Old teens get a new look, fans cry foul

GalleyCat points out that Betty, Veronica, and the rest of the Archie comics gang (who they’ve dubbed “the world’s oldest teenagers”) are getting a makeover. Just in appearance, though — it’s not like they’re doing a “Reggie kicks smack” storyline or anything.

Of course, as happens whenever someone tinkers with an established classic, fans are grumbling. Aside from the expected if-it’s-not-what-I’ve-come-to-expect-from-it-then-it-must-be-terrible line of reproach, others are raising concerns about body image: “‘Archie seemingly has a normal everyday physique, while B&V look like twigs that could snap in two,’ says one commenter. ‘I realize that comic books aren’t known for their realistic anatomy, but comics like this specifically designed to court younger, and female, readers really should take care to not indoctrinate such a double standard.’”

Although the new Betty and Veronica appear to have extremely pronounced collarbones, were their old versions really ever any different? And what’s so realistic in a strip with a main character who wears a crown and never opens his eyes?

Related links:
Check out the new Betty and Veronica here

Buying books for other people: a primer

In honour of the current season of gift buying and yule-ness, both the Toronto Star and The New York Times ran book-buying how-tos.

For those who just need a few suggestions on how to go about this tricky business, William Grimes at the Times provides the following tips:

“A gift book should either be no surprise or a big surprise: the one you always wanted or the one you never knew you wanted. It should either be expensive and large, or cheap and small. It should be high-minded or totally frivolous. And no matter what, it should not require sustained attention, which is impossible during the yuletide season.”

Dan Smith, the books-page editor at the Star, runs through a much stricter list of edicts:

“The well-chosen gift book, that brave gesture that marks you as deeper than the average bear, must project at least one of the following three attributes: Your gift book must display keen insight into the unfulfilled longings of the recipient, evidence that you are a thoughtful, observant soul.… Your gift book must be dandy eye candy.… Your gift book must be really stupid.”

Follow either of these guidelines, and the field of possibilities will be almost magically narrowed, making for a painless shopping task.

Related links:
Click here for the Times‘ tips
Read the Star‘s buying guide here

Judith Regan, at it again

Just when the uproar about the O.J. tell-all has finally died down, the next tasteless title from ReganBooks is raising a stink. Today’s New York Daily News details 7: The Mickey Mantle Novel, which is slated for release in March.

“One of the most beloved and talented baseball players of all time,” the Daily News reminds us, “Mantle died of cancer in 1995. In a moving eulogy, NBC sportscaster Bob Costas summed up the feelings of all Yankee fans when he said, ‘He was our guy.’”

Well, what better way to honour such an icon than to write a salacious “biographical novel” about him, “replete with pornographic passages and foul jokes”?

Peter Golenbock, the author of 7, didn’t talk to the Daily News. “But he told Publishers Weekly the book was based on Mantle stories he heard from other ex-Yankees. ‘My choice then became to write a biography and leave these stories out — but that wouldn’t be Mickey Mantle,’ he said. ‘It really didn’t leave me any other choice.’”

Of course, neither the Mantle family nor Mantle fans are all that impressed. After all, how could anyone doubt “not documentable” anecdotes that probably arose from the scout’s-honour venue of the locker room?

The Daily News spoke with Bob Thompson, a professor at Syracuse University and “pop culture expert” who said, “what Golenbock has done ‘has a long literary tradition…. I’ve read novels with Ronald Reagan as a major character,’ he said. ‘What makes this different is No. 1, it’s Mickey Mantle, and No. 2, it’s Judith Regan.’”

Yeah, that pretty much sums it up.

Related links:
Click here for the full story, including an excerpt from 7

Manic cartoon pigs and other cookbook standards

It’s not every cookbook article that can reasonably be titled “Serious Cookbook, Manic Pig,” but from the sounds of it, Au Pied de Cochon — The Album isn’t your average cookbook. As The New York Times reports, the cookbook created by chef Martin Picard and the staff of his Montreal restaurant is not exactly typical of the genre.

