Edward Champion's Return of the Reluctant

I Need a Vacation

Okay, I fully confess (the dropoff in stats and Blogllines subscribers doesn't lie!) that I've been biting the big one lately and that my posts these days leave much to be desired. (Hell, I can't even find time for the Tanenhaus Brownie Watch.) There are reasons for this -- namely, other projects and things that I'm working on, which are whittling away my wit faster than you can say summer camp.

So I've decided to throw in the towel for about a week or so and come back to this blog when I can offer half-decent posts again. A man's got to know his limitations. And frankly I'm too tired and exhausted these days to offer anything intelligible about the literary world. But I'll be back. Do visit the fine folks on the left in the meantime.

[ENTIRELY UNRELATED: In other news, it looks like Pearlstine is casting pearls before swine. Not pretty at all. About as cowardly a move as Elia Kazan, if you ask me.]

Technorati Tags: vacation, hiatus, debauchery

RIP Shelby Foote

As noted elsewhere, Shelby Foote has passed on.

Technorati Tags: Shelby Foote

Author Commencement Speeches

Bill Clinton: 1998
Hilary Rodham Clinton: 1969 (as Hilary Rodham) 1992
Richard Fenyman: 1974
Doris Kearns Goodwin: 1998
John Grisham: 1992
Lyndon B. Johnson: 1965
Nora Ephron: 1996
Erica Jong: [Booed this year; anyone have a transcript?]
John F. Kennedy: 1962
Stephen King: 2001 2005
Wally Lamb: 2003
Madeline L'Engle: 1991
Ursula K. LeGuin: 1983
Frank McCourt: 1999
David McCullough: 1986
Toni Morrison: 2004
Conan O'Brien: 2000
Anna Quindlen: 1999 2002
Salman Rushdie: 1996
Richard Russo: 2004
Alexander Solzhenitsyn: 1978 (controversy)
Gloria Steinem: 1993
Jon Stewart: 2004
Kurt Vonnegut: 1997 (falsely attributed to Vonnegut -- Kofi Annan actually spoke at MIT that year) 2004
David Foster Wallace: 2005
William Allen White: 1936
Howard Zinn: 2005

[UPDATE: Well, well, looks like Kottke ripped me off.]

Technorati Tags: Speeches, David Foster Wallace, Hilary Clinton, Commencement, Howard Zinn, Richard Russo, Kurt Vonnegut, Erica Jong, lists, best of the web

Yeah, That Thing They're Taking Back to Mom is Called a Guilt Complex and Endless Therapy For the Next 20 Years

The New York Times on fat camps: "'Maybe they're not losing the weight specifically, but instead they're learning something that they can use 20 years down the road and put into use when they're ready,' said Marla Coleman, a former president of the American Camping Association."

Leading Alt-Weekly Exploits Workers

All is not well in the New York alt-weekly world. Gawker reports that the Village Voice has proposed a contract for its writers that not only almost completely cuts out benefits, but offers a wage increase of $15/week. $15 may not get you health care, but it might just get you a movie and a few slices of pizza! Or perhaps a mousetrap to buy for the rat-infested warrens that the Voice overlords hope their staff can inhabit.

Now perhaps this has something to do with strategic alliances between the two behemoths have worked in the past. And labor and antitrust laws haven't been a concern for these two bastions of progressive and "independent" media.

Fortunately, Voice workers aren't taking this lying down and are planning a strike. One would hope that Norman Mailer, one of the original founders of the Voice, might channel his rage and energies towards these developments, rather than some book critic whose words he could easily ignore. But then that would involve Mailer living up to his self-projected image as an elder statesman, when we all know that he's really a hollow shell.

(via Booksquare)

Hot Chicks + Ten-Sided Die = Laughs

Geek Fantasies: an absolutely absurd take on fetishistic sites. Take Preview #2, where we see a camera crane up a blonde's bikini-clad body. The end of the clip has this blonde uttering, "No one expects the Spanish Inquisition." Or Preview #3, where a girl fondles a Transformer and then replies, "Mint condition."

Proposed Titles for Terry McMillan's Next Book

• The Litigation of Everything
• A Few Years Late and a Sexual Orientation Short
• Disappearing Cash
• How Stella Got Her Groove Jacked
• Waiting for Ex in Jail

[in relation to this]

Speedy Gonzales Roundup

• Salon revisits John Cheever's first novel, The Wapshot Chronicle. (Also at Salon: the first of a four-part expose on the Church of Scientology.)
• Norman Mailer calls Michiko a "one-woman kamikaze." Presumably, because he hopes to demonstrate that he was spouting forth incoherent comments just before kicking the bucket.
• Books are apparently making a comeback in Iraq.
• The Chronicle's Edward Guthmann talks with David McCullough.
• Ismail Kadare will be picking up his World Booker today.
• A 2,600 year old lesbian love poem written by Sappho has been found and published. It was written on papyrus and used as wrapping around an Egyptian mummy.

My Head Hurts! Therefore, Comic Books Are Bad!

Proving once again how culturally irrelevant they are, the Book Babes have declared graphic novels as the harbinger of evil. So suggesth one Ellen Hetzel:

I am patiently working my way through two graphic novels, David B’s Epileptic and Marjane Satrapi's Embroideries, just one more indication in our world that Western culture increasingly depends on visual messages to perceive and understand what's going on. Do I think this is a good thing? No. It seems like the mind has to be able to wrap itself around abstract ideas in order to reason, and visuals—at least as we know them through TV, movies and advertising—cause us to respond instinctively and emotionally.

Let's discuss just how profoundly stupid this paragraph is. Consider the following:

First off, if the objection here is over any book medium contains "abstract ideas," then I suppose we should discount the whole of literature outside of rigid genre-based narratives that offer nothing in the way of ambiguity. Ulysses? Sorry, Mr. Joyce, you're too "abstract." Tristram Shandy? Borges? Faulkner? Gaddis? Lessing? Flann O'Brien? Sorry, folks, the mind must "wrap itself around abstract ideas" in order to understand you. We'll have to throw you into the dust heap. But Dan Brown and John Grisham? Well, you're part of the literal-minded club. So come on by for some barbeque and MGD.

Second, what specifically is wrong with "visual messages?" Is Hetzel really advocating a culture based entirely (if not exclusively) on words? That's sure fantastic for the 42 million Americans who can't read or for quick international symbols that convey a point faster than words. I guess those Egyptians were fundamental dumbasses "wrapping themselves around abstract ideas" when they dared to communicate through hieroglyphics. I suppose Hetzel will be demanding next that we replace erect penises and floppy breasts with great Puritanical raiments of language.

Third, "visual messages" -- or, more specifically, mediums that involve visual messages -- are not exclusive to Western culture, nor are they as recent as Hetzel suggests. (Get schooled in ukiyo-e, Babe.)

Thus, if I am to understand Hetzel's argument, it is this:

1. I can't understand this graphic novel thingy. My head hurts.
2. Well, if I can't understand it, then it must be fundamentally wrong for everybody! It must be abstract!
3. The cute little comic book thingy is composed of "visual messages."
4. Since I can't understand the cute little comic book thingy, therefore anything involving "visual messages" is fundamentally wrong!
5. My head hurts. I'm out of aspirin. This is NOT A GOOD THING!
6. There are other "visual messages" on teevee and advertising.
7. Teevee and advertising are lesser mediums than the book.
8. Therefore, the cute little comic book thingy is a lesser medium.

It's good to have such circular bullshit come so easily, isn't it?

I've had my problems with the Book Babes before, but I never suspected that they'd serve up such idiotic logic. I'm quite stunned that the Book Standard would allow something so fundamentally moronic to infiltrate its pages.

(via Bookslut)

BEA: The Last Post

Several weekends outside of the City prevented me from getting to the remainder of the BEA material I collected. But this weekend, I went through the material, eliminated a good deal of the quacks, and now offer the final installment of my BEA coverage.

Media Blasters is a publisher which specializes in translations of Japanese and Korean books. They've just produced their first original Japanese book called Death Trance, a tie-in to an upcoming film by Ryuhei Kitamura (Versus). Frank Pannone told me that Death Trance features samurais, zombies, ninjas and magic. Media Blasters has been able to carve a niche, largely because it specializes specifically in shonen publications, aimed specifically at boys, and yaoi (pronounced "yowie") publications, which are gay romances aimed at woman.

Media Blasters isn't the only publisher specializing in dichotomies along these lines. Dark Horse Comics announced at BEA that it would be entering the field of Harlequin manga. The manga in question will be based on Harlequin romances. Dark Horse will be unveiling two lines: one for adults, one that is youth-friendly.

Agate Publishing arrived at BEA publicizing Freshwater Road, the debut novel by actress Denise Nicholas (star of Room 222 and In the Heat of the Night). Doug Siebold described it as "Mary Tyler Moore writing To Kill a Mockingbird." It's a coming-of-age tale about a young African American college student who goes to Mississippi to register voters in 1964. The book will be featured in the September issue of Essence. Agate also has a pocket relationshp guide called The Player Slayer, set for publication on Valentine's Day, 2006. The book is very tiny and is a "real world revision of The Rules." Of course, if you can't wait that long for this major publishing event, you can always just throw yourself into the dating pool, sans guide or books, and learn how to swim.

Fortunately, I found more pertinent tomes when I talked with Allan Kornblum of Coffee House Press. Aside from publishing Gilbert Sorrentino's latest novel, Lunar Follies, Coffee House has a memoir coming out this summer from U Sam Oeur called Crossing Three Wildernesses. Oeur lived through the Pol Pot forced labor camps (take that, James Frey!). Prior to this, he had studied for seven years in the United States. But what makes this memoir interesting is how Oeur was able to stay alive through Walt Whitman's poems, the Declaration of Independence and Kennedy's inaugural address -- all of which he had memorized and all of this while feigning illiteracy. Another Coffee House memoir is from poet Jack Marshall describing Marshall growing up in an ethnically charged household and Marshall becoming a writer in the process. Coffee House is also committed to publishing the short fiction of poet Kenneth Koch. Koch, who died only a few years ago, was primarily known as a poet (Random House has been publishing Koch's poetry), but Coffee House has been picking up the slack to get Koch's complete works published.

Akashic Books' Johanna Engels was kind enough to talk with me despite suffering from a cold . Their lead title for the fall is Marlon James' John Crow's Devil. James is a Jamiacan author and this is his debut novel. Akashic is perhaps best known for their city-based noir series and I was bemused to see that this concept is expanding to nearly every city on the planet. Since Brooklyn Noir did so well, Akashic has been branching out to Chicago, DC, San Francisco and Dublin (the four primed for the next season) and beyond (Manhattan, Baltimore, Twin Cities, L.A. and Miami compilations are also in the works). Engels told me that they keep the anthology editors local, people who have lived in the city for a while so that they can pull from local authors. The only exception to this is with Dublin Noir, where a more international mix has been effected. Joe Meno's Hairstyles of the Damned was Akashic's biggest success in its history. Meno fans will be happy to know that Akashic is publishing the paperback version of How the Hula Girl Sings.

I talked with Arcade Publishing the morning after Ismail Kadare won the Man Booker International Prize. Arcade has a dozen Kadare titles in print with another one coming in February (the new Kadare book called The Successor) that may be pushed up to October to take advantage of the prize. Arcade has been the exclusive American distributor for Kadare's work for the past eighteen years. Because there's been considerable debate over whether a literary award translates into sales, I tracked down one the heads of Arcade and asked if they had a specific sales strategy in mind. The sense I got was that Arcade is taking the award very seriously (more so than the regular Booker Prize award) and had commissioned their sales reps to begin work on sales sheets that very morning. The head couldn't be any clearer. He told me, "The regular UK Booker has an immediate effect in the U.S. It has for the past many years -- at least a decade. We're sure, and our sales reps are sure, that this award will too, especially when you look at the lineup over who Kadare was picked."

The new Kadare book, The Successor, deals with the man in line to be the successor to Hoxha, the Albanian dictator. The main character is Hoha's number two man, willingly shifting with the political tide . But the day before he is due to be named ruler of Albania, he committed suicide. Either that or he may have been murdered. Kadare has framed his next book around this murder mystery that also explores the horrors of Communism and how it affects people's lives.

As alluded to in my previous post, I talked with Chris Roberson, the publisher for Monkeybrain Books. One of their more intresting books is a collection of essays devoted to Philip Jose Farmer's Wold Newton Universe. Monkeybrain is offering a nonfiction anthology, Myths for the Modern Age, which collects Farmer's uncollected essays and fleshes out the Wold Newton concept with several other writers (including Jess Nevins) and is edited by Win Scott Eckert. Adventure! is an all-genre, all-adventure anthology edited by Roberson that includes science fiction, Westerns, and fantasy. The only restriction on the contributors was that the stories "had to contain a healthy dose of adventure." There are contributions by Michael Moorcock, Kim Newman, Kage Baker and comes out in November.

Justin, Charles & Co. specializes in pop culture-based books, such as a Douglas Adams bio written by Mike Simpson and a guy's guy book for the perfect Las Vegas weekend. (In Justin, Charles' defense, I should also point out that they also publish crime fiction.) But I was more interested in film critic's James Berardinelli's reviews, of which a second volume is forthcoming. Steve Hull told me that the first collection sold well enough to warrant a second volume. Beyond being a mere collection of Berardinelli's work, there are extra chapters on DVD easter eggs and the best special edition director's cuts. Apparently, one of the key decisions to publish Berardinelli was that he receives a substantial number of hits and is considered by Hull to be the most widely read Internet critic.

On the crime fiction side, Justin, Charles' big book is Richard Marinick's Boyos. The story behind the book is quite interesting. Marinick started off as a Massachusetts State cop who decided that there was no money in this. So he started robbing armored cars. He ran an armored car ring in Boston for eight years and was caught. He did ten years in Massachusetts State Prison. While in the hoosegow, he earned a college degree and decided that he always wanted to be a writer. Upon release from the joint, he went to work as a union tunnel worker and worked on Boyos for years. Every day, Marinick would work on the book -- in the tunnels, in the pouring rain. Eventually, the book was published.

After several attempts, I was able to track down Paul Cohen, the head of Monkfish Publishing. Monkfish specializes in spiritual books, but he was also the man who published the infamous Gerard Jones' Ginny Good. (Perhaps not so coincidentally, Gerard Jones recently emailed me, among 16,000 others, with news that he's put up MP3s of a Ginny Good audio book in progress, which can now be found at his site.) Like the rest of us, Cohen found out about Gerard Jones through an article. He liked Jones' voice and got a copy of Ginny Good (after not particularly caring for The Astral Weekend) and decided to publish it. I asked Cohen if he considered Ginny Good to be a spiritual book and he told me that he did, calling it "the epiphany of a generation." Specifically, Cohen was struck by the importance of family and relationships seen in Jones' book, which he considered deeply spiritual. One thing I didn't know was that Cohen employed David Stanford, Ken Kesey's longtime editor, to edit the book.

Of course, no BEA report would be complete without a look at some of the more unusual products. Toronto's Marilyn Herbert offers Bookclub-in-a-Box. What might this be? Well, you get a complete guide, support materials, pamphlets that could be handed out to readers, custom bookmarks, and a sticky pad to take notes -- in other words, a prix fixe menu which covers all bases. Or not. I asked Herbert if she had recipes for scones or perhaps an ideal way of setting up a table. She told me that she hadn't, but that recipes were in the works.

