Bookmarks – Jeanette Winterson on the cult of personality, Britain’s re-reading habits, TVs in bookstores, and more

Some book-related links:

• Jeanette Winterson on the cult of personality (Times Online)
• Britain likes to re-read (The Guardian)
• What do bookstores need? Television! (The New York Times)
• Clive Cussler likes to look for shipwrecks (The Christian Science Monitor)
• Jiang Rong wins the first-ever Man Asian Booker Prize (Yahoo! News)

Bookmarks – Quick links

Some book-related links:

• Norma Gabler, the Texas textbook nitpicker who spent most of her life seeking out factual errors and “left-wing bias” in schoolbooks, is dead at 84. (Los Angeles Times)
• Kerouac’s On the Road – uncut and republished. (The Independent)
• Russia goes big on book advertising. (Moscow Times)
• Norman Mailer: Mr. Television. (Slate)
• The book every soldier in Iraq should read. (Harper’s)

The Amazing Silverman needs your help!

Journalist and CityNews ombudsman Peter Silverman recently posted a comment on this Quillblog post from last year that we thought we should highlight:

I am a journalist in the process of doing a television story on the banning of Three Wishes by the Toronto School Board. I have read this book and would like to receive comments from children between the fourth and sixth grades concerning their opinions.With parental consent, I would like to interview these children for CITYTV as I am doing a documentary on this issue. I can be reached at peters@citytv.com
Thanks. Peter Silverman, OMBUDSMAN, CITYNEWS

(For those who don’t know, Silverman is a kind of consumer advocate who made headlines earlier this year when he was attacked by a shady Toronto optician who’d allegedly been threatening his customers and selling cheap knockoffs of name-brand frames. As you can see from the video here and here, Silverman more than holds his own.)

Da Vinci Code on trial — again

Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown took to the stand yesterday as the star defence witness in a copyright infringement lawsuit being launched against his publisher, Random House. The claimants this time around are Richard Leigh and Michael Baigent, two of the three authors of a book called The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, which hypothesized that Jesus Christ survived crucifixion and went on to father children with Mary Magdalene and that a secret society in France is currently involved in attempting to reinstate Christ’s descendants into political power.

That Brown was aware of the book is doubtless: Brown’s tattered and heavily marked copy of the book was submitted as court evidence; the author even named a character Leigh Teabing, an anagram of the claimants’ last names. Yet according to an article on the Times Online, because they’re suing to compensate for lost revenue, Baigent and Leigh’s lawsuit is unlikely to win them much, even if they prevail. On the first day of the case, Amazon sales for The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail shot up 3500%. (On Tuesday afternoon, the book was the 18th best-seller on Amazon.com.)

And if Baigent and Leigh do win, it might change the nature of copyright law as we know it. The authors are not contesting individual passages of Brown’s book so much as its entire premise. “The legal maxim that ‘there is no copyright in an idea’ is being tested,” writes Alex Wade of the Times, “just as, in televisual media, there have been successive attempts to claim format rights in reality television shows.” When one considers the extent to which writers reinterpret, recontextualize, and otherwise borrow the material of other writers, a successful lawsuit could mean much in the world of books.

An interesting result of this whole mess is that those intrigued by biographical details can now learn a lot about Brown: his writing process, the fact that his wife researches most of his books, that they used to sell books from the back of their car, and that one point in Brown’s career ebb saw him write and sell a story under the pseudonym Danielle Brown called “187 Men to Avoid.”

Related links:
Click here for the Times story
Click here for the Book Standard’s take on events
Click here for trial coverage from The New York Times
Click here for a story on The Guardian website

The amazing adventures of Bart and Lisa

Plenty of writers — most notably the reclusive Thomas Pynchon, who, according to a Los Angeles Times article, faxed in a list of possible jokes before his turn — have appeared, so to speak, on The Simpsons. But an episode of the show that will be broadcast next year will feature four very well-known American authors — Tom Wolfe, Gore Vidal, Jonathan Franzen, and Michael Chabon. The premise for the episode is that Moe the Bartender is a poet.

These are the two best paragraphs from Steven Barrie-Anthony’s article in the L.A. Times:

• “This is the only show of any sort that I watch on television,” Wolfe says, sitting in the greenroom after recording. The immaculately dressed author is surrounded by a group of scruffy Harvard-educated Simpsons writers, hanging on his every word. “My son, Tommy, who’s now 20, one of his first words was [Homer's trademark exclamation] ‘D’oh!’ And now any conversation he has with anybody, he’ll reference The Simpsons.“

• “My kids and my father are very excited,” Chabon says. He’s not kidding. Reached later by phone, his father, Robert Chabon, said that he always expected Michael to win a Pulitzer (which he did in 2001 for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay). “And I still think he’s going to win the National Book Award,” said the Kansas City, Kan., pediatrician. “But him being on The Simpsons is beyond my wildest dreams. You envision certain successes for your children, but this kind of success — I never envisioned.”

Related links:
Click here for the story from the Los Angeles Times

Like daytime television (on PBS)

Often, the stories behind books are almost as interesting as the books themselves. In the case of lost manuscripts, speculation abounds concerning the contents of books – in the words of Stuart Kelly, “The lost book, like the person you never dared ask to the dance, becomes infinitely more alluring simply because it can be perfect only in the imagination” – while the stories behind books, often all we have left of them, take on greater significance.

An adapted excerpt of Kelly’s new book, an exploration of the histories of could-have-been famous books that never were called The Book of Lost Books, appears on this week’s online edition of the Weekend Australian. Telling the stories of lost works by Gogol, Plath, Hemingway, Aeschylus, Shakespeare, and others, his fascinating account connects books to the vagaries of their writers and historical contexts. In plots reminiscent of daytime TV dramas, writers are stricken with pious desires to burn their manuscripts, boxes of letters are buried in gardens in the anticipation of war, suitcases containing important manuscripts are left at the train station, and scandalous memoirs are destroyed to protect reputations. Oh, the intrigue!

Related links:
Click here for the adapted excerpt of The Book of Lost Books

Tubthumping through the ages

The National Endowment for the Arts’ recent report on the sorry state of American reading habits and the withering of the printed word is still generating debate in the U.S. In an essay for The Village Voice, Paul Collins, an editor at McSweeney’s Books, argues that by defining “literary reading” as the consumption of poetry, poems, and fiction, the association’s methodology was flawed from the start: “It will come as news to historians and memoirists, working in the two most vibrantly evolving genres of the last decade, that what they create does not constitute ‘reading.’ Nor, for that matter, do essays or graphic narratives.” Collins also points out that cultural conservatives such as the NEA’s Dana Gioia have been warning — usually in the same thundering, Old Testament tones — of the imminent demise of the book for at least a century, pinning this impending catastrophe on everything from the electric lamp to the automobile to the television.

Related links:
Read Paul Collins’ piece in The Village Voice