The Wall Street Journal picks their favorite books on book collecting.
Sunday, October 10, 2010
The Auction That Is No Humbug
Charles Dickens' classic tale, A Christmas Carol, a tale I wrote about for Fine Books & Collections Magazine, is about to go to the auction block.
The Telegraph reports that the inscribed first edition could sell upward of $200,000.
Reading (Doesn't) Get in the Picture
The New York Times is reporting that picture books are languishing as parents are moving towards reading more and more chapter books to their children.
From the piece...
The picture book, a mainstay of children’s literature with its lavish illustrations, cheerful colors and large print wrapped in a glossy jacket, has been fading. It is not going away — perennials like the Sendaks and Seusses still sell well — but publishers have scaled back the number of titles they have released in the last several years, and booksellers across the country say sales have been suffering.
The economic downturn is certainly a major factor, but many in the industry see an additional reason for the slump. Parents have begun pressing their kindergartners and first graders to leave the picture book behind and move on to more text-heavy chapter books. Publishers cite pressures from parents who are mindful of increasingly rigorous standardized testing in schools.
“Parents are saying, ‘My kid doesn’t need books with pictures anymore,’ ” said Justin Chanda, the publisher of Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers. “There’s a real push with parents and schools to have kids start reading big-kid books earlier. We’ve accelerated the graduation rate out of picture books.”
Saturday, October 09, 2010
On Comic Novels
Why can't we take brilliant comic novels seriously? The Guardian probes this question.
From the piece...
The two rogue terms I'm addressing – literary and comic – share a vice: they both make exceptional what should go without saying. The novel was born of restless critical intelligence, and it was born laughing. "It pleases me to think," said Milan Kundera, in the course of accepting the Jerusalem prize for literature in 1985, "that the art of the novel came into the world as an echo of God's laughter." If this is so, then talk of the comic novel is tautologous. If we are to be true to the form there will be only "novels" and they will be effusive with wit and humour; thereafter, to help the bookshops categorise, we can allow all the sub-species they have shelf-space for – the novel of distended plot and fatuous denouement, the novel of who cares who dunnit, the novel of what Orwell in his great defence of Henry Miller called "flat cautious statements and snack-bar dialects", the novel, to sum up, of anorexic mirthlessness. But let's not forget that those are the anomalies.
No reader dare decry the pleasure any other takes in what he reads. But there is a fear of comedy in the novel today – when did you last see the word "funny" on the jacket of a serious novel? – that no one who loves the form should contemplate with pleasure. It isn't as though we have lost the capacity to laugh. Stand-up comedy is riding higher than ever. If anything there is an argument to be made that we are laughing too much. But we have created a false division between laughter and thought, between comedy and seriousness, between the exhilaration that the great novels offer when they are at their funniest, and whatever else it is we now think we want from literature.
And, talking about brilliant:
The Naked Truth about Some Very Famous Authors
Victor Hugo wrote in the nude. Agatha Christie wrote in the buff. 'Tis true. Neatorama highlights some well-known authors who let it all hang out.
With a Rebel Yell, Billy Idol Lands a Book Deal
Media Bistro notes that 80s rocker Billy Idol will pen his memoirs soon.
Perhaps he's been writing it when he wasn't dancing with himself:
KAPOW! It's the Mighty Maple Leaf!
CBC News is reporting that comic book legend Stan Lee is to create National Hockey League superheroes.
From the piece...
The idea is to attract a new generation of tweens to the world of hockey by rolling out stories involving the Guardian characters.
The NHL plans to reach boys aged nine to 14 with a website offering games involving the Guardians that will go live on Friday. A comic book could come by February, followed by a line of merchandise and video games.
The characters will be become familiar to hockey watchers, appearing in broadcasts and in animated sequences throughout the hockey season.
"I've always believed that every great plan starts with a great story," Lee said in a statement Thursday. "In the creation of GME and its unique and unprecedented relationship with the NHL, I truly believe we have the perfect combination from which to launch 30 new superheroes and excite young fans around the globe."
Friday, October 08, 2010
The Secret Weapon Against Childhood Obesity - A Magazine
The Atlantic has a piece about the new magazine ChopChop.
From the piece...
Over the next few months, an idea took shape that matched my skills to my goals: I would give recipes to pediatricians to distribute during well-child visits. Kids would learn to cook and take some responsibility for their own health. They would have fun, bond with their parents or caregivers, and stop eating so much damn junk. They would achieve nutritional literacy. This could be my own "little red wagon" project.
