Teeny Tiny Books

The always fascinating Private Library discusses small books - very very small books.

From the piece...

Surprisingly, miniature book production in the 20th century owes a large debt of gratitude to Communism. State sponsorship allowed miniature books to be published that otherwise would not have been commercially viable, and the tiny size of such books made them ideal for propagating an official state ideology to the masses. This accounts for the pre-eminence of Hungary as one of the past century's most prolific sponsors of miniature books...

Jon's Writing in Fine Books Magazine

I had the opportunity to write about Charles Dickens, the origins of his classic novella A Christmas Carol, and his performance of his piece, for Fine Books and Collections Magazine recently.

From the story...

“Promptly at 8 P.M.,” a writer for San Francisco’s Alta California newspaper wrote that night of December 31st, 1867, “unannounced, and without waiting for any stamping or clapping of hands to call him out, a tall, ‘spry’ (if I may say it,) thin-legged old gentleman, gotten up regardless of expense, especially as to shirt-front and diamonds, with a bright red flower in his button-hole, gray beard and moustache, bald head, and with side hair brushed fiercely and tempestuously forward, as if its owner were sweeping down from a gale of wind, the very Dickens came!”

The very Charles Dickens, arguably the most famous author in the world at that time. According to Harper’s Weekly, crowds began gathering the previous night to buy tickets for this performance. “Not less than 500 persons, including two women, were in the line.”

Dickens was an old 55 when he appeared on stage unannounced - he would die less than three years later. The reporter for the newspaper was a 32-year-old named Mark Twain. Dickens read aloud to Twain, and the rest of the audience at Steinway Hall in New York City, from his well-known novel David Copperfield. “Mr. Dickens,” Twain continued, “had a table to put his book on, and on it he had a tumbler, a fancy decanter, and a small bouquet.”

For more on Dickens and A Christmas Carol, go to NPR.

And, yes, for even more on Dickens, there was an auction at Christie's. On the block was a pre-publication presentation copy, one of the eight earliest known presentation copies of Dickens' immortal tale. It went for quite a sum.

Morgan Library's Christmas Gift

Care to see Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol written in Dickens' own hand? The Morgan Library is displaying it for the holidays and Book Patrol has the 4-1-1.

From the post...

The Morgan manuscript reveals Dickens dickering with the story even up to the eve of publication. The initial draft left the fate of Tiny Tim to the reader's imagination. In a final change, not even indicated in the manuscript, Dickens added this passage to reassure the reader that all was well in the Cratchit family: "and to Tiny Tim, who did NOT die, [Scrooge] was a second father." Numerous other rewrites are visible in the online manuscript, which is chock full of deletions, corrections, additions, subtractions, redactions, retractions, expansions and contractions. All of which is rather reassuring to the aspiring writers among us: even Dickens didn't get it right the first time.

Illustration: John Leech's original watercolor of the Ghost of Christmas Present.

Kindle for Christmas?

The Guardian thinks this holiday season may be a turning point, a cultural shift, in regards to our reading habits.

From the intro...

How much have our perceptions of reading and writing changed now that you can craft a novel on a laptop and scroll through it on a Nintendo games console? This Christmas could be the moment when our idea of curling up with a fat novel are transformed for ever, says Tim Adams.

From the story...

Two unrelated observations about writing have snagged at my attention in the past couple of days and refused to go away. The first was a quote from Don DeLillo, the author of the great modern epic, Underworld. DeLillo was talking about how he continues to write on a typewriter, and suggested that: "I need the sound of the keys, the keys of a manual typewriter. The hammers striking the page. I like to see the words, the sentences, as they take shape. It's an aesthetic issue: when I work I have a sculptor's sense of the shape of the words I'm making."

The second was an advert in my local Argos for a "game" for the Nintendo DS console that features 100 classic books. The cartridge packaged itself as follows: "100 Classic Book Collection turns your Nintendo DS into a portable library containing must-read novels from iconic authors such as Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, William Shakespeare and many more. Hold the DS like a book and use the touch screen to turn the pages. 100 Classic Book Collection allows various search methods such as searching for a book that suits your mood, or a specific requirement such as a short read." The soundtrack that can accompany the reading of these classics includes the canned effect of a crackling log fire.

Somewhere in between these two observations there seemed to be a disconnect, a kind of paradox, but it took me a while to work out where it lay.

