He was not of an age, but for all time.

In the Claremont Institute, a discussion of Shakespeare spanning languages and time.

College Students Get A in Narcissism

Read all about it at freep.com.

Pulped Fiction

The Independent takes a look at why writers are still struggling even though publishing is a booming business.

A Very Uncertain Country

Ian Jack discusses the new Granta list of Best of Young American Novelists in the Guardian.

Nothing Stranger than Non-fiction

The Independent discusses the nominees for Oddest Book Title of the Year:

They are not the kind of titles that are likely to top the books bestseller charts. But half a dozen bizarre tomes including a guide to stray shopping trolleys and a history of a Coventry ice-cream business may win their 15 minutes of fame as contenders for the Oddest Book Title of the Year.
The competition, which has been run by The Bookseller magazine since 1978, invites publishers, booksellers and libraries to submit their choices of the strange and odd.

Read the whole article here.

Winterson Novel "Left at Station"

A copy of an unpublished novel by Jeanette Winterson was discovered at a London Underground station. The Stone Gods is due to be published in September, but a young woman discovered the manuscript on a bench in the Underground station. It was mistakenly left by a Penguin employee.

Desai Wins Again

This time, Kiran Desai's Inheritance of Loss has picked up the National Book Critics Circle fiction award.

It's going to take some serious elbow grease...

Many, many thanks to m for this link...

Priests to Purify Mayan Site After Bush Visit.

When a narrative voice becomes your own...

The Guardian book blogs discuss when narrative voices attack.

Boys! Boys! Boys!

From the Guardian:

'I must admit, Sue, he's the dishiest thing for miles." "Yeah - and we haven't a hope of even speaking to him. You've got a steady boy and let's face it, I'm not exactly the most glamorous thing since Lynsey de Paul."
Sue really should have a little more faith. Within a few moments, Terry, best friend of square-jawed dish Ben, has crossed the curiously psychedelic disco in which they are loitering with a proposition. "I feel a twit ... but, well, my mate's on the shy side and he'd like to ask you to dance. Would you mind?"
It's an odd little tale of girl meets boy, girl discovers that boy only asked her out because he fancies her sister, girl is asked out by boy's best mate who - who knew? - has fancied her all along. ("I don't know whether we'll work out or not together, Terry. But you're kind, and gentle and nice, and maybe you can help fill the empty ache in my heart ... Maybe ...") It is short, unlikely and utterly banal, and yet in its own way rather gripping - a moving little melodrama conveyed in three short pages of speech bubbles and thought balloons.
Terry, Sue and Ben appeared in Jackie magazine on May 17 1975, the racier heirs to a genre established by the naughty boarding-school inmates and ballet-dancing heroines in the pages of Bunty and Romeo in the 1950s and 60s. And yet they, too, were a doomed breed. By the early 1980s, teenage girls wanted their cartoon-strip fiction in photos rather than drawings, and these glamorous, coltish young women, with their long-lashed eyes and gravity-defying breasts, made way for doughy teenagers with bubble perms photographed in their own clothes in suburban front rooms.
This romp through 40 years of adolescent girls' obsessions - ballet, boys and best friends - is captured in a new exhibition at the Proud Gallery in London, featuring picture and photo stories from publisher DC Thomson's stable of now-deceased teen girl magazines: Bunty, Romeo, Jackie, Patches, Blue Jeans. It features tales of spirited Scottish schoolgirls masquerading as obscure European princesses to attend the coronation, and blonde shopgirls who hide Donny Osmond in their boutique so he can escape crowds of fans, and spotty sixth-formers resentful because the new girl in school has stolen their best mate. But really, of course, it's about teenage girls - how vastly they changed over 50 years, and how profoundly they remained the same.

So if you're in London, enjoy the exhibit... if not, keep reading the article and just image that you were there.

Philip Pullman & the Butterfly Tattoo

From the Guardian:

Philip Pullman may have hit Hollywood paydirt by selling the rights to the His Dark Materials trilogy to New Line Cinema - but it seems his interest in film goes beyond the bottom line.
According to the Independent's Pandora, the author has awarded the film rights to an earlier novel, The Butterfly Tattoo, free of charge to a small independent Dutch company that promotes educational projects for young people. Dynamic Entertainment now has the option to adapt the book, in exchange for 10% of any eventual revenues. Filming is expected to begin in August.

Read the whole article here.

My only remaining question is when oh when will someone make the Sally Lockhart books into a movie? (Or several movies?) I loved those long before His Dark Materials came out. In fact, I started reading The Golden Compass and then set it aside because it was so unlike the Sally Lockhart books... I only picked GC up again (and the others in its series) when I went to Oxford because Pullman is an alum of Exeter College, where I studied. Anyway... go see the movie and cheers to Pullman for this intriguing venture.

The Louvre Abu Dhabi

More discussion and more pictures from the NY Times about the new museum.

The Tale of Harry Potter and the Naked Role

The frenzy finally comes across the pond.

Hatred for Deepak Chopra

From the Independent:

Different things spark off migraines in different people. An allergy to the smell of onions. A sharp strike to the temple with a refrigerated dessert-spoon. Kryptonite. That sort of thing.
For me, flickering vision and an abrupt and piercingly painful torsion of the optic nerve are the infallible signs of having received a press release announcing a new book by Mitch Albom, Paolo Coehlo or Deepak Chopra.
I have a conviction, perhaps irrational, but no less deeply felt than the Pope’s belief in a benevolent and omnipotent God, that anyone who goes for this kind of tree-hugging hippie crap is a morally and intellectually defective human being.

I might not agree with it all, but you can read the whole article here.

Jean Baudrillard

Jean Baudrillard died yesterday in Paris at the age of 77. Here's his obituary in the NY Times.

Wikipedia's Fictional Side

The NY Times discusses the Wikinovel.

Short Does Not Equal Shallow

Story stories often get the short straw when compared to novels, but lately, very short stories are enjoying some time in the sun -- and not unwarranted time, either, because it will probably take you longer to unpack the story than it did to read it. Read about it in the Guardian book blogs.

Books Ending Badly

The Guardian asks Richard Gwyn for his top ten list of books that end badly.

Authors, Now Playing

The NY Times reports on authors finding audiences in podcasts.

Publish or Be Damned

In the Guardian, Stephen Page argues that in this digital age, the relationship between authors and editors is even more important than ever.

Misery Makes Millions

"Misery literature" has become the book world's most lucrative sector.

Confessions of a Book Abuser

An essay from the NY Times by Ben Schott:

