Since the sleeping schedule has gone all to hell, it seems as good a time as any to point to numerous things. (I forgot what happens when my mind remains active without a break for seventeen hours. Must remember to do stupid things so that I can sleep in the future.)
The Los Angeles Timeschecks in with Howard Junker and Zyzzyva, as Junker has just retired. There doesn’t appear to be a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon in Mr. Junker’s hand, but perhaps some unknown moment of spare time involving Photoshop and, well, let’s face it, PBR might remedy this. [UPDATE: To be clear on this, Junker is retiring at the end of next year.]
Dan Green offers many thoughts on Steven Millhauser.
And speaking of Millhauser, I’m wondering if there’s a specific name for that optical illusion in which two lower-case ells appear to converge into one when you’re looking at them in a small font. I’m convinced this is why I can never trust myself when I type “Philip Roth.” I always think there might be another ell, when there isn’t. Because if you stare long enough at two ells, they merge into one!
If Obama wishes to preach hope, I certainly hope he has a solution for this retail bloodletting. Chelsea Green has managed to anger Barnes & Noble and independent booksellers because it intends to distribute Robert Kuttner’s Obama’s Challenge at the Democratic National Convention. There’s just one problem. With the book comes coupons that can be redeemed at Amazon’s BookSurge, which is their POD offering. Independent booksellers revolted and canceled orders, feeling that Chelsea Green’s move was a slap in the face. Chelsea Green president Margo Baldwin responded, blaming this favoritism on the importance of the election season. (Gee, I wonder if I can tell my landlord that I can’t pay the rent next month because I believe that this year’s Mets season is particularly important. Think he’d be sympathetic?) Anyway, instead of offering an alternative that might assist these indie bookstores, Baldwin writes that Chelsea Green “could not have survived and thrived without the innovations that Amazon brought to the book marketplace.” Amazon may be important for a small press to survive, but the people who run indie bookstores are often passionate readers. It’s the people behind the counter who have some say in where your book is positioned. There’s little doubt in my mind that POD will become a retail reality at some point. But with so many POD options out there and the atmosphere uncertain, it seems to me extremely foolish to alienate the support you have operating in the present like this.
Am I the only person who really doesn’t give two shits about Michael Phelps? You know, world events, economy in the shitter, U.S. presidential election, Georgia, rising gas and food prices, et al.
An emo version of the Footloose soundtrack. “Holding Out for a Hero” was never really intended as a song you’d want to slice your wrists to. And if you ply me with enough liquor, I could go on about my complex feelings about Bonnie Tyler at length. But I won’t. I’ll just say that the man behind this deranged concept deserves props for transmuting a teenage classic and removing all hope and redemption from its soundtrack. (via Quiddity)
Bernie Mac and Isaac Hayes died over the weekend. It’s particularly creepy that both men appeared in a film called Soul Men with Samuel L. Jackson. It’s bad enough that these two men are gone. But in considering the old adage that these things happen in threes, let us hope that Mr. Jackson is somewhere safe drinking carrot juice.
Pretty Fakes quite wisely calls out J.G. Jones on his inept Final Crisis #3 cover. And, yes, let’s be clear on this. There is no sense of wonder on Supergirl’s face. Supergirl’s eyes roll upwards as if she is a mere bimbo who has just spent thirty minutes trying to compose a text message to send to Comet. Her left hand appears to be hiding a cell phone. Her right hand seems to be waiting for a tube of lipstick. Of course, J.G. Jones’s upcoming cover for Final Crisis #5 isn’t exactly respectful to Wonder Woman. Jones is more interested in depicting Wonder Woman’s star-strewn ass than her golden lasso (conveniently hidden behind her right thigh). The upshot is that J.G. Jones seems to think it’s 1958, not 2008, and has a major problem depicting women in a position of power. But then when Jones is busy joking with Newsarama about having his groceries “delivered by a really cute girl” with this “date” getting to sit and watch him draw, and fumbling about in another interview about how great it might be to hear a beautiful woman like Angelina Jolie beg over the phone, it isn’t much of a surprise to see his work reflecting his perceptive limitations. Why Feministing or Feministe aren’t all over this is a mystery to me.
Why is dwelling upon DC’s actions in the present so important? Well, consider how Jones’s indiscretions mirror troublesome sexism in the past. Jeff Trexler offers a summary of some fascinating correspondence between DC and Superman artist Jerry Siegel. Among some of the startling Golden Age sexism: “[W]hy it is necessary to shade Lois’ breasts and the underside of her tummy with vertical pen-lines we can’t understand. She looks pregnant. Murray suggests that you arrange for her to have an abortion or the baby and get it over with so that her figure can return to something a little more like the tasty dish she is supposed to be.” (via The Beat)
The Orwell Diaries are now being distributed in blog form. Sunday’s entry: “Drizzly. Dense mist in evening. Yellow moon.” Okay, so he’s just warming up.
The New York Review of Bookshas jumped into the podcasting game. The podcasts are very rusty at this point. Interviewer Sasha Weiss sounds like a humorless human resources manager incapable of loosening up. But maybe they’ll work out the kinks in this operation as the podcast continues.
One fifth of American television viewers are watching online. What’s more, the largest group of online television watchers were well-educated, affluent women between the ages of 25 and 44. I have a feeling that they also buy books. Given that demographic, perhaps the time has come for those who complain about the paucity of literary programming on television to begin setting up their hitching posts on the new media frontier. It also means that publicists of all stripes really need to start paying attention to where and how the audiences are shifting.
This year’s Hugo winners. With her eleventh Hugo Award win, Connie Willis has now beat out Harlan Ellison for multiple Hugo wins.
Ira Glass on storytelling and taste. Once you get past Glass’s regrettable tendency to use “like” in every other sentence, he does have some insightful things to say about constant production and dissects an old clip produced when he was 28. (via Booklist)
On this blog, if I read an author and I think that the author in question is the cat’s pajamas, I can instantly declare this to an audience. The approbation may be fleeting. It may not be quite thought out. But it does represent the current moment. It does signal a natural reaction. This is not so much the case with a newspaper. If I am commissioned to write a review, I am forced to withhold my enthusiasm for an author until the review runs, or perhaps allude to the author’s considerable worth in an oblique manner. There is indeed a tradeoff here. Many newspapers, for understandable ethical reasons, don’t want authors or publishers to know precisely how reviewers feel about a particular book in advance. But the editors can help me to shape a piece or demand more of me (knowing full well that I have a tremendous work ethic) and, since it is a professional gig, my work ethic compels me to write at peak form. Alas, the conundrum remains. There is one such author I wish I could tell you about, but I cannot right now, but will elsewhere. And so my lips remain tight. But I do intend to check out this author’s backlist. Perhaps the immediacy I wish for now in the present can be atoned somewhat by this future dip into the past. I am sure that other reviewers have this problem. I am sure that the declining level of passion seen in certain reviewers I could name, but won’t, is largely because the journalism game demands that something so innately joyful, such as enthusiasm for a book, must be curtailed. Which is a bit like demanding that one withhold a giddy scream while throttling over the hump of a rollercoaster. Humans aren’t in the habit of doing this. Not unless they are also in the habit of always keeping the top button of their shirt fastened. (Aside: It should be noted that Nixon jogged in a shirt and tie. Yes, he actually exercised this way. And yet it is the famous photo of Lyndon Johnson pulling the ears of his dog that makes Johnson seem more of a scoundrel by comparison, if we use just these two examples. And while LBJ was in many ways an SOB for other reasons, I think it could be sufficiently argued that Nixon’s devotion to daily exercise is equally inhuman, perhaps more so. Which is not to compare literary people to U.S. Presidents, but to suggest a finer point about how we judge the inhuman nature of people by certain qualifying factors that involve others.) (Another aside: I wrote this paragraph before stumbling upon Wyatt Mason’s blog post concerning enthusiasm and reviews, which also has a few interesting thoughts on this dilemma — albeit not pertaining to the instant visceral response I am trying to describe.)
This post was intended as a roundup, but I see that it has transformed momentarily into something else. Were I employed as a USA Today copy editor, I would not have allowed this headline to pass. I would have demanded more wordplay in the headline. I would have spent thirty minutes attempting to persuade someone that this was an insufficient headline that didn’t perform complete justice to the presented possibility. We are told that Meyer’s fans “light up.” But while fans, meaning those on a literal level who are acolytes, certainly do “light up,” if we consider a double meaning, fans are not in the habit of “lighting up.” Perhaps they might “whirl” over the saga’s end. I could live with that. But I presume “light up” was settled upon because some member of the top brass did not wish to offend the devoted Meyerites. There are indeed comments on this article. And someone at USA Today is obviously employed to moderate these comments. So perhaps “light up” was settled upon to save the moderator some work. In the end, the headline suffers. And I can only hope that the people at USA Today put some more thought into their headlines in the future.
