The list, care of Flavorwire.
Friday, August 24, 2012
Thursday, August 23, 2012
Elvis Lit - A Survey
The Millions puts on some blue suede shoes and tramps around the ever growing library of Elvis Presley books.
From the piece...
Elvis Presley disappeared 35 years ago today.
I choose the verb disappeared for a reason. Not because I’m a big believer in conspiracy theories or Elvis sightings — I am not — but because in a very real sense Elvis Presley didn’t actually die on Aug. 16, 1977, he simply moved on to a different level in the ether of superstardom. When asked what he planned to do once Elvis was in the ground, his evil genius of a manager, Col. Tom Parker, said it all: “Why, I’ll just go right on managing him!” As Elvis biographer Peter Guralnick put it, “RCA (records) would discover that Elvis was as great a sales phenomenon in death as in life.”
Even more phenomenal than the unquenchable hunger for Elvis music, Elvis impersonators, and Elvis memorabilia (black velvet paintings, ashtrays, liquor bottles, etc.) is the relentless outpouring of books about Elvis. I call it ElvisLit — a river of words that gives every indication, year after year after year, that it will never run dry. Guralnick described it as “the cacophony of voices that have joined together to create a chorus of informed opinion, uninformed speculation, hagiography, symbolism, and blame.”
Inside the Scrabble Cheating Scandal
Indeed - Scrabble has a cheating scandal.
More from the Atlantic...
For those of us who don't compete and may not even play Scrabble, such dastardly behavior hiding beneath a certain apparent word-nerdiness was simply funny, an insight into a subculture revealing unexpected truths. But even before the ruling on Tuesday, the swirling speculation about this player's tactics means that cheating has been a hotly debated topic long before some 350 people gathered this week in a large ballroom in Orlando for Nationals.
This game is not just a hobby. The competition ranges from 1 to 4, expert to novice. "Most of the people there study word lists and play Scrabble every single day," said Max Karten, winner of division 4 of the national championship in 2009. The top prize in that division is $2,000. In division 1 it's $10,000. There are 28 rounds of the games prior to the finals on the last day; it was during round 24 that the cheater was caught. We sought out the player through
Art Moore, who was playing the underaged player and reported him for hiding tiles, revealed in an online forum for Scrabble enthusiasts that his game began much like any other competition until he noticed something odd: "the two blanks were sitting next to each other in one of the quads on my opponent's side of the board. Knowing who I was playing this immediately drew a red flag. I'd played him the day before and won handily even though he had drawn both blanks."
Oscar Wilde - Fashion Magazine Writer
For reals. That was his day job once.
From an article in the Los Angeles Review of Books...
FOLLOWING THE HAYMARKET affair of 1886, where seven
police officers and four civilians were killed in Chicago during a
labour rally, Oscar Wilde signed a petition which supported the
anarchists who were claimed to have placed the fatal bombs in the area.
Less than six months after signing this petition, which was prepared by
George Bernard Shaw and endorsed by Friedrich Engels, among others,
Wilde began working for a fashion magazine, comparable to today's Vogue.
Inconsistent? Paradoxical? Strange? For those who believe in the dissident portrayal of Wilde, the seeker of The Soul of Man under Socialism,
the former act is an earnest, sincere expression of his real
sympathies, while the latter one is a result of pressing material needs
(two years previously he had been married to Constance Lloyd, with whom
he’d had two sons), if not of outright desperation. But a closer look at
the volumes of his magazine, The Woman’s World, which is available to read through Google's digitalization program complicates this simple opposition between Wilde the dissident and
Wilde the sell-out. Under his editorship, the magazine had little
patience for gossip and superficiality, instead focusing on the
commodification of Victorian life: its potentials, its downfalls, and
the role of feminism in it.
Wilde's magazine is a serious venture, a stark
contrast to the glossy titles of our era. How lucky were those editors,
one thinks, working in a cultural milieu where commodification could be a
magazine's subject, and not its lifeblood. That The Woman’s World seemed more interested in reconfiguring the idea of femininity (Wilde pressed his publisher to revise the original title, The Lady’s World,
calling it not “womanly”) attests to its intellectual status. Upmarket,
highbrow and prestigious, Wilde's magazine could almost be described as
dissident in its frequent advocacy of the New Woman, a politically
empowered, radical re-appropriation of Victorian femininity.
