Thursday, February 02, 2012
Louisa May Alcott Goes to War
Eager to support the North, the budding author volunteered for a fledgling corps of female nurses.
From a story on History Net...
In hospitals as well as in the field, the greatest danger to soldiers and caregivers alike was disease. Less than one month after she took up her duties in Washington, in early January 1863 Alcott came down with typhoid pneumonia. At first she stubbornly tried to keep up with her duties, despite a high fever and racking cough, but she soon was confined to bed. Even then she continued to write letters and sew for the soldiers until she became dangerously ill. Her supervisor, Hannah Ropes (whose own Civil War letters and diary were finally published in 1980), wrote asking her family to come and take her home. Ropes herself subsequently fell ill and died on January 20. The next day Louisa agreed to let her father take her home.
Often delusional (and perhaps poisoned by the mercury-laced calomel she'd been dosed with), Alcott was not well enough to leave the house until spring. But as soon as she could work, at the urging of friends and family she set about revising for publication the letters she had sent and the journal she had kept. Hospital Sketches first appeared in the Boston Commonwealth, a weekly newspaper, in four installments in May and June 1863.
To Alcott's surprise, the sketches proved to be extraordinarily popular, and were quickly reprinted in newspapers across the North. Two publishers vied to produce an expanded version in book form, which appeared in hardcover that August. It too turned out to be a success with a public hungry for news about its "boys." The volume was reprinted again in 1869 with additional material, as Hospital Sketches and Camp and Fireside Stories, and again did well, selling another 3,000 copies.
In retrospect, Alcott's illness could be viewed as a fortunate outcome of her brief service, for it meant she was invalided out of nursing relatively early in the conflict (Sketches was in print before the Battle of Gettysburg) and enabled her to be first in the field with a firsthand account of how wounded troops were treated.
Wednesday, February 01, 2012
Librarian Porn
The Paris Review takes a look at this erotica sub-genre.
From the piece...
Porn books and librarians have always had a passionate, mutually defining relationship—it was, in fact, a prudish French librarian in the early nineteenth century who coined the word pornography. So it comes as no surprise that the sexy librarian, a fixture of the pornographic imagination, is most at home in books. Each year, new titles are added to the librarian-porn bookshelf. This past season’s crop included additions like Hot for Librarian by Anastasia Carrera; Lucy the Librarian—Dewey and His Decimal by John and Shauna Michaels; The Nympho Librarian and Other Stories by Chrissie Bentley and Jenny Swallows; A Librarian’s Desire by Ava Delaney, author of the Kinky Club series; and soft-core selections like Sweet Magik by Penny Watson. The conventions of the form—the dimly lit stacks, the librarian’s mask of thick glasses and hair tied into a bun, et cetera—are, of course, well known. Unlike video porn, where these conventions are typically used as a wholesale substitute for narrative, porn books still feel the compulsion to tell a story, to make the glasses and bun mean something. I was curious just what story these new books were telling. What does our most current version of the librarian fantasy say about us? To answer this question, I visited the library.
Perhaps the Greatest Comic Book Store in the World
It's in Paris. It's called BD Spirit.
From a story in Publishing Perspectives...
“We don’t carry books that just sell well. Our positioning might be a little severe, but we want our books to fit into the history of comics,” said Manuel Morin, owner and co-founder of the shop, who has also served as a member of the Grand Jury at the renowned Angoulême comic book festival, which just ended this past weekend.
Comics are a serious business for 30-year-old Morin, who has been collecting and dealing comics since he was a child. As a history buff and a passionate comic collector he has merged his two interests — he sees comics in the context of history, as a barometer for society. But he’s not too serious that he can’t have a few laughs with a client who is buying old Marvel comics with which he is wallpapering his bathroom wall.
An only child with parents who were intellectual Communists, Morin was left to read whatever he liked and he gravitated towards comics. “Culture was very important for my parents, it was a sort of ideology, that you couldn’t leave culture to the bourgeois.”
Perhaps the Greatest Comic Book Auction Ever
It's happening at Heritage Auctions.
From a piece on Crunch Roll...
The Billy Wright Collection, a newly CGC-pedigreed collection – featuring five of the top six comic books in the hobby, all unrestored and all offered without reserves – leads the way in Heritage’s Feb. 22-24 Vintage Comics and Comic Art Signature® Auction, taking place at the Fletcher-Sinclair Mansion (Ukrainian Institute of America) at 2 East 79th Street (at 5th Ave.).
“While a relatively small collection of little more than 300 comic books,” said Lon Allen, Managing Director of Comics Auctions at Heritage. “The Billy Wright Collection represents not only five of the top six comics in the business, but also 45 of the top 100 comics overall, all unrestored.”
Those top comics include Detective Comics #27 (DC, 1939) CGC FN+ 6.5, the first appearance of “The Bat Man” (Estimate: $475,000+); Action Comics #1 (DC, 1938) CGC GD/VG 3.0, the most important comic book ever published (Estimate: $325,000+); All-American Comics #16 (DC, 1940) CGC VF 8.0, the debut of Green Lantern (Estimate: $125,000+); Batman #1 (DC, 1940) CGC VF+ 8.5, a superb copy of the first official Batman comic (Estimate: $125,000) and Marvel Comics #1 (Timely, 1939) CGC VF- 7.5 (Estimate: $125,000+).
