Posts
...here are two links about gender and reading. 1) from author Claire Messud about "women's literature" from the journal Guernica and 2) a '07 piece from Eric Weiner on NPR about "Why Women Read More Than Men."
I hope both of these two things help further the discussion about the superbowl ad, the piece by Edward Campion, and Brian's incredibly thoughtful response. Are these two links directly related to the sexist nature of the Bud Light ad? No, but they should help to fill in the background.
Monday, February 08, 2010
Can Superbowl ads be sexist and anti-books?!
The answer to the headline question is... quite possibly.
Edward Campion of the "Reluctant Habits" blog takes care of some business in this post on the rampant misogyny found in the ads that ran during this year's Superbowl. In particular, a Bud Light ad had a man join a meeting of a women's book club just because they had beer. The gals then describe the book they are reading - about women living through a war they don't understand - while the man sexualizes every word, showing his interest is only in the beer and the women as objects. It ends with a painfully stupid joke about Little Women. But overall, the men are in sports uniforms and the women are in a book club.
I just have to run this excerpt about the underlying message of this asinine ad - an ad so worthless that I won't even link it here, though it's posted on Campion's site. His words:
Here then is the ad’s anti-women and anti-reading worldview: Women, no matter what their goals, aspirations, or interests, have no other role in society other than getting fucked by men. Let women have their “little” book clubs, which can be easily interrupted on a masculine whim and which women will never dare object to. They will set everything aside to give you head or to serve you beer.
And, by the way, if you’re a man, you don’t even need to read to get ahead in the world. (Indeed, one of the commercial’s curious philosophical positions is that one cannot both enjoy beer — at least the stuff better than the undrinkable swill that is being sold in this commercial — and books. Speaking as a man who enjoys beer, books, and football, and who finds intelligent women far sexier than empty-headed centerfolds, I happily refute these stereotypes through my very existence.)
But is that really the worldview at play?
It's interesting to note the conflation of reading - vs playing sports here - and women - versus beer-swilling men here. What gets lost is that the women were seemingly ready to swig some of these beers on their own while discussing this book, which, if one is to trust the description read to this loser guy, is a weak, sentimental yarn. One could wonder if the women were just using this uninteresting description to get rid of the guy so he wouldn't steal their beer. All the same, the women lose as the men invade the club - just for the beer, and possibly for the sex. (Beer goggles anyone?!)
But why, one might ask, must reading only be seen as a feminized past-time, only done by middle class women in sensible sweaters who sit inside tastefully appointed living rooms on sunny days? I might argue that it's not the reading that's the feminized activity, but the talking about reading. In that case, it's still misogynistic for many reasons, but reading is less the target. Let's face it, even guys who like to drink beer and like to read - like myself, like Christopher, like Campion - don't necessarily want to sit around and talk about how we feel about each book we read. And who cares?
I don't want to soften Campion's rant at all, which I enjoyed and which was important to get out there. (Nice to see it picked up by Galleycat.) I just want to try and preserve the idea of some gals sitting in a circle with beers on ice by their side talking about books, without the man. In the moment right before the commercial starts, those women were pretty badass, even if they get clipped out of the framed moment by moronic advertisers who always try appealing to the lowest common denominator.
Thursday, February 04, 2010
Goings On in a World in Transition
The changes happening in publishing - in economic models, in technology, in rights - are overwhelming. One could spend one's life trying to follow this mess, and I suppose some do. Here at SotB, we seek out understandable chunks and, if possible, pass them to you in some form.
With this in mind, I had to link to author John Scalzi's amusing play about the modern state of publishing, from an author's perspective, as posted on his long-running blog, Whatever. The play, entitled Why In Fact Publishing Will Not Go Away Anytime Soon: A Deeply Slanted Play in Three Acts, is about a writer being given horrendous advice on how best to publish his novel - by self-publishing - in the modern age. It shows how the exploitation of labor happens and the quality control lost due to this exploitation. It's a quick read but nicely brings up many of the issues of great concern to us and many of you.
