Month / July 2007

by Edward Champion

I Get the Picture: Rachel Cooke is Living Under a Rock

I used to think that Rachel Cooke’s columns were authored by some sheltered journalist who never left her house and who simply wasn’t paying much attention to rudimentary trends developing in the publishing industry. Here, after all, was an idiot, who was actually collecting a regular paycheck for her foolish generalizations, castigating the litblogosphere based on one day of indolent Web surfing. Maybe she simply didn’t have the smarts to engage with the world around her. Maybe she preferred to furtively pick her nose and watch bad movies instead of doing a bit of thinking or even hard investigation of a genre.

But now, Ms. Cooke declares she’s seen the light! She’s one of us now! These things called graphic novels actually have literary merit! Never mind that Art Spiegelman won a Pulitzer in 1992 — a good fifteen years ago — and Maus‘s two volumes were nominated for the National Book Critics Circle. Ms. Cooke dutifully read Art Spiegelman and she could clearly see “how brilliant it was, of course.” But being cast of an utterly lazy and incurious mental disposition, Ms. Cooke, perhaps incapable of tracking down Will Eisner or Alan Moore or any of the countless graphic novelists working around the time, privately declared in 1986 that the landscape to be devoid of any additional talent. The “strips” that Ms. Cooke identified — as opposed to comic books or graphic novels, which every other neophyte was jumping up and down over; presumably, Ms. Cooke was confused and didn’t have a clue as to where to look — were giving her a headache.

But now no more! For comics are now mainstream! And this means that Ms. Cooke can rethink her prejudices against this retrograde medium because, well, these books are now too omnipresent to discount.

I’m very glad that Ms. Cooke has written this column. It is now entirely clear that she lives underneath a rock.

(Thanks to Andrew for the link.)

by Edward Champion

Roundup

by Edward Champion

Read a Book, Read a Book, Read a Motherfucking Book

This may be the first reading campaign that has expressed the urgency of reading, while simultaneously berating its audience. And that’s not all. The spot also demands, “Your body needs water. So drink that shit,” among other angry catechisms evocative of better living.

I’d like to see more people reading and if this gets at least one kid to read a book, then it can’t be bad. It also takes a truly deranged mind to put BO on one buttock and OK on the other, suggesting in a rather hysterical sense that reading is sexy or as empowering as a booty call. I hope that the crazy motherfucker who came up with that idea is hired for something else.

But there’s an anachronistic groupthink approach to this ad — a sense of severely underestimating the audience’s intelligence — that greatly troubles me. I simply do not believe that people are this dumb or that they will be coaxed into reading because an animated guy named D-Mike says so. (And what’s wrong with the sports page anyway?)

I don’t think Tony Soprano has whacked the novel or that books are going away anytime soon. But surely there’s a better way to promote literacy than this unintentionally hilarious video.

by Edward Champion

Wait a Minute: Segundo’s a Legit Source?

I’ve just been informed that the good folks at the Dictionary of Literary Biography have used The Bat Segundo Show as a source. Clearly, they have been misinformed about this program’s dubious nature. Nevertheless, as someone who has spent countless hours thumbing through the DLB, I’m immensely honored — actually, I’m blushing — at the mention. If the DLB is beginning to cite blogs and podcasts as sources, then clearly the online medium isn’t as “sub-literary” as its detractors proclaim.

Speaking of Segundo, there are a good deal of podcasts that will be let loose in the weeks ahead, with more than a few conversational fireworks along the way.

by Edward Champion

Harcourt and Houghton Mifflin Consolidated

Publishers Weekly: “The HM Riverdeep Group has agreed to acquire the U.S. business operations of Harcourt Education for $4 billion. The deal, which is expected to close later in early 2008, includes the Harcourt’s elementary school publishing businesses as well as Harcourt Trade. The price includes $3.7 billion in cash plus $300 million in an equity stake for Harcourt in HM Riverdeep. Total revenue of the properties involved in the sale was $1.11 billion in 2006 with the vast majority generated by the school and library operations.”