July 31, 2007 | 10:24 AM | By Megan Grittani-Livingston
New York arts blogger Terry Teachout has posted a wonderful anecdote told by Edith Wharton about Henry James. It seems the Master’s complex writing style carried over into his speech, and, as one might expect, it got in the way when asking simple things.
According to Wharton’s 1934 autobiography, the two authors got themselves lost while rattling around the village of Windsor in her motor car, and James asked an old man on the road for directions.
“My good man, if you’ll be good enough to come here, please; a little nearer–so,” and as the old man came up: “My friend, to put it to you in two words, this lady and I have just arrived here from Slough; that is to say, to be more strictly accurate, we have recently passed through Slough on our way here, having actually motored to Windsor from Rye, which was our point of departure; and the darkness having overtaken us, we should be much obliged if you would tell us where we now are in relation, say, to the High Street, which, as you of course know, leads to the Castle, after leaving on the left hand the turn down to the railway station.”
I was not surprised to have this extraordinary appeal met by silence, and a dazed expression on the old wrinkled face at the window; nor to have James go on: “In short” (his invariable prelude to a fresh series of explanatory ramifications), “in short, my good man, what I want to put to you in a word is this: supposing we have already (as I have reason to think we have) driven past the turn down to the railway station (which in that case, by the way, would probably not have been on our left hand, but on our right) where are we now in relation to…”
“Oh, please,” I interrupted, feeling myself utterly unable to sit through another parenthesis, “do ask him where the King’s Road is.”
“Ah–? The King’s Road? Just so! Quite right! Can you, as a matter of fact, my good man, tell us where, in relation to our present position, the King’s Road exactly is?”
Because there is nothing more important going on in the world than the drunken, drugged-up antics of a talented young actress barely out of her teens, below is a version of Allen Ginsberg’s “HOWL,” adapted specially for Ms. Lohan. “I’ve seen the best actresses of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, drunk,/driving through the streets of Beverly Hills at dawn looking for a place to crash.”
Weirdly enough, or perhaps appropriately enough, it ends up being kind of sympathetic.
It’s not new or anything, but Clive James’ poem “The Book of my Enemy Has Been Remaindered” is a Quillblog favourite that will undoubtedly resonate with anyone who works in the book biz.
The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am pleased.
In vast quantities it has been remaindered
Like a van-load of counterfeit that has been seized
And sits in piles in a police warehouse,
My enemy’s much-prized effort sits in piles
In the kind of bookshop where remaindering occurs.
Those are just the opening lines. The New York Times‘ book blog, Paper Cuts, has posted the poem in its entirety; the hook is Norton’s announcement that it will issue a retrospective collection of James’ poetry, to be called Opal Sunset, next year.
May 29, 2007 | 10:21 AM | By Megan Grittani-Livingston
High-five, book world – CBC Online and Entertainment Weekly are reporting that British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, the madman behind the Borat character, has signed a book deal with the Random House/Doubleday imprint Flying Dolphin Press.
In the voice of the “Kazakhstani” “journalist,” Cohen will write a pair of books entitled Borat: Touristic Guidings to Minor Nation of U.S. and A and Borat: Touristic Guidings to Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. The former is billed as a guide to the U.S. for Kazakhstani travellers, and the latter will supposedly introduce Americans to Borat’s version of his home country (with a strong adherence to truth, reality, and decency, if the movie is any indication).
The website for Flying Dolphin says the publisher prints “a tightly focused list of high-quality non-fiction with occasional fiction titles. Great emphasis is placed on the quality of the writing as well as the subject matter which encompasses people and/or ideas central to contemporary culture.” Quillblog can see how the Borat titles will fit right in with that. As long as he can keep himself from talking about his sexytimes with Pamela Anderson.
The Guardian has posted a blog by William Skidelsky in which he takes issue with the seeming lack of comedy in modern fiction. The impetus for the essay was the list of 21 top young authors unveiled by Granta magazine last month.
…of the 21 best young novelists in America, not one is producing work that makes people laugh. Isn’t this more than a little peculiar? It isn’t as if the comic novel doesn’t have a distinguished pedigree. Many of the acknowledged greats have been comedies, from Cervantes’ Don Quixote in the early 17th century, via Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy to Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 in the 20th. So what’s going on?
Skidelsky’s column leaves you with the impression that there aren’t a lot of respected comic novelists around right now, which is a dubious assertion. Has he never read Tom Perrotta? Ken Kalfus? Not to mention Mark Haddon, Jincy Willett, Miriam Toews, Marina Lewycka, etc, etc. But if Skidelsky is simply trying to say that “serious” novelists get more respect, then the argument begins to look a little more plausible.