Over at MobyLives, Meg Halpern has posted on these ridiculous MacBook covers that are made to look like old books. As the company, TwelveSouth, readily admits, it's a way of hiding something of great value in something, sadly, of little value to most people:
Tucked inside BookBook, no one will ever see your MacBook, even when it’s right under their nose. Sitting on a coffee table, dorm room or desk, BookBook looks like a vintage piece of literature, not an expensive laptop. It’s a great disguise and a simple way to reduce the risk of your MacBook getting stolen.
Can't argue with that.
So as the work of modern book designers gets devalued by authors in the current age, as demonstrated in Scalzi's satire, book design of a past age gets replicated for new technology. \
It's a mad, mad, mad, mad, mad world, folks.
Wednesday, February 03, 2010
Alumni magazines?
Ok, who the hell reads their alumni magazine? I know that there are good hearted, well intentioned people who put them together but usually my UMass Amherst Magazine goes right into the recycling. Doesn't yours? I suppose if I had attended Harvard or some such I'd be interested in just which rapacious, capitalist machine my former roommate in Wigglesworth Hall was being named as CFO of, but otherwise? No thanks. Alright, I do check the Obits to see if any of my classmates have died but that is all. Seriously. Until now. This must be a case of why one should never claim that there is no such thing as a five-legged cow. The instant one does, boom!, you are driving along and see a five-legged oreo cow.
The cover story on this week's?, month's, quarter's? (what the hell is the publishing schedule of these things anyway?) issue of UMass Amherst Magazine is "The Secret Life of Books." In it, writer Eric Goldscheider ('93), takes a look at the job being done by Head of Special Collections and University Archives, Mr. Robert Cox. Right now, Cox is responsible for "the largest print-to-digital conversion project in the history of the campus, managing the transfer of the 100,000 piece W.E.B. Du Bois Library collection to electronic media." (Snooze.) However, that is not what interested me and what will be, I think, of interest to the 6 of you reading Survival of the Book is that Cox also decided to launch a project called The History of the Book Teaching Collection. It will be:
Pretty cool. The message of the collection is that notions of what a book is may be changing but that "students need to understand that those mythical objects called books were far more diverse than the museum pieces and limited editions found in most book-history collections," said Robert Cox. Indeed,
In a quick conversation I had with Mr. Cox, he said that part of the impetus for assembling this collection is that young people, in particular, are becoming "more and more distanced" from the book as a object and vehicle for information with all the concomitant ramifications that will have for our society and our culture. Additionally, the electronic/printed divide (as well as how young people utilize information) has become a site for study by the academy in and of itself:
The collection, which is still being cataloged, is growing. Cox received a early donation of approximately 75 books from UMass librarian Barbara Parker which "illustrates the history of printing, binding, and book design dating from 1493 through 1900." The library has a small budget to buy more materials as they come along but this isn't going to be a dry history that follows a simple time line. "First, we wrote on stones; then we created movable type; then someone invented ink, blah, blah, blah." The focus of the collection is more on what people thought of when they thought of books. What did people of different times, economic situations, and cultural experiences across time think about when presented with a "book?"
So what is stopping you from going by? I mean, how cool is this?:
Awesome, right?!?
"The current exhibition is not quite up and running just yet," says Cox, "but the materials are open to the public and, even though things aren't completely cataloged yet, we won't turn anyone away." Now, Cox said that it would be difficult to accommodate groups of more than 20 but anyone who comes up to the 25th floor will get to see, smell, touch, and yes, read the materials that make up the beginnings of this incredibly cool project.
The special collections hours are as follows:
Directions to the UMass campus can be found here. If you go, tell Mr. Cox that you heard about this on Survival of the Book...just for larfs. I think I write for Brian as well when I write that we editors of SotB can't wait to get out there and see this for ourselves.
The cover story on this week's?, month's, quarter's? (what the hell is the publishing schedule of these things anyway?) issue of UMass Amherst Magazine is "The Secret Life of Books." In it, writer Eric Goldscheider ('93), takes a look at the job being done by Head of Special Collections and University Archives, Mr. Robert Cox. Right now, Cox is responsible for "the largest print-to-digital conversion project in the history of the campus, managing the transfer of the 100,000 piece W.E.B. Du Bois Library collection to electronic media." (Snooze.) However, that is not what interested me and what will be, I think, of interest to the 6 of you reading Survival of the Book is that Cox also decided to launch a project called The History of the Book Teaching Collection. It will be:
"...a teaching collection to illuminate book design, production, and distribution in support of curricula in history, literature, and art. Students could smell and touch 500-year-old paper, smack in the midst of the library's ever growing cache of electronic texts."
