The ashes of Tasha Tudor and the wisdom of Solomon

Anyone who’s had them knows that children are greedy, ungrateful, little creeps. Especially so when they are all grown up and bickering over a recently deceased parent’s estate.

This is what happened in the case of Vermont children’s illustrator Tasha Tudor, who died in June of 2008 at the age of 92, leaving a $2-million (U.S.) estate . Her will stipulated that the bulk of the money go to her eldest son, with only small amounts going to the rest of the children, who are contesting the will in court.

Tudor, who lived a very proto-hippie existence with a number of beloved animals, had a few other stipulations in her will: she asked to be buried alongside the remains of her favourite dog and rooster. Even this fairly simple request got muddied, however. From the Canadian Press:

When author Tasha Tudor’s ashes were finally buried, it wasn’t in one place. Her bickering survivors couldn’t agree on when, where and how, so a judge ordered her cremated remains divided in half.

On Oct. 17, sons Seth Tudor and Thomas Tudor and daughters Bethany Tudor and Efner Tudor Holmes buried some under a rosebush she loved in her garden and the rest on Seth’s neighbouring property, where her precious Pembroke Welsh corgi dogs were already buried.

“(Seth) got the ashes, we went outside and he gave us half the ashes and he went down to his property and scattered or buried the ashes there and we scattered ours,” said Thomas Tudor, 64. “It was really an unpleasant situation.”

That’s right: they even fought over the ashes.

Despite all this trouble, things still appear bucolic on the Tasha Tudor and Family website, though it’s worth nothing that the rooster’s bio appears before any of the kids.

Bookmarks – “Rogue” edition: Palin buys her own book, an e-book pirate confesses, Rip Torn beats up Norman Mailer, and more

Some rogueish book-related links:

• Sarah Palin’s political action committee buys thousands of copies of Going Rogue
• An e-book pirate confesses
• Rip Torn has always been crazy. After all, he once beat the crap out of Norman Mailer
• Philip K. Dick? He was nuts, too
• Tiger Woods: Platonic, though definitely not platonic
• North Americans don’t read enough contemporary European lit? Who cares!
• “Dangerous” kids’ book an unlikely hit – because apparently kids need books to tell them to act like idiots
• The continuing influence of music writer Greil “What is this shit?” Marcus

Yann Martel sends Yann Martel to Stephen Harper

The first rule one learns in today’s publishing climate is that an opportunity to promote one’s own book should never, ever be passed up. Crank letter writer Renowned author Yann Martel demonstrates this truth with the 66th pick in his unilateral book club. This week, Martel is sending Stephen Harper … What Is Stephen Harper Reading? by Yann Martel.

The book’s accompanying letter is mostly a lot of musing about the wonderful thing that is a book, and how lasting. It’s fairly boilerplate book-thumping, with a few thoroughly Martelesque stylistic and ideological quirks. For example, he says that his book “will last because it will find protection in all the homes and libraries that shelter it,” suggesting that the tome is a kind of literary refugee. Martel also refers to Harper’s recent performance of The Beatles’ “With a Little Help From My Friends” as singing “poetry to the Canadian people.”

Interestingly, Martel notes that “eventually, there will be a complete edition” of WISHR? “When it comes out,” he writes, “how many letters it will contain – that all depends on [Harper].”

NY publishers’ descent from the high life

In the New York Times, Motoko Rich looks at the dying glitz and glam of the publishing world, which, according to Rich, once “came with a milieu that mixed cultural swagger with pure Manhattan high life.”

Stark contrasts are drawn between company parties past and those planned for the future: Macmillan, which announced mass restructuring and layoffs in mid-December last year, will trade their Hotel del Coronado spring list meeting venue for meetings via webcam. Simon & Schuster cancelled its holiday party, while one division of Random House had pizza and beer in a cafeteria room. Other “glittery and cozy traditions” of the industry that are being clamped down upon are flights, hotel bills, cocktail hours, and, of course, the lunch tabs.

Nobody expects one of the staples of the business — the long lunch — to die off completely because of these straitened circumstances. But publishers, editors and literary agents, who have often been among the best diners in the city, are now reconsidering their favorite restaurants.

Besides the flash, though, other aspects of the publishing business are being examined, like distribution of advance print galleys, the return of unsold books by retailers, and cash advances for authors.

At HarperCollins a new unit is experimenting with a model that substitutes profit sharing with authors for cash advances and eliminates returns of unsold copies from booksellers.

Jonathan Galassi, publisher of the literary powerhouse Farrar, Straus & Giroux, said the custom of accepting returns from booksellers was created during the Great Depression to persuade bookstores to take more copies. “In a moment where getting people to put stock in a store of anything, not just books, is harder because of the money it costs to front them,” Mr. Galassi said. “I think it might be counterproductive to have a return-free business at this point.”

James Frey, Bible-writer

In an attempt to extend his already overextended 15 minutes of fame, James Frey will be putting his factual-fictive writing style to use to write the third book of the Bible.

From the Guardian:

“It’s the third book of the Bible, called The Final Testament of the Holy Bible,” he told interviewer and fellow author Stephen Elliott. “My idea of what the Messiah would be like if he were walking the streets of New York today. What would he believe? What would he preach? How would he live? With who?”

[....]