It’s when he tries to explain why we place a higher value on serious literature that he really begins to sound bogus. Quoting heavily from an essay by writer Julian Gough, Skidelsky argues that there are two main reasons: 1) That “far more tragedies survived from ancient times than comedies, and since many western writers have taken the Greeks as their model, this has resulted in tragedy being favoured over comedy.” And 2) Christianity.
The one church spoke in one voice, drawn from one book, and that book was at heart tragic. All of human history, from the creation, was a story that climaxed with the sadistic murder of a man by those he was trying to save. Essentially, the church had to crush the comic impulse because it was so vulnerable to it. If people had started making jokes about Jesus, the entire edifice would have collapsed.
So if it weren’t for Christianity, we would all be worshiping Aristophanes, not Jesus? And instead of wearing crucifixes around our necks we’d be wearing rubber chickens?
If there is a shortage of comic novels these days – and that’s a big if – the reasons are probably a lot less fancy than those supplied by Skidelsky. Isn’t it more likely that, in North America, we are just so up to our eyeballs in comedy that novelists can’t help but feel that the comedic terrain is already well-covered? When every ad on TV is attempting to be a 30-second comedy classic, when every billboard displays a clever double-entendre, when every politician feels the need to appear on Jon Stewart to appeal to the under-40 generation, maybe a little more seriousness is finally in order.
One of the 21 authors that Skidelsky erroneously labels “unhumorous” is Jonathan Safran Foer, who spends at least the first half of Everything is Illuminated in flat-out humor mode. But then the novel takes an abrupt turn about halfway through. Quillblog doesn’t have the book at hand, but we recall the kooky Ukrainian narrator, Alex, suddenly announcing that he is tired of treating everything as a joke, that maybe comic detachment isn’t the ultimate attitude to aspire to. And from this point on, Foer himself becomes more serious, and the novel improves immensely for it. This is probably where a lot of young writers are coming from now; they’ve spent their lives being tickled to death, and they’re ready for something more.
As the L.A. Times reports, today marks Avril Lavigne’s foray into the publishing world as the imaginary friend and conscience of an unhappy teenaged girl in a two-volume manga comic.
Published by Del Ray, Avril Lavigne’s Make 5 Wishes is written by Joshua Dysart – the punk princess served as creative consultant on the project. She is, of course, doing it for the fans.
Lavigne’s official website includes a link to “Avril Manga episodes,” which stream images from the comic accompanied by instrumental versions of songs from her new album. Fans can also post their own five wishes.
The first volume hit stores today, but Lavigne’s fans will have to wait until July for, like, the best damn conclusion.
A story in Sunday’s New York Times outlines the recent, unexpected discovery made by many authors and book publicists in the U.S.: when it comes to getting interviewed on television, you are better off with the likes of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert than with, say, Regis Philbin or even Charlie Rose.
Take Muhammad Yunus, the Bangladeshi “banker to the poor” who recently appeared on “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” on Comedy Central after it was announced that he had won the Nobel Peace Prize.
“Tell me about microfinancing and microlending,” Mr. Stewart asked earnestly. “Because there’s a theory that you developed through your work in economics that has really proven to be incredibly effective in fighting poverty.”Mr. Stewart has also interviewed Ishmael Beah, the young Sierra Leonian who just published “A Long Way Gone,” a memoir about his wrenching experience as a child soldier; Jeffrey Rosen, the George Washington University law professor who wrote “The Supreme Court: The Personalities and Rivalries That Defined America”; and Vali Nasr, the Middle East expert who was promoting “The Shia Revival,” an examination of ethnic conflict in Iraq.
Since when did microlending, global poverty, constitutional law and civil wars in Africa become topics for frank discussion on fake-news comedy shows?
A press release from the Halifax-based Nimbus Publishing announced today that author Lesley Choyce has just uploaded the first installment of his three-part “animal epic film” to YouTube. The Skunk Whisperer was filmed in 2002 – and was subsequently screened at that year’s Maine International Film Festival, apparently – and has since been spun off into a children’s picture book entitled Skunks for Breakfast.
Curious, Quillblog took a look and found a somewhat bizarre – okay, totally bizarre – 10-minute documentary about the Choyce family and how it was stalked and terrorized by a skunk. One by one, each member of the family recounts their part in what will presumably be revealed, in the subsequent installments, as a man-versus-animal donnybrook for the ages.
According to Nimbus, the second installment will be uploaded tomorrow (Feb. 15), and the third sometime before the end of the month.
