Edward Gorey's The Doubtful Guest is being made into a movie.

Here's an article about Paul Auster. He talks about his film and "screwdriver darts":

"When I was a kid, maybe 11, maybe nine, I went to visit a friend and he had a den with knotty pine walls and we were throwing the screwdrivers at the wall trying to make them stick in,'' he says. ``We bet his older brother he couldn't do it and he pulled his arm back and threw it, a fiendishly fast throw and it stuck and it made a deep impression on me.''

Here's an article about the Festival of Faith and Music at Calvin College. Sufjan Stevens made an appearance, but perhaps now everyone should focus on Neko Case's religious sensibilities. There are some mp3s of lectures and things from the conference, including one from the author of that Body Piercing Saved My Life book.
Also, this:




Robyn Hitchcock on songs:

"Even if I didn't record them, I would have to write songs," says Hitchcock, 54, "the same way that a hamster gnaws on a piece of cardboard or a cat scratches a post or a dental surgeon practices dentistry. It's what I do."

A more indepth interview here, in which he reveals that YepRoc is doing a big rerelease thing of his older stuff in the next few years.

A lot of my stuff from the 1980s is coming out again starting this fall and, starting next year, maybe even some of the Soft Boys stuff from the late 1970s. Apparently, some of the stuff from Warner Bros. in the late '90s is coming out, too. The thing is, the formats keep changing. If you paint a picture, you just paint it once--and it's there until it's destroyed or the weevils eat it. If you do a print, you can keep printing up copies of that etching or engraving or whatever. If you wrote a book, if your book gets published, that's it. It could be hardback or paperback. That's it. If it's paperback, the pages will fall out occasionally. But with music, when I started, it was vinyl and cassette, and then it sort moved up to CD, vinyl and cassette. Then cassette disappeared, vinyl almost disappeared, now CDs disappeared and then vinyl's coming back. I'm thinking the next record will be vinyl and downloads only. It's a thing of having to constantly re-release stuff in new formats. Find extra tracks. I'm going back and finding demos that I've done 20 years ago that were on four-track. It took me ages to find a four-track cassette machine that I could play my old demos on. I'd love to get it all out once and forever, you know? Anyway, I'm glad people are still interested 30 years on. People want to hear yet again what we do.

Was it difficult to chose songs for those extra tracks?

You just pick the ones that aren't too bad. You listen to it [and say], "Would you really want to hear this? No I'll leave that until they re-release it in 10 years time and it serves them right if they want it." I just put the stuff that was reasonable. There's more of it than I thought. Some of it, I quite like. They were either demos or songs I lost patience with for some reason. I tidied a few of them up. It's quite fun, really. Anyway, the first lot is coming out on Yep Roc, the first package of Robyn Hitchcock solo stuff from the 1980s to 1990s. That's coming out in the fall. Next spring, I hope the Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians stuff from the '80s will come out, also on Yep Roc.