April 29, 2005
New Christian horror novel explores evolution.
Well, I'm scared.
If poetry is dead or dying, nobody told Seattle. The 2005 Seattle Poetry Festival kicks off tonight, featuring Sherman Alexie and Anne Waldman. Also profiled in this P-I article is Cranky, the Seattle-based literary journal.
Did you ever have that experience in high school where you witnessed the two nerdiest kids in the state getting into a surprisingly intense slapfight? Well...
The two branches of the Writers Guild of America are suing each other over whether arbitration is required to address their ongoing money dispute.
In court papers filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, the WGA, West, said union rules required arbitration over its claim that it was subsidizing the WGA, East, by more than $1 million.
East Coast versus West Coast! Yeah! Me, I'm representing for the Dirty South. Holla! Or something.
Sad, sad news:
Dearest Cupcakes,
We're sad to inform you that April was the final edition of Cupcake. In the nearly two years that the series existed, we were proud to have presented readings by some of New York's best women writers. The time has now come for each of us to move on to pursue other endeavors.
We thank you for having made Cupcake one of the many reasons that people look to downtown New York for cutting-edge arts and culture, and hope that you will continue to support talented women writers wherever you may find them.
Warmest regards,
Cupcake
Rick Kleffel has an audio interview with Kazuo Ishiguro about his new book Never Let Me Go.
The Bush administration yesterday revealed that some of the Sept. 11 hijackers booked their tickets on the Internet using a computer in a college library in New Jersey.
Ken Wainstein, U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, made the disclosure in testimony to the House subcommittee on crime, terrorism and homeland security. He argued that Congress should renew provisions of the USA Patriot Act that allow seizure of library and bookstore records.
Get ready for a fight.
More on David Parker, the Massachusetts father who was arrested Wednesday for trespassing after he refused to leave the campus of his 5-year-old son's school. Parker was upset that his son had brought home a copy of Who's in a Family, the Robert Skutch children's book that mentions families with gay parents.
Parker and his wife, Tonia, 34, who was also in court yesterday, said the dispute arose because they asked school officials to notify them about classroom discussions about same-sex marriage and what they called other adult themes. They also wanted the option to exclude their boy, now 6, from those talks.
Ever heard of home schooling, dude?
The U.S. military staged the interrogations of terrorism suspects for members of Congress and other officials visiting the military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to make it appear the government was obtaining valuable intelligence, a former Army translator who worked there claims in a new book scheduled for release Monday.
Erik Saar's Inside the Wire: A Military Intelligence Soldier's Eyewitness Account of Life at Guantanamo will be released on May 2 by Penguin.
Frederic Beigbeder's Windows on the World managed to win the Independent's Foreign Fiction Prize, even after getting a middling review from the Independent.
Art Spiegelman was elected into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences this year along with Tom Brokaw, Jeff Koons, Tony Kushner, and William Rehnquist.
“The women who write [cozies] stop the action to go shopping, create a recipe, or take care of cats,” he says. “Cozies are not serious literature. They don’t deserve to win. Men take [writing] more seriously as art. Men labor over a book to make it literature. There are wonderful exceptions, of course—P.D. James, Ruth Rendell.”
John Walsh looks at the outsize influence of Penguin paperbacks on publishers and readers, a few weeks before the company releases its Pocket Penguins series.
Today, inspecting my shelves, I cannot explain or deny the frisson of excitement I get simply from looking at the grey-and-white spines of Camus's The Outsider, Norman Douglas's South Wind, Elias Canetti's Auto-da-Fé, Ronald Firbank's Valmouth and Other Stories. Forgive me if I give the spines a quick sniff - a warm, sweet, toffee scent with a fugitive whiff of cigar-box and pencil shavings.
Um, John, do you want to be alone? 'Cause this is starting to feel a little awkward...
Those pesky Red Eyes and Red Streaks aren't just bad for your brain. They're bad for their parent companies, too.
The marketing insight at play here is that if you put something light, easy to read, and disposable in the hands of people facing a 15-minute train ride, many will take it. And having taken it, they'll feel less of a need to buy some other paper -- even if that paper was their actual preference. For the last nine years, Rose (who doesn't want her last name used) has managed the newsstand inside the Irving Park station. "I was selling 70 to 75 Sun-Timeses a day, 30 to 35 Tribunes, and 20 to 25 RedEyes," she told me. "Now it's 12 or 13 Tribs and about 30 Sun-Timeses." Overall, she said, her business is off 70 percent.
April 28, 2005
The Royal Shakespeare Company runs out of Shakespeare.
The Boston Phoenix profiles local lit mag Post Road.
Top selling novelist Frederick Forsyth is the latest high-profile personality to publicly back the father of a murdered Red Cap’s bid to unseat Tony Blair at the General Election, it was announced today.
Forsyth called the candidate, Reg Keys, "a decent, honest man." Keys also has the support of legendary musician/producer Brian Eno and authors Richard Dawkins and Benjamin Zephaniah.
Kevin Guilfoile concludes his series at The Morning News about his book tour for Cast of Shadows.
More reviews yesterday. In New York, the Daily News and the Post both weighed in with thumbs up. The review in the San Francisco Chronicle, however, was another animal. Anthony Giardina spends most of the article enumerating—in excruciating detail—what he says are the rookie mistakes that make me, as he puts it, an apprentice to the form. (“Only certain kinds of thriller writers,” he says, “deem it essential to tell us, when two people are out to dinner, that one of them is eating pumpkin ravioli.”) Also, in a 900-word review, Giardina misspells my name 11 times.
Bound to Be Read is closing its stores in Albuquerque and St. Paul. The Journal and the Star Tribune both refer to the bookseller as an "independent" retailer, though it's actually owned by Hubbard Broadcasting, a Minnesota-based corporation that owns several television and radio stations.
Hilary Mantel explains the effect her memoir Giving up the Ghost had on her family.
On September 16, 2003, as I was leaving my flat to go up to London for a radio interview, I picked up with the post a letter forwarded by my agent. Something about it said, "OPEN ME." I glanced at the signature: a stranger's. I read the contents. I dropped the page into my notes for the interview. As I travelled to London, I felt that, though my body was on the train, my mind was radically displaced. "So," my interviewer said, "… your family. Your parents split up when you were 11. You haven't seen or heard of your father - is this correct - since 1963?" I touched the letter, which I had put down, like a talisman, by the microphone. I was able to say: "Not until this morning."
UCLA is trying to cut energy costs by reducing the use of air conditioning. That worries the college's librarians, who are concerned about the possible effect on books.
Kristen St. John, the collections conservator in charge of preserving books, said she will be looking for sharp rises in humidity or temperature, which could accelerate the death of books by speeding up a process called acid hydrolysis, which causes paper to lose its flexibility.
Over time, paper becomes brittle, turning yellow or brown and cracking easily, she said. This is the point of no return for research materials, as acid hydrolysis breaks fibers in paper, an irreversible process, she added.
Old people like books about old people. (And if there are cats involved, so much the better.)
Alternet is running an excerpt of No god but God by Reza Aslan, the book currently being fought over in my household. (He's also interviewed there.)
Author Mykel Mitchell has set out to bridge the gap between Hip-Hop and Christianity in his new book, titled "Word: For Everybody Who Thought Christianity Was For Suckas."
