- From 1934 to 1949, the Philly Inquirer published “complete illustrated novels” in its Sunday book review section. You’d be hard-pressed to find even the most secure and well-funded Sunday supplements doing anything like this today. (via Books, Inq.)
- Primo Levi’s “A Tranquil Star.”
- Keith Gessen asks, “Where is Martin Amis heading next?”
- Behold: New Critics.
- Obviously, Kim Bofo has never read Faulkner. The “clever literary thing” is something known as eye dialect, designed to convey cadences in phonetic terms. It is not intended to be “clever,” nor is it intended to spawn anti-intellectual hostility from across the big pond. More information can be found here and here.
- Joyce and Beckett play golf. (via Fimoculous)
- The 11 Least Intimidating Movie Villains. (via Quiddity)
- Poor Mike Judge. Fox doesn’t deserve him.
Month / February 2007
NBN Trumps Perseus PGW Offer
We’re now less than a week away from the February 12 bankruptcy hearing. But this morning, PW reporter Jim Milliot revealed that one of the two mystery buyers was the National Book Network. NBN made a better offer to PGW clients than Perseus. NBN plans 85 cents on the dollar and only a three-year contract extension (as opposed to Perseus’s 70 cents and four years). Further, NBN has filed an unsecured claim to retrieve the remaining funds, instead of an administrative claim. This is a good sign that NBN might be spreading some of the monies around to the creditors. Galleycat has a memo of NBN’s offer for your perusal.
Radio Free PGW, in a shocking digression from its trademark cynicism, has signaled its approval of NBN, writing, “Hopefully, this will mark an end to the hard sell and arm twisting, and we hope to never hear the words ‘sixty-five percent’ again.”
Of course, since many PGW clients have signed agreements with Perseus (and from what I can determine, these agreements are by no means final; Perseus must have 65% of the PGW clients signed on before the February 12 hearing for the deal to go through), it will be interesting to see how this showdown between NBN and Perseus plays out. And what of the third rumored AMS purchaser? Will we see 90 cents on the dollar and two years? 110 cents on the dollar and six months? Come on, indie presses, hold out and watch these titans tear their follicles out while trying to woo you!
New Jack Butler Interview
A hot tipster has informed me that a Jack Butler interview will be appearing in the Summer/Fall 2005 issue of the Mississippi Quarterly. What’s more, said tipster somehow scored a copy of this interview and passed it along, to which I raise my highball glass with gratitude. Of course, I wouldn’t mention any of this if I didn’t provide you with a sneak peek. So here goes:
JB: I soon resolved not to become a rehasher, a writer who goes back to some imagined South of the past and merely iterates the stereotype, however vigorous the stereotype might seem. This resolve was not the result of loving SF. It was just, who wants to be a copycat?
My scientific and SF background came to the rescue. I appropriated from physics the notion of the multiverse. My multiverse consists not only of the quantum probability alternate universes, but all of the universes that can be imagined (including, like Woody Allen, those of fiction), and, as I like to say, all of those that can’t be imagined as well. I work, from time to time, on a collection of stories patterned loosely after The Canterbury Tales, which I call Tales from the Multiverse. It owes a lot to science fiction, but more to Chaucer’s incredible poem.
Since my Yoknapatawpha is the multiverse, I am freed from the constraints of consistency.
* * *
You hear that, gang? To paraphrase a really crappy cartoon about robots, there’s more to Jack Butler than meets the eye. Sometimes, anachronistic education is the mad and unexpected muse.
Chunky Roundup
- If you’re anything like me, you consider Jackie Collins’ words to be about as insightful and comprehensible to your life as those incomprehensible furniture instructions printed who knows where. Yet Ms. Collins seems to believe that she can help Victoria Beckham. Perhaps Ms. Collins is attempting to atone for past conversational setbacks. Or perhaps she’s alarmed that Tony Danza didn’t follow her advice to get his nipples pierced in order to ward off evil eidolons. Either way, I’m awaiting the inevitable novel fictionalizing Ms. Collins’ admonishments, Fool Me Spice, Shame on Me.
- It wouldn’t be a Tuesday without a Lethem story. (Hell, it would be Tuesday without a Collins story. But I’ve already blown that promise and you can send your disused prophylactics to me by mail in protest.) It appears that Boston musicians are creating an original song from the lyrics in Lethem’s upcoming novel, You Don’t Love Me Yet. The winning song will be unfurled at Lethem Central and it will be performed at the Coolidge Corner Theatre on March 27. Whether this will translate into a Clap Your Hands-style indie hit through the Internet or an unsettling choice at your karaoke bar of choice remains anyone’s guess.
- Cathy Young offers this disingenuous claim: “Respectable modern-day literature has no shortage of derivative works: What are Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead or John Updike’s Gertrude and Claudius but Hamlet fanfics?” I think not. There’s a fundamental difference between “writers” who labor over bad prose describing Kirk schtupping Spock and writers like Stoppard offering a witty and separately realized tale of two overlooked bumblers. In Hamlet, R&G were little more than minor characters with scant attributes. Plus, I don’t believe international copyright law applies to works published in 1599. Besides, it’s not as if Updike and Stoppard are going to other characters for the majority of their work. Updike and Stoppard have indelible characters like Rabbit Angstrom and Moon to fuel their respective imaginations. Fanfic writers, by contrast, often have no narrative ideas other than derivative stories involving characters they don’t own or have not created. Further, they are often inept with subject-verb agreement. I advise novice writers to toil at such infecundities at their own peril. What’s more, Ms. Young has also taken Lee Goldberg’s comments out of context. But then one would expect no less of a self-acknowledged fan fiction writer accustomed to absconding with characters she has neither the right nor the talent to tinker with. (And lest I be accused of attacking Ms. Young’s character, let’s let her fiction speak for itself. This story reveals such blunders as “Xena’s voice spilled into his reverie.” You mean, Xena’s voice is liquid as opposed to aural? Who knew? Or how about: “Back in his leather pants, Ares came out into the main room of the house.” The prepositional phrase is unnecessary. We’re already in the goddam house. The words “out into” are oxymoronic. And what in the hell does that dreadful clause about the leather pants have to do with the sentence’s purpose? I could examine this dreadful prose at length, but I’d rather spend a weekend hiring someone to saw my limbs off.)
Everything They Want
All Headline News: “Sources say that George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley are going to reform Wham!.”
I’m concerned here. And it’s not just because of the period that follows the exclamation mark in that sentence, but because I’ve long referred to Ridgeley as “That Other Guy.” I’ve felt very comfortable doing this over the years and, if Wham! is to reform, then referring to him as Ridgeley is going to require a synapse I don’t feel like using, something that I’d rather use to memorize a line of poetry than another pedantic pop cultural nugget.