Boston Globe Ideas, public radio, offbeat news, and Karen Russell.

From Ideas:

He's nicknamed "the 52 hertz whale" because that's the frequency at which he sings his whale songs (most whales sing at between 15 and 25 hertz). His weird voices seems to have alienated all the other whales; the only people who listen to him are Navy sonar engineers, who have tracked his movements since 1992 using a classified system of submarine-detecting hydrophones. No one has ever seen the 52 hertz whale, and so no one knows why his voice is so high. Scientists speculate that he could be malformed, a "hybrid" between two species of whale, or simply deaf.

From American Public Media's The Dinner Party Download show:

Among searches finding this site, I've noticed a lot of folks Googling for Karen Russell's Swamplandia book. Clicking reveals the book comes in February! With an exclamation in the title! Swamplandia! I can't wait.

From September, the Book Case has the really, really good first lines.

Chapter One: The Beginning of the End

Our mother performed in starlight. Whose innovation this was I never discovered. Probably it was Chief Bigtree’s idea, and it was a good one—to blank the follow spot and let a sharp moon cut across the sky, unchaperoned; to kill the microphone; to leave the stage lights’ tin eyelids scrolled and give the tourists in the stands a chance to enjoy the darkness of our island; to encourage the whole stadium to gulp air along with Swamplandia!’s star performer, the world-famous alligator wrestler Hilola Bigtree. Four times a week, our mother climbed the ladder above the Gator Pit in a green two-piece bathing suit and stood on the edge of the diving board, breathing. If it was windy, her long hair flew around her face, but the rest of her stayed motionless. Nights in the swamp were dark and star-lepered—our island was thirty-odd miles off the grid of mainland lights—and although your naked eye could easily find the ball of Venus and the sapphire hairs of the Pleiades, our mother’s body was just lines, a smudge against the palm trees.

This month, the Lemuria Bookstore Blog has a plot summary.

Set in the swamplands of Florida, Russell’s novel focuses on the Bigtree family:  owners of the theme park Swamplandia!, faux Native-Americans, and alligator wrestlers.  The narration oscillates between the youngest Bigtree child Ava and her older brother Kiwi, and it explores the heartache of losing Hilola Bigtree, wife, mother, and alligator-wrestler extraordinaire, to cancer.

In addition to their grief, the family must cope with the loss of interest in Floridian swampland culture and history—essentially the Bigtree way of life and source of pride…

On the Amazon page, Carl Hiassen says he can't recall the last time "a first novel that made such a rich and lasting impression." Booklist calls the book "ravishing, elegiac, funny, and brilliantly inquisitive." Cool.

From July, Random House Library Services interviews Russell.

Q: Do you have a favorite library or librarian from your past?
A: I have a favorite English teacher, this patron saint of grammar, Miss Madeleine Timmis, who gave me Michael Crichton and John Grisham books on the sly and without whose encouragement I would never have become a writer, I’m convinced. And I still remember the whole-body thrill I felt at age seven when our grade school librarian, Sister Patricia, gave me “special access” to the grown up kid books early on, which was maybe the best compliment of my life to date—to get to exit the patronizingly carpeted “bean bag” area of our very tiny library and freely touch the spines of the “adult” (read: Nancy Drew) books. I don’t know a single writer who doesn’t cite the library as their favorite childhood place—I remember it as a nerd’s Valhalla.

If you saw me smiling on the train Wednesday morning, I was reading the start of Karen Russell's "The Dredgeman's Relevation." If you saw me linger on the platform that evening, I was reading the story's end.

Her fiction in a July New Yorker is the story I'd most anticipated of the magazine's "20 under 40" series. Russell is a random acquaintance of this blog, and I've been a fan of her writing since first reading it. In her stories — usually somewhere between the magical and the grotesque, often equally joyful and gothic — she makes investment. You get the feeling she has to reach a personal, sustained suspension of disbelief for each sentence. At least I get that feeling. The voices beat reality.

Her relative absence from publishing as she's worked on her first book has been no easy time for a Karen Russell fan. Which, granted, is likely much easier than being Russell, as she actually has to write the book.

So, if you do one good thing for yourself today (and you should), read "The Dredgeman's Relevation." Print the pages, take them on the train with you and smile until you're engrossed. Here are five lines from the story — the first sentence and four non-spoiler others. Now go places.

