The list, care of the Christian Science Monitor.
Friday, July 20, 2012
Why Do New Novels All Look Alike?
That's the question recently posed by the Atlantic.
From the piece...
There was something recognizable about those looping, seemingly handmade cursive letters. Was it déjà vu, or had we seen this cover someplace else before?
Maybe not this very cover, but several notably similar ones. Handscript-titled book covers with simple handmade illustrations have been used lately all over the upper echelons of fiction: Last year, Chad Harbach's divisive baseball bildungsroman The Art of Fielding had its title curlicued across the front, like the franchise name on an old-style home-team jersey; meanwhile, Pulitzer Prize winner Jeffrey Eugenides' The Marriage Plot introduced itself to the world in a disarmingly dressed-down fashion, its name hurriedly jotted down over a comic-book graphic of a wedding band. Similarly, John Green's 2011 book The Fault In Our Stars, Mark Haddon's new release The Red House, Maggie Shipstead's June debut Seating Arrangements, and Giorgio Faletti's forthcoming Italian-import sensation A Pimp's Notes all feature hand-scrawled titles that largely dominate their covers, accompanied by only minimal artwork.
Examine a few more, like the assorted shorter works by Salmon Fishing In The Yemen author Paul Torday, and it would seem that this handicraft, homespun pattern is the hautest couture of the moment in book fashion.
... Or is it?
Thursday, July 19, 2012
Should Young Adult Fiction Have Age Ratings?
That's the question recently posed.
From a piece in the Christian Science Monitor...
“All you have to really do is read what teenagers write themselves, and I've judged competitions for teenagers writing, and it's darkness beyond anything I would come up with,” Ness told BBC Breakfast. “Teenagers look at this darkness all the time, and I always think if you're not addressing it in your fiction, then you're abandoning them to face it themselves.
“It's not as if books exist in a vacuum and that's all the input teenagers are getting,” he continued. “Teenagers look at the Internet, they look at the news, they look at pornography on the internet, they look at violent movies on the Internet. So if children's literature is not addressing that, if it's addressing the world as it should be rather than as it is, then why would a teenager read you?”
What’s more, Ness argued, ratings systems for young adult literature simply don’t work. “If it's got an 18 certificate for adults, then younger children will look it out when their parents are not around … Children are great self-censors. They know what they can read and they know what they want to read, and if you don't give it to them, they'll find it somehow.”
Wednesday, July 18, 2012
The Severe Ethical Breaches of Superhero Journalists
The list, care of Discover Magazine.
From said list...
Clark Kent
When it comes to journalistic ethics, Mr Kent is not so super after all. He regularly reports about himself without disclosing as much. He deceives his employers by moonlighting during working hours as a doer of derring, leaping his contractual obligations in a single bound. Worst of all, he uses the privileged inside information that he gleans as a journalist for his own personal gain during his extracurricular activities. Here is a man who is faster than a speeding bullet, stronger than a locomotive, and about as transparent as either of those.
On Comics
Fed up of superhero films? Hiding your copy of Watchmen behind The Economist on the train? Comics are a serious literary form as well as being fun, says the author of a new book on Batman.
From an interview on the Browser...
Do you feel the spate of films based on comic books over the last decade has done comics a service or disservice?
Actually, my impression is that comics are a minority pursuit again, just a research project for film producers. Films and video games are so much bigger. Marvel considers comics a sideline now, and there’s not much feedback from the films to the comics. The Avengers has taken more than a billion dollars at the box office, but I doubt that many of the people who saw it then bought any of the original comic books.
So why should we read comics? What’s the appeal?
They are a unique storytelling medium. They can tell a story in a way that no other medium can. But I’m not evangelical about comics, and I don’t have a problem if they’re a niche interest. There was a time in the eighties when everyone thought comics were going to break through. They were sold in bookshops. “Sequential art”, “post-textual literature” and all kinds of other pretentious terms were bandied about. I don’t think that’s necessary. Comics are their own thing, and work on their own terms, in different ways to novels and films.
School Bans "Bastard Out of Carolina"
BOO!
From a piece in the San Jose Daily News...
In what's becoming an annual showdown that's uncommon in the liberal Bay Area, the Fremont Unified School District board overruled Hu and rejected novelist Dorothy Allison's "Bastard Out of Carolina" for the AP English supplemental reading list. While the book detailing horrific childhood abuse will remain in school libraries, it can't be taught in class.
That has Hu and others bringing up charges of censorship by the three-member board majority.