I called Barry Zuckerman, chief of pediatrics at Boston Children's Hospital. I knew Barry because when other hospital administrators seemed more worried about whether wheeling toys through hospital corridors violated arcane regulations, he wholeheartedly supported it. I knew that not only did Barry think outside the box, he barely knew there was a box. He loved the idea of ChopChop and pushed me to get more feedback from other doctors. Literally every single pediatrician said, "Bring it on!"
My son's pediatrician, Dan Slater at Harvard Vanguard Medical Associates, actually asked, "Can you get it to me in two weeks?" In spite of my excitement, I challenged him: Would he really have time to talk about cooking with a patient when he had only 30 minutes to cover an endless array of topics, among them seat belts, bike safety, oral hygiene, physical hygiene, physical activity (including the dictum to learn to swim), boundary setting and rules, sleep habits, school, growth and development, strangers, sport safety, safety at home, healthy friendships, and bullying?
His unequivocal response was yes. He told me he talked about healthy eating all day long with his patients. "But I have no tools. If you give me healthy recipes, then I'm not just talking about it; I'm giving my patients something they can really use."
It became obvious that there was a need for ChopChop, and that to get to doctors I needed to be a non-profit (I re-started Kid2Kid) and raise money. The first one into the money pool was Boston Medical Center, Barry's hospital, of course. When other hospitals heard that Barry was in, that got their competitive juices flowing, and they followed as well.
The Spectre of Tom Joad
Pop Matters discusses the importance of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath.
From the piece...
Conditions were ripe for the emergence of The Grapes of Wrath from the recently founded studio Twentieth-Century Fox. Producer Darryl Zanuck had always been considered sympathetic to progressive film content. While at Warner Bros. he championed the production of I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang (1933), which chronicles the real-life exploits of Robert Burns who had been mercilessly imprisoned and punished by the Georgia penal system. In 1933 he left Warners to found his own studio, Twentieth-Century Films, which purchased the bankrupt Fox Studios in 1935 to finally become Twentieth-Century Fox.
Similarly, John Ford had proven his progressive credentials with his pro-I.R.A., expressionist-inflected 1935 film The Informer. It won Best Actor, Best Director, Best Screenplay, and Best Music during the 1936 Oscars. Ford’s frequent screenwriter, Dudley Nichols, held well-known Left sympathies and consistently pushed Ford’s filmmaking into even more populist directions as their 1939 collaboration Stagecoach reveals, where bankers are exposed as scoundrels, and prostitutes and outlaws represent the true legacy of American democracy and frontier fortitude.
The Grapes of Wrath remains a foundational example of Popular Front culture. The Popular Front refers to a change in Communist Party ideology in 1935. Instead of opposing other Left groups like socialists, democrats, and anarchists, as had been previously done, the party initiated a coalition among them in order to collectively combat the rising threat of international fascism. Many cultural workers joined in the three primary efforts initiated by the Popular Front: anti-fascism, pro-union, and racial equality. Langston Hughes, Ernest Hemingway, James Cagney, John Howard Lawson, Billie Holiday, Orson Welles, Fritz Lang, Jean Renoir, John Steinbeck, John Ford, and Dudley Nichols, to only name a few, all allied themselves with a Popular Front outlook. Because of the diverse Left political philosophies influencing Popular Front culture, the products tend to emphasize a populist outlook with opaque gestures towards systemic analysis of capitalism and oppression.
The Hardy Boys Need No Eulogy
The Millions celebrates the Hardy Boys.
From the story...
Though I must have read 30 or 40 of the original blue-spined books, not one retains a bright spot in my memory. F. W. Dixon tried his best to innovate and add new elements to the tales. He sent his protagonists to exotic ports-of-call—war-torn Central America in The Mark on the Door, Scotland in The Secret Agent on Flight 101, India in The Bombay Boomerang, Africa in The Mysterious Caravan, and the depths of the Yucatan in The Jungle Pyramid. But no matter where the Hardy siblings traveled, I found their adventures invariably lackluster. Though they may have engaged a pre-teenage boy in the late 1960s or early ’70s, they were hopelessly insufficient to leave me any permanent pleasant memories. I would never stay up until one in the morning reading The Mysterious Caravan.