Book Pulping - a History
New York Magazine looks into it.
From the article...
What eureka moment gave us book recycling? The details are forgotten, but we know that in the early seventeenth century, when the cost of paper was astronomically high, proto-publishers ripped old pages from unwanted books and used them as endleaves. Adam Smyth, a senior lecturer in literature at the University of London, notes that a mention of the lost Shakespeare play Love’s Labour’s Won was discovered inside a copy of the 1637 text Certaine Sermons. * “All of which suggests,” Smyth says, that “an early Jonah Lehrer would have quickly seen his pages binding the boards of someone else’s book.”
Between those ancient repurposed pages and modern pulping came another stroke of inspiration: the invention of wood-based paper. It used to be that paper was made from rags, a shortage of which gripped the Western world in the early nineteenth century. In Nova Scotia, a young logger and poet named Charles Fenerty proposed a solution: Why not make paper out of wood? (Rags have to be made; trees grow.) “I entertain an opinion that our common forest trees, either hard or soft wood, but more especially the fir, spruce, or poplar, on account of the fibrous quality of their wood, might easily be reduced by a chafing machine, and manufactured into paper of the finest kind,” he wrote in 1844.
Fenerty died in 1892 without ever having secured intellectual property rights to, or a following for, his notion. It took German mechanic Friedrich Gottlob Keller to actually develop a machine that realized Fenerty’s vision. Keller sold his invention to an entrepreneur; a patent was granted; an industry was born.
Why Misquotations Catch On
How sayings from books, movies, and speeches get misremembered, care of the Atlantic.
From the piece...
Have you noticed how incorrect quotes often just sound right—sometimes, more right than actual quotations? There's a reason for that. Our brains really like fluency, or the experience of cognitive ease (as opposed to cognitive strain) in taking in and retrieving information. The more fluent the experience of reading a quote—or the easier it is to grasp, the smoother it sounds, the more readily it comes to mind—the less likely we are to question the actual quotation. Those right-sounding misquotes are just taking that tendency to the next step: cleaning up, so to speak, quotations so that they are more mellifluous, more all-around quotable, easier to store and recall at a later point. We might not even be misquoting on purpose, but once we do, the result tends to be catchier than the original.
In some cases, it's a simple question of word order. "Methinks the lady doth protest too much" has an easier rhythm than the actual, "The lady doth protest too much, methinks." The change certainly matters if you're a poet, or preserving the integrity of Shakespeare. But at least it does no real harm to the meaning.
In some, it's a simplification or contraction of something that's a bit messier to remember without it. "Beam me up, Scotty!" was never actually uttered by any Star Trek character. "Beam us up, Mr. Scott!" was, in the 1968 "Gamesters of Triskelion." Likewise, Humphrey Bogart's iconic "Play it again, Sam" was in reality, "If she can stand it, I can. Play it." Note how in both cases, the sense remains basically the same. The adjustments are minor ones. They aren't blatant misquotations so much as attempts to, on some level, make things sound the way they should sound. These misquotes are in the category of, "right, that's what I wanted to say—and maybe even how I wanted to say it."
Wednesday, August 22, 2012
Wondering How Far Magazines Must Fall
Magazines are in crisis. People aren't buying them much anymore.
From a story in the New York Times...
The problem is more existential than that: magazines, all kinds of them,
don’t work very well in the marketplace anymore.
Like newspapers, magazines have been in a steady slide, but now, like
newspapers, they seem to have reached the edge of the cliff. Last week,
the Audit Bureau of Circulations reported that newsstand circulation in
the first half of the year was down almost 10 percent. When 10 percent
of your retail buyers depart over the course of a year, something
fundamental is at work.
I talked to an executive at one of the big Manhattan publishers about
the recent collapse at the newsstand and he said, “When the airplane
suddenly drops 10,000 feet and it doesn’t crash, you still end up with
your heart in your stomach. Those are very, very bad numbers.”
Tuesday, August 21, 2012
Monday, August 20, 2012
A Guide to Collecting Cookbooks
AbeBooks whips up a batch of collectable cookbooks, here.
From the piece...
The sheer array of cookbooks is daunting to the first-time collector so it is advisable to specialize in a single genre or ethnicity, or to collect the work of a particular author or group of writers from a region or period.