Quote of the Week

One of the greatest gifts my brother and I received from my mother was her love of literature and language. With their boundless energy, libraries open the door to these worlds and so many others. I urge young and old alike to embrace all that libraries have to offer.
- Caroline Kennedy

Humour Books of the Year

The list, according to The Telegraph.

Seasons Greetings from Robert Frost

The Paper Cuts blog, on The New York Times, discusses some handsome chapbooks; Christmas "cards" sent out as holiday greetings by the Spiral Press in limited release from 1929 to 1962.

From the piece...

Joseph Blumenthal, who headed the small but renowned printing press from 1926 to 1971, first decided to make a letterpress chapbook of Frost’s poem “Christmas Trees” in 1929 for his wife and a small group of colleagues. He had been working on an edition of Frost’s poetry, but the chapbook — of which 250 copies were printed — was made without Frost’s knowledge. As Blumenthal recounts in a short pamphlet published in 1963, after the last of the Christmas cards, Frost saw the card the following February and immediately requested copies for his own family. He wrote to Blumenthal, “my sympathies have been enlisted on the side of small presses and hand setting. My heart will be with you in your work.”

Photo by Jennifer Chen; courtesy of Poets House

An Open Letter to My Artistic Potential

A humorous bit by Jamie King, care of McSweeney's.

Three and a Half Centuries of Royal Society Publishing

Trailblazing is an interactive timeline for everybody with an interest in science. Launched to commemorate the Royal Society's 350th anniversary in 2010, it showcases sixty fascinating and inspiring articles selected from an archive of more than 60,000 published by the Royal Society between 1665 and 2010.

Friday's Poem

You've been wondering, "What would the most famous speech in all of Shakespeare's works sound like in the Klingon language?" I know it's been on your mind so, though not necessarily a poem, Friday's Poem is of Hamlet, Klingon-style:

The Sweet Science

Powell's Books steps into the ring to discuss the sport of boxing as told through books (I just started reading Wil Haygood's Sweet Thunder: The Life and Times of Sugar Ray Robinson and have been quite taken with it).

60 Years Through His Lens

The Daily Beast focuses on photographer Harry Benson, who has been taking iconic photographs for decades. There is a new monograph of his work.

From the piece...

The book, which spans Benson’s 60-year career, reads like a cultural and political atlas of American history. He has photographed every president since Eisenhower, countless movie stars, singers, soldiers, civil-rights heroes, and athletes. A masked Frank Sinatra walking up the stairs of Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball in 1966; a sanguine mother breastfeeding her baby under the folds of her Ku Klux Klan robe in South Carolina in 1965. Martin Luther King giving a stirring speech after the tear gassings in Canton, Mississippi; Oprah Winfrey stopping for a coffee on the streets of Chicago in 1996. Richard Nixon, flanked by his family, giving an emotional resignation speech in 1974; Hillary Clinton bending over a hammock in Little Rock to give her husband a kiss in 1992. Michael Jackson cavorting with children on the grounds of Neverland; George W. Bush practicing his golf swing in the Texas Governor’s Mansion.

Celebrity Memoirists and Their Ghost Writers

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting, behind-the-scenes look at ghost writers and their craft.

From the piece...

Midwives, collaborators, co-authors, co-writers, writers-for-hire, book doctors, ghosts—call them what you will—give aid and adjectives to athletes, politicians, movie stars, moguls, miscreants and the briefly famous who are asked to tell their stories and don't know how. "Often, when a celebrity tries to write the book himself, he'll be on page 200 and he's still only 12 years old," said Dan Strone, CEO of Trident Media Group, a literary agency.

Cover billing is a function of the publisher's wishes, the "name" author's wishes, the collaborator's wishes, prior experience, fee, prominence (big names in the field include "Iacocca" co-writer William Novak, and David Ritz, the go-to guy for musicians with a tale to tell) and level of involvement in the project. Is this helper writing every word, simply doing research and fact-checking, or perhaps organizing a pre-existing manuscript into tidy form?

The Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Ron Powers, who worked on Ted Kennedy's memoir "True Compass" but whose name went missing on the cover, is a case in point. "'True Compass' was based on years of personal journals and five years of an oral history," said a spokesman for Twelve, the book's publisher. "Ron's role as a collaborator was unique. It was more a matter of shaping text. The words were the senator's own." Because of a confidentiality agreement, Mr. Powers declined to comment.