I have to admit I was flattered when, returning to my hotel room on the shores of Lake Como, a beautiful Italian chambermaid took my hand. I knew that the hotel was noted for the attentiveness of its staff. Surely, though, such boldness elevated room service to a new level. Escorting me to the edge of the crisply made bed, the chambermaid pointed to a book on my bedside table. ''Does this belong to you?'' she asked. I looked down to see a dog-eared copy of Evelyn Waugh's ''Vile Bodies'' open spread-eagle, its cracked spine facing out. ''Yes,'' I replied. ''Sir, that is no way to treat a book!'' she declared, stalking out of the room.
I appreciate the chambermaid's point of view -- and I admire how she expressed it. Yet I profoundly disagree. While the ideas expressed in even the vilest of books are worthy of protection, I find it difficult to respect books as objects, and see no harm whatsoever in abusing them.
There are, of course, some important exceptions: rare books or those of historical interest, books with fine binding or elegant illustrations, unpurchased books in bookshops, and books belonging to other people or to libraries. All of these I treat with a care and consideration that I would not dream of bestowing on the average mass-produced paperback. Once a book is mine, I see no reason to read it with kid gloves. And if you have ever seen a printing press disgorge best sellers at 20,000 copies an hour, you might be tempted to agree. It is the content of books that counts, not the books themselves -- no matter how well they furnish a room.
Indeed, the ability of books to survive abuse is one of the reasons they are such remarkable objects, elevated far beyond, say, Web sites. One cannot borrow a Web site from a friend and not return it for years. One cannot, yet, fold a Web site into one's back pocket, nor drop a Web site into the bath. One cannot write comments, corrections or shopping lists on Web sites only to rediscover them (indecipherable) years later. One cannot besmear a Web site with suntan-lotioned fingers, nor lodge sand between its pages. One cannot secure a wobbly table with a slim Web site, nor use one to crush an unsuspecting mosquito. And, one cannot hurl a Web site against a wall in outrage, horror or ennui. Many chefs I know could relive their culinary triumphs by licking the food-splattered pages of their favorite cookbooks. Try doing that with a flat-screen monitor.
All of these strike me as utterly reasonable fates for a book, even though (and perhaps because) they would horrify a biblioprude and befuddle a Web monkey.
The most rococo act of book abuse is something I have performed only once -- and it is a great deal more difficult than countless movies would have one believe. To excavate a hiding place for valuables within the pages of a thick book takes a sharp scalpel, a strong arm and a surprising amount of patience. I had hoped to cut a hole with the exact outline of the object to be hidden -- not, sadly, a revolver, but something equally asymmetrical. However, slicing page after page with uniform precision proved beyond me, and all I could manage to gouge was a rather forlorn rectangle. (There are some who would tempt fate by stashing their baubles within ''Great Expectations'' or ''Treasure Island.'' I played safe with ''Pride and Prejudice,'' since I had never gotten much further than its eminently quotable first line.)
I also enthusiastically turn down the pages of books as I read them -- so much so that I have developed a personal dog-earing code: folding a top corner marks a temporary page position, while folding a bottom corner marks a page that might be worth revisiting. In both cases, the tip of the fold points toward the relevant passage. Of course, this could be achieved with a ribbon or a bookmark; but so many books are bereft of ribbons, and I have always thought there is something ever so slightly shifty about those who always have a bookmark on hand.
My favorite act of abuse is writing in books -- and, in this at least, I follow in illustrious footsteps. Mathematics would be considerably poorer were it not for the marginalia of Pierre de Fermat, who in 1637 jotted in his copy of the ''Arithmetica'' of Diophantus, ''I have a truly marvelous proof of this proposition that this margin is too narrow to contain.'' This casual act of vandalism kept mathematicians out of trouble for 358 years. (Andrew Wiles finally proved Fermat's Last Theorem in 1995.)
Libraries have an ambivalent attitude to marginalia. On the one hand, they quite properly object to people defacing their property. Cambridge University Library has a chamber of horrors displaying ''marginalia and other crimes,'' including damage done by ''animals, small children and birds,'' not to mention the far from innocuous Post-it note. On the other hand, libraries cannot suppress a flush of pride on acquiring an ancient text ''annotated'' by someone famous. Like graffiti, marginalia acquire respectability through age (and, sometimes, wit).
While I take great delight in marking significant passages, jotting down notes and even doodling in my books, I do draw the line at highlighter pens. One of my schoolmates used to insist on marking the passages he needed to review with a fluorescent pink highlighter. It was gently suggested that, since swaths of his textbooks were smothered in pink, it might be easier to highlight the areas he didn't need to remember. He should have taken this advice, since the pink glop reacted badly with one particularly porous textbook, dissolving all of the type it touched and leaving legible only the irrelevant passages.
I am not unaware that the abuse of books has a dark and dishonorable past. Books have been banned and burned and writers tortured and imprisoned since the earliest days of publishing. While one thinks of such historical nadirs as Savonarola's ''bonfire of the vanities'' and the Nazi pyres of ''un-German'' and ''degenerate'' books, the American Library Association warns that we still live in an era of book burning. Perhaps inevitably, J. K. Rowling's boy wizard is the target of much modern immolation. One group in Lewiston, Me., when denied permission for a pyre by the local fire department, held a ''book cutting'' of ''Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone'' instead.
To destroy a book because of its content or the identity of its author is a despicable strangulation of thought. But such acts are utterly distinct from the personal abuse of a book -- and there is no ''slippery slope'' between the two. The businessman who tears off and discards the chunk of John Grisham he has already read before boarding a plane may lack finesse, but he is not a Nazi. Indeed, the publishing industry thinks nothing of pulping millions of unsold (or libelous) books each year. And there was no outcry in 2003 when 2.5 million romance novels from the publisher Mills & Boon were buried to form the noise-reducing foundation of a motorway extension in Manchester, England. It is notable that those who abuse their own books through manhandling or marginalia are often those who love books best. And surely the dystopia of ''Fahrenheit 451'' is more likely avoided through the loving abuse of books than through their sterile reverence. Not that I expect the chambermaid to agree.

That was the whole essay, but here's the link.

Weekend in New York Photo Scavenger Hunt

From the NY Times:

One reason people visit New York is to catch a glimpse of things they'd never see in the average American city. Some such sights are mystifying, some charming, some jaw-dropping — and some are even legal.
This week, Weekend in New York offers a photo scavenger hunt, in which you (working alone or in a group) seek out scenes and objects intrinsically New York and capture them with your camera. The hunt could be the centerpiece of your weekend, but also could serve as just a way to enhance your downtime as you wander from restaurant to park to museum, observing the natives in their natural habitat.
If competing against others, award two points to the team that does the best in each category, and one point to anyone coming in a reasonably close second. Or, if you're playing alone, just award a whole bunch of points to your own team and declare yourself the winner.

Read the rest of the article and learn the rules here.

Patagonia in a New Light

Mmm... Patagonia. Definitely on my shortlist of places to visit before I die.
This image from the NY Times article: "The Hosteria Pehoe glows on the shores of a small island in Pehoe Lake in Torres del Paine National Park."

Mistaken Invasion

Yesterday, the Swiss mistakenly invaded Liechtenstein.

Read about it in the Guardian here and here.

Hooking Up...

The NY Times discusses Laura Sessions and her book about "the damaging effects of 'hooking up.'" Thankfully, it also discusses how ridiculous she is, too.

To critics, the book, which was published on Feb. 15, is an odd throwback -- not only retro in its point of view, but also out of sync with the current climate of high-achieving girls who are usually applauded for focusing on their careers and their female friends, rather than on finding Mr. Right.
Salon.com likened ''Unhooked'' to a ''50s-style handbook on appropriate femininity.'' Slate magazine said it is alarmist and ''makes sex into a bigger, scarier and more dangerous thing than it already is.'' A review in The Washington Post by Kathy Dobie, the author of ''The Only Girl in the Car,'' said that Ms. Sessions Stepp ''resurrects the ugly, old notion of sex as something a female gives in return for a male's good behavior.''
Many of the critics do not question that hooking up is common in the age group that Ms. Sessions Stepp singles out. In fact, while studies show that fewer teenagers are having sex, other studies of students at individual universities show that the hookup is the predominant way that students sexually interact.
But no studies draw a line between the hookup culture and either clinical depression or a lifetime of remaining single, the critics point out.

Read the whole article here.

Auden the Spy?

Well, not really. But MI5 evidently thought that Auden helped two Cambridge spies escape capture.

New Rough Guides Site

Rough Guides has updated its website -- and to celebrate, a few perks:

• If you purchase any Rough Guide books between now and March 31st through the Penguin website, you can get 20% off of your order (just type in the coupon code RGFEB when you check out at the Penguin site).
• Register to win a trip for two to Morocco!

World Book Day Poll

And so, the numbers are in. A poll for World Book Day asked people to rate the top 100 books. Here's the top ten... apologies if your favorites didn't make the cut.

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. (a tie) Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
8. (a tie) His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

Check here for the article and here for the complete list.

Former Soho Stripper Scoops Literary Prize

Really, it's just a good headline.

Librarian's Guide to New York

Check it out.

Thanks, m, for the link.