The way Kathie Lee needed Regis? That's the way I need Jesus.
The Washington Post profiles satirist and cartoonist Ali Lmrabet who was recently banned from practicing as a journalist for ten years in Morocco.
In March, after battling for months with media regulators, Lmrabet received a temporary license giving him permission to start a new magazine. In an interview at the time, however, he predicted that the government would continue to throw obstacles in his way. "I do believe that I'm going to publish again, but I also believe that they are going to make my life very, very hard," he said.
A Librarian's Plea for Library Etiquette.
If you want to view pornography, buy a home computer. While we support free speech, our facility needs to be child-friendly. No one -- not children, other patrons or staff -- wants to see your "private life."
But if you must view pornography on a library computer, at least try to make it family-friendly. There's no reason to do a Google search for "naked frat guys with hard cocks" when you could just search for "naked frat guys with erect penises."
Police arrested a Lexington father who refused to leave the Joseph Estabrook School yesterday after school officials rejected his demands that his 6-year-old son be shielded from any discussions about gay households.
David Parker, 42, confronted officials after his son brought home "Who's in a Family," a storybook that includes characters who are gay parents.
The Book Standard reports on how Ignatius Press, a small Catholic publisher, dealt with the sudden fame of one of their authors — the former Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger. You have to wonder how it would have affected sales if Ratzinger had taken the name "Hilarius II."
The Guardian interviews Peter Stephan Jungk, author of The Perfect American, a fictionalized biography of Walt Disney's last years.
He was a very strong, magnetic force throughout my childhood. A close friend of my father's, Heinz Haber, worked for Disney and presented him like a demigod. So I became curious: who was the man behind the demigod? The more I learned about him, the more I became fascinated, especially when I found out how little artistic work he had actually done himself. He had been the general of a thousand workers and drawing soldiers. It was quite an experience to look behind this facade.
Accidentally publishing a picture of the wrong Frank Calabrese in a story about the Mafia? Okay. But follow it up with another wrong Mob photo? Way to go, Chicago Tribune. Make us proud.
Mario Garcia examines the use of the tabloid format by newspapers at a time when it is becoming more and more popular. (As it should. You can't read standard newspapers on the train without asking your neighbor to hold up the other side for you.) Poynter has an excerpt of the article, although the entire 24-page (depending on just how much a journalism geek you really are) is available for download in PDF format.
Ian McMillan has reworked John Betjeman's famous poem "Slough" to be more positive about the town.
In the original, Betjeman writes: "Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough, it isn't fit for humans now".
In the revised work, McMillan counters him: "Come friendly words and splash on Slough! Celebrate it, here and now".
Tucson Weekly profiles Red Meat cartoonist Max Cannon, who's just released a new collection, Red Meat Gold.
On mainstream strips he enjoys: "I like to look at 'The Family Circus' because it's so fucking weird. A lot of people say the world of 'Red Meat' is so separated from reality. I think it's more in step of reality than 'The Family Circus.'"
Edward Wyatt looks at a new trend in retail: supermarkets with big-ass book sections.
April 27, 2005
Area Man Well-Versed In First Thirds Of Great Literature.
Here's one way to get your novel published: Marry a filmmaker. The New Yorker looks at Hollywood wives who write, paying special attention to Ron Howard's wife, Cheryl Howard Crew (In the Face of Jinn).
Howard counts among her literary influences Stephen King, Robert Ludlum, James Clavell, and Nelson DeMille, along with Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.
Sounds great!
Also at The New Yorker (yes, The New Yorker): A new short story by Haruki Murakami.
The Boston Globe profiles the book The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution by Elizabeth Lloyd. That title sure grabbed my attention.
America is obsessed with fat, possibly because it's easier to be obsessed with fat than it is to be obsessed with, say, geopolitics. Try this: Watch your local news broadcast three nights in a row. I fucking guarantee you'll see a story about how fat this country is and why that's bad. Fuck terrorism, the environment, and homelessness — there are soda vending machines in school cafeterias! Won't somebody please think of the children?
Seattle Weekly looks at three new books about the American preoccupation with weight: Wendy McClure's I'm Not the New Me, Judith Moore's Fat Girl: A True Story, and the anthology Fat: The Anthropology of an Obsession. Reviewer Lynn Jacobson isn't exactly impressed by the first two, but I'm still looking forward to reading McClure's book. (What can I say? I like her.)
Ronald Reagan's handwritten diaries of his eight years in the White House will be published as a book to be released next year, the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library Foundation and HarperCollins Publishers announced Tuesday.
Finally, a book that will teach America's youth about real values. How else will the leaders of tomorrow learn how to ignore AIDS, lie about Iran-contra, joke about bombing the Soviet Union and consult astrologers about vital national security decisions? Even in death, the man's still giving.
At a press conference in Seoul, novelist Chang-Rae Lee (Aloft) said his next book will deal with the aftermath of the Korean War.
Ian McEwan considers climate change at OpenDemocracy.net.
The sheer pressure of our numbers, the abundance of our inventions, the blind forces of our desires and needs, appear unstoppable and are generating a heat – the hot breath of our civilisation – whose effects we comprehend only hazily. The misanthropic traveller, gazing down from his wondrous, and wondrously dirty machine, is bound to ask whether the earth might not be better off without us.
Gina Mallet explains why she, a food writer (and author of one of my favorite books of last year Last Chance to Eat) and gourmet, loves McDonalds.
If the public buys what the food biz sells, then food biz's like McDonald's will happily continue to sell. If however, the consumer starts to protest and stops buying, the food biz reacts positively by trying to adjust its practices. The supermarkets would never have themselves included organic produce in their stores unless the public had asked for it. McDonald's would never have stopped buying battery hens' eggs unless it was convinced that the hen-huggers, animal activists, were affecting their business. In the matter of ADR, the technology that strips cow carcasses so thoroughly that chips of bone were showing up in pizza toppings, McDonald's reacted quite swiftly to consumer protests and banned it. McDonald's is always trying to stay one step ahead of the consumer.
The Bozeman (Montana) Daily Chronicle covers a speech by Sherman Alexie (author of the underappreciated classic The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven).
He bashed liberals for trying to convince him that President Bush was the Anti-Christ. Give the Anti-Christ a little credit, he said.
"I think the Anti-Christ is going to have higher than a 40 percent approval rating," he said.
See, this is why Jen has a crush on the guy.
In China, you don't even have to exist to have a bestseller.
At about US$4 a copy, Executive Ability is estimated to have grossed about US $8 million. The publisher of the first volume, which was co-authored by a fictitious white-haired Duke University professor named David Byrne, said it was duped like everybody else.
April 26, 2005
If you want to steal occult books or sex manuals from a library, don't do it in New Zealand. The consequences are dire.
On another occasion Mr Lewis saw a young man push four books under his jacket and leave the library.
"I followed him and asked him what he thought he was doing. He was quite taken aback that someone from the library had descended on him so quickly. We sat and talked and when I explained that the library was a community resource, he got quite a sheepish look on his face."
And then Mr. Lewis brought out the taiaha. Problem solved.
John Wiley & Sons, a leading publisher of technology books, said Apple Computer has removed all its titles from the shelves of Apple stores in apparent retaliation for the upcoming publication of a biography of Apple CEO Steve Jobs.
