To whit:

• Phil at Collected Miscellany asks whether reading choices are related to the season.
• Anthony Miller

looks into the “summer reading” semantics.

• The Columbus Telegram takes the tone of a schoolmarm, perhaps losing potential summer readers in the process.
• And there are lifelong cognitive advantages to reading during the summer.

To address all of this, I should start by saying from the offset that I view “summer reading” as a load of poppycock. This may have something to do with living in a city where the weather remains fairly consistent year round. But I suspect too that my reading habits stemmed from spending my teenage years living in Sacramento holing myself up with books and films in the coolest indoor environs available. (Because of my pallor, I was known to roast into ruddiness and sometimes burst into flames, thus precluding me from completely enjoying movies where vampires exploded with pyrotechnic splendor along these lines.) So the notion of reading a thick Doestoevsky novel keeping me in a cool place was infinitely more rewarding than hours-long exposure to the sun (although friends, respective of how little effect the strongest sunblock had on me, were kind enough to drag me away).

The real question then is whether climate has any bearing on reading habits. If we are to understand the definitions posited, nice sunshine and wearing little clothing is conducive in some sense towards one reaching for a “beach book,” generally described as a book with little substance, little in the way of grit, and much in the way of lobe-flabbing sensationalism.

I’m not necessarily badmouthing trashy reading or relaxing. Sometimes, it’s necessary to aid a rebound from a synapse-bursting bout with Ulysses. I’m just curious why we’re all intended to, framing the image in literary terms, turn into margarita-sipping idiots for three months.

I suspect the term “beach book” arose from the “summer movie” concept, when seasonal distribution results in Hollywood bombast being deployed in every multiplex from here to Tripoli. But a movie involves a two-hour experience. A 300-page book, at 30 pages or so an hour, might involve an experience that lasts around ten. So if one is submerging one’s self into a book for such a lengthy period of time, why then would one reach for nothing more than comfort reads during a three-month period? Would not instant gratification (or chill time) be better served through the film conduit?

Conversely, if readers are supposed to dumb themselves down for three months, what then is the purpose? Anyone who has ever been in a library for hours at a time knows that, with their far-from-lavish budgets and their malfunctioning heaters, they are just as sweltering as a summer day without a breeze. The temperatures are comparable, but in the library’s case, the results are insufferable. The beach, by contrast, is intended as a comfortable spot to perch up and laze away with a potboiler.

I would ask those who champion the beach book why they are content to champion a dull novel in a comfortable environment. Surely, if a reader is placed in a comfortable clime, he will be more relaxed and perhaps more willing to exert his mind into a William Gaddis novel.

Does it not then make sense to champion robust and multi-layered epics as beach book candidates?

Said Laurie Anderson: “She tells a story about asking Thomas Pynchon whether she could turn his novel Gravity’s Rainbow into an opera. He said yes, but only if it was played on one instrument: the banjo. ‘Some people have the nicest ways of saying no.'”

[RELATED NEWS: Holy cow! The new Bookforum will be a special issue on Pynchon. Hat tip: Rake and Derik.]

If you’re like me, you avoid CliffsNotes with a passion and go out of your way to remember pedantic book details that the slackers salivating over those by-chapter summaries in those hideous yellow pamphlets will never possibly account for. (For example, I still remember almost two decades after I read Animal Farm that Napoleon was a Berkshire boar.) If you’re also like me, you’re probably curious about who this Cliff character was, the man who opened Pandora’s box back in the day.

Fortunately, Ask Yahoo! has some of the details. It seems that the Cliff in question is one Cliff Hillegass. Mr. Hillegass, who died a few years ago at the age of 83, was a disciple of the “self-starter” school of thought. That’s all fine and dandy, until one considers that being a “self-starter” extends into the unfortunate realm of Dale Carnegie.

But no matter. Hillegass, it seems, was a grad student in geology and physics working as a college representative for Long’s College Bookstore. Cliff cultivated contacts, like many a successful businessman. But here’s the interesting thing: the CliffNotes summary idea was actually pilfered from Canadians!