Pretty cool. The message of the collection is that notions of what a book is may be changing but that "students need to understand that those mythical objects called books were far more diverse than the museum pieces and limited editions found in most book-history collections," said Robert Cox. Indeed,
"Nowadays, when most people hear the word "book," they still tend to think of a printed, bound set of (usually) paper pages. But the notion of a "book" is now a jumping-off point for an evolving repertoire of modern reading tools, from e-textbooks to "vooks"--electronic books with embedded video. Though paper is a 2,000-year-old technology, (a highly portable revelation that followed cumbersome clay tablets), books can now be read on touch screens and e-readers, such as Kindles (God help us - Ed.)"
In a quick conversation I had with Mr. Cox, he said that part of the impetus for assembling this collection is that young people, in particular, are becoming "more and more distanced" from the book as a object and vehicle for information with all the concomitant ramifications that will have for our society and our culture. Additionally, the electronic/printed divide (as well as how young people utilize information) has become a site for study by the academy in and of itself:
"Academics," writes Goldscheider, "actively question the impact of electronic texts--on brains, on learning, on pedagogy. This year, an Amazon-supported trial of Kindles in classrooms at seven universities showed that many students and teachers still prefer old-fashioned bound-paper books because they can write in the margins, bend pages, add stickies, and locate passages more easily. E-readers are an emerging technology, so these shortfalls will likely be addressed in subsequent versions. Especially in education, electronic texts, which offer endless opportunities for layered reading and self-directed learning through instant cross-referencing, can trump old-fashioned books. Printed books stand as more or less finished statements and sentiments; they ask for reflection and response more so than interaction. In contrast, readers of electronic texts actively navigate a complex web, often writing or changing texts themselves along the way."
The collection, which is still being cataloged, is growing. Cox received a early donation of approximately 75 books from UMass librarian Barbara Parker which "illustrates the history of printing, binding, and book design dating from 1493 through 1900." The library has a small budget to buy more materials as they come along but this isn't going to be a dry history that follows a simple time line. "First, we wrote on stones; then we created movable type; then someone invented ink, blah, blah, blah." The focus of the collection is more on what people thought of when they thought of books. What did people of different times, economic situations, and cultural experiences across time think about when presented with a "book?"
"Humble, everyday texts play an important role in book history, which is why, explains cox the the libraries have a particular interest in collection books printed in rural and small-town New England. "They're what average people of the time thought of when they heard the word book.""
So what is stopping you from going by? I mean, how cool is this?:
"On the 25th floor of the library you can hold in your hands a rare 1676 edition of Thomas Hobbes's translation of the work of the Greek historian Thucydides. Handsomely bound in leather...the paper, made from pulped rags, still feels like cloth, dimpled and almost ready for ironing; these pages cannot be riffled, but must be lovingly turned. The ink, with lampblack as a key component, is remarkably dense. Run your finger over a page and you can feel the impression left by metal type."
Awesome, right?!?
"The current exhibition is not quite up and running just yet," says Cox, "but the materials are open to the public and, even though things aren't completely cataloged yet, we won't turn anyone away." Now, Cox said that it would be difficult to accommodate groups of more than 20 but anyone who comes up to the 25th floor will get to see, smell, touch, and yes, read the materials that make up the beginnings of this incredibly cool project.
The special collections hours are as follows:
Monday through Friday, 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., except major holidays. SCUA will be closed when the W.E.B. Du Bois Library is closed. If you are planning a visit from a distance, please contact us in advance to verify that the department will be open. A small number of collections are stored off site and advance notice will expedite service.
Directions to the UMass campus can be found here. If you go, tell Mr. Cox that you heard about this on Survival of the Book...just for larfs. I think I write for Brian as well when I write that we editors of SotB can't wait to get out there and see this for ourselves.