Happily, however, the executives at Simon & Schuster must have realized the dwindling audience for F. W. Dixon’s original series, and with #59 the Hardy Boys entered a new era. The last of the fifties—Night of the Werewolf—launched the brothers onto a more exciting trajectory. The post-58 bunch, written in the late 1970s and early ’80s, satisfied my desire for a more contemporary thrill, and I soon devoured the entire set. The covers presented Frank and Joe in modern coiffure and wardrobe, though they continued to change their features after each adventure (perhaps to avoid recognition by paroled crooks from past episodes): in #63 the boys appear as trim, intellectual sweater-wearers, while in #64 they wear tight short-sleeved shirts, are shaggy-headed with a hint of hair on their slightly exposed chests; still stranger, in #77 they seem to be neat yuppies out on a company picnic (though an out-of-place tiger growls menacingly from a rock behind them). Perhaps Simon & Schuster hoped to appeal to a wide range of white males and changed the Hardys’ appearances to approximate those of their readers. (I myself had a more definite resemblance: the first name of the elder Hardy sibling.)
Despite the variability of the boys’ appearance, their adventures became consistently entertaining.
Sylvia Plath Suicide Poem Discover. Written by...
Ted Hughes.
The Daily Mail has more...
It was the tragic end to a romance between two writers who captivated the public.
Now a newly discovered poem by Ted Hughes has cast fresh light on his torment over the suicide of his wife Sylvia Plath.
The harrowing work has been unearthed at the British Library 47 years after Plath gassed herself at the age of 30.
Hughes, a former poet laureate, became a hate figure for feminists after his philandering drove Plath to kill herself in February 1963.
But his previously unpublished work, Last Letter, offers a fresh take on the tragic incident.
The poem was discovered by Melvyn Bragg in the British Library’s Ted Hughes archive with the help of his second wife, Carol Hughes.
Thursday, October 07, 2010
Phil Collins Remembers the Alamo
Phil Collins, famous for "Sussudio", is writing a book about the Alamo and the Texas Revolution.
From the story on Billboard...
Collins tells Billboard.com that he's in the midst of writing a book about his extensive collection of Alamo and Texas Revolution artifacts, stemming from an interest in the topic that started when he saw the Walt Disney film "Davy Crockett" as a child. "It's a huge collection of memorabilia from the Alamo and before and after it, basically the Texas Revolution in general," explains Collins, who's a frequent visitor to and even rents property in San Antonio, near the Alamo site. "It's basically the history of all the things I've collected and putting them in the context of the revolution. It's in progress and it's entertaining."
Collins' collection includes a variety of weapons, armaments clothing from the fort, as well as receipt for nearly three dozen head of cattle signed by Alamo commander William B. Travis and another signed receipt for a horse saddle owned by Alamo survivor and early San Antonio Mayor John W. Smith.
And, for you, the aforementioned "Sussudio":
What Batman Taught Me About Being a Good Dad
That's the title of Adam Rogers' piece in the Atlantic.
From the story...
Back on Earth, in a wordless montage, Batman goes to see Vixen. She collapses in tears. Later, in front of a giant statue of Bwana Beast, other costumed heroes walk past her, making comforting gestures. In a presumably posthumous voiceover, Bwana Beast says he would do it all again, in a hummingbird's heartbeat. I decided, roughly, that I wouldn't let the kid see it. Because, you know: dead superheroes. But idiotically, I had used the end of part one as an opportunity to explain what "to be continued" meant. And the little so-and-so remembered. A few nights later, he asked to watch part two, and after some hesitation, I decided to give it a shot. During the memorial sequence, my son figured out something was wrong. "Papa," he said, "why they all just standing there?"
"Bwana Beast was their friend," I said. "And now he's gone."
"What happened to him?"
"He used up all his powers fighting the starfish monster."
The boy climbed up onto the couch into my lap, facing me. "Can't he get more power?" he asked, voice cracking.
"There isn't any more power," I said. "He used it all."
He started to cry. "Is he coming back?"
I started to cry, too.
Care to See the World's Most Expensive Book?
You're in luck, if you visit Paris, London or New York City.
From the small story in the Independent...
As part of a collection of rare books and manuscripts, the book will go on auction following its tour in London on December 7. By renowned ornithologist, naturalist, and painter Audubon (1785-1851), the book depicts his paintings of flamingoes, swans, and other American birds. Thought to be one of only 100 in existence, Birds of America is bound in large format - 90 centimeters by 60 centimeters - because the author wanted to present his subjects in their life-size.
Also on display is what is considered the most important book of the English language, a copy of Shakespeare's First Folio, a volume of 36 of his plays originally published in 1623. The book is valued at £1-1.5 million (1.2-1.8 million euros).
Wednesday, October 06, 2010
Confessions of a Used Book Salesman
It's begins, the Salon piece, "I spend 80 hours a week trawling junk shops with a laser scanner. I don't feel good about it."
