• Keith Richards will play Depp’s dad in Pirates 3. Let us hope that the scene doesn’t involve coconut trees.
• Great Ormond Street Hospital, owner of the Peter Pan rights, is getting its panties in a bunch over Alan Moore’s Lost Girls. Interestingly, the copyright on Wendy is still active in the United Kingdom, despite the book and the play being a little less than a century old. I was baffled by this devleopment until I read up on crazed EU copyright law. Here’s the irony: The UK copyright expired at 1987, but an EU directive extended copyright from 50 years to 70 years after the author’s death. The situation is complicated in the United States, where GOSH claims that they own the Peter Pan copyright through 2023, despite the original edition of Peter and Wendy being published in 1911.
• The Old Hag is blogging again, but for how long?
• Heidi McDonald’s invaluable comic blog, The Beat, has jumped ship from Comicon to PW. (via Galleycat)
• I will control my worst impulses and say nothing about the Sean Connery memoir. Nothing! Ever lose your car keys? Shithead! The gun is good, the penis is evil! You have the gift, Jamal! Damn.
• Birnbaum talks with Gay Talese.
• Pussies. (via Jeff)
• Jean Cocteau sound files (via wood s lot)
• The Six Most Feared But Least Likely Causes of Death. Consider how much airtime much of these highly improbable deaths get on the news. Now consider a parallel universe in which your local anchorman reports on more quotidian deaths: “Robert Harris died today of lung cancer. He was 72, entirely unremarkable in every way, but, in his prime, could kick your ass in lacrosse.” (via Quiddity)
• Richard Simmons on Whose Line Is It Anyway?
• The Rocketboom flap becomes a soap opera.

Amanda Congdon leaves Rocketboom. While there is no clear-cut answer on what went down, the upshot is that Congdon wanted to move to Los Angeles, that producer Andrew Baron couldn’t afford to do this, and so Congdon was “unboomed.” Congdon says she was fired. Baron says she quit.

It is almost certain that Congdon will find work elsewhere. But what of Baron? And what of Rocketboom’s future? Will Congdon’s replacement garner the same results as Congdon? Will Rocketboom be Rocketboom?

It certainly hasn’t prevented some folks from egregious posturing.

The London Review of Books examines the new Doctor Who series and concludes, “It’s obvious that the future is not with families, or sofas, or even tellies as we imagine them: though they sit in bedrooms and in the backs of cars, and hang on walls, made of plasma, opposite massive empty fridges, in apartments in which the only seating is on one of those healthful rubber balls. The BBC claims to be looking forward to a newly interactive and demanding audience of ‘participants and partners’ and ‘communities’ and so on; but there is an opposing possibility, a movement to lonely super-consumerism, fan and fantasy fused together in wi-fi symbiosis. Sometimes, I think Russell T. Davies and his team have built a commentary on this process into Doctor Who’s current storylines. Sometimes, I think I am hallucinating this notion, from watching too much Doctor Who too close together, causing plots to ripple and shimmer with interference, story-arcs to swim across my eyes.” (via Bookish)

I will confess that the fanboy in me was shouting at the climax of last week’s episode. But Who‘s second season has been very problematic, suffering from lackluster scripts, Tennant’s inability to find the same firm footing that his predecessor did, and a base capitulation to giving the fans what they want (Sarah Jane Smith, K-9, the Cybermen, et al.). When Who explores intriguing ideas (a parallel universe featuring zeppelins in homage to Michael Moorcock’s Oswald Bastable series, Satan embedded near a black hole), it stops short from weaving these ideas into a taut emotional quilt, opting for blockbuster action and shaky narrative conclusions instead. It’s a telling sign that the only episode that has reached last year’s high watermark, “The Girl in the Fireplace,” didn’t find a way to figure Rose, who struck me as a far more integral component last year, into the picture at all. Perhaps this is why Billie Piper is leaving. In fact, there was one episode, while entertaining on a crass level, that had little to do with the Doctor at all, telling the story from an unemployed thirtysomething named Elton and lingering far too long on the man dancing around in his flat. (No surprise. Russell T. Davies, the show’s producer and worst writer, penned this story.)