"I'm challenging them on their biases," said Hu, who twice before submitted Allison's semiautobiographical novel and National Book Award nominee for district approval. Even with the endorsement of a district textbook committee, the board voted it down, as it did in 2009 and 2010.
Last year, the board rejected her nomination of Tony Kushner's "Angels in America," a Pulitzer Prize-winning play about AIDS in the 1980s.
Board members deny that their decisions are politically motivated. Instead, they say the books are too violent, shocking or disparaging of certain groups.
The Nature of Cinderella
The Los Angeles Review of Books investigates symbolism and nature in Cinderella while reviewing some recent retellings.
From the piece...
On top of the many modern retellings, there are also a myriad of older versions that we might consider templates: not only Grimm’s “Aschenputtl” (published 1812), but also the Chinese “Yeh-hsien” (recorded circa 850), and Giambattista Basile’s Italian “Cerentola” (published 1634). Any consideration of the story we call “Cinderella” for simplicity’s sake must acknowledge that Cinderella has had a dizzying array of personae over hundreds of years, in several cultures. There is no one authoritative tale of Cinderella, only a hall of mirrors with a different face in each reflection.
One theme that older versions have in common, however, is the cultivation of a strong affinity between the main character and nature. In “Yeh-hsien,” the protagonist is given dresses and jewels by the magic bones of her pet fish. Another Chinese version of the tale, Lin Lan’s “Three Wishes,” portrays women reincarnated as animals. The beautiful young girl’s dead mother becomes a cow who aids her daughter with domestic tasks set by a cruel stepmother — until the stepmother kills and eats the cow. The Cinderella figure of that story, Beauty, is drowned in a well by her ugly stepsister, then transformed into a sparrow, then back again into a girl. The Grimm’s Cinderella has perhaps the most marked connection to nature. If the tale seems to emphasize the lowly status of Cinderella as a servant in her stepmother’s house, it is worth remembering that Cinderella is an employer of her own: she commands the birds to sort the lentils her stepmother has thrown into the ashes, and when she needs lovely clothes for the ball, she tells a hazel tree, “Shake your branches, little tree, / Toss gold and silver down on me.” Doves are her confederates, and when the stepsisters take knives to their feet in order to fit into Cinderella’s gold slipper, the birds warn the prince: “Roo coo coo, roo coo coo, / Blood’s in the shoe.”
This emphasis on nature may be due in part to a focus on transformation.
Tuesday, July 17, 2012
Archie Getting Own...Make Up Line?
Indeed!
From a piece in USA Today's Pop Candy...
Today, I have the exclusive news that Archie Comics has partnered with MAC Cosmetics, of all things, to launch a makeup line called "MAC Archie's Girls."
According to the publisher, the cosmetics "will celebrate the iconic beauty looks of Betty and Veronica" and be available next spring.
Walker Evans’ Famous Picture of an Alabama Tenant Farmer’s Wife Is Celebrated and Explained
Walker Evans’ portrait of Ellie Mae Burroughs, an
Alabama tenant farmer’s wife, is one of the greatest images in American
art. In a new ebook essay, Jerry L. Thompson explains how the photograph
happened and why it still resonates today.
From a piece in the Daily Beast...
“He could control the darkness of
the shadows collecting in Ellie Mae’s eye sockets and under her chin,
but he could not control how she reacted to a large camera being placed
so closely to her face. He could not control the pattern of lines
beginning to etch themselves into the skin of that young face. He could
not control, but only watch, the play of eye tension and mouth tension
on that face as he waited for the right instant to click the shutter.
And apparently he could not control the length of his close contact with
her: he exposed only four sheets of film.” A few lines later, Thompson
puts it more bluntly: “Evans took the pictures, but he didn’t make them
by himself; he and Ellie Mae made them together, as a collaboration.”
Evans
kept two subtly different images from that encounter. The photograph
that found its way into the suite of pictures that opens Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
shows a worried, quizzical woman. The other image, where she allows
herself the ghost of a smile—paradoxically, it seems the sadder of the
two pictures—Evans included in American Photographs, the seminal
catalog of his 1938 one-man show at the Museum of Modern Art, the first
such show ever granted a single photographer by that museum. One of the
pictures is taken with flash, and one without. At the time, the
technological requirements of using flash with the Deardorff would have
meant that Evans had to move very quickly and surely to change
strategies on the spur of the moment. The results are two photographs
that are similar but different, and different enough to make both of
them keepers. An artist may not know what he’s after, but he knows when
he’s got it.
Monday, July 16, 2012
How to Use Tumblr to Connect to Readers
Poets and Writers offers some suggestions, here. (Have you seen my Tumblr blog yet? It's right here)
From said list...