Scott Baio – who played Chachi on Happy Days, Charles on Charles in Charge, and … um, that’s pretty much it, actually – is currently shopping around a tell-all memoir, BaioWatch: How I Dated and Loved Hollywood’s Most Beautiful Women and Ended Up Alone, about his life as a former star and notorious ladies’ man. According to a story on canada.com, Baio ended a relationship with Canada’s own Pamela Anderson when she expressed interest in a breast-enhancement.
“One day Pamela came home and said, ‘I’m thinking of getting my boobs done.’ Admittedly, I was surprised. My initial response, ‘Reduced?’ She already had large, beautiful, natural breasts,” [Baio] recalls. “At that moment I knew our relationship would soon begin to crumble. Pamela had finally gone Hollywood – or whatever it is that happens when a woman becomes a hot celebrity.”
Baio also talks about losing his virginity to Erin Moran (who played Joanie on Happy Days) and being asked by Liza Minelli to father her child.
On the evidence, it’s hard to say what Baio will get first: a new girlfriend or a publishing contract, though it’s probably fair to say that no one was sadder to see Judith Regan go.
When trying to get published, many writers become familiar with the old adage, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” But if that doesn’t work, maybe they should try The Rejected Fiction Writing Contest.
The contest, being held by The Rejected Quarterly (“First in the field of rejection since 1998”), only accepts work that has been rejected at least five times. The submissions require proof of rejection – so no trying to sneak in something that only two publishers have turned down, you haven’t suffered enough.
The contest offers a cash prize, but the real reward is that ever-elusive goal of publication. The top three stories will be published in the magazine. Fingers-crossed, sixth-time’s the charm.
BoingBoing.net directs us to “The Devil’s Publishing Dictionary,” a collaboration between two book bloggers to give a set of common publishing terms more accurate definitions. All of the entries are of the “funny cuz it’s true” sort, but here are some of the highlights:
Advance Reading Copies: A prepublication edition of the book that is distinguishable from regular editions by having no price on the cover, and by costing the publisher more per copy than the reviewers will ever realize by selling them at the Strand or on eBay.
Agents: Even the best authors will eventually write themselves out and fall from favor. Even the best editors will lose their jobs to corporate mergers. But successful agents go on forever, and the really successful ones have lovely summer homes. Try to impress this on your children’s minds when they’re planning their future careers.
Earn Out: To the author, proof that the publisher didn’t pay enough for the book.
Mid-list: What other authors are who sell as well as you do, but don’t have your inherent talent or obvious commercial promise.
And, closest to Quillblog’s hearts:
Reviewer: A person who by virtue of their position must either disappoint their readers, or the authors they review. The ones who satisfy their readers keep their jobs.
Read Ambrose Bierce’s original The Devil’s Dictionaryhere.
Stephen King is the U.K.’s favourite guilty pleasure read, as reported in The Guardian. In a survey conducted for the Costa Book Awards 2006, King topped a list that included J.K. Rowling, John Grisham, and Dan Brown (the latter two tied).
The article includes a quote from Simon Trewin, a contributing author to The Encyclopaedia of Guilty Pleasures: 1001 Things You Hate to Love, noting that in general we prefer to read a book in public “that makes us look good.” And Quillblog noticed that Guardian reporter Peter Bradshaw’s own blog included a New Year’s resolution to finish reading Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and a future goal of tackling Hermann Broch.
But if guilty reading pleasures are ruling the day, perhaps it’s Bradshaw who will need to mask his high-brow literary tastes with the faux book covers Costa provided for download.
Elvis Costello once said his work was mainly driven by “guilt and revenge.” That apparently goes for Michael Crichton, too, if you replace “guilt” with “environmental catastrophe denial.” As The New York Times reports, Crichton has apparently used his new novel, Next, to settle a score — in the most ham-fisted manner possible.
Earlier this year, Washington political columnist and Yale grad Michael Crowley wrote a piece in The New Republic criticizing Crichton’s attempts to influence public policy regarding the environment. And now, the newly published Next features a throwaway reference to a character named “Mick Crowley,” who just happens to be a Washington political columnist and Yale grad. Oh, and who also just happens to be awaiting trial for sexually assaulting a two-year-old. Oh, and who’s also, um, poorly endowed.
Well, maybe Crichton feels better now, anyway.
Crowley has written about the “literary hit and run” on the New Republic site, but you need a subscription to read it. The Times also has a recap.
The London Review of Books boasts some of the most hilariously bizarre personal ads. David Rose, advertising director at the twice-monthly literary journal, has compiled “some of his favourite ads” in They Call Me Naughty Lola: Personal Ads from the London Review of Books. As the New York Times reports, the following ad made the cut: “Bald, short, fat and ugly male, 53, seeks short-sighted woman with tremendous sexual appetite. Box no. 9612.”