What troubled me about the Bookclub-in-a-Box concept was how literal-minded it was. Herbert showed me a Life of PI sample and the thick bundle of information revealed copious efforts to reveal every possible enigma (such as how did Richard Parker, the tiger, get his name). What's more, Bookclub-in-a-Box hadn't bothered to contact any of the authors they profiled. So many of their answers are unilateral. Then again, who knows? Perhaps this concept might play well in the sticks.

Creature Features and More

If you lived in Northern California and remember the UHF programming of the 1960s through the 1980s, this site has done an admirable job chronicling the various ways that UHF stations aired movies during that time (complete with fantastic hosts such as Bob Wilkins and cheesy jokes galore). If you were too young or you weren't growing up in the area, let's just say that you missed out an a very important cultural indoctrination process. I'd venture to say that I wouldn't hold nearly as much regard for Godzilla or horror exploitation films had I not seen them through these conduits.

Round Robin

• In light of the assaults on eminent domain and flag burning (and with the frightening prospect of Justice Rehnquist resigning looming in the air), there's at least some good news on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting/PBS budget cuts. Yesterday, the House of Representatives voted by a 284-140 vote to rescind the $100 million cutback. And that's really what current politics is about these days: finding scant hope in small victories while the fiber and sanctity of this nation is gutted. So bust out the party poppers while the apocalypse ravages across the heartland.
• The so-called "Pope" has published a book that urges all non-believing Europeans to live as though God exists. If that fails, then there's always putting on a tin hat and looking for crop circles in the hinterland.
• It looks like Limbaugh and Noonan are running away from the Klein book. Their latest amusing claim is that The Truth About Hilary was "written and published by a bunch of left-wingers." Well, that's pretty interesting, given that Sentinel, the publisher of the book, describes itself on its webpage as "a dedicated conservative imprint within Penguin Group (USA) Inc. It has a mandate to publish a wide variety of right-of-center books on subjects like politics, history, public policy, culture, religion and international relations."
• Cynthia Ozick talks with the Melbourne Age.
• The Connection continues its series of writers talking about other writers who have influenced them. The latest audio installment is Russell Banks talking about Jack Kerouac's On the Road.
• Evil Dead star Bruce Campbell is on a book tour for his new novel, Make Love the Bruce Campbell Way.
• So can James Frey follow up the intensity of A Million Little Pieces with his new memoir? Mike Thomas of the Chicago Sun-Times talks with Frey and learns that Frey's life is "sort of surreally magnificent."
• James McManus has been tapped to write a poker column for the New York Times. Executive editor Bill Keller says that McManus' column will be "a literate combination of the drama, strategy, psychology and color of card play that should interest both serious players and the simply curious." This from a guy whose idea of literacy is questionable at best.

Watered Down Knowledge, The Slim-Fast Book Diet: What a Concept!

For the last 12 years, the wax has accumulated in my ears, preventing me from comprehending any book more than 200 pages. Brain cells have been lost thanks to an unfortunate experience with hallucinogenics that occurred during my midlife crisis. And I no longer have any patience for a reading experience that lasts longer than 45 minutes. Since the Times is so gutless when it comes to printing four letter words (yet strangely fixated on sodomy and other carnal activities of the genteel), and since it harbors an illusion that it is a family newspaper, I'll merely connote a small nugget, if you will, published by Harry G. Frankfurt. It shines like the bottom of a clean unsoiled toilet for readers too indolent and too inveterate to read a book of normal length. It represents, in two words, the future.

Two books stare at me at my bookshelf. One is so large that I cower behind my four-poster bed, hoping that the episodes of Lost I TiVoed will get me through this cold and lonely night. The book is thick and large. And I haven't seen anything like it in my life. Never mind that its author, N.A.M. Rodger, spent several years of his life becoming an authoritative expert on naval history or that the book in question contains about a hundred pages of maps and other valuable resources to aid and abet the truly obsessed nautical man. For I am neither a nautical man nor an intellectual. However, I do manage to sound pompous and authoritative enough to maintain my regular gig at the Times. Bombast and bluster should count for something, no?

Consider the skim book, which resembles a Slim Jim in makeup and nutritional value, the one that is short enough to give you the basic information yet without scholarship or that pivotal additional context. These things are lovely, no? You can read it one in a few hours, go to a cocktail party, and talk as if you're an expert on Waterloo! These fantastically thin books, influenced by the abridged grandeur of Cliff and SparkNotes, are devoid of footnotes and are, for the most part, useless in an academic environment. But doesn't it feel good, dear reader, to allow such colossal hubris to go to your head and to think that being knowledgable means barely retaining the basics?

I call for a new age of thin books, whereby people learn less and scholarship is spruned rather than stomached! Bring me 50 page volumes that give me everything I need to know about the rise and fall of Genghis Khan! Better yet, why not one-page volumes contained in an expensive spine? I offer the ideal biography of Napoleon:

COVER
TITLE PAGE: Napoleon: A Biography
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE: "Napoleon was short. THE END."
ABOUT THE AUTHOR PAGE

Is this not the most ideal reading experience one can have? Does not the salient fact that Napoleon was a short man stick out? Publishers and authors alike can rest easy that they are saving the marketplace! Prices for books will go down. Authors will be able to publish 300 books a year. And those pivotal sound bytes of knowledge will soar!

I can imagine the book clubs discussing the whole of a book contained within one sentence. The conversations will last no more than five minutes, discussing Napoleon's short stature, and then everyone can, at long last, get blitzed on the merlot. What a joyous epoch of knowledge lies ahead of us!

So bring on this new age of slim books. Dismantle the history graduate programs and the other pedantic forms of education that rarely pay off. The time has come, at long last, to put the Robert Caros and the William T. Vollmanns out of work and let the silent vox populi scream out their malformed thoughts from the highest summit.

Condi's Teeth Continue Steady Transmutation to Pure Evil; Well On Their Way to Palpantine Proportions

Morning Linkage

I'm trying my best to post lengthy entries (and reply to the email backlog), but other obligations have kept me firmly bogged. In the meantime, here's some morning linkage:

• David Foster Wallace gave a commencement speech at Kenyon College a few weeks ago. (via Scott Esposito, who has returned from Spain and has somehow managed to get the keys back from Dan Wickett)
• A whole-hearted congratulations to M.A.O. for being selected one of Time's 50 Coolest Websites.
• Ron Hogan has a modest proposal. Even though his idea doesn't involve cannibalism, I did manage to cough up a few shellacs. Have you?
• I don't know what's stranger: the idea of six good reads to the sound of rain or the fact that this high-concept article came from the Tuscon Citizen. Riddle me this: when did Arizona journalists become cummulus experts?
• Tempo has announced the 50 best magazines for 2005. It's safe to say that Beads Today and Anal Angels didn't make the list.
• CNN explores Maine's literary heritage, but one has to wonder why Stephen King gets more paragraphs than Longfellow.
• A new version of Sling Blade will be released to DVD. It's 22 minutes longer. Remarkably, 19 of these minutes are composed of medium shots of Billy Bob Thornton saying "M'hmmm. Yup." But there is now a three-minute monologue of Karl Childers extolling the virtues of "taters."
• Yes, indeedy. Michel Houellebecq is a badass. (via Maud)
• And this compelling public access show may get me to rescind my eight year self-imposed ban on cable television. Here in San Francisco, we have a show called "Fantasy Bedtime Hour" that involves two nude women reading Stephen R. Donaldson's 1977 novel, Lord Foul's Bane, and other strange speculative fiction titles. I've always been a sucker for a nude woman reading to me in bed. I've also been a licker too. But then that's probably TMI.

Primer

I have just seen the film Primer, and my head fucking hurts. But in a very good way.

Do I know what went on? Somewhat. What makes this film such a delight is how it can be viewed as both a left brain experience or a right brain experience. The left brain can soak up the multiple timelines and time travel devices (I believe there were at least four, but I wasn't taking notes) and try to keep up. The right brain can relish in the confusion and accept the film as a parable for personal responsibility and young smart men who sacrifice viands and sleep to play god for their very deadly ambitions, only to discover that they unearth more havoc than personal returns.

For those still flailing in the dark (including moi), this timeline helps considerably. Shane Carruth, the young man who wrote, directed, produced, acted in, photographed and did several other things for this movie is definitely a talent to be watched. He shot this film for only $7,000. And Carruth's wild ambition makes El Mariachi look like juvenile fluff. If you're looking for an exciting, head-scrambling experience, the film is available on DVD. Joe Bob says check it out.

Former House Speaker Farts in Committee "For Old Time's Sake"

Roundup

• Because one can never cover too many awards, I note that Orhan Pamuk has won the 2005 Book Trade Peace Prize. The prize is the most coveted literary award in Germany.
• Alan Riding points to a quiet controversy that has been unearthed regarding women's writing prizes (and the Orange Prize in particular). Specifically, novelist Anne Fine is quoted, "I do think the Orange Prize has created a division, an artificial barrier where there was only an awful inequality." Perhaps the answer is much simpler. Could it be because Fine has never been longlisted for the Orange Prize?
• Super Size Me filmmaker Morgan Spurlock is entering the book industry. The first book is Don't Eat This Book. The second one will be Slightly Smarter Though Still Stupid White Men.
• After years of relying on numbers cobbled together from disparate sources for our neighbor up north, publishers can now rejoice. BookNet Canada has introduced a new centralized sales-tracking system. This makes Canada the last English-speaking nation to do this. But the Globe and Mail's Kate Taylor is mourning: "At its most useful, it will let publishers stop guessing how many books they have really sold; at its most dangerous, it will draw them yet further into the pointless game of second-guessing their customers."
• In Waynesville, MO, as many as 20,000 books from Waynesville school libraries are going straight to the dumpster. This remarkable idea comes to us from the mind of Superintendent Ed Musgrove, who is inflexible to donations because "it would cost more for us to pack them up and donate them than to destroy them." It seems that despite the fact that other members and local residents expressed concern over this small-town homage to the barbarians who destroyed the Great Library of Alexandria, Musgrove stayed firm, revealing that the main factors being employed to remove the books are the copyright date and the subject. If you'd like to let Musgrove know how you feel about this, here's his contact information.
• One amusing thing that's come out of the ballyhoo concerning Edward Klein's expose, The Truth About Hilary, is, as the BBC has reported, the listings over what other books the customers have bought. Currently leading the list is John E. O'Neill's Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry. Craig Shirley and Dick Morris are concerned that Klein's smear approach will make Hilary Clinton a more sympathetic person and thus a more viable presidential candidate for 2008. Meanwhile, Klein himself keeps flip-flopping with his source (Or is it none or more than one? One never knows with this guy.) that claims that Bill Clinton raped Hilary to conceive Chelsea. [UPDATE: Ron Hogan has additional information about Klein, jumping off from this Publishers Weekly article.]

What to Do at a Reading

M.J. Rose has put up a list of ten things not to do when publicizing your book. Beyond Rose's troubling Miss Manners-style tone, as a man who tries to attend several readings a month, there are a few reality alerts that need to be addressed.

1. Most of the people who attend readings are probably not going to be familiar with your book, much less you. They are, as Stanley Elkin repeatedly suggested in George Mills, more likely to be there for the free food and wine. This in itself is not as ignoble as it sounds. Because this understandable impulse is walking hand in hand with some love or curiosity for literature. So it is possible for an author to win potential readers and book buyers over. However, reading your excerpt in a dry somnambulistic tone is not going to do the trick. It is essential for the aspiring author to not just entertain (in a manner that she is comfortable with), but to win potential readers and buyers over to her side. An author may have penned the best novel of the year, but if the author reads without feeling or enthusiasm, if the author doesn't, say, find her voice within the dialogue of the characters, what then is the point of a reading? That means actually enjoying the book tour process (as much as it detracts you from your writing) or breaking out of the troubled template of reading followed by questions. Why not pick five people out of the crowd to enact certain characters from a book? Or reverse the questioning process. Ask the audience how often they write. Bring strange props or offer to do something nutty if a customer buys a book.

2. With rare exceptions, all press is good press. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. If you are concerned with losing readers because of what you do or because of the tone of your book, then you probably shouldn't be in this business. The minute that a book is published, it has already lost and found readers. Some folks (like me) may not want to read another self-absorbed memoir written by a middle-aged Caucasian going through a midlife crisis. Some folks may be averse to genre fiction. Some folks simply want to read a Dan Brown novel. If you're concerned that some people aren't going to be interested in you, then fuck 'em. Cater to the people who are going to be interested in your type of book. Your goal as an author is to locate the people who will be attracted to your voice and appeal directly to them without compromising who you are.

3. Some people are going to be annoyed with you no matter what you do. I'm not suggesting that authors become outright assholes, but I should point out that if you smile artificially towards someone (or offer passive-aggressive advice lists that reek of inexplicable and unvoiced fury), most humans will know that you're putting on some kind of act. Find a genuine way to enjoy other people, even the ones you're uneasy about. Because enthusiasm is infectious and there is always a common ground somewhere. Learn to be curious, courteous, yet remain true to yourself. If there's some heckler in the crowd (and there will be at some point), responding in a calm, detatched, NPR-sounding way isn't going to win you respect from yourself or from your reading audience. Find out where the guy's coming from and don't take it so personally.

4. For Christ's sake, go to the trouble of talking with and thanking the booksellers. I've heard absolute horror stories from booksellers of certain authors (who shall remain unnamed) who treat the people behind the counter with utter disdain. As if they were dumbass baristas. Newsflash: Booksellers actually fucking read and they determine placement of your book. Besides, most of these folks are very nice. Talk to them, find out what these folks are reading and (here is where I agree with Rose) buy a book or three.

5. To a great degee, it is about you. You penned the book, you showed up, people are there for you. But this doesn't mean it has be exclusively about you -- far from it. So make it a conversation rather than an exposition.

Another Ego Who Makes Generalizations About the Locals, Another Ungrateful and Overhyped Author

Like the Rake, I'm mystified why no one in Denver has put this smug bastard in his place. Perhaps the concept of "When in Denver, do as the Denverites do" only applies if you get less press than Tom and Katie. But then I like omelets and I also realize that 99% of Jeep drivers aren't thinking about Nick at Nite every minute they drive. I think it's safe to say that now there is no way in hell that I'm reading this memoir, even if the book is placed squarely into my hands.

Call in Chabon & Lethem

Patricia Storms strikes again. This time, it's the publishing industry. Even the LBC "controversy" gets sent up. (via Bookdwarf)

Roundup

• Cory Doctorow's Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, a very nutty-looking novel about Alan, the son of a mountain and a washing machine, is, like Cory's other books, available for download under a Creative Commons license.
• Well beyond the war over "chick lit" (a term that, as far as I'm concerned, refers to those tasty square blocks of gum rather than books) is the more visible war over "women's fiction." Elizabeth Berg is the latest to complain.
• In an unfortunate scenario straight out of Nicholson Baker's Double Fold, Matthew J. Bruccoli has put out a $1,000 reward for missing volumes of the Pottsville Journal between 1924 and 1926. On those microfilms are John O'Hara's early newspaper work. Bruccoli believes that Gibbsville, O'Hara's infamous town modeled after Pottsville, was formed in this early journalism.
• An NYU academic claims to have figured out how "The Waste Land" was written. Even stranger, it involves the FBI.