From the story...
I'm pretty sure I first heard about the practice of shopping for books with laser scanners in a story on NPR, which, as I recall it, disparaged their use as classless. And, really, it is precisely this. The book merchant of the high-cultural imagination is a literate compleat and serves the literate. He doesn't need a scanner, because he knows more than the scanner knows. I fill a different niche—I deal in collectible or meaningful books only by accident. I'm not deep, but I am broad. My customer is anyone who needs a book that I happen to find and can make money from.
"I heard about what you're doing," says someone from my old MFA program. "It's a really creative way of educating yourself."
"I don't read the books," I say.
"But you … look through them?"
No—I look through the books only to see if there are marks or stains.
Can We Create a National Digital Library?
In "A Library Without Walls," the New York Review of Books asks that question.
From the story...
Can we create a National Digital Library? That is, a comprehensive library of digitized books that will be easily accessible to the general public. Simple as it sounds, the question is extraordinarily complex. It involves issues that concern the nature of the library to be built, the technological difficulties of designing it, the legal obstacles to getting it off the ground, the financial costs of constructing and maintaining it, and the political problems of mobilizing support for it.
Despite the complexities, the fundamental idea of a National Digital Library (or NDL) is, at its core, straightforward. The NDL would make the cultural patrimony of this country freely available to all of its citizens. It would be the digital equivalent of the Library of Congress, but instead of being confined to Capitol Hill, it would exist everywhere, bringing millions of books and other digitized material within clicking distance of public libraries, high schools, junior colleges, universities, retirement communities, and any person with access to the Internet.
The ambition behind this project goes back to the founding of this country. Thomas Jefferson formulated it succinctly: “Knowledge is the common property of mankind.” He was right—in principle. But in practice, most of humanity has been cut off from the accumulated wisdom of the ages. In Jefferson’s day, only a tiny elite had access to the world of learning. Today, thanks to the Internet, we can open up that world to all of our fellow citizens. We have the technical means to make Jefferson’s dream come true, but do we have the will?
Porn Magazines Go Old-Fashioned
The New York Times highlights how the porn mag industry is, uh, stripping down, and going back to basics.
From the piece...
Come closer,” Mr. Leder instructed Ms. Nola, as the two tried different angles. “Tilt. Head this way.” With the exception of Mr. Leder’s 2-year-old son, Jack, who would occasionally stumble into the frame, the house was surprisingly quiet for a photo shoot, especially a pornographic one. There were no photo assistants, no special lighting, no bunny suit in sight.
Mr. Leder continued snapping Ms. Nola — raising her head, facing the sun, lifting a leg — until his camera suddenly stopped clicking. He looked at his 1965 Canon Pellix and spotted the problem. “I’ve got to get some film,” he said.
Film?
Mr. Leder is no ordinary pornographer. Along with his wife and editor, Danielle, the bearded, flannel-wearing Mr. Leder is the creator of Jacques, an upstart adult magazine in Brooklyn that reinterprets vintage Playboy in the age of 3-D porn and GPS hookups.
Joined by a small but influential roster of new pinup magazines — published in places like Amsterdam and the Lower East Side — Jacques is offering a self-conscious throwback to the magazines of the late 1960s and early 1970s, before the days of silicone implants, Photoshop and streaming HD video.
Should Criminals Be Allowed to Read Violent Crime Books in Prison?
The Huffington Post discusses it.
From the story...
Other books available in the prison system include Ann Rule's "If You Really Loved Me," about the real-life manipulation of a 14-year-old into murdering her mother, and "Along Came a Spider," a novel about a psychopath who kidnaps and kills children of prominent people. The AP obtained lists of prison library holdings under the state's Freedom of Information Act.
State Sen. John Kissel, R-Enfield, whose district includes six state prisons, said he will ask that "In Cold Blood" and other true crime or graphically violent books be removed from prison libraries.
"There are so many books in the world, and I don't think inmates need to be reading about murder, whether it's fiction or nonfiction," he said. "One would hate to think that Mr. Hayes read this book for hours and hours and hours and thought about it for days and days and days and hatched his plan for what took place in Cheshire."
If the department does not remove the books, he said, he will introduce legislation to force them.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Connecticut said it would oppose any such ban.
"This is yet another case of politicians scapegoating expression as the cause of serious violent crime," said ACLU attorney David McGuire.
The Ancient Dream
The Boston Review recently had a long piece about the married life of Leo and Sophia Tolstoy.
From the story...
