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September 11 Web Archive Collection This is an archived Web site from the Library of Congress. |
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http://www.mobylives.com/ Archived: Dec 17, 2001 at 18:13:57 |
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TREND OF THE YEAR |
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| Maybe you've noticed a minor but growing phenomenon in the book business lately — clusters of books about the same odd thing coming out all at once. There are similar trends in titles, too, that make you think there's something going on that you're not quite hip to. Maybe it's another indication of how imitative of the movie industry book marketers have become. After all, the movie biz, as if to show off exactly how bereft of ideas it is, has been doing this for years — giving us not just a rash of Shakespeare movies, say, after none for years, but, sometime next year, two movies about famous monobrowed Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. On the one hand, this is great; any movie about Kahlo beats the tar out of the subject matter of most American films. But, on the other hand, why now? Kahlo's story hasn't changed since she, uh, died in 1954. Anyway, in the book biz, something similar went on earlier this year when there was a cluster of books about Dante. There was a new translation of the "Inferno," a Penguin lives biography, a collection of essays by poets writing about Dante, and an expensive art book that collected Botticelli drawings illustrating the Divine Comedy. Of course, Dante was one of the most important poets of all time and these books make sense, even if the coordinated timing of their appearance is still puzzling. Or take the current rash of books about last year's endless presidential election. Even their timing makes sense (and, a year later, is more seemly than the first rash of "instant books" that hit stores right about the time the Supreme Court judges were stepping out of their robes). But sensible trends aren't what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about are those clustered publications that seem to appear for completely obscure reasons. Why, for example, was the word "honeymoon" considered a hot choice for titles this year? (There was "Honeymoon," by Kevin Canty, and Chuck Kinder's great novel, "Honeymooners.") Or how about the word "hunter"? ("The Hunter, by Julia Leigh; "The Hunters," by Claire Messud.) Or "corrections"? ("A Few Corrections," by Brad Leithauser, and "The Corrections," by Mr. Anti–trend himself, Jonathan Franzen.) And what do you think is going on with the color red lately? Seems like everyone's using it — there's "My Name is Red," by Ohan Pamuk, "The Red Tent," by Anita Diamant, and "The Heart of Redness," by Zakes Mda. (Not to mention Anne Carson's "Autobiography of Red" from a couple of years ago.) Also, let's not forget the great, ongoing rage for titles involving the suffix "ist," such as Colson Whitehead's "The Intuitionist," Donald Antrim's "The Verificationist," and, coming soon, Peter Rock's "The Ambidextrist." But my favorite no–apparent–reason trend this year had to do with a trend of subject matter, not title. Yes, I'm talking about the fact that someone named this Johnson year — this was the year for books oriented around the great eighteenth–century British writer Dr. Samuel Johnson. Most of them also threw in his sidekick and biographer James Boswell. There was, for example, "Boswell's Presumptuous Task: The Making of the Life of Dr. Johnson," by Adam Sisman, which focused on their relationship and the seven years it took Boswell to write his bio of Johnson. "A Life of James Boswell," by Peter Martin, was a more straightforward bio. "Dr. Johnson's London" by Liza Picard looks at life in London during Johnson's time. And there was even a novel — Beryl Bainbridge's "According to Queeney," which, as the book jacket says, "illuminates an intimate corner of the great man's life that his devoted biographer James Boswell never knew." The best of the lot, for my money, is Sisman's book. Boswell has long been portrayed as a dissolute character who somehow got "lucky" when he wrote his masterpiece, a theory akin to the one that if you give a monkey a typewriter he will eventually type "War and Peace" (until then, he'll produce what are known as "insurance policies"). But Sisman portrays Boswell as someone with talent overcoming his troubles, and it's a stirring story. Bainbridge's "Queeney," too, is an absorbing charmer. Which goes to show an old trend–basher like me. I mean, despite their importance as literary figures, Boswell and Johnson are not the stuff of the bestsellers that drive the industry nowadays. And yet here's a bunch of books about them. It's an encouraging sign for the industry, and a reminder that some trends are better than others. Last Week’s Column: WEIRD BOOKS FOR WEIRD PEOPLE It's easy to saunter into a bookstore and get someone a bestseller. But what if you've got to get something for someone with really weird taste? EDITORS: INTERESTED IN CARRYING THE MOBYLIVES COLUMN? Find out more — here, then here. |
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Monday, 17 December 2001 RIP: W.G. Sebald . . . W.G. Sebald, the German–born author whose autobiographic novels mixing a stark style of dreams and images into a dark, personal mysticism had recently gained markedly increased critical attention and praise after years of writing in obscurity, died on Friday in England, where he had lived for 40 years. According to an early report in The New York Times, "He was driving his daughter, Anna, home, said Andrew Wylie, his agent. 'Perhaps he suffered a heart attack,' Mr. Wylie said. 'He swerved into oncoming traffic.' Mr. Sebald's car struck a truck, and he apparently died instantly. His daughter was badly injured in the accident," although there seem to be no further reports on her condition. As an obituary in The Guardian notes, Sebald was "reluctant to call his books 'novels', because he had little interest in the way contemporary writers seemed to find all meaning in personal relationships," and because, in writing about World War II and its aftermath, it seemed "presumptuous" to describe the sufferings of others. Instead, he found it necessary "to invent a new literary form, part hybrid novel, part memoir and part travelogue, often involving the experiences of one 'WG Sebald', a German writer long settled in East Anglia." A Times of London notice observes, "Though he wrote in German, his reputation at the time of his death stands perhaps even higher in the English–speaking world than it does in his native land," although an early report in The Guardian called him a "cult writer." Robert McCrum, literary editor of The Observer, notes in his tribute that "Sebald, German readers said, writes 'like a ghost'." W.G. Sebald was 57. • MORE: As a remembrance, The New York Review of Books offers four reviews of Sebald's books. First, books, then the world . . . Having only entered the field of American media last summer with its takeover of Houghton Mifflin, barely two weeks after a lengthy New York Times profile announced to the world that its CEO Jean–Marie Messier had moved to New York to "woo investors," and barely one week after the news that second in command Edgar Bronfman had announced his departure, the French company Vivendi Universal has made a major expansion into American broadcast media by clinching a multi–billion dollar deal to buy the USA Network and Universal Studios. An Associated Press wire story reports the deal was worth $10.3 billion, and says the new company, to be called Vivendi Universal Entertainment, will be "the world's second–largest media company," and competing with the major forces in the industry, including: AOL Time Warner, Walt Disney Co., and Viacom (owners of Warner Books, Hyperion and Simon & Schuster, respectively.) Meanwhile, a New York Post report says the deal was worth $12.4 billion, and it describes the complicated transaction for "stock, cash and assumed tax liability." It also notes that Vivendi now owns such diverse enterprises as the Home Shopping Network and Ticketmaster, and that the acquisition of Universal brings with it close ties Stephen Spielberg's Dreamworks SKG and its partners David Geffen and Microsoft co–founder Paul Allen. That's right — Leonard Riggio, a.k.a. Robin Hood . . . In rather marked contrast to a Friday Chicago Tribune report that says book sales this holiday season have not met pre–September 11 expectations, but are nonetheless one of the few areas of the retail business where sales are up — it quotes Barnes & Noble head Leonard Riggio saying, "We're doing better as a rule than the average retail" — a New York Times story by David D. Kirkpatrick says that "book sales have fallen off this fall," and one of the