March 31, 2005
A scheme to promote the healing powers of poetry has found its way into thousands of GPs' surgeries. But can rhyming couplets really help the sick?
Who needs Vicodin when you have Galway Kinnell?
(Me. I do.)
C is for cheers and congratulations
A an able Duchess fine
M means marriage for a second time
I instils invitations, maybe flowing wine
L denotes the love I hope she feels for him
L is for logistics, she needs to say her grace
A arrange the future in this manic human race
This pretty much defies comment, don't you think?
Creative Loafing has uncovered the secret index to Jane Fonda's forthcoming memoir.
China Syndrome, The (1979)
Five weeks spent learning Chinese for, p. 380
Two-hour tantrum after finding out film has nothing to do with China, p. 382
Thanking Three Mile Island managers for cross-promotional nuclear accident, p. 386
Camille Paglia talks to the Philadelphia City Paper about poetry.
Look at this whole period now, where you have the entire art world, which is opposed to the Iraq war. Where is the strong poem that comes from that? I saw a lot of stupid poems. There's one [adjusts voice] "Dick Cheney's at the White House today! Dick Cheney's --" Oh my God! This is so stupid! Sneering, snide, preaching-to-the-choir stuff. If you have something to say, and you are opposed to the war, where are you? We don't want "Bush is bad." That's not a poem. We can get that in an op-ed.
She's making the same point that Neal Pollack has made before. And though I opposed the war, I agree with both of them. The poets-against-the-war movement might have been well-intentioned, but it was about as effective as the "Just Say No" and "Increase the Peace" campaigns of decades past. Just like no one really wants to hear LL Cool J preach to them about drugs and violence, I'm not convinced that Adrienne Rich is going to change that many minds about President Bush.
Look for an interview with Paglia in Bookslut's April issue, coming next week.
Kiko Martinez has an excellent story about the new anthology Desahogate: Growing Up Xicana/o, an anthology published by the Xicana Xicano Education Project. It doesn't look to be available for purchase on the Internet, but if you live in San Antonio, you can pick it up at Hogwild Records or Black Mountain Books. The article gives a well-deserved shout-out to Arte Público Press, the University of Houston imprint that publishes a number of excellent books, including the Texas literature classic George Washington Gómez, which I love dearly.
While reading selections from his novel, 21, author Jeremy Iversen showed yesterday that fraternity parties can inspire art.
That's not news. According to his biographer, W. Somerset Maugham wrote Of Human Bondage while "smashed on Zima" and after "totally hooking up with this one chick from Texas Tech."
But anyway, the Penn student paper talks to Iversen about his debut novel 21 and, for some reason, commercialism. "People buy products to feel good about themselves," Iversen says. Hey, that's a noble sentiment! Maybe I was wrong to dismiss the guy as just another alcohol-loving frat boy!
In order to make the book more appealing to college-age readers, Iversen plans to release shot glasses and a clothing line based on the book.
The Philip K Dick Award winner has been announced: Life by Gwyneth Jones. "The Philip K. Dick Award is presented annually for distinguished science fiction published in paperback original form in the United States."
Katie Roiphe wants to know why reviewers of Ian McEwan's Saturday haven't mentioned its structural similarity to Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway.
Public events similarly intrude on the two wartime novels: In Mrs. Dalloway a mysterious motor car bearing either the queen or the prime minister is spotted in the streets, and in Saturday the prime minister is glimpsed on the displayed television sets in a shop; throngs of admirers gather outside of Buckingham Palace in Mrs. Dalloway, and protesters wave placards in Saturday; a plane on fire evokes terrorist fears in Saturday, and a plane advertising toffee breeds fear and confusion in Mrs. Dalloway. The war against Germany hovers anxiously over Mrs. Dalloway, as the war in Iraq hovers over Saturday; in both books one can feel the city's tension in the traffic.
The US military is planning to win the hearts of young people in the Middle East by publishing a new comic.
An advertisement on the US government's Federal Business Opportunities website is inviting applications for someone to develop an "original comic book series".
"In order to achieve long-term peace and stability in the Middle East, the youth need to be reached," the ad says. (Thanks to Lindsey for the link.)
Filmrot.com presents: Sin City Comic-to-Screen Comparisons. (Link from TMN.)
The Philadelphia Inquirer interviews Francine Prose about A Changed Man, and asks her about one newspaper's now-famous Holocaust survivor mix-up:
Although most reviews have been glowing, one naysayer, Marta Salij of the Detroit Free Press, was so eager to castigate Prose that she described Maslow as "a stand-in for Elie Wiesenthal," mixing up survivors Elie Wiesel and Simon Wiesenthal.
Prose laughs when reminded of the piece. "It's absolutely not Elie Wiesel," she insists.
It's time for the New York Press's 50 Most Loathsome New Yorkers list again. This year the list includes publisher Judith Regan, the "writers" of Brad and Jen: The Rise and Fall of Hollywood's Golden Couple, New York Times food critic Frank Bruni, and Graydon Carter.
The Boston Phoenix takes a look at the redesign of Poetry Magazine and the influence of editor Christian Wiman. The most radical change? The addition of prose.
Some sad news out of Canada — The Porcupine's Quill, the beloved Ontario small press, is reducing its staff and cutting its publishing list. Founder Tim Inkster doubts the press will stay in business past 2007, and blames the publisher's troubles on the "scorched-earth policy" of chain bookstore Chapters and its corporate parent, Indigo Books. The Globe and Mail's Rebecca Caldwell gently suggests the publisher's decline might also be due to "a change in the taste of the reading public — such as a decrease in demand for literary fiction, Porcupine's specialty, and an increase in easy-on-the-mind thrillers such as behemoth bestseller The Da Vinci Code."
Bloomsbury, one of my favorite publishers, is having a good year.
Elaine Lafferty is resigning as editor of Ms. Magazine. As she has only been there two years, and those two years have been some of the greatest in Ms's history, you know there's a story behind the resignation. The Observer tries to find it. If you believe that feminists are humorless, stodgy old ladies, I wouldn't read this article. It'll only cement your opinion.
However, according to Ms. Lafferty, Ms. Spillar objected to the language describing the “baby” and its body parts. From Ms. Lafferty’s perspective, the piece transcended politics, but concerns about the political use of language in the abortion-rights controversy are a major preoccupation for feminists at the moment; for some feminists, using the word “baby” (instead of “fetus”) in a story about abortion violates a cardinal rule...
Ms. Lafferty felt that the legal excuse was a front for concerns about the image being too provocative. She said she’d consulted other lawyers who felt there was no problem with trademark infringement, but that Ms. Smeal and Katherine Spillar, the executive vice president of the Feminist Majority Foundation, were firm...
March 30, 2005
Following up on yesterday's post about the Starbucks quotes-on-cups story, Hal of Year of Glad points to this story about conservatives who are upset about the liberal bent of the contributors.
The problem, critics say, is the company's list of overwhelmingly liberal contributors, including Al Franken, Melissa Etheridge, Quincy Jones, (and) Chuck D. Of the 31 contributors listed on Starbucks' Web site, only one, National Review editor Jonah Goldberg, offers a conservative viewpoint.
