Cormac McCarthy, Screenwriter?

Indeed. The novelist has turned in a 'spec' feature-film script that deals with a lawyer who becomes embroiled in drug trade in the Southwest.

From a story in the Guardian...

Deadline reports that the screenplay, called The Counselor, is set in the modern-day south-west of the US and recalls the hard-boiled world of No Country For Old Men. It depicts a respected lawyer who bites off more than he can chew after foolishly getting involved in the drug business. Such a storyline recalls Sean Penn's Golden Globe-nominated turn in the 1993 Brian De Palma gangster film Carlito's Way.

"The spec falls smack in the middle of what everyone responds to with Cormac's novels," Wechsler told Deadline. Steve Schwartz added: "Since McCarthy himself wrote the script, we get his own muscular prose directly, with its sexual obsessions. It's a masculine world into which, unusually, two women intrude to play leading roles. McCarthy's wit and humour in the dialogue make the nightmare even scarier. This may be one of McCarthy's most disturbing and powerful works."

Libraries are Funny

Scott's Lost Last Photographs

The last photographs taken by Captain Robert Scott, lost for most of the 20th century, have been bought for the nation in time for the centenary of his doomed expedition to reach the south pole on 17 January 1912.

From an article in the Guardian...

The Scott Institute was founded with money left over from the fund for the widows and orphans of Scott and his four companions, who starved and froze to death with him on their heartbreaking return after learning that the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen had beaten them to the pole. It has bought the 109 photographs, never seen by Scott himself – they were developed after he set out on the last fatal stage – for about £750,000 with a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund of £704,000. They will be reunited with Scott's camera, presented by his daughter-in-law Lady Philippa Scott, in 2008. Professor Julian Dowdeswell, head of the Scott Polar Research Institute, said: "Scott's photographs bring to life, in vivid detail, his party's sledging journey into the interior of Antarctica. From men and ponies struggling through deep snow, to panoramas of the Transantarctic mountains, the images are very powerful."

The World's Largest Qur'an

A calligrapher created the 500kg book to show that his country's rich cultural heritage and traditions had survived the war.

From a piece in the Guardian...

The lavish book, with pages measuring 2.28 metres by 1.55 metres, has been certified as the world's largest by the Afghan ministry of Haj and religious affairs, according to the Kabul cultural centre that houses it.

The previous claim to the title was for a copy unveiled last year in Russia's Tatarstan region.

The Afghan Qur'an weighs 500kg and its 218 pages of cloth and paper, bound inside an embossed leather cover made from the skins of 21 goats, cost over £300,000 to create.

Mohammad Sabir Khedri, the master calligrapher behind the project, worked with nine students on a design that combines gold script with millions of tiny colourful dots, forming highly symbolic decorations around the giant pages.

"I wanted to use as many tasteful colours as possible to make this holy book look beautiful," he said, standing beside his enormous creation in a room built specially to house it.

A Rare Book Collectors Guide to the College Library Book Sale

My friend, an editor of Fine Books & Collections Magazine, wrote a piece recently for the Millions.

From said piece...

As both a reader and a book collector, I’m a big fan of college library book sales. Held annually or bi-annually at colleges and universities across the country, these sales convert library discards and unwanted donations into desperately needed funds. Uncluttered by the kinds of books that glut public library sales, the college library book sale paints an interesting picture of town-gown reading habits.

When I had the opportunity to attend The Friends of the Library Used Book Sale at the State University of New York in New Paltz, I tried to get there as early as possible, knowing that ambitious local booksellers and scouts would arrive when the door opened at 8:00 a.m. Not that I was necessarily looking for an overlooked first edition (although applying my esoteric knowledge about books and collecting for profit would be fun). Lest you think that the tables were filled with the fifth edition of the MLA Handbook, I will declare up front that I did find one such diamond in the rough — a first edition of Dwight Macdonald’s Against the American Grain: Essays on the Effects of Mass Culture in a Brodart-enclosed dust jacket (always a good sign). The book was not an ex-library copy — a red flag for collectors, but not readers — and because I had studied the book in graduate school, I knew not only its academic value, but also its scarcity on the market. I had purchased my own copy about ten years ago, settling for a yellowing, faded paperback, which still sits on my shelves. It’s not a find that will make me rich, but if I chose to sell it, I could buy five New York Times bestsellers in hardcover.

