The classic book is now 50 years old. The eggs are probably green now because they've been moldering for 50 years so I would not attempt to eat them.
And, speaking of Dr. Seuss, he has a new home - online.
Monday, August 16, 2010
Happy Birthday, Green Eggs and Ham
The classic book is now 50 years old. The eggs are probably green now because they've been moldering for 50 years so I would not attempt to eat them.
And, speaking of Dr. Seuss, he has a new home - online.
Archie Plans to Rule the World
The New York Times takes a look into Archie Comics' expanding empire.
From the piece...
At 68 years old, Archie is suddenly looking awfully spry.
His new zest for life is the work of new management at Archie Comics. The team is aggressively trying to take the tried, true and previously lethargic Archie family of characters, including Betty and Veronica, Sabrina the Teenage Witch and Josie and her bandmates, and transform them into global brands in comics, film, apparel and more.
“We’re at the beginning of the beginning,” says Jon Goldwater, co-chief executive of Archie Comic Publications. “We’re going to expand. Publishing will always be part of it, but we must morph into a multimedia company.”
With more than $40 million in print and digital sales last year, Archie Comics, based in Mamaroneck, N.Y., is a small player in a large but unforgiving market dominated by DC Comics and Marvel Entertainment. Archie’s titles capture less than 1 percent of sales at comic book specialty shops, and the competitive challenge is only growing: Comics in general are battling the popularity of other distractions like video games and YouTube. And traditional readers of comics are aging, with no steady stream of new ones to take their place.
But comics alone are not what generate the hundreds of millions of dollars that characters from DC and Marvel can rake in, which is what Mr. Goldwater wants to emulate.
Is the Pen Name Mightier Than the Sword?
That's the question that the Washington Post recently asked. Who uses pseudonyms and why?
From the piece...
"The transparent pseudonym is very modern," says Carmela Ciuraru, a Brooklyn-based author and editor whose book "Nom de Plume: A (Secret) History of Pseudonyms" comes out next year. "It's getting to have it both ways: exploiting the popularity and safety of your own established brand while using the protective cloak of a pen name. . . . It's an easy way to show off how versatile they are as a performer. . . . If a critic bashes them for taking on a different genre or prose style, they've always got their own wildly successful, established name to fall back on."
Vampire maven Anne Rice wrote erotica as A.N. Roquelaure in the '80s to avoid confusing readers and scandalizing her father. The ruse didn't last long, and Rice didn't try to keep it a secret.
"It can be very liberating to step away from your body of work, but very quickly I embraced all of it under name of Anne Rice," she says from her home in Rancho Mirage, Calif. Using an open pseudonym "strikes me as a sophisticated way to brand and introduce a particular type of work. The name is almost part of the title of the book, a part of the brand, signaling that the author's writing in a slightly different style and voice."
Friday, August 13, 2010
RIP, Cathy
ACK! Cathy is no longer after 34 years as a daily comic strip.
From a piece in the Los Angeles Times...
On Wednesday, "Cathy" creator Cathy Guisewite announced she'll be retiring in October. She cited several reasons for calling it quits, including a "creative biological clock."
It's the kind of joke the comic Cathy might make as well. During the '80s and '90s, the comic gave the tribulations of single women lighthearted treatment, from Cathy's annual bathing suit shopping trip to her many, many failed dates.
But if Cathy was a chipper, comic-bound Mary-Tyler-Moore type, that kind of single gal eventually started to look a bit, well, dated. Cathy's heavy thighs didn't have the sass of popular books like "The Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing" by Melissa Bank or "Good in Bed" by Jennifer Weiner, didn't have the glamor of the "Sex and the City" girls in their Manolo Blahniks. Despite not needing to age, Cathy was starting to feel a bit old.
The Offspring of Charles Dickens and J.R.R. Tolkien
They've collaborated together on a children's book. The National Post has more.
From the piece...
After self-publishing Wish, the poet (he’s published several volumes of poetry previous to Wish) contacted fellow British literary offspring and actor Gerard Dickens, who agreed to read the audio version of the book. Tolkien tells The Guardian:
“I worked with Gerald after considering and deciding against various possible readers with the help of my agent,” said Tolkien. “I had heard his Dickens readings [Dickens has narrated audiobooks of titles including The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist] and felt he had great professional stature as an actor: a remarkable range of tones and shades of emphasis both in narrative and in dialogue.”