The Independent tells the story of Patricia Ferguson's Orange Prize longlisted novel It So Happens, a book that no one wanted to publish.
Largeheartedboy is adding a new series on his blog called Book Notes. Authors will create mix CDs based on their new work. Today's Book Notes is provided by Tom Bissell, author of God Lives in St. Petersburg.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations says the conservative National Review magazine apparently has removed advertisements for two "virulently anti-Muslim books" it is selling in its online store.
The New York Sun profiles poet John Ashbery.
Ayelet Waldman describes her day.
6:15 A.M. After whipping up an omlette aux fines herbes and squeezing the oranges for his juice, I wake up my husband with the customary morning blowjob. Torrid. From what I can make out through the door, the kids have realized that they're going to have to cook their own breakfast again. I hope they also realize that if they make a mess, they're going to have to clean it up. This mommy business is rough, demanding stuff. The husband finishes his breakfast and takes me from behind.
Robert Gray explains the upcoming project "Reading the World," a collaboration between Dalkey Archive Press, FSG, Archipelago, New Directions, and Knopf to promote literature in translation. It's all being headed up by Dalkey editor superhero Chad Post.
As Post recalls it: Last year at BEA, I produced a small booklet listing all of our upcoming translations, from Dutch, from Estonian, from Bulgarian, etc. Paul Yamazaki [City Lights bookstore] picked this up at our stand and said that it was the "most beautiful thing" he had found at BEA. So in talking with him, I mentioned that it would be great if we could figure out a way for publishers and booksellers who love these type of books to work together to help raise the awareness of the translations being published.
Rana Dasgupta is interviewed at the Guardian about his new collection of short stories/novel/"story cycle", Tokyo Cancelled.
Canadian radio documentarian Paul Kennedy wants Leonard Cohen to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. If you're not a fan, start your eye-rolling now: I agree. He's the best writer in Canadian history, and one of the best in North America. Read his magical novel, Beautiful Losers. Read Stranger Music, a collection of his poems and lyrics, which I carried around with me pretty much constantly from 1995 to 1997. I guarantee you'll fall in love with his writing. (Note: This is not a guarantee.) Kennedy explains:
"There are a lot of people in Montreal who are very passionate about Leonard Cohen ... He's different from a celebrity; he's almost God."
To which I can only say: Almost?
I finished Paradise some time last week, making it book #26. It's just great. I loved it. I've gushed enough on this blog already. I'll probably gush more in the future. I picked up Nervous System: Or, Losing my Mind in Literature by Jan Lars Jensen. We've been complaining a lot about memoirs on the blog lately, but if there's one thing I like, it's a well written illness memoir. Especially if it's a mental illness memoir. Nervous System reminded me of one of my favorite memoirs of all time, Molly Haskell's Love and Other Infectious Diseases (which currently has some tragic cover art; my edition doesn't look like that, poor thing).
Jan Lars Jensen wrote a book called Shiva 3000. At some point in the publication process he became convinced that his book would lead to protests, a declaration of war, and an eventual nuclear holocaust. He began to believe that the FBI had found out about his book and would not let him live. He began to believe that the only way to protect his wife would be to kill himself. A suicide attempt lead to the psych ward, where he saw FBI agents where there were only air conditioner repairmen.
My favorite part of the book came near the end when Jensen began writing about the effect literature has had on his mental illness. How the books he reads forms his delusions, and how the religious freak he shared a room with at one point had the Bible influencing his delusions. And the excitement a first time author should be going through were of course marred by the knowledge that in some ways his own book had driven him crazy.
Mary Matalin's conservative imprint at Simon & Schuster will publish a memoir by Mary Cheney, the vice president's daughter.
Australian officials cracked The Da Vinci Code when they discovered illegal drugs hidden inside a copy of the best-selling novel sent to Australia from Britain, Justice Minister Chris Ellison said on Tuesday.
The drugs in question were anabolic steroids. There's a Jose Canseco joke somewhere here, but you'll have to think of it yourself.
Weetzie Bat is not welcome in New Ipswich, New Hampshire. The mother of a Mascenic High School sophomore is challenging Francesca Lia Block's Dangerous Angels, a collection of the popular young-adult Weetzie Bat books. Oddly enough, teacher Penny Culliton has been down this road before.
This is the second time that Culliton has faced complaints about her choice of literature. In 1995, she was fired from her position at Mascenic for teaching three novels with homosexual themes: "Maurice" by E.M. Forster, "The Education of Harriet Hatfield" by May Sarton, and "The Drowning of Stephen Jones" by Bette Greene. Culliton later won her job back in binding arbitration.
March 29, 2005
Do you have any books by Moby Dick? (Thanks to Mike for the link.)
Pitchfork considers the pop culture response to 9/11, taking a long look at Malcolm Clark's Islam for Dummies.
Islam for Dummies isn't afraid to address the rift between the Western and Muslim world. (The paragraph about the Israel-Palestinian conflict is flagged, ironically, with a "HEADS UP" icon showing a man getting bonked in the head with a flying object.)
This interview with Dr. Richard Deyo on Alternet has convinced me to put his new book Hope or Hype: The Obsession with Medical Advances and the High Cost of False Promises on my to-be-read pile. (But like my obsession with books about farming, I worry that I am the only one who's interested in books about the modern medical establishment.) Deyo touches on some of the issues being idiotically ignored on the news lately.
The patients feel like there is no limit because insurance picks up the tab up to a million dollars, sometimes two. Now health insurance is becoming unaffordable to many people and Medicare is in trouble financially. I argue we should be trying to get the most health care for the most people as opposed to getting every last minute of life for an individual who may have a terminal illness. But words like "rationing" are taboo. We can't talk about it. It is almost as bad as being liberal in today's political debate. The truth is, if we reflect, we acknowledge that we'll have spent hundreds of thousands for one patient to prolong a week of life in an intensive care unit as opposed to spending that on other things like prenatal care and preventive services, on things that might save more lives.
I recently switched from Linux to Windows at work, and the first thing I did was disable the horrible fucking grammar check function on Microsoft Word. (Though it took me an hour to figure out how, which, admittedly, says a lot more about me than it does about Microsoft.) But God, I hate it, hate it, hate being corrected on my usage by the same computer program that brought the world that talking paper clip.
University of Washington Professor Sandeep Krishnamurthy: Also not a fan, but maybe for different reasons. Krishnamurthy points out that the grammar check doesn't actually catch all usage mistakes, and lets stand sentences like "Marketing are bad for brand big and small. You Know What I am Saying? It is no wondering that advertisings are bad for company in America, Chicago and Germany."
My main problem with the grammar check is that it insists on "correcting" sentences that aren't actually incorrect. Split infinitives, terminal prepositions, "sentence fragments" — all bullshit rules that only grammar prescriptivists give a shit about. (Yeah, that's right, I ended that sentence with "about." Fucking sue me.)
Regardless, both Krishnamurthy and I both agree that the Word grammar check should die and burn in hell. (Krishnamurthy never actually said that, but you can kind of read between the lines.) Seattle reporter Todd Bishop continues the discussion on the P-I's Microsoft blog.
