David Wolman: Carroll, Clinton, Clemens… Lefties All

I didn’t have to read too far into A Left-Hand Turn Around the World before I thought it might be a good idea to invite David Wolman to tell Beatrice readers about his favorite lefty writers. It was just so much fun to skip around and read about Wolman’s exploits hanging out with Portland Satanists and Japanese golfers, all in order to understand the mysteries of left-handedness. I’m not always a big fan of the “travelogue in support of quirky cultural theses” genre, but Wolman knnows how to be entertaining without constantly making the people he writes about the butt of his jokes. So I asked, he agreed to take some time out of his book tour, and, well, here he is…

Ah, to write with the left. It was Oscar Wilde (we presume) who coined that by-now-clichéd-among-southpaws line: “If the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body, then only left-handed people are in their right minds.” Wilde, it appears, was not left-handed, but Mark Twain, Lewis Carroll, Bill Clinton, and other famous names to put pen to page did so from the port side.

To a certain degree, any recap of favorite left-handed authors—including the shorty I plan to serve up three paragraphs from now—is fatally flawed from the get-go. For starters, a natural preference for the left hand has been perceived with such negative freight for so much of human history and across cultures, that scores of writers, famous and anonymous alike, may have been, in the neurological sense, left-handed. But as children these writers-to-be, thanks to the wisdom and vision of the adult population, were swiftly and comprehensively forced to switch to right-handed writing, eating, and violin-playing. How is anyone to know, then, with absolute certainty, that Shakespeare was not a southpaw?

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14 November 2005 | guest authors |

Ron Hogan Has a Posse!

I’ve already done a little write-up of last night’s party for Galleycat, but I wanted to make sure I posted this photo of me with the core members of my awesome Bulfinch Press crew, publicist Claire Greenspan (left) and editor Karyn Gerhard. They’ve been doing a great job (this week alone, Stewardess! has picked up glowing mentions in Stuff and Hollywood Life, plus the IFC website) and I’m looking forward to putting together some other great stuff with them in the weeks ahead. Like, for example, next Tuesday’s Borders (Park Ave/57th St) appearance with Joe Bob Briggs!

10 November 2005 | events |