Michael Jackson Sings...Robert Burns?!

Indeed.

From a piece in the Guardian...

A Scottish museum may soon be home to one of Michael Jackson's unreleased albums. More than a decade after Jackson and David Gest recorded songs based on the poetry of Robert Burns, Gest reportedly intends to donate the recordings to the poet's official museum in Ayrshire.

In a career of peculiar projects, it remains one of the singer's strangest: a collection of showtunes inspired by Burns's life and work. The songs have never been made public – it was either overlooked or forgotten in the Jackson estate's search for unreleased material.

"I Know What Love Is"

Read a beautiful letter written by Ansel Adams, here.

The Autumn of Joan Didion

The Atlantic has a long profile of the author, here.

From the piece...

Women who encountered Joan Didion when they were young received from her a way of being female and being writers that no one else could give them. She was our Hunter Thompson, and Slouching Towards Bethlehem was our Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He gave the boys twisted pig-fuckers and quarts of tequila; she gave us quiet days in Malibu and flowers in our hair. “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold,” Thompson wrote. “All I ever did to that apartment was hang fifty yards of yellow theatrical silk across the bedroom windows, because I had some idea that the gold light would make me feel better,” Didion wrote. To not understand the way that those two statements would reverberate in the minds of, respectively, young men and young women is to not know very much at all about those types of creatures. Thompson’s work was illustrated by Ralph Steadman’s grotesque ink blots, and early Didion by the ravishing photographs of the mysterious girl-woman: sitting barelegged on a stone balustrade; posing behind the wheel of her yellow Corvette; wearing an elegant silk gown and staring off into space, all alone in a chic living room.

Didion’s genius is that she understands what it is to be a girl on the cusp of womanhood, in that fragile, fleeting, emotional time that she explored in a way no one else ever has. Didion is, depending on the reader’s point of view, either an extraordinarily introspective or an extraordinarily narcissistic writer. As such, she is very much like her readers themselves. “I’ve been reading you since I was an adolescent,” a distinctly non-adolescent female voice said on a call-in show a decade ago, and Didion nodded, comprehending. All of us who love her the most have, in ways literal and otherwise, been reading her since adolescence.

Didion was also recently interviewed in the Believer, here.

Today's Poetry - Finding Its Way

To say that poetry no longer matters is a gross misreading of the facts.

A slideshow, care of the Washington Post.

The Twilight Series Could Continue Without Twilight Books to Adapt

Anything to make a little money.

From a piece in the Guardian...

It is a quandary faced by studio executives over the years: what to do with a successful movie franchise that has run out of books to adapt. But this may not be an obstacle for the Twilight films, after Lionsgate chief executive Jon Feltheimer suggested his company may continue the series beyond the November release of Breaking Dawn Part 2, supposedly the final instalment in the vampire romance saga.

Lionsgate bought Twilight studio Summit for more than $400m on Friday, and one of Feltheimer's first proclamations was to suggest his company wants to maximise profits from its newly acquired asset. The Twilght series has so far generated almost $2.5bn at the global box office.

The Twelve Best Books for Preteens

The list, care of the Christian Science Monitor.

Marvel Comics to Start Facebook Game

At some point this quarter, Marvel will unveil its first Facebook game. The Disney-owned company hopes that Marvel: Avengers Alliance can compete with popular Facebook games like Farmville. Find out more, here, at Inside Social Games.

Literary Friendships

A slideshow, care of the Daily Beast.

Ten Great Books about Martin Luther King, Jr.

The list, care of the Christian Science Monitor.

Zora Neale Hurston Sings the Blues

During the Great Depression, the novelist Zora Neale Hurston traveled from Harlem to Florida to record folk songs for the Federal Writers Project’s Florida Folklife archive.
She left behind 18 amazing recordings, telling the story of individual folk songs and singing many of the tunes herself.

Hear the recordings, here, at Sad Men.

His Hour Upon the Stage

As a lifelong reader of Shakespeare’s plays, Abraham Lincoln had reservations about how they were presented.

From a piece in the American Scholar...