The books disappeared from Apple stores last week after a month of increasingly contentious discussions about publication of the book, "iCon Steve Jobs: The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business," said author Jeffrey S. Young. The book, co-written with William L. Simon, offers an unflinching account of the rise, fall and rebirth of one of Silicon Valley's most charismatic figures.
It's encouraging that Donald Hall, one of America's best poets, is getting some good press these days. The Concord Monitor looks at Hall's new memoir, The Best Day The Worst Day, about his life with his late wife, poet Jane Kenyon.
One of the most legendary zines in history, Chickfactor, is now online. (Via Largehearted Boy.)
Also at LHB: John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats is the first participant in Note Books, in which "musicians will stop by and write a short piece on their current reading, influential books, or literary leanings." It's a great idea, and you couldn't pick a better first contributor than Darnielle, who also writes the journal Last Plane to Jakarta. I've been listening to The Mountain Goats pretty much exclusively over the past few weeks, and I couldn't be more excited about The Sunset Tree, which was released today.
(Physician Rita Charon) and others are seeking to improve the relationship between physicians and patients using literature and writing. The goal is to make doctors more empathetic by getting them to articulate and deal with what they feel and to develop sophisticated listening skills, ears for the revelations hidden in imagery and subtext. The field -- alternatively called narrative medicine, literature and medicine, or medical humanities, depending on the approach -- began by most accounts about 30 years ago and is now widely reflected in medical school curricula around the country.
This sounds like a great idea, but I just learned that Zadie Smith is writing a rock opera based on my Zyrtec prescription, so I'm not really sure how to feel.
I guess we all went through a Gothic chapbook phase when we were teenagers, listening to Felix Mendelssohn and reading Stephen Cullen's The Haunted Priory; Or, The Fortunes of the House of Rayo, A Romance Founded Partly on Historical Fact. But it used to be such a pain to go to Hot Topic to get the latest books. Enter Zittaw Press, which reprints and assembles the chapbooks in the owners' New Hampshire apartment. Not everyone — surprise! — gets it.
Apparently, their Web site turns up in searches for "Gothic," and Franz Potter has fielded e-mails from concerned parents who want to know why their teenagers are dressing in black, whitening their skin and wearing red lipstick.
A French children's book author who claimed Disney's Finding Nemo copied a fish of his creation has been convicted of fraud and ordered to pay damages.
Franck Le Calvez claimed that the film's title character was based on his orange and white clown fish, Pierrot.
But a French court ruled on Wednesday that Nemo had existed before Pierrot and that Le Calvez even knew of the Disney character when he created his.
Writer talks to 25 George Bushes for her book.
This sounds a lot like a nightmare I have every once in a while. It also involves peach cobbler and 3rd Rock from the Sun actor French Stewart. You can sort of imagine how the whole thing plays out.
American publishers are dying to cash in on the manga craze, and they are releasing manga versions of Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys this year. No word on whether these American versions will be flipped like Japanese manga. The New York Times gives a timeline of Nancy Drew's evolution including the new manga version, and the Papercutz website has previews of the artwork.
The Bangkok Post has a profile of Rattawut Lapcharoensap, author of Sightseeing.
Southern Connecticut State University barred a student from a poetry class after his professor said a poem he submitted contained veiled threats to sexually assault her and her 3-year-old daughter.
The student, Edward Bolles, said his poem entitled "Professor White," was meant to be a satirical piece about globalization. In it, a Mexican student named Juan has a sexual encounter with the daughter of his white professor.
Dennis Johnson of Moby Lives gets to the bottom of the whole Chabon hoax affair with a precise summation and an interview of the original Bookforum article and target of Eggers' scorn, Paul Maliszewski.
It seemed to me that buried in the lecture is a story about Chabon's life, and that it got lost. It's a story about his growing up in Columbia, Maryland, about his parents' divorce and his father's embellishments and lies, and about Chabon's attempts to escape that world into alternative universes imagined by mystery, science–fiction, and fantasy writers. To me, that sounds like a great story. It's a quieter story, for sure, and harder to tell in some ways, more difficult to imagine as a writer, because, in some of its details, it might appear just plain or even average American, but still, I'd love to read it. But that story—that true story—is obscured when Chabon inserts his fictional brush with a fake Holocaust survivor. In fact, letting the Holocaust into the story of his life has the effect of dwarfing everything else.
The Daily Star profiles Israeli dissident author Sami Michael.
Hilary Mantel talks to the Guardian about her new novel Beyond Black, her disguise as a suburban housewife, and how her sex genders her readers.
The Monitor just goes crazy with poetry, running a profile of Jane Hirshfield, reviews of books by Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Ted Kooser and William Matthews, and a review of a biography of Ogden Nash.
Jeff Shartlet (editor of Killing the Buddha website and book; read the Bookslut interview with him here) reviews relationship guides for Christians over at Nerve.
Not that Dobson acknowledges a debt to feminism; indeed, he sees it as a threat to Christianity. The problem, as he outlines it in Straight Talk to Men, a Dobson "classic" originally published as Straight Talk to Men and Their Wives, is that men, in a righteous attempt to resolve the problems of sexism, have ceded too much power to women. As a result, he insists, women are engaging in a parody of male headship and most men lack the guts — and the sensitivity — to stand up to them. "Everything we do is influenced by our gender assignment," he writes. "Any confusion… in the relationship between the sexes… must be seen as threatening to the stability of society itself." Dobson, unlike other Christian manliness gurus, gets specific about the consequences, illustrated in this new edition of Straight Talk through an imaginary dialogue between a group of "yesterday's husbands and fathers" (from 1870) who've been transported into the present to talk to a representative of "the culture."
The culture's spokesman paints a lurid portrait of today's world, in which boys typically look at pornography depicting women "hanging from trees, and being murdered with knives, guns, ropes, etc."; in which "it its legal for a father… to have a homosexual experience with his son"; in which women are called to combat in a time of war, because men are not up to the job. "I miss John Wayne," laments Dobson.
Can't read without Oprah? Get a life. Think about it: If you don't care enough, or aren't interested enough, to freely pick out a book you want to read and enjoy, then you might as well not be reading at all. Go do something else. You're obviously not that interested in books anyway.
Alex Good might be on to something. But I was reading The Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life yesterday, and well, it was making me very tired. It was just so much work. Steve Leveen wanted me to make lists of topics that interest me, wanted me to interview people I knew to get book recommendations, wanted me to practice speed reading and "learn how to take notes" in the margins of my book. (The very idea makes me shudder.) Does being well read really take all of that? No wonder people are afraid of books. I put the book down and watched a few Alec Guinness movies.
Harry Potter's choice of girlfriend has set off a global internet backlash with ugly racial overtones.
Yeah, I had to read that twice too. Scottish actress Katie Leung, who is 17, has become the target of vicious racial slurs by jealous and/or sociopathic Harry Potter devotees. Leung will play the character Cho Chang in an upcoming Harry Potter movie.
April 25, 2005
Terence Davies' planned film adaptation of Lewis Grassic Gibbon's Sunset Song is no more, sadly.
Even if you’ve never fantasized about Jane Austen in leather...
Stop right there. I have. I do. Every night.
...you’ll get a kick out of "A Factory of Cunning." This deliciously wicked novel by British writer Philippa Stockley takes us back to London in the late 18th century, a dark, scurrilous time of strict public morality but ubiquitous sexual exploitation.
