Along with the Leo Lionni faves and the David Carter pop-ups and the requisite Goodnight Moon and Guess How Much I Love You, I sure would love to have a Myriopticon for my daughter. (Baby Einstein has nothing on this.) You can’t buy one, but you can see one from 1866 on display at a new exhibit at the Newberry Library: “Artifacts of Childhood: 700 Years of Children’s Books,” which showcases 65 of the library’s 10,000-plus books and games for children. This includes centuries-old Italian and French versions of Aesop’s Fables and some early- and mid-20th century selections from Chicago publishers, among other beautiful and rare items. The Myriopticon is “a small paper box shaped like a table television [containing] a long, continuous paper scroll printed with panoramas of famous Civil War battles that are wound past a ’screen’ on the box”–essentially a portable, small-hands-friendly form of the Cyclorama in Atlanta’s Grant Park. Pretty cool. The exhibit opened Saturday, September 27, and runs until January 17, 2009.

Date: Thursday, Sept 25, 2008

Time: 7-8pm

Location: Quimby’s Bookstore / 1854 W North Ave

Tonight, join the ranks to hear Joe Meno and Arthur Nersesian read and sign copies of their most recent books. Known for his acclaimed novel The Fuck-Up, Arthur Nersesian’s The Sacrificial Circumcision of the Bronx gets this praise from Kirkus Review: “Combining sci-fi space/time-warping, Unabomber-style political ranting and an overall air of goose-bump paranoia, this is one turbo-charged trip . . . Imagine William Burroughs and Philip K. Dick sharing a needle.”

Meno’s tome Demons in the Spring, is a collection of “twenty short stories with illustrations by twenty artists from the fine art, graphic art, and comic book worlds-including Charles Burns, Ivan Brunetti, Jay Ryan, Anders Nilsen, Geoff McFedtridge, KOZYNDAN, Evan Hecox, and Cody Hudson.” Meno’s work is practically a Chicago brand unto itself and needs little introduction, but the theme of tonight’s event–much like the stories themselves–is “catastrophe” and how to deal with them. And after a two-week period that included Hurricane Ike, David Foster Wallace’s suicide, and the greatest American financial disaster since the Depression, what’s more effing timely than “catastrophe?” It’s been rough out there lately, but after you’ve gotten appropriately outraged about the state of things, come on out, lick your wounds, bind yourself with the like-minded,  and let’s rally.

Artist Anders Nilsen will open things with a slideshow, Abraham Levitan of Baby Teeth will accompany Meno, and Chicago artist and self-professed meddler Rob Funderburk will host the event. Proceeds from the book go to benefit 826 CHI, a tutoring center on Milwaukee Avenue.

First there was the runaway success of the six-word memoir book. Now this: the Twitties Contest, “an inaugural award honoring the best one-liners from Twitter.com, a Web site where “Twitterers” text or blog the minutiae of their daily lives in super-short “Tweets.”

Twitties judges received more than 1,200 nominations, which they pared down to 60 finalists — five in 12 categories.

And the winner? Votes are still being tallied, apparently. Hold onto your seats.

Though I’m pretty intrigued by what seems to be a surge of interest in micro-prose in many forms, and all its possibilities vis-a-vis technology and social networking apps, I gotta admit I’m underwhelmed by the three finalists represented in the WaPo story (there are 60 total — five per 12 categories). But of those three, my certain fave:

“I am totally serious. My Ob/Gyn was IN my vagina, and an earthquake started rattling the room!”

Know somebody doing something um, literary, via tweets? Let us know.

At McSweeney’s. Send yours in:

[W]e’ve begun a thread of memories of David Foster Wallace that will, we hope, be some kind of salve during this wretched and bewildering week. Remembering him, and hearing of his warmth, his realness, his generosity and incredible decency, from those who knew him well and those who only met him once, might dull the pain a bit and, at the very least, remind us all why he meant so much to the world. If you would like to send a contribution—and it need not be beautifully written or profound—e-mail cmonks [at] mcsweeneys.net. New entries will be added to the top of the thread each day. This site will be devoted to his memory for the foreseeable future.

Why the fuck did David Foster Wallace kill himself? And why are his obits so fucking paltry? How is it in any way fucking fair that each and every last person on this earth is going to spend the rest of her life without getting to read anything new he’s written?

What the FUCK? NOT FAIR. So not fair.

We never intended Literago as a journal, but the first way I thought of processing the suicide (?!) of someone this important to both literature and, well, me is to blog about it. Fuck any notions of postmodernism — that the funniest and most important North American writer of the last two decades hanged himself is just BALLS.

This bullshit is senseless and horrible, but I can’t help but think it will lodge him more solidly into the adolescent firmament, which can only be a good thing. I will go to sleep thinking of a small, pimply teenage girl of the distant future reading Infinite Jest on a rickety suburban schoolbus.

Sad news: David Foster Wallace hanged himself Friday night.

[Update from previous version of post]: Kakutani’s appraisal in the NYT, personal comments from fans, etc. on Metafilter (thanks, EW), and an old profile/memorial at the Trib. 

From the NYT piece:

[W]hile his own fiction often showcased his mastery of postmodern pyrotechnics — a cold but glittering arsenal of irony, self-consciousness and clever narrative hijinks — he was also capable of creating profoundly human flesh-and-blood characters with three-dimensional emotional lives. In a kind of aesthetic manifesto, he once wrote that irony and ridicule had become “agents of a great despair and stasis in U.S. culture” and mourned the loss of engagement with deep moral issues that animated the work of the great 19th-century novelists.

For that matter, much of Mr. Wallace’s work, from his gargantuan 1996 novel “Infinite Jest” to his excursions into journalism, felt like outtakes from a continuing debate inside his head, about the state of the world and the role of the writer in it, and the chasm between idealism and cynicism, aspirations and reality. The reader could not help but feel that Mr. Wallace had inhaled the muchness of contemporary America — a place besieged by too much data, too many video images, too many high-decibel sales pitches and disingenuous political ads — and had so many contradictory thoughts about it that he could only expel them in fat, prolix narratives filled with Mobius strip-like digressions, copious footnotes and looping philosophical asides. If this led to self-indulgent books badly in need of editing — “Infinite Jest” clocked in at an unnecessarily long 1,079 pages — it also resulted in some wonderfully powerful writing.

Date: Monday, September 15th, 2008

Time: 7:00 p.m.

Location: The Experimental Station (6100 S. Blackstone)

There’s nothing to get your blood up this election season like reading The Wrecking Crew (aside from contemplating the thought of Sarah Palin getting exposure on a weekly basis). Thomas Frank proves once and for all that a book about the skullduggery of the Conservatives can make you laugh to yourself on the bus. Moreover, the man is a fantastic speaker (the floppy hair helps his emphasis). I’ve made it a point to catch him every time he’s given a reading since The Conquest of Cool. I even listed him on my online application for graduate school as among the reasons I wanted to go to U of C. If you can’t tell by now, I’m a superfan, the adult equivalent of that guy in college who never took off the Vonnegut t-shirt. Don’t let that stop you from going to this reading, though. I promise it can only help those still seething from watching the RNC.

If you haven’t yet had a chance to read, here’s a nice video primer: