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!
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?
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!
"This is but a lame excuse for a blog post, wherein you just link to other bloggers' stuff!" you cry. Well... um... it's true. But hey, we here at SotB have day jobs, okay? I'm busily working amidst manuscripts and proposals, writing up memos seeking approval of my projects. It's always "me, me, me" with you. Jeesh.
So at least I'm doing something. Fun links!
We have brought you fun book art before, which typically only works if you destroy actual books. Now we bring you very cool book art that may be able to exist with a book. Right?! Courtesy of Entertainment Weekly's Shelf Life blog via BookNinja, here are the world's cutest bookmarks, designed by swissmiss, who was inspired by Icoeye.
If you don't love that Moby Dick, you don't truly have the ability to love anything, or at least anything bookish.
Courtesy of Publishers Weekly, we have Priya Ganapati's article from Wiredabout all things e-reader. Read it or don't, I don't mind. Part of me wants to, part of me feels like I've read it all before, but truly, I know there's useful info in here. Ironically, I'll probably print it out and read it on the bus on the way home. Take that, not-yet-for-sale Apple Tablet (tm)!
And finally, via my genius British journalist friend Damian Barr who sent this to me by email, we have a charming collection of writing - a Five Dials Special - about David Foster Wallace, who passed away in 2009. It includes short pieces by Zadie Smith, Don Delillo, and more, and images by Michael Schmelling. More info on the publication Five Dials, published by British publisher Hamish Hamilton, can be found here, including the manner in which one joins its mailing list.
With Houghton Mifflin Harcourt supposedly safe - for now - I thought we could post some fun videos for this Friday afternoon.
The first two come via MobyLives, who posted these clips of Vladimir Nabokov discussing Lolita to show how bad TV sucks these days. One might also appreciate this window into a time when a new medium was trying to explore how to bank off strong elements (authors) of a previously dominant medium (books). As we can see, eventually tv producers said "Screw it!" and just turned to bestselling self-help writers, on the whole.
Fun stuff! I love me some Nabokov.
Next we have the rarely seen (anymore) Fran Lebowitz talking about the mass misreading of Jane Austen, which leads her to complain (quite rightfully) about how we teach reading and what we expect from books. (To paraphrase her, they should be "tours," not "mirrors.") For those who don't know, Lebowitz was Sedaris before Sedaris, but smarter, with an edge. I was pleased to see her here, mouthing off.
Being Boston-based, we here at SotB like to keeps tabs on our big local publishers.... or publisher. So I felt compelled to quickly post the news whipping around the interweb about the big momma Boston publisher (with offices in NY but c'mon...), Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
If you have a subscription to the Wall Street Journal - in which case, you probably wouldn't be reading this blog - you can look here for the article on HMH's debt restructuring. The rest of us have to read second-hand in a variety of places, including:
- Mediabistro's GalleyCat, where Jason Boog links to the WSJ article and reports that, "According to an unnamed source in the article, the company currently has $6 billion in debt." Whoa.
- The Bookseller, from the UK, also linked by Boog. This is useful since HMH's parent company, Education Media & Publishing, is based in Ireland, within this site's reach. This article in turn links to an Irish source, RTE Business, for the financial info.
- And back on our fair shores, Melville House's MobyLives - a favorite blog of SotB's - reports on the issue as well, with the provocative headline, "Is Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Going Under?" Dennis Johnson posts a link to Publisher's Lunch, which again requires a subscription,. Johnson provides a nice summary that basically says the debt restructuring will lessen Barry O'Callaghan's stake in the business and increase the Irish government's stake - and thereby, the stake of the Irish people. Johnson pulls this quote out of the Pub Lunch post, from Irish official George Lee:
It has been reported to me that the education materials company Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has failed, and that a number of Irish equity investors have lost significant sums of money as a result. Many of these investors were funded through large loans from Anglo Irish Bank, which is now wholly owned by Irish taxpayers. As a company, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt was a highly leveraged operation and had very significant banking commitments. I understand that the remaining US business is to be transferred to its bond holders. However, it appears that its Irish equity investors will lose all of their investment as a result of this failure. This will have repercussions for Anglo Irish Bank, and possibly other Irish banks, and therefore the Irish taxpayer.
Again, whoa.
In our new global economy, this means that my colleagues who are a mere half hour bike ride from me right now are sitting in cubicles worrying about their jobs as the Irish people read their newspapers and grumble about this "failure" happening in the US of A which, if they understand correctly, is essentially a bail-out situation just like the one being experienced by the US government with fat cat Wall Street execs. It's all a big fat mess.
I hope for the best, folks, for the employees of HMH here in Boston and beyond, and for the good of publishing. HMH has an incredible backlist and is too important to lose wholesale.