The demand for rare cookbooks is fuelled by the fact they are so hard to find, especially in good condition. Once a book has gone out-of-print, it becomes increasingly difficult to find and its value increases as it becomes more collectible.
Condition is the key factor. Look for a pristine copy that appears to have been lovingly read rather than one that has endured the heat, liquids and dirty fingerprints of a working kitchen. Is it signed by the author or someone of note? Does it have a dust jacket? Is it a first edition? Is it out-of-print? These are all important factors to take into consideration before purchasing.
Sunday, August 19, 2012
Navigating the World of Literary Agents
Michael Bourne at the Millions is our guide.
From the post...
Now, it may sound heartless to reject 18 query letters in 14 minutes, and every time Brower hit send on a rejection email, my heart sagged a little at the poor writer seeing yet another rejection from an agent, but you have to see it from the agent’s perspective. Literary agents work on commission – typically, an agent takes 15% of a client’s earnings – and every minute an agent spends working on a manuscript that doesn’t sell is a minute that agent is working for free.
This, I think, helps explain the anger and angst so many writers feel toward agents and other publishing professionals. Most writers when they show their work to someone – a professor, a friend, a spouse – they have a reasonable expectation of getting encouragement or at least some useful feedback. But an agent isn’t a friend. An agent isn’t a teacher, either. An agent’s job is to find an author whose novel is ready for publication, or so close to ready that it makes economic sense for the agent to put the time into helping make it ready, and connect that writer to a publisher. That’s it. The better agents attend writing conferences, visit MFA programs, and scour literary magazines for fresh talent, but all the rest of it, getting your work to a publishable level, building a track record that will be attractive to a publishing house, wangling connections that will get you out of the slush pile – that’s your job.
If you are sending out query letters blindly to dozens of literary agents, as I did when I finished my first book five years ago, you’re engaging in the same kind of magical thinking that makes people buy lottery tickets. You might get lucky, but the odds of that are, well, somewhere in the neighborhood of 1 in 11,111.
Amazing! The Return of Amazing Stories
After a long haitus, Amazing Stories (having folded in 2006), is back and is offering its first issue FREE.
Learn more, here.
Saturday, August 18, 2012
Why Do Women Authors Dominate Young-Adult Fiction?
That's the question explored recently by Salon.
From the piece...
Ask anyone in the book business if Lewit is right, and they’ll probably agree; with a few exceptions, the most successful and prominent contemporary YA writers are women. Furthermore, the cultural infrastructure supporting their books — from agents and editors to librarians, teachers and that formidable new force in the YA world, bloggers — is predominantly female. Some observers blame this state of affairs for the drop-off in boys’ reading habits as they reach their teens; it’s a system ill-suited to producing books that will interest boys, they argue. But if YA has indeed become a gynocracy, few ask why.
The answer, I believe, is prestige. YA is a prestige-free zone, or at least it has been for most of the decades of its existence as a self-identified genre. Perhaps this is changing, now that we’ve seen certain very popular YA series bestride the bestseller lists: Harry Potter, Twilight and the Hunger Games. Yet I don’t think the prestige of YA has changed all that much, not really. Unfortunately, I can’t prove it.
That’s the maddening problem with prestige: It can’t be measured. Immaterial and unquantifiable as it may be, it still lies behind many of the ongoing debates among book lovers. The pitched battle waged by genre fans against literary fiction is largely about the allocation of prestige. So is the campaign to highlight the gender imbalances in literary journalism. Even Jonathan Franzen vs. Oprah, a face-off that’s beginning to fade from the collective memory, was ultimately about prestige.
The Love Affair of H.G.Wells and Rebecca West
Michelle Dean discusses it on the Rumpus.
From the piece...
Wells and West fancied that their intellectual union benefitted their writing, and saw it as energizing. But from the start it was clear that the raising of Anthony would be another story altogether. Late in life, she’d write to her sister that she regretted not sending Anthony away for his first year so she could work. “As it was,” she wrote, “I had to work hard later on, so that I could not give Anthony all the time he needed when he was a little older.” Plus, as she complained to a friend who’d come to visit her at home with a tiny Anthony, “I hate domesticity. I can’t imagine any circumstances in which it would be amusing to order 2 ounces of Lady Betty wool for socks for Anthony.” This rather marked her out from her Edwardian counterparts, though it still is the kind of thing a mother can be pilloried for saying publicly.
