The list, care of Scientific American.
Sunday, August 29, 2010
Saturday, August 28, 2010
Read Comics in Public
Get your geeky self on out there with a comic book today, my friends. It's National Read Comics in Public Day.
From the official site...
The concept is fairly simple: we’re asking that everyone take an hour or two out of their day on August 28th (also the birthday of Jack “King” Kirby, incidentally) to read a comic book in a public setting—a park bench, a beach, a bus, the front steps of your local library (we do ask, however, that you be mindful of local loitering laws). Let strangers see you reading a piece of sequential art.
Take to the streets. Be proud. If someone asks what you’re reading, say, “a comic book” (the phrase “graphic novel is also acceptable, but let’s face it, it sort of defeats the whole purpose). Heck, lend them a book, if you’ve got an extra—what better way to make a new friend and convert a new reader?
Be not ashamed!
The Don't Bother Travel Guide
Everyone wants to have a great vacation - see new places, visit with new people, have new experiences. But should that be at Seattle's fabled GUM WALL?!?! On NPR, they discuss Catherine Price's new book, 101 Places to Not See Before You Die.
From the story...
The Museum Of Tap Water, Beijing
In 2001, Price says, an edict was issued that required Beijing to open 150 new museums by 2008. Hence a museum devoted to the fascinating history of ... tap water.
The museum is full of artifacts from the early days of Bejing's tap water system, which dates back to 1908. On display are coupons that people brought to water stations to receive water, and stethoscopes that were used to detect leaks in the pipes.
The irony of the whole museum, Price says, "is that Beijing's water is not safe to drink from the tap."
A brief aside: 6 Places I Would Actually Really Like to Visit Before I Die...
1) Iceland
2) Ghana
3) Quebec City
4) New York City
5) South Africa
6) Peru
Playing with Time
On the Book Lady's Blog, she has come up with an annotated list of a several novels and short stories that play with time in compelling ways and in most cases also happen to be amazing.
From the piece...
The Beggar Maid, Alice Munro.
This set of linked stories, which charts the nodal events in the life of a single protagonist, Rose, has the effect of a novel, because we see Rose’s life journey, from having grown up in a small town in rural Ontario (covered in the first 3 stories), to having made her way out in the wider world (the next 5 stories), where she reinvents herself over and over (as wife of a pampered rich boy, lover to various men, mother, TV talk show host, actress), and her eventual return to the town where she grew up (the last 2 stories). Taken together the stories have the feeling of the wanderings of Odysseus, though with a far less dramatic homecoming (though it is, of course, heartbreaking). Part of the wonder of this book is that while the stories themselves are arranged in chronological order with regard to Rose’s life (so that we are able to connect the dots and put together a complex larger portrait of her, complete with well-developed themes about self-image and social class) there is a great deal of time-bending within the stories. The first story, “Royal Beatings,” for instance, which recounts events in Rose’s childhood, takes a jump at the end to a many-decades-later point in time that lies beyond the time frame of the book’s final story, “Who Do You Think You Are?” Meanwhile, this final story travels back to a point in Rose’s childhood that predates any of the events in “Royal Beatings.” It’s also worth noting that the linked story or novel-in-stories format is particularly suited to this kind of jumping around in time, because each story itself becomes a kind of “block” in the overall architecture.
Friday, August 27, 2010
Inspired by J.D. Salinger's Toilet
The Los Angeles Times took a dip into EBay waters, recently, to discover twelve non-book literary oddities. Enjoy!
A Garden of Books in a Forest of Trees
Behold the artwork of designers Thilo Folkerts and Rodney LaTourelle.
From a story about the garden in Arch Daily...
The Jardin de la Connaissance is a temporary garden in a forested area involving approximately 40,000 books, multi-coloured wooden plates and several varieties of mushrooms.
In reference to the festival’s theme of paradise, there are exposed the tree (of knowledge) as the central semiotic theme of the paradisiacal garden. Rather than reopening a way through the proverbial enclosures, the design team is interested in its manifold textures. From the single tree of knowledge they have gone to the many of the forest; from one truth to the plenitude of multimedia and the overwhelming world of information. The ‘Garden of Cognition’ does not illustrate a ‘return to nature’ or attempt a ‘biblical’ reconciliation, but its intention is to provide a platform to experience and frame the forest of the many in a unique and compelling way. The garden engages the mythical relation between knowledge and nature integral to the concept of ‘paradise’. By using books as material in the construction of the garden, they confront these instruments of knowledge with the temporality of nature. And by exposing these fragile and supposedly timeless materials to transformation and disintegration, they also invite an emotional involvement of the visitor. The book assemblages establish a framework amidst the forest that embodies a variety of experiential activities. The Jardin de la Connaissance becomes a sensual reading room, a library, an information platform, a dynamic realm of knowledge.
The Library at Guantanamo Bay
What do the prisoners read there, anyway? The Guardian illuminates us.
From the piece...
The 176 prisoners at the US facility have access to 18,000 books, magazines, DVDs and newspapers across 18 languages from their prison library, according to an investigation by Time magazine. The most popular titles among inmates are the Harry Potter books, novels by John Grisham and Agatha Christie, and Islamic texts. Prisoners are also keen to get their hands on photo-packed travel books, particularly ones featuring the ocean.
