Sunday night brought another night of Vermin — the Vermin on the Mount reading series at Chinatown’s Mountain Bar. Poet Dan Kaplan, political chronicler Josh Bearman, and novelist Janet Fitch read. Guess who’s in the picture? Yeah, Janet Fitch, not so hard.

Fitch read from her new novel “Paint it Black”; she is also the author of “White Oleander,” which was an Oprah pick and a movie, too.

OK, this is not much of a report. The Mountain Bar was beautiful, as always. Host Jim Ruland was the most as always, the audience was appreciative as always, the company of Mark Sarvas and David Francis was more charming than I deserved.

I did not take notes. The photo will have to do.

Janet Fitch, author of “White Oleander,” reads from her

Jerry Yang is out as CEO of Yahoo. In his goodbye e-mail to all of Yahoo, he proves the concerns about the literacy of the dot-com generation are valid. “i” he types, over and over again:

i will be participating in the search for my successor, and i will continue as ceo until the board selects a new ceo. once a successor is named, i will return to my previous role as chief yahoo and continue to serve as a director on the board.

Ow, the lack of caps hurts. This is not an adolescent typing on a cell phone but the head of a multimillion dollar tech company perfectly capable of spouting CEO speak. Later in the memo:

i strongly believe that having transformed our platform and better aligned costs and revenues, we have a unique window for the right ceo to take ownership over the next wave of mission-critical decisions facing the company.

Unfortunately, he’s a lot less capabale of using the shift key. May he find a place where his crazy capz-free-stylz are appreciated.

I always appreciated the style of Rocky Gardiner, the person who wrote the LA Weekly horoscopes. They  were lighthearted, popculture-y and short, about as good as you can get for horoscopes. Before today I knew nothing about Gardiner — couldn’t have told you her gender, even — but I am sorry to learn that she died on Halloween at age 70. May she find a welcoming and witty place in the firmament.

LA-based poet Douglas Kearney does some pretty cool work. And he just got a Whiting Award, which, at $50,000, is also pretty cool. OK, those are both understatements. I write far more articulately about him in this feature in today’s LA Times.

A review of The Drowned Life by Jeffrey Ford in the 11/9 paper. Here’s how it starts.

The collection “The Drowned Life” raises a banner to salute the power of the imagination. Jeffrey Ford doesn’t just invent one world with its own rules, creatures and imagery — he creates dozens in 16 dreamlike stories, which move between science fiction, fantasy and (mostly) normal backyards.

Mainstream media is catching on to the power of blogging in many ways, but one thing they haven’t embraced is prolific profanity. At the LA Times book blog Jacket Copy, I don’t write FUCK or SHIT or any variants thereof.

Which is perhaps why I am inordinately tickled by cursebird. It’s a site that captures all the profanity-laced tweets from twitter and spools them out as fast as they happen. Some tweets are simple, yet obscure — “this shit is taking entirely too long” says what it means, but leaves you wondering exactly what shit — could it be a line at a store, a bus home, a breakup? So many possibilities. Others are far more specific: “thank fucking gawd. sarah palin didn’t know that africa was a continent or who was in the nafta agreement http://tr.im/w9r jesus.”

There is appreciative — “Listening to ‘Death Letter’ from Son House’s Original Delta Blues. Un-bloody-believably utterly bastard brilliant.” There is oversharing: “Can I ever have a phone call w/Brad where I a) don’t have to explain the fucking obvious b) aren’t accused of being a bitch c) don’t cry.” (Does Brad follow her, you think?)

I like these tweets that imply a bigger story. “Spent the afternoon buying shitty old bikes from a city warehouse, to be welded to a giant pineapple.” Was the curseword necessary? Probably not. Do I want to know more about the giant pineapple and its welded broken bikes? I kinda do.

But then there’s this (about manga): “I fucking hate Hidan for killing Asuma but I can’t help but like how foul-mouthed he is.” It’s a loop of profanity — the cursing fan, the foul-mouthed character, the cursebird watching it all.

I liked it better when those crazy Klansmen stumbled around in pointy-hatted sheets, so you could easily identify them.

Although I suppose there aren’t that many shaved head, gun-toting racists in white tuxedos with assassination on their minds. Other than these two.

At least, I certainly hope not.

Kiran Desai was announced the winner of the Man Booker prize tonight for The Inheritance of Loss. At 35, Desai is the youngest woman yet to win the prize. Her mother, Anita Desai, has been shortlisted twice without winning.
The wire report described the controversy over this year’s shortlist this way:

This year the big shock was the omission of leading authors and hotly fancied contenders like Peter Carey and David Mitchell.

Hotly fancied! I love England.

There are some things I remember when traveling nowadays:

• Don’t bring water for the flight.
• When carrying lots of books, it’s OK to put some in your checked bag; it doesn’t mean you don’t love them, but they are heavy, and you can’t read them all at once.
• When leaving a car in Pittsburgh’s long term parking, write the asile number of where it’s parked AND the kiosk where you hop on the shuttle, as they do not match and, when you return, the shuttle driver will drop you at the kiosk, not your car.

The thing I never remember is that loading the iPod at the last minute is a very. bad. idea. But I cannot resist. I make sure all the podcasts are loaded, grab willing, free downloads and buy a few indulgences on iTunes. Load the CDs into the laptop for easy transfer. Have I packed? No. But damn, that iPod will be well equipped.

If it’s a little thin around here for the next few days, I’m dashing out to LA and back for some last-minute BBQing. Today’s high in Pittsburgh was supposed to be 63 degrees; when I was running errands, the mercury hovered around 58. We have a word for that in Los Angeles: we call it WINTER.

So off to the hot desert for a last dose of summer gone too soon. Happy Labor Day.

I am far away from my library but that can’t stop me from thinking Don Delillo as I walk throuhg New York City. I was on my way to the subway when I stumbled across the short spurt of West 3d also known as Great Jones Street.

Great Jones Street was Delillo’s third novel, published in 1973. In it, rock star Bucky Wunderlick fakes his own death to live on, in a surreal, post-rock-star, post-dead world. it begins thusly:

Fame requires every
kind of excess.  I mean true fame, a devouring neon, not the somber renown of waning statesmen or
chinless kings.  I mean long journeys across gray space.  I mean danger, the edge of every void, the
circumstance of one man imparting an erotic terror to the dreams of the republic.

Not to get all weepy here, but doesn’t Delillo just fucking nail rock stardom, the edge of the void, when it was still all mushy and fresh and new? Janice Joplin and Jimi Hendrix had been dead barely 3 years when the book hit shelves. "Imparting an eroitc terror to the dreams of the republic" — shiiiiiiiit, Kurt Cobain was a snotty-nosed Kindergartener, but boom! — there’s his future in one damn sentence.

Delillo’s NY of the early seventies probably didn’t include a Quizno’s on the corner, but a little bit of it remains in SoHo. Whew.