editions of Frankenstein, this volume will be essential. As a reading text of the novel, though, it's awkward, given how much the scholarly apparatus has to intrude upon the actual text, so it's not a book anyone will want to read as their first encounter with Mary Shelley's "hideous progeny".

I'm intrigued by Penguin's re-issue of Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton's novel Who Would Have Thought It? not only because I had never heard of it or because it is billed as the first Mexican-American novel, but because it tells the story of a Mexican girl raised by Apaches who ends up in New England amidst hypocritical abolitionists.I don't usually find a plot to be the most intriguing things about a novel, but that's a plot that intrigues me!

Finally, among the books you may not have heard of, sits my friend Caroline Nesbitt's horse novel, Ride on the Curl'd Clouds, which I am curious to read not because I know anything about horses (I don't), but because I've known Caroline and her writing for years. One of these days I'll get around to interviewing her about the book and about her decision to publish it via Lulu.com, a decision she and I talked about a lot -- Caroline had previously published a nonfiction book in the traditional way, but we thought she might be able to have more success publishing her novel herself and marketing it within the equestrian community, a world she knows well.

The other books are there because at one point or another they seemed interesting to me and so I hope to get to time to read at least some of them. We shall see...

If you happen to be in the San Francisco area this week, please consider heading to Modern Times independent bookstore this Thursday, July 30, at 7 PM. IRAQIGIRL’s developer (i.e., the guy who discovered the IraqiGirl blog, had the idea to make it into a book, and assembled the initial manuscript), and former human shield in Baghdad, John Ross, will be talking about how the book came to be and reading some selections.

And now having shamelessly promoted the book, I’m going to even more shamelessly brag on behalf of the press publishing it. Here’s Library Journal, post-ALA:

Small presses, big books

Essays by Arundhati Roy and Wallace Shawn, plus reflections on the contemporary world by Noam Chomsky and Breyten Breytenbach. Top picks from a big New York house, right? Wrong. These authors are all being published this fall by Chicago-based Haymarket Press, truly a small press that thinks big and my top find of the convention. Roy’s Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers (Sept.) argues that Hindu nationalism and economic reform are thwarting India’s democratic efforts, turning the country into a police state. Shawn’s Essays (Sept.), his first collection and ranging over his entire career, move from the act of playwriting to considerations of privilege, while Breytenbach’s Notes from the Middle World (Nov.) considers the artist’s role in a shrinking global environment. Chomsky’s Hopes and Prospects ponders political activism in the Western Hemisphere.

And now I am going to stop bragging. For this week, anyway! Real posts coming up.