Fante Published Today

Dan Fante's Fante: A Family's Legacy of Writing, Drinking, and Surviving is officially out and about today. I was lucky enough to read it earlier this summer, and my immediate sense was that Dan had written his best book yet.

It also got me back to exploring his father's novels, and I particularly enjoyed Dreams from Bunker Hill and The Brotherhood of the Grape.

The Less United States of Kudera is wishing Dan well at his hometown reading this Friday night at Skylight Books in Los Angeles. Here's my interview with Dan on his Bruno Dante novels, his father, alcoholics anonymous, and more.

Iambik audiobook

Fight for Your Long Day is now available as the first Atticus audiobook thanks to Mark F. Smith's voice and many others, no doubt. On the book's page at Iambik, point to and click on "listen to first chapter" for a sample.

Poe's woes

When times are tough, even dead writers suffer?

For some time now, I've thought that Edgar Allen Poe was living quite an extravagant life--three homes in three Mid-Atlantic cities seemed a bit much, and I had a sneaky feeling he may have had rent control in the Bronx and unpaid property taxes in Philly.

Well, this article suggests the tell-tale signs that the authorities are on to fast Edgy, and that officials will finally force him to live (in death) a bit more moderately. Baltimore is hiring consultants (scholars of literature and readers of classics, no doubt) to develop plans for Poe and his home to become self-sufficient in the town where he died.

There's no word yet on whether we'll be able interview the dead writer on these new austerity measures.

no worries, it's legal!

So now that corporations have unlimited fundraising capability (bye bye  McCain-Feingold, right?), it appears that the mystery man who created the corporation merely to donate $1,000,000 to a Mitt Romney PAC did so legally. Possibly. But if so, this means that any wealthy person who wants to overcome the $2,500 maximum donation rule can do the same if I'm not mistaken. Or rather, I should say that any person who wants to bother creating a shell company can do this, and then just as Romney's "friend" did, dissolve the corporation a few months later.

I think.

Yah, scary. It'll be interesting to see if the new laws can stand or if the election cycle becomes an even greater parody of such--this time, creating an entire economy driven on the need for people to learn how to set up corporations (and then dissolve them), so they can aid personal favorites just a little bit more.

Which could mean jobs, and could be good? For years now, I've noted that major political contests do create jobs, thousands of temporary positions at the very least.

I should note that I might be mistaken about some of the facts and the legality, here, and this entire blog entry could merely be attributed to S&P Downgrade Anxiety (SPDA); however, the mystery contributor was willing to reveal his name.

follow up

This is a much more developed article about the 37 year old man who lost his life in California earlier this week. In fact, the story tells a lot about about the need to support, care for, and protect the mentally ill as best any society can. And so, it is all the more troubling that the country's (and states') financial position(s) might mandate cuts to these services, and even more so, that some people (and insurance policies) still fail to recognize mental health at all.

burden the many, and for the few?

I've often connected the themes of Fight for Your Long Day to the egregious debt loads a majority of college students face, but at least, as of now, we have no debtor's prison for when the money can not be repaid.

There are also the cases where in the process of enforcing our "laws" we end up killing young people; these two stories caught my attention yesterday and today:

http://news.yahoo.com/florida-teenager-dies-jail-being-arrested-possession-marijuana-185653175.html

and

http://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/126554518.html

Meanwhile, yahoo.com is also reporting that Mitt Romney has received $1,000,000 donations from companies created for the sole purpose of eliding campaign-finance laws:

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/mysterious-company-dissolves-giving-1-million-pro-romney-142445497.html