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3 to get ready: Money for arts journalism
From the home page
Lara Pellegrinelli | NPR
From the home page
Lara Pellegrinelli | NPR
Most people who haven't been living under a rock are aware of the newspaper industry's precipitous decline. And even the least media savvy surface dwellers could guess that this sorry state of affairs has disproportionately impacted arts journalism. In comparison with the one in four newsroom jobs that have been lost in the last decade, approximately half of all arts writing staff positions and beats have disappeared, according to estimates by Arts Journal editor Douglas McLennan.
Aside from us self-interested types who like this job and hope to continue doing it, why should you care about this most impressive of vanishing acts? In short, because the health of the arts media has an impact on the health of the arts ecosystem as a whole. ...
Read more at NPR.com
Christopher Hitchens dies
From the home page
“In whatever kind of a ‘race’ life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist,” Mr. Hitchens wrote in Vanity Fair, for which he was a contributing editor. ...
Read more at The New York Times
Occupy the comics!
From the home page
DeLillo’s uneasy overview
From the home page
Liesl Schillinger | The New York Times
The older you get, the more jarring it can be to turn on the news and behold newly minted pundits sounding off on the import of dramatic changes rocking the nation — pundits who look as if they’re barely out of high school. How do these youthful commentators come by their rapid-fire insights? Does somebody tweet them their lines? Is there a meme? Don DeLillo takes this sense of generational perplexity one absurdist step further in “Hammer and Sickle,” the longest of the nine excellent stories in “The Angel Esmeralda,” the first collection of his short fiction.
In that story, published last year in the midst of our confidence-shaking era of economic instability, the inmates of a minimum-security prison gather in a common room every afternoon to watch two little sisters, ages 10 and 12, deliver the daily stock market report on a children’s television channel. ...
Read more at The New York Times
Joan Didion’s Blue Period
From the home page
Susan Cheever | The Daily Beast
About halfway through writing Blue Nights, her enchanting evocation of the life of her daughter, Quintana, Joan Didion stopped cold. The book was a portrait of Quintana from her birth and adoption in 1966 to her 2005 death following a massive brain hematoma in New York Hospital. But there were parts of Quintana’s story that Didion did not want to tell.
“I thought, ‘I’m not going to finish this, I don’t have to finish this book,’” she tells me as we sit in her Upper East Side living room one afternoon drinking tea from flowered cups. The room is deliciously crowded with books, photographs, and mementos—things Didion once treasured for the memories they evoked. “In theory these mementos serve to bring back the moment,” she writes in the book. “In fact they only serve to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here.” ...
We, the Living
From the home page
Fear & loathing with HST
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Philip Roth wins Booker Prize
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Read more at BBC News
Examining The Pale King
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Alicia J. Rouverol | The Monitor
In David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, in a mock documentary, a tax examiner identified only by his ID number tells the viewer about his idea for a play, in which a “wiggler” is poring over 1040s: “The setting is very bare and minimalistic – there’s nothing to look at except this wiggler, who doesn’t move except every so often turning a page or making a note on his pad.” The audience, he says, will grow restless and bored. “Then, once the audience have all left, the real action of the play can start.... Except I could never decide on the action, if there was any.”
A wiggler is a rote examiner who studies tax returns to determine which are worthy of an audit, Wallace tells us in his posthumous novel scheduled for release on tax day.
At the Regional Examination Center (REC) in Peoria, Illinois, in May 1985, a fictional Wallace joins his fellow GS-9 IRS recruits for an intake training session, where he learns from the veterans that the work will require periodic flexing, visualizing, and a necessary bearing down.
Reading The Pale King requires precisely this kind of close examination – a sort of literary audit, but a worthy one at that. ...
Read more at The Monitor
Peanuts the graphic novel
From the home page
Charles Moss | PopMatters
Peanuts will always be most famous, first and foremost, for the comic strips that Charles Schulz created for newspapers around the world, and that continue to run today in reprints. The animated specials, such as It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown and A Charlie Brown Christmas, not to mention numerous Peanuts-related merchandise — t-shirts, figurines, trade paperbacks, posters, etc. – have solidified Charlie Brown, Snoopy and the rest of the Peanuts gang as some of the most recognizable characters in pop culture history.
Schulz died in 2000, with his farewell comic strip published only days after his death. He had planned to retire from cartooning due to the colon cancer that would take his life at 77. For nearly 50 years, Schulz himself created 17,897 original Peanuts strips for daily newspapers around the world. Currently, reprints of his work appear in more than 2,200 newspapers in 75 countries and 25 languages.
Now, Charlie Brown, Snoopy and the rest of the Peanuts gang have made their way to the graphic novel. ...
Read more at PopMatters
Manning Marable dies
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William Grimes | The New York Times
Manning Marable, a leading scholar of black history and a leftist critic of American social institutions and race relations, whose long-awaited biography of Malcolm X, more than a decade in the writing, is scheduled to be published on Monday, died on Friday in Manhattan. He was 60.
His wife, Leith Mullings, said that the cause was not known but that Mr. Marable, who lived in Manhattan, had entered the hospital with pneumonia in early March. In July 2010, he had undergone a double lung transplant.
Mr. Marable, a prolific writer and impassioned polemicist, addressed issues of race and economic injustice in numerous works that established him as one of the most forceful and outspoken scholars of African-American history and race relations in the United States. ...
Read more on Marable from William Grimes at The New York Times
Catcher on the fly
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Reuters
LONDON - J.D Salinger, the famously reclusive author of "The Catcher in the Rye", was not such a hermit after all, according to newly published letters Thursday that show he travelled — and enjoyed Burger King.
Salinger died last year aged 91, leaving a reputation as an angry recluse who struggled to come to terms with the success of his 1951 novel, a tale of teenage rebellion which made him a cultural icon, as well as rich.
But a collection of 50 typed letters and four handwritten postcards sent over two decades to a British friend, Donald Hartog, show a different side.