Choose your content carefully. You can post text, photos, audio, video, and more. “Before hitting that Create Post button, ask yourself, ‘If this post popped up in my dash, would I care about it enough to share the link with a friend on Gchat?’” says Cole Stryker, author of Epic Win for Anonymous: How 4Chan’s Army Conquered the Web (Overlook, 2011). “Imagine every post you write will be seen by a powerful editor who could make your career.”
Show your personality. “Tumblr is all about personality,” says Maris Kreizman, creator of the wildly popular Slaughterhouse 90210 Tumblr, which combines pop-culture images with excerpts from books. “Use your Tumblr to share your voice, your particular point of view, with the larger Tumblr lit community. Straight-up self-promotion should be kept to a minimum, unless it somehow involves pugs.” (I must admit that I do post a lot of pictures of little dogs.)
Spider-Man and the Modern Comic Book Movie
Comic book movies - why are they so popular and are they here to stay...forever?!
From a piece in the New York Times...
A O. SCOTT Our superheroes have been around for a very
long time — Superman and Batman were born in the ’30s; Spidey and many
of his Marvel brethren are children of the ’60s — but they appear to be
more powerful than ever. That is partly the result of corporate strategy
and canny marketing, but it’s also clear that these serial narratives
about regular folks gifted (or cursed) with extraordinary abilities and
menaced by diabolical enemies exercise a powerful hold on the popular
imagination. Some of the movie world’s most talented actors, directors
and writers have succumbed in the past decade to the pulpy, allegorical
allure of comic books. Critics have too.
MANOHLA DARGIS On one level the allure of comic book
movies is obvious, because, among other attractions, they tap into
deeply rooted national myths, including that of American Eden
(Superman’s Smallville); the Western hero (who’s separate from the world
and also its savior); and American exceptionalism (that this country is
different from all others because of its mission to make “the world
safe for democracy,” as Woodrow Wilson and, I believe, Iron Man, both
put it). Both Depression babies, Superman and Batman, were initially
hard-boiled types, and it’s worth remembering that the DC in DC Comics
was for Detective Comics. Since then the suits have largely remained the
same even as the figures wearing them have changed with their times.
Every age has the superhero it wants, needs or deserves.
Top 10 Comic Book/Classic Mash-Ups
Literary characters – from James Bond to Fanny Hill – and authors themselves often pop up in comics and graphic novels. The list, care of the Guardian.
Sunday, July 15, 2012
The Return of Buck Rogers
Howard Chaykin is going to be writing and drawing a Buck Rogers series. From Hermes Press.
From a small piece on Comics Beat...
Hermes doesn’t do a lot of original material. Their website only lists two original works: Tails, a hardcover, and the third volume of Lions, Tigers and Bears, a trade paperback. Hermes is being a big tease about this, preferring to give out their information at their Comicon panel, but if this is a monthly comic, that would be a departure for Hermes. Their track record suggests graphic novels.
As for Chaykin, well… it’s Howard Chaykin. He’s done a couple licensed books before. Star Wars seemed to turn out alright. The Shadow just got reprinted. Buck Rogers would harken back to Chaykin’s earlier days of Ironwolf and, perhaps, Cody Starbuck. Buck Rogers ought to be in his wheelhouse. (Especially Black Barney the space pirate.)
Saturday, July 14, 2012
Woody Guthrie Novel to Be Published
House of Earth, thought to have languished for years in a closet, is said to be influenced by Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath.
From a story in the Guardian...
House of Earth is Guthrie's only "fully realised" novel, they said, influenced by his experiences in America's Dust Bowl, as well as John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. Tracing the story of Tike and Ella May Hamlin, "hardscrabble farmers" in Texas, it is a "searing portrait of the Panhandle and its marginalised Great Depression residents". Despite a slightly esoteric focus on the importance of adobe housing, House of Earth also includes graphic sex, including "a scorching lovemaking scene on a hay bale".
At the time of its writing, Guthrie apparently shared House of Earth's first chapter with musicologist Alan Lomax, who called it "quite simply the best material I'd ever seen written about that section of the country". But Guthrie only showed the finished manuscript to one person, film-maker Irving Lerner, and it languished for decades in a Coney Island closet. After learning of its existence in the late 90s, Brinkley finally tracked down the manuscript last year, with help from Guthrie's daughter, Nora.
History of Reading
We can learn about the past not just through what was written but how it was read. Leah Price tells us about reading aloud in Roman times, Gutenberg-era marginalia, and Middle Age solutions to information overload.
From an interview on the Browser...
What exactly do you mean by the history of reading?