For one thing, it was self-published, and the first press run of 6,000 copies sold out in three weeks. For another, it was written by Picard and the staff of Au Pied de Cochon over two years on Mondays, the restaurant’s weekly day of closure.

As a result, the group had the freedom to do pretty much whatever they wanted: “How else could they open the book with a photograph of Mr. Picard in a meat locker, slugging a split pig as if it’s a punching bag while his shirtless staff watches? Would a big publisher have let them include a picture of the barrel-chested Mr. Picard wearing nothing but a regal sash under the title ‘PDC Food Porn,’ or a portrait of the dishwashers acknowledging their hard work, or a phone message from an unhappy diner with choice words for Mr. Picard?”

The illustrations, by waiter Tom Tassel, include “a manic pig with a missing foot” who “hobbles around with a glass of wine, falls in love with a roasted Guinea hen, sucks sap out of a maple tree and, next to a recipe for a cookie with an off-color name, loses consciousness under a nun’s habit.”

Related links:
Read more about Au Pied de Cochon at the Times

Booze, books, and work obligations

In today’s National Post, Samantha Grice talks to authors Noel Boivin and Christopher Lombardo about their new book, The Man Who Scared a Shark to Death and Other True Tales of Drunken Debauchery (Penguin Canada). The piece focuses on how to avoid making an ass of oneself at the inevitable office holiday party.

“While it’s tempting to take full advantage of the free bar in an effort to lessen the pain of a co-worker’s dancing or a higher-up’s groping, caution and moderation when surrounded by the people who sign your paycheques (and pink slips) is advised. ‘It doesn’t work out well for anyone in the book who gets into the sauce while their employers are around,’ says Boivin, pointing to the first story in the compilation as evidence.”

As Grice reports, Lombardo “declines all office Christmas party invites as a matter of practice,” ostensibly to avoid any potential for misbehaviour. Funny, then, that the story opens with this anecdote from their book launch:

“It’s as though they learned nothing from their research. At one point during the launch party for their book, [...] Noel Boivin and Christopher Lombardo found themselves in a Guinness chug-off. It’s illuminating that they both recall taking second place (first place was won by a girl, but in their defence she was drinking lager) and the following day was painful.

‘I didn’t make it into work and I feel mildly guilty about that,’ says Lombardo. ‘It would be one thing if I couldn’t drag my carcass out of bed for the morning, but I work in the evening and by 5 p.m. I still couldn’t make it. But I thought that was what was expected of me — I’m the drinking author guy so I had to play up the part.’”

Related links:
Click here for the story at the National Post

Ian McEwan, still not off the hook

After Ian McEwan was (sort of) accused of plagiarism, all kinds of big name authors came to his defence. But not everyone has been convinced by the razzmatazz lineup of defenders, which includes Thomas Pynchon, Margaret Atwood, Zadie Smith, and Martin Amis.

Jack Shafer at Slate, for one, remains completely unswayed. “As a long-time magazine and newspaper editor,” he writes, “I’d have no trouble firing McEwan for writing as he did if he worked for me.”

Shafer argues that McEwan’s defenders, who claim that every novelist worth his weight in newsprint undertakes research in the same manner as McEwan, are merely making an empty gesture. “If McEwan really did nothing out of the ordinary, the authors campaigning for him would do him a great service to note the passages in their own books that rooked from historical sources in a similar manner. Don’t hold your breath.”

After a brief interlude in which he admits that the charge of “Plagiarist!” never really seems to cause the accused the harm it should, Shafer engages in a passage comparison, examining two remarkably similar sentences, one from Ludmilla Andrews’ memoir, the other from McEwan’s Atonement.

His unimpressed conclusion: “I detect no mash-up here, no adding of value, and no ‘creative use,’ to quote Pynchon’s generous letter of support. McEwan helps himself to Andrews’ words as if they first appeared on the planet in one of his rough drafts. To protest, as he does, that her memoir served as ‘research’ is a lie. McEwan rewrote Andrews’ vivid copy and called it his own. The laugh of larceny is that the Booker Prize-winner didn’t even improve it.”

