The Beiderbecke Affair has very kindly and generously been included on a list of the top fifty blogs about literature. You can find TBA perched at number thirty-six, under "Best Literature Blogs on a Specific Subject," where it reads:
This is a blog that concerns itself with things literary while also indulging in jazz musician Bix Beiderbecke and Korean culture. There hasn't been a new post in a while, but it is a useful stop if either topic interests you. It also contains recommendations on how to begin appreciating both.
True, there hasn't been a new post in a while, although the above honor provides a lovely excuse to rectify that. It's been a big year: a writing fellowship in France, a new house, a baby, and a book contract.
With regard to the latter, Finding Bix will explore the life and legend of the early jazzman Bix Beiderbecke with an emphasis on the ways in which Bix is still relevant to people today -- for instance in arguments about race, sex, drugs and alcohol, and family. The book also wonders why so many of us are so personally invested in this long-dead cornet player and whether that investment prevents us from getting at some important truths about the man. (See this post on the wonderful blog Ward 6 -- better deserving of a place in the top fifty, I think -- which initiates a far more clear-eyed discussion of this, vis-a-vis Ray Carver, than most of what I've seen among Bixophiles.)
Anyway, the publisher will be Speck Press, which just released a great new book by Ted Gioia, The Birth (And Death) of the Cool, which was reviewed in this morning's Washington Post. (Its prose is "lapidary"!) Look for Finding Bix, an aspirant to lapidariness, sometime in 2011.
And expect it to be dedicated to Molly & Beatrix (above) and armed with a big thank-you to all the readers of The Beiderbecke Affair, without whom, honestly, this book would not have been possible.
