And My Book Wishlist for 2006 Begins...

In 2004 the hee-larious electorate of Orange County elected one Steve Rocco to their school board without apparently knowing anything about the guy. Anything and everything is what they got: scraggly and wearing a knit cap, Rocco has weirdly transfixed meetings with rambles about the death of John Lennon and a conspiracy to kidnap his own parents by county medical officials.

Throughout the year, Orange County Weekly's The Rocco Files has suggested that not only is Rocco a performance artist, but maybe the second coming of Andy Kaufman:

Rocco hints at his real identity in his website, andykaufmanlives.com. There, he claims Andy Kaufman "faked his own death" in what was obviously the most masterful stunt in a masterful career and went on to live in relative obscurity.... Immediately below that declaration of faith, Rocco provides readers with a fascinating Q&A—with himself. It’s a technique Rocco employed in Hey, Man, the self-produced, self-distributed pamphlet of self-interviews in which Rocco grills himself about his resolution of the Kodak/Albertsons/SmokeCraft Sausage conspiracy that led to his 1980 conviction for shoplifting several rolls of film and a sausage from a Santa Ana grocery store....

Q: Steve Rocco, do you have anything to do with the Andy-returns sites or press releases?

A: Absolutely not. I stand on the corner and stare at the sky. They walk up behind you and yell boo.

When the Weekly tried a phone number listed by Rocco, it proved to be for the unamused office of Kaufman's former manager. One reader theorized that "Steve Rocco is probably the same ex-pro skater Steve Rocco who was a fan of the "comically political" punk band the Dead Kennedys, and he’s just following in DK frontman Jello Biafra’s footsteps by getting involved in a little politics and monkey wrenching it."

It won't be his first outing. The Weekly also discovered a self-published 1992 book by Rocco, which "revealed that Albertsons Supermarket tried to murder him 20 years ago":

The alleged plot by the seemingly innocuous doubler of grocery coupons began in 1980, when police arrested Rocco at a Santa Ana Albertsons and booked him on shoplifting charges. It’s an incident Rocco detailed extensively—really, really, really extensively—in his 1992 book, ROCCO Behind the Orange Curtain: Secret Chronicles & Public Record Accounts of Corruption, Murder & Scandal of Corporate & Political California.

Sadly, Amazon is out of copies, and I can't find one on eBay or Bookfinder. But I'm already sold on it: I must find that book....

Direct From The Prestigious Internet

This week's issue of Stranger has a very entertaining pullout section dedicated to its Year in Corrections, ranging from "The Stranger regrets our multiple incorrect renderings of the band name Clap Your Hands Say Yeah this year" to the immortal "Stranger critic Charles Mudede regrets writing a positive review of Happy Endings in the July 14 issue, as Happy Endings was a bad movie. Have we mentioned Mr. Mudede drinks?"

Speaking of which, the corrections-o-rama site Regret The Error noticed a whopping one this week in the LA Times:

An article in Tuesday's Section A about tensions over the federal effort to reintroduce wolves into parts of the West wrongly attributed to Wyoming Gov. Dave Freudenthal a statement that Wyoming considered the Endangered Species Act no longer in force and "now considers the wolf as a federal dog." The statement, which was circulated on the Internet, was purportedly from Freudenthal but was in fact a hoax.

Yup: an internet hoax was the source of a front page quote...

Flowers Personified

I stumbled across this staggeringly beautiful 1847 edition of JJ Grandville minutes after it went up for auction tonight:




Those are hand-tinted plates in there.... A lot of them.

Incidentally, there's an interesting write-up about Grandville here, noting that "He is said to have been an influence on Dore, Hugo, Kafka, Tenniel (Alice in Wonderland), and Walt Disney."

The Whale and His Authors

I'm tentatively slated to appear this morning on NPR's Weekend Edition to talk about Herman Melville and good ol' Reverend Henry Cheever.

I was lucky enough to find myself a first edition copy of The Whale and His Captors. There's something strange about holding a book that you know to be the very same edition that Melville once pondered as he tackled his own great epic. It's a very curious work -- quite disjointed and with barely a narrative to speak of, really, but full of interesting tidbits. Something I didn't mention in my interview with Scott Simon is that a sizable chunk of The Whale and His Captors is a hobby horse about how upset Cheever gets over whaling on the Sabbath.

In one especially comic moment -- I'm sorry, in one especially terrible, terrible moment! -- he describes whalers gathered around at a Sunday service on deck, the reverend intoning solemnly from his portable lectern, when the call "Thar she blows!" sings out from a mast... whereupon every whaler completely hauls ass out of the service.

There Can Only Be One!

This week The Stranger anointed Marlon Brando's novel Fan-Tan as "The Best Worst Novel Ever Written." But wait! On Wednesday in the New York Sun, Otto Penzler claimed my author Harry Stephen Keeler as "The Worst Writer in the World":

Keeler is to good literature as rectal cancer is to good health. He makes the J.D. Robb novels seem as if they were written by Shakespeare. Given the choice of reading three Keeler novels back to back or being imprisoned in an Iranian jail, you'd need to think about it.

Funny story: at Penzler's own bookshop, a first edition Keeler is one of the most highly valued items in his entire catalogue -- worth 10 times any book that Penzler himself ever wrote.

I'm just saying.

Think Writing in German's Hard? Well...

Today's Tapei Times profiles Cay Marchal, a German who has cut out the translation middleman and written a book of essays in Chinese. Published by Aquarius Books in Taipei, A Guide to My Foreign Soul in Taiwan is now in its second printing:

In my book, I have written also about the problem of trying to write in Chinese," Marchal said. "There is an American writer in Japan named Ian Hideo Levy, and he is one of the few non-Japanese writers to write novels in Japanese directly by his own hand, without translations, so I guess he has gone through similar experiences as I have in trying to write in Chinese."

It's a small club. I suspect that most authors haven't the faintest idea what happens to their books in translation. Although some foreign publishers will consult with the author about wording etc. -- I've found Adelphi Edizioni in Italy to be admirably careful in translating my books -- with many foreign publishers, you get their check and you literally never hear from them again. It's a strange sensation, though I've gotten used to it. There's no proofing process for the author: the translation could say just about anything and you'll never be the wiser because, of course, you can't read the language. So Marchal is probably one of the relatively few Westerners with exact control over what his books in Chinese actually say.

Melville's Stablemate

Here's something you don't see every day. It's the closing hours of a first-edition Melville on eBay -- of Redburn, namely, the 1849 novel that preceded Moby-Dick. This copy reveals something interesting in its back page advertisement: namely, that at the same time that Redburn came out, there was another curious title being advertised as a fellow new release from the same publisher.

See if you can pick out the Rather Significant Clue here:





Yep: right as Melville was turning to what to write next, out came The Whale and His Captors by the Reverend Henry Cheever. It's an 1849 whaling adventure that also mixes in heaps of technical detail with maritime religious reflections. Sound familiar? Check it out for yourself -- they have the whole text online of Cheever's book here.

And we do know that Melville read it. How? Because he quotes Cheever in the opening of Moby Dick....

Dead Literature (Pt II)

There's a fascinating post over on Caleb Crain's blog about a new study of adult literacy. You might recall that last year I laughed, hooted, and jeered in the Village Voice at an NEA study which purported to show "Reading at Risk." And I still find it a laughable piece of work -- particularly given its shaky methodology and the grandstanding assertions made by NEA chair Dana Gioia, which of course the press duly and doltishly repeated.

But this new National Assessment of Adult Literacy by the U.S. Department of Education is worth paying attention to. For one thing, it relies on actual testing rather than deeply suspect self-reporting -- "Unlike indirect measures of literacy," the report notes on page 2, "which rely on self-reports of literacy skills or educational attainment, the assessment measures literacy by asking respondents to demonstrate that they understand the meaning of information found in the texts they are asked to read." For another thing, it measures actual demonstrable reading ability rather than a arbitrary valuing of certain genres. Frankly, I don't really care all that much if novel-reading is in decline: artistic genres are Protean, and so is the consumption of art. But I do care a great deal indeed if people can't understand the Bill of Rights.

