William Shakespeare, handsome devil

There’s been a flurry of chatter this week, some of it embarrassingly silly, following the Shakespeare Birthday Trust’s unveiling of what they claim to be a newly discovered portrait of William Shakespeare, painted during his lifetime.

Given that our era’s obsession with image and personality is underfed when it comes to Shakespeare (who, alas, never got around to writing a tell-all memoir about his troubled marriage and stint in rehab), the painting would be notable no matter what it actually looked like. But apparently it’s especially notable because, as The New York Times puts it, it depicts the Bard as “a head-turner of a man,” far from the nebbishy image that’s been associated with him until now.

In middle age, this Shakespeare has a fresh-faced complexion, a closely trimmed auburn beard, a long straight nose and a full, almost bouffant hairstyle. He is dressed in elaborate white lace ruff and a gold-trimmed blue doublet of a kind worn only by the wealthy and successful men of his age.

Props to American critic Wyatt Mason for highlighting two of the most egregious idiocies that have been floated so far. The first is the very idea that thinking of Shakespeare as a rich, striking dude will now somehow enhance or transform our understanding of his work.

It gets better. Apparently, the Shakespeare Birthday Trust put forward with a straight face the assertion that, as the Times puts it, the painting gives new support to “generations of speculation as to whether the playwright, a married man with three children, was bisexual.”

Because, you know, sharp-dressed men and all that.

At the very least, watch for the inevitable critical monograph entitled “William Shakespeare, Elizabethan England’s Metrosexual.”

Mason also points to a New Republic slide show about alleged images of the Bard. And as debate about the painting’s authenticity rages on, here in Canada we wait for Stephanie Nolen to weigh in.

The battle over robot toothbrushes

Two weeks ago we blogged about Scholastic’s controversial misuse of its book clubs, but it would appear that was a mere footnote compared to the uproar generated by the company’s Klutz division, which has published Invasion of the Bristlebots, a book packaged with two tiny toothbrush robots – and which fails to credit wife and husband team Lenore Edman and Windell Oskay for the invention.

A storm of fury has unfurled across the blogosphere, according to Publisher’s Weekly:

A typical one, on blog.makezine.com: “Sad to see something for fun take on evil overtones of corporate thought theft.” Others on the same site acknowledged the possibility of innocence: “Given how stressful publishing is these days, and how shoestring those types of projects can be, I wouldn’t be surprised that they were completely unconscious of the need to attribute.”

The storm even prompted an apology from Pat Murphy, an editor at Klutz:

I wanted to let everyone know that Lenore Edman at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories and I had a good conversation this afternoon.

We spoke about our shared commitment to making science and technology accessible to children. We began a discussion of ways that Klutz could acknowledge the exceptional work that Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories has done in Bristlebot research – starting with this message and continuing with acknowledgment in the next printing of the book and on the Klutz website.

Let this be a lesson: never deny the power of the blog.

Joe Torre’s sort-of memoir

Yankee supporters, as well as baseball fans not in thrall to evil, are eagerly awaiting former manager Joe Torre’s upcoming tell-all book. The New York Times breaks down the unique nature of the project: Torre shares authorial credit with veteran baseball reporter Tom Verducci, but the book’s not an as-told-to. Torre is referred to in the third person throughout, and he had veto power only over his own direct quotes. (The Times piece also looks at similar collaborations both in and out of the sports world.)

Amusingly, the Yankees are reportedly considering a new contract clause “intended to ensure that future books about the Yankees are ‘positive in tone,’ and ‘do not breach the sanctity of our clubhouse.’” What, this never occurred to them after Ball Four?

Etiquette advice for Google Book Search

Dan Blacharski, a columnist for ITworld.com, has weighed in on the Microsoft vs. Google book search debate, pointing out that while it is fashionable to bash Microsoft as a corporate bully, the Microsoft Live Book Search system treats copyright holders more fairly than Google Book Search does, because Microsoft only “displays books that are past their copyright, or have been specifically authorized by the copyright holder.”