While the ads are “weird in the extreme,” the Times suggests “they are also peculiarly English.” Kate Fox, a cultural anthropologist who wrote Watching the English, spoke to that: “‘An advertising campaign focusing exclusively on the disgust people feel for your product strikes a lot of people as perverse,’ Ms. Fox said in an interview. But when Britons exaggerate their faults, she said, they are really telegraphing their attributes.”
Just in time for tonight’s Giller gala, Shinan Govani covered the more gossipy side of the event in yesterday’s Post. Focusing on “Giller virgins,” ie, those who’ve never been to the event before, Govani mentioned Justin Trudeau, host of the evening, Trudeau’s wife Sophie Gregoire, and … a two-week old baby. Carolyn Weaver, co-host of Fine Print, though not a Giller virgin herself, will be bringing her son Thorne to the festivities, as Govani related in typically effusive prose.
Oh, and the Giller finalists got a mention: “Meanwhile, there are some very expectant authors who’ll be in the spotlight, too.”
This week, there’s something even weirder than usual appearing on daytime TV. Marvel Comics has teamed up with long-running soap opera Guiding Light to produce a superhero-themed episode and an eight-page comic book.
According to The New York Times, “the episode is a mix of slapstick (a thief is shocked by the heroine, and his hair stands on end) and drama (are the powers worth possibly losing her husband?). Transitions between scenes feature comic book panels by Alex Chung,” the artist of “A New Light,” the eight-page comic that will commemorate the partnership.
As bizarre as this collaboration sounds, the Times does make the pretty good point that comic books and soaps do share “never-ending stories, characters with complex histories, and a preponderance of long-lost relatives (evil twins or otherwise).”
Still, Quillblog can’t help but chuckle at the still from the soap, with the hero, Guiding Light, clothed in an over-the-top silver lamé outfit and navy cape, straining to push a car.
Slate has a quiz up today entitled “Match the Porn With the Politician Who Wrote It!,” in which readers are given a dozen or so book excerpts, ranging from the steamy to the unsettling, and are asked to — as the title suggests — match them to the political figures who wrote them. Cadidates range from Jimmy Carter to Winston Churchill (who, interestingly enough, is not responsible for the excerpt that ends with the indelicate placement of a cigar).
Wired has a feature in its November issue on short short short fiction. Inspired by Hemingway, who wrote a six-word story (”For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”) that he’s said to have called his best work, they asked sci-fi writers and personalities to try their hands at the same feat.
Notable Canadian entries come from Atwood (”Longed for him. Got him. Shit.”) and Shatner (”Failed SAT. Lost scholarship. Invented rocket.”).
The online version of the story also includes 59 six-word tales that didn’t make it to print, including one from another Canadian, Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing, who spotted this link in the first place: “Batman Sues Batsignal: Demands Trademark Royalties.”
As you may or may not have heard, this year’s winner of the Man Booker Prize will be announced today. To bring busy would-be readers up to speed, The Guardian has a special Booker edition of its “Digested Reads” feature, in which all six shortlisted books are rewritten in the styles of the originals, but in extremely condensed form.
Our personal favourite has to be the digested version of The Inheritance of Loss, the portentously titled novel by Kiran Desai. It begins thus:
The description of the mist moving like a water creature across the great flanks of the Himalayas possessed of ocean shadows and depths told Sai that she had inadvertently found her way into a lyrical evocation of post- colonial multiculturalism. She picked up a copy of National Geographic. “That should add a nice post-modern ironic nod to globalisation,” she reckoned.
[Note: digested reads of the Giller prize shortlist — or of any other new Canadian book, for that matter — would be enthusiastically welcomed in the comment section below.]
Just think — one day, you could be reading this blog in book form. Wired reports today that “Blurb.com, a self-publishing startup, will invite 600 bloggers this week to test out its new service by creating a free bound copy of their blog.”
Blurb.com CEO Eileen Gittins is keen to cash in on the digital publishing trend and our blog-happy society. “Distribution in the publishing industry is becoming all about making a book discoverable across the web, increasing its visibility to potential readers,” she says. She also says, somewhat frighteningly, that “Blog is just one flavor of content we will slurp.” Yuck.
Either way, what bloggers will get is this: “An 8-by-10 full-color, hardcover book with custom dust jacket costs between $30 and $80 … [and will include features] like extensive customization options, an e-commerce storefront, and forthcoming tagging and metadata add-ons.”
