A mild controversy may be brewing around Malcolm Gladwell, the Canadian journalist and bestselling author of Blink and The Tipping Point, and a New Yorker staff writer.

The dispute arose after The New Republic’s cantankerous literary editor, Leon Wieseltier, passingly referred to Gladwell as an “idiot” on his blog. Basically, Gladwell’s popularity rubs Wieseltier the wrong way, and he ascribes it to a general decline in American ideas: “The language of business is now the smart language. This society is surrendering not to economics but to economicism, which is what happens when economics settles where it does not belong,” he writes.

In response, New York Times blogger Barry Gewen hesitantly stepped up in Gladwell’s defence:

Now, Malcolm Gladwell’s books can certainly be criticized for a superficial and homiletic sheen, but their author is anything but an “idiot.” Gladwell has ferreted out some fascinating research and translated it into language that makes it accessible to millions of readers. He is a very capable popularizer.

Here’s what Gewen has to say about Wieseltier:

The chattering classes have long complained about how talk radio and the shouting contests that pass for political commentary on television have lowered the tone of discourse in America…. So it’s dismaying when [Wieseltier] takes the same kind of bullying cheap shot, and in one of our leading intellectual publications, that one expects from, and dislikes in, a Rush Limbaugh or Bill O’Reilly.

Who says booksellers are the last guardians of good taste in an ever-more tawdry world?

From AbeBooks:

Welcome to the Hooker Prize – in honor of Elliot Spitzer and his fall from grace in a New York minute, AbeBooks.com has compiled a list of 10 recommended non-fiction reads about hookers, madams, high-class callgirls and prostitutes. Prostitution, of course, is the oldest profession in the world and has fascinated readers for centuries. Since the 1970s, there has been a wealth of memoirs from ‘ladies of the night’ so here’s the literary lowdown on the callgirl culture.

Yes, The Happy Hooker by Xavier Hollander is #1.

Coinciding with World Book Day, celebrated yesterday in the U.K., Faber and Faber publisher Steven Page added his voice to the chorus of supporters of new technology, in an op-ed piece in The Guardian. But unlike most Web 2.0 evangelicals, Page brings to the debate the ornery tone of an old-school pedant and snob, arguing in his somewhat muddled rant – in which he deftly drops a pitch for Faber’s new line of print-on-demand titles – that the digital future is a chance for serious, thoughtful writers to reclaim the publishing landscape from grubby Joe Public – with his incorrigible taste for celebrity gossip and “misery memoirs.”

“Technology, often feared by the bookish world, is a growing friend,” writes Page.

Global communities are gathering around common interests online, just as intellectuals gathered in cafes in 1900s Vienna. They are gloriously beyond corporate control and naturally antipathetic to the reductive mass market. We are only at the beginning of this social revolution. I am not an advocate of the life led online, but as broadband reaches all generations, genders and income brackets, so this will develop usefully…. Literature can thrive in these places.

And while Page’s overall perspective is fairly astute, it does read as though he is still somewhat flabbergasted by this newfangled Internet thingy: “We must provide content that can be searched and browsed, and create extra materials – interviews, podcasts and the like.”

Seems like a weak cocktail for reviving High Art.

James Wolcott has a post up today about the relative lack of Mailer content in The New Yorker over the past six decades or so – Louis Menand’s pithy obituary notwithstanding.

Wolcott pulls a quote out of Mailer’s book Armies of the Night to help explain the scarcity:

Although [critic Dwight MacDonald] would not admit it, he was in secret carrying on a passionate love affair with The New Yorker – Disraeli on his knees before Victoria. But the Novelist [Mailer] did not share Macdonald’s infatuation at all – The New Yorker had not printed a line in review of The Presidential Papers, An American Dream, or Cannibals and Christians, and that, Mailer had long ago decided, was an indication of some of the worst things to be said about the magazine. He had once had a correspondence with Lillian Ross who asked him why he did not do a piece for The New Yorker. “Because they would not let me use the word ’shit,’” he had written back. Miss Ross suggested that all liberty was his if only he understood where liberty resided. True liberty, Mailer had responded, consisted of his right to say shit in The New Yorker.