Judith Regan writes a love letter to her new hometown, Los Angeles. It's an essay "so bootlicking, Hollwyood execs will be wringing their socks for weeks to come," says GalleyCat.
If the pulse of Washington is driven by power, the pulse of New York is driven by money. The heartbeat of Los Angeles, on the other hand, is driven by creativity.
Wrap your mind around that one for a while.
Canada's first poet laureate, George Bowering, only wrote two poems during his two-year term, reports the Winnipeg Sun.
These dangerously naïve or clandestinely seditious librarians are beyond foolish. They potentially jeopardize the lives of American citizens.
No square inch of this country should be a safe harbor where terrorists calmly can schedule the slaughter of defenseless civilians. Whether fueled by sincere civil libertarianism or malignant Bushophobia, those who thwart probes of Islamo-fascist library patrons have the same impact: They make it easier — not harder — for terrorists to kill you.
The National Review's Deroy Murdock takes a bold anti-librarian, pro-Fascist stance on the Patriot Act. I don't think they know who they're messing with here. Librarians tend to take the First Amendment pretty seriously — and, like nurses, they're legendarily intelligent, well-informed and politically active. No offense, Deroy, but I'm putting my money on the good guys.
The Orange Prize debuts a new prize for first fiction.
Flak Magazine gives well deserved love to Boris Akunin, the writer of the newly released The Turkish Gambit, as well as The Winter Queen and Murder on the Leviathan.
What a relief to read a comic book round up that doesn't include the phrase "not just for kids anymore!" and seems to be written by someone who encountered comics before the moment the editor asked him to review some. The review has to cover a lot of ground in a relatively small space, but John Hodgman manages to cram in reviews of two nonfiction books about comics and short reviews of Locas (read Bookslut's review here), Buddy Does Seattle, The Golden Plates, and Above and Below. Don't miss the sidebar with a slideshow of artwork from the books, narrated by Hodgman.
On Thursday, (Norman) Mailer will be in Austin, Texas, to announce the sale of his archives to the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas for $2.5 million. Stored in nearly 500 boxes weighing more than 20,000 pounds...the trove includes all manner of Mailerabilia dating to his childhood and especially his early years at Harvard...
I don't guess there's a tactful way to include a wife-stabbing joke in here, huh? Just wondering.
How do you get an author to visit your book club? A few Virginians suggest buying her dinner and drinks, though a huge mirror just overflowing with coke has always worked for me.
The Marjane Satrapi Embroideries deluge has begun. There are new reviews at Time, the Globe and Mail (which I wrote), the Village Voice, as well as PW and Booklist. You can read an excerpt at Salon.com, and she's interviewed there as well.
In Iran, sex is not considered a sin. A woman, even in the Islamic Republic of Iran, if she can prove that her husband cannot do it with her, then she can ask for a divorce. It's not a sinful thing, the sex act itself.
I'm not talking from the legal point of view. I'm talking about the way the people think about it or talk about it. But then comes the issue of virginity, and virginity for me is really the sign of a patriarchal society. In a patriarchal society in which the father is the chief of the family, he owns the land and he owns the cow and he owns the house and he owns his wife, and so it's better if she is not secondhand. If you want to buy a pair of shoes, it is better that nobody else has worn them before you -- it is something like that.
Young girls who enjoy classic romantic fairy tales like "Cinderella" and "Beauty and the Beast" are at greater risk of becoming victims of violent relationships in later life, a British researcher says.
A study of both parents of primary school children and women who have been involved in domestic abuse claims than those who grew up reading fairy tales are likely to be more submissive as adults.
No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam author Reza Aslan has been making the rounds lately, recently appearing on The Daily Show and Fresh Air. While the Daily Show interview is oddly not available online (most of their interviews are put up for at least a short amount of time) you can listen to the Fresh Air interview, which is more in depth anyway. Aslan gives a fascinating interview.
I bet you've been wondering, "Hey, what were the best poems in New Zealand during the year 2004?" Wonder no more. There is now a website.
April 22, 2005
Holy crap. When I posted earlier today about Harvard's book collection prize, I sort of assumed it was the only one. But no. Apparently, this is a lot more common than I thought. They didn't do this at my alma mater, where the Poultry Science Department probably gets more funding than the undergraduate library.
Anyway, bookseller Garrett Scott of Ann Arbor, Michigan, was nice enough to send me links to some other college-sponsored book collecting contests, including ones at Yale, Michigan, Sweet Briar College, UCLA, Berkeley, Amherst, and Montana. (And Emily Friedman, who does not own a bookstore as far as I know, points out that Bryn Mawr has a similar contest as well.)
I'm still confused about this whole thing, but Garrett points out that these contests help to "develop a new customer base for a pursuit sometimes seen as overrun by old white guys." I don't think any of these contests are open to 27-year-old college dropouts, which means my "Like Sugar: 176 Used Sweet Valley High Books" will not be paying off for me anytime soon. Pity.
(Garrett and Emily — thanks.)
The New York Times previews Will Eisner's The Plot: The Secret Story of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Kevin Guilfoile continues his series about his book tour for Cast of Shadows.
I read. I talk. I open it up to questions. Sarah’s realtor raises his hand. “What religion are you?” he asks. “Catholic,” I say. The realtor nods, stands up, and walks out the door.
One day, you're a new New Yorker subscriber. A few months later, the only issue you finished reading was the first one to arrive, and even that felt like homework. The others get flipped through and then placed on the "Surely I'll read these someday" pile along with the half-read Atlantic Monthlys, the issues of The Economist you pick up at the bookstore but never read, and the Paris Reviews you should really just throw away. Soon after that, your cat is knocking the precarious stack over at least twice a week, and you're getting so close to just chucking the whole lot. But articles! That look so interesting and important! Oh... you'll get around to them soon. Real soon. Right after you finish this issue of Lucky. Well, at least I'm not alone.
Alternet reprints this article from Poets & Writers about the success of small publishers. It's written by Johnny Temple, Akashic publisher by day, rock star by night.
It was the money I received from our record deal that gave me the means to begin Akashic. We modeled it after visionary, independent music labels, like Dischord Records in D.C. and Touch & Go Records in Chicago. Although Bobby, then Mark, left the company early on to focus on raising their families, I have worked with Johanna Ingalls, our managing editor from near the beginning, to keep our doors open for business. Now we publish more than 20 books a year; our list is about three-quarters urban literary fiction and crime fiction, one-quarter political nonfiction.
Writer and former Esquire editor Daniel Torday picks five young writers you should be reading.
Oprah Winfrey will be extending her already pervasive and lucrative brand with the launch of an annual series of hardcover books that will spin off material from O, the Oprah Magazine...
Live Your Best Life, the first book in the new series, will be published in September and feature 100 articles from the magazine's past two years. Contributors will include such Oprah regulars as relationships expert Dr. Phil and financial adviser Suze Orman. Oxmoor will sell the Oprah titles in both traditional bookstores and by direct mail.
Mr. Luna has rounded up some information on Jacob Holdt, author of American Pictures: A Personal Journey Through the American Underclass. Lars von Trier has based his USA Trilogy (Dogville, Manderlay, and Washington) on Holdt's book. Holdt has quite the odd personal website, including a "Coming soon!" gallery of his ex-girlfriends.
