Video: Alan Moore documentary
Altertube has posted a 77-minute documentary on the cult comics-writer and novelist Alan Moore (The Watchmen, From Hell, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, V for Vendetta).
LOL Cats coming to a bookstore near you
MediaBistro’s GalleyCat blog reports that Gotham Books will publish a book spinoff from the LOL cats website I Can Has Cheezburger. The agent says, “The authors are letting [website icon] Professor Happycat guide the reader through the different memes with brief definitions and context, while still capturing the absurd humor of the site.” Uh huh.
Meanwhile, notes GalleyCat, there’s already a book that compiles Adam Koford’s The Laugh-Out-Loud Cats, a strip based on the premise that LOL cats started in a newspaper comics strip in 1912.
There’s a very funny video clip for Koford’s strip. We posted it a few months ago, and–what the hell–here is it again in case you missed it the first time.
Fun with data mining: Books that make you dumb
Artur Bergman at O’Reilly Radar points out a data-mining exercise that correlates the most popular books on a variety of college campuses, as compiled at Facebook, to those schools’ average SAT scores. The results are posted, in graphic and tabular formats, at Books That Make You Dumb.
Top 5 “smart books”: Lolita, 100 Years of Solitude, Crime and Punishment, Freakonomics, and Catch-22.
Books: A-list authors turn to the comics
In the Times of London, Tim Martin name-checks the growing number of literati who are turning their talents to comic book serials and graphic novels, starting with novelist Jodi Picoult (whose Wonder Woman series has just been issued as a book).
Martin continues:
“The size of the influx is startling. Stephen King, one of the world’s bestselling authors, has recently overseen the first in a series of comic adaptations from his Dark Tower novels. Ian Rankin, having retired the bibulous Inspector Rebus from print, has turned his attention to John Constantine, the hard-bitten Chandlerian sorcerer of Vertigo’s Hellblazer comics. Michael Chabon has published several issues of The Escapist , a superhero created by the fictional protagonists of his novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, while his contemporary Jonathan Lethem is halfway through a run on Omega the Unknown, a timely resurrection for one of the most philosophically baffling superheroes.”
New short-fiction venture is BYOB (Build Your Own Book)
Via Media Bistro’s GalleyCat, a new web company called Anthology Builder has amassed a collection of short stories–from the public domain, and licensed from other publishers–that users can mix and match into custom short-story collections of up to 350 pages that they’ll print and bind and send to you for $14.95 a pop.
Per GalleyCat, “Right now, the selection appears to skew heavily towards science fiction and fantasy, but just think of what might happen with a larger inventory, either here or with another publisher. Don’t like this year’s ‘best’ American short stories? Imagine you could draw upon the contents of all the major literary journals, at least when the authors agree to participate, and create your own all-star lineup. Or what if you could create your own ‘The Greatest Stories of [Favorite Author]’? Obviously, there’s issues to be resolved among authors and agents as they sort out the financial ramifications of putting their work into the kitty, but it’s got a lot of potential…”
Books: Bob Sullivan’s Gotcha Capitalism
This sounds like fun. Bob Sullivan, who does an entertaining consumer affairs blog called The Red Tape Chronicles at MSNBC, has written a book about hidden-fees scams and how to beat them called Gotcha Capitalism.
“The teaser rates on cable television in particular are really abominable. When you get ads that say ‘$29.99 a month, there’s often an asterisk. But almost never will they say what the real price is going to be when that teaser period is up. It’s usually six months or a year. There are a lot of folks who kind of live six months at a time and continually get those discounted rates. But you have to keep calling to ask. But the thing that bothers me most is when you’re trying to compare and the real decision is, ‘Do I get this cable service, this cable service, satellite TV, maybe something else,’ I defy anyone to actually sit down and write out, like a rational consumer would, what the real price of this service will be a year from now, to actually compare it. Because the prices are almost impossible to find.”
That’s from a Fresh Air interview with Sullivan; transcript here.
Steve Jobs: The last word on Kindle, e-books, books?
The man from Apple talks to NYT technology blogger John Markoff:
“Today he had a wide range of observations on the industry, including the Amazon Kindle book reader, which he said would go nowhere largely because Americans have stopped reading. ‘It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,’ he said. ‘Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.’”