From the home page
David Kamp, Vanity Fair
The scars run up and down John Lennon’s torso, unignorable souvenirs of that night nearly 30 years ago when a team of Roosevelt Hospital physicians, led by Dr. Stephan Lynn, heroically patched back together an upper body torn open by the gun of Mark David Chapman. Four plastic surgeries followed in the next eight months, as did an intensive rehabilitation program of physical therapy, but no amount of medical expertise could disappear the various discolored nebulae of scar tissue that blotch Lennon’s chest and back.
Not that he seems to care on this scorching, sun-blasted August 2010 day. He bounds about the pastures of his dairy farm unabashedly shirtless—nearly naked, in fact, wearing only skimpy white tennis shorts with the top snap undone and a pair of olive-green Wellies “because Mother doesn’t want me getting Lyme’s again.” ...
Read the rest in Vanity Fair
Keith, growing up in public
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Michael E. Ross for PopMatters
He’s been so much of our pop-cultural oxygen for so long, so basic to the swagger we brandish on our own best days, his quips and observations such a foundational part of the modern world that when you heard Keith Richards had written a book, maybe for just a moment you thought, “You mean he hasn’t written one already?”
Close to 50 years after the humble birth of his band, the Rolling Stones, the profane, sentimental, profligate, visionary rock n' roll buccaneer archetype the world knows by first name alone has finally committed his Life to print, a rock n’ roll bildungsroman that’s as much a biography of a band's life as an autobiography of his own.
There have been previous Stones books, heaven knows, two of them written by Bill Wyman, for 28 years the Stones’ rock-solid bass player. But Wyman (who joined the band after its inception) caught the train after it left the station; Keith was present at the Stones’ creation. That experience gives us the clearest portrait of the genesis of the band we now recognize was as culturally indispensable as it was seemingly incorrigible.
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Johnny Otis
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MICHAEL E. ROSS | 05.26.2010
For generations, the intersection of race matters and popular American culture has been a busy one; anyone navigating that intersection has been as likely to encounter a collision as an opportunity for merging traffic.
Johnny Otis has lived most of his life at that crowded thoroughfare. Considered by many to be the father of modern R&B music, Otis has been songwriter and impresario, author and nightclub owner, producer and band leader, journalist and broadcaster, artist and mentor, negotiating the free-fire zone of racial and cultural politics for more than 60 years with an unwavering integrity and sense of purpose as rare as it was revolutionary.
His career, especially in the turmoil of the ‘50s and ‘60s, is the framework for Midnight at the Barrelhouse, George Lipsitz’s expansive, insightful biography of one of modern music’s most important figures, a book that manages the difficult feat of being at once a social history of America’s evolution; a study of the ways music and culture transcend the rigidities of race and ethnicity; and a biography of one musician’s place in the national songbook and the nation’s evolution.
Read more of the review in PopMatters
The future of books, or not
MICHAEL E. ROSS
The book, published in late March, has found its champions, most recently Jennifer McDonald, who speculates on the possibility of Monson’s work being “the Book of the Future” in a recent blog in The New York Times.
In a series of essays that shift from his experience as a juror in a criminal case to memories of his dying mother, Monson dissects postmodern culture and the ways the individual expression, the assertion of “I,” both dovetails with and differs from the “I” of the collective culture, as expressed in YouTube videos and blog posts. Monson ricochets from his own experiences as memoirist to wider observations and criticisms of culture at large.
Full disclosure: I haven’t read Monson’s book in its entirety; since this isn’t a review of the book in the conventional sense — assessing the acuity of its language, the power of its narrative — that really isn’t problematic. My issue is with how many of Monson’s ideas employ the use of the dagger (†) as an indicator of a wide range of ancillary material — from thoughts to videos — that aren’t in the narrative of the book itself.
◊ ◊ ◊
“This book is a book,” he writes at the beginning. “It is fixed in time, in space, in print, an artifact. ... Each dagger indicates an instance of redirect, a bubbling-over instance, where, for one of many reasons, I have more information, a further reflection, more thinking on the subject that has either gone on past the boundaries of the object, the fixity of the book. ... The daggers sometimes lead to things that exceed the capacity of footnotes. Some of them have video. Some images. Some evolving text.”
The daggers, which appear in Monson’s book frequently enough to be considered a defining feature of its architecture, are intended to ferry the reader to the author’s Web site, Other Electricities.
I know what you’re thinking: “Wait a minute, you just sent me a link to a Web site, you’re sending me somewhere else. Isn’t that the same service, the same function Monson is offering in his book?”
Therein lies the dilemma, the cross-purposes of using the analog at the service of the digital in the way Monson has. It totally works here, online where embedded links identified by a slight change of color or an underlined word easily tip the reader to where that underlying information lies, and how to access it with a click of the mouse. When Monson’s book rolls out in the iPad environment, readers may have the opportunity to touch the device’s screen and be transported to the source of these alternate thoughts and considerations.
Readers don’t have that option when they’re experiencing Monson’s book in print form. That’s the firewall between print and digital, and it’s one that deserves to be there; in fact, for books as we’ve known them to have any kind of future, that firewall has to be there.
◊ ◊ ◊
Other writers have tried to push this envelope. McDonald mentions Walter Kirn’s 2007 novel, “The Unbinding,” published as a book after being originally published in serial form on Slate. Kirn’s book used bold face type to indicate where the links were to the corresponding online publication.
In his print introduction, Kirn writes that “an Internet novel … should look and feel — and even sound, perhaps — like something new, disorienting, wild. A buzzing, humming, electronic circus teeming with hypertext lions and virtual clowns.”
The late David Foster Wallace made frequent use of footnotes and endnotes in his fiction, employing devices of communication more common to the scholar trafficking solely in nonfiction; this was Wallace’s bid to move beyond the narrative itself, to offer the reader the additional dimension of thought and nuance there wasn’t room for in the narrative.
But Wallace’s approach gives a reader the satisfaction of discovering that further elucidation of ideas somewhere within the book s/he is holding (sometimes in footnotes that are paragraphs in length). You’re not chased out of the comfortable analog house Wallace has just invited you into by his alter ego wielding a digital dagger.