Particularly when they occupy the Oval Office.

Anyway. The survey's results? -- mixed, but worth some concern. But because it doesn't have someone braying cultural apocalypse over it, don't expect this study to show up on the media's radar...

Dead Literature

This week's TLS has an interesting article on a new Times of London collection, Great Lives: A Century in Obituaries. Obituaries, as written in Britain, are a genuine literary genre, one whose subtleties have still largely evaded American obit writers. One of the great merits of a well-written British obituary is that you needn't know or care about the deceased or their profession: it is meant to stand on its own as a compelling piece of writing.

The TLS gives a fascinating glimpse into the origins of the genre:

In Britain, it seems to have been the Gentleman's Magazine which first developed the genre, particularly under the Editorship of John Nichols in the last two decades of the eighteenth century. Thereafter, other publishers tried to launch regular collections of obituaries. The Annual Necrology published one volume for 1797-8, then stopped. The Annual Biography and Obituary ran for ten years between 1817 and 1826. It offered brief biographies of the moderately famous and long entries for "Celebrated Persons" (Napoleon got 220 pages). Another short-lived venture, Charles R. Dodd's The Annual Biography, resulted in only one volume, covering deaths for 1842. It too combined long memoirs of "Distinguished or Remarkable Persons" with short notes on "Persons of Less Importance."

Ah, the British.

Curiously enough, after I coined the word "necrologue" for an article on posthumous travelogues in this month's Believer, I discovered the OED word had a brief existence a couple centuries ago as an early term for "obituary." This would have been right around when the genre was being invented; I suppose the word for it hadn't even been nailed down just yet.

There is at least one worthy US addition to the genre: Thomas McG Thomas's 52 McGs. And the TLS article doesn't mention the immensely satisfying obituary collections issued over the years by the Daily Telegraph: it probably goes without saying that my favorite volume is Volume 1: Eccentrics...

Monkeys! Monkeys! Monkeys!

You all know how I love bizarre Victorian children's books about monkeys, so I could hardly pass up mentioning this discovery:



Speaking of weird old stuff, I see on eBay that's there's also a copy of a good old-fashioned harangue against the waltz:

Why Libraries Don't Sell Slurpees

Turns out Salt Lake City isn't the only place where book theft concerns are brewing. In Kentucky, the Lexington Herald-Leader reports that librarians are asking police to throw the book -- sorry, it couldn't be helped -- at four guys who held up a library last year:

Over the past year, dozens of librarians and curators from across Kentucky have fired off letters to U.S. District Court Judge Jennifer Coffman in Lexington, urging her not to go easy on four defendants who stole rare manuscripts and sketches from the Transylvania University special collections library in December 2004..... What shocked librarians about the Transylvania theft was the physical assault on special collections librarian B.J. Gooch, who was incapacitated with a stun gun and then tied up.... The Transylvania case "combined the most frightening elements of blue-collar crime with white-collar library crime," said Miles Harvey, an author of a book about a famous map thief. "It was a like a 7-11 knock-off with armed assailants while taking cultural artifacts."

Curiously, the one thing the article doesn't mention is just what exactly got stolen. An AP account earlier this year reveals one of the key items: a manuscript of Darwin's Origin of Species. Apparently, though, the robbers did not have a keen sense of irony. The AP account also notes that "the men used color-coded nicknames -- "Mr. Black," "Mr. Green," "Mr. Pink" and "Mr. Yellow" -- inspired by the 1992 movie Reservoir Dogs."

"The film" the AP reporter helpfully adds, "was about a botched robbery."

Umm... Book 'Em?

Much hubbub in Salt Lake City today over a major book theft. Today's Salt Lake Tribune reports:

A thief entered the LDS Salt Lake City University Institute of Religion between Oct. 24 and Nov. 8 and removed a safe from a secretary's office that is normally locked outside business hours. When the heist was over, an 1840 edition of the Book of Mormon printed in Nauvoo, Ill., and an 1841 edition printed in Liverpool, England, were gone. By the end of last week, University of Utah police were following up on a lead, and evidence collected at the scene was still being processed. So far, however, the stolen books, worth a combined $60,000, have yet to surface - at least not publicly. And it could take years, perhaps even decades before they show up again in the public marketplace, those familiar with rare-book theft say.

Hmm. An entire safe stolen "between October 24th and November 8th"? Isn't that a rather large window of opportunity? -- a veritable French door of opportunity, you might say?

Interestingly, since prominent antiquarian dealer Ken Sanders happens to be in Salt Lake City, the newspaper goes on to reveal that book crimes are apparently way, way up lately:

Sanders, past chairman of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America's Security Committee, says book theft and fraud are on the rise across the country and in Utah. When he began his tenure as chairman six years ago, he issued a couple of dozen book-theft and fraud alerts each year. In April, when he stepped down, he was issuing more than 100 alerts a year. Sanders, whose bookstore has also been targeted by thieves, attributed the rise to general public awareness of the value of antiquarian items due to the Internet and TV programs, like "Antiques Roadshow."

Of course, sometimes the Roadshow dealers themselves can't keep from giving in to temptation...

Lobster Boy Meets Girl

Today's Daily Telegraph has a splendid round-up of the year in nutty books, including such titles as How To Stage a Military Coup and Dirty Fan Male: A Life in Rude Letters. Most intriguing is Guillaime Lecasble's novel Lobster:

A fable of crustacean love. Our hero is a lobster aboard the Titanic. From his tank, he watches his father being eaten by a pretty girl. Then the boat founders and Lobster escapes. Aboard the sinking ship, Angelina, the girl who ate his dad, knows a brief but shattering moment of physical love with Lobster. Then they are separated. They pine for each other. Angelina tries having sex with another lobster, with disastrous results. Death smells of bay leaves.

Say, shelve this alongside Lemon and Butter, and you got yourself a meal! A dirty, dirty meal.

Um, Will This Be On The Final Exam?

It's not just for Pakistani textbooks anymore: over in TLS, Adele Davidson has discovered vertical acrostic messages hidden within the poetry of George Herbert:

"Divinity" contains an acrostic including the letters JWCABAL, the word “cabal” suggesting the Jewish cabal, or secret religious wisdom.... "The Rose", averring “repentance is a purge”, mentions the flower’s properties as a purgative: the acrostic includes the word PISS.... “Faith”, with the acrostic TAIIWTIATAWFNWATIIWVFW, contains the phrase "I wait, wait, wait, wait."

"His poem 'Misery'", she adds, "concludes, "HAA HAA."

Whatsit of the Week

If this item hadn't gone for a head-spinning $130 on eBay, I'd have been all over this: a November 1 1897 issue of The Casket, a trade newspaper for morticians. Among ads for the "Detroit Funeral Couch" and ad slogans like "No One Likes To Ride In a Poor Hearse" -- does anyone even like to ride in nice one? -- the ads for embalming fluids are priceless. There's Peruvian Embalming Fluid, Perfectum Embalming Fluid, and of course Shaw Bleaching and Embalming Fluid Powder, which bears the rather unwise motto "Make Your Own Fluid."

My own personal favorite product name: Mummaline.

Harry's Here!

Keeler's Riddle of the Traveling Skull is finally out in general release -- you can get it at McSweeney's, Amazon and Powell's -- just in time to gift wrap it for your favorite readers of demented literature. Over on his blog Neil Gaiman very kindly dubbed it "undoubtedly the best-looking edition of anything by Keeler ever published," and notes:

It may start a major Harry Stephen Keeler revival, but probably it won't. (Mostly, I think, because you need to have a certain mindset to find Keeler anything other than unreadable. I think he's worth it, but I know that most people won't -- it's not like a bad film, where you watch it to laugh at it; in Keeler's case it's not so bad it's good -- it's actually good, it just shouldn't be.)

He's right. The first time you read Keeler, you either want to track down all his books or you want to throw him clear across the room. There doesn't seem to be much middle ground. To get a sense of just who this strange Keeler fellow is, check out my NPR interview or the inevitable Wikipedia entry that I just discovered this morning....

Very, Very Tiny Luggage Labels

Sarah's Books in Bangor, Maine, sends word that they have just started up a book blog, and they already have a fascinating item up about bookseller labels in old books -- as Sarah calls them, "the luggage labels of the book trade":



Note, by the way, that one of these is for Madge Jenison's old Manhattan bookshop Sunwise Turn -- the store immortalized in her 1923 bookselling memoir of the same name, and which also makes a couple cameo appearances in Sixpence House.

I've seen these labels on the inside covers of old books starting around the mid-1800s, and finally disappearing around the 1940s or 50s. Here's a question: why did they come about, and why did they go away? If anyone knows, I'm very curious to find out.

John Locke Eats a Pineapple

This week's TLS has an interesting review of Fran Beauman's history Pineapple: King of Fruits. For those of you who have ever noticed the rather comical appearance of pineapple motifs in Georgian decoration, well, wonder no more:

In his “Essay Concerning Human Understanding”, John Locke asserts the impossibility of knowing the taste of pineapple before you have actually tasted it. This is not just a throwaway remark; he returns to the point in several drafts and in several places. In 1671, Locke wrote that the man who has never had pineapple, that “delicate” fruit, “in his mouth” cannot have a true or “new” idea of it. He can only have an amalgam of “old” ideas based on the descriptions of travellers. Later, he wrote that “we see nobody gets the relish of a pineapple, till he goes to the Indies, where it is, and tastes it”. To think that you could relish a pineapple without really experiencing it was like imagining you could see colours in the dark... [it] was the ultimate in inaccessible luxury fruit. Unless you were close to royalty, or a traveller to the West Indies, you were very unlikely to have been anywhere near one.

The aristocratic practice of raising them in hothouses did not exactly drive down prices, either:

The expense of a single English-raised pineapple in the second half of the eighteenth century was about £80, or £5,000 in today’s money. No wonder a single pineapple was often “made to last for some time, passed on from party to party until it began to rot so much it smelt out the whole household”. By Victorian times, one horticulturalist claimed he had heard of a “single pineapple going the round of west-end dinner parties for some weeks”. Beauman does not mention a similar assertion which I have come across elsewhere, that poorer middle-class families would even take to hiring pineapples for occasions when they wished to entertain, in order to appear grand, praying that no one would actually attempt to cut a slice.

Doesn't look like Chatto and Windus is serious about distributing the book the US, but you can find it on sale over at Amazon UK....

Dept. of Scary Old Bibles

I'm a sucker for weird bindings, and eBay always has a few around. I just came across this decidely 3-D Victorian Gothic binding dating from 1848:


Not to be outdone, here's a book of "numerous plates of trees, forests and wooden art objects," published in Leningrad in 1966, bound in cloth-covered planks of wood. Because, really, why bother making paper when you can just skip a step and go straight to a piece of wood?

Map Delivery

A wonderful Guardian piece on the pleasures of old maps -- I find these and ancient tourist guidebooks incredibly useful as a tool in creating historical travelogues -- includes this charming anecdote by Paul Hamilos:

I once ordered a copy of Charles Booth's 1889 Descriptive Map of London Poverty from the London Topographical Society. Weeks, then months, passed, and I heard nothing. I may even have forgotten that I had ordered it. Then, early one Sunday morning, I was woken up by the sound of the doorbell. An elderly gentleman in a deerstalker hat with a tube under his arm asked my name, confirmed that I was the intended recipient of Booth's map, handed it to me, and was off. If only all purchases were made like that.

That map, by the way, is still available from the London Topographical Society. Here's a detail from it:



No prizes for guessing what the color red indicated....

The Illustrator's Tale

The State Library in Victoria is exhibiting more of its rare books, reports the Age of Melbourne. That's nice, but the article is worth it alone for this incredible William Morris design from an 1896 edition of The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer:

Dumping on Literature

After all the fuss in British media last week about the Office of Fair Trading's upcoming decision over the Waterstone's and Ottakar's merger... silence. What's going on? Turns out the decision, due on Friday, has been put off for a week -- something that Forbes was one of the few outlets to even report on.

In the meantime, though, today's Daily Telegraph reports that a ruinous price-cutting war is being waged by the chains:

Virtually every Christmas hardback is now available at 50 per cent off, from the cricketer Freddie Flintoff's autobiography to Jamie Oliver's Italian cookbook. W H Smith also has additional "10 per cent off everything" days. Waterstone's set a new benchmark this week, selling Gloria Hunniford's Next to You about her daughter Caron Keating for only £6.99, a discount of £11 on the cover price.

Nigel Jones, of the market town chain Ottakar's, said: "I am staggered at the extent of the discounting. It is more than just price-slashing, it is carnage."...

The latest books war has broken out a decade after the collapse of the Net Book Agreement, which barred discounting to protect publishing diversity.... Smaller chains and independents are feeling the pressure. Many blame publishers for offering trading discounts of as much as 75 per cent to the large retailers. When Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince was discounted by up to 70 per cent in July, the MP Lynne Jones tabled an early day motion urging publishers not to deal on terms that enabled "extreme discounts". But publishers say that they risk being forced out of shops if they fail to agree deals.

To be fair, it should be pointed out that chains have long had a large presence in Britain: indies already had their clocks cleaned out by WH Smith back in the Victorian era. Even so, for almost the entire 20th century -- hard to believe, but true -- book discounts were regulated. Not so since the death of the Net Book Agreement. And with new books being sold at 75% off -- below wholesale -- well, I guess you could call that a loss-leader. But in other contexts there's another word for systematically selling at a loss to drive out your competitors: it's called dumping.

Hey, Tukku Tuutussa To You Too...

British papers, like their American counterparts, have spent the last week disappearing up their own posteriors with end-of-the-year lists. (Incidentally, has anyone pointed out that end-of-the-year lists are an easy way for papers to run allegedly bookish content without actually having to pay for reviewers? Just wondering.)

In the spirit of contrariness, I hereby elect the one book that I am certain will not be on anyone else's year-end list: Singing in Finnish. The aim of this book," reports Anni Haataja in the Finnish online magazine 6 Degrees, "Is to teach Non-Finns to pronounce Finnish well enough to be able to sing Finnish."

Still, it might be a little confusing:

For example, the literal translation of the lyrics ‘pai, pai paitaressu, tukku tuutussa tupukka’ goes ‘swad- swad- swaddled-baby, bundle in-cradle precious-one’ and the more understandable literary translation is ‘bye, bye, my sweet swaddled baby, rocking in the basket’,” explains [author] Holman.

Hey, wouldn't it be funny if this guy was just making stuff up for foreigners and claiming it was Finnish? And everyone in Finland was playing along?

Big Pack Attack

It's make or break time for British booksellers. The Waterstone's and Ottakar's merger -- the fears over which have been previously discussed here and here on this blog -- is going before the UK's Office of Fair Trading.

Today's Observer reports that "this week could be decisive for the future of the book trade":

Scott Pack is already seen by many as the most powerful man in the books trade. As head buyer for Waterstone's, he decides which books the country's largest chain will stock and promote. His decisions can make or break an author's career. On Friday, his influence is set to extend yet further. The Office of Fair Trading is due to decide whether to refer Waterstone's planned takeover of Ottakar's bookshops to the Competition Commission. If the £96.4 million deal is given the go-ahead, Waterstone's parent company, HMV, will control at least 23.6 per cent of the British book trade.

Leading publishers and authors are making a last-ditch attempt this weekend to head off the deal, which some fear will mean too much power being concentrated in the hands of Pack and Alan Giles, chief executive of HMV. 'Scott Pack is believed to be pretty much all-powerful in deciding which books are promoted,' said Mark Le Fanu, general secretary of the Royal Society of Authors. 'His decisions are then rolled out through the country. Publishers are in thrall to him, and authors' careers are dependent on his decisions.'

The biographer Michael Holroyd is one of the writers who have come out against the merger. 'Waterstone's choose about 5,000 books a year and promote them so that they sell tremendously - at the expense of other books,' he said. 'If a book isn't taken up within a month, it is replaced. Ottakar's, on the other hand, gives books more time to take off. There are two categories of books - the tortoises and the hares. If this deal goes ahead, we will end up with all hares and no tortoises. Books that could become classics in 20 years' time are being threatened.'

It's a story that gets curioser and curioser when you see in the Independent a few weeks ago a report that "The OFT has been furnished with all manner of evidence on Waterstone's market position - including, it is rumoured, a tape of controversial chief buyer Scott Pack talking to a publisher."

Toys In The Attic

Lately my son has taken to bolting up to the attic the moment I turn my back; when I trudge up there after him, I find him already galloping back down the steps, humming happily as he carries off some curio randomly grabbed from one of the boxes. It's his equivalent of hitting the flea markets.

Today's attic find: a 60th anniversary pack of playing cards issued by Penguin in 1995.




It's a lovely little deck -- anything designed after old Penguin paperback would be -- and each of the 52 cards features a different old cover from the 1930s and 40s. I actually remember where I bought the deck: on Canongate in Edinburgh, at R Somerville, an store dedicated entirely to rare and unusual playing cards. Sadly, after 18 years there, Somerville recently packed up and moved to France.

But for the card pictured above, at least, there's a happy ending. Aside from being a great title, I remembered Nick Hornby talking up Hangover Square in his Believer column a year ago. And guess what? Hangover Square is coming back in a new edition by Europa Books next month....

Best Book Review Headline of 2005

...goes hands-down to The Stranger and its new review of Anne Rice's latest.

Transcendentalism 4 Sale -- Cheap!

It's not often you can get a original piece of Transcendentalist art for the price of a used Hyundai, but here's someone selling a Christopher Cranch landscape for $6500:




Given that Poe once lauded Cranch as, ahem, "the least objectionable of the Boston group," I'd recommend that the NY Public Library buy it -- if only it wasn't so busy deaccessioning its 19th century art...

Blame Her For Mushy Peas...

The oldest known cookbook in the English language has turned up in Derbyshire, reports the BBC:

Her Cookery Book, written in 1742 by Mary Swanwick, includes a range of unknown dishes such as squichanary pye and Stoughtons drops. The book, which also includes instructions for stewed calf's head, was donated to the Derbyshire Record Office by an anonymous Stockport man.

Archivists are still trying to decipher much of its faded handwriting. Staff at the records office said they had an older recipe book, though nowhere near as comprehensive as Mary Swanwick's, which features about 100 dishes. Among the ingredients needed for squichanary pye are a type of parsnip not commonly available now, spices, candied oranges and lemon and white wine.

There's no links up for it yet, but plans have been announced for the book to be reprinted in 2006....

A Heck of a Job, Brownie

Sir Thomas Browne's 1658 work Urne Buriall was one of the closest models for The Trouble With Tom, and the source of the book's opening epigraph: "Who knows the fate of his bones, or how often he is to be buried? Who hath the oracle of his ashes, or whither they are to be scattered?”

Until now, though, you couldn't find a cheap copy of it. But today's Guardian carries word that Penguin has released a splendid little £3.99 edition. Nicholas Lezard explains:

Urne-Burial was conceived in response to the archaeological discoveries that helped to inaugurate a new era of antiquarianism in England, and begins as a meditation on the burial practices of the ancients. As Browne points out, "men have lost their reason in nothing so much as their religion ... the religion of one seems madnesse unto another".... you'll soon find that, like Hamlet, it is full of quotes. "A Dialogue between two Infants in the womb concerning the state of this world, might handsomely illustrate our ignorance of the next"; "the long habit of living indisposeth us for dying"... Browne is a miniaturist, an elegant raiser of ideas and a provoker of ideas in others: it was in a long note made in his copy by Coleridge that the very word "marginalia" was invented.

Buy this one and shelve it right next to Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. You'll have to get it off Amazon UK, though: there's still no US edition. (What gives, Penguin?)

Ben Who?

Last month U Penn Press released volumes one and two of JA Leo Lemay's ginormous 7 volume biography of Benjamin Franklin, the work that basically his entire scholarly life has been leading up to. It has been received, so far, to virtually zero press coverage.

That silence is the sound of critics quietly leafing through the volumes and taking notes for upcoming reviews.... right?

Free Parking at Barnes & Noble!

Oops...

Stubble Hearts Banksy

One of my favorite recent book purchases was from Quimby's a couple weeks ago: it's Cut It Out, a collection of public stencilworks by guerilla artist Banksy. You may recall the recent Times piece on his practice of sneaking his own parodic artworks onto the walls of the Met. Banksy's own website includes this fine clipping from the Telegraph:



A lot of Cut It Out is equally cheeky or provoking, but some of it is unexpectedly moving or just flat-out inspired. And at $11, it's just about the best deal going in clever art books...

Le Censeur, C'est Moi.

A pretty shocking publishing item from France has barely any media traction yet, but it really should. Yesterday's International Herald Tribune reports:

A glamorous Frenchwoman who divides her time between New York and Paris, upset about a forthcoming biography, has asked that her estranged husband intervene and convince the publisher to cancel the book's release. This could be an item for a society column if the name of the woman were not Cécilia Sarkozy, whose husband, Nicolas, is the interior minister of France.

According to an account published Friday in Le Parisien, a French daily, Sarkozy summoned the publisher, Vincent Barbare of Editions First, to his ministry office on Nov. 9, at the height of the rioting that engulfed France this month. The following day, Le Parisien said, the publisher called the author of the book, "Cécilia Sarkozy: Between Heart and Reason" and told her it would not be released.

Asked about the report, Nicolas Sarkozy's spokesman, Frank Louvrier, would neither confirm nor deny that the meeting took place. "We won't be making any comments on this," Louvrier said. "We have more important subjects to deal with - terrorism, the recent urban violence, et cetera."

A spokeswoman for Editions First also declined to comment on the reported meeting but said the release of the book, which had been scheduled for Thursday, had been "deferred" and that no new release date had been set.

How "deferred"? A report inside the Guardian yesterday says that "According to some reports, he had the first 25,000 copies pulped and the text deleted from the firm's computers." That's bad enough, but even worse when you see the IHT's reminder of just who Sarkozy is:

The suppression of the book, if confirmed, would inevitably raise questions about Sarkozy's use of his office. He is a leading contender to succeed President Jacques Chirac in 2007 and one of the most popular politicians in the country.....

Uh-oh.

Alas, There Are No Limericks

The Times of London covers the recent Selected Works of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (1647 - 1680), who traditionally holds the laurel of being the most obscene poet ever.

How obscene? Let's sit down and get comfortable, shall we?

Much wine had passed, with grave discourse
Of who f- - -s who, and who does worse
(Such as you usually do hear
From those that diet at the Bear),
When I, who still take care to see
Drunkenness relieved by lechery,
Went out into St James’s Park
To cool my head and fire my heart.
But though St James has th’ honor on ’t,
‘Tis consecrate to prick and c- -t.
There, by a most incestuous birth,
Strange woods spring from the teeming earth;
For they relate how heretofore,
When ancient Pict began to whore,
Deluded of his assignation
(Jilting, it seems, was then in fashion),
Poor pensive lover, in this place
Would frig upon his mother’s face;
Whence rows of mandrakes tall did rise
Whose lewd tops f- - - -d the very skies.