Starbucks is featuring cups with quotes from a host of famous and sorta-famous people, including writers such as Roger Ebert, Philip Levine, Walter Mosley, Al Franken and Mitch Albom. Apparently this is meant to foster discussion and debate in coffee houses. The last time I went to a coffee house, I listened to two kids talk about how they considered themselves "post-post-punk," but maybe if they were staring at a quote from the guy who wrote The Five People Morrie Met in Heaven Last Tuesday, the quality of discourse would improve. Hey, it's worth a try! (Just kidding. It's totally not.)
Via Political Wire.
This week's Guardian Digested Read: Straight by Boy George.
Having been to India, I am a deeply spiritual person and I can usually tell exactly what someone is thinking about me before they know themselves. I couldn't have reached this state of serenity without so many people, like my good friends Mike and Dragana, reminding me of how important I am to them.
Nine Ki has also been profoundly influential on my life. Every person has three numbers based on their birth date and this dictates how well you can communicate with others. My numbers are 317 which means I am open and kind. Madonna is a 683. Enough said.
It's time to nominate your favorite female comics creators, writers, and artists for this year's Lulu awards.
PEN/Faulkner Award winner Ha Jin talks to Radio Free Asia about his novel War Trash. (Via Largehearted Boy.)
Why haven't newspapers (except one) covering the Terri Schiavo case mentioned that one of the leading "pro-life" protestors hounding Schiavo's husband is a convicted rapist?
In a review of Hugh Miles' Al-Jazeera: How Arab TV News Challenged the World, The Globe and Mail asks "Which do you trust less: Al-Jazeera or Fox News?" (Note the different subititle for the US version: "How Arab TV News Challenges America.")
USA Today discusses Iranian women writers, mentioning Afschineh Latifi's Even After All This Time: A Story of Love, Revolution, and Leaving Iran, Azadeh Moaveni's Lipstick Jihad: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America and American in Iran, Roya Hakakian's Journey from the Land of No: A Girlhood Caught in Revolutionary Iran, Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis and Persepolis 2, and Firoozeh Dumas' Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America.
D. Parvaz discusses needless memoirs and just totally loses it.
Scots are perplexed, and maybe just a bit flattered (I'm guessing here), about the popularity of Scottish imagery and characters in American romance novels.
The authors, some of whom can barely contain their passion for a land they see as impossibly romantic, say their books are successful because Scottish men in kilts are so breathtakingly beguiling.
Sue Ellen Welfonder, author of the bestselling Devil in a Kilt, said: "It’s the kilts. That or the men that fit in them. Scottish men are unbelievably sexy."
"Who's interested if the leader of Niger goes on Newsnight? It's 'get Geldof'. I'm Mr. Bloody Africa. I'd dearly love not to have to go there the day after tomorrow. More often than not, it bores me profoundly - the pace of change is far too slow, and Africans excuse their own complicity in exactly the same way as our politicians." — Sir Bob Geldof, January 2005
"Africa has the lot - vast seas of sand, tropical jungles, equatorial rainforest. And within this immense continent more peoples, more languages, more cultures, more animals than anywhere else on our world. It is quite simply the most extraordinary, beautiful and luminous place on our planet." — Sir Bob Geldof, March 2005
The rock star and occasional Nobel Peace Prize nominee is sounding a lot more diplomatic after he received a deal from Random House to write a book about traveling in Africa.
March 28, 2005
So this is what my bookshelf is missing. I'm ordering ten. (Via Bookninja.)
The War on Drugs claims another casualty. A young Maryland poet and her boyfriend have been arrested on charges of possession of marijuana and hallucinogens with intent to sell. Feel safer now that this criminal is off the streets? Thank the Republicans and Democrats who insist on prosecuting kids for a victimless crime. God bless America.
Parents in Alaska, perhaps suffering from some sort of frozen-brain thing, are challenging The House of the Spirits by that well-known pornographer Isabel Allende.
(James) Gudaitis' son, however, was disturbed by the same work. Daniel was uncomfortable with references to the occult, including the main character's ability to see visions, play the piano without using her hand and levitate, because of the family's evangelical Christian faith, Gudaitis said. Gudaitis was equally disturbed by the elements of sexual exploitation in the book.
Berkowitz offered Daniel the alternative, Thomas Hardy's "Tess of the d'Urbervilles," after Gudaitis objected to Allende's book, but Gudaitis said reading a different book can make students feel inferior to their classmates.
You know what can make a student feel inferior? Having a psycho dad who tries to ban the books you're supposed to be reading for school. And yeah, The House of the Spirits has some pretty explicit discussions about sex. But the kid in question was 17 when he was assigned it. That's one year older than the legal age of consent for sex in Alaska. So: he's old enough to have sex, old enough to drive a car, old enough to be tried as an adult and old enough to enlist in the National Guard, but not old enough to read Allende?
I would just like to take this opportunity to thank my parents for being sane.
The Hugo shortlist has been announced.
I only wish I had thought of the comment written over at I Love Books: Ayelet Waldman and Michael Chabon have somehow turned into the Angelina Jolie/Billy Bob Thornton couple of the literary world.
I am the only woman in Mommy and Me who seems to be, well, getting any. This could fill me with smug well-being. I could sit in the room and gloat over my wonderful marriage. I could think about how our sex life - always vital, even torrid - is more exciting and imaginative now than it was when we first met. I could check my watch to see if I have time to stop at Good Vibrations to see if they have any exciting new toys. I could even gaze pityingly at the other mothers in the group, wishing that they too could experience a love as deep as my own.
Oh my god. Please.
The great Jessa Crispin, whose star I conveniently hitched my wagon to, is interviewed at MediaBistro. And you've got to love that picture. If a photographer made me pose in front of my bookshelves, you'd just see like 25 copies of
The Charlotte Observer profiles North Carolina censor Martin Davis, who tried to get the city's library to ban sexually explicit books. He's turning his attention to the Gay Pride Festival and The Vagina Monologues now. Davis might be interested in the Fox News Channel blocker, which a Tulsa man is marketing to sensitive liberals. It might sell well, despite the fact that, as my dad points out, "you could just not turn on the Fox channel."
Each year, hundreds of students use the essay portion of the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills test to write about being abused, neglected or raped, education officials say.
Others write about being depressed, or wanting to die or hurt themselves or others.
I am filled with hope that I may dry your tears of lemonade. As my xiphoid process falls from my mitten, it reminds me of your hailstone.
Wish you could write a poem that beautiful? Well, you can't. I am a fucking genius. But you could write one almost as good with the Love Poem Generator! (Via Choriamb.)
I remember the days when Michael Schaub was just a wee lad with aspirations to write for the Austin Chronicle. ::sniff:: Now he's all grown up with a second review in the Washington Post, this time for Seth Greenland's The Bones. I'm so proud.
Daniel Gross thinks that the new conservative imprints are too late.
The choice of conservative to run the line is also pretty uninspired. For Matalin, the deal is less about the books than it is about the permanent campaign. The canned quotes in the S&S press release sound like they were written by Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson. "The unstoppable quest for human and economic liberty is remaking the world, literally before our eyes," she said. Of course, she won't be actually poring over the galleys looking for dangling participles. Rather, her role will be more like that of a political strategist—a profession she'll continue to practice—providing "conceptual editing."
