Richard Dooling writes in to report that he authored an op-ed piece pertaining to L’Affaire Lamott. The piece appeared in the Omaha World-Herald, but is not available online. But Dooling has it up on his website.
Author / Edward Champion
Roundup
- Apparently, poetry couldn’t get Clive James laid. (via Ron Silliman)
- A New York vacation plan for bibliophiles. (via Rare Book News)
- Edward Gorey’s “The Trouble with Tribbles.” (via Quill and Quire)
- Apparently, the Toronto International Film Festival schedule is flummoxing cineastes, including Quiet Bubble and Roger Ebert. There also appear to be more than a few literary connections with this lineup.
- George Saunders is guest blogging at Powell’s this week.
- Persona Non Data on the Times E-Reader.
- Apparently, eBay is now censoring auctions of comics it finds objectionable. (via Occasional Superheroine)
- Joe Meno and other authors on what best captures Chicago.
- You can always count on the NYT corrections page for some unusual syntax. Today: “A film review in Weekend on Aug. 17 about ‘Marigold’ misstated its rating status.” The review is not of Marigold. It is about Marigold. It is not a film rating, but a “rating status.” Which makes me wonder whether social strata can now be applied to a film rating. (Is a PG-13 movie now considered middle-class? Or is it some benign out-of-towner entering a cocktail party at a Fifth Avenue apartment?) The Times regrets the vernacular, but this is the Times, after all.
- Jeff VanderMeer covers the Hugo Awards.
- Auden’s lost poems.
So Was the $1 Million Donation a Way to Deflect This News?
Publishers Weekly: “Random House reported a 8% decline in worldwide earnings for the first half of 2007, to 44 million euros ($60 million) while parent company Bertelsmann posted first-half losses primarily due to Napster legal difficulties.”
Apparently, David Remnick Also Thinks Women Aren’t Funny
Benjamin Cohen has a gender breakdown of contributors to the New Yorker‘s “Shouts & Murmurs” section. The results are extremely troubling. It seems that only 17 of the 133 authors who have appeared in “Shouts & Murmurs” since 1992 have been women. Patricia Marx is the female author who has appeared most, at seven times, but her work is occluded by Steve Martin’s 29 appearances.
So does Remnick subscribe to the Christopher Hitchens hard line? (It’s interesting to note that Hitchens’s essay also appeared in a Conde Nast magazine.) Why haven’t women been assigned to this section? And while I’m on the subject, why does Steve Martin get an interview slot at the New Yorker Festival, but not Marx? Okay, so some chick named Susan Morrison is interviewing him, because this is the 21st century and some faces have to be saved. But I’m truly astonished that the magazine which frequently published Dorothy Parker, an inarguably funny woman, seems to have reverted to some backwards 19th century idea about gender on this subject.
Details on Nicholson Baker’s New Book
Thanks to Julia Prosser, here is what I’ve been able to find out about Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke. There is not yet a subtitle to this 800 page opus, but the book is described as “a meticulously researched, astonishingly new perspective of the political, social, religious, and economic events throughout the world in the years preceding World War II—an invaluable work of nonfiction and an impassioned, persuasive call for pacifism.”
The book’s editor is Sarah Hochman, who has also edited the German writer Maxim Biller.
The release that I have also describes it as “a unique, deeply moving indictment of the treasured myths that have romanticized much of the 1930s and ‘40s—and a testament to non-violence and pacifism that applies as much to our own age as to any other.”
It also describes Human Smoke as “weav[ing] together the events and individuals that unnecessarily enabled or prolonged the irreparable damages of the war, including hundreds of often-overlooked facts, quotes, and articles that were frequently published in The New York Times, TIME, and countless other sources, which have been easily accessible to readers for generations.”
So yeah, I’d say that we might be seeing a good deal of that Baker-like precision here. The big question is just what specific elements Baker will be looking into to support his thesis for pacifism.