Why doesn't Garrison Keillor ever read this guy? Sheesh.

Scrabble: The Anti-Drug

Nicholas Blincoe in today's Telegraph relates an amusing tale of Graham Greene:

The playwright Michael Meyer travelled around the world with Greene in the 1950s. Greene had promised opium-smoking and other tropical decadences, so Meyer was disappointed to find that Greene had packed a portable Scrabble board. The nightly Scrabble games almost ruined their friendship. The problem, according to Meyer, was that Greene's spelling was "deeply dubious", and the pair did not have a dictionary. During a stay in Tahiti, Greene produced the words "zeb", which he claimed was an Elizabethan word for "cock", and "quoign" which he insisted was Shakespearean, quoting: "Yon castle's quoign that Duncan's spirit haunts."

Meyer thought the line was as dubious as Greene's spelling and, in the sultry Tahitian nights, tempers frayed. The pair were still arguing when they reached San Francisco, months later. They ran straight from the ship to a second-hand book store and found a dictionary. The word was in, spelled "quoin", which satisfied Greene, though as Meyer pointed out, "quoin" would not have landed on a triple letter score.

Speaking of such things, while in Seattle I ran into Vinnie Wilhelm, a recent grad of the Writers' Workshop and one of my old Scrabble sparring partners. Vinnie's mulling a book idea that you will certainly be reading between hardcovers in a couple years or so -- it's pretty great -- but in the mean time, you'll just have to settle for his recent interview with Daniel Alarcon:

Vinnie: I'd like to begin with oral sex. In "City of Clowns," the second story in your collection, you provide one of the most compelling instances in recent literature of a man performing cunnilingus on a woman who is wearing stilts. I think we'd all love to hear whatever you feel comfortable sharing about the genesis of this scene.

Daniel Alarcón: In Lima I briefly dated a girl who owned a pair of stilts. I can't really say much more about it, except to add that I write fiction and have an active imagination.

Please, Mister, Buy This Book?

After giving a reading in Boston on Thursday night at the Brookline Booksmith, I perused the children's book section for a while, buying for my toddler an utterly charming board book edition of Ruth Bornstein's 1976 tale Little Gorilla. But there was another book back there that startled me with its power: Seonna Hong's newly released Animus, a moving picture book about a girl spooked by a mean dog in her neighborhood.

I'm not sure I'd really call Animus a children's book -- if it is, then you have one spooky kid. But it's one of the most elegantly realized moving picture books I've ever seen: if you care about books as beautiful objects, then this is surely one to get. You can see its artwork from this Hong exhibition last year in Manhattan's Gallery 5BE, and Hong's home page is here.

Poe Conks Out

Just back from another week on the road, and while in NYC I was lucky enough to examine some splendid stuff in the Park Ave. bookshop of James Cummins. One scandalously entertaining item: a first edition embodiment of Edgar Allan Poe's plagiarism. And no, it's not a book of Gothic tales or poetry. It's a book on... um, seashells.

Here's the description from item #74 of the latest Cummins catalogue:

POE, Edgar Allan. The Conchologist's First Book: A System of Testaceous Malacology arranged expressly for the use of Schools.... Philadelphia: Published for the Author by Haswell, Barrington and Haswell [1839]....

Poe was hired by the publishers to produce an American version of Captain Thomas Brown's The Conchologist's Text-Book, a popular English textbook and standard in that field. Poe's The Conchlogist's First Book is mostly taken fropm Brown's text, without any credit. A charge of plagiarism was set against Poe. This was the only American publication of Poe's which went into a second edition during his lifetime.

The price? 1,750 clams.... (ahem)....

And Not Once Do I Roll The Letter "R"

I get interviewed on Italian radio.

It's around minute 7:00 of the show -- and can you guess whether I'd just woken up?

Oh yes you can....

Ghost Signs

Yesterday's Times had a wonderful article on fading painted signs. If you've ever lived in a city, you know the sort:




Surprisingly, these old signs are not covered under any preservation laws:

The city's Landmarks Preservation Commission, however, has decided that it will not protect what it calls "ghost signs," according to Diane Jackier, a spokeswoman. "The commission protects architectural features and the commission does not consider the painted signs a significant feature," she said. No one has applied for a landmark designation for a painted sign in years, Ms. Jackier said.

Signs that are threadbare but still visible recall workhorse department stores like Gimbels and Hearns and men's clothing shops like Rogers Peet. They evoke a time when apartment buildings like the Warwick Arms at 101 West 80th Street trumpeted ULTRA MODERN APARTMENTS with GLASS SHOWER ENCLOSURES and when bowling alleys like McLEAN BOWL-O-DROME, which opened in 1942 along the Yonkers border, lured customers by boasting of air-conditioning.

Occasionally development actually serves to preserve these signs by walling them off: when I was living in San Francisco, I remembering seeing one large storefront torn away during a renovation to reveal an ancient painted sign underneath for -- oddly enough -- Coney Island Hot Dogs.

Someone should compile a book of these signs. Has someone compiled a book?...

Pat Boone Recommends The Moderate Course

Some fine strange old books were brought out for Tuesday's literary revival at Quimby's in Chicago. After I kicked things off with a selection from one of my favorite self-published memoirs, Looney Tombs: Confessions of a Small-Town Funeral Director's Son by David Goulet, Claire Zulkey shared a turn of the century muckraker about Chicago's trade in "white slavery" (i.e. naughty, naughty prostitution), and Elizabeth Crane read from Jerome K Jerome's 1889 collection Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow. Jerome, as it happens, is just about my favorite writer ever -- his narrative voice in Three Men in A Boat really influenced my own for Sixpence House.

But I don't think any of us could quite top this: Nathan Rabin of The Onion bringing in Pat Boone's 1958 teen advice bestseller Twixt Twelve and Twenty, which was the number 1 bestseller in nonfiction for 1959. (Some context: this was just after On The Road came out. If I may hazard a guess, I would say the audience crossover between those two books was precisely... zero.)

Rabin interviewed Boone for The Onion a couple years ago, and so what better guide to lead us through passages like:

Now that I'm the father of four little girls I could wish that there were less kissing and more scrabble and parchesi. Do you know why?

Not for the usual negative reasons, although I go along with those. We all know that indiscriminate kissing, dancing in the dark, hanging around in cars, late dates at this early stage can lead to trouble. And that you miss a lot of fun with the nicer play-by-the-rules crowd. There is absolutely no need to rush clumsily into things that will have such beautiful meaning later on.

But I recommend the moderate course for another very positive reason. Kissing is not a game. Believe me! It means a lot more than just a pleasant pastime, a forfeit, or a test of popularity. I can tell you for sure that if you get to thinking of it that way, you're dead wrong. A kiss is a beautiful expression of love ~ real love. Not only that, it is a powerful stimulus of emotion. Kissing for fun is like playing with a beautiful candle in a roomful of dynamite! And it's like any other beautiful thing ~ when it ceases to be rare, it loses its value and much of its beauty. I really think it's better to amuse ourselves in some other way. For your own future enjoyment I say go bowling, or to a basketball game, or watch a good TV program (like the Pat Boone Chevy show!), at least for a while.

Sure, go and ahead and laugh, but... um... actually, yeah, just go ahead and laugh.

Magical Histamine Tour

Despite touring with a head cold, I managed to enunciate to a more or less comprehensible degree in this radio interview about The Trouble With Tom last week on Seattle's NPR station KUOW...

Ramona the Homeowner

Get out a very small ice-cream bowl, because Weekend Stubble has a little scoop for you. While searching through some Portland property listings -- no, do not read too much into that -- Mrs. WS noticed that Beverly Cleary's old house is up for sale.

