Bookslut

Gaper's Block points out a contradiction in Illinois's governor's thinking. While he wants every youngster out there to have a book to increase literacy rates, the library budgets have been slashed.

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Japan, the country that has brought us manga with little schoolgirls raped by demons and anime with schoolgirls raped by tree roots, has finally labeled something obscene. Normally, I'd be offended, but I'd like to take a moment and just be glad someone over there has a sense of decency. Okay. Offended again. (Link from Ed.)

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God damn it, somebody go find him. This is depressing the shit out of me.

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A. L. Kennedy (you should consider reading Everything You Need) responds to Alexander McCall Smith's attack on Irvine Welsh. It has made us fall in love with her all over again.

And, of course, Scotland today is justly renowned as a land entirely without poverty and crime. No one who lives here is ever lonely, or upset, ill, or worried, no one loses their job, raises their voice, swears, dislikes the weather or has a mild headache for a while. Our local and national government are not inefficient and corrupt and our executive's Holyrood premises won't eventually cost more than building a Scottish embassy on Mars. In short, we have no reason whatsoever to write anything other than lovely, slightly dusty histories, or fables involving Africa and Nice Ladies.

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Jay McInerney is evidently a candidate for the open restaurant critic position at the New York Times. The Kicker has his first column.

You are yet again standing in the doorway of Schiller's at 4PM on a Saturday afternoon. You wish that you could say that your return was entirely accidental, but let's face it, you live on Essex and Rivington and just couldn't make it any further up the block. You head to the bathroom because the tiny Bolivians in your head have forsaken marching for a more aggressive variation of a Justin Timberlake breakdancing routine and it's not even dark yet.

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The Nabokov Museum in St. Petersburg is broke.

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I love 2 Blowhards, but it's like The Atlantic. I feel I'm always trying to catch up. So this entry from a few days back that I'm just now getting to should be read immediately. Michael discusses the difference between movie people and book people, particularly dealing with how the two different worlds approach high and low culture. As always, be sure to read the comment section.

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The new Holt Uncensored is up, and she has a list of her wishes for 2004 in publishing.

Come on, you guys, where's your heart? Take a leadership role in the book industry by at least pretending you have one. Here's all you have to do: pay authors just a few pennies for every used-book sale.

Not this again.

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The folks at Readerville are discussing the "news" that New York Times Book Review is sexist. The discussion has gotten pretty heated, and they've gone so far as to do a breakdown of how many men v. how many women are published by various publishers. The results are pretty surprising.

It's difficult for me to formulate a response as my own reading habits are pretty damn sexist, too. In fact, just a woman's name on the spine means I'm more likely to pass it up. My own inherent sexism, I suppose. (Although nothing in the world makes me pass up a book faster than a woman protagonist written by a man.) But tell me, "Just how sexist are your reading habits?"

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And you guys think I'm hard on Laura Miller.

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The question is, did Woody Allen really think Harper Collins wanted his memoirs about just his movies, or is he being clever and scamming them out of $2 million? Either way, it's pretty funny.

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You should really be on I Love Books, even if it's just to read headlines like, "Waugh! What is He Good For?"

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Two completely different reactions to Dr. Laura's Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands. First is Jennifer Howard's offended reaction in the Washington Post. She takes the usual feminist reaction to Dr. Laura, who admonishes women for having careers and children and not being the good little wife. The more interesting piece, unfortunately, is not online yet. Caitlin Flanagan (again, the first thing I read in the Atlantic was her review) takes a more surprising approach. It seems Flanagan has recently become addicted to Dr. Laura's show and tries to separate the crazy from the rational. She's persuasive. The article should be here soon. Or just go buy the magazine. It's exceptionally good this month.

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Rimbaud was a whiny little bitch.

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This took place 40 years ago in Africa, and still I ponder it - the opportunity, the self-deception, the sex, the power, the fear, the confrontation, the foolishness, all the wrongness...

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Actual Comments Overheard In A Poetry Workshop By A Fiction Student In An MFA Program That He, In Order To Fulfill All Degree Requirements, Is Forced to Take: “This poem reminded my of an infant playing with an insane toy, and we were the infant. Or the insane toy. It actually seems to work both ways, and that is what makes this poem simply delicious.” (Link from Maud.)