"The dredgeman had a name, Louis Thanksgiving Auschenbliss, but lately he preferred to think of himself as a profession."

"Lightning sent down its white spider legs outside the boxcar doors and crawled up the pine trunks, trailing fires."

"Outside, rising from the ground like the earth's own exhalation, came the odor of peat, a great seawall of it, nothing so subtle or evanescent as a fragrance — no, this was stuff with a true stink."

"The insects had been a chronic irritation on the C.C.C. barge, but out here on the marshy open prairie they were pestilential, their sawing sound filling the air like a cruel ventriloquy of the men's own thirst."

"He did not have any headaches that day, or dark presentiments."

I'm excited to see Karen Russell, long a fav of this blog, on The New Yorker list of "20 under 40" fiction writers. "The list will be published in the double fiction issue of The New Yorker that arrives on newsstands Monday," the NYT tells us. Can we have writing with this list, please?

Between Russell, the fantastically debuting Joshua Ferris, all the folks who have blown me away in their New Yorker work (like Yiyun Li), let's feature their short stuff and forget about Talk of the Town for a week.

In related news, it appears that Russell's Swamplandia! is now due for either a February 2011 or spring 2011 release. Looking forward to it.

Update, days later: Should've mentioned that I first heard about the issue via Gawker's quality "How to Complain About The New Yorker's 20 Favorite Writers Under 40." And the post answers my concern — "eight of whom will be published in an upcoming 'fiction' special; the other 12 in subsequent issues of the magazine." Awesome.

As promised, the New Yorker has begun posting video of its Valentine's "Love Is Strange" Speakeasy, and we get highly watchable readings from Jeffrey Eugenides — already discussed here — and Karen Russell.

Russell, you may remember, has shown up in this blog since May 2004, when she was Nerve's Strumpet22 and on her way to cool and known young writerdom. This video brings no news of Russell's coming book, a follow-up to her terrific St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves collection of short stories, but her appearance now seems promising.

Other potentially good news? Her agent has a blurb: "In Swamplandia!, celebrated young storyteller Karen Russell tells the tale of the Bigtree dynasty, who own a deteriorating alligator theme park and café on the coast of Florida. Russell takes some very contemporary elements, theme parks, real estate wars, and a freakish and individualized American family and injects ancient drama/tragedy into it. The result is rich, stylistically brilliant, and wholly original. This much anticipated first novel will be published by Alfred A. Knopf." No date given, but still.

If you've read St. Lucy's, you know this setting. "Ava Wrestles the Alligator" is the first story in the book and maybe this blog's favorite. Russell notes in one '06 interview about the book that "it picks up where 'Ava Wrestles the Alligator'  leaves off." An '07 Esquire column has more: "On a good day, writing about Ava's adventure is pure joy. On a bad day, I want to pull each of my hairs out individually. I'll start to doubt the very premise of the novel. I've got these noisy critical voices inside of me, a mean bunch who I like to visualize as a chorus of spinster aunts. I think they subsist on vinegar and unsalted pretzels; they heckle me continuously as I write. The aunts fill the stands of a dumpy dog track and place dollar bets on how badly the novel is going to turn out. I've found the best way to shut these haters up is to listen to a lot of hip-hop. … [Kanye discussion] … My current favorite is Ice Cube's 1999 hit You Can Do It (Put Your Back in to It). Perhaps Ice Cube did not write this song to inspire first-time novelists. In fact, I'm pretty sure the 'it' in question involves moving your ass at the velocity of a helicopter rotor and having 14 hours of intercourse with Ice Cube. Well, I have reinterpreted You Can Do It for my purposes…"

Do you live in New York? If so, you need to go somewhere for me. The New Yorker Festival is coming up fast, and many of this blog's favorites are going to be there.

Who, you ask? Scheduled are: Edward P. Jones ("Volvo," "By twenty five," "D.C., New York, memory"), Karen Russell ("Reading Karen Russell," "The cover: The word 'Stories' in the wolf's bite") Jonathan Franzen ("Sending the tablet into the sea," "On reading"), Orhan Pamuk ("All the drunk collected tokens," "The best part of the 'Journeys' issue"), Malcolm Gladwell ("A most reasonable 'fro," "Before the Super Bowl"), Jeffrey Toobin, and many more. Enough? I want John McPhee to canoe-surf the crowd, but I'm not holding my breath.