Wolcott notes that, these days, “all manner of shit is said in The New Yorker, and nobody minds, not even the senior nuns.”

(By the way, you can say “shit” in Q&Q.)

The death of Norman Mailer elicited tons of reaction over the weekend. Here are just some of the obituaries, personal reminiscences, and other items – not all of it positive, obviously.

• The New York Times
• Toronto Star
• Los Angeles Times
  
• The New Yorker
• James Wolcott
• Robert Fulford in the National Post
• The Guardian’s book blog
• Salon
• New York Post (”Literary Pug and Original Hipster Mailer, 84, Dies”)
• Christopher Hitchens in Slate

Here’s a shocker: Bill O’Reilly said something incredibly stupid on his show yesterday, something that would be offensive if it weren’t so laughably moronic.

This time, it was about J.K. Rowling’s recent claim that she felt Dumbledore was gay – a claim that sent a chorus of shrugs through her legions of young readers.

Here’s what O’Reilly had to say about the whole kerfuffle, according to Think Progress:

Bill O’Reilly joined in the fray, asking if Dumbledore’s outing was part of the “gay agenda” of “indoctrination” of “children.” O’Reilly claimed that by dropping “the gay bomb,” Rowling is a “provocateur” who is “going to let all hell break loose.”

O’Reilly made clear he didn’t think Dumbledore’s sexual preference was a case of just one queer apple in an otherwise unspoiled basket. “Those wizards,” he said, “I’m very, very suspicious about what they’re doing in their spare time.”

For the morbidly curious, here’s what O’Reilly gets up to in his spare time. (Not for the faint of heart.)

The U.S. publishing house Dutton is about to release a memoir by James Lipton – host of Bravo’s Inside the Actors Studio – and the folks at Gawker have already proclaimed it possibly the “most gloriously horrendous book ever written”:

You have to love a man who starts the memoir of his middle-brow career with an epigraph by Chaucer, from The Canterbury Tales: “And gladly wolde he lerne and gladly teche.”

For anyone who isn’t familiar with him, Lipton is that celebrity interviewer with the pretentiously pointy beard and irksomely wire-rimmed glasses, the one who sits on a New York theatre stage with, say, Sally Field, asking her to elucidate the socio-political meanings of The Flying Nun. According to Amazon, Lipton’s other major book is a 1968 reference title called An Exaltation of Larks, which pretty much says it all. For a more trenchant critique of Lipton’s peculiarly irritating manner, however, see this Saturday Night Live sketch featuring Will Farrell.

The Bush administration has long been noted for the high literary tone maintained by its most powerful denizens. The president’s own voracious reading habits are well known, as is his fondness for employing complex Oulipian constraints in many of his public remarks, which some of his lesser-read critics have misinterpreted as mere malapropisms.

This tradition continues with the departure of Bush’s closest advisor, Karl Rove. In reference to Congress’s current subpoena-mad mindset, Rove had this to say: “I’m realistic enough to understand that the subpoenas are going to keep flying my way. I’m Moby Dick and we’ve got three or four members of Congress who are trying to cast themselves in the part of Captain Ahab — so they’re going to keep coming.”

Rove went on to compare the Washington press corps to Eliot’s The Hollow Men, “Leaning together/ Headpiece(s) filled with straw,” the controversy over warrantless wire-tapping to Kafka’s The Trial, and the situation in Iraq to the final act of Macbeth.