Jonathan Franzen: Great American Novelist
Jonathan Franzen is gracing the cover of Time magazine. It's the first time in ten years (the last was Stephen King) that a living author graced said cover.
From the cover story...
Franzen isn't the richest or most famous living American novelist, but you could argue — I would argue — that he is the most ambitious and also one of the best. His third book, The Corrections, published in 2001, was the literary phenomenon of the decade. His fourth novel, Freedom, will arrive at the end of August. Like The Corrections, it's the story of an American family, told with extraordinary power and richness.
The trend in fiction over the past decade has been toward specialization: the closeup, the miniature, the microcosm. After the literary megafauna of the 1990s — like Infinite Jest, by Franzen's close friend, the late David Foster Wallace — the novels of the aughts embraced quirkiness and uniqueness. Franzen skipped that trend. He remains a devotee of the wide shot, the all-embracing, way-we-live-now novel.
It's hard to say exactly what makes Franzen so uncomfortable. It could be me, or the prospect of being on the cover of TIME. It could be the pressure of having to follow up the huge success of The Corrections, or it could be the much fretted-over standing of the novel in America's cultural-entertainment complex. Maybe it's all of the above.
If they could talk, the otters would tell Franzen to man up, chill out and have a sea urchin. But I'm not sure that's possible for him, or even a good idea.
And, lucky him, he's also profiled in Vogue where he chats about his new book Freedom. The magazine has an excerpt from said work that one can read as well.
Not to be outdone, the New York Times also reviewed Franzen's latest, here.
Oh, and don't forget the Guardian's profile of him, too.
Thursday, August 12, 2010
Robert Falcon Scott's Antarctic Notebooks
They've been found, 99 years later.
From the piece on 3 News New Zealand...
A 99-year-old manuscript has been discovered detailing captain Robert Falcon Scott’s plans to be the first to reach the South Pole.
The handwritten notes, acquired by Canterbury Museum, are a lecture Mr Scott gave to his men on the ice, setting out the journey to the pole.
Hand bound in royal blue, captain Robert Scott’s plans for his southern journey to the pole were thought to have been lost forever.
“It was really amazing the first time I got to read it and see and feel the paper and you can smell the tobacco smoke,” manuscript curator Joanna Condon says.
Mr Scott loved his pipe and loved to write inside his hut at Antarctica.
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Romance Novels in Amish Country - They're Hot
USA Today takes note of the rising interest in Amish romance novels.
From the piece...
It's plain and simple: The Amish inspirational is one of the fastest-growing genres in romance publishing.
For many readers today, it's all about the bonnet. In our sex-soaked society, nothing seems to inflame the imagination quite like the chaste.
In popular series such as Beverly Lewis' Seasons of Grace, Wanda Brunstetter's Indiana Cousins and Cindy Woodsmall's Sisters of the Quilt,the Amish fall in love while grappling with religious taboos and forbidden temptations.
And it all happens in über-quaint settings brimming with hand-sewn quilts, horse-drawn buggies and made-from-scratch Pennsylvania Dutch specialties such as shoofly pie.
"It's a huge, huge, huge trend," says romance blogger Sarah Wendell, co-author of Beyond Heaving Bosoms: The Smart Bitches' Guide to Romance Novels.
A Dozen of Literature's Greatest Jerks
The list (one that includes Hamlet and Holden Caulfield) care of Paste Magazine.
From said list...
Work: Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (1875-1877)
Character: Anna Karenina
Jerk Attributes: Anna is selfish and cares far more about her place in high society than about the feelings of either of the men who are in love with her.
Quintessential Jerk Quote: “You were not mistaken. I was, and cannot help being, in despair. I listen to you but I am thinking of him. I love him, I am his mistress, I cannot endure you. I am afraid of you, and I hate you.”
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Guardians of the Nation's Attic
The Los Angeles Times has a piece about the National Archives, who keeps watch over 10 billion historical records. Its treasure hunting team keeps watch over collector shows and EBay for the scraps of valuable history that have been stolen.
From the story...
It is mission impossible by any measure; the National Archives keeps watch over 10 billion federal, congressional and presidential records. The most famous -- the Constitution, Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights -- are enshrined in the magnificent granite headquarters blocks from the White House. But they are a sliver of the nation's important stuff, much of it shelved or boxed all over the country. (Indeed, the dismantled pieces of Parkland Hospital's Trauma Room 1, where President Kennedy was pronounced dead, are in an underground cave in Kansas that no one intends to open.)