Cult books: Lewis Hyde’s The Gift is re-issued
Via Dwight Garner at the NYT books blog PaperCuts: Art prof/critic/philosopher Lewis Hyde’s 1983 book The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, is being re-issued by Vintage in a 25th anniversary edition with warmed-up packaging and a less scary, more prosaic subtitle (Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World). [ Amazon page]
What’s it about? No one has ever been to answer that concisely. Garner calls it “a many-stranded meditation on art and commerce,” and I certainly can’t do any better. For what it’s worth, the old subtitle was more evocative of Hyde’s writing, which is far-ranging and idiosyncratic and partakes as much of philosophy, psychology, and mythology as of “criticism.” He trucks in big ideas. His prose is dense; he’s one of those writer’s writers. But in this case, the mere fact that David Foster Wallace thinks he’s aces shouldn’t discourage you. If you’ve ever read Kenneth Burke, Hyde is roughly as maddening and as occasionally thrilling.
Also recommended: Hyde’s 1998 book, Trickster Makes the World: Mischief, Myth, and Art. Here’s an interview about that book.
Books: Funniest literary quotes of the year
John Dugdale of the Times of London rounds up some of the nastier, and funnier, literary quotations of 2007, most but not all British in origin:
“Oh, Christ. You can’t go on getting excited every year about this. I’ve won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one.”
–Doris Lessing’s response on being told she had won the Nobel prize for literature
“It seems like a really original and interesting read.”
–Penguin turns down chapters from Pride and Prejudice, submitted by David Lassman
“Q: What drew you to the story?
Denis Johnson: I have no idea.
Q: When you were writing Tree of Smoke, did you have an audience or ideal reader in mind? If so, who?
DJ: I write for my wife, my agent and my editor.
Q: Were there moments in the writing process where you worried the book wouldn’t work? If so, how did you press on?
DJ: Well, I’ve never thought about this before, but now that you ask it occurs to me I don’t have much interest in whether my books work or not.”
–Interview with Denis Johnson (pictured above) by America’s National Book Foundation, when Tree of Smoke was a finalist for their awards
Books: Rove’s memoir sells for a lot less than expected
Apparently that Bob Barnett magic is not as powerful as it used to be. The DC lawyer and powerbroker who has peddled memoirs by the likes of Alan Greenspan, both Clintons, and Tony Blair for millions apiece, was expecting to get $3 million or more for the rights to Karl Rove’s memoirs, but last week the former Bush administration propaganda minister (pictured) signed on with Threshold Books, a right-wing Simon & Schuster specialty imprint where Rove’s old pal Mary Matalin is editor, for a paltry $1.5 million.
Freakonomics: You’ve seen the book, now read the movie
Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s book will be made into a documentary film featuring 15-minute segments by a number of prominent doc directors. “Under producers Chad Troutwine (Paris je t’aime) and Seth Gordon (The King of Kong),” writes Monika Bartyzel at Cinematical, “Freakonomics will bring together Super Size Me’s Morgan Spurlock, Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing from Jesus Camp, Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room), My Country My Country’s Laura Poitras, Eugene Jarecki of Why We Fight, and finally Jehane Noujaim (Control Room)–each of whom will film a section of the book.”
Books: The 2007 award for best local cameo in a biography or memoir goes to–Eleanor Mondale
The Warren Zevon oral history/biography I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead, released last spring, contains numerous excerpts from Zevon’s diary about his brief relationship with Eleanor Mondale 17 years ago. Here are the best bits:
February 27, 1990–Minneapolis:…TV interview with Eleanor Mondale, who looked terrific… Eleanor came by after her “precinct caucus” with her friend–they came on the bus. Eleanor and I exchanged numbers… I said, “Shall I call you and try to talk you into coming to Atlanta?” She said, “You can try.” I said, “I’m a good try-er.” She said, “I’d like to see you.”
March 3, 1990–Tampa:
…Called Eleanor. She asked if I thought of myself as a sexual person. I said, “Yes, very.” She said, “Yes, very.”
March 9, 1990–Dallas:
Eleanor arrived during the show…. I glimpsed her in the wings while I was having a little non-chat with Edie Brickell. Eleanor looked spectacular. Our first kiss was amazing. She had me delirious on the bus ride… she’s wild… I guess I’ve grudge-fucked old girlfriends, distanced myself in the act with others, and become a sort of control freak… I’m readjusting to making love… I really like Eleanor. When she walks in the room, the floodlights come on throwing everything else into shadow.
April 5, 1990–Sydney, Australia:
…Eleanor gave me the best head I’ve ever had, then she went out with the promoter’s wife and came back a little drunk… very upsetting to me.
