Everyone knows that during tough financial times the belt always tightens first around programs for the arts. The latest casualty is the 2010 Dodge Poetry Festival, which the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, down thirty per cent in assets, has struck from the calendar. David Grant, the foundation’s president, promises, “Our intention is to remain champions of poetry,” while admitting, “We may have to do it in slightly different ways.” That’s hopeful, but it’s still a sad announcement. In the years since its commencement, the festival has featured hundreds of poets and attracted audiences of close to twenty thousand poetry lovers.

With “poetry heaven” (as Robert Hass once called it) gone, where is there left to go? For now, YouTube.

The novelist and short-story writer Hortense Calisher has died, at the age of ninety-seven. She did not begin writing seriously until her late thirties, but her efforts met with immediate success: The New Yorker published her first story, “The Middle Drawer” (subscription required), in 1948, followed by two more that year, launching her career. Of that initial victory, she famously said, “First publication is a pure, carnal leap in the dark which one dreams is life.”

A weekly feature by the mixologist Michael Cecconi, pairing cocktails with characters from literature.

Douglas Kerchek, “The Smoker,” from “Kissing in Manhattan,” by David Schickler
Spanish Flip

When you marry into a family that seems to have it all together, their rituals in place, and the roles they play worn as comfortably as an old coat, it’s hard to find your place. For poor Douglas to wed into the Bonner clan, he’ll need to get used to about as much freedom as an iron maiden affords. But he knows that they’re a brandy family, that they enjoy the special mixing of spirits and citrus that is a cocktail (specifically, a well-made Sidecar), and that their penthouse, in the Preëmption apartment building on the Upper West Side, needs a little of the street let in.

Start with Spanish brandy instead of the French stuff, then add some lemon and simple syrup so you have a solid foundation. But replace the Cointreau with a bit of the Caribbean’s allspice-flavored pimento dram, dark rhum, and a few dashes of Trinidadian Angostura bitters, plus the white of one egg. Why add protein to a cocktail? For the frothy head and the amazing mouth feel it provides.

I think that Douglas wants to put his own stamp on this brandy family, to enjoy a cocktail that reflects Manhattan more accurately, and to impress them with the vigor he applies to shaking his take on a classic flip.

(Photograph: Jeanmarie Theobalds)

A day after Barnes & Noble shares fell five per cent, the company laid off nearly a hundred employees from its corporate headquarters in New York.

A study of the relationship between Darwin’s theories of evolution and Victorian literature suggests that stories serve an evolutionary function, encouraging individuals to work together and resist base impulses.

The annual Japanese imperial poetry reading, a tradition that began more than a thousand years ago, was held yesterday; the public submitted 21,180 poems on the theme of “life,” but only ten were chosen to be recited alongside the royal family’s compositions.

Random House Publishing Group has completed its restructuring, resulting in the layoffs of at least four high-level editors.

A civil recovery scheme, part of the Coroners and Justice Bill presented in the British Parliament this week, aims to prevent criminals from selling their stories to publishers and profiting from their crimes.

Rumor has it that so far there are eight books about Bernard Madoff in the works.

The science-fiction writer Graham Joyce, who has won both the British and the World Fantasy Awards, has confirmed that he will “help develop the storyline” of the forthcoming video game Doom 4.

In a dispute over territorial rights, Hachette Book Group U.S.A. has removed all of its titles from e-book retailers in the U.S.

Kikuko Tsumura has won the hundred and fortieth semi-annual Akutagawa Prize for promising new Japanese writers, for her novel “The Boat of Golden Pothos.”

In honor of Edgar Allan Poe’s bicentennial on Sunday, the Bronx Historical Society is hosting a celebration at Poe Cottage, with the actor Tristan Laurence playing the part of the famed writer.

The novelist, short-story writer, and former president of PEN, Hortense Calisher, has died, at the age of ninety-seven. She did not begin writing seriously until her late thirties, and once said, “I felt the years I wasn’t writing there was a kind of glass wall between me and the rest of the world.”

Louisiana State University will pay tribute to Black History Month with its first annual Black Literature Read-In, on February 2nd.

After listening to Judith Thurman talk about her Scrabble addiction, in a companion podcast to her piece in this week’s issue, I wondered if we had ever encountered each other in the murky highways of online Scrabble. I seem to recall a particularly traumatic defeat at the hands of a cool customer who placed the “z” of “schizo” on the triple-letter scoring position within a double-word scoring formation (minimum eighty points). But it’s hard to be sure after countless Scrabble one-night stands on Facebook.