Three Strikes and a Long Way from "Fever Pitch"

Three strikes against Nick Hornby: Stephen Metcalf, TMFTML and Laura Demanski.

We gave up on the man after How to Be Good and suggest you do the same. Let's put it this way: he's the Moby of literature.

At This Rate, We'll Have Regular Three Day Weekends By 2050

The two-day weekend, as we know it, is a mere sixty-five years old. More at Ask Yahoo.

The Black Helicopters Hover Just Next to the Plunger

Ayelet Waldman: "Every popped light bulb is a catastrophe, every leaky faucet spells if not the end of the world then surely the beginning of months of crack-assed plumbers hunched over my sinks and toilets, flushing my hard-earned dollars down their mysterious drains."

Will someone get her a good therapist? Save the Chabon family!

Persona Non Grata

Maud pointed out the Neal Pollack/Dave Eggers fracas this morning and made a case for honest criticism.

I don't have any self-serving magazine manifesto or "woe is me" Eggers-style panegyric to contribute to this argument, but there are two additional misleading statements in the Pollack article that should be pointed out. The first needs to be corroborated, but if it is true, then I will update this post with the rather interesting results. If true, Pollack doesn't have nearly the sense of humor or "thick skin" that he claims he does.

The second involves Pollack's misleading statement that he "had a five-figure credit card debt." As reported here last November, the film rights for Never Mind the Pollacks were sold to Warner Brothers' Bill Gerber for a mid six-figure sum, somewhere between $250,000 and $500,000 -- enough to take out a five-figure credit card debt and more. (This news was, as I recall, originally reported in Publisher's Lunch. But the deal was also reported in Variety and at Done Deal.)

I don't care if Pollack is writing under a persona or not. I'll only say that I've enjoyed Pollack's satire in the past, but find his recent non-satirical work stiff, humorless and far from genuine. If Lenny Bruce or Andy Kaufman came up to you and told you that what they did was an act, would you have as much respect for them in the morning? That's like telling a four year old kid that Santa Claus doesn't exist.

Pollack, by his own admission, has settled into yuppified complacency. That's a shame. Because he's become about as lively as a tired Catskills comic waiting for the septuagenerians to laugh. This isn't a "hateful" statement. It's an honest criticism for a writer who has, to my great sadness, turned chicken.

Partial List of the Class of '05

William S. Morricone-Goldsmith; Joaquin Stick; Enrique Insalada Suavo; "Little" Nell Carter-Mondale; Henrietta Hi-Fi Tapa; Georgia Savannah Cargostygian; Gilbert Fishernie Scale; Christian Muslim Disciple; Patricia Pedunda Removal; Abigail Winslow Flexbreeze; Gershwin Girthloss Waverley; Zachary Payne Lastoo; Faith B. Initiative; Octavia Gregoria Calendar; Jesse James Cleaner; Freddie Friday Freedom; Vernice Itralia Carnal; Ryan Whiskian the Fifth; Huey Louie Dewey; Stephanie Stair Io; Debbie Does Dallas; Ami Amy Amyself; Abby Road Listener; Milford Paperchevy Treedodge; Gino Effyes Emaybee; Connie Artis Tree; Quinten Common Divider; Buster Chops; Carl S. McDonald, Jr.; Dusty Bowler; Jay Kline Mien; Flo Eventia Absentee

James Howard Kuntsler Goes to Raging Waters

While on my book tour for The Long Emergency, I attended a place known as Raging Waters, a "waterslide theme park" that's a first-class cesspool devoted to energy-wasting frivolities. Given the name, I had hoped that the place might sustain my relentless anger and high blood pressure. But the cabana boys were friendlier (if nowhere nearly as smart as me) than I expected. So I was forced to concede that because I wasn't in my comfortable, heavily secured and energy-efficient bunker in upstate New York, this waterslide park was yet another unfortunate component of our Clusterfuck Nation.

If anything, Raging Waters demonstrates in name and in principle that the American public will continue marching to a steady clueless beat. This summer, like the summer before it and the summer before that, people will contend with these horrid monstrosities called waterslides. Popular in California, these wiry eyesores can be found along the outer edge of the great suburban nightmare. The waterslides show no signs of abating and regularly obstruct one's view of the sun. They are sometimes green and sometimes blue, a crummy aesthetic that should remind anyone of that domestic regularity known as cleaning the toilet.

Waterslides are essentially sinuous slaloms that use up a remarkable amount of water and energy, as if people think they can have all the fun they want without consequence. Even more distressing is the sight of overpriced popsicles and young and fit bodies wearing various Speedos and swimming trunks. As any intelligent person knows, both of these garments use far too many joules during the manufacturing process and were likely produced in an export processing zone. The continued manufacture of swimming trunks will be a seminal part of The Long Emergency, where people will be forced to replace their precious swimwear with empty potato sacks that they find in what remains of the empty supermarkets that have been looted. Most of these supermarkets will, of course, be burned to the ground.

Beyond the summer attire, there remains the more problematic aspect of supine bodies being shot through a tube at remarkable speeds. It hasn't occurred to the Raging Waters management that their hundred foot high platforms not only use up a good chunk of precious wood (which will be needed for the Long Emergency when the oil runs out), PVC plastic tubing and fiberglass, but are designed to use as much water as is humanly possible.

What these yokels call "fun" is a very deadly onslaught upon my own delicate sensibilities, which of course matter more than yours. If we are to avoid the Long Emergency, then it is essentially that the United States have the least amount of fun possible. Fun uses too much energy. Fun feeds the horizontal expansion of minimalls and endless fast food franchises. There can be no fun in the United States, not now and not during the Long Emergency. A pox upon water slides! And a pox about enjoying a single moment!

Fuck Two Buck Chuck

Everywhere I go these days, from swank parties to low-key affairs, I see people -- charming and intelligent people who should know better -- gripping their red plastic cups (and sometimes actual wine glasses) with this godawful ruddy swill called two buck chuck. The whole point of this ghastly red liquid is to get as drunk as fucking possible using as little money as possible. (In this case, two measly dollars.) Which makes it another part of this goddam lofty American ideal: Get there as fast as you can in the cheapest manner possible. To hell with quality, to hell with life, to hell with savoring the moment.

These people have the audacity to call this shit "wine." As in "Can I pour you some more wine, Ed?"

No, motherfucker. You can pour me a half-decent glass of something with actual taste and texture that I can nurse for an hour while you and the boys get blitzed in minutes. All because this crap is named after a motherfucker named Charles Shaw, whose name sounds suspiciously like a vicious investment banker who takes every dollar in your savings account and leaves in a cloud of dust before he can hand you a receipt.

I have to ask this all-important question: Does it feel good to drink a "wine" whose only real achievement is underpricing cheap Gallo?

I'm no vintner and I'm hardly a wine connoisseur. And the last thing I want to do is advocate that Sideways wine snob bullshit that shows no signs of dying among the hipsters. But I've learned over the years that wine isn't meant to be guzzled. When I taste this shit, it conjures up the unsavory notion of fermented Kool-Aid. And the last thing I need when I'm relaxing is to be reminded of that shifty pitcher-sized son of a bitch with the permanent smile on that bulbous and untrustworthy face.

What makes two buck chuck any difference from grabbing a forty ouncer? If you're going to inhabit a alcohol paradigm this low, why not drink two buck chuck in a paper bag? While you're at it, have a glass of this junk to wash down with your crappy Big Mac meal.

If this is about getting trashed (and by the way that people slam their two buck chuck, that's certainly the ostensible goal), why not bourbon? Hell, why not ether? Drinking two buck chuck feeds into the blotto impulse but it tastes like a poorly mixed girly drink. And the sad thing is that the bartender's not there to fix it right. It's the drinking equivalent to a pup staying on the porch while the big dogs play.

Plus, two buck chuck rhymes with "fuck." Outside of Orangina (as pronounced ni New Jersey), I can't think of a single successful beverage that rhymed so bluntly with copulative terminology. It's a wonder that no one has suggested "two buck chuck and a fuck." That honesty (get trashed, get fucked, wake up with a hangover wondering who the hell this stranger is) would make me feel so much better about the deceit of it all.

So fuck two buck chuck. Fuck it hard.

Me? I'll be drinking my Kendall Jackson pinot. It's eight bucks more, but it lasts a whole evening. And when you compare the dollar-to-drinking rate of each (a bottle of two buck chuck in an hour versus a ten dollar bottle of Kendall over five hours), the balance evens out.

Questionable Axiom of the Week

"No woman is worth dating, much less talking to, if she can't name the three major oceans. And if she names the fourth (established a few years ago) or the fifth, then she's more than okay in my book." -- Me, in email to friend.

Angelina Jolie Vows to Take Up Smoking Again and "Put Sharon Stone in Her Place"

The Curious Psuedo-Hero

I'm currently reading Stanley Elkin's George Mills, an ambitious and resiliently inventive novel about a family line doomed to failure (all of them are named "George Mills" and extend back a thousand years) and susceptible to the throngs of losers, charlatans and fakes that exploit humanity with kooky get-rich-quick schemes and use the various Millses as lackeys and novitiates. Elkin has a considerable bone to pick with astrologers, con men, and even telethon hucksters like Jerry Lewis. What makes George Mills such an interesting read is that the various George Millses are, not unlike Marquand's George Apley, satirical characters that are written with a quiet sympathy. One hopes that these characters will see the blinding obstacles which prevent them from taking control of their lives. And yet because the reader knows this type so well, they are almost always doomed to failure or a late recognition of their problems.

I'm fascinated by this type of protagonist, because it doesn't exactly involve a clear hero or an antihero. (For purposes of clarification, I'll call this character type a "psuedo-hero.") The interesting thing about Marquand and Elkin is that, by hanging their novels around psuedo-heroes, they both tapped into a wide reception (Marquand with postwar middle-class readers, Elkin with the critical community), only to drop rapidly out of public consciousness. (Most of Marquand's work is out of print. Avon put out a series of Elkin trade paperbacks in the mid-nineties, most of which I was able to find years ago in remainder piles.)

Fortunately, Dalkey Archive Press has kept all of Elkin's work in print. They also have an essay by Rick Moody about Elkin.

Roundup

• As reported several places, Jonathan Coe has won the Samuel Johnson nonfiction prize for Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B.S. Johnson.
• Edward Jones has won this year's IMPAC award.
• The Blog Story thing is making the rounds. Sarah and Gwenda have offerings.
• In Congo, 1,000 die per day: why isn't it a news story?
• To hell with Michael Jackson. Apparently, Pretenders frontwoman Chrissie Hynde, who is a big fan of Martin Amis, got drunk and attacked him at a book signing. The moral of the story? Celebrities are scarier than regular Joes.
• Ellen Feldman's new novel speculates on what happened to Peter van Pels, the boy that Anne Frank had a crush on.
• Haruki Murakami still contends that he's not part of the literary establishment. There's also some stuff in the article about writing routines and the like.
• It looks like the Village Voice might be taken a cue from the litblogosphere. Not only has their books section included readings, but they're now sending Ed Park to cover book signings.
• Online dating services are doing big box office in Australia. We're talking $15 million a year. What's interesting is that the people who use this dating services (at least in Australia) seem terrified by the idea of meeting someone at a pub. There are some 1,700 services that exist which cater to specific crowds. And now there's a consumer's guide available purporting to explain whether these services actually work.
• Tiffany Murray lists her top ten dark comedies.
• Bono on Bono: Must we feed this man's ego any further by printing a book on this?
• Birnbaum dances with Alma Guillermoprieto.
• And Galleycat gets to the bottom of this whole eBay ARC-selling bidness.

BEA: The Publishers, Part Two

I had initially hoped that I could give you BEA coverage in one fell swoop, but I collected so much information that I'm going to have to distribute it on a piecemeal basis. So without further ado:

I talked with Suzanne Balaban of Scribner's. Balaban told me, "We pride ourselves on the readability of our books." At first, I feared that she was referring to reads that went by so fast that the books in question took less time to complete than a pizza delivery. But she clarified her statement by telling me that she was talking about "books you can't put down."

With this credo in mind, Scribner's has a guy by the name of Tim Winton as their autumn heavy-hitter. Apparently, Winton is an "Australian rockstar" novelist and he has a book coming out in September called The Turning. There are emotional turnings, dramatic turnings and slow awakenings. But apparently there aren't any apple turnovers involved. Perhaps because they hope that Winton will be a household name here in the States. My professional guess here is that apple turnovers might alienate the Hot Pockets crowd.

Scribner's also has a new Frank McCourt memoir. This one describes his time as a teacher at Stuyvesant. There's an emerging writer named Eric Puchner who has a short story collection called Music Through the Floor. a collection of postmodern tales.

But from where I'm sitting, Scribner's most interesting title might just be Mark Gattiss' The Vesuvius Club. Aside from being part of the excellent comedy troupe The League of Gentleman, Gattiss also wrote a witty episode of Doctor Who featuring Charles Dickens. The Vesuvius Club is billed as a Sherlock Holmes spoof.

Henry Holt doesn't have much in the way of fiction coming up this year. But they do have a new Paul Auster novel called The Brooklyn Follies. The novel chronicles a man who comes to Brooklyn to die and who meets his long lost relatives. There's family dysfunction and Abigail Cleaves promises that the new Auster is one of his lightest and "more accessible" novels.

The folks over at Farrar, Strauss and Giroux seem to be working overtime on the translated novels front. That's all fine and dandy. But when I encountered them, they were sitting around a table with an open package of Doritos. However, I should point out that, despite being cruel enough to tempt me with a chip (I declined), they were amicable folks.

The big title they're leading with is Rafi Zabor's I, Wabenzi. It's a memoir, but it's the first volume in an ongoing spiritual autobiography. In the first volume, Zabor becomes a Sufi mystic and takes a pilgrimage across Europe in a Mercedes Benz. And I should point out that "Wabenzi" translates into "Eye of Mercedes Benz" in Swahili.

Knopf's Nicholas Latimer dishes dirt on the new Anne Rice novel Darlene Faster talks about Crown's upcoming titles (with cameo appearance by Sarah Weinman)

Karen Olsson's Waterloo is Farrar's major debut novel. It's a political love novel chronicling a slacker journalist in Waterloo, Texas. The book follows his attempts to do better at life. I was assured by the FSG folks that this novel had to be read to be understood. But then I was getting that kind of hype from everyone.

FSG is also publishing a novel by (wait for it) Scott Turow. The book is called Ordinary Heroes. It's set in World War II. Turow was inspired by his father, who fought in the front lines. As expected, there's a legal case in the form of a courtmarial. The idea here is that this novel is "more literary" than Turow's other work.

But if Turow signals a potential capitulation to a favored author, FSG makes up for it with Christopher Sorrentino's Trance. This is an underground novel in which every sentence is "laced with edge," as the FSG people put it. Whatever the novel's plaudits, I was still quite concerned when they confessed that the book was "positioned how we hoped it would be." That's the kind of phrase I often reserve for my own private speculations on BDSM. But no matter: this was the publishing industry. That's the way things work in New York.