James Miller is causing something of a stir across the pond. I’m becoming a bit suspicious of novels that concern themselves with privileged children or adolescent wunderkinds or behavioral generalizations that stem from such topics. Personally, I’m fascinated by the kind little girl who lives on the first floor of my apartment building. She spends her summer days looking outside the window, clearly fascinated by every observational possibility. She says hello to everybody. And we all say hello back. She enjoys this. And yet because we’re all in a rush, we don’t stop to ask her what her name is or why she is so drawn to the window. That sense of kindness and curiosity is considerably more interesting to me than another hackneyed variation on how today’s emerging youth want this or demand that. Let us consider Miller’s hasty generalization: “They feel powerful playing those games, because in real life they feel powerless. One 12-year-old girl I taught was an advanced wizard in the World of Warcraft, who would trounce adults in magic battles.” The subscriber base for World of Warcraft is estimated to be somewhere in the area of 16 million. But while this is certainly a large number, there are 73.7 million children in the United States alone. If we assume all Warcraft players to be children (which is folly, but provides us with a working statistic to put Miller’s generalization into perspective), then what of the 80% who don’t play Warcraft? What of those who prefer to spend their time looking out the window? This may sound like some overly sincere A Tree Grows in Brooklyn premise, but it does nevertheless offer a less premeditated starting point with greater possibilities than Miller’s overly simplistic viewpoint. All one has to do is start asking questions.
Forget quotidian hazards such as beer and hot fudge sundaes. Email is the new peril. I do not know anyone who has personally died from email. But it is possible to keep up. Particularly if you type at a very high speed. I am not as efficacious as I’d like to be with my Yahoo account, in part because this represents a secondary account. But I do respond to just about every email on the main one. Of course, I’m also unafraid to respond at extremely strange hours. The way around email, of course, is to kill about 20 emails with one two-minute phone call. But then people are also terrified of picking up the phone. I do not believe that a 1,500 word article on the subject was necessary. At least not with this “email is the new ebola” angle. It is, oddly enough, just as troublesome as a rambling 1,500 word email (and I sometimes write these; I apologize; I am only responding). But then the nice thing about a silly article like this is that you don’t have to hit the reply button. (via The Book Publicity Blog)
And now another conservative has written a book bemoaning hip-hop, suggesting that it cannot affect social change. This is mostly true, but I believe that this misses the point of hip-hop. I find myself more in Michael Eric Dyson’s camp. Why can’t pop music also serve as social criticism? Pop music can certainly serve as a weapon. Consider the relentless music used to torture Abu Ghraib prisoners and the hard rock employed to smoke out Manuel Noriega.
This is not the way to make poetry accessible for Web 2.0. This looks like it was made by a 15-year-old who has just discovered After Effects, with Lemm Sissay resembling a man who has spent the last two decades pining desperately for a small role in an Antonioni film. Too bad Antonioni’s dead.
The question of whether it is really that late is, of course, determined by what you consider to be late.
It is late. Later than it should be. Later than when I had started. Later than I anticipated it to be. There is work to do. And this will mean sleeping less, so that I will not be late on other things. To bring this roundup full circle to the initial question, perhaps staying up late is comparable to Nixon jogging in his shirt and tie, while turning in work late is the equivalent of LBJ pulling the ears of his dog. It’s all in the angle.
If anti-Obama books are the new bestsellers, I intend to write an anti-bestseller that is the new literary Obama. The novel will presented with a hopeful corona, keeping you spellbound in its initial narrative campaign, only to betray you midway through with shameful appeals that confirm the prejudgments of literary cynics. But since you’ve read this far into the book, you’re obliged to go the distance. Even though you’ve realized that the book in question is just another pandering novel. (And perhaps this type of book may be close to what Wyatt Mason describes.) I do not know if anyone can make money from an anti-bestseller structured along these lines, but if someone can make a persuasive case that one can, I may commit a modicum of labor for such a narrative experiment. (Latter link via The Publishing Spot)
I’m with Matthew Tiffany on this: This has to be one of the most appalling literary interviews I’ve read in a while. Who is Drew Nellins? And why is he wasting Chris Adrian’s time? One could easily obtain more substance from a telemarketer trying to sell you a $16.99 delicacy, with dung and a chickenhawk’s cloaca listed as the main ingredients, shipped third-class from an island nation that you’ve never heard of, than the hopeless results emerging from Nellins’s bradykinetic four-lobe throttling pattern. Step it up, Mr. Nellins. Intelligence will be rewarded, but slum it at your own peril. This has been a shot across the bow.