The Independent profiles Cynthia Ozick (Heir to the Glimmering World), a contender for the Man Booker International Prize.
But her new US publisher, Houghton Mifflin, was convinced that this could be her break-through novel. So last year, in her mid-seventies, she was trained up by a media coach who, as she wrote, "impersonat[ed] every possible species of television interviewer: breezy; bright; bored; brazen; stupid; intense; indifferent", and then embarked on her very first author tour.
Three (Harvard) undergraduates were recognized this week for the outstanding quality of their personal book collections, ranging in subject from Beat literature to standards of American etiquette.
Loren J. Bienvenu ’07 and Brian J. Distelberg ’05 tied for first place in the competition for this year’s Visiting Committee Prize for Undergraduate Book Collecting. Katherine G. Ward ’05 received third-place honors.
I don't know what's more horrifying: that Harvard has a prize for book collecting, or that the students actually name their book collections. (Example: "Women’s Spaces and Social Safety: American Etiquette and Lifestyle Manuals 1846-Present.")
Four young men have pleaded guilty to charges they assaulted a librarian in an attempt to steal valuable books and artworks from the Transylvania University library.
They admitted they conspired to steal rare and valuable books such as a first edition of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species and sketches by renowned naturalist John James Audubon....
But what the four defendants in the Transylvania book heist didn't say yesterday is why they decided to steal some of the most treasured works in Transy's collections.
Uh...money? Maybe? That's usually why people steal things, but...
A scholar is reconstructing James Agee's A Death in the Family. Agee died before the book was completed, and the current version — which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1958 — was originally published to raise money for Agee's widow and children.
April 21, 2005
Alternet profiles the upcoming book The Truth About Hillary: What She Knew, When She Knew It, and How Far She'll Go to Become President by Edward Klein, a book dominating right wing media a full five months before its release.
In 1957, on television's Nitebeat, Mike Wallace asked William Carlos Williams if he thought that E.E. Cummings' poem "(im)c-a-t(mo) / b,i;l: e" was really a poem. (Television was different back then.) Williams said no.
In which Billy Collins traces a line from E.E. Cummings to text-messaging.
God, Colin McIlvoy is my new hero. This guy may be one of the only people out there who actually gets poetry. Nice work, man.
Wade Roush looks at the infinite library, and the attendant copyright battles and handwringing over what this means for actual libraries.
The Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford in England is the only place you are likely to find an Ethernet port that looks like a book. Built into the ancient bookcases dominating the oldest wing of the 402-year-old library, the brown plastic ports share shelf space with handwritten catalogues of the university’s medieval manuscripts and other materials. Some of the volumes are still chained to the shelves, a 17th-century innovation designed to discourage borrowing. But thanks to the Ethernet ports and the university’s effort to digitize irreplaceable books like the catalogues—which often contain the only clue to locating an obscure book or manuscript elsewhere in the vast library—users of the Bodleian don’t even need to take the books off the shelves.
C. K. Williams (The Singing, Repair) has won the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.
Dear newspaper and magazine people: Just because we're under 35 does not mean we're retarded.
Print outlets are simultaneously encouraging their staffs to get out and "do" television, even if that means appearing as experts in dubious venues. Take the Newsweek correspondent who found himself vamping through a "Britney's Pregnant!" segment last week on Headline News' "Showbiz Tonight." The only things missing, in hindsight, were a kazoo band and floppy red shoes.
This mandate to entice younger readers -- to be more confrontational, lively and provocative -- invariably comes at a price. It's terrific in theory, until the facts inconveniently begin to get in the way and credibility suffers.
An Edgar Allan Poe scholar is claiming that Baltimore — where even the NFL team is called the Ravens — doesn't really have a strong claim to the writer. Poe lived in Baltimore for a while, and died there, but he was a Boston native who considered Richmond his real home, according to Poe author James M. Hutchisson. Happily for Baltimore, though, the city can still lay claim to John Barth. Look for the Ravens to change their name to the Sot-Weeds any day now.
As a huge Shirley Jackson fan, I can't tell if this news from the Sci Fi channel is horrifying or exciting.
Actor Michael Douglas is behind one of several new projects being considered for next year. He is executive producer of a drama series about the late author Shirley Jackson (The Haunting of Hill House). Described as a cross between Desperate Housewives and The Twilight Zone, the series mixes supernatural tales with Jackson's own saga, "a family drama about the unconventional life of an urban clan living in small-town Vermont," says Mark Stern, chief of original programming.
Nerve.com has an interview with the author of Jesus and the Shamanic Tradition of Same-Sex Love, and, uh, yeah.
Matt Taibbi considers Thomas Friedman's latest.
Thomas Friedman does not get these things right even by accident. It's not that he occasionally screws up and fails to make his metaphors and images agree. It's that he always screws it up. He has an anti-ear, and it's absolutely infallible; he is a Joyce or a Flaubert in reverse, incapable of rendering even the smallest details without genius. The difference between Friedman and an ordinary bad writer is that an ordinary bad writer will, say, call some businessman a shark and have him say some tired, uninspired piece of dialogue: Friedman will have him spout it. And that's guaranteed, every single time. He never misses.
Wayne Alan Brenner talks to 24 hour comics people.
The Daily Star reports from the second "Imagining the Book International Biennale" at the Alexandria Library.
The British bookstore chain WH Smith is in trouble for what may be the most insensitive marketing campaign since Royal Crown's ill-fated 1989 "I'd Piss on My Grandmother's Grave for a Diet Rite" ad push.
A man who said he was a Vietnam veteran spat tobacco juice in Jane Fonda's face at a Kansas City book signing, calling her a traitor for a trip she made to Hanoi in 1972, police said Wednesday.
April 20, 2005
If you're a liberal Catholic, it's hard not to roll your eyes at the title of Truth And Tolerance: Christian Belief And World Religions by Pope Benedict XVI (the former Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger), who has not historically been known for either truth or tolerance. Dennis Doyle very delicately reviews the book at the National Catholic Reporter.
Cardinal Ratzinger does have an intellectual approach that tends to be markedly detached and analytical to a fault. Still, he too has grown and adapted over the years, and can almost be called mellow relative to his persona of the ’80s. This book could help many American Catholics to bypass common stereotypes of the cardinal as an unthinking reactionary and get down seriously to where they agree or disagree.
Good luck finding a copy — the book has skyrocketed to #17 on Amazon's book sales list. (Benedict's Salt of the Earth is #5, closing in on Harry Potter and Thomas Friedman.) Ignatius Press, which publishes Benedict's books in the United States, is being inundated with orders.
Books about Benedict aren't doing so bad, either. Christianity Today's Sam Storms recommends John Allen's Cardinal Ratzinger: The Vatican's Enforcer of the Faith, letting the German-born pope off the hook thusly:
Nothing should be made of the fact that he was briefly a member of the Hitler Youth, given the fact that membership at that time was compulsory. The relationship of the Catholic Church to the Nazi regime is a controversial issue even today, as countless books have been published in the attempt either to suggest collaboration on the part of the papacy or to vindicate Rome from any involvement in Hitler's policies. Allen is probably correct in concluding that "Ratzinger is no more culpable than any other decent German citizen. The point is that many Germans failed to question, to dissent, and where necessary to fight back." The bottom line is that there is no evidence to suggest that Ratzinger was anything other than adamantly opposed to the anti-Semitic policies of the Reich.
