Sons and Fathers

Frank Miller's masterwork, The Dark Knight, is discussed by the Los Angeles Review of Books.

From the review...

For a variety of reasons, Batman has always appealed especially to those who want to distort the superhero ethos. First MAD, The Realist, and underground comics published funny, derisive, lewd versions of famous daily comic strip and comic book characters like Batman and Robin, allowing the backroom cynicism of politics, the newsroom, and showbiz to invade our youthful entertainments. Then, there was the infamously campy, Zeitgeist-grabbing Batman television show, starring Adam West and Burt Ward, which ditched the vestigial noir elements for a leap into pure pop idiocy.

Such sacrilege demanded a reformation, and Batman fans got it in the 1980s with the work of Frank Miller. Miller, a Gotham lover of the old school, gives his Dark Knight Returns a nod to its pulp sources with a reference to Commissioner Gordon’s “sketchy” early days as a Chicago cop. Miller picked the right superhero to revisit. Not only could the 60s devolution of Batman be improved: so could the original.

Miller is a classicist; he loves the melodrama of the comics form. He speaks of forcing his readers to slow down, to work against the impulse to race along with the storyline, in order to appreciate the art. A story chopped into a procession of frames colliding and sparking off each other is a perfect illustration of Eisenstein’s theory of montage, but there is a limit. When a comic book is reprinted as a bound book — much less in an extravagant, large, boxed, hard cover glossy re-framing of form like this edition — its cheap glory is corrupted by promising too much. The graphic-novelization of comics is a wrong turn as sure as Cinerama was for cinema. I never saw the first printing of Miller’s work, and I’m sure those who have seen the original art value the high-tone reproductions now available. Nonetheless, this deluxe treatment shifts focus from storytelling and the normal porn of form to the distracting fetish of printing specs.

The Most Overrated Classic Books

The list, care of the Huffington Post.

What Typos Mean to Book Publishing

There's more typos in more books lately. Why? What does that tell us about the publishing business?

From an article in the New York Times...

Editors I spoke to confirmed my guesses. Before digital technology unsettled both the economics and the routines of book publishing, they explained, most publishers employed battalions of full-time copy editors and proofreaders to filter out an author’s mistakes. Now, they are gone.

There is also “pressure to publish more books more quickly than ever,” an editor at a major publishing house explained. Many publishers now skip steps. “In the past, you really readied the book in several discrete stages,” Paul Elie, a senior editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, explained. “Manuscript, galley proofs, revised proofs, blue lines. You marked your changes at each stage, and then the compositor incorporated them and sent you the next stage. Now there are intermediate stages; authors will e-mail in ‘one last correction,’ or we’ll produce intermediate stages of proof — the text is fluid, in motion, and this leads to typos.”

Authors, too, bear some blame for the typo explosion. As Geoff Shandler, the editor in chief of Little, Brown and Company, told me, “Use of the word processor has resulted in a substantial decline in author discipline and attention. Manuscripts are much longer than they were 25 years ago, much more casually assembled, and beyond spell check (and not even then; and of course it will miss typos if the word is a word) it is amazing how little review seems to have occurred before the text is sent to the editor. Seriously, you have no idea how sloppy some of these things are.”

Miranda July Is Totally Not Kidding

There's a great profile of short story writer/filmmaker/actor Miranda July in New York Times Magazine.

From the piece...

In person, July was very still, with ringlets of curly hair falling over her wide blue eyes like a protective visor, and she seemed perceptively aware of the “precious” label that is often attached both to her and to her work. At a different point in our time together, I followed her into a hotel room in San Francisco, where Mills had left her a knitted octopus wearing a scarf and hat on the couch. She laughed when she saw it but also appeared a bit mortified: “Oh, God,” she said. “It’s kind of a joke. . . . It’s not. . . . Really, this isn’t us at all.”

At their house, Mills emerged from his office; in contrast to July’s measured composure, Mills seemed in constant motion, often running his hands through his Beethoven hair. Both he and July have directed new films being released this summer. His film, “Beginners,” is loosely based on the true story of his father’s coming out at age 75. July’s film, “The Future,” is her second feature as a director, and it’s a funny, sad portrait of a couple at a crossroads. Sophie, played by July, works at a children’s dance school, and Jason, played by Hamish Linklater, provides tech-support by telephone from their sofa. The couple is weeks away from adopting Paw-Paw, an injured cat and a symbol of impending adulthood who is also the film’s narrator. A talking cat is exactly the kind of detail that might endear people who are endeared by Miranda July and infuriate people who are infuriated by her. There are plenty of both.

“You’ve met us at a weird time,” Mills said. “We’re usually just two workaholics in our separate corners.” July and Mills first crossed paths in 2005, when July’s debut feature, “Me and You and Everyone We Know,” made its premiere at Sundance at the same time as Mills’s film “Thumbsucker.” They met at a party — “She wore a yellow dress,” he recalls — and he watched her do a Q. and A. the next day. “She was so strong and declarative. I fell in love instantly.” They married in the summer of 2009 at Mills’s house in the Nevada hills.

