Heidi Benson has a definitive report on the LATBR‘s current state: The Book Review will lose four pages and merge with an eight-page opinion section. It could launch as soon as this month. These are unsettling developments to say the least.
Much to my regret, I was too fried this weekend to attend Wondercon. (I plan to do penance by vigorously reporting at the forthcoming APE.) But Newsarama has a definitive roundup.
Giles Foden responds to the whole “Martin Amis as Britain’s greatest living author” controversy, revealing that Amanda Ross, responsible for picking such questionable titles as a Robbie Williams biography for the Richard & Judy Book Club, hates the word “literary.” Well, I’m not fond of anti-intellectuals who are more fond of bullshit labels than a book’s innards, but you don’t hear me complaining.
Laura Miller on Un Lun Dun. I have enjoyed Miller’s reviews in the past. But I’m troubled by her Malcolm Jones-like pronouncement, “I’d never been able to get past the first chapter or so of the books I’ve tried.” Again, I must ask if today’s book reviewers are lazier than previous generations. It’s one thing if a critic didn’t care for a book, but if a critic is being paid to review something, is it not a critic’s obligation to remark only upon books that she has read? These revelations reflect badly on the reviewer and badly on the pub. Miller dismisses Miéville’s style in these earlier as “half-baked” and “callow,” but it seems to me that if she didn’t read Perdido Street Station and The Scar in full, then Miller’s modifiers are best applied to her own review, particularly since this idle speculation comes with no supportive examples.
Robert Birnbaum talks with Martin Amis for the fifth time. Lots of good stuff, including Amis describing how to hit the reader over the head on a character’s race.
RIP Arthur Schlesinger, although turning Barbra Streisand on to The Economist is the least of his achievements.
More silly narcissism charges. I’m beginning to wonder, in light of all these allegations leveled at technology, if complaining about what others do with their lives is itself a form of narcissism. Look, someone else could be an intense Scrabble player and spend all of their spare time talking about it. But I’m not going to call them “narcissistic.” Enthusiastic, maybe. Sometimes so wrapped up in their interests that they sometimes forget to eat, sleep, or socially interact, okay. But it does not follow that these folks think about anything but their own interests. Could it be that the “Narcissism!” hues and cries are a new backlash against geeks? (via Speedy Snail)
Matthew Tiffany on What is the What: “I read a page, two maybe, at night before the words begin to dance and I drool. I haven’t been reading in traffic, or on lunch break. Then I thought that it was the subject matter; not giving me enough of an escape from the everyday. Which is absurd, because Deng in a refugee camp in Ethiopia is pretty damn far from my everyday.”
Still believe that comics are trivial? PW reports that graphic novel sales increased 12% from 2006 to 2005. Comics aren’t going away anytime soon. And if you haven’t embraced them, or at least investigated them, by now, you may as well be using a Telex instead of a fax machine.
David Denby: “‘Syriana’ made sense in the end, but you practically needed a database to sort out the story elements; the movie became a weird formal experiment, testing the audience’s endurance and patience.” Speak for yourself, Denby. If Denby is advocating an end to nontraditional cinematic narratives (and I suspect that he is), I don’t know why this man continues to review movies. Denby’s hostility towards multilayered narratives seems less predicated upon aesthetics and more rooted in intellectual indolence. The New Yorker editors should demand better, posthaste.
Ron Silliman: “The Departed is a more complex, more compelling film than either Babel or The Queen, even if it lacks the social importance of the former or the challenge of making a film where so little happens on the surface of things.”
New Scientist: “Sleep also helps us to extract themes and rules from the masses of information we soak up during the day.” Speaking for myself, I don’t know if my dreams of wild orgies with 1940s noir queens is really a matter of “extracting information.”
Yesterday, I felt a man’s bicep in a hotel room. I’m not lying about this. This man, who will appear very soon on The Bat Segundo Show insisted that I do this, and who was I to turn him down? When a man makes a convincing case for why you should feel his bicep, my position is to throw caution to the wind and live dangerously.
Speaking of which, Chris Lehmann talks with Martin Amis and asks him the real questions, such as what it was like to sleep with Tina Brown. I’m not sure what bearing this has on Amis as a writer, but if Lehmann is going to lower the bar like this, fair is fair. I’ll accept his needless and gossipy question as legitimate journalism the minute he tells us whether his wife takes it up the ass.
Bookblog: “I’ve read a few interviews [Valentino Achak Deng]’s done along with Eggers, but I’m interested in what he’s like without having Eggers around.” This is a very good observation.
Behold! The latest Tournament of Books. I still don’t understand the purpose of the white chicken in the red circle. No doubt this is a deeply symbolic gesture on the part of Kevin Guilfoile. Or perhaps he and the Morning News gang came up with the whole idea at a KFC (the only restaurant that could accommodate the meager ToB catering budget).