Matalin's partisan hackishness almost certainly guarantees she will publish only the most predictable conservative writings. (Rep. Chris Shays this week noted charged that "this Republican party of Lincoln has become a party of theocracy." Would Matalin sign up Shays to write a book on the topic? Of course not. She's far more likely to publish a memoir by flack Scott McClellan—It Ain't Lying If You Believe It?—than by a Republican who might tell conservatives something they might not want to hear.)
Liesl Schillinger, who's one of the country's most incisive book critics, reviews A Changed Man for the NYTBR, and finds it "powerful, funny and exquisitely nuanced." Francine Prose discusses her novel in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review: "It's about so many other things: how people make moral decisions and try to lead decent, moral lives and become their idea of what a good human being is." Book of the year, I'm telling you. (Though now I have to read AL Kennedy's Paradise, which Jessa, who has never led me astray, swears is brilliant.) And if the NYTBR would give Liesl Schillinger a weekly column, I would mortgage my house to buy a daily subscription to the Times. Which is high praise, seeing as how I rent.
Charles Webb has written a sequel to his novel The Graduate, which was turned into one of the most legendary films in history. But it won't be published until after he's dead.
The tenth annual Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair was a success. If you're simpatico with the men and womyn who run the fair, you might want to send a thank-you letter to President Bush.
"A Bush election is very good for anarchist consumerism," said organizer Joey Cain, 50.
Yeah...I...huh.
RollingStone.com has a short profile of Paul Hornschemeier, author of Mother Come Home.
What if the diaries portrayed Barbie as a pioneering feminist -- and never mind that she herself would never use that term?
What if they revealed that, when she wasn't trying on miniskirts, she was schlepping down to Washington for the Senate debate on the Civil Rights Act of 1964?
What if they took on anorexia, for heaven's sake?
I would say: Please! Shoot me now! In the head!
Habitus: A Diaspora Journal brought two Nobel Prize winners, Imre Kertesz and Gunter Grass, together with exiled writer György Dalos for a conversation on the fall of Hungary to communism, the state of denial Germany went into following WWII, how they became writers, etc. It's a fascinating conversation, and it says great things about the future of newly launched Habitus.
Let the blog backlash begin. (First link via Collected Miscellany.)
Rosemary Goring is skeptical about the stated intention of big publishing houses to "give (the people) what they want to read," fearing books will soon be produced the way battery hens produce eggs.
"It's awful when a book such as Katie Price's Being Jordan or Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code is criticised in the press," cried Elaine McQuade of Penguin. "We've got to be a lot less snooty about books." In other words, suspend all critical faculties and be grateful for anything that comes wrapped in a cover and printed in ink. But have you been in any bookshops lately? They're stuffed with lifestyle bibles, ghosted celebrity memoirs, and Charles and Camilla joke books. The volume of low-brow, short attention-span, or picture-led books is staggering.
I'm not sure what the US equivalent of Charles and Camilla joke books is. But remember the 25,000 Lewinsky joke books that came out about six years ago? Yeah, I'm glad that's over.
March 25, 2005
The Vermont Guardian profiles the opening of the Center for Cartoon Studies. (From Thought Balloons.)
Ray Bradbury, John Updike and William Saroyan are among the authors whose selected works some parents and clergy want banned from a sixth-grade reading list in Washington County public schools.
Don't these people have jobs? Have they considered taking up a hobby? I hear stamp collecting is fun.
The Boston Phoenix interviews Jonathan Safran Foer.
The Texas State Board of Education is in charge of setting standards for textbooks in the state's public schools. No surprise there. Also unsurprising: the board is dominated by the Christian right wing of the Republican party. As a lifelong Texan, I'm prepared to lie in the bed that my insane conservative neighbors have made. That's the price you pay for living somewhere where chicken fried steak and Shiner Bock are readily available on every corner.
But it ain't just Texans that have to live with it. It's cheaper for textbook companies to make all textbooks conform to Texas' standards. Which means if your kid goes to school in, say, Vermont or Iowa or another state with a progressive citizenry, they'll still be reading books that have been carefully vetted by the Texas SBOE, and guaranteed not to offend sensitive fundamentalist sensibilities.
So hopefully you have no problem with your children being lectured about abstinence, but kept in the dark about birth control and disease prevention. Hopefully you're OK with your kids being taught that, despite all common logic and scientific evidence, evolution is just a flimsy theory. Hopefully you don't want your children to know about global warming — a handful of Texans don't believe in it, so don't expect your kids to ever hear the phrase in school.
In his brilliant novel Kings of Infinite Space, James Hynes has some fun with the idea. The protagonist is fired from a textbook company after including hidden messages like "EAT ME SATAN" in grammar books. It's an unbelievably funny idea, even if the actual situation is pretty tragic. This is why the 2006 state election in Texas affects everyone in the country. If the religious right keeps winning here, everyone in America loses.
Coolest mugshot ever. When I'm in my forties, I want to look like Jeffrey Page. He's got kind of a Sam Elliott thing going on. The New Jersey columnist makes some good points about a group of Fair Lawn, N.J., parents who want to ban Pat Conroy's The Lords of Discipline from their child's school.
More than 60 writers, including Irvine Welsh, AL Kennedy, and Richard Jobson, are to take part in this year's Word literary festival in Aberdeen.
Jessa, I'm going ahead and buying a plane ticket to Scotland. Is it cool if I expense it? Or should I just use the Bookslut credit card? Please advise.
Enough of the Brontë industry's veneration of coffins, bonnets and tuberculosis. It is time to exhume the real Charlotte - filthy bitch, grandmother of chick-lit, and friend.
Too many fucking memoirs. At least Grimes pulls out a few good memoirs for mention, like Ayun Halliday's Job Hopper and John Falk's Hello to All That. Don't miss the Audio Slideshow in the sidebar.
Authorities in China have banned a novel about adultery set during the Cultural Revolution. I guess this is why John Updike never broke into the Chinese market.
John Banville draws some interesting comparisons between HP Lovecraft and Michel Houellebecq in this essay at BookForum.
Philip K. Dick will be posthumously inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame on May 6. But what the hell took them so long? Several SF authors are already members, including Isaac Asimov, Andre Norton, Ursula K. Le Guin and Samuel R. Delany. Good authors all, but did any of them have Dick's insanely high literary credibility?
The new issue of Indy Magazine is exclusively about the work of Art Spiegelman. They not only have the usual scholarship about Maus but also an essay on his out-of-print book Breakdowns, an interview with Francoise Mouly about her collaboration with Spiegelman on RAW, an oral history of RAW, the influence MAD Magazine had on Spiegelman, and more. You've got your reading cut out for you, Spiegelman fans.
Nextbook has an interview with Shalom Auslander about his new book of short stories Beware of God and growing up in an Orthodox family.
I mention in one of the stories that I think absolute belief to be the easiest thing. And I can't listen to someone who has never doubted or gone their own way tell me how I am supposed to live my life. I remember going into the laundry room on Friday night at a young age and going OK, I want to see what happens if I put this light on. And you do it and hold your breath and wait to die. And you don't. You shut it off before your parents find out. At some point, you do the math: If God didn't kill me, my parents will. How are you supposed to grow up wanting to be around that?