A worse effect of the mores of the time was that they prevented West from public honesty about Anthony’s paternity, too, a fact which leaked into their private lives. He was encouraged to call her Auntie Panther, as a young child, before he learned she was actually his mother. There appears to have been no single revelatory moment. He was gradually let in on the secret of his parentage, with Wells beginning to sign letters as his father around the age of either. Wells, had also quietly put the child in his will, acknowledging him as a son and leaving him £2,000.
Their affair continued in the background, still rich and heavily-felt in letters to her. But Wells was, as could perhaps be expected, not wholly faithful to Rebecca.
Rapunzel - the Ballet
Poet Carol Ann Duffy is writing a ballet based on the classic fairytale.
From an article in the Guardian...
Duffy, renowned for her wry reinterpretations of classical myths and legends – including Mrs Midas, quite glad at her shiny new golden toilet bowl, but terrified of the prospect of a solid gold baby – is returning to the sinister original version of the story by the Brothers Grimm. A couple are forced to give away their longed-for only child to a witch, who locks her in a tower with neither stairs nor door, and a handsome prince who climbs up by her long tresses is blinded for his effrontery.
Duffy is collaborating with musicians and artists who have recent form in delighting and terrorising viewers: costume design will be by Michele Clapton, who also works on the swords-and-sorcery television series Game of Thrones, and music by Murray Gold, whose recent work includes Doctor Who and Torchwood.
Friday, August 17, 2012
Supermother - Elzbieta Jablonska
A Polish artist takes a look at gender roles by photographing herself as superheroes.
Learn more, here.
Thursday, August 16, 2012
Auto Crrect Ths!
James Gleick laments it for the New York Times.
From the piece...
I MENTION a certain writer in an e-mail, and the reply comes back: “Comcast McCarthy??? Phoner novelist???” Did I really type “Comcast”? No. The great god Autocorrect has struck again.
It is an impish god. I try retyping the name on a different device. This
time the letters reshuffle themselves into “Format McCarthy.” Welcome
to the club, Format. Meet the Danish astronomer Touchpad Brahe and the
Franco-American actress Natalie Portmanteau.
In the past, we were responsible for our own typographical errors. Now
Autocorrect has taken charge. This is no small matter. It is a step in
our evolution — the grafting of silicon into our formerly carbon-based
species, in the name of collective intelligence. Or unintelligence as
the case may be.
Wednesday, August 15, 2012
Vintage Recordings of Patti Smith's Poetry
Awesome.
One of Smith's poems...
seventh heaven
Oh Raphael. Guardian angel. In love and crime
all things move in sevens. seven compartments
in the heart. the seven elaborate temptations.
seven devils cast from Mary Magdalene whore
of Christ. the seven marvelous voyages of Sinbad.
sin/bad. And the number seven branded forever
on the forehead of Cain. The first inspired man.
The father of desire and murder. But his was not
the first ecstasy. Consider his mother.
Eve's was the crime of curiosity. As the saying
goes: it killed the pussy. One bad apple spoiled
the whole shot. But be sure it was no apple.
An apple looks like an ass. It's fags' fruit.
It must have been a tomato.
Or better yet. A mango.
She bit. Must we blame her. abuse her.
poor sweet bitch. perhaps there's more to the story.
think of Satan as some stud.
maybe her knees were open.
satan snakes between them.
they open wider
snakes up her thighs
rubs against her for a while
more than the tree of knowledge was about
to be eaten...she shudders her first shudder
pleasure pleasure garden
was she sorry
are we ever girls
was she a good lay
god only knows
An Ode to the Eraser
Care of Mary Norris in the New Yorker.
From the piece...
I find that it was in 1650, in Nuremberg, that lead was first glued to wood, creating the modern pencil. It was not until 1858, according to Henry Petroski’s authoritative book “The Pencil,” that an enterprising Yank named Hyman Lipman, of Philadelphia, patented a method of attaching an eraser to the pencil. Joseph Reckendorfer bought him out and patented a new, improved eraser-tipped pencil in 1862. In Europe, despite the fact that in 1864 an eight-foot-long rubber-tipped pencil was carried in a parade honoring Lothar Faber, the German pencil king, the eraser is more likely to be sold as a separate item.