Now the Archival Recovery Team, as the treasure hunters are formally known, is asking the American people to help find what rightfully belongs to them. They published a pamphlet on how to recognize an historical federal document, and who to call if you find one. The Wright Brothers patent -- lost or stolen in the '80s, no one knows for sure -- was May's featured missing item on the archives' Facebook page.
"We have taken theft out of the shadows," Brachfeld said, recalling the days when embarrassing losses were kept secret. "We want people to know we live, we exist. If it's gone, we want it back. And if it's stolen, we will do our best to send whoever took it to jail."
Voices of a Nation
The American Scholar has an interesting article about 19th century American writers, struggling to discover who they were and who we are.
From the piece...
Henry David Thoreau once famously said that Americans lead lives of quiet desperation, that flitting circumstances cause our distraction and that, despite Christianity and candles, we sit in the dark. There, in a nutshell, is the conundrum of the 19th-century American writer who frowned on the country’s aesthetic lassitude, its getting and spending, its fundamental malaise—and yet wanted, above all, to create a language commensurate with a luminous, moral vision of national freedom; what could be more American?
“The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself,” Ralph Waldo Emerson, America’s spiritual cheerleader, complained. The writer, the American writer, would be different. “We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands,” Emerson continued, “we will speak our own minds.” But though Emerson’s call for self-reliance is one of the commonplaces of American literature, not until I began systematically assembling material for my anthology of 19th-century American writers on writing did I understand how these authors, who frequently meditated on craft or style, also anguished about what self-reliance, to them as writers, truly meant.
Poets of Pop
The New Statesmen discusses the lyricism of pop music these days.
From the piece...
In many ways, the survival of the lyric makes sense. After all, we listen to pop music today on MP3 players and headphones, creating a private space for ourselves in which we can ingest its meanings. Artists today operate in a similar way, burrowing inside themselves to find ideas with which they can snare our attention. And many artists in love with language have found their way into the mainstream.
Consider the American folk-inspired singer-songwriter Joanna Newsom, who sells out huge venues in minutes and has made the top ten album chart with her recent triple-LP, Have One on Me, despite her lyrics being more of the Emily Dickinson school than the "awopbopaloobopalop" academy. She writes sturdy, structured poetry influenced by nature and nurture. Take this lyric about a rabbit from the song "Baby Birch": "But I caught her and skinned her quick/Held her there/Kicking and mewling/Upending, unspooling/Unsung and blue". The song's half-rhymes and soft rhythms demand as much attention and unpicking as good poetry.
Bands such as Arcade Fire create alternative worlds with their words. For their 2004 debut album, Funeral, they constructed a snowy dystopia full of dead adults and young children, and a dark psychedelic poetry far removed from the Edward Lear-influenced surrealism of the Beatles. In 2004, in a frightened and fractured America, the lyrics of their biggest hit, "Wake Up", resonated widely : "If the children don't grow up, our bodies get bigger but our hearts get torn up/We're just a million little gods causing rainstorms/Turning every good thing to rust".
Here's an Arcade Fire song, by the way:
Monday, August 09, 2010
Marilyn Monroe and her Literary Loves
The Independent reveals some of Marilyn Monroe's favorite writers. Heady writers, they were (think Samuel Beckett and James Joyce, amongst others).
From the piece...
Monroe, whose death at the age of 36 remains a mystery, was an avid reader and something of a culture vulture while she lived in New York, frequently visiting museums and attending plays. Not that she got any credit for her intellect. Michelle Morgan, who wrote Marilyn Monroe: Private and Undisclosed, said: "She played ditzy blondes and for some reason people believed that was the person she was, but that couldn't have been further from the truth. It's intriguing that she seems to be one of the only actresses who people confuse with her parts. People believed she was a joke but she was always trying to better herself."
She had a vast library, which included works by George Bernard Shaw, Tennessee Williams, Ernest Hemingway, D H Lawrence, F Scott Fitzgerald and John Steinbeck, as well as Joyce, which she took with her whenever she moved house, something she did many times over her short lifetime. Her copy of Ulysses fetched $9,200 (£5,800) at an auction of her possessions by Christie's in 1999. While in Hollywood, she briefly took evening courses in art appreciation and literature at UCLA before withdrawing after her presence proved too distracting for the other students.
The Library of Congress and All That Jazz
Booktryst, one of the better literary-minded blogs around, discusses jazz and the photography of William Gottlieb.