HarperCollins, ever digitally conscious, weighs in — on both sides. Group president Brian Murray says, “The role of a 21st-century publisher is making books available offline and on,” while CEO Jane Friedman says, “self-publishing is little more than a vanity press.”
Harlan Ellison brought some much-needed scandale to the Hugos when he groped fellow sci-fi scribe Connie Willis and kissed her for good measure when accepting his Special Committee Award this week. He also put the microphone in his mouth.
(At least, we think that’s what happened: the picture at midamercon.org’s photo gallery shows a strange object protruding from Ellison’s maw pre-acceptance. Adding to the strangeness are the hammer and duct tape on the podium.)
The nerd blogs were up in arms over the incident denouncing Ellison as a “boorish pig” (Edward Champion’s Return of the Reluctant) and “taking all the fun out of being in the genre and not inspiring anyone with anything but horror and the urge to vomit and throw out their books.”
What Ellison needs is his own Marty McFly to teach him how to behave around a woman.
Yahoo! News is carrying a Reuters story today reporting that Günter Grass is getting a pat on the back from the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem for his decision “to waive restrictions on his Nazi archives so the center could investigate his time in Hitler’s Waffen-SS.”
Apparently, Germany has very strict data protection laws, which would keep the details of Grass’s recently unshadied past on lockdown, but the center’s appeal last week for full access melted Grass’s heart.
According to the story, Efraim Zuroff, head of the Wiesenthal Center, said in a statement, “While access to archives will certainly make a historical investigation easier, documents by themselves will not deliver a clear picture of his war service.”
The center has found that “press reports on his past have been contradictory” and hope the author will speak out to set the record straight once and for all by “giv[ing] details about the unit or units he belonged to and about any operations and his role during this time,” according to Zuroff.
PW Daily has a story about Sterling Publishers’ cashing in on the marketing behemoth that is Snakes on a Plane by churning out — wait for it — Snakes on a Sudoku.
According to the story, “Sudoku grids [feature] diagonally connected boxes, or ’snakes,’ slithering through the standard game board. (Or, as the house’s marketing copy describes it, ‘replaces the traditional 3×3 squares with deadly s-s-s-s-snakes.’). The idea for the title, which went to press for 40,000 copies and has, according to Sterling’s director of library and specialty marketing Chris Vaccari, sold 1,000 copies in its first three days on the market, grew out of a joke conceived by one of the house’s editors.”
The snake-y Sudoku puzzle first appeared on Sterling editor Francis Heaney’s blog back in March, leading to “a mention in an April 14 Entertainment Weekly cover story about the film and its unexpected online fan base …. Sterling managed to scrape together a licensing deal and enough snake-filled Sudokus to get their unusual addition to the SoaP (that’s the invented acronym of the title, to you non-fans) frenzy in front of readers in just enough time.”
The Financial Times reported last week that a U.S. news service has designed computer programs to write stories for them.
“Thomson Financial, the business information group, has been using computers to generate some stories since March and is so pleased with the results that it plans to expand the practice,” according to the article. “The computers work so fast that an earnings story can be released within 0.3 seconds of the company making results public.”
The computers pen stories about “whether a company has done better or worse than expected …. by using previous results in Thomson’s database.” They’ve been 100% accurate so far, but the stories are a wee bit on the dry side, so a project to integrate more adjectives into their programs is in the works.
Thomson’s senior vice-president of strategy says that using the computers will free up their reporters to “have more time to think.”
Yeah — more time to think about how a robot could steal their beat.
Literary Saloon links to a VietNamNet Bridge story on the difficulties Vietnamese publishers face.
Vietnam has been tightening control over copyrights in the wake of the ratification of the Bern Convention for Literary and Artistic Works, making it difficult for indigenous publishers to buy rights to foreign titles. Vietnamese publishers complain of having to exchange hundreds of e-mails with Western publishers to hammer out the details, a process which can take the better part of a year, and being forced to offer up cover designs, distribution plans, and cover prices before the Western publishers will agree to sell rights.
The googlewatch blog is reporting today that “publishers who want to make their books searchable online” now have a non-Google option to turn to. LibreDigital, ” a division of Newstand, which provides exact digital duplicates (layout included) of newspapers” is offering the first “service … to allow publishers to digitally capture and deliver book content in a controlled context online.”
“Publisher HarperCollins and Austin, Texas-based LibreDigital announced today a hosted service called LibreDigital Warehouse that will give publishers and booksellers the ability to deliver searchable book content on their own web sites. Like Google Book Search, the service will allow users to search the entire content of a book and preview a percentage of its text and illustrations,” according to the story. LibreDigital Warehouse has a leg up on Google because publishers can “customize which pages a user can view, which pages are always prohibited from viewing (such as the last three pages of a novel), and what overall percentage of a book is viewable. Publishers can customize these rules per title and per partner.”