Angelina Jolie on Darfur

From the Washington Post, Angelina Jolie on Darfur:

It has become clear to me that there will be no enduring peace without justice. History shows that there will be another Darfur, another exodus, in a vicious cycle of bloodshed and retribution. But an international court finally exists. It will be as strong as the support we give it. This might be the moment we stop the cycle of violence and end our tolerance for crimes against humanity.
What the worst people in the world fear most is justice. That's what we should deliver.

Read the whole article here. Thanks to Hil for sending it my way!

Slim Lit...

From the Guardian:

Two leading publishers have hit on the idea of boiling down classic novels for modern audiences who are too busy/stupid to read the real thing. Orion was first off the blocks with its Compact Classics, which will appear in May - Anna Karenina, Vanity Fair, Moby-Dick, The Mill on the Floss, David Copperfield and Wives and Daughters, all reduced to not more than 400 pages for "less confident readers". Soon after come Bleak House, North and South, Middlemarch, Jane Eyre, The Count of Monte Cristo and The Portrait of a Lady, similarly straitjacketed.
Without falling into the trap of condemning all abridgement - it happens on radio without a squeak of protest - at least half these titles should not be on the list. The fact that Moby-Dick is a digressive, unboildownable whale of a book is the whole point; The Portrait of a Lady, Vanity Fair and Middlemarch are straightforward reads - page turners, even for less confident readers, though in the case of Middlemarch there are admittedly a lot of pages to turn. The rambling David Copperfield is ripe for cutting, but Bleak House, in which Dickens was consciously widening his scope as an artist, is not. A great novel is more than its plot; it is an ecosystem, a world. Tamper at your peril.
Meanwhile, HarperCollins is reducing War and Peace from almost 1,500 pages to 900. It says it will give us less war. Perhaps it has hit on the answer. Why not The Only Child Karamazov, Le Misérable, A Tale of Two Medium-Sized Towns, Limited Expectations and A Couple of Days in the Country? That should do the trick.
Professor John Sutherland of UCL has suggested that it is far better to do the abridging yourself. My recollection of reading what we must now call The Odd, Isolated Skirmish and Peace is that Prince Andrei is fascinating and Pierre a bore, so when the latter appeared my reading/skipping speeded up, though I always tell myself I will one day go back and read it properly (ditto Proust, Shakespeare's Sonnets, Chaucer, Milton, Don Quixote, Romola, Ulysses, and everything by Thomas Pynchon).

Find the article here.

Harry Can Act!

The reviews are coming in and it appears that the young man behind the boy wizard can actually act. Daniel Radcliffe has been getting very positive reviews for his performance in Equus -- read about it here in the Guardian.

Does a few million more really matter?

The Telegraph talks about Cussler and his trial.

Quelle Horreur!

It's hard for Americans to scandalize the French (well, unless they're commenting that they're astounded by how prudish and stupid we are), but here's a fine example of an American author writing in French and shocking them all.

Escapism or Egotism?

The Guardian looks at authors writing about authors in their books:
The central character in a TV adaptation of an Ian Rankin short story being shown tomorrow is a policeman called John Buchan who has been bested in love and other areas of life by a rich, sexy, witty, bestselling novelist called Jack Harvey.
Most viewers will spot that the policeman's name is an allusion to a famous Scottish novelist - the author of The 39 Steps - but fewer may pick up that Buchan's nemesis is also a Caledonian literary reference. Jack Harvey is the pseudonym under which Ian Rankin published three early novels.
Read the whole article here.

Only in the movies...

Once again, scientists kill a perfectly good movie technique... you can't actually ignite a petrol/gasoline fire with just a lit cigarette.

The Vanity Fair After-Party

Evidently, it's hands down the best Oscar after-party.

Fertility Clock for Men?

It seems that women aren't the only ones whose clocks are ticking.

Philip K. Dick

The Times discusses Philip K. Dick.

Math & Architecture

The NY Times discusses signs of advanced math in medieval architecture.

Portrait of the Artist as a Hot Chick

The Guardian blogs on Becoming Jane.

More on the Oscars

The NY Times on the Oscars.

PEN/Faulkner Award to Philip Roth

Roth's short novel Everyman has won the PEN/Faulkner Award. Read about it in the Guardian or the NY Times.

Lady Chatterly Best Film at the Cesars

Reported by the BBC: "Lady Chatterley has taken the award for best film at the Cesars, France's glitzy equivalent of the Oscars." Read the article here.

Rowling Sues eBay Over Pirated Books

From the Times:

In fiction his enemies are evil wizards and magical beasts, but Harry Potter’s latest adversary is a real corporation with a turnover of more than £2 billion.
J. K. Rowling, Harry’s creator, is suing the online auction hosting service eBay after unscrupulous sellers used the Indian version of the website to sell unauthorised versions of her books.

Read the whole article here.

War of Ideas

From the Guardian:

The film Casablanca (1942) has become a permanent icon of a certain kind of educated culture, at least among older generations. The cast will still be familiar, I hope: Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet, Marcel Dalio, Conrad Veidt, Claude Rains. Its phrases have become part of our discourse, such as the endlessly misquoted "Play it again, Sam" or "Round up the usual suspects". If we leave aside the basic love affair, this is a film about the relations of the Spanish civil war and the wider politics of that strange but decisive period in 20th-century history, the era of Adolf Hitler. Rick, the hero, has fought for the republicans in the Spanish civil war. He emerges from it defeated and cynical in his Moroccan café, and the film ends with him returning to the struggle in the second world war. In short, Casablanca is about the mobilisation of anti-fascism in the 1930s. And those who mobilised against fascism before most others, and most passionately, were western intellectuals.
Today it is possible to see the civil war, Spain's contribution to the tragic history of that most brutal of centuries, the 20th, in its historical context. It was not, as the neoliberal François Furet argued it should have been, a war against both the ultra-right and the Comintern - a view shared, from a Trotskyist sectarian angle, by Ken Loach's powerful film Land and Freedom (1995). The only choice was between two sides, and liberal-democratic opinion overwhelmingly chose anti-fascism. Hence, asked in early 1939 who they wanted to win in a war between Russia and Germany, 83 per cent of Americans wanted a Russian victory. Spain was a war against Franco - that is to say, against the forces of fascism with which Franco was aligned - and 87 per cent of Americans favoured the republic. Alas, unlike in the second world war, the wrong side won. But it is largely due to the intellectuals, the artists and writers who mobilised so overwhelmingly in favour of the republic, that in this instance history has not been written by the victors.

Read the whole article here.

Hardback Mountain

This Wall Street Journal Opinion Page piece discusses the painful act of cutting back a personal library.

Why We Miss Susan Sontag, Volume 1

From the New York Observer... "Why We Miss Susan Sontag, Volume 1."

Evolution and Gossip

An incredibly science-y article about "evolution, alienation and gossip."

Adventures in Film Narrative

From the New Yorker, a critic at large... "The New Disorder: Adventures on Film Narrative."

Face Value

The Toronto Star (yes, Jadis, I'm catching up on my aldaily.com) on a new study that suggests how we respond to a candidate's face can determine our choice on election day.

Why has mankind always loved to draw animals?

The Telegraph and David Attenborough attempt to answer that question.

Rachel Weisz at the Oscars

You knew I had to do it. A whole post exclusively based on how beautiful Rachel Weisz was at the Oscars. Though yes, I agree, the Cartier necklace wasn't perhaps the best idea, but still, I love her.

Beware Celebrities Bearing Gifts

The NY Times discusses Obama, Geffen, the Clintons and others.

Is the movie magic gone?

