Month / January 2004

by DrMabuse

Harbingers of Horrific Plans

Bad reviews? Shoddy placement? Nope. Bruce Stockler says the biggest obstacle to publicizing a book is obituaries

The University of Michigan has launched a 20,000 volume digital collection. It uses a system similar to Amazon’s Search Inside the Book feature (minus the page limitation) and you can search through the entire collection for a specific word or phrase. But, unfortunately, there isn’t an author search. Some of the gems I’ve found include Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Rienzi, The Last of the Roman Tribunes (with such sterling prose as “Rienzi made no reply; he did not heed or hear him — dark and stern thoughts, thoughts in which were the germ of a mighty revolution, were at his heart.”), Seward Hilter’s Sex Ethics and the Kinsey Reports (“The females of the lower educational levels, Kinsey notes, had more often been afraid that masturbation would mean physical harm and also that it was abnormal and unnatural. We should note, however, that the women of the lower educational levels tend to marry at earlier ages, and that more of them might masturbate eventually if they postponed marriage to later ages.” Oh really?), the complete works of Coleridge, Guizot’s The History of Civilization, and some Thackeray.

De Niro and Scorsese are set to write a joint memoir. The director and star report that they have a unique writing approach. Before they begin each chapter, the two of them duke it out over who gets to sit in front of the computer. So far, Scorsese reports that he’s only lost one ear and three fingers.

Slightly old news, but the FBI reports to be on the lookout for almanac carriers. Anyone carrying an Information Please may very well be plotting terrorist activities, especially if the books are “annotated in suspicious ways.”

by DrMabuse

I Am Not Spalding

Concerning these little AudBlogs you may or may not be listening to — I want to assure the small audience here that I am not a drone, that I stutter on a regular basis, that just this week I forgot in conversation the first name of a good friend’s great love from 1997, that I was flogged by said friend over the strains of some Yardbirds track, and that I often do not know where in hell these anti-lucidities are going. Spalding Gray remains missing and these audio things, uttered on a cell phone near odd palazzos, adjacent to coiffed, besuitted, beautiful and not so beautiful people who remain hopeless perplexed by any talk outside brokering a deal, only serves as cheap surrogate and handy experiment until Mr. Gray’s hopeful return to crazed modern life. This has been a disclaimer.

by DrMabuse

American Suckers

Close to the centenary, all is not well in Dali world. Robert Deschames, author of a Dali biography, has been fighting the Gala-Salvador Dali Foundation for some time. He claims that Dali gave him the commercial rights to his work during their friendship. The Foundation says no. The battle has waged in court for some time. Attorneys have profited. Deschames’ attorney claims that his client is ruined. This wouldn’t be the first time that money got in the way of one of Dali’s friendships, but it does mark the first time that it’s happened beyond the pale.

Putin is pissed. A history book suggested that he was a dictator running a police state. The great irony is that he’s now ordered a review of all history books.

Proving once again that Viagra conquers all, Julio Iglesias (that would be Dr. Julio, father of the Julio we know) has fathered a child at 87. This beats out Saul Bellow, who became a dad again at 84, and whose illegitimate grandson has recently taken over Playboy. Bellow responded, “That bastard! Does he know how much work it took?”

Here are several reasons why I will probably never read David Denby’s American Sucker:

1. He finds spiritual redemption in 8 Mile.

2. The Washington Post: “This warmed-over Horatio Alger rhetoric is very hard to stomach coming from a man cushioned in a handsomely paid magazine job, trying to stake himself to a stock market windfall in order to keep control of a $1.4 million apartment financed largely by his own family inheritance — someone who spent not one but two tours of duty at an Ivy League university, subsidized the second time via the good graces of a book contract. Bleary-eyed community college night classes, indeed.”

3. The Boston Globe channels John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Great Crash, noting, “When those same [economic] leaders are led off in handcuffs, it is a pretty good sign the boom has turned into a bust.” Denby, of course, stayed in after the NASDAQ dropped in March 2000.

4. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel: “At times, Denby’s obsessions become tiring – if he had a deeper navel, he would have written a longer book.”