In one sense, July has been enjoying the Platonic ideal of creative success in the age of the hyphenate artist.

Her movie:

Students Get Close and Personal with Rare Books

NPR highlights the University of Virginia's Rare Book School.

From the article...

The university's Rare Book School estimates that it owns about 80,000 publications and print-related materials. And while some of those items are quite valuable, Michael Suarez — director of the Rare Book School — wants students to be able to handle them so they can better appreciate the history of paper, binding, typography and illustration.

"We insist that students touch and smell and shine light through items, and investigate them to understand the book in history, and understand the book as history," Suarez says.

The classes that bring students into this underground treasure trove mostly deal with antiques, but the program also explores the preservation of materials that were born digital. That might soun

Top Ten Invented Languages

The list, care of Top Tenz.

From the piece...

Enochian

This language appeared in the 16th century in a series of books by astrologer John Dee and seer Edward Kelley. According to Dee, it was the language used by God to create the world, which had gradually ‘devolved’ over time to become the Biblical Hebrew of the Old Testament. Luckily for them, this language was taught to Dee and Kelley by angels. Enochian also came with an alphabet, which Dee and Kelley used to write their books detailing magical practices.

Modern skeptics have since pointed out that Enochian has far more in common grammatically with English than any form of Hebrew. Still, the language became popular again in the 20th century, and it’s still used by some occultists today.

Many Business Books, But Few Written Well

The New York Times laments that there's not very many well-written books on business.

From the piece...

The problems are as varied as the books themselves; enumerating them could take an entire page of this newspaper. Some are too technical, some not technical enough. Some topics are hopeless: I’m not sure anyone can shape the Greek debt crisis into a narrative an American would read.

Some authors aren’t able to gain access to the business people they chronicle, and thus produce books that feel incomplete. Some don’t know how to tell a story. Some don’t even try. Some books just plain put me to sleep.

I co-wrote my first business book in 1990 — it did O.K. — and ever since, I’ve wondered why so few take flight. There are theories, the kind business writers will discuss after a couple of beers but generally refrain from debating in public.

For one thing, these books aren’t easy to create. Businesses, and especially American corporations, offer scads of compelling human dramas, the vast majority of which go untold, even unnoticed. It’s the corporate world’s zeal for secrecy — and the tendency of companies to avoid publicity they can’t control — that makes these tales tough to find and even tougher to tell.

The difficulty of spinning a good business yarn, however, doesn’t fully explain quality issues. One problem for the business reader is that too many of the authors aren’t gifted writers; they are chief executives, professors and experts in their field, and the lack of professional craftsmanship shows.

Books and Other Fetish Objects

With books getting digitized right and left, what of the printed book?

From a piece in the New York Times...

Last month the British Library announced a project with Google to digitize 40 million pages of books, pamphlets and periodicals dating to the French Revolution. The European Digital Library, Europeana.eu, well surpassed its initial goal of 10 million “objects” last year, including a Bulgarian parchment manuscript from 1221 and the Rok runestone from Sweden, circa 800, which will save you trips to, respectively, the St. Cyril and St. Methodius National Library in Sofia and a church in Ostergotland.

Reporting to the European Union in Brussels, the Comité des Sages (sounds better than “Reflection Group”) urged in January that essentially everything — all the out-of-copyright cultural heritage of all the member states — should be digitized and made freely available online. It put the cost at approximately $140 billion and called this vision “The New Renaissance.”

Inevitably comes the backlash. Where some see enrichment, others see impoverishment. Tristram Hunt, an English historian and member of Parliament, complained in The Observer this month that “techno-enthusiasm” threatens to cheapen scholarship. “When everything is downloadable, the mystery of history can be lost,” he wrote. “It is only with MS in hand that the real meaning of the text becomes apparent: its rhythms and cadences, the relationship of image to word, the passion of the argument or cold logic of the case.”

I’m not buying this. I think it’s sentimentalism, and even fetishization. It’s related to the fancy that what one loves about books is the grain of paper and the scent of glue.

Who Has Been America's Drunkest Writer?

F. Scott Fitzgerald.

From a piece in the Daily Beast...

As Thomas Gilmore asserts in Equivocal Spirits: Alcoholism and Drinking in Twentieth-Century Literature and John Crowley corroborates in The White Logic: Alcoholism and Gender in American Modernist Fiction, the fable of Fitzgerald’s Edgar-Allan-Poe-like low tolerance was likely just that—a fable, helped by an alcoholic’s tendency to sometimes conceal consumption and sometimes boast about over-consumption. But whatever the legend of his drinking capacity (Hemingway himself witnessed another time when Fitzgerald drank far more than he ever saw and was completely fine, even telling articulately the story of him and Zelda’s life) by the thirties Fitzgerald was not so much as capitalizing but clutching onto the persona of a washed-up alcoholic. He was obsessed with his great literary promise and the even greater subsequent disappointment, knowing that alcoholism was behind it but had not been the sole cause to a tragedy so immense (to him). At his lowest point, in 1935, he claimed to have “not tasted so much as a glass of beer for six months,” which was likely untrue.