At the time of their nuptials, Lev Nikolayevich, by then a recognized writer, was a 34-year-old count who had lived a good fifteen years with the contradictions of character familiar to all readers of literature: on the one hand, he was a gambler, a drinker, a whoremaster; on the other, a breast-beating penitent who preached love, poverty, and humility, but made his family miserable, lived in luxury, and couldn’t get enough of his own growing fame. For the mass of Russians he would become a saint; for church and state, a devil; for Maxim Gorki, a figure of genius and disgust whose humility was “hypocritical and his desire to suffer . . . offensive!” In his early 30s, Tolstoy already wanted desperately to be saved from himself.
Sophia Andreyevna Behrs was the eighteen-year-old daughter of Andrey Behrs, a court doctor, and Lyubov Alexandrovna Behrs, a childhood classmate of Tolstoy’s. As full of intelligent high spirits as the Natasha of War and Peace, Sophia read, dreamed, larked about, loved music passionately, and fantasized conquering the world through marriage to a Great Man. Sonya (as she was known) could, in fact, have grown into a woman of sensibility and character had she ever had some real work to do. As it was, all she ever did have was the inherent sturm-und-drang of being married to Lev Nikolayevich. This would become not only her subject, but her organizing principle, her all-encompassing reality: the circumstance that nourished a richly talented arrest.
They were married in Moscow on September 23, 1862. Immediately after the ceremony, off they went to Tolstoy’s country estate, Yasnaya Polyana, where (except for winter visits to Moscow) they lived for the rest of their long lives. Here, Tolstoy wrote his books, took his walks, rode his horse, underwent his religious conversion, and held court to the world. And here, Sonya bore thirteen children, entertained hordes of visitors, copied out Tolstoy’s work (War and Peace six times), and eventually ran the estate herself. Good times were plentiful—parties, dinners, celebrations; skating, swimming, sleighing; musicales and performed readings; twenty people at the table every evening—yet almost none of them are recorded in the diaries where, in time-honored diary fashion, we read almost exclusively of the ongoing distress and discontent of two of the most strong-willed people who ever lived.
The Joker in the Deck: The Birth of a Supervillian
Who created Batman's nemesis, anyway? Meet Jerry Robinson.
From the piece in the New York Times...
Published by the company that would become DC Comics, the Batman stories were an immediate hit and pushed the men hard: they would work in Mr. Kane’s Bronx apartment and have long discussions over lunch or dinner to come up with content. It was a hectic pace, but, Mr. Robinson said with a smile, “I was young and foolish.”
If a hero is only as good as his opponent, then the creation of the Joker cannot be underestimated. “Villains, I always thought, were more interesting,” Mr. Robinson said. He learned from his studies that some characters were built on their contradictions, so he decided that his evildoer would have a sense of humor.
“I think the name came first: the Joker,” he said. “Then I thought of the playing card.” (There was always a deck at hand, he recalled, thanks to his family’s love of bridge and other card games.)
Tuesday, October 05, 2010
A Life in Books: Lauren Child
If you have kids, you've read Lauren Child's books. If you don't have a kid, read Lauren Child's books anyway. They're damn charming. The Guardian interviews her, here.
From the piece...
In Charlie and Lola's third outing, 2003's I Am Too Absolutely Small for School, Lola's parents decree that she is "nearly quite big enough" to go into the classroom. Lola raises a series of objections: the uniform; the curriculum; school dinners, which she doesn't want to eat "alone, all by myself, on my own". In the book, of course, Charlie is on hand to reassure her and Lola ends up having a high old time, afterwards pinning her initial reluctance on her invisible friend, the can-carrying Soren Lorenson (rendered in the books in clear, raised plastic, so children can catch a glimpse of him when the light's right). But for Child herself, things didn't go quite so smoothly. Soon after she passed school age, her father, who had been teaching art at Downe House, was offered a job at Marlborough College, over the county border in Wiltshire. "We'd been living in this little village and suddenly we were in what felt like a vast metropolis," she remembers. "In fact, it wasn't a big move, but it felt enormous – shocking! I moved from my tiny village school to an infant school in the town, and I just found it overwhelming." Her parents picked up quickly on her misery and moved her after a term, but the scars clearly run deep, and go some way to explaining, perhaps, why her books focus so firmly on small, solvable problems: how to put off bedtime; what to do if you don't like mashed potato.
