- James Wood has jumped ship from The New Republic to The New Yorker. Said Leon Wieseltier: “The New Republic plays many significant roles in American culture, and one of them is to find and to develop writers with whom The New Yorker can eventually staff itself.” This may be a wild stab in the dark, but I don’t think Wieseltier plans on tap dancing anytime soon over this.
- So if the publishing industry is dying, why is Jane Friedman so convinced that it is “the healthiest I have seen it in a very long time?” HarperCollins has seen its annual revenue shift from $737 million to $1.3 billion. But how much of this comes from gutsy instincts? And how much of this comes from business consolidation? We’re not getting anything close to the whole story here. (via Written Nerd)
- Richard Nash announces that there will be a brand new Donald Barthelme collection! Flying to America, containing 45 pieces of previously uncollected pieces, is coming. In the meantime, if you need a Barthelme primer or pick-me-up, Jessamyn West’s page is a good start.
- Michael Blowhard has some significant beefs with tables of contents in magazines. But if you want to talk about labyrinths contained within magazines, let’s talk about all those goddam ads you have to flip through to get to the TOC page. I’ve often found myself flipping through about forty to fifty pages of ads just to find the TOC. To add insult to injury, the TOC is often staggered across multiple pages without so much as a helpful notation as to where to find the second page. Which means something like this: TOC Page One, 12 pages of ads, TOC Page Two. And this is the seminal idea that Michael hasn’t considered. Magazines are now designed to be completely unnavigable for the reader. It is now almost impossible for a reader to not get lost within several pages of advertising. Thus, the marketing team can pride themselves on a design in which advertising comes first and content comes second. But the magazine design and navigation fails as a result. The advertisers are favored more than the readers, because they bring in more revenue for the magazine. (Or did you honestly think that all those cheap magazine subscriptions were pulling in most of the income?) In fact, the situation is so tilted in favor of the advertisers that it’s quite possible that magazines may very well be doing the work of advertising agencies. Which makes me wonder why we don’t just call the chief offenders “adazines” — a soporific drug compelling people to buy stuff they don’t need disguised as a journalistic endeavor.
- Books are like a box of chocolates. You never know what lamebrain movie star you’re going to get. (via Romancing the Tome)
- Sorry for failing to report this, but the Man Booker longlist is here, if you care. Normally, I’d get excited. But this is such a safe and predictable series of titles.
- Dan Green offers a quasi-contrarian take on Jamestown.
- 2006 Congressional revolution? Far from it. The Democrats are a bunch of weak-kneed lilies who represent the people’s interests as much as a Coca-Cola billboard. Pete Anderson has a list of the Demos who thought that busting up what little remains of civil liberties was a pretty nifty idea. The time has come to let these assclowns know that they must tread delicately or face repercussions from the people who elected them.
- One of Levi’s major causes — hell, he brings the subject up every time I see him — has been the pricing disparity between hardcover and paperback. He’s now enlisting readers and bloggers to begin the discussion to end all discussions on this subject. So go over to Litkicks and feed him all sorts of info on the subject.
- Jonathan Rosenbaum on Bergman. Not the tribute you were expecting. (via James Tata)
- The San Francisco Chronicle has let loose a considerable number of journalists. (via Frances)
Roundup
– August 8, 2007Posted in: Roundup
The Call by Yannick Murphy: The always interesting author of Here They Come and Signed, Mata Hari returns with a novel that whips up a worldview from a rather quirky set of limitations: namely, the call logs that a veterinarian maintains as his son is unexpectedly put into a coma and an unforgiving economy denies him work. What emerges is a surprisingly optimistic, often funny, and very moving account on how one family uses acceptance and forgiveness as a way to atone for hard knocks. (
Birds of Paradise by Diana Abu-Jaber: Forget Franzen and Eugenides. If you're looking for a social novel that counts, Diana Abu-Jaber is the author you're looking for. Building from the free-form exploration of consciousness and identity in Crescent and the gripping procedural structure of Origin, Abu-Jaber's latest novel is her finest, equally fluent with gutterpunk culture and smarmy real estate men. It has been suggested by The Washington Post's Ron Charles that you will likely gain some pounds while reading this novel. This is certainly true. Abu-Jaber's description of food is so precise that it often made me want to do more cooking. But I very much admired the way in which Abu-Jaber presents all her characters as unwitting victims of rough capitalism, which permits them some dignity even as they perform terrible acts.
The Last of the Live Nude Girls by Sheila McClear: This memoir isn't so much about the decline of the Times Square peepshow, as it is about one young woman's efforts to pull herself up by by her bootstraps when presented with few economic options. Filled with self-introspective candor and a quiet dignity, McClear's story is one that might befall any of us in these volatile times. While McClear does get back on her feet, her book leads one contemplating the terrible fates of other young women now moving to New York and falling into deadlier vocations. (
The James Wood move seems meaningless to me. He probably appeared half as many times in The New Yorker each year as he did in TNR.
I’m really upset about the Patriot Act vote – I even know one of the people who voted for it personally. She was a prosecutor, but still. :-p WTF? She’s getting a letter.
I bought a copy of Vogue out of boredom on a weekend roadtrip, and counted the pages it took me to get to the TOC: 52! And the rest of the TOC didn’t follow on the next page, I had to hunt 12 more pages in to get the second part. Damn! I mean really – they can put all those stupid ads in there, but why can’t they move the TOC where we can find it? Perhaps that’s why they put the stupid page numbers on the cover – because nobody can find the TOC!
I like how The Believer puts their TOC on the back cover. But a small word in defense of all those ads – they do indicate a good pay-per-word rate, which is hard to come by for freelancers.
You should check out the magazine Adbusters. Great cutting-edge (if polemical) content, no advertising. Actually anti-advertising, as the title suggests. http://www.adbusters.org
Ed — the reason I keep bringing it up is that I want you on my bandwagon! I’m not going to rest until that happens.
The Barthelme news is maybe the best thing I’ve ever read on your blog, Ed.
Roger Ebert, at his web site, has a strong rebuttal to Rosenbaum’s tut-tutting of Bergman.