McDonald, the Times writer, finds merit in Monson’s approach, with reservations. “[I]ndeed it does seem to work in this, a book of nonfiction, a book of ideas, one trying to replicate the action of synapses firing,” she writes. “But would daggers (or links, in an e-book) be too distracting in a novel, or would they be engrossing, drawing the reader even further into the fictional world?”
Her question seems to invite another one: How would Monson’s idea play in other creative pursuits? Consider how this might work in motion pictures, that most popular art form in the world: What would movies look like if a character’s dialogue was periodically punctuated on the screen with the flash of an asterisk to indicate some part of the character’s inner life or musings of the moment (the meaning of which would escape you until the end of the movie, when you find the asterisks refer you to ... another movie altogether)?
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The act of reading books — not e-books but the real, bound, acid-free, paper-cut-inducing thing — is an implicit entrance into a contract of perception. In the hands of a skillful writer of fiction or nonfiction, it’s understood that the medium through which we experience that perception is, or seemingly should be, a thing unto itself, and not dependent on another medium to deepen (or establish) our understanding of what should be on the page in front of us.
Daggers and other typographical surrogates for elaboration off the page don’t work, can’t work in the context of the book as its own freestanding universe, a place with its own cosmology and rules, rules of no rules, its boundaries set only by the writer’s imagination and the willingness of the reader to suspend the relentlessness of his or her reality to embrace the expression of that imagination.
If readers can’t willingly make that concession to the book as its own self-sufficient realm — one less immediate and insistent than the online world they’ve briefly escaped from — what’s the point of reading it that way?
Timothy Schaffert, a lecturer in the English department of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, clearly grasped this in a reader’s comment on McDonald’s essay:
“[I]f I've put my book aside to dial-up the Internet, I've left the author's consciousness and entered the collective one. The pull of electronic communication and instant insight is often with us, teasing us away from the refined and purposeful containment of print technology. … Sure, a book's physicality is indeed ‘fixed in time, in space,’ but the act of reading is fixed only by the limitations of the reader's imagination.”
Reading passages of the print version of Monson’s daggered book immediately puts you in reference to something other than the book itself — a potentially self-defeating exercise that undercuts the rationale for reading the book in the first place. When it appears, however infrequently, you’re taken out of Monson’s narrative flow; the book’s intrinsic potential for revelation is thwarted by a forced reliance on something else, found somewhere else, to fully achieve that revelation.
Ironically, what McDonald describes as the future of the book may really a vision of the death of the book as an analog instrument.
◊ ◊ ◊
With the device of daggers, Monson has effectively created an alternative to an experience that doesn’t need an alternative. For this print reader, anyway, those daggers aren’t so much indications of new ideas or “synapses firing” as they are manifestations of a typographical Godot, a character that, like its namesake in Samuel Beckett’s legendary play, never shows up.
Monson gets credit for adventurously exploring the boundaries of the gray area between the analog of print and the digital of everything we informationally consume today; “Vanishing Point” is a principled attempt to offer a compelling idea of how books and the online experience could intersect in the future.
But that which works well in the online world is sometimes irreconcilably at odds with its analog counterpart. The world of real live books may be better for that.
Michael E. Ross is the editor of Culcha.
Image credits: Home page: Keith Richards: Ian Gavan/Getty Images. Jimmy Page 1968: © 1968 Dominique Tarlé. This page: Terry McMillan: David Shankbone, republished under Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license (Wikipedia). John Updike drawing: © 1983 David Levine. Vanishing Point cover: Greywolf Press. David Foster Wallace: Pabouk, republished under Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license (Wikipedia).
Ward: The next Toni Morrison?
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Keli Goff | Loop21
When Toni Morrison’s classic “Beloved” failed to win the National Book Award in 1987, fans and fellow writers alike were shocked as well as outraged that a budding literary legend was overlooked. This year literary insiders were shocked for a different reason. Jesmyn Ward, a relative unknown won the coveted honor for her second novel, “Salvage the Bones,” the story of a family whose lives are upended by a hurricane.
When Toni Morrison’s classic “Beloved” failed to win the National Book Award in 1987, fans and fellow writers alike were shocked as well as outraged that a budding literary legend was overlooked. This year literary insiders were shocked for a different reason. Jesmyn Ward, a relative unknown won the coveted honor for her second novel, “Salvage the Bones,” the story of a family whose lives are upended by a hurricane.
Ward, whose novel was inspired by her family’s experience during Hurricane Katrina, does not represent your typical National Book Award Winner. She is 34, African-American and prefers writing about the kind of people she believes are often ignored in popular writing, specifically poor people of color.
Winning the National Book Award this month immediately catapulted Ward into the stratosphere of the literary elite, meaning she will have to get comfortable rubbing elbows with people very different from the disenfranchised characters she crafts with such artistry. Ward chatted about her win and her reservations about the blockbuster book and film “The Help,” in a conversation with Loop21.com.
Read Keli Goff’s Q&A at Loop21
Read Keli Goff’s Q&A at Loop21
Christopher Hitchens dies
From the home page
William Grimes | The New York Times
Christopher Hitchens, a slashing polemicist in the tradition of Thomas Paine and George Orwell who trained his sights on targets as various as Henry Kissinger, the British monarchy and Mother Teresa, wrote a best-seller attacking religious belief, and dismayed his former comrades on the left by enthusiastically supporting the American-led war in Iraq, died on Thursday in Houston. He was 62.
The cause was pneumonia, a complication of esophageal cancer, Vanity Fair magazine said in announcing the death, at the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center. Mr. Hitchens, who lived in Washington, learned he had cancer while on a publicity tour in 2010 for his memoir, “Hitch-22,” and began writing and, on television, speaking about his illness frequently.
Christopher Hitchens, a slashing polemicist in the tradition of Thomas Paine and George Orwell who trained his sights on targets as various as Henry Kissinger, the British monarchy and Mother Teresa, wrote a best-seller attacking religious belief, and dismayed his former comrades on the left by enthusiastically supporting the American-led war in Iraq, died on Thursday in Houston. He was 62.