Monday, February 01, 2010
Amazon does Crazy Again, Macmillan Fights Back
We are not real journalists here at SotB, which most of you know. We don't go out investigating stories, doing interviews, issuing reports... we have full-time jobs that justify our reading industry pubs, but don't necessarily justify our writing at length about hot topics du jour. But then something huge happens and I feel the need to at least put it out there for you, reader, in case you are stuck in some kind of cave and only have access to this item in your Google Reader. When you can get your browser to go to BookNinja, we're here to give you what we can.
With that in mind, I feel obligated to mention the rapid weekend firestorm that occurred in the last few days, when Amazon and Macmillan went at each other's throats, claws and fangs out. Shelf Awareness, as ever, does a fine job summing up the whole thing, so follow the link to read up on how it all went down.
I was particularly disturbed by this news, which I had not heard elsewhere:
The Macmillan ban went beyond Amazon's website: reportedly without notice to Kindle owners, Amazon went into the devices and removed Macmillan titles from wish lists and removed sample chapters of Macmillan titles. This move was reminiscent of the retailer's quiet pulling last year of some e-titles whose copyrights were in question (Shelf Awareness, July 19, 2009).
Yikes. That's f'ed up, y'all.
Another one of my favorite blogs, MobyLives, posted Macmillan CEO John Sargent's letter to authors and agents, re: Amazon, in full. More recently, this blog, too, offered an update to the madness.
So rather than report on this news at length, I'll provide those links and promise that someday soon, Christopher and I will have more thoughtful comments about Amazon's monopolistic evil. For now, I'll only say that this comment from Amazon's most recent press release truly disturbed me:
We don’t believe that all of the major publishers will take the same route as Macmillan. And we know for sure that many independent presses and self-published authors will see this as an opportunity to provide attractively priced e-books as an alternative.
The fatcats at Amazon, as usual, are missing the point. Self-published authors and indie presses that go into the book market just looking to push more product? Really? They ain't selling mops, they're selling books, written by people in a way, some of us hope, that is imaginative, innovative, new, edgy, honest, powerful... But Amazon winks at those authorpreneurs out there, if you will, and says, "Here's your chance to beat publishers like Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Metropolitan, St. Martin's, and more! Just sell your stuff cheaper and everyone will forget the names Jamaica Kincaid, Czeslaw Milosz, Flannery O'Connor, and Philip Gourevitch. HA! Just markdown your products and you'll leave those pathetic editors and their 'big name,' 'talented' authors in the dust!"
Apparently, #amazonfail is not just a 2009 thing...
PS / Addendum
I just have to post a link to this wonderful piece by Kit Eaton over at Fast Company, which opens beautifully:
There's one clear conclusion falling out of the ridiculous Amazon versus Macmillan books debacle that played out this weekend: Amazon really doesn't care about you, in fact it kinda hates you--pretty much whoever you are.
Here here! Be sure to click over to get a smart take on a dismal moment in bookselling.
Thursday, January 28, 2010
J. D. Salinger, 1919-2010
As most of the readers of this blog probably know, it has been confirmed that author J. D. Salinger has passed away at 91. He is most famous for his novel, Catcher in the Rye, though also greatly respected for his short story collection, Franny and Zooey.
The New York Times probably offers the best obit as of now, with many tributes surely to follow. Clearly this obit was pre-written and filed, waiting for the day it could be pulled out, updated, and issued. I wonder, though, why the same wasn't ready for Howard Zinn? They are still running a crappy AP obit for him. At least his local paper here, The Boston Globe, is running a better obit for him.
RIP...
**UPDATED 16:56 on 28/1/2010** As ever, the Guardian UK outdoes our own newspapers for a tribute to Salinger (plus various and sundry other links). You can find everything you ever wanted to know about J.D. here. You're welcome!
**UPDATED 16:56 on 28/1/2010** As ever, the Guardian UK outdoes our own newspapers for a tribute to Salinger (plus various and sundry other links). You can find everything you ever wanted to know about J.D. here. You're welcome!
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Howard Zinn, dead at the age of 87.