From the piece...
After a few months on the job, Gottlieb offered to write a weekly column on jazz for the Sunday edition. The Arts Editor agreed, and his pay jumped from twenty-five to thirty-five dollars a week. But more importantly, he became the writer of the first jazz column to appear in a daily newspaper. At first a Post photographer was assigned to illustrate Gottlieb's column. But soon the management of the paper decided the arrangement was too costly, and the lensman was reassigned. Unwilling to publish the column without photos, Gottlieb sold his prized record collection and used the proceeds to buy a camera. With a lot of help from the Post's staff photographers, and a tremendous amount of practice, William Gottlieb taught himself how to take photos that were not only good enough for publication, but were works of art in their own right.
By age twenty-two, Gottlieb was known in the Washington, D.C. area as "Mr. Jazz." But Mr. Jazz had a growing family, so he left the advertising arm of the paper in 1941 to earn a graduate degree in economics at the University of Maryland. However, he never gave up writing and illustrating his Sunday jazz column. After serving as an Army photographer in World War II, Gottlieb once again followed his heart, and in 1945 he moved to New York City, determined to become a full-time jazz writer and photographer. He stopped in at the New York office of DownBeat magazine, and was pleasantly surprised to learn that the staff was not only familiar with his work for the Post, they downright admired it. Gottlieb was hired on the spot as an assistant editor.
Here's Charlie Parker playing "Confirmation":
A Loose Affiliation of Literary Geniuses
How are Virginia Woolf, Harriet Beecher Stowe, John Ruskin and J.D. Salinger tied to one another? Look no further than this helpful chart, care of Good.
The Return of the Novella?
Why is the novella such an intriguing and attractive fictional form? Because it's perfect for our shrinking attention spans.
The Daily Beast has more...
But what is a novella anyway? Page count provides the only broadly responsible definition: roughly 60 to 120 pages of prose fiction, or as Melville House succinctly puts it: “Too short to be a novel, too long to be a short story….” More often than not, though, the novella can be called something else too: fiction's most open-ended and compellingly discursive form. As in a short story, plot isn't paramount, but, without the story's demanding confines, there's room to wander. That means novellas are often structurally syncopated (think of the masterly changes of tempo in Joyce's The Dead), and their effect tends to be not instantaneous but cumulative: Read any two pages of Lin's Shoplifting at American Apparel and you'd likely set it aside; read the whole thing and its strange sadness will overtake you. The novella has ambivalence built into its DNA. It's neither one thing nor the other and tends to make you think even as it lures you down blind alleys and serves up irresolute endings.
If that sounds like hard work—well, sure, sometimes a novella's pleasures have to be earned. That's certainly true of Jean-Christophe Valtat's 03, a novella consisting of the arresting and round-about musings of a rebellious suburban teenager by one of France's rising literary stars. Published there in 2005 and discovered in a Paris book shop by FSG editor Lorin Stein (who commissioned an English translation, appearing in paperback this month), 03 is a single paragraph that runs for 85 pages, a young man's simultaneously punkish and Proustian meditations on his attraction toward a mentally disabled girl at a bus stop. I had to read 03 twice to follow what was going on, but in the end Valtat's novella radiated an unexpected tenderness that has lingered with me. It's the most original and evocative portrait of the adolescent mind I've read in years.
Sunday, August 08, 2010
Shazam!
Captain Marvel is starting to take flight again, after languishing under the popularity of Superman. Captain Marvel, for a time, actually outsold Superman comic books on the newsstands. That was decades ago, though, and as Superman has flown into our collective consciousness, Captain Marvel has marveled that he hasn't had much in the way of that collective consciousness pie.
No more? The Los Angeles Times discusses some recent rumblings in regards to the superhero.
Literary Last Words
"Come, come, no weakness; let’s be a man to the last!"
- Lord Byron
Byron was attended by two young doctors on his death bed in Missolonghi. Faced with the terrible problem of treating a world-famous figure for an illness which neither knew anything about, they fell back on the usual treatment of the time – to bleed the patient and so reduce his fever. Byron resisted, saying that there had been 'more deaths by lancet than by the lance', but gave in when warned that the disease could ‘deprive him of reason'. The weakened poet sank into unconsciousness and died under his terrified doctors' hands. After the autopsy the doctors blamed each other for the death
The Guardian offers more of these morose tidbits, here.