Nicholas Latimer over at Knopf was a nice guy -- if only because he put up with my heckling about the Anne Rice novel (MP3 link). But Knopf also has the first Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel in ten years. Latimer didn't offer many details, but he did say that "it's going to break everyone's heart." Edith Grossman did the translation of this puppy and I sure hope she's collecting some hefty residiuals.

Knopf also has a "very interesting" Marlon Brando bio that was taken over by David Thomson at the last minute. There's also an odd husband-wife mystery novel coming out involving a forensic pathologist meeting an assistant DA. The book was written by a husband and wife team. And funnily enough, it's written by a husband and wife who share the same vocations.

As for the Anne Rice novel, you'll have to hear the MP3. Needless to say, Rice's latest book is about Christ between the years of 7-9. And there's apparently some controversy over Jesus's "sinless" nature.

By the time, I spoke with Darlene Faster at Crown, Sarah was kind enough to tag along and put up with my caffeinated questioning. I was compelled to talk with Crown because they published Lee Martin's excellent The Bright Forever, of which I'll have more to say about in a future post or review.

The Bloomsbury folks were quite mysterious. For one thing, they were terrified by the fact that I had a mike. I won't name names. They did, however, give me the skinny on several of their titles.

One of Bloomsbury's flagship fiction titles is Jim Lynch’s A Highest Tide. Lynch is a Washington-based journalist who writes for the Oregonian. The novel takes place in Puget Sound. It tells the tale of a teenage boy who is the first person to see a giant squid alive. The locals descend on him. He becomes a local prophet. He’s a regular kid in love with the girl next door. It's billed as a coming-of-age story.

They've also got a new one from Rats author Robert Sullivan called How Not to Get Rich. It's a short book that’s a spoof on how-to-get-rich titles. Every year, Sullivan visits his wife’s family on the West Coast, but he doesn’t have enough cash for plane tickets. So the Sullivan clan drives cross-country in a rickety car. The journey here is what comprises this nonfiction offering.

And then there's Rodney Bolt's History Play, which dares to portray Christopher Marlowe as a guy who didn't die off in a barroom brawl. In Bolt's book, Marlowe goes on to write all of Shakespeare’s plays. The book was apparently quite a sensation in the UK.

But the big news from Bloomsbury is that Dale Peck has a children’s book. Yes, you read that right. Drift House should be out sometime in September. Peck's inspiration for the book came when he left New York just after September 11 to spend some time on Cape Cod with a friend. Peck's friend lived in a house just on the coast built by a shipbuilder. The friend woke up the next day and told Peck that he had the strangest dream. It involved a house that took off and went to sea.

Apparently, this so captured Peck’s imagination that he started outlining notes for the story. In Drift House, several kids are sent to live with a professor during the Blitz. The book is inspired by The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and serves as an homage to C.S. Lewis. It's a magical fantasy of these kids trying to get back to land. There are several adventures, including one on an island where all of the extinct creatures can be found (such as a dodo and a Trojan horse).

I asked the Bloomsbury people if there was any rage or anger in this book. They insisted that there wasn't and replied, “He’s kind of shed all of that reputation and totally immersed himself into this book.” In fact, Peck himself says that writing this book was one of the most fulfilling and energizing things he’s done in a long time.

Has the kinder, gentler Dale Peck made his presence known? I suppose we'll have to wait until September.

Fans Unintentionally Give Michael Jackson A Few Ideas About What to Do at Neverland After Not Guilty Verdict

Cats Mastermind Plan to Take Over Earth

The London Times: "They may look like lovable pets but Britain’s estimated 9m domestic cats are being blamed by scientists for infecting up to half the population with a parasite that can alter people’s personalities....Infected men, suggests one new study, tend to become more aggressive, scruffy, antisocial and are less attractive. Women, on the other hand, appear to exhibit the “sex kitten” effect, becoming less trustworthy, more desirable, fun- loving and possibly more promiscuous."

Two words: cat ladies.

Enough said.

Eleven Years Without an Album = "Unexpected" Reunion to Regalvanize Radar Presence

Roger Waters and Pink Floyd are reuniting. (via Ghost in the Machine)

Linky Linky

While you await the inevitable long-form posts:

CURRENT AFFAIRS:

• Portuguese poet Eugenio de Andrade has died. He was 82.


• The San Francisco Chronicle declares Michael Houellebecq one of the "most compelling novelists today." He's also been claimed the "most hated man in Europe." No word yet on whether Houllebecq will be accused of molesting an infant or whether he will be appearing as a mafioso in an upcoming reenactment of the Kefauver trials for Court TV.


• Is there a detente in literary London?


• Apparently, there's a concerted effort to break the long-term reading record. 100 hours of continuous reading, according to Guinness. That doesn't seem so tough, but then I'm an inveterate reader and an insomniac..


• Who is Trevanian?


• Lionel Shriver: "I acted like a man." That still doesn't explain the way she kissed her Orange Award.


• Apparently, there's another version of No Exit written by "John-Paul Sartre." Was this Jean-Paul's brother? Or some fly-by-night impostor? Hopefully, the Centre Daily Times fact checkers here will be more diligent in their pursuits than their copyeditors.


• Current theatrical plays are "excellent television scripts" but very few "really show a sense of how to write for the theatre." That's the verdict of some anonymous literary manager at a theatre. But if theatre is transforming into what is essentially live television (and the many "theatrical" reenactments of films and television, with their one-man performances of the Star Wars trilogy and the like suggest that this is the case), the interesting question here is how theatre can draw in the short attention spans while remaining true theatre.


• And we'll be a lot less lazier than this when we offer our final BEA upcoming titles post.

STEPHEN DIXON: For those who caught my post at the LBC site this morning, here's some more Dixon info:

• Small Mouth Press interview: Dixon has published 425 stories and has "another fifty stories" lying around.
• Stephen Dixon on Thomas Bernhard: Was Dixon influenced by Bernhard's long paragraphs? (Rain Taxi)
• "Shoe" -- early excerpt from I (from 1999).
• From McSweeney's: J. Robert Lennon, Jonathan Lethem, a Dixon interview, and another excerpt from I.
• Stephen Dixon at work.
• Excerpt from Phone Rings.

Juggling Act

Several unexpected obligations and occurrences over the weekend (resulting in lack of sleep) pretty much derailed my update plans and I'm still catching up. But I hope to get the final BEA post, the latest Tanenhaus watch, and my thoughts on the book-length version of James Kuntsler's The Long Emergency up in the next few days. In the meantime, I've posted a writeup of the book I nominated for the LBC.

Quick Bites

• Which famous modern American poet are you? (Me: Sylvia Plath, apparently.) (via Gwenda)
• There's an interesting niche blog, Living with Legends, which caters to books for residents of the Hotel Chelsea. This is a nice supplement to the literary map of Manhattan.
• The new Bookslut issue is up and there's a good interview with Jon Scieszka.
• Still behind on email backlog. Bear with me.
• And my final BEA post should go up sometime this weekend (I hope).

Another Tragic Biography?

Blake Bailey, the author of the Richard Yates A Tragic Honesty who inspired a drinking game here earlier in the year, has a new John Cheever biography coming out. The Boston Globe caught up with Bailey. Thanks to a $42,000 Guggenheim fellowship, Bailey says he plans to spend the next two years explaining how Cheever arrived at his tombstone. (Bailey has until December 2007 to deliver the manuscript.) Which suggests an equally arduous and equally moribund biography of another great writer. But Bailey says that he plans to approach Cheever's life as "a redemptive fable." Bailey has already talked to half of his 150 sources and read all 28 volumes of Cheever's private journals.

McGraw Hill: When Will They Learn?

In 2003, Diane Ravitch's The Language Police chronicled the often ridiculous lengths that school textbook publishers resort to not to offend anyone. For example, according to some of the mandates, a dinosaur can't be mentioned because this implies the theory of evolution. Further, no stories or pictures of a mother cooking dinner are allowed because this reinforces a stereotype. (Unsurprisingly, many of these ideas, which involve preposterous gender-neutral rephrasings of questions and promoting abstinence over contraception, were whipped up by McGraw-Hill. One professor, Sean G. Massey, was so furious that he initiated a boycott.)

As if publishing approaches to school textbooks wasn't absurd enough, McGraw-Hill is now hoping to target children in Canada with ads placed within their textbooks. The Toronto Star reports that McGraw-Hill has been "quietly trying to coax companies into buying advertising space in their texts."

McGraw-Hill has a history of doing this. In 1999, a McGraw-Hill mathematics textbook featured an equation asking students to figure out how much money they needed to save to buy a pair of Nikes. The outcry resulted in AB 116, banning commercial images in public school textbooks in California.

Hopefully, the Canadians might take a cue from this.

House Kills Public Television Funding

A House subcommittee has voted to cut all federal funds for the Corporation of Public Broadcasting within two years. That's $400 million a year, comparative chump change in the federal budget, to destroy a broadcasting conduit that offers educational and alternative programming to the public.

These creeps truly want the public to remain uneducated. Super Bowl, yes. Sesame Street and Frontline, no.

Fun with Face Analyzer

According to Face Analyzer, the following "personality" can be determined from my face:

Intelligence: 6.5 (Average Inteligence)
Risk: 4.2 (Low Risk)
Ambition: 6.2 (Average Ambition)
Gay Factor: 1.5 (Very Low Gay Factor)
Honor: 4.8 (Average Honor)
Politeness: 6.2 (Average Politeness)
Income: 6.4 ($30,000-$50,000)
Sociability: 5.1 (Average Sociability)
Promiscuity: 3.5 (Low Promiscuity)

My archetype, apparently, is Beta Academic.

Even more shocking, the celebrity face that I match up most with is Richard Gere. I'm not entirely certain about that. He has more hair than I do. But apparently I'm more polite than he is.

Because I'm suffering again from insomnia, I tried seeing if I could hack this system by submitting multiple images of my face in various poses (using the same lighting, the same red tee, the same stubble and the same white wall). When I stuck out my tongue, my income level dropped and my intelligence level dropped nearly a full point. Even stranger, my honor level went up when I took a photo of my face in crazy mode.

Nothing, however, fluctuated beyond a point. Sadly, my promiscuity score remained stable in all poses. I had hoped my gay factor would shoot up, but there was little I could do to get it beyond 1.6.

Whatever one thinks of the accuracy of this test, it does serve as a nice counterpart to Malcolm Gladwell's "The Naked Face" -- an essay from several years ago. The Face Analyzer has a 87% success rate determining race and gender. Unfortunately, there's little on the Face Analzyer site that indicates how the personality attribute score is calculated. All we know is that the picture is sent to a facial recognition engine, which is purportedly the world's most accurate software. Too bad they couldn't name the software they're using or the engineers and scientists who developed it.

[UPDATE: Tito runs some tests of his own. Apparently, the pre-jailed James Brown is a "white collar" type.]

Burgess's 99

I've been on an Anthony Burgess kick lately. But what I didn't realize was that back in 1984, Burgess offered a list of the Best 99 Modern Novels between 1939 and 1984, novelists who "have added something to our knowledge of the human condition."

As can be expected, James Joyce and Flann O'Brien are there. But there are some quirky choices too, such as David Lodge's How Far Can You Go?, J.G. Ballard's The Unlimited Dream Company, John O'Hara's wildly ambitious The Lockwood Concern and Erica Jong's How to Save Your Own Life.

Beyond this list, there are some interesting revelations about Burgess in the article. For one, Burgess once had "the notion of writing a fiction of a dying man who sees the unfolded Times on his bed and deliriously traces all his past life as though it were the content of that newspaper - news items, editorials, crossword puzzle, everything." The other thing, and it's perhaps an invaluable piece of info for those impoverished souls who left BEA with copious swag, is that when Burgess wrote book reviews for the Yorkshire Post, the local post office had to hire additional staff to take in the book parcels. Further, since Burgess was paid a pittance, every two weeks, Burgess would pack two book-filled suitcases and sell all of his review copies at half price.

And You Thought Trekkies Were Out of Control

Not only did a group of Doctor Who fans kidnap a Dalek on display, but they have severed the Dalek's plunger arm and sent a ransom note reading, "WE ARE HOLDING THE DALEK CAPTIVE AND IN ISOLATION. FOR THE SAFETY OF THE HUMAN RACE WE HAVE DISARMED AND REMOVED ITS DESTRUCTIVE MECHANISM. WE DEMAND FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS FROM THE DOCTOR. -- GUARDIANS OF THE PLANET EARTH."

Even stranger is the fact that actor Colin Baker (who once played the Doctor) may be sending a message to the kidnappers.

Dr. Bersherloff on Ayelet Waldman

Since people seem content to pay authors staggering sums of money to spill ridiculous items about their personal lives and because this new trend shows no sign of dying, we've asked Dr. Heinrich Bersherloff, a "recovering psychiatrist" with an emphasis in mood disorders, to weigh in on magazine essays and articles that demand careful reading between the lines. Dr. Bersherloff hopes that his work will lead readers to better understand novelists' neuroses, since their personal lives are apparently what editors want to dig into further. However, I should point out that the doctor is just stepping into his field work after a three-year hiatus.

THE SUBJECT: Ayelet Waldman

THE ARTICLE: "Blast from the Past" (Salon, June 6, 2005)

PREVIOUS SIGNS OF NEUROSIS: "Baby Lust," where Ms. Waldman contemplated child-bearing for the sake of child-bearing, "Living Out Loud," where Ms. Waldman confessed that she had voiced suicidal urges on her blog and frightened her family in the process, and "Truly, Madly, Guiltily," whereby getting it on with her stallion, Pulitzer-Prize winning husband was prioritized above and beyond being a mother.

TELLTALE SIGNS FROM CURRENT ARTICLE:

Waldman: "I'd never heard [her two oldest kids] express any kind of excitement about P.E. before -- they are not natural athletes -- but there they were strategizing and recounting the high points of their respective matches with unprecedented zeal."

Dr. Bersherloff: It is clear that the subject fears that her children might possibly supplant her own achievements. There exists an unfulfilled desire within the subject to excel at athleticism or perhaps throw a discus into the air. Given the subject's previous depression, her fixation upon age and her expression of disbelief that her prodigy would indeed be excited about P.E. (insisting, for example, that her children are "not natural athletes"), I am forced to suggest that she get out of the house and take salsa dancing lessons with her husband. This will allow the subject to engage in athletic activities, fulfill intimate desires with her husband, and detract her away from her solipsism.

Waldman: "I remember very little about the season other than the ache in my shoulder from holding my hand above my head in a futile attempt to distract the gnats from my face, the sound of my own teammates' jeers as I made my regular strikeout, and the euphoria of being allowed to take the bench whenever our team had the slightest chance of winning."

Dr. Bersherloff: In sixth grade, the subject had a traumatic experience while on a softball team. By her own admission, she was isolated and withdrawn, and took solace in these introverted feelings. And her failure at the bat appears to have occluded positive memories such as post-game pizza parlor parties.

