Bookmarks: a small town book tour, inappropriate books for kids, and Walt Whitman selling jeans

Bookish links from across the Web:

• Test your celebrity poet knowledge over at Details and guess which verses have been written by Michael Jackson, Mr. Spock, Jewel, or William Butler Yeats
• Battle of the sexes, poetry edition: Do women write “female” poetry? 
• Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue tour skips San Francisco and Los Angeles and makes stops in Noblesville, Indiana, and Rochester, New York 
• Don’t tell Scholastic: a new blog dedicated to inappropriate books for kids
• Recordings of Walt Whitman reading “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” and “America” are being used in Levi’s Jeans new ad campaign. Controversial use of a dead poet’s work or clever marketing strategy? Slate Magazine discusses
• Kazuo Ishiguro “auditions” characters to narrate his novels. Colum McCann will print out chapters of his incomplete book, staple them together, and take them to Central Park, pretending to be reading someone else’s work. The Wall Street Journal interviews 11 top authors about their writing habits

One Response to “Bookmarks: a small town book tour, inappropriate books for kids, and Walt Whitman selling jeans”

1. November 11, 2009 | 8:29 am Darrel Blaine Ford says:
   

   I am almost 80 years old. I have studied, been refreshed by “Leaves of Grass” & revered Walt Whitman for 7 decades. For the past 1/4 century I have portrayed ( I call it personating ) him in his “Good Gray Poet” persona at all manner of venues, colleges, universities, highschools, Civil Wat & other historical ceremonies & observances, theatres, TV & films, & regularly performed & functioned as a resource at his birthplace in Huntington, Long Island, NY & his last residence in Camden, NJ. I thoroughly support these commercials. For me anything that brings Walt & his poetry to the attention of new readers, especially young people, is a glorious win win. Darrel Blaine Ford/Walt Whitman

   November 11, 2009 7:19 AM