Barnes & Noble in the Fight of Its Life
Will it survive the digital world - with Amazon.com permeating the landscape?
From a piece in the New York Times...
Inside the great publishing houses — grand names like Macmillan, Penguin and Random House — there is a sense of unease about the long-term fate of Barnes & Noble, the last major bookstore chain standing. First, the megastores squeezed out the small players. (Think of Tom Hanks’s Fox & Sons Books to Meg Ryan’s Shop Around the Corner in the 1998 comedy, “You’ve Got Mail”.) Then the chains themselves were gobbled up or driven under, as consumers turned to the Web. B. Dalton Bookseller and Crown Books are long gone. Borders collapsed last year.
No one expects Barnes & Noble to disappear overnight. The worry is that it might slowly wither as more readers embrace e-books. What if all those store shelves vanished, and Barnes & Noble became little more than a cafe and a digital connection point? Such fears came to the fore in early January, when the company projected that it would lose even more money this year than Wall Street had expected. Its share price promptly tumbled 17 percent that day.
Lurking behind all of this is Amazon.com, the dominant force in books online and the company that sets teeth on edge in publishing.
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
How We Made the Gruffalo
"My original Gruffalo was scarier, with bigger claws – and the mouse had a Bavarian hat and lederhosen," says Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler for the Guardian.
From the story...
I quickly realised that using a tiger would be a problem; I had to invent a predator who wouldn't really have been in the wood. It was then that I came up with the "Silly old fox, doesn't he know/ There's no such thing as a …" couplet. "Gruffalo" just fitted the rhyme.
I submitted the story to the publisher, and they sat on it for a year. I started to think it would never see the light, but one day my husband said: "Look, it's so good. Why don't you just send it to Axel?" So I did, although I hardly knew him; he'd illustrated my first book, but I'd only met him once or twice. Within a week I got a letter from Alison Green, Macmillan's picture book editor, saying he'd shown it to them and they were desperate to publish it.
It wasn't all plain sailing; Alison phoned me at one point to ask: "Do you envisage these animals wearing clothes?" Axel's first sketches had the mouse in a checked shirt and the fox in a frock coat, which was almost OK – but the snake in a bow tie was a definite problem. The Gruffalo took a couple of attempts. I still have some original sketches: in one he's very upright and ogreish, in another he's on all fours and looks like a wild boar. I'd originally imagined him as a bit more colourful and weird – but he's absolutely right the way Axel drew him.
Reconsidering the Genius of Gertrude Stein
The New York Times reconsiders.
From the article...
Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) is called a genius, and it’s from that vantage her writing is read — or not read, since awe and reverence are regularly met by dismissal and ridicule. Curiously, not every “genius” is equally suffocated by the label. Readers know the extraordinary reputations of Shakespeare and Virginia Woolf, but some prefer “Richard III” to “Richard II,” or “Mrs. Dalloway” to “Orlando.” They feel at liberty to discriminate.
Fewer readers imagine they can create their own Stein; many feel she is beyond their capacity to understand. Maybe this is because she has been claimed as the sine qua non of the avant-garde. But she aligned herself with her time. Being part of the “contemporary composition” was central to her work, a point she made in her trenchant essay (originally a lecture) “Composition as Explanation”: “The only thing that is different from one time to another is what is seen and what is seen depends upon how everybody is doing everything.”
Literary Gender Bias at NPR
The Boston Phoenix examines it.
From the piece...
My own research has turned up even more damaging statistics. To test Weiner's hypothesis, I turned to another literary gatekeeper: public radio. NPR is one of the few mass media outlets to devote regular coverage to books and novelists. According to their own Web site, 34 million people tune into NPR stations every week, and almost 27 million listen regularly to at least one NPR show. And NPR drives sales: as any bookseller will tell you, a guest spot on Fresh Air sends droves of right-minded Americans scurrying to their local independent.
Does NPR, arguably the most far-reaching book-review outlet in America, favor women or men? I tallied the genders of novelists reviewed or interviewed between August 1 and November 31, 2011, on the NPR shows Fresh Air, All Things Considered,Talk of the Nation, Morning Edition, and Weekend Edition, and the WBUR shows On Point and Here and Now.
As it turns out, public media is worse than even the New York Times. Far worse. NPR and WBUR talked about male writers about 70 percent of the time. Of the roughly 60 works of fiction discussed on NPR, only about 20 were written by women. Of the six novelists featured on more than one program, all but Amy Waldman, author of The Submission, were men. Of the three novelists interviewed on more than one program, all were men. Terry Gross interviewed twice as many male as female novelists, and Morning Edition apparently dedicated no coverage at all to women fiction writers.
Monday, January 30, 2012
Fun with Homonyms
Book Riot revels in them.
From the piece...