principal reasons for that is that book buyers have begun to "show signs of resistance" and "sticker shock" to high cover prices. The problem has become exascerbated, says Kirkpatrick, as "the big bookstore chains and online retailers have pulled back from previously widespread discounts." Kirkpatrick says "Some in the industry say publishers should reconsider their prices, especially in view of the many cheap alternatives to reading a book," and he, too, cites Leonard Riggio, this time as one of those leading the charge on behalf of consumers, starting with a speech Riggio gave to publishers where "Mr. Riggio told them that they chose prices 'foolishly' and that some prices were 'abominations.'" Publishers, meanwhile, "say that book prices have risen only about as fast as inflation over the last decade, and that their profit margins have not improved," Kirkpatrick notes. Cantor Fitzgerald head gets book deal . . . After previous reports (such as the second item in this New York Post column) saying that publishers had shown little interest in a book proposal by Howard W. Lutnick, head of the bond–trading firm Cantor Fitzgerald, the company that lost 600 of its 1,000 employees in the attacks on the World Trade Center, a new report in The New York Times says that HarperCollins has signed a deal with Lutnick to publish the book for an undisclosed amount. Lutnick will co–write the book with a friend, Thomas Barbash, a teacher of creative writing at Stanford and San Francisco State College who is publishing a first novel next year. Lutnick says he will be giving all of his income from the book to a fund for families of his company's victims, one of whom was his own brother, Gary Lutnick. As the report notes, Lutnick "attained a melancholy fame after Sept. 11 for his public displays of grief for his workers and his commitment to their families," but that "some of the family members have occasionally criticized his public appearances as potentially self-serving," especially after he promptly cut off the paychecks to missing employees' families. Ray gets his day . . . Friday was Ray Bradbury day in Los Angeles. As this brief Associated Press wire story notes, L.A. Mayor James K. Hahn issued a citywide proclamation honoring the 81–year–old writer "for his work and for moving to Los Angeles in 1936." Bradbury and Hahn, the report notes, "struck up a friendship earlier this year after the mayor revealed his favorite book was Bradbury's 'Fahrenheit 451.'" Risky reading . . . In an alley just off what's called the Flower crossroads in Herat, where "only a few weeks ago the Taliban were still publicly displaying the bodies of those they had hanged," hung a discreet sign reading "Golden Needle, Ladies' Sewing Classes." But actually, what took place behind the sign wasn't a sewing class: instead, "Three times a week, young women, faces and bodies hidden by their Taliban–enforced uniform of sky–blue burqas and flat shoes, would knock at the yellow iron door. In their handbags, concealed under scissors, cottons, sequins and pieces of material, were notebooks and pens." Once inside, Herat University professor Mohammed Nasir Rahiyab taught them "forbidden subjects such as literary criticism, aesthetics and poetry." As Christina Lamb notes in her profile of the group for London's Daily Telegraph, under a regime that "beat women simply for wearing heels that clicked, the Sewing Classes of Herat was a venture that could easily have ended in more bodies swinging above Flower crossroads." But as Rahiyab tells Lamb, "A lot of fighters sacrificed their lives. Shouldn't a person of letters make that sacrifice, too?" Before sci–fi was a genre, they just called 'em "books" . . . Classic authors from the early days of science fiction such as Jules Verne "never get listed among the great authors" of their time, even though their books are still popular. But, as Scott McLemee notes in a report for The Chronicle of Higher Education, two university presses have each launched an ambitious series of publications that could change the regular condemnation of such writers "to a minor place in cultural history." One series, the "Wesleyan Early Classics of Science Fiction Series," will feature "annotated editions of works from the genre's prehistory," starting off with two of Verne's books. The other series, the "Bison Frontiers of the Imagination" from the University of Nebraska Press, started in 1998 and has so far "reissued 19 science–fiction novels that originally appeared between the Victorian age and the 'pulp' era of mass–market paperbacks and magazines during the early 20th century." Among the many notable re–discoveries of these two efforts are forgotten sci–fi books by Mary Shelly ("The Lost Man") and Honoré de Balzac ("The Centenarian"). Does the mouse know about this? . . . It is a surprisingly rich place for book lovers, says Washington Post book editor Michael Dirda; a place where Jack Kerouac spent a lot of time, where Zora Neale Hurston grew up, and where eminent Southern writer George Garrett was born and raised. It hosts numerous great bookstores, including 15 used bookstores, and a terrific annual Shakespeare Festival. What city is it? As Dirda explains in his column, it's Orlando, Florida. "Sometimes derided as a wasteland of highways and strip malls," says Dirda, "Orlando possesses a far more bookish culture than it is generally given credit for." Lucky students? . . . One of his students, Jay McInerney, remembers that Raymond Carver was so nervous about teaching that on class day "he would get agitated, as if he himself were a student on the day of the final exam." Poet Maura Stanton remembers that her teacher, John Berryman, "mumbled and coughed and peered around at the audience, his veined hands shaking as he held up a book." And Dana Goia remembers that when he studied with Elizabeth Bishop, at the end of the semester, "more than any of her students, she was overjoyed that classes were over." Still, vivid as such anecdotes are, a new book that collects these tales and others by writers talking about their mentors seems somehow weak, says critic Jennie Yabroff in a review for the San Francisco Chronicle. "Perhaps it is this complete absence of discord," she suggests. "One recollection of a mentor–student relationship gone awry, either soured by a difference of expectations or simply outgrown, would have emphasized the rarity of successful, mutually beneficial relationships." The first Gen X writer? . . . Most people who use the word "epigone" (meaning "an inferior imitation") no longer realize it was coined by German novelist Karl Immermann for his 1836 novel, "Die Epigonen" (The Epigones). But, as Wolfgang Schneider points out in this profile from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, it was an "extraordinarily clever novel about society on the brink of industrialization" that " now seems fresher and more entertaining than many better–known 19th-century German works." In fact, at a recent conference in Germany organized "to keep the author from being totally forgotten," one Japanese professor called Immermann "the first great postmodernist." Schneider calls him the Gen X star of the 19th century. Another reason to fear posterity . . . Word concordances — the counting of how many times a particular word appears in a text — can reveal some interesting things about a given writer. For example, the two words most commonly used by the peripatetic Gustave Flaubert were "up" and "about." In one Zane Grey western, "man" or "men" are mentioned 546 times, while there are only 75 mentions of "woman." And in the Starr Report, Bill Clinton's fifth most commonly used word is "perjury." As a Syndey Morning Herald feature notes, "If you've ever studied English literature, you'll know the exquisite pleasures of a close examination of the text. Parsing, analysis, deconstruction joys - one and all." Now, as the article details, the formerly painstaking work of actually counting the words has become "something the computer has brought within reach of the simpleton." Shine up your books . . . In 1915, in the midst of World War I, Vanity Fair magazine asked P.G. Wodehouse to write a piece offering advice to the Christmas shoppers. Now, saying that "With the approach of another wartime Christmas, we should heed his advice," The Times of London has reprinted the article, which Wodehouse wrote under the pseudonymn of P. Brooke–Haven. "The first rule of buying Christmas presents is to select something shiny," says Wodehouse/Brooke–Haven, "It must gleam with that light which, as the poet so well says, never was on sea or land. Books are very popular for that reason. There is probably nothing in existence which can look so shiny as a collected works of Longfellow, Tennyson or Wordsworth . . . They may also be used as mirrors." NOTE: Daily newspapers often change URLs when archiving, so some links