If Who is to maintain its impact and its freshness, it must take more chances. It must find more ways to rethink its own mythology (such as last year’s “Dalek”). I suspect last year’s success had more to do with the performance and the characterization of Christopher Eccleston, who provided a dark and often peremptory edge that we hadn’t seen so frequently in the Doctor before. Tennant, twelve shows or so in, plays like an awkward and better-looking amalgam between Troughton and McCoy — almost as disposable as Paul McGann was in that terrible TV movie from a few years ago. Unlike Eccleston, Tennant, who is a natural comic actor who deserves more room to breathe, isn’t convincing when he tries to be threatening. Every actor who has played the Doctor (including Tom Baker) has understood that this dramatic heft is a pivotal part of the Doctor’s character, essential to maintaining his mystique. But I’m not convinced that Russell T. Davies or his writers completely understand this.

The Bat Segundo Show has been named as a Yahoo Pick! I’m speechless! Thanks so much!

Another week, another ridiculous Lev Grossman article. This week, the silly man dodders on about which authors represent today’s “generation.” By “generation,” I presume Grossman refers an author under the age of 40 who somehow “speaks” to the 18-34 generation. Bafflingly, Grossman imputes that David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, Jonathan Lethem and Michael Chabon are over-the-hill and, as a result, inured from appealing to younger readers.

But why should an author’s age matter? Grossman’s ageist approach fails to account for one overwhelming reality: it’s the books, stupid.

Further, why must an author be under an obligation to speak to his generation? Doesn’t fiction reflect themes that transcend a particular time or place? Catcher in the Rye continues to sell 250,000 copies a year, which, even accounting for the copies purchased for classrooms, suggests that it is doing quite well at appealing to younger readers. Not bad for a book that came out more than fifty years ago.

But even if we take Grossman’s thesis at face value, what of the following authors?

• Haruki Murakami, sold 2 million copies of Norweigan Wood, at 38, and continued to attract young readers in his forties.
• Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy, published when Auster was 40, attracted a considerable number of hipsters in the late 80s.
• That L. Frank Baum guy who created the Oz books? 44 when he published the first Oz book.

I could be here all night.

Also, the Time copy editors seem to be asleep at the wheel. Grossman writes:

Ten years ago novels were expanding rapidly, like little overheated primordial galaxies. Chunky, world-devouring tomes like Wallace’s Infinite Jest and Franzen’s The Corrections were supposed to be the wave of the future…

Uh, Lev, The Corrections came out five years ago, not ten. And Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas clocks in at 528 pages, just 40 pages under The Corrections‘ 568 pages. I don’t think the bulky novel is showing any immediate signs of extinction. Particularly while Vollmann’s still around.

[UPDATE: Mr. Sarvas serves up some thoughts.]

Allen Lane, father of the affordable Penguin paperback, is remembered by Steven Russell.

Kung Fu Porn (definitely NSFW)

Dan at Pamie.com tried this experiment out. List twenty-five opening sentences of blog entries started in the past two months (in my case, twenty-four over three months):

1. The first time I remember being profoundly misunderstood was at the age of six.

2. The time has come for me to join my revolutionary comrades.

3. Don’t worry. This isn’t one of those tedious hiatus announcements.

4. I can’t even get published in my hometown newspaper.

5. Leon Wieseltier called Checkpoint “a scummy little book.”

6. Allow me to fuck your shit up.

7. There is simply no accounting for taste.

8. I’m jumping in here really quick to report that I’m still making phone calls.

9. The latest scam to crack down on Web expression comes in the form of mandatory web ratings.

10. So your faithful reporter finished Colson Whithead’s Apex Hides the Hurt, a title he’s put off reading because of the shaky reviews.

11. I regularly take on too much and have great difficulty doing nothing.

12. This morning, I received an email that someone is impersonating me and making telephone calls in the dead of night.

13. Since I’ve been too busy cooped up in my five-star hotel room humiliating some of these valets (all of them obvious idiots, I tell you), I haven’t had enough time to follow all the discussion about ME! ME! ME!

14. Last year, the CBC mentioned that the way to get a reader’s attention was to feature a book cover that prominently features breasts.