From the LA Times:

By this reckoning, no matter how much films may improve, their prospects are not likely to — which suggests that something has fundamentally changed in our relationship to the movies. The long, long romance may finally be losing its bloom, and that is why Hollywood should be concerned.
What is happening may be a matter of metaphysics. Virtually from their inception, the movies have been America's primary popular art, the "Democratic Art," as they were once called, managing to strike the American nerve continuously for decades. During the 1920s, nearly the entire population of the country attended the movies weekly, but even when attendance sank in the 1950s under the assault of television and the industry was virtually on life support, the movies still managed to occupy the center of American life.
Movie stars have been our brightest icons. A big movie like "The Godfather," "Titanic" or "Lord of the Rings" entered the national conversation and changed the national consciousness. Movies were the barometers of the American psyche. More than any other form, they defined us, and to this day, the rest of the world knows us as much for our films as for any other export.
Today, movies just don't seem to matter in the same way — not to the general public and not to the high culture either, where a Pauline Kael review in the New Yorker could once ignite an intellectual firestorm. There aren't any firestorms now, and there is no director who seems to have his finger on the national pulse the way that Steven Spielberg or George Lucas did in the 1970s and 1980s. People don't talk about movies the way they once did. It would seem absurd to say, as Kael once did, that she knew whether she would like someone by the films he or she liked. Once at the center, movies increasingly sit on the cultural margins.

Read the whole article here.

Notable Quotables

Louis Menand in the New Yorker:

Sherlock Holmes never said “Elementary, my dear Watson.” Neither Ingrid Bergman nor anyone else in “Casablanca” says “Play it again, Sam”; Leo Durocher did not say “Nice guys finish last”; Vince Lombardi did say “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing” quite often, but he got the line from someone else. Patrick Henry almost certainly did not say “Give me liberty, or give me death!”; William Tecumseh Sherman never wrote the words “War is hell”; and there is no evidence that Horace Greeley said “Go west, young man.” Marie Antoinette did not say “Let them eat cake”; Hermann Göring did not say “When I hear the word ‘culture,’ I reach for my gun”; and Muhammad Ali did not say “No Vietcong ever called me nigger.” Gordon Gekko, the character played by Michael Douglas in “Wall Street,” does not say “Greed is good”; James Cagney never says “You dirty rat” in any of his films; and no movie actor, including Charles Boyer, ever said “Come with me to the Casbah.” Many of the phrases for which Winston Churchill is famous he adapted from the phrases of other people, and when Yogi Berra said “I didn’t really say everything I said” he was correct.
So what? Should we care? Quotable quotes are coins rubbed smooth by circulation. What Michael Douglas did say in “Wall Street” was “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good.” That was not a quotable quote; it needed some editorial attention, the consequence of which is that everyone distinctly remembers Michael Douglas uttering the words “Greed is good” in “Wall Street,” just as everyone distinctly remembers Ingrid Bergman uttering the words “Play it again, Sam” in “Casablanca,” even though what she really utters is “Play it, Sam.” When you watch the movie and get to that line, you don’t think your memory is wrong. You think the movie is wrong.
“For lack of a better word” spoils a nice quotation—the speech is about calling a spade a spade, so there is no better word—and “Play it again, Sam” is somehow more affecting than “Play it, Sam.” But not all emendations are improvements. What Leo Durocher actually said (referring to the New York Giants baseball team) was “The nice guys are all over there, in seventh place.” The sportswriters who heard him telescoped (the technical term is “piped”) the quote because it made a neater headline. They could have done a better job of piping. “Nice guys finish seventh” is a lot cleverer (and also marginally more plausible) than the non-utterance that gave immortality to Leo Durocher. But Leo Durocher doesn’t own that quotation; the quotation owns Leo Durocher, the way a parasite sometimes takes over the host organism. Quotations are in a perpetual struggle for survival. They want people to keep saying them. They don’t want to die any more than the rest of us do. And so, whenever they can, they attach themselves to colorful or famous people. “Nice guys finish last” profits by its association with a man whose nickname was the Lip, even if the Lip never said it, just as “Winning isn’t everything” has a higher market valuation because of the mental image people have of Vince Lombardi. No one has a mental image of Henry (Red) Sanders, the coach who used the phrase first.
The adaptive mechanism benefits both parties. The survival of the quotation helps insure the survival of the person to whom it is misattributed. The Patrick Henry who lives in our heads and hearts is the man who said “Give me liberty, or give me death!” Apparently, the line was cooked up by his biographer William Wirt, a notorious embellisher, who also invented Henry’s other familiar quotation, “If this be treason, make the most of it!” But a Patrick Henry who never said “Give me liberty, or give me death!” or “If this be treason, make the most of it!,” a Patrick Henry without a death wish, is just not someone we know or care about. His having been said to have said what he never said is a condition of his being “Patrick Henry.” Certain sayings, like “It’s déjà vu all over again,” are Berra-isms, whether Yogi Berra ever said them or not. “Je ne suis pas marxiste,” Karl Marx once complained. Too late for that. Like Yogi, he was the author of a discourse, and he lives as long as it does.
Karl Marx has thirteen quotations (plus eight for which he shares credit with Friedrich Engels, who, interestingly, never felt it necessary to say “Je ne suis pas engeliste”) in the compendious, enjoyable, and expensive “Yale Book of Quotations” (Yale; $50), edited by Fred Shapiro. Groucho Marx (no relation) has fifty-one quotations. The big winner is William Shakespeare, with four hundred and fifty-five, topping even the Yahwist and his co-authors, the wordsmiths who churned out the Bible but managed to come up with only four hundred quotable passages. Mark Twain has a hundred and fifty-three quotations, Oscar Wilde a hundred and twenty-three. Ambrose Bierce edges out Samuel Johnson in double overtime by a final score of a hundred and forty-four to a hundred and ten. And Woody Allen has forty, beating out William Words-worth, Rudyard Kipling, and both Roosevelts.

Read the rest of the article here.

The Romantic Lives of Braniacs

From the Boston Globe:

Pity the overschooled old maid and the lonely career woman. Highly educated or high-achieving women are less likely to marry and have children than other women. If they do marry, they are more likely to divorce. Even if they don't divorce, their marriages will be less happy. And, oh, yes, they'll be sexually frustrated, too.
These maxims, widely accepted for at least two centuries, are bad news for a state so focused on brainy pursuits. Thirty-five percent of Massachusetts women 25 and older have a bachelor's degree or more, a level of educational attainment almost 10 points higher than the national average. So perhaps it follows that 28 percent of women in the state have never been married. Massachusetts's proportion of never-married females is the third highest in the nation, topped only by the District of Columbia and the state of New York. But are these women really educating themselves out of the marriage market? If a woman reads Proust or computes calculus, is she unable to attract a mate?
Conventional wisdom says the answer to both questions is yes. But a close look at the historical transformation of marriage in America suggests that educated women now have a surprising advantage when it comes to matrimony.

Read the whole article here.

The Last King of Scotland

Idi Amin is responsible for the death of approximately 300,000 Ugandans. Considered to be one of the truly terrible dictators of recent years, I echo the sentiments expressed by many that I've heard lately: it's hard to believe he only died three years ago (exiles in Saudi Arabia).
How do you get close to a figure like this, even in a film? The Last King of Scotland is based on a novel by Giles Foden that uses a Westerner to help us gain access to this world. Nicholas Garrigan is a young Scottish doctor in the early 1970s who, terrified at the idea of working in a family practice alongside his father for the rest of his days, spins a globe and decides to go to the first place his finger lands. At first spin, it's Canada... on his second try, he lands on Uganda... and so he goes.
Wide-eyed and enthusiastic, all Garrigan seems to radiate is delight at his adventure in Africa. He starts working at a clinic where he's more interested in seducing Sarah (Gillian Anderson), the wife of the head doctor at the clinic than saving lives - or at least that's what we see. He's clearly involved with the people there, playing soccer and interested in going to a rally where the new "boss" will be speaking - Idi Amin. He convinces Sarah to come with him and Garrigan cheers along with the people as Aidi Amin promises reform, peace, food... On their way home, their jeep is overtaken by soldiers who need a doctor for Idi Amin, who has been in a minor car accident. Garrigan proves his mettle by overstepping his bounds... the noise of a fatally injured animal and the people arguing means he cannot concentrate on fixing Idi Amin's hand, so he takes a gun and shoots the animal.
The next day, Idi Amin invites Garrigan to his capital and asks him to be his personal physician. Lured from the clinic by parties, women, and the respect of such a powerful man, Garrigan quickly falls into a world where he's way over his head.
Now I know that I've put my money on Forest Whitaker winning the Oscar for Best Actor this year (he won the Golden Globe and it really is an impressive performance, though really, of those nominated, I would otherwise go with Leo), but I want to pause for a moment to praise James McAvoy. Yes, he's adorable and the Scottish accent is delicious, but for the entire movie, I was utterly astounded by McAvoy. He delivers a really great performance, which seems to come out of the blue after all the hype about Forest Whitaker. Aside from the fact that I think that he's a great young actor, I think my amazement has more to do with the fact that his great acting was a constant reaction to Whitaker. Whitaker is a powerhouse, he inhabits the role, you aren't even aware that acting is going on... and McAvoy/Garrigan is swept along, desperately trying to stay ahead of Whitaker/Idi Amin. Garrigan makes some stupid choices (I mean come on, there have to be *some* single women in Uganda, kid!) and has no idea what he's dealing with -- a fact that Idi Amin calls him on towards the end of the movie... and it hits hard because really, very few Westerners have any idea of what they're dealing with when they try to "help out" in Africa.
Overall, it was a very powerful movie with a very convincing portrayal of a true monster.