won't work beyond the day they're first posted. Friday, 14 December 2001 Government relents on prosecution of Russian e–book "hacker" . . . The U.S. government announced yesterday that it would "defer" prosecution of a 26–year–old Russian programmer who had been imprisoned for developing software for his Moscow employer, ElComSoft, that allowed people to make copies of encrypted electronic books. Dmitri Sklyarov, the first person ever prosecuted under the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, will be allowed to return to Moscow with his wife and two children, although he is expected to testify against ElComSoft; charges could eventually be dropped, according to a New York Times report. Skylarov was arrested in July when he appeared at the DefCon computer "hackers" convention in Las Vegas to speak about his research into encryption technology, and was subsequently imprisoned in San Jose. As an Associated Press wire story notes, his arrest was urged by Adobe Systems Inc., because he'd develped software marketed by ElComSoft that "lets readers disable copyright restrictions" on Adobe's e–book software and "make backup copies of e–books or transfer them to other devices, such as handheld computers." But, as an in–depth report from The San Jose Mercury News notes, "ElcomSoft argues that copying an electronic book is no different from transferring a record album onto a cassette tape, a practice that is allowed under copyright law." Interfering with the analogy, however, is the fact that "the use of electronic books is governed by a contract that a purchaser agrees to uphold." Meanwhile, as The Times story notes, the agreement gains the government Skylarov's testimony, "but it also shifts attention away from Mr. Sklyarov, who has been portrayed by members of the technology community as a martyr in the fight over copyrighting digital material." As The Mercury News reports, "Protesters around the world have rallied on Sklyarov's behalf," including First Amendment advocates who feel the Digital Copyright Act is an abridgement of free speech. The issue became so hot that, as the A.P. notes, "Adobe eventually dropped its support of the case after Internet policy groups threatened to boycott the company's products." And at Skylarov's hearing in August in San Jose, The Mercury News notes, "supporters chanted and waved signs saying 'Free Dmitry' and 'Don't Make Crypto a Crime.'" Bezos says don't worry — he knows exactly what he's doing . . . "Anyone who has gone shopping on Amazon.com lately has to be wondering how the company is going to make money," observes Washington Post reporter Leslie Walker, noting that the website is awash in "steep discounts," such as free shipping for orders over $99 and 30 percent off all books over $20 — and this in what "Wall Street views as the most crucial Christmas so far" for the company that has never made a profit. But, in her report of a live, online interview with Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos, Bezos defends the discounts, saying, ""Even though it may seem counterintuitive that lowering prices helps with profitability, we believe it does. Lower prices lead to higher volumes, which can lead to higher dollar profits even if the percentage profits are less." She says he also predicted "the Internet's inherent efficiencies will put downward pressure on consumer prices for years to come . . . which is partly why he wants Amazon to be seen as more of a discounter (think Wal-Mart) than an upscale department store (think Nordstrom)." Analysts, meanwhile, are divided. "Skeptics say that's the kind of thinking that killed many Internet retailers in 1999 and 2000," Walker notes, while "Supporters think Amazon has the scale to pull it off." • MORE: Read the full text of online interview. Blow hard pressed to defend himself, but JFK, Jr. book coming out anyway . . . When it was first announced that he had signed a $500,000 deal with Little, Brown to write a biography of his boss, John F. Kennedy Jr., last year, Richard Blow created an uproar: as an editor at George, he'd signed a confidentiality agreement, and had been critical of other George staffers he said violated confidentiality after Kennedy's death. Little, Brown quickly backed out of the deal and Blow disappeared. Now, as Keith J. Kelley reports in his New York Post Media Ink column, Blow is back. This time, he has a deal with Henry Holt to publish the book, to be called "America's Son," and it is already "undergoing final editing in advance of its May release." In addition, Kelly reports a deal "between Vanity Fair Editor-in-Chief Graydon Carter and Holt for an excerpt this spring." Kennedy partisans are still furious. "I think it is unethical that he is writing a book," said Kennedy's longtime personal assistant Rose Marie Terenzio. "He signed a confidentiality agreement. Just because he chose not to honor it doesn't make it ethical." But as Kelley notes, "experts said that the death of Kennedy, combined with . . . the folding of the magazine earlier this year . . . make the confidentiality agreement difficult to enforce and potentially moot." Blow himself, meanwhile, "is being kept under wraps by Holt." MightyWords founder MightySorry . . . Within a month of the shut–down of e publishing ventures by Random House and AOL Time Warner, which closed its iPublish division, all due to low sales, another significant player in the field, MightyWords, 50 percent of which is owned by Barnes & Noble.com, has announced it will also close. "I thought electronic publishing was going to be big," explains company founder and CEO Chris MacAskill in this Wall St. Journal story (via The Melbourne Age). "What a rude awakening I got." MacAskill is credited with being one of the principal figures in an imminent e–book revolution, particularly for inspiring Stephen King to write his popular e–book "Riding the Bullet," the idea for which supposedly came to King after he read a short piece by Arthur C. Clarke that MacAskill had published with his former company, book retailer Fatbrain. Now, however, despite the fact that MightWords sold "about 50,000 units per month," MacAskill says, "There just weren't enough sales" to continue. In case you've ever wondered how much of a book you can quote in a book review . . . The publisher of the Atlanta–area Business Book Review said he was surprised that Harvard Business School Publishing, the book publishing arm of the Harvard Busiess School, was suing his company for copyright infringement. At issue are the "reviews," including eight–page "summaries," of 26 HBSP titles published in the Review, which HBSP asserts, according to a report from The Atlanta Business Chronicle, "consist almost entirely of language taken directly from its original books." Joyn Fayad, BBR publisher, tells the Chronicle that "We were totally surprised that HBS Publishing could even think to bring suit . . . when so much value has been added by BBR to all parties involved, and for so many years." But in a press release announcing the suit, Allan A. Ryan, HBSP's Director of Intellectual Property, says, "These are not bona fide reviews of our books, and they are not summaries of our books' content in a paragraph to let people know what we're publishing. This company takes eight pages of our authors' own words, packages it for sale with our authors' names, and sells it alongside a picture of the book itself. That's not only copyright infringement, it's a deceptive practice that misleads consumers into thinking that HBSP and our authors have approved or endorsed the summary, which we have not." Book sales bucking national retail trends: They're rising . . . Better–than–expected sales following Thanksgiving have "raised hopes thoroughout the book–selling world," says reporter Patrick T. Riordan in a Chicago Tribune story. It's "very good news indeed," says Riordan, particularly "given the state of the American economy and the aftershocks of Sept. 11." He notes that Amazon.com's Jeff Bezos recently admitted "that his company lost $25 million to ฮ million in book sales because of the attacks," with Bezos saying, "For a one– to two–week period right after Sept. 11, we saw sales [go] very low because everybody was glued to the TV." In fact, says Riordan, a "key reason for anxiety was the lack of attention that new books and authors had received from radio, television and other news media that were focusing their coverage, almost exclusively, on terrorism and the war." Now, however, "book sales are bucking a trend throughout the rest of retailing." Barnes & Noble chairman Leonard Riggio says, "We're doing better as a rule than the average retail." American Association of Publishers head Patricia Schroeder says, "We're not out of the woods yet, but people are beginning to smile a little." Murdoch film moving in spite of suffering from "PBS Syndrome" . . . A new movie bio