The cause was pneumonia, a complication of esophageal cancer, Vanity Fair magazine said in announcing the death, at the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center. Mr. Hitchens, who lived in Washington, learned he had cancer while on a publicity tour in 2010 for his memoir, “Hitch-22,” and began writing and, on television, speaking about his illness frequently.
“In whatever kind of a ‘race’ life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist,” Mr. Hitchens wrote in Vanity Fair, for which he was a contributing editor. ...
Read more at The New York Times
Occupy the comics!
From the home page
Scott Thill | Wired.com
Nearly 30 years after publishing V for Vendetta, writer Alan Moore and artist David Lloyd are throwing their support behind the global Occupy movement that’s drawn inspiration from their comic’s anti-totalitarian philosophy and iconography.
Moore will contribute a long-form prose piece, possibly with illustrations, to the Occupy Comics project. His writing work will explore the Occupy movement’s principles, corporate control of the comics industry and the superhero paradigm itself.
Lloyd signed onto the growing Occupy Comics project last week, as did Madman’s Mike Allred and American Splendor’s Dean Haspiel. Occupy Comics will eventually sell single-issue comic books and a hardcover compilation, but an innovative arrangement with Kickstarter means that funds raised through pledges of support can be channeled directly to Occupy Wall Street’s populist ranks now.
Read more at Wired.com
Nearly 30 years after publishing V for Vendetta, writer Alan Moore and artist David Lloyd are throwing their support behind the global Occupy movement that’s drawn inspiration from their comic’s anti-totalitarian philosophy and iconography.
Moore will contribute a long-form prose piece, possibly with illustrations, to the Occupy Comics project. His writing work will explore the Occupy movement’s principles, corporate control of the comics industry and the superhero paradigm itself.
Lloyd signed onto the growing Occupy Comics project last week, as did Madman’s Mike Allred and American Splendor’s Dean Haspiel. Occupy Comics will eventually sell single-issue comic books and a hardcover compilation, but an innovative arrangement with Kickstarter means that funds raised through pledges of support can be channeled directly to Occupy Wall Street’s populist ranks now.
Read more at Wired.com
DeLillo’s uneasy overview
From the home page
Liesl Schillinger | The New York Times
The older you get, the more jarring it can be to turn on the news and behold newly minted pundits sounding off on the import of dramatic changes rocking the nation — pundits who look as if they’re barely out of high school. How do these youthful commentators come by their rapid-fire insights? Does somebody tweet them their lines? Is there a meme? Don DeLillo takes this sense of generational perplexity one absurdist step further in “Hammer and Sickle,” the longest of the nine excellent stories in “The Angel Esmeralda,” the first collection of his short fiction.
In that story, published last year in the midst of our confidence-shaking era of economic instability, the inmates of a minimum-security prison gather in a common room every afternoon to watch two little sisters, ages 10 and 12, deliver the daily stock market report on a children’s television channel. ...
Read more at The New York Times
Joan Didion’s Blue Period
From the home page
Susan Cheever | The Daily Beast
About halfway through writing Blue Nights, her enchanting evocation of the life of her daughter, Quintana, Joan Didion stopped cold. The book was a portrait of Quintana from her birth and adoption in 1966 to her 2005 death following a massive brain hematoma in New York Hospital. But there were parts of Quintana’s story that Didion did not want to tell.
“I thought, ‘I’m not going to finish this, I don’t have to finish this book,’” she tells me as we sit in her Upper East Side living room one afternoon drinking tea from flowered cups. The room is deliciously crowded with books, photographs, and mementos—things Didion once treasured for the memories they evoked. “In theory these mementos serve to bring back the moment,” she writes in the book. “In fact they only serve to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here.” ...
We, the Living
From the home page
Paul Constant | The Stranger
Your stoner friend pointed this out years ago, and it probably blew your mind: Zombies are symbols for Western culture's blind adherence to the consumer economy. [Inhale, pass.] It's true, man! Think about it: They stagger around mindlessly, consuming everything they come across, as if the world is totally normal even though it's collapsing all around them. [Exhale, cough.] George Romero made this rich metaphor totally overt with Dawn of the Dead, which was set in a frickin' shopping mall, for Christ's sake! Anyway, that's why zombies became so popular over the last decade—consumer culture is out of control, and the zombies are, like, our twisted reflection.
All due respect to your friend — I took a film appreciation class once and it totally changed my life, too — but the stoned commentary about zombies being a commentary on our culture is more of a commentary on the shallowness of cultural commentary itself.
You know what the zombies in Colson Whitehead's new novel, Zone One, symbolize?
Dead people. ...
Read more at The Stranger
Your stoner friend pointed this out years ago, and it probably blew your mind: Zombies are symbols for Western culture's blind adherence to the consumer economy. [Inhale, pass.] It's true, man! Think about it: They stagger around mindlessly, consuming everything they come across, as if the world is totally normal even though it's collapsing all around them. [Exhale, cough.] George Romero made this rich metaphor totally overt with Dawn of the Dead, which was set in a frickin' shopping mall, for Christ's sake! Anyway, that's why zombies became so popular over the last decade—consumer culture is out of control, and the zombies are, like, our twisted reflection.
All due respect to your friend — I took a film appreciation class once and it totally changed my life, too — but the stoned commentary about zombies being a commentary on our culture is more of a commentary on the shallowness of cultural commentary itself.
You know what the zombies in Colson Whitehead's new novel, Zone One, symbolize?
Dead people. ...
Read more at The Stranger
Fear & loathing with HST
From the home page
Johnny Depp | The Daily Beast
My first encounter with Hunter S. Thompson was when I was invited to the Woody Creek Tavern in Colorado in December 1994. Someone said, “Why don’t you come down, and you and Hunter will have a drink.” So I went down to Woody Creek Tavern, and I’m sitting way in the back of the place against the wall, looking at the front door about 50 yards away. Suddenly I see the door spring open, and I see sparks! I realized there was a large-ish, three-foot cattle prod and a Taser gun, and the sea began to part—people were leaping and hurling themselves out of the path of the mayhem that was approaching—and I heard the voice first say, “Out of my way, you bastards!” He was using them as “just-in-case weapons,” but it was a very economical way for him to clear the path. He made the Red Sea part, arrived at my table, and said, “How are you? My name is Hunter.”