The big question is that do I, as a creator of content and writer of books, have a problem with my books being on Google Book Search? It’s a tough question. When a library carries one of my books, they have purchased it from the publisher, and I get my fifty cents worth of royalty payment. But a library makes that book available only to a local community; if an online library makes a book available in digital form to the entire world, there should be adequate compensation to the author. But as I said, that’s not what Google is doing. They are, however, providing a summary, table of contents, title page, index, and copyright page, a link to buy the book, and a place to search the book. Search results will show snippets of text, maybe a few paragraphs, related to the search. Frankly, it doesn’t seem like such an egregious imposition on my rights, and it may help me sell a few books in the process. The grey area comes in deciding whether Google has a right to scan and index those books without permission from the publisher. Publishers may well decide it’s to their advantage to grant permission-but it would be more fair for Google to seek out that permission before scanning.

A Google feature in TIME magazine last year reported that the company’s founders use the informal corporate motto “don’t be evil.” Perhaps they also should add a corollary from everybody’s mom: “And always ask politely before you borrow something.”

Reviewing Mailer

The 83-year-old Norman Mailer has a new book coming out next week – his first in over a decade – and The New York Observer’s Philip Weiss has just weighed in with an early review.

Weiss says at the outset of his piece that he sat down to read The Castle in the Forest (Random House) “wondering how many rounds [Mailer] can still go with a pencil,” but then he spends the rest of the review basically apologizing for ever having doubted the man.

This work has vigor, excitement, humor and vastness of spirit. There are a few signs of strain, but they hardly count against the power of the language and the ideas. Here’s Norman Mailer in Act V, and he has all the wit and magic of old Prospero.

If Weiss is right, it’s certainly good news for Mailer’s fans. But he has so much trouble synopsizing the nearly 500-page tome – even though his review runs a lengthy 2,000 words or so – that you may come away worried that Mailer has succumbed, like Pynchon and DeLillo, to the everything-plus-the-kitchen- sink approach to novel writing. As has been established elsewhere, The Castle in the Forest is a fictionalized biography of Adolph Hitler, but Weiss makes it sound as if Mailer is barely interested in Hitler:

There’s little history here at all, and more about czarist Russia in the late 1800s than about Hitler as a fascist leader. [And] any thought you have that the book will take up Jews and the Jewish question – again, no. Mr. Mailer finishes with Hitler in 1905, at age 16 or so, in Linz, Austria, at about the time when he’s figured out how to masturbate.

Weiss basically gives up trying to tell us what The Castle in the Forest actually is, and instead gives over to transcribing a long series of interesting (but rambling) phone discussions with Mailer about history, fathers and sons, incest, the Devil, demonology, his Jewishness, and the kabbalah. Let’s hope the book itself is a little more focused.

The real meaning of publishing

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 Dictionary here.

The problem with Blitcons

Although the famous have come to his defence in the question of plagiarism or fair borrowing as historical research, will anyone defend Ian McEwan from Ziauddin Sardar’s charge in New Statesman that he, Martin Amis, and Salman Rushdie form a triumvirate of Blitcons?

Sardar, a writer and broadcaster who has been appointed as a commissioner of the U.K. Commission for Equality and Human Rights, says the three are “the vanguard of British literary neoconservatives.”

According to Sardar, the “Blitcon project is based on three one-dimensional conceits” — a faith in the absolute supremacy of American culture, the belief that Islam is the greatest threat to Western civilization, and that “American ideas of freedom and democracy are not only right, but should be imposed on the rest of the world.”

After examining various bits of writing from each man, Sardar concludes:

The real world is not a fiction. The ideology of mass murder has a history and a context in all its perversity and evil. But the wild imaginings of the Blitcons are not an appropriate guide to the eradication of this horror. Turned to this end, the manipulative power of literary imagination is nothing but spin. And such spin is simply hatred answering, mirroring and matching hatred.

(Kind of makes the whole plagiarism controversy look like a walk in the park….)

Related links:
Click here for the full article in New Statesman

Trimming the fat

The New York Times points out today that Paul Anderson’s 2004 tome, Hunger’s Brides, is being released by his American publisher, Carroll & Graf, in paperback — and at half the length of the original hardcover. The new, skinnier version runs to only 750 pages, a far cry from the “4 pounds, 9 ounces and 1,360 pages” that it used to be.