Saturday, August 07, 2010
25 Pickup Lines to Woo Bookworms
We could make such a beautiful library together.
I hope you’re one of the best minds of my generation, because I’d sure like to see you naked.
Forget the New Yorker. You’d make my 20 Under 40 list any day.
Single white female seeks Brooklyn-dwelling Jonathan for coffee-shop work dates, long walks in Prospect Park, baby-making.
Little-known fact: The Sound and the Fury wasn’t named after Macbeth — it was inspired by a night with me.
Those are just a few of them, care of Flavorwire.
How Did Scott Pilgrim Go from Comic Book to Movie?
The Los Angeles Times marks the road in how it happened.
From the piece...
Oni Press of Portland, Ore., which has nine employees and publishes three to five comics or trade paperbacks each month, is behind a big movie being released Aug. 13 by Universal Pictures: "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World."
The special effects-heavy comedy starring Michael Cera as a slacker who must battle his new girlfriend's seven evil exes is extremely loyal to writer-artist Bryan Lee O'Malley's comics, including borrowing their hyper-stylized, video game-inspired visuals.
It's the first film produced by Closed on Mondays Entertainment, the production company that Oni Press publisher Joe Nozemack founded with producer Eric Gitter in 2003 to help shepherd Oni's projects onto the big screen. Closed on Mondays has 12 projects in various stages of development at studios and recently signed a deal with CBS to create television shows.
The fact that such a small publisher has its own production company shows just how important Hollywood has become to the comic business, which has seen sales shrink recently at the same time that movies based on its material have exploded.
Here's a recent trailer for the coming movie:
The Tyranny of Reading Multiple Books
How many books do you read at one time? Do you just involve yourself with the one and then, when it's finished, pick up another? Or is your nightstand stacked with three or four books, all in various states of being finished?
Being a freelance writer and a reader, it's almost a must to read several books at one time to keep up. Right now, I'm reading books about locavorism, comic books, cemeteries, and, for fun, The Passage by Justin Cronin.
On the Publisher's Weekly blog, PWxyz, they lament the piles of books they'll most surely never get through.
KCRW's Bookworm
Want to listen to some great interviews with some great authors? Michael Silverblatt is your man to give it to you as the Bookworm on KCRW radio. Recently he interviewed such authors as Jane Smiley, Aimee Bender, Peter Carey, Yann Martel, Ian McEwan and many others.
Happy listening!
Friday, August 06, 2010
Tarzan Skills
You want them, right? You'll be a better person if you could swim, dive, climb, and swing like the Lord of the Apes, yes? The Art of Manliness delivers.
From the piece (on how to swing like Tarzan)...
Perhaps Tarzan’s most iconic skill was his ability to traverse the jungle by swinging from vine to vine in the jungle canopy. But interestingly enough, Edgar Burroughs never described Tarzan performing this feat. Perhaps he understood what Hollywood did not: In real life, the vines that Tarzan uses to swing (lianas) are attached at the bottoms of trees, not the tops as in the movies. So swinging from vine to vine sadly isn’t possible in the real world.
Nonetheless, Tarzan did do his fair share of swinging. He would use the limbs and branches of trees like the parallel or uneven bars you see in gymnastics. Tarzan would swing his body back and forth to build momentum so he could hurtle his body through space and to the next limb. Just as primates living in the jungle get around the tree tops. And kind of like the guys in the above video.
I’ll be honest. I like the movie version of swinging Tarzan. As a boy, whenever I saw a rope hanging from some fixed object, I’d instinctively run towards it, leap into the air, grab hold of the rope, and swing as high as I could while giving my best Tarzan yell. I know I’m not the only kid who did this.
While you may never have to perform an uneven bars routine in a tree, you’ll probably have to bust out some rope swinging skills at some point in your life, even if it’s just at a team-building ropes course or at the old swimming hole.
If you’re a grown man, it may have been awhile since you swung like Tarzan. I know my rope swinging skills were bit rusty the last time I tried to swing from a rope and into a river. In my first attempt, I didn’t let go when I should have and ended up landing pretty close to a bunch of rocks near the shore. Not good. And kind of embarrassing.