If you said “newspaper,” congratulations—you know how to recognize a homonym! Also, you must remember a time when newspapers were actually “read all over.”*
*I prefer this less-tactful version: “What’s black and white and red all over and can’t fit through a revolving door? A nun with a spear through her head.” But, alas, no homonyms.
In the technical linguistic sense, a homonym is a set of words that share the same spelling and the same pronunciation, but have different meanings.
Want a list of homonyms? Alan Cooper's obsessed with them.
Why Movie Posters Are Trying to Throw Off Your Balance
There's a short piece in New York Magazine about titled movie posters.
From the piece...
Key art, of course, moves in cycles. Witness the “distressed type” fad of a few years ago, which has given rise to the current obsession with Futura font. The idea behind the tilting trend is that it forces our brains to engage with the poster's image and mentally correct it: Just as we can't help ourselves from adjusting a picture frame that's hanging askew, you've mentally engaged with and corrected the poster before you even realized you've been paying attention to it.
"A Wrinkle in Time" and Its Sci-Fi Heroine
The New York Times revels in the 50th anniversary of the publication of A Wrinkle in Time.
From the essay...
But for those who came of age anytime during the past half-century, the most startling transformation occurred upon reading Madeleine L’Engle’s Newbery Medal-winning classic, “A Wrinkle in Time,” which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. It was under L’Engle’s influence that we willed ourselves to be like Meg Murry, the awkward girl who suffered through flyaway hair, braces and glasses but who was also and to a much greater degree concerned with the extent of her own intelligence, the whereabouts of her missing scientist father, the looming threat of conformity and, ultimately, the fate of the universe.
Meg Murry, in short, was a departure from the typical “girls’ book” protagonist — as wonderful as many of those varied characters are. Meg was a heroine of science fiction.
Sunday, January 29, 2012
Are Germans Ready for a Republishing of Mein Kampf?
That's the question posed recently by the Christian Science Monitor.
From the article...
Will a German magazine’s attempt to republish excerpts of the anti-Semitic manifesto propagate hate and inspire neo-Nazi groups? Or will it deflate the aura that surrounds the restricted work and expose it as a confused, rambling screed?
Peter McGee was counting on the latter. The British publisher had planned to run three 16-page segments of “Mein Kampf” as pamphlets inserted into issues of German magazine “Zeitungszeugen” starting next week. Critical commentary of the text was to accompany the excerpts. As of midday Wednesday, however, the plan was put on hold under threat of legal action from the state of Bavaria.
“It’s long overdue that a broad public should get the opportunity to deal with the original text,” McGee had told German newsmagazine Der Spiegel.
Saturday, January 28, 2012
A Master of Arts in...Crime Writing?
You betcha.
From a piece in the Guardian...
As the underworld steadily increases its grip on literary culture, City University in London is turning to crime, with the launch of an MA devoted to teaching crime fiction and thriller writing.
Launched in response to student demand, and to the growing popularity of the genre, the UK's first creative writing masters dedicated to crime and thriller novels is another harbinger of a "second golden age of crime writing".
The genre is the second biggest in the UK, according to official data, with sales of £87.6m in 2011, while debut thriller Before I Go to Sleep by SJ Watson topped the charts last week. The course will teach budding Agatha Christies and Ian Rankins everything from how to create suspense to new ways to tackle new crimes, thoroughly investigating all aspects of the genre, from police procedurals to psychological thrillers.
On the Making of Habibi
It took the graphic novelist Craig Thompson seven years to complete Habibi, his epic exploration of child slavery and sexual awakening in an imaginary Middle-Eastern kingdom.
He charts its creation from first thoughts to finished pages, here.
Friday, January 27, 2012
Doomsday Speeches
What if D-Day failed? What if the first men on the moon didn't come back? If these landmark events had ended in tragedy, what would General Eisenhower and President Nixon have said?
From a piece in the Atlantic...
Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace.
These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice.
These two men are laying down their lives in mankind's most noble goal: the search for truth and understanding.
They will be mourned by their families and friends; they will be mourned by their nation; they will be mourned by the people of the world; they will be mourned by a Mother Earth that dared send two of her sons into the unknown.
In their exploration, they stirred the people of the world to feel as one; in their sacrifice, they bind more tightly the brotherhood of man.
70 Years in Comics
IGN interviews the legendary Stan Lee.
From said interview...
IGN: [laughs] What would you say is the biggest way that the comic book industry has changed in your lifetime? From when you started to where you are now?
Lee: To me, the two biggest changes are, one, they use computers now for the coloring and for the lettering. Another way is, it used to be you just had people that wanted to write and draw comics in the business. Now, you get people who are professional and highly selling novelists writing comics. You get the top artists drawing comics.
And the reason is, they're always thinking, "Gee, if this books turns out good they'll make a movie out of it and I'll become rich and famous!" Or, richer and more famous. So we have very important people now working on comics that wouldn't have gone anywhere near them a few decades ago. That's a big change.
The Poem Forest
Poem Forest took place November 2011 at the New York Botanical Garden, which was celebrating the renovation of its 50-acre old-growth forest. The Garden, in conjunction with the Poetry Society of America, asked Jon Cotner to do something poetry-related on site.
Here is what he did.
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