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While estimates suggest that in the next 100 years perhaps five per cent of species will be wiped out, Mark Abley's Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages argues that it is languages that are really under threat. The consensus seems to be that on current trends, between 50 and 90 per cent of the world's 6,000 or so languages will cease to exist over the next century.

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McSweeney's has a new Dispatch from a Public Librarian up. You can also read the introduction and the first dispatch.

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"But I think we made really serious missteps in 2000 and 2001, and we’ve really turned our backs on a world that could have been pleasant, delight-ful, peaceful, and technocratic. Now we face a world that is religious, narrow-minded, fundamentalist, and violent." A couple of Bruce Sterling links this morning. First is this interview with Reason Magazine, where he discusses forseeing the rise in terrorism, global warming, and porn on the Internet. There is also "the state of the world, the future, and everything" discussion that takes place annually with Sterling. It's extremely long, but fascinating. You didn't really plan on getting work done today, did you? He also has a new book coming out, The Zenith Angle. And that has been your Bruce Sterling update.

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I just got around to reading this, "Good to Hear You" by Holiday Reinhorn.

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One of the less reported stories has been Castro's imprisonment for dissent of 10 independent librarians in Cuba. The Village Voice has written a few columns about the matter, asking why the American Library Association hasn't protested these arrests. Now librarian Ann Sparanese has written in support of Castro's decision, and the Village Voice responds.

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Sara Steffens writes a love letter to East Bay libraries.

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Librarian extraordinaire Jessamyn West adds a bookplate exhibit to her website. Lots of naked ladies.

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The Economist writes about the Voynich manuscript, a 234-page book with beautiful illustrations, naked ladies, and an unknown language or code. It currently lives at Yale where cryptographers have tried for 30 years to read it, as well as countless linguists. But no one tell Tracy Chevalier. She'll try to write a goddamn novel telling its "story".

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I'm impressed. An article about Native American literature that isn't all about Sherman Alexie. (Link from Bookninja.)

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In order to promote Seth Flynn Barkan's new book of poetry Blue Wizard Is About to Die, Rusty Immelman Press is developing a special game of Counter Strike called Kill the Authors. You can register now for the March tournament. (Thanks to Jarret for the link.)

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Can someone explain the idea behind Vintage Murakami to me? I saw it at a bookstore the other day, and it seems to be chapters from different books. Why would someone pay the same price as a full length book by Murakami for this? There is also a Vintage Amis, and god knows how many others.

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Ever since the end of the year, you've been checking Salon.com, thinking, "Please, Laura Miller. Give us your best books of 2003. We feel lost without your wise guidance." Wait no longer! Today she gives it up, and it's pretty much what you'd expect. The Curious Incident. The Fortress of Solitude. Old School. It's an extremely predictible list.

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Nerve.com has a new short story by A.M. Homes, titled "The Weather Outside is Shiny and Bright."

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It seems Alexander McCall Smith thinks his comments about Irvine Welsh have been "misinterpreted." Alas. One more literary feud squashed before I could really enjoy it. What is it going to take? I want Jonathan Safran Foer swinging a broken beer bottle at the New Yorker literary festival by the end of the year.

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And for those outraged that the low-rated Doonesbury survived while Boondocks didn't, we made the decision to drop Boondocks because we did not want to keep publishing a comic that we regularly needed to censor. During the past year, Boondocks was substituted a number of times because it was deemed inappropriate for a family newspaper. And not just this family newspaper. Editors across the country were making the same decisions.

I'm with Liz. Bunch of pussies.

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Danny Gregory writes about and posts some images from Chris Ware's Acme Novelty Date Book on his very beautiful and impressive blog. (Bookmark, folks.) Link from Stephany.

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The Salon Life section is mentioned among others for the worst web writing in 2003.

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For those of you in Chicago, Audrey Niffenegger will be at Women and Children First tonight to read from The Time Traveler's Wife.

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Jennifer Weiner was excited to learn Toni Collette will be playing Rose in the movie version of In Her Shoes. (No permalinks; scroll to the 01/06/03 entry.)

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Sarah LeFanu rereads Ursula K. LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness every decade or so, and she still finds relevant.

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J. Robert Lennon has a squirrel problem.

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The Seattle Times profiles new London publisher Hesperus Press. They work in the same vein as NYRB and Persephone, concentrating on "literary curiosities" such as Faust by Turgenev and The King of Pirates by Daniel Dafoe. The good news is Herperus's books are available in the United States as well.