While there remains a slim chance that the subject is terrified of pepperoni or Wurlitzers (if this is the case, I suggest "Wurlitzer therapy," which would involve gradual sessions of cheery Bach fugues played at Pizza and Pipes), it is worth pointing out that the negative feelings here then stem not necessarily on the sports, but from group activities. It is suggested that the subject find a social comfort zone (explicitly without the presence of Quirkyalone types) that permits her to function in regular society. It may be a radical form of therapy to plunge the subject into Manhattan without a purse or a cell phone and observe how she survives over the next 24 hours. But since the subject insists upon writing about every element of her life, this might be the only pragmatic solution.

Waldman: "The game, more important, that exemplified everything that was wrong with my childhood in suburban New Jersey, a short, pasty-faced Jewish girl in a town full of scrubbed, blond, athletic WASPs, their long tanned limbs toned from years of tennis lessons and country club swim teams?"

Dr. Bersherloff: Again, it is not the sport, per se, that is the problem here, but the subject's dejected sense of herself -- the fears and jealousy that she has clung onto for the past three decades. There is a fear here of being different, a lack of confidence that has the subject uncomfortable. Curiously, the difference relates to athleticism. It is this authority's professional opinion that the subject should stop giving a fuck about these things and live life.

Waldman: "I know it's fashionable to claim to have been a nerd as a child, to insist on having scrabbled to hold on to the lowest tier of the social ladder, to recount years of torture at the hands of the golden and anointed. Trust me, I know just how trite my history of exclusion is. "

Dr. Bersherloff: The subject also feels that her problems are trivial and thus unresolved. Instead of confronting her flaws head on, the subject is quite content to wallow in her own misery, again comparing this process against social standards. Getting past this obstacle then is the key to saving the Chabon/Waldman children from almost certain permanent scars.

Waldman: "Nonetheless, as someone who still, at 40, gets a clutch of nausea every time she drives by George Washington Junior High School, I am just not willing to let go of the reins of this particular hobbyhorse."

Dr. Bersherloff: Patient obstinacy is not very successful in a therapeutic environment. We professionals encounter this all too often and are forced to remain silent as these subjects spill out their moribund tales of self-loathing and fail to see the obvious in front of them. This is one of the reasons why I stepped away. I made the mistake of setting up my practice in a quiet Connecticut town. Hearing endless story after story about the stress and terrors of walking through a Bed, Bath and Beyond was getting to be too much for me.

At 40, one shouldn't be trembling in front of a junior high school. It is clear that the subject has some signifcant work to do in confronting her fears.

Waldman: "Gym class was, of course, where the strongest, best-looking kids were made captains and chose us spazzes last. More important, it was where the figures of supposed authority allowed them to do so. Forget the work our parents did molding our minds and values. Everything fell apart as soon as we put on those maroon polyester gym suits."

Dr. Bersherloff: Again, it is appearance that is the problem. It should be noted that the subject makes scant reference to her parents. Was then a disparity between the subject's comfort at home and the subject's comfort at school?

Waldman: "You can't play dodgeball. It's cruel." (followed by Waldman threatening to call the gym teacher and her children begging her not to call)

Dr. Bersheloff: It is quite possible that the subject is reexperiencing her own parents' behavior from the other side of the parent-child divide, thus continuing the cycle. Is it possible then that the subject as a child was prevented from experiencing athletics and that this, in turn, led the subject to associate very specific colors and taller, blonder, and non-Jewish people with tremblings of fear?

Waldman: "The National Association for Sport & Physical Education has issued a position paper on dodgeball, and they don't like it any more than I do."

Dr. Bersheloff: Dodgeball, serving as a reminder of the subject's own bad athletic experiences, is then confirmed to be the enemy. The subject's emotions have already confirmed dodgeball to be pestilent in nature, but the subject hopes that by groping for an authoritative paper, she will keep her own deep-seeded fears at bay.

Waldman: "The thing is, my fantasies about being a parent always involved fighting for my unpopular child, doing for her what my own parents couldn't do for me when I was a girl."

Dr. Bersheloff: The subject's notion of motherhood involves personal wish fulfillment. It seems not to involve the child deciding for herself, but the mother deciding exclusively for the child. Some cynical wags at APA conferences often refer to this disorder as Christina Crawford Syndrome. But I truly hope that in the subject's case, it is less severe than this.

Waldman: "My children are nothing like me, and they can never quite figure out why I'm laying it on so thick. They aren't living out my childhood, they're living their own. "

Dr. Bersheloff: The subject suffers from substantial delusions about the differences between herself and her children. She is mystified that her children do not fall directly in line with her parental approach and her own interests. I recommend a role reversal playout, where the subject's children pretend to be the mother and the subject pretends to be a child. Soft padded bats will be distributed in the event that the subject craves a spanking or the subject's children need to let off some steam. Should the subject come away from this therapy a bit demoralized and demonstrate the same self-centered behavior, then we will repeat the role reversal, but this time include the subject's husband as father.

PRESCRIPTION:

A long-term therapy program is which the subject can (a) be a more considerate mother, (b) find an appropriate balance of her own needs and the responsibilities it takes to raise children, and (c) stop thinking that she is the center of her own universe.

AM Roundup

• Like the Rake, Professor Fury sings the praises of Jack Butler and reminds me that I've yet to pick a Butler book up. The situation will be corrected this week.
• And speaking of the Rake, he finds the real reason to flip through Bookmark Now. And unsurprisingly, it involves Michelle Richmond.
• Collected Miscellany talks wiith Michelle Herman.
• Randa Jarrar depicts BEA from a cabbie's perspective. (via Maud)
• Megan has her BEA report up.

BEA: Jessa Crispin

[Photo above by extremely nice man who wishes to remain anonymous because of the framing.]

No, you are not seeing things. That's Jessa Crispin and me talking about the BEA booths, inter alia. Believe it or not, we had a not half-bad conversation.

You can listen to it here (MP3, 5:02).

Morning Roundup

I'm still trying to sift through all this BEA data while simultaneously engineering audio for Segundo. I hope to post more things tonight (particularly on details from various publishing houses). The goal is to get done with all this by the end of the week. In the meantime, check out Bud Parr's extremely comprehensive coverage, which crosses over with mine and covers a few booths I didn't get a chance to check out.

Here's the morning roundup:

• Terry Teachout (who sadly was out of town during BEA week) tackles "Culture in the Age of Blogging."
• Based on some recommendations from trusted people, I'm more interested in Nicole Krauss the writer then Nicole Krauss the person, but, despite my JSF mandate, even I couldn't resist this profile, which tells how the two met. Apparently, the two met on a blind date. I leave experts to conclude whether it had something to do with Mr. Foer's email skillz.
• According to a new scientific survey, successful marriages involve comparable education backgrounds, not socioeconomic strata. Interestingly, education affects the speed at which couples marry and have children. Maybe this explains all those crushes I had on teachers growing up.
• I didn't check out the Google Print booth at BEA, but IT World did.
• Clay Evans' review of Sam Weller's Bradbury bio reveals some interesting details: Bradbury traveled primarily by roller skates well into his twenties and he was a flamboyant irritant to science fiction authors.
• Apparently, some of the tales from the Brothers Grimm can be traced to women. Scholars believe that women provided these tales to Jacob and Wilhelm, and the Brothers Grimm capitalized upon these stories. Perhaps Terry Gilliam and Ehren Kruger aren't as far off with their film premise as we figured.
• Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian has received a $2 million advance. It's an elaborate multi-plotted tale about Vlad the Impaler. The film rights have been picked up by Sony and it has the Susanna Clarke/Michael Faber-style "ten years to write" label written all over it. But is it any good? Laura Miller says it's good, not great. Publishers Weekly notes that "a lot here lives up to the hype." The Los Angeles Times thinks its okay, but quibbles with the overwrought prose.
• The Telegraph speaks with Christopher Hitchens. There's the usual contrarian grenades, including Hitch confessing that he doesn't find Marilyn Monroe beautiful.
• Yet another example of BEA covered with an amateurish glitterati angle: Wynonna Judd and Kim Catrall described as "leading thinkers."
• This week's upcoming film horrors: The Banger Sisters' Bob Dolman making How to Eat Fried Worms and Akiva Goldman writing a remake of The Poseiden Adventure for Wolfgang Petersen.
• A collection of celebrities playing table tennis (via the Morning News)
• While I was out of town, a man broke the six-and-a-half-hour endurance test at the Masturbate-a-thon.
• Notepad Invaders (via Quiddity)
• Editing Hunter S. Thompson (via Kitabkhana)

The Bat Segundo Show #2

A Working Class Hero is Something to Be

Chip McGrath has an interesting essay on social class in American novels (and culture in general), suggeesting that the poor were quite invisible in fiction until the turn of the 19th century and that a substantial portion of 20th century novels have been devoted to a long tradition of upward mobility worship. McGrath accuses American culture of turning its back on blue-collar life and suggests, "If Gatsby were to come back today, he would come back as Donald Trump and would want a date not with Daisy but with Britney. And if Edith Wharton were still writing, how could she not include a heavily blinged hip-hop mogul?"

No Doubt That This Was What Watson and Crick Had in Mind

We here at Return of the Reluctant take considerable pride in exposing the pressing issues of our time. This includes, of course, the very seminal subject of female orgasms. Interestingly enough, nobody had thought to determine if there was a biological basis for orgasms. Until now.

The answer is yes, indeedy, there is a genetic basis. The results will be published in the August 2005 issue of The American Society of Human Genetics (not yet available online).

But it's not encouraging. Somewhere between 34-45% of the variation between the ability to orgasm and the inability to orgasm can be explained by heredity. Tim Spector of St. Thomas' Hospital in London effected these results by using 1,397 pairs of twins, both identical and non-identical.

Criminally, one in three women said they never or infrequently had an orgasm. 14% always had an orgasm during intercourse. 34% always had an orgasm during masturbation.

The hypothesis going around is that the women who can't obtain an orgasm are more likely to be born and thus the unlikely orgasm trait will be carried over. Why? Well, Spector speculates that women who orgasm too easily aren't as skillful in selecting potent partners.

If that's the case, does this mean that female partners who continually use birth control of some kind (or who have no children or fewer children) are more likely to have an orgasm? Raising a kid is certainly no picnic and I would speculate that the higher stress that mothers suffer is going to affect their ability to orgasm. But if there is a genetic predisposition (as Spector concludes)that truly prevents women from achieving orgasm, then at the risk of drawing the wrath of the multitudes here, I'm curious whether there's a chromosomal corollary between the ability to orgasm and (a) wanting to have a child, (b) willingly placing one's self continuously in stressful situations (i.e., not being able to relax enough to have an orgasm), and (c) being less inclined to use birth control.

For the men who hope to use this information as an excuse to cop out after ten minutes, I should remind them that sexual intercourse is an act that involves two people in which both are equally culpable or, obversely, equally compatible.

Bush Befuddled by Unexpected Breakdown of Animotronic Prime Minister; Asks for Manual

And the Orange Prize Goes to...

...Lionel Shriver for We Need to Talk About Kevin. Looks like the bookies were wrong.

Because Women Merely Put Out for a Lucky Stud, Marry and Reproduce, and Write "Chick Lit" Novels

I'll have more to say about this nonsense when I get to the Tanenhaus Brownie Watch, but Sarah and Carrie have some interesting thoughts on the chicklit problem.

The Old Hag in Dolby Digital

If you're interested in heckling a litblogger, you've now got the chance. Lizzie Skurnick will be on WYPR's Marc Steiner Show from 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM (EST) tomorrow afternoon. The call-in number is 410-662-8780.

Top o' the Heap

Last night, I opted to chill out and sleep, seeing as how I hadn't slept for more than four hours in a week and having a percolating brain to process the copious info I collected was better than being half-asleep at the wheel. This should demonstrate to Mr. Parr that I am, in fact, not as tireless as he claims. But more BEA coverage is coming, along with catching up with the Tanenhaus Brownie Watch backlog and several other fantastic things.

In the meantime, here's some headlines from the literary front:

• TMFTML unearths a deadly accurate depiction of today's version of a David Sedaris essay.
• Jose Saramago's new novel, The Intermittency of Death, will be launched in six nations in Europe and Latin America. There are no details as of yet, but the new book will have "a different style" from previous books. But my guess is that this doesn't mean much. Given the moribund title, most likely, this means that the limited edition will have a tartan cover instead of a cloth one.
• The bookies believe that Jane Gardam's Old Filth will win the Orange Prize tonight. We will find out in one hour, as the prize will be announced at 1845 BST.
• Liars Club author Mary Karr says, "Oh my God! I wake up every day...and I feel like Walt Whitman. I really do. I've never been so happy." We understand that "feeling like Walt Whitman" is a codeword for merging memories with fictional asides and transforming it into a well-received and best-selling "memoir."
• Even the hallowed Library Journal was seduced by the BEA's Dark Side (meaning stormtroopers and celebrity).
• Kate Atkinson complains about the "nastiness" of blogs. Well, if we're so nasty, Kate, I guess we should stop praising you then, eh?
• The marketing for the next Harry Potter is very odd. Rowling will give no interviews to the UK press. And there's a contest in which 70 youngsters between 8 and 16 will meet Rowling and "grill" her on questions about a book. While it's doubtful that we'll find any future Mike Wallaces among this group of urchins, I find it strange that the publisher would go out of their way to ignore journalistic and critical reception. Catering to the readers and fans is one thing, but I predict that, despite the definitive bonanza sales this book will pull in, this ostracized approach may result in a minor backlash.
• Marilyn Monroe's black book has sold for $90,000 at an auction. Call me practical, but that seems a high price to pay for dead people's phone numbers. Believe it or not, the book sold more than a painting that Marilyn created.
• Katie Holmes as Wonder Woman?
• "Books are not toys." Well, you can build your toy house with Lincoln Logs. And I'll build mine with the 150 books in my bookpile. My guess is that I'll be having more fun than you, sir.
• Diane Johnson takes a look at several Jane Austen books in the NYRoB. Also, Jonathan Raban on Robert Lowell.

More BEA Coverage

I'm riding on Americanos because of the time difference, but I hope to get some audio and additional reports up tonight. In the meantime, here's a quick guide to coverage around the blogosphere:

• Ron Hogan weighs in through the conversational front.
• Bud Parr (who had a much swankier camera than I did and who offered a fine argument over why I should take digital photography more seriously) has pictures and impressions from the floor.
• Nathalie has captured the crazy crowd I had to storm through at the "Generation Next" panel and has her own perspective on what went down (part of an ongoing series).
• Publishers Marketplace has some good stuff from bookseller Robert Gray and Sarah Weinman.
• There are some great photos from Mary Reagan being unloaded right now.
• Mark Sarvas is still posting before his flight back to Santa Monica (and this workhorse tells me I get the Pulitzer) and has the goods on the book review embargo panel.
• MJ Rose offers a roundup.
• Cantara Christopher is also posting some quick stuff.

If there are any more floating around (or you've authored one), drop me an email.

Apple's Jobs and Intel's Otellini Work Out Handshake/Hug Compatibility Problems

So Much for the 1984 Ad

One thing that the Apple geeks aren't mentioning about the Intel chip use is something that I see as pretty important. If you were thinking of bolting from PC to Mac because of the DRM invasiveness, Apple is no longer a sanctuary. This is a bad move in more ways than one.

