Give It The Pulitzer Now

This is for real, it's available for pre-order at Chronicle Books and Amazon. A long-held personal tenet is that many works of literature should be revitalized by adding zombies. The Grapes of Wrath...and Zombies. I mean, if War and Peace had zombies in it, many, many more people would get to the last page. When I showed the description to my wife, she said "I have got to read this!" Meet one of the biggest novels of 2009:

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies features the original text of Jane Austen's beloved novel with all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie action. As our story opens, a mysterious plague has fallen upon the quiet English village of Meryton—and the dead are returning to life! Feisty heroine Elizabeth Bennet is determined to wipe out the zombie menace, but she's soon distracted by the arrival of the haughty and arrogant Mr. Darcy. What ensues is a delightful comedy of manners with plenty of civilized sparring between the two young lovers—and even more violent sparring on the blood-soaked battlefield as Elizabeth wages war against hordes of flesh-eating undead. Complete with 20 illustrations in the style of C. E. Brock (the original illustrator of Pride and Prejudice), this insanely funny expanded edition will introduce Jane Austen's classic novel to new legions of fans.

Jane Austen is the author of Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion, Mansfield Park, and other masterpieces of English literature.

Seth Grahame-Smith is the author of How to Survive a Horror Movie and The Big Book of Porn.

The Grandest Novel

Opening paragraph to The Odyssey:

This is a story about a man, one who was never at a loss. He had travelled far in the world, after the sack of Troy, the virgin fortress; he saw many cities of men, and learnt their mind; he endured many troubles and hardships in the struggle to save his own life and to bring back his men safe to their homes. He did his best, but he could not save his companions. For they perished by their own madness, because they killed and ate the cattle of Hyperion the Sun-God, and the god took care that they should never see home again.

Frozen Scandal

Scandal is our growth industry. Revelation of wrongdoing leads not to definitive investigation, punishment, and expiation but to more scandal. Permanent scandal. Frozen scandal. The weapons of mass destruction that turned out not to exist. The torture of detainees who remain forever detained. The firing of prosecutors which is forever investigated. These and other frozen scandals metastasize, ramify, self-replicate, clogging the cable news shows and the blogosphere and the bookstores. The titillating story that never ends, the pundit gabfest that never ceases, the gift that never stops giving: what is indestructible, irresolvable, unexpiatable is too valuable not to be made into a source of profit. Scandal, unpurged and unresolved, transcends political reality to become commercial fact.

Frozen Scandal - The New York Review of Books.

Current Reading: The Art Of Learning

Learning is hard. It's mostly a lonely, unsparing endeavor. It involves hard struggles with your pride, your cruzzled ego, the ugly things in your soul and the nearly unwinnable arguments with your giant, excuse-filled demons. Not learning is easier at first, but it gets progressively harder. Someone said that the definition of insanity is performing the same failed behavior over and over again while expecting a different outcome, that is a successful, result. It's true that lotteries can be won on rare occasion, and I don't discount the hope that buying the tickets provides. But real learning is a more reliable way up, even if it proceeds by a shovel strike into hard ground followed by each excruciating shovel pull. Learning is a conscious decision to countenance heartbreak face-to-face.

Josh Waitzkin, the subject of the film 'Searching for Bobby Fischer,' is one of the best learners on earth today. My great friend and prophet Still Life Living (SLL) sent me The Art of Learning as a present. And probably as a curse. SLL is on a spiritual quest which I respect and have sometimes shared, and he has sprinkled more than a few grains of sand into the incompletely clamped shell of my oyster crevice. I have so much to thank you for, V. And thanks for this book.

Josh Waitzkin was a chess prodigy. Chess caught his imagination while walking through Washington Square with his mom when he was 6 and he saw the park denizens playing speed chess. He sat down at a table and didn't look back for a dozen years. He drew Gary Kasparov in an exhibition when he was 13, the youngest player ever to do so. He was the US Chess Champion 8 times before he was 16, was the youngest International Master, and his style of play thrived on chaos and intuition. He was very much like Bobby Fischer, only more sane and better socialized. His parents were loving and ideally supportive, and that was a tremendous advantage. But even so, his quest for excellence drew him to the edge of sanity, and he wasn't ready for celebrity. He turned back from Bobby Fischer's path.