A few pointers I took from my experience…First, make sure to grab the rope in the middle. Hold the rope tightly. Don’t wrap your legs around the rope as it creates a risk that you’ll get tangled up with the rope when you let go with your hands (this risk is increased exponentially by the wearing of a blue speedo). The true trick to swinging from a rope is timing. I’ve found letting go right in the middle of the upwards trajectory to be the sweet spot. If you let go too early in the upwards arc, you’ll get distance in your drop, but you won’t get as much height. If you let go at the very top of the arc, your drop will have extra height but not as much distance. And of course, if you don’t let go at all, your swing will end up on Youtube and be watched by millions.
The Kama Sutra. Now in Audio
'Tis true. For the first time in the book's 1,600 year history you can listen to the book.
From the piece in the Book Bench...
"Too shy to read the Kama Sutra on the train during rush hour? Just take out your headphones," Reuters helpfully suggests. While it's true that listening to a book is even sneakier than reading one on a Kindle, I'd be afraid that my face would give me away. If everyone can see the cover of your Kama Sutra, everyone knows what you're up to—for better or worse. If you're listening to the Kama Sutra, you've got a secret. Suppose you smirk or blush at the wrong moment? What will your fellow passengers think then? Ah, the seeds of paranoia are planted.
It also occurs to me that in many parts of the world, people do not take trains or buses to work. They drive. Listening to the Kama Sutra on a car stereo invites all kinds of potential peril.
And, if you have a Snuggie (who doesn't?!?!) and are in love, don't forget Snuggie Sutra.
Superman Saves Famiy from Losing Home
Seriously. A family was saved from the brink of foreclosure when they uncovered a copy of the extremely rare Action Comics No. 1 in their basement. Published in June 1938, the comic introduces the world to Superman--other copies have sold for more than a million dollars on the market.
Thursday, August 05, 2010
Who Needs a Publisher Anymore?
Newsweek takes note of the ever-growing self-publishing market and how it's gained oodles of respectability.
From the piece...
Until recently, reviewers and booksellers looked down on self-published authors the way Anna Wintour scorns Dress Barn. Now new writers and established authors alike are increasingly taking publishing into their own hands, and the publishing establishment is paying attention. According to a recent Bowker report, the market for “nontraditional books” in the United States grew by more than 750,000 new titles in 2009—a 181 percent increase over 2008. Five of the top 100 bestsellers in the Kindle store—which now produces more sales than Amazon’s hardcover list—are currently self-published.
Bob Young, CEO of print-on-demand service Lulu.com, says that the publishing and distributing of books online will not be the old book industry on a new platform. It will be a new industry, dependent not on bestsellers but on niche publications. Young compares Lulu to eBay, which many feared would kill the traditional auction business. “Ten years and 60 billion transactions on eBay later,” Young says, “Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and the farm auctioneers are still doing fine. That’s because it was not people with Picassos who were selling on eBay. And in our case, it won’t be John Grisham selling millions of copies on Lulu.”
Austenized!
Jane Austen's been poked fun at recently. There's been a slew of books like Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and the like, mash-ups of classic literature and horror. But what if you reversed it? What if you took horror classics and Jane Austen-ed them up?
From a piece on Open Salon...
Jane Austen hated horror. The first novel she ever completed (though it remained unpublished until after her death) was Northanger Abbey. It featured a heroine enthralled with The Mysteries of Udolpho, a popular gothic novel of her era. Unlike the traditional gothic romance heroine, Catherine Moreland does not overcome supernatural obstacles to land a handsome hero. Instead her poor taste in fiction almost costs her a good man who writes her off as a half brain. (She is, and remains, a half brain. But this being a novel of its time, he must marry her anyways.)
So enough with the zombies, the vampires and the sea monsters! I’m with Laura Miller. The time has come to avenge the relentless mangling of Austen.
Here, Austenized for your amusement, three Hollywood horror classics, re-energized with the kind of rigorous moral message and redemptive plots that have been entertaining readers for generations. Like Austen, I’m a realist. I don’t expect to turn back the blood dimmed tide of CGI and 3D. But, readers, let's go down fighting!
Wednesday, August 04, 2010
Is Anyone Under 40 Collecting Books?
That's the question Fine Books Magazine recently asked. The simple answer is there are.
From the piece...
Fowler explained that although a lot of his young customers are very smart and cultured people, they are simply not aware that there is a history of book collecting. To them, you buy a book, and maybe another, but there is no coherence, or growth, to the activity.
But how could they know this, asked Fowler, when most became readers in an age when serious bookstores were closing?
“All of a sudden bookstores became a complete anachronism,” he said. “So I play that up. One thing that books have over electronics is their anachronism.”