As an editor, I was only able to work with Howard two times before I left editorial. Once, as a newly minted Assistant Editor, he helped me organize, edit, and select the pieces for my first book, the anthology titled The Power of Nonviolence. It became, I think, a solid seller for Beacon Press and I remember him telling me that he thought the selections were pretty savvy for a "new born." I took that as a compliment, wouldn't you? In fact, I distinctly remember him telling me that he had never read the Camus piece I found for the book and was grateful to me for bringing it to his attention. When you are just starting out that kind of praise...well, let's just say I was really thrilled.
The second time I was lucky enough to work with him was on a reissue of Francis Russell's A City in Terror: Calvin Coolidge and the 1919 Boston Police Strike. While he only supplied a blurb for this lost classic (which has since found its audience with Dennis Lehane discovering it and making it one of the bases for his novel The Given Day), his strong quote about the book and the stand he took for me in helping me calm the jittery nerves of a boss concerned about bringing back a history book from a long dead, unknown historian about a forgotten time in Boston history went a long way in shaping my editorial career. That's it. Not too much but I can honestly say that the time spent working with him will remain with me for the rest of my publishing career. Rest easy, my friend. The fight is now ours from here on out.
-Christopher
From the Boston Globe:
For Dr. Zinn, activism was a natural extension of the revisionist brand of history he taught. Dr. Zinn's best-known book, "A People's History of the United States" (1980), had for its heroes not the Founding Fathers -- many of them slaveholders and deeply attached to the status quo, as Dr. Zinn was quick to point out -- but rather the farmers of Shays' Rebellion and the union organizers of the 1930s.
As he wrote in his autobiography, "You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train" (1994), "From the start, my teaching was infused with my own history. I would try to be fair to other points of view, but I wanted more than 'objectivity'; I wanted students to leave my classes not just better informed, but more prepared to relinquish the safety of silence, more prepared to speak up, to act against injustice wherever they saw it. This, of course, was a recipe for trouble."
Certainly, it was a recipe for rancor between Dr. Zinn and Silber. Dr. Zinn twice helped lead faculty votes to oust the BU president, who in turn once accused Dr. Zinn of arson (a charge he quickly retracted) and cited him as a prime example of teachers "who poison the well of academe."
Dr. Zinn was a cochairman of the strike committee when BU professors walked out in 1979. After the strike was settled, he and four colleagues were charged with violating their contract when they refused to cross a picket line of striking secretaries. The charges against "the BU Five" were soon dropped, however.
Dr. Zinn was born in New York City on Aug. 24, 1922, the son of Jewish immigrants, Edward Zinn, a waiter, and Jennie (Rabinowitz) Zinn, a housewife. He attended New York public schools and worked in the Brooklyn Navy Yard before joining the Army Air Force during World War II. Serving as a bombardier in the Eighth Air Force, he won the Air Medal and attained the rank of second lieutenant.
After the war, Dr. Zinn worked at a series of menial jobs until entering New York University as a 27-year-old freshman on the GI Bill. Professor Zinn, who had married Roslyn Shechter in 1944, worked nights in a warehouse loading trucks to support his studies. He received his bachelor's degree from NYU, followed by master's and doctoral degrees in history from Columbia University.
Dr. Zinn was an instructor at Upsala College and lecturer at Brooklyn College before joining the faculty of Spelman College in Atlanta, in 1956. He served at the historically black women's institution as chairman of the history department. Among his students were the novelist Alice Walker, who called him "the best teacher I ever had," and Marian Wright Edelman, future head of the Children's Defense Fund.
During this time, Dr. Zinn became active in the civil rights movement. He served on the executive committee of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the most aggressive civil rights organization of the time, and participated in numerous demonstrations.
Dr. Zinn became an associate professor of political science at BU in 1964 and was named full professor in 1966.
The focus of his activism now became the Vietnam War. Dr. Zinn spoke at countless rallies and teach-ins and drew national attention when he and another leading antiwar activist, Rev. Daniel Berrigan, went to Hanoi in 1968 to receive three prisoners released by the North Vietnamese.
