Who will take over the UK division of Borders? It doesn’t appear to be doing so well! I don’t understand. UK sales have been up 6-7% each week over the course of the summer and yet these big boxy stores don’t seem to work. Several potential purchasers are now contemplating precisely what to do about this predicament. Will they stand arms a-kimbo to one side while Borders becomes more desperate and the asking price goes down? Will there be maniacal laughter involved? Is there a maximum amount of smugness that the Borders executives will reach? Or will they adopt humility? Will we find them on the dole? Or is this one of those business stories that litblogs are not supposed to follow? (Well, this one does and probably will.) (via Paul Collins)
The apparently semi-literate Joseph Ridgwell hasn’t heard of Stephen Crane. He wrote a masterpiece called The Red Badge of Courage. Never observed war, but you wouldn’t know it from the battle scenes. Wrote it when he was 23. And if Ridgwell truly doesn’t see great emotional depth in Hunger, one of the most emotional books I’ve read in the past decade (and it hit me in the gut three times), one must indeed wonder if he is belaboring his point. Why does the Guardian continue to feature so many imbecilic arguments about books for its blog? (via Stephen Mitchelmore)
Elizabeth Crane on Cashback: “Arty filmmaker, whoever you are, I’m sorry to harsh your mellow, I often save my negative reviews for my private life, but you lost me at beauty. Give me Russ Meyer any day.”
Jonathan Franzen is apparently so desperate for attention that he’s trashing Tony-award winning shows when he isn’t translating. Hey, J-Franz, it’s been six years since The Corrections. You can bitch all you want and translate all you want later. But for now, you’re not allowed to whine until you cough up another novel, okay?
At the Observer, several authors name underrated novels. Peter Ho Davies picks an LBC nominee, The Cottagers.
Rasputin contemplates dead blogs: “That former bastion of quality, The Minor Fall, The Major Lift, has been lost to history, as its former URL now goes to an adult marketing site; which is rather the internet equivalent of the fate of those poor souls in a John Carpenter zombie movie who get their brains ‘et.”
There are now far too many reading challenges for me to keep track of at A Life in Books. I’m going from memory here. But here’s what I think happened. First there was the Chunkster Challenge. Then there was the Read 26 Books With Titles Beginning from A to Z Challenge. Then there was the Read Books Written by the Literary Jonathans Challenge. Then there was the Read Books That You Can Barely Lift Challenge. Then there was the Read 100 Books While Participating in a Triathlon Challenge and the Read All of Proust in Total Darkness Challenge. I’m amazed at these folks. Not only are they involved in multiple challenges, but they can somehow keep track of them all. I’m amazed, I tell you. Amazed.
Doctor Whois to have a gap year. No Who in 2009, except for three specials. And all of them will be written by…shudder…Russell T. Davies.
Nice to see gender generalizations applied to blog. What good is it to apply a 1940s false assumption to a 21st century medium? (via Evil Genius Chronicle, who also has quite an ebullient podcast)
Darby Dixon reflects upon this business of fiction writing. No, you won’t completely understand it. But write every day. Do something every day. Keep some kind of hanging sword over the work, a sense of fun and enjoyment that will make up for the horrible resistance to stop. Don’t stop.
Slipping behind the Atlantic paywall onto the Powell’s platter: B.R. Myers on Pollan, which makes one wonder whether someone should write A Critic’s Manifesto and put an end to this damn Fisking.
It may be a false correlation between two separate events, but let’s consider the whole Reading is Dead question. In Scotland, we have a very fine showing of participants at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. In the States, Borders reports a quarterly loss, despite a rise in sales generated by Harry Potter 7. (It should be noted that Barnes and Noble that showed a profit.) So what do all of these things say? Are we simply seeing bad management? Do the EIFF participants end up moving a sizable number of books? Andrew Carnegie was a Scotsman. Should we resuscitate his ghost and put him in charge of Borders? I will need more coffee before any reasonable associations kick in. So never mind me. I’ll save useful analysis for later.
This week in Dammit Janet: Maslin botches a review for a book ostensibly (ghost)written by Johnny Cash’s wife. “This book does not include Ms. Cash’s side of the correspondence. Nor does it need to: Mr. Cash’s impassioned dialogue is conducted as much with himself as it is with her.” Ya think?