of the late novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch, "Iris," based on two memoirs about her written by her husband, John Bayley, "is hardly adequate," says notes critic Charles Taylor. "It has little to say about her ideas or her place in literature, and it treats her life in a manner that's fragmentary at best." In general, he says in a review for Salon, the film suffers from "PBS syndrome." And yet, the performance of Judi Dench as Murdoch is haunting. "Playing someone with Alzheimer's could so easily have been a stunt (the way playing a retarded person, or an autistic person almost always is), an easy play for audience sympathy," notes Taylor. "Dench never loses herself in the fog that descended upon Iris Murdoch; she's always communicating back to us, shining a dim beacon from that uncharted country from whose bourn no traveler returns." The first fairy tales . . . The fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm published between 1812 and 1814 are generally "viewed by literary historians and ethnographers as something of a watershed, a line constantly reinforced in subsequent writings," notes Heinz Rölleke. "As a result, collections of fairy tales predating or appearing at the same time as those of Grimm were considered not true to the genre, of neither artistic nor ethnographic importance." This probably accounts for the neglect of writer folk tale author Benedikte Naubert, whom Jacob Grimm himself praised, suggest Rölleke. But, as he details in this profile of Naubert, "This situation has now changed fundamentally. Naubert's collection of 15 long stories is the most important of the dozen books of fairy tales from the last 20 years of the 18th century." Hundred–year–old adventurer's tale suddenly hot . . . He was "small and scrawny even by the standards of the age, a stick of beef jerky adorned with whiskers," but to many American historians, explorer/conservationist John Wesley Powell, was a towering figure. And, as Sam Shapiro points out, "this has been a banner year" for the man who underwent some harrowing adventures as perhaps the first person to traverse the treacherous waters of the Colorado River into the Grand Canyon. At least three books about Powell are just out, including a scholarly biography, a book that foucses almost exlusively on the "insanely ambitious journey" down the Colorado, and even a novel. In a review for Charlotte's Creative Loafing newsweekly, Shapiros says it's about time writers focussed on Powell, whose story "makes for a white-knuckle history lesson, one that should appeal greatly to readers fascinated with courageous exploits from the annals of American exploration, as well as those who gravitate toward the Perfect Storm category of nonfiction, those somewhat masochistic 'you are there' accounts of life–and–death struggles against Nature in all its hellish manifestations." Anit–smoking novel one writer's "most smokin' book" . . . Beating Philip Roth's "Portnoy's Complaint" by nearly fifty years, Italo Svevo's "Confessions of Zeno" was one of the first books to make comedy out of therapy, and use the conceit that it was an "analysand's report to his analyst," as Sven Birkerts puts it. For years, Birkerts says, he's also remembered it for a central device that he loved – that the book was about the character going into therapy to quit smoking. But re–reading this recently re–published book made him realize he'd remembered some things about it incorrectly — it was both different, and even better than he remembered. He talks about both the book he calls "the most smokin'" he ever read, and the strange act of "readerly deja vu" that occurs when we re–read books from our youth in this essay from the Raleigh News & Observer. Writer offers yet another convenient excuse to not read Harry Potter . . . Are you one of the few people in the world who has not read a Harry Potter book but decided to go see the movie anyway? Then maybe you have some questions about one or two things in the film that seemed mysterious — such as "Why does that library book scream at Harry?" In this article from Slate, Josh Daniel offers a "guide to some of the movie's more puzzling questions," such as the one about the screaming library book, about which he says, er, "Actually, the book doesn't explain this one either." But he's got some theories . . . . Making it worse, cowboys carry guns . . . As the descendent of actual cowboys, Salt Lake City resident Phil Jacobson always wanted to be a cowboy himself but didn't see how to make it happen. Then one day he saw an ad in the newspaper: "Cowboy Poetry Gathering and Buckaroo Fair." As he writes in a long, discursive essay about his quest for The Salt Lake City Weekly, "I don't know how to make a lasso, shoe a horse or eat pork and beans out of a can. But poetry? I can rhyme every time. Shoot howdy, this poetry event, I reckoned, had the makings to be my entrance into the world of wide–open plains and horses with no names." He took things a step further when he came up with the idea for Cowboy Haiku. An example: "He says: Yippee–aye / Get Along Little Doggie / Rusty talks too much." Thursday, 13 December 2001 McGraw–Hill "restructuring" . . . Textbook publisher McGraw–Hill, whose properties also include Business Week magazine and Standard & Poor's and other financial information providers, announced plans to cut 925 employees, or 5 percent of its work force, in a press release yesterday. According to an Associated Press wire story, the company "plans to eliminate 575 employees from its education division, 50 from its financial services unit and 300 from its media and information operations." According to a Reuters report, the moves should "enhance growth," although "profit growth remains on track." CEO Harold McGraw III said the "restructuring" will "position the corporation for solid performance in 2002 and beyond." Public display of bitterness and greed fails to draw sufficient attention to aging brat . . . A 35–year correspondence between Margaret Salinger and her father J.D. Salinger failed to sell at a Sotheby's auction yesterday. According to an Associated Press wire story, bidding "started at $130,000 and was stopped at $170,000 because it didn't meet the minimum price the seller was willing to accept," although that minimum set by the seller — Margaret Salinger — was not revealed. Sotheby's had estimated it would receive somewhere between $250,000 and $350,000 for the 32 letters, which "begin in 1958 when Margaret 'Peggy' Salinger was 2 and end in 1992 when Salinger advises her to terminate her pregnancy." Better than fiction . . . In his novel "Utz," Bruce Chatwin depicted a reclusive Czech art collector who smashed a priceless collection of 18th century porcelain rather than see it fall into Communist hands. The story was inspired by Rudolph Just, who died in 1972, and who did indeed have such a collection. But he didn't smash it — he hid it, and kept it hidden for 70 years, through "Nazi occupation, Communist rule, the Velvet Revolution and the break–up of Czechoslovakia," as a BBC News wire story details. At one point, Just was even put in a Nazi labor camp, from which he escaped. Now, the recently re–discovered collection has sold in an auction for £1.5 million. Just's grandson says the sale "has given my grandfather a much greater profile as a collector and the printed catalogue of the sale is a lasting reminder of what good taste and connoisseurship he had." Arnold's theory: some believe in the oral tradition more strongly than others . . . "First novels by African–Americans have larger first printings than those by white authors, because they sell better," reports Martin Arnold. In fact, "many first novels by black authors sell well enough not just to cover their advances, but also to earn some royalties for their writers. Which doesn't happen that often for white first novelists." But, as he explains in his New York Times column, African–American authors have "a greater potential for sales because blacks are ravenous for books relevant to their experience, and until recently there have not been many available." Also, he says, sales are helped by "black independent bookstores, the black book clubs and an ever–growing number, almost an explosion, of black reading clubs." None of which should be surprising,he says, as "storytelling is a natural ritual of many black families." Max Rodriguez, editor of QBR: The Black Book Review, explains, "We are oral, and now that oral tradition is being translated into stories in print for the first time. This leads to devouring of novels that will be talked about, making for strong word–of–mouth sales." Book that says the environment is getting better, not worse, comes under attack from scientists . . . The new book by Bjorn Lomborg, "The Skeptical Environmentalist," "brings us glorious news," says Colin Woodard: "Contrary to what the