"I tell ya, Dan Brown's been beating me up lately," navy lieutenant Robert Collett told Time. "All his books are very popular, but we don't have all of them in Arabic." The International Committee of the Red Cross will sometimes help out when a particular translation can't be found, sending its staff to local stores to pick up copies because it believes that "access to books and news from the outside is very important to the prisoners' mental state".
Civil rights lawyer H Candace Gorman sent the library an Arabic edition of a Harry Potter book herself because it did not have all of the published titles and her client, the Libyan national Abdul al-Ghizzawi, was keen to keep up with the boy wizard's adventures. "The guards were telling him things that had happened in the book, but he didn't know if it was true or not," she told Time. Ghizzawi saw similarities between his own situation and that of the prisoners of Azkaban, and between George W Bush and Voldemort, she said.
Thursday, August 26, 2010
The Photography of Robert Giard
American photographer Robert Giard, notes the Beinecke Library, is renowned for his portraits of American poets and writers; his particular focus was on gay and lesbian writers. Some of his photographs of the American gay and lesbian literary community appear in his groundbreaking book Particular Voices: Portraits of Gay and Lesbian Writers, published by MIT Press in 1997. Giard’s stated mission was to define the literary history and cultural identity of gays and lesbians for the mainstream of American society, which perceived them as disparate, marginal individuals possessing neither.
See some of his work, here.
For more author photography, check out the stash of poet portraits at the Rare Books & Manuscript Library at the University of Pennsylvania.
Pictured above: John Boswell.
Writing a Novel in Three Days
Could you do it?
From a piece on The Millions...
Day three, ten a.m.: no sleep last night. Nothing else seems substantial anymore except for the words on the laptop screen. The backs of my eyeballs feel prickly, suggesting complete and unforgiving fatigue. My brain went AWOL hours earlier and I keep omitting words like ‘a’, ‘an’, ‘or’, and ‘of’ from sentences. Yet I am ecstatic—an intense happiness burgeoning in me from too much caffeine, too little sleep, and having just spent two and a half days in a dream world of my own creation. As of right now, I am a novelist.
Three days from midnight to midnight: write as much as you can, wherever you wish; this is the International 3-Day Novel Contest. The average finished entry is between twenty and thirty thousand words. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone is about 77,000 words. Thus, the finished result is more novella than novel, but all the same, a grand effort considering the timeframe.
Back to day one: The Setup. The contest allows prior planning of plots and characters. Oops. I snatch at ideas, desperate for anything. How about an alien abductees’ support group? Brilliant—very Fight Club. (Didn’t Graham Greene once say, “Writing is a form of therapy”?) Having a vague idea for a plot, I engage in the writing process. Many authors talk of losing themselves in the “zone”. They make it sound as if the words write themselves. I wish. Midnight arrives and the word count is a contemptible 4,500 words. The zone has eluded me. The 3-Day Novel Contest is held annually in early September on the Canadian Labor Day long weekend. In 1977, a writer’s group in Vancouver accepted the challenge for the first time.
The contest has been running ever since. According to the organizers, the 3-Day Novel Contest has been called a “fad,” an “idle threat,” a “great way to overcome writers block,” and “a trial by deadline.” It opposes the notion that novels take eight years of angst to produce. Most entrants recognize that winning is secondary to finishing with a complete novella and no nervous breakdown.
The Literary Dating Scene on Alikewise.com
The New Republic checks it out.
From the story...
Alas. The first writer I put in—W.G. Sebald—turned up no hits at all. “We expanded the search to include other books relating to ‘Sebald,’” the site helpfully informed me, bringing up the profile of a 39-year-old man in New York (good start) seeking a woman between 18 and 48 (I qualify). Unfortunately, my prospective match seemed to have missed the point entirely: his profile lists two books by Michel Houellebecq, about each of which he commented only “It was ok.” My heart beat faster upon seeing his third choice: Quo Vadis, by Henryk Sienkiewicz. A man who reads Polish epics might be a man for me! But it sank again upon reading his comment: “This is an ok read.”
I was hoping for someone a little more articulate. Time to expand the possibilities. I put in Philip Roth, Emily Brontë, Kafka, but the pickings were still slim. A 35-year-old New Yorker is currently reading the new David Mitchell novel and finds The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto “sexy.” Hmm. I was intrigued by a 36-year-old Brooklynite who put up The Annotated Lolita and The Catcher in the Rye (“I wonder how phonies feel when they read this book”) until I saw that he also likes Women Who Run With the Wolves. Clicking on Salinger led me to a different guy with some decent choices, including Orhan Pamuk, The Black Dahlia, and Herodotus. Unfortunately, he lives in Australia.