Here's the link to the NY Times review.

A Traveler's Library

The Chronicle of Higher Education brings you Jay Parini (a Middlebury prof and author/poet):

Weeks before any journey, I begin to worry about what books I'll bring. It doesn't matter whether it's a short hop for the night or something more adventurous, I wonder what I'll read en route (if I'm going by plane or train) and what I'll read while I'm there, perhaps sleepless in a hotel room. There's nothing worse than being without the right book in those situations. Yet — given the restrictions and demands of travel — one has to be selective.
What constitutes the "right" book is, of course, a wildly subjective judgment. For me, it depends a great deal on my mood and the context of the journey. An overnight flight from New York to London, for example, has its peculiar demands. It's a trip I've done many times over the past four decades — I've spent nine of my adult years in Britain — so I know the routine. You arrive at JFK around 6 or 7 p.m., hungry but putting off dinner until the flight. You get on the plane a few hours later, having made your way anxiously through security. You sit and read for a while in the departure lounge, annoyed by the screaming children (yours or someone else's). You fret as the plane lifts off, heads into the darkening sky. Soon the stewards come around with drinks and dinner. Then you've got the rest of night, if you're a nervous flier like me, to pass without sleep.
That is when having exactly the right sort of book matters a great deal, and when most travelers turn to the best-seller lists. Bring out the Patricia Cornwell, Stephen King, John Grisham, or whatever latest mystery or thriller vaguely rings your bell at the moment. In truth, almost none ever do. The best sellers usually bore me to death, with their cliché-ridden prose and stereotyped characters. The plots often spin too quickly, in unlikely directions: I can suspend only so much disbelief in a few hours of reading. There is a thriller by Ken Follett that I've read twice, The Key to Rebecca, and I like Eric Ambler a good deal. But it's a rare book of this kind that can overcome the combination of ennui and anxiety.
The object is to find a book that will last about five hours, which means a short book — a novella is perfect, or a collection of stories. I find fiction preferable on planes. That's just an old instinct in operation: I've always read novels or stories on planes, as when I read nonfiction, I'm usually taking notes, and the aura of real work hovers around the project. I don't like to work between midnight and dawn, and that holds when I'm flying in the wee hours. It can be difficult, however, to lose yourself in a good book when you're hurtling along at hundreds of miles an hour, so I've developed a trick. I get myself about three-fourths of the way through a good novel before the journey begins. It's the last quarter of many narratives that most absorbs my attention; I therefore time the reading so that I am at an interesting part as I begin to wait for the plane to board. I hardly know that I'm in an airport. Once buckled in my seat, I can read on the runway as we wait in line for takeoff. As the plane begins to claw its way upward, airborne, I'm in the most engaging stretch of my book. If I've chosen the novel well, and timed my reading to perfection, I'll finish the last pages as we fasten our seat belts to land at Heathrow.
I began traveling in earnest as an undergraduate, heading off to Britain on a decrepit Italian ship in the late summer of 1968. I happen to recall exactly what I was reading: Isaiah Berlin's life of Marx, and the essays of T.S. Eliot. I was beginning the intellectual journey of my life, so to speak, and took it seriously. I still have my copies, with their silly comments in the margins, the covers tatty and stained. I quarreled in my marginalia with Berlin and Eliot, taking a certain jejune pride in my points of view. It took some years before I realized that notebooks worked as well.
That same year, I spent Christmas with a friend's family in an icy, remote village in northern Spain. They were wonderful, but I missed my own family in Pennsylvania. Rather wisely, I had brought with me several books by John Updike, and I spent hour upon hour in my unheated bedroom, gloves on my hands, lost in Updike's early fiction, which evoked the sights and sounds of my home state, with its mild landscape, its gently rolling fields, and the small towns where high-school basketball games mattered desperately. I practically memorized the stories in Pigeon Feathers, still one of my favorite volumes of fiction because of its acute particularity, especially in the title story, which features an adolescent boy in the passion of self-discovery. I read and reread Of the Farm, a splendidly sensuous novella. I even liked The Centaur, which now strikes me as rather forced and dull. Whenever I see those books on my shelf, I can smell the cooking of that Spanish kitchen, where I also often sat at a plain wooden table while my friend's mother fried garlic and fish over a gas stove.
I learned a good lesson there. It often pays when traveling to take along something familiar. I keep a separate shelf in my study for what I think of as "comfort books." These are the texts that I know will keep me happy in strange or awkward settings. At my age now, rereading is often preferable to reading, so I have a small number of deeply loved books that I can rely on. Among the volumes on this shelf are One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez, and the poems of Robert Frost. I can always find more than enough comfort and satisfaction, even challenge, in those pages to get me through a difficult day or two. Márquez, a master of whimsicality, always lifts me into a zone somewhere beyond reality, but nevertheless grounded as well. The poems of Frost, which I know so well, always remind me of home — not a literal place, of course, but the home of language so perfectly aligned with my own sense of the world.
In the early 70s, I journeyed by myself across North Africa, usually by bus, sometimes hitching a ride. I carried with me in my backpack Dante's Divine Comedy in three paperbound volumes, and those proved an immense blessing. I was, then, unfamiliar with poverty of a certain depth and enormity, so the Inferno offered an appropriate analogue. It's useful when the book you're reading as you travel has a certain resonance, so that inner and outer realities touch, however obliquely.
On a long journey, it's also useful to have a decently ambitious but discreet project on hand. Dante's epic was perfect in that respect. I could read the cantos, then read them again, and again. I could take notes in the margins. I could puzzle my way through difficult passages. I could find myself lifted by the poetry, transported. The morning I first climbed the heights of the Paradiso, I was sitting in a cafe by the Mediterranean, drinking espresso, eating yogurt and honey. The light on the sea was unimaginably bright and copper in color. I was warm and happy, at ease, and could fully appreciate the excitement of Dante's pilgrim as he approached the light of God. (I seem to have lost that edition of Dante, and it's probably a good thing, as my marginal notes would now seem embarrassing, and I recall I spilled coffee on the Paradiso in a way that stained the tops of most pages and annoyed me for years afterward.)
I look over my bookshelf and remember certain journeys. I know I was traveling by train through Eastern Europe when I read Erich Auerbach's Mimesis, one of those monumental works of literary scholarship by a European critic of the old school. It always thrilled me to think that Auerbach wrote that book under trying wartime circumstances, without the benefit of a library; he had nothing but his own well-stocked mind for recourse. I doubt that I finished Mimesis — it's a fairly long and dense book — on that trip, but I know it kept me company through several weeks of fairly arduous travel in Poland, Lithuania, and Czechoslovakia (this was before the drawing aside of the Iron Curtain).
If I take a long trip soon, I want to have a similar book with me: something as densely packed, informative, and meditative by an old-fashioned literary historian like Auerbach. Such books are not "difficult" in the way of criticism in the age of poststructuralist theory. You don't get lost in the arguments (and bad syntax) and, accidentally on purpose, lose the book along the way.
We all have a long, imaginary shelf of masterpieces we have not read. For years I was embarrassed by my ignorance of War and Peace, and Tolstoy's massive novel had sat on the shelf, glaring at me. Not until the mid-80s, when I passed a lovely spring on the Amalfi Coast of Italy in a tiny rented house, did I find myself ready to tackle it. I would rise at dawn (we had two babies then) and take my coffee to the terrace. There was a grove of lemon trees behind me, and I could look all the way down the coast from Amalfi to Salerno, the sunlight on the sea like scattered coins. I was absorbed for two months in that astonishing novel, making my first acquaintance with Pierre, Natasha, Bolkonsky, and the rest of Petersburg society. Forever I will associate that story with that place, and that time in my life.
One day, on a desert island, real or unreal, I will read Stendhal's The Red and the Black or Zola's Germinal or any one of the countless other well-known or lesser-known masterworks that have tugged at my sleeve, as if wondering why I won't dance with them. Life is short, but art is long, as the aphorism has it. Too bad about the life thing, but as for art, the longer the better. I look forward to the journeys that lie ahead of me, in the pages of books and on the road itself: times when I will settle happily with a book for a discrete period, in circumstances that may well prove ideal for a certain type of reading.

