A while back I discussed the minor furor over proposed changes at the New York Times Book Review, including charges of dumbing down and sensationalism. Now the helm has been handed over to a new editor, Sam Tanenhaus, a widely published journalist and the author of a well received biography of Whitaker Chambers. It remains to be seen if the New York Times Book Review will change significantly. On another, much more visible front, the Jayson Blair affair has reemerged due to the release of the book in which he tells his side of the story, Burning Down My Masters’ House: My Life at the New York Times. It is hard to imagine that anyone will take seriously a book by someone whose claim to fame is his astounding lack of credibility. In fact, the venomous pans are already rolling in (Dallas Star Telegram, San Francisco Chronicle, and the Boston Globe. Even the Brits get into the act.) My favorite, though, is this headline from the Christian Science Monitor: “Jayson Blair: ‘I lied.’ Reader: ‘No kidding.’” I’m rather happy to see the level of outrage that Blair’s book is generating. Meanwhile some are reporting that the Times stands to benefit if Blair’s book does well (LINK). I’m not sure if that story has legs, though.
New York Times News
More NaNoWriMo
Sloganeering rightly takes me to task for my sloppy framing of the NaNoWriMo debate – primarily the fact that I make no attempt to present the opposite point of view – and does it for me by pointing to Websnark’s pro-NaNoWriMo post from a year ago.Clearly some people find NaNoWriMo useful (or at least fun) or it wouldn’t still be around, but I question the idea that it’s good for aspiring writers. Websnark presents four reasons why NaNoWriMo is an instructive exercise. The first three touch on the idea that if you want to be a writer, you have to stop being lazy and/or afraid and you have to write every day. This is undoubtedly true, and at the very least NaNoWriMo shows people how hard this really is, though I have my doubts that very many people continue to write every day on December 1 and beyond, which is the point, right? Essentially, I’m not convinced that there’s an easy trick to learning how to write every day, or even that it can be taught at all.Websnark’s last reason for liking NaNoWriMo is that “There are worse reasons to form a community than creativity,” and that is about the best defense of NaNoWriMo that I can come up with as well. There certainly worse, less productive things one could do with one’s time, and NaNoWriMo makes a solitary, often grueling endeavor fun and social, if only for one month out of the year. But, then, if writing weren’t solitary and grueling, we’d all have novels out.
Confined By Pages: The Joy of Unread Books
I’m in Amazon
I know it’s not too hard to peddle your wares on Amazon, but I have to say, when I stumbled across my name listed as “Editor” for something being sold on Amazon, it was quite a thrill. The book that I helped edit has been out for quite some time, but seeing it in Amazon made me realize that now might be a good time to mention it again. The book is called Two Letters, and I first mentioned it about a year ago when the book came out, but I didn’t really get into the details or how I came to be involved with the project; I was busy with school and deep in the depths of my first Chicago winter, but that’s no excuse, really.One of the great things about living in Los Angeles was that everyone there has a side project. People have day jobs, but they never talk about them. They’re always working on a short film or getting ready to open a gallery. Hollywood aside, it’s a very creative place. One such side project was conceived by a couple of friends of mine, Christopher Lepkowski and Mark Dischler. They wanted to create a publication that showcased talented writers and artists and they wanted it to look nice. If it ever got more high concept than that, I wasn’t told about it. In order to provide some structure to the book, my colleagues came up with the theme “sneaking in,” and decided that all of the work in the book would loosely adhere to that theme. I was brought on in the later stages, to recruit writers and help select work – fiction and non-fiction – for the book. I ended up getting some of my very talented friends involved. My friend Cem wrote about “sneaking in” to Burma and speaking to dissidents when he was living in Thailand. My friend Alexa wrote about unexpectedly assisting her photographer boyfriend on an erotic photo shot. My friend Joseph wrote the sort of boozy, heartbroken stories that he’s so good at. I helped my fellow editors get all the writing together, and then life intervened. I got into grad school, left Los Angeles, got married, and sort of forgot about the book. I’d almost given up hope that Two Letters would see the light of day, but then, in January of 2005 a few copies showed up in the mail. There had been delays with the printing, as is so often the case with these sorts of things, and the guys had wanted to get everything just right. I’m glad they took their time, because the book looks great. There’s tons of great art and comics, but my favorite part is that for each piece of writing, artist Michael Vecchio created an original illustration. It’s hard for young writers to get their work published, but to see it presented with such care was just a thrill. It was a great side project to be a part of, and I hope more side projects like it come my way soon. When I saw it there on Amazon the other day, I thought that I should really try to do better by Two Letters, even though it is coming a little late.A new installment of Two Letters may be on the way shortly. Here’s the website.
Old News
At GalleyCat, Ron points to a New York Times story – coming four months after the fact – about how a mention of Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman boosted book sales. You expect the Times to be a little more on top of things.In a similar “old news” vein, having followed the Google Book Search story pretty closely, I clicked over to Charles Arthur’s story on the topic in the Guardian – which usually has pretty great book coverage – and was disappointed to find it to be a rehash of old news with a healthy dash of scaremongering about how Google could start printing on demand the books they’ve scanned and sell them to customers (oh, please!). Pretty weak stuff. I did however enjoy the story Arthur linked to, Victor Keegan’s account of trying to get some of his writing published by a print on demand publisher, just to see how the process works.
Fishing With Linkbait
Just as I (and several others) suspected! The New York Times piece on the best novels of the last 25 years was just a ploy to get mentioned on blogs. By way of proof, check out what I found in the traffic logs for The Millions today:Time/Date: Thu_Jun__1_13:09:16_2006_DSTVisitor IP: nytgate05.nytimes.comReferred by: www.technorati.com/search/www.nytimes.com/2006/05/21/books/fiction-25-years.htmlSeriously, I think it’s great that folks at the Times read blogs, and I’m glad they care that bloggers read the Times, but it seems like a lot of trouble to go to just to get mentioned by us.(For those of you unfamiliar with traffic logs, the above basically means that someone at the Times arrived at The Millions after checking Technorati to see which blogs referenced its 25 best books story.)Update: Well, I figured out why the Times was wondering what I wrote about their list. They were putting together this page. So kudos to the Times for acknowledging that this list was the start of a conversation and not a decree and for being willing to host some of the resulting conversation on its site. I’d love to see more of this in the future.