Fingering Shakespeare's First Drafts

There is a history in all men's lives," William Shakespeare wrote, and there are few better places to find out about his life and legacy than the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. Host Scott Simon, for NPR, visits the library with Weekend Edition's literary detective, Paul Collins, for a look into the vaults that hold early Shakespeare folios.

The Art History Books of the Year

The list, according to The Telegraph.

The Cows That Killed Jane Austen

How did Jane Austen die, anyway? Was it because of cattle?

The Rumpus Interview with McSweeney's Publisher Oscar Villalon

The Rumpus chats with Villalon about the state and future of book reviewing, reading and literature’s place in our contemporary culture.

From the interview...

Rumpus: And then, paradoxically, insisting reading is good for their kids.

Villalon: Right, well it’s not gonna make you a better person. There’s no bearing between reading and the child’s morality. It does not make you a better person. The same way that writing doesn’t help heal your wounds. It’s not therapy. Reading shouldn’t be therapy either. Now, what it might do is put into context your own situation in life. It might give you some sort of consolation as to what your dilemma is, and it might give you some sort of answer as to how you should act. But, if you’re a sociopath, you’re still a sociopath.

It’s kind of like marriage and reading. The personality you go in with is the personality you’re gonna remain with. Nothing’s gonna change. It’s who you are. He can mature and not be as reckless and stuff, but that has nothing to do with reading. It just has to do with life experiences, I think.

Before, I remember before I did this job going to bookstores. I rarely go into bookstores now. Every now and again, just to see how things are, but I used to spend hours in there, and just think and look up. What a bounty. You can pick from any of this. And you live in this country and you’re living in reasonable safety, and have reasonable comfort, and you can enjoy yourself in this way and feel you’re, again, your self, your inner life developing by reading this. I think if anything, that’s the best thing, is that you don’t need approval.

If you read and you read widely and you challenge yourself, reading different books and things you might not necessarily be comfortable with, but just to see what’s going on, you’ll find that sort of comfort in having a rich inner life. Being able to put things in perspective, and being able to see, it’s a comedy. Don’t kill yourself.

My Horrible New York Times Book Review

Well, not MY horrible New York Times Book Review, but Ronlyn Domingue's. That's the title of an essay in The Nervous Breakdown about the terrible review and what it taught Domingue about the writing process.

From the piece...

I spent years on that book, doing my honest best. My first novel is an extension of me. It reveals a few personal beliefs and unanswered questions, some nameable, some that remain ambiguous or unconscious. It revealed an appreciation, even love, for the South and its people that I thought I didn’t possess. The Mercy of Thin Air shares my lifeblood as much as any organ or limb. It is not a fallen hair, a trimmed fingernail. The word-made-flesh has a spine holding it together. My reaction to the bad review was a feeling of negation, that what I wrote, even I, didn’t matter.

Ergo, a matter of ego.

Almost four years later, I’ve accepted the extremes. I realize that I gave way too much power to the Dark Side. The Shadow came to call. It was the umbra opposite my fiery effort to finish the novel and get published. The review incarnated my worst fears, hidden and denied. My work—therefore, I—was unoriginal, talentless, ridiculous.

Although the advice to have a thick skin was well-meant, it is emotionally dishonest. Sharing one’s writing is a naked act not intended for the meek. Harsh words can—and sometimes do—undermine the most confident, successful writers. It’s human. It’s okay. It will pass. Now, my guidance to myself, and others, is to have a permeable skin, one that doesn’t resist or trap the good or the bad. Reviews, critiques, comments come in, then move on. Then there’s space, inside and out, for something new.

Alicia Silverstone - Cookbook Author

True thing! The Wall Street Journal recently caught up with Silverstone in her Vegan kitchen, far away from the halls of high school...



Photo by Victoria Pearson.

A Free Press Doesn't Mean Free Newspapers

That's the statement made in a recent blog post on the always tremendous Big Think.

From the piece...

Various solutions are being proposed to the present newspaper crisis that has seen many regional papers go under and many national ones lose lots of money. However, it seems there is less focus on narrowing the credibility gap.

Realizing the tension between profit and public interest, numerous non-profit ventures have been proposed to resuscitate the news industry. From government subsidized reporting to NGO-funded news production, more strings are being attached to a once-free press.