15. These are troubling times for anybody who gives a damn about satire, because joyless pricks like Garrison Keillor seem to be the posterboys intended to assuage liberal malaise.

16. Frankie and the NR were sweethearts.

17. Every now and then, the Chronicle columnists get something right.

18. Memorial Day is such an absurd occasion for me that I really can’t dignify it with a coherent response.

19. I am a good person; I am also a bad person.

20. I’ve been having lots of discussions with people these days about cultural icons that seem to be verboeten to certain culture-vultures in the City (and in other urban areas).

21. Sometimes, I feel like the mainstream media and the new media need to get together for a few rounds of karaoke and sing “Ebony & Ivory” (or perhaps in the newspaperman’s case, “I Will Survive”) to each other, and realize that there really ain’t that much of a difference between us.

22. Bush’s recent declaration contains several troubling grammatical inconsistencies.

23. Again, the mad rush of insomnia stampedes over my being like a thunder of bison confusing me with the main trail.

24. Whilom ther was dwellynge hewed whyte

Slate‘s new redesign hurts my eyes.

What Microsoft adCenter has to say about you, the reading audience:

48% of you are male, 52% of you are female.

Microsoft predicts that 24.60% of you are below eighteen (what?) and that being down with the kids is the future of edrants.

Generally speaking, it’s split as follows:

18-24: 26.80%
25-34: 27.20%
35-49: 23.00%

Of course, had I known all along that I was appealing to fifteen year olds, I would have seriously curtailed my use of ten-cent words. I suppose I’ll have to spend more time dwelling upon Beyonce.

Perhaps something is off with the calculations. 60% of the John Birch Society‘s readers are women? Really? (via MeFi)

[UPDATE: Tito works the numbers, determined to find the manliest website.]

• Word on the street is that Harper Lee has written something for Oprah. This is the second essay that she’s written in 40 years, which makes one Harper Lee essay every twenty years. Maybe we might get another out of Lee if she lives another twenty years. But I think the workaround here is to cryogenically freeze Harper Lee and have her wake up a century now, only to extract the mandatory five essays she owes us. (via Bookslut)
• Maud unfurls an interesting Borges-Pynchon connection.
• I have a grand temptation to cover this. Of course, if all the purported “experts” are as clueless as Tee Morris, then it might be safe to say that the Dummies books are the publishing industry’s answer to Wikipedia.
• Pete Anderson happily reports that he’s received 100 rejections for his stories and speculates upon the reasons why.
• Gabriel Garcia Marquez can’t get his hometown renamed to Macondo.
• After four attempts, Roger McDonald has won the Miles Franklin Literary Award.
• Nearly 150 years later, the remains of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s wife will finally be moved next to her spouse. Eminent domain’s a bitch, ain’t it?
• Ed Guthmann talks with Dhanvant Shanghvi.
• Jeff VanderMeer may be suffering a fate worse than a DVD selection consisting solely of Uwe Boll’s oeuvre: he can’t leave New Hampshire.
• James Wood apparently reviewed Terrorist at The New Republic, but I’ll be damned if I can read the article. (Thank you for your HTML incompetence, TNR!) Does anyone have a working link?
• “Primo Levi and Translation” (via ReadySteadyBook)
• Lionel Shriver on immigration, with some cogent objections from Laila.
• Harry Potter to die in Book 7? Pop open the champagne. (via Bookninja)
• Frank Wilson, book review editor of The Philly Inquirer, offers some interesting thoughts on the whole print vs. online media debate. Like Bud, I have to say that it’s good to see someone in print media offering a more nuanced take over the standard “newspapers are gatekeepers/bloggers are upstarts” argument that guys like Tanenhaus and Freeman frequently resort to.
• Dave Munger on why he won’t go to the movies anymore.
• For those who missed the BEA speech in podcast form, the text of his speech is now available, which sends Levi Asher into an uproar.
• The best advice to a writer juggling exercise and a day job? Lots of exercise.

Various tasks currently occupy my attention. Will return on Tuesday. Visit fine folks on right, commit minor infractions, you know the drill.

Scarves for Tech Addicts.