There are strands in my life that I let drop. I spread a hand as wide as possible and close it on as many as I can. Those strands I hold together, and the rest I watch lying around the outside. On whatever surface. They're obviously there, but to pick them up I'd need to open my fist and lose others. Work is exempt, sifted and juggled with the other hand that doesn't matter as much. It's the grip on your good hand that means everything. That goes and you fall. But grip tight enough and eventually you fall asleep.

Reading books is one of the outside strands, an unknowable exercise in appreciation and pause for the secretly-fidgeting completist. Sitting still enough to focus, focusing enough to take in this page, paging unconsciously enough to ignore the numbers and never think of thumb-counting ahead to the break, breaking enough but not so much to condone a rush of relief. When you love words and consider the above, you're a traitor. I am. So you read for desperate little stretches and hope to get caught up enough to forget.

I read St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves this afternoon, the short-stories publishing debut for Karen Russell, mentioned here a number of times in the past, mostly recently when I bought the book in December. I'd already read two of the stories in the New Yorker and loved them both. But then work heated up and time to got to seeming shorter than it actually was, shutting off different valves to send all the steam where I thought it was needed. It wasn't, of course, but you'd rather have too much steam than run out. I would. I shouldn't assume for you as you do quite fine. Enough ahead, and not doubting that yet, I got to the book today.

Somewhere along the way I cracked the top of the binding. The first three paragraphs of the first story legitimized it. The first two were setup, descriptive and rushed so as to be admittedly minor in the story's course, until the moment just before the third paragraph when the course took hold.

My sister and I are staying in Grandpa Sawtooth's old house until our father, Chief Bigtree, gets back from the Mainland. It's our first summer alone in the swamp. "You girls will be fine," the Chief slurred. "Feed the gators, don't talk to strangers. Lock the door at night." The Chief must have forgotten that it's a screen door at Grandpa's — there is no key, no lock. The old house is a rust-checkered yellow bungalow at the edge of the wild bird estuary. It has a single, airless room; three crude, palmetto windows, with mosquito-blackened sills; a tin roof that hums with the memory of rain. I love it here. Whenever the wind gusts in off the river, the sky rains leaves and feathers. During mating season, the bedroom window rattles with the ardor of birds.

Now the thunder makes the thin window glass ripple like wax paper. Summer rain is still the most comforting sound that I know. I like to pretend that it's our dead mother's fingers, drumming on the ceiling above us. In the distance, an alligator bellows — not one of ours, I frown, a free agent. Our gators are hatched in incubators. If they make any noise at all, it's a perfunctory grunt, bored and sated. This wild gator has an inimitable cry, much louder, much closer. I smile and pull the blankets around my chin. If Osceola hears it, she's not letting on. My sister is lying on the cot opposite me. Her eyes are wide open, and she is smiling and smiling in the dark.

"Hey, Ossie? Is it just you in there?"

If you haven't read Karen Russell, you probably should. She's about my age and a Northwestern grad, and her writing makes you carried-along happy instead of Olympic-watching jealous.

And she has a book out.

Karen first appeared in this space in May 2004 when she was Nerve blogger Strumpet22, taking the site's idea of pleasure in a more modest yet simultaneously more enjoyable direction. She found the blog mention here, and we e-mailed briefly (Go U Northwestern). We then lost touch until June 2005 when "Haunting Olivia" grabbed me in the New Yorker's Debut Fiction issue. It was a terrific story. The way it took hold, it made me think of being a kid and falling asleep a night, when you're small and the darkness starts to swim around you.

The author's name was Karen Russell, so I e-mailed her again to find out if that was her. Indeed it was. She was also knee-deep in book writing. I was going to blog about that awesomeness here, but then I lost the issue and my handle on Outlook Express, and life moved on. Until this last June, when she made it into the New Yorker again, with "Accident Brief." It was cold like a Salinger short — and like the story's plot — but descriptive with a mystery that made the chill unique. I saved the issue and planned to write here whenever the earlier issue turned up again.