Dr. Zinn's involvement in the antiwar movement led to his publishing two books: "Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal" (1967) and "Disobedience and Democracy" (1968). He had previously published "LaGuardia in Congress" (1959), which had won the American Historical Association's Albert J. Beveridge Prize; "SNCC: The New Abolitionists" (1964); "The Southern Mystique" (1964); and "New Deal Thought" (1966).
Dr. Zinn was also the author of "The Politics of History" (1970); "Postwar America" (1973); "Justice in Everyday Life" (1974); and "Declarations of Independence" (1990).
In 1988, Dr. Zinn took early retirement so as to concentrate on speaking and writing. The latter activity included writing for the stage. Dr. Zinn had two plays produced: "Emma," about the anarchist leader Emma Goldman, and "Daughter of Venus."
Dr. Zinn, or his writing, made a cameo appearance in the 1997 film "Good Will Hunting." The title characters, played by Matt Damon, lauds "A People's History" and urges Robin Williams's character to read it. Damon, who co-wrote the script, was a neighbor of the Zinns growing up.
Damon was later involved in a television version of the book, "The People Speak," which ran on the History Channel in 2009. Damon was the narrator of a 2004 biographical documentary, "Howard Zinn: You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train."
On his last day at BU, Dr. Zinn ended class 30 minutes early so he could join a picket line and urged the 500 students attending his lecture to come along. A hundred did so.
Dr. Zinn's wife died in 2008. He leaves a daughter, Myla Kabat-Zinn of Lexington; a son, Jeff of Wellfleet; three granddaugthers; and two grandsons.
Funeral plans were not available.
The second time I was lucky enough to work with him was on a reissue of Francis Russell's A City in Terror: Calvin Coolidge and the 1919 Boston Police Strike. While he only supplied a blurb for this lost classic (which has since found its audience with Dennis Lehane discovering it and making it one of the bases for his novel The Given Day), his strong quote about the book and the stand he took for me in helping me calm the jittery nerves of a boss concerned about bringing back a history book from a long dead, unknown historian about a forgotten time in Boston history went a long way in shaping my editorial career. That's it. Not too much but I can honestly say that the time spent working with him will remain with me for the rest of my publishing career. Rest easy, my friend. The fight is now ours from here on out.
-Christopher
From the Boston Globe:
Howard Zinn, the Boston University historian and political activist who was an early opponent of US involvement in Vietnam and a leading faculty critic of BU president John Silber, died of a heart attack today in Santa Monica, Calif, where he was traveling, his family said. He was 87.
"His writings have changed the consciousness of a generation, and helped open new paths to understanding and its crucial meaning for our lives," Noam Chomsky, the left-wing activist and MIT professor, once wrote of Dr. Zinn. "When action has been called for, one could always be confident that he would be on the front lines, an example and trustworthy guide."
As he wrote in his autobiography, "You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train" (1994), "From the start, my teaching was infused with my own history. I would try to be fair to other points of view, but I wanted more than 'objectivity'; I wanted students to leave my classes not just better informed, but more prepared to relinquish the safety of silence, more prepared to speak up, to act against injustice wherever they saw it. This, of course, was a recipe for trouble."
Certainly, it was a recipe for rancor between Dr. Zinn and Silber. Dr. Zinn twice helped lead faculty votes to oust the BU president, who in turn once accused Dr. Zinn of arson (a charge he quickly retracted) and cited him as a prime example of teachers "who poison the well of academe."
Dr. Zinn was a cochairman of the strike committee when BU professors walked out in 1979. After the strike was settled, he and four colleagues were charged with violating their contract when they refused to cross a picket line of striking secretaries. The charges against "the BU Five" were soon dropped, however.
Dr. Zinn was born in New York City on Aug. 24, 1922, the son of Jewish immigrants, Edward Zinn, a waiter, and Jennie (Rabinowitz) Zinn, a housewife. He attended New York public schools and worked in the Brooklyn Navy Yard before joining the Army Air Force during World War II. Serving as a bombardier in the Eighth Air Force, he won the Air Medal and attained the rank of second lieutenant.