Behold!



Doesn't look like the press has picked this item up yet, as the info is buried within the agent's flyer for the house. The bigger surprise is that at $319,000 the place is actually pretty cheap for the neighborhood it's in. I guess literary history doesn't add as much value to a house as granite countertops....

Trashcan Full of Books

Among the Guardian's brief book reviews is one you can almost hear the pitch for -- in fact, my guess is that the title alone sold it: 101 Illnesses You Don't Want to Get.

Oh, just imagine the editor at Cassell rubbing his hands in glee when he heard that one.

You know who should partner to publish it in the US? The Discovery Health Channel. It'll go along nicely with such family classics as 160 Pound Tumor (a show invariably followed by another titled 200 Pound Tumor) and Trashcan Full of Skin.

Düh...

Hey, New Yorker: what's with the umlauts?

What kind of idiot puts an umlaut in "reënact"? That should have been my reaction when I found the word in a New Yorker film review, but, because the New Yorker is famously tough on spelling, I began to doubt myself, even to wonder what kind of idiot doesn't know that "reënact" requires an umlaut?...

Oddly, none of my dictionaries has the word at all, which suggests it does not exist. So why do I know what it means?

My computer's spell-check allows "re-enact", so I am advocating that. My decision is final. I have no idea why the New Yorker prefers "reënact" - but I suspect that they are Motörhead fans.

Hmm. No sleep 'til Park Slope?

The Vanishing Child

I have a piece in the Lives column of today's NY Times magazine about our decision to put Morgan on Prozac. It was probably the most physically draining writing experience of my life. Revisiting the experience of my son was slipping from my grasp was not easy; even harder was trying to crunch any meaningful thought about it into 900 words, and then into ever-fewer words as a new layout dictated shortened copy.

One of my main initial ideas was largely lost, as a result -- it became more of a personal essay and less of a pointedly historical one about why we distrust the decision to medicate children. For what it's worth, I hope the piece still helps other parents who find themselves at the same crossroads. But here are how two of the snipped-out paragraphs ran:

We raise our eyebrows at today's glossy pharmaceutical ads, and drug product placement on emblazoned mugs and pens, but it's nothing new. Barker's Nerve and Bone Liniment published branded comic books and cookbooks; Beecham's Pills issued tourist picture books; Hamlin's Wizard Oil printed sheet music; the Kickapoo Indian Medicine Company put on traveling entertainments. And patent medicine advertising didn't just support newspapers: sometimes it made them. The Gannett media chain began with the 1866 periodical Comfort –published primarily to promote Oxien, William Gannett's "Up-to date Pills for Present-day ills."

We laugh now, of course. But if today's drug reps are little different from their Victorian forefathers, a century of scandal-induced drug laws have created laboratories that actually practice some science. Pharmaceutical companies used to be hucksters of snake-oil: now they are hucksters of medicine.

As Marcia Angell and others have abundantly demonstrated of Big Pharma, their conduct and their medicines still fall far short... but they are also clearly an improvement on the past. I do not doubt that in an earlier era, had Morgan continued spinning out of control, we would have been obliged to institutionalize him simply to insure the safety of his baby brother. Morgan is a very powerfully built child -- he's always been in the top percentile of growth charts -- and his tantrums were becoming physically dangerous. One stray fist or foot at a five-month old baby, and... well, I do not care to imagine the result.

I believe this medicine gave me my son back.

The fact that drug companies engage in disgraceful machinations should not cause us to automatically conflate their bad behavior with a bad product. And the medication of children has become a convenient punching bag for lazy cultural commentators. It's an essentially distrustful and elitist stance: the presumption is that doctors don't know what they're doing and parents don't care enough. In my experience, neither is generally true, and the decision to medicate is not undertaken lightly.

Anyway. If it gets letters, I suspect it may be criticism for all the wrong reasons. I don't care, really: it's easy for letter writers to be blithe about other people's decisions. They weren't there and I was. Medication demands that you ask yourself whether you trust doctors, the drug industry, or indeed your own judgment. None of those are yes or no questions. But there are times -- when your child is before you, suffering -- that demand a yes or no answer.

Your Art Criticism Makes Baby Jesus Cry

An amazing discovery by Nathan Rabin over at The Onion -- Nathan will, by the way, be joining me for a splendiferous McSweeney's event at Quimby's this coming Tuesday night.

So: it seems that Yakov Smirnoff... yes, that guy... is also a painter:

As a painter, Smirnoff has approximately four themes. They are, in order:

1. God bless America.
2. After September 11th Lady Libery cried and the bald eagle soared and the flag waved majestically and Uncle Sam put his foot in terrorists' asses
3. Children are the future
4. Jesus loves America and children and hates the terrorists and joined Lady Liberty in weeping after September 11th.

A full listing of Smirnoff's paintings can be found here:

http://yakov.com/giftshop/paintings/default.asp

My personal favorite is one of two paintings of Jesus laughing. Though they're both masterpieces of unintentional uber-kitsh I prefer the first one, since it makes Jesus look like Maurice Gibbs of the Bee Gees in the midst of a three-day Ecstasy binge.

Really? I mean, Nathan must be exaggerating at least a little. No one could possib...




Oh. My. God.

Gravity Kills

After my first week on the road hawking the new book, it was a pleasure to return home last night to find Mark Sanderson in the Telegraph announcing that nearly 100 new entries have been supplemented to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, which is hands-down my favorite reference work in the world. And it sounds like the new supplement may have my favorite entry ever:

It's the barely-heard-of who provide the most amusement. Robert Cadman (1711-40), for example, was a rope-walker whose act involved sliding face-first down a rope from the top of St Paul's blowing a trumpet and firing pistols as he went. Alas, a fatal fall in Shrewsbury brought an end to the Shropshire lad and the so-called "flying craze" of the 1730s.

Find-A-Grave includes a picture of the St. Mary's Church tombstone for the, ahem, "would-be aviator":

6 Bd/1 Ba/50000 Bks

Over at the Times, Jeremy Mercer excerpts his new memoir Time Was Soft There, about his Paris sojourn at Shakespeare & Co. :

Eve peered at me. You mean you don’t know who George is?” She beckoned me towards a collection of photographs lining the walls.

“That’s George.” Eve was pointing to one picture where the man was leaning over a table full of books with a broad smile. “He runs Shakespeare and Company.”

She said this as if it explained everything but it still didn’t make sense. The books I could understand, likewise the tea party — just. But the beds . . . there were beds everywhere . . .

“But what exactly goes on here?”

“You don’t know? The bookstore is like a shelter. George lets people live here for free.”

I will now pause for a few minutes to allow some of you to go rummaging for your passports...

The Riddle of the Traveling Author

I’m on the road to tour for The Trouble With Tom this week, so things will be pretty quiet here. But! – it looks like the first few copies of the next Collins Library title, The Riddle of the Traveling Skull, may actually arrive in time for Monday’s reading at the Booksmith in San Francisco. The official debut of Harry Stephen Keeler’s berserk mystery novel will be at Quimby’s on November 1st, but those who are fleet of foot may be able to snag themselves an early copy tomorrow night….

Quitting The Quitter

You know you're in for interesting times today at The Onion A.V. Club blog as soon as you see the headline: Why We Won't Be Reviewing The Quitter.

In it, reviewer Noel Murrary writes:

The three people on The A.V. Club staff who regularly read and review comics--that would be myself, Tasha Robinson and Keith Phipps--are all, naturally, Harvey Pekar fans. As such, we couldn’t be happier about the recent success that Pekar’s had.... [But] both Tasha and I were so stunned by the mediocrity of Pekar’s much-hyped new graphic memoir The Quitter that we decided not to review it.... the book is too long, too unfocused, and it ends the same way all of Pekar’s stories do these days, with the author bitching about his bank account. Plus, there are a handful of panels where the first-person captions directly repeat information from earlier in the book....