In case you haven't seen it before, Scans Daily has images of the comic book Jamie Hewlett of Tank Girl fame illustrated to the lyrics of Pulp's "Common People."
I wanted to do something other than read Paradise yesterday because I'm almost finished and when it's over I'll be sad, so I read Wilfred Santiago's In My Darkest Hour instead. It had its moments. You can read an interview with Santiago here.
March 24, 2005
Steve Almond vs. Steve Almond.
The Broken Curse: A Literary Theory.
The Red Sox won the World Series last year because their home jersey was inadvertently featured on the cover of the Spring 2004 issue of The Kenyon Review.
The ex-husband of Kansas romance novelist Rebecca Brandewyne is accused of placing a bomb on his porch and blaming it on his ex-wife. Wow. I am so glad that my girlfriend is sane.
Best-selling crime writer Ian Rankin is taking to the stage for a series of performances which will include storytelling and live music.
Jonathan Safran Foer is slated to follow in Rankin's footsteps with a pop opera tentatively titled Extremely Funky and Incredibly Rockin'. Deborah Solomon co-wrote the libretto.
I'm still getting used to referring to Ethan Hawke as an "Academy Award-nominated screenwriter," but hey, there it is. Now he's a fellow book reviewer (though not really). Gawker has the scoop. (Via Academy Award-nominated sound editor Bookninja.)
Australian conservatives are demanding the removal of two children's books that feature characters with gay parents. Normally, I'd get off on a long, self-righteous rant here — because I know everyone loves that — but it's a lot harder to get angry at right-wingers when they have cool accents.
The foreword for Garry Trudeau's upcoming Doonesbury book will be written by Sen. John McCain.
In his new column, Adam Langer discusses some differences between American and European publishing.
What do the following books say about a person's sexual characteristics:
- A man currently reading The Da Vinci Code?
This guy is going to be awful in bed. This is just one step up from a sci-fi reader, someone who thinks sex can't measure up to masturbation.
Three female authors -- AL Kennedy (Paradise), Yvonne Roberts (The Trouble with Single Women), and Jane Rogers (The Voyage Home) -- write about the problem with women writers.
From the titles of Roberts's books, you can tell what kind of nonsense she'll write: "Today, female creativity is still constrained by the need to cook the children's tea, exploration limited to the wilder shores of Tesco, and women novelists undoubtedly do produce work that's dull, domestic and depressed (especially since publishers and readers lap up the genre)." She seems to be advocating for more chick lit, but this time on the naughty side. Jesus. Jane Roberts points out the number of women authors that don't write exclusively about domesticity.
AL Kennedy, however, reinforces why I love her so.
Sadly, Women's Writing is the only one of the above repeatedly used as a stick to beat women who write. Either Women's Writing is fluffy and inconsequential, full of romps and buttocks - or Women's Writing is coarse and aggressive and the kind of muck you'd expect from an off-duty stripper in a strop - or Women's Writing is obsessed with plumbing and bleeding and bonding to whale music. Effectively, Women's Writing is whatever has most annoyed any given journalist, commentator, academic, or author in the past few books by women they've read. Sweeping generalisations must be made, insults must be slung, personal abuse is welcome and two or three days of columns and op-eds can be sustained with the merry to-and-fro.
What no one mentions, however, is that many women authors love the Women's Writing label. They either spend their time trying to defend chick lit as a genre, or they're producing right wing propaganda in tales of women who can't do it all afterall. God knows I temporarily declared I would be reading no more contemporary literature by women for a while after coming across Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life, wherein Rosenthal defined "What a Woman in Today's World" is. And of course it was restrictive and offensive and completely ridiculous. But because publishers and even some of the writers themselves insist on this box called "Women's Writing," you can see how the reader would get confused. Maybe that's why AL Kennedy uses her initials.
Our criteria for listing a children's book are:
The book must contain no racially destructive propaganda, either in text or illustrations.
The book should serve a racially constructive purpose by providing White role models, instilling White values, or building a sense of White identity through the teaching of White history and legend. Sometimes, as in the case of fiction intended more for enjoyment than for edification (an example is Wind in the Willows ), the constructive purpose may be subliminal, but it is still there. Even books for very young readers may be constructive, if only by teaching love for animals, reverence for Nature, or proper standards of behavior for White children.
Books listed at National Vanguard Books include Anne of Green Gables, Blueberries for Sal, The Hidden Staircase, and The Secret Garden.
Ha Jin's War Trash won the PEN/Faulkner.
March 23, 2005
Emma Garman noticed a few similarities between Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Nicole Krauss's The History of Love. But they are, after all, married, so a plagiarism lawsuit is unlikely.
Is it a cute postmodern joke? God knows Foer is fond of those. Or perhaps it's a romantic statement: as we are joined in matrimony so is our work? (Naturally, the dedications are to each other.) Reading the novels back-to-back triggers the strange sensation of exiting an imaginary world only to immediately re-envision it through a slightly different lens. And it's an appealing world, notwithstanding the war—or terrorism—derived gravitas with which the authors imbue their tales: a cozy milieu of Manhattan Jewish intellectuals, of unostentatious comfort, of kind and cooperative strangers, of family members who are always nice to one another and whose dysfunctions are poetic, never crass or petty.
If the two books are so similar, the question is which is worth reading? The answer, surprisingly, is The History of Love, a book unlikely to get as much attention as her husband's.
He meant it as a piece of religious satire, a playful look at the life of Jesus. But Gerhard Haderer's depiction of Christ as a binge-drinking friend of Jimi Hendrix and naked surfer high on cannabis has caused a furore that could potentially land the cartoonist in jail.
Mike and I might have to eventually battle over the best book so far in 2005. He keeps harping on about A Changed Man, but I see your reformed-Neo-Nazi and raise with drunken sex with a dentist from Paradise by AL Kennedy. It is so good. Kennedy is keeping score of her reviews, the good, the bad, and the odd. The US attention has just started, so you can keep checking back at Metacritic, where Paradise is beating A Changed Man by three whole points.
Poor Andrew Motion. The UK's poet laureate has to write a poem celebrating the upcoming marriage of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles. (We can only pray it's not a rap.) But it's not all bad news for the guy:
Since he took up the 300-year-old post in 1999 for an annual salary of £500 and 500 bottles of sherry, Motion has dutifully written about the royal family but also penned poems on everything from train crashes to trade unions.
Whoa, whoa, whoa — 500 bottles of sherry? What? Britain, explain yourself.
More about The New New Journalism: The Boston Globe has a short interview with the editor Robert S. Boynton. Columbia Journalism Review also has a review of the book. Julia Klein raises a few questions, like, where are the women at? And, can we have an anthology, please?
The ever popular Pictures of Writers thread.