After turning away from chess, he sought peace and refuge in a martial art. Tai Chi. It turned out to be like chess, only with his body and neurons. There are two championships of Tai Chi held in Taiwan every couple of years, and in relatively short order, by learning from each loss, he went on to win both Taiwanese titles in 2004. This is as unlikely an accomplishment as a city in Japan fielding a team to beat the Pittsburgh Steelers in the Super Bowl. Waitzkin re-wired chess moves into his body, rapid-fire, reading the smallest moves and intents. He addressed his weaknesses to become the top martial arts gladiator in the world. Like with chess, only better, he learned numbers in order to forget numbers, and learned forms in order to leave those forms behind. He learned the rules so he could break them. He was able to read the minds of his opponents, and despite their greater athletic gifts, he achieved the impossible in Taiwan, and won their Super Bowl.

In another discipline some time ago, I had the privilege to know a virtuoso. He was possibly the best in the world at what he did. His code name was Krull. By working within the rules and being aware of my weaknesses, I came to be his leader, but I wasn't as good as him. Not anywhere near. He was always great, and could master situations I chose to avoid. He was a martial artist, and his talent was pure. Head-to-head, he would probably have beaten me seven times out of ten. I short-changed myself by fearing his skill, and then compounded it by accepting a role as his manager. I'm not beating myself up for doing a good job or working the system. I only wish I'd left my ego at the door and had been brave enough to learn more from Krull, because he had so much skill to teach.

Current Reading: People Of The Wetlands--Bogs, Bodies, and Lake-Dwellers

Does that title have you excited yet? Enthralled? It's ok if it doesn't, but the picture should have you at least a little bit curious. It's one of the world's most famous naturally preserved mummies. I suddenly had time to read the book it was in after seriously aggravating a previous neck injury last week, which precluded all non-essential tasks, like most blogging. Nerve pain radiated out from my upper spine, cramping up everything from there to my chest, rib cage, lower back, through my armpits, and having me retching from nausea and missing sleep much of the week. Never knew armpits could cramp up? They can. And, no, they're not pretty when they do.

As there are about 50-100 posts to catch up on, a book post, being relatively simple, seemed like a good way to start. Plus, I empathize with the poor gent in the picture, which is featured on the cover of the book. He, you might say, ahhh, died of his neck injury. My nerve paths may have complained, but the mummy, now he had some urgent issues. The braided leather rope around this man's neck dug deep furrows into the skin under his jaw and at his throat, indicating he was hung and left dangling for some time before his body was thrown into the Tollund bog in Denmark around 2,400 years ago. He was blond, and he had not shaved in at least a week.

Many of the mortal coils preserved in bogs around the world were, like Tollund Man, the result of executions. Thousands of bodies are preserved in the bogs, along with artifacts, tools, boats, clothing, and objects hinting at technology and customs at the boundaries of history. No place does bog forensic evidence point to execution with such prevalence as in Northern Europe, which in composite tends to confirm Tacitus when describing Geman tribal justice in the late 1st century A.D.:

- traitors and deserters are hanged on trees;
- cowards, shirkers, and sodomites are pressed down under a hurdle into the slimy mud of a bog;
- wives guilty of adultery are taken from the house, stripped, shaven, and flogged by their husbands;
- criminals are taken to their place of execution, and the body from the execution, on a cow-hide so as not to touch cultivated land.

Geez. These precursives are only encouraging in contrast, and at that, there are many here among us now whose views do not provide very stark comparison. Nonetheless these mummies and bog artifacts convey to those of us with northern European roots the first views of our illiterate ancestors. Their sturdy and utilitarian clothes, their great skills with wood and leather, their often under-nourished physical condition, the food in their bellies (often gruel containing a startling variety of seeds and non-local grasses), even their very flesh and hair. All but their blood. As the Irish dramatist R.B. Sheridan once said, "Our ancestors are a good kind of folk but they are the last people I should choose to have a visiting acquaintance with."