According to Fowler, books to a younger collector have a very different meaning than they do to a collector from the pre-Internet days. In the past people bought books mostly to read them. It was a practical thing. The distance required to view them as artifacts did not exist.
To a young collector, however, who does not see a book as the primary source of culture, it is essentially an artifact. So a bookseller working today must know this and embrace it, instead of resisting it, as many do.
“To them it all seems incredibly antique,” he said. “They all think it’s a cool object. But they have no idea why it’s worth $50.”
Tuesday, August 03, 2010
Speculating on the Book Trade
Are rare books good investments? The International League of Antiquarian Booksellers sheds some light on the subject.
From the piece...
The stock market appeals to the gambler in me. The first thing I do in the morning is switch on my computer and check stock prices. Unlike the price of rare books, they change every day. My earnings as a book dealer have always been either supplemented, or often superseded by, my earnings from the stock market. I can see a time when the book trade will be reduced to a handful of big businesses in London. There are not enough books to go round, and the present hierarchy of dealers operating at different levels will ultimately disappear. The internet has made the business a level playing field. Anyone can become an expert at the press of a button. Its effect on the trade has been dramatic – the internet kills every book stone dead.
The Way We Live Now
Peggy Orenstein, for The New York Times, wonders how good for us is this Twitter phenomena.
From the essay...
The expansion of our digital universe — Second Life, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter — has shifted not only how we spend our time but also how we construct identity. For her coming book, “Alone Together,” Sherry Turkle, a professor at M.I.T., interviewed more than 400 children and parents about their use of social media and cellphones. Among young people especially she found that the self was increasingly becoming externally manufactured rather than internally developed: a series of profiles to be sculptured and refined in response to public opinion. “On Twitter or Facebook you’re trying to express something real about who you are,” she explained. “But because you’re also creating something for others’ consumption, you find yourself imagining and playing to your audience more and more. So those moments in which you’re supposed to be showing your true self become a performance. Your psychology becomes a performance.” Referring to “The Lonely Crowd,” the landmark description of the transformation of the American character from inner- to outer-directed, Turkle added, “Twitter is outer-directedness cubed.”
The fun of Twitter and, I suspect, its draw for millions of people, is its infinite potential for connection, as well as its opportunity for self-expression. I enjoy those things myself. But when every thought is externalized, what becomes of insight? When we reflexively post each feeling, what becomes of reflection? When friends become fans, what happens to intimacy? The risk of the performance culture, of the packaged self, is that it erodes the very relationships it purports to create, and alienates us from our own humanity.
Eleven Beloved Children's Books with Seriously Dubious Lessons
The list, care of Lemon Drop.
For example...
8) "Chocolate Fever"
This book about chocolate addiction teaches kids that if they're feeling under the weather and suddenly covered in mysterious spots, the best solution is to RUN AWAY FROM HOME. Dude, we watch "House." We know that eating one food uncontrollably can only be indicative of one thing: a dangerous medical condition called pica.
7) "Caps for Sale"
Never mind the fact that the Caps for Sale guy sleeps in trees and leaves his belongings on the ground. Did you see him wig the hell out at those monkeys? The Peddler needs some anger management, stat.
Have $40,000 Laying Around?
Then you might have a chance to outbid people for Batman #1. The Christian Science Monitor takes note of a coming auction in which an Alaskan will put up the first issue of Batman (though he was first introduced in Detective Comics #27). There is believed to be around 300 of these comic books left in existence.
Monday, August 02, 2010
What are the 15 Best Selling Books Ever (after the Bible)?
The Huffington Post has the answer. Think Harry Potter. There are a few surprises however, including a work by Agatha Christie.
Yrsa Sigurdardóttir, the Next Stieg Larrson?
Everyone is looking for the person who can give us the next The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo-type books. The Telegraph looked to Iceland and found Yrsa Sigurdardóttir, crime fiction writer. She was also interviewed by J. Sydney Jones, here.
From the Telegraph piece...
“I was nine years old, living in the States at the time of the Eldfell eruption,” Yrsa tells me on the short flight to the island. “For me as a child this was spectacularly exciting, that Iceland was on the news. This was the only time that happened.”
The eruption saw the creation of a 700ft mountain where a meadow had been. All of the island’s 5,000-odd inhabitants were forced to leave and many returned to find their homes buried under solid lava.