Related links:
Read the full story at Slate

A blog posting describing what happened to the title of a book of illustrations that shows what happens on each page of a novel by Thomas Pynchon

Thinking about illustrating a favourite novel, then publishing the illustrations in book form? Be prepared to get longwinded with the title.

Artist Zak Smith created a series of illustrations for Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow that featured one drawing for every page of the novel. Publisher Tin House Books, efficiently and elegantly, was calling the book Gravity’s Rainbow Illustrated: One Picture for Every Page. But, as GalleyCat points out, once Penguin, Pynchon’s publisher, found out about the title, they made some noises of dissatisfaction that resulted in this: “Tin House is changing the title back to what Smith called his exhibition of the artwork during the 2004 Whitney Biennial, Pictures Showing What Happened on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon’s Novel Gravity’s Rainbow, and is slapping stickers on as many of the 5,000 paperbacks they still have sitting in a PGW warehouse.”

Related links:
Read the GalleyCat post here

NY bookstores pass the smell test

In the travel section of today’s Globe and Mail, Montreal writer David McGimpsey walks us through a day of book shopping in New York City. McGimpsey visits all sorts of bookstores — from small indies to university bookshops, from kids’ stores to the big chains, he does not discriminate.

Well, except on one point: “Big or small, I do insist that all bookstores worth visiting must smell good. The potential for a moldy, newsprinty smell is so strong in a bookstore, you really have to appreciate those toasty places that somehow smell like a bakery at Christmastime.”

What? Not everyone likes the smell of musty old paperbacks?

Related links:
Take a tour of New York’s bookstores here

The walking novelist

Aside from writing books, Will Self also takes walks. Epic walks.

The New York Times devotes ink and a photo slideshow to documenting Self’s 20-mile trek from New York’s Kennedy airport to his hotel. Accompanied on this walk by Times writer Charles McGrath, Self smokes hand-rolled cigarettes with the help of a classy cigarette holder, stops for lunch, and waxes philosophic about walking.

“‘People don’t know where they are anymore,’ he said, adding: ‘In the post-industrial age, this is the only form of real exploration left. Anyone can go and see the Ituri pygmy, but how many people have walked all the way from the airport to the city?’”

It’s worth noting that in Self’s latest book, The Book of Dave, the main character, a London taxi driver, leaves the city and takes a long walk to the country as part of his healing process.

Although there are hints that on this six-hour journey Self and McGrath talked about books, including Self’s latest, the article is more concerned with Self’s new hobby. “‘Alcohol and drugs tend to keep you from taking walks,’ he said while in New York. ‘Or at least walks of the right kind,’ and he added that walking made him feel better than drugs ever had. ‘But I’m not addicted,’ he said. ‘I don’t need to score a walk.’”

Related links:
Follow Self’s footsteps at the Times

Douglas Coupland and the curse blessing of the Blackberry Pearl

Douglas Coupland can add celebrity endorser to his list of roles. The Vancouver author, screenwriter, artist, and all-around Renaissance dude is one of the five “extraordinary people” endorsing Rogers’ Blackberry Pearl.

Not only does the product’s website feature a still of one of these phones with a shot of Coupland on its screen (how deliciously meta) but by clicking on it, you can discover all of the exciting things he does with his new toy, and at what time he does them. For even more Coupland-Blackberry fun, watch a video in which he extols the product’s virtues and tells us that the Blackberry is a part of the future finally feeling like the future that was promised by sci-fi — “I mean, just the fact that I can get e-mail in a parking lot is sexy,” he tells us.

In addition to perusing Coupland’s technological, company-approved itinerary, you can also take a look at a posting on flickr photo sharing titled, “WTF douglas coupland!?” that features, in addition to a shot of a two-page magazine ad of Coupland, Blackberry in hand, a thread of outraged fans bemoaning his corporate stint.

(Thanks for the tip, Bookninja.com.)

Related links:
To see Douglas Coupland’s Blackberry, visit this website, then click the “LIFE” button.
The magazine ad and flickr conversation are here