The IACP finalists for 2005 Cookbook Awards have been announced. The food writing award, or "The Cuisinart Award" as it's called, has the following nominees:
Poet of the Appetites: The Lives and Loves of M.F.K. Fisher by Joan Reardon
Sirio: The Story of My Life and Le Cirque by Sirio Maccioni and Peter J. Elliot
Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America by Laura Shapiro
Other worthy books nominated include Pure Chocolate, The King Arthur Flour Cookie Companion: The Essential Cookie Companion, Bouchon, On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen, and Bruce Aidells's Complete Book of Pork: A Guide to Buying, Storing,
and Cooking the World's Favorite Meat.
The complete list of nominees for the journalism award has also been announced.
Things I would rather do than watch any movie starring Christina Ricci:
1. Watch any movie directed by Ben Affleck.
2. Perform "It's Raining Men" in a karaoke bar in Alabama.
3. Read Chloe Does Yale five times, consecutively, while periodically looking up at whoever happens to be sitting next to me and exclaiming, "This Chloe girl sure does enjoy oral sex!" While in Alabama.
4. Watch a film adaptation of Chloe Does Yale directed by Ben Affleck and scored by the Weather Girls while performing oral sex on Alabama state Rep. Gerald Allen.
But I liked her in The Addams Family.
Slate has a hilarious review of Prozac Nation, the movie based on Elizabeth Wurtzel's book, which stars Ricci. And which qualifies as a match made in the depths of hell. It's been awaiting release for about five years, evidently, which probably tells you about all you need to know about the film's apparent quality. And if that doesn't, well:
But perhaps Jason Biggs, Ricci's co-star in the film, got at the most important reason for the film's underachiever status when he told the press, "I just don't know that the center of the story is a very endearing and likable character." Proving Biggs' point, Wurtzel herself was less tactful in a recent assessment of the film, telling the New York Times, "As you should have figured out by now, it's a horrible movie."
Anyway, Ricci has a topless scene, for those of you who are into that sort of thing. Slate's Dana Stevens perfectly captures the appeal of movies like this as "mental-health porn," which seems apt. God, I thought we'd heard the last of Elizabeth Wurtzel's literary career. I was wrong. I was so wrong.
Things I would rather do than read any book by Elizabeth Wurtzel:
1. Watch any movie directed by Ben Affleck.
...and the rest sort of plays out the same way.
Top Cabinet officials are up in arms about the allegations of widespread steroid use made by former Secretary of State Colin Powell in his new political tell-all Pumped: Living Fast, Loose, And On The Juice During My Tumultuous DC Days—And Nights.
Poor Dennis Lehane. This is going to suck, baby, suck.
A food author died in an arson attack at her mother’s home, police said today.
Miriam Polunin, whose work includes Healing Foods and The Natural Pharmacy, was staying at the detached house in Macclesfield, Cheshire, when it caught fire in the early hours of Saturday.
Norman A. Porter Jr., who wrote and performed poetry under the name J.J. Jameson, has been arrested in Chicago. Porter, a convicted murderer who escaped from a Massachusetts jail in 1985, had apparently been living in Chicago for several years. He's being extradited to Massachusetts, where he'll face charges of prison escape and violating parole. ChicagoPoetry.com, who once named Porter their "poet of the month," is shocked by the news, and links to several news stories about his past and his arrest.
When publishing and politics meet, only one thing can happen: pure fucking excitement. Or mind-numbing boredom. It's definitely one of the two. At any rate, USA Today run stories about Mary Matalin's new conservative imprint at Simon & Schuster, and the new book by fired CBS News producer Mary Mapes.
I hate Mary Matalin's politics, mostly, but she's one of only a few outspoken pro-gay conservatives, which takes guts in the party of Sen. Rick "Man on Dog" Santorum. She's also pretty charming in The War Room, the excellent documentary about Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign. Yeah, Mary's all right. For a Republican.
March 22, 2005
Nerve has announced the monthly Henry Miller Award, with a prize of $1,934 (the year Tropic of Cancer was released) to the best literary sex scene of the month. (Thanks to Jackie for the link.) This month's nominees:
Home Land by Sam Lipsyte
Paradise by AL Kennedy
Milk by Darcey Steinke
The Position by Meg Wolitzer
Beautiful Blemish by Kevin Sampsell
Anita Shreve: Saturday looks good to me. (Apologies to Fred Thomas and friends.)
Agatha Christie and Jack London books are easily found on the shelves of the El Segundo (California) Public Library, but the City Council has deemed the two celebrated authors too un-American — literally and figuratively — to attach their names to new meeting rooms at the library.
Christie was nixed because she was British; London because he was, at one time, a socialist. Columnist John Bogert is pissed.
Mayor Kelly McDowell best summed up the feelings of the council and the whole namby-pamby spirit of our overly cautious offend-nobody child-safe silly-ass times when he said, "I don't want to make a political statement by naming a room, period. I don't want to use one whose politics, in my view, weren't in line with American ideals."
Michiko Kakutani, I will send you fifty dollars if you use the word "silly-ass" in your next review. Actually, better make it twenty. Twenty damn dollars! You'd have to be a fool to turn down that kind of scratch.
Louis de Bernieres (Corelli's Mandolin, Birds without Wings) writes about a disastrous vacation in Greece.
I was 28, and it was with a woman who, unbeknown to me, was thinking of a way to leave me. We spent two weeks in a horrible part of Corfu, infested with horseflies, where the discos thumped all night and the dogs barked along with them. Our neighbours in the apartment were a father and son from Glasgow, both butchers, who had come to Greece because they had worked out that, even taking into account the price of the airfare, it was cheaper to be drunk for two weeks in Greece than in Glasgow. They only went out at night, and spent the days sleeping off their hangovers. They were pasty faced and as pale as vampires.
More on the first fiction being released in trade paperback only: Robert Gray comments, and there are more letters at Moby Lives.
Nerve is running an excerpt from AL Kennedy's new novel Paradise.
A month ago I couldn't find anything to read. Now my to-be-read-next stack is not only huge and about to tip over, it's full of things I can't wait to read. On that pile is The New, New Journalism, a book I hope I can hurry up and get to soon. There are "conversations" (as they call it) with some of my favorite nonfiction writers ever, like Calvin Trillin, Jon Krakauer, and William Langewiesche. When reading this round-up at the Millions of the writers' various books, I thought that they also probably had a lot of free content online. Just something to keep me busy while I waiting for the book to come up in my queue.
Gay Talese
Frank Sinatra Has a Cold
On the Bridge: The Verrazano-Narrows and the shape of New York
Michael Lewis
Losers: The cult of failure in Silicon Valley.
Eric Schlosser
A Grief Like No Other
Reefer Madness (excerpt)
Worthy of the Slaughter: On Saving Private Ryan
Over There
Susan Orlean
Online archive available at her website
Calvin Trillin
Letter from Berkeley
Richard Perle: Whose Fault Is He?
Don't Mention It: The hidden life and times of a Greenwich Village restaurant.
Lost Son: Finding the Family He Left Behind
The Red and the White
Ted Conover
Online archive available at his website
Leon Dash
Rosa Lee's Story: The Series
Jonathan Harr
A Civil Action (excerpt)
The Burial (PDF)
Ron Rosenbaum
New Lolita Scandal! Did Nabokov Suffer From Cryptomnesia?