This is a growing field that encompasses very different kinds of questions. When did human beings first become literate? Who was able to read in different societies – men or women, adults or children, masters or slaves? Who could read, who did read, and did they read Bibles or novels or newspapers or train schedules? The more interesting question, and the one that's harder to answer, is what people made of what they read.
People who write leave evidence. People who read don't. When a historian of reading gets very lucky, once in a lifetime, she manages to unearth a diary or a letter in which someone describes whether they loved or hated the book they were reading, and what they loved or hated about it. But most of the time you have to make do with a patchwork of contradictory clues.
For example, Ernest Hemingway had this to say about James Joyce: "I like him very much as a friend and think no one can write better, technically. I learned much from him." But if you look at Hemingway's copy of Ulysses, which is kept today in a library in Boston, you see that the first and last pages are the only ones that have been cut. So you can't always trust people to tell the truth about their own reading. What makes it fascinating and also frustrating to study is that reading is one of the most private things we do.
This is a growing field that encompasses very different kinds of questions. When did human beings first become literate? Who was able to read in different societies – men or women, adults or children, masters or slaves? Who could read, who did read, and did they read Bibles or novels or newspapers or train schedules? The more interesting question, and the one that's harder to answer, is what people made of what they read.
People who write leave evidence. People who read don't. When a historian of reading gets very lucky, once in a lifetime, she manages to unearth a diary or a letter in which someone describes whether they loved or hated the book they were reading, and what they loved or hated about it. But most of the time you have to make do with a patchwork of contradictory clues.
For example, Ernest Hemingway had this to say about James Joyce: "I like him very much as a friend and think no one can write better, technically. I learned much from him." But if you look at Hemingway's copy of Ulysses, which is kept today in a library in Boston, you see that the first and last pages are the only ones that have been cut. So you can't always trust people to tell the truth about their own reading. What makes it fascinating and also frustrating to study is that reading is one of the most private things we do.
Win a Free Bike from the Paris Review
All you have to do is enter this contest where you write a very short story about the image above in the style of a famous writer.
Friday, July 13, 2012
Detective Sherringford
That was almost the name of Sherlock Holmes.
A list of 17 famous literary characters who were almost named something else, here.
Thank You, Fair Readers
Thanks for checking out my blog. It's taken a little while, but I've had over 1 million pages views on this thing.
Thanks to all my readers! Of course I can't list them all, but to all of you, cheers to you!
Whether you're in the States - from California to New York, Texas to Florida, Washington to Illinois, or around the world, bravo!
I've readers come to the site from Britain and Canada, India and Eritrea (to name a few). From Canada and Germany. Australia, the Philippines, Turkey, Singapore, Lebanon, Croatia, France, Fiji, Finland, Pakistan, Romania, Algeria, Argentina, Iraq, Bulgaria, Jordan, Estonia, Ghana, Belarus, Iceland, and Bhutan (to name a few).
Until the next million, a million thanks!
Jonathan Shipley
P.S.
You can follow my writing escapades on Twitter, here.
Or, if you want to see a bit of the goof in me on Twitter, here.
You can follow my writing escapades on Pinterest, here.
You can follow my weird haiku Tumblr blog, here.
Thursday, July 12, 2012
Cheryl Strayed in Conversation
The Rumpus interviews writer Cheryl Strayed.
From the article...
Rumpus: Yes, I do know. There are certain stories that I always just keep coming back to and back to, in things I’ve published, and in things I’ve not yet. And I think if I do publish a memoir, I will still have to write about them.
Strayed: A lot of writers do that. You look at the bodies of work of some of the writers I admire most – Mary Gaitskill, Alice Munro. They’re each telling like a family of stories over and over again. I mean, some writers manage to be incredibly diverse. But most writers have a sense of what their territory is. And not that they don’t deliver something unexpected – they do – but they deliver something unexpected within the context of what we know belongs to them.
Rumpus: You describe in Wild how you chose your last name – Strayed. I wonder though whether to some degree you were also choosing it as a pseudonym, knowing you were hoping to write. Was there any aspect of hiding from people from your past?
Strayed: No, no. I never thought of the name as a pseudonym. I thought of it as just a name change. And I broadcast it to everyone. I sent out a missive saying, “Now my name is Cheryl Strayed.” Actually, one of my fears when I changed my name was that I didn’t want people to lose track of me.
6 @Twitter Rules for #Authors
The Los Angeles Times breaks it down for writers, here.
From the list...
2. Share your process. Twitter is a place where fans get a deeper connection to artists, performers, scholars ... and authors. Your readers are interested in your process. Tweet a bit about how your work. Invite your followers to a local book signing.
