paper trail

Dec 3, 2010 @ 9:00:00 am

Barry Hannah

This weekend, Bob Dylan aficionados will converge on Manhattan’s 14th Street Y for events exploring his watershed work with The Band. There’s a photo exhibition tonight, and a symposium and concert on Sunday. The participants are a freewheelin’ mix, including authors such as Greil Marcus, Christopher Ricks, and Dana Spiotta, filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker, and musicians from the bands The Fiery Furnaces and John Wesley Harding, as well as William G. Scheele, a curator and photographer who worked as the group’s roadie.

Beginning at midnight on Sunday, Kyle Minor of the blog HTMLGIANT will be reading Long, Last, Happy, the new selection of Barry Hannah stories, in its entirety online. He expects the marathon webcast to last “15-25 hours.”

Wrapping up National Novel Writing Month.

At Slate, Christopher Beam looks at the Wikileaks cables as literature, while McSweeney’s brings us Ben Greenman’s “Fragments from WikiLeaks! The Musical, including this pivotal denouement featuring Julian Assange realizing his destiny: “‘I'll dub myself Mendax/ It means ‘noble liar’./ I'll remake myself as a/ High-tech town crier.’”

Did John Updike do the dishes? Attendees at the first annual John Updike Society conference wanted to know, but the more significant questions that arose were how literary reputations are made and why they endure.