Photo courtesy of the Hartford Courant.

Political Fictions

New York Magazine has invited seven writers to submit short stories featuring contemporary political figures. (And you can play, too.)

Short stories on the site include Paul Rudnick's "Going Nog," (What's a Palin-family Christmas without a certain almost son-in-law?) and Walter Kirn's "Celestial Marriage" (The Romneys experience couples' massage).

Enjoy!

Jon's Writing in Vintage Seattle

I got to write about a very old bathroom for Vintage Seattle. Exciting, no?! Very much so. This is the first piece I've ever written about a comfort station! Thrilling, yes? Yes, indeed.

Photo courtesy of Seattle Municipal Archives.

The World's Oldest Antiquarian Bookseller

Meet Muriel Craddock. She's 97-years-old and is still selling books. You can read her story in Australia's The Age.

From the piece...

At the tender age of 97½, Muriel Craddock would like to announce the re-opening of her family bookshop in the Assembly Hall building in Collins Street. Yes Muriel, seated regally in a corner, is back in-store with daughter Kay and enjoying the unique ambience of the antiquarian book business they started with Muriel's late husband, Les, 44 years ago.

''Mum is much-loved by customers,'' says Kay. ''Just sitting there, talking to people.'' Muriel says she never loses interest in the book trade, but in recent times she has been concerned at the attrition of old faces. ''I'm out-living everybody,'' she frets.

A Future Beyond the Printed Page

The Financial Times discusses books in the digital age.

From the piece...

Ten years from now, electronic paper will be indistinguishable from the magazine you are holding. And not only will it be as flexible and lightweight as the printed page, with the same colours and clarity, it will also be dynamic, updating itself via a wireless internet connection and perhaps even showing video.

That is the boldest prediction from today’s most ardent proponents of e-paper. And the hype around electronic reading devices is at fever pitch. Amazon’s Kindle is now on sale outside North America for the first time, and a flood of rivals is heading for the market from retailers such as Barnes & Noble, computer makers such as Asus and new companies including Plastic Logic (with which the FT has a content partnership).

But even today’s e-readers are going to look out of date pretty soon. Next year will see the first devices with flexible displays. Already, e-readers with colour screens are becoming available, and advances in technology will soon create a glossier look and feel closer to a printed magazine. Also next year, Apple is expected to launch a touch-screen “tablet” that could create a whole new category between laptops and mobiles.

Quote of the Week

To gain your own voice, forget about having it heard. Become a saint of your own province and your own consciousness.
- Allen Ginsberg

Books That Changed America

NPR has a discussion with Jay Parini, who has just published a new book, Promised Land: Thirteen Books That Changed America. Start here to listen.

The Glass Menagerie, by Tennessee Williams

How did the title of one of Williams' best-known plays come to be? Gary Dexter lets us know.

From the piece...

Tennessee Williams’ sister Rose suffered from lifelong mental illness, and underwent a pre-frontal lobotomy in 1937. The operation was new and untested, and in Rose’s case was a disastrous failure, leaving her permanently brain-damaged. She spent the rest of her life in institutions, unsure who she or her family were, and convinced that she was forever twenty-eight years old. Tennessee Williams’ attempt to explore the tragedy of Rose gave rise to many of his greatest plays, and Rose herself appears in various guises throughout his work.

Here's a bit of the play, one that has Katharine Hepburn and Sam Watterson:

An Interview with Rare Book Collector Ken Sanders

Collectors Weekly recently caught up with famed book collector, and dealer, Ken Sanders about book collecting, specifically in regards to collecting books from, and about, the West.

From the interview...

Collectors Weekly: What are some of the most sought-after Western titles of the 20th century?

Sanders: To stick with the Beats for a moment, a beautiful copy of On the Road by Jack Kerouac, in its dust jacket, is a $10,000 to $15,000 book now. An autographed copy of the little first edition of Howl, depending on who’s signed it, could sell from $5,000 to $25,000. Gary Snyder’s first book, Riprap, from 1959, sells in the $2,000 to $3,000 range.

The rarest book by Wallace Stegner, one of the giants of Western literature, is a little monograph published by the University of Utah that sells for around $15,000. His rarest novels are his early ones, Fire and Ice, On a Darkling Plain, and Big Rock Candy Mountain. Nice copies of those are always in the thousands of dollars.