Although Google is being sued by the Author’s Guild for their service, HarperCollins is going full-steam ahead with their new service, providing 160 to 200 titles initially and up to 10,000 titles in the future.
Peter Darbyshire, on his book blog for Vancouver’s The Province, has posted an interview with The Garneau Block author Todd Babiak. In the interview, Babiak makes clear that part of his interest in writing a serial novel based in Edmonton was the chance to explode some myths about his home town and his province: “I think, nationally, Alberta is seen as a Conservative monolith with cowboy cities, but it’s completely untrue.”
Babiak also tackles the subject of The Great One: “Edmonton lived through 10 years of heartbreak after Gretzky left…. There is something sweet and ridiculous about this… I mean, it’s just hockey! Edmonton and Canada must discover other themes and myths.”
Interestingly, when discussing his post-Garneau Block projects, Babiak mentions “a magical realist screenplay called The Great One, set on the day Gretzky announced he was leaving Canada.”
Scottish novelist A.L. Kennedy is trying a new line of work — standup comedy. In a piece for The Guardian, she writes about her “evenings in murky basements trying to make people laugh” over the past 18 months. But it may not be as dramatic a changeup as it sounds: as any watcher of Seinfeld reruns knows, the two fields share a delight in language. “If you really want a good, informed discussion about literature, nip round to the green room of any comedy club. Comics read. A lot,” writes Kennedy. “In between the off-kilter kindness, the libellous attacks and peering into the abyss, you’ll find a concern for words: knob jokes, satire, whimsy, they all make extremely demanding demands.”
The Sydney Morning Herald has a fun wee piece on the perils of lovey-dovey book dedications that might come back to haunt you later, and a dedications page’s potential as a zinger launchpad.
“But, when love turns sour, loving dedications can have a horrible, inexpungable irony. Novels have an unfortunate habit of surviving marriages,” according to the article. “Peter Carey — two-time Booker winner and one-time divorcee — is reportedly asking his Australian publishers to remove the dedications (four, by my count) to the ex-Mrs. Carey, Alison Summers, from future editions of his work. His current novel, Theft, dwells on the ‘evisceration’ the central character undergoes at the hands of the divorce lawyers. ‘Alison Summers, with all my love’ was the dedication to Oscar And Lucinda. He might have toyed with ‘Alison Summers: with a sizeable proportion of my cash’ for Theft.”
Then there’s Saul Bellow, whose biographer noted that “to get his muse working, the novelist liked to change wives.” According to the story, “he got through five and his dedications are a trail of marital gore. His last great novel, Ravelstein, contains a vicious portrait of Mrs. Bellow No. 4 (Alexandra Ionescu Tulcea, Romanian mathematician) and a fulsome dedication to Mrs. Bellow No. 5 (Janis Freedland, former student): ‘A la bella donna della mia mente. To Janis, The star without whom I could not navigate.’”
Amazon, having made the dubious decision of adding fresh produce to the books, CDs, and DVDs it has for sale, has now become the target of online wags with time on their hands.
Their prime target — for no discernible reason other than the obvious absurdity of mail-order milk — is Tuscan Whole Milk, 1 Gallon, 128 fl oz. The customer reviews begin reasonably enough (”Who buys milk on the internet? For some strange reason, I can’t see supermarkets going out of business anytime soon.”), but almost immediately the snark starts rolling downhill and gaining speed, with entries from “Noam Chomsky,” “Samuel Taylor Coleridge,” “Bill Cosby,” “Cereal Lover 5,” and many others. The reviews now stand at 504 and counting.
Here is a very small sampling (spoiler alert):
“While I didn’t think this milk would initially be worth the outrageous shipping cost (when compared to the price of the milk itself) I soon realized how mistaken I was: this milk is made from ground up bone and the tears of babies; simply put — this milk is potent enough to kill a grown man.”
“This deeply-hued milk gives off aromas of calcium and niacin and generous American oak. There is less obvious oak on the palate. The milk is very crisp and smooth in the mouth, with modest sweetness and a dab of cheese flavouring; pleasantly sour aftertaste. Ideally served chilled with grains and pastry. Not the best offering from this particular dairy, but far from the worst in a market oversaturated with local offerings.”
“I was planning a Star Wars themed party, and really wanted Tusken milk. This was not a particularly good substitute.”
