Katrina-Related Links

• If you just happen to send a check for $8 (or more) to the LSU Foundation for its Katrina relief fund, and then mail it to the offices of The Southern Review, Bret Lott will send you a free copy of the latest Review, which features paintings of the Gulf Coast region by Billy Solitario. Editor Bret Lott reminds you that in the eyes of the law these two actions–your donation, his sending you a magazine–are mutually exclusive, and “not a single penny will come even close to the coffers of the Southern Review.”

• The Children’s Book Council is keeping track of relief efforts from several organizations, including some of its member publishers.

• I mentioned it on Galleycat already, but it’s worth repeating: tonight’s Happy Ending is a fundraiser for a charity to be determined by the audience members. Guest readers: James Salter, Jim Shepard, Julia Slavin, and Amy Hempel.

• Dayne Sherman, who’s an official “friend of Beatrice,” is a reference librarian at Southeastern Louisiana University. This is his Katrina story, published in the Soma Review.
  

14 September 2005 | uncategorized |

What Tom Cruise Believes Instead of Freud

Somebody, it might have been BoingBoing, led me to a Wikipedia article about Scientologist space opera, the wacky cosmogony that L. Ron Hubbard foisted onto his followers. “Hubbard argued that science fiction was actually an unconscious recollection of real past lives that could be uncovered in detail through Scientology auditing,” so apparently while he didn’t believe in psychology, he did believe in the collective unconscious–Dianetics has a volcano on the cover, for example, because it’s supposed to remind us subliminally of the time 75 million years ago when Xenu brought us all to Earth, sat us around the volcanoes, and then dropped a bunch of H-bombs on us.

13 September 2005 | uncategorized |