Child is modest about her early talents ("I wasn't the best drawer in the world, hardly child-prodigy standard"). But her father encouraged her interest in art and her mother, meanwhile, made sure there were plenty of books about the house, and inadvertently stoked a fascination with Americana still visible in her artwork today. "I was obsessed!" Child grins. "And crazy as it sounds, it was all down to Alistair Cooke. My mum was really into him – I watched his documentary series with her, and we'd always listen to Letter from America on the radio. Their sitcoms made ours seem lacklustre in comparison. And the films! When I was a child, English films so often seemed to be about the dreary, hard-slog side of life, whereas you'd watch The Philadelphia Story, and it was endless glamour: the stories were overblown and exciting, the costumes and sets were glorious."
The Case of the Purloined Franzen Glasses (UPDATED)
+Greg+Martin.JPG)
Someone stole Franzen's glasses...Then asked for a ransom of $100,000 for their safe return. This is true.
Luckily, before his glasses were taken...FROM HIS FACE...he wrote this for the New Yorker.
After his glasses were safely returned (PHEW!), Frazen spoke to NPR about it.
And now, as the dust settles and the police chopper is grounded, people are asking, "WTF?!"
And now, the turd who stole them.
Peanuts and the Death of Comics
Good grief! Charlie Brown is 60 years old. No strip, notes Salon, will ever be as beloved or as important.
From the piece...
From the international headquarters of Things Ain't What They Used to Be, a bulletin: This weekend marks the 60th anniversary of "Peanuts," which debuted Oct. 2, 1950. After honoring the date by revisiting Fantagraphic Books' handsomely designed anthologies of Charles Schulz's strips -- highly recommended to any "Peanuts" fan -- I want to pose a couple of questions here.
First, is there any recent-vintage daily comic strip being published regularly in North America that's as widely recognized, never mind beloved, as "Peanuts"?
And second, is such a scenario even possible?
I'm pretty sure the answer to both questions is "no." But I'm throwing them out anyhow in hopes that someone will persuade me otherwise. I love the comic strip form, but I feel fairly certain it's either dead or doomed -- because even if there were somebody out there doing early Schulz-quality work, who would know about it? I mean, besides die-hards who consciously go spelunking for good new strips online and spread the word when they find something? Seriously, does anyone even do that? The world has changed to the point where that's less possible, maybe impossible.
Monday, October 04, 2010
Do You Have to Be a Murderer to Write Killer Fiction?
That's the question posed, recently, by Mulholland Books. Do you write better crime fiction if you've been involved, a victim or the perp, in crime yourself?
From the piece...
Crime fiction is about murder. Do crime writers who have experienced violence write different kinds of murder mysteries than people who never have? I think so. Just like the best war novels are almost most often written by men who’ve experienced war (From Here to Eternity, The Young Lions, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and The Naked and the Dead). In American fiction, as far as I know, the only great war novel ever written by a guy who had no experience in war was Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage.
My favorite crime novel, The Hoods by Harry Grey, was written by a man who was serving time for manslaughter in Sing Sing. While it is true one of the most successful books, The Godfather, was written by a man with no known ties to the Mafia, Mario Puzo was smart enough to pick up a great deal of street gossip and anecdotes from his Mafia-infused neighborhood. In addition to this, as a veteran of World War II, he witnessed much violence and corruption in postwar Berlin. Out of this came his wonderful novel The Dark Arena. Perhaps the greatest crime trilogy of the 20th century, the Studs Lonigan books, was written by James T Farrell, a guy who knew many Studs Lonigans in the poor and violent Chicago neighborhood he grew up in. And of course, we also have Nelson Algren.
Perhaps a writer can compensate for not personally taking part in violence by being an acute observer. Therefore we have people like George Pelecanos, Dennis Lehane, and James Ellroy, who may not have participated in violence themselves, but avidly follow and report on it.
Sunday, October 03, 2010
Authors Feel Pinch in the Age of E-Books
The Wall Street Journal discusses how authors are finding their way in this new digital book age.
From the piece...
It has always been tough for literary fiction writers to get their work published by the top publishing houses. But the digital revolution that is disrupting the economic model of the book industry is having an outsize impact on the careers of literary writers.
Priced much lower than hardcovers, many e-books generate less income for publishers. And big retailers are buying fewer titles. As a result, the publishers who nurtured generations of America's top literary-fiction writers are approving fewer book deals and signing fewer new writers. Most of those getting published are receiving smaller advances.
"Advances are down, and there aren't as many debuts as before," says Ira Silverberg, a well-known literary agent. "We're all trying to figure out what the business is as it goes through this digital disruption."
Can Fascism Be Funny?
That's the question the Daily Beast asks after Nancy Mitford's long out-of-print novel, Wigs on the Green, is reissued.