We know that people don’t necessarily present themselves in the most honest light in their online-dating profiles. Still, the majority of the virtual bookshelves fall into two categories: mind-numbingly conventional or bewilderingly schizophrenic. I learned, not to my surprise, that hipsters all over the country read Murakami, Kundera (the site offers no statistics, but in my unscientific perusal The Unbearable Lightness of Being seemed to pop up more often than any other book), and GarcÃa Márquez. On the other side of the spectrum, a search for Elie Wiesel led me to a woman who lists Night and Survival in Auschwitz together with Bridget Jones’s Diary and The Devil Wears Prada. But she put up Wislawa Szymborska, too, so I’m willing to forgive her. (Note to the guy in Brooklyn who likes Szymborska as well as Clarice Lispector, Graham Greene, and Bolaño: I can teach you how to pronounce her name.)
Steve McCurry and the Universality of Reading
Publishing Perspectives celebrates the photography of Steve McCurry who captures readers worldwide.
From the story...
One of his ongoing projects is compiling a collection of photos of people reading; on Monday, he put a selection of these photos on display for the first time on his own blog. Entitled “Fusion: The Synergy of Energy and Words” (Part I and Part II) drew a strong reaction from book lovers. “More than 4,000 people visited the site in the first few hours and I started getting calls from librarians and booksellers asking about the photos,” says Bonnie McCurry V’Soske, Steve’s sister, who manages her brother’s business.
The idea to shoot photos of people reading was itself prompted by his relationship with legendary Hungarian photographer André Kertész, who was also fascinated with images of people reading. “Henri Cartier-Bresson was a friend of mine and he once said, ‘Whatever we have done, Kertész did first and it’s apt to start here,” says McCurry. “I met Kertész in 1984 when I moved into the same building where he lived on Fifth Ave. in New York and I knew he’d done a body of work on people reading. It was an inspiration to me. Reading is kind of the universal endeavor, one without regard to nationality, race, age or culture.”
McCurry’s photos cross these cultural and socioeconomic boundaries. His personal favorite of his collection is a photo of a young Thai man reading a book while nestled up to the back of an elephant, shot earlier this year. Among the two dozen images posted online is photo of a group of Chinese men perusing newspapers through a shop window, another of an Afghan shopkeeper reading in his modest stall, and one Italian monks in contemplation with their Bibles.
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Ten Reading Revolutions Before E-Books
The Atlantic gives us a run-down.
From the piece...
5. The shift from scroll to codex was in turn enabled by a shift from papyrus to parchment and then paper, but honestly, the continual changes in materials essential to writing and reading alone could constitute a few dozen revolutions, at different places and times all over the world. Let's just say that what the things we read are made out of has always been very, very important.
6. This is especially true for arguably the most important reading revolution -- the industrial revolution. Gigantic presses powered by steam (and later, electric power) could crank out books and newspapers and advertisements that strained the always-fickle paper supply. Eventually, papermakers were able to invent a variety of mechanical and chemical techniques engineer decent-quality paper out of pulped wood, a supply that (unlike cloth rags) appeared limitless. Print was off to the races, and dozens of other inventions helped make generating texts cheaper and faster. Having beaten back the scroll, our anthropomorphized codex now jostled against increasingly-important nonbook documents glutting the alphabetic information stream, like newspapers and office memoranda. More people were reading too, thanks to cheap primers and a state-driven educational push towards universal literacy: historian David Hall has called this the "literacy revolution." If print in the Renaissance and early modern periods was a proof-of-concept, a limited beta - the Xerox PARC GUI and first-generation MacIntosh of the new modes of producing and consuming text - the age of industrial print was Windows 95.
The Orwell Project
One Muslim artist responded to his mistaken FBI investigation by creating an online record of his every move, meal, and travel. That artist is Hasan Elahi.
From a piece in the Daily Beast about him and his work...
Elahi is a 37-year-old conceptual artist who teaches art and visual theory at San Jose State University in California. He was born in Bangladesh and grew up in New York. Like many other Muslims in the days following the attacks of September 11, 2001, Elahi found his name on the government’s terrorist watch list. In response, he decided to open nearly every aspect of his life on his website, TrackingTransience.net. At that site one can find a record of the coffee he has bought or the amount of cash he has withdrawn in the past week. Over 20,000 images on the site are time-stamped and give information about the places he has been and meals he has consumed. In May 2007, when I met Elahi in a restaurant for lunch, he took a picture of his salad—smoked salmon with strawberry dressing—and then of the urinal in the men’s room. The pictures were uploaded on his site. Having beforehand perused the list of his recent purchases, I was able to confirm that the camera he was using, a brand-new Canon G7, was one that he had acquired the previous week at a shop in New York City.
Book Cover - A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb. By Amitava Kumar. 232 pages. Duke University Press. $21.95. The Orwell Project, which is the name that Elahi has given to his exercise, is in reality a work of collaboration between the artist and the FBI. It was the latter who inspired this work that is part performance, part protest.
40 Best Comics for the Classroom
Online Masters highlights those comic books that can be used as teaching tools in the classroom for kids young and old.
From the list...
35.) Owly
Writer/Artist: Andy Runton
The largely textless adventures of the sweet, friendly Owly work as excellent storytelling conduits for young, imaginative children. A few teachers have been known to test their students’ creativity by having them come up with dialogue all on their own.