Abraham Lincoln’s courtship of Mary Todd was anything but smooth. At one point it helped bring on a bout of severe depression that left the future president nearly dysfunctional for a brief period and caused him to avoid Springfield’s social world for several months. In a letter to an absent friend, the future Mrs. Lincoln lamented this state of affairs and wished “that he would once more resume his Station in Society, that ‘Richard should be himself again.’ ” The expression she used is clear enough in meaning, but Lincoln’s biographers have been less certain about its source. In fact, the expression “Richard’s himself again” was in vogue in antebellum America, deriving from one of the best-known speeches in the most performed of all Shakespeare plays, Richard III. But that speech, as Lincoln himself would later point out, was not written by Shakespeare.

This curious state of affairs is surprisingly emblematic of the undernourished state of our knowledge of Lincoln’s famous affinity for Shakespeare. We have so many well-attested stories of Lincoln extolling Shakespeare as a young man in New Salem, of his carrying a volume of Shakespeare’s works around with him on the judicial circuit, of his ability (and willingness) to recite from memory long passages from Shakespeare at the drop of a hat, and of his reading from the plays by the hour to his secretaries and guests as president, that there can be little doubt of his longstanding attachment to the writings of the Bard. And although he seems to have had few opportunities to see Shakespeare’s plays performed before becoming president, he frequently attended the theater in Washington, including many performances of Shakespeare. But this well-established pattern has led his biographers and other commentators to make some unwarranted assumptions and surmises, while neglecting clues that lead to strikingly different conclusions.

Lost Brahms Piece Found

An unknown work by the composer Johannes Brahms has come to light after almost 160 years following its chance discovery in a visitor's book, and will be played for the first time next week.

From an article in the Independent...

Roger Wright, controller of BBC Radio 3, the classical music station, said: "Brahms is one of the most significant composers of the 19th century... This is a fascinating discovery; it sheds light on his work in a new way. You can absolutely recognise this as Brahms' style."

The piece was discovered by chance while Mr Hogwood leafed through manuscripts held in the US. He brought the piece to Mr Wright, who commissioned the celebrated Hungarian pianist Andras Schiff to play it for the first time. The short work will appear on BBC Radio 3's Music Matters on January 21.

The Jack the Ripper Manuscript

A manuscript possibly written by Victorian serial killer Jack the Ripper is to be published worldwide.

From a piece on BBC News...

It is thought to have been written in the 1920s and is entitled The Autobiography of James Carnac.

Ripper historian Paul Begg has read the whole manuscript and said it could not be dismissed as a piece of fiction as "you find all sorts of questions and lots of niggles" about its content and provenance.

The manuscript is the first time the name James Carnac has been linked to Jack the Ripper - although no public records have yet confirmed whether Carnac existed.

Other suspects have been put forward in the past by Ripper historians, but to date his true identity has never been discovered.

Amazon's Erotica Plagiarism Problem

Amazon's erotica section isn't just rife with tales of lust, incest, violence, and straight-up kink. It's also a hotbed of masked merchants profiting from copyright infringement. And even with anti-piracy legislation looming, Amazon doesn't appear too eager to stop the forbidden author-on-author action.

From a piece in Fast Company...

She decided to test drive the service with Erotic Stories of Domination and Submission: Taking Jennifer, a book by one of her authors, then watched it climb the rankings in "gratifying leaps." But Sharazade was dismayed that a number of books, a few with nonsensical titles, were beating hers, even though they were hamstrung by twisted grammar and perverse punctuation. Some sported covers comprised of low-resolution images with no lettering. One author managed to misspell her own name. "Even in porn, customers come down on books that are totally incompetent," Sharazade says, "but this wasn't happening with these."

After checking the author page for Maria Cruz, who that day had the top-selling erotica book in Amazon's U.K. Kindle store, she counted 40 erotica ebook titles, including Sister Pretty Little Mouth, My Step Mom and Me, Wicked Desires Steamy Stories and Domenating [sic] Her, plus one called Dracula's Amazing Adventure. Most erotica authors stay within the genre, so Sharazade was surprised Cruz had ventured into horror. Amazon lets customers click inside a book for a sample of text and Sharazade was impressed with how literate it was. She extracted a sentence fragment, googled it, and found that Cruz had copy and pasted the text from Bram Stoker's Dracula. Curious, Sharazade keyed in phrases from other Cruz ebooks and discovered that every book she checked was stolen.

Ask Andrew: What Are Your Views on the Book Publishing Industry?