And today it did. Off for a few days, I was going through the foldable boxes next to front door, crammed to the sides of the massive stereo box, and the issue turned up. Dusty but probably exactly where I'd left it. The cumulative effect of the find and the steady success in my fight against the inbox — turning up the fact I still owed a reply from many months before — sent me to Google to see if Karen had come out with a book.

Indeed she had, as St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves came out this fall. It collected the first New Yorker story and added previously unpublished others, and the reviews were great. I ordered my copy this afternoon and finally finished this post.

David Amsden, a man a good bit older than 17, wrote a diary for Slate about attending a high school prom recently with a 17-year-old. The result was as strange as you might have expected. One of the less controversial but more enjoyable lines: "The guys, meanwhile, look even younger and goofier than usual in their tuxes: gawky, a little helpless even, as if they'd raided the closet of some extinct species of older man who roamed the earth in 1987, before mysteriously vanishing."

Amsden's article then drew such a response on the Fray (the Slate message boards) that he went and wrote a response.

Strumpet22 wrote about sexy phone voices for her Nerve blog early Friday morning: "I learned that in order to have a truly sexy phone voice, you need to also be capable of saying sexy things. Otherwise it's like having a finely-tuned Stradivarius, and using it to play the theme from Sanford and Son."

Seth Schiesel of the New York Times wrote about vigilantes' reverse scamming of "Nigerian" scammers recently. CNET's News.com picked up the story.

For Friday's paper, David W. Chen of the Times visited the Bridge Apartments, "the four high-rises lined up like dominoes atop the Trans-Manhattan Expressway." Writes Chen: "People say that the elevators are too crowded and too slow. And, except on the ground floor, tenants can only press a button to go down, not up. That means someone on, say, the 16th floor who wants to visit a friend on the 32nd floor would have to ride down to the lobby before heading back up."

Ticketmaster's weekly e-mail: "Don't miss Hanson."

If you're using nwu.edu e-mail addresses, stop. As long planned, Northwestern is killing them on Sunday. Use northwestern.edu instead.

For those who've heard about or seen my family's garage transformation, the conversions Bethany Little of the Times wrote about Friday are nothing like our garage's. My brother and I went to college instead.

Big thumbs up to Barnesandnoble.com, the kid Amazon's always pushing around, for amazingly fast delivery. Ordered the Racing in the Street essay collection and Mrs. Bruce's new album on Tuesday, using standard delivery, and both arrived today.

I found music retailer Classic 45's carries a good audio clip from Eddie Floyd's Yum Yum Yum (I Want Some) (mentioned earlier this week). But in as clear a sign as any of the digital divide's persistence, I still couldn't find full lyrics anywhere on the Web. In another search, the lyrics of Sly and the Family Stone's underrated Underdog again appeared only once on the Web, in an Italian blog (scroll to the bottom).

Ralph Wiley, the most stylistically proficient and probably best all-around writer of ESPN.com's Page 2, died last Sunday night of heart failure. His story archive continued to live on the site.

"I feel like I dozed off in the Lifeskills 101 class, and now I have to crib other people's notes," writes Strumpet22, my favorite of Nerve's new promo bloggers.

The mature-but-literate audiences-only site is trying a unique approach to boosting traffic and funds to its personals section. The site is hiring bloggers to date solely through the section and then report the results online. Strumpet22 and five others are the first bunch. Every two months, viewers are going to vote someone off the island.

Nerve editors, of course, plan then to replace the dismissed with new bloggers. Why? They don't explain. I imagine it's because they've got a great promo idea and they know it.

None of the first crew's work has yet lived up to Nerve's no-limits essence, but maybe that's what happens when you have to post your picture and face the accountability of an archive. Is that disappointing? I don't think so. Your coked-up exploits with the '99 Atlanta Falcons (or their cheerleaders) may have been fabulous — but do you have a sister who's, you know, normal?

Not normal normal. More like working at normal but falling short every day and being kind of happy you only got as far as you did. As my new fave described her blog getting started: "This reminds me of the time I arrived at Jenny Lucio's birthday party an hour early, and then sat around wearing a Smurfs party hat and a dour expression while the Lucios blew up the Moonwalk."

"My blog," she adds, "needs a Moonwalk."