- Salon’s Allen Barra believes that Point to Point Navigation is merely a irrelevant rehash of old ideas.
- Terrible news from Philadelphia: anywhere between 68 to 71 staffers have been laid off from the Inquirer, possibly more. To my knowledge, the layoff list has not been made public yet. Hang in there, Frank and do stop by at Books Inq. to wish the hard-working Books team some well-deserved support. Given the circumstances, I hope everyone emerges out of this as unscathed as possible.
- Need to step behind the beady curtain and get your Gatsby fix? Yardley and Sarvas are your well-hung men.
- For those who have expressed horror that Bat Segundo would get involved with Nina Hartley, rest assured that we’ll be classing up the joint in a few days. Keep watching the airwaves.
- Justine Larbelestier on paragraphs.
- Amerdeep Singh examines the effects of shifting the MLA to the first week of January.
- The band Seven Seconds of Love is upset at Coca-Cola for pilfering their dance moves for a commercial.
- RIP Philippa Pearce.
- RIP Tillie Olsen. The Bluestalking Reader has more.
- Micawber Books, the Princeton bookstore, has closed. The owner, Logan Fox is upset that movies and television shows have replaced books as cultural cocktail party banter.
- One would presume that the Judith Regan story was as dead as the dodo, but not for Kimberly Maul, who, dredging for desperate controversy, reports that a temp claims Regan didn’t make the crazed anti-Semitic remarks on the phone. Right. Because we all know that temps are the most indispensable and highly regarded employees in the office. And we all know that this temp followed Regan everywhere during her one week of employment. Come on, Ms. Maul, it ain’t that slow a news day.
- Jerome Weeks responds to recent arts coverage changes at the Dallas Morning News, observing, “The problem for newspaper arts coverage has little to do with editors’ fears of cultural ignorance or what readers want. The problem has to do with the fact that local arts (and book publishing) do not generate much ad revenue. That might explain why the only critic that the DaMN is currently replacing with someone actually in town is — the restaurant critic. Restaurants provide ad revenue.” I’m not sure if I entirely buy this. Are we to assume that arts coverage readers don’t eat or purchase products aside from books?
- Kassia Krozser on book price fluctuations.
- 50 Cent has set himself a new goal: “the top of the literary world.” So does this mean that we’ll see an alliance between Nas, Jadakiss and Norman Mailer? We haven’t seen a literary feud for a while and I suspect that 50 might be just the man to get one going again, gangsta style.
- Tibor Fischer on Hannibal Rising.
- Vendela Vida is A-List? Who knew?
- Don’t miss Darby Dixon’s “Books I Failed to Read in 2006.”
- The Jack Vance Treasury!
Roundup
– January 3, 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. (
I get the feeling Nas and/or Jadakiss would call him No’min, the way Ali and Foreman did.
Ever play the game “What sort of a drink would a Vendela Vida be?”
My answer: an empty glass.
I was about to make a Vida cocktail crack, but I see my significant other beat me to it.
Well, in my view, Julavits is a better cocktail.