Link to the article you just read here. Personally, I say you should bring Alain de Botton's The Art of Travel along on your next excursion if you haven't read it.

Saint or Celebrity?

Spiked takes a look at a new book, Mother Teresa: Saint or Celebrity?

(Can't Get No) Satisfaction

Scientific American tells us that the new science of happiness needs some historical perspective.

Love Me, Love My Books

We've all done it. You make a new acquaintence, you ask them about books... you visit someone's home, you scan their shelves. You don't usually have access to your favorite writer's study, but here, the Times talks about a new book that explores the shelves of top authors:

You’ll find it hard to love someone if you don’t love their books. I speak as a reader, of course: but any real reader would tell you the same. Think that your new acquaintance might become your friend or your lover? Better take a good look at their vital statistics — that is, see how their shelves are stacked.
Favourite writers are friends too; you might not have met Carl Hiaasen or Margaret Drabble, but if you’ve read their books you feel as if you might have. Who can blame you for wanting to know what they read, to see if they like what you like, or even just what you think they might like?
So thanks to J. Peder Zane, who has provided some of the answers in The Top Ten: Writers Pick their Favourite Books. In a sense, it’s an unsurprising collection, but no less pleasing for that. I’m not shocked to learn that Hiassen’s top novel is Joseph Heller’s Catch22; nor that Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five and Martin Amis’s Money also appear on his list. I adore Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda; of course he chose Gabriel GarcÍa Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera and Great Expectations, too . . . the flip side of his own novel, Jack Maggs.
You can learn things, too, from these lists. Stephen King’s No 1 book is The Golden Argosy, edited by Van H. Cartmell and Charles Grayson. If you’re thinking: “What?”, then never fear. King explains that it’s an anthology of short stories that he found in a Maine “bargain barn” called The Jolly White Elephant, that it includes stories by Faulkner, Poe and Fitzgerald and that it “taught me more about good writing than all the classes I've ever taken”.
Annie Proulx, author of The Shipping News, provides her list (which begins with Homer’s Odyssey and ends with the haiku of Basho) with this qualification: “I find this list-of-ten-books project to be difficult, pointless and wrongheaded.” Hard to figure why she bothered to contribute, then.
David Mitchell chooses Chekhov’s novella The Duel, saying that he would save it “from a burning house before everything else I’ve read”, while the American novelist A.M. Homes ranks Nabokov’s Lolita below the children’s book Flat Stanley.
Our sister journal The TLS points out that there is a notable omission from almost all these lists: its diarist, J. C., remarks on “how few writers, when asked to name the world's best books, choose the Good Book”. The Bible crops up on only six lists, “well behind Lolita”.

Read the article here.

Censorship: Still a Burning Issue

The Independent discusses its collection of once-banned books, censorship and literary pariahs.

Truth, Lies and Anti-Semitism

From the Guardian:

When Irène Némirovsky's Suite Française was published in English last year, something was left out. Just a few lines omitted from the introduction to the French edition that had appeared two years previously. Nothing to diminish the remarkable achievement of the writer's novel describing life in a French village under Nazi occupation. Nothing to undermine the ecstatic reviews - Le Monde called the book "a masterpiece ... ripped from oblivion" - and the fact that the novel has become a runaway bestseller.
And nothing to taint the story of the book's extraordinary appearance after 50 years tucked away in a French cellar, or the narrative of Némirovsky's tragic last years - stories that helped make Suite Française a literary sensation. Némirovsky, a Kiev-born Jewish woman, had settled in France with her wealthy family after the Russian revolution; become a literary celebrity on a par with Colette in 1930s Paris; was refused French citizenship shortly before the second world war broke out; and, in 1942, was deported to Auschwitz where she died, a stateless Jew, aged 39. For many years, the manuscript of her masterpiece, written on paper as thin as onion peel, had remained in a suitcase that she handed to her daughter Denise when she was arrested.
What was missing from the British Chatto & Windus edition was a passage in which Miriam Anissimov, a biographer of Primo Levi, suggested that Némirovsky was a self-hating Jew.

Read the whole article here.

The History of the Pink Carnation

I admit it. I like a little bit of fluffy reading every now and then... And I'm a sucker for the Scarlet Pimpernel, so when The History of the Pink Carnation crossed my path, I simply had to read it. It's one of those romantic historical novels that follows two stories... the modern-day academic girl is looking for love (and affirmation in her chosen career field) and stumbles across a truly epic love story in a dusty box that has all the staples: secret identities, the French Revolution, swordplay, corsets and petticoats.
The one thing I wasn't prepared for was just how steamy things get. Perhaps I've read too much Austen, but I felt myself go crimson at a particular scene that featured a young lady's first encounter with a gentleman's hands under her petticoats... while they were being ferried across a river in a boat. I mean really!

In any case, here's the summary from the publisher:

Nothing ever goes right for Eloise. The day she wears her new suede boots, it rains. When the subway stops short, she's the one thrown into some stranger's lap. And she's had her share of misfortune in the way of love. So, after deciding that romantic heroes must be a thing of the past, Eloise is ready for a fresh start.
Setting off for England, Eloise is determined to finish her dissertation on two spies, the Scarlet Pimpernel and the Purple Gentian. But what she discovers is something historians have missed: the secret history of the Pink Carnation-the most elusive spy of all time. As she works to unmask this obscure spy, Eloise has more and more questions. Like, how did the Pink Carnation save England from Napoleon? What became of the Scarlet Pimpernel and the Purple Gentian? And will Eloise Kelly escape her bad luck and find a living, breathing hero of her own?

It's an amusing little read, but aside from the lead characters, no one's really quite fleshed out. (And even then, neither heroine is really delightful.) Everyone's silly and it's certainly not the Pimpernel, but if you've got a rainy weekend and you want chick lit with a little more of a literary side, then here's what you've been looking for.

Independent Spirit Awards

And the winners are...

How has HPDF affected your life?

The Guardian book blogs talk about HPDF... Harry Potter Discounting Fever.

The Published Author Campaign

From the NY Times:

The lineup of potential US presidential candidates is a mishmash of senators, governors, former big-city mayors and a retired four-star Army general.
But nearly all of them share one title: published author.
"You're not a real candidate, Pinocchio, if you haven't written your own book," said Mark Halperin, the political director of ABC News. "If you know everybody else is doing a book, you've got to do a book."

Read the whole article here.