Christopher Hitchens on Harry Potter in The New York Times:

For all this apparently staunch secularism, it is ontology that ultimately slackens the tension that ought to have kept these tales vivid and alive. Theologians have never been able to answer the challenge that contrasts God’s claims to simultaneous omnipotence and benevolence: whence then cometh evil? The question is the same if inverted in a Manichean form: how can Voldemort and his wicked forces have such power and yet be unable to destroy a mild-mannered and rather disorganized schoolboy? In a short story this discrepancy might be handled and also swiftly resolved in favor of one outcome or another, but over the course of seven full-length books the mystery, at least for this reader, loses its ability to compel, and in this culminating episode the enterprise actually becomes tedious. Is there really no Death Eater or dementor who is able to grasp the simple advantage of surprise?

Stephen King on same in Entertainment Weekly:

One last thing: The bighead academics seem to think that Harry’s magic will not be strong enough to make a generation of non-readers (especially the male half) into bookworms … but they wouldn’t be the first to underestimate Harry’s magic; just look at what happened to Lord Voldemort. And, of course, the bigheads would never have credited Harry’s influence in the first place, if the evidence hadn’t come in the form of bestseller lists. A literary hero as big as the Beatles? ”Never happen!” the bigheads would have cried. ”The traditional novel is as dead as Jacob Marley! Ask anyone who knows! Ask us, in other words!”

Um, let’s call it a draw….

There should be a word for a book review that exists only as a venue for the reviewer’s own particular hobbyhorse – religion in Hitchens’ case, “bigheads” in King’s.

The me-view?

Journalist Alan Weisman has just published The World Without Us, a non-fiction tome based on an intriguing premise: how would the Earth change if the human population disappeared overnight? The book has already drawn some press, including this piece in Newsweek. And the Newsweek piece in turn has drawn the notice of shock jock Rush Limbaugh, who castigated both the book and the “Drive-By Media” (look alive, folks, he’s talking to us) on his radio show.

Quillblog is currently in the midst of reading The World Without Us, and can testify that it’s essentially a curious and dispassionate look at various aspects of ecology and biology, free of value judgments. But Limbaugh, who has clearly never so much as glanced at the book and apparently reached the limits of his comprehension skills just struggling through the Newsweek story, blusters that the article’s “about how great the planet could be again if we were just all wiped out, and it focuses on a guy who’s trying to accomplish that.” This shouldn’t need repeating, but just in case: Weisman is not some eco-terrorist.

Limbaugh froths on:

How does a guy write a story like this? Writing about some clown that wants to kill him, wipe him off the face the earth — and this Weisman guy, the subject of the story, acts like he’s not even part of the human race. “They,” “you,” but never “us,” in his words.

Actually, Weisman uses the first-person plural throughout the book. Starting with, um, the title.

The hit Hollywood comedy Knocked Up opened this past weekend to rave reviews and big box office. The movie is about a couple dealing with an unplanned pregnancy, and whatever the film’s strengths, no one could dispute that its premise is an old and well-worn one.

Except Canadian author Rebecca Eckler, who thinks they stole it from her.

In a long article in the latest Maclean’s, Eckler argues that the movie’s writer-director, Judd Apatow, ripped off her 2004 memoir of the same name, and explains that she’s suing Apatow and Universal Studios. The piece isn’t available online, but here are some of Eckler’s smoking guns:

The movie Knocked Up features a woman named Alison who becomes pregnant after getting drunk. While she gets drunk going out celebrating a promotion at work, I got drunk, and knocked up, celebrating at my engagement party. Both my book and the movie feature one night of passion and the nine months that follow. Fine. Whatever. But what got me was the fact that “Alison” was an up-and-coming television reporter; in my book I was an up-and-coming newspaper reporter.

Also, Eckler had a friend with kids, and the Alison character has a sister with kids. And both book and movie have scenes with multiple pregnancy tests. And, a-ha, the father in the movie is a Jewish Canadian, just like the father of Eckler’s child. (And, um, also just like Seth Rogen, the actor who plays the film father.)

Maybe it’s just Quillblog, but this nonsense seems equivalent to one mystery writer suing another because both of their books open with mysterious murders, or because both of their cop heroes tend to buck departmental bureaucracy. A warning to comedy writers out there: if you’re working on a gag in which someone has to buy something embarrassing at the supermarket and the cashier calls for a price check on the store PA system, you better make sure Eckler hasn’t used that one – if she has, she’ll think you nicked it from her.

