Happy World Book Day, dummy!

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.

Norman Mailer and The New Yorker

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.)

Norman Mailer remembered

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

Bill O’Reilly outs J.K. Rowling as a “provocateur”

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.)

James Lipton memoir: worst book evah?

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.

Karl Rove is a big, white whale of a reader

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.

Critical Quidditch: Christopher Hitchens vs Stephen King

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?

Rush Limbaugh, literary journalist

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.

Eckler vs. Hollywood

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.”

The Man vs. the Boss

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.”