I’ve just learned that the Terre Haute bloggers are now planning a six-week symposium entitled How to Discourage Reading Through Soporific Lectures. They are currently lining up speakers. If you are a bland individual who has not laughed once in the past six years or you think jellybeans are extraneous or you think people should read their books in the same manner in which they are prescribed Brussels sprouts for dinner, please let them know. They are hoping to find the most boring and ponderous people for their lecture series. Bonus points if you ain’t gettin’ any. (And it also appears that a symposium on nose picking is also in the works. These are exciting times!)
Apparently, books strike fear in the prison system. Or maybe thye’re afraid that the convicts will become too smart. Never mind that the prison-industrial complex is allegedly supposed to rehabilitate. (Why else refer to them as penitentiaries or correctional institutions?) It’s worth observing that a little known piece of California progressivism, put into action by San Quentin librarian Herman Sopector, called bibliotherapy enabled Eldridge Cleaver to write Soul on Ice. I first learned about all this when reading Joseph T. Hallinan’s excellent book, Going Up the River: Travels in a Prison Nation. For furtherreading on the subject, check out Eric Cummins’ The Rise and Fall of California’s Radical Prison Movement. (Recent news via Quill & Quire)
Carolyn Kellogg is now a teacher! I hope we get some long-form teaching narratives soon.
Jane Austen’s latter years will be the subject of a new BBC drama. In fact, there are now so many dramas covering so many years of Jane Austen’s life that the producers of Teletubbies are also contemplating a drama. The new project, It is a Perambulator Universally Acknowledged, will cover Austen’s existence between one and three years old.
In the current Believer: Nick Hornby and David Simon. Next up: Garrison Keillor and David Mamet, where the latter will ask the former why he can’t say “fuck,” much less any word, with anything approaching cheerful conviction. (via Pinky’s Paperhaus)
Take it from this Gibson reader, Mr. Asher. It was certainly a terrible job. “Inhabitants?” Uh, there was only one character in Pattern Recognition allergic to trademarks. The Times regrets the error.
You can see just about anything — however illusory — when banging out a generalization-laden essay.
James Wood is the most feared man in American letters? Get real. He’s a mere nitpicking titmouse. To be afraid of Wood is like having minor chest pains while passing the Grey Poupon from one Rolls Royce to another. If such a perception is even half-true, then the time has come for the literary world to get the wind knocked out of its too comfy constituency.
Emdashes has collected a helpful list of stories that first appeared in The New Yorker. My vote: John Cheever’s “The Swimmer.” I doubt very highly that anything as remarkably inventive as that story will ever appear in Remnick’s pages.
Believe it or not, there was a time in Dwight Garner’s career when he wasn’t a corporate tool. Case in point: this highly entertaining John Updike interview from 1996 that even has Updike revealing his feelings about Nicholson Baker, even if Garner can barely contain his antipathy for John Barth.
The Guardian reveals the longlist for this year’s First Book Award.
BODY: You are getting very sleepy. ME: Okay, I will try to sleep now. But where were you a few hours ago? BODY: Waiting for you to stop thinking. Was it necessary to look at all those YouTube clips of things resembling amateur cooking shows? ME: I can’t help it if the brain keeps going! I’m just naturally curious. BODY: We’re a service industry, you know. ME: A service industry of one! I have to get up in a few hours! BODY: Oh, you can hack it. Jesus, you’re neurotic about all this. You shouldn’t have taken a nap. ME: You were the one who hijacked ontological operations! BODY: You are getting very sleepy! ME: Thanks, body. Thanks a lot.
The “This I Believe” segments on NPR really make me want to hit something. These so-called “essayists” are needlessly calm and the worldviews expressed generally involve some unhelpful “common sense” you can all too easily obtain from a bland bookkeeper who has neither smiled nor walked on the wild side once in the past twelve years. So why do I listen to NPR? Well, I keep hoping that some crazy bastard will emerge, screaming “We’ve going to blow shit up in Torremolinos!” and then proceed to deliver an enthusiastic, profanity-laced lecture on Borges, with a digression into the history of the graham cracker, with a mariachi band forcing the staid hosts to dance and speak in an inflection that isn’t that sedate, okay-I’ll-have-my-Valium-now NPR issue voice. Why doesn’t anyone on NPR get excited?
Todd McFarlane and Josh Olson promise a revisionist Oz film. The new movie, tentatively entitled Tits and Toto, will involve Dorothy pimping her way down the Yellow Brick Road, schtupping everything she sees. Look for a ten-minute water sports scene involving the Cowardly Lion, where he runs into the forest after being asked to urinate upon Dorothy’s bare bottom. And instead of an oil can, the Tin Man will, thanks to the magic of bukkake, will be unlocked from his rust. Fun for the whole family! Do you think they’ll show it every year on television?