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Jeff Chang has a few complaints about the Da Capo Best Music Writing series.

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Howard Hampton responds to Curtis White's The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don't Think For Themselves.

Outing Fresh Air hostess Terry Gross as a "morbid, perverse, and voyeuristic" dominatrix of the mind, White sees National Public Radio's semi-elevated inanity as the intellectually pornographic, Big Brother-like suppression of all things sacred. By the lights of The Middle Mind, Gross's rink-a-dink salon of the airwaves is more than Oprah-esque trivialization, it's a genuine threat to the sanctity of art, holding the national imagination hostage. At least the awareness of anyone who matters— all piddly 2 million of 'em. Imagine, we're asked to shudder, the whole country wired to Terry Gross's bourgeois ass!

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RB: What is your evidence that mainstream literary culture is flat? What do you mean by flat?

NP: The events are really dull. A writer appears onstage, is introduced as some god of American prose. Jonathan Safran Foer, for instance. Young Mr. Safran Foer—the merits of his book aside, the way he is presented as a writer and the way he presents himself, to me is antithetical to what I think the literary culture should be—his book aside.

It's not a real Neal Pollack interview until he trashes Jonathan Safran Foer.

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Sexism at the New York Times Book Review? Nooo....

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Back when I worked at Austin's Planned Parenthood, we were a bit obsessed with the goings on of the Bush twins. Everyone had a Jenna Bush story in that town. And if there's one thing I miss about pre-September 11th media coverage, it's the regular updates on the girls. (I wonder if the Bush twins blog is still around...) But this excerpt from The Perfect Wife: The Life and Choices of Laura Bush almost makes up for it.

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Tips on how to write a suspensful novel. (Link from Ed.)

The opening sentence is essential to a great suspense novel, as it lets the reader know what the story's going to be about. I've included a sample opening sentence below, to show you how it's done right:

John crossed over to the living room and lit a cigarette.

Note how I have successfully introduced a character, a location, and an action. Now let's crank up the suspense:

John crossed over to the living room and lit a cigarette. Or did he?

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"Alexander McCall Smith, one of the most popular Scottish authors, has launched an outspoken attack on fellow writer Irvine Welsh, labelling him a 'travesty for Scotland.'" Smith, as you may or may not know, is the author of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, which was something of a surprise hit. I love a good brawl, but Smith's criticisms are a bit odd. He calls Welsh's use of swear words "vulgar" and "debased." He says nobody in Scotland behaves they way they do in Welsh's books. Really? Not a one? You mean Scotland hasn't had a drug problem? Poverty issues? Restless youth? And of course no one there uses the word "fuck." Brawls are much less fun when one of them is a prude.

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It's a very good thing one of my New Year's Resolutions was not updating Bookslut on time. Day seven is too soon to start failing for the year. This year's Guardian First Book Award winner Robert Macfarlane spoke to James Purdon about his book Mountains of the Mind, the pressure of a follow-up, and odd fan letters. Bear v. Shark author Chris Bachelder also talks about the pain of the sophomore slump, as well as the death of Johnny Cash and modern satire. And Warren Ellis agreed to answer four questions from Comicbookslut Karin Kross.

In reviews we have the new Stephen King (we really couldn't resist), Liz Miller uncovers the '60s (and wishes they'd cover themselves up again) in her review of Naked Came the Stranger, and there are diseases from corpses and a high profile suicide in our nonfiction reviews. We aim to please.

And because there's a law out there somewhere, we have a few year end wrap ups. Propaganda examines the books by "the insane, stupid, and just plain evil" from 2003. Comicbookslut tries to look on the bright side of the year. Hollywood Madam writes an open letter to Oscar (honey, you know he never listens).

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An Indian mob has destroyed 30,000 ancient manuscripts and rioted in retaliation for Oxford University Press publishing a book about a Hindu king.

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Mark Alan Stamaty has drawn a scammed author comic for the New York Times.

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That ridiculous little poem Laura Bush said her husband wrote? He didn't write it. Now, someone else might make a joke about Bush not being able to string that many words together coherently, but I'm trying to be a moderate.

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I thought this article about modern mysteries was interesting until I saw the man who wrote it was in fact a writer. The writer of About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made. That fact alone allows you to disregard everything he says.