Read more at The Daily Beast
My first encounter with Hunter S. Thompson was when I was invited to the Woody Creek Tavern in Colorado in December 1994. Someone said, “Why don’t you come down, and you and Hunter will have a drink.” So I went down to Woody Creek Tavern, and I’m sitting way in the back of the place against the wall, looking at the front door about 50 yards away. Suddenly I see the door spring open, and I see sparks! I realized there was a large-ish, three-foot cattle prod and a Taser gun, and the sea began to part—people were leaping and hurling themselves out of the path of the mayhem that was approaching—and I heard the voice first say, “Out of my way, you bastards!” He was using them as “just-in-case weapons,” but it was a very economical way for him to clear the path. He made the Red Sea part, arrived at my table, and said, “How are you? My name is Hunter.”
Read more at The Daily Beast
Philip Roth wins Booker Prize
From the home page
BBC News
U.S. writer Philip Roth has been announced as the winner of the fourth Man Booker International Prize.
The award and £60,000 prize money is presented to a writer for their "achievement in fiction on the world stage", organisers said.
Roth, 78, said: "This is a great honour and I'm delighted to receive it."
His body of work includes the 1997 novel American Pastoral, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize. At 26, he wrote his first book Goodbye, Columbus.
The announcement was made at a press conference in Australia, during the Sydney Writers' Festival.
U.S. writer Philip Roth has been announced as the winner of the fourth Man Booker International Prize.
The award and £60,000 prize money is presented to a writer for their "achievement in fiction on the world stage", organisers said.
Roth, 78, said: "This is a great honour and I'm delighted to receive it."
His body of work includes the 1997 novel American Pastoral, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize. At 26, he wrote his first book Goodbye, Columbus.
The announcement was made at a press conference in Australia, during the Sydney Writers' Festival.
Read more at BBC News
Examining The Pale King
From the home page
Alicia J. Rouverol | The Monitor
In David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, in a mock documentary, a tax examiner identified only by his ID number tells the viewer about his idea for a play, in which a “wiggler” is poring over 1040s: “The setting is very bare and minimalistic – there’s nothing to look at except this wiggler, who doesn’t move except every so often turning a page or making a note on his pad.” The audience, he says, will grow restless and bored. “Then, once the audience have all left, the real action of the play can start.... Except I could never decide on the action, if there was any.”
A wiggler is a rote examiner who studies tax returns to determine which are worthy of an audit, Wallace tells us in his posthumous novel scheduled for release on tax day.
At the Regional Examination Center (REC) in Peoria, Illinois, in May 1985, a fictional Wallace joins his fellow GS-9 IRS recruits for an intake training session, where he learns from the veterans that the work will require periodic flexing, visualizing, and a necessary bearing down.
Reading The Pale King requires precisely this kind of close examination – a sort of literary audit, but a worthy one at that. ...
Read more at The Monitor
Peanuts the graphic novel
From the home page
Charles Moss | PopMatters
Peanuts will always be most famous, first and foremost, for the comic strips that Charles Schulz created for newspapers around the world, and that continue to run today in reprints. The animated specials, such as It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown and A Charlie Brown Christmas, not to mention numerous Peanuts-related merchandise — t-shirts, figurines, trade paperbacks, posters, etc. – have solidified Charlie Brown, Snoopy and the rest of the Peanuts gang as some of the most recognizable characters in pop culture history.
Schulz died in 2000, with his farewell comic strip published only days after his death. He had planned to retire from cartooning due to the colon cancer that would take his life at 77. For nearly 50 years, Schulz himself created 17,897 original Peanuts strips for daily newspapers around the world. Currently, reprints of his work appear in more than 2,200 newspapers in 75 countries and 25 languages.
Now, Charlie Brown, Snoopy and the rest of the Peanuts gang have made their way to the graphic novel. ...
Read more at PopMatters
Manning Marable dies
From the home page
William Grimes | The New York Times
Manning Marable, a leading scholar of black history and a leftist critic of American social institutions and race relations, whose long-awaited biography of Malcolm X, more than a decade in the writing, is scheduled to be published on Monday, died on Friday in Manhattan. He was 60.
His wife, Leith Mullings, said that the cause was not known but that Mr. Marable, who lived in Manhattan, had entered the hospital with pneumonia in early March. In July 2010, he had undergone a double lung transplant.
Mr. Marable, a prolific writer and impassioned polemicist, addressed issues of race and economic injustice in numerous works that established him as one of the most forceful and outspoken scholars of African-American history and race relations in the United States. ...
Read more on Marable from William Grimes at The New York Times
Catcher on the fly
From the home page
Reuters
LONDON - J.D Salinger, the famously reclusive author of "The Catcher in the Rye", was not such a hermit after all, according to newly published letters Thursday that show he travelled — and enjoyed Burger King.
Salinger died last year aged 91, leaving a reputation as an angry recluse who struggled to come to terms with the success of his 1951 novel, a tale of teenage rebellion which made him a cultural icon, as well as rich.
But a collection of 50 typed letters and four handwritten postcards sent over two decades to a British friend, Donald Hartog, show a different side.
Imagining Lennon at 70
David Kamp, Vanity Fair
The scars run up and down John Lennon’s torso, unignorable souvenirs of that night nearly 30 years ago when a team of Roosevelt Hospital physicians, led by Dr. Stephan Lynn, heroically patched back together an upper body torn open by the gun of Mark David Chapman. Four plastic surgeries followed in the next eight months, as did an intensive rehabilitation program of physical therapy, but no amount of medical expertise could disappear the various discolored nebulae of scar tissue that blotch Lennon’s chest and back.