Surprisingly, the idea to cut the book in half appears to have been Anderson’s. The Times spoke to Philip Turner, editor-in-chief at Carroll & Graf, who said the author wanted to “take a crack at reducing the book’s length.”

Fait accompli, it would seem. The “skinny” paperback version is going by the title Sor Juana or the Breath of Heaven, and has the subtitle, The Essential Story from the Epic Hunger’s Brides.

“Essential,” huh? If that’s the case, one can only wonder why those other, apparently inessential, 610 pages were included in the first place.

In other Carroll & Graf news, Philip Turner is launching his own eponymous imprint at the house. In recent years, he has published several Canadian titles at Carroll & Graf, including Roméo Dallaire’s Shake Hands with the Devil — which sounds like the kind of book he’s now looking for for the new imprint. “It’s going to be a purpose-driven imprint, thematically propelled by books whose authors are perceived as truthtellers, whistleblowers, muckrakers and revisionist historians,” Turner says in the company press release.

Related links:
Read the Times story here
Read a 2004 Q&Q article about Hunger’s Brides here
Read an April 2006 Q&Q article about Carroll & Graf here

Welsh squelched

Every once in a while, a book review comes along that is so harsh, so deadly, so unforgiving, it’s like watching an author get stripped naked and flogged right in front of you. The kind of review that makes you say a silent prayer of gratitude that it wasn’t your own book in the crosshairs – just before you email it to every evil-minded book friend you have.

Neel Mukherjee, taking on Irvine Welsh’s newest novel, The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs, in The Sunday Times, has written just such a review. Mukherjee doesn’t wait to get the flogging started. He begins: “Let’s call a spade a spade — Irvine Welsh’s sixth novel is so awful that, to paraphrase James Wood, it invents its own category of awfulness.” Amazingly, after that decidedly ungentle beginning, it only gets worse:

“Five novels later Welsh is still doing his substance-abuse-in-Edinburgh shtick, but it has become a meaningless brand — look carefully and you can almost see the TM symbol — emptied of all authenticity, forced and false. Like most such products, it should go straight in the bin.”

After spending 700-odd words stomping poor Welsh into the dirt, does Mukherjee then extend a hand to help the author up, maybe offer him a conciliatory drink in the bar after?

“This is a demeaning book that cants the reader’s soul downwards, making it feel complicit with the writer’s dishonest short-changing of his readership, telling them that this lazy, dishonest, appallingly written rubbish is the real thing while laughing all the way to the bank as a result of our gullibility. Those howls of rage of his early years have turned to the empty baying of a dog. Take him away.”

If it is true what Clive James said about damning reviews (“When you say a man writes badly, you are trying to hurt him. When you say it in words better than his, you have hurt him,”) then we can only wish Welsh a speedy recovery.

Related links:
Read Neel Mukherjee on Irvine Welsh’s newest novel
Read Clive James on ‘snark’

Death to Harry Potter! Well, maybe… Okay, probably not…

The CBC was trumpeting the news yesterday that two key characters are going to be offed come the newest installment of the bespectacled moppet’s adventures.

They reported that an interview broadcast on Monday on Britain’s Channel 4 saw author J.K. Rowling reveal that “one character [gets] a reprieve, but I have to say two die that I didn’t intend to die.”

She refrained from letting us in on which characters get the ax because she doesn’t want “hate mail.” And, one would assume, because spoiling the surprises in your upcoming novel isn’t such a savvy business move. (Rowling’s nothing if not savvy: the story also reports that she is “considered one of the wealthiest people in the world…. Her personal fortune is estimated to be more than $1 billion.”)

While Harry seemed safe at the beginning of the interview – “I’ve never been tempted to kill him off before the end of book seven, because I always planned seven books and that’s where I want to go” – she then reflected that any characters left standing at the end of the series could be co-opted by another author, prompting her to say, “It will end with me and after [I'm] dead and gone they won’t be able to bring back the character.”

After all, “a price has to be paid, we are dealing with pure evil here. They don’t target extras do they? They go for the main characters … well, I do. This is a world where some pretty nasty things can happen.”

Related links:
Read the CBC piece here