After the war, Dr. Zinn worked at a series of menial jobs until entering New York University as a 27-year-old freshman on the GI Bill. Professor Zinn, who had married Roslyn Shechter in 1944, worked nights in a warehouse loading trucks to support his studies. He received his bachelor's degree from NYU, followed by master's and doctoral degrees in history from Columbia University.
Dr. Zinn was an instructor at Upsala College and lecturer at Brooklyn College before joining the faculty of Spelman College in Atlanta, in 1956. He served at the historically black women's institution as chairman of the history department. Among his students were the novelist Alice Walker, who called him "the best teacher I ever had," and Marian Wright Edelman, future head of the Children's Defense Fund.
During this time, Dr. Zinn became active in the civil rights movement. He served on the executive committee of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the most aggressive civil rights organization of the time, and participated in numerous demonstrations.
Dr. Zinn became an associate professor of political science at BU in 1964 and was named full professor in 1966.
The focus of his activism now became the Vietnam War. Dr. Zinn spoke at countless rallies and teach-ins and drew national attention when he and another leading antiwar activist, Rev. Daniel Berrigan, went to Hanoi in 1968 to receive three prisoners released by the North Vietnamese.
Dr. Zinn's involvement in the antiwar movement led to his publishing two books: "Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal" (1967) and "Disobedience and Democracy" (1968). He had previously published "LaGuardia in Congress" (1959), which had won the American Historical Association's Albert J. Beveridge Prize; "SNCC: The New Abolitionists" (1964); "The Southern Mystique" (1964); and "New Deal Thought" (1966).
Dr. Zinn was also the author of "The Politics of History" (1970); "Postwar America" (1973); "Justice in Everyday Life" (1974); and "Declarations of Independence" (1990).
In 1988, Dr. Zinn took early retirement so as to concentrate on speaking and writing. The latter activity included writing for the stage. Dr. Zinn had two plays produced: "Emma," about the anarchist leader Emma Goldman, and "Daughter of Venus."
Dr. Zinn, or his writing, made a cameo appearance in the 1997 film "Good Will Hunting." The title characters, played by Matt Damon, lauds "A People's History" and urges Robin Williams's character to read it. Damon, who co-wrote the script, was a neighbor of the Zinns growing up.
Damon was later involved in a television version of the book, "The People Speak," which ran on the History Channel in 2009. Damon was the narrator of a 2004 biographical documentary, "Howard Zinn: You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train."
On his last day at BU, Dr. Zinn ended class 30 minutes early so he could join a picket line and urged the 500 students attending his lecture to come along. A hundred did so.
Dr. Zinn's wife died in 2008. He leaves a daughter, Myla Kabat-Zinn of Lexington; a son, Jeff of Wellfleet; three granddaugthers; and two grandsons.
Funeral plans were not available.
I-Pad zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Having watched some painfully mired livestreaming (technology fail - curious...) and followed the live-blogging at the NY Times during Steve Jobs' big announcement, I feel confident in saying, as others have, Apple is putting out a big ol' i-touch.
This may be a game-changer for news media, especially newspapers, but I don't think it will radically change book culture just yet.
I just wanted to throw something up here to show that we *do* pay attention to technological advances that impact book publishing here at SotB... but we don't have to like them or get giddy about them.
That whole presentation, with all the applause and "awesome" this and "just amazing" that was a bit too tent revival for my liking anyhow. Right?
Famous Literary Drunks & Addicts
Hi there, Christopher here. I have a longer post coming sometime today but I thought that you all might find this Life Magazine photo essay on the prevalence of mind enhancing drugs in the creative process.
Enjoy! More soon...
Enjoy! More soon...
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Gatz, or The Great Gatsby on stage
I took a bit of a theatre challenge this weekend: my partner and I attended a full performance of Gatz, a production by the Elevator Repair Service theatre troupe being staged at the American Reportory Theater in Cambridge, MA. As the A.R.T. describes it,
A theatrical tour de force, Gatz is conceived as a single six-hour production in which an ensemble of 13 actors bring to live every word of the novel with no text added and none removed. Gatz is a one-of-a-kind theatrical event defined by its radical commitment to one of the 20th century's greatest novels.