It’s also hard to migrate back to physical Scrabble—I itch to shuffle the tiles with a click, and despair of the arithmetical quandaries posed by manual score-keeping. Most of all, I miss the appearance of productivity. The fatal beauty of playing Scrabble online is how industrious you can look to others. The expression of intense concentration, all that clicking, the muttering of words—it could pass for writing, and an innocent passer-by might take you for an assiduous cultural worker.

Yet all is not lost. In a New Yorker article from last July, analyzing the insight process, Jonah Lehrer advocates letting the mind wander when you are working on a problem. Apparently this relaxes the prefrontal cortex, enabling the brain to make serendipitous connections. Lehrer quotes the psychologist Jonathan Schooler: “The big ideas seem to always come when people are sidetracked, when they’re doing something that has nothing to do with their research.” A.k.a., playing Scrabble. (I know at least one person who is convinced that Scrabulous has made her a better writer.)

Such sterling consolation makes it easier to face the mirror on cold winter mornings after sleepless nights exchanging words with strangers online. Back to square one.

This weekend, I’ll be one of the locusts on the Mall in D.C., clucking and clapping and elbowing my way to the Port-A-Potty. I don’t have a ticket to the Inauguration but, as my father (who is currently in Baghdad, so close and yet so far) so wisely put it, “You must go. Dress warmly, drink carefully, pee in the bushes (no pun intended), and take part in an historic moment in America.” I’ve been reading plenty to deter me—accounts of the momentous crowds, the closed streets, the hoards of security—so it’s comforting to follow the fictitious Patrice and her aged Aunt Lettie on their determined voyage to the capital swamp in Curtis Sittenfeld’s novella “Got Hope,” written expressly for the occasion and being serialized now through Tuesday on Slate.

As of today, the women are plopped on Amtrak heading south from Patrice’s Philadelphia home, chumming it up with fellow pilgrims and discussing Inaugural side effects, from overpriced room rentals on Craigslist (Patrice’s memory of journeying through the site: “She found herself sitting alone in her apartment at 10:15 at night looking at penises. Actual penises!”) to the no doubt dismal cell-phone reception. Thoughts are of the election, and the soon-to-be past Administration. Patrice, on dating in the Bush era:

In the last eight years, she’d been told by three separate men—two were white, and one was black—that she reminded them of Condoleezza Rice, an observation to which she’d been tempted to respond, at least to the white men, by saying they reminded her of George W. Bush.

When tomorrow’s installment (“a surprise awaits Patrice and Aunt Lettie in their Craigslist apartment”) arrives, I’ll be jammed on my own Amtrak train. Since Sittenfeld predicted the melee at train stations everywhere, can she also predict where the shortest line in D.C. to the ladies’ room might be? That would be helpful.

Earlier this week, I bemoaned my reluctance to make notes in books, which has left me at sea in Bolaño’s labyrinth, unable to keep track of what seems literally a cast of thousands. A commenter, yale09, pointed me to Anne Fadiman’s essay “Never Do That to a Book,” which divides readers into “carnal” and “courtly” lovers:

"Carnal lovers" will mark and dog-ear pages, rip covers or whole chapters etc while "courtly lovers," like yourself, revere their books and leave them untouched.

I wonder if Professor Amalfitano, in Part II, would qualify as a courtly lover. Books are so much a part of who he is that when, having shipped his belongings from Spain to Mexico, he finds, in one of his boxes, a book that he has no recollection of ever buying, let alone taking the trouble to pack, he thinks that he is losing his mind. (He goes on to hear voices, so he’s not entirely wrong.) The book in question is a geometry textbook (weirdly, written by a poet) which Amalfitano hangs from a clothesline in his back yard, recreating Marcel Duchamp’s “Unhappy Readymade,” from 1919. It’s almost an act of violence against the book, abandoning it to the carnal touch of the elements.

A reader writes in to ask if the “Unhappy Readymade” actually exists. It does, or perhaps we should say did; no trace of it remains beyond a photograph, which Duchamp later retouched, superimposing images on what had become blank pages. (See left.) The artwork was a wedding present to Duchamp’s newly married sister, and consisted of instructions to go out and buy a geometry book (he did not even provide materials!) and dangle it by strings from their balcony.