36.) The Yellow Jar
Writer/Artist: Patrick Atangan
Educators may love the idea of incorporating The Yellow Jar into their lessons, as they open up “Western” children to many traditional Japanese folktales that would otherwise remain unknown or obscured.
37.) Robot Dreams
Writer/Artist: Sara Varon
Sara Varon illustrates a bittersweet story of a robot and its deep friendship with a dog, silently, realistically exploring themes of human interaction and the waxing and waning of interpersonal connections.
38.) All Star Superman
Writer: Grant Morrison
Artist: Frank Quietly
Even students who do not read superhero comics still know of Superman and his origins, and Grant Morrison’s exploration of his life, times and adventures stands as essential, entertaining and wholly humanizing. A pleasant surprise considering the invulnerable alien at its center.
The Open Road When It Wasn't So Open
The New York Times has an interesting, though, unfortunate slice of history. They recall the Green Book Guide for Negro Motorists. Printed during the era of racial discrimination, it highlighted to black drivers where they could eat, or sleep, or find gas.
From the piece...
Julian Bond, the civil rights leader who is now a faculty member at American University, will take on a cameo role. Mr. Bond recalled that his parents — his father, a college professor, became the first black president of Lincoln University, in southern Pennsylvania — used the book. “It was a guidebook that told you not where the best places were to eat,” he said, “but where there was any place.”
In November, Carolrhoda Books will release Mr. Ramsey’s “Ruth and the Green Book,” a children’s book with illustrations by the award-winning artist Floyd Cooper. It tells the story of a girl from Chicago in the 1950s and what she learns as she and her parents, driving their brand-new car to visit her grandmother in rural Alabama, finally luck into a copy of Victor Green’s guide. “Most kids today hear about the Underground Railroad, but this other thing has gone unnoticed,” said Mr. Ramsey. “It just fell on me, really, to tell the story.”
Historians of travel have recognized that the great American road trip — seen as an ultimate sign of freedom — was not that free for many Americans, including those who had to worry about “sunset laws” in towns where black visitors had to be out by day’s end.
For a large swath of the nation’s history “the American democratic idea of getting out on the open road, finding yourself, heading for distant horizons was only a privilege for white people,” said Cotton Seiler.
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
The Seventeen Most Innovative University Presses
The list, with recommended reading from each press, care of Huffington Post.
FYI: The crowd above isn't cheering for a Nebraska football win. They're cheering because of the University of Nebraska Press's definitive seven-volume set of the journals of Lewis and Clark.
From the piece (the aforementioned University of Nebraska)...
Donna Shear, director, says: "We're proud of our long commitment to publishing Native American, Western American, and regional history and literature. We're the largest and most diverse university press between California and Chicago and we take that role very seriously, publishing 160 new titles per year and keeping 3,000 titles in print. Next year, we'll mark the 50th anniversary of the first books published under our paperback imprint Bison Books. Bison Books makes classic literature accessible and affordable for everyone. Editors selected books for popular appeal and lasting value. UNP first published eight paperbacks under this imprint in 1961, including Old Jules by Mari Sandoz, and sold them for $1.00-$1.50 each. The books sold in truck stops and dime stores and were immediately popular. The Bison goal is still one we embrace today: making and keeping literature accessible and affordable. That's why we are making as many of our titles available in various e-book formats as we can. It's also why we continue to be committed to literature in translation, having published in English the last two Nobel laureates in literature. UNP is one of the most active American publishers of translated work. I'm especially excited about the publication in October of Four Years in Europe with Buffalo Bill--the first of The Papers of William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody series. This series is another indication of our commitment to the history and literature of the region, much like our comprehensive seven-volume Definitive Journals of Lewis and Clark we published in the early 2000s." Titles of special interest include Ted Gilley's Bliss and Other Short Stories (winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction) and Sonya Huber's Cover Me: A Health Insurance Memoir (Bison Books).
We Too Were Children, Mr. Barrie
That's a great name for a blog, isn't it? What's the blog about? Discussing children's books written by "adult writers" that are no longer in print. For instance, did you know Virginia Woolf wrote The Widow and the Parrot? Me, either. Thanks, WTWCMR for illuminating us!
Monday, August 23, 2010
John Kennedy Toole: The Omega Point
There's a new documentary on the life and work on the author of A Confederacy of Dunces. Learn more, here.
The Best Comics
IGN Comics helps comic book readers out by picking their favorite comic books published recently.
The Best of Marvel Comics.
The Best of DC Comics.
The Best of Vertigo Comics.
The Best Indie Comics.
Happy reading.
Jane Austen's Writing Desk: The Author's Creative Process
The Telegraph celebrates the ability to see an author's writing process through their manuscripts, something they fear they'll not be able to celebrate much longer with Microsoft Word, Google Docs, and the like.
From the piece...
Although manuscripts may yield the odd ugly truth about a writer's style, they are still a beautiful thing to behold – and one which risks becoming increasingly rare in today's digital world. The two draft chapters of Persuasion that will be on display show neat, looped writing, occasionally scoured out with thick, angry black lines. It is a visceral thrill to see a favourite writer's thought processes on paper; to realise that the sentences etched on to the page with such elegant certainty were scribbled out and scrawled back in again. It draws a direct line between the book on your bedside table and the woman who sat frowning at her desk, nearly 200 years ago.