BEA: The Two Cliched Reactions

The headline for this USA Today BEA wrapup from Carol Memmott is "Glitterati outshine literati at BookExpo." That's funny. Because I saw plenty of small press booths crowded big-time on Friday and Saturday. I saw an NPR reporter talking with Dennis Loy Johnson. I saw oodles of folks converge upon the Independent Consortium party. The list goes on.

Granted, the main booths at Random House and Time Warner were crowded shitstorms. But then I didn't come to BEA to touch John Irving's hem. I came to find out about upcoming releases, meet people I had corresponded with, and get a better sense of how the publishing industry operated.

So far, in the reports that have been proffered, there seems to be two common reactions to BEA floating around:

1. Big popular names occluded the little guys.
2. This was a despicable showcase about the "business" of books, rather than books themselves.

In response to Point (1), I should point out that nobody is holding a gun to your head to see Billy Crystal. Nobody is forcing you to waste your time standing for about an hour in line to get two minutes with Spike Lee. BEA is really an experience that an individual makes of it. Reading Carol Memmott's article, you would think that literary people were nowhere to be found. But the fact of the matter that it was Memmott, a reporter who purports to "cover books" for a major newspaper, who decided that Billy Crystal's schtick, Candace Bushnell, and Tab Hunter were more important (and I'm giving Memmott a generous margin here) than getting a goofball report (as I did) about Anne Rice's latest novel or (more nobly) finding out about the interesting novels in translation that Farrar Strauss & Giroux were profiling.

There was no shortage of interesting books at BEA to write about. And there were limitless people to talk to.

Memmott's article then is not really about books at all, but about a journalist "reporting" who was at the autograph table -- information readily available at the BEA main site -- and an opportunity to hobnob with Tab Hunter about his sexuality. What then distinguishes this nonsense from a People Magazine profile?

As to Point (2), I don't necessarily believe that thinking about the publishing of books detracts from the appreciation of books as works of art, provided that one keeps the lines of thought separate. In fact, I'd say that it's pretty damn essential for us to be thinking about the business of publishing a little bit, if only so we can understand why certain books get published and others don't. It is the business, as unsavory as it may be, that determines who are the midlisters, who are the A-listers, and who are left ignobly in the remainders piles.

Why then should we ignore it? If book lovers cut this area of thought from their ruminations, then in my view they are no different than the book publishers who often fail to recognize the book community. Maybe it's the idealist in me, but I personally believe that if this chasm is bridged in some way, that if both sides make an effort to understand each other's needs, the book climate can only be improved. Literary lovers get the books they want published and publishers discover the conduits in which to make their literary fiction sell.

Part of the problem is that publishers view the publishing business with a "winner take all' approach. They dwell upon the Billy Crystals and the Candace Bushnells of our world who need to add rumpus rooms to their palatial Park Avenue estates. Memmott is culpable here, because her article is echoing this hard line. The duty here is for all sides to think and act more flexible about literature and to consider that sometimes a small press title or a book distributed through the streets might just turn a profit in its own right. And the duty for all journalists is to remain unseduced by celebrity bloat and realize that 30,000 people descend every year because it's about the books, stupid.

Wickett Alert

The tireless Dan Wickett is blogging over at Scott's and taking full advantage of his stint to offer his comprehensive coverage.

BEA: The Publishers, Part One

I've arrived back in San Francisco. But with all the information I have to process, I'm not done with BEA by a long shot. To get a head start, I started listening to one of the minidiscs on the flight and transcribed the following notes until my laptop battery ran out. (DFW fans, take note. Major details on Consider the Lobster to follow.)

Please note that because my crap is still packed, I'll be referring to the publishing houses as "they" and "them." I did in fact speak with specific people, but I want to ensure that I spell their names right. So without further ado:

Again, I can't convey how cool the people at Soft Skull Press are. Poor Richard Nash was sounding hoarse when Bud and I talked with him at length during the Independent Consortium party. By the time he got to PGW, the poor man was sans voice. But I did want to point to two nonfiction titles on the catalog that were introduced to me: Michael Standaert's Skipping Towards Armageddon, a takeoff on Joan Didion's famous book, is an expose that dishes the dirt on the Left Behind series. Equally noteworthy is a collection entitled America's Mayor, which is critical of Rudolph Guiliani and examines his legacy before 9/11 (a mayorship that seems all too overlooked these days).

I hooked up with the folks at Tor to see if they had any emerging science fiction authors that they were promoting. What's interesting is that, aside from the next Wheel of Time volume coming nout on October 11 and The Road to Dune (which will collect several previously unpublished Frank Herbert essays), Tor has shifted to an interesting YA emphasis with a new imprint called Starscape. The field is relatively new for them. And it's a particularly interesting direction for Tor and for science fiction in general, given that Monkeybrain is also specializing in pure speculative adventure anthologies (inspired by the Chabon-edited anthologies for McSweeney's). If I had to offer a prediction, I think we're going to be seeing a good deal of books that pay homage to Heinlein-style juvenile fiction and a return to Golden Age-style speculative fiction in the next year or two. I'm not sure if this is a good thing or not. On one hand, part of me sees this as a backlash to the prodigious work of China Mieville and John C. Wright. But if both subgenre markets are allowed to flourish, then this is still a good sign that speculative fiction is alive and well.

At St. Martin's, there's a hot allegorical title coming in October. And David Maine (who may very well be a smarter Gregory Maguire) has a new retelling of Cain and Abel called The Preservationist. St. Martin's is also publishing a TPB original novel called Away from You, wirtten by Melanie Finn. The novel tells the tale of a South African woman living in the States who has to go back to her home country and unravel a family mystery.

Not sure how much I got into it with my APE report, but Drawn and Quarterly has a lot of Joe Sacco-style comics journalism titles coming up. War's End is a followup by Sacco to The Fixer. It's a collection of two short stories set in Bosnia. [UPDATE: Jessa writes in to let me know that the Sacco pieces have been previously collected and are not, in fact, followups.]

There's also Baghdad Journal from Steve Mumford. Mumford took three trips to Iraq and drew what he saw there. It's due out in October. Guy Delisle's Pyongyang chronicles a French cartoonist who went to North Korea to work for an animation company. He spent three to four months there. The D&Q folks assured me that it had a dark comic tone.

For more traditional titles from D&Q, Seth's new volume, Wimbledon Dream, is "a complete departure from anything he's done." But then that's the case with nearly anything Seth does. Even so, this volume is in the form of a scrapbook, but, unlike other scrapbooks, it tells a linear narrative. Michael Rabagliati has a follow up to Paul Has a Summer Job called Paul Goes Out, an autobiographical story about getting a first apartment in 1983.

Little Brown has several interesting titles. Rick Moody's The Diviners is a comic novel set in the movie business about vanity, ambition and the frantic pace of lives. While we're not all that crazy about Moody, this novel has been declared "ambitious" and has Moody using a broader canvas for his characters. There's alos a first novel centered around a mother/daughter growing up in Tahiti. (I'll have the exact name after I unpack.)

Finally, we come to David Foster Wallace's Consider the Lobster -- also set to be published by Little Brown. Here's what I found out:

• The book comes out in January 2006.
• It includes "about twelve" essays. (The title essay is, of course, the one that appeared in Gourmet.
• The infamous "Host" essay will appear.
• There will be an essay that DFW published under a psuedonym where he attended the Adult Video News Awards, confronted his own shame, and contemplated the desexualizaition of sex.
• One essay's on Updike, the other's on Dostoevesky.
• "How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart," the essay about the 14 year old girl tennis player that DFW knew better than any adult, will be there.
• Apparently, there's also an essay on language and culture in which DFW uses the publication of the American Usage Guide to talk about what gets put into dictionaries, who lets cerrtain words in, dictionary making, and deconstruction. DFW confronts the decay of language, and how it is enhanced by the publications of these dictionaries. The title page of this essay is in 4 point type and contains hundreds and hundreds of solaces he’s collected over the years.

Also from Little Brown, Walter Mosley has new Easy Rawllins novel coming out. Los Angeles 1967. Easy Rawlins meets hippies. The previous novels were Mosley’s father’s Los Angeles, but this one begins in Mosley’s own Los Angeles (meaning the one that he personally experienced). Apparently, when Mosley was a teenager in 1967, he used to drive to the Sunset Strip and want to be a hippie.

I am now about to collapse. More later.

Also, Mary Reagan (who I was glad to meet) has some great photos up. As does Nathalie.

BEA: The Last Day

The mistake I made was to forget about the galleys. I became so wrapped up in talking with many people that I had forgotten the "book" in Book Expo America. While I had a flight to catch in mere hours (I'm at JFK now), there was clearly no other option. Fill as many bags as I could, FedEx them back home, and get the hell out.

The funny thing about this is that if the books had been replaced with, say, a bank vault, this would have the element of despicable crime written all over it. But at BEA, it seems, this behavior is sanctioned, if not outright encouraged. One publicist who had "a big stack of galleys" waiting for me had the sense of humor to unload a colossal 1,400 page book (which I'll end up reading of course, now that I can't say no to a longass book).

This probably wouldn't have happened had Sarah Weinman not been there. Sarah, besides maintaining a great blog, being a supernice person and being wise beyond her years, accompanied me as I talked with many more publicists and was good enough to put up with my fey enthusiasm and brio, which so overwhelmed me that, during some points, it took me more than a minute to introduce the publicist to Sarah (a sin for which I am now stewing in my own personal guilt).

It was Sarah who coined the term "drive-by galleying." But it was also an effort to meet some of the remaining folks on the floor and get the lowdown on the titles. Curiously, some of them were hesitant about the audio thing. Which begs the question: why be a publicist if you're afraid of a microphone that's placed deliberately outside of eye contact so as to not frighten people off?

On Sunday, the floors were gradually dwindling. But people still milled about. There were last minute deals and, at the Farrar Strauss & Giroux table, all the marketing people were huddled around a table eating a bag of Doritos.

But Sarah went above and beyond the call of duty. She offered to FedEx the bags of books back to me. It was Sarah who reminded me that I had a plane to catch. It was Sarah who whittled the bibliophile in me down to brute pragmatism. And for this I remain not only grateful, but indebted. Rest assured the gesture shall be paid in kind. That's the kind of person she is, and if you haven't read her blog or met her in person, you're missing out.

BEA: Quick Notes

I'm still sitting on an incredible amount of information to process. I have a small time window before my flight. So in lieu of a summary, I'm going to use the time to talk with more people. The rest will have to wait upon my return to San Francisco. (However, if JFK has a wireless connection I can use, I'll do some posting from there if I have the time.)

I have the complete scoop on David Foster Wallace's Consider the Lobster directly from DFW's editor/head publisher himself. Watch these pages.

There was also an unexpected meeting between me and somebody else. It wasn't Tanenhaus, but the results will be here in visual and audio form. Needless to say, you might be surprised.

Dale Peck, believe it or not, has a children's book coming out through Bloomsbury.

Megan and I spoke with Chronicle Book Review Editor Oscar Villalon at the PGW party and he gave me a great idea to improve the state of book review coverage in the nation. The insane scheme will probably be unearthed here and at Bookdwarf.

Maud Newton is a standout lady. And all the bloggers I met here proved to be fantastic people. If you're ever in New York, I highly recommend hooking up with these folks.

Cake?

Moleskine junkies: They've got a new product. It's a reporter's notebook, which means that the binding is at the top. Still has the pocket and it's been proving quite handy. Moleskine was kind enough to get me a copy. Certain Moleskine addicts managed to walk away with considerably more. I'm not naming names.

Whoever created the ridiculous Subtalk ads on the subway is a genius. They are quite comically alarmist. One, for instance, has a man gripping the outside part of a closed subway door, and hanging on as the subway moves. The ad declares in bold letters: "This man might lose his life!" Either New York has people who regularly do this or some guy did this and there was a major wrongful death suit. Either way, to think that the MTA would spend money on such an ad, for such a minor problem, is a funny thought. Someone clue me in.

The crowd here is starting to thin out, but there are still people to meet and books to pick up. A full summary of upcoming titles will be coming in the next day or two. We never sleep around here.

Edie Falco at the Algonquin

Chekhov's Skull

[ABOVE: Bud Parr chats with the most energetic man in small publishing, the loquacious Richard Nash of Soft Skull Press, at the Independent Consortium party.]

Stormtroopers Invade BEA

BEA: Young and Hybrid Editors Panel & The State of the Publishing Industry

The publishing industry is a strange business. For one thing, the product that a publisher sells isn't necessarily guaranteed a profit. While this could be said of other products bought, sold or bartered for, there is a unique difference in the book world. You see, the profit margin is contingent not on the amount it takes to produce the labor, but on the difference between advance and royalties paid out to author (ideally as low as possible, which is interesting given that it is the author who creates, pitches and slaves over the work in the first place), the printing costs and amount shilled out to staff (also ideally as low as possible) and the net sales that come from a book's sales through a distribution method that is equally batty (printing a book from a press, shipping all these copies out to warehouses, and then further shipping all of these to various booksellers) and time-consuming (the production process alone takes up to a year and a book might tank after three weeks).

It is strange in the sense that certain formats carry stigmas by buyers and sellers alike. If a book is self-published, it is genuinely considered crud (in most cases, with good reason). If a book bypasses the delectable hardcover stage and is issued anew in paperback, it is either genre or of questionable literary merit. (And often the two go hand in hand, no matter how seasoned the efforts.)

The publishing industry has responded to setbacks in sales by publishing even more books (150,000 last year), which is about as sensible as slaughtering five hogs to make three ham sandwiches. Further, even the sharpest minds in the industry (the publicists with the ideas, the editors who hone a book to fit a market, the MFAs shrewd enough to discern a dunce from a diamond) have no definitive idea about the "future of publishing," a nebulous catch-all term that could mean everything and nothing. It is this “future of publishing” that catches voices in sussration, that has the eyes roll back into dollar signs shanghaied from a 1940s cartoon, that forms the basis of panels and deals.

Yet nobody can make a clear call.

The good news is that, like roulette, any number can win and any player on the table could make a killing. Never mind the odds or the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing or that the guiding brain behind these two hands (read: executive managers) is often slow to change, innovation, or experiments. Understandably so, because if it takes two years to clear things with the editors, the money men, and the people who distribute the books for purchase and consumption, then one must abide by a clear outline. Lack of planning is, after all, what made the initial attempt to build the Panama Canal such a disaster.

But the nice thing is that anything and everything can be published, provided it is profitable. Skirmishes and disagreements can be set aside because the one thing that everybody can agree upon is money. Dennis Loy Johnson told me that when he met with booksellers, they knew him as the Moby Lives rabble-rouser. But this didn’t prevent him from selling the goods or meeting chain resistance in the brick and mortar stores. And in the Generation Next panel I attended, one editor pointed out that self-publishing shouldn’t be necessarily dismissed, pointing out that a book in the streets managed to sell 200,000 coppies.

Because this is a business, it also means that the literary author who unexpectedly found success with a flagship title can be wooed by a bigger publisher hoping for the steady turnaround, leaving the small guy flinging whatever silent code of commitment into the dust. It also means that the reverse situation is true, where an author who doesn’t sell can also find himself standing in the dole line (not that he isn’t already).

