Severe sleep deficit which permits me to see beyond time, crazed schedule. So another roundup:
- Another day, another array of crazed parents declaring that the Harry Potter books are evil and trying to ban them. I really don’t get this paralogical thinking. A book doesn’t cause someone to do anything; a person makes a decision on his own. And if the kid in question was practicing witchcraft for two years and the parent failed to notice the lodestones, the incense or the Wiccan catalogs in her daughter’s bedroom, then isn’t it the parent’s fault for failing to keep a scrupulous eye?
- Snoop Dogg has written a novel. The working title is Q&G(Quatrain & Gangsta): The Masterpiece.
- At the LBC, Ms. Tangerine Muumuu unveils my personal favorite of the five: Yannick Murphy’s Here They Come.
- Dan Green on Beckett: “Beckett insists that we accept these situations for what they are and focus our attention on the working-out of such ‘impoverishment’ in purely dramatic terms. Still, every reader/every viewer is going to experience this drama and its finally ungovernable ramifications in different ways and to different effect. Trying to restrict the reader’s experience by the fiat of authorial intent is, if nothing else, really just a hopeless task.”
- Scott McKenzie on why people hate self-published authors.
- Mark Ames, who can also be heard on The Bat Segundo Show #17, is now blogging for the Guardian. (via Richard Nash)
- Even National Inquirer reporters are writing novels.
- Anthony Lane: “There is one overriding reason to see ‘I Am a Sex Addict,’ and it has nothing to do with sex.”
- Manly reading: a small-time success?
- Blackwell, a bookstore chain, has come up with a list of 50 Books That Shaped the World. I must concur that Jonathan Livingston Seagull did indeed change the world, its film adaptation being something of a cash bonanza for Mr. Neil Diamond. Diamond was allowed to unleash further music onto the world and the world has simply never been the same since. Indeed, one might conclude that it is still recovering.
- Amazon 2.0. (via Booksquare)
- It looks like Chomsky’s cognitive theory has been confirmed in part by scientists.
- How Computers Cause Bad Writing.
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. (