A lot of early books aren’t necessarily rare or valuable, such as Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire and The Monkey Wrench Gang; N. Scott’s Momaday’s House Made of Dawn; Frank Waters’ novels and his book on the Colorado River, The Man Who Killed the Deer; the William Eastlake’s trilogy; and Vardis Fisher’s books.

As for rarities, David Seals, a relatively unknown Sioux writer, had a hit movie made from his self-published first novel, Powwow Highway, in 1989, but I’ve never been able to get my hands on a first edition on that book. The University of Chicago Press published several thousand copies of Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It as a favor to a former professor. He wrote the book at age 70 after he retired, and it became a hit movie, but that first edition is tough to find.

Before The Big Sky, A.B. Guthrie wrote a murder mystery called Murders at Moon Dance that he was so embarrassed by he never allowed it to be reprinted. It’s never listed on any of his books, so a lot of people don’t even know he wrote it. That book in its original jacket is very hard to find. Another bad first novel of note is The Indians Won by best-selling author Martin Cruz Smith. In it, the Indians and the Mormons team up and take over the interior of the United States. That book is really hard to find in the true first edition.

Billy Collins' Action Poetry

The poetry of Billy Collins has been subject to new wonderful animations by various artists. You can see the pieces, here.

Alice + Pooh + Potter + Cowardly Lion = $

A valuable collection of children's literature is about to be sold at auction. The Los Angeles Times has the story about the collection, owned by former NFL kicker Pat McInally.

From the piece...

Other first-edition children's books for auction include "Stuart Little" signed by E.B. White; "The Fellowship of the Ring" by J.R.R. Tolkien; "Watership Down" by Richard Adams; and "Mother Goose in Prose," L. Frank Baum's first book, in which Dorothy makes her debut. A copy of "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" is accompanied by a letter about Narnia written and signed by C.S. Lewis. There are also limited editions of "Winnie the Pooh," "The House at Pooh Corner" and "Now We Are Six," all inscribed by author A.A. Milne and illustrator Ernest H. Shepard, as well as a limited edition of the first four Harry Potter books inscribed by J.K. Rowling.

Fatherhood in Poetry

In Roger Robinson's Poetry Workshop, on The Guardian, there's a discussion of poetry involving fatherhood. He's asking for your best poem on fatherhood as well. Why not submit something?

Those Winter Sundays
by Robert E Hayden

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?

What Are the Cheesiest and Most Inappropriate Sci-Fi Covers Ever?

io9 has got the list, one filled with oddities, a list with covers that'll make you laugh, cry, or get a little queasy.

Serving Up Some Poetry with Your Thanksgiving Pumpkin Pie

"Thanksgiving," by Edgar Albert Guest:

Gettin’ together to smile an’ rejoice,
An’ eatin’ an’ laughin’ with folks of your choice;
An’ kissin’ the girls an’ declarin’ that they
Are growin’ more beautiful day after day;
Chattin’ an’ braggin’ a bit with the men,
Buildin’ the old family circle again;
Livin’ the wholesome an’ old-fashioned cheer,
Just for awhile at the end of the year.

The Poetry Foundation offers up some selections for you to read before your feasting.

The 101 Most Influential People Who Never Lived

It's an intriguing list, and now a book. Romeo and Juliet (pictured above) made the Top Ten. Buck Rogers is #84.

The Remains of Albert Camus

Do not wait for the last judgment. It takes place every day.
- Albert Camus (1913 - 1960)

Camus' last judgment was in Burgandy, January 4, 1960 when he died in a car crash at the age of 46. Should his remains, then, stay where they are or should they be moved to Paris's Pantheon? The debate rages.

Writing about Writers

It begins...

When I first encountered Joan Didion, I was on a bus heading back to my apartment in the middle of the night. This was in Cambridge, Mass., in 1975, and I had picked up a paperback copy of Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Didion’s first nonfiction collection. The opening piece, “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” begins with a description of the San Bernardino Valley, east of Los Angeles, and of “the hot dry Santa Ana wind that comes down through the passes at 100 miles an hour and whines through the eucalyptus windbreaks and works on the nerves.” Three pages later, with an October Santa Ana bearing witness, a dentist’s wife named Lucille Miller watches her husband burn to death in the family Volkswagen. By the time I emerged from this sinister dreamscape, I had overshot my bus stop by a mile.