Anyway, Tasha and I saw no reason to put down one of our heroes in a permanent, archived way. The only reason I bring up the book here in blog form is that I’ve been reading a lot of rave reviews for The Quitter.... Pekar’s responsible for some of the best comics in the history of the medium. Don’t quit on him because of The Quitter.

To which I can only say: hooray for The Onion.

Choosing books for review is essentially a zero-sum game. There are only so many article assignments and column inches to work with. If you choose a book to review -- an inferior book, a book that you personally would not want someone to read -- then you are necessarily pushing aside another and possibly more worthy book. You may even be pushing aside some newly reissued other and better book by the same author.

Which is not to say that there are not some books that deserve pummeling in public. It is easy to see the usefulness of debate over a tangibly harmful book -- Crichton's global-warming novel, say. But beyond that... I'm not as sure. Sometimes the best thing to do, when presented with mediocre work, is indeed to throw it aside and move on to something else.

All Her Life For Sale

It's not at all unusual to find old diaries turning up on eBay -- battered Jackson-era journals of a traveling minister, yellowed notebooks kept by a 1920s housewife, the battle-scarred account of a long-dead soldier. These are the kind of things that get washed away in estate sales and bob up to the surface at junk dealers.

But it's a little strange to find the teenage journal of a living person for sale:

Have you ever wanted to read someone else's diary? Are you a bit of a 'voyeur', in so much that you are interested in peeking into people's lives? Perhaps you are the same age as me (I was born in 1976) and you think it would be neat to read about what someone else was going through at the same point in history? Are you a teenager right now and want to see if the things you're feeling and thinking are 'normal'? Maybe you're an academic, sociological, psychological type and think that this would make for a unique insight into the stream of consciousness of a 13 year old Canadian teenage female? Or hey, maybe you just think this would be good for a read, or a laugh (it is).

Well, you're in luck today! In June, 1990, I was just leaving grade 8 - elementary school. I had a whole summer aheard of me before the beginning of high school, grade 9. I decided to keep a journal of the things that I did, the places I went and generally, what was going on in my life at the time.

In this amusing diary, you get coverage of every day of summer vacation from June 22 to September 3. Read about my experiences at work (my paper route, my adventures in babysitting, volunteer Candy Striping at the hospital, my first 'real' job - at McDonald's), what I did for fun, where I went (Niagara Falls on both sides of the border...Canada and the USA), what I got for my 14th birthday, what movies & TV I watched and YES, EVEN MY DREAMS!!! Where else are you going to get this kind of a book?!?!? No where! My life experiences are for sale - get them while they're here!

Yep, that's her -- Tammy -- taken cerca the 1990 edition of the diary. This is apparently the first in a line of "Tammy Books" in which she sells not only her old teenaged diaries, but will also reproduce for you photos from back then, and even provide a typed "List of Characters."

Say, I wonder if she's met Gerald Murnane?...

I, Paid Lecturer

Now here's a curious choice of visiting lecturers at my old alma mater. UC Davis's daily paper The California Aggie -- the first publication to ever hire me as a writer, so praise or blame them accordingly -- reports that discredited 1992 Nobel Prize winner Rigoberta Menchú has been invited to lecture on campus:

Her autobiography I, Rigoberta Menchú was exposed by The New York Times in 1999 to contain fabricated accounts of her life. She will be speaking at UC Davis on Oct. 21. In her book, she describes watching her brother Nicolas die of malnutrition, but a New York Times reporter found him alive, running a homestead in a Guatemalan village. Additionally, she wrote in her book that she never went to school, but Menchú’s half sister confirmed that she was a scholarship student at a prestigious private boarding school. Scholars have argued over whether her book should still be taught in classrooms, as some felt it challenges a university’s dedication to truth and critical thinking....

UC Davis history professor Thomas Holloway, who helped arrange Menchú’s visit, encouraged students to look past this controversy and focus on the bigger picture. “She is someone that people ought to hear,” he said. “It’s important to hear people like her who have worked so hard to reach a position where the exploited, indigenous majorities can finally have their place at the table of government and be full members of society.”.... Her supporters argue that her book captures a larger truth about life in the indigenous tribes of Guatemala.

Yes, yes -- well said. To this end, I hereby invite the oppressed students of Professor Holloway to begin fabricating work in his courses. Because, don't you know, perhaps they will be exposing a larger truth in the process.

The Ice Capades

Over at The Stranger, Neal Pollack reviews Nicholas Johnson's Big Dead Place, an account of Antarctica's McMurdo Station by a former dishwasher/support-staff/grunt there -- and a writer who, rather refreshingly, admits that "I find nature creepy and disturbing." But not as creepy and disturbing as some of the people in it:

The petty bureaucrats that run McMurdo make good paper villains, but his real target is the National Science Foundation, which has been totally corrupted by the Raytheon Corporation. In the context of Raytheon's vaguely sinister aims, the antics of Johnson and his friends seem accidentally rebellious and subversive, whereas in a nonfrozen dorm setting, they'd just be immature. He's also particularly strong in criticizing naïve media descriptions of Antarctica, and reserves special scorn for the overhyped "rescue" of a doctor who needed breast cancer medicine, while actual workers at the base sat around with broken limbs and separated shoulders, waiting for the next airlift to New Zealand because the doctor's plane was too full of journalists.

Johnson, incidentally, maintains an extensive Big Dead Place site. And really, how can you not love a site that includes a All-John-Carpenter's-"The-Thing"-Review-Section?

Yes, A Real of Pair of Cut-Ups

A pretty inspired pairing here: the Guardian has A Humument author Tom Phillips review Graham Rawle's cut-up novel....

Playing the Imaginary Horses

Today's Sydney Morning Herald reports that novelist Gerald Murnane is soon retiring from writing to concentrate on the personal archive crammed into filing cabinets that already covers two walls of his office:

There are stories and poems written as a child, and a journal begun at 18 about girls and dreams of being a writer. For each book he has manuscripts, proofs, reviews and correspondence. "But it grew to the point where it's become almost an obsession that my life has to be recorded, a time-consuming thing. Once I realised the thing could have monetary value I added even more - even an application letter for reserve seats at the Caulfield Cup."

Perhaps there's a closet show-off inside Murnane. However, the most intriguing parts of his colour-coded collection are kept for his own satisfaction. He has written 50,000 words on "people who might have loved me", a history of his bowel movements since the constipated, white-bread '40s, a file of "miracles", and a "shame" file that documents his gaucheries. He expects his sons to pass the whole thing onto a library and says it holds no dark confessions to shock a future biographer.

Only his imaginary horseracing world makes him reticent. Over decades he has drawn intricate racing silks; named horses, jockeys and trainers; designed racecourses and run races with the winners calculated by a complex system of numerical values given to letters in words drawn from random texts.

Ok, go ahead and laugh, but I have to admit that I'm utterly intrigued by this story.

Amazingly, Michael Brown Wasn't Involved

There's a brief but worthy article in the Boston Globe about the Great Molasses Flood of 1919 :

On Wednesday, the Weymouth-based author and historian [Stephen Puelo] will visit the Barnes & Noble in Bellingham to read from Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919 (Beacon Press). At the event, Puleo will not only discuss the 15-foot-high wave of molasses that spilled from a North End storage tank, leaving death and devastation in its suffocating wake, he also will tell how he researched the long-forgotten facts of the story.