The Last Secrets of Skull & Bones
Explaining Hitler (excerpt)
Degrees of Evil
The Journalism of Ideas
Jon Krakauer
Into Thin Air
Everest Debate
Lawrence Wright
Online archive available at his website
Jane Kramer
Lone Patriot (excerpt)
Blood Sport
Private Lives: Germany's Troubled War on Terrorism
Richard Preston
The Demon in the Freezer
The Hot Zone (excerpt)
Alex Kotlowitz
The Other Side of the River (excerpt)
Speaking of Sex (audio)
In the Face of Death
Richard Ben Cramer
Joe DiMaggio (excerpt)
How Israel Lost (interview)
What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now?
William Langewiesche
An Inexorable Retreat
The Problem with Houston
Inside the Sky (excerpt)
Letter from Baghdad
Welcome to the Green Zone
William Finnegan
The Economics of Empire
The Election Mandela Lost
The Candidate: How the Son of a Kenyan Economist Became an Illinois Everyman
Leasing the Rain
The New Anti-Globalists
Lawrence Weschler
The Looking Glass
Mr. Shawn's New Yorker
Age of Wonder
Inhaling the spore: field trip to a museum of natural history, - un - Museum of Jurassic Technology
Comedy of Values
Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
Random Family (audio excerpt)
Home is Where the Cul-de-Sac is
I've been telling people that A Changed Man might well be the best American book of the year. That's a risky pronouncement to make when it's not even April. And already I find myself eating my words. Presenting The Marino Mission: One Girl, One Mission, One Thousand Words, "a young-adult fiction paperback that features 1,000 of the most common SAT words." (It's published, unsurprisingly, by Cliffs Notes.)
Where do you go for well-written stories about American poetry? The UK, of course. The Scotsman's Susan Mansfield has a truly fascinating article about US poets Jane Hirshfield, Thomas Lynch, Sharon Olds, and, happily, the brilliant Mark Doty.
On Saturday the Scottish poet and novelist John Burnside, in conversation with Richard Holloway about "Poetry and the Spirit", praised American poets for their willingness to engage with spiritual issues. It is especially interesting that at a time when the US government is embracing a narrow strand of religious faith and its societal aspirations, creative thinkers in the country are still exploring the role of the spiritual in all our lives.
"The story is about my cat Shayna eating barbeque chips. My cat is a black and white tabby," said (young writer Alexa) Bergeski.
The story revolves around a winter day in December where Bergeski was eating barbeque potato chips and her tabby, with natural cat curiosity, began sniffing around her. Bergeski went to the family's Christmas tree and gave her cat a chip. After a few sniffs, Shayna gobbled down the crunchy treat.
"Then Shayna went to her water bowl to get a drink," said Bergeski.
Hey, she's still better than Dale Peck.
The archvillain in Spider-Man 3 will be played by Thomas Haden Church, who was inexplicably passed over for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Sideways. Exactly which archvillain he'll play is being kept a secret. I wonder if Michael Chabon will be involved in this one?
Rebecca Caldwell at the Globe and Mail considers the new crop of writers whose parents are also writers. Mentioned are Christopher Rice (son of Anne Rice), Owen King (son of Stephen King), Anne Giardini (daughter of Carol Shields), Emma Richler (daughter of Mordecai Richler), and David Layton (son of Irving Layton).
And booksellers won't automatically order more books based simply on the ancestry of the author, because there's no guarantee that they will sell, just the way other name-dependent book gambles, such as the celebrity memoir, aren't surefire sellers.
Said Richard Bachmann, the owner of A Different Drummer Bookstore in Burlington, Ont.: "Having a name's a start, but probably even better would be having a good editor."
Oh, amen, man.
A previously unknown novel by Alexandre Dumas, the author of The Three Musketeers, has been discovered in the French National Library, the daily Le Figaro has reported.
I was wondering what Denis Johnson was up to. I hadn't heard much lately about the author of the amazing short story collection Jesus' Son (which was made into an equally amazing movie) and the novel Already Dead. It turns out he's written a play, now being performed in Seattle, called The Cassandra Cycle, Play One: Hellhound on My Trail. The Seattle Times likes it, mostly, and notes that the next two plays in the cycle, Shoppers Carried by Escalators into the Flames and Soul of a Whore (sweet Jesus, those are great titles) will be performed in the coming months.
A Gannett reporter looks at the success of the Complete Idiot's Guide and For Dummies books. There's some interesting information: the first topic in both series was MS-DOS. The second most popular Idiot book is The Complete Idiot's Guide to Understanding Catholicism; the ninth most popular is The Complete Idiot's Guide to Amazing Sex. And:
People who buy the "Idiot's Guides" tend to go for religion, with the Bible guide being one of the brand's consistent best sellers.
Somewhere in Chicago, Jessa is laughing very hard.
The Comics Reporter has a short interview with Peter Bagge about his new book Buddy Does Seattle, how he keeps up with all of his various projects, and why he's working for Reason Magazine.
A Harvard assistant librarian is suing the university, claiming she was passed over for promotions because she's African-American "and is perceived as merely a 'pretty girl' whose attire is too 'sexy.'" Jesus, who the hell is advising Harvard on gender issues? Bobby Riggs? Pat Buchanan? Larry Summers?
March 21, 2005
Over at Saucy, Bookslut's own Colleen Mondor writes about The Lost Gardens of Heligan.
Some good news from Virago, one of the coolest publishers on the planet: A new Sarah Waters novel is scheduled for release next February. (Waters is the author of the extremely acclaimed novel Tipping the Velvet.)
New at Newsday: Stuart Klawans thinks Jonathan Safran Foer is plenty talented, but finds Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close somewhat disappointing, and Maud Newton recommends A.L. Kennedy's Paradise.
MBToolBox has a short interview with John Green, author of Looking for Alaska.
Inside Higher Education is celebrating the re-release of Otto Weininger's Sex and Character.
A fascinating article at Bookninja about the "self-styled poetry guerrilla warriors" of Foetry.
These contests are fuelled by vanity. My appeal to all writers of poems and stories is to please stop entering contests that require entry fees and provide subscriptions in return. Please, have faith in the intrinsic value of your writing and don't look to others to affirm your genius. Please, pull the plug on the life support to a score of mostly unwanted and unread literary journals.
Clark County (Oregon) commissioners and library leaders are mulling whether registered sex offenders pose a threat to young library users -- and whether libraries should be off-limits to them.
Funky Winkerbean starts a series on the issues facing comic book stores selling adult material to adults. (As in, they get arrested for it.)
I have a big enough ego that I just don't care. In Y, a couple of issues ago, there was a two-part arc with a theatre troupe and Yorick wasn't in it too much. I think about 90% of readers really hated it. They were like, "What's the point?" and "Let's get back to the main story." And, uh, I don't care. This is something that I wanted to tell and these are characters we'll revisit and will have a larger importance to the story. So, no, for good or bad, I write stories that I want to read. And you know, it's great when people like it. Bad reviews make me eat Oreos and feel miserable, but no, it doesn't change my desire to tell the story exactly the way I set out to do it.
Brian K. Vaughan, writer now of four different comics -- Ex Machina, Y: The Last Man, Runaways, and Ultimate X-Men -- talks to IGN about the delicate balancing act.