Three decades later, as I could not possibly have imagined in 1975, I found myself in Didion’s Manhattan living room, interviewing her for The Washington Post.

I was an aging rookie on the Post’s book beat, which I’d recently been asked to take over. I was also quietly terrified, as I would be many times when talking with writers I admired. Fear isn’t a bad thing for a reporter. It forces you to prepare and keeps you alert. But in retrospect, I put this interview in a category of its own.

That’s because preparing to talk with Didion — though I was scarcely conscious of this at the time — taught me how to think about my job.

You can read more of Bob Thompson's article in The American Scholar, here.

Photo:
Julian Wasser/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images

Dead Caulfields

From a site dedicated to the works of J.D. Salinger...

Aside from his Nine Stories, JD Salinger published twenty-two stories in various magazines which remain uncollected. Several attempts have been made to compile these stories together but have met stiff resistance by the author. Spanning his literary career between the years 1940-1965, these stories display changes in both the author's style and message. While some are plainly of commercial quality, most are serious works containing an expansive gift of enlightenment and self-examination.

Collected on Dead Caulfields? The uncollected stories of J.D. Salinger.

The Bible is Ha-Ha Funny

First up, the always super McSweeney's, with "Tom Swifties Excised from the Bible."

Included...

"Seriously, Eve, you were created from my third nipple," Adam ribbed.

"Cain, will you spot me while I try to bench this giant rock?" Abel said bashfully.

Next up, the even superer Ricky Gervais on the Book of Genesis:

Since When Did We Start Making Such Great Movies Based on Books?

This is the question Esquire is asking, with all the great literary adaptations hitting the silver screen lately (Fantastic Mister Fox, Where the Wild Things Are, The Road, etc).

From the piece...

Look at who's converting some of these titles for the screen. Jonze adapted Wild Things alongside novelist Dave Eggers, whose fantastical revisionism both owed to and grew from Sendak's slender storybook. Its young hero is the product of a broken home representing not only divorce and alienation, but also the enduring battle between those who take control of their imagination and those who would sooner outsource it to Disney or, worse yet, Hasbro. The acclaimed author Nick Hornby addressed a similar fissure in his script for An Education, based on Lynn Barber's coming-of-age memoir about a girl who suffers the consequences of mistaking affect for sophistication. It's easily the same accusation you could level at the "minds" who reinvented films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or The Last House on the Left, atmospheric '70s masterpieces that refused to do their audiences' thinking for them.

Those were the days, and the adaptation boom is part of a concerted creative effort to reclaim them — a chance for nice guys like Eggers and Hornby to break through and beat Hollywood at its own derivative game. It's not a fluke, either; novelist Larry McMurtry probably struck the first blow four years ago with the screenplay for Brokeback Mountain. Adapting Annie Proulx's short story, he and co-writer Diana Ossana won Academy Awards for penning American cinema's most mainstream gay drama to date. Two of the next three years' Best Picture Oscar winners were book adaptations as well — hardly a new phenomenon, but one that made ultimate insiders out of inveterate iconoclasts like Joel and Ethan Coen (No Country For Old Men) and Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire), who compromised neither their sources nor their styles in maneuvering to the top. Peter Jackson they weren't.

Who Are the Greatest Swashbuckling Heroes in Sci-Fi in the Last 100 Years?

io9 separates the wheat from the chaff, here.

Where, Oh Where, is the Good Sex in Fiction?

This is the question The Guardian asked recently.

From the piece...

As the bad sex in fiction award shortlist lined up yesterday, the authors and their publishers scrambled to declare they'd have been offended not to have made the cut. Perhaps they were forgetting: it's the quality of the writing, not the sex, that's being assessed – and writing about sex well is one of the hardest things to do.

There's an assumption that it will involve writing the nuts and bolts, what goes where. Wrong. Try it. "His right hand slipped down her left thigh, as his left hand deftly undid the catch of her bra, and then he whispered in her ear … " – which one? Where's this guy standing? Or is he sitting? Perhaps lying? And what's she doing with her hands, right and left?

Writing about sex can be like a complicated game of Twister. You sit in front of your laptop, trying to work out where everything's going. It's worse than following the instructions for assembling flatpack furniture. Maybe there are some people who are turned on by DIY manuals, but for most of us they have the opposite effect. There are better ways for the writer to seduce the reader.