Judging Panel for Booker Prize Announced

Didn't we just give Inheritance of Loss the Booker? Dear me. The judging panel for the Man Booker Prize for fiction was announced -- and it's also been announced that this year, the longlist will be kept to a dozen titles.
It includes Giles Foden (who wrote the book The Last King of Scotland, the movie adaptation of which is winning Forest Whitaker such acclaim), Wendy Cope, Ruth Scurr, and Imogen Stubbs (the actress who I enjoy in the film version of Twelfth Night, directed by her husband Trevor Nunn). The director of the London School of Economics and Political Science (Howard Davies) will sit as the chair.
No, no, don't rush yourselves in reading Kiran Desai's book -- the next Booker Prize will not be awarded until October, you have time yet.

Middlebury History Department Bans Citing Wikipedia

... read about it in the NY Times.

A Monthly Voyage to Narnia

The few and the faithful gather to discuss CS Lewis and Narnia.

Tribute to Altman

Friends, family and colleagues gathered to honor Robert Altman.

Prince Harry to Iraq?

From the NY Times:

Britain's official policy on Iraq is that its troops will leave as soon as they can hand over to Iraqis. But there is one particular soldier who, according to a crescendo of British newspaper reports, does not seem quite so replaceable.
Prince Harry, third in line to the British throne and second son of Prince Charles, is an army officer, reportedly with a hankering to be treated as just another soldier in line for rotation in southern Iraq.

Read the whole article here.

No Offense?

The Guardian book blogs talk about banning books and ask if freedom of literary expression has its dangers.

Book Club Blonde

From the Times:

“An hour and forty-five minutes before Nazneen’s life began . . .” No, let’s start that again. Or – better – let’s not start that at all. Monica Ali’s Brick Lane may have been hailed by the critics as “the sort of book you race through greedily, dreading the last page”, but it was hailed by someone more important than the critics as “the kind of book that makes you want to give up after 40 pages”. Who was that more important person? Amanda Ross, a working-class girl from Essex who wears designer clothes, has blonde hair and works not in publishing but in daytime TV.
Irony is a time-honoured literary device, any writer can tell you that. And it’s ironic that publishers – traditionally fussy Oxbridge types with English degrees – are having to suck up to someone who studied drama at Birmingham University and who cheerily admits that “I don’t really know anything about books at all”. When 44-year-old Ross, a powerful TV producer, founded the Richard & Judy Book Club three years ago, publishers barely deigned to look up from their proofs. Daytime TV, they assumed, was the domain of council-house illiterates and Daz adverts. Another nail in the coffin of Britain’s literary culture, they lamented.
But Ross had a hawk’s eye for storytelling.
Of the 100 bestselling titles last year, 21 were by authors discussed on the Richard & Judy Book Club – all chosen personally by Ross. Publishers couldn’t console themselves with the thought that she had dumbed down Britain’s bookshops because in fact she had done the opposite. “I don’t know what a literary book is. As long as it has a good story, who cares?” she has said.

Read the whole article here.

Happy Birthday, WH Auden!

Happy 100th birthday, Auden!

The Guardian comment section celebrates...

The Death of Books (Again)

The Orange County Register on electronic publishing.

Reaping the Rewards of the Grapes of Wrath

From the Guardian:

A rare edition of John Steinbeck's 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath has sold for $47,800 (£24,380), doubling the estimated price and setting what is believed to be a world record for a book by the Nobel Prize-winning author.

Read the whole article here.

Bedtime Reading Week

From the Guardian:

A competition to find a new star of children's fiction has been launched by the value bookseller The Works.
As part of the Bedtime Reading Week - a week of special events to promote reading to children at bedtime - they've teamed up with Walker Books to offer authors the chance to get their work published. 5,000 copies of the winning entry will be printed and sold up and down the UK.

Read the whole story here.

War and Peace... short and sweet?

From The Age:

SINCE its publication in 1869, Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace has presented the reader with the duel challenge of an eye-straining 1500 pages and an unerringly gloomy ending.
That, however, is now to change with the emergence of a slimmed down version of the literary classic with a happier conclusion.
HarperCollins, the publishing firm who will release the new book in April, describes the novel's brevity as "something to celebrate" while in Russia, the book is already being marketed as "half as long and twice as interesting" — despite the new book still running to a challenging 1000 pages.
By the time the original tale of love and loss set against the background of the Napoleonic wars reaches its conclusion, most of the 580 characters have died, suffered agonies or at least fallen on hard times.
But in the new book, taken from one of Tolstoy's earlier drafts, two of the main characters, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky and Petya Rostov, who die in the original, survive.
A spokesman for HarperCollins predicted it would have mass appeal. "The new version is of course aimed at students of Tolstoy," she said. "But we are sure it will also prove fascinating to the general reader."
Despite the publisher's upbeat assessment, literary critics and fans of the original are likely to be dismayed.

Read the whole article here.

Scrotum

Dear goodness, someone alert the police, a book used the word "scrotum!"
Of course, it's not just any book, it's a Newberry winner. On the first page of The Higher Power of Lucky, a girl overhears that a neighbor's dog has bitten on the scrotum by a rattlesnake.
Get over it, folks. Here's the Guardian to report on the ridiculous American librarians who are banning this book from their libraries for using a totally valid word that names a human body part in a way that isn't lewd or too graphic.

A Kiss Too Far?

I didn't watch the Super Bowl, but apparently there was a commercial where two guys kissed -- two mechanics were eating the same Snickers bar and kissed... and then they flipped out. The NY Times talks about this and public displays of affection by gay couples.

Can Creative Writing Be Taught?

From the "You asked..." section of the Guardian, the question is, Can creative writing be taught?

"If Poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not come at all." So wrote John Keats 189 years ago. Martin Amis's appointment as professor of creative writing - announced this week by Manchester University - would seem to embody the opposite view: that students can be taught to write.
The creative writing boom in the UK began in 1970 when Malcolm Bradbury and Angus Wilson set up an MA at the University of East Anglia. One of their first students was Ian McEwan. But even the UEA prospectus sounds a note of caution: "Writing successfully needs strong gifts, considerable resilience and a certain amount of luck."
The prospectus goes on to say that "the courses best suit those whose work is self-aware rather than instinctive" - which would seem to contradict Keats's view. In fact, it is tacitly acknowledging two important things: many an "instinctive" scribbler can't actually hack it, and what can be taught is not so much creativity as analysis and self-criticism - or as Amis, below, might put it, how to wage war on cliche.
AS Byatt says: "My instinct is that it can't be taught - but I think that Sylvia Plath would not have been a great poet if she hadn't studied very technically with Theodore Roethke and Robert Lowell." What such courses offer is time and space to write, the attention of an expert reader (the tutor) and contacts.
Observers of the north American scene, where the tradition of training writers is much stronger, might disagree, and eight years of longlisting for the Guardian first book award has taught me that there are an awful lot of very competent novels about logging pouring out of Canada. But how many competent novels about logging does the world want or need?
The boom is not so much about making great writers as about universities trying to attract students and make more money by appealing to young people with implausible dreams. Just watch them all queuing up for Manchester in a year's time.

Here's the link.

An Update on the Wikinovel...

It seems things are not going well.

A FEW weeks ago, my colleague The Bluffer drew your attention to A Million Penguins, Penguin's wiki-based online collaborative novel that can be written, altered and read by anyone. "Can a community write a novel? Let's find out," said Jeremy Ettinghausen, Penguin's digital publisher.
Well, having reached an astonishing 10 hits per second, the project has now metastasised into three different novels, as the "community" went Lord Of The Flies and split into separate factions. In a way, I'm unsurprised. If you advertise an arena to display the unedited scribblings of every wannabe with a broadband connection, you can't be too taken aback when it descends into an attention-seeking tug of war.
Although Penguin maintains that it's not a talent contest, it must realise that any slightly ajar door will soon be jam-packed with hopeful toes. It reminds me of the wonderful retort that the late Giles Gordon gave to an aspiring author who asked how to get published: "Write a good book."
Despite - as predicted by Penguin itself - descending into alphabetti spaghetti fairly quickly, A Million Penguins might have some afterlife as a curiosity. But at least it shows that publishers are taking the opportunities of the internet seriously, and not wringing their hands over the often heralded Death of the Book.