Manuscripts are also a reminder of the vastly differing approaches that writers take to their art. For every perfectionist Flaubert, who could spend a week agonising over one page of crabbed handwriting, there is a Kerouac, who tapped out On the Road in three giddy weeks of spontaneous prose. As with Austen, the paragraph breaks were inserted into the 120-foot-long typewritten scroll by an editor; in both cases, only the manuscript points to the original breathlessness.
The Chart of Fantasy Art
Orbit has been taking a look at 2009 fantasy book cover art and has charted the rise of the green dragon. Also, swords are big and heroines wear shoes suitable to chase werewolves.
Sunday, August 22, 2010
In Terrifically Creepy Beloved Children's Author News
Mummified remains of babies found in a basement in Los Angeles may have ties to the author of Peter Pan. True story.
Books Have Many Futures
This, according to NPR.
And, talking about the future of books, why not read, in the Atlantic, the Bookfuturist Manifesto.
From the piece...
A bookfuturist manifesto could never really be like an avant-garde or political manifesto, partly because the whole idea of bookfuturism is to critically unravel these contradictions, rather than stake out definite positions that we'd cling to no matter what. For instance, when Amazon's Kindle first came out, I was completely of the mind that these text-only files cheaply mocked the experience of reading a book without actually including all its rich physicality, or trying to create a new, specifically digital experience. Now, as the whole industry's moved towards multimedia tablets and touch interfaces, I find myself thinking, "you know, maybe just focusing on text, and making that experience as useful and enjoyable as possible, is a really good idea. Text and textual interfaces are incredibly resilient and powerful. Bring back the command line!"
Bookfuturism turns out to be not just about books as such, but a kind of aesthetic and culture of reading, literacy, history, in connection with (only rarely in opposition to) other kinds of media culture. And reading here would also obviously include newspapers and magazines, and even things like maps and advertisements and data visualizations, plus whatever's displayed on the different screens most of us look at all day at home or work. What does it mean to live in this hyperliterate world? How do we make sense of it? There I think we need to actually articulate something like Jason Kottke's motto: "Liberal Arts 2.0."
The other way you can describe bookfuturism is by distinguishing it from what it's not. The bookfuturist is profoundly different from the two people he might otherwise easily be mistaken for at first glance - the technofuturist and the bookservative. These positions are easier to recognize, because most of our public discussions of new technology takes place as an argument between these two camps. And it's heating up now, because for a long time, even though people like CP Snow talked about "two cultures," these people were really on separate tracks - the engineers were doing their thing, the traditional culture people another. They didn't really understand each other, but mostly respected each other's credentials and institutional authority. Those disciplinary and technological walls started to fall apart at the same time as the elevated platforms separating enshrined experts from engaged citizens vanished. Authority is no longer a given, or given at all.
And, continuing our discussion of the future of book publishing, there's the Independent discussing their radical future.
Cult of the Unwitting Oracle
Pop Matters has an interesting article about the unintended religious legacy of writer H.P. Lovecraft.
From the piece...
In his lifetime, some people were already finding religious inspiration from Lovecraft’s literary work. He wrote in a 1933 letter that the author William Lumley believed that Lovecraft and his literary pals who used his pseudomythology were “genuine agents of unseen Powers in distributing hints too dark and profound for human conception or comprehension.” Lovecraft recognized the dilemma that he had become an unwitting oracle with some humor: “Bill tells me that he has fully identified my Cthulhu & Nyarlathotep … so that he can tell me more about ‘em than I know myself.” The irony was not lost on Lovecraft. In fact, it confirmed his views that people fall for some of the most absurd religious beliefs: even from his own pen! Nevertheless, this was a portentous moment. Lovecraft’s religious seed had been spilled.
Since William Lumley, the people finding a religious message in Lovecraft have slowly proliferated. It is a very dark, though ironically appealing message for many. The beginnings of the occult fascination with Lovecraft may be attributable to the number of forged Necronomicons, purporting to be the actual book that Lovecraft mentions in his fiction, that were forged as early as the 1940s and sold to unsuspecting seekers. The Simon Necronomicon (1977) is but the most popular of many predecessors. But it was not until the 1970s that Lovecraft’s fate as an unbeknownst prophet, one who made contributions to a recognized religion, was solidified by the notorious, but often misunderstood Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan.
As a brief aside, Selections from H.P. Lovecraft's Brief Tenure as a Whitman's Sampler Copywriter.
Saturday, August 21, 2010
Getting a Mental Kick Out of Reading Tough Books
The Washington Post discusses the joy of reading difficult books.
From the story...
This kind of reading you can't take on lightly, in moments between weeding the garden and answering your e-mail, or after a long day of meetings. You need some serious time -- or some serious sickness and drugs -- to clear the decks for such texts. They presented complex arguments to follow and difficult thoughts to parse. Some paragraphs and pages, even the occasional whole essay or chapter, needed several readings to sink in. Taking notes helped.