Not that he seems to care on this scorching, sun-blasted August 2010 day. He bounds about the pastures of his dairy farm unabashedly shirtless—nearly naked, in fact, wearing only skimpy white tennis shorts with the top snap undone and a pair of olive-green Wellies “because Mother doesn’t want me getting Lyme’s again.” ...
Read the rest in Vanity Fair
Keith, growing up in public
From the home page
Michael E. Ross for PopMatters
He’s been so much of our pop-cultural oxygen for so long, so basic to the swagger we brandish on our own best days, his quips and observations such a foundational part of the modern world that when you heard Keith Richards had written a book, maybe for just a moment you thought, “You mean he hasn’t written one already?”
Close to 50 years after the humble birth of his band, the Rolling Stones, the profane, sentimental, profligate, visionary rock n' roll buccaneer archetype the world knows by first name alone has finally committed his Life to print, a rock n’ roll bildungsroman that’s as much a biography of a band's life as an autobiography of his own.
There have been previous Stones books, heaven knows, two of them written by Bill Wyman, for 28 years the Stones’ rock-solid bass player. But Wyman (who joined the band after its inception) caught the train after it left the station; Keith was present at the Stones’ creation. That experience gives us the clearest portrait of the genesis of the band we now recognize was as culturally indispensable as it was seemingly incorrigible.
Exhaling, years later
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From the home page
Lisa Page, The Washington Post
In her break-out bestseller, "Waiting to Exhale" (1992), Terry McMillan celebrated female bonding. Girlfriends assumed top status in the hierarchy of important relationships for women. The novel, about four black women living in Phoenix in the late 1980s, depicted professional burn-out, romantic betrayal and survival. These were women in their late 30s and early 40s, providing solace to one another in a way that family members, husbands and boyfriends did not. They partied together, cried together and, ultimately, recovered together.
McMillan's new novel, "Getting to Happy," is a sequel that resumes the story some 15 years later. All four women are back, but this time, of course, they're middle-aged. The issues of their youth have morphed into new ones. There are children now from failed relationships and grandchildren, too, along with failed businesses and second mortgages. Each of the four is in her 50s, or about to be, and not quite sure what to do with herself. …
The difference between this book and "Waiting to Exhale" is that "happy" has a different meaning now. For these women, it's no longer about the perfect job or the perfect man. It's a more complicated notion. The theme of addiction carries through the novel, and that's no accident. McMillan suggests that Bernadine's struggle with antidepressants, Robin's trips to the mall and Gloria's struggle with food are all symptoms of the same thing. The notion of "getting to happy" means doing away with self-delusion. And, according to McMillan, it also means forgiveness. The outrage and the disappointment so vividly portrayed in the opening chapters must ultimately melt into understanding, even love, if possible.
Read the rest at The Washington Post
In her break-out bestseller, "Waiting to Exhale" (1992), Terry McMillan celebrated female bonding. Girlfriends assumed top status in the hierarchy of important relationships for women. The novel, about four black women living in Phoenix in the late 1980s, depicted professional burn-out, romantic betrayal and survival. These were women in their late 30s and early 40s, providing solace to one another in a way that family members, husbands and boyfriends did not. They partied together, cried together and, ultimately, recovered together.
McMillan's new novel, "Getting to Happy," is a sequel that resumes the story some 15 years later. All four women are back, but this time, of course, they're middle-aged. The issues of their youth have morphed into new ones. There are children now from failed relationships and grandchildren, too, along with failed businesses and second mortgages. Each of the four is in her 50s, or about to be, and not quite sure what to do with herself. …
The difference between this book and "Waiting to Exhale" is that "happy" has a different meaning now. For these women, it's no longer about the perfect job or the perfect man. It's a more complicated notion. The theme of addiction carries through the novel, and that's no accident. McMillan suggests that Bernadine's struggle with antidepressants, Robin's trips to the mall and Gloria's struggle with food are all symptoms of the same thing. The notion of "getting to happy" means doing away with self-delusion. And, according to McMillan, it also means forgiveness. The outrage and the disappointment so vividly portrayed in the opening chapters must ultimately melt into understanding, even love, if possible.
Read the rest at The Washington Post
Jimmy Page, page by page
From the home page
From the home page
Ben Sisario, The New York Times
In the mythology of rock, Jimmy Page is the great guitar wizard, hurling Led Zeppelin’s thunder and fire down from the mountaintop. It’s an image that the band cultivated, of course, but it wouldn’t have stuck if it weren’t for Mr. Page’s skill, finesse and imagination, which made him one of the most influential guitarists in history.
Mr. Page, now 66, was never much of a talker, and when he gave interviews he mostly preferred talking about his music instead of about himself. He’s still that way. On Sept. 27 Genesis Publications, a British company that specializes in lushly designed rock photo books, will publish “Jimmy Page by Jimmy Page,” a 500-page collection of images that Mr. Page selected to represent his career.
Instead of a straight autobiography, it’s a career record in pictures, and while there are some candid shots at diners and customs checkpoints on the road, for the most part the book portrays Mr. Page in six-string-Adonis glory onstage. … The book, printed and hand-bound in Milan, is limited to 2,500 copies and available only through Genesis (genesis-publications.com), for £445 (about $685).
Read the rest at The New York Times
In the mythology of rock, Jimmy Page is the great guitar wizard, hurling Led Zeppelin’s thunder and fire down from the mountaintop. It’s an image that the band cultivated, of course, but it wouldn’t have stuck if it weren’t for Mr. Page’s skill, finesse and imagination, which made him one of the most influential guitarists in history.
Mr. Page, now 66, was never much of a talker, and when he gave interviews he mostly preferred talking about his music instead of about himself. He’s still that way. On Sept. 27 Genesis Publications, a British company that specializes in lushly designed rock photo books, will publish “Jimmy Page by Jimmy Page,” a 500-page collection of images that Mr. Page selected to represent his career.Instead of a straight autobiography, it’s a career record in pictures, and while there are some candid shots at diners and customs checkpoints on the road, for the most part the book portrays Mr. Page in six-string-Adonis glory onstage. … The book, printed and hand-bound in Milan, is limited to 2,500 copies and available only through Genesis (genesis-publications.com), for £445 (about $685).