The above is more or less what I’ve put together from the people I’ve talked to at BEA and my own perceptions (pre-show and post-show). A lot of this was discussed in the aforementioned Generation Next panel (which I plan to summarize in a future post). But I’ve come away with a greater appreciation for what publishers do and with the unique dilemma and strange system that they face.

I attended the Generation Text panel on Friday. The panel, a collection of "hybrid young editors," included:

• Liz Nagle, Associate Editor, Little Brown & Co.
• Chris Jackson, Editor, Crown Publishers
• Lorin Stein, Editor, Farrar, Strauss & Groux
• Gillian Blake, Executive Editor, Bloomsbury
• Kate Travers, Editor, HarperCollins

The panel was moderated by Steve Zeitchik, News Editor of Publishers Weekly.

SUMMARY:

The room was again SRO. I strongarmed my way to the front to take notes in what little floor space remained at the front of the panel table.

Steve Zeitchik asked if publishing was heading towards a "winner take all approach" and a reading climate where everybody was reading the same book. He wondered if the editors had any specific strategies to promote reading or specific titles.

Gillian Blake responded by saying that any campaign of this sort could start with TV, but expressed concerns that there wasn't enough space in people's consciousness for books.

Chris Jackson noted that grassroots politics were instrumental in marketing The Lies of George W. Bush. The book did well because of its ability to tap into Working Assets and similar conduits. He said he wasn't completely pessimistic.

Lorin Stein, who struck me as a dour and humorless numbers man (which I suppose you have to be in this business, even if you are an editor), said that publishers needed to spend more time making phone calls and sending letters. He noted that publishers were resonsible for more books per editor.

Liz Nagle said that she had lots of success with Yiddish with Dick and Jane at Little Brown courtesy of Vidlit (which was discussed here yesterday). The Vidlit Flash shorts were emailed from person-to-person. But even this innnovative success is not what Little Brown is spending all of its days doing this.

If I had to peg the smartest and most open-minded person on the panel, I'd say that it was Kate Travers. Unlike the other panelists, Travers immediately cut to the chasm between the publishing community and the public community. She compared the hardcover with the oldest child (the glamour child), the forefront symbol of literature and the paperback as the cute little child. The original trade paperback, meaning books that are published directly to trade paperback without benefit of a hardcover release (books along the lines of The Interpeter of Maladies and Bright Lights, Big City), was something of an awkward middle child, but she adamantly supported it, pointing out that it had not received enough recognition as a viable format.

Travers bemoaned the fact that publishers don't want to gamble on new authors. Her mission as an editor is to fulfill the life of a book and destroy the perception that an original TPB is "not good enough for hardcover." But she said this situation is changing.

Blake weighed in with the hard economics. If a publisher commits to an original TPB, then they need to be confident that it will be $60,000. Because you're only talking about $1 per book. An original TPB needs to hit the bestseller list to make its money back.

Sam Lipsyte's Home Land was brought up. When asked about how much Lipsyte was paid for the book, Stein responded, "It was criminal how low we paid out."

Zeitchik, perhaps making up for the previous day's inadequate discussion on the subject, brought up the 18-34 question and what responsibilities editors had to this crowd.

Travers, again demonstrating some pragmatism on this subject, pointed out that literature was in a serious crisis vis-a-vis younger readers. She pointed out that people in their late twenties still reach for a video game and, as Gillian Blake also pointed out, don't necessarily spend their Sunday afternoons reading a book for a few hours. If they do buy a book, they'd rather wait the extra year for the trade paperback than shell out the twenty-five bucks. She hoped that there could be an alliance built to back up editors and pointed out the authors being stolen away from the small presses.

Jackson remarked that the pie has to get bigger, so that books will draw young adults. One of his titles, Angry Black White Boy, was a success because of its marketing. Crown had distributed stickers, mix CDs and even put up a graffiti wall. These were concrete efforts to pitch to young audiences in what he called an "authentic" way . He also noted that because of Def Poetry Jam, young teenagers stood around the block to get into a poetry reading. He insisted that "the audience is there."

Zeitchik brought up the previous day's resistance on the 18-34 panel, noting that many people in the audience expressed resistance that this audience was not thinking commercially (or even practically) about this pivotal audience.

Travers pined for a more collective atmosphere and hoped that open forums such as book fairs (one of which she was organizing in Brooklyn) could get people talking about literature again.

Stein had the novel idea of reintroducing corporate mandates for literary publishing, pointing out that this used to be a practice among the big houses.

Blake confessed that today's books might very well be a matter of publishing work that these editors are proud of when they're old and tired. Literary publishing is equally unforgiving with young and hip editors.

Jackson said that today's publishers and editors needed to be more connected with the bookstore atmosphere. He said he had learned a lot because his wife had opened up a bookstore and that this had transformed his understanding. At Random House, staffers went to various Wal-Marts to observe how people bought books and how they selected them, gauging their excitement and lack of excitement w/r/t their choices.

Nagle was willing to go further by having Little Brown employees work in a bookstore for a week.

Blake suggested that publishers were "punished for their success." The problem with finding the next Kite Runner is that the shareholders will demand more money the following year and that they would then be paying outrageous sums to the same author for a repeat success. She insisted that, in most cases, the first book would sell the most, implying very strongly that this author payouts were a signinficant problem.

Stein's hard statement: "Give me a book that sells 300,000 copies. I don't care how crummy it is, I'll publish it."

Jackson said that the problem isn't so much demand, but the bidding wars that come with a hot title.

Blake singled out another problem: retail returns. If a book is likely to be marked down, where's the incentive to order extra copies if the customer or the retailer knows that they're going ot pay less later.

Small presses do play into the consciousness. Stein remarked that since it is easier to publish a book these days with advancing technologies, a small publisher is almost on the same footing as one of the big boys. There has been diversity despite the growing conglomeration.

Traver suggested that self-publishing shouldn't be ignored. She singled out The Rules of the Game, a book that she had seen people reading on the subways. She was unable to find the book, but learned that people had bought this on the street. After Bookscanning the title, she learned that it had sold 200,000 copies.

CONCLUSIONS:

Zeitchik was a very good moderator, constantly keeping the conversation flowing with seminal questions. But the panel, which hoped to tackle many important questions, only created more.

The gist I seemed to get here is that today's publishers, even the more literary-minded ones, are almost completely out of step with today's audiences. Random House's trip to Wal-Mart is a start, but I'm mystified why they didn't go to a bookstore -- seeing as how most people of a book-minded persuasion are going to go to a place that specializes in books. Call me practical, but this might be the behavior that is worth observing.

Further, since there are few guarantees that a publisher might be profitable, Stein's hard idea about literary mandates is a good one. As much as these editors bemoaned the "everyone is reading the same book" school of thought, their companies are dictated by finding the next Dan Brown . And it was interesting to see their editorial attitudes reflecting this.

The other lingering question: are publishers responsible to some degree for the dropoff in reading with the 18-34 crowd? If they are not fully accessing them, then should they be allocating more resources to this? Or is this too much of a long-term financial thing even for Random House?

Television and community awareness seems to have played a seminal part in promoting reading. But so has the Internet with the Vidlit idea. If the publishing industry moves at the rate of a dinosaur and the act of consuming media only accelerates, is it little wonder then why readership has dropped?

I still have a remarkable amount of data here to process, but I'm running late on little sleep and much coffee and I again have too many things that I'm doing today. Factor in the ridiculous amount of books I have to ship back to San Francisco and you see my dilemma. I hope to get more pictures up today and brief reportage and another massive post up tomorrow. I'm sitting on two minidiscs of interviews, which includes the publisher of the 2005 Man Booker International winner. More to come.

I will say that I agree with Mark. I've had enough of these panels. They are essentially repetitions on the same two themes: the "future of publishing" and whatever misunderstood technology happens to be percolating at the moment. I'm also inclined to observe that this industry seems to be a matter of endlesly putting things into action and I suppose has enough returns to keep it self-supporting. But while this has allowed it to preservere through the 20th century, the 21st century, with its Amazons and its Oprahs, includes far more variables for a venture than meets the eye. This may in fact be good for the small publisher who is attuned to the book-buying public and might explain why niche publishers are doing so well.

But for the big boys, and even the mid-sized folks, the answer to me seems startlingly clear: become aware of the shifting paradigms (which, yes, includes book blogs) and dare to put your money where your mouth is. Or to put it succinctly:

Adapt or perish.

The Monkey's Big Enough to Eat the Man in the Yellow Hat

[ABOVE: Curious Georges insisted on shaking my hand. Since he frightened me and I was thinking about Howard Hughes, I figured that taking his photo would be the only sure way to scare him away.]

Who is Jacob Javits?

[ABOVE: A statue of Jacob Javits, a senator apparently of some purport and the person whom this convention center is named after. Could someone give this Californian a history lesson? I'm genuinely curious if a chair was involved during Senator Javits' career.\

Visual Proof That Moby Lives

[ABOVE: Dennis Loy Johnson and David Kipen, in front of the Melville House booth.]

I spoke to Dennis Loy Johnson, Valerie Merians and David Kipen. It seemed that Melville House was the convergance point. More to come about what we talked about, except that Kipen has a very ambitious idea in an upcoming book (and I, as a gentile, have a horrible memory for words that begin with "sch" -- fortunately the good and remarkably energetic Kipen didn't hold this against me) that boldly challenges the auteur theory.

Believe it or not, I also shook hands with Jessa Crispin, who I ran into by chance at the Melville House booth. She left before I could talk with her further (my fault, because I ended up speaking with Kipen for quite a while). But let it be publicly stated that, as a gentleman who thinks petty rivalries are silly and largely ignores these things, I openly offer my hand towards a detente against all perceived offenses on all sides. The question here is whether or not Ms. Crispin is equally willing.

On the floor, there are numerous publishers of many stripes. Everything you can imagine has found a way to be published. I'm not sure where I stand on the grand irony of a Caucasian publisher profiting in "history" written by Black Muslims (i.e., the Farrakhan crowd). But that's the kind of fringe stuff you find in the back.

Hitting the Floor

Additional coverage of BEA can be found at Chekhov's Mistress, Beatrice, and of course, the Elegant Variation. We just caught sight of a guy who is either Stephen Elliott or who looks like Stephen Elliott. There are bagpipes playing downstairs -- presumably because lots of Scottish folks read books or Irvine Welsh is primed to make a surprise appearance.

I'll report more later in the afternoon. If you need to get in touch with us by email, we're having server problems. Try arizona_jim@yahoo.com.

Signing off. There's boatloads of people here.

Who is Mad Max Perkins?

[ABOVE: Max Millions, at Thursday's blog panel (with MJ Rose).]

BEA: Impressions and Reportage from Thursday

Please also note that I will probably be misspelling a good deal of names and, for this, I apologize. Because of wireless limitations, I will correct all such typographical errors upon my return home.

A few quick thanks are in order: one to Harper Collins, who was kind enough to offer wireless access for BEA’s many participants (several photos of congregating litbloggers hunched over their laptops in the galleria have made the rounds), and the other to Tina Jordan, who was kind enough to offer us all press credentials. I fully expect the reports to interlap. So I’ve been roaming Jacob Javits’ floors with a portable minidisc recorder and digital camera. The sounds will be edited and posted here upon my return to San Francisco.

I have a few initial observations. First off, I should point out that BookExpo America is a trade show, meaning that people here view and approach books as a business first and foremost. I’ve talked with publicists and exhibitors about what they hope to get out of BEA. Outside of educational seminars, like most trade shows, they hope to find the shortest path to profit – a not uncommon practice here in the crowded and unforgiving nblocks of Manhattan. In some cases, that means stumbling into panels (such as yesterday’s litblog panel) for the “next big thing.”

But even this “education” sometimes leads publishers and publicists pining for a vote of confidence. Arthur Fournier of Guilford Publications confessed to me that he was relieved to see his conclusions confirmed by the big editors attending the morning's Publishing and Electronic Media seminar. Likewise, Kevin Smith of Kuna, Inc., a publisher that specialized in materials written for credit unions, told me that he was particularly interested in the digital mediums being pushed, but expressed his surprise with how other publishers weren't very forward-thinking in embracing these new conduits. He compared it to an army "fighting the last war to figure out what's coming up." Smith clearly didn't want to follow this model. But when I asked him how he could convince others how to hop on the bandwagon, he felt that "thinking outside the box" himself and perhaps convincing others to do likewise might be a start.

If there is a problem with this approach, sometimes lofty intentions, or even modest goals of profitability commingled with artistic gain, get left in the dust. I talked with a cheerfully cynical man named Andrew Porter, who had a badge that read “Too Many ABAs.” Three years after selling his Hugo-award winning magazine venture, the Science Fiction Chronicle, to another publisher and getting, in his words, “screwed from the new publisher,” Porter told me that this was his “final convention in the book field.” He had attended every single convention since 1976 and handed me an impressive leaflet that listed some of the highlights. He called this BEA “his farewell tour” and had conceded this as an opportunity to catch up with friends.

Then there are the misconceptions about what these new technologies and conduits mean. For instance, if you ask a publisher what a “blog” is (as I tried to explain what this site was all about), this is when the confusion (and perplexed reactions about the technical and logistical fundamentals) kicks in.

Some folks, like Publishers Lunch’s Michael Cader, understand that a blog operates as a conduit between reader and publisher and optimize their services to reflect this without compromising the credibility for either side. But if a publisher doesn’t know how a blog works, if they, as one publicist expressed to me Thursday night, don’t have the demographics at their fingertips, there’s a fundamental problem in the co-opting process. Because these are the hard stats that industry people look for. They have specific ways of conducting their business and, like any businessman, they want to turn a profit. So the real question isn’t “Are blogs viable in today’s literary marketplace?” (I would argue, based on the rise in sales of Sam Lipsyte’s Home Land and Kate Atkinson’s Case Histories, that they are; to what degree, nobody truly knows) but “Are publishers flexible to refocusing some of their business strategies to this separate and independent force?” Or does it all boil down for the big Dan Brown kill?

My conversations so far have suggested that the cleanup is the thing but, at this point, I’m almost tempted to apply William Goldman’s infamous maxim about Hollywood: “Nobody knows anything.” I was unable to get into the “Capturing the Elusive 18 to 34 Year Old Reader” panel moderated by Jessa Crispin. It was SRO, but many people privately expressed their disappointment with me about the lack of ideas articulated. It struck me as a sad irony that such a palpable frustration would go down the day before the exhibitor floor opened.

I would again argue that pointing to a sales factor is a start, but delving into it and daring to think beyond the existing sales strategy might be a more successful way to meet this problem head-on. But shifting away from a perception (such as the idea that only people over 50 are interested in World War II) involves not only rampant persuasion among a publishing house’s staff (extending from the top down), but a dramatic (some might say revolutionary) shift with how people go about buying and reading books.

To be fair to the publisher, with the book industry left with sales that are sometimes tenuous even for carefully researched successes, it’s little wonder that shifting their strategies in the digital age remains an impossibility, particularly with so many unspoken issues concerning literary blog accreditation. Hoopla alone isn’t necessarily going to cut it for the book consumer. And sending an author out on a book tour, only to see the author greeted by a handful of people and crickets (none of whom buy the book, including the crickets, who are sentient and endowed with the ability to slide a credit card) is as equally risky as considering the digital conversational domain.