experts have been telling you, forests are spreading, air and water pollution are improving, global warming will have mild effects, and there won't be any food shortages as the world's population grows. And there's no need to worry about the ozone hole, species extinction, or acid rain; all those pesky environmentalists have just been exaggerating to try to scare you." But Woodard is one of those "pesky environmentalists," and in this in–depth review for TomPaine.com, he says that if Lomborg's thesis "sounds too good to be true, that's because it is." He calls the book "an intellectually dishonest tract filled with glaring omissions, appalling errors of fact and analysis, and inaccurate characterizations of contrary arguments." He also notes with dismay — and severe criticism — the fact that "The book has become a runaway hit on both sides of the Atlantic following a wave of credulous features, book reviews, and Lomborg guest essays published in many of the world's most respected newspapers and magazines." He cites, in particular, a series of articles about the book that appeared in The Guardian, a New York Times profile of Lomborg, and a review from the Washington Post that was "gushing in its praise." • MORE: The Union of Concerned Scientists has also expressed concern about Lomborg's book, as this article from their website details. New bio ascribes Di's post–husband problems to pills . . . A new biography will claim "the increasingly erratic behavior of Princess Diana in her final years may have been casued by a dependence on the notorious drug Rohypnol," a.k.a. the "'date rape drug,' which was designed as a sleeping pill, but was banned after numerous cases in which it was used by predators to knock out and have sex with helpless women," according to a New York Post column by Neal Travis. "Diana was always a pill-popper, using various prescription drugs to battle everything from depression to sleeplessness to sudden weight gain," Travis says, and in the new book author Chris Hutchins, who has written biographies of Tina Onassis and Sarah Ferguson, claims Diana got Rohypnol from Lady Dale "Kanga" Tryon. Tryon "is said to have later told Hutchins that Diana confessed to her that she would sometimes go out driving after taking the drug and would wake up the next morning not knowing where she had spent the night," says Travis. Angry Penguin biographer still being punished for her book . . . First, Janine Burke's biography of Albert Tucker, one of Australia's most acclaimed painters and a member of the artists' collective known as the Angry Penguins, was delayed when Turner's widow, Barbara Tucker withheld permission to reprint his pictures and letters. As noted in a previous MobyLives posting, to a Melbourne age report no longer available, it was "a nasty surprise" for Burke, who had worked closely with Tucker himself on the book and had his approval. Now, Burke is under pressure she suspects is once again instigated by Barbara Tucker — the board of the Museum of Modern Art at Heide voted for Burke to resign from her own position on the board, although as another Age report notes she "refused to budge and the board cannot force her departure." In a statement, the board said it fears Burke's presence will interfere with its acquisition of more than 200 works by Albert Tucker. But a museum trustee said "It's a disgrace if the executors of the Tucker estate are going to insist on asking for control over board positions as a prerequisite for the Tucker gift." Outcast society of women depicted in new novel . . . When she first heard about the outcast society known as the Wrens, fiction writer Rose Doyle knew she wanted to write about them. The Wrens were a group of Irish women who, in the mid–19th–century, "lived rough, brutally hard lives on the plains of Kildare . . . The name comes from the shelters they lived in, hollowed out 'nests' in the ground which they covered with layers of furze." Made up of "unmarried mothers, free–thinkers, alcoholics, prostitutes, vagrants, ex–convicts and harvest workers," Doyle says "they were reviled, stoned, beaten, spat upon . . . refused goods by local shopkeepers and burnt out of their nests. Even the workhouse refused them . . ." In this essay from The Irish Times, Doyle tells the history of the Wrens, and how she went about researching it for her novel, "Friends, Indeed." New memoirs about countercultural childhoods cite lives as American as Huck Finn . . . "For sheer jaw–dropping astonishment," Micah Perks' memoir about her hippie childhood, "Pagan Time," is "hard to beat," says Patrick Sullivan. Perks book about being raised on the commune in the Adirondack wilderness, where her parents ran a radical school for troubled children, says Sullivan, recounts some vivid scenes, such as the time her father took twelve of his female students on a "clothing–optional" rowboat excursion around Lake Champlain. Another former hippie kid, Lisa Michaels, also tells some wild stories in "Split: A Counterculture Childhood." In Sullivan's San Jose Metroactive profile of the two, Michaels, says "fashionable women wearing Gap clothes" keep approaching her after readings to reveal they, too, were hippie kids. "There was a real sense of gratitude for the freedom and respect they were given as tiny children," she continues. "And that is certainly true of me." Perks, meanwhile, says she felt her childhood was "a quintessential American childhood." She says, "What came together in the '60s wasn't some weird, anomalous moment in our history. It's something that's happened over and over in America: a desire for utopia . . . We want to form the perfect community and also escape into the wilderness like Huckleberry Finn." There's gold in them thar kids: Curious George is next . . . The director of the hit kids' movie "Monsters, Inc." is currently negotiating to make a movie starring pernnial kids' favorite Curious George, says a report from Canoe, the Canadian wire service. The report cites a story in Variety (unavailable as a link) that says the project had been "in the works as a live–action film," but that now Universal Pictures has chosen David Silverman to direct a "computer animated adaptation" of "The Man in the Yellow Hat," the first book in the series written by Margaret and Hans Augusto Rey — interestingly, written by the Paris–based German couple in 1940 while they fled the Nazi invasion of Paris and headed on bicycle to the south of France. Harry Potter and "Lord of the Rings": teaching children racism? . . . The appeal of both Harry Potter and J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" is "fundamentally racist," says Chris Hemming in a Sydney Morning Herald commentary. He calls "Lord of the Rings" "almost a parody of a Hitlerian vision: orcs are ugly, disgusting, brutal, violent — without exception; elves are a beautiful, lordly, cultured elite . . . To know one is to know all . . . An orc — any orc — is without question an enemy. A hobbit would never side with an orc." "If you have doubts," Hemming says, "call up a few white supremacist sites on the Web. Tolkien is recommended reading for families hoping to bring up their children in a wholesome, racialist atmosphere." Meanwhile, while the right often sees J.K. Rowling's creation as too paganistic, Hemming nonetheless notes "Harry and his friends are members of an elite" whose "skills must be inherited before they are developed with teaching at Hogwarts. The reader quickly identifies with this genetic elite, and despises the talentless, boorish muggles. How we laugh when the Dursleys get into difficulties! They deserve it. They are, after all, just muggles — hapless, fat, brutal and stupid. They're all like that. Go on, Harry, hit them again and watch them cry." In short, Hemming says that the two children's movies whose popularity is currently sweeping the globe, "offer the same comfort for the whole world: join our tribe, be special with us, despise our subhumans." Wednesday, 12 December 2001 Goosebumps suit gives Scholastic — well . . . The Supreme Court has declined to hear a case that would have stopped a class action lawsuit against Scholastic Books brought by its own shareholders, who accuse the company of securities fraud by concealing declining sales of the publisher's "Goosebumps" series of childrens' books. According to an Associated Press wire story, "The company announced in February 1997 that investors should expect share losses," but "shortly before that" Scholastic vice president Raymond Marchuk "sold about $1.2 million in company stock, or 80 percent of his holdings, the lawsuit says." The A.P. report says that according to a lawyer for the stockholders, one toy store chain had told Scholastic "that Goosebumps books were not selling well because of the 'scary nature' of the series." Bezos tests new partnership with spatula . . . As part of a "whirlwind tour" to