Frey said his version would see Jesus living with a prostitute. “It doesn’t matter how or who you love. I don’t believe the Messiah would condemn gay men and women,” he said. Judas, meanwhile, would be the “same as he was two thousand years ago”, a “selfish man who thinks of himself before the good of humanity, who values money more than love.”

Sounds like a holiday bestseller in the making.

The Twilight guide to battling teen pregnancy

The blog Whiskey Fire has directed us to a nutty column by someone named Dr. Miriam Grossman, who feels that Stephenie Myers’ Twilight series has a lot to say on the subject of teen sex in this era of licentiousness and vice.

Here’s the best part (emphasis added, but hardly needed):

When standards are lowered to these abysmal levels, teens get a green light for behavior they’ll regret. Instead, a girl should be encouraged to wait until her own Edward Cullen comes along, a man who has waited for her as she has for him; who will stay at her side, fight battles for her, and prove himself. “Your scent is a drug to me,” Edward tells Bella, while eyeing her neck with hunger. But he doesn’t give in. As Tanya pointed out, he fights the toughest battle – the struggle against himself – in order to keep her safe and whole. This is what our girls are dreaming about, and this is what they deserve.

Now that’s something you can sink your teeth into.

As Whiskey Fire notes: “It’s true – most young women are very much attracted to young men who think they smell nice but won’t really chomp out their aortas.”

Break up with your book club

What happens when a book club’s members are mismatched – when the majority wants pop-lit and Oprah’s picks versus the classics, or when one member is found without an anecdote to contribute to a conversation about soiled Pampers? The New York Times‘s Joanne Kaufman writes about book clubs gone bad:

“Who knew a book group could be such a soap opera?” said Barb Burg, senior vice president at Bantam Dell, which publishes many titles adopted by book groups. “You’d think it would just be about the book. But wherever I go, people want to talk to me about the infighting and the politics.”

Sometimes the problem is a life-stage mismatch among group members. “I know of a group where all but one member has young children,” said Susanne Pari, author of the novel The Fortune Catcher and the program director at Book Group Expo. “They talk for 15 minutes about the book and then launch into a discussion of poopy diapers and nap times and preschool.”

Esther Bushell, a professional book-group facilitator, says that one woman left a book club because she couldn’t see herself sitting around and talking about a book — instead, she was looking to network.

Another woman decamped because she wanted to read more chick lit. “I hate to sound ponderous,” Ms. Bushell said, “but I have a certain moral obligation. I don’t feel I can be paid for leading a discussion about The Devil Wears Prada.”

Battle of the bloggers, IFOA edition

Toronto author Andrew Westoll has been doing a fine job as the official blogger for this year’s International Festival of Authors. In fact, it seems he’s been doing such a good job that National Post society columnist Shinan Govani has been ripping off his reporting – or so Westoll alleges.

The controversy (okay, the tiff) is concerning Westoll’s fly-on-the-wall account of a Friday night dinner conversation between novelist and critic Francine Prose and a handful of other IFOA authors (including Q&Q’s own Nathan Whitlock). On his blog, Westoll relates several telling details from the exchange, in which he observes Prose playing with her food (“I watched Francine pick the pepperoni off her pizza”) and overhears an anecdote concerning Laura Bush.

Govani’s write-up (scroll down) seems to draw from the same well of first-hand experience:

As the celebrated and perfectly-named Prose flicked pepperoni off her pizza, we hear, she told people about the “Laura Bush moment” she had some weeks back when she had an opportunity to visit the White House. Long story short: She kinda told the First Lady off.

The weasel word here is the vague “we hear” embedded in the first sentence. The verdict: while this isn’t an example of straight-up plagiarism, a hat-tip to Westoll would have been the gentlemanly thing to do.

Publisher of controversial Mohammed novel firebombed

As previously noted on Quillblog, publication of the novel The Jewel of Medina was canceled by Random House U.S. due to the possibility that it might offend Muslims and perhaps initiate attacks by those at the radical end of the faith. It was a dumb move – to pre-emptively censor oneself – but one dumb move always engenders another, and now the offices of the book’s U.K. publisher have been firebombed. And it gets worse.

From The Telegraph:

Hardline clerics said that further attacks would be “inevitable” if publication of the novel, The Jewel of Medina, goes ahead as planned next month.

Police moved in to arrest three men moments after a fire broke out at the London home and office of Martin Rynja in the early hours of Saturday.

The attack came days after Mr Rynja’s company, Gibson Square, bought the rights to the book by the American writer Sherry Jones, which has already been likened to Sir Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses.

Islam’s radical fringe has clearly decided once again  that the “dangerous Muslim” stereotype is better propagated from within. They’re like the drunken frat boys at a party who are determined to wreck it for everyone, or the former child stars who keep getting pulled over high on meth.

Sarah Palin vs libraries

There is already more than enough troubling and tawdry whoop-de-doo surrounding Sarah Palin, John McCain’s pick for the vice-presidential slot, to make the whole circus worth watching, but this paragraph from a long article in Time magazine about Palin’s tenure as the mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, should have some special resonance for Quillblog readers:

[Former mayor John] Stein says that as mayor, Palin continued to inject religious beliefs into her policy at times. “She asked the library how she could go about banning books,” he says, because some voters thought they had inappropriate language in them. “The librarian was aghast.” That woman, Mary Ellen Baker, couldn’t be reached for comment, but news reports from the time show that Palin had threatened to fire Baker for not giving “full support” to the mayor.

This just gets better and better.