It wasn't the writing that called for all that labor, though there was some chewy prose. If my brain was sweating, it was because genuinely subtle, imaginative thinking rarely reads like a thriller. (I know: I own almost the complete works of Robert Ludlum, given to me by my son. He knows that once I pick up one of those trash novels, I can't put it down.)
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The thing is, getting through those complex books, and really grasping what they had to say, gave a thrill such as I hadn't had in ages.
Is a Sitcom Featuring a Hard-Drinking Composer Based on Stephen Sondheim?
That's the word, according to the Telegraph.
From the piece...
The original script for the pilot episode is understood to have portrayed Segal as a homosexual, heavy-drinking Broadway composer, aged 44, who lives a self-destructive, cocaine-fuelled existence before having a heart attack.
Sondheim, who is homosexual, had a heart attack in 1979, when he was 49. He has admitted that he has a "large capacity for alcohol" and told his biographer, Meryle Secrest, that he took cocaine in the Seventies. The script is believed to have undergone several key changes, including Segal suffering an aneurysm rather than a heart attack. However, a spokesman for Sondheim, whose musicals include Sweeney Todd and Follies, declines to discuss allegations that his lawyers requested changes be made.
"Steve is a very private person," says the spokesman. "The closest he will ever come to revealing his own personal history is in the form of the book he is publishing with Random House in October called Finishing the Hat, and even that is in lyric form."
His friendship with Logan is reportedly under strain.
Here's Dame Judi Dench singing "Send in the Clowns":
Friday, August 20, 2010
Finding the Beat
James Franco penned an essay in Vanity Fair about how he became Allen Ginsberg in the upcoming movie, Howl.
From the piece...
Young Ginsberg—the Ginsberg who went to Columbia, whose work was read by Lionel Trilling and Mark Van Doren, who was kicked out of college (and institutionalized) in part because he was gay—is not a familiar character. Everyone has an image of the large-bellied, bearded, balding Buddha figure that Ginsberg became. But to play the young Ginsberg, you, the actor, must be slim and clean-shaven and must dye your hair black—your full head of hair. You must wear thick-framed glasses. You must apply prostheses to your ears to make them stick out.
To play the young Ginsberg you will be required to read his poems in character—and will want to catch the distinctive New Jersey accent (he was from Paterson), and the determined lilt that varies in tone from ironic-tragic to wryly comic. So you will need to listen to recordings, and listen to them a lot. There is little film footage of Ginsberg from this time, but there are plenty of audio recordings. Notice how on the earliest ones his delivery is staid and serious—he even tells hecklers to shut up. On the later recordings, 35 years on, he is loose and funny, a practiced performer. If you are going to play the young Ginsberg, you will want to meld a variety of these readings. If you are completely faithful to the early ones, your performance could be flat. Use the early readings as a model for the scenes where Ginsberg is just starting out. Use the later ones to provide a sense of Ginsberg’s evolution. Regardless, listen to all of the recordings, every day, for months. Walk around New York doing this. Put the recordings on your iPod and walk. Get your voice in tune with his. Don’t worry about people looking at you. In New York, this is not weird.
There are 8-mm. home movies of Ginsberg taken on the Jersey Shore, but they show a boy too young for your needs. The closest thing to the period you want will be the film Pull My Daisy, by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie. It came out in 1959, only three years after Howl. There is no sync sound on the film, only a voice-over by Kerouac, so you won’t hear Ginsberg speak. But you’ll see how he sits. You’ll see his jaunty movements when he walks, dances, moves his arms. The other valuable piece of footage for your purposes is an interview with Ginsberg, filmed at the City Lights Bookstore, in 1965. Granted, this material is more than 10 years after the period you wish to depict. But the gesticulations are the same. Ginsberg loved to talk with his hands.
All of this is the external work on the character.
Here's a trailer:
Vladimir Nabakov's Lolita
It was published in the United States 52 years ago. The Reader's Almanac discusses the publication of the controversial work.
From the story...
After what he called “five years of monstrous misgivings and diabolical labors,” Nabokov finished writing Lolita in December 1953 and began submitting it to publishers. “It is overwhelmingly nauseating, even to an enlightened Freudian. To the public, it will be revolting. It will not sell, and will do immeasurable harm to a growing reputation.... I recommend that it be buried under a stone for a thousand years.” So went one of the many rejection letters. Five leading publishers—Doubleday; Farrar, Straus; New Directions; Simon & Schuster; and Viking—all turned it down.
That was when Nabokov’s European agent, Doussia Ergaz, recommended Maurice Girodias of the Olympia Press in Paris, publisher of Samuel Beckett, Henry Miller, and William S. Burroughs. Nabokov was then teaching Russian Studies at Cornell and feared he would be fired unless the book was published under a pseudonym. Girodias would publish it, but only with Nabokov’s name as author. Nabokov agreed but was wary, as he expressed in a letter in July 1955: “You and I know that Lolita is a serious book with a serious purpose. I hope the public will accept it as such. A succès de scandale would distress me.”