3. Engage with your readers. Twitter is also a place where your fans can directly engage with you, however much you want (it doesn’t have to take up a lot of your time). You can see messages from other users in the “Connect” tab on your Twitter homepage. Is there a question in there for you? Answer it.
And don't forget to follow me, here.
Wednesday, July 11, 2012
Alienation, Abandonment, Homelessness - Must Be a Children's Book!
Those are the prevalent themes in children's literature these days.
From a piece in the Guardian...
Modern books are more likely to feature children who are abandoned, alienated and have no home to return to, than characters who voluntarily set off on adventures, according to Professor Kathy Short, president of the International Board of Books for Young People.
"For these children, childhood is not the happy, carefree time it is 'supposed' to be," said Short. "Children don't leave home on a lark. They are thrust out. These children are not wild things. They are too busy taking care of their troubled parents to have time to follow a rabbit down a hole; too frightened of abuse to trust the Tinman, and too fearful to set out on an adventure for fear that their unreliable parent might not be there when they return.
"These children have been caught in the crossfire of the gender, race, class and culture clashes between adults," she added. "Like all people in the postmodern world, children are confronted with multiple competing truths and a lack of absolutes."
My Fabulous Boring Book Collection
There's a small humorous essay about a guy who collects boring books (like a collection of Adlai Stevenson's speeches, for example).
From the piece in the New York Times...
My hobby has two rules: I buy books only on the street. (Uniquely boring
books must present themselves willingly; you can’t hunt them down.) And
the titles must meet a standard of boring intrigue that I have a hard
time putting into words, beyond “I know it when I see it.” This is where
— if I may shed any pretense of modesty — taste and connoisseurship
come into play.
Highlights from my collection:
Stevenson: Speeches
By Adlai Stevenson; foreword by John Steinbeck (1952).
By Adlai Stevenson; foreword by John Steinbeck (1952).
Though he lost consecutive elections to Dwight Eisenhower, Stevenson had
a reputation as a gifted speaker, esteemed for his dry,
self-deprecating wit. But did even his most fervent supporters really
need unexpurgated texts of his “Farm Policy” speech or the Sept. 23,
1952, address on “The Control of Inflation”? Getting the party started
in his foreword, John Steinbeck notes, “A year and a half ago, I had
never heard of Mr. Stevenson.”
Mmmm....pie
We hold this truth to be self-evident: America loves pie. We, the people, a nation of bakers and eaters, value the art of creating that crispy, gooey, fluffy, fruity dessert — and each region reserves the right to bake the treat in its own individual style.
Listen to a story about pie on NPR, here.
Tuesday, July 10, 2012
The Author of the Civil War
It was...Sir Walter Scott?
From a piece in the New York Times...
Sir Walter Scott not only dominated gift book lists on the eve of the Civil War but also dominated Southern literary taste throughout the conflict. His highly idealized depiction of the age of chivalry allowed Southern readers and writers to find positive meaning in war’s horrors, hardships and innumerable deaths. And his works inspired countless wartime imitators, who drew upon his romantic conception of combat.
Rare 16th Century Map of America Found in Germany
The BBC notes that a map, known as the "birth certificate of America" has been found.
From the article...
The map, by the famous cartographer Martin Waldseemueller, is credited with being the first to document and name the newly-discovered land of America.
It had been thought that Waldseemueller had only made four copies, but researchers at a Munich university have now discovered a fifth version.
This new map was found in the pages of an unrelated 19th century book.
Sven Kuttner, head of old books at Munich's Ludwig Maximilian University, said: "It seems to be a second edition and this is a unique map. Until now, we have no signs for a further map like this."
A Farewell, And a Different Farewell, and Yet Another Farewell, to Arms
A new edition of A Farewell to Arms, which was originally published in 1929, will be released next week, including all the alternate endings, along with early drafts of other passages in the book.
From a story in the New York Times...
It is also an attempt to redirect some of the attention paid in recent years to Hemingway’s swashbuckling, hard-drinking image — through fictional depictions in the best-selling novel “The Paris Wife” and the Woody Allen film “Midnight in Paris,” for instance — back to his sizable body of work.
“I think people who are interested in writing and trying to write
themselves will find it interesting to look at a great work and have
some insight to how it was done,” Seán Hemingway, a grandson of Ernest
Hemingway who is also a curator of Greek and Roman art at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, said in an interview. “But he is a writer
who has captured the imagination of the American public, and these
editions are interesting because they really focus on his work.
Ultimately that’s his lasting contribution.”
Monday, July 09, 2012
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