promote Amazon.com's seventh holiday season, Jeff Bezos stopped off in Chicago to make an appearance behind the grill flipping burgers at a local eatery, the Billy Goat. As The Chicago Tribune's Christine Tatum reports in her column, Bezos said "Amazon would turn its first 'pro forma operating profit' in the fourth quarter," which she calls "a cagey way of saying that the company stands a good chance of racking up another money–losing year." Tatum reviews the company's recent buying spree and wide–ranging partnerships with other retailers and notes Bezos nonetheless claims, "We don't want to be all things to all people . . . Physical retailers are coming to us because they're realizing that it's hard to do online business well." She also notes that the owner of the Billy Goat said Bezos "can come again tomorrow at lunch if the Internet thing doesn't work." NYU to name reading series after Agha Shahid Ali . . . New York University has announced it will hold an annual reading series named after the late poet Agha Shahid Ali. The news was revealed in this obituary of the poet, from the Indian publication Rediff.com. (No American publications, except for the local newspaper, The Daily Hampshire Gazette, have covered Ali's death yet.) Ali died at his home in Amherst, Massachusetts on December 8 after a long battle against brain cancer. Second opinions on Pauline Kael . . . When she died, it seemed as if nearly every critical writer in the world had nothing but lavish praise for Pauline Kael (except for a few mentions of Renata Adler's famous criticism, 20 years ago, that Kael's film reviews for The New Yorker were, "piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless.") Now, as Don Aucoin says in a Boston Globe column (second item), several writers have begun to discuss her work and influence in a less laudatory fashion. Critic Tom Carson, for example, says she inspired him when he started writing in the 1970s, but later he says she became a "vain, self–deluding would-be power broker . . . writing about ever–more–vapid films in the same hyperbolic, souped-up tone, contriving momentousness by fiat." Her former friend, director Paul Schrader has also written a critical piece about her. Aucoin himself says, "The cult surrounding Kael has always mystified me." Filming the poet's life difficult when the poet was Miguel Piñero . . . "Poet, playwright, street hustler, thief and drug addict, Miguel Piñero made art out of his stormy life," but it took a while for others to make a film about that life, says Dana Calvo in a Los Angeles Times article about the making of the new movie, "Piñero." Actor John Leguizamo spent 18 months developing the movie before deciding he didn't want the title role when "he discovered something that repulsed him" — Piñero had sexual relationships with teenaged boys. Leguizamo's replacement, Benjamin Bratt, says Piñero "was a freak" leading "a life of crime and hustling," making him "far too troubling and complicated to be a true hero." But others say the story of the "strung–out genius" who learned to write while imprisoned in Sing–Sing was an important story to tell. Miguel Algarin, who helped found the Nuyorican Poets Café with Piñero, says, "Mikey was a great playwright, a great poet. He was the philosopher of the criminal's mind. You deal with the ethics of that." The dancing laureates . . . Past winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature were in Stockholm last week for this year's presentation of the prize to this year's winner, V.S. Naipaul. Among the former winners in attendance were Nadine Gordimer and Günter Grass. "Both make no secret of not having recommended Naipaul for the prize," and both "disagree with Naipaul's denial of any political motivation in his writing," with Gordimer calling it "cowardly and pointless" to write "about colonial structures without ever taking a stance on them." But Gordimer and Grass agree on something else: "they like each other." As this Frankfurter Allgemeine profile of the two notes, "A picture of the two dancing hangs at her [Gordimer's] home — not a waltz, but the tango. 'It takes two to tango,' says Gordimer, her eyes sparkling." Ambler's spy novels back, and just in time . . . Spy novels will undoubtedly change in the aftermath of September 11, observes Mahinder Kingra, but they'll no doubt continue to be popular. "Every conflict since World War I has inspired libraries of suspense novels about professional and amateur spies, the majority of them jingoistic, crypto–fascist potboilers that only excite the worst passions of a nation at war," she notes. But "If the genre has produced any works of genuine literary merit, it is largely due to Eric Ambler," the inspiration for writers including John Le Carré and Alan Furst. Now, Random House is reissuing two of his books, "Background to Danger" and "A Coffin for Dimitrios." In a review for the Baltimore CityPaper, Kingra says, "In a world where Tom Clancy and his lesser imitators churn out cliché–ridden stories about square–jawed American heroes and swarthy, hate–filled Muslims, it's worth exploring Ambler's accomplishments to see his ability to craft thought–provoking thrillers based on complicated world events." • RELATED: In the above article, Mahindra Kingra quotes Alfred Hitchcock saying Eric Ambler devised heroes who "are anything but heroic, nor are they startlingly wise, or even daring. They are ordinary, rather pleasant people . . . who want to stay out of trouble and live comfortably." But a new book about Hitchcock himself, Peter Conrad's "The Hitchcock Murders," says Tom Shone in this New York Observer review, "is a quite terrifying book, designed to give even hardened Hitchcock fans the jitters." The revival, or diminishment, of the Diaspora? . . . "At the very moment when Jews have more freedom than ever to assimilate in secular society, more of them than ever are reconnecting to their Jewish culture and faith," observes Larry Tye. However, many Jews, he says, are put off by the "arrogance" and "insolence" of people in Israel, making the country "a source of pride but not necessarily a place to send their dollars or their children." So, he says, on an identity quest as a Diaspora Jew, he's written an account of "seven cities that he believes represent the revival of Judaism in the Diaspora: Dusseldorf, Dnepropetrovsk (Ukraine), Boston, Buenos Aires, Dublin, Paris, and Atlanta" — cities he says ""more in common with one another than with the Jewish state." But in a Jerusalem Post review of the book, "Home Lands: Portraits of the New Jewish Diaspora," critic Moshe Dann says Tye's thesis is "problematic." For one thing, is it a diaspora or abandonment? "One cannot dismiss the rate at which Jews are abandoning their faith," Dann notes. The year's notable poetry . . . Critics and columnists are starting to come out with their annual "best of" reviews, but few publications seem to feature a particular focus on the year's best poetry. But poet Carol Muske–Duke was recently given the chance by the Los Angeles Times, and the resultant column includes some unavoidably obvious choices — reading James Merrill's "Collected Works" is "like reading Marvell or Keats or Dickinson, she says. But Muske–Duke makes some surprise selections, too, such as the anthology of "Frontier Taiwan," which offers an opportunity to realize "as magnificent, traumatic and revolutionary a breakthrough as any witnessed in world literature during the 20th century" — "the emergence of modern poetry in China." September 10, New York City . . . As the editors of The New York Observer note, it is an "aching holiday season" here in New York City. But when editors asked 50 New York writers to write about their day on September 10, they were "amazed at their tenderness and wit." They've posted those essays in a lenthy section that includes Tom Wolfe, Janet Malcolm, Cynthia Ozick, Dominick Dunne, and numerous other New Yorkers, from Martin Scorcese to Mayor–elect Michael Bloomberg. Why writers cut a wide path around remainder tables . . . Novelist Dean Crawford didn't know about it until a friend saw his book on a remainder table in a bookstore: it had gone out of print. Poet and critic David Lehman regularly gets requests for his widely discussed, and praised, "Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man," especially from academics who ask, "could I buy 30 copies for a class?" But the book is out of print. As David Mehegan says in this Boston Globe feature, "Writers dream of their first book and of what comes after," but there's one thing "they're never ready for: having their books go out of print." Two suggestions: stream–of–consciousness writing, or get another house . . . "One of England's best loved writers," Alan Bennett has been prolific for 40 years, writing plays and movies ("The Madness of King George"), and novels (most recently, "The Clothes They Stood Up In"). But now, he's suffering from "a debilitating bout of writer's block that has made him depressed," says a report in The Observer. "I've been unable to write at various times in the past, but this is the longest period when I've been unable to complete anything at all," he said at a recent reading in London. "It's not that I don't think of stories, but at the moment they really are too bleak to visit on the public." The Guardian reports that the problem started in his home in Yorkshire, so he's been trying to write at his other house, in London . . . where he has "experienced the same problem." Tuesday, 11 December 2001 J.R.R. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings; Chip McGrath, lord of the bestsellers . . . Over the year's, the Ballantine edition of J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" trilogy has sold over 55 million total copies. Last year, it sold 300,000 of volume one, "The Fellowship of the Ring." This year, in anticipation of the upcoming movie version of "Fellowship," the company has sold 1.8 million copies. The film is also accredited with putting all three volumes plus a special "Official Movie Guide" in the top four slots of most bestseller lists — except the one at the New York Times, where only the movie guide has made the list, as Paul Colford notes in his New York Daily News column. New York Times Book Review editor Charles (Chip) McGrath told him that's because of a "policy" the Times has regarding "backlist titles." He concedes Tolkien publishers are "not terribly happy about this decision." Colford points out that's because many stores discount titles on the Times list, thereby "spurring additional sales." That other Festive Manufactured Holiday Phenomenon for Children gets underway . . . The next big mega–movie version of a kid's book, the first installment of J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, is due out next week, but it had a big premiere in London Monday night. As an Associated Press wire story reports, "Although it has not generated the overwhelming attention of last month's premiere of the first 'Harry Potter' film, an estimated 2,000 fans lined London's Leicester Square, screaming and shouting" at arriving stars Liv Tyler, Christopher Lee, Ian McKellen and Elijah Wood. The story contains no word on what viewers thought of the film, but Neil Spencer, in an commentary in London's Observer, predicts all three films will go over just like the books themselves, which he says remind him of another movie trilogy, "Star Wars": "Both have become massively popular while being derided by purist cineastes and literati." In fact, says Spencer, there are numerous similarities between the "Rings" books and "Star Wars," such as that "Both returned to traditional story-telling at a time when their respective art forms were gripped by experiment," and "Both are conscious attempts to tap the wellspring of myth." And both, he says, deserve more credit as serious works of art. The REAL question about Harry . . . "By the end of its cinema release more than one billion children will have seen Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone," notes Jim Schembri in a Melbourne Age story. "This is on top of the those who have read the books, which thus far have sold more than 160 million copies throughout the world." Yet while the film "has been praised for its positive messages about good over evil," he notes, "we never really get a fix on just what kind of hero Harry Potter is — Those glasses, that scarf, the way he rides his broomstick, the fact that his closest friends are a boy and a girl prompts one to ask of Harry Potter the question that is on everybody's mind: is he or isn't he?" The truth about fiction in womens' magazines . . . It launched the careers of Sylvia Plath, Truman Capote, Joyce Carol Oates, and even Michael Chabon, won 43 O. Henry Awards and a National Magazine Award for Fiction, but by the time it ceased publication in October after 66 years, Mademoiselle magazine "had become little more than a product–pushing, 'Sex and the City' fanzine," says Kera Bolonik in this Salon essay. Still, she says, the demise prompted many to observe that "Mademoiselle died, along with a handful of other 'women's glossies,' when they stopped publishing fiction back in the 1990s." That, says Bolonik, has been "interpreted by many in the worlds of media and publishing as a surrender to simplistic marketing instincts and a misinterpretation of readers' interests and aptitude," and has "revived the debate about whether readers of so–called women's magazines would ever buy glossies that included fiction." Early candidate for most controversial author of 2002 . . . As David D. Kirkpatrick reported last week in a New York Times story (previously posted on MobyLives), controversy already surrounds a new book by Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy, even though it's not out until next month, because of its title: "Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word." The title "has elicited considerable hand–wringing among the mostly white staff of its publisher, Pantheon Books, where some executives have even refused to say its name," Kirkpatrick noted. But author Kennedy tells Linton Weeks in this Washington Post profile that, for him, "There was no hand–wringing over the title." Weeks reports, "Over soup and dessert, Kennedy does say the word outright at times. He also uses 'the N–word' euphemism and refers to it as 'that word.'" As for criticism, Kennedy says it "comes with the territory." Inclusion of "alternative" poets in anthology causes ruckus . . . Poetry anthologies "are a kind of historical record, like time capsules," notes Stephen Burt of The Boston Review. They are also like ice cream: "they vary enormously in taste and quality; like ice cream, they may be classified as "vanilla" or "other." Vanilla anthologies ratify a period's or an audience's already-existing tastes; other anthologies seek to change those tastes." But the new ambitious, capacious, sometimes capricious "Anthology of Modern British & Irish Poetry," edited by Edward Said finds consistency, also gibberish . . . In his new book, "Reflections on Exile," Edward Said collected decades worth of his essays and cultural criticism. Talking about the process of putting the book together in an interview with Joan Smith (part of a PEN lecture, text courtesy of The Guardian), Said says he found himself disagreeing with his younger self, and sometimes "feeling some disbelief that I could have written such gibberish. Disagreeing and wondering how I came to be interested in that particular subject, and then wishing that I could take it back and change it. It's a grim moment." He also noticed a consistency: "I find myself instinctively on the other side of power." The Book Lady speaks . . . She's known around St. Paul as "the Book–Bag Lady, the Book Bag–Lady, or simply the Book Lady," and for 50 years has been "materializing at local secondhand bookstores, church-basement bazaars, sidewalk flea markets, estate sales, and going-out-of-business liquidations," where she "unfailingly gathers dozens of volumes and wobbles off beneath a cascading hillock of cast-off histories, out-of-date textbooks, discarded high school yearbooks, and dog-eared paperbacks." But her name is actually Jeanette Kamman, and she's the founder and sole custodian of the Kamman–Dale Library for Orphans. In a profile for the Minneapolis CityPaper, Peter Ritter visits her at the library, which is "in three adjacent houses on St. Paul's west side, occupies the better part of 30 rooms, sundry stairwells, various closets and cupboards, and two bathtubs." By the entry is "a sign taped in one window, which reads, in the cut-and-paste lettering style of a ransom note, 'They're Killing Us! Protect Yourself.'" Looking for the real Anthony Burgess . . . It's been eight years since Anthony Burgess died, and two biographies of the novelist look about to appear simultaneously sometime next year . . . and couldn't be more different, says Michael Ratcliffe. In an essay for The Observer, where Ratcliffe was once Burgess' editor, he considers the two forthcoming books and which may be closer to the truth. One of the biographers, Andrew Biswell, says he is "assembling a scholarly life of a writer for whom he feels 'deep affection' and greatly admires." The other writer, Roger Lewis, "thinks the man who wrote 'A Clockwork Orange' was a bit of a monster, and had done his best work by the age of 50." Lewis is also reputed to have said he was going to "crucify" Burgess in his book, although he strongly denies the quote. Still, it's contributed to his being seen as "the enemy" by Burgess' widow, who seems to have given an unofficial nod to Biswell. Prolific scholar faces the ultimate deadline . . . With six books in 10 years, iconoclastic art historian Michael