Man, who'd have thought that Communist Chinese censors wouldn't have a sense of humor?
China has banned a new novel by an award-winning author on grounds that the title satirises the slogan "Serve the People" coined by late Communist Party chairman Mao Zedong, publishing industry sources have said.
This does not bode well for my forthcoming memoir Serve the People Lunch: Eleven Years of Working at Bob's Sausage Shack. Don't make fun. It's a living.
A new book argues that Huey Long, the legendary Louisiana politician, was killed by his bodyguards and not by Carl Weiss, the physician blamed for assassinating him.
John Leonard's essay about Jonathan Lethem in the New York Review of Books almost had me convinced. I tried very hard to like Lethem's books, but his metaphors kept getting in the way. Maybe one day I'll pick up Motherless Brooklyn, the book people tell me will change my mind, but until then I'll stick with his essays. Leonard, on the other hand, does not appreciate Lethem's essays at all, not even the hysterical one about telling a girlfriend as they walked out of a Cassavetes film, "If you don't understand that film, you don't understand ME!" Leonard's essay is called "Welcome to New Dork," and he takes offense at Lethem's cravings for pop culture.
But if you read the essay, you realize it's only in the nonfiction that it offends him. He likes Lethem's fiction. He thinks The Fortress of Solitude falls apart in the final third, but that is hardly pop culture's fault. Books fall apart sometimes. Endings are rough. So when Leonard declares at the end of the essay, "But it is time this gifted writer closed his comic books for good," I have to wonder why he thinks that'll help. It seems to me that Leonard liked everything Lethem wrote before The Fortress of Solitude, was disappointed, and started looking for the cracks in Lethem's other work. Then The Disappointment Artist is released, and Leonard realizes Lethem's inspirations come from a completely different place than Leonard had hoped. So he decided to write this silly essay. But if you are at all interested in Lethem, you should maybe read it. Just don't read the last third. It all falls apart there.
Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone got a lot of flak for urging Catholics not to buy or read The Da Vinci Code. The book's defenders had a good time with the story, casting Bertone as a would-be censor (which, to be fair, he probably is). If Bertone had just urged people not to read the book because it's terrible, he probably wouldn't have been mocked so relentlessly.
Now comes Archbishop Thomas Collins, the highest-ranking Catholic cleric in Edmonton, Canada, who encourages Catholics everywhere to chill out.
"It's all a bunch of hot air," he said. "It's sort of like an anti-Catholic Raiders of the Lost Ark.
"It's very gripping. It's got tidbits of obscure and fascinating, but inaccurate, information. And it's all put together in a concoction that appeals to conspiracy theorists antagonistic to the Catholic Church."
What was she thinking? Zoe Heller doesn't much like Ian McEwan's Saturday, although she's very deferential about it. Those British are just so polite.
The National Book Critic Awards:
Fiction: Marilynne Robinson's Gilead
Nonfiction: Diarmaid MacCulloch's The Reformation: A History
Biography/Autobiography: Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan's De Kooning: An American Master
Poetry: Adrienne Rich's The School Among the Ruins
Criticism: Patrick Neate's Where You're At: Notes From the Frontline of a Hip-Hop Planet
Celebrate World Poetry Day with the Guardian's poetry mood matcher. (I was recommended "Lassitude" by Mathilde Blind, with the explanation "You're experiencing a bit of an existential crisis, aren't you? Here's a poem to help you through your long dark night of the soul.")
Book #23 was The Meaning of Wife by Anne Kingston. It's an interesting book. It might very well contain important information. It wasn't exactly revelatory to me, as I've read a lot of women's studies books and I'm not in need of convincing. Most of what it said -- diamonds are bad and monopolized, marriage is harmful to women and beneficial to men, unmarried women with important jobs aren't unmarried because of their jobs, they have the jobs because they're unmarried -- I agree with. I've been dumped because early on in the dating process I've stated no kids, no marriage, no changing my mind. I learned some new statistics in The Meaning of Wife, and I do wish it had been more anecdotal, more like Peggy Orenstein's Flux. There are only so many percentages and studies quoted a person can read before they start wishing a real person would show up and tell their story.
But my main complaint has nothing to do with the research, the writing, or the theories. It's the cover. Sure, it's cute. But now the only people who will pick up this book are us crazy women libbers. It's aggressively feminist, even with the color and the bridal script font. It screams "Fuck you, men!" Books like Why There are No Good Men Left and The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism manage to look like real books and could fool thinking women into buying them. They're also considerably less embarrassing to read on public transit. This is a book that could possibly change people's minds, but not if they run away in fear at the cover.
Book #24 was Jeanette Winterson's Lighthousekeeping. There's nothing to be said other than I was really into her in high school. Now not so much.
March 18, 2005
Can anything good come out of Alabama state Rep. Gerald Allen's bill to prohibit state funds from being used to buy books with gay characters or themes? Alice Walker thinks Allen's hate bill presents Alabama with a chance to move forward.
"Do not go backward, Alabama," Walker said. "You're on the move; you don't have to go backward. You all know all that was back there was an incredible amount of pain and an incredible amount of confusion.
"Don't let them push you all back, because all of us must live. We must live in dignity and honesty. There's no future back there."
Sequential Tart interviews Michelle Tea about her collaboration with Lauren McCubbin, Rent Girl.
There's a lot of denial that happens with my writing. I can't really think to much about what I'm revealing, or who will be reading it or seeing it. I know intellectually it will be out in the world, but something crucial stops that from sinking in. It's a weird ability that absolutely allows me to write these pieces honestly and ideally without a lot of internal censorship born of shame or embarrassment.
The Glasgow Evening Times profiles local comic creators, like Grant Morrison and Mike Millar.
More than 500 students from English and performing arts classes at Skyline High School were treated to a performance by hip-hop Chaucer rapper Dirk "Baba" Brinkman this week.
Brinkman, 26, put to music literary favorites the "Pardoner's Tale" and the "Wife of Bath's Tale" and rhymed along.
Odd. I spent last night watching Freaks and Geeks on DVD and avoiding the music-industry infestation of Austin that is South by Southwest. I'd never really seen the show before, but sweet Jesus, it's brilliant. Now comes the news that creator Paul Feig has a new book: Superstud: Or How I Became a 24-Year-Old Virgin, the cover of which is pretty sweet. I actually read Feig's previous book, Kick Me: Adventures in Adolescence, and I wasn't really impressed. But I'm willing to give this one a shot, if only because I'm still blown away by Freaks and Geeks. How can a show with "Bad Reputation" by Joan Jett as its theme song be bad? It can't. Rent or buy it today.
Author and professor Barry Hannah is being treated for an undisclosed illness in an intensive care unit at a Texas hospital, his wife, Susan Hannah, said Thursday through a family spokesperson.
Your eyes probably hurt just thinking about it: Tens of thousands of Japanese cellphone owners are poring over full-length novels on their tiny screens.
So it's not enough that my debt collectors somehow figured out my cell phone number. Now I have to worry about John fucking Irving calling me at three in the morning. Great.
There is a very interesting discussion going on in the Letters section o