In the golden days before 1958, when one could walk into an American bookstore without being tempted and when one was forced to discern meaning on text alone, it was a man named Jack Cole (not to be confused with the creator of Plastic Man) who had offered Cole’s Notes for Canadian consumption. And it was Cole who planted the seed during a fateful conversation with Cliff that provided the yellow-backed lifeblood, the idea that was unapologetically cribbed, for many an intellectual deviant during the next fifty years.

Hillegass tried to sell the Nebraska Book Company on the idea. They passed. So Cliff borrowed $4,000 from the bank and began unleashing the beasties from his basement in Lincoln. He started with 16 Shakespearian titles, made a bit of money, and the rest is history. Eventually, in 1998, Hillegass sold his enterprise to IDG for more than $14 million.

To be fair to the original Cliff, he did repeatedly point out that his notes “are not a substitute for the text itself…and students who attempt to use them in this way are denying themselves the very education that they are presumably giving their most vital years to achieve.” Cliff did genuinely love literature, gave $250,000 to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln for an English chair and was really into rare lamps and sculpture gardens. But despite Cliff’s quirkiness and generosity, his statement is a bit like telling a pyromaniac with a lighter that he should probably use the disposable Bic in a judicious manner.

Of Jack Cole’s fate, I can find no trace. But I plan to find out what happened to the Cliff before the Cliff. For if he is the true originator and Cliff the mere opportunitist, then we now have another equitable reason to blame Canada.

It’s a sad time for San Francisco cinema. The Roxie is at death’s door. But unlike the bailout in 2002, this time, it doesn’t look like it’s going to happen, unless some enterprising person gives Bill Banning $140,000 in the next 45 days.

This comes not long after the Coronet, the finest single-screen theatre for blockbusters, died a few months ago.

So what’s left? Well, I’ve never given the Castro a dime ever since the owners fired programmer Anita Monga last year and replaced the calendar with safe repertory programming. If the Roxie goes, the only decent single-screen theatres left will be the Balboa and the Red Vic.

Three single-screen theatres compromised in one year alone speaks ill of the future.

• Paul Collins has unearthed a new scandal. It seems that author Misha Defonseca was denied royalties for her Holocaust memoir, Misha: A Memoir of the Holocaust Years. A state appeals court upheld a $22.5 million award to Defonseca and her ghostwriter, Vera Lee of Newton. The specific publisher was Mount Ivy Press, founded by Jane Daniel. The court docket for the case can be found here. While Judge Kantrowitz’s opinion is not yet posted, it appears that the judgment amount may have been amended. The question here is whether $22.5 million was genuinely withheld from the two writers or whether the damages might be punitive. (via Moby Lives)
• Scott Esposito talks with Richard McCann.
• If Bill Clinton’s memoir wasn’t plodding enough, the paperback version will have additional pages. But get this: the extra pages are being added to acknowledge the criticisms about length. Isn’t that a bit like lighting up a cigarette in front of a cancer patient after you’ve been repeatedly asked to put it out?
• Apparently, David Cronenberg wasn’t even in the running for the Palme d’Or for his new film, A History of Violence. As a Cronenberg fan, I blame Toni Morrison.
• The University of Texas, now in the business of withholding books and volumes from undergraduates, will be getting Norman Mailer’s archives. The archives will be shipped with a full-scale reproduction of Mailer’s ego for articulate Third Wave feminists to whittle down in a nanosecond.
• The “dead white male” reading list debate has been revived on the East Coast. But it appears that some teachers may be playing the multicultural card because Great Expectations is too hard for some students to read and because dense books like Heart of Darkness can’t be taught by teachers, even after playing the film Apocalypse Now in class. One reading list replacement is John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany. Irving is inarguably white and male and some might argue that he is dead on page.
• A $53,609 check was awarded to Claire Tomkin, a 21 year old fiction writer. The Sophie Kerr Award is the largest undergraduate literary award in the nation.