A recent project to excavate some of these houses inspired Yrsa to set her third crime novel, published in Britain as Ashes to Dust, on Heimaey. It begins with a man returning to his newly disinterred childhood home and discovering three decades-old corpses and a severed head in the cellar.
She is astonished that nobody else beat her to the idea: Iceland bulges with crime writers. Yrsa, however, is one of only two to have been translated into English so far (the other is the chilling Arnaldur Indridason) and she is now published in 35 countries, appealing to fans of Nordic crime supremos Henning Mankell and Stieg Larsson, but free of the Weltschmerz of the one and the implausibilities of the other.
We head to the area the locals call “Pompeii” where the tops of a dozen houses poke out of the lava. These suburban villas lack the grandeur and aesthetic appeal associated with more famous excavation sites, but the effect is oddly poignant.
Yrsa has made friends with some of the people who lost their homes. “They were teenagers at the time. They remember the smell, and just being dumped on fishing boats wherever there was space. They were being seasick, some of them thought it was a war. It’s the middle of the night, you’re sleeping and then all of a sudden, boom, life is just collapsing."
Joshua Jackson Celebrates Dawson's Creek Fan Fiction
You're saying to yourself, Dawson's Creek fan fiction? Can there be such a thing? Oh, there is. And Joshua Jackson reads it, here.
Sunday, August 01, 2010
John Steinbeck-Inspired Summer Travel
"We do not take a trip," John Steinbeck once said, "a trip takes us."
The Readers Almanac takes note of a few bloggers who have used John Steinbeck, particularly his work Travels with Charley, as a traveling companion.
From the story...
Jim Terry found echoes of the four months in 1960 Steinbeck chronicled in Travels with Charley in his two-week cross-country road trip from Dallas, TX, to Watkins Glen, NY.
I found my old yellowed, cracked page paperback copy which I had read nearly fifty years ago and read it again.
Steinbeck realized he had lost touch with the country he had been writing about for thirty years. He said, "I, an America writer, writing about America, was working from memory, and the memory is at best a faulty, warpy reservoir. I had not heard the speech of America, smelled the grass and trees and sewage, seen its hills and water, its color and quality of light."
Diane, Evan, and Maia are a family on a multi-year sailing trip aboard a 40-foot catamaran. This week, upon arriving at the Sea of Cortez, they turned to Steinbeck’s The Log from the Sea of Cortez to describe what they are seeing and feeling:
I’ve been struggling to find the words to describe this place—beyond snippets of stories and moments out of our life. Fortunately I don’t have to. John Steinbeck did. He was here 70 years ago on a research vessel. His book is a must have for every visitor to the Sea of Cortez:
We wondered why so much of the Sea of Cortez was familiar to us…coming to it was like returning rather than visiting. Some quality there is in the whole Sea that trips a trigger of recognition so that in fantastic and exotic scenery one finds oneself nodding and saying inwardly, “Yes, I know.”
If it were lush and rich, one could understand the pull, but it is fierce and hostile and sullen. The stone mountains pile up to the sky and there is little fresh water. But we know we must go back, and we don’t know why.
The Nostalgia Narrative
The American literary genre of you can't go home again – that fertile ground farmed by Faulkner, Twain and Kerouac – has in the last half-century found a new voice abroad. The Guardian discusses it.
From the piece...
Think of the successful ad-man hero of John Updike's The Farm, who returns to his family's crumbling Pennsylvania farm for an emotionally fraught visit, or Quentin Compson of William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom, shivering in his dorm room at Harvard, who begins his defence of the American south with the ringing endorsement, "I don't hate it ... I don't hate it."
This thread of conflicted nostalgia is strongest in America's most autobiographical novelists, especially the ones who had to leave to write but continuously dial back the past in their work: writers such as Jack Kerouac, who frantically travelled America, but wrote most of his later books about Lowell, while living with his mother in Queens and Florida.
Then there's Mark Twain, whose autobiography appears in the new issue of Granta, who rose out of Missouri and saw the world, but settled in Hartford, Connecticut in a white mansion that everyone around him could see looked exactly like a river steamboat.
But like so many things America feels it has invented, from democracy to baseball, the you-can-never-go-home again narrative is hardly unique to it. In fact, in the last half-century (and especially in the last 20 years, as diaspora writers from the Dominican Republic to Nigeria to India and Pakistan have emerged as some of our most vigorous storytellers), nostalgia – which is a combination of "returning home" and "ache" – has taken on a different texture.
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