In a conversation with Pierre Cabanne, the artist explained his purpose:

The wind had to go through the book, choose its own problems, turn and tear out the pages.…It amused me to bring the idea of happy and unhappy into readymades, and then the rain, the wind, the pages flying, it was an amusing idea…

In “2666,” Bolaño quotes Duchamp as having said that he liked undermining “the seriousness of a book full of principles,” and noting that in the process of being destroyed “the treatise seriously got the facts of life.” What does this mean for “2666” itself? Is it possible that Bolaño sees his novel as battered and torn, scarred by its author’s long fight to get down on paper the darkest “facts of life”? Surely Bolaño, when it came to books, was a “carnal lover,” holding nothing back.

On Tuesday night, at the Russian Samovar, on Fifty-second Street, Sam Lipsyte aired part of his comic novel-in-progress, and probably got more applause than whoever was onstage at the Laugh Factory down on Eighth Avenue. Lipsyte’s narrator, a laid-off university administrator, is a loser—one of those “mistakes you sometimes find in a office”—but an outrageous one. The first two chapters manage to pull off race jokes, Holocaust jokes, murder jokes, infanticide jokes, library-sex jokes, gay jokes, and eating-disorder jokes. The volume and breadth of the hilarity was like a dare. Lipsyte’s characters reduce everything to brutal one-liners, from U.S. history (first “we dick-slapped the Soviets,” but now we’re the “bitches of the First World”) to parenthood (a child, the narrator tells us, is an “expensive hobby,” especially “the hidden costs, like food”). The gentle-looking writer became half reader, half spectacle as he channelled his narrator and blandly confessed a fantasy: sex with a voluptuous co-worker in the library, with lubricant spraying onto rare folios.

The two most popular writers in the world in 2008, according to international best-seller lists, were Khaled Hosseini and Ken Follett.

Caleb Crain is still pessimistic about reading in America, despite the recent National Endowment for the Arts report saying that more Americans are reading literature.

The Maoist-led government in Nepal has launched a campaign to fight illiteracy, hoping to teach more than a million impoverished Nepalese to read and write within three months.

Attendance at public libraries across the country has increased dramatically in the past year, in some places by as much as sixty-five per cent.

Smashwords, a digital catalogue of self-published books that can be accessed via iPhone, is now allowing users to download e-books free of charge.

The School Board in Brownsville, Oregon, has voted not to ban the graphic novel “The Book of Bunny Suicides.”

The Morning News has released this year’s list of fiction contenders for its annual Tournament of Books; “2666,” by Roberto Bolaño, made the cut.

Andrew Taylor, the author of “The American Boy” and the “Roth Trilogy,” has won the 2009 Cartier Diamond Dagger, which is awarded for “sustained excellence in crime writing.”

While many contemporary novels languish on the shelves, CRW Publishing, which specializes in pocket-sized editions of classics, has reported a forty-seven-per-cent increase in sales.

The Chinese film director Zhang Yimou, who directed the opening ceremony of the Beijing Oplympics, is suing the author and the publisher of “Documenting China, Zhang Yimou’s Biography,” which Zhang claims is defamatory.

As the nation prepares to inaugurate a bona-fide literary writer as President, we’ve received word of another writer elevated to a job in the West Wing: Ethan Canin, the author of the best-selling novel “America, America,” has discovered that he was the inspiration for the name of the Chief of Staff character on the latest season of “24.” (The fictional Ethan, who served as Secretary of Defense under season six’s troubled POTUS, spells his surname with a “K.”)

Given “24”’s obsession with political corruption, Canin is an apt reference. Several of his works address the topic, either obliquely or head-on. In “America, America,” a liberal Presidential aspirant is ruined by scandal; the excellent short story “Vins Fins” sets one family’s domestic turmoil against the backdrop of Watergate. So, what gives? Is “24” attempting to trade in its brutish reputation for a more bookish mien? Yesterday I e-mailed Canin (a former professor of mine) to get the scoop. He writes,

We don’t even have a TV. Maybe the producers figured I wouldn’t know they’d used my name (but they forgot about all the e-mails that have started coming in). Either that or a comment on the key importance of literary writers in upcoming national-security decisions.

Sad truth is that an old and great friend of mine from grade school, Alex Gansa, is one of the writers for the show. (In seventh grade he defeated me for vice-president of the student council…) And I’m friends with Howard Gordon, too, who runs the show. I believe they are casting against type.

As for political corruption: I have to fight my own nature on that one. My own nature is to trust people. What a fool I’ve been proven to be. Hence, perhaps, the interest. (I’m going to have to get the DVD of “24.”)