Camille has been "producing acclaimed work at a breakneck pace," work that "so compels and provokes his colleagues that they are particularly eager for him to complete his umpteen unfinished projects, if humanly possible," says Peter Monaghan in a Chronicle of Higher Education profile. "Michael has done more than virtually anyone I can think of to recast the field of medieval art history and to open it up to new perspectives and approaches," says Harvard's Jeffrey F. Hamburger. As for Camille's more provocative qualities, says Hamburgrer, "A little controversy is a good thing in a field sometimes as staid as medieval studies." And indeed, Camille's many on–deck projects seem as idiosyncratic as ever, and in an interview, Monaghan says "Camille mentions so many books in progress that he would need two or three more careers to get to them all." The problem is time is running out on the one he's got — Camille has an deadly brain tumor and is writing as fast as he can. Confusing industry, or industrial models, with art . . . As critic Alex Good notes, Charles Baudelaire once said, "What man, worthy of the name of artist, what genuine lover of art, has ever confused industry with art?" But nowadays, says Good, "our attitude has become less certain." As he notes in a lengthy essay from his website, GoodReports, "Complaints about the industrialization of the arts and their dissemination by global media corporations have taken on a political dimension. In addition to being soft–hearted and fuzzy–minded in a William Morris kind of way, they are also viewed as elitist." As things have developed, he asks, can anyone "distinguish between industry and art"? Perhaps more importantly, he argues, "The engine of change in the arts during the past century was not an advance in technology, but the application of managerial models of production that followed in its wake." One critic wonders: Has Bellow written his last book? . . . "There seems to be a bit of mischief going on in the title of Saul Bellow's new book," notes Stephen Amidon in a New Statesman review of Bellow's "Collected Stories" — from which, he observes, "a number of novellas and short stories missing." So, he asks, "Why not "selected"? Could it be that the author is giving us a sly thematic nudge here, using a literary commonplace to indicate a unifying concern?" In fact, he speculates, "Collection here means recollection. For Bellow's vibrant and unforgettable characters are in fact collectors of stories . . . They are on the lookout for memories, gathering them in, jealously bringing them out for a guest to examine . . ." as if in a final book. |
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WHALE SIGHTINGS
This week's fiction:
"I Am an American"
by JAMES ALAN MCPHERSON
(from Ploughshares)
"Pratfall from Grace"
by GREG BAILLIE
(from Phantom Luncheon)
This week's poetry:
"The Guest"
by JO MCDOUGAL
(from Perihelion)
"The Girl on a Bridge"
by SUZANNE FRISCHKORN
(from In Posse Review)
"Talking to Little Birdies"
by CHARLES SIMIC
(from The Boston Review)
This week's audio:
(requires RealPlayer)
NATHAN ENGLANDER
reads two short stories, "For the Relieve of Unbearable Urges" and "Reb Kringle"
GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE
reads his poem "Le Pon Mirabeau" (in French; from a recording made in 1913)
Special edition:
POEMS FOR THE TIME
Alicia Ostriker's anthology of the poets she's been turning to of late — Stephen Dunn, C.P. Cavafy, Marianne Moore, and others, plus a never–before–seen poem of her own.
RECENTLY
UNDER–APPRECIATED
CANARIES IN THE MINESHAFT
by Renata Adler
(St. Martin's, $26.95)
Often funny, always engaging, these brilliant essays on media and culture are by one of the most insightful and original minds writing today, with a wide-ranging and fearless intellect, Adler looks at everything from presidential impeachment to Sesame Street's Big Bird.
DIRT
text by Jo McDougall
(Autumn House Press, $14.95)
Exquisitely timed and shaped, these poems exemplify the high art of artlessness. Equally impressive is the way her spare, clear voice directly addresses grief and memory, as in "Growing Up in a Small Town": "Our fathers / kept the sky / from falling. / Our mothers, / talking of recipes and funerals / and that Hopkins girl, / wove our world."
20: THE BEST OF THE DRUE HEINZ LITERATURE PRIZE
edited by John Edgar Wideman
(University of Pittsburgh, $25)
Celebrating twenty years of debuts, this book showcases the amazing track record of one of the country's most preeminent first book prizes. The contest has been won by, among others, Stewart O'Nan, Rick DeMaranis, Elizabeth Graver, Robley Wilson, Jane McCafferty and more, and a story from each is featured.
ALL THE REVIEWS THAT FIT
OFFICIAL TALLY:
Since March 21, 2001 (the MobyLives.com launch date), the New York Times has given 154 plugs in 256 days to books written by staffers or former staffers.
Average frequency with which the New York Times plugs books by staffers or former staffers: every 1.66 days
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Most recently:
•Plugs 126 — 154
The December 2 Sunday New York Times featured the yearly "Editor's Choice" awards for "best books" of the year. One of the nine books chosen for an Editor's Choice was "The Metaphysical Club," by Louis Menand, a contributor to the Times Sunday Magazine. It's the papers fifth plug of the book, although none of these plugs, including this one, have mentioned Menand's associationg with The Times. There was also a favorable review of "Travels With a Medieval Queen," by Mary Taylor Simeti, a regular contributor to the Times Sophisticated Traveler Magazine, although the review does not mention this. There's also a favorable critique of "Desperate Hours: The Epic Rescue of the Andrea Doria," by Richard Goldstein, and editor and writer for the Times obituary section, and a positive review for "Prince of Princes: The Life of Potemkin" by Sebag Montefiore who, as is noted in his book jacket bio, "writes for The New York Times, particularly about Russia." A section heralding the "best" gardening books of 2001 selects "The Minmalist Cooks Dinner" by Times food columnist Mark Bittman for a plug. Caroline Seebohm, a longࡦtime regular contributor to the Times book and travel sections, also gets a good review for her "Boca Rococo: How Addison Mizner Invented Florida's Gold Coast." Meanwhile, in the newspaper's assessment of the year's "Notable Books," there are twenty–one plugs for books by Times contributors. This includes, in fiction: "The Center of Things" by Jenny McPhee, who, in her fifth plug from the paper, goes unidentified for the fifth time as a regular contributor to the NYTBR; "The Hunters" by Claire Messud (the book's sixth plug); and "In the Floyd Archives" by Sarah Boxer (her fifth plug). In nonfiction: "The Algeria Hotel" by Adam Nossiter, who, in his fourth plug, isn't identified as a staffer; "Ava's Man" by Rick Bragg (the book's third plug); "The Botany of Desire" by Michael Pollan, who is not identified as a Times contributor (his fifth plug); "The Brother" by Sam Roberts (his fourth plug); "Comfort Me With Apples" by Ruth Reichl (her fifth plug); "Crescent and Star" by Stephen Kinzer (his sixth plug); "Displaced Persons" by Joseph Berger (his fifth plug); "Eastward to Tartary" by Robert D. Kaplan (his third plug), who is unidentified as a Times contributor; "Emergence" by Steven Johnson (his fourth plug), whose affiliation with The Times is unacknowledged; "Facing the Wind," by Julie Salamon (her eighth plug); "Germs" by Judith Miller, Stephen Englelberg and William Broad (the book's third plug); "The Lost Children of Wilder" by Nina Bernstein (her sixth plug); "Mary Shelley" by Miranda Seymour, who goes unaccredited as a frequent contributor to the NYTBR (her fourth plug); "Next" by Michael Lewis (his seventh plug), who is not identified as a contributor to The Times Sunday Magazine; "The Noonday Demon" by Andrew Solomon, who is unidentified as a Times (his eighth plug); "President Nixon: Alone in the White House" by Richard Reeves, who is not identified as a long–time Times reporter (his fourth plug); "Utimate Journey" by Richard Bernstein (his seventh plug); "War in a Time of Peace" by David Halberstam, who is unidentified as a long–time Times staffer (his third plug).
Should the Times — or any publication — review books by its own staffers?
WHAT DO YOU THINK?
RELEVANT READING:
Relevant Reading I
John Leonard, former editor of the NYTSBR, tells what it’s like behind the scenes.
Relevant Reading II
Retiring New York Times book reviewer Christopher Lehmann–Haupt talks about the time editors ordered him to give a book a bad review.
Relevant Reading III
The books of Renata Adler, Joe Conason, Gene Lyons, and others get reviewed in the New York Times by people mentioned critically in the book.
Links
Zembla: The Official Site of the Vladimir Nabokov Society