Email access is highly limited. So if you’ve sent anything, I haven’t yet received it.

For what it’s worth (and to clarify a minor rumor floating around), I’m not stalking Sam Tanenhaus. I just want to give the man an opportunity to respond to the criticisms hurled his way on these pages. So if you’re a friend of Sam’s, please tell him that I’m not a lunatic and that I'm just a persistent guy who wants to talk with him.

The LBC party at the Slipper Room was packed beyond anyone’s predictions with the very 18-34 crowd (or those hoping to market to it) that seems to be in question. About a hundred people packed this bar on the Bowery. There is an audience for this stuff.

Liz Dubelman of Vidlit has a novel idea that she's managed to parlay: humorous Flash-based "trailer" presentations of books for the Web. Think Jibjab meets books. Dubelman showed me "Yiddish with Dick and Jane" on her Powerbook. The short merged a Yiddish language lesson with the famous children's primers. However, the short got Dubleman and several related publishers in trouble. It seems that the people who owned Pearson, who holds the rights to Dick & Jane, didn't know whether "Yiddish" was a parody or something which infringed upon their rights. On a Thursday evening before a holiday weekend, armed with a bouquet of flowers, a process server served Vidlit (along with all the publishers that Vidlit had contracted with). Dubelman told me that she's not sure what happened with the lawsuit, but that she believes it was settled through Time Warner. Vidlit has also produced shorts for Random House, Warner Books, and Little Brown. There are also shorts in the works for Scholastic and Harper Collins Children's.

Compilations are a hot commodity these days. Paul Solansky didn't have a problem finding a publisher for a new book due to be published by Bluesberry in January 2006 (co-authored with Arlene Sorkin) called I'm Sorry: The Apology Anthology. Solansky scoured databases with the keyword "apology," only to unearth a vast deposit of insincere apologies, many of whom were delivered by politicians. But Solansky also included a speech from a former President that he found remarkably sincere. "Clinton had this unbelievable apology being delivered at a national prayer breakfast for the whole Lewinsky thing," said Solansky. "It was breathtaking. It was like a preacher talking. And it seemed more sincere than any other politican I've heard." The best apologies, Solansky said, were the ones that atoned for racial epithets, which involved "construing" the spoken faux pas. But one of Solansky's favorite apologies involved four Los Angeles television stations apologizing for broadcasting a man's suicide live.

We've Arrived

The above picture is the hard-working Bud Parr. The two of us are here at the Jacob Javits Convention Center figuring out the wireless setup. And it looks like all systems go.

I've attended a panel on blogging (a portion of which will be podcasted upon my return to San Francisco) and I'm hitting a few more today -- all this on about 30 minutes' sleep.

My efforts to make the acquaintance of Sam Tanenhaus backfired. Tanenhaus ran away before I could say hello. However, Ben Schwarz was a very personable guy.

But enough of this hobnobbing. You want real news and I'm here to give it.

Last night on the plane:

July 1, 2005, 10:09 PM Pacific Time

Using stealth detective work, I have determined that I am at least one of three people on board this JetBlue flight going to BookExpo. Sitting two rows ahead of me is a woman with colorful hair who “has a book out” that she sold at BEA last year. To her left, across the aisle, a gentleman who is also heading there to pitch “earthware.” Unfortunately, my peripheral hearing is dampened by two very nice yet very noisy kids. So I only have telling details to go on.

“A book goes through a two year process.”

“I sort of…stumbled into writing.”

“I’m the best at what I do.”

This writer, who also has interesting fingernail polish, is like many a San Francisco professional, an ex dot commer and someone who apparently stumbled onto writing by accident.

I’d say hello, but there’s two problems: (1) I’ve got a window seat and the other two seats in this aisle are occupied and the plane is about to take off, and (2) I sort of relish this James Bond stealth.

Anyway, there are more important things to consider. Namely, how I will sleep during the next five hours in a cramped JetBlue plane. I just got off the phone with my sis and told her that I could sleep peacefully on a bed of nails. This, of course, is braggadacio.

Right now, I’m highly amused by the bespectacled, black-haired man who knows nothing about the book industry, who didn’t come on with a tome beneath his arm, and who has one of those staccato titters (hehhehehehehehehooohooohaaaaaa) that’s meant to establish bonhomie. I like this guy and I hope the writer gets him hooked into the magical world of books.

June 2, 2005, AM (morning panel on blogging)

Max Millions showed up as promised in an alluring costume. I arrived late to the panel because I had just disembarked from a red-eye, but there seemed to be a confusion over what the role of blogging entailed. Many publishers in the crowd failed to understand that blogging was conversational in tone. Max Millions pointed out that you could smell the passion and that it was clearly distinguishable from sheer shilling. MJ Rose noted that she had seen hits rise on her blog, but had not seen an increase in comments. But she suggested that publishers might wish to adopt a blog-oriented catalog for their books.

One of the problems with the panel was that there's still a fundamental chasm between bloggers and publishers. The publishers were more concerned with how they could use blogs as marketing tools. But when I heard the name Dan Brown name-checked (instead of, say, William T. Vollmann, an author who perhaps deserves more attention and whose sales could be boosted using the litblog conduit), I realized the disparity goes well beyond marketing and art, and more between cash bonanza and the kind of special literary niches that many litblogs are all about.

I'll have more on this later when I post the MP3.

So Long As Tina Brown Stays Off the Dole, We're In

It's a veritable boon for Pauline Kael and James Thurber completists. For one Ben Franklin, eighty years of The New Yorker will be available in DVD format. This is probably the best idea since Broderbund issued all of the issues of MAD Magazine on CD-ROM.

The Big Lesson Here: Perhaps City Hall and Topless Mitchell Brothers Dancers Shouldn't Be Combined For A...Ahem..."Training" Film

I'm howling with laughter over how the City and the 49ers will handle this, particularly since the stunning video embarassment is readily available online. Offensive stereotypes, girl-on-girl action, homophobia, racism, and the 49ers -- much of it shot in Mayor Gavin Newsom's office.

Political corruption hasn't been this fun to watch this since Marion Barry's cocaine video.

Lauren Baratz-Logsted: "T.B.: Saying the Unthinkable in Fiction"

[EDITOR'S NOTE: While we're on the move, Lauren Baratz-Logsted was kind enough to offer us an essay about her experiences with reading reactions.]

I didn’t set out to write books that would piss people off.

Of course, when it happens, I don’t mind it so much – at least, I’ve come not to mind it so much. When I sit down to write, since I primarily write books of a comic or satirical nature, my intention is to create something that will make people laugh and, between the laughs, think.

As far as intentions go, when I originally left my day job as an independent bookseller back in 1994, I didn’t plan on writing comedy or satire. I thought, like many a bright-eyed writer jumping into the fray, that I was going to write the Great American Novel. But I don’t think any writer can control her natural voice any more than she can control her tendency to check her Amazon numbers on an hourly basis. But the big surprise was that, when I sat down to write, the voice that came out was a decidedly comic one.

My first novel, The Thin Pink Line, was published in 2003. On the surface, the book is about a self-obsessed Londoner who fakes an entire pregnancy. But if you scratch the surface, you’ll also find a scathing indictment of the notion that, all too often in life, people make life-altering choices (marriage, children, et al.) – all because “everyone else is doing it.” Sometimes, they avoid serious thought about what the decision actually means.

When my book hit the stacks, things began well enough. All the pre-pub reviews were positive: Kirkus gave it a starred review with PW calling it “hilarious and original,” blah blah blah. What writer wouldn’t want to hear that? Particularly the “blah blah blah” part. But then the Amazon reviews started popping up and I realized I’d done something unexpected: I’d written a book that polarized audiences. If you look at my page there, you’ll see that out of my 100 reviews, half are for five stars, while the other half are one-stars. Not that reviews have any affect on my writing. And that’s not to say I don’t care at all about what people think. But if at the end of the day I’m proud of something I’ve created, then that has to be enough. I always like to say that I’ve been compared, variously, to Swift and shit.

While I respect the right of readers to hold the latter view, I hope no one will hold it against me if I prefer the former. As for the one-stars, they mostly seem upset about a single thing: they hate what my character does! Now, we don’t even need to get into the issue of people picking up a book that’s cover actually says the character fakes an entire pregnancy and then getting upset when she does, in fact, fake an entire pregnancy. The point is that I’d struck a nerve with people, many of them fundamentalist in temperament, who misconstrued things a bit, obviously believing that I (as the author) was endorsing Jane Taylor’s behavior.

I’ve come to realize that if readers don’t get that a book is satire from the get-go – satire being defined in my Webster’s Tenth as “a literary work holding up human vices and follies to ridicule and scorn; trenchant wit, irony or sarcasm used to expose and discredit vice or folly” – they miss the point of the exercise entirely, preventing themselves from enjoying the book. If I had to pick just one area of writing that is most likely to be misunderstood by an American audience, it would have to be satire. Before Helen Fielding and Nick Hornby opened American editors’ eyes to a new way of seeing, I regularly received rejections from publishers saying that while they thought the material was hysterical, they didn’t believe Americans liked comic novels or satire. And now that a lot of comedy and satire is published here, there is still a problem in that publishers are so bent on presenting heroines as being likable, as being “the girl next door,” that readers are understandably confused when they find those heroines doing over-the-top things like, say, faking an entire pregnancy. My characters are almost never girls next door. In fact, you probably wouldn’t want to live next door to my characters! But, hopefully, if you read the books, you’ll laugh a few times at the things they get themselves up to. And maybe you’ll find yourself thinking in the process.

And now I’ve written a third book, A Little Change of Face. And again, some readers have completely missed the point of the exercise.

A Little Change of Face is about Scarlett Jane Stein, a very attractive, 39-year-old, unmarried, Jewish librarian from Danbury who, for one reason and another, decides to sabotage her own looks in order to find out how the world will treat her once she’s no longer a swan.

So far, so good. No one had any trouble with that part.

However, they did have a problem with one of the supporting characters, T.B. (standing for Token Black).

Romance Reader at Heart, a website devoted to romance novels, wrote, “As if that name is not ridiculous enough, Scarlett and her friends talk in Ebonics while in TB’s company (TB is a lawyer and obviously uses Standard English). I am not even black and I found this offensive.” And the ubiquitous Harriet Klausner, who described my clearly British protagonist Jane Taylor as “Turkish” in a review of my previous book, The Thin Pink Line, weighed in with the following, “…and Scarlett speaking hip hop with a black attorney pal seem inane for educated people and clearly in poor taste. Simply Scarlett needs to dump her best pal and treat TB (don’t ask) with respect maybe the love of her life will do likewise.” Ah, well, grammar notwithstanding, at least Harriet gave me five stars anyway.

Sometimes, when in doubt, I’ve learned to let crazy Jane Taylor do my talking for me. Here’s Jane, talking about her problems getting the wording regarding race right in my second novel, Crossing the Line:

I hadn’t known many black people in my life, but what few I’d known, I’d liked. Oh, I do know that sounds like one of those backhanded compliments, like when someone says, “Some of my best friends are Jewish” – which really is true in my case, but only in the singular, since my best friend, no ‘s’, is David and he is Jewish. (At least, I’m pretty sure he is; he never really talks about it.) And, anyway, what would be better, to say that some of my enemies are Jewish or that the few black people I’d known I’d hated? Neither of which would be true, of course. As a white Christian, my random sampling of other races and religions was just too limited to make any kind of meaningful sweeping generalizations. All of this said, if anyone else ever comes up with a way to say, “I’m not a racist” without people automatically knee-jerking to “Ah, she’s a racist” or “I’ve liked what few black people I’ve known” without sounding like some kind of insufferable prig, please drop me a line.

Oh, and here’s one last interesting part on that subject: I can say “I hadn’t known many black people in my life, but what few I’d known, I’d liked” and fully realize that there will be some who will find the remark offensive. And yet, any remark I make about the white people I’ve known would have to be more offensive, the truth being that having known a ton of white people in my life, there had been precious few I’d genuinely liked. So there.

For intelligent readers who read the book closely, I don’t think they’ll have a problem seeing what I’ve done here. I’ve created a character who is an indictment of the fact that, however far we may think we have come since the Civil Rights Movement, all too often, in books and on TV and in film, African-Americans are still relegated to supporting roles in our society. As T.B. says to Scarlett when they first meet, referring to her own nickname, “I am the movies, and TV too…I’s the judge and the pediatrician and the prosecutor…I’s the local color, I’s the next-door neighbor, I’s the best friend who gets killed so the star can get angry…I’s expendable.”

And anyone who is willing to take a hard look at the entertainment industry would have to honestly agree, she’s right. Friends, one of the most successful sitcoms in history, and even set in New York City – New York City! – is about as white a show as there ever was. And just look at the three people who die in the beginning of Jurassic Park: the fat guy, the smoker and the black man – this is Hollywood’s definition of who’s expendable.

But Scarlett doesn’t see T.B. as expendable and says as much. Indeed, she refers to TB as “the glue” and anyone reading closely should see that as well. T.B. is the female character that Scarlett is most consistently honest with as T.B. is with her. T.B. is the female character who most consistently provides Scarlett with unconditional love and support and, again, it goes both ways. As for what is inaccurately characterized as Ebonics in the book, I’d have to wonder if someone who could see such a shadow where none exists might not be carrying around their own collection of racial guilt or if they’ve ever even had any close friends of another race at all.

Here’s some of my own personal history and you can take it for what it’s worth:

When I was twelve years old, both my best friend and my boyfriend were black, and while the latter is mostly forgotten, the former still blazes clear in my mind 30 years later and will for as long as I have memory. Stephen King, another writer who’s been maligned for other issues than I have, does occasionally get things right . In his novella Stand By Me, he passes a remark that has stuck with me in essence all these years: the best friends you will ever have are the ones you have when you are 12 years old.

As far as I am concerned, the character of T.B. is as much a tribute to that friendship as it is anything else. It is a tribute to two young girls, both very short, who played basketball together and talked slang together. Despite both of the girls being highly educated, they often lapsed into the vernacular that T.B. and Scarlett used. They laughed and loved and argued so much sometimes it made the fans in the stands uncomfortable.

I know in my heart that even if the entire rest of the world reaches misimpressions about the character of T.B., that young girl that I loved so much, Donna, would totally understand.

I do realize that, as writers, we do not get the luxury of sitting on every readers’ shoulder – I’m picturing a very mini-me here, perched on your shoulder, a glass of Shiraz in my hand – directing the reader’s attention to what’s important in the work, explaining jokes that don’t go over at all, or correcting misimpressions. But one still does hope for intelligent readers, readers who can be depended upon not to mistake an uber-British Londoner for a Turkish woman. And, maybe just occasionally, readers who are intelligent enough to see that what others might perceive as racism is in fact anything but.

Lauren Baratz-Logsted is the author of The Thin Pink Line and Crossing the Line. Her third novel, A Little Change of Face, will be published in July 2005. Her essay, “If Jane Austen Were Writing Today,” is collected in Flirting with Pride and Prejudice: Fresh Perspectives on the Original Chick-Lit Masterpiece, edited by Jennifer Crusie and due out from Benbella Books on September 1.