April 18,1990–Brisbane:
…what, one wonders, will we do? Live together? I’m sure I’m in love with her.
May 13, 1990–Adelaide:
…Eleanor faxed Minneapolis gossip column about us.
July 2, 1990–Minnesota with Eleanor:
…I told Eleanor I didn’t know if I could handle the long distance relationship… She said she wasn’t going backwards in the relationship and if I started seeing other people–sleeping with them–that was it…
July 7, 1990:
Made love with Annette on the couch.
Books: Doris Lessing’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech
Via Galleycat:
“The storyteller is deep inside everyone of us. The story-maker is always with us. Let us suppose our world is attacked by war, by the horrors that we all of us easily imagine. Let us suppose floods wash through our cities, the seas rise… but the storyteller will be there, for it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us - for good and for ill. It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative.”
The Guardian has the full transcript.
James Baldwin, 1924-1987: “I can’t be a pessimist, because I’m alive”
James Baldwin, the finest 20th-century writer about race and America and one of the greatest essayists this country ever produced, died 20 years ago today: November 30, 1987. In this clip, taken from an early 1960s TV interview, he talks about Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and the civil rights movement that was then breaking onto the national stage. (Unfortunately, the synching of image and sound are off. Doesn’t really matter.)
Your James Lipton fix: Actor’s Studio host pimps his new book
A three-minute book trailer for Inside the Actor’s Studio host and popular cult-object James Lipton’s new book, Inside Inside. Best line: “Everything you see in this room, and much more, is inside Inside Inside.”
Mixed reviews for Kindle, Amazon’s new e-book reader
Steven Levy, who wrote the Newsweek story on Jeff Bezos’s new $400 e-book viewer, writes at his blog that he likes it. Author John Scalzi, whose science fiction novel The Ghost Brigades is one of the first titles offered, gives a more withering assessment:
“Meh. It looks like a nice toy. But I look at it this way: I can pay $400 for an e-book reader, and then pay $7.99 for an electronic copy of a book, or I can just pay $7.99 for the actual book, which requires no expensive intermediary equipment to enjoy, and use that extra $400 to buy 50 more books. Seems pretty straightforward to me. Also: paying for a monthly subscription for newspapers and blogs you can read on the Web for free? That earns a fairly large WTF? from me. But, you know. Whatever makes people happy.
Books: The amazing worlds of Fletcher Hanks
It isn’t a graphic novel and it isn’t contemporary, but the book I’ve enjoyed most from the comics world this year is Fletcher Hanks: I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets!, a Fantagraphics title edited by Paul Karasik and published last summer ($19.95; details here).
Hanks’s work is the subject of cult legend among some collectors of the period when he worked (Depression era; all the work in this 124-page volume was published in 1939-41), but I’d never heard of him. His comics stories are as brash, grandiose, frightened, and paranoiac as the America in which he drew them. And Paul Karasik’s biographical story about Hanks at the end of a book is a little gem itself.
Books: What are your “brick lit” nominees?
They coined a new term at Media Bistro’s books blog, GalleyCat, last week: “brick lit,” which is defined as “over-long books by ‘genius’ writers who could’ve done with some editorial supervision.”
The discussion started with Denis Johnson’s 624-page, National Book Award-winning Tree of Smoke and proceeded to name-drop several other books: Don Delillo’s Underworld, Russell Banks’s Cloudsplitter, Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day, Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games, and Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle trilogy.
Anything you’d add to the list?
Book news: Rowling as Voldemort, the future of publishing
- Dwight Garner at PaperCuts on last night’s National Book Awards winners;
- MediaBistro’s GalleyCat (and Salon) on the Harry Potter lawsuit that is making JK Rowling one of the biggest villains-du-jour in publishing;
- Buzz, Balls & Hype features an essay by thriller author Barry Eisler, who argues that technology will soon make authors as independent from publishing houses as recording artists are from record labels;
- GalleyCat sums up all the hubbub and gossip surrounding publisher Judith Regan’s $100 million lawsuit against Harper-Collins and NewsCorp.
Oxford American Dictionary names its 2007 word of the year
Locavore–a San Francisco-coined word for people who strive to eat only locally grown foods–has edged out such competitors as mumblecore (low-budget, improvised indie movies), previvor (a person who has survived a genetic predisposition to cancer), and tase (to blast with a stun gun).
Locally grown: There’s no way to be sure Adam Platt has even heard of “locavores,” but he’s had it with them all the same.
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