1 out of 99 literary critics agree that I, Edward Champion, am one of the great underrated novelists working today. And while the one critic who proffered this plaudit was wildly drunk (this was after I had purchased him several rounds of sangria and offered to pay his cabfare home), the statement was, nevertheless, recorded on a microcassette and the critic in question signed a notarized document attesting to this fact. I can drag this evidence into a courtroom if I am subpoenaed. I might even show up in a suit, if the charges are serious and the dollar amount is substantial.

What you may not realize is that I’ve been secretly authoring a book called Whirlwind, a gripping literary thriller that, for no explicable reason, involves lots of tantric sex, a twenty-page segue on the history of umbrellas, and an underground league of terrorists — all of them named Ralph, in grand homage to Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. It promises to be the most engaging piece of contemporary fiction since Nicole Richie’s The Truth About Diamonds.

With these credentials, you might be asking yourself how you could go wrong publishing me. You might also be asking yourself why I haven’t unleashed the first ten chapters of Whirlwind for public consumption. After all, the information wants to be free, right? As a compromise, I offer a paragraph from my masterpiece:

Archer looked down at his right shoe. It was untied. Not just one end of the lace, but both ends. If the shoe had possessed a consciousness, it would have reflected sublime loneliness. The kind of loneliness that punches you in the gut and then punches you in the gut again before you get a chance to recover your breath. Archer wondered if he could live with his shoes untied. It was noon. He hadn’t had lunch. And at this rate, he was going to have a late one. The man with the umbrella was right behind him, hoping to bombard him with pamphlets. His stomach gurgled. The time had come to take a risk. Archer looked both ways, the way that his mother had once told him to when crossing the street, and he bent down, tying the shoe. One shoe, one small accomplishment, one step away from a fate worse than Eichman.

You might be thinking that such stunning prose speaks for itself. But you’d be wrong. I’m one of those misunderstood geniuses doomed to offer my great works in piecemeal on my blog. But I’ve wised up. Taking a page from the Steve Clackson playbook, I’ve decided the following:

Whirlwind can be yours for FREE!
Pay no royalties, no advance!
Whirlwind will be 100% yours.
Publish 1,000 copies or publish just one and sell it on eBay. It’s up to you!
You publish it, you market it and keep all the money!
The catch.
One caveat.
Well, maybe two. Who’s counting?

To acquire the rights, you have to support my drinking habit. You have to pay my rent. You must donate $5.00 from every book sold to the Edward Champion Belgian Beer Fund. I’m sick and tired of breaking my cousin’s piggy bank for a 40 oz. bottle of Miller High Life. The time has come to live large, live proud, and live inebriated, as the occasion suits me.

That’s it one completed Thriller with a lot of umbrellas, it’s yours if you want it.

Alternatively, you can send bottles of beer to my PO box.

I trust that you, the readers, will make the right call here and recognize my literary genius. I trust that you will see the noble philanthropy at work here and use this as an excuse to stifle your literary acumen!

And besides, who needs the publishing industry when you can get free beer?

Shatner meets Miss Piggy, Shatner serendades Lucas, and Shatner on $20,000 Pyramid.

Silverblatt talks with Leonard Cohen.

C. Max Magee makes Poets & Writers, chronicling the rise of Library Thing.

Williamette Week Online: “The thing that I want to find out is who’s doing the entry for butter. There’s an entry for butter! What would motivate someone to do that? There’s an entry for waffles; I cannot fathom what that person’s motive is. And it’s good—it’s got the history of waffles!”

The motive, Mr. Klosterman, is that inquisitive people are actually interested in the minutiae of our world. The purpose, Mr. Klosterman, is because understanding how such things like waffles and butter came into being provides larger insights into human innovation and invention. (Watch James Burke’s Connections, if you don’t get this. I’m recommending a television program for you instead of a book, because literacy seems to elude you.)

Incidentally, I have requested an interview with Chuck Klosterman. This is the second time I have tried to talk with him as he’s come through my town on a book tour. And while the Scribner people have been very kind and they are busting their humps off, all interview requests, apparently, have to be cleared through Klosterman. Klosterman refuses to respond to my emails, which leads me to believe, all of his assertions of manhood and “working out” to the contrary, that he is too cowardly to talk with an interviewer who won’t kiss his ass.

