“A lot of teams didn't bring it up [his past]. They just told me that they knew about it. They just told me they just wanted to talk football. It's all about playing football and just becoming an NFL player.” – On Michael Oher, posted by ESPN.com's Kevin Seifert, February 20, 2009 Michael Oher is a first-round NFL draft prospect from Mississippi who could play left or right tackle depending on the team he is drafted by. You might recognize his name from The Blind Side, a book about his life by Michael Lewis. The book, which partially chronicles Oher's impoverished upbringing and educational challenges (he has several learning disabilities), has recently been optioned by Hollywood to be adapted into a movie. Last month Oher had an extensive meeting with the Chicago Bears, who are looking to replace right tackle John Tait. However, right tackle is not Oher’s natural position, and this was all before the Bears traded for quarterback Jay Cutler.

In 1982, a young artist from Hawaii named Stan Sakai sketched a rabbit with a samurai sword and his ears pulled up into a top knot. That sketch turned into the critically-lauded Usagi Yojimbo, the epic comic book tale of a fantastical medieval Japan, now entering its 25th year in print. Its 23rd collected edition, Bridge of Tears, will be published in July, and last week Sakai was nominated for the 2009 Will Eisner Comic Industry Award for best ongoing series.

Sad news for fans of Austin film and stage: The body of local actor Lou Perryman was discovered in his home on Thursday by Austin police, working off of information provided by a man who is now being held in custody. According to News 8 Austin, 36-year-old Seth Christopher Tatum turned himself in Thursday morning, confessing to attacking Perryman and also stealing his car: "He basically made the statement that, 'By the way, that's a stolen car, and I'm pretty sure I killed the owner of the car,'" Sgt. Joseph Chacon said. "We found out the owner of the car, went to address on a 'check welfare' call. That's where we found Mr. Perryman." Perryman is perhaps best known for his work with Eagle Pennell in the films The Whole Shootin' Match (1978) and Last Night at the Alamo (1983), although he continued to work steadily in TV and film. He was also a member of the Austin theatre company Big State Productions and took part in their now-legendary production In the West. More details as they come in. And here's Perryman talking to the Chronicle in 2007 with his Shootin' Match costar Sonny Carl Davis on the occasion of the film's DVD release by Watchmaker Films.

On the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the publication of Billy Lee Brammer's The Gay Place, the Chronicle's own Michael Ventura wrote this: "It is still the finest novel written by a Texan, and with Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men it gracefully holds its place as one of the two great political novels in American literature." And on the occasion of what would have been the 80th birthday of Brammer, who died in 1978, ACC's annual Carnival ah! program will feature a panel called Austin in the '50s: The Political and Literary Landscapes of Billy Lee Brammer. The panel kicks off with the premiere screening of "The Flea Circus," a short film based on an excerpt from The Gay Place, directed and produced by his daughters Shelby and Sidney Brammer. Next up is a panel discussion, and if you know the first thing about Texas letters, you know the lineup is an impressive one: Longtime Texas Monthly columnist (and one of Brammer's Mad Dog pals) Gary Cartwright; Brammer's first wife, Nadine Eckhardt, whose memoir Duchess of Palms was just published by UT Press; legendary curmudgeon Don Graham, who's perhaps the leading authority on Texas literature; Kaye Northcott, former editor of The Texas Observer; Texas Monthly senior editor Jan Reid (The Bullet Meant for Me); and former state legislator A.R. "Babe" Schwartz, who helped lead the Killer Bees in its Senate quorum-busting move in 1979. The Chron's Film News columnist Joe O'Connell will moderate. The event is free and open to the public. It takes place this Friday, April 3, at 5pm on the Mainstage Theatre, 2nd floor of the Rio Grande Campus of Austin Community College (1212 Rio Grande). Refreshments and birthday cake in the lobby post-panel.

This is the way to publish sketchbooks. More, please. You publish the sketchbooks. Actually reproduce, as closely as possible, the same scale, paper, binding, and well, heft of these precious archives. Many artists carry a sketchbook wherever they go, each page, clean and bright with the promise of a new idea, a chance to capture a unique face, a juvenile cartoon, and, maybe most importantly, private failures of experimentation. With his new sketchbook Be a Nose! (McSweeney's, $29), pioneering comics artist Art Spiegelman utilizes the same ace-in-the-hole design sense that made RAW Magazine the most important comic work of the 1980s.

Admit it. You don't read enough poetry. Sure, sometimes it's hard to find the time, but would it help if it was read aloud to you? No eyestrain involved. What if we told you it was really good poetry? Sold yet? You should be. Tonight, three poets – Oregon natives and Michener graduates, all of 'em – share the mic tonight at BookPeople. You might recognize twins Matthew and Michael Dickman as the precogs from Minority Report, but even more impressive is their poetry: They've both been published in The New Yorker in recent months, and both have titles out from Copper Canyon Press. Michael McGriff, a childhood friend of the twins (and an old drinking buddy of ours), has a whole host of accolades under his belt, including the Stegner Fellowship and Ruth Lilly Prize; Library Journal called his recent book, Dismantling the Hills, “a powerful first collection of narratives with spark and intelligence.” All three read tonight at BookPeople at 7pm.

Look for Stanley Kubrick's original vision of A.I. and his unrealized Napoleon project to come out in book form this year, the late director's longtime executive producer and brother-in-law Jan Harlan said during a SXSW Film panel Sunday. The A.I. book will include 25 original drawings from Kubrick's earlier vision for the film, prior to him passing the project on to Steven Spielberg. "In Stanley's hands it would have been so dark," Harlan said, adding that Kubrick saw the story really as a "fairy tale" more suited to Spielberg's talents.

The Chicago Tribune calls Peter Ferry's debut novel, Travel Writing, "an absolute pleasure to read ... ensnaring, funny, suspenseful, smart and poignant." Anyone in the mood for ensnaring, funny, suspenseful, smart, and poignant would do well to hit BookPeople tonight – that's where Ferry will be, at least, as part of the monthly Utter Reading Series. Ferry goes on at 7pm.

Wednesday, March 11. 7pm. Get your calendar. Mark it down. I’ll wait. Oh, and if you have something on for then, reschedule. This is sweeter. What it is is the broadcast premiere of A Company of Voices: Conspirare in Concert on KLRU. If you are already a fan of Conspirare, you don’t need me to explain why this is a significant event. But if you still haven’t heard Austin’s beloved – and increasingly world renowned – vocal ensemble and are wondering what all the fuss is with the multiple Grammy nominations two years in a row and widespread critical raves and invitations to perform at choral assemblies across the planet and what all, this program, which will be shown nationally on PBS, will make it clear to you. The members of this choir and its leader, Craig Hella Johnson, are vocal alchemists who can transmute any scrap of music into aural gold. Now, don’t let the word “choir” throw you. If you’re imagining a horde of black-robed figures belting out endless runs of 16th notes and unintelligible German text that was dusty and tired when Bach was in knee pants, think again.