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Today's publishing world is overwhelmingly confessional. It seems the most popular memoirs are by those who haven't done a damn thing spectacular with their lives. Everyone's first book is autobiographical; even Jonathan Safran Foer named his goddamn narrator after himself. So when you trot out your first book, everyone assumes it's about you. When Danny Leigh talks about his book The Greatest Gift, assumptions are made.

I understand the logic only too well. This is, after all, what writers do - however much veiling and flimflam is applied to the material. Just not me. In fact, it was the fear of doing this that had me dallying for years before I started to write seriously. What was I going to produce otherwise? Yet another preening missive from a university-educated twentysomething (then), living in London, working as a journalist and... Do you see what I mean? I've lost interest already.

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Over at the Guardian, Helon Habila and Courttia Newland discuss racism in literature and the obligation of black writers to their audience.

I've been in Britain a year now, and for the first time in my life I find myself in a community where people of my colour are numerically in the minority; for the first time diasporic literature (Afro-American and black British) begins to have more meaning for me in its treatment of racial issues. Now I understand fully what Toni Morrison meant when she said that for her literature has to be political, has to be beautiful, has to be rooted in a particular culture, a particular point of view. Would a Caucasian author, for instance, feel that kind of necessity?

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Laura Kipnis, who wrote the interesting Against Love: A Polemic, now writes about whether professors should be allowed to sleep with their students.

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Mobylives has gone on hiatus.

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Heru Ptah got a book deal by peddling his book A Hip Hop Story on the subway. The rest is MTV history.

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Leigh Ann bravely offers up her list of books bought in 2003 but not read, including "an entire year of McSweeney's Journals. Amen. She even writes out her list of books sitting on her shelves unread for five years and ten years.

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Yourdictionary.com has a list of the 100 most commonly misspelled words. I'm glad to see I'm not the only idiot who spells out "existence" a couple different ways before getting it right.

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Seduction and romance are not always easy for writers and academics. Their occupations are solitary, their interests cerebral, and there are limits to the amorous possibilities offered by libraries and warm-riesling-fuelled poetry readings. So just over five years ago, the London Review of Books began running personal advertisements, in the hope they would provide a platform for like-minded people to find love, or sex, or at least a suitable reading group.

One might have expected the advertisements to be more literary and erudite than the norm, but no one was quite prepared for the first ad, which read: "67-year-old disaffiliated flaneur, jacked-up on Viagra and looking for a contortionist trumpeter." A cult phenomenon was born.

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Gene Wolfe's new book The Knight is book one of the new The Wizard Knight series. He's interviewed at Infinity Plus.

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There's a new Joe Sacco interview in LA Weekly about his new (great) book The Fixer. He deserves some sort of award for always answering the question, "So why comics?" with grace.

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The New York Observer profiles Brigid Hughes, the new editor of Paris Review.

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This: "Research by The Bookseller magazine has found that leading publishers are set to cut new adult titles by up to 20 per cent over the next three years to try to boost profits." would have been good news had it not been preceded with this: "Publishers are reducing the number of books they release to concentrate on "big name" authors or "good-looking" first-time novelists who are more marketable." Slash. For the love of god, please slash. But slash the "good looking" first-time novelists, not the literary midlist.

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Evidently there is a war being waged. It seems to me the writer is trying to make a big deal out of a small one. The article may have seemed more relevant if it had been published soon after the National Book Awards ceremony. I thought this had already been talked out. Stephen King was not the most gracious recipient the award had ever seen, Shirley Hazzard seemed uncomfortable responding, and supporters of each side have said some silly things.

It seems a matter of common sense. I think anyone who reads King's comment that the new Peter Straub book lost boy lost girl deserves the National Book Award knows it is ridiculous. Unfortunately for King, the National Book Awards are not run like the Oscars where big and dumb rules, giving The Titanic the award over L.A. Confidential. (Yes, I'm still fuming.) And not that Straub is big and dumb, but it is a matter of storytelling vs. writing.

But this is a matter that should die down again quickly. I doubt we'll see King up on that podium ever again.

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Some quick housecleaning this morning:

I am no longer accepting applications for the SF columnist position. Sorry.

If anyone in Chicago is interested in forming a book group, reading the kinds of books I mention on this blog, please e-mail me.

And although Kenan spends his entire day on I Love Music, I just now discovered I Love Books. Just what this procrastinator needs. People complain that Bookslut doesn't have a forum, so go here instead. I'll probably be addicted soon.

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