“hii Tuscan U r so cool I luv yr milk , me and all my freinds and my cousint Tiffani drink u all teh time!!!!!!11 when r u coming back to Jerzee??? u rule I hope u read these!!!!!!!!!!11″
“I just found a finger in my milk.
BTW, Snape kills Dumbledore.”
“This joke has been milked long enough. Maybe Tuscan can bottle the milk from this joke and sell it. Anybody want to buy some Joke Milk?”
Nicholas Clee has a story in The Times about three books that claim to be #1 bestsellers, and the vaguely dishonest, semantical games their authors and publishers play to justify that claim. One book was #1 in Britain for a week, though not internationally, as its jacket claims. Another was the top seller at a single book chain. The third, and most suspect, was very briefly ranked number one on Amazon UK, thanks to its author, who “sent out e-mails offering ‘certain bonuses’ (mostly tennis-related) to people who bought his book from Amazon, hoping for a top 100 position.”
After taking the time to make clear that The Times‘ own list cannot be so easily manipulated, Clee gives some explanation as to why some authors and publishers have resorted to this kind of sleight of hand:
“Dan Brown’s domination of the 2005 bestseller lists charts caused a lot of grief to ambitious novelists who found the #1 position blocked to them for most of the year.”
Perhaps we’ll soon see books marketed as being top sellers based on the fact that their authors were once given a mug that said “#1 Dad.”
The Dallas Morning News contains an article by Jerome Weeks that stresses the need for authors to know how to promote their work. And he doesn’t mean the bare-bones basics of not getting drunk at readings (although that can have its own special charm) and putting in time at every little earnest litfest that pops up nearby. Weeks says that one needs to come to the table with a fully-blown top-drawer marketing plan in place with the cherry on top of a doozy of a gimmick.
Or at least some super-targeted marketing. He mentions one author who penned a birdwatching tome. Knowing his publisher’s marketing staff wouldn’t exactly be clawing each other’s eyes out over who got the glory of shilling this read, he came prepared with the relatively cheap and no-muss-no-fuss option of sending him to a selection of Audubon Societies around the country, and he’d chip in on the roadtrips on the side to hit as many as possible.
A friend of Weeks’s does this chap one better by recruiting the possible market for her own book — dance workshops, flamenco instructors and guitarists — not only to read her work, but to perform at other more pedestrian readings to get the juices going … and the wallets opening.
Weeks then muses on the nature of the beast: “Not every novel lends itself to this, of course. And serious book lovers may wonder what live dance has to do with the art of literature. But just as America has turned into a “sink or swim” society, publishers keep abandoning worthy authors to a marketplace stacked against them. And they do this while newspapers and electronic media are ditching arts coverage. In such a world, a little barnstorming self-promotion is a basic survival skill. And doing it with some flamenco flair is just smart.”
It’s too bad Ernest Hemingway isn’t alive today — who wouldn’t want an army of six-toed supercats to command? But now his kitty command could be in jeopardy!
Apparently, around 46 cats (half of them polydactyl) — all descendants of Hemingway’s beloved feline friend Snow White — have had free rein of the Hemingway house since his suicide in 1964, a fact that perturbs the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Since the house is now run as a museum (where the cats are a big hit, apparently), according to a Guardian story, they “want to fine the museum’s owners up to $200 a day for ‘exhibiting’ the animals without a licence, according to a lawsuit filed in Miami, but the trustees insist that tourists pay to see the house, of which the cats are merely residents … The dispute has reached Miami’s district court, where the museum wants a federal judge to rule on whether it needs a licence under the Animal Welfare Act.”
Says the story: “They’re comparing the Hemingway house to a circus or a zoo because there are cats on the premises,” said Cara Higgins, the museum’s lawyer. “This is not a travelling circus. These cats have been here for ever … We’re asking the judge to let us know whether this act applies to the cats, and if so why that is if the animals are not in commerce. If it’s something to do with the number of cats, how many do we have to get rid of to be in compliance?”
Hit the ATM, the DVD kiosk, and the made-to-order book machine? This ain’t no book vending machine, folks — it’s more like a coffee-machine, making a book for you in three minutes or so at a penny a page.
The aptly-named Espresso Book Machine, according to an article in next week’s Newsweek, is “currently being tested at the World Bank bookstore in Washington, D.C. … and can print the text for a 300-page book, with a color paperback cover — and bind it — in just three minutes and for only a penny per page.”
The brainchild of former Random House editorial director Jason Epstein and former Dean & DeLuca CEO Dane Neller, the machines go for $100,000 a pop; the New York Public Library and the Egypt’s Bibliotheca Alexandrina are due to get theirs for fall tryouts.