In England, erasers are called rubbers, after the material they were originally made from. (What we call rubbers the English call French letters.) Before rubber, the material most suited for erasing pencil marks was bread crumbs. A snob might say that the eraser-tipped pencil is like a sofa bed: it sounds like a good idea, but it often features neither the best possible sofa nor the best possible bed. Focussing on the eraser, unscrupulous pencil-makers sometimes stiffed consumers with inferior lead. Or maybe the lead was O.K., but the eraser smeared your mistakes around, making them more conspicuous. In short, the effort to combine two distinct things in a single product can lead to something distasteful; for instance, Guinness gelato, which, trust me, is not a good flavor.
I do not pretend to be an eraser connoisseur. While I don’t mind being known in certain circles as the Pencil Lady, I’d rather not be called Bride of Gumby.
Why New Orleans Should Have a Daily Newspaper
New Orleans just might be the largest city in the nation without a daily newspaper.
The Atlantic laments that fact.
From an article...
From outside of New Orleans, this entire story seems most perplexing for the fact that seemingly everyone in the city wants a daily newspaper except for the people who have the power to print one – and those people, the Newhouses, have steadfastly refused to sell to new owners who share the community’s wishes. This odd misalignment of interests speaks to a larger question: To whom does a newspaper really belong? Especially when it is the only newspaper in town.
Does the Times-Picayune belong to the Newhouses, the latest in a line of 175 years' worth of stewards, who may do with it whatever they want today? Or does it belong, in some larger sense, to the city itself?
No one can force the Newhouses to blow money the family doesn’t want to on a dying newspaper model. But if other deep pockets in the city are eager to do that – and so many in New Orleans want them to – then that option should be on the table.
New Orleans should have a daily newspaper not because daily newspapers are a great business model (they’re pretty clearly not), nor because daily newspapers play some special role in civic life.
Save the Sci-Fi
Groovy project. Singularity and Company are taking vintage sci-book books that aren't in print anymore then turning them into e-books.
From their site..
Singularity and Company is a team of time traveling archivists longing for futures past.
Each month, our subscribers help us choose a vintage, out of print scifi book to rescue, and, with the rightsholders' permission, ebookify. We're bringing forgotten 20th century scifi into the 21st.
Tuesday, August 14, 2012
Poe's Raven Hearth Alit from Obscurity
One hundred and sixty-eight bleak Decembers ago or thereabouts, Edgar Allan Poe sat before a fireplace in a farmhouse on a high bluff on what would someday be called the Upper West Side, composing a poem. The fireplace, encased by a wooden mantel carved with vines and fruit, found its way into the poem: the place from which “each separate dying ember / Wrought its ghost upon the floor.”
It then made its way to Columbia University much later. Then, it went into obscurity. Then it's been rediscovered.
From a piece in the New York Times...
The Raven Mantel has had a less conspicuous history.
Poe’s quarters on the second floor of the Brennan farmhouse were small but comfortable, with windows that looked out past ponds and hills and forests toward the Hudson. The house became a place of pilgrimage in the decades after Poe’s death, and on his visit in 1888, Hemstreet, a retired Civil War colonel and board member of the Brooklyn art museum, regarded the Raven Room, as it was called, “with profound sentiment.” But he had to decide quickly what to salvage.
Though the chamber door plays a leading role in the poem, Mr. Hemstreet noted that there were only seven inches from the top of the door to the ceiling – leaving no room for a pallid bust of Pallas, much less a lordly raven perched atop it – and ruled it out.
Instead, he handed the contractor $5, pried the mantel off the wall with a crowbar, and had it shipped to his home at 1332 Bergen Street in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and installed around his own hearth.
Great Books and Where to Read Them
Smithsonian pairs books with where to read them.
From the post...
Texas, Lonsome Dove.
Author Larry McMurtry creates a lovable cast of characters in the cowboy era of Texas in this Pulitzer Prize winner of 1985. The year is 1876, and Gus and Call, a pair of retired Texas Rangers, now operate a cattle ranch by the Rio Grande and spend their days tracking rustlers and warring with bands of Comanche Indians. Just as the reader grows cozy with life on the farm, the prospect of joining a cross-continental cattle drive pulls Gus and Call from their idyllic home and on an adventure to Montana. Through dangerous encounters one after another, the men convince readers they’re invincible, but a tragedy ends the party, only one of the pair returns alive to Texas, and we remember that the American frontier is as brutal as it may be alluring.