Oh, and in her Maclean’s piece Eckler refers to an infamous e-mail blowout between Apatow and another TV producer, Mark Brazill, implying that the dispute is evidence of Apatow’s thieving ways. Readers should probably check out the whole thing and decide for themselves, though.

Finally, on a completely unrelated note, the very same issue of Maclean’s has an article called “Courting trouble with misblurbs,” about an interesting legal development in the U.K.: “Misquote a critic to sell more tickets or books, and you could face jail time in Britain.”

American politicians keep on fighting over Bruce Springsteen lyrics. A memoir by Tom DeLay, the controversial former Republican whip, is about to be released under the title No Retreat, No Surrender. As the ABC News website reports, that title appears to be borrowed from Bruce Springsteen’s song “No Surrender” – which John Kerry used to rally the Democrat troops during his 2004 presidential campaign.

A DeLay spokesperson claims that the former Congressman was inspired by a Spartan rallying cry, not by the Boss (and as luck would have it, apparently “no retreat, no surrender” is bellowed at some point in the new Spartariffic movie 300). The article notes that Jean-Claude van Damme also appeared in a 1986 action film called No Retreat, No Surrender, though strangely DeLay isn’t claiming that as an influence.

Nor is DeLay’s book the first or most egregious case of Springsteen appropriation. Ronald Reagan famously invoked the then-current “Born in the U.S.A.” during the 1984 presidential campaign – an odd choice, since the song’s about an embittered Vietnam vet who feels betrayed by his country.

In any case, Quillblog’s favourite bit in the ABC News article is this one:

The refrain of the song is, according to Springsteen’s website, “No retreat No surrender,” just like DeLay’s book. It should be noted, however that there is some debate on the Internet over whether Springsteen utters a “believe me” or a “baby” between the phrases “no retreat” and “no surrender.”

“Baby.” Definitely “baby.”

Apparently, the war in Iraq has a lot in common with a recently adapted-for-film fantasy trilogy. As Salon.com reports, Rick Santorum, “embattled Pennsylvania senator, […] has equated the war in Iraq with J.R.R Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.”

“‘As the hobbits are going up Mount Doom, the Eye of Mordor is being drawn somewhere else,’ Santorum said. ‘It’s being drawn to Iraq and it’s not being drawn to the U.S. You know what? I want to keep it on Iraq. I don’t want the Eye to come back here to the United States.’”

Related links:
Read the full story at Salon (you’ll have to watch a brief movie trailer to get there)

The New York Times confirms a story that appeared on Radaronline.com earlier this week that “James Frey, the author who admitted making up portions of his best-selling memoir, A Million Little Pieces, and his publisher, Random House, have agreed in principle on a settlement with readers who filed lawsuits claiming they had been defrauded.”

The Times relies on an anonymous source for details of the settlement because it has yet to be approved by a judge, but states that “consumers who bought the book on or before Jan. 26 – when both the publisher and author released statements acknowledging that Mr. Frey had altered certain facts – will be eligible for a full refund.” If you didn’t keep your receipt, the publisher will accept some other proofs of purchase such as a particular page of the hardcover novel or the paperback’s front cover.

Quillblog prefers the more creative terms set out in a mock memo from Random House on Edward Champion’s Return of the Reluctant blog. The memo promises a refund of $4.24 for anyone returning the dust jacket with a hand-drawn moustache on the author’s photo, and a special offer: “If you send us a videotape, a VCD, or a DVD, in which you can demonstrate that you led or coerced a group of people to throw at least 200 copies into a public bonfire, we would like to offer you a promising career here at Random House.”