That's the whole bit of the article, but here's the link to the Scotsman for those interested.

Jacqueline Wilson

The Times talks about Jacqueline Wilson and what makes her empathisize so strongly with childhood agony?

Across the Universe

Thanks to Jadis for sending me this (yes, about two weeks ago... this is how behind I am on my updating...). A trailer for the new film Across the Universe which uses Beatles songs to craft a love story set against the backdrop of the turbulent 60s. Eddie Izzard makes an appearance; directed by Julie Taymor.

More on Auden

... in the Independent.

The Da Vinci Clones

From the NY Times:

Take a sacred treasure. Add a secret conspiracy. Attach a name well known to scholars — Dante, Poe, Wordsworth, Archimedes, Machiavelli, Shakespeare, the Romanovs, Vlad the Impaler, "Hypnerotomachia Poliphili," whatever — and work it into a story that can accommodate both the Glock and the Holy Grail. If there's any room left for the Knights Templar or DNA samples from Biblical figures, by all means plug them in.
Thanks, Dan Brown. Look what you started...

The NY Times talks about Dan Brown and the many cloned spin-offs that call themselves books.

Seduced by Austen

From the Independent:

It is a truth universally acknowledged that so long as there is a new generation of lovelorn teenagers to be seduced by a series of happy endings, the inevitable glamorisation, refashioning and repackaging of Jane Austen will roll on.
This year, however, will see an unprecedented scale of adaptations to detail the surging emotions suppressed beneath scores of empire-line dresses.
Sunday evenings may not be able to promise the vision of Colin Firth emerging from a lake but from the middle of next month they will offer new versions of Mansfield Park, Persuasion and Northanger Abbey featuring Billie Piper, Anthony Head and Jemma Redgrave.
Andrew Davies, who adapted the oft-recalled 1995 BBC series of Pride And Prejudice, is among the writers working on the season and ITV will also rerun his 1997 adaptation of Emma, which starred Kate Beckinsale and attracted 12 million viewers.
Then, within weeks, Anne Hathaway's portrayal of the early life of Austen, which documents the travails of Jane's own heart, will also be on screens across the world.
While some dedicated Austen fans may feel it has taken liberty with the scant facts available on Jane's romances and spun up a Hollywood fiction, the film is no doubt yet another avenue to satisfy the insatiable appetite for the early 19th-century author.
ITV yesterday unveiled its new Austen season in what many have interpreted as an attempt to boost somewhat disappointing ratings figures of last year. Coupled with that, it is also an apt way to compete with the BBC, which has won widespread acclaim with its adaptations of Dickens' Bleak House, also written by Davies.
With millions of pounds committed to putting the two-hour adaptations together, the ITV director of drama, Nick Elliott, said they were important remakes for the new generation, some of whom will only just be becoming Austen-literate.
"About every 10 years, all the great stories need retelling. These films will be very much 2007 films... we've asked and pushed the production team to make them young. Her stories always make great TV drama and our Jane Austen season will feature the absolute cream of British acting talent."
Northanger Abbey, the novel which was sold to a Bath bookseller for £10 in 1803, will again be adapted by Davies. The plot surrounds the life of 17-year-old Catherine Morland, who arrives at Northanger on the invitation of Henry Tilney who fascinates and intrigues her.
Mansfield Park, which has been more recently adapted for cinema audiences, follows Fanny Price, the poor relation who finds herself living among wealthy relatives and whose virtue is ultimately returned by her true love Edmund. The adaptation is to be worked on by Maggie Wadey.
Persuasion, which is being developed by Clerkenwell Films, is about the ordeals of Anne Elliot, who breaks off her engagement to Captain Wentworth after being persuaded by her family, but manages to find her way back into his heart.
When first unveiling ITV's plans, Mr Elliott said he had shied away from Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility and deliberately chosen to feature Austen's lesser known works including Northanger Abbey and Persuasion - both of which were published after her death.
But no matter which it were to be, those who choose to switch on to the Sunday evenings (and possibly those in management of ITV), will be assured of one thing: their own series of a proven formula for happy endings.

Yes, I'm aware that was the whole article. And what did I spend my senior year obsessing over? Here's the link to the article.

The Campus Novel: No Longer On Leave

The Guardian book blogs discuss the return of the campus novel.

Turner Watercolors

From the Guardian:

Last summer a record £5.8m was paid for a watercolour when Turner's The Blue Rigi was auctioned. Now a batch of 14 of his watercolours has come up for auction and are expected to make up to £15m, amid an exceptionally strong market for his watercolours.

Read the whole article here.

Rocking Against Global Warming

Al Gore is sending out an SOS to the world...

Al Gore, the former vice president and now hit documentary maker, on Thursday added rock promoter to his résumé, announcing plans for a 24-hour concert series on all seven continents to highlight, you guessed it, the dangers of global warming.
With a powerhouse lineup of acts from the Red Hot Chili Peppers to Snoop Dogg to Bon Jovi, what's being called "Live Earth" aims to gather more than 100 of the world's top musicians on July 7 — and attract 2 billion viewers, most of them via television, radio and the Web.
The concerts will be streamed live on MSN, Microsoft's information portal.

Read more on MSNBC here, visit the main website for LiveEarth.org here, or just go straight to the information on the concert.

Oh, and by the way, if you haven't signed it -- a petition asking Al Gore to please run for president in 2008.

NYC Brand Condoms

In 2005, New York started an Internet-based initiative to distribute free condoms throughout the city. Yesterday, the first New York City branded condoms made their debut.

Adolescent Girls Heart Ayn Rand

From In Character:

Few authors inspire the kind of life-changing devotion, blind hatred, or contemptuous dismissal so frequently achieved by Ayn Rand, the founder of “Objectivism” and author of the novels Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, the non-fiction book The Virtue of Selfishness, and nine others. Despite nearly unanimous critical disdain, her books became best-sellers; the combined sales of her work continue to top 500,000 copies every year – more than Philip Roth, way more than, say, Zora Neale Hurston. Objectivism, as dramatized in Rand’s novels and meticulously set out in her non-fiction, glorifies the self-reliant individual (as opposed to the collective), prizes rational thought, and dismisses organized religion of any sort. Politically, it bears some resemblance to libertarianism, though Rand herself dismissed members of that party as “hippies of the right” who “substitute anarchism for reason.” Next to her casket was a six-foot-tall floral arrangement in the shape of a dollar sign.
It’s easy enough to explain Rand’s appeal to those who adore capitalism, abhor government intervention, and prize individual liberty above all. But the particularly fascinating thing about Rand is that many young women, like Gottlieb, revere the book as teenagers and later come to loathe – or at least laugh at – the novels as adults. In the 2003 movie Lost In Translation, Charlotte, played by Scarlett Johansson, says that every girl goes through a “horse phase” and a “photography phase, where, you know, you take dumb pictures of your feet.” For a certain kind of American girl, the “Ayn Rand phase” is another rite of passage.

Read the whole article here.

How to Talk About Books that You've Never Read

Another article on the French author who's telling everyone how to talk about books they've never read.

How Not to Talk to Your Kids - The Inverse Power of Praise

There's been talk about the fact that anyone born after 1982 suffers from pathological narcissism... an interesting idea but how did we achieve that cut-off date? Here's the New Yorker on the power (and peril) of praising your kids.

A Flash of Flesh

Oh the hooplah over Daniel Radcliffe and Equus... Here, the Guardian asks how is it that on-stage nudity still has the power to shock.

Loaning Books

Does the question, "Say, can I borrow that book when you're done?" fill you with cold fear? Then you and this Guardian blogger might get along: his advice matches that of Polonious: "Neither a borrrower nor a lender be [when it comes to books]."