Girodias printed 5,000 copies of Lolita in English in September 1955. It sold mostly to English tourists and did not receive any critical attention until, in an interview with the London Times, Graham Greene named it one of the three best novels of 1955. This prompted John Gordon of the Sunday Express to order a copy and to denounce it as “about the filthiest book I’ve ever read” and “sheer unrestrained pornography.” The ensuing brouhaha (Gordon pointed out that Greene had been sued by Shirley Temple “for having said the little girl made her living out of displaying her thighs for the delectation of middle-aged gentlemen”) made Lolita into an international sensation.
The Eat Pray Love Merchandising Machine
The Julia Roberts movie has fueled a $350 million industry based on chick lit. But inside the numbers, the book looks less like a business juggernaut—and more like an innovative Hollywood marketing campaign. The Daily Beast has more, here.
From the piece...
The film's release catapulted the movie tie-in version of the paperback back onto the top of bestseller lists.
Meanwhile, for all the snickering about how a classic testosterone movie, The Expendables, beat out Julia Roberts et al. at the box office this weekend, a Sony source says that the movie will wind up generating close to $175 million in ticket sales this year worldwide, according to internal projections.
Perhaps most interesting, however, are the dozens of licensed products and knockoffs that are fairly unprecedented for a movie where the core audience is around 40. Sony cut a deal with HSN, and the shopping network devoted three full days of programming during the first weekend of August to Eat Pray Love-themed merchandise, some of which remains available on HSN.com.
The network would not comment on the viewership over that period, but said that it was "very pleased with the performance" and more than 100 products sold out during the event. Some featured products, like beaded bracelets and pillow shams, evoke the Italy-India-Bali theme of the story. (Gilbert structured her book into 108 "tales" in deference to the number of beads on a prayer bead necklace; HSN included a $350 prayer bead necklace.) Other products, such as Perlier's body cream and shower gel, were licensed, under the EPL banner.
Cookbook for a Cause
Download a free cookbook, help the Feeding America campaign. Sounds like a win/win, eh? The Pampered Chef cookbook has a collection of personal and family favorite recipes from folks like Courteney Cox, David Arquette, Mario Batali and more! Happy eating.
Thursday, August 19, 2010
Hans Keilson and Other Rediscovered Novelists
The Daily Beast discusses the literary success of Irene Nemirovsky and Hans Fallada, two rediscovered novelists who wrote about World War Two and resistance to Germany. Add Hans Keilson to that list.
From the piece...
It's important, then, to keep one's eyes on both sides of the literary-and-commercial divide when another alleged discovery comes along, particularly in an age hungry for the lurid sheen of memoir-style truth. But, as a critic and reader, it's thrilling when that writer deserves the hype. In this case, Hans Keilson, a German physician who fled to the Netherlands before World War II and later joined the Dutch resistance, helping to spirit downed pilots and Jews out of the country, is such an example. Farrar, Straus and Giroux has just published two Keilson novels, The Death of the Adversary and Comedy in a Minor Key, that the author began writing while underground. Adversary was originally published in the U.S. in 1962, when it was praised by TIME magazine, making Keilson something like a re-discovery for American readers.
This is the first English publication of Comedy in a Minor Key, a slim and poignantly titled novel. Based on the author's time in hiding and dedicated to the Dutch couple that sheltered him, Comedy tells the story of Wim and Marie, a married couple in their mid-twenties, who take in Nico, a fortyish Jew fleeing Germany.
In Today's "What Too Them So Long?" Department
Into the Wild and Into Death
Some unfortunate news is coming out of Alaska. A fan of Chris McCandless, subject of Jon Krakauer's amazing book Into the Wild and, of course, Sean Penn's movie of the same name, died trying to get to the bus that Chris McCandless died in.
The New Yorker has more, here.
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
The Real Life Quasimodo
With his hunched back and deformed face, Quasimodo, the tragic hero of Victor Hugo's novel The Hunch Back of Notre Dame, has always been considered a mythical creation drawn from the depths of the author's imagination.
Not so fast, notes the Telegraph.
From the piece...
Clues suggesting that Quasimodo is based on a historical figure have been uncovered in the memoirs of Henry Sibson, a 19th-century British sculptor who was employed at the cathedral at around the time the book was written and who describes a hunched back stonemason also working there.
The documents were acquired by the Tate Archive in 1999 after they were discovered in the attic of a house in Penzance, Cornwall, as the owner prepared to move out.
However, the references to a "hunchback sculptor" working at Notre Dame have only just been discovered, as the memoirs are catalogued ahead of the archive's 40th anniversary this year.
The seven-volume memoirs document Sibson's time in Paris during the 1820s, when he was employed by contractors to work on repairs to Notre Dame Cathedral.
For giggles, here's Quasimodo all Disneyfied:
The History of Captain America's Shield
Care to know? Look no further than at Marvel.
From the story...
Later stories, such as the classic CAPTAIN AMERICA Vol. 1 #355 by Roger Stern and John Byrne, revealed that President Franklin Roosevelt presented the hero with the traditional, circular shield that fans around the world know and love shortly after Steve Rogers became Captain America.
Crafted from vibranium and an experimental metallic alloy, Captain America's shield served him well as he fought throughout Europe. The vibranium in the shield made it capable of absorbing and deflecting large amounts of energy and force, while its aerodynamic design made it a perfect projectile weapon, giving Cap both great defensive and offensive capabilities.