(To be fair, some Jewish leaders and Holocaust survivors have suggested that Benedict's past isn't worth worrying about.)
But no one doubts that Benedict's election will be bad for Catholic liberals and dissenters. Boston College theology department head Stephen Pope (seriously) worries that Benedict's reputation as a censor and doctrinal hardliner will have a chilling effect on Catholic academics and writers.
"The thing that makes theologians most nervous about Cardinal Ratzinger and now Pope Benedict XVI is he's not very interested in engaging in a dialogue and providing a clear public process," said Professor Stephen Pope, chairman of Boston College's theology department. "Cardinal Ratzinger's tendency was to want to stop conversation as soon as what he considers errors appear, whereas most theologians want to allow for free discussion and for debate."
Henry Louis Gates Jr., chairman of the Department of African and African-American Studies at Harvard University, has been elected chair of the Pulitzer Prize Board, the board announced Tuesday.
Variety is reporting that Alfred Molina and Ian McKellen will star in the film adaptation of The Da Vinci Code. Ugh. Man, they can't even use money as an excuse. McKellen is rolling in Lord of the Rings cash, and Molina can always fall back on the millions upon millions he got from the television phenomenon that was Bram and Alice.
Nerve interviews Marjane Satrapi (Embroideries, Persepolis).
Embroideries is appearing in America after Persepolis 1 and 2, but I made it between those books. Persepolis was a heavy story — I had to remember unpleasant things, and had in my mind a mission to teach people about my country, because there has been so much misunderstanding. So I really needed a moment of joy, just joy — and I wrote about this afternoon that I spent with women of different generations. I really loved the stories the women told me. I don't know if they are made up or true. I don't think it matters. They made me laugh so much I just wanted to share them.
I'm confused. What the fuck does a dead lamb floating in formaldehyde have to do with Camille Paglia's new book?
Whoa! Phyllis Schlafly is still alive! Who knew?
"Well, if you notice, most grocery stores are becoming almost 50 percent deli. That's because women just don't want to cook anymore," Schlafly said.
Old age plus insane conservative author equals hilarious.
The Guardian endorses Leonard Cohen for the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Don Hewitt, the man who brought dreamy Mike Wallace into my life on a weekly basis with 60 Minutes, is looking to create a new hour long news program for PBS. With Nightline's future in jeopardy, this seems like a genius idea to me. The author of the piece, however, seems not to have noticed that 60 Minutes is consistently one of the highest rated shows on television, as he asks, "Also: Does anyone really care to watch quality news?" (What does all of this have to do with books? Umm, Don Hewitt wrote a book once called Tell Me a Story: Fifty Years and 60 Minutes in Television. There you go.)
Over at Chicklit, they're discussing going on book binges.
Adam Langer pays tribute to the hardest workers in publishing, the copyeditor.
Adam Langer: What makes you a good copyeditor? Is there a "copyediting gene?" Are copyeditors wired differently from everyday folks?
Steve Lamont: One needs to be fairly neurotic to copyedit—you have to be willing to spend time worrying about whether something’s a restrictive participle or a nonrestrictive one, and you actually have to care. Relatedly, it has to make a difference to you whether the name of the song is “I Want to Hold You Hand” or “I Wanna Hold Your Hand.”
Naturally, realising that you're suddenly the nostalgia generation is strange and unpleasant - you get used to being too young for culture to take your nostalgia needs seriously, and then suddenly you get Hitchhiker's, Doctor Who and Live Aid, all aimed directly at your heart. If you're old enough for your formative years to be the focus of all cultural retro-thrusts, then the chances are that you're the ones in charge, and it's your fault, not your parents' at all, that everything's going wrong.
Zoe Williams looks forward to the nostalgia fest that is Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Andrea Levy is interviewed at Salon about her award winning novel Small Island, why she didn't read books until she was 23, and the place between ashamed and not ashamed.
The British Library is running out of room for book enthusiasts, writes John Sutherland, despite the fact that you have to get a "reader's pass" to use the reading rooms.
Above all, the BL was at pains to keep at bay London University's 100,000 students. But, in the last few months, undergraduates have suddenly been made very welcome. Word of mouth means more are streaming in every day. Even, as one member of staff complained to me, sixth formers can now get a reader's ticket.
Why is the British Library now Liberty Hall? One assumes that new "targets" have been issued. More users means more clout, and more funds. Lift the portcullis: let in the students. And, if that doesn't work, let in the winos and the street people.
A library welcoming college students? God forbid. And I'm all for being randomly offensive (Fuck! Fuck! The Pope is a Nazi! Fuck!), but something tells me that winos/street people reference could have been rendered just a wee bit more sensitively.
April 19, 2005
The Guardian has an odd little interview with Irvine Welsh.
MM: Tell us about your new novel.
IW: Oh god, I hate it so much. I'm at that stage where I wish it would just leave my life so that I can do other things. I can't make head nor tail of it. I think it's about identity, but I could be wrong.
If you want to catch up on the literary career of Pope Benedict XVI, you can check out his Milestones: Memoirs 1927-1977, Truth And Tolerance: Christian Belief And World Religions, or Called to Communion: Understanding the Church Today.
A gaggle of Canadian poets will hoist books and beers in New York this week at three events to help publicize a landmark achievement: the first publication in recent memory of a Canadian poetry anthology in the United States.
That anthology would be Open Field: An Anthology of Contemporary Canadian Poets.
Introducing the Wingdale Community Singers, featuring musician David Grubbs (Gastr Del Sol) and novelist Rick Moody. I'm sure Dale Peck will waste no time in calling Moody the worst songwriter of his generation.
Book #31 was The Diary of Andres Fava by Julio Cortazar, a book so good it made me cry on the train. It feels unfair to talk about it now when it's unavailable, so Bookslut will have more about it when it's released next month. But consider pre-ordering it if you're a Cortazar fan.
Dear GQ:
It must be hard to be you. I know your circulation is healthy, your advertising revenue is doing well, but you and I both know you are the bimbo of the male magazine category. Even more so than Maxim, which comes off more like the cad than the bimbo. You and Esquire used to be on the same level for a couple of years. Then a new editor, some real content, a redesign, and pow. Esquire was kicking your ass in quality. And look at you. Your design is even hard on the eyes. You don't have much going for you these days other than the half naked girl on the cover, and even she is a bimbo.
But by printing Walter Kirn's "The Forbidden Word," you've changed from bimbo to frat boy, and it doesn't look good on you. There really are no redeeming qualities to this article; it's not even provocative in its controversial stance. It's just... dumb. It's like that guy at the bar complaining about how the "Mexicans" are coming into our country and stealing our jobs. And why can't they just learn some fucking English already? Everyone just averts their eyes and slowly backs away. Except for the brain dead idiots who agree with him.
And is that really what you want in an audience? People who agree with Kirn that women are to be dominated? People who read Kirn's spitting fury at his memory of fights lost to women, of times women turned down sex with him, when they had the nerve to fight back, and nod along? Kirn writes about his dick and his "masculinity" with an obvious fear of castration, as if he equates it with sexual rejection. He compares women to "wall sockets with fur," and refers to his dick as "my vigor, my alpha status, my swollen, overbearing potency."