''There was no book on the flood.... After a year and a half of looking, the court archivist finally called me one day and said she had found the trial transcripts, all 40 volumes, all 25,000 pages," he said, adding that she also found the trial damage awards.... Among the issues Puleo ties in are World War I (the molasses was distilled into industrial alcohol used to produce military explosives) and the anarchy movement (the tank owners stated that anarchists blew up the tank). Immigration is explored as well. ''Most of the residents of the North End were Italian, they were immigrants, and they were not citizens, so they had very little to say," Puleo said. ''So this monstrous 2.3 million-gallon tank placed 3 feet from Commercial Street was erected without a whimper of protest, and no city official complained even after it started to leak from day one."

An interesting note here: books coverage typically has the shelf life of a bottle of milk. It's rare for a paper to cover a book that has been out for much more than a month -- two, at most, if the author's big. Puelo's book has been out for over two years now, and the Globe -- not to mention the Bellingham Barnes & Noble -- deserve kudos for not giving in to this incessant and ridiculous pressure for "timeliness."

The Grand Shampoo-bah of London

Sepia Mutiny noted a fascinating article at the BBC this week: a plaque has gone up in London for Sake Dean Mohamed, who it turns out was both the first Indian writer to be published in English and the proprieter of London's first Indian restaurant:



His BBC biography reads like a wonderfully improbable and colorful mixture of professions. Along with the restaurant (which went bust after a couple years), he was also famed as -- I love this -- "The Shampooing Surgeon" of Britain. To wit:

Mahomed had worked for the East India Company, had gone to Ireland and had run away with an Irish girl. The pair set up the Brighton baths and, once reports of cures emerged, he became very successful. He received the ultimate accolade by being appointed Shampooing Surgeon to both George IV and William IV. He was also a writer and was the first Indian to publish a book in English: The Travels of Dean Mahomet, published in 1794. In 1820 he wrote Shampooing; or benefits resulting from the use of the Indian Medicated Vapour Bath which went into three editions. He even had poems written in his honour.

The word shampoo, incidentally, turns out to be of Indian origin. (Who knew?) There's an Oxford UP book on Dean Mahomed, The First Indian Author in English, and his Travels are also in print.

Zedheads

As if on cue after this week's fine TLS introduction to psychogeography, today's Telegraph brings us word of a rather unusual guide to Britain:

Dixe Wills has produced The Z-Z of Great Britain, published on Thursday by Icon Books. A jocular guide to all 41 places in Britain beginning with what the Earl of Kent in King Lear called the "unnecessary letter", it features such out-of-the way delights as Zabulon in Carmarthenshire (Population: two), Zeal Monachorum in Devon and Zoar on the mainland of Shetland ("What's There? A 1950s crofter's house; the ruins of a much older crofter's house; the ruins of another crofter's house which is older than the current one but not as old as the other one; some grass; some cliffs; 33 sheep").

If this does well, expect up to 25 sequels....

Tosh and Table Margarine

Over at the Times of London, Grahame Rawle describes how he collaged the text of his novel Woman's World from his massive collection of 1960s women's magazines:

Found text became an integral part of the story. By cutting out words and rearranging them on the page, “big-boned” Norma Fontaine finds a feminine voice with which to tell her tale — a voice that inevitably takes on the chirpy wisdom and underlying moral tone of the original writing.

To get the story structure right, I set the collage aside and wrote my book in the traditional way as a word-processed document. At the same time I was collecting fragments of text from the magazines, saving anything that I thought might prove relevant – words, phrases and sentences that would approximate to what I wanted to say. I think in all I clipped more than a million words from editorial pieces, romance stories, problem pages, and advertisements..... A sentence might be made from five or six separate components. A simple line such as “I was furious and had to leave the room” could end up as “Red rage rose within me like mercury in a toffee thermometer and I knew I had to leave before I reached the boiling point for fudge”. Instead of saying “Nonsense”, Norma might say: “That’s all tosh and table margarine.”

In a related story: Cosmopolitan Releases 40-Year Compendium: 812,683 Ways To Please Your Man.

The Also-Rans

Writing the Guardian yesterday, publisher Susan Hill gives a glimpse into what happens when you put out an open call for fiction: namely, you get buried. But along with the usual complaints about what kind of books made her eyes roll ("Most of the worst novels were written in the first person narrative present tense"), Hill does something very unusual indeed:

Out of the 3,741 submissions, I asked to read just seven in full. Every one of them was a pleasure and a revelation, each by a talented, if not always fully-formed writer. Interestingly, all but the eventual winner were set in the past and several in countries other than the UK. Charlotte Johnston, an 80-year-old, wrote Hidden Lives, a delightful book about a 19th-century Welsh family. Francis Barber Gentleman, by Marion Jordan, told the story of Dr Samuel Johnson's black slave. It was more biography than novel and it did not quite go anywhere but it was a memorable read and I have hopes for its author. Ian Pike is a wonderful writer who sent me The Ice Barn, set in the American West. It was the close runner-up to my eventual choice. I gave it 8/10. But I was looking for a full score and I had almost given up hope of finding it when into the box popped the beginning of The Extra Large Medium or Unfinished Business by Helen Slavin.

Hill gives you her shortlist. It is, in its way, really a very generous thing to do: when you're starting, any public recognition of your existence as a writer, published or not, is like finding water in the desert.

Curiously enough, I've also seen a public rejection method employed in some 19th century magazines. Instead of mailing you back a form letter, a column would be set aside for listing out rejections, often helpfully categorized along the lines of : "Very Fine, But Not For Us: Roberts, Green, Barker, Dobson. Already Covered Previously: Weiss, Phillips. No, Sir!: Lee, Maggs..." etc.

I believe -- though I'm not sure -- that it was Harper's or perhaps Galaxy that used to do this. Our egos are far too fragile today for such public rejection, I suppose. Still, perhaps it did serve one rather clever purpose: you had to order the next issue of the magazine to find out what your literary fate was.

(Not) The Latest Bestsellers

Today's Times of London includes a feature that I wish more book sections had: a glimpse at one of their old bestseller lists. I've been curious about these ever since reading Frank Mott's classic 1947 study Golden Multitudes: The Story of Bestsellers in the United States. (There's also a wonderful modern update in Anthony Lane's collection Nobody's Perfect.)

Today's vintage bestseller list in the Times is from October 3, 1976, with the added bonus of snarky modern comments. On The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh: "He may be the funniest English novelist yet, but he’s still got a girl’s name."

Little-Known Books By Well-Known Authors

I'm on NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday this morning to talk about my article in this week's Village Voice on such unknown literary orphans as Walt Whitman's temperance novel, Caleb Carr's rock and roll novel, and Martin Amis's video game guide Invasion of the Space Invaders.

Oh, and....

My Theoretical Identity

Pour yourself some coffee and join the great Robert Birnbaum for his interview with me over at Identity Theory....

All Over The World

Jack Shafer has a great Slate article on Nicholson Baker's collection of original newspaper volumes of Joseph Pulitzer's New York World. (Thanks, Maud!)

Those who read about Baker's quest in Double Fold will be delighted to hear that he and his wife now have a book collecting the World's graphic genius: The World on Sunday: Graphic Art in Joseph Pulitzer's Newspaper (1898 - 1911).

For instance:




...The Busiest Hour on Earth. Between 6 and 7 p.m. More Happens on Manhattan Island than Anywhere Else -- Here Are a Few Surprising Occurences.

The artist was, of course, that busiest and most prolific of all vintage illustrators: Unknown.

Book Lust

It's not often that I expect to find book leads in Budget Living magazine, but their current issue has John Waters in a priceless picture on their back-page "My Best Buy" column:





No, you are not misreading that title: it's The Loves of Liberace. Waters found it at San Francisco's Kayo Books -- a great store, by the way, if you're looking for ultra-campy old paperback pulps. (Check out their cover art gallery.) As for Loves, "It was published by press agents," Waters explains, "to convince people that Liberace had lots of girlfriends, which is ludicrous."

Did the ruse succeed? Well, let's get closer look at that cover:




Can't you just feel the sexual tension there? Can't you? Can't y....

Oh. You can't.