Jennifer Howard

“Ageing chimp’s own story on list for Guardian first book prize,” sez today’s Guardian. (Haven’t the Brits learned how to spell “aging” yet? Honestly.) Me Cheeta: the Autobiography is billed as the true story of Cheeta the Chimp, star of Hollywood blockbusters, told “in his own words”. The book documents the life and times of a chimpanzee who has outlived all his co-stars from the 1939 film “Tarzan” to reach the ripe old age of 75. He withdrew from the limelight in 1964 after biting his “Doctor Dolittle” co-star Rex Harrison, and has retired to an old chimps’ home in… Read more...

Is there anybody who isn’t covering the Democratic convention? Even the Library of Congress has a correspondent there. She’s photog Carol M. Highsmith, and she’s been filing images (copyright-free) from the Mile-High City. She’ll be filing from Minneapolis-St. Paul, too. Highsmith has already donated a large (also copyright-free) image archive to the LOC: The online presentation of the Carol M. Highsmith Archive features photographs of landmark buildings and architectural renovation projects in Washington, D.C., and throughout the United States. The first 23 groups of photographs contain more than 2,500 images and date from 1980 to 2005, with many views in… Read more...

I don’t know about you, but I have been underwhelmed by Twitter as a vehicle for political coverage. Just because everybody’s doing it doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. Does “twittering” sound like serious reportage to you? Twittered literature, however—now there’s an idea with legs. Call it twitlit. Maud Newton notes that, so far, we have twittered versions of Moby-Dick, Paradise Lost, and William Blake. Others?… Read more...

No, it’s not a job in journalism. The Guardian reports that some intrepid Brits are looking for a hardy soul to accompany them to the South Pole in honor of the 100th anniversary of Ernest Shackleton’s Nimrod expedition: A hundred years after the appearance of one of the strangest and least enticing advertisements in newspaper history - “Men wanted for hazardous journey. Small wages. Bitter cold. Long months of complete darkness. Constant danger. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success” - a single brave soul is being sought to shuffle along in the heroic footsteps of Ernest… Read more...

During my stint as a contributing editor at Book World, the phrase “minor novelist” used to get thrown around once in a while. I always hated it: It’s patronizing, and it’s almost always used by people who will never get around to writing a novel at all. (Though of course if they did it would be anything but minor.) After reading a review in the Aug. 1 TLS, though, I’d like to suggest that the phrase “minor memoirist” needs to go into wider circulation, given what the publishing industry has been dishing out. Here’s A.N. Wilson (in no sense a… Read more...

The July 18 issue of the TLS has a report on the Fred Astaire Conference, held in June at Oriel College, Oxford. I’ve been to a fair number of academic conferences in the last couple of years—some more entertaining than others—and I wish this one had been in the travel budget. Thanks to my dad, I grew up on musicals, and I am delighted that scholars have seen fit to tackle the big questions: A lively discussion evolved around the subject of Rogers’s dresses, traditionally maligned for being ‘in the way’: a view that is now undergoing revision. Even the… Read more...