Now, I know it's not cool to call someone a sexist. It's not. Sexists are in vogue right now. Blah blah blah, I'm a humorless feminazi who probably doesn't shave her armpits, blah blah blah. But seriously?
Back in the 70s, when I was young and feminism was a strange new force in my tiny Minnesota town, I remember my sense of puniness and dread as one by one my buddies' mothers became aware of their talents and potential and started doing things like taking night classes in Journal Writing and Sketching the Male Nude. Houses that had been spick-and-span for years suddenly languished, with toys all over the living room and half-eaten TV dinners in the trash cans. Something big was happening. Big and bad. When I heard my playmates' parents fighting, the husbands' voices were high and pleading, like the voices of firemen talking down stranded kittens. The wives' voices were as throaty as V-8 engines, though, and they made me fear for my future as a man. Would I be allowed to talk back when I grew up, or had the sexual order shifted permanently?Later, in college, surrounded by the daughters of those growling, liberated mothers, it took me a while to dish out the low blows that they felt entitled to aim at me. The utter shame of having been born male was being reinforced daily in my classes, which, no matter what their subject was -- but especially if it was literature or art -- seemed devoted to reminding me that my sex had long run roughshod over the world and would presently face some frightening reckoning. I could only conclude that I'd been born too late. My forefathers had held the upper hand for centuries, but just a few years ago they'd dropped their fists and exposed my generation of men to a thousand years of pent-up wrath that we were expected to absorb without complaint, in the name of historical justice or some such nonsense.
Umm, GQ, isn't this supposed to be an essay on the word "cunt"? Not exactly William Safire material, is it?
I'm just saying that maybe a real article on the word "cunt" would have been interesting, not this screed against feminism. I know you can do better than that. Maybe you guys should actually read what you publish.
Hugs and Kisses,
An Esquire Subscriber
"George Washington is the father of our country. He is the greatest American who ever lived and he's the 11th president. What's wrong with that?" Stanley said.
A Connecticut historian wants $10 million to build a presidential library for Samuel Huntington, who he says is the real first president of the United States.
The Financial Times talks to Tom Stoppard about The London Library.
John Grisham's A Time to Kill is being challenged in a Fargo high school. Deborah Meyers, an English teacher at Fargo North High, at least has a good sense of humor about easily-offended parents:
When (parent Ruth) Walsh expressed concerns about the Grisham novel, Meyers suggested Walsh's daughter read "Fahrenheit 451," Walsh said.
Gawker Reports: PEN Festival Puts Even Margaret Atwood to Sleep.
If you doubt copy editors can be artists, witness this headline: Anne Rice: Gone from New Orleans, editing book about Jesus.
What this does to employee morale hardly needs to be spelled out. Those who choose not to buy into the system and claw their way into middle management are left at best, bemused and annoyed; at worst, bitter and paranoid. Imagine my co-workers' disappointment when they fled from that world of incompetence to the perceived haven of the independent bookstore - only to find the same damn thing, minus the holiday party and the health benefits.
The fact is, a "corporate" atmosphere can be created anywhere; it's not just about the size of the store or the profit margins. Our bookstore certainly lacks the corporate bottom line and the large employee base. We aren't setting up shop in every city across America or drawing up maps for world domination. We don't have an advertising budget. Hell, we don't even have a bathroom. (Yes, that is illegal. Someone please contact OSHA.)
Link from Galleycat.
A book that's quietly being distributed within Norway's Muslim community refers to Norwegians as the sons of Satan. The book, written by an anonymous author, has been turned over to police by Oslo's Anti-Racism Center.
April 18, 2005
The Discovery Channel asks: Who is the greatest American? The list of nominees includes writers Maya Angelou, Carl Sagan, Sen. Barack Obama, Michael Moore and Dr. Phil McGraw (seriously), as well as publisher Hugh Hefner. Though perhaps all you need to know about this television special is that one section of the nominee list is labeled "Favre to Hanks." (Via Political Wire.)
So that's why everyone was staring at me. I thought it was because I was wearing white shoes after Labor Day but before Memorial Day, but I guess it was the axe/porn thing.
Scholars from Oxford are using infrared light to read manuscripts that have faded so badly, they were presumed unreadable. It's technological advances like these that make me wish I hadn't failed science. Three times. (Thanks to Wes for the link.)
Camden, New Jersey, has the wrong Whitman.
It seems Camden is actually the home of Geezer Whitman, a poet past his prime who came here old and left stone-cold.
Forget Leaves of Grass. Our guy's more Stems and Seeds.
The Ann Arbor News has a sensitive profile of Donald Hall, "one of our best loved poets," and the husband of the late, sorely missed Jane Kenyon. Hall is the author of an essay that deserves to be a classic, "Death to the Death of Poetry." Kenyon was one of America's greatest poets (see "Let Evening Come," one of her best-known, most beautiful poems).
The Archbishop of Canterbury has defended the work of a children’s author jailed for 2½ years for sexually abusing his young girl fans.
Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk (Snow, My Name Is Red) is being sued in Turkey for "damaging the state." His offense: acknowledging the massacres of Armenians and Kurds in Turkey.
One student meandered in asking a question about (Ann) Coulter's assertion that Muslims should be converted to Christianity. "What is your name?" she asked. "I'm sending it to John Ashcroft."
Patrick White's Sydney house, in which he lived and wrote from 1964 until 1990, has been sold after a long and emotional battle over its future.
White, author of the classic Riders in the Chariot, won the Nobel in 1973. Australia's National Trust director Elsa Atkin is mad as a cut snake:
"Everywhere you go in the world, all civilised societies honour their literary figures by saving their houses and making them into places people can go and visit, but the Australian governments obviously don't feel that Patrick White should be honoured," she said. "They don't feel they will get political kudos out of it.
"The apathy and neglect that we have shown to the father of Australian literature is bewildering."
Shalom Auslander, author of the delightful Beware of God, has an essay at Nerve.
I wake up in the morning to the sounds of a lesbian in Howard Stern's studio; blindfolded, she is trying to guess which of three contestants is her girlfriend by licking their pussies. I yawn, switch from FM to AM, and try to find the weather report.
I trudge through Manhattan, oblivious to the towering billboards of near-naked models, oblivious, too, to the near-naked women around me. Two girls hurry by; their asses read Juicy. "How come," I wonder, "you can never get a goddamn cab in this city?"
I arrive home in the evening, turn on the television, and I'm met with the latest music video from the latest teenage ingénue, bent over, her barely covered ass shaking at the camera. I reach for the remote and change the channel. "There's never anything on," I sigh.
What the hell is happening to me?
Thomas Leitch suggests a few books that would make good movies.
The Decatur (Alabama) Daily has an interesting rundown of a disturbing trend: Overprotective parents are evidently getting tired of trying to ban video games, and have turned their attention back to books. The Limestone County Board of Education, which had previously banned Judy Blume's Blubber from its schools ("because it contained the words 'damn' and 'bitch'"), just recently handed down the death sentence to Chris Crutcher's Whale Talk. Challenging Whale Talk is becoming something of a nationwide pastime for right-wingers:
"We can’t allow students to go down our halls and say those words, and we shouldn’t let them read it," said board member James Shannon. "That book’s got a lot of bad, bad words."