And talking about sex, AL Kennedy, also for The Guardian, has a new piece on writing, entitled, "Just because a story's about sex doesn't mean it's about sex."

From her piece...

It's sometimes difficult to explain this to people – and journalists – who seem to expect all kinds of strenuous research for which I personally would lack, in every way, the flexibility. Fiction about sex is still fiction – standard operating procedures apply. Equally, it is occasionally disconcerting to deal with emerging writers' work when half the notes you have to give read roughly along the lines of "As far as I'm aware, the average penis doesn't extend to three feet and is unable to go around corners." Or "Is this scene followed by reconstructive surgery?" And a percentage of the remaining comments may mention errors caused by embarrassment or a desire to shock. But we, as writers, are already sitting in the nice privacy of the reader's head, enjoying the usual range of necessary intimacies, which we earn by being beautiful, interesting, hypnotic, poetic and all the rest – jumping out from behind a damp bush and ejaculating wildly would almost always be inappropriate and shoddy. And there is, naturally, nothing to be embarrassed about – the reader thinks of sex a ridiculous number of times per hour without our assistance already. We are simply dreaming together – anything goes.

Painting by Frances Lynn.

The Books That Changed My Life

Famous authors reveal their favorite titles in Best Life Magazine.

Quote of the Week

One gains universal applause who mingles the useful with the agreeable, at once delighting and instructing the reader.
- Horace

Terrible Poetry Jokes

Care of Peter Lavelle at McSweeney's.

A sample joke...

Wordsworth and Coleridge are watching the Lakers game. They can't get service at the crowded bar. Coleridge smiles and says to Wordsworth: "Lager, lager everywhere, and I can't get a drink." Wordsworth says to Coleridge: "I have pleurisy."

Why We Use Cookbooks

The great Adam Gopnik, in The New Yorker, discusses our hunger for cookbooks.

From the piece...

A man and a woman lie in bed at night in the short hour between kid sleep and parent sleep, turning down page corners as they read. She is leafing through a fashion magazine, he through a cookbook. Why they read these things mystifies even the readers. The closet and the cupboard are both about as full as they’re going to get, and though we can credit the fashion reader with at least wanting to know what is in fashion when she sees it, what can the recipe reader possibly be reading for? The shelf of cookbooks long ago overflowed, so that the sad relations and failed hopes (“Monet’s Table,” “A Drizzle of Honey: The Lives and Recipes of Spain’s Secret Jews”) now are stacked horizontally, high up. The things he knows how to make that are actually in demand are as fixed as any cocktail pianist’s set list, and for a clientele of children every bit as conservative as the barflies around that piano: make Parmesan-crusted chicken—the “Feelings” of food—every night and they would be delighted. Yet the new cookbooks show up in bed, and the corners still go down.

Vicarious pleasure? More like deferred frustration. Anyone who cooks knows that it is in following recipes that one first learns the anticlimax of the actual, the perpetual disappointment of the thing achieved. I learned it as I learned to bake. When I was in my early teens, the sick yearning for sweets that adolescents suffer drove me, in afternoons taken off from school, to bake, which, miraculously, meant just doing what the books said and hoping to get what they promised to yield. I followed the recipes as closely as I could: dense Boston cream pie, Rigó Jansci slices, Sacher Torte with apricot jam between the layers. The potential miracle of the cookbook was immediately apparent: you start with a feeling of greed, find a list of rules, assemble a bunch of ingredients, and then you have something to be greedy about. You begin with the ache and end with the object, where in most of the life of appetites—courtship, marriage—you start with the object and end with the ache.

If you have an interest in antiquarian cookbooks, start here.

Welcome to Forks, Washington

Forks, not far from me, is the setting for the Twilight books that are all the rage these days. A writer for Details Magazine traveled there and discussed it with an essay, "So the Woman You Love Has the Hots for a Vampire. What Does That Say About You?"

Friday's Poem

Jimmy Stewart's "Lake Baringo":



Photo by Nasieku.

Best Books About Books for 2009

The list, care of Book Patrol.

Best Books for Boys and Young Men

The list, care of The Art of Manliness.

Best Books of 2009

The list, care of Publishers Weekly.