From the piece...
The question is usually answered by reference to PG Wodehouse’s The Code of the Woosters where Bertie briefly faces down Sir Roderick Spode, head of the Black Shorts movement. That passage is generally referred to as satire. But it is not quite. Roderick Spode may be based on the leader of the British Union of Fascists, Oswald Mosley (Spode’s policies include the dividing up of English counties for the cultivation of specific types of vegetable). But Spode is a character from pure planet Wodehouse—just as much as Aunt Agatha or Gussy Fink-Nottle.
And it is just as well. For the closer fascism gets to real satire, let alone real life, the closer you are to things which do not assist humour. The principle interest in Nancy Mitford’s finally republished novel is seeing this at work—watching where the satire works and where it falls more than flat.
Of course, for Mitford, Wigs on the Green was not simply a satire of the wretched British fascist movement: it was also family biography. By the time she came to write the novel, two of her five sisters had fallen for fascism (and for fascists) while another, Jessica, had fallen for Communism.
Her satirical range does not (and cannot) extend to encompass the horrors which her sisters were, by the time of writing, not just flirting with, but sleeping with.
Before Scott Pilgrim...
There was Raleigh.
The New York Times takes note of Scott O'Malley's graphic novel, Lost at Sea.
From the piece...
Though “Scott Pilgrim” dishes out its share of confusion and angst, “Lost at Sea” is much more melancholy. It captures the pain and desperate limbo of being 18 and aimless — and is a book I’d recommend for any brooding, sensitive, searching teenager who could use a reminder that she’s not alone.
Its protagonist is the doleful Raleigh, who’s on a road trip with a threesome of friends who aren’t really her friends, and who feels so empty inside that she’s come to believe her soul has been stolen by a cat.
“This is hard to admit but I am terrified of everything,” Raleigh says. “Sometimes I get very scared by my own hair falling into my face.”
Saturday, October 02, 2010
The Great Great Gatsby
Care to watch "Gatz" - a seven HOUR performance based on Fitzgerald's famous novel? Learn more about it, here.
From the story in the New York Times...
This is how “Gatz,” Elevator Repair Service’s seven-hour performance now at the Public Theater, begins. When I saw it last winter, produced by the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., the set was a spectacularly cluttered office that appeared to be part warehouse, part paper-pushing operation and part waiting room — not a bad metaphor, if you think about it, for the inside of your own head. And what goes on in your head is, in a way, the real subject of “Gatz,” which is not, strictly speaking, a staged reading of “The Great Gatsby,” even though every one of the book’s 47,000 words is pronounced onstage. Neither is it a dramatic adaptation of Fitzgerald’s novel. It’s more a dramatization of the act of reading itself — of what happens when you immerse yourself in a book.
Slowly, over half an hour or so, the man in the office (Scott Shepherd) starts to become interested in what he’s reading. Pretty soon he’s doing the voices, raising his pitch almost to a falsetto for Daisy Buchanan and artificially deepening it for Tom. And then, miraculously, people who have been silently coming in and out of the office, going about their workaday business, begin to imitate the characters, speaking the lines and even acting them out. A young woman who had been idly reading a golf magazine turns into Jordan Baker. A bullying, key-jangling janitor becomes Tom. Wilson, the garage mechanic, emerges — of course! — from the tech guy, summoned to deal with all that balkycomputer equipment.
This, or something like it, is what happens when you get caught up in a book.
James Franco's Favorite Poems
Franco, now starring in the Allen Ginsberg biopic, Howl, picks his favorite poems for New York Magazine.
What Are Books Good For?
That's the question recently posed by the Chronicle of Higher Education.
From the piece...
I've been wondering lately when books became the enemy. Scholars have always been people of the book, so it seems wrong that the faithful companion has been put on the defensive. Part of the problem is knowing what we mean exactly when we say "book." It's a slippery term for a format, a technology, a historical construct, and something else as well.
Maybe we need to redefine, or undefine, our terms. I'm struck by the fact that the designation "scholarly book," to name one relevant category, is in itself a back formation, like "acoustic guitar." Books began as works of great seriousness, mapping out the religious and legal dimensions of culture. In a sense, books were always scholarly. Who could produce them but serious people? Who had the linguistic training to decode them?
In the sense of having been around a long time, the book has a long story to tell, one that might be organized around four epochal events, at least in the West. In the beginning was the invention of writing and its appearance on various materials. The second was the development during the first years of the Christian era of the codex—the thing with pages and a cover—first as a supplement and eventually as a replacement for the older technology of the scroll. The third was what we think of as the Gutenberg moment, the European deployment of movable type, in the 15th century. And the fourth is, of course, the digital revolution in the middle of which we find ourselves today.