Read the rest at The New York Times
A history of L.A.’s future
From the home page
From the home page
Michael E. Ross, PopMatters
It was as true in 1781 as it is today: the city of Los Angeles as much an idea as a municipality. When it was established that year, El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Angeles Del Rio de Porciuncula was already foreshadowing its future as a vibrant, polyglot, world-class city, with a population whose ethnic mix prefigured the L.A. of today.
But the journey of L.A.’s black citizens was one and the same as with the drive for influence and self-determination by black Americans elsewhere in America, with the same challenges and setbacks. To some extent, the story of black Los Angeles has been rife with bad press.
It was as true in 1781 as it is today: the city of Los Angeles as much an idea as a municipality. When it was established that year, El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Angeles Del Rio de Porciuncula was already foreshadowing its future as a vibrant, polyglot, world-class city, with a population whose ethnic mix prefigured the L.A. of today.
But the journey of L.A.’s black citizens was one and the same as with the drive for influence and self-determination by black Americans elsewhere in America, with the same challenges and setbacks. To some extent, the story of black Los Angeles has been rife with bad press.
Long considered marginalized in the historically tragic enclaves of Watts and South Central, black Angelenos have faced enduring misconceptions of who and what they are. The popular imagination has mentally locked L.A.’s black community in those two districts—and similarly fastened on the riots in Watts (1965) and South Central (1992) as defining a stratum of West Coast American life that’s deeper and wider than a few spasms of urban upheaval can suggest. …
Black Los Angeles, the exhaustively-footnoted product of eight years of research by these scholars at UCLA and other institutions, is a thorough study of a largely-unexplored dimension of urban American history. ...
Like City of Quartz (1990), Mike Davis’ groundbreaking social history of Los Angeles, Black Los Angeles examines where the myth and the reality of Los Angeles diverge. Where Davis’ focus is largely on the broad modern-day fault lines of class, income, and religion, the new book of essays provides a rich perspective of a smaller slice of the city’s population and what makes it tick and breathe. …
Read the rest at PopMatters
Black Los Angeles, the exhaustively-footnoted product of eight years of research by these scholars at UCLA and other institutions, is a thorough study of a largely-unexplored dimension of urban American history. ...
Like City of Quartz (1990), Mike Davis’ groundbreaking social history of Los Angeles, Black Los Angeles examines where the myth and the reality of Los Angeles diverge. Where Davis’ focus is largely on the broad modern-day fault lines of class, income, and religion, the new book of essays provides a rich perspective of a smaller slice of the city’s population and what makes it tick and breathe. …
Read the rest at PopMatters
John Updike: A mind at work
From the home page
From the home page
From Sam Tanenhaus, The New York Times:
”CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — When John Updike died of lung cancer in January 2009, at 76, there seemed little left to learn about him. Not only was he among the most prolific writers of his time, but he was also among the most autobiographical, recasting the details of his life in an outpouring of fiction, poetry, essays and criticism that appeared with metronomic regularity in the pages of The New Yorker and in books published at a rate of almost one a year for more than half a century.
“Yet Updike was a private man, if not a recluse like J. D. Salinger or a phantom like Thomas Pynchon, then a one-man gated community, visible from afar but firmly sealed off, with a No Trespassing sign posted in front. ...
“But all the while he was fending off the public, Updike was also leaving a trail of clues to his works and days: an enormous archive fashioned as meticulously as one of his lathe-turned sentences. ‘The archive was vitally important to him,’ Mrs. [Martha] Updike said in a telephone interview, especially in his last days. “He saw it not just as a collection of his working materials, but as also a record of the time he lived in.’” …
Read the full story in The New York Times
”CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — When John Updike died of lung cancer in January 2009, at 76, there seemed little left to learn about him. Not only was he among the most prolific writers of his time, but he was also among the most autobiographical, recasting the details of his life in an outpouring of fiction, poetry, essays and criticism that appeared with metronomic regularity in the pages of The New Yorker and in books published at a rate of almost one a year for more than half a century.
“Yet Updike was a private man, if not a recluse like J. D. Salinger or a phantom like Thomas Pynchon, then a one-man gated community, visible from afar but firmly sealed off, with a No Trespassing sign posted in front. ...
“But all the while he was fending off the public, Updike was also leaving a trail of clues to his works and days: an enormous archive fashioned as meticulously as one of his lathe-turned sentences. ‘The archive was vitally important to him,’ Mrs. [Martha] Updike said in a telephone interview, especially in his last days. “He saw it not just as a collection of his working materials, but as also a record of the time he lived in.’” …
Read the full story in The New York Times
Johnny Otis
From the home page
MICHAEL E. ROSS | 05.26.2010
For generations, the intersection of race matters and popular American culture has been a busy one; anyone navigating that intersection has been as likely to encounter a collision as an opportunity for merging traffic.
Johnny Otis has lived most of his life at that crowded thoroughfare. Considered by many to be the father of modern R&B music, Otis has been songwriter and impresario, author and nightclub owner, producer and band leader, journalist and broadcaster, artist and mentor, negotiating the free-fire zone of racial and cultural politics for more than 60 years with an unwavering integrity and sense of purpose as rare as it was revolutionary.His career, especially in the turmoil of the ‘50s and ‘60s, is the framework for Midnight at the Barrelhouse, George Lipsitz’s expansive, insightful biography of one of modern music’s most important figures, a book that manages the difficult feat of being at once a social history of America’s evolution; a study of the ways music and culture transcend the rigidities of race and ethnicity; and a biography of one musician’s place in the national songbook and the nation’s evolution.
Read more of the review in PopMatters
The future of books, or not
MICHAEL E. ROSS
The book, published in late March, has found its champions, most recently Jennifer McDonald, who speculates on the possibility of Monson’s work being “the Book of the Future” in a recent blog in The New York Times.