So I hereby call out Chuck Klosterman publicly on my blog. I know you’re coming through San Francisco next week, Chuck. If you’re truly a man, you’ll sit down and talk with me and answer my questions. Or do you really think you’re better than John Updike, Erica Jong, Sarah Waters, T.C. Boyle, William T. Vollmann, Octavia Butler, Norman Solomon, and Dave Barry?

Dempsey scores! More here.

Never mind. We lost.

The Myths of Nonprofit Literary Publishing: “If a for-profit group had grants, no income tax liability and a free workforce, someone would be making good money and fewer small businesses would go under. Why does a nonprofit have these savings and still claim to be too poor to pay its bills, namely the writing content that serves as the very foundation of the publication?” (via The Publishing Spot)

There is some speculation that Kate Morton, author of The Shifting Fog, has one-upped Chloe Harper’s $1 million advice from 2002, collecting the largest publishing bounty ever granted to a debut Australian novelist. The book proposal started off as an elaborate, small-time Ponzi scam so that Morton could garner a bit of pocket money out of the Australian publishing industry. To everyone’s surprise, while waiting for the checks to come in the mail, Morton ended up writing her novel. And the deal became legit shortly after Allen & Unwin admired Morton’s inventive approach to sales. They responded with largesse.

The Globe and Mail‘s Sarah Hampson profiles fiction editor Ellen Seligman, who observes that, like the protagonist in Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly, she has split her brain in two independently functioning hemispheres. There is the First Response Brain, which is designed to offer immediate answers (such as “It’s Strunk & White, you callow amateur! Not Stunk & White! Call me when you have a clue!”). And there is Seligman’s Editor’s Brain, an entity quite capable of whacking down a 1,200 page manuscript in half before lunch hour. Seligman’s Editor’s Brain (hereinafter “SEB”) has threatened to develop its own set of limbs, walk away from Seligman’s body and enter the cranium of Viking editor Paul Slovak. SEB’s plan is to ensure that Bill Vollmann’s books aren’t nearly as long and that T.C. Boyle turns out a book every other year rather than annually. Fortunately, Viking has employed considerable security to ensure that half-brains — particularly Canadian half-brains — will never enter its premises.

[UPDATE: Bookninja has some inside dirt relating to Seligman.]

Today is a sad day — a bleak and possibly irreversible moment in publishing history where we shall all mourn the loss of one of the great incomplete masterpieces. I am convinced that literary scholars will place this stunning work next to Ralph Ellison’s Juneteenth, Dickens’ The Mystery of Edwin Drood and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Love of the Last Tycoon. Of course, the Great Author’s representative states that the Great Author herself will “save the memoirs for a rainy day when she needs to re-invent herself.” I take this as a sly reference to the immortal melody “MacArthur Park.” Will the Great Author and Her Man finally find connubial bliss and settle down in a needle-laden warren? And shortly before moving, will the Great Author and Her Man, both distracted by the heightened opioid receptors blitzing through their bodies, zone out and leave their wedding cake in the rain?

A few weeks ago, Steve Mitchelmore raised a provocative point about Suite Française, suggesting that the novel’s glowing reception had more to do with its origins, as opposed to its qualities as a novel. This led to a backblog battle between Steve and a certain literary guy in Oakland.

Now Mark Thwaite has stepped in and sides with Steve, pointing to Kaszuo Ishiguro’s blurb mentioning the “story behind the novel.” Given that Ishiguro devoted a mere fifty-one words to his blurb, I don’t believe this is entirely fair, particularly since he confined the historical context to the second of his two sentences.

Further, both Mark and Steve have dismissed the book without even bothering to examine its contents. Which strikes me as a bit ironic. If the talk should be centered on the book and the book alone, shouldn’t Mark and Steve live up to their own pledges and offer criticism after they’ve read the book?

Laila Lalami observes that Monica Ali’s new book, Alentejo Blue, hasn’t exactly been ratcheting up the plaudits. But Laura Demanski disagrees, calling Alentejo Blue Ali’s “more ambitious and accomplished novel.” Is Ali suffering a sophomore slump or is the book misunderstood?

Ebert writes his review from Garfield’s perspective.

Rambo finds literary meaning in ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer'”