Back in November, I tried to coin the phrase "polibrity" in a post, referring to folks like Sarah Palin who pretend to be politicians but are really just seeking out the spotlight - politicians who in fact are mere celebrities. Polibrities. I was prompted by this post on Newser from Michael Wolffe, in which he suggested bluntly, "Literate people should boycott books." He based this provocative statement on the fact that folks like Palin claim that they are authors, but actually do not write books. Publishing such drivel ruins books for the rest of us. I don't entirely agree with him, but I certainly stand next to him in frustration.
The term I created to air my frustration, polibrity, has generated some traffic to this site, and I noticed its correct usage in Peter Grier's recent article about Palin joining Fox News, in the Christian Science Monitor - a respectable publication if there ever was one! Perhaps Grier came up with this term on his own, or perhaps he read it here. Either way, I'm pleased to see it circulating. It has since been picked up in a few tweets, by social media folks like Seattle's Linda "TheNewsChick" Thomas, whose tweet was reposted by Steve Furman, a Chicagoan who runs the Expedient Means website. It's totally national.
Are there other examples of polibrities, beyond Ms. Palin? Sadly, for those of us on the left, we have Al Franken. I like the man just fine, but I'm not sure he should be a politician. What was wrong with comedy, and writing funny books skewering rightwing nutjobs? I for one enjoyed Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Rightjust fine. Rather than go into elected office, I'd rather folks like Franken - who have done horrendous movies and cheap television shows - just keep taking shots from the sidelines. Molly Ivins did a damn good job with it. (See my obit for her here.) Michael Moore has his place. In a more serious way, smart and much-needed folks like Amy Goodman, Naomi Klein, and Jim Hightower keep plugging away outside the beltway.
Polibrity elsewhere? Of course, there's Arnold Schwarzenegger, a large presence who cannot be ignored, whom we can only hope will not follow in the footsteps of Reagan. I know Schwarzenegger has calmed down from his "girly man" shout-outs, which were quite common early in his campaign, but I still think he has no place in office.
Given how much folks seem to enjoy this term, I will try going forward to occasionally provide "Polibrity updates," especially as they relate to publishing. (There may be fewer, sans Judith Regan, a woman who should have coined this term. She amped it up a notch!) Sure, that will put me in the awkward position of hoping for polibrity sightings despite being frustrated by the phenomenon, but for you readers, I'll do it.
To support our belief that books should survive despite the mad rush for all things electronic/digital (books are already "handheld" and "mobile," for those keeping score), we have in the past here at SotB mentioned artistic uses for books, uses that go beyond mere reading. In that spirit, I wanted to alert all of our good readers to artist Mike Stilkey's work on the spines of books. Stilkey was profiled over at the This Blog Rules blog. (A+ on subtlety with that blog name, btw). Enjoy!
Okay, folks, we're back and better than ever for 2010! Sorry for taking the first week off. We promise to try and not leave you high and dry in the future.
Having said that, please consider this a kind of soft launch, as it were. I'm not coming out swinging, but rather offering a pleasant, casual post about a relatively quiet story... perhaps I'm still in vacation mode.
As many of you know, the bookseller B. Dalton is closing down completely. Jackie Crosby of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune offers this obit for the chain, which started in Southdale Center in Edina, MN. What I find so intriguing about this story is how it offers a brief history of a bookstore that was, for so many of us, ubiquitous in our suburban childhoods.
At Deerbook Mall in scenic (note sarcasm) Humble, Texas, the B. Dalton was the store I had to visit just before closing one night, much to my working parents' chagrin, to grab one of their last copies of T. H. White's The Once and Future King, just before we started reading it in 9th grade. (This was also the first time I recall being overwhelmed by assigned reading - we had to read 30-40 pages a night, I believe.) It had a great location in that mall - right across from the food court. The store became a bit desolate, however, when B&N opened a Book Stop across FM 1960, which while small by today's superstore standards, seemed huge at the time. I remember the wonder at finding a fully stocked poetry section, a huge number of journals and magazines, and a fiction section that had all kinds of cult fiction that I had heard of but didn't know how to get - B. Dalton was never hip, but instead always painfully middle-brow, even by suburban standards. One aspect of its history that didn't surprise me in Crosby's article was how it found great success by predicting the popularity of Richard Bach's Jonathan Livingstone Seagull. Ouch. Again, Bookstop wasn't revolutionary ultimately - just FM radio to B. Dalton's AM.
(As a sidenote, I don't know what the Humble Bookstop is now, but it's endlessly cooler older sibling, the Houston Bookstop located in the Alabama Theatre downtown, recently closed, but not without a fight.)
I'm not surprised to learn that B. Dalton was a mere effort to take advantage of the growing number of Baby Boomers with disposable income who liked to read in the 1970s. The place always struck me as a bastion of self-help and financial books. Say what you want about B&N, as Ted Striphas explains in his book (The Late Age of Print), it started out as a way to take advantage of the college book market, and in some ways it retains that feel.
So RIP, B. Dalton, and may your passing lead to the opening of new and exciting venues for selling books (though preferably not in a corporate manner, but rather in a independent, sustainable manner that is better for workers, communities, and the planet). Cheers!