But it's not just the shield's iconic status that makes it unique amongst all the other weapons in the Marvel Universe. During a mission in AVENGERS Vol. 1 #215, the villainous Molecule Man reduced Cap's shield down to its primary elements along with Thor's hammer, Iron Man's armor and the Silver Surfer's board, but it was the shield's atomic makeup that the villain described as the "weirdest of all."
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
For the Guardian, Ian Rankin discusses Robert Louis Stevenson's classic work, published in 1886.
From the piece...
Think you know this book?
Think again.
The notion of a "Jekyll-and-Hyde" character has become a lazy way of describing someone when they do something contrary to their normal nature. But that's not quite what Dr Henry Jekyll does. Rather, he consciously searches for a chemical that will allow him to separate out the two sides to his nature. He is fascinated by the duality of man and wants to explore his darker side. Resolute and determined, eventually he succeeds. But his evil self becomes stronger over time, until it threatens to extinguish Jekyll altogether. The doctor has played with fire and he's burning from the inside.
Sadly, we'll never know the thrill experienced by this explosive book's original audience. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is a work of suspense, but we all know the twist these days, don't we? So why do we still read the story? Well, it's written with great economy, tension and wit. I know few books so concise that pack such an emotional punch.
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
The Man Who Hated Comic Books
His name was Dr. Frederic Wertham who thought comic books were corrupting the minds of our youth. Booktryst has more, here.
From the piece...
Through his publication of the irresistibly entitled 1954 book, Seduction of the Innocent, Wertham crushed the genre known as "Crime Comics," and caused over a dozen comic-book publishers to close up shop. As a direct result, the industry chose to police itself by creating the Comics Code Authority in late 1954, rather than risk government censorship. The code mandated that "excessive violence; lurid, unsavory, gruesome illustrations; sex perversion and "all elements... considered violations of good taste or decency;" no longer debase the pages of American comic-books. Pop culture historian, Catherine Yronwode, believes Wertham's chilling effect on the comics cannot be overstated: "He and he alone virtually brought about the collapse of the comic book industry in the 1950s."
The Mysterious Midnight Poet
There's someone writing poetry and leaving it anonymously on people's doorsteps in Morgantown, West Virginia. Who is it? The Charleston Gazette investigates.
From the article...
City police Lt. Harold Sperringer says the poems written on scraps of paper don't appear threatening. In fact, the writer appears to be trying to sway recipients' minds on a variety of topics.
Sperringer said the poems are "hard to explain'' and they "don't make a lot of sense.''
The notes started appearing on porches last month in the city's first and second wards. So far police have collected several, but Sperringer says some residents have thrown them away.
Heinlein and the Saturday Evening Post
On Tor there's an interesting essay about Robert Heinlein writing science fiction for the Saturday Evening Post in the late 1940s, a time when the magazine didn't print much of anything science fiction related.
From the piece...
Every student of Heinlein knows that among the number of things he did during his career, one of the more significant events was selling four science fiction short stories to The Saturday Evening Post in the late 40s, thus becoming the first writer of the genre to graduate from “the pulps,” as the science fiction magazines of the time were known, to writing fiction for “the slicks,” the name for the higher-end, general interest magazines. And among those magazines the Post was at the top of the heap, having the highest circulation of any magazine in America at the time.
Why had Heinlein tried placing the story in a magazine that hadn’t published science fiction before? One obvious reason was for the money: The Saturday Evening post paid a multiple of what Heinlein could have earned from John Campbell and Astounding, and that of course was reason enough in itself, especially for a man who, as I noted in my earlier entry about Heinlein, wasn’t always flush with cash. Another reason was because Street & Smith, the publisher of Astounding, where Heinlein placed much of his fiction, had declared it was buying “all rights” to work it published, and Heinlein, who had an eye toward reprints and adaptations, refused to sell his work under such terms.
But Learning Curve points out another reason, which is of interest to me: Heinlein felt that there was a need to propagandize and popularize the idea of space travel and exploration, for a number of reasons, not a few related to the already-chilling cold war between the US and the Soviets. Writing for the pulps in that regard would be preaching to the converted; placing science fiction in the Post, on the other hand, would be putting it into the laps of people who had never read science fiction before, or who avoided it as something for the eggheads and misfits.
Today's Superheroes are Bad Role Models
This, according to child psychologists.
From a piece in the Guardian...
They thwart dastardly supervillains and have saved the world countless times over but macho superheroes now face a determined new foe in the guise of a mild-mannered child psychologist.
Professor Sharon Lamb, from the University of Massachusetts in Boston, accuses the new generation of superheroes, exemplified by Robert Downey Junior's playboy millionnaire Iron Man, of being bad role models for young boys.
Unlike conventional superheroes such as Superman, who stood for justice, fairness and decency, the modern macho superheroes portray a negative masculinity, characterised by mindless aggression and rampant sexism. Lamb, who surveyed 674 boys aged four to 18, claimed these hardnosed heroes may be damaging the social skills of teenagers and even affecting their performance at school.
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