The "novel" in question? F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, of course! The only words spoken aloud on stage come from the book, and the main character on stage reads every word of the novel, except for some dialogue read by characters in character. Sadly, I cannot describe this in a way that does it justice. The conceit is not just a lark, just some gag. This performance is beautifully executed, managing to be laugh out loud funny one minute, moving the next, and entertaining and engrossing for a full 6 hours - yes, 6 hours. We arrived at 3 pm and left after 11pm, with 2 10+minute intermissions and one hour-long meal break. It was worth every minute.
First of all, I kept thinking of our sweet li'l blog here due to one particular aspect of the performance. Ya see, it's built around a grungy office. The narrator walks into the office, hits a light, and sits at his desk. He has a tragic old worn-out desktop computer, and it won't start. Again, remember that no words are spoken aloud that are not in the novel, so the actor does a Chaplin-like routine that will be familiar to any of us in the modern age - hit the on switch, hit a few F keys at the top of the keyboard, try some combinations. When nothing works, he picks up the novel and starts reading. Soon, his co-workers, who walk past him doing mundane office tasks, start embodying the characters. The broken computer returns throughout the play, never functioning, and we are grateful because a functioning computer would interrupt the story we're being told.
I love that, in conceiving of how to bring this novel to the stage, the creators of this performance opened with technology failing. I know this will sound reactionary, but I also know that those of us who love books deeply enjoy that moment when we shut the computer off, when we put the cellphone away, when the hum of the electrified appliances around us hushes and it's just us and the book, possibly a good lamp. (Hey, you can't throw it all out, right?) Don't get me wrong, I am no back-to-the-woods kind of guy. I spent the day after this day-long theatre production at an outlet mall. But I read to be solitary, and I take pleasure in how minimal an energy requirement is necessary for this activity. Call it "green" or call it "simple" or call it "retro," I just know the words work on the page, the page works as a way to bring me the story bit by bit (not byte by byte), and the book offers a generous but not demanding venue for me. We understand each other.
I also want to comment on this transition from book to stage in this production. It's flawless. I can't say enough about how enjoyable it was to see something brought to a whole new form of art without harming the original, but instead leaving the original with so much dignity. The book is there on stage, in the actor's hand, for the full 6+ hours. And the production plays with the words on the page: an actors spills coffee and it seems like a mistake, until the narrator reads, "Michaelis fumbled as a way to distract Joe." There is silence as the narrator and another actor stare at each other, then the actor speaks, and the narrator follows with, "He said, after a long pause." It's so goddam endearing to any book lover. They didn't ignore the words or mock the words or feel the need to capture each one with some precious touch. They played with the words, and the story, and the characters, with respect and intelligence.
This production gave me great hope, in some odd way, about the future of the book. It reminded me that people love these things, with their gradual storylines and delicately chosen words and chapters - to start intermission, the actor would look up and say, "That's the end of Chapter 3. We're going to take a 10 minute break." You never forgot it was a book first, and it left the audience with the stage company all on the same side - on the book's side, as we all show our support with this 6+ hour commitment.
In my day job, I'm dealing a lot with electronic scholarly communication - where it's going, what's needed, what's fair in terms of access and cost. And I'm often left reminding people that articles and books do not just happen magically due to the wonders of technology. The narrative had to be written and edited by the author and then pitched; the editor had to acquire the book and edit more; the copyeditor had to carefully read through each word and all the grammar; the designer had to catch breaks and set each page. Just because you can download a pdf of a monograph now with ease doesn't mean it didn't take great thought and labor to get to that point. The end is just not mindful of the means of getting there, and I worry what this will mean for books going forward. Just because we can grab a book off Amazon from our Kindles (no I don't have one! royal "our") in 30 seconds doesn't mean it came into being that easily.
Seeing this production was relief, at the core of things (and on top of that core was the simple enjoyment, as time breezed by in a way that was truly unexpected). It was a relief to see something come out of a book that salvaged the painstaking labor that goes into writing the thing. I can only hope that future uses of books and narratives manage to increasingly respect rather than denigrate that intellectual/creative labor.
Gatz! is coming to NYC next season, so folks in or near NYC, check it out! Boston folks, get tickets now!
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