Monday, August 13, 2012
Of Mice and Men and Texas Death Row Cases
John Steinbeck’s son has criticized the State of Texas over its use of his father’s fiction in death row cases.
From a piece in the Telegraph...
Texas has been using the mental disability of Lennie Small, the Nobel
prize-winning author's fictional character in Of Mice and Men, to define
learning difficulties and thus to justify its execution of Marvin Wilson,
who was put on death row for the 1992 murder of a police informant.
Despite the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2002 ruling in Atkins v Virginia banning the
execution of the mentally disabled, Wilson, who had an IQ of 61, was killed
by lethal injection yesterday.
The Texas Court refused to grant a stay of execution by claiming the defendant
was not mentally disabled.
In a statement, Steinbeck's son Thomas Steinbeck, an author himself, said that
if his father were alive today, he would be “deeply angry and ashamed to see
his work used in this way.” He called the situation "insulting,
outrageous, ridiculous and profoundly tragic."What of the Exclamation Point?!
Smithsonian Magazine examines its history.
From the piece...
But where did the exclamation point come from? Any why does it seem to be creeping into everything we do?
Turns out, no one really knows the history of the punctuation mark. The current running theory is that it comes from Latin. In Latin, the exclamation of joy was io, where the i was written above the o. And, since all their letters were written as capitals, an I with an o below it looks a lot like an exclamation point.
But it wasn’t until 1970 that the exclamation point had its own key on the keyboard. Before that, you had to type a period, and then use the backspace to go back and stick an apostrophe above it. When people dictated things to secretaries they would say “bang” to mark the exclamation point. Hence the interobang (?!) – a combination of a question (?) and an exclamation point (!). In the printing world, the exclamation point is called “a screamer, a gasper, a startler or a dog’s cock.”
RIP Joe Kubert
From ‘Sgt. Rock’ to the Kubert School, comic book creator and teacher Joe Kubert leaves a legendary legacy.
From an obituary in the Washington Post...
Kubert was one of the few left whose careers stretched back to nearly
the dawn of the comic book. Born in Poland in 1926 shortly before his
family immigrated to the United States, the Brooklyn-raised Kubert
reportedly drew on the shop paper of his father, a kosher butcher. Young
Joe would gain entrée into professional comics by somewhere between age
10 and 13 (depending on which his own recollections you believe). From an obituary in the Washington Post...
Kubert spent most of his career working for DC Comics, developing his kinetic line and exquisitely weighted cross-hatchings that defined his signature style. The artist-writer became most associated with Sgt. Rock and Enemy Ace and Hawkman and the prehistoric Tor — on his way to becoming a master of action and the recognized leader in “war comics.” He also had a stellar run on Tarzan. As Mark Evanier writes: “Joe had a way of imbuing the work with a kind of four-color testosterone. No one did male better.”
Sunday, August 12, 2012
The Philosophical Roots of Science Fiction
io9 digs deep.
From the piece...
And by the same token, the philosophy of human nature often seems to depend on conjuring imaginary worlds, whether it be Hobbes' "nasty, brutish and short" world without laws, or Rousseau's "state of nature." A great believer in the importance of science, Hobbes sees humans as essentially mechanistic beings who are programmed to behave in a selfish fashion — and the state is a kind of artificial human that can contain us and give us better programming, in a sense.
So not only can you use something like Star Trek's Holodeck to point out philosophical notions of the fallibility of the senses, and the possible falseness of reality — philosophy's own explorations of those sorts of topics are frequently kind of other-worldly. Philosophical thought experiments, like the oft-cited "state of nature," are also close kin to science fiction world building. As Susan Schneider writes in the book Science Fiction and Philosophy, "if you read science fiction writers like Stanislaw Lem, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Sawyer, you already aware that some of the best science fiction tales are in fact long versions of philosophical thought experiments."
But meanwhile, when people come to list the earliest known works that could be considered "real" science fiction, they always wind up listing philosophical works, written by philosophers.
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