“If publishers digitize their catalogs and booksellers get onboard (big ifs), the machine could revolutionize the current warehouse-distribution model,” according to the story.
The L.A. Times boasted one of the most intriguing leads of recent days with the announcement that “Irish archeologists Tuesday heralded the discovery of an ancient book of psalms, found by a construction worker while driving his backhoe into a bog.” Instead of finding used prophylactics or perhaps a cat skeleton, they unearthed a 20-page book “dated to the years 800 to 1000. Trinity College manuscripts expert Bernard Meehan said it was the first discovery of an Irish early medieval document in two centuries.” National Museum of Ireland director Pat Wallace said, “This is really a miracle find.” Years of “painstaking analysis” await the book, which has been tossed in the fridge for the time being (clearly a more pleasant home than a bog). According to the L.A. Times story, “It could take months of study, Wallace said, just to identify the safest way to pry open the pages without damaging or destroying them. He ruled out the use of X-rays to avoid moving the pages.”
“First of all, it’s unlikely that something this fragile could survive buried in a bog at all,” according to Wallace. “And then for it to be unearthed and spotted before it was destroyed is incalculably more amazing.” He said the engineer was just minding his own business, tearing up the bogland last week — to create commercial potting soil — when, “just beyond the bucket of his bulldozer, he spotted something.” To add to the Indiana Jones feel, the location of the site is top-secret, to protect the ongoing dig.
The Guardian explores the phenomenon of novelists who write great books yet suck at penning plays. Or, as Philip Hensher puts it: “[James Joyce’s play] Exiles, like most plays written by novelists, is a notoriously plonking effort.” Zing!
Hensher’s musings on the “curious fact that very few writers have ever been able to write both good novels and good plays. Almost invariably, even the most acclaimed and technically skilled novelist turns into a rank amateur when writing for the theatre.” He goes on to document the most famous example — Henry James published a handful of plays, and then complained that no one was putting them on until someone agreed to stage his work Guy Domville.
According to the Guardian article, “the first night of Guy Domville was one of the most famous theatrical disasters of the 19th century. The play staggered on for only five weeks, almost never to be staged again. A glance at the text shows why: the plot is something about a Catholic priest renouncing his vocation, delivered in the novelist’s famous subtle dialogue, which proved impossible to speak on stage with any conviction. James, clearly, just couldn’t write for the stage.”
Other novelists who failed Drama 101 include, he says, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Graham Greene, William Golding, Muriel Spark. But, to be fair, he also claims that many playwrights can’t write a novel to save their life, such as Tom Stoppard and Joe Orton. He does allow that there are a few stars such as Anton Chekhov and Michael Frayn who can rock both forms, though.
While getting one’s jollies from poring over accurate sales data only recently became a favourite activity among Canadian bookfolk, Australia six-year-old book industry sales data program, according to an Australian article, is like many a six-year-old in that it’s causing somewhat of a ruckus.
The story is a profile of Michael Webster, who “introduced the contentious book sales tracker Nielsen BookScan to Australian publishing” and, while he can’t leap over tall buildings in a single bound, he is “the kind of man grown authors have reason to fear … [and] partly because of him, the Australian book industry is undergoing a mini-revolution. In the process, he has helped turn a quaintly old-fashioned trade — described by novelist Robert Drewe as being ‘like journalism, with better table manners’ — into a more efficient and more ruthless industry.”
Webster says that BookScan forces publishers to see themselves as an industry. “It’s bringing that cold, hard commercial side into it,” he says. BookScan provides publishers and bookstores with “continuous, comprehensive sales data, as it surveys everything from postmodern poetry to street directories at the point of sale.” It also has a pretty good track record — it claims to track around 90% of book sales across the country, courtesy of 100 Australian bookstores, and gets the info out to their customers within a week.
But, according to the Australian article, “for a service that ostensibly tracks barcodes, BookScan divides opinions like no other publishing industry tool.” Yea-sayers give props to the transparency the service brings to the trade, while naysayers say the lists “foster obssession” with bestsellers.
Looks like we have a whole barrel o’ fun in store…
A 
A press release from the Halifax-based Nimbus Publishing announced today that author Lesley Choyce has just uploaded 
Scott Baio – who played Chachi on Happy Days, Charles on Charles in Charge, and … um, that’s pretty much it, actually – is currently shopping around a tell-all memoir, BaioWatch: How I Dated and Loved Hollywood’s Most Beautiful Women and Ended Up Alone, about his life as a former star and notorious ladies’ man. According to a story on 
When trying to get published, many writers become familiar with the old adage, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” But if that doesn’t work, maybe they should try The Rejected Fiction Writing Contest.