Related links:
Click here for the full story in The New York Times
Click here for Edward Champion’s Return of the Reluctant blog

Here at In Other Media, controversy makes us as giddy as the recipients of brand new puppies on Valentine’s Day morning. In the last month or so, we linked to as many stories on James Frey as there were alleged lies in his book A Million Little Pieces. Now, on this side of the border, we have a little bookish hilarity to call our own.

Yesterday, we linked to a review in the Sunday Toronto Star in which writer and reviewer Ryan Bigge scoured the English and German lexicons for words to describe just how bad he thought Leah McLaren’s debut novel, The Continuity Girl, was. Today we combed the archives to find the article that may have started it all: a column featured in The Globe and Mail in 2001, written by one Ms. McLaren about Bigge’s debut, A Very Lonely Planet: Love, Sex and the Single Guy. Like Bigge did in his review of The Continuity Girl, McLaren chose not to review the book so much as defame its writer. To this end, McLaren used more than half of her column to define a term that she coined and that no one ever used again. Lurpers, she writes, are the angry young men of the 21st century – cynics who have a hate-on for all that they don’t have but secretly want: “success, confidence, fame, money, sex, charm, recognition, art, conversational ease, style, respect, drugs, a sense of wonder…. He is Holden Caulfield 10 years later, a grown boy, who in the words of Philip Roth, approaches life ‘with all the arrogance of someone who has succeeded at nothing.’”

“Like so many Lurpers, Bigge is an established legend in his own mind. He even has his own Web site to prove it. His first book, A Very Lonely Planet: Love, Sex and the Single Guy, will be published by Vancouver small press Arsenal Pulp this month. The title could actually be Anatomy of a Hard-up Lurper.”

Ouch. From whence comes such a personal attack? Do these two know each other? Couldn’t McLaren, who has now written of a childless woman, have had sympathy instead of vitriol for the perpetually single Bigge? One thing seems clear: riffling through the discount tables at Pages the other day, In Other Media found copies of Bigge’s book. We can all be somewhat sure that, someday, in that very same spot, will be McLaren’s. So can’t we all just get along?

Related links:
Click here for McLaren’s review of A Very Lonely Planet, as featured on Bigge’s website
Click here to read comments posted in response to yesterday’s installment of the McLaren-Bigge feud

William Safire has a funny piece on the International Herald Tribune site on the unique lexicography of book blurbs. Safire points out that in the “throbbing universe of book promotion … we have a language that treats lesser-known authors like stars shooting toward the firmament of literary fame,” then provides readers with a handy guide to decoding blurbspeak: “Acclaimed, in this fulsome lingo of book ads and catalogs, now means merely ‘the author received at least one good review.’ Widely acclaimed means ‘two or more, plus a cable TV plug.’ Critically acclaimed means ‘it was decently reviewed in a specialized publication but didn’t sell.’” (Thanks to goodreports.net for the link.)

Related links:
Read William Safire’s piece on blurbspeak

Earlier this year, Amazon inadvertently outed a number of authors who’d posted glowing “customer reviews” of their own books, or their friends’ books. Now the online bookselling giant’s reviews section is in the news again; horror author Anne Rice has posted a lengthy rant in rebuttal to several negative assessments of her latest book, Blood Canticle.

In a very long posting free of paragraph breaks, Rice lambastes her critics’ “hateful and ugly responses” and “stupid arrogant assumptions.” She also offers to refund money, directing unsatisfied readers to return their copies of Blood Canticle directly to her and even supplying her home address.

And as Judy Stoffman in the Toronto Star drily sums up: “Rice praises herself for the effort she puts into polishing her prose and reveals that she refuses to be edited.”

Rice’s posting has of course inspired further, ah, dialogue on the Amazon.com site. Writes one recent customer reviewer: “Anne, for someone who does not need an editor, you need to understand the very basic rules of netiquette and page breaks. Your writings here were a disaster, and I daresay most of your books, up to and including this one are also a disaster.”

Related links:
Toronto Star piece on Anne Rice’s Amazon posting
Amazon.com’s Blood Canticle page