So you buy a used book from eBay, and it turns out it has a university stamp on it with the warning "not for resale." Which government agency do you notify: Homeland Security or the FBI? Ethicist Randy Cohen has the answer. (Scroll down to the second letter.)
The Orange Prize has announced its shortlist.
Popmatters has an interview with the editors of The Last Pentacle of the Sun: Writings in Support of the West Memphis Three.
The New York Times Magazine has an essay that was adapted from Peter Kramer's new book Agaisnt Depression. Kramer is the author of Listening to Prozac and a somewhat controversial figure, especially with author Peter Breggin whose book Talking Back to Prozac is a direct response to his theories. The controversy lies in Kramer's full faith in prescription medication and that there is nothing wrong with being on these drugs for the rest of your life. Of course Breggin is controversial himself for being against all mood disorder medications all the time.
Somewhere in the middle is Daphne Merkin, writing about Against Depression in Elle Magazine.
My own view is that depression is confounding precisely because it isn't psoriasis; it speaks to our complexities, our mix of vulnerability and resilience in a way that a skin disease simply does not. It is an imaginative trope as well as an illness, pointing up the cracks in the facades of all our lives, the places where we might stumble if we aren't careful. Thinkers have been mulling over heroic melancholy since before the invention of brain imaging not only to justify their bleak outlooks but also as a way of understanding the workings of the creative imagination and the meaning of emotional suffering.
Haaretz profiles Israeli author Etgar Keret.
All in all, a number of good things have happened in recent years: He has married Shira Geffen, his girlfriend for the past eight years; he has published a book of short stories ("Gaza Blues") jointly with Palestinian writer Samir el Youssef; he has written the script for an animated puppet feature; in the United States they are making a film based on his book "Kneller's Happy Campers" (Tom Waits is supposed to be playing the main character); he is working with his wife on a film that will be called "Meduzot" ("Jellyfish"), in which there will be three stories about women.
It must have been the first conference in the history of Abraham Lincoln scholarship to call the Great Emancipator "a terrifically sexual guy." Addressing the nation's top Lincoln scholars on Sunday, two historians defended a new book that claims Lincoln was gay and called for more research into his sexuality.
We're spending millions on researching space and vaccines and shit, and we can't free up a few bucks to fund studies on whether Lincoln was gay? That's not the America I love.
Paula Kamen got a glowing interview and review in Salon.com last week for her new book All in My Head: An Epic Quest to Cure an Unrelenting, Totally Unreasonable, and Only Slightly Enlightening Headache. (Although I would like someone to put a stop to this trend of people in similar situations reviewing books like Kamen's. Andrew O'Hehir's wife suffers from chronic pain as well. It's great that O'Hehir liked it because he could relate to it, but I prefer a reviewer who acts as a reader, not just a fact checker. Reading some of these reviews, the reader may be led to believe that these books are only for chronic pain sufferers/farmers/statiticians. I would like to report that I started reading All in My Head last night, and thus far, it is excellent even for people not in pain.)
Steve Almond is conflicted about Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.
Honestly, I don't quite know what to say to people when they tell me they loved ELIC. A part of me (the well–behaved, slightly fraudulent part) wants to say: Well, that's great! To be moved by a book, particularly in this era of screen addiction, is a net positive. The other part of me wants to say: How could you fall for such well–meaning dreck?
April 15, 2005
"How to Make Love Like a Porn Star" author Jenna Jameson has filed a federal lawsuit to bar her publisher from getting a cut of a proposed reality show featuring the adult film actress.
Well, that's one way to get young men to come to the library. At least 10 percent of them.
The novelization of Revenge of the Sith, the latest Star Wars movie, is already on sale – weeks before the movie's May 19 release.
The early publication date would seem to fly in the face of all the attempts by George Lucas, the creator of the science-fiction saga, to keep the film's plot a secret.
SPOILER ALERT: This movie is going to fucking suck!
The Comics Curmudgeon, which might be the best website ever, points us to the Drink at Work blog, maintained by Francesco Marciuliano, a writer for the comic strips Medium Large and Sally Forth. There was a Sally Forth strip a few months back that had Ted, Sally's husband, wearing a Sonic Youth t-shirt. I wonder if Francesco was responsible.
You'd think a Catholic university would take peace pretty seriously. You'd be wrong.
Colman McCarthy, a professor in Georgetown’s Justice and Peace program, was asked not to teach his Literature of Peace class next semester, according to William Hahn, a dean in the College.
McCarthy, a self described pacifist and anarchist, has taught the class for the last three years.
I have this fantasy that the next Pope will shock the world by revealing himself to be a far-left liberationist once he's installed. He'll ordain women and married people as priests. He'll defrock Cardinal Law and encourage the state of Massachusetts to prosecute and imprison him. He'll drop the Church's increasingly irrelevant ban on birth control. And he'll force so-called Catholic universities to respect peace and justice. Someday.
Nerve offers sex advice from former Catholic school students, though they didn't ask me. And nowhere does the phrase "crushing sense of guilt and shame" make an appearance.
What's the best way to suggest introducing a third partner into a new relationship?
"It worked for the Father, Son and Holy Ghost."
If anyone needs me, I'll be at confession.
Tragically, I missed Stacked the other night, though Slate reporter Dana Stevens didn't, and was a little surprised at the show's "decent dialogue and solid ensemble acting." If you're not familiar with the show, Stevens offers this rundown:
The premise: A stuffy, recently divorced bookstore owner (Elon Gold) hires a high-spirited party girl (Dame Judi Dench. No, just kidding: Pamela Anderson) after she wanders into the shop distraught, seeking a self-help book and the courage to dump her cheating rocker boyfriend....
Pam's appeal (which Stacked, at least so far, seems to understand) is that her persona makes visible the contrivance, the ridiculous effort, of remaining the official "sexiest woman alive" for over a decade and a half. Whatever the real woman may be like, the appeal of Brand Pam is, above all else, how natural she seems—she may be a fake, but she's a real one.
Oh, ouch.
The Australian founders of the Lonely Planet guides stay in $500-a-night hotel rooms, give the finger to beggars and have lost touch with their counter-culture roots, according to a profile in The New Yorker magazine.
That's from a report in The Australian. Reporter Georgina Safe gets a somewhat annoyed quote from one of LP's chief hippies in charge, Maureen Wheeler, who the New Yorker describes as "an ardent woman with a deeply amused laugh."
"Tad (Friend, the New Yorker reporter) told us that he thought it would be interesting to do the idea of how Lonely Planet has become a mainstream publication, which there is no doubt that it has," she said. "(But he) came to the story with it pretty much framed in his mind ... there are different interpretations of stories, and that is his."
The Newport-Mesa (California) Unified School District has banned a flier advertising an upcoming lecture by controversial author and commentator Eric Schlosser.
Jaime Castellanos, assistant superintendent of secondary education for the district, said he had ordered all middle schools and high schools not to display a flier promoting Schlosser's speech this Friday and Saturday as part of the Newport Beach Public Library's Distinguished Speakers Lecture Series. Schlosser, whose presentation is billed to center around his book "Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal," has written numerous articles and books advocating the decriminalization of marijuana.
Why is California afraid of pot? I thought that was like their number-one export.
The Telegraph is pleased with the new film adaptation of