In a series of essays that shift from his experience as a juror in a criminal case to memories of his dying mother, Monson dissects postmodern culture and the ways the individual expression, the assertion of “I,” both dovetails with and differs from the “I” of the collective culture, as expressed in YouTube videos and blog posts. Monson ricochets from his own experiences as memoirist to wider observations and criticisms of culture at large.
Full disclosure: I haven’t read Monson’s book in its entirety; since this isn’t a review of the book in the conventional sense — assessing the acuity of its language, the power of its narrative — that really isn’t problematic. My issue is with how many of Monson’s ideas employ the use of the dagger (†) as an indicator of a wide range of ancillary material — from thoughts to videos — that aren’t in the narrative of the book itself.
◊ ◊ ◊
The daggers, which appear in Monson’s book frequently enough to be considered a defining feature of its architecture, are intended to ferry the reader to the author’s Web site, Other Electricities.
I know what you’re thinking: “Wait a minute, you just sent me a link to a Web site, you’re sending me somewhere else. Isn’t that the same service, the same function Monson is offering in his book?”
Therein lies the dilemma, the cross-purposes of using the analog at the service of the digital in the way Monson has. It totally works here, online where embedded links identified by a slight change of color or an underlined word easily tip the reader to where that underlying information lies, and how to access it with a click of the mouse. When Monson’s book rolls out in the iPad environment, readers may have the opportunity to touch the device’s screen and be transported to the source of these alternate thoughts and considerations.
Readers don’t have that option when they’re experiencing Monson’s book in print form. That’s the firewall between print and digital, and it’s one that deserves to be there; in fact, for books as we’ve known them to have any kind of future, that firewall has to be there.
◊ ◊ ◊
Other writers have tried to push this envelope. McDonald mentions Walter Kirn’s 2007 novel, “The Unbinding,” published as a book after being originally published in serial form on Slate. Kirn’s book used bold face type to indicate where the links were to the corresponding online publication.
In his print introduction, Kirn writes that “an Internet novel … should look and feel — and even sound, perhaps — like something new, disorienting, wild. A buzzing, humming, electronic circus teeming with hypertext lions and virtual clowns.”
But Wallace’s approach gives a reader the satisfaction of discovering that further elucidation of ideas somewhere within the book s/he is holding (sometimes in footnotes that are paragraphs in length). You’re not chased out of the comfortable analog house Wallace has just invited you into by his alter ego wielding a digital dagger.
McDonald, the Times writer, finds merit in Monson’s approach, with reservations. “[I]ndeed it does seem to work in this, a book of nonfiction, a book of ideas, one trying to replicate the action of synapses firing,” she writes. “But would daggers (or links, in an e-book) be too distracting in a novel, or would they be engrossing, drawing the reader even further into the fictional world?”
Her question seems to invite another one: How would Monson’s idea play in other creative pursuits? Consider how this might work in motion pictures, that most popular art form in the world: What would movies look like if a character’s dialogue was periodically punctuated on the screen with the flash of an asterisk to indicate some part of the character’s inner life or musings of the moment (the meaning of which would escape you until the end of the movie, when you find the asterisks refer you to ... another movie altogether)?
◊ ◊ ◊
The act of reading books — not e-books but the real, bound, acid-free, paper-cut-inducing thing — is an implicit entrance into a contract of perception. In the hands of a skillful writer of fiction or nonfiction, it’s understood that the medium through which we experience that perception is, or seemingly should be, a thing unto itself, and not dependent on another medium to deepen (or establish) our understanding of what should be on the page in front of us.
Daggers and other typographical surrogates for elaboration off the page don’t work, can’t work in the context of the book as its own freestanding universe, a place with its own cosmology and rules, rules of no rules, its boundaries set only by the writer’s imagination and the willingness of the reader to suspend the relentlessness of his or her reality to embrace the expression of that imagination.
If readers can’t willingly make that concession to the book as its own self-sufficient realm — one less immediate and insistent than the online world they’ve briefly escaped from — what’s the point of reading it that way?
Timothy Schaffert, a lecturer in the English department of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, clearly grasped this in a reader’s comment on McDonald’s essay:
“[I]f I've put my book aside to dial-up the Internet, I've left the author's consciousness and entered the collective one. The pull of electronic communication and instant insight is often with us, teasing us away from the refined and purposeful containment of print technology. … Sure, a book's physicality is indeed ‘fixed in time, in space,’ but the act of reading is fixed only by the limitations of the reader's imagination.”
Reading passages of the print version of Monson’s daggered book immediately puts you in reference to something other than the book itself — a potentially self-defeating exercise that undercuts the rationale for reading the book in the first place. When it appears, however infrequently, you’re taken out of Monson’s narrative flow; the book’s intrinsic potential for revelation is thwarted by a forced reliance on something else, found somewhere else, to fully achieve that revelation.
Ironically, what McDonald describes as the future of the book may really a vision of the death of the book as an analog instrument.
◊ ◊ ◊
With the device of daggers, Monson has effectively created an alternative to an experience that doesn’t need an alternative. For this print reader, anyway, those daggers aren’t so much indications of new ideas or “synapses firing” as they are manifestations of a typographical Godot, a character that, like its namesake in Samuel Beckett’s legendary play, never shows up.
Monson gets credit for adventurously exploring the boundaries of the gray area between the analog of print and the digital of everything we informationally consume today; “Vanishing Point” is a principled attempt to offer a compelling idea of how books and the online experience could intersect in the future.
But that which works well in the online world is sometimes irreconcilably at odds with its analog counterpart. The world of real live books may be better for that.
Michael E. Ross is the editor of Culcha.
Image credits: Home page: Keith Richards: Ian Gavan/Getty Images. Jimmy Page 1968: © 1968 Dominique Tarlé. This page: Terry McMillan: David Shankbone, republished under Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license (Wikipedia). John Updike drawing: © 1983 David Levine. Vanishing Point cover: Greywolf Press. David Foster Wallace: Pabouk, republished under Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license (Wikipedia).