Year / 2005

by Edward Champion

The Return of Cracked Magazine

Remember Cracked Magazine? It competed with MAD through a good chunk of the 1980s. In fact, many of the artists and writers who wrote for one magazine would regularly jump ship to the other, depending upon how much money the other outlet was offering. (Don Martin may have crossed the threshold at least six times.) And then Cracked folded and MAD was purchased by Time Warner, and MAD‘s edge was gone, baby!

Well, it looks like Cracked has relaunched — both as a magazine and as a website. Let us hope that it is unapologetically irreverant, reminds MAD of the satirical edge it sustained for so many decades, and forces BOTH magazines to keep each other in check, ensuring that we have two mighty satirical cartoon magazines taking the piss out of any and all targets. Golden age, indeed. Now more than ever, we need it. (via Yankee Potroast)

by Edward Champion

Kepler’s Lives. Cody’s Lives.

I haven’t checked it out yet, but the SFist has the scoop on the new Cody’s near Virgin Megastore. Beyond the delicious irony of the failed Planet Hollywood (co-owned by the Governator) space now being occupied by floors of books, it looks like a positively fantastic place to hole up for an afternoon. Between this and the Kepler’s reopening, it looks like a veritable golden age for Bay Area indie bookstores.

by Edward Champion

National Book Awards Finalists

As a reader recently noted, there are now so many major awards being announced that it is often difficult to keep track. Tomorrow at 2:00 PM EST, this year’s National Book Award finalists will be announced. If we had to hazard a guess, we believe Louise Erdrich’s The Painted Drum will be one of the finalists. Of course, the truly distressing part of tomorrow’s nominations is that they will be announced by John Grisham. Which is a bit like inviting someone as crass and as obnoxious as Gilbert Gottfried to be the keynote speaker at an Evelyn Waugh conference.

by Edward Champion

Roundup

  • Frances Dinkelspiel covers the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association.
  • This week, in the City, it’s Litquake. We’ll be crawling ourselves this Saturday, in more ways than one.
  • Word on the street is that the long-delayed Nobel Literature Prize will finally be announced this Thursday. Apparently, one of the Swedish intellectuals lost a few meatballs along the way. Knut Ahnlund gave notice that he was quitting in disgust over last year’s winner, Elfriede Jelinek. Ahnlund said that Jelinek’s work was “whinging, unenjoyable, violent pornography.” Well, that’s all very fine, Knut. But why wait a year to pull out? There’s still the risk of impregnating the proceedings with spurious seed. There’s been some speculation that Orhan Pamuk might be this year’s Nobel winner and that Ahnlund’s resignation has something to do with this year’s choice. But if my experience with self-important people serves as any guide, I’m guessing that Ahnlund wanted to sabotage this year’s proceedings by raising a stink and that the real winner will be someone completely unexpected. Let us hope that it’s as edgy a choice as Jelinek.
  • And speaking of awards, I’m not sure what to make of the Blooker. The Blooker hopes to award books that are based on blogs. But how many “blooks” are there? Certainly not enough to create a longlist. Further, are any of these really readable, much less enduring? More importantly, does Wil Wheaton really need another silly trinket?
  • Another day, another Dave E—- profile. His latest cause? Granting teachers more pay. While he’s at it, he may want to champion offering his volunteers some recompense. He’s also getting the little tykes to read every periodical in America, presumably to keep tabs on any naysayers. Child slave labor too? Why, in a parallel universe, Dave might very well be the literary equivalent of Phil Knight!
  • Four-Eyed Bitch wants to know why literary readings are so dull.
  • A new Internet radio station devoted to poetry has been launched by Brian Douthit.
  • Also worth looking into: Circadian Poems, a poetry blog.
  • Can pop culture be tracked in the 21st Century in book form? Encyclopedia of Pop Culture authors Michael and Jane Stern (among others) say no.
  • Literary critic Wayne C. Booth, author of The Rhetoric of Fiction, has passed on.

[UPDATE: The Complete Review has the full story on Knut “I Like My Literature Non-Pornographic” Ahnlund. Apparently, he’s not even a bona-fide Nobel judge and, whether he likes it or not, Ol’ Knut Basket Case won’t get his much vaunted reprieve until he meets his maker.]