This practice of constant myth-making and denial offered Fitzgerald perhaps the most painful decline of all the great novelists. He wasn’t so much a victim of alcoholism as the very embodiment of alcoholism—or the stages of alcoholic recovery, in reverse. He was so submerged in drink that he didn’t even need to write about booze for us to connect his thoughts to booze. His words and his life had all the makings of a stiff drink, in all its nighttime glamour and morning gravity.

Winnie-the-Pooh's Long March to Cultural Dominance

The Atlantic offers a timeline of important dates in Pooh history.

From the piece...

The latest Winnie the Pooh film comes out today, marking the fifth time Pooh, Piglet, Tigger, and friends have appeared in a feature-length movie. But the inhabitants of the Hundred-Acre Wood aren't just movie stars: Since A.A. Milne introduced the world to Christopher Robin's animal buddies with his 1926 book Winnie-the-Pooh, the characters have appeared on chinaware, baby bibs, vitamin bottles, and much, much more. In 2004, the characters came in second in a Forbes list of the top-earning fictional characters—just a hair behind Mickey Mouse and company—with a $5.6 billion annual income.

How did Pooh, Piglet, Eeyore, et al transform from introspective children's literary characters to brand ambassadors for everything from paper dolls to bandages?

10 Unconventional Bookstores

Enjoy!

FYI

Are Romance Novels to Blame for Bad Relationships?

Is Borders Disappearing for Good?

It looks that way.

Why Librarians Should Be More Like Lady Gaga

I’ve always been famous, it’s just no one knew it yet.
— Lady Gaga

From a piece in the Washington Post about how to keep libraries and librarians relevant...

Shift perception! We need to be more like Lady GaGa than Lady Bird Johnson. We need to establish a clear, pervasive, vibrant, and involved presence in their school, community, and on the web. The more visible librarians are the less likely that they’ll be taken away. Those teacher librarians who are hiding their brilliant programs under a bushel, that’s when they’re most likely to get cut. We need to stay positive, be proactive, and always be professional!”

Hero Worship

The Financial Times looks at the changing face of superhero comics.

From the article...

Superhero comics – secular modern myths, written in collaboration by generations of writers – have tracked our culture for more than 70 years, providing wish fulfilment fantasies, cultural exemplars, vehicles of satire and cautionary tales of the abuse of power. Attempts to work out what they say about us have been around nearly as long. When Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster created Superman in 1938, as fascism took Europe in its grip, they intended him to be, in Siegel’s words, “a character like Samson, Hercules and all the strongmen I ever heard of, rolled into one”. Umberto Eco proposed, in a 1970s essay on Superman, that in a society increasingly dominated by machines, it was down to the “positive hero” of myth to “embody to an unthinkable degree the power demands that the average citizen nurtures but cannot satisfy”. As the comics writer Grant Morrison pithily observes in Supergods, his book-length analysis of the superhero phenomenon, the idea of these characters has long been “at least as real as the idea of God”.

Like the idea of God, the idea of superheroes has changed with the times, subject to canonical revision, radical exegesis and acrimonious debate. They have also risen and fallen in the public esteem, with the recent boom in Hollywood adaptations an instructive case in point. Tales of godlike superbeings are out, while tales of humans in excelsis are in – as evidenced by the recent popularity of Iron Man and Batman, millionaire playboys and super-CEOs waging a technologically assisted war on crime and the enemies of society. A 2006 film featuring the infallible Son of Krypton proved markedly less popular.

Like the idea of God, too, a recent downturn in public interest has earthly rights­holders worried.

The Boy Who Lived Forever

Time Magazine explores the enduring legacy of Harry Potter and what that means in the world of fan fiction.

From the article...

J.K. Rowling probably isn't going to write any more Harry Potter books. That doesn't mean there won't be any more. It just means they won't be written by J.K. Rowling. Instead they'll be written by people like Racheline Maltese.

Maltese is 38. She's an actor and a professional writer — journalism, cultural criticism, fiction, poetry. She describes herself as queer. She lives in New York City. She's a fan of Harry Potter. Sometimes she writes stories about Harry and the other characters from the Potterverse and posts them online for free. "For me, it's sort of like an acting or improvisation exercise," Maltese says. "You have known characters. You apply a set of given circumstances to them. Then you wait and see what happens."

Maltese is a writer of fan fiction: stories and novels that make use of the characters and settings from other people's professional creative work. Fan fiction is what literature might look like if it were reinvented from scratch after a nuclear apocalypse by a band of brilliant pop-culture junkies trapped in a sealed bunker. They don't do it for money. That's not what it's about. The writers write it and put it up online just for the satisfaction. They're fans, but they're not silent, couchbound consumers of media. The culture talks to them, and they talk back to the culture in its own language.

And how did the books change peoples' lives? The Cleveland Plain-Dealer had an essay contest. Read some of the entries, here.

The Art of Isaac Salazar

Enjoy.

A Typeface for Dyslexics

What the Heck is a Tegestologist?

Mental Floss offers up 20 strange words to describe collectors.