When we say "book," we hear the name of a physical object, even if we're thinking outside the codex. The codex bound text in a particular way, organizing words into pages, and as a result literally reframed ideas. The static text image on my desktop is the electronic cousin of late antiquity's reading invention. When my screen is still, or when I arrange text into two or four pages, like so much visual real estate, I am replicating a medieval codex, unbinding its beautifully illuminated pages. Yet reading digitally is also a scroll-like engagement—the fact that we "scroll down" connects us to a reading practice that dates back several millennia. One of the things that book historians study is the change in, and persistence of, reading technologies over time, and what those historians have demonstrated is that good technologies don't eradicate earlier good technologies. They overlap with them—or morph, so that the old and the new may persist alongside yet another development. Think Post-its, printed books, PC's, and iPads, all in the same office cubicle.
Friday, October 01, 2010
Writing: The Dangerous Profession
For the Windsor Star, Salman Rushdie thinks it's a dangerous time for writers.
From the piece...
Salman Rushdie, a man whose writings put his own life at risk, says there has never been a more dangerous time for artists who challenge official historical, political and religious doctrine in the world.
"We have to understand that these are days in which writers themselves, not just novelists, not just playwrights and poets, but journalists as well are in more danger perhaps than they've ever been," Rushdie said Monday in an address to a conference of risk-management professionals, meeting in Edmonton.
"The Iraq war has resulted in the deaths of more journalists than any war in history. In many Islamic countries, journalists are now seen as fair targets ... so the job of reporting and recording history is more dangerous today than it has ever been."
For those same reasons, the role of the artist to shape and expand our understanding of that world has never been more important, Rushdie said.
"If your task is to push out the boundaries, and open up the universe, you cannot do that by sitting safely in the middle of the room. If you want to push out the borders, you have to actually go to the borders and push against them. You have to go to the edge and of course the edge is not without its risks because there are people there who do not want the universe opened some more and in fact would prefer it shut down considerably. And they're often people of considerable power and ruthlessness."
The Unabomber's New Book
It's a bit discouraging when my writing can't find a publisher but a homegrown terrorist...in prison, can. Wo, is me. The news, care of Peninsula Daily News, is that Ted Kaczynski has a new book out.
From the article...
The Unabomber -- who argued that technology is at fault for society's current problems and pockmarked his argument with bombings for nearly two decades -- has published a book through a small Port Townsend publisher.
But his publisher is short of the accolades book publishers usually place on their authors.
"He is a murderer, and he is a sociopath," said Adam Parfrey, who published Technological Slavery by the now-imprisoned Theodore J. Kaczynski.
But Parfrey said in an interview Monday that Kaczynski "is also provocative and intelligent.
"He is a genius and a very good writer who can add to the discussion about technology," said Parfrey.
What Celebrity-Penned Children's Books Tell Us About Their Authors
Notes, care of New York Magazine.
From the piece...
If Roast Beef Could Fly by Jay Leno
Synopsis: After helping his dad build a new rotisserie for a big family dinner, little Jay Leno wants really badly to taste the roasting meat, but his mom won’t let him and he’s too short to reach it, so he pulls out his plastic comb and uses it to taste the meat drippings, but then on his fourth pass, the comb gets stuck and melts into the roast beef and his dad can’t cut the meat so he throws it out the window and the dog catches it and the whole anecdote just keeps going on and on and on ...
Excerpt: Dad picks up the roast beef like a football and throws it out the window. Everybody is just standing there, mouths open, stunned … or maybe just hungry.
What it says about the author: Jay Leno’s habit of taking things that aren’t his and ruining them for everybody else began earlier than we thought.
The Unofficial Twilight Cookbook
It's a real thing, this fantasy food cookbook. The Guardian takes a bite into it.
From the piece...
What is it with vampires? Despite the fact that they are forced to spend the whole of eternity unable to eat, loads of the food obsessives I know seem to be fascinated with them. This is presumably why Gina Meyers thought there was enough scope to write Love at First Bite: The Unofficial Twilight Cookbook.
It is as dreadful as you might expect from an author who has the audacity to give her self-published book a five star review on Amazon without the benefit of a pseudonym, and I feel sorry for some of those who give it less than glowing reviews, such as the poor hapless woman who says, "I thought that this cookbook would teach me how to cook for my boyfriend, but instead it pretty much made him dump me".
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
